How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (41 page)

But Hexter's attack on Shaw's credentials inevitably leads you to question Boswell's own credentials—the ones that actually matter, rather than the arcane fluencies that merely serve as rhetorical passementerie. For if you accept Hexter's argument that Shaw's discussion of late antiquity and the early Christian Church is handicapped by the fact that he was trained as a classicist rather than as a medievalist, then what do you do about Boswell himself—a medievalist who bases his radical claims on a lengthy discussion of classical culture, literature, sexual and social
institutions, and history? The extent of Boswell's methodological and interpretive errors in dealing with classical material makes it increasingly difficult, even for other gay scholars like myself, to dismiss doubts about his scholarship merely as instances of “institutional homophobia.”

Much more significant is the way that Hexter's backfired defense provides the basis for an even broader and unfortunately more devastating critique of Boswell's book. For if Shaw's alleged lack of expertise in medieval matters makes him unfit to judge Boswell's book, how on earth are Boswell's intended nonspecialist readers supposed to judge Boswell's book? The answer is that they can't, and the results have been depressingly predictable across the board.

Some examples. In an admiring 1994 “Talk of the Town” piece commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, a gay
New Yorker
editor staunchly defended Boswell, lavishly praising his “erudition,” “scholarly acumen,” and “linguistic dexterity.” (This last was followed by a suitably awed reference to Old Church Slavonic.) In a letter protesting a brief and critical review of the book that I contributed to the gay monthly
OUT
, a reader duly described himself as being “awed by the extensive erudition of the still youthful John Boswell.” But awe does not make for critical readers—something Boswell knew, and something borne out in my correspondent's closing remark. “Boswell's text admittedly is heavy with copious footnotes,” he went on, “[but] the author stated [that] readers can skip the technical footnotes included for others.” (But as we have seen, Boswell often hides the potential objections to his arguments in those very footnotes.) And then there's the Washington, D.C., gay couple who, inspired by
Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe
, were married using the
adelphopoiêsis
ceremony. You can only be thankful that Boswell chose not to write about human sacrifice.

You can't blame these people, of course. Between the rhetorical sleight of hand and the august-looking footnotes, how could they
not
be duped? As depressing as these uncritical endorsements of Boswell's thesis may be, they do serve to demonstrate the effectiveness of his approach. And they make it clear that, until the audience for the classics journal
Dioniso
outnumbers the audience for
Doonesbury
, tendentious attempts to mainstream complex and technical material in a way that produces such results must remain a questionable strategy.

Less easy to excuse than the deluded D.C. duo (who, for all we know, have unwittingly pledged to be well-behaved clan leaders, till death them do part), is the endorsement of Boswell's book by people who should in fact know better. There is little point getting flustered by heated opposition to and feverish denunciations of Boswell's book from right-wing political and religious groups, who clearly have a vested interest in resisting his thesis. But what does invite concern is the readiness with which some scholars and journalists of a more liberal temperament have knowingly suppressed discussion of the work's intellectual failings in order to promote what they see as its broader political agenda. Or, in the case of Boswell's publisher, to promote sales of a controversial book about a “hot” topic. (It's interesting to wonder why
Same-Sex Unions
wasn't brought out by an academic press: and whatever the answer to that question may be, it's not an appealing one.)

An example. To review Boswell's book,
The Nation
found a gay graduate student in comparative literature who readily acknowledged to me, when I contacted him about his review, that he is “not an expert at all in any of the fields that Boswell is.” What appears to have won him the assignment was, instead, his journalistic expertise in writing about “sexuality and cultural politics.” (Small wonder that his review gratefully acknowledges Boswell's inclusion of the Appendix of Translations: “general readers won't have to worry about brushing up on”—what else?—“their Old Church Slavonic.”) Yet even with this stacked critical deck,
The Nation
couldn't necessarily produce a winning hand for Boswell. “My review really didn't reflect how critical I was of the book,” the reviewer told me. But you'd never guess as much from the finished review; it's a rave.
The Nation
's respectful review reflects its writer's conviction that Boswell's book should be defended from the “slanted treatment” he felt it was receiving in the popular press. If abandoning your intellectual standards to advance a political agenda isn't slanted, it would be nice to know what is. But then, that's what
Same-Sex Unions
is all about.

