Conflicts in Heroism

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There is a slight conflict persistent in today’s attitude towards the concept of the hero. On the one hand, it is seen as overblown and politically incorrect; yet feats of bravery are still admired, and virtuosity revered.

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The Relatively Short Time Span of the Human Project

 

Since, on the greater scale of things as we now conceive them, the human race may prove to be only a brief—thus far—episode, it is perhaps unsurprising that certain features of human existence should nevertheless appear strikingly constant: as obvious, one might say, as the noses on our faces.

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“Incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard, 1984, p. xxiv) was the name of the game, or clarion cry, of Postmodernism. Since then, however, it increasingly seems that, rather than returning to ‘metanarratives’ or ‘grand narratives’, people are converging upon the idea of emergent truths: patterns or constants which reveal themselves through repeated observation rather than through philosophical imposition. This may offer a more empirical means of identifying certain primal qualities within human existence—again, perhaps, things ‘as plain as the noses on our faces’.

 

Phenomena of this kind might include those which seem almost pointless to contest, however one approaches their semantics: that the sun heats and illuminates; that human beings experience pain and hunger; that bodies are vulnerable; and so forth.

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The asymmetry of the gametes, and its expression in the differentiated biological genders of the parents, may be considered alongside another curious circumstance of human existence. In a dynamic faintly reminiscent of the more primordial form of organic reproduction represented by the splitting of a cell, the human organism begins its existence within the female body and, for all practical purposes, initially as part of that same bodily system. Yet the developing child will itself ordinarily embody one or other biological sex, and must eventually emerge from this condition of profound physical continuity as a distinct organism.

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As the child gradually comes to understand and represent itself within an interactive world, this passage from bodily dependence towards differentiation seems to correspond with another strikingly persistent feature of human existence: the construction of a stable sense of self - or an image or representation of itself, to itself. The connections between this process of self-representation and the recurrent presence of heroic motifs are explored here for the constants they may share. In effect, the essay traces not only the history of the hero, but the heroic history of the idea of the hero itself.

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The First Human Hero — Heroism in Embryo

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Born in the fabled cradle of civilisation, the Epic of Gilgamesh is among the earliest great works of literature to survive and present itself to us. Stories concerning Gilgamesh were brought together into Akkadian epic during the second millennium BCE and repeatedly transmitted and rewritten. Fragments travelled extraordinary distances through the ancient Near East, while themes from the poem—most famously its flood narrative—continued to echo through later religious and literary traditions.

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Gilgamesh begins not as a saint but as an overbearing king: magnificent, powerful and objectionable. His friendship with Enkidu enlarges him; Enkidu’s death breaks him. The heroic journey consequently changes direction. Having defeated monsters, Gilgamesh encounters something that strength cannot defeat and begins the impossible quest to escape mortality. A. R. George neatly characterises the central theme as “the vain quest of a man to escape his mortality” (George, 2010, p. 1). The poem becomes less a simple celebration of conquest than a meditation upon the limits of human existence.

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Gilgamesh’s heroism initially appears in the ancient language of distance, ordeal and extraordinary action. Yet the outward journey quickly acquires an existential dimension. In Robert Temple’s verse rendering:

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“He crossed to the far shore, traversed the vast sea to the rising Sun.
He explored the rim, sought life without death.”

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— The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. Robert Temple, Prologue, p. 11

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The geographical edge of the world becomes inseparable from the psychological limit of the self. Gilgamesh is dissatisfied with mortality despite being himself, in mythic terms, two-thirds divine. The paradox is almost comic in its grandeur: the being who appears nearest to escaping ordinary human limitation is precisely the one most violently confronted by it.

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The poem’s treatment of Enkidu’s death makes this explicit. Gilgamesh covers his friend’s face, paces in grief, and cries out in terror at the discovery that what has happened to Enkidu will also happen to him. The death of the other produces an image of the future self. The hero who has overcome the external world encounters himself as a mortal creature.

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“He covered, like a bride, the face of his friend …
Like a lioness deprived of her cubs, he paced to and fro, this way and that …
‘I shall die, and shall I not then be as Enkidu? … Sorrow has entered my heart!’”

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— The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. Andrew George, Tablets VIII–IX, pp. 65, 70

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There is already something surprisingly modern here. Gilgamesh does not interest us merely because he defeats Humbaba. He has, amongst other things, an ego problem. He must discover the limits of himself, be broken by grief, move beyond the familiar world and return with a transformed understanding of what it means to be alive. The exterior adventure has an interior corollary almost from the beginning.

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Yet this interior life is still represented with a curious exteriority. Psychological disturbance frequently appears almost as something that happens to Gilgamesh rather than as an interior world continuously explored by the narrative. On the journey to the Cedar Forest, for example, “Gilgamesh rested his chin on his knees, / sleep fell upon him, that spills over people.” He wakes startled and then recounts the dream to Enkidu, who interprets it for him. The inward event is rendered as dream, bodily sensation and external sign rather than extended introspection. (Tablet IV, trans. Andrew George; p. 30.)

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The poem itself subsequently underwent a strangely heroic resurrection. Lost to modern culture for centuries, it re-emerged piecemeal from broken cuneiform tablets during the nineteenth century. The decipherment of Tablet XI caused a sensation because its flood narrative bore conspicuous similarities to Genesis: divine destruction, a warned survivor, a great vessel and the preservation of life. A story which had apparently vanished descended into historical oblivion and returned.

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The hero therefore appears near the beginning of written literature at a peculiar frontier between history, mythology, religion and cosmology. Humanity has repeatedly projected meaning into the heavens, reading the stars as though they contained an enlargement of its own stories. Even controversial ethnographies such as the famous twentieth-century accounts of Dogon knowledge of Sirius belong to this strange territory. Later fieldwork challenged much of what had been attributed to the Dogon, but the persistence of the fascination remains revealing.

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In such senses, the hero seems connected with the very origins of the human ‘project’, if it may be described as such. With its iridescent resonances with the Book of Genesis, Gilgamesh appears almost intrinsically bound to the very apparatus of human existence: mortality, self-recognition, cosmological projection and, perhaps, a built-in predisposition towards heroic conceptualisation.

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The Hero in the Flesh — Greece

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The Greek heroes inherit this gigantic scale. They emerge from a mythic world whose oldest strata contain tantalising, if obscure, correspondences with Near Eastern narratives—not least in the more distant cosmogonic accounts of Hesiod and the Titans.

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Achilles is almost incandescent with heroic ability, yet he is also petulant, grief-stricken and terrifying. Odysseus is courageous but cunning, theatrical, deceptive and endlessly resourceful. Theseus, Perseus and Heracles inhabit a world of monsters and impossible tests, but Greek literature does not require its heroes to be morally uncomplicated. Extraordinary capacity and extraordinary defect can reside within the same body.

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Sarpedon’s speech in the Iliad captures something essential about this heroic consciousness. He imagines, only to reject, the possibility of escaping battle altogether:

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“Ah my friend, if you and I could escape this fray
and live forever, never a trace of age, immortal,
I would never fight on the front lines again …
But now, as it is, the fates of death await us,
thousands poised to strike, and not a man alive
can flee them or escape—so in we go for attack!”

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— Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles, Book XII, lines 374–380, pp. 335–336

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Heroic action is not based upon ignorance of mortality but upon consciousness of it. The warrior advances because death cannot ultimately be escaped. The heroic gesture is made inside the knowledge of finitude.

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Human Vulnerability in Greek Tragedy

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Greek tragedy carries the contradiction further. Its central figures suffer, misunderstand themselves, make disastrous choices and encounter circumstances beyond their control. Heroism becomes interesting precisely where aspiration meets necessity, fate, ignorance and ordinary human frailty. Oedipus is formidable because his intelligence cannot rescue him from what he does not know; Ajax’s greatness cannot protect him from humiliation; Agamemnon’s status does not exempt him from moral catastrophe.

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One can already see here what is arguably a distant precursor of what will later become the antihero. In Euripides’ Heracles, the great hero has been driven mad and killed his own children. Theseus struggles to reconcile the shattered man before him with the legendary figure:

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“Are these indeed the words of Heracles, the much-enduring?”

