1 Introduction
The Long Descent into the Past
Madeleine Scherer
When Odysseus’s helmsman Elpenor bids the hero to ‘remember me’, he not only speaks to the protagonist of Homer’s epic but also utters a plea to the audience. Odysseus’s own listeners at the Phaeacian court and the rhapsode’s audience listening to the Homeric epic are asked with equal fervour to commit the helmsman into their communal memory, to continue talking about him and disseminating his story.1 Elpenor’s wish came true, perhaps by no merit of his own, rather marginal role in the Odyssey, but through his being commemorated into one of the most famous necromantic narratives of Western literary history. Did this line in the epic selfconsciously foresee Elpenor’s prominent place within the cultural memory of the generations still to come? In other words, was Homer aware of the commemorative power of the myths he was collecting and adapting in his poetry? And why did he draw his audience’s attention to their own, meta-fictional memories of the epic narrative just as they became immersed in Odysseus’s quest to confront his past?
Questions such as these draw attention to the connections between the appearance of spirits, the recovery of memories, and the transmission of narratives that are established in many stories of spectral haunting and necromantic summons. The Greek literature
that followed the Homeric epics is filled with ghostly apparitions, wherein the dead remind the living not only of their existence but also of their wishes and their fortune (or, often lack thereof). To this day, few spectres are remembered as well as Elpenor, Anticleia, Teiresias, Anchises, Dido, and Eurydice, their tales inseparably connected with both their ancient origins as well as the long tradition of the ghost story.2 The most famous spectral appearances of literary history can be found in the canonical descent narratives that describe the pursuits of the living who choose to seek out the dead of their own accord, undergoing the dangerous journey into the underworld. The earliest known descent appears in the Sumerian and Akkadian epic of Gilgamesh, written around 2100 BCE, and the trope later resurfaced in the Homeric and Virgilian epics of ancient Greece and Rome, most commonly dated around the seventh or eighth century BCE, and between 29 and 19 BCE respectively.3 Other well-known descent narratives centre on heroes such as Inanna, Orpheus, Theseus, Jason, Heracles, and Demeter, while the underworld also plays an important role in ancient Egyptian eschatology.4 The motif of an underworldly descent was not unique to the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, however – across the world, it has long been part of different religions and mythological frameworks.
1 The term rhapsode (ancient Greek: ῥαψῳδός) refers to the bards who would perform epic poetry in antiquity, largely in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.
Within the descent tradition known also by its Greek term katabasis, a typically male hero travels to the land of the dead to gain a piece of information that is vital for the continuation of his quest; whether this information pertains to the self, superhuman powers, a forgotten object, or a lost person.5 It is on these descents where both the hero and his audience are most keenly made aware of the fleeting memory of the dead, of the knowledge which their ancestors held, and where the need to preserve what had been lost becomes most profound. In the katabatic narratives of GraecoRoman antiquity, the hero’s descent often involves a reunion with a
dead family member, his former loved ones, his companions, and other heroes of a mythical age, reunions that remind him of his past and which are contrasted with the future he needs to embrace.6 This tension between past and future consistently returns as the conceptual core of katabatic narratives throughout the ages: the hero’s struggle to regain what he has lost and his strife to be transformed into a man able to proceed on his journey. And what the heroes always return with, no matter what occurs after their perilous crossing of the boundary between the living and the dead, are the memories of the deceased, and the tales they bid us remember.
2 Johnston (1999, ix).
3 One important distinction needs to be made between Homer’s Odyssey XI and the other epics in which an underworld narrative dynamic is used; unlike Aeneas and others, Odysseus does not actually enter the underworld but rather he summons the spirits of the dead by sacrificing a ram. Odysseus’s encounter with the dead is termed a nekyia, a necromantic encounter, rather than a katabasis in which the hero literally descends into the realm of Hades. Because of their frequent aesthetic and thematic overlap, the two formats are commonly studied together in classical scholarship.
4 Cf. Falconer (2007, 2). Many of these stories reached literary fame and cultural pervasiveness through referencing and drawing on one another: thanks to M.L. West’s The East Face of Helicon we know about the influence of Sumerian and Babylonian works on ancient Greek culture, for instance. Along similar lines, Virgil’s Aeneid is thoroughly indebted to the Homeric epics and Plato’s Myth of Er from the Republic, as well as the Greek concept of metempsychosis for his famously intricate version of the underworld. For important scholarly works on descent narratives, cf. the work of Friedrich Slomsen on the afterlife (1972, 31–41), and also Nicholas Horsefall’s 2013 commentary on the Aeneid.
5 Falconer (2007), 3.
The katabatic journey into a space filled with the ghostly embodiments of his past ends in the hero’s metaphorical transformation and rebirth, after which he leaves the underworld a different person from the one who first entered. Memories of and confrontations with the past are used to prefigure a dramatic development in the story, as the past turns into the future and memories are transformed into possibilities, predictions, and visions.
It commonly begins with the descending hero setting out to visit or even rescue a deceased soul, a quest tied to his sore need for information – Odysseus seeks out Teiresias for guidance on the way back to Ithaca while Orpheus hopes to rescue his wife from the cold grasp of Hades. At times, these quests fail as much as they succeed, as in the Odyssey an empty, unfulfilling embrace with his beloved mother is placed immediately after the hero’s acquisition of a prophecy vital for his continuing journey, and Orpheus’s success in negotiating the release of his wife is followed by her loss as he breaks the rules of the underworld. As the heroes descend ever further into the past, success and failure exist in a close double-bind in the unforgiving terrain of Hades.
While in antiquity, the most famous descent narratives both describe the perils of the underworld and end with the prophetic revelation which awaits its heroes, katabasisfundamentally was and continues to be a tale of recollection. Although it is the oracular knowledge bestowed on them by the sage Teiresias and by Anchises that ultimately allows Odysseus and Aeneas to return to their quests for (a new) home, the largest parts of the heroes’ descent are made up of their fleeting reunions with dead loved ones, friends, comrades, and even enemies. These encounters force the heroes to remember and accept the misfortunes and mistakes that have led them to the underworld, the lowest point of their journey, as the future that awaits them can only be realised after they have confronted their past. Odysseus is forced to face Ajax, whose death he inadvertently caused by tricking him out of Achilles’s armour, while Aeneas is reminded of his former lover Dido when he passes by her shade in the underworld – both heroes feeling a sense of responsibility for the spirits’ presence in Hades. Both the ghosts of Ajax and Dido refuse to speak to the protagonists, their silence emblematic of the divide and enmity which the heroes’ deceitful actions caused: while Odysseus tricked Ajax out of his spoils of war, Aeneas left the queen of Carthage after she believed them to be bound by ties of marriage. Apart from these poignant reminders of the heroes’ often less than noble past, katabasisalso evokes familial and personal recollections through the heroes’ fleeting encounters
with a dead family member, recollections that are shaped by bittersweet and nostalgic regret for a nostos the heroes have lost.7 Finally, catalogues of the dead serve as commemoratives of some of the most famous departed heroes of a recent or even mythical history, commemoratives that are largely unrelated to the epic narrative itself and instead provide an intermission in which popular myths are recounted to the audience.8
6 For instance, Dido turning away from Aeneas in Aeneid VI foreshadows his political marriage to Lavinia, a marriage driven by Aeneas’s duty, his pietas, which contrasts his passionate affair with Dido, itself characterised largely by furor, violent emotions.
