We are Philoctetes

by liberal japonicus

A little background and my overripe thoughts about Biden quoting Seamus Heaney (after Sophocles), started off by this article from the Guardian.

What was quoted by Biden was originally part of a theatre piece that Heaney wrote for the Field Day Theatre Company, at the end of the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland. In the program, Heaney notes:

The conflict between the young man's [Neoptolemus, son of Achilles] sense of integrity and the older man's [Odysseus] code of loyalty and solidarity intiates the drama, which goes on to enact itself in the consciousness of Philoctetes himself: in him and around him Sophocles locates an argument about the different consequences of outrage and obligation:

The Guardian article quotes Heaney, who says

“Poetry’s special status among the literary arts,” [...] “derives from the audience’s readiness to … credit the poet with a power to open unexpected and unedited communications between our nature and the nature of the reality we inhabit.”

The article doesn't note that this is poetry's trap, you can get yourself waaaay out on a limb and then saw through the limb you are perched on, which I will demonstrate below the fold

What is generally taken as the poem was actually the final rhapsode of the Chorus, which Heaney later split off as a separate poem, dedicated to Nelson Mandela:

THE CURE OF TROY
Human beings suffer.
They torture one another.
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

History says, Don’t hope
On the side of the grave,’
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles.
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing,
The utter self revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
And lightening and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

That notion of holding off is why Clinton quoted it in Derry, during the Northern Ireland Peace Process, and why Gerry Adams could recite it from memory. I imagine that this is why Biden has used it. But the poem is from a play which is from Greek myth, which is the beginning of me going down this rabbit hole.

Looking at the passage in Biden's speech, it functions as a call to arms and though a number of people have commented that Biden's speech was not an ordinary convention speech (and of course, these are not ordinary times), conventions usually want to bring people in. But myths in general and Greek myths in particular aim to hold up a mirror to us, often in ways we don't expect.

The wikipedia articles about the translation and the original and the figure of Philoctetes can fill in the gaps but quick run thru for those who don't want to click.

Philoctetes received the bow and poisoned arrows of Heracles, and all of the traditions explaining why he was left on the isle of Lemnos while the rest of the fleet sailed on to Troy relate to a wound on his foot that festered and stank. Between the stench and Philoctetes' cries of pain, it was decided to leave him on Lemnos. The traditions suggest that his foot was poisoned, usually by a snake, which ties back to his poisoned arrows and modern interpretations have his poisoned arrows the cause of his wound. The Greeks return when it is prophesized, ten years later, that they will only defeat the Trojans if they have the bow and arrows of Heracles, so Odysseus and another Greek (the play has Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, another tradition has Diomedes) go back to Lemnos and they are surprised to find Philoctetes still there with his wounded foot (and one can easily imagine, everything else) still festering. So the theme of the play is how Philoctetes puts aside his bitterness and reconciles with the Greeks. (and we are told that he did come back and was one of the Greeks hidden in the Trojan horse) The piece is designed for the theatre, and it is easy to see that quote as representing Biden's theme of the eventual triumph of the light. One can also suggest that this carries a notion of setting aside revenge, which TBH wouldn't make me very happy, I have to admit, and why you don't see folks quoting the "hope for a great sea-change, on the far side of revenge". (and one can imagine advisors for Mike Pence eagerly seizing on the call to believe in miracles, doncha know. Like I said, multiple interpretations)

Another part of the story that is interesting to me is the bow and poisoned arrows. These come from Heracles, and they seem to cause more problems than they are worth. This article discusses the interesting paradox of poison in the ancient world. And this article draws a parallel between those poisoned arrows and gun ownership. (which would have probably made one former member of the commentariat's head explode). As that article points out, the poison that Heracles uses ends up killing him when his wife is tricked by the centaur Nessus to anoint Heracles's shirt with Nessus' now poisoned blood and when he puts it on, the poison burns his body, causing so much pain that he throws himself on a funeral pyre and only Poeas, Philoctetes' father, is willing to light Heracles' pyre, and and for that act, he receives the bow and arrow, which he passes down to his son.

The play revolves around this bow and these arrows, items which have sentenced Philoctetes to 10 years of exile and excruciating pain. The Greeks return to Lemnos and find Philoctetes

living like an animal in a cave, whose floor was slick with the fetid pus draining from his wound. The emaciated archer, surrounded by feathers and bird bones, was still racked by pain from the arrow poison.

So I would note that one could read it as maybe the things that you treasure, can end up crippling you. (hello social media!)

Odysseus is able to trick Philoctetes and take the bow and arrows, but Neoptolemus cannot accept that as honorable and returns them, which then has Philoctetes agrees to rejoin the Greeks.

