The torque of Pride

When Dante crosses the threshold into Purgatory proper and hears the door swing shut, he speaks of the one thing that could never be excused - looking back:

Poi fummo dentro al soglio de la porta
che 'l mal amor de l'anime disusa,
perché fa parer dritta la via torta,

sonando la senti' esser richiusa;
e s'io avesse li occhi vòlti ad essa,
qual fora stata al fallo degna scusa? 

When we had crossed the threshold of the door
Which the perverted love of souls disuses,
Because it makes the crooked way seem straight, 

Re-echoing I heard it closed again;
And if I had turned back mine eyes upon it,
What for my failing had been fit excuse?   (Purg. 10.1-6)

No possible excuse for someone who has been advised not to look back, no matter how strong the temptation. Dante, the new Orpheus, passes the threshold safely and successfully. This is only one of several thresholds, however - instead of assuring the safe return of his Eurydice to mortal life, obeying the order to not look back gives Dante hope of seeing his Beatrice at some future moment, when he is fit to experience her transhumanized form.

One way of understanding a constitutive difference between the canticles, then, could be one's relation to hope:

Inferno:       hope forever lost.
Purgatorio:  hope actively propelling one ahead
Paradiso:     hope substantiated

This small scheme will be subject, of course, to our reading of the Paradiso, which is about to begin. I want to bring up one other thing about the Purgatorio as we get to that new threshold, and it's contained in the snippet quoted above.

che 'l mal amor de l'anime disusa, 

perché fa parer dritta la via torta,

 the threshold (soglia) . . .

that souls' bad love disuses
because it makes the crooked path seem straight.

Entering the terrace of Pride, the poet lays down an apparent law of the human condition: when we desire wrongly, that causes us to see as direct what is in fact crooked, or indirect.

The narrator here posits a turning, or torque, of the soul by which what it sees, and how it sees - cognition - is skewed by what (and how) it wants. Where Plato's soul just needed to be turned around and ascend to see the Good in order to want it, this offers a more Augustinian view. One cannot see straight until one's love (will) has turned toward the Good. The will is what is bound, imprisoned, and the terraces of penitence are about liberating it from its false and deviant loves.

The complex path of discipline, edification, and challenge that the pilgrim goes through before Virgil can "crown and mitre" him as a freely willing self over himself should be kept in view as one enters Paradise.

It's a path with its own complications. I'll just briefly point to one. In the same canto (10) of Purgatorio, before they encounter the Proud souls bearing their pedestals, Dante and Virgil see three narratives depicted on the terrace wall, famously described as visibile parlare: The three tales are the Annunciation, the story of Uzzah and David and Michal, and the tale of Trajan and the widow.

Contemporary commentators including Robert Hollander and Nicola Fosca have noted some complications of the tales -- for example, that the angel's appearing to Mary, which bears the hope of salvation to everyone born after Christ, carries a sense of doom to Virgil, the poet of the 4th Eclogue, whose prophecy of a savior to be born did not save him from Limbo.

Hollander also wonders whether the Proud souls, crushed under the weight of their stones, can even see these storied walls - are the walls inclined so one can see from a very low angle, he and others ask.

Another point that seems relevant is that the first sin, the one upon which all other sins feed, requires those carrying their pedestals to read from their low and oblique angle, over and over again, three tales that, in a very real sense, defy easy understanding. One might quite easily see an image of the Annunciation, but does that mean that one in fact understands it? What would "understanding" mean here?

And if the Annunciation is problematic, the tale of Uzzah poses its own difficulties. Here's a guy leading the oxen that are bearing the Ark of the covenant, and the Ark totters, seeming about to fall. He reaches out his hand - one can easily presume it's an automatic reflex - and is struck dead for presuming to do something he was not tasked to do. Is this readily comprehensible? Or must one go round the mountain several thousand times before it begins to make sense? This is of course about the automatonic nature of our drives, desires, and thoughts - these things we are persuaded we simply control.

The tale of Trajan also runs counter to common sense (as does, of course, the spectacle of David) and all military protocol.

If we gloss over these tales (as I'm doing here), it could be at our peril. If we presume we have read them aright, we might be submitting our qualifications for spending a good amount of time on this very terrace.

