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Sunday Review: Pilinszky’s ‘Passio’

posted by the Judge


Well, it’s my turn to review a book again. I’m dealing with János Pilinszky’s Passio, translated from the Hungarian by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri. Read the review here.

I was mightily disappointed by this book. There isn’t as much as one mention of the Golden Team, or even one poem discussing the great Ferenc Puskás. Instead, all we get is great literature.

I don’t know what this continent is coming to, really.

Enjoy your Sunday!
 

Anatomy of Tragedy #7: Videogames

written by the Judge


XVI

Our anatomy of tragedy is finished, and the question is – where do we go from here? It is interesting to contemplate the tradition of criticism behind this genre, and look at the path that winds towards us. When Hegel developed his brilliant theory of literature, it was the beginning of the nineteenth century. A new literary genre, called the novel, had become very popular.

Novels, back in Hegel’s time, were far less sophisticated than they are today. And they were not recognised as a legitimate part of ‘high’ culture. Indeed, reading many novels was seen as the symptom of a shallow mind, one only occupied with frivolities (amusing, given that the contemporary cliché says exactly the opposite – reading many novels is now characteristic of the deep and intellectual mind). This is, I suppose, the reason why Hegel decided not to bother with this new mode of writing – but now it seems like the most glaring omission from his theory.

Enter Mikhail Bakhtin, writing from his position of complete obscurity in the first half of the twentieth century, and producing one of the most important and original studies of the novel ever written. His work is very seldom connected to Hegel and Nietzsche, but in my opinion it makes for a natural sequel to their investigations. Bakhtin never mentioned the I and O symbols, but he identified the stand-out trait of the novel as a literary genre: while poetry transitions from one primal symbol to the other, and drama synthesises them both in a single effect, the novel simply uses them liberally, with no consistent rule or method at all. The resulting condition of chaos, in which anything goes, even something as polymorphous as Joyce’s Ulysses, is the realm of the novel. Cinema, though a new revolutionary art in its own right, did not innovate the symbolic arena the way that the novel did. The language of film is always either the language of drama or that of the novel (and as of late, even that of poetry!); images are used instead of words, but the rules (or lack thereof) stay unchanged.

For my own part, having written a series on poetry and one on drama, I appear to be left with the task of getting one done on the novel. I doubt that I will. My impression is that it would be redundant: Bakhtin’s work may not include a specific discussion of the I and the O, but it is very exhaustive in all other matters. And since the novel is defined by not having a consistent structure for the dynamics of the I and the O, I feel there is little I may add, at least for now.

Are we, then, at the end of hermeneutics? Has this tradition – the one embodied in the continuity of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Bakhtin, not the broader one which includes Heidegger, Gadamer and other illustrious thinkers – been completely mined out? What fascinates me is that we find ourselves today in a similar position to Hegel’s two-hundred years ago. Hegel may have had all the intellectual means – if not a great deal of predisposition – to study the novel, but there would have been little material for him to look into: novels back then were just too simple. Dostoevsky, on whose work the theory of Bakhtin was wholly predicated, published his major works thirty years after Hegel’s death. The German philosopher simply came too early.

We are, as I said, in a very similar position. Though cinema may not have changed the structure of narrative from literature, we are today witnessing the rise of a new, fresh, revolutionary art-form that does. I am talking about videogames.

Games appear to be at a stage of development not unlike the novel in Hegelian times. They are not accepted as legitimate members of high culture, and people who indulge in them are often frowned on as time-wasters. They have developed by leaps and bounds since their appearance in the 1970s, but they are still very rudimentary: more often than not, developers struggle to weave narrative into gameplay, and they borrow methods and techniques from other forms, especially film. Games that involve ‘cut-scenes’ – moments in which the game stops and you simply watch an animated sequence – are trying to replicate an effect which does not belong to their medium. There is no material in these cut-scenes to develop a new branch of hermeneutic theory, because this type of narrative is derivative.

And yet games genuinely exhibit the potential for new narrative structures, much more so than film ever did. At the heart of the original gaming experience there is interactivity – not only the possibility of choosing between different paths on a story, but the possibility of making one’s own arrangement with the symbols that one is offered. A structure that efficiently, uniquely suits the videogame format sees the player coming to a scenario after some great event has happened, and reconstructing the story by finding fragments left by the previous occupants (diary entries, pictures, memos, objects, living creatures, etc.). If the order in which these fragments are found and the option itself of finding them is not linear (as in the original Resident Evil) but left to the player’s decisions on where to go and what to do (as in the GameCube’s Metroid Prime), we have a structure that no other art-form can replicate at all. If poetry has no time, if drama has time self-contained and bound to the continuum of the stage, and if the novel has time which is not self-contained and follows no rules but its own, then videogames have something completely new – in a videogame, the factor of time is transferred from the space of the text onto the reader: you are time. Causality takes on a new dimension. The symbolic value of signifiers – whether objects stand for the I or the O – relies on the arrangement effected by the player’s actions and therefore depends on a whole new principle, has whole new effects. The very structure of the novel is contained within that of videogames, as a player forms his / her own novel out of the fragments and variables that s/he is offered – exactly like the structure of drama is contained in the novel, and the structure of poetry is contained in drama. We have finally reached the next level.

