After Dionysus: A Theory of the Tragic 9781501744877

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After Dionysus

After Dionysus A Theory of the Tragic WILLIAM

STORM

Cornell University Press / Ithaca and London

Copyright © 1998 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1998 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Storm, William, b. 1949 After Dionysus : a theory of the tragic / William Storm. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-8014-3457-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Tragic, The. 2. Tragedy. 3. Characters and characteristics in literature. 4. Self in literature. 5. Order (Philosophy) in literature. I. Title. PN1675.S76 1998 8o9-2'5i2—dc2i 97_43549

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are either recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of non wood fibers. Cloth printing

10 987654321

For Bert O. States

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix

1

1

The Character of Dionysus

2

Tragedy, Tragic, Vision

28

3

On the Status of Vision

32

4

The Situation of the Tragic

3

The Tragic Field

6

The Case of Agamemnon

7

Invocations of the Tragic in King Lear

8

Tragic "Nonentity" in The Seagull

137

Afterword: The Face of the Tragic

177

Index

181

8

70

92 118 138

Acknowledgments

FOR INSPIRATION, instruction, and support during the writing of this book, I am deeply grateful to Deborah Storm, my parents Bruce and Harriet Storm, and my friends and colleagues at the Univer¬ sity of California, Santa Barbara, especially Sharon Dasho, Robert Egan, W. Davies King, Robert Potter, Carmen Rendon, Bert O. States, and Simon Williams. I also wish to remember and express gratitude to those professors at the University of Southern California who introduced me to the study of dramatic literature, the late James H. Butler, James H. Durbin, and most particularly, William C. White. W. S.

After Dionysus

Introduction

THE SUBJECT of this book is "the tragic/' as a condition of existence and a process in art. Emphasis is placed on how this quality is made theatrically manifest through a particular kind of depiction of dra¬ matic character—that is, how it is artfully interpreted so as to find a re¬ flection in the representation of human selfhood on the stage. The tragic, which has a purely aesthetic history that extends to the same Dionysian ceremonies that gave rise to tragedy, is a phenomenon that transcends the period of its Greek beginnings. It continues, in fact, to stand for those rending and separating forces which, though originally associated with the malign influence of its patron god, are nonetheless eternal in human experience. The nature of the tragic has, certainly, been a highly con¬ testable subject in critical and philosophic discourse, and a primary goal of this book is to provide a context in which this concept can be under¬ stood—and also utilized—in a more concrete fashion. My first objective is to establish, in Chapter 1, the Dionysian associa¬ tions of "the tragic" and then, in Chapter 2, to differentiate this term from the other two with which it is commonly confused or conflated— namely, "tragedy" and tragic "vision." Proceeding from a conviction that tragedy itself should not be characterized solely in literary or for¬ malistic ways, my approach here includes the historical and philosophi¬ cal contexts that, when taken together with factors of dramaturgy, create a set of interactive coordinates. In advance of Chapter z/s discussion of the tragic as both an ontological condition and an aesthetic process. Chapter 3 evaluates the current status of vision as a theoretical and diag¬ nostic concept. Apart from the controversial aspects of the tragic itself, two other terms—"cosmos" and "character"—are central to my investigation and may also be perceived as contestable or unstable in certain contexts. In an

2

Introduction

admittedly generalized way, I would say that an underlying motive of this book is to correlate aspects of tragic dramaturgy with the manner in which an impression of the cosmic is conveyed, and to do so in a panhistoric context. And yet, clearly, the idea of what constitutes the overarch¬ ing embrace of the drama—its cosmos, if you will—has changed decid¬ edly since the time of the Greek dramatists and, indeed, has done so from one age to the next. It seems to be the current fashion, for example, to align the implications of cosmos almost exclusively with astronomical considerations—that is, with the view that is afforded by the night sky or by the equations of newly equipped astrophysicists. Yet such a tendency, rich in its yield concerning the reach and history of the known universe, can be accompanied by a concurrent diminution of the metaphysical or god-oriented influences that were a significant part of the cosmic vision of other epochs. This predilection, it seems to me, is necessarily problematic for the stu¬ dent of tragedy and of tragic drama generally. The Greek drama in par¬ ticular is inextricably wedded to the vast realm of gods, fates, and des¬ tinies, and to the operations of unseen daimonic forces. Renaissance tragedy is typically played out in an arena that, while terrestrial, nonethe¬ less acknowledges a much more inclusive domain of cosmic spheres and correspondences. Even the tragic drama of the modern period, godless or not, is by no means without its level of cosmic and metaphysical asso¬ ciations—even though such operations may be enacted in more con¬ strained and familiar settings than in previous eras. Strictly from a his¬ torical point of view, the idea of a tragic cosmos is ubiquitous, or, as Richard Sewall has pointed out, the "first thing that tragedy says about the cosmos is that, for good or ill, it is."1 The problem, then, is one of immediacy and current application. For even as we may readily allow for the cosmic associations of all manner of dramas past, it is increasingly difficult to lend these a strong contempo¬ rary resonance, or one that may extend to the theatrical expressions of our own time. The difficulty is compounded, it would seem, by the fact that the macrocosm of tragedy has been conceived in such a variety of ways, from the god-ordered arena of the Attic dramatists to the tragic ironies of Ibsen, Chekhov, or Beckett. The great gods and fates of tragedy, even when cast in metaphorical terms, are not always transfer¬ able from one age to another, let alone from one play to the next. In our

i. Richard B. Sewall, “The Tragic Form," in Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Lau¬ rence Michel and Richard B. Sewall (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963), 121.

Introduction

3

own time, the generally received skepticism concerning the participation of deities in human affairs, and the dubiousness concerning metaphysi¬ cal categories generally, has made for a climate in which the "cosmic" is better left, again, to the purview of high-powered telescopes. And yet, by consigning the idea of a tragic cosmos to the sensibilities of other ages, we inevitably aid in the impoverishment of own understanding of the¬ atrical possibilities and magnitudes. A result of this trend, simply in the context of tragic drama, has been to encourage a historical stratification that may allow certain eras their cosmic ambitions while begrudging them to others. The criteria, it would seem, typically involve such factors as an acknowledged participation of deities or supernatural powers, the nature and pertinence of metaphysi¬ cal experience or, quite simply, the recognition of realms where man is not the measure and where some larger and more pervasive force is at work in human affairs. In the light of such factors, those ages in which a pantheon of gods were thought to be attentive, when fate was construed as a palpable force, or when the structure of a macrocosmos was con¬ ceived so as to include humankind in its hierarchy are likely to be per¬ ceived as quite distant from our own—in philosophical as well as chronological terms. Yet our own purview is correspondingly reduced when the tragic expressions of these past eras are placed at too much of a remove, or when their respective iterations of "cosmos" are put in some parenthetical, if not apologetic, context. The possibility exists, however, that such a distancing effect is largely the result of an inadequate, or at least incomplete, view of what "cos¬ mos" may imply with respect to the drama. There is, after all, no par¬ ticular mandate to confine its associations to matters of divinity or the metaphysics of experience—even though each of these contexts is im¬ portant and may in fact be central to the understanding of given works in certain cultures. As a viable alternative framework—or as a concur¬ rent one—we might turn to those aspects of the cosmic that pertain most particularly to order, system, and cohesiveness. Cosmos, from this per¬ spective, is indicative of a notable degree of sense, of magnitude, and of entirety—factors that require, in and of themselves, no participation of deities and no enforced reference to supernatural interventions. In this context, cosmos is most dependent on the dramaturgical order itself, and on the aesthetic sensibilities that fashion particular dramas at various times. In this book, then, the effort is to place the phenomenon of tragic characterization in the context of a complex ordering system—one as his¬ torically pertinent to tragic drama as the behavior of the fates and the great gods.

4

Introduction

Cosmos is, as we know, the antithetical partner of chaos, and it is in this relation that we locate one of the more central and long-standing tensions in tragedy. The ordering system to which I refer is, in one im¬ portant sense, the response of tragic art to that which is disorderly, vio¬ lent, or anarchic, and to events that appear to occur haphazardly, with¬ out apparent cause or sequence. From the time of the Greek dramatists, indeed, it has been characteristic of tragic drama to identify the sensical and the systematic, even in those realms where the order is delicate and where it might be tenuously maintained. "Senseless tragedy" is a phrase that has become all too common in contemporary experience. Its implication of great calamity or misfortune that has occurred with apparent randomness, or with a marked degree of unreason, has come to characterize all manner of events, both global and immediate. We have grown so used to outbreaks of violence without ap¬ parent motive, and to the suffering of undeserving victims, that the non¬ sensical quality of such events is, ironically, one of their more predictable attributes. In the context of dramatic writing, however, "senseless tragedy" is an oxymoron. The continual aspiration of tragedy, dating to its Attic beginnings, has been to affirm the existence of cosmos over chaos, even when the order that is promoted is a fragile one. No matter how dark the world of a particular play may appear, and regardless of what may have transpired in the progress of such drama, there is still the factor of "sense" that offers both a context and a perspective. My refer¬ ence here is not simply to those cases where a tragedy has ended on a promising note—as in The Eumenides, say, or in the Shakespearean vision of the more honorable characters advancing to fortune or power—but rather to the interior mechanisms that govern the progress of the drama throughout, lending both a shape and an implication of the sensical to the overall pattern of events. To return, then, to the matter of terminol¬ ogy: I take "cosmos" to mean the embracing realm that necessarily in¬ cludes the dramatic character, a systematic context that is at odds with the chaotic, and one which, though not necessarily connoting either the god-ordered or the metaphysical, nonetheless stands for a palpable, if embattled, orderliness. This brings us to a consideration of the "character" who is set in rela¬ tion to such a "cosmos." Here we encounter a term that, though appar¬ ently unassuming, has encouraged a good deal of worthwhile contro¬ versy. The word itself has a myriad of associations, quite apart from those that pertain most directly to the cast of a play or other work in-

Introduction

5

volving fictive representations of a personage, but even in the literary context the range of interpretation is broad.2 Strictly in terms of the study of tragedy, an estimable amount of attention has been given to the con¬ trast between the Aristotelian concept of ethos and the ideas concerning individual depiction that are the product of subsequent eras—and I will consider this distinction at some length in chapters that follow. A related aspect of this controversy concerns the degree to which one can legiti¬ mately apply considerations of personality, identity, or "inferiority" to what may be regarded simply as a literary construct. When observing a dramatic character, in other words, to what extent are we meant to as¬ sume that a "person" is what we are confronting, complete with all man¬ ner of traits and particularities, a past history, and an emotional and be¬ havioral disposition?3 My own bias here, and one that attends quite specifically to the larger argument of this book, is that what is represented in tragic drama is an ex¬ perience of pure selfhood—and moreover, that the depicted self is the pri¬ mary site of a Dionysian pattern of rift and separation that is the signature event in such representations. It is in this situation that the distinction be¬ tween literary and dramatic characterization becomes more pressing— the distinction, that is, between the physical and mimetic experience that is offered by the stage and the reflection of such an enactment in text. It is curious, given the amount of commentary that this issue has engendered, that the predilection to equate literary and dramatic character persists as strenuously as it does, an equation that would find little if any distinction between characterization in narrative fiction and in drama.

2. Use of the term "character" can be understood as introducing interpretive issues of considerable intricacy; the term may or may not be seen as including, for example, such fac¬ tors as identity, personality, traits, moral qualities, behavior, and so forth. A semantic prob¬ lem also results from the term's range of meanings and connotations. For one incisive treat¬ ment of such issues, particularly from a semiotic standpoint, see Joel Weinsheimer, "Theory of Character: Emma," Poetics Today 1.1-2 (1979): 185-211. 3. Bert O. States distinguishes among various terminologies relating to the composition of stage character—focusing in particular on a delineation of differences among character, personality, and identity, in his "Anatomy of Dramatic Character," Theatre Journal 37.1 (1985): 87-101. For States, "A dramatic character is, first and foremost, an intensified sim¬ plification of human nature: he is a Personality with a Character—someone who appears and behaves in a certain way and who carries within him a certain ethos, or disposition with respect to moral conduct and choice" (91). In States's view, identity is separate from character and personality, at least in one sense, because it is marked by "an intentional thrust not carried by the other terms" (95).

6

Introduction

With respect to tragic drama, however, it is important to bear in mind that an ancestry exists—one that connects theatrical depictions of char¬ acter to the experience of the sacrificial victim in the Dionysian rituals and to the later incarnations of the god in the tragedies themselves. Tragedy, in this ancestral sense at least, requires a warm body; if this 1 stipulation is not met, there is the loss of a necessary immediacy and power of identification. But perhaps the more rigorous distinction is one that applies not only to the legacy of tragedy but to theatrical art gener¬ ally. While certain scholars will argue that character is inevitably—and solely—a function of text, this point of view is more favored by the critic than the practitioner of the art. For the actor in particular, a dramatic text is but a guideline for action and impersonation—or, to come at this from a different angle, the text is little more than trace evidence of the fully vi¬ talized realization of physical and emotive selfhood that is the offering of the live theater. What is imagined by the playwright, incarnated by the performer, and witnessed by the audience is the living act itself, not the textual blueprints or remnants. Consequently, my inquiry into the de¬ piction of selfhood in tragedy proceeds directly from a conviction that dramatic character is a qualitatively different phenomenon from literary character, and that the former must be given the sort of psychic and so¬ matic status that arises from its theatrical legacy and, indeed, from its birthrights. The primary aim of this book is to correlate the depiction of selfhood in tragic drama with the condition of the tragic itself—and with the ways that it is manifested in dramatic art. And, as I have intimated here, the re¬ sult of this particular relation is a Dionysian rending of that image of self¬ hood in which the character experiences an interiorized dismemberment that is an analog to the ancient rite of sparagmos. Yet this purely tragic process, even as it is realized and completed in the experience of indi¬ vidual character, does not necessarily result from that character's traits or behaviors alone. Indeed, this process typically results from a more comprehensive and pervasive dramaturgical arrangement. It is for this reason that, after examining the nature of the tragic at length in Chapter 4, I proceed in the following chapter to develop a theory of the tragic "field"—that is, a model for the connective and cumulative interactivity that brings about the Dionysian effect under a variety of circumstances. The final sequence of the book is composed of three case studies that indicate how this theoretical construct—as it includes the representation of selfhood, the impress of the tragic, and the attendant field methodol¬ ogy—may be identified in a range of dramas from different historical pe-

Introduction

7

riods. Beginning with the Greek context (which serves as a basic point of reference throughout the book), the focus of Chapter 6 is on the various incarnations of Agamemnon, primarily in the Aeschylean trilogy and in

Iphigenia in Aulis. Then, for what is arguably the paradigmatic instance of tragic dismemberment in Renaissance drama, I proceed to the experi¬ ence of Lear on the heath, and to his confrontation with a supremely tragic duress in the storm scenes of King Lear's third act. Concluding with a highly representative figure from the period of early modernism, I turn to a Chekhovian character—Constantine Treplev—and to the manner in which the tragic field can be constituted in accord with the purely psychological stresses in The Seagull. The foremost reason for making these particular choices is that in each case there is an especially strong indication of the experience of selfhood in confrontation with a fundamentally tragic—and divisive—exertion. These figures are, in ef¬ fect, representative of how three different dramatists, from vastly differ¬ ent eras and cultures, have put the human face of character on the condi¬ tion of the tragic. Taken together, they provide for a transhistoric view of a phenomenon that is as old as the recorded drama, which endures in our own time, and which will continue for as long as an artful response to this condition persists. Regardless of historical epoch, however, the dramatic character who is placed in such a fundamentally tragic agon will invariably show the signs of a familial lineage that extends to Diony¬ sus. This book begins, therefore, with a look at the patron god of theater, and at what this god stands for with respect to the possibilities for a co¬ hesive state of selfhood under tragic circumstances.

The Character of Dionysus

She was mad, stark mad, possessed by Bacchus. Ignoring his cries of pity, she seized his left arm at the wrist; then, planting her foot on his chest, she pulled, wrenching away the arm at the shoulder—not by her own strength, for the god had put inhuman power in her hands. —Euripides, The Bacchae

IN THIS graphic excerpt, from the Messenger's account of the death of Pentheus at the hands of his mother. Agave, and the maenads, what is described is a sparagmos—the tearing apart, limb from limb, of a sacrificial victim. As the Messenger continues, he relates how one of the bacchantes "tore off an arm, another a foot still warm in its shoe," and that, with the dismemberment completed, Agave picked up her son's head and "impaled it on her wand." Later on, when a triumphant Agave exhibits her prize before the Theban citizenry, she is still possessed by the god and believes her trophy to be the head of a lion she has hunted. But soon, standing before Cadmus, her father, she is brought to anag¬ norisis: "Now, now I see: Dionysus has destroyed us all."1

i. Euripides, The Bacchae, trans. William Arrowsmith in Euripides V, The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 204, 213.

The Character of Dionysus

9

In these events one can identify a clear and representative case of how the Dionysian "tragic," as a separating process, produces its singular, rending effect on dramatic character. Pentheus is literally torn apart; the sundered pieces of his body are scattered by the bacchantes, later to be gathered together and placed on a bier. But Agave, too, has suffered a sparagmos, although in her case it is not her physical being but rather her identity and image of selfhood that have been torn apart. While her body, unlike her son's, remains "entire," her concept of self has been rent and scattered, with the roles of mother, daughter to Cadmus, and bac¬ chante wrenched into an impossible coexistence. As the play ends. Agave is banished from Thebes, yet she has also been denied any vestige of cohesiveness with respect to her former identity. It is Dionysus, "terri¬ bly blasphemed," who has wrought these separations in her character. But what of the character of Dionysus? Who, or what, is it that can bring about such a tragic rending? Twentieth-century scholarship has produced an array of new perspectives on the god and his range of pow¬ ers, as well as an invigorated argument over whether or not his identity can be conceived in a unified fashion. In one sense, perhaps, there is no singular identity that can be assigned, if only because the god is innately too changeable, too multiform, for so unitary a characterization. Apart ^ from the god's own variegated incarnations, the Dionysus of the anthro¬ pologist or the scholar of religion may differ significantly from that of the theater historian or theorist. One might conclude, in fact, that simply in the context of post-Nietzschean influences, the Dionysian presence has become as theoretical a matter as either a historical or a divine one. J Solely in the context of The Bacchae, Dionysus is a "character" in the sense that a role is given his name and is performed by an actor, yet "he" is also—and concurrently-^the amorphous spirit that possesses Agave and the other bacchantes. Dionysus becomes, in the course of this drama, a force field of dissembling and dismantling power that infuses and af¬ fects all the play's action. The character appears in The Bacchae as youth¬ ful, long-haired, and effeminate, yet this is merely one of his many guises. Dionysus is the god of theater, of the mask and impersonation, of myriad selves, and the range of his possible incarnations is vast. And yet the tendency to formulate a unified conception persists. Even as Albert Henrichs proposes a Dionysus who, because of the necessar¬ ily composite and evolutionary nature of his divinity and history, "de¬ fies definition," other scholars pursue a more collective portrait—if not a single unity, then at least a means of relating the varied strands of

10

After Dionysus

identity.2 It is legitimate, certainly, to continue to speak of Dionysus as a "god" with respect to the wide and variable spectrum of his ancient associations. In a more inclusive sense, however, the Dionysian pres¬ ence might ask to be considered in a broader phenomenal context, as a consolidation of tendencies and effects that transcends both geograph¬ ical and historical boundaries. It is the case, moreover, that while the field of Dionysian associations has necessarily broadened to include a theoretical or psychological con¬ text in addition to religious, theatrical, or historical ones, it has proved difficult to keep such categories discrete, one from the other. Rather, they tend to bleed into one another, just as the category of the religious, for example, inevitably affects—and indeed augments—the aesthetic scope of the theoretical (as in Nietzsche). Even if, as Ruth Padel would argue, the god has "been a litmus test for every epoch's obsessions," the accumulation of such historical interpretations remains in itself perti¬ nent and instructive.3 The historical phenomenon of Dionysus is, in its

2. Albert Henrichs, "Loss of Self, Suffering, Violence: The Modern View of Dionysus from Nietzsche to Girard," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 88 (1984): 205-240. See also the introduction to Masks of Dionysus, where the editors state that "the central enigma re¬ mains: Is Dionysus a unity, a single deity who purposely reveals himself to mortals in a dizzying array of contradictory roles and images? Or is he simply a modern academic and artistic construct—a false unity created from a half-dozen different Dionysi with entirely different cults and myths anchored to specific times and places in the ancient world? Or fi¬ nally, and less pessimistically, is there a middle ground between the two positions, where we can allow the impossibility of discovering any simple unity or Dionysiac essence in the evidence, admitting at the same time the possibility of developing a coherent conceptual framework upon which we can hang the different masks of the god and appreciate their in¬ terrelationships with one another?" (Thomas H. Carpenter and Christopher Faraone, eds. [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993], 2-3). 3. Ruth Padel, Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 26. Continuing, she writes: "Romantic Dionysus, the principle of life, replaced Renaissance Dionysus. Modern Dionysus is the principle of death and violence. He took shape in the 1870s, has run for over a hundred years, and shows lit¬ tle sign of letting up. Since the 1930s, though, he has been joined by a Dionysus of duality, a god of opposites, paradox, contradiction." The reference here is to Walter Otto's Dionysus of polarity and "paradox," a characterization that Padel disputes: "The image is too easy, I think, for in the Greek pantheon Dionysus does not have a monopoly on paradox and con¬ tradiction. All Greek gods were paradoxical." See also Rainer Friedrich, "Everything to Do with Dionysos? Ritualism, the Dionysiac, and the Tragic," in Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond, ed. M. S. Silk (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 257-283. The idea that Diony¬ sus (in Henrichs's words) "defies definition" is for Friedrich "a post-Romantic phenome¬ non, the result of the modern confusion arising from claiming the god's own good name for various modern ideologies" (258). Henrichs, however, endorses Otto's point: "Dionysus as the embodiment of opposites—Otto's construct—remains to this day the most successful

The Character of Dionysus

11

very persistence, strongly indicative of a generalized means through which humanity has continued to characterize a highly particular sort of presence and power, one that is at once localized and pervasive, creative and destructive. It is only in the full breadth of this context, in fact, that a truly collec¬ tive identity can be constituted, even from the many selves and influ¬ ences that are evident in the encompassing historical presence of this figure. If Dionysus is, after a fashion, "torn apart" into his own multi¬ tudinous range of character, he can also be pieced together, as legend has it that he was, into an entirety. Although the god may not be perceived as existing in any singular or corporeal form, he is manifest nonetheless in the cumulative iterations of a transhistorical Dionysian phenomenon. In either case, whether we imagine this multiform presence as one with¬ out a stable identity or as one whose character is infinitely varied and yet cohesive, the effect of this deity—that is, of this force field—on tragic characterization is profound and far-reaching, and is by no means con¬ fined to the Greek drama only. It is not my primary business to enter into the lengthy and apparently inexhaustible debate over the place or influence of Dionysus in the ori¬ gins of tragedy per se. This book focuses specifically on the effect of a Dionysian "tragic" spirit on characterization patterns in drama, as man¬ ifested in a broad range of serious plays that necessarily includes a num¬ ber of Greek ones. And, as Gerald Else would caution, "anyone who deals with the origin of tragedy is theorizing. Aristotle theorized, and so must we; he had too few facts to do otherwise, and so have we."* * * 4 Still, since the relation of Dionysus to the embracing character of tragic drama is fundamental to my pursuits here, and because it remains a contentious area of scholarly inquiry and debate, some assessment of the god's rela¬ tion to the early development of tragedy is in order. Such discussion is warranted, in particular, because of a fundamental and apparently anomalous question that continues to underlie the issue: Why should Dionysus, who is not mentioned by Aristotle and who is only rarely de¬ picted in Attic drama, be regarded as so pervasive a presence?

attempt to deal with the multiple identities of Dionysus" ("'He Has a God in Him': Human and Divine in the Modern Perception of Dionysus," in Masks of Dionysus, ed. Carpenter and Faraone, 31). 4. Gerald F. Else, The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), vii.

12

After Dionysus

My own belief is that, quite apart from the range of associations that connect the god of impersonation and the mask to theater in the most basic sense, the relation of Dionysus to a specifically tragic process is so direct as to make his presence innate, whether he appears in a particular drama or not. I would sympathize with Padel when she suggests that tragedy is the god's "own art form," and that all tragedies are "under the auspices of Dionysus."5 Still, it will behoove us to consider some key points more fully, and to further test this proposition of the Dionysian as an intrinsic, rather than an inconsistent or indefinable presence in the an¬ cient drama. The least contested ideas concerning the relation of Dionysus to the be¬ ginnings of the tragic theater are, not surprisingly, the most basic and fa¬ miliar ones having to do with Athenian civic, religious, and theatrical procedures as these related to the Great—or "City"—Dionysia. In this context, at least, there can be little doubt of the centrality of a Dionysian presence: the name of the god is associated with the festival itself as well as with the temple and primitive theater on the slope beneath the Acrop¬ olis; his eminence is overtly apparent in the processionals connected with the Dionysia; a seat was prominently situated in the theater for the priest affiliated with his worship.6 But what of the presence of Dionysus—or lack of same—in the plays themselves, or in the dithyrambic compositions? Did dramatic tragedy truly arise from the ritual practices of the cult of Dionysus or from dithyrambs composed and chanted in the god's honor? Or, on the con¬ trary, do tragedy's origins owe more to political changes in Athens in the fifth and sixth centuries, b.c., to hero-cult rites and ceremonies of mourn5. Padel, Whom Gods Destroy, 29, 89. 6. Jean-Pierre Vernant effectively summarizes the exalted position of the god on the oc¬ casion of the Dionysia: "The three days of dramatic performances were part of the major festival held in honor of Dionysus, and they were closely connected with other ceremonies: dithyrambic competitions, processions of young people, blood sacrifices, and the parading of the god's idol. They were thus allotted a particular place in the cult ceremonial and con¬ stituted an essential element in the whole complex ritual. Furthermore, the theater building consecrated to Dionysus incorporated within its precinct a temple to the god, where his image was housed; at the center of the orchestra, where the chorus performed, was a stone alter, the thymele; and on the tiered steps a fine carved seat, in the place of honor, was re¬ served by right for the priest of Dionysus" (Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece [New York: Zone Books, 1988], 181-182). See also Simon Goldhill, "The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology," in Nothing to Do with Dionysos?: Athenian Drama in its Social Context, ed. John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 97-129. As Goldhill concludes, "the Great Dionysia seems to me an essentially Dionysiac event" (129).

The Character of Dionysus

13

ing for the dead, to the development of a new poetic range and style, or to the radical innovations of Thespis and Aeschylus?7 Aristotle indicates that tragedy, like comedy, was "at first mere impro¬ visation," and that it "originated with the authors of the Dithyramb."8 And yet, as Else takes care to remind us, Aristotle in the Poetics "does not actually mention Dionysus or 'the Dionysia/"9 True enough, yet Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, whose Dithyramb Tragedy and Comedy is rig¬ orous in its identification and analysis of the historical evidence, refers more than once to the dithyramb's "primarily Dionysiac character," and states (in a refutation of William Ridgeway on this point) that the form was "primarily and continuously regarded as Dionysiac."10 In a spe¬ cific reference to the "earliest mention of the dithyramb," PickardCambridge cites a fragment of Archilochus of Paros: "I know how to lead the fair song of Lord Dionysus, the dithyramb, when my wits are fused with wine." Pickard-Cambridge's fundamental assumption, in this regard, is that the dithyramb's "special connexion with Dionysus throughout its his¬ tory is sufficiently attested,"11 and Carl Kerenyi reinforces this idea when he points out that " 'Dithyrambos' was one of the names of Dionysos himself, and this name was given to the type of choral song whose orig¬ inal, though not exclusive, theme was the birth of the god."12 Whether or 7. For a discussion of the range of theories that have arisen concerning the origins of Greek tragedy, I have referred primarily to Else (due largely to his focus on the issue of Dionysian influence), but other notable sources include William Ridgeway, The Origin of Tragedy (1910; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1966) and John Herington, Poetry into Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), in addition to Pickard-Cambridge, Murray, and Vickers (see individual notes). 8. Aristotle's Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher, with an introduction by Francis Fergusson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 57. Considerable debate has attended this passage, which appears in chapter 4. The entire paragraph, in this translation, reads as follows: "Whether tragedy has as yet perfected its proper types or not, and whether it is to be judged in itself, or in relation also to the audience—this raises another question. Be that as it may. Tragedy—as also Comedy—was at first mere improvisation. The one originated with the authors of the Dithyramb, and the other with those of the phallic songs, which are still in use in many of our cities. Tragedy advanced by slow degrees; each new element that showed itself was in turn developed. Having passed through many changes, it found its natural form, and there it stopped." 9. Else, Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy, 13. 10. Arthur W. Pickard-Cambridge, Dithyramb Tragedy and Comedy, 2d ed., revised by T. B. L. Webster (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 3, 5, 6. 11. Ibid., 1. 12. Carl Kerenyi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Eife, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 305.

