Matthew Gumpert: Reading Hector: Iliad 22

    The 14th ELL Events, a lecture titled “Reading Hector: Iliad 22” was held on October 15 at 11:30 a.m. with the participation of Matthew Gumpert, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature in the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Boğaziçi University.

    This lecture was written based on an audio recording, and the transcript was generated using AI. As a result, there may be some nonsensical words or logical errors here and there. If you’d like, you can also listen to the audio recording, I’ve shared the download link:
Reading Hector: Iliad 22

Also you can read in PDF.

Lecture Transcript

    Thank you very much. Thank you for that introduction, Rana Hoja, and thank you for also making me feel so welcome here in this wonderful city. My first time in Konya. Um, so I'm delighted to be here, uh, and to see such a, a wonderful crowd of young faces. I just want to start out by thanking, first of all, thanking Rana Hoja, thanking the Department of English Language and Literature, the Faculty of Letters, the Dean, the Vice Dean, the Rector, all the gods and goddesses who are looking down on us-from Olympus. I don't want to leave anybody. You know, you... That's the... You know what happens when you forget to mention a god. You know, so you have to be careful. So I'm just trying to cover them all. Um, and, um, so I'm going to be talking about a text from the Iliad. It's, um, it, it, it's going to get sometimes technical, so bear with me. But a-as long as you have a general sense of the Iliad, the Odyssey, if you're somewhat familiar with some of the major mythological figures like Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, then I think we'll be fine. Uh, and I'd be happy to take questions also, depending on how much time we have. You'll let me know if we're running out of time, and I'll happy to answer your questions at the end of that. So it's okay not... I always tell, tell my students when they, when they don't understand that, that, um, confusion can be... There's good confusion and bad confusion, right? Good confusion is productive confusion, the kind of confusion that leads you somewhere, right? Uh, and eventually you'll... you find... you, you'll find your way out of that confusion. As... Another student of mine just told me yesterday, a couple of days ago, I was teaching and she said she was very... She felt lost. I said, "She enjoyed being lost." Enjoyed being lost in the text. So that's-- I think that's part of, uh, what I'm being inspired by, that student telling me, "Enjoy being lost in the text." All right. I hope... Technically, I hope it all goes according to plan, and, uh, hopefully the slides will, will help. Yeah, you can see that. Can, can they see that clearly enough in the lights? Is it easy to see?

    No. It looks a bit faint, but actually... Well, maybe the next one is easier to read. That's okay, right? Okay. All right. So let's, let's, let's get started in earnest. So I'm talking about a scene from the Iliad, uh, on, on... And when I say Iliad twenty-two, you'll probably-- you probably know that the Iliad, like the Odyssey, is divided into twenty-four chapters. And, uh, so by saying Iliad twenty-two, we're simply saying Iliad chapter twenty-two or book twenty-two. And if I add some more numbers after that, those are the line numbers. Okay? And, um, in general, I'm referring to the translation by, uh, Lattimore, famous translator of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Um, but in general, the translations that I'm using today are my own translations from the ancient Greek or sometimes the French, um, unless I otherwise tell you, um, just so you know where that is coming from. So, uh, I'm hoping that you know a little something about the overall story of the Iliad and, uh, the scene that we're focusing on in book twenty-two or chapter twenty-two is the famous duel, uh, the mano a mano, man against man, the famous showdown, uh, that we've been waiting for throughout the whole story between Hector and Achilles. Uh, and, um, that's something about the Achilles and, and Hector and Odysseus, that will help. But again, bear with me if, if there are things that you don't know. Okay, so readers who have been reading the Iliad have described Achilles' behavior in the wake of Patroclus's death. You all know who Patroclus is. Yes. Okay. Uh, have described Achilles' behavior in the wake of Patroclus's death in Iliad Book Sixteen, when Patroclus is killed, has described Achilles' behavior as a form of savagery or madness. So for example, there's one critic, Horn, from two thousand eighteen, who classifies Achilles as a sociopath given his behavior, suffering from antisocial personality disorder. It's fun to psychoanalyze our heroes from ancient Greece. Um, Homer's diagnosis is considerably less precise. In the Iliad, Achilles' state of mind after Patroclus's death is termed variously as savage or wild. The critics will cite Achilles' implacable pursuit of vengeance, his refusal to negotiate with Hector, his stubborn mistreatment of Hector's body. The persistent view of Achilles by other critics as a tragic protagonist in the wake of or in the grip of what we call atē, delusion in its most malignant and dangerous form, amounts to pretty much the same diagnosis. And yet there's a whole group of other readers, among them me, uh, that for... that think that Achilles' signature is rather not this sociopathic madness, but rather a kind of clarity of mind, a refusal to indulge in self-delusion. So for example, a wonderful critic named Redfield argues that Achilles is a heroic figure rather than a demonic figure because his- Negations are founded not on a perversity of will, but on the clarity of intellect. Such detachment, this is me now, includes the knowledge and acceptance that his own death at the hands of Apollo is imminent. So Achilles is one of the-- is perhaps the only great hero in the Iliad, in the Iliad who actually refers to his own death as imminent. He knows he's not gonna make it out of Troy. He knows that his time on earth is limited, and yet he goes forward with that clarity, not shunning, not shirking it, not pretending that it's not there. Say-saying: "Look, I know I'm never gonna make it out of Troy alive." And there is that kind of... that courage and that kind of clarity of mind. Now, these two critical assist-- Uh, at first, we seem to be at an impasse here. We have, we have mad Achilles, angry Achilles, crazy Achilles, Achilles the sociopath. Then we have Achilles, cool, clear, calm, collected, detached. So there seems to be a contradiction, but maybe they're not as contradictory as they might appear. For example, Achilles' rage. You've all heard of the, the rage of Achilles. It's interesting. You know, um, occasionally... I hope you don't mind this. I'll be giving you a few ancient Greek words today to just have fun with. Um, and the-- it's, it's-- I, I... Many of you are enjoying the experience of reading translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Of course, you're missing something inevitably because you don't have the, the original language. And so I encourage all of you to go out there and learn ancient Greek, right? If you... If that, if that is the case, if you all listen to my, my plea, then we'll se- we'll double the number of students in the world who are now learning ancient Greek at universities, right? It's, it's something that's beginning to disappear from our universities, and we don't want that to happen. But if you can read the original, um, you can see things that you may have missed in the translation. And for example, the very first word of... The first, the first line of the Iliad in ancient Greek goes something like this, "Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληιάο ἀχιλῆος." And that very first word, mēnin, the very first word of the very first piece of literature, let's say, in the West, is the word mēnin. It's the word anger or... who is almost godlike in his power and his anger. So Achilles' famous rage, his mēnin, right, lends, after all, brutal purpose to his violence. He's not randomly violent. He's not sociopathically, chaotically violent. His violence has a point. Think of that image there. Violence has a point, especially when we remember how he kills Hector with his spear. His violence has a point. I'm making a pun there on the various meanings of the word point there, right? We may admire Achilles' unmatched capacity to focus. Sure, that's good, and that's one, one of the points I'm going to be making today is the extraordinary focus of the critical mind. But at a certain point, focus becomes, how do I put this, fixation. Becomes a little bit creepy. Someone focuses you on you too much, you know there's a problem, right? Focus can become fixation. So we can understand why there's an ambiguity about the nature of this, uh, rage and the violence of Achilles.

