Lysistrata: Antiwar Comedy of the Sexes

Aristophanes. Lysistrata. 411 BCE. Ancient Greek antiwar comedy of the sexes.

I took 75 minutes to devour this deliriously ribald comedy of the sexes from the classical era’s finest comic playwright, ranking higher even than Petronius and Juvenal. This play features an Athenian heroine called Lysistrata, who persuades girls and matrons all over Greece to halt the sanguine Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens by refusing to sleep with their husbands until the latter negotiate a peace treaty. These unorthodox antiwar activists occupy the Acropolis and taunt and allure the men until, frantic with lust, the men give in and make peace. Afterward . . . well, everyone just gets “so happy together,” as The Turtles would sing.

Lysistrata is a fantastical farce that Aristophanes makes wildly convincing. The wordplay and situational comedy (men walk around trying to hide their huge erections under their cloaks) are sure to evoke gut-wrenching guffaws of mirth and astonishment. But the antiwar message is dead serious; readings of the play proliferated when the USA invaded Iraq in 2003.

Now, ribaldry may be an art form degenerated from the sublime climaxes of Greek Victorianism (Aeschylus) and modernism (Euripides), but it is precisely because of its postmodern sensibility—its iconoclasm, playfulness, feminism, and mockery of male sexuality—that Lysistrata is the funniest, most uninhibited play I have ever read. Never mind the Sixties—it was Aristophanes who first called upon humanity to “make love, not war”!

The Tragedy of Electra’s Justice

Euripides. Electra. 405 BCE. Ancient Greek tragedy.

By the gods, where do I begin? This is a bloody, brilliant masterpiece! Literature that raises devastating philosophical dilemmas is rare indeed, and all the more precious when executed so flawlessly as by Euripides. With crisp, flowing dialogue that actually really is dialogue and not drawn-out monologuing by arcane choruses, this ancient Greek tragedy follows Electra and Orestes as they plot to murder their mother Clytemnestra in retribution—a term synonymous with justice, as Kant sensibly recognized—for her killing their father, King Agamemnon of Mycenae.

I love what Euripides does with this set-up. He suggests that all killing is impure, regardless of how justified it may be, and that all killers must atone in some way, including through the ritual cleansing of guilt. (This provokes the query: might the lack of any socially or religiously based means of purification contribute to the PTSD running wild among soldiers nowadays?) It is this vital distinction between justified and just that civilization has lost—drat Augustine and his just war theory. We forget that while killing may sometimes be necessary, it is never right.

The characters in Electra do what they feel they must do, what their souls or fates inexorably impel them to do, but they do not rationalize their sins; they merely explain the reasons that motivated those sins. And although they have to nerve themselves to the deed and their consciences torment them after the fact, they regret the necessity of killing—they don’t regret the actual slaughter. Nevertheless, our killers are not fatalists; indeed, it is their very capacity of choice that torments them so, because free will means that we alone are responsible for our actions, whatever fate, honor, or dreadful circumstance bind or impel us. We are naked before the gods.

Pride Goeth Before Destruction

Euripides. The Bacchae. 405 BCE. Ancient Greek tragedy.

There are so many ways in which we can interpret The Bacchae, the ancient Greek tragedy by the great Euripides. At its center, of course, is the conflict between King Pentheus of Thebes and his divine cousin, Dionysius. But the pair are symbols as well as men. Pentheus is the tough-minded, masculine ruler who becomes unreasonable in his insistence on rationality, whereas Dionysius is the effete source of the wild destructiveness that possesses the women of Thebes, and it is he who coolly manipulates and destroys the unbelieving Pentheus in the goriest way imaginable. Pentheus seems to stand for rationality, order, manhood, patriarchy, and the Apollonian; Dionysius for irrationality, chaos, the feminine, and the fluid boundaries of the Dionysian—Eros versus Thanatos, if we dare to invoke Freud and Nietzsche in one breath.

