The Wound and the Witness: The Rhetoric of Torture

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The Wound and the Witness

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The Wound and the Witness The Rhetoric of Torture

JENNIFER R. BALLENGEE

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2009 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Cathleen Collins Marketing by Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ballengee, Jennifer R., 1968– The wound and the witness : the rhetoric of torture / Jennifer R. Ballengee. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-2491-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Classical literature—History and criticism. 2. Torture in literature. I. Title. PA3015.T67B35 2009 880.9'355—dc22

2008027671 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. [. . .] The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable. —Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

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Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ix

INTRODUCTION

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CHAPTER 1 The Legal Body: The Symbolic Corpse in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone

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CHAPTER 2 The Political Body: Pain and Punishment in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus

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CHAPTER 3 The Erotic Body: Mutilation and Desire in Achilles Tatius’s Leukippe and Kleitophon

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CHAPTER 4 The Moral Body: The Figure of Suffering in Prudentius’s Peristephanon Liber

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EPILOGUE Pain and Public Opinion: The Rhetoric of Torture and the Media

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NOTES

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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INDEX

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Acknowledgments I would like to thank those who helped me to bring this project to fruition, after what seems like many years. Peter Bing, Cathy Caruth, Walter Kalaidjian, David Konstan, Helen Morales, Claire Nouvet, and Erdmann Waniek provided invaluable input and interest in various early incarnations of chapters. To Tom Cerbu I owe heartfelt thanks for laying the foundations for so much of this work and for being such an inspiring mentor. I also owe many thanks to Elissa Marder, whose influence, advice, rigorous critique, and kind encouragement continues to shape my thinking. For being an editorial miracle-worker, an invaluable resource, a guide, a gadfly, and a friend, I thank Bracht Branham. In addition, I am deeply grateful to the friends and colleagues who were kind enough to read parts of the manuscript, to offer advice, or simply to listen to my ideas in a smoky bar: Peter Baker, David Bergman, Frances Botkin, Jennifer Culbert, Walt Fuchs, Loren Glass, Robert Hughes, David Kelman, and Alphonso Lingis. Finally, of course, I couldn’t go without thanking Rick, for first encouraging me to think, my mother and father, for making it possible, and especially Doug, for everything. I gratefully acknowledge previous publications of parts of this work. A much shorter version of chapter 1 appears in the Fall 2006 edition of Colloquy. A version of chapter 3 was published in The Bakhtin Circle and Ancient Narrative: Ancient Narrative Supplementum 3 (Spring 2005). A much abbreviated version of chapter 4 appeared in Crossings: A Counterdisciplinary Journal, Winter 2004.

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Introduction The practice of torture has become the topic of heated debate in the United States and abroad in recent years—a controversy heightened in tone and urgency by the release in early May, 2004, of the now infamous photos from the Abu Ghraib prison. In the slew of articles, editorials, and books that have emerged in the wake of this scandal, running alongside the charged and defensive semantic arguments over the precise definition of torture, one large question has been voiced with varying levels of shock and sincerity and in a variety of forms: How could this happen? While a number of investigations continue to produce revelations and causal explanations targeting the military, the government, or simply the behavior of “a few bad seeds,” a larger ethical question stands in abeyance behind these scattered designations of blame: How does torture continue to persist in a post-humanist global community? This book responds to the question with an approach rather different than most currently appearing in print, on the airwaves, or over the Internet. Delving into the roots of Western culture, this study focuses upon the representation of torture in order to examine the persuasive potential of such representation for a witnessing audience—in other words, the use of torture as a rhetorical device. The Wound and the Witness: The Rhetoric of Torture situates torture’s practice within its historic rhetorical function, which manifests itself in four areas of ancient culture that continue to shape America’s sense of itself today: the legal, the political, the erotic, and the moral. Examining key texts from the Ancient Greek and Roman worlds, this study shows how the representation of torture functions as a rhetorical tool by combining bodily empathy with ethical and aesthetic judgment in order to persuade its audience.1 For, I argue here, the audience, or the witness, is the key element in the “successful” practice of torture in its political province. As the following chapters indicate, from Ancient Greece to contemporary Iraq, the witness is complicit in the production of meaning that torture communicates. It is the presence of this witness that indicates the rhetorical aspect of the practice of torture.

1

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The Wound and the Witness

Torture, Rhetoric, and Representation Torture clearly has a persuasive or rhetorical potential—a fact that Aristotle recognized and that remains obvious today. Yet Aristotle’s Ars Rhetorica avoids much discussion of the practice. Since his instructional study defines rhetoric as “the faculty of discerning in every case the available means of persuasion” (I.i.14), he concentrates his attention on rhetorical proofs that are artificial, entechnoi: those that are a product of techné or art and that therefore require analysis and study in order to be discerned and understood. Aristotle places torture, or basanos, among the proofs that require no art or technique, proofs that are atechnoi and are therefore considered already given requiring no invention (I.ii.2). The “givenness” of the proof gained by torture, like the other inartifical proofs he lists (“witnesses, depositions under torture, contracts, and the like”), seems to derive from its physical presence. The proof provided by torture requires no rhetorical technique in itself, since the deposition is merely presented in court, like a contract or a witness. Aristotle elides, for the most part, how that deposition is obtained, and how it is presented. Yet, with the ubiquity of communications and news media today, modes of presentation are significant aspects of persuasion. Our judgment is often elicited by the images represented on television or the Internet, or in newspapers, magazines, or film. In our society of spectacle, communication has become an increasingly visual enterprise, as Michel de Certeau has noted: “From TV to newspapers, from advertising to all sorts of mercantile epiphanies, our society is characterized by a cancerous growth of vision, measuring everything by its ability to show or be shown and transmuting communication into a visual journey.”2 More mediated than the basic conscious experience of seeing in the world, the increasing primacy of vision corresponds with a growing ubiquity of technologies of visual representation, such as the camera or film. Thomas Keenan has noted, “[T]he image or specter of the camera [. . .] now seems to haunt our consciousness—indeed, to form the most privileged figure of our ethical consciousness, our conscience, our responsibility itself.”3 Keenan argues that the visual spectacle (framed for the camera) dominates our ethical consciousness, a claim that resonates with Susan Sontag’s last book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). In her study of the rhetoric of the image, Sontag provides a meditative historical consideration of the powers of representation to move audiences and to sway public opinion in matters of war and politics. While Sontag emphasizes the manner in which image and language work together to communicate a rhetorical message, Judith Butler, in a memorial piece for Sontag, emphasizes the persuasive potential of visual representation alone: “Narrative coherence might be a

Introduction

3

standard for some sorts of interpretation, but surely not for all. Indeed, if the notion of a ‘visual interpretation’ is not to become an oxymoron, it seems important to consider that the photograph, in framing reality, is already interpreting what will count within the frame; this act of delimitation is surely interpretive, as are the effects of angle, focus, and light.”4 The image presents a version of events, a sense of things, a feeling, an idea, in its representation of a moment or situation. In fact, the sense of “immediacy” conveyed in the visual representation makes it a uniquely potent rhetorical tool: the image, which seems to recreate a “present” moment that has now passed, prompts with its “presence” an immediate and empathetic response in the witness. These qualities, by which images convey a sense of authenticity and personal relevance, make visual representation a particularly powerful rhetorical device; the narrative that recreates or contextualizes the visual focuses linguistically this imagistic potential. The combination of visual spectacle, narration, and performance disseminated by today’s media to contemporary society thus makes the analysis of torture’s presentation, and its concomitant rhetorical potential, a rich avenue of investigation. Moreover, although Aristotle found the presentation of torture in the courtroom largely irrelevant to his rhetoric, the representation of basanos figures significantly in ancient literary works. This study investigates the manner in which basanos is presented in the overtly representative world of creative literary genres: the literary works addressed here all emphasize visual or performative elements as essential to their dramatic, narrative, or poetic expression. Thus the following chapters address tragedies, which are, of course, meant to be performed; the early novel or romance, a genre that necessarily highlights the spatial and visual; and a set of martyrological poems that recreate the staged spectacle of the torture of Christian martyrs by the Romans. Each literary text in this study, in its depiction of the scene of torture before a witnessing audience, emphasizes visual representation, utilizing language to create or describe visual spectacles, merging the linguistic and the imagistic. In figuring the witness to torture within the literary text (in addition to the implied audience viewing or reading the piece), these works situate the spectacle of torture in its civic social context, making manifest the manner in which the literary and the political coincide. My focus upon literary genres, rather than on the more overtly rhetorical legal or juridical speeches of orators, is intentional. The choice of texts reflects the primary focus of my investigation, which examines how torture is represented to an audience, not how torture actually inflicts pain upon its victim. In a broad sense, literature’s unique value is in its capacity to convey human experience and our engagement with it, by means of a variety of general and personal expressions. As Kevin Crotty has remarked,

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“The pertinence of literature to law lies essentially in the way it sets law within a human context: it presents law as an activity to which people have recourse for reasons that can be appreciated only in the broader context of their lives.”5 In fictional or poetic compositions the manner of the representation of human experience emerges with significant clarity, as the primary concern of the literary creation. This analysis of torture in ancient literature may differ from general expectations in its particular choice of literary texts as well. While such a study might be expected to address the myth of Prometheus—whose torturous punishment is frequently referenced in ancient and modern literature—I have intentionally chosen not to foreground that story. Most importantly, Prometheus is a Titan, not a human; as we shall see, the persuasiveness of torture as a rhetorical device plays upon specific notions of human mortality and related notions of the human. Furthermore, neither Hesiod’s Theogony nor Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, the two primary literary sources addressing the Prometheus myth, actually features torture as basanos or represents torture as a rhetorical trope. In the account given by Hesiod, Prometheus’s punishments, along with those of his brothers Atlas, Menoitios, and Epimetheus, are given before a description of his crimes, emphasizing the punitive powers of Zeus, Hesiod’s epic hero of the poem.6 The details of the punishment—Prometheus being shackled to the rock and having his liver daily consumed and regenerated—are relegated to only a couple of lines, framed within the account of his eventual release by Herakles. In the context of the aoide¯ composed by Hesiod (a singing tradition that prefigures and predates the advent of the systematic study of rhetoric by about three centuries), Prometheus’s punishment describes neither the practice of torture nor the technique of rhetorical presentation. Aeschylus’s play, too, chooses to emphasize an aspect of the myth other than that of Prometheus’s torture. Though the play opens with Prometheus being chained to the rocks of the Caucasus Mountains, his infamous torment by the eagle (or vulture, in some versions of the myth) never actually occurs in the play. Rather, the play focuses upon the tension between mortals and immortals—or between blind hope and foresight—embodied in the exchange between Prometheus and Io that occupies the bulk of the text. The play closes with Prometheus refusing to give Zeus insight into the future and thus gaining a vague and ominous hint of the tortures to come—torments that never actually figure in the action of the play and whose threat, therefore, depends upon a prior familiarity of the audience with the myth. Thus, since the two most extensive accounts of the Prometheus myth do not reflect the rhetorical potential of torture addressed in this inquiry, neither text figures as a primary element of the study. However, Prometheus and his

Introduction

5

punishments constitute a popular motif or trope rather frequently in many other works of ancient literature; in chapter 3 of this study I address such a case, when the myth takes the form of a significant rhetorical ekphrasis in Achilles Tatius’s Leukippe and Kleitophon. Highlighting the mode in which the visual serves the rhetorical, then, this study investigates the representation of torture in four distinct genres of ancient literature within their cultural contexts. The Wound and the Witness then concludes with an epilogue that utilizes the conclusions of the book’s four primary chapters in order to consider recent representations of torture in the media—from political speeches, to videos displaying battered prisoners, to judicial testimony, to photographs documenting prisoner abuse. The aim of the book is not to offer an analysis of the techniques of torture in praxis, nor does it attempt to formulate a definition of torture—although I do discuss in the epilogue the rhetorical significance of the ongoing debates in American politics about the precise definition of torture. Rather, the following chapters address instances in which bodily injury or suffering is presented as torture—whether by a specific linguistic designation or by direct association or context—before a witnessing audience. This study, in other words, picks up the analysis of the rhetorical function of torture where Aristotle left it centuries ago: not at the level of its implementation, which, he seems to have imagined, would produce a straightforward deposition that would then be delivered, just as perfunctorily, at court; but at the level of the representation of that torture. For both recent events and ancient texts show us clearly that the presentation and representation of torture creates a rhetorical situation that always contains at its heart—at the nexus of context, author, and audience—at least one text to be communicated.7

Torture and the Witness The message communicated in the representation of torture depends upon the engagement and interpretation of a witnessing audience, an essential part of the rhetorical situation. This function of the audience in the persuasive effectiveness of torture—the participation of the audience in producing torture’s significance—thus occupies a particular concern of this study. In the scenes of torture described in the ancient texts addressed here, the witness embodies both a legal and an ethical concept, both someone who “bears witness” and someone who observes. The witness or audience observes a scene presented before it—or represented for it—and responds to the demand of the rhetorician’s address with an interpretation or judgment. As Michel Foucault has demonstrated, the power of the state may be “written” without words on the bodies of soldiers, prisoners, or civilians

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The Wound and the Witness

in the display of strategically placed bruises, wounds, and mutilations.8 In a manner similar to the public execution, torture—or the results of torture—presented to the public can convey an unspoken message for the regime that inflicts it.9 Here, the relation between the tortured body and an intended meaning operates not on the level of the confession of the victim (the primary witness, perhaps), but on the level of the witnessing public—the audience that reads in the manifestations of torture the intended, but unspoken, message. Yet this book deviates significantly from recent studies that address premodern literature and culture by means of Foucault’s analysis of the body and punishment.10 While Foucault locates a seventeenth-century shift in Enlightenment discourse that inaugurates a split between the mind and the body characteristic of the modern age, and distinct from any preEnlightenment conception of the human being, this project paints a rather different picture. As my readings demonstrate, the association of bodily pain with understanding resonates from the ancient through the modern, within the idea of bearing witness. The texts addressed in this study all demonstrate a consistent association between bodily pain and an essential, ideological “truth” that is conveyed by means of the representation of torture. This formula, in which an unspoken ideological message takes on definite shape when presented before an audience, emerges with particular clarity when the scene of torture appears in literature. For literature, with its emphasis on linguistic representation and audience, provides a space in which the problems of communicating the abstract or nonlinguistic dovetail with the quality of the literary itself. Literary language, by its nature, wrestles with abstract ideas or metaphysical notions whose very abstraction resists being uttered in language at all.11 As the following chapters show, the literary depiction of pain thus tends to make manifest concepts difficult or impossible to represent in language. For example, the figure of torture appears with the moment of recognition in Oedipus Rex; Oedipus gouges his own eyes out, shedding bloody tears and demonstrating to the audience his self-knowledge. In a different case, Prudentius evokes the mystery of the Christian God by describing how the martyr celebrates the liberation of the divine Word, which flows along with blood out of his wounds. Thus, the sight of the tortured body in literature, as in its political context, bears a nonlinguistic message whose painful inscription might evoke a particular physical, intellectual, or emotional response in its reader or audience. Whether in cases of actual or fictional torture, the communication of meaning via torture corresponds to the witnessing of the body in pain by an audience that responds to the spectacle. In the literary and political scene of torture, the mutilated body must be presented before an other or others; the “effective-

Introduction

7

ness” of the torture depends, in part, upon the one who sees the inscription of pain upon the body and responds to it. This witness may be the victim, the torturer, an observant bystander within the presented scene, or the audience of the event or “text” itself. The appearance of the event within the literary text always reflects upon this double audience: the witness or witnesses who function within the text and the one who interacts from without—the reader. In both cases, torture is staged in order to provoke a particular response, the apprehension of a message evoked by the tortured body addressed to the witness.

Torture and Meaning What we will find, however, is that torture and its representation create uniquely fertile rhetorical situations precisely because they combine three factors—the body, pain, and the image—that all resist linguistic signification. In the words of Jean-François Lyotard, the body is intractable, untranslatable; it resists meaning, in its very materiality.12 Yet the body has often been associated with “truth” or certainty—“I can feel it in my bones,” is just one of quite a few clichés that reflect this common association. As this book in each of its chapters theorizes the response of the witness to torture, it necessarily also explores this traditionally assumed relation between the body and knowledge. Perhaps the phenomenological awareness of having a body invests any idea worked out in terms of the body with a strange sense of certainty. In its position of mediation between what is known and what continues to elude understanding, the body stands as locus of communicated meaning—a position that has allowed it to maintain, over the ages, the sense of being a site of knowledge, an apparent repository of potential understanding, though the “understanding” may be articulated in a variety of different terms. Thus Aristotle, despite his apparent lack of interest in torture, admits in the Ars Rhetorica that torture is an accepted mode of evidence because it “appears trustworthy, because a sort of compulsion attached to it” (I.xv.26). This compulsion or necessity (ananké) that accompanies the presentation of torture as evidence, that makes it appear to be trustworthy or authoritative, seems to derive from its association with the body. Yet most often, the relation of the body to understanding, knowledge, or certainty rests upon an empathic sense—literally, a bodily association that one human body feels (and interprets) in response to another human body. The body, in this sense, is symptomatic: in its physicality, it points to a range of associations (or answers) from which we may choose. This intractability of the body compounds, in both the practice and the representation of torture, with the problem of pain. In the practice of

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The Wound and the Witness

torture during interrogation, the body is subjected to extreme pain, stress, and deprivation, in an effort to prompt the victim to communicate some response to the torturer’s questioning.13 In this case, the authority of the product of the infliction of pain—the “evidence” that the interrogation claims to produce—depends upon a referential relation between the body (in pain) and a meaning that is interpreted by the torturers as true.14 In being painfully marked, body parts become more than themselves; the torturer inflicts pain in order to extract a true story, a story that will constitute valid evidence. The torturer believes that the body will release the truth if it suffers unbearable pain; therefore, the painful wound of torture signifies the truth that the torturer intends to extract, whether the story is actually true or false. The materiality of the body veils over the ambiguity of the message elicited by means of pain; the uncertainty of the testimony produced by torture robes itself in the certainty of the experience of the physical body. The unreliability of testimony given under torture has oft been noted. Aristotle observes that “those under compulsion [of torture] are as likely to give false evidence as true, some being ready to endure everything rather than tell the truth, while others are equally ready to make false charges against the others” (Art of Rhetoric I.xv.26). The painfulness of pain undermines the dependability of the confessions pain produces. Aristotle’s long-past observation has recently been reiterated both to defend and to oppose U.S. interrogation methods. Defending CIA modes of questioning prisoners in 2005, Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA officer and former deputy director of the State Department Office of Counterterrorism, explained in a Los Angeles Times editorial: “If you inflict enough pain on someone, they will give you information, but what they tell you may not be true. What real CIA officers know firsthand is that it is better to build a relationship with trust.”15 Yet two years later, the Bush administration continues to devise confidential new rules governing interrogations, despite repeated assertions by experts advising the intelligence agencies that such techniques are “outmoded, amateurish and unreliable.”16 The persistence of torture in the face of the uncertainty of the evidence it produces indicates that clearly torture serves other purposes, as well. While torture may not communicate reliable testimony, Elaine Scarry and others have theorized that the torturer uses torture to convey a general message of power to its victim, by destroying the subjective world of the tortured and replacing it with the torturer’s own ideology.17 The “effectiveness” of torture in this regard hinges upon its ability to break down and eliminate all that is known and familiar, to deconstruct the rational, to replace reason with unreason. The means of torture, the pain inflicted upon the human body, supplies the means for such destruction by its very nature: for what

Introduction

9

is particular about the suffering body is its total and complete irrationality. Strangely, then, at the same time that torture produces such irrational, often indescribable effects upon the already intractable body, torture also creates the semblance of some kind of understandable message: a sense of certainty, a “compulsion,” a “truth” manifested by or in utter duress. If a sense of certainty may be conveyed to a torture victim by means of his or her own pain, it stands to reason that the duress of the victim might have a similar effect upon any witnesses to the torture, as well, at least at the level of bodily empathy. We see a body in pain, and we react with our bodies, with what our bodily memory tells us about pain: the worst that we have experienced, the worst that we can imagine. And in this bodily response, in our uncomfortable consciousness of our own bodies, we feel certain; the body, in this sense, in our sensory awareness of our bodies, appears to be trustworthy, it embodies what seems true or proven (p√stiV). Torture thus conveys a sense of certainty by means of experiencing or witnessing the body in pain; this is an empathetic, not a logical connection. Moreover, in order to communicate such a message, torture must be presented or represented to a witnessing audience. The representation of torture creates yet another level of ambiguity in an already vexed chain of communication. In addition to the resistance of the body and of pain to linguistic or logical communication, the visual image complicates communication because it may suggest multiple possible meanings at once. As Roland Barthes has argued, the image offers a range of connotative meanings that are unlimited by the defining quality of language. The image “poses a question of meaning” because it implies “a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds” from which the reader must choose: the visual image resists determinable meaning by allowing a range of possible interpretations.18 Thus any caption or narrative accompanying or reiterating the visual may direct the engagement of the audience toward a particular response or interpretation. In sum, the sense of certainty conveyed by torture and its representation covers over the slipperiness of its message—the fact that it communicates either too little (since communication breaks down at the level of the materiality of the body) or too much (since the destructive quality of pain and the polysemy of the image may produce a range of possible meanings). This polysemy gives torture its unique rhetorical potential: the audience’s response—illogical, empathetic, immediate—feels certain, yet that certainty or authority can be guided in a number of directions by the rhetorician, since the various elements involved in the representation of torture actually resist determinable meaning. Torture is therefore not only unsuccessful at eliciting dependable confessions, as Aristotle and others more recently have noted, but torture

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The Wound and the Witness

is also apt to fail at sending one particular and clear message. Logically, then, it appears that the “effectiveness” of torture lies not so much in the value of the confessions it produces, or in a specific message that it is intended to send, as in some other “benefit” it offers to those wielding it as a weapon.19 Indeed the factors that make the messages produced or conveyed by torture ambiguous also enable it to generate a wide range of meanings. The polysemy of torture, the fact that the body in pain may communicate a number of different associations or messages, places the witness to torture in a disturbing position: for it is thus by means of the response of the witness to torture that torture conveys its message.

Bearing Witness to Torture The essential role of the witness in the function of torture raises the ethical dilemma of responding to the representation torture—that is, torture in its rhetorical function. Thus, this study investigates, in the ancient texts it explores, questions of response, persuasion, and judgment when a scene of torture is presented. First, in the text, what is the nature of the response to torture? Secondly, what is the status of the knowledge associated with this response? Finally, then, what does it mean for a text to use torture as a literary and rhetorical figure? What responsibility does this incur for the reader? Within the literary, artistic context, the response of the witness (audience, reader) to torture takes on qualities of aesthetic judgment, in the radical sense of aesthesis as a bodily feeling or sensation.20 In other words, aesthetics and empathy correspond in the response to torture; the interpretation of the representation of torture by the witness emanates from a combination of aesthetic and empathetic responses. This inference, while appearing perhaps expectedly in the space of literature, generates troubling ethical questions about the nature of the response to the representation of torture, in general—in the context of the literary or the actual. This project explores the ethical implications of the audience’s part in the rhetorical function of torture, in the imagined world of a literary space where the audience comprises an expected and necessary aspect of the literary text. In addition, though, these four chapters addressing literary works from the fifth century BCE to the fifth century CE investigate the relation between the representation of the violent wound (or wounding) and the response to its representation by an audience that is also posited within the text. My methodology combines close reading and philology along with an analysis of the representation of torture itself in its textual and cultural context. Since the literary texts addressed in the project span about one thousand years and utilize three different genres, I consider

Introduction

11

genre, style, and cultural particulars of each work. My analysis draws upon theorists who address problems of aesthetics specific to the periods of the chosen texts. The first two chapters, then, approach the use of torture in Sophocles’ Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and Oedipus at Colonus through a consideration of fifth-century Athenian culture, law, and the specific genre of tragedy. Similarly, the third chapter’s reading of Achilles Tatius’s Leukippe and Kleitophon considers the events in the novel within the context of the romance scheme, described by Mikhail Bakhtin as “adventure-time.” Chapters 3 and 4 both take into account Late Antique “Second Sophistic” style in their analyses of descriptions of visual spectacle. But the reading of the Peristephanon Liber of Prudentius in chapter 4 also addresses philosophical, theological, and aesthetic problems that are unique to early Christianity. Since the audience plays an essential role in this relation, a part of this exploration necessarily considers the nature of the response provoked by such a depiction of bodily pain in a work of literature. The literary works examined in this book all contain a scene of torture meant to persuade its audience of an abstract idea. In a manner common to ancient Greek drama, Sophocles’ Theban plays use bodies as well as words to express the action or plot of a tragedy. Yet these bodies represent meaning not only mimetically or through gesture. In Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and Oedipus at Colonus, the physical body also functions as a material signifier, a visible sign that embodies an essential but abstract idea in each of the plays. In Sophocles’ treatments of these three separate episodes from the mythical story of the house of Cadmus lies a complex conflict between the law of the family and the law of the city; discord arises between these two modes of being in regard to the pursuit of justice. Sophocles enables the body to communicate the political and legal ideologies that arise from this tension by removing the body from its normal biological function and investing it instead with a symbolic import communicated by means of physical suffering. Chapter 1 begins by reading the scene of Antigone’s mourning in Oedipus at Colonus to explore how the living or dead body in Sophocles’ tragedy embodies its symbolic meaning by being somehow tied up with it. By extension, then, torture guarantees truth in these plays because of the material, changeable, mortal nature of the body: because the body suffers pain, the unchangeable truth can be “wrung” out of it (to use the figure of speech Creon utters when he threatens his guards). In Antigone, the resistant corpse of Polyneices motivates the tense struggle between Creon and Antigone. Ultimately, as chapter 1 demonstrates, depictions of torture or physical suffering, references to torture, and the display of wounded body parts and corpses onstage emphasize the body’s physicality; the body becomes a physical, visual, and public symbol of the ideological cause of

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the deaths of Antigone, Haemon, and Eurydice, and of Creon’s resultant guilty suffering. Physical suffering in this play emerges as an antidote, a retributive act meant to level the balance of Justice once again. This material body, in its position as physical juncture of person and society, is thus emphasized as the place where the law of the family or the city will be written on the individual in the name of Justice. In chapter 2, then, I read these bodily signs in terms of the basanos that is repeatedly invoked in Oedipus Rex. Basanos designates both torture and touchstone; the two notions come together in the significant mark or trace that torture leaves upon the body. As chapter 2 shows, the tortured body is established, in the course of Oedipus’s winding investigation, as a mark of authenticity or truth. Hence, when Oedipus stabs his own eyes out, he is not only inflicting punishment upon himself. In the terms established within this tragedy, Oedipus’s self-inflicted wound simultaneously signifies the horror of his crimes in a manner that appears authentic or valid to himself, the chorus, and the witnessing audience. Chapter 2 concludes by demonstrating how this significance of bodily suffering emerges in Sophocles’ final tragedy, as well. In Oedipus at Colonus, the dead body can acquire the power of a heros:21 it can ultimately embody justice and protect the city of Athens because of the sufferings or injustices it has physically undergone. The performance of bodily suffering also occupies a position of preference in the early novel, a genre that reflects the influence of its literary predecessor, the drama, in its emphasis upon disguise, spectacles, and staged events.22 Yet in the case of the early novel, or romance, the significance of bodily torment reflects overtly erotic concerns—problems that evoke the tension between individual and polis from a rather different angle than the tragedies. The heroes and heroines of the early novels describe suffering from the wounds of eros, hidden deep inside their bodies. Yet the adventures that comprise the events of these novels etch these mysterious pains upon the outer flesh of the lovers, in abduction by pirates, imprisonment by bandits, encounters with exotic animals, and, most pertinently to chapter 3, in the frequent mutilation (or apparent mutilation and death) of the heroines of the novels. In a reading of Achilles Tatius’s Leukippe and Kleitophon, chapter 3 investigates the manner in which the gap between the inner experience of the hero and heroine and its outer manifestation is negotiated by means of bodily mutilation. In the novel’s emphasis upon performance and spectacle, Leukippe and Kleitophon invites the reader to follow the gaze of the hero in the novels, staring in rapt fascination at the physical torment of the female lover. Such a formula foregrounds the issue of gender; indeed this chapter investigates the manner in which bodily torment becomes a means of negotiating the tension between individual desire and the role of the subject in society, a struggle that involves donning the

Introduction

13

social terms of gender. I argue in this chapter that the body, in its endurance of both the invisible wounds of eros and the visibly apparent wounds of abuse and mutilation, marks in torture the tension between private and public born in the process of becoming subject to culture. While torture in Sophocles’ tragedies marks, in political and legal terms, the problem of justice for the individual and society, the body in the romance marks the presence of desire, an abstraction that manifests itself in a pointedly physical manner: bodily torment thus takes an erotic expression as the individual negotiates between private desire and public responsibility and expectations. In each of these three chapters, torture figures rhetorically to communicate abstract political, legal, or erotic concerns, marked upon an individual before a larger witnessing audience. In chapter 4, the public performance of torture before an audience takes its most conspicuously rhetorical form in order to communicate an overtly religious message. Chapter 4 investigates the Christian figure of suffering through a reading of Prudentius’s Peristephanon Liber. Here, bodily torture exhibits its polysemy most obviously, as the message sent by the martyrdom described in each of the poems serves at least three different persuasive purposes. In each of the poems that comprise this martyrology, Prudentius points clearly to the double function of the martyrs’ suffering and his own text’s depiction of it. Each account illustrates the belief that undergoing a painful martyrdom is both a victory and a liberation: “through the wide wound [vulnus amplum] a glorious gateway opens to the righteous, and the soul, cleansed in the scarlet baptism, leaps from its seat in the breast” (l. 25–30). Yet the affect of suffering or witnessing torture produces a rhetorical effect as well: the pain the martyrs suffer, which is demonstrated by the violence or extremity of the wounds that the torturers inflict, allows the victim, the witness, and/or Prudentius to testify to the enormous power and presence of the Christian God. The extent to which the martyr suffers torment correlates directly to the potential that he or she will achieve eternal life in heaven; moreover, as Prudentius indicates at the beginning of his poem, if the poet’s descriptions of the martyrdoms are adequately effective and moving, their representation may earn the poet himself a place in heaven. In addition, the poem suggests still another potential persuasive intent to the torture of the martyrs: the torture, performed by the Roman government, is applied with the purpose, expressed by the Romans, of punishing Christians for failing to practice the “state” religion, and thus to serve as an example to other subversive elements in the society. Chapter 4 thus examines the manner in which torture functions rhetorically to communicate multiple levels of meaning. Chapter 4 focuses on Prudentius’s account of the martyrdom of Romanus. Romanus’s torture culminates in the removal of his tongue and

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the poet’s description of the unsilenced message of Christianity that continues to emanate from Romanus’s bloody and wounded mouth. While the tongue (lingua) figures most clearly the speech of Romanus being physically removed,23 his ability to continue communicating (according to Prudentius) emphasizes the nonlinguistic nature of his address. Concentrating particularly on this episode, chapter 4 examines how graphic accounts of physical suffering function rhetorically to testify to the mysterious nature of the unknowable, unspeakable Christian God by means of the witnessing audience posed in and by the text. For it is the process of wounding Romanus in the presence of the witness, I argue, that communicates his unspoken message. The four main chapters of the book, then, comprise a literary-critical approach to the rhetorical function of torture. In this way, this study differs from the political, historical, or sociological study of the actual practice of torture. Through this literary approach, my research into the scene of torture sheds light on the nature of the response to torture. I focus on the effects of torture on the audience or witness, rather than upon the method or purpose behind those implementing the torture. Exploring the political, legal, erotic, and moral potential of the rhetoric of torture in literature, each chapter theorizes the manner in which the representation of torture persuades its audience to deliver an interpretation or judgment in response to the spectacle of pain. In this manner, this investigation of torture in ancient literature provides insight into how the audience for whom torture is staged participates in determining torture’s significance, choosing an interpretation from a number of possible meanings depending upon how the rhetorical situation is framed in its representation.

The Rhetoric of Torture The historical valorization of suffering as a mark of “authenticity” or “truth,” established in chapters 1 through 4, continues to resonate in modern judicial, ethical, philosophical, and cultural conversations. In the modern world, torture occupies a paradoxical position. Post-Enlightenment conceptions of human rights and the changing nature of modern penal and judicial systems have combined to diminish the incidence of torture in the modern world. However, the practice of torture continues, as human rights organizations, international tribunals, the media, and victims of torture across the world will attest. Indeed, torture has acquired an unmistakable visibility recently; the number of books that have appeared examining the Abu Ghraib scandal alone reflects torture’s ubiquity in the media. Yet among the books relating firsthand army experiences,24 tracing the events leading up to the photos

Introduction

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released from Abu Ghraib,25 or describing America’s historical position on torture,26 none address directly the overwhelming rhetorical use of torture in the media—a practice established well before the world ever saw the grinning face of PFC Lynndie England. References to torture in speeches meant to incite aggression or elicit condemnation, images of bodily mutilation in the media, and depictions of bodily abuse staged before cameras have proliferated since the terrorist attacks upon the United States in 2001, in an explosion of rhetoric referring to the practice of torture. From revelations of Saddam Hussein’s use of torture against his own citizens to U.S. threats of taking the “gloves off” in dealing with terrorists, the specter of torture has haunted the “war on terror” since its inception. Accusations that the CIA has been illegally using force to interrogate political prisoners (or “rendering” prisoners to other countries for this purpose) have surfaced several times over the past few years, prompting the U.S. government and the public to engage in a debate over the precise definition of torture or “severe distress.” The epilogue draws the conclusions of the book’s four chapters to bear on this most recent phenomenon of torture, in light of its representation by the media before a globally witnessing audience. As The Wound and the Witness demonstrates, perhaps the most “effective” aspect of torture is its rhetorical agility, which emanates from the ambiguity or polysemy of its communication. A number of messages may be generated by the representation of torture; the rhetorical situation in which torture is presented may prompt a response in its audience as likely to be motivated by empathy, an aesthetic response, or the investment of desire, as by a logical judgment. Wayne Booth expresses the tension between rhetoric and ethical judgment: “The problem is [. . .] that in judging rhetoric we can never fully escape our own deepest convictions. As we examine any rhetorical move, it will probably seem better or worse according to our own judgment about the case being made.”27 Thus torture in its rhetorical function inhibits the possibility for ethical judgment by producing a number of messages to which the audience responds by being persuaded. In other words, while the representation of torture introduces an ambiguous undecideability that might allow for ethics, its bodily and visual nature prompts an empathy and corresponding sense of certainty that provokes decision and thus forecloses the ethical. The Wound and the Witness offers insight into the long Western cultural tradition of torture’s rhetorical significance. In the interests of the legal, political, erotic, and religious, the body in pain becomes a rhetorical figure, presented before an audience in order to prompt a response or judgment. Following Aristotle’s suggestion that the art of rhetoric is the practice of being able to discern its modes, this book offers a historical

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and comparative investigation of the representation of torture in order to analyze its rhetorical function. For by recognizing the rhetorical situation in which the witness participates we might begin to recognize the rhetorical situation in which torture persists.

Chapter 1

THE LEGAL BODY The Symbolic Corpse in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone

At the close of Oedipus at Colonus (c. 401 BC), the last extant play of Sophocles and his final treatment of the myth of Oedipus’s accursed family, a strange dramatic event occurs. As the thunder of Zeus peals overhead, Oedipus’s body, located somewhere offstage, disappears forever, simultaneously bestowing a remarkable power upon the site where he departs from earthly life. Perhaps stranger still, for the form of the drama, are the responses that Theseus and Antigone have to the catastrophe. According to the messenger who reports the details of Oedipus’s death to the chorus (and the watching audience), the epic hero who alone among humans has permission to witness Oedipus’s passing actually fails to see the singular event: And when we had departed, after a short time we turned around, and could see that the man [Oedipus] was no longer present, and the king [Theseus] was shading his eyes, holding his hand against his head, as though some terrible, terrifying thing, unbearable to see, had been presented. [„V d# ™p–lqomen, cr¬n¯ braceƒ straj°nteV, ÷xape√domen t¿n †ndra t¿n mÆn o¶damo£ par¬nt# ⁄ti, †nakta d# a¶t¿n ımmºtwn ÷p√skion, ceƒr# ™nt°conta krat¬V, „V deino£ tinoV j¬bou jan°ntoV o¶d# ™nasceto£ bl°pein.] (1647–52)1 In an odd twist of dramatic performance, Sophocles represents the catastrophe2 of Oedipus’s death by means of a messenger who is forbidden to see the occurrence and thus must report upon what he saw of the only one who was allowed to see, Theseus—who himself fails to see because

17

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The Wound and the Witness

the sight presented is too terrible for seeing. In lieu of representation, then, in the place of what cannot be staged, the audience must turn to narrative language to gain knowledge of this event. Such a pointedly linguistic presentation seems counter to an art form located in its theatrical performance. As Aristotle indicates in the Poetics, tragedy, which belongs to the arts of mimesis or representation, remains distinct from other mimetic arts such as epic poetry, dithyramb, or music in that it utilizes actors on a stage along with verse and rhythm in order to convey its meaning. As his well-known formula describes: Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its elements [used] separately in the [various] parts [of the play]; [represented] by people acting and not by narration; accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions. [⁄stin o‚n trag¯d√a m√mhsiV prºxewV spouda√aV ka¥ tele√aV m°geqoV ÷co§shV, “dusm°n¯ l¬g¯ cwr¥V …kºstw tÍn eÎdÍn ÷n toƒV mor√oiV, drÔntwn ka¥ o¶ di’ ™paggel√aV, di’ ÷l°ou ka¥ j¬bou pera√nousa t‹n tÍn toio§twn paqhmºtwn kºqarsin.] (1449b24–28)3 The body of the actor corresponds to the meaning of language; gestures have the potential to be both mimetic and deictic. In tragedy, this passage suggests, the “doing” (drÔntwn) of actors takes the place of the reporting (™paggelÍn) of narrative language. Tragedy represents its meaning upon a stage before an audience by means of bodily actions supplemented by spoken words. The speech of the messenger (that is, the reporter, the †ggeloV) quoted earlier, however, suggests a more complicated relation between mimesis and language in tragedy. In fact, later in the Poetics, it seems that poetic language, apart from the bodily gestures that correspond to it, comprises an integral part of the function of the drama. The purpose of the performance of speech, Aristotle suggests, would disappear if the thought spoken by the actor were not essential: “For what would be the task of the speaker, if the necessary elements were apparent even without speech? [t√ gΩr œn e≥h to£ l°gontoV ⁄rgon, eÎ ja√nonto fl d°oi ka¥ m‹ diΩ t¿n l¬gon;]” (1456b7–8).4 Lucas’s commentary suggests two possible meanings: “Either A. is asking what would be the function of speech in drama if the necessary emotions could be aroused by pantomime, or, more likely, what would be the role of rhetoric in drama if the emotions could be aroused by the action.” With an emphasis on the way in which language itself conveys meaning,

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Aristotle introduces a discussion of lexis, diction, the manner of speaking the thought of the tragedy.5 Diction provides, he explains, the means by which rhetoric will be effected in the drama. Derrida, in his essay “White Mythology,” likewise suggests that this passage emphasizes the function of rhetoric in tragedy: “If there were no difference between dianoia and lexis, there would be no space for tragedy [. . .] This difference is not only due to the fact that the personage must be able to say something other than what he thinks. He exists and acts within tragedy only on the condition that he speaks.”6 For Derrida, the need for lexis, the rhetorical presentation of the thought of the work, indicates a significant difference—between speech and thought—that creates the space for tragedy. In tragedy, the thought of the work can be expressed in speech that does not refer to it directly; conversely, words in tragedy may, by means of their rhetorical potential, pose a number of possible meanings. Rhetorical speech, then, is an essential aspect of tragedy; without speech, the thought of the play remains unspoken. Yet what happens when speech fails? To return to the play, in the speech of Antigone that follows the messenger’s report (quoted earlier), Sophocles presents another barrier to understanding: Alas, alack! It is for us, it is for us to lament in all fullness for the accursed blood from our father that is in us, unhappy pair; our father for whom we endured continual pain, and at the last we shall carry away from him things beyond reason that we have seen and suffered. [aÎaƒ, je£◊ ⁄stin, ⁄sti n¸n d‹ o¶ t¿ m°n, †llo dÆ m–, patr¿V ⁄mjuton †laston a«ma dusm¬roin stenºzein, „\tini t¿n pol∞n †llote mÆn p¬non ⁄mpedon e≥comen, ÷n pumºt¯ d’ ™l¬gista paro√somen, Îd¬nte ka¥ paqo§sa.] (1670–6) For Antigone and Ismene, what is left at the end of Oedipus’s life, which it is their continual curse to mourn, surpasses reason (it is ™l¬gistoV), remaining for them in the experience of sight and suffering. What eludes speech can nevertheless be seen and felt. It seems, then, that speech works in conjunction with physical performance in the tragedy; for, in drama, “discourse itself is on display.”7 These two responses to Oedipus’s death present two divergent hurdles to communication. On the one hand, the event of Oedipus’s death cannot be seen by any individual, even the epic hero designated to witness it.

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The Wound and the Witness

Nevertheless, the death is reported by the witness in terms of its not having been seen; the messenger’s words, delivered to the audience of Theban elders and the audience of spectators, take the place of the actual event. Yet this narrative account, failing to correspond entirely to the catastrophic moment of Oedipus’s death, cannot entirely convey the thought or meaning of his death. This difference arises again in the second passage. For, as Antigone laments, the meaning of Oedipus’s death—that is, what the mourning of his passing and therefore of his past, would convey—stands beyond reason, it cannot be reasonably communicated to others but remains to the daughters only in what they themselves have seen and suffered because of their father’s life. This failure in language returns us to the difference between speech and thought. Bridging the difference between lexis and dianoia, the tragic actor performs upon the stage not only before his audience, but for his audience. The terms of this performance are echoed in Antigone’s troubled lament. The necessity of the mourning that Antigone finds impossible shifts the impact of Oedipus’s death from his daughters’ individual experience of the event to the manner in which they may (or may not) communicate his death, by means of his life, to the polis. The transference of mourning from an individual ritual to a communal demonstration and process raises the problem of communicating the act of mourning to a large body of people. What does the corpse of the one who has died mean for the polis? What is the meaning of the loss of the individual for the city? In Oedipus at Colonus, the meaning of Oedipus’s passing, and his past life, for the city, is embodied in his crimes: his past achieves significance in its pollution of the polis. For the city, the meaning of his passing must somehow indicate the nature of that pollution—that is, the extent of his transgression—in order to measure its loss or resolution in death. While the individual mourns in ritual the passing of an other individual, the meaning of mourning for the city is construed in terms of a larger ideal that reflects the position of that individual in relation to the city.8 In the case of Oedipus, mourning becomes an exploration of justice, in which the body becomes evidence or proof that will indicate justice effected. Thus, the individual body stands in as evidence for the meaning—the thought—of Oedipus’s life. Antigone’s method of communicating the meaning of his death—by means of her own body’s suffering—suggests this potential of communicating, from the individual to the masses, by means of the body. While Oedipus at Colonus offers a demonstration of the political fate of Oedipus’s body, whose public significance has already been made horrifyingly clear,9 Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, in its essential concern with burial, traces the role of the body in its shift from individual to political mourning. Describing events that occur after Oedipus’s criminal investigation, self-conviction, and death in exile,10 this play demonstrates a preoccupation

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with crime and judgment that reflects a fifth-century Athenian interest in the democratic mode of justice—the formal trial. As a result, the body in Antigone functions not only as a representation of an action, but ultimately as a potential body of evidence—the evidence of meaning—whose suffering provides the legitimacy of proof to a witnessing audience. While the corpse, in its persistence on stage,11 reminds the audience of a potential meaning that it indicates, the body acquires this potency by having suffered pain. How does suffering enable the body to mean more than itself? How does the symbolic potential of the body relate to its position at the juncture of individual and polis? In this chapter, I will suggest that in the conjunction of tragedy and trial (both aspects of the polis),12 the sense of the body as evidence expands the function of mimesis—through the rhetorical concepts of evidence, proof, and punishment. By first establishing the dead body as symbolic for the polis, Antigone goes on to reveal the capacity of the living body to convey meaning as well, a significance pointedly established by means of Creon’s threats of torture. Thus the body in this play functions rhetorically, surpassing the temporal and spatial limits of language to imply a connection to the divine order of justice via the tortured or suffering body.

The Unforgettable Corpse Of Sophocles’ three Theban plays, Antigone (c. 442 BC) provides the clearest example of the status of the material body for the polis in the motivating corpse of Polynices. Taking place after a war between opposing forces led by Antigone’s two brothers, the play emerges from an army of bodies killed in battle—corpses among which those of the brothers occupy a position of marked importance, due to the political significance with which they are invested. Yet it is Polynices’ corpse, denied burial by Creon as punishment for his insurrection against Thebes and his brother Eteocles, that poses the ethical dilemma of the play. While Antigone expresses a passionate loyalty to her brother, repeatedly attempting to give Polynices a proper burial, Creon opposes her efforts with a staunch and unbending loyalty to the city-state, condemning her actions as traitorously criminal. Polynices’ unburied corpse introduces an ethical dilemma into the play from the very first, when Antigone proposes to her sister Ismene her plan to bury it, raising the problem of Creon’s edict against such an action. What seems to strike Antigone first about the situation is the inequality with which her brothers are being treated: while Eteocles is honored with burial, Polynices is not. Yet the manner in which she relates Creon’s proclamation to Ismene reveals that the matter is not merely about a simple burial: “But

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as for the unhappy corpse of Polynices, they say it has been proclaimed to the citizens that none shall conceal it in a grave or lament for it, but that they should leave it unwept for, unburied, a rich treasure house for birds as they look out for food [t¿n d’ ™ql√wV qan¬nta Polune√kouV n°kun / ™stoƒs√ jasin ÷kkekhr£cqai t¿ m‹ / tºj¯ kal§yai mhd‰ kwk£sa√ tina, / ÷øn d’ †klauton, †tajon, oÎwnoƒV gluk∞n / qhsaur¿n eÎsorÍsi pr¿V cºrin borøV]” (26–30). While the practice of leaving traitors unburied is not uncommon in fifth-century Greece (and therefore wouldn’t be especially shocking to Sophocles’ audience), Antigone’s emphasis upon the results of such treatment—that the body as carrion would provide food for scavengers—emphasizes the particularly shameful quality of the corpse denied burial.13 In addition, Creon’s edict specifies that the body not be covered in a grave (m‹ tºj¯ kal§yai); the corpse thus remains in view, as a reminder to citizens of the fate of a traitor, but also as a nagging reminder to Antigone of the dishonor directed toward her brother. Thus the dramatic stichomythia between the sisters that opens the play revolves around the ethical dilemma posed by the presence (above ground) of the dead body: while Ismene protests that in burying Polynices Antigone would commit an act forbidden to the city (™p¬rrhton p¬lei [44]), Antigone asserts that to be caught not burying him would be a betrayal to her brother (o¶ gΩr d‹ prodo£s’ ªlÔsomai [46]), one of her own (tÍn ÷mÍn [48]). Arguing that her crime is a hallowed one (˙sia panourg–sasa [74]) that the gods would honor, Antigone claims that it would be especially honorable to die doing such a deed. When Ismene suggests that her sister is seeking to accomplish an impossible thing, Antigone retorts, “If you say that, you will be hated by me, and you will justly incur the hatred of the dead man [eÎ ta£ta l°xeiV, ÷cqarŒ m‰n ÷x ÷mo£, / ÷cqrΩ d‰ t¸ qan¬nti proske√sfi d√kfi]” (93–94). Thus, Antigone asserts that the honor of the gods protects her in burying Polynices, even if she should die, whereas the just hatred of the dead condemns Ismene’s refusal to act. In her passionate conviction, however, Antigone urges Ismene not to maintain a protective silence about her transgression, but rather to proclaim her crime to all, a request that Ismene responds to with clear misgiving. Creon’s entrance, in which he takes up the thread of Ismene’s argument, is directly preceded by the parodos describing, as Mark Griffith’s commentary points out, “what Polynices had represented while he lived—a hideous threat to his whole community.”14 That a chorus made up of Theban elders, leading citizens of the city of Thebes, delivers this warning reemphasizes the political nature of the problem of Polynices’ corpse. The chorus’s concern with the polis thus sets the stage for Creon’s claim, following this chorus, that he enacts his laws for the good of the city. In his first speech (162–210), Creon describes the needs of the city as his first

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priority, clearly establishing that this takes precedence even over the ties of a loved one, since such dear attachments, he argues, can only be formed in the luxury of a well-run city. The greatness of Thebes, he continues, can be attributed to the effectiveness of the laws (nomoi, 191) of this hierarchy, laws that privilege the city over personal feelings. Creon’s emphasis upon the priority of the city over the personal makes his laws, of course, radically incommensurable with Antigone’s emphatic assertion that her ties to her brother precede any other consideration, even concern for her own life. Creon proposes that his civic laws take precedence over Antigone’s individual ties to her family, raising an ethical conflict that seems to present an opposition between societal structures, such as the law and the city, and the desires of the individual, such as home and family. Thus, the play has become for many commentators a paradigm of the ethical dilemma of the individual in society.15 Critics find expressed in Antigone a tension between a range of dialectical oppositions, including the law of the polis and the law of the oikos, the law of men and the law of the gods, civil law and natural law, techné and nature—with Antigone’s revolt associated with family, nature, the worship of the divine. Feminist critics find in Antigone a distinctly feminine heroine, overturning the patriarchy in a passionate subversion of the order of the law; in these readings, Antigone’s desires cause disruptions that can break apart the regimes of Creon, Aristotle, and all of dialectical philosophy. Yet what is this nature, this passion, this desire, that would be incorporated into a conception of ethics, specifically the ethical conflict at the heart of Antigone? In these ethical readings of the play, Antigone is seen to personify or enact limits that are particularly human aspects of existence in opposition to the societal construction of the polis and the laws that correspond to it. At the heart of these terms of conflict, however, lies the compulsion that initially provides the catalyst for their production. While the dialectical approaches noted here appropriately draw out possible terms of conflict within the play, none address the persistent and haunting figure that prompts these oppositions: the corpse of Polynices, a representation of the human at its most extremely inhuman.

