This is the blog that we will use over the next ten months to support the Madonna Professional Development course
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Salt&Light
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Chapter VII Anchor passages
p.180-183 "So he just wanted a grandson," he said. " That was all he was after. Jesus, the South is fine, isn't it. It's better than the theatre, isn't it. It's better than Ben Hur, isn't it. No wonder you have to come away now and then, isn't it."
His trouble was innocence. All of a sudden he discovered, not what he wanted to do but what he just had to do, had to do it whether he wanted to or not, because if he did not do it he knew that he could never live with himself, never live with what all the men and women that had died to make him had left inside of him for him to pass on, with all the dead ones waiting and watching to see if he was going to do it right , fix things right so that he would be able to look in the face not only the old dead ones but all the living ones that would come after him whe he would be one of the dead....
...and when he got to be a youth and curiosity itself exhumed the tales which he did now he had heard and speculated about them, he was interested and would have liked to see the places once, but without envy or regret , because he just thought that some people were spawned in one place and some in another, some spawned rich (lucky, he may have called it: or maybe he called lucky, rich) and some not, and that (so he told Grandfather) the men themselves had little to do with the choosing and less of the regret because ( he told Grandfather this too) it had never once occurred to him that any man should take any such blind accident as that as authority or warrantto look down at others, any others. So he had hardly heard of such a a world until he fell into it.
Anchor passage 2
pp.187-188
That's the way he got it. He had learned the difference not only between white men and black ones, but he was learning that there was a difference betwen white men and white mennot to be measured by lifting anvils or gouging eyes or how much whiskey you could drink then get up and walk out of the room. That is, he had begun to discern that without being aware of it yet. He still thought that that was just a matter of where you were spawned and how; lucky or not lucky; and that the lucky ones would be even slower and lother that the unlucky to take any advantage of it or credit for it, feel that it gave them anything more tender toward the unlucky than the unlucky would ever need to feel toward them....
So he knew neither where he had come from nor where he was nor why. He was just there, surrounded by the faces, almost all the faces which he had ever known, always known (though the number of them, despite the efforts of the unmarried sister who pretty soon, so he told Grandfather, and still without any wedding had another baby, decreasing, thinning out, because of the climate, the warmth, the dampness) living in a cabin that was almost a replica of the mountain one except that it didn't sit up in the bright wind but sat instead beside a big flat river that sometimes showed no current at all and sometimes ran backward, where his sisters and brothers seemed to take sick after supper and die before the next meal, where regiments of niggers with white men watching them planted and raised things that he had never heard of.
He would have coveted the rifle, but he would himself have supported and confirmed the owner's pride and pleasure in its ownership because he could not have conceived of the owner taking such crass advantage of the luck which gave the rifle to him rather than to another as to say to other men: Because I own this rifle, my arms and legs and blood and bones are superior to yours except as the victorious outcome of a fight with rifles: and how in the world could a man fight another man with dressed-up niggers and the fact that he could lie in a hammock all afternoon with is shoes off? and what in the world would he be fighting for if he did? He didn't even know he was innocent that day when his father sent him to the big house with the message
Anchor passage 3
p.198ff
He went to the West Indies. That's how he said it: not how he managed to find where the West Indies were nor where ships departed from to go there , nor how he got to where the ships were and got in one nor how he liked the sea nor about the harships of a sailor's life and it must have been hardship indeed for him , a boy of fourteen or fifteen who had never seen the ocean before, going to sea in 1823...
What I learned was that there was a place called the West Indies to which poor men went in ships and became rich, it didn't matter how, so long as that man was clever and courageous: the latter of which I believed that I possessed, the former of which I believed that, if it were to be learned by energy and will in the schol of endeavor and experience, I should learn....
I had a design. To accomlpish it I should re
His trouble was innocence. All of a sudden he discovered, not what he wanted to do but what he just had to do, had to do it whether he wanted to or not, because if he did not do it he knew that he could never live with himself, never live with what all the men and women that had died to make him had left inside of him for him to pass on, with all the dead ones waiting and watching to see if he was going to do it right , fix things right so that he would be able to look in the face not only the old dead ones but all the living ones that would come after him whe he would be one of the dead....
...and when he got to be a youth and curiosity itself exhumed the tales which he did now he had heard and speculated about them, he was interested and would have liked to see the places once, but without envy or regret , because he just thought that some people were spawned in one place and some in another, some spawned rich (lucky, he may have called it: or maybe he called lucky, rich) and some not, and that (so he told Grandfather) the men themselves had little to do with the choosing and less of the regret because ( he told Grandfather this too) it had never once occurred to him that any man should take any such blind accident as that as authority or warrantto look down at others, any others. So he had hardly heard of such a a world until he fell into it.
Anchor passage 2
pp.187-188
That's the way he got it. He had learned the difference not only between white men and black ones, but he was learning that there was a difference betwen white men and white mennot to be measured by lifting anvils or gouging eyes or how much whiskey you could drink then get up and walk out of the room. That is, he had begun to discern that without being aware of it yet. He still thought that that was just a matter of where you were spawned and how; lucky or not lucky; and that the lucky ones would be even slower and lother that the unlucky to take any advantage of it or credit for it, feel that it gave them anything more tender toward the unlucky than the unlucky would ever need to feel toward them....