    But I'm trying, trying to argue that it, in a, in a rather unusual move, that it, it, it, it mo- it confirms and reinforces his detachment, his clarity, his precision. Okay? So what if we approach, then... You're all students in a department of, or most of you, departments of literature and language. So what if we approached Achilles' extraordinary ability to see, well, his extraordinary ability to focus as a specifically critical faculty? Critical. I know we use that word a lot in our classes. Critical thinking, reading critical theory, writing criticism. What does it all mean, right? Nobody really knows. We come out of four years, we still don't know what cri-critical thinking is, but we talk about it a lot. What if the ability to focus, what if we can learn something, strangely enough, from Achilles as a role model? I'm not suggesting that anybody go out and kill lots of people. Far from it, right? But that ability to focus, right?

    What if that was a critical capacity, the capacity specifically to make fine distinctions? And you have there on the slide there, the second term after atē, krino, the ancient Greek verb. I've translated it into Roman letters for you, so it's not difficult to read. Right? Transliterated into regular good old-fashioned, um, letters we can recognize. Krino is a Greek verb meaning something like to separate, to distinguish, to pick out, to choose. Uh, and it, in fact, is the origin of our word criticism, right? Because what do we do when we criticize? We distinguish. We make fine distinctions between this and that. In a way, that's right there a good definition of what we mean by critical thinking. So nowhere in... I guess what I'm saying is, in a way, this capacity to focus is a capacity, an extraordinary unmatched capacity for close reading. So who would have thought Achilles, teacher of the year, right? Critic of the year. The capacity to close read.

    And this capacity for close reading nowhere, I think, is it more evident, uh, than in the long-awaited monomachia. There's the third term on your first slide. A battle of one against one, monomachia. Nowhere is it more evident than in the long-awaited monomachia between Hector and Achilles in book twenty-two, lines three twenty-one to twenty-nine Okay. So I-I mentioned tragedy, and very often you'll see people reading, despite the fact that it's an epic, piece of epic literature, you'll see people reading the Iliad or the Odyssey as a piece of tragic literature. And Achilles, in many ways, certainly fits the portrait of a tragic hero, in which he brings misery upon himself through his own actions. He doesn't know that putting Patroclus into the fight instead of himself will end up killing Patroclus, bringing grief upon himself. That's often the tragic arc, right? The tragic hero unwittingly, unknowingly performs actions which turn upon himself or herself.

    So within the tragic reading of this story, Achilles' failure to see the implications of his own actions is a form of what we would call hamartia or hamartia, hamartia. People pronounce it differently. Some of you will know this term if you've been talking about tragedy or reading Aristotle's Poetics, which is a book on the first-- or really the first important piece of literary criticism in the West, and it's a book about tragedy, right? We'll come back to this term hamartia or hamartia as a kind of what we ordinarily think of as a kind of moral failure. We'll come back to that in a moment, so bear with me. We'll come back to hamartia. But more recently, we see some interesting readings from critics who are interested in narrative technique. There's a kind of critical theory that we call, right, narratology, the study of narration and narrative techniques, which often uses the notion of focus or focalization at its center.