Mourning and Burial The guard who arrives to report the initial transgression of Creon’s edict—the discovery that someone has buried Polynices’ body—states his case nervously and briefly, afraid that he will suffer blame for delivering the bad news. Significantly, in his initial statement of the problem, he casts the burial itself in metaphorical terms: “Someone has just gone off after burying the body, sprinkling its flesh with thirsty dust and performing the necessary

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rites [t¿n nekr¬n tiV ™rt√wV / qºyaV b°bhke k™p¥ crwt¥ diy√an / k¬nin pal§naV k™jagiste§saV ˝ cr–]” (245–47). While the guard’s reference to the sacrifical rites of burial conveys a sense of the significant act accomplished, he expresses the physical action in terms of a metaphor: “thirsty dust [k¬nin pal§naV].” Though the correspondence of these terms seems almost clichéd,—when the ground is dry and dusty, it needs water or is “thirsty,”—Griffith suggests in his commentary that the reference to water also may indicate the burial ground’s need for the tears of lament.16 Indeed, as the description of the guard goes on to indicate, Antigone’s scattering of dust over the body, accompanied with the necessary ritual mourning rites, seems to have sufficed to protect Polynices’ body just as well as a fully underground burial would. In fact (as Carol Jacobs has pointed out), the slightness of Antigone’s interaction with the physical earth echoes the lightness of the dust on Polynices’ body: both are so light as to seem hardly existent at all. Thus, the guard marvels at how the earth about the body remains unmarked, and at how the body has vanished despite the fact that it is only covered with a light dust: like the scattering of dust, the metaphor suggests, rather than explicitly demonstrates, the burial. Significantly, also, he notes that the layer of dust has somehow protected the body from being mauled by animals or birds (a fact bearing the potential to especially irritate Creon, whose edict had emphasized such a fate for the corpse). Antigone’s ritual burial, slight as it manifests itself physically, subverts the prohibition that Creon has placed on the body. In doing so, she follows a customary rite of mourning that mediates between the dead mortal and the gods, as Bernard Knox points out: Antigone’s appeal is not general but specific. She is not opposing a whole set of unwritten laws to the written laws of the polis, nor is she pleading the force of individual conscience or universal and natural law. She is claiming that the age-old customary rites of mourning and burial for the dead, which are unwritten because they existed even before the alphabet was invented or the polis organized, have the force of law, unwritten but unfailing, which stems from the gods and which the gods enforce.17 Antigone herself, of course, claims that she performs the ritual of “burying” Polynices in the service of the laws of the gods. Yet the dusted corpse remains in view for the guard to discover; thus the ritual Antigone performs affects the city, as well. When the guard brings her before Creon, charging her with the burial, the chorus exclaims as she approaches, “Surely they do not lead you captive for disobedience to the king’s laws [. . .]? [o¶ d– pou s° g’ ™pisto£san / toƒV basile√oiV ™pºgousi n¬moiV (. . .);]” (381–82). Pro-

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viding the conclusion to their choral song that has addressed the dangerous potential of man, the choral reference to the nomoi that Antigone has broken as kingly [basile√oi n¬moi] distinguishes this set of prohibitions as another man-made thing, a product of techné, and thus good or bad only to the extent to which they carry out the justice of the gods (see especially lines 365–71). Antigone reiterates this distinction shortly thereafter. When Creon clarifies with astonishment that she has dared to break his law, she replies with a justification that places her squarely on the side of the gods: Yes, for it was not Zeus who made this proclamation, nor was it Justice who lives with the gods below that established such laws among men, nor did I think your proclamations strong enough to have power to overrule, mortal as they were, the unwritten and unfailing ordinances of the gods. [o¶ gºr t√ moi Ze∞V ‡n ˛ khr§xaV tºde, o¶d’ ≠ x§noikoV tÍn kºtw qeÍn D√kh toio§sd’ ÷n ™nqrÔpoisin Ïrisen n¬mouV, o¶d‰ sq°nein toso£ton ¯# ¬mhn tΩ sΩ khr§gmaq’ Ïst’ †grapta k™sjal› qeÍn n¬mima d§nasqai qnhtº g’ ∫nq’ •perdrameƒn.] (450–55) Excluding Creon’s laws from the divinely ordained laws, Antigone aligns herself with rights proclaimed by either Zeus or divine Justice—which she significantly locates as residing with the gods below, that is, the chthonic gods, among whom Hades would be included.18 In either case, Zeus or Justice, these divinely ordained laws seem to gain their validity in her assessment because of their immortal nature: they are unwritten (†grapta), unlike the laws of men, which in their material (written) presence may ultimately be subject to temporal decay (thus her designation of them as mortal [qnhtº]). The mourning that Antigone seeks to accomplish, then, echoes the divine laws she claims to follow, inasmuch as mourning seeks to immortalize, or make present in memory, the one who has passed away. Yet the effects of this memorial ritual extend beyond Antigone’s relation to the gods; the importance of Polynices’ unburied body to the city determines that her actions must resonate in a public sense, as well. In response to Antigone’s claims, Creon emphasizes again his devotion to the laws of the city, arguing their importance in terms of what lies at stake in their being obeyed or transgressed: But there is no worse evil than insubordination! This it is that ruins cities, this it is that destroys houses, this it is that shatters

26

The Wound and the Witness and puts to flight the warriors on its own side! But what saves the lives of most of those that go straight is obedience! In this way we have to protect discipline [. . .] [™narc√aV d‰ meƒzon o¶k ⁄stin kak¬n◊ ≈¢d’ ™nastºtouV a©th p¬leiV ∫llusin, h ≈¢de summºcou dor¿V o≥kouV t√qhsin, h tropΩV katarr–gnusi◊ tÍn d’ ırqoum°nwn s±zei tΩ pollΩ sÔmaq’ ≠ peiqarc√a.] (672–76)

For Creon, then, the laws of the city must be obeyed because they save the citizens at all levels: in government, home and military life. In the face of such high stakes, obedience becomes unequivocal and unquestioning; he therefore categorizes any deviance from the straight path of the law as anarchy (™narc√aV, not subordinate to the ruler or †rch). The choice here stands framed as the stark difference between disorder and order, a distinction at the heart of much of Sophocles’ work.19 Creon’s fear, expressed here, of a continuous threat to the fragile hold of absolute order manifests itself in his extreme treatment of Polynices’ body (i.e., his emphatic desire that the body be exposed as carrion for mutilation by animals) and his later obsessive attempts to oppress Antigone. Such a fear gives a tenuous quality to his rule, as if it could be subverted by the slightest deviance, the expression of any loss of faith. Thus he declares in his decree (or so Antigone reports it) that the one burying Polynices will be subject to death by stoning. Such a death might serve as a public demonstration of the results of betraying the rule of Creon.20 Even the demonstration of force and control that a public execution might provide, however, seems too weak an enforcement for Creon. In a later exchange with Antigone, he extends this desire to control not only the lives but also the deaths of those who usurp his authority. When she asks, “Do you wish for anything more than to take me and kill #¢ katakteƒnai m’ …lÔn;]” (497), he replies, “Not I! me? [q°leiV ti meƒzon h When I have that, I have everything [÷gÚ m‰n o¶d°n◊ to£t’ ⁄cwn ˝pant’ ⁄cw]” (498). Indeed, if he had Antigone’s death, he would have everything, for being in possession of another’s death would give him a quality similar to the gods who have a hand in fate. With this threat, Creon conflates his own potential with that of the gods. Yet for Creon, as he demonstrates with the public spectacle of stoning he first proposes with his edict, his power depends upon his ability to persuade his subjects the citizens to invest him with it. This becomes clear as he begins to lose the empathy of the chorus. Once Haemon appears onstage and tries to convince his father to change his mind, the chorus seems to waver in their support of Creon’s execution of Antigone, his son’s fiancée.

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Thus, after Haemon exits, the chorus asks Creon if he still intends to kill her; when he replies in the affirmative, they ask how he will do it, giving him the opportunity to change his method of execution from the formerly expressed public stoning to a less dramatic option of burying her alive in a tomb, out of sight of the city (775). Creon therefore struggles to maintain his present power, seeking to prevent any disorder in the city that might lead to a loss of authority, by modifying his plans.21 The execution he therefore proposes, death by burial alive, though less dramatic and painful (presumably) than the first option, presents its own set of worries to Antigone. From loudly proclaiming her part in mourning her brother, she turns to nagging worries about the chances that she herself will be mourned by others, if she is to die alone, hidden, and possibly forgotten in a cave: “No longer may I, poor creature, look upon the sacred eye of the shining sun; and my fate, unwept for, is lamented by no friend [o¶k°ti moi t¬de lampºdoV ˘er¿n / ∫mma q°miV ˛røn tala√na˚ ◊ / t¿n d’ ÷m¿n p¬tmon ™dºkruton / o¶de¥V j√lwn stenºzei]” (879–82). With this complaint, Antigone shifts her focus from the consideration of her (and her brother’s) individual relation to the gods to anxiety about her position in the public at her death; in other words, she worries that her memory, her reputation, will die with her. Creon responds to this concern by reaffirming her worries; although he rhetorically suggests at first that she will be mourned as a matter of course, he goes on to emphasize the isolated nature of her living tomb, and its complete removal from those living above ground. By removing her body from view, Creon suggests that he will veil the sign that would inspire the mourning of Antigone—her corpse. With this gesture, Creon plans a similar fate for Antigone as he has designated for her brother: by consigning her to a death removed (effectively) from the city, he buries the disorder of her anarchy along with her—just as he excludes the body of Polynices, who has brought disorder into the city as a result of his uprising.22 In each case, Creon physically removes the disorder from the sphere of city life or action. By burying Antigone alive, Creon also hopes to remove the pollution of further disorder by avoiding the guilt of having killed her directly. Yet, in doing so, he subjects Antigone to suffer a fate in death also similar to Polynices’: an unmourned death. However, in eliding the space for burial, Creon continues the cycle of disorder, thus failing to impose the order he seeks.23 The potential for disorder inherent in Creon’s treatment of corpses is realized in Teiresias’s warning of a plague on the city resulting from Creon’s treatment of Polynices: “And it is your will that has put this plague upon the city; for our altars and our braziers, one and all, are filled with carrion brought by birds and dogs from the unhappy son of Oedipus who fell [ka¥ ta£ta t›V s›V ÷k jren¿V noseƒ p¬liV◊ / bwmo¥ gΩr ≠mƒn ÷scºrai

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te panteleƒV / pl–reiV •p’ oÎwnÍn te ka¥ kunÍn borøV / to£ dusm¬rou peptÍtoV OÎd√pou g¬nou]” (1015–18). In this case, the pollution of the plague on the city manifests a symptom of the problem that Creon is causing: the disruption of a custom in which women mourned for the dead, recalling their life as a memory that allowed the passing of the dead. It is this “law,” of course, to which Antigone refers in her claims to be doing the just thing in burying Polynices. Prohibiting the memorializing ritual of mourning that Antigone would perform, Creon causes a disruption that then manifests itself on the living body, in the form of a plague. In his rage at Antigone’s subversion, Creon disrupts the divine order of things, which leads to a disturbance in the order of the polis, as well. The chorus addresses the problem of such violent anger in their fourth song, which revolves around a discussion of the dangerous threat to order that passion poses: You [Eros, passion] wrench just men’s minds aside from justice, doing them violence; it is you who have stirred up this quarrel between men of the same blood. Victory goes to the visible desire that comes from the eyes of the beautiful bride, desire that has its throne in sovereignty beside those of the mighty laws [. . .] [s∞ ka¥ dika√wn ™d√kouV jr°naV paraspø˚ V ÷p¥ lÔba˚ ◊ s∞ ka¥ t¬de neƒkoV ™ndrÍn x§naimon ⁄ceiV tarºxaV◊ nikø˚ d’ ÷narg‹V blejºrwn ≈i¢meroV e¶l°ktrou n§mjaV, tÍn megºlwn pºredroV ÷n ™rcaƒV qesmÍn◊] (791–99) Avoiding a direct condemnation of either Creon’s or Antigone’s violence, the chorus uses the violent conflict between Polynices and Eteocles as an example of the damage that passion can cause, diverting men from justice to injustice. As an example of right action, however, they provide the image of the desire emanating from the eyes of a bride, who in occupying the customary position for the female in society therefore follows the “mighty laws” (qesmÍn), that is, those that are established. Having confirmed this precept, the chorus can then accuse Antigone on the grounds of the hubristic folly to which her passion has led her, as well as for the established laws that her father broke before her: “Advancing to the extreme of daring, you stumbled against the lofty altar of Justice, my child! And you are paying some torment [inherited] from your father [probøs’ ÷p’ ⁄scaton qrºsouV

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/ •yhl¿n ÷V D√kaV bºqron / pros°peseV,  t°knon, pod√◊ / patr¸on d’ ÷kt√neiV tin’ ¡qlon]” (853–56).24 Not only has Antigone gone too far in pursuit of her own desires, the chorus argues, but she also suffers in repayment, as a payoff or vengeance, for her father’s crime. The chorus here accuses Antigone of acting against divine justice, as a result of her own passion and her father’s incest. Antigone takes up only the second of the accusations against her (one of which, ironically, her father might also be accused), seeing her own predicament as punishment for the fate cursed upon her by Oedipus: You have touched on a thought most painful for me, the fate of my father, thrice renewed, and the whole of our destiny, that of the famous Labdacids. Ah, the disaster of marriage with his mother, and my father’s incestuous couplings with his ill-fated mother! From what parents was I born, miserable one! To them I go, to live with them, accursed, unmarried! Ah, brother who made a disastrous marriage, in your death you have destroyed my life! [⁄yausaV ™lgeinotºtaV ÷mo¥ mer√mnaV, patr¿V tripol√stou o≥tou to£ te pr¬pantoV ªmet°rou p¬tmou kleinoƒV Labdak√daisin. ÎÚ matr¸ai l°ktrwn ¡tai koim–matº t’ a¶tog°nnht’ ÷m¸ patr¥ dusm¬rou matr¬V◊ oi≈¢wn ÷gÔ poq’ ª tala√jrwn ⁄jun◊ pr¿V o•`V ™raƒoV †gamoV ˝d’ ÷gÚ m°toikoV ⁄rcomai◊ ÎÚ dusp¬tmwn kas√gnhte gºmwn kur–saV, qanÚn ⁄t’ o‚san kat–nar°V me.] (857–71) Providing the fullest reference in the play to her father’s crime, Antigone specifically describes Oedipus’s transgressions of established law: not only did he marry his own mother, but he had children from this incestuous coupling. By leaving out the other aspect of Oedipus’s crime, his murder of his father (i.e., the shedding of kindred blood that Creon is trying to avoid by burying Antigone alive), Antigone’s speech depicts Oedipus’s crime as one of pollution: by committing incest and bearing children who

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are also his siblings, Oedipus has prevented, in a sense, the passage of time, the movement forward of generations. Thus Oedipus’s offense against the laws of the gods and society is here raised in terms of temporal disorder—a corruption of time, a failure to pass on, that makes the memorializing of mourning impossible.25 These are the transgressions for which the gods will make Antigone suffer, as both the chorus and Antigone suggest, providing a demonstration of Antigone’s suffering as a lesson about breaking established laws and creating divine disorder (or stumbling against the altar of Justice), just as Creon sought to make a demonstration of his own order by means of his punishment of both Polynices’ and Antigone’s bodies. Such a reading is corroborated by the language the chorus uses in the previous passage to refer to the debt of suffering that Antigone owes: coupled with the idea of paying a penalty,26 †qloV acquires the sense of not only a struggle or contest, but even a torment or ordeal. Through suffering some torment or punishment, the chorus and Antigone’s response imply, the debt owed for causing such disorder might be paid and order be restored. The punishment of Antigone will provide a meaning or value for Oedipus’s past life, a painful labor that takes the place of meaning.

Punishment and Spectacle Elaborating upon the idea of suffering punishments, the fifth song of the chorus (944–87) describes a series of punishments: the tomblike imprisonment of Danae,27 the rocky imprisonment of Lycurgus,28 and the blinding of the sons of Phineus.29 Avoiding a consideration of responsibility or guilt, the chorus focuses on the process of suffering punishment, concluding with the notion that inescapable Fate manifests itself in each of these examples. In this sense, the punishments stand as evidence of both the ineluctable nature of the difficulties Fate imposes, but also of the power of Fate, in its ability to punish without mercy. In a more immediate sense, Teiresias prophecies a similar case of the punishing payment of vengeance when he warns Creon of the exchange of corpses that his hubristic actions will provoke: Then know well that you shall not accomplish many racing courses of the sun, and in that lapse of time you shall give in exchange for corpses the corpse of one from your own loins, in return for having hurled below one of those above, blasphemously lodging a living person in a tomb, and you have kept here something belonging to the gods below, a corpse deprived, unburied, unholy. Neither you nor the gods above have any part

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in this, but you have inflicted it upon them! On account of this there lie in wait for you the doers of outrage who in the end destroy, the Erinyes of Hades and the gods, so that you will be caught up in these same evils. [™ll’ e‚ g° toi kºtisqi m‹ pollo∞V ⁄ti tr¬couV ªmillht›raV ≠l√ou telÍn, ÷n o«si tÍn sÍn a¶t¿V ÷k splºgcnwn ¤na n°kun nekrÍn ™moib¿n ™ntido£V ⁄sfi, ™nq’ „\n ⁄ceiV m‰n tÍn †nw balÚn kºtw, yuc–n g’ ™t√mwV ÷n tºj¯ kaoik√saV, ⁄ceiV d‰ tÍn kºtwqen ÷nqºd’ a‚ qeÍn †moiron, ™kt°riston, ™n¬sion n°kun. „\n o®te so¥ m°testin o®te toƒV †nw qeoƒsin, ™ll’ ÷k so£ biºzontai tºde◊ to§twn se lwbht›reV •sterojq¬roi locÍsin ≈¢Aidou ka¥ qeÍn #Erin§eV, ÷n toƒsin a¶toƒV toƒsde lhjq›nai kakoƒV◊] (1064–76) Teiresias’s warning raises the future curse of Creon in terms of antidote (from the verb ™ntid√dwmi [1067] derives the noun ™nt√dotoV, something given in remedy, an antidote): the corpse that the gods will demand from Creon will be given in payment for the disorder he has created by the mismanagement of corpses (not only has he refused to bury a dead body, but he also gives a living body burial). In this way, then, Creon will provide an antidote to the plague caused by unburied corpses from which the city suffers. Referring to this plague on the city again on lines 1081–83, Teiresias emphasizes how the cosmic disorder that Creon has caused resulted in a disorder manifested in the city. With this, Creon assumes the position in which he has placed Antigone, the cause of disorder in the polis; the spectacle of punishment with which he has threatened her hence becomes a spectacle of punishment under which he must suffer. Creon finally responds to this final warning of Teiresias, and exits the stage intending to bury the corpse and then release Antigone. Nevertheless, less than one hundred lines later, a messenger arrives to announce the payment of the antidote, the death of Creon’s only son Haemon, who, he announces, has died by his own hand, “in anger against his father for the murder he committed [a¶t¿V pr¿V a¶to£, patr¥ mhn√saV j¬nou◊]” (1177). He describes to the chorus how he, along with several of Creon’s other attendants, heard a cry issue from the cave as they followed Creon toward it, intending to release Antigone. Worried at its portent, Creon urged his attendants forward to see whether he feared correctly that the voice issued

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from his son Haemon. At their master’s orders, the messenger describes, he and his peers looked in on a tragic scene of loss: Antigone hanging by the neck and Haemon clinging to her waist, lamenting her death caused by his father. When Creon finally approached, the messenger continues, Haemon lunged at him with the sword, missed and then drove it into himself, finally achieving a sort of union with Antigone in his death throes: Still living, he clasped the maiden in the bend of his feeble arm, and pouring forth a sharp jet of blood, he stained her white cheek. He lay, a corpse holding a corpse, having achieved his marriage rites, poor fellow, in the house of Hades, having shown by how much the worst evil among mortals is bad counsel. [÷V d’ •gr¿n ™gkÍn’ ⁄t’ ⁄mjrwn parq°n¯ prospt§ssetai◊ ka¥ jusiÍn ıxeƒan ÷kbºllei r≈o‹n leukŒ pareiø˚ join√ou stalºgmatoV◊ keƒtai d‰ nekr¿V per¥ nekr¸, tΩ numjikΩ t°lh lacÚn de√laioV ⁄n g’ ≈¢Aidou d¬moiV, de√xaV ÷n ™nqrÔpoisi t‹n ™boul√an ˙s¯ m°giston ™ndr¥ pr¬skeitai kak¬n◊] (1236–43) In death, Haemon and Antigone rejoin society through their achievement of the marriage rites (tΩ numjikΩ t°lh lacÚn), resolving the passioninduced mistakes described by the chorus in lines 791–94 (and, even in dying, realigning their desire within socially and divinely approved parameters, as does the bride described by the chorus in lines 795–99, quoted in the previous section). In addition, though, the scene of Haemon’s dying provides a lesson, as well: it “shows” or displays (de√knumi) to the witnessing phalanx of guards (and, via the witness’s report, the chorus of Theban citizens and the audience, too) the extent to which “bad council” is the worst of human evils. The paradigmatic and gruesome suffering of Haemon’s death throes resonates in his dead body when Creon appears later, bearing it onstage. The chorus responds to his entrance: “Here comes the king himself, bearing in his arms a conspicuous memorial; if we may say so, his ruin came not from others, but from his own failing [ka¥ m‹n ˙d’ †nax a¶t¿V ÷j–kei / mn›m’ ÷p√shmon diΩ ceir¿V ⁄cwn, / eÎ q°miV ÷ipeƒn, o¶k ™llotr√an / †thn, ™ll’ a¶t¿V ªmartÔn]” (1257–60).30 Thus, the chorus provides a narrative description of Creon’s appearance on stage, explaining the deictic significance of Haemon’s corpse: it functions as a distinguishing mark (÷p√shmoV), a mimetic sign or reminder (mn–mh) of being guilty (ªmartºnw). Not

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only does the body Creon carries bear a lesson for himself, however; the reminder, displayed in his arms onstage (in front of the palace doors that would have been depicted at the back of the skene31), speaks to the city as well, as Segal explains, “The term ‘conspicuous memorial’ [. . .] refers specifically to the commemorative ceremonies of the public funeral and the entombment of warriors who have fallen in behalf of the city.”32 Thus, the corpse of Haemon, exhibited in the arms of his father the king, bears along with it the meaning of his life in death: the mourning prohibited by Creon’s edict returned to the city in a public mark of mourning. Creon’s antidote has yet to take effect, however: the exchange of corpses continues only a few lines later, with the messenger’s announcement of the suicide of the queen, Eurydice.33 Enhancing the exhibition of Haemon’s body in Creon’s arms, the corpse of Eurydice also appears displayed prominently on the stage, as the chorus indicates in their exclamation, “You can see it! It is no longer hidden indoors [˛røn pºrestin◊ o¶ gΩr ÷n mucoƒV ⁄ti]” (1293). Most commentators agree that this scene would have been staged with Eurydice’s body then appearing onstage on the ekkuklema, a mechanized wheeled platform that would have been pushed onto the center of the stage, probably through the opening of the palace doors at the back.34 The corpse thus presents a dramatic spectacle over which the messenger describes the manner of her death as Creon laments his fate. As in the case of Haemon, the messenger describes the details of Eurydice’s death: hurling curses upon her husband, the killer of her son, Eurydice copied the method of Haemon’s death, “so that she experienced #¢sqet’ ıxukÔkuton pºqoV◊]” the suffering of her son [˙pwV / paid¿V t¬d’ fi (1315-6). With this double death, Creon finally recognizes his culpability in the downfall of his family, his ineluctable guilt: “Ah me, this can never be transferred to any other mortal, acquitting me! For it was I that killed you, #¢moi moi, tºd’ o¶k ÷p’ †llon brotÍn unhappy one, I, I speak the truth! [w #` m°leoV, / / ÷møV ªrm¬sei pot’ ÷x aÎt√aV. / ÷gÚ gºr s’ , ÷gÔ s’ ⁄kanon, w ÷gÔ, jºm’ ⁄tumon◊]” (1317–20). Creon’s formulation of this lament in terms of an accusation or charge (aÎt√a) that he can never escape echoes the accusation that the messenger utters upon announcing the death of Eurydice: “You were reproached by the dead as guilty of those deaths and these [„V aÎt√an ge tÍnde k™ke√nwn ⁄cwn / pr¿V t›V qano§shV t›sd’ ÷pesk–ptou m¬rwn◊]” (1312–13). Thus, the description that follows of Eurydice’s death, coupled with the display of her corpse alongside Haemon’s on stage, calls an accusation upon Creon. It is this guilt that Creon then assumes when he recognizes his actions as the cause of Eurydice’s and Haemon’s deaths. Creon reemphasizes the losses he has suffered as he leaves the stage at the end of the play, though his words begin to turn responsibility for his suffering off of himself and onto fate. While his speech marks the presence

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of the corpses next to him, his lament also indicates that there is something more that is unrecognizable to him: Lead me out of the way, useless man that I am, who killed you, my son, not by my own will, and you here too, ah, miserable one; I do not know which to look on, which way to lean; for all that is in my hands has gone awry, and fate hard to deal with has leapt upon my head. [†goit’ œn mºtaion †ndr’ ÷kpodÔn ˙V,  paƒ, s° t’ o¶c …kÚn kat°kanon #¢moi m°leoV, o¶d’ ⁄cw s° t’ a‚ tºnd’, w pr¿V p¬teron ≥dw, pø˚ kliqÍ◊ pºnta gΩr l°cria t™n ceroƒn, tΩ d’ ÷p¥ krat√ moi p¬tmoV dusk¬mistoV eÎs–lato.] (1339–46) As Griffith points out, Creon’s speech suggests a contrast between what is visible (the dead bodies of Haemon and Eurydice) and what is invisible (the mysterious but inescapable hand of fate). Creon’s struggle with seeing such a spectacle also puts an emphasis upon his pain in witnessing the results of his folly; thus Creon assumes the position of witness that the guards, chorus, and audience have previously occupied (and continue to perform in this scene). The spectacle of dead bodies before him forces him to bear witness to what they represent—in this case, his complicity in their death. The accusation against Creon, then, is something that he witnesses alongside the others: embodied in the corpses of Haemon and Eurydice are the signs of his guilt. Yet, as Antigone points out previously in the play, a dead body, being dead, cannot bear witness (“The dead body will not bear witness to that [o¶ martur–sei ta£q’ ˛ katqanÚn n°kuV]” [515]). How, then, can a corpse deliver an accusation of guilt against another? For the corpse of Antigone, as well as that of Haemon, Eurydice, and Polynices, it is the narrative surrounding the corpse that communicates the meaning of it. In other words, the corpse alone doesn’t convey the meaning, but something more embodied in it. While the sight of the dead body makes present a past life, the fate of that life remains unknown while life remains. Ruing the fate of Creon, the messenger refers to this temporal distinction just before announcing Haemon’s death: “there is no state of human life that I would praise or blame as though it had come to a stop; for fortune makes straight and fortune brings down the fortunate or the unfortunate man at all times [o¶k ⁄sq’ ˛poƒon stºnt’ œn ™nqrÔpou b√on / o®t’ aÎn°saim’

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œn o®te memya√mhn pot°. / t§ch gΩr ırqoƒ ka¥ t§ch katarr°pei / t¿n e¶tuco£nta t¿n te dustuco£nt’ a÷√]” (1156–59). The meaning of a life unravels as it passes; the only unchanging life is a dead one. Thus the synthesis of the passing events of life can only be made after death: for example, in the interpretation of mourning—or, likewise, in the narrative accounts of the messenger. The messenger’s speech suggests that a difference between mortal and immortal is in the subjection of mortals to a mysterious fate that always surprises man with fortune or failure—that works upon man’s life, in other words, outside of his control. For this reason, the only way to escape change or fate in life is death. Once death has occurred, mourning or a narrative might take up the death, and the past life that it marks, and give it meaning. In seeking to control the deaths of others, Creon might thus impose his own meaning upon them. The effective potential in the display or spectacle of corpses has already been suggested in connection with Creon’s treatment of the corpse of Polynices. Creon raises the possibility that such a display could be directed against another person when he angrily threatens his son with witnessing the death of his fiancée: “Bring the hateful creature, so that she may die at once close at hand, in the sight of her bridegroom! [†gete t¿ mƒsoV, „V kat’ ∫mmat’ a¶t√ka / par¬nti qnfi¢skfi plhs√a t¸ numj√¯◊]” (760–61). Perceiving that he has lost the support of even his own son, Creon furiously proposes to punish him for his betrayal by murdering his beloved right in front of his eyes. This seems to be a case, then, in which a corpse is meant to provide retribution; by means of his ability to take life away, Creon will suggest the necessity of supporting the authority of the king, “paying back” Haemon for his hint of insubordination. Thus, Creon’s threat to Haemon involves more than the simple presentation of Antigone’s dead corpse for him to witness: it also includes the action of her being killed in front of him. It is in the process of being deprived of life that Antigone’s death will gain meaning for Haemon—a punishing meaning, Creon hopes. In this sense, the tormented struggle in payment for justice of which the chorus warns Antigone (in the previously quoted lines 853–56) becomes the meaning of her death.

Torture, Punishment, and Control This threat of torture echoes a more sweeping warning that Creon delivers before the guard and the chorus of elderly Theban citizens only a few lines before this exchange. Convinced that the criminal bural of Polynices manifests a money-driven conspiracy against him, Creon asserts his authority

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by issuing a general threat of punishment to all present. Since, in this case, Creon expresses the terms of the conspiracy as monetary, the sense of this imminent punishment as “payment” appears clearly: “But those who to earn their fee have contrived to do this thing have ensured that in time they #¢nusan tºde, / cr¬n¯ pot’ will pay the penalty [˙soi d‰ misqarno£nteV h ÷x°praxan „V do£nai d√khn]” (302–03). In this exchange, Creon suggests that justice will necessarily be effected upon the conspirators; the threat of punishment that immediately follows links this retribution directly to the torture that those will suffer who choose the profits of conspiracy over bending to the king’s authority. As he exclaims in threatening fury to the citizen chorus and guard, “If you do not find the author of this burial and reveal him to my eyes, a single Hades shall not suffice for you, before all have been strung up alive to expose this insolence [. . .] [eÎ m‹ t¿n a¶t¬ceira to£de to£ tºjou / e•r¬nteV ÷kjaneƒt’ ÷V ıjqalmo∞V ÷mo§V, / o¶c •m¥n Ai≈¢dhV mo£noV ™rk°sei, pr¥n œn / zÍnteV kremasto¥ t–nde dhlÔshq’ ©brin (. . .)” (306–09). Here, not only does Creon threaten his subjects with torture,35 but he marks the method of torture as a public display of their crimes. Those not complying with his edict will manifest or exhibit (dhl¬w) the extent of their hubris (i.e., the folly of usurping Creon’s authority) by means of their public torture (being hung out alive [zÍnteV kremasto√] and, presumably, suffering the corresponding punishments). Thus, Creon proposes to bring before the polis a visual reminder of the results of breaking his laws. In addition to the public spectacle of torture as retribution for subverting his authority, Creon also implies with this threat that he will control the manner of their dying (i.e., they will not merely suffer a simple trip to Hades). With this claim, Creon assumes a position that supersedes the limits of the mortal; for, as the chorus that follows this scene indicates in its “ode to man,” death presents the most clearly insurpassable limit to mankind, despite all of his skill in thought and techné: “only from Hades shall he apply no means of flight [≈¢Aida m¬non / je£xin o¶k ÷pºxetai]” (361–62). This limitation of mortals occurs in the midst of a song glorifying man’s great potential of creation. Thus, the subjection to death appears as a limit point for mankind; despite their cleverness with laws and technology, mortals remain inescapably subject to death. Creon’s suggestion that he might control the working of death upon others through subjecting men to his laws—in the most extreme sense, by means of punishing torture and a tormented death—raises him beyond the bounds of mortals, toward the immortals. The divinities, in their eternal existence, remain exempt from the death that stands at the limit of mortal life. The third choral song emphasizes this immortal timelessness, in regard to Zeus and his laws:

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Zeus, what arrogance of men could restrict your power? Neither sleep the all-conquering nor the unwearying months of the gods defeats it, but as a ruler time cannot age, you occupy the dazzling glare of Olympus. For present, future, and past this law shall suffice: to none among mortals shall great wealth come without disaster. [teºn, Ze£, d§nasin t√V ™ndrÍn •perbas√a katºscoi; tΩn o®q’ ©pnoV a˘reƒ poq’ ˛ pantog–rwV o®t’ ™kºmatoi qeÍn m›neV, ™g–rwV d‰ cr¬n¯ dunºstaV kat°ceiV, #Ol§mpou marmar¬essan a≥glan◊ t¬ t’ ⁄peita ka¥ t¿ m°llon ka¥ t¿ pr¥n ÷park°sei n¬moV ˙d’◊ o¶d‰n ¤rpei qnatÍn b√otoV pºmpoluV ÷kt¿V †taV.] (604–14) The chorus suggests that the law of Zeus remains, along with the god, infinitely, beyond temporal limitations or the efforts of gods or man to defeat it. Recalling Creon’s hubristic nomoi with this remark, the chorus then goes further to specify the nature of this eternal law of Zeus, foreshadowing Creon’s own defeat. For the essence of Zeus’s law, the song indicates, emphasizes change: if a mortal holds wealth, inevitably he will lose it. The divine law thus demonstrates its unique superiority in precisely what it portends for mortals: eternal and unchanging, divine law specifies that mortals must always be subject to change. Not only are mortals consigned to change, however, but, as the song goes on to describe, they are subject to being ignorant of when or how that change will occur: “For widely wandering hope brings profit to many men, but to many the deception of thoughtless longings; and a man knows nothing when it comes upon him, until he scalds his foot in blaz#`nhsiV ™ndrÍn, / ing fire [ª gΩr d‹ pol§plagktoV ÷l- / p¥V polloƒV m‰n o polloƒV d’ ™pºta koujon¬wn ÷rÔtwn◊ / eÎd¬ti d’ o¶d‰n ¤rpei, / pr¥n pur¥ qerm¸ p¬da tiV prosa§sfi◊]” (615–19). Thus, the inevitability of change in human life raises the necessity for reminders. While the exposed corpse of Polynices might serve to remind Theban citizens of both Polynices’ crimes against the city and of Creon’s authority as ruler, the suffering of Antigone and Creon—a suffering made material by the spectacle of the corpses that surround them—serves as evidence of their “crimes.” While the dead bodies, in their insistent presence, bear witness to the Theban citizens and

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the audience of the laws of gods and men, by juxtaposition the suffering of Creon and Antigone recalls the limits of being mortal. While the presence of the corpse persistently reminds those who witness it to remember, the living body that suffers unto death can evoke an even greater meaning. With the torture he inflicts, Creon addresses the transgressive thought or idea by means of the body; he inscribes punishment, vengeance, or, in other words, justice, in visible marks that will endure, along with the body, even after death. The physical presence of the body lends the certainty of its physical permanence to the intangible idea inscribed upon it. Used in this way, the material body is set apart from itself, objectified; its physical elements, which, in their presence seem unchanging, offer themselves as materials upon which the invisible workings of a permanent spiritual antidote might be demonstrated. The pain of a punishment that evokes justice suggests a complicated interrelation between the body and the spirit; the messenger alludes to their peculiar bearing on each other in his evocation of the survival of an unhappy life: “For when a man’s pleasures have abandoned him, I do not consider him a living being, but an animated corpse [ka¥ gΩr ≠dona¥ / ˙tan prodÍsin ™ndr¬V, o¶ t√qhm’ ÷gÚ / z›n to£ton, ™ll’ ⁄myucon ≠go£mai nekr¬n]” (1165–67). Not only is the unchanging man a dead man, but the man without pleasure is dead, as well. This sentiment adds to the mysterious element of fate in mortal life an invisible quality that animates the body: without it, the body becomes devoid of meaning or intention, merely an animated corpse. Such a possibility implies a split in the living mortal between the body and the spirit—that which feels pleasure or bends to fate—hidden within. Sophocles raises the consideration of a split between the body and the mind—that is, an “inner” sense—in the first angry exchange between Creon and the guard who brings news of Polynices’ burial: Creon: Guard: Creon: Guard: Creon:

Do you not know even now how your words pain me? Is it your ears or your soul that feels the pain? Why do you try to measure where my pain is? The doer pains your heart, but I your ears. Ah, you are a chatterer by nature, it is clear!

[KREWN. FULAX. KREWN. FULAX. KREWN.

o¶k oΔsqa ka¥ n£n „V ™niarÍV l°geiV; ÷n toƒsin ·s¥n Á ’p¥ tŒ yucŒ dºknfi; t√ d‰ r≈uqm√zeiV t‹n ÷m‹n l§phn ˙pou; ˛ drÍn s’ ™niø˚ tΩV jr°naV, tΩ d’ Ât’ ÷gÔ◊ o≥m’, „V lºlhma d›lon, ÷kpejuk¿V eΔ.] (316–20)36

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In this dramatic stichomythia, the guard addresses the source of Creon’s fears about losing his authority, proposing a radical split between the mind and the body. Acknowledging that he causes Creon discomfort with his words, the guard attempts to distinguish the sort of pain he causes; while Creon resists the attempt to locate it, the guard insists on differentiating between the bodily pain that he inflicts on Creon’s ears and a different sort of pain caused by the one doing the crime he has reported. This other pain attacks, the guard insists initially, the psyche¯ (yuc–)—the soul, spirit, or mind—or, as he next proposes, the phre¯n (jr–n). Although Creon responds by disregarding this distinction, the guard’s protestation implies a difference between two types of pain—bodily pain and that which would be “encased” within the body: psyche¯, heart, mind, understanding, phre¯n. His attempt to locate Creon’s pain thus appears clearly as an attempt to claim himself as inflicting the lesser of the two sorts of pain: bodily. Yet this defense of himself also suggests that Creon (mistakenly) treats him as if he were imposing the more serious sort of pain, to the psyche¯ or phre¯n. Creon’s last comment before exiting the stage confirms this fear, as he threatens the guard, once again, with torture: “But if you do not reveal the doers to me, you shall testify that low desire for profit is the cause of pain [eÎ d‰ ta£ta m‹ / janeƒt° moi to∞V drÍntaV, ÷xereƒq’ ˙ti / tΩ deilΩ k°rdh phmonΩV ÷rgºzetai]” (324–26). Coupled with the pain that Creon threatens to inflict, what the guard utters (÷xer°w) will bear witness to what his maneuverings have accomplished: that pain (p›ma) he suffers. The pain in this exchange functions both as a demonstration of punishment for the guard’s crimes and as a verification of the crimes themselves. With this threat, Creon aims bodily torment at the lasting aspect of the guard, his spirit or psyche, which (Creon hopes) will remember his crimes as his body suffers for them. In inflicting the torture that will compel the guard to testify to his guilt before witnesses, Creon will exert his authority over both the guard and those to whom the guard, by means of his pain, will confess his guilt—that is, in Creon’s terms, his transgressions against the city. The issues of power and control manifest in Antigone suggest contradictions between the citizen-man and the polis. Creon’s hubristic pursuit of power raises questions about the use of power in the city-state. Christian Meier sees in Creon’s tyrannical actions a comment by Sophocles on a potential problem in democratic, fifth-century Athens: “justice had now become a matter of free-willed [. . .] decision-making.”37 In his use of the body, both living and dead, Creon creates the impression of certainty by playing uncertain ideas out upon the physical presence of the body. Expressing a similar concern, yet in less specifically political terms, Lesky also suggests that a central concern of this play remains this problematic lack

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of certainty, “a tension that must have been felt in a time that saw both the completion of the Parthenon and the beginning of Sophism.”38 Indeed, in its spectacle of suffering and death, the tragedy itself also imposes its own meaning upon these bodies placed upon the stage; as Segal suggests, “Tragic art enables the polis to confront the contradictions which man’s place in nature poses.”39 Tragedy expresses the failure in communication of such contradictions by bridging them over with a correspondence of language and gesture. As we have seen, the tension between nature and techné, between the individual and the city, arises from an excess that resists containment in either category: the body. In both cases, the conflation between a torment and death whose outcome means justice depends upon the inescapable persistence of the body, enduring suffering to the end and remaining after death. The perseverence of the body, in other words, determines its value as antidote or demonstrative proof, enabling it to function not only as a reminder of what has passed but as certain and ineluctable evidence of what is present. This concern with the body as proof—that is, with the resolution of uncertain knowledge in bodily terms—arises with even more urgency in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex.

Chapter 2

THE POLITICAL BODY Pain and Punishment in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus

The formulation of the body as proof appears with renewed urgency in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (c. 430–420 BCE); the physical body here arises as a locus of certainty in the midst of a fog of ambiguity that otherwise clouds events and knowledge in this play. As this chapter will demonstrate, the evidence that provides the resolution in Oedipus Rex, ridding Thebes of its unlawful pollution, derives from the performance of the body in pain, which is figured by the language of the play as torture. Yet this formula reverses in Oedipus at Colonus, when Oedipus describes his past sufferings to the deliberating Erinyes—but this time presents them as proof of his innocence. Although the body moves from evidence of guilt to evidence of innocence in these two plays, the body’s physical torment emerges in both dramas as the material proof that marks the political significance of the crimes (whether he is guilty or innocent) upon Oedipus before the witnessing citizens.

Plague, Pollution, and the Polis It is Oedipus’s inability to recognize himself—his identity, his relationship to Iocasta, his culpability in Laius’s murder—that provokes most of the dialogue in Sophocles’ account of the myth of Oedipus the King. Even when the truth is clearly presented to him, Oedipus often misses the point, pressing on in his investigation, thus making his ultimate revelation all the more painful (and public). Considering Oedipus’s reputation as a sharp solver of riddles, what is it that obscures his vision so? A temporal and linguistic confusion infecting the play on several levels muddies his reasoning, even as it helps to create a sense of urgency about the need for proof or evidence of facts related to past events in Thebes and in his own

41

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life. In a play whose action is prompted, as in Antigone, by the problem of a corpse (a corpse that, significantly, remains offstage), the evidence that provides resolution derives from the body in pain—a tortured body that in its enduring survival seems to bear witness to the certainty of guilt. Oedipus begins his investigation at the request of the citizens of Thebes, who have turned to him to be relieved of the plague, as he previously relieved them of the “plague” of the Sphinx. The stagnant symptoms of this miasma (plague or pollution) that torments the city casts its pall upon the progression of action in the play, as well. The plague that provokes Oedipus’s investigation thus provides the clearest indication of the distorted time of the play, time that fails to move forward at a normal pace, shifting back and forth between past, present, and future. The priest, leader of the gathered citizens, describes the symptoms of its pollution to Oedipus (and the audience): For the city, as you see yourself, is grievously tossed by storms, and still cannot lift its head from beneath the depths of the killing angry sea. A blight is on the buds that enclose the fruit, a blight is on the flocks of grazing cattle and on the women giving birth, killing their offspring; the fire-bearing god, hateful Pestilence, has swooped upon the city and harries it, emptying the house of Cadmus, and black Hades is a plutocrat in groans and weeping. (22–30)1 The symptoms of the plague, as the priest describes them, center upon infertility, the inability to produce or move forward, both in the natural world and in the polis. As spokesman for the Theban citizens frightened by this confusion, the priest aptly describes the problem with a metaphor of a city that is drowning; his poetic yet imprecise language reflects the unknown threat that burdens the city. Oedipus responds immediately not only with empathy and a promise to address the problem, but also with a claim that the illness bothers him more than all of the Theban citizens: Children, I pity you! I know, I am not ignorant of the desires with which you have come; yes, I know that you are all sick, and, sick as you are, none of you is as sick as I. Your pain comes upon each by himself and upon no other; but my soul mourns equally for the city and for myself and for you. (58–64) Carrying responsibility for the city, he argues, makes the plague affect him in triplicate: not only must Oedipus worry about the city, but each of its citizens and himself, too. By suggesting that he suffers for all of

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these things as each individual citizen suffers only for himself, Oedipus describes a conflation of himself and the city. This confusion echoes the disorder of the plague. Reemphasizing the stagnant pollution of the plague is Oedipus’s own curse, with which he threatens anyone withholding information about the cause of the plague (and which, of course, ultimately ends up being a curse directed toward himself): “And for those who take no action I pray that the gods may not send up crops from the earth nor allow their women to bear children, but that they may perish by the fate that now afflicts them or by one yet worse” (269–72). With this curse, Oedipus ultimately consigns himself to a continuance of this barren time, unable to regenerate itself or move past itself, foreshadowing even beyond the play a repetition of the unceasing iteration that occurs within it. This distorted or condensed sense of time manifests itself within the drama as a whole, as well; the play’s circuitous investigation of past events envelops the action in a suspension of time that prevents any coherent establishment of past, present, or future. Although the play occurs after Laius’s murder, what happens within the text surrounds this prior event; as a result, the past unfolds along with the present. At the same time, the movements and actions that ultimately result in the tragedy of the play (that is, the murder and incest) are provoked by a fear of what will happen in the future. In the same manner of condensation, characters span the bridge of past and present. Thus, the herdsman who is witness to Laius’s murder is also the one who gave him away as a child. As Dawe notes in his commentary to the Greek text, “This double function both in the present and the past of supporting characters serves the ends of artistic economy, but also conveys the psychological truth that for Oedipus, who is at once a ‘son and husband,’ the present is his past.”2 It is fitting, then, for Iocasta to tell her account of the past in a convoluted manner (711–22). Beginning with the ill-fated advice “Pay no attention to oracles,” she proceeds to prove this to Oedipus by relating her own experience. First, she explains that an oracle was given that Laius would have a son who would kill him; however, she continues as she leaps forward in time, it was many strangers who killed him. Her account then skips back again to the child’s birth, when Laius has the child’s feet fastened together and has him cast over a precipice (of course, this is contrary to other explanations given). Her strange conclusion, otherwise redundant, reflects her conflation of these two different periods of time: “And so Apollo did not bring it about that he [the child] should become the murderer of his father, nor that Laius should suffer the disaster which he feared, death at his son’s hands [k™nta£q’ #Ap¬llwn o®t’ ÷keƒnon #¢nusen / jon°a gen°sqai patr¿V o®te Lºion / t¿ dein¿n o•jobeƒto pr¿V h paid¿V paqeƒn]” (720–22).

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This confusion of time appears concentrated, of course, in Oedipus’s own crimes. As a result of his incestuous relationship with his mother, the children he has borne, being also his own siblings, fail to produce a new generation. Thus in its stagnant nature, the pollution oppressing the city reflects the corruption of Oedipus’s position in it: by committing parricide and incest, Oedipus has disrupted the fundamental structure of social relations in the family and the city.3 As such, the drama of Oedipus unfolds within the context of the polis. Simon Goldhill notes, “The chorus of civic elders in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus constantly places the turmoil of the house of Laius in the context of the city of Thebes.”4 Unfolding in the presence of the Theban elders and prompted by a problem plaguing the city, the knowledge sought by Oedipus’s investigation becomes as essential for the city as for himself. By extension, the audience watching the play could have also seen the drama of Oedipus as reflecting upon their own city, since its performance followed within a few years at least one if not two plagues striking Athens itself.5 To a certain extent, then, the problems of the plague and its cause (Oedipus’s crimes) raise the general concern of the position of the individual citizen and the individual ruler within the larger Body Politic.

Identity Crises Oedipus’s position as an individual within the city is complicated by the troubling confusion tainting his own identity. From the day he is given by his parents to the shepherd to be put to death, Oedipus is caught, inextricably, in his own unknown doom or destiny. As Teiresias later asserts, he is doomed by the “double-edged curse” of his parents to homelessness and darkness. This is indeed the manner in which he appears in the play, from the beginning. A stranger, his lineage uncertain, Oedipus’s true identity remains unknown to himself and the Thebans at the beginning of the play.6 As such, Oedipus already occupies a position practically outside of the polis;7 as a foreigner, he may not be considered a citizen. In addition to this, Oedipus’s central question to Teiresias, “What parents? Wait! Who among mortals gave me birth? [po√oisi; meƒnon. t√V d° m’ ÷kj§ei brotÍn;]” (437) provides a crucial revelation of Oedipus’s uncertainty about both his heritage and, therefore, his name.8 In the patrilineal ancient Greek society, Oedipus’s lack of a (known) father puts his legitimate identity into question. As Pietro Pucci notes, sons are designated by fathers’ names traditionally in ancient Greece—thus Oedipus evokes Laius as “the son of Labdacus, sprung from Polydorus and from Cadmus before him and from Agenor long ago” (267–68). Pucci explains, “The Father figure is the figure of the

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anchorage of any discourse to a fixed origin, to a transcendental signified, and therefore, in the play, he is not simply the figure of Oedipus’s real biological origin, but the figure around whose constitution and fabrication the possibility of truth pivots [. . . .]”9 Indeed the absence of a known father, as dominant signifier, puts into suspension all meaning for Oedipus, including that of his own identity. Hence, Oedipus embarks upon his investigation shrouded in ignorance of his own identity and, consequently, his relation to the city, unable to see his culpability in the suffering of Thebes. While the pollution caused by Oedipus’s crimes depends upon his self-recognition, in general, the lack of clarity that surrounds Oedipus’s identity and his position within the city also reflects a certain amount of uncertainty about his role as a ruler of the city and as an individual within the city. Ironically, Oedipus’s murky background corresponds with a dogged self-assertion throughout the course of the investigation. This tension between certainty and uncertainty and the sort of knowledge it begets arises in the third chorus (863–910), which considers the laws of gods, justice, and the dangers of mortal laws and rulers. Characterizing hubris as extreme self-assertion, the chorus suggests that the competitive desire that issues in hubris or tyranny is the manifestation of individual self-promotion over the oligarchy. Juxtaposing this flaw with an opening stanza glorifying the dependable, lasting, and true nomoi of the gods, the song makes the two mutually exclusive: in the face of individual mortal insolence, the power of the gods seems to decrease; yet as long as justice prevails, the divine laws of the gods remain superior. Oedipus demonstrates the dangers of his own strong, individual will most clearly, perhaps, in his exchange with Teiresias.

