While the Christopher Nolan rendition of the Odyssey was artistically better than expected—and by that I mean narratively and not simply on the level of cinematic techne—one prominent difference from its Homeric source could not be ignored. Nolan’s Odyssey, unlike Homer’s, is one produced by an age of disenchantment, where the gods don’t speak but in the natural language of wave and cloud and thunder, and the apparition that seems a god later appears to be little more than Odysseus’s traumatically damaged memory reasserting itself in the present. Anyone looking for another examination of the war that launched a thousand ships—one more explicitly engaged in theological investigation—should turn to Yann Martel’s new fiction, Son of Nobody.
Martel’s oeuvre, at least since his second novel, the Man-Booker-Prize-winning Life of Pi, has largely been concerned with the problem of evil and therefore with the quest for theodicy, an understanding as to how God can be just while there remains evil in the world. Son of Nobody pirouettes artfully between two main characters, the first being Psoas, Son of Nobody, the Midean nobody whose exploits at Troy the rediscovered poem center upon, and Harlow Donne, the Canadian academic who has pieced that work together from the fragments of Oxyrhinchian papyri. The two men have much in common despite the thousands of years which separate them—they both have left home behind, particularly wives and children, in pursuit of work (for Psoas, war, for Harlow, textual archaeology) commanded by a powerful superior utterly indifferent to their fates despite profound human similarities between their supervisors and themselves. But what they ultimately have in common is suffering and facing down the death of innocents, questioning how the world can continue to turn in the face of such a mystery.
Anyone expecting to open the pages of the book so conveniently labeled “a novel” on its cover and find the usual uninterrupted flow of prose for hundreds of pages at a time will find themselves questioning what exactly it is that’s been put in front of them. Son of Nobody combines a series of poetic fragments in free-verse—although more inspired by Lattimore than Laforgue—with running footnotes, which at times appear scholarly. However, as one reads, Harlow diverges from his role as scholarly commentator and instead inhabiting a narrator role vis-a-vis his own life. The most recent type of such a fiction is of course Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), where a lengthy poem by the fictitious poet John Shade is encompassed by editorial materials created by one Charles Kinbote, Shade’s neighbor, academic colleague, and, supposedly, his friend. We come to see, however, that Kinbote has published his edition of Shade without the permission of the latter’s widow and that his notes have less to do with analyzing the poem and more to do with providing a paranoid interpretation of the poem as an esoteric political tale about the last prince of the fictional Eastern European country of Zembla. One of its early critics claimed that “whether it be a novel at all is open to question, so unconventional is its form,” and the same charge can be made of Son of Nobody. But that question—the question of literary form—opens up the fundamental significance of Martel’s fiction, a new episode in the Menippean tradition.
Martel does not show his commoner Psoas as merely ridiculous, but endows him with a peculiar noble dignity in his love for his family which urges him to continue to fight, even a battle which appears unwinnable.
The group of works which came to be grouped together as Menippean satires take their origin from Greek Cynic philosophy, particularly the Cynic philosopher Menippus, whose antics were chronicled by the Hellenistic writer Lucian. Lucian wrote in the second century AD largely satirical works, treating serious things with great humor in the style aptly called spoudaiogeloion, which literally translated means “the serious-comical thing.” While Plato’s dialogues send Socrates into commonplace settings—the Athenian agora, a symposium, or pacing outside the city walls—Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead send Menippus to Hades, and he’s more often mocking the dead souls for their transgressions than he is engaging in philosophical disputation (although he does that as well). Works of the Menippean tradition have been called an “anti-genre” because while they often have certain features in common—such as the endeavor to combine heterogenous things (prose and poetry, phallic jokes and philosophy), a particular concern with the grotesque, and the equality of mankind before death—they’re an odd bunch of compositions that don’t sit well together. Consider, if you will, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Joyce’s Ulysses—and now, Martel’s Son of Nobody.
Harlow Donne dedicates his translation and editorial work of the fragments of his newly-discovered “Psoad” to his daughter, Helen. His subsequent loss of her draws him into greater sympathy with the characters of Greek epic—in a heated argument with his wife, he implicitly compares himself to Agamemnon, a strange comparison which only makes sense when we understand that Harlow wants to see his suffering as noble and not purposeless or without meaning.
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville suggested that the reading of Greek and Latin literature could be useful to Americans for a similar reason. The classics “marvelously . . . counterbalance our particular defects,” living as we do in a democratic nation. They impart a love of order, a care for detail, “a noble step,” “and the search for ideal beauty constantly shows itself.” The Menippean satire, like the Greek old comedy, tends to deal with low characters rather than high ones; commoners more often are at its heart than kings. But Martel does not show his commoner Psoas as merely ridiculous, but endows him with a peculiar noble dignity in his love for his family which urges him to continue to fight, even a battle which appears unwinnable.
One of the recurrent events within the episodes of the “Psoad” are battlefield encounters between Psoas and Prince Mestor, ostensibly one of Priam’s fifty sons. The first encounter is preceded by a section of the poem “How Men Fought: The Hero and the Ordinary Men,” where, after the poet outlines the advantages of the hero (his god-made armor, his training from youth for battle, and his spiritedness), he nonetheless insists that the roles of the ordinary man and the hero might yet shift in battle, the former fighting with grim resolve, “his face impassive, / his actions quick, his intent precise and deadly, / just as you might see the hero fleeing / like a hare pursued by dogs, face white with fear.” This shift is what we eventually see when Psoas, having grieved for the insult Mestor issues about his wife, finally triumphs, when the prince and commoner fight on shockingly equal terrain, the details of which are not less Greek for being ludicrous in the best sense.
Less ludicrous is the encounter Psoas has subsequently with Hades himself, who has emerged from the underworld to see the battle which is glutting his kingdom with shades. The presence of Hades provides evidence of Martel’s theological depth. Harlow, annotating this section, seeking consolation for the death of his daughter, constantly thinks about the Greek epic in conversation with “the other foundational book of Western culture, the Gospels.” He sees in the Psoad’s valuation of the common man in his dignity, in his vulnerability to loss, death, and suffering, Psoas’s insistence on and enactment of the truth he proclaims to Mestor—“I am no less of a man than you are”—a precursor to the Gospels. While the metaphysical roots of the claim in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” can be found in the Book of Genesis that man and woman are created in the image and likeness of God, the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth enacts this truth of human dignity, by revealing his desire to live among mankind and to show us thereby the dignity of the ordinary everyday nature of our existence. Harlow sees the image of Hades desiring to know “the fruit of death” as a revelation that the Incarnation would not be wholly foreign to the Greeks, that even they might have an intuition that the good God might want to be with us in our suffering.
It was Erich Auerbach, in his classic work of literary criticism, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), who noticed this unique place of the Gospels in Greek literature. Tragedy focused on the serious actions of the serious man; comedy on the unserious actions of the unserious man. But the Gospels, in portraying Peter’s betrayal of Jesus and his agonized contrition, betray the serious action at work in the soul of a low-born fisherman, suggesting that such seriousness is possible for all who come to love the Lord of all mankind. Martel’s work presents this profoundly democratic truth in a literary mode fascinatingly between aristocracy and democracy: a place our nation will need to rediscover for its next two hundred and fifty years.