As something of an aside, it’s worth pausing for a moment and looking at the evolution of literary theory and the way that it paced after the evolution of the great literary forms. Studying a poem meant studying the text itself and what it said, while studying a play meant studying the characters and what they believed in. The rise of the novel coincided with the explosion of a concept that, in literary theory, had until then been given relatively less attention – the concept of the author, and the idea that meaning is buried deeper than in the previous levels and in the author’s mind. As the symbolic play of the text went into more and more subterranean levels, the theory behind those texts correspondingly started hunting for meaning in new, hidden agents. In cinema, there is no new level to make the previous ones redundant. But in games, intended in the sense that I discussed above, the author clearly takes a back-seat and the player comes to the fore as the matrix of meaning, in a way that even contemporary theories on subjectivity and literary con/text cannot fully account for.

At this point, though, our series must genuinely come to a close, and a white flag must be raised. Not because the topic has been exhaustively treated, as in the case of the novel, but for the opposite reason – because there is not enough material to study. Videogames are, as I mentioned, still quite rudimentary. There has been no Dostoevsky in their world. There has been no Proust. An anatomy of gaming must be left to scholars as of yet unborn, and my best wishes – along with a quantum of irrepressible envy – go out to all of them.

Sunday review: Anthony Wilson’s Riddance

posted by the Judge

Goddamn, what a day. I was out in London with a friend and I was reminded of every reason I love that city so much. I was also reminded of the fact that Camden Town is DAMNED TO HELL with me. Every time I go there something bad happens – in this case, someone nicked a hat I was exceptionally fond of. I walked out of that pub and would have welcomed a fist fight, no joke.

So after all that stuff happened, I got back home and finally found the time to stop thinking about hats and turn my mind to poetry criticism. Here’s our Sunday review, gents. Judi Sutherland reviews Anthony Wilson’s Riddance, which is about the lugubrious topic of cancer. A difficult topic, but apparently Wilson handles it in a pretty detached manner.

I’d love to close with our usual ‘Have a great Sunday’, but it may be a bit late for that. And ‘have a great Monday’ sounds like I’m mocking you.

Anatomy of Tragedy #6: Modern Film

written by the Judge


XV

A more ‘proper’ study of these genres would have seen me writing about tragedy and comedy simultaneously, drawing examples from each in turn and constructing a single argument for both. In reality, though structurally very close, tragedy and comedy are historically so distant that they are best studied separately.

My choice was to focus on tragedy because it is, by and large, an easier subject. Since tragedy has always been identified as ‘high’ culture, even by Aristotle, dramatic traditions have generally striven for greater and greater purity of the genre. Playwrights were interested in writing true, classical, eternal tragedies. Comedy, by contrast, has always been seen as a ‘low’ genre – and it does not help that Aristotle’s book on comedy should have been lost, resulting in a millenarian scholarly slant in favour of tragedy (famously fictionalised by Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose). As a consequence, writers of comedies have liberally moved away from – rather than towards – formal purity. Classical plot structures have been sacrificed in favour of (or contaminated by) contingent humour, slapstick and vulgarity. The precept was, and still is, to use anything in order to please the immediate crowds, rather than the eternal reader.

Modern film reflects the disparity in the historical fortune of tragedy and comedy very well. Modern comedies, in particular family and romantic comedies, are usually classical in their format. Family comedies have a hero, typically a father who is somewhat foolish, irresponsible or down on his luck, and an anti-hero, some bad guy who represents a corporation or another collective group. Once the interests of these two characters collide, the hero ‘finds himself’ and is reconciled with his family (sometimes, by metonymic extension, he gains the admiration of an even wider group, like having all of his friends or colleagues applauding him), while the anti-hero is deprived of his power or status. In love stories, the structure is not dissimilar, though the triangles are a little different – instead of the father who must reconcile himself with the family, we may have a single girl who must get together with the ‘right’ guy, and who succeeds in doing so as she overcomes a number of obstacles in the form of nefarious social pressure: other guys trying to seduce her, her family opposing her, her career choices clashing with the sentimental ones, and so on.