Why point this up with emphasis? Let's remember that these works, Dante avers, are produced by an Artist that surpasses Polycletus and Nature itself - making the question of distinguishing real from fake, fact from fiction, a real, not a rhetorical, question. And let's remember that the basic element of Pride is in fact to think something is straight that is not. The torque of Pride and the torque of simplistic reading are not, in this canto, unrelated. In a very real sense, Dante has engaged the full web of rhetoric, the textual deviousness of tropes, mimesis, figuration and narration, in his analysis of Pride. To sin is to be trapped in trope. The presumption of reading -- in the sense of some unmeditated, direct apprehension of a text -- puts one fairly far along the path of error.

One can hope that the challenges of Paradise, however daunting, leave us less prone to tie ourselves in knots.

Noises off: Sound, sense and wildness in Philoctetes

The spare theatrical texture of Sophocles' Philoctetes is the sign of a playwright who has encountered complexity. It teases us into thinking we are "seeing" all there is to see. In contrast to earlier works -- such as Antigone and Women of Trachis -- this late work (produced in 409 BC, when Sophocles was nearing 90) has little of their dazzlingly dense poetry, laden with myth and mystery.

The lines seem more direct, less rifted with ore, yet immense dimensions of story trail behind them. Also, there's a crabbed, echoic, halting rhythm at times that strikes the ear -- places where it's as if the sentences themselves, like the pathetic figure at the center of the play, had a hard time making headway against some ill-defined but crushingly painful resistance. One reaches for analogies - one thinks (perhaps too easily) of Beethoven's last quartets, reaching for musical form beyond any music that had ever reached the human ear.

Some of this is apparent early on, at the first sign of Philoctetes. The Chorus says:

προυφάνη κτύπος, 
φωτὸς σύντροφος ὡς τειρομένου του, 
ἤ που τῇδ᾽ ἢ τῇδε τόπων. 
205βάλλει βάλλει μ᾽ ἐτύμα 
φθογγά του στίβον κατ᾽ ἀνάγκαν 
ἕρποντος, οὐδέ με λάθει 
βαρεῖα τηλόθεν αὐδὰ τρυσάνωρ: διάσημα γὰρ θρηνεῖ.

Chorus 

I heard a sudden thud, one that might naturally come from a man worn by pain. From there it came, I think—or there. [205] It strikes, strikes hard on my ear, the sure sound of someone creeping along his way as if tortured. I cannot miss that grievous cry of a man hard-pressed, even from afar—its tone is too clear.

The above translation is Jebb's. Here's Torrance:

A cry has arisen
as if from a man worn down by pain -
from there - or over there - it came.
Surely I hear the voice of someone
helplessly creeping along;
I cannot ignore
that grievously wearying voice from afar -
it comes too distinctly.

And here's Grene:

Hush! I hear a footfall
footfall of a man that walks painfully.
Is it here? Is it here?
I hear a voice, now I can hear it clearly,
voice of a man, crawling along the path,
hard put to it to move. It's far away,
but I can hear it; I can hear the sound well,
the voice of a man wounded; it is quite clear now.

The chorus speaks of what it hears, and what it hears is not at first clear. προυφάνη κτύπος is vague - κτύπος means a loud noise, a crash, as of thunder, or horses' hooves. προυφάνη also is decidedly open-ended, suggesting something manifesting towards one.

Each translator has dealt with this auditory fuzziness differently. One hears a human "cry," another, a "footfall." Jebb is closest to the sense of "noise" with "thud," but inserts the subjectivity of the choral speaker with "I heard," when it's more a sense of a loud noise manifesting itself.

This might seem trivial, but Sophocles was certainly capable of having his chorus say "I heard a voice!" if that's what he was after. The passage goes on to underscore the strange non-localized aspect of the noise - Grene gets it best by being entirely uncertain where it's coming from:

is it here? is it here?

The first sign of Philoctetes, then, is a loud, rude sound, indistinct in quality and location. As the chorus continues, we gather that in fact it is speaking about its own experience of sensing, then gathering more information, then translating that initially vague noise into the "heavy sound of a weary man" (βαρεῖα τηλόθεν αὐδὰ τρυσάνωρ), and then into, "a clear wail" (διάσημα γὰρ θρηνεῖ).

We don't find the word for "voice" until φθογγά (206) - and even then, it's voice as something that strikes, repetitively (βάλλει βάλλει ), more like the traces of a hobbled gait (στίβος). What is emphasized is the process of moving from a purely sensory experience (from a random direction) to a more vivid awareness of a sound now apparently "far off" to an even more specific sense of a wail coming through clearly. διάσημα carries the word for "mark" or "sign" (σῆμα + διά (through)). A mere noise turns into a sign which then gets read, translated, and grasped as meaningful.

