Victoria Wohl
“The function of literature”: the very phrase evokes the defensiveness of literature departments struggling to justify their existence to budget-cutting administrators. But the question of literature’s function is as old as literature itself. Does literature have a (any) function? Does it have a (single) function? These questions impinge upon the very definition of literature: what (if anything) literature does helps define what (if anything) literature is.1
At first glance the issue might seem fairly straightforward for ancient Greece, where literature was composed for and consumed at specific occasions, and its function was tied to that of the occasion, be it to celebrate the victory of an Olympic competitor (as in Pindar’s epinicians), to exhort the troops (Tyrtaeus’ elegies), or to honor the dead (the funeral oration). Some genres and texts were more closely tied to this functional context than others, of course. We might trace a continuum from an actual funeral dirge (thrēnos) to the dramatic dirges sung by characters in tragedy; from a real epitaph like Simonides’ for the dead at Marathon to the highly polished epitaphic epigrams of the Hellenistic writers, whose imitation of the form was a literary game unencumbered by actual stone. That continuum is sometimes taken as a historical trajectory, but even as the Greeks came to understand genre in more formal and abstract terms (Ford 2002), their literature never lost its performative function. Attic tragedy, for instance, seems to have originated as a ritual for Dionysus; that function had so faded by the fifth century that it gave rise to the adage, “nothing to do with Dionysus.” But that ritual function could always be re-activated as a source of poetic meaning, as in Euripides’ Bacchae, where pointed metatheatricality collapses the Dionysiac worship within the play, with the play as Dionysiac worship.
But while the performative context might have determined the form of Greek literature (one wouldn’t sing a thrēnos at a wedding or an epithalamion at a funeral) it did not fully determine its meaning.2 Take as an example these lines of Sappho (F 105a V):
οἰ˜ον τo` γλυκυ´μαλον ἐρευ´θεται ἄκρωι ἐπ' ὔσδωι,
ἄκρον ἐπ' ἀκροτάτωι, λελάθοντο δε` μαλοδρόπηες,
οὐ μα`ν ἐκλελάθοντ', ἀλλ' οὐκ ἐδύναντ' ἐπίκεσθαι
as the sweetapple reddens on a high branch
high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot –
no, not forgot: were unable to reach(trans. Carson 2002)
For us this fragment appears in isolation as an objet d’art (DuBois 1995, 31–54). We can admire its euphony and metrical balance, its use of polyptoton (the repetition of “high”) to mimic the sense of distance, the self-correction that produces an impression of spontaneity, as if the poet notices the scene at exactly the same moment as the pickers notice the apple and both simultaneously are reaching for their object and failing to grasp it. But this fragment was probably originally part of an epithalamion, a wedding song. Its function would have been to adorn the occasion and honor the bride, whom the simile of the sweet, unreachable apple depicts as both pure and ripe for marriage. This “sweetapple” is about to be plucked, and the function of the song was presumably to celebrate that inevitability. And yet there is an anticipatory sadness to these lines that sits ill with that purpose. The very beauty of the image of this solitary, sweet, reddening apple, sublime in its unreachability, generates regret for its inevitable harvest. These lines pull against the function of the poem as a whole, the celebration of a union that will end this fragile moment of suspension and, plucking the apple, obliterate the simile. This artful image thus complicates the poem’s performance of its epithalamic purpose; the poem’s aesthetics exceed its function and stand in a certain tension to it. Indeed, we might say that this is precisely what makes these lines literature: their irreducibility to simple functionality.
My chapter fleshes out this hypothesis by looking at the two primary functions of literature as the ancient Greeks saw it: to educate its audience (a social–didactic function) and to entertain them (an emotional–hedonic function). The two are not mutually exclusive, of course, but neither are they always mutually reinforcing. The emotions literature arouses and the pleasure it gives operate independently of its social and ideological aims and can subvert (as well as support) them. This means that while literature clearly did serve important social functions, as we shall see, it can never be reduced to a single function – “the function of literature” – or subordinated to a logic of pure functionality, and this is precisely what makes it literature.
