Abstract:This article considers the role of emotion, memory, and trauma in literature. It analyzes the lead characters in Salman Rushdie's novel Fury and Homer's Iliad and suggests that the traumatic childhood experiences of Professor Malik Solanka and Achilles significantly influenced their anger and rage in their adult lives. It also discusses Sigmund Freud's thoughts about trauma and explains that his theory is based on the three basic concepts of repression, deferral, and overdetermination.
“…Homer's Iliad () begins with the image of rage, and Salman Rushdie's novel Fury () also begins with this emotion. Classicist Glenn Most () treats the Homeric depiction of the warrior Achilles and Rushdie's story of an enraged professor as related moments in the Western literary tradition. Most identifies in the two works a fundamental difference in the classic Greek vs. modern Western understandings of the psychological development and growth of the subject and asks what causes it.…”
Section: Freud's Achilles' Heel?mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Let us begin with one of Most's examples of Achilles' psychological state:Anguish gripped AchillesThe heart in his rugged chest was pounding, torn …Should he draw the long sharp sword slung at his hip,Thrust through the ranks and kill Agamemnon now?—Or check his rage and beat fury down?As his racing spirit veered back and forth,Just as he drew his huge blade from its sheath,Down from the vaulting heavens swept Athena(1.88–95; Homer :83–84) (Most :444)…”
Section: Freud's Achilles' Heel?mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Could the disproportionate, perhaps pathological anger of Achilles be understood as stemming from his known abuses in childhood?For eyes that can see, all the materials necessary in order to construct Achilles' psychoanalytic family romance are abundantly available: we can easily envision how the parents' acrimonious marriage and their neglect and maltreatment of the child, compounded by his upbringing at the hooves of an inhuman centaur in the desolate wilderness of Thessaly, by his uncertainties about his sexual identity, and by his obsessions with his own mortality might well have created psychological traumas resulting in the extraordinary mixture of narcissism, uncontrollable rage, lack of self restraint, vindictiveness, violence, unswerving loyalty to his friends, and boundless pity for himself that make up the charming personality of Achilles as an adult. (Most :449)…”
Section: Freud's Achilles' Heel?mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Most draws upon his familiarity with classical commentary to conclude that precisely this connection between the adult's observed rage and the child's known traumas was not made in the way we might expect.Achilles' anger was sometimes excessive and hence inappropriate, but no one in antiquity ever seems to have suggested that Achilles was simply ill. What is more, no one in antiquity ever even hinted that Achilles' notoriously excessive anger might have been the result of having had an unhappy childhood—indeed, the very notion that some Greek or Roman might have even imagined making such a suggestion seems just as ludicrous to us as such a suggestion would doubtless have seemed to them. (Most :448)…”
Section: Freud's Achilles' Heel?mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Why did Japanese worshippers of mountain religion fashion the Kunisaki peninsula in the form of the Lotus Sutra and what did they hope to achieve in so doing (Grapard )? What distinguishes Homer's Iliad and Salman Rushdie's novel Fury with respect to the psychological causes of rage (Most )? And, what is the difference between modern art and so‐called primitive art and how are both traps (Gell )?…”
Diverse phenomena in sociocultural life are analyzed with recourse to Peirce's concept of the dicent interpretant. Attention to the semiotic role of the interpretant, itself a sign that articulates with connected signs in the generative process of semiosis, contributes to expanded understanding of ritual and attendant anthropological objects. I discuss how semiotic ideology makes possible, and makes real, a particular transformation of potentials of form expressed as likenesses into actual existents represented as contiguities. I develop an indexical treatment of such transformations that I label dicentization. Indexicality and iconicity have become central to linguistic anthropology and dicentization offers an account of how they work together beyond language in cultural semiosis. The article generalizes and applies the resulting explanatory model to a range of social phenomena described in the literature, including Aboriginal Australian iconography, Medieval Japanese asceticism, Homeric and Freudian psychologies of rage, and traps and primitivism in African and modern art. The analysis contributes to a semiotic realist conception of the continuity of representation and reality. [dicent, interpretant, ritual, indexicality, semiotic realism]Our ability to perceive reality means that reality realizes (actualizes) itself in us; that this in turn is the only way that we can realize (appropriate through understanding) the fact that reality is so realizing itself in us; and that in so doing the self-realization of reality itself takes place. Keiji Nishitani "Religion and Nothingness" (1982:5) The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. The very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of an infinite increase in knowledge.
