The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016

by Tony Harrison

  La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé.

  Admittedly, it is a crucial line. A line full of mythical reverberations. For those who know the myth. And it’s not enough to refer the reader, as most French editions do, to the tableau généologique or the index mythologique. For one thing, we are preparing a piece for the stage and not the study. Tableaux and indices are not theatrical, at least in a would-be Racinian recreation. The line is the key to the inner struggle of Phèdre, to her essential torment. For those who are at home in the obscure genealogies of Crete! As an eighteenth-century commentator puts it, this line ‘semble préparer le spectateur à ce caractère mélangé de vices et de remords que le poète donne à Phèdre’. The key word in this is ‘mélangé’. Many simply stress that the line signals the bad heredity of Phèdre, as if it were simply a case of the mother, Pasiphaë, though R. C. Knight tentatively suggests that ‘Minos may perhaps stand for moral conscience’. Both elements of Phèdre’s parentage are of equal importance. The problem about expanding the line, and absorbing into it the facts given in study texts by genealogies impossible to project theatrically, is that the line occurs in a context of nervous reticence. It is an old story for Hippolyte and Théramène. Théramène cuts off Hippolyte with an abrupt ‘J’entends’. The line foreshadows the causes of Phèdre’s shame and her need to break through the barriers of shame; it articulates her tension, without Hippolyte having to transgress his own sense of propriety by being specific. It is an ‘enough said’ situation. The polarities represented by Minos and Pasiphaë are those which maintain the tension of the whole play and not simply the character of Phèdre. Minos and Pasiphaë, an emblematical marriage, are the opposite poles of the human consciousness. Minos (whose function we cannot ignore and who is given a disastrously misleading emphasis in Robert Lowell’s epithet ‘homicidal’) is one of the three judge figures in Greek mythology. He is the judge who punishes crime, as opposed to Aeacus, who represents division of property, and Rhadamanthus, the rewarder of virtue. Interiorised psychologically, as he is in Phèdre, he is that part of our selves which is judgement, prescription, that part that creates moral codes, imposes laws, fixes limits, the ‘frontiers’ of experience, defines the acceptable and punishes transgression. Pasiphaë is the transgressor of the codes created by Minos, that part of our selves that hungers for every experience, burns to go beyond the frontiers of current acceptability, specifically, in her case, to gratify her sexuality with a bull, incur the guilt of forbidden bestiality. She is what Henri de Montherlant made of her in his play Pasiphaé (1928): the woman who wants to transcend morality, accept every part of her nature, however ‘animal’ or ‘bestial’ it has been branded by the law-makers, to assert that nothing is unhealthy or forbidden. She rejects the codes of her husband Minos. The Minos/Pasiphaë duality is yet another statement of ‘civilisation and its discontents’. In that sense we are all children of Minos and Pasiphaë. The wedlock of Minos and Pasiphaë is a dynamic power struggle for the upper hand fraught with matrimonial tension, uneasy even in brief armistice. The struggle lives on in their daughter Phèdre, with the father Minos continually more assertive. I have isolated the function of Minos and made him simply ‘the judge’, who represents internally the moral conscience and is, in the exterior political world, a representative of ‘the rule of reason’, like the ambiguously placed Governor himself, only utterly unimpeachable:

  a judge so unimpeachable and just

  to have a wife destroyed by bestial lust!

  That may well seem a far cry from the cherished

  La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé

  and it is not intended as its formal equivalent. I have had to redistribute the energies of that renowned line over my whole version, surrender the more obvious nugget for a concession to work the whole seam more painstakingly.