In Aristophanes’ Frogs, Dionysus goes to the underworld, determined to bring back a “clever poet” (ποιητοῦ δεξιοῦ, 71) “so that the city may be saved to lead its choruses” (1419). In Hades he presides as judge over a contest to determine which tragedian, Aeschylus or Euripides, shall return to the living. This famous competition between the two playwrights is one of our earliest pieces of literary criticism. The two compete on stylistic terms – the metrical intricacies of their lyrics, their choice of diction – but also on the benefit each offers to the city. Aeschylus claims that his magnificent martial verse made the Athenians better warriors, while Euripides’ scandalous plots incited them to incest and adultery (1013–88). Euripides counters that his plays, by introducing logic and rhetoric, taught the audience to speak and think and question (950–79). Despite their artistic differences, the two playwrights agree on the essential criteria for a good poet: “artistic skill and advice, and that we improve men in the city” (Δεξιότητος καí νουθεσίας, ó̒τι βελτίους τε ποιούμεν τοὺς ἀνθρώπους ἐν ταɩ˜ς πόλεσιν, 1009–10). The two have different views on precisely how drama makes citizens better, but they both assume that literature has an ethical, as well as an aesthetic, function and expect it to serve a serious social purpose (Dover 1993, 13–15).
The belief that literature could and should serve a didactic, ethical, or social function had a long and honorable pedigree in Greek tradition, as the character Aeschylus himself points out. From the beginning, he says, the best poets have been “useful” (ὠϕέλιμοι, 1031): Orpheus taught the mysteries, Musaeus prophecy and cures for diseases; Hesiod taught tilling of the soil, and “the divine Homer” marshaling, arming, and military valor (1030–36). Of course, the immediate fungibility of literature’s teaching is questionable – could one really win fifth-century battles with tactics learned from Homer?3 – and in fact it is questioned even in Frogs, for when the tragedians are asked to weigh in on the concrete problems facing Athens, the advice they give – in verses culled from their own plays – is ludicrous, impractical, or hopelessly obscure (1420–66). But the assumption of literature’s fundamental utility is accepted without debate. As Aeschylus puts it, “Boys have a teacher who instructs them, but adults have poets” (1055–6).
Earlier chapters in this volume have documented the Greeks’ use of literature as a source of technical (see Fögen, ch. 17, and Asper, ch. 26 in this volume), historical (see Tsakmakis, ch. 14, and Dubischar, ch. 28 in this volume), or moral knowledge (see Konstan, ch. 27 in this volume). The association of oral poetry with divinely inspired memory and the view of poetic activity not as the creation of original fictions but as the transmission of established truths (cf. Hose, ch. 24 in this volume) vested literature with the authority of tradition, an authority underwritten by the gods themselves (Detienne 1996 [1967], 29–52). Even after this link between poetry, memory, and truth became attenuated with the spread of writing and the “secularization” of poetry, literature retained its authority as a token, if not a source, of truth. The fourth-century orator Lycurgus, for example, quotes extended passages of Homer, Tyrtaeus, and Euripides in his court case against Leocrates (In Leocr. §§100–10; cf. 92, 132); these venerable poets testify to the noblest ideals of Greek patriotism and valor, and indict Leocrates by his failure to live up to them. Lycurgus quotes his passages out of context and interprets them simplistically, if not tendentiously. But his interpretation is less telling than the mere gesture of citation: just by quoting these canonical literary authors, Lycurgus lays claim to their prestige.4 Lycurgus apparently deployed a similar strategy outside the courtroom, too: as archon in c. 330 BCE he oversaw the compilation of official texts of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and the reconstruction of the Theater of Dionysus. In using poetry to augment his own political authority, Lycurgus was following a familiar tradition: his Athenian contemporaries may have recalled that the dramatic festival of the City Dionysia was established in the 530s by the tyrant Peisistratus as part of the consolidation of his own power.