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Heracles replies:

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“Endurance must have a limit.”

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— Euripides, Heracles, trans. E. P. Coleridge, lines 1348–1350

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The archetype of superhuman endurance discovers that he possesses a human breaking point. There are echoes here of what will later be regarded as ‘anti-heroic’: human frailty appearing almost ironically against the scale of the heroic exemplar. These figures remain enormous enough for myth, but they are already fissured by the recognisably human.

This becomes important later. The antihero only makes sense because the heroic model remains somewhere behind him. He is not necessarily the opposite of the hero; he is often the collision between heroic aspiration and the ordinary vicissitudes, weaknesses and absurdities of human existence.

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Exteriority to Interiority

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The ancient world is not devoid of interior life, but the internal world of its protagonists is represented differently from that of later European literature. Gilgamesh’s suffering appears through lamentation, dream, gesture and physical wandering. Homeric emotions are spoken, enacted, pleaded and fought across the visible world. The distinction is therefore not the presence or absence of psychology, but the means by which that psychology is represented.

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Erich Auerbach, in the opening chapter of Mimesis, identifies in Homer the tendency:

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“to represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts.”

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— Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask, Chapter 1, p. 6

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Psychological processes are frequently treated in a similar manner. Characters speak what they think and feel. Grief becomes lamentation; fear becomes flight or speech; divine disturbance becomes dream or omen. The psychology is real, but it has not yet become the enormous private chamber that it will become in later literature.

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A Homeric death can be rendered with terrifying brevity: the warrior falls, darkness or mist covers his eyes, and the narrative moves on. Compare this with the minute fluctuations of embarrassment, desire, jealousy, self-deception and memory that will occupy hundreds of pages in Tolstoy, Proust or Joyce. The subject has not suddenly acquired an inner life; rather, literature has progressively made the inner life into an increasingly elaborate representational space.

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The Iliad repeatedly marks death through such stark formulations as “black night came swirling down across his eyes” or “the dark came shrouding down across his eyes.”

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— Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles, Book V, p. 186; Book XIII, p. 360 

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Something like a movement can therefore be traced from exteriority towards interiority. The ancient hero is not without psychology. Psychology has simply not yet become the principal landscape through which the hero must travel.

Across the centuries, then, literature makes a very discernible journey inward, towards increasing psychological depth.

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Rome and Christendom

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Rome produces another transformation of the heroic ideal. In Virgil’s Aeneas, heroic identity is increasingly bound to pietas: duty to gods, ancestors, family and a civilisation still to come. Heroism becomes not merely an eruption of individual prowess but the subordination of the individual to something larger than himself. The hero may conquer precisely by accepting an obligation he did not choose.

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After the storm in Book I, Aeneas encourages his exhausted followers while concealing his own despair. Virgil makes the division between outward heroic appearance and inward suffering explicit:

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“he feigns hope on his face, and keeps his anguish hidden deep in his breast.”

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— Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. J. W. Mackail, Book I, line 209

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Something significant has happened. The hero now performs courage for the sake of others while privately experiencing its opposite. Heroism is already partly theatrical: the stable exterior is maintained against an unstable interior. We have also moved another increment towards increased interiority.

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Christianity permits another alteration. The martyr, saint and pilgrim can inhabit recognisably heroic structures while reversing many values of the warrior. Victory may consist in suffering; strength can appear as humility; conquest may be over temptation or sin rather than another people. Death itself can become passage rather than defeat. The old structure of ordeal, descent and return survives, but its field of operation becomes moral and spiritual.

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Dante provides one of the great syntheses. The Divine Comedy is at once journey, vision, pilgrimage and extraordinary adventure, while Classical antiquity continually resurfaces within its Christian architecture. The protagonist travels through impossible worlds and encounters monsters, sinners, saints and exemplary figures, yet the ultimate object of the journey is a transformation of consciousness.

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Medieval Christianity therefore did not simply erase the heroes and masters of antiquity. Dante makes Virgil, the Roman poet, his literal guide through the underworld and greets him in language bordering upon hero-worship:

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“O, of the other poets honour and light …
Thou art my master, and my author thou.”

