Being with the Dead by Ruin Hans

Author:Ruin, Hans [Ruin, Hans]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2018-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

6

Visiting the Land of the Dead

HISTORY AS NECROMANCY

The mirror of history has melted, and beneath it, a patient, hybrid organism grows in his cruciform shadow.

—Derek Walcott, Omeros LIX

Introduction

When Odysseus, after his long captivity on the island of Calypso, is washed ashore in the land of the Phaeacians, he is treated with a feast by King Alcinous. Initially the king does not know who his guest is, because Odysseus has refused to say his name. At the height of the feast Alcinous asks the blind bard Demodocus to sing the stories from the great Trojan War as though they had already become folk mythology and oral epic during Odysseus’s long years of delayed homecoming. In the presence of one of the protagonists who actually experienced it, the story of the dramatic events is thus recounted within the framework of the epic itself. In this remarkable early instance of metaliterature, the author of the epic poem inscribes the oral performer of the epic into the text, situating the social and technical origin of his own endeavor as a writer within the narrative. When Odysseus hears the stories of his own adventures and is reminded of his lost companions, he is deeply moved. He tries to conceal his tears, but Alcinous sees them and compels him to reveal his identity and to explain why he is so saddened by the narrative. It is at this point that Odysseus first says his name and that he begins to tell his story, not only of who he is and where he comes from but also what he has experienced. Throughout the night of the feast he takes over the story from the bard and tells the story of his adventures after Troy, leading up to the shipwreck and his encounter with Calypso.1

In her essay “The Concept of History” from the collection Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt pointed to the particular scene where Odysseus listens to Demodocus as marking the “beginning of history.”2 As the living hero is confronted with his own deeds through a collectively shared narrative, he and his life have become objectified “history” in precisely the sense that Herodotus would later give to this term. For Herodotus, as Arendt points out, the basic and explicit motive was to secure that the “great deeds” of both Greeks and barbarians were not forgotten, but preserved in memory, and that their glory and reputation—their kleos—would not perish. Humans are mortal, surrounded by immortal gods and nature, but through works of greatness preserved in oral and eventually written narrative, they can aspire to take place in, as Arendt writes, “the world of everlastingness.”3

Arendt’s suggestion was taken up by François Hartog in a more recent article on the origin of the concept of history, where he explicitly discusses the relation between Homer and Herodotus.4 Hartog argues that whereas Herodotus first simply sought to rival Homer and the Trojan epic through his depiction of the Persian Wars, it turned out that he had created a new and unique form of narrative and literary voice, history.

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