In Ann Arbor
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
—T S Eliot (slightly altered)
As the header image indicates, I have been reading a bewildering array of things lately (the image is a mere selection!). Though it can feel vertiginous, I don’t mind, because a maelstrom of reading means good work is underway. Much of that work might only be happening in my head, between putting down, say, a comparative Germanic grammar in the small hours of the morning and taking up Elias Lönnrot or Charles Williams in the evening. But it still counts. All my reading has to do with one or more of my current book projects: a book of essays, a fantasy, and a realist novel. All of these books come from my perhaps somewhat unhinged sense of place, one aspect of which I wrote about in my most recent post at the blog of Slant Books.
I want to say a little more here than I could in that post about this astonishing 1995 book by an amateur Italian scholar (click on image for Amazon link):
I call Vinci an amateur scholar simply because his training is not in classics or archaeology or any other field that would be relevant to his book’s project—he’s a nuclear engineer. But in some ways this may be to his book’s benefit, and he clearly writes out of love for his subject (I’ll get to what precisely that is in a moment). So I don’t let his lack of proper credentialing deter me. One must sometimes look outside of the hallowed precincts of Academe for real insight, and if there is one thing we should know by now, tutored by the most prestigious US institutions of higher education, it’s that credentials may not be worth the paper they’re printed on.
I’m not much invested in whether Vinci is right. It’s what he’s trying to do, the project of his book, that leaves me almost nonplussed. Superficially, the book is about accurately and plausibly mapping Homer’s epic poems. His thesis is that those poems are really set in the far north of Europe. As he points out, people have known for millenia that Homer’s geography (and his weather and astronomy) does not look much like that of the Mediterranean and Black Seas; and there are ancient authors who locate some of Homer’s places off the north coast of Europe. The result of Vinci’s research—much of which he conducted by visiting the places he writes about—situates the Homeric epics over a vast area stretching from the Faroe Islands to the White Sea and the eastern and southern edges of the Baltic. Ithaka is in the Danish Archipelago, Troy in Finland, Scylla and Charybdis amidst the Lofoten islands in northern Norway, etc. He claims the poems are based on events that would have happened as the Holocene Climatic Optimum was collapsing about 2000 BC. When that occurred, the people who would become the Mycenaeans left their northern homeland and traveled via the south-flowing rivers of eastern Europe to the Aegean. They transposed their stories—along with the geography of those stories—to their new home, but then forgot their distant origin by the time the Homeric tales took shape, many hundreds of years after the events they purport to describe.
As much as I love the geography of this book, what staggers me is the implicit theory of fiction. That is what I consider to be the real project of the book, in an etymological sense: the missile of an idea that the book casts forth. Vinci’s idea has caused me to realize how much, as moderns (or postmoderns, or very late moderns, or what have you), we take for granted a fundamental division between fiction and reality—a division “Homer” (anyway his culture) clearly never knew. We very easily assume that if someone sets about spinning a tale, he or she will have little difficulty and no qualms making things up out of whole cloth. But that’s not how fiction works at all. Fiction comes from reality like a child from her mother. The worlds of fiction aren’t merely like the world we know, they are continuous with our primary world and share its DNA. Fiction is founded in actual knowledge. When it becomes completely untethered from the world, it founders. And so it is quite natural for Vinci to want to find a real landscape for Homer’s epics. All great mythmakers have understood the truth of fiction… until, perhaps, the present.
I’ll come back to that complaint about contemporary mythmaking in a moment, but I want to say a little more about the Vinci book. It is chock full of quotation from the Iliad and Odyssey, which is itself a pleasure. (Though I have to say I can’t stand the transliterated Greek that Vinci uses. I can read Greek when it’s written in Greek letters just fine, but if I see e.g. hóson t’epí hémisy páses I feel like I’m having a stroke.) All the quoted material reminded me of just how concrete and precise Homer is, and I remembered how the experience of learning Greek and Latin was a revelation of how concrete and precise all language is fundamentally. Like the best myth, language itself, especially Homer’s, is “of the earth, earthy” (1 Cor. 15:47) however spiritual it might also aspire to be.