The haunting spirits of the deceased turn into potent memories once the heroes ascend back to the overworld, and what they have seen continues to haunt them for the rest of their journey. Their encounter with the dead not only shapes the structure of katabasis but also makes up the journey’s emotional core, and the memories of their loved ones become a form of compensation for their permanent loss. In the end, all that remains of them are memories, which to this day is a common comfort given to those who have lost a friend or a family member. It is no surprise therefore that some of the most memorable and commonly adapted parts of the katabasis narratives in both the Odysseyand the Aeneidare the heroes’ thrice failed embrace of their deceased family members; a moving reminder of the missing connection between the living and the dead, and the permanent boundary that now separates them.
There exists a twofold dynamic between remembering the dead and remembering the past in the katabasisnarratives of antiquity: at the same time that the spectral embodiments of their past force the hero to remember and reflect, the descent narrative serves as a meta-fictional reminder to its readers or audiences of the very existence of the unquiet dead, and of the histories they were a part of. In antiquity, reminding the living of their stories and accomplishments was one of the spirits’ main concerns: when Elpenor asks Odysseus to remember him in the introductory
quotation, it is a plea for Odysseus to remember to bury his body, an important practice in the ancient world as it creates a visible monument for the life of the deceased.9 But in a meta-fictional sense, Elpenor also asks the hero to commit his tale to his own memory and – inadvertently or not – that of the people listening to the epic narrative, both at the fictional Phaecian court and wherever the ancient Greek rhapsodes chose to perform the Homeric epics. Memory became a multifaceted preoccupation of the hero’s descent, one whose significance extended both to the memory that is obtained within the world of the story, memories of the story and of its characters, and to cultural commemoration within the ancient world.
7 Nostos can roughly be translated as ‘the journey home’ or ‘homecoming’.
8 Cf. Davide Susanetti, who writes ‘[t]he entire archive of stories and legends, the mythological arsenal from which Greek poetry takes it tales, comes to life in a sort of symbolic recapitulation, in a paradigmatic catalogue of all that is memorable and worthy of celebration’ (2016, 256). Susanetti’s chapter in Deep Classics discusses classical descent narratives and its spectres as a model for our relationship with the past.
For another example of what I tentatively call a meta-fictionality of remembrance within katabasis, we may look to Orpheus’s descent, most famously discussed in Plato’s Symposium, Virgil’s Georgics, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Orpheus, a famous singer in antiquity, travels to the underworld to plead for the life of his deceased wife Eurydice, whereby the beautiful music he plays for Hades and Persephone convinces the underworldly rulers to release her spirit – under the condition that Orpheus travels back to the realm of the living without looking back at his wife. Orpheus fails to obey this rule, glancing back at Eurydice just as they begin to see the light of the overworld, and thus seals his wife’s fate for all eternity. While she remains lost to her living husband, however, Eurydice enters the realm of mythology through the singer’s katabatic quest: although Orpheus disobeys the laws of the underworld and thus fails to revive the spirit of his wife, her memory is saved through the act of narration itself, as the tale of the famous bard’s descent becomes a memorial to her
existence. While Orpheus’s story has since been adapted to mean various different things to different writers, many of these adaptations continue to centre on the importance of memory, both in the literal and in the meta-fictional sense. In Rainer Maria Rilke sonnets, for instance, the Orphic hero descends into the underworld for artistic inspiration, an underworld filled with poetic song in which there exists ‘enough memory to keep/ the one most delicate note’.10
As Rilke’s poetic persona descends into the depths of Hades, it is literary and creative memory he searches for, the poetic voices of the past that, in a Dantean fashion, congregate within the underworld and provide the poet with inspiration.
Returning to antiquity, katabasiswas not only a narrative dynamic in which the heroes’ own memories could be retrieved, but the descent also framed more varied and, at times, meta-fictional processes of memorialisation, which restored or at least engaged with those stories the authors deemed important to revive. Intertextual and cultural memories of katabasisfound their way into all manner of textual sources, including philosophy and even satire, where the conceptual core of remembrance continued to shape adaptations of the narrative dynamic in a variety of different contexts. The case-studies in this collection show that ancient descent narratives which explore themes of both individual remembrance and cultural commemoration were not limited to epics like Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, the Orphic myths, or Virgil’s Aeneid but extended to sources like Egyptian funerary iconography, Herodotus’s histories, the Epicurean philosophy of Lucretius, Lucan’s civil war narratives, and the satires of Lucian.
9 Many references to the importance of a proper burial can be found in both the Iliadand the Odyssey. Cf. for instance Grethlein (2008, 27–51).
10 Rilke (1987, IX).
In ancient Greece the Homeric epics served as a particularly prominent source of generic memory traditions. They collected popular myths of the Iron Age and took the form of, as Jan Assmann phrases it, an ‘organizational form of cultural memory – as a
reconstruction of the past that supported the self-image of a particular group’.11 As they brought together multiple, fragmented traditions, the Homeric epics served as the starting point for new memories that were adapted into the Greek polis and beyond, and served as an ‘archive for exemplaamaioreadminus’.12 The Greeks, as Assmann adapts the famous line from German author Thomas Mann, ‘liv[ed] in quotations’, in an environment of ‘critical intertextuality’ and ‘of cultural memory as scholarship or science’.13 In this fertile mnemonic environment, many ancient thinkers and writers refigured the myths they had become familiar with through or around the Homeric poems, often keeping underlying ideas while substantially changing the context and resolution of the original narrative. One of the most popular tales introduced into the cultural memoryspheres of ancient Greece by this way of ‘living in quotations’ was the descent narrative, and while the myth continuously changed in thematic, aesthetic, and overall storyline, we can see throughout this collection that it retained a conceptual interest in remembrance and transformation.
By the fifth century BCE, myth and memory had become shifting notions in Greece, as it became increasingly difficult to untangle a past woven out of ‘historical’ accounts, word-of-mouth stories, legends, fables, and, of course, epic narratives.14 Especially in a society in which writing was never more than a new medium reserved for an elite minority, many a story would have been remembered more than it was read, and remembered in perhaps a different version to the one(s) committed to written form.15 In this environment, katabasis held a unique place as a narrative dynamic that, while thematically concerned with the past and its haunting influence, was also itself a commonly reimagined myth that ‘haunted’ the cultural imaginations and memoryspheres of antiquity. The realm of mythology has long caught the attention of memory scholars as a particularly fertile ground for mnemonic traditions. Stephanie Wodianka, for instance, frames adaptations of mythology not as modifications of older stories but as a semantic, retroactive process which mnemonically ‘actualises’ the original story.16
Psychoanalysis, too, holds that memorised myths act as mediators that help both individuals and communities understand their histories and the world around them; myth’s role in cultural memory thereby fulfils a practical social function.17 Based on these important understandings of the interconnected roles of myth and memory, in this collection due attention is paid to the role of memory in order to highlight the socio-cultural and symbolic functions descent narratives held in ancient history and culture – and, as we will see, in later centuries alike – as popular myths that were used to negotiate ideas of the past, the present, and even, at times, the future.
