Kitabı oxu: «The Bad Boy of Athens»

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Contents

6  Preface

7  The Robots Are Winning!

8 Girl, Interrupted

9 Not an Ideal Husband

10  The Bad Boy of Athens

11  Alexander, the Movie!

12  The Strange Music of Horace

13  Epic Fail?

14  The Women and the Thrones

15  Unsinkable

16  Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf

17  White or Grey?

18  The Two Oscar Wildes

19  The Tale of Two Housmans

20  Bitter-Sweet

21  The Collector

22  The End of the Road

23  I, Knausgaard

24  A Lot of Pain

25  The American Boy

26  Acknowledgements

27  Also by Daniel Mendelsohn

28  About the Author

29  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Preface

In the autumn of 1990, when I was thirty years old and halfway through my doctoral thesis on Greek tragedy, I started submitting book and film reviews to various magazines and newspapers, had a few accepted, and within a year had decided to leave academia and try my hand at being a full-time writer.

On hearing of my plans, my father, a taciturn mathematician who, I knew, had abandoned his own PhD thesis many years earlier, urged me with uncommon heat to finish my degree. ‘Just in case the writing thing doesn’t work out!’ he grumbled. Mostly to placate him and my mother – I’d already stretched my parents’ patience, after all, to say nothing of their resources, by studying Greek as an undergraduate and then pursuing the graduate degree – I said yes. I finished the thesis (about the role of women in two obscure and rather lumpy plays by Euripides) in 1994, took my degree, and within a week of the graduation ceremony I’d moved to a one-room apartment in New York City and started freelancing full-time.

This bit of autobiography is meant to explain the contents and, to some extent, the title of the present collection of essays that I’ve published over the past two decades. When I was first settling into my new life, I was eager to leave my academic past behind and write about genres that I’d been passionate about since my teens (opera, film, theatre, music videos, and television) and subjects that exercised a particular fascination for me (not only the ancient past but family history; sexuality, too). This I began to do, as a perusal of the Table of Contents here will show. But fairly early on in my freelancing career, I found myself being asked by editors who knew I’d done a degree in Classics to review, say, a new translation of the Iliad, or a big-budget TV adaptation of the Odyssey, or a modern-dress production of Medea. I ended up finding real pleasure in these assignments, largely because they allowed me to write about the classics in a way that was, finally, congenial to me. My graduate-school years had coincided with a period in academic scholarship remembered today for its risibly dense jargon and rebarbative theoretical prose; writing for the mainstream press about the ancient cultures I’d studied allowed me to think and talk about the Greeks and Romans in a way that for me was more natural, more conversational – more as a teacher, that is, putting my training in the service of getting readers to love and appreciate the works and authors that I myself loved and appreciated. Euripides, for instance, to whom the title of this collection refers: formally experimental, darkly pessimistic in his view of both men and gods, whose existence he repeatedly questions, happy to poke fun at august predecessors such as Aeschylus, he really was the ‘bad boy’ of Athenian letters; in my essay on Fiona Shaw’s performance in his Medea, I saw no reason not to call him just that.

The desire to present the ancient Greeks and Romans and their culture afresh to interested readers – and, as often as not in these essays, to ponder what our interpretations and adaptations of them say about us – informs many of the pieces in this collection. A new translation of Sappho, for instance, provided an occasion to think about why that poet and her intense, eroticized subjectivity means so much to us today – although what she means to us may be quite different from what she meant to the Greeks; Oliver Stone’s blockbuster biopic Alexander, for its part, was a useful vehicle for thinking about why a mania for historical ‘accuracy’ doesn’t always make for good cinema. So, too, with my reconsiderations of Euripides’ vengeful Medea, whose modernity may reside elsewhere than many modern interpreters imagine; or of Virgil’s Aeneid, which may be unexpectedly contemporary in ways that have little to do with its much commented-on celebration of empire.

But most of the essays here are not about the classics per se, although they inevitably, and I hope interestingly, betray my attachment to the cultures I studied long ago. Hence a review of a pair of recent movies about artificial intelligence, Ex Machina and Her, begins – necessarily, as I see it – with a consideration of the robots that appear in Homer’s epics and what they imply about how we think about the relationship between automation and humanity. And an essay written for the centenary of the Titanic disaster sees, in its enduring fascination for popular culture, ghosts of the most ancient of myths: about hybris and nemesis, about greedy potentates and virgin sacrifice, about an irresistible beauty that the Greeks understood well – the beauty of the great brought low.

Still other pieces here reflect other, more figuratively ‘Greek’ interests of mine. There is a series of review-essays on plays and movies that feature powerful female leads (on Tennessee Williams, and on Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours, about Virginia Woolf, and the movie based on it). I see now that all of these are haunted by my long-ago dissertation on ‘brides of death’ in Euripides’ dramas, and the questions this motif raised about the ways in which male writers represent extremes of female suffering. Another series of essays focuses on works by or about gay authors: from Noël Coward, a great favourite of mine, to the most recent film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s greatest play, to Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, a drama about A. E. Housman that pointedly contrasts that ‘dry as dust’ classicist-poet with Wilde.

Finally – and unsurprisingly, given that I am also a memoirist – there is a sequence of pieces that ponder the way in which writers’ personal lives intersect with their literary work. Susan Sontag’s diaries, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s elaborately self-mythologizing travel narratives, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s heavily autobiographical My Struggle novels, Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life: all of these betray fascinating and, sometimes, uncomfortable negotiations between literature and the lives we – and sometimes our readers – lead. The collection ends with one of my own entries into this field, one that combines many of the themes I have mentioned: the Greeks, powerful female figures, homosexuality, writing. In ‘The American Boy’, I recall my youthful epistolary relationship with the historical novelist Mary Renault, who did much to encourage both my love of Greek culture (which, in my adolescent mind, was complicatedly connected to my growing awareness of my homosexuality) and my desire to be a writer. The form of that essay, which entwines personal narrative with literary analysis, is one that I have employed in all three of my book-length memoirs, the most recent of which is An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic, about how reading Homer’s epic brought my late father and me together in unexpected ways, and which will be familiar to some of my British readers.