There are many other types of comedy in film, some of which are utterly modern and have nothing to do with the ancients. Certain unbridled comedies along the lines of the Naked Gunor Scary Movie series are little more than a string of all sorts of gags, held together by a pretext narrative. The old Disney and Warner Bros cartoons are entirely based on visual slapstick and they all have the same story (a morality tale in which the bully gets punished, whether his form be that of a cat, a coyote, a duck or whatever else), or else they have no story at all – some of them simply stage an isolated episode in which a character or a group of characters are doing something (examples include building a ship, trying to put out a fire, cleaning a car, taking a train, skating on ice, and many more). Artists such as the Monty Python group have developed entire feature-length films which are based on an absurd type of humour which has nothing to do with classical comedy. Indeed, comedy has genuinely exploded in the last century, as the classical format has established itself and been taken to new heights, while new modes and genres have developed alongside it (I say this with the qualifier that a great deal of comedy from the past has simply not survived – for all we know there might well have been such a thing as an equivalent of the Naked Gun films in Classical Athens, but one understands why they may not have been recorded for posterity).

On the other hand, tragedies have not flourished at all in cinema. There are some genuine representatives of the genre, but they are few and far between. The only ones I can think of are Coppola’s first two Godfather movies, De Palma’s Scarface, Woody Allen’s Match Point, and George Lucas’ Revenge of the Sith (the latter being quite possibly the most dreadfully written tragedy in recorded history). Other than that, there is no such thing as an established tragic genre in cinema. The movies that we file under the official genre of ‘Drama’, from Spielberg’s Schindler’s List to Mendes’ American Beauty, are works of considerable merit and undeniable moving power, but they have nothing to do with tragedies. If anything, they are closer in form to the novel, a story-telling mode in which signifiers of the I and the O are used freely, without being organised into coherent structures. This is true even of films that stage apparently ‘tragic’ plots, like Scott’s Thelma & Louise, which is not a tragedy for the simple reason that the death of the two heroines is an act of ultimate affirmation, not one of surrender.

The only time that something like an incipient tragic tradition developed in cinema was in the 1940s, when the genre of film noir made its appearance in America. These dark brooding films consistently play around with tropes belonging to classical tragedy (broken dreams, forbidden love, inevitability, violation of the law, murder of kin), and a drive towards reviving the old dramatic tradition – whether deliberate or not – can be read everywhere. A few of the films are successful in executing the tragic effect, such as Billy Wilder’s unforgettable Double Indemnity, which is as impeccably tragic as anything by Shakespeare. Most of the others start out by establishing a tragic premise, but they abort it halfway, or are simply unable to sustain the tension between Achilles and the sea over the complicated structure of a feature-length film. The decline of film noir after less than a couple of decades meant that the genre never had the time to evolve into a real continuity – so that North America does not (yet) have its own tragic tradition the way that the European countries do. There have been attempts at reviving or simply referencing film noir, but even when the results were gorgeous (one film to bind them all – Scott’s Blade Runner) the elements that were reproduced were those of lighting, frame, character or tone. In other words, it was always primarily a visualrevival. The tragic tension that characterised these early films has been all but forgotten.

This cross-contamination of genres in cinema is in fact a good thing; it allows for an enormous variety and freedom of expression. But it does mean, at least for now, the death of tragedy, in a way which even George Steiner (author of a book called Death of Tragedy) would not have anticipated.

A coda to wrap it all up next week and then we’re done, ladies and gents!

SUN-day review! Sarah Arvio’s night thoughts

posted by the Judge


It’s Sunday! And, er, it’s chaos. I’ve been all caught up with stuff that’s been happening, and in the middle of it all Blogger decided to die on me (hence the fact that I skipped the local update to the review ofTodorovic’s Little Red Transistor Radiolast week).
 
As importantly, I only just found out that “It’s Sunday!” is alarmingly close to the catchphrase for Rebecca Black’s dumbass hit video. Apparently I’m a gigantic fool for being the only person on the planet not to have heard of Miss Black (I only found out about her through her death battlewith Justin Bieber), who has the most contradictory name for the type of persona she projects. It would be much more fitting if she were reading Sylvia Plath and acting all goth, like I would have done at sixteen had I been a girl. Come to think of it, I was doing pretty much the same as a boy, ‘cept that instead of Plath I was reading Leopardi. ANYWAY. You can picture me announcing this weekend’s review with flashing multicoloured pop-lights all around me and this rapper dude driving around in a car making rhymes about poetry criticism.* That would be the day.
 
It’s Sun-day! Sun-day! We’re reviewing poetry to-day! It’s being reviewed by Shane A! He’ reviewing Sarah Arvio, hey! Her book is night thoughts, yay! Read it over at this link, wa-hay! Fun, yeah! Party, yeah!
 
(Wait a second. There’s a connection even between night thoughts and Rebecca Black’s name now? WTF???)
 
I’m over that. Have a great Sun-day!

*(I’m off to try and make that video).

NaPoWriMo and the Pulitzer Remix!

It’s that time again! Like many other masochists across the globe, Jon and I are diligently offering ourselves up to Lord April for the annual creative carbolic soaping that is NaPoWriMo.

In celebration of this year’s scribblefest, why not check out found poetry extravaganza The Pulitzer Remix? Eighty-five poets from seven countries will create found poetry from the 85 Pulitzer Prize-winning works of fiction. Each poet will post one poem per day on the project’s website (www.pulitzerremix.com) during the month of April, resulting in the creation of more than 2,500 poems by the project’s conclusion.

