Thoughts........The Greek Myth of Marsyas

employing mythology as a potential narrative anchor or creative protagonist.......


Inspired by the re-reading of the myth as a psychoanalytical device in 'The Skin Ego' by Didier Anzieu and in 'The Return of Marysas: Creative Skin' by Stephane Dumas


According to Dumas, the myth of Marysas offers a exceedinglg rich medium for reflection 'that is at once anachronistic and of great current relevance in respect of creative visual arts.' The myth, told in Ovid's Metamorphoses, tells the story of a musical battle between Apollo and Marsyas. In the contest between Apollo and Marsyas, the terms stated that the winner could treat the defeated party any way he wanted- Marsyas naturally lost and was flayed. Marsyas' intact skin was preserved at the foot of the citadel of Celaenae: it hung in cave whence the river Marsyas, a tributary of the Meander, rises. The hide, hanging in the cave remained sensitive to the music of the river.
Pertinent is Dumas's rereading of the painted of said event by Juseppe de Ribera, that depicts the two figures in stark contrast with the radiant apollo towering above the prostrate Marsyas. Flesh and fabric merge into one another. The billowing fabric recalls fleshy fruit and becomes a sort of carnal landscape enclosing the figure of Apollo before flying off the frame of the picture. Dumas elaborates on the myth that extends it to realms of phenomenology and aesthetics, envisaging an interpretation that is vastly different from the neoplatonist reading that prevailed during the Renaissance. Dumas proposes that 'our relationship to the world is based upon a kind of suspended touch, which jean-luc nancy terms tact 'from before any subject', setting and removal, the rhythm of the body's coming and going in the world. Tact is more of a 'weighing' than a mere touch. If our relationship to reality is too distant, too smooth, too suspended, it ends up becoming fossilized. If the virtual no longer bears any relation to the actual, to the actual body, it is in danger of disappearing or becoming projection tending to appropriate reality in a tyrannical way. As if Apollo, as portrayed by Ribera, were irremediably detaching himself from Marsyas' body and the ground on which he is standing.(Dumas)


Dumas proceeds to construct a precise reading of Ribera's painting in terms of Deleuze's thinking on the fold, which of course is built up around Leibniz and a baroque world view. 'For Apollo and Marsyas do indeed seem to be unfolding on either side of the horizon from one and the same fabric. Deleuze's notion of folding is understood as simultaneous form and process. this doubled movement-structure is the mode in which, he suggests, baroque thought understood matter to be organised. Folded in its structure and form, matter cannot be divided into atomistic units but instead is both continuous and differentiated- matter dynamically contracts (enfolds) and extends (unfolds) as it grows and decays.

A myth develops by means of a double process of encoding - of an external reality on the one hand (botanical, cosmological, socio-political, toponymic, religious etc.) and inner physical reality on the other. In that process, inner psychical reality is brought into correspondance with the encoded elements  of external reality. In my view , the myth of Marsyas is an  encoding of the particular reality  I call the Skin  Ego.  What actually interests me in the Marsyas myth, and what constitutes its specificity in relation to other Greek myths, is, first of all the movement within it from the sound envelope to the tactile envelope; and secondly, the turning of a tragic destiny into a beneficient one. (Anzieu)