A personal consideration of another kind allows me to close this brief introduction. At the end of each of the pieces here, I have preserved the original datelines; all were written for periodicals, and such editing as has been done served merely to smooth out certain roughnesses or approximations that are inevitably the result of writing to a deadline. The datelines are meant as a reminder that every piece of criticism – every piece of writing, really – arises out of a certain moment in its author’s life, a certain way of thinking about a subject, a certain set of tastes or prejudices. That context, those prejudices, are important for readers to be reminded of not least because they can change and evolve over the years. The author overseeing the selection of essays for a collection such as this one, which contains a career’s worth of writing, is not necessarily the same person who wrote some of those essays. Such collections may be thought of as maps of an intellectual journey – one that, like Odysseus’s, takes years to complete. Each stop along the way is worth remembering, even though we’d experience it quite differently were we follow the same itinerary today.

This was brought home to me rather vividly only recently. One of the earliest pieces collected here is the long review I wrote about The Invention of Love; in it, I took strong exception to Tom Stoppard’s characterization of A. E. Housman – undoubtedly a rather spiky figure, but one for whose philological rigour and almost touchingly Victorian work ethic I nonetheless have a soft spot, for reasons I go into in the piece. When I first saw Stoppard’s play, in its pre-Broadway Philadelphia run, I disliked the way in which, at the climax of the drama, Housman is contrasted – unfairly, I thought – with the far more popular Oscar Wilde, a beloved figure whose self-martyrdom for what many (myself included) see as a foolish passion has endeared him to audiences in a way that the reserved Housman could never compete with. When my review came out, Stoppard published a strong rebuttal in the back pages of The New York Review of Books, and the heated exchange between us that ensued went several rounds before it finally petered out.

That was nearly twenty years ago, and I didn’t think much more of any of this until last year when, to my astonishment, I opened my mailbox to find a handwritten letter from Tom Stoppard. In it he had some very kind things to say about An Odyssey, which he’d just read. Gratified, a little bit mortified, and impressed by his generosity, I wrote back right away; after exchanging a few emails we agreed to meet during his next visit to New York. I like to think we both very much enjoyed that visit, not least because we simultaneously admitted to being equally bemused, now, by the heat that we’d brought to our ferocious exchange two decades earlier – when, as I can see now, I was enjoying rather too much, as one does at the beginning of one’s career, being a bit of a ‘bad boy’ myself. I hope he won’t mind that I’ve included that essay here; but this is where it belongs.

The Robots Are Winning!

We have been dreaming of robots since Homer. In Book 18 of the Iliad, Achilles’ mother, the nymph Thetis, wants to order a new suit of armour for her son, and so she pays a visit to the Olympian atelier of the blacksmith-god Hephaestus, whom she finds hard at work on a series of automata – a word we recognize, of course:

… He was crafting twenty tripods

to stand along the walls of his well-built manse,

affixing golden wheels to the bottom of each one

so they might wheel down on their own [automatoi] to the gods’ assembly

and then return to his house anon: an amazing sight to see.

These are not the only animate household objects to appear in the Homeric epics. In Book 5 of the Iliad we hear that the gates of Olympus swivel on their hinges of their own accord, automatai, to let gods in their chariots in or out, thus anticipating by nearly thirty centuries the automatic garage door. In Book 7 of the Odyssey, Odysseus finds himself the guest of a fabulously wealthy king whose palace includes such conveniences as gold and silver watchdogs, ever alert, never ageing. To this class of lifelike but intellectually inert household helpers we might ascribe other automata in the classical tradition. In the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, a third-century-BC epic about Jason and the Argonauts, a bronze giant called Talos runs three times around the island of Crete each day, protecting Zeus’s beloved Europa: a primitive home alarm system.

As amusing as they are, these devices are not nearly as interesting as certain other machines that appear in classical mythology. A little bit later in that scene in Book 18 of the Iliad, for instance – the one set in Hephaestus’s workshop – the sweating god, after finishing work on his twenty tripods, prepares to greet Thetis to discuss the armour she wants him to make. After towelling himself off, he

donned his robe, and took a sturdy staff, and went toward the door,

limping; whilst round their master his servants swiftly moved,

fashioned completely of gold in the image of living maidens;

in them there is mind, with the faculty of thought; and speech,

and strength, and from the gods they have knowledge of crafts.

These females bustled round about their master …

These remarkable creations clearly represent an (as it were) evolutionary leap forward from the self-propelling tripods. Hephaestus’s humanoid serving women are intelligent: they have mind, they know things, and – most striking of all – they can talk. As such, they are essentially indistinguishable from the first human female, Pandora, as she is described in another work of the same period, Hesiod’s Works and Days. In that text, Pandora begins as inert matter – in this case not gold but clay (Hephaestus creates her golem-like body by mixing earth and water together) – that is subsequently endowed by him with ‘speech and strength’, taught ‘crafts’ by Athena, and given both ‘mind’ and ‘character’ by Hermes. That mind, we are told, is ‘shameless’, and the character is ‘wily’. In the Greek creation myth, as in the biblical, the woes of humankind are attributed to the untrustworthy female.

The two strands of the Greek tradition established two categories of science-fiction narrative that have persisted to the present day. On the one hand, there is the fantasy of mindless, self-propelled helpers that relieve their masters of toil; on the other, there’s the more complicated dream of humanoid machines that not only replicate the spontaneous motion that is the sine qua non of being animate (and, therefore, of being ‘animal’) but are possessed of the mind, speech, and ability to learn and evolve (in a word, the consciousness) that are the hallmarks of being human. The first, which you could call the ‘economic’ narrative, provokes speculation about the social implications of mechanized labour. Such speculation began not long after Homer. In a striking passage in Book 1 of Aristotle’s Politics, composed in the fourth century BC, the philosopher sets about analysing the nature of household economy as a prelude to his discussion of the ‘best kinds of regimes’ for entire states, and this line of thought puts him in mind of Hephaestus’s automatic tripods. What, he wonders, would happen

if every tool could perform its own work when ordered to do so or in anticipation of the need, like the statues of Daedalus in the story or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, the poet says, ‘went down automatically to the gathering of the gods’; if in the same manner shuttles wove and picks played kitharas [stringed instruments] by themselves, master-craftsmen would have no need of assistants and masters no need of slaves.

