Harrumphing Hellenes and house-hunters: Troilus and Cressida

Me, shouting from upstairs to my wife in the kitchen: “Because African leopards are going extinct! Because facts are going extinct! Because, because…bullshit!”

Thersites, railing against Patroclus: “The common curse of mankind, folly and ignorance, be thine in great revenue!” (2.3.23-24).

Me, venting into the iPhone: “What’s the point? What’s the point? Money is a fetish. Things fall apart. Entropy. We’re all gonna die!”

Thersites, still railing against Patroclus: “Thou idle immaterial skein of sleave-silk, thou green sarsenet flap for a sore eye, thou tassel of a prodigal’s purse, thou! Ah, how the poor world is pestered with such waterflies! Diminutives of nature.” (5.1.25-28)

Me, rage-whispering to my wife during a tour: “The extra room for a yoga studio? Ludicrous! Absurd! Stupid!” I extended my arms in a broad sweep and looked up, as if indicating the universe, the totality of all that is and ever was. “It’s all stupid!” 

Thersites, quarreling with Ajax: “The plague of Greece upon thee, thou mongrel beef-witted lord!” (2.1.11-12).

If you haven’t guessed already, my wife and I have been house-hunting. Which is to say my wife has been house-hunting, and I’ve been coming to terms with it. Slowly. Bitterly. And with a philosophical vehemence I can’t help but recognize in Thersites, a Greek soldier who lambastes his fellow fighters with his crass-tongued cynicism in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.

***

Troilus and Cressida is a challenging play. Indeed, some scholars have actually called it one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays.” These – including All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, as well as Timon of Athens and The Merchant of Venice on some lists – are part-comic and part-tragic, leaving the reader without any real sense of thematic resolution at their close. In other words, as I said when I finished the play, “What the hell was that?”

The play takes place during the Trojan War. Troilus is madly in love with a fellow Trojan, Cressida, who gets traded to the Greeks in exchange for a captured soldier. The two pledge their fidelity to each other when she’s handed over, but, after later eavesdropping on her in the Greek camp, Troilus comes to believe Cressida has taken a new lover.

Aside: It’s not exactly clear what she does, but let’s be clear: 1) Cressida’s in enemy territory, so flirtatious appeasement may be a form of self-defense; 2) she was bartered by men like some object, so why should she keep any pledge? and 3) after they have sex, Troilus pulls away, just as she feared, like a dude who sneaks out of a girl’s apartment, leaving no note or number, before she wakes up on Saturday after a magical night on the town, in spite of all his talk about wanting “a deep and meaningful connection.” So, deal with it, Troilus.

But most of the action centers on the Greeks trying to get a too-proud Achilles out of his tent to fight, featuring to this end some very long, dense, and elaborate speeches from Ulysses about hierarchy and social order. (I jotted, brilliantly, in my margins at one point: “Difficult speeches.”) Ulysses tries to goad Achilles to action by glorifying the ox-dumb Ajax, but it’s the death of Patroclus, his comrade and likely lover, that spurs him back onto the field, where he kills, ignobly, the great Trojan warrior, Hector. The Trojans learn of their devastating loss, Troilus rallies to avenge Cressida’s apparent betrayal with Greek blood, and the play ends. Opaquely, like some modern novel or film.

And throughout all this, we have Thersites issuing his unsolicited criticisms like a snarling Greek chorus.

***

Thersites and I have a lot of differences, of course. For one thing, he’s a soldier in the ninth year of the Trojan War. I’m just pushing back against home ownership. (No easy marriage jokes here: I’ve only been married for two years. Rimshot. Dublin’s housing market is like a battlefield, however.) For another, Thersites vents his vexation through many more personal insults than I do, although my wife would surely disagree.

And yet the harrumphing Hellene and I do have a lot in common. We both speak our mind, even when we should bite our tongues. We both approach situations with negativity and pessimism. And neither of us is an immediate actor in the plot. Thersites doesn’t take up his sword in the fray, only his snark from the peanut gallery. I’m not finding the properties, setting up viewings, talking to agents, or calculating expenses. I need a coffee and a sweet just to lure me to a viewing.

But whenever my wife texts me a link to a property online or phones me up to say a new viewing window of a house has opened, I leap immediately to a strange and volatile mix of cynicism and alarmism about the world.

But where I feel most kindred to Thersites is the nature of our objections. Our complaints, ultimately, take a broader, more universal view. Thersites exposes the deeper follies of the Greek model of heroism and masculinity. I lay bare the delusions of bourgeois materialism, of capitalist teleology.

OK, these are very generous readings of our general petulance.

See, I don’t object to homeownership as a matter of cost or  on the grounds of middle-aged striving and settling. But whenever my wife texts me a link to a property online or phones me up to say a new viewing window of a house has opened, I leap immediately to aa strange and volatile mix of cynicism and alarmism about the world – about climate change, about our slaughter of wildlife, about our political and social failure to address poverty and oppression and inequality, about the burden of things, about the transience of all things, about mortality, about man’s puny place in the cosmos.

Why buy a house? I think. Our renovations are only going to add carbon to the atmosphere in one way or another. Why buy a house? Donald Trump won the presidency – we must do all we can to fight back! Why buy a house? You know, one day the sun will burn out. I’m not claiming it’s logical, but in my strange Buddhist social justice nihilism, buying a house makes me exclaim, like Thersites: “Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery! Nothing else holds fashion” (5.2.193-94).

***

Of course, there are two sides to the conversation.

Me: “The extra room for a yoga studio? Ludicrous. Absurd. Stupid.”

My wife, exasperated: “You’re being an asshole. Good Lord, let a woman daydream.”

Me: “Because African leopards are going extinct! Because facts are going extinct! Because, because…bullshit!”

My wife, shouting back: “You act like your life is so hard. You get to spend your days doing something you’re passionate about. If you care so much about leopards, do something about it.”

It’s easier to hide behind ontological abstractions and ethical high-horses, I admitted to myself.

Me: “What’s the point? What’s the point? Money is a fetish. Things fall apart. Entropy. We’re all gonna die!”

My wife, explaining herself for the final time: “Because I work really freakin’ hard and just want a place I can come home to at the end of the day and feel like myself.”

It sinks in. Slowly. Bitterly. “I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. You deserve that.”

“Then why do you act like the world’s on fire?”

“Because homeownership is just so…adult.”

It’s easier to hide behind ontological abstractions and ethical high-horses, I admitted to myself.

“I do like your ideas about herringbone tiles in the kitchen,” I continued. “And the place does have lovely old sash windows.”

I was met with a suspicious silence.

***

There were two sides to Thersites’ conversations, too. After Hector surprises Thersites on the battlefield, he asks whether he should kill him: “What are thou, Greek? Art thou for Hector’s match? Art thou of blood and honour?”

Thersites: “No, no, I am a rascal, a scurvy railing knave, a very filthy rogue.”

Hector: “I do believe thee: live.”

Thersites: “God-a-mercy, that thou wilt believe me – [Exit Hector] but a plague break thy neck for frighting me.” (5.4.22-28)