If literature could bolster the power of a dominant individual, it could also serve the interests of the dominant class. For example, Hesiod’s vision of monarchical power, both divine (in the Theogony) and human (in Works and Days), places the imprimatur of his divinely inspired verse on both the dominant class and the prevailing class structure of his own society. Human kings are legitimated by their connection to the king of the gods, and those who swallow bribes or give crooked judgments delegitimate themselves, not the institution of kingship. Hesiod’s verse supports this structure of power in part by mystifying it: the successional struggles of the past are in the past (Theogony); in the present era, monarchical power is represented not as won in a struggle against others and at their real expense, but as part of the just order of the cosmos, revealed to the poet on Mount Helikon by the Muses themselves.5 Similarly, Pindar’s highly adorned praise of athletic victors (leavened with discreet warnings against greed and hybris) celebrates not only the individual victor and his household but also the elite class to which they belonged, again euphemizing dominance won in a competitive field of intra-elite (and occasionally inter-class) rivalry as the natural product of divine ancestry and hereditary virtue, including the virtue of recognizing and rewarding a good poet (e.g. Pythian 10.64–72, on which see Rose 1992, 141–84). Indeed, epinician, the genre of praise-poetry Pindar wrote, seems a perfect blend of form and function: the genre’s aesthetics, with its intricate mythological narratives and ornate, gold-encrusted imagery, makes the poem itself a prestige object, a form of symbolic capital for its recipient (Kurke 1991). One can see why the tyrants of archaic Greece collected poets the way modern autocrats do mansions or racing cars.6
Thus, if literature served a social purpose, as Aristophanes’ underworld-tragedians agree, that purpose was often, in practice, strongly conservative: to “save the city” meant saving the existing social hierarchy and the individuals or groups who enjoyed dominance within it. That is nowhere more obvious than in sympotic literature (cf. Baumbach, this volume ch. 22, pp. 345–6). One thinks of Theognis, denouncing the vulgarity of the nouveaux-riches and the evils of social miscegenation in the same finely turned elegiacs in which he lauds the beauty of the boy Kyrnus and vaunts the immortalizing power of his own poetry. The didactic function of poetry here serves an obvious (conservative) social end as Theognis initiates Kyrnus into the values – social, moral, and aesthetic – of his class (e.g. Thgn. 15–18, 27–38, 563–6, and see Cobb-Stevens 1985 and Levine 1985). Plato writes the conservative function of (sympotic) literature into law in the Laws: his Athenian proposes the symposium as a school of self-restraint and sympotic music as a means of training the soul in the pleasures of virtue (Lg. 652a–55b). The wise legislator will accordingly compel the poets to depict the happiness of the just man and the misery of the unjust (660e–61c), with strict penalties for those who do otherwise (662b). A play on the double meaning of nomos – both law and musical mode (800a) – makes the poet into a sort of policeman who upholds the state’s laws by strict adherence to the laws of music, including Law #3: “the poet shall not compose anything that goes against the laws of the city and what it defines as just, beautiful and good” (801c–d). The didactic role of literature here reaches a dismal extreme, as both education and literature (not to mention drinking) are reduced to tedious rehearsals of the doxic and the nomic.
Of course not everyone thought the symposium should showcase state-mandated choruses of old men singing morally edifying songs. In the classical period, and particularly in democratic Athens, sympotic poetry was not only a weapon of social conflict but also its object. In Aristophanes’ Clouds the old father Strepsiades, along with the avatar of traditional education “Just Argument,” praises the good old days, when boys learned the old songs by heart and sang them to tunes passed down from their fathers (Nub. 966–8). But when Strepsiades asks his son Pheidippides to sing one of the old tunes – Simonides or Aeschylus – at a symposium the young man scorns them as boring and outmoded and instead offers a new musical selection, the scandalous verses of Euripides (1352–79). The play presents this radical new literature (the so-called New Music) as part of the sophistic movement of the late fifth century, which challenged received wisdom and traditional values and which the older generation naturally viewed as the end of civilization. Little wonder that Clouds closes with Strepsiades burning down the “Thinkery” where Pheidippides acquired his new literary sensibility.
Pheidippides’ revolutionary musical tastes and his father’s reaction to them show that if literature often served to consolidate the dominant class and to reproduce its ideology and social dominance, it could also act as a vehicle for ideological critique and challenge to the status quo. Hesiod tells the fable of the hawk and the nightingale (Works and Days 202–12): the powerful hawk’s threats to the bardic bird are answered by the poem as a whole, as the poet speaks as an advocate for dikê (justice) against the hybris of crooked kings.7 Indeed, one might even say that literature emerged in Greece in this opposition between hawk and nightingale, that it was precisely by taking an oppositional stance toward power that poets asserted the autonomy of literature and thus defined it as a discernible domain. One narrative of the “invention” of literature gives a pivotal role to the seventh-century poet Archilochus, master of abusive “blame poetry” and supposedly the first poet to write in his own voice about his own (fictionalized) life experiences (Fränkel 1950, 147–70; cf. Will 1969; Burnet 1983, 6–7, 15–32; Gentili 1988, 179–96). The extant fragments present a persona that is cynical and anti-heroic (e.g., F 5 IEG); rejecting wealth and power (F 19 IEG, F 114 IEG) they identify with an anti-elitist ethos. Likewise, Leslie Kurke has recently argued that Greek prose came into its own as a literary form by appropriating the dissident voice of the slave–provocateur Aesop: both Plato and Herodotus, she argues, incorporated (even as they disavowed) aspects of this abject and subversive tradition in order to define their novel genres of writing and articulate their opposition to the ideologies (philosophical or political) of their day (Kurke 2011, esp. 241–431). We have already seen another example in the “New Music” of which Pheidippides is such a fan in Clouds. While it is difficult to reconstruct the positive social or political agenda behind this aesthetic movement, for its critics (including Plato, Laws 669b–70b), this voluble, emotional style of song inspired effeminacy and inconstancy at best, anarchy at worst, and represented everything they hated about the radical democracy (Csapo 2004). That this was the first literary movement to generate extensive theorization marks its importance in the evolution of literature as a distinct field; that one of its main theoretical forefathers, Damon of Oa, was ostracized from Athens gives some measure of precisely how radical it seemed (Wallace 2004).
