How Greek Tragedy Works: A Guide for Directors, Dramaturges, and Playwrights [1° ed.] 0367634074, 9780367634070

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HOW GREEK TRAGEDY WORKS

How Greek Tragedy Works is a journey through the hidden meanings and dual nature of Greek tragedy, drawing on its foremost dramatists to bring about a deeper understanding of how and why to engage with these enduring plays. Brian Kulick dispels the trepidation that many readers feel with regard to classical texts by equipping them with ways in which they can unpack the hidden meanings of these plays. He focuses on three of the key texts of Greek theatre: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Euripides’ The Bacchae, and Sophocles’ Electra, and uses them to tease out the core principles of the theatre-making and storytelling impulses. By encouraging us to read between the lines like this, he also enables us to read these and other Greek tragedies as artists’ manifestos, equipping us not only to understand tragedy itself, but also to interpret what the great playwrights had to say about the nature of plays and drama. This is an indispensable guide for anyone who finds themselves confronted with tackling the Greek classics, whether as a reader, scholar, student, or director. Brian Kulick is chair of the Theatre Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He has been an Associate Artist at The Public Theatre where his work on Shakespeare has been seen at The Delacorte in Central Park, and the Artistic Director of Classic Stage Company where he directed such world premieres as Anne Carson’s critically acclaimed An Oresteia.

HOW GREEK TRAGEDY WORKS A Guide for Directors, Dramaturges, and Playwrights

Brian Kulick

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Brian Kulick The right of Brian Kulick to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-63407-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-63406-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-11909-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

In regards to Hesiod’s nine immortal muses, I would like to humbly offer up a tenth candidate: My wife Naomi, the muse and protector of easily disheartened authors. This book, actually all my books, are – secretly – for her.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgementsix

Introduction: 115th and Broadway, circa 410 BCE

1

PART I

Conversing with shadows: on the interpretation of ancient texts

17

1 Raising the dead; or, theatre as thanatology

19

2 Antigone: a journey to the underworld of the text – how to read a Greek tragedy

26

3 Dictionary for the ghost language of the tragic

45

PART II

Toward an alternate poetics; or, what our three Greek tragedians can tell us about the nature and function of the tragic

55

4 Aeschylus’ Agamemnon; or, first principles

57

5 Sophocles’ Electra; or, the dialectics of the tragic

81

6 Euripides’ The Bacchae; or, recognition as re-cognition

106

viii Contents

PART III

Further thoughts on form

127

7 Tragedy as “the metaphor of an intellectual intuition”: Hölderlin on the poetics of the tragic

129

8 Among the ruins: what the fragments can tell us about Greek tragedy

146

CODA

Back to the light of day

169

Appendices173 Appendix 1: what to think about when thinking about staging a Greek chorus  174 Appendix 2: Agamemnon and the red carpet; or how to create an event in 3 steps  175 Appendix 3: scoring an agon logon; or the music of actions  177 Index180

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

These acknowledgements need to wend their way back to my childhood in a sleepy little suburb of Los Alamitos, California. It was there that I would spend my summer days in the Owens family’s two car garage, watching with rapt amazement as Mark Owens would patiently take apart a lawnmower engine – piece by piece by piece – until all the pieces lay neatly arrayed about him. Then, without missing a beat, or consulting an instruction manual, or even breaking a sweat, he would put the engine back together – piece by piece by piece – until it was restored to full working order. Mark could basically take apart any mechanical thing and put it back together again, learning all its clockwork-like secrets, and somehow making it run better than it did before any of his zen-like tinkering. I grew up with Mark as a role model. What Mark did with engines, I wanted to do with classic texts. I realize that this is basically what I’ve been doing throughout my adult life, only it hasn’t been in the Owens family’s two car garage, but in a classroom at Columbia University. There, with a remarkable stream of students, I’ve been ever so carefully disassembling the ancient texts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. I now realize that I am forever in Mark’s debt for teaching me how to do this with patience, fortitude, tenacity, and good humor. So Mark is the first person that I really need to thank. With that done, we can quickly jump to adulthood and the great Robert Woodruff. It was Robert who had the singular vision to insist that every incoming class of Columbia theatre directors should “begin at the beginning” with staging the Greeks for an entire semester. There were no books, no lectures, just scene presentations and critiques. That was it. That was the class. And slowly, scene after scene and critique after critique, he and his directors started to figure out what the ancient Greeks and theatre were all about. Next, I have to thank Robert Brustein who, upon retiring from Harvard, asked Woodruff to take his place, thereby leaving an opening for someone to teach the Columbia Greek class. Enter the amazing

x Acknowledgements

Anne Bogart, the head of the Columbia directing program, who believed (I still don’t know why) that I  could somehow fill Robert Woodruff’s very big shoes. Next up, for much thanks, would be the subsequent 120 Columbia graduate directors who, over the past 20 years, have taught me just as much, if not more, than I  taught them about how Greek theatre works. They did this by simply doing; showing me scene after scene, filled with much inspiration, ingenuity, and dynamism. This book simply would not exist without their inspiring investigations. Simultaneous with this was an invaluable set of encounters with the extraordinary Anne Carson. These took place while staging her luminous translations of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. My all too brief time spent with her and her words was a masterclass in all things Greek. This brings me to the present and Ben Piggott, my editor at Routledge, who has been the presiding spirit over all three books that I  have written. Everyone should be so lucky to have such a caring and benevolent force as Ben looking after them. On the heels of Ben’s beneficence was Zoe Forbes, his editorial assistant, who was always available to cheerfully answer even the most abstruse questions regarding the often arcane protocols of the publishing world. I would also like to thank the patient and attentive assistance of Charles Pletcher and my son Noah who both guided me through the labyrinthian intricacies of the ancient Greek language. Then there were dear friends and colleagues like Anne Bogart, Nancy Keystone, and Carey Perloff who all looked at early chapters of this book and kindly cajoled me to keep going to the end. Finally, just before reaching the finish line, I must thank the remarkably keen eyes and fierce intelligences of Mikhaela Devra Mahony and Jonathan Seinen who wrangled my ever wayward sentences and missing prepositions into some semblance of coherence so that you, kind reader, might be able to make your way through this little book that you now hold in your hands.

INTRODUCTION 115th and Broadway, circa 410 BCE

The 49 steps I’m late again. Out of the subway, up the stairs, and onto the street. It’s another overcast Upper-West-Side morning in Manhattan. At the intersection, I run a stale yellow light and am met with a blare of horns from a fleet of impatient automobiles. They seem as eager as I am to get to their collective destinations. I cross the street, make my way through the glass doors of the Shapiro building, past the security guard, down the stairs, 49 steps in all, to the basement, across the hall, through a door, and into a tiny room that is already descending into darkness. I take the first available seat. As the light falls, a howl rises; half animal, half human. A subsequent pool of light reveals a woman. Her eyes gleam with madness. She triumphantly brandishes something in her hand, holding it high above her for all to see. Is it? Could it be? Yes, it is. A severed head. Welcome to a typical fall morning for myself and an ever-changing cast of dedicated young directors who have set aside the first three autumnal months of the year to investigate this strange world called Greek tragedy. I’ve been watching scenes like this for nearly two decades now, every Thursday from ten in the morning to one in the afternoon. It is part of a scene study class which I have been tasked to teach for all incoming directors who attend Columbia University’s School of the Arts Graduate Theatre Program. I’ve seen fathers sacrifice daughters, mothers murder sons, sons dispatch mothers, and an occasional god arrive to undo all of these deadly deeds. It is as if that staircase I descend every fall Thursday were some kind of secret time machine, each of those 49 steps taking me further backward into the dark abysm of time where I am enjoined to explain why such scenes are still somehow necessary to another generation of young theatre makers. This book has grown out of those weekly encounters.

2 Introduction

The first order of business is always how to navigate one’s way through these ancient texts that go about their “work” in such a radically different manner than our own contemporary drama. For some, this has become an almost insurmountable obstacle. Such a feeling of absolute interpretative futility is perhaps best articulated by Pierre Klossowski, the painter/philosopher/and sometime author, who writes, “This humanity that has vanished to the point that the term ‘vanished’ no longer has any meaning – despite our ethnologies, all our museums, and everything else – how could such a humanity have even existed?”1 If such a world is indeed so profoundly remote from us, where does one begin? Klossowski believes we must start by looking within ourselves and within our language. He writes: Forever remote: the exploded star of ancient Greeks now flashes inside us, in the darkness of our memory, in the great starry night we carry in our hearts but flee in our fallacious light of day. And there we trust ourselves to our living language. Yet at times between two everyday words a few syllables of dead languages will slip out, ghost-words that have the transparency of a flame at high noon or an azure sky. But for a moment as we shelter them in the penumbra of our spirit they become increasingly bright . . . And for an instant give hidden meaning back.2 Take a simple little word like enthusiasm. Something all of us, hopefully, feel at various moments in our lives. Hiding in the center of this seemingly innocent, quotidian word is something entirely otherworldly. A word within the word: theos (god). There it sits, the secret beating heart of this signifier, giving life to its deepest etymological meaning. Enthusiasm enters our modern-day English from the Old French enthousiasme, which hails from the older Greek enthousiasmos, which goes even further back to a proto-Indo-European root word which is believed to be dyew. In almost all Indo-European languages the word for God or gods is a descendant of this ancient sounding; from Zeus and Jupiter (via *dyēus-patēr) to the Hindu Dyaus Pita and the Norse *Teiwaz (Tyr). So when we speak about this sensation that we call enthusiasm, what we are really saying, according to exactitude of our etymologies, is that we have been momentarily filled with a god. The point of entry for such divine visitations was the thumos (what we now would call our solar plexus). This was the instrument placed within our chests so that we might receive the divine. For most moderns, the days of Greek gods entering us have long since passed. The rush of the numinous seems to have gone into hiding, disappearing into everyday words like enthusiasm, or existing between the lines of plays  – like those of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides  – which often remain “mum” to us in terms of their larger meanings. These plays behave like Aeschylus’ Watchman who informs the audience, “I  speak to those who know. For all the rest: ox on my tongue.” The first big challenge facing us is this: how to remove that ox! Because if we can accomplish that, then we just might get these ancient texts to speak freely, to

Introduction  3

divulge one or two of their many secrets. This is what Part I of this book endeavors to do: examine how we moderns can cultivate the necessary imaginative space to project ourselves into these works and move about within their various meanings; or, put another way:

How to read a Greek tragedy: descending into an ancient text Such a practice is, for me, like heading down into the bowels of the Shapiro building every Thursday morning. It is a step-by-step affair, ever downward. When we do this in buildings, we call it taking the stairs. When we do it with texts, we call it hermeneutics – a rather off-putting word for a rather miraculous human process. Give the word a second chance and you just might catch a glimpse of divinity. Do you see him? There’s a god hiding out in that word: Hermes, the god of verticality. He’s the one who rushes back and forth between gods and mortals with all manner of messages. Up and down he goes, but then, after a while, mostly down. Though famous for having ushered the souls of the dead to Hades, he now spends most of his days and nights taking gentle readers, like you and me, into the weeds of words. Once upon a time, he guided Orpheus down into the underworld to retrieve his beloved Eurydice; now, he escorts mere mortals into the depths of ancient texts to wrest some meager scrap of meaning. This first chapter begins by taking a quick look at the history of the West’s particular penchant for these descents into the earth, words, texts, and our very selves. It wants to show how all of these various journeys ultimately lead to the same exact destination: the realm of our imagination. The imagination is not only a space, but also something of a muscle: one that we seem to flex with less and less frequency. We are content to leave the heavy lifting to our modern-day entertainment industry, which is more than happy to step in and do all the imaginative work for us. Not sure what to focus on? Not to worry, the camera will point you in the right direction. Don’t know how to feel about a given scene? Don’t panic, the soundtrack will tell you whether or not to take what you see seriously. Not certain about the work’s ultimate message? Just wait, our hero is about to arrive with a tidy little moral in hand. Still not quite sure you got it all? Relax, they’ll be a sequel next summer. This sort of work is engineered to appeal directly to one’s day-to-day fantasy life, a realm our friendly French theorists call “the imaginary.” But there is another, much less traveled region of the imagination that Henry Corbin, the philosopher turned Islamist, has designated as “the imaginal.” This is a deeper strata of the imagination where a much older set of symbols resides, often smuggled into us without our knowledge and lodged deep within our unconscious. This domain is less and less frequented, leaving these older symbols to remain dormant in our minds, biding their time, waiting for a rhyme between our present and their past in order to reactivate them. For those who hail from the West, much of this symbolic flotsam and jetsam turns out to be related back to the myths of the ancient Greeks, prompting critics

4 Introduction

like George Steiner to ask, “What are we to make of the fact that, when you get right down to it, our psychological and cultural condition finds its origin in a ‘handful of antique stories’?”3 Steiner, in such statements, seems to be rummaging about in Corbin’s imaginal neck of the woods. We will use one of Steiner’s most beloved examples of this, Sophocles’ Antigone, as a vehicle to help us arrive at this imaginal destination. But before we begin such an analysis, we must make an important distinction between the Antigone of myth and the Antigone of tragedy. The latter Antigone, the one we are interested in, speaks to us in the very distinct dialect of the dramatic, employing a range of storytelling inflections that differs markedly from the mother tongue of myth. Even though drama grows out of myth, often finding itself retelling the same story, it does so in a very different register. Drama foregrounds radically different aspects of how things unfold and, perhaps most importantly, how they resolve. The bulk of Chapter 2 is a purposely cautious journey through Sophocles’ Antigone, practicing what Nietzsche called the art of “slow reading.” This is a practice that is becoming harder and harder to maintain in our hyper-accelerated age. If anything, this section wants to give readers permission to rediscover what it means to take one’s time, allowing them to cultivate an interrogative frame of mind where all questions are indulged and no answers are immediately required. The only surety necessary is a singular belief in the power of the interrogative. For it is the question – whether sublime, ridiculous, or quite impossible – that keeps readers moving deeper and deeper into the underworld of the text, leading them to that magical moment when the words on the page become images in their minds. Once these images can be summoned at will, independent of contact with the text, we know we have found our way back to the hidden realm of the imaginal. It is at this point that these images can speak to us. With this in place, we can move to:

When a play can be read as a meta-theatrical manifesto The following three chapters make up the heart of this book. They each center around a rather straightforward question: Could one read certain of the Greek tragedian’s plays not just as plays, but also as secret (or not so secret) meta-theatrical manifestos on the poetics of tragedy? And if one were to embark on such an investigation, what plays might one choose to develop a set of theories on just what these tragedians thought they were doing when they created this thing called theatre? I have chosen three such plays, one from each of our three major Greek tragedians. These are: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Electra, and Euripides’ The Bacchae. Each of these works are believed to have been written late in the lives of their respective authors and each has a certain summa-like feel; as if they were written, in part, as a definitive statement on their work and the “work” of tragedy itself. I have turned to these specific texts to tease out an alternative poetics, one which would supplement and complicate Aristotle’s ever-influential musings on the tragic form. Aeschylus’ Agamemnon begins this investigation. He is the master when it

Introduction  5

comes to the first principles of tragedy. This chapter looks at the centrality of the event in his work, the development of what I call “The Tragic Equation,” and how both of these two essential elements flow into Aeschylus’ haunting notion of pathei mathos (“learning through suffering”). From Aeschylus we move to Sophocles and his Electra to try to better understand the unique role of dialectics in his thinking on tragedy. Sophocles uses the clash of binary oppositions found in myth as the very foundation of his theatre, but his refusal to resolve these opposites creates an intriguing rift between the mythic and tragic. Finally, we arrive at Euripides and his Bacchae. Here we look at the act of recognition (i.e., of seeing) and how it can lead to a fundamental re-cognition (i.e., in thinking), not only for Euripides’ characters, but for his audiences as well. Throughout all this, my primary focus is on what these plays can tell us about the nature and function of theatrical representation. In doing so, we will also look at how each of these authors uses one or more of their characters as a kind of personification of theatre itself. Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra becomes the first, and perhaps, grandest stand-in for the theatrical practice; she takes on the roles of principal player, author, director, and even scenographer in the impromptu tragedy of her husband Agamemnon. Following on the heels of Aeschylus, Sophocles shows how Clytemnestra’s children, Orestes and Electra, can be seen as the dialectical offspring of their mother’s form of theatre: Orestes representing a “Theatre of Deceit” and Electra a “Theatre of Truth.” Finally, Euripides rounds out this way of looking at these plays with the most natural (and perhaps flamboyant) stand-in for all things theatrical: Dionysus, who is, after all, the god of theatre! It is he who cast Pentheus, the reluctant audience member, as the unwitting principal player in what will become Pentheus’ own ensuing tragedy. Each of these personifications reveals their authors’ understanding of the way tragic theatre goes about its unique work, granting us a rich and varied view of the many modalities and strategies of tragedy. Having descended into the weeds of these texts, Part III of the book attempts to leads us:

Back toward an aerial view of Greek tragedy The final two chapters grant us a more expansive view of the tragic form as a whole (or as whole as we can make it, given we are dealing with a body of work that is even less intact than Rilke’s archaic torso of Apollo). This section begins with a look at the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s thoughts on the nature of ancient Greek tragedy. Although these notes are immensely hermetic in nature, they are, to my mind, some of the most insightful observations on the telos of ancient Greek tragedy that have been bequeathed to us. Hölderlin, unlike the rest of us mere mortals, brings an acute poet’s understanding to the work of these kindred poetic souls hailing from another time and place. Somewhere between 1789 and 1800, he jots down his now famous observation that tragedy is: “The metaphor of an intellectual intuition” (“Uber den Unterschied der Dichtarten”). This chapter attempts to tease out what Hölderlin might mean by this cryptic remark. It also attempts to unpack other evocative conceptual nuggets as “the quick grasping” of a work of

6 Introduction

art, the “poetic logic” of tragedy, its “calculable law” and “ungovernable thought” which brings us to “the extreme edge of suffering,” and “the eccentric orbit of the dead.” It is here, Hölderlin tells us, that we realize the tragic hero is made up of “nothing but time.” These mad and cryptic notes are meant more for our imagination than our intellect; they somehow bring us closer to the secret beating heart of these plays than any “rational” argument that I have encountered. The book ends with a chapter on the vast corpus of Greek fragments. This includes the dramatic detritus of not only our three extant tragedians, but also scraps from other fellow dramatists such as Achaeus, Aristarchus, Critias, Diogenes of Athens, Ion, Neophon, and Theognis. It also looks at what the fragments can tell us about the shift in the dramaturgical organization of tragic trilogies. We know that the desire for linked trilogies (think Aeschylus’ Oresteia) shifts during the careers of Sophocles and Euripides; as a result, there no longer needs to be any seeming connection between plays. We have enough material from Euripides’ last posthumous work to begin to have a cautious understanding of how such late trilogies might have functioned: how they might have still rhymed in intriguing ways across what, on the surface, seemed like radically different stories with nothing overtly in common with one another. Examining these fragments gives us a tentative sense of how such late trilogies were organized and suggests that these seemingly unrelated works still created a kind of associational meaning that accrued from one work to the next. It is my hope that this last chapter might inspire more readers and theatre makers to further investigate these shards of lost tragedies in order to gain a fuller picture of this remarkable moment when Western drama was born. Finally, these last chapters attempt to make a case to our increasingly distracted age that, as the poet Zbigniew Herbert writes, “lingering in the past need not represent a flight from the present, a kind of disappointment. For if we embark on a trip into time while not yet frozen, with all the baggage of our experience, if we inspect the myths, symbols, and legends, to extract from them what is valid, then no one can deny that this effort will be active and productive.”4

In full disclosure I do not subscribe to any one school of interpretation. I came of age between the demise of New Criticism and the rise of Post-Structuralism and was never a true believer in either literary cause. I, like many of my generation, developed an allergic reaction to any critical “ism” in general. The best I can do is look at this vast legacy of critical theory not as a series of fallen gods, but as tools for an interpretational toolbox. I don’t particularly care where these tools come from, or if they are mutually exclusive, as long as they can help me with a provisional understanding of a given artwork. So I am more than happy to use a hammer from Heidegger, a wrench from Lacan, and even a chainsaw from Derrida. I’m open to any approach as long as it helps me build a temporary house of understanding. It is this theoretical eclecticism that, for better or for worse, I end up bringing to the world of tragedy.

Introduction  7

When I was in college, the stunning works of Jean Pierre Vernant, Pierre VidalNaquet, Nicole Loraux, and Marcel Detienne were finally being translated into English. This was a revelation to me. I was enraptured with these writers, especially the great Vernant who grounded his work on the Greeks in a deep and dynamic understanding of how tragedy rhymes with democracy. I  felt and still feel that this is an accurate and timely argument (I will use much of it to discuss the inner workings of Agamemnon). On the American side there was the remarkable Martha Nussbaum with her magnificent and similarly inclined work, The Fragility of Goodness. Much of this thinking has, justifiably, won the day; although, in lesser hands, it has become somewhat lazy and axiomatic. Recently I’ve begun to feel that, when it comes to tragedy, everywhere I turn, all I hear about is: tragedy and democracy, tragedy and democracy, tragedy and democracy. This beautiful argument has been so watered down that it becomes a kind of de facto utilitarian reading of the form, as if tragedy were only necessary if it is thought of in terms of a kind of glorified civics lesson. Yes, that is a big part of tragedy  – I  get it. I  teach it. I  believe it. But . . . but . . . this reductive version of the democracy/tragedy argument often feels at the expense of other, equally rich aspects of Greek tragedy. Certainly there is an ongoing generation of extraordinary scholars who have broken ground in so many fertile areas of rich and rewarding research;5 but I cannot help, at times, to be lured by the Siren call of earlier critical eras, strains of thinking that refer back to the Romantics or – God forbid – even the Structuralists! Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the new ideas – just not always at the expense of old ones. I also worry that in our current and overzealous desire to make the Ancient Greeks accessible to ourselves, we miss  out on their initial strangeness, wonder, majesty, and – perhaps most importantly – mystery. They are so very like us and then not. It is these moments of not to which I want to be sensitive to when we approach this rare creature called Greek tragedy. In this respect my inclination is more philosophical than, say, political, psychological, or historicist. I believe all of these readings to be equally valid, just not what necessarily draws me, personally, to these ancient works. It is somewhat unnerving to realize that these plays can take on so many multiple and even conflicting meanings. This too is part of the tragedy’s perennial mystery. Auden reminds us: “There could be no stronger proof of the riches and depths of Greek culture than its powers of appeal to every kind of person.”6 This is as true of Greek culture as it is for its most precocious offspring: tragedy. But just what, exactly, is this word and form that we have been bandying about so off-handedly throughout this Introduction?

What we talk about when we talk about tragedy; or, Greek tragedy in a nutshell Tragedy literally means “goat song.” It is from the Greek tragos (goat) and ôidê (song). Why the art form bears such a name is, as with many aspects of tragedy, open to interpretation. When I was a student, the etymological roots of this word

8 Introduction

suggested: “to sing of the goat.” This, according to some scholars, pointed to the archaic ritual of scapegoating: the yearly practice of selecting an individual who was then either banished or sacrificed to expiate the sins of their whole community. Viewed from this vantage point, tragedy was the aesthetic revision of this rite. Here, a fictive character, like Oedipus, became the theatrical representation of the ritual scapegoat. Nowadays, the generally accepted theory behind the etymological meaning of tragedy has shifted from “song of the goat,” to “song for a goat.” This new line of thinking argues that the goat was basically just a reward for the winner of some ancient choral competition. Such a seismic shift in the understanding of the word tragedy is a good example of the wide array of other competing speculations that are engendered by this most elliptical of art forms. According to perhaps the most quoted passage of Aristotle’s Poetics, tragedy is: An imitation of an action that is of stature and complete, with magnitude, that, by means of sweetened speech, but with each of its kind separate in its proper parts, is of people acting and not through report, and accomplishes through pity and fear the cleansing of experiences of this sort.7 Setting aside the last 11 words, which has been the cause of whole oceans of scholarly ink to be spilt,8 this is not a bad working definition of the form. Upon closer inspection, one might be inclined to think of Greek tragedy as something akin to Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together by so many disparate and conflicting Greek pastimes: singing, dancing, Homer, and the love of a good rhetorical debate. Every Greek tragedy can be broken down into the following elements: 1

2

3

Prologos – the beginning of a Greek tragedy which usually starts with a speech from a figure who directly addresses the audience. This figure is usually either quite prominent, like a god (think Aphrodite in Hippolytus); or rather minor, like a servant (think the Maid in Medea or the Watchman in Agamemnon). Rarely are these openings given over to the central character of the tragedy, although we do have a few have examples of this as well (think the opening scene in Antigone where Antigone immediately appears looking for her sister). Parodos – which means entry song. It is sung by the chorus when it enters. In the early tragedies this was usually made up of anapestic meters (de-de-Dum) which are slightly martial in feel. Later tragedies might involve amoibaion, a lyric dialogue between the chorus and a major actor. Epeisodia – there are usually five or so episodes interspersed between choral stasimon (songs) throughout the arc of a given tragedy. These dramatic scenes all contain an event which will, in some way, change the situation of scene, pushing the tragedy forward to the next event/episode. These episodes usually contain one of the following six dramatic devices: •

 gôn Logôn. This is a rhetorical battle of wits. The Greeks loved a good A argument, whether it was histrionic in Aeschylus, dialectic in Sophocles,

Introduction  9

• •

•

•

•

4

5

or sophistic in Euripides. This is one of the most popular ingredients of a Greek tragedy. Amoibaion. This is a lyric dialogue between two characters or a character and the chorus. Kommos. This literally means “striking” and is associated with the action of a grief- stricken person beating their breast in mourning. In tragedy, this becomes a form of lyrical lamentation. Rhêsis. This is an extended speech, usually in tetrameters. These set speeches run the gamut of human expression. In such moments a tragic figure might justify, lament, critique, review his or her life, or simply bid the world ado. A Messenger Rhêsis. This is a speech, given by an aforesaid messenger, relating to some off-stage, often violent, event. The Messenger relays this event in vivid detail. This is the closest Greek tragedy comes to harkening back to its Homeric/bardic roots. In short: It is a really good story told well. Stichomythia. This is a rapid exchange of short single lines between two or more characters. One could paraphrase such an exchange in the following manner: “Don’t.” “I will.” “You won’t.” “You’ll see.” “You’ll be sorry.” “Says who?” “Says me.” The Greeks couldn’t get enough of this sort of pithy exchange.

Stasimon – between each episode we will find a different kind of stasimon (song) from the chorus commenting or elaborating on what has just transpired. This is almost always in the form of strophe and antistrophe. These are the two major elements that make up a choral ode. They literally mean “turn” (strophe) and “counter turn” (antistrophe). These two terms grew out of the choreography of the chorus where the strophe was a turn from east to west and antistrophe was a counter turn from west to east. This becomes one of the essential organizing principles for the development of a given chorus. Exodos – this is the scene following the final choral stasimon. In Euripides, this often results in some sort of divine intervention or revelation.9

That’s it. It’s that straightforward. Every tragedy has to have these five basic structural blocks: a prologos, a parodos, multiple epeisodia, interspersed with stasima, and resolving in an exodus. Each of these episodes is made up of either an agôn logôn, an amoibaion, kommos, rhêsis, messenger rhêsis, stichomythia, or some sort of interesting recombination of these elements. Just as the audience would come in already knowing the plot of the story (which was most usually based on a few select myths), they would also be familiar with the structural elements that supported the unfolding of the story. This is not so different from an ice skating routine where one expects to see the skater perform a lutz, triple axle, or quadruple leap. Remember, these tragedians were also competing; they were being judged not only on the merits of the story, but also on how they handled the story within the demands of these very specific structural expectations. This is also not that

10 Introduction

dissimilar from our modern-day genre expectations. We know that if we go to see a thriller, there is every likelihood that we will see a car chase. This is to be expected, but what is unexpected – and eagerly anticipated – is how each director will realize their particular car chase, how will it be different from all the other car chases we’ve already seen. The Greek audience might have felt the same way about an ensuing agôn logôn. Now these limited structural principles are supported by an equally limited palette of story patterns. Peter H. Burian tells us, try as he might, he can only discern five basic story lines in the canon of extant Greek tragedy. These are plots of: Retribution: The punishment of past offenses (think Agamemnon) Supplication: The seeking of asylum by those who are dispossessed (think Suppliant Women) 3 Sacrifice: The giving up of one’s life for the greater good (think Iphigenia in Aulis) 4 Rescue: The saving of a life by another (think Iphigenia in Taurus) 5 Recognition: The return and discovery of one thought lost (Think Helen) 1 2

There can also be combinations of these five patterns to create a series of intricate variations. For instance: take a little retribution, add a touch recognition, and you have Electra. Take a little retribution, add some supplication, throw in a dash of sacrifice, and you get Medea. Take a little sacrifice, add a healthy dose of supplication, mix in just a hint of rescue, and finish it off with a dollop of retribution, and you end up with Trojan Women. Burian concludes this review of the limited repertory of plot types in the extant Greek tragic canon with the following observation: These story patterns function as a system whose signifiers are closely aligned to the central values and conflicts of a culture . . . staging in ever new guises the immemorial conflicts of male and female, parent and child, rival siblings, individuals versus community, of mortals versus gods.10 All of this, Burian tells us, points to “tragedy going about its cultural work.” In other words, tragedy is “working through” the problems which face 5thcentury Athenian audiences. It does so by employing a certain set of mythic stories; although, where myth has a tendency to validate, tragedy begins to cultivate a tendency toward critique. This fundamental difference between the mythic and tragic register will become a major leitmotif of the ensuing pages. But we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves; for now it is enough to bear in mind that this immensely complex and contradictory creature called Greek tragedy grows out of a very fixed set of structural expectations and an even narrower palette of story patterns. This is just one of the many paradoxes that we will encounter as we work our way through this ever elliptical mode of dramatic expression. Well, this pretty much constitutes what would pass for the first day of class with my students. Speaking of whom, if you’d permit me, I’d like to return to them for

Introduction  11

a moment, and take those 49 steps back down to the bowels of the Shapiro building on 115th Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive.

Notes from the underground; or exercise #1: the dreaded Greek chorus As I mentioned, it was here, in a little black box theatre, where many of the questions that this book attempts to address were first articulated. It was also here that the vertigo-inducing abilities of the ancient Greek tragedians first made themselves known to me in all their majesty and terror. In this case, the majesty was in the words of these writers, and the terror was in the eyes of the assembled directing students as I informed them that their first assignment would be to stage a Greek chorus. “I’m sorry, did you say: a Greek chorus?” asks one student. “Yes.” “A whole Greek chorus?” “Yes.” “From beginning to end?” “Yes.” “How?” “How, what?” “Should we go about making it?” “I don’t know.” “You don’t know?” “Well, truth to tell: no one really knows.” “They don’t?” “No. But – ” “What?” “In this case, not knowing can be a good thing.” “It can?” “Yes.” “Why?” “Well, you’ve got carte blanche.” “To do?” “Whatever you want.” This does not necessarily allay my students’ trepidations, but it does make them feel a little less panic stricken to know that our understanding of Greek tragedy is not at the same in-depth level of, say, Japan’s understanding of Noh Theatre. This extraordinary form of theatrical expression has an unbroken tradition, handed down from master to disciple since its inception in the 16th century. Our tradition in relation to Greek tragedy is, like so many other of our Western traditions, a broken one. Our knowledge of the form and its theatrical practices exists somewhere between

12 Introduction

a well-informed conjecture based upon certain limited historical/archeological evidence and a your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine leap of creative and scholarly faith. Nowhere is this perhaps more true than with the Greek Chorus. In the beginning, long before there was tragedy, there was the chorus. Tragedy, we are told, slowly evolves out of seasonal festivals where choral competitions were held. Legend has it that one day the actor Thespis stepped forth from one such chorus, changed a pronoun or two, and low and behold tragedy was born. Although this new form could never quite shake its choral origin, tragedy would remain a resolutely plural affair. This unique dramatic device is, in many ways, the most alien aspect of Greek tragedy. Yes, we have choruses in opera and in our American musicals, but they don’t quite function in the same exact fashion. The relentless presence of the Greek chorus remains something of a mystery. Why are they almost always there? Why are they so necessary? And just who are they? Sometimes they are the status quo, sometimes soldiers, sometimes suppliants, and even, on occasion, “barbarians.” Sometimes they seem to speak the mind of the author, sometimes the mind of the audience, and – on rare occasions – the mind of a god. No matter what role they seem to assume, they always ensure that whatever may want to be private must remain resolutely public. This simple brute fact changes everything. The chorus, in many ways, becomes for tragedy what the observer is to one of physicist Werner Heisenberg’s subatomic experiments. Both outside presences seem to secretly change the outcome of what is being observed just by the act of observation itself! And so, the chorus’s presence seems to forever alter the very nature of the dramatis personae, forcing these characters to super-size their language and their behavior for all those now assembled. As a result, everything these principal players do is, consciously or unconsciously, mediated in response to the ever watchful eyes of these on-stage interlocutors. This forces yet another layer of opacity between these already enigmatic tragic heroes and our understanding of them. In many ways, the chorus is an immensely multifaceted dramatic device, allowing tragedy a certain amount of narrative dexterity. It enables these authors to expand and contract the various thematics of their stories at will. A simple scene between two agonists can become the subsequent source of a much larger metaphysical rumination on the part of the chorus (think the Sophocles’ famous choral ode on humankind in Antigone), or the grand historical sweep of the Trojan War can be distilled to its most intimately personal register with an ensuing choral lament (think of any number of stasima in Trojan Women). Finally, the chorus becomes a kind of mirror reflection of ourselves as audience. We watch these other watchers and find ourselves taking our cues from them, modeling our reactions after theirs, and being quietly trained in the fine art of spectatorship. And when the principal players leave the stage, the chorus is still there. Silent no more, they sing, they dance, they tell us what they think, what they feel, and what they fear. Soon their thoughts are our thoughts; we become them and they become us. Before we know it, we are one theatrical consciousness.

Introduction  13

In these moments, when they explode into song and dance, what did they sound like? Look like? How did they move? This is just the first in a series of unknowables that come between us and Greek tragedy. For me, this limitation of knowledge should not be a source of despair, but rather an open invitation for further investigation and reinvention of the form. This is what we’ve been trying to do in the basement of Columbia’s Shapiro building for all these years, looking for those moments where what seemed distant and dead could, on occasion, come vividly and miraculously back to life. Our point of departure for this investigation becomes the staging Greek chorus, which is the directors first assignment. The basic pedagogical rationale behind starting with the chorus is that, after this, everything else about Greek tragedy should seem easy (Ha! Ha!). Low and behold, there are always one or two of these forays into the Greek chorus where one can feel the sudden and profound power that these ancient works still possess. Often this is thanks to the intentional or unintentional intersection between our present and the play’s past, where, for a brief instant, these two tenses rhyme. If you will indulge me, I’d like to recount one such moment when the past and present aligned. This was with a chorus from Euripides’ The Bacchae, staged by the extraordinary young director, Pavol Liska. It went something like this: The lights fade. In the darkness we hear music. A solo piano. Is it a piece by Saint Saens? Satie? Faure? Hard to say. It is delicate though and somehow sad, very sad. Lights slowly rise. The music continues. Before us is a line of people, four in all, equally spread out horizontally across the stage. They are all dressed in contemporary winter wear. One has a crumbled newspaper under his arm; another is carefully sipping coffee from a styrofoam cup; a third has headphones on – bobbing to a seemingly relentless beat that only he can hear; the fourth is reading a text on her cellphone. They exude a kind collective affectlessness. The atmosphere is one of infinite boredom; a low frequency ennui permeates the space. The music continues. Every so often, one of the four will look at their watch, then lean forward, then crane their neck, then look off to the left. It is clear they are waiting for something in the distance. Whatever it is, it does not arrive. Nothing to be done but go back to their paper, or coffee, or music, or texting. Where are they? What are they waiting for? Through these slow repetitive gestures it dawns on us: We are at some subway stop, waiting for a train that never comes. As we make this realization, one of the awaiting passengers speaks Reginald Gibbons’ luminous translation of the following chorus in a completely affectless voice: Will I ever celebrate All night with white foot Flashing in the bacchic dance? Will I ever fling back My head and let the air Of heaven touch my throat

14 Introduction

With dew, like a fawn at play In the green meadows?11 No one seems to hear him. No one seems to care. Another looks at her watch, leans forward, cranes her neck, looks to the left, sees nothing, and returns to her default pose of sipping coffee. Then, she too speaks, in an equally affectless manner, sharing the following off-hand observation: What is wise? What gift from the gods Do mortals judge more beautiful Than to hold our outstretched Strong hand over an enemy’s head? This too seems to fall on deaf ears. The woman calmly returns to sipping her coffee. The young man with headphones continues to bob to the throbbing music that only he can hear. He begins to hum and then sing with growing intensity: The unremitting power Of the divine begins only Slowly to move, but Always moves. The person next to him, who has been texting joins in, singing as well: It brings To reckoning those mortals Who honor senseless Arrogance and who with mad Beliefs do not give The gods their due. And then the man with the crumpled newspaper and the woman who has been sipping her coffee join in as well, the song now building in bacchic intensity: Whatever the divine may be, Whatever over long ages of time Is accepted as lawful, always, And comes to be through nature. Then as suddenly as they started, all stop; restrain themselves, returning to their collective affectless state. One says: Happy is he who escapes A storm at sea and finds safe harbor.

Introduction  15

Another says: Happy is he who has risen above Great toils. A third says: And hopes are as many as those who hope – Some will end in rich reward, others in nothing. Finally all four say: But those whose lives are happy Day by day – those I call the blessed. And with that the four go back to their default waiting poses. The music continues as they wait . . . and wait . . . and . . . wait. A brief eternity seemed to transpire, long enough for us to ask, “What was it they were waiting for, again? A  train? A god? A god as train?” In the end, it didn’t seem to matter anymore. None came. And as the lights began to fade, one sensed that none would ever come. This scene by Pavol remains one of the most wonderful and evocative collisions between the present and the past that I’ve experienced in class. In a way, I could imagine everyone in that initial audience feeling quite at home in this world, from the first three lines of the scene: Will I ever celebrate All night with white foot Flashing in the bacchic dance? The problem extends beyond the chorus and into the audience itself, articulating a secret desire that so many of us unconsciously long for. In a fallen secular world, we all find ourselves on a kind of existential subway platform waiting for a god in the form of a train to take us away. Transport us elsewhere. Anywhere but here, which has become this terribly quotidian world of ours. Let’s imagine that Pavol’s train did, indeed, arrive. Shall we board? Its next stop: the underground of the ancient text. Quickly now, the doors of the subway car are about to shut.

Notes 1 Pierre Klossowski, Diana at Her Bath, translated by Stephen Sartarelli (Hygiene, CO: The Eridanos Library;1990), 3. 2 Ibid. 3 George Steiner, Antigones (New Haven: Yale University Press; 1996), 110.

16 Introduction

4 Zbigniew Herbert, The Collected Prose 1948–1998, edited by Alissa Valles (New York: Ecco Books; 2010), 600. 5 In England there remains a vibrant, dynamic, and level-headed tradition of remarkable scholars that includes the legendary Oliver Taplin and his seminal, Greek Tragedy in Action (London: Routledge; 1978); Alan H. Sommerstein, The Tangled Ways of Zeus (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2010); Edith Hall, Greek Tragedy: Suffering Under the Sun (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2010); Simon Goldhall whose book, How to Stage a Greek Tragedy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 2007) has become one of the essential companions for all my students who work on the Greeks. In America there is the great Helena Foley whose Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press; 2001) is another masterpiece in her long and distinguished career. There is also the remarkable and hugely prolific Gregory Nagy, The Ancient Greek Hero (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 2013) and one would not want to forget the extraordinary Froma Zeitlin, Playing the Other (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1996). This is just the tip of the iceberg! As one can see, there is a veritable Renaissance of Anglo-American Classical Scholarship. 6 W.H. Auden, Forwards and Afterwards (New York: Vintage Press; 1990), 5. 7 Aristotle, On Poetics, translated by Seth Bernardete and Michael Davis (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press; 2002), 17–18. 8 I must confess that I have added to this scholarly ocean of ink; see Brian Kulick, The Secret Life of Theatre (London: Routledge; 2019), 134–150. 9 For more on this subject see Malcolm Heath, The Poetics of Greek Tragedy (London: Duckworth; 1987). 10 Peter Burian, Myth into Muthos: The Shaping of Tragic Plot, in Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, edited by P.E. Easterling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1997), 178–211. 11 Euripides, The Bakkhai, translated by Reginald Gibbons (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2001), 76–77.

PART I

Conversing with shadows On the interpretation of ancient texts

1 RAISING THE DEAD; OR, THEATRE AS THANATOLOGY

Notes from the underground #2 I often think that those of us who work with classics are in the resurrection business, communing with shades and entreating them to come back with us to the above world. It is painstaking work. Our tools are neither chisel nor spade, but rather imagination and sympathy. So, how to begin? Where does one start? What preparation is necessary to ensure a meaningful encounter with these long lost ancestors of ours? Zbigniew Herbert, the great Polish poet, calls this process a delicate dialogue with the dead: “A careful listening for the voices of those that have left us, a touching of stones on which partially erased inscriptions of past fates are still discernible, a calling up of shades so they may feed on our compassion. . . .”1 Herbert is onto something when he speaks of our encounter with the ancient Greeks as a conversation with shadows. They do indeed continue to haunt us, often within the penumbra of our language. This sort of lexical reincarnation can be found at the dawn of the Greek language with the advent of the word sêma. Sêma can mean either sign or tomb, and therefore points to the fundamental intersection between these two concepts, which on the surface seem to have little in common with one another. How could two such dissimilar terms be equated? Well, each sign (word) entombs a certain meaning for all eternity; every time we encounter that specific sign, the interred meaning is brought back to life in the form of a phantasm (mental representation). In this respect language can be seen as a resurrection machine: entombing meanings in signs that when read or spoken, bring the spirit of their meaning back to life. And so, philology can be thought of as a kind of thanatology; an ever so patient attempt to disinter these ancient meanings and associations from their contemporary lexical moorings.

20  Conversing with shadows

It is usually at this juncture that a student of mine gently interrupts: “But how – exactly?” “ ‘How exactly’ what?” I ask back. “Do we go about talking to the dead?” another says. “That is the question.” “But is there an answer?” “Yes, but I’m not sure you’re going to like it.” “Well?” “It has to do with – ” “Yes?” “A god.” “A god?” “Yes.” “Which one?” “Hermes.” “The one who ushered souls to Hades?” “Yes, but all these Greek gods did double duty. In addition to being a guide to the underworld, Hermes was also the god who . . .?” “Invented language for mortals.” proffers another student. “It’s why his name becomes part of our modern-day word for hermeneutics.” says a second. “This god loves the depths of things, whether that’s beneath the ground or in the roots of words.” I say, adding, “We need to follow in his fleet footsteps.” “Where?” “To the center of the text and ourselves.” “Meaning?” “That the journey to the center of a text is also a journey to the center of ourselves, which is also, very much, like a journey to the underworld. We need to start digging.” “And when we ‘dig’ our way to this ‘center of ourselves,’ what are we supposed to find?” “Our imagination.” “And what does that do?” “It helps us inhabit these ancient works.” “But how?” How indeed. This is the subject of much philosophical speculation. A whole host of thinkers from Plato, through Marsilio Ficino, all the way to the likes of Freud and Jung believed that a certain set of primordial meanings exist deep within our psyche. Henry Corbin, the philosopher turned Islamist, takes this thinking a step further by conceiving of a very distinct province within our imagination which he calls the imaginal. The job of Corbin’s imaginal realm is to

Raising the dead  21

take all the mythological, metaphysical, and mystical intimations we have and transform them into concrete and tangible images. Depending on one’s imaginal skill and tenacity, these images can go on to achieve the seeming solidity of an alternate objective reality.2 To arrive at these transformative powers we need to follow the likes of Hermes as he transforms himself from Hermes-the-guideto-the-underworld to Hermes-the-guide-to-the-underground-of-texts. The one informs the other. This slow historical transformation is, as I’ve said, instructive. It is a descent with a long and venerable history, both literal and figurative. It bespeaks a deep (no pun intended) intuition on the part of our ancestors. It is ultimately a journey that will eventually lead to Corbin’s imaginal realm where we can enter into a dialogue with the past; once there, we can visualize it, decipher it, and, if we’re lucky, bring a part of its potential meaning back to the light of day. And so, without further ado:

Downward ho! a brief history of going under The ancient Greeks called it nekyia, the rite for persuading the dead to speak. The most famous literary example of this can be found in the eleventh song of the Odyssey. Here, Odysseus employs the directions of Circe to famously speak with Achilles and other residents of Hades. This becomes the basic template for many future journeys to the underworld. Aeneas will follow a similar path in the sixth book of the Aeneid. These fantastical travels were not just reserved for poets, but also for early Greek philosophers. Heraclitus will speak of being lured by bathus (aka “the depths”), writing, “You could not find the ends of the soul though you traveled every way, so deep is its logos.” Other philosophers like Parmenides and Empedocles, ignored Heraclitus, and searched for the secrets of the soul through the ritual of katabasis. This is the practice of sustained incubation deep within the recesses of various caves. When you break this word in two, you have kata = down and basis = step; which is what these two philosophers did. Parmenides describes his own youthful ritual of katabasis in the prologue of his great poem on the nature of being. Empedocles also practiced this underground art in order to acquire a state of epopteia (“the beholding” of the most ancient wisdoms). Yulia Ustinova, in her Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind, believes that such “incubations” functioned as a form of sensory deprivation, where the human being is secluded from the external stimuli or “noise” of life. Once the mind is relieved of processing this continual stream of sensory input, it has the tendency to turn in on itself. The result of such a process, according to Ustinova, is “an intensive discharge of inner imagery” which changes the brain, not only experientially but also physiologically and biochemically, leading to altered states of consciousness.3 This demand for such otherworldly contact became a “big business” for late antiquity when, due to the volume of would-bevisitors, entire caves were converted into veritable cities of nekyomanteia. Here the general public could undertake their own katabasis, usually with some sort of guide

22  Conversing with shadows

or pyschopompós (psukhe = soul, pompos = conductor). Although these practices have long been abandoned, they have left a significant trace in the way we conceive of meaning as having a certain depth that must be plumbed in order to lead to any sort of deep understanding. Even in this last phrase, “deep understanding,” we can see the trace of this ancient desire still at work in our everyday language. Meaning is not just hidden in our imaginations but buried and in need of further textual excavation. Nowadays when we think of interpreting an ancient text, we tend to think of it like a kind of textual archeology. The discovery of multiple meanings in the text is similar to the experience of the modern traveler who, while visiting the excavations of Troy, discovers the fact that there were seven Troys that lay one on top of another. When we encounter a classic text, we are often moving through strata after strata of previous meanings and interpretations. Freud was a great fan of Henry Schliemann, the amateur archeologist who discovered Troy. The father of psychoanalysis fancied himself an archeologist of the mind with his conception of the unconscious as something buried deep within us, ever in need of psychic excavation. Freud will write to his colleague Wilhelm Fliess about an early patient that, “Buried deep beneath all his fantasies, we found a scene from his primal period . . . in which all the remaining puzzles converge . . . I scarcely dare believe it yet. It is as if Schliemann had once more excavated Troy, which had hitherto been deemed a fable.”4 And later, in penning the case study on his famous patient Dora, Freud compares himself to a conscientious archaeologist, “. . . I had no choice but to follow the example of those discoverers whose good fortune it is to bring to the light of day after their long burial the priceless though mutilated relics of antiquity. . . .”5 Out of such thought would grow Eugen Bleuler’s concept of Tiefenpsychologie, which we translate as depth psychology. This brings us to the doorstep of Carl Jung’s rather vague notions of the “collective unconscious” and “archetypal thinking.” It is through the help of Jung that the thinker Henry Corbin emerges with a significantly more rigorous (and far more evocative) notion of the functions of what he believes to be a very archaic region/faculty of humankind’s imagination. What he calls:

The realm of the imaginal This is a relatively modern conceptual paradigm that Corbin begins to articulate in the late 1940s. It is built on the foundation of ancient Greek and Arab theories of phantasia, a word which is often translated as “mental representation” or “image.” Aristotle tells us in De Anima (3.7–8) “the soul never thinks without phantasmata.” He goes on to designate three types of resulting interior activity: phantastikon (the forming of mental representations), dianoêtikon (forming of opinions from these mental representations), and mnêmoneutikon (the storing and recalling of these mental representations). Zeno, the Stoic, speaks of humans as possessing thêsaurisma

Raising the dead  23

phantasion or a “storehouse of mental representations.” It is where we keep our dreams, myths, and other creative elaborations.6 This fascination with the imagination migrates from the West to the East and is further developed by a select group of ancient Arab thinkers (Avicenna, Ibn Arabi, Mulla Sadra, and Suhrawardi).7 They follow in the footsteps of the Greeks and continue thinking through such theories. For these Arab thinkers, there is a special region of humankind’s imagination which they will call alam al-mithal, often translated as mundus imaginalis (world of images), which is a kind of mundis archetypus. Alam al-mithal becomes the Arab term for the part of our imagination that deals with Plato’s Theory of Pure Forms. But these thinkers go further than Plato in their conception of this imaginative faculty which, for them, is reserved exclusively for the reconciling of two mutually exclusive realms of our human existence: the material and the metaphysical. It is the singular job of this region of our imagination to do the work of translation, converting the metaphysical into the material and the material into the metaphysical. Corbin calls this the imaginal realm and likens it to a sensorium where certain amorphous ideas and paradigms of a mystical or mythical nature are made into tangible images that can feel as real as our own objective reality. In other words: We can inhabit these imaginative landscapes. Corbin believes that certain archaic symbologies lie dormant in our imaginal realm, waiting for us to wake them. “I’m sorry,” interrupts a student who has clearly wanted to say something for quite some time, “but what does Corbin and his imaginal realm have to do with Greek scene study?” “Right. I can see how this can feel like something of a – ” “Stretch,” the student says, completing my sentence. “Fair enough. Well, I believe the myths of the ancient Greeks are a part of this vast symbology which resides within us.” “And they’re located in Corbin’s imaginal realm?” “Right. A character like Antigone becomes one of its shadow inhabitants, not all that different from the ones found on the fields of Elysium. Such a character takes up permanent residence deep within this private theatre of our mind. There’s just one problem.” “And that would be? “Many of us no longer know how to reach this imaginal realm; or, once there, know how to activate its gum stuck mental machinery.” “And if we could?” “We would then be able to bring these phantom images back to momentary life.” “Which means what?” “We would be able to vividly visualize them, their surroundings, their circumstances, their inner life, and what all this might mean.” “I do that already,” says a student. “You do?”

24  Conversing with shadows

“Yeah, pretty much.” “How much?” “You mean percentage-wise?” “Sure.” “I don’t know. Maybe 60%.” “What’s stopping you from 100%?” “Well, it’s hard. I mean these texts are old.” “Exactly, they tax our imaginative capabilities and strategies, both of which are somewhat underdeveloped these days.” “More so than before?” asks another student. “More or less.” “And why is that?” asks a second. “I think a lot of this has to do with our popular entertainment,” says a third. “What’s wrong with our popular entertainment?” says the first, somewhat on the defensive. “Nothing,” I say. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of popular entertainment. I consume it just as much as the next person, if not more so. There’s just one little problem with it.” “Which is?” “Well, it has tendency to take on more and more of our imaginative work, leaving very little for us to actually do. As a result, we’ve grown somewhat lazy when it comes to reading something like Antigone. We’ve forgotten how to enter such texts, linger there, and return with the beginnings of an understanding.” “So what do we do?” “We need a guide.” “A Hermes.” “Who can help lead us through the underworld of the text.”

Notes 1 Zbigniew Herbert, The Collected Prose 1948–1998, edited by Alssa Valles (New York: Ecco Books; 2010), 600. 2 It should be noted that Corbin insists, out of deep respect for his sources, that the imaginal must not be thought of as some sort of metaphor for a mental process, but rather, as an actual metaphysical space which a mystic can inhabit. Corbin would repeatedly express his dismay when his concept of the imaginal was robbed of this mystical cast. Unfortunately, the concept is so attractive that such nonbelievers as myself cannot resist employing it to help explain how the imagination translates the metaphysical/mythical into the material and the material into the metaphysical/mythic. 3 Yulia Ustinova, Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2009), 33. 4 Richard Armstrong, A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press; 2005), 114. 5 Ibid., 124. 6 Francis Yates, The Art of Memory (London: The Bodley Head; 1966), 46–52.

Raising the dead  25

7 See Henry Corbin’s groundbreaking books, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital (Princeton: Princeton University Press; 1988); Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone; Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi (Princeton: Princeton University Press; 1997); Henry Corbin, The Voyage and the Messenger; Iran and Philosophy (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books; 1998).

2 ANTIGONE A journey to the underworld of the text – how to read a Greek tragedy

The challenge Sophocles’ Antigone is strikingly familiar and unnervingly strange at the very same time. The fact that she is at all relatable to us may be largely thanks to the extraordinary work of a host of translators, thinkers, and theatre practitioners who have labored over centuries to make Antigone feel like one of us. This is both a tremendous service and something of a betrayal. In their efforts to say Antigone and her world is just like ours, we lose a sense of how this work is still profoundly distant, strange, and even outright alien. When translators gloss over these differences, or find inventive solutions to the lacunae of a given text, they often rob of us of certain imaginal riches; for it is often within these gaps that more treasure is buried. How can we access such treasures if we do not even know they are there? Take for instance the very first five words of the play: ô koinon autadelphon Ismênês kara1 Many translators attempt to solve the actual difficulty of this line and bring it into a rather benign English, often rendering it as: “Ismene, my own true sister, Oh dear one.” But R. D. Dawe in his Studies on the Text of Sophocles immediately dissuades us from such a comfortable, normative reading, and warns all well-intentioned but uninformed readers that, “I can see no solution (for translating this line) and write this note only to show the difficulties of this notorious passage that may be even greater than we imagined.”2 Much scholarly ink has been spent on the potential meaning of these five simple words that begin Sophocles’ great play. A literal translation shows just how cryptic this opening actually is; such an attempt might read as “Oh common one” or “Oh kindred” (ô koinon) “of the same womb,” or “of the same sister/brother” (autadelphon), “head of Ismene” (Ismênês kara). Or perhaps: “O

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joint self sister, head of Ismene.” George Steiner complicates this even more with a translation that reads: “Oh my very own sisters’ shared, common head of Ismene.”3 Anne Carson settles for, “Oh Ismene, O one and only sister whose blood intersects with my own in too many ways. . . .”4 R. C. Jebb wants to keep this simple and straightforward; his succinct gloss tells us that ô koinon is “kindred” and autadelphon is “very sister.”5 End of story. But even he confesses at the end of his short footnote that “The pathetic emphasis of this first line gives the keynote of the drama.” How so? What exactly is Jebb pointing at? Part of the answer to all of this lies in the visualization of the scene that, I would argue, grows out of a certain imaginal work which the reader/interpreter must do. We require a kind of deep imaging process that happens within the mind’s eye as it views the imaginal plain in which this scene is played out. Jebb tells us in the first footnote of his commentary that it is just before daybreak. Ismene is to meet Antigone away from the palace so that they might talk about the fate of their brother Polynices, who has been forbidden a burial for his part in the rebellion against Thebes. It is dark, the sisters’ meeting is clandestine; they have not seen each other since this recent turn of events. One can imagine the reunion. Two sisters, who are indeed, as Antigone says, “ô koinon autadelphon,” embrace. It is a loving embrace, their temples touching, foreheads pressed against the other. Perhaps the explanation for Antigone’s cryptic Ismênês kara is that she is simply holding the head of her sister between her loving hands. You see, nothing can separate them – nothing ever has, nothing ever will – or at least that is what they believe in this tender sisterly moment of ô koinon autadelphon. That is the way with this family, the house of Oedipus: imaginations, lineage, and bloodlines commingle. But all this is about to change. For the first time in their lives, Antigone and Ismene will find themselves on opposite sides of the debate over the plight of their unburied brother. Their sudden difference will cleave them in two. It will separate them irrevocably from this time forth, for the very first and last time. They will become torn asunder. Antigone’s speeches are filled with the concept of “two in one.” They begin the scene as “two in one,” in a sisterly embrace, but some 60 or so lines later, they will have split from being “one” and find themselves divided into two distinct and differing beings. This is the trajectory of the scene. It is a severing of familial ties. Antigone, for the first time, finds herself outcast. Singular. Alone. This sense of existential isolation will grow from scene to scene until Antigone is momentarily divided with her very self, just as she reaches the threshold of death. And so, two sisters locked in an embrace, two in one, slowly become two out of one. Cast out of the comfort of their relationship, they individuate. The movement of this scene encapsulates the movement of the entire play: a play which follows Antigone’s standing forth, by standing out from her sister, her family, and the state. A play that explores what it means to stand out and stand apart from the status quo. Antigone will experience, for the first time, the burden of such singular individuation. It is this image of Antigone, no longer embracing her sister, but standing apart, across the stage, about to exit that brings us back to Jebb’s initial observation of this being “the keynote of the drama.” Or, as he goes onto explain, “The origin

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that connects the sisters also isolates them. If Ismene is not with her, Antigone stands alone.”6 The italics are mine. This image speaks to the very heart of the play. It is the reason, perhaps, that it still speaks to us across millennia. This is the moment when we first realize our individuated self, the first time we feel the actual weight of maintaining our unique singularity. What we have just done is bit of imaginal work: placing the scene before our mind’s eye and visualizing it, beat by beat. For some, such work unspools effortlessly like watching a film; for others, such work is work – hard, laborious, and often, sadly, fruitless. I tend to think of the imagination as a muscle; if it is not exercised it will atrophy. We all have access to this faculty as a child (it is our major way of understanding the world); some leave this gift behind as they enter adulthood. Fortunately, for most, some vestige of this process remains. It’s what aids us when we read a variety of texts. But classical texts, as we have just seen, present some additional challenges. How exactly does one find one’s way to the underworld/ imaginal plain of a classic work? What are the steps? Where does one begin?

An imaginal journey to the center of Sophocles’ Antigone Let us turn to Lucian of Samosata (AD 120), one of the great satirical thanatologists of the past, for advice on this arduous journey. Lucian was an accomplished belletrist and wit during the Second Sophistic who ventured to an imaginal underworld on numerous literary occasions, most notably in his famous work Dialogues with the Dead. He may not be as profound or knowledgeable as Virgil, but he is an amiable and down-to-earth guide to have at our side as we begin our descent into the kingdom of textual shadows.

Step 1: In search of a guide I decided to go to Babylon and consult an expert in Zoroastrian magic. I’d been told that such people had methods of opening the gates of Hades, taking anyone down there and bringing them back safely.7

Just as Dante had his Virgil, we all benefit from a companion who has already traversed the foreign land we wish to visit, helping to point out the sights we might inadvertently miss. The Underworld, as Homer can attest, is a difficult place to navigate on one’s own. The finding of the right path is a traditional issue that runs throughout almost all underworld stories. Plutarch warns us to expect, “wandering astray in the beginning, tiresome walks in circles, some frightening paths in darkness that lead nowhere.” Hence the necessity of a guide or god. What is true for the underworld is true for the underneath of an ancient text: how one finds one’s way to the storehouse of its potential meanings is a challenge made less arduous when undertaken with one already familiar with the terrain. Xanthias and Dionysos, our

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two hapless underworld wanderers in Aristophanes’ The Frogs, inventively find their way by following behind a torch-lit procession of initiates who are clearly in the midst of some secret Eleusinian Mystery Rite. We will follow in their footsteps, although the procession we join is made up of a more secular manner of initiates known as scholars and translators. It is they we will turn to, to help us navigate the underworld of these ancient texts. In the case of the journey into Sophocles’ Antigone, who might that be? Who would we want to bring along with us to aid in our understanding of this elusive play? Perhaps a scholar like R. C. Jebb, who comes armed with his meticulous and exacting glosses on the work. We might also want to turn to the patient and ever-expanding imagination of a thinker like George Steiner whose book, Antigones, guides the reader through the many incarnations of this extraordinary character from Sophocles to today.8 Finally, no modern journey would be complete without an ever attentive translator like Anne Carson. She has been responsible for some of the most incisive and beautiful renditions of the Ancient Greeks into our otherwise halting English language. Ms. Carson is that now rare breed of poet and scholar who, thanks to this dual understanding, is able to get to the very quintessence of these ancient authors’ intentions. It is just such a constellation of guides who will be able to point out the significant sights worth seeing as we undertake this long voyage toward the secret meaning buried deep within Sophocles’ Antigone.9

Step 2: initial preparation We lived on a diet of chestnuts, drank nothing but milk, honey-and-milk, or water from the river Choaspes, and at night we slept out doors on the grass. Having completed this regimen, he took me down at midnight to the Tigris, where he washed me, dried me off, and then with the aid of tapers, squill, and various other things made me thoroughly pure and holy . . . after that he drew a magic circle round me, so that the ghosts couldn’t do me harm, and made me walk backwards all the way to his house.10

Milk and chestnuts? Tigris water? Magic circles and walking backwards? That might have been all well and good for a wishful sojourner of Lucian’s day, but what about now? What sort of regime would help us unpack the underground mysteries of a text like Antigone? Are there such rituals for a modern-day interpreter to penetrate the depths of an ancient text? And what would even constitute a modern cleansing for a secular society like ours? What would that look like? What would that procedure be? Perhaps the question for us, in this accelerated age, might be put forth in the following fashion, “How can we, in this culture of profound distraction, clear our minds and slow ourselves down so that we move through a text at a pace where appreciating all its sights and significations is possible? How might we allow ourselves the opportunity to linger amongst a text’s images until they reveal their secrets to us – how does one arrive at such a conducive metabolic rate of appreciation?” It is different for

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everyone, but creating one’s own magic circle that keeps out the distractions of the modern world can be a great help. Perhaps this is the best way to prepare oneself to move backward into the lost time of an ancient text. In this respect, we could take a page from Nietzsche who reminds us that he and his studies are friends of lento: I am a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading . . . for philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow – it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve lento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today . . . in the midst of an age of "work,” that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to "get everything done” at once . . . this art does not easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers.11 I cannot stress enough how essential these simple words are to our ability to create the space for a work of art to begin to work on us. We must shut out our world to enter this other world. With this in mind, we can move to:

Step 3: invocation We dug a hole in the ground, which we filled with blood by cutting the sheep’s throats over it, with lighted torch and comprehensive invocation we summoned Hecate and Persephone.12

What is the special invocation of today’s interpreter? What secret sequence of words will take us deeper into the underworld of a text like Sophocles’ Antigone? In our day and age, such an invocation comes in the form of the interrogative. If we think of a text as a locked door, then the question is the key. This remains our best means of coaxing meaning from otherwise recalcitrant texts: The question gains us admittance. Without it, we remain in the courtyard of plot. The question, therefore, opens the door and leads us within the work’s secret interior. Hans-George Gadamer tells us: Interpretation always involves a relation to the question that is asked of the interpreter. To understand a text means to understand this question. But this takes place, as we have shown, by our attaining the hermeneutical horizon. We now recognize this as the horizon of the question within which the sense of the text is determined.13

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Gadamer goes onto explain: Ideas do not occur to us entirely unexpectedly. They always presuppose an orientation toward an area of openness from which the idea can occur – i.e., they presuppose questions. The real nature of the sudden idea is perhaps less that a solution occurs to us like an answer to a riddle than that a question occurs to us that breaks through into the open and thereby makes an answer possible. Every sudden idea has the structure of a question.14 The ancient Greeks were a culture that embraced questions, keenly attuned to the interrogative life. This is, after all, the land that birthed Socrates. The ancients knew the greatest questions merely engendered a multitude of suppositions on the cusp of becoming answers: A great question should always exceed its potential answer. When this happens, we now find ourselves in the domain of great art, an experience which always keeps meaning beyond whatever provisional answer we try to attach to it. What does the Mona Lisa mean? Or Hamlet? Such works defy our meager interpretations. The question is a way to acknowledge this excess of meaning and take us deeper into the work of art. A common question amongst ancient Athenians leaving the theatre would have been, “What does this have to do with Dionysus?” This expresses the fundamental difference between Greek myth and Greek drama. Greek myth is interested in giving its audience an answer; Greek drama, which grew out of the mythic impulse, traffics in questions. The Greek myth, as Claude Lévi-Strauss told us, is about the resolution of “binary opposites.” In other words, myths give us answers for the contradictions in a given culture that do not resolve themselves. The myth explains away whatever perplexities we might encounter so that we may continue down the road of life unencumbered, without having to maintain two contrary points of view. Greek drama, in contrast to myth, is interested in that moment when our knowledge arrives at a fork in the road and has to choose between paths of understanding. Such forks come in the guise of questions, which keep things open for further contemplation. Greek drama dealt – and reveled – in insoluble problems, confronting such conundrums as: “Who is to blame?” (The Oresteia); “How can we help these refugees?” (Children of Heracles), and; “What is the place of religion in the modern world?” (The Bacchae). Our tragedians rarely answer any of these questions, but leave them to their audience to tease out for themselves. Such an approach bespeaks an ancient intuition that the meaning of a work is only truly rewarding when the audience discovers it for themselves. Or, as King Solomon puts it, “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings to search the matter out.” The ancient text demands that we become kings of the hermeneutic, of that which is hidden. It is we who must work to bring such things to light. For the ancient Greeks, the discussion of a given play’s issues does not end with the actors’ collective bow. These unanswered questions plague the playgoer on their way home or perhaps at elaborate, after-play dinner parties (think Plato’s

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Symposium). Ultimately, the movement from question to answer might occur on the floor of the Parthenon, leading finally to the articulation of a point of law – all thanks to a continued dialogic engagement which began in the theatre. Gadamer reminds us, “Questioning opens up possibilities of meaning, and thus what is meaningful passes into one’s own thinking on the subject. . . . To understand a question means to ask it. To understand meaning is to understand it as the answer to a question.”15 We must trust in this interrogative spirit. With such an approach, we can continue our downward journey.

Step 4: the crossing Down by the river we found a boat waiting for us. After sailing downstream for a while, we entered the marshy lake that swallows up the Euphrates, crossed it, and came to a desolate shore, covered with dense woods that shut out the sun. There we disembarked having arrived in the kingdom of Hades.16

Each question leads us downward, question by question, step by step, deeper and deeper into the text. The question is at the heart of the ancient Athenian theatre on a macro as well as micro level. We join a chorus of questioners that stretches back over two millennia. What is this collective question? A seemingly straightforward humble query: “Why does Antigone do what she does?” A simple enough question made all the more mysterious by how difficult it remains to answer. What accounts for her radical actions? What is motivating Antigone’s relentless demand for justice? And can such a demand be so deep that she is actually willing to die for it? Where does such commitment for her cause come from? Is it an almost cellular form of ethics that compels her? Is it a love of justice? Or filial love for her brother? Or even some other form of love we would rather not speak of? The depth and articulation of these expressions of love for Polynices by Antigone has often shocked readers, the most famous and flummoxed being none other than Goethe. The grand old poet of Weimar was so unnerved by the seemingly incestuous pronouncements of Antigone that he had hoped these might be the product of a poor translation rather than her true sentiments. But given the incestuous line that runs through this family, who can say? And yet, purity or pathology still do not seem to answer the mystery of Antigone’s singular resolve, or her nearly superhuman calm which runs throughout the play, even at the very moments just before her death. It all begins to strike us as deeply perplexing. What the chorus calls δεινός (deinós). This leads us to a variety of questions that run the gamut from the sublime, through the ridiculous, and to the impossible. Such questions require a certain resoluteness which, when adhered to, can lead to a moment of revelation. As Cesare Pavese, the much-neglected Italian novelist, tells us: A true revelation, I am convinced, can only emerge from stubborn concentration on a single problem. I have nothing in common with experimentalists,

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adventurers, with those who travel in strange regions. The surest, and the quickest, way for us to arouse a sense of wonder is to stare, unafraid, at a single object. Suddenly – miraculously – it will look like something we have never seen before.17 This is what I call Pavese’s “law of fixity.” Let’s apply it to the following set of questions and see how staying focused on these interrogatives can deepen our relationship to Sophocles’ extraordinary, bottomless text.

A sublime question: (which are invariably of a philological nature) What exactly does the word deinós mean? And why is this attribute so important to the chorus and the play?

This word appears in the first line of Sophocles’ famous choral ode which begins with the following observation: polla ta deina k’ouden anthrôpou deinoteron pelei. Jebb has given us what is the standard reading of the line: “Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man.”18 Our difficulty begins with the third word of the chorus: deina, from deinós, which our trusty Greek lexicons inform us has a multitude of meanings beyond Jebb’s rather comforting “wonders.” The word itself hails from the Proto-Indo-European dyewnos where its root *dyew is usually translated as “fear.” The lexical density of the Greek word itself feels bottomless. Its usage spreads out like a massive adjectival stain, expanding in meanings that derive from its Proto-Indo-European root of fear and morphing into that which is: terrible, horrible, astounding, dangerous, marvelous, mighty, powerful, wondrous, strange, able, skillful, clever, shameful, timid, and even cowardly. Our slow reading seems to have come to an immediate halt. Which of these English approximations should we try to apply to this word? The choice immediately changes the entire meaning of our understanding of what man is. Anne Carson, in her recent translation of the text, attempts to solve this lexical conundrum in the following creative fashion: many things strange terrible clever wondrous monstrous marvelous dreadful awful and weird there are in the world

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but none more strange terrible clever uncanny wondrous monstrous marvelous dreadful awful and weird than Man.19 But even with these multiple shadings of deinós, what is Sophocles getting at with this particular chorus? Why a dissertation on man, now? Here, the question prepares the ground for what we are calling a slow reading, which is a combination of patience and relentlessness. We have to learn to be still with this mysterious word. We have to allow the word to work its wonder on us, a process whose major component is time. One of the great slow readers of the 20th century was the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who devotes the final chapters of his Introduction to Metaphysics to this ode of Sophocles. Heidegger sits with the word deinós for five or so pages, associating it, at first, with “the terrible.” Not satisfied with this standard translation, Heidegger begins casting about for a way to break this word out of its fallen/habitual/degraded understanding and return the word to its deeper existential possibility. He starts by describing, rather than strictly naming what he thinks the word evokes. This leads him to the following definition, “the sense of overwhelming sway, which induces panicked fear, true anxiety, as well as collected, inwardly reverberating, reticent awe.”20 Heidegger decides to translate deinós into the German “unheimlich” which means “uncanny.” And so, the line, in Heidegger’s hands becomes, “Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing/uncannier than man bestirs itself. . . .” Part of the genius of substituting “unheimlich” for deinós is in the etymological roots of this German word, wherein “Heim” means “house” and the “un” is an ousting from this abode. For Heidegger, the sensation of the uncanny is to be literally “unhoused,” to find oneself suddenly lost in the world at large, with no way home. Isn’t this what is so unnerving about the word deinós itself? That it cannot house any one secure meaning, it is an empty house of a word, where no inhabitant of meaning feels at home. Perhaps more to the point, is this not what Antigone and Ismene feel when they slowly separate from one another? Are they not both un-housed from the house of Oedipus? Is this not the movement of the entire play? Isn’t the corpse of Antigone’s brother “un-housed,” waiting to be buried – to be returned to the

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earth, its final abode? Won’t Creon himself, through his actions, be un-housed as father, husband, ruler? But first and foremost, this seems to be Antigone’s trajectory. The story is of a young woman who has decided to take a stand, and in standing out, now stands alone. She has become un-housed, and this un-housed-ness speaks to us. For on some level, we all know what it means to be outcast from our familiar surroundings, to suddenly feel the weight of our own unique singularity. That word, deinós, speaks to our sense of just how uncanny and singular Antigone actually is. Who is this girl who is so unfazed by standing out, of being alone, so terribly un-housed? She seems somehow unreal. Is this a girl of eighteen or some alien creature? How could she possess such otherworldly resolve? It is nothing short of deinós. Before we know it, we find her before her punishment, about to be buried in an open tomb for betraying Creon’s decree. Now she is only moments away from being buried alive, and suddenly she is a girl of eighteen again. Not only can we see this, but we have reached another level of imaginal engagement: we can feel it. We can feel what Antigone is feeling through the black, insect-like markings that make their way across a white page like this, leading us to:

An impossible question: (Just because they are, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be asked) What does Antigone’s journey tell us about our human condition?

Antigone instructs us and those who surround her to: look at me people I go my last road I see my last light look Death who gathers all of us into his old bent arms in the end is gathering me21 Carson has Antigone tell us, “I'm a strange new kind of in-between thing aren’t I?/not at home with the dead nor with the living.” And, following Heidegger, she continues this train of thought, informing us that she is “nowhere at home on this earth.” All that is left for her is to join her ill-fated family: father, mother, brother. And so, she addresses her tomb: O house in the ground forever I go to you I go to meet my people  . . .

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look at what is happening to me and look at the men who are doing it I was caught in an act of perfect piety.22 Viewed in this light, Antigone does indeed suddenly feel somewhat alien. Yes, Antigone rhymes with us in her initial act of individuation, in that moment when we realize we are resolutely other. But what does one do with such knowledge? Do we attempt to fold back into our family, state, or status quo? Or do we remain separate, un-housed, left to the vicissitudes of being “outside”? Perhaps we try build an entirely new house to shelter us from the dangers of such existential exposure? Is such an endeavor even possible? Or are we doomed to repeat the same social structures, just with different names or presiding gods? Many of us choose to return to the fold, finding solace in the “they.” Antigone, like her very name, decides otherwise: to go against the grain, to be contrary, to remain in the harsh light of the outside, to bear the unbearable weight of her singularity. The “why” of Antigone seems to speak to this fundamental choice we all must face at various points in our lives: the choice between the burden of singularity and the comfort of the plural. Even in the comfort of others, however, we can never quite escape the revelation of our radical difference. The thought, once thought, is difficult to un-think. It returns to haunt us. Is this a further variation of Heidegger’s unheimlich, that uncanny sensation which is an integral part of the human condition, the realization of our fundamental and inescapable un-housed-ness. This brings us to the shores of the “what” of Antigone, where the weight of singularity is part of the distinguishing dramatic DNA for the extant tragedies of Sophocles. Here we always seem to find a figure  – Oedipus, Ajax, Philoctetes, Electra – who stands out and apart, alone in a no-man’s land between the polis and the gods. The questions grow: Do they return to the polis? Give themselves over to the gods? Fate? Or attempt the impossible and hold their ground? And if so, for how long? Sophoclean tragedy charts this trajectory from the comfort of the polis, across this harsh no man’s land of singularity, toward these characters’ seemingly predestined fate, a location just beyond the realm of the gods themselves. The chorus of Aeschylus warns against such a singular journey: Dangerous to be big and famous – There strikes the thunderbolt of Zeus! I prefer to remain obscure. I’m no sacker of cities! Let me keep My little life to myself.23

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In other words, stay within the seemingly undifferentiated anonymity of the “they” which, in this case, goes by the name of chorus. Sophocles’ characters – Antigone, Oedipus, Ajax, Electra, Philoctetes  – all break from the comfort of the chorus. They stand out, un-housed, to face the elements, and in doing so, show their true selves. This is the tragic paradigm in a nutshell. What makes Sophocles’ handling of the form so unique is his singular dramatic acuity; it never seems to blink. Nothing misses his relentless gaze. This is the potential “what” for Sophocles’ Antigone which allows us to move onto its “how”: in other words, the way tragedy goes about working on us, and how it branches out in potential meanings. There is a political Antigone, read Brecht’s adaptation; a psychological Antigone, read Lacan; a feminist Antigone, read Butler; an extensive philosophical Antigone, read Hegel, Hölderlin, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger. Antigone, as you can see, and many have attested, is the darling of philosophers. Each age must choose which “how” best speaks to their time.

A ridiculous question: (Although, as you know, there is no such thing) Why does Sophocles feel compelled to punish Creon twice for his wrong-headed punishment of Antigone? Why wasn’t once enough? Isn’t twice just too much?

First Creon loses his son and then, right on the heels of this, his own wife. Both loved ones commit suicide in response to Creon’s stubborn path. And yet, this dual blow to Creon feels somehow excessive, even by the standards of Greek tragedy. It begs the question, what is the thematic necessity for two deaths? Doesn’t such dramatic exuberance threaten to capsize the tragedy and turn it into some sort of precursor to melodrama (the bastard child of tragedy proper)? Even Creon himself cries out, “Why, when I am destroyed, destroy me again?” We must allow this question to lead to other related questions surrounding this situation, such as, “What is the difference in Creon’s experience of the death of his son and the subsequent news of the death of his wife?” This question leads to the following observation: When we first see Creon, he has had time to process the death of his son, whereas the news of his wife catches him off guard. We see him dealing with grief in the moment. From this observation, we might ask, “How, or in what ways, are these responses different?” This question allows us to begin to see how Creon’s expression of grief over his son is somewhat mediated. It is as though he is directing the spectacle of his grief, telling the chorus to, “Look: the killer and kill, a father and son.” This leads us to the moral of Creon’s self-styled spectacle: “I have learned, and I am ruined.” But has he learned and, perhaps even more importantly, is he truly ruined? The emergence of these new questions are ultimately answered in how he responds to the news of his wife’s subsequent death. It takes the second death for Creon to actually break down and tell the chorus in the simplest, most child-like

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honesty that it was “nobody else; it’s my fault./ I killed you. Me, really me.” Such direct candor reveals how contrived and ultimately hollow his earlier remarks were, as though they were scripted to show the chorus that he had learned his lesson, and could, even with such “painful” knowledge, continue to be their leader. Our questions have led us to the threshold of revelation: Creon is punished again, because he did not fully learn before. And so there he is, like Antigone before him, standing apart from all others. Having been singled out, he now feels the crushing weight of his singularity. Ironically, in this respect, he is not so very different from his niece. Both are creatures of a certain relentless will, and although they were on opposite sides of the issue, they found themselves at the same exact endpoint. They are unheimlich. Uncanny and un-housed. Outcast. Exposed. And in this exposure, they are forever separated from their fellow citizens. Alone, they both must face their finitude. At every turn in the story we want to sound out such questions: whether they are over the meaning of a single word, a larger thematic arc, or something as seemingly mundane as a dramatist’s choice of various dramatic options. We traverse a text by the nature of the questions we ask of it. Every question, even the most naïve, has the potential to take us deeper into the underworld of the work. If we are patient with seeing where these questions can lead us, we may find ourselves arriving on the doorstep of the imaginal – this strange intersection between our imagination and the text. But to reach this final resting place of phantom meaning we must remind ourselves, that in this final leg of our journey:

Step 5: no baggage allowed We came to a large field overgrown with asphodels. Vast numbers of ghosts were making their way to Charon and his bark which was decamped by the river Styx. There Charon told us: “You can see for yourselves how small my boat is, it’s liable to capsize and go to the bottom. But there you are, all turning up at the same time, with any amount of baggage! Well, you can’t take that stuff on board . . . leave all your junk on the shore.”24

Be prepared, at first, to leave everything behind – all your 21st-century preconceptions (aka baggage) – and just sink down into the underground of the text, into the imaginal world of the past with no judgments or biases. Take, for example, the Greeks’ relationship to public forms of grief, which is very different from our own. Take Creon’s end. It would be perfectly acceptable for a modern-day Creon to lament in public. Not so for 5th-century Athenians, whose model in such matters of male comportment was Pericles, who, we are told: Even though his sons were fine young men and died within seven days of each other, he endured it free from grief; for he maintained his calm, and this brought him great benefits every day, in terms of happiness, freedom from pain and a good reputation amongst the multitude. For every man who saw

Antigone  39

Pericles bearing his sorrows in so steadfast a way thought that he was both high minded and brave, and even more powerful than themselves, knowing very well that they themselves would be helpless in such circumstances.25 In other words, we “moderns” would see something wrong with a man not openly grieving for his sons. We would think him somehow emotionally blocked, but our Athenian ancestors would think such blockage was to be cultivated and emulated. This explains why Creon keeps imploring the chorus to “take him away,” since he is in fear of breaking down emotionally in front of the people who look to him as leader. We have a tendency, when dealing with the past to see how it may rhyme with us, sometimes forcing this rhyme and turning these ancient ancestors into “us” in togas. It is equally important to understand their profound moments of fundamental difference. See how alien they can be, for in such alien-ness lies a crucial lesson in the genealogy of humanity. It is how we can chart the distance we have traversed from these shades and without ever just assuming that distance equals progress. The myth of an ever-perfectible future is just that: a myth. In some ways these shades are far, far ahead of us. We are still catching up to what they innately understood. To gain some of that understanding, we must respect their fundamental difference and distance from us. Let us try, as best we can, to accept the world we meet, on its own terms. Leave our preconceptions at the shores of our century. In this way, we may be able to hear what these shades still have to say.

Step 6: arrival We decamped from Charon’s boat and Made our way to the Acherusian Plain, we found the Heroes and Heroines and all the other dead . . .26

And so a series of questions, large and small, has brought us step by step, deeper and deeper, into the interior of both the text and ourselves. Katabasis and hermeneutics rhyme in their fundamental liminality. In both experiences we cross a threshold from our everyday world; one path takes us to the underworld, the other to the underground meaning of a text. In each there is that palpable moment of arrival, when we sense we have passed over to this other side of being and perceiving. Nietzsche’s cautious reading has slowed our mental metabolism to the point where we can appreciate the horizon of Gadamer’s questions, and sit before these vistas employing Pavese’s fixed stare. The words on the page have become images in our minds. At such moments we can “see” the embrace of Antigone and Ismene. We can catch a glimpse of their foreheads touching and understand this otherwise elliptical moment. The phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, author of the remarkable, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, calls such a moment the passage from passive to active reading. A passive reader, according to Ingraden, puts their whole effort into

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making sense of the meaning of sentences without necessarily turning those meanings into projected objects (things, places, characters, states of affairs, or events). The passive reader makes no attempt to apprehend such fictional objects, or to create from them a larger synthetic whole. The active reader, on the other hand, begins to objectify and synthesize the meanings of the author’s words into a quasireality, a field of fictive objects; often going beyond the authors intention, supplementing the work of fiction, and becoming something of a co-author in the process. This is the work of our imagination which Mikel Dufrenne, author of The Phenomenology of the Aesthetic Experience, defines as, “a force which strives for visibility. The transcendental imagination having opened up the area in which something given can appear, the empirical imagination fills out this field.” He notes that imagination tends toward a kind of “world building,” both in our dealings with the real and the fictive: It is because the imagination continually enlarges the field of the real which is offered to it and furnishes its spatial and temporal depths that appearances gain a certain stability and that the real becomes a world. . . .27 This is imagination’s world-building capability which is different from understanding. Dufrenne tells us, “Understanding thinks an essence, but the imagination opens up a world” (my italics).28 But what actually activates this creative apparatus that moves us from the level of understanding to the level of imagining? Ingarden believes that the imagination is provoked by what he calls “places of indeterminacy.” These are moments in a literary work of art where certain objects, persons, and events are lacking a full description. Because of such lacunae in a given text, we often find ourselves involuntarily filling in these narrative gaps. For example, Sophocles neglects to tell us the color of Antigone’s eyes; so we might, inadvertently, imagine them as dark brown. Ingarden calls this complementary process the “concretization” of fictional objects, telling us: In concretization the peculiar correlative activity of the reader comes into play. On his own initiative and with his own imagination he “fills out” various places of indeterminacy with elements chosen from among many possible or permissible elements.  .  .  . Usually the “choice” is made without a conscious, specially formulated intention on the part of the reader. He simply gives his imagination free rein and complements the objects with a series of new elements, so that they seem to be fully determined. . . . How this happens in specific cases depends upon the peculiarities of the work itself and also the reader, on the state or attitude in which he finds himself in the moment. As a result, significant differences can exist among concretizations of the same work, even when the concretizations are accomplished by the same reader in different readings.29

Antigone  41

Theatre, particularly ancient Greek theatre, also has its own “places of indeterminacy,” beginning with its insistence on an empty stage with no representational scenery. There is also its use of masks which, although expressive, still limit the full range of meanings that the human face can assume. Finally, there is no omnipotent narrative voice telling us how a character feels; we must, therefore, intuit this through vocal inflections and body language. All this provokes us toward further concretizations, which Ingarden believes leads us to a richer relationship with the work of art, giving us a sense of its totality, and helping in our overall engagement with the work’s deeper telos. Now, as mentioned earlier, one of the challenges that our imagination faces today is a mass culture which works very hard to remove all potential “places of indeterminacy.” This is particularly true of certain Hollywood films that literally do all the work for us, leaving nothing to the work of our imagination. If imagination is a kind of mental muscle, then we can begin to understand why it has begun to atrophy thanks to the overzealousness of our 20th- century entertainment industry. It makes it particularly challenging when encountering such texts as Antigone which are purposely constructed with “places of indeterminacy” to lure the spectator deeper into the world of the play. This becomes even more difficult as we move from Ingarden and Dufrenne’s notions of the imagination and enter Corbin’s imaginal realm. As stated, Corbin locates the imaginal within the larger apparatus of the imagination. Corbin characterizes the imagination as a kind of “sensorium” which he goes on to further defines as: the internal space where external sensory perceptions converge. The imagination, in its sensitive and passive aspect, is simply a bank which stores images from sense-perceptions, which are projected in the sensorium. But in the active aspect as virtus combinativa, the Imagination is as if between two fires.30 These “two fires” are what the Arab thinkers called the calculative faculty (wham) and the meditative mode of thinking (mufakira). The calculative faculty of our imagination deals with our day-to-day world, building out from these quotidian occurrences a variety of potential imaginative scenarios. This is the part of the imaginative faculty that can generate both potential realistic outcomes as well as those of a “fantastical, imaginary, unreal, and even absurd” nature (these can become the ideations of Freud’s neurotic or paranoid subjects). But the second “fire,” or meditative faculty has access to a different storehouse of images that can be projected across the mind’s sensorium, what Corbin defines as the reality of the mundus imaginalis. This meditative faculty goes on to: project (these) imitative images into the sensorium – no longer originating in sensory perceptions, but in the world of pure intelligibility.31 These are intellective, mythic, or metaphysical images which the imaginal “translates,” converting them into material terms and, conversely, transforming the

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material into such symbolic resonances. This is where a symbol can be reduced to a tangible object or the tangible object can be elevated to the role of the symbolic. It is at this point that we can begin to see Antigone and Creon not just as uncle and niece, but also as allegorical embodiments of larger abstract ideas. The imaginal is the place where the work of such symbolic translation and re-scription can happen. And so, to resume our journey to the center of Antigone, we have finally arrived at the point where we and the text intersect: This is the vast region of our passive imagination. The space where our mind houses innumerable situations and scenarios that are just waiting for us to return. To wander amongst them is not so different from wandering through Augustine’s realm of memory which he describes as, “fields and spacious palaces of memory, where there are treasures of innumerable images, brought into it from all sorts of things perceived by the senses. There is stored up, whatever else hath been committed and laid up, which forgetfulness hath not yet swallowed up and buried.”32 Once here, we continue to make our way to the more active part of our imagination, Corbin’s imaginal realm. This is a very discreet district within the larger principality of the imagination where some of the oldest and most abstract images and ideas of culture are stored. It is here that we could say Plato’s Pure Forms exist, alongside Jung’s concept of Archetypes, and Lévi-Strauss’s Mytheme. What analog should we choose to characterize this unique substrata of the imagination? For myself, I do not envision such a space as resembling Plato’s Cave or Augustine’s Memory Palace. In my mind’s eye I envision a rather dilapidated dance hall from a century or so ago. Scattered about the dance floor are a variety of figures, gliding across the dullish parquet floor, like shooting stars in slow motion. It is a black tie affair. Over there, you can see Plato’s Forms dancing with Jung’s Archetypes, and in the corner a Greek Myth is whispering sweet nothings into the ear of Borges. He nods his ancient head as the Myth continues telling him its intricate tale of labyrinths and minotaurs. And then, amidst the array of slow dancing symbols from bygone eras, I imagine catching a glimpse of none other than Antigone herself. I recognize her thanks to all the imaginative work I’ve done. All those questions, large and small, have brought me closer and closer to her – so close that I can now see myself reflected in her dark brown eyes. I ask if she wouldn’t mind a question or two. “Anything,” she says. "What did you mean just before you died when you said, ‘I am a strange new kind of in-between thing aren’t I/not at home with the dead nor with the living’?” She responds, “You mean my . . .” I can’t quite catch the strange sounding word. Was it a-nag-nor-isis? “That’s from Aristotle’s Poetics,” a student offers. “What does it mean?” asks another student. “It has to do with recognition. Right?” says the first. “Right,” I say, chiming in. “It’s a word that Aristotle specifically associates with tragedy.” “Yes, up to this point we’ve been speaking the language of the mythic rather than the tragic.”

Antigone  43

“What’s the difference?” “Although they tell the same stories, they often express very different meanings.” “Meaning?” “The grammar and syntax of each brings different elements into focus.” “So what was backgrounded in myth becomes foregrounded in tragedy?” “In a manner of speaking. In order to fully understand the story of Antigone as tragedy, we must learn tragedy’s very specific nomenclature. Let’s take a moment and acquaint ourselves with this spectral language so that we might better converse with these shades.”

Notes 1 R.C. Jebb, Sophocles’ Antigone (London: Bristol Classical Press; 2004), 8. 2 For a deep dive into the philology of Sophocles, Antigone, see R.D. Dawe, Studies on the Text of Sophocles (Leiden: Brill; 1979), 99–120. 3 George Steiner, Antigones (New Haven: Yale University Press; 1996), 208. 4 Sophocles, Antigone, 13. 5 Jebb, Antigone, 9. 6 Ibid. 7 Lucian, Satirical Sketches, translated by Paul Turner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 1990), 100–101. 8 Other helpful commentaries can be found in The Cambridge Greek and Latin Classic Series, not to be confused with the equally impressive and comprehensive Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries Series. There are also the immensely helpful commentaries in Oxford’s Clarendon Series and for individual studies of the plays see The Companion to Greek and Roman Tragedy Series published by Bristol Classical Press. In terms of issues regarding Greek tragedy in general there is Wiley-Blackwell’s wonderfully exhaustive three-volume, Hanna M. Roisman, Encyclopedia of Greek Tragedy (Hoboken: Wiley). 9 In addition to Anne Carson, I also turn to the equally masterful translations of Richard Emil Braun and his muscular translation of Antigone and Reginald Gibbons for his inspired rendering of The Bacchae. Both of these translations can be found in Oxford’s The Greek Tragedy in New Translation Series, under the general editorial supervision of Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro. 10 Lucian, Satirical Sketches, 101. 11 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, edited by Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, translated by R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1997), 5. 12 Lucian, Satirical Sketches, 102. 13 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, second revised edition (London: Continuum Press; 1994), 370. 14 Ibid., 366. 15 Ibid., 375. 16 Lucian, Satirical Sketches, 102. 17 Caesar Pavese, Dialogues with Leuco, translated by William Arrowsmith (Boston: The Eridanos Library; 1989), 1. 18 Jebb, Antigone, 13. 19 Sophocles, Antigone, translated by Anne Carson (London: Oberon Classics, 2015), 23. 20 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press; 2000), 159. 21 Sophocles, Antigone, 38. 22 Ibid., 40–42.

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2 3 Anne Carson, An Oresteia (New York: Faber and Faber; 2009), 26. 24 Lucian, Satirical Sketches, 103. 25 John Dillon, The Greek Sophists, translated by John Dillon and Tania Gergel (London: Penguin Press; 2003), 9. 26 Lucian, Satirical Sketches, 106. 27 Mikel Dufrene, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, translated by Edward S. Casey (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; 1989), 357. 28 Ibid., 357. 29 Roman Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, translated by Ruth Anne Crowley and Kenneth Olsen (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; 1980), 53. 30 Henry Corbin, The Voyage and the Messenger: Iran and Philosophy (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books; 1998), 127. 31 Ibid. 32 Saint Augustine, The Confessions, edited by Temple Scott, translated by Edward Bouverie Pusey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press; 2009), Book X, 8.

3 DICTIONARY FOR THE GHOST LANGUAGE OF THE TRAGIC

What remains of Greek tragedy? A handful of plays, ghost words with the power to haunt. What we know of Greek tragedy resembles a shattered statue. We painstakingly attempt to put the pieces back together into something comprehensible. What sort of figure does it make? What kind of shadow does it cast? How can we begin to reconstruct this long-lost tradition? Let’s look at a series of surviving Greek terms which have been used in relation to tragedy by both the tragedians and their interpreters; perhaps these words can become a kind of lexical constellation that can illuminate the night sky of tragedy and help guide us to the safe harbor of understanding. Seven of these key words are as follows: THEATRON (the-a-tron) (n.), (θέατρον, pl. θέατρα); derived from the (v.) θεάομαι (theáomai, “I view”).  Thea is at the root of a trio of key terms: theôros (the theatrical spectator), theôrien (to both see and learn), and theôria (the development of a thought or theory). Knowledge for the Greeks is an ocular affair, when we “see” something, we somehow come to “know” it. And so they build theatra, “spaces in which to see and learn.” Extended time in a theatron or with theôria leads to a similar experience of theasthai. This is a state where one finds oneself gawking in rapt attention; hoping, at some point, that what is being contemplated will all come together to make some semblance of sense. Hence the tendency sit with one’s mouth slightly ajar, as if the sudden bestowal of knowledge were a kind of feeding. But what is it we are actually seeing when we turn our attention to the Greek stage and watch a play like Sophocles’ Antigone? What is being brought to the light that would otherwise go unseen? For the Greeks, the theatron is a machine of visibility that allows us to catch sight of humankind’s eternal: AGÔN (a-gon), (n), ἀγών, struggle.  The lexical beginnings of agôn are first found in Homer where the word referred to a meeting or meeting

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place. It goes on to be characterized as a council, assembly, field, or arena. It is within this environment that the word continues to stretch its lexical limbs and intriguingly becomes a place for competition. By the time Pindar picks the word up, it is a contest, or game with prizes. The tragedians define these dynamics as a struggle, combat, test, or trial. Aristotle and Demosthenes wrest the term from the playing field, bringing it back indoors and using it to name such activities as discussion, discourse, oration, debate, and harangue. Euripides will also, in passing, equate agôn with suffering. The early Christian writers, who seem to be keen readers of Euripides, find this gloss on the word immensely helpful in discussing the nature of martyrdom. Aristotle, intriguingly, has very little to say about agôn in his Poetics. He gives pride of place to plot, followed by character, and then thought. It is under the concept of thought that agôn makes its first appearance in Poetics where a character tries to prove their argument through persuasive speech. It is Plutarch, not Aristotle, who links agôn to a larger idea of dramatic action. Antigone tells the story of the collision of two forces: Antigone and Creon. Their fatal meeting becomes the play’s meaning. It sets in motion our next set of essential dramatic terms; the first being: HAIRESIS (ha-i-re-sis) (n). αἵρεσις; (from αἱρέομαι), choosing, choice.  This is more of an internal affair: an interim for deliberation. An action presents itself to the mind’s eye as a path that forks into two divergent directions. There is the action and its opposite, non-action. The latter is less attractive to the Greeks; they are a people of doings. But the hairesis still gives them pause. In tragedy there may be two paths, but only one choice. Creon demands we choose between brothers. One was a patriot, the other a traitor. Both are now dead. Should both be given proper burials? Creon chooses to punish one and honor the other. The patriot will be given a state funeral with all the trappings befitting a hero; the traitor will be left to rot, unburied, his carrion flesh to become food for vultures. This prompts another even more fatal choice for Antigone and Ismene, who are the sisters of these brothers. Do they follow Creon’s edict? Or do they defy it and bury their brother? Ismene believes such defiance will only end in more woe; Antigone, like her very name, thinks otherwise. She makes a choice: She decides to take action, defy Creon, and bury her brother. In both instances we have moved from the realm of hairesis to the realm of: DRAN. (n.) δρᾶν; present active infinitive of δράω (dráō), an action.  This Greek root still survives in our word drama. Its original usage signified action, or its humbler lexical sibling: doing. Of action, Hegel writes: “It is the clearest revelation of the individual, of his temperament as well as his aims: what a man is at bottom and his inner most being comes into actuality only by his actions.”1 The ancient Greek tragedians seem to agree with Hegel. We find them constantly making a fundamental distinction between

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words and actions; here, actions always trump words. Words are for bards; actions seem to be the real province of tragedians. Euripides in fragment 394 says outright, “I have never preferred words to actions”2 and in fragment 890 tells us, “When it comes to words, the return you can expect is just more words; action is earned by one who provided action.”3 Sophocles has the same fundamental respect for actions, telling us in fragment 407, “Fortune does not fight on the side of those who take no action.”4 But more importantly, it is actions that reveal what is true; this is what Sophocles shares in fragment 388: “The action itself will soon show it as I know for certain.”5 Words tell us many things, true and false; but actions, according to the tragedians, rarely lie. And so we are tasked with keeping our eye on the actions of such characters as Antigone and Creon; it is their doings, more than their words, that will reveal who they really are. With such actions taken, one hopes one has not committed a: HAMARTIA (ha-mar-tia) (n), ἁμαρτία, from ἁμαρτάνω (miss the mark).  This is a simple word with a complicated etymological history. It is one of Western civilization’s great mistranslations. Used in the Greek New Testament as a variation on the theme of original sin, it becomes a person’s fatal flaw. But its origin in Greek antiquity is far more innocent. The word enters the Greek language from the world of archery, where it meant “to miss  the mark.” By the time our Greek tragedians get their hands on the word, it has come to mean an innocent act with colossal consequences. The word comes to cover a wide variety of unintentional mistakes that can run the gamut from falling in love with the wrong person to fighting a battle that one is destined to lose. The ancient poets remind us that such mistakes, even at their most innocent, are dangerous; they can attract wolves. Creon will undertake a series of actions over the course of the play, each becoming more wrong- headed. There is his initial decree that Polyneicies remain unburied, there is his disregard of his son’s concerns, and, finally, there is the execution of Antigone. Take note: Those wolves smell blood. PERIPETEIA (per-i-pe-tei-a) (n), περιπέτεια; peri (around) + piptô (fall).  A reversal in one’s fortune. Such a change in circumstance is usually for the worse, hence the word’s built-in allusion to a fall, but peripeteia is also a not-so-distant lexical cousin of the more straightforward periagôgê, or turning. These two forms of displacement (falling/turning) are both very much at work in Antigone, particularly in terms of Antigone and Creon’s slow shift in status. She and her uncle will, over the course of the play, change positions with one another. The foreshadowing of this reversal is hinted at in their very first encounter with one another. It is here that Creon announces to the chorus: “I’m no man – she is the man – she is a man, she’s the king – if she gets away with this.” And Antigone does indeed, little by little, usurp Creon’s standing within the community. She, who is considered as insignificant,

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continues to grow in stature as she steadfastly faces her death; whereas Creon, who is considered all-powerful, is reduced to complete and total abjection after the deaths of his wife and child. In the end, he is so undone he can no longer move. He must beg others to help carry him off stage, for fear that someone might see him broken, in tears, sobbing like “the woman” he was so afraid of being characterized as in the very beginning of the play. These reversals lead to an: ANAGNÔRISIS (a-nag-nor-i-sis), (n), ἀναγνώρισις; ana (back) + gnôrisis (making known).  Here is another word that has had a somewhat complicated etymological history. Like hamartia, it was borrowed by the New Testament to explain the revelation of one’s fatal flaw. The original Greek understanding of the word is, once again, much more humble in its lexical intent. It functions more along the lines of a prosaic recognition, rather than any sort of divine revelation. There is nothing necessarily spiritually inclined in the pagan usage of the word. In Greek tragedy, certain facts come to light: that one is of noble birth, that one’s beloved is not dead, or that the woman standing before our hero is his long-lost sister. The result is a change in the way we apprehend things. It is a reminder that nothing is necessarily as it seems, or as Heidegger puts it, “tragedy is the movement from seeming to Being.”6 It is a sudden apprehension of what is there but not seen, what is often overlooked – a knowledge that can, on occasion, cut deep, often drawing blood. Lacan likens the act of anagnôrisis to the practice of anamorphoses.7 In this painterly technique made popular during the Renaissance, one finds an indecipherable image or confusion of lines in place of some representative picture. But, if one steps to the side of the canvas, and looks again, this slight change in perspective suddenly reveals a coherent image. The most famous example of this can be found in Holbein’s The Ambassadors, where at the feet of two imposing Renaissance gentlemen is what looks like a bone from some long extinct creature. But step to the right of the painting and this strange bone-like object reveals itself to be an elongated Death’s head. What at first looked like a painting celebrating the worldly acquisition of two men, now shows itself to be a critique of such aspirations, reminding us that “all is vanity.” Anagnôrisis has a similar, immediate impact, as though the meaning of a person or situation suddenly snapped into sharp focus for all to see. Such a moment can be found just before Antigone’s death where she realizes, “I am a strange new kind of in-between thing aren’t I/not at home with the dead nor with the living’?” Or Creon realizing, “Nobody else; it’s my fault. I killed you. Me, really me.” The entire machinery of tragedy has been put into motion to arrive at these moments of revelation.

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And so This ghost vocabulary provides us with an elementary glimpse at the language of tragedy. Such concepts as agôn, hairesis, dran, hamartia, peripeteia, and anagnôrisis become a kind of dramatic alphabet. This is not that far from Artemidorus who, in his Oneirocritica (The Interpretation of Dreams; circa 200 AD), likened the explication of dream images to a school teacher explaining the letters of the alphabet to a class, “Once they have taught their students the value of letters, then they are to show them how to use them together.”8 This impulse is also similar to Claude Lévi-Strauss and his concept of mythemes.9 This, as you may remember, is a term from the halcyon days of structuralism and was thought of as a kind of fundamental generic unit of narrative from which a mythic story could be constructed. The great critic Jan Kott, in his masterful Eating of the Gods, writes: “For a long time I  thought that I  could discover the smallest structural unit of the tragic opposition: trageme.”10 In Lévi-Strauss, the mytheme can be made manifest in a character, event, or theme that reoccurs from myth to myth, providing these myths with their particular way of being understood. In tragedy, these mythemes are taken and put through the very particular process of an agôn, which usually begins with a hairesis, works its way through the other tragemes of dran, hamartia, and peripeteia, and finally arrives at some sort of anagnôrisis. Each part of this theatrical process constitutes a discreet trageme that, when put together, makes up the fundamental grammar of tragedy. In this respect, tragedy is a particular kind of syntactical restructuring of myth. It reorganizes myth toward a particular kind of agonic unfolding which begins in choice and ends in an unforeseen re-cognition. And so the mytheme of the Antigone story is filtered through a specific sequencing of tragemes. This begins with foregrounding the essential agôn between Antigone and Creon. It is within this framework that the other tragemes are set in motion. Juxtaposing the mythemes of Creon and Antigone is somewhat similar to the juxtaposition of vowels and consonants: It is out these stark differences that comprehension and meaning emerge. It is not just these differences that become clearer when we place Antigone and Creon against one another, but also, and perhaps even more intriguingly, we begin to sense their secret similarities which emerge thanks to their forced conjunction. Midway through the play, Creon says of Antigone: CREON Yes, but these stiff minds are the first to collapse. Fire-tempered iron, the strongest and the toughest, that’s the kind you most often see snapped and shattered.11 Creon is talking about Antigone, but he might as well be describing himself. Uncle and niece have this trait of unyielding singularity in common. They do not bend to others. On the surface these two figures could not seem more dissimilar. He is all

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abstraction, utility, and mind; she is all intuition, association, and heart. Yet each is equally resolute in their chosen path; nothing will deflect them. It is here that they mirror one another. They are diametrically opposite while being fundamentally the same; together they make the perfect Sophoclean paradox. The problem of such singularity would not emerge without pitting these two forces against one another. This secret dynamic slowly reveals itself through the arc of their agôn. Its trajectory becomes more visible as we move through the play. This returns us the intersection of theôria (the development of a thought or theory) and theôros (the theatrical spectator). These two dynamics meet in the moment of theôrein (when one finally sees and learns), the moment when everything is suddenly made visible to us. Here, the author’s intent, momentarily, snaps into focus.

And yet Another reading of the text might bring forward another series of questions that might, in turn, yield another set of answers, which might easily change our entire understanding of the work’s meaning. The more time we spend with Antigone and Creon, the more we begin to see how their agôn points to multiple (parabolic) meanings. Here is just a brief sampling of their potential symbolic resonances:

Creon Represents:

Antigone Represents:

State Family Human Law Divine Law Zeus Demeter Sky Earth Old Young Male Female Logos Mystery Realist Idealist Powerful Powerless Political Personal This one plot has many stories to tell. As a result, the essential agôn between Antigone and Creon can be read: politically, philosophically, psychologically, religiously, and so on. Each of these readings can be put through the same tragic trajectory from hairesis to anagnôrisis, yielding multiple and equally valid interpretations. But what, if any, of these meanings might have been part of Sophocles’ original intention? Or was Antigone always meant to function freely in its meaning-making? This brings such parabolic stories back to the realm of dreams. Freud called certain dreams overdetermined. His great predecessor, Artemidorus, said such dreams possess varying degrees of parasêma. The prefix para (beyond, altered, or contrary) + sêma (sign/ representation)  =  moments where signs refuse to behave themselves and remain

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fixed within one stable meaning. In the case of such stories and dreams, their meaning can become errant, wandering about freely. Signs, stories, and dreams can simply mean too much or, if you will, over-mean. This phenomenon is perhaps best captured by the ancient rabbis of the Talmud (Berakoth, Tractate 55b). Here, we learn of a faithful congregant who has had a strange dream and goes from rabbi to rabbi to tease out its meaning. Each rabbi gives the congregant a completely different reading of his dream. Finally, the congregant obtains an audience with the wisest rabbi of the land. He says to this venerable rabbi, “I had a dream, and I have no idea what it may mean. It has sent me to twenty-one different Rabbis, and they have given me twenty-one different interpretations. Which is correct? Or is there, perhaps, a twenty-second interpretation?” “There is,” says the rabbi. “And what would that be?” asks the congregant. “That all twenty-one previous interpretations were correct,” answers the wise old rabbi. It is perhaps not by accident that the number of interpretations in this story are twenty- two in total, the same exact number as the letters in the Hebrew alphabet. Each sojourn to the underworld of the text has the possibility of bringing back one of the many lost letters of tragedy’s secret alphabet. It is as though the text were some sunken ship, and we are bringing it back to the surface, piece by piece. The challenge is that the ship is so leviathan in size that we will never succeed in restoring it in all its former glory. We must be content with whatever piece we are fortunate enough to wrest from these depths. In our next set of descents, we will be attempting to specifically retrieve the meta-theatrical meanings that are embedded in the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

Concluding observations “You keep referring to this basic difference between myth and tragedy,” asks a student. “Yes.” “I think I’m getting what tragedy is, but what about myth?” “What about it?” “What is it, exactly?” “Myth is the narrative-of-choice when it comes to having to explain something. One might ask, ‘Why do the seasons alter?’ Myth, steps in, sits us down, and says, ‘Let me tell you a little story about a girl named Persephone.’ Having explained the alterations of the seasons with this tale, Myth murmurs to us, ‘Would you like to hear the one about the invention of love, or perhaps the creation of the world? I’ve got a million of ’em.’ ” “And what about these binary oppositions you keep talking about?” “What is the opposite of life?” “Death.” “That’s a basic binary opposition, perhaps the biggest binary opposition there is.” “And myth resolves something like that?” “Yes.”

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“How?” “Let’s go back to Persephone. This myth also shows us how life and death are actually not separate entities but inextricably intertwined, just like the cyclical nature of seasons. We come to learn that there is death in life (winter from fall); but, even more miraculously, life out of death (spring from winter); or, as Rilke later puts it, I die but become a tree. In short, the myth shows us that life grows from death. Take the central image of the Persephone myth. Does anyone remember what that is?” “Yeah, the eating of a pomegranate.” “And what does half a pomegranate look like?” “A dissected heart.” “Right, an image of death. And yet what is inside the pomegranate?” “Seeds.” “Right, an image of life.” “So life exists in death.” “Exactly.” “And what about tragedy?” “Tragedy would be very interested in the moment Persephone eats that pomegranate.” “Why?” “Well, that’s the big moment, isn’t it? By eating the pomegranate, she must remain half a year in the land of the dead.” “So?” “So, why did she eat it?” “I can’t remember,” says one student. “In the version I read she didn’t know what she was eating,” says a second. “The way I heard it, she was forced into eating it by Hades,” says a third. “I thought she chose to eat it on her own volition, knowing full well what it was and what would happen to her if she did,” says a fourth student chiming in. “Myth gains in sophistication through such variations. Which version do you think our tragedians would choose to dramatize?” “The one where she chooses knowingly?” “Why that one?” “Because you said, tragedy is interested in free choice.” “So we have the beginnings of an interesting tragedy, there’s an agôn between . . .?” “Hades and Persephone.” “And the hairesis is?” “To eat or not to eat the pomegranate.” “And the dran?” “She eats it.” “Hamartia?” “She shouldn’t have eaten it.” “Peripeteia?” “Now she must remain for half the year in the land of the dead.”

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“And the anagnôrisis? . . . Well? . . . What do you think? . . . Anyone?” “It’s complicated.” “Why?” “Because it suggests some pretty messed up stuff.” “Like?” “She’s actually – secretly – in love with Hades.” “Which suggests?” “We have a complex relationship with death; we fear it, but we’re also . . .” “Yes?” “Drawn to it.” “Todestrieb!” exclaims a student. “Todes-what?” asks another. “Todestrieb. It’s German for ‘death drive,’ ” explains a third. “Which is?” “Freud’s theory for all our self-destructive behaviors.” “And what does that have to do with death?” “According to Freud, every self-destructive act is part of life’s desire to return to death.” “That’s crazy.” “That’s tragedy.” “How so?” “It likes to take a simple little myth and make us question it. It opens things up for further discussion and investigation. So, with all this in mind. Let’s move on to three examples of actual, extant tragedies doing just this kind of work.”

Notes 1 G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics, Volume One, translated by T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2010), 129. 2 Euripides, Fragments, Volume I, edited and translated by Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press; 2008), 435. 3 Euripides, Fragments, Volume II, edited and translated by Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press; 2008), 495. 4 Sophocles, Fragments, edited and translated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press; 1996), 215. 5 Ibid., 205. 6 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press; 2000), 112. 7 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-Alan Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton Press; 1998), 88, Book XI. 8 Artemidorus, Oneirocritica, translated by Daniel E. Harris-McCoy (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2012), 295. 9 Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest School (New York: Basic Books; 1963), 211. 10 Jan Kott, The Eating of the Gods, translated by Boleslaw Taborski and Edward J. Czerwinski (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; 1987), 18–20. 11 Sophocles, Antigone, translated by Richard Emil Braun (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1973), 39.

PART II

Toward an alternate poetics; or, what our three Greek tragedians can tell us about the nature and function of the tragic

4 AESCHYLUS’ AGAMEMNON; OR, FIRST PRINCIPLES

Notes from the underground #3 And so, we have gained a few more tools for the reading of a Greek tragedy. These include: Nietzsche’s “art of slow reading,” Gadamer’s “horizon of the question,” Pavese’s “law of fixity,” and Ingarden’s “concretion of fictive indeterminates.” All of these can aide in reaching and activating Corbin’s “imaginal realm” where a dramatic figure like Antigone can emerge from the shadows of the text and be cloaked in a variety of potential interpretations. With these tools in place, we can now move on to the telos of tragedy: what it does, why it does it in a certain manner, and what that manner might tell us about its form and function. There is no one simple answer but rather a series of answers that each generation sounds out for themselves. I always ask my students if they can enumerate some of these various theories. There is usually a brief pause and then one brave soul ventures: “Well, Aristotle thought tragedy somehow cleansed us.”1 “Brecht believed that tragedy’s fatalism simply coerced its audience into accepting their lesser lot in life, keeping them forever in their place,” says another student.2 “Jean Pierre Vernant thought tragedy was invented to help its audience transition from an archaic to a modern culture, training its initial audiences in their new role as part of the recently minted democratic polis,” concludes a third.3 “And what about the tragedians themselves?” I ask. Silence. “What do you think they thought?” More silence. “Can we ever know what they made of making tragedies?”

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Silence with just a hint of fidgeting. “I think we can,” I finally say. “But where? Where would you find this?” asks a student. Where indeed. Perhaps hidden in their own plays. I think we can read a select group of their tragedies as meta-theatrical manifestos on the nature and purpose of tragic theatre itself. Three such works that immediately come to mind are: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Electra, and Euripides’ The Bacchae. Why these three? Well, each were written late in their respective author’s life and each has the feel of a summa-like work. They seem to reflect on the overall arc of each author’s dramatic trajectory, as well as on the tragic form itself. When one spends time looking at these plays in this way, one begins to see that our three Tragedians have rather specific notions of what they think tragedy is and what they think tragedy can do. We can also begin to discern a set of basic dramatic tenets that each of these authors share, as well as how each introduces their own unique innovations to the field. And so, it is these three authors who can, in many ways, best express what they were actually up to and why. They may not ultimately agree upon the role of Greek tragedy, but we can at least learn what each suspected the form could achieve. All we have to do is listen attentively to the secret meta-theatrical manifestos that hide between the lines of these late great plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Aeschylus is the master of the first principles of tragedy. These are perhaps best articulated in his late masterpiece, Agamemnon. Here in this first play of his Oresteia cycle, he not only sets up all the themes for this trilogy, but also alludes to the secret teleology of tragedy. As a result, this play can be read as a meditation on the role of dikē ( justice) and, simultaneously, as a treatise on theatre itself. This chapter will tease out two essential principles of tragedy: the nature of events and what I will call “the tragic equation.” It will also look at how both of these principles are shaped by Clytemnestra, the play’s central character, who steps forward as the very personification of theatre: becoming the chief actor, author, director, and scenographer in the tragedy of Agamemnon. With this in mind, let’s now turn our attention to the prologue of the play which not only introduces us to the story of the House of Atreus, but also puts forth theatre’s very first principle: the primacy of “the event.”

Watching the watchman There he sits, atop the house of Atreus, waiting, “like a dog.” Those are his words for this rather unenviable nocturnal vigil. Who is this poor beleaguered soul? Aeschylus calls him a phylax which can indeed mean watchdog, but the word is more generally understood as being a keeper or a guard. We might be more inclined to call him a skopos, the word for Watchman. This word can also refer to a goal, or a mark to be aimed at. Phylax or skopos, our midnight interlocutor has been charged with a goal that directs his steadfast gaze toward the far horizon. There, in the distance, is the future where his eventual freedom seems to reside. This future is in no hurry; it

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bides its time, withholding its arrival for yet another night. Of all the ways to open a play, why does Aeschylus begin with this inconsequential fellow? What is he trying to tell us? What is Aeschylus’ goal? What, indeed, might our author be aiming at? Let us attempt to unpack this intriguing opening to Agamemnon. Rarely do the extant ancient Greek tragedies begin with their central characters; usually we meet a figure who remains somewhat distant from the main action. In most cases that means either a god or a servant. It seems somehow appropriate that an ancient Greek play would begin with a professional watcher, especially since the Greek’s word for theatre (theatron) literally means, “a space in which to see.” If anyone could give an audience advice on the demands and responsibilities of this kind of ocular attention, it would be someone like our night Watchman. He and his various colleagues have been waiting and watching atop the roof of the House of Atreus for almost 10  years total. That’s 120 months, 521 weeks, 3,650 days, 87,600  hours, 5,256,000 minutes, 315,532,800 seconds. Our poor Watchman tells us that he’s been at it, every night, for an entire year. One suspects he feels the painful passage of each of those receding seconds. What do the ancient Chinese say? Death by a thousand cuts? In this case it would be death by roughly 15,250,000 seconds and counting. In short: It is an excruciating existence. A punishment that one might think was reserved for a figure like Sisyphus or a character out of Samuel Beckett. Perhaps Didi and Gogo are dramatic descendants of this humble Watchman. They wait, like our Watchman waits. They, for Godot; our Watchman, for Agamemnon  – or, to be more exact, a sign from Agamemnon. In this way, this Watchman reminds us of two other famous dramatic descendants: Francisco and Bernardo, the watchmen of Hamlet who are on the lookout for the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Beckett seem to equate the foundational act of theatre with the habits of waiting and watching; a kind of theatrical purgatory. So it’s no wonder our Watchman begins the play begging for theos (aka a god). Roberto Calasso tells us “In the Greek language the word theos has a predicative function: it designates something that happens. There is a wonderful quote of this in Euripides’ Helen: ‘O theoí, theòs gàr kaì tò gignōskein phílous’ (‘O gods: recognizing the beloved is a god’)” Calasso goes on to quote the Greek classicist Károly Kerényi who believed that the distinguishing quality of the Greeks was their habit of saying of any event that “it is theos.”4 Following on the heels of this invocation comes the Watchman’s humble request for apallagê. If we get into the weeds of a word like apallagê, we discover it is made up of two words. The first, apo, can be translated as: “ ‘by” or “at the hands of.” The second word, allagê, means “change.” These two words, when taken together, give us the more literal: “by means of change,” or, “in the hands of change.” In short, it is a change in circumstance, which always has a trace of the divine at work within its very transformation, that our Watchman desires. Tragedy, in part, is a chronicle of such micro and macro changes over time. The characters in these works hope that such changes will be for the best, but tragedy – as we have learned – has another agenda. This is what Aeschylus will call pathei

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mathos, learning through suffering. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. What change does our Watchman seek? What will bring about this longed-for transformation in the general state of his affairs? A simple little thing that he calls a symbolon. This is the lexical ancestor of our modern-day word for symbol. The specific symbolon that our Watchman waits for is the light of a beacon from Troy. Its sudden conflagration will signal the long hoped-for news of victory by Agamemnon and his Argive army. But this literal symbolon also has a figurative association as well, since light (aka illumination) is another age-old symbol for the symbolic process. Since time immemorial, we have associated light with logos (aka understanding). Things are “brought to light,” made visible. We could think of the Watchman himself as a symbol as well; a symbol of us, the audience. We, like the Watchman, are waiting and watching for a sign to shine forth and change our understanding of what is before us. Prior to such illumination, the audience could be characterized as in the throes of theasthai (“to look with one’s mouth open,” or “to gape or stare in rapt attention”). Theasthai is etymologically linked to both theôria (theory) and theôros (the spectator in theatre). In both words, meaning emerges by way of a sequence of signs or symbola that, like mathematical integers, add up to an eventual and comprehensible whole. Hans-Thies Lehmann observes that “the mode of seeing that underlies both theôria and theôros amounts, on a certain level, to marveling from a standpoint far from meaning, of gawking without understanding.”5 Here, we and the Watchman momentarily rhyme in our expectation of the arrival of a meaningful occurrence. But let us return to the literal and longed-for light of the night Watchman that does indeed finally arrive and change everything. It is here, right at the very center of our little scene, that the symbolon of light shines forth. Twenty lines into our text and we have encountered our very first event.

The nature of the event Events are the prime movers of the tragic. The Hebrew Bible tells us that in the beginning there was light; the New Testament tells us that in the beginning there was logos; for Greek tragedy, in the beginning there was the event. The event, in Aeschylus, is as consequential as the splitting of the atom. The subsequent release of energy gives a tragedy its propulsion; the work gains further velocity via the chain reaction of event upon event. All of this grows out of that very first inciting event: in this case, the sighting of the beacon light by the Watchman. This, in many ways, is the “big bang” of this drama, out of which emerges the entire universe of the ensuing play. In Agamemnon we are able to discern the following sequence of events: Event #1: The sighting of the beacon light. Event #2: Clytemnestra explains that the light signifies the fall of Troy. Event #3: A Messenger confirms the fall of Troy and the destruction of the Fleet. Event #4: Agamemnon walks on the red carpet, sealing his doom. Event #5: Cassandra prophesies her and Agamemnon’s death.

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Event #6: Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon. Event #7: Aegisthus reveals that he and Clytemnestra will now rule. As you can see, each and every episode has a central event. To switch scientific metaphors, if we think of each episode as a living cell, then the event is its nucleus. Some of these dramatic nuclei function on a larger architectonic level, becoming: Inciting, Irrevocable, Penultimate, and Concluding events of the play writ large. After the Inciting Event of the beacon light, we see a series of smaller events that leads to what I am calling the Irrevocable Event: Agamemnon walking on the red carpet. You will notice that this architectonic event happens right at the very center of the play. It is this event that the entire play hinges upon. From here, everything turns. The Irrevocable Event of walking on the red carpet will lead to the Penultimate Event of the murder of Agamemnon, which will lead to the Concluding Event of the new reign of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. Such events grow in magnitude. If we return to the above list, we will notice four essential kinds of events: Events as outside occurrences (the beacon light). Events as revelations (the news of the fall of Troy). Events as the result of choice (deciding whether or not to walk on the red carpet). Events as the result of actions (the killing of Agamemnon). On the surface, these events may seem radically different; but upon closer examination, we discover that they all share the same set of defining characteristics: Events change the fundamental situation of a scene, act, or entire play. Events demarcate time. There is a before, during, and after the event. Events change the polarity of things. Scenes can go from, say, joyful to somber. Events are irrevocable. Once they happen, you can never really go back. Events lead to other events. A chain of events is like a chain reaction. Events bring us to the threshold of revelation, bringing things to light. Given this criteria, it becomes clear that the sighting of the beacon light becomes the event of this first scene. It demarcates time. The scene, thanks to the event, breaks down into three distinct units: there is before the sighting of light, the sighting of the light, and after the sighting of the light. But, perhaps most importantly, in terms of acting and directing, there is a significant change of polarity in terms of the tone and energy of the scene. The scene begins with our Watchman in the depths of despair: WATCHMAN Gods! Free me from this grind! It’s one long year I’m lying here watching waiting watching waiting . . .

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But whenever I take to my restless dreamless dewdrenched bed I cannot close my eyes – fear stands over me instead of sleep. . . . How I pray for change! A happy change. A light in the darkness.6 Then comes the event of the light and with it, this radical polarity shift of tone and energy. WATCHMAN Hold on! There you are! Fire in the night! Blazing like day! You make me dance with joy! I must send news to Agamemnon’s wife to rise from bed, to shout aloud for this amazing light – if Troy is really taken as the beacons seem to say. I myself will start the dancing. For if they are in luck, I am in luck – we’re Throwing triple sixes!7 Perhaps most importantly, events, like the beacon itself, bring things to light. Events draw out what might otherwise remain hidden. They bring things into view, right to the very threshold of revelation. What does the light reveal about our dour Watchman? Well, to begin with, that he is not as dour as we first thought. Thanks to the event of the beacon light, he immediately wants to sing, dance, and play at dice. The reversal here is huge, from one extreme (despondency) to its opposite ( jubilation) within the wink of an eye. There is nothing subtle about the events of Aeschylus; when it comes to events in his plays, they are seismic, elemental, like nature at its most extreme. The director and the actor should not be shy in playing these dynamic shifts of polarity. This, after all, is the dramatic signature of Aeschylus. Events are writ large and should be played that way. We will have to wait until Sophocles or Euripides for events to find a more subtle, human scale. This is not to say that Aeschylus is without nuance. We find that at the very end of this scene, after our Watchman is worn out by his celebratory outpourings. On the other side of this burst of joy, he slyly confides in us:

“As for the rest I am silent, ox on my tongue” Tragedy and its subsequent dramatic progeny are not only about what is said, but, just as importantly, about what is not said, what is left unspoken. Tragedy teaches us how to comprehend what remains hidden. Agamemnon will become a dramatic

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masterclass in reading between the lines in order to arrive at the full truth of a given matter. Case in point: reading Clytemnestra. For not only is she Mycenae’s ambiguous Queen, but she is also Aeschylus’ working metaphor for theatre. Her words may be suspect, but her actions will ultimately ring loud and clear. This brings us back to the word dran which we, up to this point, have been translating as action. Nietzsche, contra Aristotle, believes this word actually means event. He insists: It has been a real misfortune for aesthetics that the word for dran has always been translated as action. . . . The word dran is of Doric origin, and according to Doric usage it means “event’ ” . . . not a doing but a happening: drân in Doric actually does not mean “do.”8 Which philosophical titan should we follow here? Aristotle? Nietzsche? Can we split the difference? Can we imagine both definitions, like lexical tributaries, flowing into the meaning of dran? After all, isn’t it doings that lead to happenings? Wasn’t it Paris’s action of taking Helen that led to the event of the Trojan War? Action and event seem to be inextricably entwined. For our purposes, we will say that the very heart of the theatrical enterprise exists at the intersection of dran. Here action becomes event. Aeschylus’ theatre suggests that it is at this conjunction that truth is revealed. Such turns are another kind of symbolon which we must learn how to read. The Watchman ends his brief time with us by offering this final observation: WATCHMAN This house if it could talk would tell a tale. But me – I talk to those who know and then I lose my memory.9 “Those who know” are those who can go beyond words and read the signs and symbols of actions and events. Such dynamics are best brought to light by this new invention called the theatron; a space in which seeing, rather than just listening, reigns supreme. This is the education that Agamemnon will bequeath to us: how actions and events, more than words, can lead to truth. And with that, the Watchman recedes from our view (“I slip away unnoticed” would be a more literal translation of his last line). It is at this juncture that we can move from the prologos to:

The parados; or the introduction of Aeschylus’ second principle, the tragic equation As if on cue, a chorus of Those-Who-Know enter, or perhaps we should say Those-Who-Know-a-Certain-Amount. Certainly, they are Those-Who-KnowMore-Than-We. Some of this knowing, no doubt, has to do with age. They are

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old. Very old. So old that even 10 years ago they were considered old. They are far too old to be sent off to the Trojan War. And so, they shuffle about to an anapestic meter (de-de-Dum, de-de-Dum, de-de-Dum), chanting away about the Trojan War which, for all they know, is still raging far from the House of Atreus. Mark Edwards, in his marvelous Sound, Sense and Rhythm, tells us that the meter they greet us with has certain martial-like pomp, but to our ear, we might be put in mind of the more innocuous rhythm of “’Twas the night before Christmas when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. . . .”10 I suppose knowing this makes our gaggle of little old men all the more ridiculous, and yet their thoughts are grave. The chorus takes us back to that first day, 10 years ago, when the entire Argive fleet had assembled at the island of Aulis. They too were waiting, just like our Watchman, only these men were waiting for a wind rather than a light – a wind to carry them across the sea to Troy. But there is not even the slightest breeze. Just stagnation. They are an army driven mad by enforced idleness. Nothing will bring about a change in their listless circumstances; not the usual burning of sacrifices, nor the pouring out of libations. Why? The men look for a symbolon. They find it, like the Watchman, in the sky above them. We are told: CHORUS A black eagle and behind it a white one, whirling in the open air to drop upon a pregnant hare They ate the hare, they ate her womb, they ate her unborn young.11 What could this mean? The warriors need another master of ocular arts to translate this image for them. In this case, it is Calchas, a professional seer rather than a watchman. He associates the two hare-devouring eagles with the two warmongering Atreid brothers, Agamemnon and Menelaus. The poor defenseless hare becomes Troy itself. Calchas imparts his prophecy, shifting the meter from military anapests to flowing dactyls (Dum-de-de-Dum-de-de-Dum-de-de) which sound, according to Edwards, like Longfellow’s “This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and hemlocks. . . .” This rhythm has the lilt of Delphic Oracles, which renders Calchas’s omen into the following cadences: the goddess Artemis hates the feast of the eagles. She wants, according to Calchas, another sacrifice: CHORUS A lawless joyless strife planting sacrifice that will turn a wife against a husband.12 In short: She wants King Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia for the gift of wind. And so, the symbolon of the twin eagles feeding on the hare leads us

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to the cusp of an event. The two eagle-like brothers are now circling another hare, Agamemnon’s daughter.

The hairesis of Agamemnon, part 1 What is Agamemnon to do? Be a father and save his little girl, or be a warrior and do whatever must be done to ensure victory? Suddenly, it is as if we have fallen down the rabbit hole of this lengthy chorus and into a play within a play. We have arrived at the very quintessence of tragedy: the singular event of our hero brought to the brink of an impossible choice. The chorus sets Agamemnon’s decision to a slow, relentless, deliberative kind of metrical burrowing. It is as though we were experiencing the set piece of an unwritten tragedy by Aeschylus. A member of the chorus gives voice to Agamemnon’s thoughts: Hard for me to disobey. Hard for me to cut down my own daughter, prize of my house, Defiling a father’s hand with a girl’s blood at the altar. Which of these is apart from evil? How can I desert my ships and fail my allies? Their desperation cries out for a sacrifice to change  the winds a girl must die.13 Agamemnon finds himself faced with our old friend, hairesis (choice). In the ancient days  – the days that were ancient even back then  – the gods entered men and made them do the things that the bards would subsequently sing about. But now, modern man must choose for himself and be held accountable for those choices. That is what it means to be part of a burgeoning democracy. Tragedy, democracy’s precocious cousin, grows up at the same time in Athens and chronicles the Athenian’s newfound sense of agency. And so, tragedy loves nothing more than the event of placing its heroes on the threshold of a decision and watching, with the greatest of attention, which course they will take. JeanPierre Vernant tells us that a hairesis is “reasoned calculation that is expressed in a decision that leads directly to action. This aspect of choice in a practical domain, commits the subject to the action, the very moment he has come to a decision.”14 Take, for example, the same decision that plagues two other famous dramatis personae, Orestes and Hamlet: to kill or not to kill? For Orestes, the difficulty of choice is momentary; with his knife posed above his murdering mother’s breast, he stops and asks his companion Pylades which is better, “to be shamed or kill my mother?” Pylades evokes the necessity of oracles and sworn oaths. Orestes agrees and plunges the knife into his mother’s heart. For Hamlet the choice

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consumes most of the play, creating the dreaded interim which, as Shakespeare tells us in Julius Caesar, is the interval between the “first motion” (thought) and the “acting of the dreadful thing.” In such moments, everything can indeed feel like a hideous dream. It is a sensation that the warrior Arjuna of The Mahābhārata, also experiences as he looks out across the battlefield and views the assembling enemy army. He turns to his chariot driver, the great God Krishna, and asks the question of Orestes and Hamlet: to kill or not to kill? Before him is his enemy but they are also his family, mentors, and friends. Should he throw himself into battle? Or run from this dreadful place as fast as he can? An interim opens up and threatens to swallow both Arjuna and Krishna. It is during this moment that Krishna expounds what will come to be known as The Bhagavad-Gita, the great treatise on action in inaction and inaction in action. Such moments, it seems, can engender whole tragedies and religious tracts. Agamemnon, Orestes, Hamlet, and Arjuna all choose to take action; this wakes the otherwise slumbering “fate,” whose gum-stuck machinery begins to turn, moving our hero and the story to their inextricable end. Aeschylus calls what usually follows:

Pathei mathos; aka, “learning through suffering” and the birth of modernity This term grows out of a set of dramatic integers that we first encountered in Chapter 3 of this book. Here we can gather them into the simplest and most straightforward fashion, making up what I call “the tragic equation.” It can be notated as follows: hairesis + dran + hamartia + peripeteia + anagnôrisis = pathei mathos. This is the remorseless math of tragedy. All of this hinges on the moment of choice, the making of a hairesis, and on the possibility that one’s ensuing actions could lead to a terrible mistake, thereby reversing one’s fortune and teaching us, through the suffering of another, what not to do. This is Agamemnon’s predicament. But why is such a horrific existential conundrum of such interest to our Greek tragedians and their audiences? Jean-Pierre Vernant tells us that the tragic form marks an important shift for 5th-century Athenians who are moving away from an archaic sensibility to a more modern point of view. This is brought about, in part, by the advent of democracy, which demands that the polis take responsibility for their actions. This is a radical departure from ancient times when one believed that it was a god that compelled them to take action. Look at The Iliad. At the start of Homer’s great epic, we find Agamemnon and his armies encamped before the walls of Troy, making little progress in their siege. One of the reasons for this seeming stalemate is Achilles’s refusal to fight. It seems that Achilles is angered that Agamemnon went and stole his concubine Briseis, whom he won as a war prize during the sack of Lyrnessus. Odysseus and company implore Agamemnon to give Briseis back to Achilles; at last, Agamemnon reluctantly relents. He calls a general assembly and makes the following pronouncement:

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AGAMEMNON . . . it is not I who am at fault, but rather Zeus, and Fate, and some night walking Fury, who in the assembly cast wild delusion on my mind that day when acting alone, I took his prize from Achilles. But what could I do? It is the god who accomplishes all things. Ate is the elder daughter of Zeus, the accursed who deludes all; her feet are delicate and they step not on the firm earth, but she walks the air above men’s heads and leads them astray. She has entangled others before me.15     (Book 19 lines 86–90) And so it is not Agamemnon who is to blame for the rash taking of Briseis from Achilles. But rather Zeus, fate, the Furies, or – a slightly more obscure word, Ate. E. R. Dodds, in his masterpiece The Greeks and The Irrational, tells us that Ate is “a state of mind – a temporary clouding or bewildering of the normal consciousness. It is, in fact, a partial and temporary insanity; and, like all insanity, it is ascribed, not to physiological or psychological causes, but to an external ‘daemonic’ agency.”16 In other words, some spirit has entered Agamemnon and made him do this mad act against his will. That is what the Agamemnon of Homer has to tell us about his actions. But what about the Agamemnon of Aeschylus? There he stands, knife in hand, before the bare breast of his innocent daughter. There are no gods in sight, there are no gods invoked. The gods, it would seem, have retreated from the scene. He is utterly, irrevocably alone. The decision is his and his alone. Welcome to the birth of modernity, marked by the sudden absence of the gods and the new-found agency of humankind. This is what it means to be a 5th-century Athenian. The choice (hairesis) is yours and yours alone. This moment marks the shift from an epic to a tragic sensibility. The responsibility for the action, good or bad, will fall on Agamemnon. The question: What will he do?

On the cusp of this terrible event On the threshold of a hairesis, an abyss of uncertainty opens. Time stops. All is still. The world drains of color. The only movement is the pounding of one’s heart. And then . . . and then? Well, in this case, the chorus tells us what happens next: CHORUS . . . He put on the yoke of Necessity. His mind veered toward unholiness his nerve turned cold. It is delusion that makes men bold, knocks them sideways, causes grief.17

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And as Agamemnon plunges the knife into his daughter’s innocent breast, the chorus plunges into what Edwards designates as a bacchic meter (de-Dum-Dum). This is a wild, unrestrained, mad meter. Edwards explains with his patient exactitude that such meter “invoke(s), as most scholars agree, an Asian or oriental tone, usually rather passionate.” What happens next the chorus did not see and therefore cannot say. We learn from Euripides’ version of the story that just at the moment Agamemnon’s blade was about to penetrate Iphigenia’s chest, the gods whisked her away and replaced her with a stag. This is what a messenger will tell Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, in Iphigenia in Aulis. But Clytemnestra refuses to believe this, writing this report off as feeble propaganda intended to soothe the hearts and minds of anyone who heard the tale of such a horrendous sacrifice. Later, in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, we learn that the gods did indeed take pity on Iphigenia and magically transferred her to safety. By then it is too late. Agamemnon, Cassandra, Clytemnestra, and Aegisthus will all have been killed. But we are, once again, getting slightly ahead of ourselves – which is, no doubt, what a Greek audience would have done, since they knew all this before the play even began. Yes, there will be surprises along the way, but the general outline from myth to tragedy will remain, for the most part, very much the same. Back on Aulis, Agamemnon’s terrible deed is now done. The wind, as Artemis promised, has returned. The event of the sacrifice has brought about a muchneeded change in the situation. Events – like the light, or the flight of the birds – both bring about change and become a kind of symbolon in need of interpretation. For Agamemnon, it would seem he has escaped the terrible trajectory that often follows on the heels of a hairesis. There seems to be no hamartia in sight. And if there is a peripeteia, it seems to be all for the good. No need to end in some searing anagnôrisis of doom. For Agamemnon and his men, all seems well: they may leave this purgatorial island, sail to Troy, sack the city, and return victorious. We know better, since we know the story. Retribution, as we will learn, is ever patient. It can bide its time, waiting decades or entire epochs to reach the original perpetrators, but reach them it will. And so the sacrifice of Iphigenia will be tied to the soon-to-be-murder of Agamemnon. Remember: Events have a habit of creating more events. This is part of the lesson of Aeschylus and, by extension, tragedy itself. Now, with the first principles of event and the tragic equation in place, we can turn our attention to how they will be deployed by:

Clytemnestra, queen and secret personification of theatre itself Queen Clytemnestra enters. From the moment she steps on stage, she is, in a manner of speaking, play acting. She is our first example of a character as a personification of theatre or, perhaps we should say, a kind of theatre. We will discover the same personifying at work with both Orestes and Electra in Sophocles’ Electra and with Dionysus in Euripides’ The Bacchae. In all these instances we discover a

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character, or characters, who represents a working metaphor of how theatre works on us. Each of these personifications shows us a different modality of what their authors think theatre can be and do. In the case of Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra, she is Greek tragedy at its grandest. Everything about her feels large, iconic, bold, and somewhat elliptical. Who is this person before us? Like an actor she plays a variety of roles. There is the Queen which she essays with great aplomb and then there will be the loving wife, which is somewhat less convincingly rendered. What is really underneath these masks of Queen and wife? Clytemnestra is very difficult to read. She says one thing, but clearly she means something else. But what? There is an “ox on her tongue”; she refuses to say what she really thinks. Like the Watchman, who we met at the beginning of the play, we will have to wait patiently, remain ever so attentive, and watch closely for signs of who Clytemnestra really is. We will see that she has a plan, much like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but instead of enlisting a theatrical troupe to do her bidding, she will do it pretty much all on her own. This is a solo performance with a special guest appearance from her lover Aegisthus. At this moment she is the lead actress in her own drama, but soon she will be taking on the roles of author and director, creating her own sequence of events utilizing the tragic equation to create the tragedy of Agamemnon. Her play, like Hamlet’s, is a kind a mousetrap to capture the hubris rather than conscience of a king and to prove his guilt for all to see. This will famously culminate in the red carpet scene where Clytemnestra will add scenographer to her extensive theatrical resume. But, here, in this moment, she puts on her first show as actress. Clytemnestra announces that Troy has finally fallen. The chorus is politely dubious of how Clytemnestra has come about this news. Is this the result of some prophetic dream? An oracle’s omen? No messenger, no matter how fleet footed, could arrive so fast with such news from Troy. How can Clytemnestra be so sure? Amidst these questions from the chorus, Clytemnestra explains her ingenious:

Path of illumination You see, Clytemnestra has set up an elaborate ancient communication system where the news of Troy’s fall travels from beacon fire to beacon fire. Hugh LloydJones in his commentary on the Oresteia likens this endeavor to the torch-races held in Athens. In these relay races, “the torch was passed from one member of each team to the next.”18 Clytemnestra walks us through this illuminated route from Ida, Lemnos, Athos, Makistos, Messapion, Asopos, Kithairon, Gorgon’s Lake, Mount Aigiplanktos, The Saronic Gulf, Arachnaios, and finally, to the roof of the House of Atreus. The speech is basically a 230-line list of place names that this trail of light has traversed. It is, to us, a strange way to introduce this character, who now appears essentially to be hellbent on walking us through the precise travel itinerary of this beacon light. What is Aeschylus up to with this first speech of Clytemnestra? David Raeburn and Oliver Thomas, in their wonderful The Agamemnon of Aeschylus:

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A Commentary for Students, speculate that perhaps Clytemnestra’s list of toponyms is a kind of speaking in code: Many of the toponyms (and possibly all) have ominous associations with female treachery, ambushes, and the death of kings. The suggestive connections with these types of destruction not only create foreboding, but are malevolently ill-omened and contribute practically to the dramatic momentum of Agamemnon’s murder.19 This is one of my favorite glosses for this rather elliptical speech and yet I can’t help also wondering if Clytemnestra’s illuminated itinerary might also be understood as another kind of elaborate symbolon. Earlier, we intimated that we associated the light that our Watchman witnessed to our concept of “the event.” What if we continue along these interpretational lines? What if this sequence of lights could be thought of as a chain of events? Both have the ability to traverse great distances: the beacon fires moving through space, the events of a story moving through time. What we first thought was a singular light turns out to have been one of many, reaching all the way from Mycenae back to its point of origin in Troy. This trajectory is not that dissimilar to the event of the soon-to-be-murder of Agamemnon, which has its antecedents all the way back in time, 10 long years ago, when Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter on the island of Aulis. Here geography (the path of the lights from Troy to Mycenae) becomes a metaphor for a kind of temporal genealogy (the chain of events from Iphigenia’s sacrifice to Agamemnon’s death). Perhaps Aeschylus wants to show us how both these lights and events have extensive antecedents. What we will subsequently learn is that the path of events which leads to Agamemnon’s murder goes even further back, beyond that terrible day on the island of Aulis, to a moment that hides in that dark and backward abysm of time. Cassandra will further intuit this, and Aegisthus will ultimately confirm it. This seems to be part of Aeschylus’ tragic strategy, which wants to return us to that first primordial event from which all other events grow. To bring it into the light. Having proved her husband’s victory, Clytemnestra can now put forth a variation of the tragic equation. This begins with her somewhat suspect “hope” that Agamemnon and his army have restrained themselves from the sacking of Troy’s golden temples. CLYTEMNESTRA And if only they reverence the gods and temples of that city these captors will not fall captive in turn. Let no mad impulse strike the army to ravish what they should not, Overcome by greed.20

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Now it is the men who are faced with a choice (hairesis), the first integer in Aeschylus’ tragic equation. What do they do? Do they follow their impulse and plunder these sacred temples or heed the warning of their oracles and abstain from their baser impulses? Lights, symbols, events, and now choices are multiplying before us. We have already seen the fatal choice of Agamemnon at Aulis. In the next episode we’ll learn from a Greek Messenger about the army’s equally fatal choice at Troy. The tragic equation gets its second iteration. It’s as simple as one, two, three. One (dran): the temples are sacked. Two (hamartia): the gods are angered. Three (peripeteia): the Argive fleet are destroyed. And the anagnôrisis? What everyone knew all along: The war was never about honor, just plain plunder. This is the lesson that has been learned. Only Agamemnon and his men have been spared the working out of this tragic formula. They have returned safely home. It seems that pathei mathos happens on its own timetable. There is no rush. It can be immensely patient, it can bide its time, waiting for the most opportune moment to strike.

Episode 3: walking on red carpets This is the moment we all have been waiting for: Agamemnon has finally returned. His speech to us feels even more obligatory than the one by the Messenger who preceded him. He thanks the gods, gloats over the total destruction of Troy, says he knows about the strife at home, promises to deal with it in due time, but now . . . now . . . he would like to find his way to his hearth and home. Clytemnestra dons a new role/mask; moving from Queen to loving wife. She greets her husband with a lengthy response, expressing her thanks for his safe return. To celebrate her husband’s victory, she has strewn his pathway to the palace with a wealth of fine fabrics, fashioned to grace the feet of her mighty warrior. Now, Clytemnestra is no longer just a mere actress, she has become author, director, and scenographer of her very own theatrical mousetrap. Agamemnon stops, spellbound by the symbolon of this crimson pathway. He, and we, are confronted with the play’s most complex sign. What does it mean? What does Clytemnestra intend? What does Agamemnon see? Let’s begin by trying to unpack the potential meanings of Clytemnestra’s finely woven symbol. One could say that there are as many meanings to this bolt of red fabric as there are strands of silk that make up its fine weave. It shimmers in both Agamemnon’s and the audience’s consciousness; it’s as if the very molecules of this red fabric might be loosened, strand by strand, until it is transmogrified from an attractive ground-cloth intended to honor arriving dignitaries into something entirely other. But what is this other meaning? Or meanings? It seems like – dare we say it – a river of blood. But is it the blood of his daughter? Or the blood of all the men he lost at Troy? Or a premonition of his own soon-to-be-spilt-blood? Or all these bloods indiscriminately mixed together? Or is it the path to Hades, where Agamemnon suspects he is headed? Or is the red his shame for what he has done? Or Clytemnestra’s rage made manifest? And what about Agamemnon? When he looks

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at this red carpet, what does he see? A temptation? An honor which he secretly believes he deserves? Or a terrible transgression, showing his hubris, and therefore offensive to the gods? And what about Clytemnestra? What does she see? All of the above? Or perhaps: just a trap. You see, Clytemnestra knows who her husband is. She knows that he’s guilty of hubris. When faced with the choice between glory or his daughter’s life, he chose glory. She has waited 10 years for this very moment, for his return. Now she can exact her revenge for the murder of her daughter. She has set this trap to show the world Agamemnon’s true intentions. The trap is now before his feet. It is this bolt of precious red fabric intended for gods, not mortals. All she has to do is get him to walk on these precious fabrics; such an action, in her eyes and the eyes of the ancient Greeks, will make clear that Agamemnon can never resist the call of glory. It is the only thing that matters, more dear to him than his own daughter. Clytemnestra believes, on a cellular level, that this is the sad and simple through-line of Agamemnon’s irredeemable life. If he steps on the carpet then everyone will know the terrible secret of his insatiable vanity, and his subsequent “dispatch” by Clytemnestra to Hades will therefore be justified for all, including the gods above. And so, Agamemnon is faced with a new hairesis/ choice. Just as on Aulis, 10 long years ago, when he had to decide the fate of his daughter, now he is faced with a choice that seems to determine his own fate. He must decide whether or not he is deserving to go against the decorum of mortals and trample fine fabrics reserved for the gods: an act that could very well bring about their displeasure and his end. Ah, but to feel that soft pathway beneath his tired feet. Hasn’t he earned it? Who would begrudge him this, after all he has done? Will he succumb to the temptation? Does he have the gall to do so? And if he does, will it suggest the hubris Clytemnestra suspects? What will he decide? What will he do?

“I shall proceed into the house walking on red carpets,” or, Agamemnon’s hairesis, part 2 Once again, we are at the very heart of tragedy, which is at the very heart of this play. Agamemnon is at the cusp of a choice. A hairesis and with it, the following integers in a slowly emerging tragic equation: Hairesis (Should he walk on these precious fabrics?) + Dran (He walks on them) + Hamartia (angering the gods) + Peripeteia (leading him from victor to victim) + Anagnôrisis = ?????? But what does it reveal? What is the anagnôrisis that ensues? As we noted earlier, an event not only changes the nature of a situation but also allows us a certain kind of visibility. It makes things that would have otherwise gone unnoticed suddenly legible. In the moment of an event we can see things that have, heretofore, remained

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latent and unseen. Events change situations and, in doing so, bring certain things to light. At this juncture, we are more interested in what this hairesis can show us – what we could call “the optics of the tragic” – rather than how it changes Agamemnon’s situation – namely, “the mechanics of tragedy.” This is the moment the Greek’s call anagnôrisis, or recognition, when a revolution in plot leads to a revelation in character. So, what do we see? The answer depends on what production you might have encountered. The moment remains uncommented on by Aeschylus. There is no stage direction explaining what the actor should show or what the audience should feel. This is one of the interesting paradoxes of theatre. Every time Aeschylus’ Agamemnon is performed, we know he must walk across that red carpet to his predetermined end, but what this walk shows us and what that might mean is left to each actor and director. I know this for a fact because, after assigning our young directors a Greek chorus, we move on to this scene. So I’ve become quite familiar with this moment; I’ve watched it over 20 years, with 6 directors per class. When you do the math, I’ve basically seen this one scene some 120 times. If you calculate that the average length of a red carpet is about 20 feet, that means these Agamemnons would have walked a collective mile or so. In New York City terms, this is the equivalent of 20 blocks – that’s basically a red carpet stretching from Columbia University all the way down Broadway to the 96th Street Subway Station. Now, over these 20 years, I’ve also seen every manner of red carpet. There have been red carpets made out of red light, red rose petals, red paint, red tape, people dressed in red lying in a row with Agamemnon walking on their backs, the list of inventive red carpets stretches into infinity. Perhaps the most evocative rendering of the carpet was done by Kon Yi, a wonderful South Korean director who, after his time at Columbia, returned to his country to start his own theatre company. In Kon’s version of the scene, Clytemnestra laid out a red carpet made up of 20 or so identical little girl’s red dresses that had all been stitched together. (I believe the actual stitching was done by Kon’s wife who joined him during his studies and was always around to lend a helpful hand and artful eye to Kon’s work.) One could not look at these delicate bloodstained dresses and not think of Iphigenia. It was a staggering image that sent an immediate chill down our collective spines as we watched this Agamemnon tread across these mnemonically charged garments. Kon’s Agamemnon seemed completely indifferent to the signification of these dresses. This was not the result of some obtuseness on the part of Agamemnon, but rather profound indifference. Wives, daughters, domesticity meant nothing to him. This was clearly a man of stone. So much so, that one wondered if Clytemnestra’s awaiting axe could do the trick and penetrate this seemingly inviolate individual.

“Perfect this . . .” That’s what Clytemnestra demands of the gods.

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CLYTEMNESTRA Zeus, Zeus, god of things perfect, accomplish my prayers. Concern yourself here. Perfect this.21 Agamemnon has been confronted with his choice (hairesis), taken action (dran), committed what we know to be a mistake (hamartia) and now everything will turn for the worse (peripeteia). The gum-stuck machinery of fate (moira), rouses itself from its stupor. Gears, rusted from rest, are tasked with remembering their purpose: motion. Slow and awkward at first, it begins to pick up speed, freeing us from a kind of temporal purgatory. But before we leap into this future, let us remind ourselves of Aeschylus’ subtle play with time. Everything, up to this point, has been in the grip of some terrible, seemingly irreversible past. Now, in this moment, with Agamemnon’s walk on the red carpet, we are finally and resolutely catapulted from what-once-was to what-soon-will-be. Right here, at the very mid-point, the very heart of the play, everything is about to turn. In the explosion of the event, there is a moment where the detritus of past, present, and future swirl about like dead leaves in a storm. Cassandra, the prophetess and concubine of Agamemnon, is the only one aware of this temporal tempest. Her fevered brain moves back and forth, from the past to the present and from the present to the future. Slowly two simultaneous pictures emerge, both born out of her oracular restlessness. One is intimations of a long-lost past where Atreus, the father of Agamemnon, has chopped up his brother Thyestes’ children for an infernal feast; the second is flashes of a-not-toodistant-future where Agamemnon and Cassandra will be similarly dismembered by Clytemnestra’s awaiting axe. But past and future are all a jumble. They are like the jigsaw pieces from two entirely separate sets of puzzles, all mixed together. Cassandra’s burning mind attempts to force these incompatible shards of time into a completed picture. But the pieces refuse to cohere. This is not like Clytemnestra’s ever orderly trail of the beacon lights; this is a mental conflagration.

Episode 5: “I am struck,” from micro to macro event Events, as we have seen, engender further events until they become a chain; just as one beacon light leads to another. The event of Agamemnon’s walking on the red carpet leads to the event of Agamemnon’s death. Unlike other Greek tragedies, no messenger arrives with a rhêsis that recounts this terrible death. We hear directly from Agamemnon himself, who cries out from off stage: AGAMEMNON (Scream) I am struck.22

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And then the dead bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra are brought out for all to see. If every scene we encountered had a central micro event (the beacon light, the story of the destruction of the fleet, Agamemnon walking on red carpet), then every tragedy (in a given trilogy) possesses one macro event that changes everything for everyone. Make no mistake about it. We have arrived at the macro event of Agamemnon: his death. If every micro event brings something to light (the Watchman’s joyful self, the Greek army’s folly, Agamemnon’s hubris), then what does the macro event of Agamemnon’s death bring forth? What is being brought to light here? Out of the shadows, just behind this fatal tableau, stands Clytemnestra with an axe in her hand. This must have been quite a revelation to that first Athenian audience – much more striking (excuse the unintended pun) than the actual felled bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra. They would have known the myth, known that Agamemnon and Cassandra were fated to die. They would have even known that Clytemnestra had a hand in luring them to their death, but they would not have known that it was actually by her hand that they died. According to the myth, preAeschylus, it was Clytemnestra’s lover, Aegisthus, who would have actually done the deed. But not here. Not now. The power of the myth is always in the variation, the one detail that changes everything. This is Aeschylus’ variation. Just as we want to know what kind of person kills his daughter, Aeschylus wants to know what kind of person kills her husband. We want to know, in the words of that other watchman from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “Who’s there?” What is behind the mask of Clytemnestra? Thanks to this event, we gain a further glimpse.

“I said a lot of things before that sounded nice,” in the wake of the event; or from seeming to being, reading Clytemnestra Heidegger tells us that the trajectory of tragedy moves its central characters from seeming to being. It is the event that paves the way for such visibility. The event allows us to see what might otherwise remain unseen. Up until this point we have observed Clytemnestra’s mask: regal, majestic, stately, steely, aloof, other worldly, all knowing, and all powerful. She has been called a “man-minded woman,” which she must be if she wants to rule this man-made world. And rule she has, with great discipline. There is never a doubt that she is in command. Her voice never falters, but her words have a strange double-seeming meaning. There is something not quite right when she speaks to the chorus, or even to her husband after his 10-year absence. Now, with the murder of Agamemnon, another Clytemnestra emerges. It begins when Clytemnestra, bloody axe in hand, informs the chorus that, “I said a lot of things before that sounded nice.” Now, we catch a glimpse of Clytemnestra’s true face. Underneath all the public and wifely rhetoric lies a steely assassin who has never wavered in her desire for vengeance. She has waited, with implacable patience, for the opportune time to strike. And strike she has – one, two, three times – until Agamemnon lies before her, bloody, lifeless, dead. She tells us, “It’s

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been a long long time I’ve been pondering this/Crisis of an ancient feud/Finally, I say finally.” There are no regrets for this since, according to her, Agamemnon “has the libation he deserves/He filled this house like a mixing bowl/to the brim with evils/now he has drunk it down.” If her mask seemed to suggest an ice queen, her face reveals the fire of an avenger. And as she continues to speak to the chorus in this remarkable scene, bloody axe still firmly in her grip, a final Clytemnestra emerges. We have reached the threshold of revelation. In this moment, mask and face recede to give us a glimpse of her soul, or what little soul is left: the soul of a wronged mother. The chorus accuses her of transgressing the law. Clytemnestra’s response reminds us that beneath this assassin/queen lies a mother who has lost her daughter forever. Listen to Clytemnestra’s response to the chorus’s accusation of evil: CLYTEMNESTRA Ohnow you pull out your code of justice – Call me accursed, demand my exile! What about them. What about him? This man who, without a second thought, As if it were a goat dying, sacrificed his own child, My most beloved, my birth pang, my own – And he had flocks of animals to charm the winds of Thrace!23 This will be our only glimpse of Clytemnestra’s soul, but it is more than enough. It does not necessarily justify – but certainly helps to explain – her actions, putting them in the most human of terms. After this, Clytemnestra has no more need for a mask and what little soul is left is as easily discarded as the axe that did Agamemnon in. The long road from seeming to being has been traversed. What emerges from this sequence of events is a new face which she is unafraid to show: the face of absolute authority.

“It’s payback for his father’s crimes . . .” With the murder now done, Aegisthus, Clytemnestra’s accomplice and lover, emerges grinning from the shadows. If Clytemnestra’s art is to bring to light an event that is hidden by the great distance of space (Troy), then tragedy’s art is to bring to light what is hidden in the great distance of time (the curse of the house of Atreus). What we are looking at is the long genealogy of cause and effect, of event to event, across generations. Or as Aegisthus tells us: For Atreus you know, who was ruler of this land and this man’s father, drove Thyestes, who was my father and this man’s brother – am I making myself clear? – out of his city and away from his home. Then when he (Thyestes) returned as a suppliant to his (Atreus’) hearth

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Atreus set before my Dad, with hospitality more zealous than kind, a merry meal of his own children’s flesh. The toes and fingers he chopped up especially small. Thyestes took a chunk and ate it, not knowing. That meal ruined our family, as you can see. He suddenly saw what he’d done, shrieked aloud, fell back vomiting carnage and called out a curse upon this house, kicking over the table to emphasize it: May the entire race of Pelops perish this same way! So that’s why you see this man lying here dead.24 And so, we have reached the Ur event, the moment that set in motion all which was to follow. This is the patient art of Aeschylus, to work our way ever backward to the primordial moment. Here, tragedy is a kind of relentless etiology that will not stop until it has arrived at the very source, the true wellspring of the problem. We have reached a kind of catharsis, but this particular purgation is of a temporal rather than medicinal nature, where a problem is figuratively expelled from the deep interior of time. Theatre becomes a machine for bringing all manner of dark matter to light. In doing so, it has once again reanimated the tragic equation which, in this iteration, plays itself out in the following fashion: Hairesis (To seek revenge on Agamemnon for the murder of Iphigenia) + Dran (The subsequent killing of Agamemnon) + Hamartia (The gods frown on this action) + Peripeteia (Electra and Orestes will, in turn, seek their revenge, murdering Clytemnestra and Aegisthus) + Anagnôrisis (This cycle will continue ad-infinitum) = Pathei mathos (hence the ultimate intervention of the gods and the institution of the rule of law). What seemed like an apallagê (release/change) for Clytemnestra and Aegisthus will turn out to only be part of an endless cycle. Time here is not yet linear; it lurches forward only to find itself bending backward until it has formed something of a circle, bringing us back where we started, but with blood now on someone else’s hands. The world keeps crying out for an apallagin, but it will have to wait. It will take two more plays in this trilogy before revenge’s recursive nature has been tamed. Aeschylus’ audience knew all this, but his characters are just getting their first tutorial in the tragic equation and the nature of events.

Concluding observations “So, for Aeschylus, it’s pretty much all about events?” asks a student. “Well, events move the story along and bring certain things to light that might otherwise not be seen.” “So: Agamemnon seems like a proper ruler but is actually a cold-blooded murderer.”

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“Or: Clytemnestra seems like a cold-blooded murderer and turns out to be a wronged mother.” “In both cases, events help move us from seeming to being. They bring us closer and closer to the quintessence of the character or the true problem of the play, until both finally stand before us, completely unconcealed, for all to see.” “And Aeschylus invents events?” a student asks. “That we don’t know,” I say. “What do we know?” “That all three tragedians rely on events; they are the basic building blocks of tragedy.” “And all three authors use them in the same exact way?” “No, events have their own unique weights and measures which varies from tragedian to tragedian.” “So the weight of an Aeschylean event would be?” “Certainly amongst the heaviest, the boldest, the most unapologetic. You’ve got beacon lights in the dead of night, red fabrics that suggest rivers of blood, and a husband axed to death by his wife. All of these have a certain size and majesty, resulting in these huge shifts in polarity.” “And with Sophocles?” “With Sophocles the event can be something as simple as the relating of a dream.”25 “And Euripides?” “It can be a character just uttering the word: “ah.”26 “What about the tragic equation?” asks another student. “What about it?” “ Does every play have this same precise math?” “As with all conceptual templates, they work better with some plays than with others. This particular sequence of dramatic integers are certainly at play in Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone. They are also present in Euripides’ last two works: Iphigenia in Aulus and The Bacchae.” “And that French theorist . . .?” says a third student. “You mean the great Jean Pierre Vernant?” “Yeah. Him. He thinks all this has to do with the Greek’s new-found sense of agency?” “In part.” “Cause all these plays seem to be about humans taking responsibility for their own choices.” “Right. No more: ‘a god made me do it.’ Now, according to Vernant, it’s all about the event of making the best-informed choice one can.” “Which is always wrong.” “Maybe that’s part of the point. Maybe learning through suffering is really more like learning through another’s mistakes.” “You mean Greek tragedy is that simple?”

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“I had a friend who used to play this game where he would distill every dramatist’s aesthetic agenda down to the most succinct two-word definition. It was kind of like a theatre version of ‘Name that Tune.’ If you asked him about Chekhov, he would say it all boiled down to, ‘Live now.’ If you asked him about Shakespeare, it was, ‘See better.’ ” “And if you asked him about the Greeks, he would boil it down to . . .?” “‘Be Careful’ . . . and in some cases . . . ‘Be very careful’.” “Like in a haunted house?” “More like in a haunted world.” “For all their new-found sense of agency,” says a student, “these Greeks still have one foot very firmly planted in the age-old superstitions of the past.” “Is that so different from us? Don’t we all pivot between reason and superstition?” says another student. “Maybe even we aren’t as modern as we would like to think.” “Maybe.” The class concedes. “These sorts of contradictions were of particular interest to our next dramatist,” I interject, thankful for a clean segue. And with this, we turn our attention from the mighty Aeschylus to his great successor: Sophocles.

Notes 1 For Aristotle’s Poetics, I always turn to two key translations, Aristotle on Poetics, translated by Seth Benardete and Michael Davis (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press; 2002); Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle, translated with commentary by Stephen Halliwell (Chapel Hill: University North Carolina Press; 1987). There is also Stephen Halliwell’s book-length analysis, Aristotle’s Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1998). 2 Brecht’s responses to Greek tragedy are scattered throughout his collected writings. The two key volumes would be, Brecht on Theatre, edited by Marc Silberman, Steve Giles and Thomas Kuhn (London: Bloomsbury Press; 2018); B. Brecht, Brecht on Performance, edited by Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Thomas Kuhn (London: Bloomsbury Press; 2018). Also, in the spirit of this critique is Augusto Boal’s famous essay, “Aristotle’s Coercive System of Tragedy,” which can be found in his seminal, Theatre of the Oppressed (New York: Theater Communications Group; 1993). 3 See the magnificent masterwork of Jean Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, translated by Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Press; 1990). Also, in an American vein, is the equally monumental, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, edited by Martha C. Nussbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2001). 4 Roberto Calasso, Literature and the Gods, translated by Tim Parks (New York: Knopf; 2001), 5. 5 Hans Thies Lehman, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, translated by Eric Butler (London: Routledge; 2018), 27. 6 Anne Carson, An Oresteia (New York: Faber and Faber; 2009), 11. 7 Ibid., 12. 8 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, edited and translated by Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage; 1997), 174. 9 Carson, An Oresteia, 12.

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10 Mark W. Edwards, Sounds, Sense and Rhythm; Listening to Greek and Latin Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press; 2002), 71–83. 11 Carson, An Oresteia, 14–15. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 17. 14 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, 57. 15 Homer, The Iliad, translated by Peter Green (Berkeley: University of California Press; 2018), 358. 16 E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press; 1951), 8. 17 Carson, An Oresteia, 18. 18 Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Aeschylus the Oresteia (Berkeley: University of California Press; 1979), 46. 19 David Raeburn and Oliver Thomas, The Agamemnon of Aeschylus: A  Commentary for Students (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2012), 100. 20 Carson, An Oresteia, 22–23. 21 Ibid., 44. 22 Ibid., 61. 23 Ibid., 64. 24 Ibid., 70. 25 Ibid., 109. 26 Euripides, The Bakkhai, translated by Reginald Gibbons (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2001), 73.

5 SOPHOCLES’ ELECTRA; OR, THE DIALECTICS OF THE TRAGIC

If Aeschylus lays out the foundational principles of tragedy, Sophocles continues to develop the form by seizing upon its inherent dialectal dynamics. He uses the clash of binary oppositions found in Greek myth as the very foundation of his theatre. An example of this would be the agôn between Antigone and Creon that we observed in Part I of this book. If myth (and something like Aeschylus’ Oresteia) have a tendency to resolve things, then Sophocles’ tragedy has a tendency to complicate them. This will become the essential difference between myth and tragedy in the work of Sophocles and Euripides. Sophocles will complicate such myths; Euripides will ultimately mock them. But, it would seem that Sophocles’ great advance in the art of tragedy is to understand how to develop these binary oppositions into a powerful theatrical dialectics that the audience must resolve for themselves. We will see this dialectical thinking put to work in Sophocles’ Electra where the competing strategies of Orestes and Electra become the most significant binary opposition of the play, pitting one sibling’s approach against the other. If Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra is the living personification of his idea of theatre, then Sophocles’ Orestes and Electra can be seen as the dialectically-opposed offspring of their mother. The result is two radically different metaphors for the theatrical endeavor. We could think of Orestes’ plan as a kind of “Theatre of Deceit” in contrast to Electra’s project, a kind of “Theatre of Truth.” The question becomes which type of theatrical enterprise is the most successful in winning over an audience. In this play, Sophocles will use the powerful dialectics of the tragic to interrogate tragedy itself. But before we delve into this profoundly dialectical play, let’s take a quick look at 5thcentury Athenian notions of dialectics to ensure that we and Sophocles are on the same page.

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An ever-so-brief history of ancient Greek dialectics Dialectics grows out of the art of dialogos (dialogue). This is long before dialectics became the fancy intellectual plaything of Hegel with his thesis, antitheses, and synthesis. Back in Plato’s day, it was merely the humble art of conversation. Granted, it was a certain type of conversation aimed at getting to the bottom of things, to their root causes, and – if one was lucky – to the truth, alêtheia. If nothing else, it has the power to perplex, according to master hermeneutist Hans-Georg Gadamer. He tells us that this, in and of itself, can be a genuine philosophic function since, “by confounding preconceptions, dialectics is capable of opening up a view of the true relationship of things.”1 Aristotle credits Zeno not only for excelling in the realm of paradoxes but also for creating a type of dialectics which used indirect logical arguments to defeat an opponent. One could, perhaps, see a connection in these two philosophical forms since both deal with the nature of contradiction. Where the use of paradox remains a somewhat rarified practice, the dialectical technique would be famously picked up by both Socrates and the Sophists. At this juncture, dialectics becomes, according to Diogenes Laërtius in his Lives of the Philosophers, “a discourse, or speech (logos) consisting of questions and answers on a philosophical or political subject.”2 Abu Nasr Al-Farabi, the great Islamic philosopher and commentator on Plato and Aristotle writes in his Book of Dialectics (Kitab al-Jadal) that, “The activity of this art is debate and dialectic. It is a discourse with well-known speeches by means of which a questioner seeks to refute whichever of the two parts of a contradiction that arises and to achieve that by questioning the respondent who seeks to defend it.”3 In the hands of the Sophists, this dialogic approach became – according to Socrates and Plato  – a mere set of artificial practices to win any argument. Protagoras, a major Sophistic practitioner of this form of discourse, would boast that he could make the weaker argument appear stronger and maintained that for every subject, an opposite statement could be made. This led to a kind of argumentation where every statement was met with a counterstatement. Plato argues that Socrates is interested in ferreting out the truth, rather than just attempting to win an argument by any rhetorical means possible. Socrates, according to Plato, engaged instead in a kind of prolonged cross-examination, through question and answer, which refuted the original thesis of one’s opponent by revealing inherent contradictions found in their various positions. Mikhail Bakhtin, the great literary theoretician and life-long advocate of what he calls the art of the dialogic, has this to say about Socratic dialectics: “Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people, collectively searching for the truth in the process of their dialogic interaction.”4 We can already discern several passing similarities between the dialectics of philosophy and that of theatre. Both Socrates and Sophocles will use a dialectical approach of statement and counterstatement to, as Bakhtin says, test truth through “the provocation of the word by word.”5 And although Socrates is forever critical of theatre, it does not stop him from appropriating many of its tactics, including what

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Bakhtin calls “dialogue on the threshold,” which shows how Socrates/Plato would rely, more and more, on extraordinary situations (i.e., impending death in Phaedo) “to cleanse the word of all of life’s automatism and objectlessness, that would force a person to reveal the deepest layers of his personality and thought.”6 It is at such points that the work of Socrates and the work of Sophocles seem to meet.

Sophocles’ theatre as dialectical machine It should not surprise us that it is Sophocles, the most dialectically inclined of tragedians, who appeals the most to Hegel. His writings return over and over again to Antigone, where Sophocles’ dialectical penchant is very much on display: The collision between the two highest moral powers is set forth in a plastic fashion in that supreme and absolute example of the tragedy, Antigone. In this case, family love, what is holy, what belongs to the inner life and to inner feeling, and which because of this is also called the laws of the nether gods, comes into collision with the law of the State. Creon is not a tyrant, but really a moral power; Creon is not in the wrong; he maintains the law of the State, the authority of government, is to be held in respect, and that punishment follows the infraction of the law. Each of these two sides recognizes only one of the moral powers, and has only one of these as its content; this is the element of one-sidedness here, and the meaning of eternal justice is shown in this, that both ends in injustice just because they are one-sided, though at the same time both obtain justice too. Both are recognized as having a value of their own in the untroubled course of morality. Here they both have their own validity, but a validity which is equalized. It is only the onesidedness in their claims which justice comes forward to oppose.7 It is intriguing to note that Hegel’s college roommate, Hölderlin, was also keenly aware of this dynamic in the work of Sophocles. Being more a poet than philosopher, however, he is taken with the rhythmic rather than rhetorical nature; how speech after speech cancels out the other, hurdling its characters toward silence, which in the tragic world, always equals death. Take, for example, this famous passage from Antigone: ANTIGONE Death is a god who wants his laws obeyed. CREON Not that good and bad be treated equally under those laws.

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ANTIGONE Does anyone know? Maybe down there, all is pure? CREON Enemies and friends are two different things and dying doesn’t reconcile them. ANTIGONE And I wasn’t born to hate one with the other but to love both together. CREON If you must love somebody, go down there and love the dead.8 Such an exchange, is similar to Hegel’s dialectics and Bakhtin’s “provocation of the word by the word.” Hölderlin says, in such cases, that, “Das griechischtragische Wort ist tödlichfaktisch” which roughly translates as “the Greek word is factually deadly.” As far as Hölderlin is concerned, words can seize a human body and kill it. He calls this “der wirkliche Mord aus Worten” which, in our English, becomes “real murder through words.” This is indeed what Creon will do to Antigone, sentencing her to her death.9 As we will see, it is not only Sophocles’ dialogue which is inherently dialectical but his entire theatrical apparatus. Every scene, situation, character, thought, theme, and statement is put under the immediate tension of its dialectical opposite, bringing us closer and closer to the truth that theatre is capable of making manifest. In many ways, Sophocles’ Electra feels like the very epitome of this approach; it’s as though the very play were a manifesto on the dialectical nature of the theatrical; a force which seems to rival the technics of such philosophical titans as Socrates and Plato. In this respect, it is as though dialectics itself were an essential part of the DNA of theatre. With all this in mind, let us turn our attention to Electra’s:

Prologos; or, on the edge of action Sophocles, in keeping with the tragic tradition, opens Electra with a figure somewhat distant from our central plot, a wizened old man who functions like an everknowledgeable tour guide to two fellow travelers. He points out the sights of the

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land before them: the grove of Io, the marketplace of Apollo, the Temple of Hera, and . . . wait for it . . . the golden walls of Mycenae. Yes, we are here, once again, at the dreaded house of Atreus, where Agamemnon was murdered. Beside the old man is none other than Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, who has returned to seek his revenge on his father’s murderers. The Old Man speaks of real places: of Argos, groves, marketplaces, temples, golden walls. He relays real events: personally saving the life of the infant Orestes, carrying him to safety, and rearing him to manhood. All of this is true, for the Old Man lives in truth; Orestes, on the other hand, is more interested in deceit. Between the truth of the Old Man and the deception of Orestes is the liminal space of the Oracle of Pytho who, we learn, has enjoined Orestes to return to his homeland to seek his revenge. This act, in the eyes of this seer, is just. Out of this oracular permission comes Orestes’ plan: The Old Man is to pretend to be a messenger from Phocis, of the house of Phanoteus. He is to relay that Orestes died in a chariot race, dragged beneath the wheels of his vehicle until all the life in him was extinguished. The real Orestes, now disguised, will then be able to gain entrance into the unsuspecting household as the bearer of the urn that carries his fictive ashes. Sophocles, the master of all things dialectical, throws us immediately into the secret dialectics of the play, truth vs. fiction, or perhaps we should say, truth vs. theatre. In many ways, this first scene reads as the beginning of a theatrical rehearsal with Orestes as the playwright/director. Here he is, after all, distributing roles, outlining the plot, and establishing the timeline of the events to come. In such a light, the following line from Orestes stands out: “Can a mere story be evil? No, of course not – so long as it pays in the end.”10 Is this Sophocles’ rebuttal to all those naysayers of tragedy? An example of how this form, which is made up of so-called lies, can lead to certain unseen truths? This play, like Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, seems to be telling two simultaneous stories: one about the House of Atreus and the other about the theatre of Athens. The Old Man immediately thrusts us into the very heart of tragedy: the moment of choice. He finishes his brief tour of Mycenae by telling Orestes: OLD MAN Now is the time to decide what to do. Already the sun is hot upon us. Birds are shaking, the world’s awake. Black stars all night have died away. Now is no time to delay This is the edge of action.11 Orestes, like his father and all the heroes of Greek tragedy, is set before the crossroads of a decision, tasked with choosing which way to turn, what path to

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take. Like his theatrical descendent, Hamlet, Orestes decides to employ many theatrical tools to achieve his ends. What does this entail? Just enough ingenuity to make up a little story, tell a little lie, make a little fiction, play a little part. For Hamlet, all of this is in the service of catching the conscience of the King, but for Orestes, the idea of theatre is to gain admittance into an otherwise hostile house. Think of that house as a stand-in for the audience’s well-guarded consciousness. How can tragedy penetrate such a well-protected citadel? Perhaps by pretending to give its intended audience what it wants: in this case, news of the death of its adversary, Orestes. This is the Trojan horse that gets Orestes inside. From there, his real agenda can be put into effect, namely, to “break with my enemies like a star.” This is something that simultaneously illuminates and crushes any opposition. This is the goal of Orestes, the goal of tragedy: just get inside, by any means possible. It usually does so under false pretenses, often with the promise of all manner of titillation, then – once in – it goes to work on the audiences’ imagination, until it has conquered its foe.

Episode 1: from Orestes to Electra; or, the theatre of deceit meets the theatre of lament Just as Orestes and company are about to go about their collective plan, they hear a shriek, “IO MOI MOI DYSTENOS.” The Old Man wonders if this terrible sound has been issued from some servant, but Orestes knows better. He knows on some sort of cellular level that this is none other than his sister, Electra. “Should we stay and listen?” he asks. “No,” comes the immediate response of the Old Man; their path is the path of action. Another dialectic opens up: words (Electra) vs. deeds (Orestes). Tragedy is made up of both properties; it waits for the two to be conjoined. Such a process can take the entire length of a given play. In the end, Electra and Orestes will finally meet, and the deed will indeed be done. But a play, as we know, is ultimately nothing but words. If real action is ever to take place, it would have to happen beyond the comfortable confines of the theatre, out in that other world – which we call reality. Such work is left to the audience who has taken in the words of the tragedy; only they can ultimately answer its call. Only they can take actual action. But for now, our focus turns from Orestes to Electra, from actions to words, and with this transition comes a question: What words best lead to actions? Electra will deploy an array of sounds to try to incite action within the chorus, her sister, her mother, and ultimately, Orestes. Yet only Orestes hears her call. Orestes is the perfect audience for Electra, poised to do her bidding. When we listen to Electra, what kind of audience are we? An audience like that of the chorus? Her sister Chrysothemis? Her mother Clytemnestra? Or her brother Orestes? How do Electra’s words fall upon us? How do we hear them? Do we reject them? Let them in? Let them alter us? This is the question of Electra: What are the right set of words to set us in motion, to make us take action. In this respect, Electra becomes the very

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epitome of tragedy, the living, breathing embodiment of the form. To interrogate Electra is to interrogate tragedy itself. Orestes’ question – “Should we stay and listen?” – is our question. It is the first and perhaps most fundamental question to be addressed to the tragic. Why, in the speed of being, must I stop to listen to the fictive cry of another? Especially a cry from some distant past, which was distant even to that very first audience of Sophocles’ play. What, in short, can be gained by lingering once again with Electra’s lament? Just what happens to us under the exposure of her words, to the exposure of tragedy? Then and now? These are the questions that begin to grow out of Orestes’ first question. Orestes heeds the advice of the Old Man and moves on; we, on the other hand, decide to stay and listen to the call of tragedy.

“I cannot not grieve”; Electra’s tragic trajectory Tragedy, like Electra, is resolute. In Anne Carson’s luminous translation, Electra tells us, right from the start, what might as well be tragedy’s very motto: ELECTRA Never will I leave off lamenting, never. No. As long as stars sweep through heaven. As long as I look on this daylight. No.12 Isn’t this what tragedy does? Puts forth a relentless “no” to a world that prefers an ever-easy “yes,” sounding a discordant note in an otherwise harmonious symphony? This quality of tragedy is made all the more vivid by the dialectic between Electra and the chorus; or, put another way, between one who cannot move on and those who can; or, put a final way, between tragedy and its audience. In Electra, we find a chorus incapable of understanding their heroine’s ceaseless, violent mourning. They begin by asking, “Oh my child, why melt your life away in mourning?/ Why let grief eat you alive?” To them, Electra’s relentless grief makes absolutely no sense whatsoever: CHORUS . . . You run yourself out in grief With no cure, no time limit, no measure. It is a knot that no one can untie. Why are you so in love with the unbearable?13 This is not all that different from Claudius’s question to Hamlet, “How ’ist the cloud still hangs on you?” Here Claudius and the chorus rhyme in their

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concern and absolute bewilderment over these two seemingly obstreperous children of tragedy:

Gertrude enjoins her son to, “Cast thy nighted color off . . . Do not forever with thy veiled noble lids/seek thy father in the dust.” But Hamlet and Electra simply cannot stop. Electra tells us, “I cannot not grieve.” A wrong has been done, the world moves on, but Electra cannot. Hamlet cannot. Tragedy cannot. Hamlet, Electra’s distant dramatic kin, asks, “Must I remember?” Tragedy’s answer is, “Someone must.” That someone becomes Electra, Hamlet, tragedy. All three know, on some cellular level, that we cannot gloss over past wrongs. These wrongs must be addressed or they fester, becoming Freud’s return of the repressed and grow far worse for not having been dealt with straightaway. But what is it that needs to be addressed? The death of the father, or the death of an idea? Both perhaps. Tragedy folds the two, the real and the ideal, into one. Electra explains the tragic crux of her project and what keeps her fixated within her endless grief: ELECTRA You say ignore the deed – is that right? Would you approve this? It defies human instinct. Such ethics makes no sense to me. . . . For if a man is earth and nothing If a man is void and dead space lying, If a dead man’s murderers do not give blood for blood To pay for this, then shame does not exist. Human reverence is gone.16 Tragedy: the idea of dying for an idea. This is Electra’s tragic fate. And unlike Hamlet, she never questions this course of action. She remains firm, resolute, singular, and Sophoclean in her purpose. For Electra, like tragedy, there can be “no rest, no retrieval” from this perpetual protest. What makes this all the more impressive is the length of Electra’s opposition. Remember that when we meet Hamlet, his

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“acting out” has lasted a mere six months; for Electra, it has lasted her entire adult life. It would seem from this encounter that nothing will dissuade her from her stance – nothing except the hope of Orestes’ return and subsequent revenge. After all, Electra is the realm of words, Orestes the realm of deeds. It will take both for action to ensue. Until then, Electra is left to just: words, words, words.

Episode 2: “it came out of a dream in the night.” Electra and tragedy’s multiple arts of persuasion; from agōn logōn to the interpretation of dreams The next skirmish over Electra and her perpetual protest comes with the entrance of her sister, Chrysothemis. Here, we are treated to one of tragedy’s favorite devices: the agōn logōn, also known as the battle of wits. Where Euripides might be inclined to show off in an almost sophistic fashion (look at the agōn logōn between Helen and Hecuba in Trojan Women), Sophocles is known for debates that are perfectly balanced in their argumentation. Just take a look at any of the dialectically inclined encounters in Philoctetes. In Euripides’ Trojan Women, it is Helen who, much to our surprise, seems to win her debate with Hecuba; in Sophocles, it is often hard to declare a clear victor since both sides of the debate are so well argued. Such is the case with Electra and Chrysothemis. Chrysothemis begins the debate by once again declaring Electra’s project pointless since it achieves nothing; as a result, it is no more than pure self-indulgence. But more than that, it is simply not pragmatic. This is perhaps the greatest “sin” in Chrysothemis’s world. Now is not the right time. Those in power are simply too strong; opposition will only end in ruin; or, as she poetically puts it, “In rough waters lower the sails, is my theory.” She concedes that justice is not on her side, but she wants to live a free woman, which means that there are masters that must be obeyed. Electra counters, accusing Chrysothemis of complicity and cowardice. Neither argument has shifted the other’s course. We are at another moment of stalemate between these two sisters, who have been at odds with each other ever since the fatal day of their father’s death. When we think of Sophocles, we often think of these beautifully crafted agōnes logōn that are found in Antigone or Oedipus the King, and yet they rarely carry the day. For all of Sophocles’ rationalism, it would seem that – even for Sophocles – rationalism has its limits. It is one mode of persuasion found in tragedy, but rarely is it the decisive path to winning over an opponent. In the specific case of this scene from Electra, it is not a rational argument that leads to a change in the hearts of these sisters, but rather the interruption of the nonrational in the manner of a dream. A new dialectic emerges: the rational argument vs. the nonrational dream. Here, it seems, Electra and tragedy succeed through their similarity to the world of dreams. In many ways, tragedy is a kind of waking dream, trafficking in images and energies that can be interpreted in a number of ways. These images and energies are so powerful, they bypass our rational selves and enter into the realm of our fantasy life, haunting us just like dreams do – not to mention the fact that both tragedy and dreams are in need of interpretation. This is certainly the case with a dream by

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Clytemnestra, on whose interpretation so much will depend. It seems that Chrysothemis has been tasked with bearing funeral offerings to their dead father by their murderous mother. Electra finds this odd. Why would their murderer of a mother feel compelled, especially after all these years, to provide such offerings to the very man she dispatched to Hades? Chrysothemis tells us that this is all on account of a dream that came to their mother in the depths of the night. Here is Sophocles’ version of Clytemnestra’s dream: CHRYSOTHEMIS The story is she dreamed of our father And knew him again for he came back into the light. She saw him take hold of his scepter and stick in the hearth His own scepter over the whole of Mykenai.17 The problem for Electra and her sister is whether this is simply an allegory or indeed an actual omen. Late in Electra’s response to the dream she wonders aloud: “Suppose he (Agamemnon) had some part in sending her these cold, unlucky dreams.” The philosopher Democritus attributed dreams to what he called phantom effusions that cascaded off objects of the world and into the receptive mind of the dreamer. The deciphering of these currents required a high degree of interpretation. Aristotle believed that the best interpreters were melancholics; on account of their intensity, they were “good shots” who could “hit the mark.”18 It is through such a “heightened sensitivity” that Electra is able to win over Chrysothemis. And so, this ultimate persuasion is achieved not through a rational argument, but via the strange, nocturnal evocation of dreams. It is thanks to this dream – its recounting, brief explication, and unspoken wonderment – that the relationship between Electra and Chrysothemis is finally reset from the adversarial to the sisterly. Just as Electra and Chrysothemis are joined, so too are tragedy and dreams. Tragedy, it would seem, is carried along the same powerful stream as dreams, both moving us in unconscious ways.

Episode 3: Electra encounters Clytemnestra; or the theatre of lament meets the theatre of state After a brief choral interlude, we are finally introduced to Electra’s archenemy, her murdering mother, Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra remains the formidable figure that we first met in Aeschylus; the passage of the years has not diminished her extraordinary self-possession or regal certitude. The subsequent showdown between daughter and mother makes the previous agōn logōn between sisters look like mere child’s play. Here, as we near the center of the play, is an agōn logōn for the ages, as memorable as anything Sophocles has ever penned. Clytemnestra more than holds her own, making a persuasive case for her murder. One cannot help but think that if Clytemnestra ever decided to hang up her crown, she would make an

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extremely commanding attorney. Listen to her defense of herself and her actions. It is nothing short of an extraordinary performance on Clytemnestra’s part. This is another kind of theatre, different from the theatre of Electra or Orestes. This is the theatre of the State which borrows heavily on the theatre of spectacle in its comportment, language, and all the outward trappings and signage of power (crowns, gowns, and such). Everything is pitched to impress or, if need be, oppress. This is the theatre of Clytemnestra. It is what we have previously called her mask: the implacable Queen. But what lies beneath this mask? What about her face? Her soul? Ah, that is the perennial question for all dramatists tackling this extraordinary character. In the previous chapter, we saw how Aeschylus handled the mask, face, and soul of Clytemnestra. There, Clytemnestra’s mask was similar to what we now see in Sophocles. Aeschylus went on to show us the face of the revenger and the soul of a wronged mother. What about here? What does Sophocles see beneath Clytemnestra’s regal mask? We will have to wait until Clytemnestra breaks away from Electra to bring her sacrifice to the grave of Agamemnon; there, in a subsequent soliloquy, we are granted a rare glimpse of Clytemnestra’s actual face. With the god Apollo, she lets down her guard, and asks that he “loosen the fears that hold me now.” Toward the end of this prayer, we learn Clytemnestra is indeed human, like all of us. She is vulnerable, susceptible to a night of bad dreams and ambiguous visions. And what does she want? What all of us crave, “a life untroubled . . . in the midst of loved ones and children.” In other words, her face is not so distant from our face. She finishes her prayer with: CLYTEMNESTRA As for the rest, Though I keep silent, I credit you (Apollo) with knowing it fully. You are a god. It goes without saying, the Children of Zeus See all things.19 Just what is “as for the rest?” Her true feelings? Does Clytemnestra have feelings? Revenge, yes; but what about regret, remorse, or, dare we say it, the desire for some semblance of repentance? How do we, mere mortals, catch sight of this? How do we gain the visibility granted only to the gods? We will have to wait until the next scene to gain access to this most secret part of Clytemnestra, her alleged soul.