    So we're already doing something, I think, related to where we started with at the beginning of this, uh, beginning of our talk. So narratological readings, for example, wonderful critic named... narrative technique functions almost like a cinematographer. Think of it as the lens. Do you do a close-up? Do you do a wide angle? Do you change your shots quickly? Do you keep it in one shot without break? Those are all different cinema- cinematographical techniques that change the way we approach what we're watching in film. And so this allows us to see how an ancient Greek critic like Homer is modulating, changing perspective and tempo and rhythm in order to foreground the character's shifting psychological, emotional, even epistemological concerns. Even-- In other words, what do they know and when do they know it? That can be established through what the narrative is focusing on, where it is focalized. Now, what such critical perspectives, these perspectives that focus on, on narrative, on how you tell the story, on what you're focusing on, these suggest, I think, the critical nature of what we call perspective itself. In other words, in trying to make sense now, in trying to read Achilles, we have failed to see the obvious, that Achilles himself is trying to read Hector. So we don't usually think, especially in a world where we don't even know what role was played by writing. People often say that the Homeric epics were composed at a time when there was no such thing as writing. Not perhaps entirely true, but the question of writing is an interesting one. We, we can come back to it perhaps in the question section, section if we have time. All right? So the idea that it's easy to miss the idea that Hector and Achilles and all the heroes of the Iliad, in order to kill, they have to read. They have to understand. They have to focus. And no one is better at focusing than Achilles. Reading, um, and I guess if we look at it from this perspective, um, it suggests, I think, that this scene that we're going to look at in more, in more detail, we're about to embark on a journey of close reading. Isn't that exciting? So I hope, I hope it-- I hope you'll bear with me as we move into the text and, and try to do exactly what Achilles is doing, which is focus. So does that mean we're trying to kill the text? Maybe, in a way. Isn't that what we're trying to do when we solve a text? When we're trying to understand something, we're trying to kill it, to make it--to master it, to dominate it in some ways. It's interesting to think about. Okay, so viewed from this perspective, the scene that we're looking at becomes... In other words, Achilles' defeat of Hector becomes a performance of prodigious, in other words, extraordinary critical mastery, one in which the art of killing is indistinguishable from the art of reading. It makes what we do sound a little bit more exciting sometimes, doesn't it? All right. Reading as such is a predatory practice, a violence enacted, violence enacted upon the text. Each critic in this seems to encounter-- Each critic this encounter between Achilles and Hector seems to suggest is a... Well, let me put it this way. Each critic, thanks to Oscar Wilde, kills the thing he loves, right? The original, you will know, is each man, of course, kills the thing he loves. I live with Oscar Wilde's famous motto, "Each thing kill-- each man kills the thing he reads." And reading here is a form of mastering or consuming or consumption, and a text read this way, in this fashion, after you've read it, what do you do with it? You throw it out. You discard it. You're done. The disposable text. Okay, that's... I know you've been dying to get to the next slide. When is he gonna get to the next slide? Yeah. How long is this talk? So here we go. This is, this is, uh, uh... This is gonna be a little, a little precise, but that's what we gotta do.

    So it is Achilles' critical instincts finally that enable him, I would argue, to defeat Hector. At Iliad Book twenty-two, line three twenty-one, Achilles solves Hector, solves Hector by scanning him like a text and in the Greek, and I'm now referring here to moment-specific terms in the Greek that have been debated by classicists. What does this mean? How do we translate it? So I'm offering my translation, but one that is certainly confirmed by other famous translations, although there is some disagreement sometimes about the best way to translate a word from 800 BC, obviously. Um, so it is Achilles' critical instincts that enable him to defeat Hector. Achilles solves Hector by scanning him like a text, eyeing or discerning. And you see the word there, esaron, in parentheses there. Esaron, which means eyeing or discerning his body, Hector's body. Why? To locate a gap in the armor. An opening where, ope in Greek, the skin or the surface of the body, the kroa or kroa, might give way. It's a difficult term to translate. Open up, might give way, exei. Okay? So Hector's body, faced with this perspective, indeed, we see an opening. Hector's body opens, or I guess a better translation would be appears or is revealed, phainetai, as in phenotype or phenomenology. Phaino means to appear. It appears, it reveals itself there. Where? Well, there where exactly the collarbones... Sorry to get a bit anatomical here. The collarbones divide the neck from the shoulders, namely the gullet. You know that soft, nasty part that you don't even like to touch? You know, right, where, where something could go in really easily. The gullet, the laukine. So, okay. And this is one of the strength-- one of the experiences, I'm sure you've had this if you've been trying to read the Iliad. Most of the Iliad, uh, is composed of a succession of deaths, lovingly retraced in succession. This guy died this way, this guy did this way, and it's extraordinarily anatomical, right? I mean, I'm sure you've had this experience. It's even... It's like a... It's like one of those, you know, spatter, blood spatter movies like Saw, where you see everything and you don't want to see everything. So, you know, and the spear went through his third rib, and it came out between his shoulder blade, and then his spleen spilled out on the ground, and it's like the whole thing is an anatomy lesson in the precise, you know, undoing of a body. And of course, the Greeks understood the Homeric epics to be not just stories that were a lot of good t- a lot of good fun, not just books of mythology or encyclopedias of rituals, but they were also how-to manuals. How to live your life in the best possible way, in every possible aspect of existence. How to worship a god, how to be a king, how to make a ship, how to prepare medicine for wounded soldiers, how to kill a man. That's how... I would subtitle the Iliad, The Iliad: How to Kill a Man. And this is exactly what we're getting here in precise anatomical perspective in the scene that I'm focusing on here today. Okay? All right. So hence the anatomical detail. We'll come back to the gullet. Poor Hector and his gullet. We'll come back to that at the very end of the talk. Okay? So Achilles' goal here, his task, how to kill a man, how to kill the best of the Trojans, Hector, is facilitated by the fact that Hector's armor, the armor that Hector is wearing, was once his own. It was Achilles' armor. It's like, "Hey, you're wearing my armor." Before he loaned it to Patroclus. That's the whole problem, right? Again, I don't want to go into the details of the plot. You can get ChatGPT to do that for you. It'll be much better than I can, but you know the basic story.

    Yes. Achilles refusing to fight, he's gone on strike because he's been dishonored by Agamemnon, and finally things are getting so bad for the Greeks that Achilles says, "Okay, look, I'm not ready yet to go back into the battle, but I will send my favorite friend, so-called friend, whatever you want to think of Patroclus, I will send him into battle instead, and he'll wear my armor, and just seeing my armor on the battlefield will freak out the Trojans that they'll run back to the, the walls of Tro-Troy, and we'll... I'll save the day." And it, it kind of works until Patroclus goes far too right? Achilles has given Patroclus very strict instructions. "Do not try to take Troy yourself. Once the Trojans have turned tail and run, you come back home." Right? I don't want to see you trying to go for too much heroism. And of course, Patroclus, that's exactly what Patroclus does, and he's killed by Hector. For those of you... Just spoiler alert.