  The problem, then, of Phèdre, as of us all, is that she contains within herself both Minos and Pasiphaë. That is the essence of the genealogy. She condemns the mother/female/accepter/‘transgressor’ in herself with the voice of the father/the male voice of punishment/repression/rigid social code. That is the psychological dynamic of the character. As with the outer political dynamic, I have sought to create an equivalent, but redistributed, nexus of imagery for the internal tensions. The ‘bestiality’ of Pasiphaë is seen as part of the threat of the alien, of that personified, often apostrophised India upon which the exiled British projected all that was forbidden in their own culture. The temple sculpture and painting of India depict, in a spirit of acceptance, what one particular picture reproduced in the National Theatre programme for Phaedra Britannica called ‘the love of all creatures’. It is a painting from Rajasthan of circa 1780 showing not only pairs of animals copulating, but women in joyful congress with a variety of beasts. One could well apply to it the long passage of the power of Venus from Seneca’s Phaedra:

  The dolphin of the raging sea doth love:

  the elephants by Cupid’s blaze do burn:

  Dame Nature all doth challenge as her own,

  And nothing is that can escape her laws.

  That in the translation of John Studley, 1581, the first English version of Seneca’s play. But the Indian picture goes just a little further, extends the frontiers of Venus into bestiality. This is quite beyond the limits of acceptability for the British in India, totally alien, though no doubt present in the dark recesses of the imagination. To Western eyes India seemed actually to celebrate a world where everything was sexually possible. The Western reaction was both fascinated (Pasiphaë) and repressive (Minos). It is the voice of Minos we hear speaking through Lieutenant General Sir George MacMunn:

  In the description of the astounding indecency which to Western eyes the temples of Conjeveram, of Jaganath and the Black Pagoda offer, mention has been made of the bestiality recorded: the mingling of humans and animals in intimate embrace … The ancient religions did permit such terrible abominations and India has always apparently been more openly acquainted with such matters than the rest of the world.

  When the guilt of Pasiphaë, which, it should be noted, is never specifically referred to in Racine, although it is, characteristically, in Seneca, is mentioned in my version it is intended with reference to what is depicted in the temples listed by Sir George MacMunn:

  Mother! Driven by the dark gods’ spite

  beyond the frontiers of appetite!

  A judge’s wife! Obscene! Such bestialities

  Hindoos might sculpture on a temple frieze.

  And the monster which kills Thomas Theophilus (Hippolyte) and seems to represent the suppressed passions of all the principal characters is described by Burleigh as being

  like one of those concoctions that one sees

  in dark recesses on a temple frieze.

  But on the faces of the women in the painting from Rajasthan, women being joyfully pleasured by everything from a peacock to an elephant, we have the spirit of Pasiphaë seeking the total joy that seems to lie beyond all remorse and moral codes. One senses the Yeatsian cry:

  When such as I cast out remorse

  So great a sweetness flows into the breast

  We must laugh and we must sing,

  We are blest by everything

  Everything we look upon is blest.

  The nearest my Memsahib ever gets to understanding such a mood is, ironically, in her envy of the young lovers she imagines untrammelled by the agonies that destroy her:

  To follow one’s feelings through nature’s course

  without recriminations and remorse,

  not to feel criminal, and meet as though

  the sun shone on one’s love and watched it grow!

  Ah! Every day they must wake up and see

  vistas with no black clouds, and feel so free!

  The tensions of the Minos/Pasiphaë polarity are maintained too in my images of the hunter, the Victorian type, projecting his inner repressed desires onto the fauna of India, amassing tiger pelts, covering his walls with animal heads, collecting
obsessive proof that he is in control of his own animal nature, that he is the fit representative of ‘the rule of reason’. The Governor himself is renowned as a great hunter, naturally, often scorning the rifle with its distant, rationally controlled despatch for closer gladiatorial combat with a bayonet. The images of the hunt are maintained, in one degree or another, in all the versions of the story: Euripides, Seneca, Racine. At the beginning of the Euripides play Aphrodite (Venus) herself complains of Hippolytus that he denies her not only by ignoring women, but also by driving wild animals off the face of the earth. Venus, the principle of generation, replenishes the stocks exhausted by the hunter. The nurse in Seneca tells the destructively chaste young man as much, imagining the world as an unpopulated desert without the influence of the love goddess:

  Excedat, agedum, rebus humanis Venus,

  Quae supplet ac restituit exhaustum genus;

  Orbis iacebit squallido turpis situ;

  Vacuum sine ullis piscibus stabit mare;

  Alesque coelo deerit, et silvis fera … (ll. 469–73)

  Come now, if Venus withdraws from human life, Venus, who makes our race complete and restores it when it is depleted, then the whole world will sprawl squalidly in a foul condition; the sea will come to a standstill, empty of fish; there will be no birds in the sky nor wild animals in the woods.

