How great literature can change your life

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Thursday

 As today is All Souls’ Day and a time when various cultures are celebrating the Dead of the Dead, I share the first part of a talk I gave this past Sunday on literary depictions of life after death. (I will post the final part of the talk, on Philip Pullman’s Amber Spyglass, on Sunday.)

We cannot know, of course, if the authors are right about the afterlife, and in any event depictions of post-life realms are more about negotiating the challenges of this world than predicting the next. But by putting those challenges in a death setting, the authors add an extra level of intensity and urgency to our biggest issues. Or put another way, to seriously imagine what, in passing over, we pass over to, leads to profound insights into the great existential questions—the great existence questions—about the meaning of life.

After all, as Samuel Johnson once said, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

When I started putting this talk together, I didn’t fully realize how the four works I have in mind are all variations of the same work. It all started with the underworld scene in Homer’s Odyssey, which inspired the underworld scene in Virgil’s Aeneid, which in turn inspired Dante’s Divine Comedy. Meanwhile, one can find traces of Homer, Virgil and Dante in Philip Pullman’s underworld scene in The Amber Spyglass, which is the third book in his Golden Compass fantasy trilogy.

The Odyssey

In the Odyssey, Odysseus visits the land of the dead after having spent a year on the island of the sorceress Circe. He does so to figure out what to do next. At this point in his travels, he has encountered considerable hardships. The storms and encounters with hostile islanders have, I believe, made him question whether he really wants to set out to sea again. After all, he has found safe refuge with Circe.

To be sure, he has difficulties with her at first—she tries to turn him and his men into livestock—but since then she has provided him with a comfortable life. In fact, by getting him to temporarily give up his duty to return home, along with its duties of kingship, perhaps she has succeeded after all in transforming him and his men into contented animals. To borrow a line from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,” they have become people who do no more than “hoard, and sleep, and feed.” 

I frame the drama in this particular way because the prospect of death often gets us to reflect upon our lives, as my wife Julia mentioned in her talk on Louise Penny’s murder mysteries last week. When The Odyssey opens in medias res, we see the gods discussing the hero, who has been stranded on Calypso’s island, this time for seven years, not just one. It is the gods who reaffirm that he has a purpose in life: he must return home to restore order in Ithaka. By this point, of course, he has lost everything—all his boats, all his men, and all his spoils from the Trojan War. On the plus side, he has the option of spending the rest of his life with a beautiful island nymph.

So back to Circe’s island, where he still has a boat. To determine what to do next, he takes her advice to consult with the prophet Teiresias in the land of the dead and travels there. In Hades he encounters a vast array of characters that those who know their Greek mythology will recognize. They cover the full range of human behavior, some having achieved glory, others having committed horrible crimes. After having learned his future from Teiresias—he will encounter more death and heartbreak but will ultimately die quietly in bed surrounded by his community—he converses with various individuals. In the talks with his former war companions Agamemnon and Achilles, I believe, we see the real meaning of the episode.

Before turning to them, however, allow me to mention his encounter with his mother, who has died while he was away. It is a heartbreaking scene and speaks especially powerfully to any of us who have lost someone we have loved. Odysseus’s mother tells him that she has died for “loneliness for you”:

“[O]nly my loneliness for you, Odysseus,
for your kind heart and counsel, gentle Odysseus,
took my own life away.’

                                              I bit my lip,
rising perplexed, with longing to embrace her,
and tried three times, putting my arms around her,
but she went sifting through my hands, impalpable
as shadows are, and wavering like a dream.
Now this embittered all the pain I bore,
and I cried in the darkness:

                                                        “O my mother,
will you not stay, be still, here in my arms,
may we not, in this place of Death, as well,
hold one another, touch with love, and taste
salt tears’ relief, the twinge of welling tears?
Or is this all hallucination, sent
against me by the iron queen, Perséphonê,
to make me groan again?”

Attempting unsuccessfully to hug a loved one will show up again in The Aeneid and Pullman’s Amber Spyglass.

Back to his battle companions. If I am right that Odysseus is really struggling about whether to leave the island or to stay, Agamemnon and Achilles both give him reasons to reject his duty and choose Circe.

