Halleran, 'Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9512
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9512-halleran-whom
@@@@95.12.22, Padel, Whom Gods Destroy
Ruth Padel. Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic
Madness. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Pp.
xviii + 276. $29.95. ISBN 0-691-03360-9.
Reviewed by Michael R. Halleran, Classics -- University of Washington
mrh@u.washington.edu
Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream" has come to represent, as
well as anything else, the disintegration and alienation of the
modern self. The tortured and ghost-like individual, raised
hands accentuating the outline of a misshapen head, cries out,
while the disturbed background of color and movement offers an
outward representation of the pained inner state. This familiar
and haunting picture adorns the cover of Ruth Padel's Whom
Gods Destroy. The title, of course, is allusive: "Whom gods
destroy they first make mad" (Quem deus vult perdere, dementat
prius). A Latin phrase, but it reflects (and perhaps even
translates) a familiar Greek notion--gods bring about a person's
destruction by instilling madness. The dust jacket's
juxtaposition of modern and ancient well suits the book's
exploration of Greek concepts of madness and (to a lesser degree)
their modern-day counterparts.
As in her earlier In and Out of the Mind (rev. BMCR
3 [1992] 471-4), of which this book is a continuation, P. is very
much interested in language, how the words used by the Greeks
allow us to get closer to them, unfiltered as much as possible by
later history's lenses. Her method is to bring all she can
(anthropology, history, psychology) to bear on extraordinary and
often heavily charged texts, most of them poetic. She has little
truck with the "original" or "real" meaning of a word, but
rather, with her poetic sensibility, seeks to explore the full
range of its semantic panoply.
The book is divided into five parts (plus Introduction and
Appendix-on ate) and twenty-two chapters, which in turn
are sub-divided into sections (113 in all). The great number of
smaller sections reflect P.'s approach. Although she does have
several overarching arguments, she focuses very much on the
particulars--many mini-essays on words relating to madness.
"This is a book of ingredients," she tells us in the Preface
(xiii), and the many ingredients do not always blend together.
There is also a certain amount of repetition from section to
section.
P. starts (Part I: "Language and Timing") with some of the basic
words for madness. Madness drives one "out" (E)K?-) or "aside"
(PARA-) from one's wits, causes one to wander, makes one "other".
Orestes and Io both are made to wander literally in their
madness. Mania's possible etymological connection to
menos suggests its violence; it is a "fit of madness".
Madness is typically seen as temporary, something that accounts
for a particular behavior (from which one infers the madness),
not an underlying condition. The way the Greek language
describes madness--with verbs (esp. participial forms of
verbs)--points to madness as action, what happens more than what
exists. Even those who are chronically mad (Io and Orestes are
again the examples) suffer from intermittent fits of madness, not
a permanent state of frenzy. The model of Greek medicine, which
focused on the manifestations of acute illness, provides a
parallel to this construction of madness.
In the next two parts ("Darkness and Vision" and "Isolation:
Wandering, Disharmony, Pollution"), P. explores what madness is
like, first from the inside then from the outside, although, as
P. readily acknowledges, these two perspectives often blend.
First and foremost, madness is black. The mind is darkened by
madness; so are one's innards; Furies are children of the Night.
Melancholao (lit. "I'm full of black bile") serves as a
somewhat crude synonym for the more refined mainomai. In
the theory of humors, too much black bile could cause madness.
Sophocles' Ajax, one of the extant tragedies which
foreground madness, provides much useful material here for P.'s
discussion. Whereas many when mad have their vision perverted,
like Ajax, and see things differently from the way they are,
prophets enjoy another type of madness. Prophetic madness (one of
the four types of mania classified by Plato in the
Phaedrus [244e]) differs in that the person inspired by
mantic frenzy does not merely see things differently from the
sane but things that are not accessible to the sane; the prophet
sees things "truly".
Madness seen from the outside highlights distance and otherness.
The mad are often by themselves, separated from their
communities. Their madness cuts them off from sane society.
This distance is both inner (the mad have been driven "away from"
the path of good thinking) and outer (the mad keep
themselves--and are kept--physically away from others). The
wandering that characterizes Orestes and Io especially serves as
an homology for the interior wandering of their wits. For the
ancient Greeks, to be without a community was to have a
diminished self. Madness from the outside was also imagined as a
kind of dancing, violent irregular movements. The Greeks
associated it with various outward signs, including rolling eyes
and skin sores. Madness was also, unsurprisingly, connected with
pollution, which also kept others at a distance.
In part four ("Damage") we find the most sustained, and
rewarding, argument. P. begins with a discussion of ate,
especially as found in Homer. Her treatment of the notorious
two-sidelines of ate ties in very much with her overall
approach of discussing both the inner and outer states of
madness. She sees ate as part of a sequence, one which
begins with inner "damage", which then in turn causes a damaging
outward act, which act might itself bring about further damaging
consequences. Ate, then, is what one experiences, what
one does under its influence, and what may follow as a result.
