The Book of Lamentations turns its back on the ideological hysteria of its time at least partly as a result of the extraordinary impact on Castellanos of the work of Simone Weil, whose 1939 essay, “The Iliad, Poem of Might,” is fundamental to an understanding of The Book of Lamentations. (To such a~ degree that certain passages of Castellanos’s novel—“the smooth orbit without resistance or objection” in which Leonardo Cifuentes moves, for example—seem to be cited directly from Weil’s essay: “He who possesses strength moves in an atmosphere which offers him no resistance.”) After serving as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, Weil found in the Iliad a way of explaining to herself what she saw there: “That might which is wielded by men rules over them,” she wrote. “The human soul never ceases to be modified by its encounter with might.” And the effect of might on the soul is brutally simple: “Might is that which makes a thing of anybody who comes under its sway. When exercised to the full, it makes a thing of man in the most literal sense, for it makes him a corpse.”

In the Iliad, according to Weil, “The cold brutality of the facts of war is in no way disguised, because neither victors nor vanquished are either admired, despised or hated.” Over the later course of European history, Weil said, the purity of this knowledge was lost or distorted; it became difficult not to believe “first, that degradation is the innate vocation of the unfortunate; second, that a soul may suffer affliction without being marked by it, without changing all consciousness. . . .” Like Castellanos after her, Weil was an acute observer of the ways in which oppression transforms human beings, grinding them down, diminishing them, attenuating their humanity; her argument, in this respect, resonates with Hegel’s dialectic of the master and the slave. “On no occasion has the Slave a right to express anything if not that which may please the master. This is why, if in so barren a life a capacity to love should be born, this love could only be for the master.” This is the love Teresa Entzín López has for Idolina, the only convincing example of love in Castellanos’ entire novel.

The miracle of the Iliad—a miracle, Weil believed, that barely endured beyond the limits of ancient Greek civilization—was this: “The bitterness of it is spent upon the only true cause of bitterness: the subordination of the human soul to might, which is, be it finally said, to matter.”