The project is sponsored by the Found Poetry Review, the only literary journal in print dedicated to publishing found poetry.

“We recognize that there are many prestigious awards recognizing the work of writers from around the world,” explains Jenni B. Baker, project creator and editor-in-chief at the Found Poetry Review. “Understanding that all lists have their shortcomings, we chose the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction list for both its length and its potential to spur new works of found poetry by our poets.”

Pulitzer Remix poets are challenged to create new works of poetry that vary in topic and theme from the original text, rather than merely regurgitating the novels in poetic form. Posted texts will take the form of blackouts, whiteouts, collages and more, and will range from structured to more experimental forms.

This is the second year the Found Poetry Review has lead a project for National Poetry Month, Last year, on the heels of a successful Kickstarter campaign, the journal enlisted volunteers to distribute 500 found poetry kits in public spaces in communities across the US and abroad.

After the conclusion of Pulitzer Remix, Baker intends to seek a publisher for an edited collection of poems from the project.

“Compared to traditional poetry, very few works of found poetry ever see publication. We look forward to putting together a manuscript of the best pieces from the project in hopes that these poems will live on beyond National Poetry Month,”she concludes.

You can follow the project at pulitzerremix.com or on Twitter at the hashtag #pulitzerremix. Project updates can also be found on the Found Poetry Review’s Facebook page and Twitter profile.

Anatomy of Tragedy #5: Comedy

written by the Judge

XIV

As we go towards the end of these meditations, a few words must be said on the subject of comedy. Comedy stands to tragedy in the same way that epic poetry stands to lyric poetry: it is the diametrical opposite, but in its true nature it is not as widely appreciated or understood by criticism.

If we start from the precept that comedy is the opposite of tragedy, it seems natural to look at the parable of its protagonists to make a comparison. Unfortunately, this is a topic on which comedies are frequently misleading: the character most central to the narrative (sometimes the one who gives the comedy its title) is not the equivalent of the tragic hero. Think of Shakespeare’s The Jew of Malta. Anyone would agree that Shylock is the most memorable character in the play, and maybe the most important. It is also possible to recognise in his parable the downfall of a tragic hero, and some modern renditions of the play have attempted to give it an accordingly serious, sombre slant.

This line of thinking only leads to confusion. The ‘protagonists’ of comedies are usually anti-heroes – old men who are rich and / or powerful, corrupted in their value-systems, trying to use their leverage to bend someone else to their repulsive will. The typical set-up sees one of these old men trying to marry a girl whom another character, a young man, happens to be in love with. It is this ‘young man’ who is the actual equivalent of the hero, having to fight for his individual love against unfavourable social forces, while the old man, as a representative of power, money and law, is the chorus (as often as not he is also the younger man’s father, thus standing in also for familial responsibility, history and heritage).

There are alternative set-ups, of course. One of the most popular consists in having a titular character who is not an old man, but a sly, witty, low-born servant who drives the plot forward with his clever tricks, such as Figaro or Scapin. This makes for another choral figure, because the servant represents the lower classes, in contrast to the play’s actual protagonists who are always of higher and more distinguished birth. Yet it does not change the actual structure of the play – the servant is normally there to help develop the same conflict between some grumpy aged bureaucrat and a younger hero. 

This structure has led a number of commentators to describe comedy as a type of story in which a young generation prevails over the old. This is historically true, but the question of age is of course not strictly necessary to develop a comic drama. Strepsiades, the real hero of Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds, is in fact an old father who is trying to educate his son (in this case the anti-hero figure is played by Socrates, the misleading, pompous head of the philosophers). Strepsiades ends the play in the most active condition it is possible to imagine, as he is single-handedly smashing down and burning the school of the philosophers with an axe, while Socrates cries out O signifiers in his final line, ‘Ah! ah! woe is upon me! I am suffocating!’

The above example reveals the true difference between tragedy and comedy. Though the structure is the same for both genres, the dynamics are reversed. At the end of comedies, the chorus figures close on signifiers of the O, that is to say, on equality and peace:

KING: All yet seems well, and if it end so meet,
The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.
(All’s Well That Ends Well).
 
CLOWN: But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day.
(Twelfth Night).

DAKE: Proceed, proceed: we will begin these rites
As we do trust they’ll end in true delights.
(As You Like It).

