Let’s not forget the wolves…

It’s obvious from mere flick through any blogging site that weblogs (to give them their full and proper name) are a mass elephants’ graveyard in the internet jungle where the interests and dreams of many people go to die untended and alone. The family blog trails off after the kids’ second birthday. The specialist in threaded fasteners stops writing midway through his catalogue types of handmade screws and bolts of the pre-industrial Midwest. Those of candid prostitutes and candied cooks peter out after the book deal is inked, and revived sporadically as the second book teeters towards being remaindered.

For the last few months this blog has appeared as if it was going to become one of these: the good initial impulses, the slightly poorer and more distracted second month, a long stretch of silence with occasional hiccups of life. I've felt as if it’s been in danger of being a forgotten and abandoned mud brick dwelling fit perhaps  only for future web-archaeologists to perhaps stumble over to say "yes, indeed, there was once life here. But not now. We don't know where the people that built this went, as this is all they've left us..."

My excuses are several and, I think, reasonable. My interest in matters of war and peace have been swamped by the preoccupations of moving house, moving country and, most importantly, learning how to be a father to my new daughter born in the middle of last November.

So several months later and I’m back in the library on the other side of the world after my non-statutory paternity leave; it feels like I’m learning to think and write again, alongside that strange process of rediscovering things that I’ve already thought and written which feel as if they were dreamed up by strangers. I have, I’ve realised, missed reading and writing a great deal. In the case of this blog I know I have missed writing it more than I have been missed by anyone reading it. It gave a regularity to my writing, a place where stray ends could be noted in a more comprehensive way than in a notebook or a single dogend of paper, a hint that what I’m doing may be useful or interesting one day to someone beyond myself. Most importantly though, and what I’ve missed, was the feeling that I was actually finishing little pieces of work while struggling with the usual battles of larger pieces of research that seem unending. I have quite a few of these dogends that I'll work up to putting up here over the next few weeks as I get back into writing.

Despite feeling somewhat rusty, I’m going to try to make a few brief notes on the relationship between proverbs that use analogies drawn from the animal kingdom that describe political relationships between humans. When I first sat down to think about writing something about this, I thought that the impulse to write on this had come only from my recent reading of Hal Foster’s review in the LRB this morning of a collection of lectures given by Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I and, in turn, my brief look over/ under/ around those lectures online. Not to mention, of course, the connections that I made between these and my ongoing interest in the adages of Erasmus.

Now I’m writing, though, it’s occurred to me that it’s also probably influenced by Charles Martin’s lovely translation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid that I bought before we left the UK. This has been something that I’ve been gradually dipping into in those minutes/ hours/ what seems like months that it takes my new daughter to sleep.

It’s a fairly obvious observation that  it is at its heart it is a book about transformations, which has resonated with me over the past few months not only as one of its steady themes is the transformative power of love. In one sense such transformations are ones that take place in private and inward ways; in another, they are external and evident to others. So it is when, in Ovid, gods and humans change themselves or are changed into other forms, whether that be a god transforming to inspire love (Zeus’ usual trick to get laid, of course, see Europa, Danäe etc), or gods turning mortals or lesser deities into other shapes, whether that be as punishment (Lycaon, Kallisto etc), a reward (Daphne, Pygmalion), or for other reasons. It’s also occurred to me how relevant this theme is to me in a more immediate context – that of watching my daughter transform from a peaceful sleeping baby into a howling beast in the space of a few minutes. 

Anyway, this post is simply to raise a few questions and make a few points about Derrida’s Beast and Sovereign, Erasmus’ Adages and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It should come with a  caveat; I’m not a scholar of philosophy in general or Derrida in particular, neither am I a classicist. Having said that, I am interested in making connections between different genres and periods of thought and I’m looking to open up ideas rather than state them definitively. 

Derrida’s preoccupation in these lectures is the concept of sovereignty, particularly as it is articulated in the discussion of man as a political animal throughout history. As he put it, in the yearbook of the ÉHESS, where the course was delivered from 2001 to 2003: ‘The point was not merely to study, from Aristotle to contemporary discussions (Foucault, Agamben), the canonical texts around the interpretation of man as a “political animal.” We had above all to explore the “logics” of organizing both the submission of the beast (and the living being) to political sovereignty, and an irresistible and overloaded analogy between a beast and a sovereign supposed to share a space of some exteriority with respect to “law” and “right” (outside the law: above the law: the origin and foundation of law).