The gods who cause one to experience ate can then punish
the mortal for the actions stemming from it. The same doubleness
applies to the Erinyes as well (177). Since, P. argues, this
chain of disaster lies at the heart of tragedy, the tragedians
could not use ate in the same way without "overloading"
things (188). Madness, then, replaces ate. "Madness
slipped into the pre-prepared ate apparatus of relating cause of
crime to consequence and punishment" (188). Madness could, of
course, serve as either the gods' punishment (as with Orestes) or
its instrument (as with Heracles). Hamartia, referring to
different shadings of error, is related by P. to madness, since
behind it "as tragedians use the word, seems to be the basic
insight that 'mistaking' where your own interests lie may be bad
and mad. 'Error' shades into madness." (200) At the end of part
four, P. returns to the gods as the cause as well as the agents
of madness. In her view the gods place mortals in a "double
bind", as we are forced to live in a world of conflicting divine
loyalties.
In the book's final part "(Madness: A Rough Tragic Grammar"), P.
advises caution for those who tread the path of her inquiry,
emphasizing that one must respect the constructions and
categories of other cultures. In particular she points to the
pitfalls inherent in some psychoanalytic approaches to this
material, especially when it ignores other avenues such an those
offered by anthropology. The final chapter gives a summary of
Greek tragic madness, the appropriate connections of Dionysus to
madness (namely the god's violence, interest in illusion, and
outsider status) and the connections between the tragic hero and
the madman. An appendix on the "thinning" of the semantics of
ate in tragedy, a list of works cited, and a useful index
conclude the book.
On a fundamental point I disagree with P. Madness, while
undeniably fundamental to several of our extant plays, and
ancillary to many others, does not, in my view offer the
privileged paradigm for understanding tragedy that P. suggests.
P. at times overstates her case. Take for example
Hippolytus and Antigone, two plays in which P.
holds that madness figures prominently. While Phaedra's bizarre
(love-sick) behavior leads the chorus to wonder whether she is
possessed by a god (141-4), and Phaedra herself claims that in
her "delirium" she was mad (241), madness is not presented as
fundamental to the play. The chorus in that same choral song
offer several other non-manic explanations for Phaedra's
behavior. And, although Phaedra's intense passion is divinely
caused and drives the action of the play, the play's many pivotal
decisions--Phaedra's to confess her passion and later to take her
life, the Nurse's to intervene, Hippolytus' to take and to keep
his oath, Theseus' to curse and to exile his son-do not stem from
madness. The Nurse regrets her decision, as does Theseus, but
neither of these mortals nor the god Artemis in her explanatory
role at the end ascribes the reason for their mistakes to
madness. Even Antigone does not blame for the madness for
the destruction it presents. Creon was guilty of a mistake, bad
judgment not madness (see esp. 1261-9). Antigone herself,
although intemperate and head-strong, is not mad. The gods, to
be sure, play a role in the destruction of the Labdacids (see
esp. the often cited 622-5), but they do not effect this
destruction through madness. The story of Lycurgus told by the
chorus (955-65) is filled with madness but the connection of this
tale to the drama is oblique and indeterminate.
Like In and Out of the Mind, this book has metaphor at its
core. In reviewing that earlier book, I suggested that P. needed
to address metaphor more directly. Unfortunately, she does not
do that here. She asserts that before the fourth century there
was no such thing as metaphor for the Greeks: "Fifth-century
Greeks did not distinguish between literal and metaphorical
meaning, or not in the ways that we do" (158); "We cannot speak
of a relationship, or slippage, between literal and metaphorical,
concrete and abstract meaning in pre-fourth-century Greek" (169).
This is an interesting and provocative claim, but the argument
for it is never made. P. deals with the matter indirectly in
discussing "hyperbolic" madness (cases where someone says, "You
must be mad to believe X") (194-6), but this is not developed. I
don't doubt that the fifth-century Greeks had a different feel
for metaphor from our own. But I cannot accept at face value the
claim that they had no such thing. At the very least, as early
as the Homeric poems the Greek language had varying degrees of
literalness. Metaphor, to be sure, is not a simple phenomenon,
but P. is well equipped to approach the topic directly and
profitably. It is a disappointment that she chose not to.
P. has produced another provocative and intriguing study. Not
all of her connections will persuade but they will make one
think. And there are many unexpected--and savory--ingredients
along the way (e.g., on Christian "folly", 93-4). P.'s style is
consistently forceful and confident; one cannot help but enjoy
reading the book (and where else will one find the Erinyes
described as a "gang of muggers", 79?). Those with an interest
in Greek culture or constructions of madness will enjoy this
lively work.