With all that in hand, if I go a bit (well a ways) further and see how we may apply the story, (and this is just me, I'm not suggesting that anyone else is thinking this), the question becomes, just who is Philoctetes supposed to be?

While you can obviously answer 'us', i.e. the people who Biden is speaking to, Biden was speaking to a multitude of groups. Is it dissident Republicans (their arrows having poisoned them?), or progressives, or liberals (groups which are taken to be forever separate if you go by NBC's breathless tweets)? Certainly some can imagine Republicans as the focus, and need to join to defeat the enemy. Or if the focus is the unjustifiable wrong that was committed against Philoctetes, a wrong that has to be ignored so they can pitch in, he becomes the Progressives. Or how about Democrats, exiled and suffering, and Biden is asking them to take the once in a lifetime opportunity to make 'hope and history rhyme'. So many interpretations, so little time.

And that's the other thing about these myths, they often tell us that it doesn't really matter who 'they' are, in the final analysis, the 'them' always can become 'us'. At least that is what I think when I see the last words of the play, which Heaney gives to Philoctetes:

Suspect too much sweet talk

But never close your mind.

It was a fortunate wind

That blew me here. I leave

Half-ready to believe

That a crippled trust might walk

And the half-true rhyme is love

Comments

[nous]

Philoctetes was staged for the first time in Athens at the City Dionysia in 409 BCE, which was in the second phase of the Peloponnnesian War. Athens had been deep in an economic crisis and the democracy there had been overthrown by an oligarchy. Their most talented general, Alcibiades, had been exiled (drummed up charges of impiety and religious vandalism) and was under a sentence of death. But two years before the play was produced the Athenian fleet destroyed the Spartan navy and Alcibiades was reappointed to lead them. The fleet won victories that restored the economy of Athens and democracy was restored.

I don't know who Philoctetes is supposed to be, but I think that a historicist reading of Philoctetes would play up the parallels between him and Alcibiades which makes me think that the chorus, speaking as they are to the Athenians, would put the Athenians in the place of the sons of Atreus, seeking to restore Philoctetes/Alcibiades to his place so that he could bring an end to the years of war.

And the backdrop of the Peloponnesian war, with North vs South and outside aid from an Eastern despot (Persia), makes for some compelling symbolism both for Heaney's Ireland and for the US.

And I think the reading of the myth whereby the poison comes from the arrows of Hercules rather than from a punishment handed down by the goddess for impiety betrays a very post-enlightenment understanding of mythology. The Athenians were much more concerned with the way that religious offense (miasma) could pollute a city and bring down misfortune upon them from the gods. That's the whole point of the Dionysia after all. Just read the Bacchae if you want to get a better understanding of that mindset.

[liberal japonicus]

Great stuff. The play itself has Philoctetes being punished because he trod on Heracles burial place, another version has him making a vow not to tell anyone, but points it out with his foot to get around his oath. There's also three other versions that have been lost that we know of from an analysis by Dio Chrysostom. Here's a reconstruction of Euripedes version and the last page is particularly interesting concerning parallels.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/148090

A little more accessible is Edmund Wilson's The Wound and the Bow, which is what pushed Heaney to choose the myth. Definitely worth reading.

[Hartmut]

The play also shows how fluent character interpretations in mythos are. There is quite often a huge difference between Greek* stage plays and epics. Neoptolemos is in other contexts usually a very negative character (e.g. Greek vases depicting him beating Priamos to death with the body of the baby child of Hector) while here is a stand-in for the ephebes, the new levvies who swore their oath during the same festival the play was staged. Odysseus (generally an ambiguous figure independent of literary genre) is a stand-in for the military superiors to whom the oath was directed. The play starts sympathetic to Philoctetes but shifts (expressed by the chorus) when he stays stubborn even after he got credible evidence that it's not just a trick to get his bow and arrows but there is indeed a genuine prophecy. Sophocles does not provide a simple solution. He is clearly pro-polis (the common good over the individual) but also warns of corruption (corrupt means by the leaders and the resulting corruption of the ideals of the young men). The play would likely not have survived or get discussed to-day, if it was just a one-sided propaganda piece (again, this is Greek not Roman).

*The Romans had their own biased views in part because they claimed to be descendants of the Trojans.

[Nigel]

I hope you're not suggesting Biden shot himself in the foot ...

[liberal japonicus]

Nigel wins the thread.

[cleek]

95.866% of Americans have never heard of this.

but, Biden saying it sets up a nice contrast between himself and Mr "Two Corinthians", dunnit?

[Hartmut]

It's all Greek to them, naturally.

[russell]

you guys know stuff

[Girl from the North Country]

Great multi-layered post, lj, and comments, y'all.

