Kassandra

In the early days of the Trojan war, following an upsetting argument with her father, Priamos, king of Troy, over the use of lying to the public for the purpose of political expediency, Christa Wolf’s Kassandra has a dream for the first time in a while:

“It was that type of dream which I immediately considered important, and that, though I found difficult to understand, I did not forget. I walked, alone, through a city that I did not know. It was not Troy, though Troy was the only city I had ever seen. The city in my dream was larger, wider. I knew that it was nighttime, though the moon and the sun both stood in the sky, fighting over primacy. I was chosen by someone, though I didn’t know who, to be the deciding judge: which of the two heavenly bodies shone brighter. Something in this competition was wrong, but I didn’t know what, no matter how much I tried to figure it out. Until at last, dejected and heavy, I said that as everyone knows and can easily see, it is the sun which shines the brightest. Phoebus Apollo! cried a voice, triumphant, at the same time as, to my horror, Selene, the lovely goddess of the moon, flew, plaintive, down to the horizon. This was a judgement on myself, but how could I be guilty when I had only said what was the case.”

Having woken up, she recounts the dream to her ancilla Marpessa, who says “The important part of your dream, Kassandra, was the effort you made to give an answer to a question which was totally wrong.” This episode constitutes the most concrete example of an understanding of power which Christa Wolf develops throughout the novel; specifically, the way in which power operates in a proud but failing state.

More than anything else, Wolf’s Troy is characterized by a state of constant and growing paranoia due to their obvious military inferiority to the Greeks. The circumstances of the war are themselves dubious, though one is led to believe that it has something to do with the growing imperial ambitions of the Greeks, their desire for unfettered access to the Black Sea which the Trojans control by virtue of their geography. The Trojans are, by Kassandra’s account, a proud and cultured people with a long tradition, one which is at risk in the face of not only the overwhelming military superiority of the Greeks, but also their barbaric unscrupulousness. In the first days of the war, Kassandra witnesses the Achaeans break military convention such that they mow down with ease their more acculturated Trojan foes. And their greatest warrior, who is given the epithet “das Vieh”, meaning the livestock or the swine, is a warrior who is willing to do anything to secure the Greek victory and to hide his latent homosexuality, going so far as to sexually defile the corpse of Penthesilea. Christa Wolf is perhaps justified here considering that even in the victorious Greek’s rendering of the story in the Homeric epics, Achilles still commits one of the more heinous actions in the war, the dragging of Hector’s body around the walls of Troy by chariot. To think what those he offended would have to say about him, had they the chance! Still, one makes the accusation of barbarism with some reservation: their leader, the ruthless Agamemnon seems to suffer from erectile dysfunction, recalling Freud’s castration complex. And at several points in the novel, the Greek attitude to war is associated not with the past, but with the future, indeed the reader’s present. Undoubtedly, Wolf has the horrors of the 20th Century in mind.

It is against the backdrop of this onslaught that the quasi-Stasi-like figure of Eumelos is able to climb the ranks of Trojan society and install himself as one of the city’s most powerful men. We are told he is the son of an indigent nobody, and yet by the middle of the novel, he has gained the utter confidence of the failing King Priamos, and exercises unfettered command over Trojan affairs as head of what can best be described as the Trojan secret police. Though it is never explicitly said, the reader is led to believe that Eumelos is behind the entire war, having orchestrated the return of Paris and the kidnapping of Helen, meaning his power derives exactly from the state of emergency he himself has created.

What is most fascinating in Eumelos is the degree to which his name transcends his personhood and his body and enters the realm of pure principle. As Kassandra first learns that the Trojans do not actually hold Helen captive – that her capture was invented by Eumelos as a political ploy to instigate the war, she falls into an acute state of psychosis, shouting, “We are lost.” Considering this episode years later, she asks herself “Why did I scream, […] we are lost!, why not: Trojans, there is no Helen! I know why, I knew it then too: the Eumelos in me forbid it.” In other words, Eumelos has become for her a figure of self-censorship, what Kant called “self-imposed immaturity”. Even more significant is Kassandra’s last encounter with him on the day the Greeks bring the Trojan horse into the city:

“Eumelos. Before him I stood once more. Saw his face, which one forgets from time to time and which therefore endures. Expressionless. Iron. Unteachable. Even if he believed me – he would never oppose the Trojan people. Let himself be slaughtered. He would survive anyway. And the Greeks would also make use of him. Wherever we would come, he would already be there. And would continue to exist well beyond us.” In Eumelos we might see a strange amalgamation of Nietzsche’s last man, “ineradicable like the beetle,” and Cormac McCarthy’s figure of the Judge, who by his own account will “never die.” As a parallel of the Judge, Eumelos is the incarnation of the barbarism that, according to Walter Benjamin, necessarily accompanies man’s progress into culture. Christa Wolf doesn’t go as far as Benjamin, but she would agree that the statement at least applies to imperial culture. As an incarnation of the last man, he is also a coward, indecisive, “expressionless”. In the figure of Eumelos, we therefore see two constitutive moments of nihilism at once: on the one hand, the violence of arbitrary will, on the other, the indecisiveness which inherits from lack of an ordering principle. He is, as such, the harbinger of modernity, a representative of its dialectic, composed of domination and radical skepticism.

