After All
Although embedded in an epic genealogy, Bellerophon’s is a story of erotic triangles, ideal matter for a novel. We do not know where Homer got the story; presumably it reflects an extremely ancient Lydian layer in the epic tradition from which he drew, dating from a time long before his own (supposing we place Homer in the eighth century B.C.). It was a time when some form of reading and writing was known to the Aegean world, or at least to the people of Lykia where the story is set. No one knows what system of writing this was. Homer himself may not have known. The poet is widely believed by scholars to have been illiterate; in any event, he betrays not the slightest fascination, as he tells his Bellerophonstory, with the phenomenon of writing and reading that figures crucially within it. The motif of letters falls so flat here it makes you wonder.
Bellerophon was a young man gifted by the gods with remarkable beauty (Il. 6.156). Exiled from his home for murder, he takes refuge with King Proitos of Ephyra and all unwittingly stirs love in the heart of Anteia, Proitos’ wife. The lover is “maddened by desire” (6.160), the beloved unresponsive: a typical erotic scenario, which draws a typical erotic reaction from Anteia. She triangulates. By means of a lying tale she inflames her husband to jealousy of Bellerophon, so that he resolves to destroy the young man, but not in direct encounter. Proitos arranges a kind of deadfall, in which the three angles of eros will close on Bellerophon when actuated by a deadly text. Bellerophon is despatched to Lykia, to the halls of Anteia’s father, carrying his own death warrant:
πέμπε δέ μιν Λνκίην δέ, πόρεν δ᾽ ὅ γε σήματα λυγρά
γράψας ἐν πίνακι πτυκτῷ θυμοφθόρα πολλά,
δεῖξαι δ᾽ ἠνώγειν ᾧ πενθερῷ ὄφρ᾽ ἀπόλοιτο.
and Proitos sent him to Lykia and bestowed on him a
written text that would kill him [sēmata lugra]
for he wrote many life-destroying things
[thumophtbora] on a folded tablet
and bid him show it to Anteia’s father so that he
might be destroyed.
(6.168-70)
What are the “life-destroying things” on the folded tablet? The life to be destroyed is Bellerophon’s and the destroyer, Anteia’s father. Most likely, then, Proitos relates to the father that his chaste daughter has been shamed by the rapist rogue Bellerophon: the erotic triangle that began in Anteia’s imagination now acquires the status of written fact. (That fact is a lie but so is any novel; this should not detain us.) Upon the fact is projected a metaphor that almost kills Bellerophon. The metaphor brings together the action of wooing a lover and the action of reading a written text on the screen of Bellerophon’s life. For he is twice unwitting victim of the signs he carries. First his own beauty, gift of the gods, seduces Anteia, unknown to him. Then the folded tablet, bestowed by Proitos, writes the order for his death, and he does not read it. “Life-destroying things” are the text he carries, but the word (thumophthora) is an ambiguous one. On the surface, “life-destroying things” refers to the projected murder of Bellerophon, but the adjective can also convey the emotional sense “heartbreaking” (as it does in Od. 4.716) and evoke the seductive beauty that drove Anteia mad. Unwitting wooing began Bellerophon’s story. Unread writing will end it. These possibilities float just where Bellerophon cannot see them.
Bellerophon is a living metaphor for the blind point of eros, carrying on his face (beauty) and in his hands (tablet) a meaning he does not decode. The text remains for him a folded one, literally and metaphorically. Unfolded, its two sides compose one meaning, a meaning vitally incongruent with the actual fact of Bellerophon (alive). It is a meaning that is a verb and that will act to assign a new predicate to Bellerophon (dead). It is a meaning whose novel sense will not entirely obscure the previous sense, nor the difference between them (for death keeps life visible while making it absent). The meaning is a blind point where Bellerophon’s knowledge of his own situation disappears into itself. If Bellerophon were to unfold the tablet and intercept the message he is carrying, he would exclaim (with Aristotle): “Well, I was quite wrong after all!” That would be a moment of wrenching pain. Also it might save his life. We have to keep going back to such moments if we wish to maintain contact with the possible.