Yet the truth is more complicated than any such binary. Dionysius has both Apollonian and Dionysian elements; the whole primal bacchanalian madness with which he infects Thebes is an elaborate plot to punish that city’s royal house for casting out his mother after she was impregnated by Zeus. Thus, Dionysius is rational (calculating) in his pursuit of irrationality. As for Pentheus, he is “civilized” but scarcely admirable. Belligerent and intolerant, he denies the divinity of Dionysius and threatens him with death and imprisonment, stupidly and arrogantly scorning the might of the gods. This is hubris. It was Agave who bore her son’s head home.

Maupassant versus Tolstoy: Prostitutes

Guy de Maupassant. Selected Short Stories. Late 1800s. Short fiction.

Prudishness has never been a characteristic of French literature, but Guy de Maupassant seems to have fallen in love with every prostitute he ever met—including, no doubt, the one who infected him with syphilis, which eventually drove him to madness and death. Half of his short stories, including the stylish little “Boule de Suif,” seem to feature prostitutes—and these always seem to be honest, hard-working women who are much cleverer and more decent than the snooty bourgeoisie and dull-witted peasants who serve as foils.

I shall not dispute Maupassant’s authority on the relative morality of prostitutes. I will content myself with invoking Leo Tolstoy, who, as I recall, rapped young Guy’s knuckles for establishing an improper moral relation between audience and subject. My readers doubtless know that Maupassant’s dynamic, unpretentious writing helped shape the modern short story genre, but when the only “good” people in his stories seem to be lovers, adulteresses, and prostitutes, I’m going to have raise a quizzical brow at his odd, sexually charged idealization of French working women. It says much about a (male) literary culture that found authenticity only in the bodies of exploited, female, urban proletarians, who could achieve a modicum of economic and psychological independence from the patriarchal bourgeois culture only by enacting their given, marginal role within that culture, in turn reifying its pretensions to moral superiority.

Just as importantly, Maupassant’s superior literary efforts are those that capture the ironic tragedy of human existence (“The Necklace”), explore emotional fanaticism (“Mother Savage”), or evoke a Poe-like atmosphere of horror and futility (“The Horla” and “The Hand”). Stories like these marvelously reveal the crisp and unadorned beauty of the author’s prose style.

In spite of—and because of—his fixation with prostitutes, Maupassant is well worth reading.

To read Tolstoy’s critique of Maupassant’s writing, visit this page on (where else) Wikipedia.

G K Chesterton: The Absurd Made Sacred

G. K. Chesterton. The Napoleon of Notting Hill. 1904. Tragicomic fantasy.

In 1904, G. K. Chesterton published the most underrated novel of the twentieth century—one that would inspire Neil Gaiman and Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins alike.

Concise but richly written, this magnificent novel abounds with holy fools, starting with Auberon Quinn, who never takes anything seriously. So when made king of a Victorian England set in 1984 (that’s right, Chesterton inspired George Orwell too), Auberon, as a joke, issues heraldic arms and colors to each London neighborhood. Only a short-sighted draper’s assistant, Adam Wayne, the High Provost of Notting Hill, takes this return to medieval-style urban patriotism seriously, and with awe-inspiring, fanatical charisma he rallies Notting Hillers to defend Pump Street against hostile takeover by Bayswater- and Kensington-based business interests.

Street battles with swords, horses, and halberds fill much of the novel, and the absurdity of the premise makes for delightful satirical overtones, but Chesterton is truly serious about societal regeneration through faith—not a staid Christian faith but a zealous faith in something other than ourselves—in the power of the spirit to overcome mere odds and remake the world. The Notting Hillers demonstrate this faith and this power, to the wonder and ultimate joy of cynics like Auberon, who comes to recognize Adam’s romantic and heroic mode of being as sane and natural, whereas “he himself, with his rationality and his detachment and his black frock-coat, he was the exception and the accident—a blot of black upon a world of crimson and gold.”

Both comic satire and epic tragedy, this novel possesses in abundance the gravely comic and surreally grand Chestertonian eloquence so suitable for conveying that writer’s wisdom.