In Clouds Euripides is the poster-boy for the New Music. In Frogs, too, and in fact throughout Aristophanes, Euripides appears as a subversive figure whose dramas defy Athens’ cultural, social, and political nomoi (e.g. Acharnians 394–556, Thesmophoriazusai). There is much in his plays that seems to bear out this characterization. His Orestes, for instance, takes on both the literary tradition and the political status quo. The weak and demoralized protagonist seems unable to enact his myth and his vacillation threatens to rewrite the canonical narrative of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, as well as normative ideals of heroism and elite manliness. The gods are absent and unreliable in this play, and the democratic assembly is a vehicle of corrupt rhetoric and mob violence (Zeitlin 1980, Euben 1986). Such challenges to contemporary Athenian ideals and ideologies are the rule rather than the exception in Euripides’ plays and, indeed, in tragedy as a whole. One might think of the way Sophocles’ Antigone questions the ideology, articulated most forcefully in Pericles’ funeral oration in Thucydides, of the primacy of the polis over the individual and family. Or the way his Philoctetes suggests that a young soldier may be acting justly by following his own conscience against the explicit order of his military commander. If tragedians are school-masters for grown-ups, what did Sophocles’ audience learn from this lesson in insubordination? As Simon Goldhill (1987, 74) remarks, “Rather than simply reflecting the cultural values of a fifth-century audience, …rather than offering simple didactic messages from the city’s poets to the citizens, tragedy seems deliberately to problematize, to make difficult the assumption of the values of the civic discourse.”
This problematization is all the more radical, as Goldhill emphasizes, when we remember the context of these plays, the City Dionysia (cf. Hose, this volume ch. 21, pp. 329–31). Given the civic importance of this festival and the huge investment of the polis’s resources, communal and individual, in the dramatic productions, we might expect the plays themselves to contribute to this magnificent self-display of Athens’ power and beneficence. We might thus posit that tragedy functioned as what Louis Althusser (1971) calls an ideological state apparatus, enacting and reproducing the dominant ideology of the democratic state. Tragedy does often present an idealized vision of Athens as the birthplace of law and justice (Aeschylus’s Oresteia) and champion of suppliants (Euripides’ Heraclidae and Supplices), a place where intractable tragic problems find resolution (see Zeitlin 1990). If ideology in Althusser’s model “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (1971, 162), then tragedy’s frequent depiction of Athens as powerful, just, and eternally democratic helps to solidify that imaginary relationship, binding individuals in the audience to an idealized vision of their polis and erasing or smoothing over any inconsistencies between that ideal and the audience’s daily reality.
On the one hand, then, tragedy seems to function institutionally as part of the ideological apparatus of the polis; on the other hand, it often seems, as Goldhill says, “deliberately to problematize” central ideological tenets of that polis. We might explain this apparent contradiction as a peculiarity of Athens’ radical democracy: one of the virtues of democracy, after all, is its openness to auto-critique, its invitation of challenge from its own citizens and its willingness to debate even its most basic presuppositions. In this regard, tragedy may be thought to reproduce Athenian democratic ideology precisely by challenging it. The spectral Euripides in Frogs suggests as much when he claims that his drama is more democratic (δημοκρατικo`ν, 952) than Aeschylus’s because it teaches the audience “to think, see, understand, twist things around, to scheme, to suspect wrongs, to consider things from all angles” (957–58). In this same vein, N. T. Croally (1994, 43) offers “a three-word description of tragic didacticism: tragedy questions ideology.”
