Murnaghan, 'Helen of Troy and Her Shameless Phantom', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9410
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9410-murnaghan-helen
Norman Austin, Helen of Troy and Her Shameless Phantom.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv + 223. $29.95.
ISBN 0-8014-2955-2.
Reviewed by Sheila Murnaghan -- University of Pennsylvania
Standing at the center of the Trojan legend, Helen of Troy
embodies a stubborn paradox: as the prize for which countless men
are willing to fight and die, she is most highly valued; as an
adulteress, she is the source and object of deep shame. Helen is
the most conspicuous instance of that perplexing, unstable union
of seductiveness and treachery, of indispensability and
unreliability, which the Greek imagination saw as intrinsically
female. The ancient mythological tradition worried away at the
problem of Helen, generating multiple characterizations of her as
heartlessly evil, sympathetically chastened, or subject to forces
beyond her control. One notable response was the creation of an
alternative legend, according to which Helen herself never went
to Troy and her place there was filled by a phantom. This story
was elaborated by a diverse and distinguished series of authors
comprising Stesichorus, Herodotus, and Euripides.
This ingenious variant on Helen's story resolves the question
of her moral status by dividing her contradictory qualities
between the real, upright woman and the unreal, wayward phantom,
but also raises other, equally challenging issues. The
introduction of the phantom opens up questions about the purpose
of war and about the relationship between a series of seeming
opposites that the Greeks expressed as onoma and pragma
or dokesis and ta onta and which modern
thinkers might variously express as appearance and reality,
signifier and signified, or absence and presence. It is no
surprise, then, that this legend received its fullest treatment
in antiquity from Euripides; that it was dramatized by two
modernist poets, Hofmannstahl and H.D.; and that it has been
explored in articles by classicists interested in literary theory
and feminist criticism such as Froma Zeitlin and Karen Bassi. Now
the legend of Helen's absence from Troy has become the subject of
a book-length treatment by Norman Austin.
Austin's survey starts with the more canonical tradition, in
which Helen does go to Troy, as told by Homer in the Iliad
and the Odyssey and by Sappho, and then moves on to
Stesichorus, Herodotus, and Euripides. His account includes
quite full plot summaries, which should make it accessible to
readers who do not already know these texts. He also offers
detailed discussions of the problems associated with
reconstructing Stesichorus' fragmentary Palinode from the
ancient testimonia: Did Stesichorus include the phantom, or did
he just deny that Helen went to Troy? Were there two
Palinodes, as a commentary by the Peripatetic Chamaeleon
would have it? Was Hesiod actually the first to introduce the
phantom, as a scholiast claims? Those discussions are, however,
scattered through Austin's exposition, and that may make it
difficult for neophytes to piece together the overall picture.
As he contemplates this legend, Austin is not particularly
interested in what each treatment can tell us about its author
and how that author exploited a chance to play with the
mythological tradition, but rather in Helen herself and the
challenges inherent in telling her story. While he evokes the
full range of issues raised by his material and sometimes seems
to be groping among them for the central thread to his
argument his most consistent focus is on Helen's adultery as a
serious embarrassment to Greek honor that Greek writers were
collectively trying to remove. "We can imagine Greek sailors,
Dorians at least, facing down the chuckles in countless harbor
taverns when Helen's name was mentioned."
Stesichorus, Herodotus, and Euripides are seen as taking on
this shared problem of impaired Hellenic honor, each improving on
the solution of the other. Stesichorus got as far as
establishing that Helen did not go to Troy but left open the
possibility that she spent the war years unchaperoned and still
out of control. Herodotus took care of that defect when he
endorsed a story he heard from some Egyptian priests that she had
been confiscated from Paris by a noble pharaoh who kept her in
Egypt until she was collected at the end of the war by Menelaus.
But a version in which all the credit belongs to an Egyptian
could not really restore Greek honor, and so Euripides came up
with his plot, in which Helen herself wards off the advances of
the good pharaoh's lascivious son and Menelaus is her rescuer.
It is hard to believe that most Greeks took the Helen legend
as seriously as Austin would have it, and his approach tends to
underrate both Helen's fictional status and the freedom enjoyed
by those authors who told her story to pursue artistic agendas of
their own. If we choose to believe Plato's account of the
genesis of the Palinode, then Stesichorus did see Helen as
a powerful goddess, seriously demanding reverence and a clear
record, but Herodotus and Euripides seem more interested in using
Helen to work out their own concerns about truth, appearances,
and tradition than in serving the cause of Helen's
rehabilitation.
Furthermore, the role Austin assigns these authors does not
just obscure their individual interest: it is also doomed to
failure. For one of Austin's main points is that no amount of
revision could ever neutralize the original, adulterous Helen, in
whom he finds a limitless appeal that transcends the conjoined
rationalism and moralism that spawned the phantom story. In his
evocation of Helen's power, Austin even attributes to her a
mystical capacity to disrupt textual traditions: it is because
Helen is the subject that the papyrus of Sappho's Anaktoria ode
is so fragmentary; that Hesiod's Catalogue of Women
becomes lacunose just where Helen might be mentioned (" . . .
ancient texts have a tendency to wobble, and some even to
dissolve clean away, when Helen's name appears or should appear,"
p. 106); and that the choral ode about the Great Mother in
Euripides' Helen is so corrupt (" . . . the text falls to
pieces, as texts are wont to do, when Helen is introduced," p.
178).
Austin's tendency to write about Helen as if she really
existed can be linked to the markedly psychoanalytic cast of his
discussion, seen, for example, in his equation of the
onoma/pragma opposition with Lacan's distinction between
"Meaning/ the Signifier" and "Being/ the Subject." For him,
Helen is to be understood as a Jungian archetype, and this makes
her, if not a literally real woman, a genuine force in human
experience. She is a manifestation of the Mother, a
representation of beauty that transcends moral categories as it
attracts the energies of the male libido. The original Helen
story, in which that amoral power remains invested in a single,
enigmatic and daemonic figure, is the one that Austin finds truly
compelling. "To identify the libido as such, and to weave it
into a plot that is the ground of the Iliad, was a great
feat of the human imagination. But when Olympus crumbled, and
the gods were toppled from their thrones, the plot came to seem
too naive for the more serious intellects" (p. 133). Austin is
clearly out of sympathy with the rationalism that was a major
force behind the phantom myth and in line with psychoanalysis'
tendency to validate desire and chip away at guilt and
shame drawn to the original, Iliadic Helen. Thus he
dwells on Helen as she appears in the Homeric epics and includes
a detour into Sappho's Anaktoria ode, in which Helen's choice to
leave with Paris is cited as proof of the power of what one
loves.
Characteristically, Austin makes the most of the challenge to
conventional morality that Helen represents in Sappho's poem. As
he puts it, Sappho "gave herself permission to read the myth in
her own way" (p. 52), and used Helen to voice an indifference to
men and a love for women that her culture would have found
shameful. The shamefulness of Sappho's desire for women is a
dubious proposition, and Austin's attempt to support it with an
argument that lyric was confessional and therefore had to be
about what was socially unsanctioned, is hardly successful. But
Sappho's pointed focus on Helen's self-willed departure for Troy
certainly highlights what was most enduringly provocative about
Helen's story. This unreconstructed Helen is Austin's true
inspiration, and his book is ultimately a tribute to her power,
an ode to the figure who is unequivocally Helen of Troy.