Daniel Mendelsohn - Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture

MEMOIR

The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity

CRITICISM

How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken: Essays

Gender and the City in Euripides Political Plays

TRANSLATION

C. P. Cavafy: Complete Poems

C. P. Cavafy: The Unfinished Poems

C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS:
ESSAYS FROM THE CLASSICS TO POP CULTURE

Copyright 2012 by The New York Review of Books
All rights reserved.

Originally published in The New Yorker: Unsinkable, Battle Lines, Arms and the Man, Epic Endeavors, Heroine Addict, Rebel Rebel, and But Enough About Me.

After Waterloo copyright 1999 The New York Times Company.
Zoned Out copyright 2006 The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.

Cover image: TM & 2012 Marvel and Subs. All Rights Reserved.
Cover design: Evan Johnston

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mendelsohn, Daniel Adam, 1960
Waiting for the barbarians : essays from the classics to pop culture / by Daniel Mendelsohn.
p. cm. (The New York Review collection)
1. Canon (Literature) 2. LiteratureAppreciation. 3. Popular culture21st century. I. Title.
PN81.M514 2012
801.95dc23

2012012240

eISBN: 978-1-59017-609-2

v3.1

in memory of my father,
multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
haec accipe multum manantia fletu

DON T WORRY. ALTHOUGH the title of this book may seem alarmist, theres nothing to be anxious about. At least, thats what the author of the poem from which I borrowed it thought.

In Constantine Cavafys Waiting for the Barbarians, the representatives of a very grand and sophisticated culture, unnamed but apparently Rome, assemble at the city gate in great state, from the emperor to his various officials, awaiting the arrival of envoys from the (also unnamed) barbarians. The city has fallen into an anticipatory stupor: the senators sit around making no laws, and the orators fall silent, having tactfully absented themselves. (The barbarians are bored by eloquence and public speaking.) They all wait from early morning until evening, fidgeting with their embroidered scarlet togas, their amethysts and emeralds, until it becomes clear that the barbarians arent going to come. Only in the final line of the poem does Cavafy give the proceedings an unexpected twist: the emperor and the rest, you learn, are actually looking forward to the barbarians arrival. Perhaps these people, the narrator sighs in the last line, were a solution of a sort.

So the poem is about confounded expectations in more ways than one. Theres the disappointed anticipation of the waiting emperor and his people, of course, but even more, perhaps, there are the oddly thwarted expectations of the reader of the poem, which have been set up by that sonorous, portentous, and now-famous title. Detached from its context, the phrase waiting for the barbarians, which has been used as everything from the title of a novel by J. M. Coetzee to the name of a chic mens clothing store in Paris, seems to be about the plight of a precious civilization perilously under siege by the crude forces of barbarity. And yet Cavafy himself clearly saw it differently. A note he wrote in 1904, the year he published the poem, indicates that for him it was not at all opposed to my optimistic notionthat it represented, indeed, an episode in the progress toward the good.

Why, you wonder, should the imminent advent of the barbarians suggest positive progress? Here its important to remember a bit of biography. Cavafy had come of age in the late nineteenth century, the era of the flowery and highly perfumed Decadents, and only when he was around fortythe time he wrote Waiting for the Barbariansdid he set about stripping his work of all derivative artifice, transforming himself into an idiosyncratic modernist. So the poem may well be a parable about artistic growththe unexpectedly complex and even, potentially, fruitful interaction between old cultures and new, between (we might say) high and low; about the way that whats established and classic is always being refreshed by new energies that, at the time they make themselves felt, probably seem barbaric to some. As Cavafy knew wellhe was, after all, a specialist in the marginal moments of ancient history, the era in which Greece yielded to Rome, when paganism met Christianity, when antiquity made its long and gentle slide into the early Middle Agesthere rarely are any real barbarians. What others might see as declines and falls look, when seen from the birds-eye vantage point of history, more like shifts, adaptations, reorganizations.

The meeting of the ancient and the contemporary worlds is one theme that connects the twenty-four essays in this collection. Some of the pieces here are dedicated to the classics themselves: for instance, an essay on a new translation of the Iliad, collected in the section called Classica (a rubric I owe to my longtime flea-marketing companion Bob Gottlieb, who thus christened a vast category of household knickknacks). And a number of them are concerned with the waiting for the barbarians phenomenon: they consider the ways in which the present, and especially popular culture, has wrestled, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, with the past. Julie Taymors Spider-Man musical tried and failed to adapt ancient myths of metamorphosis to modern comic-book sensibilities; its interesting to think why the two genres dont really mix. Jonathan Littells The Kindly Ones owes a major debt to Aeschylus Oresteia. No fewer than three significant novels published in 2010 took classical myths as their starting points, and their adaptations, as always, tell us as much about the present as they do about the past.

But by far most of these essays are concerned with contemporary popular culture and its products: television, movies, plays, novels, memoirs. Nearly all were first published over the past five yearssince 2007, that is, when the manuscript for my first collection was submitted. (The remaining handful, with one exception, were all published within the past ten.) A recurring theme in that collection, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, was the effect of the September 11 attacks on pop culture in the first half of the first decade of the new century. Its now clear to me that in the second half of that decade (and since), Ive been preoccupied with what I think of as the reality problem: how the extraordinary blurring between reality and artifice that has been made possible by new technologies makes itself felt not only in our entertainmentsthe way we create and experience movies (Avatar) and Broadway shows (Spider-Man, again)but in the way we think about, and conduct, our lives. Certainly one side effect of the ongoing erosion of the boundary between the inner and the outer self, itself made possible by new technologies and media that allow us to be private in public (smartphones, iPods, blogs, Facebook, etc.), is a profound alteration in our sense of what is truth and what is fiction: readers of a good deal of contemporary writing must ponder the difference between (as one memoirist has put it) real reality and my reality. (This is the subject of my