Episode 4: the return of Orestes’ theatre of deceit The Old Man arrives and, following Orestes’ earlier bidding, puts on quite a show for Clytemnestra and Electra. Technically this performance is a Messenger rhēsis which recounts events that have happened off stage. The Old Man has a particularly impactful story to tell, made all the more intriguing since, unlike most other

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extant Messenger stories, this story is patently false. A lie. Or, in our argument, yet another kind of theatre. What is beginning to emerge is that, for Sophocles, everything is a kind of theatre. There has been Electra’s Theatre of Lament and Clytemnestra’s Theatre of State, and now we’re back to Orestes’ Theatre of Deceit. If Electra’s theatre is based on truths that an audience would rather not hear; then Orestes’ theatre is based on lies they would like to believe. In other words, Orestes is giving his audience, Clytemnestra, exactly what she wants: a story about the death of Orestes. And what a story it is. A  veritable tour de force, it is worth attempting to recapitulate here. The Old Man’s story begins with the arrival of Orestes at Delphi. This is the place not only of oracles but also of olympics. On Day One of the games, Orestes enters all manner of foot races and wins at each, capturing first prize and the hearts of the crowd. They chant his name: “Argive Orestes!” The Old Man, in Anne Carson’s translation, tells Electra and Clytemnestra, “So far so good. But when a god sends harm, no man can sidestep it, no matter how strong he may be.”20 Day Two begins with a chariot race. The best of the best are there to compete, and among them is Orestes. The crowd cheers, the trumpet blares, and the race begins. Orestes’ rivals take the lead. Orestes hangs back, biding his time. Then, as is often the case in such races, a rival chariot goes out of control, swerves, and crashes. The other charioteers, unable to alter course, crash as well, one after another, until all that is left is Orestes and a rival Athenian. They both avoid the fate of their fellow chariot drivers and continue on, neck and neck, toward the finish line. And then, as fate would have it, during a wide turn, Orestes’ chariot hits a nearby pillar, and the axel box smashes in two. Orestes is thrown from the chariot, tangled in his reigns, and dragged to his death by the now riderless horses. The crowd cries out, “Not the boy!” But it is too late. The horses come to a stop, the dust clears, and Orestes’ broken body lies lifeless on the ground. Blood is everywhere, the corpse unrecognizable. Orestes is given a hero’s funeral, his body burnt upon a public pyre for all to see. His ashes have been placed in an urn that now makes its way from Delphi to the royal house where it will be buried beside the grave of his father. The Old Man finishes his tale with, “That’s my story. So far as words go, gruesome enough. But for those who watched it, and we did watch it, the ugliest evil I ever saw.”21 The mention of evil at the end of the Old Man’s tale sends us back to the beginning of the play where Orestes rhetorically ponders, “Can a mere story be evil? No, of course not – so long as it pays in the end.” This tale certainly seems to pay off, both Clytemnestra and Electra are completely taken in by the Old Man and his fictive recounting of Orestes’ death. And, for the first time in the play, Clytemnestra is openly moved. We will deal with the nature of this “movement” in a moment. Let us stay focused on the success of this false story. Again, it is interesting to note that the agōn logōn of Electra and her mother ends in a stalemate similar to the previous agōn logōn with Electra and her sister. It takes the evocative power of this story to move Clytemnestra in the same way that it took the interpretation of a dream to move Chrysothemis. Reasoning and

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critique fall short when compared to the persuasive powers of dreams and fictions. This fiction, in particular, is a great set piece; although narrative in nature, it works its magic on us until we can see this story in the theatre of our minds as vividly as anything we have yet seen on Sophocles’ stage. It is as immersive as a dream and, like a dream, centers around a very particular wish-fulfillment, one especially crafted for Clytemnestra’s ears: Orestes’ death. In the end, this tale wins Clytemnestra over in a way that none of Electra’s truths ever will. Here, in a way, we are presented with the fundamental difference between the purity of tragedy versus the pragmatism of entertainment. We encounter two types of tellings, two ways of attempting to move an audience; but, in the end, it is Orestes’ theatre that is triumphant. Why wouldn’t it be? It is, after all, a theatre of pure action, creating event upon event, all crafted to keep the listener on the edge of their seat. In short, it is, indeed, nothing more than a pot-boiler. Or is it? The story might be quite inconsequential but the response of its intended audience is anything but. As a matter of fact, the response can be more telling than the tale itself. Once again, this brings Orestes close to the shores of Hamlet who, as you may remember, crafted a play within his play to catch the conscience of his uncle, the false king. Or, as our noble Dane explains: HAMLET  . . . I have heard That guilty creatures sitting at a play Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck to the soul that presently They have proclaimed their malefactions For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players Play something like the murder of my father Before my uncle. I’ll observe his looks. I’ll tent him to the quick. If ’a do blench. I know my course.22 Now, we and Orestes know that Clytemnestra is guilty of the murder of Agamemnon. Clytemnestra, unlike Claudius, will be the first to proclaim this brutal fact to anyone with ears. What we don’t know is what she feels about this. Is her blatant remorselessness just a bit of bravado? Or are there any other sentiments at work within her besides a vestigial twinge of paranoia? Is there any sense of guilt or remorse? This is the question we cannot help but ask whenever we confront Clytemnestra in Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides. In Sophocles’ version we have seen her mask (regal queen), her face (a woman who wants to return to a simple uncomplicated life), but what about her soul? Does Sophocles’ Clytemnestra even have a soul? And if so, what are its contents? It may be what she, in her prayer to Apollo,

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called, “all the rest of it,” what she keeps silent about since the god can already see it. But how can we? One such way is through Hamlet’s play within a play and the Old Man’s story of Orestes’ false death. By watching how Claudius and Clytemnestra watch these works of fiction, we can learn something about their inner selves that would otherwise remain hidden. We must, as Hamlet says, “give heedful note” to their response. And when we do, what do we see? At the end of the Old Man’s story, do we see a mother overcome with grief by the loss of her son? Let’s observes Clytemnestra closely; this is what she says: CLYTEMNESTRA Zeus what now? Should I call this good news? Or a nightmare cut to my own advantage. . . . To give birth is terrible, incomprehensible. No matter how you suffer, you cannot hate The child you have borne.23 And yet, Clytemnestra cannot help but take stock of the fact that Orestes has remained in exile, never bothering to reach out to her, never attempting to understand her side of the story. Instead, he held her actions against her, made terrible threats, let it be known to the world that he would right her wrong, revenge his father’s death, and punish his mother. She concludes, “And I had no shelter in sleep by night or sleep by day: Time stood like a death master over me, letting the minutes drop.”24 And so? Pay strict attention, or as Shakespeare enjoins us, “Be all ears.” CLYTEMNESTRA Now I am free.25 . . . From now on I pass my days in peace.26 And with that Clytemnestra exits. Just before the play within the play, Hamlet pulls Horatio aside and entreats him: “Observe my uncle . . . For I mine eyes will rivet to his face/And after we will both our judgements join/In censure of his seeming.” Electra does the same, turning to the chorus after Clytemnestra exits, and dryly asking them: ELECTRA Well how did she look to you – shattered by grief? Heartbroken mother bewailing her only son?27

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At this point, we would have to concur with Electra, “No, you saw her – she went off laughing.” In Aeschylus, on the other side of the event of Agamemnon’s death, we found the soul of Clytemnestra to be a grieving mother; in Sophocles, on the other side of the Old Man’s story of Orestes’ death, we find the soul of Clytemnestra now gone, a monstrous self-interest in its place. And Electra? What of her? She is devastated. A string of animal-like cries breaks through her otherwise steely rhetoric. But no sound can assuage the pain she feels. Each cry, as we will see, becomes another crack in the armature that has protected Electra for all these years, releasing the last remnants of hope which she held within her. It is at this emotional juncture that Chrysothemis re-enters.

Episode 5: tragedy as pharmakon Chrysothemis returns, still thinking Orestes is alive. Electra breaks the news to her sister that their brother is dead and then begins to enlist Chyrsothemis in a new plan. But something is different in this encounter, something has changed. Electra, who has always been the epitome of tragic persuasiveness, seems to falter here for the first time. Slowly over the course of the scene, it becomes clear that something in Electra has snapped. She has a plan: Chrysothemis should murder Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. Why Chrysothemis should do this, rather than Electra, is never made quite clear. But what is even more troubling is the idea of Chrysothemis as a worthy successor to Orestes in avenging their father’s murder. This strikes us as rather far-fetched, to say the least. To tell the truth, the whole thing sounds a bit – well – mad. There’s no other word for it. And then there is Electra’s rationale to her sister which strikes us as equally deranged. Listen to Electra’s reasoning – if you can actually still call it that. She tells her sister that she’s getting on in years, that marriage now might as well be a fading dream, and that murdering mom might not only win her the approval of the people but also a worthy husband. “Men,” according to Electra, “like a woman with character.”28 This leaves us to assume that nothing adds character like a little murder. Suddenly we find ourselves questioning Electra, and for the first time, we are not necessarily on Electra’s side of the argument. We are not alone in this newfound hesitation. Chrysothemis herself recoils from her sister’s outrageous plan, leaving Electra to her own irrational devices. The chorus, now alone with Electra, talks of her strange descent: “Betrayed/alone/she goes down in the waves,” they say, as if she were drowning in her relentless pursuit of revenge. “She is glad,” they tell us, “to go dark.”29 If Electra is the very embodiment of tragedy, then there is – for all its good – still something mad, dark, and dangerous about the form. It has a tendency to go too far, to the point where the play itself threatens to careen off the rails of its plot. It’s not just Electra; look at her kindred spirit, Hamlet, another avatar of tragedy. By the end of the Act III of his play, we find him chopping up Polonius behind the stairs and making one bad joke after another about the poor old fellow being food for

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worms. Is Hamlet still playing mad or has he been driven mad in the process? Our tragic hero suddenly seems oddly villainous. What has happened? How can such things shift so radically? A new dialectic has opened up before us. Suddenly Electra, our ostensible hero, has become both a positive and negative force. We are used to our agonists being either neatly “pro” or neatly “anti,” but not both simultaneously. Here Electra and tragedy begin to resemble Plato’s pharmakon, as teased out by Jacques Derrida.30 It was Derrida who reminded us of the twisting nature of this medical term, a term which refuses to maintain a stable meaning. This trickster-like referent is usually thought of as a remedy. In its most positive usage, it is a cure; in its more ambiguous moments, it can become a poison. With this in mind, we can see how Sophocles’ Electra, both play and title character, mirror the unpredictability of the pharmakon. At times Sophocles’ tragedy functions like a remedy: Think of Electra’s first exchanges with Chrysothemis as she tries to bring her back to the just path. At times, it functions like a drug: Think of the Old Man’s story about the false death of Orestes which intoxicates Clytemnestra. And sometimes it functions like a poison: Think of this current exchange between Electra and Chrysothemis. Tragedy, like the pharmakon, contains all these unstable contraries. We find a similar phenomenon at work in the sophist Gorgias’ oft quoted Encomium of Helen where he characterizes certain forms of rhetorical speech as another kind of pharmakon: The effect of speech (tou logou dunamis) upon the condition of the soul (pros tēn tēs psychēs taxin) is comparable (echei ton auton logon) to the power of drugs (tōn pharmakōn taxis) over the nature of bodies (tēn tōn somatōn phusin). For just as different drugs dispel different secretions from the body, and some bring an end to disease and others to life, so also in the case of speeches, some distress, others delight, some cause fear, others make hearers bold, and some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion (tini kakēi tēn psuchēn epharmakeusan kai exegoēteusan).31 All of this is not so far from the moment in Romeo and Juliet where Friar Lawrence tells us about the infant rind of a flower he holds in his hand. This seemingly inconsequential bit of flora possesses the power to heal and the power to harm: “Two such opposèd kings encamp them still/In man as well as herbs – grace and rude will. /And where the worser is predominant/ Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.”32 This is the danger with the pharmakon, certain rhetorical speeches, and now tragedy itself. It can heal, but it can also harm. In short, it is not to be trusted. No wonder Solon, the great statesman, was against this new art right from its inception. Here is Plutarch’s recounting of Solon’s fatal encounter with theatre: He went to watch Thespis personally acting in one of his own plays, as was the custom in the old days. After the performance he had a question for

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Thespis, “Aren’t you ashamed to tell such enormous lies in front of so many people?” he asked. Thespis replied that there was nothing wrong with saying and doing this kind of thing for fun. Whereupon Solon gave the ground a mighty blow with his stick and said, “But if we accept this ‘fun’ and think highly of it, before long we’ll start to find it cropping up in all the important areas of life.”33 Even at the very birth of Western drama, there was a sense of its inherent danger, returning us to Sophocles’ opening question, “Can a mere story be evil?” At this moment, we begin to suspect that the answer could very easily be: yes. This is made all the more concerning as we enter the penultimate scene of this tragedy.

Episode 6: Orestes’ theatre of deceit, part 2; the empty urn, pharmakon or magnētis lithos? As if on cue, Orestes now returns, disguised as a messenger, further corroborating the news of his death with the urn of his alleged ashes. He hands what we know to be an empty urn into his sister’s hands. Electra holds the urn, contemplating it, thinking that its meager contents hold what is left of her brother and her hopes. Electra does not doubt the contents; she cradles it in her arms like a babe and delivers one of the great laments in all of Greek drama. Sophocles’ urn becomes, in many ways, the ultimate metaphor for theatre. We, like Electra, cry over nothing, over a fiction that is less substantial than a shadow. The crucial difference is that Electra does not know this, but we do – and still we cry with her. It is truly extraordinary when one thinks about it. Many philosophers, Wittgenstein in particular, have marveled over whether or not we can actually feel what another person feels, but how much more wondrous that we can feel for a fiction! For theatre is indeed nothing but an empty urn. The last time someone reminded us of this extraordinary fact was Shakespeare’s Hamlet, after experiencing the Player King’s portrayal of “the marbled queen.” Our melancholy Prince tells us, in a fit of amazement, “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her/That he should weep for her?” But weep we do, as the Greeks did, for their fictitious Electra and her empty urn. We and the actor fill that empty urn with meaning, or a memory, or in the case of Polos (the great Greek actor and most famous interpreter of the role of Electra), with the actual ashes of his dead son. But ashes or no ashes, we the audience make a certain emotive leap. Without thinking, we instantly feel, just like Clytemnestra and Electra felt when they heard the Old Man’s story of the false death of Orestes. And yet the two experiences are not exactly analogous. In the case of the Old Man’s story, it seemed as though his words entered Clytemnestra and Electra; whereas, in the case of Electra and the empty urn, the event does not so much enter us, as we enter it. Electra and her empty urn seems to draw a feeling out of us that is directed toward them. This leads us from the discussion of the pharmakon in Plato’s Phaedrus to

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the discussion in Ion over the magical powers of magnētis lithos, also known as the Magnesian stone. This is a region in ancient Greece where these magnetic lodestones were found. Socrates talks, with a heavy dose of irony, about the art of the Homeric rhapsode as such a magnet: This stone does not simply attract iron rings, just by themselves; it also imparts to the rings a force enabling them to do the same thing as the stone itself, that is, to attract another ring, so that sometimes a chain is formed, quite a long one, of iron rings, suspended from one another. For all of them, however, their power depends upon that lodestone.34 And so, this magnetic attraction goes from the muse, to the poet, to the rhapsode, and finally to the audience. The audience, according to Socrates, is the last link in the chain. Just as the pharmakon can be of a positive or negative nature, so too can the magnētis lithos. Here, with Electra and the empty urn, it is the positive response of sympathy; but, in other instances, a given theatrical moment could just as easily draw out the more negative impulses of envy, ire, or hate. Theatre works both ways: It can enter us like the pharmakon, or draw things out from us like the magnētis lithos. The unnerving thing is that, in either case, we have little control over what these two procedures can do! This brings us to the crux of the problem: how susceptible we are to the powers of theatre. How easily can we be persuaded by the magnetic force of something like Electra and the empty urn? This is the danger. But in this moment, we are completely taken with this extraordinary lament and the beautiful reunion between brother and sister that ensues. And so, we find ourselves in sympathy with them as they begin their plot. Yet once their plan becomes actuality, many audiences members will find themselves, once again, recoiling from the deed. It is here we experience:

The Sophoclean turn It begins when we hear the blood-curdling cry of Clytemnestra, struck offstage by Orestes. It is a sound that has the power to unnerve, in and of itself, no matter who it is that makes it. But not to Electra. Her response is not to recoil like us but to call out, “Hit her a second time, if you have the strength.” And when Orestes does, and we hear another blood-curdling cry from Clytemnestra, Electra concludes in coldblooded fashion, “If only Aegisthus could share this.” Finally, when Orestes returns drenched in blood, she no longer refers to Clytemnestra as her mother, but simply as “the creature.” The play is turning and so too is Electra. She is transforming from lamenter to avenger. The transformation is complete when she agrees to play a part in Orestes’ ongoing theatre of deceit and to lure Aegisthus into the house to hear about Orestes’ alleged death and see the “evidence.” In short, Electra, the champion of truth, agrees to dissemble. She says, without the slightest hesitation, “Leave this part to me. . . .”

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Even the chorus is swayed in this: “Why not drop a few friendly words in his ear/ so his moment of justice may come/ as a surprise.” And so she does with consummate aplomb. She relishes the way that her innocent remarks take on a double, darker meaning. Who, in this moment, does she remind us of? Ah, yes, her mother, “the creature,” as she appeared in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Irony turns to remorselessness when Aegisthus asks to speak in his defense, and Electra immediately interjects, “No! Don’t let him speak – by the gods! Brother – no speech now!” If anyone knows the power of words, it is Electra. She continues: ELECTRA Kill him at once. Throw his corpse out for scavengers to get. Nothing less than this Can cut the knot of evils inside me.35 This refusal, of course, goes against one of our deeply engrained democratic principles, namely the idea of due process of law wherein a person is given a chance to defend themselves and be judged by a jury of their peers. For Sophocles’ audience, however, these principles have just been newly minted and are being tested here. Does his initial audience feel the same vestigial response to Electra’s blatant rejection of the ways of Athens? Regardless, Electra, the champion of justice, seems terribly unjust in this moment. Her transformation from lamenter to avenger seems complete. So much so, that she has nothing left to say for the rest of the play. This leaves Orestes with the last words over Aegisthus’ fate: ORESTES You shall not die on your own terms. I will make it bitter for you. And let such judgement fall on any whom wish to break the law. Kill them! The evil were less.36 The word “evil” once again sends us back to Orestes’ original question that opened the play: “Can a mere story be evil?” Throughout this chapter we have been crossing out the word “story” and replacing it with the word “theatre.” The question – of Solon, of Plato, and others – has now become, “Is theatre evil?” But which theatre? Sophocles, throughout this play, has shown us several theatrical iterations. There is: Orestes’ Theatre of Deceit, Electra’s Theatre of Lament, and Clytemnestra’s

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Theatre of State. Orestes’ theatre gives you the lie you want to believe. It traffics in action, dissembling for good. Electra’s theatre insists, up until the end, on telling you the truth you’d rather not hear. It has a certain purity, being part prayer and part provocation. It traffics in words and lamentations. In the end, these two theatres, Orestes’ Theatre of Deceit and Electra’s Theatre of Lament, join forces to destroy Clytemnestra’s Theatre of State. What are we to make of this theatrical merger? Just what is Sophocles up to? In Sophocles’ dialectical hands, he shows how Orestes’ theatre dissembles for the good, Clytemnestra’s theatre for the bad. But Electra’s theatre – the theatre closest to the workings of tragedy – the one that, up until a certain point, we’ve been rooting for; the one we thought was the very beacon of authenticity and a necessary objective correlative; this very theatre turns out to be not so pure and ultimately – potentially – equally problematic in its own right. Sophocles, the consummate dialectician, cannot resist revealing that even Electra’s theatre is vulnerable, that it too is susceptible to pressures beyond itself. It too can break in either the direction of doing good or ill. This is the dialectical conundrum that faces us. Tragedy contains these troubling binary oppositions within its own potential unfolding. This brings us to our final and fundamental dialectic:

Myth vs. tragedy Myth, as we’ve said, attempts to resolve all binary oppositions so we are left knowing what is good and what is bad. Myth has little tolerance for ambiguity. It was built to combat a world that was crippling ancient humanity with the weight of unrelenting unknowableness, hence the invention of the gods. But for the 5th-century Athenians, certain gods were on the wane and with them the solace of many of their stories. In their stead comes a new form, Greek tragedy, which – although still based in myth – becomes less and less interested in resolving the binary oppositions that set myth to motion in the first place. If anything, post-Aeschylean authors like Sophocles and Euripides seem content in exacerbating such binary oppositions to the point where we come face to face with certain deep contradictions that refuse to resolve themselves as neatly as myth would like. In this respect, Sophocles’ theatre is rigorously dialectical in the Greek sense rather than our current understanding of the word. Hegel has not yet arrived on the scene with his nice and handy little notion of synthesis, a concept that just can’t resist tidying up the mess of ambiguity that ensues when binary oppositions are left unattended. In tragedy, there is rarely such synthesis. Instead, Sophocles establishes and then multiplies an increasing number of binary oppositions, keeping them all alive and unresolved throughout the play. It’s as though these contradictions were just so many spinning plates – plates which one cannot help fearing will all come crashing down at any moment. We leave the theatre wondering just who will clean up the ensuing mess. It is a strategy which seems aimed at

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troubling the spectator long after the performance is over. And so, Sophocles’ Electra leaves one with questions rather than answers. Is theatre good? Evil? Indifferent? All of the above? None? No chorus is going to come out in the end and tell you what you should think. You will have to do that yourself, on your own, in the privacy of your home, or in the midst of the agora, haggling it out with other former audience members. This brings us back to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s observation that part of the power of Greek dialectics is simply to perplex us to the point where it confounds many of our hasty preconceptions of how the world works. It forces us to rethink such things for ourselves. And so, Sophocles allows Electra to perplex us. She refuses to stabilize into a simple consumable meaning. The same is true of the form she personifies. Greek tragedy resists any easy closure. This brings the character and the play back into the orbit of Plato’s dreaded pharmakon and magnētis lithos. Tragedy is the powerful combination of the two; it can get inside of us and it can pull us outside of ourselves. In either direction, it can lead to positive or negative results. It is unpredictable, dangerous, and, as Solon suspected, not to be trusted. In the wrong hands, it can do much damage. This is Sophocles’ astute warning. We must use this immensely powerful dialectical medium with the greatest of care.

Concluding observations “So tragedy isn’t necessarily all that good?” asks a student. “Correct,” I say. “But it isn’t all that bad.” “Right, it’s not a situation of either/or but rather – ” “ – And/both,” the student says, completing my sentence. “We, as an audience, have to live within that tension.” “Can we go back to something you said at the beginning of our discussion?” asks another student. “Sure.” “About how dialectics grows out of dialogos?” “Yes.” “Can you explain what the difference is between dialogos, dialectics, and the dialogue found in a tragedy by Sophocles?” “I can try. Gadamer translates dialogos as conversation. Both Socrates and Sophocles notice something interesting that happens when humans engage in this activity. Gadamer explains this best: No one knows in advance what will “come out” of a conversation. Understanding or its failure is like an event that happens to us. . . . All this shows that conversation has a spirit of its own, and that the language in which it is conducted bears its own truth within it – i.e., that it allows something to “emerge” which henceforth exists.37

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This is the natural inclination of conversation. Something often emerges in the process, ‘a third thing,’ that neither interlocutor anticipated and it is greater than either interlocutor’s previously held point of view. This ‘third thing’ is often characterized as the ‘truth’ of a given matter. Now, Socrates and the Sophists take this particular habit of conversation and turn it into a much more focused methodology of dialectics. We could describe dialectics as the testing out of one point of view by its opposite. There are two branches of this method: the Socratic which is more earnest in its endeavor and the Sophistic which tends toward the more playful.” “But how does this relate to the dialogue in a tragedy like Electra?” “Well, tragic dialogue shuttles back and forth between the conversational and dialectical. Can you give me an example of a moment in Electra where things feel loose and digressive like conversation?” “The early exchanges between Electra and the chorus?” “Yes, that has the rambling feel of the conversational. And what would be an example of a more formalized dialectal argument?” “The first scene between Electra and Chrysothemis.” “And what do we call this type of exchange?” “An agōn logōn.” “Which means?” “Battle of wits.” “Which are much more combative than the roundabout arguments found in Plato.” “It’s like Socrates on steroids.” “But,” says another student, “for all of Sophocles’ high-minded use of rational devices like the agōn logōn, there is a deep irrational streak that runs through the whole play.” “You’re right, rational arguments don’t seem to win these characters over.” “Or bring them to any acknowledged truth.” “Only a strange dream or a fake story about Orestes’ death seems to do the trick.” “Tragedy likes to play in the same murky waters as dreams and lies.” “No wonder it gave Plato the heebie-jeebies.”38 “It reminds me of Hesiod’s Theogony,” says a student who rarely speaks. “What about it?” “You know, the moment he is talking about his initiation by the Muses into the art of poetry.” “Do you remember what the Muses say to him?” “Yes, it goes something like: You field dwelling Shepards. You base creatures. Mere Bellies. We know how to speak many false things that are like true things. And we also know, when we want, how to utter true things.39 “Even back then, in the time of Hesiod, the Greeks were very aware of the duality of their language and the poetry that they made out of it,” concludes our usually shy student.

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“You’ve just cited one of the most disputed passages in all of Ancient Greek poetry,” I say. “How so?” asks another student. “It has to do with the words that Hesiod uses for speaking truth,” says our shy student. “And they are?” “Well,” says our shy student, “the Muses use two very different words for truth (etymoisin and alēthea) and two very different words for speech (legein and gērysasthai).” “So?” “So it’s interesting that when the Muses talk about speaking lies they use the very common/everyday word legein for speech; but when they talk about speaking truth they use the much more obscure word gērysasthai.” “What’s the difference?” “Well the verb legein corresponds to the noun logos and so, it is associated with reason.” “And gērysasthai?” “Is much more esoteric in nature. It is a word that is hardly ever used and, on those rare occasions when it is, it is only to talk about the subliminal or associational power of things like birdsongs or the sound rather than the meaning of a poem. What some people might think of as nonsense or gibberish.” “So they use two different words, what’s so strange about that?” “Well, you would think that they would use a word like legein when they were talking about truth and a word like gērysasthai when they were talking about false or nonsensical things; and yet, the Muses reverse all this.” “Which means?” “That certain truths cannot be arrived at by the logic of legein.”40 “We certainly live in a historical moment that seems to favor legein over gērysasthai,” I say, returning to the conversation. “This is true with how we view Greek tragedy these days, favoring a kind of utilitarian/legein notion of tragedy as a kind of grand civics lesson; as opposed to the 19th-century romantic/gērysasthai view of tragedy which might speak to some deeper metaphysical aspect of our existence. At the end of the day, I  think we can all agree that Greek tragedy employs both legein and gērysasthai. This particular dialectic is very much on display in our next and, according to some scholars, last great play of the Golden Age of Greek tragedy.” “And that is?” “Euripides’ Bacchae.”

Notes 1 Hans George Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press; 1982), 25. 2 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, edited by James Miller, translated by Pamela Mensch (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2018), 11. 3 Abu Nasr Al-Farabi, Book of Dialectic (Kitab al-Jadal), edited and translated by David M. DiPasquale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2019), 12.

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4 Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press; 1990), 60. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Hegel, On Tragedy, edited by Anne and Henry Paolucci (Westport: Greenwood Press; 1962), 325. 8 Sophocles, Antigone, translated by Richard Emil Braun (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1973), 41–42. 9 Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, edited and translated by Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (London: Penguin Books; 2009), 330. 10 A slightly more literal reading might go something like, “Indeed, I think no utterance (rhēma) bad/evil (kakon) if it’s spoken profitably (syn kerdei, ‘with gain’).” Kakos can be tricky to translate into English because it spans the semantic territory of both “bad” and “evil.” 11 Anne Carson, An Oresteia (New York: Faber and Faber; 2009), 88. 12 Ibid., 92. 13 Ibid., 94. 14 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by Abigail Rokison-Woodall (London: Bloomsbury Press, Arden Performance Edition; 2017), 26, I.ii, lines 87–92. 15 Carson, An Oresteia. 16 Ibid., 98–99. 17 Ibid., 109. 18 Peter T. Struck, Divination and Human Nature: A Cognitive History of Intuition in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press; 2016), 160–161. 19 Carson, An Oresteia, 121. 20 Ibid., 124. 21 Ibid., 127. 22 Shakespeare, Hamlet, 150, III.ii, lines 81–92. 23 Carson, An Oresteia, 127. 24 Ibid., 128. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 130. 28 Ibid., 138. 29 Ibid., 144. 30 Jaques Derrida, Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 2017), 61–156. 31 Ibid., 115. 32 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, edited by Rene Weiss, third edition (London: Bloomsbury Press, Arden Shakespeare; 2012), II.iii, lines 20–25. 33 Plutarch, Greek Lives, edited by Philip A. Stadter, translated by Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1998), 74. 34 Plato, The Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, translated by Lane Cooper (Princeton: Princeton University Press; 1989), 222. 35 Carson, An Oresteia, 170. 36 Ibid., 171. 37 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, second revised edition (London: Continuum Press; 1994), 383. 38 For what it’s worth, Socrates intriguingly says of his own sophia (wisdom) that it is amphisbētēsimos hōsper onar (as equivocal as a dream). See Plato, Symposium (Indianapolis: Hackett), 175e3.

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39 For a more accurate version of this passage see Hesoid, Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, edited and translated by Glenn W. Most (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press; 2006), 5. 40 For a wonderful gloss on this infinitely intriguing passage by Hesoid, see Coulter H. George, How Dead Languages Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2020), 152–153.

6 EURIPIDES’ THE BACCHAE; OR, RECOGNITION AS RE-COGNITION

If Aeschylus’ Agamemnon taught us about the nature of events in relation to the tragic equation and Sophocles’ Electra detailed the dialectical nature at the heart of tragic impulse, then Euripides’ The Bacchae seems to be secretly talking about what we would now call the phenomenology of tragedy; in other words, just what happens to us when we, as an audience, watch a play. Once again, in The Bacchae we have a director/principal performer: Dionysus, the god of theatre; but, for the very first time, we also have a fully dimensional representative of the audience in the character of Pentheus. His journey becomes a metaphor for our journey. In many ways, this particular play becomes one of Euripides’ most profound statements on how tragedy goes about its secret work. It shows us how tragedy develops two types of sight: a “seeing through” and a “seeing double.” Both of these ocular modalities are a part of Euripides’ art of recognition as re-cognition. In this way, tragedy functions like a figurative blow to the head which leads to a whole new way of relating to the world at large. With that said, it is time to meet the god who throws the first punch. It is he who tells us:

“I reveal to mortals”; Dionysus as the visionary force of theatre There he stands smiling at us, this figure that calls himself Dionysus. He is a god. And like many of his celestial siblings, his godhead ranges over a variety of realms. He is, among other things, the god of wine, the god of theatre, and the god of ecstasy. Is such a divine portfolio the result of mere chance, or are these activities somehow secretly linked? Such questions will have to wait. Right now, this god has an axe to grind; for he is a god whom the land of Thebes refuses to recognize. Recognition is the key word here. It is an issue that has dogged Dionysus since birth. You see, he is the progeny of his mortal mother Semele and Zeus, who is his

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father. It’s that last bit that Thebes finds hard to believe. These people, who should be the last to deny him, did just that. Well, we’ll let Dionysus speak for himself: DIONYSUS  . . . Denied that I Am Dionysus, the son of Zeus. They said That Semele had been taken by a man And she only claimed it was Zeus who was To blame for the wrong doing in her bed – They thought this claim the sophistry of Cadmus, Her sisters gloated to everyone That this lie was the reason Zeus had killed her.1 Now, you remember what happened to Dionysus’ mother, Semele, yes? Cast your mind back to that warm spring day in middle school when your English teacher first introduced you to the myths of the ancient Greeks. It was on one of those halcyon days that she delicately had to discuss Zeus’s long list of “trysts” – aka rapes – with mortal women. There was Alcmene, Callisto, Demeter, Europa, Leda, Niobe, Io . . . the number of mortal women feels as though it could stretch into infinity. Well, somewhere toward the end of this list, just when your attention was no doubt flagging, came the name Semele and the sad story of her liaison with Dionysus’ father. Actually, all stories of “liaisons” with Zeus end sadly, but perhaps Semele’s is the saddest; as well as the one oft-used as a template for future fairy tales. Please bear with me as I briefly recount this tale of woe, since it has a significant bearing on The Bacchae and this whole issue of recognition. Semele’s tale goes something like this: Hera, Zeus’s wife, is – by now – well aware of her husband’s philandering ways and onto his most recent fling with Semele. Hera, being ever resourceful, disguises herself as an old crone – yes, you heard right – an old crone. I told you this myth was a first draft for future fairy tales. She befriends Semele, who eventually confides to Hera that her lover is none other than Zeus. Hera, perhaps the most psychologically astute of the gods, pretends not to believe Semele and thereby plants the terrible seeds of doubt into the poor girl’s mind. Now Semele begins to question the very validity of her lover’s claim. Zeus, unaware of Hera’s meddling, is ever-eager to please Semele and promises to grant her one wish. Whatever she wants, he will not refuse her. What does she ask for? You guessed it: for Zeus to prove he is a god by revealing himself in all his true divine glory. Zeus begs her not to ask this of him, but Semele will not rest until she knows for certain the man she loves is actually a god. And so Zeus relents. He decides to show himself during the darkest of night, bringing about a shroud of immense fog as a buffer to his divine luminescence. With all of this in place he reveals the smallest bolt of his lightning self which still pierces through the nocturnal veil of night and incinerates poor, innocent Semele. You see, no human can look upon the true nature of the gods. And so she perishes in

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the face of Zeus’s true presence. Greek myth is rife with disastrous outcomes like this. Think of Actaeon’s spying on the goddess Diana at her bath. Diana, enraged at being seen, turned Actaeon into a stag. Now the hunter becomes the hunted and is ultimately torn to bits by his own hounds. The divine, it seems, must remain hidden, on threat of death. This backstory sets the parameters of our current story, which is very much about what can and cannot be seen. But it can be terribly easy for what is proverbially out of sight to also end up being very much out of mind. This is why Dionysus arrives, to make places like Thebes fully learn what neglect of his Bacchic rituals means. Dionysus is very clear on this: There is a danger for those who neglect the hidden or, worse, who no longer believe in the hidden simply because it does not readily show itself. That way madness and catastrophe lie, along with, perhaps, Freud’s return of the repressed. Dionysus arrives when we no longer recognize certain things like the numinous. He has invented a machine called theatre that can bring such things (like himself) back to light of day, for all to see. A place where he can be “revealed” to mortals as the son of Zeus. The operative word here is emphanēs which translator Reginald Gibbons brings into English as “revealed” but can also mean to comprehend by making visible/ manifest. Dionysus, being the god of the theatron (a space in which to see) deploys a wide variety of ocular nomenclature throughout this first speech. There is phainō which can mean to shine, bring to light, be visible, make appear, or simply show; endeiknymi which can mean to prove by putting forth, putting on display, or making manifest; and deiknymi which can mean to expose to one’s eyes. All of these ocular words are deployed for Dionysus to show Thebes that he was born a god. And when he’s accomplished this, he’ll travel to yet another country to reveal himself again. It is as if Dionysus was putting on a show for Thebes, and once he is done there, he intends to take it on the road. He’s bringing his production wherever people might have difficulty seeing what needs to be seen, or more specifically, so they may see the divine in the quotidian and conversely the quotidian in the divine. He is there (aka theatre is there) to help us recognize the necessity for a kind of double sightedness, so that we might find our balance in the world at large. But more of this later. We’ll have plenty of time to tease out Dionysus’ re-cognition project. For the moment, let’s just concentrate on Dionysus’ plan, which is not that far from the one Orestes just hatched in Electra. Dionysus, like Orestes, wants to put on a little show. And why not? He is, after all, the god of theatre. And so, it makes a certain sense that, like Orestes, he would want to be author, director, and principal player in his own improvised Greek tragedy. He’s already begun by having transformed himself from a god and assumed the role of mere mortal; he’s even brought along his own personal backup chorus of bacchants from Asia Minor. They’ve become something of sensation in Thebes, having won over most of the female inhabitants who are joining him in droves. It is as if the circus came to town and everyone has decided to run off to join the show. There’s just one final audience member to win over: Pentheus.

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“I reject the sight of you.” Pentheus as recalcitrant spectator Meet Dionysus’ mortal cousin: Pentheus. He is the son of Agave, sister to Semele; they were both daughters of Cadmus, the former king of Thebes. Pentheus has succeeded his grandfather as ruler of the land. Everything you need to know about Pentheus is contained in his name, which roughly translates as “man of grief,” from the word penthos. He shares this Greek root with another famously problematic mythological character: Penthesilea, the Amazon Queen. Both are responsible for causing much grief for themselves and others. Penthesilea is killed by the hand of her lover Achilles; Pentheus, as we shall soon see, is killed by the hand of his own mother Agave. Suffice to say, theirs is a complicated grief wherein love, destruction, and denial, are inextricably entwined. This latter attribute, denial, is something Pentheus does a great deal of: he denies Dionysus, Dionysus’ bacchic rituals, and, most importantly, his very own secret attraction/ fascination with both. When he sees his grandfather Cadmus and the soothsayer Tiresias wearing dappled fawn skins, crowning their grey hair with ivy tendrils, pounding the ground with their mighty thyrsi, and generally behaving like a couple of aged bacchants, he tells them, flat out, “I reject the sight of you,” as well as all of the women of Thebes who have run off to engage in similar bacchic rituals. As far as he is concerned, these women are more interested in Aphrodite than Bacchus; it’s sex, not salvation that’s brought them to the mountaintop. The same cynicism allows him to dismiss Tiresias’s belief in Dionysus; from Pentheus’ jaundiced point of view, Dionysus is less a god and more another cash cow whose pseudo-religion Tiresias can sell to his ever gullible clientele. And so, Pentheus dismisses the whole Dionysian affair as beneath his dignity or interest. And yet . . . and yet . . . Pentheus seems just a tad too intrigued with the stranger who has arrived in the land of Thebes. He takes the time to describe this exotic fellow in such a degree of detail that it belies his outward show of indifference. This is how Pentheus characterizes the disguised Dionysus: PENTHEUS A sorcerer, a Lydian casting spells. His long blond hair perfumed, his cheeks as red As wine, his eyes with the charm of Aphrodite’s And all day long and all night, too, they say, He mingles with young girls, he promises them His mysteries of joyous rapture – but . . .2 Instead of going on, he cuts himself off and even threatens to cut off the head of this man who seems to provoke such strong feelings within him. Later, when he finally does meet Dionysus, disguised as this Lydian stranger, he remarks, “Well,

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you do have the shape/Of a man whose body women don’t find ugly.” The strange convolution of this sentence seems to mirror the convolution in Pentheus’ own soul. Once again, he will be captivated by Dionysus’ hair, as well as this stranger’s fair skin. For a brief and revealing moment he will sound more like a lover than a grand inquisitor. And so, in the realm of denial, perhaps Pentheus’ greatest effort is with himself and his own illicit desires which he refuses to recognize. He keeps them hidden, just out of sight, even from his very self. Dionysus will draw this secret out of Pentheus; it is all part of his plan. And so, Pentheus begins to resemble one of those seemingly recalcitrant audience members who foreswear all things theatrical. You know the type. Theatre has been engaged in a conversation with this sort of spectator throughout its long history, from the days of Solon to today’s right-leaning-church-abiding business man. To all of them, theatre is somewhat suspect. Why? Well, they can’t quite put their finger on it. For some, it’s just a waste of time, a bunch of make believe, or a lot of hot air; for others, it’s just not a respectable endeavor; and for a select few, it’s downright salacious and sinful. And yet they can’t help enquiring about what exactly transpires on these stages.

“The god – you claim you saw him clearly – what is he like?” theatre’s temptation; to show what we cannot readily see Pentheus is perhaps the most virulent type of anti-theatricalist. He not only rejects this mode of expression, he wants to shut it down once and for all without ever having actually seen or experienced it for himself. And yet before he does so, he wants to meet one of its perpetrators. He wants to be in a room with this stranger. He wants to be face to face with him. He wants to learn exactly what goes on in this world that he refuses to experience firsthand. He wants to at least experience it vicariously. Listen to Pentheus interrogating the disguised Dionysus, who has been captured and brought to Pentheus’ palace: PENTHEUS These mystic rites of yours – what are they like? DIONYSUS They must not be known by mortals who aren’t Bacchae. PENTHEUS How do they benefit the ones who make the ritual sacrifice?

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DIONYSUS That’s not for you to hear – although it’s worth your knowing. PENTHEUS You counterfeit a good reply, so that I’ll want to hear. DIONYSUS The rites of the god would scathe a nonbeliever. PENTHEUS The god – you claim you saw him clearly – what was he like?3 The fact that Pentheus thinks of these rites as taboo obviously makes them all the more tempting (apropos of Dr. Freud). And besides, curiosity seems to run in the family. Think of his aunt Semele, who also wanted to brush aside the veil of appearances and catch a true glimpse of this numinous world and its personages. This is a family that just can’t help themselves, just as we can’t help ourselves. Theatre attracts all of us. It calls us, draws us in, and even when we refuse it, it finds a way to insinuate itself into our imagination. This is the magnetic power of theatre. After all, we all want to see. What better place to do so than in a theatron whose very name, as we’ve noted earlier, is all about visibility. This is Dionysus’ divine invention: a way to reveal holy things without incinerating people in the process. Or perhaps, this new mode of expression will singe us in another less fatal but nevertheless essential fashion. More on this, later. For now, let’s return to Pentheus’ interrogation of the disguised Dionysus.

“He is right here” but “you cannot see him” The confrontation between Pentheus and Dionysus is one of the great scenes in all of Greek tragedy. At times, it feels like a first draft of that epochal encounter between Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ. There, too, the divine has assumed the shape of a mere mortal and, there too, the question becomes: Who can see past appearances and get to the numinous quintessence of what is before them? Pentheus can’t, Pilate can’t. Can we? Pentheus wants to know where he can find this god, to which Dionysus replies: DIONYSUS He is right here, now, and sees what I am suffering.

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PENTHEUS Where is he, then? My eyes don’t see him here. DIONYSUS He’s where I am. Because of your irreverence you cannot see him.4 Most of us go about looking, yet rarely seeing. What is the difference? Looking is passive, seeing is active. Looking, in many ways, is our default way of casually engaging with the world around us; seeing is a much more engaged mode of sudden comprehension. Why is it so hard to sustain a state of active seeing? Dionysus says it is born out of irreverence, but what is the cause of such a shallow frame of mind? One cause (among many) is simple habit; the relentless day-to- day-ness of our perennial reality deadens our sense of wonder, draining away the numinous quality of the world at large. Wittgenstein tells us, “The aspect of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.”5 Take, for example, our experience of Pentheus on stage. Well, he is not really Pentheus – he is an actor playing Pentheus. At first, we are very much aware of this. This figure walks out on stage and we think to ourselves, “Ah, that is an actor, he is playing the part of Pentheus.” But very soon, we become habituated to thinking of this actor as Pentheus; so much so, the actual actor recedes from our view, now eclipsed by the very character he plays. We no longer see the actor, only the character; and yet the actor is still there, all the time, in front of our very eyes. We still have the potential, throughout the performance, to be reminded of this fundamental dichotomy between actor and the part he plays. The author can draw our attention to this by giving the actor an aside, or the actor could make a mistake, momentarily compromising the illusion. In such moments, we are given the opportunity to see through the illusion of appearances that has been engendered by habit and get back to the truth of the matter: this is an actor. This moment of recognition is also an important epistemological moment of re-cognition. It is a kind of seeing that makes us re-think the world before us. Dionysus’ challenge to Pentheus (and, by extension, to all of us) is to arrive at this form of recognition as re-cognition, so that we can see through the habitual and right to the wondrous “thingness” of things. In a way, what Dionysus is saying is not that far from Wittgenstein’s observation, “Why should dreaming be more mysterious than the table? Why should they not be equally mysterious?”6 Pentheus just sees a world of tables, period. Dionysus sees the table and the very mystery of the universe that makes tables possible. He wants us to cultivate this sort of perpetual double vision, and so Dionysus has created the theatron not only to represent the world, but to re-present it to us in a way that we can see it anew, with fresh eyes. But more of this later; Dionysus is still not finished with his critique of Pentheus; not only can Pentheus not see Dionysus, he cannot even see himself. This is conveyed in one of the most devastating lines of the entire play:

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“You don’t know what your life is, nor what you’re doing, nor who you are” We are coming to the end of this first encounter between Pentheus and a disguised Dionysus. It began with Pentheus in power and the disguised Dionysus powerless. But ever so slowly, almost imperceptibly, the tables have been turning so that now, the roles are reversed. The disguised Dionysus, who just moments ago was the accused, now sits in judgment of Pentheus. His rather severe pronouncement bears repeating. Looking Pentheus straight in the eye, he says to this ruler, “You don’t know what your life is, nor what you’re doing, nor who you are.” It is a stunning statement. In many ways, this is what tragedy says to every audience member. We too are just like Pentheus, equally unaware of what our lives mean, where they are headed, or who it is that sits in the driver’s seat. Tragedy allows us to see those-who-cannot-see. It is a sobering tutorial, a kind vicarious pathei mathos, a learning of suffering through others. The ancient Greeks knew from the moment they sat down where Pentheus is headed: It was already foretold in myth, inscribed in his very name. Pentheus, seemingly unperturbed by the disguised Dionysus’ existential diagnosis, exclaims proudly, “I am Pentheus, Agave’s son, Echion was my father.” To which Dionysus responds, “Your name means grief, and you suited for it.” We will watch this man of grief, hyperaware of each step he obliviously takes toward his doom. The theatron allows us to see him not-see. We see this not-seeing over and over and over again until it becomes almost unbearable.

“I come here to tell” first messenger rhēsis; the aural vs. the ocular This latter point is conveyed by a Messenger who arrives to report on what is happening in the mountains. Suddenly we move from seeing to telling. The Messenger wants to know if he can speak freely about what he saw. Pentheus enjoins him to speak, and speak he does. He gives an extraordinary, surreal, dream-like recounting of spying on the maenads. It is a truly hypnotic tale which reminds us that Greek theatre may celebrate the ascension of the visual, but it still understands and honors the art of the aural. Sound remains very much an essential part of the experience of ancient Greek theatre. The old aural mode of Bardic tales lives on in the messenger rhēsis of Greek tragedy. These moments have the power to draw us even deeper into the theatrical experience. The imagery becomes so vivid it seems to go right to work inside of us, activating our imaginal resources and turning these sounds into mental images that put us in an almost trance-like state. This is the power of these sequences. Yet invariably, actors and audiences seem to always dread them, afraid they will be undramatic and nothing but a bore. Nine times out ten, however, in performance, these sequences can be amongst the most affective moments in the entire evening. Why?

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I suppose much of this has to do with the intriguing phenomenon of sound and how we experience it. It is activated in us as early as our time in our mother’s womb, long before we are even aware of our ability for sight. Even after we are born, the recognition of family members happens first through sound, since our ocular capabilities are still slowly developing. Eventually, vision will catch up and seemingly dominates our aural predisposition, but we should not underestimate the profound primal impact hearing has made on our relationship with the world at large. It remains almost magical. Sound, on a basic level, is a moving vibration that is both there and not there. Invisible, it still has the ability to envelop us, happening around us but also including us. It seems profoundly indifferent to the border between ourselves and its source and, as a result, we can easily become one with a siren, a melody, or the words of the storyteller. The sound resonates between our ears, within our head. The voice of the storyteller is registered inside us, just as our very own voice is. The experience of a storyteller’s voice is similar to experiencing our own mental stream of consciousness – both seem to be within us. This is the subjective power of sound: it collapses distance. It can make certain moments as vivid as our dreams, taking us deeper into the world of the play. This will be the first of two messenger rhēsis scenes, both functioning like trap doors, plunging us into a deeper level of the imaginal life of the text. It functions both as a drug (pharmakon) that intoxicates Pentheus and also as a magnet (magnētis lithos) that draws him to the mountain of the maenads.

“You have heard me speak but you do not do what I say.” Pentheus and Dionysus’ second encounter That is what Dionysus says when Pentheus rejects Dionysus’ plan to bring him, incognito, to the mountaintop to witness the secret rites of the maenads. It leads to an intriguing moment midway into their agōnin. It is right here, at the very center of the scene, that Dionysus emits the following: ἆ (a). A tiny sound, but on it the entire situation turns. Dodds, in his unrivaled commentary on the play, characterizes this moment in the following fashion: “The stranger recalls him with ‘a.’ This is hardly like the English ‘Ah!’ signifying resignation. It can be a gasp of astonishment or a groan of pain but it often expresses urgent protest, ‘Stop’.” Dodds then tells us, with an eloquent turn of phrase, “the question has touched a hidden spring in Pentheus’s mind, and his self-mastery vanishes.”7 This is a liminal kind of peripeteia. It is the moment that Pentheus falls down the rabbit hole of the play, the moment he will go from audience member to active performer. What follows is his brief “audition.” Under Dionysus’ spell, we learn that he wants more than anything to see these women, be amongst them, experience what they experience. Dionysus tells him all he has to do is disguise himself as one of them, as a woman, and he can easily join them without being detected. Pentheus demurs, but his secret desire ultimately gets the better of him and he agrees to go off with Dionysus and be dressed as a woman.

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Let us pause for a moment, at the threshold of this transformation, and return to a question we asked earlier: Why is Dionysus, among many things, the god of theatre, wine, and ecstasy? Is there a secret rhyme between these experiences that Dionysus bequeaths to humankind, and if so, what might it be? Certainly, one can say that the exposure to theatre and wine can lead to ecstasy. That feeling of being out of mind and out of body can, in such extremity, be a kind of momentary, induced madness. That certainly is the part of the etymology of ecstasy, but there is an even earlier understanding of what this word brings about. Ek-stasis, in this primordial setting, is the moment when things stand out. Both wine and theatre have this potential: to make things come to the fore. Think of those times when you’ve been at a party and someone you know, an acquaintance more than a friend, is very drunk. Often in such states, we gain a glimpse of another secret self emerging. We have a phrase like “so-and-so is a mean drunk,” which suggests that the alcohol brings this meanness out of the person; conversely, a very cold and aloof person can suddenly reveal themselves to be secretly warm and sentimental just after having downed one or two drinks. Theatre has the same power to lure out the secret self of a dramatic personage thanks to a series of events that can reveal the core of the character. This is what Heidegger calls the movement from seeming to being. This is part of the art of Dionysus – the ability to draw out this secret other, to see through a person, to see their dual nature, and in short, to see double. This is exactly what seems to happen when Pentheus returns dressed as woman.

“I see two suns”: being in-between and seeing double Pentheus returns. He is in the middle of his transformation, on the cusp of shifting from spectator to performer. At this juncture we are catching him in an intermediate/liminal stage. This is not that dissimilar to what happens to us when we experience a play; ever so slowly, our sense of self can dissolve to the point where we seem to fold into the very story we are viewing. Moments before we were outside the story, and now we find ourselves inside of it. Or rather, we are only aware of this shift much later, after we “return” to our previous default point of view as a spectator. It is then that we often realize we’ve experienced a swath of time where we forgot ourselves and the reality of being in the theatre, where we were momentarily enmeshed in this alternate reality, existing just on the other side of the proverbial footlights. Pentheus is poised between both worlds, leading to a kind of double sight: he sees two suns, a double seven-gated fortress of Thebes, and disguised Dionysus as both man and bull. He wonders if Dionysus has always been both bull and man, or if this is some sudden transformation. In the phenomenology of theatrical spectating, this would be equivalent to an audience member going back and forth between perceiving the person on stage as both an actor and the character. Dionysus reassures him that, “You are seeing what you are supposed to see.” This is the “gift” of theatre, reminding us of reality’s own dualities, giving us access to the

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dual nature of nature itself. In other words, appearances are rarely as stable (i.e., uniform) as we would like to believe. We give things names to stabilize them, but their reality has a tendency to exceed the singularity we wish to bestow on them. Both Pentheus and the audience have been granted access to a kind of dual vision. Just as there are “two suns” to Pentheus, there are two Pentheuses before us: Pentheus the man and Pentheus the man who is trying to be a woman. The metamorphosis is not quite complete and so we are hyperaware, which in this case means comically aware, of this fundamental division between what Pentheus aspires to be (a woman) and what he still is (a rather ungainly man in a woman’s dress). Dionysus is also in something of a dual role as both director and now costume designer, attempting to make Pentheus pass as a woman. In most productions that I have seen, this is always something of a tall order since the distance between most actors who play Pentheus and their ability to radiate femininity is something of a challenge, to say the least. As a result, in this moment the play usually relaxes into broad humor. This leads to yet another duality – this time, in tone – where what we are experiencing is both humorous and deadly serious at the same time. It’s funny because Pentheus will never pass as a woman and serious because not passing is going to get him killed. At the end of the scene, it becomes clear that it is impossible for Pentheus to make the complete transformation into the world of the Bacchae, just as it is impossible for us as an audience to ever fully enter the alternate reality of the theatre. At most, we can momentarily project ourselves into this fictive affair for extended periods of time, and then eventually return to our seats in the auditorium. This is the unstable state of Pentheus who returns, in the next scene, to the more comfortable, default role of audience member, where he decides:

“I will hide”; the supposed safety of the audience That’s Pentheus’ solution: to return to the relative safety of spectating. What happens next is related by our second Messenger, whose description of Pentheus’ plan sounds very much like Euripides’ most extended metaphor for watching a play. It begins with Pentheus, Dionysus, and the Messenger journeying up the mountains. The three look for a place where they can safely watch the maenads. Like dutiful audience members, they “were careful not to speak, nor make a sound.” They hide themselves in the grassy valley so, like audience members, they “can see without their being seen.” In other words, just what a 5th-century, Athenian audience thinks it is doing while it watches a play like The Bacchae. But Pentheus is not happy with his seat, so to speak, and seeks a better vantage point in a nearby tall-necked tree. Dionysus performs the following wondrous deed. He bends the tree so that its upper branches now touch the ground, allowing Pentheus to mount it like a horse. Then Dionysus, with equal mastery, releases the tree, allowing it to return to its proper height with Pentheus atop it. And so, Pentheus is granted a kind of God’s eye view. More importantly, he gains a sense of safety. This is a false assumption on

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the part of Pentheus, as it is for most audience members. Even at a great distance, events have a way of breaching their bounds and crashing into us. For Pentheus, this will play itself out in a literal fashion; whereas, for the audience in a theatre, this remains a more figurative affair. For now, though, everything feels at a safe remove. There is a reassuring stillness that comes from this distance. The Messenger tells us, “The high air/ was still; the leaves of all the trees were still – you would not have heard one animal/ stir or cry out.”8 And yet, the Bacchae have a way of ferreting out Pentheus’ hiding place, just as tragedy has a way of finding out its audience and attacking its imagination with the same savage intensity that Agave attacks the hiding Pentheus, tearing his forearm from his shoulder with her bare hands. It is hard for our bodies not to respond to the Messenger’s vivid description of Pentheus’ subsequent dismemberment. We feel a twinge of vestigial pain, as if our own arms had been torn from their sockets. For a moment, this pain is shared by Pentheus and us. The subsequent sparagmos (the rending, or pulling of something to pieces) happens to Pentheus’ body, but it should also happen to our psyche. This is the maximal point of the tragedy where what unfolds onstage tears apart our own way of looking at the world. The comfort of our world view, everything we hold near and dear, should be put in doubt. It should be shattered into a thousand pieces, and like Pentheus’ subsequently dismembered body, its parts scattered about the thick impenetrable woods of our once impervious philosophy of life. This is the work of tragedy: to destroy our naïve sense of security, to reawaken us to the fragility of the human condition and the indifference of the world that envelops us. It should shatter us like a hammer or, as Kafka writes, like an axe that strikes at “the frozen seas within us.”9 And what do we do with these scattered bits of Pentheus or the shattered pieces of our psyche? That is the question that now confronts us: How do we piece ourselves and our beliefs back together again in the aftermath of tragedy’s provocation? And when we do, what new image emerges from this reassembly? For tragedy is still not done with us.

“. . . First look up . . .” from Pentheus to Agave At this point, Euripides shifts from the story of Pentheus to that of Agave, his mother. This is the same mother who, according to the Messenger, just tore Pentheus to pieces in a moment of bacchic madness. She arrives triumphantly, brandishing the severed head of her son. This dramatic leap from Pentheus to Agave is not as extreme as it first might seem; in the original production, the actor who had just essayed the role of Pentheus would have just gone off stage and simply switched masks, returning to play Agave. This is an important fact to hold in our mind’s eye since the actor playing Agave would now be holding in his hands the mask of Pentheus, the role he just played, which now stands in for the decapitated head of Agave’s son. This is not the only rhyme between these characters. Agave also suffers a similar difficulty with seeing what is actually before her. In her trance-like state,

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she believes she is holding the head of a lion when, in actuality, it is the head of her son. She cannot see through her illusion to the reality underneath. Just as Pentheus could not see the god behind the man, she cannot see the man behind the animal. Once again, we return to the play’s central preoccupation, the inability of this family to recognize the essential nature of things, whether that is the divine from the human or the human from the animal. This ability to “see through” is beyond them. But how does one learn to see the two that is in one? Euripides shows us a process not unlike that of our modern psychoanalysis. This is undertaken by Cadmus, the father of Agave and grandfather of Pentheus. He becomes a kind of precursor of our modern-day healers of broken psyches. He arrives, having gathered all the dismembered pieces of his grandson’s body. The only part missing is the head, which his daughter, unknowingly, holds in her hands, still thinking it is the head of a lion. Cadmus will help Agave move from illusion back to reality in a series of very careful steps. Let’s break this down, step by step, to see what Cadmus’s process might tell us about the process of tragedy.

First step: look away After discerning that his daughter sees a head of a lion instead of the head of her son, he asks Agave to do as he says. Agave, ever respectful of her father’s wishes, complies. His first request seems simple enough: CADMUS First, look up just a moment at the sky. AGAVE All right. Why do you say for me to look there? CADMUS Is it the same, or did it seem to change? AGAVE It’s brighter than before, and seems more clear.10 Tragedy happens at the remove of the world; the spectator is taken out of the midst of their lives and given a kind of bird’s eye view of things. As a result, their vision can feel more acute, thanks to their new vantage point. Cadmus wants to know what this shift feels like to Agave.

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CADMUS And is there still a fluttering in your spirit? AGAVE I don’t know what you mean. But somehow, I do Feel more myself, my mind is different.11 From this remove, comes a distance from our daily preoccupations that can weigh us down and obstruct our figurative view of things. This is the part of the healing power of a shift in perspective. We are released from the “trenches” of our lives and ultimately offered – to continue the metaphor – a kind of “aerial view.” This distance helps us get an objective remove on our situation and will ultimately allow us to see anew. Now we are ready for:

The second step: remember While looking away, Cadmus wants Agave to cast her mind back to another time and place, far from the incidents of this particular day. This is another kind of looking, a further form of distancing, almost proto-Brecthian in intent: CADMUS To what house did you go when you were married? AGAVE You gave me to Echion – “the Planted Man,” as they say. CADMUS And in this house, what child did you bear for your husband? AGAVE Pentheus – from my union with his father.12 Greek tragedy makes a similar request of its audience. It comes at us from an oblique angle, usually utilizing the past. This past is often seen through the softening lens of nostalgia, making it a place that audiences are more or less willing to go. Greek tragedy does this by trafficking in a past made up of myths and Homeric stories, which, at first glance, seem to have little to do with 5th-century Athens.

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This is tragedy’s strategy: a kind of dramatic shell game, momentarily distracting the audience. In such moments of distraction, we often let our defenses down and are suddenly more open, more receptive, and therefore more vulnerable. In such a state, tragedy continues its work on us, unassumingly drawing little correspondences between the “then” of the play and our own “now,” secretly preparing the ground for the leap of analogy. CADMUS Now, then – whose countenance do you have in your arms? AGAVE A lion’s head – so the women said, in the hunt.13 This playing with time takes time. An analogy is often like a slow-moving stain; it can take a while before it arrives before us. It is an incremental affair: biding its time, insinuating itself in a subliminal fashion, and then, at last, making its way cautiously toward consciousness. And so we wait for the analogy to meet with our reality. In life, faced with such a disconnect, we tend to shrug, move on, and turn our attention back toward the comprehensible. There’s no time in the speed of life for such sustained contemplation. But tragedy says, wait – linger – so that we might:

The third step: look again In doing so, we move from looking to seeing. This is the power of the sustained gaze. The world wants to guard against such ocular acuity; this why it works so hard to distract us on a daily basis. But tragedy is not easily distracted. It demands that we stay seated before the problems of the world. Like a hunter, it knows to be patient. It knows how to wait for its prey. CADMUS Look again – it’s not much toil to look. AGAVE Oh! What am I seeing? What’s this I’m holding in my hands? CADMUS Look closely now, and understand better.14

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Tragedy demands this sustained gaze, for it is only through such insistent optics that things can shift from seeming to being. Theatre is the art of looking again, and in this process we magically move from passive looking to active seeing. Only then do we actually recognize what is before us. It is recognition as re-cognition. It happens over the duration of a sustained and remorseless gaze. It is optics plus time that leads to insight, which is a seeing of what has always been in sight all along. We were just too close to recognize it. Slowly, bit by bit, each time we are compelled to “look again” (compare the world of the play with our world), we realize that what we have been watching is not just the story of another, but the story of ourselves. This second look can be immensely painful. It can show us our self, or our world, in a way we would rather not see, but it is too late now. We cannot help it; the process is complete and we see the connection, whether we like it or not. AGAVE Doomed woman that I am, I see the greatest grief. CADMUS Does it still appear to you to be a lion? AGAVE No, I am doomed. It is Pentheus’s head I’m holding now.15 Perhaps this is why theōros (the spectator in the theatre) is so close to the Greek word theōria, which means theory. Both theatre and theory hold a person in a certain form of suspense until the plot or idea becomes clear to them. The Greeks add another term for the interim between looking and seeing; they call it theasthai which roughly translates as “to gawk with your mouth open.” Theasthai, for Hans-Thies Lehmann, is “the mode of seeing that underlies both theōria (theory) and theōros (spectator),” and it means “on a certain level, to marvel from a standpoint far from meaning, gawking without understanding.” And then there is the moment, the final “look again,” when all becomes evident. Perhaps we could say that the power of theatre is that it gives us the opportunity to look again, and in this second glance we catch a glimpse of something other, something deeper. We glimpse a second reality that tells us more about ourselves and the world we inhabit. This is the gift – some might say curse – of theatre: It allows us to see through things to their core, the place where things are brought to light that might otherwise remain hidden. In this respect tragedy is theatre’s most relentless form.

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The fourth step: keep looking and you will see Cadmus has brought Agave to the point where she can see through the illusion of the lion’s head to the reality of her son’s severed head in her hands, but he has still not brought her to the point where Agave sees the connection between what she sees and how what she sees has happened. She does not yet understand that what is in her hands was done by her own hands. Tragedy does not stop until everything is brought to light, no matter how painful it might be to see: AGAVE Who killed him? How did this get in my hands? CADMUS Unhappy truth, how wrong the moment when you come to us. AGAVE Speak! My heart is leaping in fear of what’s to come. CADMUS You and your sisters were the ones who killed him.16 Recognition comes in bits and starts, a trail of breadcrumbs that inevitably leads to oneself. Finally, Dionysus has his recognition. But is this god to blame? Or fate? Or just Agave? Remember Heraclitus’s observation: Character IS fate. We crush ourselves. It is planted in us at the moment of our birth. This is not as original sin, but rather a certain disposition that works itself out, like a mathematical equation, to its inevitable end. With this knowledge, we must begin to piece ourselves, our beliefs, and our world back together again. CADMUS I made a long hard search for (the scattered body of Pentheus); I bring it with me. AGAVE Has all of it – the limbs – been placed together decently? CADMUS No, not completely, for you still hold his head.17

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The process is not complete without restoring the most important piece: the mind that might someday see anew.

Contemplating the mask of Pentheus This extraordinary tableau of the actor playing Agave, contemplating the mask of his previous role as Pentheus, joins our other two iconic images of Agamemnon walking on the red carpet and Electra crying over an empty urn. Each, in their own unique way, are perfect symbols for the theatrical process. We can see how Aeschylus’ red carpet shows us the way events can bring what is hidden into light; we can see how Sophocles’ empty urn shows us the way theatre operates as a magnet drawing hidden aspects of ourselves out into the open; but what, exactly does Euripides’ image of Agave contemplating the mask of Pentheus reveal? In many ways, it is the most elusive of our three tableaux. Just what is Euripides trying to convey to us with this image? In a play about seeing double, Euripides presents us with the ultimate double image: What we see is both the character of Agave incapable of recognizing her son Pentheus’s head and, at the very same time, an actor now playing Agave who is unable to acknowledge that he holds in his hand the mask of his former role as Pentheus. Reality and illusion coexist in this very moment – the ultimate moment of seeing double. But to what end? Why? What is the point here? Let’s begin with analyzing how these two images rhyme. In both cases, neither the character nor the actor playing the character recognizes Pentheus. The character of Agave does not see that this mask represents her son; the actor does not acknowledge that this mask represents his former role. We sit in somewhat smug superiority seeing them not-see, not acknowledge this. But what about us? What are we not seeing? Could we, like the character and the actor, be blind to the fact that Pentheus might be a reflection of us? Are we not recognizing ourselves as Pentheus or, at least, a potential Pentheus? Is this our blind spot? Is this the final re-cognition that Dionysus demands? I am always struck by Queen Elizabeth's response to seeing Richard the Second. When asked what she thought of the performance she said, “I am Richard.” But shouldn’t we all recognize ourselves in Richard? Richard is us, or, at the very least, a version of what we might become. Isn’t the revelation of every play that I, an audience member, am in a certain sense Oedipus, or Hamlet, or Willy Loman, or Blanche DuBois, or any myriad of other central characters? Isn’t that the ultimate recognition of theatre, and if it is, what do their tragic ends mean to me? A recognition that we are these characters must, in the end, lead to a re-cognition of how we are currently living our lives. And so, I must contemplate the fate of Pentheus in the same way that Agave and the actor playing Agave contemplate the mask of Pentheus. I must recognize not only his features but also his fate and then, by extension, I must ask myself, “How do I resemble this man who has been destroyed? Am I like him? Or Agave? They are characters who are both alike in their inability to see – am I of their kind? Do I, a child of modernity, forget to take note of the numinous? Do I forget to recognize Dionysus? And if so, do I do so at my peril? Is

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this what happens to those who lose sight of such things?” To recognize this means to re-cognize my life. This is what Dionysus told us, way back at the beginning of the play: that he had come because he was not being recognized. This is what Cadmus concludes at the end of his last scene with Agave: “Through Dionysus this house began to see once more.” And so, we can add to Dionysus's divine portfolio: God of Recognition, inventor of the theatron, that machine of re-cognition.

Concluding observations The class sits in silence for a moment. Somewhere in the distance a siren can be heard passing by. Silence again. Finally one student says: “So I’m Pentheus? “We’re all, in one way another, Pentheus,” says another student. “How so?” “Well, for one thing, we no longer believe,” proffers a third. “In the gods?” “Or maybe we just forget,” I suggest. “Forget what?’ “The miraculous nature of things.” “Like?” “Well, take this table.” “What about it?” “What if I said it’s not a table.” “What is it then?” “An agreement amongst trillions of impatient atoms that have vowed to swarm together into the shape of a table.” “That’s not belief, that’s just science.” “But isn’t that, in and of itself, somewhat miraculous, just bordering on – dare we say it – the very edge of the numinous? Call it what you want – science, magic – this doubleness is nothing short of wondrous. Isn’t it?” “I suppose.” “There’s just one problem,” I say. “What?” “We keep losing sight of this duality.” “Which is why we need the gods,” says another student. “We do?” asks a third. “To remind us,” says the first. “And if we’re not reminded?” asks the second. “Then our world, our lives, the sheer mystery of our very being begins to shrink.” “I’m fine without seeing any of these atoms or Dionysus,” says a fourth student. “Are you? Really?”

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“Totally,” he says. “But how do you know?” I ask. “That I’m fine?” “That you’ll remain fine.” “Why wouldn’t I?” “Well, what if the material world just isn’t enough? Isn’t that Dionysus’ warning? Isn’t this what he wants us to recognize?” “And what if we could care less?” “Then it will be the ultimate undoing of ourselves and our society.” “How so?” “What do atoms do?” “Hold this table together.” “Belief in the gods are like those atoms, they hold societies together.” “You think?” “That’s what Plato thought. Without them, he worried the center would not hold. That was the great fear for these archaic cultures as they inched toward modernity.” “That what?” “That Society, without some sort of mutually agreed upon theological underpinning, would not be able to hold itself together. This is what many 5th-century Athenians were struggling with as they moved further away from their gods.” “Maybe they should,” says a student, who up to now has been silent. “Maybe they should what?” “Abandon these gods as fast as they can,” says this student. “Why?” “Why? Am I the only one here who isn’t just a little taken aback by the fact that this god of theirs, this Dionysus, out of sheer petulance, has one man torn to pieces and another turned into a snake? Maybe it’s time for a new god, or no gods.” “But why?” asks another student. “Why what?” “Why did he punish them?” “Because Dionysus has some sort of inferiority complex,” says the student. “Because,” corrects the other student, “he was not recognized.” “I’m not recognized and I don’t go around tearing people apart and turning them into snakes!” “But you’re not divine.” “So?” “So,” says the other student, “there needs to be a certain reverence in the world for the world.” “And why is that?” “Because without it things become merely things,” says the student. “And that’s bad?”

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“Yes, when things become merely things, they just get used and discarded,” says the other student. “Look at our planet; we refuse to recognize its uniqueness, its preciousness, its majesty. Instead, we exploit it, pollute it, and neglect it. So what does the planet do in return for such mistreatment?” “It fights back.” “Like Dionysus.” “This is tragedy doing its work,” I say, re-entering the conversation. “How so?” “By engendering this conversation we’re having. In tragedy, we are left to solve the problem of religion, or democracy, or the rise of legein at the expense of gērysasthai. I could go on, but our time has run out – which, believe it or not, will become the topic for our next discussion on Hölderlin and his theories about Greek tragedy.”

Notes 1 Euripides, The Bakkhai, translated by Reginald Gibbons (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2001), 46. 2 Ibid., 52. 3 Ibid., 60. 4 Ibid., 62. 5 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, edited by P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, revised fourth edition (Hoboken: Wiley; 2009), 56e, section 129. 6 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume One, edited by G.H. von Wright, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1980), 74e, section 378. 7 Euripides, Bacchae, edited with commentary by E.R. Dodds, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1986), 175. 8 Euripides, The Bakkhai, 84. 9 Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors (New York: Schocken Books; 1990), 14. 10 Euripides, The Bakkhai, 91. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 91–92. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid.

PART III

Further thoughts on form

7 TRAGEDY AS “THE METAPHOR OF AN INTELLECTUAL INTUITION” Hölderlin on the poetics of the tragic

Notes from the underground #4 The previous section of this book endeavored to show how, through a close reading of certain plays, we can catch glimpses of what our three extant tragedians believed Greek tragedy was attempting to accomplish. Through such a lens, one can also begin to see how each of these tragedians both built upon the dynamics of their peers and, at the same time, put forth their own unique points of inflection within the ongoing development of the tragic form. As helpful as such readings can be, I find that many of my students remain hungry for some sort of grand “unified field theory” of Greek tragedy. There are of course, many such theories out there as previously noted. But the days of such bold and all-encompassing theoretical explanations seem to be very much behind us. We have entered and remain within the strange, mystifying, and unyielding zeitgeist of a quantum mechanical world. This profound sense of indeterminacy has insidiously invaded all branches of our learning, making us understandably shy when it comes to putting forth any grand unifying notions. Such totalizing impulses all seem so terribly, dare I say it, “19th Century.” My students could care less about such academic skirmishes. They simply want to get closer to the deep and secret source of the Greek tragic impulse. So, what’s a poor professor like myself to do? The answer, in a word, has become: “Hölderlin.”1 “Who?” ask my students. “Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin, the great 19th-century German writer who just happened to be college roommates with two of the all-time great philosophical totalizers: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling.”

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“So he was philosopher?” “No.” “A Greek scholar?” “Not exactly.” “Then what was he?” “More like a tutor.” “At a university?” “For the child of a somewhat well-to-do-family.” “And that’s it?” “Well, he was a poet.” “Of note?” “Not during his lifetime.” “But he wrote about Greek tragedy?” “Yes.” “What’s the name of his book?” “There’s no book.” “Then what is there?” “Some notes.” “Notes?” “Yes, about twelve pages or so.” “Twelve pages?” “Maybe twelve and half.” “And that’s it?” “Well, he also translated two of Sophocles’ plays into German.” “Ah, so that’s what made his name . . .” “Actually, they were used as evidence of his . . .” “What?” “Ensuing madness.” “He went mad?” “Just after completing his translation of Antigone.” “Mad, like: momentarily mad?” “A little longer than that.” “How much longer?” “Sort of the last 30 years of his life.” “In one of those German sanatoriums like in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain?” “More like locked up in the top of a tower from a Grimm’s fairy tale.” “All alone?” “With a specially made muzzle that kept him from both screaming and speaking.” Usually at this point there is a long silence; or as Shakespeare once wrote, “No tongues. All eyes.” And those eyes are looking at me as if I  am as mad as poor Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin. I  suspect that if my students had, at that very moment, been transported into the contents of a comic book, the collective

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thought bubble floating above their heads would read something like: “And just what makes you think that this poor, unknown, crazy German poet can, in any way, capture the entire telos of Greek tragedy in twelve pages of notes!?!” I realize that all of this does not instill much hermeneutic confidence; but, for my money, Hölderlin comes closest to divining what might partially account for Greek tragedy’s inception and perennial persistence. Why is Hölderlin able to get the closest to the potential animating force of tragedy? Perhaps because he, unlike the rest of us mere mortals, is a great poet. For many, he is indeed one the greatest poets of the German language. As a result, he understands his ancient Greek compatriots on a deeply intimate level, as poet to poet. It is here that Hölderlin gains the upper hand and surpasses even the most well intentioned of university professors. Thanks to his refined poetic sensibility, Hölderlin is able to intuit how this time-based art called tragedy becomes a living, breathing metaphor for our fundamentally uncomfortable relationship with time and finitude. Is Hölderlin ultimately correct in his admittedly hermetic intuitions? As I said, it is unlikely that any “unified theory” can account for every ramification of such a highly complex and overdetermined cultural phenomenon as Greek tragedy; but, as far theory goes, his is perhaps one of the most elegant and haunting. Let’s turn our attention to the early 1800s; Hölderlin has just penned his second Greek translation and is eagerly awaiting a response from “on high” about the results of his most recent labors.

They all laughed That’s the way the story goes. We are in Weimar, Germany, the home of Goethe’s theatre. Schiller is there; he is the first to begin giggling. Goethe, never to be outdone by anyone, and least of all by Schiller, starts laughing all the louder. Their unified derision is infectious. Soon the entire company of actors, assembled to do an informal reading of Hölderlin’s translation of Antigone, is convulsed in laughter. It is the sound of every translator’s worst nightmare. The reading sputters to a halt as everyone tries to regain their composure. This is, after all, supposed to be a tragedy. But just what, in point of fact, was so funny? It seems what Schiller found amusing and Goethe so terribly wrong was the sheer literalness of Hölderlin’s translation, his desire to dig into the very roots of Greek words and retrieve their most ancient and abstruse origins. A simple line like Ismene’s “You seem to be harboring some dark secret,” becomes in Hölderlin’s translation, “You seem to color a word red” (“Du schist din rotes Wort zu farben”). This is because the Greek word for “secret,” in its oldest etymological usage, was related to an ancient Greek practice of dyeing certain fabrics. Hölderlin would explain to his publishers, “I hope to present Greek art to the public with more liveliness than usual by bringing out more the oriental that the Greek art has denied.” Hölderlin believed that the Greek language was built on an older, more primal/ Persian- inflected form of expression that was covered up by what he characterized as Sophocles’ Hesperian/Western impulse. He was searching for what he thought of

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as the dark ages of language, a foundation that a sophisticated 5th-century Athenian like Sophocles was trying to hide and refine. Hölderlin was no longer interested in the poetic edifice that Sophocles built, but rather in searching for the very soil underneath Sophocles’ linguistic foundation. The goal of Hölderlin’s translation was to break through the floorboards of Sophocles’ refined poetry and plunge his spade into the lexical muck, into those first words that the Greeks used to grasp the world in all its immediacy. In this respect, Hölderlin is not afraid to get his hands dirty. This, in a nutshell, is Hölderlin’s theory of translation. But as far as Goethe, and Schiller, and the assembled actors were concerned, Hölderlin might as well have been tracking mud into their citadel of high art. But it is Hölderlin who has the last laugh on Goethe, Schiller, and the assembled actors; time has smiled on Hölderlin’s translations and theories of Greek tragedy. They are now seen as ahead of their time – so much so that we still have not quite caught up with Hölderlin’s deep, counterintuitive inklings. He has much to tell us about the Greeks and their theatre.

Hölderlin’s intuition Hölderlin, being first and foremost a poet, puts great stock in what he calls rasches Begreifen, which literally means “quick grasping.” This comes to most of us through our intuitions. Somewhere between 1789 and 1800, Hölderlin jots down this now famous observation about tragedy, which he describes as: “The metaphor of an intellectual intuition” (“Über den Unterschied der Dichtarten).” Just what this intuition might actually be is worked out in two sets of notes; one in regards to his translation of Antigone and the other to his translation of Oedipus. These two plays, for Hölderlin, form the alpha (Antigone) and omega (Oedipus) of Greek tragedy. For Hölderlin, Antigone is the trace of the archaic, capturing a more primitive/irrational Greek past that even precedes Homer. This is a world he connects to “the East,” calling it the Oriental influence. Oedipus, on the other hand, captures the stirrings of the Greek future in reason. This fundamental shift in the culture connects to what will become “the West,” and which Hölderlin calls Hesperian. Spend time in the contemplation of these two works, and, as far as Hölderlin is concerned, you will know all you need to know about the trajectory of the Greek civilization, as well as the nature and function of tragedy. Even when we combine these two sets of notes on these two separate plays, they barely exceed 12 pages; yet they contain perhaps one of the most sophisticated (and eccentric) readings of how Greek tragedy works on us as a reader or spectator. Hölderlin, who is a poet and a thinker, writes criticism poetically, and so we must respond to his criticism in poetic fashion. Its meaning is never fully stated, but rather implied; as a result, we must use intuition as our primary guide. We will find many words and terms we know, like “rhythm,” or “caesura,” or “representation,” but these familiar words will be deployed in a wildly creative re-application to the world of tragedy. In addition to this, we will find a forest of evocative terms and phrases that are never quite defined by Hölderlin, but left to our imagination. This is a complex constellation of evocative terms that we must attempt to connect and map, like stars in a particularly impenetrable night sky. Hölderlin will speak of “poetic logic,” “the

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calculable law,” “the ungovernable thought,” “the extreme edge of suffering,” and “the eccentric orbit of the dead” where the tragic hero is “nothing but time.” As you can see, this feels more like the phrasing of a poet than that of critic. Truth to tell, I found myself having to convert Hölderlin’s prose into verse before I could fully begin to comprehend it. And so, a passage of Hölderlin’s becomes: At a moment like this man forgets both himself and the God and, in a sacred manner, turns himself round like a traitor. For at the most extreme edge of suffering, nothing exists Besides the conditions of time or space.2 As you can see, Hölderlin’s thought immediately lends itself to such vertical form of expression. Something about the space between phrases not only helps the idea of each phrase to stand out, but also helps us understand how that segment of thought fits into the larger idea that is being slowly conveyed. I proffer this as a strategy for anyone who might struggle, as I have, with these somewhat recalcitrant texts. Regardless of how one goes about working through these critical writings, once that work is done and we have allowed the words, images, and ideas to go to work on our imagination, we find the extraordinary vista of Greek tragedy opening up before us. The view is nothing short of breathtaking. Let us take a brief look.

The calculable law of tragedy which first reveals itself through rhythm The Calculable Law of Tragedy, for Hölderlin, is one of the few straightforward theories in his notes. It is, in my versification of Hölderlin’s prose: the law, the calculation, the manner in which the whole man, a system of feelings, develops under the influence of the element, and the way in which ideas, feelings, and reflections emerge in different orders.

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All this is that which we will call tragedy which develops according to poetic logic.3 Tragedy is a particular kind of development. It has, according to Hölderlin, “a living sense” that is found in what he calls the tragic transport. This is made manifest by tragedy’s rhythmic succession of ideas. It makes sense that a poet would be sensitive to the nature of rhythm in all its manifestations: not just in a verse line, but in the overall unfolding of a play. For Hölderlin, rhythm is all. It is the first law of tragedy. Hölderlin is not alone in his elevation of rhythm above all else. Ezra Pound writes, “Rhythm – I believe in an ‘absolute rhythm,’ a rhythm that is, in poetry which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed. A man’s rhythm must be interpretative, it will be, therefore, in the end, his own, uncounterfeiting, uncounterfeitable.”4 But how is this rhythm constituted in Greek tragedy? For Hölderlin, it is the rapidity of enthusiasm that certain ideas generate in the characters, which become oppositional in dialogue. Hölderlin tells us, Everything is speech against speech, which mutually cancel each other out. All to the moment of complete exhaustion. Towards a dialogue which, in its angry sensitivity, will tear apart the souls of these very listeners.5 Tragic representation becomes a continuum rather than an utterance, a current of energy that runs through the tragedy from beginning to end. This continuum is made up of the arrangement of persons in relation to one another and in the form of reason, which represents itself in the clash of opposites. This spirit of antithesis, where one idea or person is placed alongside its opposite, prompts the philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe to ponder tragedy’s relationship with the birth of speculative thought. He writes, “To what point is one authorized to say that it is tragedy, the re-elaboration of the philosophical or ‘poetic’ (Aristotelian) conception of tragedy, that furnished the scheme which is the matrix of dialectal thought.”6 Hölderlin thinks of these arrangements of persons – whether they are Antigone, Oedipus, or Ajax – as a series of differing dialectical agōnes. For Antigone, the agonal analog becomes a relay race; for Oedipus, a boxing match; for Ajax, a fencing bout. These agōnes obtain their own velocity or time signature, a distinct metabolics for the tragic unfolding.

The caesura; or, tragedy’s second law Hölderlin tells us, “rhythmic succession of ideas wherein the transport manifests itself demands a counter rhythmic interruption, a pure word, that which in metrics is called a caesura.” Of course, a poet, who gives pride of place to rhythm, would also value rhythm’s opposite: the caesura. The caesura, as you remember, is the break or pause within a metrical line of a poetry. Hölderlin elevates this brief breach of time in a verse line and expands it into a break or

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suspension within the unfolding of tragedy. But why does Hölderlin believe in the necessity of this counterforce? He tells us that the caesura is necessary “in order to confront the speeding alternation of ideas at its climax, so that not the alternation of the idea, but the idea itself appears.” Jerome Billings in his Genealogy of the Tragic explains, The caesura is the moment in which the audience gains the distance necessary to understand the wholeness of “the tragic transport” apprehending the transience of succession as secure simultaneity. The caesura offers a vision of what lies behind the “tearing alternation” depicted in tragedy, and so has a therapeutic aim, allowing for reflection amid chaos. Since tragedy represents a catastrophic change in the world depicted, it must afford a standpoint outside of that world in order for the necessity of change to become clear. In both Antigone and Oedipus this takes the form of a prophetic moment in which the tragic course of nature is revealed.7 Hölderlin designates the speeches of Tiresias as the moment of caesura in both Oedipus and Antigone: “He (Tiresias) steps into the path of fate as the guardian of the natural power which tragically removes man from his orbit of life, the very midpoint of his inner life, to another world, and tears him off into the eccentric orbit of the dead.” First we see this in Oedipus where Tiresias gives his king the following clue: TIRESIAS The Man you’ve long Been hunting, threatening and proclaiming the murder Of Laius, is here; a stranger, as people say, He dwells with us; yet soon as a native He’ll be known, as a Theban, and will not Like his fate. . . . He’ll be known, indeed, dwelling with his children, As a brother and a father, and of the wife who Bore him, son and husband, in one bed with His father, and his murderer.8 And once again, it is Tiresias who confronts Creon. This time he is much more direct; perhaps he has learned from his last encounter with Oedipus that when it comes to this family, the unambiguous route is best: TIRESIAS Now understand this: Few courses of the racing sun remain

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before you lose a child of your own loins and give him back, a corpse, exchange for corpses. You have dishonored a living soul with exile in the tomb, during a member of this upper world below.  . . . A crime of violence is being done and you are commanding it. Therefore, relentless destroyers pursue you, Furies of death and deity, they lie in wait for you now to catch you in the midst of your crimes.  . . . Consider that. The time is near.9 We see similar moments of tragic caesuras in the earlier plays we have examined. Take Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. This time the agent of the caesura’s meaning is carried out by another seer, albeit a reluctant one: Cassandra. She sees what is to come, but thanks to Apollo’s curse, no one can understand her vision: CASSANDRA Do you not see them there those young ones who nest by the door like shapes in dreams like children murdered . . . Yes, I see this and I tell you vengeance is coming – a soft lion tumbles in the master’s bed awaiting him – how little the great general understands . . . the future is coming. Soon enough you’ll pity me, you’ll say I was a true prophet.10 And so, in all these instances, we see that the caesura brings the plot into clear focus, warning the character and the audience to its potential catastrophic arc, and also attempting to shield them from what is still to come. These caesuras fall at different points in different plays and result in different rhythmic dynamics. Hölderlin attempts to diagram this, much as one might diagram where the caesura falls in a verse line. Antigone is first notated as ______/__

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Oedipus becomes the inverse of this, being notated as: ___/______. In both instances the / represents where the caesura falls in the unfolding of the drama. Hölderlin believes that where the caesura falls determines the subsequent rhythmic flow of the work. He explains that in Oedipus, the idea (the desire to know, solve the riddle) meets the resistance of the caesura early. Hölderlin asks us to think of the caesura (/) as a shield that protects the central character from meeting their end (i.e., meeting their fate). Sometimes the character is rushing to that end or fate (Creon and Antigone) and sometimes the end or fate is rushing to meet the character (Oedipus). In both cases, the caesura functions as a shield that tries to halt either dynamic from advancing, since on the other side of a caesura lies catastrophe. In the case of Antigone, the characters are hurtling toward their fate, but just before the last possible moment, on the precipice of catastrophe, a caesura is placed to protect them. They ignore it and continue on to their destruction. In the case of Oedipus, the end (fate) is rushing to meet Oedipus and arrives as the play begins. Oedipus ignores the caesura’s warning, brushes the shield of the caesura aside, and is lured on by the great gravitational force of fate, as if it were a black hole. Hölderlin characterizes this as a tearing: it grabs hold of Oedipus and pulls him toward that which awaits him. For Creon, the caesura comes quite late, but once he approaches it, he too is pulled along by its inevitable gravitational force. Hölderlin returns to his diagram, now representing the movement of Oedipus as: a c___/________b Here (a) is the caesura or the counter-rhythmical interruption, (c) is the beginning of the play and (b) is its end. From here, Hölderlin once again shows the inversion of this diagram with the movement of Antigone which he diagrams as: a c__________/____b The caesura of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon intriguingly falls right in the middle of the unfolding of the drama and would be notated as: a c_____________/_______________b What is fascinating about these rhythmic observations of Hölderlin is that he has found a way to score the actual movement of Greek tragedies.

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The ungovernable thought What is it that compels these characters to ignore the warnings of the caesura, brush aside its shield, and continue onward? Hölderlin calls this “the ungovernable thought.” He tells us, “Because knowledge, when it has broken through its limits, as if intoxicated in its own magnificent and harmonious form, provokes itself to know more than it can bear or grasp.”11 For Oedipus and Antigone, they are both drawn by nefās, a wrong that must be set right. In the case of Oedipus, this wrong dwells in finding who is responsible for the plague, which leads him to himself and his own origins. Here the ungovernable thought manifests itself in his relentless quest to know the culprit, even if that culprit proves to be his very self: OEDIPUS Let break, what must. I’ll know my family, Even if it’s base, I’ll yet discover it . . . . . . thus will I not go, Without seeking out, wholly, what I am.12 For Antigone, ungovernable thought becomes the necessity to bury her brother. She rejects Creon’s edict; for her it is nefās, not the law of gods. She explains: ANTIGONE These laws are not for now or for yesterday, they are alive forever; and no one knows when they were shown to us first. I did not intend to pay, before the gods, for breaking these laws because of my fear of one man and his principles. I was thoroughly aware I would die before you proclaimed it; of course I would die, even if you hadn’t. Since I will die, and early, I call this profit.13 This is similar to Electra’s relentless desire to set right the nefās of her father’s murder. She too will not relent, not give in: ELECTRA And I tell you, if someone were to give me all the gifts that make your days delicious,

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I would not bend. No. You can have your rich table and life flowing over the cup. I need one food: I must not violate Electra.14 In these moments the tragic hero exhibits and is driven by what Hölderlin names as Zorn, the German word for fury. It is the need to do what must be done in order to make things right, to root out nefās and burn it to the ground. It will rage like a wildfire, burning a righteous pathway right up to the heavens to confront the gods and their neglect. The tragic hero sets aside any vestige of Socratic balance and hurdles headlong into this mad, obsessive pursuit. The chorus will shake its head and avert its eyes to such mad behavior. They will call it “a self-willed passion” and the “path to ruin.” But the tragic hero persists, and in this persistence the hero comes to recognize themselves for who they truly are. Because of this, Hölderlin can write, “Thus stands Oedipus himself at the centre of the tragedy of Oedipus.” George Steiner calls this “self-recognition in fury,” and notes that it is “a concise formulation of the Jacobin-Utopian demon of revolution and revolutionary terror. Hölderlin himself had recognized himself as a spirit ‘made furious’ by inspiration and the philistine deafness of society around him.”15 Hence the dangerous structure of the scenes, where we find speech after speech, canceling one another out as it careens toward catastrophe. Made all the more dangerous because Greek tragic discourse is, “Das griechischtragische Wort ist todlichfaktisch.” This is an almost impossible concept to bring into comprehensible English. The best translators can do is, “the Greek word is factually deadly.” But what does this mean? As far as Hölderlin is concerned, words can seize a human body and kill it. He calls it “der wirkliche Mord aus Worten” which, in our English, becomes “real murder through words.” But what does this mean to us moderns? Yes, yes, words can scar or slay us in a metaphorical sense. But for Hölderlin’s Greeks, this is not a metaphor but a reality. Oracles can kill with their prophecies, Creon with his edicts. Antigone knows this. Confronted by Creon she is not afraid, though he reminds/threatens her: CREON Not that good and bad be treated equally under those laws.16 But she does not back down, does not demur. She looks at this man, her uncle, her ruler, and the decider of her fate, and says without blinking: ANTIGONE Does anyone know? Maybe, down there, all this is pure.17

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And with that outright disregard and defiance, she has sealed her own fate. Creon, pushed into a rhetorical corner and on view by a chorus of elders, feels he now has no other choice but to utter the following words: CREON If you must love somebody go down there and love the dead. I’m alive though, and no woman will rule me.18 Antigone’s seemingly irrational resolve is, according to Hölderlin, human reason passing through the midst of the unthinkable. This is an almost sacred kind of madness which is the loftiest human phenomenon. It transcends words, even the words that can kill; it becomes “more soul than language.” Hölderlin explains, “Antigone’s attitude depends partly on the superlative of human spirt and heroic virtuosity.” Here, the spirit awakens most mightily; at this moment, “one must take hold of oneself more firmly than ever, which is why one stands with their character most open.”19 It is in this instant that Antigone stands out in the open and exposes herself. Hölderlin notes that in moments of such high consciousness, the soul always compares itself with the object devoid of consciousness. He gives two examples: a land grown barren and the fate of Niobe. Two images of what is fruitless and desiccated. We are at the threshold of the dead. It is here that Hölderlin says Niobe, “counted for the Father of Time, the hourly strokes of gold.”20 The father of time is one of Hölderlin’s many names for the god Zeus, who finally makes his appearance.

