clew's reviews: a book log

St. Dale, Sharyn McCrumb

There was a kerfuffle in a corner of blogland a while ago over whether Achilles is a hero. (Not whether he was a hero; and originally it was over whether Che Guevara is or was a hero; but Achilles is conveniently apolitical.) Brad DeLong hosted a lot of this and has at least one linkfest on it.

I thought much of the confusion was due to a modern, maybe specifically USian, oddity: that we have combined our ideas of 'hero' and 'saint' and we expect people's behavior to be equally combined. Possibly we got this from 'virtue', which has meant both 'strength' and 'goodness'.

McCrumb's novel follows a pilgrimage that visits NASCAR tracks up and down the East to lay wreaths in honor of Dale Earnhardt. It's supposed, I think, to make us more sympathetic to the many fans of stock car racing who grieved for his death as though he were a martyr. Certainly there are several wine-and-cheese characters who Learn to Understand.

There are also several uses of the word 'sympathetic', and understanding doesn't align with all of them. What I thought McCrumb showed me was that a lot of the veneration of Earnhardt comes from a confusion of virtue and strength; the latter was more clearly associated with Earnhardt than the former. The main virtue ascribed to him is instead a strength, that he never quit being as aggressive as he was at the beginning. This last will be deeply attractive to people who have to knuckle under a lot, but when it gets down to increasing your own son's chance of fiery death, I'm pretty sure it's heroism but not virtue. Cf. Rustum and Sohrab; but that wasn't done knowingly.

I think, not with respect to this novel particularly, that the confusion of strength and virtue is very useful and is therefore not examined very closely. The circle of thoughts looks like, Achilles is great; therefore Achilles is admirable; therefore Achilles is good; therefore anything Achilles does to continue winning is justified. At the end of this there are no bounds put on strength. Achilles himself never went so far towards wrong.

ISBN: 075820776X