I don’t remember how Elizabeth Hardwick’s Bartleby in Manhattan, came into my life. And, regrettably, I don’t remember much about the essays within – except for one: Hardwick’s essay about Simone Weil.

In my memory (over the years, the book was lost), Hardwick focuses her attention on one extraordinary work: Weil’s interpretation of the Iliad as a “poem of force”.

There was a tantalizing quote from Weil in Hardwick’s piece, surrounded by a sea of praise and a remembrance of the shock-of-the-new moment (in the 1940’s, I believe) when Weil’s work reached Hardwick and her friends in New York.

That small sample of translated material, and Hardwick’s elegant explanation of its significance, lit a spark, a strong desire to seek out the source material and read Weil for myself.

In those pre-Amazon, pre-ubiquitous Internet access days, this involved a trip to the library, a search through card catalogs, a gathering of book titles and publisher info and a visit to a small bookstore to order a copy.

When I finally had a chance to read the entire Iliad essay, I understood what had stunned Hardwick into admiration so many decades before.

Weil begins:

The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.

For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very centre of human history, the Iliad is the purest and loveliest of mirrors.

To define force – it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody at all; this is a spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us:

…the horse
Rattled the empty chariots through the files of battle,
Longing for their noble drivers. But they on the ground
Lay, dearer to the vultures than to their wives.

The hero becomes a thing dragged behind a chariot in the dust:

All around, his black hair
Was spread; in the dust his whole head lay,
That once-charming head; now Zeus had let his
enemies
Defile it on his native soil.

I first read these words while sitting in a park outside of the University of Pennsylvania’s Van Pelt Library. It was a pleasant summer night, not too hot or humid; the daylight was just beginning to fade as I waited for friends to meet me.
There was a sort of vibration, a stream of intellectual excitement swirling around my mind as I glided through this work. The insight was so fundamental and so elegant: what is force? The ability to turn something, a person, into nothing, a corpse or, perhaps even worse, a living corpse, a something paralyzed by the fear of becoming nothing into immobility, or at best a narrowing of thought and action from a universe of possibilities into the harsh necessities required for survival.

Wasn’t this the ultimate objective of chattel slavery in the US and later, Jim Crow? The threat of force used to turn (or try to turn) a population of millions into things? Wasn’t this the core of Stalinist purgings and indeed, of the 20th century’s central act of destruction, the holocaust?

Weil seemed to capture the heart of the Iliad – which I could never read in quite the same way again – but also, as was clearly her ambition, the existential properties of violence.