In a much shorter passage than I've managed in this comment, Sophocles dramatizes the act of translation. The chorus quite carefully moves through the stages of an interpretive act from initial sound to apparent signification to a sign it feels it can read, translate, understand. The translator who jumps in too soon with the presumption that one here is hearing a human voice betrays the way in which the speech makes the act of translation itself both its subject and the very thing it performs. Traduttore, tradittore indeed!

Why does this matter? Perhaps because this is but one of several moments in the Philoctetes when something manifests, but leaves substantial doubt about what it is, how it is to be understood and assimilated to consciousness. A few lines further on, Philoctetes will be overjoyed to hear the sound of Greek:

234: ὦ φίλτατον φώνημα: he'll say, upon hearing Neoptolemus's voice.

O cherished sound! 

Less than the meaning of Neoptolemus's words, Philoctetes delights in their sound. Their cadence stands out against the background noise of barbarous, non-Greek, utterance, whether of man, beast, or pounding surf. It manifests by its phonetic texture alone something that is not uncivilized, or barbarous, or monstrous. And this matters. Marooned on Lemnos for nine years, Philoctetes has been surrounded by wildness. It is by no means clear how far from savagery - from a purely wild being - he now is.

Yet it's this figure, human or no, that Odysseus must "persuade" to return to service in the Greek army, to Troy, to a mission that means nothing to the order of wild things -- signals lost in the crash of the pounding surf.

Shelter from the storm: Antigone 117-125

Beauty walks a razor’s edge

στὰς δ᾽ ὑπὲρ μελάθρων φονώσαισιν ἀμφιχανὼν κύκλῳ 
λόγχαις ἑπτάπυλον στόμα 
ἔβα, πρίν ποθ᾽ ἁμετέρων 
120αἱμάτων γένυσιν πλησθῆναί τε καὶ στεφάνωμα πύργων 
πευκάενθ᾽ Ἥφαιστον ἑλεῖν. τοῖος ἀμφὶ νῶτ᾽ ἐτάθη 
125πάταγος Ἄρεος, ἀντιπάλῳ δυσχείρωμα δράκοντος.

[117] He paused above our dwellings; he gaped around our sevenfold portals with spears thirsting for blood; but he left [120] before his jaws were ever glutted with our gore, or before the Fire-god's pine-fed flame had seized our crown of towers. [125] So fierce was the crash of battle swelling about his back, a match too hard to win for the rival of the dragon.

Seven-gated Thebes

Jebb notes the oddness here, as has been noted here for the second strophe, of a "blurred" transition from figure to proper sense, and calls it "thoroughly Sophoclean":

The words φονώσαισιν ἀμφιχανὼν... λόγχαις once more merge the image of the eagle,—as at v. 115,—in literal description of a besieging army, save in so far as the figurative “ἀμφιχανών” suggests a monster opening its jaws. The word was perh. suggested by Il. 23.79 “ἐμὲ μὲνκὴρ ι ἀμφέχανε στυγερή” (hath gaped for me—i.e. ‘devoured me’). These transitions from clear imagery to language in which the figure is blurred by the thought of the object for which it stands, are thoroughly Sophoclean: cp. n. on O. T. 866.

Further along in the strophe, many translators choose to not include the names of gods that are in the Greek. Jebb has "Fire-god" -- literally it's "piney Hephaestos." He and others also literalize Ares. Jebb has "clash of battle" where "clash of Ares" (πάταγος Ἄρεος) would seem closer to the text.

Grene drops the divine names for literal reference.

But before his jaws would be sated
with our blood, before the fire,
pine fed, should capture our crown of towers,
he went hence—
such clamor of war stretched behind his back,
from his dragon foe, a thing he could not overcome.

Fitts-Fitzgerald:

But before his jaws were sated with our blood,
Or pine fire took the garland of our towers,
He was thrown back; and as he turned, great Thebes––
No tender victim for his noisy power––
Rose like a dragon behind him, shouting war. 

Curiously, all three keep the figure of the dragon for Thebes, but the effect is different. Fitts-Fitzgerald's dragon is an animated simile and vocal where Jebb's is more like a metonymic mascot name.

We can't ignore the issue of the war "at the back of" the attacking army (or eagle). If the Theban defenders were in the city, how did they (the dragon) rise behind the enemy? Perhaps something (the beam of Helios?) caused the Argives to turn and run, so that the defenders opened the gates and pursued them.* 

So, with help from Nicholas P. Gross's commentary and begging the indulgence of the gods and skilled craftsmen of translation:

He stood having gaped around the roofs of the seven-gated mouth [stoma or στόμα is singular - the multiple as one] with bloodthirsting spearheads. Before the jaws could glut our blood or
piney Hephaestos seize our crown of towers, they left [no agency is identified], and the clashing Ares of the dragon stretched round the back of the Eagle, a near-equal hard conquest.

