Adulting?!

When was the first time you really felt like a grown up (if ever)?

I’m not sure when I first encountered the word “adulting” but I find it to be both apt and an odd concoction that’s arisen from the English language. I’m still not sure I like it, but it seems my approval is not needed.

Speaking of approval—and I may have told this story before—I recall the first time I realized I was an independent-thinking scholar. My time in my PhD program was fraught with difficulties: faculty who didn’t think I was good enough and kept trying to discourage me from continuing; this only ended the second time I did the oral defense of my dissertation. (I did the qualifying exams twice and the orals twice.) It continued with a dissertation advisor whose advice consisted of, “What you sent me is not a dissertation” and “Don’t sent me anything for awhile while I appeal my negative tenure decision.” (I replaced him as my advisor.) At one point, another member of my dissertation committee suggested my travails were “building character,” but I replied that I already had character or I wouldn’t still be there.

Along the way, I encountered that moment I mentioned above, the independent-thinking scholar thing. The instructor for the Greek and Romans seminar would eventually open up our class meetings for discussion, but first spent a great deal of the time telling us what we should think about the plays we were reading. One of these strong and dogmatic opinions concerned the play Ajax by Euripides. According to him, this play, unlike any other extant Greek tragedy, had a diptych structure. It began in one location, and after a few scenes and odes, changed locations. This made Ajax unique among the plays of the period.

Side note: that sentence needs to read, “among the plays of the period that we still have.” I used to do a calculation for my Intro to Theatre students. If you take just one theatre festival, three playwrights each wrote three tragic plays for it. That same theatre festival likely began (I’m guessing here) around 505 B.C.E. and would likely have ended with the fall of Athens in 405 B.C.E. So 9 plays times 100 years equals 900 plays. But we only have 33 (Aeschylus’ 7, Sophocles’ 7, and Euripides’ 19), which seems like a terrible loss until you have to read all the extant Greek plays for your qualifying exams, and then the loss of such literature and knowldge seems like a gift. 😉

When I was doing just that, I re-read Ajax on my own, and had a completely different response. Yes, Ajax does change locations, but that does not define the play’s structure. If you read it with the normal structure of a Greek tragedy, it follows the same path as the rest. At the beginning, there’s a dialogue between the goddess Athena and Odysseus about Ajax. He’s been struck by madness and has slaughtered sheep he thought were the Greek generals Agamemnon and Menelaus. In his despair, Ajax falls on his sword to kill himself. The generals debate with Ajax’s half-brother Teucer; the former want to leave the body unburied and be desecrated by animals, while Teucer wants a proper burial. Odysseus then steps in and reverses his earlier opinion of Ajax, and advocates for his burial.

This reversal of Odysseus (which sounds like something Aristotle might talk about in his Poetics!) is the true action of the play, in my interpretation. While the play is entitled Ajax, he is the agent of the true action of the play which concerns Odysseus and his change of mind.

Ah, the joy I felt at that revelation! I had arrived at this reading on my own, and could use the text as supporting evidence for my argument. While I never told the instructor about my conclusions, I always kept my satisfaction close, to remind me of my intellectual development away from simply believing my professors to finding my own path.

Coda: It’s too bad I didn’t get to attend my commencement ceremony. I would have had immense satisfaction walking up to that instructor and waving my diploma in his face. Alas!