Plutarch’s Boat

Abstract

The article considers how the scene in the scenic presentation can constitute a twofold instance of interruption—not only as an intervening element within a performance but also as something that may interrupt it entirely—and how these two interruptions are intertwined. The demonstration builds on a scenic lecture of the classical text by Plutarch on the disappearance of oracles, dating from the first century CE. The text is renowned for its story of the death of ‘the Great Pan’. A closer analysis of the text indicates how that seemingly eccentric story is essentially motivated by the worry of the author concerning the disappearance of ‘providence’ and thereby the sense of ‘allness’ (pan) provided by a historical world. The conclusion links the story to the present-day post-pandemic situation: What if, on every occasion when a human community or society, a dêmos or ‘people’, becomes interrupted by its fundamental exposedness to the disastrous effects of the non-human universe, no matter what is their cause, a certain ‘allness’ dies? What are the spiritual, political and transcendental consequences of that event in history, and what are they today? Insofar as these questions can only open in a scenic perspective, they re-articulate the scene or the stage, in a novel way, as a dimension of radical exposure engaging our experience and bodies genuinely and relating them to what they are not.

Notes

1 At the time Plutarch wrote his dialogue, he probably worked as a priest at the sanctuary of Delphi (1974: 86).

2 Regarding the modern reception of the story, see Meriman (1969).

3 I thank Mika Elo for drawing my attention to the prefix ‘pan-' in the term ‘pandemic’.

4 See, for example, Homeric Hymn 19 to Pan, 45; Hesiod, Works and Days, 80–82; Plato, Cratylus 408b–c.

5 In his reading of Oedipus, Hölderlin draws attention to a similar type of historical situation: the tragic hybris of the hero occurs ‘in idle time’ or ‘in time of leisure’ (in müssiger Zeit) (Hölderlin 1988: 108).

6 The figure of Pan ‘the god of flocks and herds of Greek mythology, usually represented with the horns, ears, and legs of a goat on the body of a man’ (OED 2020) embodies that spiritual function perfectly, by mediating between the chaotic ‘Arcadian’ physis susceptible to evoke ‘panic’ among humans, and the civilized human culture with its serene bucolic fantasies. Concerning the multifaceted meanings and functions that Pan had in the Greek cult, see Borgeaud (1979).

7 Like the ‘Stoic’ ideas of ˱conflagration’ (ekpyrôsis, 415f), the recurrent cyclic destruction of the world, or the ‘Epicurean’ ideas of ‘infinity’ (apeiron, 420b) and the infinite number of parallel worlds (423c–431a). As an interlocutor notices, the hypothesis of the infinite worlds would make the work of ‘God and prophecy and Providence’ impossible (423c).

8 The same term occurs in the dialogue both as a name with a capital letter (Pronoia: 413a, 414f) and as a noun (pronoia: 420b, 423c, 435e, 436d).