In tragedy, the hero goes through a lyric transition (I to O) while the chorus draws an epic parable (O to I). In comedy, it is the other way round: the anti-hero, who is the chorus figure, goes through a lyric movement, while the young man, who is the actual hero, lives through an epic. The young man starts from a condition of passivity, being subject to the laws and the will of the old man (especially when the latter is framed as his father), and by the end of the comedy gets to marry the girl he desires – thus starting his own family, achieving economic independence and becoming his own self-subsistent pater familias. The old man, by contrast, goes from being in a position where he may enforce his will, to being compelled to surrender it. This does not make of him a tragic hero, on the contrary: we are able to empathise with a tragic hero because he represents the I, which is what allows us to identify with him. But the comedic anti-hero represents the O, and when he makes a lyric speech, the social values he defends or expresses are repressive (and not assertive) of the individual, such that we are pleased to see them undone. This is the lyric monologue that Molière’s Harpagon enounces at the end of the fourth act of The Miser, after his money has been stolen:

Ah! I’ve seized my own self. My spirit is troubled, and I ignore where I am, who I am, and what I do. Alas! My poor money, my poor money, my dear friend! They have deprived me of you, and since you have been taken from me, I have lost my support, my consolation, my joy; all is finished for me, and I have nothing else left in the world: without you, it is impossible for me to live. It’s finished, I can’t take it any longer; I die, I am dead, I am buried.
 
Some rhetorical subtleties aside, this speech is not qualitatively different from those made by tragic characters. The difference between Harpagon’s speech and that of someone like Romeo is that Harpagon is appealing to a social construct – money – that we are not able to identify with; the fact that we may desire money does not mean that we are willing to define it as our identity. Romeo, on the other hand, is speaking for an individual, internal will – in this case, his love for Juliet – that we can instantly make our own.

 
The result is that Harpagon’s speech is met with social rejection by the audience, in the form of laughter. Laughter is originally a mechanism developed for the expression of social allegiance: we laugh with the people we like, and at the people we dislike. By contrast in a tragedy, the lyric speech is made by someone the audience is siding with, and the result is that we suffer together with him.
 
In both tragedy and comedy, we walk out with a feeling of existential satisfaction, as though the order and harmony of the universe had been re-established. The difference between the two genres is rather subtle, and it is defined by the way they cross over the lyric and epic effect. If we agree that in the lyric we experience a dissolution, a gentle dissipation of the self, while in the epic we experience its affirmation, then here is how they are crossed over in drama: in tragedy, we identify with the hero as he dissolves lyrically, and with the chorus as it assumes the ideal of the hero (by picking up the I which he has relinquished). Thus, we are effectively dissolving into an ideal. We may be disappearing, but we are disappearing into something greater, more noble – and that’s why the tragic is uplifting even as it is sad. In comedy, we identify with the hero as he wins an epic struggle for his own individual agency, and with the chorus as it surrenders its active agency to the hero. In this case it is the hero who is picking up the mantle of a social collectivity or a social rule – that is why his victory is normally expressed through the group ritual of marriage. In comedy, we are being named, born, individualised, accepted as we truly are, by and into a group that is larger than we are, namely society. Our own individualism is defined and supported by the social context in which it subsists, while in tragedy it is society which marches on under the banner of the fallen hero’s individual values. This is not a ‘philosophical’ difference; you could argue that the two things are really the same thing, at least in terms of what they mean and imply. It is, rather, an aesthetic difference: even if we can’t pin down tragedy and comedy in terms of an ideological distinction, we feel the difference between them, we experience it fully on an emotive level, much like we feel the difference between an epic and a lyric poem even if they are both, say, about a religious poet’s love for God.
 
Thus a genuine comedy does more than simply make you laugh. Unlike satire, parody, common jokes or desecrating humour, which can be just as funny as anything in the above classical format, you will walk out of a comedy with a harmonious feeling that more elementary humour cannot give to you: it’s like knowing that the world is beautiful.

Final part coming along next week, fellas, with a look at tragedy in the world of film. See you then!

Anatomy of Tragedy #4: The Hell and Heaven of Faustus

written by the Judge


XII

I have drawn all of my examples from the Elizabethan stage so far because I am writing in English and they allow me to illustrate directly the linguistic operations taking place, but the same rules hold true in other dramatic cultures as well (with due differences in terms of tone and style, obviously). Case in point: the Hellenic chorus tends to close the play on an active note, with final lines that range from the soberly emancipated…

House of Atreus, you’ve survived
so much grief, but what’s been
accomplished today sets you free.
(Electra).

…to the outright euphoric:

Cry out your joy now, in song!
(Eumenides).

Indeed the most common rhetorical construction by the chorus at the end of tragedies is an exhortation to go somewhere or start doing something – in other words, to start taking action. Sophocles’ The Women of Trakhis ends with Hyllos saying, ‘Women, don’t cower in the house. / Come with us’, while Philoktetesends with ‘Let’s all set off together / now, praying to the nymphs of the sea / come take us safely home.’ This form holds true in other traditions, over and beyond the Elizabethan. This is how Jean Racine has Theseus speaking out in the final speech of Phaedra:

Let us go, by my mistake alas too illuminated,
And mingle our tears to the blood of our unhappy son.
Let us go embrace the remains of that dear son,
To expiate the fury of the prayer I detest.
Let us honour him as he deserves, […]

These are all very straight-forward examples, because making a general argument makes it easier to illustrate my point. I think it is important to specify that things are not always as linear or as easy as they appear. Sometimes there are important contextual issues that arise; the first two plays in Aeschylus’ Oresteia do not see the chorus ending with an active affirmation, and this for the simple reason that they are part of a trilogy, and the story does not end until the Eumenides (which, as we have seen, finish with an active chorus).

