Flip-flopping

Emily Wilson

• Hesitant Heroes: Private Inhibitions, Cultural Crisis by Theodore Ziolkowski
  Cornell, 163 pp, £17.50, March 2004, ISBN 0 8014 4203 6

Most of us, it seems, tend to think of the ‘hero’ as someone who never hesitates. As soon as he has made up his mind, he acts. But in Hesitant Heroes Theodore Ziolkowski identifies texts central to the Western canon – the Oresteia, the Aeneid, Parzival, Hamlet, Wallenstein – which show heroes who hesitate at the moment of decision. He argues that each of these works uses the personal hesitation of a single character to represent a broad cultural crisis, a shift in values from one ethical or social norm to another. The theme of hesitation in literature isn’t new – the ‘Hamlet problem’ was a popular topic in 19th-century Romanticism – but the originality of Ziolkowski’s book lies in his tracing Hamlet’s problem back before Hamlet. His selection of texts shows that hesitation is not a peculiar feature of modern or early modern literature: classical Greek and Roman heroes hesitate no less than modern ones.