Helen Morales (University of California - Santa Barbara)
The title nods to Kehinde Wiley’s artwork ‘After John Raphael Smith’s A Bacchante (after Sir Joshua Reynolds)’ (2009). Rather as Honig invites us to look at a text anew by juxtaposing it with different texts, I am going to focus my response to her bold and brilliant book through a brief analysis of Wiley’s portrait. Wiley makes some similar critical moves to Honig. Both Wiley and Honig’s works stake a claim to classicism for those who are normally excluded from its traditions and both show the power of creative confabulation. They also represent strikingly eirenic bacchants, and it is this that provokes a couple of key questions about – or even criticisms of - Honig’s theory.
My first question is Where is Dionysus in Honig’s reclamation of Euripides’ Bacchae for a feminist theory of refusal? Wiley is free to represent Dionysus through his affects, but Honig’s theory is mapped onto Euripides’ play. In an unpublished lecture on the Bacchae quoted by Honig, Judith Butler argues that ‘this is not a story of women’s liberation’. For Butler, and for many of us, it is hard to get away from Dionysus’s power, his manipulation of the bacchants (‘I have driven these sisters mad’, he boasts), his ‘sadism’ even (as Telò, 2020 would have it). Honig’s reading focuses on Agave and her sisters, and away from Dionysus, which is part of her resistant reading. But the question remains, if we care about plot at all, how are we to think about Dionysus? We might turn to Nonnus’ Dionysiaca (44-46) to answer this question (for, as much as Honig has a point that we have a responsibility to re-read and re-write to the archive of canonical texts ‘[b]ecause to leave the archive where it is and build elsewhere is to be pressed into fugitivity’s path’ and to ‘abet [the archive’s] reproduction of the same’, we also have a responsibility to expand the archive). In the Dionysiaca’s baroque, queer rewriting of the Bacchae, Dionysus takes pity on Agave and Autonoe and makes sure they return to the city and their beds. He gives them a drink that will make them forget, and puts into their minds dreams of hope. Can we use Nonnus to supplement a Honig reading of the Bacchae with his empathetic Dionysus, or does only he offer patriarchal control in a different guise, one that will prevent the women from reclaiming the city?
My second and related question is about madness. Through his poised and serene representation of a young black man as a bacchant, Wiley insists on challenging the ‘angry black man’ stereotype. It is important for Honig too that the bacchants be in control of their actions; in her reading, we need to depathologize them to take them seriously as subjects, as agents. But can we – should we – following Therí Alyce Pickens and others – reimagine madness and put it back into a feminist theory of refusal?
Perhaps madness of a kind is necessary to move from the theory to the practice.