Herman Melville’s Beautiful Pagan Christ

Herman Melville. Billy Budd, Sailor. c.1889. Allegorical nautical novella.

Melville’s posthumously published story of the sea partakes of the allegorical profundity and majestically crafted biblical prose of Moby-Dick. However, its brevity doubles its impact.

“All but feminine in purity,” the able seaman Billy Budd charms everyone on board with his Nordic beauty and innocence, for he is as flaxen-haired, courageous, and inarticulate as the Angles (or Angels, in Pope Gregory’s phrase) from whom he descends. Indeed, Melville likens this Christ-like, Myshkin-like innocent to both barbarian and child but also to a nude Adam sculpted ere the Fall, giving Billy a veiled homoerotic appeal.

Billy’s tragic flaw (or hamartia) is a tendency to stutter in passion. So when the ship’s Master-at-Arms John Claggart, a being of sociopathic and elemental evil who embodies Plato’s “depravity according to nature” axiom, accuses Billy of plotting mutiny, Billy can defend himself only by striking Claggart dead. As Captain Edward Vere of the HMS Bellipotent exclaims, “Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!”

A compassionate edition of Creon or Javert, Captain Vere nonetheless orders Billy hanged for striking an officer, despite the extenuating circumstances, citing the all too recent Nore Mutiny as showing the need for adherence to the rigid exigencies of the Law rather than to natural justice. Vere’s teleological suspension of ethics (a la Kierkegaard) generates a tragic confrontation between right and right, necessitating the crucifixion of this beautiful pagan Christ.

Inevitably, Vere’s own fate is intertwined with a French warship called the Athée—Atheist.

Henry James: Elegant. Daisy Miller: Cute!

Henry James. Daisy Miller. 1879. Trag-rom-ic novella: tragedy-romance-comedy.

This enchanting little narrative is elegantly crafted and boasts one of the most appealing heroines in literature, though its style does perhaps verge on the constipated.

Indeed, at first I found myself rebelliously comparing this novella to the writings of P. G. Wodehouse, who playfully aped James’s high-brow style and preoccupation with the aristocracy, and of Edith Wharton, who never attained the color and intimacy of James the Younger. Yes, James expresses a typically Anglo contempt for “dagoes,” sprinkles the narrative with pretentious French phrases and references to Byron and Cherbuliez (?); and gives us characters we tend to identify as Wodehousian goofs: the lounging gentleman, the charmingly artless young lady, and the blunt little boy who is the instrument of their meeting. Nevertheless, by its end I was willing to proclaim Daisy Miller a masterpiece.

My change of heart was due partly to James’s elegant craftsmanship and the ephemeral delicacy of his prose. Mostly, though, it was because I had fallen in love with Daisy Miller myself. She is so cute! So frank and sincere—so utterly charming! She teases and tantalizes the gentlemanly Mr. Winterbourne and shocks polite society (if it were so unmannerly as to allow itself to be shocked) with her very public goings-on with the suave Mr. Giovanelli. She is the perkiest little flirt in the world, and yet she is so innocent, so unaware of how unforgiving the world can be, and so heartbroken when she finally comes into this knowledge. The ending is inevitable.

Enduring the Soviet Gulags with Dignity

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. 1962.

This compelling autobiographical novella isn’t a  politically vociferous polemic against the Soviet Union or its cruel and inhumane gulag system. Rather, it’s a paean to the Russian spirit, which ice and hierarchy have imbued with an extraordinary power of endurance: the capacity to soldier on uncomplaining through every adversity.

In a manner foreign to the activist, neurotic West, Solzhenitsyn’s characters unite the stolid strength of the peasant with the astute self-possession of men forced to make their own ways in a world indifferent. Yet the troubles of the prisoners or zeks (somewhat moderated, of course) can be found in every society. Pointless and repetitive work, arbitrary authorities, and the struggle for survival can be found in the pencil-pusher’s office and the savage’s hut too. Since we can neither ameliorate our conditions nor escape from them, Solzhenitsyn bids us endure them without complaint or defiance. Seek strength in faith, exalt in every  ounce of bread, and find purpose even in the most Sisyphean tasks: “Thank God for the man who does his job and keeps his mouth shut!”

