Abstract
Little attention has been paid to Mary Renault’s choice of title for The Charioteer. Reading the Phaedrus, Laurie Odell, Renault’s protagonist, realizes: “In his imagination the pages were printed not with their own paragraphs only, but with all that he himself had brought to them: it seemed as though he must be identified and revealed in them, beyond all pretense of detachment, as if they were a diary to which he had committed every secret of his heart.” Clearly, the Platonic subtext remains crucial in Renault’s novel. The Phaedrus, in its central allegory proposed by Socrates, offers an erotic choice between the white horse and the black horse and (ideally) the mastery of the two by the charioteer. In The Charioteer, Ralph Lanyon privileges the black horse and exposes Laurie’s love for Andrew Raynes, who embodies mainly the white horse, as insufficient. Renault uses Plato as a model for a love between two young men that offers the good life, a love uncontaminated by the “queerness” of modern homosexuality. However, since the promiscuity of the gay world is, to some extent, anticipated by another participant in the Phaedrus, Lysias, the choice for Laurie is not only between black horse and white horse, but also between Lysian non-eros and Socratic love.
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Notes
Sweetman [1] 244.
For more biographical and literary background information, see Endres [5]. It is obviously noteworthy that Renault is a woman writing about classical antiquity and about male homosexuality, but the subject of Renault’s gender is complicated, as is Renault’s refusal to identify as a lesbian. Lisa Moore [6], for example, writes: “South Africa may indeed have represented a world in which the privilege of a male Athenian citizen was most closely reproduced in the life of a midcentury white British lesbian freed for professional accomplishment by her refusal of the roles of wife and mother,” 27.
The following studies only cursorily or very briefly link The Charioteer to Plato and the Phaedrus (and, as I will point out, are occasionally misleading): Abraham [7] 64-68; Aldrich [8] 189-191; Dick [9] 30-37; Sinfield [10] 143-145; Sturges [11] 215-218; Summers [12] 156-171; Sweetman [1] 138-150; Wolfe [13] 103-121; Zilboorg [14] 105-131.
Many parallels could be drawn between Andrew and Socrates: both will not yield to immense political pressure; both face great military danger without fear; both “regard maturity as a thing to be desired” (Charioteer 107). Or, what Laurie thinks of Andrew reads temptingly like Alcibiades’ description of Socrates as Silenus: “Yes, Laurie thought with inexpressible comfort, Andrew was solid. One could imagine oneself being involved with him in utter disagreement, in exasperation even; but one would never chip the facing and find rubble behind” (209). Alcibiades says about Socrates: “his talk most of all resembles the Silenuses that are made to open… But when these are opened, and you obtain a fresh view of them by getting inside, first of all you will discover that they are the only speeches which have any sense in them; and secondly, that none are so divine, so rich in images of virtue” (Symp. 221e-222a). At the same time, given Andrew’s total lack of passion (or ignorance of it), he also differs substantially from Socrates, who is passionate yet passionless.
While Renault’s use of religion may nowadays seem antithetical to same-sex desire, there is a rich tradition of “gay“ writers synthesizing the Platonic/pagan with the Christian, most notably Alfred, Lord Tennyson in In Memoriam, Walter Pater in Marius the Epicurean, John Addington Symonds in his Memoirs, or Oscar Wilde in De Profundis; see also Sedgwick [15] 136-141.
Aristophanes’ famous myth of soul-mates is explicitly dismissed by Diotima (for Aristophanes, love is the search for something lost, whereas Diotima insists that love results in the search for something that has not yet been found; Symp. 205d and 212c). Moreover, the Phaedrus always deals with both horses, not with halves.
Gregory Vlastos [16] may have articulated this view most forcefully (and controversially).
Nussbaum [17] 232.
Hammond [18] 230.
Halperin [19] 76.
Summers [12] 170.
Sweetman [1] 144.
Dick [9] 37.
Sweetman [1] 139.
Hammond [18] 234.
My point would also go a long way in explaining Renault’s momentous decision to abandon, after publishing The Charioteer, modernity for classical antiquity; from then on, she would focus on the worlds of Theseus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the Great – or what Ralph refers to as “the upper crust.”
Hammond [18] 234.
Zilboorg [14] 129.
Thanks to Ruth Hoberman, to the participants of the 27th Biennial Conference of the Classical Association of South Africa, University of Cape Town, July 2007, and to the anonymous readers for very helpful criticism. Thanks also to Roy Sargeant and Paul Regenass for letting me look at the voluminous Charioteer fanmail Renault received (located in the Artscape archives in Cape Town).
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Endres, N. Horses and Heroes: Plato’s Phaedrus and Mary Renault’s The Charioteer . Int class trad 19, 152–164 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-012-0314-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-012-0314-3