Blindness and Insight Oedipus’s inability to see himself or his crimes arises several times in the text, before he physically blinds himself; his own lack of insight emerges in distinct contrast to the clarity of inner vision that Teiresias possesses. On line 105, at the beginning of his investigation into Laius’s murder, Oedipus claims, “I never saw him [Laius] [o¶ gΩr eÎseƒd¬n g° pw].” The use of the verb e≥dw is significant here, because of its dual reference to both seeing and knowing—it is a seeing that matters, a seeing of the truth. Hence, in the midst of the heated exchange between Teiresias and Oedipus (300–462), the prophet accuses Oedipus, “You find fault with my temper, but you have not seen your own that lives with you, and you blame me [ırg‹n ÷m°myw t‹n ÷m–n, t‹n s‹n d’ ˛mo£ / na√ousan o¶ kateƒdeV, ™ll’ ÷m‰ y°geiV]” (337–38). In the same manner, Oedipus describes himself, the solver of riddles, as “I [. . .] Oedipus who knows nothing [÷gÚ (. . .) ˛ mhd‰n eÎdÚV

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OÎd√pouV]” (396–97)—literally, “the nothing seeing Oedipus.” Clearly, his ability to solve riddles doesn’t fall under the aegis of “knowing seeing,” but rather under a different type of seeing—one of discovery or appearance. When Oedipus complains that Teiresias speaks too much in riddles (439), the prophet ironically replies, “Do you not excel in answering such riddles? [o®koun s∞ ta£t’ †ristoV e•r√skein ⁄juV;]” (440). While Teiresias sees (˛rºw) and knows (e≥dw), Oedipus is best, at most, at seeing (or discovering) what is apparent (e•r√skw).10 Oedipus’s apparent reluctance to see who he is and who his parents are (or were) thus seems rather an inability to see. Yet this blindness to himself begins with the confusion of his identity in infancy—the terrible curse of his parents. The cause of Oedipus’s inability to see is subtly indicated in Teiresias’ reference to the ™mjipl–x—double-edged curse—of his mother and father: Do you know from whom you come? Are you even unaware of being an enemy to your own beneath and above the earth? And the two-pronged curse that comes from your mother and your father shall one day drive you from this land with terrible step, now having sight, then in darkness.11 #` n [¡r’ oΔsq’ ™j’ „\n eΔ; ka¥ l°lhqaV ÷cqr¿V w toƒV soƒsin a¶to£ n°rqe k™p¥ g›V †nw, ka√ s’ ™mjipl‹x mhtr¬V te k™p¿ to£ so£ patr¿V ÷lø˚ pot’ ÷k g›V t›sde dein¬pouV ™rº, bl°ponta n£n m‰n ∫rq’, ⁄peita d‰ sk¬ton.] (415–19) While Teiresias indicates the two aspects of the curse of his mother and father, his exile and his blindness, the prophecy still remains rather ambiguous. Of course, such indefinite language is typical for oracular utterances;12 nevertheless, the vague terms of Teiresias’s claim elude significant details: When was the curse bestowed? In what manner? Was it a spoken curse? Or was it a curse resulting from Oedipus’s experience with his parents, their exposure of him? More importantly, when will the curse take effect? The accusation of Teiresias that directly precedes this passage implies that the curse of blindness is already at work on Oedipus: “And I say, since you have reproached me with my blindness, that you have sight, but cannot see what trouble you are in, nor where you are living, nor with whom you share your home [l°gw d’, ÷peid‹ ka¥ tujl¬n m’ ·ne√disaV◊ / s∞ ka¥ d°dorkaV ko¶ bl°peiV ≈i¢n’ eΔ kako£, / o¶d’ ⁄nqa na√eiV, o¶d’ ˙twn oÎkeƒV m°ta]” (412–14). By proximity, Teiresias’s accusation links Oedipus’s blind ignorance and his parents’ curse together. While the curse seems destined

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for Oedipus’s future, his parents have already inflicted a wound upon him that will become inseparably enmeshed with his identity. Although exposure (abandonment outside of the city or home) of unwanted or illegitimate infants was not an uncommon occurrence in ancient Greece, Oedipus seems particularly surprised when he learns that Iocasta herself gave up her own child for this end.13 When the Theban shepherd later informs him of the child he was ordered to expose, with its feet bound, Oedipus replies with amazement: Oedipus: Was it she [Iocaste] who gave it to you? Theban: Yes, my lord. Oedipus: For what purpose? Theban: So that I could destroy it. Oedipus: Poor thing, was she its mother? Theban: Yes, it was for fear of evil prophecies.14 ≈¢de soi; OIDIPOUS. ‡ gΩr d√dwsin h QERAPWN.

mºlist#, †nax.

OIDIPOUS. „V pr¿V t√ cre√aV; QERAPWN.

„V ™nalÔsaim√ nin.

OIDIPOUS. teko£sa tl–mwn; QERAPWN.

qesjºtwn g’ ∫kn¯ kakÍn. (1173–75)

The change of speaker within the line here increases the pace, creating a chopping rapidity that reflects the anxiety and shock of Oedipus. His use of the noun teko£sa (present participle of t√ktw, to bring forth into the world, to bear young) to designate Iocasta in line 1175 emphasizes the horrible irony of her intended destruction of her own progeny, born from her own body. In addition, the verb used here to describe Iocasta’s intention—™nal√skw, to destroy or kill—is far more severe than the typical words used to describe infant exposure: ™pot√qhmi, ™poq°siV, ÷kt√qhmi, ÷kq°siV, all of which denote merely a “setting out.”15 Oedipus’s reaction to this act of Iocasta’s frames her action, which was not particularly exceptional at the time, in exceptionally personal and intimate terms; his extreme response thus emphasizes his own participation in this event too far in the past or too unbearable to remember.

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Oedipus’s stubborn persistence in missing the truth of his identity, even as Teiresias tries to inform him of it, indeed suggests the sense of a past too horrible to recall. Such a resistance is perhaps most evident in Oedipus’s sporadic and fumbling investigation, in which his questions develop illogically and his responses to others are often irrelevant. Oedipus’s illogical investigation becomes apparent when the progression of his questions is isolated. The main points of his series of questions unfold as follows: “What is the nature of the trouble?” (99); “Who is the man whose fate he [Apollo] is revealing?” (101); “Where in the world are they [the murderers]? Where shall the track of an ancient guilt [aÎt√aV], hard to make out, be found?” (108); “Was it in the house, or in the fields, or in another country that Laius met his bloody end?” (112); “Was the deed seen by no reporter, or companion of his journey, whose information one might have used?” (116); “But how could the robber have reached this pitch of daring, unless there had been some payment of money from here?” (120); “But when the throne had met with this disaster, what trouble prevented you from knowing all?” This line of questioning is disrupted in the middle of Oedipus’s exchange with Teiresias, when, prompted by Teiresias’s warnings, his concern becomes “Who among mortals gave me birth?” (437). After this, Oedipus’s investigation seems to turn back to the murder, but in terms that more specifically aim to exclude the possibility that he himself was the cause of it: “If it was many, I’m innocent. If it was one, I’m guilty” (paraphrasing lines 752–833). Since the messenger who can answer this question also has insight into Oedipus’s relation to Polybus and Merope (they adopted Oedipus, the shepherd tells him in consolation), the investigation of the murder becomes entangled with Oedipus’s investigation of his identity—and of the truth of the prophecy that prompted his flight to Thebes in the first place.16 The conclusion of his investigation, far from its initial question, really becomes the resolution of whether or not the prophecy (that he and his parents, coincidentally, received) was true; he realizes eventually, of course, that it was. Oedipus’s resistance to insight becomes more insistent as his investigation progresses. Even after Iocasta herself clearly sees the truth, her son continues to press further in pursuit of the very knowledge about which Teiresias and Iocasta have already attempted to warn him. Beginning on line 1060, Iocasta anxiously begins to try to dissuade Oedipus from continuing his investigation. Her protestations quickly become desperate, until she cries in frustration, “Ah, ah, unhappy one! That is all that I can say to you, and nothing any more! [Îo§ Îo§, d§sthne◊ to£to gºr s’ ⁄cw / m¬non proseipeƒn, †llo d’ o®poq’ ©steron.]” (1071–72; these are, significantly, her last lines of the play). Yet Oedipus continues not to “see” the truth, blind to himself and resistant to hearing the truth of himself in the words of others.

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The Problem of the Word Part of the problem of self-discovery for Oedipus, then, derives from an inability to recognize himself represented in the words of others—that is, to apprehend his identity within the community of Thebes. Oedipus expresses difficulty with the words and speech of Theban society at the beginning of the play, when he admits that he is a stranger to the word and its implications: “I shall speak these things as a stranger to the tale and a stranger to the deed17 [ªgÚ x°noV m‰n to£ l¬gou to£d’ ÷xerÍ, / x°noV d‰ to£ pracq°ntoV◊]” (219–20). As he moves toward gaining knowledge of himself, then, he must also learn to recognize the power and influence of communication and its effects in Theban society. Yet the approach to language followed by other characters in the play often suggests that words bear only arbitrary and uncertain meaning. In this sense, the irreverence of Oedipus’s wife, Iocasta, toward oracles is significant. As noted above, when Iocasta advises her husband against worrying about the oracle, she insists, “learn that nothing that is mortal is possessed of the prophetic art! [mºq’ o©nek’ ⁄sti soi / br¬teion o¶d‰n mantik›V ⁄con t°cnhV]” (708–09). If mortals cannot possess the skill of prophetic sight, then neither the priestess at Delphi or Teiresias could be considered as knowing or speaking the truth of the god. Her “proof” of this ends, of course, with the remark And so Apollo did not bring it about that he [her son] should become the murderer of his father, nor that Laius should suffer the disaster which he feared, death at his son’s hands. Thus did the voices of prophecy outline the future; pay them no regard, for if the god needs a thing and looks for it, he will easily reveal it by himself.18 #¢nusen [k™nta£q’ ’Ap¬llwn o®t’ ÷keƒnon h jon°a gen°sqai patr¿V o®te Lºion t¿ dein¿n o•jobeƒto pr¿V paid¿V paqeƒn. toia£ta j›mai mantika¥ diÔrisan, „\n ÷ntr°pou s∞ mhd°n◊ „\n gΩr œn qe¿V cre√an ÷reunø˚ r≈a˚d√wV a¶t¿V janeƒ.] (720–25) Having explained the oracle that she and Laius feared, and then, by means of a strangely organized sequence of events, “demonstrated” how it did not come true, Iocasta concludes that the oracles of Apollo should not be feared, since they seem to bear no truth. Following immediately upon this ill-timed dismissal of prophecy, Iocasta asks a rhetorical question remarkable for its shortsightedness, “But what should a man be afraid of when

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for him it is the event that rules, and there is no certain foreknowledge of anything? [t√ d’ †n joboƒt’ †nqrwpoV, „\˚ tΩ t›V t§chV / krateƒ, pr¬noia d’ ÷st¥n o¶den¿V saj–V]” (977–78). The unfolding of man’s life depends upon chance, or t§ch, Iocasta argues; since man can have neither control nor knowledge of the future, there is no point in worrying about it. Yet the chorus that is framed by these untimely observations, sung by citizens responsible to the law, deals directly with the danger of hubristic pride that leads one to ignore the laws “generated in lofty heaven” (866–67), as we have seen. Thus the exchange sets up a clear contrast between obeying and trusting the laws of the gods and ignoring or questioning them; the second option, the chorus insists, leads to uncertainty (and an awareness of uncertainty) and disorder. Perhaps even as powerful as the “divine word” in Sophoclean tragedy are curses, which are in this play frequently referred to as ⁄poi—the radical meaning of which is simply “words.” In this regard, the chorus also sets an example of the proper respect that should be given to these speech-acts. Over one hundred lines of Oedipus’s investigation pass before he curses any witness who doesn’t testify, yet it is not until the point of the curse that the chorus leader, thus obligated, replies (276). Oedipus, on the other hand, ignores Teiresias’s warning of his parents’ “double-edged curse,” as well as the prophet’s caution that Oedipus’s words, his speech (jÔnhma), leads him astray (324–25). As the investigation involves him increasingly in the exchange and meaning of words and language, however, Oedipus makes a pertinent comment: it was because of a word (l¬goV) dropped by a guest at a party that he began to question his parentage (784), the doubt that sets the chain of events of the play in motion.

The Word and the Witness Despite the uncertainty of words, then, not only his own words but the words of others bring about Oedipus’s movement out of his repetitive trap so that he might finally begin to see his own represented identity. Reflecting the important position that the observations of society hold in Oedipus’s evolution toward discovery, the need for a witness soon becomes an essential aspect of his investigation. Because his investigation initially intends to discover the cause of the plague on the city, Oedipus begins by asking Creon, who he has sent to consult with the Pythian oracle about the problem, “But what is the word?19 [⁄stin d‰ poƒon to®poV;]” (89) and then, “With what means of purifying? What is the nature of the trouble? [po√¯ kaqarm¸; t√V ˛ tr¬poV t›V xumjorøV;]” (99). However, soon after the cause of the plague is revealed (that there will be “pollution” in the

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city until the citizens find and expel the murderer [or murderers] of Laius), the investigation begins to revolve around the question (and implications) of, “Was the deed seen by no reporter [. . .]? [o¶d’ †ggel¬V tiV (. . .) kateƒd’(. . .)]” (116). Here, this is not just any bystander, but someone who “saw” (kateƒde) the truth. Oedipus, for his part, eventually realizes that in order to discover (h•r›sqai) the solution, he must find a witness (1050). That the position of the witness is integral to the revelation of the identity (of the murderer[s]) is made clear by the slip that is made, in lines 292–96, from the witness to the killer: Chorus: He was said to have been killed by people on the road.20 Oedipus: I also have heard that; but no one sees the doer. Chorus: But if he has any particle of fear within him, he will not wait long, now that he has heard such curses pronounced by you. Oedipus: He who is not afraid to do the deed is not frightened by a word.21 [COROS.

qaneƒn ÷l°cqh pr¬V tinwn ˛doip¬rwn.

OIDIPOUS.

#¢kousa k™gÔ◊ t¿n dÆ drÍnt# o¶de¥V ˛rø˚ . h

COROS.

™ll# e≥ ti m‰n d‹ de√mot¬V g# ⁄cei m°roV tΩV sΩV ™ko§wn o¶ meneƒ toiºsd# ™rºV.

OIDIPOUS.

„\˚ m– ’sti drÍnti tºrboV, o¶d’ ⁄poV jobeƒ.] (292–96)

In this passage, the designation of plural for the travelers and singular for the witness reveals a subtle transition. Although they begin by discussing the murderers, it is the witness who must fear Oedipus’s curse (upon any witnesses who fail to testify). Oedipus’s final remark, then, implicates the witness as the killer—a killer who, significantly, fails to recognize the potential of the word (his curse or ⁄poV). The later revelation that the shepherd who was witness to Laius’s murder is also the one who gave the infant Oedipus to the Corinthian herdsman provides yet another indication that, at least for Sophocles, the witness is responsibly involved in the crime. Because of his importance, it is necessary to have a reliable witness, one who will deliver the true logos (as Oedipus denotes it, l. 755). As we have seen, however, both Oedipus and Iocasta perceive the word as possibly uncertain; not only are oracles and prophecies dubious, but the falsehoods uttered by characters within the play call its validity into question, as well. For example, on line 293, Oedipus denies that anyone knows a witness,

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although Creon has clearly told him that, of the several who were killed at the murder, there is one still alive: “They were all killed, except one, who ran away in terror and could tell nothing of what he saw for certain, except for one thing” (118–19).22 Like Oedipus, Creon also revises his story. Although at one point he explains the city’s failure to investigate the murder as being the fact that “The Sphinx with her riddling song forced us to let go what was obscure and attend to what lay before our feet” (130–31), he later says they did search, but didn’t find anything (567). Thus, not all accounts can be considered reliable testimony.

Witness, Evidence, and Torture What, then, guarantees the dependability or validity of a witness and his testimony? A hint of this is clear in the sense that the term “martyr,” from the Greek verb martur°w (to be a witness, to bear witness, give evidence, bear testimony) has acquired today. It implies that there must be a pain, a labor, to witnessing, an association already evident in certain aspects of fifth-century Athenian court legislature.23 As the introduction to this book notes, Aristotle’s Rhetoric groups bºsanoV, or torture, among the inartificial proofs used in argument.24 Of its efficacy, he remarks, “Torture is a kind of evidence, which appears trustworthy, because a sort of compulsion is attached to it [A˘ d‰ bºsanoi martur√ai tin°V eÎsin, ⁄cein d‰ doko£si t¿ pist¬n, ˙ti ™nºgkh tiV pr¬sestin].”25 Yet torture is not actually dependable, he goes on, because one may over- or underemphasize its importance depending on whether it is for or against one. Also, he adds, some may give false testimony in the hope of having their torture relieved.26 Despite these potential drawbacks, references to basanos in the orators27 attests to its role in trials; Michael Gagarin notes, “In the orators it sometimes retains the simple sense of a ‘test’ but more often designates a means of confirming information by an interrogation, normally, but not always accompanied by the infliction of physical pain.”28 While scholars debate whether or not torture was actually used in trials,29 they agree upon its use as a rhetorical device, evoked during arguments in court. Gagarin explores the function of basanos as a rhetorical device in fifth-century Athenian trials: A full understanding of basanos in Athenian law must begin with the realization that an Athenian trial was in an important sense a staged competition (the Athenians themselves called it an ™gÔn), whose goal was only partly the determination of a set of facts and their legal consequences [. . .]. Thus, the function of

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any ‘legal’ institution in Athens must be understood in terms of its contributions to a litigant’s forensic strategy, which consisted primarily of his single l¬goV delivered at the trial.30 Gagarin suggests that basanos provided a persuasive rhetorical device in an argument whose effectiveness depended more upon persuasive force than factual evidence. Convincingly, however, David Mirhady notes that its rhetorical effectiveness must nevertheless have derived from its threat as an actual possibility.31 This judicial and rhetorical function of torture appears in the second choral song of the play, in which the chorus raises the idea of the basanos in connection with Oedipus. The ode considers the troubling omen that Teiresias has delivered to Oedipus in front of the Theban elders and the rest of the city. Although the prophet’s warnings seem to condemn their king, the chorus reasons that it has never had cause to doubt Oedipus’s legitimacy: “For what quarrel had the Labdacids or the son of Polybus neither before nor now have I learned, that I should put the matter to the test (basanos) and go against the public fame of Oedipus to aid the Labdacids in the matter of mysterious deaths [t√ gΩr “ Labdak√daiV / Á t¸ pol§bou neƒ- / koV ⁄keit’ o®te pºroiq°n / pot’ ⁄gwg’ o®te tan£n pwV / ⁄maqon, pr¿V ˙tou d‹ / basºn¯ (. . .) / ÷p¥ tΩn ÷p√damon / jºtin eΔm’ OÎdip¬da Labdak√daiV / ÷p√kouroV ™d–lwn qanºtwn]” (489–97). Because of the manner in which Oedipus seems to have proved himself good for the city, the chorus shies away from questioning or testing his status. In concluding, the song continues this sentiment, suggesting that his victory over the Sphinx itself provided test enough of Oedipus’s character: “For in sight of all the winged maiden came against him once, and he was seen to be wise and approved as dear to the city . . . [janerΩ gΩr ÷p’ a¶t¸ / pter¬ess’ ‡lqe #¢jqh / basºn¯ q’ ≠d§poliV]” (507). Emphasizing k¬ra / pot°, ka¥ soj¿V w the public witnessing of Oedipus’s struggle with the Sphinx and its consequent public good, the choral song depicts the basanos as a test that could effectively persuade a large audience to believe in a certain truth—in this case, Oedipus’s good character. Yet, by the third choral song, the chorus anxiously worries over the problem of hubris, reconsidering his glorious position in the city as a hubristic one that might merit the punishment of the gods. Although the basanos seems a convincing test in the second chorus, by the third chorus troublesome news has depleted the persuasive force of the device. In other words, the basanos in which the Sphinx tried Oedipus by means of riddles lacks the authority of certainty that would enable it to remain convincing to the Theban elders. This problem of validity echoes the concerns of Oedipus, who seeks dependable evidence in a

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situation in which the dependability of words has been cast into doubt. If words derive their power not from being factual or logical but from being able to persuade, how can they bear a lasting authority? A related aspect of Athenian judicial process provides an answer. While few scholars feel comfortable claiming that freemen were tortured in Athenian trials for anything other than traitorous crimes,32 most agree that the torture of slaves to gain evidence was an accepted practice. Frederick Ahl notes that “the testimony of a slave was legal evidence only if it was extracted under torture.”33 As A. R. W. Harrison explains, “Normally a slave’s evidence could only be produced in court if it had been given under torture; this was due to the irrational but strongly held view that a slave would only speak the truth under torture.”34 Not only would a slave’s testimony given under torture be acceptable as evidence, but such testimony held more validity than that of an untortured freeman: “There was a commonplace to the effect that evidence given by a slave under torture was more reliable than evidence given by a free man.”35 The idea that torture could raise the word of a slave above the willing testimony of an Athenian citizen suggests that pain lends a component of truth to testimony. Such a validation of testimony by pain clearly arises when Oedipus finally gains the opportunity to question his own witness.36 When the moment arrives for interrogating the Theban slave (who both gave away the child and was witness to the murder), it is not surprising that Oedipus first carefully establishes his identity (1117–18) as the witness who will provide the evidence needed in his investigation. While the Corinthian shepherd easily answers the unimportant questions concerning his identity and country, he balks when Oedipus gets to the point, asking him about the child the messenger claimed to have given him. The shepherd resists telling what he knows, and Oedipus compels him to speak, menacing, “If kindness will not get you to speak, pain will! [s∞ pr¿V cºrin m‰n o¶k ÷reƒV, kla√wn d’ ÷reƒV]” (1152; literally, “You don’t want to speak from kindness, but you’ll speak weeping [kla√wn]”—the significance of the tears will be discussed later). When the slave anxiously protests, “I am old; do not torture me, I beg you! [m‹ d›ta, pr¿V qeÍn, t¿n g°rontº m’ aÎk√sfi]”37 (1153), Oedipus immediately replies with force: “Will not one of you at once tie his hands behind his back? [o¶c „V tºcoV tiV to£d’ ™postr°yei c°raV;]” (1154).38 Thus the essential testimony in Oedipus’s investigation is delivered under threat of torture. Oedipus’s menacing physical threat extorts a memory from the shepherd; for Oedipus and for the audience, pain validates that memory as the evidence upon which his recognition depends.39 For at this point, Oedipus delivers a violent outburst; admitting his culpability, he draws attention to the “light” of knowledge that has finally dawned upon him (notably still expressing this awareness in terms of

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vision). In his confessional cry, Oedipus conflates this light of awareness with the light of day, simultaneously calling upon the light and expressing his imminent departure from it: “Oh, oh! All is now clear! O light, may I now look on you for the last time, I who am revealed as cursed in my birth, cursed in my marriage, cursed in my killing! [Îo∞ Îo§◊ tΩ pºnt’ œn ÷x–koi saj›. /  jÍV, teleutaƒ¬n se prosbl°yaimi n£n, / ˙stiV p°jasmai j§V t’ ™j’ „\n o¶ cr›n, x∞n o«V t’ / o¶ cr›n ˛milÍn, o©V t° m’ o¶k ⁄dei ktanÔn]” (1182–85). While in this passage Oedipus confesses to his crimes with metaphors of light, he then goes on to enact them before his witnesses by means of the punishment he inflicts upon himself.40 Bursting into Iocasta’s inner chamber with his sword (1252–62), he furiously violates her most private space, occupying the position of his father and the son of Iocasta at once. Immediately after penetrating into her room, he lowers her from the noose, rips the broaches off her breast, and delivers a wound to himself that vies with the nominative mark his father gave to him:41 For he broke off the golden pins from her raiment, with which she was adorned, and lifting up his eyes struck them, uttering such words as these: that they should not see his dread sufferings or his dread actions, but in the future they should see in darkness those they never should have seen, and fail to recognise those he wished to know. Repeating such words as these he lifted up his eyes and not once but many times struck them; the bleeding eyeballs soaked his cheeks, and did not cease to drip sending forth sluggish drops of gore, but all at once a dark shower of blood came down like hail. (1268–79) Despite his earlier confession, Oedipus provides the evidence of his crime with this violent gesture that the messenger describes. As the arbiter of torture throughout the play, Oedipus turns the basanos onto himself, remembering his crimes and “proving” his guilt with a demonstrative mutilation of his own body. With his bloody tears, Oedipus gives an uncontrollable sign of his seeing. In this spontaneous physical response is embodied the knowledge and recognition of the nature of himself as himself. Thus, he weeps until Creon orders him to stop crying and go within the palace, out of sight of a witnessing chorus and, perhaps, audience, who needs relief from the spectacular horror of seeing the guilty Oedipus. This performance of torture displays not only the wound, but also the suffering experience of that wounding. There is a wound that is the gaining of knowledge, and a pain that accompanies the witnessing of it.42 Oedipus’s acquired ability to “see” is necessarily accompanied by the discomfort of gouging out his eyes. In this transformation, his seeing that was not seeing becomes a seeing

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too much. His blindness bears witness to himself and, with that, his culpability; for those watching the spectacle, his bloody tears bear witness to his having seen. Ironically, being blind, he becomes condemned to being forever in his own sight; of this horror, his tears are both a relief and an acknowledgment. Unseeing, he can no longer hide from himself the horror that is seeing and, at the same time, presenting himself to others. After passing through this stage, Oedipus appears to “see” and recognize himself. For his blinding is also a self-wounding, a painful witnessing of his past, his memory, and, with this, of his identity. As Oedipus himself cries, “How the sting of these goads has sunk into me together with the remembrance of my troubles! [o«on eÎs°du m’ ˝ma / k°ntrwn te tÍnd’ o≥strhma ka¥ mn–mh kakÍn]” (1317–18). The memory of his crimes corresponds with the pain of the wounds he has inflicted upon himself; the representation of this torment before the witnessing chorus and audience performs the reversal of his prior ignorance, rooted throughout the play in his lack of memory of his own identity. Caught up in the unwitting exploration of his past, Oedipus’s inability to progress throughout the play had suggested a deathlike state, a failure to move forward with life. As he approaches his ultimate realization, Oedipus himself expresses the wish that he were dead: A curse upon the shepherd who released me from the cruel fetters of my feet, and saved me from death, and preserved me, doing me no kindness! For if I had died then, I would not have been so great a grief to my friends or to myself. [∫loiq’ ˙stiV ‡n ˙V ™gr√aV p°daV nomºV ÷pipod√aV m’⁄lab’ ™p¬ te j¬nou ⁄ruto k™n°swsen, o¶d‰n eÎV cºrin prºsswn. t¬te gΩr œn qanÚn o¶k ‡ j√loisin o¶d’ ÷mo¥ tos¬nd’ †coV.] (1349–55) Yet, in many ways Oedipus seems as if he is almost already dead. Long before his horrible recognition, Oedipus suggests that his life is rather a dying. Intent on punishing Creon for trying to frame him, Oedipus retorts to the protesting chorus that their sparing of Creon brings upon himself, “the necessity for me to die utterly [cr– me pantelÍV qaneƒn]” (669).43 The rhetorical exaggeration here seems to imply that Oedipus is already somewhat dead; Creon’s pardon would simply guarantee, for him, the ultimate resolution of his current dying-in-life. Such a reading is supported by Oedipus’s final speech: “So much, at least, I know, that no sickness or other

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factor would have killed me; for I should never have been saved from death but for some dreadful evil [ka√toi toso£t¬n g’ oΔda, m–te m’ œn n¬son / m–t’ †llo p°rsai mhd°n◊ o¶ gΩr œn pote / qnfi¢skwn ÷sÔqhn, m‹ ’p√ t¯ dein¸ kak¸]” (1455–57). Oedipus hence sees himself as impervious to any mortal death, rather experiencing his life as a death. Saved by the shepherd from his intended destruction, he is trapped in a life that is, for him, not a living but a dying—the “dreadful evil” of survival. As a result, he is unable to identify himself to himself or in relation to others. In order to be able to “see” himself, it is necessary, then, for his “self” to become an object—that is, to gain an identifiable position within society; for Oedipus’s identity also includes his position within the city. Consequently, Oedipus must be witnessed as the subject that he is—by others as well as himself—in order for him to have this knowledge.44 By relating the memory of the sight of Oedipus’s violent self-mutilation to the chorus of Theban elders (and to the audience), the messenger conveys Oedipus’s memory and pain to a necessary group of secondary witnesses.45

The Persuasive Potential of Pain For the chorus, who along with the palace messenger must witness Oedipus, simply this act of witnessing is a painful experience. That their role is to “see” Oedipus in particular is made clear in the account of Iocasta’s death; the messenger who was present describes how she ran wildly weeping into her bedroom, crying bitterly over memories of Laius and the crimes she committed on the same bed after his death. Yet relating what followed this presents a problem for the messenger, he explains in his account: “And how after that she perished is more than I know; for Oedipus burst in crying out loud, so that we could not watch her calamity to its end, but #¢pwV m‰n ÷k tÍnd’ o¶k°t’ were gazing upon him as he moved around [cw oΔd’ ™p¬llutai◊ / boÍn gΩr eÎs°paisen OÎd√pouV, •j’ oß / o¶k ‡n t¿ ke√nhV ÷kqeºsasqai kak¬n, / ™ll’ eÎV ÷keƒnon peripolo£nt’ ÷le§ssomen]” (1251–54). Recalling his memory of events to the chorus (and audience), the messenger fails in witnessing Iocasta’s death on account of witnessing the actions of Oedipus. As testimony for Oedipus, then, the chorus must, despite their discomfort, see Oedipus in all his shame, as his “crime” is revealed.46 The witnessing of Oedipus is, in this sense, a socialization of him by others. It is through the testimony of the Corinthian messenger/shepherd and the Theban slave, as well as that of Teiresias, that Oedipus’s identity is determined. Yet the chorus’s and the palace messenger’s recognizing of this identity are equally important; their vision of him situates him in society,

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establishing his particular position in relation to the rest of the city. In this manner, they draw him into the public, toward a moment at which he might recognize himself within it. Yet the chorus takes on the responsibility of witnessing Oedipus’s revelation and self-punishment with difficulty. Horrified, they cry out that he has revealed something terrible “not to be heard or looked upon [o¶d’ ™koust¬n, o¶d’ ÷p¬yimon]” (1312).47 The response of the chorus to the shocking vision of the blinded Oedipus expresses a troubled ambivalence that swings between fascination and horrified repulsion: “I cannot even bear to look on you, though I wish to ask you many questions and to learn many answers and perceive many things; such is the horror you inspire in me! [je£ je£ d§sthn’, ™ll’ o¶d’ ÷sideƒn / d§nama√ s’, eq°lwn p¬ll’ ™ner°sqai, / pollΩ puq°sqai, pollΩ d’ ™qr›sai◊ / to√an jr√khn par°ceiV moi]” (1303–06). Most painful and, at the same time, involved is the lament of the final chorus. Accountable as reliable witnesses, they may not detach themselves from his horror nor from his pain: “Ah, son of Laius, would that I had never set eyes on you! For I grievously lament, pouring from my lips a dirge. To tell the truth, you restored me to life and you lulled my eyes in death [ÎÚ La√eion  t°knon, / e≥qe s’ e≥qe se / m–pot’ eÎd¬man◊ / „V ıd§romai / per√all’ ÎΩn c°wn / ÷k stomºtwn. t¿ d’ ırq¿n eÎ- / peƒn, ™n°pneusº t’ ÷k s°qen / ka¥ kateko√mhsa to¶m¿n ∫mma]” (1216–22). Demonstrating the responsibility of bearing witness to the identity of Oedipus, their seeing of his horror becomes not only a recognition but a participation, as well. Along with expressions of civic disapproval, the last three lines of this passage imply a sort of symbiosis with their king; upon his actions, life and death may come and go for these citizens. This empathetic response contributes greatly to the response of those witnessing pain in mimesis; as Aristotle emphasizes in the Poetics, the tragic hero must be someone with whom an audience might identify.48 In his study of the representation of the wounded body, Dennis Patrick Slattery describes the effectiveness of this shared experience between the witness (audience/reader) and the victim (tragic hero): “Within the imaginative experience there arises a sympathy of place, of being part of the same terrain, of feeling the generic quality of a literary work echo in one’s being not in an exclusively intellectual, but in a visceral way.”49 Slattery suggests that a sympathetic response that evokes bodily empathy represents the most effective imaginative response of an audience. Yet, in this act of participation, the witness must forfeit the distance and perception of merely witnessing, as Derrida suggests: In fact, a witness, as such, is always blind. Witnessing substitutes narrative for perception. The witness cannot see, show, and speak

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at the same time, and the interest of the attestation, like that of the testament, stems from this dissociation. No authentification can show in the present what the most reliable of witnesses sees, or rather, has seen and now keeps in memory [. . .].50 Simultaneous seeing, then, is not possible.51 Rather, the work of testifying requires a relinquishing of sight, in as much as one is at the same time really “seeing” and knowing. The authenticity that comes from the pain of the tortured or wounded witness—what the pain, perhaps, is meant to signify—expresses the labor of actually witnessing a truth or memory. Yet the most intense pain is, in fact, at least momentarily blinding. In perceiving Oedipus’s mutilation of himself as proof of his guilt, the chorus of witnesses experiences its own blinding, in an identification that is essential for the recognition of his identity in its relation to the polis.

Oedipus at Colonus: The Suffering Body and Political Memory Oedipus’s suffering body in Oedipus at Colonus persists as a mimetic device, recalling by its presence his criminal corruption of the city. In this play, however, the more recent wound of Oedipus’s disfigured face, absent his eyes, combines with the ankle scar (inflicted when Laius—or Iocasta–bound his ankles and exposed him in order to avoid the crimes prophecied for Oedipus) to mark his guilty potential achieved years earlier in Thebes. His body, lame and blinded, stands as proof of the crimes that Oedipus has unwillingly and unknowingly (he claims in lines 547–48) committed. His physical defects also present evidence of his curse and his punishment to the elders of Colonus, whom he meets at the sacred grove of the Eumenides, as well as to the witnessing audience of the play. Thus, the body, having suffered torment and torture, holds the memory of that suffering; the bodily marks of Oedipus’s troubles indicate the presence of this memory, which remains in the body. Oedipus reiterates the inescapable memories of his torment when the chorus of elders, who have heard rumours of his fate, ask him for details of his past; compelled to recount his ill fortune, Oedipus claims, “I suffered woes unforgettable! [⁄paqon †last’ ⁄cein]” (538).52 The presence of Oedipus’s body on stage provides a consistent reminder, along with his words, of the magnitude of his past troubles. Yet the enduring nature of these sufferings, their continued presence in his body, gives Oedipus a powerful weapon to offer to those giving him sanction. Following an oracle of Apollo (which he repeats in prayer to the Furies upon entering their grove, ll. 84–110), Oedipus confidently waits to offer himself as prize to Colonus and the Athenians. Refusing to explain

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himself before anyone but the king of Athens, Oedipus asserts when Theseus finally arrives: “I come to offer you the gift of my wretched body, not much to look at, but the profit that will come from it is better than good looks53 [dÔswn ˘kºnw to¶m¿n †qlion d°maV / so√, dÍron o¶ spoudaƒon eÎV ∫yin◊ tΩ d‰ / k°rdh par’ a¶to£ kre√sson’ Á morj‹ kal–]” (576–78). Although Oedipus initially resists explaining the “profit” that his suffering body will bestow upon the city, he claims exceptional importance, based on his own pitiful story that he goes on to relate to Theseus. His power derives from his sufferings, which in their irrational and outrageous proportions have taken him outside of the limits of mortals. In an echo of the Theban elders’ response to Oedipus’s revelations in Oedipus Rex, the chorus of Colonian elders recoils at their discovery of Oedipus in the grove: “Ah, ah! He is terrible to see and terrible to hear! [ÎÚ ÎÔ, / dein¿V m‰n ˛røn, dein¿V d‰ kl§ein]” (140–41). Oedipus’s horrible fate, reflected in his appearance, removes him from society, setting him apart as something too terrible to be understood, a disruptive force to the order of the polis. He is, as Antigone will later lament, ™l¬gista, outside of reason, incommunicable and unspeakable (l. 1622, quoted at the beginning of chapter 1). His sufferings, Theseus suggests, surpass the normal limits of mortals; he encouragingly asks Oedipus, “Then what is the affliction greater than man can bear from which you suffer? [t√ gΩr t¿ meƒzon Á kat’ †nqrwpon noseƒV;]” (598). By casting this affliction in terms of disease, Theseus recalls the pollution and plague that caused suffering not only for Oedipus but for the citizens of Thebes, as well. Suggesting that Oedipus bears torments greater than mankind, Theseus, who as king of Athens maintains order in the city, removes Oedipus’s disorder from the rule of what is expected from man. Yet Oedipus himself denies that he exists wholly outside the law, pleading with the chorus, “Do not look on me, I beg you, as a lawless one! [m– m’, ˘kete§w, pros√dht’ †nomon]” (142). Rather, he suggests that his gift derives from a law that surpasses mortals, the more ancient law of justice, approved by Apollo and manifested in the resting place he has chosen, the grove of the Eumenides, female divinities who denote a euphemistic reference to the avenging Erinyes, or Furies.54 While the horrifying Oedipus may be an unspeakable element to the chorus, this characteristic aligns him with the Eumenides, whom the chorus characterizes in the same way. The chorus equates Oedipus’s position as a stranger, in fact, with his willingness to go into the sacred grove: The old man is a wanderer, a wanderer, not a native! Else he would never have come to the inviolable grove of these awful maidens, whom we are afraid to name, and whom we pass

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without looking, without sound, without speech, moving our lips in respectful silence. [planºtaV planºtaV tiV ˛ pr°sbuV, o¶d# ⁄gcwroV◊ pros°ba gΩr o¶k Òn pot# ™stibÆV ÒlsoV ÷V tønd#™maimaketøn korøn, ≤V tr°momen l°gein, ka¥ parameib¬mesq# ™d°rktwV ™jÔnwV, ™l¬gwV t¿ tøV e¶j–mou st¬ma jront√doV ˘°nteV.] (122–33) Not only are the Eumenides unnameable, but they inspire the citizens to behave ™l¬gwV,55 indicating that they are, like Oedipus, incommunicable, buried in silence.56 From this position outside of communication, outside of civil society, Oedipus calls upon justice to provide vengeance for him, by investing his body with the power of revenge. Indeed, Oedipus approaches the chorus as if he were on trial, claiming a just defence from their accusations; when the chorus reminds Oedipus that he killed his father, the hero replies that he did so, but that he has “a plea in my defence! [pr¿V d√kaV ti]” (546). In language that reflects such a trial, Creon later calls on those present to be witnesses of Oedipus’s incriminating testimony: “I call on these men, not on you [Oedipus], and also on my friends here, to be witnesses of your answers [. . .] [mart§romai to§sd’, o¶ s°, pr¿V d‰ to∞V j√louV / o«’ ™ntame√bfi r≈–mat’]” (813–14). With those on stage and in the audience serving as witnesses, then, Oedipus must prove his case. Yet what is this case? As we have seen, Oedipus’s tormented body marks the curse he suffers and the punishment that expressed his guilt. Yet the trappings of a trial here suggest that Oedipus presents before the witnesses the proof of his innocence. This is, in fact, what he argues to the chorus before Theseus’s entrance: “I will explain! I murdered and slaughtered as the victim of the power that sent me mad, but according to the law I am clean! It was in ignorance that I came to this! [÷gÚ jrºsw◊ / †ta˚ ªlo∞V ÷j¬neus’ ™p¬ t’ w#¢lesa, / n¬m¯ d‰ kaqar¬V◊ †idriV ÷V t¬d’ ‡lqon]” (546–48). In the same moment that Oedipus confesses to his crimes, he claims innocence from them on the basis of madness. In his defense, Oedipus claims to have acted within a nomos that would accept insanity and ignorance—what lies beyond reason—as proof of innocence. With this, Oedipus’s tormented body not only provides present evidence of his past

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sufferings, but then also stands for the injustice of these torments. The suffering body thus becomes evidence of his innocence, a virtue he adamantly claims in arguing with Creon, “No, neither this marriage nor the killing of my father, which you never cease to cast in my teeth with bitter reproaches, shall prove me to be evil! [™ll’ o¶ gΩr o®t’ ÷n toƒsd’ ™ko§somai kak¿V / ≈`V aΉn ÷mjoreƒV s§ moi / j¬nouV patr¯¢ouV ÷xoneid√zwn gºmoisin o®q’ ou pikrÍV]” (988–90). While the extent of his torment stood for the measure of his guilt, it now stands for the amount of his innocence—that is, the extent to which Oedipus deserves vengeance, or a “pay back” or antidote (to recall the terms of Antigone), in the name of justice. Thus, the potential that Oedipus offers derives from his suffering inhuman bodily torment both for committing unspeakably terrible crimes and for being innocent of those crimes. Not surprisingly, then, this vengeance, Oedipus explains, will be delivered by means of his body: the power of injustice expressed by his suffering form will remain embodied in his corpse upon death, bestowing supernatural powers upon the place of his burial. Oedipus describes the terms of this gift to Theseus: I will explain, son of Aegeus, what things are laid up (ke√setai) for your city, invulnerable to passing time. I myself, with no guide to lay a hand on me, shall now show you the place where I must die. Do not ever reveal to any human being either where it is concealed or the region in which it lies; for its perpetual nearness renders to you a protection stronger than many shields or spears brought in from outside! But the things that are taboo and that speech must not disturb you yourself shall learn, when you go there alone [. . .]. (1518–27) A great power will be laid in store (ke√setai) for the city in the place where Oedipus’s body lies in death. Oedipus prophecies, then, a future vengeance not only for himself but also for the entire city of Athens, against the city of Thebes (who will come to make war on them). Yet how can the body of one provide such power for the many citizens of Athens? What makes Oedipus’s claims convincing for his witnesses? The struggle over Antigone between Oedipus and Creon raises this problem of persuasion. When Creon arrives on the scene to apprehend Oedipus and his two daughters, the chorus reacts with shock to Creon’s violent assertions. Oedipus himself calls on the polis for defense: “I call on the city! [ÎÚ p¬liV]” (833). The chorus responds with a significant threat: “What are you doing, stranger? Will you not let her go? Soon you will come to a trial of strength [t√ drø˚ V,  x°n’; o¶k ™j–seiV; tºc’ ÷V bºsanon eΔ cerÍn]” (835). The basanos the chorus threatens echoes the one that Oedipus has already

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passed, years before, in Thebes. With their response to Oedipus’s cry for aid, the chorus suggests that Creon’s suffering a basanos might resolve the conflict by demonstrating Creon’s illegitimacy (or legitimacy) before all of the citizen-witnesses present. Likewise, the memory of Oedipus’s torment and endurance remains, retained in the body still marked by it, the wounds persuasively borne before witnesses and audience. The persuasive force of this rhetorical device, however, the source of the “knowledge” the witnesses have gained about Oedipus, rests upon an obscure foundation.57 Oedipus stresses (ll. 1518–27, quoted earlier) that the location of this gravesite must remain unknown to all mortals, for the protection it will provide is rendered by its being always near (geitonÍn ™e√) yet never located precisely. This power of future vengeance depends upon the mystery that will surround his death. Theseus the hero stands apart from mortals, as Oedipus promises him that he will learn these taboo (÷xºgista) things. Yet the city must remain ignorant of the exact source of their powerful vengeance; Oedipus reserves this knowledge only for one who remains apart from the hoi polloi, above the mass of citizens of the city—the Athenian hero and king, Theseus. Yet with his eyes shielded, Theseus misses the moment of Oedipus’s death;58 the precise point of Oedipus’s meeting with the gods and departure from mortals on earth remains elusive. Shrouded in mystery, Oedipus’s burial site echoes the inhuman torment of Oedipus’s life.59 As the chorus indicates, Oedipus’s sufferings are too horrible to be spoken, their extent too vast to communicate. Likewise, the amount of vengeance, the antidote that Oedipus deserves for this injustice, remains beyond measure, even the precise location of its source uncertain. With his past obscured by its limitless trouble, the persuasive basanos that Oedipus must suffer doubly—to prove his guilt and to prove his innocence—ultimately embodies the meaning of his life: terrible criminal, scapegoat, hero. In its terrible, unsightly punishment and death, Oedipus’s body gains the potential of justice, an immeasurable capacity that enables Antigone, finally, to communicate the meaning of his death: He died in the foreign land as he desired; and he occupies a bed shady forever, nor did he fail to leave behind mourning with tears. For this eye of mine, father, laments for you with weeping, nor do I know how I can make away with such great grief, unhappy one! Alas, you wished to die in a foreign land, but you died thus, far from me! (1705–15) With her tears, Antigone demonstrates that she has found a way to mourn the passing of her father; yet, at the same time that they bear witness to

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his death, her tears obscure the precise nature of what lies hidden in the shadowy (e¶sk√aston) grave. The weeping language of Antigone’s final lament expresses the meaning of Oedipus in terms of distance; yet while the moment and place of his death remain unknown, his tormented body in its proximity infuses the site with potential. However, this is not an endless power in itself; the vengeance he brings refers directly to the divine order of justice: the Eumenides and Zeus, whose actions are locatable at the site of his tortured, dead body. The inhuman extent of his suffering having already removed Oedipus from the realm of mortals, this separation is finalized by his apparent connection to divine justice. The “certain” evidence presented by Oedipus’s tortured body, coupled with an imprecise or irrational (†logoV) knowledge of him, persuades his witnesses of his incredible power. As Froma Zeitlin has suggested, “In Athens [Oedipus] can transcend the physical body through metaphor and cult to be incorporated into this idealized territory for his longest sleep.”60 In other words, with a physical display of the proven innocence he claims, Oedipus provides a bodily rhetorical trope that communicates a much larger significance. His suffering body, in life and death, represents something not only other than itself but greater than itself: the immeasurable potential power of future vengeance for himself and the city of Athens. By marking his tormented corpse as something other, unknowable, irrational, †logoV, Athens incorporates the exiled Oedipus back into the polis.61

Chapter 3

THE EROTIC BODY Mutilation and Desire in Achilles Tatius’s Leukippe and Kleitophon

Sophocles’s Theban plays describe the symbolic significance of the tortured body in social terms of judgment and justice. The payment of the debt accrued by trespassing against the law (whether the law of man or of gods) is performed before a witnessing chorus or audience who gives the suffering body its meaning by bearing witness to it and thereby drawing it into the symbolic life of the polis. The performance of punishment before the witnessing citizenry thus resolves the tension or pollution created by the crimes of the individual. The importance of performance in this process is quite obviously facilitated by the theatrical nature of these tragedies, which display or describe the wounded body before the witnessing citizenry upon the stage; bearing witness onstage is always executed before a second witness, the audience. Although the narrative form of the early novel was read rather than performed upon the stage, the genre manifests clear traces of the performative elements of its literary predecessor, the drama. Extant versions of the early Greek novel adhere closely to a formal “romance” plot pattern: hero and heroine meet, fall in love at first sight, are suddenly and violently parted by some outside intrusion (usually the invasion of pirates and the kidnapping of one or both of the lovers), and then undergo a series of adventures separately before being reunited before the ultimately approving eyes of society. Performative elements emerge in the novels particularly during the cycle of mishaps and adventures that the hero and heroine undergo, as on several occasions the heroine is typically subjected to various bodily mutilations, “coincidentally” performed before the distant and horrified gaze of her lover. The visual elements of these moments are combined with numerous ekphrases of paintings and murals and highly detailed descriptions of foreign places and animals to produce a particularly spectacular narrative

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work. Unlike the public spectacle of the drama, however, the visual images produced in the novels are internalized, represented by the imagination inside the reader’s head. In this sense, the introspective nature of the novel lies in tension with the external and physical transformations that the novel describes. Such a tension runs in tandem with a similar conflict described by the novels’ characters themselves, who move through their adventures driven by the powerful arrows of eros, which inflict hidden wounds and turmoil within their bodies. In this chapter, I demonstrate how the physical torments described as inflicted upon the heroine (and, on occasion, the hero) during the course of the lovers’ adventures manifests this conflict between inner and outer experience; in this sense, the adventures provide a space and time in which these tensions can be expressed before being mastered by the reunion and marriage of the couple under the approving eyes of society. In this investigation of individual bodies entering the symbolic register of the social by means of the spectacle of torture, I have found Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of the early novel particularly helpful, both in his elucidation of the spatial and temporal character of these adventures and in the aspects of the episodes that he fails to address. In his discussion of the Greek romance in his essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,”1 Bakhtin designates as “adventure-time” the series of episodes that happen between the lovers’ first professions of love and their eventual marriage and acceptance by society. This concept of Bakhtin’s has prompted a significant amount of debate among classical scholars. Critics argue that Bakhtin’s adventure-time chronotope seems to deny the significance of the events that occur between the beginning and end of the novel. Indeed the adventure-time chronotope does leave relatively unexplored the bulk of the events that constitute the narrative. Yet, in doing so, the concept helpfully demarcates a problematic gap in these Greek romances between the narrative frame that begins and ends the novels and the matter of adventure-time, which I will henceforth refer to as “content,” contained within this frame.2 For the events of the romances describe the tensions and torments of erotic subjectivity, played out upon the surface of physical bodies that are somewhat veiled in Bakhtin’s conception of adventure-time. The bodies of the hero and heroine, in suffering the hidden pains of eros, express inner complications that prove as resistant to any normalizing theory of narrative as they do to the ideology of the society that seeks to constrain them. Thus adventure-time, in veiling over the insistent persistence of the biological bodies that provoke these adventures, in fact emphasizes a gap that occurs on both the level of the narrative and of the characters themselves. The disconnect between the narrative frame and the erotic

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adventures (or content) of these novels is recapitulated in the gap between outer expression and the inner experience of the hero and heroine in the course of those adventures. In demarcating the travels of the hero and heroine within the adventure-time chronotope, Bakhtin follows the impetus of the novels themselves, which repeatedly invite us, as readers, to investigate these bodies by representing their torments as the object of a fascinated gaze: the gaze of the narrator and his implicit and explicit audience. The body, which endures both the invisible wounds of eros and the visibly apparent wounds of torture and mutilation, marks the conjunction of private and public, interior and exterior, in the romance.3 The function and significance of the body is perhaps most emphatically foregrounded by the performance of numerous apparent mutilations and near death experiences that the female heroine, in particular, suffers in the course of the novel. Thus the question of gender inevitably arises in this bodily investigation. This is not surprising, since the romance emerges in this study as a place in which the individual, with all of its disruptive desires in tow, is imagined in the process of becoming subject to culture, which requires the mastery of unruly impulses and the establishment of a socially approved sexual identity.

