Displaced fire: Heroides 16 in light of myth

"Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop." - H.L. Mencken

One choice Ovid had to make in Heroides 16 and 17 was how to have Paris's immediate challenge -- the seduction of Helen -- resonate within the overarching story in which the lovers play so key a role.

The poet weaves the larger mythical structure within fine details of Paris and Helen's letters. When Paris ponders whether he should speak, he speaks of fire:

Eloquar, an flammae non est opus indice notae,

     Et plus quam vellem iam meus extat amor?

Ille quidem lateat malim, dum tempora dentur

     Laetitiae mixtos non habitura metus,

Sed male dissimulo; quis enim celaverit ignem,

     Lumine qui semper proditur ipse suo?Si tamen expectas, vocem quoque rebus ut addam — 

     Uror! habes animi nuntia verba mei. 

Shall I then speak out? Or is it unnecessary to point to a flame that betrays itself? Hasn't my love already stood out more than I would wish? I'd prefer it to lie latent till time permits sheer joy unmixed with fear. But I dissemble poorly; for who can conceal a flame betrayed by its own light? If you nonetheless expect that I add voice to acts -- I am burning. You now have the words that herald my heart.

Paris has no choice. To ask whether he should speak, he must speak. In voicing his question and its implications, he gives away the store. Not surprising that eloquar, the root of "eloquence," can be read here as a rhetorical question.

This eliding of the confession of love with the act of loving is consonant with the elisions we looked at earlier, involving space, time, giving, and self. Not all articulation works that way. I can say "I am going to the gas station" many times over, but it doesn't get me there. Saying "I love you," however, does what it says. The delicate relation of speech to action here makes it essential that we explore Paris's statement in relation to the larger mythic structure in which it plays an essential part.

For the author of this letter, passion and love are embodied in flammae. The paradox of fire is that it cannot be concealed, since it produces light, the very thing that enables things to appear. If I burn, you will necessarily see it, he says, even if I wish to keep my love hidden. Paris burning is the thing, the rebus; "I burn" are verba added to the unspoken. To say "I burn" is to "shed light" -- the light of language, of pointing (indice) -- upon light. Saying "I burn" makes patent and explicit what was latent, implicit. Indeed the very word for latent, lateat, lies hidden within the word laetitiae, the explicit consummated delight of Paris and Helen. Ovid, like Freud, loved puns.

Fire is of course a key motif that runs throughout the mythic tapestry behind this tale. Pardon the compression here, but it's necessary:

Hamartia and reversal in the Hippolytus

The stagecraft of Euripides is charged with tremendous compression. From the first moment Phaedra appears to the audience, she mirrors the dying Hippolytus who will be carried on at the end of the play:

Phaedra 

Raise up my body, hold my head erect! My limbs are unstrung. [200] Take my fair arms, servants!

αἴρετέ μου δέμας, ὀρθοῦτε κάρα:
λέλυμαι μελέων σύνδεσμα φίλων.
λάβετ᾽ εὐπήχεις χεῖρας, πρόπολοι. 200

Hippolytus 

Oh! Oh! I beg you by the gods, servants, handle my wounded flesh gently! [1360] Who is standing on my right at my side? Lift me carefully, draw me with muscles ever tensed, me the wretch, cursed by his father's misdeed.

φεῦ φεῦ: πρὸς θεῶν, ἀτρέμα, δμῶες,
χροὸς ἑλκώδους ἅπτεσθε χεροῖν. 1360
τίς ἐφέστηκεν δεξιὰ πλευροῖς;
πρόσφορά μ᾽ αἴρετε, σύντονα δ᾽ ἕλκετε
τὸν κακοδαίμονα καὶ κατάρατον
πατρὸς ἀμπλακίαις.

In response to Phaedra's condition, the nurse suggests that we are all unhappy lovers of the light we have, without experience of a life we yet seem to intimate:

Nurse 

Anything we might love more than life is hid in a surrounding cloud of darkness, and we are clearly unhappy lovers of whatever light there is that shines on earth [195] because we are ignorant of another life, since the life below is not revealed to us. We are borne along foolishly by mere tales (μύθοις).

ἀλλ᾽ ὅ τι τοῦ ζῆν φίλτερον ἄλλο
σκότος ἀμπίσχων κρύπτει νεφέλαις.
δυσέρωτες (sick in love with) δὴ φαινόμεθ᾽ ὄντες
τοῦδ᾽ ὅ τι τοῦτο στίλβει (glitter, gleam) κατὰ γῆν
195 δι᾽ ἀπειροσύνην (inexperience) ἄλλου βιότου
κοὐκ ἀπόδειξιν τῶν ὑπὸ γαίας,
μύθοις δ᾽ ἄλλως φερόμεσθα.

We cannot know, though we conceive, something greater than life to love. We are adrift in stories. The nurse then turns into a midwife/analyst, interrogating Phaedra's story, probing and prodding until she, the analyst, speaks the name "Hippolytus." That "touches" the queen. The nurse's clinical attitude is clear -- better to loosen up, confess your love, even act upon it, than to die from repressing desire. She takes her direction from this view.