So he knew neither where he had come from nor where he was nor why. He was just there, surrounded by the faces, almost all the faces which he had ever known, always known (though the number of them, despite the efforts of the unmarried sister who pretty soon, so he told Grandfather, and still without any wedding had another baby, decreasing, thinning out, because of the climate, the warmth, the dampness) living in a cabin that was almost a replica of the mountain one except that it didn't sit up in the bright wind but sat instead beside a big flat river that sometimes showed no current at all and sometimes ran backward, where his sisters and brothers seemed to take sick after supper and die before the next meal, where regiments of niggers with white men watching them planted and raised things that he had never heard of.
He would have coveted the rifle, but he would himself have supported and confirmed the owner's pride and pleasure in its ownership because he could not have conceived of the owner taking such crass advantage of the luck which gave the rifle to him rather than to another as to say to other men: Because I own this rifle, my arms and legs and blood and bones are superior to yours except as the victorious outcome of a fight with rifles: and how in the world could a man fight another man with dressed-up niggers and the fact that he could lie in a hammock all afternoon with is shoes off? and what in the world would he be fighting for if he did? He didn't even know he was innocent that day when his father sent him to the big house with the message
Anchor passage 3
p.198ff
He went to the West Indies. That's how he said it: not how he managed to find where the West Indies were nor where ships departed from to go there , nor how he got to where the ships were and got in one nor how he liked the sea nor about the harships of a sailor's life and it must have been hardship indeed for him , a boy of fourteen or fifteen who had never seen the ocean before, going to sea in 1823...
What I learned was that there was a place called the West Indies to which poor men went in ships and became rich, it didn't matter how, so long as that man was clever and courageous: the latter of which I believed that I possessed, the former of which I believed that, if it were to be learned by energy and will in the schol of endeavor and experience, I should learn....
I had a design. To accomlpish it I should re
Monday, June 6, 2011
Interpretive lens of Greek tragedy
The following are some insights borrowed from Greek Tragedy by Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz
Chapter 5 : Family Romance and Revenge in the House of Atreus
* Though the Greeks sometimes imagined marriage as the death of a maiden, or compared the premature death of a maiden to marriage to Hades (e.g., Iphigenia at Aulis and Antigone), for Elektra marriage beneath her station is a form of death.
In what ways is this true of Ellen, Rosa and Judith?* Elektra presents herself as a victim; she enters singing of her lineage. She is in mourning for her wretched life...and her father's fate, slain by his wife and Aigisthos...She mourns not only the dead but also her absent brother, who should come to free her and avenge his father. At the same time , she is impatient and angry at his delay. Her pain is increased by the contrast with her mother. Clytemnestra's children are in exile, whilethe mother lies in a bloody bed with her new husband
Is this also in part Judith's dramatic trajectory?
*On a psychological level, the play reveals that we can sink ourselves in our own mourning, condemning ourselves to living death by attachment to the past
*The role of the children in the family is strongly distinguished by gender. Orestes has been brought up as the avenger, while Elektra has been treated asa servant; dressed in rags, fed crumbs from the family table, unmarried and childless, she must wait for Orestes to begin her life.
Is there a similar dynamic between Judith and Henry?
Chapter 6: Victims and Victimizers
As an imitation woman, Medea is complex and dangerous. She is not simply the sympathetic betrayed woman. From the beginning the Nurse directs us to fear for the children. Medea presents the murder or sacrifice of the children as inevitable, but it is only inevitable because she has chosen to use them as bearers of the gifts, and even then, if she can get away, why can'y she take them with her?...The only way to destrpy Jason completely is to kill the children, not because he loves them so dearly (she loves them more) but because it was very important for a Greek man to leave progeny...She will take revenge by destroying the future of his house.
Are there hints of Medea in the portrait of Rosa that Faulkner paints?
Chapter 5 : Family Romance and Revenge in the House of Atreus
* Though the Greeks sometimes imagined marriage as the death of a maiden, or compared the premature death of a maiden to marriage to Hades (e.g., Iphigenia at Aulis and Antigone), for Elektra marriage beneath her station is a form of death.
In what ways is this true of Ellen, Rosa and Judith?* Elektra presents herself as a victim; she enters singing of her lineage. She is in mourning for her wretched life...and her father's fate, slain by his wife and Aigisthos...She mourns not only the dead but also her absent brother, who should come to free her and avenge his father. At the same time , she is impatient and angry at his delay. Her pain is increased by the contrast with her mother. Clytemnestra's children are in exile, whilethe mother lies in a bloody bed with her new husband
Is this also in part Judith's dramatic trajectory?
*On a psychological level, the play reveals that we can sink ourselves in our own mourning, condemning ourselves to living death by attachment to the past
*The role of the children in the family is strongly distinguished by gender. Orestes has been brought up as the avenger, while Elektra has been treated asa servant; dressed in rags, fed crumbs from the family table, unmarried and childless, she must wait for Orestes to begin her life.
Is there a similar dynamic between Judith and Henry?
