The Ariadne Myth

The issues in mythology seem even more prominent, however, when one looks at de Chirico’s early paintings which so influenced the Surrealists, even if de Chirico was not himself a member of the group and his later works vociferously denied. The Ariadne series, though so generally termed only in the beginning of the 20th Century with the show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the forty odd pieces de Chirico produced in 1913-1917, in particular points to a subterranean mythic base in surrealism.

This series of paintings are suggestive of the story in which Ariadne is abandoned by Theseus on Naxos after helping him kill the Minotaur and escape the Labyrinth, figures of the myth which would both return in surrealism as prominent journals. This myth is of particular interest because of the undetermined ending. In one account, she weeps for Theseus until she dies. In another account, she is married to Dionysus and made an eternal figure.

To consider some details of this myth: Ariadne is an epithet for Aphrodite, meaning the holy one, who is in the geneology of Greek mythology the first of the Olympians after Zeus castrates his father Kronos, a clear personification of Eros, the abstraction that is first to appear when Chaos is sundered. This places Love, not in its Romanticized sense, but in its wholistic sense of Union, at the foundation and returns us to Breton who would insist on the importance of Love. Staying with the Greek myth a moment longer to address Dionysus, we can see how passion and immediacy play into surrealism. Dionysus is generally known as the god of wine, but he governed all things liquid and living, such as wine, but also the sap of trees, semen and blood. This then is Breton’s Mad Love. In the de Chirico series, Ariadne is frozen in time, a marble statue in a yellow piazza with a column way on one side, a tower looming, a ship and a train in the distance. She seems to wait between her two fates, neither chosen yet.

Her two fates depict the strange mythic split within surrealism, as presented in the different statements on myth of Breton and Bataille. Breton advocated a new mythology, a new lifepath with a new lover. Bataille, on other hand, claimed an absence of myth, in which its very absence was necessary to the realization of a new and thus entirely different ritualization of life in which a mythology would eventually assert itself. In either of these choices, political speech in Barthes’ meaning is invoked to declare a new language, new myth. As Barthes recognizes, all political speech if it succeeds must become myth speech, something seemingly recognized and even permitted by both Breton and Bataille’s arguments. Either way, surrealism as it is here described seems inherently and actively political, definitely engagé.