Ransom explores the idea that personal transformation is an almost inevitable
aspect of the human condition. The vision in which Priam sees himself ‘dressed in a
plain white robe without ornament. No jewelled amulet at his breast’ is a vision of
himself reduced to his essential humanity with no symbolic interdictions in the form
of his noble status to come between himself and the world, specifically between
himself and Achilles. To enact this change is in some sense to challenge the will of
the gods who had decreed Priam’s fate from the moment he was originally ransomed
as a child. Priam sees his entire life as a mockery, ‘and all that lies between, the
extravagant pageant of his days as Priam, King of Troy, a mockery as they had all
along intended’. In this moment of despair Priam experiences a divine visitation from
the goddess Iris who assures him: ‘Not a mockery, my friend, but the way things are.
Not the way they must be, but the way they have turned out. In a world that is also
subject to chance’. (p.46)
This notion of chance is significant in the novel’s examination of the individual
capacity for transformation. For Priam, human life has always appeared subject to
the will or whims of the gods, a fore-ordained pattern in which individuals merely
constitute the motifs of this larger design. The visionary discovery or revelation that
chance plays a significant part in human affairs is a moment of profound personal
liberation for Priam as he is able to envision a role for himself that transgresses the
boundaries he had always believed were immutable for him. Priam articulates a new
conception of human possibility through this discovery: ‘I believe’, he says, ‘that the
thing that is needed to cut this knot we are all tied in is something that has never
before been done or thought of. Something impossible. Something new’. (p.58)
Priam expresses this belief in terms that also ironically signal the modern narrative
form that will inherit the legacy of the oral tradition and translate it into something
new for an audience of readers when he says, ‘The fact that it has never been done,
that is novel, unthinkable — except that I have thought of it — is just what makes me
believe it should be attempted. It is possible because it is not possible’. (p.59)
Priam’s vision becomes something of an allegory for the birth of the modern novel
with its emphasis on individual experience and character psychology, the classical
novelistic themes of chance, contingency, the striving of the protagonist and the
examination of the problematic self. Malouf discovers in the classical tradition of the
Homeric epic the first cultural stirrings of the impulses that would eventually lead to
the conception of the modern novel as the dominant narrative form of a
post-classical age.
aspect of the human condition. The vision in which Priam sees himself ‘dressed in a
plain white robe without ornament. No jewelled amulet at his breast’ is a vision of
himself reduced to his essential humanity with no symbolic interdictions in the form
of his noble status to come between himself and the world, specifically between
himself and Achilles. To enact this change is in some sense to challenge the will of
the gods who had decreed Priam’s fate from the moment he was originally ransomed
as a child. Priam sees his entire life as a mockery, ‘and all that lies between, the
extravagant pageant of his days as Priam, King of Troy, a mockery as they had all
along intended’. In this moment of despair Priam experiences a divine visitation from
the goddess Iris who assures him: ‘Not a mockery, my friend, but the way things are.
Not the way they must be, but the way they have turned out. In a world that is also
subject to chance’. (p.46)
This notion of chance is significant in the novel’s examination of the individual
capacity for transformation. For Priam, human life has always appeared subject to
the will or whims of the gods, a fore-ordained pattern in which individuals merely
constitute the motifs of this larger design. The visionary discovery or revelation that
chance plays a significant part in human affairs is a moment of profound personal
liberation for Priam as he is able to envision a role for himself that transgresses the
boundaries he had always believed were immutable for him. Priam articulates a new
conception of human possibility through this discovery: ‘I believe’, he says, ‘that the
thing that is needed to cut this knot we are all tied in is something that has never
before been done or thought of. Something impossible. Something new’. (p.58)
Priam expresses this belief in terms that also ironically signal the modern narrative
form that will inherit the legacy of the oral tradition and translate it into something
new for an audience of readers when he says, ‘The fact that it has never been done,
that is novel, unthinkable — except that I have thought of it — is just what makes me
believe it should be attempted. It is possible because it is not possible’. (p.59)
Priam’s vision becomes something of an allegory for the birth of the modern novel
with its emphasis on individual experience and character psychology, the classical
novelistic themes of chance, contingency, the striving of the protagonist and the
examination of the problematic self. Malouf discovers in the classical tradition of the
Homeric epic the first cultural stirrings of the impulses that would eventually lead to
the conception of the modern novel as the dominant narrative form of a
post-classical age.
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