Anagnorisis: Scenes and Themes of Recognition and Revelation
in Western Literature
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volume 204
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​favl
Anagnorisis: Scenes and Themes
of Recognition and Revelation
in Western Literature
By
Piero Boitani
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Francesco Primaticcio, Penelope and Odysseus, ca 1545. Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art.
WGA18409. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Boitani, Piero, author.
Title: Anagnorisis : scenes and themes of recognition and revelation in
western literature / by Piero Boitani.
Other titles: Riconoscere è un dio. English
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill Rodopi, [2021] | Series: Internationale
Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft,
0929-6999 ; vol. 204 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020056587 (print) | LCCN 2020056588 (ebook) |
ISBN 9789004453661 (hardback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004453678 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Literature–History and criticism. | Recognition in literature.
Classification: LCC PN56.R33 B6513 2021 (print) | LCC PN56.R33 (ebook) |
DDC 809/.9335–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056587
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issn 0929-​6 999
isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 5366-​1 (hardback)
isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 5367-​8 (e-​book)
Copyright 2021 by Piero Boitani. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi,
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To Emilia
∵
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Note on Texts, Translations, Bibliography, and Style
xiv
Introduction 1
1
Cinderella and the Greeks 1
2
Aristotle and the Philosophy of Anagnorisis 11
3
Re-​Cognition, Reading, and Reconnaissance 26
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
1
The Universe of Recognition 39
Reason
2
Electra and Hamlet
101
Towards Nothingness
3
Oedipus and Lear 143
Recognizing God
4
172
To Recognize Is a God
5
Helen, Magdalen, Hermione, Marina –​Menuchim 220
A Spark of Love
6
Medieval Recognitions
290
I know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
7
Dante’s Recognitions 318
8
re You Here?
A
Brunetto, Dante, and Eliot
360
Through Time and Space
9
Intertextual Recognition 387
viii Contents
10
To Conclude and Re-​Cognize
The Pain and Joy of Compassion
Index
433
415
Preface
This book has been half a lifetime in the making and has a history full of peripeties and recognitions like all the epics, comedies, romances and novels worthy of respect. I remember very well the exultation I felt when I discovered –​
I was in Cambridge, at the time –​this theme, which could be treated, with the
title of Anagnorisis, in a manner not unlike that which Erich Auerbach had
employed for the imitation of reality, Mimesis, in Western literature. That elation was accompanied by a sense of sudden revelation and feverish desire to
explore books, plays, operas, films. I also felt confident because I could rely on
extraordinary authorities. Anagnorisis had been theorized by none less than
Aristotle; the Fathers of the Church had discussed agnitio (the Latin word for
recognition, “agnition” in English usage up to the 18th century, often employed
in this book) in their commentaries on the Gospels; a host of Italian, French,
and English scholars had gone back to Aristotle’s Poetics from the Renaissance
onwards; at the beginning of the twentieth century wiedererkennen had
become a central idea in Sigmund Freud’s writings; and recognition finally
entered the horizon of great literary critics such as Northrop Frye, Umberto
Eco, and Frank Kermode.
I had all reasons to feel happy. I drafted an outline for the book I wanted to
write –​this, substantially –​and gave a course of eight lectures on the theme
in Cambridge. I mention this with some complacency because the reactions
these elicited were very encouraging, and I still remember, with reconnaissance, Muriel Bradbrook’s words and, in Norwich, those of W.G. Sebald. Much
more important was the reaction of my then young wife, who burst into tears
at the end of my lecture on the Odyssey (the embryo of c­ hapter 1 in the present volume). I worked relentlessly on the project for a year and the inaugural
course I gave at Sapienza, the University of Rome, when I got there in 1985, was
on recognition.
In the spring of that year, however, peripeteia and anagnorisis suddenly
took place together, as according to Aristotle it happens in the best tragic plots.
Through a friend I discovered that an Oxford scholar was working on this
theme, too. He was English, Oxonian, and a student of French literature, while
I was Italian, Cantabrigian, and a student of English literature. One could not
imagine a more stereotypical peripeteia of secular rivalries than this. I went to
Oxford to meet Terence Cave and we talked at length, with great fervour and
cordiality, of our respective projects, ‘feeling’, as he wrote afterwards, ‘a little
like reluctant twins’ –​the reluctant twins of so many recognitions in comedy
and romance. We decided, however, to proceed each on his own path, because
x Preface
our plans, although at times inevitably overlapping, were sufficiently different
to allow complementary treatment.
Terence won the competition with great momentum, publishing in 1988
with Oxford University Press his beautiful Recognitions. A Study in Poetics: a volume of five hundred pages, elegant, subtle, rich. Perhaps because of that book’s
publication, or more simply due to lack of maturity and preparation, I lost the
drive to complete mine. Not interest in the subject, on which I lectured all over
the world, but the desire to build an organic, coherent whole, a Book such as
I had imagined. As other passions urged, I began to disseminate (scatter and
disperse?) some chapters of Anagnorisis in other books both in English and in
Italian. Their traces are discernible here. I delved into topics Terence had not
treated, like the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, the Middle
Ages, Dante (but each of these involved long periods of research and meditation). In a word, I was buying time.
In the Nineties, recognitions were almost sunk by the passion for Ulysses,
which burst out with irresistible strength –​paradoxically, as the Odyssey is the
one tale in Western literature that contains more recognition scenes than any
other book (its plot, Aristotle says, is ‘complex’ precisely because ‘there are recognitions and characters everywhere’), and because it was from my work on
anagnorisis that the idea was born of studying the play of pre-​figurations (of
‘shadows’) and fulfilments which then inspired my first book on Ulysses.
The fire, however, was smouldering under the ashes. I could not really forget
anagnorisis, which was now an essential part of the way I looked at literature
and life. Nothing, in fact, fascinates us more than something which has to do
with knowledge –​with the process of acquiring knowledge such as presented
by literature: not with knowledge of natural phenomena as pursued by science,
but cognition of human beings who meet and recognize each other. Through
recognition, literature stages knowledge of, and in, the flesh, a wholly earthly,
but almost sacred, experience. As Euripides’ Helen says, in a line that is the
title of one of this book’s chapters, to recognize is a god.
The book i present here, partly constructed out of the ancient fragments,
is meant to be a complement to Terence Cave’s. I do not enter, except in the
first chapter and more fleetingly elsewhere, the field of poetics which he
explores so well. Likewise, I leave in the shade the writers of the great French
tradition, which Terence discusses with a competence and profundity I could
never attain. If he speaks of Goethe and Kleist, of Balzac and Dickens, of Henry
James and Joseph Conrad, I deliberately, although with some regret, avoid
them, choosing instead Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Dumas and Sartre, Pirandello
and T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann and Joyce. This is therefore the (no more reluctant) twin of Recognitions, but still, I trust, an original volume on recognition,
Preface
xi
one where I try to reach the heart of the matter, the existential and ontological
roots of anagnorisis. Of course, I should also underline that Terence and I do
not see eye to eye in every single aspect of our subject, the basic difference
being, as was already clear in the Recognition and the Modes of Knowledge volume (2013), that I see the Aristotelian codifications as having been a central
element of a complex plot framed as a problem of knowledge, while Cave states
that ‘plots are structured around the loss and recovery of knowledge’.
As I write of recognition, the feature which according to Aristotle makes a
plot ‘complex’, the chapters that follow present a complex, rather than linear,
structure. No “pure” method seemed to me apt to deal with the infinite variety
of agnitio: not the chronological one, because recognition appears immediately in all its forms from the very beginnings of literature; nor the typological
one, since it would necessarily be based on Aristotle and therefore would leave
out too many types; nor the generic one, as different literary genres do not
always employ distinctive recognitions; nor finally the thematic one, in that
stories based on the same theme or archetype do indeed treat recognition in
very different ways.
Thus, I have structured these chapters according to a series of mixed criteria, but each chapter is broadly organized on diachrony. Generally, the reader
will find in each chapter (with the exception of the one devoted to Dante) the
discussion of an ancient work of literature, followed by the analysis of a medieval and/​or modern one (the Dante chapter has a sequence in the following
one, which compares Dante’s recognitions with those of T.S. Eliot). There also
is a chapter on recognition scenes in the Middle Ages, which provides a link
between the ancient ones –​be they classical or Biblical –​and the modern ones.
Likewise, there will be a chapter (9), which will explore recognition in non-​
Western cultures and then the very peculiar kind of ‘intertextual’ recognition.
On the other hand, I thought it was necessary to have an Introduction where
I must discuss the various aspects of anagnorisis as treated by Aristotle, Freud,
and Ricœur.
The usefulness of this section will become evident to those who continue
further in their reading, because I often go back to those texts, and particularly to Aristotle’s Poetics. In Chapter 1 Ulysses represents the archetypal figure
and nostos –​return –​the thematic model, but the Odyssey is there, at the very
beginning, because it embodies the whole universe of recognition. The chapter
is then subdivided into two portions, because the defining thematic model can
be used in two different ways, which in turn strongly influence recognition.
In Chapter 2, the type of anagnorisis is, very much within Aristotle’s model,
that based on syllogismos –​reasoning –​and the scenes between Electra and
Orestes, from Aeschylus through Shakespeare all the way to Sartre illustrate
xii Preface
its development. Chapter 3 goes back to Aristotle’s type of recognition stemming ‘from the events themselves’, but, reflecting as it does on the two tragic
figures of Oedipus and Lear, it shows how Western literature moves from those
‘events’ towards absence, emptiness and nothingness even as it aspires to realize in action the Delphic maxim, Know thyself.
I move, then, to Biblical scenes with Chapter 4. To recognize God is not
exactly easy, but both the Hebrew and the Christian Bible show us that it is
perhaps possible, and those who rewrite Biblical texts, like Thomas Mann in
Joseph and his Brothers, or Joseph Roth in Job, know perfectly well what they
are attempting to do and what it entails. In Chapter 5 I return to classical antiquity to examine recognition in romances, from Euripides to Shakespeare and
finally to modern lyric poetry and the novel. Chapters 6–​8 are devoted to medieval recognition, Dante, and T.S. Eliot. Chapter 9 is almost entirely new: only
the first few pages were present in the book’s Italian version, Riconoscere è un
dio (Einaudi, 2014).1 I felt the need to explore my theme in non-​Western literature, and that of seeing how one can recognize through another text. In
the last chapter I present some conclusions, picking up and examining more
deeply –​re-​cognizing –​many of the scenes with which I have dealt before, but
placing new ones beside them. I discuss here a specific theme which I consider
central: that of the pain recognition often causes, but also that of the joy it can
inspire.
On the whole, I would like to suggest that the way anagnorisis is treated
in Western literature is profoundly influenced by Judaic-​Christian ideas of
God and his Son, about faith and signs (which are however partly anticipated
by pagan culture, and which in any case do not completely destroy ancient
representations). It is the absorption of Ancient and New Testament that
definitely transforms Oedipus’ recognition of himself as the culprit into self-​
recognition tout court, because through the recognition and confession of an
absolute God it forces human beings to bend in on themselves, to dive into
themselves like never before. The striking German formula for human knowledge of God in the Bible is still pregnant, since that knowledge always implies
Erkenntnis, Anerkenntnis, Bekenntnis and Erkenntlichkeit, that is to say, recognition, acknowledgement, confession, and gratitude.
1 The publication was followed by widespread debate which culminated with a Conference
in Louvain, Belgium, on 5–6 November 2017. A volume entitled Slow Reading and the Shock
of Recognition, ed. A.A. Robiglio, will be published later this year by the Cordoba University
Press, containing a first section, ‘Recognition in Aristotle and beyond: Celebrating Piero
Boitani’s 70th Birthday’, with essays by F. Meier, R. Saarinen, C. Lonergan, O. Joyce Coughlan,
is prefaced by my own narration, ‘The Best Kind of Recognition’, which shows the role played
by anagnorisis in my life. See also O. Guerrier, ‘The avatars and vicissitudes of anagnorisis
from the 1960s to the present’, Reconnaissance littéraires (2020) 21–33.
Acknowledgments
Having worked on this book for over thirty years I felt it should be dedicated to
one of the very few people who were the first to listen to my inaugural course on
anagnorisis at Rome Sapienza in 1985–​86. There are, however, quite a number of
persons to thank for suggestions, corrections, additions. My graduate students
at Berkeley, Notre Dame, and Toronto come first to mind, followed by larger
audiences all over Italy and the world. But individuals have been perhaps more
important. I shall mention Jill Mann, John Kerrigan, Patrick Boyde, Jonathan
Steinberg, and above all Peter Dronke in Cambridge; Cormac O’Cuilleanain,
Corinna Salvadori Lonergan, and John Scattergood in Dublin; the late André
Crépin in Paris; my German friends Jörg Fichte, Hans-​Jürgen Diller, Friedhelm
Marx, and the late Willi Erzgräber, Dieter Mehl, and Karl-​Heinz Göller, who
have helped me shape some of my ideas. Anita Weston read earlier drafts of
these chapters and made many suggestions for improvement. Irene Montori
and Marina Peri have helped with proofs and Index. Imponderable as they
ultimately are, my greatest debts are to Michael P. Gallagher, Frank Kermode,
Robert Alter, Morton Bloomfield, and Harold Fisch. I do not think I could have
even conceived a project such as this without the encouragement and the
phronesis of my best Roman friend, Francesco Calvo.
Piero Boitani Rome, October 2020
newgenprepdf
Note on Texts, Translations, Bibliography, and Style
The provenance of texts and translations used in this volume is signaled in
the footnotes, but the Hebrew Bible is Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, 4te
verbesserte Auflage, Stuttgart, Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1990; the Greek
Septuaginta, ed. A. Rahlfs and R. Hanhart, editio altera, Stuttgart, Deutsche
Bibelgesellschaft, 2006; the Latin (Vulgate) Bible is that edited by A. Colunga
and L. Turrado for the Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, Madrid, 2005 (1955);
the English Bible is the Authorized King James Version, Oxford and New York,
Oxford University Press, 1997, and often Robert Alter’s magnificent translation
with commentary, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols., New York and London, Norton,
2019; the German Bible the Lutherbibel of the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft,
Stuttgart, 2016. The New Testament (Greek) original is quoted from Novum
Testamentum Graece et Latine, ed. E. and E. Nestle, rev. B. and K. Aland and
others (‘Nestle-​Aland’), Stuttgart, Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994. Aristotle’s
Poetics is generally quoted from the 1995 Loeb edition by S. Halliwell, but many
have been consulted. The two letters ‘dk’ accompanied by a number indicate
a fragment in the classic edition of the Vorsokratiker by H. Diels and W. Kranz,
Zürich, Weidmann, 2004 (1951), translated into English by K. Freeman, Ancilla
to the Pre-​Socratic Philosophers, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press,
1983 (1948). Editions of Greek and Latin classics not specified in the notes are
of the texts in the Loeb series. Likewise, editions of Italian standard classics
not indicated in the notes are those of the Mondadori Meridiani. For Dante’s
Divine Comedy I have used A.M. Chiavacci Leonardi’s edition with commentary, 3 vols., Milan, Mondadori, 1991–​1997.
Each chapter, or major section of chapter, presents a list of the texts discussed there and a substantial critical bibliography, with suggestions for further reading.
Finally, the style used in Anagnorisis is basically the Oxford and Cambridge
one with very few variations. Thus, single inverted commas are employed for
quotations, double inverted commas for quotations within quotations or for
authorial emphasis, punctuation always follows the quotation marks. Author,
title, place, publisher and date are separated by commas; an exponential number following a date indicates an edition’s: thus, 19852 stands for ‘second edition,
1985’. The style for articles in periodicals follows standard international usage.
Introduction
1
Cinderella and the Greeks
The story of Cinderella is one of the best known in the world. In the form
edited by the Grimm brothers in their famous collection of Fairy Tales, it is
entitled Aschenputtel, because Cinderella, after slaving away all day, is forced
by her evil stepmother and stepsisters to lie by the hearth amongst the ashes.
In spite of them, Cinderella does attend the feast in the king’s palace together
with all the maidens of the kingdom from whom the prince will choose his
bride. She sits under a hazel-​tree, and cries out ‘shake, shake, hazel-​tree,/​Gold
and silver over me!’, and her friend the bird brings her a marvellous dress and
beautiful slippers. Cinderella goes to the palace (where her stepmother and
sisters do not recognize her); the prince dances with her all day until night
comes, then waits to escort her home. But for two days Cinderella escapes
him, hiding in the pigeon-​house and in the pear-​tree by her house and quickly
getting rid of her dress and slippers and letting herself be found in the ashes.
Her father suspects that the unknown maiden loved by the prince may be his
daughter. But on the third night, in trying to flee from the prince, Cinderella
loses her left golden slipper upon the stairs. With this ‘proof’ in his hand and
knowing that the maiden lives in that particular house, the prince comes to
look for her. Whoever can wear that slipper shall be his bride. The two sisters
force their feet into it but the blood that flows from their feet betrays them.
Finally, Cinderella is allowed to try the ‘Pantoffel’. She washes her hands and
face, curtsies, takes her clumsy shoe off her left foot and puts on the golden
slipper, which fits her as if it had been made for her. Then she stands up, the
prince looks at her face and recognizes her (‘erkannte’) as the beautiful girl
who had danced with him. He exclaims ‘This is the right bride’, puts her on his
horse and rides away with her.1
In this story the moment in which the prince recognizes Cinderella, and the
means by which he “proves” her identity are obviously crucial. Without the
recognition the plot would have no denouement, or as Aristotle would say, no
lysis. Or at least it would not have the “right” solution, the one we expect and
wish for. The prince might have taken one of the stepsisters. Indeed he does
ride away first with the one and then with the other, and it is only when the
1 The text is Grimms Märchen: Text und Kommentar, ed. H. Rölleke, Frankfurt am Main,
Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 20072; the English translation is the Fairy Tales, London, The
Scolar Press, 1977.
© Piero Boitani, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004453678_002
2 Introduction
two doves (which sit by the hazel-​tree near the grave of Cinderella’s mother)
sing to him to look at the blood gushing out of the shoe that he realizes they
are the wrong ladies. Or he might have gone away with no bride at all: which is
what happens the first two times, when Cinderella disappears into the pigeon-​
house and the pear-​tree: this is most likely what a modern short story writer
would have ended his tale with. The “right” recognition is, then, the key to this
folktale, and the “proof” is crucial to the “rightness” of the recognition.
When the elder sister tries on the slipper, she finds that her toe is too big for
it. ‘Never mind’, says her mother, ‘cut it off. When you are queen you will not care
about toes, you will not want to go on foot’. When the second sister puts the shoe
on, her heel is too large, but her mother squeezes it in. The slipper must find a foot
that matches it perfectly. The “proof”, or, as Aristotle would call it, the semeion,
the ‘sign’, must be convincing. In the absence of finger-​prints, a shoe (not a mass-​
produced say, size 4 shoe which fits the same-​sized foot all over the world, but one
made by hand and for the foot of a particular person) –​in this case miraculously
supplied by a bird and hence, we surmise, created expressly and to perfection for
Cinderella –​will be fairly conclusive evidence, especially if it be made of gold,
which cannot be easily or quickly remoulded to fit someone else. Indeed, the
‘Pantoffeln’, which on the first day are ‘of spangled silk’, become ‘ganz golden’ on
the third. And if this, which could also mean ‘all embroidered with gold’, is not
enough, Charles Perrault, in an earlier version of the tale, and Walt Disney who
follows him, supply us with a shoe made of glass.2
We shall soon see how feet and footprints are important for recognition
scenes and for discussions about them in classical Greece. Later in this book
we will find a French shoemaker of the sixteenth century maintain that a
man who returned to his village after many years is not the same one who left
because the size of his foot is different. And we will also see how, in spite of
this, the man was recognized by his wife as her husband. We will even see how
a twentieth-​century Italian lady persists in believing that a man who has lost
his memory and reappears after the Great War is her husband even though his
fingerprints prove that he is another person.
In short, the Cinderella story exhibits a pretty strong faith in the value of
signs, but this faith, essential to this kind of recognition and hence to the plot of
such a story, may change. A sign can be misinterpreted, manipulated, changed
beyond –​the wordplay tells us much –​recognition. Yet the golden or glass
slipper is not the only point about this recognition scene. Before trying it on,
dirty Cinderella, covered with ashes, washes her hands and face and curtsies
2 ‘Verre’ (glass) or ‘vair’ (fur) in Charles Perrault, Les Contes des fées, Paris, Bonnot, 1972.
Introduction
3
before the prince. She no longer is Aschenputtel, Cendrillon, Cenerentola, but
someone with a civilized appearance and civilized manners, if not the beautiful maid she was at the ball. The slipper is the sign that triggers off the recognition. In a comedy, a tragedy, an epic or a novel such as those I will examine
later in this book, the actual recognition scene will be longer, more detailed,
full of words, gestures, silence and various effects. But even here, the simple
movement of Cinderella’s body in rising, and the prince’s gaze, have a particular effect on the reader –​this is the mystery and miracle of recognition that
I shall explore throughout the present work.
In Cinderella’s story the recognition brings about happiness, the fulfilment
of the prince’s love (and, in some versions, the punishment of the sisters).
The consequence of recognition will be another theme of these chapters, for
indeed one cannot separate a scene from its function and its meaning in a
story, especially when in a narrative or a play recognition becomes, as is often
the case, a theme. There are traces of this thematic treatment of recognition
even in the Grimm brothers’ version of the tale. When Cinderella goes to the
ball the first time, her stepmother and sisters do not recognize (‘kannten’ –​
knew) her and think she must be the daughter of a foreign king, ‘so beautiful
did she look in her golden dress’. They do not even think of Cinderella, says the
text, which specifies that in their minds Aschenputtel is at home, sitting in the
dirt sorting lentils out of the ash. Later, when Cinderella disappears into the
pear-​tree, her father has a first suspicion, ‘Can it be Cinderella?’, and orders the
tree to be felled.
An author would make much of these hints. But even here it is clear that the
non-​recognition of Cinderella by her stepmother and sisters is both a question
of her physical appearance, her disguise, and of their mental blotting out of
Aschenputtel. For them, the beautiful girl cannot be the maiden they abuse
and reduce to non-​existence, to ‘ash’. On the contrary, her father has a glimpse
of the truth, even though he has not seen her in the splendid dress and only
knows that someone has disappeared into the tree. In fact, we have here one
of those mysteries that characterize the recognition theme. Cinderella’s father
has, in this version, a very small role to play at this stage of the story. Earlier on,
he was shown as forgetful of his but recently dead wife, uncaring and dry as a
man who pays no attention to his daughter. When he goes to the fair, he brings
his two stepdaughters pearls, diamonds and fine clothes –​to Cinderella only
the sprig she had asked for (this she subsequently plants by her mother’s grave,
and it grows until it becomes the tree where Cinderella’s bird-​friend lives).
Now, suddenly, Aschenputtel’s father reappears and thinks for a moment that
the girl of whom the prince is talking to him and who has hidden in the pear-​
tree in his garden might be Cinderella.
4 Introduction
We should ask ourselves what this means. Does it indicate that deep down
the father is aware of his daughter –​a form of unconscious recognition? That
would be, as we shall see, a Freudian kind of recognition. Perhaps, instead, he
is reasoning, in a process Aristotle would call syllogismos. The last time they
found Cinderella in the house after the unknown girl disappeared next to it, so
it is possible that this might be her. Or else the story is pointing out the mystery,
playing on the theme of recognition and non-​recognition, alerting the reader
or the listener, by this sudden intrusion, that this is one of the central problems
of the tale.
We cannot forget that Cinderella escapes from the prince thrice, disappears, changes, is found, and is not recognized by the man with whom she
has danced all evening. This may make us speculate on various possibilities.
1 –​The prince is stupid; he does not recognize her until he has the proof and
she washes her face. 2 –​He cannot recognize her because he is conditioned
by his image of her after the ball, and, deep down, because he, a prince, cannot even think that he has been dancing all night with a poor servant, an
ash-​girl. 3 –​Cinderella’s disguising ability is extraordinary: she can change
her appearance –​into a foreign princess or a chimney-​sweep –​unbelievably
quickly (and all her movements in this phase of the story suggest a protean
rapidity). 4 –​Perhaps Cinderella can really be both: the daughter of a rich
man forced into semi-​slavery, she has within herself the potential to be a
king’s daughter, which is brought to actualization by the bird, the inhabitant
of the tree planted by her in memory of her mother, that is, symbolically, by
her own memory, her piety and virtue.
∵
These, and other, considerations can be made. The point to be stressed, however, is that all of them revolve around the question of recognition, non-​recognition, misrecognition (méconnaissance), and identity. Why, then, is recognition so important? As an element of plot, it is present in dozens of stories.
And in his famous work on the morphology of the folktale, Vladimir Propp
catalogues it as item No. 23 (Q) among the functions of characters.3 Propp,
however, was not the first to notice the importance of recognition in the plot
of a story. The first to do so, as far as we know, were the people who, first in
3 V. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, Engl. trans., Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press,
1968. See also Stith Thompson, The Folktale, New York, Dryden Press, 1951, H0-​H199.
Introduction
5
European culture, speculated about the meaning, the value and the mechanism of literature –​the Greeks.
Their word for recognition was anagnorisis.4 This is an abstract term composed of two parts, the prefix ana and the noun gnorisis, the latter linked to
verbs such as gnorizo (‘to make known’, but above all ‘to gain knowledge of’, ‘to
become acquainted with’, ‘to discover’) and ultimately to gignosko (‘to know’,
but in the sense of the French connaitre, ‘to come to know’ or ‘learn’): the process of knowing as opposed to given knowledge, French savoir or German wissen. In Latin, the opposition is between cognoscere and scire, between cognitio
and scientia. Gnorisis would, then, roughly correspond to the English cognition.
The prefix ana has the primary meaning of ‘up, from bottom to top’, with
the sense, then, of motion upwards. It also means, however, ‘up and down’ and
hence, especially in a temporal sense, ‘throughout’, and it is from this notion
that comes that of repetition and improvement which ana often brings to
compound words together with that of increase or strengthening. Thus anakrino (krino meaning ‘to separate’, ‘to distinguish’ and hence ‘to judge’) means
‘to examine closely’, while anabioo (bioo = to live) means ‘to come to life again’,
‘to relive’.
Anagnorisis indicates, then, at least three processes connected with knowing –​a coming up, a sur-​facing of knowledge; a strengthening of knowledge;
and a repetition of knowledge, re-​cognition. Latin employs a word with more
limited semantic possibilities, agnitio (from ad-​gnosco, in which the prefix fundamentally means ‘towards’, ‘near to’), but which is the technical term for recognition in a play or a story. In English, the word agnition and the verb to agnize
disappeared from current usage after the eighteenth century (but I will use
both throughout), and of all modern European languages only Italian has kept
agnizione, together with riconoscimento, as the common equivalent of anagnorisis. French, English and Spanish all prefer words in which the prefix indicates
reiteration: re-​connaissance, re-​cognition, the knowing of something already
known. In French the word reconnaissance also means ‘gratitude’, whereas
Italian keeps riconoscimento and riconoscenza separate.
German is perhaps more subtle: it has two verbs which must be both translated as ‘recognize’ but between which there is a clear distinction –​erkennen
and wiedererkennen. In these the root kennen (to know) is strengthened by the
inseparable prefix ‘er’ which basically means ‘out’, ‘out of’, but also implies a
raising up, and which also indicates the achievement of an end or the completion of an action. Erkennung is, thus, the closest modern European equivalent
4 Which I will italicize in this introduction only as a term new to the reader.
6 Introduction
of anagnorisis. It is cognate to, but profoundly different in meaning from
Erkenntniss –​ knowledge tout court. Yet the presence in German of wiedererkennen and Wiedererkennung is also significant. Wieder is an iterative prefix,
the equivalent of the French and English re (in a sense one could translate
Wiedererkennung as re-​recognition), and it is employed to make clear that the
knowledge one acquires of somebody or something in wiedererkennen is a re-​
discovery of something already known.
These semantic distinctions are not the product of mere philological casuistry. They mirror profound literary and philosophical –​imaginary and mental –​conceptions. For exactly what does it mean that the prince recognizes
Cinderella? He danced with a beautiful girl, dressed in splendid clothes, but is
now faced by a poor servant covered with ash. He knew the girl who looked like
a foreign princess, he must now learn that Ashputtel is the same person. He
has to both know and recognize the maiden who has washed her face and tried
on the slipper. Where is the distinction between erkennen and wiedererkennen,
and what exactly does ‘knowing’ imply?
∵
The ancient Greeks provided a few answers to the questions I have just asked
about Cinderella. The word anagnorisis itself was born in all probability in the
fifth century B.C.E., together with the other terms ending in is, like mimesis,
anamnesis and the like, with the birth, that is, of abstract, theoretical, philosophical and technical thinking, when the motto of the Delphic oracle, gnothi
seauton, know thyself, still means ‘man, know that you are just a man, not a god’,
but it also starts meaning, with Socrates, ‘know yourself, explore who you are’.
Anagnorisis is absent in Homer and Hesiod, whereas the verb, anagignosko,
is used in the Odyssey. As an abstract term, it must have been coined by people who meditated on Homer’s anagignosko, during that long process which
Bruno Snell called the ‘discovery of the mind’ (‘Entdeckung des Geistes’),5 perhaps somewhere between Heraclitus, who proclaims in one of his fragments,
edizesamen emeouton (‘I searched out myself’, or ‘I tried to decipher myself’),
and Socrates and his pupil, Plato.6
5 In English, The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature, New York, Dover,
1982 (1953).
6 Heraclitus, fr. 246 (= 101 dk), in The Presocratic Philosophers, ed. G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven,
M. Schofield, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 19832. The following books offer
decisive contributions to the discussion on aesthetics and poetics in archaic and classical Greece: A. Ford, The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical
Introduction
7
It might even be that, as so much in early Greek philosophy, the concept of,
and the word for anagnorisis are linked to the beginning of medical science, the
most important practical end of which consists in recognizing the symptoms
of a particular disease. An interesting passage in the Corpus Hippocraticum
(the collection of treatises attributed to Hippocrates, the most famous of fifth-​
century Greek physicians, but by no means all composed by him) discusses the
causes of epilepsy and maintains that these lie in the action of ‘air’.7 According
to the author, nothing in the human body is more important for intelligence
(phronesis) than blood. ‘So long as the blood remains in its normal condition,
intelligence too remains normal; but when the blood alters, the intelligence
also changes’, as, in different degrees, happens when one sleeps or is drunk.
When, in an attack of epilepsy, air is mixed with blood, this stops flowing and
intelligence is irreparably affected.
In this passage, one sentence immediately attracts our attention, because it
establishes a direct connection between blood and intelligence and between
this and ‘habit’. ‘So if all the blood experiences a thorough disturbance, the
intelligence is thoroughly destroyed. For learnings and recognitions are matters of habit (ethismata)’.8 The words for ‘learnings’ and ‘recognitions’ are
respectively mathemata and anagnorismata. The former originally means ‘that
which is learnt, known’; the usual meaning of the latter is ‘tokens of recognition’. But mathemata also means ‘knowledge’, ‘learning’ (and especially the
Greece, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2002; G.M. Ledbetter, Poetics before Plato,
Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2003; J.I. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in
Ancient Greece, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010; S. Halliwell, Between Ecstasy
and Truth: Interpretations of Greek Poetics from Homer to Longinus, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2011; A.-​E. Peponi, Frontiers of Pleasure: Models of Aesthetic Response in Archaic and
Classical Greek Thought, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012; M. Heath, Ancient Philosophical
Poetics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013. The original texts, with commentary,
were conveniently collected by G. Lanata in Poetica Pre-​Platonica: Testimonianze e Frammenti,
Florence, La Nuova Italia, 1963. A very different view of the beginning of Greek thought is
held by W. Burkert in many of his books, including Greek Religion, Cambridge MA, Harvard
University Press, 1987; P. Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy Mystery and Magic. Empedocles and
Pythagorean Tradition, Oxford, Clarendon, 1995; L. Gemelli, ‘Einführung’ in Die Vorsokratiker,
ed L.Gemelli, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2001, pp. 373–​465; L. Gemelli, ‘Indovini, magoi e meteorologoi. Interazioni e definizioni nell’ultimo quarto del V secolo a.C.’, in La costruzione del discorso filosofico nell’età dei Presocratici, ed. Michela Maria Sassi, Pisa, Edizioni della Normale,
2006, pp. 203–​235; L. Gemelli, ‘East and West’, in Ancient Philosophy. Textual Paths and
Historical Explorations, ed. L. Perilli and D.P. Taormina, Abingdon-​New York, Routledge, 2018,
pp. 1–​40.
7 Hippocrates, Peri Physon (Breaths), xiv: Hippocrates, vol. ii, pp. 248–​251, trans. W.H.S. Jones,
Cambridge MA and London, Harvard University Press-​W. Heineman, Loeb, 1979 (1923).
8 Ibid., p. 251.
8 Introduction
mathematical sciences), and by affinity an abstract meaning must be attached
to anagnorismata, too.
What is interesting in this passage is the near equation of phronesis with
savoir and recognize by way of ‘habit’. We are being told that we lose our intelligence if we lose our habits, and that these are ‘knowing’ and ‘recognition’.
There is something materialistic in this formulation, something typical of a
person who approaches the problem of phronesis (loosely, thought) from a
physician’s point of view. But what is striking is that this writer should mention
recognition together with knowledge or learning as the two foremost habits
of phronesis. For the author of the Peri Physon to recognize is essential to the
functioning of our brain.
∵
We have no way of establishing with certainty when this treatise was composed. It is almost certainly not by Hippocrates himself, though the doctrine of
air as the cause of diseases is attested as having been propounded by him. The
honour of having used the word anagnorisis for the first time must, then, be
accorded to Plato, Socrates’ disciple and Aristotle’s teacher, and in many ways
the father of Western thought. Plato puts the word into Socrates’ mouth in the
Theaetetus, a dialogue concerned with the nature of knowledge (episteme) and
dealing with three main theories about it, each in turn put forward and then
rejected –​those of knowledge as perception, true opinion or judgement, and
true judgement with an ‘account’ or ‘explanation’. After having proved that
knowledge does not lie in sense-​perception, Socrates asks Theaetetus to offer
another definition of episteme, one that will take into account the fact that
the object of this research has emerged as ‘what the mind (psykhe) is doing
when it is busying itself, by itself, about the things that are’ (187 a). Theaetetus
replies that this would coincide with ‘making judgments’ (doxazein) and proposes that this be taken as a definition for episteme, provided the adjective
‘true’ is added to qualify doxa, because ‘false judgment’ (pseudes doxa) also
exists.
Socrates is quick to seize on Theaetetus’ pronouncement, and starts inquiring how false judgment might be possible. The conclusion he comes to is that
false judgement cannot be accounted for unless one considers the action of
memory in the process of knowledge. At one point, Theaetetus tells Socrates
that sometimes he, who is acquainted with Socrates, imagines that one whom
he does not know and sees from afar is the Socrates he knows (191b). This is certainly possible, replies Socrates, and there must be a mechanism that explains
this sort of phenomenon. He embarks, then, on a new search, suggesting a new
Introduction
9
approach. The famous image of the wax block and the concept of memory are
introduced here:
Well, then, let me ask you to suppose, for the sake of argument, that there
is an imprint-​receiving piece of wax in our minds: bigger in one, smaller
in others; of cleaner wax in some, of dirtier in others; of harder wax in
some, of softer in others, but in some made of wax of a proper consistency […] And let’s say it is the gift of Memory, the mother of the Muses,
and that if there is anything we want to remember, among the things we
see, hear, or ourselves conceive, we hold it under the perceptions and
conceptions and imprint them on it, as if we were taking the impressions
of signet rings. Whatever is imprinted, we remember and know, as long
as its image is present; but whatever is smudged out or proves unable to
be imprinted, we have forgotten and don’t know.9
Let me try to adapt Socrates’ argument to the Cinderella story. The prince,
Socrates would say (192 d), knows Cinderella and has a memory in his mind of
what she is like, and the same with the stepsisters. At certain times, say at the
ball, the prince sees or touches or hears or otherwise perceives them. At other
times, say after the ball, the prince has no perception of either Cinderella or
the stepsisters, but remembers them all and has them in his mind. Now, if the
prince knows Cinderella and the sisters, but sees neither and has no present
perception of them, he can never think in his own mind that Cinderella is one
of the sisters. If he knows Cinderella but not one of the others, he could never
think that the one he knows is the other he does not know. Finally, if the prince
neither knows nor perceives either Cinderella or the sisters, he cannot think
that one unknown person is another unknown person (193 b). A mistake can,
then, only occur in the following manner –​and here we go back to Plato, where
Socrates, talking to Theaetetus, continues thus:
I know you and Theodorus and have imprints (semeia) of the two of you
on that piece of wax, like those of signet rings. I see you both, some way
off and not properly, and I am eager to assign the imprint which belongs
to each, and to insert and fit the seeing into its own trace (ikhnos), so that
recognition may take place (hina genetai anagnorisis). But, missing that
aim, and making a transposition, I attach the seeing of each one to the
9 Plato, Theaetetus, 191c-​d, trans. J. McDowell, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973, p. 78. The original text is in Plato, Theaetetus and Sophist, ed. C. Rowe, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2015.
10 Introduction
imprint which belongs to the other, like people who put their shoes on
the wrong feet; or alternatively my going wrong is because the same sort
of thing happens to me as happens to sight in mirrors, when it flows in
such a way as to transpose left and right. It’s then that different-​judging
and the making of false judgements occur (193 b-​c).
Here, finally, we have the word anagnorisis inserted in an extremely interesting context –​one in which the nature of knowledge and of méconnaissance
are discussed, and where the image of feet and shoes that we have found in
the Cinderella story recurs; one, finally, in which the semeion (the sign, the
‘imprint’) is explicitly compared to the ikhnos, the foot-​trace or foot-​print, with
an allusion to one of the most famous and widely discussed recognition scenes
of classical Greece, that in which Electra, in Aeschylus’ Choephori, begins to
suspect the arrival of her brother, Orestes, by fitting her foot into the footprint
he has left next to Agamemnon’s tomb.
The first part of the sentence describes the process of recognition, which
consists in assigning the proper memory-​semeion to the proper visual image, in
fitting semeion and opsis –​imprint and seeing. The second part of the sentence
describes the process of méconnaissance, that of applying the opsis to the
wrong semeion. In the first case, the prince recognizes Cinderella (and indeed
fits her foot into the slipper, if not into the ikhnos). In the second, he takes one
of the stepsisters (and indeed puts the wrong foot into the right shoe). Nor
should we neglect the image of the mirror, which will recur in many of the
recognition stories we shall examine later in this book.
This first part of the sentence has an extraordinary finality, summed up
by the hina, the ‘so that’, ‘in order that’, which introduces its last clause. And
the final purpose of the operation described there is recognition: hina genetai
anagnorisis. Plato is discussing the nature of knowledge. That finality suggests
that the object of this search might be found somewhere in the direction of re-​
cognition –​in particular if one thinks that the opposite of anagnorisis is seen
as heterodoxia or pseudes doxa, ‘different-​judging’ or ‘false judgment’. The key
to this finality lies in the concept of memory, Mnemosyne, not by chance the
mother of those Muses whose special pupils are the poets and whose ultimate
gift to mankind is the poetry that will concern me throughout this book. But
memory occupies a very special place in Plato’s theory of knowledge. For, as
he shows in the Meno, zetein and manthanein –​to search and to learn, in short
connaitre –​ are anamnesis, that is, reminiscence or recollection of something
which the soul, before its incarnation, had already learnt and known. There
is a deep affinity between anamnesis and anagnorisis, both in their grammatical appearance and in the two processes which they sum up and which
Introduction
11
have their centres in memory. If one were to generalize, one could say that for
Plato all knowledge is anagnorisis, re-​cognition, wieder-​erkennen, because it is
anamnesis.10
The philosophical implication of all this should only be hinted at in a book
which purposes to deal with literature and should not prevent us from making a more strictly literary consideration, namely one regarding the naturalness with which Plato seems to use the word anagnorisis in the Theaetetus. An
extremely attentive, passionate reader of poetry, and an experienced spectator
of tragedy (though ultimately a severe judge of both), Plato employs a term
which appears at once normal and technical, as if expecting the audience to
understand without difficulty both the word and the allusion to the Choephori.
A generation earlier, a soldier and an historian like Thucydides, in describing,
with the ability of a painter, a battle in the moonlight between Athenians and
Syracusans (of the year 413 B.C.E., when Plato was about fifteen years old), says
that the fighters could see each other’s bodies before their eyes, but could not
be sure of recognizing friends and enemies. The word he uses is not anagnorisis, but gnosis.11 Plato, then, launched the concept of anagnorisis onto the
worlds of philosophy and literature, for the first time in history offering an
explanation of the mystery in the Cinderella story.
2
Aristotle and the Philosophy of Anagnorisis
It was left for another philosopher and literary critic, a disciple of Plato, to
consecrate the term, anagnorisis, for posterity. Aristotle is the first man in the
European tradition to elaborate a theory of recognition in works of literature,
and his discussion of it, based on the epic and tragic poetry known to a fourth-​
century Greek audience, was widely influential down to at least the eighteenth
century. The present book takes it as a point of reference to show both how
Aristotle’s ideas are illuminating even now for anyone concerned with this
problem in Western literature, and also how they are often inadequate, indeed
even how we (and I mean readers from the fourth century B.C.E. onwards)
must widen out, contradict, and revolutionize them in order to understand the
literary phenomenon of recognition.
The concept of anagnorisis is developed by Aristotle in the Poetics, a work
on the ‘art of poetry’, which might have originated as a series of lecture notes
10
11
On Plato’s poetics, see G. Cerri, La Poétique de Platon, French trans., Paris, Belles
Lettres, 2015.
Thucydides, Historiae, vii, 44, 2.
12 Introduction
and of which only the first book has survived, dealing with general principles, tragedy, and the epic.12 This is not the place for a detailed discussion of
the whole Poetics, a book on which some of the best minds of the West have
laboured for two millennia. Suffice it to say that in it anagnorisis seems to
occupy a central place. It is the only concept to which are devoted one whole
‘chapter’ and at least two more half chapters and which crops up throughout
the work.
As Aristotle sees it, anagnorisis is fundamental both from an internal and an
external point of view, as an element in the plot of a tragedy or of an epic poem,
as something which responds to the deep logic of a work of literature, and as
the cause of particular effects on the audience. All forms of poetry (tragic, epic,
comic, lyric) are, for Aristotle, ‘imitative processes’ –​mimeseis –​but they differ
in having different means, objects, and methods of imitation.
Peripeteia and anagnorisis are the principal means by which tragedy
attracts,13 and are essential in the so-​called ‘complex’ plots. In a ‘simple’ plot
the development is ‘continuous and unified’, and the final ‘reversal’ takes
place without peripeteia or anagnorisis. In a ‘complex’ plot the reversal is continuous and is accompanied by peripeteia or anagnorisis or both. The Iliad,
for instance, is ‘simple’ and ‘fatal’, while the Odyssey is ‘complex’ ‘because in it
there are recognitions from beginning to end’ (1459 b 14–​16). Both peripeteia
and anagnorisis are subject to and must respond to the deep logic which rules
the construction of plot. In the first place, ‘the poet’s job is not to report what
has happened (ta genomena), but what is likely to happen according to the
12
13
The Greek text of the Poetics i use is that established by S. Halliwell for the Loeb edition of Aristotle, Longinus, and Demetrius, Cambridge MA and London, Harvard
University Press, 1999. The English translation is, basically, that of G.F. Else published by
the University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1967, which I have often changed taking
into account Halliwell’s version. The best commentaries on the Poetics are S. Halliwell,
Aristotle’s Poetics, London, Duckworth, 1986; D.W. Lucas, Aristotle: The Poetics, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 1968; R. Dupont-​Roc and J. Lallot, Aristote. La Poétique, Paris,
Seuil, 1980; D. Guastini, Poetica, Rome, Carocci, 2010; and the Norton edition of the
Poetics, ed. M. Zerba and D. Gorman, New York-​London, 2018. The contributions in Essays
on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. A.O. Rorty, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992, are often
stimulating; and the two classics J. Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, London, Chatto
& Windus, 1962, and F.L. Lucas, Tragedy: Serious Drama in Relation to Aristotle’s Poetics,
London, Chatto & Windus, 19572, always worth reading.
The verb used by Aristotle is psykhagogein, originally meaning ‘to conjure up the dead’;
hence, even if taken metaphorically, it indicates a pretty strong form of attraction.
Aristotle uses the adjective psykhagogikon (1450 b 17) for ‘spectacle’, but says this is alien
to poietike. For other uses of the word, see C. Diano, Saggezza e poetiche degli antichi,
Vicenza, Neri Pozza, 1968, pp. 248–​249.
Introduction
13
rule of probability or necessity’ (1451 a 37–​9). The events ‘imitated’ in a tragedy must be ‘fearful’ and ‘pathetic’, and they will be the more so if they take
place contrary to one’s expectations and yet ‘after’ and ‘through’, following
from, each other. In this way ‘they will be more productive of wonder (thaumaston) than if they happened at random, by chance’, for ‘even among chance
occurrences the ones people consider most marvellous (thaumasiotata) are
those that seem to have come about as if on purpose’ (1452 a 1–​7). Thirdly,
anagnorisis and peripeteia must ‘grow out of the very structure of the plot
itself, in such a way that on the basis of what has happened previously this
particular outcome follows either by necessity or in accordance with probability’ (1452 a 19–​21).
What, then, are peripeteia and anagnorisis? The definitions Aristotle gives
of them are brief and even somewhat unclear at first sight, but they will be
constantly recalled and illustrated in this book, and we shall see how the
obscurities do in fact represent Aristotle’s effort to be as comprehensive as
possible and how, when seen in the proper literary context, they are suggestive and illuminating. Peripeteia is a ‘shift, a change (metabole) of what
is being undertaken to the opposite and this in accordance with probability or necessity’. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, for instance, the messenger from
Corinth arrives at Thebes thinking that he will relieve Oedipus, but in fact
brings about the opposite (1452 a 22–​279). And here is what Aristotle says of
anagnorisis:
Recognition (anagnorisis), as the noun itself indicates, is a shift, a
change from ignorance to knowledge, to awareness (ex agnoias eis gnosin
metabole), leading to friendship or hostility (eis phi1ian e eis ekhthran) of
those who are marked out for good or bad fortune. The most beautiful
anagnorisis is one that takes place at the same time as peripeteia, as in
the Oedipus. There are also other kinds of anagnorisis –​those towards
inanimate objects (apsykha) and chance occurrences (tykhonta), as has
been said, also happen; and also to recognize if one has acted or not.
But that which is most integrally a part of the plot and of the action is
the one said above; for that anagnorisis, together with peripeteia, will
excite either pity (eleon) or fear (phobon), in actions of which tragedy is
assumed to be an imitation (mimesis), because also success and lack of
success (bad and good fortune, to atykhein kai to eutykhein) will follow
from those things. As anagnorisis is of persons (tinon), there are some
recognitions of one person by the other one only, when it is already
known who the other one is, but in some instances it is necessary to
have both recognized, as Iphigenia is recognized by Orestes through
14 Introduction
the sending of the letter, but of him by Iphigenia another anagnorisis
is required.14
By the time Aristotle writes these paragraphs the three major Attic tragedians –​
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides –​are dead. So is Aristophanes, the great
comic writer, while Menander, the leader of the New Comedy, is probably at
the beginning of his career. Homer’s epic poems are already several centuries
old. Aristotle’s position is not very different from that of a critic writing now on
authors like Joyce or T.S. Eliot, or, on the other hand, on Milton, Racine, Ariosto
or Dante. The critic’s and the philosopher’s observations are, thus, based upon
a distance in time and continuity of culture which allow both generalization
and specification. And what we have in these lines is precisely a general definition of anagnorisis followed by a short list of particular variations and the
quotation of two instances. On several of these instances, as we shall see, the
author will deal further.
The emphasis which emerges from the very first line is at once philosophical and literary. Aristotle’s semantic awareness (‘as the term itself signifies’)
shows both that anagnorisis is by now a very common technical word and
that the author wants to stress its meaning tout court, as if a reflection on
this were capable of bringing to light the very essence of the literary –​theatrical and narrative –​phenomenon of recognition. And this essence is fully
caught, with the wonderful aim with which the philosopher hits on the right
idea, by the first clause: ‘anagnorisis is a change from ignorance to knowledge’. No better definition of the phenomenon will be offered in over two
thousand years. It is so simple as to appear almost obvious, so general as to
seem almost useless –​yet we feel that it is absolutely right. For it gives us an
answer to a question we asked à propos of the Cinderella story. Anagnorisis
is a change from agnoia to gnosis. The key of this expression is the word gnosis, knowledge: for another culture, the fruit of the forbidden tree; for the
Greeks, the gift of Prometheus which Aeschylus splendidly celebrated in his
Prometheus Bound, and Plato discussed in his Protagoras and Philebus not
just as the donation of all arts and sciences (tekhnai), but also of intellectual
light.15
14
15
Poetics, 1452 a 30–​1452 b 8: see J. MacFarlane, ‘Aristotle’s Definition of Anagnorisis’,
American Journal of Philology, 121 (2000): 367–​383.
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, 436–​506; Plato, Protagoras, 320 d–​322 a, and Philebus, 16
c. See also Democritus, fr. 8, 1 dk See H. Vial and A. de Cremoux, dir., Figures tragiques
du savoir: les dangers de la connaissance dans les tragédies grecques et leur posterité,
Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2015.
Introduction
15
For Aristotle, this knowledge, which some modern interpreters tend to see
also in a reflexive, inward light, is not an abstract, theoretical process, but a
knowing in the flesh –​the meeting of two human beings, their communicating
to each other, their contact and interpenetration. It is the truth and being of
men (the ‘others’ as well as the ‘self’, as in the case of Oedipus), that anagnorisis
gives us a knowledge of. Though he mentions recognition of ‘inanimate objects’,
‘chance occurrences’, action or inaction (thus opening up exciting literary and
epistemological prospects), Aristotle clearly underlines that anagnorisis primarily regards people, and particularly those people who in a tragic context are
‘marked out for’ or ‘defined with reference to’, bad or good fortune. Moreover,
anagnorisis moves towards, leads to, either philia or ekhthra, friendship and
love, the sphere of blood ties on the one hand, and enmity or hostility on the
other. It reveals that Iphigenia and Orestes, in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris,
are brother and sister. It makes Oedipus, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, know
that he has killed his father and married his mother. It forces Clytemnestra, in
Sophocles’ Electra, to recognize that her son Orestes is now her enemy.
Anagnorisis lies at the centre of the tragic and epic plot, because it regards
human beings in their closest relationship to each other, disclosing their ties of
kinship or hostility and producing their ultimate destiny, success or lack of it,
bad or good fortune (atykhein and eutykhein). No wonder its effect on the audience is either pity or fear. A well-​known scholar indeed wrote that ‘recognition
is in fact a way in which the emotional potential inherent in certain human
situations can be brought to its highest voltage, so to speak, at the moment of
discharge’.16 We shall see throughout this book how true this statement is, how
the acquisition of knowledge is the fundamental knot of a literary plot.
Aristotle himself is clearly aware of all these implications. In c­ hapters 13 and
14 of the Poetics he discusses some of the key concepts he related to anagnorisis in ­chapter 11. The most important one is that of eleos and phobos, the pity
and fear which are and ought to be the characteristics and the effects of tragic
mimesis.17 If this is so, the tragic plot cannot show a change from bad to good
fortune, because this would be neither pitiable nor fearful. Furthermore, the
change cannot affect either a virtuous man so as to transform his good into bad
fortune (because such a man does not deserve misfortune), nor a wicked man
his bad fortune into good. What is left, then, is someone in between, ho metaxy,
16
17
G.F. Else, Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1957,
p. 353.
For a complete analysis of these see D. Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies
in Aristotle and Classical Literature, Toronto, Toronto University Press, 2006; and
G. Guidorizzi, I colori dell’anima. I Greci e le passioni, Milan, Cortina, 2017.
16 Introduction
an intermediate character, ‘who is neither a paragon of virtue and justice nor
undergoes the change to misfortune through any real badness or wickedness
but because of some mistake (di’hamartian tina); one of those who stand in
great repute and prosperity, like, for instance, Oedipus and Thyestes and similar conspicuous men from families of that kind’. So, the change must be from
good to bad fortune, due to a great hamartia, and of a character ‘in between’,
metaxy (1452 b 31 –​1453 a 23).
The point that interests us here is that the tragic character passes from good
to bad fortune not because of badness or wickedness, but because of a great
mistake. Tragedy portrays the fallibility of man. And this fallibility –​the mistake or hamartia –​is due to ignorance: agnoia of a person ‘with whom the
action has to do’. We are, then, back at the beginning of Aristotle’s definition
of anagnorisis as a change from ignorance to knowledge. ‘The discovery is …
the counterpart and reverse of the mistake … the hamartia represents the reservoir of emotional potential; the recognition is the lightning flash through
which it passes off’.18
The action, the plot of a good tragedy, must then involve ignorance and
knowledge, and at the same time arouse pity and fear. An enemy attacking
an enemy, or an action performed by neutrals will produce no pity. ‘But when
the tragic acts come within the limits of close blood relationships as when
brother kills or intends to kill brother or do something else of that kind, or
son to father or mother to son or son to mother –​those are the situations
one should look for’ (1453 b 19–​21). A poet, of course, cannot ‘break up’ the
‘transmitted stories’ but he should either invent plots or present traditional
stories ‘well’ or ‘beautifully’ (kalos). And it is this ‘good arrangement’, this
kalos that involves a complex relationship of action, ignorance, knowledge
and recognition.
The older poets, and Euripides in his Medea, have their characters commit
the tragic act ‘knowingly and wittingly’: Medea kills her children knowing who
they are. But in Aristotle’s favourite tragedy, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus perpetrates
his terrible crimes (though outside, ‘before’ the play) ‘unwittingly’, and then
recognizes his phi1ia, the relationship he has with Laius and Jocasta. On the
other hand, one might intend, through ignorance, to commit the crime, but
recognize before doing it. This is what happens in Cresphontes, where Merope
is about to kill her son but does not do so because she recognizes him first.
The same applies to Iphigenia and Orestes in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris. For
Aristotle, this is the best arrangement. Second best is to act in ignorance and
18
Else, Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 383.
17
Introduction
then, afterwards, recognize what one has done (Oedipus), because in this case
the anagnorisis is ‘surprising’, of ‘shattering emotional effect’ (ekplektikon).
Third in descending order comes action with knowledge, as in Euripides’
Medea. Fourth and worst is to know and to intend to act, but then not to do
so, which is the way Haemon acts with Creon in Sophocles’ Antigone (Hegel’s
favourite tragedy), and, we might add, what best seems to fit the favourite
modern play, Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Thus action, inaction, intention, knowledge, and ignorance define the various possibilities of a tragic plot. In this scheme, anagnorisis figures as the characteristic of the best type of tragedy, and its importance in a theory of poetry
becomes absolutely central as is to be expected from a philosopher who maintains that ‘as in science new contemplations and learning are most conducive
of pleasure, so recognition of one’s relatives (ton synethon anagnoriseis): and
the reason is the same’.19
∵
Aristotle’s attention to anagnorisis is, therefore, an integral part not only of his
technical analysis of poetry, but also of his philosophical consideration of it,
and ultimately of his reaction against Plato’s theory of art. Having given us a
general definition of anagnorisis in c­ hapter 11 and a careful study of the role
it plays in a tragic plot in ­chapter 14, Aristotle studies the different kinds of
recognition in ­chapter 16. This looks like a purely technical exposition, but in
fact implicitly contains, as we shall presently see, a fundamental philosophical
message.
Aristotle organizes his typology of anagnorisis in a scale of ascending
order, from lowest and ‘least artistic’ to ‘the best’. There are five main types
and one which we could call a sub-​type. The first, lowest but most frequently
used because of aporia, that is, lack of intellectual, imaginative and technical
resources, is anagnorisis by means of signs (dia ton semeion). These can be of
two kinds: ‘inherited’ and ‘acquired’. A birthmark would belong to the first class.
But the second is subdivided into two, ‘on the body’ and external. Scars belong
to the first sub-​class; rings, necklaces, Cinderella’s slipper, in fact any object, to
the second. There are of course better and poorer ways of using recognitions
by way of signs. For instance –​and one notices that Aristotle’s notion of anagnorisis is not limited to tragedy but applies to the epic as well –​in the Odyssey
Odysseus is recognized by means of his scar by both his nurse Eurycleia and the
19
Eudemian Ethics, 1237a 25.
18 Introduction
swineherds. I shall come back to these passages in due course. For the moment
suffice it to say that Aristotle prefers the scene with the nurse, because here the
recognition stems from the peripeteia, unexpectedly, by Eurycleia discovering
the scar while washing her master’s feet. In the scene with the swineherds,
on the other hand, it is Odysseus himself who points to his scar to prove his
identity. Recognition by means of ‘external signs’ such as rings and necklaces
was developed, according to the third century biographer Satyrus, by Euripides
(an instance is the Ion), and became one of the distinguishing features of New
Comedy. In comic works it will remain central at least until Oscar Wilde’s The
Importance of Being Earnest.
Agnition by means of signs, whether ‘inherited’ or ‘acquired’, ultimately
rests on the value we assign to two complementary factors –​material evidence
and human perception. The bodies or the objects of which Aristotle speaks
belong to the sphere of pure materiality, to apprehend the data of which we
use our senses. But what would happen if the signs in question were purely
conventional or counterfeited, or if they were not material but, say, spiritual
or verbal? Cinderella’s slipper could be made of wool and thus fit one of the
sisters’ feet. A god, a devil, a ghost cannot offer any material pistis, any proof,
of ‘its’ identity (and it will be interesting to see that in New Testament Greek
the word semeia will primarily refer to Jesus’ miracles, and pistis mean ‘faith’).
Finally, what would happen if we were to doubt the validity itself of signs
or of our perception? We can, as Theaetetus and Socrates maintain, have false
judgement. We can believe that a sign does not correspond to the ‘thing’ which
it ‘signifies’. Carlo Ginzburg has shown how complex is, in the nineteenth
century, the elaboration of a scientific paradigm of clues-​signs for the identification of a criminal or the author of a painting, or to initiate and pursue
a police inquiry.20 Modern semioticists, from Charles Peirce to Umberto Eco,
still discuss the nature and the mode of production of different kinds of signs.
Hippocrates had already concluded that, as far as medicine is concerned,
symptoms can be recognized as valid only if they are seen in a certain context.
Heraclitus seems to catch the full mystery of signs when, in a famous fragment,
he proclaims that ‘the lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither declares nor conceals but signifies, gives a sign (semainei)’.21
20
21
C. Ginzburg, Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1989.
Heraclitus, fr. 244 (= 93 dk). Aristotle himself, who in the De Interpretatione uses the term
semeion for words (the letters of the alphabet are ‘signs’ of verbal sounds and these in
turn of the soul’s ‘affections’, 16 a ff.), also employs the term symbolon (token of identity)
in the same context. In the Rhetoric (1357 b), he distinguishes between two types of signs,
one called tekmerion (proof), and the other without any specific name (anonymon). The
Introduction
19
Signs are difficult to read. A recognition by means of signs poses artistic
problems, too. Aristotle prefers Eurycleia’s recognition to that of the swineherds, though both are based on Odysseus’ scar. What we have in the latter
scene is a purely instrumental use of the evidence, whereas in the former the
sign emerges in the narrative as a coup de theatre. Thus, if recognition through
signs is the lowest form from a gnoseological point of view (sense-​perception
being the lowest form of knowledge) and on the whole, also from an artistic
point of view, technical and artistic strategies can ennoble it.
Likewise, an artistic motivation determines the place which the second
worst kind of anagnorisis occupies in Aristotle’s scale. This is recognition ‘contrived’ (or ‘forged’) by the poet independently of the means he uses to stage it.
In the play which Aristotle obviously considers second only to Oedipus Rex,
Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, there are two recognition scenes. When Orestes
and Pylades arrive in Tauris so that the former can gain possession of the statue
of Artemis, give it to Athens and thus have respite from the Furies that pursue
him, they meet a priestess of Artemis’ temple. This is Iphigenia, Orestes’ sister,
miraculously saved by the goddess from sacrifice at Aulis. A rule of the country forces Iphigenia to offer in sacrifice all Greeks who reach Tauris. Iphigenia,
who does not know who the two strangers are, decides to save Pylades’ life
provided he brings a letter from her to her brother Orestes. This makes Orestes
recognize her, and this anagnorisis, Aristotle says, is of the best kind, because
it stems from the plot itself. But Orestes still has to be recognized as such by
Iphigenia. And this Euripides effects by having Orestes mention as proofs of
his identity a series of details related to their family and Iphigenia’s own past
life at home.
Aristotle objects that this kind of recognition is contrived by the poet, who
makes Orestes say not what the plot requires but what he, the poet, needs to
be said. In fact, he maintains that this fault is closely allied to the one the poet
makes in an anagnorisis by means of signs –​‘for Orestes’, who offers Iphigenia,
as Euripides himself makes him say, several verbal proofs (tekmeria), ‘might
as well have actually worn some tokens’ (1454 b 35–​6). What Aristotle dislikes
about this kind of recognition is not the use of signs as such, but its artificiality,
its being imposed from outside onto the plot of the play (or the epic). That
Iphigenia should want to send a letter is only natural, and at the same time
former proceeds from universal to particular: ‘All those who have a temperature are ill’,
‘If she has milk, she must have given birth’. This is ‘necessary’ and, if true, irrefutable. The
second type of sign goes from particular to universal: if one breathes quickly, he must
have a temperature. But this is not necessary, and, even if true, it can be refuted. A person
might have difficulty in breathing even if he or she does not have a temperature.
20 Introduction
the scene produces a shock. It is this deeper logic of poetry that Odysseus’
use of his scar with the swineherds or Orestes’ speech to Iphigenia overlooks,
whereas in the scene with Eurycleia the semeion, though still purely material,
is employed within that logic.
In the third type of anagnorisis, the central mechanism is provided by memory (mneme), for Aristotle a higher form of knowledge. We move one step further away from material signs. Though they are by no means absent, they represent only the point of departure of a process which has the human being at
its centre. When Odysseus, as we shall see, hears the lyre-​player sing his own
enterprises, he ‘remembers’ and ‘weeps’ (1455 a 2–​4), and is thus recognized by
his host Alcinous. Here, the sight or the hearing of ‘something’ (ti) triggers off
a ‘reaction’, an aisthesthai, that is, a feeling, a perceiving and understanding, an
awareness –​through memory. We need only mention the name of Proust to
see how modern this procedure can be. With it, we are inside a human being,
his sensations (seeing or hearing), his prise de conscience (aisthesthai), his
emotions (weeping). The latter become a living sign.
Once more, however, we must pause to ask ourselves an important question: what is memory? In archaic Greece Mnemosyne is a goddess and the
mother of the Muses. She inspires poets and gives them knowledge, as Hesiod
says,22 of ‘all that has been, is, and will be’. In an oral society memory is a
supreme gnoseological faculty. For Plato, as we have seen, true knowledge is
itself anamnesis –​reminiscence. For Aristotle, on the other hand, memory represents only one stage in the process of knowledge, and precisely that which
converts sense-​perception to experience, upon the latter of which are founded
art and science. Thus, Aristotle’s anagnorisis by means of memory is higher
than recognition by means of signs in the same way as, in his theory of knowledge, memory represents a higher stage than sense-​perception.
The fourth (and second best) type of anagnorisis is based on syllogismos,
and with it we enter the more properly intellectual level of knowledge, that of
reason, as well as the sphere of the third most important among the elements
of tragedy, that of thought (dianoia). By syllogismos we must, I think, understand ‘inference’ or, generally, ‘reasoning’ as opposed to the more specific ‘syllogism’, a term and a process which Aristotle expounds at length in his logical
writings. Strictly speaking, syllogismos would for Aristotle apply to what we
would call ‘deductive syllogism’, i.e., one that proceeds from ‘universal premises’, and where the middle term constitutes the substance or raison d’etre of
the necessary connection between the two extremes.23 In the proposition, ‘all
22
23
Theogony, 32 and 38.
Prior Analytics, 24 b 10 and 68 b 15.
Introduction
21
men are animals, all animals are mortal, hence all men are mortal’, the middle
term (animal) is such a substance: men are mortal because they substantially
are animals.
The only fairly intelligible example of anagnorisis ek syllogismou that
Aristotle offers in the Poetics (the others being from works lost to us) comes
from the recognition scene in Aeschylus’ Choephori, a passage to which we
have seen Plato allude in his Theaetetus, and which was hotly debated in fifth
century Athens. Plato had used that scene to introduce the concept of memory
in the discussion of false judgment. Aristotle uses it to give us an instance of
reasoning in tragedy. His argument sums up the Aeschylean treatment of the
Electra-​Orestes meeting in the following manner: Electra argues that somebody like her has come, that nobody is like her but Orestes, that hence it is
Orestes who has come.24
The actual scene, as we shall see in a later chapter, is much more complex
and includes also the use of material signs both as traces (the lock of hair and
foot-​prints similar to hers that Electra finds by Agamemnon’s tomb) and as
circumstantial, conclusive evidence (the piece of cloth, Electra’s own work,
which Orestes shows her later). As a matter of fact, Electra’s syllogismos can
take its shape only because the lock of hair and the footprints are there to point
out the presence of somebody ‘like’ her. The functions of these signs, however,
is a stimulating one. They do not produce what Aristotle in the Rhetoric calls
‘extra-​technical arguments’,25 as would a witness, a confession under torture
or a written document. They constitute the basis for a ‘technical argument’ –​
one that is constructed ‘by means of method’. In particular, Electra’s argument
would belong to the third type of ‘technical discourse’, that which is produced
by ‘demonstration’ or ‘apparent demonstration’, based, exactly as in dialectic
(and Aristotle refers here to his own Analytics and Topics), on either syllogism
or induction.26 Electra’s argument is, then, broadly speaking a syllogism. It is
reasoning, and the value of reason is what Aristotle wants to exalt in discussing
recognition by means of syllogismos.
The fundamental validity of reasoning and inferring will remain constant in
the West down to Sherlock Holmes and the judicial enquiries of our own day.
On the other hand, the specific validity of syllogism and induction –​already
debated in antiquity –​is increasingly questioned until Locke, with his critique
of the former, and Hume, with his ‘sceptical doubt’ on the latter, seal a fundamental crisis of the two processes. More generally, the rationalism of Greek
24
25
26
Poetics, 16, 1455a 4–​6.
Rhetoric, 1355 b 35 ff.
Rhetoric, 1356a 34ff.
22 Introduction
philosophy, which even at the time of its greatest flourishing coexists with a
high degree of irrationality in Greek culture itself,27 will, at one point, be confronted with the paradoxical message of Christianity. Later on, the certainties
of rationalism and positivism will be questioned to an unparalleled extent, and
some will decree the death of reason. The story of Electra and Orestes will, in a
later chapter of this book, supply us with enough material to discuss the implications of recognition by means of reasoning.
Aristotle himself seems to be aware of the dangers –​and the advantages –​of
using reason in recognition scenes. In the Topics he opposes the various forms
of reasoning (syllogismos) to false reasoning (paralogismos, 101 a 5–​18), and
‘paralogism’ is a concept discussed time and again in the Sophistici Elenchi, a
treatise devoted to logical fallacies. In the Poetics, the treatment of recognition
by means of reasoning is followed by a short discussion of anagnorisis ‘based
on mistaken inference on the part of the audience’ (ek paralogismou tou theatrou), while later on Homer is praised for his ‘right way to purvey falsehoods
by false inference’.28 The passages Aristotle quotes to illustrate both the former and the latter ‘paralogism’ are either obscure or controversial, and the text
itself of the first paragraph in question is uncertain. I shall therefore leave this
kind of recognition out of my discussion.
The fifth and best type of anagnorisis is that which arises ‘from the events
themselves’ (ex auton ton pragmaton), with the ‘shock’ (ekplexis) resulting
‘through likelihood’ as in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Euripides’ Iphigenia in
Tauris. Here, we reach the climax of poetic logic and of logic tout court, which
together ought to rule the development of tragedy. On the one hand we have
the mythos, plot as ‘structuring of the events’, the greatest of the six elements of
tragedy and indeed its ‘beginning’, ‘soul’ and goal. At this level of perfection, it
is inevitable that anagnorisis should take place at the same time as peripeteia,
because a recognition ‘that is most integrally a part of the plot, the action’ (1452
a 37), can only be one which arises ‘from the events themselves’, and that is the
“finest” recognition, which coincides with peripeteia. The logic of mythos at
its best is not separate from logic itself, for this kind of recognition supremely
responds to the demands of eikos –​ likelihood, probability –​as indeed all
poetry should.
If the best type of anagnorisis stems from the events themselves in their
concatenation, it is bound to reveal to both the characters involved and the
audience the why of those events, their causes. In this sense it corresponds,
27
28
See the classic study by E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley, The University
of California Press, 1952.
Poetics, 1455 a 12–​15; 1460 a 18–​19.
23
Introduction
on the plane of Aristotle’s gnoseological theory, to the final and highest stage
of knowledge such as is outlined in the very first chapter of the Metaphysics
and the very last of the Posterior Analytics. Here the intellect (nous) is seen
as directly apprehending the principles or causes by reaching a ‘contact’ with
things.
Chapter 16 of the Poetics is not, then, a merely technical list of types of recognition –​as such it is in fact, as we shall see throughout this book, incomplete.
It is a grandiose attempt to organize the problem of the acquisition of knowledge in a work of art according to two sets of criteria, one depending on the
value and interaction of elements internal to tragedy, and one tied to a precise,
philosophical theory of knowledge. According to the former, anagnorisis by
means of signs, the ‘least artistic’ (atekhnotate), corresponds to ‘spectacle’ or
‘visual adornment’ (opsis), the least artistic (atekhnotaton) of the six elements;
anagnorisis by means of reasoning belongs with ‘thought’ (dianoia); and anagnorisis ‘from the events themselves’ falls into the realm of mythos. According
to a philosophical criterion, anagnorisis marks a ‘passage from ignorance to
knowledge’ through the various gnoseological processes of sense-​perception
(semeia), memory (mneme), reasoning (syllogismos), and intellect seizing the
causes (‘from the events themselves’).29
This process corresponds, as we have seen, to that outlined by Aristotle in
the Metaphysics (i,1) and the Posterior Ana1ytics (11,19). But if recognition is
the privileged moment of knowledge in drama and the epic, what is knowledge in its essence? In discussing the problem of the triangle and criticizing
Plato’s theory of anamnesis, Aristotle maintains, in the Prior Analytics,30 ‘that
in no case do we find that we have previous knowledge of the individual, but
we do find that in the process of induction we acquire knowledge of particular things just as though we recognized them’ (hosper anagnorizontas). True
knowledge is, ultimately, recognition. Nor is the pleasure of acquiring knowledge different from that of recognizing one’s relations, the ‘reason’ for both
being the ‘same’.31
∵
There is, finally, a specifically aesthetic field in which knowledge can be but
recognition. Tragedy, comedy, and the epic are imitative processes, Aristotle
29
30
31
Aristote, La Poétique, p. 276.
Prior Analytics, 67 a 20–​25.
Eudemian Ethics, 1237 a 25.
24 Introduction
says at the very beginning of the Poetics (1447 a 16), and they were brought
into being by ‘the habit of imitating congenital to human beings from childhood’ and by ‘the pleasure that all men take in works of imitation’ (1448 b 4–​9).
This pleasure is grounded in recognition. There are things, like ugly animals or
corpses, that we dislike in themselves, but whose images we view with pleasure
(1448 b 10–​12). The reason for this lies in the re-​cognitive process which mimesis produces in human beings and which is similar to the process of learning
pleasurable to all mankind:
The explanation of this too is that understanding (manthanein: learning) gives great pleasure not only to philosophers but likewise to others
too, though the latter have a smaller share in it. This is why people enjoy
looking at images, because through contemplating them it comes about
that they understand and infer (manthanein kai syllogizesthai) what each
element means, for instance that ‘this person is so-​and-​so’ (‘when one
says: “that is he” ’, outos ekeinos).32
The pleasure of mimesis lies in acquiring knowledge, and knowledge is a process of recognition, a reasoning which culminates with an anagnorisis. In a
strikingly similar passage of the Rhetoric (1371 b 4–​12), Aristotle again maintains that the pleasure derives not from the object of imitation as such, but
from the syllogismos we make that the imitation corresponds to the object.
As a premise, he says, here, that ‘to learn and to wonder’ (to manthanein kai
to thaumazein) are pleasant, and hence whatever is similar to these, like ‘a
work of imitation, such as sculpture, painting and poetry’, is also pleasant. As
a conclusion, he adds that peripeties and ‘to be saved from dangers by a hairsbreadth’ are also pleasant, because they, too, are ‘wonders’ (thaumasta). We
are very close indeed to the concerns of the Poetics on the one hand and the
Metaphysics on the other.
∵
To begin with the latter, one will recall that if, in its very first sentence, Aristotle
proclaims that ‘all men by nature desire to know’, he goes on to explain, in the
second chapter, that philosophy (the love of wisdom: philosophia) arises, and
arose from the very beginning, from wonder (dia to thaumazein), because men
32
Poetics, 1448 b 10–​12, Halliwell’s translation; and see S. Halliwell, The Aesthetics of
Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2002.
Introduction
25
found themselves wondering about increasingly difficult problems and hence
asked themselves increasingly difficult questions such, for instance, as about
the origin of the world. And a man who is ‘uncertain and wondering’, is conscious of his being ignorant.33 Philosophy is an escape from ignorance towards
knowledge initiated by wonder. So far Plato, too, would agree.34 But he would
violently disagree with the parenthesis Aristotle inserts here (982 b 18–​19),35
according to which ‘it is for this reason that the lover of myth is in some sense
a philosopher, for myth is composed of marvels’ (ek thaumasion). Now, by lover
of myth (philomythos) Aristotle must mean both he who recounts the myth,
i.e., the poet, or the artist in general, and he who listens to or reads it, i.e., the
audience. In the former instance, we can then say that wonder, which lies at
the beginning of philosophy, also lies at the beginning of poetry, and this is in
fact the interpretation that Thomas Aquinas implicitly gives of the passage in
his Commentary on the Metaphysics.36 In the latter instance, we will have to
say that wonder, which lies at the beginning of philosophy, also lies at the end
of poetry. In both cases, we will have to admit that, through wonder, poetry is
for Aristotle somehow akin to philosophy.
This double message is borne out by the Poetics, where poetry is seen as ‘a
more philosophical and serious business than history: for poetry speaks more
of universals, history of particulars’. The poetic universal consists in showing
‘what kind of person is likely to do or say certain things, according to probability or necessity’, and the poet’s job is to report ‘what is likely to happen: that is,
what is capable of happening according to the rule of probability or necessity’.
In tragedy, it is the structuring of the plot, and particularly the working out
within it of peripeteia and anagnorisis, that must obey the rule of probability
or necessity. And to apply the rule of probability or necessity in a plot means
to structure ‘fearful and pathetic’ events in a such a way that ‘they come about
contrary to one’s expectation yet logically, one following from the other; that way
they will produce greater wonder than if they happen merely at random, by
chance –​because even among chance occurrences the ones people consider
most marvellous (thaumasiotata) are those that seem to have come about as
if on purpose’.37
33
34
35
36
37
Metaphysics, 982 b 11–​17.
Indeed, he had initiated this kind of thinking in the Theaetetus, 155 d.
Metaphysics, 982 b 18–​19; and see S. Broadie, ‘A Science of First Principles’, in Aristotle’s
Metaphysics Alpha, ed. C. Steel, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 41–​67.
In Duodecim Libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis Expositio, l. i, i, iii, 55, ed. R.M. Spiazzi,
Turin-​Rome, Marietti, 19712, p. 18.
References in this paragraph: Poetics, 1451 b 5–​9, 1451 a 37–​8, 1452 a 18–​20, 1452 a 1–​7.
26 Introduction
What is likely or necessary is universal and hence knowable, whereas
chance is impenetrable to man, it has the status of ‘being by accident’ of which
‘there is no knowledge’. Tragedy, which represents chance as if ruled by purpose and thus elicits the wonder which is the first step on the way from ignorance to knowledge, is ‘an enterprise such as no science can perform: that of
giving knowledge of chance, and by the means itself of science –​the search
for the universal’.38 But if tragedy as such is capable of providing this kind of
knowledge, anagnorisis, which is the moment in tragedy where the passage
from ignorance to knowledge takes place in the actual flesh of human beings,
and which can unveil and explain even the meaning of inanimate objects and
chance occurrences –​ anagnorisis must be such an explosion of knowledge
that it will indeed shatter both the characters and us. It is precisely the forms
and the meanings of this knowledge that the present book will try to explore,
extending, adapting and modifying Aristotle’s approach as our way through
genres and cultures requires, but in the conviction that at bottom his treatment has caught the essence of the phenomenon.
3
Re-​Cognition, Reading, and Reconnaissance
Why do we listen with greater pleasure to men singing music which we happen
to know beforehand, than to music which we do not know? Someone close to
Aristotle, if not Aristotle himself, asked this question twice in the Problems. In
both cases, several tentative answers are offered, but the first time round the
fuller solution sends us back to recognition:
Is it because, when we can recognize (gnorizosi) the song, the attainment
as it were of his aim by the singer is more obvious? This is pleasant to contemplate. Or is it because it is (more) pleasant (to contemplate than) to
learn? The reason is that in the one case it is the acquisition of knowledge,
but in the other it is using it and a form of recognition (anagnorizein).39
With a specific reference to aesthetic pleasure, this answer explicitly states
that recognition is more pleasant than cognition. Whether or not the sentence
is inspired by the sense in which we have seen Aristotle maintain that true
knowledge is always a recognition, there is no doubt that here the iterative
38
39
V. Goldschmidt, Temps physique et temps tragique chez Aristote, Paris, Vrin, 1982, pp. 264–​
265, my translation.
Problems, xix 918 a 3–​9, and then 921 a 32–​40 in the Loeb edition, vol. i, 1953, p. 381.
Introduction
27
quality of recognition is stressed. This is not anagnorizein in the sense of
surfacing of knowledge, but with a more explicit meaning of re-​cognizing –​
wieder-​erkennen –​ and in a context which clearly places the pleasure of recognition in the audience. How much of this theory is due to the fact that so many
Greek tragedies or epic poems deal with myths that an audience would already
‘know beforehand’, we have no way of knowing. But we do know how much
Western literature uses those stories –​and others from Hebrew and Latin legend or history –​over and over again. And we shall encounter the aesthetics of
wieder-​erkennen several times in this book.
We must also note that the first sketch of this aesthetics in the Problems
comes long before the invention and spreading of print, or, to use Walter
Benjamin’s expression, of the ‘technical means of reproducing a work of art’,
which make the recognition of known stories, pictures, and music much
more easily available to an ever greater number of individuals. The culture
of the written word is much older than that, and although the re-​cognition
of known stories can easily take place in an oral culture, there is a way in
which it is more closely connected with reading, which offers a constant
opportunity for it.
Classical Greek employs words such as anagignoskein and anagnosis for ‘to
read’ and ‘reading’, and indeed Aristotle himself uses them in this sense in the
Poetics. Comparing tragedy and the epic in ­chapter 26, he maintains that the
former, like the latter, produces its effect even without movement (i.e., mimic),
for ‘it manifests itself such as it is through reading’ (dia tou anagignoskein). He
repeats this concept shortly afterwards, saying that tragedy ‘has dramatic vividness in reading (en te anagnosei) as well as in actual performance’.
Both the verb, anagignoskein, and the abstract noun anagnosis, have the
primary sense of ‘knowing well’, ‘knowing again’ and ‘recognizing’. Herodotus,
for instance, employs anagnosis to indicate Astyages’ recognition of his grandson Cyrus, the future king of Persia, in his romance-​like account of the latter’s
accession to the throne (1,116). But when applied to written characters, both
the verb and the noun mean to ‘recognize’ them, and hence to ‘read’. Reading is
recognition. Beyond the merely technical implications of this (reading as recognition of certain letters), Greek thus opens up to a whole new space.
Reading can be a cultural recognition or a recognition of the self “through”
a character, the plot, the message itself of the book. It can be recognition of
truth. It is the reading of a passage in Paul’s Letter to the Romans that precipitates Augustine’s final recognition of his self and of God –​his definitive conversion. By reading Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and Cicero’s On Friendship
Dante decides to abandon the love poetry of his youth and devote himself to
the study of philosophy. Reading Homer’s poems, Goethe comes to see in them
28 Introduction
‘no longer a strained and inflated heroism, but the reflected truth of a primeval
present’.40 We can say it with Proust:
In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own
self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he
offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book,
he would perhaps never have perceived in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self (la reconnaissance en soi-​même, par le
lecteur) of what the book says is the proof of its veracity, the contrary
also being true, at least to a certain extent, for the difference between
the two texts may sometimes be imputed less to the author than to the
reader.41
But how does this anagnosis-​reading work in fiction? Are there specific
strategies by which an author can bring it about in an audience of readers? Are
they different from those employed in view of recognition in drama or opera?
In what way does the wieder-​erkennen of known stories affect anagnosis-​
anagnorisis and, conversely, how does anagnorisis in new stories bear upon
the plot-​structuring which reading requires?
‘Recognition is an earlier stage of reading’, writes Frank Kermode, ‘By learning one passes from one to the other’.42 Perhaps we shall learn more by taking a
step back and one forward at the same time –​by trying to tie inner recognition
and wieder-​erkennen.
∵
Let us return to Cinderella. Stepmother and stepsisters do not recognize
Cinderella when she appears, in all her splendour, at the ball. Her father,
too, seems to suppress within himself any knowledge of his daughter. I have
already mentioned the possibility of seeking the help of Freud’s theories of
psychic repression in order to explain these details of the folktale. The pages
Freud devotes to recognition represent, in more than one way, the point of
arrival and, at the same time, the reversal, in modern time, of Aristotelian and
40
41
42
Augustine, Confessions viii. xi. 29; Dante, Convivio ii xii 2–​4; The Autobiography of Goethe.
Truth and Poetry, Book xii, trans. J. Oxenford, London, Bohn, 1848, pp. 467–​468.
Proust, Time Regained, p. 949: M. Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, dir. J.-​Y. Tadié, iv,
Paris, Gallimard, 1989 (Le temps retrouvé), pp. 489–​490.
F. Kermode, The Art of Telling: Essays on Fiction, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press,
1983, p. 112.
Introduction
29
Christian lines of thought. To study them might help us understand the way
recognition has changed in modern literature.
Concern with the inner life of man, which increases considerably when classical philosophy becomes Christian thought and practice (the ‘examination of
conscience’ symbolically represents this phenomenon), reaches a climax in
modern psychoanalytical theories. European philosophers had already placed
the life of the individual mind at the centre of their attention and made it the
basis itself of being (‘I think, therefore I am’, in Descartes’ famous formulation).
This subjectivism was, however, still grounded on a conception of thinking as
a conscious and rational activity. With Freudian psychoanalysis, the emphasis falls on the processes of the unconscious, and particularly on those which
are subject to repression. It is then obvious that in this context recognition,
which postulates by definition a coming to awareness or prise de conscience,
will take on different connotations. Where its function remains essential is,
rather, in the area which at once divides and joins the unconscious and consciousness, its basic purpose being now that of setting up a kind of discrimination between mental impulses so as to activate repression of an unacceptable
one. In General Theory of the Neuroses, Freud expresses this concept with the
image of the two rooms and the watchman who performs his function on the
threshold between them:
We will compare the system of the unconscious (des Unbewussten) to
a large antechamber, in which the psychic impulses rub elbows with
one another, as separate beings. There opens out of this ante-​chamber
another, a smaller room, a sort of parlour, which consciousness (das
Bewusstsein) occupies. But on the threshold between the two rooms
there stands a watchman; he passes on the individual psychic impulses,
censors them, and will not let them into the parlor if they do not meet
with his approval. You see at once that it makes little difference whether
the watchman brushes a single impulse away from the threshold, or
whether he drives it out again after it has already entered the parlour. It
is a question here only of the extent of his watchfulness (Wachsamkeit),
and of how early he carries out his act of recognition (Erkennen).43
The erkennen mentioned here implies an almost purely unconscious awareness of what is unacceptable among mental impulses. Recognition is so much
43
General Theory of Neuroses, in Introduction to Psychoanalysis, pdf Books World, pp. 259–​
260. The German original in Gesammelte Werke, London, Imago, 1940–​1952.
30 Introduction
an inner phenomenon that it can scarcely be … recognized. When, in the
Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud discusses the ‘conscious ignorance
and unconscious knowledge of the motivation of accidental psychical events’
as ‘one of the psychical roots of superstition’, he calls this kind of recognition
‘dim’, ‘obscure’ (dunkle Erkenntnis), defining it as the ‘endopsychic perception’ (endopsychische Wahrnehmung) ‘of psychical factors and relations in the
unconscious’.44 Freud’s analysis in this text of the ‘mythological conception of
the world’ sounds like a most precise prophecy indeed of what will happen in
twentieth-​century literature. Here is how the full sentence looked in the first
English translation of Psychopathology:
As a matter of fact, I believe that a large portion of the mythological conception of the world which reaches far into the most modern religions
is nothing but psychology projected into the outer world. The dim perception (the endo-​psychic perception, as it were) of psychic factors and
relations of the unconscious was taken as a model in the construction of
a transcendental reality, which is destined to be changed again by science
into psychology of the unconscious.45
Much modern literature, as we shall see, portrays man as incapable of true
recognition, or as capable only of a recognition which is either endopsychic,
subliminal, or based on elementary, primary impulses or sensations such, for
instance, as the sexual ones, or odour.
It will not be surprising, then, that in a more restricted aesthetic field recognition should be wieder-​erkennen, the rediscovery of what is familiar, and
that this should be seen as one of the basic pleasures that art affords to men.
In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud quotes at this regard a
passage from Karl Groos’ Die Spiele der Menschen, which in turn sends him,
and us, back to Aristotle:
It seems to be generally agreed that the rediscovery of what is familiar,
‘recognition’ (das Wiedererkennen) is pleasurable. Groos writes: ‘recognition is always, unless it is too much mechanized (as for instance in dressing …), linked with feelings of pleasure. The mere quality of familiarity is
easily accompanied by the quiet sense of comfort which Faust felt when,
after an uncanny encounter, he entered his study once again (Goethe,
44
45
Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. A. Brill, London, Fisher Unwin, 1914, p. 309.
Ibid.
Introduction
31
Faust 1, 3). If the act of recognition thus gives rise to pleasure, we might
expect that men would hit on the idea of exercising this capacity for its
own sake –​that is, would experiment with it in play. And in fact Aristotle
regarded joy in recognition (Freude am Wiedererkennen) as the basis of
the enjoyment of art, and it cannot be disputed that this principle should
not be overlooked, even if it does not possess such far-​reaching significance as Aristotle attributes to it’.46
Groos, and Freud with him, are evidently thinking of the wiedererkennen
of the Problems and of the pleasure in recognition which in the Poetics
Aristotle associates with mimesis. As we have seen, however, the latter is
for Aristotle a complex phenomenon, involving the essential components
of ‘learning’, ‘reasoning’ and ‘wondering’ –​that is to say, operations which
imply a certain degree of intellectual engagement. Freud, on the other
hand, identifies the pleasure we feel in the rediscovery of what is familiar
with ‘pleasure in economy’: recognition (Erkennen), he says, is pleasurable
in itself ‘through relieving psychical expenditure’. The transformation of
Aristotle’s syillogizesthai into ‘relief of psychical expenditure’ is indeed significant, but what is more important for us is that much modern literature
seems to set store by recognition precisely in the sense of rediscovery of
what is familiar –​by superimposing the Aristotelian and the psychoanalytical motivations of its pleasure. This, as we shall see, is the case of Thomas
Mann’s Joseph tetralogy.
The Freudian wiedererkennen is closely tied to the mechanism of déja vu,
defined in Psychopathology of Everyday Life as ‘the recollection of an unconscious phantasy’. ‘At such moments’, Freud says, ‘something is really touched
on which we have already experienced once before, only we cannot consciously remember it because it has never been conscious’. It is worth noting
that for Freud the phenomenon of déjà vu ought to be included ‘in the category of the marvellous and the uncanny’ (Wunderbares and Unheimliches),
and that the latter represents for him ‘that class of the frightening which leads
back to what is known of old and long familiar’. Our unconscious mind is
dominated by a ‘compulsion to repeat’ which is inherent in our instincts, and
whatever reminds us of this compulsion is perceived as uncanny. We repress
something that is frightening, but it ‘recurs’. The uncanny ‘is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-​established in the
46
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. J. Strachey, ed. A. Richards,
Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976 (The Pelican Freud Library, vi), p. 170.
32 Introduction
mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of
repression’.47
It is up to psychoanalysis –​not to poetry or art –​‘to bring to conscious
recognition (zur bewussten Anerkennung) the things in mental life which are
repressed’. There is at once an affinity and a profound difference between
dramatic anagnorisis and the recognition of psychoanalysis. When, in the
Interpretation of Dreams, Freud comes to the exploration of the Oedipus complex, he declares that the action of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex ‘consists in nothing other than the process of revealing (Enthüllung), with cunning delays and
ever-​mounting excitement … that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius,
but further that he is the son of the murdered man and of Jocasta’.
That process of revelation which, with Aristotle, we shall see as in fact a
process of recognition on Oedipus’ part, ‘can’, according to Freud, ‘be likened
to the work of a psycho-​analysis’. Furthermore, ‘recognition’ goes much more
deeply, for it sums up the entire import of the Oedipus Rex for the audience
as well: ‘While the poet, as he unravels the past, brings to light the guilt of
Oedipus, he is at the same time compelling us to recognize our own inner
minds (zur Erkenntnis unseres eigenen Innern), in which those same impulses,
though suppressed, are still to be found’. The reason itself why Oedipus Rex
moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one
must be that there is something which ‘makes a voice within us ready to recognize the compelling force of destiny’ in that tragedy.48
This Erkenntnis of the ‘inner mind’ is on the one hand unconscious (a ‘voice
within us’) recognition of what is already known but suppressed, and on the
other hand identification of the spectator with the character: indeed, it is the
former through the latter. Freudian anagnorisis seems to be over two thousand
years removed from Aristotle, though the play at the centre of their attention,
Oedipus Rex, is the same.
Freud, however, extends his notion of dramatic Erkenntnis to all drama, and
explicitly recalls Aristotle. In his paper on ‘Psychopathic Characters on the
Stage’, he begins by referring to the notion of terror, pity and catharsis which,
47
48
‘The Uncanny’, in An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, vol. xvii of The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and gen. ed., J. Strachey
(London, Routledge, 1955); the quotations in this paragraph come from pp. 238, 241,
241–​2. It may be interesting to note that for a modern critic such as Harold Bloom the
Freudian ‘uncanny’ is the equivalent of ‘sublime’. See, for instance, his ‘Freud and the
Sublime: A Catastrophe Theory of Creativity’, in Agon, New York, Oxford University Press,
1982, pp.91–​118.
The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey, ed. A. Richards, Harmondsworth, Penguin,
1976 (The Pelican Freud Library, iv), pp. 365, 364.
Introduction
33
‘since the time of Aristotle’, have been assumed to constitute the ‘purpose of
drama’. This purpose, and hence those notions, can be described in detail as ‘a
question of opening up sources of pleasure or enjoyment in our emotional life’
by means of the spectator’s identification with the hero.
In psychopathological drama ‘the source of the suffering in which we take
part and from which we are meant to derive pleasure is no longer a conflict
between two almost equally conscious impulses’ as in psychological drama,
‘but between a conscious impulse and a repressed one’,49 the ‘precondition of
enjoyment’ being that ‘the spectator should himself be a neurotic, for it is only
such people who can derive pleasure instead of simple aversion from the revelation (Freilegung) and the more or less conscious recognition (gewissermessen
bewusste Anerkennung) of a repressed impulse’.50
Significantly, Freud identifies the paradigm of this type of drama with
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the play which in the Interpretation of Dreams he had
coupled with Oedipus Rex as being underlain by the same ‘child’s wishful
phantasy’. If in Oedipus this ‘fantasy is ‘brought into the open and realized as
it would be in a dream’, in Hamlet ‘it remains repressed’ and we only learn
of its existence ‘from its inhibiting consequence’, that is to say, from Hamlet’s
inaction. The fact is, Freud says in ‘Psychopathic Characters on the Stage’, that
Hamlet ‘becomes psychopathic in the course of the action of the play’ and that
the repressed impulse in him ‘is one of those which are similarly repressed in
all of us’ –​which makes it easy for us ‘to recognize (wiederfinden) ourselves in
the hero’. On the other hand a necessary precondition of this form of art is that
‘the impulse that is struggling into consciousness, however clearly it is recognizable, is never given a definite name; so that in the spectator too the process
is carried through with his attention averted, and he is in the grip of his emotions instead of taking stock of what is happening’. Thus, the core of repressed
material is unable to reach consciousness. ‘After all’, Freud concludes, ‘the conflict in Hamlet is so effectively concealed that it was left to me to unearth it’.
In much modern drama, then, recognition is on the one hand ‘more or less
conscious’ for the characters –​on the other made possible or even compelled
by the play in the spectators as Erkenntnis of their inner mind because they
recognize in the character their own repressed impulses. Ultimately, however,
recognition is inexpressible by all save the psychoanalyst. We shall see in the
course of the following chapters how much of all this is mirrored in modern literature. But a writer, however modern or post-​Freudian, cannot relinquish the
49
50
‘Psychopathic Characters on the Stage’, in Writings on Art and Literature, Stanford,
Stanford University Press, 1997, quotations in this paragraph, pp. 87–​90.
Ibid., p. 91.
34 Introduction
privilege of knowledge which Hesiod’s Muses bestowed on him at the beginning of Western literature. After Freud, the poet’s point of departure, his source
of inspiration and his aim may be different, but recognition will still be one of
his fundamental purposes. ‘The greatness of true art’, Proust writes in a passage of that Time Regained to which we will return at the end of this book, ‘lay,
I had come to see, elsewhere: we have to rediscover, to reapprehend, to make
ourselves fully aware of that reality, remote from our daily preoccupations,
from which we separate ourselves by an ever greater gulf as the conventional
knowledge which we substitute for it grows thicker and more impermeable,
that reality which it is very easy for us to die without ever having known and
which is, quite simply, our life’.51 Retrouver; ressaisir, faire connaître –​anagnorisis ‘will out’, and because of it ‘real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated
… is literature’.52
∵
A final leap will take us back to the realm of philosophy, where both Plato
and Aristotle had placed anagnorisis, and to our own days. In 2004 Paul
Ricœur published his Parcours de la reconnaissance,53 a volume comprising three essays: the first and last dedicated to the discussion of the more
51
52
53
Proust, p. 931: Temps retrouvé, p. 474.
Discussion on anagnorisis has thrived in the last few decades. Before Kermode and Eco,
Northrop Frye paid considerable attention to it from Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, to Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology,
New York, Harcourt Brace & Co., 19632, and beyond: see Cave’s discussion in Recognitions,
pp. 191–​199. E. Levinas devoted a few pages to it in Totality and Infinity, Amsterdam,
Kluwer Academic, 1980; G. Wunberg followed suit with his Wieder-​Erkennen. Literatur
und ästhetische Wahrnehmung in der Moderne, Tübingen, Narr, 1983. D. Culbertson’s
Poetics of Revelation: Recognition and the Narrative Tradition, Macon GA, Mercier, 1989,
was a milestone, followed by Recognition: The Poetics of Narrative: Interdisciplinary
Studies on Anagnorisis, ed. P.F. Kennedy and M. Lawrence, New York-​Berlin, Peter Lang,
2009. P. Garrido Camacho’s El Tema del Reconocimiento en el Teatro Español del Siglo XVI.
La Teoría de la Anagnôrisis, Madrid, Támesis, 1999, has a more limited scope, but is not by
any means useless.
Paul Ricœur, The Course of Recognition, trans. D. Pellauer, Cambridge MA, Harvard
University Press, 2007. See J. Sunkenberg, ‘Narrative Identity. Recognizing Oneself in
Augustine and Ricoeur’, and C. Tarnopolsky, ‘Recognizing our Misrecognitions. Plato and
the Contemporary Politics of Recognition’, both in Recognition and Modes of Knowledge.
Anagnorisis from Antiquity to Contemporary Theory, ed. T.G. Russo, Edmonton, University
of Alberta Press, 2013, pp. 141–​54 and 241–​259. The stimulating book by P. Markell, Bound
by Recognition, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2003, is explicitly devoted to politics, but makes important suggestions in both the first chapter, ‘From Recognition to
Introduction
35
properly historical-​philosophical dimension (Descartes and Kant in the first,
Hobbes and Hegel the last), while the central one analyses the ‘Greek background’: Ulysses, Oedipus at Colonus, and Aristotle.
This complex and vitalizing enquiry moves from the hypothesis of inverting, ‘on the very level of the grammar’, the verb ‘to recognize’ ‘from its use
in the active voice to its use in the passive voice: I actively recognize things,
persons, myself; I ask, even demand, to be recognized by others’.54 Basing
himself closely on vocabulary and dictionaries, Ricœur moves, for example, from Kantian Rekognition in the first edition of the Critique of Pure
Reason to Hegel’s Anerkennung in the Jena Realphilosophie, and then to
Bergson’s ‘recognition of memories’. However, he meets two fundamental
obstacles: the ‘ruin of representation’, as postulated by Levinas in Husserl’s
last works, and the ‘test’ to which recognition is put by ‘the unrecognizable’ described in ‘pages of a cruel beauty’ in Proust’s Time Regained: pages
which return frequently in the present work and in which recognizing
someone within Time is compared with the reflection on ‘a mystery almost
as disturbing as that of death, of which it is, indeed, as it were the preface
and the harbinger’.55
The passage from Proust also offers a horizon which is different from that
of ‘disconsolate meditation’: namely, the level of ‘the recognition by the reader
in his own self of what the book says’ –​in short, ‘something like reading a life’.
Once more, the way out of the impasse returns, therefore, to Greek thought
and literature, because the Greeks have placed recognition in the realm of ‘recognizing responsibility’.56
In Homer the characters constitute ‘centers of agency’: ‘they are constantly
wondering what to do, coming to some conclusion, and acting’. The first and
most prominent example of this is Ulysses himself, the protagonist –​as will
be seen in Chapter 1 –​of an entire ‘cycle of recognition opened by that of the
father by the son’ and which ‘loops back together with that of filiation by way
of the conjugal relation’: agnition with Telemachus, Penelope, and Laertes.
Disguise, signs, and verbal formulae of recognition are the keys to enter the
universe of Odysseus’ anagnorisis, but Ricœur is careful to draw up the limits
54
55
56
Acknowledgment’, and the third, ‘Tragic Recognition: Action and Identity in Antigone and
Aristotle’.
The Course of Recognition, p. x.
The Course of Recognition, pp. 66–​68; Proust, Time Regained, p. 982.
Here (pp. 69–​72) Ricœur explicitly follows Bernard Williams’s reflection in Shame and
Necessity, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993.
36 Introduction
of anagnorisis proposed by the poem: the recognition the Odyssey presents
is basically –​and entirely, Ricœur mantains –​that of Ulysses, moving in step
with his revenge and presenting itself as necessary to his regaining of power,
and this constitutes a fundamental ‘dissymmetry’. At his own admission ‘the
dramatic peak is attained in the scene of the wife’s recognition, where the
dissymmetry mentioned earlier comes close to yielding to something like a
mutual recognition’.57 Ricœur fails, however, to see that in this scene, as in that
with his mother Anticleia in Hades, the ‘dissymmetry’ has long given way to
reciprocity, to mutual recognition: the simile of the shipwrecked man saved
from the sea’s fury which Homer applies first to Ulysses then to Penelope is
decisive, as we shall note. Equally decisive is his meeting with his mother in the
world of the dead: here Ulysses is the first one to recognize.
Mutual recognition is also that between Helen and Menelaus in Euripides’
Helen in which the woman pronounces the crucial exclamation: ‘to recognize
those we love is a god’. Equally profound and moving are the acts of mutual
recognition between Iphigenia and Orestes in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris
(and, rather than in Goethe’s rewriting, in Gluck’s version, where in the fourth
act the anagnorisis is underlined by a powerful dramatic and musical climax)
or possibly even more so that of Electra and Orestes in Sophocles’ Electra,
where the present study ends.
Ricœur’s second example is more fitting. The play of Sophocles he chooses
is not, as might be expected, Oedipus Rex but Oedipus at Colonus, where the
recognition operates ‘between’ the two tragedies and ‘has the significance
of a retraction at the level of the recognition of responsibility’. The distance
Oedipus covers between Thebes and Colonus is that ‘from misfortune undergone to misfortune assumed’. Putting aside anger and impulse, he now himself suffers and endures what earlier he had enacted, proclaiming his innocence and tolerating his tragedy to the point of dying in complete serenity and
leaving his daughters his last words of love: ‘I loved you as no one else had
ever done’.58 This is indeed the message of Oedipus at Colonus which should
‘remain’, Ricœur concludes: ‘it is the same suffering human being who recognizes himself as agent’.59
At this point Ricœur abandons literature for philosophy: strangely for a
scholar who has analysed the Scriptures with exquisite subtlety, without
57
58
59
The Course of Recognition, pp. 72–​75.
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 1617, ed. G. Avezzù and G. Guidorizzi, Milan, Fondazione
Valla-​Mondadori, 2008: Engl. trans. E.F. Watling, The Theban Plays, Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1947, p. 120.
The Course of Recognition, p. 79.
Introduction
37
ever mentioning the Bible, where, to cite the most obvious, the mutual recognition between God and Abraham, the agnition between Joseph and his
brothers, and even more that between Joseph and Jacob, examined here in
Chapter 5, would all have been directly relevant to his area of enquiry. As it
is, his thought processes lead him to Aristotle, then St. Augustine, and lastly
to Hobbes and Hegel: from action to memory, from promise to gift, and from
social practice to peace: a trajectory leading to ‘mutual recognition’. The first
stop is the Nicomachean Ethics and ‘man’s task’ analysed in terms of happiness,
virtue, and wisdom, before what he perceives is Aristotle’s central contribution in ‘decision’ (prohairesis) and action, spheres in which Ethics and Poetics
admirably meet.
The enquiry thus expands from memory to the Bergsonian moment of the
‘recognition of images’, from promise to active life,60 from capacity to ‘capability’,61 and dissymmetry to reciprocity. Ricœur’s final goals are mutual recognition and reconnaissance, which in French, as in English ‘recognition’, conveys
both the sense of recognizing and of gratitude, its truest and most complete
form. The two passages which end the book (in chronological order though
here inverted) come from Montaigne and Simone Weil. Frantic with grief at
the loss of La Boétie, Montaigne writes in the Essays, ‘defending distance in the
proximity of love and friendship’:
In the friendship I speak of, our souls mingle and blend with each other
so completely that they efface the seam that joined them and cannot find
it again. If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be
expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.62
Simone Weil, on the other hand, celebrates both forms of love, like Aristotle
elevating it to the rank of ‘unique good’:
Two forms of friendship exist: meeting and separation. These are indissoluble. They encompass the same good, friendship. […] Encompassing the
same good, they are equally good; lovers and friends have two desires: one
is the desire to love to such a point as to compenetrate one another and
60
61
62
The specific reference here is to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, Chicago and
London, University of Chicago Press, 1958.
For the second of these Ricœur was inspired by Amartya Sen’s On Ethics and Economics,
Oxford, Blackwell, 1987.
The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. D.M. Frame, Stanford, Stanford University Press,
1957, p. 139. See O. Guerrier, Rencontre et Reconnaissance. Les “Essais” ou le jeu du hazard et
de la verité, Paris, Garnier, 201
38 Introduction
become a single being; the other is the desire to love to such a point that
if separated by half the earthly globe their union would suffer no loss.63
Mutual recognition and reciprocal reconnaissance do indeed imply meeting
and separation, and union which remains stable in both conditions. Simone
Weil, however, read the recognition scene between Sophocles’ Electra and
Orestes in striking detail: a scene focused on com-​passion and mutual suffering, and bearing strange similarities to that between Jesus and Mary Magdalen
in John’s Gospel.64 Towards the end, this book will move in the same direction,
in the company of Paul Ricœur and Simone Weil.
63
64
Simone Weil, Amitié, in Œuvres, Paris, Gallimard, 1999, p. 755: my translation.
Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks London-​New York, Ark,
1987. And see the last chapter of the present book.
­c hapter 1
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
The Universe of Recognition
1
Aristotle chose three recognition scenes from the Odyssey in his treatment of
anagnorisis –​those between Odysseus and Eurycleia and between Odysseus
and the swineherds as example of anagnorisis by means of an ‘acquired’ sign
(the scar) and that between the hero and Alcinous as model of recognition
by means of memory. He also mentioned, somewhat mysteriously, the ‘bath’
scene in connection with paralogism and with Homer’s art of ‘purveying falsehoods’. Indeed, Aristotle realized that anagnorisis is a fundamental element
of the Odyssey. When, in ­chapter 24 of the Poetics, he discusses the epic and
in particular the differences between epic and tragedy, he draws a distinction
between the Iliad and the Odyssey maintaining that the former is ‘simple and
fatal’ while the latter is ‘complex’ because ‘pervaded by recognition’.1 Indeed,
what with recognition, méconnaissance and revelation, there are over twenty –​
over thirty if we consider as individual episodes the Hades group –​such scenes
in the Odyssey. In this chapter, I shall examine them one by one, following
the complex plot of the poem, in an attempt to show their meaning and their
thematic and structural import. I shall then turn to modern versions of the
Odysseus story to explain their approaches to anagnorisis in the general context of nostos –​the hero’s return home –​and of the transformation of Odysseus
into a Nobody. Joyce’s Ulysses and Borges’ Odyssey xxiii will provide us with a
first answer to this question. In the second section of the chapter we shall follow the development of pseudo-​identities, and the growing tensions between
desire for recognition and its increasing difficulty. The case of Martin Guerre,
Dumas’ Count of Montecristo, and Pirandello’s The Late Mattia Pascal will constitute our most important texts.
At the beginning of the Odyssey we are told that the hero of whom the poet
will sing is a man (aner) of many ways who wandered for a long time after
he destroyed Troy, who saw many cities of men and knew their minds, who
suffered many woes on the sea, struggling for his life and the return of his
1 Poetics, 1459 b 14–​16.
© Piero Boitani, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004453678_003
40 Chapter 1
men.2 Almost twenty years have passed since Odysseus left Ithaca, his wife
Penelope, his baby son Telemachus, his father and mother. He has spent ten at
Troy, another ten wandering around the Mediterranean because of Poseidon’s
hostility. In the latter’s absence, the gods now assemble and on Athena’s urging decide that Odysseus, who has been forced to stay for many years with
the nymph Calypso on the remote island of Ogygia, should now be allowed to
return home as he most fervently wishes. The situation in Ithaca is not good.
Penelope, Odysseus’ faithful wife, is surrounded by the powerful Suitors who
want to marry her and, in the meantime, live off her husband’s patrimony.
Telemachus, now a man of twenty, is powerless. Athena, however, appears to
him disguised as Mentes, leader of the Taphians, a friend. She urges him to
go seek news of his father abroad and just before Phemius, the singer, starts
recounting the sad story of the Greeks’ nostoi from Troy, the goddess disappears ‘like a bird soaring high in the air’. Full of wonder, Telemachus does not
recognize her, but thinks this must be a divinity (i, 322–​4).
2 The edition I use of the Odyssey is the second Valla-​Mondadori one in six volumes (Milan,
2004); the commentary in the first edition was subsequently published by the Clarendon
Press at Oxford in three volumes, 1988–​1992. The English translation generally is Richmond
Lattimore’s, New York, Harper & Row, 1965. I do, however, also use Robert Fagles’ translation, New York, Penguin, 1996, as well as Robert Fitzgerald’s, Alexander Pope’s, and George
Chapman’s –​in order to show their differences in interpretation and above all in style.
A note will always indicate when I use a translation different from Lattimore’s. A new edition with commentary, by S. Pulleyn, has just started to be published, with vol. i: Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2019. Apart from the cited commentary, the studies that have most
influenced my treatment of the Odyssey are: N. Austin, Archery at the Dark of the Moon.
Poetic Problems in Homer’s Odyssey, Berkeley and London, University of California Press,
1975; Odysseus/​Ulysses, ed. H. Bloom, New York and Philadelphia, Chelsea, 1991; P. Citati,
La mente colorata. Ulisse e l’Odissea, Milan, Mondadori, 2002; S. Goldhill, The Poet’s Voice.
Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991;
B. Graziosi, Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2002; B. Graziosi, Homer, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016; B. Graziosi, ‘Ritorno e
fondazione da Omero a Ugo Foscolo’, in B. Graziosi and A. Barchiesi, Ritorni difficili, Rome,
Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2020, pp. 13-​54; D. Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient
Greeks; I. Malkin, The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity in the Odyssey, Berkeley,
University of California Press, 1999; S. Montiglio, Wandering in Ancient Culture, Chicago and
London, University of Chicago Press, 2005; S. Montiglio, From Villain to Hero: Odysseus in
Ancient Thought, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2011; S. Murnaghan, Disguise and
Recognition in the Odyssey, Lanham, Lexington Books, 20112; G.A. Privitera, Il ritorno del guerriero. Lettura dell’Odissea, Turin, Einaudi, 2005; P. Pucci, Odysseus Polutropos. Intertextual
Readings in the Odyssey and the Iliad, Ithaca NY and London, Cornell University Press, 1987;
P. Pucci, The Song of the Sirens. Essays on Homer, Lanham MD, Rowman and Littlefield, 1998;
S. Said, Homer and the Odyssey, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011; M.C. Legaspi, Wisdom
in Classical and Biblical Tradition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018, Homer: A Collection
of Critical Essays, ed. G. Steiner and R. Fagles, Englewood Cliffs NJ, Prentice-​Hall, 1962.
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
41
With this short scene, in which the meeting between a god and a man provides
no full knowledge, but a sudden illumination and understanding, the theme of
recognition is first sounded in the poem. Telemachus perceives the mystery –​the
readers know it. Soon provided with a ship, Odysseus’ son reaches Pylos, the home
of old Nestor, where Telemachus introduces himself to the king and asks him for
information. Seized by wonder, Nestor recognizes him because his words are so
like Odysseus’ (iii 122–​5), and immediately afterwards, when Athena, disguised
as Mentor, once more disappears, the old wise man is quick to know her as Pallas
(iii, 371–​4).
Nestor, however, knows very little about Odysseus –​he can only tell Telemachus
about the strife-​ridden beginning of the nostoi, the returns of the Greek warriors
from Troy, and of the fate of Agamemnon, killed by his wife and her lover when
he came back to Mycenae. He advises Telemachus to go to Menelaus, who will
know much more, and offers to have him accompanied to Sparta by his own son,
Pisistratus. When Telemachus and Pisistratus reach Sparta, Menelaus is celebrating the double wedding of his son and his daughter. The palace is splendid and,
upon entering it, Telemachus, leaning his head close to his companion ‘so that
none of the others might hear him’, comments that the house of Zeus on Mount
Olympus must be like this inside. But Menelaus overhears him and replies that
no mortal can rival Zeus, that he has suffered much before being able to bring all
this back home, and that he wishes he could live with only a third of all the goods
if only the men were alive who died at Troy. For one in particular he grieves –​
Odysseus, now so long gone, and no one knows whether he is alive or dead. This
makes Telemachus weep and hold up before his eyes his purple mantle –​a gesture
which, as ancient commentators already remarked, we will see Odysseus repeat
later in the poem. Menelaus perceives this and is uncertain whether he should
leave it to his guest to name his father or speak himself first. This recognition
scene, however, is much more complex than the one with Nestor. While Menelaus
is thus pondering, Helen comes out of her chamber and, entering the court room,
immediately speaks to her husband. She asks him whether he already knows the
names of his guests, and promptly adds: ‘I think I never saw such a likeness neither/​in man nor woman, and wonder takes me as I look on him,/​as this man has
a likeness to the son of great-​hearted Odysseus’ (iv, 140–​3).
Helen cannot, of course, remember the features of Telemachus himself,
whom, if ever, she saw when he was a baby. She is, rather, quick to notice the
resemblance between father and son –​as all women are, remarks Athenaeus
quoting this passage.3 The images of the past, of the Trojan war fought for
3 Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 190 e.
42 Chapter 1
her (145–​6), rise before her eyes as the presence of Telemachus evokes the
figure of Odysseus. Menelaus, whom we have already seen wondering about
Telemachus’ reaction to his words, at first confirms his wife’s impression:4
‘Odysseus’ feet were like this man’s, his hands were like this,/​and the glances of
his eyes and his head and the hair growing’. Finally, what Aristotle calls aisthesthai, perception or awareness of what one has seen or heard, takes place: when
Menelaus talks about Odysseus, the young man weeps (151–​4).
A scenically and psychologically complex mechanism of recognition is thus
set in motion: ‘likeness’ and memory; gesture, sight and awareness are about
to produce a ‘reasoning’ the result of which may be anagnorisis. The process,
however, is interrupted by Pisistratus, who declares openly that this is indeed
Telemachus the son of Odysseus (155–​167). The denouement is thus much
swifter than in the similar scene later in the poem when Odysseus reveals himself to Alcinous, but the function of the recognition plot is as subtle. It heightens
and then fulfils our expectations, but at the same time it does not do much more.
The recognition scenes in Books iii and iv –​anagnorisis ‘by means of memory’ –​concern Telemachus, establish his identity and his status in the world of
heroes while simultaneously evoking Odysseus himself, the protagonist until
now absent from the poem. Recognition is one of the devices through which the
‘Telemachy’ –​as this part of the poem is called –​becomes and is the ‘Odyssey’.
Homer’s purpose is confirmed by a splendid scene that takes place but a
hundred lines after the anagnorisis of Telemachus by Menelaus and Helen.
While entertaining the guests with her reminiscences, the queen recounts a
curious episode of the Trojan war. Bent on a spying mission, Odysseus flogged
himself, then threw a worthless piece of cloth sheet on his shoulders and,
looking like a servant or a beggar, entered Troy, where all the inhabitants were
taken in by his trick. Helen alone recognized him even in this disguise and
questioned him, but he eluded her. Only after she bathed him, anointed him
with olive oil and put some clothing on him, and only after she swore not to
disclose the identity of her guest to the Trojans, did Odysseus reveal ‘all the
purpose’ of the Greeks. Having gathered much information and killed a few
enemies, he finally returned to the Greek camp.
This episode is particularly interesting because, while building up the personality of Odysseus as ‘man of many ways’, it establishes a pattern of disguise-​
recognition which will become prominent in the second part of the poem
(the bath motif will be present in the climactic scenes with Eurycleia and
Penelope).5 An archetypal comic feature is thus projected both onto the past
4 Echoed by Virgil, Aeneid iii 490.
5 See S. Murnaghan, Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey.
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
43
(Troy) and the future (the nostos). Finally, as is typical of the complex plot of
the Odyssey, the episode is introduced as a story within the story, which Helen
tells to entertain her guests and her husband (as well as to present herself
in a better light). And this mini-​Odyssey where disguise and recognition are
the dominant plot-​devices is significantly announced by the teller herself as
‘seemly’ and ‘plausible’ (eoikota) and judged by the audience, as Menelaus puts
it, as having been recounted ‘in the right, proportioned fashion’ (kata moiran).
Eminently artistic and fully human, the scene of Odysseus the beggar recognized by Helen in Troy finds its counterpart in the next anagnorisis of the poem.
