POLITICS AND POMEGRANATES REVISITED
IT HAS NOW BEEN nearly twenty years since I wrote “Politics and Pomegranates,” and it is not the essay I would write today. It was composed originally for a 1975 conference on “New Approaches to the Study of Classical Antiquity,” and it was designed as an experiment in juxtaposing psychoanalytic theory with literary criticism. At the time, I wanted to see whether I could avoid the subordination of text to theory which had always been the hallmark of so-called “applied analysis.” As one critic later put it, “The relationship between ‘literature and psychoanalysis’ … is usually interpreted … as implying not so much a relationship of coordination as one of subordination, a relationship in which literature is submitted to the authority, to the prestige of psychoanalysis.”a
“Politics and Pomegranates” was an attempt to achieve this kind of “coordination.” I wanted to “elucidate a common structure underlying both [the ancient text and the modern theory].”b More specifically, I aimed at offering a structuralist analysis of the narrative dynamics of the poem, at a time when there existed in the literature only one literary study of the hymn.c And I also wanted to juxtapose against this interpretation the analytic logic of the Freudian paradigm of female psychosexual development.
Indeed, the Freudian theory of female psychosexual development appeared to me to embody and illustrate a cultural logic analogous to that found in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. In both, the strategies of resistance to patriarchal domination have an internal logic and coherence, and both culminate in a validation of the patriarchal order. The juxtaposition of Freud and Demeter, I thought, could serve both to demonstrate the structural unity of the poem and to clarify the ideology underlying the psychoanalytic theory.
The analogy also seemed particularly useful in explaining the meaning of the central section of the hymn encompassing Demeter’s sojourn among human beings. This section previously had been understood simply as aetiological, and I wanted to argue instead that it constituted the narrative core of the poem and that it was critical to transforming the withdrawal theme into the central motif of the poem.
In the years intervening, “Politics and Pomegranates” has gained recognition almost exclusively as a feminist/psychoanalytic interpretation of the poem. Its contribution to the history of literary analysis of the poem, in other words, has fallen victim to the power of the psychoanalytic paradigm. For its readers, however kindly intentioned, have imposed upon the essay the very subordination of text to theory which I had attempted to avoid.
Consequently, it is not without misgivings that I have agreed to send forth “Politics and Pomegranates” in its original form once again, knowing full well that, like the written word of Plato’s Phaedrus, “it has no capacity to protect or defend itself” (275e6). Wherefore these brief remarks, which are meant to serve as the “help” that in Plato’s view the written word always requires of its parent (ibid.), and my hopes that the reader’s interest in the psychoanalytic aspects of my discussion will not be allowed to occlude the literary aspects of my analysis of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.
Summer 1992
a Felman 1978:5; emphasis in the original.
b Peradotto 1977:5.
c Lord 1967 (reprinted in this volume).