Pollution and Crisis in Greek Tragedy by Fabian Meinel

Abstract

414 PHOENIX to identify a feature within a text as “self-consciously” commenting upon itself? These questions are central to the whole project, and it might have been helpful if they had been tackled head-on. But after all Wohl does not claim to offer an exhaustive account of the topic (ix). What she has provided is a thought-provoking discussion which effectively links tragedy’s formal aspects to questions of broader thematic and intellectual interest. Euripides’ undeniable oddity has sometimes led critics to view him as a facile provocateur, but he emerges from Wohl’s book as a serious artist, profoundly engaged with contemporary issues. The University of Exeter Matthew Wright Pollution and Crisis in Greek Tragedy. By Fabian Meinel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2015. Pp. xiii, 278. Pollution, purification, and purity are salient and recurrent concerns in Athenian tragedy, and this book seeks both to interpret individual tragedies through their treatment of pollution and to understand both pollution and tragedy as ways of expressing and negotiating complex problems. The readings of the texts are subtle and sometimes brilliant, even when they are not entirely convincing; Meinel seems to be a deconstructionist at heart, and the book typically finds complications or undercutting ironies wherever a play seems to present a resolution. It is less clear that it is entirely successful in providing the “new perspectives on pollution” (from dust jacket) outside the tragic context. Moreover, Meinel has not fully overcome a frequent problem met when converting the dissertation into a book: the assumption of a reader who is almost as close to the topic as the writer. Thus, terms like “crisis” and “negotiation” are more fashionable than lucid and require more explanation than is given. The introduction presents the premise that pollution “constitutes a convenient tool in the negotiation of tragic crises” (6; “crisis” here means something like “complex sociocultural problem”). The introduction includes some polemic against Mary Douglas’s famous definition of pollution as category-transgression, and especially against the essentialist assumption that pollution can be defined in any one way. So far, so good, although I am inclined to think that category-transgression is a more important aspect of pollution than Meinel acknowledges, albeit not the only one. The author then lists a series of functions and associations of pollution, all of which seem valid. Pollution as a category of thought allows narratives of cause-and-effect to be generated; it is inherently fluid and unstable; it is associated with exclusion from the civic community, while purity helps define the group; it is an evaluative category that is potentially coextensive with other evaluative categories. These are clarified, however, only in the following detailed discussions of particular texts. I would have appreciated, for example, some analysis of the way Greek authors use the language of ritual pollution for moral evaluation and what that can tell us about pollution itself. Sometimes it is easy to see how the following chapters develop these various functions of pollution, sometimes it is not. Chapter One (“Pollution, Interpretation and Understanding ”) focuses on two plays: Hippolytus, which shows pollution as a possible cause, even as Hippocratic causality puts it in doubt, and Oedipus Tyrannus, which invites the audience to identify miasma as the essence of Oedipus while showing the inadequacy of this identification (and the self-blinding as a failed purification). In Chapter Two BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 415 (“Pollution and the Instability of Civic Space”), the author addresses Antigone, in which Creon is consistently obsessed with boundaries and with stability. Pollution, however, is destabilizing and mobile, as the birds carry bits of the rotting corpse everywhere. In the Oresteia, to which the third chapter is devoted, pollution is closely associated with revenge-justice; each killing is seen as a purification, but the purification is simultaneously a source of new pollution. Ritual purification cannot solve the problem, because there is a wider problem of justice that neither ritual nor revenge can address. In an excursus to this chapter, Meinel argues that in Iphigenia in Tauris—which he sees as truly tragic, not a romance—the allusions to the Oresteia show that in this play, too, purification fails. If the Erinyes were not placated by...