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Drama: The Point of Medea

This is an art critique I wrote a few months ago, but it follows a lot of my thinking and will help me relate when I eventually get into the rigorous mathy stuff. I should probably source everything eventually.

The Point of Medea - Josh Brewster

    Euripides' Medea (produced in 431 BCE) is an outwardly controversial play with anti-establishment sentiments, infidelity, malicious plotting, manipulation, treason, and child murder. It invites every manner of reaction to these grotesque, shocking, and seemingly absurd acts of destiny by well-known mythological figures. Its famous characters are portrayed in a more realistic and fallible light among society. 

     These are typical characteristics of Euripides's works, one of the three great tragedians of Athens (the others being Aeschylus and Sophocles) in the fifth-century BCE. This is also the first and only Greek tragedy where filicide goes unpunished and is performed in cold-blood over temporary madness (like that of Ino mentioned on line 1325, whom the Chorus relate Medea to). It also seems to do everything to antagonize the audience (the Greeks at the time). It features a dissenting female barbarian protagonist whose catharsis is the indulgent description of the King's and princess's murder, filicide of her own children, finally capped off by her convenient escape while bickering with Jason. This puzzled me. Euripides’s Medea invents a new ending to her story that is offensive and brutal to comedic levels yet maintains seriousness and conviction in a way I didn't understand at first, because what's the point? What was this play trying to say, if anything?

    The obvious or more superficial (but not wrong!) interpretations take a moralistic stance on the play, deeming it as merely offensive or misogynistic or otherwise a condemnation of Greek society at the time. That's all fine and good, but Euripides wrote this and entered this in a competition (and lost) in Athens in 431 BCE, what the heck was he thinking? Unfortunately, that's lost to history, as anything about Euripides himself is all in secondary accounts, many of which mocking him and his work. However, if we consider the history and culture of the time, we can come to understand what he COULD have thought and what this play CAN mean because of that. Context can help reveal both the signs of the times and Euripides's personal contributions to art. Lit theory.

    5th-Century Athens is known as "The Golden Age of Athens" or the Age of Pericles. The beginning of the Golden Age was marked by the defeat of Persia in 478 at Byzantium (later Constantinople/Istanbul). This began a period of intense prosperity and militaristic cultural hegemony. In this time, there were great efforts to promote literacy and active participation of citizenry in politics. The famous politician and orator Pericles (The "first citizen of Athens") became the center of politics, promoting populist ideas of equality over patronage and corruption (as long as laws were obeyed and the gods were observed). He and his followers recognized that the uneducated majority had no voice against the ruling and wealthy classes of the city. 
     
     Pericles effectively promoted participatory democracy. This led to the rise of socially supported Sophist schools which taught rhetoric and logic to get people thinking for themselves. Pericles also promoted athletics and the arts to engage and educate the masses, with emphasis on theater (tragedies, mainly) and literature in the arts. During this time, Athens transformed into the beautiful, artistic, progressive city we know of legend. Philosophers such as Socrates and Plato gained fame and for their ideas. The three great tragedians prospered, as well as countless other artists, scientists, and intellectuals. However, Athens had a darker side.

    Service to military, law, and the gods was strict and enforced, and women were considered property with few rights and little access to education. This was very much a period of great humanistic change, but was marred by imperialism and nationalism. The effect it had on art was a necessary reaction and was deeply influenced by Sophist teachings, notably those of Socrates, who openly challenged the status quo. This is where Euripides comes in.

    Euripides was a playwright in the midst of all this. Secondary sources say he studied under the artists and philosophers known as Anaxagoras and Prodicus. Prodicus was a first-generation Sophist and a known friend of Socrates. He was known for teaching linguistics, ethics, and naturalism. Naturalism is the philosophical idea that the world works through natural properties, as opposed to supernatural forces. Naturalist philosophy also holds that there are no spirits or deities or any inherent purpose in nature. This was an early form of metaphysics, in that it largely looks to linguistics (i.e. symbolism) for insight on nature, human or other. This was Euripides's foundation for his thought.

    Tragedies themselves were a public contest between playwrights, usually four per event. It was funded by the state with prizes for winners. Plays were sung and spoken and generally limited to two or three actors wearing masks to represent their characters. The actors themselves were cared for and pampered by the wealthiest families in Athens. The cultural significance of Greek Tragedy was profound. It was the state’s exalted form of media, comparable to that of modern cinema and television. One source cites Greek theater as "a social gathering for 'carrying out quite publicly the maintenance and development of mental infrastructure' and it offered spectators a 'platform for an utterly unique form of institutionalized discussion'." (Source) Theater was, very seriously, a way to educate an uneducated audience, to promote higher thinking through the cathartic impact of the works (the word catharsis was invented in the 4th century by Aristotle). This means most of the works were deliberate promotions of ways of thinking, and Aeschylus and Sophocles were on top of this. Euripides was the outlier.