In telling Telemachus of his own nostos, Menelaus reveals that he was told by
the Old Man of the Sea, Proteus, how Odysseus dwells against his will with
the nymph Calypso and cannot return home because he has no ship. While
Telemachus prepares to go back to Ithaca and the Suitors organize an attack
against his boat, we are finally, with Book v, brought to Odysseus. On Athena’s
request, Hermes is sent by Zeus to announce to Calypso the gods’ will –​that
Odysseus must be let go. When, after his flight over the waves, Hermes reaches
Ogygia and enters Calypso’s cave (the beautiful surroundings of which are the
prototype of all subsequent Edenic loci amoeni in Western literature), the two
gods stand face to face (v, 77–​80):
nor did the shining goddess Calypso
fail to recognize him when she saw him come into her presence;
for the immortal gods are not such as to go unrecognized
by one another not even if one lives in a far home.
Homer points out clearly that anagnorisis is a purely human affair: man alone
forgets himself, suffers change and must therefore recognize and be recognized.
The gods, forever numinous, always have superior knowledge, and hence cannot fail to know each other at first sight. The contrast between these encounters and those between deities and human beings is striking. Telemachus, we
have seen, does not recognize Athena; Nestor knows her only because she disappears suddenly. Later in the Odyssey, even Odysseus fails to recognize Pallas
disguised as a young shepherd, though in the Iliad (ii, 182) he recognizes her
voice. I shall go back to this theme in a later chapter. Here, to underline the difference between the unfailing knowledge which the gods possess of each other
and the doubts and the efforts that human recognition of the divinity involves,
I shall only recall that King Alcinous maintains before his court that Odysseus
is a man because, he argues, gods in the past have always shown themselves
clearly to the Phaeacians, sitting beside them and feasting with them. Even
when encountered alone, a god does not conceal himself to an inhabitant of
44 Chapter 1
Scheria, because the Phaeacians are not common mortals: they are like the
Cyclopes and the Giants, ‘very close’ to the gods, and indeed, as Nausicaa tells
her maids, their ‘friends’ (vii, 199–​206); or, as Zeus himself puts it (v, 35), ankhitheoi, near to and like the gods.
It is among the Phaeacians that the next recognition scene of the Odyssey is
set, prepared by a build-​up that spans the whole of Book viii. Odysseus, freed
by Calypso through Hermes’ intervention, sails on his raft towards Ithaca, is
wrecked by Poseidon and lands at Scheria after two days and two nights of
swimming in the open sea. At this point, he is really a Nobody. Nameless, naked
and encrusted with salt, he appears to Nausicaa and begs her have pity on him.
Then, concealed in mist and guided by Athena (whom he does not recognize),
Odysseus follows Nausicaa into her father’s palace, where, still unknown, he
implores the queen and all the Phaeacians to protect him and bring him home.
The following day, a banquet is held. Alcinous summons the blind bard
Demodocus, who starts singing a story, ‘the fame of which reaches the wide
heaven’ and which concerns the quarrel between Achilles and Odysseus at
Troy.6 Odysseus, ‘taking in his ponderous hands the great mantle dyed in/​sea-​
purple, drew it over his head and veiled his fine features,/​shamed for tears
running down his face before the Phaeacians’ (viii, 84–​86). Every time the
singer pauses, Odysseus takes the mantle away from his head and wipes off
the tears, but every time the singer starts again, the hero covers his head and
weeps. Alcinous, who alone notices this, stops the bard and proposes athletic
games. During these, Odysseus is challenged by Alcinous’ son, Euryalus, and
throws the discus much further than any of the young Phaeacians are able to.
He also proclaims that he has always been excellent at shooting with bow and
arrow: indeed, during the war at Troy only Philoctetes surpassed him in this.
Then, the banquet resumes.
Demodocus now sings of the love story of Ares and Aphrodite –​a wonderful erotic-​comic story of cuckoldry –​and the Phaeacians dance. As the meal
begins, Odysseus sends a piece of his pork to the bard, ‘for’, he says, ‘with all
peoples upon the earth singers are entitled/​to be cherished and to their share
of respect, since the Muse has taught them/​her own way, and since she loves
all the company of singers’. At the end of the banquet, Odysseus addresses
Demodocus (viii, 487–​498):
6 Of which there is no trace in the Iliad nor in any of the epic fragments. In his comment ad
viii, 75, J.B. Hainsworth maintains that opposing Odysseus to Achilles is, however, significant, the former representing a new idea of the hero (intelligence) against the latter, the old
type (force).
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
45
Demodocus, above all mortals beside I prize you.
Surely the Muse, Zeus’ daughter, or else Apollo has taught you,
for all too right following the tale you sing the Achaeans’
venture, all they did and had done to them, all the sufferings
of these Achaeans, as if you had been there yourself or heard it
from one who was. Come to another part of the story, sing us
the wooden horse, which Epaeus made with Athena helping,
the stratagem great Odysseus filled once with men and brought it
to the upper city, and it was these men who sacked Ilion.
If you can tell me the course of all these things as they happened,
I will speak of you before all mankind, and tell them
how freely the goddess gave you the magical gift of singing.
This is a crucial moment in Western literature. The hero of a story is asking a
poet to sing his own past. This hero, hitherto unknown and nameless to the
people in whose presence he stands, is going to become known as Odysseus
himself, the man who burnt ‘the topless towers of Ilium’, the very man of whom
Demodocus has already sung. Odysseus, who wept and covered his face the
first time, now weeps and covers his face again, having himself provoked the
tear-​bringing memory. As a woman weeps over the body of her husband when
she sees him dying, fallen in defence of his city, and as the enemies drag her
away in slavery (523–​530), thus Odysseus sheds his tears.7 Once more, Alcinous
is the only person who notices this. He stops the singer, but this time openly
asks Odysseus to reveal his name and his land. Why, he adds, does the fate of
Troy awake his grief? The gods themselves did this, ‘and spun the destruction/​
of peoples, for the sake of the singing of men hereafter’.8 Has his guest lost a
relative or a companion at Troy?
With this question Book viii ends. Book ix opens with the revelation of
Odysseus’ identity, preceded by the sentence that Virgil’s Aeneas and Dante’s
Ugolino will echo9: ‘But now/​you’re set on probing the bitter pains I’ve borne,/​
so I’m to weep and grieve, it seems, still more’:
I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, known to the world
for every kind of craft –​my fame has reached the skies.
Sunny Ithaca is my home.10
7
8
9
10
I shall go back to this simile in the last chapter.
viii, 579–​580. Again, I shall return to this momentous formulation in the last chapter.
Aeneid ii, 3; Inferno xxxiii, 4–​5.
ix, 19–​21: these, and the preceding lines, in Fagles’ translation.
46 Chapter 1
Thus speaks Odysseus to Alcinous, and immediately starts recounting his
adventures, which will take up Books ix to xii of the poem.
Aristotle considered this episode an example of anagnorisis ‘by means of
memory’, and there is no doubt that in the complex and magnificent mechanism of this long scene, which begins virtually at the beginning of Book viii
and ends almost six hundred lines later at the beginning of Book xx, memory
works as the spark, a simple and yet incredibly deep and complicated activity
of the human mind. Odysseus is twice reminded of Troy; he twice reacts by
weeping. Finally, Alcinous must ask him who he is, and Odysseus tells him.
The first observation one could make on this passage is that, literally speaking, it constitutes no recognition scene. Odysseus reveals himself; he is not recognized by Alcinous. Yet, if anagnorisis is a shift from ignorance to knowledge,
this is a scene of recognition, and in a much deeper sense than one would
gather from the surface of Aristotle’s Poetics. In hearing Demodocus’ first song,
Odysseus’ memory is stirred, he re-​lives his past. He, the man who landed in
Scheria alone, naked and covered with salt, is the same man who quarreled
with Achilles at Troy, the man about whom a poet now sings. Nobody and hero
of the mythic war: the two images overlap and clash in his mind, and Odysseus
weeps. This is the awareness, the aisthesthai that follows on seeing or hearing
something, which Aristotle considers the central mechanism of recognition
through memory. The second time, however, it is Odysseus himself who wants
Demodocus to sing of the Trojan horse, his own greatest triumph as a trickster
and strategist, thereby himself provoking his tears and prompting Alcinous’
question. In short, Odysseus seems deliberately bent on recuperating his identity after ten years: and, at a deeper level, this scene becomes one of recognition, while it functions as self-​revelation and represents for Alcinous and the
Phaeacians an acquisition of knowledge.
All these processes are, as Aristotle maintains, set in motion by memory.
One could speculate if, in Aristotelian terms, this is pure ‘memory’ (mneme)
or rather ‘reminiscence’ (anamnesis), the difference between the two being,
according to the De Memoria, that in remembering one keeps in his mind
things one has already apprehended, while in reminiscing one ‘finds again’
things that one had apprehended but not kept. In other words, we could discuss whether in Odysseus’ case there has been an interruption of consciousness, a lacuna which must be filled by means of an effort and a ‘search’ to bring
back to awareness his past experience, or whether his memory has never lost
its data. So far, we have seen very little of the hero of the Odyssey, but at least
on one crucial occasion he has shown us that he is fully aware of his past.
In the midst of the storm, just before his raft capsizes, despairing Odysseus
wishes he had been killed by the Trojans over the body of dead Achilles (v,
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
47
306–​12). When Demodocus sings the first time about the quarrel between
Odysseus and Achilles, it is, then, Odysseus’ mneme that is struck as if by lightning. But in the four hundred lines that separate the first from the third of
Demodocus’ songs (the hero reacts with simple joy to the story of Ares and
Aphrodite), Odysseus’ memory acquires that element of ‘willingness’ which
Aristotle associates with anamnesis. By asking the bard to sing of the wooden
horse, Odysseus shows that he wants to be reminded of his own past. In short,
Odysseus’ memory, which at first appears, in Proustian terms, quite ‘involuntary’, gradually becomes ‘voluntary’ –​a deliberate recherche.
However, it seems to me far more important to note that Odysseus’ memory
is itself stirred by the Muse, the Muse being, according to Hesiod’s Theogony,
the daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, Memory herself. It is the song of the
bard that reminds Odysseus of his other self, the Greek hero. Deep down, then,
this scene is one of anagnorisis dia tes poieseos, recognition by means of poetry.
And deeper still, this is the poet’s own indirect recognition of himself and his
art. When he asks Odysseus who he is, Homer makes Alcinous say that the
tragic fate of men is willed by the gods themselves ‘for the sake of the singing
of men hereafter’.
This statement –​which Nietzsche calls ‘reckless, horrifying, and unbelievable’, and which Borges quotes more than once –​is quite dizzying.11 We are
listening to a poet celebrating himself –​a procedure not uncommon in the
Odyssey, where a poet, Phemius, sings of the nostoi of the Achaeans at the very
beginning of the poem (i, 325ff) and where this very singer is, together with
the herald, the only man saved by Odysseus when he takes his final revenge
on the Suitors (xxii, 330 ff.). Of the blind Demodocus, Odysseus himself says
that he ‘is like the gods in his singing’ (ix, 4); and Odysseus is in turn praised
by Alcinous for telling the story of his adventures ‘with form in [his] words
and wise thoughts inside’, ‘expertly like a singer’ (xi, 367–​8) –​an indirect
11
Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschlisches, ii, 189, where, after exclaiming,
‘How paradoxical Homer can be!’, he goes on to ask if there can be ‘etwas Verwegeneres,
Schauerlicheres, Unglaublicheres’ than the passage in question: ed. G. Colli and
M. Montinari, München, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag-​De Gruyter, 1999, pp. 462–​463.
For Borges (and Mallarmé), see ­chapter 10, n. 22. However, the concept and the formulation are not uncommon in Homer’s poems: see for example Iliad vi, 357, where Helen tells
Hector: ‘Zeus planted a killing doom within us both,/​so even for generations still unborn/​
we will be matter for song’. W.F. Otto, Theophania, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann,
1979, pp. 27–​29, quotes another instance in Euripides’ Trojan Women, 1240 ff. and refers
to Hölderlin’s epigram, ‘Sophokles’: ‘Many tried in vain to joyfully say the most joyous,/​
Here finally it speaks to me, here within mournfulness’: Hölderlin, Werke und Briefe, ed.
F. Beissner and J. Schmidt, Frankfurt am Main, Insel, 1982, i, p. 36.
48 Chapter 1
compliment by a character in the story to the poet who has devised the story
itself and has it told by another character within it. It suddenly dawns on us
that the Odyssey contains, amongst other things, a poetics,12 and that this, in
some oblique way, is related to recognition.
The release of emotion that the anagnorisis through memory and poetry
at the end of Book viii produces in us as readers is immense. For we are fully
aware all the time that this is Odysseus, of whom we read in the Iliad, who
destroyed Troy and is now here before our eyes after a terrible storm. Yet we follow with mounting suspense the process by which Homer makes him known
to Alcinous and to himself from Demodocus’ first song and the reaction it produces in Odysseus to the hero’s boasting that in bow-​shooting only Philoctetes
surpassed him, to Demodocus’ third song, Odysseus’ second bout of weeping,
and his final revelation. There is, here, a deep sense in which anagnosis –​ reading –​becomes anagnorisis. In reading a scene such as this we recognize who
and what Odysseus is, what he –​a nobody who had been a great hero –​means
to us, but we also recognize how our emotions, our memory, and poetry, work.
We begin to have a glimpse of what we ourselves are like when we read a poem
like the Odyssey.13
∵
Homer makes us recognize Odysseus as a person, a human being with his own
history, his own experiences, his own feelings. Homer and Odysseus devote the
next four Books of the poem to the reconstruction of his past and with regard
to the recognition of his identity. These Books are shaped like a great ‘V’, at
the beginning of which Odysseus is still the Greek hero who destroyed Troy,
while at the bottom he is, literally, nobody, and at the end starts re-​acquiring
his personality.
In Books ix–​x of the Odyssey, we have two sets of recognition scenes. In
the first, among the many adventures of the nostos he now relates to Alcinous
the meeting with the one-​eyed Cyclops, Polyphemus, stands out. When
Polyphemus asks him his name, Odysseus replies: ‘Nobody’ –​Outis. After
blinding the giant and escaping, the hero shouts at Polyphemus that his real
12
13
See P. Citati, La mente colorata. Ulisse e l’Odissea, pp. 161–​168.
Nor can we separate this from the way in which, after three thousand years of Odyssey
reciting and reading, the anagnosis is for us tied to the other sense of anagnorisis –​re-​
cognition, Wiedererkennen –​and the peculiar pleasure we, as the Problems observe, derive
from it. See Introduction, pp. pp. 27–29.
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
49
name is Odysseus, son of Laertes, ‘destroyer of cities’. Polyphemus, then, recognizes: a prophecy is now being fulfilled, he says, which he had received a
long time before, according to which he would lose ‘the sight of his eye’ at
the hands of Odysseus. But he was on the lookout for a handsome, tall, strong
man: instead, he who has just robbed him of his eye is a small, puny, weak man,
‘good for nothing’ (outidamos).
In his recognition, Polyphemus bitterly discovers the relativity of the common notions of size and scale, but remains profoundly ignorant about Odysseus’
nature, taking outidamos –​worth nothing –​for outis, no-​one. But ou-​tis is the
same as me-​tis, Odysseus’ supreme quality –​metis –​the knowing, cunning
mind.14 Odysseus says so himself, when he laughs at the other Cyclopes’ reaction to Polyphemus’ invocation for help: ‘ “if you’re alone, and nobody (outis)
is trying to overpower you now –​look, it must be a plague sent here by mighty
Zeus … You’d better pray to your father, Lord Poseidon” … but laughter filled my
heart, that my name (onoma) and perfect cunning (metis) had deceived him’.15
One cannot reproach Polyphemus for not knowing Greek well, but the
blindness Odysseus forces on him is a perfect contre-​figure and contrapasso for
his total ignorance, an agnoia from which the gnosis of recognition emerges as
partial and external (his enemy’s size, but not his intelligence). But Odysseus,
too, remains trapped in his wordplay: he tenaciously hangs on to his identity,
but cannot avoid going the way that leads him to nothingness, to ‘no-​one-​ness’.
For he will really be a nobody when he ends up in Ogygia, Calypso’s island, and
a nobody again when he reaches Scheria, the land of the Pheacians. ‘Nobody’
is the name of a painful katabasis down into the truth –​nobody, just a ‘bare,
forked animal’, without heroic identity, without royal insignia, without a past;
suspended in the timeless aura of Calypso the ‘concealer’, he shall retrieve his
name by weeping at Demodocus’ song.
Odysseus hangs on to his identity and to his humanity. He rejects Calypso’s
offer of immortality ‘without aging’, deliberately choosing mortality and
Penelope’s old age (v, 215–​24). He resists the temptations of the Lotus Eaters
in Book ix and the Sirens’ enchantments in Book xii, both of which are
attempts on his, and his companions’, memory. Nor is there perhaps a more
justly famous icon in the ancient imagination than that of Odysseus who, tied
of his own will to the mast of his ship and having filled his men’s ears with
wax, yet is himself listening to the Sirens’ song which offers him pleasure and
14
15
F. Frontisi-​Ducroux, ‘Ulysse en personne’, in F. Frontisi-​Ducroux and J.-​P. Vernant, Dans
l’œil du miroir, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1997, pp. 13–​50.
ix, 456–463, in Fagles’ translation, with several changes.
50 Chapter 1
knowledge.16 For the Sirens, like the Muses of Demodocus, know all the pains
Achaeans and Trojans suffered during the War, and like the Muses of Homer
and Hesiod, know all that happens on earth. Odysseus rejects this total, epic
song and the Sirens’ knowledge because, as Circe has warned him (xii, 39–​54),
this is pure illusion, leading to death. The Sirens sit in a beautiful meadow, but
the beach before it is piled with bone-​heaps of men now rotted away. Odysseus
knows that the only “good” knowledge is returning home (xiii, 41–​46), that
mere knowledge of the past of the Trojan war and mere knowledge of events,
such as that the Sirens offer, will bring death. He rejects this kind of knowledge,
but poised between two attitudes, will not miss the experience.
Odysseus, then, does not forget himself –​it is what happens to him that
makes him lose his identity. When he enters the world of the marvelous and
the fantastic, of the sea which reveals mysterious countries, strange peoples
and terrible monsters to him, he is still Odysseus. But when, after two years
of wandering, after one year with Circe and seven with Calypso, he lands on
Alcinous’ island, he is Nobody.
The play with his identity, however, is much more internally articulate
than the mere plot surface of the poem would seem to disclose. In Book xi,
Odysseus, obeying Circe’s prompting, goes on what could well turn out to be
his last journey, to the land of the dead. Here, a whole series of recognition
scenes gives us food for thought. First, as soon as the blood of the sacrifice is
spilt on the misty shores of the land of the Cymmerians, Odysseus recognizes
and is recognized by one of his companions, Elpenor, who has just died falling
off the roof of Circe’s house because he was drunk (xi, 51–​83). Then Anticleia,
Odysseus’ own mother, appears. He recognizes her and weeps but does not let
her drink the blood –​Tiresias must do that first in order to prophesy Odysseus’
future. And the soothsayer comes, recognizes and is recognized (90–​1), drinks
the blood and foretells the future. At the end of his speech, Odysseus asks him a
crucial question: ‘I see before me now the soul of my perished mother/, but she
sits beside the blood in silence, and has not yet deigned/ to look directly at her
own son and speak a word to me/. Tell me, lord, what will make her know me
and know my presence?’ (141–​4). Clearly, one of the purposes of the nekyia –​
the evocation of the dead –​is recognition. By drinking the blood, Tiresias
replies, the ghosts will tell Odysseus the truth. The ‘dark-​clouding’, hot blood
16
xii, 188. See P. Pucci, The Song of the Syrens, Oxford, Rowman & Littlefield, 1998; L. Spina
and M. Bettini, Le Mythe des sirènes, Paris, Belin, 2010. For the popularity and interpretation of this image in early Christian theology and literature, see H. Rahner, ‘Odysseus at
the Mast’, in his Greek Myths and Christian Mystery, trans. B. Battershaw, London, Burns
and Oates, 1963, pp. 328–​386.
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
51
of sheep is the means through which the dead acquire their consciousness and
memory anew and through which a totally un-​Aristotelian anagnorisis will be
constructed. If only for a short time, the sap itself of the victims gives life back
to the departed. Thom Gunn has beautifully caught the essence of this mysterious fiction in his ‘The Book of the Dead’17:
Slowly the form took body: they could see
Blood flow down the diaphanous throat, slow, stay,
Clot, till the neck became opaque. And he,
Tiresias, stood before them, heavy as they.
Odysseus therefore lets Anticleia drink, and she recognizes him instantly (153).
The scene that follows –​a supreme scene of anagnorisis and one which, as
we shall see in a later chapter, became a model in Western Literature –​brings
together many motifs.
Here, Odysseus finds home again –​his family, his very mother. She asks him
what leads him to Hades, if he is coming from Troy after much wandering, if he
has been to Ithaca and seen his wife. He replies that he has not yet reached his
country, and asks her how she died, whether his father and son still have his
‘dignity’ and their inheritance, whether his wife is faithful to him. She answers
the last question first: yes, Penelope is faithful; Telemachus administers his
lands;18 but Laertes is in the country, he sleeps in the dirt next to the fire in
winter, on fallen leaves outside in summer –​he lies there grieving for Odysseus,
longing for his return. She herself, Anticleia, did not die pierced by Artemis’
arrows or by long, slow illness –​‘it was my longing for you, your cleverness/​and
your gentle ways, that took the sweet spirit of life from me’. It is this sentence
that moves Odysseus. He now tries to embrace the ghost he tries three times
and three times he fails, for she fades away like a shadow. With ‘sorrow sharpened’, Odysseus then asks his mother another crucial question:
Mother, why will you not wait for me, when I am trying
to hold you, so that even in Hades with our arms embracing
we can both take the satisfaction of dismal mourning?
Or are you nothing but an image that proud Persephone
sent my way, to make me grieve all the more for sorrow?
17
18
Which, however, describes Tiresias’ own materialization –​unlike the Odyssey. See the
‘Book of the Dead’, in Collected Poems, London, Faber, 1993, p. 104, lines 5–​8.
Some kind of short circuit takes place here, for Telemachus does in no way ‘administer’
(nemetai) his father’s estates. Heubeck’s comment ad 181–​203 is not resolutive.
52 Chapter 1
Anticleia’s reply is quick and precise:
Oh my child, ill-​fated beyond all other mortals,
this is not Persephone, daughter of Zeus, beguiling you,
but it is only what happens, when they die, to all mortals.
The sinews no longer hold the flesh and bones together,
and once the spirit has left the white bones, all the rest
of the body is made subject to the fire’s strong fury,
but the soul flitters out like a dream and flies away.19
The recognition scene between mother and son brings Odysseus nearer home
in spirit while he is furthest away from it in the flesh. The emotional weight
this anagnorisis carries is enormous. A man finds his mother, whom he did not
know had died, and finds out she was killed by nostalgia (ponos: sorrow) and
discovers that his father is dying because of his being away. It is an immensely
painful recognition, and one that, with its personal sorrow, brings home a still
more painful truth, that of the ultimate destiny of a human being, death. That
body which incarnates our emotions, our very being children of parents, vanishes forever. What is left is the soul, like a shadow, a dream, an image (eidolon)
of what has been. Walter Otto called it the ‘Sein des Gewesen’, the ‘being of
having been’.20 At its degree zero, anagnorisis is indeed a shift from ignorance
to knowledge –​to the kind of absolute and extreme knowledge that recognition in a nekyia will always have.
And yet at the same time the recognition between mother and son moves
towards another, different direction –​it brings her back to life again for a
moment, makes her take part in the world of the living, of Laertes, Penelope,
Telemachus. Behind the shadow of death is the throbbing world of life, and
both are inextricably intertwined in the final truth of recognition: ‘Therefore/​
you must strive back to the light with all speed’, Anticleia recommends to
Odysseus with her last words.
Immediately afterwards, Odysseus re-​enters the world of myth. He sees
the great women –​Tyro, Alcmena, Megara, Jocasta, Chloris, Leda, Phaedra –​
and the great men –​Minos, Orion, Titius, Tantalus, Sisyphus. The eidolon of
19
20
xi, 210–​214 and 216–​222. Heubeck, ad 217–​20, comments that ‘Anticleia’s answer neatly
summarizes the main points of Homeric belief concerning the psykhe’ and gives references. But see also E. Rohde’s classic Psyche. Seelencult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der
Griechen, 2 vols., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010 (1898), and Psyche, trans.
W.B. Hillis, London, Routledge, 2010 (1925).
Otto, Theophania, p. 52.
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
53
Heracles recognizes him (xi, 615). In between the two groups, after the interruption of Alcinous’ queen, Arete (who imposes a pause on the tale and our
growing gloom, reminding us that we are still in a story within a story, and in
the world of the living), anagnorisis brings Odysseus back to Troy. He sees,
is recognized by, and talks to Agamemnon, Achilles and Ajax. Setting up a
contrast between his fatal return and Odysseus’ own, which will be a leitmotif in the poem down to its end, Agamemnon tells his friend how, at the end
of his nostos, he was killed by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, tries to embrace
him and asks him where his son Orestes lives. He also warns him against the
unfaithfulness of wives and recommends that he be careful even with truthful Penelope!
Ajax, still enraged at the decision the Greeks ruled in favour of Odysseus
over possession of dead Achilles’ arms, refuses to talk to him and goes off
into the darkness –​a scene which the author of the Sublime called ‘grand’ on
account of Ajax’s ‘sublime’ silence, and which was imitated by Virgil in Book vi
of the Aeneid, when Aeneas meets Dido’s shade in Hades.21
Achilles is reminded by Odysseus of his glory and the great honour he had
when alive, and of his dominion over the dead now. As yet another revelation
of the truth, the hero’s reply is memorable:
Talk not of ruling in this dolorous gloom,
Nor think vain words (he cried) can ease my doom.
Rather I’d choose laboriously to bear
A weight of woes, and breathe the vital air
A slave to some poor hind that toils for bread,
Than reign the sceptred monarch of the dead.22
Achilles also asks about his father and his son and departs in joy when he
learns of the glory the latter won at Troy. Once more, then, recognition means
for Odysseus finding his identity as a hero. In the middle of his transformation
from Odysseus to Nobody, he meets his old companions, the great warriors of
their time in Troy, and indeed the whole mythical past of his race. Significantly,
it is with the dead that Odysseus rediscovers this past, and it is in talking to him
that they, the dead, evoke their hate and their love. Anagnorisis in the world
of the dead means a return to life. Anagnorisis in the world of the dead means
unearthing one’s roots, one’s past, one’s –​everyone’s –​truth: a mother, the old
21
22
‘Longinus’, On the Sublime 9, 2–​3; Aeneid vi, 450–​476.
xi, 488–​91: Pope’s translation, 595–​600.
54 Chapter 1
companions, death. Anagnorisis in the world of death, however, also means,
as we shall soon see, discovering one’s future and finding one’s meaning for
all times.
∵
As Odysseus ends the four-​book-​long tale of his adventures, the real nostos
begins. The Phaeacians cover him with presents; he takes his leave of Alcinous
and Arete, while Nausicaa had already bid him farewell in an enchanting little
scene in Book viii (457–​468). While he sleeps, the men of Scheria carry him
back to Ithaca on a ship that flies over the waves. ‘At the time when shines that
brightest star, which beyond others/​comes with announcement of the light of
the young Dawn goddess’ (xiii, 93–​4), Ithaca is finally in sight. The Phaeacians
land their sleeping passenger with all his treasures and depart again, to meet
their fate, their ship being turned into stone by Poseidon as they reach home.23
We are entering the second half of the Odyssey and the peculiarly “comic”
atmosphere that pervades it. This part of the poem opens with two misrecognition scenes, each followed by one of revelation.
Slowly, Odysseus awakens and, after an absence of twenty years, fails to
recognize his own country. Out of the two lines in which the original sketches
the misrecognition, Chapman makes four: ‘Divine Ulysses, on his country’s
breast/​Laid bound in sleep, now rose out of his rest,/​Nor (being so long
remov’d) the region knew’, while Monteverdi creates a whole long, memorable solo scene, ‘Dormo ancora?’.24 Odysseus does not recognize his fatherland because Athena has surrounded him with mist ‘so she could make him/​
unrecognizable and explain all the details to him,/​to have his wife not recognize him, nor his townspeople/​and friends’ until he punishes the Suitors
(xiii, 190–​193).
23
24
Thus fulfilling, as Alcinous says (xiii, 172–​183), an old prophecy. Poseidon has already
asked Zeus for permission to destroy the Phaeacians’ ship and to cover their city with a
mountain, and Zeus has granted it (xiii, 154–​158). Zeus’ justice is therefore called into
question, because the Phaeacians are ‘just’ people against whom divine vengeance should
not be exercised. The Odyssey’s theology, which opens the poem with Zeus’ speech –​a
true theodicy –​at the Council of the gods (i, 32–​43), will find another stumbling block in
Odysseus’ men’s punishment for eating the Oxen of the Sun announced in the very first
lines of the poem (i, 7–​9): should they have starved to death?
George Chapman, in Chapman’s Homer, ii, ed. A. Nicoll, London, Routledge, 1957; Claudio
Monteverdi, Giacomo Badoaro, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria i. vii The Operas of Monteverdi,
ed. A. Ridler, London, Calder, 1992.
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
55
It is from passages such as this that one understands how for the poet of the
Odyssey recognition is a theme and a tool. The goddesses’ intervention intends
making the hero unrecognizable to all including his wife and, in the meantime, makes his own land unrecognizable to him. Odysseus’ return home is
not enough. To render it emotionally crucial to him and artistically enjoyable
to us, an obstacle must be introduced that will plunge him into doubt, which
he will have to surmount, and which will set us in expectation. This emotional
and aesthetic doubling of the difficulties endured by the hero is achieved by
misrecognition. Were the Odyssey a race the scenes of anagnorisis would be the
hurdles that make it gripping.
The present episode constitutes a triple hurdle. When Odysseus, finally
awake, looks around thinking the Phaeacians have deceived him, Athena
approaches disguised as a young shepherd, of whom he immediately asks
information. The goddess that made Odysseus and Ithaca mutually unrecognizable now conceals herself. Hence, a triple denouement follows, with two
revelations and another méconnaissance trick. The first lysis concerns the
identity of both shepherd and place. In a pretty roundabout fashion, the
young boy reveals that this is Ithaca. Odysseus rejoices, but, true to himself,
does not let on who he is. Instead, he concocts the first of three marvellous
stories building up a fictitious identity of himself as a Cretan.25 All of these
are different, all perfectly plausible in a world of violence, piracy, and slave-​
trade. They completely succeed in fooling his interlocutors, the swineherd
Eumaeus, his own wife Penelope26 –​all, that is, save the present one, the
young shepherd, who instantly smiles on him, strokes him and takes on the
shape of a tall, beautiful woman who ironically reproaches him for trying to
deceive her:
Whoever gets around you must be sharp
and guileful as a snake; even a god
might bow to you in ways of dissimulation.
You! You chameleon!
Bottomless bag of tricks! Here in your own country
would you not give your stratagems a rest
25
26
xiii, 256 ff.; xiv, 191 ff.; xix, 164 ff.
And a modern scholar like Paul Faure, who published his Ulysse le Cretois in 1980 (Paris,
Fayard). The Cretan of Odysseus’ stories escapes from Crete and from Egypt on board a
Phoenician ship, and the Phoenicians play a role in the poem. Victor Bérard, who edited
and translated the Odyssey into French (it is still the Pleiade edition) wrote an important
book entitled Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée, Paris, A. Colin, 1902.
56 Chapter 1
or stop spellbinding for an instant?
You play a part as if it were your own tough skin.
No more of this, though. Two of a kind, we are,
contrivers, both. Of all men now alive
you are the best in plots and story telling.
My own fame is for wisdom among the gods –​
deceptions, too.
Would even you have guessed
that I am Pallas Athena, daughter of Zeus,
I that am always with you in times of trial,
a shield to you in battle …27
It has the characteristics of comedy, but it is nevertheless a theophany, and
Odysseus responds to it appropriately: ‘It is hard, O goddess, for even a man
of good understanding/​to recognize you on meeting, for you take every shape
upon you’.28
Athena’s revelation of herself sets off the final apokalypsis of Ithaca. Not
satisfied with the shepherd’s answer, Odysseus asks the goddess if this really
is his island. She points out the harbour, the olive tree, the cave sacred to
the Naiads, Mount Neritus, and simultaneously scattering the mist away.
Odysseus recognizes Ithaca and kisses the grain-​giving ground. Unlike that
offered by the Sirens, this is not sterile knowledge: it is recognition of one’s
roots, of one’s being from a place, a specific land in the immensity of space.
After roaming the Earth, Odysseus finds the earth –​the grain-​giving ground
of Ithaca. The ‘far journeys’, the ‘many cities’, the ‘wide sea’ he has known
(i, 1–​4) have become this harbour, this olive tree, this cave, this mountain.
Significantly, recognition of Ithaca coincides with the first time the hero is
able to see Athena after the Trojan War. The shepherd’s sudden metamorphosis and the clearing of the mist –​theophany and topophany –​feel like
miracles.
Another marvel concludes the episode with a méconnaissance trick.
Odysseus has kissed the soil of his island, but he must conquer it anew, defeating the Suitors. To this end, Athena now withers his flesh, ruins his hair, dims his
eyes, puts a rag on him to make him ‘unrecognizable to all mortals’ (xiii, 397).
Odysseus, the destroyer of cities, the wandering sailor, the Nobody, becomes
27
28
xiii, 291–​301, in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation, London, Collins, 1961.
xiii, 312–​313, now in Lattimore’s translation.
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
57
an old beggar. It is the “comic” disguise through which he will become a man,
and a king, again.29
The familiar folklore motif of disguise and recognition characterizes the
second half of the Odyssey, but each single scene of anagnorisis treats it with
distinguishing features. When, for instance, Odysseus meets Telemachus
in Book xvi, a complex interplay of human feelings and divine miracles is
staged. The king’s old swineherd, Eumaeus, has accepted the tramp for who he
says he is, a Cretan veteran of the Trojan wars who has had many adventures
around the Mediterranean and who has just managed to escape from some
Thesprotian slave merchants. Eumaeus, however, refuses to believe what the
old beggar reveals about Odysseus’ imminent return and, of course, fails to
recognize his master just as he becomes a story-​teller who invents tales about
himself (Odysseus, the tramp recounts, got him a mantle by playing a trick on
another man during an ambush outside the Greek camp at Troy) and builds up
yet another false identity.
In the meantime, Telemachus leaves Sparta, escapes the Suitors’ ambush,
lands at Ithaca and reaches Eumaeus’ hut as the two old men are getting breakfast ready. Preceded, as Odysseus notes, by the fawning of dogs who recognize
a familiar person (xvi, 8–​10), Telemachus enters the hut surprising the swineherd, who welcomes him like a father his only son after ten years of absence
(17–​20). The beggar, who thus learns the newcomer’s identity, is introduced
to him by Eumaeus as a Cretan asking for protection and, in the exchange
that follows, the situation in the palace is fully described for Odysseus’ benefit. Telemachus sends Eumaeus to inform Penelope of his safe return home.
Finally, father and son are alone. Athena appears again as a beautiful, tall
woman, but only Odysseus and the dogs –​who stop barking –​see her, while
Telemachus is unaware of her presence, ‘because the gods do not appear visibly to all’ (161). The goddess nods to Odysseus to go out, urging him to reveal his
identity to his son. She taps him with her golden wand, turns his rag into a clean
tunic, increases his strength and stature, tans his skin, changes his beard to
blue-​black. Odysseus goes back in. Telemachus looks at him in astonishment,
declares he thinks his guest is a god and prays him to be gracious. Odysseus’
reply is another of those supreme moments of revelation to which the poem
has accustomed us: ‘No, I am not a god. Why liken me to the immortals?/​But
I am your father, for whose sake you are always grieving’ (xvi, 187–​188).
Then he kisses his son and the tears running down his cheeks splash on the
ground. Telemachus, however, does not believe. He thinks and proclaims aloud
29
Murnaghan, Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey, pp. 176–​180.
58 Chapter 1
that this cannot be his father and that he must be deceived by a daimon for
a human being cannot so suddenly metamorphose himself without the help
of a god. Odysseus replies asking for belief and offering only his sword and
Athena’s miracle as proofs (xvi, 202–​218):
Telemachus, it does not become you to wonder too much
at your own father when he is here, nor doubt him. No other Odysseus
than I will ever come back to you. But here I am,
and I am as you see me, and after hardships and suffering
much I have come, in the twentieth year, back to my own country.
But here you see the work of Athena, the giver of plunder, who turns me
into whatever she pleases, since she can do this …
Odysseus sits down again but now Telemachus believes and folds his father into
his arms, shedding tears. Desire for mourning rises in both. Homer describes
the emotional power of anagnorisis and reunion with a splendid smile:
and they cried shrill in a pulsing voice, even more than the outcry
of birds, ospreys or vultures with hooked claws, whose children
were stolen away by the men of the fields, before their wings grew
strong …
Critics have often considered these lines as evidence that the recognition scene
between Telemachus and Odysseus is the work of someone who has revised
the poem. At first sight, the simile would seem to be more appropriate for a sad
occasion. Yet, apart from the strictly philological considerations that could be
made to counter their conclusions, it strikes me that whoever composed this
passage had a profound perception of human reactions. The simile’s boldness
strikes the very centre of these reactions –​not merely joy at the present fulfilment, but exultation turned, by a wel1-​known mechanism, into tears with the
sudden intrusion of grief for the past absence. Father and son have virtually
never seen each other since the latter was a baby when Odysseus left for Troy.
If this makes Homer use extraordinary, miraculous means to stage the recognition, it also makes him underline the recovery of sonship and fatherhood
through its contrary, the birds’ loss of their children.
In fact, the simile fittingly concludes on an elemental, almost animal-​
like level, a scene which begins with all the characteristics of theophany.
Odysseus’ instantaneous metamorphosis is the only semeion –​ and a divine
one –​employed in the anagnorisis. What makes Telemachus believe is not
only Odysseus’ explanation of the miracle, but above all his words: ‘No other
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
59
Odysseus than I will ever come back to you’. ‘But I am that one’, he says in
the original: all’hod’ego toiosde. If he were speaking Latin, he would say, Ecce
ego sum. The god-​and-​father-​like assertion –​very similar to Joseph’s with his
brothers in Genesis, or to Jesus’ with his disciples after the Resurrection –​is
not rational, but it appeals to Telemachus’ emotions, and precisely because
it does that, it fulfils the extreme longing and the built-​up expectation that
the Telemachy has shown us growing. Odysseus’ affirmation is, against reason,
successful. The shift from ignorance to knowledge can be brought about, as it
were contra Aristotelem, by miracles and emotion, by simply playing on human
feelings and words.
The closer Odysseus gets to his house, the more these elements become
prominent in the poem. When, accompanied by Eumaeus, the old beggar
reaches the palace, his dog pierces straight through the disguise and recognizes his master. Argus, the dog Odysseus himself had raised without having
any joy from him since he went to Troy, lies on a pile of manure all covered
with ticks. As soon as he perceives his master, he wags his tails and lays both
his ears back. He cannot rise and come close to Odysseus, but the latter notices
him all the same. He looks at him from a distance, secretly wipes away a tear,
and tells Eumaeus that surely this dog’s shape is splendid, but he is not certain whether the animal still has the running speed to go with the beauty. As
Eumaeus replies, the ‘doom of dark death’ overcomes Argus when, after twenty
years, he sees Odysseus again (xvii, 327–​328).
Aristotle never contemplated this particular type of recognition –​an anagnorisis that one should call ‘by instinct’. Such a scene, however, tells us much
about the relationship, the distinct identities, the different ways of grasping
the truth that distinguish animals and men. We have seen how the Odyssey
shows us gods knowing gods and men not knowing divinities and recognizing or misrecognizing each other. We are now at the bottom of the scale. The
poem shows us how animals can recognize men the way in which men can
never recognize each other –​through a lightning flash of instinct which needs
no outward sign, no supernatural revelation, no reasoning, nor even, if we listen to Bergson, memory proper. A dog’s recognition of his master, the French
philosopher says, is ‘experienced’ or ‘lived’ ‘rather than thought’, sa reconnaissance doit être plutôt vécue que pensée.30 It is pure, instantaneous perception
(Homer, it will be noted, does not even mention smell), which represents for
man a mystery as great, though more familiar than, God’s knowledge. Seeing
(304), man is overwhelmed by emotion, wipes away his secret tears and starts
30
Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1965 (1939),
p. 49.
60 Chapter 1
asking questions to remove, and conceal, the pain. He has ulterior motives and
a deeper understanding. The dog, unable to move, signals his recognition feebly and desperately. And, having finally beheld the truth –​no abstract concept, but a living human being returned after twenty years –​he dies. Homer
ignores facile human explanations of the causes of Argus’ death, avoiding even
the moving account that Shakespeare’s Edgar gives of Gloucester’s death after
Edgar’s own revelation of himself:
but his flawed heart –​
Alack, too weak the conflict to support
‘Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief –​
Burst smilingly.31
Although we anthropomorphically tend to attribute Argus’ death to precisely
such a conflict of feelings, Homer makes the connection between anagnorisis and death purely and mysteriously paratactic (and formulaic): literally,
what the text says is, ‘and dark death by destiny (kata moir’) caught Argus,/​at
once seeing32 Odysseus after twenty years’. The two lines epigraphically make
pathos deflagrate. Argus’ recognition of his master stands in sharp contrast to
all the other scenes of anagnorisis in the poem, and particularly to those that
take place in Ithaca between Odysseus and his own philoi. What distinguishes
it is the absence of the obstacle represented by an initial misrecognition.
Argus’ anagnorisis is not a passage from ignorance to knowledge, but the re-​
activation of knowledge by the mere appearance of its object, the lost master.
Direct, absolute, and impossible to simulate, for the dog knowledge coincides
with life –​and hence with death.
∵
When, on the other hand, the hero stands for the first time face to face with his
own wife Penelope, the scene is a crucial one of méconnaissance. Penelope has
heard from Eumaeus about his guest and his beautiful, enchanting, singer-​like
stories (xvii, 517–​21), and that he maintains Odysseus is close. When husband
31
32
King Lear, v.iii.195–​198.
This is a participle, idont’, in the original, line 327. Andreas Divus, who translates ‘ad verbum’, writes ‘Argum autem rursus parca coepit nigrae mortis/​statim videntem Ulyssem
vigesimo in anno’: Homeri Odyssea ad verbum translata, Andrea Divo Iustinopolitano interprete, Parisiis, In officina Wechelli, 1538, p. 152 (the edition Pound quotes in the first of the
Cantos).
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
61
and wife meet, the latter asks the beggar who he is (xix, 104–​5), but he replies
he will not answer that question and rather praises her. Penelope rejoins that
all her beauty and excellence are gone since Odysseus left for Troy. The Suitors
want to marry her and she can no longer put them off. Her trick of weaving a
web as a shroud for Laertes during the daytime and undoing it at night was discovered, and the time has come for her to choose a new husband. Once more,
she asks Odysseus who he is, and the hero invents the third story of himself as
a Cretan, this time adding that, as a brother of King Idomeneus, he entertained
Odysseus in Crete while he was on his way to Troy. ‘He knew how to say false
things that were like true sayings’, the poet comments (203). Penelope weeps,
her body melting like the snow on the mountains when the south wind blows.
She weeps ‘for her man, who [is] sitting there by her side’ (209).
Odysseus, however, stops the impending recognition. He feels pity for his
wife, but his eyes, ‘as if made of horn or iron’, are steady under his lids –​he
hides his tears and deceives her. Penelope now puts him to the test: if it really
was Odysseus you saw in Crete, tell me how he was dressed. At first, the beggar pretends it would be difficult to say because this happened a long time
ago, but he then describes in minutest details his clothing of twenty years
ago and drops the name of his herald (221–​48). Recognising the certain signs
(semat’anagnousei … empeda, 250), Penelope weeps once more, but comes to
no anagnorisis.
The present ‘méconnaissance by means of paralogism’ is wholly justified by
the poem’s internal logic. Coming as it does after the Argus episode and before
Eurycleia’s recognition of Odysseus, it underlies the alternation of méconnaissance and anagnorisis present throughout the poem and particularly in its
second half. Above all, it heightens our suspense, raising our expectation for
the crucial recognition scene between husband and wife which we know will
have to take place. In fact, it deliberately counterpoints that scene by making
Penelope recognize here ‘certain signs’ of Odysseus’ lies the same way she will
recognize the ‘certain signs’ of his truth four Books later.33
Paralogism ‘counterfeits truth’, making the irrational ‘pass’ as ‘acceptable,
veri-​similar’,34 and this is precisely what Aristotle praises in Homer, who,
he says, ‘taught other poets the right way to purvey falsehoods’.35 The word
Aristotle uses here for ‘falsehoods’ is pseude, the same Homer employs when
he tells us that Odysseus said ‘many false things which were like true sayings
33
34
35
xxiv, 206: the formula used there is the same as that employed in xix, 250.
Aristote, La Poétique, p. 382.
Poetics, 24, 1460 a 19.
62 Chapter 1
(xix, 203). Aristotle theorizes verisimilitude, Odysseus and the poet practice
it. Penelope’s ‘false reasoning’36 responds to a logic which can take in the irrational as a superior form of truth. And the poem’s truth is that Penelope does
not come to the right conclusion, that she is deceived by the beggar’s beautiful
lie because Odysseus is as good a liar as Homer. Penelope is not yet ready for
recognition, which must come as a climax after Odysseus’ revenge. Her mind
is so far from even considering the possibility of her husband’s return as real
that she does not believe (309–​16) what the beggar adds now, mixing false
and true –​that Odysseus is alive, collecting treasures to bring back home, that
he alone, having lost all his companions, was cast ashore in the land of the
Phaeacians, and that, finally, having consulted the oracle at Dodona, he will
return home ‘within the lapse of time, when one moon wanes and the next
one rises’ (306–​7).
The whole episode, then, is meant not only as a trial of Penelope’s faithfulness, but also as a play on our own knowledge of Penelope’s ignorance, that is,
with the ‘plot within the plot’ which characterizes the whole second part of the
Odyssey.37 Emotionally, this is founded on the tears Penelope sheds twice and
on those Odysseus withholds inside his eyes ‘as if made of horn or iron’, on the
paralogism which prevents her from recognizing her husband ‘sitting next to
her’ –​in sum, on the extreme tension of a quasi-​recognition. The result is the
sheer ‘wonder’ we feel at the complexity and pathos of the scene, especially
when, soon enough, we realize this is only the first panel of a triptych.
Indeed, we are in for greater wonder and greater surprise. Penelope asks
Eurycleia to wash the guest’s feet (he himself has just said he will allow only
an old nurse to do it), remarking: ‘Odysseus must by this time have just such
hands and feet as you do/​for in misfortune mortal men grow old more suddenly’ (358–​9). The old woman covers her face with her hands and, shedding
hot tears, addresses him with words of compassion which end (xix, 379–​381):
there have been many hard-​travelling strangers who have come here,
but I say I have never seen one as like as you are
to Odysseus, both as to your feet, and voice and appearance.
Odysseus confirms that all people who have seen them say so. The recognition scene is about to begin. The nurse takes the basin and pours water into it.
Odysseus, who is sitting close by the fire, suddenly turns to the dark side of the
36
37
A fallacia consequentis; a man who had entertained Odysseus would be able to describe
him; because his description is so precise, this must be Odysseus himself.
Murnaghan, Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey, p. 118.
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
63
room because he thinks she might notice the scar and ‘all would be discovered’.
But Eurycleia comes up close, starts washing him, and recognizes the scar (392),
‘which once the boar with his white tusk had inflicted/​on him, when he went
to Parnassus, to Autolycus and his children’. There follows a long digression
(393–​466) in which we are told with abundance of details the story of the hunt
and of Odysseus’ wound. Then, the poet returns to Eurycleia and once more
says that, while touching the scar, she recognizes it. She lets Odysseus’ foot go,
so that his leg, which is in the basin, falls free and the bronze echoes. The basin
tips over on one side and the water spills out on the floor. Eurycleia, seized by
pain and joy at once, her eyes filled with tears, her ‘springing voice held within
her’, strokes Odysseus’ chin and addresses him: ‘Then dear child, you are really
Odysseus. I did not know you/​before; not until I had touched my lord all over’
(xix, 474–​5). She then turns her eyes to Penelope, wishing to indicate that her
husband is here. Penelope, however, cannot see or perceive what she sees,
because Athena turns her mind aside. Odysseus seizes Erycleia’s throat with
his right hand and tells her not to cause his death by revealing that he is back.
She offers to list the name of the maids who have betrayed him, but Odysseus
replies he will find out by himself. Eurycleia goes back to the hall to fetch more
water, then washes and anoints him. Finally, Odysseus’ dialogue with Penelope
resumes, ending with Penelope’s report of her dream and her announcement
that she will propose the Bow contest the following day.
The episode of Odysseus and Euryclea has been the subject of a famous
essay by Erich Auerbach38 which is still to the point. I will therefore limit myself
to a few considerations on Homer’s treatment of recognition in this passage.
Firstly, let us note that Odysseus is now inside his own house for the first time
after twenty years. He has revealed himself to his son. The dog, Argus, has recognized him on the threshold. His mother is dead, his father is in the country,
his wife cannot recognize him –​yet. The old nurse means home –​she is as near
as could be to a mother. She knows Odysseus as nobody does, for she has been
in the house, as the poet tells us in Book i (428–​433), ever since Laertes bought
her very young. She laid baby Odysseus on his grandfather’s knee, as we are
told during the digression in the middle of the present scene, when our hero
received his very name. It cannot but be her lot to recognize Odysseus for the
first time in his house. To be recognized by Eurycleia means to gain one’s past
again: adolescence, childhood, birth, name, his own very essence. In spite of
his disguise and of the changes that time, suffering and Athena have wrought
38
E. Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. W. Trask, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1953,
pp. 3–​23.
64 Chapter 1
on him, he is, as Eurycleia notices before seeing the scar, astonishingly similar
to Odysseus as the old nurse remembers him.
Secondly, the mechanism of the scene can in no way be considered a paralogism. Eurycleia points out the beggar’s likeness to Odysseus in appearance,
voice and feet, thus seemingly setting in motion what Aristotle would consider
the premises of a ‘similarity’ syllogism. But Eurycleia has no time to develop
her reasoning. Unlike Orestes in the Electra plays, Odysseus is before her eyes,
and the scar is there to prove it. The scar, undoubtedly an ‘acquired sign’, is
in fact the living semeion of his identity, the link between his past and his
present, the healed wound that has marked his body ever since he reached
manhood in chasing the boar with his grandfather’s sons. There is an enormous difference between this scar and that which the old servant and Electra
recognize on Orestes’ brow in Euripides’ Electra. Homer devotes over seventy
lines of digression to tell us how, when and where Odysseus was wounded,
whereas Euripides, constrained by the needs of the stage, spends but two
lines on Orestes’ scar. Significantly (and Auerbach has shown this beautifully),
Homer does not recount the story of the scar as part of Odysseus’ or Eurycleia’s
thoughts. He interrupts his narrative to tell us another one from outside. The
effect of this presentation is that we perceive and accept the tale as objective
truth and take it as it should be, as definitive proof of Odysseus’ identity. As
Aristotle remarks in expounding this scene, anagnorisis is, then, very much the
consequence of the external and internal logic of the mythos. Human intelligence and, to say it with Hamlet, a ‘special providence’ concur in producing it.
Seizing Eurycleia by the throat, Odysseus urges her to hush, ‘since’, he says, ‘you
have thought (or ‘found’, ‘perceived’) this and a god has put it into your mind’
(xix, 485).39
As Aristotle rightly noted, Eurycleia’s anagnorisis is profoundly different
from the next recognition scene in the Odyssey, although the means employed
in both, the scar, is the same. The day after the foot-​washing episode, as
the stringing of the Bow begins, Odysseus tests the loyalty of his shepherds
Eumaeus and Philaetius and, to prove his identity, shows them his scar (xxi,
207–​25) A release of emotion is present here, too (221–​225), but the recognition is essentially instrumental. Odysseus needs the help of the two men and
must therefore reveal himself. In the Eurycleia scene, instead, the anagnorisis,
prepared and suspended by the nurse’s hint at the likeness between the beggar
39
In his The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1982, pp. 274–​5, Julian Jaynes gives a slightly different interpretation of this line
(485), saying that Eurycleia recognizes Odysseus because a god has put recognition in her
mind (thymos).
65
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
and Odysseus, constitutes a detonating surprise. It is an admirable example of
an event which, as the Poetics notes, comes as a development of the preceding
ones, being thus inserted within a series of causes and effects, but takes place
‘contrary to expectation’.40
Finally, the scene with Eurycleia possesses a physical, bodily aspect as no
other scene in the poem. The nurse touches the scar with her hand and recognizes it; then, after understanding who the old beggar really is, she caresses his
chin. An instant later, Odysseus takes her by the throat. Seeing and touching
are exhibited with explosive strength, so much so that Euryclea exclaims, you
are Odysseus, and I did not recognize you before ‘touching you all over’. The
verb used here, amphaphaasthai, would be, in Latin, palpare, and Divus translates contrectavi. As we shall see in a later chapter, Thomas the Apostle wants
to do the same with the risen Christ: ‘Except I shall see in his hands the print
of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand
into his side, I will not believe’.41 Euryclea needs no faith, the evidence of the
senses is conclusive for her. It is for us, too, still shocked as we are by Penelope’s
misrecognition.
Knowledge of the senses is, for Aristotle, the basis on which all subsequent
knowing processes are founded. Perhaps it is not by chance that the nurse’s
touching –​the reiterated ‘feeling around’ as if seeking confirmation and at the
same time express love, with the chin’s stroking –​comes after Argus the dog’s
blind intuition. Together, they represent the first roots of knowledge in the animal and in the human being and make us understand what anagnorisis really
means –​not abstract but living knowledge –​knowledge in the flesh.
∵
The third panel of the triptych now opens up. As if nothing had happened,
Penelope, when the nurse has anointed Odysseus, starts speaking to him.
Without recognizing him, she now shows the beggar she trusts him. She tells
him she is constantly in two minds about what to do, whether to stay in the
palace as when Telemachus was a boy and needed her, or marry one of the
Suitors and leave her son master of the house as he now wishes (here, she uses
the famous nightingale simile). Then, she recounts a dream she has just had, in
which her twenty geese were killed by a big eagle. In the dream the eagle offers
40
41
Poetics, 1452 a 3–​5.
John 20: 25. In Luke 24: 39, Jesus says to the disciples: ‘Palpate (pselaphesate) me et videte,
quia spiritus carnem et ossa non habet’.
66 Chapter 1
her the key for interpreting it: the geese are the Suitors, who are soon going to
be killed by Odysseus himself, the eagle.
The old beggar immediately concurs. Penelope then announces she is going
to propose the Bow contest: whoever will string Odysseus’ bow and shoot an
arrow clean through all the axes lined up in the hall, him she shall follow, leaving the house where she has been so happy. Once more, the beggar agrees to
the plan, encouraging her to carry it through, for Odysseus, he says, will be
home before any of that crew can handle the bow.
The atmosphere of closeness, near familiarity, and trust that reigns in the
scene, Penelope’s leaning on her guest and revealing to him her uncertainty,
her dream, and her intentions, are such that many in the past have wondered
whether in fact she has not already recognized him. But Homer offers not the
slightest clue that this might be the case. Silence shrouds recognition.
In the next two Books, instead, we reach one of the climaxes of the Odyssey,
the revenge. Carefully planned by the hero, his son and Athena, this is of course
accompanied by the shock of recognition the Suitors feel when the old beggar
succeeds in stringing the bow, shooting through the axes and then unexpectedly killing Antinous. Ironically, it is in fact Antinous who, at the beginning
of the contest, proclaims that no one among them is as good as Odysseus –​
he saw him and, although he was a child at the time, he remembers him well
(xxi, 93–​95). The beggar, significantly stripping off his rags, transforms himself
into the Avenger. The Suitors persist in their blind ignorance, thinking that the
tramp has killed their leader by mistake. But the time of truth has come, and
the Voice thunders (xxii, 35–​41):
You dogs, you never thought that I would any more come back
from the land of Troy, and because of that you despoiled my household,
and forcibly took my serving women to sleep beside you,
and sought to win my wife while I was still alive, fearing
neither the immortal gods who hold the wide heaven,
nor any resentment sprung from men to be yours in the future.
Now upon all of you the terms of destruction are fastened.
The effect of this revelation is not mere Aristotelian fear, but great terror.
Although anagnorisis is not the poet’s primary concern here, he is yet careful
to point out that whereas Odysseus recognizes Athena when she appears as
Mentor to help him in the battle, the Suitors are fully deceived by her disguise.
Blind and helpless, they fall one by one, becoming but the ‘dead bodies’ and
the ‘endless blood’ over which Eurycleia wishes to raise her cry of triumph.
The massacre is ruthless and total –​only the singer, Phemius, is spared. The
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
67
treacherous maids are hanged from a line, as if they were thrushes. Nose, ears,
hands, feet, and genitals are lopped off the unfaithful goatherd, Melanthius.
Odysseus then orders the hall to be purified with fire, and Book xxii ends with
him ‘recognizing in his heart’ the women who have not betrayed him.
If, then, this Book is enclosed by the two opposite extremes of recognition –​
the Suitors’ green terror at the beginning and Odysseus’ ‘sweet longing for lamentation and tears’ when he recognizes the loyal maids at the end –​Book xxiii
is the song of the anagnorisis between Odysseus and Penelope, the scene for
which the poem’s audience have been waiting since the beginning, and one of
the highest moments in the literature of all times.
The scene, which occupies the whole of this Book, comprises three different stages that build up the tension and culminate with the embrace and the
weeping of husband and wife. Eurycleia’s annunciation to Penelope comes
first, itself made up of three moments. During the slaughter, Penelope was
asleep in her bedroom. Now, finally, Eurycleia runs up the stairs and tells
her: ‘Wake, Penelope, dear child, so that, with your own eyes,/​you can see what
all your days you have been longing for./​Odysseus is here, he is in the house,
though late in his coming:/​and he has killed the haughty suitors’ (xxiii, 5–​9).
Penelope thinks the old woman is crazy and reproaches her harshly. But, –​second moment –​Eurycleia insists and offers the first proof: ‘Odysseus is here, he
is in the house … He is the stranger … Telemachus knew, but he was discreet,
and did not betray the plans of his father’ (26–​31). After these words, Penelope
springs up from her bed, embraces the nurse and weeps. However, she is not
yet convinced, and in the conversation which constitutes the third moment
she maintains that Odysseus is dead and a god must have killed the Suitors.
Eurycleia then produces the second proof: ‘Your heart was always mistrustful./​
But here is another proof (sema) that is very clear. I will tell you/. The scar,
which once the boar with his white teeth inflicted./​I recognized it while I was
washing his feet, and I wanted/​to tell you about it, but he stopped my mouth
with his hands’. Finally, Penelope agrees to go downstairs to see her son, the
dead men and, she says, ‘the man who killed them’ (83–​84).
This first scene sets the psychological background, the pace and the themes
of the following ones. In the second we see Odysseus and Penelope for the
first time seated in silence, by the fire, opposite each other. Again, this scene,
too, goes through three different stages. At first, while Odysseus keeps his eyes
down waiting for her to speak, Penelope wonders, full of doubts (93–​95):
She sat a long time in silence, and her heart was wondering.
Sometimes she would look at him, with her eyes full upon him,
and again would fail to know him in the foul clothing he wore.
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Penelope’s mute glances, her oscillating between recognition and non-​
recognition, are interrupted –​second movement –​by Telemachus, who
accuses her of having a heart harder than stone. Her reply voices the silent
uncertainty she feels with a trembling declaration of impotence (103–​107):
My child, the spirit that is in me is full of wonderment,
and I cannot find anything to say to him, nor question him,
nor look him straight in the face.
At the end of this third movement, Penelope asks for the ‘secret signs’ which
only she and her husband know, and the scene closes with Odysseus’ smile.
There follows a splendid suspense-​raising interval, in which the hero gives
instructions to Telemachus so as to deceive the Suitors’ relatives, and is bathed
(iii, 62). Washed, anointed, dressed and made more beautiful by Athena,
Odysseus, ‘looking like an immortal’, then returns to his chair, opposite his
wife. The recognition scene starts again and reaches its climax in this third
episode, itself once more divided into three stages. For the first time after the
killing of the Suitors, husband and wife actually speak directly to each other.
Odysseus begins by reproaching her for being so hardhearted and asks the
nurse to make him up a bed. Penelope’s reply –​second stage –​clearly points
out the difficulty of recognition. Time has changed his appearance, and the
present aspect of Odysseus does not coincide with the image of the past she
has in her mind. It is the first surfacing of a theme that Proust will develop fully.
Yet, while voicing this difficulty, Penelope for the first time addresses him as
if he were Odysseus: ‘I know very well’, she says, ‘what you looked like/​when
you went in the ship with the sweeping oars, from Ithaca’ (175–​6). Finally, she
tells Eurycleia to make up his bed, the one he himself built, outside his room,
in the hall.
It is this that precipitates the third movement of the third scene –​Odysseus’
reaction and the recognition. His bed, he angrily proclaims, cannot be moved,
for there is in it ‘a very secret sign’ (188). He himself, Odysseus, made it out of
the olive tree which grew in the courtyard and around which he walled the
bedroom itself. At the end of this long description of his past work as a carpenter, Odysseus once more says: ‘Thus, I reveal to you this sema, this sign’ (202).
Finally convinced as she ‘recognizes the clear proofs’ offered by him, Penelope,
her knees and heart going slack, her eyes bursting with tears, runs up to him,
throws her arms round his neck, and begs his forgiveness. Holding his wife,
Odysseus weeps. Man and woman are one again. Homer suggests this indirectly with an exceptionally beautiful simile where Odysseus’ repeated experience of shipwreck is transferred onto Penelope’s reaction at final recovery of
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
69
her husband –​a simile which for all readers begins with him and, unexpectedly
and gloriously, ends with her (xxiii, 232–​240):
He wept as he held his beloved wife, whose thoughts were virtuous.
And as when the land appears welcome to men who are swimming,
after Poseidon has smashed their strong-​built ship on the open
water, pounding it with the weight of wind and the heavy
seas, and only a few escape the grey water landward
by swimming, with a thick scurf of salt coated upon them,
and gladly they set foot on the shore, escaping the evil; so welcome was
her husband to her as she looked upon him, and she could not let him
go from the embrace of her white arms.
He, clearly, is the subject of the first seven lines of the simile: he, who has
escaped shipwreck more than once, swimming to land; he, whose body we
have seen coated with salt. But then the simile turns to her, and we are given
to understand that recovering her husband now is to her like land that appears
welcome to those who have barely escaped shipwreck. Thus, he and she, she
and he, share the same experiences, are in fact one and only person –​which
they will be again in the flesh, too, in a moment, as they make love on the bed
that is no more just a sign, but their unique secret symbol, forever.
Dawn would break out on their weeping, but Athena prevents it from coming. The long night goes on. Odysseus wishes to retire to bed, Penelope wants
to hear Tiresias’ prophecy of his last labour, which he has just mentioned. Led
by Eurynome’s torch, they finally enter their thalamos –​the nuptial bed –​and
enjoy love. When they have finished, they start enjoying each other’s stories,
he her tale of oppression, longing and pain, she his account of the nostos with
all its adventures and misfortunes. As he tells his own ‘Odyssey’, Odysseus falls
asleep, and Book xxiii ends with the coming of dawn.
I know only three scenes in our planet’s literature comparable to this for
general theme and intensity: Dante’s recognition of Beatrice at the summit of
Mount Purgatory; Pericles’ recognition with Thaisa in Shakespeare’s Pericles
(and partly Leontes’ with Hermione in the Winter’s Tale); and Pierre Bezuhov’s
recognition of Natasha in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I shall examine them in
three successive chapters later in this book. But I would like to note here two
substantial differences. In the Comedy as well as, although to a lesser extent,
in Pericles and in War and Peace, the strongly physical and spatial dimensions
of Homer’s scene are absent –​the two seated opposite each other, the bath,
heart and knees yielding, the embrace, the tears, the bed, the olive tree, the
stories, the love making. In Dante, in Shakespeare, in Tolstoy, the sign of the
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bed is gone, too. It is replaced in the first by the ‘signs of the ancient flame’
which the pilgrim feels burning again in his heart as soon as he sees the veiled
lady appear at the climactic moment of the procession. It becomes, in the second, the chest containing the documents and the objects which prove Thaisa’s
identity. In the third, the very name, ‘Natasha’, pronounced by Princess Maria,
provokes Pierre’s recognition. The protagonist’s passion, of course, is still present –​reflected, Virgilian, in the Purgatorio, romantic in War and Peace. Except
for Pericles, it is not conjugal, and in none of the three instances does it contemplate physical consummation. Not a small difference, given that a human
being does not live by spirit alone and the union of a man and a woman is one
of the few glories of the flesh.
The bed, therefore, takes centre place in the anagnorisis between Penelope
and Odysseus. Penelope is not satisfied with Eurycleia’s sign, the scar, which is
part of the old nurse’s experience. Penelope requires a sign of her own. Producing
in the audience a tremendous shock of surprise (Aristotle’s ekplexis), Homer,
Penelope and Odysseus choose as decisive sign the bed rooted in, and carved
out, of the olive tree by Odysseus himself. The poet of the Odyssey knows very
well how to pick his signs. Eurycleia’s scar, Penelope’s marriage bed, Laertes’
fruit trees are not artificial inventions –​they all play with Odysseus’ essence
and with the essence of each of his dear ones. The nuptial bed of Penelope and
Odysseus is the foundation symbol of their union, the very root of their marriage. Its image stands at the centre of Book xxiii: from it springs Penelope at
the beginning, to it man and wife go back at the end. It represents the cradle,
substance and primeval truth of mankind. By joining his wife in their bed, the
warrior, the wanderer, the castaway, the beggar, the avenging old hero, merge
into a single figure. He becomes a man: of the species anthropos, homo (and
the first sapiens sapiens in our literature) as different from other animals, but
also aner (the poem’s first word), vir, man in his heroic quintessence and this
man who wanders, knows and suffers and finally returns home; man, in short,
both centrifugal and centripetal.
The secret sign of the bed overcomes with implacable logic all other signs
(the slaughter of the Suitors, Telemachus’ knowledge, the scar), all necessary
but not sufficient. It plays with appearance and memory, with doubt and certainty, against all words. It is a thing, a piece of nature, a tree growing out of the
ground and a block of wood, yet it is built by a human with skill and beauty.
Finally, it becomes the focus of memory and the source of yet another story –​
in short, of the ‘Odyssey’ that Penelope and Odysseus have to recount to each
other in order to evoke the final trial prophesied by Tiresias and therefore
the future ‘Odyssey’. The bed rooted in the olive tree represents the Odyssey’s
71
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
Alpha and Omega, the definitive message about love, happiness, and narration
that Penelope’s recognition of Odysseus contains.
∵
The poem, however, is not over, nor is anagnorisis finished in it. In the last
Book, Hermes leads the souls of the Suitors to Hades and, in this second nekyia
Agamemnon recognizes one of them, Amphimedon (102), who tells him of
Odysseus’ nostos and revenge. With this recognition ‘in the bowels of the earth’
the return of all the Greek warriors from Troy really ends. But Odysseus still
has a father to find. He goes to Laertes, who is alone in his orchard spading
out a plant, with a dirty tunic on. Odysseus is uncertain whether to embrace
and kiss him, revealing himself, or test him. Seeing him old and miserable, he
weeps standing under a towering pear-​tree; then, he decides for the test. He
approaches him, asks him whose slave he is, praises his expertise with plants,
and invents another story. He wants to know if, as a man he has just met told
him, this is really Ithaca and if his guest of long ago, Odysseus, is still living
here. In tears, Laertes replies in the negative and asks him who he is. His son
concocts another fictitious identity. Disillusioned by the newcomer, Laertes
pours grimy dust over his face and head, ‘groaning incessantly’. Odysseus cannot endure this any longer and reveals himself (xxiv, 321–​366). But his father,
too, demands ‘certain signs’. Odysseus shows his scar and adds he can name
the trees Laertes gave him when he was a child –​thirteen pear-​trees, ten apple-​
trees, forty fig-​trees and fifty vines. Laertes’ knees and heart yield as he recognizes the proofs Odysseus has offered. He has to support the old man who is
fainting.
If someone other than ‘Homer’ ever added this Book to the original Odyssey,
he knew what he was doing. With Agamemnon’s recognition of the Suitors,
with the aged servant Dolius’ recognition of Odysseus later in the Book (391–​
411), and above all with this scene between Odysseus and Laertes, Homer has
not only completed a pattern present throughout the poem, but also deliberately played with the audience’s expectation for anagnorisis and the sheer
pleasure it gives.
The Odyssey is indeed, as Aristotle remarked, full of recognition from
beginning to end. Anagnorisis has its roots in the folktale origin of very many
motifs of the poem. As part of the mythos, it is inseparable from the nostos to
which it supplies a sense and a meaning. Recognition, misrecognition and
meta-​recognition involve all the characters, from Odysseus to Telemachus,
from Nestor to Menelaus and Helen, from the living to the dead. Recognition
72 Chapter 1
through memory, through poetry, by means of signs, by instinct, by revelation, by miracle, by sight; anagnorisis of animals, human beings, places
and gods; méconnaissance with the stories Odysseus tells Athena, Eumaeus,
Penelope and Laertes, with the creation of possible, plausible and probable identities. Recognition turns Odysseus, the man of many guises and a
nobody, into what Pirandello would call ‘One, No One and One Hundred
Thousand’.
∵
The Odyssey is the first and largest universe of recognition in our literature. In it the shift from ignorance to knowledge touching a man’s very flesh
is a recurring scene, and thereby a theme which ultimately asserts man’s
original faith in his identity, in the coincidence of appearance and being.
It is this iteration of recognition scenes with their variations and with their
grandiose play on human feelings that moves us, frees us and prompts us to
project ourselves on Odysseus. By recognizing him with the other characters of the poem, we fulfil our psychological and emotional potential, rediscovering the value of signs, memory, poetry and human love. We not only
enter the world of war, of wandering and exploration, of home and home-​
coming, of tale-​telling, but we also become aware of the potentialities our
own identity contains, realizing that we, too, may be ‘of many minds’ and
‘many ways’ if only we serve intelligence with the same patience and constancy as Odysseus.
The Odyssey ends with the last recognition scenes and with the peace
imposed by Athena on the factions of Ithaca ready to fight against each
other, for or against Odysseus. It is, from this point of view, a ‘closed’ poem.
But there is something in it that opens it up and keeps it open after the end.
This is the part of Tiresias’ prophecy which concerns the hero’s last journey
and his death. Its importance cannot be underestimated since, after Tiresias
pronounces it in Hades, Odysseus reports it to Penelope word for word after
their reunion. When you have killed the Suitors, Tiresias tells Odysseus, you
must take an oar, carry it on your shoulders, and go on a journey until you
come to a place where there are men who know nothing of the sea, who eat
unsalted food, who never have known ships whose cheeks are painted purple,
who never have known oars, which are like wings to ships. The ‘clear signs’
that you have reached this place will come to you when you meet another
wayfarer, who will take the oar you carry as a winnowing fan. At that point,
you must plant your oar in the ground and render sacrifice unto Poseidon,
return home and offer hecatombs to all the gods. Finally, ‘Death will come
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
73
to you from the sea, sweet,/​and it will end you in the ebbing time of a ripe
old age’.42
In this episode, projected onto the future, and which points to the ultimate conclusion of Odysseus’ adventures, we have an encounter between
two nameless travelers who do not recognize each other. Odysseus is neither
a king, a hero, or a nobody, but merely the carrier of an oar. Nameless, he does
not speak, but ‘things’ speak for him –​things which are misrecognized, misinterpreted. In fact, the méconnaissance is the ‘clear sign’ that Odysseus’ travels
are now over. An oar will be taken for a winnowing fan in a land which knows
not the sea, nor salted food, nor ships: in a country, that is, which does not
share Odysseus’ system of signs and is outside civilization such as Odysseus
knows, and the Odyssey describes. Alone and nameless, the hero of Homer’s
poem reaches beyond recognition to become the symbol of our world.
As such, he will beget an innumerable progeny of Ulysses which fills literature down to our own century. Odysseus’ last journey and the manner of
his death as predicted by Tiresias are enigmas which have prompted poets
and interpreters to produce many ‘last voyages’. For instance, Tiresias says
that death shall come to him ex halos. Exegetes have discussed for centuries
whether this expression means ‘far away from the sea’ or ‘out of the sea’. If
the latter is true –​and this interpretation was proposed already in antiquity –​then Odysseus’ death is forever linked to that element which plays so
large a part in his nostos, the sea, and the unrecognized Odysseus of Tiresias’
prophecy becomes potentially the ancestor of Dante’s Ulysses (whose death
comes from the sea at the will of God as he sights the mountain of Purgatory)
and, through him, of Tasso’s Christopher Columbus, eventually of T.S. Eliot’s
Phlebas the Phoenician, and of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Odysseus in ‘The
Second Voyage’.43 While composing his ‘Ulysses’, Tennyson, for instance,
wrote that he was connecting Tiresias’ prophecy with Dante’s Inferno xxvi.44
42
43
44
xi, 119–​36; and cp. xxiii, 165 ff.
Dante, Inferno xxvi; Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata xii, 67, ed. L. Caretti, Milan,
Mondadori, 1979; transl. Edward Fairfax, Jerusalem Delivered, New York, Capricorn Books,
1963, xv, 25–​32; T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts,
ed. V. Eliot, London, Faber, 1971, pp. 55–​71 and relevant notes; E. Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘The
Second Voyage’, in The Second Voyage, Dublin, Gallery Press, 1977. See E. Bloch, ‘Odysseus
Did Not Die in Ithaca’, in Homer, ed. G. Steiner and R. Fagles, pp. 81–​85; É. Stead, ed.,
Seconde Odyssée. Ulysse de Tennyson à Borges, Grenoble, Millon, 2009; P. Boitani, The
Shadow of Ulysses. Figures of a Myth, trans. A. Weston, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994, and
Il grande racconto di Ulisse, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2016; G.H. Tucker, Homo Viator, Geneva,
Droz, 2003; P. Ford, De Troie à Ithaque, Geneva, Droz, 2007.
See Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. C. Ricks, London, Longman, 1969, p. 139.
74 Chapter 1
Irremediably past recognition, Ulysses will incarnate the aspirations and tragedy of modern man.
∵
In this context, it may therefore be interesting to see how the theme of recognition is treated in the modern Odyssey, Joyce’s Ulysses. In this Dublin microcosm, with a Ulysses who is an Irish Jew ruminating on and experiencing the
world in his mind more than in its reality, anagnorisis such as we are used to
it from Homer’s poem simply does not exist. If you have the others within
yourself, there is no need to recognize them, and what you have to do is find
them in your consciousness or in your unconscious. In the sixth episode of
Ulysses, for instance, the visit to Hades of Odyssey xi is replaced by Bloom’s
attendance at Paddy Dignam’s funeral. As, outside the Dignam home, Martin
Cunningham, Mr. Porter, Simon Dedalus and Bloom sit in the cab that will
take them to the graveyard, Bloom notices an old woman peeping at them
through a window pane and immediately starts thinking of the role women
have in giving birth and laying out corpses after death.45 This, which is all
the recognition scene with Anticleia has become, precedes another episode
where, when the cab stops at the Grand Canal, Bloom sees a dog’s home. As
often happens in Ulysses, Bloom’s mind suddenly evokes his father. Here, he
thinks of his dog, Athos, and then of his father’s last wish: ‘Be good to Athos,
Leopold, is my last wish. Thy will be done. We obey them in the grave. A dying
scrawl. He took it to heart, pined away. Quiet brute. Old men’s dogs usually are’
(p. 92). Mental association and memory take the place of recognition. Argus
is reduced to Athos.
Interestingly enough, it is a literary scene of anagnorisis that marks an important moment of Bloom’s relationship with his father. In the ‘Lotus Eaters’ episode, Bloom sees an advertisement in the paper for a play he has already seen
but would like to see again in the evening. This is Leah, a nineteenth-​century
version and adaptation by the American Augustin Daly of S.H. Mosenthal’s
Deborah.46 Bloom then remembers that his father was always talking about the
climactic scene in which ‘old blind Abraham’ recognizes the voice of the apostate Jew Nathan and ‘puts his fingers to his face’ (p. 79). He recalls Abraham’s
exclamation in Leah and at the same time his own father’s words on it:
45
46
James Joyce, Ulysses, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1969, pp. 88–​89.
A production of which, with Mrs Bandman Palmer as protagonist, was staged on 16 June,
1908 at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. Significantly, Bloom will later include attendance at
this performance in the account of his day to Molly (p. 656).
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
75
–​Nathan’s voice! His son’s voice! I hear the voice of Nathan who left his
father to die of grief and misery in my arms, who left the house of his
father and left the God of his father. Every word is so deep, Leopold.
The anagnorisis in Leah, a very melodramatic episode accompanied even by
lightning, ends with Abraham’s death. It clearly has special significance for
Bloom’s father, who finds himself in the position of the father Nathan abandoned to die of grief and misery, but who projects onto Abraham his desire to
recognize his own son as a Jew and to welcome him back to his community
and his God before dying. Rudolph Virag Bloom however, kills himself without
recognizing his Nathan-​Leopold who, after his suicide, does not even ‘go into
the room to look at his face’ (78). In real life, recognition such as it takes place
on the stage is denied.
Thus, the nekyia becomes purely mental evocation. Reading the names of
the dead in the newspaper obituary means meeting them. Seeing a small coffin
flash by makes Bloom think of his little son Rudy’s death (97). When Mr. Power,
immediately afterwards, says that ‘the worst of all … is the man who takes his
own life’, Bloom again evokes his father. Finally, when he reaches the graveyard,
he meditates on his mother’s, his son’s and his own burial in the plot he has
bought (113). In short, we do not have recognition through memory, because
here anagnorisis is memory.
If this is true of the living, the dead have no possibility of recognition at all.
When the four friends halt by the door of the mortuary chapel, Bloom finds
himself standing behind Dignam’s son and, as usual, starts musing: ‘Poor boy!
Was he there when the father? Both unconscious. Lighten up at the last moment
and recognize for the last time. All he might have done’ (104–​5). Recognition is
not only poor consolation; it is something that stops with the end of life.
Yet Joyce contrasts this definitive sentence with a subtle, ironical and mysterious play on recognition and misrecognition. When, in the Hades episode
itself, the cab passes by the concert rooms and the Queen’s Theatre with posters announcing future programmes, Bloom’s thoughts associate his wife Molly,
a singer, with her lover Boylan: ‘He’s coming in the afternoon. Her songs’ (93).
At the very same moment Boylan passes by in the street. The recognition is
indirect. The focus shifts suddenly from Bloom’s ruminations to his friends’
exchange. Through their conversation we see them recognize Boylan one by
one, and follow his own passing from non-​recognition to anagnorisis (94)
–​ How do you do? Martin Cunningham said, raising his palms to his
brow in salute.
–​ He doesn’t see us, Mr Power said. Yes, he does. How do you do?
76 Chapter 1
–​ Who? Mr Dedalus asked.
–​ Blazes Boylan, Mr. Power said. There he is airing his quiff.
Bloom’s reaction is indeed a recognition, laden with all sorts of feelings in its
apparent neutrality and producing the typical effect of irony on the reader: ‘Just
that moment I was thinking’. Then, ‘Mr. Dedalus bent across to salute. From the
door of the Red Bank the white disk of a straw hat flashed reply: passed’. This, in
sum, is the typical recognition scene of modern city-​streets –​a casual, if polite,
exchange that takes place entirely by chance.47 Inner awareness, however,
changes this fortuitous and indirect anagnorisis into a reminder and an omen
both of the character’s own plight and of the reader’s knowledge of it. By making
the recognition correspond to Bloom’s thoughts and then having him notice the
correspondence, Joyce has transformed the episode into a little tragicomedy.
A more mysterious series of misrecognitions haunts the whole book. When
the mourners in the Hades episode take up their positions around the grave,
Bloom notices a stranger: ‘Now, who is that lankylooking galoot over there in
the macintosh? Now who is he I’d like to know? Now I’d give a trifle to know
who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of’ (111). The enigma has
no solution. At the end of the book, when the modern Ulysses is finally back
home, the figure of Mcintosh still puzzles him (650):
What selfinvolved enigma did Bloom risen, going, gathering multicoloured multiform multitudinous garments, voluntarily apprehending,
not comprehend?
Who was Mcintosh?
The whole mystery of the episode –​the ‘secrecy’, as Frank Kermode called
it48 –​is due to the failure of all the characters in Ulysses to recognize this figure.
He keeps appearing and disappearing in a discontinuous manner and seems
to be both a reality and a product of Bloom’s own imagination. He receives
his name from a piece of clothing, a raincoat, and this name is in turn applied
to him by Bloom himself. It is nonetheless significant that his first surfacing
in Bloom’s attention should make Joyce’s protagonist think of potential identities: ‘If we were all suddenly somebody else’ (112). Odysseus opened up for
us the infinite space of personality by being, and being recognized as, many
47
48
Two more instances of this kind of recognition occur in the ‘Eumaeus’ episode, when
Stephen sees Gumley ‘a quondam friend of his father’s’, and then recognizes ‘Corley’s
breath redolent of rotten cornjuice’ (536).
F. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1979.
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
77
people. Mcintosh does the same thing for Bloom by not being known. Being a
‘selfinvolved’ enigma, one, that is, which is enclosed within itself and also has
something to do with Bloom’s self, Mcintosh represents the stumbling block of
knowledge.
Although, as we have seen, the nature of anagnorisis is completely different in Ulysses from the Odyssey, the frequency and intensity of recognition
scenes increases the closer we approach the nostos –​Bloom’s actual return
home. Once more Joyce plays a subtle counterpoint between one episode and
the next, and between his own treatment of the theme and Homer’s. In the
‘Eumaeus’ episode, for example, Odysseus’ moving encounter with his dog
Argus is transformed into Bloom’s (and Stephen’s) accidental meeting with a
horse dragging a sweeper. A ‘good poor brute’ ‘not worth anything like sixty-​five
guinea’, a ‘big foolish nervous noodly kind of a horse’, the animal is first of all
associated with a dog (583). Then, after a pause in which we follow the meanders of Bloom’s thinking and of Stephen’s talking, the horse again catches the
former’s attention (‘the horse was just then …’, 585) and finally comes into full
view. Here, anagnorisis does not simply disappear: it is so profoundly ignored
while being teased that it is totally annihilated (585):
The horse, having reached the end of his tether, so to speak, halted, and,
rearing high a proud feathering tail, added his quota by letting fall on the
floor, which the brush would soon brush up and polish, three smoking
globes of turds. Slowly, three times, one after another, from a full crupper, he mired. And humanely his driver waited till he (or she) had ended,
patient in his scythed car.
On the other hand, the end of the ‘Circe’ episode treats recognition in a very
different fashion. Here two ghosts appear, both as projections of the characters’ complex or desires. The first is that of Stephen’s mother who, rising ‘stark,
through the floor’, materializes before her son ‘with the subtle smile of death’s
madness’. Stephen’s ‘horrorstruck’ question, ‘Lemur, who are you? What bogeyman’s trick is this?’ (516), makes the reader visualize a recognition scene, but
the exchange between the two makes him realize that she is a mere incarnation of Stephen’s guilt feelings and his own exclusive fantasy, unreceived by all
save Buck Mulligan. After their experience in the brothel, Bloom then rescues
Stephen, his “son”, and after ‘communing with the night’ and contemplating
the young man’s face, he falls silent and ‘stands on his guard, his fingers at his
lips in the attitude of secret masters’. Suddenly, ‘against the dark wall a figure
appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an
Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his
78 Chapter 1
hand’. Like an odd mirror figure, ‘he reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page’. ‘Wonderstruck’, Bloom ‘calls inaudibly’: ‘Rudy!’ (532).
Incarnating the ideal image his father has always projected onto him, the ghost
of Bloom’s real son has appeared and has been “recognized” just as the protagonist extends his paternity to Stephen Dedalus. Rudy, however, ‘gazes unseeing
into Bloom’s eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling’. Between him –​a ‘fairy’
figure, a creation of disappointed love –​and Bloom himself there is no communication. The recognition is one-​sided; but it is at the same time allusive.
The image of Rudy and the reality of Stephen are superimposed.
When we approach the ‘Ithaca’ episode, which sums up the themes of the
entire book with its great catechetical sequence of authorial questions and
answers, we see Joyce progressively draw together, at the end of his Ulysses’
nostos, three main lines of the recognition motif: recognition of philoi, of self,
and of universal truths. The three are intertwined and the reader is meant to
see them as such: no recognition of truth is possible without self-​knowledge
and human communication.
Paradoxically, the first thing Bloom discovers even before reaching his
house in Eccles Street is ‘that the field of individual development and experience was regressively accompanied by a restriction of the converse domain
of individual relations’. In passing from non-​existence to existence, Joyce
specifies, Bloom has come to many and has been received as one; ‘existence
with existence’, he is ‘with any as any with any’; finally, when he dies in passing from existence to non-​existence, he will be perceived by all as ‘none’
(582). It is on the present oneness, loneliness and anonymity that Bloom will
have to reconstruct ‘interindividual relations’ from scratch, and the act of
self-​recognition we are witnessing here will constitute the starting point of
this operation.
In the ten following pages of ‘Ithaca’, Bloom and Stephen grow increasingly close. They enter the house, drink ‘the creature cocoa’ together, converse
about their previous encounters, compare their careers and, becoming ‘Stoom’
and ‘Blephen’, finally face each other after Bloom’s singing of the first lines of
Israel’s anthem (610):
What was Stephen’s auditive sensation?
He heard in a profound ancient male unfamiliar melody the accumulation of the past.
What was Bloom’s visual sensation?
He saw in a quick young male familiar form the predestination of a future.
What were Stephen’s and Bloom’s quasisimultaneous volitional quasisensations of concealed identities?
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
79
Visually, Stephen’s: The traditional figure of hypostasis, depicted by
Johannes Damascenus, Lentulus Romanus and Epiphanius Monachus as
leucodermic, sesquipedalian with winedark hair.
Auditively, Bloom’s: the traditional accent of the ecstasy of catastrophe.
The ghostly encounter with Rudy is past. Ulysses and Telemachus meet and
recognize each other. Coming from the parallel scene in the Odyssey, this is not
quite the recognition we would expect, but it is what anagnorisis has become: a
matter of almost purely subjective sensation (either auditive or visual), of ‘ego-​
centric’ perception of the ‘other’, and at the same time, by virtue of association, the realization of a meaning beyond the interlocutor’s mere appearance.
For Stephen, Bloom becomes ‘the accumulation of the past’, Wandering Jew
and Ulysses. For Bloom, Stephen represents ‘the predestination of a future’ –​
fatherhood and sonship, art, poetry, Ireland. Quasisimultaneously, to use
Joyce’s expression, recognition leaves the realm of pure sensations and enters
that of ‘quasisensations’, in which the will plays a part. Here, symbolic projections emerge as ‘concealed identities’. For Stephen, Bloom incarnates ‘the
traditional figure of hypostasis’: Christ the Logos, ‘with white skin, winedark
hair’, and ‘sesquipedalian’ (i.e., ‘pedantic’, but also proportioned as 3:2 like the
Trinity described in the works of St John of Damascus and St Epiphanius). For
Bloom, on the other hand, Stephen represents the beginning of Doomsday as
sketched in traditional apocalyptic writing.
Anagnorisis is within the self. In it, the ‘I’ comes to knowledge when the
‘other’ sparks off his sensations. Instead of opening itself out to the interlocutor as in traditional recognition, the self reaches out to him within its own
feelings and cogitations. Then, suddenly, the ‘I’ perceives in the ‘other’ a projection of his own images and manias which acquire symbolic meaning for the
reader. Recognition is at once communion and awareness of each individual’s
monadism. When, in symbolic procession, Bloom and Stephen, having discovered several universal truths inside the house, go out like Dante to see the stars
again, they fall silent, ‘each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the
reciprocal flesh of theirhisnothis fellow-​faces’. Finally, ‘centripetal remainer’
and ‘centrifugal departer’ separate (936).
In the meantime father and son have, both inside and outside the house,
roamed through micro and macrocosm. From the everyday objects of Bloom’s
kitchen, they launch on a quest and discovery of the universe and, with their
different temperaments –​‘the scientific, the artistic’ –​explore the elements
of water and fire, discuss language, assess human life and its decay, meditate
on the evolution of the universe and of Earth, consider the various features of
constellations. Within this ever wider anagnorisis, they come to recognition
80 Chapter 1
of their different ways of reaching knowledge. It is a climactic moment in the
development of Ulysses (618):
Did Stephen participate in his dejection?
He affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding
syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational
reagent between a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon
the incertitude of the void.
Was this affirmation apprehended by Bloom?
Not verbally. Substantially.
What comforted his misapprehension?
That as a competent keyless citizen he had proceeded energetically
from the unknown to the known through the incertitude of the void.
No comment can be more precise than Joyce’s own formulation. I am merely
pointing out that whereas Stephen’s way from ignorance to knowledge is the
traditional, ultimately Aristotelian route of reason (which, however, is now
made to explore a world built on uncertainty and emptiness), Bloom’s progress is typically modern. He proceeds ‘from the unknown to the known’
through ‘the incertitude of the void’. Hence, Bloom’s knowledge is either
totally precarious or reached by means which have little to do with rational,
syllogistic processes. It is in fact based on sensations, mental association,
symbolic leaps.
Just before the two characters part, Bloom’s meditation concentrates upon
the affinities between the moon and woman. Immediately afterwards, a ‘visible form sign’ attracts Bloom’s and consequently Stephen’s gaze. It is the light
of Molly Bloom’s lamp, still on in her bedroom (623). Indirectly, Penelope
has appeared. As Bloom becomes Everyman and Noman (648), his nostos
approaches completion. Finally he reaches his bedroom, asks himself once
more who was Macintosh, undresses, with circumspection enters the bed
where Molly is asleep, perceives in it ‘the imprint of a human form, male, not
his’ (632), and looks at Molly’s bottom, which sums up ‘the eastern and western terrestrial hemispheres’ full of ‘adipose posterior of female hemispheres,
redolent of milk and honey and of excretory sanguine and seminal warmth,
reminiscent of secular families of curves of amplitude,… expressive of mute
immutable mature animality’ (635).
Here, then, is Penelope’s bed, and here are also the signs –​the ‘visible
signs of antesatisfaction’: ‘an approximate erection: a solicitous adversion: a gradual elevation: a tentative revelation: a silent contemplation’
(655). Action follows. Bloom kisses his wife’s ‘plump mellow yellow smellow
81
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
melons’. The ‘visible signs of postsatisfaction’ are subtly different from
those of ‘antesatisfaction’: ‘a silent contemplation: a tentative revelation: a
gradual abasement: a solicitous aversion: a proximate erection’. ‘What’, asks
then the omnipotent, inquisitional narrator, ‘followed this silent action?’,
and replies: but anagnorisis, of course! Penelope shows ‘somnolent invocation, less somnolent recognition, incipient excitation, catechetical
interrogation’ (656).
Leopold Bloom has indeed come home, as the last lines of the episode
make clear. The ‘dark bed’ is where the new Ulysses, Sinbad the Sailor, finally
rests, becoming ‘the childman weary, the manchild in the womb’ who now
faces ‘Gea-​Tellus, fulfilled, recumbent, big with seed’ (658). Like Odysseus,
Bloom tells Molly –​with the appropriate modifications –​where he has
been during the day. Unlike Odysseus and Penelope, Bloom and Molly do
not enjoy love, but in fact grow increasingly aware of the breakdown of
both physical and mental intercourse between them in recent years. Like
Odysseus, Bloom returns to his wife and, by kissing her behind, accepts her
unfaithful fidelity, life and the human condition. The recognition between
them, however, is both somewhat less and somewhat more than the one
we read in Odyssey xxiii. On the surface it seems purely sexual, ‘expressive’,
to adopt Joyce’s phrase, ‘of mute immutable mature animality’. At a deeper
level, it is much more explicitly symbolical than anything Homer suggests.
Finally, it is partial and for the moment still one-​sided. Anagnorisis brings to
no complete reunion, to no satisfied love. Bloom accepts Molly, but Molly’s
own recognition, although ‘less somnolent’ than her ‘invocation’, is still a
mere quasi-​awareness. Her full response will come in the last episode of
Ulysses, ‘Penelope’, where in eight monstrously long sentences of stream of
consciousness, Molly’s mind says yes to her husband, her past, her memory
and the entire universe:
and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my
eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my
mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him
down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was
going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.
∵
In spite of all the differences, Joyce’s Ulysses still resembles Homer’s Odysseus,
and recognition, however changed, still marks his return home. There is however one modern author who treats his hero in a very different way. In a sonnet
82 Chapter 1
entitled ‘Odisea, libro vigésimo tercero’ (‘Odyssey, Book xxiii’)49 Jorge Luis
Borges spends over ten lines describing Odysseus’ rest after his return home
and reunion with Penelope. Here is the text of the poem, accompanied by an
English paraphrasis:
Ya la espada de hierro ha ejecutado
la debida labor de la venganza;
ya los ásperos dardos y la lanza
la sangre del perverso han prodigado.
A despecho de un dios y de sus mares
a su reino y su reina ha vuelto Ulises,
a despecho de un dios y de los grises
vientos y del estrépito de Ares.
Ya en el amor del compartido lecho
duerme la clara reina sobre el pecho
de su rey pero ¿dónde está aquel hombre
que en los días y noches del destierro
erraba por el mundo como un perro
y decía que Nadie era su nombre?50
The revenge has now been accomplished, Ulysses has regained his kingdom and
his queen ‘in spite of a god and his seas’, ‘in spite of the grey winds and of Ares’
clashing’. Penelope sleeps on the breast of her king ‘in the love of the shared bed’.
‘But’, the poet suddenly twists around in the middle of line 10, ‘where is that man/​
who in the days and nights of his exile/​wandered around the world like a dog/​
and said that his name was Nobody?’
Odysseus is finally split into two: Ulysses once more the king, now; Nobody the
wandering dog, before. Whether or not Borges suggests that this division is present
in the hero’s own consciousness now, as Penelope reclines on his breast, the most
important aspect of the poem seems to me the fact that, by asking that question
49
50
Published in the collection El otro, lo mismo (1964). I shall go back to Borges, Homer, and
Ulysses in ­chapter 9.
Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas, ii, Buenos Aires, Emecé, 1996, p. 275.
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
83
at the end of the sonnet, the author freezes his character in the role of Nobody.
It is as Nobody, not as Ulysses, that he leaves a lasting impression on those who
read ‘Odyssey, Book xxiii’. Furthermore, however significant this annihilation of
Odysseus-​Ulysses may be, Borges actually does something much more subtle and
perverse. He shifts the burden of cognition and recognition onto us.
In the first ten lines, he offers us something which is presented as factual history and which in fact we know to be a fiction. He tells us: things went this way;
and we accept it on the basis of Homer’s account. Then, abruptly, he counters
all he has said so far with his ‘but’ and asks us where that man –​whose name he
never mentions –​the traveller who called himself Nobody, is. By asking not who,
but where that man is, Borges forces us to enter the realm of endless speculation.
How are we to judge where that man, obviously ‘el otro, lo mismo’, different from
and yet the same as, the present one, is? How are we to recognize a connection
between Nobody and Ulysses? We can certainly do so by way of Homer’s Odyssey,
and this is what Borges plays upon, forcing us to interpret (his own) fiction by
means of another, more ancient and different, fiction (Homer’s).
But if, as an orthodox process of cognition requires, we were to limit ourselves to one object of knowledge –​one text –​at a time, we would be unable
to establish a definite connection between Ulysses and Nobody, for on this
page we are presented with two persons distinct in place, time and name. And
how, in any case, can we recognize even Nobody alone? All we are told is that
‘aquel hombre’ said his name was Nobody. Are we, like Polyphemus, to believe
him? And should we, by extension, believe all the false identities with which
Odysseus presents himself to his interlocutors? Should we, on the contrary,
consider lies all the stories he recounts to the Phaeacians, all his adventures,
a great portion of the Odyssey? Someone has, indeed, proposed it with some
ground.51
What we are asked to do in ‘Odyssey, Book xxiii’ is to recognize a being
by not knowing, but only presuming to know, his name: to recognize that the
two entities about which we are being told are the same by superimposing the
two parts of the sonnet and, finally, by reading the story in the light of another
story. Recognition has become a metaphysical and meta-​literary abyss.52
51
52
M. Lavagetto, La cicatrice di Montaigne. Sulla bugia in letteratura, Turin, Einaudi, 20022,
pp. 5–​36. The idea that the entire Odyssey may be a lie inspires Jean Giono’s La Naissance
de l’Odyssée, Paris, Grasset, 1930.
To which a further plane could be added if one took into consideration another poem
by Borges from El hacedor, ‘Arte Poética’, Obras completas ii, p. 221, where Ulysses is seen
as, ‘harto de prodigios’, tired of prodigies, ‘weep of love’ when he sights Ithaca ‘green
and humble’: ‘el arte’, Borges concludes there, ‘es esa Itaca/​De verde eternidad, no de
prodigios’.
84 Chapter 1
2
What would happen if Odysseus returned to a changed home –​one, for
instance, in which his father is dead and his wife has not waited for him?
And what if a man came back to Penelope pretending to be Odysseus –​as the
Penelope of the Odyssey in fact fears –​but being someone else, or being someone who cannot be proved to be either Odysseus or another man? Both things
have happened in history as well as in literature, and I will now examine some
examples to see what recognition becomes in these cases.
In all of them, anagnorisis is obviously crucial, because it represents the
moment where identity is established or remains suspended and where a truth,
a fact, a series of signs and proofs are accepted or not. This is of course particularly critical in real life and before the practice of taking fingerprints, blood or
sperm tests or the even more sophisticated eye-​recognition and other tests of
modern technology, or since having passports or identity cards became normal. If we are to believe Herodotus (iii, 61–​78) the fate of the Persian empire
before and after the death of Cambyses depended on ascertaining whether
the man who proclaimed himself to be Smerdis son of Cyrus (who had been
murdered on Cambyses’ orders) was or was not such. The recognition, we are
told, was effected after Cambyses’ death by one of the pseudo-​Smerdis’ wives,
who found out, while the usurper was asleep, that he had no ears and must
therefore be Smerdis the Magian. Down to the pseudo-​Princess Anastasia of
the days after the Russian Revolution and the execution of the Romanov family, history is full of ‘Celebrated Claimants Ancient and Modern’.53
In Joyce’s Ulysses, the false identities with which Homer’s Odysseus
deceives Eumaeus, Penelope and Laertes crystallize into the single figure
of the red-​bearded sailor whom Stephen and Bloom meet on their way to
Eccles Street (‘Eumaeus’, 543 ff). Very often, however, the passage is not from
fiction to fiction, but from historical reality to literature. The story of false
Demetrius is, in this respect, central to the European imagination. After
the death of the tsar Ivan the Terrible in 1584, his third son Demetrius was
either killed or accidentally stabbed himself to death in an epileptic fit in
1591. Responsibility for his murder was attributed to Boris Godunov, who
became tsar in 1598. In 1603 a man who pretended to be Demetrius turned
up in Poland and, helped by the aristocracy of that country, by the Catholic
Church and by discontented Russian boyars, marched against Boris, defeated
53
The title of a book published anonymously in London in 1874 by Chatto & Windus.
Another was Impudent Imposters and Celebrated Claimants: from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur
Horton, London, Ward, Lock, & Tyler, 1877.
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
85
him and was crowned Tsar (1605), only to be murdered less than a year later.
Demetrius’ career depended upon his being recognized by his mother, Ivan’s
widow Maria –​a recognition which, according to most contemporaries, was
duly obtained. Literature was quick to seize upon this story. Ten years after
false Demetrius’ accession to the Russian throne, Lope de Vega had already
produced his El gran duque de Moscovia y emperador perseguido, and it will
be enough to recall the names of Schiller, Hebbel, Pushkin and Mussorgsky
to realize how popular the theme was up to the nineteenth century.54 In
twentieth-​century Italy, the complex and fascinating Bruneri-​Canella case
(also known as the case of the ‘smemorato di Collegno’) filled the newspapers and the courts for decades, inspiring Pirandello’s Come tu mi vuoi and
Sciascia’s Teatro della memoria.
A similar story of pretense –​and one tied to the theme of nostos –​ took
place in sixteenth-​century France and became so famous at the time that even
Montaigne mentioned it in his Essays, was published in book form more than
once by various authors in several languages, transformed into melodrama
in the nineteenth century, and was revived by an American historian and a
French film-​maker. This is the story of the Return of Martin Guerre.55
Martin and Bertrande married at a very young age in their village of Artigat,
but, because of his impotence, had no child for more than eight years. Soon
after their son’s birth, Martin stole a small quantity of grain from his father and
disappeared, ending up in Spain at the service of the Bishop of Burgos. Eight
years later, in 1556, “Martin Guerre” returned to his village. He was immediately
recognized by his sisters, his wife accepted him after he mentioned white hose
in her marriage trunk (the ‘sign’), his uncle Pierre welcomed him back into the
family after they talked about things they had done together. The whole village
celebrated his return.
In her bed, Bertrande must have recognized that this Martin was not her old
one, but she welcomed him (they then also had a daughter) and in the course
of their conversations his memory of the past must have undergone careful
reconstruction. A couple of years later, however, trouble began. Martin asked
his uncle Pierre for the accounts he had kept after his father’s death and, finally,
brought a suit against him to court at Rieux. Pierre accused Martin of being
an impostor, and the village split, the shoemaker, for instance, maintaining
that his feet were much smaller than they had been before his disappearance.
54
55
See E.C. Brody, The Demetrius Legend and its Literary Treatment in the Age of the Baroque,
Cranbury NJ, Associated University Presses, 1972.
For which I use N.Z. Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, Cambridge MA and London,
Harvard University Press, 1983.
86 Chapter 1
A soldier passing through said that the real Martin Guerre had lost a leg in war
and now had a wooden one. The news spread that the impostor was Arnaud
du Tilh called Pansette.
Bertrande defended the new Martin with great energy and ‘searched her memory for a sexual episode –​perhaps even embroidered it –​with which they could
surprise the Court’.56 The judges went through the whole series of witnesses,
proofs, secret signs –​shoes, scars, teeth –​and memory. Arnaud was pronounced
an impostor. He appealed, and a new trial opened in Toulouse in 1560, which
Montaigne says he ‘saw’ when he was a child.57 Again, the evidence was examined in great detail, while the new Martin gave a splendid show of his memory
and his impersonating abilities. The judge, Jean de Coras (who was also the first
to publish a book on the story, in 1561), tended to believe Martin and Bertrande.
Then, the coup de theâtre took place: the real Martin appeared with his
wooden leg before the Court. His uncle Pierre and his sister Jeanne recognized
him. Bertrande, trembling and weeping, embraced him and asked him for forgiveness. The sentence was pronounced shortly afterwards: Arnaud du Tilh
alias Pansette was found guilty, he was to recite a public apology and be put to
death in Artigat. He was hanged in front of Martin’s and Bertrande’s house in
September 1560.
The story is undoubtedly ‘merveilleuse’, as Montaigne said. The ingredients
of comedy, romance and tragedy are all there, superbly mixed, and the questions they raise are important ones. What, in the first place, is the meaning and
the status of a man’s identity in the sixteenth century? What does it mean to
be a specific ‘I’? Can one ‘be’ someone else? And why would he want to do so?
In the case of Arnaud du Tilh, there is, of course, a question of interest: the
worldly goods of Martin Guerre are greater than his own, and it is when Pierre
Guerre’s interests are at stake that Arnaud’s identity is definitely questioned.
But does this suffice to explain his whole enterprise, his shows during the trials,
his careful reconstruction of his own memory? In his story, there is a curious
element of game, of conscious part-​playing, of adventurous impersonation.
Arnaud likes being someone else (a pleasure which the youth and beauty of
Bertrande obviously increases), is fond of theatrically staging his trials, plays
his part perfectly till the last day of his life.
56
57
Ibid., p. 57.
Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. J. Balsamo, M. Magnien, C. Magnien-​Simonin, Paris,
Gallimard, 2007, pp. 1076–​1077. Montaigne says that the ‘accident’ seemed to him ‘avoir
rendu l’imposture de celuy qu’il jugea coupable, si merveilleuse et excedant de si loing
nostre cognoissance, et la sienne, qui estoit juge, que je trouvay beaucoup de hardiesse en
l’arrest qui l’avoit condamné à estre pendu’.
87
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
What, then, about Bertrande, this ‘honest’ Penelope who, abandoned by her
husband after eight years of uneasy marriage, welcomes a new Odysseus in her
bed? In the film she is made to say that she defended Arnaud because she fell
in love with him. This is possible, even probable. But the game Bertrande plays
is very dangerous for her, and she must be aware of it –​if found out, she will
lose everything, her credibility, her honesty, even perhaps her life. Yet she risks
all. After a moment’s hesitation, she accepts the new Martin’s secret sign, the
white hose, helps him build up his memory and fabricate other signs. Only at
the end, when with the true Martin’s return everything seems lost, she repents
and recognizes her old husband. Bertrande does not simply accept Arnaud’s
deception, she actively collaborates with him for the success of his enterprise.
Together they build a new life, the life she would have liked to have. The nostos
of pseudo-​Martin fulfils a deep-​rooted expectation, a dream. His return heals
the wound inflicted by her husband’s departure. And this wound is not only
emotional, sexual and material, but also social. Martin’s return re-​establishes
social harmony in the village and in the family: once more, everything is as it
should be.
The real Martin decides to come back after many years. No doubt, he is
prompted by interest. But why does he return only after such a long time? He,
the centrifugal man, has positively decided to leave home, to build a new life
abroad. Suddenly, he becomes centripetal. When not only his material goods,
but also his wife, his son and his identity are about to become someone else’s,
Martin reappears. He is not prepared to give up his ‘I’ for good and claims
it back.
The final recognition is a restoration of the old order. Arnaud’s dream
life is destroyed. Martin’s resurrection means his death. But between the
two recognition scenes –​one of Arnaud’s at his arrival in Artigat, the other
of Martin’s at the end of the Toulouse trial –​a whole series of questions
remains open for several years. What is the value of signs, of memory, and
of emotion? If signs can be fabricated and memory built up, if emotions
are not faked but newly created, if in sum the will to believe prevails over
everything else, will anagnorisis still be a shift from ignorance to knowledge –​and to knowledge of what? Of the truth? And what, as Pontius Pilate
said, is truth?58
∵
58
John 18: 38.
88 Chapter 1
The paradoxical message of Christianity is, in its extreme form, that the return
of the master disguised as a beggar should produce no recognition. Such is
the import of the medieval legend of Saint Alexis, the most beautiful version of which is narrated in the eleventh-​century Vie de Saint Alexis.59 In this
Chanson, the son of the Roman Senator Euphemianus, Alexis, leaves his wife
after a wedding imposed on him by his father to devote himself entirely to
the service of God. After seventeen years, Alexis by chance returns to Rome,
where he lives unrecognized and as a beggar in his father’s house for exactly
the same amount of time he has spent away. Feeling close to the end, he writes
his life story on a piece of parchment, which is read out in public after his
death. His father, mother and wife finally recognize him and desperately weep
over his body.
The astonishing feature of this legend is not only the absence of recognition,
but the fact that Alexis does not want to be recognized. When he finds himself
in Rome again, he is warned that his family may recognize him and ‘encumber
him with worldly honour’ (199–​200). Even on the point of death, he closely
guards the parchment where he has recounted his life ‘so that they may not
recognize him until he was gone’ (286–​7). Alexis accepts, even desires, being
a nobody to the greater glory of God. He sacrifices recognition on the altar
of sainthood. It is the last and perhaps greatest renunciation of his life, and
it brings to its logical consequence the Gospel’s message according to which
whoever forsakes his house, his father, mother and wife for Jesus’ sake, ‘shall
receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life’.60 Recognition will
come, significantly, only after death and as the consequence of a miracle which
is the earthly ‘sign’ of God’s recognition of his servant.
Self-​denial, however, is not accepted by normal human beings. Father,
mother and wife react with despair at Alexis’ death, and the greatest poetic
achievement of the Vie is the moving scene in which his frustrated Penelope
pronounces her complaint over the newly recognized body of her husband
(466–​95). In the end she too must accept the Christian logic incarnated by
Alexis’ parable (494–​5), and the poet of the Vie concludes his narrative by
showing us husband and wife reunited in God (606–​10). The nostos ends in
Heaven.
∵
59
60
La Vie de Saint Alexis, ed. M. Perugi, Geneva, Droz (Textes Litteraires Français), 2000.
Here, recognition is a theme: see lines 115–​121, 240–​263.
Matthew, 19: 29.
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
89
A less extreme message is borne out by a much later story of nostos, Alexandre
Dumas’ Le Comte de Monte-​Cristo, published in 1844.61 The difference, however, is that the protagonist of this novel reaches only the beginning of the
Christian ideal itinerary, and only at the end of the story. In this immensely
successful nineteenth-​century version of the Odyssey, the Suitors have won,
and Odysseus’ only purpose is revenge. Finally, he returns to his Ithaca not as
a beggar, but as a mysterious, rich and powerful foreign aristocrat. Naturally,
these changes affect the way in which the theme of recognition is treated.
The story of Edmund Dantès, the protagonist of Montecristo, is one of
double nostos. At the beginning of the book, we see him return to Marseilles
to comfort his old father and marry the beautiful Mercedes. He is, however,
falsely accused of plotting with Bonapartists and imprisoned in the Chateau
d’If, the grim castle island in front of Marseilles. There, he languishes for fourteen years, becoming a Nobody, but also meets the old Italian abbot Faria, who
educates him in all possible skills, teaches him languages, culture and refinement, and finally reveals to him the existence of a fabulous treasure buried
underground on the island of Montecristo. At Faria’s death, Dantès manages
to escape from jail and to find the treasure. He changes his appearance and
returns to Marseilles to find his father dead and Mercedes disappeared. With
this second nostos the revenge begins. The Count of Montecristo, as Dantès
now styles himself, discovers that Mercedes’ old suitor, Fernand, has married her, and forces him to commit suicide. He finds out the people who had
betrayed him and punishes them one after the other by exposing the crimes
they have committed in their social ascent. On the other hand, he protects
the son of his old employer Morrel, who had tried to save him from prison,
and even resuscitates the girl with whom he is passionately in love. He spares
and then helps Mercedes, forgives the last of his enemies and, after a visit to
the Chateau d’If, recognizes his own love for Haydée, the Greek princess now
formally his slave.
In this intricate plot, anagnorisis plays a central part. The theme follows
two main lines of development, one of revelation and one which leads to self-​
recognition. The former coincides with revenge –​in Aristotelian terms with
the reversal that brings to ruin Montecristo’s adversaries. The latter is born
out of Dantès’ recognition by Mercedes and his subsequent meditation on
revenge. The novel’s last chapters are concerned with the problem of how a
61
Alexandre Dumas, Le Comte de Monte-​Cristo, ed. G. Sigaux, Paris, Gallimard, 1981.
Throughout, I modify the Collins translation of The Count of Montecristo, London-​
Glasgow, 1955.
90 Chapter 1
man who has been recognized by others for what he was can now recognize
himself for what he is.
This theme is first sounded when Dantès, having escaped from jail, arrives
in Leghorn. There, he undergoes a most important trial –​as to whether, not
having beheld his own features for fourteen years, he can recognize himself.
He goes to a barber and then looks at himself in a mirror. His very features
have changed. Prison has had the effect of turning ‘the round, open, smiling
face of a young and happy man’ into the ‘oval, lengthened’ face of resolution,
thoughtfulness, melancholy, misanthropy and hatred. The ‘deep learning’ he
has acquired spreads over his features ‘an aura of intelligent assuredness’. His
complexion, once dark, Mediterranean and plebeian, now has the ‘aristocratic
beauty of the men of the north’ (sic!). Finally, Dantès’ eyes, which have been
used to twilight or darkness for many years, possess ‘that singular faculty of
distinguishing objects in the night common to the hyena and the wolf’ –​a
characteristic that Montecristo will indeed exhibit in his subsequent career.
In short, Edmond smiles in looking at himself: ‘it was impossible that his best
friend –​if indeed, he had any friend left –​would recognize him; he could not
recognize himself’.62
The impossibility that his old friends recognize him, and for him to recognize his own self is in fact for a long time Montecristo’s story. When Dantès
toys with his identity, disguising himself as an English bank clerk, the Abbé
Busoni, Lord Wilmore, Sinbad the Sailor, Monsieur Zaccone, and the Count
of Montecristo, he deceives others but also himself. He is many and no one.
He plays many roles but has lost and deliberately put aside his past. In many
ways, he is a mask, and indeed a whole section of the book is devoted to the
Roman Carnival, where identities are fictitious, ever-​changing pretences on a
background of folly and illusion.
Montecristo’s fondness for the omnipotent game of disguise produces
a play on recognition and misrecognition which is present throughout the
second section of the novel. Thus, in ­chapter 34 he appears and is recognized as Sinbad the Sailor, as the man who talked in the Colosseum with the
Roman bandit Vampa, and as the Count of Montecristo. Later on (­chapter 52),
he convinces his interlocutors that he is the same person who years before
appeared in Perugia as a great doctor. In another chapter (69), we have a
typical scene of disguise comedy. As the envoy of the police prefect leaves
Wilmore’s house, the English Lord pulls off his light hair, red whiskers, false
jaw and scar ‘to resume his own black hair, the dark complexion, and the
62
Le Comte de Monte-​Cristo, p. 234.
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
91
pearly teeth of the Count of Montecristo’. Here, even the most famous of signs,
the scar, is faked.63
Lastly, both Dumas and his protagonist play on the double meaning of the
word reconnaissance itself. In ­chapter 20, the Count visits the Morrels in Paris
and questions them about their mysterious benefactor. The first climax of
the scene is reached when Montecristo ventures to give a short description
of this character’s appearance. Julie exclaims, ‘Oh, do you then know him?’;
but Montecristo replies he only knew a Lord Wilmore who was constantly as
generous as their unknown protector. ‘Sans se faire connaître!’, Julie interposes.
‘C’était un homme bizarre qui ne croyait pas à la reconnaissance’, answers
Montecristo, adding that perhaps now he has proof enough that reconnaissance exists.64 It is obvious from the context that this word now primarily
means ‘gratitude’, but also that it includes ‘recognition’, in a way which we shall
see is typical of the Bible. To recognize Montecristo –​to recognize God –​means
being grateful to him. As a matter of fact, in this very scene we are told that old
Morrel, Julie’s and Maximilien’s father, the only person who had tried to help
young Dantès, maintained that their unknown benefactor was a ‘lost friend’.
Morrel’s last words on his deathbed had been of recognition rather than reconnaissance: ‘Maximilien, it was Edmond Dantès!’.
However fortuitous it may appear, this recognition play is functional to the
two laws that inspire Dumas’ conception of the novel and Montecristo’s idea
of life as art. The former is proclaimed in c­ hapter 77: ‘With you, my dear Count,
one does not live, one dreams’. The second is formulated by Montecristo himself in ­chapter 52: ‘This is art: to be a great chemist in the East, one must direct
chance’. With Montecristo, life is a dream, but a dream artfully created to dominate hazard. It is in this context that recognition becomes the final instrument
with which Montecristo punishes those who had betrayed him.