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— Dante, Inferno, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Canto I, lines 82–85

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The Classical exemplar has been absorbed into a Christian journey of salvation. The master survives, but his function has been transformed.

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Renaissance — The Classical Hero’s Return

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The hero blossoms—indeed, bodies—forth again during the Renaissance. While the period is resolutely distinct from the later eighteenth-century movement described as Neoclassicism, it is emphatically a return to the Classical. Greek and Roman bodies, philosophies, myths and conceptions of individual accomplishment become newly available within Christian Europe.

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The human figure consequently assumes extraordinary centrality. The love of God and the new confidence in human possibility coexist during this period; hero-worship and the idealisation of the body breathe alongside religious devotion.

Michelangelo’s David embodies this renewed heroic confidence. The figure is Biblical, Classical and Renaissance at once: an idealised human body representing not merely strength but the suspended instant before courageous action. The hero has become flesh with extraordinary intensity.

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At the same time, the Renaissance elevates the artist himself. The painter, architect, sculptor, poet or polymath can increasingly become an exceptional individual whose abilities appear to exceed the ordinary. Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael become not simply craftsmen but exemplary figures. The idea of the master assumes new proportions. The artist can now function almost as another species of hero: a demonstration of what concentrated human capacity can become.

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Literature, however, continues to complicate the model. Hamlet possesses many outward qualifications of the heroic protagonist and yet finds heroic action almost impossibly entangled with consciousness. Reflection, which might once have supported action, begins to interfere with it. The capacity to see too many possibilities becomes itself an impediment.

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This interiority is especially notable in Hamlet, and symptomatic of the ineluctable movement inward both in humanity and in its literature.

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Baroque and Rococo — Candlelight and Illusion

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The Baroque introduces another kind of instability. Movement replaces repose; theatricality, illusion, sensuality, darkness and sudden illumination complicate Classical equilibrium. The period can at moments feel tantalisingly close to later Romantic sensibility: ecstatic saints, stormy heavens, shadow, music, emotional abandon and elaborate imaginary worlds. Yet it would be too neat to call the Baroque merely a premature Romanticism.

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The Baroque is associated with theatrical chambers and a strange hinterland of private reverie: the faintly mesmeric sound of the lute and mandolin, figures caught between performance and introspection, and elaborate fantasy worlds whose boundaries seem less secure than those of the Classical imagination. Germain Bazin describes the Baroque artist as one who:

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“longs to enter into the multiplicity of phenomena, into the flux of things in their perpetual becoming.”

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— Germain Bazin, Baroque and Rococo, trans. Jonathan Griffin, pp. 6–7

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The compositions become “dynamic and open” and tend to expand beyond their boundaries. Elsewhere he describes an instinctive preference for “forms that take flight” (Bazin, 1964, p. 7).

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This formal distinction is suggestive beyond form. Classical compositions remain comparatively bounded and self-contained; Baroque forms intermingle, dissolve and escape. It would be excessive to turn an art-historical distinction directly into a psychological law, but an analogous movement is difficult not to notice: away from the self-possessed figure and towards a more porous creature acted upon by sensation, music, atmosphere and emotion.

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In Dutch interiors Bazin describes the room as:

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“a secret place, a refuge of private life”

 

where figures “indulge in music or in conversation” or sit “pensive and alone”, conscious of “the sadness of the human condition.”

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— Germain Bazin, Baroque and Rococo, trans. Jonathan Griffin, p. 100

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Particularly interesting in this respect is Bazin’s observation about the lute, an instrument strongly associated with the sound-world of the Baroque. A particularly striking example of its curiously mellifluous and otherworldly character can be heard in Antonio Vivaldi’s Chamber Concerto in D major, RV 93, for lute, two violins and continuo—above all in its second movement, the Largo, which can sound, to modern ears, strangely and unexpectedly contemporary.

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“the plaintive lute became a favourite instrument in Italy and later in France. Its effects on the human psyche were thought to be so pernicious that preachers and moralists joined in condemning it.”

