Gilgamesh (7 page)

There is no consolation in platitudes, and for Utnapishtim to tell him that he is going to die seems as tactless as it was for St. Paul to tell the Thessalonians that they were
not
going to die.

The only effect the speech seems to have is that Gilgamesh finally recognizes the old man as Utnapishtim. He also acts with a restraint that we haven't seen before. “I intended to fight you,” he says,

Finally, Gilgamesh gets to ask his burning question: How did Utnapishtim overcome death and become immortal? Utnapishtim, who is not a believer in making a long story short, tells him about the Great Flood. His speech is a very strong piece of writing, as beautiful as its descendent, the Noah story, but far more detailed and dramatic, and filled with the most vivid images: the unsuspecting workmen drinking barrels of beer and wine to celebrate the completion of the ship; the terrified gods fleeing to the highest heaven and cowering there like dogs; Utnapishtim falling to his knees and weeping at the first touch of the blessed sunlight; the gods, starved because all their
human food-providers have drowned, smelling the sweet fragrance of Utnapishtim's sacrifice and clustering around it like flies.

The Flood story explains Utnapishtim's exemption from mortality by narrating the circumstances that prompted the gods' decision. It also explains the Prologue's statement that Gilgamesh “had been granted a vision / into the great mystery, the secret places, / the primeval days before the Flood.” The vision into the great mystery does not, however, seem to do Gilgamesh a bit of good, at least now. It certainly doesn't tell him how to overcome death. Immortality, it turns out, was a one-time offer, and that bleak fact is Utnapishtim's main revelation.

Why, then, did the poet include the Flood story at such length? Is it merely an interesting digression? Any reader who wants to understand its dramatic function in the poem should read Book XI again, this time skipping from Gilgamesh's first question (“Tell me, how is it that you, a mortal …”) to the end of Utnapishtim's speech (“Now then, Gilgamesh, who will assemble … ?”). If you delete or drastically abridge the Flood story, the interval between the question and the dashing of Gilgamesh's hopes seems far too short. But with the story continuing for as long as it does, the suspense keeps growing. We are aware that Gilgamesh is listening with absolute attention, because at any moment the way to overcome death may be revealed. We can feel his attention even the second or tenth time we read this speech, when we know that Gilgamesh won't find his answer. And when the speech comes to its disappointing climax, we are carried on to the next incident with at least the satisfaction of knowing the
whole story. We have heard everything there is to hear about how Utnapishtim became a god. Obviously, this is not the way out.

The story has another dramatic effect as well. It gives us a harrowing picture of the cost of Utnapishtim's immortality; the immortality itself seems like a pallid afterthought. Hovering in the background of this narrative is an unspoken question: If you had to experience all that terror, and the death of almost every living thing, in order to be granted immortality, would it seem worth it?

Far from being sympathetic to Gilgamesh's anguish, Utnapish-tim is gruff, almost taunting, in the conclusion to his speech:

(The more Utnapishtim reveals of his crankiness and cynicism, the less attractive immortality becomes.) He proposes a test: If Gil-gamesh can overcome sleep for seven days—sleep being the likeness of death—perhaps he will be able to overcome death too. But Utnapishtim knows from the start that Gilgamesh, “worn out and ready to collapse,” will fail the test. And indeed, he falls asleep immediately. Utnapishtim says with contempt:

There is a poignant irony about this test. In the bad old days, when Gilgamesh was terrorizing the citizens of Uruk, it was a well-known fact, as Shamhat told Enkidu, that the king was “so full of life-force that he need[ed] no sleep.” Sometime after Enkidu's arrival he lost that vitality, in the same way that Enkidu, after he made love with Shamhat, lost his life-force and could no longer run like an animal. In this too Gilgamesh and Enkidu are twins. The poem doesn't tell us exactly when Gilgamesh began to need sleep. The first we hear of it is on the journey to the Cedar Forest, when it is a recurring element in the ritual for dreams.

Experiencing intimacy seems to be for Gilgamesh what experiencing sex is for Enkidu: an initiation into human vulnerability. Once he found the companion of his heart, Gilgamesh became, in effect, three-thirds human. He left behind his kinship with the “unsleeping, undy-ing” gods, just as Enkidu left behind the two-thirds of him that was animal. Unwittingly, each gave up part of his physical strength in order to know the kind of love that “an animal [or a god] can't know.”

After Gilgamesh fails the test, Utnapishtim's wife, sweet where her husband is sour, suggests that they wake him up and gently send him back home. But according to Utnapishtim, Gilgamesh is a deceiver like all humans and must be shown proof that he slept, and this the
seven hardening loaves provide. Gilgamesh, acknowledging his failure, cries out in a very moving and beautiful passage:

After first making sure that Gilgamesh is washed and anointed, in a kind of ritual renewal, and is given royal robes that will stay clean until he returns to Uruk, Utnapishtim sends him on his way. And that seems to be the end of the story.

But Utnapishtim's compassionate wife intervenes once again. So, as a parting gift, Utnapishtim reveals a second secret of the gods. He tells Gilgamesh where, in the waters of the Great Deep (the freshwater sea under the earth), he can find a magical plant that will restore him to youth. However young his name implies he is, Gil-gamesh feels old and weary now, and in desperate need of renewal. He plunges into the Great Deep, finds the plant, and brings it to the surface. Finally, it seems, he has found something that will put his heart at ease. But in this poem there is always a “but.”