11 Assmann (2011, 250).
12 Grethlein (2014, 236).
13 Ibid, 274.
14 Cf. Gould (2001, 408, 414); Grethlein (2014, 236). On the intertwined relationship between history and myth, cf. Saïd (2007, 76–89).
This collection takes note of the complex relationships that exist between katabatic narratives and various forms of remembering: both the memories that are recovered by the heroes within their underworldly descents, the authors’ and their audiences’ mnemonic relationships to the stories that precede their own narrative, and a general interest in the workings of memory on socio-cultural levels. This memory-driven analysis is not a replacement for the study of intertextual adaptations; in fact, an understanding of intertextual relationships in the ancient world often underlies and informs the readings of the chapters. What this collection highlights are the multifaceted and complex engagements with both fictional and meta-textual remembrance, which ancient descent narratives are often entangled with, drawing attention to the importance of memory both for the ancient world at large and for the katabatic genre and its reception.
The story of the descent into the underworld did not cease to inspire writers in later periods of history. Graeco-Roman katabasis shaped the works of authors like Dante and Milton, who adapt the katabatic narratives of epic into Christian frameworks, to Derek
Walcott, who places his underworld within the Atlantic Ocean, and J.M. Coetzee, who locates Hell within a South African Township. Not only within a Western literary tradition but all across the world, the descent into the underworld has held a prominent place within the human imagination as a narrative dynamic that foregrounds conversations with the ghosts of the dead, holding long forgotten or repressed secrets, information, and creating memories that remain with the hero long past the end of his quest. Its seeming universality in being adapted, drawn on, or refigured globally has led to scholars such as Rosalind Williams to describe the katabatic journey as an ‘enduring archetype’,18 while Rachel Falconer has previously described the idea of a journey to the underworld and the ensuing return as even more entrenched in the Western imagination than the notion of Hell itself.19 While the descent narrative has been tied to preoccupations of both fictional, intertextual, and cultural remembrance in the memory cultures of antiquity and beyond, in the twentieth-century memory explosively resurfaced as a central concern both in the West and beyond, and came to define the shape katabasiswould take from then onwards. As a symbol that frames a quest for the recovery of traditions, an exploration of an uncertain history, and a spiritual journey to confront trauma, one of the most important twentieth-century katabatic texts was written by Joseph Conrad at the very start of the century with his seminal 1899 Heart of Darkness, then remained, a pervasive literary and cultural motif centred on the excavation and interpretation of the past. From T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses, the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, Zbigniew Herbert’s postwar poetry, and Seamus Heaney’s early bog poems as well as later translations and transfusions of Virgil’s underworld to Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomy, Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, Kazuo Ishiguro’s memorious novels, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, and popular fantasy novels such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s LordoftheRings and Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea, twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers have turned repeatedly to the trope of a descent into the past.
15 On the development of writing in ancient Greece, and its influence on ancient Greek culture, cf. Thomas (1992), esp. chapter 4.
16 Wodianka (2006, 5–6).
17 Renard (2013, 63–64). Jan Assmann draws comparable conclusions on the relationship between cultural memory, history, and myth in antiquity: ‘cultural memory transforms factual into remembered history, thus turning it into myth’ (2011, 38).
The number of catastrophic developments in the history of the last century played a particularly important role in shaping the imagination of many authors and drew them to the katabatic motif, as the unfolding events ‘convinced many people of the view that Hells actually exist, and survivors do return, against all probability, to pass on their experience’.20 Historians, authors, journalists, politicians, and philosophers alike turned to pre-existing images of the underworld as the symbolic expression of displacement, nostalgia, and trauma. Edith Hall has summarised the importance of the conversation with the dead in OdysseyXI for the literature of the twentieth century when she writes ‘the poem’s status as an “aftermath” text, a post-war story, has had particular resonance for an age that has defined itself as post-everything: postmodern, poststructuralist, post-colonial’.21 Beyond the confines of katabasisitself, the stories of refuge, loss, displacement, recovery, and homecoming of ancient epic have become evocative narratives in the context of many political developments of the twentieth century; from the Odyssean journeys of Aimé Césaire’s poem on diasporic identity, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, to Patrick Kingsley’s The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe’s Refugee Crisis, an account of the Syrian refugee movements of 2016, framed by the narrative template of Odyssean travels.
18 Williams (2008, 11).
19 Falconer (2007, 1).
20 Ibid, 3.
In the apocalyptic history of the twentieth century, classical antiquity resurfaces from the depths of Hades; in the words of
Williams, images of Pompey become the photographs of ruined Warsaw and Dresden as modern culture is ‘haunted by a remnant of the mythical’.22 But why is it that the symbol of the underworld has had such a unique importance for the twentieth century that it inspired so many writers to try and capture its elusive essence?23 How did the catastrophes and social upheavals of the time inspire this almost singularly prevalent return to an ancient myth that katabasisbecame a central motif within many re-imaginings of both present and past? This volume explores the idea that it is an inherent and self-conscious preoccupation with processes of remembering and commemoration that continues to draw authors to the descent narrative dynamic.
The question of how to remember the past is one that the twentieth century has been particularly gripped by.24 The number of global massacres, wars, and genocide occurring in such a short span of time, combined with increasingly quick ways of distributing information about these horrors from around the globe, has formed a ubiquitous and self-reflexive memorial culture, overwhelmed with the dilemma of having to commemorate often unspeakable atrocities. At both the 2017 and the 2019 Memory Studies Association conferences, a majority of papers focussed on memories in or of the twentieth century, many of which were of a traumatic nature. The ‘memory boom’ of the 1970s is a consequence of this Benjaminian history of repeating catastrophes, one which necessitates an exploration not only of the events that themselves occurred, but of how they are remembered by individuals, nations, and within global, inter-, and transcultural frameworks. Irish memory culture, for instance, came into being out of this ‘obsess[ion] with the past. […] While representations of the past have always been an integral element of Irish culture, they are now one of its most compelling subjects. And the tone that characterises this subject is trauma’.25 In Graeco-Roman antiquity as well as in the twentieth century the concept of memory lay at the forefront of cultural consciousness. Remembering the past – and the question of how to remember – assumed such a fundamental importance in people’s
lives at the time that perhaps the central myth around memory became one the most popular tropes to draw inspiration from.
21 Hall (2008, 214).
22 Williams (2008, 189).
23 This is not to suggest that the reception history of katabasis was not bound up in concerns with memory up until the twentieth century, but the sheer mass of new adaptations of the descent narrative, many of them explicitly meta-textual in its preoccupation, is worth remarking upon and trying to unpack.