Dantès’ revelation of his identity to his former enemies is the supreme act
of satanic revenge, which makes him appear as God but condemns them to
death or madness and their judge to total sterility. In ­chapter 83, significantly
63
64
Edmond Dantès must not show any token of his identity: he must appear as totally
unknown, remote and mysterious as a god. By contrast, Mercedes’ successful suitor,
Fernand, is recognized by a scar on his right hand when he is exposed before the
French Senate. In the seventeenth-​century world of the Three Musketeers, Dumas made
D’Artagnan recognize Milady as a dangerous criminal because of the lily-​mark impressed
on her shoulder. But the branding of prisoners had been abolished in France in 1832. Thus,
neither Edmond Dantès, a former inmate of the Chateau d’If, nor Hugo’s Jean Valjean,
have any mark on their bodies. It must, however, be noted that the story of The Count of
Montecristo fictionally begins in 1815.
Le Comte de Monte-​Cristo, pp. 633–​635.
92 Chapter 1
entitled ‘The hand of God’, Dantès appears to one of the traitors, Caderousse,
now on the point of dying. Caderousse maintains that there is no God, no
Providence, only chance, but Montecristo replies that the proof of the contrary lies precisely in his being present there ‘rich, happy and safe’, whereas his
enemy, Caderousse, is dying in despair. When, finally, Dantès reveals who he
is, Caderousse repents, acknowledging God’s existence. To recognize Edmond
Dantès means recognizing the hand that has directed chance, to see a God at
times turned into Lucifer, and hence to die or plunge into madness. Such is the
fate of Caderousse, of the old suitor Fernand (­chapter 92), of the ‘procureur du
roi’ Villefort (­chapter 111).
Montecristo-​Dantès can also be a benevolent divinity. In c­ hapter 105, after
the funeral of Maxemilien Morrel’s beloved Valentine, Montecristo prevents
the young man from killing himself by revealing his true identity. When
Dantès pronounces his name, Morrel forces his family on their knees, and his
brother Emmanuel embraces the Count as a ‘Dieu tutelaire’. Even here, however, Montecristo shows himself to be a God who has yielded to the temptations of the Devil. When he promises Maxemilien that he will help him and
asks him to hope, Morrel, who thinks this means that he will be able to see
his Valentine again, is caught between faith and doubt. On the one hand, he
cries that he is ready ‘to lift the stone of the tomb that covers the daughter of
Jairus’ and to walk on the waves at his command. On the other, he thinks that
Montecristo is only trying to console him. At this point, the Count reproaches
him (pp. 1266–​1267):
‘Ainsi’, dit le comte, ‘faible cœur que tu es, tu n’as pas la force de donner à
ton ami quelques jours pour l’épreuve qu’il tente! Sais-​tu qu’il commande
à bien des puissances terrestres? Sais-​tu qu’il a assez de foi en Dieu pour
obtenir des miracles de celui qui a dit qu’avec la foi l’homme pouvait
soulever une montagne?’.
‘And so’, said the count, ‘your heart is weak, you do not have the
strength to give your friend a few days for the trial he will make! Let’s see,
do you know that he has enough faith in God to obtain miracles from
Him who has said that with faith one can lift a mountain?’
Morrel has faith, and Montecristo rewards him by resuscitating Valentine
(­chapter 117). The scene in which, under the effect of tobacco and drugs,
Maxemilien sees the girl again as if in a dream is the climactic anagnorisis of this Christian, nineteenth-​century version of a Greek romance, a
magnificent melodramatic equivalent of the last scene of Shakespeare’s
Winter’s Tale.
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
93
Before being able to perform this miracle, however, Montecristo has to go
through a long process of self-​recognition. This is begun by his encounters with
Mercedes. Only she can have the instinctive understanding, the deep-​rooted
love of the dog Argus and thus be able to recognize Edmond Dantès. When the
two meet again for the first time, in c­ hapter 41, the scene has been skillfully prepared for several pages with mounting suspense. Montecristo is in the house of
his old rival, Fernand, where he looks at a portrait of Mercedes in Catalan costume, such as he remembers her. Then Fernand himself enters the room, and
the two men sit opposite each other like Odysseus and Penelope. Fernand does
not recognize his interlocutor, who keeps in the shadow. Finally, Mercedes herself appears. When Montecristo turns towards her, she remains ‘immobile and
pale’ and lets fall the arm which she had rested on the gilded door-​post. This
is the only gesture which indicates recognition. The conversation that ensues
follows the canons of politeness and elegance, with the addition of a slight
tension that only the readers can understand. Dumas gives no clear indication
as to whether Edmond has understood that Mercedes has recognized him. The
two are enclosed within their respective pallor, Mercedes trying to reach out
to him with words of thanks for having saved her son from the Roman bandits.
Montecristo, who believes he sees tears in her eyes at this point, speaks to her
with ‘sweetness’, but remains impenetrable and finally leaves.
Whatever one may think of Dumas’ use of convention, this is a great recognition scene precisely because there is no release of emotion and no reunion.
The tension is completely interior, and, by limiting himself to reporting the
polite words, the bows and the lady’s tears, Dumas forces us to speculate on the
two characters’ feelings and to build our own recognition scene. Furthermore,
he prolongs this scene to the very end of the novel. There are three more
encounters between Mercedes and Edmond, and the barrier between them
which is still present at the next meeting (­chapter 71), falls down in the second,
where the road to a decisive change in Montecristo’s attitude is finally opened.
In ­chapter 89 Mercedes visits the Count to beg him spare her son Albert in
the duel they must fight the following morning. She calls him ‘Edmond’ and
appeals to him in the name of ‘Mercedes’. Montecristo replies that Mercedes
is dead. She insists and the discussion between them is long and passionate.
At the end, however, the Count forgives Albert and accepts sacrificing himself in the duel. The true recognition then takes place with Mercedes’ words: ‘I
have seen you once more as noble and great as in the past’. The way is open to
self-​recovery. After the last act of his revenge, Montecristo returns to Marseille
where, in his father’s house, he meets Mercedes for the last time. Once more,
he repeats that he considers himself God’s agent: ‘derrière moi, invisible,
inconnu, irrité, il y avait Dieu’. His enormous fortune was a sign of Providence,
94 Chapter 1
who ‘needed’ him for her ‘grand designs’. Yet, in this being a ‘priest’ devoted to
one and only purpose there was not one moment of tranquillity. He felt himself being driven like the ‘cloud of fire passing through the sky to go burning
the wicked cities’ (­chapter 112).
At the end of this interview, having left Mercedes forever, Montecristo goes
back to his past. There has already been a change in him: he has reached the
‘abyss of doubt’. Has his great ‘architect’s work’ been ‘sacrilegious’? To answer
this question, he must gain ‘an exact appreciation of the past’. He, the ‘resurrected man’, must ‘find the corpse again’. Edmond Dantès returns, then, to the
Chateau d’If, to visit the old cells where he and Faria had been confined. The
recognition is complete. In his cell, Montecristo finds the inscription he had
written on the wall, ‘My god, save my memory’, and in Faria’s room he prays for
a sign. The keeper gives him the abbot’s manuscript on the kingdoms of Italy.
And there, in the epigraph, he finds the answer: ‘Thou shalt tread upon the
lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet’.65
Comforted by the words of the Psalmist, Montecristo overcomes his doubts. In
yet another revelation scene (­chapter 116), he can forgive the last of his enemies, Danglars, because he himself ‘needs to be forgiven’. While resuscitating
Morrel’s fiancée, he discovers that Haydée, the Greek princess with whom he
finds himself in love, returns his love. They leave together, and Morrel receives
from him a letter where the final recognition –​a confession and an acknowledgment of self and God –​is inscribed:
Dites à l’ange qui va veiller sur votre vie, Morrel, de prier quelquefois pour
un homme qui, pareil à Satan, s’est cru un instant l’égal de Dieu, et qui a
reconnu, avec toute l’humilité d’un chrétien, qu’aux mains de Dieu seul
sont la suprême puissance et la sagesse infinie. Ces prières adouciront
peut-​être le remords qu’il emporte au fond de son cœur.
Tell the angel who will watch over your life, Morrel, to pray sometimes
for a man who like Satan, thought himself for an instant equal to God,
but who has recognized with Christian humility that God alone possesses
supreme power and infinite wisdom. These prayers will perhaps soften
the remorse he carries at the bottom of his heart.
Although not completely sudden, this conversion undoubtedly contrasts with
the relentlessness with which Montecristo pursues his revenge. This dualism
carries one of the fundamental messages of the book. On the one hand, we
65
Psalm 91: 13.
95
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
have the recognition game and the scenes of revelation, a knowledge which
is denied or delayed, and which finally kills. On the other, there is anagnorisis
which leads to life, love and forgiveness, which heals the fracture between past
and present, which makes Dantès recognize God and himself in humility.
Dumas shows a strong will to believe in the continuity and wholeness of
human identity, thus revealing the central faith expressed by the Odyssey.
But the Odysseus who conquers his house anew, although now –​as Dante
would put it –​‘experienced of the world, of human vices and valour’ –​is the
same man who had left twenty years before and the same king of his island.
The man who writes his recognition letter to Maxemilien Morrel is both one
and two: ‘Edmond Dantès, Comte de Monte-​Cristo’, as he signs himself. He is
something more than he was before, something which only a belief in both
Providence and social progress could produce.
∵
Sixty years later, this belief was shattered. In 1904 Pirandello published Il fu
Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal), a novel where the motifs of adventure,
nostos, and return from death are treated in a paradoxical manner.66 After his
marriage, Mattia Pascal is forced to live with a suddenly decayed wife (Romilda)
and a terrible mother-​in-​law. In one day, he loses both his baby daughter and his
mother. Depressed, he decides to go away and makes a fortune in Montecarlo
playing roulette (this is not an infinite treasure like Montecristo’s, but a sum
on which Mattia Pascal could live for the rest of his life). He is returning home,
dreaming, like Edmond Dantès, of revenge, when, reading the newspaper, he
discovers that a body has been found by a mill in his native village of Miragno.
The man has killed himself and has been recognized by wife and acquaintances as Mattia Pascal, librarian. Mattia Pascal feels he is finally free. He stops
in a village, goes (like Dantès) to a barber, where looking at himself in a mirror
after the ‘operation’, he finds that only his squinting eyes can reveal his identity. From a conversation on the train he picks up a new name, ‘Adriano Meis’,
throws away his wedding ring (which, with the two names inscribed inside,
could be a decisive recognition sign), decides to forget his past and starts
building a new memory. He will be Adriano Meis, born in Argentina, returned
to Italy a few months old. He does not remember his parents, both dead. He
has been brought up by his grandfather, whose figure he builds with loving
66
Luigi Pirandello, Il fu Mattia Pascal, in Tutti i romanzi, ed. G. Macchia, vol. i, Milan,
Mondadori, 1973. The English translation, The Late Mattia Pascal, is by N. Simborowski,
Sawtry, Dedalus, 20112, often modified.
96 Chapter 1
care. An ‘invented man’, forced to live by himself, he travels, like Odysseus, all
over Europe, enjoying his new freedom and yet wishing to return home. He is
now an ‘alien’, a ‘nothing’, a ‘forestiere della vita’. For a while, he lives in Milan,
where he discovers he cannot have a friendship, nor indeed any relationship
with another human being, because he is afraid of being recognized. He moves
to Rome, where he rents a room from a family. Here, he finds an odd situation.
Anselmo Paleari, the father, is a passionate reader of theosophical books and
an enthusiastic spiritist. His first daughter is dead and her husband, Papiano,
has used up her dowry and exploits the family. A second daughter, Adriana, is
a sweet, humble, frightened creature, whom Papiano plans to marry so as not
to be forced to return his first wife’s money. Adriano Meis and Adriana Paleari
fall in love with each other, and Adriano undergoes an operation to correct his
squinting eye. Some of his money, however, is stolen by Papiano during a spiritualist séance, and he is even challenged to a duel. Adriano Meis, who has no
identity, can neither marry Adriana nor have recourse to the police nor fight.
So, finally, he decides to kill himself and stages a perfect suicide on the Tiber.
He decides to become Mattia Pascal again, goes to a barber once more and
reaches the villa of his brother Roberto, where a first recognition scene takes
place. He learns that his wife is remarried (to a friend of his) and goes back to
Miragno for his revenge. He arrives at night and finds his wife, her husband and
his mother-​in-​law at home.
The anagnorisis that follows is both comic and tragic. The situation is obviously paradoxical: here is a man resurrected after two years, whose apparition terrifies his relatives, and one who, by law, would have to take back his
wife (who has had a daughter by her second husband). Mattia Pascal plays
with the husband’s jealousy and with the feelings of Romilda but decides to
leave them in peace. As the night turns into dawn like in Odysseus’ scene with
Penelope, Mattia wanders through the town, where nobody recognizes him
‘because nobody thinks of him anymore’. The following day, he is recognized
by the priest, the keeper of the library where he used to work, and by the whole
town. Legally, however, ‘Mattia Pascal’ does not exist, and he himself, as he tells
us in the last page of his memoirs, does not know who he is. He visits the tomb
of the unknown man who killed himself and was recognized as Mattia Pascal
and, when asked who he is, replies, ‘Well, my dear, I am the late Mattia Pascal’.
In the story of Mattia Pascal, the end, through a double suicide and a double resurrection, coincides with the beginning. Yet this is only the surface.
The Mattia Pascal who returns to Miragno to be recognized by his unfaithful
Penelope is not the Mattia Pascal who left for his wanderings and adventures.
And Adriano Meis commits suicide because he has discovered that he cannot be someone else. Unlike Edmond Dantès, he cannot thoroughly become
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
97
the Count of Montecristo. Both the institutions of modern society (registry
offices, identification papers, police organizations) and his own conscience
prevent Adriano Meis from having a true identity. In Milan, he has a first crisis, and an occasional companion, Tito Lenzi, speaks to him about conscience.
Conscience, he says, ‘is not an absolute sufficient unto itself’: ‘when the feelings, the inclinations, the tastes of the others I or you think of are not reflected
in me or you, we cannot be satisfied, tranquil, or happy’.
A few pages later, Adriano Meis concludes, anticipating the philosophy
Pirandello was to expound in Così è –​se vi pare, that he can believe in his
fictitious identity only if others believe it. He decides, then, that he must
live, and moves to Rome. But in Rome, where Anselmo Paleari’s theosophy
and séances represent the modern experience of Hades, Adriano Meis discovers exactly the opposite of what Odysseus found in his visit to the underworld: that he ‘cannot be a hero anymore’. After the operation on his eyes
which he undergoes in order to improve his looks and to destroy the last remnant of Mattia Pascal’s identity, Adriano Meis lies in bed in total darkness.
And Anselmo Paleari entertains him with a long speech on what later will
be called ‘lanterninosofia’, ‘lanternosophy’. According to this, man is unfortunately not like a tree that lives but does not feel itself and cannot realize
that the wind or the sun are things different from itself. We men have the
sad privilege of feeling ourselves live, ‘with the beautiful illusion that derives
from it –​that of taking as a reality outside ourselves our own inner feeling of
life’. This ‘feeling of life’ is precisely like a small lamp which each of us carries,
lit up, in himself:
un lanternino che ci fa vedere sperduti su la terra, e ci fa vedere il male
e il bene; un lanternino che projetta tutt’intorno a noi un cerchio più o
meno ampio di luce, di là dal quale è l’ombra nera, l’ombra paurosa che
non esisterebbe, se il lanternino non fosse acceso in noi, ma che noi dobbiamo pur troppo creder vera, fintanto ch’esso si mantiene vivo in noi.
Spento alla fine a un soffio, ci accoglierà la notte perpetua dopo il giorno
fumoso della nostra illusione, o non rimarremo noi piuttosto alla mercé
dell’Essere, che avrà soltanto rotto le vane forme della nostra ragione?
a little lantern which makes us see ourselves scattered over earth, and
makes us perceive good and evil: a little lantern lamp which projects all
around us a more or less extensive circle of light beyond which lies the
blank shadow, a fearful shadow which would not exist if the lantern was
not lit in us but which we must unfortunately believe to be real as long as
the lantern is alight within us. When at the end it is snuffed out, perpetual
night will greet us after the misty daylight of our illusion, or rather we
98 Chapter 1
will be left at the mercy of Being, which will only have shattered the vain
forms of our reasoning.67
Paleari’s ‘lanternosophy’ aims at proving that death is not real, that in fact it
is only ‘the breath that extinguishes the small lamp’ which stops us from seeing beyond its circle the wide universe where ‘we have already lived and will
always live’. Death eliminates the shadow projected by our individuality. But
Adriano Meis has already ‘died’: he is the reincarnation of Mattia Pascal. He
exists between a false, but perfectly real (because legal) death, and a perfectly
real (because real but completely fictitious) life. When, later, he contemplates
his shadow on the Milvian Bridge, he asks himself: ‘Who’s more of a shadow,
me or it?’. In the same chapter, he comes to the obvious conclusion: ‘Who was
I? Nobody’.
Consciousness –​the feeling of oneself, the little lantern –​kills Adriano Meis.
One day, Paleari talks to him about a puppet-​theatre production of Orestes’
tragedy ‘d’après Sophocle’ –​that Electra to which we will turn in the next chapter. If the paper sky over the stage were rent, he says, Orestes would be unable to complete his revenge. This is precisely what happens to Adriano Meis.
After he ‘kills himself’, he decides to return home as Mattia Pascal, to fulfil the
anagnorisis, to go back to his roots: ‘There, I would declare myself, get myself
recognised as still alive, graft myself onto buried roots’. The nostos, the revenge,
and the recognition are physically possible –​indeed, up to a point, perfectly
plausible and in accordance with our expectations. Paradoxically, however,
they are too normal.
Take, for instance, the recognition scene between Mattia and his brother
Roberto. Announced by a servant as ‘a friend coming from far away’, Mattia
waits in the sitting room. When the door opens, he rises, his eyes dimmed by
emotion, a convulsive laughter gurgling in his throat. Roberto stands before
him, ‘upset, almost stunned’:
–​Con chi … ? –​fece. –​Berto! –​gli gridai, aprendo le braccia. –​Non mi
riconosci? Diventò pallidissimo, al suono della mia voce, si passò rapidamente una mano su la fronte e su gli occhi, vacillò, balbettando: –​Com’è
… com’è … com’è? Ma io fui pronto a sorreggerlo, quantunque egli si
traesse indietro, quasi per paura. –​Son io! Mattia! non aver paura! non
sono morto … Mi vedi? Toccami! Sono io, Roberto. Non sono mai stato più
vivo d’adesso! Sù, sù, sù … –​Mattia! Mattia! Mattia! –​prese a dire il povero
67
Il fu Mattia Pascal, pp. 484–​485: The Late Mattia Pascal, p. 140.
Odysseus, Ulysses, Nobody
99
Berto, non credendo ancora agli occhi suoi. –​Ma com’è? Tu? Oh Dio …
com’è? Fratello mio! Caro Mattia! E m’abbracciò forte, forte, forte. Mi misi
a piangere come un bambino.
‘Who … ?’, he murmured. ‘Berto!’, I cried, opening my arms, ‘Don’t you
recognise me?’. He went very pale at the sound of my voice, passed his
hand swiftly over his forehead and eyes and wavered stuttering: ‘How can
it be? How?’. I was ready to hold him up, though he drew back, almost as if
afraid. ‘It’s me! Mattia! Don’t be afraid, I’m not dead. Can’t you see it’s me?
Touch me. It’s me, Roberto. I’ve never been more alive than now. Come
on!’. ‘Mattia! Mattia!’ poor Berto started saying, still not able to believe
his own eyes. ‘How can that be? You! Oh God … how? My brother! Dear
Mattia!’ And he hugged me very tight. I started to weep like a child.68
Apparently, this is a perfect recognition scene, highly pathetic in its conciseness and altogether plausible in its development. But a rationalist like Aristotle
would have serious objections against it. Where are the semeia, where is the
reasoning, where the memory? As a matter of fact, the scene is a conflation of
two or three much earlier recognitions, crucial in Western Literature, which
I will examine later in this book: the post-​resurrectional appearances of Jesus
to Mary Magdalen, the apostles and doubting Thomas. Roberto is startled by
Mattia’s voice, by his calling him by name, like Magdalen is by Jesus’ ‘Mary’. Like
Jesus to the disciples, Mattia tells his brother, ‘be not afraid’. And as Jesus urges
the apostles, ‘touch me’, so does Mattia invite Berto, ‘Toccami’.69 Yet the fact is
that Mattia Pascal is anything but the Son of God or the Messiah. He has not
performed miracles, and, above all, he lives in a society where signs and identification papers are considered indispensable to recognition. Mattia Pascal has
not risen from the dead, because he never died. A few minutes later, when
Roberto hears his story, he rounds off the anagnorisis with an exclamation that
dispels and explodes the Gospel-​like aura: ‘Mattia, matto’ (Mattia, mad).
It is this at once pathetic and comic aspect of anagnorisis that culminates
in the scene where Mattia Pascal arrives at home in Miragno. When Romilda’s
mother and new husband open the door, Mattia steps forward, shouting ‘Mattia
Pascal! From the other world’. Pomino, the husband, falls on the ground; the
mother-​in-​law shrieks like a woman about to give birth; Romilda swoons. In
the chaos that follows, Mattia finds in his arms the howling baby daughter of
his wife and friend. And he dandles her until she falls silent. The comic terror
68
69
Il fu Mattia Pascal, p. 556: The Late Mattia Pascal, p. 196.
References here to John 20: 16, Matthew 28: 10, Luke 24: 39.
100 Chapter 1
of the recognition gives way to normal life, to the impulse of a simple man: ‘my
hatred’, he confesses, ‘cooled’. Then, he starts playing with his interlocutors. For
a moment, as she serves him coffee, Romilda looks into his eyes, but (‘che lesse
in quell’attimo negli occhi miei?’) she immediately lowers hers. For a moment,
Mattia feels a lump in his throat strangle him with unexpected tears, but the
cup of coffee is smoking under his nose. Mattia Pascal throws anagnorisis to
the dogs. After he is recognised by the whole town (a scene which he explicitly
refuses to describe), he goes to the graveyard, to put flowers on the tomb of
‘Mattia Pascal’, and concludes, ‘I could not really say who I am now’. When the
little lantern of consciousness spreads its limited and limiting light, Orestes
becomes Hamlet, Odysseus remains Nobody, and anagnorisis is a shift from
unconscious knowledge to conscious ignorance.
For, as Ralph Ellison’s black invisible man proclaims from his hole under the
ground of Harlem, ‘responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a
form of agreement’.70 In a novel where the nostos has become picaresque exploration of the wide, white world, and where revenge is unthinkable, where to a
young black man of twentieth-​century America are imposed multiple identities only convenient to society, where in fact, like Dostoevsky’s author of the
Notes from the Underground, the protagonist is invisible, recognition of him
by others is by definition impossible. ‘Like a continually endangered Odysseus
under the polyphemal white eyes of society he is’, it has been said, ‘Noman’.71
And yet whatever hope is left to him (to us) lies in recognition. As he confesses
at the end of his story, ‘all boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility’. Just before he says,
‘I now recognized my invisibility’, he declares what the anagnorisis consists
of: ‘Well, I was and yet I was invisible, that was the fundamental contradiction.
I was and yet I was unseen’ (p. 507). In 1952, an African American from the
deep South and deeper New York tells us that the knowledge one shifts to from
ignorance is not awareness of an alternative between to be or not to be, but the
painstaking recognition of a state where to be and not to be coexist.
70
71
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, London, Gollancz, 1953, p. 11.
F.R. Horowitz, ‘Ralph Ellison’s Modern Version of Brer Bear and Brer Rabbit in Invisible
Man’, Midcontinent American Studies Journal, iv (1963): 21–​27, at p. 22.
­c hapter 2
Reason
Electra and Hamlet
Electra and Hamlet undoubtedly are among the greatest tragic characters in
literature, and part of their success may well be due to the fact that they show
recognition as intimately connected to an exercise of their rational faculties.
In this chapter, I examine this connection in the light of Aristotle’s discussion
of anagnorisis in the Poetics. We have already seen how Aristotle quotes as a
typical example of anagnorisis ek syllogismou the recognition scene between
Electra and Orestes in Aeschylus’ Choephori (458 bce). After Aeschylus gave it
a particular pattern and significance, this scene seems to have acquired central
importance in Greek culture and to have occupied the best minds of Athens
in discussions the issue of which concerns not only drama, but science and
philosophy as well.
If we accept the (very tentative) modern dating of post-​Aeschylean Electra
plays, Euripides’ tragedy, which contains a deliberate artistic and philosophical
attack upon Aeschylus’ scene, goes back to ca. 418 bce whereas Sophocles’ version, which seems to take up a middle ground between Aeschylus and Euripides,
would appear to belong to the years around 413. In 423–​22 Aristophanes mentions Aeschylus’ scene in The Clouds. We do not know how he would have
considered Euripides’ version, but judging from the treatment he receives in
the Frogs we may presume that Aristophanes would have pronounced a pretty
severe sentence on his Electra.1
Debate on the Electra scene by dramatists in their plays thus covers the second half of the fifth century, the age of Pericles, sophism and Socrates. In the
two immediately following generations, philosophers resume the discussion,
and once more this focuses on Aeschylus’s version, to which Plato, as we have
seen, seems to allude in his Theaetetus, and which Aristotle chooses as paradigmatic of anagnorisis ‘through reasoning’ in the Poetics.
1 Aristophanes, Clouds, 534–​536, where the Chorus says: ‘So now this new comedy of mine, like
the legendary Electra,/ has come on a quest, hoping somewhere to find similarly intelligent
spectators:/ for she will recognize the lock of her brother’s hair if she sees it’: ed. and trans.
J. Henderson, Cambridge MA and London, Harvard University Press (Loeb 488), 1998, pp. 82–​
83. I will soon go back to the Frogs (971–​974) passage.
© Piero Boitani, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004453678_004
102 Chapter 2
Why, then, does there grow in classical Greece so much interest for a single,
apparently minor scene of drama? My answer to this question would be threefold. In the first place, the importance of the Electra–​Orestes recognition in a
play about Orestes’ return home and his revenge of his father Agamemnon’s
murder upon his mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus is absolutely
fundamental. The moment in which Electra, who alone in the Atreid family
has kept faith to the memory of her father, recognises her brother Orestes
marks the turning point in the action of such a play, where the union of
brother and sister alone can bring about the completion of divinely ordained
revenge within the justice of the lex talionis. In Aeschylus’ Oresteian trilogy,
which begins with Agamemnon’s return and his murder, and ends with Orestes
being acquitted of his matricide by the new justice of Athens, the recognition
scene corresponds to the first reversal, or peripeteia, in the plot of the tragedy. Secondly, that recognition scene stands at the end of a return, Orestes’,
implicitly contrasted with Agamemnon’s nostos, where re-​union between husband and wife spelt death to the former. The recognition between Electra and
Orestes fulfils a strong expectation, reunites brother and sister, reconstructs a
family –​a ‘house’ now divided, fragmented and dispersed –​re-​establishes the
old order and opens the way to justice. Finally, the technical means employed
by each playwright to bring the anagnorisis to fulfilment have a bearing on
the artistic construction of each play and imply different gnoseological and
epistemological attitudes, in particular with regard to the value of signs and
reasoning.
The three fundamental moments in the story of Orestes’ revenge must be
his return, the recognition with Electra, and the murder of Clytemnestra and
Aegisthus: there is no way in which the order and logic of this mythos can be
altered without in fact constructing a wholly new story, with a different meaning. Aristotle states as much in the Poetics. But he maintains that a poet has the
right and the duty to ‘manage transmitted stories well, in an artistic manner’
(Poetics 1453b 22–​26). The plots of the Electra plays by Aeschylus, Euripides
and Sophocles bear witness to the constrained freedom with which a Greek
playwright can treat his material. Aeschylus places the recognition scene
almost at the beginning of the Choephori; Euripides has it one third of the way
through his Electra; and Sophocles delays to the final third of the play.
Three clearly different dramatic strategies inspire these changes of tempo,
as will be apparent from a consideration of the three plays’ scale and emphasis. The Choephori (or Libation-​Bearers),2 just over a thousand lines in length,
2 Texts and translations of the three plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles are from
the Loeb edition, as follows: Aeschylus, Oresteia, ed. and trans. A.H. Sommerstein; Euripides,
Reason
103
runs its course from beginning to middle and end without superfluous episodes and stages essentially one active character, Orestes. Electra disappears
from the play once the revenge proper starts, the function of the nurse is
simply that of calling Aegisthus back to the Palace, Pylades pronounces only
one, though decisive, sentence (when Orestes hesitates to kill his mother, his
friend replies to his question whether he should with ‘Then what becomes in
future of Loxias’ oracles delivered at Pytho, and of faithful, sworn pledges?’,
900–​902). In Euripides, the play has become over thirteen hundred lines long,
Orestes and Electra kill their mother together, Pylades is silent throughout, but
we have a peasant (Electra’s husband), a messenger (who describes Aegisthus’
death), and an old man who has been Agamemnon’s guardian and who recognizes Orestes, and finally two dei ex machina, the Dioscuri Castor and Pollux.
With Sophocles, Electra has become a play of a thousand five hundred lines,
with a series of secondary episodes that make the plot ‘complex’. The theme
of Orestes’ death, already present in Aeschylus (and absent in Euripides), is
amplified, the supposedly tragic end of the hero being first announced by the
old man and then apparently confirmed by Orestes and Pylades, who carry on
the stage the urn which we are told contains Orestes’ ashes. Finally, the main
characters have increased to include Electra’s sister, Chrysothemis, to whom it
now falls to find the lock of hair by Agamemnon’s tomb.3
Suppliant Women, Electra, Heracles, ed. and. trans. D. Kovacs; Sophocles, Ajax, Electra,
Oedipus Tyrannus, ed. H. Lloyd-​Jones: all, Cambridge MA and London, Harvard University
Press, 2008, 1998, 1994.
3 The critical works I have most often consulted are: B. Snell, Aischylos und die Handeln im
Drama, Philologus, Supplementband xx, Heft 1, Leipzig, Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung,
1928; K. Hamburger, Von Sophokles zu Sartre. Griechische Dramenfiguren antik und modern,
Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 1962; F. Solmsen, Elektra and Orestes. Three Recognitions in Greek
Tragedy, Amsterdam, Noord-​Hollandsche Uit. Mij., 1967; A. Martina, Il riconoscimento di
Oreste nelle Coefore e nelle due Elettre, Rome, Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1975; E.A. Havelock, The
Greek Concept of Justice from its Shadow in Homer to its Substance in Plato, Cambridge MA,
Harvard University Press, 1978; M. Heath, The Poetics of Greek Tragedy, London, Duckworth,
1987; A. Poole, Tragedy: Shakespeare and the Greek Example, Oxford, Blackwell, 1987; T.C.W.
Stinton, Collected Papers on Greek Tragedy, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990; B. Williams, Shame
and Necessity, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993; J. Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy.
Aeschylus to Armageddon, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996; A.P. Burnett, Revenge in Attic and
Later Tragedy, Berkeley-​Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1998; F. Condello, Elettra.
Storia di un mito, Rome, Carocci, 2010. On Greek tragedy the important books for me have
been M. Pohlenz, Griechische Tragödie, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 19542; B.M.W.
Knox, The Heroic Temper. Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy, Berkeley-​Los Angeles, University
of California Press, 1964; J. de Romilly, L’évolution du pathétique d’Eschyle à Euripide, Paris,
Presses Universitaires de France, 19802, and Le Temps dans la tragédie grecque, Paris, Vrin,
1971; B. Vickers, Towards Greek Tragedy, London-​New York, Longman, 1973; S. Said, La
faute tragique, Paris, Maspero, 1978; R.P. Winnington-​Ingram, Sophocles. An Interpretation,
104 Chapter 2
Aeschylus’ plot underlines the problem, which is central for him, that of justice. Clytemnestra has murdered Agamemnon, blood calls for blood (400–​2),
Apollo had ordered Orestes to exact revenge. Accordingly, with but one hesitation, the hero proceeds with his task. The middle of the play, significantly, is
taken up by the long dialogue in which Orestes, Electra and the Chorus discuss
dike, or justice, evoke the past of the Atreid family and Agamemnon’s murder,
pray for his assistance, and learn of Clytemnestra’s dream (in which she gives
birth to a serpent that sucks clots of blood together with her milk). The end of
the play leaves the central question open once more. As soon as Orestes has
killed his mother, he is in turn ‘polluted’ and the Furies start tormenting him.
The anagnorisis between Electra and Orestes, which comes very early in this
plot, is not only instrumental to the revenge –​it reconstructs the ‘eagle’s blood
bereaved’ (247–​8), the domos, the House around which revolves the entire
trilogy.
In Euripides, Electra is much more prominent, and the whole play has a
more pathetic setting. Electra’s ruthlessness for revenge, like her mother’s
murder of Agamemnon, has personal motivations as well as her general desire
for justice. She has been banished from her father’s house and turned into a
peasant’s wife. Above all, as Clytemnestra tells her, anticipating the formulation of Freud’s, and above all, Jung’s ‘Electra complex’, her nature has always
been to love her father.4 The question of justice, therefore, is much more individual: should Orestes and his sister kill their mother? The ideal centre of the
play has Electra and her brother discuss this, with Orestes, anguished at the
thought, maintaining that matricide is wrong and that perhaps a fiend (alastor) disguised as the god commanded him to kill Clytemnestra (967–​979). The
solution to Orestes’ and Electra’s dilemma comes at the end of the play with the
Dioscuri announcing Orestes’ acquittal by the Athenian tribunal. Apollo will
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980; C. Segal, Tragedy and Civilization. An
Interpretation of Sophocles, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1981; Oxford Readings
in Greek Tragedy, ed. E. Segal, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983; B. Williams, Shame and
Necessity, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993; The Cambridge Companion to Greek
Tragedy, ed. P. Easterling, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997; M. Ringer, Electra
and the Empty Urn. Metatheater and Role Playing in Sophocles, Chapel Hill NC, University of
North Carolina Press, 1998; E. Hall, Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2010; B. Hoxby, What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015.
4 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), The Standard Edition of the
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. vii, London, Vintage, p. 227; Carl Gustav Jung, The
Theory of Psychoanalysis, New York, Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co., p. 69 ff. (it
was Jung that named this the ‘Electra complex’): see J. Scott, Electra after Freud: Myth and
Culture, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2005.
Reason
105
take upon himself the blame for Clytemnestra’s death (1266–​7). His ‘unwise’
prophecy, and Fate, are responsible for the matricide (1301–​2).
Yet this answer is, clearly, not satisfactory, for it raises another crucial question left unanswered here –​can one trust the gods? In this context, the recognition between Orestes and Electra, even more essential here than in Aeschylus
for the progress of the action, acquires a different light. Celebrated by Electra
as the first ‘victory’ the god brings them, the reunion between brother and sister, pathetic as it is, represents but a short-​lived personal joy. The House of the
Atreids is not at all rebuilt, and it is interesting to note that in the last scene
of the play Orestes and Electra weep at length over the separation imposed
on them by Castor and Pollux (130–​39). The thread joining that anagnorisis
and reunion with this final parting is indeed symbolic of the play’s nature and
message.
The apparently minor part played by the revenge proper in Sophocles’
Electra is most curious. Both Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are killed in little
over a hundred lines at the end of the play, and furthermore, in contrast with
both Aeschylus’ and Euripides’ versions, Clytemnestra is murdered before
Aegisthus; neither Orestes nor Electra seems to show any hesitation before the
matricide; and finally there seems to be no hint of the crucial problem arising
from Orestes’ killing of his mother –​the problem represented by the Furies in
Aeschylus, and by the message of the Dioscuri in Euripides.
In the Choephori, the protagonist is Orestes, at least for the last two
thirds of the play. In Euripides, Orestes and Electra are both central figures
and both kill their mother. Sophocles undoubtedly makes Electra the true
protagonist of most of his play. She is alone, anguished by her misery and
debasement, full of resentment towards Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, relentless for revenge, ready to perform it on her own (1019–​20). Yet the punishment of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus is not just the fruit of Electra’s fury.
Sophocles keeps the deep motivation of Aeschylus’ play. As Electra replies to
Clytemnestra with perfect logic, ‘was that a reason for him [Agamemnon] to
die at your hands? According to what law? Take care that in laying down this
law for mortals you are not laying down pain and repentance for yourself!
For if we are to take a life for a life, you should die first, if you were to get
what you deserve’ (579–​83). The House and the dead are similarly active in
the accomplishment of justice. As Clytemnestra is being killed, the Chorus
exclaims, ‘O city, O unhappy race, now the fate that was yours from day to day
is dying, dying! … The curses are at work! Those who lie beneath the ground
are living, for the blood of the killers flows in turn, drained by those who
perished long ago!’ (1413–​21). There is, however, something out of joint (and
I think deliberately so) in this logic.
106 Chapter 2
I shall give only two indications of this unjointed logic in the Choephori that
coincides with the recognition plot. Clytemnestra, who says she feels ‘no regret
at what was done’ (549), shows herself very uncertain when she learns that
Orestes is dead: ‘What of this? Am I to call it fortunate, or terrible, but beneficial? It is painful, if I preserve my life by means of my own calamities … Giving
birth is a strange thing; even when they treat one badly, one does not hate
one’s children’ (766–​71). At the end of the play, the Chorus and Electra listen
to Clytemnestra’s cries as she is being murdered. When Orestes strikes her for
the first time, Electra exclaims, ‘Strike twice as hard, if you have the strength!’
(1415). But there is no doubt that, both before and after this, the Chorus
expresses all its horror at what is being done (1384–​1397, 1413–​1421): ‘Maia’s son,
Hermes, hides the plot in darkness and brings him to the very end, nor does he
delay! … I heard a cry dreadful to hear, that made me shudder!’. Only a few lines
later, when Orestes and Pylades have killed Clytemnestra, the Chorus seems to
recant: ‘nor can I find fault with it!’, the Chorus says (1423). This oscillation5 is
typical of the kind of play Sophocles has written. When, in the very last sentence of the play, the Chorus comments, ‘Seed of Atreus, after many sufferings
you have at last emerged in freedom, made complete by this day’s enterprise!’,
we ask ourselves what exactly this means. What ‘freedom’ is the Chorus talking about? And what kind of ‘completion’ or ‘perfection’ (teleōthen) has the
sperma of Atreus achieved?
We are, I think, meant to ask these questions. Sophocles’ Electra is a ‘problem’ play.6 Let us consider the structure of the plot. The revenge, we have seen,
is reduced to two brief scenes at the end. The recognition between Orestes
and Electra is delayed to the last third of the play. In fact, the whole ‘middle’
of Electra is taken up by what I would call a ‘recognition plot’. This begins with
the arrival of the old man who announces and describes in splendidly epic
detail Orestes’ death in the races at Delphi. In lines 755–​6, interestingly enough
exactly halfway through the 1510 lines of the play, the theme is brought to sudden focus by the forester’s words. After his fall from the chariot, Orestes was
dragged by the horses in the dust. He was so stained by blood ‘that none of
his friends (philoi) that saw him could have recognized his wretched shape’.
Indeed, his body is immediately cremated, and his ashes placed in the urn that
Electra ‘recognizes’ as ‘Orestes’ when, accompanied by Orestes, it appears on
stage. Meanwhile, Chrysothemis reports her finding the lock of hair, the ‘sign’
5 The fluctuation of the play would be epitomized in line 1423 if we, with the manuscripts, read
legein: I cannot say anything, ‘terror makes me mute’.
6 The definition is by F. Dunn in his and L. Lomiento’s excellent edition of Elettra in the
Fondazione Valla-​Mondadori series, Milan, 2019, pp. xi-​xxix.
Reason
107
(tekmerion, 944) of a would-​be Aeschylean anagnorisis. Electra discards this, in
favour of the ‘sign’ (tekmeria, 1109) represented by the urn. Slowly, this ‘proof’
is proved false and Agamemnon’s signet ring becomes the ‘sign’ of the true
recognition (1223). Finally, more than a hundred lines later, the old man is recognized by Electra as the ‘paidagogos’ who saved Orestes after Agamemnon’s
death (1345–​63).
I shall return to this recognition plot presently. For the moment, I note
only that it introduces into the play the notion that reality can be ambiguous,
that truth may be hidden behind it, and that recognition is a process which
might have to retrace its steps through méconnaissance. And this is precisely
what both Clytemnestra and Aegisthus have to learn, too. If the recognition
plot marks the centre of the play, and its climax, the Electra-​Orestes anagnorisis, sets the peripeteia in motion, the end of the play sees peripeteia coinciding with a double recognition. As she prepares the fatal urn for the funeral
rites, Clytemnestra discovers, in a dreadful flash, that one of the men standing behind her is Orestes: ‘My child, my child, have pity on your mother!’
(1410). Soon after, Aegisthus returns unaware to the palace and wants ‘proof’
that Orestes is dead. He asks Orestes and Pylades to raise the veil which covers the corpse lying before him, believing it to be Orestes’, and would have
Clytemnestra summoned. As Orestes replies, ‘She is here near you; cease to
look elsewhere!’, Aegisthus raises the veil and exclaims, ‘Ah, what do I see?’
‘Whom are you afraid of? Whom do you not recognize?’, asks Orestes cruelly,
and while Aegisthus is still uncertain about the identity of his enemy he adds,
‘Do you not see that for some time you, still living, have been bandying words
with the dead?’. Finally, Aegisthus recognizes Orestes (1466–​80). Thus, revenge
is made to concur with anagnorisis, justice is accomplished at the same time
as truth and reality are unveiled, and recognition dominates the play, inviting
the audience to acquire true knowledge of its tragic meaning.
Let us now return to the recognition mechanisms employed by the three
poets to see how they work and what they mean. The three scenes have two
elements in common –​the finding of the lock of hair (by Electra in Aeschylus,
by the old man in Euripides, by Chrysothemis in Sophocles), and the ultimate
proof of Orestes’ identity by means of a material sign (Electra’s piece of weaving in the Choephori, the scar on Orestes’ brow in Euripides, Agamemnon’s
signet ring in Sophocles). In all three versions, these two elements are closely
linked to each other. They are both ‘signs’, albeit (and here is the rub, as we shall
see) of a different nature, and the ‘acquired’ sign –​as Aristotle would call the
vestment, the ring and the scar –​always follows the ‘inherited’ sign (the lock
of hair). Also, whilst the cloth, the scar and the ring are purely material, impersonal signs, the lock of hair has a personal value (it comes from Orestes’ own
108 Chapter 2
head by an act of his will) and a ritual significance, which ties it to the roots
themselves of the tragedy (it is placed on Agamemnon’s tomb as a sacrifice to
his memory). The two kinds of signs are, then, clearly charged with a different
intensity and, as we have seen, occupy a different position in the plot of the
three plays.
Aeschylus gives particular prominence to the ‘inherited’ sign by making
Electra herself find it and use it to initiate an anguished discussion with the
Chorus and with herself. Here we have three main stages. In the first, Electra
sees the lock and, reasoning by exclusion, concludes that Orestes has sent
it. The scheme of this syllogismos is as follows. Electra: I see a lock (167).
Chorus: Whose can it be? (168). Electra: None but myself would make this
offering (172); it is very likely our own (174–​6). Chorus: Can it be that Orestes
offered it? (177). Electra: It resembles his (178). Chorus: But how did he venture to come here? (180). Electra rightly concludes ‘he has sent it’ (180). Behind
the impeccable form, the logic playing in the argument responds to the inner
nature of the sign by progressing from me (172), to us (176) and his (178–​9) –​
in other words by moving from personal identity, to family connotation and
finally to the brother’s person in a parabola from particular to species and
again to the individual.
Then, Electra launches into an anguished monologue, itself divided into
two sections. In the first, she balances out the possibilities: ‘How can I believe
that anyone else among the citizens is the owner of this hair? And certainly it
wasn’t his killer who cut it off, either –​my mother … But for me to accept this
outright, that I think this adornment comes from the person I most love in the
world, Orestes –​oh, hope is flattering me!’ (184–​194). She says that she is ‘tossed
about in two minds’ (196). This meditation culminates in a cry at the muteness
of the signs themselves: ‘If only it had a mind and a voice like a messenger’
(195–​200). In the second part of the monologue Electra finds the foot-​prints,
which she calls a ‘second sign’ (tekmerion, 205) and of which, like a Sherlock
Holmes, she distinguishes two sets, ‘his own and those of some fellow-​traveller’
(208): they are ‘resembling and similar’ to hers (206), and the heels and tendons agree in their proportions with her own (209–​10). Yet Electra’s conclusion
once more points to uncertainty: ‘Agony and mental breakdown are close to
me!’ (211).
Finally, in the third stage Orestes appears. In the ensuing dialogue between
him and his sister, Electra continues, even after his revelation (‘I am he’, 219),
not to believe him in spite of the signs of the lock of hair and footprints. ‘Are
you trying to weave a web of trickery around me?’, she says (220). The burden
of proof falls now on Orestes, who plays superbly with Electra’s own previous
thoughts:
Reason
109
So when you see me in person you’re reluctant to recognize me –​whereas
when you saw this cut lock of mourning, and when you were examining
the tracks of my feet, your heart took wing and you imagined you could
see me. Put the lock of hair next to the place it was cut from, and take a
look: it’s your own brother’s, and it matches that of your own head. And
look at this piece of weaving, the work of your own hands, the strokes of
the batten and the picture of a beast.7
Electra now accepts him and indeed bursts out, pouring on him the names and
love of father, mother, sister and brother (245).
It seems to me that three observations can be made on this complex scene.
In the first place Aeschylus and his Electra implicitly express a firm belief in
a process which, beginning with the perception of material clues, examines
them rationally and proposes a hypothesis that is finally validated by ‘proof’.
The central mechanism of this process is the syllogismos Aristotle speaks of
in the Poetics: somebody like me has come, nobody is like me but Orestes,
hence it is Orestes who has come. Notice, however, how the progress of this
‘reasoning’ is much more complex and accurate than Aristotle seems to show.
Correctly, the first conclusion Electra reaches after examining the lock of hair
is that Orestes has sent it. The final indication of Orestes’ presence can be
deduced only from the footprints. What, then, we have here is the first example I know of in literature of a scientific process of deduction –​a solemn occasion indeed for us all.
However, and this is the second point, this mechanism is based on certain ‘signs,’ and their nature is ambiguous. Hairlock and footprints cannot by
themselves offer conclusive evidence for the hypothesis elaborated by Electra.
Likeness per se can only produce a hint, a suggestion, but it cannot constitute
evidence. Likeness in a context (Agamemnon’s tomb) goes one step further
in furnishing a clue, but it is not final, either. Yet the most important thing
here is that Aeschylus and Electra are perfectly aware of all this. Electra cries
out at the muteness of the signs she has observed, twice in her monologue
says she has a ‘divided’ mind (196 and 211), and when Orestes reveals himself, she refuses to believe him. Once more this moment is significant for the
Western mind –​the moment of doubt. If lock of hair and footprints are mute
signs which can, however, on the basis of ‘similarity in context’, substantiate a hypothesis, proof is obtained by another material sign –​the piece of
cloth, the work of Electra’s own hands, which represents a hunting scene. In
7 Aeschylus, Libation-​Bearers, 225–​232.
110 Chapter 2
passing from lock of hair to footprints, we have already shifted from an ‘inherited’ to an ‘external’ sign. Here, the ‘external’ sign (the cloth) is, however, no
longer anonymous –​it bears Electra’s own stamp like a signature. It comes
from Electra herself and has the individual and family mark of a hunt, which
the entire Oresteia uses as a central image of the Atreid house and its destiny. A symbol of civilized man (who weaves and hunts), it is an external sign
which contains in its kernel all the strength and significance of inheritance.
Electra gave it to Orestes a long time ago, when he had to leave Argos after
Agamemnon’s murder (the sign prompts us to reconstruct its story and thus
go back in time), Orestes gives it back to Electra now. It joins brother and sister in the past and present.
This leads me to the third point –​the artistic rendering of the scientific process by Aeschylus. Finding of the clues, examination, syllogismos, hypothesis
and verification, are the outward marks of something deeper, of an inner reasoning which substantiates them and adds to them an elemental dimension.
The rational process is based, as Aristotle quite rightly sees it, on a fundamental relationship of ‘likeness’: this lock of hair and these footprints are like mine.
Electra clarifies this concept in both parts of her speech. This likeness, as I have
already remarked, involves not only two individuals (Orestes and Electra), but
the species, the family (us) as well. Furthermore, as the reasoning progresses
towards verification, likeness starts implying identity by its very repetition,
until, when accused of weaving a snare against Electra, Orestes replies, ‘then
I must be hatching plots against myself’ (221). Orestes is identified as such
while he makes himself one with his sister. Electra calls him father, mother,
sister, brother.
No wonder Aristotle chose this scene as an example of recognition through
reasoning. What must have appealed to him is not only the mechanism, but
also the clarity and the anguish of the process –​the dialogue with oneself,
the groping for an answer, the check of reason, the incredibly condensed word
play, belief, doubt, suspense, surprise, recognition. Nor can anyone fail to
notice how this initial anagnorisis finds its counterpart in the final one, when
Clytemnestra understands that Orestes himself stands before her, the living
incarnation of the snake she has dreamt, sucking her milk and blood, as and
because he is killing her (892–​8): ‘Stop, my son, and have respect, my child’.
A servant has just announced Aegisthus’ death with the oracular ‘The dead
are killing the living, I tell you!’ (886). In spite of the ‘enigma,’ as she herself
calls it, Clytemnestra understands (887). The Choephori climaxes to a ‘blood’
recognition.
∵
Reason
111
The recognition between Orestes and his mother towards the end of Euripides’
Electra becomes non-​important. Clytemnestra is killed by Orestes and Electra
together and all we hear of her cries is ‘My children, in the gods’ name, do not
kill your mother!’ (1165). But in the first part of the play the question of recognition is played upon with insistence and suspense. When Orestes arrives
in Argos with Pylades, he offers his hair on Agamemnon’s tomb (91) and then
meets Electra purporting to bring her news of her brother. During their conversation, Electra declares that, were Orestes to appear before her, she would
be unable to recognize him. ‘No wonder’, replies the stranger, ‘you and he were
young when you were separated’ (284). Electra concludes that only the old
man who had been Agamemnon’s tutor could recognize her brother. She does
not notice that her interlocutor seems to know a lot about their story, for he
interrupts her with ‘Is this the man they say snatched him from death?’.
Euripides, in other words, prepares the ground thematically for the recognition while laying it waste intellectually. Anagnorisis is impossible unless
through a witness. Accordingly, Euripides splits the recognition scene proper
into two halves: in the first he attacks Aeschylus’ solution, while in the second
he offers his own. The burden of representing Aeschylus’ position and being
teased for it falls on the old man, who, upon meeting Electra, tells her that
he has seen a lock of hair on Agamemnon’s grave. Perhaps, he says, Orestes
has come in secret to visit the place. No other Argive would. ‘Put the lock up’,
he concludes, ‘against your hair and see whether the colour of the shorn tress
is the same. For it commonly happens that those who have the same paternal blood in them show physical similarity in most things’ (508–​23). Now, we
know that Orestes has indeed left his hair on Agamemnon’s tomb, and thus
the old man’s inference is correct. But Electra destroys his argument by attacking the specific validity of the clue, of the ‘likeness’ syllogism, and of its context. As to the latter, a brave man like Orestes would not come secretly, as if he
feared Aegisthus (524–​6). Secondly, how could the two locks correspond if one
belongs to a noble young man trained in the ‘wrestling schools’ while the other
is a woman’s and softened by combing? It is ‘impossible’ (amekhanon). Finally,
one would find many people with hair of a similar hue even if they are not of
the same blood (527–​531).
Having thus disposed of Aeschylus’ first clue, Euripides proceeds to attack
the second. The old man invites Electra to go and try the shoeprint: ‘see if it is
symmetros to your foot’ (535). Aeschylus’ Electra had maintained that the heels
and markings of the footprints, if metroumenai, would coincide perfectly with
her own, while she had used symmetros for the lock of hair. The point would
be crucial in a detective enquiry, for metros, the root of both words, expresses
‘measure’ in the typically Greek sense of ‘proportion.’ Hence, the Aeschylean
112 Chapter 2
Electra seems to be saying that the footprints have the same general outlook
as hers, and that in their proportion they coincide with hers. When he uses
symmetros, Euripides’ old man keeps Aeschylus’ ambiguity, though he emphasizes the likeness (sym). But when Electra fires her reply the ambiguity has disappeared. Again, she criticizes the context first: ‘how could a footprint be made
on ground well-​stoned?’ (536–​7). Then she eliminates the metros, replacing it
with isos (‘equal’): ‘And if there is one, the feet of siblings will not be of equal
size when one is male and the other female: the male will be larger’ (537–​9).
Not satisfied with having destroyed the clues, Euripides attempts an attack
on Aeschylus’ concluding evidence, too. When the old man asks Electra, ‘But
if in fact your brother should come to this land, is there not some bit of your
weaving by which you could recognize him, the cloak weaving in which I spirited him away from death?’ (540–​2), she replies that when Orestes left, she
was a child (which means that she could not have been weaving anything)
and besides he would not be wearing now the same cloak he had in infancy,
because clothes do not grow with the body (543–​6). This particular attack rests
mainly on context. The error Aeschylus has made, Euripides says, is serious –​
not just one that depends on ambiguous signs and faulty reasoning, but a mistake in dramatic verisimilitude. When Orestes left, Electra was a child.
Aeschylus’ whole recognition mechanism is thus exposed. Euripides leaves
the solution for the second half of his scene, when Orestes appears on stage.
The old man, as Orestes himself remarks, stares at him, ‘as if he were looking at
hallmark on silver’, and paces around him (558–​561). After some hesitation, he
recognizes the young man by a scar on Orestes’ brow cut when as a child he fell
in chasing a fawn with Electra (573–​4). By introducing this last factual detail,
Euripides avoids a possible accusation of paralogism (‘not everyone who has a
scar on his brow is Orestes’). Electra, convinced by all the old man’s signs (symboloisi), embraces her brother.
The introduction of a third person into the episode makes a difference.
Euripides stages the scene between Electra and the old man as if it were a
discussion such as those that Protagoras, Gorgias, or indeed Socrates could
have held –​a dialogue, a logical debate on a specific quaestio: how can you
prove a man’s identity? Attached to this is the parody, and hence critical discussion of Aeschylus’ anagnorisis process. Euripides does not deny the validity
of the process as such –​the reasoning of Aeschylus’ Electra. He attacks the
specific value of Aeschylus’ signs and the context in which they are inserted.
His Electra is a sharp sophist. Indeed, Aristophanes ironically makes Euripides
say of himself –​in front of Aeschylus and Dionysus –​in the Frogs: ‘That’s how
I encouraged these people to think (phronein), by putting rationality (logismon) and critical thinking (skepsin) into my art, so that now they grasp and
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really understand everything, especially how to run their households better
than they used to do’.8
Euripides does make Orestes leave the lock of hair on Agamemnon’s tomb,
but he maintains that as a sign this is not sufficient to constitute the basis for a
syllogismos. He proclaims that in this particular instance, in this context, only
an eyewitness can prove Orestes’ identity. When the old man finds the ‘acquired
sign on the body’ –​the scar on the brow –​which he can tie to a particular episode in Orestes’ life, and after he has attentively scrutinized the young man,
then all the signs start meaning something and Electra is convinced. Euripides’
treatment of Aeschylus’ scene marks a new development in the history of ‘reasoning’ –​one that strikes a note of caution against the use of rationality and
scientific processes. In doing this, Euripides brings to their extreme logical
consequence the doubt and the anguish at the muteness of signs of Aeschylus’
Electra. He invites us to look at the details, with the result that nobody after
him has been able to reproduce Aeschylus’ syllogismos until modern science
offered the quantitative and qualitative means of assessing the probatory
value of signs: until, that is, Electra’s clues were replaced by forensic evidence.
Euripides’ position is, however, particularly delicate, in that he accepts the
tradition according to which Orestes consecrated his hair on Agamemnon’s
tomb (90–​1), thus making the audience aware that one of the signs Electra so
logically refutes is indeed a truthful one –​a contradiction which will be amplified by Sophocles with the device of the urn. Conditioned by so many factors,
no wonder that Euripides’ final answer should be of a different intensity to
Aeschylus’. Instead of relying for its effect on the mounting anguish of reason,
on the excitement of a new tool brought to bear on human affairs, it resorts
to critical discussion, a skepsis on the verge of becoming an intellectual game.
After the critique of Aeschylus’ clues –​which of course destroys the Choephori’s
use of ‘inner reasoning’ as well –​we are left on pretty thin ground. The paidagogos’ attentive perusal of Orestes comes unexpected, and we all share Electra’s
and Orestes’ ‘wonder’ (563) as it rises to a climax with the old man’s cryptic
revelation, ‘Daughter Electra, my lady, offer prayers to the gods’. When Electra
asks him (literally), ‘For what, things that are not or things that are?’, he replies
with a significant remark: ‘Pray you may grasp the precious treasure the god is
showing (phainei) you’ (565). Orestes’ identification is like a divine revelation,
a materialization at which the audience feels total surprise because it comes
8 Aristophanes, Frogs, 971–​977, ed. and trans. J. Henderson, Aristophanes iv, Loeb, Cambridge
MA and London, 2002, pp. 156–​157. And see D.J. Conacher, Euripides and the Sophists, London,
Bristol Classical Press, 1998; and J. Dillon, ‘Euripides and the Philosophy of his Time’, Classics
Ireland, 11 (2004): 47–​73.
114 Chapter 2
after a long logical exchange which has proved that Orestes cannot be present.
The scar, of which we were told nothing before, is also surprising. Nothing,
after all, can be more unexpected in this intellectual atmosphere than finding a
Homeric solution to the ever-​present problem of recognition –​Odysseus’ scar.
∵
We have already seen how Sophocles turns recognition into a central plot of
his Electra and what this does to the overall meaning of the play. The question
we must now ask is how he deals with the problems raised by Aeschylus’ and
Euripides’ two contrasting versions of the recognition scene. In Sophocles this
takes place after two sub-​plots and two false recognitions within them. In the
first place, Chrysothemis reports Clytemnestra’s dream to Electra (417–​25). The
Chorus’ description of Clytemnestra’s dream in the Choephori comes out at
a much later stage, thus confirming Orestes’ resolution to kill his mother. In
Sophocles’ Electra, on the other hand, the dream foreshadows Orestes’ return
and revenge. Its content has changed: instead of linking Orestes to his mother,
it ties father and son. Agamemnon has appeared to the queen in a dream,
taken the sceptre and planted it by the household altar. From it springs and
spreads a fruitful bough, until it overshadows all Mycenae’s land. No explanation is given, but it is clear that the dream anticipates some future event, thus
titillating our expectations.
Secondly, after the old man’s announcement of Orestes’ death, Chrysothemis
reveals to Electra that their brother is alive and present (877–​8). She declares
she has herself seen ‘sure signs’ (saphe semeia, 886) of it, and when Electra asks
her what ‘proof’ (pistis) she has, Chrysothemis tells her story. As she reached
the old tomb of their father, she saw milk recently poured flow down from
it and the grave itself surrounded by flowers. Wonder seized her. She turned
around to see if anyone was coming, but the place was deserted, and she cautiously approached the tomb. There, she saw a lock of hair:
And the moment I saw it, ah! a familiar source of light struck me; I beheld
a token (tekmerion) of him among mortals whom I love the most, Orestes!
I took it in my hands, and uttered no ill-​omened word, but at once my
eyes filled with tears of joy. And I know now, just as I knew then, that this
ornament came from none but him. For to whom does this pertain but to
you and to me? and I did not do it, that I know, neither did you; how could
you, who cannot leave this house even to go to the gods without ruing it?
As for our mother, it is not her way to do such things, nor could she have
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115
done it without our knowing. No, these offerings at the tomb come from
Orestes.9
This passage full of emotion is Sophocles’ first answer to the Aeschylus-​
Euripides dilemma. Sophocles, too, uses the lock of hair and makes
Chrysothemis consider it a sign or a proof, but instead of having her rationally
infer that it belongs to Orestes because it is similar to hers, he swiftly delves
into the mystery of association and memory. A sudden ‘luminous form’ (903)
invades Chrysothemis’ soul –​the image-​thought ‘of seeing a sign of Orestes’.
For the moment, there is no hint of rationality at work. Chrysothemis picks up
the lock of hair as if to appropriate the sign, to touch the evidence of her own
feelings and thoughts, and, surrounded by silence, bursts into tears. For her,
anagnorisis is attained.
The syllogismos is a later rationalization of an intuitive process. Now, one
can reason by exclusion: if it was neither me, nor you, nor our mother, then it
must be Orestes. After Euripides’ critique, Sophocles eliminates the concept of
likeness, which was at the base of Aeschylus’ syllogismos, but sticks to reasoning, implicitly declaring it possible and indeed in the human mind directly consequent upon the apprehension of reality by means of an intuition dominated
by emotion. At the same time, Sophocles slowly transforms Chrysothemis’
evaluation of the ‘sign’ she meets. At first, this is only a potential tekmerion, a
sign supposed to be sign, but when Chrysothemis tells the story to Electra, it
has become a set of signs endowed with certainty (saphe semeia, 886).
Finally, another trick is played before our eyes. The material sign, eloquent
to Chrysothemis’ intuition, is shown to be twice as mute here as in Aeschylus
when the voice of a witness overwhelms it. Electra replies to Chrysothemis’
report, ‘You do not know not where your feet or your thoughts are carrying
you!’ (922), and when her sister retorts with the certainty that first hand, ocular
knowledge gives her (‘But how can I not know what I saw with my own eyes?’),
she reveals that Orestes is dead and that this has been announced by a man
who witnessed the event (924–​7). Hence, the offerings found on Agamemnon’s
tomb must be an anonymous homage to Orestes’ memory (932–​3). Recognition
is proved to be méconnaissance –​while we know its knowledge to be truthful. As after Clytemnestra’s dream our expectation had risen to a climax with
Chrysothemis’ report, so now it falls back into uncertainty. Orestes is alive and
here, we know that. But how is our knowledge to become the play’s anagnorisis
9 Sophocles, Electra, 902–​15.
116 Chapter 2
if Orestes is, to all effects, dead for the characters –​if the lock of hair is replaced
by the urn?
When this, the apparently final testimony of a life now ended, is recognized by Electra as the truthful sign (emphane tekmeria, 1109) in spite of its
total muteness, the audience know that Sophocles is staging a misrecognition.
They expect this inextricable knot of reality, appearance, knowledge and ignorance to be untied. And in fact, the dénouement take place in the very same
scene, and it contains a double recognition. The urn, accompanied by Orestes,
appears before Electra. She is allowed to take it in her hand and pronounces a
moving complaint on it (1126–​70). As her last words mingle with the Chorus’
philosophical consolation, Orestes feels he cannot keep up his pretence and
recognizes his sister:
Ah, ah, what can I say? Where can I go, since words fail me? I can no
longer control my tongue! more strength to dominate my tongue … Is this
the illustrious person of Electra that is here?10
The dialogue between the two now unfolds quickly. When Electra remarks that
her interlocutor is the only one to show compassion towards her, he replies,
‘Yes, I am the only one who has come suffering your very same pain’.11 Electra at
once thinks he might be a distant relative (1202). Orestes decides to say all. The
urn contains Orestes’ ashes only ‘in pretence’ (1217). The grave of that unhappy
man does not exist –​a living man does not have a tomb (1218–​9). And the riddle precipitates truth and recognition:
electra:
orestes:
electra:
orestes:
electra:
orestes:
electra:
orestes:
electra:
orestes:
10
11
What do you say, young man?
All that I say is true.
Then is the man alive?
If I am living!
Then are you he?
Look at this seal that was my father’s, and learn whether
I speak the truth!
O dearest light!
Dearest, I too can witness.
Voice, have you come?
Ask it of no other!
Sophocles, Electra, 1174–​1177.
My translation of line 1203.
117
Reason
electra:
orestes:
electra:
Do I hold you in my arms?
So may you always hold me.
Dearest women, fellow townswomen, you see here Orestes,
dead by a stratagem, and now by a stratagem preserved!12
For the scene’s finale, Sophocles resorts to Aeschylus’ technique: it is words that
unveil Orestes’ identity, it is a ring –​but the ring of the House, of Agamemnon –​
that proves it. Dream, lock of hair, urn, are finally replaced by a true sign which
substantiates, and at the same time is substantiated by, the presence of a living
man. With the voice, out come truth and light and recognition of the ‘stratagems’, the mekhanai of death and life. Anagnorisis is revelation.
Be that as it may, it seems clear to me that the eighty-​year old Sophocles who
composed the Electra chose a recognition mechanism which goes beyond both
the impassioned rationalism of Aeschylus and the wonder-​seeking intellectualism of Euripides, while taking both into account. The man who had built up
the inexorable concatenation of events and deductions in Oedipus’ detective
inquiry, knew the value of signs and of reason as well as the importance of
méconnaissance. In the Electra, he continued his exploration. His solution was
not to indict signs by means of ‘reasoning’, but to show how they can be right or
wrong depending on the reality we assume to be true, to point out how ‘stratagems’ can create both death and life. By multiplying characters, plots and signs,
by immersing them in a mixed light of emotion, rationality and enigma he
made the theme and scene of anagnorisis the problematic pivots of his Electra.
It is by no means insignificant that when, in yet another anagnorisis episode,
an increasingly mad Electra recognizes the old man as her ‘father’ and ‘saviour’
(soter), he should cut her short with a sentence which delays full knowledge
to an indefinite future of tale-​telling: ‘for the story of the time between,/​many
nights and days are rolling on/​that shall reveal these things to you,/​Electra,
in truth’.13
If, then, all three tragedians agree that ultimate proof of Orestes’ return and
identity must be an ‘acquired’ sign, there is no doubt that the process by which
they lead us to it is very different. The way in which they deal with this famous
recognition scene depends of course on their temperament and their approach
to dramatic art. But it also clearly shows different attitudes to a problem which
is ultimately philosophical –​what is anagnorisis, the shift from ignorance to
knowledge –​and within it to a basically epistemological question –​what is the
12
13
Sophocles, Electra, 1219–​29.
Sophocles, Electra, 1364–​1366: I have slightly modified the translation.
118 Chapter 2
value of signs, clues, reasoning? To these questions Aeschylus, Euripides and
Sophocles offer the different answers I have tried to indicate, but the dilemma
of Orestes’ and Electra’s recognition stands there for us as a paradigm of the
problem of knowledge which, as Aristotle might have put it, both poetry and
philosophy face. The very intense debate on this scene that dramatists and philosophers pursue between the fifth and fourth centuries bce seems to be a witness to this as well as to the coming to awareness –​the re-​cognition –​of Greek
culture. The question to which we now turn is what modern treatments of the
Electra-​Orestes recognition scene can tell us about our own culture.
∵
A first answer may be provided by Robert Lowell’s translation for the stage of
Aeschylus’ Oresteia.14 Here, Orestes offers on Agamemnon’s tomb ‘these locks
of my hair, this blood-​knot –​of red feathers dipped in blood’, which Electra and
the Chorus find as they pour libations on the grave. Interestingly, however, only
fragments of Aeschylus’ ‘reasoning’ are left, and they are themselves inserted
into a different context. When Lowell’s Electra sees the blood-​knot ‘tied with
human hair’, she immediately concludes that ‘they couldn’t have come from
our house’ and, asked by the Chorus who could have brought them, she replies,
‘Someone who has sworn to avenge Agamemnon –​I think Orestes may have
sent them’. The Chorus retorts that Orestes would not dare return to Argos. The
syllogismos has changed. There is no question of similarity here, but only one of
context. As Electra puts it, ‘whoever left it (the knot of eagle-​feathers) wished
to avenge my Father’s murder. I think Orestes …’ She herself leaves the conclusion totally tentative: ‘The gods know’. Significantly, what is left of Aeschylus’
scene is Electra’s anguish, her doubt, her cry at the muteness of signs: ‘I wish
these feathers had a voice … Oh this confusion! My mind is groping’. On the
other hand, Lowell’s Electra reacts to the sight of the ‘eagle feathers’ somewhat
like Sophocles’ Chrysothemis when she finds the lock of hair: ‘But when I look
at these/​red feathers, it’s as though someone/​has slashed a sword across my
heart./​It’s as though my own blood had stained them’.
Aeschylus’ ‘external’ sign becomes ‘internal’. Instead of –​however
mute –​objects, we have an entirely subjective feeling, which transforms the
reasoning-​by-​similarity into a sudden deep flash of total identity. Electra no
longer says, ‘This hair is like ours, like mine’, but ‘it’s as though my own blood
14
Robert Lowell, The Oresteia of Aeschylus, London, Faber, 1979, pp. 58–​61 for the whole
passage.
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stained them’. Lowell keeps a hint of the Sophoclean Chrysothemis’ reasoning
by exclusion –​for a second, his Electra thinks that her mother, or rather ‘the
mistress of Aegisthus’, ‘left this knot of eagle feathers to tell [her] [she] must
die’. The American poet has also eliminated the footprints and changed the
first ‘sign’ itself, making it more Aeschylean than Aeschylus himself had ever
imagined. Orestes’ hair is marginal in Lowell’s scene. What counts here the
knot of eagle feathers dipped in blood, the eagle being the very symbol of the
Atreid house as consecrated in the Oresteia. Similarly, final proof of Orestes’
identity is no longer just a cloth with a hunting scene woven by Electra –​it is
a piece of tapestry embroidered by her and sent to Orestes in his exile (which
disposes of Euripides’ double criticism, of the vestment and of the incongruity
of Electra weaving anything as a child), which represents not just a hunting
scene connected with the general imagery of the Oresteia, but a hunter killing
a wolf and his bitch –​a clear allusion to Orestes’ murder of Aegisthus and
Clytemnestra.
In this terse modern version, then, the powerful mechanism of Aeschylus’
deduction and doubt has disappeared, and the clues themselves on which it
was based have significantly changed. Lowell’s Electra seems to give up the
possibility of knowledge: ‘The gods know. We pray to the gods, –​and they
spin us round in circles like sailors’. All this happens in what purports to be a
translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia but is in fact a rewriting of it.15 The fact that
Lowell has felt the need to interpret and adapt the recognition mechanism of
his original for a twentieth-​century stage should make us pause.
Obviously, a modern author cannot make Electra a complete Sherlock
Holmes nor transform her clues into forensic evidence without turning the
Choephoroi into a comedy. Our scientific, archaeological mentality will not
accept such a massive intrusion of twentieth-​century assumptions and criteria
into classical myth. Yet if Robert Lowell feels free to change Aeschylus’ signs
and conclusive evidence, clues could be found from which to deduce Orestes’
presence with a higher degree of certainty –​for instance a sequel of eagle’s
feathers and a piece of writing. As soon as we envisage this solution, however,
we realize that in fact it would destroy the recognition scene. If Electra obtained
conclusive evidence of Orestes’ return before he actually appeared to her, the
anagnorisis would become a purely mechanic question of exhibiting and recognizing a token –​a ring, a scar, eventually an identity card –​as indeed is the
case in many operas, detective novels, films, and modern police enquiries. In
15
In his version of The Oresteia, London, Faber, 1999, Ted Hughes is much more faithful to
the original.
120 Chapter 2
other words, we realize that dramatic recognition ‘through reasoning’ cannot
do without the thrill of scenic ambiguity and rational uncertainty, for in order
to stage the process of knowledge by means of reasoning a play must give us
the same excitement and anguish that finding the clues, inferring, doubting
and obtaining evidence make us feel in science.
Is there a solution, then, to the problem of the Orestes-​Electra recognition
for a modern artist? –​one, that is, who knows classical treatments of the scene,
cannot accept Aeschylus’ version after Euripides’ critique, but cannot change
its mechanism radically for reasons which are at once, as we have seen, philological, artistic and epistemological. There are, I would say, three kinds of solution. The first is to eliminate reason altogether. The second consists in making
the recognition itself insignificant. The third resorts to a complex procedure,
which explores the dilemma itself without resolving it.
To illustrate these three solutions in detail would far exceed the limits of
this chapter. But even a quick survey of modern versions of the sujet of Electra
will show interesting changes in the role of reason in anagnorisis. It is certainly
remarkable that two dramatists of the Age of Reason should opt for the first
solution which leaves reason and signs no decisive part to play in the recognition proper. In Voltaire’s Oreste (first staged 1750) Electra accepts Orestes’ identity ultimately in an act of faith invoking the force of ‘nature’ and the ‘voice
of blood’: ‘Yes, I love him; yea methinks/​I see my father’s features, I hear his
voice;/​ La nature nous parle, et perce ce mystère./​Do not resist her: yes, you are
my brother./​You are. I see you. I embrace you’.16 Nature speaks to us and penetrates this mystery, Electra says.
While signs are still allowed a certain, though secondary and non-​crucial,
role by Voltaire, Alfieri’s Oreste (first performance, 1781) eliminates them
completely. The anagnorisis scene in act ii, scene 2, is preceded by no signs,
nor by any syllogismos. Electra recognizes her brother purely ‘at his fury’
and asks him to recognize her ‘al duolo, al pianto, all’amor mio’ (at her woe,
weeping and love). Reason is replaced by feelings; the signs are now Orestes’
uncontrolled fury and wish for revenge and Electra’s tears. It is in fact by
forgetting himself, by abandoning prudence and reason that Orestes reveals
himself.17
16
17
Voltaire, Oreste iv.v, in vol. iv, Chefs-​d’Œuvre dramatiques de Voltaire, Herhan, Dabo et
Tremblay, 1819, p. 77. Voltaire composed Oreste against his ‘enemy’, Crébillon’s Électre,
where the recognition takes place (iv. ii) in much the same way, but without the appeal
to Nature: Crébillon, Œuvres, Paris, Herhan, Renouard, 1802, vol. i, pp. 212–​213.
Vittorio Alfieri, Oreste, ii. Ii. 222–​26, in Opere, vol. i, ed. M. Fubini and A. Di Benedetto,
Milan-​Naples, Ricciardi, 1977.
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121
Alfieri’s recognition scene, so typical of his temperament and his style,
shows a poet who, nourished by the culture of the Enlightenment, reacted
against it to the point of being considered a proto-​romantic. A century and
a half later, when in 1903–​4 Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote after Sophocles
his one-​act play on Elektra,18 for which Richard Strauss provided a memorable
musical score, the cultural situation had profoundly changed, but the solution
to the recognition problem of Electra and Orestes remained basically the same.
In this drama (and opera) the anagnorisis is, as in Sophocles, double,
Electra and Orestes having to recognize each other, but the plots and counterplots leading to it have disappeared. Chrysothemis finds no lock of hair on
Agamemnon’s tomb, no urn is carried on the stage, there is no final recognition between Orestes on the one hand and Clytemnestra and Aegisthus on the
other. What is left of the Sophoclean mythos is the announcement of Orestes’
death, and what is added to it is the theme of Electra’s obsessive waiting for her
brother, which pervades the earlier part of the play. Thus, the crucial anagnorisis between Orestes and Electra constitutes the real climax of the piece –​as
Strauss’ music makes clear and as Ernst Bloch underlined in 1974.19
Orestes, having recognized Electra by her grief over his pretended death, is in
turn recognized by her only after a dog has greeted him and an old servant has
kissed his feet. Recognition has changed its purpose as well as its mechanisms.
In recognizing Orestes, Electra’s mind, devoted to a revenge which no longer
bears any trace of justice, breaks down and turns at once towards darkness,
madness and nothingness. Anagnorisis is a passage from ignorance to an even
greater ignorance. The clues, the reasoning, the proofs of Aeschylus are gone.
The opposed signs, the memory, the flashes, the ambiguity of Sophocles have
disappeared. What replaces them is the question, hammered out throughout
the scene, ‘Wer bist du?’. It is words and the way they are pronounced, signifying a whole universe of hidden feelings and reality, that produce the recognition. Beyond mute gestures, it is Orestes’ tone of voice that convinces Electra.
The old servant kisses his feet in silence and the master addresses his sister:
Die Hunde auf dem Hof erkennen mich,
und meine Schwester nicht?
The dogs in the courtyard recognize me,
and my sister not?20
18
19
20
H. von Hofmannsthal, Elektra, in vol. 2, Dramen, Gesammelte Werke in drei Bänden, Berlin,
S. Fischer, 1934.
E. Bloch, Höhepunkt und Anagnorisis, Süddeutscher Rundfunk 2, 28.10.1974.
Elektra, p. 167: my translation.
122 Chapter 2
Hofmannsthal has turned Orestes into Odysseus and with a masterly stroke
fused the dog Argus and the nurse Eurycleia into a single line and a silent kiss.
If Alfieri’s and Hofmannsthal’s plays are indicative of the first solution a
modern artist can give to the problem of the Orestes-​Electra recognition, that
of eliminating reason altogether, the second possibility –​that of an insignificant recognition –​can be observed in two other modern plays. In O’Neill’s
Mourning Becomes Electra (1932), Electra becomes Lavinia, and Orestes is
called Orin. They are the offspring of a New England family, the Mannons,
in the 1860’s. Their father, general Ezra Mannon, returns home after the Civil
War, and is poisoned by Captain Brant at the instigation of Mannon’s wife,
Christine, who is having an affair with him. When Orin, too, comes back from
the war, he and Lavinia avenge their father’s murder. It becomes increasingly
clear that O’Neill makes overt use of Freud’s and Jung’s Oedipus and Electra
complexes. Orin hates his father and loves his mother, while Lavinia adores the
former and despises the latter. But the point to notice from our angle is that in
this setting the Electra-​Orestes recognition becomes completely unnecessary,
and in fact O’Neill eliminates it altogether.21
Five years later, in 1937, the French author Jean Giraudoux produced an
Électre,22 where the protagonist only suspects that her father has been murdered and receives confirmation of this in a dream, while Argos lives an undisturbed life of peace ruled by Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Here,
Orestes appears as a stranger who reveals himself to Electra by simply pronouncing his name (i. vi.). Likewise, Clytemnestra understands, later but long
before being killed, and without any particular excitement, that the stranger
is her son (i. xi). In this totally unheroic atmosphere, recognition has lost its
importance –​it has become an ordinary event which requires no special mechanism and prompts but a passing emotion. ‘Tu es Oreste!’, exclaims Electra
when the stranger declares that his name is that which alone can draw her
towards a human being. Orestes simply replies, ‘O ungrateful sister, who recognize me by my name only!’. Then, the scene ends abruptly with Clytemnestra
appearing on the stage.
At first glance, the recognition between Electra and Orestes in Jean-​Paul
Sartre’s Les Mouches (The Flies, 1943)23 looks similarly uncomplicated. Orestes,
previously introduced as Philebe, makes himself known to his sister by saying
21
22
23
E. O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra, in Three Plays, New York, Vintage, 1995.
Jean Giraudoux, Électre, ed. C. Weil, in Théâtre complet, dir. J. Body, Paris, Gallimard, 1982,
pp. 593-​685.
J.P. Sartre, Les Mouches, in Théâtre complet, dir. M. Contat, Paris, Gallimard, 2005, pp. 2–​87.
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‘Electre, je suis Oreste’ (ii. iv). We soon realize, however, that in this play anagnorisis becomes an important theme. The recognition scene itself is split into
three different stages. At first (i. iii), Orestes recognizes Electra because she
reveals her own name. Then, when in his turn he says who he is (ii. iv), she
refuses to accept him as Orestes because he does not correspond to her image
of him and is unwilling to act and think as she wishes. Finally, when he changes
his mind, she calls him ‘Oreste’ (ii. iv, end).
In this context, recognition becomes a philosophical motif, sounded from
the very beginning of the play: in the first scene the pedagogue remarks to
Orestes that the flies seem to recognize him. One second later, Jupiter introduces himself as Demetrios, and the play on his identity will continue until
the second scene of the third act. In The Flies recognition is the acquisition of
consciousness and decidedness. Orestes is recognized as such by Electra when
he realizes that he must ‘descend’ towards others, say farewell to his ‘lightness’,
become a ‘voleur de remords’, a ‘thief of remorses’ (ii. iv). The flies, which seem
to recognize him at the beginning, stick to him –​and to him alone –​at the end.
Parallel to this process of recognition by which Orestes starts incarnating
his mythological self by becoming a true human being, another takes place
which brings him to recognize Demetrios as Jupiter. Here, Sartre plays on the
traditional theme of theophany, recognition and misrecognition of gods.
At the end of the play, Jupiter acts the part of the Creator, of the supreme
ruler of a harmonious universe in which Orestes is only a ‘mite’ who has committed evil. But Orestes replies: ‘You are the king of the Gods, Jupiter, the king
of stones and stars, the king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the king of
men’. Recognition between human beings has little value, too. When, after the
murder of Aegisthus, Electra, now full of horror, tells her brother there is no
need to kill Clytemnestra as well, Orestes says he ‘recognizes’ her no longer, and
she replies ‘je ne te reconnais non plus’ (ii. vi). The ancient story of anagnorisis between Electra and Orestes is finished forever. In Marguerite Yourcenar’s
Electre (1954),24 the scene has in fact disappeared.
Far from making recognition insignificant, Sartre turns it into an existential problem. In doing so, however, he stresses its insolubility. Not only does
he eliminate reason from the Electra-​Orestes anagnorisis, but he makes recognition dependent upon one person’s acceptance of another’s image of him.
When this coincidence of images and purposes ends, when two consciousnesses start conflicting, anagnorisis is denied. People –​or gods –​continue to
exist, but they cannot be known anymore.
24
Marguerite Yourcenar, Électre, in Théâtre, vol. ii, Paris, Gallimard, 1971.
124 Chapter 2
Post-​Aeschylean treatments of the Orestes-​Electra scene prove, then, that
it contains a dilemma which the Western mind, or at least Western literature,
seems incapable of solving –​a dilemma centred upon the value of signs and
reasoning, and ultimately of cognition itself. Can one find counterproof of this
in a work of literature that does not make use of Electra and Orestes as such?
The answer to this question cannot but be affirmative if one thinks of the post-​
classical tragedy par excellence –​Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
∵
In Pirandello’s Il fu Mattia Pascal, which I discussed in c­ hapter 1, a friend tells
the protagonist that a puppet theatre is going to stage the tragedy of Orestes
‘d’après Sophocle’, and invites him to imagine its culminating moment, when
the puppet representing Orestes is about to exact revenge for his father’s death
on his mother and Aegisthus. At that point, the paper sky of the puppet theatre
would suddenly be rent. What would happen then? ‘Orestes would be terribly
disconcerted by that hole in the sky. He would still feel the urge for revenge, but
his eyes would go to the tear and his arms would fall’. Destroy the veil of faith
in the supernatural, endow an ancient hero with self-​reflecting conscience –​
Pirandello seems to be saying –​and you have the protagonist of modern tragedy. ‘Orestes would become Hamlet’, he writes.25
Pirandello would find himself in good company, because Herder, Hegel, and
Kierkegaard, amongst others, had preceded, and Gilbert Murray was to follow,
him in seeing the two characters as related.26 In fact, affinities between the stories of Orestes and Hamlet were first detected, if we are to believe Henry James
Pye, in the eighteenth century, when the French abbot Prévost wrote ‘a comparison between the tragedies of Electra and Hamlet, in which ‘he commends the
English poet because wiser than Sophocles, he forbids young Hamlet, by the
apparition of the ghost, to attempt anything against his mother’s life’.27 Pye’s
25
26
27
Luigi Pirandello, Il fu Mattia Pascal, p. 467.
See A. Cutrofello, All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity, Boston and London, mit Press, 2014,
pp. 103–​104. Gilbert Murray’s ‘Hamlet and Orestes: A Study in Traditional Types’ was the
1914 Annual Shakespeare Lecture at the British Academy, published in London by Milford
and in New York by the Oxford University Press.
H.J. Pye, A Commentary Illustrating the Poetic of Aristotle by examples taken chiefly from
the modern poets, London, John Stockdale, 1792, p. 283. Nicholas Rowe already noticed
similarities and differences in his 1709 ‘Some Account of the Life, &c of Mr. William
Shakespear’, in William Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, vol. 2, 1693–​1733, ed. B. Vickers,
London, Routledge, 1974, p. 201.
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quotation and short discussion of this comparison occur in his second note
to ­chapter 14 of the Poetics –​the chapter, that is, where Aristotle discusses the
various combinations of action, inaction, ignorance, knowledge and anagnorisis in a tragedy. For Aristotle, the worst possible way of arranging these elements in order to produce pity and/​or fear consists in having a character ‘know
and intend to act and then refrain from acting’. This, he says, ‘has a morally
repulsive quality and is not tragic, because there is no disaster’. In his Second
Discours sur la Tragédie (1660) Corneille, afraid that Aristotle’s condemnation,
if not corrected, might include his own Cid, Cinna, and other works, limits its
purport by saying that ‘it must be intended only of those who know the person
they want to ruin and draw back by a simple change of will, without being
forced by a notable event and without any loss of power on their part’.28
Whether we agree with Aristotle or Corneille, in a general fashion both their
statements seem to fit Hamlet’s plight extremely well, for Hamlet ‘knows’ his
uncle Claudius and his mother Gertrude and intends to kill the former, but he
refrains from doing so until the very end of the play. Yet as soon as we say this,
we realize that something is missing from our picture –​that is, a clear idea of
Hamlet’s ‘knowledge’, and of his knowledge of Claudius and Gertrude in particular.29 What Hamlet knows as the play begins is that his mother has married
her husband’s brother a month after the former’s death –​that she has posted
‘with such dexterity to incestuous sheets’. He knows this ‘is not, nor it cannot
come to good’, and he knows his own state of mind about it. Significantly, he
voices his feelings before harping on the particular fact which at this point
appears to us as their main cause. His first great monologue in the play (i. ii.
129–​59) opens with one of those general, introspective, melancholy series of
reflections which have made him dear to all audiences. He wishes ‘that this
too too sullied flesh would melt,/​Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,/​Or that
the Everlasting had not fix’d/​His canon ‘gainst self slaughter’. He feels ‘all the
uses of this world’ to be –​to him –​‘weary, stale, flat and unprofitable’, the
28
29
Pierre Corneille, Œuvres complètes, ed. G. Couton, vol. iii. Paris, Gallimard, 1987, p. 153,
and on him Terence Cave’s model analysis, Recognitions, passim.
I use H. Jenkins’ edition of Hamlet for the Arden Shakespeare, second series, London,
Methuen, 1982. Critical literature on Hamlet is just impossible to keep up with. I have
used the following: G. de Santillana and H. von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill, Boston, Godine,
2007 (1977); E. Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus, London, Gollancz, 1949; M. Scofield, The Ghosts
of Hamlet: The Play and Modern Writers, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980;
A. Green, Hamlet et Hamlet. Une interprétation psychanalytique de la représentation,
Paris, Balland, 1982; Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. H. Bloom,
New York, Chelsea House, 1986; and, in particular, S. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven
Plays of Shakespeare, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 20032.
126 Chapter 2
world itself ‘an unweeded garden/​That grows to seed’, ‘things rank and gross in
nature’ possessing it entirely.
Such is Hamlet’s knowledge –​an inner awareness of what is inside him (‘I
know not “seems”,/​I have that within that passes show’, he says) and of how
the world without is reflected, ‘seems’ in him (‘seem to me all the uses of the
world!’), as opposed to the purely external and obviously true knowledge his
mother Gertrude would have him assent to: ‘Thou know’st ’tis common; all
that lives must die,/​Passing through nature to eternity’ (i. ii. 72–​73). Hamlet,
and we with him, gains more factual knowledge about Claudius and Gertrude
from the Ghost. Scenes i and iv of Act I are the great recognition scenes of
Hamlet –​which, contrary to all the plays we have so far studied, thus begins
with anagnorisis. Scene v contains the revelation: in it, the Ghost unfolds the
truth about his death –​the murder of King Hamlet by his brother Claudius.
The second section of scene ii links the first and second recognition scenes
and prepares the revelation.
With Barnardo’s ‘Who’s there?’ –​the first words of the play –​the first scene
of Hamlet plunges us into the atmosphere of uncertain expectation and mystery that Coleridge praised so much. It is a bitter cold midnight, and the sentry
on guard, Francisco, whom Barnardo comes to relieve, is, for unknown reasons, ‘sick at heart’. The night has so far been quiet, perhaps too quiet –​‘not
a mouse stirring’. But when Horatio emerges out of the darkness, the battlement of the castle is suddenly filled by words indicating a mysterious presence: ‘What, has this thing appear’d again tonight?’ (i. i. 24). Sceptical Horatio
will call ‘this thing’ what he considers his friends’ ‘fantasy’ and will not let
‘belief take hold of him’. Against his ironical detachment stands Barnardo’s and
Marcellus’ fear, based on what they have twice witnessed, that the ‘dreaded
sight’ might appear again. And soon as Barnardo starts recounting what happened the night before, ‘it comes again’ ‘in the same figure like the King that’s
dead’. Horatio the scholar, now harrowed ‘with fear and wonder’, must discover
the identity and the business of the Ghost. Both he and his friends, however,
refrain from accepting ‘him’ as in fact the dead King. They insist on ‘its’ mere,
though perfect, likeness to Hamlet’s father, while proving its objective reality
through ‘the sensible and true avouch/​of [their] own eyes’–​the evidence of
sense perception (i. i. 43–​61).
We have here the most uncanny anagnorisis so far encountered. There is no
doubt that ‘this thing’ is now recognized as ‘something more than fantasy’ –​as,
indeed, a thing –​and that it looks ‘like’ the dead King. Its nature, however, is
totally mysterious, as Horatio makes explicit by asking it, ‘What art thou that
usurp’st this time of night,/​Together with that fair and warlike form/​In which
the majesty of buried Denmark/​Did sometimes march?’ (i. i. 49–​52).
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127
Horatio’s and his friends’ enquiry are as perceptive and rational as
Aeschylus’ Electra’s. They remark that the ‘apparition’ is as ‘like’ the King as
Barnardo is ‘to himself’, that ‘such was the very armour he had on/​When he
th’ambitious Norway combated’ and that ‘so frown’d he once’ (i. i. 63–​65).
They explore the causes that may have produced the appearance of ‘this portentous figure’. When Horatio recounts that Norway and Denmark had a feud,
which is being renewed by the young Norwegian Fortinbras in an attempt to
recover the land lost by his father to King Hamlet, Barnardo at once seizes on
this situation as the possible explanation of the Ghost’s coming. Horatio, who
significantly proclaims this inference a ‘mote to trouble the mind’s eye’, yet
adds as an historical parallel the events –​including the squeaking and gibbering of the ‘sheeted dead’ in the streets –​which took place in Rome ‘a little ere
the mightiest Julius fell’ (i. i. 117–​118). The Ghost, in other words, is considered
as an omen –​a sign. Like Electra with the lock of hair, Horatio wishes it had
a voice and indeed six times charges it to speak. When the Ghost reappears,
Horatio addresses it with a fourfold conjuration which also contains three
hypotheses to explain its coming: something ‘good’ might be done to ease its
condition; or the Ghost may know things regarding the country’s fate which
could be avoided if disclosed; finally, the Ghost might reveal the existence of
a hidden treasure.
All this reasoning comes to nought. The cock crows and though the Ghost
apparently is about to speak and the three friends try to stop it from going, it
disappears. Horatio’s conclusion is that the Ghost seems ‘like a guilty thing’ for
which the cock’s crowing represents ‘a fearful summons’. Indeed, the ‘present
object’ makes ‘probation’ of the ‘truth’ (i, i, 160–​1) that the cock awakes ‘the god
of day’ and that, ‘at his warning,/​Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,/​The
extravagant and erring spirit hies/​To his confine’ (i. i. 157–​160). Horatio now
knows that this ‘fantasy’, this ‘illusion’ is a ‘spirit’.
As a recognition scene, this passage is not only unfulfilling, but in fact alienating. The knowledge Horatio, Barnardo and Marcellus gain is purely visual –​
naked sense-​perception. The various syllogismoi they elaborate apprehend
only a partial ‘what’, never a ‘how’ or a ‘why’. The ‘ghostliness’ of the Ghost
and its likeness to the dead king are blank facts, whose real nature and causes
remain obscure and problematical –​‘a mote’, indeed, ‘to trouble the mind’s
eye’. The object of this knowledge is a thing –​it may be a ‘guilty thing’ (153),
or a ‘sign’. The truth is, it is elusive, ‘invulnerable as the air’ (150), ‘dumb’ (176).
Consequently, the effect on the observer of this state of affairs is that his disbelief cannot be suspended any longer, yet is only half removed. While the
action sets us in expectation of recognition, words and silences plunge us into
a deeper level, where the certainty of knowledge is radically, irremediably
128 Chapter 2
questioned. It is a situation which perfectly sums up the continuous tension
characterising the gnoseological status of Hamlet.
When, in the second half of scene ii Hamlet, having vented his spleen and
discussed the inner awareness he has of external facts, is informed by Horatio
of the night’s events, he, too, must face this problem. The exchange which
introduces Horatio’s disclosure is significant. ‘My father’, the prince says, and,
after a pause, ‘methinks I see my father’. Horatio’s inevitable question, ‘Where
my lord?’, at once sends us back to the uncanny, tense atmosphere of the first
scene. Hamlet’s reply, ‘In my mind’s eye, Horatio’ (i. ii. 183–​185), is resolutive in
appearance only. It signals the fact that Hamlet’s thoughts circle continuously
around the image of his father, his death, his mother’s hasty re-​marriage, but
it also announces a fundamental problem of the play –​the suggestion that
Hamlet’s vision of his father’s Ghost may be, as Gertrude will tell him later,
‘the very coinage of [his] brain’ (iii. iv. 139). For the moment, Hamlet’s phrase
heightens the suspense, while Horatio’s rejoinder alleviates it by going back
to past reality and building up the image of the dead king –​an ideal monarch
and, as Hamlet adds, a true man: ‘I saw him once; a was a goodly king’; ‘A was
a man, take him for all in all’. The objective reality of ‘seeing’ and ‘being’ in the
past is, however, suddenly replaced by the disquieting impression of a present
vision. ‘My lord’, Horatio says, ‘I think I saw him yesternight’. No wonder Hamlet
replies in amazement, questioning the seeing: ‘Saw? Who?’ (i. ii. 188–​189).
Horatio’s account of the Ghost’s apparition first to Barnardo and Marcellus
and then to himself progressively underlines its ‘likeness’ to the king. The ‘figure like your father’ of his first words becomes, in his last, so similar to King
Hamlet as Horatio’s hands are to each other: ‘I knew your father;/​These hands
are not more like’ (i. ii. 211–​212). Interestingly enough, Horatio does not make
clear whether his knowing was past knowledge of the king or present recognition of him in the Ghost’s figure. By using the image of the two hands to
indicate the likeness, he does not go beyond the mirror-​like individuality of
two separate objects. Quite understandably, Hamlet, although startled by this
account, is not satisfied with it and begins what might be considered a true
police-​like interrogation. ‘Where was this?’, ‘Did you not speak to it?’, he starts,
but soon turns to the crucial problem of establishing the exact nature of the
‘likeness’ proclaimed by his friend. ‘It’ and ‘he’ are mixed in both questions
and answers, from which Hamlet learns the following facts: that the Ghost was
armed from top to toe, but that ‘his’ face was visible as ‘he wore his beaver up’;
that his countenance was sorrowful and ‘very pale’ rather than angry; that he
fixed his eyes constantly on Horatio; that ‘it’ ‘stay’d’ ‘while one with moderate haste might tell a hundred’; and finally that his beard was ‘grizzled’ or, as
Horatio specifies, ‘a sable silver’d’ such as he, Horatio, has seen ‘it in his life’
Reason
129
(i. ii. 196–​241). Here, we have a scientific enquiry turning upon the basic coordinates of the phenomenon –​place, duration, appearance, movements. But
one cannot examine with the tools of reason the data of a phenomenon which
Horatio himself calls a ‘marvel’ (i. ii. 195). One can only accept its factuality as
witnessed by three people on different occasions and proclaim it, as Hamlet
does, ‘very strange’, adding that it ‘troubles’ him. The Prince, however, goes one
step further. While pledging himself to become an eyewitness and to speak
to the Ghost ‘if it assume [his] noble father’s person’, the man who has just
conducted such a thorough examination of the evidence, left alone, exclaims:
My father’s spirit –​in arms! All is not well.
I doubt some foul play. Would the night were come.
Till then sit still, my soul. Foul deeds will rise,
Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes. (i.ii.255–​258)
Suddenly, Shakespeare’s hero appears less rigorous than Aeschylus’ Electra. He
now seems to believe that the Ghost is his father’s spirit itself, and from this
to infer that something is wrong and that there is, or there has been, ‘some
foul play’. Furthermore, he expresses total confidence in the fact that crimes
will in any case always be disclosed to human beings (one suspects that he
reaches this conviction by simply pairing the ‘foulness’ of both the particular
‘play’ and general ‘deeds’). Yet what ‘foul play’ can Hamlet suspect and fear?
And what ‘foul deeds’ can he so firmly believe in except for his mother’s marriage to Claudius, which needs no ghostly revelation? He seems to take the
Ghost’s apparition as a sign that ‘all is not well’, then to build suspicion on it,
and finally to extract certainty out of the suspicion. What would the Euripides
of Electra have made of this –​of a knowledge based on such scanty evidence,
so unreliable in its flights?
Shakespeare supplies no direct answer to this question. Rather, he seems to
suggest an obscure, impalpable and undefinable correspondence between the
inner savoir Hamlet has voiced earlier in the scene and the cognition of mysterious new facts he has acquired from Horatio. ‘It is not, nor it cannot come to
good’; ‘All is not well’ –​these are the two statements in which Hamlet sums up
what he knows before and after Horatio’s account of the Ghost, thus projecting
one type of knowledge onto the other and plunging us into an unprecedented
state of epistemological mystery.
We expect some light from the encounter, announced as probable and
imminent, between Hamlet and the Ghost. What comes is indeed light but
surrounded by thicker darkness. As, during the night watch, Hamlet disserts at
length about the Danes’ love of revel and drink, the Ghost reappears. Halfway
130 Chapter 2
through scene iv of Act i, Hamlet sees and addresses it, and we are convinced
that a recognition scene will follow. But the first words the hero speaks to what
he knows looks exactly like his father, are not of welcome –​they concern its
nature. Is this ‘a spirit of health’ or ‘a goblin damn’d’, a good or an evil spirit?
What interests the enquiring mind of Hamlet is the Ghost’s ‘questionable
shape’, the fact that it has appeared in a form which requires interrogation and
investigation. Hence, Hamlet chooses to speak to it and to call it/​him ‘Hamlet,
King, father, royal Dane’. This is all the anagnorisis we are given –​the subjective, voluntary attribution of a name in which are summed up the essential
qualifications of the as yet unidentified entity which has appeared. And what
kind of recognition can this be if Hamlet, as he says, still ‘bursts in ignorance’?
Like Horatio before him, Hamlet never asks the Ghost who ‘he’ is –​he rather
implores an answer to ‘why’, ‘what may this mean’, ‘wherefore’ and, finally and
above all, ‘what should we do’. The Ghost is for him an ‘it’ (as Hamlet keeps saying throughout the scene) and a ‘dead corse’. Yet Hamlet recognizes that what
the ‘sepulchre’ has ‘cast up again’ is a ‘thou’, that the ‘canoniz’d bones, hearsed
in death’ which have now ‘burst their cerements’ were those of a person. The
gnoseological question is identified with the essentially metaphysical mystery
of death, the problem which Hegel asserts is at the bottom of Hamlet’s heart
from the very beginning of the play.30
By revisiting the ‘glimpses of the moon’ the Ghost makes night ‘hideous’,
but above all alters the ‘disposition’, the mental constitution of men –​who
are but ‘fools of nature’ –​‘with thoughts beyond the reaches of [their] souls’.
A ghost, says Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus discussing Hamlet, is ‘one who has faded
into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners’.31 How can our souls, the souls of beings subject to the laws of nature,
have thoughts that go beyond them to penetrate an ‘absence’? It is, basically,
the problem Hamlet will return to time and again in the play, beginning with
the famous ‘to be or not to be’ monologue, where the ‘undiscover’d country,
from whose bourn/​No traveller [except ghosts!] returns’ (iii. i. 79–​80) constitutes the central stumbling block. And yet what is thought, and in particular
what can knowledge come to, if man’s mental constitution does not allow him
to go beyond the reaches of his soul –​if all a human being tries to apprehend
must already be within his mind’s limits? Is Hamlet, by choosing the extreme
case of the Ghost, proclaiming the impossibility of knowledge?
30
31
Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, vol. ii, Oxford, Clarendon Press,
1975, p. 1231.
J. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 188.
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We must go further in the play to see if this hypothesis is tenable, but
before doing so let us pause a moment to consider yet another problem. When
the Ghost refuses to answer Hamlet’s questions and ‘waves’ him ‘to a more
removed ground’, Horatio and Marcellus entreat the Prince not to follow ‘it’.
Hamlet, who at this point cannot do without knowledge, replies that there is
nothing to fear. He does not ‘set [his] life at a pin’s fee’, and as for his soul, ‘what
can it do to that,/​Being a thing immortal as itself?’. What Hamlet, in an obviously Christian context, is saying, is that his soul is as immortal as the Ghost –​
implying that the Ghost and his soul, that soul whose ‘reaches’ are so limited
by nature, have a fundamentally identical ontological status. Can there really
be no communication, no ‘knowledge’ between them?
Scene v provides Hamlet with knowledge, but through ‘revelation’, not recognition. The Ghost promises to ‘unfold’ something, proclaims Hamlet shall
soon be bound to ‘revenge’, and declares he is his father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin’d to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in [his] days of nature
Are burnt and purg’d away.32
The Ghost’s revelation is double. On the one hand, it concerns the murder of
Hamlet’s father by his brother Claudius (the account of which, incidentally,
leaves totally uncertain the question whether the fratricide preceded or followed Claudius’ winning of Gertrude ‘to his shameful lust’, and makes no mention of her complicity with him). On the other hand, it tells Hamlet that his
father is now a soul being ‘purg’d’ –​hence supposedly in Purgatory.33 In the
first case, the Ghost’s revelation agrees with Hamlet’s inner awareness (‘O my
prophetic soul!’, he exclaims) –​so much so that some interpreters have followed Hegel in maintaining that the apparition functions only as the ‘objective form’ for Hamlet’s ‘inner presentiment’ (innerer Ahnung).34 In the second
case, the Ghost tells Hamlet what his status after death is, but, while mentioning its terrifying aspects, refuses to reveal the details because, he says, he is
‘forbid/​To tell the secrets of [his] prison-​house’ and ‘this eternal blazon must
not be/​To ears of flesh and blood’ (i. v. 14–​22). Though the Ghost’s reticence
is justified by the dramatic effect it produces, his excuse would not be shared
by contemporary ‘spirits’ (as Andrea’s in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy), let alone the
32
33
34
Hamlet, i. v. 10–​3.
See S. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001.
Hegel’s Aesthetics, vol. i, p. 231.
132 Chapter 2
souls of Dante’s other world. The Ghost, in other words, deliberately maintains
a degree of secrecy precisely about that ‘change of manners’ of which Stephen
Dedalus speaks and which is a fundamental problem for Hamlet as well.
Our hero, however, seems to accept his father’s answers to his ‘why’, ‘wherefore’ and ‘what should we do’ without questioning them. He pledges himself
to revenge ‘with wings as swift/​As meditation or the thoughts of love’, and
to remember the ‘poor ghost’ ‘whiles memory holds a seat/​In this distracted
globe’. Finally, pressed by the wonder of his fellow student Horatio and while
humorously belittling the Ghost as ‘boy’, ‘truepenny’ and ‘old mole’, Hamlet
draws the general truth out of the episode: ‘There are more things in heaven
and earth, Horatio,/​Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ (i. v. 174–​175) –​
an apparently definitive statement of faith in ‘impalpability’, supported and
prompted by the spirit’s voice which continues to haunt the scene with an
uncannily subterranean (and perhaps diabolical) ubiquity.
These, then, are the ‘recognition’ and ‘revelation’ scenes of Hamlet. How
are we to interpret them, taking the foregoing pages into account? One thing
we can say for sure: that Hamlet, and the audience with him, while seemingly
passing from ignorance to knowledge, do so in a completely unsatisfactory
manner. We learn that the Ghost exists. As for its nature, meaning, purpose
and identity we can only accept its indemonstrable words or rely on vague
clues such as a ‘likeness’, which is never, and cannot be, proved. Furthermore,
we know there is a suspicious and mysterious correspondence between what
I have called Hamlet’s inner awareness and the knowledge the Ghost imparts
to him. In a sense, we come close to the situation of Werner Heisenberg’s indeterminacy, or uncertainty, principle. At this level, the presence of the observer
(Hamlet’s consciousness) influences and alters the development of the phenomenon he is trying to understand (the Ghost’s revelation) and thus makes it
impossible to establish its nature and causes. There may well be more ‘things’
in heaven and earth than our philosophy dreams of, but they are unknowable
within the reaches of our souls which, however, basically share the nature of
those ‘things’. This is one of the paradoxes that dominate Hamlet, and particularly its ‘recognition’ scenes.
∵
This is also one of the reasons why a thoroughly rational, critical interpretation
of those scenes is ultimately ineffable and why the best ever put forward comes
not from a critic or a philosopher, but from a poet. In one of the central episodes
of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre Wilhelm and his company stage a production of Hamlet. Though they rehearse and discuss many details of the play
Reason
133
before the premiere, Wilhelm pays no heed to the question of the Ghost. He has
received a mysterious note which promises the actual presence of the Ghost
on the scene at the right moment: ‘Your zeal deserves a miracle (Wunder). We
cannot make miracles, but something marvellous (Wunderbares) shall happen’
(v, 6). Wilhelm trusts the unknown writer. The evening of the performance (v,
11), as the play begins, Wilhelm (whose role is that of Hamlet) is completing his
make-​up in front of a mirror when somebody runs in his dressing-​room crying,
‘The Ghost! The Ghost!’. Startled but in a hurry to join King and Queen on the
stage, Wilhelm has no time to look around. When the curtain rises, Horatio
approaches him and, ‘as if introducing himself’, tells him: ‘the devil’s inside the
armour! He’s terrified us all’.
In the interval, only two tall men wearing white mantles and hoods are visible in the wings, and Wilhelm, who feels his recitation of the first monologue
has not been successful, enters the scene in a state of confusion. He pulls himself together, however, and goes through the passage on the Northerners’ love
of drinking ‘with appropriate indifference’, forgetting the Ghost. He is, therefore, really terrified when Horatio cries, ‘Look, my Lord, it comes!’:
Er fuhr mit Heftigkeit herum, und die edle, große Gestalt, der leise, unhörbare Tritt, die leichte Bewegung in der schwer scheinenden Rüstung
machten einen so starken Eindruck auf ihn, daß er wie versteinert
dastand und nur mit halber Stimme: ‘Ihr Engel und himmlischen Geister,
beschützt uns!’ ausrufen konnte. Er starrte ihn an, holte einigemal Atem
und brachte die Anrede an den Geist so verwirrt, zerstückt und gezwungen vor, daß die größte Kunst sie nicht so trefflich hätte ausdrücken
können.
He whirled violently round; and the tall noble figure, the low inaudible
tread, the light movement in the heavy-​looking armour, made such an
impression on him, that he stood as if transformed to stone, and could
utter only in a half-​voice his: ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us!’ He
glared at the form; drew a deep breathing once or twice and pronounced
his address to the Ghost in a manner so confused, so broken, so constrained, that the highest art could not have hit the mark so well.35
Wilhelm’s own very literal translation of the passage helps him, and the public are clearly fascinated. As the audience applauds wildly, the Ghost beckons
35
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, in the Hamburger Ausgabe in 14
Bänden, ed. E. Trunz, Band 7, München, Beck, 1973, p. 321: Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,
Cambridge MA, New York, Collier, 1917, p. 185.
134 Chapter 2
and the Prince follows him. The scene changes. When they reach the furthest
place, the Ghost unexpectedly stops and turns. Hamlet, therefore, finds himself standing a little too closely. With ‘longing and curiosity’ Wilhelm tries then
to look through the lowered beaver but can only discern deep-​set eyes next to
a well-​shaped nose.
Spying in trepidation, he stands before the Ghost. When from under the
helm the first sounds come out and a voice, harmonious and only slightly
hoarse, makes itself heard with the words, ‘I am thy father’s spirit’, Wilhelm
withdraws a few steps in fear and the whole audience shivers. The voice seems
known to everybody and Wilhelm thinks he can notice a similarity with the
voice of his own father. These marvellous sensations and memories, the curiosity to discover the mysterious friend and the fear of offending him, the very
unseemliness of coming too close to him as an actor in this situation, make
Wilhelm move alternately towards opposite sides of the scene. He changes
position so often during the Ghost’s long tale, he looks so uncertain and
embarrassed, so attentive and yet so distracted, that his acting produces general admiration as the Ghost does general terror. The spirit speaks with a deep
feeling of discontent rather than despair –​but a spiritual, slow, immeasurable
discontent. It is the dejection of a great soul separated from all earthly things,
but which is subject to endless sufferings. Finally, the Ghost sinks down, but in
a singular fashion. A light, grey, transparent veil seems to rise like vapour from
where he is standing and then sinking floats above him and disappears with
him under the stage.
The mounting suspense and the superimposition and interpenetration
of theatrical fiction and reality (Hamlet–​Wilhelm–​William Shakespeare) in
Goethe’s passage constitute a very appropriate translation of Hamlet. Wilhelm
has worked out all the details of the play –​the Ghost remains an unknown
mystery both within and without the stage. It belongs to the sphere of Wunder
where the note of the mysterious friend has placed it, and all the company can
do is ‘wait for the strangest guest role’ (wunderliebste Gastrolle) to materialize.
The status of the apparition is ambiguous and disconcerting. Horatio thinks
it is the devil (Hamlet will also fear this in Shakespeare). In the wings –​the
world of reality –​only two tall white figures are visible. Wilhelm sees two eyes
and a nose, but, interestingly, the beaver of this Ghost is down and sight therefore uncertain. Furthermore, this detail has the power of raising suspicions
about the Ghost of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, too. He wears his beaver up when
he appears to Horatio, but we are not told whether Hamlet can see his father’s
face at all. Finally, the recognition in Wilhelm Meister intensifies the eeriness of Hamlet. When the sounds of a harmonious and slightly hoarse voice
emerge from the armour, the words that take shape are ‘I am thy father’s spirit’.
135
Reason
Shivering, both Wilhelm and the audience think they recognize the voice (die
Stimme schien jedermann bekannt), but Wilhelm has an even more uncanny
experience –​he believes he can discern a ‘similarity’ (Ähnlichkeit) with the
voice of his own father.
The ontological depths sounded by this ‘likeness’ (which cannot but recall
Shakespeare’s insistence on the same concept) between the voice of a mysterious actor impersonating a spirit –​the voice of a real-​unreal ghost –​and that of
an actor’s –​a man’s –​real father, find their counterpart in the epistemological
uncertainty of Wilhelm’s ‘impression’ (glaubte … zu bemerken). The plane of
the subject’s ‘sensations’ and ‘memories’ (Empfindungen und Erinnerungen) is
contiguous to, and indeed made inescapably to intersect with, that of his ‘curiosity’ as a man and ‘preoccupation’ as an actor about the theatrical ‘situation’.
It is out of this insoluble compound of elements that the undefinable Gestalt of
the father emerges –​not just as Hegel’s ‘objective form of Hamlet’s inner present’, nor only as Freud’s ‘unconscious recognition’ of a repressed impulse,36 but
as a mysterious and complex Ähnlichkeit irrepressibly surfacing from the mind,
from the theatre, from life. The scene ends as uncannily as it had begun, with
a vapour-​like veil disappearing under the stage. Interestingly enough, both the
veil and the Ghost’s mystery will haunt Wilhelm almost to the end of the novel
(viii, 5) and will never have a fully satisfactory explanation.
∵
We all know what the encounter with the Ghost does to Shakespeare’s
Hamlet –​how, having proclaimed the time ‘out of joint’, he will consider it
a ‘cursed spite’ to have been born ‘to set it right’ (i. v. 196–​7), and how he will
from now on bear himself ‘strange or odd’, putting on ‘an antic disposition’.
I do not intend to follow all the numberless thematic threads of Hamlet, but
only those that bear on my topic –​recognition. Of this, there seems to me to be
three main parallel, intersecting and yet diverging developments in the course
of the tragedy. The first follows directly form the Ghost’s revelation and concerns Hamlet’s attempt at testing the spirit’s story. The second is represented
by Hamlet’s growing recognition of his inaction. And the third is the sudden
emergence of a new knowledge towards the end of the play.
Euripides’ Orestes had asked himself and his sister whether the Apollo who
ordered him to kill his mother might not be ‘a demon in likeness of the god’
36
Hegel’s Aesthetics, vol. i, p. 231. Freud, ‘Psychopathic Characters on the Stage’: see
Introduction, p. xx.
136 Chapter 2
(Electra, 979). Likewise, Hamlet soon thinks that the spirit he has seen ‘may
be a devil’, who has ‘assumed’ a ‘pleasing shape to ‘abuse and damn’ him (ii. ii.
594–​599). Whereas Orestes almost immediately overcomes his doubts, Hamlet
decides to obtain evidence about the Ghost’s nature and of the truthfulness of his
message. As he puts it: ‘I’ll have grounds/​More relative than this’ (ii. ii. 599–​600).
Hamlet’s enquiry –​his search for ultimate recognition –​starts here. The
mechanism he devises to acquire the decisive semeion is the play he has the
actors stage, a play in which his father’s presumed murder will be re-​enacted.
Although he shows himself initially cautious about the certainty and efficacy
of such a procedure (‘I have heard/​That guilty creatures’), Hamlet immediately afterwards declares himself totally sure that an assassin will confess his
crime, or, as he puts it, that ‘murder, though it have no tongue, will speak/​With
miraculous organ’. He will therefore observe his uncle’s ‘looks’: ‘I’ll tent him to
the quick. If a do blench,/​I know my course’. In short, ‘The play’s the thing/​
Wherein [he]’ll catch the conscience of the king’ (ii. ii. 600–​1).
Hamlet’s reasoning sounds impeccable, but in fact his language betrays a
deep uncertainty in the links between the various stages of the syllogismos. In
the first place, how precisely have ‘guilty creatures sitting at a play’ ‘proclaimed
their malefactions’? There is no doubt that such criminals can be ‘struck to
the soul’ when beholding an ‘image’ of their crimes. Modern fiction and modern police make use of similar methods. But does Hamlet expect Claudius to
confess? He –​and this is the second point –​would seem content that murder,
even without a ‘tongue’, will speak ‘with most miraculous organ’. What kind
of an organ might this be, and of what would its miraculous quality consist?
Perhaps Hamlet means his uncle’s ‘looks’, his flinching or not when the play is
acted out before him. These ‘looks’ certainly have no speaking tongue (they are
mute signs), but they could hardly be said to be miraculous organs. Hamlet is
looking for a ‘sign’ but seems (quite understandably) uncertain as to its nature.
Thus, while trying to gain ‘grounds more relative than this’, that is to say, than
the Ghost’s revelation, he will take as ‘proof’ the ‘conscience’ of the King.
Claudius’ conscience may well be caught (as indeed it will), but a conscience
cannot be taken as evidence. Hamlet seems to realize this, for when, before
the actual performance of the play, he tells Horatio about his plan and asks
him to ‘observe’ his uncle with the utmost attention, he replaces ‘conscience’
by ‘speech’: if Claudius’ ‘occulted guilt’, he says, ‘do not itself unkennel in one
speech,/​It is a damned ghost that we have seen,/​And my imaginations are as
foul/​As Vulcan’s stithy’.37 At the same time Hamlet promises he will ‘rivet’ his
37
iii, ii, 80–​4: Italics mine.
Reason
137
eyes to Claudius’ face and tells Horatio that afterwards they shall ‘join’ their
‘judgments’ in censure of his seeming (iii. ii. 85–​87). He requires a co-​witness
and a discussion of the evidence. This, however, has again become ‘seeming’.