    Euripides in his time was both celebrated and mistrusted. While his works accomplished the level of entertainment and impact sought in Greek theater, he was very controversial in message and delivery. He was celebrated because his plays were innovative and entertaining, but mistrusted due to his shocking portrayal of anti-establishment and heretical characters (mythical figures as everyday dissenting Athenians for instance). He was aligned with Socrates and is told to have been exiled for impiety to Macedonia near the end of his life, where he served the King's court until his death in 406 BCE.

    Now we have a proper backdrop for understanding Medea. Medea is drenched with Socratic language. Medea and Jason have clever arguments, Medea is boldly anti-establishment, manipulative to men, treasonous in her actions and words, and her efforts are aided by Helios, all resulting in a nice new life in Athens. Medea is cold-blooded and calculated. It's also as if the gods wanted Jason to be punished for breaking his oaths, rewarding Medea for following her destiny. There's a quality of satire and pure entertainment here that didn't go unnoticed for me. It doesn't stop there, however.

    Medea's actions can best be understood by her nature as a character. Medea is a woman and a Greek epic hero. As a woman in Greece, she incites themes of irrationality and sensitivity. As a hero, she is a paragon of justice and righteousness, observes destiny, and is driven to heroic actions by her very nature. She assists Jason to the point of sacrificing her own brother, dismembering him, and feeding him to monsters in pursuit. She faced exile from her land to start a new life with Jason, swearing oaths and having children. She went to great lengths to follow her destiny, and Jason's infidelity denied her honor in her choices. 
   
      Medea's revenge, thusly, was not only the passionate outcry of an individual, but was done on the grounds that it was rationally and absolutely the right thing to do, and that the sacrificing of her own children, whom she really did love, was an act of self-sacrifice only Medea the Hero was capable of in seeking justice and honor. Her comments about women in society among others are related to those ideas as well. Seems simple, right? Right, but how did Euripides think this was a good idea to write in the world he lived in? A probable answer lies with Greek philosophy.

    An important thing to understand with any philosophy is that while they may make many practical attempts at understanding humanity and nature, they rely heavily on observations of symbolism and beauty to make their point. This is from the assumption that those symbols can be the embodiment of those higher or natural meanings, beyond the human observer. Think of it as pre-scientific. These are subjective studies at heart and provide a powerful platform for art (it’s all just conveying feelings with symbols anyway), and Greek Tragedy was absolutely built on it. Socrates believed that beauty was in that which did not deny its nature. He believed human nature was inherently rational and grounded in a knowable, objective reality (more terms that didn’t exist), and that indulgence of rationality revealed the beauty around us and in ourselves. This therefore helped us prosper as individuals. 
     
     Euripides was schooled in this thought. This is the vein revealed in Medea and partly why it survives as a powerfully controversial work of art. It stands as testament to Socratic beauty and ways of thinking and in an extreme context, with all the impact, entertainment value, and nuance of a well-made Greek tragedy. Medea exemplifies Greek values of honor, justice, and individuality, but applies them in monstrous ways out of necessity. That’s shocking and uncomfortable for your average norm-follower. This is why Euripides was celebrated yet mistrusted for his work, as he was associated with Socrates's "decadent intellectualism," known at the time to be callously self-indulgent and destructive. What was crafted to be as nuanced and serious as Medea herself, instead seemed merely clever and cowardly as Jason to the majority of Euripides’s contemporaries.

    Euripides is cited as a pioneer of Greek New Comedy, where "imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates" as well as the use of deus ex machina plot devices (such as Helios's chariot) among others. Of the 92-96 plays attributed to him, only 18-19 survive.

Extra thoughts:

    Greeks (and most people in any time) assumed they could tap an essence of reality with their art (including athletics), and through that art reveal and connect to that essence, some absolute fact of life. It's through their potent and intoxicating formula for catharsis that they could teach these lessons to the masses, imprinting their angsty art-vibes on people's brains to improve their decision-making and communication skills, but more broadly their appreciation of life (often dictated by the state, unfortunately).

Aristotle believed that art was the imitation of nature, and used math and symmetry inherent in nature in search of “perfection, timelessness, and the relation between being and becoming.” He believed art was meant to show and not tell of these ideas and that the more perfect the imitation, the more it could accurately reveal about nature and ourselves as the human-crafted embodiment of those concepts.

