Siren Song

The classical hero who rises in the ranks, dominates the fields of war, and claims the seas for his own is frequently assessed—if not destroyed—by the lure of beauty: “It was Beauty killed the beast,” says capitalist film director Carl Denham in King Kong (1933). Beauty is a ruse—a dangerous distraction from practical, profitable pursuits like war and conquest. It is the animal that responds to beauty—not the thinking man—and the animal is not to be trusted in a culture which values the constructed environment over the organic. Why then, if these men are so smart, do they persist in leaping “overboard in squadrons / even though they see the beached skulls” (Lines 5-6) of their predecessors?

With the exception of Homer’s Odysseus (who, aware of the danger, made his crew tie him to the mast and stuff their own ears with wax), every mariner who leaves himself vulnerable to the siren song makes the mistake of thinking he will be the one to be different. Call it ego, call it hubris but each doomed seaman—despite concrete sensory evidence to the contrary—despite knowing the fate of every man that went before him, believes he is strong enough not only to survive, but in the case of Margaret Atwood’s poem, to be the hero who saves the helpless creature.

When Odysseus decides he must hear the siren song for himself, he understands that if he doesn’t take precautions, he will succumb. For him, the sirens are temptresses, not victims. Odysseus may want to know the unknowable—he may want to access their magic or wisdom—but he has no need to flex his heroism on behalf of the sirens. Atwood gives her siren a song that is hardly magical, but instead “boring” (Line 26). It’s a trick, and an easy one, to appeal to the hero’s desire to be the savior. Jacque Derrida theorizes that there is no true generosity without anonymity and that to extend a gift with one’s name attached is inherently transactional (Philosophy of the Gift, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, edited by Charles Champetier, Angelaki (2001) 6:2, 15-22). By saving the siren, the hero is essentially purchasing her.

The siren in “Siren Song” understands that pretending to be helpless exposes the hero’s Achilles’s heel. It is he, in fact, who is helpless in the face of desire to distinguish himself as exceptional. However, the question remains: Why does it keep happening? While the ego is at fault, blame is perpetually deflected back to the external seductress: beauty. The ego never takes responsibility and therefore can persist unaccountable. The siren’s old and tired trick is distressingly powerful, and evergreen.