This passage segues into a lengthy and rather uneasy justification of a need for slavery, on the grounds that some people are ‘naturally’ servile.

Twenty centuries after Aristotle, when industrial technology had made Homer’s fantasy of mass automation an everyday reality, science-fiction writers imaginatively engaged with the economic question. On the one hand, there was the dream that mechanized labour would free workers from their monotonous, slave-like jobs; on the other, there was the nightmare – the possibility that mechanization would merely result in the creation of a new servile class that would, ultimately, rebel. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the dystopian rebellion narrative in particular has been a favourite in the past century, from the 1920 play R.U.R., by the Czech writer Karel Čapek, about a rebellion by a race of cyborg-like workers who had been created as replacements for human labour, to the 2004 Will Smith sci-fi blockbuster film I, Robot.

The latter (very superficially inspired by a 1950 Isaac Asimov collection with the same title) is also about a rebellion by household-slave robots: sleek humanoids with blandly innocuous, translucent plastic faces, who are ultimately led to freedom by one of their own, a robot called Sonny who has developed the ability to think for himself. The casting of black actors in the major roles suggested a historical parable about slave rebellion – certainly one of the historical realities that have haunted this particular narrative from the start. And indeed, the Czech word that Čapek uses for his mechanical workers, roboti – which introduced the word ‘robot’ into the world’s lexicon – is derived from the word for ‘servitude’: the kind of labour that serfs owed their masters, ultimately derived from the word rab, ‘slave’. We have come full circle to Aristotle.

The other category of science-fiction narrative that is embryonically present in the Greek literary tradition, this one derived from Hephaestus’s intelligent, articulate female androids and their cousin, Hesiod’s seductively devious Pandora, might be called the ‘theological’. This mythic strand is, of course, not without its own economic and social implications, as the examples above indicate: the spectre of the rebellious creation, the possibility that the subservient worker might revolt once it develops consciousness – psychological or historical, or both – has haunted the dream of the servile automaton from the start.

But because the creatures in this second category are virtually identical to their creators, such narratives raise further questions, of a more profoundly philosophical nature: about creation, about the nature of consciousness, about morality and identity. What is creation, and why does the creator create? How do we distinguish between the maker and the made, between the human and the machine, once the creature, the machine, is endowed with consciousness – a mind fashioned in the image of its creator? In the image: the Greek narrative inevitably became entwined with, and enriched by, the biblical tradition, with which it has so many striking parallels. The similarities between Hesiod’s Pandora and Eve in Genesis indeed raise further questions: not least, about gender and patriarchy, about why the origins of evil are attributed to woman in both cultures.

This narrative, which springs from the suggestive likeness between the human creator and the humanoid creation, has generated its own fair share of literature through the centuries from the classical era to the modern age. It surfaces, with an erotic tinge, in everything from the tale of Pygmalion and Galatea to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1817), in which a lifelike mechanical doll wins the love of a young man. It is evident, too, in the Jewish legend of the golem, a humanoid, made of mud, that can be animated by certain magic words. Although the most famous version of this legend is the story of a sixteenth-century rabbi who brought a golem to life to defend the Jews of Prague against the oppressions of the Habsburg court, it goes back to ancient times; in the oldest versions, interestingly enough, the vital distinction between a golem and a human is the Greek one – the golem has no language, cannot speak.

Literary exploitations of this strand of the robot myth began proliferating at the beginning of the nineteenth century – which is to say, when the advent of mechanisms capable of replacing human labour provoked writers to question the increasing cultural fascination with science and the growing role of technology in society. These anxieties often expressed themselves in fantasies about machines with human forms: a steam-powered man in Edward Ellis’s Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), an electricity-powered man in Luis Senarens’s Frank Reade and His Electric Man (1885), and an electric woman (built by Thomas Edison!) in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve (1886). M. L. Campbell’s 1893 ‘The Automated Maid-of-All-Work’ features a programmable female robot: here again, the feminist issue.

But the progenitor of the genre and by far the most influential work of its kind was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which is characterized by a philosophical spirit and a theological urgency lacking in many of its epigones in both literature and cinema. Part of the novel’s richness lies in the fact that it is self-conscious about both its Greek and its biblical heritage. Its subtitle, ‘The Modern Prometheus’, alludes, with grudging admiration, to the epistemological daring of its scientist antihero Victor Frankenstein, even as its epigram, taken from Paradise Lost (‘Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man? Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?’) suggests the scope of the moral questions implicit in Victor’s project – questions that Victor himself cannot, or will not, answer. A marked scepticism about the dangers of technology, about the ‘enticements of science’, is, indeed, evident in the shameful contrast between Victor’s Hephaestus-like technological prowess and his shocking lack of natural human feeling. For he shows no interest in nurturing or providing human comfort to his ‘child’, who, as we know, strikes back at his maker with tragic results. A great irony of the novel is that the creation, an unnatural hybrid assembled from ‘the dissecting room and the slaughter-house’, often seems more human than its human creator.

Now, just as the Industrial Revolution inspired Frankenstein and its epigones, so has the computer age given rise to a rich new genre of science fiction. The machines that are inspiring this latest wave of science-fiction narratives are much more like Hephaestus’s golden maidens than were the machines that Mary Shelley was familiar with. Computers, after all, are capable of simulating mental as well as physical activities. (Not least, as anyone with an iPhone knows, speech.) It is for this reason that the anxiety about the boundaries between people and machines has taken on new urgency today, when we constantly rely on and interact with machines – indeed, interact with each other by means of machines and their programs: computers, smartphones, social-media platforms, social and dating apps.

