Sanguinity

Backstory: My alma mater has long had a bit of a cult about its Humanities 110 course. The course has been in place since the 1940s, and every student is required to take it freshman year (or, if they're a transfer student, the year they transfer), no exceptions. The syllabus has been largely static since its inception: the first semester is the Greeks (Illiad to Aristotle), and the second semester is a speed-run of Romans-to-Rennaissance (Aeneid to Dante). When I was a student, if you forgot your student ID and wanted free beer at a social (which, at the time, did not age-check students), you got quizzed on the Illiad, which you were supposed to have read before you arrived for the first week of classes -- that was how you were supposed to prove you were really a student. (Or, if you're more cynical: prove that you're worthy of drinking with the students.)

For decades now, parts of the student body have been advocating for an expansion of the curriculum, trying to make it less white supremacist. A few years ago they won, and the Hum 110 curriculum was massively overhauled, most significantly to include units on Latin American and Harlem Rennaissance literature.

Naturally, this caused a tumult among the alumni. Many were curious about the new curriculum; others felt the loss of being one people united by a shared reading list. In response, the college alumni office, in conjunction with the Humanities faculty, put together a Hum 110 book club, in which we have the opportunity to work our way through the new curriculum, sit in on recordings of the lectures, discuss the books with our peers, etc. It began this fall, and will take three years to complete (because many of us have day jobs and can no longer do -- or fake -- a thousand pages of reading a week).

As an undergrad, one of my claims to fame irrelevancy is that I actually did all the Hum 110 reading my freshman year. (Well. Very nearly all. Short only a couple hundred pages of Tacitus and turning to the Cliff Notes for the Nicomachean Ethics. I could not cope with the endless litany of always choosing moderation in all things, enumerated at a distinctly immoderate length.) It's unclear whether, thirty-five years later, I can accomplish the same feat again, but I'm looking forward to giving it a go. ;-)


Andrew George (translator), The Epic of Gilgamesh (2022 ed.)

This volume contains all the currently translated (which is a subset of all the extant) fragments of Gilgamesh tablets -- George has been updating the text every so often, as translation continues and more parts of the epic get filled in. He explains in his introduction that we have a wealth of fragments spanning multiple millennia, cultures, and languages, and a significant portion of them are currently sitting unread in museums. (Apparently we have way more cuneiform tablets than people qualified to read them?? George reckons that we already have the complete text of Gilgamesh in our hands, it's just going to take time and funding to get around to reading it! THEN GIVE HIM FUNDING. HOW MUCH CAN READING ONE EPIC COST?)

George divides his text into four chapters, each collecting one era/culture/language's version of the epic -- which explains why this volume is four times the size of the other Epics of Gilgamesh on the bookstore shelf, a thing that puzzled me when I was standing there looking at them all. Only the "Standard Babylonian" version (1300-1000 BCE), the one that took Victorian Britain by storm and is also the most complete of the four, was assigned.

I was wholly unfamiliar with Gilgamesh before reading this, beyond the osmosis that he has a wild-man companion Enkidu, Enkidu dies tragically, and that the two of them are allegedly pretty gay.


They are, in fact, pretty gay! -- at least in this translation, I can't speak to the original. Enkidu is created for the purpose of being a companion to Gilgamesh, and Gilgamesh's prophetic dreams about Enkidu include the repeated refrain that, "like a wife, you'll love him, caress and embrace him." I know we've always been here, and I also know we haven't everywhere been a contested people, but there's still something deeply moving about a record this old -- and a hero celebrated so widely and so long! -- simply and matter-of-factly being one of us.

(Although I am very disappointed to report that my discussion group did NOT find it gay. They thought it more likely that Gilgamesh and Enkidu were friends who... liked to walk arm in arm? Something? I found it very disappointing and more than a little bewildering.)

(Here, as an antidote to that disappointing conversation have some of my favorite gay Gilgamesh and Enkidu art: Gilgamesh and Enkidu by kianahamm.)

The syllabus discusses this work as an exploration of contrasts (city and forest, sleep and death, etc.), but I can confess here to my fannish friends that I am most taken with the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu.

Spoiler:

I was very shocked to learn that Enkidu does not have a heroic death! He falls ill to a disease (which may be divine retribution for an earlier exploit); he rages about the indignity of death by disease, preferring a death on a battlefield; and within two weeks he is dead. And oh, how Gilgamesh mourns! The whole back half of the epic is Gilgamesh's grief. ;_; He becomes a wild-man himself, roaming to the ends of the earth, unwashed and ungroomed, clothed in the pelts of wild animals... It takes Uta-napishtim (the man who, guided by the gods, built a boat, gathered seeds and animals, survived a divine catastrophic flood, and gained immortality) metaphorically kicking Gilgamesh's ass to get him to start bathing again and return to his duties as king.

One of the two lectures focused on Gilgamesh as an early exemplar of the Hero's Journey, and then, with the help of Ursula Le Guin's Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the lecturer kicked the hero's journey to the out to the back alley and stomped on it. In sentiments reminiscent of Berthold Brecht's A Worker Reads History, he advocated reading Gilgamesh not as the story of a hero, but as the story of a community of care and Gilgamesh being brought into harmony with it. I find that a compelling reading: one of the things I found interesting in the story is how both Gilgamesh and Enkidu are troublesome and badly behaved (from the perspectives of their subjects / local people), and how the locals band together to pair off Gilgamesh and Enkidu, so that they'll keep each other busy and distracted and give the local people a break. And certainly the whole affair with Humbaba and the Cedar Forest strikes me as very much like Le Guin's mammoth hunters, who, from an excess of energy and time on their hands, decide to go mammoth hunting. (Are we meant to valorize Gilgamesh killing Humbaba and logging the Cedar Forest? It is not at all clear to me that we are.)

Next up: The Tale of Sinuhe and other Egyptian Middle Kingdom literature. And I'm leading the discussion group this time, so I need to come up with some good questions.