    But it's no big deal. If you haven't, then you're in trouble. I, I just ruined the whole thing for you. Okay. All right. So for a critic like DeJong, I mentioned her before, she's one of my favorite critics of Homer. The reference to Hector's wearing... He's putting on a Patroclus or Achilles armor is-- She thinks of it as a narrative device, a way of showing us a-- signaling a shift in Achilles' perspective. It's like, "Ah, this is what Achilles is looking at now. He's noticing this." Right? It's like a psychological detail. So that looking at Hector, Achilles then remembers his, Hector's, appropriation, his stealing of Patroclus' armor. And of course, that makes him really angry because it reminds him of what Hector did to Patroclus. Okay. So he sees... So I guess what I'm-- why am I dwelling so much on the question of the armor? Um, you know, it's not often remarked, this is an advantage in some sense. This is a strategic opening, we might say, for Achilles. He knows the armor he's looking at. It's his armor, and that gives him a strategic advantage. And so sure enough, we see here him finding the opening. Um, and once he discovers the weak spot, and he knows where to look for that weak spot, in this place, te, here, there, right there, in this place, Achilles... Where am I? Um, Achilles drives his spear. Through the tender neck went the point. The antiku apodoio daphnos eloth akoke. Through the tender neck. I want you to think about that unnecessary, repeatable adjective, tender. Through the tender neck went the point of the spear. Not just the spear, but the point of the spear. Not just the neck, but the tender part of the neck. There's an interesting simile. I don't think we'll have time to go into it in detail here, but there's an interesting simile. Um, actually, let me... Before I get to the interesting simile, let me, uh, talk a little bit more about focalization. Um, I, I, I regard that-- I guess what I'm trying to say is I think of focalization, the way that some critics use the term, as a term of narratology. What is he focusing on? Right? You can use it for short stories. Who is-- Who, through whose perspective are we experiencing what we're experiencing in the story is the focalizer, which is not necessarily the same as the narrator. Right? I'm sure you've been talking about this in your classes on literature. I regard focalization here not merely as a narratological device in the way I'm just suggesting you can use it or the way you may, you might know it, but as the critical gesture par excellence above all. Achilles' extraordinary capacity to train his powers of discernment, what we might call critical thinking, on... What does he train it on? The faults or fault lines of his enemies. I'm playing on the word fault, of the word fault, as in it is your fault. It's your weakness. Your-- It's a moral failure. It's your fault. And also a fault, like we talk about a fault in an earthquake. A fault line is the crack, the fissure where things separate. Okay? In other words, the gaps in the armor, the openings or the edges where there's a way in. Note the close relationship in this scene between seeing, solving, and slaying. Again, I love, I love a good bit of alliteration. That's why I try to use it whenever I can. Seeing, solving, and slaying. The Greeks always equated knowing with seeing. But in the case of Achilles, that optics, that the art of seeing has been rigorously and absolutely weaponized. Right? So now I talked about a simile. Critics have debated, um... Yeah. Critics have debated... would argue that the radiance, the beautiful brilliance of Achilles' spear actually stands for the clarity of his perception, and so too its sharpness. Again, sharpness can be both metaphorical, you know, a very sharp intellect, or the sharpness of a knife, the pesky side of a knife that can, can, that can cut. Um, so this word for sharpness, elcheos, you see it there, uh, the first part of that line, the last word, elcheos, functions not only to heighten the tension of the scene, but to suggest the piercing nature of Achilles' critical vision. DeJong drives home the point, ha ha ha, so to speak. Achilles is looking, eseron, and asking himself in this scene where it, that is Hector's body, would most give way. So the scene, it's an extraordinary moment. We don't just see he just comes along and throws the spear. We watch him debating. We watch the process of critical engagement. Where, hmm, where is there an opening?

    Where is there a point where I might have a way into the body of the enemy, right? So this is a demonstration, an extraordinary demonstration of Achilles' critical powers, those powers which are meticulous, methodical, and murderous. Sorry, alliteration again, I can't help myself. Meticulous, methodical, and murderous. In other words, we're talking about his ability to find the fissures, the faults in the armored body of the enemy, the flaws in his apparently seamless surfaces. And again, think about that word flaw, like fault. You could talk about a flawed piece of wood, a flaw in the design, which would be a, a mechanical gap or error. Or you could talk about you have a lot of flaws. I think you can be a better person. You can talk about it in a moral or an ethical sense. Okay. Still with me? Okay, great. Focalization, if we look at it this way, not just as a narrative psychological technique, but as a rigorous form of reading closely, is a central gesture in Greek tragedy.

    So if you'll allow me just for a moment as a kind of parenthesis to talk about Sophoc-- one of my favorite plays, Sophocles' Oedipus. How many people know S-Sophocles' Oedipus the King? The story of Oedipus, right? Okay. All right. Um, let me just for a moment. There's a moment where Achilles, if you know the story, sorry. Uh, uh, uh, Oedipus comes to the city of Thebes, and in order to become king of Thebes, he has to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, this monster that's been eating the Thebans in this city in Greece. And we know that the Sphinx is this monstrous creature who has a riddle to tell, and no one has been able to solve the riddle. So Oedipus comes along and tries to solve it. And the riddle, and the word for riddle is quite interesting. The riddle, uh, the aenigma, as in enigma. Our enigma comes from the Greek word aenigma, right? Um... Sorry. There it is. Okay. The, the riddle or aenigma of the Sphinx is not for anyone to explain, detain.

    I'm just mo-mo-moving along to this qu-quote here. But rather, Oedipus destroys her, epausa, having hit the mark. This is the way his solving the riddle was described, as hitting the mark, khrusas, by dint of thanks to pure intelligence. Gnōmē. Gnōmē, as in gnosis, right? Gnōmē, intelligence. And interestingly enough, the chorus compares this triumph to the release of an arrow finding its target. Toxeus, letting go an arrow, letting loose an arrow. Now, why am I talking about this? Well, when it comes to solving the puzzle of his own identity, if you know anything about the story of Oedipus, uh, he's way off the mark. He has no-- not a clue who he is. And when he discovers who he is, namely the daughter of his, of his wife-- Sorry, the son of his wife, right, and the killer of his own father, it destroys him. But he's clueless when it comes to himself. But when he-- But he's brilliant at solving puzzles around him, like a detective. Okay?