The Chronotope and Adventure-Time Noting the genesis of Bakhtin’s conception of the chronotope in both Einstein and Kant, Bracht Branham explains its double function in Bakhtin’s literary criticism: The idea seems to have two aspects as Bakhtin develops it: the founding or “indispensable” assumptions of a genre (or indeed any utterance), which themselves may never be the object of representation and yet shape the parameters of the way that spatial and temporal relationships are “artistically expressed” in a given genre; and how these “appropriated aspects of reality” are used to articulate the specific meaning of a “concrete artistic cognition” or artifact [. . .]. As a fundamental working assumption that shapes the genre’s way of seeing reality, it should provide an analytic framework for understanding how and why each genre (or subgenre) “is adapted to conceptualizing some aspects of experience better than others.”4 The chronotope represents an inherently anthropologic approach to genre, positing the work of literature in terms of a textual world-making that

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reflects a concrete stance toward the real world, an attitude made possible by the manner in which space and time are imagined in the text. Thus, the chronotope is significant precisely because it introduces a physicality to the literary form and the language and events depicted in it. The chronotope highlights the phenomena of bodies moving through and interacting within the created “physical” environment of the narrative: “Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.”5 Bakhtin’s use of metaphorical language here complicates the attempt to interpret his meaning in literary terms. The formula “Time [. . .] takes on flesh” suggests an ambiguous materiality of the literary event. This fleshly interaction of time, space, and body within the text appears perhaps most clearly in Bakhtin’s description of the adventure-time chronotope. Bakhtin explains that adventure-time is characterized by “a technical, abstract connection between space and time, by the reversibility of moments in a temporal sequence, and by their interchangeability in space.”6 In this sense, the storyline might be imagined as a tightrope: if the rope were looped over so that beginning and end touched, one might skip easily over the dangling middle, unaware of what had been missed. The novel begins with love at first sight and ends with marriage: “Two adjacent moments, one of biographical life, one of biographical time, are directly conjoined.”7 Bakhtin consequently locates the adventures of the novel outside of biographical time, since the characters of the heroes seem unchanged at the conclusion: “in [the Greek romance] there is a sharp hiatus between two moments of biographical time, a hiatus that leaves no trace in the life of the heroes or in their personalities.”8 Instead, between the first moments of love and the telos of marriage (or, as Bakhtin puts it, “the arousal of passion, and its satisfaction”), the hero and heroine are inevitably separated, each suffering a series of adventures in foreign lands as they struggle to reunite again. Yet, he argues, despite the amount of suffering that each undergoes, the main characters do not demonstrate any noticeable development but instead remain the same, with “no potential for evolution, for growth, for change [. . .]. What we get is a mere affirmation of the identity between what had been at the beginning and what is at the end.”9 This dreamlike lack of consequence in adventure-time is enhanced by its exotic locations, which seem more generic than real; the touristic descriptions of these alien lands suggest that they are consequently untouched by history.10 In addition, the events that take place are overwhelmingly caused by random contingency, quirks of fate, or tricks of chance—nonhuman forces, for the most part, that act suddenly upon the lives of the surprised hero and heroine. There are no series of hours and days developing into what would seem a normal progression of human life. The abstract world of contingency and chance

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thus becomes for Bakhtin a place in which the endurance, rather than the development, of the hero and heroine as individuals is demonstrated.11 Bakhtin’s assessment of the conventional frame of the romance plot foregrounds a sharp contrast between the story’s frame (the beginning and end of the novel) and its narrative content (the adventures in which the hero and heroine suffer physical and emotional hardships as they travel through foreign countries). Yet, in demarcating the gap between the frame and its content, Bakhtin marginalizes the matter of these adventures. Rather, the lovers’ adventures become for Bakhtin a series of interchangeable episodes demonstrating a metaphysical ideal of an enduring individual. This abstraction of the human body emerges despite his pointed consideration of the physicality of the chronotope, which he notes appears most clearly in the initial meeting that inevitably befalls the hero and heroine by chance. The meeting represents a point of contact, and particularly physical contact; in the Greek romance, this contact is very much that of the meeting of human bodies. Bakhtin notes, It is nevertheless a living human being moving through space and not merely a physical body in the literal sense of the term. While it is true that his life may be completely passive—“Fate” runs the game—he nevertheless endures the game fate plays. And he not only endures—he keeps on being the same person and emerges from this game, from all these turns of fate and chance, with his identity absolutely unchanged.12 Although the adventures manifest themselves primarily in bodily experiences, Bakhtin here strives to grasp the genre’s sense of a “living human being” that exceeds the “mere physical body.” His conception of the adventuretime chronotope minimizes bodily experience by positing a theory of the emerging novel that reads the human bodies moving about within the text as signifiers of a fairly minimal conception of being “human.” Thus his account of the chronotope reflects the point of view of the framing poles of the narrative, subordinating the fleshly body to the idea of the enduring, public image of an individual that he sees as the “artistic and ideological meaning of the Greek romance.”13 Yet, I suggest, this ideal public image endures not despite the lovers’ adventures, but precisely because of the bodily torments represented in the suspended animation of adventure-time. In other words, the matter (or content) of adventure-time manifests a concern with the gap between inner and outer (or private and public) experience by means of repeated scenes of bodily violation and invasion. Adventure-time thus presents a series of explorations of inner experience, all of which contribute to the final

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conclusion of the narrative, in which the authenticity of inner experience is verified and codified in societal terms, enabling the lovers to once again take up their respective (and respectable) roles in society.

The Body and the Disruption of Adventure-Time As I have noted, Bakhtin’s conception of adventure-time in the ancient Greek novel seems to have provoked the bulk of the criticism of his theory of the novel, particularly by critics who seem to feel the theory threatens to detract from the value of the Greek romance as a literary genre.14 Much of this criticism focuses on the force of eros in the novels. An examination of such criticism paradoxically reveals the manner in which eros changes by means of the bodies of the lovers apparently tormented during their adventures—a significance of the body overlooked by many of Bakhtin’s critics and by Bakhtin himself. Arguing against Bakhtin’s contention that the romances unfold only in space, and not in time, David Konstan emphasizes the lovers’ developing experience of eros as an essential aspect of their adventures. Konstan reads Bakhtin’s concept of adventure-time as overlooking the various events of the novel, reducing them to a “parenthesis,” in the process of demonstrating the unchanging nature of the hero and heroine. For Konstan, by contrast, the individual events are essential to the novels, in that they prove a “development” of fidelity of the lovers for each other. In fact, one of Konstan’s stated objects in his study of the Greek romance, lies, he suggests, in proving just the opposite of Bakhtin’s static adventure-time; Konstan aims to “exhibit a movement in the Greek novel by which the loyalty appropriate to marriage is distinguished from the spontaneous erotic attraction that brought the couple together in the first place.”15 By means of the illustration of this progress of fidelity, Konstan seeks to demonstrate his larger claim that what makes the genesis of the romance innovative, in its earliest inception in the ancient Greek novels, is the unique conception of eros in these texts. According to Konstan, eros emerges as distinct from its form in the literary genres that precede it; for in the Greek romance, he argues, eros incorporates its sense both as passion or desire and as the sort of faithful love embodied in marriage. In the ancient novel, he argues, “erotic attraction is represented as a uniform and undivided motive [. . .]” and “[. . .] everyone who is under the spell of eros wants it to last forever.”16 In other words, sexual attraction isn’t divided into either lust or the desire for marriage; eros includes both, undifferentiated, in the novels. For this reason, Konstan asserts with an oblique nod toward Bakhtin, it may seem to a modern reader

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as if nothing really happens in them.17 Because the novels don’t describe a division of eros between a lower, bodily love and a higher more enduring love, he continues, they don’t describe a development of the hero or heroine in which he or she evolves from a base desire to an appreciation for the rewards of a higher love, such as marriage. Rather, the novels demonstrate an endurance of this feeling of undifferentiated eros, an endurance of loyalty or fidelity. In order to demonstrate this fidelity of eros, of course, the hero and heroine must remain unchanged—an argument that begins to sound suspiciously like Bakhtin’s.18 Yet the manner in which Konstan arrives at this juncture is worth examining further here, for, by means of what it fails to address, Konstan’s conception of symmetry in the Greek romance resonates productively with Bakhtin’s adventure-time chronotope. As I have noted, Konstan’s thesis is that love takes a particular form in the ancient romances that “distinguishes them as a genre from all other amatory literature in the classical world,” as well as from the Roman novels. Specifically, complete symmetry between the hero and heroine—a balance Konstan finds manifested in everything from their social class to their ages to the intensity of their desires for each other—seems to enable a uniquely novel form of eros that itself maintains an equal balance between bodily lust and the sort of “higher affection” that leads to marriage.19 Konstan suggests that “the reciprocal love between the primary couple is constituted in the Greek novels as the basis for an enduring relationship of marriage, in contrast to modes of eros that arise in situations marked by an asymmetry of power and feeling,” such as that found between an erastes and eromenos.20 Of course, as Konstan admits, the lack of equality he finds inherent in homoerotic relationships is also reflected in the common Greek conception of marriage, in which the marriage is arranged by men (the fathers of the groom and bride or the groom and the father of the bride) with the woman playing the role of passive object in the exchange.21 Nevertheless, the special eros of the Greek romances, he asserts, describes a bodily desire that both lovers want to last forever; thus eros acquires the uniform motive of marriage.22 Konstan finds that, throughout their adventures in the novel, the hero and heroine enact this symmetry by exhibiting equal levels of passivity or activity as they struggle to maintain their fidelity toward each other in the face of dangerous threats to it. Arguing that this fidelity doesn’t necessarily represent the same idea as chastity, he notes that the hero or heroine, if coerced, might well have sex with another yet still be considered to have remained loyal to his or her beloved. Thus, he concludes, the romances describe an eros that doesn’t distinguish between body or spirit, a nondiscrimination made apparent by the fact that the body becomes an insignificant factor in determining fidelity in love.

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While such a utopian scheme of desire clearly privileges heterosexual relations that culminate in the “higher” love of marriage, Konstan’s theory seems perhaps most questionable in its conception of an eros that is prompted by bodily desire, yet transcends that desire to reach its spiritual aim, while at the same time not differentiating between bodily and spiritual affections. In order for such an endurance of body and spirit to be the case, it stands to reason, the body must remain a factor in the equation.23 Yet Konstan insists that the fidelity that reflects this unchanging and enduring eros rises above any bodily associations of chastity. In his valorization of (spiritual) fidelity over bodily chastity, Konstan cites two exceptions to this rule. In Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, the heroine Callirhoe, split from her first husband (the hero Chaereas, who she believes is dead), is compelled to marry the nobleman Dionysius in order to provide a life and future for Chaereas’s child, with which she is pregnant. Despite this sexual union with Dionysius, Chaereas forgives her for straying and reaccepts her as his wife when they’re reunited—a gesture that Konstan reads as demonstrating the endurance of fidelity despite bodily transgression. The bulk of Konstan’s argument, though, rests on his analysis of another exception, in Achilles Tatius’s Leukippe and Kleitophon, in which the hero Kleitophon is guilty of a sexual dalliance with the noblewoman Melite. In this case, he has agreed to marry Melite in the belief that his beloved Leukippe is dead or lost forever. Kleitophon successfully postpones consummating the union, however, until he finds Leukippe alive again. In a parting gift to the love-suffering Melite, he only then submits to her desires, in an act of both sympathy for her and respect for the god of love, whom he fears he might otherwise offend. While Konstan posits that in this case Achilles Tatius may be self-consciously pushing the form to its limits, he nevertheless uses this episode as the central demonstration of the distinction he draws between chastity and fidelity. For the novel ends with two of tests of “honor,” which, he claims, “do not make sex the essential criterion of fidelity.”24 The basis of this conclusion lies in the fact that the tests go off without a hitch, despite the fact that Melite and Kleitophon have had sexual relations. Unfortunately, this conclusion omits the fact that the two ordeals are testing Melite and Leukippe, not Kleitophon. Thus, Leukippe easily passes the test, which assesses her virginity, since she has remained chaste throughout the story. Melite also passes the test, since the stated purpose of her trial is to determine whether or not she committed adultery while her husband, Thersandros, was away. Since she and Kleitophon have their sexual encounter after Thersandros returns, she too passes.25 Contrary to Konstan’s assertion, then, in both cases the clear focus of the trials pinpoints bodily chastity. In fact, the background myths

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that explain the rituals of each test emphasize bodily lust and resistance. Leukippe’s test in the cave of Pan refers back to a frustrated lust the god held for the virgin maiden Syrinx; in order to escape his advances, the maiden’s body must metamorphose into a set of pipes (which are then often fondled and blown upon by Pan). The ritual test Melite undergoes refers back to another bodily transformation, that of the virgin Rhodopis, who is beguiled by the arrow of Eros into forsaking her vow of loyalty to Artemis in pursuit of her desire for the young man Euthynicus. As a result, Artemis turns the maiden into a spring of water on the spot; it is in this spring that Melite must bathe, a tablet around her neck inscribed with Thersites’ accusation. The women’s effortless passing of these tests (even in the case of Melite, who is, in fact, actually guilty of adultery) suggests the tests are rather pro forma than serious examinations. In this sense, these bodily trials emphasize the disconnect between the private experience of the body and the public perception of it. While Melite has, in fact, committed adultery with Kleitophon, she is able to escape punishment for it because of a semantic distinction, a technicality of language that communicates to the witnessing public her (false) innocence. Yet Konstan’s claim that fidelity remains distinct from chastity represents a persistent aspect of his general argument for the symmetry demonstrated by the hero and heroine in these early novels. For the undifferentiated quality that he identifies in the eros of Greek romance bolsters his claims that the hero and heroine maintain a balance that avoids the typical discriminations of gender.26 This desire to establish gender equality in the lovers all but eliminates the body (and hence gender) from the novels altogether. Not coincidentally, in this pointed avoidance of the body, Konstan’s notion of unchanging endurance echoes Bakhtin’s theory of static individuals in the midst of adventure-time perhaps most closely. For, upon closer examination, Bakhtin’s own conception of the Greek romance similarly avoids an overt conceptualization of the physical body as a factor in adventure-time, even though his explanation of the endurance of human identity in the Greek romance (see the section on the chronotope and adventure-time, earlier in this chapter) clearly emphasizes the image of the individual. Despite the fact that his conception of the chronotope emerges in terms of the fleshiness and physicality of events in space and time, Bakhtin’s conception of the human being “living” within the chronotope evidently does not hinge on the physical body per se (nor, therefore, does it take into account the question of gender). His efforts to pursue the body as meaning more than itself demonstrate this abstract concern, as Bakhtin considers the recurring motifs in Greek romance of disguise, recognition, betrayal, false death, and tests of fidelity as various tests of “the heroes’ integrity, their selfhood.”27 For Bakhtin, the appearance of

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integrity or enduring identity takes precedence over a close consideration of the bodily trials that make such identity manifest in society, particularly in the Greek romance. In this sense, Konstan’s attempts to remove the body from eros seem to echo Bakhtin’s own omission; as such, Konstan’s most radical claim of all, that the hero and heroine suffer equal hardships in the course of their adventures, becomes even more significant in its marked avoidance of the body. Yet the body, as the locus of the eros that ignites the plot, actually indicates an essential concern of these early novels. Indeed, the relegation of the body to a metaphorical status by both Bakhtin and Konstan reflects the central problem raised by the literal presence of the flesh in these novels. As I will show, the novels depict the body as a locus of eros that resists being successfully integrated into the enclosing frame of the novels. The fleshly body, in its continuous and uncontrollable responses to desire, introduces a persistent emotional excess that precludes any unified or stable articulation of private human identity in the social realm, while prompting the metaphorical mastery of the body by the gaze of the narrator, the author, and the critic.28

Torture and the Wound of Eros As I have noted, the Greek romances are replete with scenes and threats of physical mutilation, torture, and near-death or even apparently fatal encounters, in both the plot of the narratives and in ekphrases of paintings and mosaics that appear frequently in the texts. For example, in Chariton’s novel, the heroine Callirhoe suffers two Scheintode and the hero Chaereas one; in Achilles Tatius’s novel only the heroine Leukippe undergoes such apparently violent demises, appearing to die three times in addition to suffering a bout of madness in which she loses herself to such an extent that she ignores all conventions of modesty and exposes herself; in Heliodoros’s novel, too, the heroine appears to suffer violent deaths on several occasions. In addition to the Scheintode, the novels present numerous references to bodily mutilation, in the guise of both accidental suffering and legally imposed torture. The elaborate descriptions of these spectacular scenes of violence in the narrative are echoed by the frequent ekphrases that foreshadow events in the main narrative.29 The distinct correlation between violence experienced by characters and violence represented by artifacts emerges unmistakably in the ekphrasis that introduces Achilles Tatius’s novel. The narrative opens with an unnamed narrator describing a painting he is examining, a picture of the rape of Europa by Zeus in the form of a bull. The narrator describes

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the artist’s depiction of the scene of the beautiful maiden (kal‹ parq°noV) astride the bull with particular attention to the appearance of the maidens who witness her abduction: At the far end of the meadow, where the land jutted out into the sea, the artist had placed the maidens. Their pose expressed both joy and fear [. . .]. Their faces were blanched, a wry twist at the corners of their mouths, eyes wide and staring out to sea. Their mouths were slightly open, as if a moment later they would actually scream in fear; they reached out their arms toward the bull.30 In his assessment of the image, the narrator links the beauty of the maidens directly to the fear they express.31 Moving from this description of the helpless onlookers’ response, he turns his focus upon the bull (Zeus) carrying away Europa, devoting attention to both the massive strength of the bull and the overtly erotic appearance of the young woman perched on his back: There was a chiton over the maiden’s chest down to her genitals [aÎdo£V]; from there on a robe covered the lower part of her body: the chiton was white, the robe red, and the body showed subtly through the clothing—navel well recessed, stomach flat, waist narrow, but with a narrowness that widened downward towards the hips. Breasts gently nudging forward: a circumambient sash pressed chiton to breasts, so that it took on the body’s form like a mirror. (1.1.10–11)32 The depictions of both the maidens and Europa attach an explicit erotic beauty to the scene of impending sexual violence, as the bull, led by the child-god Eros, swims out toward the horizon, with Europa captive on his back. As the narrator remarks upon his admiration of the painting (#EgÚ [. . .] ÷pfi¢noun t›V graj›V), a stranger who turns out to be the hero of the novel, Kleitophon, approaches and engages him in conversation. The painting provokes Kleitophon to launch into a description of his own troubles in love, and it is Kleitophon’s narration of these trials that comprises the rest of the novel (the anonymous narrator never reappears).33 In the story that follows, detailed ekphrases of paintings and descriptions of exotic animals alternate with Kleitophon’s account of events in their own adventures with which the descriptive images clearly resonate. As I will demonstrate, this first ekphrasis establishes a precedent of aesthetic enjoyment of the visual

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synthesis of beauty and violence that also echoes throughout the narrative, with regard both to paintings and to touristic spectacles and to the actual events that they foreshadow, as well. Kleitophon begins his story by relating the details of his first meeting with Leukippe, with whom he immediately falls in love. Occurring only a few paragraphs after the opening, Kleitophon’s description of his first sight of her echoes quite clearly the initial ekphrasis: Her face flashed on my eyes like lightning. Such beauty I had seen once before, and that was in a painting of Europa on a bull: delightfully animated eyes; light blond hair—blond and curly; black eyebrows—jet black; white cheeks—a white that glowed to red in the center like the crimson laid on ivory by Lydian craftswomen. Her mouth was a rose caught at the moment when it begins to part its petal lips. (1.4.3–4)34 Kleitophon’s nominal reference to the painting combined with his description of Leukippe, particularly her parted red lips, draws an unmistakable reference to the appearance of Europa and her maidens in the previously described painting. In evoking this comparison, Achilles Tatius places Leukippe in the position of Europa, whose aesthetically pleasing appearance is linked directly to her apprehension of sexual violence. Kleitophon’s descriptions of both scenes provide a potential guide for the reader’s “eye,” as well, which in following his narration also follows his gaze, a phenomenon to which we shall return shortly.35 Yet Kleitophon troubles this neat formula by extending the threatened violence to refer to the wound of eros that he himself is about to suffer: “As soon as I had seen her, I was lost. For Beauty’s wound is sharper than any weapon’s, and it runs through the eyes down to the soul. It is through the eye that the wound of eros passes [ıjqalm¿V gΩr ˛d¿V ÷rwtik¸ tra§mati]” (1.4.4–5).36 This series of related images, all of which link eros (and the beauty that prompts it) to images of physical violence, produce an ambivalent notion of the body as both potent and vulnerable: the body can unintentionally and unwittingly inflict the wound of eros by its mere appearance, yet can then also be wounded by eros, either literally, as in the case of Europa’s rape, or figuratively, as in the case of the “wound” of eros that Kleitophon describes here. The motif of eros as physically wounding occurs with overwhelming frequency in the Greek novels. As in this series of images, the power of eros to wound registers on multiple semantic planes, as the narrative alternates between visual representations of violence, actual threats of violence, and the metaphorically violent effects

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of eros on the lovers’ souls (expressed and perhaps experienced as violent effects on their bodies). The painful experience of the penetration of the body by eros (either literally or metaphorically) prefigures the violent images of wounding that proliferate during the lovers’ adventures, when multiple instances of physical torment including dismemberment are staged before various witnessing audiences. In particular, the characteristic trope of the Scheintod, or “false death” (almost a generic signal in its own right), achieves its effect only in the process of being witnessed by others, particularly when the male lover gazes at his heroine apparently being brutally murdered before his eyes—and, in every case, in a manner that pointedly violates the integrity of the body. This key biographical moment is reflected upon from various angles in repeated scenes of voyeurism by characters and readers. The reader takes vicarious pleasure in the spectacle as he or she follows the gaze of the admirer. The significance of this exchange is emphasized by its repetition throughout the narrative. In Achilles Tatius’s novel, Leukippe’s first apparent death is prefigured both by a dream her mother has the night Leukippe and Kleitophon plan to elope and by an ekphrasis that directly precedes the scene of her “murder” by pirates. As Kleitophon steals into Leukippe’s bedroom in the beginning of the novel, intending to consumate their union, her mother has a dream in which “It appeared to her that some plunderer with a naked sword took her daughter, snatching her away, and throwing her over on her back, he ripped her open with the blade, up to the middle of her stomach, beginning from her genitals [÷d¬kei tinΩ lfist‹n mºcairan ⁄conta gumn‹n †gein ªrpasºmenon a¶t›V t‹n qugat°ra ka¥ kataq°menon •pt√an, m°shn ™nat°mnein tŒ maca√ra˚ t‹n gast°ra kºtwqen ™rxºmenon ™p¿ t›V aÎdo£V]” (2.23.5).37 Leukippe’s mother, thus warned, flies to her daughter’s room, catching the two together, and consequently prompting the series of events that lead to their flight from the land. Her mother, furious and anxious that Leukippe has not managed to retain her virginity, threatens to torture Leukippe’s slave girl Kleio, in order to provoke a full confession. Kleitophon, Leukippe, Kleio, and Kleitophon’s manservant Satyros (who is in love with Kleio) flee just in time to save Kleio from torture.38 Leukippe herself is relieved to be united with her lover, escaping her mother’s shaming and wounding accusations.39 Shortly after they embark on their adventures, however, they are shipwrecked at sea and land at Pelousian, where they visit a temple to Zeus Kasios that features a painting of Andromeda and Prometheus, which Kleitophon describes fully in an ekphrasis. The hero describes Andromeda’s appearance first, dwelling on her beauty as she struggles, pinned to a cliff, watching an approaching sea-monster:

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The Wound and the Witness There is a curious blend of beauty and terror [kºlloV (. . .) ka¥ d°oV] on her face: fear appears on her cheeks, yet a bloomlike beauty rests in her eyes. Her cheeks are not quite perfectly pale, but brushed with a light red wash; nor is the flowering quality of her eyes untouched by care—they seem like violets in the earliest stage of wilting. The artist had enhanced her beauty with this touch of lovely fear [˙utwV a¶t‹n ÷k¬smhsen ˛ zwgrºjoV e¶m¬rj¯ j¬b¯]. (3.7.3–4)

As in the ekphrasis of Europa, Andromeda’s beauty is perceived as heightened by her terror. The combination of paleness and redness on her skin recalls that of the maidens and Europa, whose diaphanous gown is also echoed by Andromeda’s own garment: “the whitest of robes, delicately woven, like spider-web more than sheep’s wool.” Kleitophon’s description emphasizes the contrast between the grace of the maiden and her imprisonment, framing her appearance in terms of her impending union with death: Her arms were spread against the rock, bound above her head by a manacle bolted in the stone. Her hands hung loose at the wrist like clusters of grapes. The color of her arms shaded from pure white to livid, and her fingers looked dead. She was chained up waiting for death, wearing a wedding garment, adorned as a bride for Hades. (3.7.4–5) Andromeda’s beauty in this scene emerges in connection with her entrapment, as she struggles underneath the gaze both of the (rather phallic) monster, whose sinuous neck and tail arch toward her, and of Perseus, her approaching savior, as well as the admiring gaze of Kleitophon and Leukippe and, by extension, the novel’s audience. A “sequel” painting depicts the corresponding pain of Prometheus, pinned to the ground as the eagle burrows into his stomach, eating his liver. As Kleitophon remarks, “You would have pitied the pain in this painting [“l°hsaV œn „V ™lgo£san t‹n graj–n].” (3.8.5). While the depiction of Andromeda’s beauty echoes the prior descriptions of Europa and Leukippe, here the eagle consuming Prometheus’s liver resonates with both the dream of Leukippe’s mother and the torturous death that Leukippe herself will appear to suffer later in the same chapter: A bird feasted on Prometheus’ stomach. It stood there ripping it open, or already had ripped it open; and its beak dipped into the hole, and it appeared to be digging the wound, seeking the liver, which was visible because the painter depicted the wound as laying open [. . .]. [∫rniV ÷V t‹n to£ Promhq°wV gast°ra

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#¢dh m‰n o‚n ™ne¯gm°nhn◊ trujø˚ ◊ ¤sthke gΩr a¶t‹n ™no√gwn, h ™llΩ t¿ r≈ºmjoV ÷V t¿ ∫rugma kaqeƒtai, ka¥ ⁄oiken ÷por§ttein t¿ tra£ma ka¥ zhteƒn t¿ ≠\par◊ t¿ d‰ ÷kja√netai toso£ton, ˙son ™n°¯xen ˛ graje∞V t¿ di¬rugma to£ tra§matoV (. . . ).] (3.8.1–2)40 The violent penetration of Prometheus by the eagle echoes the mother’s vision of her daughter stabbed in the belly, suggesting a sexual violence implicit in both scenes. Prometheus’s male gender here subverts what, in the case of Europa, Andromeda, and Leukippe, appeared to be a trend of violence directed toward the female sex; in particular, his violation resonates significantly with that of Leukippe, in her mother’s dream. The penetration of the stomach (gast°ra) here recalls the association of the gast°ra with the genitalia (aÎdÔV), connected by the ripping wound of the dream-marauder’s knife; by association, then, this scene also conveys the suggestion of not only penetration but rape. Moreover, the violation of Prometheus is witnessed, as in the cases of the violated females, by the observant male hero depicted within the painting, as well as by the male hero narrating the ekphrasis of the scene to the characters and the readers. The witnessing of this violence is emphasized, as it is in the scene of Andromeda, as Kleitophon describes Prometheus’s own fascination with his wound: “he stares both at his own wound and at Herakles [who, like Perseus, also looks on as he approaches to relieve Prometheus’s suffering], wanting to concentrate on the hero but forced to focus at least half of his attention on his own agony” (3.8.7). As in the case of the abduction of Europa (and as will shortly occur again with Leukippe’s mutilation), the scene of violation, although inflicted upon a male figure, nevertheless provokes the same irresistibly fascinated gaze, represented as an essential aspect of that scene. Just after this description, Kleitophon relates in a brief sentence their leaving the temple, taking two days of rest, then hiring a boat and setting off in search of their friends. Immediately, however, the boat is overtaken by bandits, who kidnap the hero and heroine. When the bandits call for a sacrificial virgin, Leukippe, of course, is taken from Kleitophon. Later that day, the Egyptian army arrives, Kleitophon and the other captives escape to join them, and by the end of the day the army is victorious, though many of the bandits escape safely to the opposite side of a chasm. Early the next day, Kleitophon watches the bandits on the other side of the trench prepare an altar for sacrificing Leukippe. The hero describes the ensuing event in detail: Then at a signal they all moved far away from the altar. One of the attendants laid her on her back and tied her to stakes fixed

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The Wound and the Witness in the ground, as sculptors picture Marsyas bound to the tree. He next raised a sword and plunged it into her heart and then sawed all the way down to her abdomen. Her viscera leaped out. The attendants pulled out her entrails and carried them in their hands over to the altar. When it was well done they carved the whole lot up, and all the bandits shared the meal. [eΔta ™p¿ sunq–matoV pºnteV ™nacwro£si to£ bwmo£ makrºn◊ tÍn d‰ nean√skwn ˛ ¤teroV ™nakl√naV aut‹n •pt√an, ⁄dhsen ÷k pattºlwn ÷p¥ t›V g›V ÷rhreism°nwn, o«on poio£sin o˘ koroplºqoi t¿n Mars§an ÷k to£ juto£ dedm°non◊ eΔta labÚn x√joV bºptei katΩ t›V kard√aV ka¥ dielk§saV t¿ x√joV eÎV t‹n kºtw gast°ra, r≈–gnusi◊ tΩ splºgcna d‰ e¶q∞V ÷xep–dhsen, ˝ taƒV cers¥n ÷xelk§santeV ÷pitiq°asi t¸ bwm¸, ka¥ ÷pe¥ ·pt–qh, katatem¬nteV ˝panteV eÎV mo√raV ⁄jagon.] (3.15.4–5)

The comparison to Marsyas fosters another moment of gender ambiguity (for the language here avoids any direct reference to Leukippe’s gender), drawing attention to the manner in which Leukippe is bound and emphasizing the similarity of her plight to that of not only Marsyas but, again, the entrapped Andromeda and Prometheus. In turn, the sword plunged into her body and excavating her stomach (gast°ra) recalls both her mother’s dream and the eagle who feasts on Prometheus, the similarity to the latter extended by the bandits’ cannibalistic feast on Leukippe’s entrails. Once more, the spectacle of wounding gains importance by being witnessed by Kleitophon, who thus occupies the position of Perseus and Herakles, in pointed contrast to his companions, who can’t bear to watch the gruesome display: “As each of these acts was performed, the soldiers and the general groaned aloud and averted their eyes from the sight. But I, contrary to all reason, just sat there gazing. The immeasurable evil left me thunder-struck [ta£ta d‰ ˛rÍnteV o˘ m‰n stratiÍtai ka¥ ˛ strathg¿V kaq’ πn tÍn prattom°nwn ™neb¬wn ka¥ tΩV ∫yeiV ™p°strejon t›V q°aV, ÷gÚ d‰ ÷k paral¬gou kaq–menoV ÷qeÔroun. t¿ d‰ ‡n ⁄kplhxiV◊]” (3.15.5). In his inability to turn away, even as his companions cannot bear to look, Kleitophon emphasizes his individual and active participation in the scene, as he gazes fascinated at the disembowelment of his lover. The language of Achilles Tatius here emphasizes Kleitophon’s particular manner of looking; unlike the soldiers and generals, who simply “see” her (˛rºw) and then turn their eyes away, Cleitophon gazes like a spectator (emphasized by the use of the verb qewr°w) at the dramatic spectacle (t›V q°aV, a noun typically used to indicate a dramatic performance) of Leukippe’s mutilation.41 Rapt with attention and immersed in the sequence of events, he stares at the scene as if at a painting, describing its details with a similar engage-

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ment, even voyeuristic enjoyment (in an echo of the aesthetic pleasure of the anonymous gazer who describes the first ekphrasis).

Gender, Society, and the Erotic Gaze The paradox of Kleitophon’s horrified enjoyment of this scene, which encapsulates a typical association of torture and eros in the Greek romances, has raised an equally conflicted range of responses from scholars. While some easily dismiss the episode as an example of “penetrating wit” or “kitsch,”42 others note the sadistic element of Kleitophon’s gaze, a consideration that invariably raises the question of gender to varying degrees. In other words, Kleitophon’s qewr¬menoV has prompted scholars to qewre√n (theorein: to look at, view, behold) themselves—and, not surprisingly, by means of theory. The tension between the artificial spectacle and the fascinated witnessing of it demand a meta-looking, an analysis of the act of looking and of the spectacular object that is subject to that gaze. For example, while Konstan considers these scenes of violence as a demonstration of the passivity of the male lover, who is often paralyzed with fear in the face of danger to himself and his beloved, he also notes the voyeuristic quality of the spectacle: There is [. . .] an independent pleasure in the rhetorical embellishment and flair with which Leucippe’s suffering is narrated, and the audience, watching her from a position of safety and detachment, is invited to be titillated at the spectacle. In addition, an element of aggression and control is inevitably created by the unseen observation of another, who is thereby reduced to the condition of an unwitting performer. Clitopho, for all that he is paralyzed by the sight of Leucippe’s helplessness and victimization, is by virtue of being witness to it in a position of power over her. Clitopho’s command of the narrative voice, together with the staginess of Leucippe’s several encounters with death, makes him the onlooker in their relationship, and the effect of his gaze disrupts the parity or reciprocity between the lovers.43 As Konstan notes, Kleitophon’s witnessing of the scene (along with the audience) has an element of aggression and mastery to it—a position that subverts any claim to parity between the hero and heroine, as he admits. Dutifully citing an observation by Luce Irigaray regarding mastery and the male gaze,44 Konstan notes that Kleitophon’s narrative gaze makes the relationship between the two appear asymmetrical, a problem that he

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resolves by noting how Kleitophon’s position as male narrator highlights his desire for Leukippe, an apparent asymmetry that is balanced by the revelation of Leukippe’s reciprocal desire for him. Konstan’s brief consideration of Kleitophon’s fascination with Leukippe’s apparent disembowelment in terms of the dominating/sadistic male gaze theorized by Irigaray echoes the discussion of this episode by Brigitte Egger and Helen Elsom, both of whom evoke psychoanalytic and film-oriented gender theory in their considerations of the scene. Egger’s and Elsom’s studies of the Greek romances45 utilize feminist analyses of the gaze theorized by Teresa de Lauretis and Kaja Silverman, both of whom follow Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking work on the male gaze in cinema. The significance of the male gaze for Mulvey unfolds psychoanalytically, within the phallocentric system in which woman is subject to the male gaze. In this scheme, the female signifies, in fantasy and in language, the radical lack of the phallus. As such, she provokes a castration anxiety in the male that can only be resolved in one of two ways. Either the woman can be punished, her guilt justified by her own “castration,” or she can be fetishized, in which case she is transformed “through overvaluation (fetishism) into a compensatory object.”46 Thus Leukippe’s apparent mutilation and Kleitophon’s fascination with it may be read as a product and a manifestation of castration anxiety. Of course, as Kaja Silverman notes, this formula depends upon a binary opposition of masculine/aggressive/sadistic and feminine/passive/masochistic, thus suggesting that the pleasure of the gaze for the male subject involves mastery. While Egger’s chief concern in her essay “Looking at Chariton’s Callirhoe” focuses upon establishing the possibility of a female readership of the novel, her approach includes an analysis of the genre’s construction of gender. Establishing the voyeuristic mastery of Kleitophon’s (and thus the audience’s) gaze over the beautiful heroine, she argues that such mastery is an anxious response to the incredible power of Leukippe’s beauty, a potential that she argues offers an equal opportunity for subversive female thoughts.47 Similarly focused on the subjection of the female to a dominating gaze, Elsom, in “Callirhoe: Displaying the Phallic Woman,” claims that the romances embody the structure of pornography by exposing the woman to the “public gaze.” Yet Elsom, following Silverman, de Lauretis, and Gayle Rubin, also argues that the romances don’t necessarily assume an “ideology of gender.” Rather, “Each text constructs its own, and by exposing the process by which gender is constructed offers a critical reader the choice of passive consent or active criticism.”48 Nevertheless, Elsom concludes that the “scopophilic” action of the hero, a response to castration anxiety provoked by the woman, is inadvertently echoed by the reader, resulting in a narrative of “exposure and revelation, which is inherently transgressive and

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violent.”49 While Elsom’s argument allows for a consideration of the relation of the construction of gender to culture or society, her conclusion is limited by opposing the genders of male and female into two distinct categories. This is the same trap that Konstan falls into, as he attempts to work out the scene in Achilles Tatius that troubles his argument for symmetry by turning (albeit briefly) to Irigaray’s conception of the male gaze. Yet Elsom helpfully indicates the role that culture plays in the construction of gender. For the gap between form and content indicated by Bakhtin’s frame of adventure-time highlights the difference between the beginning and end of the narrative and the adventures that lie between, a difference identified by either being a part of society or, as the lovers travel through foreign lands, outside of it.

Penetration, Domination, and Socialization While the mastery of the gaze of the voyeuristic hero over his heroine may seem to imply a gender-specific form of dominance (i.e., the domination of the male over the female), this authoritative gaze is repeated in form by the mastery of society over both the male and female characters as they are united as a couple in the conclusion of these novels. In addition, in a strange subversion of gender specificity, this fascinated, exploratory gaze resonates with several scenes describing exotic animals that the lovers encounter in their travels.50 These factors disturb the gender polarity that emerges in the readings of Konstan, Egger, and Elsom.51 Achilles Tatius’s descriptions of both the hippopotamus and the crocodile, narrated by Kleitophon, echo closely the details of Herodotus’s descriptions of these Egyptian creatures but with one important addition: an emphasis upon the mouth and belly. Thus, Kleitophon’s description of the crocodile (4.19) notes, as Herodotus does (2.68), the creature’s amphibious existence, its four feet and scaly skin, its length and enormity of body, and the size of its teeth. Following this, however, Kleitophon diverges from Herodotus’s account (which describes how the sandpiper enters the crocodile’s enormous mouth to clean it of leeches) to concentrate entirely on the mouth’s gaping opening: The head is directly joined to the line of the back: nature has robbed it of a neck; the head is more ferocious than the rest of the body, stretches endlessly along the jaws, and all of it opens. At other times, when the mouth is not gaping, it is only a head, but when it opens its jaws to prey, it becomes all mouth. [. . .] The span is incredible—a chasm as far back as the shoulders, opening

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In this digression from Herodotus’s account, Achilles Tatius places a clear emphasis on the opening from the outside to the inside of this foreign animal,53 suggesting that with the eyes one might penetrate through the mouth into the inner, mysterious, and hidden part of its being, the stomach (≠ gast–r), which receives such emphasis in the descriptions and dreams of Leukippe’s and Prometheus’s violation. The description of the hippopotamus (4.2) features a similar emphasis upon penetrating deep inside the mouth.54 As in the account of the crocodile, Achilles Tatius follows the details noted by Herodotus (2.71), comparing the animal to both the horse and the ox, noting its cloven hooves and its round blunt head. Yet, again, the description in the novel diverges from Herodotus’s account when it reaches the subject of the hippo’s mouth, which gapes open “all the way back to the temples [g°nuV e¶reƒa, ˙sh ka¥ pareiº, m°cri tÍn krotºjwn ™no√gei t¿ st¬ma]” (4.2.3). The great, gaping capacity of the hippo’s mouth reminds the Egyptian general of another exotic animal, the elephant; he then quickly relates a tale of how he once saw a man easily put his head deep into the middle of an elephant’s jaws. Once again, here the mouth becomes a source of penetration into the unknown inner regions of the beast.55 The descriptions of the hippopotamus and the crocodile frame the episode in which Leukippe is driven mad by an overdose of aphrodisiac (as it is discovered later). So insane is she that she forgets all modesty and exposes her genitalia to all who are gathered around her as she writhes upon the ground (≠ d‰ prosepºlaien ≠mƒn, o¶d‰n jront√zousa kr§ptein ˙sa gun‹ m‹ ˛røsqei q°lei) (4.9.2). In this case, Leukippe’s hidden mysteries become visible not through the mouth but via her genitalia; framed by the descriptions of the hippopotamus and crocodile, the genitalia take their place alongside the mouth as a potentially penetrable opening from the outer into the inner body. Of course, such an emphasis upon locales of penetration is hardly surprising in an erotic narrative. Yet coupled with the scenes of bodily violation and mutilation that arise at other points in the lovers’ adventures, the act of penetration from the outer to the inner body becomes pointedly emphasized. Adventure-time emerges as a chronotope of experimentation or play that centers around penetrating the body into its hidden, inner areas—the mysterious region wounded by eros. The matter of adventure-time—which includes experiments in violation and penetration into the private, hidden body, apparent deaths, spectacles of torture, and endless sufferings of the wounding arrows of unfulfilled

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eros—becomes resolved and closed off with the reunion of the hero and heroine; for they are invariably ultimately reunited in a public ceremony that involves a trial or test that at least one of them must pass in order to remain together. As in the case of the test of Leukippe and Melite discussed earlier, these trials examine in a legal, official manner the fidelity of the two lovers for each other. Yet the tests, as their foundational myths make clear, are emphatically oriented toward the body, the faithfulness of the heroines demonstrated by means of their bodily integrity. As such, these trials appear to bring together the private lives of the individual lovers with their public position—their acceptance by society, culminating in the official sanction of marriage and the assumption of their designated gender roles.56 Bakhtin notes of these trials: “If, in the final analysis, we should ask what, more than anything else, defines the unity of the human image in a Greek romance, we would have to answer that this unity is characterized precisely by what is rhetorical and judicial in it.”57 As Bakhtin indicates, the rhetorical nature of the judicial in these novels reflects the style of the Second Sophistic, during which most were written. The Second Sophistic (late first to second century CE), as depicted by Philostratus, is characterized above all by the public performance of ethos—in other words, its emphasis on outward expression rather than content. For Bakhtin, the externality of rhetoric is reflected in the nature of the concluding trials in the novels: “These rhetorical, judicial and public moments, however, assume an external form that is not consistent with the internal and authentic content of an individual man. His internal content is absolutely private [. . .].”58 The ostensible aspect of the trials addresses the external, apparently unified aspect of the body; yet, at the same time, the bodily ordeals and threats of torture featured in the trials are directed toward the hidden, “absolutely private” aspect within.59 As we have seen, this elusive “inner” aspect of human experience emerges in the novel by means of eros; the hidden, private individual appears in the body’s painful wounding by eros, which seems to penetrate mysteriously inside the body from somewhere outside of it. In its efforts to overcome the disruptive effects of eros, then, the attempt of the trial to legally authenticate the social position of the private individual resonates with the controlling gaze of the hero upon the wounded heroine. In this sense, the final trial echoes the ritual involving the phoenix that Kleitophon describes at the end of book 3, directly preceding Leukippe’s bout with madness. An expedition of the Egyptian army must be delayed because of the arrival of the phoenix, whose importance the general explains to Kleitophon. Once again, Achilles Tatius echoes Herodotus in his account of the phoenix (3.73),60 recounting the process in which the dead phoenix is wrapped by his offspring in an egg-like ball of myrrh and carried to Heliopolis, where the myrrh-egg is presented to an Egyptian

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priest. Achilles Tatius’s narrative differs in two significant ways, however. Whereas Herodotus’s account designates the dying phoenix as father (t¿n pat°ra), thus suggesting the bird’s gender is male, the general’s description in Achilles’ narrative leaves the gender unspecified. In the novel, the offspring is ˛ paƒV, which can designate either a male or female child, and the dead parent is referred to merely as the corpse (t¸ nekr¸). This creates a gender ambiguity exacerbated by the reproductive nature of the treatment of the dead bird’s body, formed as it is by the child into an egg-like package and delivered to the priest. In addition, the general adds a brief explanation (absent from Herodotus) of how the new phoenix must be authenticated as such once he arrives in Egypt: “An Egyptian priest brings a book from the inmost tabernacle and examines the bird according to the picture. The phoenix knows that his authenticity is being questioned and exhibits the secret, forbidden parts of his body . . . [⁄rcetai d– tiV ˘ere∞V AÎg§ptioV, bibl√on ÷x ™d§twn j°rwn, ka¥ dokimºzei t¿n ∫rnin ÷k t›V graj›V. ˛ d‰ oΔden ™pisto§menoV ka¥ tΩ ™p¬rrhta ja√nei to£ sÔmatoV (. . .)]” (3.25. 6–7).61 Only by examining the genitalia of the phoenix, the general implies, may the priest verify the bird’s authenticity. As Helen Morales indicates, the proximity of this story to Leukippe’s madness and her own genital exposure draws a clear connection between the two. Yet, while Morales draws upon this relation to explore the beastialization of Leukippe, who becomes in Morales’s argument akin to the other beasts described in the novel as a wild thing in need of taming, I take this comparison in a different direction. The gender ambiguity inherent in Achilles Tatius’s account of the phoenix, along with his emphasis upon genitalia as a place of verification of identity, places an unmistakable emphasis upon this point of penetration or opening as a place in which the gendered individual might be verified. Thus the repeated scenes of bodily penetration (by the sword or the eye) that comprise the matter of adventure-time emerge as an exploration of identity—an identity that, within the chronotope, remains ambiguous and undefined and that only assumes gendered social authenticity once the lovers undergo their public trials and are reaccepted into society. That the authentification of the phoenix takes place in a social ritual draws a further parallel between the test of the phoenix and the public trials that close the novel. Yet the ritual of viewing the phoenix’s genitalia remains shrouded in ambiguity, as Achilles Tatius never clarifies exactly which sex’s genitalia the priest seeks or sees.

Theorizing Torture and the Erotic With an eye toward the social, then, let us return now to the scene of Leukippe’s disembowelment and Kleitophon’s horrified fascination, our

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qewr√a now appropriately situated in the strange suspension of adventuretime. As we have seen, Kleitophon’s apparent pleasure in the scene might easily be viewed as sadistic male domination. Yet the distinction demarcated by adventure-time—the framing events occurring in and approved by society and the adventures experienced outside of society—emphasizes the lack of familiar social constraints during the course of the lovers’ adventures in foreign lands. In this space outside of culture, we see the relaxation of the gender roles enforced at the beginning and end of the novels. For even Leukippe, while she is usually constrained by her female modesty, loses any sense of shame in her episode of insanity. Indeed, the rebellion of the young lovers against their parents, in pursuit of their own happiness, indicates an important break with the mores of their own society—a break that is reiterated in their mutual exchange throughout their adventures of positions of weakness and strength, dominance and submission.62 As such, a consideration of Kleitophon’s response to Leukippe’s apparent mutilation merely in terms of a male dominating gaze imposes a falsely limiting assessment of his behavior in terms of the sort of gender expectations that are put into place at the end of the novel, when Kleitophon and Leukippe are established as a married couple in society. Yet, contrary to the frame of the narrative, the suspended space of adventure-time elides social constraints such as gender, disrupting the dichotomizing characterization of Kleitophon’s behavior as only sadistic male pleasure. In approaching alternative explanations for Kleitophon’s voyeuristic behavior, theories of gazing and representation more recently posed by Kaja Silverman and Carol Clover introduce a helpful vocabulary. In her essay “Masochism and Subjectivity,” Silverman proposes to break down the Freudian sexual dialectic described earlier (male/aggressive, female/passive) with a reconsideration of Freud’s theory of repetition-compulsion expressed in his analysis of the child’s game of fort and da played with a spool. Freud considers this game in terms of the economy of pleasure afforded to the child who plays it in response to his traumatic separation from his mother.63 Silverman returns to this moment in order to argue that masochism is equally constitutive of subjectivity and pleasure. Her analysis notes Freud’s linguistic shift between the “compulsion to repeat” which he finds in the child’s game, and the “mastery” that he attributes to the child’s actions. Obviously, compulsion and mastery are at odds. Therefore, Silverman concludes, “The compulsion to repeat can only be understood in light of the fact that instinctual unpleasure is apprehended by the subject as cultural pleasure.”64 In other words, Silverman argues that the masochistic constitution of the subject is a response to enculturation, which, of course, involves the imposition of gender categories. The entry of the subject into the symbolic field—into culture or society—depends upon the successful repression of instincts or transgressive desires; thus instinctual displeasure becomes cultural pleasure.

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Carol Clover’s work on horror films explores this articulation of masochism to enculturation in terms of the gaze, arguing that male viewers as well as female viewers identify with the female victims in horror movies. Clover, too, locates sexual difference as a cultural concept, suggesting that the gender of characters is codified by their actions; the actions of the characters do not emanate consequentially from their genders. Avoiding the binary opposition of the two genders, Clover conceives of gender relationally: “It is a universe [. . .] of slippage and fungibility, in which maleness and femaleness are always tentative and hence only apparent.”65 Following the development of Freud’s theories of masochism from “A Child Is Being Beaten” to “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” she notes that though the place of masochism in the psychic economy shifts for Freud, it remains associated with the “feminine” position, whether it is the fantasy of a girl or a boy. She thus notes that the term “feminine masochism” refers to the masochistic perversion of men as well as women. The “feminine masochism” model thus exposes the muddled experience of genders, the fact that it is not a clear dialectic or opposition, suggesting instead that the voyeuristic excitement of watching a female victim “is precisely predicated on the undecidability or both-andness or one-sexness of the construction.”66 In other words, the fascinated thrill of watching the female mutilated or attacked emanates from a masochistic identification of the gazing male with the victim; the pleasure produced from this exchange results from a masochistic desire that includes transgressing gender boundaries. Silverman’s and Clover’s theories provide an alternative lexicon for considering the scenes of spectacular bodily violation in the Greek romances in terms of masochism and gender ambivalence, rather than simply male domination. In this sense, reading adventure-time as a period of suspension outside of their own society, Kleitophon’s fascination with Leukippe’s disembowelment expresses a masochistic fantasy that is part of his own process of becoming an acceptable subject in formal society. The gender ambiguity created by the parallels between Leukippe, Prometheus, and Marsyas—and Kleitophon’s own references to himself as Niobe in this scene—thus reveal the lovers as in excess of the polarized dialectic of male and female. With eros causing the wound that marks the becoming-subject of both hero and heroine, the troubling effects of desires that conflict with the societal ideal for the incultured individual—or, in other words, the public citizen—assume a visible shape. Bakhtin notes that the pivot of the novels is love. Social and political events, he asserts, gain meaning only in regard to their reflection on “private life.” As a result, he reasons, “the public and rhetorical unity of the human image is to be found in the contradiction between it and its purely private content.”67 The image appears to be unified, in other words,

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by demarcating private, unacceptable desires from culturally acceptable behaviors. The external manifestation of the intact bodily figure implies a unity thus presented as a “proof”; one is persuaded of a unified individual in society in the expected rhetorical, judicial setting of an official trial. Yet in Bakhtin’s formulation the body—focus of the trial and embodiment of the human—remains hidden, folded into the contradiction between the public and the private individual. Interior experience cannot be successfully externalized. Such a response to the body is perhaps necessary in the face of its disruptive potential. Peter Brown has noted of the body in the later Roman empire: “In a world seemingly governed by iron constraints, the human body could stand out as a clearly marked locus of free choice.”68 Indeed, the potential of the body to disrupt the univocal voice of lawful society appears unmistakably in the plot of these romances—the adventures, travels, and sufferings of their heroes and heroines provoked by Fortune (Tyche) and, most importantly, the uncontrollable urges of eros. In this sense, the prevalence of wounding—the psychic wound of eros, the physical wound caused by eros, the actual and threatened tortures presented as erotic—figures formally as a subversion of the social individual caused by eros, allowing the painful wound to appear as a symptom of the disruptive potential of the body. The body thus appears in the Greek romances as latently criminal, its erotic transgressions and gender ambiguities implicit in the hero’s and heroine’s adventures in foreign lands, their private “loop” of adventure-time lost and hidden from society. The physical body disappears within the concept of the enduring individual in Bakhtin’s analysis of the chronotope of the novel, just as the waywardness of eros, its impulsive nature, is supposed to be contained by marriage. For Bakhtin, the public and rhetorical constraints of the trial depend upon homogenization and extreme abstraction of “all that is concrete and merely local. The chronotope of the Greek romance is the most abstract of all novelistic chronotopes.”69 Hence the rhetorical figure of the body veils its internal ambiguity, its private, “hidden” meaning, the excess produced by the painful wounds of eros. Bakhtin’s judicial idea of the individual, with its emphasis on socially constructed identity and the “absolutely private” self present within, tends to downplay the corporeality of the body, the material, biological substratum of identity. However, the living flesh, wounded by eros, reveals a process of becoming or evolution that, ironically, reflects Bakhtin’s own claims for the value of the novel. Bakhtin’s analysis illustrates the fact that the romances tend to conclude by erasing the transgressive body in the process of reincorporating the hero and heroine as socially acceptable or comprehensible individuals. Thus Bakhtin’s adventure-time chronotope highlights the way that the genre effaces the

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experience of becoming induced by eros. Nevertheless, the transgressive and erotic body at the heart of the novel insistently continues to emerge, incomplete and excessive, prompting the desire for mastery in the process of judgment or criticism: in the fascinated gaze of the author, the narrator, and his audience.

