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do not remember these tales of warning'50. Stinton51 takes it closely with  'you did not remember the gods' because, he argues, it would be extraordinary 'perverse'52 to criticize Clytemnestra for forgetting a story which is probably untrue. Cropp suggests that the chorus is 'recommending attention to "fearful piety-inducing tales" in general'53. The lack of precision in  opens the possibility of a range of reference to the preceding exemplum and discussion of exemplarity. As Stinton shows, it is hard to delimit the reference without prejudging the use of the example. |
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What I hope to have highlighted by this brief discussion of figures in a play much concerned with exemplary models and paradigms of behaviour54 is three points about narrative and exemplification. First, examples themselves are narrativized told as narrative and as such are open to the plays and openness of the narrative form. (This problem has been brilliantly analyzed in Kant by Caruth.55) The example's narrative form always threatens to produce an excess of signification beyond the controlling lines of the case it is designed to illustrate. Second, the positioning of examples within a narrative not only produces the interplay of the narrativized example in tension with the framing narrative, but also requires a recognition of the constant recontextualization and realignment of the example as Electra's attack on Clytemnestra's exemplary destructiveness must be viewed in relation not only to Clytemnestra's own argument but also to the unfolding tragic narrative of violence.56 This leads to my third point: this constant recontextualization also involves an intertextual dynamic, as the exemplary narrative is construed within a tradition of exemplification. In the case of Euripides, it is especially Homer that I have emphasized here; Aeschylus and other fifth-century writers would need to be included also. The force of exemplification also depends on a history of exemplification. As Classics teaches us . . . |
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In this paper, I have tried to offer some reasons why an exposition of critical theory, followed by an exemplary reading, raises a network of difficult |
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50 Denniston (1939) ad loc. |
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51 Stinton (1978) 7982. |
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52 Cropp (1988) ad 745. |
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53 Cropp (1988) ad 745. |
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54 For a discussion of the play along these lines see Goldhill (1986) 24864. |
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55 Caruth (1988). For a brilliant post-structuralist discussion of the plays and the openness of narrative, see Felman (1977). Barthes (1975) remains exemplary. |
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56 These two first problems lead to certain well-known cruces about exemplarity, such as the fourth stasimon of the Antigone, where exemplarity is again explicitly marked, and critically problematic: see Sourvinou-Inwood (1988); (1989); Winnington-Ingram (1980) 1029; but the general problem is less commonly discussed, even in tragedy. |
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