Elastómeros

The Idea of the “Tragic” and Attic Tragedies

The intuitive relation via which people constitute themselves as subjects in the world ensues, by and large, from one major impulse: the desire to know. The achievement of this aspiration marks the latent transition from intuition to actualisation. In a certain sense, an individual’s self- realisation is the direct outcome of this process, which impels one to interact with life, to partake in the ways of the world by embracing its each and every aspect, putting the personal cumulative knowledge to test thereof. Then again, in the grand scheme of things, the question of how and when an individual realises itself is of secondary importance. What becomes more of an issue, instead, is the ostensible fact that things take their course throughout the journey that one comes to call life. To take part in the ways of the world is to witness the inscrutable ways in which things run their course and eventually trap people in positions, where they are forced to make choices so as to be able to alter the course of events, if not things themselves. Denoting the A and Ω of an individual’s self-realisation in the same breath, these moments of decision-making concurrently expose humankind in its most (in)vulnerable state(s) and reveal the far-reaching consequences of the choices made. And those who live through these consequences prove to be the fortunate ones, albeit temporarily. At the end of the day, things do take their course; an individual’s free will turns out to be limited and is driven, for the most part, by a firm, yet natural belief that knowledge-cum-experience can supplement one with an everlasting fuel, as well as an error-proof shield against the calamities of the voyage at hand.

No serious interpreter of tragedy can easily dismiss this point. Indeed, from antiquity to German Idealism, and from modernity to the present, tragedy and the idea of the “tragic” have been a thorn in philosophers’ flesh, precisely under the guise of an aesthetic mode of ontological inspection into the conflictive correlation amidst people and the cryptic ways of the world. Simultaneously lighting the beacons on the dark road of periodisation in the long history of tragedy and demarcating the lines between tragedy as a form of art and the tragic as a vehicle of thought, this preliminary projection frames the terms of the debate that is perhaps most ably articulated by Peter Szondi: “Begun by Schelling in a thoroughly non-programmatic fashion, the philosophy of the tragic runs through the Idealist and Post-Idealist periods, always assuming a new form. If one counts Kierkegaard among the German philosophers and leaves aside his

72 students such as Unamuno, the philosophy of the tragic is proper to German philosophy. Until this day [1961], the concept of the tragic has remained fundamentally a German one” (2002: 1- 2, brackets added). Szondi thus formulates a very powerful thesis that continues to comprise a basis1 _{for investigations not only over philosophy and tragedy, but also on the cardinal part that}

dialectics acquire for comprehending the lineament of the tragic, which, in the words of the scholar, “is a mode, a particular manner of destruction that is threatening or already completed: the dialectical manner. There is only one tragic downfall: the one that results from the unity of opposites, from the sudden change into one’s opposite, from self-division” (ibid.: 55, emphasis in the original). As it stands in this explication, dialectics suggests itself to be a robust method of inquiry into the kernel of the tragic and appeases the absence of such pivotal movements as French Neoclassicism and English Renaissance from the initial designation, and, by logical inference, from Szondi’s conceptual framework.

That being said, the obscurities at play hamper one from putting the wheels of this method into motion straightaway. Even though it is truly impossible to come up with a satisfactory definition of tragedy that can cover the demands of a plethora of perspectives varying from, say, G. W. F. Hegel to Friedrich Nietzsche, the axiom that “tragedy is a mimesis of a praxis,” or better, “tragedy is mimesis not of persons but of praxis and life,” as was discussed in the previous chapter in conjunction with Aristotle’s identification of mimesis with praxis through the medium of tragedy, can be established as a plausible zero benchmark. Nevertheless, any assay to loosen the ties, let alone to sand off the rough edges of the other chunk in the wheelwork, is tantamount to stirring up a scholarly hornets’ nest: the tragic. Especially juxtaposing it to Szondi’s rejection of its existence qua “essence” and commendable struggle to detect it “in the most concrete element of tragedies” (ibid.: 56), namely, the plot, illustrates that attempts to delineate the tragic raise matters that overreach the problematics of definition. The fact that Szondi himself reverts to the notion of plot-structure in order to break the deadlock of his approach can be taken as an accidental sign of respect to Aristotle, who assigns a vital role to muthos in his dramaturgical schema to a degree that its construction grows into a virtual surrogate for the vague end goal of tragedy, katharsis. Nonetheless, it is significant to underscore that this homage is paid involuntarily in the sense that it stands in stark contrast with Szondi’s point of commencement, where he bluntly states that “Aristotle’s text strives to