H

After Dionysus

not Aristotle had the Dionysian element in mind when he referred to the dithyramb's role in tragedy's development cannot be known, but it seems clear (and Pickard-Cambridge emphasizes this) that dithyrambs were not thought to have had a Dionysiac character simply because they were performed at festivals that were held in the god's honor. Among the more extensive and well-known arguments against so ex¬ alted a position for Dionysus are those advanced by Else in his The Ori¬ gin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy. Else, who places the singular innova¬ tions of Thespis and Aeschylus at the center of tragedy's generative moment, argues strenuously against the prominence of the dithyramb and other religious or ritualistic phenomena commonly associated with the tragic origins. The presence of the god, however, remains stubborn and continuous; as Else comments, Dionysus "lurks athwart our path in many disguises, not least in that of the suffering god or hero." (The ref¬ erence here is primarily to the theories, now mostly discounted by clas¬ sicists, of Gilbert Murray, Sir James Frazer, and the "Cambridge Ritual¬ ists.")13 And, his arguments against a full range of theories pertaining to tragedy's origins notwithstanding, Else acknowledges the ubiquitous¬ ness of the Dionysian presence, allowing that many of the proposed sources of tragedy "turn out to be 'Dionysus' after all, although in a more elastic sense." In consideration of such pervasiveness, and abetted by the strength of Nietzschean influence, Else's assessment is that "The spirit of Dionysus is Protean, infinitely diverse yet single: lop off a limb here and he will grow a new one there." Despite such allowances, however, Else's posi¬ tion is stated unequivocally: "There is no solid evidence for tragedy ever

13. Such theories advanced the proposition that the experiences of Dionysus, as a vege¬ tation deity and as the resurrected "Year-God," were manifested in a ritualized progression that was then reflected in the structure of tragedy. See, in particular, Gilbert Murray, "Ex¬ cursus on the ritual forms preserved in Greek Tragedy," in Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 341-363; and Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 1 vol., abridged ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 448-456. Although now generally dismissed by classical scholars, Murray's ritual theory was adapted by Francis Fergusson, applied to a structural analysis of Oedipus Rex, and aligned with what Fergusson termed the "tragic rhythm" (The Idea of a Theatre [Prince¬ ton: Princeton University Press, 1949], 26-27). See Pickard-Cambridge's argument with Murray, 126-128, or, more recently, Brian Vickers's questioning of the legitimacy of reli¬ gious and anthropological "evidence" in Towards Greek Tragedy: Drama, Myth, Society (London: Longman Group, 1973), 38-39. For a historical comment on the scholarly dispute that has attended the propositions of the Cambridge group, see Henrichs, " 'He Has a God in Him,"' 27m

The Character of Dionysus

*5

having been Dionysiac in any sense except that it was originally and regularly presented at the City Dionysia in Athens."14 Else, it should be noted, is not alone in this assessment; Oliver Taplin, for example, con¬ tends that "there is nothing intrinsically Dionysiac about Greek tragedy."15 It is, however, this very issue of the "intrinsic" nature of the Dionysian that commands our further attention here. "Nothing to do with Dionysus" is a Greek proverb that, based on cer¬ tain evidence, may date to an era when there was a movement away from a strictly Dionysian subject, in the dithyramb and then in tragedy.16 Kerenyi asserts, however, that the proverb had less to do with subject matter than with a particular play's seriousness or relevance to the Dionysian spirit. For him, the saying "was not a thematic judgment but a judgment on the superficiality of a play, its irrelevance to the god in

14. Else, Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy, 27, 30, 7. It is the legacy of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, says Else, that has contributed greatly to modern impressions of the Dionysian in relation to tragedy's beginnings. A "Dionysiac spirit," in Else's words, "is what survives, sometimes in bizarre ways, in most of the speculations on the origin of tragedy, even from scholars who owe nothing directly to Nietzsche." Else allows that Nietzsche "caught and characterized the essential thing about the Dionysian spirit," yet he insists that there is no trace of "Dionysiac ecstasy" in the extant plays. 15. Oliver Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action (1978), 162, quoted in Goldhill, "Great Dionysia," 98. See also Friedrich's quotation of Taplin, in the context of his own evaluation of the Dionysian presence in Greek tragedy, "Everything to Do with Dionysos," 274. Com¬ pare to the Dionysian "pattern" identified by Richard Seaford, "Something to Do with Dionysos—Tragedy and the Dionysiac: Response to Friedrich," Tragedy and the Tragic, 284-294. 16. Vickers points to the time when a "satyr Chorus" was no longer used, and writes that "even though the festival celebrated was known as the 'Dionysia' this had no influence on the content of the plays or the attitudes toward the god" (Towards Greek Tragedy, 24). Ad¬ dressing the origin of the proverb more exactingly, Pickard-Cambridge concludes that ab¬ solute certainty of attribution is impossible, but that the saying clearly "arose out of the in¬ troduction of non-Dionysiac themes into performances in honor of Dionysus." He cites both Plutarch—"When Phrynichus and Aeschylus developed tragedy to include mytho¬ logical plots and disasters, it was said, 'What has this to do with Dionysus?'"—and Zeno¬ bius: "Nothing to do with Dionysus. When, the choruses being accustomed from the begin¬ ning to sing the dithyramb to Dionysus, later the poets abandoned this custom and began to write Ajaxes and Centaurs. Therefore the spectators said in joke, 'Nothing to do with Dionysus.' For this reason they decided later to introduce satyr-plays as a prelude, in order that they might not seem to be forgetting the god." The Suda lexicon is also cited: "When Epigenes the Sicyonian made a tragedy in honour of Dionysus, they made this comment; hence the proverb. A better explanation. Originally when writing in honour of Dionysus they competed with pieces which were called satyric. Later they changed to the writing of tragedy and gradually turned to plots and stories in which they had no thought for Diony¬ sus. Hence this comment" (Dithyramb Tragedy and Comedy, 124-123).

16

After Dionysus

whose sacred precinct it was performed."17 Indeed, and despite any in¬ dication of the god becoming less central in terms of subject matter per se, tragedy continued to have a great deal to do with a pervasive Dionysian spirit and its exertion upon character. Here I am not referring to literal representations of the god, to the dithyrambs sung in his honor, or to the satyr plays performed by "goat-men." I am arguing instead for the broader and persistent characterization of Dionysus as a continuing, recognizable force in theatrical art, the effects of which are felt particu¬ larly strongly in areas of impersonation, selfhood, and permutation of identity. This is the spirit that endured, even as ancient tragedies swiftly progressed toward a widening spectrum of subject and content. Nietzsche remarks on the persistence of a Dionysian influence on char¬ acterization in the ancient setting: "It is an unimpeachable tradition that in its earliest form Greek tragedy records only the sufferings of Dionysos, and that he was the only actor. But it may be claimed with equal justice that, up to Euripides, Dionysos remains the sole dramatic protagonist and that all the famous characters of the Greek stage, Prometheus, Oedipus, etc., are only masks of that original hero."181 un¬ derstand this passage to imply that behind the particular and exterior face of the tragic character, and in spite of whatever externalized traits and motives might be exhibited by such a personage, there exists a per¬ vasive, Dionysian strain of identity that connects one to the other and links them to a common source. Yet it is also the case that the basis for such a binding connection may be located, not only in the persistent debt of character to the god's presence, but in the fundamental act of theater itself—that is, in the gesture of assuming the identity of another for the purpose of enacting a representation of the recognizably real. This action, with reference to the god of impersonation, is a quintessentially Dionysian event. When Jean-Pierre Vernant takes up the proverbial question—"What has it to do with Dionysus?"—he proposes an answer that ties the Dionysian not only to tragic drama but to the con¬ cept of mimesis itself: "Tragedy's connection with Dionysus lies, not so much in roots that, for the most part, elude us, but rather in whatever constituted its modernity for fifth-century Greece and, even more, for us. Tragedy depicted on stage characters and events that, in the actual mani-

17. Kerenyi, Dionysos, 329-330. 18. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 65-66. For a disagreement with Nietzsche's ideas concerning any histor¬ ical Dionysian associations with the tragic hero, see, for example, Kerenyi, Dionysos, 324.

The Character of Dionysus

17

festation of the drama, took on every appearance of real existence." Ver¬ nant's argument is that even as the ancient audience saw the heroes of legend personified in action, it was aware of the elements of artifice and performance. This audience, in Vernant's view, was introduced to the "space of the imaginary," in which the actor's presence was allowed to stand in for the absence of long-dead heroes and accomplished actions, and where the merging of the real and the fictive was achieved. "If we are right in believing," writes Vernant, "that one of Dionysus' major characteristics is constantly to confuse the boundaries between illusion and reality, to conjure up the beyond in the here and now, to make us lose our sense of self-assurance and identity, then the enigmatic and am¬ biguous face of the god certainly does smile out at us in the interplay of the theatrical illusion that tragedy introduced for the first time onto the Greek stage."19 Here, it is in the complementary processes of acting and of beholding the depicted action that—in addition to the tragic quotient per se—the Dionysian presence becomes intrinsic. We are, in this chapter, investigating the character of a god; at the same time, though, we are looking at the god of character. What I have re¬ ferred to as an inclusive "phenomenon" of the Dionysian is, in this con¬ text, connected specifically and fundamentally to the act of mimetic im¬ personation. In The Bacchae, the represented character of Dionysus has the power to change the look, attitude, and behavior of those who come under his influence—and, of course, he can also transform himself. In the more embracing sense, though, Dionysus is what Charles Segal has called the "god of theatrical representation" and "the god of every type of illusion."20 And, again, there is the matter of his innate and wideranging connection to the tragic theater and its drama. As Froma Zeitlin would have it, Dionysus is the "lord of the theatre," the orchestrator of tragic rhythms, the one who "regulates the formal symmetries, reenact¬ ments, and reversals of tragic plots."21 Dionysus is the master of disguise, the assumer of shapes, the Protean creator of images and the transformer of selves. As such, he embodies a crucial paradox: he is the one of many forms, indeterminate and yet de¬ finable, at once. The god is at times depicted in literal illustration as an 19. Vernant develops this idea in "The God of Tragic Fiction," in Vernant and VidalNaquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece; quotations, 187-188. 20. Charles Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides' "Bacchae" (Princeton: Princeton Uni¬ versity Press, 1982), 298, 330. 21. Froma I. Zeitlin, Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 227, 300.

i8

After Dionysus

older, bearded figure, holding his symbol the thyrsus. In The Bacchae he is given the form of a lithe young man with the long hair of a woman, yet his range of familiar incarnations also includes the bull, goat, lion, snake, and—notoriously—the shape of other gods. He is androgynous, but this is only one among many of his assumptions of opposites and contradic¬ tions. As Walter Otto, whose description of the "contradictory" Diony¬ sus has found a particular immediacy and influence in this century, ex¬ presses it, Dionysus is "the wild spirit of antithesis and paradox, of immediate presence and complete remoteness, of bliss and horror, of in¬ finite vitality and the cruelest destruction."22 Dionysus is the Stranger, the Traveler who appears as if from nowhere, only to enforce what Vernant calls his "imperious, demanding, overwhelming presence upon this earthly world." "Here I am, I have come," announces the god-figure, thus beginning The BacchaeP Dionysus is, famously, the god of wine; he embodies the force in na¬ ture that ensures the resurrection of the vine and the plenitude of the crop. He is the spirit of intoxication, and it is in this respect, too, that the god of character exerts his impact on the identities of others. It is not only that he can alter behavior through enthusiasmos, that is, by investing a character or personage with his own spirit as he does to the maenads. He is also the god of ekstasis, the condition of transport beyond the self.24 Like an omniscient dramatist, Dionysus wields the powers of generation and destruction, delivering certain of those he encounters to ecstatic rap¬ ture and others to horror and madness. The Dionysian power can offer a means of religious transport, in which the subject achieves a primal unity with the god. Yet it can also bring about a signature process in tragic drama: a rending action in which character is fragmented, dismantled, and alienated from any possible sense of unification—with the god, with others, or most typically, with the self. The worship of Dionysus took place in no particular city or temple with which he was identified; his celebrations occurred in forests and on mountainsides, in the midst of wild nature. Here the bacchantes would

22. Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, translation and introduction by Robert B. Palmer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 136. 23. Vernant, "The Masked Dionysus of Euripides' The Bacchae," in Vernant and VidalNaquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, 390. 24. Herbert J. Muller writes, "Whereas Apollo taught the Greeks the wisdom of sobriety, 'Know thyself' and 'Nothing to excess,' Dionysus offered them the at once more spiritual and more primitive states of ekstasis ('standing outside oneself') and enthusiasmos ('posses¬ sion by the god')" (The Spirit of Tragedy [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956], 33).

The Character of Dionysus

19

dance and enter into the ecstatic trance, possessed by the god's spirit, becoming as one with the object of veneration. The ritual practice of the maenads was, in this sense, orgiastic, but as E. R. Dodds points out, the ancient orgia "are not orgies but acts of devotion," the object of which is "to have a particular kind of religious experience—the experience of communion with God which transformed a human being. . . ." The maenads, in this state of possession, were reputed to wield a superhu¬ man strength, a force that allowed them to accomplish a central rite in the act of Dionysian worship—the tearing apart of a live beast (sparagmos) before consuming the animal's raw flesh (omophagia). The favored animal for this ritual was the bull, perhaps especially so because it was the animal form most frequently chosen by the transformative god him¬ self. The sparagmos and the omophagia provided the characteristic means through which the worshipers claimed a part of the god's body and were able then to ingest his spirit. As Dodds describes this, "We may regard the omophagia, then, as a rite in which the god was in some sense present in the beast-vehicle and was in that shape torn and eaten by his people." Significantly, there is an indication that such Dionysian practices may not always have been limited to the slaughter of animals but at times would entail the sacrifice of human subjects. The question is posed by Dodds: "Did the cult once admit—as the Pentheus story suggests—a still more potent, because more dreadful, form of communion—the rending, even the rending and eating, of God in the shape of man?" What happens to Pentheus, as related in the legend of Dionysus and enacted in The Bac-

chae, is more than an act of vengeance on the part of the god, and more than an extreme act of insistence on a recognition of the god's power. It is also a divine act of character alteration, in which the god's presence is in¬ vested in a sacrificial body. "If Pentheus is to be the god's victim," writes Dodds, "he must become the god's vehicle (that is the Dionysian theory of sacrifice): Dionysus must enter into him and madden him, not by drink or drugs or hypnotism, as modern rationalism glibly suggests, but by a supernatural invasion of the man's personality."25 Here one can discern yet another of the innate ways in which Diony¬ sus, as the god of character, is manifest and pervasive in tragic drama.

25. Euripides Bacchae, 2d ed., edited and with introduction and commentary by E. R. Dodds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, i960), xii, xviii. See also Dodds's discussion of the omopha¬ gia in his The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 277-278.

20

After Dionysus

After suffering such an "invasion" of personality, the character who is infused with the Dionysian spirit is torn apart—not simply killed or de¬ stroyed by other means but aggressively fragmented and left in pieces. And again, what is evident here is a process that should by no means be understood as exclusively corporeal. There is a sparagmos of the mind and self in tragic drama that is also a specific function of the Dionysian impression on character, an effect for which the destruction of the iden¬ tity as well as the body of Pentheus may stand as metaphor. Such a representation may be justified not only by the specific experi¬ ence of Pentheus but by its prominence in the ancestry of tragic drama. Indeed, Kerenyi identifies the character of Pentheus as the "subject and hero of primordial tragedy," and describes that figure's co-participation with Dionysus: "The suffering Dionysos was at one time called 'Pen¬ theus/ the 'man of suffering.'"26 For Segal, Pentheus is "as literally de¬ constructed by the sparagmos as he is figuratively by the action."27 In Segal's view, the metaphor extends beyond the experience of individual character to that of the polis at large, as the dismemberment of Pentheus becomes "a symbolic rending of the city itself." Segal writes, "In the Bac-

chae the attempt to exclude Dionysus from the individual personality and from the city as a whole ends in the violent dissolution of both the ruler and the community. Pentheus is literally dismembered; Thebes is left without a king; the remnants of the ruling family are scattered in exile."28 It is in contexts such as these, then, that the sparagmos may be understood, not only as central to the god's intrinsic associations with tragedy, but as a fundamental element in the earliest tragic experience of character. The tearing apart of a Dionysian victim, as in the destruction of Pentheus, corresponds directly to the manner of the god's own death: Dionysus died in youth and was then reborn, but prior to his resurrec¬ tion the body in the form of a bull was torn limb from limb. Several dif¬ ferent legends—and versions of legends—are concerned with the death and rebirth of Dionysus, his mutilation, and his place of burial. In spite of this variation, however, the legends tend to hold the event of dis¬ memberment in common. Otto calls particular attention to the myth of

26. Kerenyi, Dionysos, 329. 27. Segal, Dionysiac Poetics, 239. 28. Charles Segal, Interpreting Greek Tragedy: Myth, Poetry, Text (Ithaca: Cornell Univer¬ sity Press, 1986), 34, 312.

The Character of Dionysus

21

Dionysus-Zagreus, who was torn to pieces and devoured by the Titans: "The most celebrated myth of [Dionysus's] destruction has him suffer as Zagreus, the 'great hunter/ the same fate inherent in his appalling ac¬ tions. The 'hunter' is himself hunted; the 'render of men' is himself rent." Expanding on this point, Otto indicates that when the destiny of the god "overtakes him, he is very like one of his unfortunate victims. Just as the women in Dionysiac madness tear their little boys into pieces, just as the maenads, following his example, tear apart young animals and devour them, so, he himself, as a child, is overcome by the Titans, torn apart, and consumed."29 There is a clear representation here of what can be termed the Dionysian law as expressed through the god of character: those who suf¬ fer the tragic fate must do so in the manner of the god. Tragedy, in this important sense, is not distinguished by the death of its heroes but rather by their dismemberment, by the fragmentation and the dispersal, not just of the body but of the essential self. Dionysus, after all, does not die; his body is reassembled and he is born again in the springtime. Yet the rite of his dismemberment goes on; it is repeated, as if by the maenads, over and over again in the tragic theater. And this particular attribute of Diony¬ sus—this dismembering power—is a quality that transcends the context of its ancient associations. When one considers Dionysus not only as a "god" but as a phenomenon with a lasting application and pertinence, it is evident that what tragic art continues to reiterate—over centuries—is precisely this Dionysian force of interior separation. And, whereas the death of a hero is a solitary, culminating event, or telos, the sparagmos of body and spirit can be a sustained process, an action that may take the course of an entire tragedy—or tragedies—to complete itself. Whether he is considered as an ancient god or as a representation of this core process in tragedy, Dionysus retains his status as the "render of men," one whose work it is to sever a person from himself or herself, for deliverance or destruction or both. The tragic individual, as dramatic character, has struggled from the beginning for cohesive selfhood, for a unity of motive, action, and identity. But it is just this aspiration, more so than any other, that is denied by this fundamental spirit in tragic drama. The Dionysian phenomenon, considered in these purely "tragic" terms, is not aligned with unity or cohesion but rather with fracture, with eksta-

sis and enthusiasmos, with separation and dispersal.

29. Otto, Dionysus, 105,192.

22

After Dionysus

The life cycle of Dionysus is one of death and rebirth, annihilation fol¬ lowed by resurrection. It is also a cycle of fragmentation and reassem¬ bling, as the body of the god is torn apart, only to be reborn. The pattern is always one of separation and joining, of breaking into parts and re¬ constituting the whole. This is the Dionysian rhythm, as dictated by the seasonal cycle and by the god's own experience in legend. And yet this pattern, significantly, is by no means that of the tragic theater. As demonstrated by the sparagmos of Pentheus, the tragic drama breaks the cycle at the event of dismemberment, and no resurrection is promised. Agave may hope, as she does at the end of The Bacchae, that her son's re¬ mains can be assembled—"Is his body entire?"—but there is nothing to be done; the work of the god is accomplished. In his renowned opposition of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, Nietzsche emphasizes the balance and flux between respective move¬ ments toward "Oneness" and individuation. The Dionysiac, as the "art realm" of intoxication, frees the spirit from worldly constraints, allowing for an ecstatic communion with primal unity. The Apollonian, as the art realm of dream, ensures a necessary tempering, returning the spirit to the "illusion" of individual selfhood. The advent of tragedy, for Nietzsche, is dependent on this dialectic. Each of these operations must be held in bal¬ ance, the one checking the other, the one speaking the language of its op¬ posite; it is in this marriage that "the highest goal of tragedy and of art in general is reached."30 An underlying, reiterated assumption of Nietz¬ sche's theory is that humankind continually aspires toward unity with a mystical "Oneness," that it suffers from the condition of individuation, and that what tragedy offers, as an expression of the Dionysian principle, is "metaphysical solace"—the knowledge that beyond the limits of the self, and apart from immediate appearances, "life is at bottom indestruc¬ tibly joyful and powerful." Dionysiac rapture, for Nietzsche, results from the shattering of the Apollonian principium individuationis.31 At the same time, in Nietzschean terms, it is Dionysus who stands in for individual characters on the tragic stage. We have noted his assertion that the leading characters in Greek tragedy are but "masks" of the god. This idea, taken further, is that "the one true Dionysos appears in a mul¬ tiplicity of characters, in the mask of the warrior-hero, and enmeshed in the web of individual will." It is in this context that Nietzsche's concep¬ tion of what is at times referred to as the passion of Dionysus, as it re-

30. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 131. 31. Ibid., 50, 22.

The Character of Dionysus

23

fleets the impact of the god's own legendary experience upon dramatic character, is spelled out: The god ascends the stage in the likeness of a striving and suffering indi¬ vidual. That he can appear at all with this clarity and precision is due to dream interpreter Apollo, who projects before the chorus its Dionysian condition in this analogical figure. Yet in truth that hero is the suffering Dionysos of the mysteries. He of whom the wonderful myth relates that as a child he was dis¬ membered by Titans now experiences in his own person the pains of indi¬ viduation, and in this condition is worshipped as Zagreus. We have here an indication that dismemberment—the truly Dionysiac suffering—was like a separation into air, water, earth, fire, and that individuation should be re¬ garded as the source of all suffering, and rejected. In Nietzsche's theology, then, the dismembered god promises deliver¬ ance: the rebirth of Dionysus means "the end of individuation." What Nietzsche emphasizes in his alliance of Dionysus with tragic character is "a recognition that whatever exists is of a piece, and that individuation is the root of all evil; a conception of art as the sanguine hope that the spell of in¬ dividuation may yet be broken, as an augury of eventual reintegration."32 This is masterful theory, systematic, inclusive, and transcendent. The Dionysus we have discussed, the representation of a power which en¬ sures that a tragic character will suffer in the manner of the god, is tem¬ pered in Nietzsche's vision by a Dionysus who himself suffers and is martyred in the name of those he would rescue from individuation. Yet Nietzsche's theory is problematic, and the reason for it being so lies quite specifically in a relation of character and cosmos. The workings that Nietzsche proposes take place in a macrocosmos in which a "Oneness" is possible, in which pre-Euripidean tragedy is all-embracing, in which the smaller realms of specific plays are not, themselves, individuated, and where Oedipus joins Prometheus in donning the all-encompassing Dionysian mask. It is on this macrocosmic stage that the larger, eternal drama of Dionysus is enacted, where the god dies and is reborn, cycli¬ cally and forever, and where ecstatic unity will always, by turns, conflict and find a balance with an Apollonian dream image of solitary selfhood. But the solitary tragic character, individuated and confined to the smaller and more human realms of Thebes, Argos, or Troezen, does not inhabit this macrocosm, even though he or she might well be "inhabited"

32. Ibid., 66-67.

24

After Dionysus

by a Dionysian spirit, as Pentheus is.33 Nor is the great cycle of Dionysian death and rebirth available to the tragic character who, like Pentheus (or Macbeth, in later times), will suffer only the dismemberment and never the rejoining. The difficulty that is presented by Nietzschean theory, for our purposes here, pertains not so much to a larger phenomenon of early tragedy—as the conflict and union of "art realms"—as it does to the spe¬ cific impression of a dismembering force upon dramatic character. In the macrocosmos of Dionysus, there is destruction and rejuvenation, a tear¬ ing apart and then a wholeness. But for the dramatic character, as I have suggested, the operations of the Dionysian energy intercede well before the cycle can complete itself, and only fragmentation results. "Meta¬ physical solace" may be available to one who apprehends the workings of a Dionysian super-cosmos; it is hardly so for the solitary tragic char¬ acter who falls victim to the "render of men." This rending process, which is an essential effect of the Dionysian phe¬ nomenon in its relation to tragic character in drama, is the core focus of my investigation here, along with the dramaturgical means through which a pattern of character dismemberment is accomplished. In one sense, the Dionysian sparagmos provides an apt and ready metaphor for a process of fragmentation and dispersal of selfhood that remains funda¬ mental in tragic drama throughout history. Yet there is also a way in which the Dionysian force can be apprehended in other than strictly metaphorical terms. The concept of "the tragic," as I will endeavor to demonstrate, is not to be understood solely as an aspect of literary genre or philosophic speculation, but also as a natural condition to which dra¬ maturgy responds. The Dionysian effect of rending, which is directly re¬ lated to that of "tragic" disunion or separation, can also be considered not only in aesthetic terms but as a condition of nature. Indeed, it may be just such a stipulation that has contributed to the way in which the broader phenomenon of the Dionysian has continued, historically, to transcend the apparent limitations of its ancient and original context. Dionysus has, of course, a spectrum of associations with nature, dating to his connections to the vine, agricultural plenitude, fertility, and gener¬ ative powers. Yet his "character," in this context, asks to be assessed in

33. Compare to Else, who refers to the logos of the tragic actor as "anti-Dionysiac. The tragic hero presents himself as an irreducibly separate person. His self-awareness is at the opposite pole from the Dionysiac frenzy of self-abandonment, the drowning of all individ¬ uation in a mystical unity. There is no place in the development of the tragic actor for Ergriffenheit or 'possession/ Dionysiac or other" (Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy, 69).

The Character of Dionysus

25

even more inclusive ways. Many scholars have commented on the asso¬ ciation of the god with a force of nature, including William Arrowsmith, for whom he is 'The incarnate life force itself," and Dodds, who describes Dionysus as "not only the liquid fire in the grape, but the sap thrusting in a young tree, the blood pounding in the veins of a young animal, all the mysterious and uncontrollable tides that ebb and flow in the life of nature."34 Marcel Detienne, in search of a "unifying principle" and "mode of action" to characterize the god's activity, asks this question: "What is the nature of the power that is responsible for both the fountain of unwatered wine and the frenzied dance of women screaming the evoe and tearing each other apart? What is the brutal, sudden force that erupts in such different places and forms?"35 For Arrowsmith, Dionysus is "amoral, neither good nor bad," a "ne¬ cessity" capable of both blessing and destroying. In his view, the god's first appearance in The Bacchae is as a "conventional anthropomorphic deity," but by the play's end he is transformed into a "pitiless, daemonic, necessitous power." Although Arrowsmith is focusing here on the Dionysus of The Bacchae, he goes on to make a broader point about this incarnation of the god and about "other personified necessities of the Euripidean stage." As Arrowsmith insists, "these are not merely naturalis¬ tic psychological symbols. They are precisely daimones, the great powers that stalk the world, real with a terrible reality, the source of man's very condition, the necessities that determine his life."36 One must, I believe, entertain the possibility that sparagmos, when understood as the central and reiterated manifestation of an embracing and necessitous Dionysian power, is reflective not only of an ancient

orgia but of a dismembering force that is at large in phenomenal, even if "daimonic," nature. Although it is certainly in the god's purview to be life-giving and regenerative, and although Nietzsche would identify a Dionysiac "nature" with "original Oneness," a signature mark of the god's character is this forceful and unremitting tendency toward rending

34. Arrowsmith, introduction to The Bacchae, 149, and Dodds, Euripides Bacchae, xii. See also Else: "It appears that we could say of Dionysus what Horace said of nature: 'Expelles furca, tamen usque recurret.' And indeed the situation is basically the same; for in this con¬ text Dionysus is, in a very important sense, 'nature'" (Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy, 30). Or, in Muller's words, the god was "himself at one with the life of nature. As Plutarch observed, he represented 'the whole wet element' in nature—wine, blood, semen, sap, and all the life-giving juices" (Spirit of Tragedy, 33). 35. Marcel Detienne, Dionysos at Earge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 63. 36. Arrowsmith, introduction to The Bacchae, 149-150.

26

After Dionysus

and dissolution. Thus, even as the sparagmos can be understood simply as ritual, or as a metaphor of character fragmentation, the range of "natu¬ ral" associations of the god himself invest this idea with broader impli¬ cations. What Dionysus comes to represent, from this viewpoint, is not only one of the "great powers that stalk the world" but a dismantling en¬ ergy that is at large and active in the tragic cosmos. Strictly in aesthetic terms, or in the context of character, it is the "nature" of this Dionysian power to lend both selfhood and identity, but then to test, by the most aggressive means and under the most extreme circumstances, the ability of that selfhood to cohere and retain its integrity. We have looked closely at the character and nature of Dionysus, as an ancient god-figure and as the representation of a more far-reaching phe¬ nomenon, and have considered the issue of intrinsic connections of the god to the origin of tragedy and to its manifestations. We have attended to his diverse forms and incarnations as well as to the factors that relate and possibly unify them. In one instance he is a stage character with identifiable traits, as in The Bacchae; in other cases he is a disembodied, universal principle of art, as Nietzsche would claim, or a cosmic force of both generation and disintegration. Yet even in the context of The Bac¬

chae, one cannot reduce Dionysus simply to the level of dramatic charac¬ ter, or to the textual parameters of this one play; the range of associations contained therein provides too vast a field to be constrained by such lim¬ itations. As Segal points out, the god in this play "exists as both a char¬ acter among characters and as a symbol of the very process that makes the dramatic fiction possible at all."37 Dionysus is, finally, representative of a larger field of energy and effect than any single play, legend, ritual, or theory can possibly capture. Even so, there is an innate and prominent effect of the Dionysian phe¬ nomenon that can be identified and applied to the study of character in tragic drama. We have referred to Dionysus as the "god of character," al¬ luding to his associations with the art of theater itself, with imperson¬ ation and mimesis. But a singular exertion of this theatrical god's own character has also been identified. In the context of his diverse and changeable forms, this central role of Dionysus is, of necessity, contra¬ dictory: he is both the maker and the dismantler of the human individual as portrayed through dramatic character. The Dionysian phenomenon permeates tragic drama as an underlying strain of dialectical action that is made up of both motive and reprisal, incarnate in the will of tragic 37. Segal, Dionysiac Poetics, 233.

The Character of Dionysus

27

character toward supreme selfhood and the concurrent edict against such aspiration toward cohesiveness and entirety. It is the prominence of the sparagmos, in the god's own history as well as in the Dionysian rit¬ ual, that not only suggests but underscores the centrality of this dialectic. Apart from his connections to theatrical representation generally, Dionysus is the maker of character in precisely the sense that he stresses individual resolve to such extreme degrees, a dismantler because the sentence that is handed down will always be sparagmos—of the soul and psyche if not the body.38 It is in just this way that a consideration of the effects of the Dionysian power on tragic dramaturgy applies not only to the Pentheus story or to the range of Greek tragedies, but to an entire spectrum of plays that are marked by a condition of "tragic" disunion. Other selves, in other times, are lent character by this Dionysiac force, just as they will suffer the requisite dismemberment at the god's behest. To fully appreciate the intricacies of this process, however, one must look more exactingly at the concept of "the tragic" itself, and do so by distilling its essential properties from those of two other primary and re¬ lated terms—"tragedy" and the tragic "vision."

38. In Murray's conception of the mythic or ritualistic sequence associated with Diony¬ sus, he refers to the sparagmos as a part of the "Pathos of the Year-Daimon" and includes the examples of various gods and characters who are "torn to pieces" in this phase; see Har¬ rison, Themis, 342. Fergusson, in his description of Murray's theory, does not use the latter's term ("Pathos") for the second stage of the ritual but instead says that the ritual "had its Sparagmos, in which the royal victim was literally or symbolically torn asunder" (Idea of a Theatre, 32). Murray himself, however, does not seem nearly so concerned with such a sym¬ bolic level as he is with the literal tearing apart of such characters as Pentheus or Hippolytus. My own view is that the sparagmos can be understood apart from a strict ritual se¬ quence, and is evident in the overall and cumulative effect of divisive exertions in a play's action; its impact is felt most strongly in the context of selfhood, and its effects are conse¬ quently psychological as well as corporeal.

2. Tragedy, Tragic, Vision

'TRAGEDY

IS a maenad," writes Vyacheslav Ivanov, thus

marrying the ancient drama to the votary of Dionysus and connecting it by association with the fierce ritual of dismemberment that the bacchante performed. For Ivanov, the worshiper embodies the tragic duality—the "dyad"—that marks the Dionysian force as well as its female celebrant, a dialectical principle that is essential to the interior drama of selfhood in tragedy.1 His phrase, poetically terse and evocative, is also historically and aesthetically apt, reflecting as it does the Greek disposition toward anthropomorphic illustration. Walter Burkert, for example, notes the de¬ pictions by poets and artists of the Dionysian retinue that include "Trago-

dia in the shape of a maenad," and Ruth Padel expands on this theme, in¬ cluding the painters who "draw maenads that look like Erinyes"—with each of these standing as "emblems of tragedy."2 It is precisely such use of the maenad in the ancient renderings of "tragedy" that connects the form of the art directly to the sparagmos, and by extension to the divisive nature and process of "the tragic" itself. Yet it remains true that, in spite of this ancestry, tragedy and the tragic sustain an indistinct relationship to one another. In particular—and in spite of all that has been written about the nature of this type of drama—

1. Vyacheslav Ivanov, "The Essence of Tragedy," in Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists, trans. and ed. Laurence Senelick (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 218. 2. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 185; and Ruth Padel, Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 190.