    And it is this hamartia, I told you we'd come back to that term. It is this hamartia from hamartano, to miss the mark, for example, of a spear thrown. It is this failure to hit the target which in Aristotle's formulation in the Poetics, his great work on tragedy, activates the tragic hero's reversal of fortune. Now, what am I saying here? Just very quickly back to amartia or hamartia. For three thousand years, we've been used to translating the word hamartia as the tragic flaw. Many of us who've never read Aristotle and have never read Sophocles know this phrase. It's entered into our popular vocabulary. So, right, the tragic flaw. The idea behind the tragic flaw, and it's an idea that makes sense in a Judeo-Christian, Islamic monotheistic world, is that tragic heroes get what they deserve, to put it in very simple terms, right? That there's something... We all feel that there's something wrong with them. They must have done something wrong.

    There's something bad about their character. It's a typically modern psychological notion of moral goodness or badness, and the... of bad stuff can happen to you no matter who you are or where you are or when you are, and there's no way to know, and that's just deal with it. And the way you deal with it tells us whether or not you're a hero or not. It's not just whether or not you're a hero already. It's the way you react to this fortune. Can you rise above it? That makes you a hero. But again, what if I told you that the word that we translate as tragic flaw really comes from a Greek word, as I've just outlined, meaning something like, as in arch-archery, missing the mark, failing to hit your target. In other words, a better translation of hamartia in terms of tragic mistake would be something like an error, a misstep. Oops, I got on the wrong plane, the one that's going to crash. Oops. It's not your fault that you wanted to rush home and get home sooner. You should have waited. You're being...

    No one would say that that person is to blame for the plane crash because they were desperate to get home early, right? It just happens. And why it happens, we don't know. That's the way it is. So I guess what I'm just trying to suggest is these words that have been translated to have a kind of moral meaning to them, fault, flaw, right, are in fact words that suggest much more the gaps in knowledge between what we know and what we don't know. The openings that we need to find, uh, right, or that where fate sometimes finds us. Okay? And exactly that term is being used here in this, um, scene, um, where we see E-He-Hector aiming at Achilles' shield, nor does he miss it. He does not commit hamartia. His aim is true. It's just that his spear is deflected by the gods, which is not fair at all, right? Hector's aim is true. He doesn't make a mistake. He's just playing a game that's been rigged in advance.

    So now, this may sound a little strange if we really-- if we read our Iliad and our Odyssey. Is it wrong to see Achilles and Oedipus as... Or maybe let's say rather Achilles and Hector. Is it wrong to see them as brothers in arms, deluded warriors of the truth, brought down by their failure to focalize on what really matters? I've suggested that the Iliad has long been viewed as a form of tragedy, and Achilles and Hector as tragic heroes. But this seems wrong in a way, because, I mean, Achilles' aim is flawless. His triumph over Hector is absolute. He kills him. Spoiler alert, Hector dead, no more. He's victorious. But it-- So this looks like a victory for close reading. We've solved the text. But... Right? I mean, we think of in this world where reading closely means reading ruthlessly, reading to destroy. But does-- But then ask yourself the question, do you know anything about the next two books of the Odyssey-- uh, the Iliad? It's not over until book twenty-four, right?

    Does Achilles' ruthlessness, does it really give him what he wants? Does it give him Hector? Well, I-- you may remember what happens after he kills him. It doesn't-- He, he can't destroy Hector's body. Hector's body is rendered impermeable by the gods. No matter what Achilles tries to do to it, he cannot damage the body. It's perfectly preserved. There's no way in, thanks to the gods. Does Achilles' ruthlessness give him what he wants, Hector, and by extension, Patroclus? He doesn't get Patroclus back. It doesn't make his boo-boo better, right? It hurts just as much. For all his lucidity, for all his clear-mindedness, for all his detachment, for all his intelligence, Achilles' triumph is illusory. The target he hits proves a decoy or a trap. And indeed, Hector himself prophesies Achilles' own death that's about to come, of which his death, Hector's, is a foreshadowing, right? Hector says, "Don't think you're--Don't think I'm the only one. You're next after me." Right?

    He has a moment of clarity. Um, so the trag-- And that gets us back to the notion of the tragic hero, even in a work that's a, a, a work of epic, that the tragic hero fails to recognize himself as, I guess I would call a kind of textual being, part of a text, part of a larger story, right? Part of a larger network of causes and effects. That's the whole, that's the whole notion of tragedy. We don't know where we are. We don't know what the next step we take, what it will bring us into contact with or conflict with, right? So the implications for this famous monomachia or duel are very important. It becomes a tale of dueling misapprehensions, um, hits which are really misses. Remember, Hector's aim is true. He does not miss the mark, but that misses the whole point. We're not so much playing a game as being played. The game, as I've said before, is rigged. How, how, how are we doing? You have a few minutes left. How much time do we have?

    I think, uh, make sure it's open now and for- I'll, I'll... I have-- It'll, it won't take that long. Not to worry. No, no. Okay. Okay, great. Great. Thank you. It's a good ti- good time to take a breath anyway, to have a, have a drink of water as well here, and we kind of now move to what, what, what can we get help reading the text now from one of the great critics, one of the great theorists of reading by the name of Roland Barthes. Have you heard of Roland Barthes? It's funny saying with a really strong French accent, Roland Barthes. It's always impossible to know how to pronounce those words in English because you don't know if you should pronounce them like the French pronounce them, in which case you sound like you're being pretentious, or you have to turn it into an American word like Roland Barthes, which sounds funny also. So there's no good solution. How do you pronounce it?

