Kahane, Ahuvia

Review of R. Holway, Becoming Achilles: Childsacrifice,War, and Misrule in the Iliad andBeyond (Lanham, MD, 2012

Royal Holloway - Pure

LITERATUREHOLWAY (R.) Becoming Achilles: Child-sacrifice, War, and Misrule in the Iliad andBeyond. Lanham MD: Lexington Books,2012. Pp. xiv + 255. £18.95/$29.95.9780739146903 (hbk); 9780739146910 (pbk).doi:10.1017/S007542691400144XHolway offers a reading of the Iliad focused ondestructive and dysfunctional kinship relations,and above all those of father-daughter and mother-son. The anxieties of these relations are, Holwayargues, ultimately redirected in a cathartic processthrough Achilles’ savage mênis. Holway takes his cue from contemporarypsychological research and from AttachmentTheory (especially John Bowlby, 1907–1990, andMary Ainsworth, 1913–1999), which focuses onrelationships between infants and their care-givers. One of this theory’s arguments is that whenparents and care-givers sacrifice the child’s needsfor their own, the child is forced to confront theconflict between its neglected needs and the needto avoid alienating its caregiver. This gives rise todestructive patterns of behaviour: a daughter (ordaughter surrogate), rejected and married off bythe father, uses her son to play out the trauma ofher rejection; a son, forced into the position of ahero by his mother, redirects his anxiety towardsheroic violence and anger. Thetis, Zeus, Achilles,Peleus, Hera, Agamemnon and others play variousdirect and vicarious roles in Holway’s picture ofdysfunctional kinship and cathartic transference.His objective, as he says, is to challenge the viewof Achilles as a hero ‘who speaks truth to power’(3 and elsewhere) and present him in a much morefragmented, pathological light, as the product ofdestructive family dynamics. As Holway acknowledges in the‘Introduction’, the Iliad does not present mattersquite so openly. He argues that the poem, as wellas ancient Greek culture, must present its intol-erable truths and sacrificial narratives in maskedand sublimated form. In principle, an argumentumex silentio is immensely attractive, not least inHomer or in psychoanalytically oriented work.However, this requires meticulous technical andmethodological analyses (consider, elsewhere,Porson’s lectiones statariae for the absentdigamma, Parry’s argument for orality in text or,mutatis mutandis, arguments by Freud, Lacan,Zizek, etc.). Without them, the risk of arguing forinvisible essence (‘proof: you can’t see it’) is justtoo great.Dealing with dysfunctional families comes‘naturally’ to the Greeks, to the study of poetryand social structure (see Aristotle’s Poetics,Politics, etc.). Its centrality to psychology andpsychoanalysis needs no comment. Combiningthe two has produced much interesting work (indifferent ways, G. Devereux, J. Shay, P. Slater, P.duBois, M. Leonard, etc.). But, as a reviewerfrom the American Psychological Associationsuggests of this book, invoking ‘well-wornoedipal or simplistic attachment theories’ is veryrisky (S.D. Orfanos, ‘A hero’s aesthetics’,PsychCRITIQUES 58.6, article 7). The problem,in my view, is not just lack of nuance. Holwayassumes that we can equate post-World War II,mostly American families and mythologicalfamilies whose portrayal is shaped by ArchaicGreek experience, Iron Age sensibilities retro-jected onto Bronze Age cultures (or fantasies ofthese) and by the accrued and embedded sensibil-ities of subsequent cultures. But without adetailed apologia this assumption threatens theelision of historical differences and historicity.The universalism of which psychology andpsychoanalysis have been (justly and unjustly)accused (although it also marks large segments ofWestern thought and has partly been revivedrecently, for example, in so-called Post-Deleuzianphilosophy) requires detail and reserve. I saynothing of the fact that the family is one of thefiercest battlegrounds of historical interpretation.As Claude Lévi Strauss, for example (himself auniversalist of sorts), notes, the debates on thefamily are ‘sometimes so obscure, often so futileand always so bitter that it is tempting to comparethem with those that, according to Swift, ragebetween the Big and Little Enders as to thecorrect way to eat boiled eggs’ (‘Introduction’, inA. Burguière, C. Klapisch-Zuber, M. Segalen andF. Zonabend (eds), A History of the Family I,Cambridge 1996, 1).REVIEWS OF BOOKSJournal of Hellenic Studies 134 (2014) page 1 of 2© The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 2014doi:10.1017/S007542691400144XREVIEWS OF BOOKSChapter 1 presents the basic dynamics, thequarrel and introduces us to daughter figures,mothers, sons and son figures; chapter 2 suggeststhat ‘focusing on parents’ use of children to meettheir own needs, family psychology illuminatesfather-daughter and mother-son liaisons’ (24);chapter 3 looks at the histories of some of the mainfigures in detail; chapter 4 presents an argument forthe Iliad as a cathartic device, whose embeddeddenials are its function; chapter 5 deals with fathersand sons; chapter 6 with mothers and sons; chapter7 with the tension between a child’s actions and aparent’s plans; chapter 8 looks at ‘the shift of2responsibility and anger’ which is also a part of thecathartic effect of the poem. The final chapter givesthe wide ambition of the book yet wider embraceas it attempts to read Achilles and Socrates and therelation of sacrifice and values side by side. This is a provocative and interesting book, ona few occasions presented in slightly quirky idiom,generally well-produced, but also containing someinsufficiently detailed arguments that may be hardto accept in their present form. AHUVIA KAHANERoyal Holloway, University of LondonAhuvia.Kahane@rhul.ac.uk

Review of: Becoming Achilles: Childsacrifice, War, and Misrule in the Iliad and Beyond (2012)

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Review of: Becoming Achilles: Childsacrifice, War, and Misrule in the Iliad and Beyond (2012)

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