I finished War and the Iliad today and my first reaction: Wow. The book is composed of three essays plus an introduction. The first essay, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force is by Simone Weil. The second essay is “On the Iliad” by Rachel Bespaloff. The final essay is “The Style of the Mythical Age: On Rachel Bespaloff” by Hermann Broch.

Weil and Bespaloff, both French writers of Jewish background, wrote their essays on The Iliad during the early months of World War II. The fact of them both writing their essays about the same time is merely coincidental. Weil’s was published first and when Bespahoff saw it she was quite surprised. But it also gave her the chance to make her essay a sort of response to Weil’s.

Weil was greatly affected by a new edition of Goya’s etchings, The Disasters of War which included graphic scenes of torture, rape, corpses and mass burials. It is not much of a surprise that Weil carries her response to Goya into her response to The Iliad wrapped around her fears of the war and Hitler. Her essay begins:

The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.

Weil defines force as “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. In Weil’s reading, the Iliad is filled to the brim with “things” from corpses to slaves to even Achilles himself. Her reading does not allow for resistance to being a thing, all must succumb.

Weil’s essay is grim as it delves into the workings of force. Very briefly she touches on what she sees as the “few luminous moments, scattered here and there throughout the poem, those brief, celestial moments in which man possesses his soul.” These moments last but an instant before they are overwhelmed by force.

It is a rich essay in which she also discusses Greek and Christian thought. She quotes liberally from the Iliad, lines she translates herself. But her quotes often leave out important context or scrunch together a scene to prove her point, neglecting moments that offset brutal force and having just read the poem, I found myself quite conscious of her omissions. In the introduction of the book, Christopher Benfey notes Weil’s quotation method and suggests she is not willfully misreading the poem but attempting to “isolate and intensify scenes of horror as Goya did” in his etchings.

As sick with horror as Weil’s essay made me feel, something that I did not carry away from my actual reading of the poem however horrifying much of it was, she does call the poem a miracle. By her conclusion, I gather that what Weil hopes her reading of the Iliad, and the Iliad itself, will inspire is a deeper understanding of force and its consequences that will help people “learn that there is no refuge from fate, learn not to admire force, not to hate the enemy, nor to scorn the unfortunate.”

I want to talk about Rachel Bespaloff’s essay too, but I feel as though I have gone on enough for today. So now you know what you have to look forward to for tomorrow’s post.