Chapter 6: Victims and Victimizers
As an imitation woman, Medea is complex and dangerous. She is not simply the sympathetic betrayed woman. From the beginning the Nurse directs us to fear for the children. Medea presents the murder or sacrifice of the children as inevitable, but it is only inevitable because she has chosen to use them as bearers of the gifts, and even then, if she can get away, why can'y she take them with her?...The only way to destrpy Jason completely is to kill the children, not because he loves them so dearly (she loves them more) but because it was very important for a Greek man to leave progeny...She will take revenge by destroying the future of his house.
Are there hints of Medea in the portrait of Rosa that Faulkner paints?
Chapter VI Anchor Passages
Anchor passage 1
p.147-149 ...and right about the brother-in-lawbecause if he hadn't been a demon his children wouldn't have needed protection from him and she wouldn't have had to go out there and be betrayed by the old meat and find instead of a widowed Agamemnon to her Cassandra an ancient stiff-jointed Pyramus to her eager though untried Thisbe who could approach her in this unbidden April's compounded demonry and suggest that they breed together for test and sample and if it was a boy they would marry...
That this Faustus, this demon, this Beezebub fled hiding from some momentary flashy glare of his Creditor's outraged face exasperated beyond all endurance, hiding, scuttling into respectability like a jackal into a rockpile so she thought at first until she realised that he was not hiding, did not want to hid, was merely engaged in one final frenzy of evil and harm doing before the Creditor overtook him this next time for good and all; -- this Faustus who appeared suddenly one Sunday with two pistols and twenty subsidiary demons and skuldugged a hundred miles of land out of a poor ignorant Indian and built the biggest house on ityou ever saw and went away with six wagons and came back with the crystal tapestries and the Wedgwood chairs to furnish it and nobody knew if he had robbed another steamboat or had just dug up a little more of the old loot, who hid horns and tail beneath human raiment...
Came back home and found his chances of descendants gone where his children had attended to that, and his plantation ruined, fields fallow except for a fine stand of weeds, and taxes and levies and penalties sowed by United States marshals and such and all his niggers gone where the Yankees had attended to that , and you would have thought he would have been satisfied: yet before his foot was out of the stirrup he not only set out to try to restore his plantation to what it used to be, like maybe he was hoping to fool the Creditor by illusion and obfuscationby concealing behind the illusion that time and change had not elapsed and occurred the fact that he was now almost sixty years old until he could get himself a new batch of children to bulwark him, but chose for his purpose the last woman on earth he might have hoped to prevail on this Aunt R--
Anchor passage 2
pp.159
...They lead beautiful lives-- women. Lives not only divorced from, but irrevocably excommunicated from, all reality. That's why although their deaths, the instant of dissolution, are of no importance to them since they have a courage and fortitude in the face of pain and annihilation which would make the most spartan man resemble a puling boy, yet to them their funerals and graves, the little puny affirmations of spurious immortality set above their slumber, are of incalculable importance.
Anchor passage 3
p.164-165
...and your grandfather said 'Suffer little children to come unto Me': and what did He mean by that? how, if He meant that little children should need to be suffered to approach Him, what sort of earth had He created; that if they had to suffer in order to approach Him, what sort of Heaven did He have?...
And your grandfather did not know either just which of them it was who told him that he was, must be, a negro, who could neither have heard yet nor recognised the term "nigger', who even had no word for it in the tongue he knew who had been born and grown up in a padded silken vacuum cell which might have been suspended on a cable a thousand fathoms in the sea, where pigmentation had no moral value than the silk walls and the scent and the rose-colred candle shades where the very abstractions which he might have observed-- monogamy and fidelity and decorum and gentleness and affection-- were as purely rooted in the flesh's offices as the digestive processes.
...the boy with his light bones and womanish hands struggling with what anonymous avatar of intractable Mule, whatever tragic and barren clown was his bound fellow and complement beneath his first father's curse, getting the hang of it gradually and the two of them, linked by the savage steel-and-wood male symbol, ripping from the prone rich female earth corn to feed them both while Clytie watched, never out of sight of him, with that brooding fierce unflagging jealous care, hurrying out whenever anyone white or black stopped in the road as if to wait for the boy to complete the furrow and pause long enough to be spoken to, sending the boy on with a single quiet word or gesture a hundred times more fierce than the level murmur of vituperation with which she drove the passerby on. So he (your grandfather) believed that it was neither of them. Not Clytie, who guarded him as if he were a Spanish virgin, who even before she could have even suspected that he would ever come there to live, had interrupted his first contact with a nigger and sent him back to the house; not Judith, who could have refused at any time to let him sleep in that white child's bed in her room, who even if she could not have reconciled herself to his sleeping on the floor could have forced Clytie to take him into another bed with her, who could have made a monk, a celibate, of him perhaps yet not a eunuch, who may not have permitted him to pass himself for a foreigner, yet who certainly would not have driven him to consort with negroes.