This discussion, of course, ranges widely. It takes on ideas of princely cunning that extend from Plautus to  Machivelli to la Fontaine – that the ruler must at once be fox and lion by adopting both the policy of cunning with a mighty strength. Moreover, he is fascinated by the way that the figure of the wolf appears in many political texts. The were-wolf caught between wholly wolf and wholly man in La Fontaine, the wolf in Machiavelli that he makes a great point in having forgotten in a previous seminar: “And let’s not forget the wolves,” Derrida says on the page in a lengthy parenthetical aside. “I insist on the forgetting as much as the wolves and the genelycology because what we should not stint on here is the economy of forgetting as repression, and some logic of the political unconsciousness which busies itself around all these proliferating productions and all these chasings after, panting after so many animal monsters, fantastic beasts, chimeras, and centaurs that the point, in chasing them, is to cause them to fall, to forget them, repress them, of course, but also (and it is not simply the contrary), on the contrary, to capture them, domesticate them, humanize them, anthropomorphize them, tame them, cultivate them, park them, which is only possible only be animalizing man and letting so many symptoms show up on the surface of political and ideological discourse…”A fairly lengthy quote, but if Derrida’s hard to translate, he’s also hard to edit when he’s on one of these kind of rolls.

What occurred to me in reading this is that there is at least one notable wolf that Derrida forgets – either artfully or unconsciously. One of these seemed to me to be an odd omission. Lycaon, the tyrant of Arcadia, who was transformed by Zeus into a wolf. Ovid suggests that the king murdered a ‘hostage’ sent by the Molossian kingdom, who he served up at a feast for Zeus, who was then travelling in human form to see if men were really as bad as he had heard. The king, ‘severing [the man’s] windpipe, cut/ his body into pieces and then put/ the throbbing parts up to be broiled or boiled…’ Pausanias’ account suggests instead that his crime was that he sacrificed a child on the altar of Zeus, which offended rather than pleased the god.

As far as Ovid’s account goes, Lycaon is interesting in that he is the first transformation of a human in the Metamorphoses. In this, he is a liminal figure in the grand narrative of  the different ages of human life, as he stands at the beginning of humans organising themselves into cities and societies. In fact, this is brought out in other versions of the myth elsewhere: Pausanias suggests that he was the bringer of order and civilisation to humans; his father was the chthonic king Pelasgos, born from the earth, who forbade his subjects from subsisting on grass and leaves, introduced them to eating acorns, and taught them to live in shelters and to wear clothes; his son extended this work by founding a city in Arcadia, Lykosura, the first in the world, and instituting the games dedicated to Zeus that tied the city to the surrounding regions. In this account it was the sacrifice of a child on the altar of Zeus that offended the gods. Either way, the myth speaks of the importance of keeping correct relationships with the gods who, in Ovid’s account, even have their own lares and penates as household deities in their own Olympian halls, echoing the religo-civic make up of imperial Rome. 

Ovid puts these words about Lycaon in Zeus’ mouth as a conclusion to this story, delivered to the assembled Olympian gods: “Frightened, he runs off to the silent fields/ and howls aloud, attempting speech in vain;/ foam gathers at the corners of his mouth;/ he turns his lust for slaughter on the flocks,/ and mangles them, rejoicing still in blood./ His garments now become a shaggy pelt;/ his arms turn into legs, and he, to wolf/ while still retaining traces of the man:/ greyness the same, the same cruel visage,/ the same cold eyes and bestial appearance./ One house has fallen: many more deserve to; over the broad earth, bestiality/ prevails and stirs up the Furies to vengeance.”

There’s no real point to this observation other than noting this forgotten wolf.  It is, though, I think, a significant omission for Derrida to make in a discussion of the institution of law transforming sovereign and miscreant alike into wolves to miss this example that seems to dovetail with his own argument. The ruler – at least in some accounts - who first bestowed the benefits of civic life (and assumedly, the binding laws of behaviour this entailed) to humans, was also cursed with a hubris or arrogance that leads to his behaviour not sanctioned by any law – divine, social or natural alike, and his exile under the conditions of law. The wolf of political rule and lawmaking is transformed directly into the wolf below and outside of society  and its laws. Perhaps this is because Lycaon’s transformation is punishment for violating a higher law other than his own, a divine and – in some ways –a more capricious law. Or, perhaps it's not an intentional omission, but a mere forgetting. Which, it could be argued in Derrida's own logic, is never a mere forgetting...