Other times, the passage from O to I is executed in ways which are more sophisticated (and thus harder to recognise) than the ones we have cited. I have described some of the possible linguistic methods that can be used to perform this transition in the third article on lyric and epic poetry, and we find them again in dramatic texts. Some can easily be confusing, such as the last line from the second part of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine: ‘For both their worths will equal him no more.’ This appears to close on an O signifier, if it weren’t that the phrase is a negative – it is the ‘equal[ity]’ which is no more. As more extensively argued in the article above, when an O signifier is negated, it is flipped onto its head to become an I signifier, and viceversa. Hence Tamburlaine closes with an I, even if a superficial examination may lead one to conclude that it does not.

When testing these arguments, it is important to remember that not all dramatists have been so kind to us as Shakespeare, who closed his heroic death speeches with a cataract of O’s. More often (and with no intention to detract from the bard, naturally), the solutions employed have been subtler.


XIII


The manner in which the epic and lyric trajectories of the chorus and hero are synthesised into the tragic is simple: the same signifiers are used for both antithetical sides. In other words, though they are going in opposite directions, they are walking on the same road (this also explains why simply reading a succession of unrelated lyric and epic poems does not produce the tragic). It is not a very difficult thing to execute; in fact it happens quite spontaneously, simply because the characters share the same story, and are thus allowed to respond (differently) to the same themes.

Marlowe’s Dr Faustusmakes this perspicuous. To the play’s audience, it seems that Faustus is torn between a path that leads to heaven and one that leads to hell, and that that’s the tension at the heart of the play. In reality, the play’s hero is tormented by a different spiritual problem – it is the question of his epistemological limits. Faustus is trying to learn everything in order to answer his existential problem; the fact that learning as much as he could, even becoming a master of the forbidden occult disciplines, does not ultimately give him a sense of spiritual fulfilment leads him to question the purpose and sense of learning in the first place, and thus his own sense of who he is and why he does what he does.

One way of explaining this drama is by saying that Faustus has his own, internal heaven and hell, one quite distinct from the Christian metaphysical ones. His idea of ‘heaven’ corresponds to an epistemological ideal, while that of hell is a state of ignorance. We thus have a public, Christian heaven / hell polarity promoted by the chorus, counterpoised to a private, intimate heaven / hell polarity promoted by the hero. In both cases, heaven corresponds to the I and hell to the O. Faustus ends up going from the I to the O in both polarities, thus crossing over from the purely private side to the public one and bringing them together in his trajectory.

Marlowe brings in a mirror-image to Dr Faustus in Act V via a character simply referred to as the ‘Old Man’. The Old Man comes to Faustus and attempts to convince him to be saved. Faustus, though initially tempted, is eventually intimidated into remaining with the forces of damnation, and he bids Mephistopheles go and torture the Old Man. Thus the Old Man is attacked by demons, just like Faustus will be at the end of the play; but his reaction is to scornfully resist them, and ‘fly unto my God’ instead. By doing this, he also asserts a metaphysical sense of self that is exactly what Faustus was looking for in his epistemological delirium – and which stands in contrast to, arguably even marks a passage from, his initial anonymous state as an ‘Old Man.’

The theme or plot is essentially the same; we are still talking about a Christian order and a private search for equanimity, and two almost identical characters who undergo the same trial with opposite results: Faustus goes to hell without having found a purpose, the Old Man goes to heaven with his spiritual role fulfilled.

Dr Faustus is a play that, by virtue of being constructed on the very obvious polarity of heaven and hell, makes the tragic effect clear for us to see. But its structure is in fact a constant of the genre. All genuine tragedies will exhibit a public polarity against a private one, and in all cases the protagonists will cross over these polarities in their lyric and epic trajectories, thus bringing them together and synthesising them in a single effect. The private polarity can take many forms, but it is always at heart about a spiritual sense of being in control and at peace. Likewise the public polarity will always be about whether one joins a group of people or dissociates oneself from them.

A few examples, to try and make this clearer. In the Iliad, Achilles’ private struggle between the integrity and the dissolution of his rage is set against his choice to return to the ranks of the army or retire into the solitude of his tent. In Oedipus Rex, the hero’s doubt between seeing (and controlling) his condition or being blind to it is what stands against the cleansing or perpetuation of the plague on the city of Thebes. In Macbeth, the ability to determine one’s fate or have it determined by the prophecies of the witches stands against the appropriation or loss of the crown. The list could go on.

