Explaining Demeter and Persephone

For me the myth of Demeter and Persephone speaks of the intimate love between mother and child and the fact that their wholeness is dependent on this bond. I chose to re-tell the myth of Demeter and Persephone through employing a non-gender specific symbolic image by the artist Amanda Shelsher, combined with the musical piece 'Et Misericordia' by Vivaldi. To me this image, coupled with this music, with its plurality of voices, speaks of love, humanity, vulnerability, and emotional tenderness and dependency between two humans. It speaks of helplessness in the face of uncontrollable events and the misery of life, and of human despair and beauty. It symbolizes the parent's protective love and bond with its child, and more generally the bond between any people who may rely on one another for understanding, compassion and empathy.

Demeter and Persephone, I think.

I think that I just told it in the most obvious way for me, quite personally and so perhaps less challenging of the ‘original’. Having left home quite suddenly at a relatively young age, I identified with the mother-daughter relationship from the perspective of Persephone, but for this to be the case she had to be at the decisive centre (!) of the story rather than a pawn around which to make the rest of the story play.

I was particularly interested in the mother-daughter relationship and the extreme closeness that holds it. I wanted to look at what happens to its intensity when it is forcibly separated, particularly when the separating force is internal and not imposed from without (as is implied in the original versions), and so in my version Persephone left of her own inquisitive impulse. I saw a lot of complexities in that movement and enormous emotional confusion, especially a kind of unrequited guilt and a certain nostalgia which is coloured by both her own complicity and the forever-irreversible nature of separation. I wanted her to have a certain agency and a power in that propulsion.

I tried to show the unspoken emotional understanding between them, conveyed almost in a physical way from body to body, particularly when the relationship is so confined and intensified, when one psyche seeks refuge in another. I hoped that it would be read not as a criticism of Demeter, whose strength I hope I conveyed, but rather as a display of the precariousness (this is complimentary to her immense strength, not in opposition of it) of her position both physically and emotionally, but more importantly, that it might pose a question about the possibility of protecting innocence. I thought it was particularly interesting to consider the processes and decisions which go into how the other, particularly a loved other, is protected. There is always a sacrifice in every decision, I wanted to show, particularly through the character of Persephone, the certain sense of inevitability with which painful decisions are made: decisions which are taken that are violent to the self, and in this case, to the mother. I think that the idea of protection is hugely difficult anyway and when it is set in a parent-child dynamic it is all the more charged, i particularly wanted to demonstrate the two-way nature of the desire to protect, and so Persephone’s pain and concern for Demeter has the same element of wanting to protect. This notion of protection coupled with guilt is explored both in Demeter and Persephone. There is a lot of guilt in my story which is associated with the power of decisions and actions and a certain empathy of how these actions resonate for others and how all of these factors do not synchronise. I wanted to question whether guilt is just futile. It is the most self-attacking of emotions, which is why I wanted Demeter’s silent conveyance of her pain and past to Persephone to be understood as inevitable and not to be judged, it wasn’t a failure on her part, rather, i thought that the emotion and intention was quite beautiful: was a strength, not a weakness. Both Demeter and Persephone have a lot of power in my story and I think that the main point is regarding the difficulty of managing that power when the desire which motivates decisions is fragmentary, this is in direct opposition to the ‘original’ which seems to suggest that choice isn’t really an issue, that it is simply a case of actions being made either in the name of the morally good or the morally bad.

I wanted to look at the creativity which can at times come out of depressive states. Of course this is already there in the main plot of the story, but the creativity of springtime in the traditional version is born of the joy which overrides the depression, whereas I wanted to show another creativity in more direct correlation with Persephone’s own depression: she created a kind of poetic counter-cycle. I was inspired in this by Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun in which she inquires into incidences of creativity from melancholia and other supposedly non-conducive states, I was particularly interested in Dostoevsky’s epilepsy which Kristeva dedicates a chapter to, and to which he infers in The Idiot. Again, i saw the creativity as testament to the strength of the characters and hope that a destructive creation wasn’t automatically branded negatively.