It is against the gradual onset of nihilism in her city – one in which, as Kassandra constantly laments, traditional Trojan values are forsaken in favor of politically expedient lies, all with the purpose of sustaining a martial apparatus – that Kassandra has her dream of the contest between sun and moon. It is a contest which parallels an important episode in the mythology of the years leading up to the Trojan war: Aphrodite, Hera and Athena ask Paris to choose which of the three is most beautiful. When Paris chooses Aphrodite, she promises him Helen’s hand in return. In Christa Wolf’s telling, this episode is dubious in so far as it may itself be another politically expedient lie to justify Paris’s brash actions. Whether Paris had the dream or not, the role of Helen is still problematized in the episode that immediately precedes Kassandra’s dream for it is then that she realizes that Helen is not actually living in Troy, though the Trojans continue to use her as a rallying cry for the war. Kassandra, distraught, thinks to herself, “It was time that we considered our tradition. But what did that even mean anymore? What did it consist of? Until I realized, in Helen, who we had invented, we could defend everything that we no longer had, everything that, the more it disappeared, the more we found ourselves forced to insist on its reality. So that in words, gestures, ceremonies and silence, a new Troy was created, a ghost-town, in which we might live and have our homes and feel content”. The vacuum left by the gradual erosion of Trojan culture is filled by a ruthless utilitarian pragmatism which, the ruling class believes, might give them a chance in the war. Of course, such a wretched subterfuge would be unbearable for the Trojan imagination, hence the figure of Helen who allows the Trojans to believe that the war is not about trade, but about beauty. Yet there lurks an abyss behind the specter of Helen, the horror of nothingness.

It is against the backdrop of such nihilism that Kassandra has her dream, a dream which seems to say something about a type of power structure that becomes possible as nihilism besets a culture: one in which authority can pose arbitrary questions to its subject, the effects of which are the creation of arbitrary – though politically advantageous – realities. That Kassandra’s dream does not include the offer of a reward, like Helen, is significant in so far as it reveals the illusory nature of all promises such power structures make. The most common being that of safety which, in the case of the Trojans, was temporary. Such a power structure is capable of endlessly reproducing itself not in spite of, but because the tradition upon which it predicates itself has disappeared and the reward which it offers is illusory. Kassandra’s dream is a warning about the mechanics of the lie which she is being asked to accept by her family and her society. Her decision to answer the nonsense question is a warning about just how easily she may also fall for the ruse. Marpessa’s response, that “The important part of your dream, Kassandra, was the effort you made to give an answer to a question which was totally wrong. You would do best to remember this when the time comes,” is not damning. For the time has not yet come and Kassandra is still not lost. Something within her is still resisting the lie. It would seem that it is precisely the thing within her which calls into question the validity of the question posed to her in the dream, which the question posed in the dream is itself trying to silence. That thing is the source of her dreams: her body.

Kassandra as she is remembered in the Greek mythological tradition is a figure who has the gift of truthfully telling the future, but is doomed never to be believed. Toward the end of the novel, as the character Kassandra comes to greater self-knowledge, she problematizes this account of her destiny, attributing it to a Greek metaphysical world-view which sees things in terms of either/or. She says, “I felt then that I had discovered that part of my body through which I could sense other realities entering into our world of solid bodies. […] For that which spoke from me, there is no name. I was its mouthpiece, though not willingly. It had to first grind me down before I could articulate what it wanted me to say. That I spoke ‘the truth’, and they did not want to hear me – that was what the enemy said. Not out of ill will, they just didn’t understand. For the Greeks, there is only truth or lies, right or wrong, victory or downfall, friend or foe, life or death. […] It is the other thing that they quash between their sharp distinctions, the third thing that they belief doesn’t even exist, that laughing living thing that is capable of bringing itself constantly out of itself, the unseparated, spirit in life, life in spirit.” It is this “other”, “third”, “laughing living thing”, this presence in the body which is the source of dreams and which calls into question the validity of the Eumelos-principle. It is not prophecy or fortune telling in the typical sense which constitutes Kassandra’s clairvoyance (Sehergabe). Rather, it is her attenuation to her body and to her dreams which constantly struggle against her attempts to integrate herself into a society based on a lie. The Troy in which she grew up, its traditions, have been replaced by a malignant sorcerer in the form of Eumelos who uses language disingenuously as fiat. He is able to do so because he is lying to a people who live in a state of denial at the prospect of their impending eradication.