Tragedy, Tragic, Vision

29

very little has been articulated on the connections, and differentiations, among the form and history of tragedy, its philosophy and 'Vision/' and the nature of the tragic as a generative source of this art. Part of the diffi¬ culty, no doubt, arises from the fact that certain key terms—tragedy, the tragic, and tragic vision, in particular—are often employed in discussion as if they were interchangeable or less than fully distinguished, one from the other. "Tragic," of course, is a commonplace term, and one that is em¬ ployed under all manner of circumstances. Often this word is simply taken to mean tragical, or of tragedy, or—in everyday usage—under¬ stood to connote something notably unfortunate or lamentable. But these associations, accurate enough in common parlance, do little in the way of elucidating the more fundamental condition the term also signifies. It is in this context, for example, that firmer associations need to be drawn be¬ tween the tragic and the Dionysian, as both a legacy of tragedy and a principle that continues to inform it. The tragic and the Dionysian, though intimately related, are not syn¬ onymous terms. The latter may be understood as representing a particu¬ lar power that, while possibly reflected in nature, is realized artistically in a dismembering process that attends to character in drama. The tragic, in its status as a phenomenal condition, may be thought of as having a passive as well as an active state, and it is precisely this abeyant quality that distinguishes it markedly from its related term. While the Dionysian is an aggressive strain that is impressed aesthetically upon dramatic con¬ ceptions of selfhood, the tragic—even though it underlies this propen¬ sity—must be apprehended first as a fundamental condition of mortal¬ ity, and one that may or may not find expression in art. The tragic is in this sense existential as well as theatrical; it asks to be assessed ontologically, insofar as its relation is not only to artistic endeavor but to a set of circumstances and conditions that are fundamental and timeless in the human situation. It is therefore the case that even as the tragic is inherent in tragedy, it is independent of that artistic method in a way that the Dionysian is not. The aim of this chapter is to examine certain key points of alignment and dissociation with respect to these primary terms. My concern here is not with definitions per se but rather with the clarification of a relation¬ ship that is central, and one that is manifested in several contexts. Much has been written and argued over, in recent decades, with respect to what allows for tragedy, what informs the "tragic sense of life" (in Una¬ muno's phrase), and what characterizes the generic "tragic man" or con¬ stitutes the "vision" that marks these works or emerges from their authors

30

After Dionysus

or audience. Claims on tragedy have been made in several historic eras, by many dramatists and a host of theorists. And the persistence of this argument is hardly surprising, given that tragedy is one of the two poles toward which dramatic writing has traditionally gravitated. As such, its nature is critical to the issue of theater's identity in the most profound way. Moreover, the prescriptions of tragic dramaturgy—as set down by Aristotle, adapted in various ways by the neoclassicists, and filtered through Romantic and Modernist aesthetics—have continued to serve as fundamentals of dramatic construction. Although only a few historical eras have produced plays that continue to be regarded as pinnacles of tragic art, and while there have been lengthy periods in which the exis¬ tence or validity of tragedy has been vigorously contested, the primacy of tragedy as an idea, as a means of conceiving and interpreting experi¬ ence, retains both currency and potency. It is in this spirit that its nature asks to be interrogated further, particularly insofar as that nature is af¬ fected—or, indeed, determined—by related terminologies. Tragedy's identity has been typically pursued—within a longstanding historical tradition—in its relation to literary categories, with the con¬ straints of dramaturgical form and genre given primacy. Yet much of the reason why tragedy's inclusive behaviors have been so elusive, and why its signature manifestations have been so few, can be attributed quite specifically to the fact that while evidence of tragedy may reside in writ¬ ten texts, its nature more truly lies in a confluence of factors other than the simply literary. Since this confluence has a fundamentally Attic basis and point of origin, it would seem appropriate to conduct our inquiry within that context—conforming, perhaps, to Paul Ricoeur's assertion that "one must start with Greek tragedy."3 To this end, I refer to Vernant, who has characterized the advent of tragedy in terms of a historical "moment" in which a range of tensions

3. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 211. In his phrasing, "the Greek example is not one example among others; Greek tragedy is not at all an example in the inductive sense, but the sudden and complete manifestation of the essence of the tragic; to understand the tragic is to relive in oneself the Greek experience of the tragic, not as a particular case of tragedy, but as the origin of tragedy—that is to say, both its beginning and authentic emergence." For Ricoeur, "it is by grasping the essence in its Greek phenomenon that we can understand all other tragedy as analogous to Greek tragedy." It should be noted, however, that when Ricoeur refers here to the "essence" or the "experience" of the tragic, his reference is not specifically to "the tragic" as I am defining the term in this study.

Tragedy, Tragic, Vision

3i

are crystallized within a given time frame in Athenian society.4 Ver¬ nant's reiterated point, however, is one that implies a significantly broader context than the historical one, at least as to the degree that such a frame is defined by dates that demarcate an era. For him, tragedy is de¬ pendent upon three distinct contexts; in his words, it is an "invention," the "truth" of which is to be found in "all the new and original elements that tragedy introduced on the three levels where it shifted the horizon of Greek culture." Identifying these three levels, Vernant points first of all to "social institutions," and alludes to tragedy as a "manifestation of the city turning itself into theater, presenting itself on stage before its as¬ sembled citizens." Next is the context of "literary forms," or the creation of a poetic drama designed for enactment. The third level is that of "human experience," and in this connection Vernant writes that "with the development of what may be called a tragic consciousness, man and his actions were presented, in tragedy's own peculiar perspective, not as stable realities that could be placed, defined, and judged, but as prob¬ lems, unanswerable questions, riddles whose double meanings remain enigmatic however often decoded."5 Such a triad is particularly apt in that it includes a literary description of tragedy but is by no means limited to questions of genre. Instead, Vernant's moment allows for a full range of convergences—societal and on¬ tological as well as artistic. He is, to be sure, describing an occasion that had a specifically Attic setting, created from a particular set of conditions in the polis and in the developing society of the time. It would seem, however, that his construct is readily adaptable into another three-part structure, one that will be useful here as we assess certain characteristics of tragedy in their relation to those of the tragic and of vision. In this sce¬ nario, the three contexts in which tragedy has traditionally been dis¬ cussed—historical, philosophical, and dramaturgical—will be consid¬ ered as, in varying degrees, analogous to Vernant's trio of social institutions, human experience, and literary forms. Vernant's conception of tragedy in the context of "social institutions" can be correlated with the ways in which the society conceives of itself in historical terms. It is, for example, not simply the case that tragedy poses social and political questions of law and justice but that questions are

4. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books, 1988). My reference is to the first chapter of the book, "The His¬ torical Moment of Tragedy in Greece," and to pages 27-28 in particular. 5. Ibid., 185-186.

32

After Dionysus

typically framed in a setting of historical flux, where fundamental values are undergoing a substantive change. The level of "human experience," particularly with its emphasis on "unanswerable questions" and unsta¬ ble realities, is suggestive of the purely philosophical response to tragedy that arose in the Romantic period and became predominant in the late nineteenth century, and then in the twentieth. And the category of "literary forms," finally, reflects the ongoing issue of the dramatic structure of tragic drama, a foremost consideration for Aristotle, Horace, and the neoclassicists, and the basis for more recent dramaturgical ap¬ proaches to tragedy's workings. Given the pertinence of these contexts, it is surprising that all three of them are so rarely considered at once, and assessed apart from what Vernant points to as the original setting. In truth, it is only the integration of all three categories that can supply a full range of necessary coordinates.

History and "Tragic" Chronology When tragedy is examined in the historical context, emphasis is often placed on the desultory quality of its appearances—or, to cast this in a different light, on the rare and remarkable instances of its burgeonings. Tragedy, which some have called the most sublime form of dramatic—or indeed, poetic—expression, is also among the most ephemeral of all artistic phenomena. So great is the impress of historical factors on this relative fragility that the form (if that is what it is) is discussed as often in the context of these unusual occasions as it is in terms of means or effects. Even where there is agreement that tragedy survived its Athenian devel¬ opment—perhaps even to the present day—the tendency remains to cre¬ ate subcontexts, historical in nature, for its evaluation and categoriza¬ tion. The truism persists that tragedy has truly flourished in only four historical epochs: the fifth century b.c. in Greece; the Renaissance, partic¬ ularly in Britain; France in the late seventeenth century; and Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These periods, in and of themselves, have become the instruments of measurement and com¬ parison. The condition of the tragic, by contrast, is not bound by any such his¬ torical frameworks; and it is this stipulation, more so than any other, that determines its difference from the form that contains and gives it expres¬ sion. The tragic, when understood purely as an ontological situation—as distinct from its select manifestations in art—is timeless. It is eternal to precisely the extent that mortal beings live and continue to be aware, not

Tragedy, Tragic, Vision

33

only of their own mortality but of the divisive forces that inevitably sep¬ arate being from all that is held as valuable. The degree to which such a condition is felt by a particular society, or the extent to which it demands aesthetic expression, may vary considerably from one age to another— this, in fact, is the highly alterable quality of tragic "vision"—but the con¬ dition itself is timeless and constant./Tragedy, as a means of articulating this condition, and as a form that allows for broad variation in the interpretation of it, is neither constant nor, certainly, eternal. It is a phenome¬ non that arose after many advanced civilizations had flourished and died out; its survival for most of its lifetime has been marginal; its dura¬ bility as a form has been vigorously challenged; and its future is an open question. The historical appearances of tragedy may be correlated, not only with Vernant's triad or its more generalized adaptation, but with spe¬ cific circumstances that can be identified with some precision. It is in this respect, in fact, that Vernant's conception of the historic and soci¬ etal "moment" in Athens can be understood in ways that are pertinent to other places and eras. Such moments arise when there is a dynamic collision between a past condition and a present need, a need that is evolutionary in that an imperative for growth and change is implied. With respect to the Greek setting, for example, Vernant asserts that tragedy, "in its formal logic and on the more abstract level, is a passage between mythic thought and philosophic thought, between Hesiod and Aristotle."6 Along similar lines, the historical coordinates for other moments of tragedy, of whatever duration, can be identified. Shakespearean tragedy arose at a time when the dialectic between medieval and Renaissance

6. Jean-Pierre Vernant, "Greek Tragedy: Problems of Interpretation," in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eu¬ genio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 288-289. In Vernant's words: "For tragedy to appear in Greece, there must first be a distance established between the heroic past, between the religious thought proper to an earlier epoch and the juridical and political thought which is that of the City performing the tragedy. This distance must be great enough for the conflict of values to be painfully felt, but the distance must be small enough so that the heroic past is not liquidated, rejected, so that the confrontation does not cease. By the same token, for tragic man to appear, human action must have emerged as such, but the human agent must not have acquired too autonomous a status, the psycho¬ logical category of the will must not be developed, and the distinction between voluntary and involuntary crime must not be clear enough for human action to be independent of the gods. This is the moment of tragedy."

34

After Dionysus

sensibilities was being energetically argued, when both religious and philosophic thought were undergoing profound transition, when a sense of humankind's relation to a macrocosmos was defined but also con¬ tested. For European dramatists in the nineteenth century, the potential for tragedy came about, in part, from the collision between entrenched convictions and revolutionary perceptions concerning a human being's psychological constitution, genetic and cultural predispositions, and economic imperatives. In each instance, and to a considerable degree, such variations can be attributed to the "vision" of the particular age— that is, to points of view that were collective to the extent that a particu¬ lar artistic experience could be widely shared. The "tragic" condition, however, stands apart from these processes and is not subject to their im¬ plicit variations. The tragic is neither evolutionary nor subject to vision¬ ary points of view—save for its subjective interpretations—but refers in¬ stead to an unalterable status of being. There is an another key distinction to be made in the historical context, and one that pertains quite specifically to the marking of time. There is one clear sense, certainly, in which tragedy has been traditionally preoc¬ cupied with empirical structures of time and history. The reference of the Greek dramatist was to a heroic past, and to the events of war in particu¬ lar, as a source of character and action. Shakespeare drew not only on history for his plots and situations but favored a "chronicle" style of dramaturgy in his tragedies as well as his history plays. Racine and Corneille used historical plots, in accord with neoclassical guidelines, and the aesthetic sensibilities of their age were famously dependent on past prescriptions. Ibsen was a master of expository history and was able to bring a finely delineated impression of past circumstances to bear on the present tensions in his drama. Yet there is also a sense in which tragedy sustains an argument with history and time, and a way in which the tragic event is profoundly antihistoric, at least in terms of chronological progression. It is along these lines that tragedy's orientation toward matters of history and time can contribute to a cosmic or transcendent status that need have nothing to do with the participation of divine powers. Even though a given play may be utterly dependent upon a particular juxtaposition of circum¬ stances, or on the exact timing of events—markedly so, for instance, in Romeo and Juliet or the Antigone—the essential thrust of the action and in¬ tention in high tragedy is aimed toward the isolation of pinnacle mo¬ ments that, in effect, stand outside the constraints of time. Tragedy

Tragedy, Tragic, Vision

35

means to fashion moments that are unarguably real and immediate—al¬ beit fleeting—in stage time but which are nonetheless transcendent of historical dimension. The impulse in such cases is not to emphasize the events themselves, as in a history play—even one with strongly tragic overtones, such as Richard III—but instead to use such dramatic circum¬ stances as preparation for the one event, the single moment that occurs, as it were, cosmically. Tragedy may quarrel tenaciously with time, as Juliet does in her bid¬ ding to "fiery-footed steeds," but its broader designs are captured in passages such as Macbeth's "tomorrow and tomorrow" iteration, in which time's "last syllable" is invoked and the speaker moves into a state that is beyond worldly chronology. Tragedy's preoccupations, especially with respect to character, have much to do with destiny, and while this feature has a specifically historical dimension, the more profound relation is to those isolated moments—such as Macbeth's anagnorisis—where time as humanly measured loses its significance. Whether it is Agamemnon's step onto the sacred tapestries or Solness's fall from his spire, the end of such a destiny is a passage beyond history. A distinction of tragedy from the tragic condition must include a con¬ sideration of time in this more abstracted or transcendent sense. The tragic, much like tragedy in this context, can be described as antihistoric: its relation is not to a chronological progression, and its orientation is not toward sequential events. And along with tragedy, the tragic condition shares a cosmic identity, in its implicit transcendence of the quotidian as well as in its status as a mortal condition. In tragedy, however, the moment that stands outside of time must still be framed by the events of the drama and by the chosen progression of actions that has brought a given character to a particular juncture. The moment of the tragic, by contrast, exists apart from theatrical representation; although perpetual, it is un¬ repeatable. It is the moment of the continual present, the precise point of stress between past and future in which neither is truly claimable. While such a moment may be approximated in drama as a singular experience of character, it is in fact shared by all of us as a stipulation of our mortal¬ ity. It is an eternal absolute, and in the affairs of humankind it is uninter¬ rupted. The "moment" of tragedy, as in Vernant's description, is the product of a specific convergence of historical and societal stresses, and is for this reason a rarity; the moment of the tragic, however, is always at hand. Historical patterns may affect how "the tragic" is perceived—as

36

After Dionysus

'Vision"—and how it is dramatized—as "tragedy"—but the condition it¬ self is unsusceptible to such fluctuations and is impervious to chrono¬ logical measurements.

Philosophic Behaviors Given the scope of the discourse on matters pertinent to the philo¬ sophic ramifications of tragedy, the subject of this part of our triad could be construed as being so vast as to be effectively immeasurable. So much has been written about tragedy's correlations with a range of philosoph¬ ical preoccupations—in ethical, metaphysical, existential, aesthetic, and other frameworks—that a comprehensive overview would risk redun¬ dancy and pointlessness. Still, this very tradition of inquiry, which has been conducted over centuries, is in itself suggestive of how central this subject has been in the ancestry of tragic drama. And in the context of the brief investigation here, certain parameters can be assigned, particularly so if the philosophical context is deliberately distinguished from the area of thematics and if the assessment remains focused on key points of dif¬ ferentiation between tragedy and its related terminologies. It is important that a distinction be drawn between this defined area of investigation and the areas of thematics and vision, if only because these are so closely related to the philosophical context. There is a sense, of course, in which categorical assertions about tragedy's thematic tenden¬ cies are risky. Not only can such commentary be highly subjective, but the evidence must proceed from the plays themselves, with all their in¬ dividualized manifestations of incident and behavior. It remains the case, however, that patterns have emerged, by now quite familiar, that strongly suggest a commonality. Certain preoccupations of tragedy have come to be viewed as generic, due to reiteration and durability. It is in this respect, for instance, that the achievement of wisdom through suf¬ fering, so thematically prominent in the works of Aeschylus, can be seen as an enduring motif discernible not only in the Greek setting but in other eras as well. Such primary concerns as the arbitration of law and justice, the limits of aspiration, the possibility of freedom in the context of destiny or "necessity," and the implications of individual guilt or re¬ sponsibility can similarly be understood as arising typically, and even predictably, in tragedy's ancestry. And yet, while any of these issues may be investigated in philosophic terms, they are not, in and of themselves, characteristic of the more ab-

Tragedy, Tragic, Vision

37

stract and embracing philosophical purview of tragedy. Despite the re¬ peated emphasis on these questions, their arguably generic qualities are mitigated against by a concurrent dependency on individual articula¬ tion. Simply put, such issues can be called thematic because their devel¬ opment must rely, of necessity, on the mechanics of specific plays—even as a number of such plays may deal with them similarly. The conditions that provide for a thematic emphasis must, in other words, be estab¬ lished within particular settings and interactions and proceed from the exact ways in which the dramatic events are orchestrated. It is in this re¬ gard, for example, that the repercussions around the issue of revenge— again, a recurring tragical motif with philosophic overtones—becomes thematic in the context of individualized articulation, as in The Libation Bearers, Medea, or Hamlet. It is here, however, that we can identify the key point of difference be¬ tween thematics and vision. On the one hand, vision, like thematics, may be understood in inclusive terms. One might reasonably conclude, as an example, that there are certain motifs that are evident in the arena of Greek tragedy generally—the relation of the individual to a societal con¬ text, the contrast of the human sector to that of the gods, the imperatives in regard to reverence, for instance—but that there is also a collective vi¬ sion of the situation of the individual that emerges from such points of emphasis. In this sense, both thematics and vision would seem to share an inclusive and embracing quality that we have associated with the philosophical. Vision, however, is distinct from the strictly philosophic context in much the same way as thematic inquiry is, in that there is a comparable dependency on individualized articulation. This depen¬ dency is best understood in narrower terms, as contained by the struc¬ tural limits of specific plays and, in particular, by the respective outlooks of individual dramatists. And here is where we locate the significant dif¬ ference between thematics and vision. When rightly understood, vision by its very nature is connected to point of view (and I explore this con¬ sideration in detail in Chapter 3). Vision implies a sensibility that, even though it may be understood by many, is generated from an individual perspective—usually that of the author or central character in tragedy. By comparison with thematics, vision suggests an even greater degree of influence arising from the personality and emotional constitution of the author or the character who articulates it. There is, in other words, a sig¬ nificant insinuation of personalized standpoint and perspective that the thematic context does not necessarily share.

38

After Dionysus

To isolate the philosophic part of the triad, then, is to identify an area that is distinct from both thematics and vision, as well as from the his¬ torical and dramaturgical contexts, and to focus on the more abstract be¬ haviors and effects of tragedy. Here one is drawn closer to the realm of pure aesthetics, and to factors that are not delimited by historical era or by the particularities of specific plays. This act of distinguishing the ef¬ fects of tragedy from its dramaturgy has, of course, a lineage that ex¬ tends to the Poetics. The succinct definition of tragedy that begins part 6 of Aristotle's treatise is based on a key aesthetic assumption—that tragedy is not only an imitation of an action, of a certain amplitude and heightened by language, but that it engenders eleos and phobos—quali¬ ties that arise from the action but which are felt as an effect upon the ob¬ server.7 What has rarely—if ever—been discussed in this context is the relation of eleos and phobos to the tragic itself, as distinct from tragedy. The tragic, as a condition of being, belongs to those situations in which the potential for separation—or Dionysian rending—exists within a character; it per¬ tains, at the same time, to the precise exertion of this separating energy. In the context of Aristotle's proposition, it would seem that this effect of separation must be implicitly engendered within the action of the drama in order to be conveyed to the spectator. Pity and terror are, after all, con¬ tradictory emotions, and the "tragic" effect cannot be one of experienc¬ ing them in a cohesive or unified way but rather in a manner that is in¬ herently divisive. The katharsis that Aristotle refers to would, along these lines, imply that the spectator is torn in the apprehension of this tragic ef¬ fect, possibly in a way that corresponds directly to the experience of a torn protagonist. A disunion within the hero, experienced within the dis¬ membering action of the tragedy, is transferred in specifically "tragic" terms to the spectator. And yet this tragic characteristic of eleos and pho-

7. Hans-Georg Gadamer affirms the crucial importance of this distinction when he writes, "In his famous definition of tragedy Aristotle made a decisive contribution to the problem of the aesthetic: in defining tragedy he included its effect (Wirkung) on the specta¬ tor" (Truth and Method, 2d rev. ed., translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall [New York: Continuum, 1993], 130). Still, the relation of eleos and phobos to the acI tion of the drama and to the spectator remains an area of critical argument and speculation. For a concise discussion of "the presuppositions that are shared by all or most of the writ¬ ers on the subject," see Gerald F. Else, Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937), 223-227.

Tragedy, Tragic, Vision

39

bos does not belong solely to the resulting effects of tragedy. It also ap¬ plies to the inspiration of same—or, we might say, to the tragic condition that both underlies and prompts tragedy's creation. Melpomene, the ancient muse who stands for such prompting—that is, for the inspiration behind the tragedy—carries as her standardized indicia the cup and the dagger, symbolic of the incompatible dialectics of pity and terror that are always, quite literally in such depictions of the muse, on the one hand and the other in tragic representation.8 Apart from such Aristotelian effects of tragedy, aesthetic argument has focused frequently on two of tragedy's most notable philosophic behaviors—ironic and dialectical patterns of thought and argument. Irony, of course, is a critical trope that has achieved—through varied and extensive use—a considerable elasticity and range of connotation. Purely in the context of tragedy, however, irony can be suggestive of that which is mysteriously apt or appropriate—or, put differently, of that which is utterly sensical yet does not arise expectedly from the motives or the evidence at hand. Irony may be associated, to be sure, with strictly dramaturgical and structural considerations; yet it can also function, on the philosophical level, in a way that aligns human affairs with more cosmic patterns, however scrutable these may seem to be. As a fundamental behavior in tragic drama, irony has its basis in pat¬ terns of juxtaposition. The crossroads where Oedipus encounters Laius by "chance" are in fact—and archetypally—the coordinates of his des¬ tiny. Yet it is the very concept of a crossroads—as an apparently random yet utterly appropriate intersection of destinies—that dwells not only in the plottings of tragedy but in the cosmic heart of its philosophical in¬ tentions. Of all the myriad pathways that may be implicit in a given se¬ lection of characters, tragedy tends to select those that, when juxtaposed, evince this quality of the ironic—or again, of the mysteriously apt. The passion of Phaedra must inevitably be directed at the chaste Hippolytus; the favored daughter of Lear must of course be the one whose death he brings about and suffers most severely; it is quite naturally the young and exuberant Hilde Wangel who exhorts Solness to the top of his

8. For a discussion of these attributes of Melpomene, see Robert R. Wark's commentary on Joshua Reynolds's "Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse," in Ten British Pictures 174.0-1840 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1971), 51-52.

40

After Dionysus

church spire.9 Even as these convergences occur as the result of a drama¬ tist's deliberate machinations, they are symptomatic of a behavioral ten¬ dency that transcends the particulars of any one play, the intentions of any one playwright, and the individuality of any single historical epoch. Indeed, this type of philosophic irony is so prevalent in tragedy that it constitutes nothing less than a belief system, and an organizing principle even in the most anarchical of contexts. Tragic irony is not capricious; it is a strong indicator of sense and system, however ambiguous or in¬ scrutable the surrounding context may seem. It is important to note, however, that the relation of this trope to "the tragic" is different from its alignment with either "tragedy" or "vision." Thus far I have described an attribute of tragedy that is quite closely re¬ lated to vision, at least to the degree that what is implied by the partici¬ pation of irony—in strictly philosophic, as opposed to dramaturgical terms—is a distinct point of view on such matters as the relation of hap¬ penstance to an ordered and causally determinate cosmos. What miti¬ gates against this proposition, however, is the fact that philosophic irony is so pervasive in the history and development of tragedy that it tran¬ scends the factor of individual perspective. If there is a "vision" of irony, in other words, it has become so much an attribute of the form and ex¬ pression of tragedy as to compromise the sort of particularity that might normally be associated with the perspectives of specific authors and characters. "The tragic," by contrast, is not inherently ironic. And here again it is necessary to discern between the condition of the tragic and its process— between the ontological status that it refers to and the ways in which such a status is manifested in artful depictions. In those cases when the tragic assumes its Dionysian face and becomes a force in theatrical rep¬ resentation—and one with a particular relation to the fortunes of charac9. Roland Barthes speaks to this state of affairs when he describes the occasion of the acme in classical tragedy, noting by example, "it is precisely when Agamemnon condemns his daughter to death when she praises his kindness." With respect to the acme, Barthes asks, "What does this predilection signify?"—and responds as follows: "The acme is the ex¬ pression of a situation of mischance. Yet just as repetition 'limits' the anarchic (or innocent) nature of the aleatory, so luck and mischance are not neutral, they invincibly call up a cer¬ tain signification—and the moment chance signifies, it is no longer chance; the acme's pre¬ cise function is this conversion of chance into sign, for the exactitude of a reversal cannot be conceived outside of an intelligence which performs it; in mythic terms, Nature (Life) is not an exact force; wherever a symmetry is manifested (and the acme is the very figure of sym¬ metry), there has to be a hand to guide it" ("The Structure of the Fait-Divers," in Critical Es¬ says, trans. Richard Howard [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972], 193).

Tragedy, Tragic, Vision

4i

ter in tragedy—the factor of irony may well be considered in a context similar to that provided by tragedy itself. We might remark, for example, on how "ironic" it is that tragic drama features a determined quest for in¬ tegrative selfhood but at the same time the Dionysian nature of such drama will invariably doom such a project. This is philosophic irony in a profound sense, with a full range of aesthetic implications. Yet the fun¬ damental reference of the tragic is to a condition of existence, and it is here that we note the utter absence of ironic connotations. The tragic con¬ dition, which is characterized most notably by the inevitable separation of mortal being from all that is held as valuable, is as dispassionate as a law of nature. It contains no inherent commentary on its stipulations, and no intrinsic propositions concerning whether its effects are sensical or not. The philosophic quotient of irony is closely aligned in tragedy with a predisposition toward dialectical patterns of thought and argument. Here one finds additional evidence of tragedy's "cosmic" orientation, in that such dialectics tend to evince qualities of balance, symmetry, and— once again—the sensical over the random, in philosophic as well as dra¬ maturgical terms. In this context, Schelling's proposals concerning the dialectics of freedom and necessity are exemplary, in that his ideas per¬ tain so directly to a relation of dramatic character to an embracing cos¬ mos and also to an overarching effect of tragedy's behavioral orienta¬ tions. "The essence of tragedy," writes Schelling, "is thus an actual and objective conflict between freedom in the subject on the one hand, and necessity on the other, a conflict that does not end such that one or the other succumbs, but rather such that both are manifested in perfect in¬ difference as simultaneously victorious and vanquished." What is implied here, clearly, is more than an attitude toward a par¬ ticular character's actions or even toward the possible exertions of such a character's free will. The implication, instead, is of a specific and highly refined balance in which character—as a representation of human voli¬ tion—is embraced, constrained, and finally delimited by the impress of a necessity that is cosmic in its sense as well as in its totality. Moreover, this balance is described by Schelling in a way that alludes to the "char¬ acter" of this particular "cosmos," in the sense that the dialectic at hand is "manifested in perfect indifference."10

10. F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art (1809), edited, translated, and with an intro¬ duction by Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 251-255.

42

After Dionysus

Hegel's well-known conception of dialectical conflict is also pertinent here, not only because it is so indicative of one of tragedy's more marked philosophical behaviors but because it has been so influential over time. The model that Hegel advances is notably systematic and symmetrical in its juxtaposition of contrary terms, and in this respect can also be aligned with a "cosmic" orderliness and sensical tendency. Yet it is also signifi¬ cant, in our discussion here, that the Hegelian dialectical pattern—in its relation to classical tragedy—is so markedly different from the dialectic of the tragic itself. We need not proceed exhaustively into the intricacies of Hegel's aes¬ thetics, the fundamental points of which are broadly familiar. It will be useful, still, to remind ourselves of a central Hegelian argument—that conflict in drama is less concerned with character as depicted personal¬ ity than with character as the embodiment of an ethical and spiritual essence. The agon is a philosophical one, in which a collision of values, each of which can be affirmed as a positive, produces on the one hand a "condemnation" of both terms—in that each one is, by necessity, limited and partial—and on the other hand the implication of a higher, if ab¬ stract, justice. "Eternal justice" is made manifest in dialectical collisions in which a larger and more inclusive ethical status is reaffirmed, when the "one-sidedness" of either term is condemned as incomplete and thus harmful, and when, with respect to such justice, there is a "downfall of the individuality which disturbs its repose."11 In this sort of dialectic, again, there is an implicit quotient of symmetry, and of a balance be¬ tween terms that share an equal justification—as in Hegel's favored il¬ lustration of the opposition of Antigone and Creon. A familiar difficulty that is encountered in such Hegelian illustration is, of course, the fact that what may hold true for the paradigmatic

11. G. W. F. Hegel, in Hegel on Tragedy, ed. and intro. Anne Paolucci and Henry Paolucci (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1962), 47-49. The relation of a character's actions to ethical and universalized considerations are succinctly expressed on page 47: "For what is ethical, if we grasp it, in its direct consistency—that is to say, not exclusively from the standpoint of personal reflection as formal morality—is the divine in its secular or world realization, the substantive as such, the particular no less than the essential features of which supply the changing content of truly human actions, and in such action itself render this their essence explicit and actual." On the justification of terms, Hegel says, "Primitive tragedy, then, con¬ sists in this, that within a collision of this kind both sides of the contradiction, if taken by themselves, are justified; yet, from a further point of view, they tend to carry into effect the true and positive content of their end and specific characterization merely as the negation and violation of the other equally legitimate power, and consequently in their ethical pur¬ port and relatively to this so far fall under condemnation

Tragedy, Tragic, Vision

43

Antigone is not evinced so neatly in a broader range of drama. Hegelian dialectics are, of necessity, eminently symmetrical; the opposing strains of "ethical substance" cannot, in fact, imply any great or effective im¬ balance with respect to their effects on character, situation, or argument. In tragedy, however, cosmos is always the agonistic—or, if you will, di¬ alectical—partner of chaos, and there is typically no such balance be¬ tween these stringent polarities. In the later Attic tragedies, not to men¬ tion those of the Renaissance and more recent eras, what is dramatized is a situation where order only barely survives in the face of anarchy and destruction. The dialectics of tragedy often imply a radical imbal¬

ance, especially with respect to the fate of individual character. The war¬ ring of cosmos and chaos, when impressed upon the "guilt" of the pro¬ tagonist, is frequently productive not of symmetry but of terrible incongruity. It is in this context that Herbert Muller points to a "suffer¬ ing that is not wholly deserved, that is disproportionate to the wrong¬ doing"—or, as Hans-Georg Gadamer has expressed this, "tragedy does not exist where guilt and expiation balance each other out" but rather where "the excess of tragic consequences is characteristic of the essence of the tragic."12 Such imbalances, finally, can be directly related to the primary differ¬ ence between the Hegelian view of tragedy and the dialectics of "the tragic," per se. The key point here is not so much Hegel's opposition of values—which may very well be symptomatic of a "tragic" conflict—but rather the outcome of such opposition and the implications of such a re¬ sult. The proposal that Hegel makes is that the opposing strains, in their respective incompleteness, are a part of a higher abstract order, and that a unification or synthesis can consequently proceed from their antago¬ nism. The tragic, however, involves a collision of terms that are utterly ir¬ reconcilable, with no possibility of union. The exertion of the tragic is one of determined separation, and the result of this effect is a condition that is unmendable. As a philosophic agon, then, the purely "tragic" conflict stands apart from Hegel's dialectics and also from Nietzsche's opposi¬ tion of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. No Hegelian synthesis is promised, nor is there a Nietzschean return to Oneness. The agon of "the tragic," centered as it is in the rending experience of individual character and selfhood, can bring only fracture and disunity.