This equivocal ideological lesson is unique neither to tragedy, though, nor to democracy. Instead, it is part of the broader function of literature as a site, as well as an instrument and object, of ideological struggle. As Fredric Jameson (1981) has most famously argued, literature in its very form articulates and thereby mediates antagonisms between opposed class interests, between dominant and dominated factions of society, between traditional and emerging ideologies. These antagonisms, features of every social formation, are articulated within the work of literature merely by virtue of its existing in a certain time and place, and they are irreducible in the work because they are irreducible in its social world (Balibar and Macherey 1981, 88). In tragedy, this ideological complexity is built into the basic formal features of the work. Jean-Pierre Vernant (1988) showed how the ambiguities of tragedy’s language crystallized the tensions of its historical moment: the shifting meaning of dikē in Sophocles’ Antigone, for instance, reflects a contest, undecided and undecidable at the time the play was produced, between legal and religious notions of justice. So, too, he argues that the very structure of tragedy, with its dialogue between individual heroic protagonists who speak in the contemporary dialect of fifth-century Athens and a collective chorus singing archaic lyrics, encodes a chiasmic dialectic between a heroic, mythic past and a democratic, civic, present. Tragedy does not take sides in this dialectic (it hardly could) but instead represents it for its audience precisely as a tension. By giving mimetic form to issues that may have been latent or unrecognizable in reality, tragedy brings them to the level of consciousness and makes them available for discussion and debate.
Tragedy perhaps privileges ambiguity more than other literary genres, but a similar process of mediation can be seen even in works that, at first glance, appear fully ideologically overdetermined. Theognis’s insistent equation of moral, social, and aesthetic goodness reflects a historical moment when the definition of to kalon (“the good”) and the title of hoi kaloi (“good men”) were bitterly contested and the hegemony of the landed birth elite could no longer be taken for granted. In his virulent attack on the new elite Theognis ventriloquizes, despite himself, their political claims: in his poetry, merchants and goatskin-wearing rustics invade the private symposium and mingle with the old elite in a way that would not happen in reality for centuries to come (e.g. Thgn. 53–68, 183–96, 289–92, 667–82). Peter Rose (1992, 141–84) identifies a similar dynamic in Pindar’s tenth Pythian: this poem, like all Pindar’s epinicia, works to naturalize the social prerogatives of its elite recipient as a matter of inherited excellence; its exquisitely self-conscious poetic language serves that end, but also denaturalizes elite hegemony by showing it to be the result of the poet’s own labor of praise. The poem’s very beauty, as Rose demonstrates, works simultaneously toward two opposing ideological ends (cf. Kurke 1991, 163–262).
These works do more than simply mirror the tensions of their historical and social contexts: merely by presenting them in a specific literary form they also propose imaginary solutions (Jameson 1981, 75–9). In tragedy’s dialectic between elite protagonist and collective chorus, it is the former who acts and suffers (and whose action and suffering constitute the drama) but the latter which always survives at the end. Perhaps this is not surprising given tragedy’s civic role, but in some cases the text’s formal properties work against the ostensible aims of the author: Pindar may deploy his ornate language in order to glorify his aristocratic patron but, as Rose suggests, that same language demands that the elite victor share his honor with the decidedly non-elite poet.
These examples show how the work’s aesthetic form exceeds its putative ideological function. This excess means that while literary works can – and, as we have seen, often did – serve didactic or ideological ends, they cannot be reduced to a simple lesson or a single ideology without significant violence to the work. This is precisely what makes literature a potent site of ideological mediation. It may also be what defines it as literature: when Homer is read as a military manual; when tragedy is seen as a mere ideological apparatus of the democracy and Pindar taken as a fawning parasite upon the elite; when poetry becomes a mere moral sampler – in short, when literature is reduced to a single function and hence to mere functionality – it arguably stops being literature.8
While Aristophanes’ Aeschylus and Euripides agree, as we have seen, that literature should educate and edify, what initially drives Dionysus to Hades is not a scheme to save Athens but his consuming “desire” for a poet (ί̒μερος, 59), a longing he compares to a yearning for pea-soup. Dionysus tells us that he was reading Euripides’ Andromeda when “a sudden longing struck [his] heart” (53–4); a longing not for a woman, not for a boy, not for a man, but for Euripides (πόθος 00395ὐριπίδου, 66–7). This visceral, quasi-erotic longing, which “devours” Dionysus (δαρδάπτει, 66) points us toward the second function of literature in ancient Greece: to arouse emotion or give pleasure (Heath 1987; cf. Griffin 1998). These two functions, the hedonic and the didactic, were not mutually exclusive, of course: Aristophanes himself took pride in combining them, mixing the ridiculous and the serious (πολλα` με`ν γελοι̑α … πολλα` δε` σπουδαι˜α, Frogs 389–90) and “teaching what is best” (Acharnians 658) by making the audience laugh. But if the two were, ideally, inseparable, they were not always so perfectly aligned. Through the irrational “longings” it arouses, literature works on its audience’s unconscious in complex and unpredictable ways. Like its aesthetic form (to which it is obviously connected) the emotional pleasure of a literary work exceeds its conscious function and vitiates all attempts to subordinate the work to a logic of rational utility.