Anchor passage 4
p.176
But you were not listening, because you knew it all already, had learned, absorbed it already without the medium of speech somehow from having been born and living beside it, with it, as children will and do: so that what your father was saying did not tell you anything so much as it struck, word by word, the resonant strings of remembering, who had been there before, sen these graves more than once in the rambling expeditions of boyhood whose aim was more than the mere hunting of game, just as you had seen the old house too, been familiar with how it would look before you even saw it, became large enough to go out there one day with four or five other boys of your size and age and dare one another to evoke the ghos, since it would have to be haunted, could not but be haunted although it had stood there empty and unthreatening for twenty-six years and nobody to meet or report any ghost....
p.147-149 ...and right about the brother-in-lawbecause if he hadn't been a demon his children wouldn't have needed protection from him and she wouldn't have had to go out there and be betrayed by the old meat and find instead of a widowed Agamemnon to her Cassandra an ancient stiff-jointed Pyramus to her eager though untried Thisbe who could approach her in this unbidden April's compounded demonry and suggest that they breed together for test and sample and if it was a boy they would marry...
That this Faustus, this demon, this Beezebub fled hiding from some momentary flashy glare of his Creditor's outraged face exasperated beyond all endurance, hiding, scuttling into respectability like a jackal into a rockpile so she thought at first until she realised that he was not hiding, did not want to hid, was merely engaged in one final frenzy of evil and harm doing before the Creditor overtook him this next time for good and all; -- this Faustus who appeared suddenly one Sunday with two pistols and twenty subsidiary demons and skuldugged a hundred miles of land out of a poor ignorant Indian and built the biggest house on ityou ever saw and went away with six wagons and came back with the crystal tapestries and the Wedgwood chairs to furnish it and nobody knew if he had robbed another steamboat or had just dug up a little more of the old loot, who hid horns and tail beneath human raiment...
Came back home and found his chances of descendants gone where his children had attended to that, and his plantation ruined, fields fallow except for a fine stand of weeds, and taxes and levies and penalties sowed by United States marshals and such and all his niggers gone where the Yankees had attended to that , and you would have thought he would have been satisfied: yet before his foot was out of the stirrup he not only set out to try to restore his plantation to what it used to be, like maybe he was hoping to fool the Creditor by illusion and obfuscationby concealing behind the illusion that time and change had not elapsed and occurred the fact that he was now almost sixty years old until he could get himself a new batch of children to bulwark him, but chose for his purpose the last woman on earth he might have hoped to prevail on this Aunt R--
Anchor passage 2
pp.159
...They lead beautiful lives-- women. Lives not only divorced from, but irrevocably excommunicated from, all reality. That's why although their deaths, the instant of dissolution, are of no importance to them since they have a courage and fortitude in the face of pain and annihilation which would make the most spartan man resemble a puling boy, yet to them their funerals and graves, the little puny affirmations of spurious immortality set above their slumber, are of incalculable importance.
Anchor passage 3
p.164-165
...and your grandfather said 'Suffer little children to come unto Me': and what did He mean by that? how, if He meant that little children should need to be suffered to approach Him, what sort of earth had He created; that if they had to suffer in order to approach Him, what sort of Heaven did He have?...
And your grandfather did not know either just which of them it was who told him that he was, must be, a negro, who could neither have heard yet nor recognised the term "nigger', who even had no word for it in the tongue he knew who had been born and grown up in a padded silken vacuum cell which might have been suspended on a cable a thousand fathoms in the sea, where pigmentation had no moral value than the silk walls and the scent and the rose-colred candle shades where the very abstractions which he might have observed-- monogamy and fidelity and decorum and gentleness and affection-- were as purely rooted in the flesh's offices as the digestive processes.
...the boy with his light bones and womanish hands struggling with what anonymous avatar of intractable Mule, whatever tragic and barren clown was his bound fellow and complement beneath his first father's curse, getting the hang of it gradually and the two of them, linked by the savage steel-and-wood male symbol, ripping from the prone rich female earth corn to feed them both while Clytie watched, never out of sight of him, with that brooding fierce unflagging jealous care, hurrying out whenever anyone white or black stopped in the road as if to wait for the boy to complete the furrow and pause long enough to be spoken to, sending the boy on with a single quiet word or gesture a hundred times more fierce than the level murmur of vituperation with which she drove the passerby on. So he (your grandfather) believed that it was neither of them. Not Clytie, who guarded him as if he were a Spanish virgin, who even before she could have even suspected that he would ever come there to live, had interrupted his first contact with a nigger and sent him back to the house; not Judith, who could have refused at any time to let him sleep in that white child's bed in her room, who even if she could not have reconciled herself to his sleeping on the floor could have forced Clytie to take him into another bed with her, who could have made a monk, a celibate, of him perhaps yet not a eunuch, who may not have permitted him to pass himself for a foreigner, yet who certainly would not have driven him to consort with negroes.
Anchor passage 4
p.176
But you were not listening, because you knew it all already, had learned, absorbed it already without the medium of speech somehow from having been born and living beside it, with it, as children will and do: so that what your father was saying did not tell you anything so much as it struck, word by word, the resonant strings of remembering, who had been there before, sen these graves more than once in the rambling expeditions of boyhood whose aim was more than the mere hunting of game, just as you had seen the old house too, been familiar with how it would look before you even saw it, became large enough to go out there one day with four or five other boys of your size and age and dare one another to evoke the ghos, since it would have to be haunted, could not but be haunted although it had stood there empty and unthreatening for twenty-six years and nobody to meet or report any ghost....
