‘The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters’, by Adam Nicolson For Adam Nicolson, Homer’s ‘fearless

encounter with the dreadful’ is as relevant as ever ‘The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters’, by Adam
Nicolson

‘Homer is not for the squeamish. The Iliad is a gore fest of slashed necks, metal spearheads entering
brains, blood spurting through nostrils, sea creatures nibbling human fat, and Achilles raging on, “insane
to hack more flesh”. The Odyssey, while less relentlessly brutal, also features hideous monsters, a
memorable blinding scene, and the mass slaughter of all those who dared to assume Odysseus dead
after 20 years’ absence. In his vigorous and visceral book about a lifetime of Homer-reading, Adam
Nicolson spares us none of the dripping gobbets of flesh, while also giving us much else to think about.
His slightly stilted first chapter announces that he has come to see Homer “as a guide to life, even as a
kind of scripture”, which sounds like blurb-talk, but then he surprises us by actually convincing us that it
is true. The Mighty Dead is almost unbearably personal; it includes Nicolson’s devastating account of
being raped at knifepoint – an account that has all the more impact for being unexpected and very
restrained, with little prelude or comment. Yet the link to the guiding themes of violence, honour, force
and masculinity is made clear. And for most of the remainder of the book, the focus stays less on
Nicolson than on Homer, and on origins and theories of the Homeric world. The results are at once
moving and enlightening. Homer has such power partly because he is an enigma. We don’t know who he
was (or who they were), while the texts themselves can be puzzling but fascinating to readers unused to
the repetitive, incantatory structure of oral tales. The sources are so old; if we venture beyond early
fragments of physical evidence (a few jesting lines inscribed on an 8th-century BC wine cup), we find the
ground falling away beneath our feet. We meet a dizzying “time-cliff”. Since we have to rely on a long
series of recitations, transcriptions, interpretations and (for most of us) translations, much can go
wrong. Nicolson himself was unimpressed when he first had to pick through Homer at school, in Greek.
It was like filleting fish, he says. But translations can ruin things too. He quotes the once- influential
edition by Alexander Pope, clearly designed for 18th-century sensibilities, in which a simple phrase
about a glad-hearted shepherd becomes a long, frothy confection about swains rejoicing under blue
vaults of sky. No wonder Keats was blown away when he looked into George Chapman’s older, more
muscular translation. For Nicolson, it was Robert Fagles’ version of The Odyssey that had this effect; he
was so hooked that he kept reading it while sailing in the stormy Atlantic, lashing the book to a compass
binnacle. As a seafarer himself, he clearly loves the salty, restless side of Homer. There is no doubt that
The Odyssey is a classic sea story but Nicolson also reads The Iliad mainly as an account of aggressive
seaborne Greeks making trouble in the more settled world of Troy. Always alert for modern parallels,
Nicolson makes connections with the high-flown rhetoric of military leaders in Iraq and Kuwait, and with
the attitudes and brutality of American street gangs. It’s all about courage, revenge, honour, respect; it
is all about manhood and war. Yet, oddly, it is women who have given us some of the most interesting
remarks on these aspects of Homer. Simone Weil’s study of The Iliad, published on the eve of the
second world war, argues that his work speaks only to those who see “force” as something eternal and
unavoidable in history, not to those who hope vainly for civilised progress. In an essay on Weil, Susan
Sontag adds that, sometimes, people do not crave civilisation or beauty in art at all but the “deepening
of the sense of reality” that comes from terrible things. Nicolson quotes them both, and his own
conclusion is similar. Homer may not be a life guide in the sense of offering self-improvement – indeed,
to follow his values would lead to some kind of “gang hell”. Yet there is wisdom and clarity to be found
in his “fearless encounter with the dreadful”. It is hard not to feel, watching recent events, that there is
something in this hard-bitten vision, and that the dreadful can never be much further away than (at
best) the horizon. The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters, by Adam Nicolson, William Collins, RRP£25,
336 pages
Book Summary of As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying is told in individual sections, so that the narration of the story shifts from one character to
another. While most sections are narrated by members of the Bundren family, the few that are told by
neighbors and other observers offer a glimpse of the family from an outsider’s perspective. Each
narrator — family members and outsiders alike — is believable but at the same time unreliable, forcing
readers to decide for themselves what is reality and what is not.

As the novel begins, Addie Bundren lays dying in her bedroom while her son Cash builds her coffin.
Addie’s ineffectual husband, Anse, is arranging to have her buried in Jefferson, a town forty miles away,
because Addie has requested this last wish. Anse’s motivating reason to go to Jefferson, however, is to
get fitted for new teeth and, if possible, find a new wife. Two other sons, Darl and Jewel, struggle both
with their mother’s death and their own mental health. Darl is perceptive and insightful but taunts
others mercilessly, while Jewel knows how to express love and affection only through violence, because
his mother sought violence when she conceived him during an affair with a preacher.

Daughter Dewey Dell, a simple young woman who is incapable of forming deep, logically sequenced
thoughts, is pregnant and in a hurry to get to Jefferson for an abortion. The youngest child in the
Bundren family, Vardaman, is either much younger than his siblings or is mentally retarded; throughout
the novel, he confuses his mother with the fish he catches on the day she dies.

To adhere to Addie’s wishes, the family travels the distance to Jefferson during a hot, wet spell in
Mississippi, and throughout the journey, Addie’s body proceeds to decay, while buzzards swirl
menacingly overhead. When they discover that a bridge has washed out, the family must find a way to
get Addie’s coffin over the river, and the ensuing scenes are both tragic and comic.

When these events become too horrific for Darl and he comes to understands that his mother needs to
be buried properly, he tries to burn his mother’s body and coffin in a barn, an act for which he is
declared mentally insane. His father, Anse, allows Darl to be sent to an insane asylum because he does
not want to reimburse the family for their barn, which was destroyed by the fire. Jewel, meanwhile,
saves his mother’s body from the fire, just as he saved her coffin from the swollen river, thus fulfilling his
mother’s prophecy that Jewel would save her.
TYPES OF FIGURE OF SPEECH AND THEIR EXAMPLES

Simile – Rachel is as bright as the sun.

Metaphor – The whole world is a stage.

Personification – The wind whispered in my ears.

Apostrophe – O William, you should be living now to see all this.

Alliteration – Sally sold some seashells.

Assonance – I seem to like your little green trees.

Hyperbole – I am so hungry I could eat a horse.

Oxymoron – Euthanizing their sick pet dog was considered as an act of kind cruelty.

Epigram – The child is the father of man.

Irony – A fire station burned down yesterday.

Pun – Life depends upon the liver.

Metonymy – The Bench decided that the man is guilty.

Synecdoche – We need more hands to help us move this cupboard.

Transferred Epithet – She had a sleepless night.