The hedonic view of literature, like the didactic, had a long tradition in Greek thought. The chorus of Hesiod’s Muses is beautiful and alluring (χορου`ς … καλου´ς ɩ̒μερόεντας, Theogony 7–8; cf. 64–5): it evokes precisely the longing (ɩ̒ʹμερος) that Dionysus feels for tragedy. With their lovely (ἐρατη`ν, 65), sweet (η̒δει˜α, 40) voices, they delight (τέρπουσι, 37) the mind of Zeus and make mortals forget their cares (55). This same vocabulary of sweetness, loveliness, and delight recurs throughout the archaic and classical periods to characterize poetry (Heath 1987, 5–7). That the same qualities were valued in prose is indicated by Thucydides’ contrarian boast that his own history will be “less delightful” (ἀτερπέστερον) to the listener than that of his predecessors but more useful for analyzing historical reality (1.22.4). This vocabulary of aesthetic pleasure overlaps considerably with that of erotic pleasure: Dionysus’s “longing” for Euripides is elaborated in Plato, who compares the effect of beautiful literature to a destructive passion that the sensible lover must resist (Republic 607e). Thus a Greek might have concurred with Susan Sontag (1966, 14) that to speak of art requires not a hermeneutics but an erotics.9
The pleasure of literature’s arousal is primarily emotional and linked to what ancient literary theorists termed its psychagōgia, literally, “leading of the soul” (Plato Phaedrus 261a8, 271c10; Aristotle Poetics 1450a33, 1450b17; Isocrates 2.49.6, 9.10.9; Timocles F 6 PCG; Aristoxenos F 123 Wehrli). In the Odyssey, bards can delight their listeners but also produce suffering if they sing of subjects that hit too close to home (Od. 1.325–53; 8.44–5, 60–96, 367–8, 477–543; 9.2–10): for Penelope, songs of the Greeks’ baleful homecoming arouse sorrowful longing for her husband (1.340–44), while the tale of the sack of Troy reduces Odysseus to tears of pity (8.521–31). In that poem a good host will change the song to something more upbeat, but elsewhere it becomes clear that longing and tears are also part of the pleasure of song. Gorgias, the fifth-century sophist and theorist of rhetoric, characterizes logos – crafted speech – as a kind of divine incantation that induces pleasure and reduces pain (ἐπωιδαὶ ἐπαγωγοὶ ἡδονη˜ς, ἀπαγωγοὶ λύπης, Helen, DK 82 B 11, § 10, cf. § 8); part of its power, for him, is its ability to arouse “fearful shuddering, tearful pity, and sorrow-loving longing” (ϕρίκη περίϕοβος καὶ ἔλεος πολύδακρυς καὶ πόθος ϕιλοπενθής, Helen § 9). While Gorgias attributes this emotional effect to all language, Aristotle famously postulates that the arousal of pity and fear is the “particular pleasure” of tragedy (ἡδονὴ οἰκεία, Poetics 1453b10–15) and the end toward which its reversals and recognitions are best deployed. Perhaps this is why, in Plato’s Minos, Socrates characterizes tragedy as the genre of poetry “most delightful to the masses and most able to move the soul” (δημοτερπέστατόν τε καὶ ψυχαγωγικώτατον, 321a5).
Of course, from Plato this was a backhanded compliment. For him literature’s emotional and hedonic effect makes it powerful, but also morally and socially dangerous. As a mode of mimesis, literature is suspect by nature (and drama especially so, as a purely imitative art-form). Within a metaphysics governed by the Forms, artistic representations are an imitation of an imitation and thus stand at two steps’ remove from the truth (Republic 595a–603b). In their ignorance, poets often depict things that are untrue, such as gods behaving immorally (377d–82c) or heroes succumbing to despair (387d–88e, 603e–606c), and their audiences believe it due to the inherent charm (κήλησιν) of the poetry (601a–b). This mendacious imitation produces a mimetic effect in its audience. Like Aristophanes’ Aeschylus, Plato imagines that if a tragedy imitates good men its audience will become good in imitation of them. But the reverse is also true. Poetic imitation can corrupt even a good man, infecting him with the emotions he sees depicted (605c–606d). When we enjoy a tragic scene of lamentation, to take Plato’s example, we give free rein to excessive emotions that in our daily lives we should seek to restrain. The rational part of our soul temporarily lets down its guard, both because the suffering is not our own and because it is pleasurable to watch (606a–b). But that theatrical experience has real-life consequences: simulated emotions become part of our very physis (395d2–3) and imitating shameful acts habituates us to accepting or even performing those acts in real life (606b–d). Like associating with bad people, watching morally suspect performances harms the viewer, making him take on the character of what he enjoys on stage (ὁμοιου^σθαι δήπου ἀνάγκη τὸν χαίροντα ὁποτέροις ἂν χαίρῃ, Laws 656b4–5).