24 The twentieth century is the first to have pioneered the scientific study of memory. As Astrid Erll writes:
Acts of cultural remembering seem to be an element of humans’ fundamental anthropological make-up, and the history of creating a shared heritage and thinking about memory can be traced all the way back to antiquity, for example to Homer, Plato, and Aristotle. However, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that there developed a scientific interest in the phenomenon. (Erll 2011, 13)
Memory studies provide important tools for an understanding of the katabasis genre across history, both in terms of the memories that are uncovered within the narratives themselves, the memories that exist of the descent genre, and the underworld’s symbolic importance in (trans-)cultural commemoration. By now, many narratives, images, and events have come to exist as (trans-)culturally pervasive mythologies, as ‘foundational myths’ or ‘myths of origin’ for the identity of certain groups.26 Stories from across history have gained renewed significance within increasingly global mnemonic frameworks: Astrid Erll, for instance, has described Homer as one of Europe’s earliest founding myths whose ‘(ultra) long-term mnemohistory’ can be traced back to the foundations of European culture and identity. She describes the Odyssey as a ‘powerful source for premediation’ and Homer as a travelling ‘transcultural schema’, sources which contain a narrative kernel of references which are continuously adapted and re-appropriated.27 And while these myths are often (artificially) bound up with the identity of certain groups, ‘global icons’ such as Odysseus are used
in narratives all across the world, either drawing on or deconstructing their supposed cultural associations.
25 Pine (2011, 3).
26 Cf., for instance, Virginie Renard on the First World War as a foundational myth in Great War andPostmodern Memory, 30.
27 Erll (2018, 275, 283).
Katabasis is another narrative with such a long, multidirectional mnemohistory, one that has assumed many different shapes, but whose core appeal has been an inherent preoccupation with memory and commemoration from its oldest incarnations onwards. Just as Odyssean travels continue to reappear in various forms, the descent into a subterranean past is a motif that has fundamentally taken hold within the consciousness of many different societies and cultures – spread either in its ‘classical’ guise through a colonial education system, or born out of local eschatologies. As the figure of Odysseus returns as a uniquely resonant comparison for the diasporas and displacements of modernity, Peter Chils notes that
[t]he idea that the dead, in general or in specific circumstances, may not have fully passed from the world of the living underpins so much Western history and culture, spanning ancient folklore and urban myth as well as traditional religion and contemporary literature.28
This collection also includes chapters that show how the importance of the descent narrative as a resonant myth is certainly not limited to the West.
The underworld and its ghosts have turned into a lasting, traveling, and perhaps even universal symbol for the ways we imagine the relationship between life and death, between present and past, and between memory and forgetfulness. Carl Jung even named the underworld part of an archetypal mythic unconscious, emphasising its centrality to human thought and imagination. Rather than returning to Jung’s essentialist ideas about the subconscious and its archetypes,29 this collection utilises recently developed methods from memory studies to better understand the transcultural
travel of the descent narrative, and to outline some of the ways in which katabasishas throughout its genre history been tied to metatextual and (trans-)cultural preoccupations with memory.
As a prominent number of famous descent narratives were written at the end of the nineteenth and in the twentieth century, some of the most famous studies of the katabatic genre have focussed on the modern and postmodern eras. Such studies include Falconer’s Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives since 1945 (2007), Michael Thurston’s The Underworld in TwentiethCentury Poetry: From Pound and Eliot to Heaney and Walcott (2009), and Gregson Davis’s (2007) ‘“Homecomings without Home”: Representations of (post)colonial nostos in the lyric of Aimé Césaire and Derek Walcott’. Williams’s Notes on theUnderground:An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (1990) in many ways prefigures the research on katabatic literature in modernity as she focusses largely on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, relating the technological and archaeological advancements of its time to the prominence of underground imagery.30 In Passage Through Hell, David L. Pike discusses the descent topos as a central selfauthorising strategy of modernist texts, one that is considerably complicated and redefined by writers like Céline, Peter Weiss, Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin. Ronald R. Macdonald’s The Burial Place of Memory: Epic Underworlds in Vergil, Dante, and Milton(1987) selects earlier case-studies still, providing an essential reading of the complex and manifold relationships between some of the most important canonical epics.
28 Chils (2016, 268).
29 Cf. Jung (2014 [1959], 81–82, 186). On the essentialism of Jung’s approach, cf. Hauke (2000), esp. ‘Dealing with the Essential’ 114ff.
All these studies frame memory as of either central or at least tangential importance to the descent motif. While studies like Macdonald’s emphasise the importance of remembering within the narrative itself,31 Williams elaborates on memories ofthe underworld
myth itself, arguing that ‘the metaphor of death is a primary category of human thought’:
Long before Virgil’s Aeneas was guided by a Sibyl to the infernal regions through a cave on the leaden Lake Avernus, long before stories of Proserpine’s abduction to the underworld by Plato or of Orpheus’s descent to the Stygian realm to bring back Eurydice, and long before recorded history, when the earliest humans drew the bison and bears they hunted on the walls and ceilings of caves, they must have told stories about the dark underworld lying even deeper within the earth. Even in environments that lack caves –the Kalahari Desert, and the flat open landscapes of Siberia and Central Asia – the preliterate inhabitants assumed a vertical cosmos: sky, earth, the underworld.32
The descent narrative is one that has existed as long as the first stories of mankind, in both literary and oral formats. To comprehend and usefully analyse such a long mnemohistory, not only does each descent narrative’s context invite close analysis, but the intertextual relations between katabasis narratives become important subjects for study in themselves. More than a mythical trope with a long reception history, the journey to the underworld has become what Falconer names a ‘memorious genre’, wherein the narrative structure of katabasis resonates with memories of previous descents, which are revisited throughout – and outside of – the Western literary canon and cultural imagination.33 Each version of a descent narrative therein resonates with the canon that precedes it but, more than this, it serves to perpetuate an intertextual tradition that has come to assume a recognisable place within literary memory.34 Memory scholars like Renate Lachmann have long called literature a ‘mnemonic art par excellance’, proposing that
30 Williams (2008, 16).
31 Cf., for instance, Macdonald (1987, 31).
32 Williams (2008, 8).
[l]literature is culture’s memory, not as a simple recording device but as a body of commemorative actions that include the knowledge stored by a
culture, and virtually all texts a culture has produced and by which a culture is constituted.35
The narrative dynamic of remembering is crucial both within the descent narrative itself and as part of the meta-fictional and intertextual authoring process, as the negotiations of context, creative agency, and relationality within such a prominent genre are, in effect, acts of intertextual remembering. Due to this combination of katabasis’s long-standing preoccupation with memory and commemoration, and its prominent history of intertextuality, it exists in a unique double-bind, not only an easily communicable ‘global icon’ but also a narrative dynamic that is intrinsically bound up in complex negotiations of ‘remembering’ – adapting, refiguring, alluding to – textual, intertextual, and meta-fictional versions of the past.