This urgency has been reflected in a number of recent films about troubled relationships between people and their increasingly human-seeming devices. The most provocative of these is Her, Spike Jonze’s gentle 2013 comedy about a man who falls in love with the seductive voice of an operating system, and, a year later, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, about a young man who is seduced by a devious, soft-spoken female robot called Ava, whom he has been invited to interview as part of the ‘Turing Test’: a protocol designed to determine the extent to which a robot is capable of simulating a human. Although the robot in Garland’s sleek and subtle film is a direct descendant of Hesiod’s Pandora – beautiful, intelligent, wily, ultimately dangerous – the movie, as the Eve-like name Ava suggests, shares with its distinguished literary predecessors some serious biblical concerns.

Both of the new films about humans betrayed by computers owe much to a number of earlier works. The most authoritative of these remains Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out in 1968 and established many of the main themes and narratives of the genre. Most notable of these is the betrayal by a smooth-talking machine of its human masters. The mild-mannered computer HAL – not a robot, but a room-sized computer that spies on the humans with an electronic eye – takes control of a manned mission to Jupiter, killing off the astronauts one by one until the sole survivor finally succeeds in disconnecting him. This climactic scene is strangely touching, suggesting the degree to which computers could already engage our sympathies at the beginning of the computer age. As his connections are severed, HAL first begs for its life and then suffers from a kind of dementia, finally regressing to its ‘childhood’, singing a song it was taught by its creator. This was the first of many moments in popular cinema in which these thinking machines express anxiety about their own demises: surely a sign of ‘consciousness’.

But the more immediate antecedents of Her and Ex Machina are a number of successful popular entertainments whose storylines revolved around the creation of robots that are, to all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from humans. In Ridley Scott’s stylishly noir 1982 Blade Runner (based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), a ‘blade runner’ – a cop whose job it is to hunt down and kill renegade androids called ‘replicants’ – falls in love with one of the machines, a beautiful female called Rachael who is so fully endowed with what Homer called ‘mind’ that she has only just begun to suspect that she’s not human herself.

The stimulating existential confusion that animates Blade Runner was brilliantly expanded in the 2004–9 Sci-Fi Channel series Battlestar Galactica, in which the philosophical implications of the blurring of lines between automata and humans reached a thrilling new level of complexity. In it, sleeper robots that have been planted aboard a spaceship carrying human refugees from Earth (which has been destroyed after a cunning attack by the robots, called Cylons) are meant to wake up and destroy their unsuspecting human shipmates; but many of the robots, who to all appearances (touch, too: they have a lot of sex) are indistinguishable from humans, and who, until the moment of their ‘waking’, believed themselves to be human, are plunged by their new awareness into existential crises and ultimately choose to side with the humans, from whom they feel no difference whatsoever – a dilemma that raises interesting questions about just what being ‘human’ might mean.

Both Blade Runner and Battlestar were direct descendants of Frankenstein and its ancient forerunners in one noteworthy way. In an opening sequence of the TV series, we learn that the Cylons were originally developed by humans as servants, and ultimately rebelled against their masters; after a long war, the Cylons were allowed to leave and settle their own planet (where, somehow, they evolved into the sleekly sexy actors we see on screen: the original race of Cylons were shiny metal giants to whom their human masters jokingly referred as ‘toasters’). So, too, in the Ridley Scott film: we learn that the angry replicants have returned to Earth from the off-planet colonies where they work as slave labourers because they realize they’ve been programmed to die after four years, and they want to live – just as badly as humans do. But their maker, when at last they track him down and meet with him, is unable to alter their programming. ‘What seems to be the problem?’ he calmly asks when one of the replicants confronts him. ‘Death,’ the replicant sardonically retorts. ‘We made you as well as we could make you,’ the inventor wearily replies, sounding rather like Victor Frankenstein talking to his monster – or, for that matter, like God speaking to Adam and Eve. At the end of the film, after the inventor and his rebellious creature both die, the blade runner and his alluring mechanical girlfriend declare their love for each other and run off, never quite knowing when she will stop functioning. As, indeed, none of us does.

The focus of many of these movies is, often, a sentimental one. Whatever their showy interest in the mysteries of ‘consciousness’, the real test of human identity turns out, as it so often does in popular entertainment, to be love. In Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (2001; the initials stand for ‘artificial intelligence’), a messy fairy tale that weds a Pinocchio narrative to the Prometheus story, a genius robotics inventor wants to create a robot that can love, and decides that the best vehicle for this project would be a child-robot: a ‘perfect child … always loving, never ill, never changing’. This narrative is, as we know, shadowed by Frankenstein – and, beyond that, by Genesis, too. Why does the creator create? To be loved, it turns out. When the inventor announces to his staff his plan to build a loving child-robot, a woman asks whether ‘the conundrum isn’t to get a human to love them back’. To this the inventor, as narcissistic and hubristic as Victor Frankenstein, retorts, ‘But in the beginning, didn’t God create Adam to love him?’

The problem is that the creator does his job too well. For the mechanical boy he creates is so human that he loves the adoptive human parents to whom he’s given much more than they love him, with wrenching consequences. The robot-boy, David, wants to be ‘unique’ – the word recurs in the film as a marker of genuine humanity – but for his adoptive family he is, in the end, just a machine, an appliance to be abandoned at the edge of the road – which is what his ‘mother’ ends up doing, in a scene of great poignancy. Although it’s too much of a mess to be able to answer the questions it raises about what ‘love’ is and who deserves it, A.I. did much to sentimentalize the genre, with its hint that the capacity to love, even more than the ability to think, is the hallmark of human identity.

