Gilgamesh

On original self-consciousness

An origin is a harbor clogged with hope’s freight. We expect from such traffic all manner of gifts: explanations of our current moment; an alienness to which we contrast our normalcy, superiority; a permanent reassurance that those far gone failed like we fail and hurt like we hurt. We readers hold ancient literature to an impossible standard, expecting old texts to simultaneously destroy, solidify, and reinvent our sense of self. Such hope causes us to read anachronistically, occluding past strangeness with present concerns. Better to follow Dante’s advice and abandon hope before entering; better to see a thing for what it is. How, then, to face Gilgamesh?

The epic is concerned with authority, friendship, society, striving, and death—all bywords for questions we will never answer for good. But a moment in one of the tale’s earliest formulations rings my head like a goddamn bell. Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu has died. In grief, the king wanders aimlessly. Newly challenged by death’s silence, and for the first time, Gilgamesh fears for his life. The sun god Shamash worries over the king, visiting him with a question and a claim: “O Gilgamesh, where are you wandering? The life that you seek you will never find.”¹ Two sentences that run through history like water threads through mountains. How does Gilgamesh respond? Four thousand years later, mourning whole futures, what might we say to the same sun? I don’t know. But we can sketch a sense of an answer by asking instead of He who saw the Deep: Do you know yourself?

The epic begins by praising the sole constituent of an old problem: a king abusing his subjects. Gilgamesh is introduced as “wise in all matters,” a man who “saw the Deep, the country’s foundation,” who “knew the proper ways,” who “saw what was secret, discovered what was hidden.” The poem’s events are teased: Gilgamesh “brought back a tale of before the Deluge” and “came a far road, was weary, found peace.” And we are instructed to read the tale of Gilgamesh as it has been carved in stone. The poem’s introduction looks forward to its conclusion and ahead to its future while contextualizing its nature and purpose. In other words, it models a kind of self-knowledge which its central subject initially lacks. But before elaborating what Gilgamesh is missing, we should clarify our notion of self-consciousness. Rather than assume the Delphic premise—that knowing yourself is a prerequisite of the all-encompassing work of general wisdom—we should instead adopt a simpler definition. To be self-consciousness is to conceive of yourself empirically, acknowledging the facts of your nature and your status as one part of a more important whole. Using that definition, is Gilgamesh self-conscious at the beginning of the poem?

The king of Uruk is said to know a great deal about matters external to him. He explores, fights, builds. He projects his power outwards in order to sate simple desires. Like imperialists to come, his knowledge seems to stop at a dogmatic self-regard. Yet the unnamed poets assure us that he will travel, tire, and settle down; Gilgamesh will find peace. This implies that he will decide to reflect on, then stop, his manic activity; self-knowledge is on the way. But for now, Gilgamesh is instead a “magnificent and terrible” “bull on the rampage.” Two-thirds divine, he is nonetheless an earthly tyrant, commanding women and men to satisfy his appetites. He does not know his limits and thus is ignorant of the social restraints of authority. The gods, sympathetic to the plight of Gilgamesh’s subjects, realize they must calm the “storm of his heart,” an image implying the king’s central and total thoughtlessness.

Enkidu is an “offspring of silence,” a creature whose nature differs greatly from that of Gilgamesh. His is the silence of the tabula rasa. Unlike the externalizing king, Enkidu “knows not a people, nor even a country.” Instead, he has been made to “graze on grasses” with other herbivores, peaceful among an unnamed herd. Enkidu lives well—with and for others. Yet for the hunter, Enkidu’s peace is a problem. The hunter is a node connecting murder and desire. In setting free “all the beasts of the field,” Enkidu prevents the hunter from “doing the work of the wild.” According to the hunter, this work is killing. The hunter reads into nature an essential hostility, a storm’s faceless raging. The hunter believes he must kill in order to eat; Gilgamesh has a hunter’s level of self-consciousness. He knows enough to note practically, though not philosophically, the differences between self and other, predator and prey. Animal Enkidu reveals the hunter mind’s suppositional selfishness. Enkidu’s hunter’s father hatches a plan: use a woman to alienate Enkidu’s herd from him. Gilgamesh repeats this advice. Enkidu takes the bait and exiles himself into humanity. Enkidu considers other beings enough to liberate them, Gilgamesh considers other beings enough to trap them.

Sex, booze, bread, and oil subtract from Enkidu a primal strength and add to his nature “reason and wide understanding.” No longer a simple “child of nature,” Enkidu is a man with social appetite. He has enjoyed the drugs for which so much human labor is organized. He works as a shepherd and sleeps again with Shamhat, reaffirming his agricultural nature. Hosting a new notion of property, Enkidu is enraged over Gilgamesh’s “divine” right to sleep with bridges-to-be, and thus wants to “change the way things are ordered.” Agriculture requires a fixed, and so implies a fixable, social organization. Enkidu fights Gilgamesh to stop the king’s “happy and carefree” harvest. A frustrating and wonderful lacuna hides the origin of their friendship; we pick back up with Gilgamesh showing off Enkidu to his mother. Ninsun describes Enkidu as an orphan and this devastates him. Weeping and weak, Enkidu elicits from Gilgamesh his first act of empathy. The king holds his new friend and asks why he suffers. Enkidu says that terror has entered his heart. We are barred from explication by another gap in this “damaged masterpiece,” but can speculate on the connection between Ninsun’s description and Enkidu’s terror. Enkidu might fear returning to a state in which he has no strong human bonds, or he might fear conceiving of himself as being without origin. Enkidu does not know that he was made by the gods to pacify a wild king, though I suspect he now senses his nature as a child of silence. To know true quiet, to return to it, is fearful. This is a terror we will see again.