“…Homer's Iliad () begins with the image of rage, and Salman Rushdie's novel Fury () also begins with this emotion. Classicist Glenn Most () treats the Homeric depiction of the warrior Achilles and Rushdie's story of an enraged professor as related moments in the Western literary tradition. Most identifies in the two works a fundamental difference in the classic Greek vs. modern Western understandings of the psychological development and growth of the subject and asks what causes it.…”
Section: Freud's Achilles' Heel?mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Let us begin with one of Most's examples of Achilles' psychological state:Anguish gripped AchillesThe heart in his rugged chest was pounding, torn …Should he draw the long sharp sword slung at his hip,Thrust through the ranks and kill Agamemnon now?—Or check his rage and beat fury down?As his racing spirit veered back and forth,Just as he drew his huge blade from its sheath,Down from the vaulting heavens swept Athena(1.88–95; Homer :83–84) (Most :444)…”
Section: Freud's Achilles' Heel?mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Could the disproportionate, perhaps pathological anger of Achilles be understood as stemming from his known abuses in childhood?For eyes that can see, all the materials necessary in order to construct Achilles' psychoanalytic family romance are abundantly available: we can easily envision how the parents' acrimonious marriage and their neglect and maltreatment of the child, compounded by his upbringing at the hooves of an inhuman centaur in the desolate wilderness of Thessaly, by his uncertainties about his sexual identity, and by his obsessions with his own mortality might well have created psychological traumas resulting in the extraordinary mixture of narcissism, uncontrollable rage, lack of self restraint, vindictiveness, violence, unswerving loyalty to his friends, and boundless pity for himself that make up the charming personality of Achilles as an adult. (Most :449)…”
Section: Freud's Achilles' Heel?mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Most draws upon his familiarity with classical commentary to conclude that precisely this connection between the adult's observed rage and the child's known traumas was not made in the way we might expect.Achilles' anger was sometimes excessive and hence inappropriate, but no one in antiquity ever seems to have suggested that Achilles was simply ill. What is more, no one in antiquity ever even hinted that Achilles' notoriously excessive anger might have been the result of having had an unhappy childhood—indeed, the very notion that some Greek or Roman might have even imagined making such a suggestion seems just as ludicrous to us as such a suggestion would doubtless have seemed to them. (Most :448)…”
Section: Freud's Achilles' Heel?mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Why did Japanese worshippers of mountain religion fashion the Kunisaki peninsula in the form of the Lotus Sutra and what did they hope to achieve in so doing (Grapard )? What distinguishes Homer's Iliad and Salman Rushdie's novel Fury with respect to the psychological causes of rage (Most )? And, what is the difference between modern art and so‐called primitive art and how are both traps (Gell )?…”
Diverse phenomena in sociocultural life are analyzed with recourse to Peirce's concept of the dicent interpretant. Attention to the semiotic role of the interpretant, itself a sign that articulates with connected signs in the generative process of semiosis, contributes to expanded understanding of ritual and attendant anthropological objects. I discuss how semiotic ideology makes possible, and makes real, a particular transformation of potentials of form expressed as likenesses into actual existents represented as contiguities. I develop an indexical treatment of such transformations that I label dicentization. Indexicality and iconicity have become central to linguistic anthropology and dicentization offers an account of how they work together beyond language in cultural semiosis. The article generalizes and applies the resulting explanatory model to a range of social phenomena described in the literature, including Aboriginal Australian iconography, Medieval Japanese asceticism, Homeric and Freudian psychologies of rage, and traps and primitivism in African and modern art. The analysis contributes to a semiotic realist conception of the continuity of representation and reality. [dicent, interpretant, ritual, indexicality, semiotic realism]Our ability to perceive reality means that reality realizes (actualizes) itself in us; that this in turn is the only way that we can realize (appropriate through understanding) the fact that reality is so realizing itself in us; and that in so doing the self-realization of reality itself takes place. Keiji Nishitani "Religion and Nothingness" (1982:5) The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. The very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of an infinite increase in knowledge.
Heliodorus' novel,
Aithiopika
, is one of five surviving Greek novels. Although English‐speaking critics had generally demoted the ancient novels to the status of “romance,” in contrast with the modern bourgeois novel said to have arisen in the eighteenth century, these ancient prose narratives of love are in fact fully realized novels. What is more, they display a rich sense of character and character development, even though some critics have called this aspect into question. As the longest and most complex of the Greek novels, Heliodorus'
Aithiopika
has an especially rich narrative structure and depiction of character. It is no wonder that Sir Philip Sidney placed it in the same class as Homer's
Iliad
and
Odyssey
.
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