Kayla Pollio, Period 7, 2/7/2024

Kayla Pollio, Period 7, 2/6/24
Modern Mythology 2024
Literature Circle

I’m currently reading The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. I am roughly halfway done with the book at this point. Before I started reading, I didn’t know much about Patroclus, but I was all too familiar with how Achilles meets his end. I knew the end of the book before it began, and that it would be tragic.

Now, I'm only halfway through The Song of Achilles—they’ve only just announced the Trojan War and have started traveling there. But even before the main conflict was introduced, almost every scene has had some element of foreshadowing—there have been multiple ominous warnings from other characters that Achilles will become unrecognizable when he goes to war; that he will turn into nothing more than a weapon and a killer: “You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature,” as Odysseus tells Patroclus (Miller, 2011, p. 207). And Thetis already informed us of the prophecy saying that Achilles will die young in the Trojan War, but she also says that a man named Hector will die first, so Patroclus and Achilles are planning to make sure Hector lives as long as possible to delay their destiny. But the readers already know that there is no point to this—if there’s one resounding theme in almost every Greek story, it’s that nobody can cheat their fate, not even the gods themselves.

But what if you read the book without knowing all this? There is a critical theory called practical criticism: it is when you read a text without considering the context in which it was written. You do not consider any information about the author or the time period or anything—you enter the book “blind”, so to speak. If we apply this theory to The Song of Achilles—if we forget what we know about Achilles and Patroclus and the Trojan War and just read it like it’s a present-day romance novel—how does it change? We know that the Greek story ends tragically, but if we read the book without this context, we won’t be expecting the ending—we likely wouldn’t even notice all the extra layers of symbolism and dramatic irony that the author is employing as we’re reading.

When my older sister Leila saw the Hadestown musical a few years ago, the day after she came home, she told me the entire plot, straight through to the end. I hadn’t heard the story of Orpheus and Eurydice prior to that, but I know now that its a popular myth, and most people enter the theater already knowing the ending. But they enter it anyway, because, as the song goes, “it's a sad tale, but we’re gonna sing it again.”

The Song of Achilles is another sad tale, but that doesn’t discourage us from getting invested in it. Although it makes us sad, it lifts us up at the same time. The tragic ending is a source of catharsis—whether we’re expecting and dreading it throughout the whole book, or if it shocks us at the last moment. And we choose to sing it again and again.