 

Anyway, there are other strands of similar ancient Greek and Roman stories Derrida doesn’t touch in TBATS, similarly, he omits to go into wolf-myth drawn from other cultures. The ones that I’ve noticed are the suggestions in Homer, Aesop and other early Greek writers that wolves are fierce (for example in the Iliad ‘the Myrmidons… rushed forth like ravening wolves in whose hearts is fury unspeakable—wolves that have slain in the hills a great horned stag, and rend him, and the jaws of all are red with gore…’ (XVI:156ff.) This idea is also accompanied often by the idea that the greatest strength of wolves is in their unity of purpose (Aesop’s battle between the dogs and woves at Perry, 343 or Homer’s description of the Myrmidons, above.) Such ideas contrast starkly with the other dominant perception about wolves that runs through ancient and modern literature: that they occasionally reject or are rejected by their own kind, especially in the figure of a lone wolf that operates outside the society of wolves as a rogue animal. In these perceptions wolves not only occupy a place at the limits of human society, but also as a lone wolf they are outside the society of their fellow wolves.

There is also at times a perception that wolves are, in operating on the fringes of human life, not noble creatures.  To me, this symbolism is inherent in Homer’s episode of Dolon, the Trojan spy sent to assess the Greek camp at night, whose name in Greek, incidentally,  is contiguous with my own surname as meaning both skilful and tricksy (Iliad X: 334.) Dolon covers himself in a wolfskin so as to walk through the Greek camp unnoticed. Instead he is caught by the crafty Diomedes and the craftier Odysseus (deserving of Homer’s epithet ho doulon dolos), is executed in cold blood and his ‘bloody spoils’ hung from the prow of the Ithacan king's ship. It is interesting, here, to note that at the beginning of the book X of the Iliad  both Menelaus and Agamemnon find it hard to sleep. In the middle of the night they both get up and  dress themselves in the skin of a leopard and a lion respectively. This is in contrast to the choice of   Dolon disguising himself in a  wolf pelt cloak and ferret-skin cap for his nocturnal spying mission. Where kings dress themselves in the skins of noble and mighty animals, the spy chooses the skin of a solitary and shameful animal that operates at the fringes of human experience.

Aesop had, of course has many mentions of wolves that echo all these perceptions of wolves. One considered that wolves could prey upon the good nature or stupidity of other species. A wolf is depicted as a lawgiver, who gives himself a larger portion of meat than he gives his subjects, echoed in the ancient poem about exile by the Greek poet Alkaios, who wrote “I live a life in the wolds, longing to hear the agora…. I am in exile, living on the boundary… here I settled alone as a wolf-thicket man. [lykaimiais]…’ A wolf cheats a raven from his bread. A boy claims he sees a wolf so often that when he actually does, no-one believes him and his flock is destroyed. A wolf attempts to find a pretext to eat an innocent lamb; when he is unable to, he eats it anyway as reason has no argument against the wicked intention of the wolf (and, by extension, of the tyrant.)

Beyond this, one significant context that is not mentioned in Derrida’s lectures occurs to me: that of the appearance of several adages about wolves that appear in Erasmus’ Adages. Many are simply phrases that have no great political content: The Cautious Wolf Goes in Fear of the Pit, for instance, to apply to someone who does right only for fear of being caught; Sooner than a wolf mate with a sheep for impossible pairings; one of my favourites is I am holding a wolf by the ears to signify being involved in a course of action that could not be let go of lightly, yet which could not be endured for any length of time, just like, well, holding a wolf by the ears (Incidentally, it was also used much later by Thomas Jefferson about slavery.) They also figure in Erasmus’ longest and best known anti-war polemic, Dulce bellum inexpertis: war is sweet to those who have not experienced it. Only the most savage of animals, he says in DBI, are born for fighting, such as lions, tigers and, indeed, wolves. However, not even these animals fight each other as man does.

Which leads me to the adage Homo homini lupus, a phrase drawn from Plautus' Asinaria and meaning Man is Wolf to Man, used by both Derrida and Erasmus. The first point is a relatively minor one: Derrida attributes the revival and popularity of the phrase to Thomas Hobbes, who used the phrase in his dedicatory letter to De cive. Certainly, it voices a sentiment that is never far away in his idea that  human behaviour is, at least in a state of nature, locked inextricably in a pattern of a war of all against all - bellum omnium contra omne. However, the popularity of the phrase in the renaissance should really be ascribed to Erasmus' Adages. The second point is that it is interesting that Hobbes – like Erasmus before him – does not only liken the actions of men to those of wolves, but also suggests that some of their behaviour is more akin to that of a divine being, a point also not treated by Derrida in TBATS.

