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Epic or philosophic, homeric or heraclitean? The anonymous philosopher in Charles Frazier’sCold Mountain

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Abstract

1997’s surprise best-seller,Cold Mountain, is the first novel of North Carolina native and travel writer, Charles Frazier. Two ancient Greek authors shape and drive the novel, set in the post-war Southern Appalachians of 1865. Homer'sOdyssey frames the novel: the hero Inman undergoes epic adventures after the war, has his own Penelope waiting, and travels back to a land as remote as any island, Cold Mountain, North Carolina. But fragments of an anonymous philosopher who can be identified as Heraclitus alienate Inman from the Homeric world around him and determine his fate. Ada, his Penelope, also casts off her shroud of tradition: impatient with the ‘glorious war,’ no longer content to wait, Ada plunges into the new business of living. And just as the archaic, post-Homeric Greek world produced new ways of living and thought, as exemplified by Heraclitus, so too does the post-bellum world ofCold Mountain, as exemplified by Inman and Ada; their struggle, and the novel's tension, speak to and about all those caught between two worlds, epic and philosophic, whether driven by love or strife.

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References

  1. Charles Frazier,Cold Mountain (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997). For publication history, see John C. Inscoe, “Appalachian Odysseus: Love, War, and Best-Sellerdom in the Blue Ridge,”Appalachian Journal 25. 3 (1998): 330–37. Anthony Minghella's 2003 film adaptation of Charles Frazier'sCold Mountain has met, in equal measure, with good reviews and bad, and both sides have less to do with the dialogue, characters, and setting of the current film than with opinions of Minghella and his previous work. (See, for example, the nearly two hundred reviews available on-line from the site rottentomatoes.com, in which the adjectives of description range from “lyrical” to “disastrous.”) The best and most balanced review to date is that of A. O. Scott, “Lovers Striving for a Reunion, With a War in the Way,”New York Times, Thursday, December 25, 2003. Scott's review, while positive, echoes those reviews of the novel which emphasize the sentimental quality of the work to the exclusion of all else (see n. 3 below).

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  2. Apologies to my southern readers: I have used the more familiar term ‘Civil War,’ rather than the more accurate, ‘War Between the States.’

  3. See, for example, Inscoe's review, above, or that of James Polk,New York Times Book Review (July 13, 1997): 14.

  4. Clay Reynold,Atlantic Monthly, July 23, 1997.

  5. For a discussion of Frazier's “blunt and rustic” vocabulary, with its archaic cadence, see David Hassendort, “Closing the Distance to Cold Mountain,”The Southern Review, 36 (2000) 188–192; Alfred Kazin, “Cold Mountain: the long voyage home,”New York Review of Books (November 20, 1997) 12.

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  6. Polk, 14; Kazin, 12.

  7. Polk, 14, although I cannot agree with his qualifying statement that “too much can be made of the Homeric parallels,” for, as he also remarks, they “echo through the narrative.” See also Inscoe, 333.

  8. Bill McCarron and Paul Knoke, “Images of War and Peace: Parallelism and Antithesis in the Beginning and Ending of Cold Mountain,”The Mississippi Quarterly 52 (1999): 273–78.

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  9. Frazier, who was born in 1950, gained his Masters degree at Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina, and taught at the University of North Carolina until 1990.

  10. BookBrowse.com. The interviewer's name was not given.

  11. Frazier's other source of inspiration, aptly enought, was the oral history of family experience during the War Between the States, as transmitted to him by his father. Frazier's great granduncle, W.P. Inman, like Frazier's hero inCold Mountain, simply walked away from the war and began the long walk home to the North Carolina Mountains, a dangerous undertaking given the killers roaming the hills under the guise of a Home Guard. W.P. Inman, unlike his fictional namesake, made it home safely. The sources for manyCold Mountain characters and their adventures, as well as the facts and events of the post-war era in the southern Appalachians in general, are mentioned by Frazier in his ‘Acknowledgments’ at the end of the book: Richard Chase,Jack Tales (1943); Walter Clark,Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina in the Great War (1901); Daniel Ellis,Thrilling Adventures (1867); J.V. Hadley,Seven Months a Prisoner (1898); W.K. McNeil,Appalachian Images in Folk and Popular Culture (1995). However, in an interview given sometime after the publication ofCold Mountain, Frazier alluded to his great-grandfather as well: “And part of the character [Inman] was based on my great-grandfather. Both of them [Frazier's great-grand-uncle and great grandfather] went to the Civil War—volunteered in the first few months of that war fever and went off to battle.” See “Meet the Writers: Charles Frazier,” an on-line interview available at the Barnes and Noble web site: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/writers.

  12. See, for example, Joyce Vivienne Koch, “An approach to the Homeric content of Joyce'sUlysses,” 225–38, and Morton P. levitt, “Kazantzaki'sOdyssey: A Modern Rival to Homer,” 255–64; both inHomer, ed. Katherine Callen King, The Classical Heritage 5 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994).

