Pygmalion and Galatea, Truth and Art

I Galatea – II Simple Lessons – III Pre-modern Thought – IV – Poetic Truth – V – Sometimes God Hides – VI Dreams – VII Making memories while on holiday

I Galatea

Once, there was a Cypriot sculptor named Pygmalion. He spent most of his life uninterested in women, but one day, carved a sculpture of a woman so beautiful that he himself fell in love with its likeness. Unable to admit his feelings even to himself, Pygmalion languished in longing silence. The festival of Aphrodite in Cyprus came around, and Pygmalion made an offering of livestock and a prayer, for a partner who looked exactly like the statue he’d carved and been unable to bring himself to sell.

When he returned to his home, the statue itself had come to life and become a real woman. She was named Galatea, ‘milk-white’. The two had a child, Paphos, and lived and died in as much happiness as was allowed men and women in their time.

I believe there’s merit in examining this story beyond the obvious surface level analysis.

First, we have to point out the obvious meaning in the story, by stripping the god of their personal veneer and understanding them as an abstract concept. Aphrodite, what is she? Lust, love, desire, etc. Creative and destructive, supportive and possessive. She is all these things at once. Because every nuance of this myth matters in the interpretation, it’s important to establish exactly what happens here and why. Love/desire brings Galatea to life.

But it can’t be her own desire; she’s inanimate, lacks a personality with which to desire anything. Galatea is immobile but for love; without it she is unable to move of her own will. Is she awakened by a random whim of the goddess? I would argue no, because Aphrodite in this particular tale is nothing more than the personification of the concept of love as opposed to a proper personality in her own right, as she is in, say, the story of Thetis and Peleus’ wedding. Sadly, because of this fact, her particular personal quirks will be put aside for now.

Is it Pygmalion’s will? Ah, now we’re getting warmer. By his prayer to the abstract concept of love he awakens Galatea. This implies several things.

II Simple Lessons

Pygmalion is Galatea’s creator, and by virtue of having literally carved her from stone, knows her inside out. Perhaps this is why only he would have been able to animate her in the first place – by knowing the body, he was able to conceive of the mind.

Any random passerby who happened to look through Pygmalion’s workshop window and see Galatea could have fallen in love with her and prayed to Aphrodite to bring her to life, but it would only have worked for Pygmalion because only he could understand the kind of person she could potentially have been.

The body’s structure informs the mind, and thus, the personality – think about the arrangement of your own neurons. There’s a physical makeup that informs an abstract understanding, and the same idea is found in this myth.

Aphrodite’s action in animating Galatea is a reciprocation of the effort Pygmalion put into building her. Carving a statue, especially one detailed enough for a fully cognisant man to fall in love with, is a considerable task, as I’m sure you can imagine.

His prayer, then, was not the reason Galatea awoke. It was because she had been built with the utmost care; because Pygmalion had offered his life to the creation of beauty, sacrificed his time to the idea of love, in creating the loveliest thing he could. His prayer was literally the act of building the statue – the ten minutes it took him to go to the local temple and make a quick offering were nothing but a symbolic gesture.

By his falling in love with her, Pygmalion was not, in fact, going mad. The story shows us what happens to artists and their art. Spend enough time with a project, and you will begin to love it, too. In this case, the art–or, rather, Aphrodite, the thing behind the art–reciprocates.

There’s a relevant quote from Zorba the Greek: “Behind each woman rises the austere, sacred and mysterious face of Aphrodite. That was the face Zorba was seeing and talking to, and desiring. Dame Hortense was only an ephemeral and transparent mask which Zorba tore away to kiss the eternal mouth.” (44) So, too, has Pygmalion fallen in love not necessarily with Galatea, but with the very concept of beauty itself.

“But wait,” you cry, “Isn’t this whole myth just a form of cheap ancient wish fulfilment? You’re wasting your time taking it apart in so much detail. Pygmalion was a lonely sculptor with no prospects. It seems awfully sexist that he would be able to just build himself a partner. It’s like the ancient equivalent of a sad modern man building himself a sex-bot and calling it his waifu.”

And, sure, yes, it’s possible to interpret the whole thing in that manner and brush it off. But then, why does Galatea reciprocate? Is it just an extension of the wish-fulfilment? Frankly, I have a higher opinion of the ancients than to assume there’s any of that occurring in the first place. The Galatea story’s central theme is the idea that beauty has a purpose, can give back. That it’s not just a fruitless, time-wasting lark to while away our time until we die. Rather, Galatea/beauty affirms existence. A secular miracle–Pygmalion’s creation of an incredibly detailed and beautiful statue–results in a literal miracle, as the statue comes to life.

Interestingly, it comes alive and is endowed with free will, acting outside its creator’s knowledge – did the ancients understand the death of the author thousands of years before us? That’s another question for another time, I think.

Finally, back to Baudrillard, and the real and the fake. In his 1981 essay Simulacra and Simulation, argued that modern society had replaced all substance with symbols and signifiers instead. These ‘simulacra’ are aspects of culture, television, film, writing and so on, that inform our worldview.

He divided the process of this replacement into four stages. The sign is made, it represents reality. The sign then becomes an unfaithful copy of reality, and we know that it is an unfaithful copy – a false representation. On the third stage, Pygmalion and Galatea sit and laugh – now there is a copy with no original. The fourth stage is where the simulacra multiply and interact only with each other to fill our minds, essentially; to replace reality with a collection of signs and symbols that relate only to each other. The culture drops all pretense of reality, and only interacts with other aspects of itself – other symbols. Any relation to the human experience is gone.

What I’m saying is the Greeks had already figured out Baudrillard, thanks to their conception of the eidolon and how it related to Helen and Galatea. Helen was stuck on the first level, meaning she had a perfect copy, while Galatea represented something much darker – despite the story being one of the few genuinely happy ones in Greek myth. That the story comes with a happy ending is itself a note of warning in any Mediterranean myth; the notion that Pygmalion is allowed to escape scot-free from an encounter with divinity does raise my eyebrow a fraction.

Of course, it’s easy to interpret the story differently. Depending on personal values we can see the man’s future with Galatea a complete disaster or a literal heaven-sent conclusion. One thing is absolutely certain, though; she is a simulacrum. The Greeks, perhaps unintentionally, are making the point that the simulacrum can only be the same as the real thing through divine intervention; that without Aphrodite taking pity on the lonely sculptor, Galatea would have remained nothing more than a representation – and the mere fact that she is able to live doesn’t mitigate the fact.

And the fact is also that Greeks never included stories in their religion for frivolous reasons – there was a good reason to think of Pygmalion and Galatea as real, and I think it was to demonstrate the shifting line between the real and the fake. People in the past 500 years have become largely obsessed with materialism as the only correct method of thought in direct contravention to their cultural heritage and to the detriment of the quality of their personal lives at the expense of scientific development.

Although, I guarantee you this is a trend that will soon change – as the secular elements of society overreach themselves there is bound to be some pushback. It is already beginning, and not just with me. Although my resistance to that excessive scientism was first formalised below.

III Pre-modern Thought

I wrote the first part of this essay to guess at why Galatea existed; I write the second part to affirm her importance. I concern myself here with trying to dispel the notion that we have reached a logical end-point to history, and that we have discovered the ultimate mode of interpreting the world in modern ‘objective’ scientific testing. This is a short Phillipic that aims to collect evidence to dispel a certain type of thought, that I find poisonous, hateful, and un-conducive to human joy and learning: the reliance on ‘objective fact’ and ‘science’ as the ultimate method of finding the truth to the exclusion of actual human experience.

Sole belief in materialism and subjective reality is not the end-point of logic, or of thinking logically – merely another framework, one that has replaced a method of thought that was once well-understood and commonplace.

In replacing this older mode of thought with modern secular humanism we are doing an excellent job of unlearning what we as a civilisation have already learned by making it increasingly difficult to understand our own history and the way our ancestors once understood the world. The pre-modern alternative to secular humanist thought is alive, logical, and worth preserving. Why? Because it worked. Look at what we made with it! As intellectual forward-thinking as you may be, there is a part of you that is concerned with preservation of that culture, even if you’re Sam Harris.

I concern myself here with one aspect of that old mindset: the belief that fiction is true, and that truth is not synonymous with fact. The idea that an event is ‘true’ and that the event ‘happened in reality’ are different. While such a position may initially appear to be a case of senseless semantics, made for the sake of propping up pedantic poets, it must be accounted for if the modern world is to retain a sense of how humanity used to think, and for us to continue wading through the unnameable present.

Why do we need to understand how people used to think? Or, to put the question in grander terms, what is the point of learning history? Historical education, in my experience, until my final year of schooling, was something so excessively bellophilic that it turned most of my cohort away – endless study of the first and second world wars, and of the cold war, doesn’t interest everyone. Fair play. It’s unfortunate that everyone’s first history class wasn’t a historiography class – that instead of learning about ANZACs etc we weren’t immediately made to understand why it was important to understand. (Isn’t that the question all cynical students ask of their classwork? Why are we studying this? What use will I have for quadratics in wider society, etc).

It’s fairly obvious that definition is division, and to a more belligerent mind it’s phrased as competition. And so the reason for studying history in and of itself becomes a little clearer: we want to know what we were so that we can know what we now are. Understand a little about everything around us based on what it once was. And perhaps forecast the future – very carefully! There is a quote from Bethesda Softworks’ 2003 game Morrowind that perfectly encapsulates the simple beauty of history: “When we understand the events that have happened to us, those events become history. Otherwise, we’re all just animals trying to get out of the cold.”

But there is another good reason for us to bother with it all, and that is less to do with specific factual evidence than story-based, mythic evidence. I say ‘mythic’ not in the sense of a story so old that its veracity is suspect, or something so supernatural and unrealistic as to be obviously non-factual (remember, truth and fact are different, and I’ll turn to myth later), but I mean it in the sense of ‘national myth’ (e.g. a romanticisation of the life of Garibaldi or Napoleon) in other words, a story that, even if it is not necessarily true, informs a culture’s outlook as if it were factual anyway, and thus provides insight into a culture’s valued traits – psychic, material, behavioural. Example: Odysseus was a valued hero to the ancients because Athena blessed him with cunning, he was a multi-faceted man. But claiming that ‘Athena blessed him’, while it is essentially a religious statement, is also tacitly understood as a symbolic representation of Odysseus’ intelligence.

Rather, it’s not that Athena is a symbol of intelligence – Greeks didn’t think that way. She wasn’t an abstraction. She was the concept of strategy itself. She existed inasmuch as the concept of logic, intelligence, etc did. No matter the degree which they proclaim to be logical and objective, people tend to think narratively, as we know. Ancients understood the idea of a ‘poetic truth’ or a symbolic truth, that does not exactly correspond to what happens in reality but reflects it, beautifies it, sorts it into a pattern or a mode of thought so as to make it possible for us to understand. They understood this intuitively; it was the default mode of thought in Europe for thousands of years. Materialist secular humanism has largely replaced it for most people.

It’s worth keeping around because the system we tried to switch to, to use a computing term, is not cross-compatible. It is not amenable to retaining a historically accurate understanding of events across time. It’s already impossible to understand how the ancients thought about concepts like ‘the good’ and ‘beauty’ and so on without materialists and fact-based secular humanists muddying the waters further by raising generations of themselves with a particular set of axioms that restrict modes of belief to the scientifically provable. By the way, ‘science’ as a system is like any system of beliefs – it makes sense to you because you’ve been raised to believe it and it justifies itself.

Do I not believe in the scientific method? Odd question, first of all, how can I disbelieve in a method? Of course I ‘believe’ in the fact that scientific testing of nature and the resulting technology has resulted in a great deal of seemingly accurate results and material benefits for humanity.

I have simply discarded the idea of progress at the exclusion of everything else. Steps forward are more nuanced, more careful, than making all the numbers bigger.

Consider that the idea of endless testing to discover the rules of nature is not something that evolved with the ‘Enlightenment’ and modernity but that existed alongside a religious mode of thought for thousands of years and saw zero conflict until Protestants arrived and tried to equate truth with fact.

Mencius Moldbug’s concept of the ‘ultracalvinist’ is relevant here as a sidenote.

Protestants have always had this fixation on theology as fact, as a thing to be falsified or proven in a material framework. So-called atheists think in the same terms. But truth is not the same as fact. And religion before Luther didn’t ask anyone to accept it as fact. It was accepted as truth, not fact.

IV Poetic Truth

By far the best defense of poetic truth I have read and the quickest path to understanding it comes from Robert Graves, in his text The White Goddess:

“What interests me most in conducting this argument is the difference that is constantly appearing between the poetic and prosaic methods of thought. The prosaic method was invented by the Greeks of the Classical age as an insurance against the swamping of reason by mythographic fancy. It has now become the only legitimate means of transmitting useful knowledge. And in England, as in most other mercantile countries, the current popular view is that ‘music’ and old-fashioned diction are the only characteristics of poetry which distinguish it from prose: that every poem has, or should have, a precise single-strand prose equivalent. As a result, the poetic faculty is atrophied in every educated person who does not privately struggle to cultivate it: very much as the faculty of understanding pictures is atrophied in the Bedouin Arab. (T. E. Lawrence once showed a coloured crayon sketch of an Arab Sheikh to the Sheikh’s own clansmen. They passed it from hand to hand, but the nearest guess as to what it represented came from a man who took the sheikh’s foot to be the horn of a buffalo.)

And from the inability to think poetically—to resolve speech into its original images and rhythms and re-combine these on several simultaneous levels of thought into a multiple sense—derives the failure to think clearly in prose. In prose one thinks on only one level at a time, and no combination of words needs to contain more than a single sense; nevertheless the images resident in words must be securely related if the passage is to have any bite. This simple need is forgotten, what passes for simple prose nowadays is a mechanical stringing together of stereotyped word-groups, without regard for the images contained in them. The mechanical style, which began in the counting-house, has now infiltrated into the university, some of its most zombiesque instances occurring in the works of eminent scholars and divines.

The joke is that the more prose-minded the scholar the more capable he is supposed to be of interpreting ancient poetic meaning, and that no scholar dares to set himself up as an authority on more than one narrow subject for fear of incurring the dislike and suspicion of his colleagues. To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilisation implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought. The present age is peculiarly barbaric introduce, say, a Hebrew scholar to an ichthyologist or an authority on Danish place names and the pair of them would have no single topic in common but the weather or the war (if there happened to be a war in progress, which is usual in this barbaric age).

But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialised knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to keep civilisation alive. The scholar is a quarry-man, not a builder, and all that is required of him is that he should quarry cleanly. He is the poet’s insurance against factual error. It is easy enough for the poet in this hopelessly muddled and inaccurate modern world to be misled into false etymology, anachronism and mathematical absurdity by trying to be what he is not. His function is truth, whereas the scholar’s is fact. Fact is not to be gainsaid; one may put it in this way, that fact is a Tribune of the People with no legislative right, but only the right of veto. Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.”

Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, pp. 223-24.

I’m tempted to leave the argument there. But there’s more I personally want to explain that didn’t fall under the scope of Graves’ argument. To supplement his words, an exemplar.

The death of the famous poet Li Bai (701-762AD), according to a persistent legend, occurred thusly: the inebriated poet, sailing one evening in deep waters, leaned too far over his boat’s edge and drowned in an attempt to embrace the moon’s reflection. This is factually false. Li Bai literally, historically, died of disease. However, the argument for poetic truth runs concurrent to the facts.

Here’s a little questionnaire based on what we’ve learned thus far:

Multiple Choice Exam – You have 40 minutes, 10 minutes perusal

Li Bai threw away his life in a rebellious quest for beauty: (1 mark)

Sorry, it’s a trick question. Both are correct.

Note that the two ideas converge in their result, and in their meaning: Li Bai is dead as a result of his excessive passion in either case. In this case, since the factual truth is known to us, we choose to accept it as what happened over the legend, regarded by most as a flight of fancy. But the symbolic meaning is the same as the factual.

I realise this is to an extent an argument from emotion – the belief that Li Bai’s legend is more beautiful than the truth does not negate the fact that the physical, real facts of the case still reign supreme. But I make a dichotomy between ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ because ‘fact’ is something I define in a more scientific and objective sense than ‘truth’ which I view as something more abstract, something understood with a kind of logical faculty we are no longer taught – Graves’ ‘poetic mind.’

“But that’s only because that’s how you’ve chosen to define truth. I could define truth as being ‘a series of corresponding facts that add to an accurate statement or conclusion’ and your argument would make no sense.”

Quite true. And in respect to the changing nature of words I won’t do something as crass as refer to a dictionary definition. I’ll just say that this is what the poetic mindset entails, and it’s a mindset worth preserving because it allows us to continue to understand our history and thus ourselves better the more time passes, instead of throwing both baby and bathwater away and laying down our intellectual lives for Elon Musk and Disney.

According to this mindset, in order to understand the truth of the world one must respect myths, legends, and fairytales. Now, a somewhat abstract diversion.