12. Herbert J. Muller, The Spirit of Tragedy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), 18; and Gadamer, Truth and Method, 131.

44

After Dionysus

The Dramaturgical Order It is quite naturally the case that the philosophic dispositions of irony and dialectic have direct counterparts in the dramaturgical arrange¬ ments of tragedy. While the prevalence of irony and dialectical thought may be considered in purely philosophical terms, or conceived of as standing for a particular 'Vision" of existence—of "how things are" in the world of the drama—they also, and equally, pertain to a structural bias that orchestrates the manner in which events are set forth and where they achieve a sensical, or cosmic, relation. Irony, in its purely structural manifestation, is often the result of the dramatist's deliberate juxtaposi¬ tion of circumstances, in such a way that an implicit commentary issues, and often in a fashion that indicates the operation of an unseen fatality in the fortunes of character. Irony is also evident, and markedly so, in the procedural component of peripeteia, in which circumstances are abruptly reversed and expectation turns to surprise and elucidation. Dialectic, in the structural sense, reflects the drama's natural inclination to place op¬ posing terms in active and escalating conflict; it bears the distinctive mark of tragic dramaturgy when it turns, in Burkean terminology, ago¬ nistic. In Kenneth Burke's view, the "assertion" of the protagonist pro¬ vokes an implicit "counter-assertion"; and a "final state of tragic vision" is reached when the character is made to transcend an original status and is thus able to see the new situation in its comprehensive manifes¬ tation.13 The core dialectic of tragedy, as I have argued, is an arbitration of cos¬ mos and chaos—and this fundamental agon is one that may be assessed in structural as well as philosophic terms. In the most general sense, what is continually dramatized in tragedy is the tension between condi¬ tions or events that are in some way unfathomable—due to mystery, ap¬ parent happenstance, or the sheer extremity of circumstances—and con¬ ditions that by contrast appear, however inscrutably, to be marked by order, sense, or destiny. And, as noted, it is typically the quotient of irony, in either the dramaturgical or philosophic context, which aids in

13. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (1945; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 38-40. As Burke expresses this dialectic: "This is the process embodied in tragedy, where the agent's action involves a corresponding passion, and from the sufferance of the passion there arises an understanding of the act, an understanding that transcends the act. The act, in being an assertion, has called forth a counter-assertion in the elements that com¬ pose its context. And when the agent is able to see in terms of this counter-assertion, he has transcended the state that characterized him at the start."

Tragedy, Tragic, Vision

45

this mediation of the seemingly random and that which is coherent. Irony, in this way, stands both as a representative 'Vision" of how things are in the tragic cosmos and as a structural means of articulating such an attitude. Irony always stands at the tragic crossroads, and while it may arise in a simple act of structural juxtaposition, its effect is to manage a destiny, to connote those moments when, as Roland Barthes would say, "chance signifies." In assessing such a dialectic of cosmos and chaos, one encounters what appears to be a fundamental contradiction. Simply put, the ques¬ tion concerns the manner in which events that contain a high quotient of mystery or disorder—or both—can be presented dramatically in a form that operates according to its own systematic logic and which achieves both shape and symmetry. Charles Segal is responding to a question that is very closely related to this one when, commenting on the Dionysian presence in the Bacchae, he calls attention to the particular "problem of the dramatist": "how to bring into the bounded realm of form this principle that dissolves boundaries, how to make Dionysus live within the civic and aesthetic confines of the city, theater, and festi¬ val without annihilating that space." What Segal refers to as the "Dionysiac space at the heart of the polis" is directly related to this arbi¬ tration of chaos and cosmos that the tragic playwright is called on to ac¬ complish dramaturgically.14 And, when one considers the further rela¬ tion of Dionysus to the tragic, it becomes clear that what the playwright must fashion formalistically is a means of both dramatizing and con¬ taining the signature action of rending—in this context, the dialectic of opposing strains that will finally bring a character to the requisite con¬ dition of disunion. Here again the encompassing tragic action, even in its formal dialectic, is more closely aligned with the sparagmos of a cen¬ tral character than with the telos that will likely mark the death of that figure. There are many factors, formalistic in nature, that are pertinent to the structural arbitration between character and cosmos—and here, in a paraphrase of what Else says about Dionysus, it is noteworthy how so much of the discourse over tragic dramaturgy turns out to be "Aristotle" after all. The focus of the Poetics is, after all, fundamentally placed on at¬ tributes relating to order and entirety, qualities necessarily indicative of

14. Charles Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides' "Bacchae" (Princeton: Princeton Uni¬ versity Press, 1982), 16, 217.

46

After Dionysus

a cosmic orientation. Tragedy goes to great lengths to emphasize the fac¬ tor of disorder in its universe: gods enter into titanic struggles at the ex¬ pense of mortals, social structures are cast in disarray, madness is a re¬ current motif, and time can be thrown severely out of joint. Yet tragedy also, concurrently and deliberately, underscores and assigns credence to what is necessary to bring order, drawing on such structural components as the peripeteia and anagnorisis in order to do so. Moments of reversal and recognition are most effective, in Aristotle's view, when they occur simultaneously. When this convergence takes place, we might imagine that what is achieved is an exponentially higher mastering of the chaotic tendencies in the drama. For Aristotle, of course, it is muthos—the sequence and juxtaposition of events—that is assigned the place of foremost importance in his hierar¬ chy. Ffis claims for the primacy of plot in tragedy notwithstanding, how¬ ever, the more needful qualities—in a purely "tragic" dramaturgy—are those that pertain most strongly and immediately to character. To make such a statement is, of course, to participate in a long-standing and worthwhile debate on the relation and balance between plot and charac¬ ter in tragic drama. My bias in this context can be expressed simply: in tragic drama, the structural procedures are inevitably at the service of some larger effect and intention, and the full weight and impress of the tragic action is so designed as to bear most strenuously on the face of character. Moreover, it is the tendency for such drama to impact its focal charac¬ ters in a markedly "tragic" way, associated as they are with literal or rep¬ resentative instances of Dionysian dismemberment. Even as one may re¬ spond strongly to the manner in which the destiny of a given character is orchestrated and reached in the drama, it is finally a representation of selfhood that translates such orchestration into the purely tragic experi¬ ence. The interiorized rending of the self, as a fundamentally Dionysian operation, is the central and preeminent behavior in tragic dramaturgy. Such patterns of separation are quite evident in the dramaturgical arrangements—and we shall examine these procedures closely in later chapters—but it is the specific result of such mechanics, the event of the spiritual sparagmos, which must be understood as the foremost goal and effect in tragedy. This, in essence, is the core assertion of my larger in¬ quiry and argument. It is in exactly this respect that "the tragic," in its aesthetic manifestation, can be said to demand a representation of the self in order to become operative in the drama.

Tragedy, Tragic, Vision

47

Aristotle, of course, does not speak of the tragic, nor does he refer to any such fragmentation of character in the course of a tragedy.15 Rather, his fundamental tenet with respect to ethos pertains to those qualities that are assigned by the dramatist to an "agent": the action and the plot come first, and only after these are established can traits be assigned that will be appropriate to such a sequence and development.16 There is, however, a key element, described by Aristotle and given prominence by him, that is highly pertinent to character in its relation to both tragedy and the tragic. In part 13 of the Poetics, Aristotle argues that in order for a proper emotional effect to be evoked in the tragedy, the protagonist must be perceived as an individual who is neither purely good nor bad; instead, and because of a variable yet crucial factor, the figure is seen to exist between these extremes. Here, of course, we encounter the element of hamartia, variously ren¬ dered in English as "miscalculation," "error or frailty," or "mistake."17 Often referred to as the "flaw" in tragic character, the hamartia can be more accurately related to the stature of a depicted personality in tragedy, and also to a particular sort of "tragic" vulnerability. Not so much an imperfection of constitution or behavior, the hamartia is rather a critical component of status, identity, and destiny—or, as Northrop Frye puts it, the hamartia is not a "cause of becoming" but a "condition of being."18 Thus, even though it might be inferred that hamartia lessens the stature of character, at least to the degree that it prohibits the figure

15. See, for example, Muller, who comments on Aristotle's "rather strange neglect of the philosophical and religious implications of tragedy" and speculates that the author of the Poetics may have "had little tragic sense of life" (Spirit of Tragedy, 18). 16. Aristotelian character, as Hardison puts it, is "something added on to the agent after the plot has been worked out." Character is a "type concept," derived from an assignation of qualities that are logical and appropriate to the sort of person who is involved in a spe¬ cific sequence of actions. When a suitable and desirable relation is made to exist between such actions and "type characteristics," says Hardison, "the reader or the spectator has the illusion that the character of the protagonist is the 'cause' of his actions, as in real life" (Leon Golden, trans., and O. B. Hardison, commentary, Aristotle's Poetics: A Translation and Com¬ mentary for Students of Literature [Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1981], 131,199). 17. These translations of hamartia appear, respectively, in Golden and Hardison, Aristotle's Poetics: A Translation and Commentary, 22; S. H. Butcher, trans., Aristotle's Poetics, with an in¬ troduction by Francis Fergusson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 76; and Else, Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument, yjb. For discussions of the translation issue with respect to this term, see Golden and Hardison, 183-185; and Else, 378-386. 18. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 213.

48

After Dionysus

from being more completely "good," this factor should instead be un¬ derstood as expanding the range and complexity of such a character and, finally, of the tragedy at large. It is, in a real sense, the hamartia that lends the tragic figure a cosmic association, in that it directly aligns the hero's "miscalculation" with the entirety of the drama's progression, with its ironies, and to the inclusive movement toward peripety and recognition.19 Hamartia clarifies, and thus manages, the heretofore unseen or unac¬ knowledged—chaotic—factor that resides enigmatically in the protago¬ nist until the tragic action is instigated. The sheer magnitude of the hamartia itself, and the strength of its impression upon character, is aptly expressed by Vernant when he writes that "Hamartia means, in its proper sense, blindness. That is, something which surpasses man, which comes crashing down on him, which keeps him from seeing things as they are, so that he takes good for evil, commits a crime and is then punished by this crime. His blindness, his criminal act and the punishment are not separate realities. It is the same supernatural power—blindness, ate, madness, hubris—which takes on different aspects while remaining the

u19. F. L. Lucas, for example, proposes a "Tragedy of Error," in which the "hamartia is the Tragic Error; the peripeteia, its fateful working to a result the opposite of that intended; the anagnorisis, the recognition of the truth" (Tragedy: Serious Drama in Relation to Aristotle's Po¬ etics [New York: Macmillan, 1958], 122). Along similar lines, Else connects the hamartia with Aristotle's theory of the "complex" plot. Whereas the "mistake" or "miscalculation" has typically been construed as belonging to character—a reading with which I concur— Else argues that its proper association, along with peripety, recognition, and pathos, is with plot. His indication is that "hamartia, like its correlate anagnorisis, belongs specifically to the theory of the complex plot, not to the theory of plots in general." Else comments upon "the myopia with which the sequence of Aristotle's argument has been regarded, so that hamar¬ tia was thought of as a part of the hero's character, or at least of his personal experience, while recognition was purely a technical device, a part of plot. Our findings show that hamartia also is a part of the plot. The reason why Aristotle does not call it so, along with peripety, recognition, and pathos, is presumably that it may lie outside the action of the play proper, as in Oedipus where the mistake occurred years before" (Aristotle's Poetics: The Ar¬ gument, 384-385). Hardison straddles the fence here in a way that is provocative and, I think, highly justified—especially given the relationship of the hamartia to principles of or¬ ganization in tragedy. Although he gives credence to Else's interpretation, Hardison's idea is that while "the flaw is a character trait, it is so clearly related to plot as to be inseparable from it." Hence, Hardison concludes, "it is probably safest to assume that the notion of hamartia and the strategies related to the tragic deed are part of a kind of middle ground re¬ lated to plot and character simultaneously, even though these factors appear in the discus¬ sion of plot." The hamartia, for him, is indicative of a "causal relation" between a given character and his progression ("fall") from "happiness to misery" (Golden and Hardison, Aristotle's Poetics: A Translation and Commentary, 172,199-200).

Tragedy, Tragic, Vision

49

same."20 It is in this context, indeed, that we may locate the more specifi¬ cally "tragic" implication of this Aristotelian component, even as we de¬ part from a strict reading of Aristotle in doing so. Hamartia, as the "blindness" that marks a particular figure, may be regarded as a likely point of intrusion for the tragic rending force in its Dionysian manifesta¬ tion. It is a primary factor, in other words, that allows for a particular sort of spiritual vulnerability in a given character, and makes that character more available for interior disjuncture. In a seeming paradox, then, hamartia may increase the range and magnitude of a characterization yet at the same time prepare for that character's fragmentation. It is precisely because of an unwavering allegiance to Artemis, for example, that Hippolytus is both aggrandized in his devotion to the goddess and torn apart as a result of his extremism. Or, in another era, it is the "blindness" of Lear's adamancy that sets off a pattern of progressive divisiveness, in himself and in all that surrounds him. It is along these lines, then, that while tragedy requires the element of agent or character, the tragic demands the element of self, if only as a site for interiorized rending. Here again we encounter a complex issue of definition, one that pertains not only to issues of textual interpretation but to a key difference in ancient and modern sensibilities.21 Given the striking differences between Greek and modern ideas concerning char¬ acter, it is clearly legitimate to wonder whether or not a context can be

20. Jean-Pierre Vernant, "Greek Tragedy," 285-286. 21. Hardison and Jones, for example, have addressed this matter at length, in ways that emphasize the difference between ethos and the modern inclination toward an exploration of the self and its "inferiority." Hardison describes the Aristotelian basis of characterization as grounded in "moral pre-disposition," which may bear some relation to modern "psy¬ chology" but which is more closely related to the category of "types" as set forth in the Po¬ etics. He underscores this contrast when he insists that, "Nothing could demonstrate more obviously the difference between modern 'character' and Aristotelian ethos than the fact that ethos is so emphatically distinguished from thought." Hardison comments that "(char¬ acter) can be understood as 'moral predisposition' based on such factors as age, sex, occu¬ pation, and nationality. The term 'moral' enters the definition for the simple reason that most of what would now be called psychology was included by ancient and renaissance thinkers under the heading of 'moral philosophy'" (Golden and Hardison, Aristotle's Poet¬ ics: A Translation and Commentary, 124-125). Jones specifically differentiates Aristotle's ideas from modern notions of "personality" and "naturalistic expectation" and defends Aristotle's proposals concerning the primacy of action against the later tendency to fore¬ ground the individual—that "solitary focus of consciousness—secret, inward, interesting" (John Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy [New York: Oxford University Press, 1962], 32-33)-

50

After Dionysus

defined that can possibly allow for a "pan-tragic" inquiry into the phe¬ nomenon of characterization. For Aristotle, tragedy is "an imitation, not of men, but of action and of life," yet tragedy in its post-Attic manifesta¬ tions turned increasingly to the complex constitution of the human soul.22 Despite the sharpness of this distinction, it is clear that what tragic dra¬ mas have held in common, from the time of the Greek dramatists to the present age, is an intense preoccupation with selfhood. By advocating the use of "selfhood" as the operative term here, I do not mean that it should, of necessity, be identified with matters of "personality" or "psy¬ chology." Despite the persuasive arguments that have been made for ap¬ proaching Greek characters from a psychoanalytic standpoint, the Aris¬ totelian standard continues to intrude in the path of such procedures— and this restriction, again, has legitimacy in the strictly ancient context.23 Still, interpretations based on the Poetics alone need not impact so severely upon the potential for understanding character as a representation of the complex self, even in a Greek iteration.24 Selfhood, in its relation to tragedy, is the solitary and unique identity that is depicted through char¬ acterization. It pertains to distinct and utter individuality, and as such is not related so much to the universal or generalized "type" as to a condi¬ tion of extreme distinction, apartness, and, indeed, loneliness. Selfhood is in one sense a matter of singular identity, but it is also the energetic force, localized and manifested in characterization, which struggles in tragic drama to be inviolate, to achieve wholeness and to cohere, but which engages by necessity in a fierce dialectic with the "tragic" Dionysian counterproposal.

22. We are cautioned, for example, by Hardison, Jones, and others against investing Greek characters with "personality," with "psychology," or "consciousness" or "inward¬ ness." Jones asserts, "In dramatic and histrionic fact, Aristotle's stage-figure is the mask"; for a character in Greek tragedy, the mask is a "lucid isolation of essentials," providing for a "face of tragedy which has and needs nothing behind itself" (On Aristotle, 43,45). See also P. E. Easterling, "Character in Sophocles," in Greek Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Erich Segal (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 138-145. 23. For one recent example of a psychoanalytic approach to Greek tragic character, see the chapter "Pentheus and Hippolytus on the Couch and on the Grid: Psychoanalytic and Structuralist Readings of Greek Tragedy" in Charles Segal, Interpreting Greek Tragedy: Myth, Poetry, Text (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 268-293. 24. John Jones would undoubtedly disagree with this assertion, but I suspect that he might also equate "selfhood" with such qualities as "inwardness" or "consciousness"—as, for example, when he writes that, "Our version of selfhood is centripetal and intensely in¬ ward ..." (On Aristotle, 35).

Tragedy, Tragic, Vision

5i

Action in tragedy may assume many different patterns, its many he¬ roes will confront a broad spectrum of antagonists and fates, and the var¬ ied plots of tragic dramas will involve all manner of quests and destinies. What tragedies hold in common, however, is a transcendent inquiry into the nature and the limitations of the self. Although this "action" may bear little resemblance to Aristotle's conception of praxis, it is the one that, in effect, supersedes all others in its inclusiveness. The "essence" of tragedy, as Lukacs argues, is selfhood, the force of which "overleaps everything that is merely individual," which "elevates all things to the sta¬ tus of destiny," which ultimately brings both a supreme self-affirmation and a self-cancellation in the face of the "All" against which tragic man is "shattered."25 This, in its way, is the transcendent "end" of tragedy, a moment that may have little in common with the Aristotelian telos and which elevates tragic characterization above the varied arrangements and temporalities of plot. Such an exaltation of selfhood need not, however, be understood only in relation to what Lukacs would call the "metaphysics" of tragedy. Rather, complications of selfhood can be viewed as intrinsic to the fun¬ damentals of tragic dramaturgy. Tragedy is built upon agon, a term gen¬ erally understood as referring to a conflict or contest between characters or to a collision of ideologies. But an essential and unvarying contest in tragedy is individually contained; it is a struggle of self against self. While exterior adversity is necessary, the ultimate stakes in this battle are not simply interpersonal; they pertain also—and ultimately—to the de¬ limited territory of individual selfhood. What Aristotle calls anagnorisis is, in this important sense, self-confrontation; for tragedy, even in its di¬ alectical procedures, arranges for self-self relationships. It is here, ulti¬ mately, that we find one of the most singular hallmarks of tragedy's dra¬ maturgical behaviors. Yet it is in this circumstance, too, that a purely "tragic" effect is manifested, wherein an image of self is beset by those rending and disjunctive energies that divide it from within as well as without.

25. Georg Lukacs, Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974), 160.

3

On the Status of Vision

I HAVE noted thus far a range of specific factors that differen¬ tiate three key terms that pertain to an understanding of tragic drama. We have seen that tragic "vision" differs sharply from "tragedy" and from the nature of "the tragic" itself, and that, while closely related to thematics and to a philosophical level of inquiry, tragic vision is nonetheless a distinct phenomenon that is marked notably by its connec¬ tion with an overriding and individualized point of view. As such, it is a highly subjective and changeable factor. The tragic, by contrast, is a fun¬ damental condition of existence that, although it may be apprehended in various ways or perceived in the context of differing visions, is still rec¬ ognizable through consistent, unvarying, and indeed permanent charac¬ teristics. All of these terms continue to be used in analytic vocabulary, just as they continue to provide the occasion for a good deal of worthwhile aes¬ thetic controversy. In the case of "vision," however, the result has been a critical overuse of the term, a development that has brought about a no¬ table diminishment in the connotative power and pertinence of the con¬ cept. This particular terminology has, quite simply, been used in so many different contexts and applied to such a multitude of considera¬ tions, that whatever specificity and application it may have had once are now compromised, if not lost altogether. This situation has not, how¬ ever, dissuaded scholars from continuing to employ the term for all manner of purposes. Indeed, it goes on being the inclusive designation for spirit, philosophy, perspective, and sundry other propositions hav¬ ing to do with the particular world view of an author, play, character.

On the Status of Vision

53

society, or historical era. Not only is vision itself a highly alterable quality, but the varied usage of the term has, over time, compounded its subjectiveness. In scholarly discussion, for example, the factor of vision is frequently attributed to that figure who has traditionally been known as "tragic man." But who exactly is this? Is it the dramatist who authors a tragedy? Or is it a character in a tragedy—Hamlet, for instance—who is so fash¬ ioned as to perceive life in "tragic" terms? Is it any character whose self is rended by Dionysian energies, or can it be any individual, fictional or not, who is intensely preoccupied with matters of justice, mortality, and relations with fate, destiny, or cosmic powers? While I do not mean to suggest an either/or discussion here (indeed, all of these possibilities have legitimacy), such an illustration may serve to indicate the variabil¬ ity that is typically encountered, not only when dealing with the issue of vision per se but also when attempting to locate its source or specific ref¬ erent. Still, "vision" remains the term most commonly used to describe a view of life's conditions that emerges from tragic drama, singly or col¬ lectively. For this reason it becomes especially germane to the discussion here, in precisely the sense that "view" needs to be carefully distin¬ guished from "conditions." And, as "the tragic" is distilled further from its related terms, it becomes increasingly important to assess the current viability of vision as a diagnostic concept. As a first step in this endeavor, it will be advantageous to disentangle the element of vision from that of tragedy, especially because the argument over the linkage of these two terms is such a central one. The reiterated point of contention is simply this: can a tragic vision exist apart from tragedy? The implications of this apparently unassum¬ ing question are in fact complex and far-reaching. If vision is a quality that only emerges from tragic drama, then its purview is necessarily re¬ stricted to such interpretations that arise in stage enactment or in a body of dramatic literature. What is suggested by such a view is that the sorts of visions that may arise from other artistic or literary methods—from the novel, for example, or from purely philosophical writing—may be similar and yet are qualitatively different from the vision of tragedy it¬ self. The tragic visions that are set forth by painting, poetry, or criticism are similarly differentiated from those that are conveyed by dramatic means. But is tragic writing, as it occurs in drama, this specialized? Should the visions of Melville, Nietzsche, or the author of Job be segre¬ gated in this way from those of Shakespeare, Sophocles, or Ibsen?

54

After Dionysus

If, on the other hand, vision is regarded as separate from tragedy, then how is it manifested? Even if one allows that other means of literary or philosophical expression may convey an authentically tragic vision, the question of linkage remains pertinent. How, one might ask, can vision exist apart from a specific vehicle for its expression? Or, put differently, if the productive evidence of vision is missing, how is one to be sure that such a quality exists at all, except in the vaguest and most inchoate of ways? Compounding such questions is the issue of vision's place in the sequence of artistic or philosophical production. Is vision a quality that necessarily emerges from a work of art or literature, or does vision pre¬ cede and possibly inspire such works? And finally, if one does grant vi¬ sion an inspirational status, how can such a quality be ascertained except in the specific context of the artistic product that is rendered? To return to our first consideration, that vision is necessarily linked to tragedy, it would seem to follow (from the logic of such linkage) that something about the tragic vision is dependent upon tragedy's unique mechanisms. Along these lines, one might propose that the tragic vision is necessarily "agonistic," that it reflects an ironic and dialectical view of human interaction, that it pertains specifically to the fortunes of a hero with certain kinds of qualities, as these are realized through dramatic means. But again, one may wonder if dramatic tragedy is truly this ex¬ clusive, at least in the context of such visions as it appears to provoke. Tragic dramas are, without doubt, able to distill experience in ways that are not readily managed through other means. The manner in which tragedy masters and articulates its moments of peripety and recognition, and the way it reveals the confrontation of character with a cosmic order, cannot be duplicated. Still, one may reasonably question the relation of such attributes of tragedy to the tragic vision in particular—a quality that is subjective, amorphous, and not necessarily containable within tragedy's more rigorous and selective procedures. In the face of such ambiguities, though, there is still the persistent in¬ clination to connect vision with tragedy on exclusive terms. For example, there is Vernant's contention: "Just as there can be no musical art with¬ out music and its historical development, there is no tragic vision outside tragedy and the tradition of the literary genre that it founded." In mak¬ ing such a claim, Vernant is referring primarily to tragedy in its original Greek iteration, although he points to the form's later legacy. For him, the tragic vision is "a new way for man to understand himself and take up his position in relation to the world, the gods, other people, himself, and his own actions." If I am reading Vernant correctly, he is correlating

On the Status of Vision

55

the creation of the plays themselves and the ancestry they spawned with the beginning of what he terms a " 'subject/ a tragic consciousness, the introduction of tragic man."1 This is a legitimate stance, especially in that it links vision directly with tragedy at the latter's point of origin—that is, before such vision had the op¬ portunity to be resonant in other areas or to find expression through other means. And yet, as persuasive as such a direct correlation of tragedy and vision may seem in the original Greek setting, it is not so convincing when applied to subsequent periods. Thomas Van Laan, for instance, recently has made an assertion quite similar to Vernant's: "Tragedy, I presume, cannot exist without the tragic vision, and I also presume that the tragic vision can exist only through and because of tragedy."2 Again, the problem here is one of exclusiveness. By assigning the tragic vision to tragedy alone, the poet, novelist, painter, and philosopher are excluded from what might be con¬ strued as vision's much larger purview and range of expression. To push the implications of this a bit further, the question becomes whether vi¬ sion—or a tragic "spirit" or "sense of life"—can exist apart from artistic in¬ terpretation or, indeed, from any form of direct articulation. The stand Kenneth Burke takes on this question is that the endurance of a tragic spirit is a qualitatively different factor from the survival of tragedy. Even if one allows—following George Steiner or Joseph Wood Krutch, for instance—that man's altered relationship to an embracing metaphysical context has resulted in a decline in tragic writing over time, or grants the possible effect of scientific discoveries on such writing, it does not necessarily follow that a tragic spirit has been diminished in corresponding ways. With respect to this spirit, Burke says, "there seems to be no essential abatement at all."3 Such a fundamental separation of vision from tragedy has also been argued by Bert O. States, in a way that addresses vision's necessarily philosophical component. For him, vision

1. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 240. 2. Thomas Van Laan, "The Death of Tragedy Myth," Journal of Dramatic Theonj and Crit¬ icism 5.2 (Spring 1991): 29. 3. My general reference here is to the long-standing "death of tragedy" controversy, and specifically to George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961); and Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper (1929; Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1957), 115-143. Kenneth Burke is responding to Krutch in Counter-statement (1931; Berkeley: Uni¬ versity of California Press, 1968), 199-201. Krutch's and Burke's selections also appear in Robert W. Corrigan, ed.. Tragedy: Vision and Form (Scranton, Penn.: Chandler, 1965), 271-283, 284-285. For a recent treatment of the debate over the endurance of tragedy, see Van Laan, "Death of Tragedy Myth."

56

After Dionysus

is a "philosophical outlook," an "extreme 'view' of human experience." It is the tragic "visionary" whose perspective determines the standpoint. As States argues, regarding the separation of terms, "there are testa¬ ments of tragic vision in philosophy that barely mention tragic works, ei¬ ther as products of the vision or as a necessary source of its appearance; even if this were not the case, however, it is quite possible to develop a tragic theory of human experience without much, if any, reference to tragic literature." As he concludes, "we are inevitably forced to disen¬ gage, or at least loosen, the bond between tragedy as a genre and tragic vision as a philosophical or thematic standpoint."4 There is a sense in which this question of the distinction between vision and tragedy can be reduced to the single consideration of to whom one grants the necessary visionary status. If vision is indeed to be identified with point of view—as I believe it must be—then whose view is it that de¬ termines such a vision? If we constrain the field of consideration to tragedy alone, then the only possible visionaries are the playwright and a dramatic character, most likely the protagonist. If the field is opened up, by contrast, the visionary may also be a poet, a philosopher, an artist working in a nontheatrical medium, or "tragic man"—who may embody any of these possibilities or may simply be any person who possesses a certain sort of tragic consciousness or world view, apart from any par¬ ticular articulation of such a viewpoint. Strictly with this consideration in mind, it would appear that vision is too various and pervasive a quality to be contained by tragedy alone, in spite of the range of highly specific characteristics that tragedy's tendencies and mechanisms may impose. Apart from the criterion of point of view per se, critical and philo¬ sophical discussion of the tragic sense, spirit, or vision clearly has ranged well beyond the discourse over tragic drama alone. Such discussion may pertain to religious writings, to the novel, or to philosophical currents that arise in various cultures at different moments in history. At times the tragic vision is described as a climate of thought that for one reason or another informs the Zeitgeist of an age. In other, more specific ways, vision is assigned to a particular work of nondramatic literature, to the author of such works, or to a fictional character. Indeed, conceptions of a tragic sensibility that exists apart from high tragedy are not uncommon. Arnold's "Dover Beach" is often referred to

4. Bert O. States, "Tragedy and Tragic Vision: A Darwinian Supplement to Thomas Van Laan," Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 6 (Spring 1992): 2-8.