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— Germain Bazin, The Baroque: Principles, Styles, Modes, Themes, p. 206

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Bazin immediately cites contemporaries who described listeners as “bereft of their senses” and habitual players as “fantastical dreamers” (Bazin, 1978, p. 206). The heroic body has not disappeared, but the centre of attention begins to move elsewhere. The individual listens, remembers and dreams. The faintly mesmeric lute becomes almost emblematic of this softer boundary between person and atmosphere.

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Heinrich Wölfflin consequently insisted that Baroque should not simply be understood as the deterioration of a Classical ideal:

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“Baroque … is neither a rise nor a decline from classic, but a totally different art.”

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— Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, trans. M. D. Hottinger, p. 14

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For Wölfflin, Classical and Baroque art represent different organisations of vision rather than superior and inferior points on a single developmental curve.

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Bazin takes the psychological suggestion considerably further elsewhere. He detects in certain Baroque figures an “indefinable air of slightly raffish romanticism, even of buffoonery”, accompanied by what he calls a “picturesque burlesque amusement”. Behind this apparent playfulness, however, he perceives something darker: an instinctive apprehension of a tragedy threatening civilisation which has not yet fully crossed the threshold into consciousness. Feeling escapes sideways into fantasy, game and pose.

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— Germain Bazin, The Baroque: Principles, Styles, Modes, Themes, p. 210

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This is remarkably close to an incipient psychology of Romanticism. The strange landscape, theatrical fiction, grotesque figure and half-dreaming chamber can be understood not merely as decorative excess but as signs of an interior world beginning to press against the harder boundaries of the Classical self.  Bazin’s description of Salvator Rosa—crags, ravines, dramatic light, bandits, witches and hermits—already points towards the Romantic picturesque  (Bazin, 1978, p. 210).

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Rococo pushes aspects of this world towards intimacy, pleasure, fantasy, elegance and apparent frivolity. Classical severity does not disappear, however; it remains available as a counter-current. The eventual Neoclassical reaction to Baroque and Rococo excess therefore feels less like the invention of a new language than the emphatic return of an old one.

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It is, once again, an emphatic return of the Classical hero.

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Neoclassicism — Heroic Severity

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Developments in visual art and literature now proceed in strikingly parallel ways. The heroic survives with extraordinary explicitness in eighteenth-century Neoclassicism, but its flamboyance is disciplined. Jacques-Louis David’s paintings place self-sacrifice, public duty, stoic austerity and civic virtue at their centre. The Oath of the Horatii, The Death of Socrates and Leonidas at Thermopylae ask the spectator to confront human beings who subordinate convenience, pleasure and even survival to an exemplary principle.

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Hugh Honour, writing in Penguin’s exemplary Style and Civilization series, describes the tone of Neoclassicism in terms particularly useful here:

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“David extols an heroic world of simple, uncomplicated passions and blunt, uncompromising truths.”

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— Hugh Honour, Neo-classicism, p. 34

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Elsewhere, he observes that “artists and patrons prefer those which illustrate grandeur of soul, heroic deeds, simple, powerful passions” (p. 66).

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This is the hero not primarily as colourful adventurer but as exemplar. David’s Socrates or Leonidas occupies an imagined extremity of conviction: this is what a person might do if duty, courage or belief were pushed to their limit.

Whether one agrees with the values embodied is a different question from recognising what the image asks of us. It asks us to contemplate somebody who goes further than ordinary convenience would permit.

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The political consequences of this exemplary mode are necessarily ambiguous. Civic virtue can slide into nationalism; patriotic self-sacrifice can become militarism. But that ambiguity does not abolish the exemplary function. It reveals its power.

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It would be too simple to suggest that Neoclassical heroism was produced by war: David’s Oath of the Horatii and Death of Socrates both precede the French Revolution. Yet their language of sacrifice, stoic resolution and civic duty found an extraordinarily charged setting in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic age. David’s own career makes the progression unusually visible. The exemplary heroes of antiquity give way first to the heroes and martyrs of Revolution and finally to Napoleon himself, monumentalised as commander and almost providential leader. War did not create the Neoclassical hero, but it provided this already heroic visual language with a powerful contemporary arena.