The fact that the symbols of the I and the O in the public and private polarities are essentially interchangeable means that we can even express the tragic genre algebraically. (These representations are not particularly useful in literature, as the precise nature of any given symbol can always be debated and is open to interpretation, but they are amusing enough that I may be forgiven, I hope, if I indulge on them briefly). If we understand the lyric to be represented as I → O,and the epic as O → I, then the tragic can be designated by the following formula:

C(O → I) = H (I → O)

The hero and the chorus, in tragedy, symbolically become each other when they go through their respective lyric and epic trajectories; but the specific themes inside the brackets are interchangeable. It doesn’t matter if the original symbol belonged in the private or the public polarity; it can fit just as well on either side of the equation, and in any of the brackets. Like in a theorem, the values can be transferred to different sides of the equation without changing the result.


But these attempts at usurping mathematical language are, as I said, not particularly useful, and this strand of the argument is perhaps best left at that.

Sunday Review: The Eejit Pit by Jenny Lindsay

posted by the Judge


Sunday! And while I sit here chilling to some electro-blues, lamenting this weather for having kept me away from the bottle of Baileys I wanted to go pick up, Harry Giles goes and reviews Jenny Lindsay‘s The Eejit Pit for us. Check out the review here.

Lindsay Jenny’s a performance poet (one of the big ones), which is the reason Giles Harry warned me against making my usual humorous introduction in Stone Jon’s and Irving Kirsten’s blog, with dumb jokes like pretending that I’m confusing her first name and surname: I risk being made the object of satire in one of her poems.

So I steered well clear of that mistake.

Have a great weekend and go throw some snowballs!

Anatomy of Tragedy #3: Hero and Chorus


written by the Judge


X

The development of a tragedy often centres on a single act done by the hero. Sometimes the act was committed before the events in the tragedy even begin, as in the case of Oedipus Rex, in which the sin is represented by Oedipus’ murder of his father and his wedding to his mother: the play opens in the Theban city wracked by the plague, which was sent by the gods as a punishment for what Oedipus did several years before.

(I intend from this point onwards to refer to the hero by means of the masculine pronouns, ‘he / his’. This is not a reflection on the dramatic tradition at all, as there are very many tragic heroines, from Seneca’s Medea to Racine’s Athalie. It is simply an attempt to make this article easier to read, as there are many pronouns coming up, and it doesn’t help the flow of an already complicated essay when every sentence is punctuated by s/he, his/her and hero/ine).

As the first act opens and unfolds, we usually see the hero defending the legitimacy of his act, or simply his own honour (if he is unaware of what he did). The hero’s refusal to cave in to the pressures of the surrounding characters and / or the chorus is what identifies him as a representative of the I. The hero stands tall, refuses to bend: he will not compromise his first-person ‘I’ into the multiplicity of the chorus, he will be one (1) and whole with his ethical integrity.

But as the tragedy develops and the hero becomes aware of the consequences of his act, his speeches become increasingly dominated by O signifiers. A hero’s death speech is usually overwhelmingly lyrical precisely to the extent that it is powerfully dominated by the O. The Elizabethan stage makes this quite literal. Marlowe’s Dr Faustus says ‘O’ eight times in his famous last speech, and so does Romeo. Shakespeare’s other heroes die with speeches such as these:

HAMLET: O, I die, Horatio.
The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit.
I cannot live to hear the news from England.
But I do prophesy the election lights
On Fortinbras. He has my dying voice.
So tell him, with th’ occurrents, more and less,
Which have solicited. The rest is silence.
O, O, O, O.

LEAR: And my poor fool is hanged.—No, no, no life?
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Oh, thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.—
Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips.
Look there, look there. O, O, O, O.

OTHELLO: Now, how dost thou look now? O ill-starred wench,
Pale as thy smock! When we shall meet at compt
This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven
And fiends will snatch at it. Cold, cold, my girl,
Even like thy chastity. O cursed, cursed slave!
Whip me, ye devils,
From the possession of this heavenly sight!
Blow me about in winds, roast me in sulfur,
Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!—
O Desdemon! Dead Desdemon! Dead! O! O!

A couple of notes. Firstly, Othello’s words are not technically his last, as he does exchange a few more lines with the other characters before dying; but it’s close enough to a final speech that I feel justified in quoting it along with the others.

Secondly, though I have chosen extracts in which the importance of the O as the ‘destination’ of the tragic hero is made explicit, it is important to understand that it is not the literal letter ‘O’ that matters, but its meaning, and the way this is implied. Several of the signifiers in the above speeches belong to the O: these include Hamlet’s ‘silence’ and Lear’s repetitious ‘No’ and ‘Never’. When Shakespeare’s Cleopatra dies, her final three lines open with ‘As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle’, which is a barrage of O signifiers (just before she cries out ‘O Antony!’). These terms all mean the same thing as the final O, which on these grounds might even be termed redundant (some editions of the plays in fact omit them). But the choice of linguistic technique does not matter that much for the purposes of this study. The point is always that in tragedy, the hero who started out by declaiming his I, ends up crying out an O – whether literally or by means of other signifiers.

