Three women dreaming, part 2.

Let's look at the Apollonius passage again. It's a devil to translate because it's so hypotactic, so many fragmented phrases plastered together with breathless conjunctions, δέ δέ δέ. If there's clarity in Agamemnon's dream, all elements pared down to the apparition head of Nestor and its speech, Medea is dreaming in smeared images only—it's a confused sequence. Is the first passage, the perverse revision of Jason's motives, an imaginary scene in itself or just a kind of background conviction, an underpinning for what follows? I think it's more likely the latter: the dream proper is a mashup of scenes and visions, explicitly experiential, and lines 619-623 stand apart from what follows, only introducing it, coloring and explaining the strange pantomime beginning in 623 with ὀίετο δ’, and she thought she was struggling with the bulls herself, that she wrought the deed—so easily. Apollonius has given us a kind of epistemological mimesis of dreaming when he pictured the rootless convictions that sometimes invade our dreams and drone behind their action like a cantus firmus, but with μάλ’ εὐμαρέως he moves into the peculiar experience of dreaming itself: Medea wrestles with the bulls with timeless rapidity, with the liquid effortlessness of dreamt action conforming to the will; it's not just a literary forward-reference to how her arts will save Jason at the end of the book but something more mimetic, a realism new to the literary dream.

But the scene changes suddenly, her parents are there, a decision has been made: σφωιτέρους δὲ τοκῆας ὑποσχεσίης ἀθερίζειν (625), but her parents scorned their promise. It's not just the fluidity of scene and action at issue here but really the wordlessness of Medea's dream: everything that follows is in indirect discourse, reported from the same remove as was her fantasy on Jason's intentions. I think this has much to do with the relationship to tradition I had mentioned earlier, that Apollonius is reacting to the speech-centered clarity of the Homeric dream. Those divine dreams drove everything but the central word from the dreamer's mind, and it's the word that they wake up pondering; here, though, it's the scene, the strange action, its consequences. That οὕνεκεν of line 626 only emerges from the background of the dream, only intrudes onto the experiential now of the νεῖκος ἀμφήριστον (627) because it explains the scene that actually occupied Medea's dreaming mind—it's only the revision of a waking and recollecting mind that can order the text the way Apollonius gives it to us, with the explanation before the scene, rationalization before experience. That we read this dream as if Medea were narrating it to us is another point of departure from that old Homeric clarity: we should have a text that runs in linear fashion, that a quarrel came to a draw ... because her parents scorned their promise, since it wasn't up to the girl to yoke the bulls, etc., experience before explanation. It's an insoluble narrative problem, though: if 625-627 are only a concomitant understanding or mood that underpins the νεῖκος and judgment, there's nowhere the explanatory passage can go without straining the mimetic organization of the text—Apollonius' ambition is remarkable.

That ἄφνω in line 630 has much to do with the passage as a whole, though, doesn't it? The separate parts—bull-labor, judgment and scream—all blur into one another, changes in circumstance and action piled together with the same hypotactic rapidity as Apollonius' phrases: you see the same thing in receptions of this passage by Ennius (fr. 34ff, Warmington) and Vergil (Aen. 465-69). But what about the end, that syntactically ambiguous scream? Think back to Homer again, this time to book 23, as Patroclus appears to Achilles:

ἦλθε δ᾽ ἐπὶ ψυχὴ Πατροκλῆος δειλοῖο
πάντ᾽ αὐτῷ μέγεθός τε καὶ ὄμματα κάλ᾽ ἐϊκυῖα
καὶ φωνήν, καὶ τοῖα περὶ χροῒ εἵματα ἕστο·
στῆ δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ὑπὲρ κεφαλῆς καί μιν πρὸς μῦθον ἔειπεν:
εὕδεις, αὐτὰρ ἐμεῖο λελασμένος ἔπλευ Ἀχιλλεῦ... (65-69)

And the soul of wretched Patroclus came upon him by night, very like the real one in stature and lovely eyes and voice; even the same were the garments that he wore upon his flesh. Oh yes, he paused there above his head and addressed him with this speech: you're sleeping, yes, you've forgotten me, Achilles...

It's the same double announcement that we saw in the dream of Agamemnon, reproof and warning: εὕδεις, Ἀχιλλεῦ. But in this dream—after the speeches, the prophecy, the central word to which the night-body of Patroclus is only mouthpiece—the word falls silent, and Achilles reaches famously after the body of his lover:

ὣς ἄρα φωνήσας ὠρέξατο χερσὶ φίλῃσιν
οὐδ᾽ ἔλαβε· ψυχὴ δὲ κατὰ χθονὸς ἠΰτε καπνὸς
ᾤχετο τετριγυῖα. ταφὼν δ᾽ ἀνόρουσεν Ἀχιλλεὺς... (99-101)

So he spoke, and reached out with loving hands, oh yes, but did not grasp him—for the soul dispersed like smoke, departed gibbering down into the earth. Achilles bolted upright in astonishment...

Τετριγυῖα. This is worlds away from the hideous κλαγγή of Apollonius—he's receiving the passage, but the difference is incredible. As a matter of fact it's clear that Apollonius realizes what's happened in Homer: Achilles has broken the grammar of the divine dream, tried to reach out for a body that must not be treated bodily, and this disruption shatters the speaking shade of Patroclus into a gibbering vapor, wordless, meaningless, insubstantial. So I don't think we should think of that κλαγγή as Medea's, even though the Greek would allow it; no, I think it's the scream of her dream-parents, bellowing out in rage: ἐκ δ’ ἐβόησαν | χωόμενοι, 631-32. This isn't the speech-driven dream of Homeric epic, but something much more immediate and experiential, a fantasy so gripping that its inarticulate screech blurs the boundary between dreaming and wakefulness, still lingering as Medea bolts upright on her couch—even as sleep leaves the sleeper it still hangs in her chamber, still ringing and terrifyingly real.

I alluded in passing to John Crowe Ransom's poem, "Painted Head"—do you know it? It's becoming increasingly well-represented online, though you should look out for textual corruption. It's one of my favorites in the language, and begins

By dark severance the apparition head
Smiles from the air a capital on no
Column or a Platonic perhaps head
On a canvas sky depending from nothing—

Ransom is my small hero, and noone knows about him. Pity. Oh, the painting is of course J. H. Füssli's 1802 Cauchemar. Can I be forgiven?