As you might expect, with the modern miracle of Google Maps at my disposal, Vinci’s book sent me, visually at least, to the places he discusses. There is a kind of sublimity—with the the full connotation of the word, including terror—in the fact that you can have a street view or someone’s uploaded photo of the tiny rural places Vinci identifies as the key spots in Homer’s epics. It is astonishing that we have so mastered the world this way, enclosed it within the empire of information. I find this domination of human surveillance equal parts unnerving and delightful. Here, for instance, is a serene and beautiful church I found by snooping around the villages that Vinci says were Dardanian Troy four thousand years ago:
What a perfect, gentle place it looks. If I were pedaling past such a place I would not fail to stop. You can find plenty of other images and read about the church if you Google “kiskon kirkka.” So this is the second unnerving effect of the book: the way it has reminded me how thoroughly tamed the world has become—or at least seems to have become via the power of the screen. This was not Vinci’s intention, of course, and I recall the book is from 1995, in which high and far off time it was not quite so easy to gain pixelated information from thousands of miles away. And as I said, Vinci himself traveled to the places he wrote about, or many of them (some are so remote that he couldn’t get there), making his book a species of travel writing, somewhat akin to Francis Parkman’s histories.
The third and final aspect of The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales that I find haunting has to do with the depths of prehistory and the migration evoked by the subtitle of the English edition. Suppose Vinci is right and the Homeric epics are based on—perhaps they are what Tolkien would call effoliations of—events that occurred in the Baltic and the far north of Europe four thousand years ago or more. First of all, the amount of time is awesome. The distance that separates those events from the time when they took on the forms we know as the Homeric poems is about what separates us from Charlemagne or the historical basis of King Arthur—two figures at the center of modern mythoi. That’s the distance that separates Homer’s tales from Homer. In that distant interval, if Vinci is right, a people migrated across a continent in response to climate change, the result being a most bizarre combination of memory and forgetfulness. The Mycenaeans, in this account, were able to preserve the accuracy of their mythological record by transposing it into their new environment. Yet over time they forgot that this is what they were doing. It leads one to wonder: how many layers back have we forgotten? How long did civilization carry on before we established a more or less continuous record? How much essential human experience have we lost? And will something like this happen again?
On the other hand, it’s a sort of miracle, isn’t it, that we have these names still, (wherever the ones who bore them really lived and died): Achilles, Hector, Helen, Paris… I am reminded of a short poem by the Irishman Patrick Kavanagh, referring to the 1938 Munich crisis:
"Epic" I have lived in important places, times When great events were decided; who owned That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims. I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul!’ And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen Step the plot defying blue cast-steel – ‘Here is the march along these iron stones’ That was the year of the Munich bother. Which Was more important? I inclined To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind. He said: I made the Iliad from such A local row. Gods make their own importance.
The Vinci book, in dislodging the Homeric epics from their familiar places of renown, pushes the stuff of myth into such dim recesses of the past that no human action in them can seem significant or mighty any longer. If we accept his thesis that the poems come not from warring late Bronze Age Mycenaean city-states, whose great men and divinely beautiful women we can well imagine, but from the petty feuding and nautical mishaps of far more “primitive” people we cannot directly connect with the imposing images, monuments and legacies of classical civilization, then we see better how mythmaking (or just say fiction) gets its life force not from heroism but from fidelity to the literally mundane (earthy) facts on which it is founded.
On that note, I want to turn to another body of myth: Arthuriana. I will be briefer since I can refer to a conversation that occurred on Twitter the other day when I posted this:
If you read through, you’ll see that eventually it transpired we do in fact have a canonical cinematic fantasy—it’s just not about Arthur. It’s Peter Jackson’s trilogy of films adapting Tolkien’s novel The Lord of the Rings. I came to the conclusion that the Matter of Britain, such a rich vein for almost a millenium, was exhausted and closed into obscurity ironically by a man who himself made quite a contribution to Arthuriana. Well, maybe not by Tolkien’s own work. But Tolkien’s refashioning of fantasy—a modern literature that has been around since the 19th century—paved the way for what in the Twitter thread I call Big Fantasy, the established genre that began to be mass produced in the closing decades of the 20th century. Really great (or anyway greatly ambitious) literary treatments of Arthur and the Grail, to say nothing of cinematic versions of the material, have come to seem impossible since the rise of Big Fantasy, which culminated in cinematic and television successes like the Jackson films and Game of Thrones.