 

In the era of the culture wars, the politicization of scholarship by both left and right is hardly news. But the failure thus far on the part of liberal and, especially, gay intellectuals to respond with an appropriately
vigorous and public skepticism to Boswell's questionable methods and tendentious conclusions is, I think, particularly distressing—not least because it leaves the liberals embarrassingly vulnerable. This silence is partly a matter of strategy—an interest in, say, promoting the work of once-silenced “marginal” voices such as those of openly gay intellectuals—but it is also a product of ideology: that is, a resistance to invoking certain standards of intellectual or aesthetic quality that is the legacy of a commitment to eradicate oppressive hierarchies and to demystify claims to authority.

It is one thing to acknowledge that we are all of us, scholars, critics, philosophers, implicated in the social, political, and historical contexts we inhabit; that realization has precipitated considerable soul-searching on the part of Boswell's fellow historians more than most. But it is entirely another matter to make this insight the basis for a wholesale abandonment of what one historian called the “noble dream”: a common standard of methodological and argumentative scrupulousness, if not actually some elusive “objectivity,” in historical, critical, and philological enquiry. Writing in 1934, Theodore Clarke Smith cautioned that

Although Smith was writing at a moment when egregious distortions of history for the purposes of “social control” were already being committed by both left and right, his chronological estimate was depressingly accurate. In their potential for wreaking far-ranging epistemological and methodological damage, the various fashionable “posts”—structuralism, modernism, whatever—have far exceeded anything Smith could have imagined, even in the era of Soviet jurisprudence or Nazi medicine.

This is precisely why the “noble dream” is even more indispensable for the left today than it is to right-wing intellectuals (who have successfully hijacked contemporary discussion of academic and aesthetic
standards). The overt politicization of science and scholarship in favor of a “bold social philosophy” has, as we know, always been a
totalitarian
project. Now more than ever, when much of what the left values is in danger, liberal thinkers have, if anything, an even greater investment in espousing the impartial forms and rigorous standards of logical and reasonable debate, rather than constructing jerry-built appeals to dubious authority in order to support some foregone ideological conclusion—or indeed merely to vent political frustrations. (“Conservative religious groups deserve to be riled,” one Boswell supporter wrote in response to my
OUT
review. “They have dominated Western culture and thought far too long.”)

All this is why Boswell's defenders are as troubling as his book. In slavishly championing an ostensibly liberal (because gay-friendly) agenda—and in suppressing potentially contrarian voices—they have come to resemble their own ideological enemy. You keep hoping someone on the left will notice this and say something; but so far, the silence on the party line has been deafening.

 

The list of gifted and prolific littérateurs who have been torn between the desire for seriousness and the desire to make it is a long one. Oscar Wilde is on it; as it happens, our Roman satirist, Martial, is on it, too. Indeed, the Latin poet's ill use at the hands of the author of
Same-Sex Unions
is not only representative of this particular book's shortcomings but stands, perhaps, as a symbol of the risks involved when Philology flirts with Fame. To the former, it always looks like a harmless enough fling; but the latter is a great seducer. That much, at least, we can safely glean from the classical past. On learning of Martial's death, a saddened friend summed up his career:
At non erunt aeterna quae scripsit: non erunt fortasse, ille tamen scripsit tamquam essent futura.
“You will say that his writings were not immortal,” Pliny wrote to Cornelius Priscus. “Perhaps they weren't. But he wrote them as if they would be.”