Myth Myth Myth

Demeter's story; notes, explanations and motivations.

My re-telling of the story of Demeter is as much about an awkward teenager forced out of his own context --by having to do work experience in an old people's home-- than it is about Demeter herself. He comes into contact with a parallel society that has been violently separated from his own, in the form of an old people's home. They seem to live lives that are similar, but somehow removed from his. Everyday tasks are transformed as in their detail into alien rituals and ceremonies.

He meets Demeter, one of the residents, and is told the story of the loss of Persephone. The factual reality of her story remains purposely ambiguous throughout, with earth-splitting etc. plausibly being metaphorical language. It also relied on the reader (the myth class) knowing the details of the myth, which were alluded to.

At the end of the story the nurse tells the boy that Demeter didn't have a daughter. Her story is real in that it comes from experiences in her life, her youth, but they have been reconfigured into a different narrative that serves a different purpose. The Eleusinians are the resident's of the home --Eleusina-- as well as being the followers of the Eleusinian mysteries, which relate to the cult of Demeter and Persephone. For both Eleusinians Demeter's story is about renewal and the natural cycles of life and the seasons. The myth still wields its power, to the extent that the question of whether it’s factually true or false is no longer the primary concern.

I also included at the head of the story an extract from the Antonio Machado poem 'Proverbios y cantares XXIX'. It is purposely not referenced or translated in faux modernist style (can you be any other type of modernist in postmodernity?).

Al andar se hace el camino,

y al volver la vista atrás

se ve la senda que nunca

se ha de volver a pisar.

In walking the path is made

And on turning one’s sight back

The path is visible that never

Will be trodden again

This seemed a pertinent motif for old age and Demeter's story, as well as the mythmaking power of the telling itself. In this narrative the idea of old age, loss of memory and fantasy came together. In the vagaries of reality, fiction and the inevitable deterioration of the body Demeter still finds meaning through narrating herself and her story, as well as providing a mythic narrative of renewal and worth for her aged co-habitants. The device of the work-experiencing boy is an attempt to highlight the utterly foreign nature of the discourse/paradigm these people inhabit. Entering into their world he sees a reality constructed around different assumptions, expectations, needs. It is this realization of utter difference, rather than an attempt to cross the divide, that serves as the boy’s revelation.

One can therefore see the story as the moralizing Myth I probably wanted it to be.

Myth Myth Myth...

Clare's post-analysis analysis.

Read my Penni does Pomegranate myth HERE

For me, the purpose of education is to enable us to understand and, therefore, attempt to transform the material world around us which, from a classical Marxist approach, will have an impact upon the ideological superstructure. My story, then, aimed to challenge the way we are conditioned to see things to help us understand contradictions in life which prevent us from making these changes.

This was not so much an exercise in l'ecriture feminine but rather an attempt at applying a semi-post-structuralist-realist(!) technique of literary practice to an analysis that employs a non-universalising materialist conception of the world as its theory. Realism as a literary genre is not intended to be realistic per se: by removing any fanciful extras I sought to provide a truthful rendering of typical characters under (fairly) typical circumstances in order to explore the conflict ridden and contradictory nature of social relations—of production and also sexual—by overemphasising the relationship between the unconscious and those relations.

I aimed to demonstrate this through both form and content.

