Perhaps it is possible to point to the moment in which the passage took place. On 22 January 1957, Che Guevara killed his first man. Che and his comrades were in the Cuban bush; it was midday. A soldier started shooting at them from a hut barely 70 feet from where they stood. Che fired two shots. At the second shot, the man fell. Until that moment, the earnest indignation at universal injustice had expressed itself in Byronic gestures, bad verse that Che wrote with echoes of nineteenth-century bombast, and the sort of academic prose known in Latin America as revolutionary, littered with the vocabulary of inaugural speeches and purple metaphors. After that first death something changed. Che, the ardent but conventional intellectual, became irrevocably a man of action, a destiny that had perhaps been his all along, even though everything in him seemed to conspire against his fulfilling it. Racked by asthma that made him stumble through long speeches, let alone long marches, conscious of the paradox of having been born into the class that benefited from the unfair system he had set out to challenge, moved suddenly to act rather than to reflect on the precise goals of his actions, Che assumed, with stubborn determination, the role of the romantic fighter-hero and became the figure whom my generation required in order to ease our conscience.
Thoreau declared that “action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.” Che (who, like all Argentinean intellectuals of his time, must have read “Civil Disobedience”) would have agreed with this paraphrase of Matthew 10:34–35.
The Blind Bookkeeper
I told them once, I told them twice:
They would not listen to advice.
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 6
SOMETIME IN THE SPRING OF 1943, Northrop Frye wrote a paper which, a holograph note on the typescript tells us, was intended for an Emmanuel College publication “that never came off.” Its title is “The Present Condition of the World” and its thrust the problem of steering “a middle course between platitude and paradox,” between “Olympian detachment and Bacchic outcries” when discussing this condition, which, Frye reminds us, is one of universal warfare. With his habitual clarity, Frye warns us against judging that war reaps any benefits. “A corrupt tree can only bring forth corrupt fruit, and the notion that some good may be salvaged from this evil and monstrous horror is, however pathetic and wistful, a pernicious illusion.” And Frye concludes: “And that such benefits will be ‘worth’ the blood and misery and destruction of the war is nonsense, unless posterity are insanely cynical bookkeepers.”
Much of Frye’s paper is concerned with the deistic society whose goal, he reminds us, is war. This is a truth very much worth recalling in our third millennium. It is of the essence, and we can only lament that Frye left his paper incomplete. But like all of Frye’s writings, it is rich with tempting asides. One in particular, that of a certain actor in this warmongering society, may prove useful to explore. I refer to the bookkeeper, the person in charge of tallying the sum of our follies.
Bookkeeping is an excellent word. Its present meaning is fully justified. In the brightest of our mornings, when writing was invented, the first human to scratch a readable sign on a piece of clay was not a poet but an accountant. The earliest examples of writing we have, now probably destroyed in the looting of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad, are two small tablets that record a certain number of goats or sheep: the receipts, in fact, for a commercial transaction. Our first books were ledgers, and it should not surprise us that poets later retained the two essential characteristics of their accountant elders: the delight in making lists and the responsibility of keeping records.
Two of our founding books, the Iliad and the Odyssey, excel in both. Their author agreed with Frye on the sterility of war and would never have suggested that the fruit of war is peace. Homer loathed war. “Atrocious,” “scourge of men,” “lying, two-faced,” are the terms he uses to describe it. In Homer’s poems, pity and mourning are never far from the battlefields, and it is not by chance that pleas for compassion begin and end the Iliad. The debits and credits in Homer’s books are not those of our politicians. Homer the bookkeeper is never insanely cynical.
Who then are these sane and merciful bookkeepers who, like Homer, set our accounts in order? What characteristics must they have, or, rather, what characteristics do we imagine them to have so that they can perform their work efficiently? Why have we brought into being a Homer to father our two primordial stories?
The history of writing, of which the history of reading is its first and last chapter, has among its many fantastical creations one that seems to me peculiar among alclass="underline" that of the authorless text for which an author must be invented. Anonymity has its attraction, and Anonymous is one of the major figures of every one of our literatures. But sometimes, perhaps when the depth and reverberations of a text seem almost too universal to belong on an individual reader’s bookshelf, we have tried to imagine for that text a poet of flesh and blood, capable of being Everyman. It is as if, in recognizing in a work the expression in words of a private, wordless experience hidden deep within us, we wished to satisfy ourselves in the belief that this too was the creation of human hands and a human mind, that a man or woman like us was once able to tell for us that which we, younger siblings, merely glimpse or intuit. In order to achieve this, the critical sciences come to our aid and do their detective work to rescue from discretion the nebulous author behind the Epic of Gilgamesh or La Vie devant soi, but their labors are merely confirmation. In the minds of their readers, the secret authors have already acquired a congenial familiarity, an almost physical presence, lacking nothing except a name.
Homer begins long after the composition of his poems, a parent adopted, as it were, by his children. Long centuries of literary criticism lent him features both concrete and emblematic, first through apocryphal biographies, later as an allegory, an idea, as the identity of a nation, and even as the embodiment of poetry itself. In every case, however, it was the readers who had first to conceive of an author for the poem to be conceivable.
This history of conceived authorship is, in some sense, a parallel history of literature. For the Greeks he was the beginning of all things Greek, of Greek civilization and history. For Virgil he was a Roman in all but birth. For the poets of Byzantium, he was a historian whose knowledge of humanity was great but whose knowledge of history was shaky. For Dante, a famous but retired craftsman. Thomas de Quincey, towards 1850, asked whether Homer (a name absent otherwise in Greek literature) might not be a deformation of the Semitic “Omar” and imagined him as a brother of the Arabian Nights’ storytellers. The much-derided Heinrich Schliemann, following the divagations of the historian Karl Blind, suggested that Homer, like his Trojans, was Aryan, blue-eyed, red-haired, martial, musically gifted and philosophical. Alexander Pope likened Homer to an English gentleman. Goethe saw in Homer a self-portrait: perhaps for that reason in 1805 he chose to listen to the famous Homeric lectures of Friedrich August Wolf hidden behind a curtain, embarrassed at the description of a poet whose German reincarnation he felt himself to be. Samuel Butler argued, ironically, that Homer was a woman. For Rudyard Kipling, for Ezra Pound, for James Joyce, for Derek Walcott, and for Jorge Luis Borges, Homer was everyone and no one. The linguists Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord twinned Homer with the guzlars, the epic Serbian singers who still chant their verses from village to village. In 2008, the German poet Raoul Schrott argued that Homer was inspired by the archaic songs of Sumer and suggested that he was a transplanted Middle Eastern poet who had learned his craft in Babylon or Ur. This Babylonian influence does not seem incongruous: the Epic of Gilgamesh has indeed an atmosphere not unlike that of the Odyssey, and the adventures of two men, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, whom the reader feels as one, are similar to those of a single man who calls himself Nobody and whom the reader sees as many.