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Romanticism and the Antiheroic Image of the Self — Extravagance, Inwardness, Escapism and Revolt

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Romanticism creates one of the decisive alterations in the history of the exemplary individual. Hugh Honour characterises its assertion of independence particularly well:

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“Romantics were claiming the right to go their own way unhelped and unhindered—in order to develop their individual sensibilities and express their innermost feelings without regard to, and often in defiance of, theoretical values and social conventions.”

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— Hugh Honour, Romanticism, p. 245

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The hero is no longer required to embody the accepted values of the polis. Indeed, heroism may now consist precisely in estrangement from prevailing values. The solitary artist, rebel, exile, wanderer and misunderstood visionary become possible heroic types.

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The French Revolution helps transform the political imagination, while the Sublime enlarges the experiential horizon. Mountains, storms, abysses and ruined civilisations become outward correlatives for the increasingly gigantic interior world. The Romantic artist does not simply depict extremity; he becomes a traveller towards the limits of experience.

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At one outer edge of this Romantic inheritance stood Thomas Carlyle, who sought to fuse inwardness, transcendence and individual greatness with more Classical and civic ideals of exemplary action. His hero-worship found a close contemporary parallel in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s celebration of ‘representative men’, while his emphasis upon exceptional individuals anticipates themes that would later reappear, in a very different and more critical form, in Nietzsche.

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Carlyle subsequently constructed an almost impossibly emphatic theory of exemplary individuals in his 1840 lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. His claim that history could fundamentally be explained through Great Men is difficult to accept as historical method.

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“I mean to shew that ‘Hero-worship never ceases,’ that it is at bottom the main or only kind of worship.”

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— Thomas Carlyle, letter to John A. Carlyle, 2 March 1840, Collected Letters, vol. 12, p. 67.

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“The Hero is he who lives in the inward sphere of things, in the True, Divine and Eternal, which exists always, unseen to most, under the Temporary, Trivial …”

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— Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Lecture V, “The Hero as Man of Letters,” p. 150

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Yet another of his pronouncements is considerably harder to dismiss:

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“Hero-worship exists forever, and everywhere.”

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— Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Lecture VI, “The Hero as King,” p. 196

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There is a sense in which Carlyle’s hero-worship can be read as a reaction against the more self-defeating possibilities of Romantic inwardness. The Romantic individual may become so absorbed in feeling, alienation and estrangement that the heroic journey ceases to move outward at all. There is consequently an ambiguity within the Romantic hero. Intense individuality can make the figure heroic, but the same alienation may make him neurotic, escapist, self-destructive, morally ambiguous or hostile to the world he occupies. The Byronic hero is both enlargement and fracture.

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The Antihero — The Admission of Human Frailty

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It is within this Romantic inheritance that we begin to encounter a more conspicuous fascination with defeat, ineffectuality and escapism—not simply as failures of heroism, but as experiences capable of occupying the centre of the work themselves.

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Byron embodies the contradictory type almost too perfectly. Childe Harold is marked by exhaustion, estrangement and self-disgust:

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“And Vice, that digs her own voluptuous tomb,
Had buried long his hopes, no more to rise:
Pleasure’s pall’d victim! life-abhorring gloom
Wrote on his faded brow curst Cain’s unresting doom.”

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— Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto I, stanza LXXXIII

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Here the extraordinary individual no longer needs simply to overcome the world. He may be partly at war with himself.

Goethe’s Werther gives private feeling similar magnitude. His anguish becomes the principal event:

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“all my active energies have been cast down into restless listlessness, and I can neither be idle nor accomplish anything.”

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— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, trans. Michael Hulse, 22 August, p. 67

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Neither Werther nor Byron’s protagonists are antiheroes in precisely the later twentieth-century sense, but both belong to the transformation which makes the antihero possible. The exceptional individual no longer needs to conquer Troy.

Realism intensifies the process by removing much of the mythic licence traditionally granted to heroes. Human beings are compromised by money, marriage, sex, class, cowardice, boredom, illness, social expectation and their own ridiculousness. As literature becomes increasingly fascinated by ordinary consciousness, the uncomplicated heroic figure becomes difficult to sustain without qualification.

