Phil Christman

Some weird compulsion drives me to continually re-do my education, as if from scratch—as if everything I’ve already learned was probably wrong and I need a global reset—and lately that’s led me to take another look at some of the classics of the Ancient Near East.

On re-reading Gilgamesh, I find myself wondering if one of humanity’s first fictions isn’t also its first metafiction. Check out the first tablet:

The story

of him who knew the most of all men know;
who made the journey; heartbroken; reconciled;

who knew the way things were before the Flood;
the secret things, the mystery; who went

to the end of the earth, and over; who returned,
and wrote the story on a tablet of stone.

(I quote the version by David Ferry, who treats the poem as a poem, not an archeological repository.)

Check out that “tablet of stone”: Is that a teasing reference to initial readers who would, in fact, have been reading the story in cuneiform? That’s not the last we hear of this tablet, either:

He built Uruk. He built the keeping place
of Anu and Ishtar. The outer wall

shines in the sun like brightest copper; the inner
wall is beyond the imagining of kings.

Study the brickwork, study the fortification;
climb the great ancient staircase to the terrace;

study how it is made, from the terrace see
the planted and fallow fields, the ponds and orchards.

…Go to the temple of Anu and Ishtar:

Open the copper chest with the iron locks;
the tablet of lapis lazuli tells the story.

—the tablet, and story, we’re reading. Like Don Quixote reading his own sequel, Gilgamesh both inaugurates and notices the artificiality of its epic tradition.

People used to talk about the self-conscious writers of the ‘70s (Barth, Coover, et. al.) as if they were a sign of literature’s self-exhaustion. But maybe these two impulses—to create a new way of representing human life in language; to notice, having just invented it, that this “new way” is a human product—are linked, not antithetical.