Gerald R. Lucas

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I have finished re-reading, again, what is arguably F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best short story, “Babylon Revisited.” It merges the past with the present as Charlie Wales returns to Paris to try and recapture his life literally by taking custody of his daughter Honoria, and figuratively by exploring the Paris of his prodigal past that still lives in his memory if not in reality. As Charlie looks back, he is concomitantly forced to look inward at his character and come to terms with bitter experiences that continue to haunt his life. Charlie has returned to Babylon to inquire and probe: is he a bad father and husband, or just the victim of bad luck?

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Determined by the culture that produced the literature, especially the epic, the heroic ideal represents the aspects of a hero that the culture upholds as representing the cultural ideal. Thus, while the hero represents a particular culture’s ideal located in place and time, much of how we currently observe as heroic is born of characteristics that many of these ancient heroes exemplify.

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Dante Alighieri was an epic poet who had grown out of a classical, pagan past into a pre-Renaissance Christian. While Dante was not familiar with the actual texts of Homer or other ancient Greeks, he was versed in their literature having discovered them through his own Italian predecessors, Virgil, Statius, Horace, and Latin translations of Aristotle and his Christian student Thomas Aquinas. With the Roman poet Virgil as his guide, Dante is able to traverse Hell and Purgatory; Dante recognizes Virgil as the image of Human Wisdom or rationality, not to mention the author of the Aeneid. Dante also considered Virgil to have anticipated the coming of Christ (Purgatory 70-2). Therefore, with Virgil as both his literary and rational guide and Beatrice as his beatific and heavenly inspiration, Dante is able to write his allegorical pilgrimage through Hell and the cosmos: The Divine Comedy — called a “comedy” because Dante the pilgrim journeys from grief to joy and “divine” because of the content and the artistic style. Yet along the path to salvation, Dante must purge himself of his own sinful nature, which will eventually include the repudiation of his own self. This journey begins in Hell where Dante witnesses the stories and the suffering of many sinners, some of which he empathizes with, and most of which he pities.

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Plato, in his Symposium, suggests that one could ascend the latter of love to glimpse truth in the beauty of the Forms; through love one could know beauty/truth. He also states in book ten of his Republic that: “all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers, and that the knowledge of their true nature is the only antidote to them.” Plato believes that imitation of sensible objects removed the poet, and the observer, from truth and reality by inspiring the emotions of pity and fear. Plato argued that philosophical knowledge is far superior that the mere imitative nature of art. Dante, in his Divine Comedy, seems to also climb the ladder of love literally, metaphorically, and contextually to achieve the supreme artistic expression, Platonically speaking.

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You must crave sunlight soon. —Anticleia to Odysseus

I am no superman
I have no reasons for you
I am no hero, oh that’s for sure
But I do know one thing:
It’s where you are is where I belong
I do know, where you go
Is where I wanna be —DMB, “Where Are You Going?”

Perhaps the darkest moment in Odysseus’ journey home is his visit to the Underworld. Here the dead speak, whether the literal ghosts in the Homeric version of the afterlife, or the metaphorical shades from Odysseus’ past; the hero must meet and learn from their experiences if he is to continue his journey and complete his tasks successfully. Hell, here, may be interpreted as Odysseus’ own descent into his troubled mind to search for meaning in his harried wandering and to figure out what is destination should be. At his lowest point as a man and hero, Odysseus looks inward — away from the living — in order to see just how he fits into the world of the living, how he got to the position he’s in, and what he can to extricate himself from hell.

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