On the Status of Vision

57

in this context, with its evocation of the "eternal note of sadness," heard by Sophocles on the Aegean and reiterated ceaselessly in the cadence of the waves on Arnold's "distant northern sea." Maeterlinck, in his essay "The Tragical in Daily Life," argues for the existence of a tragic sense that exists quite apart from the panoramic scope of such plays as King Lear or

Macbeth.5 In such conceptions as these, one senses a tragic vision that may be tied to tragedy through specific comparisons (in these particular cases, to Sophocles and Shakespeare) but that more importantly be¬ speaks a sensibility that is transcendent of dramatic treatments. Both Arnold and Maeterlinck evoke a sense of tragic awareness that, while in¬ dividually experienced, is collective and pervasive. With such a breadth of connotation in mind, then, it appears that vision must be assigned its own status, as distinct from solely dramatic iterations. Miguel de Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in Peoples is, of course, the philosophical work most often mentioned in discussions of such a generalized tragic sensibility that may or may not be manifested in art. Unamuno succinctly expresses this sensibility as follows: There is something which, for lack of a better name, we will call the tragic sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception of life itself and the uni¬ verse, a whole philosophy more or less formulated, more or less conscious. And this sense may be possessed, and is possessed, not only by individual men but by whole peoples. And this sense does not so much flow from ideas as determine them, even though afterwards, as is manifest, these ideas react upon it and confirm it.6 This is an extraordinary passage, in that it so cogently captures both the vagueness and the import of this tragic sense. Unamuno's vision—for that is what this is—proposes a sensibility that is all-encompassing, even if only partially realized or articulated. The philosophy itself is "whole," although the awareness of it may be less so. Despite the amorphous quality of this "sense of life," its implications embrace life in its entirety.

5. Maurice Maeterlinck, "The Tragical in Daily Life," in Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski, ed. Bernard F. Dukore (Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974), 726-727. "Is it beyond the mark," he asks, "to say that the true tragic element, normal, deep-rooted, and universal, that the true tragic element of life only begins at the moment when so-called adventures, sorrows, and dangers have disappeared?" For Maeterlinck, it is the "true self that is in us" that bears a close kinship with this "true tragic element." 6. Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in Peoples, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (London: Macmillan, 1931), 17.

58

After Dionysus

And the passage may also be read in connection with the question raised earlier, of whether the tragic vision is a quality that emerges from tragic art or precedes and possibly inspires it. Yet still, and in spite of the apparently all-inclusive character of this sensibility, its expression remains rooted in perspective, even though the point of view described may be collective as well as individual. Una¬ muno's reference is not so much to the fundamental conditions of exis¬ tence as to an individual's, or a society's, responses to such conditions. The emphasis, in other words, is placed on reaction and on the feelings engendered rather than on predisposing factors. Geoffrey Brereton, in his Principles of Tragedy, offers a pertinent assessment of this "tragic sense," and certain of his points will serve to underscore the element of perspective in Unamuno's philosophy. According to Brereton, the tragic sense "may be little more than a temperamental predisposition, a propensity to regard existence and events in a certain way which never emerges in a clearly defined attitude." Referring to the "list" of writers (and also characters) that Unamuno identifies as possessing a tragic sense, Brereton comments, "it is fair to say that [his list] reveals a strong bias toward the subjective writer who is over-conscious of the distance separating his hopes from any possibility of fulfillment and who there¬ fore feels doomed to a frustration felt as 'tragic.'" When the scope of the tragic sense is extended to larger cultural frameworks, Brereton's assess¬ ment is that Unamuno's "tragic" situation "can arise in any society which has fallen from prosperity, losing not only the material reality but the psychological sense of well-being."7 The repeated emphasis here, in the societal as well as the individual and authorial contexts, is placed on man's psychological and emotional constitution, and on such percep¬ tions as are realized through individual awareness and feeling, even when such perceptions are broadly shared. Vision may be informed by a subjective "sense" of how things are in the world, as affected by emotional and psychological variables; it can also be defined by standpoint, which is an equally ambiguous and changeable consideration. Indeed, a chameleon-like quality appears to go hand in hand with the tragic vision, which lends it a potentially broad application but which at the same time limits its usefulness as a truly pre¬ cise or graspable analytic term. The range of associations that have been assigned to vision—or, more aptly, unspecifically categorized under its

7. Geoffrey Brereton, Principles of Tragedy: A Rational Examination of the Tragic Concept in Life and in Literature (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1968), 56, 60, 61.

On the Status of Vision

59

ever widening umbrella—have become so multifarious as to turn any at¬ tempt at discerning its core definition into what must inevitably become heavily qualified statements. Thus, States has it right when he concludes, "you can't tell a tragic vision by a check-list of known characteristics; we must assume, rather, that it is always adaptable to the changing human scene."8 My intention here is not to devalue categorically the concept of vision as it may be applied in specific contexts of interpretation. To be sure, what States refers to as its "Protean" attributes are what account in large part for its historical persistence. My aim here is rather to underline the utter dependence of vision upon standpoint and perspective, and to underscore the way such a dependency leads to considerable ambiguity when approached nonspecifically. While a tragic sense or awareness may, on Unamuno's terms, charac¬ terize entire cultures and permeate historical epochs, the quality of vi¬ sion itself is usually more localized. Vision must be invested in a vision¬ ary—a perceiver—whose particular standpoint provides the angle from which circumstances are viewed, and who necessarily provides a highly individualized filter through which conditions are interpreted. Even though such a visionary may assume many guises, including that of the generic "tragic man," vision is invested most often in one of that figure's primary subspecies: author and character. In each case, predictably, a sizable quotient of individual perspective is implied. The tragic vision may find its expression in a single play or work of lit¬ erature, or it may be extrapolated collectively from several such works. One might conclude, for instance, that a play such as Hippolytus contains a tragic vision of individual identity in the context of a god-ordered cos¬ mos, yet one can justifiably point to the Greek tragic canon as continually representative of such a vision. A proposal concerning vision might, in other words, be in this case applied to Euripides alone or to Euripides along with several other Greek dramatists. Taking this a step further, one could reasonably assume that relationships exist among authorvisionaries that are transhistorical, and which bond Sophocles, for exam¬ ple, with Shakespeare and even Ibsen or Strindberg. The evidence of such authorial vision, of course, resides in the plays themselves—or in those novels, poems, and other works of literature that may arguably be included. And it is certainly the case that the vision of a particular work may be markedly different from that of another work by the same author. While Eugene O'Neill is often described in 8. States, "Tragedy and Tragic Vision," 13.

6o

After Dionysus

terms of his tragic view of life, one is likely to characterize him in this way primarily because of Long Day's Journey into Night or Mourning Be¬

comes Electra, rather than the considerable number of his plays that bear little or no relation to such an outlook. Vision, in other words, may have a high degree of variance, even when considered in the context of one writer's body of work. Still, the location of vision within the perceptive and expressive incli¬ nations of an author is highly pertinent to an understanding of stand¬ point and perspective in this discussion. Sam Smiley writes, "Vision con¬ sists of a complex of emotional and intellectual conditions within a writer"—yet we might readily extend such a terse definition to a number of other considerations, including the personal history and experience of an author, his or her particular biases, and the limited parameters of in¬ dividual perception generally.4 The autobiographical contingency might be seen as particularly germane, for example, when assessing the tragic vision of Ibsen or O'Neill. Experience itself, and the subjective transla¬ tion of personal history into art, puts a highly individualized, not to say idiosyncratic, stamp on the vision of a writer and subjects any consider¬ ation of such vision to innumerable variables. "In general," remarks Richard Sewall, "the tragic vision is not a systematic view of life. It ad¬ mits wide variation and degree. It is a sum of insights, intuitions, feelings to which the words 'vision' or 'view' or 'sense of life,' however inade¬ quate, are most readily applicable."9 10 Drawing a distinction between author and character as tragic vision¬ ary is a touchy business. Can the particular vision of a dramatic charac¬ ter ever be conceived as autonomous, or must it always be connected, however subjectively, to the dramatist who has fashioned such a charac¬ ter's thoughts, statements, and behavior? Conversely, one might wonder how a playwright's vision can exist apart from the character who em¬ bodies and articulates it. In this context, there is a sense in which vision— as individual rather than collective expression—belongs only to charac¬ ter, with the dramatist serving merely as conduit. It is the character, inevitably, who endures the tragic experience as it is represented in dra¬ matic art; it is he or she who inhabits the particular tragic world of clari¬ fied incident and destiny—not the dramatist.

9. Sam Smiley, Playwriting: The Structure of Action (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 4. 10. Richard B. Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy, 3d ed. (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 4.

On the Status of Vision

61

Perhaps there is no fully satisfying way of disentangling this connec¬ tion between author and character. Oedipus is led to a horrifying per¬ ception of his tragic relation to ordained events and is thereby brought to a level of unimaginable suffering, and yet his creator is said to have been a serene and happy man. On the other hand there are characters such as Edmund Tyrone or Master Solness who are clearly, in their respective plays and visions, standing as surrogates for the life and experience and consequent attitudes of O'Neill and Ibsen. How can one separate Ed¬ mund's vision of a life that is formed—and indeed destined—in the nexus of relationships in the Tyrone household from the circumstances of O'Neill's own life? Can the psychological imperatives that impel Sol¬ ness to his church tower be disengaged from Ibsen's own relationships and drives? It is enough to say, surely, that tragic vision may reside in character as well as dramatist, and that in both cases it is an individual sensibility or world view that is productive of such vision. What markedly differenti¬ ates the vision of a character from that of a creator, however, is not sim¬ ply the difference between the writer and his or her fictional creation, but rather the particular concentration and individuation of the expression. While the vision of an author may well pervade an entire work, or accrue collectively from several works, that of a character is succinctly defined and grounded in a particular and confined range of events and circum¬ stances, and in such traits as he or she has been granted. Vision, in this in¬ stance at least, becomes inseparable from dramaturgy. The locus of vision's clarified and reduced articulation is typically in the anagnorisis, although as we have seen the dramaturgical compo¬ nents of peripeteia and hamartia are by necessity involved here as well. The protagonist's "blindness" (in Vernant's usage) is brought around, via abrupt changes in circumstance, to a moment of vision—literally, sight— in which there is a recognition of the full impact of tragic knowledge. Vi¬ sion, when understood along these lines, is a quality that arises from within the dramatic mechanism; it comes from the discoveries reached by a character as the result of a dramatic process and is thus intrinsic to the workings of the play itself. Again, it is this emphasis on the concentrated, singular quality of a tragic vision, as revealed primarily through the dramaturgical process it¬ self, that serves to differentiate the ways such vision may be said to re¬ side in author or character. The tragic vision of an author may be mani¬ fested collectively in several works, it may contain a wide and subjective range of attitudes and perceptions, and it may bespeak a world view that

62

After Dionysus

is held prior to—or apart from—the play's composition. The vision of character, by contrast, is localized and clarified; it belongs to the me¬ chanics of one work only, and is discovered as a result of these very mechanisms. Significantly, the tragic vision of character is a matter of de¬ liberately wrought point of view, arising from the reduced and orches¬ trated circumstances in a given drama, from the experience of these cir¬ cumstances, and from an articulated standpoint on such conditions. Whether or not the same point of view belongs to both writer and char¬ acter is consequently less important in this consideration than the fact that the character's expression and realization of vision is qualitatively— and often radically—different from a writer's, even as that character is that writer's creation. By focusing so strenuously on the singular dramatist or character as a subspecies of a generic tragic personage, I do not mean to beg the ques¬ tion of a more collective or pervasive tragic vision. Clearly, an inclusive, total vision can accrue from the like standpoints of several authors or characters. Indeed, I suspect that such collectivity is what is implied, or taken for granted, in many cases in which "tragic vision" is referred to in common parlance. It remains the case, however, that vision is inextrica¬ bly wedded to perspective, and to the experience and perception of the "seeing" visionary. Such vision is inevitably based in the human emo¬ tional and psychological constitution, in a person's reactive and percep¬ tive mechanisms and capabilities. It is important, consequently, that the "character" of this tragic personage—as playwright, dramatic character, artist, or philosopher—be assessed so as to more clearly determine the qualities that inform this point of view. What, then, are some of the pri¬ mary traits that may be assigned to the tragic persona, and how may these be seen as contributing to the necessarily filtered and conditioned viewpoint that comes to be understood as "vision"? Perhaps the most necessary trait that can be assigned to this composite figure is an inclination to apprehend existence in its cosmic proportion. His or her "character" is linked to "cosmos" in precisely the sense that both experience and perceptions often extend to the broader spheres of understanding. Even the characteristically intense preoccupation with selfhood is in this context transcendent of individuality per se; it is the imperative to make sense of a concept of self in its universal setting that drives this individual's dissatisfied quests. Moreover, the tragic person¬ age is implicated: he or she not only participates in actions that may or may not arise from one's own instigation, but this participation brings with it a necessary guilt. Such guilt, however, goes hand in hand with a con-

On the Status of Vision

63

current innocence. This is what Schelling is referring to in his proposition of the "guiltless guilty person," and what Max Scheler means when he writes of an "unguilty guilt" and concludes that for the tragic hero, "the 'guilt' comes to him and not he to the guilt."11 For the tragic individual, such guilt—this "implicated" status—invariably raises the issue of per¬ sonal responsibility, which in turn implies a concern with the possibility of freedom. In this context, it is a component of the tragic figure's char¬ acter to rigorously test the limits of both responsibility and freedom— that is, the spheres of personal implication in cosmic processes. Yet there is a further range of traits, apart from this cosmic orientation, that can be associated with the tragic persona. Sewall, in The Vision of

Tragedy, pays attention to such attributes as a questioning tendency, an activist inclination, and a tolerance for profound ambiguity. Vision, on terms such as these, can be correlated not only with aspects of mood or psychological cast but with specific traits of personality. In this regard, Sewall refers to the visionary's "bent of mind" and to qualities of charac¬ ter that allow for a coexistence with "unsolved questions" and "unre¬ solved doubts."12 Elsewhere, in his essay on "The Tragic Form," Sewall stresses tragic man's connection to a mysterious and paradoxical cos¬ mos. Yet after calling attention to a variety of factors pertinent to this re¬ lation (guilt, pride, fate and freedom, ambiguity), Sewall places much of his emphasis on the quality of this figure's suffering: "it is in the peculiar

11. F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 251-255; Max Scheler, "On the Tragic," trans. Bernard Stambler, Cross Currents 4 (1954): 190. 12. Sewall, Vision of Tragedy, 4-5. His study, it should be noted, examines a broad range of works, from the Book of Job to Death of a Salesman, with several novels included along with plays. For Sewall, the "first phase" of the tragic vision is "primal" in the sense of call¬ ing forth "out of the depths" the fundamental questions of being: it "recalls the original un¬ reason, the terror of the irrational. It sees man as questioner, naked, unaccommodated, alone, facing the irreducible facts of suffering and death. This is not for those who cannot live with unsolved questions or unresolved doubts, whose bent of mind would reduce the fact of evil into something else or resolve it into some larger whole. Though no one is ex¬ empt from moments of tragic doubt or insight, the vision of life peculiar to the mystic, the pious, the propagandist, the confirmed optimist or pessimist—or the confirmed anything— is not tragic." Describing the activist tendency that he identifies, Sewall writes that, "Mere sensitivity is not enough. The tragic vision impels the man of action to fight against his des¬ tiny, kick against the pricks, and state his case before God or his fellows." In Sewall's per¬ spective, the tragic dramatist is possessed of a higher level of engagement than writers in other forms; writing tragedy is "the artist's way of taking action, of defying destiny, and this is why in the great tragedies there is a sense of the artist's own involvement."

64

After Dionysus

nature of his suffering, and in his capacity for suffering and appropriat¬ ing his suffering, that his distinguishing quality lies." Tragic man's suffering, for Sewall, is unique in that it rises from an un¬ usual sensitivity and level of awareness, is connected to a consequent knowledge or wisdom, and is the subject of this person's "intense preoc¬ cupation." Here again the element of innocent guilt is introduced: "But above all, the source of tragic suffering is the sense, in the consciousness of tragic man, of simultaneous guilt and guiltlessness." Yet Sewall's ob¬ servation is that tragic man "never glories in his suffering" but that "his characteristic mood is resentment and dogged endurance."13 There is a strong sense here, clearly, of a direct correlation between the experience and perceptions of the tragic individual and specific aspects of personal¬ ity—which in turn, I would argue, must be seen as informing the world vision that emerges. Vision, then, arises not only from the conditions or events of tragedy but from the particular manner in which these are per¬ ceived, or "suffered," by the visionary. Perception is necessarily affected by traits of personality, and it is in this way that vision and character be¬ come nearly inseparable. Whereas Sewall's tendency is to emphasize the situation of the artist/visionary, Murray Krieger's discussion of the tragic vision is ori¬ ented primarily toward character—although he also attends to the per¬ spective of the author and philosopher, most notably Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Nietzsche. The essential proposition Krieger sets forth is an arresting one, indeed. Simply put, what he suggests is a modern tragic vision that includes the Dionysian but not the Apollonian, a chaos with¬ out a counterbalance in cosmic or aesthetic order, a "tragic vision wan¬ dering free of its capacious home in tragedy." When the ordering proce¬ dures of classical tragedy are lacking, Krieger asks, what can result from the "fearsome chaotic necessities of the tragic vision?" What Krieger em¬ phasizes is not the "suffering" of the modern visionary but rather the "shock" at the discovery of such unrelieved perceptions. Bereft of com¬ forting societal or metaphysical structures, the tragic visionary confronts nothingness and possibly despair—the "sickness unto death." Here again, though, the character traits of the visionary become a predominent factor in the articulation—that is, the human embodiment—of the vision. The visionary is rebellious; he is "God's angry man;" his post¬ shock status is marked by defiance. Once more, then, there is the sense of

13. Richard B. Sewall, "The Tragic Form," in Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Lau¬ rence Michel and Richard B. Sewall (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 123-126.

On the Status of Vision

65

a vision that, even as it may represent a pervasive ontological condition, nonetheless retains its roots in individual experience and perception. For Krieger, the tragic vision (as opposed to tragedy, the "literary form") refers to "a subject's psychology, his view and version of reality."14 As one pursues a composite, if hypothetical, "personality" for the tragic individual, it is Lucien Goldmann's understanding of this figure's attributes that comes closest to an incorporation of "the tragic" as a di¬ viding, or fragmenting, condition. Whereas Sewall and Krieger empha¬ size the respective components of suffering and shock, Goldmann stresses a profound awareness of separation. It is by now a truism that the tragic sense can be seen as rooted in certain fundamental quandaries of existence, most notably in the oppositions of an infinite with finite being, or of corporeal and spiritual identities. Goldmann, however, takes primary bifurcations such as these to an extreme point of tension, and then locates this tension in the traits, perceptions, and experience of tragic man. Goldmann's theory is intricate, and the qualities he assigns to this fig¬ ure are various, but a fundamental assumption underlies his thought: the paradoxical concept of the "hidden God." While God may not com¬ municate in any direct way with tragic man, the godly presence is nonetheless intuited and affirmed: "That God should always be absent and always present is the real centre of the tragic vision." It is indeed necessary, in the context of a tragic vision, for this condition of perceived absence to persist, and the God must retain his hidden status, because "at the very moment that God appears to man, then man ceases to be tragic."15 For Goldmann, then, one might say that the tragic vision is based on the "sight" of the unseen. Goldmann's philosophy is built on a triad of terms—God, World, and Man—which are at once dependent upon, and yet exclusive of, one an¬ other. What is Man's status to be in a World in which God is felt but not seen or heard? What must become of tragic man's insistence upon "real" or "authentic" values in a world that is necessarily ambiguous and para¬ doxical, especially with respect to God's concurrent absence and pres¬ ence? Significantly, Goldmann focuses a good deal of attention not only on the situation of tragic man in such a world, but on the response of the

14. Murray Krieger, The Tragic Vision: Variations on a Theme in Literary Interpretation (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, i960), 10, 4,14-17, 2-3. 15. Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the "Pensees" of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. Philip Thody (New York: Humanities Press, 1964), 37.

66

After Dionysus

tragic mind to these sorts of circumstances. This is key, in that emphasis is placed not only on a set of existential conditions but on the actual ca¬ pacities and tendencies of a certain bent of human intellect in confronta¬ tion with the extreme paradox of inextricably related and yet mutually exclusive ideas. Implicit in Goldmann's description is a dynamic process—a drama— in which the tragic mind (which he compares with "dialectical thought") struggles for the equation that will admit the necessary but contradictory terms. Goldmann's tragic man must exist in the world and yet at the same time refuse it—"because of its inadequate and fragmentary na¬ ture"—and his insistence on "totality" must always turn into a "demand for the reconciliation of opposites." While Goldmann is in one important sense describing a condition, a situation in which tragic man exists (one in which this individual, like his God, is ultimately both absent and pres¬ ent in the world), he is also describing a dynamic interaction between human intellect and a tragic state composed of built-in rifts and contra¬ dictions.16 Goldmann's "drama," if you will, here becomes a struggle be¬ tween a "mind" that "sees" and a world that would deny that mind its desired congruence and totality. This struggle, I would argue, is always inherent in the "tragic" drama: it is the battle that is fought for a whole¬ ness of personality, conducted in this arena of bifurcated conditions and fragmenting forces. In the case of Goldmann, as in those of Sewall and Krieger, we see that in the course of the description of a tragic "vision," a "tragic man" emerges, complete with traits of perception and personality. A set of human responses is proposed, whether those responses be aligned with suffering, shock, or separation—in addition to other qualities. One could, no doubt, assemble from such traits a generic model of the tragic personage, including in the mix a number of the key characteristics that have been mentioned—guilt, implication, a cosmic sense, and so forth.17 The real issue at hand, though, is not simply a characterization of this tragic figure but rather the insistence that the tragic vision is invariably a factor of personality. Moreover, it is a phenomenon that results from a highly particularized vantage point, and that is apprehended through a very selective range of filters. Hence, the point of view that must always be understood as wedded to vision is narrowed and specified, in consid-

16. Ibid., 55, 57, 6o. 17. For comparison, see Goldmann's own enumeration of the "fundamental characteris¬ tics of tragic man" (ibid., 69).

On the Status of Vision

67

eration of those attributes that inevitably pertain to the tragic indi¬ vidual's psychological, emotional, and experiential constitution.18 In spite of the extremist viewpoint that tragic art frequently articulates (as, for Sewall, its pressing of "the 'boundary situation' for its total yield")19 such a vision does not, of necessity, suggest a cosmic or univer¬ salized status. The tragic vision simply does not exist in such total or in¬ clusive terms; rather, it is a philosophical viewpoint that, in spite of its possible breadth of implication, is not only communicated through spe¬ cific filters but at the same time is defined by these filters. To put this somewhat differently, one might say that even in those cases where vi¬ sion may be collective and broadly shared, it still retains its status as per¬ ception. As such, it cannot be understood as universalized, at large, or separate from the perceiving mechanism—namely, from what is com¬ posed of the selective character traits of the tragic personage. And yet there is, in this very context, an aspect of vision that may re¬ tain a certain pertinence, and I refer here to both the capabilities and the limitations of tragic insight as located in a visionary figure. One might say, in this case, that it is quite specifically "tragic" that vision is by ne¬ cessity so incomplete or compromised, if only by virtue of the imperfect sensory mechanisms that humankind is born with. What I have called the filters of the tragic vision—those conduits of perception that both convey and define such vision—are in this scenario inadequate by ne¬ cessity. Yet this need not be considered in simply negative ways. When humanity's "tragic" status is understood in Dionysian terms—as a con¬ dition marked most notably by sparagmos, the rending and fragmenta¬ tion of being and selfhood—then vision's enforced limitations can be seen as appropriate and even analogous to humankind's condition of separation.

18. To insist upon the connection of vision and the personality of the visionary is not to ignore the fact that vision is often conceived in highly generalized terms or that it is some¬ times described in ways that may not be directly attributable to a single—or a composite— tragic figure. Goldmann himself would say that an individual statement of "world vision" is often the localized expression of a collective awareness, or "group consciousness," that finds a voice in the artist. As Goldmann writes, "any great literary or artistic work is the ex¬ pression of a world vision. This vision is the product of a collective group consciousness which reaches its highest expression in the mind of a poet or a thinker" (Hidden God, 19). 19. Sewall, Vision of Tragedy, 7. See also Krieger, who concludes that the tragic vision, as "a product of crisis and shock, is an expression of man only in extreme situations, never in a normal or routine one" (20). States defines tragic extremity along similar lines, as "having no further extensibility—if you will, an end-of-the-road conception" (5-6).

68

After Dionysus

Even as the tragic individual may be severed from God, from es¬ teemed values, from transcendence, and from selfhood, he or she is also cut off from a complete or total vision of these circumstances. In this sense at least, 'Vision" and "the tragic" might be understood as comple¬ mentary terms. Such vision might even be appreciated, in this context, as a particular sort of endowment. Here I refer to what is perhaps its most fundamental, though neglected, characteristic—quite simply, the sight of the tragic. In this instance, the tragic individual is one who is vested with the purely "tragic" perspective, with the ability to apprehend the world in its Dionysian context and to perceive in his or her experience the rend¬ ing process that invariably attends the mortal passage through time. This interpretation may have a particularly strong resonance in the contem¬ porary setting. For the tragic personage in the modern world, after all, character is not so much a factor of grandiose stature, guilt, obsessive de¬ termination, or even a cosmic sensibility. Yet such a person is indelibly marked by a range of inevitable schisms—as sharply drawn in our world as in the past, and perhaps more violently so—that tragic experience en¬ forces on the lives and personalities of men and women. In spite of vi¬ sion's built-in limitations, then, the essential tragic process—the incessant action of disjunctive forces upon selfhood—would be comprehended as well as embodied by this figure. Even in this context, however, there is a final handicap of vision, and one that must be considered in specific relation to the Dionysian tragic process. I am alluding here to the term's inadequacy when it comes to considerations of dramaturgy per se. It is, after all, one sort of project to evaluate vision in the abstract, as a pervasive spirit, sense, or philosoph¬ ical tone that may characterize drama. It is quite another matter to at¬ tempt to employ such a term in structural or strategic analysis. While vi¬ sion may be somewhat useful, however subjectively, when investigating character, theme, or authorial intent, it loses its applicability in dra¬ maturgical assessments that emphasize the structural elements in tragic drama. Put simply, vision favors "tragic man" over tragic method. As a result, when dramatic structure is the subject of inquiry, theorists tend to turn from "vision" to "tragedy"—in other words, they turn Aristotelian. This is not, however, a satisfactory situation. Just as Aristotle notori¬ ously neglects the more philosophical overtones of tragedy, he omits a consideration of the tragic as both a condition and a dramaturgical prin¬ ciple. As noted, there is no Dionysus in Aristotle, except for the passing reference in the Poetics to tragedy's origin in the dithyramb. What is called for now, I suggest, is a reincorporation of the essential "tragic" in

On the Status of Vision

69

dramaturgical, as well as philosophical, analysis. It is, I believe, a thor¬ ough comprehension of "the tragic" itself, with its roots in the very be¬ ginnings of dramatic enactment, that can produce a different but highly viable and productive understanding of the ways in which tragic dramas are fashioned and perceived.

The Situation of the Tragic

"S U F F E R ME not to be separated" is the supplicatory intona¬ tion near the close of Eliot's "Ash Wednesday." In tragic drama, such a line might well stand as any protagonist's inevitable prayer. For it is con¬ tinually the case that what is dramatized centrally in tragedy is not death—though many may die in the course of a drama—but rather dis¬ memberment. It is in precisely this sense that tragedy is more concerned with the processes that act on character than the results that, at the play's end, bring final closure. "I will not be mad" is Lear's outcry, his resis¬ tance providing but one instance of this confrontation between the tragic process and a self that is desperate not to be divided from within. It is essential that an understanding of "the tragic" proceed from its status as both a life condition and an artistic process, as a phenomenon that asks to be considered in ontological as well as aesthetic or dra¬ maturgical terms. To illustrate this distinction simply, it is only because a character such as Lear is reflective of a constant in human nature—an innate vulnerability to fragmentation and separation—that an artful process can so thoroughly represent the mechanics of such a spiritual dismemberment. The tragic, as dramatically wrought, is always pre¬ ceded by the tragic as existential law. While the concern of this chapter is with a detailed detailed examina¬ tion of the tragic as both a condition and a process, it will be advanta¬ geous at the outset to briefly recapitulate certain key points that have been made thus far. Two primary ideas have provided the foundation for my discussion up to this point: first, "the tragic" is neither "tragedy" nor "vision," but rather has a separate and unique identity; and second.

The Situation of the Tragic

71

the tragic has an ancestry that extends to the beginnings of dramatic en¬ actment, in the sense that its fundamental nature is Dionysian. Dionysus, as the "render of men," becomes the representation of a sparagmos that may have a spiritual or psychological manifestation as well as a corpo¬ real one, and it is this rending that has always been central to the experi¬ ence of selfhood in tragic drama. Whereas the protagonist is typically in¬ volved in a struggle toward cohesive selfhood, the Dionysian, or "tragic" antagonism stands forever in the way of such a realization. A tragic par¬ adigm may in this sense be formulated as an Oedipus-Dionysus dialec¬ tic: the will toward cohesive identity ("I will know who I am") antago¬ nized by the inescapable sentence to sparagmos. There is no possibility for reassimilation, in the Nietzschean pattern, because the cycle from in¬ dividuation to the All is certain to be broken, in the tragic dramas them¬ selves, at the event of dismemberment. The tragic, as I have proposed, may be understood as the passive form of the Dionysian. It is the existential condition to which art—in this case, tragedy—responds. And yet, it need not find any sort of aesthetic ex¬ pression in order for its nature to be identified. When the Dionysian strain is introduced into a drama, the tragic becomes aesthetic—just as it becomes "process" dramaturgically—but its status as "condition" is nonetheless independent of artistic interpretation. Even as the tragic can be seen as having an aesthetic history as long as the drama's, it is also a preexisting order and its stipulations have been constant ever since hu¬ manity's first intimations of the enforced separations between selfhood and environment, or between character and cosmos. What the tragic bears witness to is not simply the mortality of humankind but the full spectrum of losses and disjunctures to which mortal existence is suscep¬ tible and must inevitably confront. The tragic is an absolute: unlike vi¬ sion, it stands utterly apart from subjective standpoint and perspective. Even though its characteristics may be interpreted from varying points of view and according to different sensibilities, its fundamental status— as a condition—is unwavering and as constant as a law of nature. It is well known that, in their consideration of tragic drama, certain Ro¬ mantics assigned primacy to the position of character over plot. The ex¬ ternal sphere of action was superseded by an inward stage of conflict where the emotional and psychological stresses of character were given prominence. The ethical standpoint of dramatic character was empha¬ sized by Hegel, and the criticism of Hazlitt and Coleridge placed charac¬ ter in the foreground of analysis. Attention shifted from the outward

7^

After Dionysus

event to the interior and organic promptings of those individuals en¬ gaged in dramatic interaction. What is less commonly acknowledged is an implicit recognition, in ev¬ idence during this period, of what I would call the Dionysian strain in the transaction between character and world. It is often the case that the Romantic posture is construed in overly empathetic or sentimentalized ways, so that even so stern a dialectic as that between finite and infinite terms becomes a hopeless longing for the unattainable. In truth, certain Romantic conceptions of the position of selfhood in the world could be stringent, even in the context of an occasionally florid means of expres¬ sion. When A. W. Schlegel writes of the "tragic tone of mind," for exam¬ ple, he is alluding to an utterly natural, if melancholy, response to a se¬ ries of rifts and losses that are intrinsic and unpreventable in experience. "There is no bond of love without a separation," says Schlegel, "no en¬ joyment without the grief of losing it." And he continues: . . . when we consider how weak and helpless, and doomed to struggle against the enormous powers of nature, and conflicting appetites, we are cast on the shores of an unknown world, as it were, shipwrecked at our very birth; how we are subject to all kinds of errors and deceptions, any one of which may be our ruin; that in our passions we cherish an enemy in our bosoms; how every moment demands from us, in the name of our most sacred duties, the sacrifice of our dearest inclinations, and how at one blow we may be robbed of all that we have acquired with much toil and difficulty; that with every accession to our stores, the risk of loss is proportionately increased, and we are only the more exposed to the malice of hostile fortune: when we think upon all this, every heart which is not dead to feeling must be overpowered by an inexpressible melancholy, for which there is no other counterpoise than the consciousness of a vocation transcending the limits of this earthly life. Such a passage can, no doubt, be read as an expression of tragic vision. That is, the writing evokes a particular sort of standpoint on existence, the voice of the visionary is lent its own character, and the mood is overtly emotional in quality. One might say, certainly, that a singular point of view is expressed, and an unusually sensitive one at that. It is psychological; for Schlegel, it is the "tragic tone of mind." And yet, what transcends "vision" and turns the passage into a state¬ ment that reflects "the tragic" is its universality. The writer's use of the "we" construct draws all of humanity into a shared plight. More impor¬ tant, the writing is descriptive of a condition that is unchanging, one fi¬ nally not open to qualitative variation, if only because no one is exempt

The Situation of the Tragic

73

from its terms. The condition that is described is one in which loss and separation are fundamental and constant factors of existence; they ulti¬ mately attend every endeavor, every aspiration, every relationship. In one sense, then, Schlegel is articulating a mode of awareness, a way of perceiving the world, but he is also delineating the ground rules that, however extreme, we are made to live by. What is evoked in such a passage is what we might call a "Dionysian latency," a condition of life characterized by the ever present risk of sep¬ aration, and one that awaits artistic process. When dramatized, such mortal perils as Schlegel describes take on their truly Dionysian charac¬ ter, and the latent possibility for rending becomes immediate stage ac¬ tion and reality. In Schlegel's own words, "when the thought of the pos¬ sible issues out of the mind as a living reality, when this [tragic] tone pervades and animates a visible representation of the most striking in¬ stances of violent revolutions in a man's fortunes . .. then the result is Tragic Poetry."1 In twentieth-century thought, the idea that the tragic may be consid¬ ered apart from tragedy has been given new credibility, but at the same time this concept has been aggressively contested. Here we find our¬ selves in familiar territory, once more confronting the question raised with respect to tragedy and vision—namely, can either term exist with¬ out the other? Moreover, the nexus of tragedy and the tragic brings us back to the issue of theatrical origins discussed earlier. I have, so far, ex¬ plored the pervasiveness of the Dionysian spirit in the instigation of tragic drama, and I have aligned that spirit with the tragic itself, as its on¬ going aesthetic voice and manifestation. Is it legitimate to conclude, then, that the tragic precedes tragedy, as a continual and omnipresent ground against which drama has arisen time and again? I believe this to be the case. But the concept of the tragic as an a priori—or, put simply, of its chicken-and-egg relation to tragedy—is an intricate problem that calls for a thoroughgoing analysis. Max Scheler's influential essay on the "phenomenon" of the tragic— which has been anthologized several times and has generated a good deal of controversy and philosophic argument—speaks directly to this problem. Indeed, I suspect that the notoriety of Scheler's claims derives primarily from his point of view on this issue of a tragic a priori. While

i. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, "Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature," in Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski, ed. Bernard F. Dukore (Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), 500.

