Gorgias Encomium Of Helen Violent Rhetoric Or Radical Feminism.pdf

Gorgias's Encomium of Helen: Violent Rhetoric or Radical Feminism? Author(s): Andy Crockett Source: Rhetoric Review, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 71-90 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/465780 Accessed: 17-09-2016 02:59 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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ANDY CROCKETT University of Arizona

Gorgias's Encomium of Helen:

Violent Rhetoric or Radical Feminism?I

A male/female binary undergirds our entire, as some have characterized it,

phallogocentric discursive system. Other dichotomies-subject/object, master/servant, writing/style, culture/nature-disseminate from it. In Cicero's

Of Oratory, Book 1, for instance, a discussion among men, Antonius critiques the Art of Oratory in terms of the female, going so far as to say that Crassus has "enriched and decorated her with the dower of diction" and has "associated [his] legal knowledge with Eloquence, as a little maid to follow at her heels"

(Bizzell and Herzberg 226, 227). Likewise, in Plato's Gorgias rhetoric is female. For Nietzsche as well as Derrida, "affirmative deconstruction" is woman; she affirms their subject position as they re-present or write her. For Freud, Rousseau, and Plato, nature and disorder are female. In academia "soft," "subjective" sciences like anthropology and ethnography, or, in the emerging

new rhetoric, the study of women's private written discourse are often thought of as "feminine," nonserious scholarship. To Levi-Strauss, we would not speak if woman had not become sign, an object of tribal exchange. And, returning to

antiquity, the Muses and the Fates, spiritual guides for artistic inspiration and

presiders over destiny respectively, were, moreover, groups of sisters-and not individual agents.2 What does it mean that structure and order are frequently figured, read as masculine; antistructure and disorder as feminine? Is speculation, critique, and so-called "radical" theory-i.e., that which does not fit, subverts, disturbs, deconstructs-therefore "female" by definition? Or is theory, that which explains, dependent on an opposition to woman and all that is symbolized by

the feminine? More specifically, what is the relationship among feminine "disorder," masculine "order," and male critics (myself included) that assume the position of woman? What exactly is meant by logos or persuasion? Few texts would seem to offer a better study of the symbolic as well as historical subordination of women to men than Gorgias's Encomium of Helen.

First, it originated in fifth-century BCE. Athens, popularly known as the font of

Western culture, "our culture," as Allan Bloom has asserted; Gorgias's Athens was also a "democratic" culture that excluded women from public affairs during one of the most misogynistic periods in history. Second, its author is male, whose aim was to exonerate Helen, male ideal and icon of beauty, for any

Rhetoric Review, Vol. 13, No. 1, Fall 1994 71

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complicity in her abduction by the Trojan Paris and consequent triggering of the Trojan war. Third, its subject matter is ultimately speech or logos itself, thereby foregrounding or showcasing the central characters at issue here: men

as speaking subjects, women as objects, and language as medium of exchange. But is a synchronic reading of this 2500-year-old text in translation valid? Julia Kristeva would appear to say that it is, according to her concept of

"monumental temporality," which is "without cleavage or escape" (Woman's Time, qtd. in Bizzell and Herzberg 1254). That is, no single text escapes contamination by gendering; no cleavage separates my critical position in the present moment from texts created in antiquity. As actual and fictive examples of discursive gendering accumulate, they begin to form a coherent or whole picture. But Kenneth Burke's postmodern dictum-"the main ideal of criticism is to use all that is there to use" and to examine those very places where contradictions between form and content arise (Covino 121-22)-suggests that

the text under study should be historically located to the extent that information is available. Likewise, my own authorial position-male, American, middle class, etc.-would need to be accounted for as well. Then again, if phallogocentrism is foundational, the "story" remains essentially unchanged

across time, cultures, and individuals; in this light the "places" Burke speaks of are not separate, temporally isolated parts of discourse but interconnections in its very, singular fabric. Thus, what follows is a poststructuralist feminist reading of the Encomium that also attempts to explore its cultural and historical

contexts; the aim is to gain an appreciation for Gorgias's task and tap into the collective or "monumental" discursive foundation that underwrites the whole situation.

What Was It Like to Be a Woman in Ancient Greece? What we have come to learn about the heroic era of Helen and the classical era of Gorgias encourages a feminist rereading of the Encomium if not of Gorgias's intentions. Yet we have to remind ourselves that any historical

narrative is but one of a multiplicity of intertwined strands. The growing evidence and methods of reading the past are compelling, but they are still interpretive. From the present perspective, it is easy to make the mistake of

compressing the hundreds of years that separated Helen and Gorgias into a conveniently simplistic representation. An exhaustive historical contextualizing

is beyond the scope of this paper, and, regardless, any "factual" historical account is, technically speaking, anathema to a poststructuralist reading. Given these constraints, we can still enact a dialogue between the signs and symbols in Gorgias's text and those to which they point in the culture-his, Helen's, and

our own-in the spirit of the idea that words indeed carry their own histories with them.

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Gorgias's Encomium of Helen: Violent Rhetoric or Radical Femninis.m? 73

Fifth-century BCE Athens, the zenith of Attic society and the time of Gorgias (484-380), was preponderately phallocratic. It was a culture, as Eva Keuls explains in The Reign of the Phallus, that quite literally worshipped the phallus-for instance in the form of huge, phallic floats in phallus-celebrating parades. This is not to be confused with cultures, widespread at the time, that worshipped the male reproductive organ in union with the female for its creative, life-giving power. The phalluses portrayed in the hundreds of vases Keuls has studied and their relations to other narrative elements both in Athenian pictorial art, poetry, and mythology are configured more as clubs and weapons of violence than symbols of cosmological support and harmony. As Keuls explains: In the case of a society dominated by men who sequester their wives and daughters, denigrate the female role in reproduction, erect

monuments to the male genitalia, have sex with the sons of their peers, sponsor public whorehouses, create a mythology of rape, and engage in rampant saber-rattling, it is not inappropriate to refer to a reign of the phallus. Classical Athens was such a society. (1)

This society was sharply stratified into layers of nobles (by birth and consequent wealth), peasants, slaves, and free laborers (whose marginal lives lacked official attachment to their employers and thus were subject to their whims). The slaves who were women also functioned as concubines and maids

(Kagan 39-40), and, like those who were prostitutes, were at the mercy of their male owners' sexual demands, abuse, and physical torture. A strict code of laws kept the categories of whore and mother separate and under strict control

(Keuls 7-8, 206). The names of women were also often suppressed, reducing

them to the status of mere conduits for males, whose guarantee of citizenship derived from the name and place of birth of their fathers and maternal grandfathers, while their given names denoted mastery, strength, and power.