Sunday, June 5, 2011
More on Judith and Henry
Mr Cook, Sahar and I had a good conversation on Friday about the Deutero-Canonical Book of Judith ( http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/r/rsv/rsv-idx?type=DIV1&byte=3825845) the inspired word it reveals. Gender politics are at the core of this apocryphal work. Certain lines ring true when they are compared to the narrative that Faulkner weaves in Absalom, Absalom! Thomas Sutpen is a metaphorical Holofernes in at least two ways. The rebellion that he puts down in Haiti reminds the careful reader of these lines from the Book of Judith (2:27-28)
Then he went down into the plain of Damascus during the wheat harvest, and burned all their fields and destroyed their flocks and herds and sacked their cities and ravaged their lands and put to death all their young men with the edge of the sword.So fear and terror of him fell upon all the people who lived along the seacoast, at Sidon and Tyre, and those who lived in Sur and Ocina and all who lived in Jamnia.
Sutpen and Holofernes are the scourges of the earth and Henry is the heir scion of this death-dealing inheritance. Although Bon and Judith were never married, Henry makes a widow of his sister and her plot to avenge her love has all the trappings of a ritual murder. In the Book of Judith, her namesake speaks these fateful words
By the deceit of my lips strike down the slave with the prince and the prince with his servant; crush their arrogance by the hand of a woman.(Judith 9:10)
Once her vengeance is fulfilled, the trajectory of the story finds its meet and proper end.
And no one ever again spread terror among the people of Israel in the days of Judith or for a long time after her death (Judith 16:25)
Then he went down into the plain of Damascus during the wheat harvest, and burned all their fields and destroyed their flocks and herds and sacked their cities and ravaged their lands and put to death all their young men with the edge of the sword.So fear and terror of him fell upon all the people who lived along the seacoast, at Sidon and Tyre, and those who lived in Sur and Ocina and all who lived in Jamnia.
Sutpen and Holofernes are the scourges of the earth and Henry is the heir scion of this death-dealing inheritance. Although Bon and Judith were never married, Henry makes a widow of his sister and her plot to avenge her love has all the trappings of a ritual murder. In the Book of Judith, her namesake speaks these fateful words
By the deceit of my lips strike down the slave with the prince and the prince with his servant; crush their arrogance by the hand of a woman.(Judith 9:10)
Once her vengeance is fulfilled, the trajectory of the story finds its meet and proper end.
And no one ever again spread terror among the people of Israel in the days of Judith or for a long time after her death (Judith 16:25)
Monday, May 30, 2011
Iphigenia as Greek Template for Judith
Please consider the following UC resource on Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides.
http://classics.uc.edu/~johnson/tragedy/iphigenia_aulis.html
Background and Preliminaries
Produced 405 B.C., after Euripides' death in 406
The contemporary military situation
The Iphigenia at Aulis (405 B.C.), like the Philoctetes (409 B.C.), seems to reflect the increasing despair as it becomes clear that Athens will lose the generation-long conflict with Sparta known as the Peloponnesian War, which lasted from 431 to 404 BC!
A decisive turning point in the war was the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, which has many elements seemingly alluded to in this play
Deception of officials: When the expedition to attack and conquer part of Sicily (including the city of Syracuse) is proposed, the Sicilian allies deceive the Athenians by pretending to great wealth when in fact they were poor: thus a famous story is told of how, when the Athenian officials were visiting, these allies gathered all the gold and silver cups and plates together, and as the officials were being dined at now one house, now another, the same gold and silver tableware was moved about, so as to make it look as though all the prominent citizens were extraordinarily wealthy
Greed leading to war: In anticipation of the great loot that would be gotten from the military expedition, the Athenians put together an absurdly large fleet (of 40,000 men!) for such a minor campaign, and a tremendous number of merchants were involved in the outfitting and the expedition itself, in hope of sharing in the profits from the looting. The tremendous size of the fleet in turn caused the Spartans to send a force under Gylippus to counter the Athenians, and this will be what leads to the downfall of the Athenian expedition.
Timidity and wrong decisions by the generals in deference to the mob: the Athenian general Nicias, in particular, vacillates, and refuses to act independently: at a critical juncture, when he could have terminated the campaign and sailed home with almost all his men and equipment intact, and when he knew well that all was endangered, he refused to act until he heard what the assembly in Athens (the "mob"!) commanded him to do; the delay while he waited for that response allowed Gylippus to get his forces into place and led to disaster.
Importance of a divine sign: Once the Athenians realized that their entire army was in danger, they prepared to abandon the campaign. But that night an eclipse over a full moon persuaded them that the gods were not in favor of their departure: the men (the "mob"!) demanded of the generals that they stay for "three times nine days," as the seers decreed. The lead general, Nicias, agreed, even though he knew the military situation was perilous. This final delay was critical in allowing the Syracusans with their Spartan allies to get the forces into place so as to destroy the Athenians.
