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Realism in Euripides

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Realism in Euripides chapter 27 Realism in Euripides Michael Lloyd Realism as a literary mode is relevant to Euripides in both a broader and a nar- rower sense. His plays are realistic in the broader sense of representing actions which in general observe the laws of nature. They contrast in this with the plays of Aristophanes, in which it is possible to fly to heaven on a dung bee- tle (Peace), build a city in the air (Birds), or interact with dead poets in the underworld (Frogs). Place, time, and character in Euripides are relatively con- sistent and coherent. People and things follow continuous paths through time and space. This contrasts with Aristophanes’ more flexible treatment (e.g. in Acharnians or Clouds), and with his frequent indifference to consistency of character.1 Any attempt to distinguish realistic from non-realistic literature or art clearly depends on the belief that ‘representation’ and ‘reality’ are usable concepts, if not necessarily easy to define or the same in all cultural contexts.2 Euripides resembles Sophocles in being a realist in this broader sense, but also invites interpretation in terms of realism as it developed as a literary and artistic movement in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, most self- consciously in France in the 1850s. This is a particular manifestation of what J.P. Stern calls ‘a perennial mode of representing the world’, and does not imply limiting ‘realism’ to what he calls a ‘period term’.3 George Eliot’s classic state- ment of a realist aesthetic in Adam Bede (1859) associates truthfulness with the representation of commonplace things. This is contrasted as an appropriate subject of literature with ‘a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic suf- fering or of world-stirring actions’.4 This is elaborated by René Wellek: ‘It [real- ism] rejects the fantastic, the fairytale-like, the allegorical and the symbolic, the highly stylized, the purely abstract and decorative … The term “reality” is 1 See Lowe (2000) 164–173; Budelmann (2014). 2 For useful criticisms of Roland Barthes in this context, see Stern (1973) 165–167; Silk (2000) 212 n. 8. 3 Stern (1973) 32, 52. Contrast Grant (1970) 47: ‘The usual meaning of realism was, and is, that provided by the realist movement (or tendency) of the third quarter of the nineteenth cen- tury’. Zanker (1987) 3–8 gives a good account of what is involved in applying the term ‘realism’ to Greek literature, in his case Alexandrian poetry, stressing the aim of realism ‘to relate the objects of literature to the audience’s experience of nearby reality’ (8). 4 G. Eliot, Adam Bede (1859), Book Second, Chapter XVII = Furst (1992) 38. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004435353_029 606 lloyd also a term of inclusion: the ugly, the revolting, the low are legitimate subjects of art’.5 These moral and literary values go back to Homer’s Odyssey, with its sympathetic and indeed heroic portrayal of the swineherd Eumaeus.6 George Eliot’s interest in the commonplace points to a feature of Euripides’ plays which was noted in his own time. The ‘Euripides’ of Aristophanes’ Frogs offers something of a realist manifesto (907–991), rejecting Aeschylus’ preten- tious and exotic subject matter and stressing his own focus on the domes- tic, familiar, and everyday (oikeia pragmata, 959).7 In Euripides’ plays, this involves both taking lower-status characters more seriously and treating the heroes of myth in a down-to-earth fashion. The former aspect of his realism has clear parallels with the nineteenth-century realists, who avoided tradi- tionally elevated subject matter in order to focus on ordinary people. Aristo- phanes’ Euripides alleges that this is more democratic (Frogs 952), anticipating Courbet: ‘La fond du réalisme c’est la négation de l’idéal … J’arrive en plein à l’émancipation de l’individu, et finalement, à la démocratie’.8 Euripides differs from the nineteenth-century realists in that the dramatic conventions within which he worked required subject matter taken from the gods and heroes of myth, so that his realism has the complementary aspect of treating elevated subject matter in everyday terms. This has a nineteenth-century parallel in the operas of Richard Wagner, who chose to take his subject matter from myth but often focused on its more domestic aspects. Bernard Williams thus remarked that ‘Wagner is Ibsen inside out’, in that Ibsen gave bourgeois domestic drama the quality of Sophoclean tragedy while Wagner treated myth in terms of bour- geois domestic drama.9 Euripides both elevates the lower-status characters in his plays and treats the heroic characters as ordinary people, bringing about a convergence which is one of the most distinctive features of his art. Realism can be discussed to some extent in literary terms, with reference to subject matter and style. David Lodge has exploited Roman Jakobson’s distinc- tion between metaphor and metonymy to analyze realism in stylistic rather than referential terms: ‘Realistic fiction is dominantly metonymic: it connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and connected by cause and effect’.10 A work which is realistic in the broader sense defined above will rep- 5 Wellek (1963) 241. 6 For a good account of this aspect of the Odyssey, see Bowie (2013) 16–23. 7 On Aristophanes’ critique of Euripides, and its later influence, see Snell (1953) 113–135; Michelini (1987) 3–10; Kovacs (1994) 22–32; Halliwell (2011) 93–154. 8 Cited by Taylor (1989) 432. Cf. Csapo (2010) 122–123. 9 Williams (2014) 394 (in an article first published in 2000). 10 Lodge (1981) 22 = Furst (1992) 147; cf. Lodge (1977)..
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