Extraordinary, but Ordinary
Reading Homeric Ideology Through Disney's "Zombies"
This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. This post is part of my plan to share new scholarship on Homer. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year, I was able to send over 2k to worthwhile organizations.
How do we know what a work of art like the Iliad wants us to believe? Pour a cup of coffee (or maybe something stronger), because the answer’s not a simple one
Iliad 2.203-6
“There’s no way all of us Achaeans here can rule!
The rule of many isn’t a good thing. Let there be one sovereign,
One king, to whom the child of crooked minded Kronos granted
The scepter and the laws so that he might provide counsel with them”οὐ μέν πως πάντες βασιλεύσομεν ἐνθάδ’ ᾿Αχαιοί·
οὐκ ἀγαθὸν πολυκοιρανίη· εἷς κοίρανος ἔστω,
εἷς βασιλεύς, ᾧ δῶκε Κρόνου πάϊς ἀγκυλομήτεω
σκῆπτρόν τ’ ἠδὲ θέμιστας, ἵνά σφισι βουλεύῃσι.
Odysseus speaks these lines as he tries to reassemble the Achaeans into assembly after Agamemnon’s test at the beginning of book 2. One scholiast explains that Odysseus is basically saying “this won’t be a democracy” (οὐκ ἔσται δημοκρατία, school. bT ad Il. 2.304b) while another suggests that the single sovereign is “what the empire of the Persians was like—whence their destruction [came]” (οὕτως ἡ Περσῶν ἀρχὴ—ἀφ' οὗ φθορά,schol. A ad Il. 2.204). Both of these responses emerge out of the political context of Classical Athens or later, since, as far as we can see from each epic, there’s no Homeric notion of democracy or the Persian empire.
The scholiasts are both engaged in a kind of double classical reception: relating the epics to their own experiences but also attributing meanings to ancient contexts that may be anachronistic. Modern scholars have been less concerned about anachronism than in evaluating here—and elsewhere in Homeric politics and culture—what values or ideology the Homeric epics are espousing. Readers like me who tend to see the Homeric poems as dialogic—that is positioning themselves as not giving any direct answers or projecting any specific values, but rather endeavoring to put different ideas in dialogue for audiences to work through—often find it hard to talk about something like ideology because we don’t see Homer as coming from any specific time or place or serving any particular interest. Yet, the nature of Homeric composition and competition with other genres and its seeming affinity for monarchy has attracted a lot of attention.
Homer and Ideology
Should we see the Homeric epics as passively (or even actively) promoting a form of government or rule? Scholars have argued that the epics present “aristocratic values” and in doing so ultimately argue against an oligarchy or democracy in favor of some kind of monarchy (even a quasi-constitutional one). Yet these arguments run up against the contents of the poems and the reality of their evolution. The Homeric epics are not tied to one single polity and were embraced by city-states with very different political histories.
My general take has long been that the epics were (and are) in part successful in a “marketplace of myth” because of their ambiguity. They provide just enough information for audiences to see themselves and their own world in the poems but not enough to tie it down to any single place. When it comes to political ideology, the epics present rough ‘institutions’ like the general assembly and the smaller council of chieftains that functioned as analogues for the probouleutic aristocratic councils (think the senate or house of lords) and the larger, more representative assembly (house of representatives/commons).
For scholars less inclined towards the dialogic approach, there have been many discussions about which political values the epics transmit. Some, like Peter Rose (1988; 1997 184-7) see an essential heterogeneity in the epics’ values, while others see the tensions as due to the epics reflecting the values of an emergent city-state (For a summary of arguments labeling the Iliad’s reflections as either “pre-political” or pointing to geometric age Greece, see Hammer 2002, 20-5). David Tandy (1997 144 ff.) argues that the epics largely present the idealogy of the elite (see also Van Wees 1992).
But dominant ideology works best when it appropriates from dissenting ideas to establish something of an integrated status quo as both Peter Rose and William Thalmann argue in different ways. Thalmann (1988, 21) draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and suggests “the traditional epic diction in its normal usage is, in Bakhtin’s term, “centripetal.” It creates a unified verbal and ideological world by sustaining the power of this discourse, reveals that the world is too rich and complex to be captured in a straightforward and unitary language, and challenges the unifying socio-political ideology.”