The Greek word for woman, gyne, meaning childbearer, directly reflects this

anonymous, vessel-like function (88-90). Women's lives were confined to the domestic sphere of maintaining the man's household and producing and caring for his offspring-hopefully, male heirs. Female infants, on the other hand, were often abandoned to die. Women's

dowries afforded them some legal leverage within marriage, but otherwise the marital fate of women was decided when they were young (in their early teens) while husbands were usually a good generation older, thereby enjoying the power accorded by such a difference. Not only did the male civic or public realm virtually exclude women, but men were also granted the freedom to seek

sexual fulfillment from women of lower class, hetaerae (a designated class of concubines), slaves, and young men (Lerner 202; Flaceliere). While male

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sexuality embodied both reproduction and pleasure in a single combined urge,

female sexuality was split into two psychologies: those who have more sex than they can accommodate, or prostitutes, and those who are allowed sex only for procreation, or wife-mothers (Keuls 204-05). The third possibility, the role of concubine forced upon Helen, an ill-defined middle ground between wife and whore, further fragmented the woman's psyche. The myths inherited by Athenian society from the Homeric era and portrayed in its poetry and visual art depict the same gynophobic and misogynistic attitudes and behavior. The slaying of amazon figures, for instance, is common, reflecting a terror of women. This fear was targeted not

only at their reproductive powers (addressed in greater detail later in this paper) but also, should they assert themselves, at their conditioned lack of training and experience to function civically, a self-fulfilling male prophecy (Keuls 3-5, 6163). Finally and most importantly, the myths involving Helen are played out in classical Greek art. According to Keuls, "the principle of fragmenting the female was present in Greek mythology long before Attic civilization reached its zenith" when "the Trojan youth Paris serves as judge in a beauty contest of

the three principal Greek Goddesses and is bribed by Aphrodite, with the promise of Helen's love, to award her first prize" (206).

Born from such stock, she had godlike beauty, while taking and not mistaking, she kept. In many did she work much desire for her love, and yet her one body was the cause of bringing together many

bodies of men thinking great thoughts for great goals.... And all came because of a passion which loved to conquer and a love of honor which was unconquered. (Bizzell and Herzberg 40)

Women were allowed to attend marriages and funerals, participate in religious festivals and cults, and serve "ritual presidency over the transitional

experiences, dying and birth" (Padel 5). But the cultic function of women was a

mixed blessing, for while it was essential to the passage of life from, say, a physical to a spiritual, or a social to a symbolic realm, it was contained and did

not accord women power in the public or civic domain. It was quite literally the

"shit work" of the culture, for it involved containment of pollution (Douglas). Transitory or liminal states are dangerous because they suspend order and involve the transgression of boundaries. By being directly associated with these

liminal states, by functioning as vehicles for their passage, women not only served as ciphers, in effect, or channels, but also were prone to contamination. Female power, its relation to darkness and chaos, needed to be controlled lest it

disorder the whole rationally and civically ordered patriarchal system. Greek life was patterned by rules about male contamination by female excreta, afterbirth, breast milk, menstrual blood, and so on. These interdictions

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Gorgias's Encomium of Helen: Violent Rhetoric or Radical Fenminism ? 75

(by the way, not peculiar to Greek culture), such as that which says that a man

must not enter the temple after sexual intercourse or that which instructs that menstruation must take place beyond the community, derive not from hygiene, as Mary Douglas would explain, but the need to distance, objectify, and order

darkness and chaos. Gendered female, the physical body, its orifices and their uncontainable "polluting" fluids, including the womb's labor, symbolically orders the "lower" rungs of the social hierarchy, the "top" being reserved for the reason of men.

Who Was Helen? In terms of the anomalous, nature, the body, disorder, and the nonmale

Other, the scant scholarship about Helen is very revealing. Helen was an incarnation of the Virgin Moon-goddess, daughter of Queen Hecuba, or Hecate,

who embodied the Crone, making her a fertility goddess and protectress of witches. As is popularly known, the worship of "darkness" by witches has been

misconstrued, feared, and punished by guardians of light and reason. Helen also "was worshipped as an orgiastic deity at the Spartan festival Helenephoria, which featured sexual symbols carried in a special fetish-basket, the helene" (Walker 382-83). Thus, Helen was associated with the sacred yet dangerous,

the tempting yet contemptible, what we might call the carnivalesque. The mythology surrounding Helen turns on a series of deceptions, seductions, and abandonments. Helen chose her husband Menelaos from a group of suitors because King Tyndareus was afraid to do the matchmaking himself for fear he would upset those princes not chosen. Therefore, what may

appear to have been independence for Helen was actually convenience and comradeship for men. When Paris arrived on the scene several years later, it was easy for him to "seduce" Helen and take her to Troy because Menelaos was

at his own grandfather's funeral. For Paris's sake, Helen abandoned her daughter by Menelaos, Hermione.

Paris, incidentally, won the hand of Helen through a promise from Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty (not to be confused with the strictly procreative sex represented by Demeter). If Paris, acting as sole judge, would select Aphrodite as winner of a three-goddess beauty pageant, she would, in exchange, give him access to the most beautiful woman in creation, Helen. Aphrodite's "crown" was an apple (an interesting cross-reference to the tree of

knowledge in the Garden of Eden). The events leading up to Paris's possession of Helen are also revealing of the kinds of qualities gendered female. Thetis (a

goddess) and Peleus (a mortal), later to be parents to Achilles, were getting married, as arranged by Zeus. The infamous apple, with the words "for the fairest" inscribed on it, was cast into the wedding by Eris, goddess of discord, who wasn't invited for obvious reasons (Graves); here again we see discord or

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chaos identified with the feminine. Three goddesses, three competing symbols

of femininity, vie for the apple: Hera the matron, Athena the sexless one, and Aphrodite the sensualist (Keuls 206). In exchange for the crown, Hera promised Paris a rich kingdom and power; Athena offered wisdom and military

success; and of course Aphrodite guaranteed him love of Helen, the world's most beautiful woman. When they lose the contest, Hera and Athena in stereotypical female rage vow to destroy Troy (Graves). On the other hand, after winning the apple, Aphrodite is reputed to have "removed her clothing to show the young man the perfection of her form" (Larousse 133, 159). (So Aphrodite was indirectly responsible for the Trojan war, thereby fulfilling the

age-old stereotype of women as untrustworthy temptresses.) In contrast to Aphrodite, Helen represented the ambiguous sexuality of the concubine. This ambiguity is highlighted by Menelaos's reaction upon first seeing Helen after the Trojan War: "Menelaos . . . went in pursuit of his unfaithful wife with the intent of killing her, but after he caught sight of her, particularly of her abundant bosom, he was overwhelmed by desire and decided

to take her home after all" (Keuls 397). Menelaos, it seems, though playing the role of husband and warrior, was reduced by Helen's bosom to a son. He'd truly come home.

The Binary Underwriting the Whole System The preceding section demonstrates an exclusion of women and the feminine that asks for a rereading of Gorgias's Encomium that starts with a look

at his frequent use of nature as trope for both defining Helen and the foundation of the culture. Gorgias entertains four explanations for Helen's voyage to Troy

and vindicates her on all charges: against Fate or a god's decision, Helen is of course blameless, same for the "dread" use of force, seduction of love, and of the verdict, logos or "persuasion," the ingredient added to logos. Yet the subordination of women, beauty, and the irrational to men, knowledge and power, so entrenched in the classical Greek culture, is also embedded in Gorgias's language and syntax. The rape of Helen seems to have been already scripted by the phallogocentric system into which she was born. According to legend, Helen had already been abducted by Theseus, the provincial, Athenian national hero before the era of Athenian hegemony. In order to give the caddish

Theseus heroic status of panhellenic proportions, a rendezvous with Helen was

inscribed into the already existing mythology. (Theseus had to return her, of course, so other legendary events could run their course [Keuls 58].)

Paradoxically, this subordination both enlightens and undermines Gorgias's argument: on the one hand, it reinforces Helen's victimization by logos; on the

other hand, it exposes the mechanism that "gives birth" to phallogocentric "persuasion."

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Gorgias's Encomium of Helen: Violent Rhetoric or Radical Feminism:' 77

The following excerpts (emphases added) reveal the extent to which Gorgias's "praise" of Helen is grounded in the construct of "nature," which in

the Greek nominative singular (physis) is a feminine noun [rl pxya = literally, nature, character].3 Now it is not unclear, not even to a few, that in nature and in blood the woman who is the subject of this speech is preeminent among

preeminent men and women. [(paa = dative singular "by nature"; KJGWI yXv -XV?1 literally, by nature and birth/descent] For it is the nature of things not for the strong to be hindered by the

weak, but for the weaker to be ruled and drawn by the stronger, and

for the stronger to lead and the weaker to follow. [7trF'vK, which includes past of physis = 3rd person singular perfect tense; literally:

it has been by nature = it is born = hence simply, it is] Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works: it can stop fear and banish

grief and create joy and nurture pity. The effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies. For just as different drugs dispel different secretions from the body, and some drug and

bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion. For the things we see do not have the nature which we wish them to

have, but the nature which each actually has. f(Pi0mv (physin) = accusative (direct object case) feminine; the second nature was added for better English and is not repeated in the original; instead Gorgias simply uses the relative pronoun in the accusative (by attraction) case; literally: things that we see do not have the nature which we wish them to have but (that) which each of them has.] Thus it is natural for the sight to grieve for some things and to long for others, and much love and desire for many objects and figures

is engraved in many men. [IJ9P1JK? = pephyke- = same as the second passage above: it has been done by nature; it is] "Nature" or physis defines Helen's beauty and her preeminence, the power of god's predetermination, the real as opposed to apparent nature of things, and

our natural tendency to grieve for some things and long for others. Nature becomes a kind of convenient material base on which to build a theory of

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persuasion, but Helen's material condition doesn't get transformed. "It is just therefore to pity her but to hate him," Gorgias states (40), but pity like charity seems only to further entrench the lower caste represented by Helen. As Lacan

wrote, "Images and symbolsfor the woman cannot be isolated from images and symbols of the woman" (qtd. in Owens 71).

Let's remind ourselves that Helen's mother was a mortal creature of nature, a swan, who was raped as well by Helen's father, the god Zeus, an immortal.4 This ongoing, indeed generational rape of nature by culture-and women by men-cannot be spelled out more clearly. Here the "pure" white body and long neck of the swan (better to incubate knowledge and separate it from the body?) and the proximity of the cleansing yet uncontainable property of water seem especially significant. Helen's beauty and parental heritage placed her in a double bind: on the one hand, her inferior female position in the social hierarchy could be explained as a procreative function of nature, reinforced by

the fact that her mother was an animal. On the other hand, nature's disorder and ambiguity could be used to explain the same in Helen, who as a virtual phenomenon has been subject to numerous attempts to classify, define, and order her. For these reasons women since Helen have been made to stay in their literal and figurative homes and perform the function of channeling nature into civilization (Pateman 21-23). Ironically, through his binary style, Gorgias enacts this subjugation of nature as he indicts the rape of Helen. Helen is a "figure" for the very

persuasion Gorgias has convicted. He subjects her to further redemption, so to speak. She is speech, stylized by men; she serves as the opposite of logos (logic, reason, law, the word of God). As shown, nature is a feminine noun, but logos

is masculine [o ?ol6o6j. She is play, which, Derrida says, Plato found use for

only if it was contained (156, my emphasis).5 (Note that feminists are often disparaged for not having any "style.")