Was the ‘speech’ Hamlet a moment ago demanded the passage in the play
which he has himself composed, as some commentators would have it? Does
‘in’ really mean ‘at’, ‘faced by’? The ambiguity of ‘tongue’, ‘miraculous organ’,
‘looks’ in the preceding passage exclude this. Once more, I think, we are confronted by Hamlet’s uncertainty and his reasonable wish to take all signs into
account.
The dumb show is staged. The action reproduces, without words, Claudius’
supposed murder of his brother by pouring poison in his ears, and Claudius’
wooing of Gertrude. Claudius does not flinch. The play follows. This time,
the actors speak, and, what is more, Hamlet himself provides a running commentary (he is ‘as good as a chorus’, Ophelia tells him). As, before the murder, the player Queen ‘protests’ she will never be a wife if she ever becomes
a widow, Claudius asks Hamlet if there is any ‘offence’ in the ‘argument’. The
prince, taking ‘offence’ as ‘crime’, replies that ‘they do but jest –​poison in
jest’, and goes on to explain that the play ‘is the image of a murder done in
Vienna’. When the future murderer appears on the stage, Hamlet glosses: ‘This
is one Lucianus, nephew to the king’. The action progresses to the poisoning
of sleeping Gonzago. The king rises. His only words are, ‘Give me some light.
Away’. Hamlet turns to Horatio: ‘O good Horatio, I’ll take the ghost’s words/​
For a thousand pound. Didst perceive?’ (iii, ii, 280–​281). Horatio’s two replies
are: ‘Very well, my lord’, and, at Hamlet’s insistence, ‘I did very well note him’.
There clearly are several problems in this recognition scene. Hamlet accepts
it as final proof of the Ghost’s revelation, but all we hear from Claudius, after
he voices his worry about the ‘offence’, is a cryptic request for light, and all we
hear from the co-​witness, Horatio, is an astonishingly brief, neutral assent. The
‘proof’ then depends on how the actor impersonating Claudius on the stage
reacts through gesture rather than word to the murder being re-​enacted in the
play within the play. Shakespeare gives us no indication of the way in which
this reaction should be conveyed. Furthermore, we know that Claudius knows
that the murderer in the play is not Gonzago’s brother, but his nephew –​
which would point to the Prince Hamlet’s revenge rather than to his uncle’s
crime as the reason for staging the play. Finally, we have the status itself of a
theatrical performance. How can this relate to reality –​let alone mirror and
prove it? In the monologue pronounced after the first player’s recitation of
Pyrrhus’ murder of Priam and Hecuba, Hamlet had asked himself a central
question: ‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her,/​That he should weep for her?’
(ii. ii. 553–​554).
138 Chapter 2
What does Hecuba, a fictional character, mean for the actor who talks about
her? What is their relationship? The actor suits ‘his whole function’ ‘with forms
to his conceit’ –​‘And all for nothing! For Hecuba!’. If Hecuba is no relative of the
player –​if fiction is ‘nothing’ to reality –​how can Hamlet expect a play to affect
Claudius? Hamlet’s question, however, presents a complementary aspect which
is even more riddling: ‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?’ Yet, if ‘Hecuba’
stands for ‘a character in fiction’ and hence for fiction in general, does it have
any sense to ask if reality ‘is’ something to fiction, as the second part of Hamlet’s
question would seem to imply? If Hamlet is asking this question, we must conclude that he is therefore subverting the established order of priorities –​requiring not that ‘playing’ should hold the mirror up to nature, but that nature question itself in the mirror. The concept itself of reality is thus shattered to pieces.38
In this context, knowledge –​recognition of the Ghost’s truthfulness by means
of the right interpretation of Claudius’ ‘signs’ –​becomes a nearly impossible
task. Hamlet plunges us into this unbearable conundrum by showing us that
never during the play does the prince obtain positive proof of Claudius’ murder of his father (though he acquires evidence that the King intends to have
him killed), whereas he, Hamlet, firmly believes in it after Claudius’ reaction
to the play, and whereas the audience is actually shown how the King’s conscience has indeed been pricked by the play. Claudius confesses his ‘offence’,
which ‘hath the primal eldest curse upon’t’, to heaven. We hear him (iii. iii.
36–​72). Hamlet does not.
Finally, Hamlet raises doubts which cannot be resolved as to the nature of
the knowledge he accepts and, once more, as to the nature of the Ghost. When
Hamlet talks to Gertrude in scene iv of Act iii, he accuses his mother of having
killed her husband –​something the Ghost has never mentioned and which the
text of the play nowhere justifies. Why Hamlet should bring this up remains a
mystery. And why, in the same scene, the Ghost should be seen by the prince
but not by Gertrude is also profoundly disturbing. Spirits can of course choose
the people to whom they appear, but that they should be visible to some and
simultaneously invisible to others is decidedly strange. Gertrude sees nothing,
yet, as she says, she sees ‘all that is’ (iii. iv. 133). Obviously, this constitutes no
decisive indication that the Ghost is mere ‘vacancy’, but it does cast a shadow
of doubt over the whole question.
Hamlet’s enquiry, and the audience’s reception of it, become loose threads
in mid air. Questionable and contradicting, this first process of ‘recognition’ is
38
See Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba, trans., S. Draghici, Cornwallis OR, Plutarch Press,
2006.
Reason
139
never completed. The bottomless depth is sounded once more by the prince
when, in an apparently mere aside, but in truly oracular fashion, he proclaims
that ‘to know a man well were to know himself’ (v. ii. 137–​138). As a consequence of this jamming of the mechanism of knowledge, Hamlet’s reasoning –​
quite unlike Electra’s –​endlessly circles around insoluble problems or crashes
against unsurmountable walls. It is capable of organizing the logical premises of a quaestio on ‘to be or not to be’, but cannot solve it because it comes
upon the stumbling block of death and its unknowable realm, and is forced
to denounce ‘conscience’ and declare that ‘thought’ itself has a ‘pale cast’. It is
able to formulate the most astoundingly piercing double meanings and witty
remarks, exposing truth to its bare bones, but neither Hamlet’s interlocutors
nor the audience really know whether this be in madness, in affectation of it,
in folly with a ‘method’ or a mixture of all.
Finally, Hamlet’s reasoning reaches a kind of degree zero when it is faced
by the absoluteness of the gravedigger’s arguments. The circularity and speaking ‘by the card’ of this character seem to prompt the prince out of ‘equivocation’. His reasoning faultlessly follows the whole process of likelihood which
through death and dust transforms Alexander the Great into loam stopping a
beer-​barrel (v. i. 200–​205). Horatio himself remarks that ‘’twere too curiously
to consider so’. An excess of ingenuity, of precision and logic brings Hamlet
close to the inanity of the gravedigger’s ‘argal’.
Paradoxically, Hamlet’s ‘curious’ syllogysmos is born out of the one supreme
recognition in the play. Aristotle had spoken of anagnorisis of ‘inanimate
objects’ (apsykha). Hamlet now recognizes Yorick’s skull. Here is the ‘mortal
coil’ reduced to grinning materiality. Here is the ‘respect/​That makes calamity
of so long life’ (iii. i. 68–​699) –​a mute, abhorred, base, stinking, inanimate
object indeed. This is the wall against which man’s ‘large discourse’, his ‘capability and godlike reason’ miserably crash. A human being can certainly look
‘before and after’ (iv. iv. 36–​38), can go back to Yorick’s past ‘gambles’ on the
one hand and forward to Alexander’s clay on the other, but beyond these, no
‘discourse of reason’ will ever reach.
In Chapter 11 of the Poetics, Aristotle asserts that ‘it is possible to recognize
whether one has acted or not’. This kind of anagnorisis is present throughout
Hamlet and constitutes one of the prince’s main torments. Tragically, it continuously crosses with his failure at achieving empirical and rational knowledge
of the Ghost and of Claudius’ guilt. It is in fact anagnorisis of his inaction that
prompts Hamlet to devise a play which he thinks will give him evidence against
his uncle. Comparison with the player’s fiction triggers off this first moment
of recognition: ‘Yet I,/​A dull and muddy-​mettled rascal, peak/​Like John-​a-​
dreams, unpregnant of my cause,/​And can say nothing –​‘ (ii. ii. 561–​564). As
140 Chapter 2
if he were the Pyrrhus of the player’s story, Hamlet stands ‘like a neutral to his
will and matter’ and does nothing (ii, ii. 477). But his problem is that, having
recognized this, he does not know why it should be so. Once more, a bottomless ignorance surfaces out of anagnorisis:
Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th’event –​
A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward –​I do not know
Why yet I live to say this thing’s to do,
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
to do’t.39
Thus, Hamlet’s case, in Aristotelian terms, is that of a tragic character who, as
we have seen, intends to act but refrains from acting, and who recognizes his
inaction but does not know to what it is due. There is no doubt that the Danish
prince is right when he talks of the ‘fighting’ in his heart (v. ii. 4–​5), and above
all when he tells Guildenstern that it is impossible to ‘pluck out the heart of
[his] mystery’ (iii. ii. 356–​357).
∵
That the heart of Hamlet –​and of Hamlet –​really is a mystery may be witnessed
by the unexpected emergence of yet another form of recognition before the
final catastrophe of the play. After Ophelia’s funeral, during which the prince
openly declares he loved her and for the first and only time proudly proclaims
himself ‘Hamlet the Dane’, he discloses to Horatio Claudius’ plot to have him
killed in England. It is in this crucial first part of scene ii of Act v that Hamlet’s
new knowledge mysteriously surfaces. While telling Horatio how, aboard the
ship for England, he unsealed the ‘grand commission’ of Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, the prince comments that ‘indiscretion sometimes serves us
well/​when our deep plots do pall’. Then, he adds: ‘and that should learn us/​
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,/​Rough-​hew them how we will’ (v.
ii. 9–​11).
Osric comes to announce the King’s bet on Laertes’ challenge. In the aside
I have already noted Hamlet says that ‘to know a man well were to know
39
iv. iv. 39–​46: Italics mine.
Reason
141
himself’. A Lord summons the prince: he leaves, and Hamlet turns to Horatio,
saying: ‘Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart: but it is
no matter’. Horatio advises him to obey his foreboding by not fighting with
Laertes. Hamlet’s reply sums up this new type of recognition;
Not a whit. We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a
sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if
it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught
he leaves, knows aught, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be. (v. ii. 215-​20)
Where does the knowledge or wisdom expressed by Hamlet in this passage
come from? His view of human affairs was completely different in the first part
of the play. Two hundred lines earlier it had become providential. Now it is,
pace Schmitt,40 decidedly Christian, as the quotation from Matthew’s Gospel
(10: 29) shows –​and as Walter Benjamin fully understood.41 But we have no
clue as to how this feeling grew up in Hamlet’s mind nor how deeply it really is
rooted, and we are therefore invited to build our own story of its development
as it were outside the text. Secondly, one would not readily agree that the battle
in Hamlet’s heart is now over, since the fact itself that he asks Horatio whether
it is ‘not perfect conscience/​To quit’ Claudius ‘with this arm’ betrays a lingering sense of uncertainty. Furthermore, the ‘illness’ about the prince’s heart
does not only refer to his presentiment, but also corresponds to his general
state of mind throughout the play. And finally, while stating that knowledge of
others is as unattainable as self-​knowledge, Hamlet discerns a divinity which
shapes our ends and a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. Once more
we encounter in the hero’s inner awareness and in the verbal fragments that
voice it, a series of contradictions and mysteries.
We detect as it were the impossibility a human mind faces when it tries
to square the circle of knowledge –​a circle the coordinates of which Hamlet
perceives in flashes but which he cannot coherently order. The ‘I’ is present in
it, indeed hampers the process with his ill, mysterious essence. Knowledge of
40
41
Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba, pp. 52–​53.
W. Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne, London-​New York,
Verso, 1998, p. 158: ‘For the Trauerspiel Hamlet alone is a spectator by the grace of God;
but he cannot find satisfaction in what he sees enacted, only in his own fate. His life, the
exemplary object of his mourning, points, before its extinction, to the Christian providence in whose bosom his mournful images are transformed into a blessed existence.
Only in a princely life such as this is melancholy redeemed, by being confronted with
itself. The rest is silence’.
142 Chapter 2
other human beings (the knowledge of anagnorisis in a play) appears as a line
which, parallel to self-​knowledge, runs ad infinitum, where we know they will
meet but can never see them actually do so. On the other hand, one knows that
human ends –​the ends of those beings whose knowledge of themselves and
of each other is constitutionally, inherently, unreachable –​are in some way
shaped by a superior agency, and that even chance occurrences like the fall of
a sparrow are dominated by special providence.
In this sense, Hamlet comes to the very particular form of recognition of
tykhonta –​the events that take place by chance –​which Aristotle mentions in
passing in c­ hapter 11 of the Poetics. It is a poet’s job, says the philosopher, ‘to
report what is likely to happen; that is, what is capable of happening according
to the rule of probability or necessity’. This is tantamount to maintaining that
tragedy represents chance as if ruled by purpose and thereby renders chance
itself knowable. The unearthing of this knowledge constitutes the ultimate
essence of tragic recognition. Hamlet, a character in a play, glimpses precisely
this knowledge when he recognizes the work of purpose in human affairs and
in the fall of a sparrow. He even ‘reasons’ on this with his usual faultless logic,
examining the three alternatives a human intellect can distinguish: ‘if it be
now, ’tis not to come’; ‘if it be not to come, it will be now’; ‘if it be not now, yet
it will come’.
Hamlet expresses this knowledge in at least crypto-​Christian terms, calling
the agent of tykhonta ‘special providence’ and alluding to Matthew’s sparrow.
At the same time, after uttering the words of wisdom and acceptance –​‘the
readiness is all’ –​he goes far beyond both Aristotle and Christianity. I have little
doubt that, given the premises in the entire play, in the last lines of Hamlet’s
present speech (which are notoriously uncertain from a textual viewpoint)
human knowledge breaks down in final defeat, thus showing us the beginning
of the end of Electra’s reason: ‘since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught,
what is’t to leave betimes? Let be’.
­c hapter 3
Towards Nothingness
Oedipus and Lear
For Aristotle, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex contains the superlative example of recognition. The reason he gives for this praise is that anagnorisis in the Oedipus
Rex occurs simultaneously with the peripeteia (the plot-​reversal) and grows out
of ‘the events themselves’. Few of us would dispute this. The play’s (astonishingly lean) 1,500 lines scroll quickly before our eyes, unfolding into a recognition
which the spectator has been expecting from the very beginning of the tragedy.
The following are the basic stages in this extraordinarily dense plot and rapid
unravelling, almost more akin to a clock mechanism than a work for the theatre.1
1 The edition and translation I use here is Oedipus Tyrannus by H. Lloyd-​Jones in the Loeb series
(20), Cambridge MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1994. Important commentaries are available in the Oedipus Rex editions of R.C. Jebb, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 18872; of R.D. Dawe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982; and in the splendid
Oedipus the King by P.J. Finglass, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018. My choice of
criticism would include: B. Knox, The Heroic Temper. Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy, Berkeley,
University of California Press, 1964; B. Knox, Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His
Time, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 19982; E.R. Dodds, ‘On Misunderstanding
the “Oedipus Rex” ’, Greece and Rome, xiii (1966) 37–49; C. Diano, ‘Edipo figlio della Tyche’, in
Saggezza e poetiche degli antichi, Vicenza, Neri Pozza, 1968; D.A. Hester, ‘Oedipus and Jonah’,
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Association, xxiii (1977) 32–61; A. Cameron, The
Identity of Oedipus the King, New York, New York University Press, 1968; P. Vellacott, Sophocles
and Oedipus, London, Macmillan, 1971; D.I. Grossvogel, Mystery and Its Fictions: from Oedipus
to Agatha Christie, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979; R. Girard, Violence and the
Sacred, trans. P. Gregory, London, Bloomsbury, 1977; J. Scherer, Dramaturgies d’Oedipe, Paris,
Presses Universitaires de France, 1987; The Oedipus Papers, ed. G.H. Pollock e J.M. Ross, Madison
CT, International Universities Press, 1988; W. Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient
Greek Sacrifice, Myth and Ritual, Engl. trans. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983;
P. Pucci, Oedipus and the Fabrication of the Father. Oedipus Tyrannos in Modern Criticism and
Philosophy, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992; C. Segal, Sophocles’ Tragic World.
Divinity, Nature, Society, Cambridge MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1998; C. Segal,
Oedipus Tyrannus. Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 20012; J.-​P. Vernant and P. Vidal Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, trans. J. Loyd, New York, Zone,
1998; M. Bettini-​G. Guidorizzi, Il mito di Edipo, Turin, Einaudi, 2003; Y. Bonnefoy, ‘Readiness,
Ripeness: Hamlet, Lear’, in his Shakespeare & the French Poet, ed. J. Naughton, Chicago and
London, The University of Chicago Press, 2004, pp. 13–​27; L. Edmunds, Oedipus, London and
New York, Routledge, 2006; A.B. Renger, Oedipus and the Sphinx. The Threshold Myth from
Sophocles Through Freud to Cocteau, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013; M. Brunner,
King Oedipus Retried, London, Rosenberger & Krausz, 2001; D.L. Cairns, ed., Tragedy and
© Piero Boitani, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004453678_005
144 Chapter 3
In what we could call the ‘Prologue’, we find Oedipus and the Priest discussing the situation in Thebes. Why, Oedipus asks the Priest as representative of the city, is the air crammed with the incense, laments, and supplication
of those whom he, as king, calls his children? The Priest informs him of the
epidemic raging throughout, and begs him to save his city once again, as he
has saved it in the past from the threats of the Sphinx. Oedipus has already
sent his brother-​in-​law Creon to seek the advice of the Delphic oracle, who
arrives at that moment with the reply: there is something impure, a ‘pollution’
(miasma) in Thebes, Phoebus states, which must be purged away. When he is
pressed for details, Creon adds that a man must be exiled or killed ‘since it is
this bloodshed that has brought the storm upon the city’ (101). The blood he
alludes to is that of Laius, the previous king of Thebes, who was killed by bandits while on a pilgrimage some years before Oedipus was crowned. Only one
man survived the ambush, and no further investigations were made, as Thebes
was then busy trying to avert the attentions of the Sphinx. At this Oedipus
declares he will clarify (show, reveal: phano) the whole episode. In the parados
the Chorus invokes the word of Zeus, newly arrived from Delphi, then prays to
Athena, Artemis, and Phoebus, bewails the pestilence afflicting the city, and
again invokes Apollo and Bacchus.
In the first episode, Oedipus orders an enquiry into the death of Laius, his
wife Jocasta’s first husband. The blind Tiresias, summoned by Oedipus, now
arrives, led by a slave. Initially he refuses to answer Oedipus, but when the king
rounds on him, accusing him of having ordered Laius’ death, he informs him
that he himself, Oedipus, is tainting Thebes : ‘I say that you are the murderer
of the man whose murderer you are searching for’ (362). Moreover, he adds,
Oedipus lives, ‘unawares in a shameful relationship with those closest’ to him.
Understandably beside himself, Oedipus accuses Tiresias of being in league
with his brother-​in-​law Creon, adding, for good measure, that his powers of
prophecy seem less than infallible: after all it was he, Oedipus, and not Tiresias,
Archaic Greek Thought, Swansea, Classical Press of Wales, 2013; E. Coughanowr, ‘Philosophic
Meaning in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex’, L’Antiquité Classique, 66 (1997): 55–​74; F. Ohly, The Damned
and the Elect, trans. L. Archibald, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992; P.J. Finglass,
‘The Ending of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex’, Philologus, 153 (2009): 42–​62; S. Halliwell, ‘Where
Three Roads Meet: A Neglected Detail in the Oedipus Tyrannus’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 106
(1986): 187–​190; S. Lawrence, ‘Apollo and his Purpose in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus’, Studia
Humaniora Tartuensia, 9 (2008): 1–​18; F. Macintosh, Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2009; M. Foucault, Lectures on the Will To Know and Oedipal
Knowledge, trans. G. Burchell, ed. D. Defert, Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan,
2013; T. Halter: König Oedipus –​Von Sophokles zu Cocteau, Stuttgart, Steiner, 1998.
Towards Nothingness
145
who ‘by native wit’ solved the riddle of the Sphinx. Tiresias then predicts the
calamities to come, exiting with a last allusion to the crime:
And I say this to you: the man you have long been looking for, with threats
and proclamations about the murder of Laius, that man is here! He is
thought to be a stranger who has migrated here, but later he shall be
revealed to be a native Theban, and the finding will bring him no pleasure, for he shall travel over strange land blind instead of seeing, poor
instead of rich, feeling his way with his stick. And he shall be revealed as
being to his children whom he lives with both a brother and a father, and
to his mother both a son and a husband, and to his father a sharer in his
wife and a killer.2
In the first stasimon the Chorus speculates as to the murderer’s identity,
invokes the ‘word’ from Parnassus, comments on the quarrel between Oedipus
and Tiresias, and compares the wisdom of Zeus and Apollo with man’s lack
of judgment. The second episode stages the quarrel between Oedipus and
Creon, Jocasta’s brother. Creon has manipulated Tiresias, Oedipus insists, in
order to have the field free to take over. Power politics are the inevitable terms
of reference for a tyrannos; hybris clouds his mind. Creon roundly denies the
accusation, pointing out the far from negligible fact that, as the third in command, he already wields considerable power: ‘As things are, I obtain everything
from you without fear’: the mere name of king would add, de facto, nothing.
The Chorus attempts to dissuade Oedipus from killing Creon, and, at Jocasta’s
arrival, invokes her help to settle the quarrel (633).
In the third episode Oedipus tells Jocasta that Creon and Tiresias accuse him
of Laius’ murder. Jocasta tries to calm him down, and, at the beginning of the
dialogue between them –​a crucial point in the plot –​gives details of Laius’ killing. To prove the fallibility of prophecy, she explains that Laius had been told
by an oracle that his death would be at the hands of a son of theirs, whereas
in actual fact he was killed by ‘foreign robbers at the place where three roads
meet’ (715–​717). Moreover, that very new-​born son who should have killed his
father was bound by the ankles and abandoned on a ‘trackless mountain’. At
these details Oedipus asks tremblingly for a physical description of Laius and
of his train and begins to realize that the prophet Tiresias ‘may have sight’.
At Jocasta’s insistence he then explains that a ‘thing to be wondered at’
had once occurred, whereby he was one day accused by a drunkard of being a
2 Oedipus Tyrannus, 449–​460.
146 Chapter 3
bastard, and not the son of Polybus and Merope of Corinth. His parents reassured him, but the question continued to vex him, and he finally went to Delphi
to consult Apollo’s oracle: his answer was that Oedipus was to face desperate
horrors: to lie with his mother and kill his father. He fled from Corinth immediately, on his way passing through the very place Jocasta has just mentioned, at
the Phocis crossroads where Laius was killed. A carriage had arrived, bearing
a man of exactly Jocasta’s description; on the man’s trying to force him off the
road, Oedipus fought and killed him with all his retinue. ‘If this foreigner had
any tie with Laius, who now could be more miserable, and who more hateful to
the gods, than I? […] And it was none other than I myself who laid upon myself
these curses. And I am polluting the bed of the dead man with the hands by
which he perished’ (813–​823). He is thus left with no alternative to exile, the
penalty he himself has imposed on Laius’ murderer. Nor would he ever dare
set foot again in Corinth, to avoid fulfilling the prophecy by killing his father
Polybus and lying with his mother Merope.
Jocasta informs him of one surviving witness, the one slave to escape the
slaughter, who, on Oedipus’ coronation, begged to be sent into the fields as
shepherd, so as to be as far as possible from the city. There is, Oedipus realizes,
one vital detail he can confirm: if Laius was killed by robbers, in the plural,
then he, who was alone, is innocent. His wife points out that the man cannot
but confirm what so many had heard, and that in any case no faith can be put
in prophecies: Apollo had predicted that Laius would be killed by his own son,
who had in fact died before him. In the second stasimon the Chorus speaks
of hybris and tyranny, invokes Dike, and deplores humanity’s lack of faith in
oracles.
In the fourth episode, as Jocasta is preparing a sacrifice to Apollo, a messenger arrives from Argos, announcing that Polybus has died and that the
city has elected Oedipus as king. Jocasta and Oedipus rejoice at this confirmation that his father died of sickness and old age and not at his son’s hand;
Oedipus, however, is still reluctant to go to Argos, fearing ‘intercourse’ with his
mother, the second part of the prophecy. At this point the messenger reveals
that he is not the son of Polybus and Merope, but was given to him by another
shepherd, of the house of Laius, who had found him as a new-​born baby, the
tendons of his feet pierced and fettered –​hence his name –​on the slopes of
Mount Cithaeron. The shepherd, the Chorus points out, must therefore be the
same man who was present at Laius’ killing, whom Oedipus had already sent
for. Jocasta, in a flash of understanding, begs Oedipus to go no further in his
enquiry, but he refuses. ‘You will never persuade me not to find out the truth’,
he says. With a desperate ‘Ill-​fated one, may you never find out who you are!’
(1077), Jocasta flees in wild grief, while Oedipus simply repeats that his origins
Towards Nothingness
147
must be discovered, at the cost of plunging his wife into the social shame of
having married below herself: for ‘she is proud in woman’s fashion’, while he is
content to be a ‘child of the event that brought good fortune’, of Tykhe (1080).
The Chorus, in the third stasimon, muses that he may be the child of Pan, of
Bacchus, or Apollo himself.
The fifth episode, however, brings the old Theban shepherd, and the information that Oedipus is indeed the child he was given on Mount Cithaeron; the
child was royal-​born, the son of Laius and Jocasta, who wanted to be rid of him
on account of the prophecy that he would slay his own father. Oedipus is now
in full possession of the truth. Everything must come to pass: ‘All is now clear!
O light, may I now look on you for the last time, I who am revealed as cursed in
my birth, cursed in my marriage, cursed in my killing!’. He leaves. In the fourth
stasimon the Chorus comments on human destiny:
Ah, generations of men, how close to nothingness (meden) I estimate
your life to be! What man, what man wins more of happiness than enough
to seem, and after seeming to decline? With your fate as my example,
your fate, unhappy Oedipus, I say that nothing pertaining to mankind is
enviable.3
In the sixth episode we learn that Jocasta has hanged herself and Oedipus
blinded himself with his wife’s golden pins. When he returns on stage for the
last time, and is reproved by the Chorus for taking his own sight, his terrifying
reply is as follows:
Do not try to show me that what has been done was not done for the best,
and give me no more counsel! For I do not know with what eyes I could
have looked upon my father when I went to Hades, or upon my unhappy
mother, since upon them both I have done deeds that hanging could not
atone for.
Then, could I desire to look upon my children, once their origins were
what they were? Never could these eyes have harboured such desire! Nor
to look upon the city, or the wall, or the statues of the gods or the temples,
from which I, who had enjoyed the greater luxury in Thebes, had in my
misery cut myself off, commanding with my own lips that all should drive
from their houses the impious one, the one whom the gods had shown to
be impure and of the race of Laius.
3 Oedipus Tyrannus, 1186–​1196.
148 Chapter 3
When I had proclaimed that such a stain lay upon me, was I to look
upon these with steady eyes? Never! Why, if there had been a means of
blocking the stream of hearing through my ears, I would not have hesitated to shut off my wretched self, making myself blind and deaf. It is a
joy to live with one’s thoughts beyond the reach of sorrow.4
He complains that Cithaeron did not kill him, that Corinth and Polybus only
gave him a beautiful ‘veneer’ that veiled his ‘secret sickness’, that the three
roads still bear the mark of his father’s blood, that the marriage brought forth
‘all things that are most atrocious among men’. He finally begs to be hidden
somewhere abroad, or be killed, or hurled into the sea, where he shall never be
seen again: ‘For there is no human being who can bear my woes but I’.
At this point, Creon arrives, and Oedipus asks him to banish him and to bury
Jocasta. He also begs him to take care of his daughters, and that he might be
allowed to touch them once more. Antigone and Ismene enter, and Oedipus
asks to be left alone with them; he then refuses to be parted from them until
Creon curtly orders him, ‘Do not wish to have control in everything!’. With the
Chorus’ salutation, the tragedy of Oedipus Tyrannus, of Oedipus the crushed
and ruined king, comes to an end (1524–1530):
Dwellers in our native land of Thebes, see to what a storm of cruel disaster has come Oedipus here, who knew the answer to the famous riddle
and was a mighty man, on whose fortune every one among the citizens
used to look with envy! So that one should wait to see the final day and
should call none among mortals fortunate, till he has crossed the bourn
of life without suffering grief.
Two aspects immediately emerge from this plot. Firstly, the recognition in the
fifth episode is not recognition in the Aristotelian sense of the term. It is not
a person Oedipus “recognises”, but a fact: that he himself, the investigator, is
the assassin. He discovers himself, his origins, his birth, his seed, as he himself
defines it. Secondly, the whole tragedy is rushing towards this recognition: in
other words, with a virtuosity which probably has no parallel in literature, the
poet has managed to sublimate the entire narrative structure in one ongoing
mechanism of recognition.
The gnosis, the knowledge which according to Aristotle is produced by
the act of recognition, is developed and discussed from the beginning of the
4 Oedipus Tyrannus, 1369–​1390.
149
Towards Nothingness
tragedy. For Oedipus the whole plot is a movement from ignorance to knowledge (as we know Aristotle’s definition of anagnorisis goes); he proceeds by
blinding illuminations or step by gradual step: from chasms of deep crisis to
creeping awareness (the crossroads, the news from the Argos messenger, the
old shepherd’s revelation). A paradigm of the connection between hamartia,
the unwitting, tragic error, and recognition, Oedipus incarnates the action
of anagnorizein itself, the process whereby knowledge slowly emerges; and
his fate consists in re-​enacting, through increasing degrees of awareness,
the same steps which had taken him, unknowingly, down into the black pit
of his being –​towards the point of contact with his mother and his father.
In this sense his fate is a re-​cognition, the anagnorisis of something already
within him.
∵
The fundamental point here is this process of gnorisis: not gnosis, savoir,
but the actual making, the building up, of knowledge: connaître. Ruthlessly
systematic, this is created by three distinct but ultimately interconnected
means, respectively verbal, structural, and thematic, which I shall deal with
in that order.
The words of Oedipus Rex are, of course, extremely important. They
reveal character, as in all plays, but here the pressing counterpoint of dialogue enacts the action itself. It is through words, questions, that Oedipus
discovers the truth. But words are of different types, divine and human, with
different values. The word of the gods –​phatis and phama –​is the ‘voice’ of
Delphi. The pestilence in Thebes, it announces, is caused by a miasma, a
contamination that requires purification: the discovery of Laius’ murderer
and his exile from the city. But the lord whose oracle dwells in Delphi, as
Heraclitus had said, ‘neither speaks out nor conceals: he semainei, he signifies, gives a sign’.5 The Theban Chorus protests, insisting it should be
Phoebus, who sent the oracle, to say who the murderer is. But the gods have
their own times and seasons, and no man, as Oedipus replies, can ‘compel the gods when they are unwilling’ (280–​281). The god’s voice is mysterious, needs interpreting, and Tiresias who, as Oedipus himself recognises,
can dispose ‘all things, those that can be explained and those unspeakable, things in heaven and things that move on earth’, (300–​302) offers the
5 Heraclitus, fr. 244 (=dk 93), in The Presocratic Philosophers, ed. G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven,
M. Schofield, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 19832, p. 209.
150 Chapter 3
interpretation. What he knows, however, is that Oedipus himself is the murderer, and, in words as allusive as those of the oracle, foretells his future,
setting present vision against coming darkness (a darkness Oedipus himself speaks of in the same passage): he condemns the ‘dangerous harbour’
of Oedipus’ marriage and his dreadful equality with his children. Tiresias’
words, as he himself maintains, are inspired by Loxias, Apollo the ‘Oblique’.
Against this divine, ambiguous word is set that of humanity, although
one of the play’s startling paradoxes is that it is through the latter, the words
of the messenger from Argos and the old shepherd, that the divine word is
explained and endorsed, with the further irony that they are set in motion by
Oedipus himself, who, with the drive of a private investigator, indefatigably
interrogates and comments. It is his word, that of the tyrannos, the supreme
authority, that orders the enquiry and claims its right to speak. Yet his word is,
as critics have underlined, dubious, ambiguous, amphibological. He says one
thing, and implies another, concealing a truth which is unknown to him but
not to us. When Creon speaks, for example, of the robbers (plural) who killed
Laius, Oedipus responds by asking how a robber (singular) would dare do such
a thing without accomplices, thereby unwittingly condemning himself. Then,
when Oedipus announces he will fight for Laius ‘as though he had been [his]
father’ (264), tragic irony has no further to go.
In Oedipus’ words human and divine language, initially totally distinct,
gradually merge, while, as Vernant writes, ‘seated on the stepped slopes of
the theater, the spectators occupy a privileged position that enables them,
like the gods, to hear and understand the two opposed types of discourse
at the same time, following the conflict between them right through from
start to finish’.6 At the beginning of the play Oedipus states to the Chorus,
ego phano, literally ‘I shall show, bring to light, the criminal’, but also ‘I shall
reveal myself a criminal’ (132). The tragedy highlights how this ambiguity of
his, the enigma he represents, is resolved by reversal. This is of two kinds,
as Knox has pointed out: in the first, the meaning of the terms describing
Oedipus are systematically reversed. From the hunter pursuing his prey
over the mountainside, he becomes the game, the wild beast, bellowing his
blind way across Mount Cithaeron. In the second type, the terms describing
him at the peak of his glory are gradually shifted to the gods: at the beginning it is Oedipus who is called ‘sovereign’ by the Priest; later the Chorus
applies this term to Zeus. In the first line of the play, Oedipus addresses the
6 J.-​P. Vernant, in J.-​P. Vernant and P. Vidal Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, p.117.
Towards Nothingness
151
suppliant Thebans like a father his children; two hundred lines later the
Chorus refers to Zeus in the same way.
Then there is, famously, the name Oedipus itself: Oidipous, he with a swollen foot (oidos), but also, he who knows (oida) the enigma of the foot. Who,
the Sphinx asks, is the being who is simultaneously dipous, tripous, tetrapous,
two-​, three-​and four-​footed? This poses no mystery for Oidipous: it is man,
he himself. His final question will therefore be: then who am I? The Sphinx’s
enigma constitutes the answer: he is the man who identifies both with his own
children and his own father –​child, adult, and old man at the same time. He is
the answer, yet the answer is an enigma.
If we then move from this densely patterned verbal plot to the play’s macro-​
plot, this too reveals the same reversal mechanism, again through words. This
is the structural means referred to above, articulated into three levels. The
first is the level of action taking place in front of our eyes –​the enquiry, the
prophecy, the quarrel with Creon and Tiresias, the dialogue with Jocasta, the
arrival of the messenger from Argos, and that of the old shepherd. The action
re-​discovers Oedipus’ past, of which he knows nothing (his birth and abandonment on account of the prophecy to Laius), at the same time also revealing the
facts immediately predating the action, of his known and recent past. The episode with the Sphinx is recalled by the Priest at the beginning of the play, and
used by Oedipus to taunt Tiresias; Oedipus’ relatively recent arrival in Thebes
is mentioned by himself in the first episode; the Sphinx is again evoked by the
Chorus, and towards the middle of the play Oedipus speaks of his putative
parents, Polybus and Merope. Jocasta adds further details: the cross-​roads, the
murder of Laius, the prophecy regarding Laius’ son, and the only witness, the
old servant.
From the moment the Argos messenger arrives, these three levels –​action,
past, and immediate past –​begin to merge, finally exploding in recognition
with the arrival of the old shepherd. The plot includes two singular details,
both of them crucial moments of méconnaissance, of non-​recognition.
The first is the superimposition of two parallel oracles: Jocasta informs
Oedipus of the oracle announcing that Laius would be killed by his own
son. Immediately afterwards Oedipus tells Jocasta of an oracle from Apollo
announcing that he would kill his own father and lie with his mother, and
Jocasta responds by citing the first one as proof of the fallibility of oracles
generally. The two correspond precisely, of course, to Tiresias’ allusion to his
‘shameful relationship’ with ‘those closest to [him]’ and to his final, terrifying prophecy, yet Oedipus, master-​solver of enigmas, fails to relate the two
oracles in any way, and completely overlooks the clues. He is unable, at this
point, to recognize the truth.
152 Chapter 3
It is difficult to believe that this is simply because Sophocles wants to add
more fuel of dramatic tension to the final blaze of recognition. This non-​
recognition serves in fact both to underline Oedipus’ inability to perform some
simple arithmetic and reach the answer, and also, at a more significant level, to
demonstrate that he is in the grips of ‘negation’ and ‘repression’, blacking out
this particular truth until events force it on his consciousness.7 Oedipus is the
man who can put dipous, tripous, and tetrapous together and, in an instant’s
illumination, recognize the infinite they conceal, the human being. Now, however, he takes one cautious step at a time, proceeding with carping diligence,
demanding eyewitnesses and first-​hand proof. Mere oracles, and in total agreement to boot, are not sufficient to convince him. He cannot afford to accept
their agreed truth because it would endorse what Tiresias had obliquely told
him: that he is indeed his father’s murderer and his mother’s husband.
This can, of course, be read as Freud’s archetypal Oedipus complex, or
rather, as an Italian critic has perceptively pointed out, the representation of
its ‘inverse’.8 When both Oedipus and Jocasta refute the oracle, Jocasta pronounces the famous words (980–​981) which form the bed-​rock of Freudian
critics: ‘do not be afraid of marriage with your mother! Many have lain with
their mothers in dreams too’. Equally, we could, with Lévi-​Strauss, see it within
the context of the whole Theban myth, of a culture, that is, which considers
humanity autochthonous and thus has to find an explanation for the fact that
present-​day human beings are the result of a male-​female union.9 In either
case, what Oedipus undoubtedly represents is the icon of the man who rejects
the truth at the very moment he is trying to bring it out. He is quick to pick up
Jocasta’s allusion to the crossroads, realising that what she describes is what
he has performed, and is anxious to know the number of killers. Like Jocasta,
however, he ignores the oracles, and neither of them thinks to wonder why
the old servant, the sole survivor of the ambush, on his return to Thebes begs
Jocasta, as she herself tells Oedipus, to be sent as far away from the city as
possible.
Oedipus makes sufficient connection to fear he may be Laius’ murderer, but
not his son, overlooking, in this supreme méconnaissance, the crucial forensic evidence: his pierced foot. In this same exchange between them, Jocasta
explains that Laius’ wretched son had been abandoned with his ankles tied, a
7 See A. Green, The Tragic Effect: The Oedipus Complex in Tragedy, trans. A. Sheridan,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 74, 21–​23.
8 G. Paduano, Lunga storia di Edipo Re, Turin, Einaudi, 1994, pp. 71–​125.
9 C. Levi-​Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jakobson and B.G. Schoepf, New York, Basic
Books, 1963, pp. 213–​218.
Towards Nothingness
153
detail Oedipus stolidly ignores both now and thereafter, when the Argos messenger gives his description of the child found on Mount Cithaeron: ‘Ah, why
do you speak of that ancient grief?’ is his only reaction (1033). The messenger
replies that he himself had ‘released’ his pierced ankles: this, which Oedipus
considers ‘a dreadful brand of shame’, the messenger tells him (1036), is what
he got his name from. The two descriptions of the feet are not identical, but
Oedipus should be aware –​in his own flesh –​of the real meaning of Jocasta’s
euphemism. In other words, for Oedipus the non-​recognition is in two phases,
the second confirming and compounding the first. From line 718 to 1034, a
full fifth of the tragedy, Oedipus forgets himself, his own name, his own feet.
He reproaches the old man for reminding him of ‘that ancient grief’, yet the
‘ancient grief’ he has chosen to forget is precisely the clue which would solve
the enigma.
All this is taking place in a tragedy where Oedipus represents the new and
rational human science, grounded in experience, research, and enquiry. To
summarise the cogent argument of another Italian scholar,10 Oedipus is he
who, through reason (gnome) pursues his historia, exploits the kairos, the right
moment, analyses the signs (semeia), and concludes in heuresis, discovery. He
is the paradigm of knowledge –​the learning (mathesis) and finding out which
lead to certain knowledge (saphes). As such, he is the opposite of the seemingly
ultra-​rational Jocasta, who denies the validity of prophecy, declaring roundly
that oracles should be brought to (judicial) account, though her rejection of
all prediction (pronoia) because inevitably lacking certainty (saphes), smacks
of the decidedly irrational. Jocasta considers the human sphere to be dominated by chance and fortune and is set against any form of knowledge: ‘may
you never find out (gnoies) who you are!’, she exclaims (1068).
At the same time, this saphes of her husband’s is in contrast with Tiresias’
aletheia, i.e. truth begotten as a natural human gift, and not reached through
enquiry and research. Tiresias, as he himself states, nurtures the truth (356);
moreover, the Chorus endorses, he is the only man in whom it is innate (299).
His aletheia is a total and instant vision of things, and of the past which produces them. A ‘master of truth’ of the archaic age, Tiresias is a majestic if primitive fossil of the sovereignty which sets itself over and against Oedipus’ new
‘tyranny’.11
It is this truth which undermines all Oedipus’ certainty, although only
through him is it evoked and fulfilled. Tiresias is better acquainted with the
10
11
M. Vegetti, Tra Edipo e Euclide. Forme del sapere antico, Milan, Il Saggiatore, 1983.
See M. Detienne, Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, trans. J. Lloyd, New York, Zone Books,
1996; E. Di Rocco, Io Tiresia. Metamorfosi di un profeta, Rome, Editori Riuniti, 2007.
154 Chapter 3
past than the future, and Oedipus has every right to underline his inability to
grasp the Sphinx’s meaning (390–​396). Tiresias represents mankind’s interpretation of Apollo’s wisdom, but this is void of fact and has to be completed by
Oedipus’ enquiry. In berating Tiresias, he accuses him of being ‘blind in ears, in
mind and in eyes’ (371), and, ultimately, in his skill, his prophetic art. Tiresias
lacks feeling, perception, sensitivity –​aisthesis –​and therefore, according to
Oedipus the empiricist, nous, intelligence, mind, wit. Nor is he a god, for, as
Xenophanes tells us, the god would ‘as a whole see, as a whole think, as a whole
hear’.12
The point is precisely this: what exactly is sophia, wisdom, and what store
should be set by rationality? The Chorus formulates the question, commenting, in the first stasimon, when Tiresias and Oedipus have crossed swords:
Well, Zeus and Apollo are wise and know the affairs of mortals, but
when it comes to men, one cannot tell for sure that a prophet carries
more weight than I; a man may surpass one kind of wisdom by means of
another (sophia d’an sophian). But never, till I see the saying made unmistakable, shall I assent to those that find fault with him, for in sight of all
the winged maiden came against him once, and he was seen to be wise
(sophos) and approved as dear to the city; thus shall he never be convicted of crime by my judgment.13
The Chorus is uncertain: in human sophia, it cannot be taken for granted that a
prophet’s wisdom is superior to common one, and Oedipus’ sophia was tested
by the Sphinx. Tiresias’ knowledge is archaic; that of Oedipus, the knowledge
current in the Athens of Pericles: the philosophy of Anaxagoras, the new historiography of Thucydides, the critical spirit of the Sophists, the new science
of medicine14 –​that same discipline which, in Sophocles’ own period, had
failed to cure the plague in Athens, so that the statue of Aesculapius had been
brought to the city (and stood, apparently, in Sophocles’ own house). Thus,
Oedipus’ saphes culminates in the discovery of the scapegoat, the pharmakos,
12
13
14
Xenophanes D17 (= dk B24) in A. Laks and G.W. Most, Early Greek Philosophy iii, 2,
Cambridge MA and London, Harvard University Press (Loeb), 2016, pp. 32–​33. It should
be noted that this accusation represents a change of heart in Oedipus, who had previously
addressed Tiresias as ‘you who dispose (nomon) all things, those that can be explained
and those unspeakable (didakta te arreta), things in heaven and things that move on
earth’ (300–​302).
Oedipus Tyrannus, 498–​511: see comments by Dawe, p. 143, and more extensively by
Finglass, pp. 332–​335.
Vegetti, Tra Edipo e Euclide, p. 11.
Towards Nothingness
155
which is to purify Thebes and rout the pestilence: he is both the miasma and
the medicine, the subject and object of knowledge.
The conflict emerges, then, of different types of knowledge: an enquiry into,
and a debate on, truth, wisdom, and science constituting the theme through
which Sophocles constructs his recognition, the shift from ignorance to knowledge. The oracle of Apollo comes from Delphi: the Delphic motto is gnothi
seauton, know yourself. In Oedipus Rex we find both meanings: ‘man, recognise
that you are a mere man’, as the Chorus concludes in the fourth stasimon; and
‘man, know yourself’. And this is precisely what Oedipus wants to know: who
he is, what his sperma, his seed is, what his origins are. Oedipus pursues the
ethical aim set out by the Delphic motto at first unconsciously, then deliberately, as if his ‘self’ were external to man, an object of enquiry to be arrived at
through deduction, proof, and signs –​in short, a natural phenomenon to be
examined and explained by science. But on discovering himself both investigator and investigated, zeton and zetoumenon, Oedipus is moving proleptically
towards the meditation and self-​reflection which characterises philosophy as
Aristotle defines it in the Metaphysics: zetoumene episteme, ‘researched science’. The tragedy of Oedipus’ ironic gnothi seauton –​the tragedy of Oedipus
Rex –​lies in showing how difficult it is to reach this knowledge rationally, how,
in fact, impossible if man does not journey into himself and as it were bend
over onto himself as Biblical characters do (since man is not simply a natural
phenomenon). And furthermore, when that knowledge is attained, the prize is
nothingness: obscurity, duality, and the mesh of contradictions and unspeakable horror that strangles the roots of self (father and mother), blinding him
while conferring a ghastly ‘immortality’. ‘So much, at least, I know, that no
sickness or other factor can kill me’,15 the sightless, shattered Oedipus baldly
states: he has eaten of the tree of knowledge, and ‘is as God’.
In Oedipus at Colonus the ninety-​year-​old Sophocles makes Oedipus’ tragic
awareness and destiny constitute the safety of Athens, but this is as yet a far-​
off point of arrival. Oedipus Rex, the tragedy of power and knowledge, “simply” presents the thudding weight of this knowledge and its effects. ‘Alas, alas,
how dreadful it is to know (phronein) when the knowledge does not benefit
the knower! I knew this well, but I suppressed it; else I would not have come
here’, Tiresias himself observes at the beginning of the play. Tiresias is speaking here of his own situation, while alluding to that of Oedipus at the end
of the play; for him, knowledge is a burden –​to the extent that even he, the
15
My translation of the line differs from Lloyd-​Jones’ and agrees with both Dawe’s and
Finglass’.
156 Chapter 3
all-​seeing seer has, in his extraordinary sentence, forgotten his own awareness
of it. This is perhaps the first time we hear it pronounced in Western literature and apprehend one of humanity’s main psychological mechanisms: the
oblivion in which we bury, out of sight of our conscience, the unbearable
heaviness of knowledge.
Jocasta’s turn soon comes. When she suddenly grasps who Oedipus is, she
exclaims: ‘may you never find out who you are’, the precise opposite of the
Delphic injunction to ‘know yourself’. It is reiterated by the Chorus, towards the
end of the tragedy, when the blind Oedipus reappears on the scene: ‘Wretched
in your mind and wretched in your fortune, how I wish I had never come to
know you!’ (1348–​1349). Here, however, the exclamation is ambiguous, and
could equally mean: ‘Unhappy in your mind and your misfortune: would you
had never known!’ In the first reading, the Chorus is rejecting its own share
in knowledge; in the second, echoing Jocasta’s words, it regrets Oedipus’
share: that knowledge had ever been necessary. In the second, moreover,
Oedipus’ intellect equals his destiny, an expression which, in the context of a
general rejection of knowledge, would be significant indeed.
The Chorus’ withdrawal from its share of the burden has actually already
occurred, in the awesome fourth stasimon in which the generations of mortals
are defined as equal to ‘nothing’. ‘Ah, son of Laius, would that I had never set
eyes on you!’ the Chorus had cried, and the field had suddenly –​as it were –​
widened. The Chorus is speaking for the whole of Thebes, the polis, and thus
for the people of Athens, and extends to them the idea of knowledge, here represented by its object Oedipus, as a burden. Will the public, too, on acquiring
its own knowledge, discover the abyss of its own self? When Oedipus, his eyes
freshly pierced, the bleeding eyeballs gushing and staining his beard, reappears for the last time, the Chorus pronounces a lament in which horror has
paralysed all will to know or enquire:
O grief terrible for men to see, O grief most terrible of any I have yet
encountered! What madness (mania) has come upon you, unhappy one?
Who is the god (daimon) that with a leap longer than the longest has
sprung upon your miserable fate? Ah, ah, unhappy one, I cannot even
bear to look on you, though I wish to ask you many questions and to learn
many answers and perceive many things; such is the horror you inspire
in me!16
16
Oedipus Tyrannus, 1297–​1306: lines 1305–​1306 recite polla aneresthai, polla pythesthai,
polla d’athresai.
Towards Nothingness
157
If it were not blocked by horror, however, the Chorus would still like to
enquire: ask, learn, behold –​to know and to understand. ‘All men by nature
desire to know’, Aristotle will say at the beginning of the Metaphysics. The
Chorus of Oedipus Rex, like Oedipus himself, already believe it.
Is the horror of the Chorus, then, our fate for being party to Oedipus’ secret,
for acquiring knowledge, for passing from ignorance to knowledge? Does recognition mean that we, too, like Tiresias, now wish to forget the knowledge
of knowledge, accepting the oblivion of ignorance? Or do we edge into madness, elbowed by the daimon? All this is certainly one of the truths Oedipus
Rex recites. The truth in the character of Oedipus, however, is a different matter. In this scene with the Chorus, Oedipus laments both the tortures of the
flesh and the memory of his ills, ‘the sting of these goads’ and the ‘remembrance’ of his troubles, the awareness of a knowledge which is now undeniable
and indelible –​the memory confirming that, even at the end of the tragedy,
there is no rejection of knowledge, on Oedipus’ part: he in fact continues to
champion knowledge as he has done throughout the whole grim unfolding.
His curses are, rather, for the man who stole him from death as a child; he
has blinded himself, and desires deafness too, because it would be ‘a joy to
live with one’s thoughts beyond the reach of sorrow’ (1389) –​and certainly ‘a
joy’ to put aside all knowledge –​but he accepts his destiny, knowing he is a
stain on the entire community. Interestingly, it is now, when he is blind and
powerless, that he thinks of his daughters, thanks Creon for taking pity on
him, and appreciates the Chorus’ kindness and compassion. Equally interestingly, this wider recognition is emblematically expressed in the way in which
he recognises them, despite his blindness: ‘Your presence is not hid from me,
but I recognise (gignosko saphos)/​your voice, though I am in the dark’. He is
recognising the human voice through which the Chorus has represented the
city of Thebes from the first lines of the play, when it was a tyrant-​to-​subject
relationship: if not as a god, certainly as the first among men. Now Oedipus is
a man among men, and a model, as the Chorus states in the fourth stasimon, a
paragon (paradeigma) of human fate and misery.
It is now very clear both why Aristotle chose this recognition in Oedipus Rex
as his paradigm, and why Freud saw in this particular character from myth the
incarnation of what he considered one of the most fundamental mechanisms
of our subconscious. Oedipus’ passing from ignorance to knowledge is a debate
on knowledge itself, on truth, enquiry, reason, and the value of self-​awareness.
The méconnaissance and recognition of Oedipus, the rational seeker of truth,
represent the triumph and defeat of knowledge and self-​knowledge both as the
process of knowing, connaître, and knowledge in itself, savoir, since knowledge
in itself has no intrinsic value. Odysseus re-​cognises himself, his dead mother,
158 Chapter 3
his son, his wife, and his father. Oedipus recognises himself, his father, his
mother, his wife, and his children. Odysseus’ long absence makes his recognition a sublimation of the feelings and prime human needs; Oedipus’ unknowing presence turns his recognition into a curse on the whole of humankind.
Odysseus’ recognition fills a void for us, fills us with enthusiasm for knowledge,
and makes us one and many; the recognition of Oedipus drains off our wholeness, anathematises knowledge, and makes us ‘equal to nothing’. Catharsis
becomes an unbearable burden, and an unbearable question: are we, too, like
Oedipus?
∵
The best answer is possibly through the question: can Sophocles’ invention be improved on? The story of the Oedipus myth in Western literature
has been pursued by several writers and the need for another treatment is
largely superseded. Let me take a more oblique route, with a brusquer leap
from Sophocles to Shakespeare than in my preceding chapter. This time,
though Oedipus Rex is traditionally (in Freud’s subconscious, too) associated
with Hamlet, I shall take King Lear. This is in part because the last scene of
Oedipus Rex that I examined, blind Oedipus’ recognition of the Chorus’ voice
steals a 2,000 year march on the scene in which blind Gloucester recognises
Lear’s voice (‘I know that voice … The trick of that voice I do well remember’), but also because I consider King Lear the inverted response made by the
Renaissance –​and therefore modernity –​to the political and gnoseological
questions put by Oedipus Rex.17
17
The best editions and commentaries of King Lear are by K. Muir and R.A. Foakes (from
which I quote) for the second and third Arden series, London, Methuen, 1952 and Thomas
Nelson, 1997. Among the innumerable critical studies, the fundamental ones are: W.
Empson, The Structure of Complex Words, London, Penguin, 1995 (1951); E.H. Kantorowicz,
The King’s Two Bodies, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957; N. Frye, Fools of Time,
Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1967; J.F. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A
Study of King Lear, London, Faber, 1949; N. Brooke, Shakespeare: King Lear, London,
Arnold, 1963; T. Hawkes, Shakespeare and the Reason, London, Routledge, 1964; W.R. Elton,
King Lear and the Gods, San Marino, Ca., Huntington Library, 1966; P.A. Jorgensen, Lear’s
Self-​Discovery, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967; S. Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of
Love: A Reading of King Lear’, in his Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 20032; King Lear. A Casebook, ed. F. Kermode,
Basingstoke, Macmillan, 19922; S.L. Goldberg, An Essay on King Lear, New York, Cambridge
University Press, 1974; R. Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater,
ed. R. Schwartz, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978; S. Bassnett, Shakespeare.
The Elizabethan Plays, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1993; R.A. Foakes, Hamlet versus
Towards Nothingness
159
Let me begin with the basic plot mechanisms of recognition. Lear is the
tragedy of an old tyrannos who, unlike Oedipus, signs away his kingdom in
order to ‘unburdened crawl toward death’ (i.i.40). Beguiled by his own narcissism, the blandishments of his two “bad” daughters Goneril and Regan, and the
obdurate silence of the “good” daughter Cordelia, he divides up his kingdom
between Goneril, Regan, and their respective husbands, banishing the third,
his youngest, and the faithful Kent who attempts to reason with him. He is
quickly disabused: Goneril and Regan lose no time in stripping him of followers and assets generally, finally turning him out of doors. Crazed with grief, he
wanders over the land like a beggar, with only his Fool and the disguised Kent.
His mind finally breaks down in the storm scene on the heath. The repudiated
Cordelia, with her husband the king of France, then returns in a failed attempt
to save him. In the specular sub-​plot, the old Earl of Gloucester is hoodwinked
by his illegitimate son Edmund into believing his legitimate son Edgar is plotting against him; Edgar is turned out and forced to wander the country, half-​
naked, as Poor Tom the beggar. In return for helping their father, Gloucester is
blinded by Lear’s daughters. The two old men meet near Dover as Cordelia is
disembarking to come to her father’s assistance with French troops; meanwhile
Edmund passes the time playing off the two sisters in highly charged erotic
interrelations. Cordelia finds her father, is defeated by Edmund’s army, taken
prisoner with Lear, and finally killed. Edgar challenges Edmund to a duel after
the death of their father and kills him; the play ends with Lear’s own death.
The last two acts of Lear contain five scenes of recognition: one between
Lear and Gloucester, which I mentioned above (iv. iv); one between Lear and
Cordelia (iv. vii); one between Edgar and Edmund, during their duel (v. iii),
(and, recognition within recognition, Edgar’s account of his self-​disclosure to
Gloucester before the latter’s death); and, lastly, one shortly before the very
end of the play, between Kent and Lear (v. iii). I shall look at some of the relevant elements here. Lear’s tragedy immediately presents itself as based on
hamartia, on Lear’s wishing to retain ‘the name and all th’addition to a king’
(i.i.137) even as he gives up real power, and when, blinded by anger, he ignores
Cordelia’s ‘sincerity’ and Kent’s attempt to help him ‘see better’; when he
rejects all his ‘paternal care,/​Propinquity and property of blood’ –​in Greek
terms, his own philia –​towards Cordelia. Through Kent, we know from the
Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1993; J. Kronenfeld, King Lear and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Language of Religion
and Resistance, Durham NC and London, Duke University Press, 1998; J. Holloway, The
Story of Night: Studies in Shakespeare’s Major Tragedies, New York, Routledge, 2014 (1961);
G. Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015.
160 Chapter 3
beginning that Lear is ‘mad’ and merely an ‘old man’. Through Kent and even
more through Cordelia we know who Goneril and Regan really are; and, ironically, from Regan’s own mouth we know Lear’s trajectory from the beginning: ‘’Tis the infirmity of his age, yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself’
(i.i.294–​295). King Lear shows us how this mad old man slowly and painfully,
through old age and madness reaches self-​knowledge and the knowledge of his
‘loved ones’ (in the sense of the Greek philtatoi), the world, and the essence of
human beings. Slowly, in ever widening circles, in a spiral coiling continuously
back on his self, Lear is to learn the truth he announced at the beginning, in
words as ambiguous as those of Oedipus: how ‘dark’ is his ‘purpose’ and how
verily ‘burdened’ he shall ‘crawl toward death’.
Lear is set on the painful path towards recognition through confrontation
with those around him. It is Kent, when he reappears, disguised, who tells
him the truth. In answer to Lear’s question ‘What art thou?’, he answers ‘A
man, sir’, adding, ‘I do profess to be no less than I seem’ (i.iv.10–​13). And
this is the journey Lear now undertakes, from appearance to being (from
‘seems’ to ‘is’, in Hamlet’s terms), to essential human being. The first level he
must reach is that of the tyrannos, of ‘King’. When, in the same scene, Lear
again asks Kent ‘What art thou?’, he replies, ‘A very honest-​hearted fellow,
and as poor as the king’. For a moment, Lear’s reaction is of recognition
and confession: ‘If thou be’st as poor for a subject as he’s for a king, thou
art poor enough’. Slowly, talking to one of his knights, Lear realises the full
extent of his ill-​treatment at his daughters’ hands, and with true Oedipal
ambiguity announces what he will be doing for the rest of his life: ‘I will look
further into ’t’ (i.iv.68). Lear has certainly ‘noted’ that his Fool has ‘much
pined away’ since Cordelia left for France; the Fool then appears, and, like
Tiresias, makes a number of prophetic pronouncements: ‘Truth’s a dog must
to kennel; he must be whipped out, when the Lady Brach may stand by the
fire and stink’ (i.iv.109–​110).
But Lear is no Oedipus. He listens to his prophet with increasing attention,
because the germs of truth are already in him, as his exchanges with Kent and
the knight show. “All” Lear has to do is become aware of this knowledge. Self-​
knowledge, as we saw, came for Oedipus from outside: he discovers his identity
as if it were the object of an enquiry conducted by a third party. Lear must turn
in on himself, dissect himself, and finally distinguish knowledge from awareness. Here ‘knowing oneself’ is transposed onto a Christian dimension: in Lear,
the torture is internal from the start: in Oedipus’ case only at the end, after
recognition. Self-​illusion is possible for Lear, but true méconnaissance and self-​
oblivion are not. He has to touch the bottom of self-​awareness. It is hardly surprising that his ‘wits begin to turn’: ‘madness’ does, indeed, ‘that way lie’.
Towards Nothingness
161
The text contains here a profound echo of the Christian ideal: ‘Let no man
deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let
him become a fool, that he may be wise’, Saint Paul had written.18 Lear moves
towards the abyss, first ‘a fool’ in name only, by the ‘title’ –​as the Fool points
out –​he was born with, a man who had ‘little wit in [his] bald crown’ when
he gave away his ‘golden one’; one who, as Goneril urges on him, should make
use of his ‘good wisdom’ and who instead begins to know himself ever more
‘slenderly’:
Does any here know me? This is not Lear.
Does Lear walk thus, speak thus? Where are his eyes?
Either his notion weakens, his discernings are
lethargied –​Ha! sleeping or waking? Sure ’tis not
so. Who is it that can tell me who I am?19
‘Lear’s shadow’ is the Fool’s answer to his disquieting question as to his identity (and not, significantly, his seed). And for all Lear’s blustering to Goneril
that he will be himself again, and again assume ‘the shape’ she thinks he has
‘cast off for ever’ (i.iv.301–​302), the way to madness and nothingness (the same
meden as Oedipus’) is now all too clearly signposted: ‘Now thou art an O without a figure’, the Fool tells him, ‘I am better than thou art now. I am a fool,
thou art nothing’ (i.iv.183–​185). His wit will indeed ‘go slipshods’, and madness
will be ready for him, in word and deed. ‘The reason why the seven stars are
no more than seven is a pretty reason’, the Fool insists, with another twist of
his maieutic knife. ‘Because they are not eight?’, Lear offers, to which the Fool
rejoins: ‘Yes, indeed. Thou wouldst make a good fool’. And again, when Lear
rails at his daughters’ monstrous ingratitude, the Fool comments: ‘If thou wert
my Fool, nuncle, I’d have thee beaten for being old before thy time’, adding,
at Lear’s puzzled ‘How’s that?’: ‘Thou shouldst not have been old before thou
hadst been wise’. ‘O let me not be mad, sweet heaven!’ Lear’s shadow finally
cries, ‘Keep me in temper; I would not be mad!’ (i.v.43–​45).
The hysterica passio rises to a crescendo over the groundswell of the Fool’s
prophecies of blind and wise men, great wheels, and tempests, a seminal
speech in which all the images of the play thicken into enigmas more opaque
18
19
1 Corinthians 3: 18: see Ch. Moeller, Sagesse grecque, paradoxe chrétien, Tournai/​Paris,
Casterman, 1948.
i.iv.217–​221: Foakes comments: ‘Lear’s dawning recognition of a gap between his role (as
king) and his identity (as human being) begins here’.
162 Chapter 3
than those of the Delphic oracle, the pronouncements of a Hamlet-​versed Old
Testament (and not Theban) Sphinx:
We’ll set thee to school to an ant, to teach thee there’s no labouring i’ the
winter. All that follow their noses are led by their eyes, but blind men, and
there’s not a nose among twenty but can smell him that’s stinking. Let go
thy hold when a great wheel runs down a hill lest it break thy neck with
following it, but the great one that goes upward, let him draw thee after.
When a wise man gives thee better counsel, give me mine again; I would
have none but knaves follow it, since a fool gives it.20
Faced with this welter of mystery and misery, Lear’s heart will not ‘down’, and
before his daughters’ insistent ‘You should be ruled and led/​By some discretion that concerns your state/​Better than you yourself’, before Goneril’s refusal
to meet anything but the barest ‘need’, Lear’s heart finally breaks. ‘Do not make
me mad’, he implores Goneril, bidding her farewell and qualifying his recognition of her as ‘my flesh, my blood, my daughter’ with the coda ‘Or rather a disease that’s in my flesh/​Which I must needs call mine’ (ii.ii.411–​412). He rejects,
then, this philia in the act of recognising it, and invokes patience while asking
the gods for a ‘noble anger’, threatening his daughters with ‘the terrors of the
earth’. In a wave of self-​pity, he sees himself as ‘a poor old man/​As full of grief
as age; wretched in both’, but at the same time refuses to weep:
No, I’ll not weep:
I have full cause of weeping, but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I’ll weep. O Fool! I shall go mad.21
The storm is gathering. In the meantime, we have been appalled spectators
of Gloucester’s deception, perpetrated by the bastard Edmund in the name
of Nature, and the transformation of Edgar into ‘the basest and most poorest
shape/​That ever penury in contempt of man/​Brought near to beast’ (ii.ii.178–​
180). Edgar saves himself by becoming another, a beggar who feigns madness,
silencing his own nature to become the voice of nothingness: ‘Poor Turlygod’,
he says, ‘poor Tom,/​That’s something yet: Edgar I nothing am’.22 His father
20
21
22
ii.ii.257–​266: the Biblical model is Proverbs 6: 6.
ii.ii.472–​475.
i.ii.191–​192. Foakes rightly comments: ‘As Poor Tom he has an identity, as Edgar he is non-​
existent. Nothing here is adverbial, meaning ‘in no way’.
Towards Nothingness
163
however takes his ‘perpendicular fall’ into Edmund’s trap and, in a series of
appalling ironies, recognises the disruption in nature, managing to distinguish
between the unnatural anger of Lear the father towards his daughter Cordelia
precisely in the moment he sees son revolt against father in the story of treason
his bastard offspring invents against the natural.
When the storm breaks, Shakespeare guides Gloucester and Lear towards
recognition in scenes which have no parallel in the whole of European literature. The progression is inexorable. Gloucester tells Tom, ‘our flesh and blood,
my lord, is grown so vile/​That it doth hate what gets it’. He fails to recognise
Edgar even as his son, leading his blind father into shelter, addresses him as
‘thou happy father’. He equally fails to recognise Kent in the precise moment
he recognises his prescience: ‘he said it would be thus, poor banish’d man !’, but
sees in Lear’s madness the onset of his own, commenting querulously: ‘Thou
say’st the king grows mad; I’ll tell thee, friend,/​I am almost mad myself’ (iii.
iv.161–​162); in Edgar’s presence he expresses his love for him despite the plot
against his life, grief which, he acknowledges, ‘hath crazed my wits’. When his
eyes are plucked out, when all is ‘dark and comfortless’, then he learns the truth
and is able to recognise: ‘Oh, my follies! Then Edgar was abused’.
Edgar, for his part, recognises his father while meditating –​as if he had read
Aristotle’s Poetics23 –​that ‘To be worst,/​The lowest and most dejected thing
of fortune,/​Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear./​The lamentable change
is from the best;/​The worst returns to laughter’ (iv.i.2–​6), words he is forced
to retract the moment he sees his father. Blind Gloucester, recognising that he
‘stumbled when [he] saw’, and that now, with no aim in view, he ‘want[s]‌no
eyes’, confesses to the Old Man, in his disguised son’s presence: ‘Oh, dear son
Edgar,/​The food of thy abused father’s wrath,/​Might I but live to see thee in
my touch,/​I’d say I had eyes again!’ (iv.i.24–​26). A few instants later, he tells the
Old Man that the night before he had seen ‘such a fellow’ as this beggar and
madman –​which made him think ‘a man a worm’ –​and that then his son had
come into his mind’.
Like Lear, Gloucester also has a more far-​reaching epiphany of the nature
of mankind. When speaking to Edgar he recalls the mad beggar (Edgar/​Tom)
he had met the night before, in the storm; man, he had mused, was no more
than a worm, and this had made him think of his son. While considering that
this particular beggar must have some power of reason, ‘else he could not
beg’, Gloucester reaches a further, devastating recognition: ‘As flies to wanton
boys are we to th’ gods;/​They kill us for their sport’ (iv.i.38–​39). Immediately
23
Poetics, 13, 1452 b 31–​1453 a 12.
164 Chapter 3
afterwards, when he realises that the beggar-​companion guiding him to Dover
is mad, his vision of the truth is further extended: ‘’Tis the times’ plague,
when madmen lead the blind’. Formulating his desperate Weltanschauung,
Gloucester thus crawls towards the ‘high and bending’ cliff where he hopes to
meet his death.
The sequence requires little comment. Recognition has become a universe
in itself. Memory, mental association, presence, failed recognition, madness,
and blindness all mesh into a strangling knot containing skeins of death,
despair, and awareness both clearly visible and tragically, deliberately, confused. Recognition and reversal –​peripeteia –​break in wave after desperate
wave. But what, then, is anagnorisis, this move from ignorance to awareness,
in King Lear?
The beginnings of an answer lie in Lear’s parallel path. In the storm of Act
iii, Lear, ‘a poor, infirm, weak and despised old man’, veering between patience
and anger, his brain loosening its grip, enters a long, tormented, but inevitably downward spiral of knowledge. The obsession with filial ingratitude opens
the way to madness and wisdom. The storm strikes flat the thick rotundity of
the world, cracks nature’s mould, and spills all germens that make ungrateful
man, as Lear had asked it to; but the ‘contentious storm’ and the ‘tempest in
[his] mind’ are the same thing –​as Lear perceives in a lightening flash –​so
that the storm is striking flat the world and human intellect as if they were
identical, annulling reality and perception and cancelling out all the objects
which fill a normal world, a normal mind. In cracking the moulds of nature,
they level world and mind to two specular versions of a tabula rasa, on which
the new, paradoxical wisdom of madness can etch elusive, fragmented signs of
awareness and, particularly, flashes of understanding which, however, lead to
no saphes, no certain knowledge.
While Nature unleashes itself around him, Lear peels the old world like
an onion: ‘undivulged crimes’, ‘close pent-​up guilts’, perjury, filial ingratitude,
kingship, justice, and female hearts which, in his grimly unmetaphoric referent, he wishes to ‘anatomize’, in order to determine if there be ‘any cause in
nature’ that makes them hard. He peels down to ‘the thing itself’ which he perceives in Tom/​Edgar, ‘unaccommodated man’ who is ‘no more than but such a
poor, bare, forked animal’. Throwing off all ‘lendings’, Lear becomes a new Job
and grasps truth’s core, the nothingness of Oedipus the King:24 ‘Is man no more
24
For the Job-​Lear comparison, see H. Fisch, The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton
and Blake, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1999, pp. 123–​132.
Towards Nothingness
165
than this?’, he speculates.25 It is this nakedness which makes him recognise, in
Tom, his ‘philosopher’, his ‘learned Theban’ and ‘Athenian’ –​his Crates and his
Diogenes, his Tiresias and Socrates26 –​and in a mad drive for total knowledge
to ask: ‘What is the cause of thunder?’.27 He is no longer able to think of what
most harms him: caught between the inner and outer storm, he searches desperately for the original cause in nature, in Regan’s heart and in thunder.
This, however, is a hallucinated School of Athens, one that has gone through
the Passion, or through Job’s debates with his friends and with God. The
moulds of nature are indeed cracked; only humanity is left, glimpsed through
recognition, to be reconstructed from scratch, a temporary fragment, starting
from the humblest element of sheer humble necessity. Hence Lear’s concern
for his Fool, for the ‘houseless poverty’ of Poor Tom, and for all the ‘poor naked
wretches’ through whom a king, by accepting to share their condition and to
experience their feelings personally, might build a world where to ‘show the
heavens more just’ (iii.iv.36).
From this point on there is no let-​up in Lear’s painful, painstaking process of
recognition. When the storm has passed and the scene moves to Dover, all the
threads of this complex plot come together. Gloucester and Edgar make their
way towards what Gloucester believes to be the ‘fearful’ and ‘dizzy’ cliff he is
seeking for. His guide’s voice is altered, Gloucester notes, but far from inducing recognition, the very same voice is able to fabricate the ultimate illusion: a
vertiginous height, created in a welter of beetle-​sized ‘crows and choughs’,
samphire-​gatherers, and fishermen no bigger than mice, from which he can
tumble ‘perpendicularly’ into the long-​sought oblivion.
Here, in a device which is to recur in a number of the later plays, Gloucester
does indeed experience a sort of death and resurrection. After his “fall” he meets
a different Edgar, who exclaims at the miracle of his being alive, who calls him
‘father’ for the first time, defines Tom as ‘some fiend’, and, by arrogating the
25
26
27
iii.iv.101: G.K. Hunter, in his Penguin edition of the play, suggested as possible sources
Florio’s Montaigne, ‘An Apology for Raymond Sebond’, ‘Tudor Translations’, vol ii, p. 172;
and Hebrews 2: 6, failing to see that the original for this is Psalm 8: 5.
Foakes discusses the hypothesis that the ‘learned Theban’ might be the Cynic, Crates,
with the Athenian then Diogenes himself. But the ‘Theban’ of l. 153 and the ‘Athenian’ of
l. 176 are, in Lear’s words, the same person, and the only ‘philosopher’ who would qualify
as both Theban and Athenian would be Cebes, disciple in Thebes of the Pythagorean
Philolaus, and then in Athens of Socrates. i don’t think Shakespeare would have had, or
thought of using, this information.
Foakes recalls Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale 258 (people wondered at what is the cause of thunder). Muir quotes The Book of Sirach (or The Sapience of Nature), and Bocus and Sydrac,
and finally Ovid’ Pythagoras in the Metamorphoses xv, 69–​72 in Golding’s translation.
166 Chapter 3
gods’ ability to remedy ‘men’s impossibilities’ –​in short, by constructing a parallel, verbal and deceptive, reality –​gives him memory, a new self-​awareness,
and a new life: ‘I do remember now’, Gloucester states, ‘Henceforth I’ll bear/​
Affliction till it do cry out itself/​“Enough, enough”, and die’ (iv.vi.75–​77). Or,
as his son states at the end of the play, ‘Men must endure/​Their going hence,
even as their coming hither’.
When the mad Lear reappears, Gloucester’s catharsis –​though not Lear’s –​is
already over. The first of the recognition scenes now occurs, between Gloucester
who, in his blindness, has discovered some sort of reason, and Lear, who is still
searching. The anagnorisis, here, is precisely this meeting and mixing of two
states of awareness, or, as Edgar glosses Lear’s comments in Act iv, ‘matter
and impertinency mixed!/​Reason in madness’. While Gloucester recognises
Lear almost immediately, on hearing his voice, Lear continues to grope his
way towards the truth. Are we to take his ‘Ha! Goneril with a white beard?’ as
meaning he actually mistakes Gloucester for his daughter? What is his degree of
awareness at this stage? When he answers Gloucester’s question with an ironic,
‘Ay, every inch a king’, and anathematises adultery, copulation, and ‘the sulphurous pit’ of womanhood, Lear curiously mentions ‘Gloucester’s bastard son’ who
‘was kinder to his father/​than were my daughters got ’tween the lawful sheets’.
A moment later, when Gloucester attempts to kiss his hand, a further existential
epiphany makes him respond, ‘Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality’.
The entire exchange between the two old men is a counterpoint of personal
obsessions, mutual empathy, and flashes of truth. ‘O ruined piece of nature!’,
Gloucester comments in his turn, with the voice of the Chorus in Oedipus: ‘this
great world/​Shall so wear out to nought’ (iv.vi.130–​131). And when he goes on
to ask, ‘Dost thou know me?’, the recognition in Lear’s answer is ironically, woefully oblique and oracular: ‘I remember thine eyes well enough’. Lear’s memory catches the very centre of Gloucester’s new awareness, of his new, painful
existence: his eyes. And he never shifts his attention (or ours, or that of his
addressee) until he has extracted some form of truth from the scene, bending Gloucester to the discourse of seeming madness: ‘Your eyes are in a heavy
case, your purse in a light; yet you see how this world goes’. ‘I see it feelingly’,
Gloucester replies, with an ambivalence worthy of Oedipus. But Lear both savages and caps his synaesthesia: ‘What, art mad? A man may see how this world
goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears’ (iv.vi.146–​147).
This is true knowledge and true wisdom. It needs no sense perception, no
intellectual gnome, no syllogistic reasoning. Rather, it is based on experience
and on the ability to extrapolate a parable from it and recognise truth within
daily life: ‘Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar? And the creature
run from the cur –​there thou mightst behold the great image of authority;
167
Towards Nothingness
a dog’s obeyed in office’. Through all the apparent meanderings of his madness, Lear circles round the original goad, kingly power: the concept of justice is overturned and the ancient tyrannos absolves all his persecutors. But
his tongue ever turns to aching tooth, the eyes. Finally, after near-​unbearable
cat-​and-​mouse retarding, he offers complete recognition: ‘If thou wilt weep my
fortunes, take my eyes./​ I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloucester’. It is
recognition which makes of Lear a ‘preaching’ prophet, Oedipus and Chorus at
once; which brings to light, with the words of Wisdom, the deeper truth rooted
in being human; which leads to re-​cognition:
Thou must be patient. We came crying hither.
Thou knowst the first time that we smell the air
We wawl and cry. I will preach to thee: mark me.
…
When we are born we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.28
In the following sequence, as Lear is hurried away to Cordelia’s camp, Gloucester
again asks Edgar ‘Now, good sir, what are you?’. No recognition is yet possible,
despite the clues of Edgar’s poignant preceding line, ‘Well pray you, father’. Yet
Edgar answers with a significant statement, in which his ‘known and feeling
sorrows’ and the poverty that has made him ‘tame to fortune’s blows’, are not
simply the reasons he is ‘pregnant to good pity’, but are also, for the moment,
the only real answers to the events of the play. Gloucester offers his own vision,
however, echoing the rejection of knowledge –​and self-​awareness –​we have
already heard in Oedipus. He blesses Lear’s madness and praises folly, which
keeps thought safely separate from pain:
The King is mad: how stiff is my wild sense,
That I stand up and have ingenious feeling
Of my huge sorrows? Better I were distract;
So should my thought be severed from my griefs,
And woes by wrong imagination lose
The knowledge of themselves.
∵
28
iv.vi.174–​179: the Wisdom passage quoted by Foakes, 7: 3 and 6, specifically mentions
kings: ‘for there is no king that had any other beginning of birth’ (7: 5).
168 Chapter 3
The king, however, is no longer mad. He regains complete possession of himself in the following scene, when he recognises Cordelia. The way Shakespeare
wakes Lear from his folly and restores him, purified, to an acceptance of life
is one of the miracles of the theatre. The king’s descent into madness and
the concomitant growth of his wisdom had been slow and spasmodic; his
resurrection looks swift by comparison, but Shakespeare is in no hurry, and
reaches the final recognition in a retarding which is all the more extraordinary
for being concentrated in a very few lines. Cordelia addresses her father as a
solicitous subject: ‘How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty?’.29 The
king’s answer emerges from an abyss, suspended between his own hell and the
heaven of his daughter:
You do me wrong to take me out o’ the’ grave.
Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.30
As the Fool’s prophecy of the wheel is fulfilled, Lear sees Cordelia as a
blessed soul, a breath of Paradise. Recognition momentarily moves beyond
this world only to plunge back into exhausted flesh. Again, when she asks
him ‘Sir, do you know me?’, he answers, ‘You are a spirit, I know; where did
you die?’. He then quickly regains a sense of time and space –​‘Where have
I been? Where am I? Fair daylight?’ –​but nebulously, his sensorial perception
still dulled: ‘I will not swear these are my hands’, and even though he feels
the pinprick he applies, he needs to be ‘assured of [his] condition’. Cordelia
then asks for his blessing, at which Lear kneels and, in twelve tentative, tormented lines gropingly completes his anagnorisis.31 He begins from the few
sure facts of his age and his madness, but fears he is not in his ‘perfect mind’;
he thinks he should recognise Cordelia and Kent, but is ‘doubtful’; realises he
has lost the memory of self and the world because he has lost any notion of
space, time, and the very clothes he wears; then, in a second’s illumination,
29
30
31
Many critics have noted that behind the reunion between Lear and Cordelia, which
reverses Lear’s former decision to abandon her to her destiny, stands the parable of the
Prodigal Son in Luke 15.
iv.vii.45–​48: Muir supplies information about the sources of the ‘wheel of fire’ (= Hell)
image, from the New Testament Apocrypha. G. Wilson Knight’s classic The Wheel of
Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy, London, Methuen, 19492, is of course very
much to the point, especially pp. 177–​206.
Foakes calls it ‘this most moving of recognition scenes’, p. 353.
Towards Nothingness
169
recognises his daughter at the instant he remembers he is (still, simply, but
totally) a man:
Pray, do not mock me.
I am a very foolish, fond old man,
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less;
And to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
Methinks I should know you and know this man,
Yet I am doubtful; for I am mainly ignorant
What place this is and all the skill I have
Remembers not these garments; nor I know not
Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me,
For as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia.32
Everything is suspended in the stupor of this beatific vision: memory and
being, knowledge and existence, madness and wisdom. ‘Pray you now, forget and forgive’, Lear asks her soon afterwards. In this moment between past,
present, and future, recognition means a new awareness, an openness towards
another being. In sharp contrast with Lear’s previous self-​absorption, the (all
too human) awareness of the wisdom of madness, this recognition, forged on a
wheel of fire, is communion: a very human wisdom sublimated and purified by
acceptance. Yet later, after their defeat, when Cordelia invites her father to see
‘these daughters and these sisters’, his mind closes in on his prison, a cage into
which the outside world penetrates only through the minds and sensations of
the prisoners, through the exclusive perception of the self. Here the contemplating awareness will ultimately become recognition of the world within the
self: a divine knowledge, as if one self communicating with another took on
something of the Godhead: ‘as if we were God’s spies’.33 This is both humility
and the taking upon oneself of what Lear defines ‘the mystery of things’:34 not,
32
33
34
iv.vii.59–​70. On Cordelia’s reply, ‘And so I am, I am’, Muir quotes Ruskin: ‘all Cordelia is
poured forth in that infinite “I am” of fulfilled love’.
Foakes comments: ‘spies of the gods or of God? An audience hears God’s, though neither
Q nor F has an apostrophe before “s”, and the play nowhere else directly refers to the
Christian God’.
Muir glosses: ‘the mysterious course of worldly events, the mystery of human life and destiny’ (but the two are different things); and for ‘things’ refers to the res of Latin poetry –​
Virgil’s Georgics (ii, 490) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (xv, 68). However, these as well as
many other Roman and Greek writers always speak of rerum causae, not the ‘mystery’.
170 Chapter 3
as Oedipus would propound, an enquiry into the nature of the mystery, but
living, and praying, and singing, and the telling of old tales; a detached, smiling
knowledge of natural and political reality, of the minutest, radiant details of
being (the ‘gilded butterflies’) and the seesaw of becoming (the ‘court news’
learnt from ‘poor rogues’); ‘sacrifices’ upon which ‘the gods themselves throw
incense’.35
This is the knowledge which will cast its aura over Shakespeare’s last plays,
in the miraculous scenes of recognition between father and daughter or husband and wife in Cymbeline, Pericles, and The Winter’s Tale, and which from
Lear’s tempest leads almost directly to The Tempest. In King Lear this divine
and human wisdom remains, however, imprisoned and condemned, as it were,
just as in Oedipus the King it prefigures the transformation to take place in
Oedipus at Colonus.
The scenes of recognition which follow that between Lear and Cordelia
throw all the hard-​achieved, momentary equilibrium out of joint, inexorably
moving in quite another direction. The first is a tragic version of the revelation
of the unknown knight in medieval romance. Edgar, no longer dressed as Poor
Tom, appears at the third sound of the trumpet, challenges Edmund, and mortally wounds him. Significantly, Edgar’s name –​‘lost,/​By treason’s tooth bare-​
gnawn and canker-​bit’ –​is only revealed when Edmund confesses his sins,
leading to a quasi-​religious recognition between the two half-​brothers: ‘The
gods are just, and of our pleasant vices/​Make instruments to plague us’, Edgar
states, pointing out the moral of divine contrapasso, while Edmund extends
the play’s wheel image: ‘Thou’st spoken right; ’tis true;/​The wheel is come full
circle, I am here’ (v.iii.171–​172).
Edmund’s recognition of his brother ends with the ‘good’ which he intends
to do ‘despite of [his] own nature’: through his death, and in a last-​minute
attempt to revoke his order and save Lear’s and Cordelia’s life. Edgar’s exposure of Edmund only occurs, however, when he has revealed himself to his
father. This revelation kills Gloucester, whose ‘flaw’d heart,/​Alack, too weak
the conflict to support!/​’Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,/​Burst
smilingly’ (v.iii.195–​198). Again, knowledge leads to death, here direct and
physical. Emotions can kill. And although this is a smiling death of reconciliation, Lear still has to plummet from the peak of the infinite ‘mystery of things’
where supreme knowledge and boundless ignorance may meet, to the small,
appalling, individual knowledge of his daughter’s death. In a return to things
35
Both Muir and Foakes point out the various Biblical loci that may have inspired this passage, iv.vii.20–​26. Out of them Shakespeare is creating his own Scriptural language.
Towards Nothingness
171
of the earth, since ‘death’ and ‘earth’ are synonyms, knowledge here is absolute,
an all-​too-​obvious, certain saphes: ‘I know when one is dead and when one
lives;/​She’s dead as earth’ (v.iii.238–​239).
When, in the play’s last recognition scene, Lear, through his ‘dull sight’, recognises Kent, the knowledge is useless. ‘I’ll see that straight,’ Lear murmurs
when Kent tries to reveal himself as the very man who has followed him as
his long-​disguised servant. Lear bids him welcome, but, as Albany remarks,
‘he knows not what he sees’. His death approaches. ‘All’s cheerless, dark and
deadly’, Kent now recognises. The whole process of passing from ignorance
to knowledge, the multiple, layered peripeteia of recognition –​are no longer
of any significance. Spectators and readers, drained by a plot of unrelenting
bleakness after it had promised peace and transfiguration, are by the end of
the play less than ‘the thing itself’: even poorer, barer, and more desperately
bereft than after the annihilation of Oedipus. All we learn is that if, in Edgar’s
words, ‘The oldest hath borne most’, ‘We that are young/​Shall never see so
much, nor live so long’, and almost envy Kent his ‘journey shortly to go’ after
his master, since our own has ended so devastatingly. Shakespeare has made
no attempt at the clockwork mechanism of Oedipus. What he has done is to
smash the clock of knowledge and set off a series of explosions, each more
terrifying than the one before, building up a cataclysmic storm. In other words,
he has given a new, and much more devastating, shape –​in a civilization no
longer pagan, but Christian –​to the ancient mask of knowledge: meden, nihil,
nothing. Nothingness.
­c hapter 4
Recognizing God
As Abraham is sitting in the plains at Mamre, at the entrance to his tent, in the
heat of the day, God appears. This is not the first time it has happened to him: God
has always appeared directly on the scene, from the very beginning of his vicissitudes, when he was commanded to leave his home in Ur of the Chaldees for an
unknown land, and his words later came to him ‘in a vision’ to confirm his promise, covenant, and blessing. Nor will it be the last time: the most terrible moment
is still to come, when, in a few years’ time, the Voice will call ‘Abraham!’ to order
the sacrifice of his beloved son Isaac. This, however, is the first time the Lord has
appeared to Abraham in the flesh, in human semblance, and in the flesh, to boot,
of three people.
‘And Yahweh appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre : and he sat in the
tent door in the heat of the day; And he lift up his eyes and looked, and, lo,
three men stood by him’.1 The verses are from the beginning of c­ hapter 18 of
the Book of Genesis, the whole of which is included in the seminal document
Bible scholars call ‘J’ –​the Yahwist –​because it attributes to God His ‘personal’
name, represented by the tetragrammaton yhwh.2 The meeting between God
and man is totally normalised, if not actually understated, with none of the
divine special effects –​pillars of clouds or burning bushes –​which accompany,
for example, those between God and Moses. Yahweh indulges in none of the
disguises the Homeric gods assumed when appearing to their protected; nor
do we get the sensation, which Erich Auerbach described so well in the first
chapter of Mimesis,3 that God is arriving unannounced from unknown heights
1 Editions and translations of the Bible are indicated in the Note on the Texts after the Preface.
I should add here Tyndale’s Old Testament, ed. D. Daniell, New Haven and London, Yale
University Press, 1992; The Holy Scriptures, trans. H. Fisch, Jerusalem, Koren, 1992; Genesis,
ed. E.A. Speiser in the Anchor Bible, New York, Doubleday, 1982; and C. Westermann’s
superb Genesis: A Continental Commentary, 3 vols., trans. J.J. Scullion, Minneapolis, Fortress
Press, 1994.
2 When the ‘documentary hypothesis’ was first proposed, by Julius Wellhausen in the 19th century, the spelling of God’s name began with a J (Jahweh), and therefore the ‘Yahwist document’ was named ‘J’ –​an acronym that stuck.
3 E. Auerbach, Mimesis. Auerbach’s famous first chapter marked the beginning of the modern
study of the Bible as literature (for which see D. Norton, A History of the Bible as Literature,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993). I cannot reconstruct this here, but can indicate the books that have influenced most my own approach and my treatment of the Bible
in this chapter: R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, London, Allen & Unwin, 1981; N. Frye,
© Piero Boitani, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004453678_006
Recognizing God
173
or depths. Abraham is having his siesta in what the Bible defines ‘the heat of
the day’, the intense, midday heat which produces mirages and blurs outlines.
When the three appear, however, the old man does not rub his eyes or make any
move of surprise, irritation, or of simple courtesy. He merely moves towards
them, throws himself on the ground, and greets Him: ‘My Lord, if I have now
found favour in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant’, adding,
as a good host, ‘bathe your feet, and rest yourselves under a tree, and I will fetch
a morsel of bread, and refresh yourselves; after that you may go on: for have you
not come by your servant?’, to which the three reply, ‘Do as you have spoken’.
There follows one of the most spectacular scenes of recognition in literature. Subtle, sophisticated, enigmatic and breath-​taking in speed and intensity,
it constitutes a wholly new type of agnition with respect to those which are so
frequent in Greek literature, and which Aristotle catalogues and analyses in
some of the most important sections of the Poetics. With the exception of two
characteristics which are so general as to form part of any detailed description –​
which Aristotle summarises in his definition of anagnorisis as the ‘passage
from ignorance to knowledge’ and an element of the ‘complex’ plot –​Genesis
18 has nothing in common with Greek artistic practice nor, consequently,
with the philosophy which analyses it (the order Aristotle gives to the different types of anagnorisis corresponds, as we have seen in the Introduction, to
the movement he describes in knowledge, from that of the senses to memory, intellect, and ‘intuition’). Here there are no ‘signs’ like the famous scar by
The Great Code, New York and London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982; R. Alter, The World
of Biblical Literature, New York, Norton, 1991; H. Fisch, A Remembered Future, Bloomington,
Indiana University Press, 1984; P. Gibert, Bible, mythe et récits de commencement, Paris, Seuil,
1986; S. Prickett, Words and the Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1986; The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. R. Alter and F. Kermode,
Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987; G. Josipovici, The Book of God, New Haven and
London, Yale University Press, 1988; H. Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, Cambridge MA and London,
Harvard University Press, 1989; M. Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, Bloomington, IN,
Indiana University Press, 1985; D. Culbertson, The Poetics of Revelation: Recognition and the
Narrative Tradition, Macon, Mercer University Press, 1989; N. Frye, Words with Power, New York
and London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990; C. Westermann, Die Joseph-​Erzählung, Stuttgart,
Calwer, 1990; H.C. White, Narration and Discourse in the Book of Genesis, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1991; Giuseppe o l’uomo dai doppi destini, Florence, Biblia, 1991; J.L. Kugel, In
Potiphar’s House. The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts, Cambridge MA and London, Harvard
University Press, 19942; J.L. Kugel, The Bible as It Was, Cambridge MA and London, Harvard
University Press, 1997; A. Bonora, La storia di Giuseppe: Genesi 37–​50, Brescia, Queriniana, 2000;
M. Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinical Mythmaking, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003.
W. Franke’s A Theology of Literature. The Bible as Revelation in the Tradition of the Humanities,
Eugene OR, Cascade Books, 2017 is worth engaging with; R. Saarinen’s Recognition and Religion.
A Historical and Systematic Study, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016, is a must.
174 Chapter 4
which Odysseus is recognized by his nurse Eurycleia, nor ‘memory’ like that
by which, according to Aristotle, Odysseus recognizes and is recognized when
he weeps at Demodocus’ song of the events at Troy; nor ‘reasoning’, the syllogismos which tells Electra that Orestes has arrived when Aeschylus, in The
Libation-Bearers, has her find a lock of hair and footprints similar to her own at
their father’s grave; nor the perfect coming together of details due to chance,
destiny, and the ‘detective’ enquiry which makes the agnition explode as if regulated by a timer in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. The recognition scene in Genesis
18 is ‘constructed by the poet’, thereby fulfilling one of Aristotle’s conditions for
his second type of anagnorisis, but not the other, that it should be ‘without art’.
Lastly, it will hinge on ‘false deduction’ –​a subspecies Aristotle attributes to the
public –​but in a totally unpredictable manner.
What Genesis 18 unfolds is a silent, mysterious, dual process of recognition: that whereby Abraham sees three men and understands that one of
them is the Lord; and that whereby the readers, who are told from the start
that ‘Yahweh’ appears to Abraham, will recognize the truth of this through
Abraham himself and J’s narration. The two agnitions are based on elements
extraneous, strictly speaking, to the agnition proper: Sarah’s laughter, the
words and thoughts of Yahweh in person, the conversation between Yahweh
and Abraham, and the readers’ powers of interpretation and linguistics.
The point is this: when the three men appear, Abraham addresses them
as ‘my lord’. The Hebrew text uses the expression ’dny, which, according to
the vowels added (the original, of course, was written only in consonants)
can mean ‘adōnī (‘my lord’), ’adōnay (‘my lords’), or ’adōnāy (‘my Lord’), the
form used exclusively for God. In principle, then, the choice is the reader’s,
who should consider firstly grammar and context, and secondly exegetical tradition. The latter, both in its Jewish and Christian versions, favours a divine
being who manifests himself as messengers or angels. Rabbinic interpretation, however, presents significant variations, in some cases indicating the
Holy Presence (Schechinah) and simultaneously ‘angels’ (front-​ranking angels
to boot: Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel who appear disguised as a Saracen,
a Nabatean, and an Arab respectively, or as a baker, sailor, and Bedouin), in
one case ‘the greatest of them, namely Michael’.4 Christian exegesis basically
concurs. Nicholas of Lyra, working from the Hebrew tradition, summarises
his position as follows: ‘Catholic elucidators state that the apparition was
one alone, because the Lord appeared neither as Himself nor in any image
4 Midrash Rabbah in 10 vols., ed. H. Freedman and M. Simon, Genesis i and ii, trans.
H. Freedman, London, Soncino Press, 1939, i, p. 411: xlviii, 9.
Recognizing God
175
representing him, but in the form of angels which he made to appear, of which
one then spoke in the person of God Himself’.5
We shall, for the moment, take it, anyway, that Abraham was aware that it
was the Lord. In the rest of his greetings to them, Abraham uses three singulars: ‘My Lord, if I have now found favour in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee,
from thy servant’. Immediately afterwards he uses the plural: ‘bathe your feet,
and rest yourselves’, and all three together, they, reply: ‘Do as you have spoken’.
Shortly afterwards, he tells Sarah to make three bread loaves, orders his servant
to dress a calf, and fetches curds and milk which he then ‘sets before them’.
He stands under the tree while they eat, afterwards asking him where his wife
Sarah is, receiving the reply ‘There, in the tent’.
In the next verse the pattern changes again when one of the three suddenly
addresses Abraham with familiarity, using the first person singular: ‘I will surely
return to you at this very season and, look, a son shall Sarah your wife have’. At
this point we –​and Abraham with us –​can be in no doubt that these are far from
normal human visitors, and that one of them has a particular prominence.
Abraham and Sarah, the narrator reminds us, are ‘old, advanced in years’, adding that Sarah ‘no longer had her woman’s flow’: i.e. she was post-​menopausal.
Sarah, who must have been all agog during this conversation, now chuckles to
herself, ‘After being shrivelled, shall I have pleasure, and my husband is old?’.
Abraham and his readers now divide. The readers receive direct confirmation
that one of the three is God in person: ‘Yahweh said to Abraham’. Abraham himself has to be content with an oblique sign, an indirect self-​revelation: ‘Why is
it that Sarah laughed, saying, “Shall I really give birth, old as I am?” Is anything
beyond Yahweh? In due time I will return to you, at this very season, and Sarah
shall have a son’. Only a superior being could divine her secret words, and if
that being asks ‘Is anything beyond Yahweh?’, the hearer should presume that
this is indeed Yahweh himself, or a messenger sent by him: an angel, or angels,
as the midrashim have it.
Abraham, however, infers nothing, no syllogismos, and J fails to show us the
old man’s reaction at this juncture. In actual fact Abraham remains strangely
unmoved throughout, giving no sign of surprise, fear, or enthusiasm. His duties
as host seem to be his only preoccupation, and the words of his guests are
accepted with great simplicity (the text as it stands invites us to speculate
but fails to clarify whether Abraham remembers the events of the previous
­chapter –​part of the Priestly document –​where he himself laughed at God’s
5 Nicholas of Lyra, Biblia sacra, cum glossis interlineari & ordinaria, Nicolai Lyrani postilla,
6 vols., Lyon, G. Marechal, 1529, i, p. 70.
176 Chapter 4
promise to give him a son by Sarah, and said ‘in his heart’: ‘To a hundred-​year-​
old will a child be born, will ninety-​year-​old Sarah give birth?’). He seems in no
hurry to establish who his interlocutor is, to recognize him or them, and the
first part of Genesis 18 ends with the exchange between Sarah and Yahweh,
when Sarah nervously denies laughing, and Yahweh quickly re-​joins, ‘Yes, you
did laugh’. The section ends, in other words, with the shadow of Isaac, the son
to be born to them, the Hebrew for ‘he laughed’, way-​ishak, punning on the
name of the future patriarch.
Until this point, then, Abraham has seen three men, and addressed first one,
then all three; one of them then speaks to him. The readers have been listening
in, knowing all this while that one of the three is Yahweh, and waiting with
some anxiety for Abraham to reach the same conclusion. The second part of
the episode opens with the three men getting up and going to contemplate
Sodom, Abraham accompanying them to see them on their way. J then makes a
sudden qualitative leap. For five verses J concentrates on Yahweh alone, revealing His thoughts and quoting His direct words. Sodom and Gomorrah’s fate is
being prepared:
And Yahweh had thought, ‘Shall I conceal from Abraham what I am about
to do? For Abraham will surely be a great and mighty nation, and all the
nations of the earth will be blessed through him. For I have chosen him,
and he will command his children, and his household after him, to keep
the way of Yahweh, to do righteousness and justice, that Yahweh may
bring upon Abraham all that he spoke of him. And Yahweh said, ‘The
outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah, how great! Their offense is very grave.
Let me go down now and see whether they have done altogether as the
outcry that has come to me, and if not, I shall know’ (18: 17–​21).
What happens in this passage is anomalous and unexpected, the knowledge
revealed in it emerging as both abysmal and singularly inverted. In the first place,
the narrator claims to know God’s actual thoughts, and expounds them briskly and
factually. In the second place, J speaks not of Abraham’s recognizing the Lord, but
of God’s recognizing Abraham: ‘for I know him’, ‘for I have chosen him’ is based on
the Hebrew root yd’, which means ‘to know’ in the sense of savoir. Yahweh, in sum,
remembers ‘recognizing’ Abraham as His instrument. Philo, the Alexandrine Jew
who produced one of the most splendid of Old Testament commentaries, glosses
the episode as God’s recognizing Abraham’s wisdom.6
6 Philo, De Abrahamo 118, vol. vi, p. 65 in the Loeb edition, Cambridge MA and London,
Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1976–​19792.
Recognizing God
177
God’s agnition is a total understanding of the human being, but equally
the memory of a past choice which translates into God’s present self-​awareness: how can Yahweh keep hidden from Abraham what he is about to do if
he has ‘recognized’ him, and found in him His ‘way’ and the aim of all His
promises; when, in other words, He has realized that Abraham is His indispensable interlocutor, His earthly alter ego, a part of Himself? What dizzying
inversion is this, God recognizing that he is recognizing a man! I shall come
back to this later. We should note in passing that Yahweh’s thoughts and words
mysteriously set off the anagnorisis mechanism in Abraham. No sooner has
He finished speaking than the other two ‘men’ move towards Sodom, while
Yahweh and Abraham stand before each other. Abraham turns to the Lord with
the utmost respect, but most direct familiarity:
And Abraham stepped forward and said, ‘Will you really wipe out the
innocent with the guilty? Perhaps there may be fifty innocent within
the city. Will you wipe out the place and not spare it for the sake of the
fifty innocent within it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put
to death the innocent with the wicked: and that the righteous should
be as the guilty, making innocent and guilty the same. Far be it from
you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do justice?’. And Yahweh said,
‘Should I find in Sodom fifty innocent within the city, I will forgive the
whole place for their sake’. And Abraham spoke up and said, ‘Here,
pray, I have presumed to speak to my Lord when I am but dust and
ashes. Perhaps the fifty innocent will lack five. Would you destroy the
whole city for the five?’. And he said, ‘I will not destroy if I find there
forty-​five’ (18: 23–​28).
Abraham, we know, drives a hard bargain, finally bringing God down to ten.
Yahweh then disappears, J states, and Abraham returns home, while the other
two men (now at the beginning of c­ hapter 19 identified as ‘angels’) reach
Sodom. How does Abraham know what God intends to do, particularly since
God himself is in doubt about revealing it to him? Perhaps when Yahweh
states, ‘the outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah, how great! […] Let me go down
and see’, Abraham spots the divine avenger-​fixation and realises that the
bringer of the Flood is now about to raze the two cities to the ground. Or perhaps Abraham, like J, is a party to God’s thoughts. Or again, the narrator may
simply be skipping a logical link which is not strictly relevant to the story, the
purpose of which is to show that man can intercede with God and be listened
to, and that God is infinitely merciful in His absolute justice. No hypothesis
can be ruled out, and there exists a series of midrashim which take Psalm 25
178 Chapter 4
to gloss the passage and proclaim that ‘the secret of the Lord is with them that
fear Him’.7
The reader, however, remains sucked down in this whirlpool of awareness, announced without even the most muffled of fanfares. The agnition is
implicit –​almost invsible –​with Abraham’s ‘Far be it from you’ and ‘Judge
of all the earth’, and reaches its peak when he addresses his interlocutor as
‘the Lord’ (here clearly ’Adonai), in contrast with his own being of ‘dust and
ashes’. In other words, when Abraham’s recognition of God is finally explicit,
it is presented accidentally, as part of a considerably more important narration of how he speaks to God and bargains with Him. This silent anagnorisis, however, has deafening reverberations. It forges, in an instant, Abraham’s
whole self-​knowledge: in the captatio benevolentiae he deploys in his negotiations with God, he understands his own frailty as a man. He also understands,
however, as Yahweh had, that this fragile mortal is the Lord’s alter ego, which
thus gives him the courage to negotiate with Him. Lastly, this is also Yahweh’s
self-​recognition: by appealing to his justice, Abraham creates it and creates
the awareness of it. Having proclaimed His omnipotence (‘Is anything beyond
Yahweh?’), Yahweh now discovers justice, and accepts Abraham’s logic: fifty,
forty-​five, forty, thirty-​five, thirty, twenty-​five, twenty, ten –​one measure of
innocence would suffice to save Sodom and Gomorrah: it would be unjust to
destroy the innocent and the guilty alike.
This Yahweh is a very different one from that who repented of His creation and decided to wash from the earth man and beast, bird and reptile; or
from the one who confounds language and scatters men abroad after Babel.8
True, Noah, as the only ‘just’ man, who had ‘found grace with the Lord’, was
spared along with his family and ‘two of every sort’ of animal. Divine justice
is a reality, then, at the time of the Flood (while it seems to play no central
role in the Babel episode), but it takes Abraham’s logic to fulfil it completely.
Recognizing Abraham, for Yahweh, means recognizing Himself in His image,
and progressing along the ‘way’ He himself had pointed out to Abraham and
his descendants; while for Abraham, recognizing God means recognizing himself and offering his own image up to God: it means confessing the vast distance between them, and still entering into a dialogue with Him, sounding His
unfathomable depths and, by exercising his own maieutic, acting, as it were,
as God’s midwife.
7 Midrash Rabbah, Genesis i, xlix, 2, pp. 420–​421.
8 Both episodes, Genesis 6–​8 and 11: 1–​9 are attributed to J, the former with Priestly
interpolations.
Recognizing God
179
Readers, in the meantime, need only to set this episode against those of the
Flood and Babel to see that the Bible is re-​writing the Bible, that J composes
by swift superimposition of images, stories, and sudden intuitions, through
trains of thought offered and withheld, and using all the devices of language
and narrative. The Yahwist document plays with suspense and readerly uncertainty, while presenting himself as so omniscient a narrator as to know God’s
own thoughts. J informs the readers from the beginning that it was Yahweh
who appeared to Abraham, but then leaves them to work out how the three
become one, and then three again, and then Yahweh with two angels, all the
time remaining at some level ‘the Lord’ (and even if these variations derive
from successive editors, they are there, in the text we read, and thus valid even
for the post-​structuralist world). J plays with our readerly capacities, offering
Sarah’s laughter and God’s recognition of it as keys, but then confuses us with
grammar games of singular, plural, name, and noun, drawing us into the trap
behind the slow, silent process of agnition between Abraham and God.
What is the reader to do? Accept the version of the Hebrew –​and most of the
Christian –​exegetical tradition, that the three are angels, manifestations of the
Divine, but not God in person? Or, as the medieval Christian tradition predictably has it, that the three-​in-​one is a prefiguration of the Trinity? Should we see
it as a throwback to an anthropomorphic God, a Yahweh made man for the first
time, like the Jesus of the New Testament? In his Questions on Genesis, Philo of
Alexandria proposes a solution which is both intellectually elegant and astute.
God, he argues, appeared to the eyes of Abraham’s soul in His essence, but with
His first powers, creative and regal, and thus a triad in one person. The apparition was in any case double, Abraham seeing three strangers, perfect in body
and in holiness. Struck by both apparitions, he ‘was unable to decide which
was the true one’, so addressed both –​the one out of piety, the other out of love
for his fellow-​men, i.e. he addresses the strangers, as the text proves, speaking
of ‘one’ and of ‘God’, but also of ‘three’ and of ‘men’. After all, Philo concludes,
even Homer, in his cunning wisdom, maintains that the divinity manifests
itself in astoundingly beautiful human form, and has Ulysses say that the gods
often appear as ‘strangers from far-​off lands’.9 Philo repeatedly brings us back
to the text; and the text, with equal insistence, repeats five times over that at
least one of the three is Yahweh, God’s proper name, in one, a posteriori, case
clarifying that one was Yahweh (the one who departs at the end of ­chapter 18)
and two angels (the ones who reach Sodom towards evening at the beginning
of ­chapter 19). Now uncertain in our certainty, the act of recognition becomes
9 Philo, Questions and Answers on Genesis 4.2: Supplement i, p. 274.
180 Chapter 4
for us an exercise in narrative interpretation, an interrogative which increases
as we read on. In a formula, our anagnorisis becomes a form of anagnosis –​
the Greek word which means ‘reading’ and is so cognate with the word for
recognition.
No formula, though, could summarize the encounter between man and God.
Think for a moment. Whether believers or not –​Jew, Christian, Muslim, agnostic, or atheist –​we still have to recognize that Genesis 18 intends –​claims –​to
set the Divinity before us, centre-​stage. This, of course, it can only do by using
human instruments (whether inspired by God or not): and it is these instruments which pitch us into the interpretative abyss we have contemplated. Nor
can we simply shrug it off: the claims of the text (read as history, myth, or fable)
will not allow it. The reader’s task is to understand, whatever the cost.
The reader’s position faced with Genesis 18 is that of Dante at the end of
his journey through Paradise, when, within the blazing divine light, he sees
three circles of three colours and one magnitude, the Trinity; then, within the
second circle, sees the appearance of our image, of a human face: Christ incarnate. Dante here feels like the geometer who ‘may fix his mind’ to measure the
circle but lacks, ‘in thought, the principle his thoughts require’.10 The readers
of Genesis 18, as human readers, will equally want to know how the image fits
the circle, and ‘come vi s’indova’, how it all ‘in-​wheres’, finds its place there. Like
Dante, they will however recognize that their ‘wings’ cannot rise to that, and,
saving some unlooked-​for grace, will at this point go their separate ways, leaving Dante to his ‘fulgore’, the flash –​undoubtedly divine in origin –​which illuminates his desire and his understanding. We, as mere readers, receive no such
sudden road-​to-​Damascus flash from Genesis 18: just a series of quiet gleams
often received indirectly, reflected in Abraham’s eyes.
As readers, we must then become like Abraham. Abraham recognizes his
God, and makes Him recognise Himself, because ready to receive Him within
that clod of earth he recognizes as himself. Like every human, Abraham is
very small, but very far from being nothing: nothing more, but not a grain of
dust less. Like Yahweh, Abraham is: the One incommensurable and omnipotent, Judge of all the earth; the other, infinitely less, but resilient, a clod of that
earth. Even dust and ashes, the lowest measure of being, are able to conceive
of, quantify, and maximise divine justice, because able to receive the guest
even without initially recognizing him.
Abraham recognizes God because he is ready to accept Him. One of the
Bible’s central themes, from Genesis to Exodus, and, in the Christian Bible,
10
Dante, Paradiso xxxiii, 133–​138.
Recognizing God
181
beyond, as far as the first words of John’s Gospel, is precisely that of God who
wants to be recognized by Israel, and the people of Israel fail, unless through
exceptional means, or by the leadership of individuals like Abraham, Jacob,
Joseph, Moses, Job, the Prophets, and, later, the Apostles. In Exodus 10, 1–​2, God
tells Moses to:
Go in to Pharaoh: for I have hardened his heart, and the heart of his servants, that I might show these my signs before him: and that thou mayest
tell in the ears of thy son, and of thy son’s son, what things I have done in
Egypt, and my signs which I have done among them; that you may know
that I am the Lord.
Throughout the Hebrew Bible (more than seventy times in Ezekiel alone)
there runs the ‘recognition formula’, whereby God proclaims: ‘they may know
that I am the Lord’.11 The human response to this is the expression of faith and
adoration as exemplified in Sirach 36: 5: ‘Let all nations know thee, as we also
have known thee, that there is no God beside thee, O Lord’. The Bible dwells
almost obsessively on two aspects of this theme: in the first place, that the
recognition process is begun by God himself –​he who, by definition, is he that
is,12 but needs human awareness to exist in history; in the second, that in order
to know God, man must be ready within himself, and must know himself as
a human being (and human becoming), and be able to look within and be
open towards the ‘other’, whether it be from earth or heaven. Translating this
concept into Greek allegory, Philo considers Abraham as the self-​awareness
which proceeds towards knowledge of God.13 In Hebrew, haker (‘to recognize’
in the strict sense of the word) plays an essential role, as we shall shortly see,
but one which is still less important than jada‘, ‘to know’ in the sense of both
connaitre and savoir. When jada‘ is applied to humanity’s knowledge of God,
however, it always implies recognition, confession, acknowledgment, and
gratitude –​or, to give it the precision and patterning open to German commentators, Erkenntnis, Anerkenntnis, Bekenntnis, and Erkenntlichkeit.14 Job is
the most extraordinary exponent of this when, having heard the voice of God
11
12
13
14
Theologisches Handwörterbuch zum Alten Testament, 2 vols., ed. E. Jenni and
C. Westermann, München-​Zürich, Kaiser-​Theologischer Verlag, 1971, s.v. jd’.
Exodus 3: 14.
Philo, De Migratione Abrahami, 1–​12; Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres, 287–​289; De Abrahamo,
70, etc.
G.J. Botterweck s.v. jada’, in Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Alten Testament, ed.
H. Ringgren and G.J. Botterweck, Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 1973, vol. iii, p. 503.
182 Chapter 4
thundering from the whirlwind, exclaims, ‘confessing Him’: ‘I recognize that
thou canst do everything, … I knew of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now
my eye sees thee. Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes’.15
∵
Genesis’ message, then, would seem to be that we must become like Abraham
if we are to recognize God. Is this, though, a feasible position? From the oblique
re-​Scripting given us by Milton, the answer has to be in the negative. In Book
v of Paradise Lost, Milton tells how the archangel Raphael is sent to Adam
and Eve to put them on their guard against the serpent’s temptation. There
are overt references to the Mamre scene in Genesis, with Adam seated ‘in the
door’ of his ‘cool bower’, while the ‘mounted sun/​Shot down direct his fervent rays to warm/​Earth’s inmost womb’ (v, 300–​303) while Eve, fulfilling her
allocated gender model, is in the kitchen preparing ‘savoury fruits’ (v, 304). At
God’s command, Raphael had hurled himself in flight towards Earth, through
a sky clear of the smallest cloud ‘as when by night the glass/​Of Galileo, less
assured, observes/​Imagined lands and regions in the moon’ (v, 261–​26), or like
the pilot perceiving the Cyclades:
Down hither prone in flight
He speeds, and through the vast ethereal sky
Sails between worlds and worlds, with steady wing
Now on the polar winds, then with quick fan
Winnows the buxom air; till within soar
Of towering eagles, to all the fowls he seems
A phoenix, gazed by all, as that sole bird,
When to enshrine his relics in the sun’s
Bright temple, to Egyptian Thebes he flies.16
If the archangel’s sight is like Galileo’s, his actual flight more closely resembles that of Hermes in the Odyssey, Mercury in the Aeneid, Michael in Tasso’s
Gerusalemme Liberata, or the phoenix in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Once at the
‘eastern cliff’ of the garden, however, Raphael assumes his natural, six-​winged
Seraph shape once more and stands, ‘like Maia’s son’, shaking his plumes and
perfuming the air. The angels on guard-​duty recognize him immediately;
15
16
Job 42: 5.
Paradise Lost v, 266–​274: ed. A. Fowler, London, Longman, 19982.
Recognizing God
183
Adam, seated in his bower, like Abraham by his tent, immediately ‘discerns’
that a ‘glorious shape’ is approaching, which ‘seems another morn/​Risen on
mid-​noon’, and asks Eve to bring food worthy of their ‘heavenly stranger’. Eve,
after an unexpected excursus into her householding principles, goes off to
pick their lunch from ‘bough and brake’, and crush ‘inoffensive must’ from the
grape by way of drink, while her husband ‘walks forth’ in dignified simplicity
to meet their ‘godlike guest’, ‘without more train/​Accompanied than with his
own complete/​Perfections’. He then addresses Raphael reverently, ‘though not
awed’, bowing low, ‘As to a superior nature’, and invites the ‘native of heaven’ to
‘rest, sit, and taste’.
The encounter is in various ways similar to that between Abraham and God.
Unlike Abraham, Milton’s Adam immediately realises that his guest is from
heaven; even more than Abraham, however, he behaves extremely naturally
with him, aware both of the difference between them, and of his own dignity.
There is an equality of being between Adam and his guest, one might say, as
confirmed by their conversation and by the fact that the archangel actually
eats the food Eve has prepared (and here Milton underlines the point that he
considers the angels corporeal spirits). For Adam too, as for J’s Abraham, there
is no problem of recognition, and Raphael is able to appear before him in all his
six-​winged, seraphic splendour. More to the point, there is no problem for the
reader either: from the start, we are told that the central character is Raphael
(as Bible readers of the Abraham episode are told it is Yahweh), and are faced,
not with three figures, but one, and one whom we are able to recognize from
classical and Renaissance similes: Homer, Virgil, Tasso, Ovid. Raphael is not
uncanny because the angel was prefigured by Mercury and the phoenix.
The episode, however, has an exact parallel in Book xi of Paradise Lost, when
Adam and Eve have committed original sin and Michael is sent to announce
their dismissal from Eden. This time Adam perceives ‘mute signs’ which bode
no good. He asks himself ‘why in the east/​Darkness ere day’s mid-​course, and
morning light/​More orient in yon western cloud that draws/​O’er the blue
firmament a radiant white,/​And slow descends, with something heavenly
fraught?’ (xi, 203–​207), and his misgivings are quickly confirmed (‘he erred
not’) by the narrator: at that moment ‘the heavenly bands’ alight, ‘from a sky of
jasper’, on a nearby hill, ‘a glorious apparition’ ‘had not doubt/​And carnal fear
that day dimmed Adam’s eye’ (xi, 208–​212).