Enjoyment is, in fact, key in this process of mimetic degradation. Virtue and vice first enter the soul through pleasure and pain, as Plato explains in the Laws, and education is essentially the correct formation of those sensations (653a–c). Poetic pleasure facilitates the surreptitious infiltration of emotions: its aesthetic qualities allow art to permeate the soul (Republic 401d5–e1; cf. Laws 659d–60a). And while that makes it potentially beneficial it also makes it dangerous, and more dangerous the more “poetic and pleasing” a work is (ποιητικὰ καὶ ἡδέα, Republic 387b1–5; cf. 397d–98b). Literature thus occupies the negative pole in the pervasive Platonic dichotomy between the pleasurable and the good: like a pastry-chef in comparison to a doctor, a poet seeks only to gratify his audience not to improve them (Gorgias 500a–502c). Literature’s pleasure not only stands apart from truth – as it had ever since the Muses warned Hesiod that their songs may or may not be true (Theogony 27–8) – but stands against it (cf. Gorgias DK 82 B 23; Dissoi Logoi DK 90, 3.25–6; Thucydides 1.22.4; Pindar Nemean 7.19–25; Isocrates 2.49).
Small wonder, then, that Plato bans poets from his ideal republic, permitting only hymns to the gods and eulogies of virtuous men, but not the pernicious seductions of “the sweetened Muse” (τὴν ἡδυσμένην 0039Cου^σαν, Republic 607a5). There are, of course, good reasons to be leery of Plato’s censorious views on literature and the positivist ontology from which they stem. But one needn’t subscribe to his prohibition in order to recognize behind his hostility to literature an astute observation about the potentially disruptive effect of its aesthetic and emotional pleasure: precisely because it works on the psyche, the unconscious, literature’s psychagōgia will always potentially exceed the conscious rulings of the lawmaker’s logos and threaten to sabotage his best-laid plans.
Aristotle responds to this same potential threat not by banning poetry but by attempting to harness its psychagōgia to rational ethical ends. For him, literature’s emotional arousal does not preclude, and ideally stimulates, a cognitive response (Poetics 1448b4–19; see Halliwell 2002, 177–206). Since the men and actions literature imitates necessarily have an ethical quality, good or bad, the audience is always making ethical determinations (1448a1–18). In tragedy, these ethical judgments are solicited in part through the arousal of emotion: Aristotle’s definition of tragedy unites mimesis of serious actions, “sweetened” language (ἡδυσμένῳ λόγῳ), and the arousal of pity and fear in a way that suggests that the ethical, hedonic, and emotional can ideally work together (1449b24–8). Tragedy’s emotional psychagōgia (1450a33) helps us to better understand the relationship between action and character and between virtue and happiness (1449b36–50a4, 1450a15–25). Its goal, its “particular pleasure” (ἡδονὴν … οἰκείαν, 1453b11), is a katharsis of pity and fear, not the purgation of those emotions but their clarification, as Stephen Halliwell (1987, 90) explains, “a powerful emotional experience which not only gives our natural feelings of pity and fear full play, but does so in a way which conduces to their rightful functioning as part of our understanding of, and response to, events in the human world.”
Aristotle thus purifies literary hēdonē of its perverse Platonic associations by yoking it to rationality and its positive social and ethical aims. But in so doing he underestimates the erratic, anomic force of literature’s pleasure that so troubled Plato. Operating at the level of the unconscious – emotion, desire, enjoyment – literature’s psychagōgia cannot be fully subordinated to conscious cognition nor reliably deployed in the service of a rational didactic, social, or ideological functionality.
I close with a brief illustration of this claim, drawn from that supremely psychagogic (psykhagōgikōtaton, Plato Minos 321a5) genre, tragedy. Euripides’ Ion tells the story of Ion, the mythical king of Athens and progenitor of its empire. Born from Apollo’s rape of the autochthonous Athenian princess Creusa, Ion was exposed as an infant and raised as a temple slave in Delphi. The play dramatizes his emotional reunion with his mother and assumption of his identity as Athenian king and hero. The play is pleasurable, to be sure, perhaps one of Euripides’ most pleasurable. But the subject matter makes it hard to take it as merely pleasurable. The play speaks overtly to the Athenian ideologies of autochthony and imperial destiny; but what it says – its political or ideological message – is far from clear. Some scholars see the play as affirming these seminal Athenian beliefs: stressing the “happy ending,” in which Athena herself appears ex machina to confirm Ion’s divine paternity and proclaim his and his city’s future glory, they read Ion as a celebration of Athens and its imperial hegemony (e.g. Swift 2008, 80–100; cf. Dougherty 1996). Others view the play as a critique of these same ideologies, an ironic debunking of Athens’ myth of origins and a cynical exposé of the violence, xenophobia, and misogyny it entails (Saxonhouse 1986; Hoffer 1996).
