The Songs of the Kings

There's an entire subgenre of historical fiction devoted to rewriting Homeric epics, the great classical tragedies, and, of course, Greek mythology. While Barry Unsworth's The Songs of the Kings certainly falls into that subgenre, it does so by utilizing Aeschylus and Euripides as a pretext for reflecting on contemporary literary and historical politics. This pointedly metafictional novel traces the multiple stories put into play to justify the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, ranging from the prophesies of the warring diviners to the machinations of the super-slick Odysseus. Unlike realist historical novelists, Unsworth has little to no interest in imagining the otherness of ancient culture; while the novel never hits the wild heights of, say, Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, it repeatedly breaks down the illusion of verisimilitude by tossing off anachronistic lingo and allusions. Odysseus often talks in modern sociological jargon; characters refer to "prime time" and "serial killers," or think in French catchphrases; and there's even a Biblical allusion floating through. Moreover, the subject matter clearly allegorizes modern global politics, with its reflections on the dangers of religious fanaticism (Apollo vs. Zeus vs. Artemis), the meaning of "just war," the threat of nationalist rhetoric, the role of spin-doctoring, proposed "civilizing missions," and the like.

Unsworth thus offers us a novel about story-telling in a time of impending mass destruction. Nearly all of the characters succumb to a utilitarian theory of story-telling: stories must have a purpose, whether they spring from the human imagination or come from the gods. (Meditating on "figures of speech," Odysseus asks himself, "what was the use of them? Whose ends did they serve?" [216]) The two priests, Calchas and Croton, interpret the gods' signs in order to discern their didactic message--an activity Calchas tries to keep separate from the story-telling of the unnamed blind singer. Many of the main characters, including Odysseus, Ajax, Agammemnon, and Achilles, want to manipulate both the singer and his tales. Only the singer, the boy Poimenos, and the slave girl Sisipyla understand the danger of deforming stories in the service of another cause; significantly, these are all characters who exist on the margins of the novel's power structure.

But Unsworth's point is not that imaginative creation has no effect, but rather that the effect is unpredictable:

And so, that evening, without fully realizing it, Poimenos joined the addicts, passed for the first time into the true, ungoverned realm of story, where the imagination is paramount, taking us to places not intended, often not foreseen, by the framers of the words and the makers of the music.

While the story has a definite, traditional form--Unsworth has read his Singer of Tales--its psychological effects are anarchic. The singer wants to please his audience, but he cannot direct how the tale will be enjoyed, interpreted, or even put into effect. Hence, as the singer realizes, the politically-minded characters in the novel fear the songs they ask him to sing: "Song was distrusted by people like that, because they saw everything in terms of utility and Song escaped their control" (218). For some of the novel's major players, songs mean immortality; for others, songs mean propaganda. But, while the song's creation and reception always exceed the teller's agency, a more ominous factor shapes the audience's eventual response:

Now that the wind has gone, it is difficult for blind and sighted alike to know the will of Zeus. Some say this, some say that. There is always another story...But it is the stories told by the strong, the songs of the kings, that are believed in the end. (296)

There may "always [be] another story," but the world doesn't collapse into a heap of conflicting narratives. Not, alas, because of truth, but because of the teller's power. (These "songs of the kings" can be collective as well as individual, one should add--the stories a nation tells itself, for example.) Unsworth's own novel offers an alternative narrative of Iphigeneia's sacrifice, one in which her devoted slave and look-alike tries to take Iphigenia's place. (Shades of A Tale of Two Cities!) But Iphigeneia ultimately rejects Sisipyla's offer because she succumbs to the power of Odysseus' language: "When he said it is my destiny to save my father and my people I knew he was right. I said the words again inside myself and I knew he was right. It is what I was born for" (332). Iphigeneia thus allows herself to be murdered because she incorporates, without question, "the songs of the kings" into her own subjectivity. Odysseus quite literally manages to rewrite Iphigeneia's understanding of her own plot. By contrast, Sisipyla, who warns Iphigeneia that "destiny" is just a "word" (332), sees through "the songs of the kings" to the political violence hiding just behind. If she cannot succeed in saving Iphigeneia, nevertheless her own escape inadvertently gives rise to a different sort of immortality for her mistress: "Because of the mask it began to be said that the girl was Iphigeneia, that she had escaped or been rescued" (336). But, as the narrator sourly notes in the final paragraph, Iphigeneia's miraculous escape can only be enshrined in the songs "when sensibilities and habits of thought had changed, and it was no longer considered desirable that such an ugly thing as the sacrifice of the innocent for the sake of prosecuting a war should feature in the songs of the kings" (336). The truth is one thing; what societies want to believe of their kings, quite another.