—Arion,
Fall 1995/Spring 1996

I

N
othing to do with Dionysos!” So went the proverbial Athenian complaint about tragedy. And no wonder: after all, the annual theatrical productions at Athens—with their brilliant costumes and special effects, the rich musical accompaniment and complex choreography, the poetically sophisticated and intellectually provocative libretti, the keenly watched competitions for playwrights—seemed to have very little indeed to do with the quaint rural shindig in honor of the wine god Dionysos from which, if we are to believe Aristotle, Greek theater evolved. For tragedy (as he asserts in the
Poetics
) got its humble start as a festive choral song called the dithyramb, sung in celebration of the god's birth; while comedy owed its origins to a genre that clearly had something to do with Dionysos's role as a fertility deity, as we may infer from its rather louche name (“phallic songs”).

Still, however far from its folksy holiday roots it may have strayed, Athenian drama in its heyday represented much more than an evening (or, more accurately, morning) of secular, private entertainment—the kind of experience we expect when we go to the theater. “Dionysos” was indeed present—nearly every extant work for the Athenian stage
returns obsessively to the subject of religion—as were a host of other issues crucial to the city and its self-image. These matters were explored with a combination of intellectual subtlety and theatrical verve made possible by the genre's natural affinity for the symbolic, abstract, and metaphorical over the naturalistic. Only in tragedy, where (for instance) women so often represent the domestic realm, and men the public, where a red carpet embodies a family's bloody past, and a trial lawyer is an Olympian deity, could a family melodrama involving bad career decisions, spousal abandonment, child abuse, and retributive homicide become, as it does in the
Oresteia
, an allegory for the establishment of justice, of orderly civic life, of civilized culture. And indeed, the grand religious and civic ceremonials that framed the performances—the opening libations to
Dêmokratia
, democracy personified, the patriotic parades, the reading of the names of patriotic citizens, the sacrifices on behalf of the city, even the visible presence of fifteen thousand other citizens in the Theater of Dionysos—underscored, in a fashion impossible to reproduce in today's theater, the sense that the plays being performed had much larger social, civic, ritual, and political resonances.

“Nothing to do with Dionysos” would, on the other hand, be a fair assessment of most modern-day stagings of tragedy. Of the vast number of works composed for production at the annual Dionysiac festival in Athens—the three great tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides wrote nearly three hundred between them, and there were many more poets writing over a period of a couple of centuries, all of them together producing a total of perhaps a thousand works in the fifth century alone—only thirty-two survive. Of those thirty-two, contemporary productions of tragedy have favored those that seem to be about recognizably contemporary emotions and dilemmas—subjects, in other words, that seem to be able to transcend the loss of the plays' original contexts and speak to some larger, “universal” truths about human nature…or, at least, to early-twenty-first-century truths. At least part of the contemporary admiration for (say) Euripides'
Bacchae
derives from the play's affinity with Freudian notions about repression and libido; certainly a great deal of our admiration for Sophocles'
Antigone
comes from the fact that it seems to be a sympathetic portrait of a hot-blooded young woman valiantly preserving her family against
encroachments by the cold and anonymous State—a modern (and modernist) dilemma if ever there was one.

How the Athenians would have viewed Antigone, and
Antigone
, is another matter; this is where context makes a difference. After all, they saw the play after also seeing the orphaned children of the war dead—and, perhaps more to the point, the tribute money from Athens's subject-allies—paraded around the theater. How, in that situation, the audience would have looked upon the willful girl's defiance of a man who is not only her uncle but also, as she herself acknowledges, the city's
stratêgos
, “general,” is anyone's guess. But it seems safe to say that without the formalities that accompanied the original performances, we have, at best, a partial sense of how the plays were understood; the evidence suggests, if anything, that their original resonances were very different from those that we associate with gripping drama. (It is entirely possible that, whereas we like courtrooms because they remind us of theaters, of “drama,” the notoriously litigious Athenians liked the theater because it reminded them of courtrooms.) Our discomfort with the idea of tragedy as essentially public, political theater is reflected, notoriously, in our embarrassment about what to do with the most distinctive feature of Greek drama, the chorus—that ever-present reminder on the Greek stage that the ostensibly personal decisions made by the individual characters are always made in the setting of, and always affect, the larger society.