  The first speech of the Seneca play is one in praise of the excitement of hunting and a list of quarry. Ironically, one of the beasts listed – ‘latis feri cornibus uri’, ‘wild bison with wide-spreading horns’, probably some sort of buffalo – is described in an edition of 1902 as ‘extinct’ owing to the untiring perseverance of the hunter! There is another element to the obsessive animal-slaying. What is part of human nature, but not acknowledged, tends to be labelled ‘animal’. Even in today’s papers behaviour which does not even transcend the limits of acceptability as much as Pasiphaë’s is labelled by the Minos voice of judgement from the British bench as ‘animal’ or ‘bestial’. We are very nervous of our status on what used to be called ‘the scale of Creation’. And this is the point of the animal abuse with which the Memsahib finally rejects her ‘lower’ self in the shape of her ayah, or with which the Governor denounces Thomas Theophilus, when he tries to reimpose within his household the rigid limits he himself has clearly gone beyond outside the home.

  The Governor’s own position on this shifting scale of transgression and animality, with Minos at one end and Pasiphaë at the other, is decidedly ambiguous. The Governor both accepts and represses, he is both law and transgression. He is in many ways the classic male hypocrite. He avidly seeks experience outside the limits of his own code, or the code his society ostensibly subscribes to, but to do so he finds it necessary, as many Victorians did, to adopt ‘native costume’. Sir Richard Burton is only one of the most well known of models for such behaviour. In some ways the Governor carries the whole burden of the male Victorian dilemma. I wanted to state the conflict at a social and political level as well as at the psychological, as it is in Racine in slightly different form. Another redistribution. I took the clues for this from what the Victorian imagination found not only in its Indian experience, but also in its assessment of the Theseus legend itself. All ages have used the long-surviving classical heroes like Odysseus, Aeneas, Theseus to realise their own natures and preoccupations. W. B. Stanford’s The Ulysses Theme (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954) has charted the fortunes of Odysseus from Homer to Joyce, and Anne C. Ward’s The Quest for Theseus (London: Pall Mall Press, 1970) has done more or less the same for the hero of our present play. To the Victorians, who often cast themselves into the roles of classical heroes reborn, Theseus was a type of Victorian. John Ruskin, in Letter XXII dated 1872 of Fors Clavigera, sees in Theseus:

  The great settler or law-giver of the Athenian state; but he is so eminently as the Peace-Maker, causing men to live in fellowship who before lived separate, and making roads passable that had been infested with robbers and wild beasts. He is that exterminator of every bestial and savage element.

  With this as a guide one may specify merely from those combats with monsters, grotesques, giants and brigands that Racine uses:

  Les monstres étouffés et les brigands punis,

  Procuste, Cercyon, et Scirron et Sinnis,

  Et les os dispersés du giant d’Epidaure,

  Et la Crète fumant du sang du Minotaure.