Gilgamesh's speech to Urshanabi the boatman on the shore of the Great Deep is a wonderfully complex little passage. First, he calls the marvelous plant “the antidote to the fear of death,” and our questions begin. If eating the plant is not equivalent to passing the
sleep test, but is a consolation prize instead-if it doesn't make you immortal like the fruit of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden-does it at least restore you to a protected youth in which you can't get fatally sick or injured, after which you again age and then die? Or is your youth just as vulnerable as an ordinary young person's? And when you grow old, can you take another bite and grow young a second time, a hundredth time, until the supply gives out? None of this is made clear; none of it has to be; any of it is possible. What
is
clear is that for someone who eats the plant, death has been temporarily avoided and the fear of death has been postponed. The plant is a medicine that addresses the symptoms of the fear of death, not its cause; it is a palliative, not a cure.

Still, Gilgamesh is elated. He tells Urshanabi that rather than eating the plant immediately, he first wants to test its effects:

This statement too is complex and fascinating. Like the killing of Humbaba, it is first of all story-driven rather than character-driven. Gilgamesh must kill the monster because that's what heroes do; he must not eat the plant because, as we all know, he returns home aged and exhausted. But there are several possibilities implicit in his
desire to take the plant home. Perhaps he is just being prudent (for the first time in his life). Perhaps he is afraid of the plant's effects, or at least cautious about them, and needs to use an old man in Uruk as a human guinea pig. On the other hand, it may not be prudence that motivates him to bring the plant home before eating it. Perhaps some transformation in his character has already begun, which makes him want to postpone the magical return to youth until he can do it in his own city, before the eyes of his own people. Perhaps there is also a desire to use the plant for the benefit of the whole community. He will go home, choose a particularly deserving old man who has nothing to lose by having the experiment fail, and if it succeeds, he will portion out tiny samples of the plant to a thousand old men, and give a sprig to the royal gardener to see if it can be cultivated in lush-gardened Uruk, so that it will be available for future generations as well. It is possible that something like these thoughts are taking shape in the shadowy recesses of Gilgamesh's mind.

So, without tasting the plant, he and Urshanabi head back to Uruk. The poet describes the trip in the same words that he used for the journey to the Cedar Forest: “At four hundred miles they stopped to eat, / at a thousand miles they pitched their camp.” This is a reverse journey through the landscape of dreams; it is, in its formulaic language, the way back from the monster. But this time, it is not a return to hubris, violence, and death. It is a return to wholeness.

Still, there is one last failure to endure and overcome. On the way back, Gilgamesh bathes in a pond and, rather than handing the
precious plant to Urshanabi, he leaves it on the ground. This act of stunning carelessness is like other famous last-minute mistakes in myths and folktales throughout the world (Orpheus' over-the shoulder glance at Eurydice, for example, or the youngest son's choice to sit on the edge of a well in the Grimms' “The Golden Bird”). There is always something fated about these mistakes; they don't seem like accidents, because they are willed by the shape of the story; we feel that they had to happen. In light of Gilgamesh's history of violence and self-destruction, it seems that some inner dynamic won't allow him to eat the plant-that would be too simple, too good to be true. The spoiler is a snake, as in the Eden story, though here the snake is not cunning, it is entirely innocent and simply takes advantage of a good opportunity. The poet needs only three lines to shatter Gilgamesh's hopes:

Thus, in the words of Psalm 103, the snake's mouth is “satisfied with good things,” and its “youth is renewed like the eagle's.”
O felix serpens!

When Gilgamesh realizes that the snake has slithered off with his antidote, he cries out yet again:

It is the last gasp of tragedy. One is touched by his anguish, but only so far. One also wants to say, Well, what do you expect, you silly goose?-

that's what happens when you leave magic plants lying on the ground!

This is not the point, of course. The episode is not meant to be a lesson in prudence. It is the end of the line for Gilgamesh's quest. He is face to face with the realization that there is no immortality and no return to youth: a realization that can result (depending on your readiness) in either despair or freedom. When there's no way out, you just follow the way in front of you.

That way, for Gilgamesh, leads back home. And on the way home, in the course of the hundreds of miles he and Urshanabi travel every day, in the dream time that is left in total silence, an astonishing thing happens: Gilgamesh becomes one with the poet's voice. In spite of the Prologue's statement, we have never believed that Gil-gamesh wrote the poem; he has always been a character in the story, not the narrator of it: a part of it, not the whole. Only now, for the first time, as Gilgamesh addresses Urshanabi with the same words that Sîn-lēqi-unninni addressed us with at the beginning of the poem, can we hear this authorial voice for ourselves.

And that is how the poem ends: where it began. Its form is not circular, like
Finnegans Wake,
but spiral, since it begins again at another level, with Gilgamesh narrating. His transformation has taken place offstage, outside the frame of the poem, at the last possible moment.

When we return to the beginning, where Gilgamesh's echoing lines point us, it is clear that he has completed the final stage of the archetypal hero's journey, in which the hero gives new life to his community, returning to them with the gifts he has discovered on his adventure.