The form was deliberately confusing. In the first instance I wanted the aesthetic quality of my myth to urge the reader to question the way we are conditioned to see things. The story (does not) start(s) with the interwoven secret 'thoughts to self/reader' which I hoped would compel the reader to emphathise with Demeter. In a post-structuralist fashion I played with the order of these interjections: the opening one spoke about a drought which had not yet happened, in fact the next section spoke about watering plants and tending fields which was the binary opposite of a drought. But to also highlight that these oppositions are not equal;one is always valourised over the other and in fact sets the limits for the oppressed other. The first part of the final interjections could have been placed near the beginning after he (who was he?) cooked the meal. I did this to illuminate that the unconscious fills in gaps and makes concrete that which is not and to show how dialectical processes are at play in that the reader imparts their own experiences on a text. They were not intended to be the story proper but rather constantly referring to something else to show that language is not always so clear cut. I did this to demonstrate that, in the words of Derrida, 'there is no outside the text'... It is often what we don't say that speaks volumes and this absence is still present in the text. I also employed labels at the bottom of the post to reinforce this. Finally on form, the myth was set a-historically to prove Levi-Strauss' proposition that the mind attempts to make sense of, and control, nature in exactly the same way across time thereby dispelling the myth of the pensé sauvage.

Content. I aimed to demonstrated how when the means of production, in this case the fields, are controlled individually by an elite, as opposed to collectively by those who operate them, ideology serves to fill the gap between being alienated from the means of production and the unconscious representation of it. By appropriating the land the ruling class accordingly altered the forces of production and transformed the relations of production and, if we accept the premise that the ideas of every epoch are those of the ruling class, we see how the lies about the bare land were implemented to justify oppression and divisions in society. I played with tropes of class and class division to highlight how they have an impact upon constructions of gender formation and divisions, sexuality and heteronormativity and to challenge other socially accepted norms such as what constitutes a 'family': who exactly were the 'four of us' who went to the city? Who did Zeus find on Demeter's breast? Even the concept of, or signifier, 'mother' is not concrete. Ownership of women is also shown here as an effect of the concept of land-ownership. And, finally, Demeter referred to god as both a transcendental god but also as the self-image of man. This contradiction again shows how ideology, in this case religion, is a necessary product of unfree social conditions (alienation from means of production and unconscious acceptance of oppressive property relations) as explained before.

When in the story I wrote 'I'm not sure if it's seeing me in pain or the milk that he loves but none-the-less I wish he would return to just cooking for us in exchange for sex', I aimed to retrieve Freud's analysis of the object of desire and to confront Lacan when he says that 'desire' is merely a desire for the others desire. Desire is always culturally and historically relative and partly because for Lacan desire has no aim it leaves the analyist to concentrate their psychoanalytic techniques on only the adjustment of the individual whereas for Freud changing the individual rather than the world was a neurotic response.

Another contradiction in a conflict ridden world is when Demeter went on sex-strike. This was, of course, a metaphor for the resistance to patriarchal rule but also highlighted how individual actions do not in and of themselves endure any permanent change. The struggle for emancipation can only be enacted collectively which is why at the end they didn't live happily ever after. They only 'live' which was intended to be a dangling signifier to indicate that the story was not complete (with no full stop) and this analysis also ends with no full stop since I do not believe that Marxism is a complete, universalising finished product and never will be.

On my analysis itself. I appreciate there are many other things I could point out and analyse. Certainly my analysis would have been different if I had written it at the time of writing my myth. My plan for the form and content was there from the beginning; but to what extent were these conscious intentions? Has my recent essay on Levi-Strauss and further readings on Freud enabled me to prove what they propose?

And finally; my authorial intention was to 'cut out' that which would make my myth appropriate to my political beliefs. And further the dialectic of intertextuality shows how we are all connected in this world whether we like it or not...

Playing at being a Roman poet

My version of the myth focuses on one particular episode in the story, in which Demeter roams the earth in search of her daughter.  I chose to focus on one episode—and specifically one emotion—so as to convey the desperate and debilitating sense of grief that a mother experiences at the loss of her daughter.