But there is still the question of why this should be so. Edward L Hamilton took the conversation around Arthur and fantasy and put it in a larger context in a way I found interesting:
You’ll see that what he says is related to what Daniel Cowper had said in the earlier thread about the Arthur story as civilizational. The switch that Hamilton points to (concomitant with the beginning of Big Fantasy) is one, we might say, from the exponents of civilization to its discontents.
This all ties in to what I wrote earlier about Felice Vinci’s book and the roots of what may seem the most remote and fantastical mythmaking in the very real ordinary world. Not in Tolkien’s work itself—as I point out in my comment to Hamilton’s thread—but in much of the fantasy that followed Tolkien’s, and by now in nearly all of it, the real world retreated further and further from fantasy, or fantasy from the world. The link between fiction and reality became ever more tenuous. (Curiously, at the same time literary fiction gradually became more and more fantastical.) We now think of the secondary worlds or “subcreations” of fantasy as having no necessary relation to the primary world, the actual creation. Homer can scatter his islands in the South Pacific for all the difference it makes to our conception of fiction in whatever form as primarily a matter of entertainment. For entertainment need not be true, need not contain any knowledge and wisdom. But fiction, oddly, must be founded in the truth of this real Earth and how men and women live on it.
This line of thought deserves to be carried on at greater length. For one thing, it has direct bearing on questions of style and the descriptive acumen of writers, something which has lately come to worry me a great deal among the rising generation of writers who seem fearfully cut off from the physical world. I may continue in the next installment by looking at how reality and fantasy interact in the work of a strange English fantasist from before the “second cultural founding of the Anglosphere” Hamilton mentioned on Twitter: E R Eddison. I also intend to write about the long forgotten poet Charles Doughty, known today if at all for his Travels in Arabia Deserta (pictured in the header). But I want to continue thinking about the murky depths of history in literature via his epic poem from 1906, The Dawn in Britain.
I really am going to try to be diligent with this substack, after having let it lie dormant for quite a while. This may result in my going off in unplanned directions. But I will always be talking about some particular book or author who has to do with fantasy, place, religion, or some combination of these topics. I know Dappled Things will be publishing my review of the 20th century Austrian novelist Heimito von Doderer’s masterpiece The Demons (newly reissued by Wiseblood Books) in their Easter issue and online. When that’s out, I’ll publish here an extension of that review, including passages from the novel with analysis. And I’ll soon be discussing Charles Williams’ contribution to the Arthur Story—the book pictured above in my Twitter post—with Sørina Higgins and Christopher Pipkin on the Inklings Variety Hour podcast. I’ll share a link to that when it’s available. I was supposed to write an essay for for Wayfare about a term I stumbled into the other day, “post-incarnational,” clearly something to do with what I’ve been saying here today. That essay has to do with the writing of Karl Ove Knausgaard. I sort of dropped the ball, waylaid by family illnesses, but if I get the thing written next week as I hope to do, I’ll link there as well.
Deus vobiscum
JMG
Ides of March 2024
I think David Jones wrestled with the excess of human history, and the overwhelming responsibility of the vatic poet to somehow acknowledge the depths that reveal themselves precisely as what announces itself as that which cannot be contained in the linear expositions of the historical record.
The mythic binds, because it arises from elemental relations that ground the historical, rather than simply embellish it. Or put another way, the instance of historical event that acts as seed flourishes as narrative account because there is openness to what is hidden in the manifest. There is a porosity to being, and a rootedness that transcends the narrow confines of what is ordinarily taken as the fictive enterprise. All this is lost on the heirs of post-Enlightenment rationalism, and the post-modern or late modern, what have you, tends, even when it reacts against Enlightenment, to accept some of its founding principles.
For certain, modernity lacks awareness of living tradition or the legendary penumbra that is not falsehood as the literalism of moderns assume, but an acknowledgement of the surplus of the earthy, and what philosophers might call the open-ended reach of the analogy of being. Tolkien's achievement is still resonant with this chthonic and linguistic history that is secretly illumined by grace. The art that knows this is also a wounded art, because it is fruitfully open to revelatory depths. There is a necessary suffering that is also joyful.
I don't think any of this is understood by Tolkien's epigoni. Surface technique and mimetic imitation occurs, but the very earthy, elemental source of insight is replaced with the ersatz and the virtual. It is anodyne, because it has rejected the way of the Cross.
Anyway, as always, I look forward to your further thoughts, Jonathan.