My claim here is simply that the culture/nature dichotomy that structures Gorgias's entire piece is underpinned by a male/female subordination that engenders all other either-or binaries, explicit and implicit. One such binary

might be called intellect/beauty. Gorgias stylizes Helen's legendary "beauty," an attribute, Cate Poynton explains, usually penned to women and always associated with the feminine, as a "challenge" or "reward" to the male intellect (48). Gorgias abstracts her ideal beauty from the ground of her body and

immortalizes it, making of it a symbolic law and making her larger than life, superhuman, that is, monstrous or anomalous (see Parsons) and inferior to reason (Foucault, Madness and Civilization).

Another such binary is desire/fulfillment or "conquer"/"unconquered." Throughout the speech Helen's only active participation comes in the form of

desire. And yet this desire is really the result, as with Foucault's hysteric (13840), of an insufficiency elsewhere, giving only the appearance of activity. She is

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Gorgias's Encomium of Helen: Violent Rhetoric or Radical Feminism? 79

indeed as susceptible to the force of love as she is to logos. These binaries give rise to other dualisms that infiltrate or, should I say, form part and parcel of Gorgias's prose. The opening section is revelatory of this: What is becoming to a city is manpower, to a body beauty, to a soul

wisdom, to an action virtue, to a speech truth, and the opposites of these are unbecoming. Man and woman and speech and deed and

city and object should be honored with praise if praiseworthy and incur blame if blameworthy, for it is an equal error and mistake to

blame the praisable and to praise the blamable. (Bizzell and Herzberg 40)

This binary or oppositional style is the tension that structures the entire piece. Indeed the effect (and cause) of such a style or grammar is the desire for

conquest. As one of my graduate professors once said: "Subject-verb-object; Man-fucks-woman." And as the above passage from Gorgias shows, the active

Subject is "manpower" or the city, while the passive "object" is the woman, not

an agent of "speech" nor a doer but a "deed." As Judith Butler explains in Gender Trouble, the "substantializing" of gender in nouns helps create the illusion of a stable identity and in so doing creates the further illusion that we are the cause of our thoughts and actions. Gorgias thus predicates his ideas on "facts" of hierarchical adjectival assertions such as "godlike beauty" and "powerful lord."

But once we dispense with the priority of "man" and "woman" as abiding substances, then it is no longer possible to subordinate dissonant gendered features as so many secondary and accidental characteristics of a gender ontology that is fundamentally intact. If the notion of an abiding substance is a fictive construction produced

through the compulsory ordering of attributes into coherent gender sequences, then it seems that gender as substance, the viability of man and woman as nouns, is called into question by the dissonant play of attributes that fail to conform to sequential or causal models of intelligibility. (Butler 24)

Modifiers supplement or turn meaning away from the noun they are modifying, mystifying the very object they purport to reify. Gorgias's prose is most adjectival when modifying the beauty of Helen. As the following section shows, however, the trope of nature is not as

unproblematic as Gorgias-and this analysis heretofore-would suggest. It is

the very impossibility of a "nature" separate from any endeavor to embody or configure it that muddies binary distinctions. Critiquing unfair subordinations

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is one thing; exposing the boundary that makes for the subordination is another.

Nature Is a Construct to Be Transgressed

The message is that phallogocentric language emerges from acts of transgression. Simplifying to the extreme: Inasmuch as man or the masculine

controls this language and seeks control of it, Helen is the sign of power, the "phallus," as Lacanians would say, and men desire-an important term for Gorgias-her, write (about) her in repeated acts of transgression. The phallus is merely an illusion, though; no man truly possesses it. It is a dream of power, which can be sustained only through subsequent transgressions (Butler 13-15, 43-50). In oedipal terms Gorgias can therefore be only a father in this transaction, "one of the guys"; he cannot preach divine law.

Like a liberal humanist, Gorgias empathizes with Helen, but in doing so he merely appropriates her, in a sense colonizes her, despite his "good" intentions. In reifying Helen and her "beauty," Gorgias replaces or mimics her in writing, with writing. By the same token he takes shape by resisting and substituting for her, just as so-called tribal groups were shaped and named by their exchange of women. The intellectual, male act of writing, then, is an act of desire for presence that simultaneously forbids its fulfillment. And for men, what more desirable presence is there than a woman of "perfection," a woman without history or organs, a wonder woman (Owens 72-73)?

Another way to express this idea that Gorgias's project is phallogocentrically and binarily doomed from the outset is to say that by a transgression of that perfection of Helen that persuasion literally breaks through to a beyond, a new insight, a more striking portrait, an "original" or "seminal" work, but that breakthrough is always bound with, and is, its limit (Foucault). As Stallybrass and White say in The Poetics and Politics of Transgression, "cultural identity is inseparable from limits, it is always a boundary phenomenon and its order is always constructed around the figures of its territorial edge" (200). The bourgeois or learned class distance themselves from the marginal folk to write about them; and yet to write about them, the

bourgeois must get entangled and muddied, if you will, with the earthy, bodily language of the marginal.

We have a model then, in which equal weight must be given to both

words in the term 'discursive domain': if every location is a specific discursive practice, location itself is in turn 'placed' and ranked according to the topographical priorities of the discourse in question. (Stallybrass 195)

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Gorgias 's Encomium of Helen: Violent Rhetoric or Radical Feminism? 81

If we think of Helen as a "place" of reproductionn (i.e., of discourse, male heirs, ideals, mysteries), again as nature, and Gorgias as dom(a)in-ant practitioner of that discourse, we see that the boundary separating the two is not only illusory but illdefined. Again, the Encomium in particular and

phallogocentric discourse in general are informed by the very "mess" (i.e., women, darkness, the earth, carnival) they seek to objectify. Kristeva might call

this nonobjective boundary the abject. As Stallybrass and White say, "Disgust always bears the imprint of desire" (191). Or, as Mary Douglas says, order

patterns disorder (2-3). Gorgias praises Helen. But the construct of Nature endures. Structuralists led by Levi-Strauss have posited a universal nature/culture distinction based on allegedly common

systems of kinship involving the exchange of women. But even if these exchanges are universal, their logic simultaneously conceals or excludes the very matter or sex out of which that logic is built. Clans are defined patrilineally by the absence or deportation of women, yet it is through their importation of women that they as-sign their name. In the end the difference between men is defined, their relations are strengthened, while women, the exchange of whom makes the male difference possible, are not identified except

as raw commodity. The totalizing or closed property of language is reflected (i.e., women merely reflect, mirror, or mime their husbands and fathers) by the women-for instance, Helen-it pretends not to exclude. And nevermind the

heterogeneity of "natures" conceived across all eras and cultures (Butler 36-43). Levi-Strauss has also posited the incest taboo as a universalizing structure.