74

After Dionysus

much of his essay is devoted to an argument that is in fact a rather famil¬ iar one, based as it is on an essentially Hegelian dialectical framework, the context that he establishes for his discussion is radical in its departure from pre-Modern thinking.2 Scheler was Husserl's student and follower, and his procedural method is phenomenological. The originality of his analysis is based, consequently, on lending the tragic its own phenome¬ nal character and status, apart from potentially attendant and defining contexts or predictable associations. This unconditional status is suc¬ cinctly expressed in Scheler's comments that "it is impossible to arrive at the phenomenon of the tragic through the art product alone" and that "the tragic is rather an essential element of the universe itself." Arguing against a consideration of the tragic on purely aesthetic grounds, Scheler instead underscores its intrinsic nature, its innate position in worldly events and interactions. The tragic, for Scheler, is "a specific feature of the world's make-up."3 The dialectic that Scheler proposes (and here we see the close resem¬ blance to Hegelian ideas) is between specific values that not only contain a necessary contradiction or conflict but also coexist in one event or one person. "To belong to the category of the tragic," he says, "some value must be destroyed. With regard to man it does not have to be his exis¬ tence or his life. But at least something of his must be destroyed—a plan, a desire, a power, a possession, a faith."4 Here again we notice that it is not only death that determines the nature of tragic existence but rather a hierarchy of intrinsic separations, in this case of a person from those val¬ ues that are most highly prized. The suggestion here is not, in fact, so dif¬ ferent from Schlegel's, in that once more it is an individual's "dearest in¬ clinations" that become most susceptible to destruction and loss. What Scheler calls the "tragic knot" involves a particular sort of value collision. The nexus of such conflict is not always situated within an in¬ dividual or character but can occur in the context of a tragic event or ac¬ tion, wherever the "inner entanglement" of value creation and destruc¬ tion takes place. It is best, however, when such a collision is centered within one person or event rather than in many. Here, it would seem, one can sense an identification of particular sites where the process of

2. See, for example, Walter Kaufmann's characterization of Scheler's "immense, but un¬ acknowledged, debt to Hegel," in his Tragedy and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton Univer¬ sity Press, 1968), 304. 3. Max Scheler, "On the Tragic," trans. Bernard Stambler, Cross Currents 4 (1934): 178. 4. Ibid., 180.

The Situation of the Tragic

75

tragic rending may occur. I would suggest, in fact, that when a value col¬ lision such as Scheler describes does become internalized in character— that is, when it is given a specifically human setting—then the potential immediately exists for the sorts of interior separations that are the mark of the purely "tragic" effect. We might extend this proposition a bit further with yet another consid¬ eration of Scheler's "tragic knot" and, indeed, of its intricacy. It is not simply a conflict of values that makes for Scheler's "entanglement"; it is also a particular relation of values and causality, a relation that is inherently dispassionate. In the world of the tragic, the causal sequence that marks an action or event is utterly independent of the values that may coincidentally attend such a circumstance. As Scheler puts this, "It is an essential charac¬ teristic of our world—and thus of every world—that the course of the causal events disregards completely the value of things." Here, then, is an¬ other nexus that provides for a site of tragic rending. Not only can the inte¬ rior clash of values produce such an effect, but so can a conflict between what is held as valuable and the exterior context of events that bears no re¬ lation or connection to what is valued. Tragedy is possible, says Scheler, be¬ cause "the sun shines on the good and the bad alike," and it is only "acci¬ dental" when the causal sequence and a securing of values coincide.5 Of particular interest here is what might be extrapolated from Scheler's propositions and applied to the situation of dramatic character. Scheler does not specifically isolate the individual's experience of such value conflicts or value/causality collisions as he describes, and these di¬ alectics can be manifest in action and event as well as within a person. But it is not at all difficult or unreasonable to personalize his conception with respect to character. Values, after all, are held by men and women, and it is human consciousness that perceives the dissonance between such values and external circumstances. What is manifested here, I be¬ lieve, is a conflict that is based not only upon value and causality but also on the dialectic of interior and exterior conditions that are innately irrec¬ oncilable. The rending process that attends a tragic character arises not merely from internal clashes of held values but from an essential separa¬ tion of the mind that holds such values from the outward conditions that deny them—a tearing of character apart from world. It is noteworthy, too, that Scheler's conception of the tragic is reflective, in its own way, of both a condition and a process. His "tragic" is a given, a part of the world's makeup, and yet for his discussion of it he adopts the active 5. Ibid., 184.

76

After Dionysus

voice. That is, it is through event and specific action (and in art) as well as in human perception, that the conflict of value and causality becomes manifest or, on our terms, becomes "process." Again, however, what most distinguishes Scheler's theory is its pro¬ posal of the tragic as an a priori, and as a quality that may be assessed within a phenomenal context. This is where the controversy truly lies, an argument that arises either from an unwillingness to accept the tragic as a phenomenal component of nature or—and perhaps also—from a ques¬ tioning of how one arrives at a concept of the tragic in the first place. The latter point is, of course, both central and disputatious in any discussion of an a priori quality or condition, particularly one attended by defini¬ tions that can be perceived as vague or various. Scheler himself opens the door to argument when, early in his essay, he raises the question of pro¬ cedure—an issue that contains its own chicken-and-egg conundrum. The question can be summarized as follows: In order to characterize the tragic, can one proceed inductively, identifying examples and then de¬ termining their commonality, when there is no prior agreement on what "tragic" signifies? Or can one legitimately begin with a generalized sense of what the tragic is—that which first provides the criteria for determin¬ ing examples—by way of approaching an "essence" of the phenomenon? In Mikel Dufrenne's reading of Scheler, this latter possibility is given credence, especially so in that it validates the "prereflective and yet cer¬ tain consciousness" that precedes analytic choice: It is such certitude that is, in our opinion, the sign of the a priori. If we were to follow Scheler's example and try to define the essence of the tragic, we would have difficulty in enunciating that essence clearly. We would hesitate, fumble, return to the empirical, and invoke singular works each of which ex¬ presses a certain aspect of the tragic. We would thus give the impression of arriving at our definition by means of induction and generalization. Yet our very choice of examples and the definitions we propose are inspired and guided by a preliminary knowledge. We would not even be able to attempt such a definition unless we have already found and were in possession of the very essence which we are incapable of formulating.6 A proposition such as this one can be regarded, no doubt, as a variety of special pleading, a rather elaborate begging of the question, or simply as one phenomenologist sympathizing with another. And such a procedure 6. Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 489-490.

The Situation of the Tragic

77

can be stringently questioned, as Walter Benjamin does when he writes of "the inadequacies of inductive reasoning in artistic theory," calling particular attention to the problem of terminology, and using Scheler as an example: "The attempt to define ideas inductively—according to their range—on the basis of popular linguistic usage, in order then to proceed to the investigation of the essence of what has been defined, can lead nowhere."7 Still, it is important to get Scheler's approach right—even allowing for its possibly intuitive element—especially when it comes to this articula¬ tion of "essence." Scheler actually rejects the inductive method of pro¬ ceeding by example, acknowledging as he does so the problem of agree¬ ment over definitions of the tragic: "The few examples and statements of others that may be given are not to serve as the basis for abstracting by induction a concept of the tragic." In truth, Scheler provides very little in terms of example, certainly not with reference to artistic works. He is pri¬ marily concerned with communicating the essential terms of his own tragic construct, having to do with value and causality, the "tragic knot," and so forth. And it must be emphasized that Scheler does not pursue a definition so much as an indication, one which is grounded in a proposi¬ tion fundamentally experiential in nature. His specified concern is with "the basis for seeing in what experience this phenomenon comes to its given state."8 Seen in this light, I find Scheler's approach much less vulnerable to cri¬ tique—even on methodological grounds—than the empiricist would in¬ sist. Instead of being inductive by example, or imposing a random defi¬ nition upon an abstract, Scheler's intention is rather to extrapolate an essential quality that attends quite specifically to an exclusivity of value and causation and to particular types of guilt and grief, a quality that is not as deliberately definitive as it is strongly indicative of where this "fixed and powerful impression" appears to lie. Its "essence" is not to be found in art alone, but in the ontological conditions that prefigure artis¬ tic rendering. This, indeed, is the primary criterion for the a priori status of the tragic. It bears noting here that Hans-Georg Gadamer also calls the tragic a "fundamental phenomenon" and a "structure of meaning" that exists apart from artistry and is "also found in life." In reference to Scheler, Gadamer mentions those modern thinkers who view the tragic

7. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), 38-39. 8. Scheler, "On the Tragic," 179.

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"as something extra-aesthetic, an ethical and metaphysical phenomenon that enters into the sphere of aesthetic problems only from the outside."9 There is another critical aspect of the controversy surrounding Scheler and the question of the a priori, and this pertains to the use of the tragic as terminology. In his Tragedy and Phdosophy, Walter Kaufmann centers much of his argument with Scheler around the types of questions I have touched on—questions that pertain mostly to methodology and the philosophical concept of a "tragic"—but he extends his disagreement to the use of the term itself. He has enormous difficulty with Scheler's fun¬ damental theory, which Kaufmann characterizes as postulating that "the tragic is, so to speak, out there, prior to and regardless of our experience and emotions." Kaufmann, whom I suspect would have equally scant sympathy with Dufrenne's "preliminary knowledge," is provoked by what he perceives as Scheler's lack of concern with proofs of his "dog¬ matic" propositions.10 Such rebuttals are by now familiar. What demands our further atten¬ tion is the important question of how "the tragic" is to be understood— and employed—simply as a term. I have discussed the nature of this con¬ cept at some length now, and there is more to be said on the subject, but the issue of terminology itself must be addressed before we specify fur¬ ther what the tragic is and what it may connote. Thus far, I have attended to a precise differentiation of primary terms, insisting that such particu¬ larization is necessary to an understanding, not only of dramaturgy and philosophical outlook but of the conditions that may prefigure—and even inspire—such factors. Does "the tragic," then, truly have viability as a term that can be used alongside "tragedy" and "vision"? And if so, how then can it be used with specificity? We have seen what Scheler understands the tragic to be, and where he finds it manifested. Although I have no argument with his concept of the tragic as an a priori, I have proposed here that its pre-existent quality comes not from its designation as a "phenomenon" but rather from its status as a condition mankind must inevitably live with, a "condition" that becomes "process" when responded to and reflected in artistic treat¬ ments. Kaufmann's dispute with Scheler arises, in this context of termi¬ nology, from the latter's perceived use of an ordinary word in specifi¬ cally technical and philosophical ways. Kaufmann's insistence that "there

9. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d ed., translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1993), 129. 10. Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy, 302-303.

The Situation of the Tragic

79

is no essence of the tragic or the philosophical" is elaborated by his ar¬ gument against usage of the term itself to denote such an essence— against "using a common word as a technical term." Kaufmann ex¬ presses the basis for his disagreement over nomenclature as follows: There is no word for [the tragic! in any language, except insofar as the Greek word, coined toward the end of the sixth century in Athens, has been taken over and adapted. The concept is based not on a common human experience but on a form of literature that was created in Athens by Aeschylus and his im¬ mediate predecessors. The plays in question were not called tragedies because they were so tragic—they merely had some connection with goats, and the Greek word for goat is tragos—but the word tragic was derived from tragedy.11 I would argue strenuously that the tragic is in fact very firmly based "on a common human experience." Moreover, I would suggest that a fundamental understanding of what the tragic is may be seen as arising from the very conditions that Kaufmann describes here, but in a markedly different way. What Kaufmann neglects in his reference to goats is the innate and perpetual presence of Dionysus in both the cere¬ mony and the presentation of tragedies. Neglected too is the intimate connection of the god to the tragos, between Dionysus and the "goatmen" who danced and sang his odes. The significant point here is that tragedy, even in its earliest manifestation, had relatively little to do with goats but a great deal to do with Dionysus. What, then, is to be gained from associating "the tragic"—as a term—with the Dionysian? Simply this: that when the term is aligned not only with the tragos but with the inherent implications and associations of the goat ceremony, then the identity of Dionysus as both the god of character and the "render of men" becomes central to, and inseparable from, its meaning. Dionysus appears, after all, in many depictions with the torn halves of a goat (or other animal) in hand, evidence of his continual identification with the dismembering ritual of sparagmos.12 Given the association of the deity with such a definition, it is ironic that the potential effect of this usage is actually to de-mystify, and indeed

11. Ibid., 307, 310. 12. See, for example, Thomas H. Carpenter, "On the Beardless Dionysus," in Masks of Dionysus, ed. Carpenter and Christopher A. Faraone (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 185-206. Depictions of the god with the severed parts of animals in hand appear, for example, on a red-figure stamnos and krater and a white-ground vase; see illustrations on 191,194, and 195.

8o

After Dionysus

to de-theologize, one's understanding of the tragic. It is possible that lan¬ guage such as Scheler occasionally employs, as when he refers to the "dark strain" of the tragic or speaks of the "heavy breath" that it emits, has contributed to the mystic and recondite associations that allusions to the tragic sometimes engender. When understood in the context I am proposing, however, there is little of the mystical—I do not say meta¬ physical—about this terminology. When securely grounded in its Dionysian framework, the term acquires an empirical meaning that "vi¬ sion" and even "tragedy" do not share, a meaning that pertains directly to acts of separation and rending and to the exertions of the god-force on character and selfhood. The tragic provides the underlying, or latent, basis for the Dionysian action. The fact that mortal existence contains not just the possibility but the certainty of sundering and division ensures the efficacy and truth of the Dionysian in tragic drama. The tragic is both condition and artistic process, but in each instance its essential meaning—as usable terminol¬ ogy—is the same. The term denotes the inevitability of separation and the irreconcilability of opposing polarities, which produce a correspond¬ ing pattern of rifting in depictions of selfhood and action. The term re¬ flects the Dionysian cycle that cannot be completed, that is broken before the event of unification, leaving only the fracture. The tragic, in short, is not simply that which is mournful, lamentable, or even catastrophic; it is that which is unmendable. As such, its core meaning is not grievous but rather divisive. In Scheler's terms, the tragic is what severs value from causation. It is also that which provides the basis for Romantic conceptions of di¬ chotomy, as between the finite and the infinite, the reach and the grasp, love and loss. Yet there is nothing remotely vague or sentimental about the tragic state, and in fact the opposite is true. The tragic, as condition or as realized process, is dispassionate and unremitting; its separations bring absolute disjuncture. It is in this vein that one may go so far as to lend the tragic its "technical" status, granting it usage as a diagnostic term that can be employed alongside, or in place of, tragedy and vision. The tragic, like its patron god, is exacting, thorough, and timeless. Its identity transcends the designation of "phenomenon"—which carries with it certain spatial and temporal associations—and asks for a more in¬ clusive status. Given the pervasiveness of the Dionysian strain in tragic drama, there is quite simply the need for a "technical term" that can be applied to how the tragic actually is reflected in dramatic construction and characterization. As I argue in the chapters that follow, a basic un-

The Situation of the Tragic

81

derstanding of the tragic can provide not only a philosophical frame¬ work but a diagnostic methodology for approaching the tectonics of tragic drama. Assigning 'The tragic" its status as a viable term, and proposing a def¬ inition that is appropriate to its historical roots, is also pertinent to the issue that I have emphasized thus far, namely the question of the a priori and the relation of the tragic to tragedy. A significant part of the diffi¬ culty that is encountered here pertains to the vagueness that has all too often characterized descriptions of the tragic in twentieth-century thought, especially when such descriptions are unnecessarily abstract or removed from immediate circumstance. Larry Bouchard is speaking to this concern when he enumerates several of the difficulties encountered in contemporary discussions of tragedy and points to a general suspicion of "metaphysical categories." For Bouchard, the problem of the meta¬ physical is tied to that of definition: "is there any experience," he asks, "that can meaningfully be called 'tragic'? Some, like Max Scheler or Mikel Dufrenne, would locate phenomenologically a tragic essence or a priori; others suggest as much when they seek to distill a tragic essence or vision. The more broadly it is defined, the less it illuminates literature; the more narrowly, the less it relates to life."13 By aligning the tragic directly with the Dionysian, I believe, one can approach problems such as these more concretely, with respect to both "life" and "literature." The tragic, as a Dionysian latency or passive con¬ dition, is indicative of an identifiable range of situations where division and separation are inevitable in existence. The Dionysian, as an artistic exertion or process, allows for an exacting analysis of how the "render of men" acts on dramatic character. But the Dionysian alignment also al¬ lows for a more tangible grasping of what I have called the chicken-andegg relation of the tragic to tragedy. In its passive state, the tragic is nei¬ ther interpretive like vision nor is it literary, historical, or philosophical in the manner of tragedy. Whereas vision and tragedy are man-made, the tragic is not; it is, rather, a law of nature, a specific relation of being and cosmos. It is here, in fact, that we can identify what is perhaps the most critical factor in our consideration of the tragic as an a priori: the tragic as the eternal source of tragic drama, not only at the site of its Greek origins but continually.

13. Larry D. Bouchard, Tragic Method and Tragic Theology: Evil in Contemporary Drama and Religious Thought (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1989), 12.

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As noted, the relation of the tragic to tragedy bears a certain resem¬ blance to the relation of tragedy and vision—and raises similar ques¬ tions. Once more, the issue is one of independence: Can the one exist without the other? Is it necessary to have tragedy in order to locate evi¬

dence of the tragic? Or, if not, can the tragic be said to precede tragedy? This latter stipulation is, of course, a crucial derivation of the concept of a tragic a priori, in that the tragic is placed, as Scheler might say, apart from the "art product." Tragedy may always contain the tragic and pro¬ vide its tangible evidence, but the tragic itself is an independent and pre¬ existing order. This consideration becomes more intricate when the im¬ plication is entertained that the art is responding directly to the underlying order or condition, and that the tragic has in this sense a gen¬ erative property. And this implication seems unavoidable. That is, as soon as one grants the tragic an a priori status, and acknowledges at the same time its direct relation to the tragedies that reveal its stipulations, it becomes difficult not to conclude that the artwork is in fact responding to the tragic in its passive state. Thus, the two terms I have discussed—con¬

dition and process—must be seen in this context as having a generative re¬ lationship: the one may be said to inspire the other insofar as "the tragic" as a Dionysian latency gives rise in "tragedy" to a Dionysian action. Clearly, it is the notion of an a priori tragic that allows for any consid¬ eration of this circumstance apart from written tragedy. Yet even among those who may allow the tragic an independent status, the question of how it is manifested remains. Bouchard gives a good deal of attention to this issue, and as ready as he may be to accept an independent tragic, he still insists on its relation to artistic interpretation. For him, "tragic art. Tragedy/ is what effectively informs us of the Tragic' in the first place. Until the advent of tragedy in art, the tragic in life remains a vague, felt but unarticulated boundary region of experience." And here again we see the importance of exactitude when it comes to a definition of the tragic as manifest either in art or in life. Without such precise definition, it is no doubt the case that the tragic in its specific connotations can re¬ main "unarticulated," even given such evidence as the tragedies pro¬ vide. "Whatever the tragic is," says Bouchard, "—an aesthetic vision, a mode of awareness, a dimension of reality—it is disclosed in and through interpretation."14 Indeed, the tragic may well be all three of these, but Bouchard's con¬ tention, as I understand it, is that these factors must, in effect, coexist. 14. Ibid., 3, 218.

The Situation of the Tragic

83

That is, the tragic may well be a "dimension of reality," but an aesthetic interpretation of it must prefigure any cogent awareness of its proper¬ ties. "To say that the tragic is inseparable from tragedy," Bouchard con¬ cludes, "is not necessarily to say it is epiphenomenal. The tragic is not necessarily without its own ontological status. But it is to say that the dis¬ tinctive disclosure of the tragic requires forms of expression that are es¬ sentially heuristic, that probe the plausibilities, limits, and resistances en¬ tailed in their matters of concern, and that thereby give us reasons in experience for talking about the tragic at all."15 Again, at issue here is the means through which the tragic becomes manifest, a problem that bears directly on our chicken-and-egg conun¬ drum. The crux of the difficulty arises when, along the lines Bouchard ar¬ gues, the tragic in life and in art are fused and made inextricable: inter¬ pretation becomes a prerequisite for manifestation. My own position is quite different from this. In a manner that, ironically, seems utterly ap¬ propriate to the divisive nature of the tragic, I have bifurcated its defini¬ tion so that two terms become necessary for its understanding. This, in my view, is what finally solves the chicken-and-egg problem: it is always the condition of the tragic that precedes its process in art. The condition of the tragic exists in life and apart from tragedy; the process of the tragic exists in the "art product" itself. The tragic condition, as a Dionysian la¬ tency, is fully apprehendable apart from tragedy; in fact, the revelation of tragedy is not strictly to interpret the tragic or to make it manifest, but rather to reveal its mechanics and its divisive action on character. The tragic in life exists continually at the interface of mutually exclu¬ sive dualities: interior and exterior, past and future, finite and infinite, life and death. It is precisely in this context of such enforced divisions that exactitude is possible in our definition of the tragic. The tragic abides in the interstices, along the fault lines that provide the ever pres¬ ent potential for Dionysian rending. When art responds to this process theatrically is when Dionysus takes the stage, and the ground of self¬ hood becomes the site where tragic dualities are torn—often violently— asunder. Again, the dialectic of the tragic is absolutely different from that of tragedy; it is neither Hegelian nor Nietzschean, in that no synthe¬ sis or transcendence is proffered; it is rather an agon between irreconcil¬ able terms. What is implicit in these proposals is not only a workable definition of the tragic but also a suggestion of tragedy's origins, in philosophical if 15. Ibid., 243.

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not strictly historical terms. I have explored at some length the diversity of scholarly opinions concerning the relationship between the cult and ceremony of Dionysus and the beginnings of tragedy. I have also paid at¬ tention to the characterization of Dionysus as a force of nature who, as the "render of men/' is directly related to those natural conditions that make interior divisions possible and also unavoidable. When Dionysus is understood in this way, the occasions for tragedy's birth can be per¬ ceived not just in a specifically Greek context but transhistorically. It is not, in other words, simply the Dionysian ceremony or performance of the dithyrambs that can be tied directly to the origins of tragedy; in more embracing terms it is the "tragic" Dionysian condition that is always there, that preceded tragedy in its Greek setting and has continued, throughout history and in other situations where tragedy has arisen, to do so. The condition of the tragic, in other words, is the ongoing site of tragedy's origin. Clearly, a theory such as this has implications for the dramatist. I have argued that, primarily because of the a priori status of the tragic and its direct correspondence to a process in art, the tragic condition has a gen¬ erative aspect: the tragic inspires tragedy. Even so, and even as one may appreciate the range of congruencies between the tragic condition and its artistic process, the conduit between these terms has to be the play¬ wright. The dramatist is, along these lines, the mediator between the tragic and tragedy, transforming the one into the other in the act of crea¬ tion. It must be the writer who, perceptive of the Dionysian latencies, translates these into the experience of character. There is, clearly, an ap¬ parent paradox in this: the tragic, which is an exertion of dismantling forces on selfhood and character, is at the same time a generative source for the dramatist. Yet perhaps this relation is not so paradoxical after all. Tragedy may, as Bouchard would claim, function heuristically with respect to the tragic, but it is in the specific realm of character where the suffering of the tragic takes place. The dramatist thus requires a character such as Solness, Faustus, or Lear who can, in effect, call down the tragic and suffer it in his or her stead. Tragedy is notably an ordering procedure, an argu¬ ment against the random, an effort toward cosmos over chaos. It is here, I believe, that we may discover the reason for this generative aspect of the tragic as it pertains to the playwright. The tragic, as a condition, is chaotic; its potentials as a rending agent are unpredictable, and yet they exist omnipresently. As a process, however, the tragic may be ordered;

The Situation of the Tragic

85

its occasion and sequence are artistically ordained, even if never com¬ pletely tamed. It is finally the act of placing character under the condi¬ tions of the Dionysian latency, of putting the face of human experience on the tragic, that makes this feat possible. The tragic, as I have empha¬ sized, is not man-made; character is what is required to make the tragic human and—in however terrifying a way—manageable. The tragic, as a condition, signifies a relation between selfhood and world; as an artistic process, it denotes a relation of character and the¬ atrical cosmos. The dramatist may, to be sure, act as the mediator be¬ tween a tragic condition and tragedy, but he or she can only accomplish such mediation through a representation of the surrogate self as a dra¬ matic, and divided, character. And this necessity, finally, is what ac¬ counts for the primacy of character in tragic dramaturgy. Over and be¬ yond such ethical and moral considerations as have been applied to character since the Romantic period, and more so even than the behav¬ ioral and psychological complexities that have been assigned and given priority more recently, it is this stipulation of the represented self as the locus of a core transition, from ontological condition to artistic process, that is the signature mark of tragic writing. What is called for here, con¬ sequently, is an even more comprehensive look at just how vulnerable this character/self is—psychologically and metaphysically—in the face of tragic rending. The essential dynamic process of the tragic is scission, the result of which signifies a particular disjuncture between character and cosmos. Yet in terms of the rended self that is always the tragic subject, we might refine this opposition by calling it a separation of represented conscious¬

ness and cosmos. The site of tragic division, the tear line that ensures the Dionysian condition, is in this case located at the intersection of the per¬ ceiving mind and all that is exterior to it. In a way that is similar to the Romantic opposition of spirit and body, the demarcation here is between interiority—the mind and the awareness of being—and the surrounding world that includes, yet is always beyond, the margin of selfhood. When such demarcation turns to complete disjuncture, when the perceptive mind and the encompassing world become completely incongruent, the result is madness. Yet even without such utter sundering, being carries with it the continual possibility of severance from that world—which is simply to say that the fault line is always there. This, I take it, is close to what Gaston Bachelard is talking about when he proposes "the being of man considered as the being of a surface, of the

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After Dionysus

surface that separates the region of the same from the region of the other."16 When applied to what is an essential condition of being, the re¬ sult is what Bachelard has famously called a "dialectic of inside and out¬ side." In the tragic dialectic of the self, the one term cannot be the other, and the dualities, as is always the case with a Dionysian latency, are mu¬ tually exclusive. In this context we can appreciate that certain of the disjunctures to which tragic characters are most susceptible are brought about not solely by interior conflict but also by rifts that intrude between interior perception and exterior circumstance. And again, the schism that separates these conditions becomes, in classical terms, the likely site of intrusion for both hamartia and hubris—the sorts of "blindness," that is, that result primarily from a dissonance between what is perceived from within and what lies beyond the boundaries of the self. Far from affording the "metaphysical solace" that Nietzsche promises as a salutary effect of tragedy, what the tragic itself brings—and I am speaking of its unmediated, a priori condition—is metaphysical terror. The extent to which the tragic forbids such ideals as union, wholeness, or "Oneness," plus the range of rifts and bifurcations that ensure the divi¬ sions within being and between being and world, and the utter solitude that invariably results, must finally be productive of a profound separa¬ tion trauma in the beholder of such extremities. The tragic, in its pure and unrelieved state, implies a level of being that is so broken as to be untenable, and indeed unlivable. Among the most severe stipulations of the tragic condition is that which positions being within a temporal sequence. The tragic is timerelated; it is a condition of being in the present and the unclaimable non¬ present at the same instant; it is the impossibility of cohesiveness over the whole of one's existence. In my discussion of tragedy in its historical context, I noted that such drama can be understood as antihistorical to the degree that what is sought is that timeless moment that exists apart from quotidian chronology. We must assert that it is the tragic condition itself that is productive of such atemporality. With respect to the experi¬ ence of the perceiving self, the tragic is felt as the division that exists be¬ tween the irreconcilable terms of past and future, with perceptive being placed at that point of collision where the one cancels out the other.

16. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (1964; Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 222. See, in particular, Bachelard's chapter on "The Dialectics of Inside and Outside," 211-231.