Pike has previously alluded to the self-reflexive dimension of the descent narrative when he notes that
[t]he lore of the nekuia is presented as a repository of the past from which each poet draws whatever mythic or historical personages are required by each audience and context. In a broader sense, the descent to the underworld reveals itself as the site where the means and intentions of representation may be expressed and contextualised.36
33 Falconer (2011, 405).
34 On genre memories and their potential to generate cultural memory, cf. Erll (2011, 74).
35 Lachmann (2010, 301). This claim is echoed in Liedeke Plate’s assessment of women’s rewritings of the classics, wherein she sees specifically classical reception as a ‘process and product of cultural remembrance’ (Plate 2011, 3).
The descent to the underworld thus becomes an ‘allegorical mode […] emblematic of metaliterary motifs in general’.37 This collection draws on conceptions of katabasisas a ‘memorious genre’ to explore the connections that exist between the descent and the various ideas around ‘remembering’ which we find both in antiquity and in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And, at its core, the
suggestion it tentatively puts forward is that the popularity of the katabasis motif in both these eras originates from the descent narrative’s textual and meta-fictional preoccupations with different forms of remembrance, a preoccupation that fundamentally resonates with and is shaped by its respective socio-cultural environments.
In the second chapter, entitled ‘The even longer Descent: Notes on Genesis and Development of Ancient Egyptian Underworld conceptions and their Interplay with Funerary Practice’, Jakob Schneider reads the emergence and transformations of ancient Egyptian underworld mythology as continuous acts of remembering, preserved, and encapsulated in funerary practices. The next chapter retains the toponymical focus as Joel Gordon’s ‘Remembering in the real world: katabaticand natural deathscapes’ investigates numerous locales across the Graeco-Roman world at which the descent into the underworld became manifest within reality, sites identified by the ancients as nekuomanteia, charonia, and plutonia. Moving from underworldly landscapes to epic, Abigail Buglass discusses Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura in the fourth chapter, ‘Lucretius’ Journey to the Underworld: Poetic Memory and Allegoresis’, focussing on the important roles that cultural memory, the remembrance or forgetfulness of the characters in the narratives themselves, and broader networks of remembrance in intertextuality all play in ancient depictions of hell and misery. Chapter 5, ‘Memories of Rome’s Underworld in Lucan’s Civil War Narrative’ by Eleonora Tola, discusses Lucan’s Bellum Civile in connection to Roman cultural memory and attempts to preserve the city’s moral traditions. The chapter that follows, ‘The Open Door to Elysium in Lucian’s True History’, is A. Everett Beek’s discussion of the sea voyage to Elysium described in Lucian’s collection of parodic tales as a literary engagement with several katabatic narratives. After the first six chapters, this collection moves from antiquity into modernity, where it uncovers adaptations and refigurations of Graeco-Roman as well as other descent traditions. Chapter 7, entitled ‘The Politics of Forgetting: Descents into Memory in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness’’: the katabatic wisdom tradition in
Joseph Conrad’s HeartofDarkness’ is Borg Cardona’s exploration of several interconnected acts of remembering in Conrad’s seminal novella. In the eighth chapter, ‘In the Depth of Water and the Heat of Fire: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as a Modern Descent into the Underworld’, Yi-Chuang E. Lin discusses Eliot’s poem within the cultural context of post-World War I Britain. Chapter 9, ‘Homer and LeGuin: Ancient and Modern Desires to Be Remembered’, is Frances Foster’s comparative investigation of OdysseyXI and Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea. Arnaud Barras’s subsequent chapter, ‘“An Australian-made hell”: postcolonial katabasis in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book ’ , discusses Australian Aboriginal writer Alexis Wright’s third novel, which depicts a world deeply imbued with an Australian Aboriginal ontology in which materiality and spirituality, life and death, and knowing and being are all entangled. The eleventh chapter, ‘Memory and Forgetfulness: In Seamus Heaney’s Virgilian Underworlds’, is Rachel Falconer’s investigation of Seamus Heaney’s poetic descents. And Chapter 12, entitled ‘“All must descend to where the stories are kept”: Katabasisand Self-Reflexive Authorship in: Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and The Penelopiad’, is Madeleine Scherer’s discussion of Atwood’s novella as an authorial descent into a past commemorated by the classical canon within a transcultural mnemonic hemisphere.
36 Pike (1997, 9).
37 Ibid, 2.
Most of the chapters from this collection are based on papers presented at the 2017 conference ‘“A Quest for Remembrance”: The Descent into the Classical Underworld’, organised by Madeleine Scherer and held at the University of Warwick, and all chapters have been selected and edited by Scherer and Falconer. The fact that only three female authors are discussed here should briefly be addressed. It is undeniably the case that the history of katabatic narratives features many more male than female authors, particularly in the literature of antiquity. Moreover, as Falconer writes,
[f]emale characters, by definition, are usually excluded from descent because they are already in the underworld; indeed, the underworld is symbolically what they are. Narratives of the Orpheus myth, for example, usually dispatch Eurydice to the underworld in the opening lines or paragraphs, if she is not discovered there already from the outset; in a sense, she has always already died.38
38 Falconer (2007, 144). As a notable exception from this trend in antiquity, Falconer names Inanna, the ancient Mesopotamian goddess who descended to the underworld to wrest power from the underworld goddess Erishkigal (ibid, 144).
To counter this tradition, many female writers have adopted the descent narrative structure, especially from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Falconer devotes one chapter of her study, Hell in Contemporary Literature to female writers who have engaged directly in the inherited gender dynamics of the tradition. And in this collection, we find Atwood and LeGuin changing the shape of that tradition from within. But many more could be discussed, from Virginia Woolf to Eavan Boland, and it is to be hoped that the present volume will prove to be a stimulus for further research in this direction.
Through these case-studies this collection hopes to explore katabasis as a sub-genre of the quest narrative; as a narrative dynamic that stretches from antiquity to the contemporary world and that, although it has varied over time and within its many adaptation contexts, has stayed continuously resonant through its strong thematic preoccupations with both memory and commemoration. The diversity of examples aims to reinforce the sense of memory as a persistent preoccupation of ancient as well as modern descent narratives, comparisons between katabasis narratives that would otherwise be difficult to frame contextually. As this volume aims to demonstrate, the long intertextual history of one of the most consistently popular tropes is best explored through a conceptual lens that appreciates katabasis’s central narrative preoccupation with textual, intertextual, and cultural memory. The history of literature and intertextuality has long been conceptualised as a mnemohistory,
and the long mnemohistory of myth provides a wide scope of casestudies to map the multidirectional travel, local integration, and, at times, the universalising and competitive nature of travelling memories. Here, the reader is invited to embark on their own katabatic descent through the following chapters, to investigate the darkness of Hell in which, in the words of Boland, ‘[m]emory was a whisper, a sound that died in your throat’.
Works Cited
Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Boland, Eavan. 1995. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. Manchester: Carcanet Press.
Chils, Peter. 2016. ‘Remembrance in the Twenty-First Century.’ In Memory in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Perspectives from the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences, edited by Sebastian Groes, 268–271. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Erll, Astrid. 2011. Memory in Culture, translated by Sara B. Young. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
. 2018. ‘Homer – A Relational Mnemonhistory.’ Memory Studies 11 (3): 274–286.