In opposition to this viewpoint is that Oscar Wilde quote from The Decay of Lying that "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life." and that this "results not merely from Life's imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise that energy." Aristotle, as well as Plato and Socrates, believed we could know an ultimate reality, and that it found expression through beauty, art, and rationality, and that this should guide our moral and intellectual progress as a people. Oscar Wilde believed, instead, that art and beauty were simply life finding expression, that the meaning was arbitrary to both the artist and the spectator (also meaning no ultimate realities or essences, just compounded subjectivity). It was essentially all both craft and spectatorship. 
  
The expression they see in the art is their own expression (or feelings) coming to life through the art and was not, in reality, anything metaphysical or profound. Greek Tragedy's effort was to have the life (uneducated masses) imitate the art and was often state propaganda-infused for that (except for Euripides, because he’s a baller rebel with his Socratic propaganda). To the crafters of the art, many sought perfection through imitation of life and a whole slew of other pretentious nonsense. Greeks were just super obsessed with perfection in general, but for complex and deeply ideological reasons as I'm trying to get at. These reasons also weren’t exactly conscious for most Greeks, that’s what the philosophy tries to unveil. However, it shaped their emphasis on athletics and art and intellectualism, as well as military, nationalism, and religion and brought about the first rigorous and somewhat scientific standards for society, a prototype for Western culture.

    Life seems to be imitating art for me as well, as my own expression I've found in Medea is that of a very dense and connected piece of literature I wanted to pull apart, which reflects my own understanding of the world. I find Medea beautiful for its honesty and how it still provides a somewhat blank canvas for interpretation (which I blame on the massive amounts of themes associated with each word and character). This is what makes it art and is probably why it's in that fat and expensive book of ours. An artist crafted it using his own ideals, and the spectators spectate with their own ideals, and they all work. This was the essential idea behind 19th century realism by the way, and realism was also steeped in Socratic/Platonic ideas of beauty and ultimate realities. The fetishising of poor people in realist writings was also partly an attempt to get "closer to nature" since the poor were apparently so far removed from educated, rational minds that they better embodied ideas about our non-rational nature, as well as the whole quiet social justice thing those writers had going on.

Extra extra thoughts:

    If I had to make a takeaway from all the ideas I’ve presented and glazed over here, it would be that Medea is exemplary of Greek Tragedy and Greek culture. There are elements of realism and deconstruction that help this, where the characters are both rational and impulsive as any human being, where the catastrophe (from a normative moral perspective) is the catharsis (from Medea’s perspective), where Greece’s highest values are turned against themselves. All of the major Greek ideological themes (many contradicting ones, at that) are there and presented in a very precise way. This becomes its universality, a broad canvas of feelings that we grab onto as we see them. It feeds everyone’s point of view, whether they actually enjoy the play or not. I feel like Euripides had an understanding of linguistics and philosophy far beyond most of his contemporaries and divorced from common beliefs of the age, perhaps even those of Socrates, but I'm probably projecting modern ideas. Greeks are among the documented first to master their art and had a science about how to impact spectators, an early study of propaganda.

The final question from me, then, is whether Euripides really understood why tragic formula worked, why jamming themes on themes on opposing themes into a work made it universally impactful. Because for me, those themes and ideologies are merely patterns picked out of the noise of sensory signals we call life, based in our individual feelings/ability as human beings. I suppose I agree with Aristotle, then, that a closer imitation to life will be made up of a vast network of those themes. It’s not that those themes are real or that they point to some absolute, they’re all just patterns that are always becoming and never being (which Aristotle would disagree). Theory involves these patterns as, simply, ways of thinking.  
   
Language itself (in the broadest sense, i.e. written, oral, math logic, our thoughts, our tools, our physical interactions, etc.) is only a system for communicating ideas and impulses, and in that way could never hope to mirror life. It is instead a part of it, we aren’t separate from anything else, and perhaps this is what universal language really stands for. It also forces us to extrapolate the symbolism into an understanding of a way or many ways of things (our own or other), a feeling limited only by the language used to explain and internalize those ways. In presenting as many of those ways of thinking as possible in an open, concise, entertaining manner, whether or not the writer believed in only one of those ways of thinking, he captured a bit of life in that it’s all perspective. That’s the power of Tragedy, or any art or science for that matter. The flipside is that this lends itself to the propagandists, reactionaries, narcissists and/or absolutists who have an agenda or totally miss the point, or lack thereof, but whatever, that’s a different issue. Linguistics is pretty cool.

Sources: Wikipedia and a ton of other stuff I forgot, this ain’t academic work.

Also Roland Barthes - Mythologies and its main essay Myth Today