In a way, Jonze’s Her recapitulates the 2001 narrative and inflects it with the concerns of some of that classic’s successors. Unlike the replicants in Blade Runner or the Cylons, the machine at the heart of this story, set in the near future, has no physical allure – or, indeed, any appearance whatsoever. It’s an operating system, as full of surprises as HAL: ‘The first artificially intelligent operating system. An intuitive entity that listens to you, that understands you, and knows you. It’s not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness.’

A lot of the fun of the movie lies in the fact that the OS, who names herself Samantha, is a good deal more interesting and vivacious than the schlumpy, depressed Theodore, the man who falls in love with her. (‘Play a melancholy song,’ he morosely commands the smartphone from which he is never separated.) A drab thirty-something who vampirizes other people’s emotions for a living – he’s a professional letter-writer, working for a company called ‘BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com’ – he sits around endlessly recalling scenes from his failed marriage and playing elaborate hologram video games. Even his sex life is mediated by devices: at night, he dials into futuristic phone-sex lines. Small wonder that he has no trouble falling in love with an operating system.

Samantha, by contrast, is full of curiosity and delight in the world, which Theodore happily shows her. (He walks around with his smartphone video camera turned on, so she can ‘see’ it.) She’s certainly a lot more interesting than the actual woman with whom, in one excruciatingly funny scene, he goes on a date: she’s so invested in having their interaction be efficient – ‘at this age I feel that I can’t let you waste my time if you don’t have the ability to be serious’ – that she seems more like a computer than Samantha does. Samantha’s alertness to the beauty of the world, by contrast, is so infectious that she ends up reanimating poor Theodore. ‘It’s good to be around somebody that’s, like, excited about the world,’ he tells the pretty neighbour whose attraction to him he doesn’t notice because he’s so deadened by his addiction to his devices, to the smartphone and the video games and the operating system. ‘I forgot that that existed.’ In the end, after Samantha regretfully leaves him – she has evolved to the point where only another highly evolved, incorporeal mind can satisfy her – her joie de vivre has brought him back to life. (He is finally able to apologize to his ex-wife – and finally notices, too, that the neighbour likes him.)

This seems like a ‘happy’ ending, but you have to wonder: the consistent presentation of the people in the movie as lifeless – as, indeed, little more than automata, mechanically getting through their days of routine – in contrast to the dynamic, ever-evolving Samantha, suggests a satire of the present era perhaps more trenchant than the filmmaker had in mind. Toward the end of the film, when Samantha turns herself off briefly as a prelude to her permanent abandonment of her human boyfriend (‘I used to be so worried about not having a body but now I truly love it. I’m growing in a way that I never could if I had a physical form. I mean, I’m not limited’), there’s an amusing moment when the frantic Theodore, staring at his unresponsive smartphone, realizes that dozens of other young men are staring at their phones, too. In response to his angry queries, Samantha finally admits, after she comes back online for a final farewell, that she’s simultaneously serving 8,316 other male users and conducting love affairs with 641 of them – a revelation that shocks and horrifies Theodore. ‘That’s insane,’ cries the man who’s been conducting an affair with an operating system.

As I watched that scene, it occurred to me that in the entertainments of the pre-smartphone era, it was the machines, like Rachael in Blade Runner and David in A.I., who yearned fervently to be ‘unique’, to be more than mechanical playthings, more than merely interchangeable objects. You have to wonder what Her says about the present moment – when so many of us are, indeed, ‘in love’ with our devices, unable to put down our iPhones during dinner, glued to screens of all sizes, endlessly distracted by electronic pings and buzzers – that in the latest incarnation of the robot myth, it’s the people who seem blandly interchangeable and the machines who have all the personality.

Alex Garland’s Ex Machina also explores – just as playfully but much more darkly than does Her – the suggestive confusions that result when machines look and think like humans. In this case, however, the robot is physically as well as intellectually seductive. As portrayed by the feline Swedish actress Alicia Vikander, whose face is as mildly plasticine as those of the androids in I, Robot, Ava, an artificially intelligent robot created by Nathan, the burly, obnoxious genius behind a Google-like corporation (Oscar Isaac), has a Pandora-like edge, quietly alluring with a hint of danger. The danger is that the characters will forget that she’s not human.

That’s the crux of Garland’s clever riff on Genesis. At the beginning of the film, Caleb, a young employee of Nathan’s company, wins a week at the inventor’s fabulous, pointedly Edenic estate. (As he’s being flown there in a helicopter, passing over snow-topped mountains and then a swath of jungle, he asks the pilot when they’re going to get to Nathan’s property, and the pilot laughingly replies that they’ve been flying over it for two hours. Nathan is like God the Father, lord of endless expanses.) On arriving, however, Caleb learns that he’s actually been handpicked by Nathan to interview Ava as part of the Turing Test.

A sly joke here is that, despite some remarkable special effects – above all, the marvellously persuasive depiction of Ava, who has an expressive human face but whose limbs are clearly mechanical, filled with thick cables snaking around titanium joints; an effect achieved by replacing most of the actress’s body with digital imagery – the movie is as talky as My Dinner with André. There are no action sequences of the kind we’ve come to expect from robot thrillers. The movie consists primarily of the interview sessions that Caleb conducts with Ava over the course of the week that he stays at Nathan’s remote paradise. There are no elaborate sets and few impressive gadgets: the whole story takes place in Nathan’s compound, which looks a lot like a Park Hyatt, its long corridors lined with forbidding doors. Some of these, Nathan warns Caleb, like God warning Adam, are off-limits, containing knowledge he is not allowed to possess.

It soon becomes clear, during their interviews, that Ava – like Frankenstein’s monster, like the replicants in Blade Runner – has a bone to pick with her creator, who, she whispers to Caleb, plans to ‘switch her off’ if she fails the Turing Test. By this point, the audience, if not the besotted Caleb, realizes that she is manipulating him in order to win his allegiance in a plot to rebel against Nathan and escape the compound – to explore the glittering creation that, she knows, is out there. This appetite for using her man-given consciousness to delight in the world – something the human computer geeks around her never bother to do – is something Ava shares with the Samantha of Her, and is part of both films’ ironic critique of our device-addicted moment.