Agamemnon, although he himself has returned safely to Greece, has then been killed by his wife Clytemnestra, which raises doubts that Odysseus himself may have: has his own wife, after 12 years of her husband’s absence, remained faithful? If not, why go home at all? Agamemnon, after describing his own murder in graphic detail, unloads on all women:

There is no being more fell,
more bestial than a wife in such an action,
and what an action that one planned!
The murder of her husband and her lord.
Great god, I thought my children and my slaves
at least would give me welcome. But that woman,
plotting a thing so low, defiled herself
and all her sex, all women yet to come,
even those few who may be virtuous.

Then he concludes with a piece of misogynistic advice:

Let it be a warning even to you.
Indulge a woman never, and never
tell her all you know. Some things
a man may tell, some he should cover up.

If we see this as an interior dialogue within Odysseus’s own mind, then he would be coming up with reasons not to go home. And although Agamemnon then goes on to say that Penelope is probably an exception to the rule—maybe this is Odysseus reassuring himself—the doubts are there.

Doubts comes from another quarter in Odysseus’s conversation with Achilles. When Odysseus essentially tells him that it’s not so bad being dead because Achilles won so much fame when alive, Achilles shuts him down real fast. First, here’s Odysseus:

But was there ever a man more blest by fortune
than you, Akhilleus? Can there ever be?
We ranked you with immortals in your lifetime,
we Argives did, and here your power is royal
among the dead men’s shades. Think, then, Akhilleus:
you need not be so pained by death.

In his reply, Achilles essentially accuses Odysseus of being facile. It’s one of my favorite passage in the epic:

Let me hear no smooth talk
of death from you, Odysseus, light of councils.
Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.

In other words, don’t tell someone who has died that death is not so bad.

Plato, incidentally, found this passage in Homer particularly objectionable. He feared the whole Hades episode would so terrify young men with the grim prospect of death that they would turn cowards on the battlefield.

But there’s a twist. After his bitter words, Achilles asks about his son, and Odysseus’s account of Neoptólemos’s bravery and his success in battle changes the father’s mood:

But I said no more,
for he had gone off striding the field of asphodel,
the ghost of our great runner, Akhilleus Aiákidês,
glorying in what I told him of his son.

In other words, although personal glory may not be enough—the great anti-war poet Wilfred Owen makes a similar point in his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”—one’s children can help give one’s life meaning. Given that Odysseus has a son awaiting him at home, this is important for him to hear. It may help convince him to leave, regardless of the dangers that await.

The Aeneid

Virgil’s underworld episode plays much the same role as Homer’s. Aeneas too has been wrestling with whether to continue on to fulfill his destiny—which is to kickstart the Roman Empire—or to settle for a comfortable but forgettable life elsewhere. He first encounters this dilemma with the Carthaginian queen Dido, whose heart he breaks when he leaves her. As in the Odyssey, Zeus—or in this case Jupiter—stands in for duty and purpose, and when he orders Aeneas to fulfill his destiny, the Trojan cannot refuse.

Aeneas encounters the same choice again on the island of Sicily. His father, whom he depends on for guidance, has just died and, to honor him, the troops hold various contests. While they are doing so, however, the women—sick of traveling and desiring to settle down–set fire to the ships. Aeneas and the men barely manage to put out the flames. 

It is as this point that Aeneas, who has been asking a lot of his people, decides to visit an Apollonian oracle in Naples, presided over by the Cumaean sibyl. She will serve as his guide through the underworld, just as Virgil serves as Dante’s guide.

Aeneas expands Homer’s vision of Hades. Although Homer implies that it is sectioned off—with places of torment for some and fields of asphodel for others–Virgil goes into much more detail. He is also more interested in using the afterlife as a place where the evil are punished and the good rewarded—so much so that Dante and others saw the pagan Virgil prefiguring a Christian vision. Because he is not Christian, Virgil can’t take Dante through Paradiso, but he does guide him through Inferno and Purgatorio. More on that in a moment.

