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Article Excerpt
Mockery and Mirth
--"if anyone examines more closely the lives of those sober gods in Homer...he will find them all full of folly"--Erasmus. (1)
The very subject of humor in Homer's Iliad might seem to be a bad joke. "Deep-browed Homer" has long been our laureate of loss, esteemed by Aristotle "in the serious style the poet of poets, standing alone." (2) Though foolishness abounds in the Iliad, as Erasmus' Stultitia long ago noticed, Homeric follies usually bring suffering and sorrow; tragedy shadows Greeks and Trojans, and shapes readers' perceptions of the Iliad. It remains difficult to comprehend (much less enjoy) Homeric comedy. The epic's very lack of humor has been regarded as a virtue: Northrop Frye observes that for the first time in Western literature the misery of one's devastated enemies is not seen as comic. Understandably, few critics have stressed the humorous aspects of the Iliad, or pursued Pope's hint "That Homer was no enemy to mirth may appear from several places of his poem; which so serious as it is, is interspers'd with many gayeties." (3) Four sequences in the Iliad illustrate the range and complexity of Homeric humor: the Olympian squabble at the end of Book I, Thersites' intervention at the Greek war council in Book II, Hera's seduction of Zeus in Book XIV, and the battle of the gods in Book XXI. Why characters in the Iliad laugh, and why readers are invited and entitled to laugh, are complicated issues. Quite distinct kinds of humor emerge from and contribute to the epic's predominantly tragic, painfully serious project. In Homer's myriad-minded narrative, it is often but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous--and the reverse.
The first instance of "mirth" comes near the end of Iliad 1, when Thetis, mother of Achilles, successfully petitions Zeus to aid her aggrieved son. Hawk-eyed Hera notices and reviles Zeus. Vainly invoking patriarchal authority, exasperated, Zeus abandons polite persuasion and frankly threatens Hera, who withdraws (rather like Achilles), indignant, sullen, and miserable. All Olympus is distressed. Tenderly comforting his mother, Hephaistos reminds Hera that once before he intervened between his quarreling parents and provoked Zeus: "he caught me by the foot and threw me from the magic threshold,/and all day long I dropped helpless, and about sunset/I landed in Lemnos, and there was not much life left in me./After that fall it was the Sintian men who took care of me." (4) He too suffered the wrath of Zeus and survived to tell the tale. A tactful diplomat, Hephaestos models courtesy and counsels acquiescence. "He spoke, and the goddess of the white arms Hera smiled at him,/and smiling she accepted the goblet out of her son's hand" (1.595-596).
To initiate festivities and celebrate reconciliation, he serves drinks. "But among the blessed immortals uncontrollable laughter/went up as they saw Hephaestos bustling about the palace" (1.599-600). Why does Hephaestos excite laughter? What's so funny? Erasmus's Folly thinks she knows: Hephaestos "often plays the clown at the banquets of the gods, enlivening their drinking bouts by limping around." (5) Modern commentators generally agree that the gods laugh at the lame blacksmith's infirmity. (6) Such humor Hobbes called "sudden glory," the "apprehension of some deformed thing in another," a sense of "eminency" above the infirmity of others, or beyond one's own former vulnerability. (7) The Hobbesian interpretation informs his contemporary John Dryden's version of The First Book of Homer's Ilias (1700). (8) Hephaestos (whom Dryden calls Vulcan) is "the Clown" (1.801)," obsequious" (1.771) and blatantly ridiculous: "The Limping Smith, observ'd the saddened Feast;/And hopping here and there (himself a Jest)" (1.778-779). Identified by his disability, Vulcan is "the lame Architect" (1.812), a slapstick character: "Pitch'd on my Head, at length the Lemian-ground/Receiv'd my batter'd Skull" (1.798-799). It's no surprise that "Loud Fits of Laughter seiz'd the Guests, to see/The limping God so deft at his new Ministry" (1.804-805).
Evidently, Hobbes's "sudden glory" or "eminency" catalyzes the laughter of the Olympians. But Homer's scene is more equivocal, and makes it much less likely that we share the gods' scoffing laughter. Only later is Hephaestos described as lame; indeed, Homer omits what Dryden stresses. Even if Homer's audience knew "the famous crippled smith" from myths and legends where he is often a comic figure, Homer's Hephaestos is neither ridiculous nor grotesque--in marked contrast to Dryden's buffoon. As rendered by Dryden, Homer's richly comic sequence shrinks to sheer farce: Vulcan is "himself a Jest" (1.779); Jove is a hen-pecked husband; Juno a nagging shrew; the gods are "Drunken" (1.810), Jove soon in capable and unconscious. Dryden's Olympus is a burlesque stage.
Translating Homer, Pope moves sharply in the opposite direction from Dryden's slapstick toward solemn grandeur. Here Jove is regal and venerable, Juno "the God's imperious Queen" (1.695). Her complaint is dignified, her demeanor proud. Jove replies with words of power. (9) Pope's Vulcan, "the Architect divine" (1.741), speaks like a god, advocating "eternal peace, and constant joy . . . the sacred union of the sky" (1.745-747). When Vulcan recalls his expulsion by ireful Jove, he describes not a pratfall but a magnificent mystery, a glorious fable of descent and recovery. Pope, remembering the gorgeous version of the myth in Paradise Lost, is nearly Miltonic: "Once in your cause," Vulcan tells his mother, "I felt his matchless might,/Hurl'd headlong downward from th' etherial height;/Tost all the day in rapid circles round:/Nor 'till the Sun descended, touch'd the ground./Breathless I fell, in giddy motion lost" (1.760-764). Here Pope captures Homer's epic humor, gigantic grandeur, the hyperbole witty but not withering.
Dramatizing divine laughter, Pope acknowledges Vulcan's clumsiness but scrupulously preserves his dignity. "Vulcan with aukward grace his office plies,/And unextinguish'd laughter shakes the skies" (1.770-771). "Aukward grace" prompts not crude derision but gay laughter: "Thus the blest Gods the genial day prolong,/In feasts ambrosial, and celestial song" (1.772-773). This Vulcan, promoting festive laughter, is very nearly "the single artificer of the world," like the singer in Wallace Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West." Pope's translation transforms Olympian laughter from Hobbesian derision to Freudian freedom: the quick transition from tension to comfort releases energy, liberated in laughter. Pope's Vulcan is not an object of abuse but a source of relief, less a bumbling buffoon than an active, conscious agent. "Turning the jest on himself," as Pope remarks, Vulcan plays the fool and precipitates gaiety: "He knew that a friend to mirth often diverts or stops quarrels, especially when he contrives to submit himself to the laugh, and prevails on the angry to part in good humour, or in a disposition to friendship." (10) Vulcan strategically deploys humor: he makes himself a figure of fun. Recounting his fall, he willingly becomes the butt and advocate of humor, cheering Hera. Then the blacksmith plays another comic role, master of the revels. Serving drinks, he clowns deliberately, spoofing himself--a god!--performing menial duties, and donning the fool's cap as warriors don arms, for defense against his more dominant tormentors.
Pope's Vulcan, much more than Dryden's, is compellingly Homeric, larger-than-life and all-too-human: god in two persons, intrinsic duality. The Olympian blacksmith is hyperbolically split, merely physical and splendidly supernal: disabled but enabled, vulnerable yet invincible. Buffeted, Hephaestos is subject to the laws of gravity; resilient, he bounces back....
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