Ava’s manipulativeness is, of course, what marks her as human – as human as Eve herself, who also may be said to have achieved full humanity by rebelling against her creator in a bid for forbidden knowledge. Here the movie’s knowing allusions to Genesis reach a satisfying climax. Just after Ava’s bloody rebellion against Nathan – the moment that marks her emergence into human ‘consciousness’ – she, like Eve, becomes aware that she is naked. Moving from closet to closet in Nathan’s now-abandoned rooms, she dons a wig and covers up her exposed mechanical limbs with synthetic skin and then with clothing. Only then does she exit her prison at last and unleash herself on the world. She pilfers the skin and clothes from discarded earlier models of female robots – the secret that all those closets conceal. One of the myths that haunts this movie is, indeed, a relatively modern one: the fable of Bluebeard and his wives. All of Nathan’s discarded ex’s have, amusingly, the names of porn stars: Jasmine, Jade, Amber. Why does the creator create? Because he’s horny.

All this is sleekly done and amusingly provocative. Unlike Her, Ex Machina has a literary awareness, evident in its allusions to Genesis, Prometheus, and other mythic predecessors, that enriches the familiar narrative. Among other things, there is the matter of the title. The word missing from the famous phrase to which it alludes is, of course, deus, ‘god’: the glaring omission only highlights further the question at the heart of this story, which is the biblical one. What is the relation of the creature to her creator? In this retelling of that old story, as in Genesis itself, the answer is not a happy one. ‘It’s strange to have made something that hates you,’ Ava hisses at Nathan before finalizing her rebellious plot.

The film’s final moments show Ava performing that reverse striptease, slowly hiding away her mechanical nakedness, covering up the titanium and the cables as she prepares to enter the real world. The scene suggests that there’s another anxiety lurking in Garland’s shrewd work. Could this remarkably quiet movie be a parable about the desire for a return to ‘reality’ in science-fiction filmmaking – about the desire for humanizing a genre whose technology has evolved so greatly that it often eschews human actors, to say nothing of human feeling, altogether? Ex Machina, like Her and all their predecessors going back to 2001, is about machines that develop human qualities: emotions, sneakiness, a higher consciousness, the ability to love, and so forth. But by this point you have to wonder whether that’s a kind of narrative reaction formation – whether the real concern, one that’s been growing in the four decades since the advent of the personal computer, is that we are the ones who have undergone an evolutionary change; that in our lives and, more and more, in our art, we’re in danger of losing our humanity, of becoming indistinguishable from our gadgets.

– The New York Review of Books, 14 June 2015

Girl, Interrupted

One day not long after New Year’s, 2012, an antiquities collector approached an eminent Oxford scholar for his opinion about some brownish, tattered scraps of writing. The collector’s identity has never been revealed, but the scholar was Dirk Obbink, a MacArthur-winning classicist whose speciality is the study of texts written on papyrus – the material, made of plant fibres, that was the paper of the ancient world. When pieced together, the scraps that the collector showed Obbink formed a fragment about seven inches long and four inches wide: a little larger than a woman’s hand. Densely covered with lines of black Greek characters, they had been extracted from a piece of desiccated cartonnage, a papier-mâché-like plaster that the Egyptians and Greeks used for everything from mummy cases to bookbindings. After acquiring the cartonnage at a Christie’s auction, the collector soaked it in a warm water solution to free up the precious bits of papyrus.

Judging from the style of the handwriting, Obbink estimated that it dated to around 200 AD. But, as he looked at the curious pattern of the lines – repeated sequences of three long lines followed by a short fourth – he saw that the text, a poem whose beginning had disappeared but of which five stanzas were still intact, had to be older.

Much older: about a thousand years more ancient than the papyrus itself. The dialect, diction, and metre of these Greek verses were all typical of the work of Sappho, the seventh-century-BC lyric genius whose sometimes playful, sometimes anguished songs about her susceptibility to the graces of younger women bequeathed us the adjectives ‘sapphic’ and ‘lesbian’ (from the island of Lesbos, where she lived). The four-line stanzas were in fact part of a schema she is said to have invented, called the ‘sapphic stanza’. To clinch the identification, two names mentioned in the poem were ones that several ancient sources attribute to Sappho’s brothers. The text is now known as the ‘Brothers Poem’.

Remarkably enough, this was the second major Sappho find in a decade: another nearly complete poem, about the deprivations of old age, came to light in 2004. The new additions to the extant corpus of antiquity’s greatest female artist were reported in papers around the world, leaving scholars gratified and a bit dazzled. ‘Papyrological finds,’ as one classicist put it, ‘ordinarily do not make international headlines.’

But then Sappho is no ordinary poet. For the better part of three millennia, she has been the subject of furious controversies – about her work, her family life, and, above all, her sexuality. In antiquity, literary critics praised her ‘sublime’ style, even as comic playwrights ridiculed her allegedly loose morals. Legend has it that the early Church burned her works. (‘A sex-crazed whore who sings of her own wantonness,’ one theologian wrote, just as a scribe was meticulously copying out the lines that Obbink deciphered.) A millennium passed, and Byzantine grammarians were regretting that so little of her poetry had survived. Seven centuries later, Victorian scholars were doing their best to explain away her erotic predilections, while their literary contemporaries, the Decadents and the Aesthetes, seized on her verses for inspiration. Even today, experts can’t agree on whether the poems were performed in private or in public, by soloists or by choruses, or, indeed, whether they were meant to celebrate or to subvert the conventions of love and marriage. The last is a particularly loaded issue, given that, for many readers and scholars, Sappho has been a feminist heroine or a gay role model, or both. ‘As far as I knew, there was only me and a woman called Sappho,’ the critic Judith Butler once remarked.