When I was in grad school and first read this, I kept having to squint my eyes and shake my head to remind myself of how to understand the distinctions Thalmann is emphasizing here. Think of it as a difference between inertial (status quo maintaining) and entropic (disintegrating) forces. The dominant power structure is constantly altering its shape, retooling its discourse in order to account for fractures and changes within the space it is incorporating.
The ongoing struggle between maintaining traditional structures and their dissolution can be seen the tension between centripetal forces, in the Bakhtinian sense, and centrifugal forces. The latter represent the many voices and interests of an imperfect system like language or real life where the basic ‘qualities’ seem apparent but there is disorder and change. These forces threaten to yield disparate ideas, to press the very notion of unity apart to the outside, to resist systemization through the process of change and variegation. Centrifugal forces, in contrast, are those cultural forces that attempt impose unity on disunity.
Disney’s Idealized Zombies
Now, precisely twice as old as I was when I started graduate school, thinking about this doesn’t strain my intellect the way it once did. But I think the opposition of the two forces as an analogy can appear more simple than it really is because in effect the processes are always ongoing and unpredictable. It is not as if culture is one master centrifuge constantly adjusting its speed and duration in response to developments and changes in various suspensions. Instead, I imagine multiple centrifugal forces operating at once in concert and then in conflict as their actions and notions are also involved the disparate, even chaotic, centripetal movements.
While closer to what I think is going on, this description will likely cause current readers to step back, perhaps even stop reading. The problem these analogies are trying to address is the interaction between an always changing dominant culture and subcultures within it. One thing less well addressed by the centrifugal analogy is the way that innovations and change within counter-movements are adapted into—or more properly appropriated by—the dominant movement in order to maintain is overall control (what we might call ‘hegemony’)
All of this can leaves head spinning. But let me offer a modern example that might help illustrate things just a little bit. Disney has a trilogy of musical movies starting with Zombies (2018; soon to be a tetralogy) that appear to use domesticated zombies being integrated with humans as an allegory for race relations in the United States (in later movies, the dynamic is repeated as new non-human species are added to the equation: werewolves, aliens, and in Zombies 4, according to my daughter, vampires are along the way). I have watched these movies many times with my family because the music is pretty good (there’s also dancing etc.) and because the message(s) are moving: the central story of the first movie is a Romeo/Juliet of a cheerleader (Addison) and a zombie (Zed) who fall in love.
The zombies are marginalized physically (they look different), geographically (they live on the shadier side of town), socially (they live in closed communities; do different jobs; and politically and legally (segregated from school). When they are forcibly integrated by the state at the beginning of the first film, their ‘worth’ to others is proved through the athletic prowess of Zed (he uses his zombie abilities to turn around the fortunes of the football team), musical abilities, and more. There’s just enough debate about the value of assimilating vs. retaining a different identity to make the echoes of structural racism clear to anyone over a certain age.
Now, as someone who has watched these movies at least a few times each and who has discussed them multiple times with my friend and fellow Homerist Justin Arft, I am both appreciative and skeptical of the ideological forces that produce them. The most important force here is in some way corporate: we have a narrative that is drawing on cultural experiences in order to perpetuate itself, by which I mean “make money”. Effective narratives that do so tap into audience experience and notions of identity and either challenge them (which is what I think good “art” does) or reaffirms identity in an ‘uplifting’ way (which successful commercial art achieves).
Disney has created an anodyne myth of overcoming difference: it takes the whole tension of the experience of racial difference and conflict and recasts its larger, oceanic currents as a conflict that can be addressed interpersonally. It acknowledges the oppositional tension between assimilation and identity, between survival and obeisance, and the sanitizes it in a way that makes the painful, threatening narratives safer, in a kind of ideological appropriation that erases some experiences, similar to the patterns Lyra Monteiro has identified in Lin-Manuel Hamilton’s Hamilton.
Given the way I have framed this, one might be forgiven for assuming that I have contempt for Zombies. The truth is far more complex. There are only a handful of times in their lives that my children have seen me cry (not that I am a tough guy; the kids are just not that observant yet). One of them is while watching Zombies. My wife and I met our first year of college: she is from South India and grew up expecting an arranged marriage; I grew up in rural Maine, and really hadn’t even talked to someone who didn’t code as ‘white’ until I went to college. Our story was wild to us, but so common for people like us: deep, dangerous love; conflicts on both sides of the family; ‘winning’ by getting married and being accepted by each side; learning only later in life after having children how this acceptance didn’t (and doesn’t) extend to the world around us or account for the loss of communities that are ready-made for homogenous families.