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The antihero is born from this difficulty.

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But the antihero may not be the negation of the hero. He may be what happens when the hero survives realism. He has lost the perfect body, uncomplicated motive and convenient divine ancestry, but narrative still follows him because the ancient question has not vanished:

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What will this person do with the fact of being himself?

 

The Brave New World of the Modernist Hero

 

Modernism appears at first to complete the destruction. Coherent narrative fractures. Perspective multiplies. Certainty about the self becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. The protagonist may be ordinary, alienated, passive or almost impossible to distinguish from the surrounding flow of consciousness.

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The First World War also became an enormous catalyst for tendencies that were already developing, particularly within the successive waves of Modernism in visual art. The unprecedented mechanisation of destruction appeared to shatter not simply lives and nations but assumptions about civilisation itself. Empires collapsed; an older European world of rattling hooves, inherited hierarchies and comparatively primitive industrial technologies seemed abruptly to recede into the past.

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T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1922, is perhaps one of the most vivid allegorical attempts to register something of the collective consciousness immediately after that rupture. Its fragments of literature, religion, conversation and cultural memory inhabit a civilisation which still possesses the remains of its inherited structures but no longer seems entirely able to inhabit them with confidence.

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And then Joyce performs a peculiar resurrection in Ulysses, a work whose closing inscription is itself strangely evocative of the unsettled European world through which it was made:

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“Trieste—Zurich—Paris, 1914–1921.”

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— James Joyce, Ulysses, Episode 18, concluding inscription p. 644

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Leopold Bloom is Odysseus.

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Even within the novel, Bloom is glimpsed as something faintly more than his apparently ordinary circumstances suggest:

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“He's a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He's not one of

your common or garden ... you know ... There's a touch of the artist about

old Bloom.”

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— James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Episode 10, lines 581–583 p. 193

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The ordinary movements of Ulysses take place inside an ancient heroic architecture. Bloom’s day is absurdly small beside the wanderings of Odysseus, and yet the disparity is precisely the point. The enormous myth and the ordinary man occupy the same imaginative space.

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This is a crucial transformation. Once the psychologically plausible modern individual can no longer comfortably resemble Achilles, Achilles and Odysseus can become invisible scaffolding. The hero survives after the heroic surface has disappeared.

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The heroic also returns in a harder register. Hemingway’s famous formulation condenses the modernist ethic:

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“But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

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— Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, p. 103

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The hero is no longer magically protected by divine ancestry. Strength consists in facing a world without guarantees.

 

Even Eliot’s ruined modern landscape retains a strangely heroic act of salvage:

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“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

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— T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, V, “What the Thunder Said,”

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The modern hero may therefore survive less by triumphing over the world than by preserving some coherent remnant of the self within it.

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Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World carries this crisis of heroic value into dystopia. John the Savage attempts to defend ideas of nobility, suffering, individuality and spiritual seriousness against a civilisation which has systematically removed the conditions in which such values might arise. His resistance ends not in heroic victory but in psychological collapse and, ultimately, self-destruction. The novel thereby stages, in deliberately dramatic form, the possible annihilation of heroic value itself—not as a moral recommendation, but as a warning about what may be lost when comfort, efficiency and social stability become absolute ends.

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Mustapha Mond states the principle of that world with chilling clarity:

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"Civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being heroic."

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— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, ch. XVII, pp. 194–195

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Postmodern Nihilism — Relativism and Suspicion

Throughout the developments of Modernism, and more broadly from the Enlightenment and the critical spirit surrounding the French Revolution onwards, habits of scepticism and analysis gathered force, eventually extending into the realms of structuralism, poststructuralism and deconstruction.

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A line of thought beginning with Cartesianism is relevant here. The separation of thinking subject from extended world, and the corresponding primacy accorded to thought, can encourage a detachment of observer from observed, thought from feeling, and mind from embodied experience. What might previously have been experienced as deeply rooted in the body, history or inherited structure can consequently be reconfigured as representation, convention or programming.

