Hymns To The Bloody Silence

      I've had some pretty weighty matters on my mind lately, and the poor thing has surely not been up to the task.   I've found myself, though, thinking a lot about Ajax (otherwise known as Aîas), and particularly about that brief appearance he makes in Book XI of Homer's The Odyssey.   This is partially because of what's happening to a close friend of mine, who, like Ajax, seems to have been royally screwed-over by The Powers That Be (Angel fans, please, say nothing), but it's also because I've been stewing on the idea of expression, and Ajax's silence in the Vision of the Dead sequence has always been especially suggestive.   Memory, however, plays strange tricks, and one's never quite sure how things went exactly, so I dragged out a copy of Homer and started rereading the relevant passage, probably for the first time in a half-dozen years.  

Continue....

Here's the section in question:

Now other souls of mournful dead stood by,
each with his troubled questioning, but one
remained alone, apart: the son of Télamon,
Aîas, it was-- the great shade burning still
because I had won favor on the beachhead
in rivalry over Akhilleus' arms.
The Lady Thetis, mother of Akhilleus,
laid out for us the dead man's battle gear,
and Trojan children, with Athena,
named the Danaan fittest to own them. Would
god had I not borne the palm that day!
For earth took Aîas then to hold forever,
the handsomest and, in all feats of war,
noblest of the Danaans after Akhilleus.
Gently therefore I called across to him:

'Aîas, dear son or royal Télamon,
you would not then forget, even in death,
your fury with me over those accurst
calamitous arms?-- and so they were, a bane
sent by the gods upon the Argive host.
For when you died by your own hand we lost
a tower, formidable in war. All we Akhaians
mourn you forever, as we do Akhilleus;
and no one bears the blame but Zeus.
He fixed that doom for you because he frowned
on the whole expedition of the spearmen.
My lord, come nearer, listen to our story!
Conquer your indignation and your pride.'

But he gave no reply, and turned away,
following other ghosts toward Erebos.
Who knows if in that darkness he might still
have spoken, and I answered?

                                                                 But my heart
longed, after this, to see the dead elsewhere.

--- from the Robert Fitzgerald translation (1961)

This got me looking at other versions of this famous scene, and it's strange some of the differences in tenor from version to version.   Here's Albert Cook's very peculiar version from 1967:

So I said, but he answered me nothing and went with the other
Souls of the shades of the dead to Erebos.
And he would have spoken in anger, just as I to him,
But the spirit within my own breast desired
To see the souls of the other men who had died.

So where does Cook get the phrase "And he would have spoken in anger"? It's a strange thing, because in Cook's version, lines earlier, Odysseus claims that "I myself spoke out to him with soothing words" (emphasis added). That's awfully speculative, and makes Ajax seem like he simply didn't get a chance to speak first so he exits pouting stage right.   (And, one assumes, negates just about everything Longinus had to say about this episode.)   I think sometimes that it's a sign of one's maturity how well one appreciates and understands silence, figurative or otherwise.   Ajax's is a stony but obviously pained silence: he was screwed by the gods and he knew it, and all he could do was accept it.   Was there any way to respond? Not really.   All he can do is face the man that was favoured by fate and address him with the most fitting response available to him: silence, and then departure, there in fact being nothing that he could say that wouldn't sound like fury, or at the opposite end of the spectrum, self-pity.  

      I think it was Stevenson who once said that the cruellest lies are often told in silence-- but one has to add to that maxim that so too are the most penetrating truths.   One need only think of the devastating effect of Christ's silence to the Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, or, more fliply, of Chesterton's refusal to engage Shaw in debate because Chesterton knew that silence was the only thing a man like Shaw could never abide.   There's something very piercing about silence, whether in cruelty or in kindness or something in between, and it commands us to understand without parsing or dissembling or explaining.   Silence is itself a language, a disturbingly opaque language, as Beckett perhaps more than anyone understood so well.   Nihilo ex nihilo, omnia ex nihilo.   It's the language of the perverse and paradoxical echo: it means everything and it means nothing at the same time, something King Lear could never have grasped.   It also begs the question: is language always-already a gesture of alternate purpose-- a supplication, an amendation, an appeasement, a rage for order to which we are not innately given? I'm sure Derrida has an answer ready on that one somewhere.

      But I return to Ajax to note something very important-- the utter lack of explicit emotion, at least as manifest in Fitzgerald's translation and butchered by Cook.   We can only imagine what Ajax's response is, or, rather, "what he's feeling," if indeed he's feeling anything as a shade.   I wonder if Milton was right to give his Satan so much self-defense (Non serviam, et cetera), so much "me miserable" justification, even if the idea of silence would surely have been anathema to our grand poetic hectorer.   I wonder if he'd then have had to modify God's response, or would he have walked away as indifferently as Homer's Odysseus does?   It's obvious that Odysseus wants something from Ajax in that passage, and it's not just the desire to ease Ajax's troubled soul. It's just as surely not simply the desire to "make things better" in the plain sense of that idea.   No, he wants, and this may be an overly-modern association but I don't think so, forgiveness, forgiveness for having been favoured by the gods, forgiveness for his survival-- which makes me think Homer may have been hinting at something much larger than we normally think for this segment.   To beg forgiveness without receiving an answer-- there's no comfort in that, no resolution, no sense of conciliation.   Ajax's answer is both cruel and not: there's simply nothing to be said, and, perhaps, that there's no point in saying anything.   And perhaps, too, there's a yet crueller irony here: that maybe Ajax's silence is a language saying so much-- or maybe it is simply Nothing At All.   Nothing.   Humanity for all its imaginative capabilities cannot truly imagine nothingness, and silence is the closest approximation of it that we know.   No wonder it unsettles us so. Or maybe it kills us to imagine what might have happened if we'd been silent and waited for words to deal with us before we tried to deal with them.