The eye of the flesh, of the flesh that has sinned and is frightened, can
no longer recognize the divine messenger at first glance. The reader, too,
seems to have fallen with Adam, as Milton abandons classical comparisons
for Biblical: the angels that appear to Jacob at Mahanaim, where ‘God’s host’
are assembled, the horses and chariots of fire that fill the mountain, around
184 Chapter 4
besieged Elisha, in Dothan.17 Michael now emerges from the angelic ‘maniple’
and walks, slowly and ‘not unperceived’, towards Adam. Adam finally understands that it is one of the Potentates or Thrones approaching, and feels its
majesty, ‘not terrible,/​That I should fear, nor sociably mild,/​As Raphael’, but
‘solemn and sublime’. The archangel manifests himself not in his ‘shape celestial’ but ‘as man/​Clad to meet man’, a warrior in purple, dyed by Iris herself,
with ‘starry helm’ and sword hanging ‘as in a glistering zodiac’ (xi, 238–​247).
His sight dimmed by sin and the shadow of death, man learns to re-​cognize
what is sent from God: painstakingly, as something no longer familiar, but sublime, a higher creature who has to span, by human semblance and the images
of war, the abyss which has now opened between them –​between two beings
of definitely different natures. The readers of this re-​Scripture are allowed no
comfortable escape into myth and poetry: if they want to recognize the divine,
they have to look the uncompromising, incomprehensible original Scriptures
full in the face.
∵
To become an Abraham with an ‘ultimate vision’ is not, then, a choice open
to us. Genesis offers a further model for recognizing God, which is both less
direct but less disturbing: a more human, therefore gratifying model: the story
of Joseph, his brothers, and his father Jacob. This episode occupies the entire
second section of the book, which subsumes the J document, the E,18 and, to a
considerably lesser extent, the Priestly one.
In the story of Joseph God only makes one direct appearance, when, towards
the end, in a nocturnal vision, he exhorts Jacob to go down into Egypt (46: 2–​4),
although he is at several points presented to the readers as Agent. When Joseph
has been sold into Egypt and is prospering in Potiphar’s household, the text
assures us that ‘God was with him’ and on his account ‘blessed the Egyptian’s
house’ (39: 2–​5). And God continues to stand by him, and act for him, in prison,
after the attempted seduction by Potiphar’s wife. Both Potiphar himself and
Pharaoh are well aware of this special protection, the king throwing at his ministers the rhetorical question as to whether they would ever again find a man
like Joseph, ‘in whom is the spirit of God’. It is Joseph himself, mid his many crises, who recognizes in God the agent not so much of his personal fortunes (this
will occur explicitly when he reveals himself to his brothers) as of the whole
17
18
Genesis 32: 1–​2; 2 Kings 6: 13–​17: Paradise Lost xi, 214–​220.
The document is called E after the name it uses for God, ‘Elohim’.
Recognizing God
185
interweaving of earthly events and their exegesis. When he explains Pharaoh’s
dreams (actually the same dream repeated twice), he states openly that it is
God, not himself, who is decoding, (‘do not interpretations belong to God?’)
and that they indicate ‘what God is about to do’, adding that ‘the repeating of
the dream to Pharaoh twice, this means that the thing has been fixed by God
and God is hastening to do it’ (41: 25–​32).
The recognition of God, then, is far from absent in the story, constituting an
important theme and the very telos or aim of the narrative. What is missing
at a first reading is human agnition. Joseph’s story begins when, as his father’s
favourite, ‘because he was the son of his old age’ (Benjamin, younger than himself and equally the son of Rachel, appears on the scene later), he is cordially
detested by his brothers. The dreams Joseph reveals to the ten of them, first
their sheaves of corn, then the sun, moon, and eleven stars ‘bowing to his sheaf’,
can only increase their hatred, appearing as pure solipsism and vanity. Jacob,
too, puts the same gloss on it, ‘rebuking’ him but at the same time pondering
over it (‘his father kept the thing in mind’). With this singular opening towards
the future, which narrative reticence immediately closes, although the reader
continues to ‘keep the thing in mind’, there begins the game of ignorance and
recognition which is so splendidly analysed by Robert Alter.19 It almost seems
as if Jacob ponders over the second dream (which involves him too, as the sun)
because it might contain elements of the truth, and reveal some awareness
of events to come (the midrash does indeed state that Jacob foresaw that the
dreams would come to pass).20
The opening out quickly becomes closure again in the following scene.
When, sent by his father, Joseph joins his brothers feeding their flocks in
Dothan, they begin to plot his murder. The eldest, Reuben, objects, and at his
insistence Joseph is stripped of his famous ‘coat of many colours’ (actually, just
an ‘ornamented tunic’) and thrown into an empty pit, whence Reuben plans to
rescue him successively; Judah, to stop them from spilling their own brother’s
blood, suggests more practically that they sell him to some Ishmaelites going to
Egypt. Meanwhile, some passing Midianite merchants pull the boy out of the
pit and sell him, for twenty pieces of silver, to the Ishmaelites. Thus (either by
hand of the Midianites or the Ishmaelites, or both), Joseph ends up in Egypt.
Ignoring Reuben’s anguish on finding the pit empty, Joseph’s brothers decide
to manufacture the proof of their innocence, dipping his coat in the blood of a
kid and taking it to their father with the words: ‘This we have found: recognize
19
20
R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, still, after forty years, the best book on the subject.
Midrash Rabbah, Genesis ii, lxxxiv, 12, p. 778.
186 Chapter 4
(haker-​na), pray, is it your son’s tunic or not?’. And Jacob ‘recognizes’ (the
verb used is the perfect of haker) the evidence his sons have fabricated, and
cries that ‘a vicious beast has devoured him, Joseph has been torn to shreds!’.
In other words, Jacob believes the sign, dumb to logic, but to the emotions
devastatingly eloquent, which the ten brothers allow to speak for itself. Here
Jacob no longer ponders, but, without the slightest rational deduction –​with
no attempt at a syllogismos –​leaps to the conclusion that his sons had projected when, on the point of killing Joseph, they had decided to tell their father
(although, significantly, they fail to do so) that ‘a vicious beast has devoured
him’. On his act of recognition, Jacob is plunged into pain and ignorance: into
Sheol, as he says in his funeral lament over Joseph: ‘For I will go down to my son
in Sheol mourning’ (37: 35).
‘Signs’, then, the reader will conclude, are meaningless: misinterpretation
can lead to false recognition, méconnaissance, although the following chapter’s account of the story of Judah and Tamar (38) forces us to think again.
Judah, Jacob’s fourth son, has three sons: Er, Onan, and Shelah. Tamar is given
in marriage to Er, but, ‘wicked in the sight of the Lord’, he is put to death by
God. Tamar is then given to Onan, who, asked to ‘raise up seed for his brother’,
and knowing it would not be considered his, ‘when he would come to bed with
his brother’s wife, he would waste his seed on the ground’, thereby incurring
the Lord’s displeasure: ‘wherefore He put him as well to death’. To save his third
son’s life, Judah decides to return Tamar to her father. When she discovers that
Judah is nearby, shearing his sheep, the girl covers her face with a veil, and
waits for him ‘in an open place’. Not realizing (jada‘) that it is his daughter-​in-​
law, Judah takes her ‘for a whore because she had covered her face’, and asks
her to lie with him. As pledge of his promise to send a kid in payment, he gives
her his seal-​and-​cord and staff, but when, later, Judah tries to keep his word,
the men of the place fail to recognize his description of her: ‘ “Where is the
harlot, the one at Enaim by the road?”. And they said, “There has been no harlot here” ’. Three months later, Tamar is pregnant, and Judah orders her to be
burnt. But she sends him his seal-​cord and staff with the message, ‘Recognize
(haker-​na), pray, whose are these?’,21 which Judah ‘recognizes’ (the same verb,
in the perfect), declaring that she has been ‘more in the right’ than he (because
he did not offer her his son Shelah); after which ‘he knew (jada‘) her again
no more’.
21
The perfect correspondence between this ‘recognize’ and that addressed earlier on to
Jacob is underlined by the midrash lxxxv, 11 as if it were a contrapasso: ‘Thou didst say
to your father, Discern; as thou livest, Tamar will say to thee: Discern’: Midrash Rabbah,
Genesis ii, pp. 796–​797.
Recognizing God
187
‘True’ signs, then, far from being meaningless, turn out to be water-​tight
proof leading from ignorance to knowledge, from error to a recognition of guilt,
and from carnal knowledge to quiescence. They speak eloquently because they
speak to the conscience, and have an ethical impulse which finds almost a
physical ‘objective correlative’: Judah is the first of the brothers to experiment
recognition ‘in the flesh’, while Tamar’s deceit, unlike that of Joseph’s brothers
(and the inversion is re-​enacted in the agnition’s verbal formula) is aimed at
continuing the family line, and life itself (her twins join Israel’s line of descent).
We have not yet done with signs. When, in the following chapter, Joseph is
sold to Potiphar and made his attendant and overseer, Potiphar’s wife is not
slow to ‘cast her eyes’ (and soon hands) on the youth ‘comely in features and
comely to look at’. This time the Judah-​Tamar model is inverted, and it is the
woman to ask Joseph to lie with her. His conscience needing no signs to rouse
it, he refuses, arguing his earthly and heavenly master’s trust. She continues to
harass him, until one day, finding him alone, she seizes him by his garment,
saying, ‘Lie with me’. When Joseph indignantly tears himself free, his garment
remains ‘in her hand’. Potiphar’s wife then calls out to her servants, accusing
‘this Hebrew man’ of having tried to rape her and showing as proof the garment which, she says, he left ‘by’ her. When her husband returns, she repeats
the whole story, and he has no choice but to throw Joseph into prison.
Once more, like Joseph’s coat, a ‘garment’ becomes a sign, mute and therefore easy to manipulate in the inversion of truth. Fragile proof in itself, it only
needed to be moved a few inches from her hands to ‘by her’, for it to assume
a far more decisive nature: her hands could have grasped the garment while
Joseph was escaping; on the contrary, it could have fallen ‘by’ her when
Joseph removed it to attempt to rape her. It is interesting that in the Koran’s
re-​Scripting of the episode, in the twelfth Sura, the sign is rightly questioned.
Here, Joseph escapes with his garment ripped down the back, meets his master
on the threshold, and at the woman’s accusations, retorts that the violence was
hers. One canny bystander offers the correct sign-​deduction detective solution: if the garment is ripped down the front, then the woman is right and he
is lying; if down the back, then the opposite is true. In the face of the evidence,
Joseph is thrown into prison anyway.22
22
Koran 12: 25–​35. The best edition (in translation) is now in Italian, ed. A. Ventura, with
commentary, Milan, Mondadori, 2010, with M.A. Amir-​Moezzi, dir., Dictionnaire du
Coran, Paris, Laffont, 2007. The fullest and most nuanced interpretation of Sura 12 is to
be found in the first three chapters of P.F. Kennedy’s Recognition in the Arabic Narrative
Tradition: Discovery, Deliverance and Delusion, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press,
2016, pp. 16–​151.
188 Chapter 4
The sign in itself, then, is neutral: this much at least is clear to the reader
of Genesis. It can lead equally to ignorance or knowledge, death or life; it
only leads to recognition, and thus true knowledge, if accompanied by self-​
awareness. Aristotle’s scientific-​philosophical criterion is here replaced by a
moral one, introspection. Sophocles’ Oedipus recognizes that he is guilty of
parricide and incest not because the clues he gathers make him feel guilty, but
because they reveal the truth of the facts committed unwittingly. J’s Judah, on
the other hand, acknowledges his blame as regards Tamar. Oedipus’ responsibility belongs to general human fallibility, while Judah’s is purely personal.
The former, necessarily, has tragic consequences; the latter can announce a
renewal of life.
Indeed, signs are not only neutral, but can be downright ambiguous. They
can be created to disturb or alarm, raise anxious questions, and promote the
stirrings of conscience. To take a proleptic leap: once in prison Joseph, we
know, prospers on account of God’s blessing. He interprets correctly the butler’s and baker’s dreams, then, when Pharaoh dreams of the seven fat cows and
the seven lean cows, and the seven good and thin ears of corn, the butler, re-​
instated in the palace, has the young Jew called to give his explanation: seven
years of plenty, and seven of famine. The king raises Joseph to general overseer,
second only to himself in power (this is Joseph’s third ‘rebirth’ after the three
‘falls’ or deaths: into the pit, into slavery, and into prison, and the third time
Joseph has been involved with dreams). Under the new name of Zaphenath-​
paneah,23 happily married to Asenath, the daughter of an Egyptian high priest,
Joseph travels the length and breadth of Egypt amassing grain during the years
of plenty and is then ready to trade with the whole world when the famine
starts.
Then, when Joseph is almost a naturalized Egyptian (he calls his firstborn
Manasseh ‘for God hath made me forget all my toil and all my father’s house’),24
his brothers appear before him to buy grain (the youngest, Benjamin, remaining at home because Jacob is afraid ‘lest mischief befall him’), and it is at this
point that the anagnorisis begins, tortuous and ludic, among delayed and
anticipated effects. Joseph being the regent of Egypt, the ten bow down before
him, thereby fulfilling his ancient, first, dream; he recognizes them, but plays
the stranger to them (in the original this is a play on the root of the same verb);
Joseph recognizes his brothers, but they do not recognize him: the repetition
23
24
Which significantly means ‘God says: he lives’, but which, even more significantly, the
midrash (xc, 4) interprets as ‘with his knowledge he reveals things that are hidden’.
Genesis 41: 51.
Recognizing God
189
underlines the contrast between his knowledge and their ignorance (the midrash, always hungry for concrete signs, maintains that Joseph recognizes them
because they are bearded, as when he last saw them, while they fail to recognize
him precisely because he is bearded now but was not at the time of his being
sold).25 He immediately remembers his dreams of them and accuses: ‘You are
spies’. Joseph’s memories and agnition immediately start up a mechanism to
test the ten, teach and punish them, and fulfil his dreams –​but above all to
recreate the past on the dramatic, psychological, and interpretative level, along
two basic axes: role duplication and reversal.26
The stunning process is now taken over by the ambiguity of signs –​or, more
correctly, everything becomes an ambiguous sign. Joseph throws them into
prison, asking as proof of their sincerity (‘No, my lord, for your servants have
come to buy food. We are all the sons of one man, twelve brothers; the youngest is now with our father, and one is no more’) that one of them return to
fetch Benjamin. Role reversal: it is the ten of them now who prove helpless
before power and are falsely accused and imprisoned. He keeps them in prison
for three days, afterwards changing his mind ostensibly because he ‘fears God’.
One of them, Simeon, is now to remain in prison, and chained before their eyes,
while they return to Canaan, taking provisions to stave off the famine in their
homes; in exchange for which they are to return to Egypt with their brother
Benjamin. Role duplication: Simeon’s arrest is not only a reversal (Simeon for
Joseph): it also jump-​starts them into reliving their past crime: how should
they behave with this brother, who now faces the same treatment they meted
out to the one who ‘is no more’? The interrelating sign, silent, secretive, and
terrible, is the prison.
The ten immediately grasp the implications without understanding the
facts. Even before Joseph picks out Simeon, they tell each other: ‘Alas, we are
verily guilty for our brother, whose mortal distress we saw when he pleaded
with us and we did not listen. That is why this distress has overcome us’ (42: 21).
Reuben is unable to resist a ‘told-​you-​so’, concluding, ‘And now, look, his blood
is requited’. Surrounded by the ambiguity of the signs, then, they recognize
the past and for the first time confess their own responsibility: in other words,
they begin to know themselves. At the same time, they remain totally in the
dark concerning external circumstances, because –​the (E) text adds with a
super-​sleuth semiotic touch rarely equalled in Western literature –​‘they did
25
26
Midrash Rabbah, Genesis ii, xci, 7, pp. 842–​844.
As convincingly shown by Meir Sternberg in The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, Bloomington,
Indiana University Press, 1985.
190 Chapter 4
not know that Joseph heard/​understood; for there was an interpreter between
them’ (42: 23).
A whole series of Chinese boxes of knowledge suddenly opens before the
reader: a sudden flash –​the presence of the interpreter –​illuminating the
preceding scene, the present, and all those to come. Joseph’s knowledge, which
has no need of a translator, is revealed as total, like God’s; while the ten brothers, just as they begin to know themselves, fall into the most complete agnoia,
an ignorance of ignorance which, beginning with the linguistic barrier, implies
total emptiness. Joseph’s knowledge, on the other hand, is ‘filled’ by his recognition and their ignorance, and overflows –​and this is the sign that behind
the mask of omnipotence there is a man –​in tears: understanding their words,
Joseph turns away from them and weeps. He recognized his brothers immediately, but his anagnorisis is only now emotionally complete: still hidden away,
but already reaching the roots of his being brother.
The game of signs goes on. The nine depart with the corn, leaving Simeon
as hostage; in each sack is ‘every man’s money’ (they had, years before,
received twenty silver pieces from the sale of their brother, the reader and no
doubt Joseph remember). This is a further, incomprehensible sign, meaning
everything and nothing, but which fills them with surprising dread (‘their
heart failed them’) and uncertainty. ‘What is this that God has done to us?’, they
ask each other when, on the road, one of them finds the money (42: 28). Later,
when at home all the others discover the same in their sacks, both they and
their father are ‘afraid’.
Jacob is aghast at their story: ‘Joseph is no more, and Simeon is no more,
and Benjamin you would take away!’, and refuses to let Benjamin ‘go down’
with them, even when Reuben offers the life of his own sons in hostage. But
the famine continues ‘sore in the land’, and their father is obliged to ask them
to search for more corn. Finally, Judah sets himself as a pledge for Benjamin,
telling his father that if he fails to bring the youngest back, he will bear the
blame ‘for ever’ (thus now accepting full responsibility for a brother, a son of
Rachel, and a favourite). And Jacob consents, sending gifts for ‘the man’ and
‘double the silver’ (for the new purchase of corn, and as refund for the old).
With Benjamin, the brothers once more go down to Egypt and stand in Joseph’s
presence. Seeing his blood brother, Joseph orders a meal to be prepared in his
house, at which ambivalent sign the brothers are terrified (together with the
readers of King James’s stark translation: ‘Bring these men home, and slay, and
make ready; for these men shall dine with me at noon’), convinced as they are
that they are to be punished for the ‘theft’ of the money. They earnestly assure
the steward that they had no idea how the money came to be in their sacks,
but that they have ‘brought it back in their hand’, with further money for corn;
Recognizing God
191
he, with a significant but enigmatic ’Fear not: your God, and the God of your
father, has placed treasure for you in your bags. Your silver has come to me’,
brings Simeon out to them, and leads all eleven in to Joseph. Again, they bow
down before him (the old dream being re-​enacted once more), while he questions them with a repetition that betrays his anxiety and obsession (‘Is all well
with your aged father of whom you spoke? Is he still alive?’), his eyes fixed on
his youngest brother, for whom ‘his bowels did yearn’.27
A silent anagnorisis again takes place: at the sight of Benjamin, at the knowledge that his father is alive, perhaps at the recognition of his brothers’ honesty,
and his satisfaction that the old dream is again fulfilled (the open text gives no
clue, but having been explicit in the parallel scene, it invites the reader to fill the
silence). The anagnorisis then explodes at the very moment it is deferred: without waiting for them to confirm Benjamin’s identity, but invoking God’s grace
on him, Joseph resists no longer. He hurries out and, overwhelmed, goes into
his chamber and weeps, unseen of all, for the second time in the story. Then,
refraining himself, he comes out and orders the meal to be served. The ‘bread’ is
‘set’ at separate places: for himself, for the Egyptians, and for his brothers, each
placed in order of seniority, from the oldest to the youngest. At this further sign
of almost divine knowledge, the brothers are understandably ‘marvelled’, even
more so when they see that Benjamin’s portion is five times so much as any of
theirs. Gulping down amazement and food, however, they drink and are merry
with him.
Ambiguous signs –​both devoid and full of meaning –​have been heating up and overcharging. In the following sequence they short-​circuit and
explode. Before the eleven set off, Joseph orders the steward to put every man’s
money in their bags and his own goblet (silver, like the twenty pieces) in the
sack of the youngest. Then, when the eleven leave, he is ordered to go after
them, search them, and accuse them of stealing the goblet ‘from which my
lord drinks, and in which he always divines’. Naturally, it is finally found in
Benjamin’s sack (the text infinitely defers, painstakingly passing from eldest down to the youngest) –​another sign, further false evidence of a false
27
King James Genesis 43: 30: bowels corresponds to the Vulgate’s ‘quia commota fuerunt
viscera eius super fratre suo’, and to the Septuagint entera –​wonderfully concrete images
for Joseph’s inner feelings, for which the original has raḥamav, ‘entrails’. Alter, translating
‘his feelings for his brother overwhelmed him’, notes that the Hebrew literally means ‘his
mercy (the same term used by Jacob in verse 14) burned hot’: rahamim, mercy, is from the
same root, rehem, as ‘bowels’. Speiser glosses: ‘literally “his emotions boiled over”. Harold
Fisch: ‘his affection was kindled over his brother’. Tyndale had translated: ‘for his heart did
melt’, and Luther ‘sein Herz entbrannte ihm gegen sein Bruder’.
192 Chapter 4
accusation. In mortification, while protesting their innocence with near water-​
tight logic, they return to Joseph and fall before him on the ground. Seemingly
enraged, he plays painfully and perfidiously with his omniscience and their
ignorance: ‘What is this deed that you have done? Did you not know that a
man like me would surely divine?’. Again, Judah acts as mouthpiece. With no
attempt to deny the particular evidence of the sign, he interprets it as a vaster
proof of older, more general crimes finally lived as if present and ongoing. He
recognizes and confesses: ‘What shall we speak and how shall we prove ourselves right? God has found out your servants’ crime’, suggesting that they expiate, all eleven, through slavery. Joseph borrows from the idea of justice that
had emerged from the dialogue between Abraham and Yahweh: ‘Far be it from
me to do this!’: only the culprit will be made a slave; the others are to return to
their father.
Judah’s first, brief confession then becomes an oration: not strictly defensive, given that the sign is seemingly irrefutable, but, paradoxically, an act of
self-​accusation, in that he now recognizes, once and for all, the higher law of
their father’s incomprehensible love for Rachel’s two sons and goes through
the stages of the mysterious adventure that has taken place until now. He
recalls in the first place, adding details hitherto omitted as to the special love
linking Jacob, Joseph, and Benjamin, their answer to Joseph on the occasion
of their first meeting: ‘We have an aged father and a young child of his old
age, and his brother being dead, he alone is left of his mother, and his father
loves him’. He then tells of Jacob’s reaction before their second journey into
Egypt, again underlining the special love for the two youngest, and, with irony,
the foolish ignorance of the others: ‘You know that my wife bore me two sons.
And one went from me and I thought, Surely, he is torn in pieces; and I have
not seen him since. And should you take this one, too, from my presence and
harm befall him, you would bring down my grey head in evil to Sheol’. ‘His
life is bound to the lad’s’, Judah now fully recognizes. Unwittingly, and for the
readers significantly, his oration now moves imperceptibly towards Jacob: ‘And
so, should I come to your servant, my father, and the lad be not with us, he
would die’. Judah made himself pledge for the boy to his father, he explains,
and will ‘bear the blame for ever’ if he fails to return him, and so offers himself
in exchange, ending, again, with the image of his father’s despair: ‘For how
shall I go up to my father, if the lad be not with us? Let me see not the evil that
shall come on my father’.
The sign –​the goblet –​has vanished. Jacob’s shadow now darkens scene and
consciences, and subsumes the whole affair, with its near-​unbearable charge
of hatred, love, pain, death, and rebirth. This third time, faced with Judah’s
repeated evocation of his father and his total recognition of their collective
Recognizing God
193
duty as sons and brothers, Joseph can hold back no longer. ‘Cause every man
to go from me’, he orders, ‘And there stood no man with him, while Joseph
made himself known unto his brethren’, weeping so loudly that he was heard
in Pharaoh’s house. The anagnorisis expected for over twenty years, prepared
and deferred through many a page, now comes about, from revelation through
words and gestures to agnition. ‘I am Joseph: is my father still alive?’, Joseph
cries out, while his brothers are too stunned and ‘dismayed before him’ to make
any response. He makes them come closer, and repeats, offering as proof of his
statement the most disturbing sign of the whole story and of their guilt: ‘I am
Joseph your brother, whom you sold into Egypt’ (the midrash adds a second sign,
when Joseph shows them he is circumcised).28 Then, to relieve them of their
fear and displaying his omniscience, he informs them of what he has known
for years: that it is God guiding the history of the world, of their particular family and people, towards life:
And now, do not be pained and not be incensed with yourselves, that
you sold me down here, because God did send me before you to preserve
life. Two years now there has been famine in the heart of the land, and
there are yet five years without plowing and harvest. And God has sent
me before you to preserve you a posterity in the earth, and to save your
lives by a great deliverance. And so, it was not you that sent me here, but
God, and he has made me a father to Pharaoh and lord to all his house
and a ruler over all the land of Egypt. Hurry and go up to my father and
say unto him, ‘Thus says your son Joseph, God has made me lord to all
Egypt. Come down to me, do not delay. And you shall dwell in the land
of Goshen and shall be close to me, you, and your sons, and the sons of
your sons and your flocks and your cattle, and all that is yours. And I will
nourish you there, for yet five years of famine remain –​lest you lose all,
you and your household and all that is yours’ (45: 5–​11).
After this near-​theophany, recalling God’s apparition and words to Jacob in
Bethel,29 there follows the recognition which works through human means.
‘And, look, your own eyes can see, and the eyes of my brother Benjamin, that
it is my very mouth that speaks to you’, Joseph assures them (‘in Hebrew’, the
28
29
Midrash Rabbah, Genesis ii, xciii, 9 and 11, p. 868.
Genesis 35: 11–​12: ‘I am El Shaddai. Be fruitful and multiply. A nation, an assembly of
nations shall stem from you, and kings shall come forth from your loins. And the land that
I gave to Abraham and to Isaac, to you I will give it, and to your seed after you I will give
the land’.
194 Chapter 4
midrash adds, providing a further material sign),30 again inviting them to bring
their father into Egypt. He then gives his final sign, and definitive proof: his
affection. He falls, weeping, upon the neck of Benjamin, who weeps on his;
then he kisses all his brothers and weeps over them. At which point they feel
able to speak to him.
The process of recognition does not, however, end with this scene of anagnorisis, the only Western literary parallels of which are the encounter between
Penelope and Odysseus and those between Jesus and Mary Magdalen and
Pericles and Marina I shall examine in the next chapter. As in the Odyssey,
there remains the agnition between father and son, prefigured in the text in
its insistence on the paternal image and the repetition of the noun. When his
brothers return to Canaan, with twenty ass-​loads of food and goods (and three
hundred significant pieces of silver for Benjamin), and inform their father that
Joseph is still alive and governor of the whole of Egypt, Jacob’s heart stops,
because he does not believe them. Signs are needed: Joseph’s exact words, and
the wagons sent to transport him to Egypt, at which point he revives, and can
conclude: ‘Enough! Joseph my son is still alive. I will go and see him before
I die’. Convinced by the words of God himself, appearing in his ‘visions of the
night’, that He will make of him a great nation in Egypt, Jacob descends to the
Nile delta while Joseph goes up towards Goshen to meet him. As soon as the
long-​lost son appears before him, Jacob falls on his neck and weeps long while
finally exclaiming, ‘Now I may die, since I have seen your face, for you are still
alive’.
And indeed the events of Genesis end shortly afterwards, with the death
and funeral of Jacob (his body, embalmed in Egypt, is transported into Canaan
and buried in the ancestral tomb, ‘in the cave of the field of Machpelah, before
Mamre’), although only after a long final blessing, recognizing Judah’s supremacy and the place of Joseph’s sons in the ‘twelve tribes of Israel’. When Joseph’s
turn to die comes, aged 110, he extracts from his brothers the promise that they
shall carry his bones up when God leads them out of Egypt into the Promised
Land. But between the two episodes, a curious scene opens for a moment the
old wounds. After Jacob’s death the brothers fear that blood may prove thicker
than water, that Joseph may bear resentment against them and finally extract
his revenge. They consequently send him a message (which Joseph again
weeps on receiving), afterwards going in person to prostrate themselves before
him and offer to be his servants. Joseph’s answer closes the wound in a double
act of recognition: of himself and of divine providence: ‘Fear not, for am I in
30
Midrash Rabbah, Genesis ii, xciii, 6, p. 862.
Recognizing God
195
the place of God? While you meant evil toward me, God meant it for good, so
as to bring about at this very time keeping many people alive’.
It should now be very clear that the whole story of Joseph and his brothers
constitutes a process of anagnorisis, a passing from ignorance to knowledge
(in Aristotle’s definition), based on three basic, complementary, and interconnected devices: sign, recognition, and revelation. Totally human, they at
the same time project a divine shadow over events. Signs, for example: this
part of Genesis organises its signs to construct a discourse, not in analytical
but in narrative philosophy, which constantly adumbrates the meeting point
between human and divine. It explores the material, evidential value of signs
(i.e. the value Aristotle would attribute them in the process of sensual knowledge) intentionally created by human individuals, and foregrounds the importance for their correct reading of the context of the events embedding them
(Joseph’s coat for Jacob; seal-​and-​cord and staff for Judah; Joseph’s garment
for Potiphar; Joseph’s words and the wagons for Jacob). It also underscores the
psychological resonance generating and being generated by them (Joseph’s
coat; the brothers’ imprisonment; the money and goblet in the sacks; the seating arrangements at Joseph’s table). This resonance originates in the memory
(Aristotle’s third phase of knowledge) and the feelings –​pain, amazement,
fear, terror –​and awakens in the addressee self-​knowledge, moral awareness,
gratitude, and confession (Judah at Tamar’s evidence, and again, much later,
when the goblet is found in his brother’s sack; the brothers when accused of
spying and when asked to fetch Benjamin).
Without the paradigm created here, the Comedy as it stands would have
been impossible for Dante, and Dostoevsky could not have written The Brothers
Karamazov. Here everything becomes sign: objects, words, gestures, actions,
and even knowledge itself (for example Joseph’s in arranging his brothers
according to age). Then, through doubt and wonder, the human sign provokes
the crucial question, and allows, indeed prompts, protagonists and readers to
glimpse God: ‘What is this that God has done to us?’, the brothers ask on finding the money in the sacks.
There can be no agnition without signs: Judah needs all the objects given to
Tamar; Joseph’s brothers need his sentence, ‘I am Joseph your brother, whom
you sold into Egypt’, his weeping, and his embrace. However, while a later
midrash gives a decisive weight to this, as we saw above, Genesis considers it
necessary but insufficient: here agnition is not possible without a recognition
of personal responsibility, without which the sign is open to misinterpretation and the agnition becomes méconaissance and ultimately ruin: ‘Alas, we
are guilty for our brother’ –​they confess, not knowing that Joseph understands because there is an interpreter between them –​‘our brother whose
196 Chapter 4
mortal distress we saw when he pleaded with us and we did not listen’. This
recognition once again involves God: ‘God has found out the crime of your
servants’, Judah proclaims in his great speech. Lastly –​and this is the real key
to the narrative’s anagnorisis –​agnition is impossible without revelation, and
vice versa. The brothers cannot recognize Joseph until he is ready to reveal
himself; when he does decide, he must do it through signs, however oblique.
‘I am Joseph your brother, whom you sold into Egypt’ is the symbol itself of
the fusion of the two procedures. Neither agnition nor revelation occurs by
chance: they are born, as Aristotle rightly states for those of Oedipus Rex,
‘out of the events themselves’: but those events are orchestrated by man and
willed by God.
This kind of anagnorisis ultimately points, of course, to the revelation-​
recognition process of God himself. Not only does the opening formula –​‘I
am Joseph’ –​recall that through which God reveals himself to the patriarchs,
but Joseph’s next statement points explicitly, for a full three times, to a recognition of the divine plan: ‘God has sent me before you to preserve life’. Neither
Joseph nor his brothers can know God through direct revelation, be it encounter, vision, or call. What happens between Joseph’s generation and those of his
ancestors is not the Fall, but the definitive entrance into the world and into
history: significantly, God will remain the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
and will never become the God of Joseph. Joseph’s own destiny within Jewish
tradition will be double-​edged: considered wise and righteous, he will however
belong both to good and evil, Israel and Egypt. But within history, humanity’s
only way of knowing God is the way indicated here, in the story of Joseph, his
brothers and his father, and in this sense Genesis now re-​writes Genesis. For
life to be preserved and multiplied (‘Joseph’ means ‘may God give increase’) it
was necessary to go down into Egypt, into the world. In the Hebrew Bible this
is acknowledged in the powerful Psalm 105:
When they were a handful of men,
but a few, and sojourners there [in Canaan].
And they went about from nation to nation,
from one kingdom to another people.
He allowed no man to oppress them
…
And he called forth famine over the land,
every staff of bread He broke.
He sent a man before them –​
as a slave was Joseph sold.
They tortured his legs with shackles,
Recognizing God
197
his neck was put in iron,
until the time of his word had come,
the lord’s utterance that purged him.
The king sent and loosed his shackles,
the ruler of peoples set him free,
made him master of his house
and ruler of all his possessions,
to admonish his princes as he desired
and teach wisdom to his elders.
And Israel came to Egypt,
Jacob sojourned in the land of Ham.
And He made his people very fruitful,
Made them more numerous than their foes.31
This is confirmed for the Christian Bible in Stephen’s important speech
in the Acts of the Apostles; it is repeated, with some fascinating touches, in
the twelfth Sura of the Koran.32 The story of Joseph, his brothers, and the
elderly Jacob reveals exactly how the anagnorisis becomes a further stage in
the discovery of God, God-​centric discourse, theo-​logy as history of salvation,
Heilsgeschichte, in which the individual recognizes his or her true role, that of
other individuals, and that of the Lord: ‘God has found out the crime of your
servants’, Judah admits, applying the manifestation of God to the sphere of
personal responsibility. ‘Am I in the place of God? While you meant evil toward
me, God meant it for good, for the survival of many people’, Joseph chides and
comforts his dismayed brothers, extending the question from personal sins to
the ways God uses them to act in the world.
It is most certainly true that within the perspective of the Hebrew Bible,
where no definitive revelation exists, the anagnorisis of Joseph and his brothers
fails to constitute the point of arrival it would represent in classical drama.33
It is equally true, however, that this ‘closure’ is not offered us, for instance, by
the Odyssey either: after the recognition scene between husband and wife we
are not only presented, as in Genesis, with that between father and son, but
with the opening towards infinity of Ulysses’ destiny through the repetition of
Tiresias’ prophecy that the hero set sail once more for a country which does
31
32
33
Psalm 105: 12–​24: R. Alter’s translation. See also Wisdom 10: 10–​14 for another summary of
Joseph’s story, where the agent of salvation is Wisdom herself.
Acts 7: 8–​18; Koran 12: 100–​111.
As Gabriel Josipovici maintains in his admirable analysis of the episode in The Book of
God, pp. 75-​89.
198 Chapter 4
not know the sea. And the long process of méconnaissance and recognition
leads to a scene of anagnorisis which represents the acme –​albeit temporary
and bristling with future interrogatives –​of one definite stage in the relation
between God and man represented by the Bible. Henceforth this phase will
be a given in terms of human awareness: the phase in which, through human
conflict and recognition, man will glimpse God’s definitive passing from the
world of being and promise to that of becoming and fulfilment. It is for this
reason that the recognition scene between Joseph and his brothers, and then
his father, is so disturbing but so satisfying for the humans which are its real
addressees. To possess this knowledge, however many times it will be called
into question in the Bible and in history, down to our own awesome, terrible
century, it is worth paying the price of so many crimes, so many confessions; it
is right and inevitable, for this supreme intuition of the Plot, to shed so many
tears. For its sake it might even be possible, for one moment only, to forget
Abraham and become like Joseph –​or, more probable for us as common mortals become like his brothers.
∵
Re-​writings of Joseph and his brothers, in whole or in part, are common in
literature: from Flavius Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities, the Greek History of the
Most Handsome Joseph and his Bride Aseneth, the Koran and Joseph and Sulaika
by the Persian Jami, and to Grimmelshausen’s Edifying Description of the Life
of the Chaste and Excellent Joseph in Egypt. The figure of Joseph has attracted
writers such as Goethe, who in Poetry and Truth tells how he virtually rewrote
the whole story in his youth, developing it and giving it closure, only to destroy
it sometime later; and Tolstoy, who in What is Art? considers it the exemplary
masterpiece, a paradigm for all works of art.34 And of course, down to Pascal
at least, the Christian tradition has read Joseph as a prefiguration of Christ
himself.
When Thoman Mann follows the young Goethe’s example (explicitly) and
undertakes the monumental re-​writing of Genesis in his tetralogy Joseph and
his Brothers (published between 1933 and 1943), the whole of preceding literature, from the midrash to Christian exegesis and Arab adaptations, is absorbed
34
Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit i, 4, Frankfurt am Main, Deutscher Klassiker
Verlag, 20182, pp. 157–​159: The Autobiography of J.W. Goethe, Truth and Poetry, trans.
J. Oxenford, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 115; L. Tolstoy, What is Art?,
­chapter 16: ed. W.G. Jones, trans. A. Maude, London, Bristol Classical Press, 1994, p. 180.
Recognizing God
199
and amalgamated in a palimpsest including history, mythology, ancient comparative religion, archaeology, and psychology: a summa, in other words an
‘epic’ and a ‘world-​system’ which Mann himself compares to the pyramids.35
The theme and problem of recognition pervades Mann’s gigantic amplification of the Bible story both because it comprises, in itself, the ultimate point
of the story, and because the story offers itself as rewriting. Mann immediately
underlines that recognition begins in Genesis long before the story of Joseph,
when, at his mother Rebecca’s instigation, Jacob tricks his father Isaac into giving him the blessing of his brother Esau. While in Genesis Isaac fails, falteringly, to ‘recognize’ Jacob because his arms are hairy like Esau’s, in Mann’s The
Tales of Jacob, the first of his four volumes, Isaac is both more uncertain and at
the same time convinced by the evidence of the material sign offered him. His
‘sighted blindness’ is played on more openly, and Jacob’s reply, which glances
at Christ’s words to Pilate, ‘Thou sayest’, foregrounds it even more. ‘Yea’, said
he, ‘these are thy hairy limbs and Esau’s red fleeces, I see them with my seeing
hands and must be convinced. The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands
are the hands of Esau. Art thou then my very son Esau?’ Upon which Jacob
answers, ‘Thou seest and sayest it’.36
35
36
Mann uses the expression ‘pyramidlike’ for the Joseph tetralogy in his Foreword to the
American edition in one volume, p. v. Opere Mondo is the title of a great book by F. Moretti,
Turin, Einaudi, 1994, published in English as Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe
to Garcia Marquez, London, Verso, 1996. Mann’s text is now available, with commentary,
in the superb four volumes of the ‘Grosse kommentierte Ausgabe’, Joseph und seine Brüder
i and ii, ed. J. Assmann, D. Borchmeyer, S. Stachorski, Frankfurt am Main, S. Fischer, 2018.
There now are two English translations, the classic one by H.T. Lowe-Porter of the entire
tetralogy in one volume, London, Secker & Warburg, 1956, and the new one by J.E. Woods,
New York, Knopf, 2005. I quote here from the former.
For the New Testament allusions in Mann’s work, see F. Marx, ‘Ich Aber Sage Ihnen’:
Christusfigurationen im Werk Thomas Manns, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann (Thomas-​
Mann-​Studien 25), 2002. The studies of Mann and his Joseph that I have found most
useful are the following: K. Hamburger, Thomas Manns biblisches Werk, München,
Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1981; E. Heftrich, Geträumte Taten. ‘Joseph und
seine Brüder’, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1993; Thomas-​Mann-​Handbuch, ed.
H. Koopmann, Stuttgart, Kröner, 19952; K. Makoschey, Quellenkritische Untersuchungen
zum Spätwerk Thomas Manns, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann (Thomas-​Mann-​Studien
17), 1998; B.-​J. Fischer, Handbuch zu Thomas Manns ‘Josephromanen’, Tübingen und Basel,
A. Francke, 2002; J. Assmann, Thomas Mann und Ägypten. Mythos und Monotheismus
in den Josephsromanen, München, Beck, 2006; Der ungläubige Thomas. Zur Religion in
Thomas Manns Romanen, ed. N. Peter and T. Sprecher, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann
(Thomas-​Mann-​Studien 45), 2012; Zwischen Himmel und Hölle. Thomas Mann und die
Religion. Die Davoser Literaturtage 2010, ed. T. Sprecher, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann
(Thomas-​Mann-​Studien 44), 2012; Thomas Mann-​Handbuch, ed. A. Blödorn and F. Marx,
Stuttgart, Metzler, 2015; U. Karthaus, Poetische Theologie. Überlegungen zu Thomas Mann,
200 Chapter 4
The theme later resurfaces in the retaliatory deception Jacob undergoes
when Laban tricks him into spending his wedding-​night with Leah instead
of Rachel. Mann’s reworking of the briefest of scenes in Genesis is a virtuoso,
lyric-​erotic-​ironic triumph. The girl is introduced, veiled, in the dark, into the
room where Jacob is eagerly waiting, and at his question ‘Is it thou, Rachel?’,
pronounced only to let her hear his voice, she replies with a coy nod of the
head. Jacob then begins his paean to eros, tenderly tracing the history of his
love-​story with Rachel, finally asking her if she, too, is ‘enraptured by the greatness of this hour’. At her reply, ‘I am thine in bliss, dear Lord’, Jacob muses out
loud that the voice could be Leah’s, immediately reassuring himself with the
idea that similarities do, indeed, exist between the voices of two sisters. He
then hazards a proclamation which for the reader ironically recalls both his
brother and his father’s ‘seeing hands’, and directly involves God himself:
Lass uns preisen die Unterscheidung, und dass du Rahel bist und ich
Jaakob bin und zum Beispiel nicht etwa Esau, mein roter Bruder! Die Väter
und ich, wir haben wohl nachgesonnen manche Zeit bei den Hürden,
wer Gott sei, und unsere Kinder und Kindeskinder werden uns folgen
im Sinnen. Ich aber sage zu dieser Stunde und mache helle meine Rede,
dass die Finsternis von ihr zurückweicht: Gott ist die Unterscheidung!
Darum, so hebe ich dir nun den Schleier, Geliebte, dass ich dich sehe mit
sehenden Händen …
Let us be glad of the distinction that thou art Rachel and I Jacob, and
not, for instance, Esau my red brother! My forefathers and I, at night
beside the flocks, have pondered much upon the person of God, who He
is, and our children’s children will follow us in our musings. But I at this
hour will say and make clear my words, that the darkness may roll back
away from them: ‘God is the distinction!’ And therefore now I lift thy veil,
beloved, that I may see with seeing hands …37
It is no surprise then when he wakes up and is aghast to see, in the clear light of
day, that the woman in his bed is Leah. J’s terse ‘when the morning came, look,
it was Leah’ will not do for Mann. For his Jacob recognition is a more complex
business. Stammeringly he asks the girl ‘since when is it thou?’ and only when
she replies, ‘Always it was I’, does he understand his night-​long ‘misconception’.
37
Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann (Thomas-​Mann-​Studien 53), 2017; A. Hutter, Narrative
Ontologie, Tübingen, Mohr, 2017.
Joseph und seine Brüder I, Die Geschichten Jaakobs, pp. 271–​272; Thomas Mann, Joseph and
his Brothers, p. 202.
Recognizing God
201
His arm leaning on the wall, and his head on his arm, he weeps ‘bitterly’ like
Peter at the crowing of the cock: tears which are to put the seal on the last
scene of agnition in the novel, that between Jacob and Joseph.
Lastly, two recognition scenes form the frame to Joseph’s own story. Mann
counterbalances the canonical scene at the end of the novel with another,
at the beginning. The merchants pull Joseph from the pit and take him with
them while the brothers are deciding to sell him. When the Midianites pass
by the nine brothers (Reuben has gone to the pit to save Joseph), their leader
asks whether they by chance know a boy that is missing. When they say no,
he reveals Joseph under a mantle, and the brothers naturally recognize him
immediately. For a moment they are nonplussed, but then immediately talk
their way out of the situation and begin to negotiate the sale. The basic price is
fixed by Judah at thirty pieces of silver, and at one sticky point in the haggling,
behaving as though he were quite infatuated ‘with the article of sale’, he kisses
the mute and blinking Joseph on the cheek. From this moment of deliberate
denial until the revelation in Egypt, the anagnorisis is suspended, playing with
and drawing on all our expectations as readers of the Bible and insinuating
itself around the entire tetralogy.
We saw above how, in the story of Joseph, Genesis develops an articulate
but strictly narrative logic when dealing with the signs and the issue of recognition. This holds for Mann’s novel too, as for example in Jacob’s deceit when
the sheepskin he is wearing is read by Isaac as definitive proof of the identity
of his son. In Mann’s extended version signs are inevitably diluted, particularly
in the first stages, where three hundred pages separate the Isaac and Jacob
scene from that of Jacob and Joseph’s coat, and three hundred more are to pass
before we meet Potiphar’s wife and Joseph’s garment.
While the theme is mimetically foregrounded within the narrative cohesion
as the novel accelerates (very relatively speaking, of course) towards the end,
here at the beginning more diegetic comment prevails. When, for example,
the ten brothers take Jacob the bloody coat of many colours, so that he may
‘interpret’ it for himself, the narrator stops and asks if the sign really is more
‘merciful’ than words, as Judah maintains. In the two pages devoted to the
question, the narrator adopts the point of view of the addressee and not, like
Judah, that of the sender. So viewed, there can be no doubt, he writes, that
the sign is considerably crueller. The word can initially be laid aside, a ‘rear-​
guard action against the forces of truth’, and only gradually work its way into
an unwitting consciousness: whereas the starkness of the sign, here the ‘blood-​
stiffened rags’, admits no illusion or ‘temporizing fiction’. The sign is real, tangible, allows no ambiguity, but forces us to recognize as our own, as born in
our own brains, a thought which, if expressed in words, would be rejected as
202 Chapter 4
madness. ‘Mute’ the sign certainly is –​‘not out of gentleness, however, but only
because it needs not to speak to be understood, being the thing itself’. The sign
is irreducible by virtue of its Wirklichkeit, its being a material entity. In Genesis
Jacob would have been obliged to recognize Joseph’s coat, but could, in theory,
have avoided jumping to the conclusion it indicates (Joseph has been torn to
shreds). Mann’s Jacob is not allowed even this theoretical possibility: for him
there is no way out, neither psychological nor epistemological. ‘Without and
within it lays you low’, the German author writes of the sign.
Mann here seems to adopt a conception of knowledge which goes way
beyond Aristotelian rationalism towards the certainties of empiricism and
positivism. This is later confirmed in the scene in which Potiphar’s wife (in
the novel Mut-​em-​enet, wife of Peteprê) shows her husband Joseph’s garment,
the ‘sign’ or ‘proof’ that speaks ‘the incorruptible language of things’. The effect
on the reader is naturally the opposite, doubly sure as she or he is, thanks first
to Genesis, and now to Mann, that these proofs are false, and it is precisely
because the author underlines the irrefutable reality of the sign that the reader
will conclude, with stronger conviction than after going through Genesis, that
the language of things, far from being incorruptible, is rotten to the core, and no
empirical certainty can be adduced from it in our groping towards knowledge.
Against such conclusion, in Joseph and His Brothers there stands no story of
Judah and Tamar. While in Genesis this occurs between Jacob’s receiving the
bloody coat and Joseph’s first success in Egypt, in Mann it is deferred until after
his elevation by Pharaoh, just before the arrival of his brothers. By so doing, the
sign’s reversal from negative to positive, and its significance in Judah’s inner
recognition become an immediate announcement of what Mann calls das
heilige Spiel, the ‘sacred game’, the whole re-​enacting of the process of anagnorisis which takes up all the final section of the tetralogy.
I intend now to have a detailed look at this, to see quite how Mann re-​writes
Genesis. For years Joseph reads the reports sent him from the frontier posts
in expectation of the one which will finally tell him his brothers are on their
way. It finally arrives, and Joseph is beside himself with excitement –​all, as he
says, ‘Tohu and Bohu’ within himself.38 He has always known, he reveals to his
phlegmatic steward Mai-​Sachme, that they would come, and that God would
turn evil into good. The ‘story’ he already knows: the problem is how to fulfil it,
enact it to perfection, and recognize and reinvent all the details, not least the
agnitive plot itself:
38
The expression, often used in the tetralogy, basically means ‘confusion’: it comes, however, from Genesis 1: 2, where tohu wabohu is translated (King James) ‘without form, and
void’, which probably implies a trace of chaos.
Recognizing God
203
Was für eine Geschichte, Mai, in der wir sind! Es ist eine der besten! Und
nun kommt’s darauf an und liegt uns ob, dass wir sie ausgestalten recht
und fein und das Ergötzlichste daraus machen und Gott all unseren Witz
zur Verfügung stellen. Wie fangen wir’s an, einer solchen Geschichte
gerecht zu werden? Das ist’s, was mich so aufregt … Glaubst du, dass sie
mich erkennen werden?
What a history, Mai, is this we are in! One of the very best. And now it
depends on us, it is our affair to give it a fine form and make something
perfectly beautiful of it, putting all our wits at the service of God. How
shall we begin, in order to do justice to such a story? That is what excites
me so much … Do you think they will recognize me?39
Joseph’s anxious, excited questions obviously have no precedent in Genesis,
but they reveal one of the main directions in which the novel will develop the
recognition process, perforating the aspect of mystery through the psychology
of the brothers. Mai-​Sachme’s answer is significant: no, he is sure they will fail
to recognize him after so many years; they will have not the slightest suspicion.
And then, ‘to recognize and to know that you recognize are two very different
things’: Zwischen Erkennen und Merken, dass man erkennt, ist noch ein gutes
Stück Weges. What is about to take place is no simple agnition, but its lunging into the gap between awareness and non-​awareness: its searching for itself
within the recognition of recognition.
Joseph’s re-​enactment has to match this. Nervous that they will recognize
him, but at the same time desirous that they should, he decides against revealing himself immediately: ‘the thing should first draw itself out before I speak
the words and say I am I’. He first wants to do his own detective work, and
‘shape and adorn the tale’, not to ruin a good story before ‘act’ and ‘result’ tally
and transform into ‘a feast of no common sort’, something the world can laugh
and cry over for the next three thousand years. When Mai-​Sachme raises the
point of what language to use, Joseph hits on the idea of an interpreter, while
together they think up the trick of pretending to believe the brothers spies, ‘of
course, because it is the only right one and as good as written down already’ –​
indeed, ‘this whole story is written down already in God’s book’.
The second direction for Mann’s agnition will then be this: rewriting is recognizing, fulfilling, and reincarnating the prefiguration in the book of God.
The book of God is not, however, only Genesis, the first of the Pentateuch, but
the entire Bible (including, for Mann, the Christian one) and, in the exegetical
39
Joseph der Ernährer, p. 1670; Joseph the Provider, p. 1052.
204 Chapter 4
tradition, Isaiah’s Heavenly scroll, the book written within and without of
Ezekiel, Revelation’s book sealed with seven seals: divine Wisdom and the
earthly world; omniscience, the universe, its happenings, and human destiny.
Here, then, on the subtle threshold between the Book of Genesis and the ‘book
of life’, between past, eternity, and present, lie the re-​Scripturing, the re-​writing
of Scripture and recognition: ‘It will run off as though it were already written
down and was being played according to script’ –​Joseph informs his steward
before meeting the ten and Benjamin, ‘There are no surprises, only the thrill of
seeing the familiar of long ago become the present’.
Some very surprising special effects are, however, produced in the Joseph of
Mann’s re-​enacting of his Biblical prefiguration. When the ten appear in front
of him for the first time we do indeed wonder whether, in his words to his steward, he ‘can make even God Himself, the great Unanswering (das Antwortlose
Gott selbst), to laugh’:40
‘So viele?’ fragte er mit verschleierter Stimme, die er, Gott wusste
warum, beinahe brummend senkte. ‘Zehne auf einmal? Warum nicht
lieber gleich elfe! Wiederholer! Frage sie, warum sie nicht gleich zu
elfen kommen, und womöglich zu zwölfen! Oder versteht ihr Männer
ägyptisch?’ […] Während der Dolmetsch die Rede Naphtali’s rasch
und geschäftsmässig-​eintönig űbersetzte, verschlang Joseph die mit
den Augen, die vor ihm standen. Er erkannte sie alle, unterschied mit
geringer Műhe jeden einzelnen, welches Werk auch die Zeit an ihnen
getan hatte. […] Du Ewiger, wie alt sie geworden waren! Es war ergreifend –​wie eben das Leben ergreifend ist. Er erschrak aber bei ihrem
Anblick, weil fast micht denkbar war, dass der Vater noch lebte, wo sie
schon so alt waren.
Das Herz voll Lachen und Weinen und Bangigkeit, sah er sie an und
kannte sie alle wieder durch die Bärte hindurch, die einige von ihnen zu
seiner Zeit noch garnicht getragen. Sie aber, die ihn ansahen ebenfalls,
dachten nicht daran, ihn zu erkennen, und ihre sehenden Augen waren
mit Blindheit bedeckt fűr die Möglichkeit, dass er es sein könnte.
‘So many?’ he asked in a muffled voice which, oddly enough, he had
pitched almost in a growl. ‘Ten all at once? Why not eleven? Interpreter,
ask them why there are not eleven of them or even twelve –​or do you
men understand Egyptian?’ […] While the interpreter rapidly and monotonously translated Naphtali’s words, Joseph devoured with his eyes the
40
Woods, p. 1304, translates ‘the great unanswering God’.
Recognizing God
205
men standing before him. He knew them every one and had no trouble
in marking in each the work the hand of time had done upon them too …
Good God, how old they had got! It was very moving –​as all life is moving. But he shrank back at the sight of them, for with them so old it was
unbelievable that the father was still alive.
With his heart full of laughing and weeping and dismay he looked at
them, recognizing every single one despite the beards, which some of
them in his time had not yet worn. But they, looking at him in their turn,
had no such thoughts; for their seeing eyes were wrapped in blindness
against the possibility that it could be he.41
The audience continues in the form of a stringent questions-​and-​answers for
some ten pages, the omission dots in the quotation above standing for at least
fifteen lines each time. Mann’s strategy for developing the Genesis story is clear
however even from this abridged version: his intention is to further increase
Joseph’s knowledge, and his use of it as provocation (‘why not eleven or even
twelve?’), at the same time as he transforms it into explicit emotion and awareness of the passing of time; and to herd the brothers’ ignorance, psychologically, into the minimal but essential gap between recognizing and knowing
that you recognize, and, epistemologically and morally, into the blindness of
those who, seeing, fail to see, like those who hear the prophecies of Isaiah and
the parables of Christ ‘from outside’.
Joseph continues with his game of cat and mouse, in the process discovering that his father is still alive and that Benjamin has eight children; he then
closes in on them, launching his accusation of spying, his third-​degree questioning as to the twelfth brother (‘What! So now all of a sudden you are twelve
men?’), and finally their imprisonment. Here Scripture is rescripted in three
different ways. The first, extra-​biblical, belonging to fiction, centres on two
touches of narrative genius: when Judah confirms that his father is still alive,
adding that theirs is a particularly long-​lived family and that their ‘ancestor
was a hundred years old when he begot the true and right son, their father’s
father’, Joseph, ‘his voice breaking’, exclaims: ‘How uncivilized!’. Then when he
learns that his small brother is himself a father, without waiting for the translation and thereby earning himself ‘a private nudge in the back’ from his steward,
he blurts out, ‘Impossible!’.
Mann’s second and third methods reveal that he was familiar with the art
of biblical narrative long before modern critics. His second, a Wagnerian, but
41
Joseph the Provider, pp. 1058–​1059: Joseph der Ernährer, pp. 1680–​1682.
206 Chapter 4
ironical and profoundly Biblical resurfacing of the recognition Leitmotif, is
shown when Reuben first answers to the charge of spying: ‘we recognize you in
your greatness, but you recognize us not in our good faith’. The third is a double
example of intra-​textual, ultra-​biblical allusion. In clear contraposition to the
episode of Potiphar’s wife, Dan reminds Joseph that it is up to him to prove his
accusation; at Reuben’s defence, Joseph replies with a further suspicion: two
or three of them, he insists, evoking the Genesis episode in which Simeon and
Levi avenge the violation of their sister Dinah with the Sichem slaughter,42
would be more than capable of entering the city and slitting the throats of
men and beasts.
The theme of recognition is never, however, abandoned. When the ten
brothers find themselves in the very pleasant, ‘flower-​twined’ chambers in
which they are ‘imprisoned’, their minds immediately run on the strange
events and even stranger character, cruel and attractive at the same time,
which has brought them to their present state. And then comes the moment
when they put together the ‘unreasonable suspicion’ of espionage ‘with
another most reasonable one’, namely, that there is some link between the
haughty foreigner’s suspicion and that which hangs over them constantly at
home; ‘in short, that this visitation was a punishment for long past guilt’. The
narrator instantly doubles up as commentator, foregrounding the theme of
recognition and turning himself into not merely the only re-​reader but the
ultimate re-​Writer too:
Es wäre nämlich ein Irrtum zu glauben und aus den Texten zu schließen,
sie hätten erst vor Josephs Ohren, beim zweiten Gespräch mit ihm, diese
Vermutung ausgetauscht. Nein, schon hier, in der Clausur, drängte sie
sich ihnen auf die Lippen, und sie sprachen von Joseph. Es war merkwürdig genug: die Person des Markthalters mit der des Begrabenen und
Verkauften auch nur in die leiseste Gedankenverbindung zu bringen, war
ihnen doch völlig verwehrt, –​und dennoch sprachen sie von dem Bruder.
Ein bloß moralischer Vorgang war das nicht; sie kamen von einem zum
anderen nicht erst auf dem Weg von Verdacht zu Verdacht, von der
Schuld zur Strafe. Es war eine Sache der Berührung.
Mai-​Sachme hatte in seiner Ruhe wohl recht gehabt, zu sagen, zwischen Erkennen und Merken, dass man erkennt, liege noch mancher
Schritt. Man kommt nicht mit einem Bruderblut in Berührung, ohne es zu
erkennen, besonders, wenn man es einst vergossen hat. Aber ein anderes
42
Genesis 34.
Recognizing God
207
ist es, sich’s einzugestehen. Wenn Einer behauptete, die Söhne hätten zu
dieser Stunde in dem Markthalter bereits den Bruder erkannt, so drückte
er sich sehr linkisch aus und begegnete mit Recht dem entschiedensten
Widerspruch; denn woher dann auch wohl ihr maßloses Erstaunen, als
er sich ihnen zu erkennen gab? Sie hatten keine Ahnung! Nämlich davon
hatten sie keine, warum Josephs Bild und ihre Schuld vor die Seele traten
nach oder schon bei der Berührung mit dem anziehend-​gefährlichen
Markthalter.
It would be a mistake to conclude, or to gather from the text, that they
first mentioned the suspicion in front of Joseph, at their second confrontation with him. No, it had occurred to them before that. Here in the
place of their first arrest it mounted to their lips and they spoke of Joseph.
That was strange. They were capable of not even the faintest mental association between this lord of the corn and their sold and buried brother,
yet –​they spoke of him. It was not a merely moral association; they did
not at first come on to it by such a route, one suspicion leaping back to
the other. At first it was not a matter of guilt and punishment, it was a
matter of contact (Berührung).
Mai-​Sachme had been right when he had remarked in his imperturbable way that it was a far cry between knowing and knowing that you
knew. A man cannot come into contact with his blood-​brother without
knowing it, especially if he has once spilled that blood. But confessing it
to oneself is a different pair of shoes. To assert that the sons had at this
point in the story recognized the keeper of the market as their brother
would be a clumsy way to put it and could only be denied forthwith; for
why then their boundless amazement when he revealed himself? No,
they had not the faintest idea. And quite specifically they had no idea
either why Joseph’s image and their ancient guilt came to their minds
after or even during their first contact with this attractive and alarming
potentate.43
In an analysis focused on the acts of discerning and distinguishing (the
Unterscheidung Jacob claims for his stock and for God), Mann transforms the
Erkennen into mystery, into ‘contact’ between blood, images of blood and the
reflection of blood, and into an inexplicable Berührung suspended between
recognition and awareness of recognition. The enigma remains at a psychological level, and the narrator can continue to play on the theme of external
43
Joseph der Ernährer, p. 1700; Joseph the Provider, p. 1070.
208 Chapter 4
recognition; as they are about to leave Simeon as hostage, Reuben recalls how
he had tried to talk them out of laying hands on Joseph, and ‘now God is asking
us: “Where is your brother Abel ?” ’ (Joseph’s nose here starts to prickle, and
he turns away, his eyes full of tears). But then at their second meeting, when
Joseph adds to the indecipherable signs of the money and the seating arrangements the fact that he knows their names in order of age, and that Benjamin’s
mother is dead, with the vision of her tomb in a silver cup and that of an adolescent in a many-​coloured coat, the mystery moves from the psychological to
the ontological.
The first mechanism to be released is of the Proustian madeleine variety,
but inverted and complicated. Benjamin stares at the mighty Egyptian who
treats him with such embarrassing fulsomeness: he looks, searches, loses, and
suddenly dredges up an image buried deep within him, and is ‘pervaded by an
old, familiar, childhood air: pungent, sun-​warmed, spicy, the essential aroma
of all the love and trust, security and adoration, all the childlike bewildered
sympathy, intuition, and half-​knowledge’ he had ever known. It is the scent of
myrtle, the ‘spicy scent of childhood’ and the child Joseph. At the same time
Benjamin feels in himself the need to establish an identity, and guess how
and why ‘the jolly, friendly present’ should be connected with ‘something far
higher, something of the divine’. The recognition process which began as an
instinctive retrieval of lost time now grows as the inner enquiry, the ‘bewitching riddle’ of a numen which is both known and seemingly irretrievably
remote. Shortly afterwards, during the night following the banquet, it collides
with the barrier of the sheer incomprehensibility of the theophany and the
impossibility of the very knowledge acquired. Benjamin, Mann writes, ‘had
seen a man in whom was Joseph’: how could that possibly be described? Men
have frequently encountered a God who chose to manifest himself in human
form, and behave as a known, familiar figure. But here ‘it was the other way
round: the humanly familiar was not semi-​transparent for the divine, but the
high and divine semi-​transparent for the long-​familiar childhood’. Joseph is
God, man, and memory at one and the same time, and to identify him, and
guess the ‘how and why’ will be constitutionally impossible for a human
being. In a passage of Time Regained to which I have already resorted several
times, Proust writes:
For to ‘recognise’ someone, and, a fortiori, to learn someone’s identity
after having failed to recognise him, is to predicate two contradictory
things of a single subject, it is to admit that what was here, the person
whom one remembers, no longer exists, and also that what is now here is
a person one did not know to exist; and to do this we have to apprehend
Recognizing God
209
a mystery almost as disturbing as that of death, of which it is, indeed, as
it were the preface and the harbinger.44
Mann proclaims exactly the same mystery –​in which, however, the term of
comparison is not death but the forbidden threshold between divine appearance and human essence. This is the continuation of the passage on Benjamin’s
tormented night:
Der Verkleidete ist nicht der, in der sich verkleidet und aus dem er hervorblickt. Sie bleiben zweierlei. Dem Einen im Anderen erkennen, heißt
nicht, Einen machen aus Zweien und sich die Brust mit dem Schrei entlasten: ‘Er ist es!’ Dieses ‘Er’ ist noch keineswegs herstellbar, wenn auch
der Geist sich zitternd müht, es zu formen; und der Schrei war zurückgebannt in Benjamins Brust, die er freilich fast sprengen wollte, ob er gleich
eigentlich noch garnicht vorhanden, sondern ein Un-​Schrei war, ohne
einheitlichen Aussage-​Gegenstand, –​das war das Unbeschreibliche.
Yet the disguised is not that behind which he disguises himself and
from behind which he looks. They remain two. To recognize the one in
the other does not mean to make one out of two, to relieve one’s breast
with the cry: ‘It is he!’ It is impossible to produce the one out of the other,
however desperately the mind struggles to do it. The cry was dammed
back in Benjamin’s breast though his heart nearly burst to contain it. Or
rather it is not quite right to say it was dammed back, for it was not yet
there, it had no voice or body –​and therein precisely lay the indescribable thing.45
This is as far as the game of agnition can go: from this point the reader simply waits for Joseph to reveal himself, for theophany and human epiphany
unfathomably to meet. And when it occurs, in the strangest of close third
encounters, after Judah’s powerful speech (in which, in Mann’s version, the
crime against their eleventh brother is explicitly confessed), the revelation
takes place in a sacred formula rewritten in familiar human terms. Hundreds
of pages earlier, at the beginning of the last volume of the tetralogy, Joseph the
Provider, Mai-​Sachme, then Joseph’s jailer, had asked him if he was Peteprê’s
(the Bible’s Potiphar) former steward. The prisoner had answered, ‘in all simplicity’, ‘I am he’ (Ich bin’s; literally, ‘I am it’): a deceptive simplicity, however,
44
45
Proust, Time Regained, p. 982.
Joseph der Ernährer, pp. 1751–​1752; Joseph the Provider, p. 1102.
210 Chapter 4
Mann immediately remarks; in the first place, the linguistic register is wrong
for addressing a superior, and in the second, the ‘he’ (the es) exceeds the question, inviting a further one: ‘What are you?’ or even ‘Who are you ?’ over and
above that. Joseph’s answer, the narrator tells us, ‘was a formula’ of considerably wider resonance, ‘from ages past. It was the time-​honoured revelation of
identity, a ritual statement beloved in song and story and play in which the
gods had parts. In such a play it is used in order to string together a whole
gamut of effects and plot sequences, from mere casting down of the eyes to
being thundered at and flung on one’s knees’. It is, in other words, the formula
of theophany. Now, Ich bin’s is also the title of the chapter in which Joseph
finally makes himself known to his brothers, and the sentence he pronounces
is a colloquial translation: Kinder, ich bin’s ja. Ich bin ja euer Bruder Joseph
(‘Children, here I am, I am your brother Joseph!’). The novel has fulfilled the
shadow of the theophany of Joseph implied in Genesis.
Human and divine come together, the ‘it’, the es, of the formula containing
the essence of the mystery; and it is more than clear that, in Mann’s rewriting,
the mystery is alluding to its figural fulfilment in the New Testament. Kinder is
the word which Jesus uses in Luther’s Bible in addressing the disciples when he
appears to them after the Resurrection on Lake Tiberias and es is the pronoun
with which his beloved disciple recognizes him immediately afterwards, as we
shall see below, in ­chapter 21 of John’s Gospel: Es ist der Herr, ‘It is the Lord’. Ich
bin’s selber is the sentence Jesus uses with the disciples in Luther’s translation
of Luke, when they see him for the first time after the Resurrection and believe
him a ghost. Joseph also echoes Christ’s ‘come unto me’; he returns the kiss on
the cheek which Judah had given him before the Midianite merchants while
selling him for thirty pieces of silver; and, lastly, again paraphrasing Luke’s
Jesus, he invites the brothers to touch him with their own hands to verify the
truth of his words. It seems almost inevitable, then, that in the concluding recognition of Mann’s tetralogy Jacob should weep bitterly, like Peter after the
cock crowed, when recognizing and embracing Joseph.
We reach this final threshold by delicate degrees. While Benjamin immediately grasps Joseph’s true identity, and has his premonitions confirmed (‘Of
course he is, of course he is! I knew it, I knew it!’), the other ten brothers stand
with ‘bursting brains’ as they try to reconcile Joseph’s two faces: the brother,
betrayed and sold, and the Lord of the Corn, now elevated to worldly glory;
they have to recognize the one in the other and, in Mann’s words, ‘to work to
hold the two together’. The revelation must be followed by the steady, painstaking adjustment of the mind to the realities of present and past which is
called, precisely, ‘re-​cognition’: the mystery which, as Proust has it, means ‘to
predicate two contradictory things of a single subject’.
Recognizing God
211
At the same time Joseph has to voice full public knowledge of himself, as it
were, and openly proclaim in front of his brothers that he is no ‘god-​hero, no harbinger of spiritual salvation’ but only he who provides for the nourishment of
his people, ‘a farmer and manager’. Then, as penultimate fulfilment, Jacob must
receive the news (Mann calls it ‘annunciation’) of the recognition, with light, ludic
indirectness, through the song of the ‘little maid’ Serah, Asher’s daughter.
Only then can the old patriarch go down into Egypt, and the final scene
of anagnorisis take place. Everything is prepared with cinematographic
care, through a rereading of the Septuagint translation of a single sentence
in Genesis: ‘[Jacob] sent Judah before him to Joseph, so that he may appear
in Goshen’. After the long journey from Canaan, Jacob’s litter is set down on
a wide plain, in the shade of three palm trees, ‘growing, it seemed, from one
root’ (Mann’s italics). Judah is sent ahead to inform Joseph, who advances in a
cavalcade of chariots and horses. As soon as he can make out distinct figures,
Jacob asks Judah who ‘the fairly thickset man, arrayed in all the splendour of
this world’ might be; at Judah’s reply, ‘that is your son Joseph’, he gets up and
‘in laboured stateliness, limping from the hip more than ever’, moves towards
him, Joseph in his turn hurrying ‘to shorten the distance between them’.
Mann’s Joseph, however, unlike that of Genesis, does not fling his arms round
his father’s neck: Mann’s Jacob does not allow it. When ‘the man’ mouths the
word ‘father’, Jacob stretches out his arms, ‘like a blind man groping’, moving
his hands ‘as though beckoning, yet partly too as though to protect himself’. He
holds his son at this distance, while his tired eyes peer ‘with love and sorrow
into the Egyptian’s face’, and do not recognize him. But something Scripturally
unexpected, yet completely natural, happens:
Es geschah aber, dass dessen Augen sich bei dem Anschauen langsam
und bis zum Überquellen mit Tränen füllten; und wie ihre Schwärze in
Feuchte schwamm, siehe, da waren es Rahels Augen, unter denen Jaakob in
Traumfernen des Lebens die Tränen hinweggeküsst, und er erkannte ihn, ließ
sein Haupt sinken an die Schulter des Verfremdeten und weinte bitterlich.
But it came to pass that Joseph’s eyes slowly filled with tears under
Jacob’s gaze. Their blackness swam in moisture, they overflowed; and
lo, they were Rachel’s eyes, Rachel’s dewy cheeks where Jacob in life’s
dreamy long-​ago had kissed away the tears. Now he knew his son. He let
his head fall on the stranger’s shoulder and wept bitter tears.46
46
Joseph the Provider, p. 1152: Joseph der Ernährer, p. 1832. References in brackets in the next
paragraphs are to the one-​volume edition of the Lowe-​Porter translation, London, Secker
& Warburg, 1956.
212 Chapter 4
In order to recognize his son, Jacob must relive his ‘life’s dreamy long ago’: he
must become blind like Isaac, remember Rachel, and weep bitterly as when
he discovered Leah in his bed. To recognize his son, he must read the one true
sign the stranger can offer him: his eyes full of tears and the shadow of his dead
mother. This is hardly a full-​blooded, Biblical anagnorisis, but it may be the only
one the Bible was able to produce, moving for two thousand years in another
culture. In classical literature no recognition is produced by a glance between
two pairs of eyes. Only the inner space that the Scriptural text leaves open to
readerly speculation in its silences and sudden, extreme flashes of emotion
could, after centuries of re-​elaboration, inspire such a purely fictional, romantic re-​Scripture, where all the mystery of recognition remains intact.
Above all, this final gesture ‘fulfils’ the work, but raises in the reader a question destined to generate further questions: why is Jacob weeping ‘bitter tears’?
Is his a recognition of guilt, like Peter’s at the crowing of the cock? What is
Jacob’s ‘betrayal’? Perhaps, as he considers shortly afterwards, he had perverted
the divine plan by conferring primogeniture on Joseph in his gift of the coat
of many colours, and now recognises that God has punished both of them. Or
are they purely human tears at the sight of a son who is now such a ‘stranger’,
found and lost in the same moment? Perhaps the betrayal Jacob weeps for was
Joseph’s, who, as his father tells him in their next conversation, has become god
of the world, and of corn, but not of salvation. Or again Jacob may be weeping
because God has dictated events according to His plans without taking into
account human doings and desires. And surely Jacob is weeping for his whole
life, passing now before his drowning eyes: for the whole awesome, miraculous
plot of the tetralogy which his recognition re-​evokes. To paraphrase the work’s
opening sentence, very deep is the well of re-​writing and re-​cognizing.
∵
It is so deep, in fact, as to shroud the very foundations of the work in mystery.
When Mann the commentator wonders, in the third volume, Joseph in Egypt,
how many years Joseph actually spent in Potiphar’s house and how many in
the ‘pit’ –​i.e. the Egyptian prison –​because, he writes, the commonly-​ascribed
tradition leaves us in doubt, he immediately adds that the question may appear
inept. ‘Do we know our story or do we not?’, he asks with every sign of impatience (552). Is it ‘proper and suitable to the nature of story-​telling that the narrator should openly reckon dates and facts?’. Should he be present in the story
as the anonymous source of what is told, or rather, which ‘tells itself as it goes’?
No, the narrator, he insists, should be inside the story, not outside: ‘But how is
it with God’, he asks, ‘Whom Abram thought into being and recognized?’ (Wie
Recognizing God
213
aber ist es mitt Gott, den Abram hervordachte und erkannte?). God ‘is in the fire
but He is not the fire. Thus He is at once in it and outside it’, Mann writes (553),
borrowing the image with which 1 Kings 19 describes Elijah’s theophany on
Oreb. Being a thing is rationally and ontologically very different from observing it. Yet ‘there are places and spheres where both happen at once: the narrator is in the story, yet he is not the story; he is its scene but it is not his, since
he is also outside it and by a turn of his nature puts himself in the position of
dealing with it’.
What Mann –​one is tempted to call him ‘M’, like the J of the Bible, and for
reasons we shall see in a minute –​is sketching here is a true narrative theology,
with all the gnoseological problems every theology implies. The narrator is like
God (and isn’t a divine Author exactly what the Bible claims for itself?): he is in
the fire but is not the fire: is at once in it and outside it. M reaches this conclusion in recalling Abraham’s recognition of God, the subject in Genesis which
was our starting point in this chapter, and to which we shall shortly return.
What, exactly, does this being-​in-​but-​not-​being, which affects both God and
the narrator, mean?
In 1 Kings 19, after the wind, the earthquake, and the fire, God manifests Himself as a ‘still, small voice’, or, in Luther’s translation, ein still, sanftes Sausen: a silent, soft murmur. And to this murmuring M’s voice is also
reduced: because he has never wanted to create the illusion of being the source
of Joseph’s story: ‘before it could be told, it happened, it sprang from the source
from which all history springs, and tells itself as it goes’. Word and becoming,
both springing from a mysterious being, touch and mingle in this mystique
of myth. The narrator’s task, his silent murmuring, is to bring the plot to self-​
knowledge. The story has been in the world since it happened and has told
itself. ‘Everybody knows it or thinks he does’ because the knowledge is as often
as not ‘casual’, of little consequence, almost a dream soaring and floating on
high for no good reason. Joseph’s story has been told hundreds of times, in a
hundred different mediums: ‘And now it is passing through another, wherein
as it were it becomes conscious of itself (Selbstbesinnung) and remembers how
things actually were with it in the long-​ago, so that it now both pours forth and
speaks of itself as it pours’. The impersonality of the approach increases the
affinity with Genesis, almost as if M were positing himself as simply another
‘documentary hypothesis’ like P, E, and J and recognition of the story: these
are the central points of the theology and gnoseology of the re-​Writing M proposes. The first is a recurring theme in the tetralogy but is foregrounded in the
chapter in the second volume, Young Joseph, entitled ‘How Abraham Found
God’ (283–​290). The discovery, the elderly Eliezer tells Joseph, was arrived at
through tortuous ways. Abraham had been moved to undertake his search by a
214 Chapter 4
question regarding man: who or what he ‘serves’; to which the Urvater’s strange
reply had been: ‘the Highest alone’. In the beginning, then, there was human
self-​awareness: with considerable audacity, and robustly despising the easy
way out, Abraham had refused to worship any second-​rate god. He, Abraham,
as human being, could only serve the highest. He had then sought to identify
this ‘highest’ in ‘mother earth’, as sustainer of life, then in the sun, ‘with all its
powers of blessing and cursing’, and lastly in the moon and the stars, all divinities of his Chaldean land. But none of these were the highest: the earth needs
rain to produce its fruits, while the sun, the moon, and the stars all set –​all are
subject to becoming: all are powers, none is the prime cause. What was wanted
was a Ruler, a Lord, who commanded those same powers. He had ‘to lay hold
upon the manifold and the anguishingly uncertain and convert it into the single, the definite, and the reassuring, of whom everything came, both good and
evil’. Gathering all the powers into one power, then, Abraham ‘exclusively, once
for all called them the Lord’.
He had, of course, ‘invented’ monotheism, and had become what, according to
M, Abiram means: ‘Father of the exhalted’. ‘Father’ indeed, since, if the qualities of
God’s which Abraham had discovered were God’s alone, he, man, had recognized
them, predicated them, and ‘by thinking made them real’. This is the ‘psychological theology’, connected to oriental initiation, which Mann speaks of in his lecture
on ‘Freud and the Future’, published in the collection Essays of Three Decades:
But on the whole a psychological conception of God, an idea of the godhead, which is not pure condition, absolute reality, but one with the soul
and bound up with it, must be intolerable to Occidental religious sense –​
it would be equivalent to abandoning the idea of God. Yet religion –​perhaps even etymologically –​essentially implies a bond. In Genesis we have
talk of the bond (covenant) between God and man, the psychological
basis of which I have attempted to give in the mythological novel Joseph
and His Brothers … God’s mighty qualities –​and thus God himself –​are
indeed something objective, exterior to Abram; but at the same time they
are in him and of him as well; the power of his own soul is at moments
scarcely to be distinguished from them, it consciously interpenetrates
and fuses with them –​and such is the origin of the bond which then the
Lord strikes with Abram, as the explicit confirmation of an inward fact.47
47
Thomas Mann, ‘Freud und die Zukunft’, in Adler des Geistes, Berlin und Weimar, Aufbau,
1965: trans. H.T. Lowe-​Porter, ‘Freud and the Future’, in Essays, New York, Knopf, 1957,
pp. 303–​324, at p. 314.
Recognizing God
215
It is perfectly clear that recognition is the central nexus in this bond, this religio (and appears, significantly, in a lecture on Freud). In the novel, moreover,
it is represented by the recognition scene between Abraham and Yahweh
with which the present chapter opened. God’s greatness, M elaborates there,
was most definitely fearsomely real and living, something that existed outside Abraham; it also coincided, however, with the greatness of his soul. And
the fear of God –​the timor Dei –​was not just ‘fear and trembling’, but also
‘the existence of a bond, a familiarity and friendship’. Faced with Sodom and
Gomorrah, Abraham had rapped God gently over the knuckles in a way ‘which
was not far from insolence’, Mann’s Abraham admits. ‘Hearken, O Lord’, M has
him say, reproducing the midrash word for word:48 ‘it must be one way or the
other, but not both. If thou wilt have a world, then thou canst not demand justice, but if thou settest store by justice, then it is all over with the world. Thou
wouldst hold the cord by both ends: wouldst have a world and in it justice. But
if thou doest not mitigate thy demands, the world cannot exist’. On that occasion, M opines, Abraham also reminded God of the promise He himself had
made, never again to send a Flood.
Abraham understood –​he writes –​that ‘the contradiction of a world which
should be living and at the same time just resided in God’s greatness itself’. It
was impossible for the living God to be only good: He had to include evil, ‘and
was therewith sacrosanct; was sanctity itself’. And he, Abraham, stood before
God, ‘an I before a Thou’. ‘God remained a powerful Thou, saying “I” independent of Abraham and independent of the world. He was in the fire but was not the
fire’. But God was also in Abraham, ‘who recognized Him by virtue of his own
power’, thereby reinforcing his I, extending his sense of self. Abraham had no
desire to lose himself to God, but to remain Abraham, ‘stoutly upright in face
of Him –​at a great distance, certainly, for Abraham was but a man, and made
of clay –​but bound up with Him through knowledge and consecrated by the
high essence and presence (Du-​ und Da-​Sein, literally, the ‘being-​Thou’ and the
‘being-​there’) of the Deity’. M’s rewriting, in a word, is figural and agnitive: M
fulfils J, through Abraham’s recognition between Mamre and Sodom.
The day will come, he goes on, when the full reality of God will be universally
recognized: this will be the advent of His kingdom. For the moment, there is
only Abraham’s ‘secret’ knowledge, a promise, and –​here M glances at the conclusion of the present work –​‘a time of waiting’, and the pain of waiting, ‘that
brought lines of suffering into the countenance of the God of today’. Between
this and its fulfilment, however, the recognizing of God will go on apace, as in
48
Midrash Rabbah, Genesis i, xlix, 9, pp. 429–​430.
216 Chapter 4
Genesis and the whole Bible (the Hebrew and then the Christian one). It is not
by chance that, at the end of the tetralogy, the Mamre episode again surfaces,
and is interpreted by Jacob only a few pages before the recognition scene with
Joseph.
The ancient patriarch now decides to teach his people, sitting them down
‘under the tree’ (a ‘giant tamarisk’) and giving an out and out lecture to all
the seventy who are to go down with him into Egypt. The promise to multiply has clearly found ways and means and casts allusive shadows of further
rewriting: Abraham had gone down with only his wife Sarah; it is in Egypt that
Jacob’s seventy will become the Septuagint, the Seventy Greek translators of
the Hebrew Bible. The subject of Jacob’s lecture is the difference between polytheism and monotheism, the ‘difference between the many-​namedness of Baal
and that of their Father the highest and only’ (1146).
The God of Jacob subsumes all the separate qualities of the other various gods, because everything flows from Him. His ‘I’ embraces everything,
‘the Being of all being (das Sein alles Seins), Elohim, the many as one’. He is
no longer, then, simply Du-​ and Da-​Sein, existence, and existence as ‘other’,
but summa of being (Sein, not Dasein). Jacob is not, here, on the point of converting to Aristotelianism or Heideggerism. What interests him is Elohim, the
name, which, obviously, also ‘means’ the nature of God, and the main question concerning that name: singular or plural? He seems to decide in favour
of singular, since the plural of El, God, would be Elim. Elohim is ‘an honorific
expansion, nothing else –​as Abraham is of Abram. God is One, not many. Yet
three men came to Abraham in the grove of Mamre, as he sat at the door of
his house in the heat of the day. And these three men were, as Abraham ‘soon
saw, God the Lord’. He had addressed them as ‘Lord’ and ‘thou’, but also ‘now
and then “Lords” and “you” ’. And when they had eaten they told him, ‘I will
come to you in a year’. ‘That was God’, Jacob comments. ‘He was One, but He
was explicitly threefold. He practised polytheism, but always and on principle
said “I”, whereas Abraham had addressed him by turns in the singular and the
plural’ (1147–​1148).
∵
In my end, then, is my beginning. The Jacob of M interprets J, as I attempted to
do at the beginning of the present chapter. He, of course, has the advantage of
being inside the story while not being the story, while I am most definitely outside it. Hence the two basic differences between his interpretation and mine.
Jacob, in the first place, maintains that Abraham immediately recognizes the
Recognizing God
217
three as the Lord, and that ‘his experience of God, like Abram’s, had been
threefold, and had comprised three men’ in one. He speaks of a ‘Father-​God’
(or of ‘God the Father’), and of a Good Shepherd who feeds his flock, and of
one whom he calls the ‘Angel’ who to the seventy seems to ‘overshadow them
as with the wings of doves’. These, according to him, comprise the Elohim, ‘the
threefold unity’, shadow of the future Trinity (Jacob will shortly rest beneath
three palms born of a single root, will recognize his Son, and, like Peter, weep
bitter tears).
Yet there is something which links me with the Jacob of Mann. I maintained
that to understand the mystery of the recognition of God between Mamre and
Sodom, it is necessary to become as Abraham; Jacob interprets it through his
own experience, which, he insists, is not unlike that of Abraham. Both of us set
out to solve the enigma: both of us reach the conclusion that to do so we must
take as departure point our being as humans. Like Abraham, Jacob, too, wants
to recognize God by thinking Him.
The reader of Joseph and His Brothers has, however, one advantage over
Jacob: outside the story, he or she is able to see that the recognition is, for Mann,
also a metaphysics, a psychology, and an aesthetics. Like Joseph, but more so,
the reader, we saw above, recognizes the whole story. And in the first place he
or she understands –​because M never tires of repeating it –​that every individual follows in the footsteps of another, and each one is the ‘type’ of a mythical character whose origins are lost in the origins of time. The Eliezer who
explains to Joseph how Abraham discovered God abolishes time, and identifies, writes Mann in his essay on Freud, with ‘all the Eliezers of the past [who]
gather to shape the Eliezer of the present, so that he speaks in the first person
of that Eliezer who was Abram’s servant, though he was far from being the
same man’. This is in fact the life of myth, and ‘one may as well say “lived myth”
as “lived life” ’. Life which affirms itself by claiming the authority of a mere
quotation: like Cleopatra’s, the incarnation of Ishtar-​Astarte and Aphrodite; or
Caesar’s, who took Alexander the Great as his prototype; or Jesus’, who, in crying out on the cross, ‘Eli, Eli, lamma sabachthani’ is repeating the opening of
the twenty-​second Psalm on the Messiah.
The tetralogy treats this subject with supremely light irony, and M’s smile
is an integral part of his ‘voice’ as narrator-​God. At the same time the fundamental seriousness is never in doubt: retracing the past leads back ultimately
to its ‘infinity’ where all origins are revealed as imaginary bases and non-​
definitive ends, and all discourse becomes ‘mystery’. The mysterious nature
of origin, M writes in The Tales of Jacob, attempting to explain how Esau can
be both Esau and Edom the Red, lies in the fact that ‘its essence is not the
line, but the sphere’. It is the sphere that constitutes the mystery. It consists in
218 Chapter 4
‘correspondence and reintegration’, in the two halves which come together in a
whole; in the two hemispheres, celestial and terrestrial, which rotate and alternate. And so we find ourselves faced with the (almost mystical) metaphysics to
which the re-​enacting of myth inevitably returns. A twofold manifestation of
mystery emerges –​of mutual recognition and mutual change:
Die Sphäre rollt: das liegt in der Natur der Sphäre. Oben ist bald Unten
und Unten Oben, wenn man von Unten und Oben bei solcher Schlage
überall sprechen mag. Nicht allein dass Himmlisches und Irdisches sich
in einander wiedererkennen, sondern es wandelt sich auch, kraft der
sphärischen Drehung, das Himmlische ins Irdische, das Irdische ins
Himmlische, und daraus erhellt, daraus ergibt sich die Wahrheit, dass
Götter Menschen, Menschen dagegen wieder Götter werden können.
The sphere rolls –​that lies in the nature of spheres. Bottom is soon top
and top bottom, in so far as one can speak of top and bottom in such a
connection. Not only do the heavenly and earthly recognize themselves in
each other, but, thanks to the revolution of the sphere, the heavenly can
turn into the earthly, the earthly into the heavenly, from which it is clear
that gods can become men and on the other hand men can become gods
again.49
Recognition thus becomes one of the two fundamental laws of the universe: of
myth, of time, and of the relationship between the human and the divine. This
recognition, readers will however have noticed, is now called not Erkennen,
but Wiedererkennen: re-​cognition, a word that mirrors a whole ontology and
aesthetics. When, in Joseph in Egypt, M wondered whether he knew his story
or not, his reply, as we saw above, lay in the mystery of Abraham’s recognition
of God. The same mystery, however, holds for the story, the characters, and not
least the narrator himself. Shortly before, in the same chapter, M had stated:
I feel indeed as though I had once already reached this point in my
story and told it once before; the special feeling of recognition (des
Wiedererkennens), of having been here before and seen it all (des
Schongesehen) and dreamed the same dream (des Schongeträumt),
moves me and challenges me to dwell upon it –​and such precisely were
the feelings, such the experience of my hero.50
49
50
Die Geschichten Jaakobs, p. 145; Tales of Jacob, p.124.
Young Joseph, p. 551: Der junge Joseph, p. 844.
Recognizing God
219
The bond between Joseph and his father is also his bond with God, in that
the event he now experiences is ‘imitation’ and ‘repetition’, such as Jacob had
already experienced. In them, the personal and the voluntary mix with the
element that ‘leads us and guides us’, so much so that it is no longer possible
to distinguish who really is imitating and willing to imitate the past, whether
the human being or destiny. In brief, if, previously, the re-​cognition and mutual
interchange was between the human and the divine, it is now between the
‘inward’ and the ‘outward’, between what lies inside, and what outside the individual. These ‘play into each other’ and are made concrete in the event which
is unique (eins) and ‘always’ (schon immer). From the foggy mystery of ‘origins’
we have reached, then, the equally mysterious shores of history and story; in
a word, of life: ‘For we move in the footsteps of others, and all life is but the
outpouring of the present into the forms of the myth’.
The Wiedererkennen is inseparable from this way of being, since it is the
awareness of forming part of the process of imitation. The only recognition is
a re-​cognitive process. But this déjà-​vu, this Schongeträumt, this re-​cognition,
are the feelings of the narrator, too; he has already ‘told it once before’, he tells
us. And it is here that the process of re-​cognition joins life with narrative. In
‘Freud and the Future’ Mann writes that if older schools of biography seek self-​
endorsement and verisimilitude through the fact of narrating ‘as it always was’
and ‘as it has been written’, it is precisely because ‘man sets store by recognition’
(dem Menschen ist am Wiedererkennen gelegen). In the new, we seek the old; in
the individual, the type. It is from that recognition that man draws ‘a sense of
the familiar in life’. Mann, clearly here in sympathy with the Freud who, in Jokes
and their Relation to the Unconscious, posits the ‘joy of re-​cognition’ (Freude
am Wiedererkennen) as one of the central impulses of the human being, would
seem to share this comfort, and does everything in his power –​and how could
he not, given the nature of re-​writing? –​to involve us in the same emotion.
For, if M is the rewriter, we are re-​readers. We too, then, are the addressees of
the answer given by Aristotle (or one of his close followers) to the question,
in the Problems, as to why we enjoy familiar music so much more than a new
piece: ‘because in the one instance we simply acquire knowledge; in the other
we use it in a form of recognition (anagnorizein)’.51 And with this, we shall have
recognized, if not God, at least man.
51
Problems xix 918 a 3–​9, and then 921 a 32–​40 in the Loeb edition, vol. i, 1953, p. 381.
­c hapter 5
To Recognize Is a God
Helen, Magdalen, Hermione, Marina –​Menuchim
Helen, whose face launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers
of Ilium, never went to Troy. Paris never swept her into his chamber. It wasn’t
Helen the city leaders contemplated on the walls. Furious at her defeat in the
most fatal beauty contest of all time, Hera fobbed Paris off with a phantom,
an image made out of air: a quasi-​living-​and-​breathing, identical copy: Helen’s
double. The flesh-​and-​blood Helen had been carried off by Hermes and hidden
in a cloud in some tuck in the ether, then removed safely to Egypt, to the house
of the chaste Proteus, to preserve Menelaus’ bed inviolate. The first ever East-​
West clash, the First World War –​the Trojan War –​was fought for an illusion.
Zeus simply wanted to ease the earth of some of its burden by thinning out
the human population, and at the same time give the most heroic of heroes,
Achilles, the chance to shine.
This is Helen’s own account when she appears at the opening of the play
Euripides devoted to her a few years before dying. This admirable fiction manages at a single stroke, following a tradition which possibly goes back to Hesiod
and Stesichorus, to rewrite the founding myth of Greek civilization, and, seventy years after the most recent East-​West skirmish at Salamis, in the middle
of the Peloponnesian Wars which were to devastate Greece, to destroy the very
idea of war. Helen is removed from sight and mind, conveniently relegated to
the shores of the exotic Nile; yet she is, for the first time, moved centre-​stage,
and Euripides’ Helen is not a tragedy in the modern sense of the word but the
enacting of an astonishing rehabilitation of the first adulteress, the story of
her reunion with Menelaus, and their return to the marital bed and home: we
would call it a romance play with a happy ending.1
The plot is relatively simple to the spectator; more complex to a careful
reader. Divided into two parts, the first shows Helen at Proteus’ tomb, where
she is imploring his protection against his son Theoclymenus, her undesired
suitor. Teucer appears before her, having returned from the Trojan War only
to be exiled by his father as punishment for not dying when his brother Ajax
1 See L. Edmunds, Stealing Helen. The Myth of the Abducted Wife in Comparative Perspective,
Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015.
© Piero Boitani, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004453678_007
To Recognize Is a God
221
killed himself after the contest for Achilles’ arms (which went to Odysseus).
From questioning Teucer (who, on recognizing her, initially hurls his hatred
at her before deciding that it is not Helen), she learns that Troy is destroyed
and Helen returned to Menelaus; that the latter, however, has been missing
for seven years, while Helen’s mother has committed suicide in shame at her
daughter’s conduct, and her brothers Castor and Pollux have either become
gods or have killed themselves, again on her account. Left alone with the
Chorus after Teucer’s hasty escape (Theoclymenus is killing any Greek to set
foot in Egypt), Helen mourns the fate of Troy and of her relatives: all the death
and despoiling caused by her name and beauty, which she now vehemently
rejects (‘Oh that I might, like a painting, be cancelled out and shed my beauty,
receiving in exchange some hideous sembiance’). Her immediate, desperate
response is to consider suicide but the Chorus persuades her to enter the palace and consult the king’s sister, the omniscient virgin prophetess Theonoe
who will be able to reveal the fate of Menelaus. Helen moves away, again giving
in to despair and again bewailing the calamities caused by illusion:
Weep for the tears of Troy!
For Troy, deeds without name have bred
Pain without end. Aphrodite, goddess of joy,
Gave, and I was her gift; thence without respite sprang
Anguish and blood and tears and deep despair;
…
But my curs’d beauty damned with deadly power
Trojan and wandering Greek to sufferings untold.2
2 The text of Helen is that edited by J. Diggle in Euripidis Fabulae, vol iii, Oxford, Clarendon
Press, 1994; the English translation by Philip Vellacott in The Bacchae and Other Plays,
Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972 (1954). Introduction and commentary by B. Castiglioni for
the Valla-​Mondadori edition, Milan, 2021; and by C. Barone, Florence, Giunti, 1995, are excellent. For a general survey of material, see W.B. Stanford, Greek Tragedy and the Emotions,
London, Routledge, 1983.The studies that have helped me shape my approach are: C. Diano,
Forma ed evento, Venice, Marsilio, 1993; C. Diano, Saggezza e poetiche degli antichi; C. Diano,
Studi e saggi di filosofia antica, Padua, Antenore, 1973; E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the
Irrational; T. Gould, The Ancient Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy, Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 1990. On Euripides: C. Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides’ Bacchae,
Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1982; P. Vellacott, Ironic Drama. A Study of Euripides’
Method and Meaning, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975; D. Conacher, Euripides
and the Sophists, London, Duckworth, 1988: A.P. Burnett, Catastrophe Survived. Euripides’
Plays of Mixed Reversal, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971; J. De Romilly, L’évolution du pathétique d’Eschile à Euripide; K. Alt, ‘Zur Anagnorisis in der “Helena” ’, Hermes, 90 (1962): 6–​24;
F. Bertini, ‘L’eidolon di Elena’, in Mythos. Scripta in honorem M. Untersteiner, Genoa, Istituto di
222 Chapter 5
At the precise moment Helen enters the building, Menelaus appears; he has
lost his ship in a storm, and, having left the person he believes to be Helen in
a cave with a small guard, he has come to the palace to ask for assistance. The
Old Woman who receives him warns him that he is in Egypt and explains that
he should depart without ado, given the new king Theoclymenus’ hatred of
the Greeks on account of Helen, who is here and whom he has every intention
of taking for his own pleasure. The dazed Menelaus asks when Helen arrived,
imagining she has been abducted from the cave; on hearing she came from
Sparta before the Greeks set sail for Troy, he can only presume that she is referring to a different Helen, the daughter of some Egyptian Zeus, from some other
Sparta. He has just taken the decision to tackle Theoclymenus in any case
when Helen comes running in to announce Theonoe’s vaticination: Menelaus
is alive and wandering the seas and will shortly arrive in Egypt, or has already
been washed onto the shore. The man in question stands stunned at her words,
while she takes in every detail of his face. After endless questions to establish
their identity, she recognizes her husband and attempts to embrace him, but
Menelaus’ mind is still on the woman in the cave, and he wants nothing to do
with her. A Messenger now arrives, however, from his surviving companions,
to inform him that the Helen in the cave has vanished into the air, revealing
Hera’s trickery. Menelaus is now able to believe his eyes and recognize his
own wife. After seventeen years they finally embrace and recite an extremely
moving ‘recognition duet’, narrating their various misadventures and exchanging impressions with the messenger, too, although Helen is careful to warn
him that Theoclymenus wishes to marry her and will attempt to murder her
husband.
This begins the second part of the play. It is imperative that Helen and
Menelaus escape, but they must first prevent Theonoe (who, as her name
states, is a ‘divine mind’ and thus all-​seeing) from revealing Menelaus’ identity
to her brother. Through a series of varying but convergent arguments –​Helen
appealing to Proteus’ memory and the prophetess’s sense of justice, Menelaus
threatening to kill himself and his wife –​they manage to procure Theonoe’s
silence. Helen sets out a plan of escape: Melenaus, in the tattered clothes he is
wearing, must pretend to be the sole survivor of the shipwreck, and announce
Menelaus’ death at sea to Theoclymenus; Helen, her head shaved in mourning,
is to promise to marry the king in exchange for a ship to perform the funeral
rites at sea for her husband, according to Greek custom. Then, once they have
Filologia Classica e Medievale, 1970, pp. 81–​96; C. Segal, ‘The Two Worlds of Euripides’ Helen’,
Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 102 (1971): 553–​614;
C.W. Willink, ‘The Reunion Duo in Euripides’ Helen’, Classical Quarterly, n.s. 39 (1989): 45–​69.
To Recognize Is a God
223
set sail, with the help of the men left in charge in the cave, they will seize command of the ship and head for Greece. This is precisely what happens: Theonoe
reveals nothing, and Theoclymenus, deceived by the couple, grants them a ship
which the Chorus bless in an extraordinary speech, wishing it a safe ‘flight’ over
the waves. Shortly afterwards the Messenger announces the couple’s escape.
A furious Theoclymenus rages that he will kill Helen, but the Twins, Castor
and Pollux, appear ex machina, revealing the plans of the gods and of destiny
to take Helen up into Olympus, and Menelaus to the Blessed Isles. The Chorus
ends the play with the considerations on the nature of the divine which also
conclude Euripides’ own Medea, Alcestis, Andromache, and the Bacchae.
Departing from the usual practice in classical drama, in Helen the recognition scene does not take place towards the end of the plot, nor does it coincide
with the denouement. Here it occurs towards the end of the first part, an anomalous but cardinal point in the action given that, without Helen’s and Menelaus’
mutual agnition, there can be no flight from Egypt, nor the complete rehabilitation of Helen which is celebrated on her return home. It also, clearly, constitutes the turning-​point of the plot: the moment when the phantom Helen, the
eidolon, disappears to make room for the real Helen; when Menelaus finally
accepts that he has fought ten years for a mere illusion. It is, lastly, point zero
for the two characters, reduced from mythical heroes to human beings with
no designation other than that of simple ‘husband’ and ‘wife’. Abducted not by
Paris but by Hera, Helen is nothing: a supplicant at Proteus’ tomb, she appears
as a wretched woman with her reputation in shreds, pursued by a man she
despises: the shadow of her own past. Menelaus, for his part, is no longer one
of the greatest Achaean leaders, the conqueror of Troy, but, like Ulysses on
approaching the Island of the Phaeacians, a simple survivor of a shipwreck, a
Nobody of shreds and tatters.
On this nothing Euripides constructs an initial, delicate, but persistent
certainty: the recognition which seals seventeen years of separation (almost
as long as that between Penelope and Ulysses) and dispels all illusion while
sanctioning the union between man and woman as the nucleus for all hope,
redemption, and salvation. The move towards anagnorisis is similarly delicate, faltering and slow, as if we had wandered into a second Odyssey. Whilst
Helen, lamenting her fate to the Chorus after Teucer’s flight, had mentioned
that husband and wife would recognize each other through signs known only
to themselves (like Penelope and Ulysses),3 Menelaus has to grapple with the
3 Helen, 290–​291: Odyssey XXIII, 109-​110. If it was staged in 412 BCE, the play was roughly
contemporary with Gorgias’ famous Encomium Helenae and preceded Isocrates’ by about
forty years.
224 Chapter 5
possibility –​absurd in the light of all empirico-​rational evidence –​that his
Helen exists, on this very shore where the shipwreck had landed her husband.
When the Old Woman informs him, he simply refuses to believe it: he has, after
all, fought for her for ten years, and for seven has wandered the seas with her! It
is almost easier to believe that there exists another Sparta, ‘another’, pace Yeats,
‘Troy for her to burn’, and that another Helen lives in Egypt, the daughter of a
man called Zeus.
Immediately afterwards, however, Menelaus is shaken when Helen appears.
As soon as he sees her emerging from the palace, he is turned to stone, unable
to pronounce a syllable. In her turn Helen, seeing a man in rags approach her,
runs to the tomb of Proteus to implore protection. Paradoxically, it seems to
be Menelaus who first recognizes her, while she is as if blinded: the supreme
moment hanging by a hair’s breadth. But seeing is one thing, recognizing
quite another. Helen has no need of secret signs, reasoning, or memory: she
simply observes and understands. At the same time, each asks the other who
he/​she is: the one is too similar to Helen; the other to Menelaus! Prepared by
Theonoe’s prophecy, Helen is more open to recognition, and immediately
accepts that her husband is he, exclaiming, ‘Come to me –​I am your wife!’.
He, however, is far from ready to reciprocate: ‘Wife? What do you mean? Leave
my clothes alone!’. The facts simply fail to square, and when Helen asks him
to believe his own eyes, he replies that while it is most certainly true that she
resembles Helen, the evidence (saphes: ‘that which is clear’) prevents him from
believing it: he already has one Helen. And when the real Helen informs him
that the other is an image created out of air by some god, and that there are not
two Helens, as he seems to believe, but only a name endowed with ubiquity,
Menelaus decides to leave her: ‘The memory of what I went through at Troy is
more convincing than you are’.4
Seeing is most certainly not knowing, nor believing: what speaks directly is
life, experience, suffering felt on the pulse, in the soul, and in the flesh. What is
certain, for Menelaus, are the long years spent doggedly battling to win Helen
back: defamation, death, destruction. This constitutes life. Accepting this
Helen means believing in the unknown, in the unowned: accepting as one’s
own a different story invented by the gods, and another level of existence independent of oneself: in a word, it means making the leap of faith.
In Euripides’ Helen Menelaus can afford not to run this risk. The Messenger
informs him of the ‘prodigy’: the Helen of the cave has vanished into the air,
explaining the divine plan as she departed. And he who was sceptical of the
4 Helen, 577 and 593.
225
To Recognize Is a God
evidence of their eyes, faced with this wonder (thauma), can now yield: ‘Then
all concurs, and the woman speaks the truth! Ah, long-​desired day that brings
you back into my arms!’. ‘That is this’ (tout est’ekeino), is what Menelaus says
literally, as if anticipating Aristotle’s outos ekeinos in the Poetics:5 a paradox
indeed, that two divergent realities are now recognized as one (‘all concurs’),
when one of the two is annulled by a ‘miracle’, and a thauma is accepted as
proof! Helen had required considerably less. After a moment’s hesitation,
given the ‘stranger’s’ condition, she was more than ready to welcome him
back. Bursting with desire and longing (‘Oh, Menelaus, when will you come?
How I yearn for your arrival!’, she had exclaimed on leaving the palace), Helen
looks and believes. ‘Oh gods!’, she murmurs, ‘Because to recognize those we love
is a god’.6
To recognize those we love is a god. The original, theos gar kai to
gignoskein philous, leaves no room for doubt: in recognizing our loved ones
(and the sentence could also be translated, ‘it is a god that makes us recognize those we love’) there is, or there comes into play, something divine
(theos could also be an adjective). It makes little difference whether the
divinity is the cause or the thing: what Helen proclaims when she understands who is standing in front of her is that to love is human, to recognize
divine: that the agnition between two human beings linked through love
has something of the life of the gods in it, and is in itself a numen. This is
a truth of no small significance. It places the divine within the process of
awareness and the love between husband and wife, and at the same time
makes that awareness, when accompanied by this love, an emanation of
the divine. Apparently a small, but in reality a huge certainty. Helen has no
need of the leap of faith: prepared by desire and longing, she perceives the
divine immediately, within herself, an instant flood of feeling the moment
she perceives her husband. Helen has no need of the leap of faith because
she herself represents faith: that between husband and wife which here is a
seamless part of her faith in god.
∵
Menelaus, with shared tears of joy, now echoes his wife’s words after the proof
of the miracle announced by the Messenger. He, too, now ‘believes’ in his wife
and in god:
5 Helen, 623, Poetics, 1448 b 17: and see Introduction, p. 24.
6 Helen, 560.
226 Chapter 5
No dearer sight than this! All grief forgotten!
Daughter of Zeus, you are mine to have and hold.
I claimed you once, when the Heavenly Twins your brothers
Rode their white horses under the torchlit night,
And their shouts of blessing echoed, echoed again –​
Once, long ago; and then
Hera stole you away, and my house was empty.7
This moment, when Menelaus too is moved by the certainty that the divine
exists in the recognition of those who love, is the moment of supreme balance
in the whole of the play. This human-​based certainty is the only one Helen
offers concerning the divine. The moment over, the divine nature becomes the
object of doubt. When Menelaus attempts to clarify the whole issue with the
Messenger, he denies that Helen was the cause or even the divine instrument
of human suffering at Troy: ‘It was not Helen’, he states, ‘for the gods deceived
us, leaving in our hands the sorrowful image of a cloud’.8 This statement in
itself constitutes one of the most important signifying nuclei in the play: the
opposition between reality and illusion, the futility of war, and divine deceit.
The Messenger then turns to Helen with a reply that marks the beginning of
the impassioned meditation on the nature of the divine which the play now
becomes:9
My daughter! The ways of the gods are involved and mysterious; they
send us good and bad fortune in turn, and all is for the best. One man
suffers, but soon his suffering is over and he prospers beyond his hopes;
another man does not suffer, but when his turn comes the luck he
enjoyed so long deserts him, and he perishes miserably. So you and your
husband had your share of suffering –​you were ill spoken of, and he
was caught in the storm of battle. As long as he struggled for what he
wanted, he gained nothing; now good fortune has come to him of his
own accord.10
7
8
9
10
Helen, 636–​645. At line 644 Menelaus says, literally, that ‘an evil (kakon) was changed, or
transformed itself, into a good (agathon)’, a formulation with which, with the addition of
God as an agent, the text of Genesis 45 would agree.
Helen, 704–​705.
This is present also in Hippolytus, 1102–​1110; Hecuba, 488–​491 and 619–​628; Heracles, 508–​
512; Trojan Women, 1201–​1206.
Helen, 711–​719.
To Recognize Is a God
227
Human and divine: no longer interacting, but separate and parallel. Changing,
uncertain, and unequal the destiny of humans, in the hands of tykhe, fortune: multi-​faceted, oblique, and resistant to all understanding and interpretation, the divinity. How far we have travelled, in one hundred and fifty lines,
from the luminous certainty of Helen, ‘Recognizing those we love is a god’! Is
this, then, the only god we are to know?
Helen’s reply is long and complex. When the Messenger launches into a
tirade against the prophecies of soothsayers –​predictions based on fire or birdsong –​arguing the merits of reason and common sense, he simultaneously
recognizes the benefits of offering sacrifices to the gods to ensure their benevolence. Some time later Theonoe actually announces a council of the gods,
presided over by Zeus, on the question of Helen’s and Menelaus’ return to their
homeland, disagreement existing between Hera (for) and Aphrodite (against).
This seeming rehabilitation of Homer’s Olympus, however, is immediately
qualified, Theonoe adding that the decision rests neither with Zeus nor with
destiny: she herself, a human being, will decide, either revealing their presence
to Theoclymenus as Aphrodite desires, or hiding the truth as required by Hera.
The gods, then, exist, their wishes can be known, and tensions among the gods
can be represented anthropomorphically, as long as this task is left to a human
being with nous, a woman called ‘divine mind’ –​the mind which for Euripides,
following the teachings of Anaxagoras, ‘is us and within each of us is god’.11 She
it is who must decide the solution (telos) of the gods’ controversy, and in judging, she will most certainly draw on her knowledge of the divine; ultimately,
however, she will rely on her moral good sense and human sense of justice.
When Helen and Menelaus appeal to her in speeches which are structured
like legal pleadings to sway the judge, Theonoe pronounces both the sentence
and the criteria adduced: extreme piety, naturally –​i.e. awe and veneration of
the gods –​but principally love and self-​consideration, which means honouring the good name of her father and avoiding the ignominy which would be
hers should she favour her brother; and then dike, the justice to which she has
raised a magnificent inner temple, and which eschews human life to survive
within the immortal knowledge of the dead:
By nature and by choice I venerate the gods. I respect myself; I am anxious not to cloud my father’s good name; while to my brother I must
refuse any service that would turn to his dishonour. Within my soul I have
11
Anaxagoras, fr. 48 dk: Euripides, fr. 1018, from an unidentified play, Fragments, ed.
C. Collard and M. Cropp, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press (Loeb), 2009, vol. viii,
pp. 576–​577.
228 Chapter 5
consecrated a great temple to justice … So I will try to save Menelaus;
and since Hera wishes to help him, I will cast my vote with hers. For
Aphrodite –​may she forgive me; but I have had no dealings with her in
the past, and I will grow old a virgin as I am now … I should indeed commit an injustice were I not to return Helen to you; for if my father were
alive he would certainly restore you to each other. Such wrongs must be
expiated by all, both the dead and the living. The mind of the departed
is without life; but it has become one with immortal spirit, and therefore
has immortal understanding.12
Just as it had previously been a woman to assert the divine presence in the act of
recognition, so now it is another woman to preach supreme moral awareness,
an awareness encompassing the divine, but privileging human reason; and it
will again be a woman, Helen, to elaborate an efficient stratagem of escape
(Menelaus meanwhile producing plan after unrealizable plan), although it
means repudiating, once and for all, her celebrated beauty, shaving her head
to fake bereavement. It will again be Helen who recognizes as ‘providential’
the seeming disaster of the shipwreck which has reduced Menelaus to rags,
whereby Theoclymenus may be convinced of the truth of his presumed death
and persuaded to agree to a sea burial. In short, it is the woman, and Helen in
particular, on whom the action hinges; hers is the intellect which plans, and
hers the capacity to sacrifice her self-​image of beauty to obtain safety. If not
exactly divine, woman is the earth’s nearest manifestation.
Divinity in its non-​terrestrial form, on the other hand, remains for men an
inscrutable enigma. When, immediately after the hatching of their escape plan,
the Chorus appears in the first stasimon of the play, invoking the nightingale
in painfully plaintive lines, and evoking the sufferings of Helen and Menelaus,
the Greeks and the Trojans, and all those who seek glory through war only to
find themselves under the ground and in the power of Hades, there again surfaces the questioning of the divine:
Shy nightingale, mistress of woodland music,
Rapt votress, sweetening with each anguished note
The green leaf-​curtained chambers of the forest,
Come to my call, and share my sorrow’s burden
With shrill grief rippling from your russet throat.
12
Helen, 998–​1016: perhaps a vague anticipation of Plato’s idea of the immortality of the
soul as expounded in the Phaedo: see Euripides, Fragments, 638 and 833.
To Recognize Is a God
229
Sharp was the pain of Helen, hot the tears
Troy’s women shed, cursing the Hellene spears,
Since Trojan oars raced the rough Malean water,
And Paris, doomed in love, brought home from Sparta,
With mocking Aphrodite as his guide,
The phantom Helen for his fatal bride.
…
What is god, or non-​god,
Or that which is in between?
Who among mortals could ever claim,
For all their searching, to have found it,
When the matters of the gods toss now here, turn now there
To reach unlooked for, contradictory ends.
You, Helen, are Zeus’ own daughter,
In Leda’s firm womb swoopingly planted.
Yet your name, unjust, unfaithful, flies –​
The name of impiety, the name of treachery,
Throughout your native Greece.
Among mortals I see
Nothing that is clear,
But the divine word I have
Experienced as true.13
The invocation to the nightingale acts as prologue to a lyrical re-​writing of
the whole system of myths surrounding the Trojan War and the ‘return’ of the
Greek heroes (issues examined in the two antistrophes omitted above) but is
also a more strictly philosophical meditation. The question, preannounced in
the human-​divine separation in the Messenger’s speech, is the alternative, now
posited as a distinctio, in directly dialectical terms:14 the Chorus asks what constitutes god (theos) or non-​god (me theos), or that which lies in between (to
meson). Basically, the Chorus is extending the terms of the question, inserting
the negative term (being –​non-​being) and the middle term which links them,
as indeed Protagoras and Gorgias had already done. Thus: it is not given to
know whether the gods are or are not (Protagoras); if something is, it is either
being or non-​being, or being and non-​being together (Gorgias). Humanity
finds no answer to the Chorus’s question, not even from philosophy: no mortal
13
14
Helen, 1107–​1164, my translation.
The formulation is clearly reminiscent of the opening of the ‘Hymn to Zeus’ in Aeschylus’
Agamemnon, 160 ff.
230 Chapter 5
can ever claim to have ‘solved’ or found it out even after a long search, both
because the actions of the gods frequently thwart human expectations, proceeding obliquely or subject to rapid change, and because human vicissitudes
(cf. Helen, Menelaus, the Greeks and the Trojans) are a contradictory switch-​
back ride. But the impossibility of a reply is endemic to the human condition,
as philosophy demonstrates. Carlo Diano, in his extremely lucid analysis of the
passage and its context, writes: ‘God, non-​god, and God and Non-​god together,
i.e. a cause operating under an order and sense of justice, or the absence of any
finality proper to tykhe, or causes which operate each time with an aim, but
lack order or any sense of justice, merely following wilful, immediate desire’.15
This, precisely, is still our dilemma.16
The alternative is radical in the extreme: without justice there is no divinity. The consequence of this is that nothing can be predicated of the gods,
because nothing can be understood, to which we should immediately add
that very little can be said of humanity either. Among mortals no clarity exists.
Paradoxically, however, the ‘word’ of the gods can be verified as ‘true’; but the
Chorus, while claiming personal experience of this, fails to clarify exactly how
and when. Helen has so far produced no proof of it at all, and the only ‘true’
words have been Theonoe’s, a ‘divine mind’ only in that she is human and with
a keen sense of justice, and Helen’s, the female by definition.
The Chorus plunges the audience into total uncertainty. Even if we accept
that it really believes in the word of the gods, we have to recognize that it does
so after discovering in transcendence nothing less than God, or Nothing, or God
and Nothing together. Shortly afterwards, in the second stasimon, the Chorus
further complicates matters by celebrating the mother of the gods, identifying
her, in a totally exceptional rewriting of myth, with Demeter, the goddess of
the hills who ‘Ran to and fro frantic over the mountains,/​Through green glades
of the forest,/​Scanning the swirl of every river,/​Scouring the deep-​voiced swell
of the salt ocean,/​Searching in anguish for her lost Persephone,/​Maiden of
mysteries’. The Chorus possibly believes in some new cult –​Dionysian, perhaps –​such as that which pulses through the Bacchae and brings about a
terrifying recognition. Or perhaps it is intrinsically uncertain as to the whole
15
16
C. Diano, ‘Teodicea e poetica nella tragedia attica’, in Saggezza e poetiche degli antichi,
p. 309.
