Stringer's Saga: Njal and the Wire

Chapter 12 Stringer’s Saga: Njal and The Wire John Hudson and Mark D. West An immediately recognisable feature of Bill Miller’s work is its combina- tion of extraordinarily diverse reading and its repeated resort to the semi- standard Western literary canon.1 The Hebrew Bible, Shakespeare’s tragedies, Montaigne’s Essays, the nineteenth-century Russian novelists (especially Dostoevsky) all recur in his writings, as they do in his conversation. Beyond such traditional classics, there are further works less universally familiar but of nearly as high standing, such as Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy and Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Most prominent amongst such works are the Icelandic sagas, above all Njal’s Saga. However, it is with literature that the Miller canon largely stops: there are practically no references in his work to music, only the very occasional refer- ence to film. Just one television series penetrates the literary citadel, sneaking into a coda and footnote in his 2011 book, Losing It. That series is The Wire, the creation of former journalist David Simon in association with former police detective Ed Burns, shown on HBO over five seasons between 2002 and 2008. Trying to summarise The Wire is like participating in the Monty Python game- show ‘Summarise Proust’, but suffice it to say that it is a study of the decline of an American city (Baltimore), of the failure of institutions, and of the impact of these on individual and collective lives. Both the viewer’s subjective assess- ment of the quality of the work,2 and the makers’ aspirations for it,3 justify 1 For the diversity of reading, note e.g. the soldiers’ diaries and memoirs that underpin Miller’s The Mystery of Courage (Cambridge, MA: 2002). The flow of e-mailed recommendations continues unabated, for example a Japanese probation officer’s diary from 1943: <https:// www.scribd.com/document/51752924/Diary-of-Probational-Officer-Kan-Nakamura-Sept- 1942-Jan-1943>, accessed 16/5/2017. In this essay, we follow Miller in quoting from the transla- tion of Njál’s Saga by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson (Harmondsworth: 1960). Episodes of The Wire are cited by series number and episode number, in the form 1.1, etc. 2 On the aspirations of The Wire to differ from other television entertainment, see e.g. R. Alvarez, The Wire, rev. ed. (New York: 2010), 3; one may consider whether the author of Njála had similar aspirations. On the Greek tragedy fatalism of The Wire, see e.g. Alvarez, Wire, 384–5; saga-fatalism might be an even more appropriate parallel. 3 Note e.g. Alvarez, Wire, 298; audio-commentary on 3.3. Note also e.g. the care with which characters are introduced; in 1.1 Wee-Bey and D’Angelo talk, the former in front of a burger © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004366374_016 272 Hudson and West its subjection to the type of close reading that will form part of this essay. Attentive viewers also know how carefully constructed the whole work is. We will do violence to it by concentrating on one strand pulled from its seamless web.4 Nevertheless, this one strand is certainly central, particularly for the first three seasons: the triangular conflict between the police, a drug gang headed by Avon Barksdale and his adviser and lieutenant Stringer Bell, and other play- ers in the drug market, including rising competitor Marlo Stanfield and indi- vidualist raider Omar Little.5 We have no doubt that The Wire is an appropriate subject of scholarly study, especially for comparison with the sagas. But we chose it for this essay for an additional reason: we know that Miller also believes it worthy, not only because he chose to cite it and only it as the television representative in his canon, but also because he is so clearly a fan. Both of us have enjoyed extensive discussions with him about the series, and one of us had the distinct pleasure of receiving Miller’s episode-by-episode real-time reactions one summer, as he attempted to bridge the self-described ‘I’m-out-of-ideas’ gap between books. Most reactions began with an open mouth and ended with head in hands. In this essay, we attempt to follow a few of Miller’s rules of writing— although we won’t even try to emulate his deep mining of the Western canon and indeed will rely simply on the two works themselves together with a very limited number of associated studies, primarily those by Miller himself. We have, though, been able to follow his rule of relentlessly informative titles: that is, we titled the essay precisely after our subject matter, a rule Miller preached to one of us (who ignored it) and followed precisely throughout his career (Humiliation, The Anatomy of Disgust, The Mystery of Courage, Faking It, and so on), until he parodied it in 2011 with a 38-word title (Losing It: In which an aging professor laments his shrinking brain, which he flatters himself formerly did him noble service: A plaint, tragic-comical, historical, vengeful, sometimes satirical sign, the latter in front of a chicken sign. They are speaking of D’Angelo having talked in a car about matters that should not be discussed there; immediately it is clear that D’Angelo may not have in him the capacity to follow the basic rules required of those participating in The Game. Cf. e.g. W. I. Miller, ‘Why Is Your Axe Bloody?’: A Reading of Njáls saga (Oxford: 2014), 18–19, on the self-conscious skill of the Njála author. 4 The web metaphor is used in a quotation mentioned in relation to The Wire by Alvarez, Wire, 197; the ‘seamless web’ metaphor goes back to Sir Frederick Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I (2nd ed., Cambridge: 1898; reissued with a new Introduction by S. F. C. Milsom, Cambridge: 1968), vol. 1, 1. 5 An alternative view would be that it is a quadrilateral conflict, the fourth dimension being conflict between, on the one hand, the police trying to do their job on the street, on the other, the authorities above them..

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