Sophocles uses ἀντιπάλῳ in the final line. Literally the word means "wrestle against," but in use it came to mean a situation in which two are "nearly matched or balanced." It's odd to use it with δυσ-χείρωμα, "hard conquest." In a few lines we have an impending attack, which suddenly ceases, and a counterattack, ending with a conquest in which the two clashing forces were nearly as one. The Argives get rendered visually, the Thebans more aurally.

In this ode rich in language in which, as Jebb notes, "the figure is blurred by the thought of the object for which it stands" so that gaping eagles and clashing Ares are jarred by actual spearheads, it would be interesting to ask our modern translators why they suppress metonymies like Hephaestos and Ares. As we've seen, the language of the ode is destabilizing -- one can't know from moment to moment whether to expect prosaic literal language, strong metaphor, weak metonymy, or a combination of these (as in φονώσαισιν...λόγχαις - "blood-thirsting spearheads").

Given this unstable poetic environment, changing Hephaestos to "fire" and Ares to "war" seems odd. Perhaps where anything goes, one seeks literal language to cling to, shelter from the storm.

*Euripides' Phoenissae offers very much this sort of scenario, except the stampede occurs after the single-handed combat of Eteocles and Polyneices. These two fight and die by each other's hand. The Argives have laid down their arms during the contest, the Thebans have not. Perceiving their advantage, the Thebans pursue and slaughter the Argive army.

Eagle's wing, horsehair helmets: Antigone 110-116

ὃς ἐφ᾽ ἡμετέρᾳ γᾷ Πολυνείκους 
ἀρθεὶς νεικέων ἐξ ἀμφιλόγων 
ὀξέα κλάζων 
ἀετὸς εἰς γᾶν ὣς ὑπερέπτα, 
λευκῆς χιόνος πτέρυγι στεγανός, 
115πολλῶν μεθ᾽ ὅπλων 
ξύν θ᾽ ἱπποκόμοις κορύθεσσιν.

[110] He set out against our land because of the strife-filled claims of Polyneices, and like a screaming eagle he flew over into our land, covered by his snow-white wing, [115] with a mass of weapons and crested helmets.

The second part of the Antigone's first ode continues the bifurcated agency begun in the first strophe. The "he" who set out is the "Man" that came to Thebes - the entire armed force of Argives. But this "he" came because of the strife-filled claims (νεικέων) of Polyneices (Πολυνείκους). Two agents, then, driving one action.

It is difficult to think of another poet who puts pressure upon grammar, particularly upon grammatical number, the way Sophocles does here. First, there's the giant collective noun, reduced to the third person singular pronoun (ὅς). "He" comes to Thebes because of the νεικέων -- the plural claims or quarrels, of the singular Polyneices, whose name contains this same word. (Πολυνείκους means "many quarrels," or "much strife.")

The attention shifts back to the "Man" now likened to a screaming eagle with a snow-white wing. Normally the term for birds' wings occur in the plural (or, in Greek, the dual*), since they naturally come in twos. This eagle has only one, and it's στεγανός -- closely, or tightly covered, watertight.

We take that to be the white shield of the army, but the moment we take the total army as one bird, and the totality of shields as one tight white wing, this singular collective entity is "with many weapons and horsehair-crested helmets."

It's as if there's a struggle going on within the grammar of the ode -- strife between a totalizing imposition of a collective singular upon numerous individuals, and an actor, or agent, that refuses to remain singular, but diverges into "Man" / "Eagle" / "wing" which has multiple armaments yet is caused by "many quarrels" who happen(s) to be one man.

If this seems surreal, consider that it's in seeming violation of certain norms of poetic figure. If something is imagined to be One though it is many, poets usually sustain their inspired images by elaborating their figure in a consistent form. Sophocles clearly doesn't want to do this - no sooner do we take the army to be singular and birdlike and single-winged than it is toting many weapons and horsehair helmets -- we're back to a literal language and plurality of real armed forces that we do not have to "take" as anything other than itself.

The effect is of rough-hewn power, neither elegant, nor clever, nor cute. I find it disconcerting, slightly surreal, and haunting. Whatever else the first ode of the Antigone is doing, the poetics of the song are claiming attention by defamiliarizing grammatical and poetic expectancies. Interpretation of what this could mean will be taken up later. For now the attempt is to describe a certain textual strangeness.