The basic dilemma lies in the alternative between tykhe (event) and the gods as expressed
in the Hypsipyle, H. von Arnim, ed., Supplementum Euripideum, fr. 63, Bonn, Marcus und
Weber, 1913, p. 65: and see C. Diano, Forma ed evento, pp. 40–​42: Form and Event: Principles
for an Interpretation of the Greek World, New York, Fordham University Press, 2020,
pp. 30-​33.
To Recognize Is a God
231
problem of the divine, wavering between philosophical analysis, canonical
religion, and a new ‘mysticism’. When Menelaus invokes Zeus and the gods,
pleading their assistance in the coming flight, the Chorus adds its voice in a
powerful stasimon which first reenacts the ship’s flight across the waves, then
evokes the Twins:
Oars of the East,
Winged Sidonian galley,
Flash through the foam-​spray!
Darling of Nereus, dance,
While the dancing dolphins follow!
Now in the soft season,
The sea smoothed with the wind’s caress,
When the voice of Calm, the grey-​blue daughter of Ocean,
Quietly sings,
Now spread sails to the breeze,
Good-​bye to the sheltering port,
Grip and pull on the pinewood sweep,
Crew of Menelaus, and carry in triumph
Helen to the harbours of home and the city that Perseus built.
…
O for wings to tread the air
Where the cranes in ordered flight
Shun the wintry rain-​storm,
Seek their southern homeland;
Swift, obedient to their eldest leader’s cry
Rising shrill, triumphant,
As they near the frontiers
Of this land, where rainlesss valleys teem with corn!
Turn, you long-​necked travellers,
Who run winged races with the dancing clouds,
And while the Pleiads still are in mid-​course
And Orion rides the darkened sky, swoop down,
Alight on Eurotas and proclaim your news
That the taker of Troy, Menelaus, is coming home.
Speed along your airy path,
Riding sons of Tyndareus,
You whose home is heaven
And the stars’ bright orbits!
Helen’s brothers, Helen’s rescuers, ride on,
232 Chapter 5
Skim the green and foam-​white ridges
On the dark face of the ocean,
Bring soft breath of welcome winds, the gift of Zeus …17
The movement from the ocean to the gods is part of the same élan: as the
sea opens at the passage of the Phoenician ship, across the horizon of the
whole Mediterranean, from Egypt to Argus, up into the crane-​crammed sky
of Libya and through the constellations, in the same way the Chorus invokes
the flight of the Twins through the ether boiling with stars to land, smooth as
a breeze, on the milky green of the sea. The exhalation of humanity, gods, and
nature is, for a moment, in the piercing nostalgia of the Chorus –​though not
in reality –​all one.
And yet, their prayer is answered. The Twins appear to appease
Theoclymenus’ anger and produce the play’s dénouement. And although theirs
is an ‘artificial’, ex machina epiphany, as lambasted by Aristotle (Euripides
being first in his firing-​line), it provides adequate reply to the Chorus’s invocation, also making its contribution to the general problematics of the play. What
can the Messenger’s words regarding divine impenetrability, and those of the
Chorus as to god, non-​god or god and non-​god possibly mean in the light of
this apparition of Castor and Pollux? Is all that questioning, all that passionate, desperate research to be swept under the ontological carpet by the divine
Twins? Well no: if anything, their appearance on the scene at this point can
only serve to underscore the unpredictable, unfathomable nature of the gods,
which the whole of Helen proclaims, and which even emerges in the Twins’
words to Theoclymenus: ‘We, now raised by Zeus to godhead,/​Would long ago
have contrived to rescue her from your land,/​But bowed to Fate, and the divine
purpose thus fulfilled’. It should also be noted that Helen, with Theonoe, has so
far seemed the only truly ‘divine’ character in the play; now her own brothers,
basing themselves on the Helen cult existing in several places, and possibly
on the Pythagoreans’ Helene-​Selene (Helen-​Moon) identification, predict her
future deification, ‘for such is the will of Zeus’.
Helen, then, like many of Euripides’ plays, ties Gordian knots around the
nature of the divine. Small wonder that the Chorus round off the question (and
the play) by admitting only a minimalist, if marvellous, transcendency:
Many are the forms of the deity,
And unforeseable the god’s decisions.
17
Helen, 1451–​1521.
233
To Recognize Is a God
The things we thought would happen do not happen;
The unexpected god makes possible.18
The only certainties, it would appear, are represented by Theonoe’s mind,
divine because human and justice-​orientated, and the sudden illumination
which leads Helen to exclaim: recognizing those we love is a god.
∵
It has been maintained that the scenes of the disciples’ recognition of the risen
Christ in the fourth Gospel (traditionally attributed to John) echo the human-​
divine agnitions developed by the Alexandrine romance, and, ultimately, by
classical theatre and epic. If this is true –​and elements in common there most
certainly are –​then John has rewritten Graeco-​Roman literature in a wholly
new way, at the same time performing an extraordinary re-​Scripting of the
Hebrew Bible for good measure.
The Gospel according to Mark, generally considered the oldest, ends mysteriously (at 16. 8: the following verses are a later addition) without Jesus’
appearance after the resurrection, and, in an explosive silence, with the fear of
the women at the tombside. Mary Magdalen, Mary the mother of James, and
Salome discover the tomb open, with a young man sitting inside. He informs
them that Jesus is not there because risen, and that they should tell the disciples he has ‘gone before’ them to Galilee, where they shall see him. The women
flee in silence and terror.19
In the canonical forms of all four Gospels there exist episodes after the crucifixion and burial when Jesus appears to his followers, first, and most of all,
to the women. John, however (and the Marcan appendix), reduces the female
figures to one only, Mary Magdalen, and it is John, with Luke and his scene on
the road to Emmaus, who constructs the most astonishing, and astonishingly
beautiful scenes of the whole tradition. The last two chapters of the fourth
Gospel, 20 and 21 (the latter considered an epilogue added by a redactor) are
cases in point, the former constituting one of the finest dramatico-​narrative
masterpieces ever written. Chapter 20 is clearly divided into two sections,
each in its turn based on two intersecting episodes which together mark an
18
19
The same lines close Euripides’ Alcestis, Andromache, and Bacchae; only four at the end of
Medea (the first line is different); Iphigenia in Tauris, Phoenician Women and Orestes have
the same three concluding lines, celebrating Victory.
See F. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy, pp. 65–​73.
234 Chapter 5
ascending –​and unique –​line of passage from ignorance to awareness –​to
recognition.20
Chapter 20 of the fourth Gospel,21 then, opens in the pre-​dawn darkness
of the first day of the week, Sunday. Mary Magdalen (who, with Jesus’ mother,
her sister, and ‘the other disciple, whom Jesus loved’, had been present at the
crucifixion) goes to the tomb where they had placed the body and finds the
stone removed. She runs to Peter and ‘that other disciple’, Jesus’ favourite
(whose name is never given in the Gospel, although tradition takes him to be
John himself, the putative author), and tells them that someone has taken the
Lord away from the sepulchre ‘and we know not where they have laid him’. The
scene here changes: Peter and the much-​beloved disciple rush to the tomb,
at first in step, and then Peter is overtaken by ‘the other disciple’, who is thus
the first to arrive. He stoops down and sees the shroud which had covered the
body, but does not enter. Peter then arrives and enters immediately, spotting
the shroud and the ‘piece of cloth’ which had covered the head (not on the
ground with the shroud, but set apart). The disciple who had been the first to
arrive now enters, ‘and he saw, and believed’, to which the Evangelist adds: ‘For
20
21
It is essential to remember that John and Matthew do not recount either the Ascension –​
present in Luke and in the Acts composed by Luke, and in the appendix to Mark –​or the
Pentecost of the Acts.
The texts of John, and of the New Testament in general, which I use here are indicated above in the Note on Texts. Translations are my own, based on King James and
later versions. The commentaries by R. Bultmann (in English translation), The Gospel of
John. A Commentary, Oxford, Blackwell, 1971, and by R. Schnackenburg (also in English
translation), The Gospel according to St John, vol. 3, Commentary 13–​21, Colorado Springs,
Crossroad, 1990 (1982), are classics. The two massive volumes (29 and 29a) of the Anchor
Bible devoted to John’s Gospel by Raymond Brown, Garden City, 1982, include translation,
guide, and commentary which are absolutely indispensable for anyone who wants to cope
with this text, as is his The Death of the Messiah, 2 vols., New York-​London, Doubleday, 1994.
I owe a lot also to Frank Kermode’s essay, ‘John’, in the Literary Guide to the Bible edited by
R. Alter and himself, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987; and to the two essays
by George Steiner, Two Cocks and Two Suppers, in his No Passion Spent, London, Faber,
1996. One would go nowhere with John’s Gospel without C.H. Dodd, The Interpretation
of the Fourth Gospel and Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1953 and 1963; and ‘The Appearances of the Risen Christ: An Essay in
Form-​Criticism’, in his More New Testament Studies, Manchester, Manchester University
Press, 1968, pp. 102–​133; and without J. Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 1991. S. Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor, London,
Harper Collins, 1993. R.H. Fuller, The Formation of the Resurrection Narratives, London,
spck, 19802; and C. Lavergne, ‘Le sudarium et la position des linges après la résurrection’,
Sindon, 3 (1961): 1–​58 are important for my argument. See, in general, D. Culbertson, The
Poetics of Revelation: Recognition and the Narrative Tradition.
To Recognize Is a God
235
as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead’. The
two then return home.
The account is both dramatic and enigmatic. The first person to be presented to us is Magdalen (as I shall call her from now on, following a tradition of some two millennia); in the darkness she notices only that the stone
has been removed before running to tell the two disciples simply that someone has removed Jesus’ body. This, of course, is only her personal conviction
(or deduction?), leading the reader naturally to extrapolate (though with
no certainty) that the tomb is now empty. Magdalen then uses a curious
plural: ‘we know not where they have laid him’. But the text shows her alone
at the tomb. Was she, then, as in the other Gospels, accompanied by other
women, the plural documenting a slip on the part of John or a redactor,
a slip that would presuppose an earlier version, and the as yet mysterious
reduction of three women to one? Or is Magdalen pre-​emptively including the two disciples in her unknowing? Whatever the reason, the phrase
expresses all her anxiety and ignorance. That Jesus’ body had been removed
by someone might appear a logically plausible, if hasty, conclusion when
faced with a missing tombstone: an emotional leap fuelled by fear and
non-​understanding.
The tension mounts, the canny director moving the action abruptly to other
characters. The pace accelerates in the second half of the scene, with the two
disciples neck and neck, then one pulling away in the race to the sepulchre.
Why does ‘that other disciple’, the favourite, overtake Peter? Because he is
younger? Or because, as Bultmann has it, he represents Hebrew Christianity,
which precedes that of the Gentiles? Like Magdalen, he, too, does not enter
the tomb (why? Is he recognizing Peter’s right of precedence?). Some glow
of daylight must in the meantime have appeared, however, since on going
closer to the tomb than she had, he stoops down to look inside and notices the
shroud on the ground. Until now we had seen only the stone removed; now,
slowly, we make out some of the objects within the tomb. We move nearer, and
see more, in the next ‘frame’ when Peter arrives and rushes in and spots the
head ‘cloth’ (the whole scene echoing, and counterpointing, that of Lazarus
at 11: 44). When he is followed by ‘the other disciple’, the objects suddenly take
on the value of signs. It becomes clear, as the oldest exegesis maintains, that
if anyone had wanted to carry away the body, they would certainly not have
stopped to unclothe it, far less gather up the cloth and place it to one side. Yet
these objects are signs only for the beloved disciple, not yet for Peter: he ‘sees’
(in John the verb connotes much more than the merely optical) and, instantly,
without transforming the signs into material proof, believes. The beloved disciple has neither time nor need to reason (what Aristotle, within the context of
236 Chapter 5
recognition, would call a syllogismos): signs are necessary not for agnition, but
to push him into taking the leap of faith.
Yet even here the text is not totally clear. The next sentence, ‘for as yet they
knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead’, brings its own
problems. Minimal textual cohesion would surely require something such as
‘for they knew the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead’, or ‘for Peter
as yet knew not the scripture’. Why the negative, why the plural? Who does
this subject stand for? Peter, as we would imagine, or Peter and the beloved
disciple, who, however, we have just been reliably informed, ‘believes’? The
sentence is not the completion of the preceding one, and shrouds the object of
the second disciple’s faith in some obscurity. What has he believed? Probably
what Jesus had repeatedly promised in his last great sermon before the Passion
(John 14: 28; 16: 9; 16: 17, etc.): ‘I go away, and come again unto you … I go unto
the Father’. Was this, though, a definite promise of the resurrection from the
dead? The Gospel tells us that the disciple believed (episteusen), but that
they failed to understand (edeisan) the scripture (or script, writing: graphen).
Believing is one thing, understanding what is written is another: particularly if
the written text is the Scripture.
The beloved disciple believes, pure and simple. The text has so far thinned
out into gaps and silence. Now, the question marks intact, it assumes a strange
fullness. All uncertainty seems swept away by the disciple’s believing. Whether
or not we join him in his faith, the account has not a shadow of doubt: he sees
and believes. His certainty is, however, not shared by Peter, nothing of whose
reaction is communicated to us, and who radically rejects Magdalen’s ‘belief’
that ‘they have taken away the Lord’. With no further explanation, the two men
return home.
Magdalen, for her part, is now outside the sepulcher, weeping (did she, then,
return alone, afterwards, or with the disciples? Did they address her?). While she
weeps, she too finally bends down to see inside the tomb, although without entering. But she does not see, or does not notice, the shroud and head cloth. What she
sees are two angels en leukois –​‘in white garments’, or, simply, ‘in white’, sitting one
at the head and one at the feet of where the body of Jesus had been. Like Abraham
at Mamre, in our last chapter, Magdalen is totally unperturbed by the two who
are here –​unlike the Mamre episode –​clearly identified as superhuman beings.
The angels should, as angheloi, messengers, be there to announce something; they
appear, however, as two lights framing an emptiness, two whitenesses underlining
an absence at the very moment they mutely imply a presence: something –​an
event –​absolutely out of the ordinary.
What the angels do is not announce but question: they ask Magdalen why
she is crying (an insistence on tears, as shortly before and shortly afterwards,
To Recognize Is a God
237
which underlines not only the emotional charge but the words of Jesus at
16: 20: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, that ye shall weep and lament, but the world
shall rejoice’). She, in all candour, gives as her answer what she has thought
from the beginning and will shortly repeat, for the third time, to Jesus himself: ‘Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have
laid him’. The problematic plural, ‘we know not’, of verse 3, is now replaced by
the more logical singular, ‘I know not’, but this firm conviction would imply
she has had no contact with the two disciples, least of all with the beloved
one. Magdalen’s anxiety and ignorance now appear as anguish and despair, as
if she were grieving Jesus’ double disappearance: that into death, and that of
the dead body.
Then, suddenly, the dramatic reversal occurs: no sooner has she pronounced
these words than she turns round and finds Jesus standing there, presumably
in full light, outside the sepulcher. Magdalen fails to recognize him (‘and knew
not that it was Jesus’). He immediately addresses her, however: ‘Woman, why
weepest thou? whom seekest thou?’; and, believing him to be the gardener, she
replies from the depths of her obsession: ‘Sir, if thou have borne him hence,
tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away’. Magdalen does not
recognize –​ she misrecognizes. Her blindness is total. But why does Jesus put
these questions to her at all, the first reiterating the words of the angels, the
second repeating the words which were the first he ever spoke in the Gospel
(1: 38) when questioning and ‘calling’ the disciples? Surely he already knows
the answer. Is he testing her faith and love? The writer is clearly dramatising
the scene with a series of questions whose implied addressée is the reader.
The agnition seems about to implode. But then Jesus speaks to her again,
simply pronouncing her name: Mariàm, ‘Mary’. Then, turning round (but
had she not turned round already? In what direction does she now turn?
Significantly, at least two versions read ‘recognizing’ instead of ‘turning’), the
woman replies ‘in Hebrew’ (but what language have they been speaking until
now?): Rabbunì, ‘which is to say, Master’. Recognition has taken place. And suddenly we understand why ‘the women’ in the other Gospels have now, in John,
become one only: an ingenious invention which gives us an agnition scene
worthy of Sophocles and Euripides (and which, incidentally, contributes to the
whole legend of Magdalen which grows over the centuries to come).
The questions, however, remain (and abound): why did Magdalen not recognize Jesus when she saw him, having been so close to him in the past? Was
he disguised as a gardener, as if he were an Athena disguised as a shepherd
to appear to the newly-​returned Ulysses? Or has his appearance radically
changed? And then is the fact that he knows her name, with the suggestive
circumstance of the two white angels, enough to prove that the man is Jesus?
238 Chapter 5
Might it not be the tone and timbre of the voice to make her turn her head,
astounding her and flooding her with the truth? And if so, why is the particular
tone not described?
Enough questions: let me try to give some answers. Jesus appears as a
human being: he is taken for the gardener. But he is no longer, in appearance,
the Jesus Magdalen knew so well. Of course, he has been through dying, death,
and burial, yet none of the pallor, rigor mortis, or decomposition of a corpse
are indicated, nor the indefinable inconsistency of a ghost (far less the luminous, numinous beauty of a god, transfigured). Jesus appears as a normal,
flesh-​and-​blood being, but different (‘in another form’, as the addition to Mark
has it). The voice would seem to be the same, but only when pronouncing her
name; when he had spoken a few moments before, Magdalen had failed to
recognize him.
Few answers are forthcoming, then –​fewer, in fact, than in the case of
the apparition to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke’s Gospel,
where they at least recognize him when he breaks and blesses the bread, thus
repeating the rite of the Eucharist. Here, in John, there are no such sacramental pointers, although Jesus’ words concerning the good shepherd (10: 3 ff.) are
evoked, when he opens the gate of the penfold, calls the sheep one by one,
by name, and is recognized and followed on account of his voice. Some readers may wish to associate this Mariam with the Miriam who, in Exodus 2: 8,
recognizes and saves Moses (her brother) for Pharaoh’s daughter; just as that
Miriam was the prophetess of the first redemption, so this Mariam (the same
name, in Aramaic) announces the second (and John rewrites not only himself,
but the second book of the Pentateuch too). The alert reader of John will thus
recognize in Magdalen’s recognition an underlying theological dimension.
A shadow of this could even be seen as prefigured in Isaiah (42: 1) when the
Lord promises Israel: ‘Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by
thy name; thou art mine’. When God calls, He possesses and saves: those who
truly listen to Him recognize Him. The ultra-​canny reader will remember that
the theme of ‘recognition’ is present from the beginning of John’s Gospel, in
the Prologue: ‘He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the
world knew him not … But as many as received him, to them gave he power to
become the sons of God’.
All this, however, has little to do with the recognition as such. At this
moment Magdalen –​unlike the beloved disciple –​does not believe, but calls
him ‘master’, recognizing him as nothing more than he had been before his
death. The agnition is the focus of narratorial attention here, but a shroud of
mystery surrounds it: a human phenomenon which, however, has something
of the unfamiliar, disturbing, and even otherworldly. Magdalen is not able to
To Recognize Is a God
239
exclaim, with Helen, ‘to recognize those we love is a god’: she can only accept
Jesus for what he was and is –​someone, a man, who has returned from the
dead. To stage the recognition between a human being and an unchanging,
ever-​transcendent God, is simple by comparison: Moses and the Burning Bush,
or Elijah and the ‘still, small voice’. The problems arise when God appears in
human form, as to Abraham, at Mamre, and are compounded when the God is
to be represented as mortal man –​mortal to the point of death, and then again
mortal, from beyond death. It is hard to imagine what the Yahwist would have
thought of it, or Euripides and Helen’s Chorus!
To recognize this man we must look death in the face and become that
face: recognizing those we love means dying a little, to use Proust’s expression,
rather than meeting the god within the process. At the same time, to recognize this man in the present circumstances means a journey beyond death,
recognizing that he is beyond the becoming to which he is subjected. To recognize Jesus now implies the discovery, in the flesh, of the being-​this-​here, on the
threshold between metaphysics on the one hand, and theology on the other.
We can hardly forget that this is precisely one of the central messages of the
Gospel according to John. Jesus has on several occasions proclaimed his being
(following Isaiah 43: 10). ‘If you believe not that I am (hoti ego eimi), you shall
die in your sins’, he warns the Jews (8: 24), adding (8: 28), ‘When you have lifted
up the Son of man, then you shall know that I am’, and finally proclaiming: prin
Abraam genesthai ego eimi: ‘Before Abraham became, I am’ (8: 58). These statements are to be taken as absolute: not so much metaphysical as directly theological. When Jesus says I am, what he is declaring is I Am, and applying to
himself the formula God uses to reveal Himself to Moses (Exodus 3: 14): eheye
asher eheye; Ego eimi ho on; ‘i am that i am … i am hath sent me unto
you’. Jesus is preaching his own supreme Being.
It must be admitted that in this scene of recognition John rewrites with
extraordinary drama and sense of theatre not just the recognition scenes in
Graeco-​Roman literature, but those of the Hebrew Bible and the Synoptic
Gospels themselves. He suggests that his readers open their eyes on the dizzying concept of God made man, and does so with narrative devices of disarming
simplicity and disturbing perception, by questioning: the head twice turned,
a gardener, a voice, and a name. And all this is done in defiance of tradition,
placing centre-​stage a woman. John possibly intended to fulfil the words of the
bride in the Song of Songs (3: 1–​4): ‘By night on my bed I sought him whom my
soul loves: I sought him, but I found him not. I will rise now, and go about the
city in the streets, … and I will seek him whom my soul loves … The watchmen
that go about the city found me: to whom I said, Have you seen him whom my
soul loves? Scarce had I passed from them, when I found him whom my soul
240 Chapter 5
loves: I held him, and would not let him go’. What we can be certain of is that if
the beloved disciple is the first to believe, it is a woman who first recognizes: e
ciò non fa d’onor poco argomento –​no small honour, this, in Dante’s words.
The scene, however, continues, and if hitherto it has been suspended
between the human and the divine, the metaphysical and the theological,
it now takes a purely prophetic and theological turn. As soon as Magdalen
exclaims ‘Rabbunì’, Jesus adds the famous Noli me tangere, a clumsy mistranslation of the Greek, and more closely ‘do not hold me back, or cling to me’: ‘For
I am not yet ascended to my father’, he explains, ‘but go to my brethren and
say unto them: I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and
to your God’. So far we have witnessed a being-​this-​here, and being, and Being.
We now hear proclaimed the being-​where which Jesus had announced to the
Pharisees and to the disciples.
When a number of the inhabitants of Jerusalem had asked with skepticism
whether Jesus was the Messiah of whom ‘no man knows whence he is’, while
Jesus’ origins were adequately known, he had stated: ‘You both know me, and
you know whence I am: and I am not come of myself, but he that sent me is
true, whom you know not … Yet a little while am I with you, and then I go unto
him that sent me. You shall seek me, and shall not find me: and where I am
(hopou eimi ego), thither you cannot come’ (7: 25–​34). To the disciples, on the
contrary, he had promised: ‘And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come
again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there you may be also’.
And to Thomas’s question, ‘Lord, we know not where you go; and how can we
know the way?’, he had replied with one of the crucial statements of the fourth
Gospel: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man comes unto the father, but
by me’ (14: 3–​6).
The being-​where of Jesus is beyond time and the world of humans (8: 23;
17: 14), with the Father, in the Father (14: 20), in the fulness of life (14: 19) and
of his glory (17: 24), and where the disciples will also go. It is this that he orders
Magdalen to announce to his followers: the recognition is extended to the
Father and to the God of all, to the where of the ascension which ‘is coming to
pass’ (human time is short-​circuiting) even as he is speaking with the woman.
The agnition ends in an indirect revelation of glory; and Magdalen is quick to
apprehend this. When her brief, normal, and most bizarre conversation with
Jesus is over, she rushes to the disciples to tell them she has seen not the ‘master’, as she had denoted him a few minutes ago, but –​thereby fulfilling the
prefiguration in the episode of the blind man healed (9. 35–​38) –​the Lord.
∵
To Recognize Is a God
241
The beloved disciple believed without seeing; Mary Magdalen recognizes
while seeing a different Jesus. Her agnition is indispensable for establishing a
continuity between the previous Jesus, the Jesus of the here and now, and the
Jesus of the here, now, and forever. Magdalen’s recognition is the human basis
of faith, and can be extended into a more ample awareness, a superior revelation. The evening of that same day, while the disciples are gathered together
behind closed doors ‘for fear of the Jews’, Jesus comes and stands ‘in the midst’,
saying ‘Peace be unto you’. Jesus’ nature has obviously changed: his body, the
Gospel implies, can pass through closed doors (or walls) and materialize suddenly within a room. But his is not the apparition of a ghost. Having greeted
them, he then shows them his hands and side: the (seemingly) material parts
of his body where the wounds and scars of the crucifixion are still visible. At
the sight of these, the disciples are ‘glad’: the signs are those of recognition, and
the subsequent rejoicing. In dramatic terms, this is the point which is closest
to Euripides’ Helen.
Jesus is both different and the same: a similar, and similarly impenetrable
message was implied in the scene with Magdalen. Only Paul, in the famous
­chapter 15 of the First Letter to the Corinthians, attempts to give an explanation –​not rational, but by analogy. ‘If there be no resurrection of the dead’, he
passionately writes after listing Jesus’ many appearances after the resurrection,
‘then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain,
and your faith is also vain’. As to the bald facts of resurrection, Paul can only
offer a simile: that which is sown cannot come to life unless it dies; that which
is sown is not the body which will be born, but a simple grain of corn. The
resurrecting body is of the same substance but different in form. And there are
earthly and celestial bodies, but the splendour of the one can bear no comparison with that of the sun, the moon, and the stars. ‘So also is the resurrection
of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption … It is sown a
natural body; it is raised a spiritual body’. Continuity and transformation: what
the scenes in John and the exposition in Paul are trying to show is the supreme
mystery of the being-​in-​becoming and the becoming-​towards-​being; in John’s
case, he is reconciling the opposition between being and becoming announced
in his Prologue.
Having shown the disciples his hands and side, the Jesus of the fourth
Gospel, now recognized as ‘Lord’, repeats the sign of peace (one of John’s
central messages), and charges the disciples with their apostolic mission: ‘as
my Father hath sent me, even so send I you’. Jesus the man, the master, now
acts as God. In the following verse he actually repeats the gesture of Genesis
(2: 7), breathing life into Adam’s nostrils so that ‘man became a living soul’.
242 Chapter 5
He breathes on them, saying (20: 23): ‘Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose
soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins
ye retain, they are retained’ (there is, of course, no Pentecost in the fourth
Gospel). Recognition has again produced re-​Scripture. John, who had dared
to rewrite the first verse of the Bible in his Prologue (‘In the beginning God
created the heaven and the earth’ –​‘In the beginning was the Word’), now
reformulates the creation of man as ‘living soul’ and has Jesus create the
new Adam.
What is still missing is the definitive recognition of the divinity, which
finally takes place in the last scene of Chapter 20, when his fellow disciples
inform Thomas, absent that Sunday evening, that they have seen the risen
Lord. Thomas, already dubious after the death of Lazarus, and uncertain as
to the ‘where’ of Jesus, replies with the famous words: ‘Except I shall see in
his hands the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not
believe’. Thomas asks for material proof, like the scar Eurycleia washes on
Ulysses’ thigh. And he seems to be about to receive it: appearing a week
later, again behind closed doors, Jesus openly invites him to touch the marks
of the nails, and to thrust his hand into his side, and ‘be not faithless, but
believing’.
Jesus’ expression is significant. Thomas had said he would not believe unless
he saw and touched; ‘Look, touch, and believe’ is Jesus’ reply. Recognition is still
the objective, but as a means to the faith which is the end. And the Evangelist,
with another mesmerising silence, makes no mention of seeing and touching,
but simply tells us that Thomas replies: ‘My Lord and my God’, ho kyrios mou
kai ho theos mou –​an expression which coincides with the Septuagint standard
translation of yhwh (kyrios) and Elohim (theos) in the Old Testament. John,
again re-​writing, proclaims through Thomas’s ecstatic exclamation that Jesus
is the same God as that of the Hebrew Bible. The last word is therefore His, to
be projected towards its ultimate adressées, the readers –​us: ‘blessed are they
that have not seen, and yet have believed’.
‘The disciple whom Jesus loved’ believed; Magdalen recognized and then
proclaimed him Lord; the other disciples rejoice to recognize him and again
declare him as such; Thomas confesses the God within this man risen from
the dead. The twentieth chapter of the fourth Gospel, in its bold re-​writing,
has passed from the dark dawn of the beginning to its glorious final proclamation, from enigmatic uncertainty to literally palpable evidence, re-​enacting
the gradual dawning of awareness in which the human leads to the divine so
mysteriously, so subtly as to give the impression that the narrative is not only
factually true but at the same time, in some way, divinely inspired. We reach
the ultimate threshold at which to decide, each of us, whether to recognize, or
243
To Recognize Is a God
recognize and believe; where recognition can be a god as long as we give ourselves to him: as long as, like Magdalen, we listen to his voice.
∵
I would like to believe that whoever continued and concluded the fourth
Gospel with Chapter 21 did so not only for ecclesiastical reasons, but because
he was still under the spell of the preceding scenes, captivated by the recognition and rewriting in John, and wanting to prolong it for one more chapter. The
first part is the account of the risen Christ’s ‘third’ apparition to the disciples.
This time Peter, Thomas, Nathanael, the sons of Zebedee, and two more disciples are at the sea of Tiberias. Peter decides to go fishing for the night, and the
others go with him. They catch nothing, however, and the nets remain empty.
In the morning, Jesus stands on the shore unrecognized by the disciples, and
asks them if they have caught anything to eat; hearing that there has been no
catch, he suggests they cast the net over the right side of the boat. On so doing
the net is immediately so full that they are not able to drag it over again. The
beloved disciple informs Peter: ‘It is the Lord’. When he hears this, Peter hitches
his coat up and jumps into the water, the others following in the boat. On the
shore they see a brazier with fish and bread. Jesus tells them to bring a little of
their catch, Peter jumps into the boat to draw up the net, ‘full of great fishes, an
hundred and fifty and three’, and Jesus invites them to eat. None of the disciples dares to ask who he is, ‘knowing that it was the Lord’.
The scene fulfils and completes the previous chapter, not least in landscape
terms: from a sepulcher and adjoining garden, from a closed room, to the
sea of Tiberias, night-​fishing, the dawn apparition of Jesus, the boat, and the
brazier. The scene is set in a wider horizon and a time-​scheme which is both
more homely (their fishing) and more “romantic” (darkness, incipient daylight,
and glowing coals). The signs are changed or extended: from shroud, cloths,
wounds, and voices to the out-​and-​out miracle of the fish. Thirdly, the agnition
is repeated (‘the disciples knew not that it was Jesus’) and concentrated on the
beloved disciple, he who had simply believed. Now he is the one to recognize
Jesus and proclaim him Kyrios: ‘It is the Lord’ (and with this he takes us back
to the scene of Joseph and his brothers in my preceding chapter). Peter, for his
part, now does what in the previous chapter he had failed to do: he recognizes,
believes, and, throwing himself at Jesus, loves. Lastly, the awareness extends
mysteriously to all of them: no-​one dares to ask who it is because they all know.
The author or redactor who continues the fourth Gospel rewrites John,
and he does so by using the Gospels themselves. The allusion to the miraculous fishing through which Peter is chosen by Jesus in Luke (5: 1–​11) cannot be
244 Chapter 5
questioned. The echo of the episode in which Peter, in Matthew (14: 28–​33),
walks over the waves, is indirect but surely present, as is the oblique parallel
between the ‘fullness’ sketched in here and that foreshadowed by the wine at
Cana. The eucharistic symbolism, underlined by the coinciding of this scene
with the miracle of the multiplication and distribution of bread and fish in
John (6: 11), is certain.
The author or redactor who continues the fourth Gospel does all this not
only in order to proclaim Peter’s rehabilitation, call, and martyrdom (in the
second section of the chapter Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him and
when the disciple answers affirmatively, he orders, ‘Feed my sheep’, then adding a prophecy on the way in which Peter will die), nor merely to clarify the
future of the beloved disciple (who presents himself here as the witness and
writer of these events). He does it also to celebrate recognition in the joy of its
being repeated and exalted. The protagonist of the scene is not another person –​Magdalen, Peter, Thomas, the beloved disciple –​but Jesus alone. Human
and divine at once, he shapes everything by himself. The chapter had significantly opened with the sentence, ‘After these things Jesus showed himself
again’. The writer who, following John’s programme, continues and concludes
the fourth Gospel, wants to crown recognition with revelation.
∵
These scenes from the fourth Gospel will cling forever to the Western imagination, with their description of recognition and faith; humanity’s encounter
with the fulness of being, God made man and returned to life from death. At
their best, even scenes of recognition between merely human beings will be
(oblique) rewritings of these. And always, as in Euripides and John, they will
centre on a woman. Thus Shakespeare’s last plays, those ‘romances’ which,
along the prefigured lines of the Lear-​Cordelia encounter, contain sublime
scenes of deferred recognition between fathers and daughters and/​or husbands and wives. I am referring, of course, to Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s
Tale, and The Tempest.
One can choose two routes to illustrate the passage from John’s Gospel to
Shakespeare. A direct one joins the resurrection scenes in the former and The
Winter’s Tale. One, more oblique but not less significant, leads from John to
Pericles.22 I shall start with the first. In The Winter’s Tale Leontes’ furious jealousy
22
For the two plays I have used the Arden Shakespeare, third series editions, The Winter’s
Tale, by J. Pitcher, 2010; and Pericles, by S. Gossett, 2004. Introduction and commentary
by S. Orgel to The Winter’s Tale, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, are indispensable.
To Recognize Is a God
245
makes him lose at once his newborn baby daughter and his wife Hermione. Here,
however, the contrast between Nature and Art, and the debate on it that dominates the whole play are added to the opposition between appearance and reality,
to the peripeties, the shipwreck, the pastoral scenes of the other romance plays.
Let me proceed with some order, leaving aside the almost infinite ramifications of a fantastic plot. Leontes, King of Sicily, is hosting Polixenes, King of
Bohemia. The two are dear childhood friends and Leontes wishes Polixenes
could stay with him a while longer. So as to convince him to stay, Leontes has
his wife Hermione speak with him. The conversations between Polixenes and
Hermione, however, unleash in him a jealousy yet more furious than Othello’s.
Leontes would have his friend poisoned but, having been warned by Camillo,
Polixenes silently leaves for Bohemia. Camillo too escapes. Leontes, suspecting
that the baby girl which Hermione has borne him is in fact Polixenes’, orders
the loyal Antigonus to take the child ‘to some remote and desert place/​Quite
out of our dominions; and that there thou leave it,/​Without more mercy, to its
own for protection/​And favour of the climate’. He then puts his wife on trial,
naturally finding her guilty, even though he has no evidence against her, and
the oracle from Delphos (sic!) proclaims that she is innocent. Mamillius, son
of Leontes and Hermione, dies out of anguish for his mother’s fate. Hermione
faints, and Leontes moves from the evil infection of his own understanding to
repentance for what he has done, and to the intention of atoning for his sin.
The king’s repentance, however, does not prevent the plot from thickening.
Paulina, loyal handmaid to Hermione, soon announces that the queen is dead.
The best criticism is represented by the following: B.B. Adams, Coming-​to-​Know.
Recognition and the Complex Plot in Shakespeare, New York-​Berlin, Peter Lang, 2000;
L. Barkan, ‘Making Pictures Speak: Renaissance Art, Elizabethan Literature, Modern
Scholarship’, Renaissance Quarterly, 48 (1995): 326–​351; H. Cooper, The English Romance
in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004; P. Boitani, The Gospel according to Shakespeare,
trans. V. Montemaggi and R. Jacoff, Notre Dame IN, 2013; Northrop Frye, Fables of
Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology; C. Hardman, The Winter’s Tale (Penguin Critical
Studies), Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1988. R. C. McCoy, Faith in Shakespeare, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2013; A.D. Nuttall, Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, London, Hodder,
1966; A.D. Nuttall, A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality, London,
Methuen, 1983; A.D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker, New Haven-​London, Yale University
Press, 2007; S. Palfrey, Late Shakespeare. A New World of Words, Oxford, Clarendon
Press, 1997; V.B. Richmond, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance, London-​New York,
Continuum, 2000; T. Rist, Shakespeare’s Romances and the Politics of Counter-​Reformation,
Lewiston NY, Lampeter, 1999; T. Tanner, Romances, New York-​Toronto, Knopf, 1996;
G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life, London, Oxford University Press, 1947; F.A. Yates,
Shakespeare’s Last Plays, London, Routledge, 1975.
246 Chapter 5
Leontes vows to visit his wife’s and his son’s tomb daily. Antigonus (Paulina’s
husband), leaves by sea with the little girl, but his vessel is shipwrecked on the
coast of Bohemia, where Antigonus is killed by a bear. The infant, who had been
named Perdita by her mother, is found by a local shepherd together with a casket
containing gold, a dress, and written information about her identity. Antigonus’
corpse and the bundle containing the little girl are found at one and the same
time: ‘things dying’ and ‘things new-​born’ are met together on the same shore.
Time now appears on the scene, playing the role of chorus. Time, a supreme
artist, has the power to upset the laws of nature, to represent things as it pleases,
and to render both past and present opaque. It thus propels the play forward
sixteen years. The Winter’s Tale is now coloured with the hues of comedy and
with those of pastoral art. Perdita, raised by the old shepherd, is by now a beautiful young girl and Florizel, Polixenes’ son, falls in love with her. The king, who
knows nothing of this, wants to find out with whom his son spends his time.
He thus goes into the countryside and meets Perdita, who not knowing who he
is, offers him flowers as a sign of welcome.
The theme of Art, closely tied to those of Nature and Time, emerges compellingly here. Polixenes tells Perdita that she is beautiful, while he should be
adorned ‘with flowers of winter’. The girl replies with an enchanting description of the season’s flowers:
Sir, the year growing ancient,
Not yet on summer’s death nor on the birth
Of trembling winter, the fairest flower o’th’season
Are our carnations and streaked gyllivors,
Which some call Nature’s bastards; of that kind
Our rustic garden’s barren, and I care not
To get slips of them.23
When Polixenes aks her in response why she neglects these very flowers,
Perdita replies: ‘For I have heard it said/​There is an art which in their piedness
shares/​With great creating nature’. The young girl sees art as artificiality: the
power of creation, for her, lies with creating nature alone. Polixenes counters
with a subtle and subtly articulated argument:
Say there be;
Yet Nature is made better by no mean
23
iv. iv. 79–​85.
To Recognize Is a God
247
But Nature makes that mean; so over that art
Which you say adds to Nature is an art
That Nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend Nature –​change it, rather –​but
The art itself is Nature.24
The vision of the man coming from the world of civilization, and in particular from the culture of the Renaissance (the debate here echoes Montaigne’s
famous essay on the Cannibals), thus contrasts with that of someone who
lives in the Golden Age and only trusts in the primordial purity of nature.
While she accepts the guest’s argument, Perdita refuses to use new grafts, ‘no
more that, were I painted, I would wish/​This youth should say ’twere well,
and only therefore/​Desire to breed by me’. Florizel, on the other hand, to
whom this last observation is directed (and who is himself a flower, as his
name declares), holds that all that Perdita does ‘betters what is done’. For him,
Perdita is the supreme Art: the art of Nature. She is dance, as if she were a
wave of the sea; she is movement itself. Her every action is the perfection of
the tode-​ti, of the individual essence which is universal by virtue of its very
individuality. Perdita represents the meeting point between what is right and
the right moment, or kairos: ‘Each your doing,/​so singular in each particular,/​Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds,/​That all your acts are
queens’.25
Polixenes, however, while recognizing in Perdita ‘something greater than
herself, too noble for this place’, wants at all costs to separate the two youths.
They, however, flee to Sicily. Leontes, who has spent sixteen years in contrition
and who swears to Paulina that he does not want to marry again, welcomes
them into his palace as soon as he finds out that Florizel is the son of his friend
Polixenes. He does not, however, know who the young girl who is accompanying him is.
The first act of recognition does not occur on stage. It is narrated together
with the other parts of the plot which have so far remained obscure by those
who witnessed it, like an ‘old tale’, and with the dream-​like pace of fairy tales.
One of the court gentlemen recounts how the bundle which had enveloped
24
25
iv. iv. 88–​97.
iv. iv. 135–​46.
248 Chapter 5
the little girl was opened. Another gentleman continues the story, as he puts it,
with ‘broken delivery’:
I make a broken delivery of the business; but the changes I perceived in
the King and Camillo were very notes of admiration. They seemed almost,
with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes. There was
speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture. They looked as
they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed. A notable passion
of wonder appeared in them; but the wisest beholder that knew no more
but seeing could not say if th’importance were joy or sorrow: but in the
extremity of the one it must needs be.26
A world destroyed, a world ransomed: the formula, similar to the ‘things dying’
and ‘things new-​born’ of sixteen years earlier, brings us to rebirth: that which
dies is saved and comes back to life. It is a miracle which produces a ‘passion of
wonder’: wonder without end.
A third gentleman picks up the tale from where the second leaves off: he
lists the ‘proofs’ that were found in Perdita’s casket: the letters with Antigonus’
handwriting, Hermione’s mantle with her jewel pinned on its neck, and finally
the ‘majesty’ of the infant and her resemblance to her mother. The third gentleman then tells of the meeting between the two kings, the deep emotion felt
by the two of them at finding their children anew, and Leontes’ cries invoking
Hermione. He tells the story of Antigonus’ shipwreck and of his brutal end in
the bear’s mouth. In short, he recounts The Winter’s Tale, this ‘old tale’ originally invented for a dark and cold season but which now enters spring. The
plot itself of the play here becomes art: after its being enacted on stage it is
now recreated through words alone, and rendered both remote and compelling, enriched and simplified, stupefied and stupefying.
At the end of his story, the third gentleman pauses on a specific detail: at
that same meeting between the two kings, Perdita is told the story of her mother’s death, to which she responds by ‘bleeding’ tears, and by deciding to go and
see Hermione’s statue, kept by Paulina in her palace:
No: the Princess, hearing of her mother’s statue, which is in the keeping
of Paulina –​a piece many years in doing and now newly performed by
that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and
could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so
26
v. ii. 9–​19.
To Recognize Is a God
249
perfectly he is her ape: he so near to Hermione hath done Hermione that
they say one would speak to her and stand in hope of answer. Thither with
all greediness of affection are they gone, and there they intend to sup.27
Here, once again, is Art. This time, however, we are not dealing with grafting but with sculpture, and specifically with a precious work of the Italian
Renaissance. The statue is the creation of the brilliant architect and fantastic painter who built and decorated the Te Palace in Mantua; an artist who
as the third gentleman himself says would, if eternal, be the Creator himself.
The newly finished work is such a perfect copy –​mimesis –​of the original (of
Hermione), it makes one think that Art wins over Nature, that Life is more
alive than the life that was. The three gentlemen are convinced that absence
from the events that will follow would mean losing the possibility of gaining
‘knowledge’ of the ‘grace’ that will newly reveal itself there with ‘every wink of
an eye’. They then set off.
And thus begins the great scene, with all protagonists present. This is now
no longer a tale: it is reality, and theatre. We are in an actual ‘gallery’, full of
‘singularities’, a private Cinquecento museum. Suddenly Paulina draws aside
a curtain and reveals the statue in a ‘chapel’. We behold, at this point, a ‘life
so lively mocked as ever/​still sleep mocked death’. Whether it be sleep or
death The Winter’s Tale never explicitly says, but the revealing of the statue
produces total silence in those present, indicating wonder without end. ‘I like
your silence’, Paulina says, ‘it the more shows off/​your wonder’. She seems to be
thinking here of that which Aristotle speaks of at the beginning of his Poetics,
when he declares, in speaking of the pleasure that human beings feel in seeing
images imitating figures, that the moment in which we recognize that ‘this is
that’ (that is, that the image corresponds to the figure), is supreme.28
With unparalleled slowness there now begin, in stages, recognition and
resurrection. Leontes exclaims that the imitation of Hermione is perfect: ‘she
was as tender/​As infancy and grace’, and the stone now is ‘loved’. And yet,
the statue has wrinkles which his wife did not have when she died. ‘So much
the more our carver’s excellence’, Paulina replies, ‘which lets go by some sixteen years, and makes her/​as she lived now’. Art thus imagines Time, reads life
through it, imitates Nature. It also transcends them, however, concentrating
into an icon that which was subject to death. Thus it is that Leontes finds in the
statue the ‘life of majesty’ which he had recognized in Hermione when he was
27
28
v. ii. 92–​100.
Poetics, 1448 b 16–​17.
250 Chapter 5
courting her, as well as a ‘magic’ that awakens memory and repentance. Thus
it is that Perdita would want to kneel before her mother’s statue, seek from it
a blessing, take its hand to kiss it. Meanwhile, asking for forgiveness, Leontes
relives his pain, and Polixenes offers to take it upon himself, ready to share the
suffering of the other, thus reaching genuine com-​passion.
Paulina, who often during the scene threatens to close the curtain, invites those
present to patience, saying that the work is only just finished, the colour not yet
dry. But Art enchants: it seems the statue breathes, that its veins truly have blood
in them: ‘the very life seems warm upon her lips’. ‘No longer shall you gaze on ’t’,
Paulina says, ‘lest your fancy/​May think anon it moves’. But Leontes is won over
by the statue: ‘Let be, let be!’, he exclaims, ‘Would I were dead but that methinks
already –​/​What was he that did make it?’ He observes that ‘the fixture of her
eye has motion in‘t/​as we are mocked with art’. Leontes indeed wavers between
ecstasy and awareness of art’s illusion. Once again, Paulina declares she will close
the curtain, otherwise the king will think the statue is alive. But Leontes declares
himself ready to abandon worldly sense and wisdom to embrace the pleasure of
the ‘present madness’. He asks again: ‘What fine chisel/​Could ever yet cut breath?’
And, finally, he wants to kiss the statue.
Paulina holds him back: ‘the ruddiness upon her lip is wet’, it would be
ruined by the kiss. She then offers to close the curtain. Leontes does not
accept: ‘No, not these twenty years’. Paulina, at this point, asks the king and
all the bystanders to prepare themselves for even greater amazement: she will
make the statue move, come down from its pedestal and take the hand of the
king, who is by this stage open to any miracle. Paulina now requires –​this is a
crucial moment –​the birth of faith: ‘it is required/​you do awake your faith’. She
then warns all those who think that what she is about to do is illicit to leave the
chapel. Finally, she pronounces the solemn command and invokes music: may
it strike and awake her. This is the time, kairos –​the right moment. May the
statue cease being stone, come down, approach and drown all those present
in wonder:
Music, awake her; strike!
‘Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach;
Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come,
I’ll fill your grave up: stir, nay, come away,
Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him
Dear life redeems you.29
29
v. iii. 98–​103.
To Recognize Is a God
251
The tomb is now empty (like Jesus of Nazareth’s after three days). Life rescues,
redeems: from death and its dumbness. The statue’s every action, Paulina says,
will be ‘holy’. Paulina’s commands –​‘descend’, ‘approach’ –​have the force of
‘Lazarus, come forth!’30 And Hermione moves, the statue ‘slowly descends. ‘O,
she’s warm!’, Leontes exclaims, ‘if this be magic, let it be an art/​Lawful as eating’. This is a strange Easter morning, in which a sculpted image comes back
to life. There are no women at the sepulchre, nor disciples, not one Magdalen.
There are a husband and a daughter, and two courts. Hermione is a statue, not
a body that goes through the walls. But the enigma, the miraculous aura, the
recognition-​faith sequence are all present.
Hermione now holds on to Leontes, embraces him: she thus forgives him,
suffers with him, rejoices with him. Some ask to make her speak, make her
reveal where she has lived or how she managed to escape death: human questions which would like to penetrate the mystery or reduce everything to fiction.
Paulina thus responds with a paradox: ‘That she is living,/​Were it but told you,
should be hooted at/​Like an old tale: but it appears she lives’.31 Perhaps it is an
‘old tale’, like those that should make one smile (Lear and Cordelia, ‘God’s spies’,
would smile out of joy): but, it is obvious (obvious to the senses) that Hermione
is, now, living.
Paulina shows Hermione her recovered daughter. And, finally, Hermione
speaks: she invokes the grace of the gods upon Perdita and asks her to tell the
story of her salvation, her life, her being found. As for herself, she simply says
that, in the hope of seeing her daughter alive again, she ‘preserved’ herself ‘to
see the issue’. Preserved in death, with body intact? Or preserved in life? These
are the questions we ask ourselves together with Leontes, who soon after wants
to know how: ‘for I saw her,/​As I thought, dead; and have in vain said many/​
A prayer upon her grave’.32
So, what is more plausible, an ‘old tale’ or a statue that comes back to life?
For these are the options in which Shakespeare asks us to believe. We are called
to decide between two alternative fictions: that of life miraculously preserving
itself through time and adversity, and that of art which, in its verisimilitude,
brings back to life. To collapse the two into one and say that Hermione never
died and only comes to back to life in the form of a statue because Paulina
wants to play an astonishing trick, is reasonable. It is too reasonable, for a scene
and a play that offer no explanation about it –​and too reasonable for life, and
for death, which do not offer explanations.
30
31
32
John 11: 43.
v. iii. 115–​117.
v. iii. 139–​141.
252 Chapter 5
Moreover: if we can believe, through the ‘suspension of disbelief’ which
Coleridge says is necessary for the fruition of art,33 that a statue can perfectly imitate a real person –​if, that is to say, we can believe in the miracle
of art –​, then, Shakespeare would seem to suggest, we can also believe in the
resurrection from the dead, the mystery and miracle preached by Christianity.
Shakespeare seems to be announcing that all that is necessary for faith is suspension of disbelief. This would be sensational good news indeed, complementing and updating our modern sensibility with that of the New Testament,
in which faith is ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not
seen’.34 What if the final part of The Winter’s Tale were a parable?
∵
I shall now take Pericles as my second example, both because its closing agnitions are among the most magical Shakespeare ever created, and in order to
follow the oblique and shadowy ghost scripting a fascinating intertext, a point
of encounter between Pericles and Mary Magdalen.35 Pericles is the theatre
version of the much-​rewritten story (existing in dozens of variations and languages) of Apollonius of Tyre (Shakespeare simply changes the names, but
openly refers to the account in the Confessio Amantis of John Gower, who
appears in the play as Chorus).
Between the vicissitudes of the two, the Middle Ages has stepped in to
operate a splendid contamination. In Iacopo da Varazze’s Legenda aurea, for
example, Mary Magdalen has become the sister of Martha and Lazarus (and
sinner par excellence).36 She washes Jesus’ feet with her tears, dries them with
her hair and anoints them with a precious ointment, repents, is present at the
crucifixion, anoints Jesus’ body after his death, and is the first to see the risen
Lord. Thirteen years after the Ascension, with Lazarus, Martha, and others, she
is herded on board a ship by infidels and abandoned to the mercy of the waves.
The divine will propels them towards Marseilles, where Mary preaches faith in
Christ. The provincial governor and his wife are ready to convert if Mary will
obligingly perform the small miracle of making the woman fertile. When the
33
34
35
36
S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ­chapter 14, in A Critical Edition of the Major Works, H.J.
Jackson, ed., Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 314.
Hebrews 11: 1.
On Magdalen, see S. Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor; Mary Magdalene from
the New Testament to the New Age and Beyond, ed. E. Lupieri, Leiden, Brill, 2019.
Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, 2 vols., crit. ed. G.P. Maggioni, Florence, sismel
Edizioni del Galluzzo, 19982, vol. i, pp. 628–​642.
To Recognize Is a God
253
latter finds that she is indeed pregnant, her husband immediately heads for
Rome, to verify the facts of this ‘Christianity’ preached by Mary. His wife begs
to go with him and refuses to be gainsaid. Blessed by the saint, the two depart.
On the second day, however, a violent storm arises, and amid the pitching of
the ship the woman gives birth to a male child and dies. The sailors are anxious
to placate the waves with the woman’s body, but her husband dictates that
mother and son be left, covered by a mantle, on a ‘hill’ arising from the waves.
Roundly cursing Mary, he continues his journey to Rome, where Peter
advises him patiently to allow his wife to ‘sleep’ and their small son to ‘rest’,
assuring him that, as the Lord gives, takes away, and returns, so he may transform his tears into joy. Two years later, having been instructed in the faith and
gone with Peter to Jerusalem, he again sets sail for Marseilles. He stops at the
‘hill’ where he had left his wife and son, and discovers a small child playing on
the seashore. The child is frightened and runs to his mother, still lying under
her mantle, and suckles. The man recognizes his son and wife and invokes
Mary Magdalen to make her breathe once more. The miracle is granted, and all
three set sail for Marseilles, where they tell the saint the whole story before she
moves to a hermitage in Aix-​en-​Provence. The story was staged in England as a
miracle play, Mary Magdalen, during the late Middle Ages.37
The central nucleus of the Apollonius and Pericles plot contains clear parallels with this secondary motif of the Magdalen legend: Pericles’ wife, Thaisa,
insists on accompanying him to Tyre, and dies in giving birth to Marina during
a storm at sea. Thrown overboard (like Jonah, due to the sailors’ superstition),
in a coffin carrying all identifying details, Thaisa is ‘resuscitated’ by the music
and medicine of Cerimon in Ephesus, where she takes refuge in the temple
of Diana. Pericles leaves the tiny Marina at Tharsus, with Cleon and Dionyza.
Years later, out of envy, Dionyza decides to have Marina put to death, but
pirates ‘save’ her in time, and sell her to a brothel in Mytilene. The girl firmly
refuses to have any part in its activities and gets permission to be housed in
an honest establishment where she earns her living by singing, sewing, and
teaching the daughters of the nobility. In the meantime, Pericles has returned
to Tharsus to retrieve his daughter, but Cleon and Dionyza answer his request
by showing him the tomb where she putatively lies. Wracked by grief, Pericles
puts on sackcloth, grows his hair and beard, and wanders, stunned, over the
seas, finally reaching Mytilene where a mysterious young girl is brought before
him to heal him with her wondrous voice.
37
Published in The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian mss. Digby 133 and E Museo
160 (Digby Plays), ed. D.C. Baker, J.L. Murphy and L.B. Hall, Jr., Oxford, Early English Text
Society, os 283, 1982, pp. 24–​95.
254 Chapter 5
Shakespeare’s version (Shakespeare’s in spite of the well-​known ‘textual
collapse’ of Pericles) naturally rewrites the plot into a frame which belongs
even more to romance than the legend of Magdalen: that of Apollonius. All
the misadventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, begin when he journeys to
Antioch to win the daughter of Antiochus the king; she will be his if he can
answer a riddle: the penalty for failure, death. Pericles decodes the horrendous secret of the incest between father and daughter, and returns to Tyre, followed by an assassin in Antiochus’s pay. Handing over the government of the
city to Helicanus, he flees, like Jonah, towards Tharsus, governed by Cleon and
Dionyza and now ravaged by famine. Pericles offers all the provisions he has
on board, then, on receiving a letter from Helicanus recalling him to Tyre, he
sets sail. Shipwrecked by a violent storm, he is cast up in rags on the shores of
Pentapolis where the waves also vomit up the armour entrusted to him by his
dying father. Donning it, he takes part in the tournament to win the hand of
Thaisa, daughter of the king of Pentapolis, Simonides. Thaisa falls in love with
him and they marry. A further message then arrives form Helicanus, recalling
Pericles to Tyre: at the pregnant Thaisa’s insistence, husband and wife set sail,
but are caught in the tempest which will be the backdrop to Thaisa’s delivery
and death.
Guided by the ancient voice of Gower, whose Choral account links the different episodes, and instructed by the dumb shows which silently, ‘like motes
and shadows’, make clear a number of plot jointures, spectators and readers
follow Pericles over the sea, a second Ulysses buffeted by fortune and the tides,
in the grasp of an incomprehensible divinity whose actions, however, are to
prove providential. Pericles has every imaginable situation hurled at him, like a
character from late-​antique romance, or a medieval knight: enigma and flight,
the salvation of a starving Tharsus, the eternal journeying, shipwreck, the tournament, the loss of his wife in a further storm, and the presumed death of his
daughter. He acts with energy, nobility, and generosity throughout: everything
is endured with patience until the final blow: the sight of Marina’s tomb. Then,
like Lear after all his maltreatment and misusage, Pericles too ‘bears a tempest
which his mortal vessel tears’, lost within himself, all awareness swallowed by
pain, allowing ‘his courses to be ordered by Lady Fortune’.
And like Euripides’ Chorus, Menelaus, and Helen, Pericles also invokes and
interrogates the gods. When, for example, the ship carrying him to Tyre, with
his wife in labour, is splintered by the storm, he appeals to the gods of the sea
and the wind, and then Lucina, goddess of labour:
The god of this great vast rebuke these surges,
Which wash both heaven and hell. And thou that hast
To Recognize Is a God
255
Upon the winds command, bind them in brass,
Having called them from the deep! O, still
Thy deafening, dreadful thunders, gently quench
The nimble, sulphurous flashes! …
… Lucina, O
Divinest patroness and midwife gentle
To those that cry by night, convey thy deity
Aboard our dancing boat, make swift the pangs
Of my queen’s travails!38
No reply is forthcoming, however, from either the gods or the elements, and
‘The seaman’s whistle/​Is as a whisper in the ears of death’. And when the reply
finally arrives, it announces, through the earthly midwife, Thaisa’s death and
the new, tiny life of Marina: ‘this piece of his dead queen’. Pericles then calls
into question the very honour of the gods, comparing it with that of mortals
who at least never take back what they have given:
O you gods!
Why do you make us love your goodly gifts
And snatch them straight away? We here below
Recall not what we give, and therein may
Use honour with you.39
Yet on turning to his newly-​born child, to wish her a life less troubled than
her birth, Pericles entrusts her to the ‘best eyes’ of the ‘good gods’; and later,
in Tharsus, in speaking of his dead wife to Cleon and Dionyza, he acknowledges that ‘We cannot but obey/​The powers above us’: even if he could
‘rage and roar/​As doth the sea she lies in’, ‘yet the end/​Must be as ’tis’.
Like the hero of romance and the Jesus of the Gospels, Pericles bows to the
telos, the end in the sense both of conclusion and objective. Only when
he hears the news that Marina, ‘all his life’s delight’, flesh of his flesh and
the beloved daughter of a beloved wife, has passed from the bloom of her
young beauty directly to death does Pericles –​like Job, in this prefiguring
of a person soon to emerge from the shadows –​dress in sackcloth and give
way to despair.
38
39
Pericles, iii. i. 1–​14. On the sea iconography see the still splendid The Enchafed Flood, or the
Romantic Iconography of the Sea by W.H. Auden, London, Faber, 1951.
iii. i. 22–​26.
256 Chapter 5
Pericles, already become Nobody after the first shipwreck, dies inside. His
wife and his daughter are both dead to him: Thaisa has indeed passed through
death, and Marina enters it, near murdered and then consigned to a brothel.
But Thaisa, as we have seen, rises again through the ministrations of music
and Cerimon’s medicines, and consacrates herself to Diana; Marina survives
all the scheming of the pimps by virtue of her words, expressive, Lysimachus
observes, of all her goodness and purity. Marina, as Gower informs us at the
beginning of the last Act, ‘sings like an immortal, and dances/​As goddess-​like
to her admired lays’; her knowledge ‘dumbs deep clerks’, and with her needle
she ‘composes/​Nature’s own shape, of bud, bird, branch, or berry,/​That even
her art sisters the natural roses’. Marina is the goddess of art and knowledge,
the quickening enchantress, Spring: Life.
Through the last Act she will by degrees also become the Way and the Truth.
The scene of recognition between Marina and her father, which T.S. Eliot
describes as the finest ever written, and a perfect example of the ‘ultradramatic’, ‘a dramatic action of beings who are more than human, or rather, seen
in a light more than that of day’,40 is enacted in an atmosphere resonant with
the fourth Gospel. Marina is presented to Helicanus as a creature who, with
her sweetness and harmony, could enchant Pericles and open a breach in his
sense-​deafness: she is both thaumaturge and kalogathos supreme, ‘all goodness that consists in beauty’.
Convinced by Lysimachus, Helicanus bids her board the ship where Pericles
lies in a stupor. Marina approaches him, singing, and invites him to listen
to her, but his only reply is an unconscious, phatic ‘Hum! Ha!’. Marina takes
this as encouragement to speak, and begins her story: she is a young girl who,
although ‘gaz’d on like a comet’, has never invited the glance of strangers (‘I
am a maid’: Virgo Mari[n]‌a); one who has suffered as he has, of noble birth
but reduced to the condition of the world’s and adversity’s slave. Getting no
reply, she is about to desist, but ‘something’ –​a daimon? –​makes her cheeks
‘glow’, whispering to her to remain until he speaks. And speak Pericles finally
does, muttering a garbled version of her words and asking her to explain herself. Marina has restored his speech. She now stirs his wandering memory and
40
T.S. Eliot, Edinburgh Lectures ii, p. 18 (‘The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse, John
Davy Hayward Collection of King’s College, Cambridge’), cit. in J. Freeh, ‘Pericles and
Marina: T.S. Eliot’s Search for the Transcendent in Late Shakespeare’, in Shakespeare’s
Last Plays. Essays in Literature and Politics, ed. S.W. Smith and T. Curtright, Lanham,
MD, Lexington Books (Rowman & Littlefield), 2002, pp. 112–​113. The recent Cambridge
Companion to Shakespeare and Religion, ed. H. Hamlin, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2019, contains several essays that are relevant to my theme.
To Recognize Is a God
257
sluggish consciousness: he asks her to look on him, as if she were some divinity,
because she is, he murmurs, ‘like something that …’. The shred of memory then
suddenly urges him to ask what country she is from: ‘What countrywoman?
Here of these shores?’, to which Marina gives a totally natural and honest,
yet allusive and near-​transcendental reply: ‘No, nor of any shores;/​Yet I was
mortally brought forth, and am/​No other than I appear’.
Marina is telling the precise truth: she is not from Mytilene, nor from any
other ‘shore’, because born at sea. Yet ‘nor of any shores’ suggests an other-​
worldy provenance, and Marina quickly adds that she was brought into the
world ‘mortally’, humbly concluding that she is precisely what she seems.
A being which coincides completely with an appearing, then? A being who
is not ‘of any shores’ but ‘of woman born’? Only the Jesus of the Gospels can
claim such fullness and such birth.
Pericles remains on the ground, ‘great with woe’ and about to ‘deliver weeping’. Emerging from his long sleep, he notices the resemblance between the
girl and his wife: the wide forehead, the same height (‘to an inch’), the same
body, straight as a rush, silver-​voiced and jewel-​eyed, Juno’s step, and her
words, enticing, appealing (the importance of Voice!). His questions tumble
out: where do you live? where where you raised? how did you learn such skills?
‘Where I am but a stranger’, is her answer to the first question, shrugging off
the others with the words, ‘Should I tell my history, it would seem/​Like lies,
disdain’d in the reporting’. The human and superhuman again come together.
Pericles is now ready to believe. The woman standing before him is Pallas,
Wisdom, Justice, and Truth:
Prithee speak.
Falseness cannot come from thee, for thou lookest
Modest as Justice, and thou seemest a Pallas
For the crowned Truth to dwell in. I will believe thee,
And make my senses credit thy relation
To points that seem impossible, for thou lookest
Like one I loved indeed.41
If it is the superhuman at play here, then it is rooted in the most human of
emotions, love –​love for a wife (Helen and Menelaus once more). Belief, certainly: but arrived at through the senses, finding resemblance through physical appearance, and being through appearance. Pericles has to make the same
41
v. i. 117–​123.
258 Chapter 5
leap as Mary Magdalen: Thaisa and Marina, he is convinced, are dead, and for
him, too, recognition lies beyond the mystery of death. Yet it also encompasses
facts, proofs, and signs: relatives, blood, line, history and sufferings endured:
Tell thy story.
If thine considered prove the thousandth part
Of my endurance, thou art a man, and I
Have suffer’d like a girl; yet thou dost look
Like Patience gazing on kings’ graves and smiling
Extremity out of act. What were thy friends?
How lost you them? Thy name, my most kind virgin?
Recount, I do beseech thee. Come, sit by me.42
Two parallel Passions are represented, making of the man and girl, father and
daughter, one person, as if foreshadowing the Christian God. It is the girl,
however, who here incarnates the infinite capacity for suffering and enduring: patiens like Jesus on the cross, and simultaneously a statue of Patience –​
like those placed on the funeral monuments of the period –​on the tombs of
kings, and on the tomb of this king, Pericles, whose painful story she smiles
down on. The image is both passive and active: endurance, and a smile which
annuls the most extreme misfortune (‘smiling extremity out of act’); Olympian
contemplation, and com-​passion: a detached, but restorative smile.
The girl simply speaks her name, like Jesus calling ‘Mariàm’: ‘My name is
Marina’. Pericles, echoing Lear on recognizing Cordelia, exclaims: ‘O! I am
mock’d,/​And thou by some incensed god sent hither/​To make the world to
laugh at me’. He is beginning to perceive the god in recognition. But Marina –​
and Shakespeare –​exacts patience. Every sentence of hers is an oracle, an
enigma eliciting further questions. The game of agnition is slow and gradual,
retarded as in Mann to emphasise all the joyous Freude am Wiedererkennen.
This is the patience that gazes on kings’ graves. Marina slowly goes on, revealing that the name was given her by her father, a king. When Pericles starts with
amazement, slowly composing the fragmented tesserae of signs behind this
revelation, she further retards with the comment: ‘You said you would believe
me;/​But, not to be a troubler of your peace,/​I will end here’. The question,
then, once more, is to believe or not to believe:
But are you flesh and blood?
Have you a working pulse? And are no fairy?
42
v. i. 132–​139.
To Recognize Is a God
259
Motion as well? Speak on. Where were you born?
And wherefore called Marina?43
In order to believe it is necessary to recognize, re-​establish the continuity of
being-​in-​reality, identify the being-​this-​here, and pass through death: to find
not a phantom or an elf, but flesh, blood, pulse, and movement –​a living being.
Everything, then, must fit: ‘Called Marina/​For I was born at sea’. Marina fails
to clarify whether or not she is flesh and blood –​anyone’s flesh and blood; she
simply evokes her birth at sea, and not ‘of any shores’. But the sea is now, for
Pericles, fast becoming that particular sea: who was your mother? And when
she replies that she too was the daughter of a king, and had died giving birth,
he self-​enforces an ultimate doubt: ‘O! stop there a little!/​This is the rarest
dream that e’er dull sleep/​Did mock sad fools withal. This cannot be/​My
daughter, buried!’. Belief in a dream is easier: no-​one survives death. But this
dream speaks, moves, and tells of wondrous but credible adventures. Pericles
asks for further details, promising to hear her out in silence, and to believe
(again) every syllable she utters. Marina further delays: then, as he weeps,
she tells her tale, ending in the name of the father: ‘I am the daughter to King
Pericles,/​If good King Pericles be’.
Now the gradual revelations and delayed epiphanies shape towards
awareness: but not immediately, not directly. Pericles calls Helicanus and
asks if he knows this girl who has caused his tears. Helicanus, not knowing
Marina, is obliged to ask Lysimachus, the govenor of Mytilene. But when
he, too, is unable to answer, it is up to him, Pericles, to fulfil the act both of
recognition and faith together. Pericles feels himself awash in the sea which
had so harrowed him, but it is now a sea of happiness: to recognize those we
love is indeed a god.
O Helicanus, strike me, honour’d sir!
Give me a gash, put me to present pain,
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O’erbear the shores of my mortality
And drown me with their sweetness. O, come hither,
Thou that beget’st him that did thee beget;
Thou that wast born at sea, buried at Tharsus,
And found at sea again. O Helicanus,
43
v. i. 150–​153.
260 Chapter 5
Down on thy knees; thank the holy gods as loud
As thunder threatens us. This is Marina.44
Marina has risen again. Born at sea, the earth buried her and the sea now
returns her, alive. Pericles becomes –​to paraphrase Dante in Paradiso xxxiii
(and Chaucer)45 –​‘figlio di sua figlia’, his daughter’s son, and, at the opposite
extreme from the incest of Antiochus with which the play opens, Marina is
presented as the shadow of Christ made man, the parent of his mother: ‘god-​
like perfect’ and ‘another life/​To Pericles thy father’, as he will state a few lines
on. Marina, then, is the Way. Yet she is flesh and blood: Thaisa’s daughter, as
she herself replies to the last of her father’s serried questions, thus producing
the ultimate proof. Pericles, and Shakespeare with him, is careful to leave the
theological subtly balanced, and fully ambiguous: Helicanus is to kneel and
thank the ‘holy gods’. And it is Pericles who now, after revealing his name to
her, is raised again, a father once more, and blesses, requests fresh clothes, and
consecrates her as his daughter, like the Holy Spirit which, in the guise of a
dove, pronounces above Jesus’ head, ‘This is my beloved son, in whom I am
well pleased’:46
Now, blessing on thee! rise; thou art my child.
Give me fresh garments. Mine own, Helicanus!
Father and daughter are becoming what Lear had wished for himself and
Cordelia, God’s spies, who have taken upon themselves, have experienced, and
are still experiencing, in first person, the ‘mystery of things’. Pericles returns to
full awareness of the world around him and of himself: ‘I am wild in my beholding’ (both perhaps ‘beside myself at what I see’, and ‘wild in my appearance’).
Then, as soon as this final act of recognition is over, the shadow of the other-​
worldly returns. Pericles again asks for his garments, invokes the benediction
of the heavens on Marina, and suddenly hears notes: ‘But hark, what music?’.
He asks Marina to go on with her tale, detail by detail, to Helicanus, who still
seems in some doubt. Then he again breaks off: ‘But what music?’. And to
Helicanus, who claims he hears nothing, Pericles replies: ‘None? The music of
the spheres! List, my Marina’. At the others’ astonishment, he repeats: ‘Rarest
44
45
46
v. i. 189–​198.
Chaucer, Prioress’ Prologue, 467–​487, and Second Nun’s Prologue, 29–​56, both from Dante.
Shakespeare, who would have read at least Chaucer, develops the image to magnificent
fullness.
Matthew 3: 17; cf. John 12: 28.
To Recognize Is a God
261
sounds!’. Then the celestial music assaults him, wounds him, enchants him,
and makes him drowsy:
Most heavenly music!
It nips me into list’ning, and thick slumber
Hangs upon mine eyes. Let me rest.47
Only Pericles hears this transcendental music, and one Italian commentator
is quite right when, glossing the phrase ‘It nips me into listening’, he writes
that ‘the metaphor is particularly pregnant because it makes physical this metaphysical hearing’.48 Knowledge of the flesh, in the flesh: experience of the
other-​worldly. To recognize those we love is indeed, finally, a god.
Is Shakespeare, then, rewriting Euripides with his attention concentrated
upon John the Evangelist? In all its philological absurdity, this seems to me the
only answer feasible in literary terms. Shakespeare as divinely inspired? I think
the only critically consistent answer in all its theological enormity is that, like
John, he does all he can to make us believe so.
And à propos of rewriting Euripides with an eye on the Gospels, we find
Shakespeare, at the end of the play, bringing in Diana ex machina to the sleeping Pericles, who is instructed to go directly to Ephesus, make sacrifices at
her altar, and reveal to her priestesses all the ‘crosses’ born by himself and
his daughter. This the pious Pericles promptly does, in the next scene; Thaisa
faints at the recounting. But here, too, Shakespeare defers. If Thaisa, like Helen,
recognizes her husband on the spot, by his voice and appearance, he needs
evidence and an intermediary. Cerimon, who had ‘raised’ Thaisa from the dead
when her body arrived in Ephesus, now reveals that the priestess of Diana is in
reality Pericles’ wife, as implied in Pericles’ own account in the temple, adding
the ‘jewels’ found in the coffin as definitive proof. But if John was reluctant
to allow Thomas to touch Jesus, Shakespeare, while not disallowing it, has no
intention of adducing merely material evidence. When Thaisa comes round,
it is again Pericles’ voice and appearance which strike her, and it is her voice,
pronouncing his name –​like Jesus’ with Magdalen –​which stops his heart for
a second: ‘O, my lord,/​Are you not Pericles? Like him you spake,/​Like him you
are’ –​‘The voice of dead Thaisa!’.
Thaisa thus twice returns from the dead. This time there is no music of
the spheres, no sleeping fit; now Pericles experiences the ultimate threshold
47
48
Pericles, v. i. 230–​232.
Pericle, principe di Tiro, ed. A. Serpieri, Milan, Garzanti, 1991, p. 216.
262 Chapter 5
between life and death, between ‘the utmost realization of happiness and the
vanishing of all’:
This, this: no more, you gods; your present kindness
Makes my past miseries sports. You shall do well,
That on the touching of her lips I may
Melt, and no more be seen. O come, be buried
A second time within these arms.49
This, then, is the supreme moment, when rediscovering a wife, recomposing
the human family, and perpetuating it (in the marriage announced between
Marina and Lysimachus) coincide with the recognition of divine action; when
kissing the lips of a woman means ‘melting’, and burying her within one’s arms
means ‘no more being seen’, so that this most human gesture of affection and
union which subverts death becomes one with the act of passing beyond: a
transfiguration. This is the time, here and now, on the earth, this is the thing –​
here, in the theatre. This, to reply to Euripides’ Chorus, is god, non-​god, and god
and non-​god together.
∵
As with Lear and Pericles, Hercules awakes and fails to recognize at his first
attempt. The plot and recognition develop when Hercules returns from Hades
with Cerberus, at the end of the last labour inflicted on him by Juno, jealous
of the stepson imposed on her by Jupiter’s unfaithfulness. He is greeted by his
father, Amphitryon, his wife, Megara, and his children. Suddenly a fit of insanity overcomes him: a Juno-​sent fury which cracks his brain, seizes his heart,
and clouds his eyes. Before the powerless gaze of his father, aghast with horror, the great Hercules kills his wife and children, believing them to be Juno
and the offspring of his enemy Licus in person. Then, falling to the ground, he
falls asleep. When he wakes, the fog still clinging to his brain (as with Lear and
Pericles) is such that he fails even to recognize his surroundings, and his home
city, Thebes. He mutters:
Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?
ubi sum? sub ortu solis, an sub cardine
glacialis ursae? numquid Hesperii maris
49
Pericles, v. iii. 40–​44.
To Recognize Is a God
263
extrema tellus hunc dat Oceano modum?
quas trahimus auras? quod solum fesso subest?
certe redimus.
What place is this, what area, what region of the world?
Where am I? Under the rising sun, or beneath the course
of the icy Bear?
Is this the boundary which the furthest earth
of the Hesperian sea gives to the Ocean?
What air do I breathe? What earth lies under my tired body?
I have surely returned.50
Thus Seneca, rewriting Euripides’ Madness of Heracles, presents us with
strength personified and made hero, lying senseless on the ground, despoiled
of his arms, at the beginning of the last scene of his Hercules Furens. We wait in
horrified anticipation for the moment he recognizes the butchered bodies of
his wife and children, learns from his father, after frantic, frenzied questioning,
that he is responsible, and realizes that he has been annihilated, made less
than a Nobody, an Oedipus who seeks death or desperate flight and will find
refuge only in the Athens of Theseus.
It is the first line of this scene –​Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi
plaga? –​which T.S. Eliot uses as the epigraph for ‘Marina’, one of the Ariel
Poems published in 1930, his own rewriting of the recognition scene in
Pericles.51 He used it, he explained in a letter, because he intended ‘a crisscross
between Pericles finding alive, and Hercules finding dead –​the two extremes
of the recognition scene’.52 In his rewriting of Shakespeare, Eliot places ‘Marina’
between death and rebirth, interlinking the two by means of the slow, mysterious process of the dawning of consciousness: making poetry on the scene of
Shakespeare and agnition itself, or, to put it more precisely, on the threshold
between the two.
‘Marina’ is a monologue pronounced by an anonymous voice which the title
and some lines imply to be that of Pericles. Its resonance, however, is at least
triple: the words emerge from the nameless breath of an ‘I’ seemingly in search
of itself, filtered through the echo of Shakespeare and reverberating between
the Seneca quotations which open and close the poem. Rewritings of Hercules
50
51
52
Seneca, Hercules Furens, 1138–​1143, in Tragedies i, ed. J.G. Fitch, Cambridge MA, Harvard
University Press (Loeb Series), 2018, my translation.
Text in The Poems of T.S. Eliot (The Annotated Text), ed. C. Ricks, vol. i, London, Faber, 2015.
Letter to Michael Sedler, 9 May 1930, quoted by Ricks, p. 774.
264 Chapter 5
Furens immersed, as it were, in the sea of Pericles (also evoked by Seneca) actually frame the poem:
What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter.
What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.53
Hercules’ sleep-​drugged questions have become, as indicated by the absence of
punctuation, both evocation and interrogation, directed at his daughter, here
seemingly recognized, and at himself and his own failed memory. Out of this,
there emerges some northern shore, known and lost, identifiable but mysterious. Eliot apparently based himself on the shores of Rogue Island, in Maine, on
the Atlantic coast of the United States; for the poetic ‘I’ of the poem, these are
vague, amorphous memories, a horizon of water and rocks suspended in time
and space. The ‘images return’ with the perfume of the pines, the woodthrush’s
song, and the water lapping the prow; past and present are co-​terminous, suggested by the poem’s temporal dimension, the reader moving in to supply the
text’s tacit association. This is not yet knowledge, in the opening lines (the last,
as we shall see, contain a subtle but vital variation), but a threshold of associations, a ‘fog’ of echoes, radical doubt as to what is actually seen and what
remembered (what seas, what shores?), and intertextual doubt as to the being-​
where (ubi sum?).
But consciousness is not inactive: we are informed that it is roused by ‘those
who sharpen the tooth of the dog’, ‘those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird’, and those who wallow in animal contentment: all ‘meaning Death’,
because all pernicious personifications of Evil and capital sins: gluttony, pride,
sloth, and lust. It is from spiritual death that this Pericles-​Hercules must rise again,
and knowledge must emerge from awareness of his own sins. Yet the purification
is through no tortuous inner process, but seemingly divinely-​dispensed: the stains
spotting his soul are stated in the present ‘confession’ but seem of no consequence
because washed ‘by a wind, a breath of pine’, while the fog singing in the wood
appears to be dispersed in space by abundance of grace:
53
Respectively the five opening, and the three concluding lines of the poem, pp. 107–​108.
To Recognize Is a God
265
Are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind,
A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog
By this grace dissolved in place (14-​16)
In the context, the mysterious wind (a wind) cannot fail to evoke the divine
pneuma of the beginning of the world, and the breath of John’s Jesus on his
disciples after the resurrection: not accidentally, Eliot associates this with a
breath. At the same time, this breath is that of the pines, the ‘scent’ pervading
the first lines. Evil is annulled by the Spirit and by the scent. Meanwhile, the
woodthrush singing in the fog disappears, leaving a concretion of voices and
a scene dimly glimpsed through the darkness, an incorporeal sublimation, a
woodsong fog: fog-​of-​the-​song in/​of-​the-​wood. Are we to take this fog as the
object of the grace which dissolves it, as grammar, punctuation, and logic
would argue, or in apposition to the wind and the breath of pine, as would be
far from unfeasible in a poet like Eliot, who has taken care to have fog lingering
over the punctuation and the definite and indefinite articles of the first lines?
Are we to read the wind, pine-​breath, and woodsong fog as variations and progressive intensifiers of the same ‘thing’? Or should we read them as a series of
agents of the ‘grace’ which wipes out evil and Death? And does ‘dissolved’ then
refer to the listed personifications of sin in the previous verse, or the ‘woodsong fog’, or only to ‘grace’?
Let me attempt a word-​by-​word paraphrase: i.e. an interpretation. First: ‘Have
become without substance, reduced by a wind,/​A breath of pine, and the fog
of the song in the wood/​[Fog] dissolved by this grace in space’. Second: ‘Have
become without substance, reduced by a wind,/​By a breath of pine, and by
the fog of the song in the wood/​[All of which are] dissolved by this grace into
space’. Third: ‘Have become without substance, reduced by a wind,/​a breath of
pine, and the fog of the song in the wood/​by means of this grace [which has
been] dissolved in space/​in this place’.
At the heart of ‘Marina’ there lies a question which might apparently solve
all questions: a mystery which can open out or close in on itself. In the first
and second readings above, the text preludes an inner process of awareness,
and a higher process of illumination, possibly ending in recognition. In the
third, however, a dream is described, an illusory vision: ‘the rarest dream that
e’er dull sleep/​Did mock sad fools withal’, as Shakespeare’s Pericles exclaims in
disbelief a few seconds before agnition. The difference is nothing less than the
alternative between salvation and resurrection granted by an external ‘person’
on the one hand, or by a mere inner illusion, ‘unsubstantial’, on the other.
The text moves in various directions simultaneously: towards an opening
up, if the woodsong fog clears; towards closure, if it remains dense; towards the
266 Chapter 5
progressive action of grace dissolving sin by means of the wind, the breath of
the trees, and the fog reverberating in the forest (that is, by divine, natural, and,
through memory and sensations, human means); or towards the sudden melting away of grace itself, into space, or in space, or even in loco, here and now.
Eliot ensures that his poem is more enigmatic than the Scriptures, creating a
rewriting which is elusive, hermetic, and evocative.
The next three lines can, for instance, be read in two radically different
ways, according to whether we listen to the echo of Pericles (‘But are you
flesh and blood? Have you a working pulse?’) or of Macbeth (‘Lesser than
Macbeth, and greater; not so happy, yet much happier’) which they undeniably contain. The voice takes up the questioning with Herculean and
Periclean insistence:
What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger –​
Given or lent? more distant than the stars and nearer than the eye
(17-​19)
Recognition is close at hand, or out of sight? Is the face given permanently,
once and for all, or a temporary gift? Pericles himself was still uncertain at
this point: ‘But are you flesh and blood?/​Have you a working pulse? And are
no fairy?’. To what reality does the entity called ‘Marina’ in the title, then,
belong: flesh and Spirit, or illusion of the mind, or of theatre, literature? Might
she even be oracular enigma, that with which the witches hail Banquo in
Macbeth?
The problem, of course, is that in ‘Marina’ the interlocutress defined ‘my
daughter’ never replies, and there is no being, more or less human, giving counterweight to the returning images, thereby creating an objective consciousness.
Pericles-​Hercules’ questions drop into the well of silence inside him, and reverberate only there. To the questions just quoted, for example, the voice replies
in a series of near-​incoherent fragments: whispers and ‘smalll laughter’ among
the leaves, and hurried steps (memories of youth? Of married happiness?), but
‘under sleep, where all the waters meet’, submerging everything.
Then there appears a first shred of self-​awareness: ‘I made this, I have forgotten/​And remember’. But this ‘doing’ is predicated on a ‘bowsprit cracked with
ice’, heat-​creacked paint, weak rigging, rotten sails, a leaking garboard strake,
uncaulked seams –​a phantom ship, in other words, the ship of an Ancient
Mariner condemned to life-​in-​death. Between one journey and the next, one
adventure-​labour and another, ‘Between one June and another September’
nine or infinite months have passed (one June, another September): time
To Recognize Is a God
267
to conceive and give birth to a daughter; time to age, be lost at sea, or in the
underworld.
The turning point comes now. Like a man-​god whose memory returns, or
who himself returns from the dead, the voice now claims to have ‘made this’,
and to have ‘made this my own’, as if he recognized that, ‘unknowing, half
conscious, unknown’, he had begotten a Daughter, fashioned his own vessel
in his own image. Now, suddenly, there appears before his eyes ‘This form, this
face, this life’. Whether ‘Marina’ (her name is never pronounced) be dream or
human being, she is, as in Shakespeare, Life, and, as in John, this. The voice has
found her within himself, with super-​herculean labour, and abandons his old
age to her, beyond himself and his own power of speech. Not an agnition, then,
but the promise of faith which is the necessary prelude:
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships (29–​32).
‘Marina’ is, more precisely, the hope of new life: the hope of the future of
the single individual, on earth, and that of eternity, of the ineffable and the
arisen; the hope of new, unending sea voyages in ‘the new ships’, leaving the
old, cracked vessel to rot away: of the living-​for-​the-​life-​of-​others –​the total
commitment of love and charity. Pericles and Hercules lay down the whole
of themselves to possess this life: ‘He that loves his life’, John’s Jesus preaches
(12: 25), ‘shall lose it; and he that hates his life in this world shall keep it unto life
eternal’. Everything seems to centre on a ‘thisness’ of form and, above all, face
(in the middle of the line), as if this Pericles-​Hercules, who had already wondered over it, perceiving it ‘less clear and clearer’, were positing a forthcoming
trajectory cognate with that of the First Letter to the Corinthians (13): now he
sees ‘through a glass, darkly’, but then he will see ‘face to face’; now his knowledge is imperfect, but then he will know completely, as he himself is known.
The voice of ‘Marina’ potentially opens, then, to the word and the Word,
uttered through ‘parted lips’. Within Eliot’s personal trajectory we have passed
the penitential Ash Wednesday to reach the Christmas-​related Ariel Poems: the
poems of the ‘altar of God’ and of Jerusalem (according to the etymology of
’ari’el and its associations in Isaiah 29), and of the aerial sprite of creation and
salvation evoked by Prospero and Shakespeare in The Tempest. But we are also
heading for the Four Quartets, where Marina’s granite islands, northern and
fog-​bound, will become the Dry Salvages, where travellers are greeted not with
a ‘fare well’ but with a ‘fare forward’, and where the present ‘daughter’ will
268 Chapter 5
become, quite explicitly, dantesquely, ‘Figlia del tuo figlio’, Daughter of your
son: the Christian Queen of Heaven.
This now casts a retroactive light on ‘Marina’, revealing its tensions and
ambiguities as tormented stages on an inner journey of conversion which is
also Eliot’s own. Suspended one second before the moment of recognition,
Marina is the most resonant prelude to it (Western) poetry has ever produced: a lyric not of being and knowing, but of the whisper of being, and the
shadow of knowing: the re-​Scripture of waiting and expectation, beyond which
it opens up the potential in each individual of the divine that lies in recognition. Thus the final questioning of the poem’s voice remains open, re-​echoing
that of the beginning, and on the threshold of awaking it returns to wonder
‘what seas what shores what granite islands’. But the same voice now moves
these seas and shores and islands ‘towards its timbers’, while, through the fog,
the woodthrush calls.
∵
Waiting and expectation, then, are our lot: has the god ever been, will he
ever be re-​cognized, known again? Let us return, in conclusion, to chapter
four of this book, to re-​writing and re-​cognizing, revisiting it after our reading of Euripides, John, Shakespeare, and Eliot. For all of these, it is woman
who possesses the particle of divinity which lies in recognizing and which
makes recognition possible. My last example is, on the other hand, a man: a
‘simple’ man, a ‘most common Jew’: Russian, devout, god-​fearing, pure of
heart, chaste of soul, and ‘just’. His name is Mendel Singer and he is the
protagonist of what I consider one of the finest and most moving of the
twentieth century’s novels, Joseph Roth’s Job, published in 1930, the same
year as ‘Marina’.54
54
I have used Hiob in the edition by F. Hackert, vol. 5 of the Werke, Romanen und
Erzählungen 1930–​1936, Köln and Amsterdam, Kiepenheuer & Witsch –​Allen de Lange,
1990. The English translation of Job from which I quote is by D. Thompson, London,
Chatto & Windus, 1983 (1933). The criticism I have found most useful is the following: M.
Greenberg, ‘Job’, in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. R. Alter and F. Kermode, Cambridge
MA, Harvard University Press, 1984; H. Fisch, ‘Job: Tragedy is Not Enough’, in his Poetry
with a Purpose, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1988, pp. 26–42; H. Fisch, ‘Being
Possessed by Job’, in his New Stories for Old, London, Macmillan, 1998, pp. 100–115; R. Frey,
Kein Weg ins Freie. Joseph Roths Amerikabild, Frankfurt-​Bern, Lang, 1983; B.M. Kraske, ed.
Joseph Roth: Werk und Wirkung, Bonn, Bouvier, 1988; G. Shaked, The Shadows Within. Essays
on Modern Jewish Writers, Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1987; R. Lux, Hiob im
Räderwerk des Bösen (Biblische Gestalten 25), Berlin, Evangelische Verlagsanstalt 2012;
To Recognize Is a God
269
Job is a rewriting not only of the Book of Job, but, as we shall see, also of
Genesis and Exodus, and like John and Shakespeare’s Pericles, it is centred on
the final recognition scene, offering the ideal forum in which to observe the
process we have been following throughout the present work. A twentieth-​
century novel written in German by a Galician Jew, it has the cadence and
resonance of an epic dictated by the winds; of a tragic, beatific Scripture
moving between two worlds, Russia and America, separated by an ocean and
by history: the small, rural, ancient village of Zuchnow, and the huge modern metropolis of New York, before, during, and after the Great War and the
October Revolution. Before we can return to our specific theme it will be necessary, then, to re-​read it, to hear, with the echo of the Biblical text, the blasts
which devastate the family of Mendel Singer. I shall therefore practice criticism as rewriting.
Mendel is ‘insignificant’ in appearance and, indeed, existence: in the large
kitchen which constitutes his entire home, he teaches children the Bible, as
thousands of Jewish teachers have done before him. His eyes, beard, and cap are
black, and he walks quickly, the skirts of his caftan flying and flapping against
his leggings and long leather boots ‘like the beat of wings’: an Everybody-​
Nobody, Eastern European Jew, in appearance part-​tramp, part-​angel. Mendel
has a wife, Deborah, and four children: Jonas, Schemarjah, Miriam, and a little
handicapped son, Menuchim, who sleeps in a basket hanging from the ceiling
by way of cot, and who, a doctor has strictured, will one day become epileptic.
From that day fear squats in the Singers’ house ‘like a monster’, pain insinuating itself into their hearts ‘like a hot, piercing wind’. Menuchim is seen as a disease eating away their collective flesh. He becomes their torment, their obsession, like the wind that here begins to blow, now to sweep over the entire novel.
Deborah takes her son to the holy rabbi in Kluczysk, the nearest small town,
for his blessing, receiving instead a prophecy of Biblical import:
Menuchim, Mendels Sohn, wird gesund werden. Seinesgleichen wird
es nicht viele geben in Israel. Der Schmerz wird ihn weise machen, die
Häßlichkeit gütig, die Bitternis milde und die Krankheit stark. Seine
Augen werden weit sein und tief, seine Ohren hell und voll Widerhall.
Sein Mund wird schweigen, aber wenn er die Lippen auftun wird, werden
sie Gutes künden […] Verlaß deinen Sohn nicht, auch wenn er dir eine
große Last ist, gib ihn nicht weg von dir, er kommt aus dir, wie ein
gesundes Kind.
Hiob –​ transdisziplinär, ed. W. Schüssler and M. Röbel, Münster, Lit Verlag, 2013; W. Pütz,
Hiob: Textausgabe mit Kommentar und Materialien, Stuttgart, Reclam, 2013.
270 Chapter 5
Menuchim, Mendel’s son, will be healed. There will not be many like
him in Israel. Pain will make him wise, ugliness good, bitterness mild, and
sickness strong. His eyes will see far and deep. His ears will be clear and
full of echoes. His mouth will be silent, but when he opens his lips they
will announce good tidings […] Do not leave your son even if he is a great
burden to you. Do not send him away from your side; he is yours even as
a healthy child is.55
The mother’s silent wait begins, while Menuchim’s brothers and sister try to
drown him, considered the canker among them, in the water butt. A tenacious
witness of life, beyond evil and pain, Menuchim refuses to succumb, shortly
afterwards pronouncing his first word, ‘Mama’, the only word he will utter for
ten years, ‘sublime as a revelation, mighty as thunder, gracious as Heaven, wide
as the earth, fertile as a field’: the voice of God and human radication, of promise and survival.
His life continues, slow and inexorable, enacted in the pace of the novel.
Miriam, pretty and sensual, devotes all her energy to men. Jonas and Schemarjah
are called up. All demonstrations of love between Mendel and Deborah are
one day converted into indifference or irritation. When, to his parents’ horror,
Jonas decides to become a professional soldier, his mother buys Schemarjah’s
passage to America for twenty-​five roubles. Mendel begins to resemble Job for
the first time, as his children disappear one by one. Only Menuchim remains,
and Mendel takes him frequently on his knee to feed him, or sits him on the
table, scrutinizing his wrinkled parchment face and trying to see through his
eyes into his brain. He repeats his name scores of times, but the child remains
inscrutable. He then taps a spoon against a glass, and the child turns immediately, a glimmer in his ‘large, grey, liquid’ eyes. Mendel continues to chink
the spoon, accompanying the noise with a song. Menuchim becomes uneasy,
turning his head and waving his legs. Again he calls ‘Mama, mama!’. His father
takes down the big black Bible and recites the first verse, as he would with his
pupils: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’. There is no
reaction beyond the ‘listening’ glimmer in Menuchim’s eyes. Heavy-​hearted,
Mendel addresses him:
Hör mich, Menuchim, ich bin allein! Deine Brüder sind groß und fremd
geworden, sie gehn zu den Soldaten. Deine Mutter ist ein Weib, was
kann ich von ihr verlangen? Du bist mein jüngster Sohn, meine letzte
55
Hiob, p. 11: Job, p. 16.
To Recognize Is a God
271
und jüngste Hoffnung habe ich in dich gepflanzt. Warum schweigst du,
Menuchim? Du bist mein wirklicher Sohn! Sieh her, Menuchim, und wiederhole die Worte: ‘Am Anfang schuf Gott Himmel und Erde’.
Listen to me, Menuchim, I am all alone! Your brothers have grown big
and strange … Your mother is a woman, what can I expect of her? You
are my youngest son, my last and most recent hopes are all planted in
you. Why do you remain silent, Menuchim? You are truly my son! Look,
Menuchim, and repeat after me the words: ‘In the beginning God created
the heaven and the earth’.56
In reciting the Creation, Mendel is attempting to mould his son and breathe
him the word through the Word. At the same time he consecrates him as his
one true Israel, his Joseph and Benjamin, and, met with his obstinate silence,
with infinite, painful, painstaking patience he again takes up the chinking of
the spoon, and his chanting of the beginning of Genesis. Then, despondent, he
opens the door for his pupils, while Menuchim drags himself behind him and
waits, curled up on the threshold like a loyal dog. The tower clock strikes seven
notes, four deep, and three high, at which Menuchim cries ‘Mama, mama!’,
stretching out his neck ‘as though he breathed in the music of the bells’. His
father, however, like Job, asks himself, ‘Why am I so afflicted?’, searching for
some sin committed and finding ‘none that is grave’. Life goes on.
Schemarjah leaves, passes the border, and manages, eventually, to reach
America, where he makes his fortune, like a second Joseph. After a time he
sends his parents ten dollars through his new-​found friend Mac, with a letter
inviting them to join him, promising tickets for New York. The pattern of the
last part of Genesis now begins to emerge in Job, albeit almost inverted. Just as
Jacob and his sons are unable to turn down Joseph’s invitation to Egypt, so the
Singers are unable to reject the promised abundance of the New World. But
Mendel and Deborah immediately pronounce, in small voices, that Menuchim,
with his slowness of mind and deformed body, cannot accompany them to
the land of health, beauty, and intelligence. As soon as the heavy sentence of
exclusion and abandon has been pronounced, the sun sinks rapidly, a black
shadow advances, ‘as a lake rises over its boundaries with the beginning of a
flood’, and a sudden wind rattles the shutters.
Menuchim must remain behind, and while the Singers are making arrangements to leave him with the son-​in-​law of their neighbour Billes, in exchange
for the use of their house, his sister Miriam shares her favours among the
56
Hiob, p. 28: Job, p. 49.
272 Chapter 5
many Cossacks stationed in the town. Menuchim must remain behind, and
for two weeks Deborah awaits the miracle (Wunder) that God will surely perform to heal him and allow his departure. Hope and faith are still alive, as is
expectation.
Menuchim must remain behind and Deborah weeps the tears of a mother
in whose memory the rabbi’s words are still ringing, ‘Do not leave your son,
stay with him’. Mendel refuses to return to Kluczysk to consult him, since ‘No
Jew needs a mediator between himself and God’; God will answer the prayers
of the righteous, only punishing those who sin. ‘Why does He punish us now?’,
Deborah asks in the tones of Job’s wife; ‘Have we sinned? Why is He so cruel?’,
to which Mendel replies, with Job’s voice, ‘You blaspheme Him, Deborah’.
Shortly afterwards, returning from Dubno without the necessary documents,
Mendel falls into a ditch when his neighbour Sameschkin’s waggon breaks,
and lies there, contemplating the stars which ‘conceal God’. The only sense
of brotherhood he now feels is with this Gentile peasant, who accuses him,
jokingly, of belonging to a race which the devil drives to wandering around the
world. Mendel’s answer is a steady weeping, at which the good Sameschkin,
himself close to tears, puts his arm round his friend’s bony shoulders and tells
him: ‘Sleep, dear Jew. Have a good sleep!’. At this moment Mendel knows in his
heart that his land is here, here are his roots, where good can grow and love
blossom towards his fellow beings.
Menuchim must remain behind, and Mendel thinks of nothing but his
son and the place he is about to leave, where he, his father, and his grandfather have all been teachers. Menuchim, ‘the idiot’, is agitated and uneasy.
The soul which God has ‘buried in the impenetrable fastnesses of his feeble
mind’ is disturbed by anxiety and fear. He drags himself to the door, where
he curls like a sick animal, or he pounds the locks of the trunk in an ‘unholy
rattling’. His mother takes him in her arms, inwardly hearing the rabbi’s
words, and gazes hopelessly at his dull, flabby face, immersed in sleep, and
the white spittle at the corners of his mouth. Deborah loses ‘the strength
which belongs with faith’, and gradually ‘the strength which is needed to
endure despair’ also abandons her. No miracle takes place. Menuchim
remains behind, stammering ‘Mama, mama’ while the cart rolls away his
mother, father, and sister.
The Singers travel for days by train before embarking at Bremerhaven. Here
Mendel is comforted by the immensity of waving water around him, recognizes (erkannte) it as eternal and God-​created, imagines Leviathan writhing
on the bed, and blesses the green rollers. Like a Job who has already heard
the Voice of the whirlwind, he recognizes the Creator and his works, which
contain even the abyss of water, and even Leviathan, who is not represented as
To Recognize Is a God
273
primeval chaos, but ‘the holy fish, whom the pious and the righteous would eat
on the Day of Judgment’. Then at last, the ship pulls out of port.
We now move from Genesis to Exodus. After a fortnight the three Singers
land in the New World, before the Statue of Liberty holding an inextinguishable, electrically-​lit torch: such are the ‘tricks’ America has up its sleeve.
Schemarjah is waiting for his father, mother, and sister. He now calls himself
Sam, and is so changed –​so Americanized in looks, smell, language, and gestures –​as to be unrecognizable. After four days’ quarantine, the Singers are
released by Mac, and New York welcomes Mendel with a hot wind, made up of
clamour and shouting, ‘a floating noise’, ‘the fiery breath of hell’. Ground and
annihilated by America, the poor Russian Jew on the verge of disappearing
consciousness sees not the Promised Land but the desert his forefathers had
wandered through for forty years.
This, then, is the new earth and the new heaven trumpeted by Isaiah: God’s
own country, as its citizens proclaim it! And is New York not known as the
wonder city, as Jerusalem once was? In actual fact it looks to Mendel Singer like
nothing so much as a ‘large Kluczysk’ and at the same time an unfamiliar world
in which he is alone, without family, ‘cast out of himself’ –​above all, deprived
of his son, Menuchim. His heart begins slowly to turn to ice, beating ‘like a
metal drum-​stick against cold glass’.
And yet Mendel soon begins to be at home in America: after all, he is the
descendant of one who, some few hundred years earlier, had been forced to
emigrate from Spain to Volinia, and is all too familiar with the centuries-​old art
of adapting, waiting, and smiling at adversity. Certainly he would love to return
to Zuchnow and retrieve Menuchim, but Sam insists it is not ‘practical’. He
lives in the hope of a letter announcing that Jonas is leaving the army and that
Menuchim has been healed, and one day, on one of his walks to pass time and
a lifetime, he takes a young boy curled up on a doorstep for his handicapped
son. In a word, Mendel lives in guilt and anguish and expectation, obstinately
loyal to the life he left behind in Russia.
But America is keen to have him forget the past, and eager to thrust its
munificence on him. Sam is happily married and getting steadily richer,
and Deborah seems to rely increasingly on Mac’s friendship. One day a letter arrives from both the Billes family and Jonas: fire had broken out in the
house and Menuchim had rushed out through the flames shouting ‘Fire!’ and
continuing with a few words more: the doctors were keen to treat him in a
Petersburg hospital. Jonas, meanwhile, was glad to be serving the Tzar in the
army. Mendel gives thanks to the Lord, and celebrates by exchanging glasses
of mead with his wife, glowing with the idea that they could very shortly send
Mac for Menuchim:
274 Chapter 5
Er holte aus dem Koffer sein altes Gebetbuch, heimisch war es in seiner
Hand, er schlug mit einem Griff die Psalmen auf und sang einen nach
dem andern. Es sang aus ihm. Er hatte die Gnade erfahren und die Freude.
Auch über ihm wölbte sich Gottes breite, weite, gütige Hand. Von ihr beschirmt und ihr zu Ehren sang er einen Psalm nach dem andern. Die Kerze
flackerte in dem leisen, aber eifrigen Wind, den Mendels schaukelnder
Oberkörper entfachte. Mit den Füßen schlug er den Takt zu den Versen
der Psalmen. Sein Herz jubelte, und sein Körper mußte tanzen.
From his trunk, he fetched his old prayerbook, so familiar to his hand.
He opened immediately to the Psalms, and sang one after the other. He
had experienced grace and joy.
God’s broad, wide, kindly hand arched protectively over him, too.
Sheltered by it, and in honour of it, he sang the Psalms, one after the
other. The candle flickered in the gentle but fervent breeze kindled by
Mendel’s swaying body. With his feet he kept time to the rhythm of the
Psalms. His heart rejoiced, and his body had to dance.57
We would appear to be at the end of the Book of Job, Mendel almost an exultant
David. But then war breaks out in Europe, Jonas is involved, and any chance of
communicating with and bringing over Menuchim seems impossible. Mendel
continues to sing Psalms, but does so now with an alien voice. Fear shakes him
‘as the wind shakes a tender tree’. Ever restless, he is tormented –​like many
Jews during the Holocaust –​at the idea of not having done enough: what can
Psalms do against the ‘great storm’? The cannons thunder, the flames shoot up,
and ‘my children are perishing. It is my fault, my fault! And I sing Psalms! It is
not enough! It is not enough!’.
The novel now speeds up in pace, as does the history of the world after 1914.
Sam leaves for Europe, with Mac, to fight for his new ‘fatherland’; Jonas is officially declared missing; Miriam announces that Mac has returned with Sam’s
personal effects and his last wishes and farewells; at the news, Deborah tears
her hair, begins to sing, emits a heart-​splitting groan, and dies. While Mendel
is imagining that Menuchim too must now be dead, and while he grieves for
Deborah, accusing America of killing them both, and reproving himself and his
wife for having ceased to love each other (‘perhaps that was our sin’), Miriam
loses her mind.
Only his own life now remains to Mendel, as to Job. Now, while he paces
about the psychiatric hospital which is treating his daughter, he observes the
57
Hiob, pp. 84–​85: Job, p. 148.
To Recognize Is a God
275
yellow cowslips in their pots and thinks of the Russian meadows, lost with
Menuchim, ‘the most loyal of all the dead, the farthest away of all the dead, the
closest of all the dead’. Pulverised by fate, and driven by the new, hard wisdom
of one who has ‘seen a few worlds perish’, he advises Sam’s widow to marry
Mac, in this way absolving himself of all family responsibility. Finally revelling
in his tragedy, he attempts to break the final tie, that with God: he lights a fire
and is about to burn the red velvet sack containing his phylacteries, his talèd,
and his prayer-​books. Like a crazed David, he chants his terrifying litany, beating time with his boots until the floorboards rattle, accompanied by the pots
on the wall:
‘Aus, aus, aus ist es mit Mendel Singer!’ […] Er hat keinen Sohn, er hat
keine Tochter, er hat kein Weib, er hat keine Heimat, er hat kein Geld.
Gott sagt: Ich habe Mendel Singer gestraft. Wofür straft er, Gott? Warum
nicht Lemmel, den Fleischer? Warum straft er nicht Skowronnek?
Warum straft er nicht Menkes? Nur Mendel straft er! Mendel hat den Tod,
Mendel hat den Wahnsinn, Mendel hat den Hunger, alle Gaben Gottes
hat Mendel. Aus, aus, aus ist es mit Mendel Singer!’
It is over, all over; it is the end of Mendel Singer! […] He has no son,
he has no daughter, he has no wife, he has no country, he has no money!
God said: I have punished Mendel Singer! For what has He punished him?
Why has He not punished Lemmel, the butcher? Why not Skovronnek?
Why not Menkes? He punishes only Mendel. Mendel has death, Mendel
has madness, Mendel has hunger –​all God’s gifts are for Mendel! All, all
is over –​it is the end of Mendel Singer!58
But if his lips and feet are ready with their sacrilege, his hands refuse to obey
his anger. Every day for fifty years Mendel had used those same objects to call
on his God: he cannot now simply burn them. A conditioned reflex towards the
sacred holds him back: his heart is ‘angry with God’, but ‘in his sinews the fear
of God still dwells’. His friends Menkes, Skovronnek, Rottenberg, and Groschel
come, alerted by his neighbours (and interpreting the role of Eliphaz, Bildad,
Zophar and Elihu in the Book of Job). When they ask Mendel why he wants to
burn the house down, he replies that he wants to burn ‘more than a house and
more than a person’, and when they presss him, he finally shouts: Gott will ich
verbrennen, ‘I want to burn God’.
58
Hiob, p. 101: Job, p. 178.
276 Chapter 5
At this ultimate blasphemy the four feel their hearts seized by sharp
claws, but, like their Biblical predecessors, attempt to reason with Mendel.
Skowronnek reminds him that God’s blows have ‘a hidden purpose’, and men
can never know the reason for their chastisement. But Mendel knows very
well: ‘God’, he spits out bitterly, ‘is cruel, and the more one obeys Him the
more brutally he treats one’. A powerful bully, He enjoys annihilating the weak
because weakness excites His sense of power. He is an isprawnik, a great, brutal
Tzarist police chief. Rottenberg and Groschel then evoke the example of Job
in person: he, too, blasphemed God, ‘And yet, it was only a test, after all’, and
Mendel, like Job, has hitherto had issue and prosperity. ‘Why do you break my
heart?’, is Mendel’s not unreasonable reply, ‘Why do you tell me all that was,
now, when I have nothing left?’: and his friends can only agree.
Rottenberg tries again, arguing that Mendel had disturbed the divine
plans by leaving behind his handicapped son as if he were a child of evil.
A long silence follows his comment, which has clearly touched the rawest
of nerves. Mendel then replies, not to Rottenberg but to his previous interlocutor, asking why he had given the example of Job. Had they, then, ‘really
seen miracles’ like those at the end of the Book of Job? Will Deborah and
Schemarjah, then, rise from the dead, will Jonas return alive and well, will
Miriam be healed, will Menuchim arrive from Russia, even supposing he is
still alive? And then, he goes on, finally answering Rottenberg, it is unfair
to say ‘that I left Menuchim behind out of unkindness, to punish him’: they
had been forced to leave for other reasons, because his daughter was running
around with Cossacks. And then, he concludes, why was Menuchim ill? ‘His
sickness itself showed that God was wroth with me. It was the first blow,
which I did not deserve’.
Menkes, like Elihu ‘the most thoughtful’, then speaks, insisting that, although
God was almighty, He considered the world no longer deserving of miracles,
and even if He wanted to make an exception for Mendel, ‘the sins of the others
would count against you’. He is obliged to limit himself to small-​scale miracles: Deborah and Schemarjah will not return from the dead, but Menuchim
is probably alive, and Mendel may well see him again after the war; Jonas may
have been taken prisoner; Miriam might get better; and, lastly, Mendel has a
grandson, Schemarjah’s son, on whom to pour his love, and comfort himself.
Mendel replies in tones of closure to this ‘most thoughtful’ voice of human
wisdom, which advises keeping the doors of the possible open but is unable to
grasp the nakedness of the being in front of him and offer adequate consolation. He begins, as always, with the last point made by his interlocutor. There
can be, he insists, no relationship between himself and his grandson, because
their natural link, Schemarjah, is dead; the doctor has said that medicine
To Recognize Is a God
277
cannot cure Miriam; Jonas is, in all likelihood, dead; and Menuchim was not
well at the best of times, and will certainly not have survived the war in Russia.
Mendel is, and wishes to be, alone. He has loved God for years and has been
hated in return. Now all that He can do is kill him, but God is too cruel for
that: ‘I shall live, live, live’, Mendel howls. When Groschel warns him that God’s
power extends beyond death, to the next world, Mendel laughs and denies any
fear of hell. He has already been through every imaginable hell, and since the
devil is less mighty than God, he will necessarily be less cruel. Job prefers the
Enemy to the Lord. Unlike his Biblical counterpart, he does not call Yahweh to
judgment –​he seems already to have condemned Him to death. His friends
fall silent.
At dawn they take him to the Skovronneks, where he then stays, steadfastly
refusing to pray or touch his red velvet sack. Gossips report that, to annoy God,
he forays into the Italian section to eat pork. But his fellow Jews take his part in
his battle against heaven, feeling for him not only pity, but admiration and reverence. Mendel has become one of the elect, the incarnation of ‘holy madness’:
Ohne Zweifel ein Auskorener war Mendel Singer. Als erbarmungswürdiger Zeuge für die grausame Gewalt Jehovahs lebte er in der Mitte der
andern, deren mühseligen Wochentag kein Schrecken störte. Lange
Jahre hatte er wie sie alle seine Tage gelebt, von wenigen beachtet, von
manchen gar nicht bemerkt. Eines Tages ward er ausgezeichnet in einer
fürchterlichen Weise. Es gab keinen mehr, der ihn nicht kannte. Den
größten Teil des Tages hielt er sich in der Gasse auf. Es war, als gehörte es
zu seinem Fluch, nicht nur ein Unheil sonder Beispiel zu leiden, sondern
auch das Zeichen des Leids wie ein Banner zu tragen.
Undoubtedly Mendel Singer was a man marked by God. In the midst
of those whose laborious days were undisturbed by terrors he lived as a
pitiful witness of the cruel power of Jehovah. For many years he had lived
his days like all the others, observed by few, by many not even noticed.
Then one day he had been set apart, in a dreadful way. There were none,
now, who did not know him. He spent the greater part of his days in the
streets. It was as though it were part of his curse not only to suffer misfortune but to set an example, to wear the sign of his agony like a banner.59
Mendel is now the Job of Western tradition: a vir sanctus but equally a blaspheming madman; the elect and the rebel, victim and idol, humanity itself
59
Hiob, p. 107: Job, pp. 188–​189.
278 Chapter 5
suffering without cause. But beneath the pain, rejection, and blasphemy, a thin
thread, a never-​severed umbilical cord links him to his God: the lack of prayer
hurts him, and his anger and impotence torment him. Mendel is angry with
Him, but has to recognize that ‘God still rules the world. Hate can move Him
no more than piety’. Remembering the many days of his life which had opened
with prayers and a familiar greeting to his ‘strong but smiling’ Father, who had
always, he believed, returned the greeting, Mendel now considers he has been
‘deceived’. The Father is ‘strong but harsh’, and from His lips comes ‘no sound,
but thunder’.
Mendel’s days are spent running small errands for others, and rocking
the cradles of others’ children, dredging atrociously from painful memory,
perhaps as a bitterly mechanical token of faith, the old chant, ‘Say after me,
Menuchim: In the beginninng God created the heaven and the earth. Say
after me, Menuchim!’. He is impervious to the many items splashed over
the newspapers, such as the outbreak of revolution in Russia. On feast-​days,
among his fellow-​Jews, his heart is a stone, his lips closed. His black caftan
is now green, and the seam visible down his back, ‘like a tiny drawing of
the backbone’. Mendel Singer is a skeleton, a death’s head that shrinks daily,
bent crookedly towards the ground, ‘a wreck of a creature, with crooked
knees and scuffling soles’: a dying life, a tiny wandering Jew, a being-​towards-​
nothingness which nothing –​neither the world, nor time, nor mankind –​
can in any way touch.
∵
Mendel Singer has become vanity of vanities, the infinite void of Ecclesiastes.
His is the story of a simple man, and, so far, the simple-​complex story of a common man: a tragedy, to define it more precisely, which has taken us through a
peak (material prosperity and ‘grace’ after the arrival in America), two reversals, or peripeteiai –​the loss of his children and homeland: then the loss of
everything –​and a difficult but fulfilled anagnorisis (between Schemarjah-​Sam
and his family). Everything in the tragedy is perfectly ‘simple’, natural, and all
too human: the sick son, destiny’s games with a family, the bitter, Kunststücke
America, producing technical marvels which are a ghastly lay version of miracles and Wunder (Roth’s slaughtering of this particular golden calf is even more
savage than Kafka’s), emigration, war, and revolution. Events seem entirely the
result of all or any of these. Yet history appears to be relegated to brackets,
while other realities, the instinct and emotions of the protagonists, occupy the
foreground: Jonas’s bellicosity, Miriam’s lasciviousness, Schemarjah’s capitalist
passion, and the decay of love between Mendel and his wife. This is why the
To Recognize Is a God
279
wind which arises suddenly and blows continuously over events, marking and
magnifying them, penetrates into Mendel Singer’s body and soul.
Above all, the tragedy is dominated by two inexplicable enigmas: Menuchim
and God. Both are obsessive, unyielding, secretely interlinked presences.
Menuchim is creation’s misfit, ‘an error in Nature’, as Montale puts it, ‘the still
point of the world, the link that won’t hold’.60 But he is, and is there, not to
be unmade: the life and sickness of the world, from its beginning. His father
seems obscurely to perceive this, when he chants to him, ‘In the beginning God
created the heaven and the earth’. At the same time he is unfathomable: why
does he exist, why does he not speak? The ‘listening light’ is in his eyes whenever he hears any elementary form of music, but his only words are ‘mama’,
and then, years on, ‘fire’. Menuchim is the child of the origins of the human
race, animal-​made-​human, a ‘thing’ (the ‘thing itself’, Lear would say) with a
soul. An ugly, dull, flabby, crawling creature curled on the threshold like a dog,
Menuchim is a pathetic, resilient, horrendous, beautiful, inexplicable mystery.
His companion is God, his creator. God never acts in the first-​person in
Job: no event is directly attributed to Him by the narrator as cause and effect.
It is Mendel and Deborah, and Mendel and his New York friends, who discuss
Him constantly and try to establish some indissoluble link between His reasons and events: between Creator and created. Between the two parallel and
independent lines which emerge in the story it is the human being who, in a
Hebrew manner, finds the plot and is caught up in it. If God is made responsible for everything, it is He who must be constantly discussed. But to reason
why with God is a thankless task: why is he punishing us? Deborah asks; why
is he persecuting me?, Mendel wants to know; and all the clever answers of his
four friends will crash against a wall of mystery.