The destruction of the Athenian force. The Spartans and Syracusans attack the Athenian fleet in the narrow harbor, and in the fierce battle the Athenian fleet is badly damaged, the harbor is blocked, and escape by sea now becomes impossible. The Athenians now try to escape overland with their force of 40,000 men, running in heavy armor with the enemy hot on their heels. In a striking, indeed haunting, passage the Athenian historian Thucydides describes the sad collapse of the Athenian military expedition:
"The Athenians pushed on to the Assinarus river, all the while being devastated by the spears, arrows and stones coming from everywhere and by the hordes of cavlry and other troops. They thought that if they could just get across the river, things would be a little easier for them. They were desperate to stop the pain, to drink some water. When they got to the river, they broke ranks and ran into it, every man struggling to make the brutal crossing first as the enemy bore down. Driven to cross all together, they fell onto one another and trampled each other down. Some were killed immediately by their own spears; others got tanlged up in their equipment and with each other and sank into the river. Syracusans positioned on the other bank, which was steep, hruled down spears at the Athenians, most of whom were jumbled together ravenously drinking from the nearly dry riverbe. The Peloponnesians went down into the river after them and did most of the killing there; and though it quickly became fouled, the Athenians nonetheless fought among themselves to gulp the muddy water clotted with blood.
"Finally, with dead bodies heaped atop each other in the riverbed, and the army decimated, some in the river and others-- such as got across-- by the cavalry, Nicias surrendered himself to Gylippus, trusting him more than the Syracusans. He told Gylippus and the Spartans to do with him what they wanted, but to stop slaughtering his men. After this, Gylippus ordered his troops to take prisoners...." [trans. W. Blanco]
Ironically, as Thucydides also tells us, the thousands of Athenians, imprisoned in a huge rock quarry, sang songs from Euripides to try to pass time in the torturous period that followed.
Structure of the play is odd, formally
postponed prologue: the other plays of Euripides start with a formal prologue that introduces the background to the action, but this play starts with a dialogue, to which is appended a speech by Agamemnon that reads very like a prologue
early agon: the agon is usually towards the middle of a Greek tragedy, but here the agon between Agamemnon and Menelaus occurs very early in the play, as though to signal that this will not be the only conflict-- and indeed the speeches between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra later in the play constitute, in effect, a second agon
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The Perversion of the Norm: quintessentially Euripidean
Examples of the twisting of what seems positive into the negative
Marriage
Peleus and Thetis: ultimately leads to the Trojan War: glory for Achilles, death for Iphigenia
Paris and Helen (a "marriage", p. 280): a symbol of violation
Achilles and Iphigenia: an emblem of falseness
Sacrifice to the gods
through association with Iphigenia, this turns into an image which is thoroughly impious (!), and gruesome: e.g. study the effect of lines 1270ff.
Leadership
study the figure of Agamemnon, the king of kings, in the opening scene, esp. lines 21ff: what is considered judgement is perverted into an image of indecisiveness
The obedient, pious, patriotic woman
Iphigenia is, decidedly, all this, but that hardly carries with it positive associations: what is the effect for the following examples:
lines 289ff
lines 1418ff
Following the will of the gods: the problem of fatedness
878: the oracle becomes the demon!
cf. 1034ff
Which do you believe is the more applicable referent: the biblical Judith or the Euripidean Iphigenia?
http://classics.uc.edu/~johnson/tragedy/iphigenia_aulis.html
Background and Preliminaries
Produced 405 B.C., after Euripides' death in 406
The contemporary military situation
The Iphigenia at Aulis (405 B.C.), like the Philoctetes (409 B.C.), seems to reflect the increasing despair as it becomes clear that Athens will lose the generation-long conflict with Sparta known as the Peloponnesian War, which lasted from 431 to 404 BC!
A decisive turning point in the war was the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, which has many elements seemingly alluded to in this play
Deception of officials: When the expedition to attack and conquer part of Sicily (including the city of Syracuse) is proposed, the Sicilian allies deceive the Athenians by pretending to great wealth when in fact they were poor: thus a famous story is told of how, when the Athenian officials were visiting, these allies gathered all the gold and silver cups and plates together, and as the officials were being dined at now one house, now another, the same gold and silver tableware was moved about, so as to make it look as though all the prominent citizens were extraordinarily wealthy
Greed leading to war: In anticipation of the great loot that would be gotten from the military expedition, the Athenians put together an absurdly large fleet (of 40,000 men!) for such a minor campaign, and a tremendous number of merchants were involved in the outfitting and the expedition itself, in hope of sharing in the profits from the looting. The tremendous size of the fleet in turn caused the Spartans to send a force under Gylippus to counter the Athenians, and this will be what leads to the downfall of the Athenian expedition.
Timidity and wrong decisions by the generals in deference to the mob: the Athenian general Nicias, in particular, vacillates, and refuses to act independently: at a critical juncture, when he could have terminated the campaign and sailed home with almost all his men and equipment intact, and when he knew well that all was endangered, he refused to act until he heard what the assembly in Athens (the "mob"!) commanded him to do; the delay while he waited for that response allowed Gylippus to get his forces into place and led to disaster.