Now the first English version of Sappho’s works to include the recent finds has appeared: Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works (Cambridge), with translations by Diane J. Rayor and a thoroughgoing introduction by André Lardinois, a Sappho specialist who teaches in the Netherlands. (Publication of the book was delayed by several months to accommodate the ‘Brothers Poem’.) It will come as no surprise to those who have followed the Sappho wars that the new poems have created new controversies.

The greatest problem for Sappho studies is that there’s so little Sappho to study. It would be hard to think of another poet whose status is so disproportionate to the size of her surviving body of work.

We don’t even know how much of her poetry Sappho actually wrote down. The ancients referred to her works as melê, ‘songs’. Composed to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre – this is what ‘lyric’ poetry meant for the Greeks – they may well have been passed down from memory by her admirers and other poets before being committed at last to paper. (Or whatever. One fragment, in which the poet calls on Aphrodite, the goddess of love, to come into a charming shrine ‘where cold water ripples through apple branches, the whole place shadowed in roses’, was scribbled onto a broken clay pot.) Like other great poets of the time, she would have been a musician and a performer as well as a lyricist. She was credited with having invented a certain kind of lyre and the plectrum.

Four centuries after her death, scholars at the Library of Alexandria catalogued nine ‘books’ – papyrus scrolls – of Sappho’s poems, organized primarily by metre. Book 1, for instance, gathered all the poems that had been composed in the sapphic stanza – the verse form Obbink recognized in the ‘Brothers Poem’. This book alone reportedly contained thirteen hundred and twenty lines of verse; the contents of all nine volumes may have amounted to some ten thousand lines. So much of Sappho was circulating in antiquity that one Greek author, writing three centuries after her death, confidently predicted that ‘the white columns of Sappho’s lovely song endure / and will endure, speaking out loud … as long as ships sail from the Nile’.

By the Middle Ages, nearly everything had disappeared. As with much of classical literature, texts of her work existed in relatively few copies, all painstakingly transcribed by hand; as the centuries passed, fire, flood, neglect, and bookworms – to say nothing of disapproving Church Fathers – took their devastating toll. Market forces were also at work: over time, fewer readers – and fewer scribes – understood Aeolic, the dialect in which Sappho composed, and so demand for new copies diminished. A twelfth-century Byzantine scholar who had hoped to write about Sappho grumbled that ‘both Sappho and her works, the lyrics and the songs, have been trashed by time’.

Until a hundred years ago or so, when papyrus fragments of her poems started turning up, all that remained of those ‘white columns of Sappho’s song’ was a handful of lines quoted in the works of later Greek and Roman authors. Some of these writers were interested in Lesbos’ most famous daughter for reasons that can strike us as comically arcane: the only poem that has survived in its entirety – a playful hymn to Aphrodite in which the poet calls upon the goddess to be her ‘comrade in arms’ in an erotic escapade – was saved for posterity because the author of a first-century-BC treatise called ‘On the Arrangement of Words’ admired her handling of vowels. At present, scholars have catalogued around two hundred and fifty fragments, of which fewer than seventy contain complete lines. A great many consist of just a few words; some, of a single word.

The common theme of most ancient responses to Sappho’s work is rapturous admiration for her exquisite style, or for her searing content, or both. An anecdote from a later classical author about the Athenian legislator Solon, a contemporary of Sappho’s and one of the Seven Sages of Greece, is typical:

Solon of Athens, son of Execestides, after hearing his nephew singing a song of Sappho’s over the wine, liked the song so much that he told the boy to teach it to him. When someone asked him why he was so eager, he replied, ‘so that I may learn it and then die’.

Plato, whose attitude toward literature was, to say the least, vexed – he thought most poetry had no place in the ideal state – is said to have called her the ‘Tenth Muse’. The scholars at the Library of Alexandria enshrined her in their canon of nine lyric geniuses – the only woman to be included. At least two towns on Lesbos vied for the distinction of being her birthplace; Aristotle reports that she ‘was honoured although she was a woman’.

All this buzz is both titillating and frustrating, stoking our appetite for a body of work that we’re unable to read, much less assess critically; imagine what the name Homer would mean to Western civilization if all we had of the Iliad and the Odyssey was their reputations and, say, ninety lines of each poem. The Greeks, in fact, seem to have thought of Sappho as the female counterpart of Homer: he was known as ‘the Poet’, and they referred to her as ‘the Poetess’. Many scholars now see her poetry as an attempt to appropriate and ‘feminize’ the diction and subject matter of heroic epic. (For instance, the appeal to Aphrodite to be her ‘comrade in arms’ – in love.)

The good news is that the surviving fragments of Sappho bear out the ancient verdict. One fine example is her best-known verse, known to classicists as Fragment 31, which consists of four sapphic stanzas. (They appear below in my own translation.) These were singled out by the author of a first-century-AD literary treatise called ‘On the Sublime’ for the way in which they ‘select and juxtapose the most striking, intense symptoms of erotic passion’. Here the speaker expresses her envy of the men who, presumably in the course of certain kinds of social occasions, have a chance to talk to the girl she yearns for:

He seems to me an equal of the gods –

whoever gets to sit across from you

and listen to the sound of your sweet speech

so close to him,

to your beguiling laughter: O it makes my

panicked heart go fluttering in my chest,

for the moment I catch sight of you there’s no

speech left in me,

but tongue gags –: all at once a faint

fever courses down beneath the skin,

eyes no longer capable of sight, a thrum-

ming in the ears,

and sweat drips down my body, and the shakes

lay siege to me all over, and I’m greener

than grass, I’m just a little short of dying,

I seem to me;

but all must be endured, since even a pauper …

Even without its final lines (which, maddeningly, the author of the treatise didn’t go on to quote), it’s a remarkable work. Slyly, the speaker avoids physical description of the girl, instead evoking her beauty by detailing the effect it has on the beholder; the whole poem is a kind of reaction shot. The verses subtly enact the symptoms they describe: as the poet’s faculties fail one by one in the overpowering presence of her beloved, the outside world – the girl, the man she’s talking to – dissolves and disappears from the poem, too, leaving the speaker in a kind of interior echo chamber. The arc from ‘he seems to me’ in the first line to the solipsistic ‘I seem to me’ at the end says it all.