1 _{Or even a covert basis, for Szondi’s thesis permeates through the literature dedicated to tragedy and philosophy}

to such an extent that it finds a secret entrance into the introduction to one of the finest collections of essays produced on the topic. The editors of the volume, Miguel de Beistegui and Simon Sparks, seem to paraphrase Szondi: “apart from the texts of Greek philosophy which treat of tragedy, whether from the point of view of its political status (the Republic), or from that of its form and effects (the Poetics), there actually exists another tradition, indeed a group of traditions, anchored in the German thought of the end of the eighteenth century, which takes tragedy—and particularly Greek tragedy—as its theme” (2000: 1).

73 determine the elements of tragic art; its object is tragedy, not the idea of tragedy” (ibid.: 1). Far from being a drawback, however, this is the strongest asset of Szondi’s An Essay on the Tragic, since it enables him to utilise one of the key concepts of the Poetics in a highly flexible vein, so much so that it obviates efforts to reconcile his enterprise with Aristotle’s treatise at the outset.

Such efforts deserve attention. Bernd Seidensticker, for one, takes notice of the other apparent Aristotelian correspondence in Szondi’s formulation, and after ascertaining his tragic dialectics in the light of peripeteia deduces that “when it came to recognizing the essence of the tragic, Aristotle was more perceptive than many modern critics have been willing to concede” (1996: 393). Be that as it may, Seidensticker’s textually-oriented analysis of Euripides is persuasive insomuch as tragedy qua drama2 is concerned, and it can barely be brought to bear on the idea of the “tragic” as such. Furthermore, without addressing the urgencies of the tragic phenomenon, Seidensticker does not really add much to Szondi’s views. That Seidensticker admits the “fundamental differences between the two approaches” (ibid.: 380) yet still insists to straightjacket Szondi into a design from which he deliberately distanced himself right from the start gives rise to an examination that contributes to certify the dialectical nature of tragedy in general, and of Attic tragedies in particular. Seidensticker’s conclusion is worthwhile, though, because it piques curiosity as to whether “the essence of the tragic” can be found in the Poetics or not. In this regard, harking back to Stephen Halliwell, who ponders over the allusions of the question in a context independent of Szondi, but at the same time dependent upon hamartia, anagnorisis, in addition to peripeteia, might be of help in terms of forming a relatively objective opinion about the issue: “There is an ultimately reassuring underpinning to Aristotle’s reflections on tragedy: a conviction that, at any rate in the heightened mythical world of unified plot-structures (a world from which ‘the irrational’ is excluded), tragic suffering lies within not beyond the limits of human comprehension. If Homeric and Attic tragedy may sometimes seem to intimate an awareness of how much falls outside those limits, there is no trace of this in the Poetics” (2006: 139).3 Stacking the odds against exertions to discover the tragic in Aristotle’s Poetics, Halliwell’s reflexion implores the necessity of a more delicate reading of Szondi’s obviously valid thesis.

Joshua Billings’ Genealogy of the Tragic (2014) fulfils this need to the best possible extent. Having acknowledged the critical valence of Szondi’s essay, he first contends on solid

2 _{Rather, “literature,” as Hans-Thies Lehmann would have it in his promising, but somewhat too generic criticism}

of Szondi (2016: 47-9).

3 _{See also, Halliwell’s earlier approach to the problem (1996: 332-49) that was published in the same volume with}

that of Seidensticker. It is regrettable that these two essays have been separated from each other in this publication whose ostensive value hinges on the manners through which contributors respond to individual papers.