Chapter 4

THE MORAL BODY The Figure of Suffering in Prudentius’s Peristephanon Liber

In the ninth hymn of the Peristephanon Liber (c. 402 CE), Prudentius describes the martyrdom of St. Cassian. A Christian teacher whose students turned away from the faith and rebelled against him, Cassian is stabbed to death by his pupils, who use their writing utensils as weapons. In a stylistic echo of the early novel, Prudentius recounts how he is reminded of the story when he sees a painting of it in the basilica of Cassian in Forum Cornelii:1 I lifted my face towards heaven, and there stood confronting me a picture of the martyr painted in colors, all his parts torn, and showing his skin broken with tiny pricks. Countless boys round about (what a pitiful sight!) were stabbing and piercing his body with the little styles with which they used to run over their wax tablets, writing down the droning lesson in school. [erexi ad caelum faciem, stetit obvia contra fucis colorum picta imago martyris plagas mille gerens, totos lacerata per artus, ruptam minutis praeferens punctis cutem. innumeri circum pueri, miserabile visu, confossa parvis membra figebant stilis, unde pugillares soliti percurrere ceras scholare murmur adnotantes scripserant.] (IX.9–16)2 In Cassian’s martyrdom, letters are inscribed with the styles into flesh instead of a wax tablet and the bloody writing marks the site of a painful martyrdom. Describing the painting, Prudentius not only recounts the visual details of it, but also steps back to make a critical comment upon it (miserabile

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visu) for his own audience.3 Immediately after the poet’s representation of the scene depicted in the painting, a caretaker of the basilica carefully narrates for Prudentius the whole story of the rebellion of the students and Cassian’s martyrdom. According to the caretaker, the marks of the bloody wounds call eventually to Christ, who thus releases Cassian’s soul from his body and carries it up to heaven. The bloody letters thus become a message addressed to Christ, who answers with salvation. Yet, Prudentius’s response to the visual depiction of Cassian’s martyrdom suggests that the wounds also carry an additional message, addressed to the viewer—in this case Prudentius, who responds with pity and, eventually, prayer. Thus the hymn to Cassian demonstrates the dual message that the wounded body of the martyr might bear: one asking for salvation, addressed to Christ, and one asking for pity and faith, addressed to the witness. On the one hand, then, the address of the martyr must both move beyond his own wounded body—in his desire to gain salvation by means of transcending his earthly, sensual, mortal self—and emphasize his wounded body—in his desire to persuade others to the faith by means of his own painful torture.4 Furthermore, in the juxtaposition of the painting and narrative, both of which tell Cassian’s story, the poet himself puts forth yet another address, this time to his own audience. By indicating both a visual (via ekphrasis) and a verbal depiction at once, Prudentius is able to suggest that the effects of each might be conveyed by his poetry. In the style of the Late Antique romance, the hymns of the Peristephanon Liber might make of the reader a witness, who can respond to Prudentius’s poems in the manner he himself demonstrates. Yet, while the spectacle of torture in the romance prompts a horrified fascination and pity that provides a socializing identification, Prudentius adopts the romantic trope into the martyrological poem as a means of particularly religious socialization: pity that prompts prayer.5 Indeed, torture in Prudentius’s poems reflects an early Christian ethos of suffering that provides access to God for the victim and, through witnessing, for others. This philosophical departure from the Greek tradition manifests itself in a radical difference in the way the tortured body manifests meaning. In a manner that departs from the Late Antique romances, Prudentius’s presentation of Cassian’s story creates a self-referentiality that emphasizes the significance of Cassian’s form of death. For his students inflict his bloody wounds by writing upon him (Prudentius uses the verbs scribo [IX.16, 52, 73] and noto [IX.82] to designate their action in his own description of the painting as well as in the caretaker’s account). This writing, in fact, presents a greater torture than simply stabbing to death; rather, by restricting themselves to the shallow piercings and markings of writing, the students create an excess of pain, exacerbating Cassian’s torment and calling

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upon Christ to grant him death out of pity, since the superficial wounds inflicted by the students promise merely to prolong his torture. The written letters on the martyr echo Prudentius’s own writing, which holds a privileged position in the Peristephanon Liber: Prudentius indicates that he hopes through his writing not only to preserve the stories of the martyrs so that his readers can continue to be inspired to faith by them, but also to gain salvation for himself through his poetic composition. Thus the series of poems aims toward two related goals. By means of his literal description, Prudentius communicates a didactic and inspirational narrative. In addition, as this chapter will demonstrate, Prudentius creates a certain excess in his writing in his use of literary, rhetorical tropes, by which he hopes to gain for himself as poet the same benefits as the martyr. Thus, Prudentius’s address to his audience manifests itself on two levels: conveying the account of the martyrdom to his audience depends upon the specific logic of language; yet suggesting the awesome (and, by nature, incommunicable) power of the Christian God at the heart of these martyrdoms depends upon Prudentius’s moving beyond literal language, releasing language from its logical limits—from its own law—by means of rhetorical trope. In addition to such literary tropes as the ekphrasis described at the beginning of this chapter, Prudentius utilizes the persuasive potential of pain to achieve such an effect, providing gruesomely precise descriptions of the torture of each of the martyrs he addresses in the work. In fact, as the hymns progress, the rhetorical potential of torture becomes increasingly emphasized. Such signifying associations with the affect of torture reach their culmination in the story of Romanus. Punished by the prefect Asclepiades for being the leader of a band of Christians, Romanus is the subject of the longest of Prudentius’s hymns.6 His story provides the clearest indication of the correlation between the wound and the Christian message by emphasizing the mouth and tongue as targets of torture. Yet Prudentius’s depiction of the torture noticeably omits any indication of pain suffered by Romanus. Rather, from the very beginning of his torture, Romanus’s voice supplies a ceaseless Christian oration in lieu of cries of pain. The prefect responds to this flow of meaning by ordering Romanus’s mouth mutilated. With this dictum, Asclepiades (along with Prudentius) asserts an association of Romanus’s voice with his wound that culminates in the removal of Romanus’s tongue. Yet Romanus perceives his mutilated mouth, opened more widely by the wound, as liberating the message of Christ that is within him. Not only is the mouth widened, but every wound becomes a mouth; hence, Prudentius suggests that the wound itself utters the voice to which Asclepiades responds. However, the nature of this response

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calls Romanus’s address into question: What sort of message is spoken by a wound? While the tongue (lingua) figures most clearly the speech of Romanus being physically removed, his ability to continue communicating (according to Prudentius) emphasizes the extralinguistic dimension of his address.7 By first considering Prudentius’s work within its Late Antique and early Christian cultural and literary context, and then conducting a close analysis of the hymn to Romanus, this chapter will examine how torture performed before a witnessing audience is used to convey a specifically Christian “word” whose effects exceed the limits of the law.

Trial, Spectacle, and Judgment In his treatise De spectaculis (c. 197–200 CE), Tertullian reprimands Roman citizens for supporting and attending the violent and idolatrous games that were so popular in Late Antique Roman society. Among the dangerous pleasures that Tertullian criticizes are several that share characteristics of the Christian martyrdoms with which he is also concerned: gladiatorial contests and hunting spectacles in the amphitheater, athletic contests in the stadium, and the performances of farces, mimes, and pantomimes in the theater. Cautioning Christians against participation in the frenzy of these Roman games, Tertullian suggests substitutes that he finds comparable and acceptable for Christians—the Christian “games” of martyrdom, exorcism, healing, and revelation (XXIX). Yet Tertullian’s urgent criticism in his Apologeticum (197 CE) against the Roman spectacles, which often were penal in nature, testifies to their enduring popularity:8 But you really are still more religious in the amphitheatre, where over human blood, over the polluting stain of capital punishment, your gods dance, supplying plots and themes for criminals— unless it is that criminals often adopt the roles of your deities. We have seen at one time or another Attis, that god from Pessinus, being castrated, and a man who was being burnt alive had taken on the role of Hercules. (XV.4–5)9 The confusion of bodily punishment and entertaining performance to which Tertullian refers here describes a public method of punishment endorsed by both Roman government and citizens. In this “fatal charade,”10 the formal process of punishing criminals before a witnessing audience increases its entertainment value by integrating dramatic role-play into the penal process. Foucault suggests that such a spectacle expresses a “juridico-political” function,11 imposing the penal aims of retribution, torture, humiliation, and

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correction upon the prisoner, while simultaneously conveying a message of power sent to the audience, meant to prevent and deter further crimes. The spectacle provides the means of capital punishment of the criminal while at the same time demonstrating the punishment for the witnessing audience. In his study of the Roman “fatal charade,” K. M. Coleman argues that in order to be an effective deterrent, “a penalty should arouse horror and aversion.”12 However, the persons who were subjected to such punishments would have been prisoners of a particular sort: in most cases, prisoners to be executed in the auditoria would have been noncitizens or the lowest class of citizen, humiliores; upper-class Romans, or honestiores, could only be tortured or executed for crimes of treason.13 Thus, since the majority of the audience would have belonged to the upper classes, there would already have been a marked difference between spectator and participant. Coleman argues that this distance allowed audiences to enjoy rather than be repulsed by these spectacles: “[N]o doubt audiences in the amphitheatre experienced these sensations, but so effective was the gulf created between spectacle and spectators that the dominant reaction among the audience was pleasure rather than revulsion.”14 According to Coleman’s claim, the deterrent power that the violent spectacle of punishment sought to convey to the witnessing spectators offered a pleasurable sensation. Indeed, audience pleasure in the spectacle is often undeniably clear in accounts of such performances. For example, Augustine describes the seduction of the violent and bloody gladiatorial spectacle, noting with horror the drunken pleasure his good friend Alypius took in such shows.15 Recalling Aristotle’s theory of catharsis in tragedy, we might conclude that this pleasure combines for the spectator a general identification with the victim with a distance between the two that relieves any sense of personal threat. Pleasure derives, in other words, from the relief of having someone with whom the audience member identifies suffer a horrible event instead of the spectator.16 The association of these spectacles with trial and punishment (particularly in the context of religious persecution), however, adds another dimension to the exchange between the audience and the victim: the notion of guilt. For example, the passio of Perpetua and Felicita describes the staging of the martyrdom as a fatal charade, with Perpetua and Felicita playing the parts of priestesses of Ceres and their male companions dressed as priests of Saturn. Although the sympathies of the crowd shift to the side of the Christians during the midst of the torture, the demand for retribution asserts itself undeniably at the close of the performance: “shortly after [one of Perpetua’s companions was tortured,] he was thrown unconscious with the rest in the usual spot to have his throat cut. But the mob asked that their bodies be brought out into the open that their eyes might be guilty witnesses of the sword that pierced their flesh.”17 The audience seems to

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demand for its satisfaction a view of the final punishment being inflicted upon the guilty. In doing so, according to the author of the passio, they themselves partake of another guilt in their witnessing. Is the exchange of guilt here the result of identification? In that case, the feeling of retribution would be a result of feeling one’s own guilt extirpated in the violent punishment of another. Of course, one might also conclude that this account was probably written by a Christian who interpreted the witnesses’ looks as guilty based on what he believed combined with what he saw. In either case, the determination of justice manifests itself in the response of the witness to what he sees presented before him. Yet the presentation of the spectacle as a pleasing dramatic performance bestows, in some measure, a quality of enjoyment or satisfaction upon the process of judgment. In the encounters Tertullian suggests as alternatives to the Roman spectacle, of course, the combatants are clearly Christians gaining victory over pagans, with good, for Tertullian, triumphing over evil. In the pagan contests that he criticizes, on the other hand, the “moral” positions of the participants are not quite as clear; this is, in fact, one of the problems that he sees in such encounters: “But who will pledge himself to me that it is always the guilty who are condemned to the beasts, or whatever the punishment, and that it is never inflicted on innocence too, through the vindictiveness of the judge it may be, the weakness of the advocate, the severity of torture?” (XIX). While Tertullian here raises the implicit problem of determining guilt or innocence in the Roman contests in which a prisoner would often be the designated loser, the certainty of Christian piety is manifested for him in the successful victories he perceives in martyrdoms, exorcisms, and healing. The certainty of guilt or innocence enacted by the punishment fails under the terms of Roman law for Tertullian, while he interprets without question the performative victory of Christian goodness. The ambiguity of rendering judgment upon the visual spectacle presents itself also in the terms of authority manifested at the site. In the excerpt of the Apologeticum quoted here, Tertullian locates the gods of the Romans in these bloody spectacles (not coincidentally, since one of his major criticisms of the fatal charades is that they corrupt the sanctity of the gods by impersonating them in such theatrical spectacles). Yet martyrdoms also provided for Christians the opportunity to make the power of their God manifest at the site of torture. Thus in the example of the passio of Perpetua and Felicita, a conflation of gods occurs: while performing in a pageant that personified Roman gods, the martyrs stoically suffer their tortures, strengthened by the perceived presence of their own Christian God. In each case, for the Romans and the Christians, the presence of the god(s) is perceived at the site where trial and punishment occur. However,

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the sense of which god is present depends, as in the case of guilt, upon the perception of the viewing spectator.

Martyrdom and the Performance of Power The interaction of perception and judgment occupies an essential position in the martyrdom, since the torture described in martyrologies appears as part of a formal trial, in the form of a quaestio, or quaestio per tormentum.18 Most martyrologies describe this sort of investigative questioning, in which an attempt is supposedly being made to extract from those accused of being Christian a “confession”—a public recantation of the Christian faith and a profession of loyalty to the Roman emperor and customs. For martyrdoms that take place in the guise of a “trial,” then, such a confession becomes the ostensible goal of the process. However, the public torture of Christians also might serve as a reminder to Roman citizens of the power of the Roman government, discouraging others from becoming Christian and betraying Roman law. In this sense, the Roman empire utilizes the spectacle of martyrdom to write the message of its own potency on the body of the martyr. Yet willingly suffering martyrdom holds its own rewards for Christians, as well. By undergoing martyrdom, Christians might combat Roman persecution by resisting the punishments inflicted upon them. Tertullian claims in the Apologeticum that Roman torture of Christians serves as proof of the innocence of Christians; it is for this reason, he asserts, that God allows Christians to suffer: “Yet, your tortures accomplish nothing, though each is more refined than the last; rather, they are an enticement to our religion. We become more numerous every time we are hewn down by you: the blood of Christians is the seed [semen est sanguis Christianorum].”19 Not only death, then, but the torturous spilling of sanguis serves as a rhetorical device to persuade others to join the fold.20 Tertullian encourages martyrs to suffer these pains stoically, in order that their manner of death might demonstrate to others the immensity of their faith and the great strength of the God who enables them to overcome their painful tortures in a bravely patient manner. Emphasizing the performance of strength, Tertullian also encourages the martyrs to approach their martyrdom as a contest. Thus the endurance of pain becomes a trial in itself. In Ad martyras (c. 197 CE),21 Tertullian’s letter of support to martyrs suffering under the persecutions of Septimius Severus (193–211 CE), Tertullian compares martyrs to gladiators (1.2), to soldiers called to service in the army of God (3.1), and to athletes in a contest

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(3.3). Not only should the martyrs not lose their faith, he urges, but they must maintain peace, since they are in a position to bestow it upon others, also, by the manner of their martyrdom. Tertullian encourages them to accomplish this feat by making the flesh submissive to the spirit, although it might fear the pains of torture. He suggests that martyrs should remember all of the others who have not only borne their sufferings patiently, but actually “sought them on their own accord for the sake of fame and glory” (4.3). This promise of fame, along with his comparison of the martyrs to heroic gladiators, soldiers, or athletes, suggests a “heroic” aspect to the suffering of martyrdom that recalls the pagan, classical, heroic tradition. Yet, after giving examples of tortures undergone by others, Tertullian is careful to point out the difference between pagan and Christian martyrdom; the goal of torture and martyrdom for Christians is suffering “for truth unto salvation,” whereas others have suffered it, he suggests, “out of vanity unto perdition” (5.1–2). The benefits of suffering a martyrdom are not only for the Church, then; although the fame of a martyr might persuade others to profess a Christian faith, the act also points to a greater “truth” of Christianity—an excess of suffering brings the promise of salvation. Tertullian asserts in the Apologeticum that nobly undergoing a torturous death at the hands of the Romans offers a guarantee of Christian salvation. Addressing the patience with which early Christians endured their persecutions, Tertullian explains that calm and willing suffering brings the grace of God, the forgiveness of all sins. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, reiterates this sentiment several years later, in his exhortation to martyrdom addressed to Fortunatus: “In the baptism of water is received the remission of sins, in the baptism of blood the crown of virtues.”22 With this statement, Cyprian formulates a level of salvation for the martyr that lies situated between common Christians and Christ. According to Paul’s letter to the Romans, the baptism of water unites Christians with Christ, also baptizing them “into union with his death. By our baptism, then, we were buried with him and shared his death by the glorious power of the Father, so also we might live a new life [eÎV t¿n qºnaton a¶to£ ÷bapt√sqhmen; sunetºjhmen o‚n a¶t¸ diΩ to£ bapt√smatoV eÎV t¿n qºnaton, ≈i¢na Ïsper “g°rqh Crist¿V ÷k nekrÍn diΩ t›V d¬chV to£ patr¬V, o©twV ka¥ ≠meƒV ÷n kain¬thti zw›V peripat–swmen.]23 With baptism, Paul saw Christians undergoing a symbolic death (a death that imitated Christ’s corporeal death) and being reborn to a new life of the spirit on Earth (with the soul taking precedence over the flesh, in an echo of Christ’s resurrection in Heaven). By extension, Cyprian’s claim about martyrdom, the martyr’s “baptism of blood,” recalls Christ’s torturous death and depicts the martyr’s as distinctly parallel—here is fleshly suffering that echoes Christ’s not only symbolically but literally. While the baptized Christian can rest secure in the belief that his or her sins

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are forgiven, Cyprian suggests, the martyr can confidently assume that he has earned a place in heaven by suffering, echoing Christ’s painful crown of thorns with his own crown of virtues, the martyr/athlete’s designation of victory. Thus, a martyr’s death ensures his salvation because of the sacrifice he makes for Christianity, a sacrifice modeled on that of Christ.24 Both of these early church writers emphasize that by suffering death salvation may be guaranteed; in other words, the pain leading up to death determines the nature of the sacrifice. In placing such an emphasis upon physical suffering, Tertullian and Cyprian reflect the words of the Sermon on the Mount, recounted in the gospel of Matthew as foreshadowing Christ’s own painful death: “Happy are those who suffer persecution for justice, because the kingdom of heaven is for them [makºrioi o˘ dediwgm°noi ¤neken dikaios§nhV, ˙ti a¶tÍn ÷stin ≠ basile√a tÍn o¶ranÍn].”25 Following this promise, the martyr suffering for the Christian church sacrifices his or her life for the earthly benefit of the church, while simultaneously feeling certain of gaining for him or herself a secure place in heaven. Additionally, the martyr might also demonstrate through his patient suffering of tortures the powerful eminence of the Christian God. In this manner, the martyr appropriates for Christian ends the spectacle put on by the Roman government in demonstration of its own power. Yet, the determination of authority and power in the violent spectacle hinges upon the perception of the witness. For either the Roman or the Christian cause, the “success” of the martyrdom depends upon a particular engagement of the audience with the performance. Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, suggests that the psychological fascination with public punishment lies in the impression of guilt made manifest: “[It] assured the articulation of the written on the oral, the secret on the public [. . .]; it made it possible to reproduce the crime on the visible body of the criminal [. . .].”26 In the Roman system, the crime displayed upon the body for the appreciation of the Roman witness would be a treasonous belief in Christianity. One professing faith in Christianity relinquished his or her Roman citizenship, since the practice of Christianity prohibited participation in Roman customs of sacrifice, worship of Roman gods, or acknowledgment of the Roman emperor as divinely ordained. Having surrendered his or her place under Roman law, however, the Christian witness approached interpretation of the spectacle from a perspective outside of that law. In the Christian system, then, the Holy Spirit itself might take the place of the “crime,” its presence appearing for the Christian witness in the suffering body of the martyr. Moved by the martyr’s performance of overcoming horrible pains, potential converts, also, might be encouraged to join the church.27 The potential for such a perversion of the intended meaning of the torture is suggested also in the aforementioned verse of Matthew. For what,

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exactly, is the “justice” [dikaios§nhV] referred to here? Under Roman law, Christians punished for being guilty of treason would be tortured in an effort to obtain a confession (i.e., a denial of Christian faith), and then put to death in the execution of justice—a justice executed in terms of mortality. Under the law of the Christian God, on the other hand, suffering the “punishment” of martyrdom became in fact a reward for innocence; the successful submission of the flesh to the soul, the victory over the bodily pain of torture, was announced by the martyr’s profession (and demonstration) of faith, up to the moment of death. Performing such an act of faith in the name of Christianity resulted in the forgiveness of sins (that is, the sins of the flesh, the sins of mortal life) and a guarantee of immortality—a justice, then, executed under the terms of immortality or God. What, then, determines the interpretation of the act of martyrdom? If martyrdom is suffered under a Roman regime, how is the law of the Christian God conveyed? The emphasis placed on the suffering body in martyrdom is important here; for although the flesh is being submitted to the soul, the body is integral to the communication of the message of Christianity that the suffering of the martyr is meant to convey. The body mediates this message, communicating it in terms of pain. Thus judgment of guilt or innocence is informed by the measure of pain. Yet the determination of value (guilt or innocence) by a measure whose quantity and quality can never be clearly defined introduces an unknowable element into the equation. The ambiguity of meaning created by the illogical factor in the function designates a place where rhetoric comes into play.28

Poetry and Potency Prudentius alludes to his poetry’s twofold rhetorical purpose in his Praefatio (404–405 CE).29 Apparently worried by his advancing years, Prudentius claims a desire to create something more meaningful than his civic service that will last beyond his death. Thus he asserts, “Yet as my last end draws near let my sinning soul put off her folly. With voice at least let her honor God [. . .]” (34–36). Prudentius claims to turn to religious writing in the hopes of gaining salvation through guiding his soul away from sinful tendencies and by voicing songs in honor of God. Although the contemplative activity of writing lacks the excitement, violence, and spectacle of martyrdom—as well as the physical suffering that would guarantee salvation—Prudentius suggests that he hopes to achieve something similar, albeit on a lesser scale, through his new vocation. In bearing witness to the acts of the martyrs through the hymns of the Peristephanon Liber, Prudentius thus pursues two rhetorical intentions: to persuade others toward the faith by describing

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the works of suffering by which the martyrs gained their salvation, and to effect his own salvation by means of the work of his writing. Reflecting such a goal, his poems often close with his own hopes for salvation, mentioned in conjunction with assurances of the salvation of the martyr(s) he is addressing. In addition, at several moments in the text, he places the purpose of his own words alongside those of the book in heaven, in which the angels record the names of martyrs. In his opening hymn, he asserts that “Written in heaven are the names of two martyrs; Christ has entered them there in letters of gold, while on earth He has recorded them in characters of blood [Scripta sunt caelo duorum martyrum vocabula, / aureis quae Christus illic adnotavit litteris, / sanguinis notis eadem scripta terris tradidit]” (I.1–3). Here, Prudentius draws a parallel between the scripta of letters in a book and the scripta etched bloodily into the bodies of martyrs. This relation is extended one step further to connect to his own writing as well. In drawing self-references to his writing at other moments in the Peristephanon, the echo of this first, heavenly, book must continue to be heard, as in the closing lines of hymn VI, for example: One day will come a time when in the dissolution of the world Fructuosus30 will free thee, Tarraco, from sore distresses, covering thee from fire; and perchance under Christ’s favour he will deign to give relief to my torments too, as he recalls my sweet hendecasyllables. (VI.157–62) [olim tempus erit ruente mundo, cum te, Tarraco, Fructuosus acri solvet supplicio tegens ab igni. Fors dignabitur et meis medellam tormentis dare prosperante Christo, dulces hendecasyllabos revolvens.] (VI.157–62)31 Through his poetic witnessing to Fructuosus’s martyrdom, Prudentius hopes also to gain the grace of God for himself. In a sense, then, the blessings that Fructuosus received for his martyrdom might be passed through Prudentius’s account of the event to the poet himself. In pursuing salvation through writing poetry, Prudentius depends upon the word to serve in a rhetorical manner analogous to that of the body, whose overt rhetorical function was already established in the phenomenon of martyrdom and the Late Antique cult of the martyr. In pursuing this goal, Prudentius draws heavily upon three related factors: the potential of memory and presence developed in the Late Antique cult of the martyr; the style of the Late Antique period, which often utilized ornamental rhetorical

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tropes such as ekphrasis and metaphor to expand the potential of language beyond its normal usage; and the strange materiality lent to the word by the early church. Liminality and the Cult of the Martyrs In the description of the martyrdom of Fructuosus described in the previous section, Prudentius suggests a larger benefit that the city of Tarraco, as the location of the martyr’s cult site, might receive from Fructuosus’s martyrdom. Such an assumption, a common facet of the cult of the martyrs, is a tradition to which Prudentius refers often in the Peristephanon. In fact, whatever power Prudentius expected to gain from his hymns seems to have been related, at least in part, to his composition or performance of them at the site of the martyr, a claim which he makes in the beginning of each of the hymns.32 In the cult of the martyr (and the corresponding cult of the saint), graves of martyrs and saints were considered privileged places that possessed powers derived from the presence of the dead body of the holy man. Peter Brown suggests that Christianity crossed traditional barriers between the living and the dead, fostering a proximity to the dead that would have disturbed pagan and Jewish beliefs. Thus, although the location of the dead would typically have been avoided by Romans, placed somewhere at the edge of town, the tomb of the saint became the public property of Christians and the focus of ritual. Such graves were thought to possess special powers, considered “privileged places, where the contrasted poles of Heaven and Earth met.”33 After religious persecutions moved into the past, Christians brought the acts of the martyrs from memory into presence by celebrating publicly the martyrs’ victories. Power was believed to emanate from the relic of the saint or martyr—that is, from the remains of the dead body, considered a junction between Heaven and Earth. Hymns, scripture, and often a reading of the martyr’s passio were part of the ritual performed by the martyr’s grave. In return, the dead holy man was thought to lend his powers to the place where he was buried. In a patriotic sense, Christian towns wanted to have their own “patron” to oversee and protect their citizens. Having a recognizable cult site linked individual towns to a growing community of Christian cities scattered around the Mediterranean world. More tangibly, though, miracles of healing, possession, or exorcism would often be performed at the tomb of a saint or martyr. The performance of these miracles was believed to be a direct result of the praesentia of the martyr. In this sense, the cult site occupied a liminal space, with heaven and earth, mortals and God, meeting at the locus of the martyr’s body. The reading of the passio, Brown suggests, “abolished time.”34 Through the figure of the suffering body, it

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brought the deeds of God in the Old Testament and the New Testament, along with the acts of the martyr, to the present; the composition of the hymn or passio in honor of the martyr, and the ritual of repeating it yearly, on the saint’s feast day, extended the time line indefinitely into the future. Thus, past, present, and future joined together into a sacred space and time, the liminal praesentia of the martyr’s shrine.35 The Scene of Writing Referring implicitly to the power of the cult site, Prudentius’s hymns use deictic markers to emphasize the place of martyrdom in the poem. Referring to both the past event and the present cult ritual, Prudentius, by moving back and forth between the oppositions of the past and present, conflates time and space into the sacred place of the poem and its performance. With his record of the martyr’s death, Prudentius situates the praesentia of the martyr in the space of his hymn. Michael Roberts describes this function as it appears in Hymn I: Time is spanned by the survival of the record of the martyrdom, in the “figures of blood” [I.3], a text that supplies the absence of a formal written Passion as a representation of the act of sacrifice from which the martyr derives. The ambiguity of the phrase inlitas cruore sancto . . . harenas in line 8 is no accident. Does it mean “sands were dyed with holy blood” in the past, or “still dyed with holy blood,” i.e., the stain remains? In practice both. At the grave of the martyr the temporal distinction of then, the time of the passion, and now is abolished.36 At the grave of the martyr, temporal distinctions are subverted by Prudentius’s hymn, sung at “this spot [hic]” of bloodshed. Thus, his poem works in the same manner as the “figures of blood [sanguinis]” which become immortal and timeless as they are translated into letters of gold written in heaven. The cruor spilled at the site where he sings gives his words a power to transcend the mortal, echoing the “figures of blood.” Prudentius thus emphasizes the association of physical suffering and the power of the martyr: it is the blood shed violently (cruore) that remains present at the site, bestowing upon his poetic version of the event its own praesentia. With his reference to the spot (hic) of former bloodshed where he now composes his poem, Prudentius is following a Late Antique literary tradition by anchoring his literary text in a particular (past) place and time by appropriation of a physical referent. Such an effect is also achieved in his poetry through the rhetorical device of ekphrasis, as I noted at the beginning

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of this chapter. The rhetorician Theon describes in his Progymnasmata the purpose that ekphrasis was to serve: “Ekphrasis is a descriptive account bringing what is illustrated vividly before one’s sight [. . .]. The virtues of ekphrasis are in particular clarity and vividness, such that one can almost see what is narrated.”37 Ekphrasis enables Prudentius, like the authors of the early novels, to bring what is visually present to them into presence for the audience, through a detailed descriptive technique meant to recreate the visual in the literary.38 The popularity of ekphrasis in Late Antique writing reflects a general aesthetic concern with appearances. In Late Antique painting, mosaic, and sculpture, as Michael Roberts notes, the “seams not only show, they are positively advertised.”39 This superficial emphasis in visual art, an attention to form as opposed to content, manifests itself in literary style, as well. The two arts in this period are, in fact, considered intimately connected, with the literary considered an extension or elaboration of visual art (an echo of Horace’s well-known pronouncement: ut pictura poesis [Ars Poetica 361]). In the Late Antique period, this connection receives a particular emphasis, stressing the ability of the literary to recreate the visual through elaborate descriptive techniques. Thus Prudentius utilizes the rhetorical trope ekphrasis to suspend the limits of language, creating a visual presence in the place of the word. Rhetoric, Faith, and Signification Yet, writing in the service of the Christian faith, Prudentius must also respond to the cautions of the early church fathers, which discouraged the gratuitous use of elaborate detail in the fear it might distract from the ideological message of the text. In the final book of De Doctrina Christiana, for example, Augustine stresses that Christian speech and writing should teach and exhort, but not delight. Insisting that Christian work should persuade, and not simply display, he nevertheless admits that display might be acceptable if such ornament is shown to be serving a higher purpose. Appealing to the Bible as an example, Augustine suggests that the best Christian speech (and art) should benefit and attract, charm and improve.40 This advice ties rhetorical tropes directly to Christian faith: the word of the early Christian writer should be able to inspire faith by means of its use of rhetorical tropes. Despite its concern with teaching over pleasure, then, emphasis upon outer form makes its appearance in Christian literary and visual art of the Late Antique period—not only in a descriptive or ornamental sense, but at the immediate level of language, as well. As Auerbach suggests, Christian

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writings offer gaps and lacunae that indicate the mystery of God. Not meant to portray reality, but rather composed to convey one “superior truth,” Christian texts leave thoughts unspoken, constructing language in such a way as to merely suggest a “second, concealed meaning.”41 Thus the literal meaning can also contain an additional, figural meaning. In De magistro, Augustine suggests such a potential for language in individual words. Distinguishing between words designating things that can be signified by signs (“signifiables”) and words designating things which can be seen (“visibles”), Augustine describes a chain of signifiers that increases in specificity from the idea of a word to the visible reality that one seeks to indicate by speaking (for example, “word” [verbum]씮 “noun” [nomen]씮 “river”씮 visible reality). In this sense, a word functions much like a gesture, pointing toward the visible reality it is meant to recall. Words thus function as a means to an end, a mediating material that aims our thoughts toward meaning.42 Augustine claims that the purpose of speech is to remind oneself of the realities themselves, “of which the words are signs” (I.2).43 For this reason, he explains, when Christ taught the disciples to pray, “He did not teach them words, but realities by means of words” (I.2). Christ, rather, “dwells in the inner man” (I.2) and God should therefore be sought in the “depths of the rational soul” (I.2). Through his analysis of language, Augustine demonstrates to his son Adeodatus, his interlocutor in the dialogue, that we learn not through words sounding in the ear, but through a truth that teaches internally. His sense of truth as an “interior light” that can be shared without words (XII.39) brings him to his conclusion: “Christ teaches within the mind. Man’s words are external, and serve only to give reminders” (XIV). Augustine’s conception of the word as a reminder that points toward an inner or hidden meaning suggests a physical sense of the word or language as framing meaning, an external element that merely indicates a reality within it. Thus the Christian word is itself liminal, literally a threshold. Entering into the space of Christian writing (or speech, in the case of the rhetorician that Augustine has in mind) puts the audience (and the author) on the threshold of a meaning beyond language. Such a conception of the potential of meaning suggested by the word alleviates language from a one-to-one correspondence, allowing an excess of meaning (i.e., the Christian God) to be possibly inherent—yet never definitely indicated—in the sign. In signifying God, the Christian word must therefore convey its ultimate meaning illogically (via a rhetoric outside of grammar) or empathically—as in the case of descriptions of wounding and pain. The Christian word—whose “outer” sign indicates the meaning hidden within—thus reveals itself in its structure as echoing the body, which encloses and imprisons the soul.

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Word, Body, Lingua In the Peristephanon Liber, the corresponding functions of the word and the body become most clear in Hymns X and XIII, which focus on the lingua as site of torture. In Hymn XIII, Prudentius pays homage to the martyr Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, whose martyrdom ended in decapitation by sword. Yet Prudentius prefaces his description of the martyrdom with the assertion that Cyprian’s tongue has continued to remain alive, though the rest of his body is dead: “His blood rests in Africa, but his tongue is potent everywhere; it alone of all his body still survives in life, it alone cannot die [. . .] [incubat in Libya sanguis, sed ubique lingua pollet, / sola superstes agit de corpora, sola obire nescit (. . .)]” (XIII.4–6). The emphasis upon the survival of Cyprian’s tongue recalls his great fame as a prolific Christian writer and as a talented orator and teacher of rhetoric prior to his church service.44 Hymn X, in which Romanus has his tongue cut out as the climactic aspect of his torture, emphasizes a much broader connection between the lingua and the immortal message of the Christian God. In this hymn, Prudentius elaborates upon his sources more than in any of the other hymns of the Peristephanon, deviating from them to provide Romanus with a number of lengthy speeches.45 This particular elaboration upon his sources makes Hymn X far longer than any of the others in the collection, accentuating the importance of Romanus as a speaker out of whose mouth flows the Christian word. In this function, Romanus’s profession appears strikingly similar to that of Prudentius, as he explains it in the Praefatio. The language of Prudentius in the last verse of this poem, in particular, reverberates strikingly with the theme of Romanus: “And while I write or speak of these themes, O may I fly forth in freedom from the bonds of the body, to the place whither my busy tongue’s last word shall tend [haec dum scribo vel eloquor, / vinclis o utinam corporis emicem / liber, quo tulerit lingua sono mobilis ultimo!]” (43–45). In writing, Prudentius hopes to escape his mortal body, springing free along with the sound—or meaning—of the Christian word as it reaches toward heaven. Such a feat might be achieved, he seems to imply, at the conjunction of poetic language and the Christian word. For in the case of Cyprian and himself, the lingua occupies a metonymic position: in each case, lingua may be read literally, as the tongue or as language; read metonymically, however, lingua may also stand in for the function of the tongue and language together—that is, the communication of meaning. In this case, lingua can then signify a meaning that lingers on, even after the bodily tongue is removed; in fact, the poem of Romanus implies that the fullest communication of meaning occurs because the tongue is removed. The

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removed lingua/tongue here reveals, by its exclusion (or extraction), the meaning of Romanus’s speech as founded upon the (torturous) exclusion of this lingua. In this case, then, Romanus’s language, excluded from itself (qua lingua), reveals itself as pure signification, or signification without referent. The removal of Romanus’s lingua emphasizes the literality of his speech—that is, its rhetorical ambivalence or undecideability. The poetic language of the poem, which allows such a rhetorical, metonymic trope to remain unresolved, allows both meanings to exist simultaneously. In other words, the ambiguity of Prudentius’s poetic language (lingua) maintains the possibility of more than one meaning at once. As Michael Roberts remarks, metaphor and metonomy in Prudentius “create uncertainty about the time and place of an action and suggest that events occur, for instance, simultaneously on earth and in heaven or in the past of the martyrdom and in the here and now.”46 The use of poetic language here suspends temporallogical dimensions, reemphasizing the sacred, liminal space of the cult of the martyrs for which Prudentius’s hymns are composed. Though, according to Augustine (and other early church fathers), the Christian God cannot be signified directly, Prudentius’s poetic word in its rhetorical ambiguity offers the possibility of a meaning that might connote that God by eliding either speech or writing, extending beyond the defined—a potential that is enabled by the removal of the lingua. Thus setting the work of his writing parallel to the work of the martyrs, Prudentius draws a link between the word and the body in their potential to surpass by means of their mutilation or distortion their own formal limits—ultimately exceeding the limits of the law itself.

The Body and the Law The parallel function of the word and the body that I am suggesting is best explored in a careful reading of that hymn where it manifests itself most clearly, the hymn addressed to Romanus, deacon of Antioch in the community of Caesarea. According to all accounts, the Roman ruler Galerius47 was overseeing the persecutions of 303 CE in Antioch. As Prudentius explains, before arriving in Antioch, Galerius “sent forth proclamations far and wide over the whole world that any man who chose to live must deny Christ [edicta late mundum in omnem miserat, / Christum negaret quisque mallet vivere]” (X.34–35). Once Galerius arrives, Christians in the community react in terror to his presence (apparently because his reputation as a tyrant is already well known) and frantically run to the temples to denounce their faith and conduct sacrifice as a mark of their loyalty to the Roman regime. Romanus, witnessing this debacle, rebukes the wayward

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Christians with unwavering and indignant speeches that reunite them in the faith. Known for his rhetorical skills, Romanus presents a dangerous threat to Roman authority; therefore, the Romans quickly hasten him away to the judge to be put before the law. The law, as Galerius’s edict describes it, allows life only in terms of negation; by negating Christ, one chooses to live. Life under the law is thus founded upon negation; in this function, Christ negated becomes life.48 In subverting Roman law, then, Romanus must willingly and calmly give himself over to the lictor, ostensibly forfeiting his life and enacting the noble martyrdom that Tertullian recommends in Ad martyras—a sacrifice that imitates the original death of Christ himself. The physical aspect of the profession of faith that the martyr must embody is central to the Incarnation, as well as to the religious doctrine that prefigures it. Christ’s human, mortal flesh provides the essential foundation upon which the act of martyrdom rests. In subverting Roman law, then, Romanus follows another law—that of the Incarnation of Christ, to which the martyr is subject in his sacrifice. Yet under this Christian law, the body acquires a significance that is quite distinct from its value under Roman law. The beginning of religious doctrine about the body for Christianity emerges from the book of Job, 19.23–37, in a passage that emphasizes physical inscription and the judicial nature of its formulation.49 His body decomposing and revolting to him, Job wishes that the evidence of his devotion could be inscribed on a pillar (25–27). With his mortal flesh clearly nearing its end, Job hopes that the story of his faith might be recorded materially, etched in stone as an enduring physical testament to his belief. Comforting himself, though, Job affirms his belief that his God will ultimately come to his defense: “Even after my skin is eaten by disease, while still in this body I will see God. I will see him with my own eyes [. . .]” (19.26–27). Although the Hebrew here may be interpreted as either “while still in this body” or “although not in this body,” Job’s emphasis upon seeing his God provoked the early Christian patristics St. Prosper, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Thomas all to suggest that Job here prophecies the Incarnation. Job expresses this projected vision as one of judicial vindication: having presented his case to his friends and received no sympathy or response either from them or from God, Job wishes that his case will be preserved forever in the rock. At the same time, he looks forward to his case being represented later, in some divine proceeding in which justice would be meted out finally by the wrath of God. The desire to transcend his fleshly existence by etching a record in stone and the belief that he will one day witness his God are both expressed in terms of justice for Job. In De carne Christi (206 CE),50 Tertullian presents his argument for the case of Christ’s fleshliness in a judicial sense as well, delivering his tes-

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timony in the form of a suasoria, a rhetorical speech meant to be delivered in court against an adversary present and open to attack. The De carne Christi intends to prove the reality of Christ’s flesh, laying the groundwork for a second argument that would prove the resurrection of the flesh of all mankind. Tertullian’s exordium gives a brief statement of his case: Those whose design it is so to disturb the faith of the resurrection as to deny that that hope extends even to the flesh [. . .] with good reason tear asunder with inquisitions Christ’s flesh as well as ours, alleging either that it existed not at all, or that in any case it was other than human: else, if it were admitted that it was human, this would constitute a leading case against them that flesh certainly does rise again, seeing it has risen again in Christ. We, in consequence, shall need to lay the foundations of the aspirations of the flesh at the point at which these dismantle them. We have to weigh up the corporal substance of the Lord: for concerning his spiritual substance there is no dispute. It is his flesh that is under inquisition. Its verity is under discussion, and its quality—whether it existed, and whence it came, and of what sort it was. A decision concerning it will lay down the law [legem] for our own resurrection. [Qui fidem resurrecionis [. . .] moratam ita student inquietare ut eam spem negent etiam ad carnem pertinere, merito Christi quoque carnem quaestionibus destrahunt, tanquam aut nullam omnio aut quoquo modo aliam praeter humanam, ne si humanam constiterit fuisse praeiudicatum sit adversus illos eam resurgere omni modo, quae in Christo resurrexerit. igitur unde illi destruunt carnis vota, inde nobis erunt praestruenda. examinemus corporalem substantiam domini: de spiritali enim certum est. caro quaeritur: veritas et qualitas eius retractatur, an fuerit et unde et cuiusmodi fuerit. renuntiatio eius dabit legem nostrae resurrectioni.] (I.1–11) Tertullian argues that the belief in resurrection—central to the Christian hope of salvation—depends upon belief that Christ existed on earth in human flesh; if his flesh can be resurrected, Tertullian reasons, then so can that of mankind. Unlike in the case of Job, who hopes for future fleshliness in order to witness his misfortunes justly rectified by a wrathful God, the pertinence of the corporeal substance of Christ expresses a concern with the future salvation (and fleshliness in heaven) of humans. While the Old Testament narrative emphasizes the persistent (i.e., continual) fleshliness of Job, Tertullian’s Christian interpretation emphasizes a flesh reborn in heaven, by means of a power of corporeality transferred from Christ to

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his believers.51 Notably, Tertullian expresses the significance of the relation between Christ’s body and mortal bodies in terms of law (lex): the nature of Christ’s Incarnation sets up a law to which the salvation of mortal man will be subject. Thus, in his argument against Marcion, Tertullian points out that the Christian faith, and all of what Christians hope for from Christ, would be a “phantasm” if Christ was not of flesh and suffered nothing. Tertullian then considers in detail the scriptural texts that bear on Christ’s human descent and his nativity, rescuing them from false interpretations, and showing that their only conceivable meaning is that Christ was possessed of truly human flesh derived from his mother, and thus traceable all the way back to Adam. His conclusion summarizes the scriptural evidence and suggests that the decision of the present question will serve as a leading case for the further claim that mankind’s natural human flesh will undoubtedly rise again, since it is of the same quality as the flesh of Christ that has already risen. Christ’s Incarnation and resurrection thus “lay down the law” for the salvation of Christians. The terms of this law are strikingly similar to that of the Romans; but in the Christian version the death of Christ, which brings with it (immortal) life for Christians, reoccupies the position of negation, which brings with it (mortal) life for Romans. As Prudentius’s account makes clear, it is Romanus’s complete willingness to sacrifice his body for Christ—his nonattachment to his mortal flesh—that results in his successful martyrdom. Romanus begins his contest against the Roman law by insisting that he surrenders any claim to his life, turning himself over with a willingness that disconcerts his torturer: “His passion for the martyr’s crown all but outstrips the lictor’s cruel trade, freely exposing his bare ribs to be cut away with the two-forked claws [amor coronae paene praevenit trucem / lictoris artem sponte nudas offerens / costas bisulcis exsecandas ungulis]” (X.71–73). The success with which Romanus can subvert Roman law depends upon the extent to which he can demonstrate that his mortal life has no value to him; for Galerius’s edict holds power only if the life that it threatens is valued as living. Moreover, the power derived from the martyrdom (the apparent salvation of Romanus, the swaying of the crowd, the benefits of the cult of Romanus) seems dependent upon the extent to which that flesh (flesh described by Romanus as sinful, prone to decay or illness, and therefore not valuable) has experienced the pain of mutilation. In this sense, the role of the body in the martyrdom is paradoxical: at the same time that the body as the sinful corruptor or prison of the soul is renounced, the flesh in its susceptibility to death and in its potential for rebirth becomes the focal point for the process of martyrdom. The martyr renounces the body inasmuch as it is subject to law, while embodying his or her corporal nature inasmuch as it represents the mortal life that he forsakes in order to gain salvation (and immortality).

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Implicit in this paradox is the problem of Christ’s mortal flesh and the sacrifice upon which the martyrdom is modeled. Prudentius makes this clear in Romanus’s second long speech, during which he testifies to the nature of the Son of God: “The Son manifested himself to be seen by mortal men, immortality putting on a mortal body, so that through the eternal God wearing a body subject to death ours should be enabled to pass to the heavens [. . .] [hic se videndum praestitit mortalibus, / mortale corpus sumpsit inmortalitas, / ut, dum caducum portat aeternus Deus, / transire nostrum posset ad caelestia (. . .)]” (X.601–04). Thus the paradox already appears in the “law” established by Christ’s sacrifice: only by means of a body subject to death might mortal man be saved. Or, put another way: there is a need for a body to be painfully sacrificed in order to pay the debt which will save man, since that from which man is being saved is his sins—that is, the fault of mortal flesh. Thus, while the Roman government threatens the body with death in order to evoke a confession and to demonstrate punishment for treason, the Christian martyr seeks a torturous death in order to punish his own flesh for being sinful, in emulation of the debt paid by Christ’s sacrifice. The martyr pursues this self-punishment to the point of death, at which time his sins will be “paid for” and salvation achieved.52 However, such an exchange addresses only the personal cause of martyrdom; as we have already seen, the martyr’s sacrifice has a rhetorical intent of enhancing the Christian church, as well. In the case of Prudentius, at the same time that he hopes that his poetry will secure his own salvation, he also professes the intention of communicating the message of Christianity through his writing. In the case of the martyr, at the same time that he or she renounces the body, the meaning of the sacrifice depends upon communicating the value of that body (an investment expressed by the extent of the debt that requires sacrifice). Thus, the specific debt paid by the martyr for his or her salvation must somehow be conveyed to and apprehended by a witnessing audience.

