Ransom is divided into five sections. In the first, the reader is introduced to Achilles
at the moment in Homer’s narrative where he has withdrawn with his Myrmidons
from the war and remains in camp refusing to fight, because of an offence to his
honour by the Greek King Agamemnon who has taken the Trojan slave girl Bresias
from Achilles. Meanwhile the Trojans, led by Prince Hector, are enjoying a period of
military ascendency due to the absence of Achilles from the field of combat. The
longer Achilles remains sequestered in his camp the greater the losses suffered by
the Greek armies; a spectacle that leads Patroclus, cousin of and closest friend to
Achilles, to don the famed armour of the invincible warrior and take the field. Initially,
the Trojans draw back at the sight of the feared Achilles but Hector engages
Patroclus believing him to be Achilles and kills him. At the news of Patroclus’ death
Achilles is consumed with an unquenchable rage and after dedicating himself to the
proper ceremonial devotions to the body of his dead friend, he confronts Hector
alone before the walls of Troy, watched by Hector’s father and mother, Priam and
Hecuba. Achilles kills Hector and desecrates his body, watching approvingly as his
men pierce the corpse with their swords before the shocked audience of the Trojan
court. Achilles then lashes Hector’s body to his chariot and drags it around the walls
of the city. In the days that follow, Achilles continues his ritualistic desecration of
Hector’s corpse, conducting a meticulous defilement, yet discovers each morning
that the body has been restored over night to a state of physical perfection, an act by
the gods that only serves to increase his rage and determination to deny Hector the
honour of a decent burial to allow his spirit to enter the underworld.
These structural elements taken from the Iliad are not Malouf’s exclusive literary
concerns in this section. Malouf appears to be principally interested here in a
characterisation of Achilles that stresses his elemental nature, drawing on the
elements of the sea and earth to emphasise something of the inner conflict of the
hero, born to both the gods and man. Achilles is seen attending to the voice of the
sea, his mother, in language that expresses the mystical aspects of his nature, its
fluidity and transformative qualities. He is here, not the conventional figure of the
invincible warrior, but something far more elusive, a contradiction embodying both
elements of mortality and immortality, ‘A gift he had taken as natural to him, the play
of a dual self...’. (p.5)
Achilles is presented by Malouf in this section as a truly mythic figure, heroic, but
also the subject of fate. Achilles represents the world of men, ‘He was his father’s
son and mortal. He had entered the rough world of men, where a man’s acts follow
him wherever he goes in the form of story’. (p.6) Malouf describes the death of
Patroclus as dream-like, for Achilles the very embodiment of a fatal vision: ‘Achilles
stands spellbound. Like a sleeper who has stumbled in on another’s dream...’. (p.12)
The death of Patroclus allows Malouf to introduce a central concern of the novel: the
formation of the self and, principally, the relation of self to other. In the death of
Patroclus Achilles clearly sees his own death, as he sees Patroclus die wearing his
armour, a vision he recognises again when he kills Hector; trying to find the right
opening ‘ … was like trying to deceive or outguess his shadow, and aiming, beyond
Hector, at himself. And Hector’s death...in his armour, like watching for a second
time the dreamlike enactment of his own’. (p.22) And again: ‘Achilles watched.
Himself a dead man’. (p.23)
Achilles achieves no consolation from killing Hector and the desecration of his body
that he ritualistically enacts each day is described by Malouf as akin to a war crime
commencing with his sadistic display as he drags the bloody corpse before the
assembled Trojan court and Hector’s family, his wife and child. Malouf explores here
something like the estrangement of the act of violence committed in times of war, in
the midst of his violations Achilles is also disconnected from his acts: ‘He was
waiting for the rage to fill him that would be equal at last to the outrage he was
committing ... and be so convincing to the witnesses of this barbaric spectacle that
he too might believe there was a living man at the centre of it, and that man himself’.
(p.27) Achilles is delineated here with a careful attention to his psychic turmoil, his
peculiar estrangement from a sense of self, the fatal effects of grief that have tipped
him over into apparent madness, the dissolution of the self in grief and violent rage.
From a character synonymous with the warrior spirit, and with the heroic ideals of
courage and heroism, Malouf offers his readers an Achilles who also embodies the
very essence of psychological trauma in war.
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