{"id":832,"date":"2009-05-01T08:47:55","date_gmt":"2009-05-01T12:47:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.therowboat.com\/?p=832"},"modified":"2009-04-30T10:06:51","modified_gmt":"2009-04-30T14:06:51","slug":"the-poem-of-force","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/2009\/05\/the-poem-of-force\/","title":{"rendered":"The Poem of Force"},"content":{"rendered":"
Some time ago, a dear friend<\/a> shared with me a photocopy of some sections of Simone Weil’s essay The Iliad or The Poem of Force<\/em>. I remember being haunted by those pages at the time, and I kept them in a safe and prominent place but never opened them again. Until, at least, the other day, when I was reminded of the text by a mention in Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others<\/em>.<\/p>\n Written in 1940, after France had fallen around her, Weil meditates on the West’s oldest account of the inhumanity of human warfare. Here she watches the death of Hector at the hand of Achilles. The translation is by Mary McCarthy; the edition a pamphlet published by the Quaker community of Pendle Hill<\/a>:<\/p>\n To define force\u2014it is that x<\/em> that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing<\/em>. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is a spectacle the Iliad<\/em> never wearies of showing us:<\/p>\n \u2026 the horses The hero becomes a thing<\/em> dragged behind a chariot in the dust:<\/p>\n All around, his black hair I see that NYRB Classics has a new edition of the McCarthy translation<\/a>. But I just ordered a used copy of the pamphlet on Amazon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some time ago, a dear friend<\/a> shared with me a photocopy of some sections of Simone Weil’s essay The Iliad or The Poem of Force<\/em>. I remember being haunted by those pages at the time, and I kept them in a safe and prominent place but never opened them again. Until, at least, the other day, when I was reminded of the text by a mention in Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others<\/em>.<\/p>\n Written in 1940, after France had fallen around her, Weil meditates on the West’s oldest account of the inhumanity of human warfare. Here she watches the death of Hector at the hand of Achilles. The translation is by Mary McCarthy; the edition a pamphlet published by the Quaker community of Pendle Hill<\/a>:<\/p>\n To define force\u2014it is that x<\/em> that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing<\/em>. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is a spectacle the Iliad<\/em> never wearies of showing us:<\/p>\n \u2026 the horses The hero becomes a thing<\/em> dragged behind a chariot in the dust:<\/p>\n All around, his black hair
\nRattled the empty chariots through the files of battle,
\nLonging for their noble drivers. But they on the ground
\nLay, dearer to the vultures than to their wives.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nWas spread; in the dust his whole head lay,
\nThat once-charming head; now Zeus had let his enemies
\nDefile it on his native soil.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nRattled the empty chariots through the files of battle,
\nLonging for their noble drivers. But they on the ground
\nLay, dearer to the vultures than to their wives.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nWas spread; in the dust his whole head lay,
\nThat once-charming head; now Zeus had let his enemies
\nDefile it on his native soil.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n