My T-shirt With The Entire Text Of Borges' Theoretical Library Of Babel Is Raising A Lot Of Questions

My T-shirt with the entire text of Borges' theoretical Library of Babel is raising a lot of questions already answered by the shirt, somewhere.

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lmao

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Achilles is thus the one Homeric hero who does not accept the common language, and feels that it does not correspond to reality. But what is characteristic of the Iliad, and makes it unique as a tragedy, is that this otherness of Achilles is nowhere stated in clear and precise terms. Achilles can only say, "There was, after all, no grace in it," or ask questions that cannot really be answered: "But why should the Argives be fighting against the Trojans?" or make demands that can never be satisfied: ".. . until he pays back all my heart-rending grief.''l2 Homer in fact, has no language, no terms, in which to express this kind of basic disillusionment with society and the external world. The reason lies in the nature of epic verse. The poet does not make a language of his own; he draws from a common store of poetic diction. This store is a product of bards and a reflection of society: for epic song had a clear social function.'3 Neither Homer, then, in his own person as narrator, nor the characters he drama- tizes, can speak any language other than the one which reflects the assumptions of heroic society, those assumptions so beautifully and so serenely enunciated by Sarpedon in book 12. Achilles has no language with which to express his disillusion- ment. Yet he expresses it, and in a remarkable way. He does it by misusing the language he disposes of. He asks questions that cannot be answered and makes demands that cannot be met. He uses conventional expressions where we least expect him to, as when

he speaks to Patroclus in book 16 of a hope of being offered material gifts by the Greeks, when we know that he has been offered these gifts and that they are meaningless to him; or as when he says that he has won great glory by slaying Hector, when we know that he is really fighting to avenge his comrade, and that he sees no value in the glory that society can confer.'4 All this is done with wonderful subtlety: most readers feel it when they read the Iliad; few under- stand how the poet is doing it. It is not a sign of artistic weakness: Homer profits by not availing himself of the intellectual terminol - ogy of the 5th century. Achilles' tragedy, his final isolation, is that he can in no sense, including that of language (unlike, say, Hamlet), leave the society which has become alien to him. And Homer uses the epic speech a long poetic tradition gave him to transcend the limits of that speech.

adam parry, the language of achilles

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the iliad stoicism in fact could not save her

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“Scared at last the maiden took refuge by the tripods; she drew near to the vast chasm and there stayed; and her bosom for the first time drew in the divine power, which the inspiration of the rock, still active after so many centuries, forced upon her. At last Apollo mastered the breast of the Delphian priestess; as fully as ever in the past, he forced his way into her body, driving out her former thoughts, and bidding her human nature to come forth and leave her heart at his disposal. Frantic she careers about the cave, with her neck under possession; the fillets and garlands of Apollo, dislodged by her bristling hair, she whirls with tossing head through the void spaces of the temple; she scatters the tripods that impede her random course; she boils over with fierce fire, while enduring the wrath of Phoebus. Nor does he ply the whip and goad alone, and dart flame into her vitals: she has to bear the curb as well, and is not permitted to reveal as much as she is suffered to know. All time is gathered up together: all the centuries crowd her breast and torture it; the endless chain of events is revealed; all the future struggles to the light; destiny contends with destiny, seeking to be uttered. The creation of the world and its destruction, the compass of the Ocean and the sum of the sands—all these are before her.”

— Lucan, Pharsalia 5:161ff, tr. J. D. Duff.

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tagamemnon lucan pharsalia

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The Foundation of the World

People do not wish to know that the whole of human culture is based on the mythic process of conjuring away man's violence by endlessly projecting it upon new victims. All cultures and all religions are built on this foundation, which they then conceal, just as the tomb is built around the dead body that it conceals. Murder calls for the tomb and the tomb is but the prolongation and perpetuation of murder. The tomb-religion amounts to nothing more or less than the becoming visible of the foundations, of religion and culture, of their only reason for existence.

Violence and the Sacred, René Girard (1972), quoted in The Girard Reader, James G. Williams ed. (2000)

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philosophy rene girard

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