Johan Tralau

The Minotaur, medallion from a bilingual Attic kylix. Photo © Marie-Lan Nguyen

The two lectures will be devoted to disconcerting images in Greek poetry, linked to sacrifice as a fundamental institution of the city. Their study will serve as a framework for the development of a general thesis on deviant metaphors. We suggest that these metaphors reveal social, political and religious aberrations. Since Aristotle, cognitive theories of metaphor have demonstrated that linguistic images help us to perceive phenomena on the basis of elements that "fit" or "understand" each other. Through a new reading of Greek tragedy, we'll uncover a typology of images that operates in quite the opposite way: these images are made up of elements that don't fit together at all, creating an alarming sense of the subversion of order.

The first lecture will focus on an image that appears in theOresteia, Aeschylus' trilogy staged in 458 B.C. This image is that of the young Iphigenia, sacrificed on an altar and compared, according to the conventional interpretation, to a goat. But we must dare another interpretation. Aeschylus creates a remarkably complex image, combining a monster, the Chimera, a young girl, a goat and the concept of law. All these links transgress fundamental taboos of the Greek imagination. Monster, animal, woman, human, justice: an irreconcilable mix with the cognitive theories of metaphor. Based on other strange images present in theOresteia - octopuses, wolves, kites, etc. -Thanks to this new interpretation of the image of the goat-monster-daughter, we'll gain a better understanding not only of one of the most important works of art in the ancient world, and of the problem of law and animals in the Greek city, but also of the cognitive functions of metaphor.

The second lecture will focus on a shocking detail from The Cretans, a fragmentary drama by Euripides that was probably staged in the 430s B.C. It involves the image of a ceiling or roof made of cypress wood, assembled with taurine glue. Commentators have shown little interest in this metaphor. But it is a disconcerting vision, for the poet describes the beams using a verb that essentially applies to liquids, and more specifically to the mixture of wine and water. This image blurs the distinction between fluid and solid: the ceiling appears as a perilously unstable liquid. While this nightmarish metaphor does not conform to the standard model envisaged by cognitive theories of metaphor, we shall see that it represents another incompatibility explored by tragedy: that of the body of the Minotaur, half-man and half-bull, whose birth is the point of departure for the Cretans. The image thus reflects the anguished subversion of the social and religious order.

We thus discover a type of image that opposes the standard model, that plays with convention, and through which we glimpse the transgression of the norms of the political and cosmological order, of sacrifice, community and metaphor itself.

Johan Tralau has been invited by the Collège de France assembly, at the suggestion of Pr Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge.