In counter balance to Achilles, Malouf introduces Priam, King of Troy, who has
witnessed the death and desecration of his son, Hector. Priam is a character who is
also consumed with grief, Hector being one of many sons he has lost in the war with
the Greeks. Priam is initially portrayed as a character who embodies the city, as the
king he is Troy itself, its personification. Hector’s death provokes in Priam
apocalyptic dreams of the destruction of the city: ‘The grief that racks him is not only
for his son Hector. It is also for a kingdom ravaged and threatened with extinction...’.
(p.40) Priam is subject to haunting visions of the destruction of his city and its
people; acutely sensitive to his own role as the sacred embodiment of their history
and culture, his status is that of a ceremonial figure, more than a man, he is
effectively confined within the ceremonial function of his title and, therefore,
experiences a dislocation from the world of human particulars, including his own
family. At one point Priam confesses to uncertainty as to the exact number of
Princes, his own sons.
Priam has a vision in which he converses with the goddess Iris who suggests to him
that his fate is not merely to be a puppet of the gods and that as a man he can affect
his own destiny by recognising the powers of chance — a blasphemous suggestion,
but one that gradually liberates Priam’s conception of himself. In this vision Priam is
transformed, no longer the embodiment of the grandeur of Troy, but simply a man,
seated on a cart, beside a driver, with the collected treasures of Troy behind them.
Priam understands instantly, instinctively what this vision means and what he must
do. The symbolism of the ransom touches something deep within him, as we later
learn from Priam himself; both his name and his fate are the result of a much earlier
ransom.
Priam informs his wife, Hecuba, of his vision and his consequent decision to travel to
the camp of Achilles to seek the ransom of their dead son’s body. Hecuba too is
portrayed as a figure consumed with grief as she gives voice to the atrocities she
has witnessed in war. Hecuba expresses a mother’s suffering as she must
remember the experience of childbirth while her dead son lies mutilated on the plains
outside the city walls. Malouf develops the dramatic contrast between war and
creation, the maternal instincts of Hecuba and the illogical destructiveness of war.
Hecuba’s memories of carrying her unborn children are removed from Priam’s own
recollections of his children which are uncertain and ill defined. Hecuba’s particular
recollections anticipate those of Somax when he recalls the deaths of his own sons
in all their specific detail and vividness.
Hecuba is frightened by Priam’s plan to ransom their son’s body and, in an attempt
to assuage her fears, Priam recounts his own narrative of chance and redemptive
transformation: ‘You know my story ... You must have heard it a hundred times as a
child in your father’s palace’. (p.63) Priam then tells the story of Podarces, son of
Laomedon, King of Troy. As a child Priam/Podarces witnessed the earlier siege of
Troy and the death of his father. The child prince hides among a group of beggar
children who will be enslaved by the city’s conquerors; in yet another instance in the
novel of the dualities of self and of the transformation into otherness, the prince
becomes a beggar. The story of Podarces incarnates the theme of chance as he
only narrowly escapes the fate of spending the rest of his life as a slave by the
chance reunion with his sister Hesione who has been promised her ‘choice’ by
Heracles, conqueror of Troy. When she chooses her brother, Heracles renames him
Priam: ‘ … the price paid, the gift given to buy your brother back from the dead. So
that each time he hears himself named, this is what he will recall ... And in the
secrecy of his own heart, that, for all the high titles the gods may heap upon him, is
the life he will go on living day after day till his last breath’. (p.74)
It is not only being renamed that affects Priam so profoundly but another sensation
that evokes the importance of story: ‘I had experienced something I could not unexperience and would never forget. What it means for your breath to be in another’s mouth, to be one of those who have no story that will ever be told’. (p.75) Thespectre of enslavement is not the worst fate that threatened the child Podarces, but to have become one of those numberless masses who are denied the consolation of having their individual stories known. If the victors write the narrative of history, Priam has experienced the fate of the losers, to be erased from the narrative, to have become anonymous, forgotten. The symbolism of the ransom becomes central to the narrative as the ransom allows Priam to transform himself for a second time in his life — on this occasion, to transcend the trappings of his royal ceremonial self, a role that has become something of an emptiness: ‘Only I know what it costs to be
such an object. To rattle about like a pea in the golden husk of my ... dazzling
eminence’. (p.78)
The response to Priam’s plan among the members of the Trojan court, his remaining
sons and daughters, is to attempt to dissuade their father from venturing on such a
dangerous mission. Malouf depicts the social divisions within the court as the effects
of a decade of war. Helenus, Cassandra, Deiphobus, Polydorus and Priam’s other
children represent a divided family who give expression to their own dislocations
within the larger culture of the city, but also their distance from the king himself. This
lack of intimacy is expressed through their inability to understand what is motivating
their father, his profound need to transcend his own role as king and act as a father:
‘You ask me to stand, as I have always done, at a kingly distance from the human,
which in my kingly role, as you say, I can have no part in. But I am also a father.
Mightn’t it be time for me to expose myself at last to what is merely human?’. (p.85)
Priam explains to the assembled court why he feels so profoundly impelled to move
beyond his sacred and ceremonial role, to enter the terrain of the merely human as
the necessary act of a father and how strongly this is tied up with his own feelings of
mortality, this quality which distinguishes human experience and consciousness.
Finally, it is Priam’s account of how deeply felt is his need to experience this
consciousness of his own mortality and identity that silences the objections of the
court. Arrangements are then made to satisfy Priam’s wishes, at first unsuccessfully
when the king is presented with transportation befitting his royal status, not the
simple mode he requested. After Priam’s angry rejection of a royal chariot this
mistake is quickly corrected; and the carter Somax with his two mules, Beauty and
Shock, is enlisted to accompany the king to the camp of the Greeks. Before the end
of this section there is another important moment of transformation in which the
humble carter Somax is transformed into the King’s herald Idaeus.
witnessed the death and desecration of his son, Hector. Priam is a character who is
also consumed with grief, Hector being one of many sons he has lost in the war with
the Greeks. Priam is initially portrayed as a character who embodies the city, as the
king he is Troy itself, its personification. Hector’s death provokes in Priam
apocalyptic dreams of the destruction of the city: ‘The grief that racks him is not only
for his son Hector. It is also for a kingdom ravaged and threatened with extinction...’.
(p.40) Priam is subject to haunting visions of the destruction of his city and its
people; acutely sensitive to his own role as the sacred embodiment of their history
and culture, his status is that of a ceremonial figure, more than a man, he is
effectively confined within the ceremonial function of his title and, therefore,
experiences a dislocation from the world of human particulars, including his own
family. At one point Priam confesses to uncertainty as to the exact number of
Princes, his own sons.
Priam has a vision in which he converses with the goddess Iris who suggests to him
that his fate is not merely to be a puppet of the gods and that as a man he can affect
his own destiny by recognising the powers of chance — a blasphemous suggestion,
but one that gradually liberates Priam’s conception of himself. In this vision Priam is
transformed, no longer the embodiment of the grandeur of Troy, but simply a man,
seated on a cart, beside a driver, with the collected treasures of Troy behind them.
Priam understands instantly, instinctively what this vision means and what he must
do. The symbolism of the ransom touches something deep within him, as we later
learn from Priam himself; both his name and his fate are the result of a much earlier
ransom.
Priam informs his wife, Hecuba, of his vision and his consequent decision to travel to
the camp of Achilles to seek the ransom of their dead son’s body. Hecuba too is
portrayed as a figure consumed with grief as she gives voice to the atrocities she
has witnessed in war. Hecuba expresses a mother’s suffering as she must
remember the experience of childbirth while her dead son lies mutilated on the plains
outside the city walls. Malouf develops the dramatic contrast between war and
creation, the maternal instincts of Hecuba and the illogical destructiveness of war.
