all we want is life beyond thunderdome
by jebni on June 18, 2004
Okay, so I saw Troy the other day, and while it was infuriatingly pat — the whole Trojan war happens in like, three weeks (bah!) — it did prompt me to think more about how heroes figure in the battles of mythology. When Hector faces off against Patroclus, all the fighting around them stops, and when he slices open Patroclus’ throat, there’s dead silence. The idea of it seems so unlikely and ridiculous, like some kind of tacky JerryBruckheimerVision, but this scene of heroes flexing and bleeding in a sanctified bubble still somehow seems disturbingly appropriate. When confronted with this phenomenon on a reconstituted Trojan battlefield of the future, Hockenberry, the scholarly observer in Dan Simmons’ Ilium, notes:
I explained the Greek concept of aristeia – warrior-to-warrior or small-group combat in which an individual can show his valor — and how important it was to these ancients and how the larger battle would often pause so that the soldiers on each side could witness such examples of aristeia.
It’s not just displays of valor as a general substance that could coalesce anywhere, though — it’s no accident that aristeia is derived from aristos, “the best”, which also forms the basis for aristocracy, “the rule of the best”. And while heroes like Hector and Achilles have a logistical impact on the outcome of the war — they’re superhuman killing machines, and also serve as important attractors for morale because of this — their paths mostly occur on a higher, more “spiritual” plane to the logistics of battle. Their pivotal moments are imbued with significance other than military. Achilles doesn’t care about the war, he wants historical immortality.
In this I’m reminded of the function that Luke Skywalker plays in the Star Wars films. Luke gets his military-logistic duties out of the way in the first film by blowing up the Death Star, and then veers off onto another plane of dodgy spiritual significance. Interestingly, he only becomes a Commander in the Rebel forces, while Han Solo becomes a General, joining the characters like Mon Mothma and Admiral Ackbar who have real world authority, but who are quite incidental to the films. In Return of the Jedi, Luke’s final showdown with Darth Vader and the Emperor occurs in a completely parallel narrative: he lets himself be captured in order to face the true evil of the Empire on a moral plane, while the Rebels engages the Imperial Fleet militarily.
In a time in which formal aristocracies seem somewhat irrelevant, the spiritual element of rule and war, which has gone from monarchy to investments in fascism in the last century, is reemerging in a glut of epic movies. Besides being just good fun, I can’t help but think that the sword and sandal epic is also the pill we take to forget about stuff like Abu Ghraib — it’s longing for a mythical time when war wasn’t so dirty. For when it had aristeia.
2 comments
Just a note, as I linked to this site looking up what the interenet community found the definition of Aristeia to be, but war has never been clean. Glory and Honor in combat existed once, and still do, but the enphasis on them in medieval times and earlier did not mean that war was clean. Far from it. Even the “good guys” in those early wars, the most holy and most clean, committed what we now consider to be atrocities on a regular basis. It was accepted back then, and whats more, it wasn’t even important. It wasn’t important,really, even in modern wars, until the advent of televised warfare. That let the common man, the people sitting at home when their country was at war, see what horrors lay in it. That was why vietnam happened the way it did, and why we only allow the cleanest wars ever, now. The prison abuse scandal was just that, a scandal, but in comparison to every war in history, this is a pale and insignificant thing. Not that it is bad, our standards haev risen, but a keen sense of history will put this more in its relevant place.
by Heimdall on 27 August 2004 at 12:43 am. #
I think you’re missing my point, which had absolutely zero to do with whether wars of the past have actually been clean, but with how the contemporary romanticisation of ancient glory and honour operates. Which, as you say, is a consequence of how the conflict Vietnam was televised, but also attributable to a whole bunch of wider factors since modernity. To draw the conclusion, though, that the prison abuse scandal is “a pale and insignificant thing” because atrocities have a long history troubles me greatly. On one hand I’m fed up with the innocent suprise expressed in the liberal handwringing over it — what the fuck did people expect in such a war?? are they that clueless about reality? — but on the other, there is, uh, the reality of it, the horror that should never be softened by putting it “in its relevant place”, even though most of us are unaware of the further everyday atrocities that have and will go on, plus the unavoidable need to engage with what Abu Ghraib has actually meant as a symbol in the scheme of things, which is undoubtedly a key moment in the souring of any supposed “honour” in the USA’s intervention in Iraq.
by jebni on 27 August 2004 at 9:10 am. #