Victoria Wohl - Euripides and the Politics of Form

Euripides and the Politics of Form

M ARTIN C LASSICAL L ECTURES

The Martin Classical Lectures are delivered annually at Oberlin College through a foundation established by his many friends in honor of Charles Beebe Martin, for forty-five years a teacher of classical literature and classical art at Oberlin.

John Peradotto, Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics

Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule

Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost: (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan)

Helene P. Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy

Mark W. Edwards, Sound, Sense, and Rhythm: Listening to Greek and Latin Poetry

Michael C. J. Putnam, Poetic Interplay: Catullus and Horace

Julia Haig Gaisser, The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass: A Study in Transmission and Reception

Kenneth J. Reckford, Recognizing Persius

Leslie Kurke, Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose

Erich Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity

Simon Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity

Victoria Wohl, Euripides and the Politics of Form

Euripides and the Politics of Form

Victoria Wohl

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wohl, Victoria, 1966author.

Euripides and the politics of form / Victoria Wohl.

pages cm(Martin classical lectures)

ISBN 978-0-691-16650-6 (alk. paper)

1. EuripidesCriticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series:

Martin classical lectures.

PA3978.W64 2015

882.01dc23 2014036247

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Baskerville 10 Pro

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For MG

C ONTENTS

P REFACE

Let me begin by explaining my title. First, Euripides. This is not really a book about Euripides. It doesnt treat all his plays or offer a synthetic analysis of their characteristic features; nor does it provide exhaustive readings of the plays it does treat. I do aim to shed light on Euripidean drama, to better understand what it is doing and how. But the books raison dtre, and my defense for adding to the enormous bibliography on the author, lies in the second half of the title. Euripides is offered as an illustrationnot the only possible one, though not, of course, chosen completely at randomof an argument about the relation between politics and literary form.

My definition of politics is both narrow and broad. It encompasses, on the one hand, the formal institutions and political practices, the class relations and power struggles, the communal decisions and actions of the fifth-century Athenian democracy; and on the other hand, the ideological beliefs (collective and individual), the attitudes and attachments, the structures of feeling (in Raymond Williamss phrase) that subtend the institutional structures of the polis. Drama operates more directly within the latter, the psychic and affective domain of ideology, but in doing so (as I hope to show) it can intervene actively in the former. Thus, while my title is meant as an allusion to Fredric Jamesons ideology of form, and a recognition of my methodological debt to his work, I chose the term politics in order to highlight the dimension of the polis and to insist upon the possibility of dramas real and material impact on the collective life of its citizens.

By form I mean nothing particularly esoteric. Following Aristotle, I take the defining formal feature of drama to be its plot structure, the muthos. If tragedy is, as Aristotle defines it, a mimsis of a praxis, an imitation of an action, the emplotment of that action is dramatic substance in its formal dimension.

One blind spot was deliberate. I have little to say about what the plays have to say, the specific content of their stated thought (dianoia). Concepts, themes, the ideas expressed by the characters and chorus are among the resources the playwright had at his disposal and will figure as such in the pages that follow. But my primary aim is not to trace political ideas or themes in Euripides plays but to examine the political thought implicit within their dramatic structures. In focusing on form, I do not disregard contentI dont even know what it would mean to do sonor seek to draw an artificial line between things that are, it goes without saying, inseparable and mutually defining. Form/content is a convenient heuristic antithesisand I will discuss it in more general terms in the conclusionbut ultimately I wish to move beyond this opposition by showing that in Euripides (aesthetic) form is itself a type of (political) content.

The focus of this study, then, is the form of the dramatic action and the formal techniques the playwright deploys to develop it. One could analyze the political meaning of any given formal element in itselfthe elitism of Euripides virgin sacrifices, for instance, or the democratic assumptions behind his verbal debatesbut my interest is in how these different elements combine to create meaning within a single drama. The book is accordingly organized not by formal feature but by play, with each play offered as an exemplification of particular issues or dynamics. Orestes. There is much else that could have been included: the narrative and political aporiai of Iphigeneia at Aulis, the imperial politics of familial recognition in Iphigeneia among the Taurians, the divided self and divided plot of Heracles, the formal chaos of political autonomy in Heracleidai. But, as I said, the point of the book is not to present a complete analysis of Euripidean drama but to offer a way of reading the politics of Euripidean form, and I hope that the five chapters below will provide a sufficient illustration of this approach and indication of its broader applicability.

It says something important about form, and perhaps also something about Euripides, that it has not always been easy to identify the most salient formal featuresin some cases not even the basic formal structureof any given play. Is it unified or fragmented? Bipartite or tripartite? Are its protagnists sympathetic or not? Where is its peripeteia? Does it even have one? Scholars disagree on virtually every point for every play, and I myself have spent more time than I had anticipated trying to decide, for instance, whether a particular scene is pathetic or bathetic. This is to say that aesthetic form is not an objective phenomenon with a fixed and discernible ontology but a matter of interpretation, the product of formalist analysis as well as its raw material. If politics is built upon a structure of feeling, aesthetics is a feeling of structure, and form is something we sense in the course of watching or reading a play.