Moved to Pity by reading Circe

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Today I am moved because I finished the excellent novel Circe, (Pronounced ‘sur see’, accent on first syllable, I looked it up) about the island witch who turned the companions of Odysseus into pigs. It is selling quietly and well, translated into 25 languages.

I suppose I can leave out telling you the book details because they would be on the websites Goodreads (volunteers) and Amazon (commercial). Now you have a conversation piece for the liberated women in your life, “This guy e-mailed me about Circe…”

Now, for Circe to be into “women’s liberation” would, I think, require a society to be around her, that she could become “consciousness raised” about. We learn by friction and then thinking. But she, an immortal, has never known mortal society before going to her island. Yet Circe’s story is still feminist, because it’s about her personal growth, something she manages to do  even though she is  exiled for eternity by her father Helios to be stuck on that lonely island. When Odysseus joins her she learns a lot from talking with him, and listening to his stories.

I liked the idea in the book that people (and groups) grow from their frictions with life and interactions with each other… because I have been returning lately to the concept, ubuntu, of nobody grows alone.

 I had a childhood fear of being an Oblomov: in Russian literature no-longer-young Oblemov is independently wealthy, almost alone, with but one friend to visit him, and lives in a messy place with a path cleared to his samovar. 

I also had, and still have, a fear of being like the POWs in the novel King Rat. I remember I was young enough to be holding a tinker toy as I read the book. (It could hold a secret radio, hidden by putting dust on the joints, that the Japanese guards did not know about)

King Rat was written by an ex-POW, James Clavell, who could not go on to write other novels until first he had written his POW horrors out of his system. 

The vast prison camp includes some very educated people. With time on their hands. Therefore the men had an opportunity to take classes under a tree, the Athenian ideal, from great minds while in Japanese POW camps… but being normal humans they blew it. For them, any friction of learning would have required commitment, being accountable to the teachers and the support of other students. Easier to be listless. When finally released, years later, they were no more educated than when they first went in. (Like how the gods never learn) Such a wasted opportunity.

For myself, I am sure the more socially isolated I am the less I do. …Come to think of it, I sometimes post to my blog, “on the fives,” only to keep to my avowed schedule for my imaginary fans.

When Circe, an immortal nymph, grows up among the mighty gods she does not reflect: You know, the old “fish do not see the water” thing—but during her many years in exile on her island she has enough time to ponder… 

She decides the gods have no obstacles, no pain to give them humility, and hence no empathy. None. Instead, the gods are cruel and capricious and “into” having rage and revenge and having unbridled emotions that to us mortals would be “immature.” I would be ashamed if my teenage son or daughter were like some of the Olympians, including the ones in Circe’s childhood who were directly cruel to her.

In America the top leader has to step down, from term limits, before he can acquire what the Greeks called hubris. Meanwhile, President-for-life Putin, isolated among “yes men,” can have a totally bizarre lack of empathy for even the most grotesque civilian casualties and atrocities. Just as the gods did grotesque things.

I liked how Circe comes to see a second side to the character of Odysseus, after he has left her. She learn about him from the mortal wife Penelope and the son Telemachus, he who’s friction has been against his heroic father, a legend who acts out a very unheroic side of himself when back home at Ithaca. Therefore Telemachus becomes much more mature than his father, and even more wise, in his way, than the immortal “wise” Athena. 

I remember a young adult novel where the teen, who has a very nice mother, later has to spend time traveling with her horrid spoiled grandmother, and then comes to understand the personal growth connection between the two women. “Character training” can arise from simply deciding not to be like toxic people. Circe will not be like the big strong gods who hurt poor Prometheus.

More on friction, call it “living:” Odysseus tells Circe he feels guilt before his younger men, because their years before the walls of Troy, and sailing with Odysseus, has meant they never knew the humility of poor crop years, nor learned to save during bumper years, nor learned the cares of having a wife and children. I guess in some ways his men are like the ignorant immortals.

All my favourite people, both in my own life and historical figures too, even the very successful ones, have known adversity and are humble. Being humble, they can “see.” The “oblivious” selfish ones (like, come to think of it, giddy nymphs) grate on me.

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My favourite line in King Rat is near the end when Marlow is grappling with the immorality of the commissioned officers and, by implication, high society: Marlow has seen the naked reality of them in the camp, and he wonders “what is right?” Then, from the liberating army, he learns that his father, in the Royal Navy, did not survive the war: “And Peter Marlow knew, tormented, that the only man who could, perhaps, have told him, had died beneath the freezing Murmansk run.”

Like Circe, in her lonely pondering, it can take me many years to go against my family, and my society, and decide for myself “what is right.”

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Sean Crawford

March

2022

Footnotes:

~The mother and grandmother were in a Young Adult series about alternate earths by Harry Turtledove. In this one, the federal system did not work out, hence the US does not have our “military and interstate highway system,” hence travel takes a while. And without the interstate “freedom rides” and federal regulations, there is more racism—the state of Mississippi is dominated by Blacks.