“Not anyone else, Bellerophon carried the letter himself: in a so-to-speak tragic manner, caught by his own wings,” says Eustathius in his ancient commentary on the Iliadic text. Eustathius is overinterpreting. As Homer tells the story there is nothing tragic about it, for Bellerophon is not “caught” in Lykia at all. After arriving at the court of Anteia’s father, he hands over the damning letter to the king, then proceeds to discredit its contents by a few heroic exploits and win the king’s other daughter to wife as his reward. The folded tablet is not mentioned again. One can see easily how Bellerophon’s tale, told from the point of view of Anteia for instance, could have furnished a tragedy (see Euripides’ Hippolytus). Equally, there is fair material for weaving a romance around Bellerophon and his Lykian bride. The Iliad does not tell these stories. Homer’s hero is a warrior and a winner. Love is incidental to him. Moreover, attempts to interpret him symbolically prove frustrating. Bellerophon wins out in the end by heroic virtue, not by unfolding his own metaphor. Homer is not primarily interested in the puzzles of inference and reference that amuse novelists and later poets; he has a war to wage. Nor is Homer interested in the writing on the folded tablet. Like Bellerophon, he transmits and ignores it. Why does Bellerophon not read the tablet? Has he no curiosity? Is he illiterate? Does he scruple to break the seal? These same questions might be put to Homer. What is his relation, as a poet speaking from within an ancient oral tradition, to this Lykian vignette about alphabets and love triangles? Can he read the signs he is using?
I do not know how one could answer these questions. A powerful metaphorical potential seems to be fossilized within this traditional story of Bellerophon and his killing text but, except in overinterpretation, it cannot be drawn out. Nonetheless, the story offers some matter for speculation about literacy and its effects on writers and readers. Bellerophon’s myth derives, as we have said, from a time when Lykian society knew some form of writing. The myth brings together a number of the notions we have been exploring in ancient novels. For example it is a love story where eros acts from a folded text; its erotic situation includes two terms until the lover deliberately complicates these by adding a third angle; a written text is the mechanism of the complication; along the angle where the written text enters the story move elements of metaphor, inference, paradox and imaginative action; these elements inscribe a blind point at the center of the story and at the center of its hero, Bellerophon; into the blind point we watch several important questions about Bellerophon, and about Homer, disappear.
Can anything be learned from the repeated confluence, in different genres, of these elements with the phenomenon of literacy?
It would seem to make sense that when an author begins to use and to think about reading and writing his imagination is trained along certain lines, his mental landscape is lit from a certain angle. The novel as a genre evolved in adaptation to that angle. Deep within the Bellerophon story some pre-Homeric imagination has traced the same angle. It provides us with a special, intractable pleasure as we read. Homer does not, in the self-conscious manner of the novelists, exploit that pleasure, yet our reading of his version brings us somewhat closer to the question that lies at the heart of the matter.
It is a question about the relations between readers and their reading. We have already recalled the famous words of Francesca in Dante’s Inferno. Other, similar scenarios come to mind, for example, that of Pushkin’s heroine in Eugene Onegin:
Tatiana is besotted by romantic fiction:
with what attention she now
reads a delicious novel,
with what vivid enchantment
drinks the seductive fiction!
… sighs, and having made her own
another’s ecstasy, another’s melancholy,
she whispers in a trance, by heart,
a letter to the amiable hero.
(3:9)
Readers in real life, as well as within fiction, bear witness to the allure of the written text. The novelist Eudora Welty says of her mother: “She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him” (1984, 17). Dickens himself would not have been discomfited by such a spirit in a reader, if we may judge from a letter he wrote to Maria Beadnell in 1855. Here he speaks of his novel David Copperfield to the woman who inspired Dora: “Perhaps you have once or twice laid down that book and thought ‘How dearly that boy must have loved me and how vividly this man remembers it!’ ” (Slater 1983, 66). Through Francesca, through Tatiana, through Maria Beadnell, through Eudora Welty’s mother, some current of eros leapt from a written page. You have felt it yourself, reading Montaigne or Heliodoros or Sappho. Can we arrive at a more realistic appraisal of this phenomenon? Just what is erotic about reading and writing?