This stoic attitude, reminiscent of the wild animal who suffers in silence, may be a quintessentially Russian trait, though it can be found, too, among pessimistic Iberian campesinos.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a microcosm in a microcosm of a microcosm, yet with its unpretentious prose and marvelously detailed realism it elevates animal endurance to human dignity. In the process Solzhenitsyn creates a new kind of hero, an ordinary Russian worker who, unlike in the arrogant and anxious West, never has time to be alienated from himself.

Medea’s Revenge on Ancient Patriarchy

Euripides. Medea. 431 BCE. Ancient Greek tragedy.

I find it astonishing how contemporary this 2500-year-old tragedy feels. Rex Warner’s translation is free of those annoyingly anachronistic “thithers” and “thous” that so intimidate readers. The translation enables the play to reveal its native fast pace, economy, and feminism, trumping its twentieth-century heirs.

Eliminating the long-winded choral declamations that nearly ruined Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Euripides invented dialogue: forceful and purposeful conversations that drive plot and reveal character. Even more compelling is Euripides’ feminist theme, then new to the Western canon. Euripides appears to have been that rare man who understood and valued women and wrote them convincingly. His Medea isn’t some vicious bitch with snakes in her hair; she is a smart, intrepid, passionate woman who gave up everything for her thankless lover, Jason of the Argonauts, and now, spurned for a Corinthian princess, refuses to submit with womanly meekness. And how typical of male chauvinists for Jason to rationalize his betrayal and accuse her of overreacting!

Even when Medea kills her own children to deprive Jason of them, we always know who we are rooting for: the wronged woman, the raging victim of the patriarchy, the queenly avenger who, unlike most such victims, has the power and will to strike back. As for the purists who grumble that Euripides should have made Medea a Hellene rather than a non-Greek Pelasgian, they are missing a crucial point: Euripides knew his chauvinistic Greek audiences would never tolerate a Greek lady standing up for herself. And even then, the Athenians could barely bring themselves to give this fiery masterpiece third prize. Stranger than the gods are the ways of men!

Young Werther’s Tragicomic Sorrows

J. W. von Goethe. The Sorrows of Young Werther. 1774. Tragic Romanticism.

So I finally read Werther, which, as the literati know, is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s celebration—and implicit condemnation—of the emotive and overwrought Romantic aesthetic. The novella is decidedly autobiographical, for Goethe himself once fell in love with a married girl named Charlotte, who liked but refused him, and therefore Werther acts perhaps as authorial catharsis, allowing Goethe to explode his passions, kill off his tormented doppelganger, and settle down into a conservative dotage similar to dear old William Wordsworth’s.

Behold young Werther, a gentleman who despises society yet cannot tear himself away, recalling the masochistic attempts at extroverted normality by Dostoevsky’s neurotic narrator in Notes from the Underground. Behold young Werther, a sensitive gentleman given to emotional extremes, swinging wildly between anguish and ecstasy, perpetually self-pitying, totally self-centered, both pathetic and noble, and above all, absurd. He fails to sublimate his passions in art or nature, he fails to make his beloved reciprocate—the poor idiot can’t even kill himself properly! Worse, he fails to live—unlike Michelangelo’s Adam, he, in his puerile petulance, turns away when God extends his hand. Still, Werther is not a “horrid little monster,” as W. H. Auden sniffed; rather, he is a mock-up of Romanticism, and his fraught persona rang so many bells that he set all Europe pealing, akin to the way J. D. Salinger distilled the spirit of the twentieth-century teenager.

Like other works that defined their generations—The Road, Vanity Fair, etc.—Goethe’s cathartic literary outpouring falls short of transcendental greatness because its psyche is so specific to its age. Yet Werther‘s slender scope is also why it should be read. For its time, it was perfect.