Troy Stories / Features / Untitled Books

Western literature starts with a war and it starts late.

Troy Stories

The Iliad is one of the most enduring and emblematic stories history has ever given us. ADAM FOULDS, author of the remarkable narrative poem Broken Word, traces its subject - the Trojan War - through centuries of literature and finds the rich cluster of stories it spurned endure into the present day.

They fight, they are killed, and darkness swallows them.

Western literature starts with a war and it starts late. The conflict is the Trojan War, the lateness is Homer's: when he composes the Iliad, the stories of the war are already well known in an oral tradition. One of the great surprises on first encountering the Iliad is that Homer emerges as a writer of a form we recognise as modern, in that he makes very strong choices about the material his poem will treat. The Iliad is no rambling folk epic, no simple accumulation of inherited matter, but is rapid, decisive and compelling. The action is set over only about forty days of a conflict that lasted years, and concentrates on one crucial argument within the Greek camp, between Achilles - the greatest, proudest, most restive and self-willed of the warriors - and his fellow generals.

The larger story of the Trojan War is familiar to most people, although that should not be allowed to diminish its strangeness. As the founding war narrative of Western culture - a culture, or set of coinciding cultures, that has made a great deal of war before and since, heaping up its millions of dead - it is distinctly odd. The war itself is straightforward enough, give or take flying snakes, unpredictably intervening gods, and a giant wooden horse. There is a siege and a sacking. But the casus belli is unusual. The war is not waged over territory or dynasty, but over a woman, namely Helen - the most desirable that the world had known. So Greek beauty is immured within the Trojan citadel and siege must be laid to regain her. It is a war then that has at its heart sex and desire. It is a very human conflict. It begins with a pang of lust and loss and ends in the destruction of a city and a people. Between these two points flow a number of stories that have been treated by writers throughout the length of the Western literary tradition, from the eighth century BC to today. While war remains something that we do, celebrate and deplore, these stories retain their relevance, and the greatest of them are among the greatest of all artistic achievements. The Iliad is the first and it is most certainly that. If you haven't read it, then a rich and exciting experience lies ahead, and Robert Fagles' pungent verse translation is the first place I suggest that you go.

What surprises about Homer, aside from the fact that he marshals his material with all the aggressive concision of a good film director, is how recognisable and human the figures are. He is one of those writers, like Chaucer, who make you feel the human continuities far more than the historical differences. In the midst of the siege, the Trojan warrior Hector returns to his wife and young baby. The parents talk with tension and urgency about their situation, with Hector attempting to reassure his wife. The baby is brought to Hector. Frightened by his father's battle helmet with its waving plumes, the baby starts to cry. Hector realises this, takes off his helmet and, laughing, comforts the baby. The moment is profoundly humane, calm and loving. It is also completely familiar, a version of a moment in anyone's life at any point in history. At such times there seems to be no distance at all between us and the Bronze Age warriors of the story. In its tenderness, however, this moment is untypical. Most of the Iliad is given over to battle that is fierce and frightening. The combat is hand-to-hand and many die, thrown from their chariots, hacked and speared and pierced with arrows. This violence is rendered in a staccato sequence of unforgettable images, such as the warrior dying with his teeth gripping the shaft of a spear that has passed through his mouth and out of the back of his head. With no heaven in the Greek cosmology for these warriors to pass onto, the deaths are mortal and unmitigated. They fight, they are killed, and darkness swallows them. Days of battle end in exhaustion and in the morning the battle is rejoined. While the poem only ever hews close to the particularity of the conflict, what emerges for the reader is a vision of life itself as agonistic, as a combat you have no choice but to throw yourself into, and in which you see some of your family and friends die before you do.

Several hundred years after Homer, the Greek tragedians take up the subject of the Trojan War with other insights and priorities. My personal favourite of these plays is Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis. The action takes place before the siege of Troy. The Greek fleet is waiting to set sail, but the wind dies because Agamemnon has offended the gods. A human sacrifice is required: Agamemnon's own daughter, Iphigenia, must die so that the war can commence. The play stages the arguments between Agamemnon and his wife, Clytemnestra, and the plotting of Agamemnon and his brother, Menalaus, to effect the sacrifice. Evidently, they are successful. We know this because the war happens. By the end of the play Iphigenia is dead and inevitable events ensue. The surface strangeness of this story - angered gods and human sacrifice - should not distract us. It is, of course, familiar on a deeper level. The play moved me because of its sharp crystallisation of the idea of the individual being sacrificed to a historical process. What shocked me was the thought that while this is something I myself have never had to confront, this is only because of my privileged historical position. Everyone who took part in the Second World War, to choose one fairly recent example that invokes millions of people, had to contemplate throwing themselves into a historical machine that could easily, sometimes inevitably, extinguish them in order to work itself out.

In Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare takes on another sub-plot of the war for a different purpose. Again the lack of a redemptive aspect is crucial. The war is stagnant in the midst of the long siege. The world seems broken, decayed. Troy has become profoundly morally relativistic. As one character puts it: 'What's ought but as 'tis valued?' The Trojan Calchas opts for self-preserving betrayal as he defects to the Greek side. After a while, as part of a prisoner exchange, he demands that his daughter, Cressida, also be delivered over to the Greek side, parting her from her lover, Troilus. She falls under the protection of the Greek warrior, Diomed. The sexual betrayal of Troilus is strongly implied. The play is bitter, perhaps the darkest of all Shakespeare's work, and proved too strong for audiences for a very long time. It was hardly performed for several hundred years, until the twentieth century recognised in it the familiar squalor and abandonment of a long war breaking down old values and priorities.

Late in the twentieth century one of the most brilliant and inventive re-renderings of the Homeric legacy appeared, in the form of Christopher Logue's versions of the Iliad (Cold Calls, War Music, All Day Permanent Red). These are not translations, but vivid rewritings in rapid modernist style, with long descriptions telescoped into single images and bursts of dialogue. For one fireside discussion, the only descriptive setting we have is: 'Gold holly in the fireplace'. This is so compressed as to almost slip past the reader, its fierce visual arrest going off suddenly, pyrotechnically. Gold holly: the sharp foliation of flames leaping up from a fire of sticks. The language of cinema is deployed - 'cut to', 'close up on' etc - to pivot and accelerate the reader through the action. Anachronism is deliberately used. An arrow wound through someone's neck is described as having the same bore as a lipstick. Bread vans cross the plain towards the Greeks. People speak in familiar twentieth century slang at the same time that the gods appear to instruct the antagonists. In this way, the endless plasticity and permutations of the Trojan War story are made manifest. Its relevance is alive in any period. It continues to unfold in our own century. This is restless stuff. It is part of our lives, part of the formation of the Western mind. Dynamic and compelling, frightening and real, it is full of story and significance. Fittingly, Logue's treatment of the Iliad is nearly complete, but remains unfinished.

Friday, 1 August, 2008