What makes such contradictory readings not only possible but, I think, inescapable, is the play’s emotional trajectory. The drama is structured by the delayed recognition between mother and son. In the opening scene the two meet and, unaware of the other’s identity, confess their longing, Creusa for the child she was forced to abandon, Ion for the mother he never knew. A series of misunderstandings keeps them apart and nearly results in murder, and it is only in the play’s final moment that they are joyfully reunited. To the extent that the audience identifies with the characters and shares their desire, they will long for that reunion and greet it when it finally comes as simultaneously natural and miraculous. But the audience’s emotional commitment to the happiness of the happy ending also entails a commitment to the Athenian ideologies of autochthony and imperialism this family reunion presages. The play’s structure of deferred recognition and the investment it produces in Ion’s Athenian identity make it difficult to buy fully into an ironic or negative reading of the play. At the same time, though, the drama’s pathos makes it difficult to accept an uncritically positive reading. Late in the play, in despair at the thought that she will never have a child, Creusa denounces the god who raped and abandoned her in one of the most beautiful and emotionally intense monodies in all of Greek tragedy (859–922). Apollo never appears to defend himself against her charges, and her despairing lament, even as it casts into relief the emotional reversal of the happy ending, also reverberates as a minor note of uncertainty within it. The play works to move its audience, to give pleasure by arousing emotions of pity and fear, of longing, frustration, and satisfaction. This emotional psychagōgia simultaneously leads toward the ideologically loaded finale and pulls against it. Its multidirectional emotive force makes it impossible to reduce the play to any single ideological function or straightforward lesson, even as the play’s insistent engagement with Athenian ideology makes it impossible to read it as just a simple romance of maternal love.
Ion illustrates the ways in which literature’s emotional impact and the pleasure it provides complicate its social functionality and resist reduction to a rational logic of utility. This same resistance can be felt even in Aristophanes’ Frogs, for all its unquestioned assumption that literature should be socially useful. For the literary contest in Hades is not ultimately won on the basis of pedagogical value or social utility, nor for that matter on aesthetic merit, despite the elaborate mechanisms contrived for its quantification. Instead, Dionysus simply follows his heart: “I will choose the one my psychē wants,” he says (00391ἱρήσομαι γὰρ ὅνπερ ἡ ψυχὴ θέλει, Frogs 1468). This emotional verdict is never justified; its apparent capriciousness – Dionysus went to Hades longing for Euripides but chooses Aeschylus – is never explained.10 Literary pleasure, the desire Plato compared to erotic madness, refuses to be subordinated to the utilitarian logic that governs the poetic contest: its psychagôgia follows its own path. Whether this erratic passion ultimately supports literature’s social function is left an open question: Dionysus does bring back a poet, but it is not obvious that Aeschylus, with his outmoded advice, will actually save the city. With historical hindsight, we know that he did not; nor did Aristophanes, for all that he was awarded a crown for the good counsel he offered in Frogs (Vita Aristophanis, PCG III.2, p. 2, l. 36–6). But to ask literature to save the city is to demand both too much of it and too little. As the god of tragedy suggests, literature can and should serve a social function, but it cannot be reduced to that function. For the emotional pleasure it produces will always exceed any simple functionality and this, in the end, is what makes it literature.
Bourdieu, P. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production. Edited by R. Johnson. New York. Essays by the prominent sociologist on the role of art within the structures of society.
Detienne, M. 1996 [1967]. The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, New York. Traces the evolution of the concept of truth in ancient Greece.
Ford, A. 2002. The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece. Princeton. A detailed but accessible study of the emergence of literary criticism in ancient Greece.
Halliwell, S. 2002. The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems. Princeton. A broad-ranging analysis of ancient Greek thought on this key concept in Western aesthetics.
Jameson, F. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY. One of the most influential works of Marxist literary criticism.
Porter, J. I. 2010. The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience. Cambridge. Presents an innovative argument for the materialist foundations of ancient Greek aesthetic thought.
Rose, P. W. 1992. Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth: Ideology and Literary Form in Ancient Greece. Ithaca, NY. Examines the ideology of inherited excellence in a variety of Greek literary texts.