  13. See W.B. Stanford,The Ulysses Theme: a Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1954), with a new Foreword by Charles Boer (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1992), especially chapter one, “The adaptability of mythical figures.”

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  14. Homer's identification with war comes, of course, from theIliad rather than theOdyssey.

  15. That is to say, the land through which Odysseus wandered would at first sight physically resemble the familiar landscape of the Mediterranean shores, or as S.L. Schein says of theOdyssey, “The hero travels through real worlds and worlds of fantasy, unreality, and half-reality,” inReading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretive Essays, ed. S.L. Schein (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 10.

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  16. Od. 1. 1 or 10. 330. The epithet also alludes to the cunning or shrewdness of Odysseus, a man whose mind ‘turns many ways.’

  17. The conventions of epic form and folktale are discussed by J.-P. Vernant,Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. J. Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1990) and G.S. Kirk,The Nature of Greek Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

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  18. Although we lack all knowledge of the historical Homer, tradition states that he was blind, probably to indicate his greater wisdom in ‘seeing’ men and their actions. ‘Biographies’ of Homer were common in the ancient world; see for example thevitae Homeri T.W. Allen, ed.Homeri Opera v.5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 184–268, for biographies from Herodotus, Plutarch, Proclus,The Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi, Suidas, and four anonymous sources; Allen himself semms to champion the figure described in the thirdHomeric Hymn (the hymn to Apollo), lines 172–73: “A blind man, and he lives on rocky Chios/and all his songs are the best now and forever,” Allen,Homer: The Origins and the Transmissions (Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press 1969, rpt. of the 1924 edition), 56, n. 58. For the figure of ‘Homer,’ legendary and historical, and an introduction to the problems of composition and transmission, see G. Nagy, “Homeric Questions,”Transactions of the American Philological Association 122 (1997) 17–60; Michael Clark,Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of Homer: A Study of Words and Myths, ser. Oxford Classical Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); O. Dickinson, “Homer, the Poet of the Dark Ages,” in I. McAusland and P. Watcot (eds.),Homer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) 19–37; M.m. Wilcox, “The Search for the Poet Homer,”Greece and Rome 37. 1 (1990) 1–13.

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  19. Od. 12. 8–12;Cold Mountain p. 230.

  20. Od. 6. 127–148;Cold Mountain p. 149.

  21. Od. 9. 84–104;Cold Mountain p. 163.

  22. Od. 10. 133–574;Cold Mountain p. 268.

  23. Od. 5.7–269;Cold Mountain p. 393.

  24. Od. 9. 106–46;Cold Mountain p. 228.

  25. Od. 23. 241–46;Cold Mountain p. 431.

  26. Odysseus enters the underworld in book 11, with the directions and description given by the goddess Circe in book 10. 507–515, translated here by Robert Fitzgerald.

  27. Cold Mountain, p. 84–5.

  28. Kazin, 12.

  29. Cold Mountain, p. 82. See also Kazin, 12.

  30. Cold Mountain, p. 248.

  31. Cold Mountain, p. 8.

  32. Od. 9. 367, from Robert Lattimore's translation (New York: Doubleday 1963), p. 156, “My name is Nobody: mother, father, and friends, everybody calls me Nobody.”

  33. Cold Mountain, p. 23.

  34. Rudy does not think highly of either Homer of Odysseus, asCold Mountain, p. 140 reveals: “That evening after dinner, Ruby and Ada sat on the porch, Ada reading aloud. They were nearly done with Homer. Ruby had grown impatient with Penelope, but she would sit of a long evening and laugh and laugh at the tribulations of Odysseus, all the stones the gods threw in his passway. She held the suspicion, though, that there was more of Stobrod in Odysseus than old Homer was willing to let on, and she found his alibis for stretching out his trip to be suspect in the extreme...” On this point, see Kathryn Stripling Byer, “On the Trail to Cold Mountain,”Shenendoah: The Washington and Lee University Review 48. 1 (1998): 112–17.

  35. William Bartram,Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida (Philadelphia: James and Johnson Publishers, 1791). Inman describes the author and his work as follows: “It was not a book that required following from front to back... The doings of that kind lone wanderer—called Flower Gatherer by the Cherokee in honor of his satchels full with plants and his attention all given to the growth of wild living things—never failed to ease his [Inman's] thoughts.”Cold Mountain, p. 15.

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  36. Cold Mountain, p. 15. This is a fairly typical example of Bartram's style, although it lacks his characteristic mix of botanical study, and philosophical musing. Bartram'sTravels met with instant widespread favor, and Bartram himself, as well as his work, has something of a cult following today. See, for example, the various internet sites, conferences, associations, biographies, travel guides, commentaries, and links found in search engines such as Google, e. g., www.bartramtrail.org.