I’ll cite from Hobbes' preface at length here not only because he explains the difference between these two seemingly contradictory perspectives on human nature, but also because there’s something I like about it as a piece of polemical prose: 'So that if Cato's saying were a wise one, 'twas every whit as wise that of Pontius Telesinus; who flying about with open mouth through all the Companies of his Army, (in that famous encounter which he had with Sylla) cryed out, That Rome her selfe, as well as Sylla, was to be raz'd; for that there would alwayes be Wolves and Depraedatours of their Liberty, unlesse the Forrest that lodg'd them were grubb'd up by the roots. To speak impartially, both sayings are very true; That Man to Man is a kind of God; and that Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe. The first is true,' he continues, 'if we compare Citizens amongst themselves; and the second, if we compare Cities. In the one, there's some analogie of similitude with the Deity, to wit, Justice and Charity, the twin-sisters of peace: But in the other, Good men must defend themselves by taking to them for a Sanctuary the two daughters of War, Deceipt and Violence: that is in plaine termes a meer brutall Rapacity: which although men object to one another as a reproach, by an inbred custome which they have of beholding their own actions in the persons of other men, wherein, as in a Mirroir, all things on the left side appeare to be on the right, & all things on the right side to be as plainly on the left; yet the naturall right of preservation which we all receive from the uncontroulable Dictates of Necessity, will not admit it to be a Vice, though it confesse it to be an Unhappinesse.'

I find it interesting that Hobbes distinguishes here between the mutually beneficial actions of ‘Citizens among themselves’ being close to the divine and the ‘natural preservation’ of men in societies being closer to the vulpine.

Hobbes was an excellent classicist, familiar not only with the original texts of ancient works, but also with much later Renaissance commentaries, including Erasmus’ Adages – if not directly, at least as it filtered into the renaissance educational curriculum. Erasmus’ influence on the tradition that informed Hobbes’ political and theological thought has already been noted. However, I'm not sure if anyone has drawn out the significance of Erasmus’ earlier account also having these two ideas about human behaviour wedged next to each other. 

This is at least true of the later editions of the work in which he added essays explaining the particular uses and meanings of particular adages (I think it’s interesting that they were not placed together in earlier editions, instead being placed far apart.) He spends far more time explaining the adage comparing men to gods than he does on their comparison to wolves, in part due to the controversial and potentially blasphemous nature of the proverb to Christian sensibilities. Drawing on a range of classical texts, he concludes that “Among Christians the name of God ought not to be given to any mortal man, even in jest; and yet such an extraordinary and disgusting flattery must be altogether unacceptable to our moral code,’ yet concedes that the adage can have its uses. For instance, he continues, it could be used to convey thanks to another. He gives several concrete examples, to make such proper usages clear. For instance, in giving thanks to a financial patron - a subject often close to the perpetually broke and money-grubbing Erasmus -  one could, he suggests, say ‘I owe everything to letters, even my life; but I owe letters to you, who by your liberality procure me leisure and support me in it. What is this, if not what the Greeks mean when they say “man is a god to man.’”

This is not to say he sees human relationships as being conditioned by these sentiments in general. After all, he included Cicero’s advice that both ‘the advantages and misfortunes of men are for the most part derived from mankind.’ And in this, these two companion adages do not completely contradict one another. Man is able to be godlike and wolf-like to his fellow man. However, Erasmus does point out in his much more brief explanation of the second adage that it is a warning ‘not to trust ourselves to an unknown person, but to be aware of him as of a wolf.’ He cites Plautus directly:  ‘“A man is a wolf and not a man,’ he says, ‘to the one who knows nothing of his character…’”

I’ll put some of my thoughts on Erasmus’ ideas about friendship and how they relate to his perspectives on how princes and states should in theory and did in practice interact elsewhere. However, here at least, it seems to me that his ideas are similar to the later ones voiced by Hobbes. And in this, these two differing perspectives are not as contradictory as they seem at first. Men (and it is men that they are talking about) are able to be of benefit to other men in the societies they share. However, they should be wary of those they don’t know and treat them with the same caution they would afford a wild wolf.

One last question. I wonder if there could be some use for newly coined adages inspired by classical models that Erasmus used, perhaps in the new controversies over the atheism advanced by Hitchens, Dawkins and Gill. Maybe on one side Deus Homini Lupus; on the other Homo Deum Lupus? 

You can find a short edition of Erasmus’ Adages selected by William Barker here. The illustration for I hold a wolf by the ears can be found at Juliana's blog with several other illustrations of some mottos and adages here. The sculpture of the wolf and the painting above are ones by CoBrA artists; the second is Karel Appel's People, Birds and Other Animals, which was used in Foster's LRB article that sparked this piece off, which has been rather longer and more rambling than I thought it would be. It's good to be back...