Those who would stage Athenian drama today must, like Aeschylus's Agamemnon, make an unsavory choice that involves a terrible sacrifice. To strip away (as often happens) the inconvenient bits that don't speak to us today—the chorus, the masks, the angular gestures, the abstruse mythic allusions, the high poeticisms of the language—is essentially to misrepresent the genre; without those elements, the elements that make plots into allegories, the domestic into the political (and even the cosmic), tragedy is miniaturized. And yet to reproduce a Greek tragedy today would be a meaningless exercise in theatrical embalming. Even if it were possible to re-create the elements of the staging, it would be quite impossible to replicate the shared civic experience that was Athenian theater.

How, then, to proceed? Three stylistically very different productions of Greek tragedies that were staged in New York in the past few
months—of which I discuss two here, and the third in a subsequent essay—suggested, paradoxically, that the best way to honor the spirit of the ancient plays was to stray very far indeed from what the playwrights wrote.

 

All three of the canonical Athenian tragedians were represented onstage in November and December 2001; ironically, it was Euripides, the most formally daring and ideologically subversive of the three, who received the most banal and conventional treatment.

You can see where the temptation to treat this twenty-five-hundred-year-old author as a contemporary might come from. The youngest of the three great dramatists—he was born a decade after Sophocles and forty years after Aeschylus—Euripides has always seemed to be the most accessible to contemporary audiences. For the postwar generation of classicists, there has indeed always been something eerily familiar about the playwright's mordantly ironic tone, about his prescient interest in, and use of, female psychology in his plays, about his flirtation with the Derrida-like Sophists and their newfangled arguments about the nature of, and connection between, language and reality; something bracingly contemporary about his language, which eschews the archaic and hieratic grandiosity of his predecessors and approaches something more streamlined, more “modern.”

And indeed, as the Peloponnesian War ground on for thirty bitter years, during which Athens collapsed both politically and morally, that playwright increasingly rejected the traditional received forms of theater in favor of what looks to us like an almost postmodern array of theatrical modes and styles—pageant, melodrama, absurdist farce, romance, sci-fi fantasy—in order to expose the morally bankrupt behavior of his city, and the immorality of war itself.
Iphigenia at Aulis
was the last of the poet's so-called war plays—a group that includes, most famously,
Trojan Women
. (It is, indeed, the last of all his plays: composed during Euripides' final years of self-imposed exile in Macedon, it was produced posthumously, along with the
Bacchae
, following his death at
seventy-nine early in 406
B.C
.) In this final work, the poet returned to a mythic beginning: the pivotal moment in the story of the Trojan War when Agamemnon, the Greek commander in chief, decides to sacrifice his own daughter in order to win favorable winds for the expedition to Troy and (he thinks) everlasting glory.

Aristotle rather enigmatically calls Euripides the “most tragic” of the three great tragedians;
Iphigenia at Aulis
suggests why. You'd think that the brutal murder of a young girl by her own father would be enough to arouse pity and fear; Aeschylus, after all, narrates the sacrifice briefly but harrowingly in a chorus of
Agamemnon
(which achingly describes the gagged girl pleading with her eyes for mercy). But Euripides brilliantly ratchets up the emotional ante in his last play, creating a complex and convoluted plot that yields terrible poignancies. Here Agamemnon, becalmed with his fleet at Aulis, has written home to lure Iphigenia to Aulis with the false promise that she is to be married to the hero Achilles (who is ignorant of the ruse); tormented by guilt, he sends a second letter warning his wife to ignore the first and thereby to save their child. This second letter is intercepted, however, and so the clueless Clytemnestra and her daughter arrive, preparing for a wedding that—as Agamemnon knows but now, pressured by his fellow generals, can no longer reveal—will be a murder. (Now it is he who is “gagged.”) The ongoing tension in the play between the rite that Iphigenia and her excited mother expect to take place and the one that does in fact occur—the climax of the play is the narration of Iphigenia's bravery at the moment she is sacrificed—is one of the most wrenching that tragedy has to offer.