Importance of a divine sign: Once the Athenians realized that their entire army was in danger, they prepared to abandon the campaign. But that night an eclipse over a full moon persuaded them that the gods were not in favor of their departure: the men (the "mob"!) demanded of the generals that they stay for "three times nine days," as the seers decreed. The lead general, Nicias, agreed, even though he knew the military situation was perilous. This final delay was critical in allowing the Syracusans with their Spartan allies to get the forces into place so as to destroy the Athenians.
The destruction of the Athenian force. The Spartans and Syracusans attack the Athenian fleet in the narrow harbor, and in the fierce battle the Athenian fleet is badly damaged, the harbor is blocked, and escape by sea now becomes impossible. The Athenians now try to escape overland with their force of 40,000 men, running in heavy armor with the enemy hot on their heels. In a striking, indeed haunting, passage the Athenian historian Thucydides describes the sad collapse of the Athenian military expedition:
"The Athenians pushed on to the Assinarus river, all the while being devastated by the spears, arrows and stones coming from everywhere and by the hordes of cavlry and other troops. They thought that if they could just get across the river, things would be a little easier for them. They were desperate to stop the pain, to drink some water. When they got to the river, they broke ranks and ran into it, every man struggling to make the brutal crossing first as the enemy bore down. Driven to cross all together, they fell onto one another and trampled each other down. Some were killed immediately by their own spears; others got tanlged up in their equipment and with each other and sank into the river. Syracusans positioned on the other bank, which was steep, hruled down spears at the Athenians, most of whom were jumbled together ravenously drinking from the nearly dry riverbe. The Peloponnesians went down into the river after them and did most of the killing there; and though it quickly became fouled, the Athenians nonetheless fought among themselves to gulp the muddy water clotted with blood.
"Finally, with dead bodies heaped atop each other in the riverbed, and the army decimated, some in the river and others-- such as got across-- by the cavalry, Nicias surrendered himself to Gylippus, trusting him more than the Syracusans. He told Gylippus and the Spartans to do with him what they wanted, but to stop slaughtering his men. After this, Gylippus ordered his troops to take prisoners...." [trans. W. Blanco]
Ironically, as Thucydides also tells us, the thousands of Athenians, imprisoned in a huge rock quarry, sang songs from Euripides to try to pass time in the torturous period that followed.
Structure of the play is odd, formally
postponed prologue: the other plays of Euripides start with a formal prologue that introduces the background to the action, but this play starts with a dialogue, to which is appended a speech by Agamemnon that reads very like a prologue
early agon: the agon is usually towards the middle of a Greek tragedy, but here the agon between Agamemnon and Menelaus occurs very early in the play, as though to signal that this will not be the only conflict-- and indeed the speeches between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra later in the play constitute, in effect, a second agon
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Perversion of the Norm: quintessentially Euripidean
Examples of the twisting of what seems positive into the negative
Marriage
Peleus and Thetis: ultimately leads to the Trojan War: glory for Achilles, death for Iphigenia
Paris and Helen (a "marriage", p. 280): a symbol of violation
Achilles and Iphigenia: an emblem of falseness
Sacrifice to the gods
through association with Iphigenia, this turns into an image which is thoroughly impious (!), and gruesome: e.g. study the effect of lines 1270ff.
Leadership
study the figure of Agamemnon, the king of kings, in the opening scene, esp. lines 21ff: what is considered judgement is perverted into an image of indecisiveness
The obedient, pious, patriotic woman
Iphigenia is, decidedly, all this, but that hardly carries with it positive associations: what is the effect for the following examples:
lines 289ff
lines 1418ff
Following the will of the gods: the problem of fatedness
878: the oracle becomes the demon!
cf. 1034ff
Which do you believe is the more applicable referent: the biblical Judith or the Euripidean Iphigenia?
Biblical Template for Faulkner's Judith
Please consider the following USCCB resource on the Book of Judith (http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/judith/intro.htm )
The Book of Judith is a vivid story relating how, in a grave crisis, God delivered the Jewish people through the instrumentality of a woman. The unknown author composed this edifying narrative of divine providence at the end of the second or the beginning of the first century B.C. The original was almost certainly written in Hebrew, but the Greek text shows so much freedom in adapting from the Septuagint the language of older biblical books that it must be regarded as having a literary character of its own. It is this Greek form of the book, accepted as canonical by the Catholic Church, which is translated here. St. Jerome, who prepared (with some reluctance) a Latin text of Judith, based his work on a secondary Aramaic text available to him in Palestine, combined with an older Latin rendering from the Greek. The long hymn of Jdt 16 he took in its entirety from that earlier Latin text.
Since it is no longer possible to determine with any precision the underlying events which may have given rise to this narrative, it is enough to note that the author sought to strengthen the faith of his people in God's abiding presence among them. The Book of Judith is a tract for difficult times; the reader, it was hoped, would take to heart the lesson that God was still the Master of history, who could save Israel from her enemies. Note the parallel with the time of the Exodus: as God had delivered his people by the hand of Moses, so he could deliver them by the hand of the pious widow Judith (see note on Judith 2:12).
