Content area
Full text
Simone Weil (ed. James P. Holoka), The Iliad or the Poem of Force: A Critical Edition. New York and Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang, 2003. Pp. x + 130. ISBN 0-8204-6361-2. USD19.95.
Why should twenty-first century classicists be interested in a short essay (twenty-six pages in this edition) on the Iliad published in French in 1941 and written by a woman who was not a professional scholar? The reason quite simply is that this brief essay is a work of deep and startling originality, one of those rare pieces of criticism that makes one look with fresh eyes at the work it treats. Its author, Simone Weil (1909-43), was an extraordinary individual, revered by some as a saint, regarded by others as an extremist of doubtful sanity. At the least one would have to say that Weil was a paradoxical person. Born of non-observant Jewish parents, she became a fervent Christian without joining any church or believing that god existed in any conventional sense. In her youth, Weil embraced Marxism, but later turned away from it. After graduating brilliantly from France's elite École Normale Supérieure, Weil taught in a high school, spent several long spells as a factory worker, joined the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, and ended her short life as a clerical worker for the Free French in London during the second World War. Having forced herself to live only on the rations allowed to people in occupied France, Weil 'died of heart failure caused by pulmonary tuberculosis and self-starvation' (p. 3); the coroner indicated that she had committed suicide 'whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed' (p. 12n. 13).
Weil's reading of the Iliad seems at first sight simple and straightforward; yet as it proceeds one realises that she is saying things about the poem that have never been put in this way, many of which are profoundly true. She is above all concerned with the manifestations of 'force' in the poem Weil uses this word in a number of ways, meaning by it 'violence', such as we see in the many battle scenes of the Iliad; Oppression and humiliation', as of Thersites by Odysseus in Iliad 2.266-70; 'power', such as the strong always wield over the weak, as...