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In making the Chorus the protagonist of the Suppliants Aeschylus has had to curtail the actor's part. But at the same time he has compensated him by giving him some of the functions of the normal tragic chorus. From the point of view of the plot Danaos may be superfluous, and his words may not be profound. But nowhere is he irrelevant or incompetently handled (1969: 138). |
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More satisfactory results might perhaps be gained from an analysis of Danaos' role in terms of the oedipal hypothesis advanced earlier. At first glance, the apparent irrelevance of Danaos seems to weigh against an overwhelming oedipal attachment on the part of his daughters, despite Kouretas' assertion that there is evidence of a counter-oedipal complex in Danaos' "violente réaction coléreuse" (1957: 601). This seems certainly true of Danaos, but the presence of a counter-oedipal complex in a parent does not at all necessitate the presence of its converse, an oedipal complex in a child. A solution to the problem of the Danaids' relationship with their father depends, I believe, on two important considerations: the pivotal role of fantasy in neurotic behavior, and the significance of Zeus in the Suppliants. |
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A major change in Freud's thought was his discovery that the stories told to him by his female patients about paternal seduction, all of which he had previously accepted as literal truth, were for the most part constructions of fantasy (Freud 1925: 3435, 1931: 238, 1933: 120). From the point of view of the daughter, what matters in any case is not the real father but the fantasized father. Psychoanalytically, Danaos is precisely "superfluous" to the Danaids' neurotic fear of sexuality, since fantasy replaces reality in the neurotic situation. The Danaos of the play is real, but as such he does not figure in the fantasies of his daughters, since fantasy is by definition the distortion of reality. As Freud says: |
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One must never allow oneself to be misled into applying the standards of reality to repressed psychical structures, and on that account, perhaps, into undervaluing the importance of fantasies in the formations of symptoms on the ground that they are not actualities, or into tracing a neurotic sense of guilt back to some other source because there is no evidence that any actual crime has been committed. One is bound to employ the currency that is in use in the country one is exploring in our case a neurotic currency (1911: 225). |
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Garvie's statement that Danaos is "superfluous" but not "irrelevant" turns out to be right after all. Danaos is relevant because he is the father upon whom the Danaids are tragically fixated; he is superfluous because in their fantasy his place has been taken by Zeus. |
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