V Sometimes God Hides

There is an Orthodox Christian idea that people assuming the roles of figures from myths and folk tales essentially become them on the outside, while maintaining individual identities that they merely put aside. So, for example, the man who dresses up as Santa and sits around in the shopping centre is no longer Joe, the 35-year old job-hunter struggling to keep his life together. He is St Nick. But he is also most definitely not St Nick. He has become a symbol of St Nick, an aspect of him, and so he is him. And the kid babbling about what present they want isn’t talking to Joe, they’re talking to Santa, even though adult logic tells us that Joe doesn’t care and won’t remember any of what the kid said in a week. But by virtue of being addressed as St Nick, Joe Bloggs in some measure becomes him.

And then Joe takes off the false beard and goes back to his cheap flat and his debt and his half-finished bottle of Yellow Tail. In other words, sometimes God hides.

(If you’re familiar with the concept of ‘mantling’ in the Elder Scrolls, this is somewhat similar.)

Santa exists in multiple aspects, much like a pagan god – he exists where there is an image of him, he exists and speaks through the mouth of Joe Bloggs playing his role. My argument for why art can be true, for why fiction is true, is that art can do the same thing. Art can assume the truth, can wear masks.

Every character in Umberto Eco’s Prague Cemetery is a real person, with the exception of the protagonist. The sentiments described in that book, and many of the events and depictions of certain social groups, are completely real. Sure, the specifics are false–or, if they’re real, all the things Simonini did in the novel were probably the works of multiple people–but the essence of the story is entirely true. Fiction can be true in the same sense that Santa can be real, in that the child talking to Santa in the shopping centre is talking to Santa and not Joe Bloggs. And Santa, not Joe, is replying.

When I read a book with elements of non-fiction, I can consider those elements as true as anything else. But fiction, in its assumption of a set of prepositions (say, magic exists, or the world has been devastated by nuclear warfare before the story begins), attempts to show us events occurring in an impossible nowhere land.

So, is it literally true that, say, a British boy named Harry Potter accidentally defeated an evil wizard as a baby and was kept in a cupboard for a decade, then invited to a magic school and so on and so on? Of course it’s not literally factual. But because we’re reading it and engaging with it as an internally consistent work, and because it steps up and assumes like Joe Bloggs “I am in fact Santa/a fantastic series of fictional events, and I will now entertain you by telling you about what presents you will receive/recounting a story with characters, themes and a plot”, it becomes entirely true. We suspend our disbelief, as the child does who asks for a toy tank or a pony from Joe Bloggs, and because we address the book as truth it assumes that mantle.

This is a little different from it being true allegorically, symbolically, or in terms of realism/potential to truly literally happen. Good books can have those characteristics, but this is a more universal quality than strict realism. There’s a ‘spirit’ to every story, a sort of ‘soul’, I suppose–an overarching meta-story–which is completely true. And the fictional account that was written by an author at a certain time is merely assuming the meta-story’s ‘soul’ to talk to us for a bit, rest us on its knee, promise us a good story.

Fiction ‘rises’ to the level of truth and assumes its mask, if only for a while, and reflects reality. Then it might step back into the safety of the false and the fantastic once more, its message/logos/truth again concealing itself. Sometimes God hides.

VI Dreams

But we’ve never quite managed to reach that perfect equivalence, the piece of insane troll logic that allows us to connect what literally did not ever happen with what literally did happen on the same level without additional qualifiers. The only way you can make the claim that fiction and reality are identical is by moving the goalposts and saying ‘well, within a particular abstract space’ such as inside the brain or in writing. But in reality, it’s not possible to assign untruth and truth the same qualities. You can’t do it except through abstraction.

It is for this reason that the modern variety of cynics and atheists deride the notion of a spiritual life, and indeed anything that exists outside of physical scientific evidence, because within their framework of values a fact is more important than a truth. More specifically, a fact is the only thing that leads to a truth: an empirically observed, testified, utterly knowable fact is all that exists.

I find such a view incredible in its short-sightedness and condescending in its simplicity, not least because they, like the rest of us, have no way to verify the truth of anything. My first thoughts on this topic invariably flit to an example of Taoist literature, Zhuangzhi’s famous parable of the butterfly:

“Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhuangzi. Soon I awakened, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”

In other words, to refer to the hypothesis, fact is not truth, because it is ultimately impossible to verify. But a truth in the style of a myth or a story doesn’t seek total verification, only trust in its underlying ideas, which I at least have noted constantly in reality. You think it’s subjective, it’s a bad argument. Well, let’s try turning this problem around.