Kassandra’s predicament would reek of pessimism, and indeed recall certain cynical caricatures of 20th Century critical theory, were it not for one important detail: the Trojan state has fallen into this crisis not by virtue of some ineluctable law, but by the deliberate effort of Eumelos to seize power. In other words, nihilism is not necessarily the result of an adamantine historical law, but of deliberate political choices made by the citizens of Troy. Of course, Wolf is not an optimist either. There is a constant suggestion that the events of the Trojan war will unleash a chain reaction of violence. Kassandra calls into question the very notion of victory (Sieg), pointing out its bittersweet nature in so far as every victory for one is a downfall for another. Nowhere is this more poignantly portrayed than the ending of the novel when Aineas – the only man who Kassandra didn’t see succumb to Eumelos’s iron law of domination and necessity – implores Kassandra to spare herself and her children the grim death which awaits them in Mykene at the hands of Klytaimnestra, and to come with him to found a new Troy. Kassandra refuses to go with him, knowing that political reality will necessitate that Aineas become a “hero,” that is, a man like Achilles. Here one of the great ironies of the novel is resolved. For Aineas, the founder of Rome, is a peculiar choice of character for Christa Wolf to use to represent the possibility of redemption in men, who are otherwise portrayed as violent and blood-thirsty. Aineas, we are led to believe, was made so in his honest efforts to found a new Troy. The results, as Roman history shows, were unfortunately reeked of utilitarianism.

Still, Kassandra’s tale does not categorically preclude the possibility of other, non-totalitarian ways of life. As the war enters its final years, the city of Troy has become a shell of its former self, the courts are full of ghosts, Eumelos has lost his thirst for power, or has accomplished what he first set out to do. And yet, the walls of Troy are built such that they are impregnable. Under the auspices of such a stalemate, Kassandra takes refuge in the hills along with Anchises and Aineas, and many worshipers of an older Trojan deity, Kybele. On one night, Kassandra asks one of the worshippers of Kybele, Arisbe, “And nothing will ever change? Forever the eternal recurrence of the same? Self-alienation, idols and graven images, hate?”, to which Arisbe replies, “I do not know. But I know this: there are breaks in time [Zeitenlöcher]. This is one, here and now. We cannot merely let it pass by in vain.” Kassandra then thinks to herself, “Then, at last, I had a ‘we’”, which is to say that for the first time in her life, she felt she belonged somewhere, no longer the estranged problem child she had felt herself to be in Troy.

There are critics who have accused Wolf of kitsch, and if there are any sections in the novel which validate this criticism, they are to be found in these final pages where Kassandra lives in the caves of Mount Ida. Perhaps this is a failure on the author’s part, though perhaps it is also a failure on the modern imagination, an imagination which, one might argue, is captured by the Eumelos-principle. An imagination in which there is no possibility of a way out of history, where history is construed as an endless series of victory-downfalls, an endlessly self-reproducing apparatus of violence and bloodshed. In Arisbe’s concept of the break in time, I hear echoes of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the messianic which becomes a possibility only in those rare moments when the continuum of history is burst open. But one need not read Benjamin to understand what it is that Kassandra experiences in the caves: it is a world in which she does not live a lie, in which language is no longer merely a tool for political manipulation but serves as a means of revealing and disclosing one’s actual authentic self. The image of Helen, that rallying cry that distracted the Trojans from the destitution of their supposed culture, finds a parallel in the image of Kybele carved upon the cave walls where Kassandra is living. Arisbe tells Kassandra that the image of Kybele is a metaphor (Gleichnis) which, she believes, stands “for that, which we do not dare to recognize in ourselves”. Whereas the image of Helen is the site of an elision, the image of Kybele is the site of a revelation.

The image of Kybele is a constant admonition to be true to the body, to listen to it. The body as a site of resistance, in so far as it does not obey the mandates of authority, is under constant attack. It is in the body that hope is to be found, in a society that does not reject the body, does not produce the kind of bad faith that leads Kassandra early on to say “I did not yet know that loss of feeling is never a sign of progress, and indeed barely a help.” Feeling implies judgement, decisiveness: it is the body’s way of saying what it likes and doesn’t like. As such, it is a locus of resistance against the very nihilism which Eumelos represents. It is because of her capacity to feel, her connection to her body, that Kassandra is repeatedly thrown in jail, that she presents a danger to the state even against her own will. “Like everyone, my body gave me signs,” she says, “unlike most others, I was not able to ignore them.”

The picture of power that Kassandra’s dream gives us, as readers, is not one which is absolute. It is one which sees these forms of power as existing alongside other forms of knowledge. Within the novel, the other form which is offered is knowledge through experience, through the body. For Kassandra, language is not the problem. It is a tool that unjust power wields – alongside terror and surveillance – in order to effect its ends. And while Kassandra does problematize language, as well as the Western tradition which inherits from Rome, she also demonstrates that language contains the possibility of something besides those illegitimate forms of power which wave the banner of pragmatism and necessity. This other possibility is to be found through love, friendship and art. It is not that these things sit outside the political realm, but rather that they constitute the only legitimate danger, the only possible resistance, to the pattern of endless violence which has not ceased to reproduce itself since the murder of Iphigenia.

7 September 2026