The deadly embrace of gods and mortals We have reached what Hölderlin believes is the telos of the tragic representation – different from all other forms of representation since it is ultimately concerned with “that moment when god becomes wholly one with man.” Hölderlin calls this moment “ungeheure,” which means monstrous in German. It is the same word he uses to translate the polyvalent word deinos in the famous Antigone choral ode on humankind. In this moment of coupling, the monstrous becomes visible. What emerges into view is none other than Death. It is the moment when Oedipus has cornered his prey, the truth, and draws back in revulsion for what it reveals: OEDIPUS LIGHT, LIGHT, LIGHT Never again flood these eyes with your white radiance, oh gods, my eyes . . .21 Even blindness cannot stop this god who comes in the guise of a terrible truth:

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OEDIPUS I this voice of agony I am what place am I where? Not here, nowhere I know! What force, what tide beaks over my life? Pain, demon stabbing into me leaving nothing, nothing, no man I know, not human, fate howling out of nowhere what am I fire a voice. . . . Thing darkness spilling into me, my black cloud smothering me forever, nothing can stop you, nothing can escape, I cannot push you away I am nothing but my own cries breaking again and again . . .22 It is the same moment where Creon, at the end of Antigone, exclaims to all who can see that: CREON It was a god. Then, right then! Hit me, held me, heaped heavy on my head; shaken on savage paths; joy trampled; and for all men, futile struggle. . . . I and grief are blended. I am grief. . . . It leaps on me, it crushes.23 It is the same moment that Agave, at the end of The Bacchae cries out, realizing that she holds in her hands the head of her son that she tore from his body in a fit of madness. God and Agave meet in her scream of recognition: two little letters, that make up the opened vowel sound: “EI.” It is a sound with no consonant at the end to contain its pain. An open-voweled sound that can go on sounding for as long as the person has breath. In other words, it is a sound that can last a brief eternity. And on the other end of this inconsolable cry? A hollowed out acceptance, “Now I see that Dionysus has crushed us.” In all these instances, the suffering body becomes an organ for perceiving the divine. The infinite form of god can only communicate himself to the body

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through the absolute immediacy of suffering. Only then can it be comprehensibly grasped or appropriated, making itself visible. Tragedy begins to resemble a trial for heresy, wherein the unfaithfulness of the hero is punished by the god, thereby ensuring that the heavenly ones do not die out. The mortal has been engaged in what is a kind of anti-theos, behaving as if s/ he were acting against god. In actuality, however, s/he is doing the god’s bidding, because in fighting against the god, the hero gives the god renewed life. They are making that which was in fear of disappearing visible once more, bringing it back into our sight lines so that we might ultimately acknowledge and honor it. The divine does not die out; it returns to us in the guise of unbearable truths, the most unbearable of which is Time. Time, we shall learn, becomes the ultimate god.

Time as god; god as time Hölderlin tells us, “At a moment like this man forgets both himself and the God and, in a sacred manner, turns himself round like a traitor  – for at the most extreme edge of suffering, nothing exists besides the conditions of time or space.” This is the moment that tragic representation stops being the representation of something else and simply is. What is this “is”? Time. Time running out. Time draining away. Time coming face to face with fate, with one’s soon-to-be finitude. At this temporal juncture, “Man forgets himself there because he is wholly in the moment.” Because man is “nothing but time.” Time is counted in suffering, because then the heart feels the passing time much more, in sympathy, and therefore, UNDERSTANDS the simple passage of hours. Reason, contrary to our faith in it, is rarely capable of inferring the future from the present. This is the work of suffering, which feels the weight and directionality of time. The time of the tragic hero, this time which is evaporating, prefigures our time. The tragic figure’s awareness of time running out makes us aware of our own finitude which we hide away deep in the deepest recesses of our unconscious. We create whole symbolic structures to keep death at bay. But every so often, we feel the need to look at it. We can’t help ourselves – just as when we pass a mirror, we can’t help but turn to catch a reflection of ourselves, in order to remind ourselves that we are there, that we are corporeal, that we are not some disembodied “I.” Just as we consciously crave catching sight of our face, we unconsciously crave catching sight of our finitude. But only at a distance, at a certain remove, where we can feel safe. And so we invent stories about other people’s finitude. This brings us back to Hölderlin’s cryptic observation that Greek tragedy is “a metaphor for an intellectual intuition.” Hölderlin ties this intuition to time, or perhaps more specifically to time running out. To help us tease out the full implication of Hölderlin’s observation, let us turn to three Greek words: hora, Hera, and hero. These three terms share a certain lexical affinity and can nest neatly into one another like a set of Russian dolls. Hora is the Greek word for “season, seasonality, the right time, the perfect time.” Gregory Nagy, the great Greek classicist, tells us that hora “stood for the natural time, in a natural life-cycle. The English word for hour is derived from ancient Greek hora,

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as in the expression, ‘the hour is near.’ ” Hera is the Goddess of hora, Nagy explains, “she was the goddess of seasons, in charge of making everything happen on time, happen in season and happen in a timely way.” Nagy draws a direct line from hora through Hera to hero, telling us: “As we will see, the precise moment when everything comes together for the hero is the moment of death. The hero is ‘on time’ at the hora or ‘time’ of death. . . . So death must be the defining moment of reality for the hero . . . since the hero must ultimately achieve the moment of perfect death. And such a perfect moment must be recorded in song, which brings kleos, or ‘glory.’ ”24 The very embodiment of this concept is Herakles, who carries the echo of each of these words in his name. Herakles literally means “he who has the kleos of Hera,” a fact which will be realized at the time of his death. Perhaps this is why Herakles was such a central character for the Greek tragedians. His name and very life story encapsulates a movement toward Hera, the goddess of time made ripe. Here the story and its hero are one. Both are hurtling toward the same end, since the end of the story is the end of Herakles. This sense of time coming-to-its-end becomes louder and louder as we move through the story of this tragic protagonist. Remember, the Greek audience knew the rudiments of the myth they were to see on stage; they knew its end and were therefore awake to its inevitable approach. In this respect, we sense time and its terminus as it draws both the hero and us toward its inexorable conclusion. Hölderlin calls this growing awareness of the advancement of time the highest form of consciousness. But this advancement of time, according to Hölderlin, is not calculated in minutes, but rather in words that eventually sputter out and give way to absolute silence. Here, silence equals death. And so, when Hölderlin tells us that Greek theatre is “a metaphor for an intellectual intuition,” that intuition is the consciousness of the approaching end of our allotted time. Here, god comes to us as time, the time of finitude, which is always approaching. This is how he makes himself visible, how he makes us aware of his inescapable presence. Hölderlin writes, “at the most extreme edge of suffering, nothing exists besides the conditions of time and space.”25 Greek tragedy brings us in close proximity to our mortality, to the moment when we are reminded of our finitude; where we, time, and space become the only constants and everything else merely passes through these three a priori categories. In this respect, Greek tragedy is the most sobering art.

Concluding observations This was a conversation I  overheard from my students during a break from our Hölderlin lecture: “This idea of language running out,” says a student, “reminds me of an old Jewish superstition that says all of us are allotted only so many words for a lifetime and when we reach our limit, we shuffle off this mortal coil.” “No doubt invented to make sure we think before we speak.”

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“Isn’t there an old proverb that says something like that?” “Yeah: ‘Don’t speak unless you can improve silence.’ ” “They say the average human is estimated to speak over 860 million words in a lifetime.” “That doesn’t actually seem like very much.” “You mean you just reach the end of your 860 millionth word and then according to your superstition – ” “Poof. Game over. You’re gone for good.” “Which is even worse for a Greek tragic character.” “Why?” “Because we always find them in . . . what’s it called?” “Medias res.” “What’s medias res?” “In the middle of the plot.” “Right.” “And the audience knew all the plots in advance.” “Right.” “So they would have known how far along a tragic character was in terms of his or her story.” “Right.” “So they would have been hyper aware that those characters only had so much time left.” “More like time running out.” “Except instead of grains of sand in an hourglass it would have been words falling from their mouths –. ” “Like dead leaves.” “Who said that? Homer?” “Me.” “I still don’t get this idea of tragedy as a metaphor for an intellectual intuition. An intuition of what exactly?” “Our finitude.” “Our what?” “Our death.” “Tragedy reminds us that the clock is ticking.” “That there’s only so much time left for us, before it all runs out.” “So the question you leave the theatre with is: ‘what are you going to do with this gift of time that’s been bestowed upon you? What are you going to do with it before it’s gone?’ ” “Speaking of time,” I say, as we resume class, “we’ve reached the end of The Bacchae and with it, the end of the golden age of Greek tragedy.” “So we’re done?’ “Almost.” “What’s left?”

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“Fragments.” “And what can they tell us?” “What indeed . . .”

Notes 1 There are several immensely helpful glosses on Hölderlin and his theories of Sophocles and tragedy. Perhaps the best and clearest introduction to this writer and his thought can be found in Dennis J. Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks; Tragedy and Ethical Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 2001). There is also George Steiner’s helpful commentary in his Antigones (New Haven: Yale University Press; 1996), and, for those with a penchant for French theory, there is a wonderful chapter in Philippe LacoueLabarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 1989). 2 Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, edited and translated by Jeremy Adler and Charles Louth (London: Penguin Books; 2009), 324. 3 Ibid., 317. 4 Ezra Pound, Early Writings: Poetry and Prose, edited by Ira B. Nadel (London: Penguin Books; 2005), 397. 5 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 323. 6 Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, 214. 7 Jerome Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press; 2017), 204. 8 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 320–321. 9 Sophocles, Antigone, translated by Richard Emil Braun (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1973), 62–63. 10 Anne Carson, An Oresteia (New York: Faber and Faber; 2010), 55–56. 11 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 323. 12 Ibid. 13 Sophocles, Antigone, 39. 14 Carson, An Oresteia, 103. 15 Steiner, Antigones, 97. 16 Sophocles, Antigone, 41. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 42. 19 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 327. 20 Ibid., 328. 21 Sophocles, The Complete Sophocles, Volume One, edited by Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro, translated by Stephen Berg and Diskin Clay (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2011), 269. 22 Ibid., 275–276. 23 Sophocles, Antigone, 71–72. 24 Gregory Nagy, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24  Hours (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 2020), 32. 25 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 317.

8 AMONG THE RUINS What the fragments can tell us about Greek tragedy

Dramatic detritus; or, in the lost and found of Greek tragedy What if fate had not been kind to Shakespeare? What if it took from us his Hamlet? What if all that survived was one speech? What if “to be or not be” was all that was left to us? Such is the sad fate of Euripides’ Bellerophon. Is Bellerophon Euripides’ Hamlet? We will never know, since we only have a handful of tantalizing fragments like F285: BELLEROPHON I myself say – in fact it’s a common refrain everywhere – that it’s best for a man not to have been born. He has three estates, of which I shall be judging one superior; and they are wealth, noble blood, and poverty; that’s the complete count I put forward. The very wealthy man, but without the fortune of birth, is miserable, yes, miserable – but it is a splendid misery when his hand opens up his treasure house for his delight; yet when he goes outside it, despite his wealth during the time before, he falls under folly’s yoke and suffers hard. Then, the man with proud and noble blood who lacks a living, has the fortune of his birth but poverty makes him inferior; his thoughts inside are misery and shame makes him reject manual work. The absolute nobody however, in his misfortune to the end, is superior in as he is unaware that he lacks well-being, since he is always in misfortune and distress. So it is best not to have experienced good things. For that’s what I remember, what I too once was like among men when my life was fortunate . . .1

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This being the tragedy of Bellerophon, one cannot help but wonder if it included Bellerophon’s mad attempt to scale Heaven on the back of his winged horse Pegasus? Or did the tragedy begin after Pegasus threw him off, sending him tumbling back to earth, crippled and embittered? What we know of the play is based upon 30 or so fragments drawn from books that quoted a line here, a line there. This is only one of the many ways these works come down to us. Some complete and extant texts like Oedipus Rex or the Oresteia are saved, no doubt, because of their immense cultural cache. Some have been saved by dumb luck: we have Euripides’ Hecuba, Helen, Hercules, and Hippolytus because this volume of Euripides’ work somehow managed to trick fate and survive. Some have been saved by the desert which has always been kind to papyrus, thanks to the climate’s resolute dryness. Some have been collected by ancient grammarians who used a phrase or two from the ancient tragedians and preserved them in their voluminous instruction manuals, not necessarily for their literary significance but rather as interesting examples of creative or improper use of syntax; we have a significant amount of extant plays by Euripides, not because he was popular on the stage (at least not during his notorious lifetime), but rather in the classrooms of the Hellenistic Age where rhetoric was studied. Finally, some have been saved since they were used to wrap mummies that were subsequently exhumed. Much of Menander comes to us from the middle-class mummies of Egypt who could only afford to be wrapped in the cheapest materials; in this case, with the pages torn from discarded copies of comedies. We could say that Meander was figuratively and literally resurrected thanks to such practices. Should we lament the disappearance of this immense body of work? Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were believed to have written over a hundred plays each, not to mention all the other works by their rivals. Rather than mourn this loss, we can choose to appreciate the tantalizing effects the surviving fragments have on our imagination; as well as what they can still tell us about the actual and extraordinary range of the tragic corpus, which suggests much more variety than one might have suspected from reading Aristotle’s Poetics. These fragments come in all shapes and sizes. Some are intact like Sophocles F843: What can be taught, I learn; What can be found, I look for; What can be prayed for, I beg of the gods.2 Others are in tatters, reading more like they came from the pen of E.E. Cummings than from our three extant Athenian dramatists. Take, for example, Euripides’ Erectheus, F102–117 where only the beginning and ends of verse lines survive: . . . Demeter. . . . not to be uttered . . . . . . who is to become . . . toil . . . . . . marrying . . . from holy . . . . . . and one . . . from Hermes . . . . . . and the . . . Kerykes . . .

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. . . for the Hyades . . . But restrain . . . . . . stars . . . piteous . . . cry out . . . . . . of Deo . . . and the things . . .3 Time’s voracious appetite for papyrus creates a veritable new work. But even amongst the ruins of all this, we can sense the grandeur of the tragic endeavor. We can find this in an array of surviving gnōmai. These are quotable maxims or proverbs that go on to have an independent existence from the tragedies that first housed them. Like certain choral odes, they are instrumental to the unfolding of the tragedy, but also enjoy a life beyond the work; lingering just like those melodies. They live on the lips of audiences long after much of the rest of the play has receded from their memory; repeated when the appropriate occasion arises; passed from generation to generation. These include such insights as: My spirit, once reached the heights of heaven, now it’s fallen back to earth. Learn not to give much faith in anything human. Aeschylus F1594 A man is but breath and shadow. Sophocles F135 Life sways, and fortune sways, as the wind blows. Euripides F1536 And then there are simpler, more prosaic pleasures, found in fragments like this one from Sophocles: What greater joy could you obtain than this: that of reaching land and then under the roof hearing the heavy rain in your sleeping mind.        (F636)7

Long lost and lesser known And what about the others? Ion? Achaeus? Neophon? Aristarchus? Theognis? Diogenes of Athens? Critias? What about these rival tragedians who vied for glory during the golden age of tragedy in 5th-century Athens? Even less exists to work with; but, in many cases, what remains is no less tantalizing. Many of these fragments have also come down to us as gnōmai, finding their final resting place in such books as those of the lexicographer Pausanias or the anthologist Anthenaeus. Such scholars collected a variety of these phrases, many of which leap from the page and directly into our imagination; take, for example, this startling statement from an unknown play by Philocles: “he would not desist from eating brains” (F5).8 Or this piece of quasiHomeric humanity, from Astydamus the Younger, where Hector says to a nearby servant: “Take my helmet, please, so that the boy is not freighted” (F2).9 Or this

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beautiful and evocative stage direction from Phrynichus’ Alcestis: “Death enters with a sword, with which he cuts off a lock of Alcestis’ hair.”10 We even have an entire soliloquy of Medea, by the tragedian Neophon which was saved for a treatise entitled On Anger: MEDEA (Speaking to her children) Out of my sight, boys! Get away from here! For by now a murderous madness has already sunk deep within my heart. Oh hands! My hands! What sort of deed is this to which we are stealing ourselves! Ah! I am wretched even in my daring. I who now set out to destroy my long travail in a short moment.    Neophon (F2)11 Many of these shards survive because they seem to conform to the demands of tragedian Dionysius who in his sixth fragment insists, “Either say something better than silence, or keep silent.”12 These bits and pieces of wisdom are heard over the din of silence, still thrumming with something to say, something to remind, warn, console, or puzzle us. Take this observation from the great Agathon: “Only one thing is probable: that many improbable things happen to humans.”13 Of all the names of all the rival tragedians, this one name may strike a distant chord in your memory. In his day, this Agathon was often mentioned in the very same breath as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. He was known to one and all as “the beautiful Agathon” for both his stunning good looks and his felicity with words. He is perhaps best remembered for being the impetus behind Plato’s Symposium, which, you may remember, begins as a banquet in celebration for Agathon’s first victory in the dramatic competition of Lenaea. Only some 34 fragments remain from this wunderkind who was so highly regarded in his time. His fifth unidentified fragment tells us, “For the gods are prevented from doing just one thing: undoing that which has already been done.”14 Let us hope, in this case, that Agathon is wrong and someday the theatre gods will restore a lost play of his to us. Until that time, we can only dream of what this innovator’s work might have been like.

When you wish upon an ancient papyrus, part 1: piecing fragments back into scenes Here are a handful of fragments which are all that is left of Ion of Chion’s The Guards. The title and a supposed conversation between Odysseus and Helen seem to suggest that this lost play dealt with an episode late in the Trojan war where Odysseus entered Troy disguised as a beggar. Legend has it he was recognized by Helen who kept his true identity a secret. In Homer’s Odyssey (4.240), we learn that after Helen recognized Odysseus she brought him to her private chamber where she bathed him, exchanged his rags for a Trojan disguise, and allowed him to

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escape. These fragments are culled from several disparate philological sources, but they begin to give us a vague sense of what Ion of Chion might have done with this tantalizing material. And how did the stranger reach the marital chamber? Frag. 43b (Heorodia, General Prosody) And now a veering wind has moved me to fear. Frag. 43c (Heorodia, General Prosody) He (she? It?) keeps silent but loathes him (me) yet with his . . . Frag. 44 (Scholia on Aristophanes) And hark, the cockerel crows. Frag. 45 (Athenaeus, The Sophist’s Dinner) Snow White Helen. Frag. 46 (Hesychius Lexicon)15 Who spoke these shards of dialogue? The director in me can’t help but fashion a scene between Helen and Odysseus: HELEN (To the Guards) And how did the stranger reach the marital chamber? The guards explain. She listens and then asks to be left in private with the stranger who she knows is none other than Odysseus in disguise. The guards, against their better judgment, grant Helen’s request. Who, after all, can say no to Helen of Troy? And so Odysseus and Helen are left alone. One can imagine the awkward silence that ensues. How much is said before Helen provocatively suggest she bathe him? How much convincing does it take for Odysseus to relent? And what do they talk about while she washes away the dirt of his disguise? We just don’t know. But at some point, I imagine, Fragment 43c transpires: ODYSSEUS And now the veering wind has moved me to fear . . . She assures him that she will not reveal his true identity, she clothes him in the garb of a Trojan and gives him directions for his escape. Having done so, she smiles, and acknowledges:

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HELEN He keeps silent but loathes me, yet with his . . . What? With his what? We will never know. All we have is Fragment 45: ODYSSEUS And hark, the cockerel crows. It is time for him to take his leave of her. She guides him to a nearby exit and just before he is about to depart, he turns, looks in her eyes, and says Fragment 46: ODYSSEUS Snow White Helen. And with that, he is gone. You see how tempting these fragments can be? They practically compel you to dream between their surviving lines.

When you wish upon an ancient papyrus, part 2: piecing fragments back into whole plays If I  could wish back into existence just one lost play of the ancient Greeks it would be Euripides’ Protesilaus.16 This figure, like the play that is named after him, has all but receded from our collective memory. And yet, for the ancient Greeks, he was a major figure, worthy of his own temple built by his devoted followers in Elaeus (the southern end of the Hellespont near the southernmost point of the Thracian Chersonese). We are told by Pausanias, who cites the author of The Cypria, that Protesilaus had a central role to play in this long-lost prequel to The Iliad. You can find passing mention of him in Homer’s voluminous list of men and ships, a section one tends to – understandably – skip. So what is so significant about this lost soul that he is honored by Homer and the people of Thrace? You see Protesilaus, according to Apollodorus’ Library, has the singular distinction of being the first Greek to be slain on Trojan soil, felled by Hector’s mighty spear. We learn in Hyginus’ Fabulae that an oracle had informed the Acheans that the first Greek whose foot would touch the sands of Troy would also be the first to perish. When the fleet had reached its destination, all held back save for Iolaus, the son of Iphiculus and Diomedea. He was the first to leap from his ship and was summarily killed by the valiant Hector. From then on he was called Protesilaus (prōtos = “the first”; läos/laus = “the people”). Lucian, in his Dialogues of the Dead, gives us a sense of the dramatic possibilities of this story with an exchange between Protesilaus and Pluto. In this brief but evocative scene

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Protesilaus implores the god of the underworld to grant him just one day and one night back on earth to spend with his newlywed wife. PLUTO Have you not drunk, Protesilaus, from the waters of Lethe? PROTESILAUS Deeply have I drunk, my lord, but my affliction was too strong. PLUTO Then be patient; in time, she will join you here; you won’t have to go up there. PROTESILAUS I cannot bear to wait. You’ve been in love yourself, before now, Pluto, and know what it is like.17 Persephone intervenes, as she once did for Orpheus and Eurydice, and Protesilaus is granted a 24-hour reprieve from the land of the dead. Hygenius tells this same story but from the point of view of Protesilaus’ wife, Laodamia. In this version she, upon learning of her husband’s premature death, prays to Persephone and is granted 3 hours with her now spectral husband. Hygenius summarizes what ensues in the following fashion: When Laodamia had used up the three hours with her husband that she received from the gods, she could not endure the suffering and pain. So she made a waxen statue in her husband’s likeness and put it in her chamber under the pretense that it was a religious statue and began to worship it. Early one morning a servant of hers brought her some fruit for her sacrificial offering. He peered through the crack in the door and saw that she was embracing and kissing the statue. Thinking that she was keeping a lover, he reported it to her father who burst into her room, discovering her with the wax statue of her late husband. In order to prevent her from prolonging her torture, he ordered that a pyre be built and that the statue and the sacred objects be burned. Laodamia, unable to endure the pain any longer, threw herself on the pyre and was consumed by the fire.18 You can see why this story might capture the imagination of Euripides. How did he develop such rich material as this? We have a handful of fragments to attempt to reconstruct what might have dramatically unfolded. We know the god Hermes

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was involved thanks to fragment 646a which seems to instruct Protesilaus to “Just follow me as I guide you.” Did Protesilaus arrive just after his effigy was burned, or did he come to inhabit it for his brief time with his wife? We do not know. But we can surmise, thanks to fragments 647–648 that Protesilaus and Laodamia’s father had some sort of dramatic encounter. Fragment 647 seems to suggest that Protesilaus is addressing Acastus, his father-in-law, since he says, “You are rightly called my father-in-law, since you settled your daughter on me.” Fragment 648 is probably part of Acastus argument in response to Protesilaus presence, since he says, “For it is unlawful for one who is polluted to be in contact with the house.” Perhaps, Protesilaus attempts to maintain his composure during this confrontation, uttering the hard won wisdom of fragment 654, “When two men speak and one of them is incensed, the other is wiser not to combat his words.” It may very well be that Laodamia is also present for this altercation between the ghost of her husband and her father, perhaps it is she who speaks fragment 649: “He has suffered such things as await you and everyone.” Perhaps fragment 650 is her father’s rebuff, “What you have said is nothing strange, that a mortal should suffer misfortune.” But, it seems, Acastus’ heart softens to their plight, provoking him to exclaim fragment 652, “O children, how you can beguile men’s hearts!” And, in the end, it must be Laodamia and Laodamia alone who speaks fragment 655: “I shall not forsake a loved one, even though he is lifeless.” And what are we to make of the disturbing fragment 656 which seems to cry out, “. . . ing my throat or throwing myself from a well-head . . . recess (and) spring water. . . .” Is this Laodamia about to plunge into the flames? Or already part of the fire? Is fragment 657 the final words of the drama? And if so, who tells us, “Anyone who puts all women together and blames them indiscriminately is foolish and not wise. There are many of them, and you will find one bad while another is of noble character as this one was.” Surly “this one” must be the loyal and loving Laodamia. And so, you begin to see the challenges that face those who collect these fragments, patiently attempting to re-member them back into the shape of a Greek tragedy, much in the way Cadmus attempts to piece back together the torn body parts of Pentheus.

“I credit everything to fortune” (FR. 61d); re-membering a lost trilogy by Euripides The three plays that make up this Euripidean trilogy function like three dramatic snap shots of the Trojan war. The first play of the cycle is Alexander which takes place a decade or so before the outbreak of the Trojan war. This play is followed by Palamedes, which takes place right at the war’s midpoint. Finally, there is the extant The Trojan Women which makes up the last play of the trilogy and chronicles the immediate aftermath of the war. A testimony has come down to us with the basic plot line for Alexander. Alexander, for those who may not be up on their Homeric minutiae, is an alternative name for Paris. You remember Paris, the fellow who ran off with Helen, resulting in a little thing called the Trojan war. The play begins with a prologue where we learn of the terrible dream that came to Queen

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Hecuba. In it, she caught sight of a strange and frightening firebrand. Cassandra, her daughter, interpreted this as meaning that her brother Alexander/Paris would be the cause of the downfall of Troy. King Priam, rather than writing this off as a sign of sibling rivalry, takes this prophecy for truth and gives Alexander/Paris to a Huntsman. The Huntsman is tasked with taking the infant from the safety of the palace and leaving it abandoned in the wilderness to die of exposure. This Huntsman, like many of his future fairy tale brethren, is constitutionally ill-disposed to disposing of unwanted children, royal or otherwise. He decides to take on the child as his own, keeping its true identity from his family, his fellow arcadians, and the child itself. The boy is subsequently raised far off from any danger. His young life passes, uneventfully, until the day he decides to try his luck at the athletic games taking place in what fragment 41a calls “. . . famous Ilium. . . .”19 So much for the backstory of Alexander. This brings us to the first episode of the play proper. Fragment 42 tells us, “time’s foot” has “moved on.”20 Queen Hecuba enters after yet another troubled night’s sleep, after all these years, she is still in mourning for her lost child. The chorus responds, “One should not lament old troubles with fresh tears.”21 Besides, there are new troubles to concern oneself with, namely the arrival of a stranger who has been participating in the games and winning every match, becoming a potential rival to her son Hector. This becomes the crux of the ensuing play. What to do with this stranger, the secret Alexander/Paris? How can Hecuba and Priam allow a country bumpkin to potentially trump their princely son? Perhaps it is Priam who comes to the following conclusion of fragment 54: Wealth and excessive luxury, it turns out, are a bad sort of training for manliness. Poverty is a misfortune, but all the same it rears children who are better at working hard and get things done.22 The testimony tells us that Priam demands an audience with this stranger. Let’s imagine that Alexander/Paris speaks fragment 55: “Wealth is unjust and does many wrongs” and goes on to voice fragment 56: “My lord, slander is a terrible thing for men. Often a man is disadvantaged by ineloquence, losing out to an eloquent one even though his case is just.” Keep this line in mind as we move through this trilogy of plays, along with fragment 60 which was most likely voiced by Priam himself: Time will show what you are; by that evidence I shall learn whether you are a man of worth or not.23 Here, we catch our first sighting of what was most likely intended to be the thematic motif of Euripides’ entire trilogy. The games resume and the stranger, Alexander/Paris, continues to prove himself the victor. Fragment 62a has the chorus set the ensuing scene:

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CHORUS (And now I see) Hector (here), (coming) from the exertions of the games, with his brother – your two sons – and they have fallen into dispute. . . . DIEPHOBUS (And how) brother Hector, can you not feel anguish, when you have been robbed prizes (by a slave). HECTOR You (are needlessly distressed?) Diephobus. Why do I need (tofeel angry/dispirited)? This is not an occasion for tormenting our spirits.24 Maybe this is the case for Hector, but not for his mother, who simply cannot abide the indignity of her noble son’s losing to this lowly stranger. What is a Queen to do but plot the stranger’s murder? She attempts to enlist her son Diephobus in the act: HECUBA . . . that he, being who he is, should be admired by the Trojans, and Priam’s house (not) be honored (by) victory! DIEPHOBUS How then (can we arrange matters?) so that they will turn out well? HECUBA . . . he must die by (my or your) hand.25 What happens next? We have the tail end of fragment 62d where Alexander seems to enter asking, “Where . . . Hecuba, tell (me) . . . the victory song. . . .”26 And then? Nothing. Or rather, a handful of incoherent fragments that yield nothing. No true sense of what their ensuing encounter might be. We must turn back to the dry testimony to learn: “When Alexander arrived, Cassandra became possessed and recognized him, and prophesied about what was going to happen; and Hecuba tried to kill him and was prevented. The man who raised him arrived, and because of the danger (to Paris) was compelled to tell the truth. Thus Hecuba rediscovered her son. . . .”27

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Now we arrive at the final episode. Priam is confronted, once again, with making the same choice that was chronicled at the very beginning of the play. Should he attempt to kill his son a second time? Or should he let his son live? Certainly, if fate let the boy survive the first time, it must be telling Priam something. But what? Priam, in this moment, makes a fatal error and believes that fate is benevolent, that fate saved his child, because his child was innocent. Why save him if this were not the case? This is how Priam misreads fate. Not seeing that fate has an agenda beyond a father’s love. The boy, in fate’s eyes, is needed to start a war. The war must happen. The boy must live so that so many others can die. The ending of the play reminds us that no one escapes fate’s ultimate wishes, and that those wishes rarely have our happiness in mind. It is around this moment that fragment 61d must have been uttered. It is attributed to the chorus who exclaims, “I credit everything to fortune.” Little do they know that it is fate, rather than fortune, that is at work here and throughout the trilogy; but more on this later. For now, let’s move to Palamedes which follows on the narrative heels of Alexander. Palamedes is famous for many things: the invention of the alphabet, dice, and – perhaps most famously  – his outsmarting of Odysseus. You may remember this mythic scene. Odysseus is plowing his field backward to convince everyone that he is mad and therefore unfit to join in the Trojan War effort. It is Palamedes who tests Odysseus’s sanity by throwing his infant son, Telemachus, before the plow. This stops Odysseus in his tracks and proves to all that he is in his right mind. Odysseus never forgives Palamedes for this ingenious trick and takes his revenge some seven years later, as recounted in this play by Euripides. Here, we find that Odysseus has planted Trojan gold beneath Palamedes tent. Its subsequent discovery suggests that Palamedes has been in the treasonous employ of the Greek’s enemies. What follows is a makeshift trial where Palamedes must defend his innocence against the accusations of Odysseus. It is at this juncture that fragment 60, from Alexander, bears repeating: “Time will show what you are; by that evidence I shall learn whether you are a man of worth or not.” This was the central issue of Alexander, and now for Palamedes as well. He stands before his fellow warriors, on trial for treason. Time, in the case of Alexander, revealed the stranger to be none other than Paris, the supposedly dead son of Priam and Hecuba. They were going to kill him and then they learned of his true self. Will the Achaean soldiers who now sit in judgement of Palamedes learn the truth, learn of his innocence? Will they make the right hairesis/choice? Because, isn’t that what it has all come down to? Making the right, informed choice. Priam made a choice that he thought was the right one, but fate had other plans. Fragment 579, which is attributed to Agamemnon and thought to be directed at Palamedes, tells us: “Long, long indeed have I wanted to question you thoroughly, but my time prevented me.”28 Now, Agamemnon has the time to sound out this man who says he is his friend. Palamedes, according to a testimony that has come down to us, will defend himself; the following fragment seems to be part of this opening argument:

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PALAMEDES I invented writing for men’s knowledge, so a man absent over the ocean’s plain might have good knowledge of all matters back there in his house, and a dying man might write down the size of his wealth when bequeathing it to his sons, and the receiver know it. And the troubles that afflict men when they fall to quarreling – a written tablet does away with these and prevents the telling of lies.29 But all this is for naught. Odysseus ultimately carries the day and Palamedes, despite his innocence is found guilty. This brings us back to fragment 56 of Alexander, “My lord slander is a terrible thing for men. Often a man disadvantaged by ineloquence loses out to an eloquent one even though his case is just.” This, you will remember was most likely said by Paris but it could now, just as easily, be said by Palamedes in relation to the wily Odysseus. Nothing survives of their fatal encounter, or the decision – we just know that Palamedes was summarily stoned to death. And so the Achaeans, like Priam, have made the wrong choice. Priam at least was allowed to live, for a while, in blessed ignorance of his error; the Achaeans are less fortunate; they seem to learn of their fatal mistake almost immediately. How else to explain fragment 588 which is attributed to the chorus: “. . . you have killed, you have killed, O you Danaans, that all-wise nightingale of the Muses, that harmed no man.”30 But it is too late. The Achaeans have made an irrevocable mistake (hamartia). We have one more play left. What choice awaits the characters of the final part of this increasingly sobering trilogy? Time has been kindest to the last play of this trilogy, The Trojan Women, which it bequeaths to us virtually untouched by its otherwise indifferent passage. It is one of the most produced of Greek plays. We know it in pure isolation, standing alone for all these years, but what happens when we return it to the framework of this particular trilogy? What does this new context reveal? What begins to stand out, thanks to the powers of association that run from play to play? What might the first of these thematic rhymes be? Let’s begin with Hecuba or, to be more exact: the lamenting Hecuba. That is how we discovered her at the beginning of Alexander, and that is how we find her some 10 or so years later. Hecuba’s woes have only increased: She has lost her husband Priam, her daughter Polyxena, and all her sons. Zeus, or some unknown force that she has no name for, has not been kind to her. And yet mid-way through the play she appeals to this power: HECUBA O you who somehow cup the whole earth Yet have your seat upon it, you boundless mystery Called Zeus, whether you are a fixed law of Nature Or man’s Mind – whoever you are, I invoke you;

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For walking your own way in silence you guide the tangled Affairs of men toward the path of Justice.31 Is that what is happening here? Throughout this trilogy, a boundless mystery, that for simplicity sake we call Zeus, is leading human kind, silently, secretly down a path. And where does that path lead? Is it indeed toward justice? Or just death and destruction? These are the questions that have been piling up as we work our way through this implacable trilogy that leads us to one final, penultimate rhyme. One last hairesis. In the first set of choices, Alexander was granted life and Palamedes death, radically different outcomes, alike only in that both were wrong and lead to more death and moral decay. And now? One final decision. What do with Helen. It is she who now is about to come before us, the cause of so much collateral woe. Should Menelaus kill her on the spot or not? This is the remaining question of the trilogy. But first, we must have another impromptu trial, like the one between Palamedes and Odysseus, only now it will be between Hecuba and Helen. Poor Hecuba, she believes she has right on her side, and that the right is self-evident. She has forgotten what her own son warned in the very first play of the trilogy: “Often a man disadvantaged by in-eloquence loses out to an eloquent one even though his case is just.” She does not know what is in store for her – she will soon learn; but now, in this instant, she is blissfully ignorant. She tells Menelaus: “Let me be the one/ To cross examine her. I know better than you/ How she made Troy suffer/ A free Debate will kill her. She’ll have no escape.”32 Clearly, Hecuba has not seen the play which just preceeded her. She has not yet learned that, just because one is in the right, that they cannot be undone by wrongful words that sound right. Menelaus allows this most famous of agōnes logōn to begin. It may very well be this dialogue that was behind the survival of the play, since it was this scene that was taught in all the schools of rhetoric during the Hellenistic Age. And at the end of this great debate, Hecuba, who is so sure of her victory, turns to Menelaus and says: HECUBA Menelaus, do what the honor of your house And all your ancestors demands, and give Your wife the justice she deserves. You’ll scour From Greece the stain of what she has done And thus earn your enemy’s respect.33 But we know, even before Menelaus opens his mouth, what his response will be. We don’t even have to have seen the other plays to know how this will end. And yet, the preceding plays make this ending all the more bitter. At least in the beginning, the choice was over the life of an innocent child. Granted it was foretold

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that his life would bring ruin to the city, but an oracle’s words pale when confronted with the face of an innocent child. But now? Now, how far we have fallen. Menelaus will save Helen. It has come to this: Why punish a woman who is just an excuse for men itching to go to war? And the choice to save her has no grand moral logic behind it, just sheer unadulterated lust. Hecuba suddenly senses this and pleads with Menelaus not to waver. HECUBA Keep faith with all the comrades she has killed. I beg you for their sake, and for their children. MENELAUS Be quiet, Hecuba. I haven’t listened To a word she’s said.34 Of course not, he’s just been taken in by the lilting sound of her voice, the smell of her perfume, seeing the nape of her long neck. He orders his men to take Helen onto the ship bound for home. Hecuba now sees that all her arguments have been for naught. She makes one last impassioned plea: HECUBA But don’t let her sail on the same ship with you. MENELAUS Why not? Has she gained weight? Is she too heavy now? HECUBA When a lover falls hard, he falls for good.35 But it is too late. Menelaus has made up his mind. We know what will happen next. A long sea voyage home where Menelaus will allow his Helen to win him over to her ways. Menelaus departs and the chorus laments: “So, Zeus – so this is your desire?” And Zeus, Fate, or whatever mysterious force, if there is a mysterious force, remains silent. It does not speak in words but events, and in this respect it is not finished “speaking.” It has one last thing to “say,” one final tragic event: the death of Astyanax, Hecuba’s young grandson, the son of her beloved Hector, executed by the Achaeans. An event which renders everyone else momentarily speechless. What can one say to the senseless barbarism of such an act? All turn to Hecuba for words of wisdom, words of solace; yet all she can say is, “So in the end

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the gods did nothing for us/Anguish and more anguish is all they ever brought.” And with this last statement she returns to what now has become her default setting: the one who wails and laments. The chorus has the final word: CHORUS Grieve for the saddest of all cities. But as you grieve Keep moving to the Achaean ships.36 It is hard not to hear these final words in light of what we now know of the entire trilogy. Taken with this in mind, it is as if the chorus were saying, “Think whatever you like, it doesn’t really matter, since some mysterious force – call it fortune, call it Zeus, or call it fate – whatever you want to call it, it has a direction of its own, which we must inevitably follow.” Earlier in the play, Hecuba called out to this boundless mystery and asked whether such direction is “a fixed law of Nature” or a product of “man’s mind.” We had thought that such trajectories were now, in light of the “Greek Moment,” ours to control, born from a new-found collaboration between our mind and our will. That’s what modernity promised the ancient Greeks. If they just used their minds a little better, deliberated a little longer, chose a little more carefully, a better path would always emerge. That was the deal. That’s what helped move the Greeks from the realm of superstition to the realm of rationality. And yet, there is still a trace of this archaic “boundless mystery” that haunts the periphery of this trilogy and other extant Greek plays. One can’t quite shake the feeling that this spectral presence is whispering to us, “Yes, yes, choose all you like; but, in the end, it is my mystery that pushes you along my predetermined path.” What are to do with this age-old debate between free will and predetermination that is sounded out in this trilogy? One answer takes us back to the German Idealism of the 1800s. This was a time just before Hölderlin lost his mind and was still college roommates with Hegel and Schelling. Each struggled with this question of fate vs. human agency. Schelling, in many ways, comes up with perhaps the most intriguing musings on the subject in his tenth letter on aesthetics: The question has often been asked: how was the reason of Greece able to bear the contradictions inherent in its tragedy? A mortal – pushed by fate into becoming a criminal, himself fighting against fate, and nevertheless punished frightfully for the crime, which was itself the doing of fate! The reason for this contradiction, what made it bearable, lay at a level deeper than one hitherto sought, lay in the conflict of human freedom with the power of the objective world, in which the mortal – assuming that this objective power was a more lofty one (a fate) – necessarily had to be defeated, and yet because it did not go down to defeat . . . allowing its heroes to fight against the superior power of fate.37

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In short: humankind becomes heroic because it still fights as though it had free choice, even in the face of unrelenting fate. For Schilling, and his roommates, there was something noble in this defiance which allowed humankind to grow in stature by continuing to fight against an impossible foe like fate – foes which seemed to be somehow diminished over the course of this struggle. Why? Perhaps because these mysterious forces are seen as unnecessarily cruel in their outrageous demands on humankind. And even though humankind is inevitably destroyed, it seems to exceed the divine in this very moment of destruction. Mortal suddenly trumps God. Another paradox. Tragedy, as we’ve come to see, loves such paradoxes. This paradox, like many others in tragedy, remains unresolved by Euripides. Resolution, after all, is the province of myth; complication, as we’ve seen, is the domain of tragedy. In many ways, myth and tragedy are the sibling rivals, with myth representing an archaic impulse and tragedy the modern. Culture needs myths to forge the foundations of a society and tragedy to call those foundations into periodic question. The dialogic nature of tragedy engenders further dialogue long after the play is over, continuing the next day at the breakfast table, in the marketplace, and even, perhaps, on the floor of the Parthenon. Will this further dialogue lead to an answer? Not necessarily. Hannah Arendt tells us that the Greeks were interested in preparing the atmosphere in which things could be talked about and slyly observes: “What Socrates apparently believed – I’m not so sure Plato believed in it – was that talking about justice makes a man more just. And in talking about courage – even if you don’t find any definition of what courage is – you may inspire men at a given moment to be more courageous.”38 The goal is to create such an atmosphere in which one can meet certain key problems and understand them on a deeper level. In this respect, tragedy questions one of the biggest conundrums for the Greeks: the pros and cons of moving away from thinking through the gods to thinking for oneself. A question that is further articulated in Euripides’ final, posthumous, trilogy.

What the fragments can tell us about the later trilogies of Sophocles and Euripides We know that early traditional trilogies were closely linked in terms of character and the unfolding of their story over time. This sort of trilogy can be seen at work in the extant Oresteia of Aeschylus; or, as we have just seen, in the story of the Trojan War as developed in Euripides lost trilogy of Alexander/Palamedes/Trojan Women. The desire for such linked trilogies shifts during the career of Sophocles and by the time of late Sophocles and Euripides, there no longer needs to be any seeming connection between plays. We have enough material from Euripides’ last trilogy to begin to have a cautious understanding of how late trilogies might have functioned in terms of dramatic organization, as well as thematic development, which perhaps still rhymed in intriguing ways across what, on the surface, seem like radically different stories with nothing overtly in common with one another.

