Afterthought on “Incest, Cannibalism, and the Gods”

This article responds to Michael Kinnucan’s piece, Incest, Cannibalism, and the Gods: The Rise of the House of Atreus.

Elena Mannini, costume design for Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers, 2001

I want to highlight something that is key to Michael Kinnucan’s essay and that I think may have been ignored. Memory, in the structure of Olympian Greek myth, is in the realm of deed, not thought. It acts upon you. He says so all but explicitly in the penultimate paragraph of the essay: “In a certain sense, the trial also represents a victory of thought over memory.… We can ask what he ought to have done. Thought gains primacy over the deed....” This paragraph itself presents a fascinating dichotomy. On the ascendant: thought, along with speech and reason, as well as argument, motive, and justice. In decline: deed and memory, along with the weight of guilt. Forgetting falls into the former camp, serving as an antidote to memory.

Memory here serves a mechanistic function. It is “the way the past presses on us,” not via our own mental work but via an external mechanism. Memory waits patiently outside of us; it takes the faceless forms of the Fates and the Furies. This is why Tantalus acts without reason: because the whole of his person is present to memory in his actions alone. That is, the human subject is affected by memory in the realm of activity and not in the realm of conscious consideration. Whereas the gods possess insight—which is a defense against the traps laid by their enemies—human beings are driven completely by impulse, of which memory is a kind. It works as a force: thus too the weight of guilt. The weight of guilt is fundamentally different from justice. It is generated unthinkingly by the circumstance of one’s actions. Justice considers one’s actions but is primarily a reconfiguration of them by way of speech, reason, and argument. Speech, reason, argument and therefore justice are all symptoms of our interpretive ability.

Memory, as we conceive of it presently, has migrated to the genre of the above modes of interpretation. Memory for us is as much a process of filtering as of retention. Forgetting is integral to this kind of memory. A curse, however, is external to us, is never inconsistent, it never disappears when we ignore it. It is complete unto itself and it is insistent. Such memory has its own ledger—it won’t allow you to forget upon it. It is free from you.

The Hypocrite Reader is free, but we publish some of the most fascinating writing on the internet. Our editors are volunteers and, until recently, so were our writers. During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, we decided we needed to find a way to pay contributors for their work.

Leave a Tip

Help us pay writers (and our server bills) so we can keep this stuff coming. At that link, you can become a recurring backer on Patreon, where we offer thrilling rewards to our supporters. If you can't swing a monthly donation, you can also make a 1-time donation through our Ko-fi; even a few dollars helps!

The Hypocrite Reader operates without any kind of institutional support, and for the foreseeable future we plan to keep it that way. Your contributions are the only way we are able to keep doing what we do!

And if you'd like to read more of our useful, unexpected content, you can join our mailing list so that you'll hear from us when we publish.