74 grounds that the problems at stake “remain deeply Aristotelian” (ibid.: 8), and later on unrolls the delicacies of his contention: “without disputing that there is something radically new in what Szondi calls the ‘philosophy of the tragic,’ I argue that questions of history, which have been central for thinking about tragedy since the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, persist through the idealist era and continue to define modern approaches to tragedy” (ibid.: 9). As it is, Billings discloses the real difficulty with Szondi’s take on the tragic4 and rightly pins down the Querelle as one of the most decisive moments in the history of tragedy. Building on the critique-resistant premise that the French competition over the genre at the end of the seventeenth century is indispensable to an ample understanding of German Idealism, the scholar proceeds to challenge Szondi’s account by proffering a “genealogical” methodology by way of which he unveils the historical subtleties of the movement, where Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone were the cherished texts of Hegel and Friedrich Hölderlin, both of whom occupy the centre stage in Billings’ work. And there is certainly much in Billings’ other writings on the subject that does intellectual justice to the “tragic turn” in German philosophy, above all his alertness to the chorus and the essential role it obtains for tragic dialectics.5 And yet, the risks entailed by endeavours to stress the exigency of Athenian tragedy to German Idealism and vice versa are considerable. What tends to get lost, even in as scrupulous a handling of the matter as that of Billings, is not merely the immediacy of the exact, if convoluted, condition within which humans are situated in Ancient Greek tragedies in toto, but more importantly, the breadth of the ways in which Roman transformation of the Attic canon divulges itself in forms that shape the opposing aesthetic views of the Querelle: the Ancient Greek tragic paradeigma on the one hand, and the Senecan shadow on the exemplum of William Shakespeare on the other, together with the theoretically loaded exempla of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine located in between.

These preliminaries do more than recapitulating the well-known historical trajectory of tragedy. Functioning as provisional signposts, they concomitantly chart out the journey of the tragic before German Idealism and hint at the problematics of reception, if not definition, inasmuch as the future of this history is in question—a question to which the present chapter intends to respond. Behind this intention there lies a triple hypothesis that operates on interwoven branches, one positing that the idea of the “tragic” has already been a philosophical constant in antiquity prior to its reconfiguration into a metaphysical Weltanschauung by the German thought, another postulating that the voyage of the tragic goes hand in hand with the

4 _{Where his negligence of the chorus within the specific context of German Idealism is evenly troubling, as has}

been noted by Goldhill (2013: 50).

5 _{Cf. “Both Hölderlin and Hegel read Greek tragedy as the representation of a kind of revolution, a comprehensive}

social change that alters collective consciousness. Their theories place the chorus within a temporal dialectic, in which insight emerges from the collision of opposed forces” (Billings 2013: 319).

75 changing conceptions of mimesis throughout history, and the other asserting that the future of the tragic resides in its poietic translation into the dynamics of the performative space of theatre. This, of course, is an offshoot of an overall (hypo)thesis that brings the notion/s of source and target dramaturgy to the forefront when it comes to the afterlife of Athenian tragedies on the contemporary stage, as was propounded earlier at various phases of this study. And here, it is imperative to underline that the proposed tripartite hypothesis neither stands for an excavation of the source of Ancient Greek tragedies, nor seeks to prove something, existence of the idea of the “tragic” qua essence in antiquity, for example. On the contrary: the hypothesis on the tragic—a hypothesis, au fond, of the inscrutable and therefore inexplicable ways of the world— encloses the area around signposts with argumentative wire so as to lay the groundwork for both exploring how philosophy reacts to the tragic in and beyond antiquity, as well as for scrutinising the manners through which contemporary theatre practitioners construe it on stage in times to come. But for the time being, the three branches of the hypothesis resolutely point towards a spot, the spot in Oedipus Tyrannus 716, “ἐν τριπλαῖς ἁμαξιτοῖς / where three roads meet” (Storr 1962: 66-7).6