Just as Menuchim cannot be killed, in the same way God cannot be
burned: flesh of the same flesh and spirit of the same spirit, they brand and
elect Mendel who chooses them in his turn. Good and evil are present in both
for those who have eyes to see: God is a ‘benign hand’ and cruel isprawnik.
Menuchim and God constitute the two opposite but complementary extremes
of the unfathomable, of the ultimate inscrutability of being. To abandon one
means losing faith in the Other; desiring to burn the First means considering
the second irrevocably dead. They are linked by way of the expectation they
60
Eugenio Montale, ‘I limoni’, in Collected Poems 1920–​1954, ed. and trans. J. Galassi,
New York, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998, pp. 8–​9: and see ‘Avrei voluto sentirmi scabro ed
essenziale’, lines 10–​13, pp. 74–​77: ‘I wanted to find out the evil/​that bores the world, the
littlest/​jilt of a lever that stalls/​the universal contraption’.
280 Chapter 5
arouse and nurture in those near to them –​the as yet vain expectation of the
miracle, the Wunder.
God cannot be known, He can only be re-​cognized. This is what Mendel is
doing when he tinkles the spoon against the glass for Menuchim, and intones
the beginning of Genesis; when, on board ship, he contemplates the sea; when
he sings his songs of thanks to America; when, bereft of everything, he admits
that God cannot be annihilated, and still governs the world; when, lastly, he
blames God for speaking only as the thunder does –​and indeed, the Yahweh
of the Book of Job speaks out of the se‘ara, the whirlwind, the storm, with the
voice of the thunder. And the God of Job speaks through the wind which blows
through the pages of the novel, thick, hot, dark, and freezing; through the
creaking of a window, the hell-​house hum of New York, the breeze of fear: the
ruah Elohim, the breath which breathes over the waters of primordial chaos.
‘Look, Menuchim, and repeat after me the words: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” ’.
∵
Mendel, curled in on himself, ready to disappear into the earth he bends
towards, an empty cypher, fails to hear the voice of God from the whirlwind.
When the war ends, the first phonogram records begin to arrive, ‘new songs
from Europe’. In one of these, Mendel hears a tinkling of water which then
swells and roars like the ocean. To him it is ‘the whole world … engraved on
such a little disk’; a silver flute then winds its way in to accompany the ‘fabric’ of
the violins ‘like an accurate little hem’: a round, flat microcosm promising the
entire Earth: small voices announced in mystery. Uncomprehending, Mendel
cries for the first time in years. Skovronnek then reads the record label: the
song is called … ‘Menuchim’s Song’.
With the arrival of spring, Mendel is another man: he hums to himself, and
allows a slight smile to remain on his lips. As the days lengthen and the community awaits the Messiah for Passover, one of his neighbours reads Mendel’s
transformation as the onset of a second childhood: holy madness, and joy at
the onset of death.
The pages of Job uninterruptedly recount Mendel’s gradual reduction into
nothingness and the arrival of the record: life simply goes on. And the waiting
begins anew, intensified and piloted by Roth, who accelerates the narrative
rhythm with the skill of an Eliot, Shakespeare, John, and the Yahwist of the
Joseph story. Menuchim’s Song safely lodged in his brain, Mendel now perfects his grand plan, to return to what had been his house and find the money
Deborah had hidden, with which to purchase his return ticket to Europe. This
To Recognize Is a God
281
he successfully does, and although the money is not enough, he will add to
it over the next few months: now he has time, and the ocean, Zuchnow, the
forests, stars, and Sameshkin ‘wait’ for him. If Menuchim is dead, then he too
will be waiting for him in the tiny graveyard, and Mendel will lie beside him on
the naked earth and wait to sleep there ‘for ever’. But his plan fails: ready for
death, he is overtaken by life, which prolongs his wait, fulfils it, and renews it.
Then, finally, the recognition takes place, unfolding in three scenes of increasing intensity, each prepared by the preceding one.
Scene one. The ice-​cream seller, Frisch, announces to Mendel that the previous evening he had been at a concert where Menuchim’s Song had been
played. The conductor of the orchestra came from Europe, was called Alexis
Kossak (and therefore a possible relative of Deborah’s: Kossak was her maiden
name), and was looking for Mendel Singer. Frisch shows Mendel the concert
programme with the musician’s photograph. Mendel grips it, staring at the eyes
which look right back at him; large and clear, simultaneously old and young,
they seem to know everything, and, like the record, to contain the whole world.
Mendel himself feels younger in their gaze, becoming a youth who needs to
learn everything. The only thing he understands is that he knew these eyes
and had dreamt of them as a boy: ‘years ago, when he had begun to study the
Bible, these had been the eyes of the prophets. Men to whom God Himself
had spoken had such eyes. They knew all, they betrayed nothing; they were
full of light’. Mendel re-​enters the primeval ocean of space and time, revisiting his past, rediscovering the Book, and recognizing that he knows nothing
any longer. He takes the photograph, immediately stopping outside to reexamine it. It now seems to him that infinity has elapsed since he entered the ice-​
cream parlour: ‘The couple of thousand years which shone in Kossak’s eyes lay
between, and the years when Mendel was still so young that he could imagine
the countenances of the prophets’.
The strange light of those eyes is both concentrated and dilated: the light
of the total knowledge granted by the word of God; the secret, enigmatic light
of prophecy; the time of youth, and of Exile; the time of Bible study, and of
waiting within the Bible; the time (and the reference is indirect but unmistakeable: die paar tausend Jahre) of Jesus of Nazareth. Kossak, the all-​knowing, has
the eyes of Mendel as a child, but they are equally those of Isaiah, Jeremiah,
Ezekiel, Daniel, and Christ. They are the eyes of those announcing salvation, of
those who prophesy, or present themselves as the Messiah. After Job, Genesis
and Exodus, Roth rewrites the Old Testament with an allusion to the New. Is
everything, then, about to come to pass?
Scene two. The evening of the Passover. Mendel is with the Skovronneks,
seated at one end of the table on which a snow-​white cloth glows, with six
282 Chapter 5
silver candlesticks each holding a white candle. Skovronnek, also dressed in
white, ‘a purified king upon a purified throne’, begins to chant the legend of the
Exodus from Egypt. All present join in, with the exception of Mendel. The melody ‘numbers over and over again’ the ‘miracles’ of God’s goodness, greatness,
and compassion towards Israel, and His anger with Pharaoh, and eventually
caresses and draws Mendel, too, into its net so that he hums in spite of himself, and rocks backwards and forwards, ‘cradled in the song of others’. It is as
if, ‘because of God’s love for his whole people’, the old man, too, were ‘almost
reconciled to his own, small fate’. His heart quietened, and well-​disposed
‘towards heaven which four thousand years ago had generously lavished such
marvellous miracles’, Mendel recalls when he, too, had headed the table and
intoned the chant celebrating Exodus and the Passover which commemorates it. He would be the only one to glance now and then at poor Menuchim,
the one evening of the year when he joined them at the festive table, and he
would see the ‘listening light’ in his eyes, and how ‘the little one tried in vain to
express what sounded in him, and to sing what he heard’. This is the rewriting
of Job: this using of tradition and its rites, retracing Exodus, and reevoking of
music (as in Pericles and ‘Marina’); this making of the Biblical past and personal memory a symphony, merging memory and anticipation, reawakening
the echo of the song heard on the record, perhaps of the chant repeated in far-​
off Zuchnow: ‘Look, Menuchim, and repeat after me the words …’.
Then the moment in the ritual arrives when the red chalice is filled with
wine and the door opened to admit the prophet Elijah, announcing the arrival
of the Messiah. The glass is ready, ‘waiting’, reflecting the six candle-​flames.
Mendel stands, glides to the door, and opens it. Skovronnek chants the invitation to the prophet. Mendel waits for him to finish, then closes the door. At
this point a knocking starts. They all think they are mistaken, and that ‘it was
certainly the wind which knocked’. Mrs. Skovronnek nags that the door was
not properly closed. But then the knocking is heard again, ‘longer and more
clearly’. They all hold their breaths, ‘perplexed and pale’: the smell of the candles, the wine, the candle-​light, and the old melody has brought adults and
children alike ‘to the point where they almost await a miracle’, and they look at
each other ‘as though they asked themselves whether the prophet were indeed
at the door’. Silence takes over the room, and no-​one dares move. Then Mendel
stands up again, and again glides towards the door. The whole scene is a marvelous Hebrew rewriting of John, totally human and wholly miraculous: a counterpoint to the Last Supper by means of a return to the original which the Last
Supper rewrites, the Jewish Passover and Exodus; a variation on Jesus’ sudden
appearance to the disciples after the Resurrection, in the closed room (here
To Recognize Is a God
283
making him knock at the door): a re-​composition in the waiting for Elijah, the
Messiah, and the wind.
Scene three. When Mendel opens the door, no prophet or Messiah enters.
Into the semi-​darkness of the passage strides a tall, elegant stranger who
presents himself as Alexis Kossak and asks to speak to ‘a certain Mendel
Singer’. Mendel introduces himself, and the guest is invited to sit. Kossak
and Singer look at each other in silence, like Penelope and Ulysses; while
the others continue praying, each seeks the other’s eyes. Nothing of the
man’s face is known to Mendel except his eyes, which his gaze constantly
strays back to, ‘like a homecoming to well-​known lights behind windows’.
Mendel takes out the concert programme with the photograph of Kossak
and hands it to the stranger, who smiles only momentarily, and ‘thinly’. We
are being invited, indirectly, to remember and conclude that these are the
eyes Mendel has already recognized as those which have heard the word
of God and know all, betraying nothing –​the eyes of the prophets: no
longer in a photograph, but in the flesh, they now seem to partially eclipse
Exodus and Exile with the shadow of a nostos, foretelling the return to the
native land.
The singing stops and dinner begins, eaten in increasing, ‘unfestive’ haste.
The singing resumes, again the recitation of miracles; then the Psalms are
intoned, the voice, the words, and the melody so enchanting that even Mendel
joins in with ‘Hallelujah! Hallelujah!’ at the end of each strophe. Then dinner
ends with the traditional ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’.
The anticipation is nerve-​racking, but the pace is now slowed down. Mendel,
bewitched by the music and led towards his true ‘home’ in Israel, puts the first
question. ‘Now, Mr. Alexis, what have you to tell me?’. The stranger apologises
for not having sent his news earlier and announces that Billes’ son-​in-​law has
died of typhus. Mendel mutters regrets, but thinks of Menuchim. Kossak goes
on to say he has bought Mendel’s old house for the equivalent of three hundred
dollars, which he would now like to give him, then confirms that Jonas has
been missing since 1915, quickly adding, however, that there is news that he is
alive and fighting with the White Guards: tiny fragments of hope begin to glimmer. Mendel is now about to ask about Menuchim, but Roth, like Shakespeare,
is a master of delaying; Skovronnek anticipates the question and likely tragic
answer, and deflects the conversation onto the stranger’s own life. Taken aback,
Kossak replies in few words: the son of a teacher, he was for many years sick
as a child, and had been sent to a public hospital in a large city. One day he
had sat down at the piano and played his own songs out of his head. The war
had made his fortune: his military music had been an enormous success, and
284 Chapter 5
he had played for the Tzar himself, after the Revolution taking his orchestra
abroad (the theme of music again).
Kossak’s story –​‘not anything special’, as he himself puts it –​has a strange
effect on his listeners, however; his words linger in the room and ‘descend’ on
his audience gradually, and singly. He speaks Yiddish badly, interspersed with
half-​Russian sentences, so that his account has to be translated into English
before they understand the whole, after Skovronnek’s retelling. A singular,
marvellous mixture of languages and interpreters is evoked (as between Joseph
and his brothers), which, however, ‘naturally’ summarize the vicissitudes of
the entire novel. The word is enigmatically suspended, echoing through the
air like a winged spirit before descending to each individual. The knife-​edge of
expectation sharpens.
Meanwhile, the candles have burnt down and the room darkens. Everyone
is reluctant to leave. Mrs. Skovronnek ‘reopens’ the evening, lighting two more
candles, while her husband asks Kossak if he is the composer of ‘Menuchim’s
Song’. His affirmative is reluctant, and in his turn he immediately asks Mendel
if his wife is dead, and if he has a daughter. Mendel nods; Skovronnek answers
that the death of her mother and brother caused the daughter’s mental illness.
Tremblingly, the destinies are about to touch. Mendel rises and goes out: he
yearns to ask after Menuchim, but dares not; he already knows the answer,
and is already tasting its bitterness to pre-​empt the shock of pain; finding a shy
hope still inside him, he tries to kill it. Deferring the moment, he goes towards
the kitchen to help their hostess prepare tea. She sends him back. The truth is
calling, and the question can no longer be delayed. To save unnecessary misery,
it is Skovronnek who puts it. ‘My friend, Mendel, had another poor, sick son,
named Menuchim. What has happened to him?’.
The stranger makes no reply but chinks his spoon in the bottom of his
glass and stares fixedly at it. Suddenly he cries: ‘Menuchim is alive!’. At these
words (which rewrite those of the brothers to Jacob about Joseph), Mendel
bursts into demented laughter which violently shakes his white beard and
resounds around the room. Skovronnek is scared and rises to hold his hands.
Then Mendel starts to weep, the tears flowing from his half-​veiled eyes into his
beard. Calming down, he again asks: ‘Menuchim is alive?’, and equally calmly
the stranger replies, ‘Menuchim lives. He is alive, he is well, he is even prosperous’. Mendel folds his hands, lifting them towards the ceiling trying to rise, feeling ‘he must stand up, stand straight, grow, become taller and taller’: the man
who had bent towards the earth is about to ‘touch the skies’. Skovronnek knows
what he must now ask on behalf of his old friend: ‘Where is Menuchim now?’.
And slowly Alexis Kossak answers: ‘I am Menuchim’ (Ich selbst bin Menuchim).
To Recognize Is a God
285
What unfolds is not recognition but progressive revelation:61 life, healing,
being-​here: a small, human, and mysterious resurrection which rewrites and
hebraically corrects the Gospel; a great and marvellous epiphany which there,
in America, and now, in the twentieth century, fulfils that of Joseph himself. It is
underscored by a rhythm which is alternately suspended, then taken up again
in threes: three scenes –​record, eyes, Passover. Three stages in the last scene –​
he is alive, he is well, it is I; three questions the text asks within the wider,
lingering one as to how the recognition will take place: when will readers start
to suspect Menuchim will come? When do they understand that ‘Menuchim’s
Song’ is the annunciation? When do they begin to conceive that Kossak might
be Menuchim? Roth is closer to the Yahwist than Thomas Mann: M, for all the
mystery, is expository, rationalising, midrashic: a hyperconscious reelaborator,
and rewriter; R is romantic, allusive, symphonic, possessed by the spirit. The
shadows of all present flicker over the walls. The candles waver, ‘as though
moved by a sudden wind’. Is God in this breath, as in the still, small voice heard
by Elijah on Oreb? Evoking the wind which has braced the narrative at crucial
points, Job suggests precisely that answer: Menuchim, surely, has come like the
Elijah of the Passover?
For his part, Mendel falls on his knees before his seated son, seeks his hands
with his lips, and reads his face with eager fingers, like blind Isaac. Not for a second does he take Menuchim for a god, far less for the Messiah: what he touches
is the flesh of his flesh, as underlined by the anxious scoring of his son’s face
with his hands. But the son sitting quietly, immobile, in the general silence,
surrounded by the encroaching darkness which merges those present into a
‘dark cloud’, and in which the candles continue to flicker, is the shadow of the
divine. When, immediately afterwards, Menuchim says to Mendel, ‘Stand up,
Father’, he sounds for a moment like Jesus speaking to Lazarus. But here, the
son takes the father under his arms, lifts him up, and sits him on his knee, like a
child, fulfilling by inversion the gesture with which, two lives ago, Mendel had
taken his son to himself. Father and son find each other, a reciprocal Abraham,
each in the other’s bosom. The Creation attempted by the Father in his chant,
‘Look, Menuchim, and repeat after me the words: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” ’, now seems fulfilled by the Son.
61
The only equivalent I know in contemporary literature is, on the secular side of things,
represented by the last five or so pages of José Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, Lisbon,
Editorial Caminho, 1993, translated into English as Blindness (G. Portiero, trans., London,
Harvill, 1997) or Seeing (trans. M. Jull Costa, London, Vintage, 2007), when the protagonists start seeing again.
286 Chapter 5
For now, however, these are simply oblique suggestions, Eliot’s ‘hints and
guesses’. A certain fact is that, sitting on his son’s knee, and looking at his
face, Mendel whispers the rabbi’s prophecy to Deborah: ‘Pain will make him
wise, ugliness good, bitterness mild, and sickness strong’. For the ‘simple,
most common’ Russian Jew, Mendel Singer, what is now achieving fulfilment is simply the far-​off blessing of the holy rabbi. But both Mendel and his
Passover companions go beyond this recognition of the truth preannounced
by a man. Unanimously his friends proclaim that ‘a miracle has happened!’.
The Wunder awaited throughout the novel has at last come about. Menkes,
‘the most thoughtful’, again takes up the reasons for consolation which he had
offered to Mendel’s despair, but subtly rearranges them into a significant re-​
cognition: the miracles perfomed by the Eternal, today as thousands of years
ago, are not now ‘modest’, but ‘great’. Then, finally, Mendel himself re-​cognizes
God, like Job, by confessing Him:
I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no purpose of thine can
be thwarted. Who is he that hides counsel without knowledge? therefore
I have uttered that which I did not understand … I have heard of thee
by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee. Wherefore I abhor
myself, and repent in dust and ashes.
Schwere Sünden hab’ ich begangen, der Herr hat die Augen zugedrückt.
Einen Isprawnik hab’ ich Ihn genannt. Er hat sich die Ohren zugehalten.
Er ist so groß, daß unsere Schlechtigkeit ganz klein wird.
I have committed grave sins, God has closed His eyes. I called Him an
ispravnik. He held his ears. He is so great that our badnesses seem to Him
very small.62
Rediscovering the Son means recognizing the Father: ‘Ijjôb probably means
‘where is my father?’. Mendel, the elect of pain, has now become ‘a disguised king’,
a little Job, a little David; possibly a little Jesus. He takes the sack of red velvet, gets
into Menuchim’s car, gives his three hundred dollars to the poor, and departs for
the Astor Hotel, on Forty-​Fourth Street and Broadway. The Passover is gone, the
angel has passed, and the true Exodus –​the return to the Promised Land –​can
now begin. The tragedy has ended and a kind of divine comedy can begin.
The recognition of God can now be the start of the recognition of the world
and of humanity. Up in the hotel room, Mendel sees ‘for the first time America’s
62
Book of Job 42: 2–​6; Hiob, p. 131: Job, p. 229.
To Recognize Is a God
287
night close at hand’: its noisy ‘song’, and the images of health and happiness it
emanates. He listens bewitched as his son tells the story of his genesis through
music: the remote tinkling on the glass, the sound of bells, the violin of Billes’
son-​in-​law, the fire, the hospital organ, the doctor’s wife’s piano: the story so
far known through hints and guesses is now known in its entirety, re-​cognized.
Then, taken to a promenade overlooking the sea, Mendel contemplates the
ocean, sun, and sky. For the first time in his life he dares to remove his old cap,
and as a ‘spring wind’ moves the few hairs on his head as he ‘greets the world’.
In the same moment he recognizes possibility, and the Scriptures: it is now
easy for him to ‘believe’ that Jonas will one day be found and Miriam healed
and returned to them, ‘in all the land no woman so fair’. ‘He himself, Mendel
Singer, would have a good death, after many years, surrounded by grandchildren, ‘old’ and ‘full of days’, as was written of Job. Shortly afterwards he recognizes the promise, and the shadows of the future springing from this and the
other world. He gazes at the photographs of Menuchim’s wife and children,
and calls down on them –​like Jacob on Joseph’s children –​God’s blessing. He
sees in the little girl’s face that of his wife, ‘dead Deborah’, and considers that
she, too, is perhaps living this ‘miracle’ with ‘strange, otherworldly eyes’. Then,
out of the brown background of the photograph emerge Jonas and Miriam,
beside ‘the new children’. And Mendel sleeps, resting ‘from the burden of his
happiness, and the greatness of the miracle’.
To recognize those we love is a god, we can only repeat with Helen: it is
Wunder and Glück, miracle and marvel, happiness and fortune: the hope of
life and fulfilment. Recognizing the son means recognizing the Father (and
Menuchim too, like God, cannot be perceived by ‘cognition’ but only ‘re-​
cognition’). But to recognize the Father, to recognize God –​and here we
rewrite Euripides, John, Shakespeare, Mann, and the Yahwist –​is a god. We
can only emerge from this tiny, irremovable tautology, within Job’s perspective,
by means of a further tautology: to recognize God is to rewrite the Scriptures, as
Mendel Singer does when, having rejected the example in his discussion with
his friends, he then identifies himself with Job by twice citing the Book, explicitly and consciously. But this re-​Scripture of one book of the Bible is a rewriting
of all Scripture; as Genesis appears in the Book of Job through Yahweh’s voice
out of the whirlwind, so Genesis, Exodus, Psalms, Prophets, and even a shadow
of the Gospels are superimposed in Job, through hint and gesture and situation. On the other hand this re-​Scripture is a continuously ‘new testament’, the
testimony of living –​and not just reading and writing –​within the horizons of
the Scriptures, thereby renewing them.
Here, however, an essential problem emerges from a contrast which refuses
to be ignored. Mendel (and Deborah and their friends) always speaks of God,
288 Chapter 5
and places everything within a God-​centred, Biblical perspective. Menuchim,
however, whom the novel presents as the ‘figure’ of Elijah and the Messiah –​a
small-​scale messiah, who will bring salvation not to a whole people, but to
one man alone –​never does. In recounting the story of his life to his father,
Menuchim never once mentions the Almighty, and never once speaks of ‘miracles’: his healing, his ‘genesis’, are through music, the fire, the doctor and his
wife –​through natural and human causes which by chance or by deliberate
application touch his mind and his psyche. When he thinks of Miriam’s future,
Menuchim gives himself as an example to counter his father’s pessimism
(‘Wasn’t I healed, father?’), but it is to the doctors he will turn.
This curious absence of God in Menuchim’s words opens a significant gap
in the novel, in re-​Scripture, and in re-​cognition, in that the narratorial voice
itself, as we have already noticed, equally never attributes an event directly
to God. At the same time, this is also the voice which creates the wind and,
through the ritual and the books of the Bible, constantly alludes to the shadow
of transcendence. Menuchim is inside the narrative; he is the son of a Bible
teacher, of a Jew who, bereft of his God, would be unable to draw breath (even
while trying to burn Him): yet he pays no attention to Yahweh. It is also true
that he was abandoned as a child and raised and healed outside the Jewish
community; but when he enters the Skovronneks’ he keeps his hat on ‘out of
reverence for the ceremony’ in which he finds himself. And he too is present –​
as cause and object –​at the jubilation celebrating the miracle. Yet when he
recounts the tinkling of the glass, the sound of the bells, and his father’s song,
Menuchim does not remember that this song began with the Beginning, the
Creation.
What are we to make of this absence, this recognition manqué? Does it point
to a gap between generations, to as it were the death of God in history? Does
Job deny the miracle as it manifests itself? I think not. Roth’s Job is re-​Scripture,
and like the Scriptures it is open or closed according to the inclination, disposition, and faith of its readers. When He calls Isaiah, God orders him to announce
to his people (6: 9): ‘Hear indeed, but understand not; and see indeed, but perceive not’. When he speaks to his disciples, Jesus reiterates Isaiah’s words: ‘Unto
you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that
are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see,
and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand’ (Mark 4: 11–​
12).63 Both Israel and the Gentiles can remain among ‘them that are without’.
63
The parallel passage in Matthew 13: 10–​15 says exactly the opposite by replacing the hina
and the subjunctive (‘that seeing they may see’) with hoti and the indicative (‘because
seeing they see not’). And see F. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy, pp. 23–​47.
To Recognize Is a God
289
Menuchim is within the narrative but ‘without’ its dominating culture, and
silent on the religion which obsesses all the others.
Scripture and re-​Scripture can be heard without being recognized, as in
Menuchim’s case. They can be read, and understood, as in Mendel Singer’s case
when, at the end, he feels he is reliving the experience of Job. Job is –​ exactly –​
a parable and a prophecy. One thing, however, it would seem to imply, unites
the two readings: the waiting within hope. When Mendel tells Menuchim that
there is no medicine that can help Miriam, his son replies, as we saw above,
‘We will go to her. Wasn’t I healed, father?’. And Mendel’s response is ‘Yes,
Menuchim is right. Man is never content … No sooner does he experience a
miracle than he already wants another. Warten, warten, Mendel Singer! Wait,
wait, Mendel Singer!’.
­c hapter 6
A Spark of Love
Medieval Recognitions
Secular German literature begins, as far as we know, with the Hildebrandslied,
an epic poem or ‘song’ probably composed in the seventh century in Northern
Italy and of which only a fragment dating from the ninth century survives. Be it
by chance or literary predestination, this fragment contains the climactic scene
of the poem, a scene of recognition. Old Hildebrand, who had been chased out
of Italy with his king, Theodoric, returns after thirty years and faces the enemy
army. The leader of the latter, the poet tells us immediately, is Hildebrand’s son,
Hadubrand.1 The two do not know each other. Hildebrand asks Hadubrand,
calling him ‘child’, who he is, and the young warrior replies he is the son of
Hildebrand, whom he venerates as a great hero of the past and who he believes
is now dead. The old man answers: ‘That knows the Highest above in Heaven,
that you never until now have measured yourself in fight with a closer relative’.
Not a word is said about what Hildebrand feels when he recognizes his son. He
offers Hadubrand a gold armband as a sign of his ‘grace’ (Huld). Hadubrand
thinks that the old warrior, a Hun in appearance, is trying to get close to kill
him. He refuses to believe that this is his father, whom sailors have reported
dead in war: ‘Tot ist Hiltibrant, Heribrantes suno’. Hildebrand’s cry comes from
his heart: ‘Alas, you ruling God, deadly fate approaches. Thirty summers and
thirty winters have I wandered out of the country, always assigned to the archers’ rank, and never did death meet me before a fortress. Now my own son must
strike me with his sword, cut me down with the axe, or I be his murderer’. We
know from other sources that Hildebrand will kill Hadubrand in the following
duel, as Cuchulain does with his own son in the old Irish legend.2
There is no doubt that this is one of the most powerful tragic scenes of
medieval literature. In it, chance and fate meet to produce a crisis; misunderstanding, irony, the ethos and the passion of war dominate the encounter; old
and young face each other; myth (the image of Hildebrand that Hadubrand
has in his mind) and reality clash; suggestive indirectness dictates the poet’s
1 Text in Althochdeutsche Literatur, ed. S Müller, Stuttgart, Reclam, 2007; the English translation is mine.
2 In the Aided Óenfhir Aife, for which see M. Tymoczko, trans., Two Death Tales from the Ulster Cycle,
Dublin, Dolmen, 1981; and K. Maier, ‘The Death of Conla’, Ériu, 1 (1904):113–​121; the rewriting by
Lady Augusta Gregory in Cuchulain of Muirtemne, London, Murray, 1902, is also worth reading.
© Piero Boitani, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004453678_008
A Spark of Love
291
technique. Above all, knowledge is introduced to make the tragic effect unbearably sharp. For the tragedy lies precisely in the conflict between Hildebrand’s
recognition and Hadubrand’s verkennen, his méconnaissance or refusal to recognize his father, and in the contrast between Hildebrand’s recognition and
his impotence before what he knows will happen. Hildebrand is old, experienced, full of memories, wise –​he knows. Hadubrand is young, impulsive,
without memory, blind –​he does not know. On top of all this we, as readers of
the poem, know everything from the very beginning. We watch this drama of
recognition and méconnaissance with growing anxiety, suspense, and sense of
impending doom. The tragic conflict takes us in.
In this chapter I am going to examine some medieval scenes of recognition,
with an eye both to their broadly cultural or imaginative relevance and to their
more strictly literary effects. For the way in which the Middle Ages treat this
theme can tell us something about their view of the human condition, and at
the same time take us to the crossroads where the tragic and its opposite, the
sublimely comic, meet. Depending on what is being recognized and to which
end it is being known, the effect of a poem will differ. Knowledge –​in literary
terms, recognition –​is the mystery we are going to sound in this and the following chapter. Here, I shall necessarily be selective, and will limit myself to treating essentially two themes, the mysteries of evangelical and para-​evangelical
recognitions, and the transformations of tragic conflicts.
Throughout the chapter, I shall take as my theoretical frame the pages
which Aristotle devotes to recognition –​anagnorisis –​in the Poetics, and
which constitute the first organic treatment of this problem. The Middle
Ages did not know that particular book of the Aristotelian corpus, as the
first full translation into Latin, by William of Moerbeke, was composed as
late as the thirteenth century, and was not widely known. Therefore, I shall
use Aristotle’s discussion of recognition, such as outlined in the Introduction
above, only as a theoretical model against which to measure the practice of
poets. Divergences from, and similarities with that theory will therefore be
constantly pointed out.
However, the Middle Ages were imbued with the Bible, and we have seen in
the preceding chapters how the Hebrew and the Christian versions of Scripture
treat recognition scenes and the theme of recognition. Let me recall here at
least some features of the New Testament which are directly relevant to medieval literature. The whole story of Jesus is seen as a struggle for recognition,
from the moment the Word becomes flesh, and the ‘darkness comprehended
it not’ and ‘the world knew him not’ to John the Baptist’s recognition of Jesus
while still in Elizabeth’s womb, down to the various revelations on the Jordan
and on the mountain, to the recognition scenes after the resurrection.
292 Chapter 6
I shall make three points here. The key pre-​Passion scene of recognition
in the Gospels occurs when Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is.
Peter –​the same Peter who will later deny knowledge of Jesus –​replies: ‘Thou
art the Christ, the Son of the living God’. Jesus’ answer to this is very interesting: ‘Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-​Jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed
(apekalypsen) it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven’.3 Peter’s recognition of the Christ has rightly been called a ‘confessio’, Petri Confessio. This is not
based on material signs, on flesh and blood, but on God’s direct revelation to
which evidently, Peter the man has responded.
Second point. During the Last Supper we have a scene in which Jesus
says: ‘One of you shall betray me’. With different and important variations, all
four Gospels tell us that the twelve start asking him, ‘is it I, Lord?’. Jesus does not
answer directly: in Mark and Luke, all he says is that it will be one who dips in
the dish with him. Matthew has Judas ask the question, and Jesus reply: ‘Thou
hast said’. John tells us that Judas was given the sop by Jesus (the sign that Peter,
through the Beloved Disciple, had asked for) and then Jesus told him: ‘that thou
doest, do quickly’. Frank Kermode wrote beautiful pages on these passages,4 so
I shall not analyse them. I merely point out that we have here a rather startling
mystery: in Matthew Jesus answers Judas with a phrase that could mean anything. In John, the sign is clear, and Jesus’ words to Judas are clearer than in
Matthew. But the eleven do not hear, do not see, in fact totally fail to recognize
Judas as the traitor, while we as readers are told beforehand and explicitly in all
versions that it is Judas Iscariot. For us, the recognition is clear. It is interesting
to note that in the Chester Plays, when Judas asks Jesus ‘ys yt not I -​that shall
doe thee this villanye?’, Jesus answers: ‘Thou hast read, Judas, redealye, -​for
sycker thou art hee’,5 where the medieval author makes explicit what was left
mysterious by Matthew and méconnaissance becomes recognition.
Third point. In John 20:25 Thomas Didymus doubts that Jesus has really
risen and appeared to the others and says that he will not believe it unless he
sees his hands with the print of the nails and puts his finger into those prints
and thrusts his hands into his side. What Thomas wants is material evidence,
like the scar Eurycleia washes in Odysseus’ thigh. And he could get it, for Jesus,
who now appears once more, invites him to reach out with his fingers and
touch the scars. But, as things are, John will not have a traditional recognition
scene. Seeing, of course, but without touching, Thomas simply pronounces the
3 Matthew 16: 13–​17.
4 F. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy, pp. 84–​95; and ‘John’, in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed.
R. Alter and F. Kermode, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 459–​465.
5 The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. R.M. Lumiansky and D. Mills, vol. i, London, eets ss 3, p. 274.
A Spark of Love
293
New Testament version of the Old Testament faith formula: ‘My Lord and my
God’, ho Kyrios mou kai ho Theos mou. The whole point is further clarified by
what Jesus says immediately afterwards: ‘Thomas, because thou hast seen me,
thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed’ –​
where even the evidence of sight is denied value. John Chrysostom among the
Greeks, and Gregory the Great among the Latins –​both later quoted by Peter
Lombard, who composed Sentences used and commented upon in all European
Schools6 –​were perfectly right, from this point of view and with this scene in
mind, to say: ‘Apparentia non habent fidem, sed agnitionem’ (Gregory) or ‘de
visis enim non est fides, sed agnitio’ (John Chrysostom). Things that appear,
which can be seen, do not involve faith, but recognition.
Gregory, whose relevant passage is once more reproduced by Peter Lombard,
solves the problem with a stroke of genius that develops the substance of an
argument proposed by Augustine.7 Both Augustine and Gregory maintain
that Thomas did touch his Master’s wounds, and Gregory adds that this was
allowed by the Lord himself so that we can have solid faith. But faith, says
Gregory quoting the epistle to the Hebrews (11: 1) is ‘the substance of things
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’. Thus, Gregory writes, Thomas’ was
not an act of faith, but one of recognition. ‘Tactus est, et agnitus est’: touched,
and recognized, as Augustine puts it. But then, Gregory asks, why does Jesus
tell Thomas, ‘because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed’? The answer
which Gregory, following Augustine, gives to this question is subtle and fundamental. Thomas, Gregory maintains, ‘saw something, but believed something
else’. A man cannot see divinity, the divine nature. ‘Thomas saw a man, but
confessed God’: my Lord and my God. ‘Hence by seeing he believed, because
considering the man to be true (realizing he really was Jesus the man), he
proclaimed him God, whom he could not see’. In his lectio on this passage,
Thomas Aquinas writes that Thomas the Apostle showed himself to be a good
theologian, confessing first, by using the word ‘Lord’, Christ’s human nature,
and then, with ‘God’, his divine nature.8 Thus, what we have here is a double scene: first, one of anagnorisis, with the right signs (Jesus’ wounds, which,
Gregory says, ‘heal the wounds of our lack of faith’); then one of faith. This
6 John Chrysostom, In Hebr., 21, 2, in Patrologia Graeca 63, 151; Gregory the Great, Hom. in
Evangelia ii, xxvi, in Patrologia Latina 76, 1201–​1202: both also quoted by Peter Lombard,
Sententiae iii, Dist. xxiii–​xxiv, Grottaferrata, Collegii Sancti Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas,
vol. ii, 1981, pp. 145–​149.
7 Augustine, Sermones 145 A, Madrid, Biblioteca de Auctores Cristianos, 1983, p. 327.
8 Thomas Aquinas, Super Evangelium S. Ioannis lectura, 20, lectio 6, ed. R. Cai, Turin-​Rome,
Marietti, 1952.
294 Chapter 6
interpretation –​a splendid fusion of Greek rationalism and Hebrew-​Christian
mystery –​will, as we shall see in a moment, condition medieval versions of
this episode.9
But it may be worth noting that when the Fathers use the word agnitio,
they always mean knowledge of something that had been known before, then
forgotten, and at one point ‘remembered’: thus, for instance, Jerome himself, the great translator of the Bible, in his exposition of Paul’s Epistle to the
Ephesians: ‘some see the difference between notio (gnosis) and agnitio (epignosis) as consisting in this, that the former is knowledge of something we
did not know before and then afterwards begin to know, whereas the latter
is knowledge of something we already knew, then ceased to know, and later
remember’.10 Jerome was followed by Isidore in the De differentiis,11 but the
approach was shared also by interpreters of secular literature, as Servius witnesses in his commentary on the Aeneid.12
∵
However, to give readers an idea of the gap that separates this mentality from
the modern one, I shall recall two examples from different countries and different centuries. In cantos xiv, xvii, and xix of his epic oratorio, the Messias
(composed between 1748 and 1773), Klopstock describes the post-​resurrectional
scenes one after the other and combining the four Gospels. We have, then, the
women at the tomb with John and Peter, Mary Magdalen, Emmaus, and the
epiphany to the eleven in canto xiv; the Thomas scene in canto xvii; and
that by the sea of Tiberias in canto xix. The repetition of the ‘miracle’ underlines its fundamental importance and points to the overall cogency of the
Gospels’ design. But after the philological revolution that Humanism and the
Reformation introduce into Biblical exegesis, Klopstock cannot have Thomas
touch Jesus. Thus, in canto xvii he reproduces the Johannine scene, emphasizing the wonder it produces and the sublime mystery it unfolds. Earlier on, however, in canto xiv, he solves the historical-​cultural dilemma of Thomas in two
9
10
11
12
On the Doubting Thomas episode see E. Spolsky, ‘Doubting Thomas and the Senses of
Knowing’, Common Knowledge iii (1994), no. 2: pp. 111–129; and G.W. Most, Doubting
Thomas, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2007.
Jerome, In Ephes. 1,15-​18a, 459, in Obras completas de San Jerónimo, vol. ix, Commentarios
paulinos, Madrid, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2010, pp. 364–​365.
Isidore, De differentiis i, 148 (89): ed. C. Codoñer, Paris, Belles Lettres, 2012, pp. 160–​161.
Servius in Aen. iii, 351 and viii, 155, in Servii Grammatici Commentarii, ed. G. Thilo and
H. Hagen, Hildesheim, Olms, 1961, i, p. 404; ii, p. 222.
A Spark of Love
295
complementary ways. In the first place, he interiorizes Thomas’ doubts. After
the eleven tell him of Jesus’ appearance, the apostle spends a horrible night
in the graveyard debating within himself and in total solitude the problems
of death, resurrection, and faith. In his praying and in his delirium, Thomas
cannot reach any conclusion by reasoning (or, as Aristotle would have called
it, syllogismos), but –​and this is the second, complementary instrument used
by the poet –​he is prompted to accept the mystery by a voice which speaks to
him from the darkness. The voice is that of Joseph, Jacob’s son, the protagonist,
as we have seen in c­ hapter 4, of one of the most spectacular recognition scenes
ever invented: a scene which Klopstock’s Jesus recounts to the two disciples
walking towards Emmaus and which they tell the apostles when they reach
Jerusalem.
The conflict between agnitio and pistis is solved by means of another miracle (Joseph’s voice) and, ultimately, by implicitly resorting to the ancient exegetical method of typology. Joseph, a traditional figura of Jesus, manifested
himself to, and was recognized by his brothers, who believed him dead –​after
resurrection, Jesus appears, is recognized, and believed in by the apostles. In
fact, Klopstock has the post-​resurrectional recognition scenes culminate in a
series of triumphal epiphanies and theophanies (canto xiii) which involve all
the patriarchs and in one of which Joseph, talking to Benjamin, recalls ‘the
sweetest of (his) earthly hours’, that of anagnorisis.13
My second example is closer to us in time. In c­hapter 9, Book 11 of
Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Ivan, the family intellectual, has a delirious conversation with the devil, who is also his own double. Ivan, we
know, is obsessed by ideas about religion and God. Earlier on, in c­ hapter 5
of Book 5, he had told his younger brother Alyosha of a poem-​parable he
had intended to write, The Grand Inquisitor, in which Jesus is reincarnated
in the Spain of the Inquisition and is imprisoned and reprimanded by the
Cardinal Inquisitor, who decides to burn him at the stake the following day.
Jesus does not reply to the old man, but simply kisses him on the lips, and
the Cardinal frees him saying: ‘Go, and come no more –​do not come at all –​
never, never!’14
One of the ‘finest passages’ of the poem, Ivan tells his brother, would come
at the beginning. Jesus would appear ‘quietly, inconspicuously, but everyone –​
and that is why it is so strange –​recognized him’. The finest passage would be
13
14
F.G. Klopstock, Der Messias, in Werke in einem Band, München-​Wien, Hanser, 1982, p. 519
(xiii, 124): my translations.
F.M. Dostoevsky, Bratia Karamazovi, Leningrad, Izdatelstvo ‘Nauka’, 1976: Engl. trans.
D. Magarshack, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1958, vol. ii, pp. 746–​765.
296 Chapter 6
precisely ‘why they recognized (iznajut) him’. We might well ask why. And the
answer, I suspect, would be that Dostoevsky saw clearly how crucial for the
whole of Christianity is the mystery of recognition, the meaning of man-​God
anagnorisis. When, later in the novel, the devil appears to Ivan as a ‘démodé’,
‘hard-​up’ Russian gentleman, he mentions The Grand Inquisitor during the
long discussion they have about God. But first of all, the devil must prove to
Ivan, who thinks he is only a projection, a double, of his own mind, that he
really exists independently of him. And at the beginning of his speech, the
devil has this to say: ‘What is the good of believing against your will? Besides,
so far as faith is concerned, no proofs are of any help, particularly material ones.
Thomas believed not because he saw that Christ had risen, but because he
wanted to believe before that’. The first part of this statement could have been
written by John the Evangelist, or Gregory the Great. But when Ivan’s devil adds
that Thomas believed not because he saw but because even before he wanted
to believe, he introduces an element of radical subjectivity –​of personal will
or wish to believe –​which is totally alien to the mentality of the Gospels or the
Middle Ages.
Of course, one might rightly exclaim, after all this is the devil speaking.
But this devil, I would re-​join, is the spokesman of nineteenth-​century scepticism, the heir of Descartes’ subjective rationalism (the devil will in fact say
to Ivan, ‘Je pense, donc je suis’), modern man who thinks he can authenticate existence by the simple fact that he thinks. Though the devil also tells
Ivan a legend (which his interlocutor says was made up by himself at the age
of seventeen) that involves a rather different message, the ‘gentleman’ who
talks about doubting Thomas not only denies the validity of proofs, of ‘signs’
in matters of faith, but also implies that faith is not God-​given. He would
agree with the Jesus of the Gospels up to when he says, ‘Blessed art thou,
Simon Bar-​Jona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee’; but he
would strongly object to the rest of the sentence, ‘but my Father which is in
heaven’.
∵
After this modern excursus, let us ask ourselves what the Middle Ages do with
the recognition-​faith scene of John’s Gospel. Briefly, the answer is –​they stress
the element of anagnorisis to the detriment of mystery and faith.
The process must have started quite early, for even Luke –​the Luke of the
startlingly beautiful Emmaus scene –​has Jesus tell the Apostles after the
Resurrection: ‘Behold my hands and my feet, that it is myself: handle (palpate
in the Vulgate) me and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see
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297
me have’.15 Here, they do not after all touch Jesus. But already in the apocryphal Epistula Apostolorum, they ‘feel’ and ‘touch’ him.16 The same is true of
Piers Plowman B xix, 167 (or C xxii, 172),17 where Thomas touches Jesus’ very
‘flesshelich herte’. This is surprising in a long narrative poem where, unlike
painters and playwrights, who would need to represent such a scene visually,
the writer could, following John’s Gospel, easily have kept silent on the whole
issue. And all the more surprising in a poem like Piers Plowman, where the
author seems to have learnt the lesson of Old and New Testament to perfection in showing us what I think can only be called18 the ‘epiphanies’ of Piers-​
Peter-​Christ with his changing identities and sudden revelations. Thus, at the
beginning (B, v, 544 ff.), Piers emerges suddenly out of the crowd. Thus, more
startlingly, (in C xvi, 33 ff., not in B), Piers appears in the dress of Patience ‘as
he a palmere were’ and Conscience ‘knew hym wel’ –​a passage which recalls
Emmaus, but with the basic difference that Conscience, appropriately for one
who bears that name, has, unlike the disciples on the road to Emmaus, no
‘holden eyes’.
Sudden appearances and disappearances, mysterious epiphanies and recognitions, characterize Abraham-​Faith, Spes and the Samaritan, who disappears
‘as wynde’ (B xvii, 349–​50). When the tourney is about to begin, here is one
‘semblable to the Samaritan and somedel’ to Piers the Plowman, who appears
entering Jerusalem ‘barfote on an asse bakke’. Faith says that he who is going
to joust in Jerusalem is Jesus and he will fetch that which the fiend claims.
Will asks, ‘Is Piers in this place?’, and Faith replies that Jesus will joust in Piers’
‘armes, in his helme and his haberioun humana natura; that Christ be nought
biknowe here, for consummatus deus’. The mysterious double nature of Christ-​
Piers appearing as the knight of medieval romance and as the Samaritan (and
Jesus) on an ass’ back deliberately prevents the recognition on the part of the
crowd, so as to make a fine theological point. The same theme is underlined
later, when Will wakes up on Easter Sunday, goes to Mass, writes down what
he has dreamed, falls asleep and suddenly sees Piers Plowman advance carrying a cross and looking exactly like Jesus. Once more, when asked by Will if
this is Jesus ‘the jester’ or Piers, Conscience answers: ‘Thise aren Pieres armes,/​
15
16
17
18
Luke 24: 39.
‘Epistula Apostolorum’, in E. Hennecke, New Testament Apocrypha, ed. W. Schneemelcher,
Engl. trans. ed. R. McL. Wilson, London, Lutterworth,1963, p. 197.
Piers Plowman is quoted from the edition by W.W. Skeat, London, Oxford University Press,
1961 (1886).
And have been called by M.E. Goldsmith, The Figure of Piers Plowman, Cambridge, Brewer,
1981, pp. 11–​19.
298 Chapter 6
His coloures and his cote-​armure ac he that cometh so blody is Cryst with his
crosse’ (B xix, 12–​14).
Langland has fully understood, and translated in his own terms, the Gospels’
point that after the Resurrection Jesus appears both with his old body that eats,
drinks and shows his wounds but at the same time can go through walls or suddenly disappear. The author of Piers Plowman also seems to have caught the
full import of the Old Testament divine epiphanies when he shows us Christ
appearing in all his power to Lucifer, a voice loud in the light. Satan recognizes
this lord immediately and his question, ‘What lorde artow’, simply prompts the
full revelation of divine glory: ‘rex glorie, and lorde of mighte and mayne’. How
different is this ‘Christus triumphans’ from the Jesus of the Gospel’s temptation
scenes, and how similar the scene to the Transfiguration or to God’s revelation
on Mount Sinai! It is clear that Piers’ epiphanies play a central role in the spiral-​
like structure of the poem. And it gradually becomes evident that méconnaissance, recognition and revelation are themes, not just scenes, of fundamental
import for the meaning of this work, and that these themes are treated in a
very Gospel-​like spirit. In a mysterious manner, they tell us the truth, and we
pass from ignorance to knowledge.
Mediaeval plays deal with evangelical recognitions-​epiphanies in a different manner and, as Otto Pächt has shown,19 influence contemporary painting, or at least manuscript illumination. It would be impossible here to discuss
even the English ones alone in detail, so I will limit myself to a few instances
and considerations. All the plays seem to imply that Thomas did touch Jesus’
wounds: this is explicit in the Chester Cycle (‘emittet manum in latus et vulnera’),20 it is indicated implicitly in the Towneley play of Thomas Indie when
Jesus, after Thomas’ cry for mercy, tells him: ‘Thomas, for thou felys me and my
woundes bare’.21
The York version is an exception, as we have no indication –​either explicit
or implicit –​that Thomas should touch the body. Here, on the other band,
the proofs of Jesus’ identity and divinity are clearly exhibited: when he first
appears to the Apostles, they see a sight ‘shynand so bright’. They believe this
is a ghost, but Jesus shows them his hands and feet and invites them to grope
his ‘woundes wete’, promising ‘ensaumpill sere’, the first of which is his eating
19
20
21
O. Pächt, The Rise of Pictorial Narrative in Twelfth-​Century England, Oxford, Clarendon
Press, 1962, pp. 39–​45.
Chester Mystery Cycle, p. 367.
Thomas Indie, 641–​643, in The Towneley Plays, ed. M. Stevens and A.C. Cawley, eets es 13,
London, Oxford University Press, 1994, vol. i, p. 386.
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299
of the honeycomb.22 In this respect, the most interesting version is that of
the Towneley Cycle, where the scene is much more elaborate than anywhere
else and where doubting Thomas has a long discussion with the other apostles whom he considers mad because, he says, clearly what appeared to them
was a phantom.23 Both Peter and Paul (who is not present in the Gospels, but
appears only in the Acts of the Apostles) tell him they have seen the Lord,
but Thomas still holds this was not a body, but a ghost. A third apostle then
recalls the story of Jonah, but this, too, fails to convince Thomas. The fourth,
fifth and sixth apostles tell Thomas that the Holy Ghost shone in Mary and
clothed God’s son in human dress. When the fight which he fought for love was
over, he skipped out of the body that clothed him. Thomas replies with perfect
logic that ‘if he skipped out of his clothes, you admit that his body was dead. It
was his corpse that appeared to you’. The others go on saying that Jesus rescued
the souls in hell and rose again in his body, ‘mighty god and man’.
Thomas then asks: if what you say is true, how could you distinguish a body
from a ghost? The sixth apostle says: Well, man has got flesh and bone, hasn’t
he? Jesus took flesh and bone from Mary. What else do you need? The argument between the ten and Thomas goes on for what in an actual performance
must be at least a quarter of an hour, with full use on the part of the ten of
all possible rational arguments, figural doctrine, quotation of authorities and,
finally, even personal reference: ‘If you don’t believe us, then you’re calling us
liars’.
The whole point here is the discussion itself. This discussion shows us that
the authors and the audience of the play are keenly aware of the difficulty of
a recognition and of a belief (pistis) based purely on reasoning, or, as Aristotle
would have it, on inference (syllogismos). For Thomas the only thing that
counts is material evidence: touching the wound. This, and this only, will prove
bodily resurrection. But then the rational soundness of Thomas’ arguing is of
course overthrown, because Jesus does in fact appear and thus proves that he
has risen from the dead with his body, which Thomas can and does touch. This
is not the point John makes in his Gospel.
As a tentative conclusion on the question of medieval treatments of the
post-​resurrectional recognition scenes, I would say, then, that these show a
much more materialistic approach than can be expected of Christian authors.
People want evidence –​signs, as the scribes and the pharisees had demanded
22
23
‘The Escreweneres’ (‘The Incredulity of Thomas’), in The York Plays, A Critical Edition of
the York Corpus Christi Play, ed. R. Beadle, vol. i, eets ss 23, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2009, pp. 393–​399.
Thomas Indie, 273–​560, pp. 376–​384.
300 Chapter 6
and such as Jesus had refused to give. Piers Plowman stands out in this context
as the only exception.
∵
So far, I have examined a sacred or pseudo-​sacred type of medieval recognition-​
epiphany. There is another tradition which stems more or less directly from
the obsession with recognition that apocryphal literature shows from the very
beginning –​for instance, from the Acts of Pilate, where Joseph of Arimathea
tells the high priest how he met and recognized the risen Christ.24 To make
clear how important this theme is, I will quote only two examples, which,
although –​or perhaps because –​extreme, are quite significant.25
In the supposedly fifth-​century Apocalypse of John the Theologian, John
asks the Lord ‘if in the world of resurrection it will be possible to recognize
(gnorisai) each other, a brother his brother, or a friend his friend, a father his
own children, the children their own parents’.26 This question is one of the
very first John asks, and it is obviously vital, for it shows us a fundamental
need of human beings –​the need for anagnorisis. What is the point of resurrection in the flesh if one cannot recognize friends, relatives, one’s own
flesh and blood? Life after death must be like life before death. Men must
not only know, meet each other, but recognize each other after a separation. Without anagnorisis, resurrection as new life makes no sense. Without
anagnorisis this life makes no sense. But the answer which the Lord’s voice
gives John is also significant, though in a more restricted, Christian and
medieval way. ‘To the righteous’, it says, ‘there is recognition, but to the sinners not at all’. So, recognition is a reward. The bad guys don’t even get that.
The supreme punishment is that they are not even recognized by their own
flesh and blood.
My second example comes also from the Greek East. It is about two centuries later, and it occurs in the Quaestiones attributed to, but apparently not
written by, St Anastasius the Sinaite.27 In No. 91, the author asks himself the following rather curious question, based on Luke 16: 27–28: ‘If those who descend
24
25
26
27
‘Acts of Pilate’, in New Testament Apocrypha, p. 466.
Alastair Minnis has allowed me to read his Hellish Imaginations from Augustine to
Dante: An Essay in Metaphor and Materiality before its publication (Oxford, Medium
Aevum Monographs, 2020): in it, the splendid reconstruction of this tradition is full.
‘Revelation of John’, in The Ante-​Nicene Fathers, ed. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, viii,
Grand Rapids, MI, Eerdmans, 1951, p. 583.
S. Anastasii Sinaite, Quaestiones, 91, in Patrologia Graeca 89, 721–​725.
A Spark of Love
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to hell do not recognize (epigignoskousin) each other, how is it that Dives prays
to Lazarus and Abraham and moreover remembers the five brothers he left
at home?’ The passage in Luke, in which Jesus is speaking, the author says, is
not factual history, but a parable (parabolikos kai typikos, all’ou pragmatikos).
There are various reasons why the story is clearly impossible (for instance,
the damned cannot see the righteous in heaven), but the most important for
our writer is that no one will suffer the Gehennah or enter the Kingdom until
the resurrection of bodies, until, that is, the situation envisaged by John the
Theologian. This doctrine makes Dives’ recognition of Lazarus and Abraham
impossible. For, Pseudo-​Anastasius says in a rather materialistic view of bodily
corruption after death, ‘when the body lies in the tomb, what can the speaking
tongue of the rich man be like, and what the drop of water that may extinguish
the fire?’ For him, obviously, recognition is a question of flesh and blood only.
Without eyes, hands, ears, anagnorisis makes no sense.
Pseudo-​
Anastasius’ theory, however, is heretical for Western tradition. Catholic orthodoxy is more literal minded in its acceptance of Luke’s
authority, who nowhere states that the story of Dives and Lazarus is a parable. Augustine, Gregory the Great, Bede, the Glossa Ordinaria, and the great
scholastic writer who sums them all up, Peter Lombard, firmly believe that
Dives recognized Abraham and Lazarus and that the souls of the damned can
see those of the blessed and vice versa until Doomsday, when this sight will
become impossible for those who are condemned to Hell.28 Wisely, Augustine
adds that he will not debate the question of how one should understand the
tongue of Dives or the finger of Lazarus –​the question, that is, of how ‘material’ all this might be.29 But in his Dialogues, Gregory the Great maintains not
only that the elect recognize even the patriarchs whom they have never seen
before,30 but also that recognition is, in the Kingdom, a criterion of retribution: ‘The good rejoice more in seeing those whom they had loved be happy
with them; the evil ones are tormented not only by their own pain but also by
the pain of those whom, despising God, they had loved in this world, and who
are tortured with them’.31
28
29
30
31
For all, see Peter Lombard, Sententiae iv, Dist. i, 3 ff., and references therein; Thomas
Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de veritate xix, 1–​2, ed. R. Spiazzi, Turin-​Rome, Marietti,
1954.
Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram viii, 5, 9, Madrid, Biblioteca de Auctores Cristianos,
1969, p. 776.
Gregory the Great, Storie di santi e di diavoli (Dialoghi) iv, 34, 5, ed. S. Pricoco and
M. Simonetti, Milan, Fondazione Valla-​Mondadori, 2006, vol. ii, pp. 266–​269.
Dialoghi iv, 34, p. 267.
302 Chapter 6
We shall have to take this tradition into account when, in the next chapter, we read the many recognition scenes set by Dante in the other world, and
above all to understand that terzina of Paradiso xiv (66–​68) in which he points
out how the souls of the blessed show a burning desire to take up their bodies
at the time of the final resurrection because they hope to recognize and re-​join
their dear ones: ‘forse non pur per lor, ma per le mamme,/​per li padri e per li
altri che fuor cari/​anzi che fosser sempiterne fiamme’ –​‘perhaps not only for
themselves, but also for their mothers, for their fathers, and for the others who
were dear before they became eternal flames’.
What is important to note here is that the medieval view of anagnorisis
touches the affective core of the phenomenon. Recognition can be a pleasure,
or a punishment: a tragedy infinitely more tragic because it implies knowledge
of itself as well as of the blood-​relationship which it discloses; a sublime elation because it adds to reunion the awareness of it.
Let us go back to our apocryphal literature. Another instance brings us
to a work where religious themes and romance plots meet –​the Clementine
Recognitions.32 Clement, a Roman, is dissatisfied with pagan philosophy. He
hears of Christ and meets and follows Barnabas, who takes him to Caesarea,
where he becomes the Apostle Peter’s attendant. While fighting against Simon
Magus, Peter instructs Clement in the faith, talking about truth and knowledge. Clement tells Peter that he has lost mother, father, and brothers. Peter
makes him recognize a beggar-​woman as his mother. Peter’s followers, Niceta
and Aquila, are recognized as Clement’s brothers. An old workman expounds
his theory of ‘genesis’, which is then discussed. He is recognized as Clement’s
father, while Peter is celebrated.
The first thing to remark here is that the author is perfectly conscious of
the affective, aesthetic, and simultaneously religious effects that recognition
scenes produce. Aristotle had seen these effects as consisting mainly of pity
and fear and had inserted them within the general context of the shock of surprise and wonder that anagnorisis prompts. When Peter recounts Clement’s
recognitions to the crowd, the narrative is ‘most pleasing’ and the hearers
weep ‘through wonder at the events, and through compassion for sufferings
incident to humanity’ through pity of humanity.33 Pseudo-​Clement also shows
clearly that recognition scenes are instrumental to showing and proving how
32
33
The Latin text, in Rufinus’ translation from Greek, in Pseudo-​Clement, Recognitiones, ed.
E. Gersdorf, Leipzig, Tauchnitz, 1838; Engl. trans. in Ante-​Nicene Fathers, viii, pp. 77–​211.
And see S. Montiglio, Love and Providence. Recognition in the Ancient Novel, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 210–​222.
Recognitiones ix, 37, p. 229: Engl. trans. p. 191.
303
A Spark of Love
Providence directs human affairs (a long discussion of what he calls ‘genesis’,
as opposed to Providence, leads to the third scene of recognition in the story),
and that recognition and knowledge of truth are very closely tied to each other.
As Book vii shows, the point of recognition is reward for chastity and knowledge of eternal life; salvation is attained by knowledge of the truth through
Peter, who is Clement’s father, mother, and brother, and who effects his recognition of his carnal mother, brothers, and father. Finally, recognition is also,
in the Biblical sense, acknowledgement: in Book i, Abraham ‘recognizes’ the
Creator; in the same Book, the Jews refuse to recognize Christ; at the end of the
work, Peter is solemnly acknowledged, and this in turn leads to full recognition
of divine Providence.
∵
Recognition of a person and recognition of the heretofore mysterious
designs of Providence coincide. This characteristic of religious romance
points to the positive pole of anagnorisis, the relief and the joy that we feel
when we glimpse a higher hand at work in our favour, in our own world. In
Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale King Alla and his wife Constance go to Rome
independently and unaware of each other after many years of separation and
after Constance’s many adventures. Alla sees their child, Maurice, knowing
that someone who purports to be his mother is alive. The recognition process begins immediately, with an increasing sense of wonder, as if all were a
‘hallucination’:
Now was this child as lik unto Custaunce
As possible is a creature to be.
This Alla hath the face in remembraunce
Of dame Custaunce, and theron mused he,
If that the childes moder were aught she
That is his wif, and prively he sighte,
And spedde him fro the table that he myghte.
‘Parfay’, thoughte he, ‘fantome is in min heed!
I oghte deme, of skilful jugement,
That in the salte see my wif is deed’.34
34
G. Chaucer, The Man of Law’s Tale, 1030–​1039, in The Canterbury Tales, ed. J. Mann,
London, Penguin, 2005.
304 Chapter 6
Then, Alla makes his ‘argument’. This, however, is not the reasoning we
would expect of an Electra (I know the mother is alive and here; this child is
Constance’s living portrait; hence Constance is alive and here). Although the
syllogismos is implied, what Alla thinks of immediately, and the only argument
the narrator recounts, points to Providence:
What woot I if that Crist have hider sent
My wif by see, as wel as he hire sente
To my contree fro thennes that she wente?
Chaucer is fully aware of the effects of a recognition scene. Alla goes to the
house of the senator where Constance is staying, to see for himself ‘this wonder chaunce’. She can barely stand on her feet, he weeps copiously:
Whan Alla saugh his wif, faire he hire grette,
And weep that it was routhe for to se;
For at the firste look he on hir sette
He knew wel verraily that it was she.
And she, for sorwe, as doumb stant as a tree,
So was hir herte shet in hir distresse,
Whan she remembred his unkindenesse.
The first effect of recognition is an unbearably sharp pain, which produces
‘pitee’, eleos. Then, when it becomes clear that Alla was not responsible for his
wife’s sufferings, sublime elation ensues. Theos gar kai to gignoskein philous,
exclaims Euripides’ Helen, as we saw in the preceding chapter, when she, who
has been kept in Egypt during the ten years of the Trojan war, and her husband
Menelaus, meet again: ‘it is a god to recognize friends’ –​there is something
godlike in recognition. Chaucer, a Christian, is less extreme, but ultimately
expresses the same feeling:
And swich a blisse is ther bitwix hem two
That, save the joye that lasteth everemo,
Ther is noon lik that any creature
Hath seyn or shal, whil that the world may dure.35
35
The last three quotations from the Man of Law’s Tale: 1041–​1043, 1051–​1057, 1075–​1078.
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‘Between the two of them there is such bliss that, except for the joy that lasts
forever, heavenly beatitude, there never has been or will be one like it until
the end of the world’: one can well understand, then, the medieval thirst for
recognition. Plots are often complicated and twisted around so that they may
contain a scene of anagnorisis. Two examples, one pathetic and one tragic,
will illustrate this. The first is the story of Gestas and Dimnas, the two criminals crucified with Jesus. In the presumably late fourteenth-​century Libro de
la infancia y muerte de Jesús the two recognize Jesus as the child one of their
fathers had saved during the flight to Egypt.36 This is a quite ingenious and,
as Aristotle would have said, ‘complex’ plot. It shows us that medieval imagination is capable of coupling in narrative what it believed was the supreme
moment of divine and human history with … recognition.
The second example is the Judas legend, which has survived in many versions.37 Judas is not only the apostle who betrays Jesus, but an Oedipal figure
besides. Without knowing it, he has killed his father and married his mother.
The recognition scene between mother and son is constructed without means of
tokens or signs, but through words and memory. By recalling certain details, the
two establish their true and original relationship. Judas is condemned forever.
The Judas legend inevitably leads to the medieval versions of the Oedipus
theme. Oedipus is not only the archetype of the complex which bears his name
since the days of Sigmund Freud, but also –​and in our context primarily –​
Aristotle’s supreme example of tragedy, and of anagnorisis within a tragedy.
How does medieval literature handle this figure?38 I have chosen two instances,
distant in time and place, both of which direct us to a happy ending.
The first is the English romance, Sir Degaré.39 Here, the Oedipus theme
is treated in a very cautious way: Degaré almost lies with his mother, whom
he has married having defeated her father the King in a tourney, but then he
remembers the hermit’s advice never to lie with a woman without first trying
on the glove which the faery knight had left her and which she had given the
infant as a recognition token (together with a letter explaining everything).
36
37
38
39
Libro de la infancia y muerte de Jesús, ed. M. Alvar, Madrid, Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Scientificas, 1965, pp. 213–​236; and see pp. 88–​98.
For which see F. Ohly, The Damned and the Elect: Guilt in Western Culture, Engl. trans.
L. Archibald, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
See A. Punzi, Oedipodae confusa domus: la materia tebana nel Medioevo latino e romanzo,
Rome, Bagatto, 1993.
Text in Medieval English Romance, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt and N. Jacobs, London, Hodder and
Stoughton, 1980, pp. 57–​88. See T. Hahn, ‘The Medieval Oedipus’, Comparative Literature,
32 (1980): 225–​37.
306 Chapter 6
Moreover, the author warns us in advance: ‘He married his mother, but God,
who guides all things, would not that they sin’. So Degaré (like Cinderella’s
prince with the shoe) tries on the gloves, and the recognition takes place without incest. Again, Degaré almost kills his faery father in combat, but the father
recognizes the blunt sword that Degaré’s mother has given him, and parricide
is avoided. Once more, the author warns us in advance: ‘The son rides against
his father, and neither knew the other’. Then the knight asks Degaré where
he was born, and he answers, ‘in Little Bretagne, son of a king’s daughter, but
I do not know who my father was’. Seeing the blunt sword, the father recognizes his son, and both faint. In Sir Degaré, then, a potentially tragic theme
becomes purely ‘romantic’, with a situation contrary to that found in the
Hildebrandslied and the Gaelic Cuchulain cycle. Providence, God, is firmly in
control, the unknown knight makes himself known, recognition is obtained
simply by means of tokens (the glove and the sword), which replace Oedipus’
splendid detective enquiry. Above all, recognition does not come as the culminating point of Oedipus’ long, passionate quest for truth, and for what he
significantly calls the sperma, his own origin and identity. It is quite by chance,
and perhaps according to the design of Providence, that the medieval knight
finds his parents.
Anagnorisis is still gnosis –​recognition is knowledge –​but a very circumscribed, limited one. Yet the recognition technique of Sir Degaré agrees perfectly with Aristotle’s theory that the plot which best produces pity and fear is
that in which someone intends to commit a crime but discovers the relationship between himself and his potential victim before he acts.
One of the most beautiful recognition scenes of the entire Middle Ages
takes place in Sir Orfeo, a romance purporting to be a Breton lay. The author
of Sir Orfeo knows the secret that ties man and woman in reunion and recognition. When, after spending a long time in the woods as a poor, wild harpist,
Orfeo sees a company of sixty faery ladies ride by a river, he approaches them
and discovers that one is his own wife Heurodis, who had been carried off into
the faery world. In the recognition scene, the feelings of the protagonists are
set against the enchanted, alien company of the faeries. Upon this uncanny
background, an extraordinary picture is drawn: an exchange of mute glances,
the tears falling from Heurodis’ eyes. Seeing on his face all the suffering he has
undergone, she pities Orfeo. Then, the faery ladies take her away:
To a leuedi he was y-​come,
Biheld, & hath wele vnder-​nome,
& seth bi al thing that it is
His owhen quen, Dam Heurodis.
307
A Spark of Love
Yern he biheld hir, & sche him eke,
Ac noither to other a word no speke,
For messais that sche on him seighe,
That had ben so riche & so heighe.
The teres fel out of her eighe:
The other leuedis this y-​seighe
& maked hir oway to ride
Sche most with him no lenger abide.40
Here, we have no hint of supernatural intervention, no providential end in
sight. The frozen instant of mutual recognition is entirely human: suspended
between a tragic possibility and a happy ending, between joy and pain, the
hearts of man and woman shiver on a threshold which we perceive as opening
on to the sublime.
∵
The story of Gregorius ‘der gute Sunder’, the good sinner, is half an Oedipus
plot, and half a saint’s legend inextricably intertwined with the themes of love,
chivalry, repentance, confession, glorification, chance, the devil’s plots and
God’s mercy. In Hartmann von Aue’s Gregorius,41 the protagonist is the son of
a brother and sister who have fallen in love with each other, only half aware of
what they are doing, because the devil so wills. When their child is born, away
from the court, his father leaves and dies of ‘Sehnsucht’. The baby, placed like
Moses in what Exodus would call an ‘ark’, and accompanied by precious material, gold, and a tablet which relates the whole story of his birth, is fished up off
the coast of an island, where he is brought up as the foster-​child of fishermen
under the supervision of the Abbot who, after discovering the secret of his origins, has him taught in Latin and prepares him for a brilliant career as a monk.
40
41
Sir Orfeo, ed. A.J. Bliss, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 19662: I have slightly modernized the
spelling; trans. B. Stone in Medieval English Verse, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1964,
pp. 222–​223: ‘He rises, thither makes his way,/​But then a lady meets his gaze:/​He clearly
understands and sees/​By every token, that she is/​His queen, the Lady Heurodis./​He
looks on her, and she on him/​In longing, but no word is said./​Then when she saw the
wretched state/​Of him who had been rich and great,/​The tears came falling from her
eyes./​This the other ladies saw,/​And forced the queen to ride away,/​And she could stay
with him no more’.
Text in Hartmann von Aue, Gregorius, ed. H. Paul, Tübingen, Niemayer, 1984, my
translations.
308 Chapter 6
But when he grows up, Gregorius, after a fight with one of his step-​brothers,
realizes that he wants to be a knight seeking adventure abroad. The Abbot
reveals the secret of his parents’ sin to him, gives him the tablet, the gold, and
beautiful clothes made with the material found in the casket. Gregorius sails
across the sea and lands near a city besieged by a foreign baron who wants to
marry the ruling Lady. Gregorius engages in combat with the baron, defeats
him, and falls in love with the lady. They marry. One day, through her chambermaid, the lady finds the tablet and recognizes Gregorius as her son. The
two decide to separate and do penance for the rest of their lives. Gregorius is
fastened to a rock in the middle of a lake and there he lies for seventeen years
until, by means of a divinely inspired dream, the Roman conclave elects him
as the new Pope. Recovered, fed, and dressed, he is brought to Rome, where
he establishes himself as one of the greatest pontiffs ever. Several years later,
his mother goes to Rome on pilgrimage, and the two recognize each other
once more.
One could discuss Hartmann’s beautiful romance at great length, taking into
account all its themes. Here, I shall however concentrate only on a few. Firstly,
the two recognition scenes are the climaxes of the plot, one at the centre of the
poem, the other at the end. Secondly, the first is a true recognition by means of
tokens, the second is best described as a revelation, since it is Gregorius who,
playing with his mother’s inability to recognize him, finally tells her who he is.
Thus, we pass from ignorance to recognition to revelation –​a movement which
is consistent with the overall message of the poem. A crucial passage divides the
first and the second stages, ignorance and recognition, of this process. When
Gregorius is first introduced to his mother and both hearts start beating hard,
she actually recognizes the very same material in the clothes which she had
laid beside the child with her own hands. Like Parzival on another occasion,
she fails to ask the unknown knight who he is –​something she will later deeply
regret –​and Hartmann, though not commenting directly on this, immediately
adds that it was achieved ‘by him whose plan corrupted Lady Eve’.42
The méconnaissance is, I think, absolutely fundamental to Hartmann’s
story: for if Gregorius himself has no way of knowing that he is committing
incest with his mother short of showing all women he might meet the tablet he
carries with him –​if, in other words, his is sinless ignorance –​his mother could
have pursued her recognition of the clothes (‘confessed to herself’, Hartmann
writes, ‘wider sich selben si des jach’) to full knowledge like Oedipus did. Her
hamartia, dictated by the devil through the impulses of the flesh, is persistence
42
References in this paragraph to lines 1942–​1954, 2572–​2573, 1960–​1961.
A Spark of Love
309
in agnoia, ignorance itself, quite the opposite of Eve’s sin. Later on, when
she discovers the tablet, she even deludes herself into thinking that perhaps
Gregorius got it from someone else. And finally, she does not recognize the
Pope as her son even though she says she would be able to do so if she saw him.
The truth comes to her from outside.
Gregorius, on the other hand, receives inner light as soon as he recognizes
that his wife is also his mother. Faced by her despair, he immediately reacts
with the knowledge that education in a monastery brings (‘I have read’, he says,
that God forgives those who repent), and dictates penance for her and for himself. Comprehension will in fact be one of the chief characteristics of Gregorius
as a Pope –​he is the best ‘healer’ of ‘sele wunden’ on Peter’s chair and has a
‘starken lere’ which makes ‘God’s honour’ grow in ‘the kingdom of Rome’. Not
even he, however, recognizes his mother when she arrives in Rome as a pilgrim, and does so significantly only when he hears her confession.43
Confession, recognition, revelation –​we are far from Oedipus, closer to
Joseph and his brothers. Gregorius raises many questions: what is sin, what is
love, what can man do when he is faced by the horrors of chance, evil, taboo;
but the ultimate answer lies in God’s Providence, and the lysis, the denouement, cannot end in catastrophe, pathos, but must end in salvation. The
catharsis here is what Gregorius and his mother undergo in those seventeen
years –​purgatory after the hell of sin and before the paradise where Hartmann
tells us they will dwell forever as saints.44
The recognition scene between Gregorius and his mother wrings tears both
of laughter and ‘phantastic emotion’ from the listeners of the grandiose musical suite composed by Adrian Leverkühn on the text of the Gesta Romanorum
in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus.45 While writing those pages, Mann was
already thinking of exploiting the Gregorius story, and in a few years’ time this
became Der Erwählte, the ‘Elect’ or ‘chosen one’: The Holy Sinner.46 The final
recognition scene in this subtle, ironical romance is a splendid piece of writing. The Pope hears his mother’s confession and promises her God’s forgiveness. But she asks: what will the ultimate fate of my son-​husband be? After all
he was more innocent than I: I conceived a son with my brother, he only lay
with his mother without knowing it. The Pope, however, contradicts her –​and
43
44
45
46
References in this paragraph are to lines 2700 ff., 3790–​3792, 3827–​3830, 3842–​3856.
References in the last three paragraphs are to lines 1945, 2506–​2515, 3938–​3939, 3953–​3954.
T. Mann, Doktor Faustus, ed. R. Wimmer and S. Stachorski, Frankfurt am Main, S. Fischer
(Grosse kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe), 2007, ch. xxxii, p. 445.
T. Mann, Der Erwählte, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer, 1984: Engl. trans. H. Lowe-​Porter, The
Holy Sinner, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1961.
310 Chapter 6
here we meet the first surprise. Grigorss, he proclaims, knew very well that it
was his mother he loved. What!?, she interrupts him. But yes, of course, he
replies, ‘a youth who sets out to find his mother and wins by conquest a wife
who, however beautiful, could be his mother, must reckon with it that she
might be his mother whom he marries. So much for his understanding. But to
his blood the identity of wife and mother was familiar long before he learned
the truth and play-​acted about it’. Thus, the value of the first recognition, the
tragic anagnorisis of incest and accident, is put back into perspective. Grigorss’
blood knew it: an inner, instinctive knowledge, which becomes awareness only
with the passing of time, replaces all semeia.
This revelation of the Pope to his mother precipitates the second recognition. He shows her the famous tablet and finally declares: ‘understand, Sybilla,
we are your son’. But –​and here is the second surprise, she replies, ‘That I have
known for long’. ‘What? So you recognized me in the Pope’s hood, after so
many years?’ ‘Holiness, at first glance. Ich erkenne Euch immer –​I know you
always’. ‘And have you, light-​headed woman, only played with us?’ ‘Since you
would play with me yourself …’. ‘We thought’, the Pope concludes, ‘to offer God
an entertainment’. This no longer is anagnorisis, but meta-​anagnorisis –​it is
recognition of recognition, that wiedererkennen which Mann celebrates, as we
have seen, in Joseph and his Brothers: the myth recognizing itself in the story
that narrates it.
In different ways, both Hartmann’s Gregorius and Mann’s Der Erwählte end
up in the levity and happy ending of comedy. In them, recognition represents
precisely the threshold, the door that can open up into either the tragic (first
scene) or the comic (second scene). The very same process takes place, though
with much less humour, in another German medieval romance, Wolfram
von Eschenbach’s Parzival,47 written at about the same time as Hartmann’s
Gregorius. As its hero must pass from ignorance to knowledge, Parzival is in its
entirety a recognition romance,48 and the scenes of anagnorisis and méconnaissance in it add up to at least forty. At the centre of the plot lies Book ix, which
begins with the recognition between Parzival and his cousin, Sigune, and culminates in the encounter between the hero and the hermit Trevrizent. In this
meeting we have a double recognition process. On the one hand, Trevrizent
must gradually learn that the knight now standing before him is not Lähelin,
47
48
Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, ed. A. Leitzmann, Tübingen, Niemayer, 3 vols.,
1961–​1965.
See D.H. Green, The Art of Recognition in Wolfram’s Parzival, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1982.
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A Spark of Love
but his nephew, the son of Gahmuret and Herzeloyde. On the other, Parzival
must recognize not only his uncle’s identity, but also that he himself has killed
one of his relatives, Ither; that Anfortas –​of whom Parzival has failed to ask the
question that could have cured the king –​is also his uncle; and finally, that he
is partly responsible for the death of his own mother.
These multiple recognitions bring Parzival to knowledge of the mysteries
of the Grail, which Trevrizent reveals to him in order to explain the relationships the hero is unaware of. In other words, it is recognition of potentially
tragic philiai that sends Parzival on to wisheit, to supreme knowledge. And the
crucial moment of this recognition is when Trevrizent tells of the unknown
knight who, at Munsalvaesche, did not ask Anfortas the famous question.
Immediately afterwards, Parzival confesses that he is that very knight. The play
of ignorance, recognition, and knowledge in this scene is typical of the whole
romance, where self-​knowledge leads to knowledge of God. As Wagner, who
significantly eliminates this scene and treats the theme in a much more mystical fashion, puts it in his Parsifal (ii, 77, 1–​4):
Bekenntnis
wird Schuld und Reue enden,
Erkenntnis
in Sinn die Torheit wenden.
Confession
shall put an end to guilt and repentance;
recognition
will turn folly into sense. 49
Recognition will turn folly into sense: it is no small praise for anagnorisis to say
that it will give some sense to a mad world.
∵
Having reached this point with one outcome of medieval recognition, I can
now return to its tragic pole for the last time and simultaneously see it in
all its ambiguity. The story of the long and passionate love of Troilus for
Criseyde, of its consummation, her betrayal with Diomedes, and Troilus’
death at Achilles’ hand was sung by Chaucer, in Boccaccio’s footsteps, in his
Troilus and Criseyde. It is a story full of exaltation, pathos, and melancholy,
49
R. Wagner, Parsifal, ii, 77, 1–​4, ed. E. Voss, Stuttgart, Reclam, 2006: my translation.
312 Chapter 6
which the author himself calls a ‘tragedy’. Troilus’ suffering reaches its climax in a recognition scene. After dreaming of Criseyde’s betrayal and after
having his dream truthfully interpreted by Cassandra, Troilus, who refuses to
accept what he calls his sister’s ‘delusion’ and who is in fact himself a ‘fool
of fantasie’, receives a letter from Criseyde which he considers a ‘strange …
beginning of change’.50 Finally, as one day he ‘stands … in his malencolie’,
Deiphobus returns from the field with a coat which he has taken in battle
from Diomedes:
and whan this Troilus
It saugh, he gan to taken of it hede,
Auysyng of the lengthe and of the brede,
And al the werk; but as he gan byholde,
fful sodeynly his herte gan to colde,
As he that on the coler fond with-​inne
A broche that he Criseyde yaf that morwe
That she from Troie moste nedes twynne,
In remembraunce of hym and of his sorwe.
And she hym leyde ayeyn hire feith to borwe
To kepe it ay –​but now ful wel he wiste,
His lady nas no lenger on to triste.51
The brooch is the ‘inanimate object’, as Aristotle would call it, that Troilus recognizes. But it is also the sign, the material semeion, that seals the tragic foreboding of Troilus’ heart. Now, the hero truly re-​cognizes (‘ful wel he wiste’)
the truth he already knew –​Criseyde has betrayed him. Yet Chaucer, though
emphasizing the anguish and the pain that take hold of Troilus’ soul at this
point, directs his recognition towards a deeper anagnorisis, one that underlines his inner division even more forcefully than before:
Thorugh which I se that clene out of youre mynde
Ye han me cast –​and I ne kan nor may,
ffor al this world, with-​inne myn herte fynde
To vnloven yow a quarter of a day.
In corsed tyme I born was, weilaway,
50
51
References in this paragraph: Troilus v, 1233–​1267; 1457–​1519; 1523.
G. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, v, 1655–​1666: ed. B. Windeatt, London and New York,
Longman, 1984.
A Spark of Love
313
That yow that doon me al this wo endure,
Yet love I best of any creature.52
The wonderful pathos of these lines signals not just the loss, but also the realization that in spite of everything Troilus cannot ‘unlove’ Criseyde even for a
minute, that she is the creature he loves most in the world –​she who inflicts
this pain on him. The depths of self-​knowledge are reached, and Troilus has
apparently become a completely modern hero. But soon, after death, Troilus’
soul ascends to the eighth sphere, and from there looks down at our ‘litel spot
of erthe’, despises the wretched world, considers it ‘vanity’ with respect to the
full felicity of heaven, and laughs even at the woe of those who weep for his
death. And with this Stoic recognition, the perspective has once more changed.
Anagnorisis transcends tragedy, making man bend in on himself, turn inwards,
explore conscience in search of, or finally with his sight fixed on, the gods.
Towards the end of the Middle Ages, at least one British poet clearly realized
the dramatic potentialities of the recognition scene in the Troilus plot. In his
Testament of Cresseid, which he himself calls a ‘tragedie’, Henryson stages a
beautiful méconnaissance-​recognition scene just before the end of the story.
This comes as a total surprise to readers and is therefore all the more effective.
Cresseid, who has betrayed Troilus and has been dismissed by Diomedes, is
now, punished by the gods, a leper. Troilus, returning in triumph to Troy after a
raid, meets her in the crowd of begging lepers, ‘not witting quhat scho was’. It is
an extraordinary moment, for Troilus, without recognizing the disfigured face
of Cresseid, yet thinks with ‘ane blenk’ that he has seen that face before, and in
fact it reminds him of ‘the sweit visage and amorous blenking/​Of fair Cresseid,
sumtyme his awin darling’. Troilus’ reaction is predictable, but Henryson surpasses himself in describing it:
Ane spark of lufe than till his hart culd spring
And kendlit all his bodie in ane fyre …53
Seized by a fever, Troilus sweats and trembles, can no longer bear his shield,
changes hue many times (514–​17). Yet, as Henryson notes with a keen sense of
pathos and drama, ’not one ane-​uther knew’ (518). Very appropriately, what
is missing here is Troilus’ awareness of his love, in short, the recognition of
recognition –​what Virgil’s Dido had exclaimed to her sister after falling in love
52
53
v, 1695–​1701.
R. Henryson, Poems, ed. C. Elliott, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1974; references are to lines
497, 501, 499–​500, 512–​13.
314 Chapter 6
with Aeneas, ‘Adgnosco veteris vestigia flammae’, or what Dante, as we shall
see in the next chapter, had tried to tell Virgil, quoting him, when, after the
journey through Hell and Purgatory, he saw Beatrice again: ‘Conosco i segni
de l’antica fiamma’ (I know the signs of the ancient flame). The whole effect
of the Testament rests precisely on the fine psychological difference between
awareness and unawareness. Troilus is unable to progress from the latter to
the former. But a second difference emerges which makes the scene extraordinary, that between the character’s unawareness and the readers’ knowledge.
As in the cases of Oedipus, Electra, and Ulysses, the audience already knows
everything and waits for the crucial moment when the character, too, will
become aware of the situation. The Scottish poet fulfils that attente in a completely unexpected manner –​and thus touches his reader’s heart.
For Troilus’ instinctive anamnesis of Cresseid upon seeing the leper’s face
Henryson offers an explanation which scholars have justly linked to Aristotelian
psychology, and particularly to a passage in the De Insomniis (460 b 1 ff.) where
the philosopher maintains that even when the external object of perception
disappears, the sensory impressions remain as objects of perception, and that
human beings are often and easily deceived about those sensations precisely
when they experience them, some being dominated by an emotion and others by another, for instance the coward by his fear, and the lover by his love,
because the former thinks he sees enemies everywhere, the latter the object of
his love. But Henryson’s lines remind me of the passage in Plato’s Theaetetus
which I quoted in the Introduction, and where, as far as we know, the word
‘anagnorisis’ appears for the first time in the Greek language; when, that is,
discussing false judgement, Socrates explains the function memory performs
in the process, that of a wax tablet:
When I, who know you and Theodorus and possess imprints of you both
like seal-​impressions in the waxen block, see you both at a distance
indistinctly and am in a hurry to assign the proper imprint of each to the
proper visual perception, like fitting a foot into its own footmark to effect
a recognition54
This passage, which almost certainly refers to the beginning of the famous
recognition scene between Electra and Orestes in Aeschylus’ Choephori, and
which describes a mechanism that Proust will exploit ad libitum and ad infinitum in the Recherche, is also the ultimate ancestor of Henryson’s ‘psychological’
54
Plato, Theaetetus, 193 b-​c: my translation.
A Spark of Love
315
explanation. In fact, the Testament scene, if I may put it boldly, stands half-​way
between Plato and Proust, or, rather, between Plato and Freud, with Aristotle:
The idole of ane thing in cace may be
Sa deip imprentit in the fantasy
That it deludis the wittis outwardly,
And sa appeiris in forme and lyke estait
Within the mynd as it was figurait.55
Nor should we forget that this is only half of the scene. Cresseid receives a
girdle from the unknown and unrecognized Troilus who, without speaking a
word, rides away ‘pensive in hart’, and, upon asking her companions who that
lord may be who ‘hes done to us so greit humanitie’, discovers it is Troilus himself. Undoubtedly, this is true recognition, and we must once more agree with
Aristotle that, coming as it does together with the achievement of the reversal
or peripeteia and without the use of signs (for the girdle here is only a token of
Troilus’ pity and humaneness), it is perfect.
This recognition brings Cresseid to ultimate, full, self-​knowledge, on the
road to which she has been ever since looking at her leprous face in the mirror,
and to her final confession and testament. This recognition leads to the pathos
or catastrophe, Cresseid’s death, and to Troilus’ despair when, through the
semeion of the ring returned to him by the lepers, he learns of her end. Finally,
in Henryson’s mind it should lead us to recognize the moral of the story and of
the world: ‘Lo, fair ladyis’, says the inscription that Troilus places on Cresseid’s
‘tombe of merbell gray’,
Cresseid of Troyis toun
Sumtyme countit the flour of wommanheid,
Under this stane, lait liper, lyis deid.
We are at the end of the fifteenth century. Aristotle’s Poetics is circulating again,
and soon it will become an obsession. But recognition is still poised between
tragedy and transcendence.
The only scene that approaches Henryson’s climax is the discovery of
Tristram as Malory describes it in the Book of Sir Tristram of Lyones, within
that Morte Darthur that sums up the entire Arthurian legend right in the middle of the fifteenth century. Here, the situation is profoundly different from
55
507–​11.
316 Chapter 6
Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid –​in one word neither tragic nor transcendental. Tristram is brought back mad to King Mark’s castle where, bathed and
fed, he recovers his memory. Isolde decides to go and see the man who has
returned from the forest:
So they passed forth and spirred where was the syke man, and than a
squyer tolde the quene that he was in the gardyne takyng hys reste to
repose hym ayenst the sunne. So whan the quene loked uppon sir
Trystramys she was nat remembird of hym, but ever she seyde unto dame
Brangwayne,
‘Mesemys I shulde have sene thys man here before in many placis’.
But as sone as sir Trystramys sye her he knew her well inowe, and than
he turned away hys vysage and wepte.
Than the quene had allwayes a lytyll brachett that sir Trystramys gaff
hir the first tyme that ever she cam into Cornwayle, and never wold that
brachet departe frome her but yf sir Trystram were nyghe thereas was La
Beall Isode. And thys brachet was firste sente frome the kynges doughter
of Fraunce unto sir Trystrams for grete love.
And anone thys lityll bracket felte a savoure of sir Trystram. He lepte
uppon hym and lycked hys learys and hys earys, and than he whyned and
quested, and she smelled at hys feete and ’at hys hondis and on all the
partyes of hys body that she myght com to.
‘A, my lady!’ seyde dame Brangwayne, ‘Alas! I se hit ys myne owne lorde
sir Trystramys’.
And thereuppon La Beall Isode felle downe in a sowne and so lay a
grete whyle.56
This scene is highly pathetic, and if we consider that before entering the garden Isolde believes Tristram dead, the impact it produces on us increases.
Exile, madness, death, and resurrection are sanctioned by recognition, which
follows on méconnaissance’s heels. Recognition, however, looks like a delicate
mechanism that human beings can hardly handle. Thus, the little dog performs a function which is similar to, but more complex than, that of Argus in
the Odyssey.57 The instinct of the ‘bracket’ identifies Tristram, but the dog is
56
57
The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 19672, vol. ii,
pp. 501–​502.
In the Middle Irish romance Merugud Uilix Maic Leirtis, the recognition between Ulysses
and Penelope is also brought about by a dog: see the edition by R.T. Meyer, Dublin, Dublin
Institute for Advanced Studies, 1958, p. 8; translated into English by K.H. Jackson in A
Celtic Miscellany, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971, pp. 57–​58.
A Spark of Love
317
itself presented as a token of love and an unfailing embodiment of the union
between Tristram and Isolde. The knowledge disclosed by the episode is neither tragic nor transcendental, but radically human –​the very essence of the
feeling that unites a man and a woman. And the medium of this knowledge,
the dog, is itself the message. Love bridges the gap of separation, madness, and
reported death. We are on the way to a fundamental change in the meaning
and function of recognition. This will come to its extreme conclusion only in
the exalted vision of Wagner’s opera, where Tristan and Isolde together sing a
hymn that George Steiner has called ‘an apocalypse of desire, an erotic consummation so complete that it annuls the autism of personal identity’:58
tristan:
isolde:
beide:
Du Tristan,
Isolde ich,
Nicht mehr Tristan!
Du Isolde,
Tristan ich,
Nicht mehr Tristan,
Nicht mehr Isolde!
Du Isolde,
Tristan ich,
nicht mehr Tristan,
nicht Isolde;
ohne Nennen,
ohne Trennen,
neu Erkennen,
neu Entbrennen;
endlos ewig
ein-​bewusst.59
A new knowledge –​a true recognition –​accompanies the consummation: love
is endless, everlasting single consciousness. The spark of love has become
infinite fire.
58
59
G. Steiner, Antigones, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984, p. 16.
R. Wagner, Tristan and Isolde, ii, 2, ed. W. Zentner, Stuttgart, Reclam, 1984.
­c hapter 7
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
Dante’s Recognitions
‘ “Miserere di me”, gridai a lui, “qual che tu sii, od ombra od omo certo!” ’ –​‘Have
pity on me whatever you are, shade or living man!’ This is the anguished cry
with which Dante appeals to a vague human form as, faced by the three beasts,
he is about to fall down the mountain back to the depths of the dark wood
(Inferno i, 65–​66). We are at the beginning of the Divine Comedy, and about
to read one of the greatest and most startling recognition scenes ever written. In the ‘great desert’ or waste land in which he finds himself Dante has
just seen, as if emerging out of nothingness, a figure that seems ‘faint through
long silence’: ‘chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco’ (63). He does not describe this
form, but suggestively evokes its shadowy appearance, the great silence that
surrounds it, and the feeling of a long absence from his own consciousness it
suddenly prompts.1 In the following lines, the image does not come into focus
visually (Dante in fact emphasizes its indistinctness and his own uncertainty
by calling it ‘od ombra od omo certo’) but aurally. The voice that answers the
poet comes from depths neither Dante nor we have yet sounded: ‘Non omo,
omo già fui’ (67), ‘No man; a man/​I was in times long gone. Of Lombard stock,/​
my parents both by patria/​were Mantuan./​And I was born, though late, sub
Julio./​I lived at Rome in good Augustus’ day,/​in times when all gods were lying
cheats./​I was a poet then. I sang in praise/​of all the virtues of Anchises’ son.
From Troy/​he came –​proud Ilium razed in flame’ (Inferno i, 67–​75). So, this is
the author of the Aeneid, Virgil himself, the greatest poet of classical antiquity
known to the Middle Ages.
Dante’s surprise and emotion at meeting such a man, thirteen hundred
years dead and yet inevitably at the centre of a medieval writer’s meditation on
his art, is almost indescribable. Dante the poet, however, can make us feel that
shock or blow (Aristotle called it ekplēxis) which recognition always produces.
‘So, could it be … you are that Virgil,/​whose words flow wide, a river running
full?’, he answers while keeping his head bowed for shame, ‘You are the light
1 The edition of the Divine Comedy I use is by A.M. Chiavacci Leonardi in three volumes, Milan,
Mondadori, 1991–​1997; the translation is by R. Kirkpatrick, also in three volumes, London,
Penguin, 2006–​2007. The Convivio is quoted from the edition, with English translation, by
A. Frisardi, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
© Piero Boitani, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004453678_009
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
319
and glory of all poets./​May this serve me: my ceaseless care, the love/​so great,
that’s made me search your writings through!/​You are my teacher. You, my lord
and law./​From you alone I took the fine-​tuned style/​that has, already, brought
me so much honour’ (79–​87).
Surprise, shame, elation succeed each other quickly, and Dante finally erupts
into a paean which is a deeper recognition, the recognition of the meaning
Virgil’s ‘humanitas’ and poetry have for him, for Dante Alighieri. Thus, what
until now was merely a ‘volume’, a book, becomes a person, and Dante’s recognition of that faint human form is presented to us as the trembling encounter of two people and the momentous coming together of two poets and two
cultures across a gulf of one thousand three hundred years. ‘In the realm of
European literature’, Ernst Robert Curtius wrote,2 ‘there is little which may be
compared with this phenomenon … The awakening of Virgil by Dante is an
arc of flame which leaps from one great soul to another … Historically, it is the
sealing of the bond which the Latin Middle Ages made between the antique
and the modern world’.
Dante has indeed begun to treat shades as ‘things of weight’. If nothing in
European poetry can be compared to this, no theory of literature has ever contemplated even the possibility of such a scene. Aristotle –​whom Dante the
character is soon going to see in the Castle of Limbo and to whom Dante as a
man owed so much for his philosophical formation –​had, in his Poetics, never
dealt with recognition scenes between gods and human beings, or between the
living and the dead, such as Greek literature could plentifully supply him with.
Perhaps he felt reluctant to enter a field where reason can find no certainty and
where anagnorisis appears as a mystery which philosophers can hardly sound.
Yet poets cannot, and do not want to, avoid plunging into those depths.
Aristotle chose, as we have seen, several recognition scenes from the
Odyssey as examples of his types of anagnorisis but neglected those of Book
xi. Whoever has read those six hundred lines will never forget the inimitable nekyia, the evocation of the dead, in which, as we have seen in ­chapter 1,
Odysseus recognizes, and is recognized by, his companion Elpenor, Tiresias the
prophet, his mother Anticleia, the heroes and heroines of the past, his friends,
the Greek warriors at Troy, Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax. Virgil showed himself
to be an excellent pupil of Homer. In Book vi of the Aeneid he has Aeneas
visit Hades, where his hero recognizes and is recognized by his pilot Palinurus,
his former lover Dido, his cousin Deiphobus, and finally his father Anchises,
2 E.R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W.R. Trask, London,
Routledge, 1953, p. 358.
320 Chapter 7
who points out to him the future heroes of Rome down to Emperor Augustus.
Recognition, here, covers not only personal roots (symbolized by the father,
who replaces Odysseus’ mother) and the tragic past (the destruction of Troy),
but also love (Dido) and the political-​dynastic future (foundation and glory of
the ‘Urbs’). Aeneas finds his meaning as the founder of an historical civilization, that of Rome.
Homer’s and Virgil’s versions of the nekyia, with all their similarities and
differences, reveal much about ancient conceptions of life after death but also
show that a voyage to the other world means next to nothing without recognition. As we have seen in ­chapter 6, anagnorisis remains central also in Christian
and medieval imagination. For the dead, recognition is a punishment or a
reward. Dante employs this tradition in his own fashion. For instance, when he
meets the avaricious in the fourth circle of Hell, he tells Virgil that he should
be able to ‘recognize’ some of them.3 But Virgil replies that these sinners are
punished by a contrapasso which is centred precisely on recognition: ‘la sconoscente vita che i fé sozzi,/​ad ogni conoscenza or li fa bruni’ –​‘the unknowing
lives that made them all so foul/​darken them now against all knowledge’. On
the other hand we have seen how the notion of reward and joy in recognition
and reunion applies to the fourth Heaven, where the souls of the sapientes
show themselves eager to take their bodies back on Judgment Day because
of love for their fathers and mothers.4 Recognition, which re-​unites human
beings, means life as knowledge of each other. To note that the Biblical jada’
also means to know someone in the flesh, ‘carnally’, is not mere philological
pedantry.
Dante, then, is the heir of a complex tradition. There are many visits to the
other world in medieval literature, and voyages which resemble them like St
Brendan’s, Tungdale’s, even Alexander the Great’s.5 Orpheus’ journey to the
other world constituted for the Middle Ages a figura of Christ’s descent ad
inferos, and this idea might have opened up the way for an integration of the
pagan and Christian views of the katabasis to Hades and of the place recognition has in it. Dante himself, after all, proclaims he was preceded by Aeneas
and Paul.6 A particular interpretation of Aeneid vi might even throw light
on the process leading to the Comedy. In the commentary on Virgil’s poem
going back to the twelfth century and attributed to Bernardus Silvestris, the
3 Inferno vii, 49–​51.
4 Paradiso xiv, 61–​66.
5 See A. Morgan, Dante and the Medieval Other World, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1990.
6 Inferno ii, 31–​32.
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
321
author follows the well-​established tradition of seeing Aeneas’ peregrinations
as an allegory of man’s itinerary through the various stages of life and through
a complete series of moral ‘errores’ (such as ‘lust’, represented by Dido’s episode). The nekyia marks maturity and means the discovery of true knowledge,
theology. In visiting the other world, Aeneas encounters his old ‘errors’, experiences them with a new awareness, and is finally able to attain knowledge of
God. Thus, Aeneas reaches contemplation of the Creator (Anchises) only after
having gone through five stages of creaturarum agnitiones, from inanimate
beings to men and angels.7
This allegory might be considered a kind of potential grid for the actual
plot of the Comedy. In Dante’s poem, the protagonist’s encounters with characters who exemplify a sin or a virtue or who interpret a particularly important piece of doctrine, lead to Dante’s salvation and ultimately to his vision
of God. In this sense anagnorisis is always self-​recognition. When, on the first
terrace of Purgatory, Dante meets the proud, he is recognized by and recognizes one of them, Oderisi da Gubbio, a famous illuminator. In the ensuing
conversation Oderisi pronounces a beautiful sermon on the vanity of human
glory which must deeply touch Dante because it mentions not only Cimabue
and Giotto, but also Guinizzelli and Cavalcanti and, implicitly, Dante Alighieri
as masters of Italian art. Dante tells Oderisi that his words have instilled in his
heart ‘bona umiltà’ –​good humility –​and will later admit to his fear of being
condemned after death to the punishment of the proud.8 The ‘I’, then, mirrors himself in the others and recognition becomes –​as should always be for a
Christian –​ confession.
Dante’s journey in the Comedy is, then, a recognition: a growth and re-​
discovery in the flesh of the Biblical knowledge of good and evil which leads
to cognition of, and full diving into, God. The Divine Comedy as a whole is a
gigantic anagnorisis, a slow and increasingly intense passage from ignorance to
knowledge. In particular, each recognition episode in the poem points to –​as
Aristotle would say –​philia (friendship) or ekhtra (hostility), not only in the
sense that they reveal to Dante whether the characters he meets are relations,
friends or enemies of his, but also in the deeper sense of showing him the
7 The Commentary on the First Six Books of the Aeneid of Vergil Commonly Attributed to Bernardus
Silvestris, ed. J.W. Jones and E.F. Jones, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press,
1977. See also J.W. Jones, ‘The So-​Called Silvestris Commentary on the Aeneid and Two Other
Interpretations’, Speculum, 64 (1989): 838–​48; and in general P. Dronke, Fabula: Explorations
into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism, Leiden, Brill, 1974; and W. Wetherbee, Platonism
and Poetry in the Twelfth Century, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1972.
8 Purgatorio xi, 118–​119, and xiii, 136–​138.
322 Chapter 7
variable degrees of man’s philia or ekhthra towards God and His law. As a matter of fact, those characters will be, as Aristotle puts it, ‘marked for’, or ‘defined
with reference to’, ‘destined to’ ‘good’ or ‘bad’ ‘fortune’ (eutykhia or dystykhia).
They illustrate the final, and eternal eutykhia or dystykhia of the immortal soul,
and later, of the body as well, of man. The tragic or sublime potential of such
scenes is therefore immense.
The recognition scenes of Odyssey xi, Walter Otto once wrote, uncover ‘das
Sein des Gewesenen’, the ‘being of having been’.9 The first thing we shall notice
by studying Dante’s equivalent episodes is that the knowledge that the pilgrim
and we readers acquire through them is not merely that of a being irremediably vanishing away, receding into the past, but the knowledge of a concrete,
present entity which, while containing the past and projecting itself into the
future of eternity, embodies a permanent essence, at once individual and universal. Thus, Dantean recognition is truly Aristotelian in spirit: it is the apprehension of the tode ti, of substance in individuality.
To recognize someone is for Dante to penetrate his or her personality to
its very essence, to understand and to stage dramatically the ultimate truth
his interlocutors incarnate in their gestures, faces, stories. Recognition opens
up for him their historical identity as frozen in the here and now of the other
world. Shades in Hell and purgatory, lights in Paradise, the souls of his nekyia
appear suddenly, manifest themselves, are recognized and recognize without the complex mechanisms of signs, memory, and reasoning about which
Aristotle writes in his Poetics, but, as it were, by their mere appearance,
their words, their self-​revelation. With her lover Paolo, Francesca da Rimini
comes out of the group of the lustful and tells Dante the tale of their love and
death. That story, and the details Francesca adds, are enough for the pilgrim
to recognize her and to make him faint for pity.10 Likewise, the heartbroken
question about his son Guido and the way in which he, his father, is punished make the poet recognize Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti in the shade that
has interrupted his conversation with Farinata.11 On the enchanted beach of
Purgatory, a soul moves out of the crowd to embrace Dante. The spirit’s love
is so obvious that it prompts the poet to do the same. He tries three times,
but in vain, to clasp his friend’s shade (thus repeating the gesture of Odysseus
with his mother and of Aeneas with his father). He shows his wonder; the
soul smiles, withdraws, tells Dante to stop, and finally the poet recognizes
9
10
11
W. F. Otto, Theophania, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 19792, p. 52.
Inferno v, 73–​142.
Inferno x, 52–​66.
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
323
him. Casella sings for him Dante’s own canzone, ‘Amor che ne la mente mi
ragiona’.12
The pathos of the two episodes of Purgatorio ii and iii –​Casella’s and
Manfredi’s –​is deliberately contrasted, in canto iv, with the comic recognition scene with Belacqua, the lazy sinner who sits ‘with his arms around his
knees,/​holding his face bowed heavily between’ (107–​108). He is such a pure
portrait of indolence and so much teases Virgil’s and Dante’s hurry to climb
the mountain (‘Well, perhaps/​you’ll need a good sit-​down before you do’, he
breaks into the conversation, addressing a panting Dante), that the pilgrim
immediately recognizes him and smiles at his ‘curt expressions and his sluggish turns’. ‘O frate, andar in sù che porta?’, ‘what point in going up?’, Belacqua
asks, thereby gaining literary immortality by means of Dante’s and Samuel
Beckett’s pen.
Similar scenes recur throughout the Inferno and the Purgatorio and are the
cause of so much of the Comedy’s appeal through the miracle of surprise and
wonder they produce in the protagonist and in the reader. They also add a
special warmth to the poem’s texture, into which they weave reunions with
long lost friends, a continuous exchange of looks, often revealing movements
of the hands.
∵
I shall now explore some of the basic mechanisms and meanings of Dante’s
recognitions, paying particular attention to the two recurring themes of recognition of poets and self-​recognition. A few preliminary remarks are, however,
necessary. In the first place, we must remember that, following Aristotle, Dante
believes that ‘nature wills that our knowledge proceed in an orderly manner,
that is, proceed from what we know better to what we do not know as well’.13
Clearly, this is also the ideal itinerary of the Comedy, because we know sin and
earthly passions much better than the bliss and mysteries of Heaven. Yet as far
as recognition of single human souls is concerned, things are similar, but at the
same time more complex: for different reasons it is difficult for Dante to recognize the shades of Hell and Purgatory, but it is impossible for him to know the
identity of his interlocutors in Paradise. There, the souls of the blessed appear
to him as lights on a background of light; hence, they must manifest themselves to the pilgrim and declare who they are. Recognition as a poetic and
12
13
Purgatorio ii, 76-​11 7.
Convivio ii i 13.
324 Chapter 7
gnoseological mechanism is, appropriately for God’s own realm, replaced by
revelation –​a process which, as we shall see, starts in the Purgatorio.
Furthermore, the very means of this gnoseological mechanism change in
passing from one cantica to another. In Hell and, partly, in Purgatory, we have
a semblance of the first stages in the process of knowledge such as Dante
conceives them.14 The pilgrim recognizes his interlocutors through his senses
(in particular through sight and hearing) and through their transmission of
‘sensible forms’ to memory as well as to the cogitative and imaginative faculties of the soul. In Heaven, the object of revelation is of course perceived
through sight or hearing, but the intellectual process simply does not begin.
What we encounter is a sudden, total ‘illumination’ that strikes the pilgrim’s
perception and intellect. These, in turn, grow higher, more intense, and more
god-​like by virtue of divine grace the higher the pilgrim ascends through the
spheres.
Secondly, one should perhaps ask oneself how Dante recognizes his characters in Inferno and Purgatorio if these are but shades. Neither Homer nor Virgil
had ever faced the question, but Dante is a poet who goes to the bottom of
things and therefore has himself provided an answer in Purgatorio xxv, where
Statius explains why the souls of the gluttonous can be punished and purged
by means of hunger and thirst. How, asks Dante, can shades suffer these and
become thinner? It is the question medieval exegetes asked about Dives. Statius
replies with a long exposition, central in many ways to the thought underlying
Dante’s poem and which concerns the generation and growth of human beings
and finally the nature of shadow-​bodies after death.
According to Statius, as soon as the soul of the disembodied dead reaches
the banks of the Acheron or the mouth of the Tiber thence to depart towards
Hell or Purgatory, its ‘virtus formativa’ projects a phantom body alike in size
and appearance to the earthly one; and ‘as the air, when drenched with vaporous rain,/​is soon adorned with many different hues,/​from other rays reflected
in the haze,/​so when the soul has reached this point of rest,/​the air around
it gathers in the form/​that virtual powers of soul impress on it./​And, as some
little flame pursues the fire/​and follows where its changing heat may lead,/​so
this new form will go where spirit goes’ (xxv, 88–​99). This is what an ‘ombra’
or fictive body is. The shade then shapes the organs of every sense, from the
lowest to the highest, the sense of sight. It is by this ‘sentire’ that the inhabitants of Hell and Purgatory speak, laugh, weep, and sigh, and therefore recognize and appear as ‘forms’ –​‘ombre vane, fuor che ne l’aspetto’ –​that can be
14
For which see B. Nardi, Dante e la cultura medievale, Bari, Laterza, 1942, pp. 100–​147.
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
325
recognized.15 The changing features and the bearing of the shade-​body reveal
the inner emotions, just as happens with the earthly body. Finally, memory,
intelligence, and will, ‘since all other powers are silent now,/​become, in act,
much keener than before’ (xxv, 79–​84): the shade of a dead man remembers,
understands, and wills more than he or she ever did when they were alive.
This complex explanation, the reasons for which are both philosophical and
poetic, points to something which is borne out in the actual scenes of recognition in Dante’s poem. The heightening of the soul’s faculties after death,
the fact that the shade changes appearance according to its ‘affections’ and
desires indicate that for the souls of Dante’s Hell and Purgatory recognition
may represent an exceptionally intense experience. His shades do not only
have a physical appearance –​they are, in a sense, naked human feelings and
minds. They cannot, as Erich Auerbach once remarked,16 hide any of their passions. Between shades thus inclined and a man such as Dante the protagonist,
inherently motivated to acquire knowledge and naturally full of a living person’s emotions on a journey to the other world, recognition will therefore be
a unique moment of contact. In other words, the anagnorisis scenes of the
Comedy are not only narrative devices. They are the technical means by which
Dante stresses the central process of the poem, the acquisition of knowledge
in the flesh, and its dramatic quality.
Thirdly, there is a quantitative and qualitative difference between anagnorisis in Hell and in Purgatory. Fully staged recognition scenes are much more
numerous in the latter. lf one excepts the encounter with Virgil in canto i,
which is a general prologue to the poem and whose events take place outside
Hell proper, in the Inferno we have only one major scene of recognition, that
between Dante and Brunetto Latini in canto xv. In the Purgatorio, on the other
hand, we have at least eight such episodes, which include the meetings with
Casella, Belacqua, Sordello, Judge Nino, Oderisi, Statius, Forese Donati, and
finally Beatrice. There is quite a simple explanation for this: with a few exceptions, the souls of the damned are not particularly keen on being identified
by Dante as this, they fear, will only bring shame onto them. An example is
Filippo Argenti, one of the wrathful in the fifth circle. Covered with mud, he
rises from the Stygian marsh as Dante and Virgil are crossing it on Phlegyas’
boat. Dante asks him who he is, but he angrily replies, ‘Just look at me. I’m one/​
who weeps’. In spite of this, the poet recognizes and curses him (viii, 31–​9).
15
16
See B. Nardi, Dante e la cultura medievale, pp. 187–​209; P. Boyde, Dante Philomythes and
Philosopher, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 270–​281.
E. Auerbach, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt, Berlin-​Leipzig, De Gruyter, 1929,
pp. 174–​176.
326 Chapter 7
Furthermore, the souls of the damned are very often disfigured both by their
punishment and their own inner anguish. In the third circle, among the gluttonous, Ciacco defies Dante: ‘You there! Drawn onwards through this stretch
of Hell,/​tell me you know me. Say so, if so you can./​You! Made as man before
myself unmade’: ‘riconoscimi, se sai:/​tu fosti, prima ch’io disfatto, fatto’.17 Even
so, the poet will not be able to recognize him because of the sinner’s ‘angoscia’,
his dreadful pain.
Metamorphosis, méconnaissance, blindness, oblivion, inability to recognize
characterize the sphere of anagnorisis in Hell. The Inferno is the place where
recognition tends towards its denial: not its degree zero, but so to speak, below
zero. Where it takes place, it is a difficult, agonizing process, as with Ciacco and
Brunetto. Its tragic essence is infinitely increased by a tension which, though
allowing wonder, has no release. The souls of Dante’s Hell have no escape. They
have but a single moment in all eternity to be, or not to be recognized by a
fellow human being. Recognition is their only chance of being remembered –​
therefore of surviving –​and at the same time of being damned forever in
human memory. For them, anagnorisis coincides not with peripeteia, the reversal of circumstances, but with pathos, in Aristotle’s meaning, catastrophe –​a
catastrophe which has already taken place in history and is there forever present outside history. The knowledge anagnorisis brings to the damned is in fact
totally useless and hopeless. For Dante, and presumably for us, this knowledge
will eventually constitute a means of real Christian catharsis and salvation. Its
effect will indeed be pity –​the Aristotelian eleos –​ but one inextricably mixed
with terror (phobos) and horror, one, as Dante tells us, transformed into a war,
the ‘guerra de la pietate’.18 Hence, to study the development of recognition in
Hell means becoming aware of the double bottom, as it were, of tragedy: to
acquire consciousness of the tragic while realizing its total uselessness for the
actors themselves.
The situation is profoundly different in Purgatory. Recognition is easier in its
regained light, for here Dante’s own body projects, to the perennial wonder of
his interlocutors, a shadow that makes him very visible. What is more important, however, is that the souls who inhabit this ‘in-​between’,19 know that they
are saved. Indeed, being recognized by Dante and thereby being remembered
by their relatives in prayer will shorten their purifying pains. Anagnorisis is for
17
18
19
Inferno vi, 40–​42.
Inferno ii, 4–​5; and see A.M. Chiavacci Leonardi, La guerra de la pietate, Naples,
Liguori, 1979.
See J. Le Goff, La Naissance du Purgatoire, Paris, Gallimard, 1981; S. Greenblatt, Hamlet in
Purgatory, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001.
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
327
them a joy, a pleasure. It is this feeling that Dante himself expresses when, in
the little valley of Antepurgatory, he sees a soul who, as if he were trying to recognize him, gazes at him attentively. The air around is darkening, yet it is not
so dark as to prevent either the dead man’s nor the living man’s eye movement
and penetration and their mutual understanding. The senses meet directly.
The shade moves towards Dante, the pilgrim towards the soul: ‘Noble judge
Nino, how it pleased me then/​to see you weren’t among the guilty souls.20
And this is the joy, the feeling almost of divine ‘grace’, that prompts
Forese Donati to cry loudly, when he turns his hollow eyes and fixes them
on Dante: ‘Qual grazia m’è questa?’ This emotion and this voice trigger off
Dante’s recognition.21 The same word marks the climax of the recognition
scene between Dante and Brunetto in Inferno xv. However, if one compares
the two episodes, the nature of the difference between anagnorisis in Hell
and Purgatory becomes immediately evident. Brunetto is less disfigured than
Forese, but in Hell Dante’s own face,22 is dirty from the ‘sucidume’ of the place,
and his eyes are dimmed by ‘mist’. When the crowd of sinners against Nature
approach Dante and Virgil across the expanse of sand under the broad flakes
of falling fire, they look at the two poets ‘as people will/​on evenings when the
moon is new –​their brows/​towards us, wrinkled into squinting blades,/​like
those of some old tailor at his needle’.23
Uncertainty, difficulty, painful efforts -​-​these are the characteristics of ‘sight’
in Hell. The first simile Dante employs here (‘come suol da sera guardare uno
altro sotto nova luna’) conflates two passages from Aeneid vi, the first of which
describes the scenery of Dis and the dark landscape through which Aeneas
and the Sibyl are now walking (‘Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram …
quale per incertam lunam’), while the second marks the hero’s recognition of
Dido’s shade in Hades.24 As we shall again see, Virgilian echoes and Virgil’s
own presence signal the high points of recognition throughout the Comedy.
In Inferno xv, meanwhile, Dante is agonizingly and uncertainly ‘eyed’ by the
whole group (‘famiglia’) under the rain of fire and is then recognized (‘conosciuto’) by one of the spirits, who takes him by the hem of his cloak and cries,
‘Qual maraviglia!’. We pass from a general view to focus on one individual, from
vision to recognition and on to wonder, with a familiar gesture that indicates
a desperate effort at establishing, or re-​establishing, human contact. Surprised
20
21
22
23
24
Purgatorio viii, 46–​54
Purgatorio xxiii, 43–​48.
As we are told in Purgatorio i, 95–​99.
Inferno xv, 18–​21.
Aeneid vi, 268–​272 and 451–​454.
328 Chapter 7
by that arm reaching out for him, Dante fixes his eyes on the man’s scorched
face. In spite of the ‘cotto aspetto’, knowledge and recognition are full, yet not
immediate:
E io, quando ’l suo braccio a me distese,
ficcai li occhi per lo cotto aspetto,
si che ’l viso abbrusciato non difese
la conoscenza sua al mio ’ntelletto
And I –​as he stretched an arm towards me –​
fixed eyes so keenly through his fire-​baked look
that these singed features could not fend away
my mind from knowing, truly, who he was.25
Profoundly different as the two recognition scenes with Brunetto and Forese
are –​and the essence of this difference may be seen in the exclamations
of the two souls, the former’s ‘Qual maraviglia!’ and the latter’s ‘Qual grazia
m’è questa?’ –​they have at least one element in common, which is shared
also by the episodes of Judge Nino and Oderisi da Gubbio: the total attention
of Dante’s poetry to the visage and particularly to the eyes of his actors. As
in Giotto’s frescoes, the ‘ficcarsi’ and ‘fissarsi’ of eye into eye is a continuously repeated motion, or rather the coming of that motion to a standstill
in a concentrated instant. It is one of the two central mechanisms employed
by Dante in his recognition scenes –​anagnorisis per oculos, ‘by means of the
eyes’. Nor is this by chance, for ‘occhio’, the most frequent noun in the poem,
represents an essential dimension of the Comedy (that of ‘vision’) and indicates the main organ through which Dante can satisfy his ever-​present desire
to know.
