1½
Once upon a time I told tales straight out, alternating summary and dramatization, developing characters and relationships, laying on bright detail and rhetorical flourish, et cetera. I’m not that amateur at the Lion’s Gate; I know my trade. But I fear we’re too far gone now for such luxury, Helen and I; I must get to where I am; the real drama, for yours truly, is whether he can trick this tale out at all — not the breath-batingest plot in the world, but there we are. It’s an old story anyhow, this part of it; the corpus bloats with its like; I’ll throw you the bones, to flesh out or pick at as you will.
What I had in mind was an Anonymiad in nine parts, reflecting (so you were to’ve nudged your neighbor and observed) the nine amphorae and ditto muses; or seven parts plus head- and tailpiece: the years of my maroonment framed by its causes and prognosis. The prologue was to’ve established, hopefully has done, the ground-conceit and the narrative voice and viewpoint: a minstrel stuck on some Aegean clinker commences his story, in the process characterizing himself and hinting at the circumstances leading to his plight. Parts One through Four were to rehearse those circumstances, Five through Seven the stages of his island life vis-à-vis his minstrelling — innocent garrulity, numb silence, and terse self-knowledge, respectively — and fetch the narrative’s present time up to the narrator’s. The epilogue’s a sort of envoi to whatever eyes, against all odds, may one day read it. But though you’re to go through the several parts in order, they haven’t been set down that way: after writing the headpiece I began to fear that despite my planning I mightn’t have space enough to get the tale told; since it pivots about Part Four (the headpiece and three parts before, three parts and the tailpiece after), I divided Helen’s hide in half to insure the right narrative proportions; then, instead of proceeding with the exposition heralded at the tail of the headpiece, I took my cue from a remark I’d made earlier on, began in the middle, and wrote out Parts Five, Six, and Seven. Stopping at the head of the tailpiece, which I’m leaving blank for my last words, I returned to compose Parts One, Two, and Three, and the pivotal Part Four. But alas, there’s more to my matter and less to my means than I’d supposed; for a while at least I’ll have to tell instead of showing; if you must have dialogue and dashing about, better go to the theater.
So, so: the rest of Part One would’ve shown the minstrel, under the eunuch’s tutelage, becoming more and more a professional artist until he’s Clytemnestra’s pet entertainer. A typical paragraph runs: We got on, the Queen and I, especially when the Paris-thing blew up and Agamemnon started conscripting his sister-in-law’s old boyfriends. Clytemnestra wasn’t impressed by all the spear-rattling and the blather of National Honor, any more than I, and couldn’t’ve cared less what happened to Helen. She’d been ugly duckling in the house of Tyndareus, Clytie, second prize in the house of Atreus; she knew Agamemnon envied his brother, and that plenty of Trojan slave-girls would see more of the Family Jewels, while he was avenging the family honor, than she’d seen in some while. Though she’d got a bit hard-boiled by life in Mycenae, she was still a Grade-A figure of a woman; it’s a wonder she didn’t put horns on him long before the war.…
In addition to their expository function, this and like passages establish the minstrel’s growing familiarity and preoccupation with affairs of court. His corresponding professional sophistication, at expense of his former naive energy, was to be rendered as a dramatical correlative to the attrition of his potency with Merope (foreshadowed by the earlier ring-business and the Chief Minstrel’s eunuchhood), or vice versa. While still proud of her lover’s success, Merope declares in an affecting speech that she preferred the simple life of the goat pasture and the ditto songs he sang there, which now seem merely to embarrass him. The minstrel himself wonders whether the changes in his life and work are for the better: the fact is — as he makes clear on the occasion of their revisiting the herd — that having left the country but never, despite his success, quite joined the court, he feels out of place now in both. Formerly he sang of bills and nans as Daphnises and Chloes; latterly he sings of courtly lovers as bucks and does. His songs, he fears, are growing in some instances merely tricksy, in others crankish and obscure; moreover, the difficulties of his position in Mycenae have increased with his reputation: Agamemnon presses on the one hand for anti-Trojan songs in the national interest, Clytemnestra on the other for anti-Iliads to feed her resentment. Thus far he’s contrived a precarious integrity by satirizing his own dilemma, for example — but arthritis is retiring the old eunuch, and our narrator has permitted himself to imagine that he’s among the candidates for the Chief-Minstrelship, despite his youth: should he be so laureled, the problem of quid pro quo might become acute. All these considerations notwithstanding (he concludes), one can’t pretend to an innocence outgrown or in other wise retrace one’s steps, unless by coming full circle. Merope doesn’t reply; the minstrel attempts to entertain her with a new composition, but neither she nor the goats (who’d used to gather when he sang) seem much taken by it. The rest of the visit goes badly.
2
Part Two opens back in Mycenae, where all is a-bustle with war preparations. The minstrel, in a brilliant trope which he predicts will be as much pirated by later bards as his device of beginning in the middle, compares the scene to a beehive; he then apostrophizes on the war itself:
The war, the war! To be cynical of its warrant was one thing — bloody madness it was, whether Helen or Hellespont was the prize — and my own patriotism was nothing bellicose: dear and deep as I love Argolis, Troy’s a fine place too, I don’t doubt, and the Trojan women as singable as ours. To Hades with wars and warriors: I had no illusions about the expedition.
Yet I wanted to go along! Your dauber, may be, or your marble-cracker, can hole up like a sybil in a cave, just him and the muse, and get a lifeswork done; even Erato’s boys, if they’re content to sing twelve-liners all their days about Porphyria’s eyebrow and Althea’s navel, can forget the world outside their bedchambers. But your minstrel who aspires to make and people worlds of his own had better get to know the one he’s in, whether he cares for it or not. I believe I understood from the beginning that a certain kind of epic was my fate: that the years I was to spend, in Mycenae and here [i.e., here, this island, where we are now], turning out clever lyrics, satires, and the like, were as it were apprenticeships in love, flirtation-trials to fit me for master-husbandhood and the siring upon broad-hipped Calliope, like Zeus upon Alcmena, of a very Heracles of fictions. “First fact of our generation,” Agamemnon called the war in his recruitment speeches; how should I, missing it, speak to future times as the voice of ours?
He adds: Later I was to accept that I wasn’t of the generation of Agamemnon, Odysseus, and those other giant brawlers (in simple truth I was too young to sail with the fleet), nor yet of Telemachus and Orestes, their pale shadows. To speak for the age, I came to believe, was less achievement than to speak for the ageless; my membership in no particular generation I learned to treasure as a passport out of history, or exemption from the drafts of time. But I begged the King to take me with him, and was crestfallen when he refused. No use Clytemnestra’s declaring (especially when the news came in from Aulis that they’d cut up lphigenia) it was my clearsightedness her husband couldn’t stick, my not having hymned the bloody values of his crowd; what distressed me as much as staying home from Troy was a thing I couldn’t tell her of: Agamemnon’s secret arrangement with me … his reflections upon and acceptance of which end the episode — or chapter, as I call the divisions of my unversed fictions. Note that no mention is made of Merope in this excursus, which pointedly develops a theme (new to literature) first touched on in Part One: the minstrel’s yen for a broader range of life-experience. His feeling is that having left innocence behind, he must pursue its opposite; though his conception of “experience” in this instance is in terms of travel and combat, the metaphor with which he figures his composing-plans is itself un-innocent in a different sense.