The goddess whom she instinctively adored - Hardy's paganism - plus a fetching nude sheep

I’ll expand on Hardy’s paganism.  Or that of the narrator of Far from the Madding Crowd, easily the most important character in the book.  I do not remember how common mythological references were in other Hardy novels, but Madding Crowd is full of them, and they all come from the narrator.  He is one odd bird.

Some references are mere metaphors.  A group of drinkers “grew as merry as the gods in Homer's heaven” while they listened to “a ballad as inclusive and interminable as that with which the worthy toper old Silenus amused on a similar occasion the swains Chromis and Mnasylus” (Ch. 23)  Virgil’s sixth Eclogue, if you are curious.  The narrator is not afraid of making me look up one of his allusions.  His characters, farmhands and shepherds, would have no idea what he is talking about.

At least one classical reference is pure comedy.  A sheep has just been sheared:

The clean, sleek creature arose from its fleece – how perfectly like Aphrodite rising from the foam should have been seen to be realized –  looking startled and shy at the loss of its garment…  (Ch. 22)

I hope that was meant as comedy.

But as the metaphors and jokes and so on accumulated, I began to realize that none of this figurative language was actually descriptive.  Virgil and Venus do not help us see the scene – metaphor as an aid to precision – but rather add a layer of meaning.  All of my notes are from the middle of the book or later, because early on I did not understand what I was seeing in the text.  I did not understand that when the narrator pulled in a Greek god he meant it.

This was the strangest one:

Although she scarcely knew the divinity's name, Diana was the goddess whom Bathsheba instinctively adored.  (Ch. 41)

Only the narrator (and the reader) see all of these gods swirling around the humans and their sheep.

It was an odd experience reading E. R. Dodd's The Greeks and the Irrational (1949) alongside Hardy:

The Greek had always felt the experience of passion as something mysterious and frightening, the experience of a force that was in him, possessing him, rather than possessed by him.  The very word pathos testifies to that: like its Latin equivalent passio, it means something “happens to” a man, something of which he is a passive victim. (Ch. VI, 185)

The passage describes three of the four major characters.  Or what about the link between Pan  who is the god of panic, sheep, and panicky sheep (Ch. III, p. 95), all important parts of Hardy’s pastoral novel.  Or  the discussion of Eros as “divine madness, “the one mode of experience which brings together the two natures of man, the divine self and the tethered beast” (Ch. VII, p. 218).  This chance meeting of books made Hardy’s, or the narrator’s, paganism and related irrationalism stand out clearly.

Dodds gives a hint about Hardy’s deeper purpose, too.  The classical scholar is pushing back on the simple idea of Greece as the birthplace of Reason.  He argues first that there were always other competing traditions, and that as Greece declined those traditions filled the vacuum, sometimes in decadent forms.  Hardy’s pagan view of life is itself a reaction against – a warning to? – or just an expression of unease about the rationalism of his own time, a reminder of the power of the gods we instinctively adore.  

The more I read about it the more my knowledge diminishes - The Greeks and the Irrational by E. R. Dodds

Sometimes I need to read a book of criticism that is full of ideas, just to loosen up the drier parts of the brain.  The subject of the book hardly matters.  The Greeks and the Irrational, the 1949 study of the title subject by classicist E. R. Dodds, inflected with the latest in philological, anthropological, and Freudian thinking, was just what I needed.  Some of it is likely wrong, but what does that have to do with ideas?

The point of the book is to set aside Athens as the birthplace of Reason and work through the available evidence about the irrational side of Classical Greek thought and life, the superstitions and magic and weirdness.  Plato, Homer, and the tragic playwrights get most of the textual attention, along with the Pythagorean cult, the Orphic cult, the Bacchic cult, all of the best cults.

The book is packed with witches, oracles, dreams, and daemons, and was nicely complementary to Carlo Ginzburg and Rudyard Kipling, and I assume will mesh nicely with Little, Big.  Dodds – here we see the influence of contemporary anthropologists – would like to link Greek cultic practices to those of Siberians shamans (direct ancestors of Ginzburg’s semi-pagan witch-fighters), which I thought was a stretch until he began to pull examples from various sources about mystics coming to Greece from the North:

Out of the North came Abaris, riding, it was said, upon an arrow, as souls, it appears, still do in Siberia.  So advanced was he in the art of fasting that he had learned to dispense altogether with human food.  He banished pestilences, predicted earthquakes, composed religious poems, and taught the worship of his northern god, whom the Greeks called the Hyperborean Apollo.  (“The Greek Shamans and Puritanism,” 141)

I have omitted the many footnote numbers, five in the above passage, for example, leading to not one but many sources mentioning Abaris, a historical, not mythic, figure, and then many more mentioning other shamans, leading to this wild claim:

Such tales of disappearing and reappearing shamans were sufficiently familiar at Athens for Sophocles to refer to them in Electra without any need to mention names.

I obviously did not understand that particular passage (ll. 62-5) of Sophocles at all, an experience that Dodds let me know repeatedly, in Homer, in Pindar, and especially in Plato; oh how poorly I must have read Plato.  Dodds sympathizes:

But I must confess that I know very little about early Orphism, and the more I read about it the more my knowledge diminishes.  Twenty years ago, I could have said quite a lot about it (we all could at that time).  Since then, I have lost a great deal of knowledge; for this loss I am indebted to [list of scholars]  (147)

This might give an idea of how Dodds’s book is pleasingly readable.  My own great hope is that if I read enough, I will at some point have no knowledge whatsoever.  Dodds has been a big help.

I hope that The Greeks and the Irrational will help spur some ideas about Little, Big.  Dodds ends with an account, social and psychological, of the collapse of reason during the Hellenistic period.  “The Return of the Irrational was, as may be seen from these few examples, pretty complete” (“The Fear of Freedom,” 253).  That has a nice touch of the cyclical ethos of Crowley’s fairy story.  The strange coincidence, though, were the many correspondences between what I was finding in Dodds and what I was reading at the same time in Far from the Madding Crowd.  Talk about the Return of the Irrational!  So as I write about Thomas Hardy next week, I will, if nothing else, lard my posts with quotations from this rich book.