In my previous post, I foolishly boasted to an empty and uncaring cosmos that I had recovered from a serious injury and would be able to continue work. There shall be a bright shiny nickel for whichever clever young lad or lady can guess what happened the very next day.
Yes, I've been struggling with the legendary Rhinovirus Prime, a disease long thought extinct by all but the most unhinged of medical professionals, but STILL IT LIVES! And I have bested it. It took two weeks for my heart to start pumping blood instead of mucus, and I never would have survived had George Harrison not taught me the secret of extracting zero-point energy from the cosmic mandala, but this is the kind of thing you need to know as a literationer.
Anyway, the Iliad. I probably should give a detailed synopsis of events of the story, but I'm not going to. This isn't SparkNotes. Besides, any meaningful commentary on the Iliad would need to be as long as the original work itself, if not longer. So let's kick meaningful to the curb and go for unthinking irreverence!
To be honest, a synopsis wouldn't even be that worthwhile. The entire first half of the story is about the Greek gods forcing a stalemate between the Greeks and Trojans. The Trojans march out, the Greeks fight them, there are some speeches, an inconsequential to the resolution and everybody goes home for the night. This happens five times.
The only truly interesting thing in the entire first half of the book is Diomedes, and that's only because he's so far beyond anything that could exist in a rational universe that he exists as some kind of attention singularity that no fascination can escape from.
Diomedes exists to be better than everybody else. He's a better fighter than Achilles or Ajax, more cunning than Achilles, brings more ships to the battle than anyone save Agamemnon and Nestor and while he takes part in the battle he gets more kills than anybody else. Several of the Trojan commanders declare him to be a more dangerous fighter than Achilles. He has several speeches where he directly states the author's viewpoint, including getting an enemy to stop fighting and work out their differences peacefully in the middle of a war. At one point he engages in single combat with Ares, the god of war, and wins. And this is a man with no special Divine origin of any kind. Even his name, "Dio-metis" is Greek for "The skill of God," which is a common Greek expression meaning "Chuck Norris."
If you've ever heard the phrase, "Even Homer sometimes nods," they were probably talking about Diomedes. Even in an epic poem where it's possible for the invulnerable son of a water nymph to meet and kick the ass of a sentient river and the pagan incarnations of the sky and the sun can come to your house for tea and motivational speeches, the mere existence of this Diomedes person completely destroys any sense of verisimilitude. Disbelief not only suspended, it's been hung, drawn and quartered. Which, for those who've never been to a public execution, means that disbelief has hung by its neck until half-dead, emasculated with a blunt knife, eviscerated while still alive, killed by removal of the heart, and had its cut into quarters and its head mounted on a spike. They'd do this in the public square, people would bring their children to watch.
Now, we can't really blame Homer for this, as such. The Greek Oral Tradition is much closer in practice to writing history than writing narrative, and certain things can't be removed to fit the demands of a story. Also, Homer might not have really existed, and it's hard to blame a fictional character, which takes the fun out of things.
It's very likely that a historical Diomedes existed, and he really was so awesome that Helios had to wear sunglasses when looking at him. But from a literary perspective it weakens the story because he makes no significant contributions to any event and cripples the argument that Achilles was so balls-nasty that the Greeks couldn't win the battle without him.
In other words, just because something actually happened, that isn't justification enough to include it in your story.
There was a WWII soldier by the name of Audie Murphy, a 5'5", 110 lb 16 year old kid who had Malaria all through the war. He once defended his entire military company from a massive German infantry and armored attack, by himself, for over an hour, using a .50 caliber machine gun that was on fire at the time. He was awarded the Medal of Honor and literally every other medal the US had. He got five of them twice. But when he played himself in the movie version of his autobiography, he had the filmmakers tone things down significantly so that people wouldn't call him a liar.
The real world doesn't have to be nearly as believable as a fictional work does. People in this world don't have the eye of God, but a writer is the creator of their own universe. Not only do they have the divine sight, they have to transfer their perspective to the reader.
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