My Sisyphean Ordeal

“To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them” – Albert Camus.

by Kudakwashe Kanhutu

In which I relate the exact nature of my fear that the next person may know more than me. 

The word Sisyphean refers to any interminable labour where success is never attained. Life – insofar as it always tends to end in death – is Sisyphean, but we are not going to get that philosophical in our discussion today. The Greek myth of Sisyphus holds that King Sisyphus of Corinth was punished by the gods “for his self-aggrandizing craftiness and deceitfulness by being forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, repeating this action for eternity.” King Sisyphus’s deceitfulness had even begun to affect those he had never met. For example, when he was sentenced by the gods to detention in the underworld by Thanatos – the messenger of death – he tricked and chained Thanatos instead. With the messenger of death so indisposed, the result on earth was that no one would die and, with no one dying when struck, wars became difficult to win. A hue and cry was raised, and Zeus devised what can be, correctly, termed poetic justice:  “as a punishment for his trickery, King Sisyphus was made to endlessly roll a huge boulder up a steep hill. The maddening nature of the punishment was reserved for King Sisyphus due to his hubristic belief that his cleverness surpassed that of Zeus himself. Zeus accordingly displayed his own cleverness by enchanting the boulder into rolling away from King Sisyphus before he reached the top which ended up consigning Sisyphus to an eternity of useless efforts and unending frustration. Thus it came to pass that pointless or interminable activities are sometimes described as Sisyphean.” 

I have found this to be the exact nature of any determined quest for knowledge – any determined quest for anything! Forget not that just last week when I finished reading Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece – Don Quixote: The Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha – I proudly announced that I had finished my quest to read all of the world’s classic works of note. Yet despite this announcement, I have just picked up Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, this, as a consequence of having recently visited Italy. But herein lies the rub, you can’t read The Divine Comedy without having first read Virgil’s The Aeneid, so I have had to put Dante aside and have to read Virgil’s Epic Poem instead. Can you picture my boulder rolling down before it reaches the top? 

My calling demands that I be conversant with all these classic works as the people I debate with, have a tendency of mentioning them in passing to illustrate a point in the debate. I was at a nuclear deterrence discussion once, when someone casually remarked that, “we run the risk, like Don Quixote, of mistaking windmills for giants, to ever be engaged with in mortal combat.” I didn’t know who the hell Don Quixote was or why he would mistake windmills for giants. I do now. I had also had to read some of these works for my Classics degree, but as will become evident below, reading to understand a work and reading to pass an exam are ever so different. A further point is that one of my hobbies is travel and, I have made reading the best classic works to come out of each country I am about to visit, part of my preparations for the visit. The more countries I visit, the more I am forced to read even more classic works. So, all these streams have met where I stand and conspired to make my quest for knowledge quite the Sisyphean ordeal. 

What you see before you now, is me having to read two more classic works in quick succession, this time from Italy. I visited Rome recently and beheld the Tiber River, walked along its banks and dipped my hand in its cool waters. This river has been a witness to history and has been invoked by poets and singers since time immemorial. It even has a nickname, they call it Flavus (The Blond). Standing before this river made me realise that I didn't know anything about this epic river. It made me remember that I had only given Virgil’s The Aeneid a very cursory read, you see, Virgil does mention and praises the Tiber River throughout his Epic Poem. I just did not know what importance the people of this land had attached to the Tiber River through the ages. 

When I read The Aeneid for my Classics exams, I only read enough to be able to build a case that Virgil’s Epic Poem closely follows the conventions set by Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey. Such a reading does not require you to understand the story, it only needs you to pick up a few cues. Here, I will not bore you much with the details of literary study’s terms and conventions. There is something called intertextuality, whereby authors borrow from each other in telling their stories. This intertextuality is also the reason why I find myself having to properly read Virgil’s The Aeneid before I can proceed to Dante’s The Divine Comedy. My attempt to ignore The Aeneid and just read The Divine Comedy utterly failed when I opened the first page of The Divine Comedy. In the first Canto, Dante meets Virgil – and is full of praise for him – as Virgil, who died before him, becomes his guide in the underworld. There are so many references to Virgil by Dante in the first few pages that it became futile for me to try to understand The Divine Comedy without having read The Aeneid first.  

Now, I am going to Russia very soon, who knows the number of classic works from that part of the world I will be forced to read by my fear that the next person there may know more than me? In addition to all that, I must keep abreast with permutations in the contemporary world of war and diplomacy.

What Use Intertextuality for Strategy?

"Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular" - Aristotle. 

I travelled to Greece to acquaint myself with the culture that has informed strategic thought.

by Kudakwashe Kanhutu

I was walking in the City of London with a brilliant mathematician friend who is employed in the top end of the banking sector. The reason why I mention his profession and disposition is to place a contrast between him - a man trained in the exact sciences - and myself; someone trained in the expansive, indeterminate and indeterminable field of strategy. We were talking about Homer's epic poem: The Iliad. My mathematician friend, brilliant as he is, assumed that The Iliad was an actual account of actual events that took place in antiquity. Therefore, he did not take it well when I told him that it was all a fiction. 

