Heracles' Hope in the Midst of Suffering

I don’t know the extent to which the culture of ancient Greece doubted its gods, but Euripides' tragedy Heracles certainly appears to question both their worthiness and existence. And when, in the course of human history, thinkers have entertained the idea that no gods exist, they always find something to replace them.

Heracles opens with the hero away performing his labours (mostly killing stuff) while an upstart ruler has evicted Heracles’ family from their home. Destitute and homeless, they supplicate Zeus for aid even as the ruler plans to execute them. At the last minute, Heracles returns, but the situation only gets worse. Hera sends Iris and Madness to drive Heracles into a frenzy during which he slays his own wife and children. When he returns to himself, he finds he has lost all by his own hands.

This story presents the gods in the worst possible light. The backstory is that Zeus cheated on Hera, sneaking into Megara’s bed and fathering Heracles. Hera exacts her revenge on Heracles and his family, using Iris and Madness as her pawns. We hear not a peep from Zeus despite all the supplication to him. Thus it’s no wonder that the characters repeatedly question the justice of the gods. After the bloodbath, Heracles openly holds the gods in disdain:

Let the glorious wife of Zeus now dance for joy and make Olympus shake with her footsteps! She has achieved her will; she has cast down from on high the foremost man of Greece, toppling him from his very foundations! What man would utter prayers to such a goddess? 

In the face of suffering, Christians claim that everything happens according to God’s will, which is unfathomable to mere mortals, but ever since antiquity, philosophers and common folk alike have seen the existence of evil and suffering as a significant challenge to the existence of any god worth the name. Would a good and all powerful god will the suffering of innocents? (previous post)

That is a riddle all believers face--as Heracles does. My copy of the play has introductory notes by Richard Rutherford, who states the play is merciless in its complete lack of hope for the hero. Instead of the deus ex machina coming at the end of the play to solve all problems, it happens halfway through and only stirs things up. And while some traditions hold that Heracles was later worshipped as payment for his suffering, Euripides has Theseus mention this briefly only to have Heracles shut him down. Nonetheless, I can’t help but disagree with Rutherford, for Euripides does indeed hold out hope.

Only it isn’t divine.

A recurring theme throughout Heracles is friendship. As the new Theban ruler Lycus subjects Heracles’ family to humiliation and worse, no one comes to their aid. The drama isn’t very long, but repeatedly the characters mention how friends tend to disappear in hard times. Amphitryon, Megara’s husband and the man who raised Heracles, states it as follows:

As for friends, some I see are not to be relied upon, while those deserving of the name are powerless to assist. So it is when men encounter misfortune. I pray that no friend of mine, even a mere acquaintance, may have this experience; there is no surer test of friends.

If Epictetus (or what I remember of his writings anyway) is anything to judge by, the vagaries of fate and the evanescent loyalty of friends are commonplace themes in ancient Greek literature, which is exactly why they stood out to me among all the more exciting elements. When you experience hard times, many friends would prefer to keep you and your affliction at an arm’s length, but a few will be there through thick and thin. This is the hope Euripides offers in a world where the gods are dubious entities at best.

This is hard to miss in the text, for not only does it show up repeatedly, but it is the note on which Euripides ends the play. Heracles is a defeated and broken demigod when his old friend Theseus shows up and offers some manly encouragement along the lines of “Quit crying and man up.” To this, Heracles is like, “Come on, everybody hurts sometimes,” and then Theseus, proving himself an understanding friend, is like, “Very well then. You’re welcome to crash at my place.”

They exit.

The caprices of fate strike us all, and when they do, maybe you turn your eyes to the heavens, maybe you don’t, maybe you feel a supernatural power answers, maybe you don’t, but undeniably the existence and qualities of any supposed divinity are uncertain. Friendship, on the other hand, while not always firm, is one hundred percent natural and experienced by all. In the absence of constant gods, we may find solace in inconstant humanity.

 

Django Unchained as Catharsis: Pity, Fear and Celebration

 

Aristotle said the essence of tragedy is “pity and fear.” Django Unchained--Quentin Tarantino’s spaghetti western about a former slave’s revenge--has much of that, and like Greek tragedy, the film unites viewers in a shared catharsis and goes beyond to celebration.

We find the following definition of tragedy in Aristotle’s Poetics:

“Tragedy then is the imitation of a good action, which is complete and of a certain length, by means of language made pleasing for each part separately; it relies in its various elements not on narrative but on acting; through pity (eleos) and fear (phobos) it achieves the purgation (catharsis) of such emotions.” (translation: G. M. A. Grube)

In Tragedy and Philosophy, Walter Kaufmann questions the usual translations for eleos and phobos, but if we take the traditional English equivalents at face value, Django Unchained certainly fits Aristotle’s definition. The horrors of American slavery--the lashings, the imprisonment, the split families, the sexual humiliation, the general abasement, the servitude--cannot fail to awaken a great deal of pity and fear in any who learn about them.

As the title of a book by philosopher Cornel West states, race matters. In America, we have grown up with the history of slavery and a subsequent century and a half of racial segregation, discrimination, prejudice, stereotype and hate. Racial tension persists today and has taken new forms and refreshed urgency in the blogs, forums, tweets and comments of cyberspace. For decent folk everywhere who have never questioned the dignity of all human beings, this ugly past that persists in staying is depressing.

And that’s why Django Unchained can provide catharsis. Catharsis is that moment in a highly dramatic film when you are in deepest, fully in tune with the characters and feeling their pain. It’s the emotional peak of Schindler’s List, The Shawshank Redemption, Legends of the Fall, Philadelphia or 12 Years a Slave. You’re riveted, you sneak a finger behind your glasses to wipe away tears, you take a deep breath . . . and then you feel as if a weight has been lifted. It’s all over now and the world looks different, starker somehow.

Much of the catharsis in Tarantino’s latest is achieved through the director’s trademark violence. Django blows holes in slave-owners, slavers and racists by the dozen. All the killing of white people caused some critics to complain that the film is a call to race warfare, but that misses the point. The film is, to my mind, primarily about killing, killing, killing the hell out of the awful legacy of racial prejudice.

And that feels good.

Tarantino’s uses of violence are anything but conventional. In Django Unchained, he uses violence as a tool for subverting narratives about race in America today. Many in America like to pretend that racial discrimination is behind us, so there is no need for discussion, while others sugar-coat talk of race with appeals to shared humanity and calls for dialogue. Django’s violence undercuts all that. The effect is not a literal or even metaphorical call to war, it’s a shared purging of past and present tensions through sublimation in art.

Thus it’s only fitting that Django Unchained moves beyond fear and pity to celebration. The film concludes with Django riding off with his wife, ending this tragedy with a happy marriage, if not exactly the traditional wedding of comedy. In art, an end is possible, but in real life the fight goes on.