    Yeah, it's- Barthes? It's better- Oh, really? With a hard "t." I try to kind of steer a path in the middle. Like Bart or something like that. Okay. All right. So let me, let me now shift and get some help from, um, one of my favorite critics, Roland Barthes. I, I recommend his, his, his, his essays. You may know him from probably one of his most famous essays that are read by- Probably the first thing you see by Barthes is "The Death of the Author," famous essay that a lot of us read in our classes on criticism, and another essay called Work-- "From Work to Text." These are all good, um, good places to, um, read Roland Barthes. So anyway. So in a wonderful work called The Pleasure of the Text, Le plaisir du texte, Roland Barthes likens reading a text to driving a nail through a plank of wood. Doesn't sound so weird after what we've just-- what we've been through. Since we've just been comparing reading to driving a spear through the neck of a man, right? And says Barthes here, this is my translation from the French: "The wood resists differently depending on the place where you attack." Wood, we would say, says Barthes, is not isotropic. It's not equally in equal in density or structure. There are moments, flaws in the text, as it were. Nor is the text. Its edges, its flaws, says Barthes, are unpredictable. Well, that's the same you might say about Hector. Achilles, we've just seen, probes-

    Sorry. -Hector's defenses to breach them at the weakest point. Hector, in other words, like that plank of wood, is not isotropic. Achilles' strategy for solving the problem that is Hector, solving the Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text, and they are distinguished by these two different modes of reading. They're distinguished by the different kinds of pleasures that they offer us. Strange to think that we're talking about pleasure all of a sudden when we've been talking about so much pain, but let's see if we can make those things match. So the first, which Barthes associates with things like striptease and interestingly enough, in a different domain, suspense, depends on, as you might imagine, the progressive undressing or the progressive unveiling or disarming of a truth. That's the first. The second, whose pleasure is more elusive, more perverse, more violent, more ecstatic, is what Barthes calls intermittence. Something that is intermittent is just happens in between two other things, right? Intermittent, between, suddenly, right? As opposed to this gradual getting to the truth, like a detective moving through, right, suspense, moving us forward, striptease, getting to the, getting to the naked truth as it were. And Barthes is purposely trying to be erotic here and sort of blending different registers, right, the literary and the erotic. And so he sees that they're, they're governed by the same kind of logic in some ways. So intermittence, which means in between two things, intermittence. In other words, when something is glimpsed in the gaps of a text, like, says Barthes, the skin which flashes, which scintille, sparkle or flash, which scintille between two articles of clothing or two pieces of armor, obviously. So Achilles' solution, which do you think-- Which do you think Achilles' solution to dispatching, defeating Hector belongs to, which one, the first or the second? Anyone? I didn't expect an openness to the question.

    Yeah. I think it's the second one, but, um- I think so too, but yeah. Um, he reads Hector first. He strips his weaknesses. Mentally first. Yeah. Before taking action.

    Yeah. And so in that sense, it's not immediate. Yeah. Sure, sure. You could look-- I mean, that's a, that's a nice way of looking at it. There is that process of reading first, the preparation, before he moves in for the kill. Then he acts in between his, um, flaws. Yeah, yeah, and puts that spear right in between the, you know, the spaces where, where the gap shows. Sure. Why not? Absolutely. Absolutely. So I think we would... Yes, our, our, our-- the inclination would be to put Achilles' solution to the, to the second kind of pleasure. The death of Patroclus, on the other hand, which is kind of interesting, kind of-- I don't know if you remember the scene where Patroclus is killed by Apollo, belongs to the former. There's a scene where... I'm not sure if I can give it to you here. No, I haven't. Sorry about that. But there's a scene, the mo- the moment where Patroclus does what he said he was not s-- told-- he promised Achilles he would not do, that he continues to fight, and he says, you know, he's, he's, he's almost mad with, with his power, Patroclus. Remember wearing Achilles' armor and says, "Hey, who knows?" Like you want to shout, "No, you idiot, you can't!" Right? And he's-- And the scene where he is killed is quite interesting, where he's disarmed and really denuded. He's quite literally denuded. And what I mean by this is, um, there's a, there's a moment where, uh... the moment where Patroclus is killed, it's quite painful, it's quite awful because it's, it's just, it's slow and gradual. It doesn't happen all at once, right? First there's a-- there's this nameless Trojan, I forget his name, Euphorbus, I think, who comes and throws a s- a spear in Patroclus' back, and he's kind of stunned, and then he runs away. He's so-- He's still so scared of Patroclus, he runs away. Next comes Apollo, who smacks him on the head, invisible Apollo, and his helmet drops, his armor falls. Literally, he's stripped naked like a striptease on the battlefield. Then third, and only third, comes Hector, straight forward and kills him with his, with, with his spear. And later, Achilles even taunts Hector. He says, "You didn't even kill Patroclus. You were just third in line." Right? It took three of you to bring the Patroclus down, so he even recognized it. And it's very much a different kind of death than the one that we see here, right? With, with, yeah, setting it up and then going for the kill, right? In that kind of focused way. So Patroclus' death is a demonic, satanic striptease engineered by Apollo. It's quite cruel. It isn't... And here we come back to that tender part of the neck that we all don't want to think about. Um, it is the vulnerability, the softness, the vulnerability of Hector's body flashing beneath his armor that lends much of its poignancy and even a certain, I would argue, eroticism to the scene between Achilles and Hector. Compare the tender part that we've seen of Hector's neck. I'm doing it wrong. There it is. I got it. Thank you.

    In fact, did I... You see, you never know when the gods intervene. Someone out there didn't like what I was saying. I don't know. Ah. This will be like a little break. I'm gonna grab some coffee.

    I'm just glad I made it this far. There it is. Thank you so much, Michael. My recording. All right, debris. There it is. Okay, that's good. Um. So compare the tender part of Hector's neck through which Achilles drives his spear to Hector's malakōteros corpse. Malakōteros, which means something like very soft, like a marshmallow. Very soft. Stripped of its armor and poked and prodded by the Achaeans. This is a wonderful scene, uh, and a sad scene where after the death of Hector, the greatest destructive force for the Trojans, all the Greeks gather around and say, "Well, he's not so tough now, is he?"