For my training in Classics, we had to look beyond the text to context, intertextuality, intention, and the question of authorship so as to have a deeper understanding of the texts we were handling. To take just one aspect as example, intertextuality; this refers to how different texts can refer to each other as part of their story telling. Indeed it was on this count of intertextuality that I inadvertently disappointed my mathematician friend with the revelation that Homer's works are fiction.

On the route to Delphi to see some of the places the literature says events took place.

Homer recounts the tales of heroes who fought a 10 year battle at Troy over a beautiful woman, Helen, who had been seduced by the Trojan Prince, Paris. At the end of this battle, the heroes return home to different fates. Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus has the famous passage on Helen which opens with the iconic words "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships..." Another great author of antiquity, Virgil, uses the ending of the Iliad as a starting point for his work, The Aeneid. He took the story in the Iliad to be true and then invented his own hero, who survived the siege by Greek heroes and escaped to start the Latin civilization. This is one aspect of how intertextuality works, but this is not the aspect I discussed with my friend on our walk in the City of London.

At Delphi. The centre of the Classical world.

Because after my study of the Classics, I was made to turn to international relations as an enhancement of my grasp of strategy in the contemporary world, I had yet come across another form of intertextuality. This type of intertextuality does not take a written text as gospel truth but contends against the other author's assertions. When I turned to international relations, my bedside book was by another great Greek author, Thucydides, and the book is The History of the Peloponnesian War. It was in this book that I first heard Homer contradicted and it surprised me. Homer wrote that the reason why King Agamemnon, the brother-in-law to Helen, managed to raise a great army to pursue the Trojans when they ran away with Helen, was because there was a pact made by every suitor for Helen that even though they had failed to win her hand in marriage; they would come to the aid of whoever became her husband should the need ever arise. An iron clad pledge to defend the honour of Greece's most beautiful woman. Thucydides objects to this, he openly says Homer was wrong to think that the reason why all those thousands of men joined Agamemnon was because of this pledge, instead Thucydides avers that it was because of Agamemnon's power that they followed him. Thucydides is thereby arguing that men were not moved to confront danger because of some high minded pledge, but by fear of the consequences of refusing to aid the most powerful King in Greece at the time.

After 3 years studying the Classics, I was forced to study IR to remain relevant to contemporary strategy.

Of course Thucydides would say this, he is known as the foremost forbearer of realist thought in international relations - realist thought in international relations assumes that power is the only force that all humans respond to. So, I was saying to my friend that "how conceited can you be, that someone wrote his work of fiction from scratch and it became a classic, then you come, some 4 centuries later and claim that that someone was wrong in saying why such and such a thing happened? But sir, you were not there and furthermore, this story is fiction, so however the author said it happened is exactly how it happened!" I thought my friend would commend me for being hawk-eyed and picking up on this, but instead he censured me for ruining what had all along been, for him, a beautiful tale of heroism in ancient Greece. I am now closer to the point I want to make in this paper.

The broader question I should have asked is what use a knowledge of Classics for Strategy? A knowledge of history, economics, mathematics, biology, agriculture, law and warfare? What use all these branches of knowledge for the strategist? The answer to that can be revealed if we take intertextuality to be a metaphor of the inevitable interconnection of everything. Nothing in this world is free standing, if you think something is unconnected to anything else that is only because you have not thought long enough about the interconnection. All those branches of knowledge I enumerated above intersect in interesting ways at the point that the strategist is standing. The more branches he is acquainted with, the more choices at the strategist's disposal. Let me make my answer emphatic by returning to the subject of my article; intertextuality. 

"The term Intertextuality, popularized especially by Julia Kristeva, is used to signify the multiple ways in which any one literary is in fact made up of other texts, by means of its open or covert citations and allusions, its repetitions and transformations of the formal and substantive features of earlier texts, or simply its unavoidable participation in the common stock of linguistic and literary conventions and procedures that are 'always-ready' in place and constitute the discourses into which we are born. In Kristeva's formulation, accordingly, any text is in fact an 'intertext' - the site of an intersection of numberless other texts, and existing only through its relations to other texts."* 

A man trained to understand that even the texts we think are very original are not original if you take a closer look; trained to understand that there are structures already in place which the text either follows or attempts to subvert; trained to know that if you look wide enough you will see how everything intersects, is a man forearmed to excel in strategy. In any case, silo-thinking has been largely discarded in the 21st Century. So, What Use Intertextuality For Strategy? 

I will tell you. Knowing that everything is interconnected makes one seek the interconnection. Seeking the interconnections increases one's stock of knowledge while at the same time giving him a knowledge of how problems of the past have been solved. Machiavelli captures the essence of what I am attempting to say. He said "Everyone who wants to know what will happen ought to examine what has happened: everything in this world in any epoch has their replicas in antiquity." The strategist in the contemporary world who knows the interconnection of all things must, in turn, be formidable. 

 Notes

 *M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009), p. 364.