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Euripides’ last trilogy is made up of two extant plays, The Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis, along with the now lost Alcmeon in Corinth. It was mounted by Euripides’ sons, after their father’s death. We do not know if the order of plays was designated by Euripides before he died, or was decided by his sons; either way, it suggests that these seemingly unrelated works still created a kind of associational meaning that accrues from one work to the next. Let’s take brief look at how such cumulative meaning arises when these disparate stories are set side by side. If making the right choice (hairesis) is the thematic motif that appears and reappears throughout the Alexander/Palamedes/Trojan Women trilogy, then we might say that the thematic rhyme that runs through Alcmeon in Corinth/The Bacchae/Iphigenia in Aulis has to do with the issue of recognition (anagnoresis). Let us begin with how Euripides seems to set this up in Alcmeon, the first play of the trilogy. Only a handful of fragments survive from Alcmeon of Corinth and some of what we possess may actually be confused with another play of Euripides’ entitled Alcmeon in Psophis which deals with the central character’s later adventures. But we know the general outline of the Alcmeon from Apollodorus Library. There, we learn that Alcmeon had two children: a daughter, Tisiphone and a son, Amphilochus. He gave them to Creon king of Corinth to raise while he traveled the world. Creon’s wife became jealous of Tisiphone’s beauty and sold her into slavery. Upon Alcmeon’s return to Corinth, many years later, he is told his daughter has died. Upon his departure, he acquires a slave girl who he later learns, through one of Euripides’ favorite genre tropes, the recognition scene, is his now grown daughter. The broad outline of the tale suggests that it conforms to the tendencies of Euripides’ late romances where popular narrative elements like separation, reunion, and recognition are all deployed for the maximal manipulation of his audience’s emotional responses. But it is the final narrative trope of recognition that brings it in line with the otherwise seemingly disparate plays of The Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis. In this instance, Alcmeon is able to ultimately recognize his daughter, and everything ends happily ever after, much in the tradition of Euripides’ Helen. Such a happy resolution is not be the case in the next play in the trilogy, The Bacchae, which deals with a series of failed recognitions. Here, Dionysus, as we have seen in the previous chapter, arrives at the top of the play and immediately informs us that he has come to Thebes to punish those who have not recognized him as the son of Zeus and therefore a god. We have also already seen how Pentheus does not recognize Dionysus. Agave too, is, at first, unable to recognize the head of her son which she mistakes, in her delirium, for that of a lion cub. Cadmus must enjoin her to, “Look closely now and understand it better.”39 Finally, she sees, but it is too late. Dionysus appears, in the end, and relates their gruesome future punishments, concluding with: I, Dionysus, say these things as the child Not of a mortal father but of Zeus. If you had chosen to think rightly when You did not wish to, you’d be happy, now, Having gained as your ally the child of Zeus.40

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Cadmus, himself, warns us, lest we’ve missed the moral of this disturbing play: "Anyone who feels/Superior to the gods should study this:/Pentheus is dead  – believe in the gods!” So, what are we to make of things when we move to the final scenes of Iphigenia in Aulis, which ends with another divine intervention? This numinous happening occurs offstage and is related by the Messenger who witnessed the sacrifice of Iphigenia. He has come to inform Clytemnestra of her daughter’s final moments. He goes on to tell her everything: how Agamemnon groaned with remorse when he saw his daughter arrive, how his daughter comforted him, how the prophet Calchus prepared the sacrificial knife, how Agamemnon took it, raised it high above his head, where it seemed to stay suspended for a brief eternity, and then, how the blade made its terrible descent downward toward Agamemnon’s ever docile daughter. It is at this moment that the Messenger confesses he and all those assembled averted their eyes to what ensued, looking up only after the terrible deed had been done, and discovering that Agamemnon’s daughter had been replaced, at the last moment, by a deer. He finishes with: . . . I saw it myself. I was there. It is plain that your daughter has been taken up into heaven. Let this quiet your grief and put an end to your anger against your husband. No man living can tell what the gods will do, but they save those whom they love. This same day has seen your daughter dead and brought to life again.41 The chorus rejoices and then Clytemnestra finally speaks. She begins as any good, god-fearing character from Homer might begin, but ends with a profoundly 5thcentury Athenian skepticism. It is a journey from faith to doubt in five short lines. This is what she says: Oh child, what deity has carried you off? How may I address you? How can I be sure, how can I know that this is not all a lie, made up to silence my bitter grieving?42 We, in this moment, are caught at the same uncertain crossroads as Clytemnestra. Is this the work of an unseen deity? Or of a shrewd propagandist? Agamemnon arrives, tells his wife to rejoice over this miracle. He displays no outward signs of deceit that we can point to. What should we believe? The testimony of the honestseeming Messenger? The further assurances of a seemingly guilt-free Agamemnon? Euripides himself, who wrote an entire earlier play (Iphigenia in Tauris) confirming

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this story to be true? Or Clytemnestra’s refusal to recognize any of this? Why does Clytemnestra’s doubt still strike us to the core? Why can’t we shake it? Why can’t we just believe the Messenger, Agamemnon, and Euripides himself? Perhaps because her question is still our question. Perhaps this question remains the question of humankind, capturing the tension between grief and doubt that becomes one of the preoccupying themes of late Euripides and perhaps late Greek tragedy in general. We are all the children of Clytemnestra’s doubt. We find a similar doubt emerging in Cadmus after he hears of his impending punishment by Dionysus: CADMUS Now we see, but you are too hard on us. DIONYSUS Yes. Because I, born a god, was so dishonored by you. CADMUS It is not fitting for gods to rage as if they were the same as mortals.43 This is an amazing exchange. A moment where a mortal stands toe to toe with a god and shames them. Looks the god in the eye and says, “You are supposed to be better than us, but in this moment we see, it is actually we who are better than you.” It is a profound moment. Dionysus tries to deflect the accusation and tells Cadmus, “Long ago, my father Zeus ordained all this.” In other words, admitting a force beyond the gods. It is as if he is saying, “Don’t rage at me, if you have a problem here, take it up with fate.” But it is too late. Some thoughts, once thought, cannot be unthought. The seed of doubt has been sown. It will grow into the thinking of Clytemnestra. In a trilogy all about the necessity of recognition, we find Clytemnestra resolutely refusing to recognize the divine in the final play of the Golden Age of Greek tragedy. Here she articulates the question that seems to be on every 5th-century Athenian’s mind, “How can we still believe?”

Concluding observations “So are you saying with the death of the gods comes the death of tragedy?” asks a student. “That’s sort of Nietzsche’s answer.” “And what’s yours?” “I don’t have an answer, but I do have a suspicion.” “And that is?”

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“That a form like tragedy is very hard to sustain. A society can only tolerate such a level of critique for so long until it becomes, for whatever reason, too much for them to bear.” “How so?” “Well, you see it over and over, these brief historical moments of dramatic critique. You can see it with the Greeks, you can see it with the Elizabethans, you can see it with Ibsen, you can see it with American drama right after World War II, and you can see it – most recently – with the American films of the 1970s. All of these moments are pockets of critique, but they only last for the historical blink of an eye.” “And then?” “Well in the case of the Elizabethan period, tragedy devolves into either gruesome revenge plays or tragicomedies which are basically flimsy tragedies with a last-minute happy ending tacked on to them. These lesser forms play on our fears or our wishes, but they no longer offer us any sustained or nuanced critique of the human condition in all its historical complexity.” “And what about us? What about now?” “Now?” “Yes.” “What do you think?” “Not good?” “I’d like to believe that we’re on the cusp of a new age of critique. Lord knows, our country, the world itself, our very planet needs it.” “And tragedy helps that – how?” “By provoking thought and argument, pushing us to face our problems rather than running away from them. Nowadays we seem to either escape into science fiction fantasies, or fetishize our fears into an endless stream of horror films.” “But tragedy doesn’t provide any answers.” “And that’s a problem?” “It is if you want to know what Euripides thinks about the role of religion. I mean, come on, just between us, do you think Euripides was for or against religion?” “Are you?” “Am I what?” “For or against religion?” “How should I know.” “And yet you think that Euripides – somehow – knows?” “Well, he’s Euripides.” “But what if he sincerely doesn’t know. What if this question is as much of a conundrum to him as it is to you?” “So Euripides doesn’t have an answer?” “Maybe not.” “Then what does he have?” “Maybe just the question.”

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“And that’s enough?” “I know this seems counterintuitive, especially since so much or our contemporary drama is predicated on giving us answers. Most of today’s plays wrap things up with a nice and tidy moral which resolves everything. The only question left at the end of most shows is: ‘So, what should we have for dinner? Chinese?’ I’m not sure the Greeks were interested in the 5th-century equivalent of Chinese food. I suspect that what they were interested in was asking a really difficult question and having its audience find the answer.” “But if Euripides doesn’t have an answer, what makes him think his audience will?” “Maybe they won’t.” “Then what’s the point?” “To engender more conversation.” “To what end?” “This brings us back to Hannah Arendt and her observation about the efficacy of dialogue. Do you remember what she said?” “ ‘That talking about justice makes a man more just. And in talking about courage – even if you don’t find any definition of what courage is – you may inspire men at a given moment to be more courageous.’ ” “Perhaps Greek tragedy’s goal is to create a momentary climate where, talking about something like wisdom (a key word in The Bacchae) makes us more wise.” “But that’s just for a moment.” “Right, which is why you want to try to extend this momentary climate into a sustained culture. A culture that can lead, if you’re lucky, to a flowering like the golden age of Greece.” “Which is?” “A society where its artists are tasked to perplex, provoke, or just plain enrage their audience into a further consideration of the things that matter the most to them.” “And tragedy does this?” “Yes.” “But it can seem so nihilistic.” “What does Brecht say?” “Sometimes a play has to say ‘No’ so loudly that it forces the audience to stand up and shout back, ‘Yes!’ ” “So tragedy is the ‘No’ that forces us to find our own ‘Yes’?” “Yes.” “Not such a bad word with which to end today’s discussion.”

Notes 1 Euripides, Fragments, Volume One, edited and translated by Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press; 2008), 297–299. 2 Sophocles, Fragments, edited and translated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press; 1996), 371. 3 Euripides, Fragments, Volume One, 399–400.

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4 Aeschylus, Fragments, edited and translated by Alan Sommerstein (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press; 2008), 169 (my slight paraphrase). 5 Sophocles, Fragments, 17. 6 Euripides, Fragments, Volume One, 155. 7 Sophocles, Fragments, 309. 8 Matthew Wright, The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy, Volume One: Neglected Authors (London: Bloomsbury Press; 2016), 222. 9 Ibid., 231. 10 Ibid., 208. 11 Ibid., 213. 12 Ibid., 241. 13 Ibid., 223. 14 Ibid. 15 M.J. Cropp, The Minor Greek Tragedians, Volume One: The Fifth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press; 2019), 93. 16 Euripides, Fragments, Volume Two, edited and translated by Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press; 2008), 106–118. 17 Lucian, Collected Works, Volume Seven, translated by M.D. Macleod (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press; 1998), 165. 18 R. Scott Smith and Stephen Trzaskoma, Apollodorus Library and Hyginus Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology (Indianapolis: Hackett; 2007), 132–133. 19 Euripides, Fragments, Volume One, 45. 20 Ibid., 47. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 53. 23 Ibid., 55. 24 Ibid., 63. 25 Ibid., 69–71. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 37. 28 Euripides, Fragments, Volume Two, 55. 29 Ibid., 53. 30 Ibid., 59. 31 Euripides, Trojan Women, in The Complete Euripides, Volume One, edited by Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro, translated by Alan Shapiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2010), 215. 32 Ibid., 216. 33 Ibid., 220. 34 Ibid., 221. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 233. 37 Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, translated by Paul Fleming (Stanford: Stanford University Press; 2002), 7. 38 Hannah Arendt, Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding 1953–1975, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken; 2018), 440. 39 Euripides, The Bahakki, translated by Reginald Gibbons (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2001), 92. 40 Ibid., 96. 41 Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis, in The Complete Euripides, Volume Two, edited by Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro, translated by W.S. Merwin and George E. Dimock (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2010), 365. 42 Ibid., 367. 43 Euripides, The Bahakki, 96.

CODA

Back to the light of day

Notes from high aboveground Twenty-odd years have elapsed from the days I wrote about in the introduction of this book. I’m no longer rushing across Broadway to make it to class on time; nowadays, I’m rarely late. This is not so much due to a change in my nature, but rather a change in my location. Thanks to the boundless generosity of Columbia University, I now have faculty housing. This makes my bi-weekly trek to class all the more manageable; one might go so far as to say, leisurely. No more switching subways for me, I can simply walk to our new rehearsals spaces in the Nash building on 132nd street and Broadway. This has allowed me, over the past several years, a little time to reflect on the remarkable work our students have done with these ancient texts. It is a marvel to behold, but I also began to realize (around walk #334) that these myriad successes were all within a rather particular zip code that existed between irony and lament. There would be occasional moments of horror, but – for the most part – these Greek scenes would evoke either a wry knowing smile or a sincere tear or two. Don’t get me wrong; this, in and of itself, is a huge accomplishment for work that is over two thousand years in age. But when it came to any feelings of the numinous, I was left numb. If the students staged a god, that divinity almost always had invisible quotations marks floating just above their heads like a modern-day crown of ivy tendrils. I had pretty much decided that, as far as the divine was concerned, I would have to reconcile myself to such representations for the remainder of my brief viewing life. That was how I was feeling up until one of the last Thursdays of our most recent fall semester. The day started, like most, in the following fashion: I reach the entrance of the building, pull out my wallet and place it before this little black box that somehow is able to read my identity card. I wait for the green flashing light above the little black box and the almost simultaneous buzz of the

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automatic-unlocking-mechanism, I  pass through the main glass doors, press the nearby button for the elevator and wait for its incremental descent. An archaic looking digital display above the elevator counts its slow arrival from the tenth floor: nine, eight – I’ve been thinking, “Is this what it’s come to?” – seven, six, five – “have we lost our ability to speak to these ancient shadows?” – four, three, two – “Or worse, have these shadows just grown tired of us?” – and finally – one – the elevator doors creak open. I get in and think, “Who has abandoned who? Or, maybe we’ve both abandoned each other.” As we slowly rise to the fifth floor, my spirit begins to fall.

Fifth-floor epiphany; or, back to Pentheus and Dionysus Out of the elevator, down the hall, turn left, through the doors, down another hall, and into Studio 1. Today is a day of scene showings from Euripides’ Bacchae; first up is a scene from Liz Peterson, another of our truly inspired young directors. But the tableaux that greets me is far from the familiar images that I associate with this play: A young woman, on all fours, crawls about the space. She wears a military helmet that is too big for her head. We know this because it keeps falling downward over her eyes. Her only recourse is to throw her head backward, returning the helmet to its proper place. The fact that it does not fly off is thanks to an elastic band under her chin which, if only a tad tighter, would keep the helmet from falling in the first place. Throughout all this, the woman on all fours has been perpetually chewing. She goes on chewing and crawling about the space distractedly. There is the gentle sound of a tinkling bell. Where is it coming from? Ah, from around the neck of the woman, a little bell on a chain that jingles as she crawls about. It is at this point that it dawns on us that the actress is playing the part of a goat. Behind her are three women in grey jumpsuits. They huddle around a small table. On the table are several half drunken bottles of beer, a portable radio that is playing what sounds like mariachi music, and an array of dangerous looking knives. The collective attitude of these grey- clad figures seems to exist somewhere between matter-of-fact-ness and boredom. One sips from a neglected beer bottle, another takes a bite from an already half eaten mango, the third continues to casually sharpen one of the many dangerous looking knives. She’s been doing this ever since we entered the space. The other two women put down their respective beer and mango and pick up a carefully folded plastic tarp. They begin to lay the plastic tarp down and then methodically duck tape it to the floor so it will stay firmly in place. The other woman continues to methodically sharpen her knife. We are starting to have a very bad feeling about this, but “the goat” continues crawling about, contentedly chewing away, oblivious to what is going on just upstage of her. The woman stops sharpening her knife. The plastic tarp is now firmly in place. The woman with the mango extends it in the direction of “the goat” who crawls onto the plastic tarp and eats from her extended hand. The woman gently pets the head of the “goat,” as the other woman approaches, discreetly keeping the knife behind her back, hidden from view. She kneels down and pets the goat with her free hand. The other woman who gave the goat the mango, now firmly holds “the

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goat” in place. The woman with the knife, slashes the goat’s neck with one swift upward cut. “The goat” writhes in pain on the plastic tarp as the other grey-clad woman sprays red Ketchup from a container making it look as though blood has splattered everywhere. The women then step back. “The goat’s” body twitches spasmodically, then slackens, then stops, then becomes unnervingly still. And just when we think she must be dead, her body jerks back to life, as she begins shouting: Outrageous Bacchic violence blazes up Close like wildfire . . . summon all our troops. And with that we realize that the actress who was playing a goat is now none other than Pentheus. What we have just seen is, perhaps, an ominous/prophetic dream: the perennial dream of the Scapegoat. The scene continues with the three women sharing Dionysus lines. Two of the women begin dressing the third as they continue to speak to a dazed and confused Pentheus. Before our eyes, this hardworking actress begins to morph from mere mortal to some sort of celestial god from our primordial past. This transformation is effortlessly enacted: first she is given a large full-length white mink coat which completely eclipses her otherwise small frame, giving her a much more substantial animal-like mass, as though she were some yet undiscovered arctic creature. The final touch is a white plastic mask of a bull, complete with formidable horns. The transformation is complete, an alien creature stands before us in all its profound otherness. Pentheus bends to the will of this unnerving apparition, consenting to do its bidding. This once powerful ruler, who prided himself on his implacable reason, leaves the stage completely ignorant to the fact that he is now heading toward his eminent death. The others follow, unable to hide the smiles that blossom across their knowing faces. We are left alone with this otherworldly figure; half human, half bull. The archaic god of an equally archaic people: Dionysus. How to describe the complete and total hypnotic majesty of this tableaux? Standing there covered in dense white animal fur with the equally ashen mask of a bull, this already imposing figure seems to continue to grow in stature until it is towering over us. Silent and imposing, it turns its head toward us, the audience, as the lights fade. What is it thinking? What does it know? Are we next? These are some of the unsettled thoughts that cross our mind as we and it sink into the darkness. For me, this scene is a great example of a director practicing Nietzsches’ art of slow reading, of working their way downward into the depths of a text and themselves, step by step, until both meet in that spectral place which the ancient Greeks called phantasia and Arab thinkers and theologians further refined into the concept of alam al-mithal. A region of the mind that Henry Corbin goes onto translate as the imaginal. Here in this private sensorium, the very abstract concept of Dionysus begins to take concrete shape. A god comes into view. It is a vision of a figure that is half creature, half celestial being. When we put these two antithetical entities together, they create something completely Other. It emerges from the depths of the imaginal and makes itself known. The director grasps this image and brings it

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back up into the light of day to share with us. It is a kind of long-lost gift, retrieved from our sunken imaginative past. The image strikes a deep responsive chord in me. I can’t seem to shake it. It comes to me, unabated, at all hours: in the middle of night, in the midst of my waking days, now as I write these words, some five months after I first encountered this image. It. Will. Not. Let. Me. Be. Every time it comes to me, I hear a sound, the blast of some ancient sounding horn. Where does this sound come from? It was not a part of Liz’s scene. And yet, now, every time this image forces itself into my consciousness, it is accompanied by this long, drawn-out, deeply resonant, almost guttural, thrum. I’ve heard this sound before. But where? And from what instrument? Slowly it comes to me: it’s a dungchen, one of those long Tibetan horns that have been blown from time immemorial. How did this sound find its way to my memory of Liz’s original image? And yet, there it is, Liz’s image has provoked this sound from my own imaginal universe. Taken together, these two sensorial forces has me in their thrall. But why? It brings me back to Sophocles’ deinos. This strange, untranslatable word, which refuses to be reduced to one simple meaning. A  word that can simultaneously conjure our given reality as: terrible, horrible, astounding, dangerous, marvelous, mighty, powerful, wondrous, strange, able, skillful, clever, shameful, timid, cowardly, and on and on until a thinker like Heidegger throws up his arms, grabs a nearby pen, and scrawls the word “unheimlich” in the margins of his edition of the text. Unheimlich. The Uncanny. This fundamental sensation which has the power to restore our sense of awe over the mystery of our very being. Something that the relentless bludgeoning force of our day-to-day habit can hammer out of us. Perhaps this is part of the power of these ancient texts, that they can momentarily return us to such moments where this initial mystery of being can be felt in all its potential wonder and, occasional, terror. Such encounters with the ancients return us to the fundamental questions of this condition we call being human. A miraculous gift that we seem to forget every 15 minutes or so. It is left to these works from the past to remind us, to wake us from our slumber of being, to provoke us into engaging with our present before it disappears into the maw of an irretrievable past. These shades command us to live, live now, live fully, live before our allotted time drains away. That is their perennial message, perennial because they know, from the vantage point of millennia, what all great artists know – that we have ears, but do not hear; eyes, but do not see. Tragedy’s timeless injunction: Use them. Now.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX 1 What to think about when thinking about staging a Greek chorus

One:  What is the Greek chorus attempting to accomplish by speaking/singing? Can you reduce this to a single sentence and keep that at the forefront of your mind as you are crafting the chorus? Two:  The chorus started here (defeated). The chorus ended there (triumphant). How did it get there???

This is the basic A B Cs of a Greek chorus (as well as scenes and whole plays). A: Beginning (one state) B: The Bridge/Development to: C: Conclusion (new state).

 Focus on B (The Bridge). The length of the bridge/development usually depends on the extreme of the polarity shift from A to B. The greater the polarity shift, the longer the bridge. Directing boils down to clearly and dynamically delineating these three essential movements. It’s all about getting from A to C by way of B. Three:  Is the shift from A to B to C organic? Or disjunctive? No value judgment in either case. But they are two very different types of theatrical unfolding.

APPENDIX 2 Agamemnon and the red carpet; or how to create an event in 3 steps

Step 1: stop, look One of the first things we learned about working on this scene is that we need to see Agamemnon see the red carpet. That literally means building in a moment where we have access to Agamemnon’s face as he first encounters the carpet being placed before him. This should be a palpable beat before he begins speaking again. By seeing how Agamemnon sees the carpet, we begin to understand what the carpet means to him. This sounds simple enough, but I cannot tell you how many of the 120 directors that have worked on this scene tend to miss this crucial step. If we do not see Agamemnon seeing the carpet, then the carpet either remains a carpet ( just something to walk on) or remains an overdetermined symbol. If we want to understand something specific about Agamemnon – who he is and what is going on inside of him in this moment – then we need Agamemnon to see the carpet. We can read this meaning in his look, his body language, in his general energeia. The carpet can be: a problem, a puzzle, a taboo, a temptation, or a temptation because it is a taboo. This information frames the way we will watch the rest of the scene. Let’s think about this analogically for a moment. Let’s say the question about Agamemnon is not whether or not he suffers from hubris, but rather alcoholism. Now let’s say what is placed before Agamemnon is not a red carpet but a gin and tonic. We can learn a great deal about whether Agamemnon is or is not an alcoholic by how he looks at that drink. He can look at it with dread, he can look at it with lust, or

176 Appendices

he can look at it and try to mask his feeling of dread or lust – you get the picture. Regardless, we understand that this glass of alcohol is more than a glass of alcohol; it becomes the personification of temptation, a kind a character in and of itself.

Step 2: the power of the caesura What we are staging is, in many ways, the quintessential event for the Greeks, the moment of haresis (aka) choice. We could swap out our drink, or the red carpet, and replace it with Agamemnon’s daughter, Iphigenia, lying before him waiting to be sacrificed. What we want to see is what Agamemnon will do. Will he grab for the drink? Take that first step? Or plunge the knife into his daughter’s breast? Which also means: How does he reach for that drink, how does he step on that red carpet, how does he plunge the knife into his daughter’s breast? Does he hesitate? Is he tentative? Impulsive? Circumspect? All of this leads us to the next step in the unfolding of this situation:

Step 3: on the threshold of revelation What does the actual walk across the red carpet tell us? In other words, this is a major opportunity for pure anagnorisis (a moment of recognition that grows out of the action). What does it say about Agamemnon? I call these moments, on the other side of events, the Core of the scene (what the event means to the character, what it reveals to us). It is worth noting that events are the domain of playwright; they create them to clear the ground for a new vision to occur. But that vision and the core moments that they produce are open for the actor and director to explore. This is one of the reasons why we can return again and again to watch a multitude of Agamemnons walk across a red carpet, or a parade of Hamlets attempt to kill Claudius. The event is always the same, but something on the other side of it is uniquely understood and revealed in the performance of each new actor.

APPENDIX 3 Scoring an agon logon; or the music of actions

Electra: episode 3, lines 444–647 In this scene, as you may remember, Chrysothemis has come to warn Electra that unless she changes her ways their mother, Clytemnestra, plans to imprison Electra for good. We can break down the scene into three major units of action. A unit is determined by a central dominating action made up of a sequence of smaller actions (often called beats or tactics) that attempt to achieve this overarching aim. The unit of action is complete when the need of the overarching aim is either won, lost, or stalemated. This will lead to another, new Unit of Action to emerge in its stead. Both the beats and units of action follow along the dialectical lines of action/ counteraction; this becomes the movement or, if you will, the music of the scene.

Unit 1 The scene begins with two set speeches, one from Chrysothemis and one from Electra, both reiterating their age-old differences with one another. The overarching action of this unit could be seen as Chrysothemis, once again, attempting to change Electra’s ways. Chrysothemis claims that Electra’s radical opposition accomplishes nothing. Electra counters by claiming that Chysothemis is just as guilty as their mother, since Chrysothemis has not outwardly condemned Clytemnestra’s murder of their father. It seems as though nothing will change either sister’s mind. Even the news that their mother plans to imprison Electra falls on deaf ears. The only thing that catches Electra’s attention is why Chrysothemis carries offerings. Let us follow this first unit of action:

CHRYSOTHEMIS ELECTRA Chides E for being stuck in her ways. Warns her of imprisonment.

Denounces C for being complicit. Downplays this news.

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Questions E’s sanity. Implores E to take this seriously. Reassures E their dead father would understand. Challenges E one last time.

Mocks the gravity of the situation. Castigates C for her presumption. Rejects C Refuses to budge an inch.

At this point, Chrysothemis gives up and tells Electra, “Well then, I will be on my way.” Chrysothemis’ intention (which we can see from her actions) was to get Electra to change her ways before she is imprisoned. The unit ends when Chyrsothemis concedes defeat and leaves empty handed. This will be the most discordant of the three units; due to both sisters’ attack upon one another, these combative actions give the unit a very distinct jagged tone and rhythm. If actions are notes, then the music of these actions is dissonant in nature.

Unit 2 If Chrysothemis was driving Unit 1 with her intention to change Electra’s ways, it is Electra who now drives Unit 2 with the intention of learning where Chyrsothemis is going and why. In this unit, Electra meets very little resistance from Chrysothemis who explains that she has been asked by their mother to go to the graveside of their dead father and leave offerings from Clytemnestra. This makes no sense to Electra. Why would Clytemnestra, who killed their father in cold blood, do such a thing? Chrysothemis reveals that Clytemnestra has had a prophetic dream. Electra gets Chrysothemis to relay the dream.

ELECTRA CHRYSOTHEMIS Inquires where C is going. Doubts that this could be so. Beseeches C to understand what this means. Promises to explain, if C will relate the dream. Encourages C to go on.

Explains. Confirms it is so. Complies, but is confused. Demurs, not an expert in Dreams. Consents to E’s wishes.

Chrysothemis’s intention in telling her mother’s dream is to gain clarity and understanding from Electra, who she hopes will elucidate what it means. This intention should color the telling. Electra wins this unit by getting her sister to tell her everything. Notice how the shift in actions shifts the tone of this middle unit. Gone are such combative actions as chiding or castigating, replaced with beseeching and demurring. This radically changes the music of the second unit, reducing its jagged feel. Like music, we need to hear this change through the new notes/actions of the sisters. Now we have reached the:

Appendices  179

Event of scene: Chrysothemis shares the dream of their mother This is as momental as Agamemnon walking on the red carpet since it radically changes the polarity of the scene. As you will remember, that scene began with Clytemnestra subservient to Agamemnon and ends with Clytemnestra triumphant. What brought about this profound polarity shift? Agamemnon walking on the red carpet. Here, it is the dream that brings about the polarity shift from the sisters opposing one another, to the sisters joining forces. It is the event of recounting the dream that paves the way for this reconcilation. The Unit ends with Chrysothemis having relayed the dream and Electra having interpreted what it might mean: A sign from the gods that Clytemnestra is to be revenged. This leads to:

Unit 3 Electra entreats her sister to join in her fight against their mother. This how these actions unfold:

ELECTRA CHRYSOTHEMIS Entreats her sister to not follow their mother’s plan.

Pleads w/E to heed her words.

Vents her outrage at Clytemnestra’s audacity. Guides her sister in what she must do instead. Promises they will be triumphant. Questions if Agamemnon’s ghost had a hand in all of this. Dismisses this last thought. Rallies her sister to join her. Agrees to follow E. This concludes the scene between Electra and Chrysothemis. What started as two sisters at complete odds with one another ends with the sisters reunited. What brings this change about? The revelation of the dream, which is the centerpiece (literally and figuratively) of the scene. The mystery and interpretation of the dream brings them both together, leading to this final unit where harmony between the sisters is achieved. And so, each unit of action has its own time signature, its own feel, its own music of actions.

INDEX

Achaeus 6, 148 Achilles 21, 66 – 67, 109 active reader 40 Aegisthus 61, 68 – 69, 77, 95, 98 – 99 Aeschylus 2, 4 – 6, 8, 36, 51, 57 – 81, 85, 91, 93, 95, 99, 106, 123, 136 – 137, 147 – 149, 161; Agamemnon 4 – 5, 57 – 79, 85, 99, 106, 136, 137; Agôn Logôn 8 – 9; chorus of agamemnon, the 64 – 65; Clytemnestra as metaphor for theatre 5, 63, 68 – 69, 75, 81, 91, 93; dramatic signature of 62; Electra 5; event, the 60, 62; first principles of tragedy 58; Oresteia 6, 81, 161; parados, the 63 – 65; pathei mathos (“learning through suffering”) 5, 59 – 60; phylax 58; prologos 8; red carpet 123; Sophocles 5; tragic equation, the 63 – 65; variation 75; Watchman 2, 58 – 60, 63 Aeschylus chorus 36 Agamemnon 61, 67 – 68, 71 – 72; Aeschylus 4 – 5, 57 – 79, 85, 99, 106; agōn logōn 9 – 10, 89, 90 – 91; events 60 – 62, 74; hairesis 46, 65 – 66, 71 – 73, 74; hairesis, the 65 – 66, 72 – 73; Homer’s Agamemnon 66, 67; Iphigenia in Aulis 68; Irrevocable Event 61; red carpet, the 60, 175 – 176; rhesis 74 – 75; tragedy of 58; variation 52, 70, 75; Watchman 8, 59, 62 Agathon 149 Agave 109, 117 – 124 agôn 8 – 10, 12, 45 – 46, 49 – 50, 52, 81, 89 – 90, 92, 96, 102, 114, 134, 141, 143, 158, 177 – 179

agôn logôn 8 – 9, 10, 45 – 46, 49 – 50, 81, 89 – 90, 92, 158, 177 – 179 Ajax 36 – 37, 134 Alcmeon of Corinth 162 Alcmeon in Psophis 162 Al-Farabi, Abu Nasr 82 alam al-mithal 23, 171 alēthea 103 Alexander (Euripides) 153 – 156 amoibaion 89 anagnorisis 48 – 53, 66, 68, 71, 72, 73, 77, 176 Anamorphoses 48 anapestic meters 8, 64 Antigone 4, 8, 12, 15, 23 – 24, 26 – 43, 45 – 50, 53n11, 57, 78, 81, 83 – 84, 89, 104n8, 130 – 132, 134 – 141, 145n1, 145n9, 145n13, 145n15–n16, 145n23; binary opposition 51 – 52; challenge, the 26 – 28; Creon 49 – 50; deinós 32 – 35, 140; Hegel’s response to 37, 46, 82 – 84; Hölderlin 131; of myth 4; mytheme 49; Sophocles 4, 28 – 33; Steiner on 4, 15n3, 27, 29, 43n3; of tragedy 4 antistrophe 9 Apollodorus’ Library 151 Arabi, Ibn 23, 25n7 Arab thinkers 23, 41, 171; see also Arabi, Ibn; Avicenna; Sadra, Mulla; Suhrawardi Archetypes, Jung’s concept of 22, 42 Arendt, Hannah 161 Aristarchus 6, 148 Aristotle 4 – 5, 8, 16n7, 22, 42, 46, 57, 63, 79n1, 79n2, 82, 90, 147

Index  181

Arjuna 66  art: of Aeschylus 77; Clytemnestra 76; of dialogos (dialogue) 82; Homeric rhapsode 98; rhetorical battle 8; rhetorical debate 8; rhetorical nature 83; rhetorical speech 96; of spectatorship 12; “the quick grasping” 5 – 6 Artemidorus (Oneirocritica) 49, 50 – 51 Astydamus the Younger 148 Ate 67 Athenaeus 150 Athenian audiences 10, 75, 116 Auden, W. H., 7, 16n6 audience 2, 5, 10, 12, 15, 51, 71, 71, 75, 77, 86 – 87, 92 – 93, 97 – 98, 106, 108, 113 – 117, 119 – 120, 135 – 136, 148, 154, 171 Augustine 42 Avicenna 23, 25n7 Bacchae, The 4, 5, 13, 31, 43n9, 58, 68 – 69, 78, 106 – 126, 141, 144, 162, 166, 170; Agave holding the mask of Pentheus 117, 123 – 124; art of recognition as re-cognition 106 – 126; Dionysus’s God of Recognition 124; first messenger rhēsis 113 – 114; problem with Pentheus 106, 109 – 114, 116 – 117; second messenger rhēsis 114; seeing double 106, 115 – 116, 123; seeing through 106; sparagmos of Pentheus 117; the story of Semele 107 – 108 Bakhtin, Mikhail 82 – 84 bathus 21 Beckett, Samuel 59 Bellerophon (Euripides) 146 – 147 Bhagavad-Gita, The 66 Billings, Jerome 135 binary opposition 51 – 52 Bleuler, Eugen 22 Borges, Jorge Louis 42 Brecht, Bertolt 37, 57, 79n2, 166 Briseis 66 – 67 Burian, Peter H. 10 Butler, Judith 37 Cadmus 107, 109, 118 – 122, 124, 153, 163 – 164 Calasso, Roberto 59 Calchas 64 calculable law  6, 133 – 134 Carson, Anne 27, 29, 33, 35, 43n9, 44n23, 79n6, 80n11, 80n17, 80n20, 87, 92, 104n11, 104n15, 104n19, 104n23, 104n35, 145n10, 145n14

Cassandra 68, 74 – 75, 136, 154 – 155 Children of Heracles 31 Chrysothemis 86, 89 – 90, 92, 95 – 96, 102, 177 – 179 Claudius 87 – 88, 94 Clytemnestra 5, 58, 60 – 61, 63, 68 – 78, 81, 86, 90 – 100, 163 – 164, 177 – 179; Aeschylus 5, 69, 75, 81, 91, 93; art 76; in Iphigenia in Aulis 68; as metaphor for theatre 63, 68 – 69; see also agôn logôn Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, The (Ingarden) 39 – 40 Compulsion for Antiquity, A (Armstrong) 24n4 concretion of fictive indeterminates 57 concretization of fictional objects 40 contemporary drama 2, 166 Corbin, Henry 3 – 4, 20 – 21, 23, 41 – 42, 57, 171 – 172 Creon 35, 37 – 39, 42, 46 – 50, 135, 137, 139 – 140 Critias 6, 148 Cummings, E. E., 147 dactyls 64 daemonic agency 67 Dawe, R. D. 26 De Anima (Aristotle) 22 deinós 32 – 35, 140 Delphic Oracles 64 democracy 7, 65 – 66 Demosthenes 46 Derrida, Jacques 6, 96, 104n30 dialectics: agōnes 134; Bakhtin 84; Greek 82, 101; Hegel 84; of Plato 82 – 84, 96 – 99, 101; of Socrates 82 – 84, 102; of Sophists 82, 102; in Sophocles 8; of Sophocles 82, 83 – 86, 100; Sophocles’ Electra 81, 106; of the tragic 81 – 103 dialogos (dialogue) 82, 101 Dialogues of the Dead (Lucian) 151 dianoetikon 22 Diephobus 155 Diogenes of Athens 6, 148 Dionysus 28 – 29, 106 – 108, 110, 115, 170 – 172 drama 31, 60; contemporary 2; Western 97 dran 46 – 47 Dufrenne, Mikel 40 Ek-stasis 115 Electra 99; agōn logōn of 92; Chrysothemis 90; dialectics 82, 83 – 86; Electra’s urn 97 – 98; play as pharmakon 95 – 97;

182 Index

Sophocles 4 – 5, 37, 58, 68, 81 – 85, 96; theatre 92, 100; tragic trajectory 87 – 89 Empedocles 21 enthusiasm 2, 134 epeisodia 8 – 9 Erectheus (Euripides) 147 etymoisin 103 Euripides 2, 4 – 6, 9, 13, 16n11, 46 – 47, 51, 53n2, 53n3, 58 – 59, 62, 68, 78, 80 – 81, 117, 147: agôn 46; Alcmeon of Corinth 162; Alcmeon in Psophis 162; Alexander 153 – 158, 161 – 162; Bacchae, The 4, 13, 58, 68, 106 – 126, 170; Bellerophon 146; Erectheus 147; Hecuba 147; Helen 59, 147, 162; Hercules 147; Hippolytus 147; Iphigenia in Aulis 10, 68, 162 – 163, 167n41; Iphigenia in Tauris 10, 68, 162 – 163, 167n41; myths 81; Palamedes 153, 156 – 158, 161 – 162; Protesilaus 151; recognition as re-cognition 106, 112, 121; seeing double 106, 115 – 116, 123; seeing through 106; Trojan Women 10, 12, 89, 153, 157, 161 – 162, 167n31 exodos 7 Ficino, Marsilio 20 Fliess, Wilhelm 22 Foley, Helena 16n5 fragments 6, 53n2, 53n3, 53n4, 145, 146 – 167 Freud, Sigmund 20, 22, 41, 50, 53, 88, 108, 111 Gadamer, Hans-George 30 – 32, 39, 43n13, 57, 82, 101, 103n1, 104n37 Genealogy of the Tragic (Billings) 135 gērysasthai 103, 126 Gibbons, Reginald 13, 108 gnōmai 148 god: and mortals 140 – 142; as time 142 – 143 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 32, 131 – 132 Goldhall, Simon 16n5 Gorgias 96 Greek chorus 11 – 13, 73, 174; Agamemnon chorus 63 – 65, 67 – 69, 73, 76; Antigone chorus 32 – 34, 36 – 39; Bacchae chorus 108; Electra chorus 87 – 88, 94 – 95, 99, 102 Greek myth 31, 42, 81, 107 – 108, 167n18 Greek theatre 41, 46, 113, 143 Greek tragedy 1, 3 – 4, 7, 69, 108, 111, 119, 129 – 131; aerial view of 5 – 6; agôn 45 – 46; alien aspect of 12; anagnorisis 48; canon of extant 10; fragments 146 – 153; dran 47; exercises 11 – 15; hairesis 46 – 47; hamartia

47; heroes of 85 – 86; as meta-theatrical manifesto 4 – 5; peripeteia 47 – 48; public forms of grief 38; role of 58; theatron 45; trilogy by Euripides 153 – 161 Guards, The (Ion of Chion) 149 – 151 Hades 3, 20 – 21, 28, 32, 52 – 53, 71 – 72, 90 hairesis 46 – 47 Hall, Edith 16n5 hamartia 47 – 49, 52, 66, 68, 71 – 72, 74, 77, 157 Hamlet 31, 59, 65 – 66, 85 – 88, 93 – 97, 123, 146, 176 Hecuba, Queen 89, 97, 147, 154 – 160 Hegel 37, 82 – 84, 129, 160; dialectics 84; intellectual plaything of 82 Heidegger, Martin 34 – 35, 115, 172 Heisenberg, Werner 12 Helen 10, 59, 63, 89, 96, 147, 149 – 151, 153, 158 – 159, 162 Hera 85, 107, 142 – 143 Herbert, Zbigniew 6, 16n4, 19, 24n1 Hercules 147 hermeneutics 3, 20, 39 Hermes 3, 20 – 21, 152 – 153 Hesiod 102 – 103 Hippolytus 8, 147 Hölderlin’s caesura 5, 83, 130 – 131, 134 – 137, 160; calculable law of 133 – 134; deadly embrace of gods and mortals 140 – 142; intuition 132 – 133; observation 142; rhythmic observations of 137; time as god 142 – 143; translation 131 – 132; ungovernable thought 138 – 140 Homer 8 – 9, 66 – 67, 119, 132, 148 – 149, 151, 153; Iliad 66, 80n15, 151; Odyssey 149 – 150 Homeric humanity 148 – 149 horizon of the question (Gadamer) 57 House of Atreus 58 – 59, 64, 69, 76, 85 Hygenius (Fabulae) 151 – 152 Ion of Chion 149 – 151 imaginal 3 – 4, 20 – 23, 24n2, 26 – 28, 35, 38, 41 – 42, 57, 113 – 114, 171 – 172 imaginal journey 30 – 32 imaginal realm 57 imaginary 3, 41 imagination 3, 6, 19 – 20, 22 – 23, 24n2, 25n7, 28 – 29, 38, 40 – 42, 86, 111, 117, 132 – 133, 147 – 148, 152 Ingarden, Roman 39, 41, 44n29, 57 Iphigenia in Aulis 10, 68, 162 – 163, 167n41 Iphigenia in Taurus 10

Index  183

Jebb, R. C. 27, 29 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) 66 Jung, Carl 20, 22, 42 Kafka, Franz 117 katabasis 21, 39 Klossowski, Pierre 2 kommos 9 Kon Yi 73 Kott, Jan 49 Krishna 66 Lacan, Jacques 6, 37, 48, 53n7 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 134 Laërtius, Diogenes 82 Laodamia 152 – 153 law of fixity (Pavese) 33, 57 legein 103, 126 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 60, 121 Lenaea, dramatic competition of 149 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 31, 49 liminality 39 Liska, Pavol 13 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 64 Loraux, Nicole 7 Lloyd-Jones, Hugh 53n4, 69, 80n18, 166n2 Lucian of Samosata 28, 151 – 152 magnētis lithos 97 – 98, 101, 114 Medea 8, 10, 149 Menander 147 Menelaus 64, 158 – 159 messenger rhēsis 9, 91, 113 – 114 mnemoneutikon 22 modernity 66 – 67, 123, 160 mortals, gods and 140 – 142 mourning 87 – 88 Mulla Sadra 23 mundis archetypes 23 mundus imaginalis 23, 41 Muses 102 – 103, 157 music 13 – 15, 170, 177 – 179 myths 51, 75; Antigone of 4; of Greeks 3; impulse 31; tendency to validate 10; tragedy vs. 100 – 101 mythemes 49 Nagy, Gregory 142 – 143 nekyia 21 nekyomanteia 21 Neophon 6, 148 – 149 New Criticism 6 Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 30, 39, 57, 63, 171 Noh Theatre 11

Odysseus 21, 66, 149 – 150, 156 – 158 Odyssey 21, 149 Oedipus 8, 27, 34 – 37, 89, 123, 135, 137 – 138, 147 Ôide (song) 7 Oneirocritica (The Interpretation of Dreams) 49, 53n8 Orestes 65 – 66, 85 – 86, 91 – 95, 97 – 98, 100 Oresteia 6, 31, 44n23, 58, 69, 79n6, 79n9, 80n11, 80n17, 80n18, 80n20, 81, 104n11, 104n15, 104n19, 104n23, 104n35, 145n10, 145n14, 147, 161 Orpheus 3 Palamedes 156 – 158 parasema 50 Parmenides 21 parodos 8 – 9 passive reader 39 – 40 pathei mathos 5, 66 – 67, 71, 77, 113 Pausanias 148, 151 Pavese, Cesare 32 – 33 Pentheus 5, 106, 108 – 124, 153, 162 – 163, 170 – 172: to Agave 117 – 118; audience in the character of 106; contemplating the mask of 123 – 124; and Dionysus 111, 114 – 115, 170 – 172; Dionysus’ mortal cousin 109; judgment of 113; as recalcitrant spectator 109 – 110; role of 117; tragedy 5 Pericles 38 – 39 peripeteia 47 – 48, 66, 68, 74, 114 Persephone myth 52 Phaedrus (Plato) 97 phantasia 22, 171 phantasm, form of 19 phantasmata 22 phantastikon 22 pharmakon 95 – 98, 101, 114 Phenomenology of the Aesthetic Experience, The (Dufrenne) 40 Philoctetes 36 – 37, 89 phylax 58 places of indeterminacy 40 – 41 Plato 20, 82, 84, 97 – 98, 101, 149 Plutarch 28, 46, 96, 104n33 Pluto 151 – 152 poetic logic 5 – 6, 132, 134 Poetics (Aristotle) 8, 16n7, 42, 79n1, 147 polis 36, 57, 66 Polynices 32 Pontius Pilate 111 Post-Structuralism 6 Pound, Ezra 134, 145n4 Priam, King 154 – 157

184 Index

prologos 8 – 9, 84 – 86, 163 Protagoras 82 Protesilaus 151 – 153 psychoanalysis 22, 118 pyschopompós 22 Raeburn, David 69 – 70 recognition 5, 10, 42, 48, 73, 106 – 107, 112, 114, 122 – 124, 139, 141, 162, 164, 176; issue of 107; narrative trope of 162 retribution 10, 68 Rhesis 9, 74, 113 – 114 rhetorical speech, forms of 96 Richard the Second 123 rival tragedians 148 – 149 Romeo and Juliet 96, 104n32 Sadra, Mulla 23 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 129, 160 Schiller 131 – 132 Schliemann, Henry 22 seeing double 106, 115, 123 seeing through 106 sêma 19 Semele 106 – 107, 109, 111 sensorium 23, 41, 171 Shakespeare, William 59, 66, 75, 79, 94, 97, 146 skopos 58 slow reading 4, 30, 33 – 34, 57, 171 Socrates 31, 82 – 84, 98, 101 – 102, 161 Solon 96 – 97, 99, 101, 110 Sommerstein, Alan H., 16n5, 167n4 Sophists 44n25, 82, 102 Sophocles 5, 33, 81 – 82, 85, 89, 92, 131 – 132, 147 – 148; Ajax 36 – 37, 134; Antigone 4, 81, 83 – 84, 89, 104n8; characters 37; dialectics 82, 83 – 86, 100; Electra 81, 84, 86 – 91; fragments 147 – 149, 161 – 164; Oedipus 89; Philoctetes 36 – 37, 89; Sophoclean turn 98 – 100; trilogies of 161 – 164 Sound, Sense and Rhythm (Edwards) 64 sparagmos 117 stasimon 9 Steiner, George 3 – 4, 29 Stichomythia 9 strophe 9, 108, 137, 139 Suhrawardi 23 Suppliant Women 10 symbolon 60, 63 – 64, 68, 70 – 71 Symposium (Plato) 32, 104n38, 149 Talmud 51 Taplin, Oliver 16n5

theasthai 45, 60, 121 theatron 45, 59, 63, 108, 111 – 113, 124 Thebes 27, 106 – 109, 115, 162 Theognis 6, 148 Theogony 102, 105n39 theôros 45, 50, 60, 121 theôria 45, 50, 60, 121 theôrien 45 thesaurisma 22 Thespis 12, 96 – 97 Thomas, Oliver 69 – 70 Tiefenpsychologie 22 time as god 142 – 143 Tiresias 109, 135 Todestrieb 53 toponyms 70 tragedy 118, 142; dialogic/dialectic nature of 161; embodiment of 95; foundational principles of 81; as meta-theatrical manifestos 4 – 5, 58; poetics of 4; society and 161 tragemes 49 tragic elements 45 – 53; agôn 45 – 46; anagnôrisis 48; dran 46 – 47; hairesis 46; hamartia 47; overview 45; peripeteia 47 – 48; theatron 45 tragos (goat) 7 translation 13, 23, 26 – 27, 33, 42, 87, 131 – 132 translators 26, 29, 108, 131, 139 trilogy 58, 75, 77, 153 – 162, 164 Trojan War 12, 63 – 64, 149, 153, 156, 161 Trojan Women 10, 12, 89, 153, 157, 161 – 162, 167n31 ungovernable thought 6, 138 – 140 unheimlich 34, 36, 38, 172 Ustinova, Yulia 21 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 7, 57, 65 – 66, 78, 79n3, 80n14 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 7, 79n3, 80n14 Waiting for Godot 59 Western drama 6, 97 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 97, 112 Xanthias 28 – 29 Yates, Francis 24n6 Zeitlin, Froma 16n5 Zeno 22, 82 Zeus 107 – 108, 159 Zorn 139