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المؤلفون: Kostas Myrsiades
المصدر: College Literature. 34:279-300
مصطلحات موضوعية: Literature, Greatness, Paean, Literature and Literary Theory, business.industry, Philosophy, media_common.quotation_subject, Homecoming, Glory, Education, HERO, business, History of film, Kleos, Theme (narrative), media_common
الوصف: In 1967 Jorge Luis Borges wrote in The Paris Review, "I think nowadays, while literary men seem to have neglected their epic duties, the epic has been saved for us, strangely enough, by the Westerns . . . has been saved for the world by of all places, Hollywood" (1967). Andre Bazin, one of the most important and influential film critics, places the western in the epic category "because of the superhuman level of its heroes and the legendary magnitude of their feats of valor," which has even turned the Civil war "into the Trojan war of the most modern of epics" (1971, 148). Communications scholar Doug Williams concurs that the Western has become the American epic, for just as John Wayne stands as an icon of the American identity so once stood Odysseus for the Greeks (1998, 93). The historian Richard Slotkin finds compatibility between Homer and the Western because the Western like the Homeric epic deals with a nation's culture and its past and thus acts as a paean to the greatness of that nation (1992). Film historian Philip French argues that there is no theme or situation that cannot be examined in terms of the Western, as "the Trojan War turned into a Texas range conflict" (1974, 23). Dealing with Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, Mary Whitlock Blundell and Kirk Ormand assert that Eastwood's film "lies squarely within a tradition that questions, but ultimately reaffirms, an ethic of violence . . . the tradition of the Western European epic, beginning with the Iliad" (1997, 543). Dealing with the heroic nature of the title hero, Robert Warshaw in his 1954 classic essay "The Westerner" calls the Westerner "a more classical figure" (154), while Jim Kitses speaks of the Western hero "as a latter-day knight, a contemporary Achilles (1970, 1) and Andre Bazin sees Billy the Kid "as invulnerable as Achilles" (1971, 147). Martin M. Winkler, who has done more than anyone else in pointing out Homeric parallels in the American Western, deals with Homer's influence in several films (1985, 1996, 2001) and especially at some length with John Ford's The Searchers, where he notices that "Ford's understanding of heroism places especially the figure of Ethan Edwards and the film's ending in the cultural tradition of Homeric epic" (2004).This paper hopes to add to this body of literature by examining the progress of the warrior's glory and his homecoming through a comparison of Henry King's The Gunfighter (1950)1 and Homer's eighth century B.C.E. Iliad and Odyssey. It explores the themes of the hero's cunning, the destination, homecoming, and reunion in the Odyssey and his being condemned to glory, his self-recognition, and the roles of irony and fate in the Iliad. This is a tale about the gunfighter as warrior, the hero who desires honor, receives it through gifts, and ends in achieving glory through those gifts. It is a tale of discovery through self-recognition that ends in the repudiation of that glory so dearly won. It is a tale of the hero's realization as he turns homeward from the wars and inward, away from the externals that glory represents, to discover that his humanity lies in the importance to him of family. The discovery is qualified, however, by a stipulation. He cannot possess what he now knows to be his true desire; he cannot be other than what he has become: a warrior whose glory comes at a cost that is part of the larger gift. The cost, as he has always known, cannot be escaped. It is his fate to be so indelibly stamped with the glory he sought that others find in him the road to their own glory. The gunfighter's homecoming is not a reunion with family but losing a title and gaining a tomb.Three terms best define the values men live and the for in the Homeric epics, although to a higher degree in the Iliad than in the Odyssey: time, kleos, and geras.2 Homeric warriors fight for tim7ecirc; (honor), which is expressed through the geras (gifts) they receive for their prowess and excellence on the battlefield. The quality and the number of gifts received in turn assures them of kleos (glory)-to be remembered after death as great warriors and thus to achieve the only type of immortality available to mortals. …
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