The story can be divided into two parts. In the first (Jdt 1-7), Holofernes, commander-in-chief of the armies of Nebuchadnezzar, leads an overwhelming Assyrian force in a punitive campaign against the vassals who refused to help in the Assyrian war against the Medes. The Jewish people stubbornly resist the enemy at Bethulia, guarding the route of access to Jerusalem. Despite the warning of Achior that the Jews cannot be conquered unless they sin against God, the proud general lays siege to the town and cuts off its water supply. After asiege of thirty-four days, the exhausted defenders are desperate and ready to surrender.
At this point, the climax of the story, Judith (the name means "Jewess") appears and promises to defeat the Assyrians. The rest of the story is too well known to repeat in detail. Having fasted and prayed, Judith dresses in her finest garments and proceeds to the Assyrian camp, where she succeeds in killing Holofernes while he lies in a drunken stupor. The Assyrians panic when they discover this, and the Jews are able to rout and slaughter them. The beautiful hymn of the people honoring Judith (Judith 15:9-10) is often applied to Mary in the liturgy.
Any attempt to read the book directly against the backdrop of Jewish history in relation to the empires of the ancient world is bound to fail. The story was written as a pious reflection on the meaning of the yearly Passover observance. It draws its inspiration from the Exodus narrative (especially Exodus 14:31) and from the texts of Isaiah and the Psalms portraying the special intervention of God for the preservation of Jerusalem. The theme of God's hand as the agent of this providential activity, reflected of old in the hand of Moses and now in the hand of Judith, is again exemplified at a later time in Jewish synagogue art. God's hand reaching down from heaven appears as part of the scene at Dura-Europos (before A.D. 256) in paintings of the Exodus, of the sacrifice of Isaac (Gen 22), and of Ezekiel's valley of dry bones (Eze 37).
The Book of Judith is divided as follows:
Peril of the Jews (Judith 1:1-7:32)
Deliverance of the Jews (Judith 8:1-14:10)
Victory (Judith 14:11-16:25)
The Book of Judith is a vivid story relating how, in a grave crisis, God delivered the Jewish people through the instrumentality of a woman. The unknown author composed this edifying narrative of divine providence at the end of the second or the beginning of the first century B.C. The original was almost certainly written in Hebrew, but the Greek text shows so much freedom in adapting from the Septuagint the language of older biblical books that it must be regarded as having a literary character of its own. It is this Greek form of the book, accepted as canonical by the Catholic Church, which is translated here. St. Jerome, who prepared (with some reluctance) a Latin text of Judith, based his work on a secondary Aramaic text available to him in Palestine, combined with an older Latin rendering from the Greek. The long hymn of Jdt 16 he took in its entirety from that earlier Latin text.
Since it is no longer possible to determine with any precision the underlying events which may have given rise to this narrative, it is enough to note that the author sought to strengthen the faith of his people in God's abiding presence among them. The Book of Judith is a tract for difficult times; the reader, it was hoped, would take to heart the lesson that God was still the Master of history, who could save Israel from her enemies. Note the parallel with the time of the Exodus: as God had delivered his people by the hand of Moses, so he could deliver them by the hand of the pious widow Judith (see note on Judith 2:12).
The story can be divided into two parts. In the first (Jdt 1-7), Holofernes, commander-in-chief of the armies of Nebuchadnezzar, leads an overwhelming Assyrian force in a punitive campaign against the vassals who refused to help in the Assyrian war against the Medes. The Jewish people stubbornly resist the enemy at Bethulia, guarding the route of access to Jerusalem. Despite the warning of Achior that the Jews cannot be conquered unless they sin against God, the proud general lays siege to the town and cuts off its water supply. After asiege of thirty-four days, the exhausted defenders are desperate and ready to surrender.
At this point, the climax of the story, Judith (the name means "Jewess") appears and promises to defeat the Assyrians. The rest of the story is too well known to repeat in detail. Having fasted and prayed, Judith dresses in her finest garments and proceeds to the Assyrian camp, where she succeeds in killing Holofernes while he lies in a drunken stupor. The Assyrians panic when they discover this, and the Jews are able to rout and slaughter them. The beautiful hymn of the people honoring Judith (Judith 15:9-10) is often applied to Mary in the liturgy.
Any attempt to read the book directly against the backdrop of Jewish history in relation to the empires of the ancient world is bound to fail. The story was written as a pious reflection on the meaning of the yearly Passover observance. It draws its inspiration from the Exodus narrative (especially Exodus 14:31) and from the texts of Isaiah and the Psalms portraying the special intervention of God for the preservation of Jerusalem. The theme of God's hand as the agent of this providential activity, reflected of old in the hand of Moses and now in the hand of Judith, is again exemplified at a later time in Jewish synagogue art. God's hand reaching down from heaven appears as part of the scene at Dura-Europos (before A.D. 256) in paintings of the Exodus, of the sacrifice of Isaac (Gen 22), and of Ezekiel's valley of dry bones (Eze 37).
The Book of Judith is divided as follows:
Peril of the Jews (Judith 1:1-7:32)
Deliverance of the Jews (Judith 8:1-14:10)
Victory (Judith 14:11-16:25)
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