Interpreting Weil's The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (part one)

I find Simone Weil’s essay on the Iliad very interesting, and would thus like to examine my interpretation of her work in a bit more detail. Some of what follows has already been said in class, but I hope to also point to some ideas that go beyond our classroom discussion.

I agree with two important points brought up last Thursday. The first is that Weil’s essay is undeniably an interesting philosophical work; a work that presents powerful and plausible theories about the nature of war and human suffering. The second point is that, despite its philosophical value, her essay fails to do the Iliad justice in the realm of literary interpretation. In other words, she fails to properly take the Iliad as a whole into consideration, neglecting how certain themes (particularly kleos) are represented in the poem itself. Furthermore, Weil seems to import modern Western ideologies, particularly Christianity, into Homer’s work, as can be seen with her problematic usage of the vocabulary of grace, halos, souls, and chastity, as well as her discussion of the Gospels. Despite this being the case, however, I would like to claim that Weil’s interpretation, if provided with supplementary argumentation, actually does less violence to the Iliad than we seem to have believed in class.

To begin with the less difficult case of Weil’s Christian vocabulary, we might give her a more charitable reading by conceding that these terms do not necessarily have to be understood as adhering to their meaning in Christian dogma. To elucidate: Weil’s use of “soul” does not necessarily have to be interpreted as some immortal, metaphysical entity that constitutes our eternal being. It may be interpreted, rather, to mean something more akin to self or subjective consciousness. This gets around the problem that heroes in the Iliad never talk about their souls – while it is true that this is the case, Homeric heroes certainly seem to have a sense of self that is pointed to in their speech. Such a use of “soul” is not without precedent, as philosophers operating in earlier centuries (and thus steeped in the Christian vocabulary) have used “soul” to mean similar things. We could, in theory, do similar interpretive work with Weil’s other uses of Christian terminology, and thus unproblematize them for the interpretation of the Iliad. Her explicit discussion of the Gospels is more difficult to contend with, but this is perhaps less damning for our present purposes. (Continued in part two).