    You know, now they, they were all scared of him in life, and they're all jabbing him with their spear and trying to pierce his flesh now that it's safe to do so. It's quite cruel, right? Um, stripped of his armor, poked and stabbed by the Achaeans. In both cases, the body is contemplated, then stabbed. A text, as it were, ruptured as it is read. That's the way we read it, by getting to the inside. Okay? And we see there that that line, the body of Patroclus as he's killed, disarmed and denuded. And the word even gunnō, where we get our word gymnasium, by the way. The word... Because the Greeks used to exercise in the nude, so the gymnasium was the place where you got naked to do exercise.

    Because it was where you exercised. So that word is there in the text, gunnō, to show us that the comp... the way he's stripped of all of his protection and revealing the, the vulnerable body beneath. Okay? So the pleasure that Achilles seeks, rooted in the ambitio... in the an nihi-annihilation, excuse me, of his adversary, is absolute, what Barthes calls ecstasy or transcend-transcendent form of pleasure and associated with violence and perversity for Barthes. In the long-awaited monomachia between Achilles and Hector, the Greek's most voracious reader meets the Trojan's most difficult text to read. And the outcome of the battle seems to confirm what we knew all along, that Hector is the better reader. He wins, no question, no contest. Unless, is there a sense in which there is only different kinds of misreading on both sides? I've already suggested there's a sense in which Achilles' victory is not what he thought it was going to be. It tastes sour in his mouth, this victory. He doesn't get Patroclus back. He doesn't get his honor back. He hasn't even gotten... Really, he hasn't even gotten Hector, who refuses to die despite the fact that he's dead. His body, perfectly preserved and beautiful, right, infuriates Achilles. So he's stymied, uh, in that quest for absolute reader... re-re- for absolute reading and absolute conquest.

    So contrary to Hector, Achilles really is a text with no way in, right? He's almost inscrutable. Um, Apollo complains that Achilles' treatment of Hector's body... I told you that he mistreats the body. He drags it around the walls of Troy. He kicks it, he stabs it. Nothing, nothing works, right? And the gods complain. They say, "This is not the way you treat a great hero." Achilles... Apollo complains that Achilles' treatment of Hector's body is subhuman. Achilles is acting like a savage beast. Eros replies, "No, you've got it wrong. Achilles is superhuman. He can do what he wants. That's what it means to be Achilles." So Achilles' superb self-awareness ironically makes him inscrutable or unreadable to his friends and his enemies, and therefore impervious to their entreaties or attacks. He is well aware that he too, um, and all too soon is destined to be solved and seen. Remember, back to Achilles' extraordinary self-awareness and clarity of mind.

    He knows that he's going to meet the same fate. So this brings us now to the old story, I'm sure some of you were wondering about this, the old story of... I'm sorry, I'm getting these, um... Yeah, we're still here. Sorry. Brings us to the old story of Achilles' heel. You've all heard the phrase an Achilles' heel, right? Now, if the theme so far as it is explicit, in terms of explicit references, is quite late, nowhere in Homer, it's quite late, so it's post-Homeric. Many have suggested that it was already though part of the early oral context for Homeric ep-epics. Um, and I think this misses an important point that really the idea that Achilles is somehow invulnerable except for his heel, or the idea that his armor is magical, uh, there are various folkloric stories about, about Achilles that become part of various traditions, even if they're not in Homer itself.

    And I think what these stories ultimately show in the end is, in a way, they prove the point we're making here, which is that, um, Achilles' defining trait is not invulnerability, it's imperfect vulnerability. He's invulnerable until he's not, right? He can't be killed until he's killed. Uh, and I think that's important to recognize, especially in the Iliad and the Odyssey, as opposed to some other traditions where you see... you'll, you'll see traditions where Achilles is a demigod. And I'm, I'm... So I'm talking about Homer here, not Percy Jackson. Um, much as I love watching Percy Jackson, but being a demigod does not confer immortality upon you in the Iliad or the Odyssey. As you'll know, Achilles is perfectly mortal, absolutely mortal. Just because he happens to have a goddess for a mother doesn't make him, like, such a big deal, you know? He's still, he's still a human being, okay? That's important to note. All right. Now, back to Hector.

    And this is the last section you'll be happy to know. No, two more sections, sorry. Second to last section. We're almost there. We're almost there. Is Hector as really as readable as Achilles believes? I think we've established that he's not. So Bart elsewhere famously distinguishes between the traditional conception of the work, the oeuvre, there you have it there on the slide, self-contained and finite. In other words, the text of simple pleasure, right? And, and on the other hand, the text, open-ended, elusive, the text of ecstasy. A more difficult text, but that gives us a more perverse, more intermittent kind of pleasure. If the work is, as Bart calls it, a fragment of substance, in other words, a thing you can hold in your hands like a book, there it is, a work. The text, on the other hand, is an entire methodological field, traces of traces of traces of traces leading to traces with no end in sight.

    For the ecstatic reader, the reader who wants the pleasure of intermittence, right? For the ecstatic reader, the work is but the imaginary tale of the text that goes on infinitely. Achilles labors under the misconception, the delusion, that Hector is a work to be disposed of, not really just Hector there. He's part of a whole larger system, a whole, a whole field of forces. Your problems are not over when you kill Hector. Hector's not the problem. The problem is the world, the cosmos, the gods. You're all, you're all part of that, right? So Hector is not a work to be disposed of. He is a text to be negotiated. But that's typical Achilles. He refuses to negotiate. There's a moment right before he's killed where Hector says, "Look- Okay, let's-- we're gonna fight it out, but let's agree that if I die, you bring my body to my parents, and if you die, I'll bring you... And Hector's like-- And Achilles is like, "Get out of here. I'm not negotiating with you. Do ani-- Do lions negotiate with sheep? Why should I negotiate with you? You're nothing to me. You're..." And he, he adopts this position that's absolutely inhuman, and refuses to engage with Hector as a human being. Uh, and it's quite telling. He refuses to negotiate.

