In and Out of the Mind

Greek Images of the Tragic Self

Ruth Padel

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781400884322
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Ruth Padel explores Greek conceptions of human innerness and the way in which Greek tragedy shaped European notions of mind and self. Arguing that Greek poetic language connects images of consciousness, even male consciousness, with the darkness attributed to Hades and to women, Padel analyzes tragedy's biological and daemonological metaphors for what is within.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: THE DIVINITY OF INSIDE AND OUTSIDE

Hail and beware them, for they come from where you have not been, they come from where you cannot have come, they come into life by a different gate. They come from a place which is not easily known. . . .

—Charles Olson, A Newly Discovered Homeric Hymn (for Jane Harrison, If She Were Alive)

THE CLASSICAL Athenians, like modern Hindus, had shrines throughout their homes. At the house-door were shrines to Apollo Aguieus, lord of roads, and to Hecate, mistress of crossroads, as well as an embodiment of the god Hermes: the herm, a stone pillar with male head, genitals, and erect penis.¹ Greek imagination divinized all kinds of things, activities, and relationships between people. There was divinity in different moments of relationships, different stages of life, different states of body and feeling. Greeks found this a natural, and useful, way of being in the world. We find it easy to disregard. "Worn-out and silly, like classical gods,” says Sylvia Plath’s insomniac of sleeping pills that no longer work. But for the Greeks of the fifth century B.C., there were gods—like electricity—at work all the time, in their bodies, minds, homes, and cities. The divinities “of" (as we put it) threshold tell us—we are very foreign observers—that Greek mentality saw something divine, with all the risk and exactingness of divinity, in the act of entering and leaving, going from inside out and outside in.

This book uses the Greek tragedies to explore some aspects of what the Athenians who wrote and watched them thought was outside and inside human beings. What came in from outside? What came out from within? What is inside and outside is seen in terms both biological (Chapters 2-5) and daemonological (Chapters 6-8). These are not separate discourses. Both biology and daemonology see what is outside as more aggressive, more to be feared.

It is often said that Greek tragedies distort their culture’s oudook. Tragedy specializes in things going wrong. It does not show us, as for instance comedy and forensic rhetoric can, human nature functioning normally, people amused at gods and animals or manipulating them successfully. At most, tragedy only indicates Greek ideas about how human nature works under normal conditions, through fantasies of what happens when its systems break down. In tragedy, as in Greek medical writing, explanation (whether explicit or implied) is of something going wrong: in a relationship, body, life, or “house.” Therefore, ideas about the mind derived from tragedy will overstress the Athenian culture’s sense that the world is hostile to human beings.

Some of this argument is absurd. Things going wrong do tell us about what is normal. The Hippocratics formed ideas about how the healthy body functions by considering what happens when something goes wrong in it. Freud’s ideas about normal mental functioning came through work on mental dysfunctioning. Work on illusion, the abnormal or paranormal, does tell us about reality and the normal.² The Hippocratics may have had some strange ideas about the body, but their approach—to normality through pathology—was sound.

Of course there are aspects of human existence and relationships that literature does not reveal. Faced with a study of early twentieth-century British and European life based on Joyce and Woolf, we might complain, what about images of life articulated in the music halls? Law Reports? Times leaders? But in fifth-century tragedy, there is a life we can legitimately talk about: imaginative life as experienced in, and illustrated by, tragedy. Evidence for the tone of this life, in particular for fear in the face of the environment’s hostility, is not confined to tragedy. Cult speaks to it, and so, in different registers, do contemporary history, comedy, lyric, philosophy, and even science, as we shall see.

Further, fifth-century Athenian tragedy expresses contemporary imaginative life more soundly than Joyce and Woolf, in their élite genres, can express the inner world of early twentieth-century Britain and Ireland. Athenian tragedy was central to its community’s life. The early twentieth-century British literary novel was not. Decorative arts of the 1930s would not have attracted many buyers with a scene from To the Lighthouse, but vase-painters from 470 B.C. onwards (roughly, from the earliest extant tragedies) often indicate that a mythic scene comes from a recent tragedy. When harpies, for instance, are labelled “Beautiful” in the masculine, they are not birdheaded women, but chorus men dressed as birdwomen. A woman at a tomb who is labelled “Beautiful” in the masculine is a male actor playing Electra. The painter offers customers a picture of Aeschylus’s handling of the myths, not of the myths themselves. Athenian society spent money on improving tragedy’s setting, and even reputedly enabled poorer citizens to afford entrance by special grants.³ Tragedy is Athens’s central popular literary genre. It stages humanity’s need to defend itself against the nonhuman (see Chapter 7). Human defenses are frail. The core hope is that something will survive nonhuman attacks. This tragic hope must have addressed something important in the popular imaginative appetite.

Of course there are problems in using tragedy as evidence for the values of its world. Some scholars stress the divide between tragedy and its world, and believe the worldview of comedy was more “familiar” to its audience.⁴ But suppose we think of comedy as a genre deliberately anodyne at the daemonic level, offering, like television ads, Agatha Christie, or soap opera, a world that deals with fears by removing their real edge? Or does comedy testify to the possibility that by staging these intense and real anxieties, tragedy had brought its fifth-century audience through that fear, for a while? Post tragoediam laughter may sound a note of relief from real terror, rather than amusement at what is not normally taken seriously.