  37. Cold Mountain, pp. 5–6.

  38. Cold Mountain, p. 25.

  39. The remnants of Heraclitus' work have been collected by Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz,Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, vol. I, 139–182; in this article, I have used the 1951 edition. This particular fragment is D(iels-)K(ranz) B 106. (In DK, A refers to ancient biographical and doxographical reports about Heraclitus, while B refers to literal quotations of Heraclitus which constitute the ‘fragments’ of his work.) A good and complete English translation of the fragments, which follows the Diels-Kranz numbers, exists in Kathleen Freeman'sAncilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948), 24–34. A good introduction to the philosophy of Heraclitus, his life and work, and its special problems of interpretation, can be found in G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield,The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd Edition, 1995), 181–212. In this article, the individual fragments discussed (and translated) by Kirk, Raven, and Schofield are identified by the initials KR and by their DK number as well; other fragments are identified only by their DK number. The fragments cited here, for example, are not included by Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, and thus are identified simply as B 106 DK and B 124 DK. In Freeman's translation (p. 32) the former runs, with the intermediate source's (Plutarch's) introductory words in parentheses: “(Heraclitus reproached Hesiod for regarding some days as bad and others as good.) Hesiod was unaware that the nature of every day is one.” The latter Freeman translates (p. 33): “The fairest universe (kosmos=‘order’ and ‘overall order,’ ‘universe’ [A.C.]) is but a dust-heap piled up at random.”

  40. See G.S. Kirk,Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 1–3.

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  41. For an introduction to the problem of the Heraclitean text as such and its interpretation, see Kirk, “Introduction,” 13–30; G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven, and M. Schofield, 183–186. For a comprehensive and detailed presentation of Heraclitus' thought in historical context see W.K.C. Guthrie,A History of Greek Philosophy I. The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 403–492.

  42. Hermann Fränkel, “A Thought Pattern in Heraclitus,”American Journal of Philology 59 (1938): 309–337 (German translation, with additions, in: Fränkel,Wege und Formen frühgriechischen Denkens: Literarische und philosophiegeschichtliche Studien, ed. Franz Tietze [München: C.H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1968], 253–283).

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  43. See Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, 182, for the “malicious intent” of “Hellenistic pedants” when it came to Heraclitus.

  44. Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, 189–196.

  45. B 51 DK=KR 209: “They do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre” (transl. Freeman).

  46. B 80 DK=KR 211: “One should know that war is general (universal) and jurisdiction is strife, and everything comes about by way of strife and necessity” (transl. Freeman).

  47. For Heraclitean criticism of Homer, see B 42, 56, 105 DK.

  48. Janet Fairweather, “The Death of Heraclitus,”Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 14 (1973) 233–39.

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  49. Ava Chitwood, “Heraclitus the Riddler,”Studi Classici e Orientali 43 (1993) 49–52.

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  50. B 49a DK.

  51. B 60 DK=200 KR. For discussion of the two fragments and their importance to Heraclitean thought, see Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, 196–198; see also G. Vlastos, “On Heraclitus,”American Journal of Philology 76 (1955) 337–368, with particular attention to pages 338–344 and 349 for fragments B49a and B 60 DK (reprinted in: Gregory Vlastos,Studies in Greek Philosophy, ed. Daniel W. Graham, vol. I:The Presocratics [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995] 127–150, particularly pp. 127–132 and 136).

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  52. See, for example,Cold Mountain, p. 327–28. Heraclitus' contempt for conventional knowledge and it's spokesmen is found, for example, in B 42 DK, “Homer deserves to be flung out of the contests and given a beating,” and B 40 DK, “Much learning does not teach one to have intelligence; for it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again, Xenophanes and Hecataeus” (transl. Freeman). For commentary on these and similar statements, see Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, 188, note 1.

  53. See, for example,Cold Mountain, p. 137.

  54. See the discussion of B 60 DK=KR 200, of ‘the road up and the road down,’ above.

  55. Cold Mountain, p. 445.

  56. Inman tells Ada that he plans to learn Greek and to continue the work of Balis, p. 433. With unconscious irony, Inman then remarks that “It's not without sense that they call it a dead language.”

  57. B 8 DK (transl. Freeman).

  58. After Odysseus kills the suitors, Athena must intervene between Odysseus and the vengeful families of the slain men (Od. 24. 521–48). But the attentive reader will remember the prophecy of Teiresias inOd. 11. 96–137, that Odysseus would continue to wander, even after returning home, until he made peace with Poseidon. The peace concluded by Athena, then, is only temporary as far as Odysseus himself is concerned.

  59. On this point, see Piero Boitani,Ombra di Ulisse, Interezioni 101 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992), “L'ultimo viaggio e la fine dei viaggi: funzioni dell'ironia,” 149–172; trans. Anita Weston asThe Shadow of Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), “The Final Journey and an End of All Journeying: The Functions of Irony,” 125–148.

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  60. In the epilogue,Cold Mountain, 448, the reader sees, albeit briefly, the child born of Ada and Inman after his death.

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  1. Department of World Language Education (Classics), University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Avenue, CPR 290, 33620, Tampa, FL, USA

    Ava Chitwood

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Chitwood, A. Epic or philosophic, homeric or heraclitean? The anonymous philosopher in Charles Frazier’sCold Mountain . Int class trad 11, 232–243 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02720034

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