Hecuba’s memories of carrying her unborn children are removed from Priam’s own
recollections of his children which are uncertain and ill defined. Hecuba’s particular
recollections anticipate those of Somax when he recalls the deaths of his own sons
in all their specific detail and vividness.
Hecuba is frightened by Priam’s plan to ransom their son’s body and, in an attempt
to assuage her fears, Priam recounts his own narrative of chance and redemptive
transformation: ‘You know my story ... You must have heard it a hundred times as a
child in your father’s palace’. (p.63) Priam then tells the story of Podarces, son of
Laomedon, King of Troy. As a child Priam/Podarces witnessed the earlier siege of
Troy and the death of his father. The child prince hides among a group of beggar
children who will be enslaved by the city’s conquerors; in yet another instance in the
novel of the dualities of self and of the transformation into otherness, the prince
becomes a beggar. The story of Podarces incarnates the theme of chance as he
only narrowly escapes the fate of spending the rest of his life as a slave by the
chance reunion with his sister Hesione who has been promised her ‘choice’ by
Heracles, conqueror of Troy. When she chooses her brother, Heracles renames him
Priam: ‘ … the price paid, the gift given to buy your brother back from the dead. So
that each time he hears himself named, this is what he will recall ... And in the
secrecy of his own heart, that, for all the high titles the gods may heap upon him, is
the life he will go on living day after day till his last breath’. (p.74)
It is not only being renamed that affects Priam so profoundly but another sensation
that evokes the importance of story: ‘I had experienced something I could not unexperience and would never forget. What it means for your breath to be in another’s mouth, to be one of those who have no story that will ever be told’. (p.75) Thespectre of enslavement is not the worst fate that threatened the child Podarces, but to have become one of those numberless masses who are denied the consolation of having their individual stories known. If the victors write the narrative of history, Priam has experienced the fate of the losers, to be erased from the narrative, to have become anonymous, forgotten. The symbolism of the ransom becomes central to the narrative as the ransom allows Priam to transform himself for a second time in his life — on this occasion, to transcend the trappings of his royal ceremonial self, a role that has become something of an emptiness: ‘Only I know what it costs to be
such an object. To rattle about like a pea in the golden husk of my ... dazzling
eminence’. (p.78)
The response to Priam’s plan among the members of the Trojan court, his remaining
sons and daughters, is to attempt to dissuade their father from venturing on such a
dangerous mission. Malouf depicts the social divisions within the court as the effects
of a decade of war. Helenus, Cassandra, Deiphobus, Polydorus and Priam’s other
children represent a divided family who give expression to their own dislocations
within the larger culture of the city, but also their distance from the king himself. This
lack of intimacy is expressed through their inability to understand what is motivating
their father, his profound need to transcend his own role as king and act as a father:
‘You ask me to stand, as I have always done, at a kingly distance from the human,
which in my kingly role, as you say, I can have no part in. But I am also a father.
Mightn’t it be time for me to expose myself at last to what is merely human?’. (p.85)
Priam explains to the assembled court why he feels so profoundly impelled to move
beyond his sacred and ceremonial role, to enter the terrain of the merely human as
the necessary act of a father and how strongly this is tied up with his own feelings of
mortality, this quality which distinguishes human experience and consciousness.
Finally, it is Priam’s account of how deeply felt is his need to experience this
consciousness of his own mortality and identity that silences the objections of the
court. Arrangements are then made to satisfy Priam’s wishes, at first unsuccessfully
when the king is presented with transportation befitting his royal status, not the
simple mode he requested. After Priam’s angry rejection of a royal chariot this
mistake is quickly corrected; and the carter Somax with his two mules, Beauty and
Shock, is enlisted to accompany the king to the camp of the Greeks. Before the end
of this section there is another important moment of transformation in which the
humble carter Somax is transformed into the King’s herald Idaeus.
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