Yet as Foucault shows, this construct can be deconstructed. If incest is taboo,

then it is unnatural; but if it is universal, then it must be natural. As Lacan would explain, it is the interruption of the incestuous mother-child bond by the

father or the phallic order that "erects" a symbolic order that warrants against further incestuousness. Paris and Helen did not commit incest, of course, but his rape of her was in some ways incidental to the graver crime, which was

Paris's violation of the all important hostlguest code (Jarratt 59). Instead of

acquiring Helen through the kind of exchange Levi-Strauss would deem cultural, Paris stole her, another state's most cherished property. This crime not only transgressed established laws about exogamy and exchange of male property, but it also demonstrated that these all-powerful, "universal" structures

and the laws that enforced them gave way to desire's mandate. The unspeakable crime of rape is displaced onto the speakable transgression of law; to sustain the inferiority of "nature," logos prevails again. The law is broken so the law can be spoken.

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Gorgias's Incompatibility with Feminism on One Level

Perhaps for some moderate or "liberal" feminists, the foregoing analysis of

Gorgias "throws the baby out with the bathwater," to use a trite but significant expression. We should not, they might contend, forsake the main "thrust" of Gorgias's speech, but appreciate it for separating Helen from the abuse and

power of language. Susan Jarratt is one critic who has praised the sophists for being a voice compatible with feminism within the white patriarchal Greek hegemonic system:

Under [Plato's] system, rhetoric followed after dialectic as a science of discovering the nature of the soul upon which a speech will act. For Plato, rhetoric was the means of delivering truth already discovered through dialectic; whereas, for the sophists, human

perception and discourse were the only measure of truths, all of which are contingent. Though Plato provided a place for women in

his ideal republic, and despite the fact that women of course were oppressed well before the fifth century, the philosophical edifice

built by Plato has provided a conceptual ground for centuries more exclusion. (64, emphasis in original)

Gorgias and Protagoras . . . employed narratives to radically reconstruct their own histories in terms which opened space for

difference. In Gorgias's imaginative reconstruction of Helen's

abduction, desire, will, and language throw open the traditional causal logic of her case and, in so doing, dislodge a mythic source for misogynism. (74)

Jarratt identifies the concept nomos as a key part of the process of democratic reform by which humans used discourse and reason to challenge

mythically or naturally based, monarchically imposed laws and conventions. Nomos first allowed for human agency in the ownership of land and later the negotiation of laws and the consequent creation of human custom (41-44). It

signified an opposition to the inherited mythic-poetic tradition of knowledge on one hand, and to the rational, monolithic Logos of the Platonism of the coming century on the other (Schiappa 201-02). But in Jarratt's enthusiasm about the sophists as an emergent antipatriarchal voice, she may be glossing over the subtler purposes of Gorgias's logos. (Schiappa clarifies that sophistic logos was a precursor to "rhetoric," which did not emerge in the vocabulary until the next

century. Jarratt appears to use the term rhetoric to include the sophists' project

[71].)

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Gorgias's Encomium of Helen: Violent Rhetoric or Radical Feminism? 83

True, Gorgias was not an Athenian citizen. He practiced an art that was marginal, and typical of the sophists, he traveled from place to place as he practiced, thus exhibiting behavior conventionally gendered female (i.e., not

stable or fixed), but the views about the sophists' intent are divergent. To one side is the idea that the sophists were indeed revolutionary, at least within the

constraints of a strictly stratified society; they encouraged antithetical readings

of the same issues and situations, thus inviting audiences to make up their own minds. On the other side is the view that the sophists were akin to the advertising agents or business and technical writers of their day, seeking financial gain as they advised others who desired the same kind of advantage, for instance, in court. The debate crystallizes in the last line of the Encomium,

urging readers to wonder about the seriousness or exact "nature" of his intent. The George A. Kennedy translation in Bizzell, from which the previous excerpts of the Encomium have been taken, reads, "I wished to write a speech which would be a praise of Helen and a diversion to myself' (40). The D. M. MacDowell translation reads: "I wished to write the speech as an encomium of Helen and an amusement for myself' (31). Finally, the translation provided by classicist Kerstin Miller, says:

I wished to write the speech on the one hand as an encomium [hymn in honor of the riches; song of praise, panegyric] of Helen, on the other hand as my plaything, toy. [Paignion is a noun that has its root in the verb paidzein, which means to play like a child, to

sport, to play; to joke, jest, be merry; to trifle.] (unpublished interview)

A generous reading on Jarratt's behalf might "praise" Gorgias for not engaging in the serious discourse of his logocentered contemporaries. After all, he's just playing. We could go so far as to say that his lack of a serious agenda is liberating; his male ego is not involved. This is not to say that he had forsaken logic. As Jarratt explains, Gorgias was very much involved in a logical analysis that would through contextualizing throw open the causal

chains that had confined Helen to blame (72-73). The "playful" or diversionary ending echoes the earlier passage in which Gorgias raises the issue of the

accused (Paris) without naming him: "Who it was and why and how he sailed

away, taking Helen as his love, I shall not say. To tell the knowing what they know shows it is right but brings no delight" (Bizzell and Herzberg 40).

