Jenny C. Mann's "The Trials of Orpheus"

Jenny C. Mann is an associate professor in the Department of English and the Gallatin School at New York University. She is the author of Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England.

Mann applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime, and reported the following:

The Trials of Orpheus is my attempt to understand: how do eloquent words produce action? Early modern writers and thinkers turned to the Orpheus myth in their attempts to answer that strangely difficult question. In the Greek tradition, Orpheus is the first poet, and one of the earliest embodiments of the idea of language as power. Orpheus’s song animates trees, tames animals, and resurrects his wife Eurydice from the dead. In describing these extraordinary powers, Ovid’s version of the Orpheus myth in his epic poem the Metamorphoses provides early modern English poets and philosophers with the vocabulary through which they can explain the peculiar force of eloquent language, which is invisible, yet also palpably real. One of the key terms for the force of Orphic song is “drawing”—it pulls, tows, drags, lures, captivates, and charms its audiences—and that is where page 99 picks up the story, with an epigraph:

By then I was used to silence.
Though something stretched between us
like a whisper, like a rope:
my former name,
drawn tight.
You had your old leash
with you, love you might call it,
and your flesh voice.
—Margaret Atwood, “Orpheus (1)”

Written in the voice of Eurydice, these verses convey the very same aspects of Orphic song that fascinate and repel poets such as Marlowe and Shakespeare. Atwood prompts us to notice how Orphic song, while perhaps beautiful and even desired, is also a form of compulsion. Orpheus’s love-song is a leash. It is voice made flesh, into rope, and thus capable of yoking others to its will. This is precisely how Renaissance writers represent the uncanny agency of verbal art, capable of pulling people across great distances of time and space. As p.99 suggests, my book takes its cues from the poets, dwelling on the combination of yearning and constraint that characterizes encounters with powerful literature, including my own.

Learn more about The Trials of Orpheus at the Princeton University Press website and follow Jenny Mann on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue