Robert Santucci (University of Michigan)
Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, an affective response to something horrible that causes a breakdown between subject and object and thus threatens one’s sense of self, seems ripe for an application to Seneca’s Thyestes. Classicists (McAuley) as well as scholars of modern English literature (Ablett et al.) have cited the play’s cannibalism for its abjective potential: the consumption of one’s children represents a literal collapse of subject and object, as Thyestes’s children are forever made part of him.
Or so it might seem. Consumption implies evacuation. Feces is, according to Kristeva, a common source of the abject, an unclean bodily product, nourishment transformed into waste. The final line of the Thyestes, Atreus’s proud rejoinder te puniendum liberis trado tuis (“I deliver you to be punished by your children,” 1112), has been read as a double entendre, as both Thyestes’s memory of his cannibalistic meal and the continuation of the family curse will punish him. Meltzer reads an additional pun, a bodily aftereffect of his feast, his churning stomach. I take this interpretation a step further: I argue that Seneca is punning on the future of the cena Thyestea, Thyestes’s inevitable bowel movement. My reading offers a further application of the abject to Seneca’s play, as Thyestes is fated to relive the horror of his feast one final time.
To my knowledge such a reading has never been proposed. Scholarly conservatism and reluctance to embrace the bodily grotesque in Senecan tragedy may be to blame, as similar grotesque and darkly humorous scenes late in other Senecan plays have met with negative judgments (e.g. Coffey and Mayer, Jenkyns on Theseus’s collecting of Hippolytus’s limbs in the Phaedra). But fortunately the tide is turning, as more recent scholarship on Senecan tragedy has recognized the artistry of the Senecan grotesque (e.g. Mader on Thyestes’s belch, Boyle on a bodily pun at the end of the Oedipus) and its complex thematic, intertextual, and affective elements. My own approach combines a close reading of the bodily grotesque in the play with a deployment of Kristeva’s abject, which will add new depth to our understanding of Senecan tragic dialogue, the interpersonal relationships within his tragic worlds, and his dynamics of revenge. The future of the cena Thyestea is another horror lurking beneath the play’s surface, exploited by Atreus, who is eager to bring his brother to previously unrealized levels of abjection.