The Poem of Force

Just recently, I came across a remarkably stupid review of Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Iliad. In addition to being stupid about the Iliad, a text I know fairly well (I’ve taught it in university-level courses), the review misunderstands Simone Weil’s “L’Iliade ou le poème de la force.” I know Weil’s essay on the Iliad somewhat less well than the Iliad (before now, I’d only skimmed it). So, this seemed to me to be a good opportunity to reread “L’Iliade ou le poème de la force,” if only to prove to myself that someone I thought was stupid really is (spoiler: they are. But the reviewer in question has already been eviscerated by much of the internet, so I won’t burden you with more of that here).

I read the translation of “L’Iliade ou le poème de la force” that appears in the George A. Panichas-edited Simone Weil Reader. Though its title is usually translated as “The Iliad, Or the Poem of Force,” in Panichas’ reader, it is called “The Iliad, Poem of Might.” I dislike this title (it’s much less mellifluous! And I see no reason for it—in fact, it’s somewhat further from the original French than is the more common title). But the text seems broadly trustworthy. All quotes below are therefrom.

Weil opens her essay with the assertion that “the true hero, the real subject, the core of the Iliad¸ is might” (I think we can replace “might” with “force”). What is “might” (*cough* force)? “Might is that which makes a thing of anybody who comes under its sway. When exercised to the full, it makes a thing of a man in the most literal sense, for it makes him a corpse.” Might also makes objects of suppliants (namely, the men who beg Achilles for their lives) and slaves. Suppliant, slave, or corpse—these are the three fates that await a defeated enemy.

But might is a double-edged sword. Even the mighty are not exempt from its depredations. For one thing, the mighty—the victorious—are not always so: “Sometimes chance serves them, at other times it hinders.” More than this, might “petrifies differently but equally the souls of those who suffer it, and those who wield it.” So, the mighty, in making objects of others, make objects of themselves, too. Writes Weil, “The Soul, which is forced by the existence of an enemy, to destroy the part of itself implanted by nature, believes it can only cure itself by the destruction of the enemy, and at the same time the death of beloved companions stimulates the desire to emulate them, to follow their dark example….So it is that the despair which thrusts toward death is the same one that impels toward killing.”

I’ve already said that I wouldn’t be engaging with the review that inspired this post (essentially, a “hot take” on Wilson’s purportedly “woke”—and thus suspect—translation). But it’s worth noting that endemic to that review—and to many other conservative accounts of the Iliad—is a misapprehension of the Iliad as glorifying war and its heroes as uncomplicatedly admirable. These are views that Weil does not share. She recognizes that “the veritable object of the art of war is no less than the souls of the combatants.”

Death awaits all of us—in peace and war alike—but, for the warriors of the Iliad, says Weil, “death itself is their future, the future assigned to them by their profession.” However, “That men should have death for their future is a denial of nature.” Achilles, the mightiest of the warriors assembled at Troy, is thus also the most perverse, for he—born to an immortal mother, near invulnerable (except for that pesky Achilles’ heel)—is nonetheless closer to death than anyone else in the Iliad, for his death at Troy has been prophesied since his childhood. Moreover, Achilles—unlike his battlefield companions—has chosen his fate.

In Weil’s reading, Achilles has lost his soul to war. He has become a beast. But his story does possess moments of grace, “luminous moments,” such as when Achilles and Priam—the ruler of Troy—recognize one another’s humanity, when Achilles returns the body of Priam’s son Hector to him.

Weil’s essay closes with a contemplation of Greek genius in post-classical cultures, namely, in the New Testament (emphatically, not in Rome, nor in the Old Testament—Weil, who was born to a Jewish family, has been accused of anti-Semitism). Like the Iliad, the New Testament concerns itself with the revelation of human suffering (chiefly, in the person of Jesus). This, according to Weil, is “the spirit of Greece.”

This preoccupation with suffering appears in much of Weil’s work. It is not exclusively the stuff of wartime (though Weil lived through and wrote during the Spanish Civil War, as well as the Second World War; she wrote and published her Iliad essay in Vichy France)—it is the lot of all people; accordingly, attention to suffering is a precondition of grace (and fundamentally human).

The circumstances of Weil’s death are often interpreted in the context of her contemplation of suffering. Weil died in 1943—only three years after the publication of “L’Iliade”—purportedly of self-starvation. The coroner who attended Weil’s death declared it a suicide. However, a number of Weil’s biographers have instead claimed that, aware of the limited rations of her compatriots in occupied France (Weil left France for the United States in 1942), Weil chose to similarly limit herself—starvation as an act of empathy, not (at least, not intentional) self-destruction. Of course, it is worth noting that Weil was frail and suffered regular, serious bouts of illness throughout her life; she had tuberculosis when she died.

Weil closes her essay with an injunction to the contemporary world, one that it seems that many of the Iliad’s admirers—those caught up in the greatness of Homeric epic, uncritical admirers of force—might benefit from: “The effects of might in war and in politics had always to be enveloped in glory…Perhaps [the peoples of Europe] will rediscover that epic genius [i.e., Greek genius] when they learn how to accept the fact that nothing is sheltered from fate, how never to admire might, or hate the enemy, or to despise sufferers.”