The Law and Language I: Bearing Witness to Roman Law The problem of communicating the specificity of the martyr’s suffering leads again to the correlation between the Christian body and word, but this time in terms of Christ, in particular. For the idea of Christ incorporates not only the appearance of God embodied in the flesh, but also the formulation of God as the Word. In a more “rational” vindication of the Trinity that comprises part of the Apologeticum, Tertullian ties the question of Christ’s corporality closely to the Word of God. He begins by urging the Romans to let go of their hateful prejudice against Christians, “let the

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truth reach your ears by the private and quiet avenue of literature [tacitum litterarum].”53 While Tertullian suggests here that the literary word might convey the truth to the Romans, the concept gains significance in the context of Tertullian’s description in chapter XI of the Incarnation, in which the body of the Incarnation is linked directly to the word. Tertullian begins describing the nature of Christ by pointing out that Logos is the maker of the universe for Christians as it is for the Stoics: We, too, to that Word [sermoni], Reason [rationi], and Power [virtuti] (by which we said God devised all things) would ascribe Spirit as its proper nature. For, in Spirit giving utterance, there would be the Word [sermo]; with Spirit, ordering and disposing all things, Reason; and over Spirit, achieving all things, Power would be present. This, as we have been taught, has been uttered by God and begotten by this utterance, and is, therefore, called the Son of God and God on account of the unity of nature; for God, too, is Spirit. [Et nos autem sermoni atque rationi itemque virtuti, per quae omnia molitum deum ediximus, propriam substantiam spiritum inscribimus, cui et sermo insit pronuntianti et ratio adsit disponenti et virtus praesit perficienti. Hunc ex deo prolatum didicimus et prolatione generatum et idcirco filium dei et deum dictum ex unitate substantiae. Nam et deus spiritus.] (XXI.11) In this passage, Spirit allows the figures of an ordering Reason, a manifest Power, and an apprehensible Word to appear as aspects of the Spirit. In this conception, Spirit takes form within Reason, Power, and the Word. Tertullian goes on to claim that Christ’s miracles manifested “that He is the Word of God, that is the Logos [se esse verbum dei, id est Logon] [. . .] original and first-born, endowed with power and reason and sustained by spirit, the same who, by a word [verbo], still creates and did create all things” (XXI.17).54 In this case, Christ is designated by Logos, which signifies the Word of God in the New Testament, and verbum—the generative word that begets the utterance of the report of the Spirit, the sermo (as in Tertullian XXI.11). According to Tertullian’s conception, the Incarnation depicts Christ materially as the Word of God. Thus, the Christian word, inasmuch as it spreads the message of its God, acquires a particular power, as well as a materiality akin to the body. Prudentius alludes to this interrelation of the Christian word and the body throughout the Peristephanon (especially in the hymn to Cassian, as previously noted), but explores it particularly in his treatment of Romanus’s martyrdom. As I have noted, the manner in which Prudentius deviates from

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previous versions of the story of Romanus emphasizes the importance of communicating the martyr’s sacrifice. Prudentius elaborates upon the passio of Romanus to provide him with several lengthy speeches, in which the martyr proselytizes the Christian faith to the bystanders witnessing his torture. Prudentius fulfills a similar role in composing hymns glorifying the martyrs and spreading the tale of their victories. Yet, the poet clarifies that he is aware of the ephemerality of the spoken word, which fades even as it is uttered, as well as the written word, which exists only as long as the medium on which the characters are etched. Prudentius sets such transient words against the permanence of the Christian word by comparing the governor’s record of Romanus’s torture to the heavenly account of the martyrdom. The details of the “great tragic drama [tantae tragoediae],” he explains, were recorded in a series of scrolls given to the emperor. “But,” he continues, “those the long passage of time destroys, they are blackened with grime or covered with dust where they lie undisturbed, old age tatters them or buries them under ruins; whereas the page that Christ has written upon is deathless and in heaven not a letter fades away [illas sed aetas conficit diutina, / fuligo fuscat, pulvis obducit situ, / carpit senectus aut ruinis obruit: / inscripta Christo pagina inmortalis est, / nec obsolescit ullus in caelis apex]” (X.1116–20). While the tyrannous governor intends for the event to remain by recording it on a parchment (that will nevertheless ultimately be lost or destroyed), Christ makes the martyrdom immortal by inscribing it [inscripta] on a page in the heavenly book. The act of inscription is here further emphasized by the lack of a verb referring directly to the governor’s action of writing. In this manner, Prudentius suggests the similarity between the immortal inscriptions in the heavenly book and the manner in which a message is made lasting on earth: by being inscribed in blood. Thus, the martyrdom recorded in the book of heaven is written on earth in letters of blood, as Prudentius describes in the opening of the Peristephanon. Such a correspondence is made literal in the hymn to Cassian, the story that directly precedes that of Romanus in the Peristephanon, and the story with which this chapter begins. Echoing Tertullian’s conception of the Word as a creative force and a vehicle for the power of the Spirit, Prudentius recalls Romanus’s tongueless speech by hoping that he, as author of the hymn, will benefit from Romanus’s power as well: “Romanus [. . .] , grant thy favour and stir up the tongue within my speechless mouth[. . .] [Romane (. . .) elinguis oris organum fautor move (. . .)]” (X.1–2). Calling into presence the suffering of Romanus by composing a hymn at the cult site, Prudentius implies that the power derived from Romanus’s torture might be redirected toward the poet creating the account of that martyrdom. This power, specifically the ability to speak in a case of speechlessness, is directly linked to the specific

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torture that Romanus suffers: the mutilation of his mouth and, particularly, the removal of his tongue. This function is then echoed in Romanus’s description of the Passion (or suffering) of Christ, as Romanus describes it at the end of his first speech: “Let us account as a prize the loss which the law imposes [legale damnum deputemus praemiis]” (X.530). This statement may be interpreted in several different ways. Referring back to the original edict decreed by Galerius, Roman law designates that a belief in Christ must be lost; Christianity (in the words of Romanus) counters with the suggestion that Christian faith be considered a prize. Or, Roman law decrees that life must be lost for those professing the Christian faith; Christianity suggests that the loss of that life in the name of Christ is a prize, or blessing, since it brings salvation. Or, if one understands Romanus’s claim as referring directly to the punishment that he himself is about to suffer, one might account given as a prize whatever it is that Roman law takes away. This last option takes shape in the context of the scene of torture that immediately follows this speech. Responding to the disruptive and threatening nature of Romanus’s diatribe, Asclepiadus gives orders for Romanus’s mouth to be tortured: Let the executioner turn the stroke on to his mouth to stop his speech, to his jaws transfer hands and sharp cuts and cords. Shatter the seat of his verbosity, puncture the bellows so that his loquacity may lose the gushing winds of words, since no law puts a stop to their sounding. I will have the very words tortured even as he speaks. [vertat ictum carnifex in os loquentis, inque maxillas manum sulcosque acutos et fidiculas transferat. verbositatis ipse rumpatur locus, scaturrientes perdat ut loquacitas sermonis auras perforatis follibus, quibus sonandi nulla lex ponit modum; ipsa et loquentis verba torqueri volo.] (X.548–55) Finding that Romanus’s words are communicated even though they are prohibited by law, Asclepiades aims the enforcement of the law at the aspect of Romanus that seems to be evading it: the part of the body from whence language is typically uttered, the mouth. The torturer’s ungulae thus score Romanus’s face, according to Prudentius literally writing [scribentibus] the message of his criminality upon his skin: “Both cheeks he scores with lines

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drawn with the claws, tracing bleeding cuts on the face; the bristly bearded skin is torn in pieces and the whole countenance cleft down to the chin [charaxat ambas ungulis scribentibus / genas, cruentis et secat faciem notis, / hirsute barbis solvitur carptim cutis, / et mentum adusque vultus omnis scinditur]” (X.556–60). Yet Asclepiades’ efforts to remove the means of Romanus’s speaking result in just the opposite. Suddenly, Romanus finds that his speech flows out freely, no longer fettered by his body. Thanking the lictor for this result, Romanus designates his wounds as the new source of his speech: “ ‘For every wound I have, you see a mouth uttering praise [tot ecce laudant ora quot sunt vulnera]’ ” (X.570). Not only does the blood of Romanus create a permanent record of his martyrdom, but the wound provides an opening from which his ideological message might emanate. The speech of Romanus emerges in a material sense, then, in the blood gushing from the cuts on his face and torso. Thus the message of Romanus follows the path of the soul, escaping from its imprisonment in the body through the wound of the torturer, as Prudentius suggests it will for all martyrs: “through the wide wound a glorious gateway opens to the righteous, and the soul, cleansed in the scarlet baptism, leaps from its seat in the breast [nobilis per vulnus amplum porta iustus panditur: / lota mens in fonte rubro sede cordis exilit]” (I.29–30). Romanus himself refers to the eagerness of the soul to make such a leap to freedom as the “prize” of “the loss which the law imposes.” In this sense, Romanus’s statement, “Let us account as a prize the loss which the law imposes [legale damnum deputemus praemiis]” (X.530), acquires yet another meaning. For if the “law” here refers to Christian law, rather than Roman law, then what must be lost is the body. Roman law demands the loss of the body (that is, the biopolitical body, the body subject to Roman law) as punishment for Christian belief. Christian law requires the loss or sacrifice of a body (that is, the sinful, mortal body, the body subject to Christian law) but considers this loss a prize, since it opens the gate (porta) enabling the soul to rise to a heavenly salvation. Yet in the case of Romanus, Roman law also seeks to impose the loss of language. Thus, the lictor suggests that he might torture the very words of Romanus (verba torqueri) by mutilating his mouth. Asclepiades clearly states the desire to remove language in his decision to mutilate Romanus’s mouth. Yet his attempt fails; Romanus makes a prize of his loss, claiming his wounds as new mouths for his message. He is able to do so, we have seen, because the potential of Christian law, in its negative relation to Roman law, also derives from this loss of language; that is, the Christian message that Romanus’s wounds deliver (as opposed to the sermoni that Prudentius records him as speaking), the “truth” to which the martyr bears witness, is a rhetorical trope outside of the sphere of grammatical language.55 This

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Christian “truth” remains, therefore, necessarily56 outside of the realm of what can be spoken or logically known: meaning flows free, Augustine suggests, beyond the material limits of the words that point us toward it.57 The potency of meaning, in the case of the wound, resides in its rhetorical nature—the wound conveys a sense of God’s power, while the ambiguity of the message that the torture conveys ensures that this sense remains beyond interpretation. Such a rhetorical possibility becomes clear in Prudentius’s depiction of the removal of Romanus’s lingua.

The Law and Language II: Bearing Witness to Christian Law The events that directly precede Prudentius’s account of this particular torture provide significant contextual details for reading what follows. Stridently discoursing through his wounded mouth, Romanus describes the particular benefit of Christ’s coming to earth incarnate, “shining before our eyes from a visible countenance, so that truth should not be uncertain and its reliability in doubt through not being disclosed face to face, with the testimony of sight [coram refulsit ore conspicabili, / ne fluctuaret veritas dubia fide, / si non pateret teste visu comminus]” (X.632–35). By being visible to the eye, Romanus argues, Christ’s nature is made certain. This assertion posits seeing as the preferred method for discerning the “truth” of Christ. The alleviation of doubt through witnessing Christ in the visible flesh, he continues, enables Christians to believe in the Incarnation and mankind’s own subsequent potential for salvation. This argument fails to convince the Romans, however, prompting Romanus to suggest to Asclepiades that the dispute between them might be solved by the determination of a third party: “But since I may not contend with you with deep reasoning, let us appeal to what lies at hand; let us inquire of the verdict of the natural understanding, which is straight-forward and artless; let us have one to judge between us who knows no guile [sed quia profunda non licet luctarier / ratione tecum, consulamus proxima: / interrogetur ipsa naturalium / simplex sine arte sensuum sententia: / fuci inperitus fac ut adsit arbiter]” (X.651–55). Romanus here suggests choosing a mediator who would make a determination in much the same way that the “testimony of sight” works: without logical analysis of reason, but rather as a judgment based on a response that is “artless” and “natural”—and therefore, like a knowledge of what is seen, not necessarily logical. As a guarantee of meeting these criteria of judgment, Romanus suggests choosing a child, “of about seven years, or less” to choose between the Christian and the Roman system of belief. A young boy is chosen and Romanus begins to interrogate him,

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with the permission of Asclepiades. In reply to a series of questions about the nature of Christ, the child explains that his mother generated his faith; she fed him with the Spirit, he describes, “and I in drinking as a babe the milk from the twin founts of her breasts drank in also the belief in Christ [ego, ut gemellis uberum de fontibus / lac parvus hausi, Christum et hausi credere]” (X.684–85). Again, Prudentius emphasizes the spontaneous and unpremeditated nature of the child’s Christian belief by depicting his faith as a substance consumed in a nutritive manner.58 Such unquestioning belief, of course, angers Asclepiades, who promptly orders the child to be tortured—in order to punish the child but also the mother by forcing her to watch his death. The sight of the physical torment of the child is so gruesome, however, that even the men wielding the instruments weep as they torture the boy. Prudentius immediately contrasts this display of sympathy with the response of the boy’s mother, who remains apart from the rest of the group, showing no emotional response other than joy. As the child cries out for water to quench his thirst (in a subtle echo of Christ’s thirst on the cross), the mother responds with a reprimand. How can he complain about thirst, she asks angrily, when he has “that living spring nearby [fons ille vivus praesto]” (X.726) from which he can drink to nourish both his body and his spirit. Recommending that refreshment to him, she then comforts him with stories by which he might draw a lesson about how he ought to behave under torture. Beginning by reminding her son of how willingly Isaac offered himself to be sacrificed by his father, she then relates the tale of a mother whose seven sons were sacrificed in martyrdom. She describes in detail how this mother watched unemotionally as her sons underwent various tortures, enduring boiling oil, burning metal plates, and scalping. Then, she continues, The oppressor commanded the tongue of one of the young lads to be cut out, and his mother said: “Now we have won glory enough, for lo, the best part of our body is being sacrificed to God. The faithful tongue is worthy to be an offering. The mind’s spokesman, which declares our sentiments, the heart’s servant, which proclaims the silent thoughts of our breast, let it be offered first for the celebration of the mystery of death, and be the first to redeem all the members, and then the rest will follow their dedicated leader.” [linguam tyrannus amputari iusserat uni ex ephebis; mater aiebat: “satis iam parta nobis gloria est; pars optima Deo inmolatur ecce nostri corporis;

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By means of such virtuous thoughts, the mother tells her complaining son, this other mother encouraged her sons to endure their martyrdom, thus earning glory and a place in heaven for her entire family. The didactic tale has the desired effect on the narrating mother’s own son: laughingly he endures the remainder of his punishments and his final sentence. After suffering blows and more cutting by the ungulae, the boy calmly bends to the final stroke of the sword on his neck, his mother lovingly catching his head in her hands as she sings a hymn for him. With the metanarrative of a mother and son told by a mother to her son, Prudentius draws attention to the act of witnessing and its intended effect. Within the hymn, the mother’s story refers to her own son and the torture that he is about to undergo, constructing a behavioral model for him by replicating their situation almost exactly. The lesson of the mother’s story, then, is for the boy to suffer his torture nobly, thereby gaining glory and the solace of salvation for both of them. In addition, creating a clear correspondence between the two stories—each having a mother comforting her son who is about to undergo a martyrdom—Prudentius sets the stage for a self-referential reading of the story. The mother relates the account of martyrdom and sings a hymn, echoing Prudentius’s own narrative songs. In this guise, Prudentius suggests to the reader an appropriate response to the account of Romanus’s martyrdom, whose tongue will be cut out like that of the boy in the mother’s story, and points the reader, with the metamother’s interpretation of her son’s mutilation, toward the significance of the removal of Romanus’s lingua. According to the mothers’ consolation, the tongue is the most worthy of offerings because it is spokesman, declarer, proclaimer, of what would otherwise remain unspoken. Prudentius (through the voices of the mothers) here designates the lingua, in both its senses as tongue or language, as linguistic communicator. Once language—or the lingua—is lost, the rest of the members (of the body) will follow their “dedicated leader” to redemption. In this sense, the removal of the lingua will liberate not only by opening a path to salvation for the rest, but also by indicating the direction in which that path might be found.59 After the child is killed, Asclepiades sets up a pyre with boiling pitch for executing Romanus, but the martyr calmly foresees the storm that will extinguish the fire, prolonging his life for a miracle that must be performed

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before he can die. Furious and frustrated by the failed immolation, Asclepiades determines to torture him unmercifully, beginning by cutting off some part of his body and continuing to dismember him piece by piece, in the hope of inflicting upon him many deaths rather than just one. Calling upon a doctor, the prefect gives careful instructions: “First let him remove the tongue by its roots, for it is the very wickedest organ in the whole body; with its impudent wagging it has both violated our long-established divine law by a most foul attack upon our gods, and been so presumptuous as not even to spare the emperor [linguam priorem detrahat radicitus, / quae corpore omni sola vivit nequior; / illa et procaci pessima in nostros deos / invecta motu fas profanavit vetus, / audax et ipsi non pepercit principi]” (X.891–95). Focusing the torture upon the tongue, Asclepiades’ order suggests that he might punish individually the most offensive aspect of Romanus. The description of what ensues indicates unmistakably that just the opposite has happened. Although the procedure is depicted as gruesome and brutal, Prudentius’s description relishes the violence as bestowing even more glory upon Romanus’s martyrdom: While he [the doctor performing the operation] was gradually cutting the filaments one by one, the martyr never bit nor let his teeth meet to close his mouth, nor swallowed blood. Firm and unmoved he stood with jaws wide open while the blood ran gushing out, a noble figure with his chin overspread with the red emblem of glory, looking at the honourable stain of blood on his breast and finding satisfaction in the thought that the scarlet on his garment has made it kingly. [illo secante fila sensim singula numquam momordit martyr aut os dentibus conpressit artis nec cruorem sorbuit. inmotus et patente rictu constitit dum sanguis extra defluit scaturriens; perfusa pulcher menta russo stemmate fert et cruenti pectoris spectat decus fruiturque et ostro vestis ut iam regiae.] (X.903–10) Providing particularly graphic details of the torture, Prudentius emphasizes the terrible mutilation Romanus endures, preparing the reader for the corresponding power that will accompany the miracle to come. The blood spilled by torture, once again, occupies a position of significance in the martyrdom. The account emphasizes the flow of blood out of the body by contrasting this effect with the pointed note that Romanus swallowed none

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of his own blood. While the blood (cruorem) cruelly shed by the doctor’s knife is refused by Romanus, the blood (sanguis) that he allows to spread over his body becomes honorable by being perceived as glorious (“in the thought that the scarlet on his garment has made it kingly”). Prudentius’s poetic description of the torture thus simultaneously describes the scene and offers a reading of it: the difference between a violent act of torture and a glorious martyrdom becomes a matter of interpretation.

Torture and Persuasion: Bearing Witness to the “Truth” Recalling the passion of Christ, the wound of Romanus gains a meaning that emanates along with the blood from the cuts inscribed by the torturer. The bleeding wounds, in both cases, signify the suffering essential to his sacrifice. Thus the blood of Romanus represents more than itself, as Christ’s did before him. Georges Didi-Huberman, in Devant l’image: Question posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art, describes this function of Christ’s wounded flesh as it appears in early Christian images of the crucifixion: “Il fallait (la croyance exigeait) que sa chair fût une chair du symptôme, érigée, triste et trouée—une chair appelant la dimension du visuel plus que celle du visible, une chair présentée, ouverte et repliée, comme un immense poing que l’on aurait blessé [It is necessary (the belief demands it) that the flesh be a flesh of the symptom, erect, sad, and broken—a flesh designating the dimension of the visual more than the visible, a flesh presented, open and folded back, as an immense fist that one would have wounded].”60 As symptom, the significance of the flesh becomes uncertain and subject to deduction; its significance overdetermined, the symptomatic flesh thus introduces an endless chain of symbolic displacement. In the sense that Didi-Huberman proposes, the psychoanalyst might be seen as conducting an exegetical iconological reading of symptoms. In the case of early Christian art, he continues, the symptomatic flesh opens the image up to an ambiguity of meaning that invites exegesis or interpretation. The opening up of the wound suggests the possibility of an unknown meaning emerging (as with blood) into the known. Hence, Didi-Huberman, borrowing a concept from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, describes the scarred flesh of Christ in paintings as belonging to the visuel, rather than the visible. The visible here denotes that which is known immediately by its phenomenal appearance to the eye. The visuel, on the other hand, connotes that which is coming into appearance, that which emerges into vision. Because of this sense of emergence, the visuel can suggest the continued possibility of an unknown meaning (the invisible, for Merleau-Ponty) while avoiding the

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complete appropriation of the unknown into the known. The symptomatic flesh thus causes a déchirure of the image that opens up the limits of conscious knowledge: Nous nous retrouvons une fois de plus dans la situation du choix aliénant. Donnons-en une formule extrême, sinon exaspérée: savoir sans voir ou voir sans savoir. Une perte dans tous les cas. Celui qui choisit de savoir seulement aura gagné, bien sûr, l’unité de la synthèse et l’évidence de la simple raison; mais il perdra le réel de l’objet, dans la clôture symbolique du discours qui réinvente l’objet à sa propre image, ou plutôt à sa propre représentation. Celui, au contraire, qui désire voir ou plutôt regarder perdra l’unité d’un monde clos pour se retrouver dans l’ouverture inconfortable d’un univers désormais flotant, livré à tous les vents du sens; c’est ici que la synthèse se fragilisera jusqu’à l’effritement; et que l’objet du voir, éventuellement touché par un bout de reel,61 disloquera le sujet du savoir, vouant la simple raison à quelque chose comme une déchirure. [We return once more to the situation of the alienating choice. We give it an extreme formula, only to aggravate: to know without seeing or to see without knowing. A loss in any case. The one who chooses only to know will gain, to be sure, the unity of synthesis and the evidence of simple reason; but he will lose the real of the object in the symbolic closure of a discourse which reinvents the object in its own image, or rather in its own representation. The one who, on the contrary, wants to see, or rather to “look at,” will lose the unity of a closed world in order to find himself in the uncomfortable opening of a universe henceforth floating, freed to all the whims of the sense; it is here that the synthesis will become so fragile that it will crumble away; and the object of vision, possibly touched by a trace of the real, will dislocate the subject from knowing, dedicating simple reason to something like a tearing open.]62 The choice of conscious knowledge, in other words, imposes limits that close off possibility or ambiguity. Knowledge through sight functions in the same manner: I see a phenomenal object, I know what it is and thus limit it to my knowledge of its being. Yet choosing to see without knowing creates the possibility of being disconcerted, surprised into uncertainty. The déchirure in the visible brings into imminence an encounter with what is not subject to knowledge—as Didi-Huberman designates it here (following Lacan), the

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“real.” The déchirure dislocates the subject from knowledge, creating a split of the image and a split of logic; it is a moment of nonsynthesis, an instant torn between consciousness and unconsciousness.63 In this sense, then, the Christian image of wounded flesh no longer represents a “figure figurée” (a fixed figure, a representational object), but rather a “figure figurante,” a figure figuring itself—that is, becoming visible. The visuel, the becoming visible, gains a virtual value (for Merleau-Ponty the imminent visible); its potential may be realized by assuming a “regard expectatif”—by allowing an opening in logic through the power of the negative: “penser la thèse avec l’antithèse.”64 The symptom, Didi-Huberman argues, has this power of déchirure. In the Christian image, then, a mark such as the stigmata would function like a stain on the flesh, marking the flesh as overdetermined (suggesting the importance of the Incarnation). The imitation of the Incarnation through the imitation of Christ’s suffering, he then reasons, makes a vocation of the bodily symptom on the body: Notre hypothèse, formulée à son extrême, consisterait à supposer tout simplement que les arts visuels du christianisme ont cherché aussi à imiter le corps christique dans les termes mêmes où tel saint homme aura pu le faire: c’est-à-dire en imitant, par-delà les aspects du corps, le procès ou la “vertu” d’ouverture pratiquée une fois pour toutes dans la chair du Verbe divin. [Our hypothesis, formulated in its extreme, would consist in supposing very simply that the visual art of Christianity has chosen also to imitate the body of Christ, in the same terms in which a saint would be able to do: that is to say, in imitating, beyond the appearance of the body, the process or the “virtue” of the opening enacted once and for all in the flesh of the divine Word.]65 The wound in Christian art or the wound of the saint, in imitating the symptomatic flesh of Christ, opens the visible to the work of the visuel, prompting the viewer to assume the posture of seeing before knowing—of seeing “devant l’image.” The wounded flesh in the depiction of the Christian martyr, saint, or savior opens up the image to the possibility of what is not apparent in the visible. This invisible or unknown knowledge, he suggests, is the death of Christ, which itself is meant to kill death (see Tertullian’s argument and St. Paul’s words about baptism, discussed earlier in this chapter). Thus, the christological painter must let death insist itself on the image: “Ouvrir l’image au symptôme de la mort.”66 Of course, Didi-Huberman is analyzing early Christian visual art, here, and not prose, in particular. Nevertheless, the language in which Didi-

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Huberman describes this function of the wound in Christian art recalls the effect that Prudentius attributes to the martyrs’ experience as the blood gushes from their wounds: “through the wide wound the soul leaps from the breast” (I.28–30). In the case of Romanus, there is another release, as well: with the cutting of his mouth and especially with the wounding of his tongue, his message flows freely to the witnessing audience. What sort of language, Prudentius asks by emphasizing the miracle of Romanus’s tongueless speech, could miraculously issue from a mouth from which the lingua has been removed? The answer is implied by his reference to his own Christian message at the end of this hymn. Prudentius closes the song by describing again, and in more detail, the heavenly book in which the martyr’s death was recorded: An angel standing in the presence of God took down all that the martyr said and all he bore, and not only recorded the words of his discourse but with his pen drew exact pictures of the wounds on his sides and cheeks and breast and throat. The measure of blood from each was noted, and how in each case the gash ploughed out the wound, whether deep or wide or on the surface, long or short, the violence of the pain, the extent of the cut; no drop of blood did he let go for nought. [excepit adstans angelus coram Deo et quae locutus martyr et quae pertulit, nec verba solum disserentis condidit, sed ipsa pingens vulnera expressit stilo laterum, genarum pectorisque et faucium. omnis notata est sanguinis dimensio, ut quamque plagam sulcus exaraverit, altam, patentem, proximam, longam, brevem. quae vis doloris, quive segmenti modus; guttam cruoris ille nullam perdidit.] (X.1121–30) In the book of heaven are recorded not only words but pictures painted (or stained—pingere) by an angel, creating a visual record of the exact extent of Romanus’s martyrdom—that is, the precise nature of his bloody wounds. With the record of the angel, the blood (cruor) shed by the Romans in an attempt to gain retribution for the debt owed to their law becomes sanguis, the blood of life given in emulation of Christ to pay the debt owed to Christian law. The book of heaven, Prudentius continues, will one day be read by the “everlasting Judge [sempiterno iudici],” who will then match the amount of suffering with the deserved or just reward. Yet this

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is a judgment deferred, a decision yet to be made. Prudentius follows this passage directly with a reference to his own record of martyrdom: “Would that I, standing as I shall be on the left among the flocks of goats, might be picked out from afar and at Romanus’s petition the King most excellent might say: ‘Romanus prays for him. Bring this goat over to me; let him stand on my right hand as a lamb and be clothed in fleece’ [vellem sinister inter haedorum greges, / ut sum futurus, eminus dinoscerer / atque hoc precante diceret rex optimus: / ‘Romanus orat; transfer hunc haedum mihi; / sit dexter agnus, induatur vellere’]” (X.1136–40). Prudentius hopes that his record for Romanus will do the same thing for the poet as Romanus’s torture does for the martyr: he hopes that his poem will gain him salvation. He envisions, therefore, that God will remember his poetry at the moment of judgment: in that instance, he will be changed from a goat to a sheep—but changed in a particular way. Not through metamorphosis, but by being transferred (Prudentius uses the verb transfero: to transfer, change over, move over). Thus, the method of his change will reflect the method employed in his poetic writing: for transfero in terms of language is also to move over, to shift a meaning, to translate, or to express by metaphor.67 In Prudentius’s writing, in the excess of meaning, ambiguity, or undecideability created by rhetorical trope, a lamb becomes more than itself, signifying a link in a typological chain that is extended to include the poet. With this, we return to the nature of Romanus’s tongueless speech. The speech that flows from Romanus’s mutilated mouth is a message no longer communicated by means of lingua. In the speech he delivers in response to the removal of his tongue, Romanus explains to Asclepiades and the audience how the miracle of his tongueless speech is possible. Since Christ as creator gives and controls speech, he argues, He can modify the production of speech to be possible in any situation: “Naturally its [nature’s] creator can change it as He pleases, making and unmaking established laws, so that speech shall not demand the agency of a tongue [hanc nempe factor vertere, ut libet, potest / positasque leges texere ac retexere, / linguam loquella ne ministram postulet]” (X.943–45). According to Romanus’s claim, then, Christ has the power to make and unmake laws because of his position outside of those laws, as nature’s creator. Thus, Romanus uses this alternate mode of communication to subvert the law of the Romans in the same manner that he subverts Roman law by shifting the value placed on the body. In speaking without his lingua, Romanus demonstrates the ambiguous rhetorical style that Prudentius, through the voice of Romanus, establishes as the unique purview of Christ. The torture of Romanus ultimately destroys the martyr’s language, yet the performance or representation of this torture in the name of Christ, in turn, deconstructs the language of the Romans—that is the laws of grammar that provide the basis for language.68

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The message produced by torture, then, is a form of communication not subject to either law; a language unbound by undecideability. The language that Prudentius attributes to Christ, Romanus, and (following the comparison he has set up) himself “makes and unmakes laws.” Such a language renders rational judgment impossible by the endless deferment of what is impossible to understand: in the terms of the martyrology, this is the miracle. The soul, liberated from the body by the opening of the wound, leaps from the breast to its place in heaven. But along with the soul flows the message of Romanus; the excess of spilled blood becomes the extralinguistic “word” of Christianity—a symptomatic word whose object remains necessarily uncertain. The stain of the wound inflicted by torture opens up the play of associations that enables the blood to become the Christian message. According to Christian law, the debt of life is paid for by the subversion of mortality in the death of the martyr; but the spectacle of torture encourages the witness to bestow it with a meaning. Similarly, in the poetic use of rhetorical trope, Prudentius opens up language to its illogical possibilities. He subverts the grammatical law of language with an ambiguity of meaning that demands the interpretation of a reader. The poem of Romanus thus highlights a correspondence or analogy between torture and the rhetorical trope, emphasized by the fact that Romanus is described initially as posing a threat to the Romans because he is a rhetorician. The narrative thus establishes a parallel between the persuasive potential of the mutilation or distortion of the body, the breakdown of its integrity by torture, and the mutilation or distortion of language by means of the rhetorical trope. The debt created by the limits of language is paid for by the subversion of language through its own exclusion, via the metonymic removal of the tongue. Metonymy requires a reader to make a synthesis to give it meaning—there is not a necessary, logical sense to it. Likewise the witness, in response to the spectacle of torture, moves beyond the limits of reason to impose his own judgment. In other words, resolving the discomfort of suspense—bringing resolution to the suspension of meaning or death—the witness interprets in the performance and representation of torture a “truth” of judgment executed. Yet the specific nature of this “truth” remains undecided. For the witnessing Romans, justice is perceived in the painful sacrifice of the body to the Roman civil law. For the audience of Romanus and the reader of Prudentius, the martyr’s suffering punishes once and for all the body that is guilty under the Christian law of sin; and the faithful witness interprets the execution of justice by another name: grace, or the death of death.

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Epilogue

PAIN AND PUBLIC OPINION The Rhetoric of Torture and the Media

The four previous chapters have explored in a range of ancient texts the manner in which the spectacle of the tortured body bears a nonlinguistic message with a powerful rhetorical potential. As we have seen, torture’s persuasive function has evolved, along with the art of rhetoric itself, since the fifth century BCE. When depicted on stage, torture’s results are displayed or described before the witnessing chorus and spectators as evidence of guilt or innocence or simply as an unmistakable demonstration of political power. Presented in prose or poetry, the vivid details of the linguistic picture describe in fascinated horror (or pleasure) the painful scene, as the body becomes a tabula rasa on which societal laws or behaviors may be inscribed. In either case, the presentation of torture has a rhetorical purpose: it is intended to invoke a particular response in its audience or reader by means of the depiction of torment inflicted upon the human body. Following Aristotle’s recommendation that the art of rhetoric is the art of understanding the tools of persuasion,1 the previous chapters have sought to identify and analyze this rhetorical function of torture. In its consideration of the foundations of torture’s persuasive potential in legal, political, erotic, and moral issues in ancient cultures, this study aims also to offer insight into a more urgent aspect of this rhetorical tradition: the growing prevalence of torture in our own cultural discourse. The representation of torture recently in political speeches, in the news media, and in books, television, and film, has placed it at the forefront of our current cultural awareness.2 In an introduction to a collection of government documents and memos connected to the Abu Ghraib scandal, Karen Greenberg declares, “The word torture, long an outcast from the discourse of democracy, is now in frequent usage. Alongside the word, the practice of torture is now in place as well.”3 Yet, despite whatever sense we may have of ourselves as a humanist (or post-humanist) global community, the claim that torture has suddenly reappeared after a long absence is unfortunately

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impossible to maintain. Accounts such as Henri Alleg’s and Jean Améry’s descriptions of their own experiences of torture in Algiers and Auschwitz, or, more recently, descriptions of the violent atrocities—described by Jennifer Harbury and others—committed in the 1980s in Central America are just a few of the modern testimonies that speak to the persistence of torture throughout the twentieth century.4 If this current appearance of torture has a particular distinction, perhaps it is rather in the mode of its dissemination: facilitated by the mass media, an overtly rhetorical intent behind the representation of torture has appeared with increasing frequency and force since the September 11, 2001, attacks upon the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The “war on terror” declared shortly after these events fostered the use of torture in persuasive modes that echo significantly the rhetorical bodies—the legal, the political, the erotic, and the moral—described in the preceding chapters. From its inception, the “war on terror” has been an overtly political war, in the sense that Thomas Keenan defines it: The political war is a rhetorical war, which of course means not that it is a matter of discourse or representation rather than reality, but that its politics—guns and all—are not simply to be imposed but demand the consent or at least the acquiescence of “the people,” and thus pass essentially through the indirections and asymmetries of persuasion.5 Keenan here describes a war embarked upon not by inevitable necessity, but by choice and calculation—conflict that therefore requires the support of a public that must be persuaded of that war’s value. Such a war becomes a political question, as governments struggle to influence public opinion; the political war thus expands significantly beyond practical matters of armed conflict to include complex strategies of information dissemination and control.6 Driven by the American shock and outrage over the September 11, 2001, attacks, the “war on terror” has manifested an overt awareness of the role that the media can play in determining public support for military action. From verbally situating the war within the ideologies of patriotism, liberation, and democracy, to visually framing the images of conflict disseminated to the public by means of strategies such as embedded reporters, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush has carefully utilized the wealth of publicly accessible media sources to strategically influence how the media communicates the terms of this conflict to its global audience. From the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan through the ongoing military activities in Iraq, the political and the rhetorical have come into confluence with increasing visibility around the question of torture. In this

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epilogue, I draw upon the conclusions of the previous chapters to argue that torture retains its rhetorical sense as “proof” when presented in the media today. Yet the “proof” provided by torture is now removed from the courtroom, used instead as part of a global trial, in which torture is presented in a variety of ways in order to provoke a moral judgment.

Rhetoric and the Media In an effort to intimidate would-be terrorists, and to reassure suddenly frightened Americans, the Bush administration sent into the media threats of tough punishment in store for prisoners taken into custody in its military prisons. A few months later, as President Bush sought to move the theater of war into Iraq, he consistently referred to Saddam Hussein’s use of torture against his country’s citizens as a reason to invade the country, depicting the conflict as one of Good versus Evil. The differences between the violent and oppressive regime of Hussein and the harsh treatment that the U.S. administration was threatening to inflict on its detainees seemed obvious and given. Yet such distinctions became mired in confusion, as the United States began anxiously defending itself against increasingly visible allegations of its own use of torture against political prisoners. In each of these cases, verbal and visual representations of torture disseminated by the media had a significant influence on public opinion. That the success or failure of a political war depends upon public opinion seems rather given in a democratic society; indeed, historically the importance of public support in waging war has hardly been limited to “free” societies. What makes the function more pressing now is the enormous role that the media plays in shaping that public opinion. The use of news media to influence public opinion is certainly not a recent innovation. William Randolph Hearst saturated his paper (the New York Journal) with reports of horrors inflicted by the Spanish upon Cuba, stirring up a public demand for American action that eventually inspired a reluctant President William McKinley to declare war upon Spain in April of 1898.7 The advent of television brought the disturbing images of the Vietnam War into America’s living rooms; ultimately, the broad coverage of the television media, in particular, contributed to the erosion of public support of that war. In 1990, during the first Gulf War, U.S. President George H. W. Bush Sr. responded to this lesson by putting Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (appointed in 1989) in charge of creating a strategy for managing the press during the war.8 The solution they developed was to limit radically the access that the press had to the “stage” of war, thus controlling the information that reached the public. President George W. Bush’s (and

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Vice President Cheney’s) development of this strategy in the more recent war on Iraq was to “embed” reporters with the troops, creating a debtexchange relation between the military and the press that imposed limits on information while yet suggesting unlimited access. The media policies of both President Bushs (or of Cheney) reflect the lesson learned so painfully by Lyndon Johnson. As Philip Seib describes it, “The nature of coverage influences public perception of events, which in turn influences the public’s political attitudes and in turn influences the policymakers.”9 This lesson of cause and effect doesn’t only apply to limiting the information provided to the public. Political regimes have also learned to use the news media, to great effect, in disseminating messages to the public—or, in the case of extremist or terrorist groups, to promote awareness of a particular cause.10 As groups vie for media time and attention, statements and images have become increasingly striking and often shocking. In recent years, we have seen increasing instances of torture, especially, staged before television cameras or news reporters in order to convey a message of power or intimidation.11 In 1993, in Mogadishu, Somalia, the bodies of Americans were shown being dragged through the streets, and a U.S. helicopter pilot—Will Durant—was displayed on videotape after being captured and beaten. Two years earlier, in Iraq during the first Gulf War, a U.S. naval aviator named Jeffrey Zaun was shot down and captured by Iraqi forces. As one major U.S. newspaper reported, “At gunpoint, a visibly battered Zaun was forced to read a statement on television condemning as ‘unjust’ the U.S.-led war to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait.”12 A more recent example of this function of the media happened in March of 2003, when Al-Jazeera, the Arab station in Qatar, broadcast footage of killed and captured American soldiers from the 507th Maintenance Company. The video featured shots of several of the prisoners being interrogated, displaying varying levels of nervousness and disorientation.13 This spectacle of punishment, however, was presented in the United States in a uniquely mediated manner. U.S. officials and media joined forces in condemning the display: the media adamantly refused to air or print the most horrific images, citing the international prohibition against such activities established in the Third Geneva Convention of 1949, which stipulates that prisoners should be protected from public curiosity. Instead, television news anchors and journalists illustrated their discussions of the event with brief clips of “acceptable” segments of the Al-Jazeera video, and then described for their viewers the frightening nature of what was not being shown. The American representation of the Al-Jazeera media spectacle of the captured U.S. soldiers replaced the majority of the videotaped images with verbal allusions to the absent images and discussion of what those events too terrible to witness might mean. In effect, then, the spectacle presented by

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Al-Jazeera was still witnessed by its intended audiences, yet in the United States its reception was framed by the interpretation of American officials and media. Thus, reporting took on the tenor of vivid speculation, as in the following newspaper account: “U.S. troops taken prisoner by Saddam Hussein’s forces could face treatment as brutal as, or worse than, Americans received in the last war with Iraq: torture with electric shocks, beatings, starvation, rape and the extraction of ‘confessions’ at gunpoint for television cameras.”14 In the place of actual visual evidence, the media created a fearful ekphrasis of potential torture conjectured from past events. The deaths and injuries that were suffered by the 507th Maintenance Company in that episode of war were undoubtedly real, but the sequence of events that followed offer an overt demonstration of the media’s influence on public opinion. The precise nature of what happened in the capture and rescue of Private Jessica Lynch was initially somewhat obfuscated by its staged presentation in the media. Further obscurity arose when a June 2003 Washington Post article by Dana Priest, William Booth, and Susan Schmidt described the confusion that surrounded the event, as American military officials attempted to document more fully what happened to the company during that time.15 Gradually the dramatic rescue of Private Jessica Lynch was exposed (and forgotten) as a rather different situation than the one initially depicted by American officials and media. The accurate story, in which Marine and Army commandos stormed forcefully into a hospital occupied only by compliant doctors and nurses and their patients, lacked the excitement of more imaginative versions. The murky details surrounding this episode were exacerbated by the rhetorical effects of the representation of torture, as described in the introduction to this study and examined throughout its chapters: the combined resistance of the image, the body, and pain to determinable meaning makes the presentation of torture a particularly effective means of disseminating affect, promoting in the witness general feelings or ideas. In this case, Saddam Hussein’s documented use of quite horrifying methods of torture undoubtedly contributed to the anxieties manifested by the soldiers of the 507th Maintenance on the video.16 Hussein’s use of torture probably further contributed to the fearsome conjectures made by U.S. officials and media describing the implications of the videotape to Americans poised to hear tales of Evil from Iraq. Yet the extent of actual mistreatment of Americans by Iraqis in this episode remains unclear, partially because of the American attempt to reframe the crisis as a figure reflecting the larger patriotic message of the war, as a success for the liberating Americans. The mutating and somewhat fuzzy details of this series of events reflect a common development in news reporting recently. Rapidly changing elements of a news story, competing versions, and the relatively rapid

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appearance and disappearance of individual events in the news are, of course, frequently identified aspects of our age of twenty-four-hour news programs and websites. This proliferation of information by the media significantly enhances the potential of rhetoric by blurring the boundaries of the “factual” and the “rhetorical.” As we have seen in the first two chapters of this study, rhetoric developed as a mode of argumentation or persuasion in the public sphere—the courts and agoras—of early Athenian democracy; not surprisingly, its force of persuasion continues to shape today’s public debates and dilemmas. Yet the public sphere has moved from a specific arena of personal interaction to a virtual space, the space of the “public screen,” as Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples have termed it. As DeLuca and Peeples argue, the ubiquity of television and television cameras have created an arena of exchange dominated by the “image event”: an image whose popular visibility and iconic characteristics allow it to function as a kind of visual shorthand, a metonymic and simplified figure that stands in for much more complex and sophisticated phenomena. Because the “public screen” is both ubiquitous and virtual, it creates a semblance of full disclosure and instant exchange; yet, DeLuca and Peeples argue, the practice of rhetoric on the “public screen,” rather than in the traditional public space, actually promotes distraction and a lack of focus, a vagueness that depends upon violence or extremity to shock viewers out of their distraction. On the “public screen,” they suggest, “Images [. . .] are important not because they represent reality but create it.”17 The argument that the development of visual media has had an influence upon the nature of human consciousness and perception is, of course, not a new one. During the relatively early stages of photography and film, Walter Benjamin argued that in order for human consciousness to cope with the increased stimuli of the “speeded-up” experience of photography and film, human experience necessarily becomes more “shallow.” About twenty years later, visual media was prevalent enough for Marshall McLuhan to theorize that it had become a prosthesis for human perception: that our reliance on such media made it a given, habitual factor in our experience of the world. This argument corresponds with Debord’s and de Certeau’s notions of the society of spectacle raised in the introduction. Niklas Luhmann has given Debord’s theory a more Heideggerian twist, arguing that our perception is now entirely mediated by the mass media, to the extent that the mass media now creates and controls our Weltanschauung. Such arguments extend naturally into Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra, which asserts that our awareness of the world is always already mediated by representation.18

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These theories of representation echo each other in their suggestions that our mediated world has a fictional, simulated, hyperrepresentational quality to it. In other words, the rhetoric of torture is currently performed upon a stage not unlike the dramatic and literary stages addressed in the previous chapters. Upon this stage, images, spectacles, and rhetorical tropes exchange freely with “reality”—a slippage of perception, experience, and representation facilitated by the ubiquity of the media. In this sense, one might argue that rhetoric is very much a “condition of our existence,” as John Bender and David E. Wellbury assert: “Modernism is an age not of rhetoric, but of rhetoricality, the age, that is, of a generalized rhetoric that penetrates to the deepest levels of human experience.”19 This phenomenon is not merely a natural evolution. As our culture becomes increasingly aware of its own mediated existence, we have developed increasingly more complex and sophisticated techniques of utilizing the media for persuasive purposes.

The Rhetoric of Torture: The Legal Body Images and words disseminated by the media have thus provided a fertile ground for the rhetoric of torture in the political “war on terror.” Even without a visual image, the mere mention of torture offers persuasive potential, as President Bush proved in his 2003 State of the Union address: This dictator, who is assembling the world’s most dangerous weapons, has already used them on whole villages—leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained—by torturing children while their parents are made to watch. International human rights groups have cataloged other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues and rape. If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning.20 The discussion of torture here plays an evidentiary function: the president catalogues Hussein’s use of torture in order to “prove” the extent of his evilness. Thus by means of Hussein’s practice of torture, Bush fosters fear and moral judgment, using torture as a means to justify going to war; in this manner, President Bush participates in Hussein’s own rhetoric of torture as power. As President Bush claimed then: “One by one, the

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terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice.”21 That address set a precedent for President Bush’s rhetorical evocation of Hussein’s practice of torture: the motif has been reiterated by the Bush administration on a number of occasions since that time. As the war trundled toward its projected close (the official end of combat was announced in May 2003, though at this writing the fighting continues), the president justified U.S. actions by reminding the world: “We’re not an imperial power [. . .] we’re a liberating power”—liberating Iraq from Hussein, whom he characterized as “a torturer, killer, maimer.” Speeches often linked Hussein to al Qaeda and 9/11, and thus to the al Qaeda ideology of terror, bringing Americans’ fears for their own safety into play, as well.22 In these cases, the representation of torture bears a number of political messages, playing the power of the United States off of the power of Hussein, and setting the political conflict within a sense of moral urgency. The rhetoric of torture establishes a stark moral opposition between Hussein, al Qaeda, and the terrorists and America, democracy, and liberation. The extremity of the contrast echoes Creon’s rhetoric in Antigone, when he suggests that the only alternative to absolute obedience is complete anarchy. It is a rhetoric evoked in the name of the city, whose extremity is justified by the state of exception produced by a political war. Yet the introduction of torture into political rhetoric may introduce a ripple effect that is difficult to control; for, as the preceding chapters have demonstrated, the representation of the body in pain produces a polysemy that is difficult to delimit. Before invoking the rhetoric of torture to argue for the need to invade Iraq, the Bush administration used language that subtly threatened bodily abuse of the suspected terrorists and others that were captured and imprisoned by the U.S. just after 9/11, at the beginning of the “war on terror.”23 The first twenty Afghan war detainees arrived at the Guantánamo compound on Friday, January 10, 2002, accompanied by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s persistent reminders that the captives were considered “unlawful combatants,” and not necessarily as prisoners of war—deliberately presenting the possibility that the U.S. might ignore in this case the protections guaranteed to POWs by the Geneva Conventions.24 As he commented, “We do plan to, for the most part, treat them in a manner that is reasonably consistent with the Geneva Conventions, to the extent they are appropriate [. . .].”25 When a (perhaps predictable) uproar arose concerning the treatment of the prisoners at Guantánamo, directly following these comments, Rumsfeld quickly changed his tune, noting, “No detainee has been harmed. No detainee has been mistreated in any way,” adding that the numerous media reports suggesting that such mistreatment might happen emanated from “people who are either uninformed, misinformed or poorly informed.” Rumsfeld then famously

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delivered a much more benign picture of the conditions at Guantánamo: “To be in an 8-by-8 cell in beautiful, sunny Guantánamo, Cuba, is not inhumane treatment.”26 Nevertheless, the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo and elsewhere reflected an awkward legal tension for the Bush-Cheney administration: while the administration sought to protect its ability to elicit information from detainees by means of interrogation, the actions of interrogators were limited by international protections designated by the Geneva Conventions, and by the War Crimes Act of 1996, which makes torture of war prisoners a U.S. felony. Thus the treatment of detainees remained a concern for human rights groups such as Amnesty International and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Criticism of CIA interrogation practices gained momentum with Dana Priest’s and Barton Gellman’s December 26, 2002, investigative report of allegations of torture at U.S. holding facilities. In this piece, Priest and Gellman reported that prisoners inside the Bagram interrogation center who refused to cooperate would be “sometimes kept standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted goggles [. . .]. At times they are held in awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment of lights—subject to what are known as ‘stress and duress’ techniques.”27 The same report also documented the U.S. practice of “rendering” uncooperative prisoners “to foreign intelligence services whose practice of torture has been documented by the U.S. government and human rights organizations.”28 Notably, government sources quoted in the critical exposé nevertheless manifested confidence in the administration’s tough stance; as Cofer Black, former head of the CIA Counterterrorist Center, noted cryptically, “This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that all you need to know: There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves come off.”29 In this case, the threat of torture—neither denied nor confirmed—creates, by means of its ambiguity, an impregnable impression of American control, power, and strength.