Euripides prepares us for the physical and emotional rawness of this revelation scene in the epode of the first choral ode (the parodos), with the strong emphasis the chorus places on the twisted (δυστρόπῳ ) "harmony" of women in the "unhappy helplessness of birth-pangs":

Epode

Women's nature is an uneasy harmony, and with it is wont to dwell the slack unhappy helplessness of birth-pangs and their folly (ἀφροσύνας). [165] Through my womb also has this breath darted.

φιλεῖ δὲ τᾷ δυστρόπῳ γυναικῶν
ἁρμονίᾳ κακὰ δύστανος ἀμηχανία συνοικεῖν
ὠδίνων τε καὶ ἀφροσύνας. 165
δι᾽ ἐμᾶς ᾖξέν ποτε νηδύος ἅδ᾽αὔρα:

The scene between the queen and her nurse, the delivery of the utterance of Phaedra's hidden love is played both as scene of analysis and an act of parturition. Before bringing her secret into the world, Phaedra raves like a woman rendered helpless -- ἀμηχανία -- by the throes of childbirth. Her hysteria centering on Artemis is that of a woman on the edge of madness:

Phaedra
sung
[215] Take me to the mountain: I mean to go to the wood, to the pine-wood, where hounds that kill wild beasts tread, running close after the dappled deer! By the gods, how I want to shout to the hounds [220] and to let fly past my golden hair a javelin of Thessaly, to hold in my hand the sharp-pointed weapon!

Her fixation on the goddess is overdetermined. Artemis is of course the special devotion of Hippolytus, bound up with Phaedra's uncontrollable passion for her stepson. But the virgin goddess also alleviates the pangs of childbirth, as the continuation of the choral epode remembers:

But I called on the heavenly easer of travail, Artemis, mistress of arrows, and she is always—the gods be praised—my much-envied visitor. 165 ff

τὰν δ᾽ εὔλοχον οὐρανίαν
τόξων μεδέουσαν ἀύτευν
Ἄρτεμιν, καί μοι πολυζήλωτος αἰεὶ
σὺν θεοῖσι φοιτᾷ.

For the Greek women of the chorus, the course of love begins in Aphrodite's caresses and ends in the easing interventions of Artemis -- the two goddesses turn out to be as inexorably necessary to a child-bearing woman as they are mutually, radically antithetical.

For Phaedra this symmetry has gotten twisted, tied in a knot. She loves a man who adores the antithesis of love. The chaste goddess who could relieve her pain is linked to her erotic desire. Already wounded by Eros, the queen dreams of being a huntress. She turns to the Mistress of Arrows:

By the gods, how I want to shout to the hounds [220] and to let fly past my golden hair a javelin of Thessaly, to hold in my hand the sharp-pointed weapon!

When the nurse joins the name "Hippolytus" to the birthright of her children, Phaedra's birth pangs become insupportable:

Nurse 

But know well—and in the face of this be more stubborn [305] than the sea if you like—know that if you die you have betrayed your sons, who shall have no share in their father's house, none:
I tell you in the name of that horse-riding queen of the Amazons who bore a master to rule over your sons, a bastard with thoughts of legitimacy, you know him well, [310] Hippolytus. . .

Τροφός 

 ἀλλ᾽ ἴσθι μέντοι — πρὸς τάδ᾽ αὐθαδεστέρα
305 γίγνου θαλάσσης — εἰ θανῇ, προδοῦσα σοὺς
παῖδας, πατρῴων μὴ μεθέξοντας δόμων,
μὰ τὴν ἄνασσαν ἱππίαν Ἀμαζόνα,
ἣ σοῖς τέκνοισι δεσπότην ἐγείνατο
νόθον φρονοῦντα γνήσι᾽, οἶσθά νιν καλῶς,
310 Ἱππόλυτον . . .

Hearing the spoken name, Phaedra emits an involuntary gasp:

Φαίδρα
οἴμοι. 

With the preternatural sensitivity of one used to the labored signs of repression (the poet H.D. called Freud "midwife to the soul"),  the Nurse pounces:

Τροφός

θιγγάνει σέθεν τόδε; - does this touch you?

What has been growing in her must come out. As it does, her dream of holding the pointed weapon - ἐπίλογχον βέλος - turns around. Like Aktaeon, she's no longer doing the hunting, and the barbed arrows will give her no rest.

After this turn, the only pointed weapon Phaedra's hand will hold is a stylus. It will unerringly find its mark in Hippolytus, who will be carried onstage, helpless, like a woman in labor; broken, like a hunted animal brought to ground.

The closely wrought text of the Hippolytus accomplishes an unthinkable reversal: compressing opposed extremes into one tragic act, a queen nobly denying Aphrodite brings down the devotee of Artemis with an arrow forged by Eros. Does the arrow miss the mark (hamartia), or hit it?