Both life and art can be abstractions. It’s easy to take an event in your life and view it as an event in a story, with its own pacing and significance to character development and an overarching plot. The materials we work with when we perform that framing process on our own memories/imagination and on fictional events are the same.

From Schopenhauer:

“Life and dreams are leaves of one and the same book. The systematic reading is real life, but when the actual reading hour (the day) has come to an end, and we have the period of recreation, we often continue idly to thumb over the leaves, and turn to a page here and there without method or connection. We sometimes turn up a page we have already read, at others one still unknown to us, but always from the same book.”

VII Making memories while on holiday

They say you don’t need to read up on a country’s history before you visit all the historical sites on holiday. Don’t bother ruining the surprise for yourself of what this thing is like. And some who enjoy being surprised will strongly espouse this view. But the corollary viewpoint is this.

What if visiting the country changes how you view the literature? And of course it will; you won’t picture anything you read in the same way you were able to before, because your views are grounded in experience rather than exclusively through provided description. So, which do you value more? The capacity for exploring a fictionalised version of a foreign country through an author’s eyes, or the actual experience of visiting it?

Bear in mind that both options can be equally emotionally powerful, both can be just as easily remembered, both contain a similar amount of pathos provided the book is good enough, and one saves the cost of a plane ticket.

What do you value more? The memory of the experience, or the imagination of what’s probably a far more interesting experience with the caveat that it didn’t happen to you? Our memories change constantly: what we conceive of as memory is mostly imagination. Therefore, the experience of reading about a foreign country versus actually visiting it are situated on the same level in the human brain, making them equally true.

They are going to match one another in status after a couple of months pass, provided the book was of a high enough quality. Assuming you didn’t lose an arm while on holiday, after a few months the only thing you can really take away from that trip is the crystallised moment of time, of you being there in the first place. The singular, unchangeable moment, that can’t be marred in reality but will slowly change in your memory as you age. And no ultimate, completely true record of it will exist. (Photographs can only ever capture the moment in which a photograph was taken, meaning they can never get the full truth regardless of how naturally everyone is acting and how wide the lens is.)

So, keeping all that in mind, that the experience of travelling and the experience of reading and the experience of swimming are rendered identical through the abstraction of time, memory, and imagination, would you prefer to have your conception of the country influenced by reading about it, or would you rather have your idea of the literature influenced by the country?

Remember, either experience is your first impression of the country. It doesn’t particularly matter which one is true; your mind accepts them both. Fiction becomes truth before truth can assert itself through direct experience. And as time passes, that truth eventually becomes fiction itself, through repeated retelling. (You might say that you didn’t tell anyone about your trip, avoiding making the memory into something abstract like words or something removed like photographs, but your brain ‘told’ you about the event every time you remembered it, so there’s no escaping retelling. And every retelling features an embellishment or a removal because that’s how memories and the human experience work.)

So (as much as this might appear to be a false binary) between art and truth, which do you value more? The ancient Greeks knew there were copies of Helen everywhere, they knew what she was. They understood that a bit of Helen was in everything beautiful. And everything beautiful was in a sense a copy of Helen, an eidolon, because it engendered desire.

That includes Galatea, Pygmalion’s fortunate statue, who begins her life a literal eidolon. She is a worshipped object which gains its own sentience only in reference to Aphrodite, without whom she is nothing. Galatea cannot exist without Helen, because Helen is almost a personification of Aphrodite herself. Galatea is a signifier of Helen.

Jorge Luis Borges touched on this without mentioning any names when he wrote about a map of such complexity that it covered the exact area of the terrain it was mapping. While being a different object in itself, and only existing in reference to an original, it was treated as though it were original by the inhabitants. From Borges, Western culture took only a short jump to Baudrillard’s ‘hyperreality’. Baudrillard asserts, because he’s a post-modernist, that the signifier is more real than reality.

In other words, where, for Pygmalion, Galatea is more ‘real’ than Helen or Aphrodite even though the latter are an essential part of what she is. This is the essential flaw of post-modern thought. Where is the basis? Without Helen, Galatea is nothing, and without a reality, hyper-reality is also nothing. The framework cannot exist without facts, the eidolon cannot live without a basis. Galatea cannot live without Aphrodite and Helen.