In Virgil’s hell, we see what (by the poet’s standards) it takes to be a good Roman citizen. What follows is a list of what one should not do:

Here are those who hated their brothers, in life,
or struck a parent, or contrived to defraud a client,
or who crouched alone over the riches they’d made,
without setting any aside for their kin (their crowd is largest),
those who were killed for adultery, or pursued civil war,
not fearing to break their pledges to their masters:
shut in they see their punishment. Don’t ask to know
that punishment, or what kind of suffering drowns them.
Some roll huge stones, or hang spread-eagled
on wheel-spokes: wretched Theseus sits still, and will sit
for eternity: Phlegyas, the most unfortunate, warns them all
and bears witness in a loud voice among the shades:
“Learn justice: be warned, and don’t despise the gods.”
Here is one who sold his country for gold, and set up
a despotic lord: this one made law and remade it for a price:
he entered his daughter’s bed and a forbidden marriage:
all of them dared monstrous sin, and did what they dared.
Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths,
a voice of iron, could I tell all the forms of wickedness
or spell out the names of every torment.”

The good, by contrast, end up in something resembling a college campus or and idyllic senior center:

[T]hey came to the pleasant places, the delightful grassy turf
of the Fortunate Groves, and the homes of the blessed.
Here freer air and radiant light clothe the plain,
and these have their own sun, and their own stars.
Some exercise their bodies in a grassy gymnasium,
compete in sports and wrestle on the yellow sand:
others tread out the steps of a dance, and sing songs.
There Orpheus too, the long-robed priest of Thrace,
accompanies their voices with the seven-note scale,
playing now with fingers, now with the ivory quill….
Aeneas marvels from a distance at their idle chariots
and their weapons: their spears fixed in the ground,
and their horses scattered freely browsing over the plain:
the pleasure they took in chariots and armor while alive,
the care in tending shining horses, follows them below the earth.

Virgil, much more than Homer, focuses on ethical behavior. In his underworld we get a sense of lives well-lived and badly-lived, and Dante will expand on this vision of the afterlife. Meanwhile, Aeneas gets from his dead father the clear and inspirational understanding he needs to continue his mission. Anchises knows the future and is able to spell out the history of Rome’s founding and rise to greatness. When he gets back to Sicily, Aeneas has reconnected with his sense of purpose and his resolve.

The Divine Comedy

The most extensive and famous depiction of life after death is, of course, Dante’s Divine Comedy. It’s impossible to do justice to this work in the short time I have so I’ll just talk about it in the framework of my remarks so far, which is that artistic explorations of the afterlife are as much about this life as the next—and that extended explorations of death are ways of grappling with the meaning of our current life.

Dante, at the beginning of the Inferno, describes himself as undergoing what today we might call a mid-life crisis.

MIDWAY upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.

So bitter is it, death is little more…

Initially Dante believes that he just has to be a good Christian, and he turns toward the distant light of Paradise, only to be beset by hostile animals—or, as we might interpret them psychologically, inner doubts and fears. In other words, there’s no cheap grace. Instead, he must confront human darkness, including his own. There’s no way around, only through.

For help, he turns to the author who means the most to him and asks for guidance—which is to say, to Virgil. Dante draws on Aeneas’s journey into the underworld, as Virgil drew on Odysseus’s, to explore his inner turmoil. These doubts begin with what people think they want—sex, money, power, revenge, self-annihilation—and goes on to conclude that, if people have turned their desires into false idols, then they create hells for themselves—not only hell in the afterlife but hell in the here and now.

Put another way, the Inferno is not about how we are going to be punished after we die but how we apply our own punishments to ourselves while still alive. To cite an example, those who are driven by greed Dante describes as incessantly pushing enormous weights.

Here too, I saw a nation of lost souls,

far more than were above: they
strained their chests
against enormous weights, and with mad howls

rolled them at one another.

Dante observes,

Not all the gold that is or ever was
under the sky could buy for one of these
exhausted souls the fraction of a pause.

Paradiso, by contrast, is accessible to those who open themselves to God’s love. Again, one doesn’t have to die to experience Paradise. After all, God’s love is always there for us. Dante expresses this idea after catching a glimpse of God:

O grace abounding and allowing me to dare
to fix my gaze on the Eternal Light,
so deep my vision was consumed in it!

I saw how it contains within its depths
all things bound in a single book by love
of which creation is the scattered leaves…

Dante sums it up in his famous concluding lines:

Yet, as a wheel moves smoothly, free from jars,
My will and my desire were turned by love,
The love that moves the sun and the other stars.

As I say, we’ll see Pullman borrow from both Virgil and Dante in Lyra’s journey to the land of the dead. But that’s the subject of Sunday’s post.