  The accounts of early ‘law-giving’, the establishment of ‘the rule of law’ in British India, read like a British version of the same kind of heroic, semi-mythical exploit. And not simply the obvious sources like Sleeman’s account of the suppression of Thuggee, legendary brigands and murderers worthy of any Theseus, but others mentioned always in mythologising tones by, for example, James Douglas in his Bombay and Western India (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1893): ‘England is the St George that has slain the great dragon of infanticide which among the Jhadejas ravaged Kach and Kathiawar’, ‘Jauhar, that Cyclopean monster of self-immolation’, ‘the Hashashin’ (from whom we derive our word ‘assassin’), ‘Dacoits’, ‘Aghori Cannibals’, ‘the anthropophagous Mardicura’. Douglas is also typical when he dramatises in a mythological, almost hagiographical way the tiger slaughter of, for example, Sir James Outram, who in ten years was present at the deaths of 191 tigers, fifteen leopards, twenty-five bears and twelve buffaloes. He doesn’t mention what Aphrodite thought of Sir James Outram, but he hails him as ‘another St Paul, [who] had been a day and a night in the deep and fought with wild beasts’. ‘The wild beasts and wilder men’ of accounts like Douglas’s of the establishing of ‘the rule of law’ in British India represent the same stage of civilisation of the Greeks before Theseus, and the Victorians saw their own confrontation in his. So the Governor in Phaedra Britannica is, as John Ruskin wrote, ‘that exterminator of every bestial or savage element’, but, at the same time, he is also, as Sir Richard Burton was described, ‘an authority on all that relates to the bestial element in man’. This authority is acquired, of course, as the Governor, who represents ‘the rule of reason’ and suppresses alien bestiality, while, at the same time, as his other (‘lower’) self he explores his own animality in his forays ‘in native costume’. It is with these two contrasting elements in his father that Thomas Theophilus has to struggle. In an article in MacMillan’s Magazine for August 1889 Walter Pater adds an important qualification to a summary of the character of Theseus that, in other respects, is similar to Ruskin’s. His Theseus

  figures, passably, as a kind of mythic shorthand for civilisation, making roads and the like, facilitating travel, suppressing various forms of violence, but many innocent things as well.

  As law-giver, then, Theseus/Thésée/the Governor shares an element of repression with the father of Phaedra/Phèdre/the Memsahib. But only part. The other side of his nature, the seeker of new experiences, especially sexual, often ‘in disguise’ precisely because he cannot relate the two halves of his nature, goes hand in hand with the hunter of beasts and the suppressor of bestial custom. That which he is most fascinated by he represses most ruthlessly. He is a kind of mythic shorthand, if you like, for civilisation and its discontents.

  The Khan who imprisons the Governor in my version of ‘a season spent in Hell’ lies, on this scale of transgression, somewhere between the Governor and Pasiphaë. There is even a slight note of envy perhaps in these lines of the Governor’s:

  My captor was a beast, obscene, perverse,

  given to practices I won’t rehearse,

  to crude carnalities that overrode

  every natural law and human code.

  He’d draw the line at nothing. No taboo

  would stop him doing what he wanted to.

  The Governor has gone beyond ‘the frontier’ both geographically and psychologically. Some of the vocabulary of territory from our Anglo-Indian experience marks the boundaries very well. ‘The frontiers of appetite … of virtue … of blood.’ The Governor has gone beyond ‘the frontier’, beyond the
Indus, known everywhere as ‘the forbidden river’. H. Bosworth Smith in his Life of Lord Lawrence speaks of the Khyber Pass as ‘the forbidden precincts over whose gloomy portals might well have been inscribed the words of Dante’:

  ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here.’

  So the hellish overtones, the Stygian symbolism were created for me by those with some historical experience of the Anglo-Indian period I chose for my setting. Whatever the Governor has experienced, and he is, possibly through fear or shame, vaguely unspecific, he has finally seen the limits of the acceptable. His version of hell is being subjected to another’s unlimited will, and suffering in the way that many victims of his casual sexual whims might well have suffered. His experience is a vision of the monstrous, the non-human other, beyond all human access and control, even for a ‘law-giver’, something more terrible than mere animal or beast, something that cannot finally be suppressed or mounted on a Residency wall, nor even physically embraced. This monster defeats both Minos and Pasiphaë. A monster to whom victims must be fed. (‘Is there not a home among us that has not paid blood tribute to that relentless monster?’ writes an Anglo-Indian lady, meaning India.) The Governor’s vision is probably a glimpse of the monster that finally destroys his son. Whatever the experience he has had of Hell, it is one which makes him long for the circumscribed, apparently ordered world of his marriage and home. But the boundaries of that he finds are now shaken, the barriers in need of reconstruction, the edges blurred between inner and outer, Hell and earth …