This strategy appears to be a choice not to engage in agonistic debate with the opposition, a sort of turning of the other cheek, a refusal to blame, to reinforce the system by opposing it. Jarratt and feminist sympathizers might see this as an admirable gesture, but again, is this an accurate reading of Gorgias's intent?

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Perhaps Gorgias was simply being a showman. If I can do this for the most

guilty, he was saying in effect, imagine what I can do for you! As Edward Schiappa explains in Protagoras and Logos, Gorgias's own particular brand of

logos-it varied from sophist to sophist-was deception (80-81). Gorgias says in the Encomium, 'All who have and do persuade people of things do so by molding a false argument" (Bizzell and Herzberg 40) thereby suggesting that persuasion (if not language itself) is essentially an occasional creation and not a

means of illuminating knowledge. In light of Gorgias's fragment On Being or On Nature (also known as On What Is Not), his views about persuasion being inherently deceptive and opinion being "slippery and insecure (41) take on

darkly ontological and epistemological proportions, for these texts pronounce a phenomenological, noncommunicative universe. The tripartite scheme follows:

Nothing is; even if it is, it is incomprehensible; even if it is comprehensible, it is incommunicable (Freeman 128-29). It has even been theorized that this early text by Gorgias was not philosophical at all. Rather, using parody, it sought to refute the philosophical views of Parmenides by reducing them to absurdity:

Parmenides dissolved all appearances but retained a world of True Being;

Gorgias eradicated that, too (MacDowell 11; Kerferd 94). Like magic and witchcraft, persuasion may have beneficial ends, but its means are the same: error of the soul of the receiver and/or deceptive opinion. More recent scholarship has shown that the Greek verb to be was not

existential but predicative (Kerferd 94-98). According to this view, Gorgias did not seriously believe that nothing exists, for to so assert would leave him vulnerable to the peritrope of turning the tables; that is, his treatise would not exist as well. Instead, he believed simply that knowledge is always provisional, situational. For the practicing sophist, this idea calls to mind the term kairos, which meant that all speeches have their opportune moment or fitness in time (Schiappa 73). Such a humanization of time helped disrupt the sense of absolute time determined by physis or fate. As for the defense of Helen, kairos indicates a notion of other possibilities, of subjective, interpretative realities. The foregoing might lead one to believe that Gorgias was utterly

relativistic. However, the opening of the Encomium "What is becoming to a speech [is] truth"-suggests that he was not relativistic, that he believed in the

existence of an absolute truth. He opposes Knowledge of What is True to Opinion in his Defence of Palamedes as well. That he posited a soul, and

"supposed that perception involves the reception of appropriate 'effluences' from physical objects" (Kerferd 100), also indicate that Gorgias believed in an objective or material reality beyond mere phenomena. However, Gorgias does not refer to truth or nonprovisional knowledge during the rest of the Encomium. And it is never clear what he identifies as the source of logos: thought, perceptual objects, words, or any relation between them. What is clear is his

description of a totalizing power of speech that is always subsequent, and

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Gorgias's Encomium of Helen: Violent Rhetoric or Radical Feminism? 85

therefore inadequate, to the reality to which it refers. For the most part, he explains, men (gender is significant here) must rely on opinion to understand the past, make judgments in the present, and proffer predictions about the

future; meanwhile, opinion is vulnerable to the powerful suasion of logos. Nevertheless, while Gorgias contended that correspondence between internal reality and external, between signifier and signified, was arbitrary, his

Encomium demonstrates that we can at least examine the reality of our own reasoning (Kerferd 81, 99).

Is Compatibility with Feminism on a Deeper Level? Perhaps Gorgias is more nihilist than feminist. Or perhaps, by not positing an essentializing feminism or foundation, Gorgias is actually compatible with more extreme feminists who want to do away with any reified co-optable fixed

position, especially anything that defines women in contrast with or difference from a male/center. Ironically, if Jarratt were interested in a less Platonic,

more sophistic, that is, uncertain and uncontained sense of logos, she might have found a different level on which to engage with Gorgias. Had she focused her critique more on the criminal logos, and not on Gorgias's crossexamination of Paris, she might have concluded that despite Gorgias's binary

style and relegation of Helen to the margins of society, the Encomium is on this other level radically feminist in how darkly it describes the entire discursive

system of logos. Derrida's reading of Gorgias in "Plato's Pharmakon," a chapter in Dissemination, says that the Attic school (Gorgias, Isocrates, Alcidamas) extolled the force

of living logos, the great master, the great power: logos dunastes megas estin, says Gorgias in his Encomium of Helen. The dynasty

of speech may be just as violent as that of writing, but its infiltration is more profound, more penetrating, more diverse, more assured. (1 15, emphasis ill original) In section 8 Gorgias states, in what may or may not be a figure of speech, that logos is a minute substance; in fact, it was not unusual for Greeks of the time to refer to speech as a physical object, so small it cannot be seen

(MacDowell 36). Derrida explains that Plato disdained writing for its

corruption of memory and truth; Gorgias and company, on the other hand, considered writing "a consolation, a compensation, a remedy for sickly speech" (114-15) because logos was a far more powerful drug, or pharmakon.

Persuasion entering the soul through speech is a pharmakon, and that is exactly the term Gorgias uses: "The effect of speech (tou logou dunamis) upon the

condition of the soul (pro ten tes psyches taxin) is comparable (ton auton de

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logon) to the power of drugs (ton pharmakon taxis)" (116). Derrida explains that logos for Gorgias was an ambivalent, indeterminate, amoral force, a kind of power base, "at once good and bad." Helen succumbed to the power of this

"lord" as if to the "force of the mighty" (qtd. in Derrida 115). By dressing this force in charm, eloquence, and reasoning (logismon), and by taming, structuring, and ordering it with its "counterpart," truth (kosmos), Paris took a furtive force per se and made it lie (116).6 Given this critique by Derrida,

Gorgias seemed to be talking about an infinite, undefinable force pervading the entire universe, the same force or energy accessed by shamans and sorcerers. This is not the practical tool Jarratt optimistically champions. But the question again arises, how "feminist" is the Encomium?