The Situation of the Tragic

87

In his discussion of temporality in tragedy, J. T. Fraser cites the 'Tragic contraction" (as proposed by Ricardo Quinones), a contraction that com¬ presses the time between birth and death until "the final and the first hour become one." It is the resulting "tragic present" that, within the drama, contains a concentration of conflicting temporalities.17 As some have pointed out, this concentration finds its reflection, classically, in the focusing of a tragedy's action into the unity of a single day's passage. The reason for this compression, as Lukacs so succinctly describes it, is "metaphysical," precisely so because the timeless "moment" of tragedy is what calls for approximation: "Tragic drama has to express the be¬ coming timeless of time."18 Such commentary as this is effective in corre¬ lating the mechanics—and the metaphysics—of tragedy with the tempo¬ ralities that isolate a clarified "moment" of action and experience, and at the same time ensure the fundamentally antihistoric disposition of tragic writing. And yet, what truly underlies tragedy's reflection of temporal¬ ity is the condition of the tragic itself, the basic disjuncture of past and fu¬ ture within which being—that is to say, the tragic self—is made to exist. When Northrop Frye identifies the fundamental quality of tragic vi¬ sion as "being in time," he comes very close to capturing the essence of this concept, especially in his evocation of how present action can be at once crucial and evanescent. What Frye describes is "the sense of the one-directional quality of life, where everything happens once and for all, where every act brings unavoidable and fateful consequences, and where all experience vanishes, not simply into the past, but into noth¬ ingness, annihilation."19 But Frye's emphasis is on the termination of this one-directional trajectory, on death as the definitive event that gives life its contour. As I have reiterated, the essentially tragic operation pertains not as strongly to death—the final severing event that in fact cancels the tragic and makes it moot—as it does to the processes of scission and dis¬ memberment, the working out of the fundamental tragic dialectic as the exertion of strenuously opposed dualities on selfhood. "Being in time" is

17. J. T. Fraser, Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge: Reflections on the Strategy of Existence (New York: Braziller, 1975), 413, 414. The “tragic contraction" is described by Ricardo J. Quinones in The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 362. 18. Georg Lukacs, Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974), 158. For another, comparable view of this phenomenon, see Jacqueline de Romilly's discus¬ sion of tragedy's "broken chronos" in Time and Greek Tragedy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 141. 19. Northrop Frye, Fools of Time (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), 3.

88

After Dionysus

a supremely apt encapsulation of this relation, but in my view the mor¬ tality implicit in the phrase is less significant, insofar as the immediate impress and experience of the tragic is concerned, than what is also im¬ plicit as a dialectic of past and future in which the self is forced to act as both mediator and collision point. The tragic is not a force, per se, yet its qualities as a condition of existence are intrinsically anti-selfhood. In terms of a tragic dialectic of temporality, then, what the self confronts is an ongoing disjuncture in time, a continual disappearance of the now. Still, and as many have emphasized, a mark of tragic character is the single-mindedness with which identity is pursued, even in the face of such an array of antagonistic circumstances. The central agon in tragedy is that which places a determined quest for selfhood in conflict with the tragic, and all of tragedy is, in this sense, concerned with the impossible project of the self. Indeed, it is the elevated degree at which this impossi¬ bility is confronted that contributes to the magnitude of tragic drama. And yet, the impossibility exists. The dramatist may respond to the tragic as a call to art, and may succeed in identifying and even ordering those rifts and disjunctures that mark the tragic condition. He or she may also be successful in putting a human face, through characterization, on this condition. But the character who bears that tragic face and struggles toward a cohesiveness of selfhood must finally do so in vain. It has been suggested that if immortality were possible there could be no tragedy. Yet a more immediate, or realistic, stipulation is that if there were an attainable wholeness there could be no tragedy, or at least no au¬ thentically tragic character. Here one is reminded of Goldmann's con¬ ception of a tragic man who must "refuse the world while remaining within it." For Goldmann, this paradoxical situation means "setting up against a world composed of fragmentary and mutually exclusive ele¬ ments a demand for totality that inevitably becomes a demand for the reconciliation of opposites. For the tragic mind, authentic values are syn¬ onymous with totality, and any attempt at compromise is synonymous with the complete fall from grace and honesty."20 Or, as Brereton de¬ scribes this situation (in his discussion of Goldmann): "The 'tragic man' seeks completeness. He must have the World and God, the body and the soul, in order to satisfy his craving for unity."21

20. Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the "Pensees" of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. Philip Thody (New York: The Humanities Press, 1964), 57. 21. Geoffrey Brereton, Principles of Tragedy: A Rational Examination of the Tragic Concept in Life and in Literature (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1968), 70-71.

The Situation of the Tragic

89

'Tragic man" may desire and pursue such a condition of wholeness, and he may intuit its possibility, but he can never realize it, precisely because the conditions under which he exists are themselves "tragic"— inherently fragmented and sundered. Even though Karl Jaspers rejects the generic proposition, "Being has a crack running through it," his grounding of the tragic in the inevitability of "universal shipwreck" in immediate human existence seems to belie this rejection. Such "ship¬ wreck" pertains, in Jaspers's view, not only to inevitable death and suf¬ fering but to "the multiplicity of elements that mutually exclude and combat one another." Here again is an evocation of what I have called the Dionysian latency, the fundamentally disjoined and contradictory nature of being that makes, in Jaspers's words, for a situation in which "reality is divided against itself" and where "tragedy is real because ir¬ reconcilable opposition is real."22 With respect to the immediate experience of selfhood in the face of such opposition, Stefan Morawski's essay "On the Tragic" contains a useful structure for identifying certain of the primary rifts that intrude between interior self and what stands apart from it—what Morawski calls the "irrevocable relations we experience vis-a-vis the world." Be¬ ginning with a point of view that echoes Scheler's ("Tragedy taken as a literary genre does not itself reveal what is tragic. On the contrary, it is the tragic itself that provides material for the tragedies"), Morawski goes on to suggest four fundamental relations between self and world: I-Thou, I-Society, I-Nature, and I-Transcendence. One individual must always exist distinctly apart from another, and indeed one has to "de¬ fend and continually reconstruct our separateness." In place of what may be envisioned as a harmonious social construct, or an atmosphere of ideal community, what in fact occurs is a "clash between the values that are supposed to transform the idealized society into a fully humanistic whole but instead exclude or destroy one another." The cultural context exists in opposition to one's solitary attempt to discover an "inner na¬ ture," or an individual "authenticity" apart from social structures: "The tragic nexus embraces nature and culture in myself, rent internally." Fi¬ nally, there is the opposition of what the individual can perceive in im¬ mediate and sensate experience and the concurrent demand for the tran¬ scendent, the identification of "another dimension without which the

22. Karl Jaspers, Tragedy Is Not Enough, trans. Harold A. T. Reiche (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), 94-95.

90

After Dionysus

mystery of existence seems negligible/' an opposition that leads to a con¬ dition of living in "two antithetical dimensions." What Morawski con¬ cludes from his four-part structure is that "the tragic derives from a coin-

cidentia oppositorium: the human existence torn by antinomic values."23 In consideration of what has been characterized in this chapter as the vulnerability of the self in the face of tragic circumstance, it might be ap¬ propriate that an I-I opposition, or exclusion, be added to Morawski's four terms. Again, it is not only that selfhood, experienced as an inferior¬ ity, exists apart from that which surrounds it, but that the interior itself is so available to division. The tragic is innately dissociative, and the realm of its disjunctive power extends to the inner conflict of values and beliefs, to the vagaries of memory, to the incongruencies of "being in time," and to the impossibility of wholeness or unity. All these factors, I believe, may provide a closer approximation of the identity of a reconceived "tragic man," who can now, in the context of the tragic itself, be primarily understood as a divided, or riven, person¬ age. Not only is this individual vested with a certain type of "vision"— the ability to perceive the Dionysian condition and its process—but his or her character is defined by the range of potential divisions that such a condition invariably implies. In the scenario I am proposing, specific traits of personality (the subjective filters of vision) are de-emphasized in favor of the more concrete, and universalized, structure of separations that intrude within the riven individual and between such a figure and the universe. The tragic, particularly in its impact on selfhood, can be un¬ derstood in terms that are objective and stable, whereas vision cannot be, and its usefulness and application can be more concretely grounded. It is one thing to suggest, as Burke does, that a "tragic spirit" abides even as the occasions of tragedy may become fewer; it is quite another matter to objectively characterize the persistent and unvarying conditions that at¬ tend the tragic, both as a state of being and as an aesthetic process. Tragedy may appear and disappear, and vision will go through its range of subjective permutations, but the tragic itself is the eternal companion of mortally separated being. With respect to the dramatist, the tragic may be understood, finally, as a "situation," and one that is both stringent and provocative: a set of en¬ forced conditions that, because of their nature and impact, suggest both

23. Stefan Morawski, "On the Tragic: A Confession and Beyond," in Essays on Aesthetics: Perspectives on the Work of Monroe C. Beardsley, ed. John Fisher (Philadelphia: Temple Uni¬ versity Press, 1983), 279, 283-288.

The Situation of the Tragic

91

a participation and a response. It is by examining this response, by look¬ ing at how a tragic condition is translated into dramaturgical process, that we may find another diagnostic means for approaching tragic dra¬ mas. There is, to be sure, a "tragic" dramaturgy that applies not only to tragedy but to a broader range of plays that, in their workings, depend upon the effect of rending conditions. Such a dramaturgy is not charac¬ terized primarily by Aristotelian emphases, but is based on such com¬ plex tectonics, related mostly to patterns of characterization, as are needed to fully manifest the Dionysian exertion upon selfhood and cir¬ cumstance. While vision has very limited usefulness when it comes to structural or strategic analysis, the tragic itself has considerable pertinence in this context. The tragic is, in and of itself, agonistic, and its perpetually con¬ trary stresses are necessary components in the fashioning of tragic drama. It is one matter, however, to propose that a reflection of the Dionysian sparagmos is the signature mark of tragedy. It is another proj¬ ect altogether to describe the intricate means by which such a dismem¬ berment of character is wrought, and to indicate how, within the bound¬ aries of a "tragic contraction," a field of divisive energies is concentrated and intensified.

The Tragic Field

THE

CONDITION

of the tragic is the eternal ground

against which the process of tragic art is enacted. As I have indicated, this reciprocity is best illustrated by identifying the congruencies that exist between the sites of potential or actual rending that attend mortal existence and the corresponding ways in which a dismembering process is carried forth dramaturgically. As the mediator in this correspondence, the dramatist responds to the conditional tragic ground by proposing another, reciprocal ground of dramatic character and action, one in which a model of surrogate selfhood is made to suffer the Dionysian sparagmos. It is in this mimesis—that is, on this occasion of tragedy being an imitation of the tragic—that an otherwise chaotic field may be ordered. As I have argued, the central feat in this managing activity is an application of the human face of character to the tragic effect. With this act of correspondence in mind, we are prepared to move from a consideration of the tragic in phenomenal terms to an assessment of how its varied exertions are contained and enacted in the drama, pri¬ marily through complex characterization patterns. We are prepared, in other words, to consider the ways a tragic condition is reflected through dramatic process—and to proceed, as Burke might say, from ontological questions to methodological ones.1 If it is the case, as Philippe LacoueLabarthe suggests in his own consideration of tragic writing, that "all one can do with death is to theatricalize it," one might then propose a re-

i. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3d ed. (1941; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 68.

The Tragic Field

93

lated correspondence—that all the dramatist can do with the tragic con¬ dition is to, not only dramatize it, but personalize it through the creation of character.2 Critical analysis of dramatic character has become so problematic that, either through benign neglect or the foregrounding of other concerns, this category of investigation has, in theoretical terms at least, been de¬ nied its place at center stage.3 Difficulties arise, notably, when critical emphasis is placed entirely on the exclusive operations of "text/7 a pro¬ cedure that tends to diminish the implicit qualities of enactment and stage representation. Still, dramatic character continues to resist being a purely literary creation, and it is in this situation that a conundrum is presented to the theorist who attends to theatrical writing and presenta¬ tion. On the one hand are the various critical orientations toward the ref¬ erential world of text; on the other is what has come to be called "performativity"—which, even as it tends to foreground the body of the performer, nonetheless de-emphasizes such mimetic embodiments in their relation to fictional characterizations.4 * * To put this problem in more workmanlike terms, and in the context of the theatrical arena itself, it is increasingly the case that while the actor and director may go right on about their necessary business of decipher¬ ing matters of motive and relationship, the dramatic theorist is posi¬ tioned uneasily between the constraints of literary methodologies and a performance-oriented criticism that is more concerned with event and representation than with the intricacies of invented character. Even in those cases where a critical method, such as semiotic or phenomenologi¬ cal analysis, is focused upon the act of theater itself, on those aspects of 2. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "Theatricum Analyticum," Glyph 2 (1977): 136. The pas¬ sage I refer to reads as follows: "But death is precisely what cannot be internalized and it is this, perhaps, that constitutes the Tragic (including what Bataille called dramatization): the 'consciousness' or rather—which is the same—the avowal that all one can do with death is to theatricalize it." 3. Bert O. States has referred on a number of occasions to this "neglect." As he has re¬ marked, "Very little in the study of drama is as neglected as the phenomenon of character" ("The Anatomy of Dramatic Character," Theatre Journal 37.1 [March 1985]: 87); and, "The current neglect of fictional character as a subject of study probably originates in our having a surfeit of it in the era of psychological criticism" ("The Mirror and the Labyrinth: The Fur¬ ther Ordeals of Character and Mimesis," Style 27.3 [Fall 1993]: 452). 4. The term "performativity" is also used, of course, in relation to performance that is not specifically theatrical in nature but rather is more closely aligned with matters of gen¬ der, ethnicity, and, in one example, what Jill Dolan has referred to as "non-essentialized constructions of marginalized identities" ("Geographies of Learning: Theatre Studies, Per¬ formance, and the 'Performative,'" Theatre Journal 45.4 [December 1993]: 419)-

94

After Dionysus

presence and sign-system that underlie and enable theatrical communi¬ cation, the area of character per se is still one that with few exceptions goes begging, at least by comparison with the perceptual elements upon which such methods tend to focus.5 My concern, here, consequently, is with finding a means of articulat¬ ing an intricate pattern of characterization in tragic drama, an approach that emphasizes the role of the tragic in dramaturgical process but at the same time allows for a consideration of dramatic character in its full mimetic context—primarily as a deliberately wrought, immediately felt impression of surrogate human selfhood. Since the cohesion of this image of selfhood is what is at stake, ultimately, in tragic dramaturgy, it would seem that an analytic means of investigation must issue from a renewed emphasis on the means and effects of characterization in these plays. Moreover, it is a complex system of affinities—the myriad ways in which a character is situated in the total fabric of a play's relationships and associations—that is central to this inquiry. For even as the Diony¬ sian sparagmos is, finally, experienced as an individual dismemberment, the fault lines where the rending effect is produced do not always exist in the interiority of a given character. They may also reside in the rela¬ tionship of one character to another—or to a larger group of characters. Significantly, such lines of potential or active disjuncture are likely to exist in the larger dynamic field of a play's action, a field that will in¬ clude, but is by no means restricted to, the boundaries of depicted per¬ sonalities. To illustrate this idea, we might briefly consider the case of Macbeth— a likely example in that a literal dismemberment separates the title char¬ acter's head from his corpse at the play's end. This, however, is but one grisly means of visualizing a metaphoric sparagmos that has already oc¬ curred—namely, the separation of Macbeth from all that he once valued and aspired toward, and the utter transformation of an honored soldier into a walking shadow. Those factors that bring about the death and de¬ capitation of Macbeth are fairly easily identified, at least insofar as there

5. Compare, for example, States's comment on this subject: "In short, an overwhelming interest in textuality, as opposed to dramaturgy, precludes any concern for what Susanne Langer calls 'form in suspense' or that nonliterary element which aligns drama more closely to speech, gesture, and performance than to language and textuality" (Hamlet and the Con¬ cept of Character [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992], 202).

The Tragic Field

95

are overt reasons and motivations, spelled out in the play's scenic pro¬ gression, for the actions taken by Malcolm and Macduff and their allies. There is, in other words, a relatively straightforward logic that attends the questions of why Macbeth must die and who it is who shall do the killing. But the more profound tragedy of this character, and by that I mean his spiritual and intellectual dismemberment as opposed to his physical one, is much more difficult to trace, and the preparation for it in the play's action is not nearly so overt. The reason for this might be attributable, in some degree, to the play's dramaturgical organization, which either by intention on the writer's part or because of other exigencies contains gaps in what might other¬ wise be a more logical, clearly motivated development. For example, the guilt of Macbeth in the eyes of others, and the suspicions entertained by Banquo, are hastily—and not always convincingly—established in the early action of the drama. Changes of attitude on the part of both Mac¬ beth and his wife occasionally seem abrupt, and even though such con¬ siderations may be disregarded as part of the play's overall economies, the impression still exists of areas of thought and motivation that are not truly made manifest in the direct interactions among the characters. Yet, it is this very issue of absences in Macbeth's structural procedure that is pertinent to a consideration of the central character's spiritual dis¬ integration and the fragmentation of selfhood that is dramatized. How, one might ask, can the dramaturgy of spiritual sparagmos—that is, the impression of the tragic as it is exerted upon character through an or¬ chestrated process—be adequately investigated in a context where cer¬ tain conventional signposts seem to be missing? The issue becomes one of methodology, of finding a means of procedure that is capable of es¬ tablishing a network of interconnection between those factors that are clearly manifested in the play's construction and those which are not so readily identifiable. The effort, in other words, is to locate a means of re¬ vealing those fault lines and tragic interfaces, within character and with¬ out, that when taken together as a totality will clarify the ways in which a conception of cohesive selfhood is dismantled. If we were to proceed conventionally, it might be profitable to look at the constitution of Macbeth himself, at the lines he speaks, the plans he makes, his responses to other characters, and so forth. One might also look at certain primary relationships in the play, at what the characters are saying and doing to one another, and at how they collectively moti¬ vate the action that transpires. These familiar procedures would appear

g6

After Dionysus

to be quite appropriate. Yet this is precisely where the investigation be¬ comes more intricate, and where conventional procedures begin to be less than adequate. Along what lines, for example, should the relation¬ ship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth be described? Or, to angle this question a bit differently, how is it that these two characters, when juxta¬ posed in the dramatic action, produce a dynamic whole that is consider¬ ably greater than its component parts? What I am arguing here is the crucial importance, in the investigation of tragic dramaturgy, of what may exist in the interstices between char¬ acters or, in more figurative terms, in the air that surrounds them. It is one sort of procedure to look at characters such as these two and attend to such factors as their mutually held ambitions, her ability to urge him toward ever more grandiose visions and deeds, and so on. Such consid¬ erations are well known and elementary. In similar ways, it might be beneficial to assess the various identifiable factors that impinge on a cer¬ tain character's situation and behavior—what Stanislavski would call the "given circumstances"—and also the element of subtext. But yet again we encounter a difficulty, and one that arises from the challenge of articulating just how these elements may be correlated, particularly in such a way as to shed light on the synergistic factor so prominent in this relationship. This is where it becomes profitable to turn from the more familiar av¬ enues of character analysis in favor of a method that emphasizes a play's underlying fabric of connective tissue. What calls for attention here, in other words, is the kinetic space around the characters. Not only is this the area in which the dynamics of interpersonal tensions are likely to be gathered, but it is also the pervasive field in which a "tragic" fault line is likely to intrude. To ground this proposition, one might compare the re¬ lationships that are wrought in drama with those experienced in life— which can be dense with exactly the sort of unarticulated background that I am describing in relation to fictional selves. It is by no means un¬ usual, for instance, to find that even the most pedestrian encounters can be rife with subtextual tension, if only because of the wealth of back¬ ground experience that two or more people can bring to an otherwise or¬ dinary exchange. Yet simply being aware of the presence and the tension of the unspo¬ ken is a very different matter from assigning a specific name to the un¬ derlying dynamic that is shared by the participants in such an encounter and which has, in effect, its own particular "character." The tensions that

The Tragic Field

97

can charge the air in an interpersonal exchange may be inchoate—and they may remain so. But in the context of tragic drama, the sources of such a dynamism need to be identified, insofar as it is often these very el¬ ements that, when juxtaposed in agonistic ways, bring about the specific effects of tragic rending. With respect to our exemplary situation, then, one can hastily sketch in some of the primary strains in Macbeth that do not belong to any single character in the play but which are nonetheless central to the intensifica¬ tion of its action and relationships. One might begin, as the play itself does, with "charm." At the moment of Macbeth's appearance before the witches, one of them declares that "the charm's wound up," thereby ini¬ tiating a dramatic process that remains unknown to the central players and yet to a large degree determines their behaviors. If we add in the strain of "desire," which characterizes the interchanges between Mac¬ beth and his wife in the early action, along with "murder" or "guilt," which infuse the later action, we begin to assimilate the composition of an underlying dynamic that is innately "tragic" in its nature—that is, one that can be concentrated and intensified to the point of rupture. In a sce¬ nario such as this, the connection of only two terms—"charm" and "guilt"—is quite sufficient to produce the sort of division between Mac¬ beth's ordained actions and his censoring conscience that can result in a tragic separation within the self. And yet neither of these terms belongs, in any strict sense, to Macbeth's character alone. These, along with "de¬ sire" and "murder" (and here I am suggesting only a few ready motifs, simply for illustration), are components in a dynamic field of interplay that are not specified within character and yet permeate the play's inte¬ grative totality. My concern here is with finding an appropriate method for addressing what is not generally conceived as a theoretical problem, namely the ex¬ tremely intricate set of relationships between character and background in tragic drama. What is called for is a means of describing a complex characterization pattern in which individual figures are set in relation not only to one another but to a connective ground that can be under¬ stood—in a seeming paradox—as an adhesive linkage but also as a site of disrupture. The Dionysian tragic, manifest in the dismemberment of represented self, is also evident in the dismembering energies that are at large in a play's connective fabric, that arise from among the characters and which are active in the larger field of the play's dynamics. Moreover, it is the pre-existing, ontological condition of the tragic, as opposed to the

98

After Dionysus

Dionysian process, that provides the everpresent fond against which the dramatic action is played, thus implying an even more inclusive field than might be immediately perceived. In either case, whether one considers the nature of the tragic as condi¬ tion or as process, it is the concept of a "tragic field" that calls for scrutiny. It is here that one can locate the level of interactivity that is per¬ tinent to character relationships but also to the juxtaposition of character with other, more abstract energies. The identification and description of a field model that is specifically "tragic" in its manifestations and effects can allow for a fuller exploration of those rending processes that occur in the drama but which may not be identifiable by other, more conven¬ tional methodologies. The field context discussed in this chapter is meant to provide a means of analysis that is both embracing and specific, that is inclusive enough to admit a broad range of dramaturgical behav¬ iors but is also precise enough to clarify the tragic process as it impacts upon individual characters in particular plays. While the field concept has gained most of its current familiarity and range of application in scientific contexts, primarily in physics, its basic tenets are by no means foreign in such areas as aesthetics and art theory, the psychology of perception, and social psychology generally. Still, its appearances in literary investigation have been comparatively recent, and field applications in dramatic theory have been only occasionally tested.6 This is surprising, considering that a central tenet of the field idea—the interconnectivity of apparently disparate phenomena—has a good deal of pertinence when it comes to unifying such elements as char¬ acter, plot, and scene, components which are often thought of as discrete. Indeed, the field idea has a fundamentally social, as well as scientific, implication. While the dictionary indicates that a field is "a region or space in which a given effect (as magnetism) exists," it also defines it as "a complex of forces that serve as causative agents in human behavior."7 For the purpose of analyzing dramatic texts, it is worth examining the extent to which these two definitions might relate to one another, even to the point of exchanging certain terms. More precisely, it will be useful to consider how a complex of causal and behavioral forces might produce

6. There are signs, however, of an increase in correlation between principles in physics and theater. See, for instance, Rosemarie Bank, “Physics and the New Theatre Historiogra¬ phy," Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 5.2 (Spring 1991): 63. Indeed, a supplement in this issue is devoted to a range of considerations of this subject. 7. Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield: G. & C. Merriam, 1965), 310.

The Tragic Field

99

an effect that, while not necessarily having the empirical qualities of, say, magnetism or gravity, can still be identified, described, and given a name. The merging of apparently discrete entities, terms, or functions is in fact the typical—and expected—result of the field approach. The basis for such mutuality is a vision of phenomena that is nonatomistic, in which emphasis on the identity of component parts is replaced by an at¬ tention to what constitutes the embracing whole.8 Extrapolating from the purely scientific context, N. Katherine Hayles recently has studied the range of correspondences between field theory and literary structures— and described a "cosmic web" of interrelationships. By contrast to the atomistic perspective, says Hayles, "a field view of reality pictures ob¬ jects, events, and observer as belonging inextricably to the same field; the disposition of each, in this view, is influenced—sometimes drastically, sometimes subtly, but in every instance—by the disposition of others."9 With respect to the situation of dramatic character, what calls for at¬ tention here is the degree to which the dramatis personae may be per¬ ceived not only in relation to the structures of story, plot, or scene, but in relation to the particular "effect" that is produced by the total interrela¬ tion of these and other elements. In this regard, a number of models might be considered as roughly analogous—for illustrative purposes— to the relation of dramatic character to the surrounding context or "field." One might refer, for example, to the range of ambiguities in the

8. This fundamental shift in perspective, in its scientific context, is succinctly described by Mendel Sachs in reference to the "continuous field concept": "This was a replacement of the atomistic view with a continuum view of the material world; a replacement of the clas¬ sical approach of materialism, where one considers the world to be composed of many dis¬ crete, separable parts that act on each other by virtue of their having particular spatial loca¬ tions and the power to act at a distance, with an abstract approach of oneness in the form of a continuous field, as the basic description of a material system. With the latter view, the atom-like features of matter emerge asymptotically as properties of a closed system—just as the ripples of a pond emerge, not as truly separate entities, but as particular manifestations of the entire pond" (Sachs, The Field Concept in Contemporanj Science [Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1973], vii). 9. Hayles emphasizes a "conceptual revolution" that has characterized the present era, and she identifies "the 'field concept' as the theme that is at the heart of this revolution." What is "most essential to the field concept," writes Hayles, "is the notion that things are in¬ terconnected." Even while noting the catalytic role of science in this revolution, she empha¬ sizes that "analogous developments have occurred in a number of other disciplines, among them philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, and literature" (N. Katherine Hayles, The Cos¬ mic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984], 9,15).

100

After Dionysus

figure/ground relationship, fundamental in gestalt psychology and dis¬ cussed extensively by Rudolf Arnheim in the context of art theory. Arn¬ heim's ideas concerning progressive historical changes in the "bound¬ ary" between figure and setting in painting might also be instructive.10 And clearly, the area of modern painting generally could provide perti¬ nent illustrations of a merging between a depicted human figure and the context in which that figure is portrayed, with scenic elements shared in the overall field of color and texture—as in a Van Gogh painting where there is some doubt as to whether it is the fevered state of the depicted character or that of the atmosphere itself that produces the overall effect. In any of these areas, an analogy might be drawn concerning the "figure" of the dramatic character who is placed pictorially—and perhaps am¬ biguously—against the "ground" of action and scene, with the connec¬ tive "field" itself relating all these elements. Such examples provide ready and familiar metaphors for a field of in¬ teractivity that can be manifested socially as well as aesthetically and vi¬ sually. Here, too, one might refer to Kurt Lewin's seminal work in the ap¬ plication of field theory to social science or, as he puts it, "in the realm of action, emotion, and personality."11 Lewin's theory emphasizes the "life space" of a personality, which in general terms is "the person and the psychological environment as it exists for him" at a "given time." Yet the "life space" does not necessarily represent the total field of personality at such moments, in that considerations of physical space, perception, and social action are likely to be pertinent. In this context, significantly, Lewin proposes a "boundary zone" for the life space, which allows that "certain parts of the physical and social world do affect the state of the life space" at a given time.12 With respect to a discussion of dramatic character, and the consideration of individual figures within a larger

10. See, as selected examples among many, the discussion of figure and ground in Fred¬ erick Peris, Ralph F. Flefferline, and Paul Goodman, Gestalt Therapy (New York: Dell, 1951); and Rudolf Arnheim's treatments of the subject in Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954; rev. ed., 1974), 227-239, and Visual Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 283-286. 11. Lewin writes that, "The possibilities of a field theory in the realm of action, emotion, and personality are firmly established. The basic statements of a field theory are that a) be¬ havior has to be derived from a totality of existing facts, b) these coexisting facts have the character of a 'dynamic field' insofar as the state of any part of this field depends on every other part of the field" (in Field Theory in Social Science: Selected Theoretical Papers, ed. Dorwin Cartwright [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1951], 25). 12. Ibid., 37.

The Tragic Field

101

field of characterization pattern, it is noteworthy that a correspondence can be drawn between the "life space" of an individual and that of a group—or, in Dorwin Cartwright's words, "One may speak of the field in which a group or institution exists with precisely the same meaning as one speaks of the individual life space in individual psychology. The life space of a group, therefore, consists of the group and its environment as its exists for the group."13 Here we might consider a hypothetical example of an occasion when the character of a group interaction could be construed as the field against which any individual behavior can be affected or defined, an oc¬ casion when the discrete boundaries of personality—or "character"—are diminished in favor of a total dynamism or a larger collective effect. Such occasions as a wedding or a funeral might be apt examples of this phe¬ nomenon, in that there is, generally speaking, a mutually held and col¬ lective view of behavior and emotional tone at such gatherings. For our purposes, however, a more pertinent example would be a formal dinner party, an occasion where there is a high degree of individuation but at the same time a high quotient of collective dynamics, or field, that arises from the spirit and tenor of the party itself rather than from the specific individuals who are invited. In order to move the analysis even closer to the subject of dramatic character, we might imagine that our hypothetical party is hosted by a dramatist, and one who prepares his or her guest list with the same sort of care that is brought to the selection of characters for a play. In prepa¬ ration, our playwright would likely consider not only the prospective setting—eight or ten places at table—but also the particular blend of traits, interests, and behaviors that might come into play there. Were such a party actually to occur, of course, it is unlikely that it would go forth strictly according to script. However our host might envision the mix of guests, and the affinities or antipathies among this cast of charac¬ ters, the individuals present would, lacking written lines and actions, un¬ doubtedly find individual ways of making the party their own. Still, the dynamics of the event itself would, to quite a large extent, determine their overall behaviors. The collective result of these behaviors would no doubt produce, in the course of the evening, a pervasive tone or "ef¬ fect"—one that would be derived from the individuals present yet would not belong exclusively to any single guest.