XI

The hero’s linguistic transition from I to O is a parable which most critics would recognise as the hero’s classic downfall. It is also the same process that takes place in lyric poetry. These things are acknowledged, in one form or another, in most of the critical tradition behind tragedy.

Now what is far less commonly recognised is the role that the chorus plays in all of this – and one of the reasons, by necessity, is the fact that the chorus appears to have vanished from tragedy since the twilight of the Classical ages. In reality, though, the chorus never died: it was simply reabsorbed. The Greeks used a collective ensemble of actors, speaking by turns, to represent social and established law. Later traditions simply delegated this role to a number of supporting characters, who had a slightly more dynamic role in the play, but who also fulfilled the same function. Like the chorus, they stood back after the hero committed his action or crime and declared “Alas, alas, how horrible!” When they did act, it was in compliance with or in defence of the same social law that is represented by the Hellenic chorus. Witness the difference between Hamlet (hero) and Laertes (chorus) when they duel. Hamlet is informed by an individual, internal agency that is impermeable to the concerns of the surrounding characters. Laertes is seeking revenge for his family: his motives are not only laced in the framework of a social construction (family), they are broadly acknowledged and understood by all of the surrounding characters (to the point that the king can use them to his advantage, by poisoning Laertes’ sword). Moreover, Laertes’ rancour, inasmuch as it is motivated by a legitimate desire to champion his family, represents a wider law that would be understandable in practically any human culture. Laertes may himself be a real character inasmuch as he is an orphaned son, but he is also forcing Hamlet to confront judgment by law. Hamlet has to pay for his murders through Laertes. What the Greeks would have dramatized by having the gods coming in and punishing the protagonist for his sin (by plagues, madness, or the furies), Shakespeare resolved by having a character who embodies the sentence of the law in his own personal drama. Laertes is a son, but on a parallel plane he is also tribunal, judge and (aspiring) executioner.

Of course, it is difficult to recognise such a thing as a ‘chorus’ when it is fragmented into many different characters as we see it in the Elizabethan stage. And yet the chorus, whether its form be organic or composite, deploys a linguistic trajectory that is just as definite as that of the hero. As much as the hero’s parable goes from the I to the O, performing the lyric, the chorus goes from the O of its initial passivity to the I on which it usually closes the play, effectively drawing an epic arch.

If the initial statements of the chorus refer us back to signifiers of the O, often even literally saying ‘O!’ (or its semi-alternatives, like ‘Alas!’), their closing statements point us to the I and to its values of individualism, energy, decision and affirmation of life. This can be performed in a number of ways, for instance by using imagery that suggests verticality and open Apollonian qualities…

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight
And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough,
(Dr Faustus)

…or by closing speeches on a proper name, i.e. a mark of individualism and specification:

For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

But in the more memorable cases we get more than just a great number of signifiers of the I. In the final speeches, as in the tragedy as a whole, the chorus specifically shows a transition from the O to the I – just like in epic poetry. Here are Antony’s closing words on Caesar in Julius Caesar, with the signifiers for the O in italics and those for the I in bold:

His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’

Notice the pattern; O-O-I-I-O-I. The last line executes synthetically what was done by the previous two, as much as the three lines together execute synthetically Antony’s whole trajectory over the course of the play. Compare the above active, affirmative statement with the passive, submissive (and only) lines he speaks over the course of his entire first scene, which he spends mostly standing in the background:

Caesar, my lord? […] I shall remember:
When Caesar says ‘do this,’ it is perform’d.

Antony has travelled on the exact opposite orbit as that of the tragic hero (a path which will later become his own in Antony and Cleopatra). A chorus, or a character standing in for it, will come to the end of the play in a condition that is active, one that demonstrates a will beyond mere social law. As Edgar says in the final lines of King Lear, his generation must ‘[s]peak what we feel, not what we ought to say.’ This is a statement that contradicts everything the chorus initially stands for, and that would sound more proper in the mouth of a hero. Linguistically speaking, they have taken up the mantle of the hero (just like the hero has joined the original circle of the chorus).

This, and not some philosophical or existential statement inherent in the genre, is what makes tragedies so ultimately uplifting even as they are so dark and terrible. The downfall of the tragic hero comes hand in hand with the rise of the chorus. Our ability to identify simultaneously with both the hero (who is a first-person ‘I’ just like the individual viewer) and the chorus (who are a multiplicity just like the entire audience) means that we experience the epic and the lyric simultaneously, and the unique effect in which they are synthesised – an effect which is simultaneously beautiful and fearsome, glorious and intimate, hopeful and pitiful, luminous and dark – is exactly what we call the tragic.

That sounded final, didn’t it? Not so! The series continues next Wednesday. See you for Part 4…

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