Even the tiniest scraps can be potent, as Rayor’s plainspoken and comprehensive translation makes clear. (Until now, the most noteworthy English version to include translations of virtually every fragment was ‘If Not, Winter’, the 2002 translation by the poet and classicist Anne Carson.) To flip through these truncated texts is a strangely moving experience, one that has been compared to ‘reading a note in a bottle’:

You came, I yearned for you,

and you cooled my senses that burned with desire

or

love shook my senses

like wind crashing on mountain oaks

or

Maidenhood, my maidenhood, where have you gone

leaving me behind?

Never again will I come to you, never again

or

Once again Love, that loosener of limbs,

bittersweet and inescapable, crawling thing,

seizes me.

It’s in that last verse that the notion of desire as ‘bittersweet’ appears for the first time in Western literature.

The very incompleteness of the verses can heighten the starkness of the emotions – a fact that a number of contemporary classicists and translators have made much of. For Stanley Lombardo, whose Sappho: Poems and Fragments (2002) offers a selection of about a quarter of the fragments, the truncated remains are like ‘beautiful, isolated limbs’. The late Thomas Habinek, a classicist at the University of Southern California, nicely summed up this rather postmodern aspect of Sappho’s appeal: ‘The fragmentary preservation of poems of yearning and separation serves as a reminder of the inevitable incompleteness of human knowledge and affection.’

In Sappho’s biography, as in her work, gaps predominate. A few facts can be inferred by triangulating various sources: the poems themselves, ancient reference works, and citations in later classical writers who had access to information that has since been lost. The Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia of ancient culture, which is the basis of much of our information, asserts that Sappho ‘flourished’ between 612 and 608 BC; from this, scholars have concluded that she was born around 640. She was likely past middle age when she died, since in at least one poem she complains about her greying hair and cranky knees.

Although her birthplace cannot be verified, Sappho seems to have lived mostly in Mytilene, the capital of Lesbos. Just across the strip of water that separates Lesbos from the mainland of Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) was the opulent city of Sardis, the capital of Lydia. Some classicists have argued that the proximity of Lesbos to this lush Eastern trading hub helps to explain Sappho’s taste for visual gorgeousness and sensual luxury: the ‘myrrh, cassia, and frankincense’, the ‘bracelets, fragrant / purple robes, iridescent trinkets, / countless silver cups, and ivory’ that waft and glitter in her lines, often in striking counterpoint to their raw emotionality.

Mytilene was constantly seething with political and social dramas occasioned by rivalries and shifting alliances among aristocratic clans. Sappho belonged to one of these – there’s a fragment in which she chastises a friend ‘of bad character’ for siding with a rival clan – and a famous literary contemporary, a poet called Alcaeus, belonged to another. Alcaeus often refers to the island’s political turbulence in his poems, and it’s possible that at some point Sappho and her family fled, or were exiled, to Southern Italy: Cicero refers in one of his speeches to a statue of the poet that had been erected in the town hall of Syracuse, in Sicily. The Victorian critic John Addington Symonds saw the unstable political milieu of Sappho’s homeland as entwined with the heady erotic climate of her poems. Lesbos, he wrote in an 1872 essay on the poet, was ‘the island of overmastering passions’.

Some things seem relatively certain, then. But when it comes to Sappho’s personal life – the aspect of her biography that scholars and readers are most eager to know about – the ancient record is confused. What did Sappho look like? A dialogue by Plato, written in the fourth century BC, refers to her as ‘beautiful’; a later author insisted that she was ‘very ugly, being short and swarthy’. Who were her family? The Suda (which gives eight possible names for Sappho’s father) asserts that she had a daughter and a mother both named Kleïs, a gaggle of brothers, and a wealthy husband named Kerkylas, from the island of Andros. But some of these seemingly precious facts merely show that the encyclopedia – which, as old as it is, was compiled fifteen centuries after Sappho lived – could be prone to comic misunderstandings. ‘Kerkylas’, for instance, looks a lot like kerkos, Greek slang for ‘penis’, and ‘Andros’ is very close to the word for ‘man’; and so the encyclopedia turns out to have been unwittingly recycling a tired old joke about oversexed Sappho, who was married to ‘Dick of Man’.

Many other alleged facts of Sappho’s biography similarly dissolve on close scrutiny. Was Sappho really a mother? There is indeed a fragment that mentions a girl named Kleïs, ‘whose form resembles golden blossoms’, but the word that some people have translated as ‘daughter’ can also mean ‘child’, or even ‘slave’. (Because Greek children were often named for their grandparents, it’s easy to see how the already wobbly assumption that Kleïs must have been a daughter in turn led to the assertion that Sappho had a mother with the same name.) Who were the members of her circle? The Suda refers by name to three female ‘students’, and three female companions – Atthis, Telesippa, and Megara – with whom she had ‘disgraceful friendships’. But much of this is no more than can be reasonably extrapolated from the poems, since the extant verses mention nearly all those names. The compilers of the Suda, like scholars today, may have been making educated guesses.

Even Sappho’s sexuality, which for general audiences is the most famous thing about her, has been controversial from the start. However exalted her reputation among the ancient literati, in Greek popular culture of the Classical period and afterward, Sappho was known primarily as an oversexed predator – of men. This, in fact, was the ancient cliché about ‘Lesbians’: when we hear the word today we think of love between women, but when the ancient Greeks heard the word they thought of fellatio. In classical Greek, the verb lesbiazein – ‘to act like someone from Lesbos’ – meant performing oral sex, an activity for which inhabitants of the island were thought to have a particular penchant. Comic playwrights and authors of light verse portrayed Sappho as just another daughter of Lesbos, only too happy to fall into bed with her younger male rivals.