The Rhetoric of Torture: The Erotic Body This suggestion of power and control over the human body—and over the political body—was sent again, visually, when America finally captured Saddam Hussein, on December 13, 2003. Television screens played and replayed the image that came to stand for his capture, a short video of Hussein’s mouth being examined, the camera angle such that the audience is put in the position of the inspector, penetrating into Hussein’s mouth from above. Rhetorically, the image demonstrates that the captured Hussein is now controlled and overpowered by his captors. Airing the news of

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the capture in an official press conference, the United States was then able to frame visually and unmistakably Hussein’s position under its dominant gaze. While the images were humiliating and invasive, they fell far short of torture. Yet the repeated picture of Hussein’s mouth being penetrated by the small penlight (as he was being examined), with the camera looming above his head, echoed images such as those of the battered 507th Company, linking physical humiliation with a sense of subjection and control. The fascinated response of the television-viewing public to that newsreel was reiterated after Hussein’s trial, when viewers around the world watched in rapt captivation the images of his execution; in a reflection of the rhetoric surrounding his capture, the CNN website’s headline on December 30, 2006, thus read “Hussein executed with ‘fear in his face.’ ”30 The fascinated response to the physical subjection of the other came into stark focus, with more disturbing implications, when the photos from Abu Ghraib surfaced, in late April and early May of 2004.31 The figures in these photos, set against the grubby hidden insides of the faraway prison, were shocking because of the abuse they suffered on film; but, with their faces hidden under hoods, they were also haunting. Rather than give us the faces of the prisoners, these photos show us the faces of American soldiers, proudly smiling and gesturing next to the hooded and faceless figures they dominate. The hooded figures are in various poses of humiliation, all naked or almost entirely naked: naked pyramids of men photographed from the front and from the rear, naked men simulating oral sex and masturbation with each other, a nude man on his hands and knees being led by a leash. The photos have an overt sexual nature, intensified by the fact that most often the smiling soldier included in the photos is a woman, cigarette in her mouth, giving the thumbs up next to the blurred space where the genitalia ought to be. The accounts of many of the prisoners in the photos of abuse that came out of Abu Ghraib detail physical and sexual abuse, such as making prisoners masturbate in front of each other, in front of female soldiers, and for pictures; attaching things to the penis; threatening rape; or forcing prisoners to simulate oral sex. Interviews note that the prisoners were almost always made to be naked. A few describe being made to crawl on all fours, like a dog; one notes being made to bark like a dog.32 The methods of illtreatment listed in the February 2004 report of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) corroborates such details,33 as does the March 2004 report submitted by Major General Antonio M. Taguba recounting his inquiry into treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.34 Responses by the administration to the photos expressed shock and horror. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that, though he’d read about the specific charges, it didn’t really hit him until he saw the photos: “You read it, as I say, it’s one thing. You

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see these photographs and it’s just unbelievable [. . .].”35 The soldiers implicated in the photos were immediately decried and dismissed as “a few bad seeds”—“Animal House on the night shift,” as former Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger characterized it.36 Indeed Schlesinger’s August 2004 report begins with a significant contradiction: The events of October through December 2003 on the night shift of Tier I at Abu Ghraib prison were acts of brutality and purposeless sadism. We now know these abuses occurred at the hands of both military police and military intelligence personnel. The pictured abuses, unacceptable even in wartime, were not part of authorized interrogations nor were they even directed at intelligence targets. They represent deviant behavior and a failure of military leadership and discipline. However, we do know that some of the egregious abuses at Abu Ghraib which were not photographed did occur during interrogation sessions and that abuses during interrogation sessions occurred elsewhere.”37 While claiming that the events depicted in the photos are “deviant,” “purposeless,” and unauthorized, Schlesinger simultaneously admits that the pictured abuses happened during interrogation, and that these abuses were not limited to this specific occurrence. Yet the rhetorical spin that surrounded the soldiers implicated in these crimes diffused the impact of the scandal, ultimately dulling some of the public outcry, at least in the United States. As the story broke, resonated in the press, and then began to fade from view, the torture reflected in the photos from Abu Ghraib functioned rhetorically on a few different levels, including their original intent. Indeed, as the photos remained in circulation, they offered new and renewed rhetorical possibilities, for a variety of audiences. For the prisoners depicted in the images, the process sent a dehumanizing and demoralizing message. In this regard, one goal of the photographs may have been coercion out of shame; according to Seymour Hersh, one government consultant suggested that “It was thought that some prisoners would do anything—including spying on their associates—to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends.”38 In addition, the photos had a broader rhetorical reach. For those taking and disseminating the photographs, the photos illustrated the prisoners being controlled and subjected, and fostered a sense of control and subjection. Such an effect was undoubtedly also the case for a broader public audience, those looking at the photos and sympathetically sharing the gaze of the cameraman. This aspect of the images also includes their prurient component. In a manner similar to the horrified yet fascinated gaze directed

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toward the staged mutilations in the ancient Greek romances, the sexual nature of the photos engaged the desire of their audience, integrating the object of the photos (the prisoners—and also the soldiers) into the social symbolic—into a designated and acceptable position in the social hierarchy. In this sense, too, the photos fostered identification between the audience and the soldiers, a “hypothetical shared experience,” as Susan Sontag has described it.39 This exchange between audience and soldiers, of course, further erases the particular identities of the abused prisoners—not only are their faces obscured (in the publicized images), but individual identity is subsumed into the mass of naked and abused bodies. Judith Butler has noted how the designation of the Guantánamo inmates as “detainees” rather than “prisoners” removes them from the law in a manner more subtle than simply excluding them from the protections of the Geneva Conventions: “They are, rather, ‘detainees,’ those who are held in waiting, those for whom waiting may well be without end.”40 The detainees depicted in the photos of abuse in Abu Ghraib occupy a similarly ambiguous position. As a result, in the shifting rhetoric of their representation, they have occupied a range of positions: ciphers of evil, savage forces to be subdued, fanatics, or monsters. Their hooded or erased faces stand in contrast to the beaming smiles of the prison guards in the photos; the detainees are a blank, ready to be filled in by means of rhetoric. They may thus be drawn into the hierarchy of society in whatever position makes those in power feel most comfortable. The extent to which the prisoners in Abu Ghraib actually permeated the U.S. social consciousness in this manner could be seen in the January 10, 2005, issue of the tabloid Weekly World News, whose front page featured an image depicting Saddam Hussein wearing only a diaper and a collar with a leash attached, the end held by a statuesque woman in sadomasochistic costume. The headline described how Hussein was “Beaten by a Gal in Prison” (who is identified in the photo that accompanies the story as the “Cruel Woman”) and “treated like a dog.” The sexual subjection pictured in the Abu Ghraib photos merged in popular culture with the images of the captured Hussein in a sadomasochistic scene featuring a woman who—in additional photos accompanying the pseudo-article—was directly connected to PFC Lynndie England (perhaps the most famous of the American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib photos). The conflation of images and messages that resulted in the absurd Weekly World News spread is not so surprising, in light of the conclusions of the preceding chapters of this book, which have demonstrated how torture as rhetoric can create an ambiguity of meaning; significance emerges from the associations and interpretations of a witnessing audience.

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The Rhetoric of Torture: The Moral Body Torture as rhetorical trope can produce a variety of responses of moral outrage, with designations of immorality shifting depending upon the political loyalties of the audience, a phenomenon that chapter 4 of this study demonstrates with particular focus. As my reading of Prudentius’s hymn to Romanus illustrates, a spectacle of torture can simultaneously send opposing messages of lawful and unlawful behavior, depending on whether the interpreting audience is Roman or Christian. Scenes of particular brutality and torture disseminated by the media during the “war on terror” have produced similarly contrasting responses. For example, on March 31, 2004, four American contractors in Iraq were attacked, shot to death, burned in their vehicles, and dragged through the streets, after which their charred corpses were hanged from a bridge over the Euphrates. The action—and its representation in the media—produced a wide range of responses in the United States. The New York Times quoted a retired electric company manager as commenting, “It just makes me madder . . . Let’s kill them all. Let’s wipe them off the face of the earth. This is war, even though a lot of people don’t realize it”; while another source (a power plant worker) could read the atrocities as a “logical result of Washington’s policy in the Middle East.”41 In contrast, the radio personality Rush Limbaugh declared, “They’re the ones who are sick . . . They’re the ones who are perverted. They are the ones who are dangerous. They are the ones who are subhuman. They are the ones who are human debris, not the United States of America and not our soldiers and not our prison guards.”42 Similarly, the disturbing photos from Abu Ghraib were capable of communicating additional messages that appear in stark contrast to those listed here. Indeed, each photograph potentially conveyed a number of signs at once, possible depictions of either moral or immoral behavior manifested by any of the figures in the images, depending on the perspective of the viewer. Undoubtedly, there were many who saw the abuse staged in the photos as evidence of the immorality of the prison guards posing with the detainees. Many of those, viewing the smiling and posing prison guards metonymically, probably went on to see the pictures as “proof” of the immorality of the American people as a whole. In the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the Bush administration worked hard to regulate the negative responses that the photos produced. As criticism arose following the release of the photos, President Bush insisted, “Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country. We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our

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soul and our being.”43 In remarks such as this, the administration suggested a moral distinction between American methods of interrogation and those of other countries, such as Iraq. The distinction reasserts the opposition already implied in the president’s rhetorical use of the term—in this quote and in his 2003 State of the Union Address quoted earlier—which asserts that torture is a figure for a certain moral type (or immoral type) of behavior, a figure for “Evil.” In this instance, the rhetoric of torture communicates a moral message: although U.S. soldiers misbehaved, their crimes were indeed nowhere near those of the Iraqi dictator. As Ahdef Soueif put it in the Guardian: “Hussein is now the moral compass of the West.”44

The Rhetoric of Torture: The Political Body As moral distinctions such as these have become increasingly ideological, arguments over the precise definition of torture have made such differentiations increasingly less obvious. In the process of dismissing those soldiers implicated in the abuses as abnormal and immoral, the White House has participated in a semantic debate over what kinds of abuses actually constitute torture. Memos and discussions seek to establish what level of pain constitutes torture, in an attempt to prove that U.S. interrogators haven’t resorted to actual torture per se. Such an argument not only reasserts the morality of America and its military in opposition to that of the terrorists or of Saddam Hussein’s regime, but also rebuts accusations that the United States has violated international prohibitions against torture. According to Abu Ghraib prison guards, confusion about what sorts of abuse were “legal” had a significant affect upon practices in the Iraq prison, as well as at Guantánamo. In establishing modes of interrogation for Abu Ghraib, Lt. General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, “borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics”45 used at Guantánamo, revising the kinds of techniques allowable twice in the span of a month (one list of guidelines was produced on September 19, 2003, another on October 12, 2003). Sanchez’s source for the list was a memo, dated August 1, 2002, composed by Jay S. Bybee, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, for Judge Alberto Gonzales, counsel to the president (at that time). This memo contends that some acts may be “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” yet do not constitute torture under Section 2340, the federal law criminalizing torture.46 According to the memo, acts considered torture must “be of an extreme nature, specifically intended to inflict severe pain or suffering, mental or physical.”47

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This semantic debate, of course, reflects an intentional confusion of terms, an ambiguity or looseness of definition meant to enable U.S. troops to interrogate detainees for information while at the same time remaining—nominally, at least—within the law. As noted earlier, the Geneva Convention prohibits torture and any use of “violence,” “cruel treatment,” or “humiliating and degrading treatment” against a detainee. The War Crimes Act of 1996 makes the failure to comply with these restrictions a U.S. felony. Thus in order to protect against the possibility that U.S. interrogators or anyone in the Bush administration might be charged with such crimes, David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s general counsel, advised a course of action that would remove the detainees from the protections of the Geneva Convention (by designating them as “detainees” or “enemy combatants” rather than prisoners of war) and that would play upon the ambiguity of the definition of torture by obfuscating what constitutes “severe” suffering.48 The designation that pain must be “severe” reiterates language that the United States appended to the UN Convention Against Torture when it acceded to that agreement (under the first Bush administration), as Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo noted to Judge Alberto Gonzales (then counsel to the president), in a memo also dated August 1, 2002: “The United States understands that, in order to constitute torture, an act must be specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering [. . .].”49 After spending some time clarifying the definition of severe physical pain in terms of what sort of severe pain qualifies for payments of health benefits, Bybee’s memo notes that severe mental pain can result from the threat of imminent death. The Bybee memo looks to the federal Torture Victims Protection Act, which provides seven firm examples of torture that have been prosecuted as illegal, to determine its definition of torture. Then, in an appendix, the memo compares cases in which rulings have determined the victim suffered actual torture, and those in which the victim was not. One example of a case considered torture by U.S. courts described the following abuses: Plaintiff was kidnapped at gunpoint. He was beaten for several days after his kidnapping. He was subjected to daily torture and threats of death. He was kept in solitary confinement for two years. During that time, he was blindfolded and chained to the wall in a 6-foot-by-6-foot room infested with rodents. He was shackled in a stooped position for 44 months, and he developed eye infections as a result of the blindfolds. Additionally, his captors did the following: forced him to kneel on spikes;

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Such accounts were contrasted with cases that were considered not to constitute torture, including the following example: The plaintiff was held for eight days in a filthy cell with drug dealers and an AIDS patient. He received no food, no blanket, and no protection from other inmates. Prisoners murdered one another in front of the plaintiff. The court flatly rejected the plaintiff’s claim that this constituted torture.51 These clarifications became important as U.S. officials sought to deny that the practices at Abu Ghraib (and elsewhere) constituted torture.52 The policy overtly denied the U.S. practice of torture, while leaving room for the possibility of cruelty; the political and legal success of the strategy depended upon the ambiguity created around the term “torture.” The resistance of torture to definite signification fosters here the ambiguity that enables a slippery legal interpretation. The law and language reveal their kinship in this context, with torture functioning in much the same way that a rhetorical trope such as metonymy does. Torture, in its resistance to definition, threatens to subvert the law as metonymy has the potential to subvert the logic of language. Thus, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press on March 23, 2004, could draw a vague distinction between the U.S. treatment of detainees and the apparent treatment of the soldiers from the 507th Maintenance Company and their Iraqi captors: “You know [. . .] under the Geneva Convention, it’s illegal to do things with prisoners of war that are humiliating to those individuals.” Torture in this sense becomes an abstraction—“Was it humiliating? Was it torture?”—that invites comparisons of levels of abuse in order to establish whether an action constitutes torture; the question becomes one of degrees of abuse. In this context, then, the representation of torture serves yet another rhetorical function: the very specific descriptions of abuses offer “evidence” for semantic distinctions about the level of abuse that constitutes torture. On another news show, therefore, Secretary Rumsfeld qualified, “I’m not a lawyer. My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture [. . .]. And therefore I’m not going to address the torture word.”53

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Since 2002, such clarifications and confusions have been a significant aspect of political rhetoric, a tendency exacerbated by the political nature of the “war on terror,” whose apparent success or failure fluctuates with the vicissitudes of public opinion. Thus torture performed before the media audience reveals itself as what it has always been: a political event—as, for example, when Oedipus pokes his eyes out on stage, before the witnessing chorus and audience, in manifest admission of his guilt; or, when Antigone must be publicly punished for burying the body of a traitor; or, when Oedipus’s broken body becomes a figure for the power of an individual’s suffering for the polis. Utilized in rhetoric and represented in the media, the tortured human body makes manifest its political significance, reiterating the question: What is the meaning of the body for the city? For our rulers as for Creon, torture is evoked and represented in order to sway public opinion. This is a rhetorical message to which the public responds—to such an extent that a May 2007 debate staged for Republican candidates for the 2008 U.S. presidential race featured torture as a central question. All of the candidates were asked, “How far can the authorities go in interrogating the terrorists to get information to avert a fourth attack?” The answers of each individual were weighed and measured, and will undoubtedly be reinvoked as the election nears and voters must choose a candidate. The debate over the definition of torture ostensibly arises from the question of whether or not such abuses as those depicted in the Abu Ghraib photos fall inside or outside of the law. Yet the fact that the debate continues—despite ancient and contemporary evidence that refutes its reliability as a source of testimony—points to a more insidious problem. The causes for the persistence of the torture debate are the same reasons that make the representation of torture such an effective rhetorical tool. The continued argument over what precisely constitutes torture—over what level of physical or mental pain is “severe” enough—reflects, once again, torture’s resistance to logical definition. In the representation of torture, the sensory, the bodily, the visual, combines with language—phusis combines with logos—to produce a meaning: for in torture the body manifests symptoms of an intended meaning through pain. But how are we to measure the level of another’s pain? The answer requires an imaginative leap, an illogical leap over the resistance of the material body. Because the body is, at some level of its physical existence, untranslatable, we must invest it with meaning, inscribe upon it language and laws. As the previous chapters have demonstrated, the resistance of the body, pain, and the image to definition or communication gives the representation of torture an inherent ambiguity that makes it a particularly effective and malleable rhetorical tool. The representation of torture overwrites the resistance of the body and pain to communication with the empathetic response

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of the witness, who responds to the spectacle with a feeling of certainty and a sure judgment. Yet that certainty merely elides the essential ambiguity of meaning that the spectacle produces. The figure of torture represented in the media is like a gesture on stage,54 working, as a visual metonymy, to make manifest (whether by form or speech) on the “stage” of war the dianoia that drives the plot forward. In the case of torture, however, the feeling of certainty provoked by the spectacle of pain elides our awareness of any ambiguity of meaning. As our bodies respond to the pain of other bodies, the sensory becomes the merely sensual; the body of the tortured becomes symptom, wound, spectacle, placed in the service of producing a variety of meanings in the name of politics. This book has aimed to demonstrate how the essentially ambiguous nature of torture’s representations—its dependence upon the body, pain, and image to make its point—precludes the ability to make ethical judgments with clarity or certainty. Yet torture’s rhetorical intent, as it is represented before an audience, demands interpretation; it solicits a verdict. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his introduction to Henri Alleg’s account of torture in Algiers, observes, “During the war [WWII] [. . .] we watched the German soldiers walking inoffensively down the street, and would say to ourselves: ‘They look like us. How can they act as they do?’ And we were proud of ourselves for not understanding.”55 As Sartre concludes, that apparent lack of understanding turned out to be a false comfort, since in Algiers—as elsewhere—the “we” proved equally capable of torturing another. Perhaps this experience of the other, over the ages, must remain the limit of our understanding. In the rhetorical use of torture, the human body of the other becomes a tortured figure to which the witness responds with an interpretation that feels true: in this political, tortured, literary event, the witness is also complicit.

Notes Introduction 1. James Elkins argues, in Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis (Stanford UP, 1999), that “pictured bodies are expressive in two largely opposite modes: some act principally on the beholder’s body, forcing thoughts about sensation, pain, and ultimately death; and others act more on the beholder’s mind, conjuring thoughts of painless projection, transformation, and ultimately metamorphosis” (p. x). While I agree with both of the possibilities Elkins proposes here, I differ with his suggestion that these are “opposite modes.” I will demonstrate that the body and mind work in tandem when encountering the rhetorical representation of torture; the two responses, in other words, function simultaneously and interdependently. 2. De Certeau thus grounds Guy Debord’s theory of the society of spectacle squarely within the social and practical necessity of everyday communication (The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall [Berkeley: U of California P, 1984]) xxi). 3. “Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television),” PMLA 117.1, 104–16: 105. 4. “Photography, War, and Outrage,” PMLA 120.3, 822–27: 823. 5. Law’s Interior: Legal and Literary Constructions of the Self (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001) 11. 6. While Prometheus’s crimes are ultimately described by Hesiod, those of his brothers never are; this omission emphatically focuses the account upon Zeus’s powers, manifested in this case by his ability to punish others, rather than upon descriptions of specific crimes and the process of punishment. 7. In “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation” (Philosophy and Rhetoric 6 [1973]: 154–61), Richard Vatz argues that a rhetorical situation does not exist as an independent sign that invites response (as Lloyd Bitzer describes it), but is rather created by an agreement of salience. The advent of a rhetorical situation thus involves interpretation: “After salience is created, the situation must be translated into meaning” (161). In this sense, the interpretation of at least one meaning is always already an aspect of torture’s persuasive potential or of its rhetorical function. 8. Foucault analyzes this political practice as it appears in the seventeenth century in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Vintage Books, 1977]). For the supposed effects of intentionally displayed mutilation, see especially his chapter “The spectacle of the scaffold” (pp. 32–72).

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9. Alphonso Lingis writes of two victims of political torture in Brazil: “They had been turned into walking advertisements of terror, agents of demoralization and intimidation” (Abuses [Berkeley: U of California P, 1994] 39). 10. See, for example, Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); David Konstan, Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1994); James I. Porter’s introduction to his edited collection Constructions of the Classical Body (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002); Dalia Judovitz, The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001); and Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995). 11. Hence, as the Formalists pointed out, even the mundane things of the world take on a richer quality, a complexity that demands interpretation, with the defamiliarization of literary language. 12. See especially Jean-François Lyotard, “Prescription,” Lectures d’enfance (Paris: Galilée, 1991) 34–56; in English the essay appears as “Prescription,” Toward the Postmodern, ed. Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, and London: Humanities Press, 1992) 176–91. As I have noted, Elkins echoes this terminology in his own book. 13. Of course, the issue of what level of pain constitutes torture has become a subject of great debate—and rhetorical artistry—in American politics since the advent of the “war on terror” after 9/11/2001. That the definition of torture is debatable at all has its roots in the resistance of the body and pain to signification that I am discussing here. I address this issue more specifically in the epilogue. 14. Elaine Scarry suggests this formulation in her approach to torture, which has been immensely helpful to me here (see especially pp. 46–51, The Body in Pain [Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1985]). 15. “. . . And Why It Should Never Be One,” Los Angeles Times, Friday, November 11, 2005. 16. Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti, “Interrogation Methods Are Criticized,” New York Times, May 30, 2007. 17. See especially pp. 46–51, The Body in Pain. 18. “The Rhetoric of the Image,” pp. 38–39 (in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath [New York: Hill and Wang, 1977]). 19. The arguments against torture are obvious and numerous, and its failure to elicit dependable testimony is, of course, merely one of them. At the most patent level, torture’s abuse of the human body—and of the human—stands behind the great number of legal arguments against its use. As we have seen lately, though, even the legal arguments against torture have not prevented its practice. For a thorough consideration of the injustice of torture in legal terms, see Christopher W. Tindale, “The Logic of Torture,” Social Theory and Practice v22. n3 (Fall 1996): 349–74. Tindale logically refutes the five specific defenses most commonly offered in defense of torture. 20. Here, I follow not only the ancient Greek roots of the term, but also Lyotard’s more recent evocation of aesthesis as a bodily response. (See “Prescription,” 179.)

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21. A dead one who protects (Bernard Knox, Oedipus at Thebes, New Haven: Yale UP, 1957). 22. There is not complete agreement regarding when this genre first developed. B. P. Reardon dates Ninus as the first, sometime during the first century BCE, followed by Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, in the mid-first century CE (in Collected Ancient Greek Novels [Berkeley: U of California P, 1989] 5). Margaret Anne Doody comes to generally the same conclusion, in The True Story of the Novel; her discussion of the genre’s appearance contextualizes it nicely, though briefly, in concurrent historical and rhetorical developments (see pp. 18–26 [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1996). Mikhail Bakhtin traces the evolution and distinction of the genre from epic, lyric, and drama in his essay “Epic and Novel” (The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist; trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist [Austin: U of Texas P, 1981] 3–40). 23. The potential of this double function of the word lingua was clarified for me by Elissa Marder, in her essay “Disarticulated Voices: Feminism and Philomela” (see esp. pp. 160–61; Hypatia v.7. n.2 [Spring 1992]: 148–66). 24. Chris Mackey (with Greg Miller) provides an account of his interrogation training and experiences with the army in Afghanistan in The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against Al Qaeda (New York: Little, Brown, 2004). Evan Wright describes the general chaos and violence of military culture in Iraq in Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War (New York: Putnam Publishing Group, 2004). 25. Seymour Hersh describes his own investigative reporting beginning 9/11/2001 and leading up to the revelation of the first set of photos out of Abu Ghraib (published in The New Yorker, May, 2004) in Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004). Two other books relate similar narratives, providing government documents and memos as evidence: Karen J. Greenberg’s and Joshua L. Dratel’s edition The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2005); and Mark Danner’s Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books Press, 2004). 26. For example, Jennifer K. Harbury investigates the relation between the current torture debate in the United States and historical CIA associations with torture in Central and South America in Truth, Torture, and the American Way: The History and Consequences of U.S. Involvement in Torture (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005). 27. The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2004) 41.

Chapter 1. The Legal Body 1. Translation modified. Greek texts of all plays by Sophocles cited in this chapter are from the Oxford Classical Texts edition, edited by Hugh Lloyd-Jones and N. G. Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). For typographical reasons, however, I have consistently used the sigma form s or V in the place of

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the half-circle sigma form employed in the Oxford version. English translations of the Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone are quoted from the Loeb editions, ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), unless otherwise noted. 2. When he arrives in the grove of the Furies at the beginning of the play, Oedipus himself refers to the conclusion of his life as literally a katastroj–n, l. 103. 3. Passages in English from Aristotle’s Poetics are from the translation of Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), unless otherwise noted. Greek text is from the Oxford edition, ed. D. W. Lucas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). 4. My translation. 5. Though, as Lucas and others point out, the text of this passage is uncertain and spurious, the turn that Aristotle makes here remains, regardless, an emphasis upon language and rhetoric in tragedy. 6. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) 232–33. 7. Lowell Edmunds, Theatrical Space and Historical Place in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1996) 3. 8. William Blake Tyrell and Larry J. Bennett provide a helpful study of the results of the transference of funeral rituals from individual and family custom to a public rite (Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone [Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1998]), see especially pp. 5–15. 9. This is according to the myth, in the previous public “outing” of his crimes (depicted by Sophocles in Oedipus Rex). 10. Though the play was written, of course, years before Sophocles’ plays that describe these events. 11. The chorus’s laments on lines 1257–60 and 1293, as well as Creon’s speech, line 1299 and lines 1341–46, deictically and verbally indicate the visible presence of the corpse onstage. Griffiths also suggests this in his commentary, p. 354. 12. Simon Goldhill’s discussion of rhetorical display and the polis, and the corresponding association of vision and knowledge, has been a great help to me in considering the spectacle of punishment in these plays (“Program Notes,” Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, ed. Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999] 1–29). 13. A very prominent example of this fear, of course, appears at the beginning of the Iliad (I.1–5), as well as at the end, as the provocation for Priam to recover Hector’s body (XXIV). 14. Antigone, ed. Mark Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 139. 15. Simon Goldhill has noted the opposition of polis (the city) and oikos (home and family), arguing that for Antigone philos is an appeal to the oikos. Reading her loyalty to the oikos as a manifestation of independence, power, and authority, Goldhill notes that such an assertion would have been perceived as particularly problematic for a woman, because of her inevitable participation in and dependence upon a network of relations in the family and polis. This raises, he suggests, an important challenge to Antigone, one to which we will return later:

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“For in democratic Athens, an essential demand of the ideology of city life is the mutual interdependence of citizens” (Reading Greek Tragedy [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986] 91). The opposition raised by the conflict between Antigone and Creon, in other words, forces a consideration of the conflicts of interest between the oikos and the polis. Identifying Creon with the city, as well, Albin Lesky (Greek Tragic Poetry, trans. Matthew Dillon [New Haven: Yale UP, 1983) shifts the stakes of the opposition by emphasizing Antigone’s claims to be doing the will of the gods by burying her brother. Lesky points out that Creon’s assessment of the city’s primary importance overturns even the traditional primacy of the gods: “When [Creon] says of the ≈¢d’ ÷st¥n ≠ s¯¢zousa (it is she who saves us), this signifies a secularpolis (189): h ization that no longer recognizes any absolute value higher than the state” (135). Thus, Lesky sees in the play a struggle between man (Creon) and the gods (Antigone). While Creon stubbornly enforces his man-made laws, Antigone bears witness to the “unwritten laws” of the gods (141). In her attachment to the corpse of her brother, Lesky sees Antigone as actually ascribing to immortal, unearthly, divine laws. Such a dialectic suggests the ethical struggle that Hegel sees enacted in the tragedy of Antigone: as a result of action, the unspoken, unknown law is broken, giving rise to the ethical conflict. Of course, Antigone, for her part, is aware of the civil law that she breaks, but she transgresses the law because she perceives it to be violent and wrong. Nevertheless, by knowingly breaking the law, her action becomes for Hegel more inexcusable, her guilt more severe; it is for this reason, Hegel argues with a quote from the play, that she must suffer: “Because we suffer we acknowledge we have erred” (Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977] 284 [quoted from Antigone, l. 926]). In this sense, Antigone’s suffering demonstrates her individual guilt in the ethical order. In her position opposite to the laws of Creon, Antigone thus appears as aligned with the natural laws (as opposed to the sort of man-made laws that the second choral song [the first stasimon], the “Ode to Man,” describes [l. 332–75]), or with nature, in general. Hence, Charles Segal explains, “In the great fifth century debate between nature and convention, physis [nature or the natural qualities, form] and nomos [law, usage, custom], Antigone stands on the side of nature. She defends those relations and aspects of life that man possesses by the given conditions of his birth against those which he creates by strength and force” (Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles [Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981] 155). In her individual opposition to Creon’s political laws, Antigone thus appears as a natural force whose struggle results from an encounter with the techné of society. In this sense, Antigone as representative of the natural laws is sometimes seen as a feminine force, rebelling against the laws of the patriarchal society. This is the reading that Carol Jacobs gives of the play; she finds in Antigone a revolutionary female figure, following and critiquing Hegel’s reading of her character. Jacobs describes the terms of the dialectic that Hegel finds manifested in the play as those of gender: “The stakes for Hegel [. . .] are sexual difference, the relation between family and state, and the movement from matriarchy to patriarchy in the pagan world” (“Dusting Antigone,” MLN 111.5 [1996] 889). For Jacobs, Antigone

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reflects both her female status and her (related) connection to nature or natural law in her approach to the earth—that is, by the manner in which she buries Polynices. Although Creon excuses his intention to execute his son’s fiancée by asserting that there are other fields to plow (l. 569), Antigone, Jacobs points out, works the earth differently, by not breaking it, or marking it as hers, but rather just dusting Polynices’ body with it. In this reading, then, Antigone poses a threat to the male system, making the mark that can’t be located, in a strange sort of écriture féminine transferred to the fifth-century ritual of burial. Jacobs contends, in other words, that the unintelligibility of Antigone’s action, its refusal to fit into any given tradition or law, provides it with the ability to subvert not only the male system but the concept of opposed poles of conflict, in general: “Antigone, indeed, changes and transforms the concept of ethics; it perverts the universal and its promise of property: it perverts as well any fixed concept of revolution against patriarchy” (911). Antigone, seen as allied with nature, not only subverts the nomoi of the dominant system (that is, Thebes under Creon), but in doing so disrupts the limits of each of the terms of opposition as well. Cynthia Willett, in her own reading of Hegel’s reading of Antigone, also ascribes such a wide-ranging disruption to the manner in which Antigone, or her actions, resists the terms of the dominant model. For Willett, however, the laws that Antigone subverts through her actions in the play are both the laws of Hegel’s dialectic and the rules of tragedy Aristotle prescribes in his Poetics. Tragic drama, she suggests, with its reversals and discoveries, parallels the dialectic form of Hegel. Following this scheme, then, dialectic depends upon a cathartic moment like tragedy: “dialectic demands the catharsis, or purging, of emotion from educated spirit” (“Hegel, Antigone, and the Possibility of Ecstatic Dialogue,” Philosophy and Literature 14 [1990] 268). Yet, she argues, catharsis proposes a purging of desire that is no more possible in dialectic than in tragedy. Because of this, Willett seeks to find in her exploration of Antigone a reconception of tragedy “that is not cathartic but ecstatic” (268). Willett demarcates clearly the relation between suffering and ethics as Hegel conceives of it: Tragedy ends in the incipient reconciliation of the ethical powers which come into conflict. [. . .] Tragic pathos, or suffering, brings each hero to recognize the opposing ethical vision which concludes a play. As the choruses of Sophocles’ plays proclaim, tragedy engenders learning through suffering. (271) Thus suffering brings about the self-knowledge that enables the ethical selfconsciousness that Hegel finds in tragedy. In taking up the agon or conflict and suffering through it, the tragic hero suffers a reversal of what appears to be true; the resolution of the tragedy conveys the recognition of this lesson. In dialectical terms, then, catharsis is thus “the systematic expulsion of what cannot be taken up into pure thought” (273). Given this, Willett argues that dialectic therefore proceeds at each stage by a forgetting (that is, a purging out) of what remains incommensurate with the absolute totality of thought. Willett identifies this forgotten element as desire. While Hegel will argue that “The relationship between the brother and

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sister alone satisfies the requirement that ethical duty to the family is pure of the vagaries or accidental attractions of natural desire” (273), Willett points to events in the play that indicate that Antigone’s passionate feelings for her brother transgress Hegel’s claim by stemming from love. In addition, Willett argues, Antigone’s “worship of death” carries erotic overtones and at several moments in the play she manifests a maternal instinct. These factors enable Willett to claim, “The agony of Antigone intimates that the righteous defense of ethical duty originates not purely in a sense of duty but in a subjective passion that determines the performance of duty” (275). Such an assertion, she insists, appears clearly in Creon’s own inability to avoid passion; he himself becomes enraged, or passionate, in his attempts to quell Antigone’s passion. For this reason, Willett proposes to reread the tragedy Antigone and Hegel’s dialectic, allowing both to retain desire, in an ecstatic rather than cathartic pursuit of knowledge. In doing so, she hopes to “refigure a women’s dialectic” that allows for an ecstatic conception of tragedy, an excess of desire in the dialectical relation of tragedy (and philosophy): “Antigone’s dialectic mediates the engagement of wife and mother within an ethics that no longer expunges subjective feeling from duty” (282). For Willett, then, the possibility of including desire in the function of tragedy or philosophy becomes aligned with the feminine; in her feminine, maternal desire, Antigone suggests the possibility for an ecstatic pursuit of truth that includes “subjective feeling” or desire in its scheme and thereby obviates forgetting. Willett’s reading draws a parallel between the “rules” of dialectic, the form of tragedy, and Creon’s laws, as well. By emphasizing the limitations that Creon’s laws impose on Antigone’s “desire”—laws that Creon himself, she notes, can’t help but transgress—Willett suggests that the play describes a conflict between individual desire and the order of the polis (as well as between individual desire and the order of philosophy). In a slightly different perception of an opposition between reason and passion in Antigone, Mary Whitlock Blundell sees the conflict personified in Creon, who undermines his own rational principles with a passionate pursuit of power. For Blundell, too, Creon’s submission to passion reemphasizes the driving force of passion for Antigone. In this manner, she sees the tragedy as manifesting the interplay of reason and passion: “Thus passion as well as mortality sets limits to the power of human reason” (Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989] 143). 16. Antigone, ed. Griffith, 167–68. 17. The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (Berkeley: U of California P, 1964) 97. 18. On line 519, she claims that Hades demands the laws she follows. 19. For Sophocles’ concern with order, rhythm, balance, and the problem of disorder, see especially H. D. F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1954) 148–55; and Charles Segal, Sophocles’ Tragic World: Divinity, Nature, Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995), especially pp. 142–43. 20. Antigone, in her recounting of the edict (35–36) stresses the public nature of the execution, ending the phrase and line with ÷n p¬lei. Griffith feels that her language here echoes the formal language of an actual edict, except for in the use

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of j¬noV, which typically designates a more violent death such as murder, rather than judicial execution. 21. Charles Segal considers this need to avoid disorder as part of the motivation behind Creon’s prohibition: “Women’s lament helps the dead make the proper transition from the realm of the living to the other world but is also perceived as a source of emotional violence and disorder. It is associated with a maenadlike release of uncontrollable and disturbing emotions; and in its call for vengeance it can also lead to an unpredictable and uncontrollable cycle of vendettas [. . .]” (Sophocles’ Tragic World 119). 22. Creon accuses Antigone of being disorderly (™kosmo£ntaV) in his conversation with Haemon (l. 730). Much earlier, on line 172, Creon refers to the violence of the brothers against each other as a “pollution” (m√asma). 23. Tyrell and Bennett suggest that the public appropriation of funeral rites created a tension between government and family: “The public funeral exacerbated the antagonism of the dêmos and the family over funeral celebrations by separating the dead from their families” (Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone 9). In this sense, Creon may be seen as creating additional tension or disorder by removing the right to burial from Antigone and taking it on for himself. 24. Translation modified (following Griffith). 25. The temporal disorder of incest makes the mourning of Oedipus seem impossible, as Antigone complains in Oedipus at Colonus, previously quoted on page 19. The symptom of Oedipus’s crime, a plague on Thebes, recalls the plague that Teiresias warns Creon against causing. The symptoms of the plague or pollution in each case are the same—the stagnation of time, the cessation of reproduction, the inability to move forward. Thus the plagues that correspond to Oedipus’s and Creon’s crimes suggest in their nature the inability to mourn, the inability to remember, the failure to pass into history. 26. Griffith: “÷kt√nw d√khn / tisin = ‘pay the penalty’ ” (272). 27. Danae is unjustly imprisoned by her father. 28. Lycurgus is punished with imprisonment (and perhaps a madness that drove him to kill his own children) for attacking Dionysos. 29. The sons of Phineus are blinded by their stepmother, Eidothea, who stabbed her stepchildren’s eyes out in vengeance against their mother, Phineus’s first wife, Kleopatra. 30. Translation modified, incorporating Segal’s interpretation of mn›m’ ÷p√shmon as “conspicuous memorial.” 31. For staging of this scene, see Rush Rehm, Greek Tragic Theater (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), especially p. 37; and Tyrell and Bennett, Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone, especially pp. 148–51. 32. Sophocles’ Tragic World 120. 33. Segal suggests that Eurydice’s suicide is her way of mourning Haemon; thus, he suggests, this reverses “Creon’s victory over Antigone [i.e., his prevention of her mourning Polynices] in the first half of the play” (Sophocles’ Tragic World 121). Conversely, Tyrell and Bennett argue that in her suicide, “Eurydice has silenced herself; she will not mourn his [Creon’s] son for him. This is the dikê, the penalty, that Eurydice extracts from Creon [. . .]. Eurydice gives Creon the woman he

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wanted, a silenced woman who refuses to mourn a philos, and gains for Antigone the vengeance she prayed for, a silent funeral for Creon” (Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone 151). Though a very dramatic interpretation, Tyrell and Bennett’s reading fails to account, as Segal’s does, for the performative aspects of the play, which contradict the idea of such a “silent funeral.” In either case, Eurydice’s suicide gains significance in its relation to mourning. 34. Griffith disagrees with this, suggesting that Eurydice’s body probably would have simply been carried onstage and placed next to Haemon’s. In either case, at any rate, the corpses present a remarkable spectacle accompanying Creon’s rueful speech. 35. Griffith notes of this passage: “Hanging a man from a gibbet or board, and either leaving him to die of starvation and exposure, or beating him to death [. . .], was a familiar mode of execution, at least for low-class criminals and traitors . . .” (176). 36. Translation modified. 37. The Political Art of Greek Tragedy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993) 198. 38. Greek Tragic Poetry 143. 39. Tragedy and Civilization 206.

Chapter 2. The Political Body 1. Greek text of Sophocles in this chapter is from the Oxford Classical Texts edition, edited by Hugh Lloyd-Jones and N. G. Wilson (Oxford UP, 1990). For typographical reasons, however, I have consistently used the sigma form s and V in the place of the half-circle sigma form employed in the Oxford version. English translations of Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus are quoted from the Loeb editions, ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1994), unless otherwise noted. 2. R. D. Dawe, ed., Oedipus Rex (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982) 274. 3. Jean-Pierre Vernant raises this problem, arguing that Oedipus’s crimes disrupt the basic structure of the polis, placing him squarely outside of it. By these specific crimes, he suggests, Oedipus equalizes what should remain distinct and separate (i.e., generations) (“Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex,” New Literary History IX.3: 492). 4. Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986) 270. 5. Lesky places the play at the midpoint of Sophocles’ work, dating its performance sometime between 425–429 BC (Greek Tragic Poetry 152). Thucydides describes two plagues besetting Athens: one in 430 BC and another in the winter of 427–26 BC (2.47–54 and 3.87). Bernard Knox points out that the reference (by the chorus, l. 190) to Ares in connection with the plague reflects the double infliction of war (the Peloponnesian War) and plague on Athens (Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979) 91. 6. Presumed the son of Polybus, king of Corinth, and his wife Merope, Oedipus appears to be a Corinthian citizen. For this reason, Knox points out,

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his position as ruler is that of the t§rannoV (tyrannos)—one not born into rule (which would be more typically called a king, or basile§V), but rather a xenos (stranger) who has taken over the throne. Yet, as the play reveals, Oedipus, the son of Laius, king of Thebes, and Iocasta, actually is legitimately basile§V (Word and Action 89). 7. Segal provides a related insight into Oedipus’s exclusion from society because of his lack of identity: “[Oedipus] lacks the basic information about his origins that gives man his human identity and sets him apart from the undifferentiated realm of nature and the anonymous, unindividuated realm of the beasts” (Tragedy and Civilization 207). 8. The source of this uncertainty, which he later discusses with Iocasta, will be discussed shortly. 9. Oedipus and the Fabrication of the Father (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992) 9. In his review of Pucci’s book, Tom McCall gives a reading of this idea that is pertinent to other ideas of this chapter, as well: “When the once-anonymous sperm [By referring to the child in this way, McCall emphasizes the possibility of sperm to be mixed, thus preventing certain knowledge of the father.] becomes old enough (bypassing the ovum in this Greek [excessively patrilinear] plot) and takes on a face and a voice, it speaks. It learns to repeat the family names that it has been taught [. . .]. In this speaking of the family name, the spermatic body must cross a great divide between its unnamed, merely biological materiality and its abstract, yet highly significant, social designation. In Greek social practice (as in others), patronymics reinforce identity through a powerful verbal incantation that erases the child’s maternal origins” (“Oedipus Contemporaneous,” diacritics 25.4: 3 [my italics]). 10. Pietro Pucci notes, “If we turn our attention to the use of the verb ‘to know’ by the two speakers, we discover the astonishing fact that the text never names Oedipus’s knowledge with the verbs oida [perfect tense in present sense of e≥dw] and phroneô, although they are used to describe Teiresias’s knowledge.” (“The Tragic Pharmokos of the Oedipus Rex,” Helios 17.1 [1990] 43). 11. Translation modified. 12. As Vernant suggests, “Human language is inverted when the gods speak through it” (“Ambiguity and Reversal” 480). 13. In his Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (Vernant and Pierre VidalNaquet; trans. Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books, 1988), however, Jean-Pierre Vernant suggests that this action was typically performed by the father: “As P. Roussel reminds me, only a father had the right to expose a newborn child” (456). 14. Translation modified. 15. Vernant notes these “technical terms used to denote exposure” (Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece 173, n.153); helpful citations are also provided in his mythe et pensée chez les grecs (Paris: Francois Maspero, 1966), 135, n.153. 16. “How can I not fear intercourse with my mother?” he asks Iocasta worriedly; she dismisses this anxiety by reassuring him, of course, that it means nothing, since so many have the same dream. 17. Translation modified.

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18. Translation modified. 19. Translation modified. 20. Already this passage could imply Oedipus as both murderer and witness. The term that the chorus uses to designate the travelers (˛doip¬rwn) phonetically echoes Oedipus’s own name when pronounced, OÎd√pouV. As Dawe notes in his commentary, Sophocles’ text previous to this refers to the travelers as lfist–V. This lends some significance to the new designation. Perhaps, then, both of these roles are already being suggested as belonging to Oedipus. 21. Translation modified. 22. The one thing this witness has to tell turns out also to be false: he claims there were not one but many murderers. 23. For a general overview of the use of torture in ancient Greece, see Page duBois, Torture and Truth (New York and London: Routledge, 1991). 24. The others are laws, witnesses, contracts, and oaths [n¬moi, mºrtureV, sunq›kai, and ˙rkai] (Ars Rhetorica 1375a–b). 25. I.xv.26. Greek text and English translation of the Art of Rhetoric are from the Loeb edition, trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1926). 26. Although the Loeb edition includes a spurious sentence at the end of this paragraph in which Aristotle concludes that evidence gained from torture is therefore not trustworthy, the prevailing argument among scholars remains that this passage is corrupt (see William M. A. Grimaldi, S.J., Aristotle, Rhetoric: A Commentary [New York: Fordham UP, 1980]). 27. See, for example, Andocides 1.30, Isocrates “Trapezeticus,” 54, and Demosthenes 30.37. 28. “The Torture of Slaves in Athenian Law,” Classical Philology 91.1 (January 1996): 2. 29. See especially, C. V. Thompson, “Slave Torture in Athens,” The Classical Review VIII (1894): 136, who argues that torture was used as evidence; J. W. Headlam responds to Thompson’s claim, claiming that torture was not used as evidence, but as an alternative mode of trial (137). Similarly, David C. Mirhady argues for the use of torture, “Torture and Rhetoric in Athens,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies CXVI (1996): 119–31, and is refuted by Gerhard Thür, who argues that the esteem for torture in fifth-century Athens comes from an earlier period (132–34). 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 122. 32. See Eugene W. Bushala, who suggests that torture was utilized on freemen in crimes against the state and on free noncitizens in homicide investigations (“Torture of Non-Citizens in Homicide Investigations,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 9.1 [Spring 1968]: 61–68). J. Walter Jones, however, suggests that in extremely threatening situations, even a freeman could be tortured in order to extort evidence (The Law and Legal Theory of the Greeks [Oxford: Clarendon P, 1956] 141). 33. Sophocles’ Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991) 201. 34. The Law of Athens (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1968) 170. See also, Robert J. Bonner: “The evidence of a slave was not accepted in Athenian courts, unless

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it was taken under torture” (Evidence in Athenian Courts [New York: Arno P, 1979] 69). 35. A. R. W. Harrison, The Law and Life of Athens, vol. 2: Procedure (Oxford, 1971) 147, quoted by Ahl (201). 36. While duBois (20) and Vernant (3) both briefly address technical legal language in (Oedipus Tyrannus), R. G. Lewis provides a detailed exploration of the play in regard to three types of Athenian trials, the D√kh j¬nou (trial of an Athenian suit for homicide brought by the kin of the deceased), the Prodikºsia (“the preliminary hearing held by the archon basileus” [48]), and the z–thsiV (“the proceedings of a publicly appointed commission of z–thtai or inquisitors charged with investigating a crime of public import committed by a person or persons unknown and with gathering information that would identify the criminals and lead to their prosecution” [50]). His alignment of the investigation in OT with the third type of trial thus emphasizes the public nature of the revelation of Oedipus’s identity (as murderer and incestuous husband) (“The Procedural Basis of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 30.1 [Spring 1989]: 41–66). Knox argues, more generally, that the chorus’s final reception of Oedipus as a paradeigma expresses a specifically legal reference: “His conviction is, as the chorus says, an example, paradeigma, the example which the Athenian prosecutor calls for in speech after speech; Oedipus is an example to all men” (Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His Time [New Haven: Yale UP, 1957] 98). 37. Dawe notes: “aÎk√zw and aÎk√a commonly include the idea of physical harm” (212). 38. Dawe’s remarks here are also pertinent: “™postr°yi: not necessarily twisting his arm behind his back in the manoeuvre widely but incorrectly known as the half-Nelson, but drawing the arms back as a first step to tying him up ready for interrogation under torture. The same verb is used of the hands and feet of the wicked goat-herd Melanthius in the Odyssey (22.190) before he is hoist upwards and left swinging. Sophocles’ audience would be less taken aback by this threat of physical violence than we are, for in their society a slave could only give evidence under torture” (212). 39. Of course, Teiresias, also, is obviously already valued as a witness and as a “seer.” Although his religious status prohibits physical maltreatment of him, Teiresias nevertheless reminds Oedipus (408–14) that he is neither a slave nor one of Creon’s men—that his power, is, in fact, equal to Oedipus’s own—as if to warn Oedipus against prompting his testimony with the sort of persuasion the ruler will later use on the shepherd. 40. William Zak suggests that when Oedipus blinds himself, he designates levels of punishment appropriate for his crimes (The Polis and the Divine Order: The Oresteia, Sophocles, and the Defense of Democracy [Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1995] 194–95). 41. Freud links castration and blindness in The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Avon Books, 1965] 434 n.) and elsewhere. In addition, G. Devereux gives a very thorough review (with helpful citations) of the link between castration and blindness in Greek tradition (“The Self-Blinding of Oidipous in Sophokles: Oidipous Tyrannos,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies XCIII [1973]: 36–49).

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42. As Derrida notes, “Deep down, deep down inside, the eye would be destined not to see but to weep” (Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993] 126). 43. The word pantelÍV here specifies the “utter” or “absolute” nature of this dying. 44. Coincidentally, legislation during Sophocles’ time underscores this importance of being witnessed by others. Frederick Ahl (quoting D. MacDowell’s The Law in Classical Athens [London: Thames and Hudson, 1978] 243) notes, “Athenian law made clear that ‘a litigant could not be his own witness’ ” (Sophocles’ Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction 21). 45. Segal remarks, “The messenger’s tale not only presents the visual contents of memory but is also an emblematic account of memory’s inner vision, for it consists in gradual penetration into increasingly interior and hidden spaces (1239–1246)” (Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge [New York: Oxford UP, 2001] 125. 46. Cynthia Chase also suggests that the witness is an essential aspect of the climax of the play: “The effect of the text, whether as Sphinx or as hero, can only be constituted by a third dimension, by the presence of witnesses—of readers” (“Oedipal Textuality: Reading Freud’s Reading of Oedipus,” diacritics [March 1979]: 64). Chase approaches the problem of the witness from a psychoanalytical viewpoint, concluding that just as Oedipus must witness his relation to sex in order to evoke a meaning about human existence, so must Freud have a witness for his text in order to evoke a meaning for psychoanalysis. By means of the reader (of Oedipus, of Freud, she suggests), the temporal disparity of each development can be resolved. While her exploration of the role of the witness has been helpful to me, her consideration leaves out, ultimately, the question of performance, although this is the very question she seems to raise in the beginning of the essay. 47. Goldhill suggests that this “unspeakable” character marking Oedipus’s transgressions reflects an imposition of control over it: “What must not be said is a categorization of social control over the possibly subversive forces of language” (Reading Greek Tragedy 214). 48. Cf., 4.2.1–3. 49. The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh (Albany: State U of New York P, 2000) 13. 50. Memoirs of the Blind 104. 51. Frederick Ahl, arguing that the play leaves the matter of Oedipus’s guilt ambiguous by failing to provide any clearly condemning evidence, suggests that such empathy misleadingly encourages the audience of the play to assume his guilt: “Sophocles’ great achievement here is to make us do what Oedipus does: to disregard or rationalize away everything that might demonstrate the hero’s innocence” (Sophocles’ Oedipus 207). 52. Polyneices’ supplication to Oedipus later in the play provide the hero with an even more dramatic opportunity to remind those within earshot of his terrible sufferings; in his blunt refusal of Polyneices, he also demonstrates an unforgiving

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anger that also reflects, in its severity, the extent of the injustices he feels he has suffered. 53. Translation modified. 54. Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek Lexicon (LSJ) establishes the Euminides as a euphemistic name of the Erinyes or Furies, the avenging goddesses featured in Aeschylus’s Oresteia. For a close exploration of the connection between the Eumenides and the Erinyes in Oedipus at Colonus (OC), see especially Edmunds, Theatrical Space and Historical Place in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus. Edmunds demonstrates that, despite the fact that Sophocles doesn’t call the Eumenides Erinyes, he implies this by having Oedipus pray to them as  p¬tniai deinÍpeV (84). Edmunds remarks that p¬tniai is an epithet of the Erinyes; deinÍpeV also recalls the hideous appearance of the Erinyes (139). He also adds, “A moment later, Oedipus refers to them as ‘August Goddesses’ (qeÍn semnÍn [89–90]), a title anticipated in the form of his question at line 41 and used again at line 458. The Semnai had been identified with the Erinyes in Aeschylus’s Eumenides, and the cult of the Erinyes described in that tragedy is that of the Semnai near the Areopagus [. . .]” (139). Thus, Edmunds proposes, if Sophocles is not conflating them, he is at any rate suggesting an identification between the two. 55. Lesky suggests, in assessing the conflict of the play, that this irrationality reflects an essential characteristic of their divinity: “Oidipous’ destiny is determined by divine power [. . .] it is a confrontation between god and man. This confrontation is not a neat moral paradigm; rather, it results from the sphere of the irrational that for Sophokles is the sphere of the divine” (Greek Tragic Poetry 183). 56. Polynices’ complaints on lines 1299 and 1434, that he suffers because of Oedipus’s Erinyes, further implies this connection between Oedipus and such divinities. 57. In his consideration of the staging of the play, Graham Ley suggests that in the display of his death, Sophocles emphasizes the rhetorical nature of Oedipus’s tormented corpse. Ley notes that at the end of the play, Oedipus is left on a “platform” of rock. The word used to indicate this seat is bema (b›ma), a term also used to refer to the speaker’s platform in a public assembly. Ley concludes that this “undoubtedly indicates [Oedipus’s] presence at the edge of the supporting structure for the ekkuklema” (A Short Introduction to the Greek Theater [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991] 45). In other words, Oedipus’s final death scene provides not simply a spectacle, but a markedly rhetorical one. 58. For a discussion of this moment, see chapter 1, pp. 17–18. 59. Shrouded in mystery, Oedipus’s body thus becomes another type of ≈¢rwV), human remains that become a site of pilgrimage and a source hero—a heros (h of power in ancient Greek custom (see Bernard Knox, Oedipus at Thebes). 60. “Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama,” Nothing to Do with Dionysus? ed. John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990) 167. 61. Though, of course, Oedipus must enter a different city than the one from which he was exiled, Thebes. Segal also refers to the formalities of symbol and cult that enable Oedipus to be reincorporated into society: “Suspended for more than the thousand lines spanning the central action of the play [. . .], the purificatory rite

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essential for Oedipus’ entrance to the holy grove finally intertwines acceptance into the sacred place of the goddesses with acceptance into the civic space of Athens” (Tragedy and Civilization 391).

