- Heroes of Antiquity, Heroes of the Modern Era, and Our Own Pitiful Lot
For a long time now, I have been convinced that the three archetypal heroes of modernity are Don Quixote, Don Juan and Faust. Anyone can challenge my opinion on this, but I find it at least plausible. One can find them, and the long shadows that start at their feet, all the way to Madame Bovary, that dangerous quixotesque madwoman. Don Juan overshadows the Vicomte de Valmont and his frightening counterpart, the Marquise de Merteuil; Faust’s cold gaze watches over Dr. Frankenstein and Sade’s brilliant degenerates. Tom Jones? A Don Juan. David Copperfield? Don Quixote. Ishmael? Faust. One could go on forever and these three will always appear as shadows, models or demons.
But what do Don Quixote, Don Juan and Faust have in common, apart from having being conceived more or less at the start of the Modern Era? They are world shapers. Don Quixote’s madness changes those around him, culminating in that heartbreaking “quixotization” of Sancho at the end of book two: broken and in his deathbed, Don Quixote’s view of the world triumphs over good-sense, because it is a better way to live. Don Juan, the supreme joker, mocks the mores of his society (not only regarding sexual matters) and, at the end, refuses to bend the knee and repent, even when confronted by supernatural forces: his will is triumphant over God’s Law. As for Faust, he manages to outsmart the Devil in Goethe’s version and gives him a run for his money in Marlow’s: his mind is triumphant over matter, his wits are sharper than the Devil’s.
Compare this to the Hero of Antiquity. We, humanistic readers that we are, barely give a damn about the gods in the Iliad, despite the fact that they have such a prominent role in it (see Alessandro Baricco’s abridgement of the Iliad for proof, but be warned that it’s monstrously tasteless). Our interest is invested in Achilles and Hector. Look no further than to the start of the matter, when Homer begins the tale by saying: “μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος” (a line too important for western literature to miss a chance to pedantically quote it in ancient Greek), that is: “sing, goddess, the rage of Achilles son of Peleus”. The heart of the story, as it would be later in Modern times, is a human affair. Understandable, since the readership is (presumably) human.
However, the hero of Antiquity is a mere ragdoll, tossed around by supernatural forces. It’s the gods who shape the fate of the Trojan War, it’s the gods who decide Agamemnon’s terrible fate, Apollo who orders Orestes to murder his own mother, Athena who forgives his crime; Apollo again who sets a trap for Oedipus, a trap ordained since the time of his grandfather, who offended that same god by killing its pet dragon. Decisively, the greatest hero of them all, Achilles, only defeats Hector thanks to the help of Athena, who tricks the Trojan prince into fighting. (For a crisp contrast between Ancient and Modern storytelling, compare Euripides’s Hippolytus and Racine’s Phaedra.)
The mistrusting reader wants to know what the point of all this name-dropping is. Well, one would think that the genre of S-F is a child of the Modern Era. Shelley, Verne and Wells certainly are modern authors, full of properly modern ideas and thoughts. But consider The Devourer and what kind of a story it tells. Don Quixote, Don Juan and Faust are nowhere near it; the story does not contain any world-shapers and its heroes, the Marshal and Fangs, are ragdolls again, not being carried away by the forces of the super-natural, but equally powerless against the merely natural. True, the Marshal attempts to change the course of destiny, but only inasmuch as he admits to Fangs’ premise: morals do not matter in the universe. He’s just playing his part as a pawn in a cosmic eat or be eaten, one more individual in the evolutionary race trying to leave behind some of his genes; he’s not being guided by morals—that is, anthropocentric considerations, properly humanistic motives.
More important, still, is Fangs’ confession. Dinosaurs destroy even their own home world because this universe has no place for sentimentality; in order to survive, carbon-based life-forms must eliminate the competition, kill or be killed. It’s just the nature of things, and Game Theory dictates that the ones to stop this madness and take a more pacifistic approach to life in the galaxy don’t stand a chance. It’s a cosmic prisoner’s dilemma. Fully aware that they are powerless to decide based on moral considerations, dinosaurs submit their agency to the forces of nature and do what they have to do, not what they would aspire to. As such, the Devourer is a hero for Antiquity, not for Modern Times.
Post-modernity has long toyed with powerless heroes. Gregor Samsa is, of course, a fine example, as is Musil’s man without attributes and, a personal favorite, Frisch’s Homo Faber, the “fabricator man” who, despite all his technical prowess, can’t shape or understand his own fate. However, those exemplary characters still live in an entirely human-made world; their issues are of human origin. S-F, as marvelously shown by Cixin Liu, presents a unique opportunity to put into play forces that are truly beyond human understanding.
In The Death of Tragedy, G. Steiner points out that true tragedy occurs when the forces at play can’t be placated by reasonable behaviour. Oedipus’ fate could not have been prevented with better city plumbing; Lear’s descent would not have been fixed by better nursing homes for the old. Modernity completely rejected this premise: everything is within human reach, Reason can overcome anything, and solve everything. Although postmodernity is too fractal to describe it with a single general rule, our stories, particularly certain type of S-F stories, seem to be on their way back to the truly Tragic: there are forces in this universe, those of physics, game theory, cosmic sociology, economics, war or what have you, that are far beyond our control. Here be dragons, and maybe that’s the thing about S-F that I really enjoy.
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