Writing with Thumos

In Plato’s tripartite theory of the soul, thumos represents “spiritedness.” It’s central to mankind’s unique ability to make choices that transcend temporal, individualistic, and bodily desires. Thumos is the soil from which moral courage grows.

If I were to propose an organizing principle that governs my reading life (and thus, my writing life), I would say that I am attracted to subtle tales of moral thumos. Three plays in particular are representative of this tendency of mine: Sophocles’s Antigone, Shakespeare’s King Lear, and Robert Boalt’s A Man for All Seasons. All three works share two broad features—a deep sense of filial piety and central character becoming a martyr. In short, these are stories about moving from the individual to something transcendent. They all make me shiver. They all give me goosebumps. And they all made me believe in the timeless power of literature to speak to the soul. For the sake of space, I will focus on the most ancient of the three, Antigone.

Let’s start with the more immediately relatable feature: filial piety. In Antigone, the title character is the sister of Polynices, who was denied burial for supposed treason against Thebes. She decides to bury him anyways. Her sister, Ismene, asks “Thou wouldst bury him, when 'tis forbidden to Thebes?” And Antigone replies, “I will do my part, and thine, if thou wilt not, to a brother. False to him will I never be found.” Her devotion to her brother is haunting. That level of love, where one feels compelled to break the law to simply bury someone already dead, would seem illogical to an entity more rational than a human being. Thankfully we are more susceptible to flights of transcendent filial piety—as Antigone herself says: “there is nothing shameful in piety to a brother.”

That filial piety, of course, ultimately leads to the slightly more alien feature: martyrdom. When Antigone decides to bury her brother, she was condemning herself to death as well. In declining to join her sister on this venture, Ismene says, “to defy the State, I have no strength for that.” Antigone clearly did though. When King Creon questions whether she helped bury a traitor, asking whether she “didst indeed dare to transgress that law” forbidding such, she readily admits that she did and knows she faces certain death for doing so. But she justifies choosing to do so anyways, saying “for me to meet this doom is trifling grief; but if I had suffered my mother’s son to lie in death an unburied corpse, that would have grieved me; for this, I am not grieved.” She shows pure courage to subordinate her natural desire to live, her biological sense of self-preservation, to tend to her dead brother. Not everybody would do this—indeed Ismene does not. But Antigone transcended beyond individualistic concerns in favor of something sublime—love. That is pure thumos. Indeed, the chorus nearly bashes us over the head with this conclusion: “The maid shows herself passionate child of passionate sire, and knows not how to bend before troubles.” In one sense, that is precisely what makes this play a classic Greek tragedy. I remember thinking of my own younger sister when I first read this book. How she might, in a different world, martyr herself to give me eternal rest. The thumotic love of a sister.

But when these thousand-year-old words, sent out like little ships in bottles, reached me across time and continents, and give me goosebumps, it was not merely about the tragedy of Antigone’s ultimate demise. It was also the inspiring story of a young girl who, even at the price of her life, chose her family over the state. As a person with vague anarchist tendencies, that appealed to me philosophically. As a person who prizes my Indian inheritance of communal and family-oriented values, it appealed to me emotionally. And as a writer, it appealed to me aesthetically.

To see the aesthetic value of this, we should turn to a more poetic, more free interpretation of this interaction between Creon and Antigone, where Antigone responds to Creon by explaining:

Those who are not buried wander eternally and find no rest. If my brother were alive, and he came home weary after a long day’s hunting, I should kneel down and unlace his boots. I should fetch him food and drink, I should see that his bed was ready for him. Polynices is home from the hunt. I owe it to him to unlock the house of the dead in which my father and mother are waiting to welcome him. Polynices has earned his rest.

Anouilh, Jean. Antigone. Translated by Lewis Galantiere, Random House, 1946.

This sublime thumos has directly affected the sorts of things I like to write, in both content and practice. Start with content. Filial piety is central to my own personal views and my work. And while I rarely have my characters rise to the level of martyrdom directly, I examine versions of the next best thing, common in Hindu epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata: exile. For example, my main current work in progress examines the varying thumos between three young friends who grow up together but destined to occupy divergent roles. One is a rishi, a word for a sage that I use in my work to describe a young member of a priesthood that wields magical powers and eventually acts as a sort of prime minister. Another friend is a young prince and warrior, bound on a path to the throne. And the third is the son of a wealthy banker and merchant who is a courtier. The first and third come into conflict with the second, over his unfaithfulness to his duties, his faith, and his soon-to-be-wife. And the first is exiled as a result. (This is not the end of the story, but that’s what’s relevant here). See already how literal and figurative piety ultimately lead the young rishi to martyr himself to the point of exile, if not death. He has the thumos to tell the truth to the prince even at the expense of his homeland.

But the effect of thumos goes beyond this sort—the literal influence it has on the content of my writing. I try to incorporate thumos into my practice as well. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the writer behind the acclaimed television show Fleabag, said once something to the effect of: “I know my writing is good when it cuts to the bone.” I take that to be why writers are sometimes embarrassed to show people their writing. Because they’ve shown moral courage and thumos in how they wrote, so much so that they’ve bared deep parts of themselves that more reasonable people might not share. They’ve denuded themselves, emotionally speaking.

I find it very attractive to write thumotically for myself, but not so much for others. Antigone in private. Ismene in public. I had been working, for a long time, on a story about a young orphaned girl who discovers she has magic powers and goes on a journey to find herself and save the world. It was fairly decent, fully plotted, and I did not have a lot fleshed out for any of my other novel ideas. I could write up passages that read fairly well and added a love story that my writing group enjoyed. But writing a tired YA hero’s journey didn’t feel like I was cutting to the bone. Yet the other story, a study on how young men orbit each other, police each other morally, hurt each other and themselves—that draws deeply from my own experiences reckoning with friends from different eras of my life. Friends I’ve grown up with, envied, pitied, drifted towards and away from, judged, and pleaded with in various moments of crisis. It feels transgressive, even dangerous, to work that into art. In short, that story is my story, and even as I struggle to shape it and discover it in a way I never had to with the hero’s journey story, the former felt real. It felt worthwhile. It felt like an artist’s job. It called for thumos.