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the Greek hoi polloi. What in the Babylonian epic represented the tragedy of a struggle crowned with defeat, the Greeks turn into a picturesque adventure tour of the Mediterranean. ‘
Navigare necesse est
‘life is a journey’—great gems of wisdom, these. The
Odyssey
is a
dégringolade
in plagiarism; it ruins all the greatness of the fight of Gilgamesh.”
    One has to admit that
Gilgamesh,
as Sumerology teaches us, did in fact contain themes that Homer used—the themes of Odysseus, of Circe, of Charon—and is perhaps the oldest version we have of a tragic ontology, because it manifests what Rainer Maria Rilke, thirty-six centuries later, was to call a growing, which consists in this: “
der Tiefbesiegte von immer Grösserem zu sein.”
Man’s fate as a battle that leads inescapably to defeat—this is the final sense of
Gilgamesh.
    It was on the Babylonian cycle, then, that Patrick Hannahan decided to spread his epic canvas—a curious enough canvas, let us note, because his
Gigamesh
is a story extremely limited in time and space. The notorious gangster, hired killer, and American soldier (of the time of the last world war) “GI Joe” Maesch, unmasked in his criminal activity by an informer, one N. Kiddy, is to be hanged—by sentence of the military tribunal—in a small town in Norfolk County, where his unit is stationed. The whole action takes thirty-six minutes, the time required to transport the condemned man from his cell to the place of execution. The story ends with the image of the noose, whose black loop, seen against the sky, falls upon the neck of the calmly standing Maesch. This Maesch is of course Gilgamesh, the semidivine hero of the Babylonian epos, and the one who sends him to the gallows—his old buddy N. Kiddy—is Gilgamesh’s closest friend, Enkidu, created by the gods in order to bring about the hero’s downfall. When we present it thus, the similarity in creative method between
Ulysses
and
Gigamesh
becomes immediately apparent. But justice demands that we concentrate on the differences between these two works. Our task is made easier in that Hannahan—unlike Joyce!—provided his book with a commentary, which is twice the size of the novel itself (to be exact,
Gigamesh
runs 395 pages, the Commentary 847). We learn at once how Hannahan’s method works: the first, seventy-page chapter of the Commentary explains to us all the divergent allusions that emanate from a single, solitary word—namely, the title. Gigamesh derives first, obviously, from Gilgamesh: with this is revealed the mythic prototype, just as in Joyce, for his
Ulysses
also supplies the classical referent before the reader comes to the first word of the text. The omission of the letter L in the name Gigamesh is no accident; L is Lucifer, Lucipherus, the Prince of Darkness, present in the work although he puts in no personal appearance. Thus the letter (L) is to the name (Gigamesh) as Lucifer is to the events of the novel: he is there, but
invisibly.
Through “Logos” L indicates the Beginning (the Causative Word of Genesis); through Laocoon, the End (for Laocoon’s end is brought about by serpents: he was
strangled,
as will be strangled—by the rope—the hero of
Gigamesh
). L has ninety-seven further connections, but we cannot expound them here.
    To continue, Gigamesh is a GIGAntic MESS; the hero is in a mess indeed, one hell of a mess, with a death sentence hanging over his head. The word also contains: GIG, a kind of rowboat (Maesch would drown his victims in a gig, after pouring cement on them); GIGgle (Maesch’s diabolical giggle is a reference—reference No. 1—to the musical leitmotif of the descent to hell in
Klage Dr. Fausti
[more on this later]); GIGA, which is (a) in Italian, “fiddle,” again tying in with the musical substrates of the novel, and (b) a prefix signifying the magnitude of a billion (as