When we watch the first duet between Zed and Addition—in probably the best song of all three movies—we weep. They dance around an abandoned classroom, singing at first about the surprise and wonder, and then into the repeated chorus:
Someday, this could be, this could be ordinary
Someday, could we be something extraordinary?
You and me, side by side, out in the broad daylight
If they laugh, we'll say, "We're gonna be someday"
We try to explain our reactions to our kids—how it was hard for us, but not like that bad; how we didn’t suffer in some clear pointed way, but lived through and with the tensions. They get it, but the way they understand anything from Disney: vicariously and part of a story with a happy ending.
The wish to both be ordinary and accepted yet to still be something special and unexpected? It strikes me as authentic and moving and pathetic (in the Aristotelian sense) every time. I can simultaneously know that Disney has selected the center-slightly-left values of a demographic with some money and sanitized it for both comfort and a wider audience and have contempt for that while also feeling real feelings in recognizing the experience it resonates in my world all while still recognizing the way that these processes implicate me in the creation of a new kind of neoliberal myth about race relations. The ideological appropriation is emotionally functional even if intellectually disorienting—like being subject to centrifugal forces while trying to move in different directions.
Back to Homer
Where does this analogy leave us with Homer? I suspect that the question of ideology and Homer is super-saturated with meaning because (1) the Homeric epics are diachronic objects, serving and responding to different cultural movements over time and as such reflect (and refract) subtle differences in values; in addition, (2) the ‘dialogic’ nature of the art form, that is, the way it invites audiences to read meaning into it, through it, and even in despite of it; and (3) while epic as the preferred discourse of a reconstructed elite may appropriate non-elite values in order to neutralize them, it also serves as a record of the fantasy of the past that serves the elite while revealing their desires.
The interpretive impasse—or the ideological aporia—that remains is (4) that the double ideological move of appropriation can strive to neuter a disruptive cultural subcurrent while also preserving it for later audiences to resuscitate. Finally, (5) we can’t avoid the ideological formation of the interpreter themselves, the way the observer decodes the discourse and valorizes one aspect of it, erring at times either anachronistically (i.e. without questioning differences between their own views and ancient ones) or monolithically (i.e. assuming homogeneity in reception during any period).
Consider the complex ideological patterning at the end of the Odyssey where Odysseus’ homecoming slaughter of the suitors has been seen as a culturally justified act that communicates a fantasy of a returning monarch exacting vengeance from a recalcitrant and decadent aristocracy. The dead-end nature of revenge highlighted in the epic’s final book, plus the individuation of the suitors, and the pathos developed in the punishment of the serving women and the mutilation of Melanthios, could also speak to early democratic or lower-class audiences, leaving just enough room for them to explore their own space in the political conflict while also providing enough ambiguity that readers like me, unfathomable generations into the future, might read productively against the grain of the dominant discourse of modern scholarship.
A short bibliography on ideology and Homer
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Trans. Holquist and Emerson.
Cairns, Douglas. “The first Odysseus: « Iliad », « Odyssey » and the ideology of kingship.” Gaia, vol. 18, 2015, pp.
51-66.
D. Hammer, The Iliad as Politics: The Performance of Political Thought (Norman, OK, 2002), especially 82–92
Peradotto, John. “Outis and the ideology of kleos.” Abstracts of the American Philological Association, 1987, pp. 127.
Stephen Scully. “The Polis in Homer: A Definition and Interpretation.” Ramus 9 (1981) 1-34.
David W. Tandy. Warriors into Traders: The Power of the Market in Early Greece. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Rose, P. W.. Class in archaic Greece. Cambridge Books Online. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Pr., 2012.
Peter W. Rose. “Thersites and the Plural Voices of Homer.” Arethusa 21 (1988) 5-25.
—,—. “Ideology in the Iliad: Polis, Basileus, Theoi.” Arethusa 30 (1997) 151-99.
Stocking, Charles. 2023. Homer’s Iliad and the Problem of Force. Oxford.
William G. Thalmann. “Thersites: Comedy, Scapegoats and Heroic Ideology in the Iliad.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 118 (1988) 1-28.
—,—. “ ‘The Most Divinely Approved and Political Discord’: Thinking about Conflict in the Developing Polis." Classical Antiquity 23 (2004) 359-99.
Hans van Wees. Status Warriors: War, Violence, and Society in Homer and History. Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1992.