One damn thing after another

Life and art

“Homer’s epos, it is remarked, is like a bas-relief sculpture: it does not conclude, but merely ceases.”

This is the first line of the last chapter of Thomas Carlyle’s monumental history of the French Revolution. Carlyle followed Homer’s example—epos was the collective term for the Iliad and the Odyssey—by not summarizing or tying up the loose ends of his saga, but simply putting down his pen at the point where Napoleon Bonaparte committed his coup of 18 Brumaire (9 November) in 1799 and made himself First Consul.

Homer and Carlyle might both have pleaded exhaustion for the inconclusive endings to their magna opera. Carlyle, writing nonfiction, had the additional excuse that history, being a subset of life, is inherently inconclusive. The rise of Napoleon started a new chapter in French history, but the shadow of the French Revolution stretched long over Europe for decades to come.

Homer aside, creators of fiction generally serve up conclusions to their audiences, who expect such things. Whether colleagues of Shakespeare, of Dickens or of Spielberg, the fictionalists give their patrons the satisfaction of knowing how the story turned out and what happened to the characters. The conclusions are by no means always happy, but they almost always conclude.

Real life is rarely so neat. The present becomes the past but it doesn’t go away. Karl Marx, in an essay that employed Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup to explain the actions of his nephew—“The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon”—declared, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Historians have to end their books somewhere. In doing so they lend the impression of periodization. Most historians like to give shape to their subjects and so find threads of meaning within periods. Arnold Toynbee, one of the most influential of the thread-spinners, derided authors who treated history as “just one damned thing after another.”

Yet most historians would recognize that periodization and thread-spinning are concessions to humans’ incapacity to hold all of the past in mind at once. These tools of the historian’s craft are approximations and shortcuts. The bounds of the periods are arbitrary and the threads owe as much to the historians’ imaginations as to the events they tie together. They give academics something to argue about, but that’s because academics require things to argue about.

At the end of the Odyssey, Odysseus has slaughtered all the suitors of Penelope, who have been eating up his wealth. Their families are upset. More bloodletting looms. Homer’s work is cut out for him. He might have to make his epos a trilogy.

Instead he simply rings down the curtain. Athena steps in, in disguise, and talks down the hot-blooded Greeks. “With that, Pallas Athena, daughter of Zeus who holds the storm-shield, made a pact of peace between both sides for all the years to come. She looked like Mentor, in his form and voice.”

Seriously? After everything Odysseus has been through, everything that tested his courage and cunning, Homer has Athena bail him out, in the guise of Odysseus’s friend?

Carlyle was right. Very anticlimactic.

Like life.