Listen to two scenes in which rules of living polytheism are treated as breakable, yet still serious. “Lycus,” prays a lawsuit addict to the hero whose shrine adjoins the courts, “help me, and I’ll never pee and fart by your wicker fence again.” “This is the full-moon day of the goddess,” says a wife. “How can I start cooking without taking a bath?” “Are you going to follow all those rules and waste time?” asks the husband. The first scene is from Aristophanes’ vision of fifth-century Athens, the second from a modern short story set in the lived Hinduism of a village in modern Maharashtra.⁵ In both, rules are important and serious, but people sometimes treat them as if they did not matter. Athenian comedy has bias, perhaps, towards those moments of “as if.” But moments when the rules did matter were just as “familiar” to the audience.

Another argument against taking tragedy as evidence for the imagination of its society—one with which I have more sympathy—is to say it “challenged” assumptions of its audience: about, say, relations between men and women, old and young; about families, marriage, gods, laws. Therefore, what it says should not be taken to express what the culture normatively felt.

Sometimes this view is put excitingly, but it can become formulaic. One gets a picture of Sophocles sitting at his desk muttering, "What assumptions shall I challenge today?” The aim of conscious challenge to current values is shared by today’s critics and scriptwriters, but was not, as far as we know, on the dramatist’s articulate agenda in fifth-century Athens. Nor did the audience consciously expect it.

I would put it differently. The tragedians who wrote the plays were drawn to focus on what was painful and precarious in contemporary imagination. Audiences shared this pain and precariousness. They were the people whose pain it was, and they were overpoweringly drawn to explore it with their dramatists. Of course, there are areas of experience that tragedy excludes, and there must be truths about the fifth-century psyche that tragedy does not reflect. Nonetheless, tragedy is the concentrated, intense genre that its community prized, for which they shut up shop, came to their uncomfortable theater, and sat still for days on end. Its ways of looking at human beings and human relations with the outside world must have had some bearing on that community’s inner life.

This book concentrates on fifth-century ideas of bodily interiority and of what we invoke when we say “mind.” A sub-theme is our own differences in these areas from fifth-century Greeks. The main project is to approach Greek images of the human interior from connections the Greeks saw between inside and outside. The book works mainly by making its own connections: between, for example, Greek scientists’ theories about perception and disease, and Greek tragedy’s vision of passion. Both suggest a particular pattern of relationship between inside and outside.

Inside and outside: the god of the relationship between them is Hermes, god of the door, of connection-making. He has many other names: Strophaios, “the Pivoter,” divinity of the stropheus, “hinge,” and Prothuraios, “Before the Door.” He is male, mobile, master of language and roads, of heralds, messages, interpretation, communication and its ambiguities.⁶ He is god of doubleness in several aspects, signified by his staff, which holds two snakes, one on each side, mirroring each other. He is lord of linguistic illusion, giving voice to what is unseen, within, silent: to the dead, to innards. He translates thought, which is within, into its external manifestation, speech. He is the bringer-out. He brings the dead back, ambiguously, to the light. He is “most helpful of gods,” with “a lovely voice” of his own.⁷

The Athenians’ familiarity with this divinity of the threshold illuminates the ways in which both their tragedy and contemporary Greek science relate the inside of a human being to the outside world. Hermes’ most common manifestation, the pervasive erect herm, stood at each front door, on street comers and important inner-city boundaries. The streets must have bristled. He was an active, talkative presence. People spoke to him. He spoke back. A herm was expected to breathe intimate, practical advice. Relationship with Hermes was one of dialogue. In sacrificing, one offered him the tongue.⁸

As outsiders, we feel our way into the Greeks’ perceptions of the world by looking at their gods. Religion was the Greeks’ most vivid medium for expressing their sense of their world and their relationships. Each divinity specialized in a different range of experience and phenomena, and each goddess or god was “many-named” according to her or his different activities. As in Hinduism, the plural deities had pluralizing epithets.⁹ We may not happen to think the titles and roles of a god are intrinsically connected. But in Greek mentality, each divine persona was a many-faced crystal through which specific spheres of activity and experience, mutually explicatory, touched. Artemis’s role as “mistress of the animals” had meaning in relation to her involvement in childbirth, chastity, hunting, and women’s death. As foreigners, we start from the basic fact of connectedness between these things.

With Hermes, therefore, we work from his compound persona, from the fact that Greek mentality connected the activities designated by his titles, toward Greek responses to each phenomenon or experience he ruled. The concrete images of Hermes’ presence—the threshold, the pivoting door—tell us that the Gree...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction: The Divinity of Inside and Outside
• Chapter 2: Innards
• Chapter 3: Disease and Divination: Knowing the Causes of Pain
• Chapter 4: The Flux of Feeling
• Chapter 5: Inner World, Underworld, and Gendered Images of “Mind”
• Chapter 6: The Zoology and Daemonology of Emotion
• Chapter 7: Animal, Daimōn: Bringers of Death and Definition
• Chapter 8: Blood in the Mind
• Works Cited
• Index