The choice to focus on a emotion as the structure for my re-telling of the myth is, in large part inspired by my classical background.  In Greek 'myth' the pantheon of gods was partly comprised of minor deities who controlled the human condition; there are perhaps more commonly known as abstract personifications such as Justice, Love, Fear or Death.  These ranged from emotions and states of mind, to aspects of the human condition, qualities or personality traits, and other abstract nouns.  During the 'Golden Age' of Latin literature, poets often emulated Greek literature, incorporating thematic and stylistic elements into their work, such as the use of these personifications in order to intimate the deeds and workings of the gods on the everyday lives of humans (deservedly or not).  Such personification and metaphorical descriptions were most famously used by Ovid and Virgil (cf. Ovid Met.11.600ff, Met.8.750ff, Virgil Aen.4.174ff).  Having read Ovid a long time ago at school, I revisited the Metamorphoses for inspiration for my personification allegory.  As I hadn't remembered reading a personification for Grief, I decided to use this as my abstract noun.  Ovid used the Latin form of the word—as opposed to the Greek—in his allegories, which I also used in my re-telling. The word dolor in Latin means grief, but it also means pain (as in physical pain), both of which I imagined Demeter would experience.  In Ovid and Virgil's work, much time is spent creating an image of the deity for the reader, particularly a full description of their physical characteristics, which embody the trait of the deity (Somnus is nodding himself to sleep, Fames is wasting away with hunger).  In fact, much of my re-telling is the story of Dolor, and the consequence that his presence has for Demeter (unfortunately I did not find a suitable female  noun for Grief, however this male messenger for the gods may also allude to another aspect of the myth: the unjust suffering of a woman at the hands of one of the chief 'architects' of the patriarchal classical world). 

I tried to incorporate thematic elements as used by Roman authors—personification of the deity (including a description of their appearance) and the consequences of their presence, in this case, the actual Grief that Demeter would suffer—as well as stylistic elements, including a tricolon simile, a chiasmus, epithets, and allusions to other events and ideas not included in my re-telling but which are part of the general story. I also changed the goddesses names to Ceres and Proserpina, which are the Roman versions of their Greek names.

In focusing on this one moment in the 'myth', I wanted to concentrate completely on Demeter's sense of anguish and grief at the loss of her daughter, and the helplessness of her situation.  This helplessness is brought out by the use of an external actor, Grief, as the figure who torments her every turn, whilst Demeter is condemned to a double suffering: the loss of her daughter and the constant presence of the deity.  Her suffering is made even more distressing with our knowledge of her divinity; most persons affected by the gods were humans, and her irrepressible suffering indicates the raw emotions that all individuals experience. I think this use of abstract nouns indicates the purpose for which they were used: to show the vulnerability of individuals at the hands of uncontrollable forces (as it was assumed in Classical Antiquity and perhaps still today?).  Demeter suffers because of Grief, and humans on earth suffer because of Demeter.  The 'myth' finishes by alluding back to the cause of this mother's anguish, and is the last word of my re-telling, the sign of her beloved daughter and the root of her grief, Persephone.

Final Question

What do you now think the object of mythology is? What is myth as an object? What does Ellwood mean when he says that 'myth was important as the bearer of the "Other"'? Do you agree? Given the sinister history of mythology is it now time to put a stop to it as a field of study? Is it 'obsolete'?

Also, remember to prepare a few words to say about your next essay, for tomorrow we'll have some case-studies brainstorming for you to have an idea of what the others are working onto.

Persephone and Demeter Myth - Holly

Many feminist interpretations of well known myths including Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad and Carol Ann Duffy’s poems are designed to give voice to the absent women of the stories or to create a feminist version of that voice. I find them lacking, however, because in the end, those voices are meaningless without their reference to the main, male voice. Giving a voice to Mrs Beast, is meaningless without reference to the story of the Beast. In the story of Persephone and Demeter, much is made of Demeter, as the mother of Persephone and about the pain of separation but Persephone is often overshadowed in this. I therefore chose to take focus away from Demeter’s trials and the hunt for her daughter’s whereabouts and look more at the events affecting Persephone. Feeling, as I have said, that Persephone is meaningless without the more mainstream representations of her mother, of Hades or of the Gods, it did not seem appropriate to leave them out. Instead I divided the story into three columns trying to show the story from three perspectives: Demeter’s, Persephone’s and Hades. Persephone’s, however, the central column, is placed lower than the two on either side of her so that her perspective becomes more subsumed, their voices being the dominant narratives of the myth, drowning out Persephone. Persephone also becomes absent during the story and the myth becomes a tug-of-war between Hades and Demeter. She reappears only to finish the tale off. Finally, all three voices are overwritten by primary basic headings within the story, as the ‘facts’, the basic narrative, apparently absent of all voices, overwrites all perspectives.