[update] *Sophocles did use the dual number, as I was happy to learn after posting the above:

11. Antigone's name means "Against the Family." "Against" carries both the sense of "close to" and "opposed to." When Antigone first speaks she is yet without a name but her language stresses closeness. She addresses her sister with a hyperbole whose overstatement of filial closeness is further enhanced by her use of the dual number. Beside the singular and plural, Greek has a set of inflections for expressing pairs, most often, common pairs like two oxen or two eyes. Antigone encloses Ismene with language that makes them such a natural pair, and Ismene acknowledges this with dual forms of her own. Source.

Antigone: First ode and some interpretive obscurity

The first choral ode of Sophocles' Antigone does a good deal of work. It presents the elders of Thebes who evoke the action that immediately preceded the play's opening. The people's fear of assault, the white-shielded army at the gates, the fate of Capaneus, all would remind an Athenian audience of Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes:

Here is a snippet of Aeschylus's first chorus, anticipating ruin at the hands of a massive Argive army at the city's seven gates:

Ah, ah, you gods and goddesses, raise your war cry over our walls to drive away the onrushing evil!
The army of the white shield, ready for battle, rushes at full speed against the city.
Who then will rescue us, which of the gods or goddesses will help? (89-91)

Here's Sophocles' first chorus, looking back upon the same event:

Shaft of the sun, fairest light of all that have dawned on Thebes of the seven gates, you have shone forth at last, eye of golden day, advancing over Dirce's streams! [105] You have goaded with a sharper bit the warrior of the white shield, who came from Argos in full armor, driving him to headlong retreat.

Sophocles' chorus is steeped in golden light - the shining beam of Helios appears thrice in the first lines, each time using the root φα, as in φαίνω, the root of light, of brightness, of that which causes anything to come into appearance:

ἀκτὶς ἀελίου, τὸ κάλλιστον ἑπταπύλῳ φανὲν 
Θήβᾳ τῶν προτέρων φάος, 
ἐφάνθης ποτ᾽, ὦ χρυσέας 

followed by the eye of golden day,

ἁμέρας βλέφαρον, 

The movement from light to shining appearance to the eye is fully coherent and augurs clarity and illumination. Yet the next lines don't quite fulfill the expectation. First, there is some uncertainty about the action: it seems the sharp bit, or bridle, of Helios has turned away the Argives:

You have goaded with a sharper bit the warrior of the white shield

We could spend some time working out precisely how the bit of Helios (presumably driving his chariot) goaded the "warrior" from Argos. Normally bits curb one's own horses, rather than goading enemy armies. Translators are not of one accord on the actual syntax.

Wyckoff:

                           O golden day's 

eye, coming over Dirce's stream,

on the Man who had come from Argos with all his armor

running now in headlong fear as you shook his bridle free.

It's unclear what verb would serve to represent the "shaking free."

Grene offers:

You drove in headlong rout

the whiteshielded man from Argos,

complete in arms;

his bits rang sharper

under your urging.

Here the "bits" belong to the fleeing Argives.

Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald do away with bits and bridles altogether:

O marching light

Across the eddy and rush of Dirce’s stream,

Striking the white shields of the enemy

Thrown headlong backward from the blaze of morning!

Here the light itself is marching, like the Argive army, and strikes that army, causing not blindness, but a muscular act in which an army is thrown headlong backward.
This might seem an odd translator's decision, given that the Greek text clearly contains the word χα^λι_νός, which can mean bit or bridle, or, anything that curbs or restrains, or, a strap, thong, fang of a serpent. And it is ὀξυτέρῳ, i.e., sharp.

So a very simple noun for an everyday object somehow becomes problematic when coupled with a ray of the sun. We get no clear imitation of an action, rather, a set of alternatives that seem to include light, mythological horses, goading and curbing, army and bridle. The collective noun translated as army or enemy is φώς, that is, "man."

The trouble lies in discerning the causation. The ode begins with the clarity of golden sunlight, but the moment it speaks of an action leading to the rout of the man/Argives, the nature of that action proves difficult to grasp. Helios's beam somehow turned away the "man," but sheds very little light on how that feat has been managed.

Before we proceed to complain of Sophocles' word choice, syntax, or dismal handling of simple metaphor, we probably should read on. In so doing, the ode will present other interpretive difficulties. For now, a strong brilliance of light and the act of routing an army are somehow involved in an obscure causal relation. Even if that relation were clear, it would still be necessary to decide on the reliability of the elders who are singing the allegation.