Theresa de Lauretis's essay "The Violence of Rhetoric: Considerations on Representation and Gender" would seem to agree that logos, particularly when it is "dressed" or institutionalized, technologized, and medicalized, is

inherently violent. It is violent because (male) force has been accepted as a normal component of social-sexual relations between men and women. Other

relations are also contaminated by violence for the same reason: because the victim is always invariably feminized according to the aforementioned

culture/nature, male/female, us/them dualism. De Lauretis explains this invasiveness of rhetoric by critiquing Michel Foucault's idea that rape is a crime of violence and not a crime of sex, thereby making the female body/pleasure a refuge from discourse. But de Lauretis counters by saying that "even when it is located, as it very often is, in the woman's body, sexuality is an attribute or property of the male" (37, emphasis in original). Here she seems to echo Gorgias's claims about the insidious, violent power of Paris's rhetoric.

But where Gorgias identifies the drug-like, bewitching power of speech, de Lauretis identifies the inexorable power of the drug industry, as it were-those

institutions and "agencies" such as law enforcement, psychiatry, medicine, indeed the science of sexuality, which perpetuate the very behaviors they attempt to help by explaining them away, by reinforcing them in discourse. Far from being an agency of repression, power is a productive force that weaves through the social body as a network of discourses and generates simultaneously forms of knowledge and forms of subjectivity, or what we call social subjects. Here we would think, the rhetoric of power and the power of rhetoric are one and the same thing. (35)

Violence, then, is not something represented by language but en-gendered in language and in us. Far from being simply agents of language or "sign" makers of the world, we are constituted by language. The objects of the world

are not merely things or states of being but components of meaning, parts of a

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Gorgias s Encomium of Helen: Violent Rhetoric or Radical Feminism? 87

living, ongoing mythos analogous to Kristeva's idea of the "symbolic

denominator" (Bizzell 1252). These objects, as we interpret them, define a possible range of experiences. The relationship between the "inner" world of the self and the "outer" world is thus reciprocal, dynamic. This is why "social

sexing ... is latent in rape" (de Lauretis 37, emphasis in original). This is why making Helen a victim (Gorgias: "It is just therefore to pity her but to hate

him"; "[she is] caught in the net of fate" [Bizzell and Herzberg]) perpetuates violence: it inscribes violence by designating or delimiting the social roles of victim/Helen and victimizer/Paris. Like de Lauretis, Gorgias seems to be

arguing that a woman's sexuality is a priori subject to control by a system of rhetoric already in place when she is born. He also does not try to obfuscate Helen's position, as de Lauretis explains:

One can see that this is undoubtedly the rhetorical function of gender-neutral expressions such as "spouse abuse" or "marital violence," which at once imply that both spouses may equally engage in battering the other, and subtly hint at the writer's or speaker's non-partisan stance of scientific and moral neutrality. (34)

Unlike de Lauretis, however, he fails to encourage a critique of violence from the perspectives of both "societal and male supremacy" (34).

If therefore, the eye of Helen, pleased by the figure of Alexander

[Paris], presented to her soul eager desire and contest of love, what wonder? If, a god, the divine power of the gods, how could a lesser being reject and refuse it? But if it is a disease of human origin and a fault of the soul, it should not be

blamed as a sin, but regarded as an affliction. (Bizzell and Herzberg 42)

But de Lauretis asserts that "the interests of men and women, or, in the case in question earlier, of rapists and their victims, are exactly opposed in the practices of social reality, and cannot be reconciled rhetorically" (38). Is

rhetoric futile for Gorgias as it is for de Lauretis? Returning to the Encomium's seemingly flippant closing remark, we see that Gorgias does not appear to be making any serious claim for the power or mastery of rhetoric to reconcile differences, though he (like de Lauretis) practices it, plays at it nonetheless.

More important for de Lauretis and feminists in general, has he failed her injunction that "gender must be accounted for"? (48). She does not identify an

all-pervasive, ambivalent energy source like logos, from which rhetoric gets its power, for she implies that that is a male concern, just as is the question, "what is woman?", the way Derrida and Nietzsche have asked it; men seeking their

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own displacement from [logosl should stop looking to women (47-48). The answer, then, is no, Gorgias has not explicitly accounted for gender. He draws

an analogy between the logos/soul relation and the pharmakonlbody relation (Derrida 116-17). He genders logos male, for men are the ones with the agency

to (ab)use it, and he genders the neuter noun pharmakon, the drug, female, for a woman, Helen-by implication, her body-is overcome by it. The question of Gorgias's feminist intent may ultimately be one of theory

versus practice. But, as Edward Schiappa reminds us in Protagoras and Logos, we have very little on which to base an answer: mere fragments of documents and references to those sophistic writings within other works, such as those of Plato. In retrospect we can say that the sophists composed an association of practitioners but did not embody a single philosophy (77-81). And yet our assessment of them as individual "philosophers" is limited if we think in terms only of transcendental knowledge and not, for example, of discourse as

epistemic. John Poulakos explains in his essay, "Rhetoric, the Sophists, and the Possible," that sophistic ontology defined two worlds or realities in which people live-a world of misfortune, a natural world about which we can do nothing, and a world of dream, the world of nomos, the created world, the

world of the institution of the possible, about which we can do something] Gorgias was to have taught people to use language and subjective belief to

bridge the gap from either direction. In theory this sounds very democratic and utilitarian; as Jarratt argues, it began to grant a voice to those who had not previously had one. In practice, however, such a public voice was granted only to those who could afford the lesson, and then only to men. Notes

1I thank Sharon Crowley and Takis Poulakos for their useful suggestions for revision.

2 Some of these examples of gendering, and the questions concerning critical theory, have been excerpted from Barbara Babcock's description for her course titled Clowning and Cultural Critique at The University of Arizona.

3 Kerstin Miller, Classicist at the University of Arizona, is responsible for these translations, without which this essay's authority would be seriously compromised.

4 See Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism, Vol. 3, and Barbara Walker. 5 We could trace the deconstruction of this culture/nature binary, oppositional style to writing itself, writing being the blunt instrument of culture and, moreover, what has popularly been called the

signpost or evolutionary turning point of "culture." Writing ("good writing," that is, which, according to Plato, is logical and excludes excess and mere sensory expression-Derrida 149) and reading gave people access to power and knowledge by proxy, that is, without the immediate supervision of teachers in the Platonic tradition. And needless to say it was the Helens of the world who were refused this

access. But prescribing a writing-culture/speech-nature subordination would make me guilty of the same

hegemonic, either-or infection I'm diagnosing in Gorgias. Besides, it would involve a gross misunderstanding of what Gorgias meant by logos, which is explored in the paper.

By virtue of being both a "speech" and a written document, his Encomium problematizes that dichotomy. Also, while Plato thought of writing as wasteful and parricidal (Derrida), he seems to have failed to realize that speech, too, is coded and mediated. From our perspective, then, the distinction between speech and writing is less significant than the engendering and binary logic of both.

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Gorgias's Encomium of Helen: Violent Rhetoric or Radical Feminism ? 89

The key in this paper is that Paris-and Gorgias spoke. Gorgias says Paris's use of logos is the

crime and logos itself is the criminal, which raises all kinds of questions about Paris's responsibility. As

Derrida explains in Dissemination, the sophists extolled logos as an ambivalent living force and looked down upon writing as a less effective pharmakon.

6 Jarratt explains that Derrida saw the sophists in binary opposition to Plato, and not in the role of pharmakon. That role he reserved for Socrates. Writing, however, was supplement, inside and outside

of memory, truth, and the system of binary dualities.

7 See Schiappa, p. 69-85, for a rebuttal to Poulakos's theory of a sophistic doctrine of the "possible."

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990.

Covino, William A. The Art of Wondering: A Revisionist Return to the History of Rhetoric. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1988. Derrida, Jacques. "Plato's Pharmacy." Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago

P, 1981. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger, An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966.

Flaceliere, Robert. Daily Life in Greece at the Time of Pericles. Trans. Peter Green. London:

Werdenfeld and Nicholson, 1959. Foucault, Michel. "A Preface to Transgression." Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected

Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald Bouchard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977. 29-52. . Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Random , 1965.

Gorgias. Encomium of Helen. Trans. Rosamond Kent Sprague. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings

from Classical Times to the Present. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: St Martin's, 1990.

. Encomium of Helen. Trans. D. M. MacDowell. Glasgow: Bristol Classical, 1982.

Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. Baltimore: Penguin, 1955. Jarratt, Susan. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.

Kerferd, G. B. The Sophistic Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. Keuls, Eva C. The Reign of the Phallus. New York: Harper, 1985.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. NewYork: Columbia UP, 1982. . "Women's Time." The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present.

Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: St. Martin's, 1990. 1251-66. Larousse World Mythology. Trans. Patricia Beardsworth. Mythologies de la Mediterranee au Gange

and Mythologies des Steppes, des lies et des Forets. London: Hamlyn, 1965. Lauretis, Teresa de. "The Violence of Rhetoric: Considerations on Representation and Gender." Technologies of Gender, Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 31-50. Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Miller, Kerstin. Personal Interview. Fall 1992; spring 1994. Owens, Craig. Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay, 1983. Parsons, Elsie Crews. "The Aversion to Anomalies. "Journal of Philosophy 12 (1915): 212-19. Pateman, Carole. "The Disorder of Women: Women, Love, and the Sense of Justice." Ethics 91 (1980): 20-34.

Poulakos, John. "Rhetoric, the Sophists, and the Possible." Communication Monographs 51 (1984): 215- 16.

Poynton, Cate. Language and Gender: Making the Difference. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.

Schiappa, Edward. Protagoras and Logos. Columbia: U of South Carolina P,1991. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Poetics and Politics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1986.

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Rhetoric Review 90

Walker, Barbara G. The Womans' Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. San Francisco: Harper, 1983.

Andy Crockett is beginning his last year in the Rhetoric, Composition and the Teaching of English doctoral program at the University of Arizona. His other postgrad degree is an MFA in creative writing ('88) from the University of Arizona. He has published poetry and fiction. His doctoral work has been

synthetic," bringing together interests in cultural studies, postmodern theory, and creative nonfiction. Announcement

"Pedagogies of Writing: Issues, Actions, and Consequences" is the topic for the Second Spilman Symposium on Issues in Teaching Writing, presented by the Virginia Military

Institute, November 12, 1994. Limited registration. For information contact Robert L. McDonald, Department of English and Fine Arts, Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, VA 24450. Phone (703) 464-7240.

Call for Papers

Scott Lloyd DeWitt and Kip Strasma invite submissions for a collection of essays that

explores the issues of hypertext, empirical research, and writing pedagogy titled Empirical Inquiry into Hypertextualizing Composition. Submissions should describe empirical research studies that investigate the influence of hypertext on students' writing processes. We are especially interested in submissions that represent diverse

teaching strategies and sites (K- 12, two-year college, university, etc.). Writers should prepare a two-page, single-spaced proposal that reveals the study's focus, its research methodology, and its current status. Submit two copies of your proposal

by I February 1995 to Scott Lloyd DeWitt, Ohio State University--Marion Campus, 1465 Mt. Vernon Ave., Morrill Hall, Marion, OH 43302-5695, or kstrasma(heartland.bradley.edu.

Announcing

Forum 95: The Interacting Communication Conference The theme of the fifth Forum conference will be "Disappearing Borders." It will be

cosponsored by the IEEE Professional Communication Society (PCS, USA), Institute for Technical Communication (ISTC, U.K.), STIC-QTD (The Netherlands) and

tekom (Germany). The meeting will be held in Dortmund, Germany, November 13-15, 1995, and the conference language will be English. For information and a brochure: in the USA contact Lisa Moretto, RGI International, 6001 South Kings Highway, Unit 767, Myrtle Beach, SC (tel: 803/238-9417); in Canada and internationally, contact Ron Blicq, RGI International, 569 Oxford St., Winnipeg, MB, Canada, R3M 3J2 (tel: 204/488-7060). FAX (for both): 204/488-7294. E-mail:

76104.1535 @compuserve.com.

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