[wj]

I hope you're not suggesting Biden shot himself in the foot ...

I'd say a more obvious interpretation would be that Republicans with integrity shot themselves in the foot. They did so by embracing the nutters, just to win an election -- rather than rejecting them in order to attracting moderates away from the Democrats.

I would say, in answer to lj's question, is that Biden (and others) are not trying to win over dissident Republicans. As Alabama senator Doug Jones put it

the outreach and support from Republicans during the convention is meant to “to get folks comfortable with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris” and show that “that they are not going to lead this country in some socialist agenda”.

That is, the dissidents don't need winning over. They (we) are already there. What's needed is, as a couple of people have put it, to get more of them to feel that they have "permission" to vote for Democrats. That is, that it isn't treason to their party to do so this time.

[wj]

Speaking of shooting oneself in the foot, I came across this in the Washington Post

“President Trump is the most pro-gay president in American history. I can prove it.”

— Richard Grenell, former acting director of national intelligence, in a video released by the Log Cabin Republicans, Aug. 19, 2020

Ignore, for the moment, the question of whether this has any connection to reality (their fact checkers deal with that). Just think about how it will play with the evangelical base. Either they abandon Trump, or they abandon yet another of their loudly proclaimed principles. Win-win.

[Hartmut]

you guys know stuff

In this case mere coincidence. In order to fill a gap in the class schedule I attended a course on Greek drama last year, and the Philoctetes was one looked at in greater detail.

[John Thullen]

Hitler was pro-gay as well, but like Trump (but even here Trump doesn't measure up, yet) he ignored his personal revulsion regarding homosexuality if individuals met the other requirements for leadership in the Third Reich: sadism, ruthlessness, corruptibility, absolute slavish loyalty, thuggery, no particular competence (which might compete with the Fuhrer's, the onetime Austrian vagabond, barely facile competence in anything but demagoguery) other than an ability to flood the Reich's enemies' zones with shit, and a personal attribute that could be used to blackmail and intimidate and coerce his underlings when necessary.

Ernst Roehm, Hitler's closest and most loyal colleague from the early 1920s, leader of the Brownshirts, also a murderous thug and a gay man, was murdered in 1933-34 under Hitler's orders when Roehm became a threat to Hitler, along with dozens of other brutal Nazis in the middle of the night, pulled out of bed and shot dead, along with their young male consorts, and of course Himmler and Goering, the latter also an exuberantly gay man, nattering in Hitler's ear that Roehm and company had to be eliminated.

Roy Cohn, a ruthless far-right role model for Trump's brand of thuggery, was a gay Jew.

A gay-conservative republican nationalist (gay-Nazi). A Jewish-conservative republican nationalist (Jewish-Nazi).

It's not the perfectly natural human quality of what's to the left of the hyphen that is to be held accountable for Cohn's mean thuggish bullying life.

It's what is to the Right of the hyphen that is accountable for his malign subhuman actions toward the Other and made him a useful tool, but ALWAYS inferior, to the EVIL embodied in conservative filth like Joseph McCarthy and Trump.

[John Thullen]

Just so with Falwell and the Evangelicals useful to Trump.

That they are fallen is no surprise ... the stridently self-righteous always seem to be having more sinful fun on the side than we godless libertines on the Left can ever manage ... it's that they are corruptible conservative nationalists and grifting conmen and conwaywomen that Trump finds employable in the wrecking of America.

It's amazing when you strip away the crypto-Christian quintessentially American bullshit of these cheap, grasping conservative god-botherers that you get right down to the banal, cliched pornographic tropes of their horrid little lives, funded of course by the dumb dupes who finance their prosperity gospel machinations via the offering plate.

Threesomes with the horny little Christian wife and the pool boys.

Really?

Do these right-wing churches have Al Goldstein on the payroll as script-writers for their sad little hand-held camera rutting and thrusting, not that there is anything wrong with that?

There must be a joke going around the student "body" of Liberty University when they could overhear Falwell yelling "Jeeee-sus Christ" at the top of his lungs from up at the big house in the small hours:

"Well, AGAIN with the suffering little children coming to him!"

"Yeah, and to think, we could have attended Berkeley and we'd be the ones having the fun."

[Snarki, child of Loki]

Pro tip: never deliver a pizza to the Falwell house.

Bet you can figure out why.

[wj]

The latest (Domino's?) commercial suggests the frisbee approach to hands-off, social distanced, pizza deliveries. Maybe that would be safe. Or perhaps not.

[wj]

Night 1 of the Republican Convention in a nutshell:
https://mobile.twitter.com/NaomiBiden/status/1298060876164079617

[Cal Lash]

Wow