∵
I shall pause now to examine in detail the Forese scene, which is central to
any treatment of Dante’s recognitions, postponing a more extensive analysis
of the Brunetto episode to the next chapter. When Virgil, Statius, and Dante
reach the sixth terrace of Purgatory –​the first two in front, the third ‘soletto di
retro’, by himself, behind the other two, intent on listening to their talk which
‘a poetar’ gives him ‘intelletto’, ‘understanding in making verse’ –​the scene is in
the first instance dominated by a tree laden with ‘fruits that smelled sweet and
25
Inferno xv, 25–​28.
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
329
good’ and whose leaves are dripping with clear water. From its branches comes
a voice which, following God’s warning in Genesis,26 calls out, ‘you may not
eat of this food’, announcing a series of examples of temperance. While Dante
strains his eyes to gaze inside the branches ‘as might some hunter tracking little
birds’, Virgil encourages him to continue with his journey. ‘Ed ecco’ –​‘And lo’ –​
we hear simultaneous crying and singing, in tones which bring both pleasure
and pain, verse 17 of the Miserere, Psalm 50: ‘Labia mea, Domine’, ‘O Lord, open
thou my lips, and my mouth shall shew forth thy praise’. The Biblical formula
‘And lo’ marks the start of an extraordinary scene.27 Surprised by the singing,
Dante asks Virgil what it is that he hears. Virgil replies by using for the first time
words repeated so often in these two cantos of Purgatorio, ‘ombre’, and ‘nodo’,
which will recur at a crucial point in canto xxiv: ‘Ombre che vanno/​forse di
lor dover solvendo il nodo’, shades who expiate their sin, gluttony, untying the
knot of their debt towards God.
The voices dominating the initial lines of canto xxiii thus become shades,
and immediately throng in a procession of souls who move along swiftly as
though absorbed in thought and wonder. Like self-​absorbed pilgrims who, on
meeting a stranger, turn towards him without stopping, so now, says Dante, ‘a
crowd of souls, silent and devout’ overtakes the three poets, and gazes at them
in bewilderment. In the silence following the singing of the Miserere the meditative and light-​passing spirits form a spectral vision:
Ne li occhi era ciascuna oscura e cava,
palida ne la faccia, e tanto scema
che da l’ossa la pelle s’informava.
Each one was dark and hollow round the eyes,
pallid in feature, and so gaunt and waste
that skin was formed to show the very bone.28
Definitely shades, now: skeletal ghosts, whose dark, deep-​ringed eyes are
the only things visible in waxy faces, whose skin has no shape but the bone
beneath it. Dante the poet, who is not lacking powerful Biblical examples,29
26
27
28
29
Genesis 2: 9.
See E. Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 180–​181.
Purgatorio xxiii, 22–​24.
Psalms 102: 5, ‘By reason of the voice of my groaning my bones cleave to my skin’; Job
19: 20, ‘My bone cleaveth to my skin’, Lamentations 4: 8, ‘their skin cleaveth to their bones;
it is withered, it is become like a stick’: see R.L. Martinez, ‘Dante’s Forese, The Book of Job,
and the Office of the Dead: A Note on Purgatorio 25’, Dante Studies, 120 (2002): 1–​16.
330 Chapter 7
comments that not even Ovid’s Erisychthon, condemned to such insatiable
hunger that he gnawed his own flesh, became so ‘withered to the very rind’.
Dante the character, however, is thinking not only of the classical myth but
also of the time when the Jews lost Jerusalem by giving themselves up to the
Romans on account of their hunger and Mary of Eleazarus ‘nel figlio diè di
becco’, bit and ate the flesh of her child.30 A terrifying pairing of allusions,
which calls to mind Ugolino’s ‘fasting’, the dreadfully ambiguous ‘digiuno’ with
which his story ends in Inferno xxxiii.
But Dante insists once more: returning to the dark and sunken eyes he has
just described, he now shows us circles which look like ‘anella sanza gemme’,
empty eye-​sockets like rings devoid of any precious stone in their centre. Those,
he adds, who read the word ‘omo’ in men’s faces –​where the two O shapes are
the eyes and the M the shape made by the nose, cheekbones and curve of the
eyebrows –​would easily recognize the M. Faces reduced to letters: and, pre-​
eminent amongst them are the bony sockets which once again cancel out the
eyes’ pupils. How meaningless this ‘recognition’ is! It seems mere reading, and
not even of a whole word but just one letter. Of course, notes the poet, no one
would believe that the odour alone of fruit and water could produce such an
effect simply by generating the desire to eat and drink: no one, at least, who
does not know how –​‘como’ –​this occurs in souls without bodies. With a brief
‘aside’, to which he returns immediately afterwards when he declares his own
astonishment in contemplating the cause of such hunger, Dante prepares for
his magisterial invention of canto xxv.
At the same time, he continues to emphasize these spirits’ terminal consumption, their ‘leanness’ and ‘wretched scurf’. As though gouging it out of
their empty eye-​sockets, Dante makes true recognition emerge from them, projecting the moment forward, holding it for two lines, and finally concentrating
it in a steady gaze, which suddenly reacquires eyes as though making them
rise from some indeterminate depths of the skull. ‘Già era in ammirar che sì li
affama’, ‘I was already wondering what had starved them so’, he writes, echoing
once more the narrative mode of Scripture, ‘ed ecco del profondo de la testa/​
volse a me li occhi un’ombra e guardò fiso’, ‘and lo, a shadow turned its eyes
on me,/​deep in its skull, and, peered fixedly’. The crowd of shades becomes
one shade, this one, and the ‘omo’ takes on the appearance of an ‘uomo’, a man
turning his eyes towards his fellow man. Here, he is the first to recognize, and,
30
Ovid, Metamorphoses viii, 739–​878; for the siege on Jerusalem and Mary of Eleazarus
the ultimate source is Flavius Josephus, De bello judaico vi, 3, 201–​13; the story is told in
Orosius, Historiae vii, 9; John of Salisbury, Policraticus ii, 6; Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum
historiale x, 5.
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
331
just as Brunetto Latini exclaimed ‘Qual maraviglia!’ in Inferno xv, so this shade
cries out –​with the variation in the word used enabling us to see the abyss
between Hell and Purgatory –​‘Qual grazia m’è questa?’ Dante bides his time,
however: he takes two terzine before exploding the agnition in the last word
of the second. The face alone would never have been enough for the recognition: it is the voice, the unique part of a person’s identity, which reveals what
appearance has destroyed. This is the spark which rekindles knowledge, which
illuminates the ‘changed features’. And now, finally, Dante recognizes the face
of Forese:
Mai non l’avrei riconosciuto al viso;
ma ne la voce sua mi fu palese
ciò che l’aspetto in sé avea conquiso.
Questa favilla tutta mi raccese
mia conoscenza a la cangiata labbia,
e ravvisai la faccia di Forese.
I never would have known him from his face.
But in his voice, all now was shown to me
that had, in feature, been destroyed and lost.
That spark for me rekindled at a stroke
clear recognition of those much-​changed lips,
and once again I saw Forese’s face.31
The name is the definitive seal: but before reaching it we pass twice from ignorance to knowledge, as if pacing out the whole process again, savouring it fully
in the retarding of the lines: from ‘mai non l’avrei riconosciuto’ to ‘mi fu palese’,
from ‘tutta mi raccese mia conoscenza’ to ‘ravvisai’; from an unknown face
to his, familiar, voice, through the disfigured and emaciated shape; and again
from the voice which is now ‘favilla’, through the ‘cangiata labbia’, to the face
of his friend.
The voice is the sign which triggers memory, as will happen six centuries
later for Marcel in the boyish laughter of his schoolmate during the ‘matinée’ at
the Guermantes. But in Dante the mechanism has a rather special brightness
and ardour: the sign is a language, a spark which kindles knowledge, and this
appears as a full fire, illuminating by reflection the face perceived. A face: for
apart from this we shall see nothing of Forese. And yet this is enough, shining
like a light: because in the face, as Dante had written in the Convivio, ‘the soul
31
Purgatorio xxiii, 43–​48.
332 Chapter 7
performs more of its function than in any other external part’ and ‘works so
subtly that by refining its material there as much as possible, no face is like
any other, because the ultimate potential of the material, which is somewhat
different in everyone, here is actualized’: ‘perché l’ultima potenza della materia, la quale [è] in tutti quasi dissimile, quivi si riduce in atto’. When potentia
becomes actus, the fulness of the individual being is accomplished and that
being becomes knowable.32
It is thus the very essence of Forese that is revealed to Dante here, the
union within him of matter and form, body and soul. And while the means
of this fusion which takes place in the shade is to be the subject of Statius’
marvellous exposition in canto xxv, it will suffice to set it against the apparently nominal general essence grasped earlier (‘omo’) to understand how substantial and individual it appears here: like Aristotle’s tode ti, the universal
which is actuated in the particular, the ‘quod quid est’, or ‘quidditas’, of the
Scholastics.
Forese’s surprise is shown in his exultation, for meeting Dante in the afterlife seems to him like a true miracle, a ‘grazia’ from above. It quickly, however,
becomes self-​awareness and desire to learn what has happened to his friend.
What now prevails is his awareness of his condition and appearance. As Forese
tells Dante, referring to the ‘wretched scurf’ and ‘leanness’ of all his companions, he is no more than the ‘asciutta scabbia’, the ‘withered scab’ that discolours his skin, a ‘lack of flesh’: but still a person, now wishing urgently and passionately to rekindle past bonds, imploring Dante –​‘tell me the truth about
yourself’ –​not to stand there without speaking to him, to identify the two souls
who are his companions.
In Aristotle, recognition ‘is a passage from not knowing to knowing which
produces friendship or enmity’: in Purgatorio xxiii it fully reveals philia, a core
dimension of human relations, in which ‘si fa uno di più’ and which has for
Dante, as for Aristotle, a highly ethical value, since it is necessary for the ‘vita
perfetta’:33 that friendship between the two which had been and continues
to be their bond. Nor should one forget that Purgatorio, beginning with the
Casella episode, is the cantica of friendship.
In the light of this feeling, the remembrance of things past now begins.
Without answering Forese’s question, caught up in his own astonishment and
32
33
Convivio iii viii 7; and see C. Vasoli’s commentary, ad loc., Opere minori i ii, ed. C. Vasoli
and D. De Robertis, Milan-​Naples, Ricciardi, 1988.
Convivio iv i 1; iv xxv 1, with quotes respectively from Pythagoras (Cicero, De officiis i xvii
16) and from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics viii, 7, 1158 a°, 1–​10. See also Convivio i viii
12: Dante speaks of friendship throughout the Convivio.
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
333
desire to know, Dante asks him a question of his own, with the same pathos
that pervades his friend’s voice:
Però mi dì, per Dio, che sì vi sfoglia;
non mi far dir mentr’io mi maraviglio,
ché mal può dir chi è pien d’altra voglia.
But tell me, in God’s name, what strips your leaves?
Don’t make me, wonderstruck, attempt to talk.
No one, desiring other things, speaks well.34
Dante returns to the question tormenting him, to the nature of this extreme
emaciation which strips away leaf after leaf, layer after layer of flesh (or parchment where the word ‘omo’ is written). But in questioning his friend he evokes
the past and links it to the present he reads in his face, already wept over at the
supreme moment of his death and which now appears so disfigured. Forese
replies by explaining the divine origin of the purification to which all sinners
of gluttony are subjected, claiming that their punishment is sanctification and
their suffering more like solace, for the desire (‘voglia’) that urges them towards
the trees is the same penance for their sins as that which led Christ on the cross
to call out gladly (‘lieto’) ‘Elì, Elì lamma sabachtani?’ An extraordinarily paradoxical comparison, if one believes that Jesus’ last words as reported by Mark
and Matthew, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’, are dictated by
despair rather than joy, yet appropriate in the theological and poetic plot of
Purgatorio xxiii, where the ‘grace’ that Forese feels on seeing Dante seems to
become the ‘voglia’ of purification, the same that dominates the Redeemer’s
sacrifice.
While Forese thus seems to take on, obliquely, a passing resemblance to
the crucified Christ, Dante the character cannot shift his attention away from
what is really troubling him: the death of his friend. Less than five years have
passed, he tells him, ‘from that day/​that you exchanged your world for better
life’: the burning awareness of death (‘la faccia tua, ch’io lagrimai già morta’),
while still tinged with grief for the past, is attenuated by the recognition that it
also announces a ‘better life’: that, in sum, there is survival after death, and that
Forese has attained eternal life. These are the two hopes that Christianity offers
to believers. And recognition, which previously only meant passing from ignorance to knowledge, and then pointed to philia, is now complete, focussing, as
in Aristotle’s definition, on the ‘fortune’, the eutykhia of its protagonist. In this
34
Purgatorio xxiii 58–​60.
334 Chapter 7
lies the subtle distinction between the acts of agnition regarding Brunetto and
Forese: while the former has taught Dante ‘how man makes himself eternal’,
and believes he is still living in his Trésor while in fact he has obtained a terminal dystykhia on account of his sin, the latter repented his gluttony on the
point of death, thus achieving eutykhia, a happy destiny.
But Dante is not content with this. He wants to know how Forese managed to reach Purgatory proper since he died fewer than five years earlier: if
he repented only at the end, he should still be in Antepurgatory, ‘where time
is redeemed by time’ (xxiii, 84). The poet answers his own question with a
stroke of genius. It was, Forese claims, ‘la Nella mia’ –​his wife –​who helped
him ‘by her flood of tears’ to obtain the bittersweet suffering of Purgatory. With
her devout prayers and sighs, she obtained a shortening of his purification.
Forese’s gratitude is profound reconnaissance, vibrant with affection: dominating it is his love for his wife, God’s love for her (to the extent that Nella takes on
the features of a Beatrice, a Lucy, a Mary), and her ‘bene operare’, the incarnation of true ethical virtue:35
Tanto è a Dio più cara e più diletta
la vedovella mia, che molto amai,
quanto in bene operare è più soletta …
My little widow, whom I loved so well,
to God is dearer still, and better loved,
since she so stands alone in doing good.
After Forese’s violent prophetical invective against the degenerate Florentine
women which starts with his mention of Nella’s solitude in barbarian Florence,
he turns to Dante to ask him about himself and the two shades accompanying him; Dante replies with a double movement which reflects once again the
scene with Brunetto, returning to the remembrance of things past and focusing
decisively on times present. Even fuller recognition takes shape, now, through
his words, touching the very life of each of them and the memory which in the
present retraces the past:
Per ch’io a lui: ‘Se tu riduci a mente
qual fosti meco, e qual io teco fui,
ancor fia grave il memorar presente …’
‘If you bring back to mind’, I now replied,
35
See Convivio iii xv 12; iv vi 13.
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
335
‘what you were once to me and I to you,
the memory of that will still be sore …’ (xxiii, 115-​117)
On the one hand there is the memory of the past relationship, on the other
the remembering, now (‘memorar presente’), that same period, which accomplishes the former through suffering. There is a substantial difference, as we saw
in ­chapter 1, between the two types of memory, which Aristotle called mneme
and anamnesis and Thomas Aquinas memorari and reminisci, and which can be
rendered as ‘memory’ and ‘reminiscence’. The first, the Scholastic memorari, ‘is
nothing other than preserving well what has been acquired’, while the second,
reminisci, is ‘a finding again (reinventio) of what was once acquired but not well
preserved’.36 Memory comes before reminiscence and is common to animals
as well as to humankind; reminiscence belongs only to humanity, and implies
the intervention of will: ‘it is a kind of inference’ (syllogismus) and ‘a kind of
search’ (inquisitio), because ‘he who remembers fixes by inference that he has
seen or heard or experienced’.37 Aristotle criticizes Plato’s theory according to
which ‘learning is reminiscence’: ‘foreknowledge of a single object can never
occur’, he claims; ‘rather, while induction is developing, we take on the knowledge of particular objects as though we recognized them’.38 Reminiscence is for
him a process of gaining awareness.
It is this type of memory and knowledge that Dante explores in the recognition scene with Forese, supplying it with all the pathos of a process which concerns not just any object or scientific data, but a person in the flesh and above
all in the bone. Dante knows that the ‘memorar presente’ (in which the memorari of Thomas seems to echo) will become ‘sore’ when Forese recalls the relationship they had –​that is, when he accomplishes an operation of reminisci in
which his will plays a part (and to that deliberativum he invites his friend with
‘se tu riduci a mente’). Purgatorio xxiii, like Inferno xv, makes poetry out of
memory, and relies, like Proust’s Recherche, on a poetics of reminiscence.
∵
36
37
38
Thomas Aquinas, In Aristotelis … De memoria et reminiscentia commentarium, 301; see the
Latin text of Aristotle, ibidem, i, 159–​163, 32, and the Greek one at 1449 b 4–​9 and 1451a 20-​
b 6. See also Convivio i viii 12; ii ii 4; iv ix 11; iv xiv 10, for the references in Vasoli’s notes on
Aristotle’s works and the comments of Albert the Great and Thomas. For a more in-​depth
treatment, see M. Carruthers, The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 46–​79, 185–​187.
De memoria et reminiscentia, 1453a 10–​14 (ii, 208–​209); Thomas, 398 ff.
Prior Analytics, 67a 22–​27.
336 Chapter 7
Let us now go back to the overall plot of recognition in the Comedy. In Inferno
xxix, after the beautifully indirect and incomplete recognition scene between
Dante and Geri del Bello (1–​36), the poets meet the falsifiers. One of them,
Capocchio, a notorious counterfeiter of metals, pictures and men –​in fact an
excellent ‘ape of Nature’ –​asks Dante to ‘sharpen up’ his eyes towards him so
as to recognize his now leprous face:
Ma perché sappi chi sì ti seconda
contra i Sanesi, aguzza ver’ me l’occhio,
sì che la faccia mia ben ti risponda:
sì vedrai ch’io son l’ombra di Capocchio,
che falsai li metalli con l’alchimia;
e te dee ricordar, se ben t’adocchio,
com’io fui di natura buona scimia.
To see, however, who (like you) speaks here
so anti-​Sienese, just sharpen up your eye.
My face –​look hard –​may give you your reply.
I am, you’ll see, the shadow of Capocchio.
Alchemically, I falsified base metals
and, if I eye you well, then you’ll recall
how marvellous an ape of nature I was.39
In Hell, no ‘imitation’ will hold, and the true nature of a man will be open to
acute sight. For, as Dante repeats in an apparently mere aside towards the end
of Purgatorio xxi, it is ‘ne li occhi ove ’l sembiante più si ficca’ –​it is in the
eyes where what we feel shows most. When the enquiring eyes of a human
being are fixed without impediment on the eyes of another, they acquire
a knowledge which is not mere recognition of an identity, but penetration
into the soul, the very essence of their interlocutor. Such is the intensity and
directness of Dantean anagnorisis that it can do without signs, memory or
reasoning.
The line I have just quoted from Purgatorio xxi –​‘ne li occhi ove ’l sembiante più si ficca’ –​belongs to one of the most famous episodes of the entire
Comedy, that in which the soul of Statius, having expiated his sin of excessive
prodigality and his fear and ‘lukewarmness’ in showing himself a Christian, is
freed from Purgatory and enabled to ascend to Paradise. With the encounter
between Virgil, Dante and Statius we enter a realm where recognition must
39
Inferno xxix, 135–​139.
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
337
be understood in at least two unusual meanings –​as agnitio or ‘acknowledgement’ of poets, and as epiphany.
Statius, Dante and Virgil have never met before and therefore, strictly speaking and according to all medieval authorities,40 cannot ‘recognize’ each other.
Yet apart from the fact (which Dante would have known only if he had read
William of Moerbeke’s translation of the Poetics) that ‘anagnorisis’ primarily
means not ‘re-​cognition’, but a shift from ignorance to knowledge, there is
a deeper sense in which this episode can be called a recognition scene. The
pattern has been set by the encounter between Virgil and Dante at the beginning of the poem and is repeated in Purgatorio vi–​v ii in the meeting between
Virgil, Dante and Sordello. It is a pattern that revolves around Virgil, with the
pilgrim playing the role of spectator or deuteragonist, and Dante the writer
that of stage director.
The fact is that Dante, Sordello and Statius do know Virgil before they meet
him. Who would not ‘know’ the great shade of Western poetry and wisdom,
which even a non-​classicizing century like the twentieth makes the protagonist
of a splendid novel, Hermann Broch’s Death of Virgil? To find Virgil in the other
world, to have him recognized three times, is the supreme dramatization and
personalization of a culture that questions and celebrates itself. Virgil himself,
though setting the example, had been less daring. In his Hades, Aeneas does
not encounter Homer (Aeneas is not, of course, the poetic persona of Publius
Vergilius Maro), but only the remote Ur-​poets, the ‘poetae theologi’ Orpheus
and Musaeus, symbols of religion as much as of poetry.41 And Aristophanes,
who in his Frogs has Dionysus himself, the god of tragedy, descend to Hades
and there be present at the contest between Aeschylus and Euripides, stages
no recognition scene in that play. Anagnorisis of poets in the other world is in
fact very much Dante’s invention.
Here, then, is medieval poetry coming face to face with antiquity –​the troubadour Sordello meeting Virgil in Antepurgatory. Looking around like a lion
when it rests, slow, solemn, full of dignity, Sordello answers Virgil’s enquiry
about the best way up the mountain by asking the two travellers from what
country they come. And the name of Mantua is enough to prompt self-​
revelation and an embrace between the two shades:
e ’l dolce duca incominciava
‘Mantua …’ e l’ombra, tutta in sé romita,
40
41
See ­chapter 6, pp. 294–295, and notes 10–12.
Aeneid vi, 645 and 667. Dante the pilgrim finds Orpheus, with Linus, in the Castle of
Limbo: Inferno iv, 140–​141.
338 Chapter 7
surse ver’ lui del loco ove pria stava,
dicendo: ‘O Mantoano, io son Sordello
de la tua terra!’; e l’un l'altro abbracciava.
My thoughtful guide began:
‘Mantua …’ The shade –​so dark-​cowled, sunk within –​
rose up towards him from where first he’d been,
saying: ‘You Mantuan! I am Sordello.
Your fellow citizen’. And each round each flung arms.42
After Dante’s invective against Italy, the emperor and Florence, which occupies
the remainder of canto vi, the scene resumes at the beginning of the following
canto, when Sordello asks his interlocutors who they are. Dante answers not a
word but leaves the stage to Virgil: ‘Io son Virgilio’. The words are as direct and
simple as Aeneas’ ‘Sum pius Aeneas’ in the Aeneid (i, 378) and Odysseus’ ‘I am
Odysseus, son of Laertes’ in the Odyssey (xi, 19). Sordello’s reaction, however, is
very different from Venus’ in the Aeneid and the Phaeacians’ in the Odyssey. It
rather resembles that of the disciples at Jesus’ ‘ego sum’ after the resurrection.
What Sordello sees before him now is a miracle, and he is uncertain whether
in his wonder he should ‘believe’ it or not:
Qual è colui che cosa innanzi sé
sùbita vede ond’e’ si maraviglia,
che crede e non, dicendo ‘Ella è … non è …’,
tal parve quelli; e poi chinò le ciglia,
e umilmente ritornò ver’ lui,
e abbracciòl là ’ve ’l minor s’appiglia.
‘O gloria di Latin’, disse, ‘per cui
mostrò ciò che potea la lingua nostra,
o pregio etterno del loco ond’io fui,
qual merito o qual grazia mi ti mostra?’
Like someone on the sudden who, before
his eyes, sees what he can’t help marvelling at,
can’t credit it but does, and says ‘It is … It’s not …’
so did Sordello, and he bent his brow,
then, turning back to Virgil, flung once more
his arms round where inferiors embrace.
‘You glory of the Latin race’, he said,
42
Purgatorio vi, 71–​75.
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
339
‘through you our tongue was shown what it could do.
Eternal honour of where I, once, was.
What merit or what grace shows you to me?’43
The words, as we shall see T.S. Eliot say in another recognition scene derived
from Dante, ‘suffice … to compel the recognition they precede’. A sacral aura
pervades this second part of the episode. Anagnorisis takes place in the atmosphere of epiphany.
The numinous, indeed divine quality of the Virgil-​Sordello revelation
increases when Statius appears on the scene later in the Purgatorio. When
the episode begins, in canto xx, a sudden earthquake announces a crucial
event. If we are unwilling to associate this with the earthquake that made
Jerusalem tremble at Jesus’ death,44 Dante himself compares it to the convulsions the island of Delos suffered just before Latona gave birth there to
Apollo and Diana, the two ‘eyes of the sky’, sun and moon. And if this pagan
Nativity is still not enough, here is a general singing of ‘Glory to God in
the highest’, and here are Virgil and Dante ‘immobili e sospesi’ ‘as were the
shepherds who first heard that song’, transporting us to the familiar account
of Christmas.45 From this proclamation of an event unique in human history Dante (here obviously absorbed in the epiphanies of Luke’s Gospel)
brings us to the end of that salvation story by comparing the appearance
of a shade to one of the most startling and beautiful of the so-​called post-​
resurrectional appearances, that of Jesus to the two disciples on the road to
Emmaus:46
Ed ecco, sì come ne scrive Luca
che Cristo apparve a’ due ch’erano in via,
già surto fuor de la sepulcral buca,
ci apparve un’ombra
And look! As in his gospel Luke describes
how Christ, when risen from the hollow tomb,
appeared to two who travelled on their way –​
a shadow from behind us now appeared.47
43
44
45
46
47
Purgatorio vii, 10–​19.
Matthew 27: 51–​52, explicitly recalled at Inferno xii, 34–​45.
The two Purgatorio references in this paragraph are xx, 130–​133 and xx, 136–​141.
Luke 24: 13 ff.
Purgatorio xxi, 7–​10.
340 Chapter 7
Thus the ‘ombra’, in the previous canto ‘born’ like Jesus, resurrects like him
‘from the hollow tomb’ and as suddenly and mysteriously materializes before
the two travellers, following them (and ‘who’, T.S. Eliot will write in The Waste
Land, ‘is the third who walks always beside you?’) while they, unaware, watch
the crowd that lies at their feet. The words of greeting spoken by the shade, similarly Christ-​like and post-​resurrectional (‘Peace be with you’),48 make Dante
and Virgil suddenly turn, the latter replying with the appropriate salutation in
words (‘Et cum spirito tuo’) or gesture (‘cenno’) and immediately adding:
Nel beato concilio
ti ponga in pace la verace corte
che me rilega ne l’etterno essilio.
May that true government
which keeps me bound in exile endlessly
grant you a place within that happy court. (xxi, 16-​18)
With this greeting, which highlights Virgil’s strong feeling of the contrast
between his own eternal exile and the shade’s ultimate belonging to the
‘blessed council’, the play begins. It will unfold in five movements or sections
of dialogue, with the third, a true central ‘act’, constituting the climax. The prologue which I have just examined, and the first scene, are a ‘divine comedy’.
The play becomes more and more human in the following stages. We begin
with the Nativity, the Resurrection, a soul’s liberation from Purgatory and
ascent to Paradise. Then, with Statius’ revelation of his identity, we go back to
earth to learn about the early stages of his life. We return to Purgatory in the
central act, the recognition scene proper. We descend to Limbo in the first part
of the fourth section, to pass once more to earth for Statius’ story of the second
stage of his life. In the fifth and final movement we follow the third stage of
Statius’ life in the world of the living and are then plunged again into the first
circle of Hell, the ‘blind prison’. A short, but significant pause ensues; then the
ascent up Purgatory’s summit resumes.49
In the first movement of this extraordinary play, the as yet unknown spirit
shows himself astonished at Virgil’s words. If you are shades whom God forbids from entering His kingdom, he asks, who has brought you so high up the
mountain? Virgil’s reply describes, as usual, the purpose of Dante’s journey
through the other world and his own role as guide. Thus, it is with Dante’s
48
49
Luke 24: 36: Purgatorio xxi, 13.
References: from Purgatorio xx, 124 to xxi, 72; xxi, 73–​102; xxi, 103–​136; xxii, 1–​54; xxii,
55–​114.
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
341
ascent that our play opens, and with a rather elaborate indication that this
is being done before death, in the living body; we are also reminded that
the pilgrim’s soul is the spirit’s ‘sister’–​a reminder of common immortality
and perhaps a foretaste of the community of poetry that is soon going to be
revealed.50
Virgil’s first question, rather surprisingly, does not concern the spirit’s name,
but the earthquake which he and Dante have witnessed and which, the poet
tells us, has been the source of his intellectual ‘thirst’ and curiosity ever since.
The mysterious epiphany has made us expect the revelation of the shade’s
identity. Dante delays it, thus keeping up suspense; but by having his persona’s
extreme desire for knowledge satisfied first, he implicitly explains precisely
why the preceding events are epiphanic –​that is, why they are visible signs
which ‘manifest’ something of higher import. To cut the spirit’s long explanation short, the cause of the earthquake is entirely supernatural: such a phenomenon takes place whenever a soul has completed its term of purification
and ‘feels’ it can ascend to Paradise (xxi, 40–​72).
The very first sentence uttered by Statius probably contains an indirect
compliment to Virgil: the ‘religione de la montagna’ sounds like an echo of the
Aeneid’s ‘religio … loci’.51 But in the play’s second movement, when the spirit
finally reveals his name, Virgil’s presence acquires a new, more substantial,
dimension. For what we are told now is not only that this is Statius, that his
fame in the world was that which most endures and gives honour –​the name
of poet –​and that he wrote the Thebaid and the Achilleid, but also that the
seeds for his poetic ‘ardour’ were planted by the sparks of a divine flame, the
Aeneid, ‘mother and nurse’ of his poetry. Indeed, Statius would gladly pay with
an extra year of Purgatory for having lived at the time of Virgil:
Al mio ardor fuor seme le faville,
che mi scaldar, de la divina fiamma
onde sono allumati più di mille;
de l’Eneïda dico, la qual mamma
fummi, e fummi nutrice, poetando:
sanz'essa non fermai peso di dramma.
E per esser vivuto di là quando
visse Virgilio, assentirei un sole
più che non deggio al mio uscir di bando. (xxi, 94–​99)
50
51
References: Purgatorio xxi, 19–​21, 25–​27, 28.
Purgatorio viii, 41–​42: Aeneid viii, 349.
342 Chapter 7
There is a clear echo, here, of Inferno i and of Dante’s own acknowledgement
of Virgil as supreme master and author, but with the difference that Dante recognized the Latin poet as the ‘only’ one from whom he had learnt the ‘bello
stilo’, but then goes on throughout the Comedy to pay his respects to various
‘fathers’ and masters –​from Brunetto Latini to Guido Guinizzelli –​whereas
Statius’ poetic and moral life is presented here as entirely dominated by Virgil,
and Virgil alone.
Statius’ last words trigger off the play’s third and central act. Once more,
literary history becomes drama. For the author of the Aeneid is present, and
anagnorisis cannot be delayed any longer. To enact it, the poet sets a scene
in which a man and his smile stand at the centre: it is the medieval poet who
acts as intermediary between the two classics, who invents his own tradition.
Virgil turns to Dante with a mute expression which orders him to keep silent.
But smiling and crying are so tied to the emotion that produces them that they
cannot be controlled by the will. Dante smiles, ‘as though to give a hint’. Statius
falls silent, stares at his interlocutor straight into his eyes, ‘where what we
feel shows most’, and asks him why a smile has flashed across his face. Dante,
caught between the opposing desires of Virgil and Statius, utters a sigh. Virgil
understands him and allows him to tell the truth. And Dante opens his mouth
to unveil the great wonder:
Questi che guida in alto li occhi miei,
è quel Virgilio dal qual tu togliesti
forte a cantar de li uomini e d’i’ dèi.
The one who guides my eyes towards the heights
is that same Virgil that you drew upon
to sing so strong of deities and men. (xxi, 124-​126)
Statius doesn’t say a word but bows down to embrace Virgil’s feet. But Virgil
stops him, calling him ‘brother’, for they are both shades. Rising up, Statius:
Ed ei surgendo: ‘Or puoi la quantitate
comprender de l’amor ch’a te mi scalda,
quando’io dismento nostra vanitate,
trattando l’ombre come cosa salda’.
And he, in rising: ‘Now you grasp how great
the love that warms my heart for you must be,
when I dismiss from mind our emptiness,
treating a shadow as a thing of weight’. (xxi, 133–​136)
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
343
In the first part of this scene, the divine comedy of epiphany has become definitively human. Dante smiles here for the second time in the poem.52 We must
remember that according to his own, as he thought, Aristotelian conception,
laughter is an exclusively and distinguishing human phenomenon.53 The smile
that irrepressibly surfaces on his lips at Statius’ words is an ‘ammicco’ –​a wink,
a nod, in a short a ‘sign’ –​which puzzles his interlocutor and makes him ask the
crucial question. In other words, what we have here is a sort of Dantean version
of Aristotle’s anagnorisis by means of signs: one, though, in which the semeion
acts not as proof, but as signifier of something that is ultimately impenetrable
to other human beings. This is neither an ‘external’ nor a ‘bodily’ sign, neither
an ‘inherited’ one like a birthmark nor an ‘acquired’ one like a scar, but rather,
as Dante tells us while using it, the inevitable ‘follower’ of the emotion from
which it comes or, as he says in the Convivio, a ‘coruscation of the soul’s delight,
a light appearing outside in accordance with what is within’.54 Hence, Statius’
look probes Dante’s very soul by questioning his eyes, where the outer expression of the inner feeling, the ‘sembiante’, is ‘most fixed’.
Once more, therefore, when we read this scene in which the action consists of a smile in the middle of a continuous exchange of glances, we penetrate into a man’s innermost essence -​here, interestingly, the root of his pleasure. The ‘dilettazione’ of the soul which Dante’s smile betrays remains, for a
few moments, enigmatic to Statius. Virgil, of course, knows its cause and so,
undoubtedly, do the readers. It is with our recognition that Dante has been
playing throughout the episode,55 devising an inexorable, clockwork ‘comic’
mechanism which we cannot escape and the successive stages of which we
ask ourselves about in anticipation, then follow with attention and increasing
wonder, and finally accept with a smile of pleasure. Dante’s delight becomes
ours. When the enigma is explained to Statius –​‘This is Virgil’, and the cause
of my smile was what you said about him (124–​9) –​what comes into full light
is not only Statius’passage from ignorance to knowledge, his anagnorisis, nor
simply that Dante’s pleasure lay in the expectation of that revelation, but also
our realization that Dante the poet has manoeuvred Dante the character in
such a way as to make that recognition inevitable and coinciding with our
knowledge, to make Statius’ acquisition of knowledge a shock or ekplexis to
52
53
54
55
The first being in Purgatorio iv, 122 at Belacqua’s indolence.
Vita nuova xxv, 2; Epistole xiii, 74.
Convivio iii viii 11: ‘corruscar’ corresponds to the ‘lampeggiar’ of the Purgatorio.
On this aspect see F. Kermode, ‘Recognition and Deception’, in his The Art of Telling,
pp. 92–​113.
344 Chapter 7
him and to us, thereby producing a feeling of pleasure. We understand, in the
end, why Aristotle says that the pleasure of mimesis, and hence of all poetry,
lies in recognition, and why the Greek words for ‘reading’ –​anagignoskein and
anagnosis –​are so close to ‘anagnorisis’.
Of this Freude am Wiedererkennen (as we in the Introduction saw Freud call
it) no trace is apparently shown in Statius himself. He, who has found again
someone indeed familiar, his mother’s and nurse’s father, neither smiles nor
speaks nor looks around with the wonder Dante anticipated. These are feelings Dante the poet projects on Statius through Dante the character. Statius’
movement in stooping down to clasp Virgil’s feet expresses recognition in the
form of worship. The ‘flame’, ‘ardour’, and warmth that characterize the Statius-​
Virgil relationship are no longer just filial feelings; they have become veneration. And, like the angel in Revelation,56 Virgil rescues Statius from idolatry by
reminding him of their brotherhood in being shades. Until now, Dante’s living
body has physically dominated the stage, while Virgil is celebrated. Suddenly,
Virgil himself brings us back to the other world, to the ‘non omo, omo già fui’
of Inferno i, and proposes a deeper, sobering, and sombre recognition: ‘frate,/​
non far, ché tu se’ ombra e ombra vedi’.
Rising from the ground, Statius accepts this truth in his answer, but the four
lines with which he concludes the canto go beyond the present situation and,
in one extraordinary leap, reach the kernel itself of the Divine Comedy, where
a poet’s love for other poets and for poetry makes him forget their emptiness
and treat shades as solid things. With this meta-​poetic recognition in which
humility and exaltation are perfectly balanced (and with which T.S. Eliot inaugurated modern poetry in his Prufrock) the canto ends.
The play, however, continues in canto xxii with a persistent oscillation
between shades and solid things; Virgil acknowledges Statius’ love and declares
he has known it ever since Juvenal descended to Limbo and told him about
it –​another dramatization of literary relationships. Immediately afterwards,
we return to the past and to earth to learn more of Statius’ life, and we discover that his entire existence has been a Virgilian itinerary. The Aeneid was
his mother and nurse in poetry, two lines of Aeneid iii made him repent of his
prodigality, and Eclogue iv showed him the way to the Christian God. Virgil is
poet, ‘famous sage’, and prophet. Yet, and this is the tragedy Dante makes us
experience while presenting to us a sublime comedy, Virgil is condemned to
Limbo whereas Statius is saved.57
56
57
Revelation 19: 10, from which the gesture and Virgil’s first words derive.
References in this paragraph: Purgatorio xxii, 10–​18; (xxii, 37–​45), xxii, 64–​75.
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
345
As Statius’ own account of his life reaches its culminating point, his conversion to Christianity, his attention significantly turns to the community of classical poetry. ‘Tell me’, he asks Virgil, ‘where are our ancient Terence, Caecilius
(Statius), Plautus’; tell me if they are damned, and in which circle. The ‘ubi
sunt’ motif is transformed: shades or not, these poets seem to be more ‘solid’
in Statius’ mind than anything else. With Virgil’s answer we do not merely
return to Limbo; we review classical tradition from Homer to Euripides and
Simonides, from Virgil himself to Persius, to the writers Statius is enquiring
about, and finally to the mythological characters of Statius’ own poems. The
mountain of Purgatory, with the miraculous quaking of which the episode
began, seems to be forgotten. Before us rises in its stead, twice evoked by the
Latin poets, Mount Parnassus. Its ‘suckling’, ‘nursing’, and ‘thirst-​quenching’
function occupies the inhabitants of Limbo as well as the travellers here in
Purgatory, where Virgil and Statius continue their conversation while Dante,
walking behind them, listens to their ‘sermoni’ from which, as if drinking
in the caves of Parnassus, he acquires further comprehension of the art of
poetry: ‘ch’a poetar mi davano intelletto’. And if one needs an example of recognition as interpretation, it will be enough to compare this line with its model
in the Vulgate’s Psalm 118 (130: ‘The entrance of thy words giveth light; it giveth
understanding unto the simple’) to understand that for Dante the two poets’
speeches are as illuminating to the apprentice of poetry as, for the Psalmist,
the words of God’s revelation are to the intellect of the simple.58
Anagnorisis of poetic masters takes place within an epiphany and has a
reflective and reflexive quality –​perhaps Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus, in Portrait
of an Artist, learnt it from Dante as well as from Thomas Aquinas. When, shortly
afterwards, Dante meets his true ‘father’ in the Stilnovo, Guido Guinizzelli, in
a recognition scene which is not described, but which is significantly compared by way of simile to an episode of Statius’ Thebaid,59 he looks ‘pensively’
at his interlocutor for a while without speaking or indeed hearing. We have
no way of knowing precisely which thoughts are revolving in Dante’s mind at
this point, but we can be sure that they regard vernacular poets and poetry
as well as other matters, for the entire passage is a dramatization of Dante’s
meditations on that topic. In it, as well as in Purgatorio xxiv, a ‘modern’ school
emerges to complement the ancient one of Limbo and Purgatorio xxii, and to
complete Oderisi’s hints in canto xi on the Guinizzelli-​Cavalcanti-​Dante triad.
58
59
References in this paragraph: Purgatorio xxii, 97–​9, 100–​114, 65 and 104–​105, 102, 105,
104, 129.
Thebaid v, 715–​730; Purgatorio xxvi 94–​105.
346 Chapter 7
A crucial moment of this is Dante’s recognition by Bonagiunta da Lucca (‘But
tell me: do I see the man who drew/​those new rhymes forth, whose opening
line ran so: “Ladies, who have intelligence of love”?’), to which the author of
the Comedy replies by enigmatically disclosing his whole poetics: ‘I am just one
who, when/​Love breathes in me, takes note and then goes on/​showing the
meaning that’s ordained within’ (XXIV, 49–54).
∵
As he ascends Mount Purgatory, Dante moves backwards through his past poetic
identities to find and renew his roots in a great sequence of self-​recognitions,
the only modern equivalent of which is Stephen’s in Joyce’s Portrait of an
Artist.60 The climax of this movement is reached in Purgatorio xxx with the
disappearance of Virgil and the triumph of Beatrice, a scene where peripeteia
and anagnorisis combine with epiphany to produce, as Dante had announced
in the Vita Nuova (xlii, 2), ‘what had never been said of any other lady before’.
Borges once wrote that Dante ‘built the triple architecture of his poem in order
to insert this encounter into it’.61 There is perhaps some exaggeration in this
statement, but also a profound truth, for this meeting constitutes the ideal climax of a human and poetic story, joins together Dante’s past and present, prepares him for the future and, on the allegorical level, replaces Reason (Virgil)
with Wisdom or Theology (Beatrice), cleanses the pilgrim entirely from sin and
finally launches him towards the ultimate end of his journey: the knowledge
of God.
It would be impossible and inappropriate to take all these elements into
account here. I shall therefore analyse this episode only as a recognition scene.
A preliminary observation seems to me opportune. There is only one passage
in the whole of Western literature that can compare with this in intensity as
well as general theme: that in which Penelope and Odysseus face each other
in the hall of their palace after twenty years. As soon as one says this, however, one realizes the fundamental difference between the two episodes. In the
Odyssey, where the hero is constantly called dios and protected by the supernatural power of Athena, the encounter is a totally and sublimely human affair;
in the Comedy the beginning and end of the scene are surrounded by a divine
aura. Beatrice appears to Dante on a chariot at the end of a solemn allegorical
60
61
See the classic study by T. Barolini, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy,
Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1984.
J.L. Borges, ‘El encuentro en un sueño’, in Nueve ensayos dantescos, Obras completas, III,
Buenos Aires, Emece, 1989, p. 371.
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
347
procession. Her arrival is greeted by Latin invocations from the Song of Songs,
from the Gospels and the liturgy, and, as we should by now expect, from the
Aeneid,62 while the scenery is compared to the resurrection of the blessed at
Doomsday (13–​18). The rosy-​fingered dawn that Athena prevents from breaking upon the lovemaking and storytelling of Odysseus and Penelope shines
here in a simile, where the sun veiled by vapour stands for Beatrice surrounded
by a cloud of flowers:
Io vidi già nel cominciar del giorno
la parte oriental tutta rosata,
e l’altro ciel di bel sereno addorno;
e la faccia del sol nascere ombrata,
sì che per temperanza di vapori
l’occhio la sostenea lunga fiata:
così dentro una nuvola di fiori
che da le mani angeliche saliva
e ricadeva in giù dentro e di fuori …
I saw, once, at the opening of the day,
the orient sky in colour all clear rose,
the western height still robed in tranquil blue,
and then the sun newborn, with shadowed face,
hazy, in vapours that so tempered it
that eyes could tolerate its light a while.
So now, beyond a drifting cloud of flowers
(which rose up, arching, from the angels’ hands,
then fell within and round the chariot) …63
At last a Lady (not, we notice, a shade, nor yet a light) appears, ‘olive-​crowned
over a white veil’ and ‘clad, under a green mantle, in colour of living flame’.64
She wears the wreath of wisdom and the colours of faith, hope and charity, but
she is also, unmistakably, the ‘donna’ of the Vita Nuova. To the unforgettable
experience of his adolescence Dante now leads us back, as he will again at the
end of the canto and in the following one, where his ‘vita nova’ will be revisited with a new consciousness. The theophany with which the scene opened
becomes recherche du temps perdu and at the same time anagnorisis.
62
63
64
Purgatorio xxx, 11–​21: Song of Songs, 4: 8; Matthew 21: 9; Aeneid vi, 883.
Purgatorio xxx, 22–​30.
Quoted from T.S. Eliot translation in his Dante, London, Faber, 1929, p. 49, itself adapted
from the Temple Classics translation.
348 Chapter 7
When she sees her husband after the slaying of the Suitors, Penelope looks
at him both knowing and not recognizing him. When Pierre Bezuhov returns
to Moscow and to Natasha at the end of War and Peace, as we shall see in the
last chapter of this book, he does not recognize his beloved ‘because of the
immense change in her’ and above all because there is no trace of the old
smile in her eyes. A passage I have often recalled might help us here. For this is
the phenomenon that Proust describes with marvellous precision and insight
towards the end of Time Regained, when Marcel fails to recognize his old
friends during the matinée at the Guermantes:
For to ‘recognise’ someone, and, a fortiori, to learn someone’s identity
after having failed to recognise him, is to predicate two contradictory
things of a single subject, it is to admit that what was here, the person
whom one remembers, no longer exists, and also that what is now here
is a person whom one did not know to exist; and to do this we have to
apprehend a mystery almost as disturbing as that of death, of which it is,
indeed, as it were the preface and the harbinger.65
Dante overcomes this terrible contradiction with a magnificent leap. He
does not recognize Beatrice, but himself and his old love for her. Before having
visual cognition of her, his soul feels the same wonder, trembling, and crush it
used to feel in adolescence:66
E lo spirito mio, che già cotanto
tempo era stato ch’a la sua presenza
non era di stupor, tremando, affranto,
sanza de li occhi aver più conoscenza,
per occulta virtù che da lei mosse,
d’antico amor sentì la gran potenza.
And I, in spirit, who so long had not
been, trembling in her presence, wracked by awe,
began again to tremble at her glance
(without more evidence that eyes could bring,
but darkly, through the good that flowed from her),
sensing the ancient power of what love was.67
65
66
67
Proust, Time Regained, p. 982.
Vita nuova ii, 3 and iii, 1.
Purgatorio xxx, 34–​39.
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
349
Recognition is instantaneous (though syntactically delayed as much as in
the cases of Brunetto and Forese) because, as Borges says, ‘for Dante Beatrice
existed infinitely’.68 Time has elapsed, but it does not have to be regained.
Beatrice’s presence is enough to join past and present without the help of memory, for the signs of anagnorisis are inner motions that the character knows
as he knows himself. Those signs come to life again, ten years after Beatrice’s
death, resurrected by a ‘power’ that moves from her. The mystery Proust speaks
of is present here, too, the ‘virtue’ which flows from the Lady being hidden; it is
not, however, the mystery that prefaces death, but that of love’s might, which
radiates in the world and transfixes human beings.
The indelible mark left on the heart by this power replaces all external signs.
In order to recognize Odysseus, Penelope must ask him to reveal the ’secret
sign’ of their bed. In Dante, this has become ‘occulta virtù’. And if, as Singleton
says, ‘recognition “by occult virtue” is common enough in medieval narrative’,69 Dante alone transforms it into an ‘earthquake’ of his heart. When the
‘occulta virtù’ becomes ‘lofty’ through visual power in line 41 –​that is, when it
openly explodes –​recognition is completed, and Dante turns to Virgil to say so.
Yet, significantly, Dante does not say that he recognized Beatrice, and this is
what makes his scene so different, for instance, from the parallel one in Pearl.
In the fourteenth-​century English poem the protagonist sees, beyond the marvellous river, ‘a crystal clyffe ful relusaunt’ from which spring rays of splendour.
A child-​maiden sits by the rock, gleaming in her white mantle. The protagonist
recognizes her immediately and tells us so:
I knew hyr wel, I hade sen hyr ere.
As glysnande golde that man con schere,
So schont that schene anvnder schore.
On lenghe I loked to hyr there;
On lenghel knew hyr more and more. 70
Dante, on the other hand, turns to Virgil, and to him he quotes –​paying a
supreme compliment to his master and guide –​the line of the Aeneid in which
68
69
70
Borges, ‘Encuentro’, p. 371.
C.S. Singleton, Purgatorio: Text and Commentary, Princeton, Princeton University Press,
1973 (Bollingen Series lxxx), p. 739.
Pearl, 164–​168, in The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. M. Andrew and R. Waldron,
London, Arnold, 1978; in J. Gardner’s translation, The Complete Works of the Gawain-​Poet,
Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1965: ‘And I knew her –​knew that I had seen
her before./​As gold gleams when men clip it bare,/​So gleamed that beautiful child on the
shore; I looked then long at that faireste of fair,/​And longer, and knew her more and more’.
350 Chapter 7
Dido reveals to her sister Anna that she now feels for Aeneas the same passion
she had felt for her husband:71
conosco i segni de l’antica fiamma
adgnosco veteris vestigia flammae
Dante does not recognize Beatrice, but the tokens of his old love for her. He
feels the ‘gran potenza’, then voices it, transforming it into an ‘ancient flame’.
A few instants earlier, Beatrice appeared as if bathed in the colour of charity,
of a ‘living flame’. When Dante feels and then recognizes in himself the signs
of the ancient flame, both images (‘fiamma viva’ and ‘antica fiamma’) acquire
new poignancy, opposing, as it were, and completing each other beyond time,
suspended between old love and present charity, between sight and inner
feeling, appearance and recognition. And if in the utterance of this recognition we can hear a distant echo of the ‘fiamma antica’ which envelops Dante’s
Ulysses,72 the Virgilian quotation at once also evokes love for the ‘divine flame’
of Purgatorio xxi: the Aeneid. Compared to this line, pronounced in Beatrice’s
presence and addressed to its own source, Virgil, even the great cry of Racine’s
Phèdre –​‘Je reconnus Vénus et ses feux redoutables’73 –​loses vigour and nearly
pales into pompous insignificance.
Beatrice is surprisingly remote from the pilgrim’s consciousness, and his
exclamation is addressed to Virgil. Suddenly, the realization that Virgil is no
longer there breaks into Dante’s awareness and interrupts the anagnorisis with
pathos, in a totally surprising reversal –​peripeteia. As unexpectedly as the shade
of the ‘dolcissimo padre’ had appeared in the dark wood, so it now fades away,
as it were ‘on the crowing of the cock’. At the ‘trumpet to the morn’ sounded
by Beatrice’s dawn epiphany, Virgil (whose name is repeated four times in two
terzinas) silently ‘hies to his confine’, and Dante inconsolably weeps.
Shades have indeed become solid things –​and have irremediably returned
to their ‘emptiness’. As anagnorisis progresses to the recovery of the past and
towards the ultimate acquisition of divine knowledge, a human loss has thus
made itself felt. Normally, we take it for granted that Virgil should disappear
when Beatrice enters the scene. But we should not, for the two, as Inferno ii
shows, can coexist side by side both from the dramatic and the theological
point of view. To have the two events coincide, to make Dante turn to Virgil to
71
72
73
Aeneid iv, 23, already imitated by Ovid, Amores, ii i 8.
Inferno xxvi, 85.
Racine, Phèdre in Oeuvres complètes i, ed. G. Forestier, Paris, Gallimard, 1999, i.iii.125.
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
351
confess his love for Beatrice with a line by Virgil at the precise moment Virgil,
unbeknownst to the pilgrim, vanishes –​is an incomparable stroke of dramatic
genius, which ties in a unique knot the rebirth of ancient memory and the loss
of present awareness, a deep inner agnitio and the singular absence of external
perception.
There is no joy in Dante’s recognition of Beatrice. His reaction is one of fear
and distress, of being ‘affranto’, wracked and overpowered, by the appearance
of his long-​lost Lady. Once more, the movement is different in Pearl, where
gladdening exultation precedes the protagonist’s confusion, amazement, and
fear (169–​184). When Beatrice finally addresses the pilgrim, he sees her as an
admiral, a stern royal figure, and a harsh mother.74 Nor is recognition complete. Dante sees Beatrice’s eyes turning to him, but cannot distinguish her
fully, under the veil. Only her own words finally declare her identity: ‘Guardaci
ben! Ben son, ben son Beatrice’: ‘Look. I am, truly, I am Beatrice’.
In Sir Orfeo, as we have seen in ­chapter 6, Orfeo and Heurodis recognize
each other at once and face each other, like Odysseus and Penelope, in total
silence. They can do so because they are equals, and their temporary reunion
is the sublime meeting of two human beings. Beatrice, on the other hand, is
both human and trans-​human. She is the poetic incarnation of a divine virtue
and the embodiment not only of Dante’s memory and love, but also of his conscience. To recognize her is both an overwhelming joy and a painful tragedy,
because it means sounding one’s innermost errors.
Dante, however, surprises us once more. Another anagnorisis has already
struck the reader. The Everyman pilgrim of Hell and Purgatory, the nameless
narrator of Inferno and Purgatorio is called ‘Dante’ for the first and last time
in the poem (55); and the sound of this name which, he says, ‘of necessity is
recorded here’, as if wedged between those of Virgil and Beatrice, has a curiously moving effect on readers who have known it all along. His signature,
humbly inserted here by the writer who will call his poem ‘sacred’, makes us
rediscover, with Yeats’ Hic, that this
chief imagination of Christendom,
Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself
That he has made that hollow face of his
More plain to the mind’s eye than any face
But that of Christ.75
74
75
xxx, 58, 70, 79.
W.B. Yeats, ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, Collected Poems, London, Macmillan, 1965, p. 181.
352 Chapter 7
His and our recognition of this human personality and poetic imagination at
precisely the moment in which he finds ‘the most exalted lady loved by man’
shows that Dante, alone perhaps of all poets, has gone through the ‘tragic war’
in the flesh and found happiness after it. For the drama of anagnorisis which
I have tried to trace throughout the Inferno and the Purgatorio culminates in
canto xxxi of the second cantica with Dante’s contrition and confession, a
supreme act of Christian self-​recognition that makes him finally recognize
Beatrice with infinite joy and, in her, with her and through her, see for the first
time a ‘splendour of living light eternal’ which radiates through the air and
which no poet will ever be able to describe:
O isplendor di viva luce etterna,
chi palido si fece sotto l'ombra
sì di Parnaso, o bevve in sua cisterna,
che non paresse aver la mente ingombra,
tentando a render te qual tu paresti
là dove armonizzando il ciel t'adombra,
quando ne l’aere aperto ti solvesti?
Splendour of living, and eternal light!
Who would not seem –​though pale from studying
deep in Parnassian shade, whose wells he drinks –​
still to be much encumbered in his mind,
endeavouring to draw what you then seemed,
where heavens in harmony alone enshadow you,
as you came forth and showed yourself in air?76
For the first time in the poem, full recognition is explicitly ineffable. Yet the
way in which Dante uses the inexpressibility topos points to the constant tensions that characterize his struggle for the sublime. Sublimity does not simply
derive from the subject matter of a poem: the equation between supreme mysteries and the sublime is reductive. Nor is sublimity merely a question of style.
Dante’s sublime is a more complex phenomenon –​it is the technique by which
the poet makes us feel the infinity and ineffability of his scenes by describing
them with words stretched to their utmost limit. This tension is already present here. The glorious opening of this passage is immediately contrasted with
the tiring work of the poet; the splendour of living light eternal opposed, with a
significant variation on the image derived from Persius,77 to the paleness of the
76
77
Purgatorio xxxi, 139–​145.
Persius, Satires, Prologue and v, 62.
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
353
human writer. And Mount Parnassus, in the ‘caves’ of which Statius, prompted
by Virgil’s example, drank, and where ancient poets dreamt of Eden (xxviii,
139–​141), appears now as a shade. The poet’s painful work becomes a vanishing
pallor, an insubstantial shadow. Paradoxically, the lightness of this image is at
once translated into heaviness: growing pale, the poetic mind becomes full,
confused, inert, as if paralysed by its own weight. Hence, the poet only tries to
represent that light.
Yet this poet has not just become pale in the shade of Parnassus, studying,
as his present rewriting of Persius shows, ‘those who, in times long gone, composed poems’. He has also, like Statius, drunk fully from its ‘cistern’, imbibing the very essence of inspiration with the holy water of the Muses. He can,
therefore, look at the living light and, albeit indirectly, express it in words.
In the next movement of the passage the object itself of the epiphany, the
‘second beauty’ disclosed by the unveiling of Beatrice’s mouth as ‘isplendor
di viva luce etterna’, is simultaneously reduced and dilated. For the heaven
now extended over Dante, by harmonizing both with earthly paradise and
with Beatrice’s new beauty –​with the supremely human and the incipiently
divine –​‘adumbrates’ this splendour. The mysteriousness of the last but
one line of the passage constitutes an infallible signal of sublime tension.
‘Adombra’, a word that can mean ‘overshadow’, ‘veil’, ‘foreshadow’, ‘represent’,
inevitably establishes an imaginative correspondence with the ‘ombra’ of
Parnassus and, joined with ‘armonizzando’, already contains the whole tension. This is reflected backwards up onto the harmony which heaven, lying
over the ancient Garden of Eden, projects on the cosmos. Not even Dante,
now, can treat shades as solid things. His poetry, and its objects, have become
such stuff as dreams are made on –​they are sailing towards the shadow of
the Argo.
The mirrored, glowing light of the beginning returns, then, at the end of
the sequence, opening up in blinding splendour through the air. The seal of
the sublime is, however, present once more. The word which indicates this full
revelation, ‘solvesti’, is strung between two extremes –​disclosure and dissolution. Thus, recognition goes beyond the boundary of human knowledge while
remaining expressible by man. We are on the very boundary between these
two poles. And there we are kept by the play of anagnorisis-​revelation that
takes place in the Paradiso.
∵
In the third cantica, we have to face the paradox that the higher Dante ascends
through the heavens, the more human and at the same time more mysterious
354 Chapter 7
epiphany and knowledge become. In Paradiso iii, for instance, we meet with
a transitional case. Piccarda Donati, Forese’s sister, does not appear as a light,
but still as a shade, although Dante’s perception of her and her companions is
envisaged, by means of five successive images, as something that stands on the
very border between nature and myth, between reality and illusion, between
’sembianti’ and their reflection in a mirror:
Quali per vetri trasparenti e tersi,
o ver per acque nitide e tranquille,
non sì profonde che i fondi sien persi,
tornan d’i’ nostri visi le postille
debili sì, che perla in bianca fronte
non vien men forte a le nostre pupille;
tali vid’io più facce a parlar pronte;
per ch’io dentro a l’error contrario corsi
a quel ch’accese amor tra l’omo e ’l fonte.
Compare: from clear and polished panes of glass,
or else from glinting waters, calm and still,
(but not so deep their depths are lost in darkness)
we see reflections that reveal a hint,
though faint, of our own looks, and reach the eye
less strongly than a pearl on some white brow.
So I saw many faces, keen to speak,
and ran now to the opposite mistake
from that which fired the love of man and stream.78
The ‘contrary error’ to that made by Narcissus is corrected by Beatrice who,
smiling, points out that these are ‘true substances’. Dante turns to the spirit
who seems most eager to speak and asks her who she is. Piccarda then appeals
to his memory, says that her being more beautiful will not conceal her identity,
and finally reveals her name:
I’ fui nel mondo vergine sorella;
e se la mente tua ben sé riguarda,
non mi ti celerà l’esser più bella,
ma riconoscerai ch’i’ son Piccarda.
I was a virgin sister in the world,
78
Paradiso iii, 10–​18.
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
355
Search deep in memory. My being now
more beautiful won’t hide me from your eyes.
I am Piccarda –​as you’ll know I am.79
Once more, the mechanism of recognition is slowed down, and by the very
words that produce the anagnorisis. Piccarda’s speech hinges on her increased
beauty and on the work of Dante’s mind. By looking at and into itself (as if
it were an unerring Narcissus), Dante’s memory will re-​cognize the lady. The
pilgrim’s reply underlines these ideas. There is, he says, ‘something divine’ in
the spirits’ wonderful aspect, and this ‘transmutes’ them from the images one
might have had of them before. This is why he, beforehand, could not remember; but now Piccarda’s words help him recall easily.
The faces of Hell were disfigured by dirt and sin. The visages of Heaven are
metamorphosed by beauty. In Hell and Purgatory, Dante had to rely on his own
eyes to recognize his interlocutors. Here, without self-​revelation, memory is
helpless: yet memory is present, and the verbal emphasis falls on the suffix ‘re’
of ‘ri-​guarda’, ‘ri-​conoscerai’, ‘rimembrar’, ‘raffigurar’. Human and divine meet
in reflexive anamnesis.
By the time we reach King Charles Martel in Paradiso viii, shades have definitively given way to lights, and recognition is purely a question of photo-​and
logo-​phany. When the spirits of the third Heaven, subject to the influence of
Venus, mention Dante’s own canzone, ‘Voi che ’ntendendo ’l terzo ciel movete’,
the pilgrim fixes his eyes on Beatrice as if to have her approval, and then asks
‘the light which had promised so much’, ‘Deh, chi siete?’. The soul’s ‘allegrezza’
increases, and the voice answers:
La mia letizia mi ti tien celato
che mi raggia dintorno e mi nasconde
quasi animal di sua seta fasciato.
My happiness conceals me from you still.
Its rays shine round me, and they keep me hid,
as though some creature swathed in its own silk.80
Charles Martel, whose name is nowhere explicitly mentioned in the canto, relies
on Dante’s (and our) knowledge of historical events in order to be identified.
Above all, he appeals to Dante’s love: ‘You loved me well –​and with good reason,
79
80
Paradiso iii, 46–​49.
Paradiso viii, 52–​54.
356 Chapter 7
too’, he says. Earthly (indeed political) passion, and earthly history are the instruments by which man can know an entity whose radiating happiness keeps it
concealed. Beatrice (the constant authenticating device), light-​revelation, and
the human heart constitute the very coordinates of heavenly anagnorisis.
The final threshold in this process is reached with the Cacciaguida episode
in Paradiso xv. Here, Dante suggests a comedy more ‘sublime’ than ever before.
Let us look at what Aristotle would have called the plot. Dante and Beatrice
have reached the fifth heaven, the heaven of Mars, where they meet the spirits
of those who have fought for faith. At the beginning, we are plunged into total
silence and, as if we were watching the falling of a star on a summer night, one
light, looking like a flame behind alabaster, glides down towards Dante. The
first surprise blows up here. For this sudden appearance is compared, with a
leap back to Virgil, to the way in which Anchises’ ‘pious’ shade ‘offered’ itself to
Aeneas in Aeneid vi. Virgil’s Anchises, however, held out his hands to his son.
The as yet unknown Cacciaguida simply ‘offers himself’, as if in an Ostension,
to Dante’s sight. Then, the spirit pronounces a solemn Latin sentence where
Anchises’ address to Julius Caesar and the Sibyl’s words to Aeneas are transformed by Biblical overtones:
O sanguis meus, o superinfusa
gratia Dei, sicut tibi cui
bis unquam celi ianua reclusa? (xv, 28–​30)
The spirit’s salutation to Dante –​‘O blood of mine! O overflowing grace of God!
To whom, as to you, was ever the Gate of Heaven twice flung open?’ –​is in fact
a consecration. Dante fixes his eyes on the light and as usual turns to Beatrice.
He is ‘amazed’, for in her eyes there burns such a smile that he thinks he is
reaching the very depths of his ‘grace’ and his ‘paradise’.
Clearly, this is both a re-​enactment and a transformation of the Statius-​Virgil
recognition scene in Purgatorio xxi. There, however, Dante’s own smile constituted the very medium of anagnorisis. Here, Beatrice’s laughter is beatifying,
and Dante is caught between two mysteries (‘e quinci e quindi’), the spirit’s
words and the lady’s laughter, which plunge him into stupor. Indeed, the way
to full manifestation is barred and the climax delayed longer than ever before.
This is not recognition, but the mysterious apokalypsis of God’s voice to the
prophet. The spirit addresses the pilgrim with necessarily obscure, incomprehensible words, and when, forty lines later, he comes closer to self-​revelation,
he speaks to Dante as if he were the Voice thundering over Jesus at the baptism
on the Jordan: ‘My branch and leaf’, he says, ‘(in whom I was well pleased,/​
waiting until you came) I was your root’.
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
357
With this ‘root’ Dante goes beyond Odysseus’ recognition of his mother
and Aeneas’ reunion with his father to reach an ancestor in whom human
and divine are inextricably mixed. Suddenly, we understand why in the course
of his journey Dante has never encountered his real parents even though he
shows us spirits eager to be reunited with their mothers and fathers. With a
gesture which is the symptom both of delicate affection and psychological
repression, he stays away from Alighiero and Bella, and replaces them with
Virgil, Brunetto, Guinizzelli, Beatrice, and Cacciaguida: ‘Voi siete il padre mio’,
he tells him, acknowledging both a genetic and a spiritual paternity.
Cacciaguida is a human and trans-​human Father, the exact counterpart
of Brunetto (Inferno xv –​ Paradiso xv) and the true, sublime counterpoint
to Ugolino. For the commentator generally identified as Bernardus Silvestris
Anchises represents, as we have seen, the Creator. Cacciaguida, born of Mary
(xv, 133) and christened in the Florence Baptistry consecrated to John the
Baptist, is Dante’s ‘creator’. He embodies Dante’s past, his roots in flesh and
history, and foretells his present (the exile) and his future, finally anointing
him as the new prophet:81 ‘The words you shout will be like blasts of wind’. The
Cacciaguida episode makes us see as it were a bridge between the human and
the divine, a threshold that opens up onto many different dimensions (personal, historical, prophetic, poetic). Revelation and discovery of these stupefy
not only Dante, but also his readers.
The interplay between human and divine dominates the last two great
recognition scenes of the Paradiso, Dante’s encounters with St John and St
Bernard. In the eighth sphere, the lights of St Peter and St James dance and sing
with all the other spirits. Suddenly, one light becomes so bright that, Dante
says, ‘were such crystal held in star sign Crab/​winter would have a month of
sunlit day’ (xxv, 100–​2). The new ‘splendour’ joins the other two as if it were
a maiden who enters the dance in honour of a bride. Fixing her eyes on it, for
once Beatrice does not delay revelation: ‘Questi’, she says, ‘è colui che giacque
sopra ’l petto/​del nostro pellicano, e questi fue/​di su la croce al grande officio
eletto’: ‘He is the one who lay upon/​the breast/​of Christ, our Pelican. And he it
was/​elected, at the Cross, for one great task’ (xxv, 112–​114). The pilgrim might
have been satisfied with this. But once more the poet manoeuvres him into a
little comedy. Medieval legends based on a passage in John’s Gospel (21. 20–​
3) maintained that the Beloved Disciple had ascended to Heaven in the flesh.
Dante the pilgrim wants to ascertain whether the light that has now appeared
contains a body. As so many times before in recognition scenes, he directs his
81
xv, 91–​148; xvi; xvii, 46–​93; xvii, 124–​35.
358 Chapter 7
eyes towards the spirit. But this is neither Brunetto nor Forese. Looking at the
light of St John is like trying to behold the sun at the beginning of an eclipse: in
order to see, one becomes blind. John then speaks to Dante:
Perché t’abbagli
per veder cosa che qui non ha loco?
In terra è terra il mio corpo, e saragli
tanto con li altri, che ’l numero nostro
con l’etterno proposito s’agguagli .
‘Why dazzle your strained eyes
to see things in this place that cannot be?
My body lies as earth on earth, and shall
As others shall until our numbers mount
To equal what’s eternally decreed.82
The comedy is over. As Statius learnt from Virgil that they were both but
shades, so Dante discovers here that even the highest of the blessed are ‘earth
on earth’. It is not, however, this knowledge that stirs him profoundly. When
he next turns to Beatrice, he can see nothing. And this blindness terrifies him
(136–​9; xxvi, 1). Revelation, knowledge, and blindness; stupor and terror: the
divine and the human meet in highest comedy.
When Bernard appears in canto xxxi, Beatrice disappears. Thus, the scene
of Purgatorio xxx is re-​enacted and transformed. While Virgil returns to Limbo,
Beatrice ascends to her throne next to Rachel, and Dante can still see her. The
spirit who suddenly materializes looks like an old man ‘clad like the folk in
glory’, and his self-​revelation is delayed by Dante, who raises his eyes towards
Beatrice and thanks her. But when this revelation comes (‘I’ sono ’l suo fedel
Bernardo’), an amazing scene takes place in the pilgrim’s heart. The last human
anagnorisis of the poem fuses earthly and heavenly in a special blend.
What Dante experiences when the old man reveals himself as St Bernard
of Clairvaux at the very summit of Paradise is compared to the emotion felt
by a pilgrim who comes to Rome from, say, Croatia to look at the ‘Veronica’,
i.e. the true image (‘vera icona’) of Jesus’ visage imprinted on a veil which a
woman handed him to wipe the sweat off his face while he climbed Calvary –​a
cloth that was exhibited in St Peter’s at Rome every year. Like the foreign pilgrim –​whose ‘old hunger’ for the icon is not sated but who, when the relic is
shown, murmurs in his thoughts, ‘My Lord Christ Jesus,/​was this the way, true
82
Paradiso xxv, 122–​6.
I Know the Signs of the Ancient Flame
359
God, you looked on earth?’ –​Dante gazes on the ‘living charity’ of him who,
‘contemplating, caught/​some taste, within our world, of final peace’. Aware of
the poet’s intense scrutiny, Bernard interrupts his rapture with an exquisitely
gentle, slightly jocose comment: ‘Child born of grace, if you/​continue with
your eyes still fixed below,/​you’ll hear no note of this bright, joyful state’. Dante
should, instead, look up, journey through the heavens with his eyes until he
spots the Queen herself, Mary.
Dante’s ‘here and now’ the specific moment of his journey when he recognizes St Bernard acquires in this passage a threefold historical dimension
and prefigures the supreme stage of his beatific vision. Dante’s recognition of
Bernard is like the pilgrim’s recognition of Jesus’ visage on the Veronica. But
Dante himself, the spiritual pilgrim of the other world, will soon recognize ‘our
effigy’, the image of the Son of Man, in God’s essence.83 Dante, who is entering
the very last stage of his beatific vision, will soon fulfil within himself the ‘taste’
Bernard had of that peace in his mystical experiences on earth.
The presence in this passage of both the projection of the earthly onto the
eternal and the reflection of the eternal onto the earthly should not make us
forget that this interplay is in a sense incidental –​that in fact what Dante is
describing is the climax of the surprise he felt when, instead of Beatrice, he
found the old man at his side, and the wonder he now feels as a lifelong expectation is finally fulfilled by the recognition of the ‘senex’ as Bernard of Clairvaux,
the great saint of the twelfth century. This is a strong human emotion, heightened by intellectual awareness. Dante has studied Bernard’s works and knows
their importance for the culture of his time. His feelings, now, resemble those
he experienced when he saw his first guide, Virgil, in the dark wood. At the end
of the poem, we are brought back to the beginning. This movement, which
is typical of the last cantos of the Paradiso, represents the last but one step
towards the supreme vision. With it, Dante overcomes the initial ‘faintness’ of
Virgil, transcends the recognition of Beatrice on the top of Purgatory, and at
the same time points to the final cognitive stage of the poem: the recognition
of God.
83
Paradiso xxxiii, 127–​132.
­c hapter 8
Are you here?
Brunetto, Dante, and Eliot
The poetic career of one of the major modernists, T.S. Eliot, begins, albeit indirectly, with two Dantean scenes, one of recognition, one of missed recognition.
These are alluded to in the epigraphs Eliot chose for the Prufrock and Other
Observations collection of 1917 (but the epigraph was only added in the second,
1925, edition), and, within that collection, to the composition from which the
book’s title came, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, of 1915. The former is
the dedication of the collection to Jean Verdenal, the French friend who had
died on 2 May 1915, a few days before his twenty-​fifth birthday, falling at the
Dardanelles in the First World War. The inscription comes from the last lines of
Purgatorio xxi, where, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, Statius’ shade,
rising after having recognized Virgil, pronounces the famous words on love:
Or puoi la quantitate
comprender de l’amor ch’a te mi scalda,
quando’io dismento nostra vanitate,
trattando l’ombre come cosa salda.1
Now you grasp how great
the love that warms my heart for you must be,
when I dismiss from mind our emptiness,
treating a shadow as a thing of weight’.
The second inscription is taken from canto xxvii of Inferno, when Guido da
Montefeltro follows Ulysses in the bolgia of the fraudulent counsellors, asking
Dante in a roaring voice what the situation is like in his fatherland, Romagna.
The pilgrim replies by describing the armed peace that reigns among the
tyrants of the area and immediately begs his interlocutor to declare his identity. Guido, however, answers with the words, which Eliot then used:
S’i’ credesse che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
1 The edition I use is the splendid The Poems of T.S. Eliot. The Annotated Text, edited by C. Ricks
and J. McCue, vol. 1, London, Faber, 2015.
© Piero Boitani, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004453678_010
Are you here?
361
questa fiamma staria sanza più scosse;
ma però che già mai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s’i’ odo il vero,
sanza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
Should I suppose, in answering, I spoke
to any person who would ever see
the world again, this flame would shake no more.
But since, if all I hear is true, there’s none
who ever yet, alive, escaped these deeps,
I may reply without fear of infamy.2
Guido does not want to be recognized: he prefers anonymity to the infamy
he fears he would receive if he were identified by name, after the story he will
recount about the deception he suggested to Pope Boniface viii so that he
could take Palestrina, and of the damnation to which, to his surprise, the devil
subjected him after his death.
One fulfilled recognition, one denied, accurately avoided –​both in the
name of Dante. To Jean Verdenal, intentionally, goes plenitude, love openly
declared –​to Prufrock, by projection, non-​knowing, the oblivion reserved to a
no one, to a man who always hesitates, never dares, continuously asks ridiculous questions.
Eliot’s poetry constantly returns to this alternating between two poles. In
the first section of The Waste Land we soon encounter Madame Sosostris,
‘famous clairvoyante’ ‘known to be the wisest woman in Europe’, who picks
up, from her ‘wicked’ pack of cards, the one destined to the poem’s protagonist. ‘Here’, she says, ‘is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor’, immediately
adding, from Shakespeare’s Tempest: ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look’.
The reference is to the scene in which Ariel sings to Ferdinand –​who has survived the shipwreck artfully caused by Prospero, in which his father the King
of Naples and all his crew have perished –​an aria that confuses, bewitches, and
enchants the young man:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-​change
2 Inferno xxvii, 61–​66.
362 Chapter 8
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-​nymphs hourly ring his knell.3
As a matter of fact, we will learn from Prospero’s own lips that the tempest
he produced was a magic fiction and all crew members are safe, but the illusion is perfect and Ariel asks Ferdinand, as he understands it, to recognize the
bones and eyes of his father in the corals and pearls lying at the bottom of the
sea. Ferdinand does not have the time to complete the recognition because
Miranda, a marvel and a miracle of life and beauty, immediately appears to
him, and she absorbs him much more than his father’s fate. The plot of The
Tempest, however, will present a whole series of extraordinary recognition
and revelation scenes, among which the main one in which Alonso King of
Naples –​no more drowned than his son –​recognizes Ferdinand as he plays
chess, cheating, with Miranda.
Madame Sosostris asks the protagonist of The Waste Land to recognize
in the card she hands him the Drowned Phoenician Sailor, just as Ariel asks
Ferdinand to do with his father, and the possibility that Eliot’s poem offer or
suggest some kind of salvation does indeed depend on the reader’s ability to
understand that the verses sung by Ariel (which surface again twice in section v, ‘The Fire Sermon’) are in fact deceptive. The Phoenician Sailor, who
will appear again in section iv, ‘Death by Water’, with the name of Phlebas, is
however recognized –​or partly recognized –​already in the poem’s first section
amidst the crowd of London clerks going to work in the City.
The panorama of the ‘unreal city’ with the great crowd flowing over London
Bridge –​‘so many’, Eliot notes from Inferno iii, ‘I had not thought death had
undone so many’ –​resembles that of the neutrals’ circle in Dante’s Hell. Many
years later, in ‘What Dante Means to Me’, the poet wrote, quoting that episode
in The Waste Land, that he had borrowed some lines from Dante ‘in the attempt
to reproduce, or rather to arouse in the reader’s mind the memory, of some
Dantesque scene, and thus establish a relationship between the medieval
inferno and modern life’.4 Among that anonymous crowd the poem’s I sees and
recognizes a man called Stetson, to whom he addresses a question: ‘Stetson!/​
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!/​That corpse you planted last year
in your garden,/​Has it begun to sprout?’.
Stetson is the name of a kind of hat, and evidently Eliot is using here the
same procedure employed by Joyce in Ulysses to create and name a character,
3 W. Shakespeare, The Tempest, i. ii. 399–​405.
4 ‘What Dante Means to Me’, in To Criticize the Critic, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965,
pp. 125–​135, at p. 128.
Are you here?
363
McIntosh, from a raincoat.5 But he adds an interesting detail: Stetson found
himself ‘in the ships’ with the protagonist, taking part in the naval battle of
Mylae between Carthaginians and Romans of 260 bc. The likelihood of
Stetson being a ‘Phoenician sailor’ is therefore high, since the Carthaginians
were Phoenicians, but the poem’s protagonist is careful not to make this identification explicit.
The play of recognition in The Waste Land appears, then, complex and
ambiguous, even in a scene modelled like the Stetson one on the Dantean type
of agnition. I should also add that later in the poem we encounter a scene of
impossible recognition. In the fifth, and last section, ‘What the Thunder Said’,
we read, shortly before the conclusion, seven absolutely mysterious lines:
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
–​But who is that on the other side of you?
In the Notes he appended to the text of The Waste Land Eliot wrote that these
lines were inspired by ‘the approach to the Chapel Perilous’ and by ‘the journey to Emmaus’ in Luke’s Gospel, and ‘stimulated by the account of one of the
Antarctic expeditions’ in which was related that ‘the party of explorers, at the
extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more
member than could actually be counted’.6 He might have added the beginning
of Purgatorio xxi, which is modelled, as we saw in the preceding chapter, precisely on Luke’s Emmaus episode, and which opens that long scene between
Dante, Statius, and Virgil the final lines of which Eliot himself had used as an
epigraph to Prufrock and Other Observations.
The fact is, however, that at this point in The Waste Land the poet shows
no interest in recognition scenes, even if they are as beautiful and significant as those of Luke and Dante. For him, it is of the utmost importance
to open up, and immediately shut down again, a possible agnition with the
5 J. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 111.
6 Eliot maintains he does not remember which account of the Antarctic expeditions it was,
although he thinks ‘one of Shackleton’s’. The detail is in fact in Shackleton’s South, which was
published in London in 1919.
364 Chapter 8
question that decrees its impossibility: ‘Who is the third one? … If I count,
there are only you and I together … But when I look … there is always
another one’.
What interests him is to suggest a potential presence, but to stop with the
actual absence. The figure he glimpses is, furthermore, hooded and wrapped
in a brown mantle, to underline its alterity and uncanniness as if ‘it’ were
a sort of Wandering Jew and we find ourselves in the middle of the Chapel
Perilous Adventure. In short, Eliot seems to prefer unknowing to the revelation that is the ultimate result of the scenes in Luke and Dante –​a surprising
feature in a man who had followed Bergson’s Sorbonne lectures and had written a Harvard dissertation on Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of
F.H. Bradley.
∵
In the second phase of his life and career Eliot returned once more to the
problem of recognition, no longer leaning on Dante, but rather on Seneca
and above all on Shakespeare. The beautiful lyric, ‘Marina’, which I have
already discussed in ­chapter 6, appeared in the 1927–​1930 Ariel Poems. I have
no intention of going back to what I wrote there, but I would like, here,
to see ‘Marina’ as a stage in the development of Eliot’s engagement with
recognition.7
We ought to remember what we already noted in the Introduction, namely,
that the poet thought that Shakespeare’s characters in Cymbeline, The Winter’s
Tale, The Tempest, and Pericles ‘belong in a world from which some emotions
have been purified away, so that others, ordinarily invisible, may be made
apparent’ and ‘are the work of a writer who has finally seen through the dramatic action of men into a spiritual action which transcends it’. Finally, Eliot
considered the scene between Marina and Pericles in Pericles ‘the finest of all
the recognition scenes’ and a perfect example of the ‘ultra-​dramatic’; ‘it is the
speech of creatures who are more than human, or rather, seen in a light more
7 I would like to stress that the lyrics’ sequence in the Ariel Poems collection as it was published seems to be structured around the theme of Christmas, the ‘first coming’, following
the pattern of annunciation, attente, prefiguration, and fulfilment, and that ‘Marina’ should
be read with ‘Animula’ in mind, because the latter, with its echoes from Hadrian’s poem and
Purgatorio xvi on the creation of the soul as a ‘fanciulla che piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia’, is a prelude to ‘Marina’, Marina being, in Pericles’ words, ‘thou that beget’st him that did
thee beget’.
365
Are you here?
than that of day’.8 Indeed, we saw in ­chapter 6 how the recognition scenes
between Pericles and Marina, and later between Pericles and Thaisa, allude, in
their celebration of the human, to a sub-​stance which, if not transcendental,
appears at least metaphysical.
In his version of ‘Marina’ Eliot opens the text up to this dimension by using
the expression ‘this grace dissolved in place’, but staging first hesitation, doubt,
fogginess, and then not so much recognition as its prelude, the waiting for it,
memory bending over to find itself –​self-​recognition. This is not the fulness
that makes Shakespeare’s Pericles say, after recognizing Marina as his long-​lost
and reborn daughter, that he is hearing the music of the spheres –​no, not the
plenitude that glitters in his exclamation, after recognizing his wife Thaisa,
This, this:
This, this: no more, you gods! your present kindness
Makes my past miseries sports: you shall do well,
That on the touching of her lips I may
Melt and no more be seen. O, come, be buried
A second time within these arms.9
Pericles, as we have seen, doesn’t relinquish human reason –​he subjects
Marina to a full enquiry, wants to hear the ‘bottom’ of her story, to combine all
the details of her account in order, like Charicleia in Heliodorus’ Aethiopica,
to have complete evidence. But, finally, he believes: ‘I will/​believe thee,/​And
make my senses credit thy relation/​To points that seem impossible’.10 Eliot’s
‘Marina’, on the other hand, represents the promise of faith, the hope –​as we
saw in ­chapter 5 –​of a new life: it is ‘the woodthrush calling through the fog’.
∵
Perhaps, for all this to take place, the mediation of Shakespeare author of the
romances was necessary. Unexpectedly, however, the last anagnorisis in Eliot’s
poetry is once more inspired by Dante, and this time in unambiguously direct
fashion. In the second section of the second movement of Little Gidding –​ the
8
9
10
T.S. Eliot, Edinburgh Lectures ii, p. 18 (The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse, John
Davy Hayward Collection of King’s College, Cambridge), cit. in J. Freeh, ‘ “Pericles” and
“Marina”: T.S. Eliot’s Search for the Transcendent in Late Shakespeare’, pp. 112–​113.
W. Shakespeare, Pericles, v. iii. 40–​44.
Pericles, v. i. 113–​115.
366 Chapter 8
fourth and last of the Four Quartets –​the lines ‘In the uncertain hour before
the morning,/​Near the ending of interminable night’ open a passage which
describes the meeting between the poetic persona of the Four Quartets and
the ghost ‘of some dead master’ in the streets of London after an air raid during
World War ii. A short conversation between the two ensues, in the course of
which the ghost speaks about poetry, time, and ‘the gifts reserved for age’.
The source for this is canto xv of Inferno, where the protagonist of the Divine
Comedy meets his old master, Brunetto Latini: a scene which, Eliot tells us in
his 1929 essay on Dante, impressed him at first reading and forever remained
in his memory.11 I shall soon return to Inferno xv. But first we must place the
whole question of the relationship between the two poets in its context. And
here, too, Eliot himself helps us. In ‘What Dante Means to Me’, Eliot made clear
to his original audience –​the public of the Italian Institute in London where
he was giving this lecture on 4 July 1950 –​the intention, method, and aim that
guided him in composing this section of Little Gidding:
Twenty years after writing The Waste Land, I wrote, in Little Gidding, a
passage which is intended to be the nearest equivalent to a canto of the
Inferno or the Purgatorio, in style as well as content, that I could achieve.
The intention, of course, was the same as with my allusions to Dante in
The Waste Land: to present to the mind of the reader a parallel, by means
of contrast, between the Inferno and the Purgatorio, which Dante visited and a hallucinated scene after an air-​raid. But the method is different: here I was debarred from quoting or adapting at length –​I borrowed and adapted freely only a few phrases –​because I was imitating.
My first problem was to find an approximation to the terza rima without
rhyming.12
Eliot went on to talk of Dante’s verse and the problems which arise when one
tries to translate or adapt it into English, and concluded by saying that ‘This
section of a poem –​not the length of one canto of the Divine Comedy –​cost
11
12
T.S. Eliot, Dante, London, Faber, 1929, p. 28.
‘What Dante Means to Me’, p. 128. The three major critical contributions are by A.C.
Charity, ‘T.S. Eliot: The Dantean Recognitions’, in The Waste Land in Different Voices, ed.
A.D. Moody, London, Arnold, 1974, pp. 117–​162; S.Y. McDougal, ‘T.S. Eliot’s Metaphysical
Dante’, in S.Y. McDougal, ed., Dante among the Moderns, Chapel Hill NC, University of
North Carolina Press, 1988, pp. 57–​81; R. Jacoff and P. Hawkins, ‘Still Here: Dante after
Modernism’, in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. T. Barolini and H.W. Storey, New York,
Fordham University Press, 2003, pp. 451–​464.
Are you here?
367
him far more time and trouble and vexation than any passage of the same
length that he had ever written’.13
I would like to draw attention to three main points. Firstly, Eliot himself
indicates two aspects inherent in his imitation of Dante –​one of style and one
of content. Secondly, he tells us the method he adopted in following Dante: ‘to
present to the mind of the reader a parallel, by means of contrast’, between a
Dantean scene and a contemporary one. Thirdly, he mentions both Inferno and
Purgatorio, does not refer to Brunetto in Inferno xv, and omits any reference to
the Paradiso. It is on these three points that I shall concentrate here.
If we turn to the manuscript draft of Little Gidding now in Magdalene
College, Cambridge, we begin to understand the last two points I have mentioned and the link that connects them at a deep level. In the prose outline of
the poem, Eliot’s jottings point to the first movement of Little Gidding (without ever mentioning this name), in which May time is set against ‘midwinter
spring’, and then to the second, the lyric piece where the death of air, earth,
water and fire is described, in the following manner:
Winter scene. May.
Lyric. Air earth water end &
Daemonic fire. The inferno.14
So far, fire is ‘daemonic’, and the notes clearly allude both to Hell as an image
of the modern city –​an icon already found in The Waste Land –​and to Dante’s
Inferno. We might think we are back on London Bridge where, as we have just
seen, a great crowd flows, ‘so many/​I had not thought death had undone so
many’. But the second cluster of notes in the manuscript draft seems to move
in an altogether different direction:
They vanish, the individuals, and our feeling for them sinks into the
flame which refines. They emerge in another pattern and recreated and
redeemed, reconciled, having their meaning together not apart in a unison which is of beams from the central fire. And the others with them
contemporaneous. Invocation to the Holy Spirit.15
13
14
15
‘What Dante Means to Me’, p. 129.
J.A.W. Bennett, ‘Little Gidding, a Poem of Pentecost’ (1974), in The Humane Medievalist and
other Essays, ed. P. Boitani, Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1982, pp. 305–​325, at
p. 309; and H. Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets, London, Faber, 1978, p. 157.
Ibid.
368 Chapter 8
In Dantean terms this is a movement of ascent through Purgatory up to
Paradise. The first line of this note is indeed made up of two verses from
Purgatorio xxvi, adapted and fused together. In the first of these the father
of the Dolce Stilnovo, Guido Guinizzelli, ‘disappears through fire’ ‘come per
l’acqua il pesce andando al fondo’ –​‘as fish do going to the water’s depth’,
going to the bottom. In the second the Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel
‘s’ascose nel foco che gli affina’, hides in the fire which refines them. This, it
will be remembered, is one of the ‘fragments’ the poetic persona of The Waste
Land ‘shored against [his] ruins’ at the very end of that poem, before invoking ‘Shantih shantih shantih’.16 Fire is no longer ‘daemonic’, but purgatorial.
Immediately afterwards, it becomes Pentecostal and heavenly –​it is the fire
of the third circle of Dante’s final vision of God in Paradiso xxxiii, the ‘foco
che quinci e quindi igualmente si spiri’ of the Holy Ghost. It is the fire that
dominates the fourth and fifth movements of Little Gidding, culminating in
its union with the rose.
In other words, the manuscript draft shows that Little Gidding is a concentrated Comedy which passes from Inferno to Purgatorio and finally to Paradiso.
This is made clear in lines 49–​51 of the first movement, where the author
points to prayer and then announces a fundamental message of his poem –​
which turns out to be a nearly perfect description of the Comedy’s mechanism:
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
The journey to the other world is presented by Dante as the gradual revelation
of truth by means of conversations with the souls of the damned, the penitent
and the blessed, and indeed as a passing ‘all’etterno dal tempo’, from time to
eternity –​a central theme of the Four Quartets.
The meeting and the conversation with the ‘dead master’ dominates the second movement of Little Gidding. This is, then, the nearest that Eliot ever wrote
not of a single scene, but of the whole mechanism of the Comedy. And that
Dante’s entire poem constitutes the background against which Little Gidding ii
is built is confirmed by the way in which Eliot’s text changed in passing from
the manuscript draft to the final version. In the manuscript, for instance, the
question ‘What, are you here?’ is closer to Inferno xv, even provided with the
16
This is one of the lines most often quoted by Eliot ever since the epigraph of ‘The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, the ‘Prufrock’s Pervigilium’, now in The Poems, ii, p. 316.
Are you here?
369
interlocutor’s name: ‘What, are you here, Ser Brunetto?’. Again, in the manuscript the poet’s persona is rather hastily approximated to Dante’s by means
of ‘I becoming other’. The final text has the more subtle ‘I assumed a double
part’. The likeness to Brunetto is thus diminished, and a few other details in the
manuscript suggestive of Inferno xv were similarly pared away later although
verbal reminiscences and gestures were kept. In other words, Eliot started
with Inferno xv and Brunetto Latini, but then moved on to something else. My
impression is that while the way in which the movement changes is typically
Eliotian, it was again Dante who suggested both the change and its direction –​
in fact, this is a splendid instance of Eliot’s Dantean and meta-​Dantean reading
of Dante’s Comedy.
Traces of this transformation are visible in ‘What Dante Means to Me’ but
are evident long before then in the manuscript draft of the poem, and then in
the text as it was published. Firstly, in the essay Eliot mentions both Inferno
and Purgatorio but omits any reference to Brunetto. Secondly, the manuscript
draft does not read ‘some dead master’ but ‘some dead masters’. Thirdly, even
the final text presents us with ‘some dead master’ who is ‘both one and many’,
‘a familiar compound ghost’. The figure is clearly conceived as a stratification of
many characters and of their meanings.
In the Comedy, and in particular in its first two cantiche, we find a whole
series of ‘dead masters’ who stand side by side with Brunetto Latini throughout
the Inferno and the Purgatorio. All appear to the poet in splendid recognition
scenes, all talk of salvation, poetry, politics, and fame. The first and foremost
is of course Virgil, the ‘master’ and teacher par excellence, ‘lo mio maestro e
’l mio autore’, who guides Dante from the dark wood to the garden of Eden.
The ‘bella scola’ of Limbo, which comprises Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, and
many other poets of classical antiquity of whom we are told in Purgatorio xxii,
follows in Inferno iv. The indirect presence of Guido Cavalcanti, Dante’s friend
in the Stilnovo –​and the poet from whom Eliot borrowed the opening of Ash
Wednesday, ‘Perch’i’ no spero di tornar giammai’, (‘Because I do not hope to turn
again’) –​is a painful wound for Dante from Inferno x to at least Purgatorio xi.
Brunetto occupies Inferno xv. Sordello, the Mantuan troubadour, Purgatorio vi
and vii. Bonagiunta da Lucca and Forese Donati appear in Purgatorio xxiii-​
xxiv. One of the most beautiful recognition scenes of the entire Middle Ages
takes place, as we have seen, in Purgatorio xxi-​x xii between Dante, Virgil
and Statius. Guinizzelli and Arnaut Daniel speak to Dante in Purgatorio xxvi.
Other instances could of course be quoted, but we have enough here to say
that Dante’s encounters with the ‘dead masters’ sum up the whole cultural tradition of Europe.
370 Chapter 8
As a matter of fact, Dante clearly faces the problem which Eliot was to label
as that of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’,17 proposing at least two different ways of dealing with it. There is, on the one hand, an ‘agonistic’ kind
of relationship which dominates in modern literature, a Bloomian struggle
between the newer and the older artist or poet dominated by the ‘anxiety of
influence’. This is quite clearly indicated in Oderisi’s speech in Purgatorio xi,
where the Cimabue-​Giotto and the Guinizzelli-​Cavalcanti-​Dante succession
are presented as a war, or a tournament fought for pre-​eminence. The words
used here are ‘campo’, ‘grido’, ‘tolto’, ‘caccerà’: ‘field’ (of battle); ‘cry’ (of victory);
‘taken, or stolen, away’; ‘kick, or thrust from’:
Credette Cimabue ne la pittura
tener lo campo, e ora ha Giotto il grido,
sì che la fama di colui è scura.
Così ha tolto l’uno a l’altro Guido
la gloria de la lingua; e forse è nato
chi l’uno e l’altro caccerà del nido.
Once, as a painter, Cimabue thought
he took the prize. Now ‘Giotto’ is on all lips
and Cimabue’s fame is quite eclipsed.
In verse, as well, a second Guido steals
all glory from the first. And someone’s born,
who’ll thrust, perhaps, both Guidos from the nest.18
This kind of conflictual mechanism is extended, in cantos xxiv–​x xvi of
Purgatorio, to the old-​new school succession, with Guittone and Bonagiunta
in the former and the poets of the Stilnovo in the latter, and to Provençal
writers, where Arnaut ‘soverchia’ –​surpasses –​Giraut de Bornelh and indeed
everyone else.19 On the other hand, the tradition of the classics is presented
as a much more peaceful succession, dominated by love and the filial feelings
of later poets towards their predecessors, as for instance in the Statius-​Virgil
17
18
19
Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), in T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, London, Faber,
19513, pp. 13–​22; and see T.S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, ed. G. Cianci and J. Harding,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Purgatorio xi, 94–​99: the theory expounded here was first developed by P. Boitani, ‘Ridon
le carte: guerra e pace nella tradizione letteraria’ (2010), in Dante e il suo futuro, Rome,
Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2013, pp. 55–​62.
Purgatorio xxvi, 115–​126, and xxiv, 49–​57. One should of course compare Dante’s canon
in De Vulgari Eloquentia ii ii-​xii.
Are you here?
371
relationship staged in cantos xxi-​x xii, or indeed as exemplified in the ‘bella
scola’ –​the ‘lovely college’ –​of Limbo in Inferno iv, where Homer, Virgil,
Horace, Ovid, and Lucan shine together, all acknowledging Homer’s first, and
all together granting Dante sixth place. The difference between the ancient
and the modern nature of the relationship –​between, that is, ‘tradition and
individual talent’ –​lies in the distance of time. Vainglory of human powers,
Oderisi maintains, lasts only as long as the green lasts on the tops of plants
or trees, ‘se non è giunta da l’etati grosse’, ‘unless some cruder, darker age succeeds’.20 The ancients are still, and equally, famous, because a darker age came
after them. The moderns are too close.
Dante’s masters –​teachers of eloquence, but also of wisdom, morality, and
truth –​represent the various stages and experiences of European culture and
poetry, from Homer’s and Virgil’s epics to the Provençal and Tuscan lyric poetry
within which Dante’s formation took place. It is by fighting and reinterpreting,
as well as going beyond, these that Dante, as author of the Comedy, was to find
his identity as a poet. But these stages also indicate the existential steps (sin,
passion, reason, faith) through which Dante as an individual and a Christian
was to find his personal way to redemption. The Comedy’s recognition scenes
are, deep down, scenes of a prise de conscience in which Dante confronts his
past identities as a human being and as a poet and overcomes them.
It seems to me there are two ways in which Eliot faces both the problem of
tradition and that of identity in the Little Gidding passage. One is by having the
ghost talk about ‘language’ in a series of lines that seem inspired by Oderisi’s
speech:
And he: ‘I am not eager to rehearse
… My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.
… These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
… By others, as I pray you to forgive
… Both bad and good. Last season’s fruit is eaten
And the full fed beast shall kick the empty pail.
… For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
… And next year’s words await another voice …’
A certain amount of tension in the transmission of ‘language’ is present here,
too, although it does not reach the height of Purgatorio xi except for the image
20
Purgatorio xi, 91–​93.
372 Chapter 8
of the eaten fruit and above all that of the empty pail kicked by the ‘full fed
beast’, which imply disdain in the way former food (poetry) is discarded by
the next generation. The other, regarding identity, is the manner in which the
recognition scene proper is explicitly, consciously announced and completed:
I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other –​
And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
Who is the ‘someone other’, I would like to ask. Dante the character or the
mysterious visage still taking shape? Who is the ‘myself’ whom the narrating
I says he knows? Isn’t recognition preceded, anyway, by a prise de conscience,
‘knowing myself’? The verse ‘Knowing myself yet being someone other’ stages,
it would seem, the structure itself of Dante’s poem, while the four lines as a
whole resemble Dante’s difficult recognition of Forese in Purgatorio xxiii. On
7 September 1942 Eliot wrote to John Hayward:
I am inclined to stick to ‘preceded’, because the words you suggest
[predicted, portended] convey a different meaning from what
I want. I mean, to be aware that it is someone you know (and not
be surprised by his being there) before you have identified him.
Recognition surely is the full identification of the person.21
In Inferno xv, Brunetto Latini is presented as a father figure, ‘la cara e buona
imagine paterna’, the ‘dear and good fatherly figure’ of the teacher of long ago.
But the Comedy is full of such father ­figures –​Virgil, first of all, ‘dolcissimo
padre’; followed by Guido Guinizzelli, ‘il padre mio’ of Purgatorio xxvi; then
Cacciaguida, ‘padre mio’, though in fact an ancestor, in Paradiso xvii; and
finally Adam, ‘padre antico’ not only for Dante but for the entire human race,
in Paradiso xxvi. Eliot doesn’t pick up this particular image in Little Gidding
but must have been fascinated from early on by the interrelated themes of
fatherhood, tradition, language, and poetry. It is, after all, from the words with
which Guinizzelli points out Arnaut Daniel to Dante that he took the dedication of The Waste Land to Ezra Pound, ‘il miglior fabbro [del parlar materno]’.
∵
21
The Poems, i, p. 1015.
Are you here?
373
Let us now go back to Inferno xv. We are in the third ‘girone’ of the seventh
circle of Hell, the place appointed for the punishment of those who have done
violence against God, against Nature, and against Art. The second group of
these are homosexuals, whom Dante considers violent against Nature, God’s
daughter. Brunetto belongs to these, all clerics and great and famous men
of letters, a ‘dismal crowd’ ‘besmirched, when living, with the self-​same sin’.
The scenery is undoubtedly infernal, and one that only Dante’s imagination
could invent. I shall describe it by quoting the summaries which the Temple
Classics edition of Dante used by Eliot prefaces to each canto of the Divine
Comedy.22 The seventh circle is ‘a naked plain of burning Sand’, limited on
one side by the wood of the suicides –​‘stunted trees, with withered leaves
and branches’. ‘A slow eternal Shower of Fire is falling’ upon all the groups of
the violent:
Sovra tutto ’l sabbion, d’un cader lento,
piovean di foco dilatate falde,
come di neve in alpe senza vento.
And over all that barren sand there fell –​
as slow as Alpine snow on windless days –​
a shower of broad-​winged fire flakes drifting down.23
After talking to Capaneus –​a blasphemer, violent against God –​Dante and
Virgil ‘go on, between the burning sand and the wood of Self-​murderers,
and soon come to a crimson streamlet that gushes forth from the wood and
crosses the sandy plain’. At the beginning of Canto xv, we see that ‘the crimson stream –​whose course is straight across the ring of burning sand, towards
the ring of Hell –​sends forth a dark exhalation (‘il fummo del ruscel’) that
quenches all the flames over itself and its elevated margins’. One will immediately recognize here the source of the fire that dominates in Little Gidding ii,
the fire of the bombs delivered by ‘the dark dove with the flickering tongue’,
and the source of the ‘dead leaves’ and the ‘smoke’ of Eliot’s second and third
terzinas. This is, as we saw Eliot himself say, ‘a parallel, by means of contrast’, of
Dante’s scene: Hell-​city, fire-​bombs, margins-​asphalt, ‘Alps without wind’ –​‘the
urban dawn wind’. By implication, the violent against Nature of Dante’s Inferno
become human beings engaged in war.
22
23
Here, Dante’s Inferno, London-​New York, Dent-​Dutton, 1920, pp. 158–​159 and 166–​167.
Inferno xiv, 28–​30.
374 Chapter 8
Walking on one of the margins ‘Dante continues to follow his Guide, in
silence, till they have got far from the wood, when they meet a troop of spirits
coming along the sand by the side of the bank’. Dante employs two double similes to describe the background and the first appearance of the ‘troop of spirits’. The first compares the margins to the dams the Flemings build between
Wissant and Bruges ‘to put the sea to flight’ and to those the Paduans construct along the Brenta ‘to shield their castles and estates’ ‘before its source
(Carinthia) is touched by the heat’.
The simile is complicated by two details, the first of which is Carinthia
being ‘touched by the heat’ –​the heat that melts the snow and causes the rivers to flood. In other words, Dante is following the course of the Brenta up into
Valsugana. Dante manages to compress allusions to three different regions of
Europe in six lines; in six lines he concentrates cities, flood, sea, river, villages,
castles, snow, and heath; in six lines he draws a comparison between the imaginary margins of an imaginary stream in an imaginary Hell and the earthly reality of the dikes built in Flanders and in Veneto. For indeed, as Erich Auerbach
said, Dante is the ‘poet of the secular world’, of the earth (the ‘Dichter der irdischen Welt’).24
Not satisfied with all this, he adds the second detail, specifying that the
infernal margins were made by the builder, ‘whoever he was’, neither so high
nor so thick as the Flemish or Paduan banks. There is even an implication,
here, that the ‘maestro’ who built them –​traditionally the Master Architect,
God –​might be a lesser, and infernal, artisan. One will understand Eliot’s problem when, in talking about his rendering of Dante in Little Gidding, he said: ‘It
was chiefly that in this very bare and austere style [Dante’s], in which every
word has to be “functional”, the slightest vagueness or imprecision is immediately noticeable’.25
The second double simile is less complex, but equally precise:
quando incontrammo d’anime una schiera
che venian lungo l’argine, e ciascuna
ci riguardava come suol da sera
guardare uno altro sotto nuova luna;
e sí ver’ noi aguzzavan le ciglia
come ’l vecchio sartor fa ne la cruna.
But here we came across a band of souls
24
25
E. Auerbach, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt: trans. R. Manheim, Dante: Poet of the
Secular World, New York, New York Review of Books, 2007.
‘What Dante Means to Me’, p. 129.
Are you here?
375
who milled around the ditch and met our tread.
And each one peered at us –​as people will
On evenings when the moon is new –​their brows
towards us, wrinkled into squinting blades,
like those of some old tailor at his needle.26
Dante, to quote Eliot’s own words in the 1929 essay, ‘is speaking of the crowd in
Hell who peered at him and his guide under a dim light’. Eliot noticed only the
second simile, translating it, ‘and sharpened their vision (knitted their brows)
at us, like an old tailor peering at the eye of his needle’. This, he said, had been
quite rightly singled out by Matthew Arnold ‘for high praise’. He added: ‘The
purpose of this type of simile is solely to make us see more definitely the scene
which Dante has put before us in the preceding lines’. In fact, the effect of this
simile consists in making us knit our brows to see the scene. Eliot neglected
the first simile, which sketches in the background –​the dim light of an evening
under a new moon –​and introduces human beings, their effort at reaching
each other, at seeing, at communicating. It is the first stage of ‘vision’, followed
by a narrowing of the focus, the tailor peering at the eye of his needle. It is the
beginning of the recognition scene.
The lines that follow in Inferno xv (17–​19) are inspired by two passages in
Virgil’s Aeneid which describe the scenery of Aeneas’s Dis, his Hell, and the
hero’s encounter with Dido:
Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram
Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna:
Quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna
Est iter in silvis, ubi caelum condidit umbra
Iuppiter et rebus nox abstulit atra colorem.
Obscure they went through dreary shades, that led
Along the waste dominions of the dead.
Thus wander travellers in woods by night,
By the moon’s doubtful and malignant light,
When Jove in dusky clouds involves the skies,
And the faint crescent shoots by fits before their eyes.
Quam [Dido] Troius heros
Ut primum iuxta stetit adgnovitque per umbras
Obscuram, qualem primo qui surgere mense
26
Inferno xv, 16–​21.
376 Chapter 8
Aut videt aut vidisse putat per nubile lunam.
Whom when the Trojan hero hardly knew,
Obscure in shades, and with a doubtful view
Doubtful as he who sees, through dusky night,
Or thinks he sees, the moon’s uncertain light.27
Dante has his own dead master from whom he borrows in much the same way
as Eliot does from him. An uninterrupted imaginative and thematic chain links
these poets: one image from Virgil’s recognition scene between Aeneas and
Dido in Hell helps Dante introduce his own recognition scene with Brunetto;
the Brunetto episode inspires Little Gidding. Dante changes Virgil by adding a
specific person as the perceiver of the dim scene –​the old tailor. Yet the cultural
communion between Dante and Virgil is greater than that between Eliot and
Dante. Dante can adapt Virgilian similes, use the same figures of speech. Even
while drawing his inspiration from Dante, Eliot, as a good modernist, eliminates almost all similes from his rendering of Inferno: in fact, he uses only two
in this entire section of Little Gidding, both with images of leaves at their centre, ‘while the dead leaves still rattled on like tin’, and ‘as if blown towards me
like the metal leaves’. Remembering Dante’s and Virgil’s comparison between
the souls of the dead and fallen leaves,28 Eliot “improves” on it by introducing a
twentieth-​century equivalent, the metallic quality that makes his leaves hang
between traditional dryness and contemporary bomb debris.
Only one image of the Virgilian-​Dantean type is kept fully in Little Gidding,
once more as if it were the distillation of an entire tradition:
And as I fixed upon the down-​turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-​met stranger in the waning dusk
Eliot skips Dante’s old tailor to go as it were straight back to the Virgilian root
of the icon and modernising it by means of the ‘stranger’. The image, however,
is not part of the scenic introduction –​it is, rather, worked into the recognition scene itself. The background has changed considerably. The dimness of
light and the darkness dominating Dante’s scene are now presented directly.
Evening has become ‘the uncertain hour before the morning’, and Dante’s circle –​a spatial entity –​is transformed into an image of circular time:
27
28
Aeneid vi, 268–​272 and 451–​454: Dryden’s translation in Virgil’s Aeneid, ed. F.M. Keener,
London, Penguin, 1997.
In Inferno iii, 112–​115, and Aeneid vi, 309–​312.
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In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
Eliot’s overture transports us into a different dimension –​the approaching end
of a specific time, the night, and the intersection of cyclical time and eternity.
We shall soon see how this theme might have been suggested or strengthened
by Dante.
The scene which opens in Inferno xv at line 22 is one of the most memorable episodes of medieval literature. It is prepared by the exceptionally dense
background I have tried to outline, but it comes as a sudden and moving surprise like Dante’s encounters with Virgil, Farinata, and Ulysses. Dante is suddenly recognized by one of the spirits,
who takes him by the skirt; and, on fixing his eyes over the baked and
withered figure, he finds it is Brunetto Latini. They speak to each other
with great respect and affection, recalling the past, and looking forward
to the future under the pressure of separate eternities. Their colloquy has
a dark background, which could not be altered; it stands there in deep
perennial warmth and beauty.29
This is the bare outline of the episode in the Temple Classics’ version, by which,
as we shall soon see, Eliot might have been inspired to adopt a central theme.
The outline fails to point out the essential movements of the two main figures,
Dante and Brunetto, getting closer to each other yet remaining separated both
physically and spiritually, as Virgil stands by, silent almost to the end. Let us
try to follow this movement. At first, Dante is eyed by all the souls. Almost
simultaneously, he is recognized by one of them. This soul catches him by the
hem of his gown and cries, ‘How marvellous!’. The whole movement takes no
more than three lines, passing from a general view (‘famiglia’) to one individual (‘un’), from vision to recognition (‘adocchiato’ –​‘conosciuto’) to wonder
(‘maraviglia’) and the familiar gesture of taking the interlocutor by the hem.
Brunetto’s cry of surprise and his gesture are more eloquent than ten lines of
description. This first terzina prepares us for the following. Both the gesture
and the exclamation are there to indicate that the figure we are going to meet
with Dante is one with whom he has the greatest acquaintance and a very close
relationship.
29
Dante’s Inferno, Temple Classics, p. 159.
378 Chapter 8
Yet Dante the poet keeps us in suspense for one more minute. Surprised
by that arm which has reached out for him, Dante fixes his eyes on the man’s
scorched face. In spite of the ‘baked features’, recognition is full, though not
immediate. Like the tailor through the eye of his needle, Dante has to look hard
before he actually sees. If intellectual recognition (‘intelletto’), the complete,
self-​aware realization of the identity of his interlocutor, is not instantaneous
for Dante, his human reaction –​surprise and an attempt to touch the visage of
the poor damned ghost –​follows without the least pause. Dante’s voice brings
recognition to us, revealing the speaker’s identity: ‘Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto?’
The questioning exclamation is formulated in such a way as to make us
realize that Dante is surprised not at meeting Brunetto, but at meeting him
here, in this particular circle of Hell and in this company. If the name and title
(‘Brunetto’ and ‘ser’) are not enough for us to identify the man, he himself will
immediately specify that he is ‘Brunetto Latino’, calling Dante ‘son’ and thus re-​
establishing the master-​pupil, father-​son relationship through which we must
look at the entire episode –​and which brings us from Hell back into the past,
the world of the living now gone forever.
Brunetto asks Dante to stay with him a little: ‘Do not, my dearest son’, he says,
‘be vexed,/​but let Brunetto Latino turn and walk/​along with you’. ‘Ritorna indietro’ is probably meant both literally and figuratively: Brunetto will stay behind
(‘dietro’) his fellow damned (‘la traccia’); at the same time he will turn back to
the lost world, to the past. The journey through time is about to begin. Dante
offers to sit down with his interlocutor, if Virgil agrees, but Brunetto prefers to
go on: ‘if any in this herd/​should ever pause, he lies a hundred years/​powerless
to fan these searing fires away./​And so move on. I’ll follow at your coat-​tails,/​
then catch up later with that entourage,/​which, as it goes, bewails eternal loss’.
Brunetto repeats ‘my son’ once more, and shows himself to be keenly aware of
time –​the present, concentrated in an instant (‘punto’); the immediate future
as a possibility (‘a hundred years’); the eternity of damnation (‘etterni danni’).
Accepting the situation, Dante indicates the two feelings that dominate him
throughout the scene. He dares not, cannot, join Brunetto, but he keeps his
head bowed ‘as though in reverence’. We have separation in spite of affection.
The gulf that divides the two men is enormous despite their closeness, past
and present. It is one of the most touching, tragic elements of the canto.
Brunetto is a historical figure, and we will understand the pathos of the episode better if we recall a few facts concerning his life and works. A philosopher
and a public servant, he was born in Florence ca. 1220 and died there ca. 1294.
A Guelph, on returning from an embassy to Alfonso x of Castile in 1260 (from
which he brought several important translations from Arabic), he learnt that
his party had been defeated by the Ghibellines and expelled from Florence.
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379
He took refuge in France, where he wrote his major works, Li livres dou Tresor
and the Tesoretto, the former –​mentioned in Inferno xv –​being an encyclopaedia of history, natural science, ethics, rhetoric, and political science, which,
soon translated into Italian, became, with Brunetto’s other works, a landmark
in the cultural history of thirteenth-​century Florence. Dante was profoundly
influenced by Brunetto’s writings both early and late in his career. And it is
in this sense that we must understand the figure of Brunetto the ‘master’: as
the ‘maestro’ of an entire town in the fields of ethics, politics, and rhetoric.
Brunetto returned to Florence after four years of exile. He was married and
had several children. This detail is not superfluous, since he is condemned to
Hell as a sodomite. His homosexuality has been a crux for centuries, and I will
not go into the history of this debate now. Suffice it to say that fairly recent
evidence, together with various allusions in Inferno xv, indicates that Brunetto
was indeed bisexual. The law that presides over Dante’s other world is inexorable, but it is a law he himself made, and why he decided to choose this particular aspect of Brunetto’s personality –​a sin which at the time was considered
particularly dirty (‘lerci’ is the word Dante uses) –​and therefore subject his
revered teacher to punishment in this circle –​why he did this, is a mystery
to me. One of the sources of pathos in the Inferno, however, is precisely the
contrast between the sin which condemns people and the human sympathy,
even the admiration, that Dante feels for them. Such is the case with Paolo and
Francesca, Farinata, Ulysses –​and Brunetto Latini.
Brunetto has a personal, specific identity, and is a historical figure. In Eliot’s
scene, these characteristics have radically changed. The ghost his persona
meets is ‘both intimate and unidentifiable’, ‘familiar’ yet ‘compound’, ‘both
one and many’: one who has left his body ‘on a distant shore’, a dead master of
speech, whom the protagonist ‘had known, forgotten, half recalled’. Although
his death on a distant shore might point to Yeats –​as would the manuscript
draft of the poem, written on the back of Eliot’s notes for his lecture on
Yeats –​it is quite clear that the identity of Eliot’s ghost must remain mysterious. Critics have proposed Mallarmé, Dante, Pound, Milton, Swift, Hamlet’s
father, yet the point surely is that the mystery was willed by the poet himself,
precisely because secrecy, as Frank Kermode has taught us, generates poetry
and interpretation, establishes hidden connections, makes us see the larger
pattern.30
Eliot’s version of the recognition scene confirms this. Dante meets a shadow,
but presents him as a ‘cosa salda’, made of flesh and blood –​face, arm, hand.
30
F. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy.
380 Chapter 8
Eliot meets a man walking, but his appearance is eerie, unreal, uncanny. He is
blown, ‘unresisting’, towards the protagonist by ‘the urban dawn wind’ together
with the metal leaves. He is ‘hurried’, but also ‘loitering’, suspended between
motion and immobility. Even during the recognition scene, he is ‘a face still
forming’. He makes no gesture but is only a voice speaking about speech. Space
and time have disappeared ‘at this intersection time/​Of meeting nowhere, no
before and after’. Only the wind and the ‘pavement’ trodden ‘in a dead patrol’
are left. Hence, the recognition is caused –​indeed, ‘compelled’ –​only by words,
and it takes place between two characters whose very appearance is changing under our eyes: the ghost looks like ‘a face still forming’, the protagonist
assumes ‘a double part’, crying and hearing ‘another’s voice’, ‘knowing himself
yet being someone other’. There is a curious metamorphic quality to this recognition. The echo of Inferno xv is heard only in the background, in the fragments of a sentence or of sound: ‘And as I fixed upon the down-​turned face/​
That pointed scrutiny’, ‘in the brown baked features’, ‘What! Are you here?’, ‘I
said: “The wonder that I feel is easy,/​Yet ease is cause of wonder” ’.
On