    There are no-- They are different species. Um, he's an object simply to be consumed. And he even says that. He says, "I, I wish I could eat you like a, like a, a dog eats a, a dead animal. I, I wanna devour you. I wanna consume you." That's what meaning is to, to for Achilles, but he can't. And there's Hector responding saying, "Well, yeah, you kill me, but that just means a few steps away from your death." In other words, Hector is the one who points out this is part of a larger text with implications that go beyond just me and my body. Okay? The work is an object to be consumed just like Hector. In other words... And if the work is an object to be consumed, then Hector's body turns out to be undigestible. Sorry. It, it, it cannot be consumed, right? Um, the text is a collaboration, says Bart. If we're looking for ecstasy, if we're looking for those heathen pleasures, we have to negotiate, we have to collaborate with the text, but that's exactly what Achilles refuses to do.

    He refuses to negotiate, refuses to collaborate, refuses to engage in dialogue. Um, right? He simply says, "You're an object to be disposed of." Of course, whether Achilles likes it or not, they are collaborators, even if they're unwilling collaborators, even if they're enemies to the death. The commerce, the business transaction, the negotiation between them that Achilles refuses is all the same there. For example, in-- we see it in the reassignment of armor. In other words, if you follow the story of the armor, where does the armor go? Right? The reassignment from Achilles to Patroclus to Hector and back to Achilles, right? It's almost a comedy of serial cross-dressing suggesting a confusion of identities, which is the case for all reading, right? The text, says Bart, would abolish the distance between the writing and the reading. Both are part of the same signifying practice. Achilles and Hector are caught up in the same murderous signifying practice.

    Their deaths, whether Achilles likes it or not, are inextricably linked. They share the same fate just as they share the same armor. Last section. I promise. To give the text an author... Remember Bart's famous piece, "The Death of the Author," and so on. To give the text an, an author, says Bart, is to provide it with a final signifier meaning. It's to shut down the writing, to shut down commerce, negotiation, collaboration, and that's a conception that suits criticism all too well. The critic, like the hero, wants to be victorious. The critic wants to solve the text and dispose of it and consume it and digest it, right? The task of discovering the author beneath the work. Author here can stand for more than just Shakespeare, the author of Hamlet. The author can be ideology, philosophy, authority, um, other texts that are prevalent, right? Anything that gives, anything that gives the text a ground, a foundation of meaning can be seen as an author. Right? And what is-- Just as...

    So the critic trying to find the author, just as Achilles is trying to find the Hector beneath the armor that is vulnerable and can be killed. But think about this. Is Hector really the author? I've asked this question before, but it's another way of asking it. Is Hector really the author of Achilles' troubles? The victory we've seen that he seeks, he doesn't get. He loses Achilles. His stubborn refusal, Achilles' refusal to return the body of Hector, which remains perfectly intact, proves that he, Achilles, is unable to finish reading it. It refuses to be read. It will not be disposed of. And in this body, interesting-- Excuse me. Interestingly enough, the body of Hector, there are both too many Hectors and not enough Hector. Well, Bart says that in the text, the voice loses its origin. No one is speaking. He's playing on words there. No one is speaking. It's just speaking itself or no one is speaking. Not one-- There's no one person speaking. It's many voices are in the text, right?

    There are many voices. Nobody or too many people, not just the... untangled, nothing decoded. The space of writing, ideally for Bart, is to be roamed across, not pierced, wandering. Again, remember back to that student who talked about the pleasures of being lost. That's what Bart is talking about, the pleasures of being lost in the text rather than trying to get to the destination as quickly as possible. Just as Hector's body is pierced by Achilles' spear. Achilles is old school, the most dogged and dogmatic of decoders, allergic to all ambiguity. He wants the answer, he wants it now. He's impatient, he's angry, he's gonna get his author beneath the text. But we know, and this brings us back to the gullet I promised we would return to at the end of this text and the end of this paper. Um, a text we know, especially one as multiple or elusive as Hector, is not so easy to shut down or shut up. And, uh, just a, a one last quick parenthesis. Um, when I'm talking about too many Hectors, if you know anything about, again, Hector, if you've read The Iliad, you'll know that Hector is famous for his, his complexity. Achilles is a killer. He is the terminator par excellence. But Hector is represented consistently in The Iliad as a man who wears many, many clothes, many hats. He is a father, he is a husband, he is, uh, a brother, right? He, I mean, he is the protector of the city. He gives counsel. We see him as, as a figure of community, whereas Achilles is the man who has withdrawn from the community. He's alone. Right? So there really are too many Hectors. There always have been, and that's what makes him such a sympathetic character in so many ways. It doesn't necessarily make him the greatest warrior. He lacks the focus, the point which Achilles has. Okay, so a text as-- one as multiple or elusive as Hector is not so easy to shut down or shut up. Because Achilles' spear fails to sever his windpipe, his asphargon, Hector can still speak. Why, why do I end with that last strange, you know, anatomical bit of detail? Uh, critics have not-- have really not known what to do with this last part of the famous battle, the monomachia, this ridiculously precise... You know, the spear went through his neck but missed the larynx or the windpipe so that he could still speak. It's a strangely over-technical, over-precise detail. Now, it does allow for the, the conversation to continue. So here we have the dying Hector, spear through his throat, conversing with Achilles, saying, you know, "Your, your days are numbered. Now that I'm dead, you are part-- You thought you were done with the story here. You're not. The story goes on. You're part of that story, Mr. Achilles, and your death is just on the horizon." And so it is a, it is a convenient su-- uh, um, a convenient premise that the, the ability to speak would still be preserved. But I think, I think we can see that if we follow the story that I've been tracing from the beginning, the story of precision, of critical distinction, of finding the faults and the flaws and the gaps and the fissures in the text. This is the final anatomical detail that suggests the cruel precision of Achilles as reader. Thanks very much.