If the plot is contrived and artificial, then so too is the characterization. Euripides more than any other playwright had no qualms about sacrificing naturalistic verisimilitude to a larger dramatic point. In play after play, he introduces spectacular surprises and bizarre turnarounds in an almost absurdist attempt to provoke reexamination of our expectations of human nature, or divine goodwill, or fate (or indeed of the theater). One of the striking things about
Iphigenia at Aulis
is the way in which nearly every major character has a sudden
volte-face
: Agamemnon writes his second letter; his brother Menelaus at first denounces him for trying to save Iphigenia, only to return in the next scene, repentant and swearing fealty to his kin; Achilles furiously rejects the idea of the
false wedding—and then seems to fall in love with Iphigenia; Iphigenia herself at first resists her fate, only to embrace it moments later, volunteering for death. (“Second thoughts are somehow wiser,” the Nurse in Euripides'
Hippolytus
famously asserts, and that would certainly seem to be the case here.) Aristotle cited the heroine of this play as a particularly egregious example of “inconsistency”; but as you watch
Iphigenia at Aulis
, you wonder if the real point here is that consistency of thought and emotion is impossible during a war—that violence has a disintegrative effect on the very minds of those touched by it.

 

None of this—a feeling for the dire real-life circumstances that shadow the play; an awareness of Euripides' personality as a dramatist, or of the centrality of this particular moment in the myth as the ideal vehicle to investigate the nature of violence and our apparent inability to resist it; a sensitivity to apparently deliberate structural anomalies—was evident in the performances of this play by New York's Pearl Theatre Company. You'd never have guessed, from Shepard Sobel's blandly earnest production, that there was much difference between Euripides and Philip Barrie; it would certainly come as a surprise, after seeing his
Iphigenia
, that this play is one that the classicist Bernard Knox could cite as an example of tragedy's, and especially Euripides', penchant for creating characters who speak “more like marionettes than living, feeling human beings.”

Indeed all you got, in Sobel's production, was living, feeling men and women, as if what happened at Aulis was Lyme disease, or a bad dot-com investment, something awful that might well befall the nice people next door and that you vaguely hope won't happen to you. In high tragedy, complex abstractions and extreme emotion are conveyed by means of high stylization: the deeply poetic texts, the rich allusive vocabulary of myth, the ritualistic singing and dancing that resonates with shared religious and social values—the very artificiality, to which Knox alludes, that enhances rather than diminishes grand themes and emotions. Without the stylization, the naked texts seem embarrassingly deflated.

Sobel's failure to appreciate this key point was evident first of all in
his casting: the bearing, gestures, and diction of the actors suggested an unfortunately extended acquaintance with made-for-television miniseries. This wasn't always necessarily disastrous, at least during those moments when Euripides does get sentimental: the Pearl's Iphigenia nicely combined virginal fragility and bouncy girlishness, with the result that her first scene with her father (the horribly ironic “Aren't you happy to see me, Daddy?” scene) had some real pathos. But more often than not, the style grotesquely dishonored the play—and the genre. This was particularly true of the dismally suburban Clytemnestra, who conveyed absolutely no sense that the play in which she was appearing was a unique representation of the pivotal moment in her towering and tormented character's evolution—the great and terrible day that turns Agamemnon's conventional wife into the monster we recognize from the
Oresteia
. In this production, Clytemnestra's dire discovery of the real reason for Iphigenia's presence at Aulis had all the moral and emotional impact of a Long Island matron discovering a faux pas in the
placement
for her daughter's bat mitzvah reception.