'Seiren' (Demester and Persephone: A Reorientation' Exegesis

The writing of ‘Seiren’ was inspired by several interwoven factors: the etymology of ‘siren’ in the Greek seiren, in its turn from seira (‘rope’, ‘cord’), with a probable literal meaning of ‘binder’; the excluded voices of the three nymphs who are with Persephone at her abduction; and the power of reflection to taint the past with emotions that could not have been present at the time. Finally, inspiration was taken from two passages of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, one of which is partially reproduced in the opening sentence: section 182 (In solitude): ‘When one lives alone, one neither speaks too loud or writes too loud, for one fears the hollow echo – the criticism of the nymph Echo. And all voices sound different in solitude!’, and the first verse of his poem ‘Sils Maria’, which in the first draft served as an epigraph: ‘There sat I, waiting, waiting – yet for naught,/transcending good and evil, sometimes caught/in light, sometimes caught in shadow, all game,/all sea, all midday, all time without aim.’ Drawing on these sources, I began to envision what one of the nymphs would feel, cursed solely for her powerlessness to act, unable to save one she, at the very least, may have considered a friend, if not more.
From this basis I considered several differing factors: the shift in the portrayal of Persephone before her abduction and her later role as the Iron Queen of Hades, the fact that some or all of the Sirens were said to have cast themselves onto the rocks following Odysseus’ escaping of them, this second act being a denial of the one purpose given to the sisters in life after their weakness. I therefore shifted my focus from a bitterness at an unjust fate to one of incredible guilt and loneliness, and also of a perhaps requited love for the maiden goddess cruelly snatched away. The nameless siren continues to sing because it is the only thing left to her, her words are a lament of her lost love and her guilt at the inability to aid the object of her affection when she needed her most, both during and after the abduction. She reports hearing of the rescue of Persephone, but having no part in it, as if her power to act has been stripped away and she can only watch in silence, while continuing to sing.
But the siren’s singing also gives her a sense of purpose, and a purpose which prevents her from confronting the lost object of desire. Unlike her sisters, who were (in her mind) guiltless, she cannot cast herself onto the rocks because she cannot stand the thought of meeting with the one she led, unwittingly, to her destruction. As such there is a strong sense that her curse is not, in her mind, unjust: the fact she has become merely an instrument for leading others to their demise, to the palace of her first ‘victim’ has a certain poetic justice to it. The siren sees herself as cowardly and selfish, but perhaps ultimately it is that she has lost any sense of self. The nymph is no longer a person but a tool of nature, and though she can say ‘I’ she no longer has a name.
Ultimately, my ‘reorientation’ of the Demeter and Persephone myth wanted to explore the potential feelings of an otherwise voiceless character, and in doing so it excluded elements of the myth which may be conceived as important, notably the perspectives of Persephone and Demeter themselves. The siren is not a main character, but her role in the original tale is instrumental: without her, would Persephone have been in Enna to be abducted? Originally present solely in her silence, a silence which is transmuted into an endless singing similarly without words, the nameless siren has here narrated her story. An implication here is that it is, in fact, this tale that she endlessly sings from her perch atop the rocks: a tale that is and is not hers, in which, even as protagonist, she can only be a spectator. She thereby continues to sing mutedly, without a voice that is her own, bound as if by rope (seira) to her fate until the death which she knows is coming, and yet is endlessly deferred by her constant immersion in a past.