In the beginning of friendship, we see the slow bloom of both men’s self-consciousness. In asking a question, in wanting to understand another’s pain, Gilgamesh now imagines aspects of reality that he does not, and cannot, innately know. But his concern is still externalized, aimed. His lack of self-consciousness is demonstrated by his proposal to ameliorate Enkidu’s suffering: to go kill a god. Enkidu is appropriately confused. He explains that Humbaba is both fearsome and a friend, and asks, “Why do you desire to do this thing?” A clear invitation for Delphic solvency which Gilgamesh declines. Instead, he states how he will begin climbing a mountain.

Gilgamesh’s sense of self develops further when goaded by Enkidu’s fear. “Why, my friend, do you speak like a coward? With your feeble heart you vex my heart. As for man, his days are numbered, whatever he may do, it is but wind.” Gilgamesh is now aware of the arbitrary nature of action. Such awareness cuts both towards existentialist construction and nihilistic destruction, but given the rest of the poem, it seems Gilgamesh has begun to believe that life is worth considering. Reasonably, he announces his plan to “establish for ever a name eternal,” entering history despite time’s abrasive air. Before departing for this grand adventure, he instructs the city’s regents to “judge the lawsuit of the weak” and “call to account those who do wrong.” In leaving home, our king has come of age. He now exercises enough self-awareness to consider the welfare of others. But as he immediately shows, this self-consciousness is not fully developed, stating that such care is to take place “while we attain our desire like babes-in-arms.” Two steps forward, one step back.

What, if anything, finally eradicates Gilgamesh’s immaturity? Does he come to understand himself fully? The king goes on to relate dreams, solicit guidance, “seek life” (through bloodshed), consider mercy, mourn death, and, finally, to fear. After Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh binges on externalization. He commands all of nature to mourn. He requires his townsfolk to listen to him cry. He praises leisurely murder. He says to his friend’s corpse, “Now what is this sleep that has seized you? You’ve become unconscious, you do not hear me!” Still Gilgamesh refuses to understand the self-implicating nature of death; still Gilgamesh acts before he understands. In a marvelous gesture of avoiding reality, the king orders the construction of an extravagant statue in Enkidu’s image. The work is done and displayed to the sun god, the entity who will in the next tablet condemn Gilgamesh to failure. Yet it is not until a “maggot dropped from his nostril” that the king surrenders Enkidu’s body for burial. It is only at that moment that Gilgamesh “grew fearful of death.” Gilgamesh now reflects on his agony with precision and urgency: “How can I stay quiet? My friend Enkidu, whom I love, has turned to clay. Shall I not be like him, and also lie down, never to rise again, through all eternity?” The maggot causes self-consciousness to irrupt into literature.² It is the lowliest of the low who crumbles the walls with which power fools itself. Finally awake, Gilgamesh seeks to conquer eternal sleep. He seeks life at the edge of the known, venturing to the bounds of the tellable. What do we make of this great turn?

For Enkidu to become fully self-aware he had to yield to a desire for companionship, a yearning the work of civilization soon follows. For Gilgamesh to become fully self-aware he had to yield to a fear of death, an aversion the work of civilization soon follows. Both men are wrapped in the world’s web amid a silk of instinct: Enkidu to move towards, Gilgamesh to move away. Thus the twinned work of life with other people. A beast made for service enters history from the realm of prey. A king permitted to rule enters history from the empire of predation. Unlike Enkidu, Gilgamesh lacks a foundation of living with and for other beings. It is only the threat of permanent nothingness, the hint of a death too small to note, that channels Gilgamesh’s energy into self-consciousness. Power makes kings, but grief motivates poetry.

A pretty ending, sure—but too glib. We are invited by the poets to have a more complex, and thus funnier, understanding of ancient selfhood. Despite his buffoonish love of violence, Gilgamesh retrieves the plant by which he may defeat death and revive his beloved. By every practical measure and after a journey to the ends of the earth, he has found “the life that he seeks.” Rather than a life defined by particular chosen qualities, Gilgamesh’s ideal is simply endlessness. Such is the aristocrat’s view of goodness: more is more, every finitude a failure. Perfectly, it is a snake—an arch symbol of rebirth; the form of the lowly trickster—who takes away our easy answer to the question of meaning. Gilgamesh sails home, lamenting his recklessness with respect to marking his way back to immortality, asking hopelessly: “What thing would I find that served as my landmark?” In the end Gilgamesh has answered the sun’s question: he is lost and has lost. One might expect a newly self-conscious person to feel broken by such a disaster, ruptured back to the faceless gaze of time. But the poets promised early on that Gilgamesh “came a far road, was weary, found peace.” In what does Gilgamesh take such final comfort? Arriving back home, he brags to his boatman: “three square miles and a half is Uruk’s expanse.” Having failed completely, our first great man points to his playpen.

1. All quotations are from the second edition of The Epic of Gilgamesh translated by Andrew George (Penguin, 2020).

2. A great and similar step can be found in The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector.