Gorgias Drops the Mic

Classroom Journal: In Praise of Helen

With my speech I have removed this woman’s ill repute; I have abided by the rule laid down at the beginning of my speech; I have tried to dispel the injustice of blame and the ignorance of opinion; I wished to write this speech for Helen’s encomium and my amusement.

This is how Gorgias of Leontini concludes his Encomium of Helen, in the translation by Michael Gagarin and Paul Woodruff, which you can find in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Gorgias here is refuting the traditional misogynistic discourse regarding Helen of Troy—which is a rhetorical task of the highest order, an argumentative challenge that he sets for his virtuosic powers of oration.

As I mentioned parenthetically in my introduction to the Classroom Journal, we actually sort of start the semester in my literary criticism course with Gorgias rather than with Plato. This is partly to correct the notion that everything begins with Plato, which is a misapprehension encouraged by the ways in which the western philosophical canon has developed. It also is a chance to appreciate Gorgias on his own terms before we move on to Plato’s Socratic grilling of the poor sophist—and I think that this is important, because Gorgias introduces a number of critical threads that we will follow for the entire course: the emotional power of poetry, the problem of unreflective adherence to tradition, the persistence of misogyny, etc. Also, Gorgias is a dazzling writer.

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But before we even get to Gorgias, we have to do all of the necessary housekeeping—introductions, going over the syllabus, taking roll, etc. We also go over the nine major units into which we will divide the course.

1. Mimesis (Grappling with Plato)

2. The Function of Poetry and the Sublime

3. Canon and Case Study: Shakespeare’s Hamlet

4. Medieval Readers

5. Women and Literature

6. Romanticism and Aestheticism

7. The Art of Fiction, The Art of Criticism (Case study: Austen’s Northanger Abbey)

8. The Uncanny (the “New Sublime”?)

9. Reimagining the Canon

The name of the course in the bulletin is “Literary Criticism to 1900,” but as with my literature survey, I ignore the arbitrary expiration date. I do concentrate on the early material so that I don’t tread too much into the territory of the companion course on critical theory (which I don’t usually teach), but I give room for modern responses to and expansions of earlier ideas. To that end, rather than moving chronologically from the Greeks to 1900 (or somewhat later), we will move thematically through this range of topics.

Gorgias acts as a kind of prelude to the first unit, since he precedes Plato and since Plato reacts against him and those of his stripe. Gorgias was a sophist, a rhetorician, who taught people the art of oration, and the text with which we begin the semester, the aforementioned Encomium, shows us what a powerful speaker he must have been. He lived a remarkably long life: the Norton Anthology lists his dates as ca. 483-376 B.C.E., which, if my math is correct, means that he was about 107 when he died. He was already old by the standards of the time when Plato was born, but he still had about half of his life to live.

Almost nothing is known of the first half of his life, except that he came to Athens from Leontini in Sicily as a sort of diplomat. He quickly gained a reputation as a brilliantly persuasive speaker, and the Encomium is an example of his oration.

Gorgias begins by making a statement that is difficult to refute, specifically, that worthy things deserve praise and unworthy things deserve blame. We all nod. Yes, of course. But then he pulls the rug out from under us, or at least out from under his original listeners, by drawing a conclusion from this first statement that would have been completely antithetical to conventional wisdom: “The man who speaks correctly what ought to be said has a duty to refute those who find fault with Helen.”

Those in his Greek audience likely turned to each other with raised eyebrows: “Excuse me? What? Did I hear him right?”

The recapture of Helen by Menelaus, vase from the 6th-century B.C.E.

Helen was the target of universal derision. She was the woman who caused a ten-year war. She was “the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium,” as Marlowe writes in Doctor Faustus. (Did it occur to anyone that bloodthirsty men with fragile egos may have had something to do with it? The term “toxic masculinity” had not yet been invented.)

Gorgias makes a convincing case by going back to the possible reasons for Helen going to Troy with Paris and abandoning her husband Menelaus: either Paris forcibly abducted her, in which case she is free of blame, or she was “persuaded by words, or captured by love,” which are irresistible forces. Words and love can be connected here by the power of poetry, because poetry has the power not only to persuade, but also to move through emotion. Through this power, poetry transforms itself into “witchcraft and magic,” and the listener is at its mercy.

The speaker acknowledges here that persuasion can be used for nefarious purposes and claims that such was likely the case with Paris and Helen. But note how in making this argument, Gorgias is also making extravagant claims for his own art: I can use the power of words to transform your mind. I can enrapture you. You are subject to my voice.

Even if Paris didn’t speak, Helen was still likely powerless to resist because of love: “If love is a god, with the divine power of gods, how could a weaker person refuse and reject him?” And, therefore, “whether she did what she did, invaded by love, persuaded by speech, impelled by force or compelled by divine necessity, she escapes all blame entirely.”

This seems like a good place to finish, but Gorgias has one more thing to say—his declaration of victory, with which we began, and his purposes for writing: “I wished to write this speech for Helen’s encomium and my amusement.” Mic drop.

It’s this last bit that really rubbed people like Plato the wrong way. Is he saying that he did this just to show how good he is at persuasion? Is he suggesting that he could have just as easily argued the opposite point? Perhaps.

What can we conclude from this? What is the relationship between literature and truth? Is truth subjective? Is it simply the plaything of poetry or rhetoric? Plato will take up the debate next.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

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