Falconer, Rachel. 2011. ‘Heaney, Virgil and Contemporary Katabasis.’ In A Companion to Poetic Genre, edited by Erik Martiny Erik, 404–420. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
. 2007. Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives since 1945. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Gould, John. 2001. Myth, Ritual, Memory, and Exchange: Essays in Greek Literature andCulture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grethlein, Jonas. 2008. ‘Memory and Material Objects in the Iliad and the Odyssey.’ The JournalofHellenic Studies 128: 27–51.
——— . 2010. The Greeks andTheir Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 2014. ‘The Many Faces of the Past in Archaic and Classical Greece.’ In Thinking, Recording, and Writing History in the Ancient World, edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub, 234–255. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.
Groes, Sebastian. 2016. ‘Introduction: Memory in the Twenty-First Century.’ In Memory in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Perspectives from the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences, edited by Sebastian Groes, 1–6. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
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semejantes, que son las que consumen las haciendas. Y esta orden guardan los señores y los servidores, los ricos y los pobres, porque los buenos y que algo pueden, quieren que tomen enxemplo dellos los inferiores para no desconcertarse, y no por esso dexan de conoscer los que más valen, porque los otros les reconocen la superioridad que sobre ellos tienen mejor que nosotros hacemos. Porque no hay en el mundo tanta soberbia ni tanta presunción y exención como en los christianos, y en esto de los vestidos mucho más, porque tan bien los quieren traer el oficial como el caballero y el criado como el señor, de manera que todo va desbaratado y sin ninguna orden ni concierto, el que no falta entre las otras generaciones de gentes de quien tengamos noticia de vista ó de oídas ó por escritura, porque lo mesmo leemos de todos los antiguos que se moderaban en gran manera en los vestidos y aderezos de sus personas.
E .—Pues no se os ha acordado de hablar en les aderezos del camino, que no me parece que habría poco que decir sobre ello.
H —Tenéis razón, porque casi todos son disparates, y si lo queréis ver, decidme, ¿puede ser mayor disparate en el mundo que andar un hombre comúnmente vestido de paño procurando que un sayo y una capa le dure diez años, y cuando va de camino lleva terciopelos y rasos, y los chapeos con cordones de oro y plata, para que lo destruya todo el aire y el polvo y la agua y los lodos, y muchas veces un vestido destos que les cuesta cuanto tienen, cuando han servido en un camino están tales que no pueden servir en otros? Y á mi parecer mejor sería mudar bissiesto y que los buenos vestidos serviesen de rua, y los que no lo fuesen de camino.
E .—Cesse un poco esta plática y mirad cuáles vienen la señora doña Petronila y la señora doña Juana de Arellano que parecen dos serafines en hermosura, pues poco vienen bien aderezadas; yo fiador que pasa de quinientos ducados de valor lo que trae sobre sí doña Petronila.
H .—También puedo yo fiar que no vale otro tanto la hacienda que su marido tiene, y así conoceréis la razón que yo tengo en lo que he dicho, porque
si el desconcierto del vestir de los hombres es muy grande, el de las mujeres es intolerable.
E .—Dexaldes pasar, que podrían oiros.
H .—Poco va ni viene que me oyan, que no soy servidor de ninguna dellas, y assí estaré libre para decir la verdad, que quieren parecer fuera de sus casas unas reinas y morir dentro dellas con sus maridos y hijos de hambre. No sé que paciencia es la que basta á los hombres que se casan en cumplir con los atavíos de las mujeres tan costosos y fuera dé términos, que en otros tiempos la que tenía una buena saya y un buen manto pensaba que no le faltaba ninguna cosa; y assí los antiguos romanos pusieron por ley y estatuto que ninguna romana pudiese tener más de un vestido de su persona, y por cierta ayuda que hicieron á la república dando las joyas de oro para una gran necesidad, entre otros beneficios que les hicieron en remuneración desto, fué el mayor darles licencia que cada una pudiese tener dos vestidos. Agora no se contentan con seis, ni con diez, ni con veinte, que hasta que no quede hacienda ninguna, toda querrían que se consumiese en vestidos. Unas
piden saboyanas, otras galeras, sayños, saltanbarcas, mantellinas, sayas con mangas de punta que tienen más paño ó seda que la misma saya, y otras cincuenta diferencias de ropas, unas cerradas y otras abiertas, de paño y de seda de diferentes colores, con las guarniciones tan anchas y tan costosas, que tienen más costa que la mesma ropa en que están puestas; las verdugadas y las vasquiñas que traen á cada día y en baxo de las otras ropas y sayas más cuestan agora que en otro tiempo lo que se solía dar á una mujer cuando se casaba, por rica que fuese. Y dexando los vestidos, en las invenciones de los tocados ¿habría poco que decir si hombre quisiese? Así Dios me salve que en pensarlo aborrezco sus trajes, sus redecillas, sus lados huecos, sus cabellos encrespados, sus pinjantes, sus pinos de oro, sus piezas de martillos, sus escosiones, sus beatillas y trapillos por desdén echados tras las orejas, con que piensan que parecen más hermosas; y de lo que me toma gana de reir muy de veras, es que lo mesmo quiere traer la mujer de un hombre común que la de un caballero que sea rico, todas quieren ser iguales y todas dan mala vida y trabajosa
á sus maridos si no las igualan con las otras aunque sean muy mejores y más ricas que ellas.
S .—Por eso hicieron bien los ginoveses pocos tiempos ha, que viendo cuán gran polilla y destryción para su hacienda eran los gastos excesivos y trajes de las mujeres, hicieron en su república un estatuto y ley general (la cual no sé si agora se guarda), y por ella pusieron el remedio necesario, el cual fué que ninguna mujer podiese traer ropa de seda ni de paño fino, sino de otros paños comunes, y solamente les dexaron lo que echan por cobertura sobre la cabeza cuando hace gran sol ó cuando llueve, que son dos varas de alguna manera de seda, así como se corta de la pieza, sin otra hechura ninguna.
E .—En eso, agravio parece que recebían las principales, pues no les dexaban en qué diferenciarse de las otras.
H .—Pluguiese á Dios que el mesmo agravio hiciesen á las principales de España, que bien se sufriría tan poco mal por que se ordenase tan gran bien, cuanto más que en todo se podría poner buen remedio, y que la ley se hiciese de manera que fuese justa, y que hubiese algunas
particularidades en que se diferenciasen las que más pueden y valen de las otras mujeres comunes.
S .—Esso sería poner confusión entre ellas, porque no habría mujer que con dos maravedís no pensase que podía traer lo que una condesa; lo mejor sería que ellas se comediesen y hiciessen lo que las romanas agora hacen, y es que todas andan vestidas de paño negro, sin guarnición ni gala ninguna, en que muestran su gran honestidad y bondad; no traen sobre si oro, ni perlas, ni otras cosas con que parezca acrecentar en su hermosura artificialmente; los mantos son unos lienzos blancos en que hay poca diferencia, que es de ser unos más delgados que otros. Todo su fin es andar honestas y sin traer sobre sí cosa que pueda dañar á su honestidad, y si algunas tienen algún vestido rico, diferenciado deste, no lo visten sino cuando hay algunas fiestas grandes, algunos ayuntamientos de muchas romanas en que quieren mostrarse. Y sin esto si fuese decir los ritos y costumbres de otras naciones en el vestir de las mujeres, todas enderezadas á buen fin, sería nunca acabar; pero en nuestra España la curiosidad
de las mujeres es tan grande, sus importunidades son tantas, sus desatinos en el vestir tan fuera de tino, que no hay quien las sufra, y en fin, todas hacen como las monas, que todo lo que ven que hacen y traen sus vecinas, quieren que passe por ellas, no mirando á la razón ni á la calidad y possibilidad de las otras, porque su fin no es sino de vestirse tan bien y mejor y más costosamente que todas, vaya por donde fuere y venga por donde viniere.
H .—¡Guay de los pobres maridos que lo han de sufrir y cumplir!
E .—No cabrían en sus casas si quisiesen hacer otra cosa.
S —Assí es, y particularmente mal podría remediarse este desconcierto; pero en general, remedio tendría si las gentes quisiesen.
H .—¿Qué remedio?
S .—Yo os lo diré. Que se heciesen leyes y pramáticas sobre ello, diferenciando los estados y dando á cada una qué ropas y de qué manera las podiese traer, y si no quesiesen tener respeto á las personas, que se tuviesen á las haciendas, y que no permitiesen que quisiesen
andar tan bien vestidos el hombre y la mujer que tienen doscientos ducados de hacienda como el que tiene dos mill, como el que tiene tres cuentos, porque de aquí nace la perdición, de que dan á uno quinientos ducados en casamiento y muchas veces los echa todos en vestidos sobre sí y su mujer, y después se ven en necesidad y trabajos sin poder remediarse. Y la pena que se pusiese en las leyes que sobre esto se hiciesen, habría de ser la mayor parte para el que denunciase de los vestidos, porque los pobres con la codicia no dejarían de denunciar de quienquiera que fuese, y assí las penas serían mejor esecutadas, y esta sería buena gobernación, que con ella se remediaría muy gran parte de la perdición del reino, que según veo trocadas y mudadas las cosas de el ser que solían, yo me maravillo cómo las gentes se sustentan ni pueden vivir con estos desconciertos que agora se usan.
H .—Nosotros no bastamos para concertarlos, y lo que más en ello se hablase es excusado; lo mejor será dexarlos y andar con el tiempo, que aosadas, que él haga presto mudanza de lo que agora se usa.
E —Plega á Dios que no sea de mal en peor.
S —Quien más viviere más cosas verá, y en fin, otros vendrán que digan que los usos de agora eran los mejores del mundo; y con esto nos vamos, que yo tengo un poco que hacer. Dios quede con vuestras mercedes.
H .—Y á vuestra merced no olvide.
Finis.
COLLOQUIO
Que trata de la vanidad de la honra del mundo, dividido en tres partes: En la primera se contiene qué cosa es la verdedera honra y cómo la quel mundo comúnmente tiene por honra las más veces se podría tener por más verdadera infamia. En la segunda se tratan las maneras de las salutaciones antiguas y los títulos antiguos en el escrebir, loando lo uno y lo otro y burlando de lo que agora se usa. En la tercera se trata una cuestión antigua y ya tratada por otros sobre cuál sea más verdadera honra, la que se gana por el valor y merecimiento de las personas ó la que procede en los hombres por la dependencia de sus pasados. Es colloquio muy provechoso para descubrir el engaño con que
las gentes están ciegas en lo que toca á la honra.
INTERLOCUTORES
Albanio. Antonio. Jerónimo.
A .—Deleitable cosa es, sin duda, Jerónimo mío, ver la frescura deste jardín tan hermoso y la verdura, tan apacible á los ojos, mezclada con las diversas colores de las flores y rosas que en ella produce la natura, con la voluntad de Aquél que todas las cosas hace, las cuales no solamente sirven al contentamiento que la vista con ellas recibe, sino que con la suavidad de su olor nos hacen alzar los juicios á la contemplación de mayores cosas, considerando qué tal será lo del cielo cuando en la tierra hallamos lo que en tan gran admiración nos pone.
J .—En gran manera me contenta todo lo que veo, y principalmente esta calle plantada de chopos, por tan gran concierto, que no sale el uno del otro con ser tan larga, siendo todos ellos tan altos y veniéndose á juntar las puntas los unos con los otros, como si la naturaleza quisiera usar de todo su poder hurtando la
fuerza del sol para que con menos pena y trabajo se pueda andar por ella, teniendo mayor oportunidad para tender los ojos por tan grande arboleda como por una parte y por otra paresce, habiendo en algunas partes tan grandes espesuras que no lo puedo ver sin venirme á la memoria las deleitosas moradas y hermosas estancias de las que los poetas llaman ninfas, y las florestas de los faunos y sátiros de la ciega y antigua gentilidad estimados por dioses. Si su diosa Diana agora estuviera en el mundo, no hallara más amenas y deleitosas las florestas y bosques á donde andaba cazando.
A .—No lo digáis de burla, que de veras podréis creerlo, porque dentro deste cercado no faltará á quien poder tirar con su arco ni en qué emplear las saetas de su aljaba; pero todo lo que habéis visto es poco con lo que veréis entrando por esta puerta. Y, lo primero, mirad esta hermosa casa y morada, no menos suntuosa que bien fabricada para el propósito que fué hecha, y la deleitosa y bien ordenada compostura deste deleitoso jardín, que es como ánima del que allá fuera habemos visto; qué orden de calles, qué plantas y hierbas tan olorosas, qué
sombras con sus descansos y asientos á donde pueden gozarse, á lo cual pone mayor contentamiento y alegría la grandeza y suntuosidad del estanque lleno de tantos géneros de pescados y tan crescidos que cuasi lo podréis juzgar por otro mar Caspio.
J .—Así lo parece con las barcas y navíos, á los cuales no falta sino la grandeza.
A .—Son conformes á la navegación que tienen, que es muy corta y de poco peligro.
J .—Lo que más me aplace es la dulce harmonía destos ruiseñores, que con la excelente suavidad de su música me tienen elevado tanto, que sin dubda no he visto más deleitoso lugar en el mundo. Pero, decidme: ¿por dónde sale el agua que vimos venir al estanque cerca de la puerta por donde entramos?
A .—Allí donde está aquel chapitel veréis una fuentecilla artificial por donde corre y sale de la otra parte, tomando la corriente por un valle más espeso de arboleda que ninguna floresta, en el cual se consume, recibiéndola en sí la tierra para depedirla por otros respiraderos, sin saber á dónde va á dar, aunque á lo que
se cree no puede ir á parar sino en el caudaloso río que de la otra parte tan cerca de las paredes del jardín tiene su corriente.
J .—¿Quién es aquel que de la otra parte del estanque anda passeándose tan embelesado y contemplativo que, á lo que paresce, hasta agora ni nos ha visto ni oído?
A .—Antonio, nuestro grande amigo, es, si yo no me engaño. Mejor conversación se nos apareja de la que pensamos.
J .—En algún profundo pensamiento anda metido, y entre sí se está riyendo no con poca gana.
A .—¿Qué es esto, señor Antonio, que tan de mañana nos habéis hurtado el gozo deste hermoso jardín?
A .—La ociosidad hace buscar algunas cosas en que pasar el tiempo, y yo, no teniendo en qué emplearlo, me he venido aquí adonde hay tanto para todos, que la mayor falta que veo es venir tan pocos á gozarlo. Y así, con la soledad que tenía, distraído en otros pensamientos, con el juicio no gozaba tanto de lo que presente tenía.
A —Así me parece que os había agora acaecido, porque de lo que pensárades os estábades reyendo con tanta voluntad, que por poco nos provocárades también á nosotros á risa.
A .—Estaba pensando en las opiniones de aquellos dos filósofos, Heráclito y Demócrito, y por no llorar, como hacía Heráclito, acordé reirme con Demócrito.
J .—¿Y qué era la causa de la risa?
A .—Ver la vanidad del mundo en una cosa que, por no ser tenido por loco, no me atrevería á decirlo.
A .—Tampoco hubiérades de decir esso para no ponernos en mayor agonía de saberla, y pues que forzosamente habréis de venir á declararos, mejor será que por vuestra voluntad lo digáis, que ninguna excusa podrá valeros para quedar (como suelen decir) preñado con vuestras razones.
A .—Con una condición os lo diré, y es, que por lo que dixere no me tengáis por desatinado, ó á lo menos no me condenéis hasta oir mi justicia, que pues tenemos tiempo y el lugar es oportuno, podréisme decir vuestro parecer,
oyendo también el mío, que después todos podremos ser los jueces para determinar la causa. Estaba pensando en la vanidad de la honra mundana y en el engaño que todos rescibimos en desearla y procurarla, y cuán mal entendemos qué cosa es honra para usar della conforme á lo que en sí es, y, en fin, con cuánta mengua y deshonra procuramos honrarnos todos los mortales, teniendo tan grande obligación para huir dello, como lo podrá ver cualquiera que con claro juicio procurare entender el engaño desta honra fingida y engañosa.
A .—Por cierto, señor Antonio, blasfemia es esta que (según la opinión general de las gentes) dificultosamente puede oirse con paciencia. Porque yo no veo en el mundo cosa que en más se deba tener, preciar y estimar que la honra, de la cual dice el filósofo que es el mayor bien de todos los bienes exteriores, y assí todos la buscamos y anteponemos á los otros bienes mundanos, y la tenemos por la más subida y más próspera felicidad y riqueza de todas las que en esta vida pueden alcanzarse para vivir en ella. Porque por ella estiman las gentes todos los otros bienes en poco: el dulce amor de los hijos,
la afición de sus mujeres, el sosiego de sus casas y patrias, y, finalmente, tienen en poco las vidas, ofresciéndolas á cada paso por la honra, y vos sólo en dos palabras procuráis destruirla y desterrarla de entre los hombres como á cosa abominable y digna de ser aborrecida. No hay hombre tan justo que la desechase, como podréis ver por lo que dice Esaias: Mi honra no la daré á otro. Sant Pablo, en el capítulo nono de la primera epístola á los de Corintho, dice: Más me conviene morir, que no que alguno deshaga mi gloria; y los hijos del Zebedeo, por la honra principalmente echaron á su madre que pidiese á Christo el asiento de la mano derecha para el uno y el de la siniestra para el otro. Y sin estos, otros muchos enxemplos podría traeros para confundir vuestra opinión tan contraria de la común en la estimación y precio de la honra, y autorizarlo con lo que dice el Sabio en los Proverbios: No des tu honra á gentes ajenas.
A .—No cumplís, señor Albanio, la condición con que se comenzó esta materia, pues sin oirme me dais por condenado. Yo confieso todo lo que habéis dicho ser assí, y lo que os ruego es que me oigáis, porque veréis cómo
debaxo dello está el engaño manifiestamente encubierto, y para que mejor lo entendáis, escuchadme con atención, no dexando de replicar á los tiempos necessarios, que á todo pienso satisfaceros.
J .—Justo es que assí lo hagamos y que escuchemos cómo funda su razón, que según las dificultades que en ella hallo, tengo deseo de ver la conclusión que tendrá.
A .—Pues hemos de tratar de la honra, para que mejor nos entendamos, es menester saber primero qué cosa es honra.
A .—Según el filósofo, no es otra cosa sino premio de la virtud.
A .—Es tan contrario lo que agora se usa de lo que el filósofo dice y otros muchos autores que tratan desta materia, como veréis por lo que adelante diré, que vosotros vendréis á confesar sin tormento ser verdad todo lo que he dicho, porque conforme á esa definición hemos de considerar de una ó de dos maneras la honra. La una es como christianos, y si lo somos tan de veras como es razón que lo seamos, mayor obligación tenemos á nuestra fe que á nuestra honra.
J —Ninguno puede negarlo.
A —-¿Pues qué cosa hay hoy en el mundo tan contraria á la verdadera fe de christiano como es la honra tomándola, no conforme á la difinición del filósofo, sino como nosotros della sentimos, porque así la más verdadera difinición será presunción y soberbia y vanagloria del mundo, y della dice Christo por el evangelio de San Juan: ¿Cómo podréis creer los que andáis buscando la honra entre vosotros y no buscáis la que de solo Dios procede? Esta nuestra sanctíssima fe es fundada en verdadera humildad christiana, y la honra, como he dicho, es una vana y soberbia presunción, y desta manera mal puede compadecerse, porque todos los que quieren y procuran y buscan honra, van fuera del camino que deben siguir los que son christianos; y así me parece que es más sutil red y el más delicado lazo y encubierto que el demonio nos arma para guiarnos por el camino de perdición. ¿Y qué pensáis que es la causa? El deseo que tiene que nos perdamos por la mesma razón que él fué perdido. Cosa es por cierto para que todos nos espantemos y nos ponga en gran
admiración, ver la fuerza que tiene esta ambición de la honra, que no solamente tenemos en poco y menospreciamos los hijos y las mujeres, los parientes, las haciendas, las vidas, pero que no haga más cuenta de las ánimas, teniéndolas en menos que si no las tuviésemos, ni esperanza ninguna de salvarlas, buscándola y procurándola por diferentes vías que lo hacían los hijos del Zebedeo y otras personas justas, las cuales buscaban la verdadera honra aunque erraban los verdaderos medios de la virtud, puesto que no querían ser honrados y estimados por las riquezas ni hazañas preñadas de la vanagloria mundana.
J .—Conforme á eso, parésceme que queréis condenar los notables hechos y dignos de perpetua memoria que los romanos, los griegos, los cartagineses y otras naciones hicieron, ofreciendo las vidas de su propia voluntad, como hicieron los Decios, Mucio Scévola y otros que por la prolixidad dexo de decir.
A .—Si essos pensaran que por ello podían perder sus ánimas, yo los condenara; pero así no quiero hacerlo cuanto á este artículo, porque no tenían