Chapter 3. The Erotic Body 1. The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981) 84–258. 2. In her sociological study of the ancient Greek novel, “The Ancient Greek Novel in Its Social and Cultural Context,” S. MacAlister also notes the productive frame that Bakhtin’s adventure-time chronotope creates. Classicum XVII 2 (1991): 37–43, see especially page 39. 3. Bakhtin’s concern with the uneasy tension between the private and the public body emerges most clearly in his later study of Rabelais. Darko Suvin sees a radical difference in Bakhtin’s treatment of the private body, characterized as isolated and repressed, and the public body, which seems almost utopian in its grotesque exhibitions and manifestations of bodily functions such as sex and digestion (“The Subject as a Limit-Zone of Collective Bodies [Bakhtin, Hobbes, Freud, Foucault, and Counting: An Approach],” Discours Social/Social Discourse: Analyse du Discours et Sociocritique des Textes 2. n1–2 (1989): 187–200. 4. Bakhtin and the Classics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002): 165–66 (quoting Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin 276). 5. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 84. 6. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 100, his emphasis. 7. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 89. 8. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 90. 9. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 110. 10. See B. Branham, ed., Bakhtin and the Classics (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2002) 183n25. In contrast, Suzanne Saïd argues that specific details describing well-known (even touristic) landmarks emphasize the distinctive particularity of the lands through which the lovers travel (“The City in the Greek Novel,” The Search for the Ancient Novel, ed. J. Tatum [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994] 216–36). For a similar emphasis upon the realism of the worlds evoked in the Greek romances, see E. L. Bowie, “The Greek Novel,” Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel, ed. S. Swain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999) 39–59. 11. J. Perkins’s study, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), helpfully highlights the influence of Stoicism upon texts produced under the Roman Empire, particularly Early Christian narratives. Unlike Bakhtin, Perkins doesn’t distinguish between the opening and closing frame of the novel and the matter of the adventures contained within this frame. While she helpfully illuminates the endurance of the lovers throughout their adventures in light of Stoicism, her analysis conflates the social body and the individual body of the beloved, suggesting that the social structures of marriage (and the tenets of Stoicism) permeate equally the various parts of the narrative and that thus the social order is celebrated in the romance,

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an idea that is clearly contradicted by the matter that constitutes the majority of the novels: the lovers’ individual adventures in alien lands. 12. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 105. 13. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 107. 14. For example, in The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1997), Margaret Anne Doody’s treatment of this ancient form emerges from her desire to designate the form as generative of the modern novel, an argument that seems to necessitate, for her, establishing the ancient novel as “high” art rather than the “low” or “popular” art with which it has been frequently associated. In drawing a connection between the ancient and modern novel, Doody contradicts Bakhtin’s sense of adventure-time with her claim that the progression of time is essential to the novel. Yet her sense of the temporal element of these novels seems to include every sort of time besides that which evolves in the present and passes into the past. Doody’s conception of time combines the historical and anachronistic—time out of time—with the mythical and the ritual, which gain their potency by their “escape” from normal time. Thus her assessment of time in the Greek romances continues to remain outside of progressive time, like Bakhtin’s adventure-time. 15. Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1994) 11. 16. Konstan, Sexual Symmetry 43. 17. Konstan, Sexual Symmetry 45. 18. As Branham also points out: “But when we inspect [Konstan’s] argument carefully, it turns out to support not the reality of change but the importance of endurance and constancy, the very qualities Bakhtin attributes to the genre. And constancy as a theme may well seem oddly suited to an emphasis on change or development” (Bakhtin and the Classics 173). 19. In this sense, Konstan’s argument echoes Foucault’s discussion in The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, vol. 3 (trans. Robert Hurley [New York: Vintage Books, 1986], see especially pp. 189–232), of the transition of eros from a relation of power between men to an ideal of symmetry between man and woman. For Foucault, however, this erotic development provides a basis for considering a simultaneous change in the relation to the self, a central concern of this chapter, as well. 20. Konstan, Sexual Symmetry 36. 21. John Winkler, in “The Invention of Romance” (The Search for the Ancient Novel, ed. James Tatum [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994: 23–38] 28) notes the deviation in the conception of marriage featured in the Greek romance, which, he argues, invests the idea of marriage with love (rather than economy) for the first time, in sharp contrast to earlier literary and social conventions. In contrast, Brigitte Egger, in “Looking at Chariton’s Callirhoe” (Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context, ed. J. R. Morgan and R. Stoneman [London: Routledge, 1994: 31–48] 131), argues that the marriages featured in the Greek romance present a situation in which females have no rights or choices, a scenario that she suggests would have been outdated and in conflict with the actual situation of women at the time the novels were written.

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22. Achilles Tatius’s characterization of Kleinias’s love for his boyfriend Charikles, and the devastated emotional response Kleinias has when his lover is thrown from his horse and killed, undermines Konstan’s assertion that only heterosexuals demonstrate a desire for their eros to last forever. Before Charikles is killed, Kleinias expresses his painful feelings of love for Charikles in the same terms of actual bodily torture that the heterosexual lovers also typically use (Leukippe and Kleitophon 1.11–13). 23. Notably, Simon Goldhill, in Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), reads the relation of chastity to the body in the Greek romances as a reflection of a similar distinction made in Christian homiletics on virginity, which distinguish between integritas (wholeness, integrity, being untouched) and sanctitas (holiness, purity, untouchability). 24. Konstan, Sexual Symmetry 53. 25. S. Schwartz, in “Clitophon the Moichos: Achilles Tatius and the Trial Scene in the Greek Novel” (Ancient Narrative 1 [2000–2001]: 93–113, see esp. p. 110) has argued that the trial in Achilles Tatius subverts what she sees as the typical role of the trial in the Greek romance: to demonstrate “justice” in reconfirming the importance of marriage over adultery. She suggests that this particular trial, however, deviates from the norm in enabling Kleitophon to commit adultery yet “get away scot-free.” Her emphasis upon the trial scene helpfully underscores its traditional importance as a concluding device, though I disagree with her interpretation of the trials as concerned with “justice.” Rather, I demonstrate in this chapter that the trials, in their formality and public nature, have the function of reinstituting the forms of society upon the errant lovers and simultaneously returning the reader to the social form or frame of the novel as a whole (in contrast to the matter of adventure-time). 26. In fact, Konstan criticizes scholars such as Carolyn Walker Bynum for reading issues of chastity in terms of gender: “It is easy to see the vast distance between this gender-polarized narrative pattern [i.e., Bynum’s reading of chastity in medieval hagiographies], with its emphasis on chastity in women and moral activism in men, and the paradigm that informs the ancient Greek novel” (Sexual Symmetry (58). 27. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination 106. 28. H. Morales, in “The Taming of the View: Natural Curiosities in Leukippe and Kleitophon” (Gröningen Colloquia on the Novel 6 [1995]: 39–50), argues that the Phoenix in the story represents Leukippe, both creatures willing to be tamed. Morales notes the emphasis in the myth of the Phoenix on the sight of its genitalia as proof of its authenticity. 29. For the use of ekphrasis to prompt or guide the reader’s interpretation see Shadi Bartsch, Decoding the Ancient Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989), especially pp. 7, 39, and 177, and H. Montague, “Sweet and Pleasant Passion: Female and Male Fantasy in Ancient Romance Novels” (Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, ed. Amy Richlin [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992] 231–49: 244). J. Heffernan’s exploration of ekphrasis, echoing that of Bartsch, suggests that the

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ekphrases in Achilles Tatius’s novel prefigure the events that follow (Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashberry [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993] 53, 57–58). While I agree with this general idea, Heffernan’s conclusion that the paintings construct a close correspondence between rape and marriage depends upon a fantasy of male figures as violating and powerful throughout the novel. His argument here disregards the Greek, which draws such a clear relation between the violation of Prometheus and the subsequent apparent violation of Leukippe, and thus disregards the male gender of the violated Prometheus, which subverts his gendered formula. 30. Leukippe and Kleitophon (1.1.7–8). Throughout this chapter, I have provided John J. Winkler’s excellent translation of the novel; on a few occasions, which I note, I have found it necessary to modify his language slightly. Greek text is from the Loeb edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1961). 31. Amy Richlin provides a helpful analysis of the use of terror to enhance beauty in the Metamorphoses; see especially her analysis of the myth of Daphne and Apollo, pp. 162–65, “Reading Ovid’s Rapes,” (Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, ed. A. Richlin [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992]). 32. Translation modified. 33. G. W. Most’s speculations, in “The Stranger’s Strategem: Self-Disclosure and Self-Sufficiency in Greek Culture” (JHS 109 [1989]: 114–33), on the cause of this disappearing narrator as prompted by a tension between self-disclosure and self-sufficiency are irrelevant here. However, he does helpfully suggest, as others have, that this initial narrator may be seen as a stand-in for the reader (133); this supposition supports my own argument that the reader (following the example of the anonymous narrator) is encouraged to view the ensuing scenes of violation in the romance with aesthetic admiration. 34. Translation modified. 35. For Achilles Tatius’s use of ego-narrative and its determination of the reader’s perspective, see B. P. Reardon, The Form of Greek Romance (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991) 119–20 and “Achilles Tatius and Ego-Narrative” (Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel, ed. S. Swain [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999] 241–58. 36. Translation modified. 37. Translation modified. 38. Renate Johne, in “Women in the Ancient Novel” (The Novel in the Ancient World, ed. G. Schmeling [London: E. J. Brill, 1996: 151–207] 188), considers Leukippe’s anger and decision to flee from her mother as the beginning of a process of becoming an independent individual: “The desire for erotic self-determination without any parental restriction arises for the first time.” 39. As Kleitophon explains here, “like arrows aimed at a target and hitting it dead center, words pierce the soul and wound it in many places” (2.29.3). 40. Translation modified. 41. As Helen Morales notes in her book Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), this is the only use of the verb qewr°w in Achilles’ novel, a fact that further emphasizes the uniquely important quality of Cleitophon’s fascinated engagement with the spectacle here. I appreciate Professor Morales’s generosity in alerting me to this detail.

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42. Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity 118, and Reardon, “Achilles Tatius and Ego-Narrative” 246, respectively. G. Anderson quips of Achilles Tatius’s apparent “fixation” with mutilated female bodies, “If any author in antiquity embodies the values of the shower scene in ‘Psycho,’ it is this one” (“Perspectives on Achilles Tatius,” ANRW II.34.3 [1997]: 2278–99) 2287. 43. Konstan, Sexual Symmetry 64. 44. Konstan cites Irigaray’s “Un autre art de jouir” (Les femmes, la pornographie, l’érotisme, ed. M.-F. Hans and G. Lapouge [Paris: Éditions du seuil, 1978]) 50. 45. Brigitte Egger, “Looking at Chariton’s Callirhoe” (Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context,” ed. J. R. Morgan and R. Stoneman [London: Routledge, 1994] 31–48), and Helen Elsom, “Callirhoe: Displaying the Phallic Woman” (Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, ed. Amy Richlin [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992] 212–30). 46. Silverman, “Masochism and Subjectivity” (Frameworks 12 [1980]: 2–9) 1. In this passage, she reiterates Mulvey’s earlier argument, expressed in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Visual and Other Pleasures [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989] 14–26). 47. Egger, “Looking at Chariton’s Callirhoe.” 48. Elsom, “Callirhoe” 213. 49. Elsom, “Callirhoe” 218. In this conclusion Elsom follows closely de Lauretis’s notion that gender construction is a violent but unavoidable consequence of language and culture (see De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987], especially p. 38). 50. Helen Morales’s essay “The Taming of the View: Natural Curiosities in Leukippe and Kleitophon” (1995), has been helpful in noting the significance of these “digressions,” particularly the description of the phoenix. 51. In addition, the fact that both Leukippe and Kleitophon (according to Kleitophon’s narration) gaze with interest at the ekphrases of Andromeda and Prometheus (3.6–8) and Philomela, Prokne, and Tereus (5.3–5) undermines even further any categorical designation of gender on the gazer or the object of the gaze. In suggesting that the novels (and ekphrases) are read by both male and female, my argument resonates somewhat with Egger’s conception of the audience of the novels, though I find unconvincing her speculative conclusion that the novels fostered fantasies of female empowerment for female readers. Egger, “Looking at Chariton’s Callirhoe.” 52. Translation modified. 53. The grammatical gender of these animals, ˛ krok¬deiloV, ˛ ≈i¢ppoV, ˛ potºmioV, and ˛ ÷l°jantoV, is perhaps worth noting here. While grammatical gender of animals is arbitrary, nevertheless the masculine gender of these animals’ names casts their descriptions in masculine terms. As such, the language suggests the potential for the masculine to be subject to spectacle and penetration. 54. As Morales points out, examining the hippopotamus provides a pretext for the Egyptian general to examine more closely Leukippe, for whom he quickly forms an irresistible desire (Morales, “The Taming of the View” 48). 55. The emphasis upon the mouth as an opening for penetration in the descriptions of the crocodile, hippopotamus, and elephant resonates, too, with the

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ekphrasis of Andromeda. Here, according to Kleitophon, the (rather phallic, as I’ve noted previously) monster that threatens her has a similarly gaping mouth: “The jaws were great and large, and gaped open from the intersection of the shoulders, #¢ mwn sumbol›V, ka¥ straight to the stomach [™n°¯kto d‰ pøsa m°cri t›V tÍn w e¶q∞V ≠ gast–r]” (3.7.7). 56. Foucault notes the submission of the private to the public for the Stoics in this sense: “[Marriage] is one of those duties by which private existence acquires a value for all” (The Core of the Self 155). 57. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination 109, his emphasis. 58. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination 109. 59. Thus, as Doody notes, “Chastity becomes a form of justice in a relationship, not an abstraction, and not a frigid purity” (The True Story of the Novel 80). 60. As Morales (“The Taming of the View”) notes. Her discussion of the phoenix provides a thorough comparison of the two accounts, as well as citations for other ancient accounts of the mythical bird (43–48). 61. Translation modified. 62. One might argue that the abuse Leukippe suffers at the hands of Thersander and Sosthenes, which verges on attempted rape, seems distinctly reserved for the female gender. Yet the men’s behavior actually goes no further than Melite’s forceful pursuit of Kleitophon. 63. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (ed. and tr. James Strachey [New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1961]) 12–17. 64. Silverman, “Masochism and Subjectivity” 3. 65. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992) 14. 66. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws 217. 67. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination 110. 68. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 85; quoted also in Doody, The True Story of the Novel 73. 69. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination 110.

Chapter 4. The Moral Body 1. Now Imola, in northern Italy. 2. English translations and Latin texts of Prudentius quoted in this chapter are from the Loeb edition, translated by H. J. Thomson, unless otherwise noted (Prudentius, Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1949–1953]). 3. Both the ekphrasis that prompts the story and the critical assessment delivered to the audience echo the rhetorical function of the ekphrasis in the early novel, as we have seen in the previous chapter: providing a visual image of an episode whose theme is framed in tone by the viewer, such “commentary” cues the audience’s response to the events that follow. In the Greek tragedies, the chorus performs this function. 4. Prudentius’s accounts of the martyrs are presented as hymns, placing them within a tradition of paeans that would have been sung in celebration of the

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sacrifices of martyrs. In this sense, both Sophocles’ tragedies and these martyrologies evoke the sense of making a past event present through performance (or implied performance). 5. I. S´evcˇenko’s informative discussion of the dialogue between Christian and pagan intellectuals in the Late Antique period has been helpful here (“A Shadow Outline of Virtue: The Classical Heritage of Christian Greek Literature second to seventh c.),” Age of Spirituality: A Symposium, ed. K. Weitzmann [Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1980] 53–73). For links between Christian hagiography and Greek romance specifically, see Zoja Pavlovskis, “The Life of St. Pelagia the Harlot: Hagiographic Adaptation of Pagan Romance” (Classical Folia 30 [1976]: 138–49, esp. p. 139) and Thomas McAlindon, “The Medieval Assimilation of Greek Romance: A Chapter in the History of Narrative Type” (REAL 3 [1985]: 23–56, esp. p. 44). 6. In fact, the length of the hymn, along with other factors, has raised the question of whether or not the Hymn to Romanus (X) was originally meant to be collected with the other hymns that comprise the PL. For more on this problem, see Anne-Marie Palmer, Prudentius on the Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 248–68. 7. The potential of this double function of the word lingua is compellingly demonstrated by Elissa Marder in her essay “Disarticulated Voices: Feminism and Philomela,” Hypatia 7.2 (Spring 1992): 148–66; see esp. pp. 160–61. 8. This passage is also quoted by K. M. Coleman, “Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments” (Journal of Roman Studies 80 [1990]) 60. 9. Tertullian, Apologeticum, Loeb Classical Library, trans. T. R. Glover (London: William Heinemann, 1931). 10. The term “fatal charade” is used by K. M. Coleman, in the aforementioned essay, to refer to this distinctively Roman conflation of punishment and drama. 11. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977) 48. 12. Coleman, “Fatal Charades” 49. 13. For more on the distinction between these two classes of Roman citizens, and its effects upon punishment, see Edward Peters, Torture (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985), esp. pp. 26ff., and Coleman, “Fatal Charades” 55. 14. Coleman, “Fatal Charades” 49. 15. Confessions VI.8. 16. In this sense, the exchange between the victim and the witness echoes not only that performed in Sophocles’ tragedies, as described in chapters 1 and 2, but also the sort of horrified fascination demonstrated by Kleitophon in Achilles Tatius’s novel, analyzed in chapter 3. 17. Herbert Musurillo, ed. and trans., The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1972) 131. This episode is also noted by Coleman, “Fatal Charades” 59. 18. See Ulpian, Digest of the “Corpus Iurus Civilis” (Concerning Torture), ed. S. P. Scott (New York: AMS Press, 1973) 47.10.15.41. 19. Tertullian, Apologeticum L.13. 20. In his essay “Prescription,” Jean-François Lyotard makes a distinction between two types of blood, cruor and sanguis, which is helpful to consider here:

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“Nous disons: dette de sang. Mais il y a sang et sang, sanguis et cruor, le sang de la vie dans les artères et les veines et le sang répandu [We speak of a “blood debt.” But there is blood and there is blood. Sanguis: the blood of life in the arteries and veins; and cruor: the blood that is spilled]” (Lectures d’enfance [Paris: Galilée, 1991 (34–45)] 40); (Toward the Postmodern, ed. Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts [New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1992 [176–91] 180). According to Lyotard (in his reading of the torturous punishment described in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”), the effectiveness of the law’s cruelty depends upon the threat that it poses to the blood that flows freely, sanguis. In other words, sanguis lends meaning to the suffering caused by torture, whose end result is blood spilled, cruor. 21. Tertullian, Ad martyras: Disciplinary, Moral and Ascetical Works, trans. Rudolph Arbesmann, Sister Emily Joseph Daly, and Edwin A. Quain (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1959). 22. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage (c. 205–258 AD). Treatise XI. The AnteNicene Fathers, vol. V, ed. Rev. Alexander Roberts and James Donalson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899). 23. Romans 6.2–4. 24. Thus, martyrdom might be read in the sense of Auerbach’s figura: “an occurrence on earth [that] signifies not only itself but at the same time another, which it predicts or confirms, without prejudice to the power of its concrete reality here and now. The connection between occurrences is not regarded as primarily a chronological or causal development but as a oneness within the divine plan, of which all occurrences are parts and reflections” (Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968] 555). Of importance for my later argument, especially, is Auerbach’s claim that this relation can only be established if both events are linked vertically to Divine Providence (not horizontally/rationally in the temporal dimension). 25. Matthew 5.10. 26. Discipline and Punish 55. 27. Giorgio Agamben describes such an ambivalent function, in which the power of the sacred body, or “bare life,” derives from being excluded from the law and thereby negatively determining the limits of the law. See Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), esp. pp. 15–21 and 71–103. 28. My conception of a “play” of rhetorical language that resists logical interpretation derives from de Man’s sense of rhetoric as dwelling both within and without the logic of grammar, producing an ambivalence or undecideability of meaning that defies certain or conclusive understanding; see especially, “The Resistance to Theory,” The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 3–20; and “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979): 3–19. De Man’s deconstruction of rhetorical language derives, of course, from Derrida’s own work on semiology and the linguistic problems of rhetorical language. My own approach to metaphor in this essay therefore also arises theoretically from Derrida’s study of metaphor and metaphysics and the slippage of logic—the excess of meaning—produced by both; see particularly “White Mythology,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982) 209–71.

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29. While Prudentius insists that the Praefatio precedes any of his other Christian writing, scholars debate whether or not it would have been possible for him to compose all of the rest of his corpus between the date of the Praefatio and his death, which probably preceded the sack of Rome in 410 AD. For a full consideration of the problem of dating Prudentius’s compositions, see Palmer, Prudentius on the Martyrs 17. 30. Hymn VI is addressed to the martyr Fructuosus, who was a Bishop of the Church of Tarraco (modern-day Tarragona, Spain). After his death, Tarraco founded a cult site devoted to the martyr. 31. Similar echoes occur again in IV.169–71, IV.193–96, X.1–5, and X.1136–40. 32. Palmer draws a comparison between the cult of the martyr and the more ancient Greek cult of the hero (such as, for example, the cult of the hero alluded to at the end of Oedipus at Colonus), which drew a similar connection between potency and place. Linking the extent of the martyr’s suffering to his or her heroic stature, she adds: “The longer and more heroic a martyr’s sufferings, the more numerous and spectacular the occasions of supernatural intervention, the greater appeared the martyr’s victory on behalf of the Church” (231). Palmer also points to the echoes of Virgil’s Aeneid (and its Augustan epic pietas) in Prudentius’s characterizations of the martyrs. Martha Malamud expands upon the parallels between several of the martyrs in the Peristephanon and Vergilian and Ovidian heroes, arguing that the three poets demonstrate “the same willingness to alter, adapt, and invent to suit [their] own poetic purposes” (A Poetics of Transformation: Prudentius and Classical Mythology [Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989] 79). In the same vein, M. Laverenne makes a passing comparison of Prudentius to Pindar in his introduction to the Budé edition of Prudentius (Prudentius, vol. VI, ed. M. Laverenne, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1963) 10. Contrary to these scholars, Peter Brown argues that the martyr had a far greater access to God or the gods than the hero claimed and that therefore any reference to martyrs as “heroes” is insignificant (The Cult of the Saints 134n.23). 33. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) 2. 34. The Cult of the Saints 81. 35. In this liminal space, normal limitations of reason or mundane reality seemed suspended. Judicial processes such as exorcisms, which were conducted at the shrines, could thus simultaneously represent the Roman power inflicted on the martyr in the past, the miraculous power of the Christian God expressed by the exorcised in the present, and the ultimate victory of Christians over pagans anticipated in the future. (Peter Brown explains this phenomenon in interesting detail [The Cult of the Saints] 108). 36. Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs: The Liber Peristephanon of Prudentius (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993) 13. 37. Ed. Spengel 1885, 2: 118. Quoted by Shadi Bartsch, Decoding the Ancient Novel (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989) 9. 38. Roberts defines ekphrasis (its Latin equivalent is descriptio) as “the visually realized description of a place, person, object, or event” (The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity [Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989] 158). 39. The Jeweled Style 158.

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40. For a thorough analysis of Christian aesthetics in the Late Antique era, see Roberts, The Jeweled Style, esp. pp. 122–47. 41. Mimesis 15. 42. I am indebted here to Sarah Spence, who first suggested this notion to me in a seminar on Augustine. In Rhetorics of Reason and Desire: Vergil, Augustine, and the Troubadours, she explores the idea of Christian word as gesture in her treatment of the orans figure depicted in the Roman catacombs (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988); see especially chapter 3, “Augustine and the Reincorporation of Desire” 55–102. 43. Augustine, De magistro, trans. Joseph M. Colleran (New York: Newman Press, 1950). 44. Martha Malamud argues that Prudentius intended his readers to see the connection between Hymns X and XIII in the obverse uses of the tongue. Yet she limits her analysis of this motif to a consideration of the relation between the living limb of the body and the dead or dying body, a relation that she suggests, “graphically illustrates the crossing of the threshold that separates death from life, animate from inanimate” (A Poetics of Transformation 120). 45. The story survives in several forms, at least one of which probably influenced Prudentius in his own composition. Two slightly different versions are attributed to Eusebius of Caesarea (d. AD 339)—a short one in the Greek text of De martyribus Palestinae and a longer one in the Syriac text of the same. Both accounts mention the Romans’ removal of his tongue to prevent his inciting the witnessing crowd; only the longer version alludes briefly to a speech of Romanus that followed this torture: “Nevertheless when his tongue, by which he spoke, was taken away, his genuine love was not removed from him, nor was the tongue of his understanding silenced from preaching” (MP 2.2.3). In addition to the accounts of Eusebius of Caesarea, there is a brief account of the torture attributed to John Chrysostom (d. AD 407), and another in a sermon of Eusebius of Emesa (d. AD 359) that describes a Christian doctor amputating Romanus’s tongue, after which he continues speaking. The doctor then performs an identical operation on a second victim, who dies and thus “proves” the miracle of Romanus’s speech and life. Finally, a Greek and a Latin passion of Romanus remain that cite all of the details of Prudentius’ story. Palmer provides a thorough account of Prudentius’s sources (Prudentius on the Martyrs 246–48). 46. Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs 174. 47. Caesar from 293 to 305, Galerius had charge of the Danubian provinces under the emperors Diocletian and Maximian. 48. Once again, Agamben’s formulation of exclusion sheds light upon the negative terms in which this Roman law is expressed—and the consequent potential of faithful Christians’ response to the law. 49. In my interpretation of this passage, I draw upon Chollet “Corps Glorieux,” Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, ed. A. Vacant and E. Mangenot (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, Editeurs, 1908): 3:1879–1906. Passages from the Old Testament are quoted from the Good News Bible translation (New York: American Bible Society, 1976). 50. Tertullian, De carne Christi, ed. and trans. Ernest Evans (London: SPCK, 1956).

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51. Augustine further emphasizes this idea of a flesh reborn in his conception of the body in heaven newly reformed as perfected—to the extent that it no longer even possesses bodily orifices (De civitate Dei XXII.16–17). In The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia UP, 1995), Caroline Walker Bynum provides an extensive explanation of the early Christian notion of resurrection as a literal, biological concept. 52. Judith Perkins suggests that Christianity formed as “a social and political unity” around the representation of the subject as a “suffering self,” thus significantly altering the traditional way of considering the human subject (The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era [London and New York: Routledge, 1995] 3). 53. Apologeticum I.1. 54. I have modified the Loeb translation here slightly. 55. Elaine Scarry’s argument that the pain of torture resists and destroys language is relevant here. Physical pain, she argues, has no referential content, it takes no object, existing solely in and for itself. Thus torture can be used to deconstruct the prisoner’s voice, creating the space for another language or message to take its place. (The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World [New York: Oxford UP, 1985], see especially 3–59.) 56. Necessarily, that is, because the Christian God is, essentially, unknowable. 57. The issues of communicating the word of God expressed by Augustine in books X and XI of the Confessions makes the efficacy of such free flowing or undefined communication clear. His analyses of time and memory in these sections are prompted by his musing over the problem of how the eternal Word of God might be spoken within the temporal terms and limitations of language. 58. For the correlation between the Spirit and blood as well as breast milk, see Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987), which explores the relation between Mary’s lactating breast and Christ’s bleeding side wound in medieval painting. Bynum’s reading sheds light on the material sense in which early Christians understood the Spirit. 59. The image here has an echo of a metaphor created by Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians, in which the members of the church are likened to members of the body, with each being dependent upon and connected to each other, governed by Christ at their head (I Corinthians 12; he reiterates the metaphor, with slight variations, in his letter to the Ephesians, 4.1–7 and 1.23). In another sense, the mother, with her spiritually nourishing breast, might also be read as representative of the church giving advice to its “members” (Auerbach and Bynum indicate the connection between the church and [the lactating, for Bynum] Mary—who gives birth to the Christian church by bearing Jesus). 60. Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image: question posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1990) 212. 61. Didi-Huberman provides a footnote indicating the sense of réel here: “Selon un usage du mot réel référé à la notion de tuchè, de rencontre. Cf. J. Lacan, Le Séminaire, XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, op. cit., p. 53–55” (172 n.1).

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62. Devant l’image 172. 63. In this sense, the wound functions as a stain, according to the terms of Lacan: a visual tuché that disconcerts the subject into an awareness of the Gaze, the preexistence to the seen of the given-to-be-seen (i.e., the subject as object)—that is, a visual chance encounter with the Real (“The Split Between the Eye and the Gaze,” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1977] 67–78). As Lacan indicates in “Tuché and Automaton,” the tuché, the chance encounter with the real, first presents itself in the form of a trauma (54–55). Thus, by extension, the déchirure provoked by the symptomatic wound might also be considered in terms of trauma. While Freud describes the trauma as an overwhelming event that happens too suddenly, too soon, Lacan expands upon this “event” as a (missed) encounter with death. In his reading of Freud’s “burning child dream,” Lacan indicates the cause of the father’s awakening from his dream of his dying child as provoked by the missed reality of the event of death. Viewing the wound inflicted by torture as a similar event, martyrdom might also be considered in terms of trauma. While such a reading of martyrdom and its symptoms (including the response of the witness) would indeed prove interesting and productive, the interests of space prevent me from carefully pursuing it here. For Freud’s conception of trauma, see Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1961), esp. pp. 10–17. Lacan addresses Freud’s burning child dream in The Four Fundamental Concepts, especially pp. 34 and 59–60. For a provocative and helpful reading of this dream and its relation to the idea of the trauma of the missed event of death, see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), esp. pp. 91–112 and 142–43 n.10. 64. Devant l’image 175. 65. Devant l’image 222. 66. Devant l’image 267. 67. The verb root is, of course, the same in both cases: transfer = trans + fer, from the Greek j°rw, as in metaphor (meta + j°rw). 68. In my conception of the undoing of grammatical (i.e., logical) cognition by rhetorical displacement, I draw once again particularly upon the work of Paul de Man; see especially “The Resistance to Theory” 17.

Epilogue. Pain and Public Opinion 1. The precise quote appears in the introduction to this volume, p. 2. 2. In competition for ratings and advertisers, television dramas and television news shows frequently highlight the same sorts of issues. Indeed, the treatment of “serious issues” in popular culture is sometimes read as a barometer for public opinion, as in Adam Green’s New York Times review of the popular drama 24: “Has ‘24’ descended down a slippery slope in portraying acts of torture as normal and therefore justifiable? Is its audience, and the public more generally, also reworking the rules of war to the point where the most expedient response to terrorism is to resort to terror? In the world beyond the show, that debate remains heated. How

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it plays out on ‘24’ may say a great deal about what sort of society we are in the process of becoming.” (New York Times [May 22, 2005]: AR34). Indeed the show 24 has had such widespread success and influence that military leaders asked, in a meeting with the show’s creators, that torture be downplayed in future episodes; the request was prompted by the fear that Jack Bauer’s “success” with the practice on the show might make torture seem too appealing to the public and to those in the military. (The meeting was arranged by Human Rights First; for an informative description and analysis of the meeting and the response of the show’s creators, see Jane Mayer, “Whatever It Takes: The Politics of the Man Behind ‘24’ ” [The New Yorker (February 12, 2007)] www.newyorker.com/reporting12007/02/19/070219a_ fact_mayer). 3. The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, edited with Joshua L. Dratel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005) xvii. 4. Henri Alleg, The Question (trans. John Calder, introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre [New York: George Brazilier, 1958]); Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (trans Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld [New York: Schocken Books, 1986]); Jennifer K. Harbury, Truth, Torture, and the American Way: The History and Consequences of U.S. Involvement in Torture (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005). 5. Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997) 14–15. 6. The first overt attempt at addressing this rhetorical aspect of war is identified by Bruce Berkowitz as the first Gulf War, when George H. W. Bush charged then–Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney with creating a press plan for the war (The New Face of War: How War Will Be Fought in the 21st Century [New York: The Free Press, 2003] 60–65). But Bush and Cheney undoubtedly drew lessons from not only the mistakes of the Vietnam War but also Cold War strategies of information and disinformation. 7. For an excellent historical overview of the influence of news media on public opinion, see Philip Seib, Headline Diplomacy: How News Coverage Affects Foreign Policy (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1997). 8. See Berkowitz, The New Face of War 60–65. Berkowitz argues: “to defeat your opponent, you must first win the information war” (21). 9. Seib, Headline Diplomacy 26. 10. See Bethami A. Dobkin, Tales of Terror: Television News and the Construction of the Terrorist Threat (Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 1992). Her concept of visual nominalization describes a synechdochal function of images: “a process of visual condensation [that] provides narrators and audiences with a visible, symbolic referent for specific terrorist action [. . .]. (63). See also, Brigitte L. Nacos, MassMediated Terrorism: The Central Role of the Media in Terrorism and Counterterrorism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002), who coins the term “media terrorism” to describe the complicity of the media in terrorist activities. 11. These displays of torture resonate compellingly with the threats of punishment voiced by Creon in Antigone, analyzed in chapter 1 of this book. 12. David Wood, “Captives Often Face Brutality, Exploitation,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution (March 24, 2003): A4.

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13. The footage was aired on Sunday, March 23, 2003. 14. Wood, “Captives Often Face Brutality,” A4. 15. Washington Post (June 17, 2003): A1. 16. Interviews with doctors who were compelled to mutilate “patients” under Hussein’s orders have now expanded the breadth of his oppressive use of violence against his own people beyond stories of his torture dungeons that circulated before, during, and after the war. See, for example, Maryam Elahi and Adam Kushner, “Doctors with ‘Dirty Hands,’” Washington Post (June 8, 2003): B07. 17. Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” in Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest, 2nd ed. (ed. Charles E. Morris III and Stephen Howard Browne, State College, PA: Strata Publishing, 2006 [244–65]) 251. 18. For Walter Benjamin’s sense of modern, technologized experience, see especially “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [NY: Schocken Books, 1968]); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964); Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000): Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994). 19. The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990) 25, their italics. 20. Transcript of Bush’s speech from the Baltimore Sun (January 29, 2003): 6A. 21. State of the Union address transcript (January 29, 2003). 22. See, for example, Pres. Bush’s press conference, April 13, 2004. 23. A May 11, 2004, piece in the Washington Post estimated that there were, at that time, “more than 9,000 people” held by U.S. authorities overseas (Dana Priest and Joe Stephens, A01). This number would include prisoners held in three different systems: “the Pentagon-run network of prisons, jails and holding facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere; small and secret CIA-run facilities where top al Qaeda and other figures are kept; and interrogation rooms of foreign intelligence services—some with documented records of torture—to which the U.S. government delivers or ‘renders’ mid-or low-level terrorism suspects for questioning.” Only very recently, under pressure from human rights groups and other countries, has the U.S. administration begun to consider moving most or all prisoners out of the Guantánamo Bay prison. 24. The June 29, 2006, Supreme Court decision, which struck down the military commissions established by President Bush for trying Guantánamo prisoners, indicated that the court felt these prisoners do, in fact, fall under the protections offered by the Geneva Conventions. At this writing, however, the effects that this decision will have upon the treatment of these prisoners (and those rendered to foreign countries) remain to be seen. 25. CNN.com (January 11, 2002) (archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/ central/01/11/ret.detainee.transfer/index.html.) 26. archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/1/22/151910.shtml.

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27. In a March 8, 2003, article, the New York Times reported that Senior American officials indicated these techniques would be employed in the interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (the high-ranking al Qaeda member suspected of planning the September 11 attacks on the United States) (“Questioning Terror Suspects in a Dark and Surreal World,” Don Van Natta Jr., with Raymond Bonner and Amy Waldman [March 9, 2003]: A1). 28. The process of “rendering” was exposed by the press again in the fall and winter of 2005–2006, this time to more critical response, particularly from Europe. 29. Washington Post (December 26, 2002): A1, quoting Black’s testimony to the United States Congress, September 26, 2002. 30. http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/12/29/hussein/index.html 31. Though Seymour Hersh broke the story in the spring of 2004 in The New Yorker, knowledge of such photos existed at least a year previous to this, as the London Evening Standard reported in a May 30, 2003 article (htttp://www. thisislondon.com/til/jsp/modules/Article/print.jsp?itemId=5072281). 32. Depositions of Abu Ghraib detainees obtained by the Washington Post are collected in Mark Danner’s Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review Books, 2004) 225–48. 33. “Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross [ICRC] on the Treatment by the Coalition Forces of Prisoners of War and Other Protected Persons by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq During Arrest, Internment and Interrogation,” February 2004, also collected in Torture and Truth 251–78. 34. “Article I5-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Brigade (The Taguba Report).” Collected in Torture and Truth 279–328. 35. Quoted by Seymour M. Hersh in Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004) 65. 36. As Danner points out, however, Schlesinger’s own report indicates that the problem was far more widespread than such a dismissal would suggest (Torture and Truth 28). 37. Quoted in Torture and Truth 41. Danner notes the contradiction in this statement. 38. Chain of Command 39. Danner notes how the images also functioned rhetorically to communicate a sense of American hypocrisy and needless cruelty to the Arabs and Muslims who opposed the American invasion and occupation: “[T]he Hooded Man and the Leashed Man fill a need, serving as powerful brand images advertising a preexisting product” (Torture and Truth 28). 39. Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) 6. 40. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004) 64. 41. Stephen Kinzer and Jim Rutenberg, “Grim Images Seem to Deepen Nation’s Polarization on Iraq,” New York Times (May 13, 2004) (query.nytimes. com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9FOCE7D9113CF93OA25756COA96Z9C8B63&sec=& spon=&pagewanted=z). 42. Quoted in Kinzer and Rutenberg, “Grim Images.”

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43. June 22, 2004, stated during the president’s welcoming remarks to the prime minister of Hungary (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/06/200406224.html). 44. Quoted by Jaqueline Rose, “Our Present Disillusionment,” Harper’s Magazine (October 2004) 18. 45. R. Jeffrey Smith and Josh White, “General Granted Latitude at Prison,” Washington Post (Saturday June 12, 2004) A01. 46. Torture and Truth 115. 47. Torture and Truth 115. 48. While many news reports and analyses between 2002 and the present writing have documented these decisions, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker provide a particularly helpful summary of the development of this policy: “Pushing the Envelope on Presidential Power,” Washington Post (Monday, June 25, 2007) (blog. washingtonpost.com/cheney/chapters/pushing_the_envelope_on_presi/). 49. Torture and Truth 110. 50. Torture and Truth 157–58. 51. Torture and Truth 160. 52. The Working Group Report on Detainee Interrogations in the Global War on Terrorism, dated March 6, 2003, notes that the United States ratified the 1994 Convention Against Torture only with several reservations and understandings, one of which was this clarification of “severe”: “in order to constitute torture, an act must be specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering [. . .].” 53. News Hour with Jim Lehrer, May 4, 2004. 54. As, for example, when Oedipus pokes his eyes out on stage, before the witnessing chorus and audience; or, as in chapter 1, when Oedipus’s broken body becomes a figure for the power of an individual’s suffering for the polis. 55. The Question 14.

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Index Abu Ghraib prison, 1, 14–15, 127, 136–140, 142–143 Achilles Tatius, Leukippe and Kleitophon, 5, 11, 12–13, 65, 72–90 Addington, David, 140 adventure-time, 11, 66–67, 68–71, 73, 83, 84, 86–89 Agamben, Giorgio, 166n27, 168n48 Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound, 4–5; Oresteia, 158n54 Al-Jazeera, 130–131 Alleg, Henri, 128, 144 Al Qaeda, 134 Améry, Jean, 128 Andromeda, 77–79, 80 antidote. See punishment Antigone. See Sophocles Aristotle: Ars Rhetorica, 2–3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 15–16, 52, 127; Poetics, 18–19, 58, 95 Auerbach, Eric, 104–105, 166n24 Augustine of Hippo: 95, 107, 169n51; Confessions, 169n57; De Doctrina Christiana, 104; De magistro, 105, 116 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 11, 66, 67–70, 73–74, 83, 85, 88–89, 147n22 Barthes, Roland, 9, 146n18 basanos, 2–4, 12, 52–53, 55, 62–63 Baudrillard, Jean, 132 bearing witness. See witness Benjamin, Walter, 132 Bitzer, Lloyd, 145n7 blindness, 45–46, 56, 156n41

body: Body Politic, 44; and empathy, 58; as flesh, 108–109; as mimetic device, 59, 101; mutilation or wounding of, 6, 89, 110, 114, 115; in pain, 6; as signifier, 20, 30, 32, 33–34, 38, 40, 41–42, 59, 61–62, 64, 65, 66–67, 69–70, 73–74, 84–85, 88, 92, 97, 99–100, 105, 122, 127 Booth, Wayne, 15 Branham, Bracht, 67, 160n18 Brown, Peter, 89, 102 Bush, George H. W., 129–130, 141, 171n6 Bush, George W., 8, 128, 129–130, 133–134, 135, 139, 141 Butler, Judith, 2, 138 Bybee, Jay S., 140–141 Certeau, Michel de, 2, 132, 145n2 Chariton, Chaereas and Callirhoe, 72, 74, 82 Cheney, Dick, 129–130, 135, 140–141, 171n6 chronotope, 66–69, 71, 73, 84, 86, 89 CIA, 8, 15, 135 Clover, Carol, 87–88 corpse, 11, 17, 20–24, 27, 30–35, 37–38, 42, 62, 64, 86, 102, 139 Crotty, Kevin, 3 Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, 98–99, 106 Debord, Guy, 132, 145n2 de Lauretis, Teresa, 82, 163n49

187

188

Index

de Man, Paul, 166n28, 170n68 Derrida, Jacques, 19, 58, 166n28 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 120–122

interrogation, 8, 52, 135, 137, 140, 156n38 Irigaray, Luce, 81–82, 83

Egger, Brigitte, 82–84 ekphrasis, 5, 65, 74–79, 81, 92, 93, 102, 103–104, 131, 161n29, 163n51, 164n3 Elsom, Helen, 82–83 England, Lynndie, 15, 138 Erinyes, 31, 41, 60, 158n54 eros, 12–13, 28, 66–67, 70–77, 81, 84–85, 88–90, 160n19, 161n22 Eumenides, 59–61, 64, 158n54 Europa, 74–79

Job, 108–110 judgment, 1–2, 5, 10, 14–15, 21, 65, 90, 94, 96, 97, 100, 116, 124–125, 129, 133, 144 justice, 11–13, 20–21, 25, 28–30, 35–36, 38–40, 45, 60–65, 96, 99–100, 108, 125, 134, 140

Foucault, Michel: Discipline and Punish, 5–6, 94–95, 99, 145n8, 160n19 Freud, Sigmund, 87–88, 156n41, 157n46, 170n63 Galerius, 107–108, 110, 114 gaze, 12, 65, 67, 74, 76, 77–79, 80, 81–82, 83, 85, 87–88, 90, 136–138, 163n51 gender, 12–13, 67, 73, 79, 80–83, 85–89, 149n15, 161n25, 163n53 Geneva Convention, 130, 134, 135, 138, 141, 142, 172n24 Gonzales, Alberto, 140–141 Guantánamo Bay detention center, 134, 135, 138, 140, 172n23 Hearst, William Randolph, 129 Hegel, 149–151n15 Herakles, 4, 79–80 Herodotus, 83–84, 85–86 Hesiod: Theogony, 4, 145n6 Horace: Ars Poetica, 104 Hussein, Saddam, 15, 129, 131, 133–134, 135–136, 138, 140 identity, 41, 44–51, 54, 56–59, 67–69, 73–74, 86, 89, 138 Incarnation, 108, 110, 112, 116, 122 inscription, 6–7, 108, 113

Keenan, Tom, 2, 128 Konstan, David, 70–74, 81–83, 146n10 Lacan, Jacques, 121, 170n63 law: 4, 22, 23–26, 29–30, 36–38, 45, 50, 52, 60, 61, 65, 89, 93, 94, 96–97, 99–100, 107–111, 114–115, 116, 119, 123–125, 127, 138, 139, 140–143; of the city, 11, 23, 25–26; of the family, 11; and literature, 4 Lingis, Alphonso, 146n9 lingua, 14, 94, 106–107, 116–119, 123, 124 logos, 50, 51, 53, 60–61, 64, 112, 143 Luhmann, Niklas, 132 Lynch, Jessica, 131 Lyotard, Jean-François, 7, 146n12, 146n20, 165–166n20 Marder, Elissa, 147n23, 165n7 marriage, 29, 32, 55, 62, 66, 68, 70–72, 85, 89 Marsyas, 80, 88 martyr: 3, 6, 13, 52, 91–125; cult of, 101–102, 107, 113, 123, 167n32 martyrdom, 13, 91, 93, 94–95, 97–100, 103, 110–111, 120 martyrology, 3, 13 masochism, 87–88 McKinley, William, 129 McLuhan, Marshall, 132 Morales, Helen, 86, 162n41 mortality, 4, 100, 110–111, 125, 151

Index mourning: and meaning, 20, 27, 30, 35; and memorial, 11, 27, 30, 33, 63; and ritual, 20, 23–25, 28 Mulvey, Laura, 82 nomos, 23, 25, 37, 45, 61, 150 Oedipus at Colonus. See Sophocles Oedipus Rex. See Sophocles oracle. See prophecy pain, 52, 54–59, 91–93, 97–100, 105, 110, 111, 123, 125, 127, 130, 131, 134, 135, 140, 141, 143–144 Paul, St., 98, 122, 169n59 performance, 3, 12–13, 17–20, 41, 44, 55, 65, 67, 80, 85, 94–96, 97, 99, 102–103, 124–125 Philostratus, 85 plague, 27–28, 31, 41, 42–44, 50, 60 polis, 12, 20–24, 28, 31, 36, 39, 40, 41– 44, 59, 60–62, 64, 65, 143, 148n12, 148n15, 153n3, 174n54 Prometheus, 4–5, 77–79, 80, 84, 88, 145n6, 161–162n29 prophecy, 43, 48, 49 Prudentius: Peristephanon Liber, 6, 13– 14, 91–125, 139; Praefatio, 100, 106 psyche, 39. See also soul; spirit punishment: 29, 30, 95–96, 97, 100, 114, 117; as antidote, 12, 31, 33, 35–36, 38, 40, 62–63 quaestio, quaestio per tormentum, 97 rape, 74, 76, 79, 131, 133, 136 representation of torture, 1–7, 9–10, 13–16, 18, 21, 23, 56, 58, 67, 76, 87, 92, 103, 121, 122, 124, 125, 127, 128–134, 138–139, 142–144 rhetoric: 1–10, 13–16, 18–19, 21, 27, 49, 52–53, 56, 63–64, 81, 85, 88–89, 93, 97, 100, 104–105, 108, 111, 115–116, 124, 125, 127, 134–140, 142–144; and ambivalence, 107, 124, 127, 132–133; and image, 2–3, 9; and

189

media, 128; and torture, 14, 100, 110, 116, 127, 131, 133–135 ritual. See marriage; mourning romance, Greek, 3, 11–13, 65–66, 68–69, 70–72, 81–82, 85, 88–89, 92, 138 Romanus, 13–14, 93–94, 106–108, 110–120, 123–125, 139 Rumsfeld, Donald, 134–135, 136, 142 sacrifice, 79, 99, 110, 113, 115 sadism, 137 sanguis, 97, 103, 106, 119–120, 123 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 144 Scarry, Elaine, 8–9, 146n14, 169n55 Scheintod, 74, 77 Schlesinger, James R., 137 Second Sophistic, 11, 85 sexual violence, 75–76, 79 Silverman Kaja, 82, 87–88 Sontag, Susan, 2, 138 Sophocles: 65; Antigone, 11, 20–40, 134, 143, 171n11; Oedipus at Colonus, 11–12, 17–21, 41, 59–64, 143; Oedipus Rex, 6, 11, 12, 41-59, 143, 174n54 soul, 13, 38–39, 42, 76–77, 92, 98, 100, 105, 110, 115, 123, 125, 140. See also psyche; spirit spectacle, 2–3, 6, 11–12, 14, 26, 30–31, 33–37, 40, 56, 65–66, 76–77, 80–81, 84, 92, 94–97, 99–100, 125, 127, 130–133, 139, 144 spirit, 38–39, 71–72, 98–99, 109, 112–113, 117. See also psyche; soul suffering: 5, 9, 11–14, 19, 21, 32–34, 37, 41, 45, 55, 66, 68, 74, 81, 84, 97–99, 103; as payment of debt, 30, 33, 35, 36, 40, 60, 64, 65, 100, 110, 122, 125; as rhetorical figure, 11, 13, 20–21, 59, 62–63, 91, 92, 122 techné, 2, 23, 25, 36, 40, 149n15 Tertullian: Ad martyras, 97–99, 104; Apologeticum, 94, 96, 97, 98, 111–113; De carne Christi, 108–110, 122; De spectaculis, 94, 96

190

Index

testimony, 5, 8, 52, 54, 57, 61, 108–109, 116, 128, 143 Theon, Progymnasmata, 104 torture: and eros, 81; as evidence, 7–8, 33, 37, 39, 40, 42, 52, 53–54, 55, 59, 61–62, 64, 129, 155n29; and interpretation, 9, 10, 14, 120, 124; as rhetorical device, 1, 36, 38, 53, 64, 92, 93, 94–95, 98, 125, 127–129; as spectacle, 26, 33–35, 36, 40, 57–58, 66, 67, 84, 92, 117, 119, 125, 127 trial: 21, 61, 72–75, 85–86, 89; and torture, 52–54, 62, 94–97, 129, 136, 156n36, 161n25

“war on terror,” 15, 128, 133, 134, 139, 143 witness: 50–51, 52, 54, 55, 57–59, 61, 63, 65, 73, 99; bearing witness, 34, 37, 39, 42, 56, 63, 65, 110; reader as, 6, 10, 92; the role of, in torture, 1, 5–7, 110, 125 wound: 55, 79; and eros, 76–77, 88; as rhetorical device, 59, 63, 85, 93, 115–116, 120, 122

Vatz, Richard, 145n7 virgin, 72–73, 77, 79 virginity. See virgin

Zeitlin, Froma, 64 Zeus, 4, 17, 25, 36–37, 64, 74–75, 77, 145n6

Yoo, John, 141