Taken far enough, such a position can suggest that thought and symbolic representation constitute almost everything that human beings are: that identity itself is, to a remarkable degree, programmable.

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At its most radical, this way of thinking can lead to suspicion of many structures formerly regarded as stable or natural: hierarchy, merit, behaviour, gender, identity and even the idea of objective excellence. Such scepticism can be gathered under the familiar Postmodern phrase “incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard, 1984, p. xxiv), or suspicion of grand narratives. The ideas of exalted merit, genius, virtuosity and heroism can all fall into the same category of phenomena to be regarded with suspicion.

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In contemporary argument, this broader cluster of relativism, social construction, suspicion of hierarchy and analysis of power is sometimes collectively described—often rather loosely—as Marxist. The description is not entirely baseless, since Marxist thought contributed profoundly to the analysis of class, ideology, material conditions and the social production of apparently natural distinctions. Yet the genealogy is more mixed than the label suggests: structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and other traditions also feed into it, while Marx himself was hardly a relativist in the simple sense. The modern use of ‘Marxism’ can therefore function as a convenient umbrella term for a much wider family of critical attitudes.

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Such criticality unquestionably has its merits. It is conceivably better to arrive at convictions not merely through suggestion, authority or inherited convention, but through direct experience, scrutiny and independent verification.

Yet if this impulse is itself fuelled by petty resentment, false iconoclasm or the desire merely to overturn what has previously been admired, its result can become nihilistic. The hero, the genius and the virtuoso may then become associated almost automatically with elitism, oppression, chauvinism or exclusion, and met with little more than eye-rolling or sneering.

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This attitude belongs to the wider suspicion of grand narratives and, followed to one of its possible conclusions, may imply that there is no entirely stable self beneath the various symbolic representations through which identity is constructed. A blasé, ironic and falsely iconoclastic impulse can emerge alongside this: one which appears to distrust not merely particular heroes, but idealism, Classical heroism, mastery and even the aspiration towards skill itself.

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There is also a familiar cultural caricature here: the idea that certain people simply “cannot identify with anything after the seventeenth century.” The phrase is obviously imprecise, but it captures a recognisable divide between those instinctively attached to older conceptions of merit, human nature and value, and those more at home in the sceptical, analytic, and relativising traditions that followed. It is too broad to describe people neatly, and there are innumerable overlaps, but as a cultural meme it points towards a real tension in modern attitudes.

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Postmodern fiction consequently becomes filled with protagonists who lose the plot in a more literal sense. Paul Auster’s characters wander through cities and identities which seem to dissolve beneath them. Vonnegut presents human beings as the playthings of enormous historical forces. DeLillo’s worlds are saturated by images and systems which make the distinction between authentic self and cultural representation increasingly unstable.

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“There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.”

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— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, Chapter 8, p. 164 

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“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura.”

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— Don DeLillo, White Noise, Chapter 3, p. 12

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“New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps ... it always left him with the feeling of being lost.  Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well.”

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— Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy, “City of Glass,” pp. 3–4

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The heroic project—to make a meaningful self acting purposefully through the world—has become questionable.

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Postmodern Susceptibility to Heroism

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The same people who greet virtuosity, notions of heroism and the like with rolling eyes and suspicion may nevertheless act in ways which contradict that first stance. Virtuosity may be treated as elitist; mastery as authoritarian; greatness as a category constructed by privilege. Yet these attitudes frequently coexist with behaviour suggesting that admiration has proved considerably harder to abolish.

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People who profess incredulity towards greatness—and, more broadly, an “incredulity toward metanarratives”—still queue to see Leonardo. They listen in silence to an extraordinary singer. They watch athletes perform things their own bodies cannot perform.

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They cry at adventure films.

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They may become moved by the story, for example, of a tiny doggy entering a burning house to save its master. This doggy may not have Thomas Carlyle as its bedtime reading, and it may not keep a copy of the Odyssey beside its basket, but the act resonates unmistakably with the ancient patterns of heroism.

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The culture may consequently maintain a curious compromise. The heroic deed is retained, but the word heroic is provisionally placed inside inverted commas. Irony becomes a permission mechanism through which admiration can survive suspicion.​​