On Fighting Over "Fiction"

Round 2...

I have spent much of the last month talking about Homer on social media, in anticipation of my upcoming course on Homer. A part of this has, of course, been weighing in on the upcoming Nolan rendition of the Odyssey, which somehow manages to make a bright and resplendent world look dark and dreary, behind a profoundly mediocre (where not downright insulting) character cast.

The only thing drearier and more insulting are Nolan’s (and Emily Wilson’s) apologists and opportunistic defenders. Among the most frequent challenges they give to any criticism of the trailers, or to Wilson’s translation, is that “it’s just fiction!”

Why are you getting your panties in a bunch over fiction?

This is actually very similar to another disingenuous argument I wrote about back in 2019, from the world of theology and apologetics:

One of the more revealing questions asked of the late Christopher Hitchens was why he bothered to go after religion at all. If he didn’t believe, that’s fine. Why not just stay home?

In contemplating whether or not to write this book and put these ideas out in public, I have often asked myself the same question. There are plenty of criticisms of Christianity out there already. Do we really need one more? Should this really be said?

A kind of implicit apathy undergirds this question, and a strange thing happens if you begin to explore this apathy. Think about it: criticizing the question is akin to asking if religion is really worth fighting over, or even arguing about.

It is not a challenge ever posed by believers to their own missionaries (“do we really need one more of those?”). These missionaries don’t just stay home, but go to the ends of the earth, often at great personal cost and risk, to share what they believe is true.

Of course, unbelievers will pose the same question to these missionaries: “if God is so great, why can’t you just keep that relationship contentedly to yourself?”

From the outside, there appears to be a kind of passive-aggressive war of enervation in which both sides make their arguments, but spend much of their energy criticizing the other side for bothering to stand up for and advance their own beliefs. It is a strange and hypocritical kind of war; an emotional siege on the morale and spirit of the opponent, rather than a manly engagement with the strength of the opposing position.

—Holy Nihilism

It should be pointed out, of course, that the critics are expending considerably less than $250 million dollars in expressing our opinions about Nolan and the Odyssey… and, of course, the apologists themselves are taking the time and effort to weigh in and defend the film.

Don’t they have something better to do?

Hypocrisy is never a particularly persuasive charge, but it can often be illustrative, and here I think it is. The apologists for Nolan and Wilson are often film school students or amateurs, artists, English majors, and literary critics — in short, people who care a great deal about and invest in the world of fiction.

Now, insofar as these apologists might be attempting to offer an internal critique toward the sort of smug conservative who looks down upon such artsy-fartsy interests and groups them all under the broad and dismissive umbrella of “underwater basket-weaving” — useless degrees in useless interests — then the liberals might actually have something of a point. Why do you care? But I am not such a conservative; I have been studying Homer seriously for years, teaching Homer for the past 2 years and viewing it as a religious text — not anthropologically, but personally — for the past 4 (and, of course, reading him on and off for the past two decades). The classics and so-called “liberal arts” are not just serious, but far more serious than STEM degrees, in my opinion.

And beyond my family and livelihood, nothing is more important to me than Homer.

Homer is not just worth caring about; he’s worth fighting over.

Indeed, the very question of what is or is not worth fighting over is not just, itself, a Homeric question, but a question that only fiction has the power to answer.

I say no wealth is worth my life! Not all they claim
was stored in the depths of Troy, that city built on riches,
in the old days of peace before the sons of Achaea came—
not all the gold held fast in the Archer’s rocky vaults,
in Phoebus Apollo’s house on Pytho’s sheer cliffs!
Cattle and fat sheep can all be had for the raiding,
tripods all for the trading, and tawny-headed stallions.
But a man’s life breath cannot come back again—
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man’s clenched teeth.

Iliad 9:488-497 (Fagles)

Homer presents us with a variety of different things that might be worth caring about. Often these are in tension, or even opposition, and sometimes we must prioritize or choose, with various consequences, depending upon what we elevate and what we neglect.

But in the absence of a story, how do we think about values? How do we grapple with what is worthwhile at all?

The oldest story of Man is that of Gilgamesh the King, a man who initially seeks domination; finding friendship, seeks glory; losing friendship, he seeks immortality. These stories are how we try to work through, distill, clarify, decide upon, and remember the most important things in life. In a very real way, the stories are mythic geographies that we live in, and by. They are the context and the connective tissue of our own being, as social animals across time. To dismiss these sorts of stories — and their adaptations — with the simplistic label “fiction” is very close to dismissing life itself as something to put a “mere” or “just” in front of.

This week in particular actually marks an interesting illustration of the point: in his Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas released on May 15, Pope Leo XIV actually quoted JRR Tolkien, making Gandalf an official part of Church social doctrine:

213. The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization.

What we are seeing is Tolkien giving language and shape to values, and this language strengthens those values in the public conscious. J.R.R. Tolkien’s contributions here are only briefly illustrated, and by no means exhausted, in this Pontific reference. But the converse is also true: to retell the story of Lord of the Rings in a manner that makes Gandalf “murky” or “complicated” is also to muddy these values, to make them questionable. It would subvert those aspirational ideals, those images of the good and the beautiful, and demoralize the audience who might previously have found some sense of place and meaning in those stories.

This is exactly what we appear to be seeing in works like Amazon’s Rings of Power, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon… and Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey.

And the apologists for these subversive works — in their attempt to offer plausible deniability, and obscure the feeling of being fucked-with that everyone gets when they see these works — always love to stack on their own psychoanalytic brand of demoralizing language

Now, these sorts of disingenuous arguments always hinge upon overly-broad categorical labels, which allow them to group stories like Homer’s Iliad in with Stephanie Myer’s Twilight under the neat little sticker-title “fiction.” Here, either philosophical or classical knowledge is useful, since their details are usually either decontextualized or only half-true (or, often, just straight-up false), and a philosophical analysis of their language often allows even the classically-illiterate to pick out dishonesty in the form of their argument.

But how to deal with these people is another matter. That we deal with them is primary.

What is essential is the recognition that it is not a winnable battle, nor is it losable. Thersites was a subversive comedian 3,000 years ago, and his spirit is as immortal as that of Achilles or Hector. When Samwise talks of there being good things in the world that are worth fighting for, this injunction holds true even if those good things cannot be permanently attained. What is valuable is, in fact, the combat itself — as an opportunity to hone one’s skill, prove oneself, and connect with the warriors who fought for things in the past.

We need not romanticize writing up angry blog posts as comparable to holding back the Persians at Thermopylae… but neither should we give in to the diminutive (and hopeful) jeering of those who hate you, and hold out for more violent and ineffective means of “fighting back.” The warriors of the past fought because it was what had to be done; today, such fantasies are usually forms of cowardice and escapism from the tedious work of simply speaking up, repeatedly, and participating in the battle which is being waged in the mind of the public.

All of this is to say that fiction is worth caring about. Myth is worth fighting over, and the giddy hatred you can see in the faces of Nolan’s apologists (as they make sure to remind their audience for the thousandth time that they’re convinced Achilles was gay) should be sufficient evidence that any feeling of aversion to hatred is entirely one-sided. And hatred is good! We should care enough to defend what we love. My criticism of Nolan, Wilson, and the dagger-eyed leftists is not that they’re “hateful,” but merely that they’re a threat to what I love. And I am not just willing, but happy, to fight for that.

If you care about Homer, or about any other canonical story that is being pushed through the progressive media pulverizing machine, I would encourage you to as well.