Tutorial Question

What can we learn from this article about the relationship between scholarship and the "invention of tradition"? How does the ‘institutionalization of forgetting’ engender tradition by manipulating the temporal dimensions of past and present and collapsing them into an a-historical history? How does ‘meaning’ become concretized into objects like ruins and literary fragments, giving ‘reality effect’ to historical narration? Are our ideals and beliefs influenced by the self-evidential power of significance of material objects or are objects always recontextualized and imbued with new meaning? (or both?) Does the process of decontextualization always imply an original context?

I suggest that you read the article extra carefully this week and that you think very carefully about the questions...

Kudos to Elizabeth for being the first to insightfully comment on her own story. As you can see its not a thousands-of-words job. I'm sure you can all manage to do it, before the end of term.

‘Demeter and Persephone: A Re-Telling’. Explained…

In my re-telling of Demeter and Persephone I was attempting to create a sense of humour within what is a very dark and sombre story. In order to achieve this I employed some unusual, and perhaps rather innocuous, motifs for example, Hades became a pie, and the underworld became a biscuit shop. I tried to keep the overall tone of my writing relatively simplistic in order to capture a jokey and jovial style. The descriptive passages were lively and I tired to write about recognisable instances rather than focussing on conceptual themes. For example, by describing the underworld in terms of the retail world, it is a comparison everyone can relate to. (After all, we have all been shopping but few of us have moseyed round with the un-dead… although anyone who has been to their local Iceland has had an experience akin to some kind of hell). Yet putting such an ordinary comparison into a re-worked Greek myth transforms it from the mundane into something rather surreal.

I also aimed at presenting my story as a fairytale. I divided it into short chapters, included a picture at the end, utilised an epistolary format to break up the block text and used LaTeX to format it so that it looked relatively professional. By deliberately trying to fashion my story into a child’s fairy tale I was trying to play with the idea that myth and folklore appear ‘natural’.

My re-telling reads more sarcastically than it reads sadly. By consciously leaving out the sorrowful themes – such as grief, separation, loneliness – I hoped that it would add more emphasis to the ridiculous nature of the compromise that Persephone is pushed into against her will. By making light of a grim plot I hoped to make the reader feel uncomfortable so that they might be forced into questioning aspects of my story.

I hope that explains my story successfully and that I have managed to make sense! I would also like to add that I very much enjoyed reading other people’s versions in all the different forms they took.

Tutorial Questions

What is 'inauthentic' about literary forms in the context that Stewart is writing about? What politics unerlies the separation of narrative genres into folklore and novel/literature or speech and writing? What is the 'structure of nostalgia' (p. 11) and what purpose or interests does it serve? Are the Grimm Brothers implicated in this structure? If so, how?

No Tutorial

I'm pretty sure that all of you received the email from Sian, but just to refresh your memory: this week there is no class, nor tutorial.
If you really can't wait to see me or James for some reason just feel free to email us.
Have a good weekend.

Nationalism

DISCLAIMER: The course staff, and SOAS as a whole do not mean to support or advertise the opinions expressed in these videos and/or the individuals expressing them. The video material has been posted for illustrative purposes only.

Question

Do you agree with Smith’s definition of myth (p.2: ‘myths are neither illusions nor mere legitimations, they may perhaps be regarded as widely believed tales told in dramatic form, referring to past events but serving present purposes and/or future goals’). Would it apply to myths more generally or just to nationalist myths? How does it apply to his characterisation of instrumentalist approaches to the study of nationalism as a ‘myth of the modern nation’? Do you agree that the instrumentalist approach should be rejected on the grounds that it does not explain the deeper ethnic roots of nationalism or is Smith constructing yet another myth? What would this myth be?

ubuweb

hello. 

Though this might be of interest to the group. 

www.ubuweb.com

Archive of some really good film, video and audio. One of my favourites is Island Song by Charlemagne Palestine. He straps a video camera to his head and drives a motorbike around an island whilst chanting "gotta get me outta here" and harmonizing with the engine. enjoy.