All the same, several methodological facets still need clarification before probing into the implications of the illustrious crossroads scene of Sophocles’ piece. This gloss becomes all the more necessary, once one recalls Simon Goldhill’s binding reservations on “hypostatization of the ‘tragic’” and invaluable suggestion that “one crucial move toward coming to terms with ‘the tragic’ is to historicize the term and thereby to see what the consequences are when it is applied with its full panoply of German Romantic associations to the genre of ancient Athenian tragedies. The challenge for the critic remains to pay due attention to the specific socio-political context of ancient drama, while recognizing the drive toward transhistorical truth both in the plays’ discourse and in the plays’ reception” (2008: 61). Goldhill rightfully remonstrates against generalisations about Attic tragedy and the tragic in the wake of German Idealism, now properly expanded into German Romanticism, and demonstrates the correct methodological path on a topic that is fraught with the perils of ungrounded speculation. Whilst the scholar is in favour of historicising “the tragic” by thinking the varied registers in which Plato and Aristotle speak of its derivatives such as tragikos, tragoidia, tragikôtatos in relation to the discourse of the tragedies themselves, the accent he places on “the drive toward transhistorical truth” paves the way for an alternative methodology, one that would pinpoint the problematics of the term in antiquity. In that respect, what comes into prominence is the burning issue of how to recognise

6 _{Unless indicated otherwise, all Greek quotations of Sophocles are from Sophocles in Two Volumes, I: Oedipus}

the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, with an English translation by F. Storr, The Loeb Classical Library, 20, London: William Heinemann, 1962.

76 this impulse in the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, alongside of their reception in performance. Keeping in mind that reception of Ancient Greek tragedies in performance is a question that falls within Goldhill’s sphere of interest7 _{encourages one to press the issue even}

more by reiterating a point that was raised in the introductory chapter of the current study: Attic tragedies’ precision to display the situation pertaining to the world and human conduct with remarkable simplicity via mimesis. In point of fact, this situation reveals the “transhistorical truth” that Godhill leaves unspecified; the truth that derives from the dialectical tension between the course of things and the course of events in life, which, in turn, is embodied nowhere but in the performative space of tragic theatre. This, in a word, is the overarching truth that does not change in essence. It is this truth with which Athenian tragedies confront the contemporary receptor at an age where the credibility of such notions as truth and reality are called into doubt, whereas the real truth of death and grief is beyond doubt.

But on a deeper level, the situation itself seems to be stuck in a topos in which matters related to the tragic can be settled within the bounds of reason. On that note, the spot in Oedipus Tyrannus might serve as the least common denominator of an extremely complex phenomenon and compel one to (re)envisage the crossroads scene in a setting for the purpose of setting the wheels of the dialectical method into motion. Signposts now metamorphose into telling signs, onto which two Delphic aphorisms, that is, “Γνῶθι σεαυτόν / Know thyself” and “Μηδὲν ἄγαν / Naught in excess”8 _{are engraved for the particular attention of the person(a), who stands at the}

crossroads as an epitome of Heraclitus’ apothegm that “ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν / I searched for myself” (D. 101).9 _{Charles H. Kahn captures the paradox inherent in Heraclitus’ axiom and}

nicely ties it to the first Delphic dictum: “Normally one goes looking for someone else. How can I be the object of my own search? This will make sense only if my self is somehow absent, hidden, or difficult to find. Thus XXVIII [D. 101] states, or presupposes, what one might have thought was a distinctly modern reading of the Delphi gnōthi sauton: self-knowledge is difficult because a man is divided from himself [sic]; he presents a problem for himself to resolve” (1979: 116, emphasis in the original, brackets added). Kahn’s annotation takes one straight to the heart of the matter, for the problem he identifies in the Ephesian’s tenet sheds fresh light on

7 _{As he vigorously shows in (2007, passim and 2010: 56-70, esp. 66-9).}

8 _{Once inscribed into the entrance to the temple of Apollo, these adages are attributed to the sayings of the Seven}