13. Dorwin Cartwright, introduction to Lewin, Field Theory, xi.

102

After Dionysus

Especially germane to the investigation here is the exertion of a collec¬ tive effect on the apparent boundaries of individual personality. Bor¬ rowing a term from Lewin, we might suggest that in the proposed ex¬ ample there is, among the group described, a sharing of "boundary zones." That is, a like effect of setting and atmosphere impacts upon a number of persons at the same time and in such a way as to compromise the notion of individuated boundaries. Or, slanting this idea a bit differ¬ ently, one could say that since a group has a "life space" in the same sense that an individual does, such a group may also have a commonly held "boundary zone" in which the effects of social and physical space are exerted and where there is a collective response to some pervasive dynamic. With the field models I have outlined serving as points of reference, we are better equipped to consider this concept in its more particular re¬ lation to dramatic character, and then to ask how such a field may be construed in specifically "tragic" terms. We are prepared, in other words, to investigate how such models of interconnectedness can be em¬ ployed in the breakdown of the boundaries that typically delineate indi¬ vidual character, and to analyze those connective matrices that act as the grounds against which the behavior of such figures is played. As a point of departure for a discussion of character in its relation to a connective matrix, it is useful—and in fact necessary—to refer to the an¬ cient model of the chorus in Greek tragedy. To illustrate the pertinence of this, we might consider the staging approach, not unusual in contempo¬ rary productions of the tragedies, in which a choral body does not act as a completely separate entity but is rather the collective ensemble that in¬ cludes, at various times, all players in the drama. In one recent produc¬ tion of the House of Atreus, for example, the chorus functioned as the om¬ nipresent source from which such individual characters as Agamemnon, Orestes, and Cassandra emerged, only to rejoin the collective body once their particular scenes had been played. Apart from the familiar exigen¬ cies that make smaller ensembles desirable in today's theater, it is im¬ portant to notice what is demonstrated metaphorically through such an approach. Especially significant is the use of the chorus as both source world and character pool—that is, as a total entity that contains in itself all the potentials necessary for individuation and reassimilation. Even though Greek tragedies were not originally staged in this way, the image of the chorus as character pool is a historically accurate one, in the sense that it was from the ancient dithyrambic chorus that the first actor and the first individualized performance emerged. Nietzsche

The Tragic Field

speaks directly to this concept when he asserts that,

103

. . we must under¬

stand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus, which always disenburdens itself anew in the Apollonian world of pictures. The choric parts, therefore, with which tragedy is interlaced, are in a manner the motherwomb of the so-called dialogue, that is, of the whole stage-world, of the drama proper." For Nietzsche, tragedy was "originally only 'chorus' and not 'drama.'"14 Yet even when "drama" appears, the choral effect is still pronounced. The characters in Greek tragedy, now individuated, retain their ties to the "mother-womb" of a chorus that continues to mediate their actions and provide an embracing context. The ancestral motif of connectedness abides, and the chorus can still be understood as the collective entity against which the actions of the foregrounded personalities are seen— and to which they in fact belong. It is noteworthy, too, that the emer¬ gence of individuated character produced, in effect, a number of addi¬ tional collectives marked by specific, often familial, relationships—such as the House of Atreus and of Thebes. In either instance, whether one considers the relation of character to an original choric entity or to these other collective bodies, the motif of interconnectedness is supremely ev¬ ident—as is the exertion of a forceful effect that results not from individ¬ uation but from the connective quality itself. To further illustrate this phenomenon, we might consider the situation of Orestes, who, in The Libation Bearers, carries out a markedly individual act: the deliberate slaughter of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. But this ac¬ tion is perceptibly less individually boundaried when examined in the light of the character field in which Orestes is operating. Such a field will have a number of component parts: the synergistic relationship with Electra; the extension of that blood relationship to the rest of the imme¬ diate family, including Agamemnon and Clytemnestra; the larger ances¬ tral family of the House of Atreus; the Chorus of serving women that in¬ teracts with Orestes and Electra; and finally the larger choric body of the

Oresteia, including the Eumenides/Furies who respond directly to Orestes' original action. This is to characterize a potential dramatic field in admittedly broad and generalized terms. Yet such a consideration is significant in its indi¬ cation of the possible layers of connectedness that bind a singular per¬ sona to a generative source-world and to an inclusive characterization

14. Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Birth of Tragedy, trans. William A. Haussmann, in Mod¬ erns on Tragedy, ed. Lionel Abel (New York: Fawcett World Library, 1967), 322, 323.

104

After Dionysus

pattern. What I have described here is what might be called a choric model, in which the field is seen primarily in relation to a character pool that is both a source and an interactive force within the plays. Such a model is key, not only in reference to early tragedies but to the degree that it also provides a context for considering the collective nature of the ensemble or dramatis personae in a range of plays from subsequent eras. Even without the presence of the chorus as it was conceived by the Greeks, the motif of an interactive entity, connected by inclusive patterns of traits and behav¬ iors, is pronounced in the history of tragic drama generally. There is a second framework that can be employed in the development of a field concept for tragic drama, one that might be termed the dra¬ maturgical model—or, since the foundation for such a framework is pri¬ marily Burkean, the "dramatistic" model. Instead of focusing mainly on the ensemble of characters, as the choric model does, the dramatistic ap¬ proach highlights the wholeness and interactivity among the compo¬ nents of action and dramatic construction—in addition to the dramatis personae. Such a concept belies the more common tendency, which per¬ sists and has an ancestry dating to Aristotle, to consider the elements of construction—plot, character, setting, and so forth—as individualized and discontinuous. What is emphasized by the dramatistic model is not merely the self-evident notion that such elements as plot and character can be viewed in terms of their mutuality within a particular play's wholeness, but rather that such elements are interconnected, as Burke would say, by specific equations, clusters, and ratios. It is, in fact, this mechanical specificity that makes the dramatistic concept so applicable in the context of field theory. What Burke calls "dramatism" is a set of dynamic relationships among five key terms. As a total operation it codifies a system of "motives," the impelling and contextual factors in behavior and action. For our pur¬ poses here, Burke's dramatism can also be understood as a structural

field—a collective ground against which any part of his pentad is in¬ evitably cast. Burke is, after all, concerned not merely with the discrete natures of his five terms—act, scene, agent, agency, purpose—but rather with the ways in which they are codependent and "contain" one an¬ other.15 Attention is directed toward the interactive whole—and, indeed.

15. The primary term in this overall participation is the act. As Burke says, "The drama¬ tistic approach is implicit in the key term 'act.' Act' is thus a terministic center from which many related considerations can be shown to 'radiate/ as though it were a 'god-term' from which a whole universe of terms is derived." The act, then, implies other terms: "Drama-

The Tragic Field

105

toward such effects that may be produced by this inclusiveness. The em¬ phasis of dramatism, again, is on the equations or ratios that can be de¬ rived from any single term's relationship to any other one. Thus, the re¬ lation between the action of a particular figure and the setting or contextual ground in which it occurs is expressed as a "scene-act ratio." And, as Burke says, all the terms in the pentad "are capable of similar re¬ lationships."16 Strictly in terms of my discussion here, what is especially noteworthy in this pattern of ratios, or connectivity among terms, is the particular relevance of such a pattern in the context of field theory. In Burke's lan¬ guage,

. . certain formal relationships prevail among these terms, by

reason of their role as attributes of a common ground or substance. Their participation in a common ground makes for transformability. At every point where the field covered by one of these terms overlaps upon the field covered by any other, there is an alchemic opportunity, whereby we can put one philosophy or doctrine of motivation into the alembic, make the appropriate passes, and take out another."17 While Burke's reference here is not to a formal field theory per se, his language strongly suggests such a consideration, especially because of its emphasis on the mediating ground as a key factor of determination. In highly generalized terms, we might say that Burke's primary trope is synecdoche; that is, his methodology indicates a recurring emphasis on the ways in which parts and wholes may be construed as standing for one another in interchangeable relationships. His system of ratios is, at least in this sense, an elaboration of synecdochic correspondences. Yet

tism centers on observations of this sort: for there to be an act, there must be an agent. Simi¬ larly, there must be a scene in which the agent acts. To act in a scene, the agent must employ some means, or agency. And it can be called an act in the full sense of the term only if it in¬ volves a purpose ..." (Kenneth Burke, "Dramatistic Method," in On Symbols and Society, ed. Joseph R. Gusfield [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989], 135). For Burke's original description of the pentad, see his A Grammar of Motives (1945; Berkeley: University of Cali¬ fornia Press, 1969), xv-xvi. 16. Burke, Symbols and Society, 136. Although Burke indicates only ten such primary ra¬ tios (at least in A Grammar of Motives, 15), William H. Rueckert argues for a larger range of possible combinations of terms, especially if one admits the "reflexive ratio," which, in his wording, "indicates the extent to which any of the five [terms] operates as the locus of its own motivations, or, to change terminologies, generates its own motives out of itself." In¬ deed, Rueckert provides a "Pentad Matrix" that allows for a visualization of a full range of cross-correlations (Encounters with Kenneth Burke [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994], 11). 17. Burke, Grammar of Motives, xix.

io6

After Dionysus

the ways that Burkean methods can be aligned with field theory are often more subjective and elusive than his structural mechanics of ratios might suggest. To say that a field analysis is concerned with the existence of a whole ground in relation to a figure or figures that may be individual yet not independent, while correct, is still insufficient. To this postulate must be added the stipulation that field theory aims to describe the specific na¬ ture and exertion of the space that surrounds and also includes the fig¬ ure—or, for our purposes, the character. To return to our operative defi¬ nition, it is the particular "effect" that exists in a region or space that must be sought. And this, of course, is where the field methodology ex¬ hibits its particular poignancy and complexity, in that its obdurate aim is ultimately to characterize the invisible. Here again, however, it is possible to pursue some further implications of the dramatistic model, and once again with reference to a Burkean vo¬ cabulary. When Burke examines the system of interrelationships within a work, the proposition he makes is that such components can be under¬ stood as belonging to "associational clusters"—a critical means of identi¬ fying "what goes with what."18 In specific relation to field theory, such identification of clusters emphasizes not only interconnectedness but also unification. Proceeding along synecdochic lines, the logic of cluster analysis suggests a progression from the identification and "indexing" of parts toward the associational groupings of such parts and finally to the nature of an entire work's unity. In order to arrive at "universe," for in¬ stance, such a logic would proceed from planets to solar systems, stars to galaxies, and so on. Such a means of unification is derived not only from generalized cor¬ respondences among elements, but also from the specific character of the connective matrix, expressed as the why of what goes with what.19 Unity is reached through progressive implication—not via metaphor so much as, again, through synecdoche. Ingredient parts "represent" one another and, in Burke's words, "To say that one can substitute part for whole, whole for part, container for the thing contained, thing contained for the container, cause for effect, or effect for cause, is simply to say that both members of these pairs belong to the same associational cluster."20 Poetic 18. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3d ed. (1941; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 20. 19. For a further description of "cluster" analysis, see William H. Rueckert, Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations (1963; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 84-86. 20. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 27, 77.

The Tragic Field

107

imitation, in the Burkean vision, proceeds from an original, inchoate "essence," which is translated into a structural framework and a unified system of related images. And the unity that is achieved will always be reflective of this inspiring essence; or, as Burke would phrase it, the structure is an incarnation that "dances the attitude" of its initiating spirit.21 This "essence," clearly, can be understood as an indicator of the specific nature of the connective matrix that unifies and correlates the constituent parts of an artwork. It is, in effect, the primary point of refer¬ ence for the issue of why what goes with what. While the "essence" itself is not necessarily the "field" (except in the most abstract and generalized sense of background), it can be strongly indicative of the internal dy¬ namics of a specific textual ground and of the resultant "effect." In further pursuit of such effects, one can shift from the concept of an informing essence toward what Burke calls the "tension" or "psychosis" in a play's dynamics. Here, too, one may find a means of expression for what might otherwise be an inchoate or "invisible" fabric of cohesion, and which also clarifies the operation of a total field of components and energies. For Burke, the tension as it exists in a play (especially a tragedy) is a concentrated reflection or imitation of a condition that already exists, that stands apart from the play, and in general terms is marked by some primary disjunction within a value structure or hierarchical order.22 The "tension" can in this way be correlated with what I have identified as the most salient feature of "the tragic" itself—namely, a divisiveness that, in spite of any mortal effort at mending, is an essential condition of exis¬ tence. In the Burkean lexicon, this tension is a central and powerful per¬ turbation that is reflected, or "analogized," throughout the fabric of a play's construction. In order for the tension to be fully manifested, Burke proposes a "character recipe," in which the various ingredient personalities

21. Rueckert describes this relation of essence and unity as follows: "After an essence is translated into progressive form, it is given a body of images and becomes a completed 'structure of interrelated terms' which, by its very nature as a poetic verbal construct, is in¬ finitely analyzable in terms of its 'internal consistency.' Burke assumes an 'absolute' unity in the greatest works of art. Everything, down to the last recorded syllable, is a necessary and functional part of the unified structure of terminal interrelationships" (Human Rela¬ tions, 169,174). 22. As Rueckert points out, Burke frequently uses "tension" in combination with other terms, primarily "psychosis," which is suggestive of a condition that, while it can be eased, is fundamentally incurable. See his Human Relations (201-212) on the range of possible synonyms for "tension," and also for a further discussion of "psychosis" in Burke's sense of the term.

io8

After Dionysus

will reflect, in the context of the overall action, the precise nature and de¬ velopment of this underlying motive.23 What is especially germane to this discussion, again with respect to the field sensibility, is the degree to which the elements of dramatic con¬ struction—and particularly the characters—are seen as symptoms of some larger condition, and also the extent to which such a tension can be understood as a permeation of a play's whole operation. Seen in this light, the tension can be viewed, in kinetic terms, as the perturbation that will inevitably exist both in and around the characters in a drama. Properly speaking, a field is never simply background; it is instead an inclusive (if amorphous) scene of activity, a ground that not only sur¬ rounds and includes the figures but which also demonstrates its own particular identity, dynamism, and effect. A Burkean tension, when considered in a field context, is the charge in a play's atmosphere, a dy¬ namic effect that both prompts and discloses a tragedy's total set of in¬ terior relations. With an acknowledged debt to Burkean aesthetics, Bert O. States has recently expanded upon certain implications of the dramatistic model, focusing in particular on its relation to the interconnections of dramatic characters in tragedy. Indeed, States's Hamlet and the Concept of Character is largely concerned with how the "family" of characters in this one densely populated play are: (1) intimately connected through a total array of traits and motives that, while individually designated by the dramatist, have a way of implicating all of the characters in each other's behavior, and, (2) are connected at the same time—and more signifi¬ cantly—by a master personality and set of preoccupations that, although related most directly to the title character, in fact belong to the overarch¬ ing consciousness of the tragedy itself. States's position is developed from certain fundamental assertions re¬ garding the relation of individual character to the dramatis personae. "I take it as an elementary law of analysis," he says, "that characters are made of each other and that the illusion of discrete individual characters

23. "If the drama is imitating some tension that has its counterpart in conditions outside the drama," writes Burke, "we must inquire into the dramatic analysis of this tension, ask¬ ing ourselves what it might be, and how the dramatist proceeds to break down the psy¬ chosis into a usable spectrum of differentiated roles. That is, we must ask how many voices are needed to provide a sufficient range of 'analogies' (with the overall tension being vari¬ ously represented in each of them)" (Perspectives by Incongruity, ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964], 167-168,176).

The Tragic Field

109

is, in some degree, a perceptual compromise; moreover, we may even speak of a super-character shared by all members of the play's society, in somewhat the same way that genetic resemblances are shared by members of the same family." With respect to the part/whole relation in characterization. States advises that "in order to confront character properly" it is necessary to "keep one eye on the group and one eye on the individual, who is in a sense always a synecdochic extension of the group itself."24 But again, Hamlet's overall characterization pattern is not only a func¬ tion of how, for instance, Laertes or Gertrude might be connected to the behaviors of the larger cast. States's theory is also centered on the rela¬ tion of such individuations to what he calls the play's "World Charac¬ ter"—a pervasive sensibility and directional motive that, while not be¬ longing to any single character, still includes and infuses all of them. "Like its protagonist," States indicates, "the play has its own state of mind, its own disposition—in a word, its own world-character through which it discourses on a particular perturbation that seems to infect and limit all actions and characters within it."25 Although States does not de¬ scribe this phenomenon specifically in terms of the field approach per se, his concept of "world character" is nonetheless strongly suggestive of the criteria that I have emphasized—to wit, the accent is placed on the whole operation as opposed to the component parts; on interconnected¬ ness, but also on the specific medium of connection; and on the particu¬ lar effects that arise from the mediating "perturbation." To approach the analysis of individual character within so encom¬ passing a framework is to undertake a radical departure from more con¬ ventional approaches. As an example, the character of Ophelia—in States's rendering—can provide an analytic route into the whole texture of Hamlet, at least when such wholeness is conceived as the total yield of the play's linguistic referentiality. In this context, it is not so much what Ophelia does in the drama, or even the way in which her interactions with other characters are conceived, that can guide one along her par¬ ticular path to the play's totality. Instead, States emphasizes the ways that Shakespeare has juxtaposed the character with the contextual "scene" (in Burke's sense of the term) and, more significantly, with the clusters of imagery and inference—what States calls the "utterance" of

24. Bert O. States, Hamlet and the Concept of Character (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer¬ sity Press, 1992), xix-xx. 25. Ibid., 62.

110

After Dionysus

the many characters—that coalesce around Ophelia and at the same time implicate her in a sphere of action and thought that extends well beyond her own immediate behaviors. Ophelia is linked, not unusually, to the paired motifs of sexuality and death. What interests States, though, are the particular ways in which these motifs infiltrate one another, as in the graveyard sequence, and es¬ pecially the way they are connected through language, as in the presence of the sexually laden "long purples" at Ophelia's drowning. Yet the most significant factor here, in the context of a field investigation, is the manner in which these motifs can be seen as leading, not only toward one another, but into the play's entire ground of linguistic and referential possibility. States finds the basis for this totality in Julia Kristeva's proposition of a "genotext," which is not the manifest language (phenotext) of a work but is rather an "underlying foundation," a generative ground that gives rise, as an energizing "process," to distinct entities and iterations.26 In the genotext, all of a work's linguistic possibilities exist as a latency, con¬ nected as a wholeness and awaiting differentiation. But even when indi¬ viduation takes place—when language turns to character, event, and ut¬ terance—the genotext is still a presence, and more manifestly so, as an ancestry and a source world. In Ophelia, States believes, "we have the clearest opportunity to ex¬ amine what boundaries, if any, may separate character and scene, or character-character and world character, or text and subtext or supertext, and how and to what extent one can be inferred from the other." Such potential for inference arises from a fundamental ambiguity in the rela¬ tions among these terms or, one might say, from their genotextual kin¬ ship. The Burkean "scene," when understood not simply as Elsinore but as the entire Hamlet universe, thus contains all the agents and their acts and also relates them linguistically: The royal road from phenotext to genotext leads through a play on words and images that can be either repetitions or reversals of each other. Thus if Ophe¬ lia is associated with long purples and long purples are associated with dead men's fingers. .. . and if Ophelia is further associated in Hamlet's mind with Gertrude and Gertrude with incest and castration, then there is at least an "underground" sense in which Ophelia, as a significant agent in the play's

26. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Co¬ lumbia University Press, 1984), 86-87.

The Tragic Field

in

sexual dialectic, stands for all these things, or at least stands in the presence of all these things.27 To borrow the Burkean term, there is a "cluster" of images and iterations around Ophelia that must invariably overlap with other character-clusters of association, one such overlap succeeding to the next until an entire famil¬ ial universe of co-implication is constituted. Here one might go so far as to speculate that, strictly in terms of language, the genotextual ground can be understood as "field"— particularly in the dynamic sense of what Kristeva calls "process"—with the corresponding array of implication among terms standing for "effect." At this stage of investigation, however, I am more in¬ terested in how the States model breaks down the boundaries between characters and at the same time enlivens the zone between them—a zone that, while "invisible," is nonetheless dense with dynamic associations. The States Ophelia is a transferable model; that is, the method of pro¬ ceeding from the clusters of association around a given character to the genotextual field of a total drama is one that is by no means limited to the

Hamlet universe. Shakespeare's works, of course, are highly conducive to this means of procedure in that they tend to generate especially rich con¬ stellations of imagery and poetic motifs. It is in this context that we are now better prepared to address the question posed earlier with respect to Macbeth and Lady Macbeth: why, when two such characters are placed in juxtaposition, is there a dynamic wholeness that appears to exceed the sum of the component parts? What is it that infuses the air—that is, the contextual ground—that so charges the atmosphere around such characters? Apart from the imme¬ diate events in a play's action, apart from subtext and phenotext, apart even from the terms of a relationship as such are typically described, there exists yet another source for this dynamism—and that is the total field of energies as it is constituted within a given work. The field view implies the existence not only of a wholly connective ground but of an omnipresent one. Thus, at any given moment in a play's development, the wholeness of the field's intrinsic energies exists both in and around the individual characters. This phenomenon is, indeed, the inevitable re¬ sult of any consideration of dramatic character as "figure"—with the necessary corollary of a "ground" that coexists in an inherently ambigu¬ ous relationship. It is in the interstices between Macbeth and his wife— or between Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Desdemona, Lear and 27. States, Hamlet, 139,129-146.

112

After Dionysus

Cordelia—that the inexorable character of the kinetic field itself will exist and play out its complex behaviors. Awaiting consideration here is the key question of which criteria, when identified in the behavior of a dynamic field, indicate that such a field may be called "tragic" in accord with our discussion of that term. My effort in this chapter has been to define the field as a theoretical means for conceptualizing the relation between character and contextual ground, for de-emphasizing the notion of discrete boundaries among characters, and for relating the complexity of character relationships and patterns to the kinetics of a connective matrix that has its own nature and behavior. We shall now turn attention to the specifically tragic qualities that can be ascribed to this phenomenon, and to locating evidence of a "tragic field" in the dramas themselves. Not surprisingly, it is appropriate again that we turn to Dionysus, the "god of character" who is continually at large in tragic drama. We have spoken of the Dionysian as standing for a dismembering power in na¬ ture, and as a pervasive strain of action that always challenges the notion of cohesive selfhood in the drama—in all cases, a prominent and com¬ manding force field. Yet Dionysus can also be conceived in terms of a connective ground, and as a breaker of individuated boundaries. As Vernant puts it, Dionysus "blurs the frontiers between the divine and the human, the human and the animal, the here and the beyond. He sets up communion between things hitherto isolated, separate." Dionysus is "everywhere and nowhere," forever challenging the concept of familiar and discrete entities and essences. For Vernant, "What the vision of Dionysus does is explode from within and shatter the 'positivist' vision that claims to be the only valid one, in which every being has a particu¬ lar form, a definite place, and a particular essence in a fixed world that ensures each his own identity that will encompass him forever, the same and unchanging."28 It is this quality, at once pervasive and connective, that when taken to¬ gether with the Dionysian identity as the "render of men," provides a central insight into the god's particular "field" of manifestation and be¬ havior. Dionysus is the original embodiment of "tragic" divisiveness; his presence, which is discernible in all of tragedy, is always the signal for an incipient sparagmos. The Dionysian, in this context, offers a highly rep-

28. Jean-Pierre Vernant, "The Masked Dionysus of Euripides' Bacchae," in Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 390,

394, 395-

The Tragic Field

113

resentative model for a kinetic field that is connective and omnipresent, and which exerts a specifically tragic energy and effect in the drama. In one important sense, Dionysus stands for a particular relation be¬ tween humankind and the gods, or between character and cosmos—a re¬ lationship that is, due to the god's own character, made intrinsically "tragic." But this is by no means the only way in which dramatic character can be seen as wedded to a large contextual ground in the original Greek setting of tragedy. Vernant devotes a good deal of attention to the quality of "context" which, he argues, must be considered along with the works of tragedy themselves—a quality that in his perception does not exist "side by side with the works" but rather underlies them as an "under-text." Such a context may be composed of many different elements—social and psy¬ chological conditions within the polis, predispositions toward crimes and matters of justice, the realm of myth and legend, and so forth. What is es¬ pecially relevant to our discussion, however, is Vernant's description of an embracing numen that can exist both within the characters and in the space around them—"within a man's soul and outside him": It is a power of misfortune that encompasses not only the criminal but the crime itself, its most distant antecedents, its psychological motivations, its consequences, the defilement it brings in its wake and the punishment that it lays in store for the guilty one and all his descendents. In Greek there is a word for this type of divine power, which is not usually individualized and which takes action at the very heart of men's lives, usually to ill-fated effect and in a wide variety of forms: It is daimon. Here, as in the case of the Dionysian, one is able to locate a connective fabric that binds character to a contextual ground and is at the same time strongly exertive of its own forceful effects, generally having to do with tragic misfortune on many associative levels. Indeed, the iteration of character (ethos) cannot in Vernant's view be truly separated from this other force. Even as actions and behaviors seem to arise from "the logic of a particular character or ethos/' such action is still "revealed to be the manifestation of a power from the beyond, or a daimon." One is led here, yet again, to the consideration of an energy that not only emanates from the individual characters but also enlivens the "space" that surrounds them and, to a large extent, allows for their crea¬ tion. As Vernant has it, "tragic character comes into being within the space between daimon and ethos." It is in just this sort of kinetic space— which I would call the manifestation of an authentically tragic field— that Vernant finds a central criterion for tragic action. "The true domain

ii4

After Dionysus

of tragedy," he writes, "lies in that border zone where human actions are hinged together with the divine powers, where—unknown to the agent—they derive their true meaning by becoming an integral part of an order that is beyond man and eludes him."29 The concept of the daimon is, appropriately, an elusive one. For Walter Burkert, the daimon is "the veiled countenance of divine activity," a godpower that "eludes characterization and naming."30 In Ruth Padel's re¬ cent work on madness in tragedy, the daimonic is treated extensively, as are corollary ideas concerning the breakdown of boundaries within a di¬ vine context. Indeed, and based on her perspective, "divinity" itself might be identified as its own "field" of intense activity, if only because of its presence in all facets of life. For Padel, the Attic atmosphere is "charged with gods," deities that are "active in every part of the environment," that "lurk in every relationship." Tragedy's early audience lived in a world "crackling with temperamental, potentially malevolent, divinity."31 What is perhaps most arresting in Padel's discussion, at least in this context of a tragic field, is her treatment of the merging of interior and ex¬ terior, character and context, in the Greek setting. She describes a belief system, utterly contrary to present convention, in which emotion arises not from within a personality but from the outside: " We think of emotion coming from inside. Greek does not." Such a proposition establishes an invariable linkage between personality and that which is exterior on am¬ biguous terms only. What Padel refers to as basic in Greek thinking is that "what is seen happening outside must be going on at the same time inside, unseen."32 In such a scenario, then, the potential field of activity includes an emotive component as well as divinity, with personalities and environment—and the daimonic presence—connected all around. There is another phenomenon, described by Padel, that also bears closely on the issue of a connective field that is tragic in its inherent im¬ plications. I refer to what she calls the "Ate-sequence” in tragedy, a chain of "damage" that, while expressed in action as an entire "sequence of suffering," also contains this key merging of interior and exterior

29. Vernant, "Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy/' in Vernant and VidalNaquet, Myth and Tragedy of Ancient Greece, 29-48. 30. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 180. 31. Ruth Padel, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 139,140. 32. Ruth Padel, Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 179,120.

The Tragic Field

115

spheres. In her words, "Ate is the damage that is doubly spoken of. Men¬ tal and physical, inner and outer, ate dovetails into that Greek impulse to see inner and outer happenings simultaneously." Such a sequence, in the terms I have been discussing here, provides the basis for a connective field in which the whole is invariably the referent, as opposed to compo¬ nent parts. In this regard, Padel refers to ate as "nomadic," in that any reference to it "gestures to the whole causal chain."33 In terms of the daimonic presence, per se, Padel describes an exertion that aligns directly with the concept of "the tragic" as an inherently divi¬ sive force. In this instance, she draws a connection between tragedy it¬ self, a divine world beset by disjuncture, and corresponding disunities within people's lives. "Tragedy inherited this sense," writes Padel, "that conflict is daimon, that the world is run by conflicted divinity whose dis¬ unity fatally affects human lives. With its special interest in inward events and their effect on the outer world, tragedy sees divine disunity as both reflected in and causing disunity and self-conflict in human minds." Indeed, the very concept of the daimon may contain, inherently, its own indication of tragic divisiveness. As Padel writes, "One etymol¬ ogy of daimon is daio, I divide."34 In spite of such descriptions of the daimon with specific reference to the "context" that a Greek play certainly implies, it would be a mistake to con¬ sider this quality only in relation to ancient tragedy. Indeed, the history of tragic drama reveals a continuing preoccupation with forces and qualities directly related to the daimonic. Ideas concerning fate, humanity's relation to the gods and to a variously beneficent and malevolent cosmos, the ties of the tragic individual to ancestral misfortune, to error and misdeed, and to inner and outer conflicts—all these belong to an ongoing lineage, if not in specifically Attic terms. So too does the idea that emotion, under certain circumstances, can be atmospheric as well as localized within personality. Thus, even as such attributes of the tragic field take shape in the original Greek setting, they can be understood as variously applicable—and in¬ deed persistent—across a much broader historical continuum. A similar case can be made for the endurance of the Dionysian strain. As I have emphasized, the signature mark of the god's impress—the 33. Ibid., 174,175,180. 34. Padel asks, "Does this express a sense that divinity makes divisions in human lives and minds? Or an insight that daimon itself is essentially divided? We cannot tell. There is plenty of room for both senses. All gods are 'many-named.' All activities are governed overlappingly by several gods. The multiplicity and divisions of divinity are an essential as¬ pect of tragic, as they were of real, life" (ibid., 210-212).

n6

After Dionysus

rending of character and the literal or metaphorical sparagmos—can be identified in any age when tragic dramas have been written. Each of these terms—the daimonic and the Dionysian—can be understood as denoting a tragic field. Each one is pervasive and interconnective; each includes the dramatis personae in its processes yet does not belong ex¬ clusively to any one individual; and each one is productive of the dis¬ tinctively tragic effect of interior rending and disjuncture. These fields are part of the fundamental ground of tragic drama, and as such they are likely to coexist, producing an intensification of their re¬ spective effects. The most marked of these effects, and the one that is closest to the tragic experience generally, is the dismemberment of char¬ acter within an overall contextual dynamic that aggressively strains the limits of selfhood. And, as is implicit in a field analysis, the site of this rending process is not only within the individualized character but can also be a feature of the connective fabric that includes yet also surrounds such a character. The figure, in other words, undergoes a process of frag¬ mentation in the context of a total ground that both contains and exerts a fragmenting energy—an energy that is part of, yet is also independent of, a play's immediate scenes and interactions. The field, as it were, is an arena of activity unto itself. Moreover, its primary orientations— Dionysian or daimonic—contain an implicit intentionality, a directional quality that prompts the action toward sparagmos and ruin. The tragic field, finally, is an organizing principle. By deliberate de¬ sign on the dramatist's part or not, tragic dramas tend to be orchestrated in such a way as to focus, in the most acute manner possible, the energy of the field itself, an energy that is both spent and fulfilled in the dis¬ mantling of character. The field concept is, after all, fundamentally con¬ cerned with layers of connectedness—in this context among factors of character, action, and scene—and with finding a name that can be ap¬ plied to the resulting totality and its effects. Here we arrive at what is perhaps the most distinguishing mark of the tragic field, a signature trait that must be expressed as a paradox. Like the Burkean "psychosis," the tragic field is a system that organizes and at the very same time creates disjuncture.35 The dramatic character who as35. Compare also to Charles Segal's idea concerning the organization of the Bacchae: "Euripidean tragedy, like all tragic art, holds a tension between the centrifugal forces it rep¬ resents—entropy, irrational and inexplicable suffering, chaos—and the centripetal, cohe¬ sive forces that lie, ultimately, in the creative, ordering, unifying energies of the work itself and in the order-imposing mind behind the work" (Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides' "Bac¬ chae" [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982], 340-341).

The Tragic Field

117

pires toward cohesive selfhood is, in tragic drama, directly connected to a field matrix of characters and action that will inevitably defeat that pur¬ pose. The tragic field, then, is innately both cohesive and divisive. At the same time as the field connotes an overall fabric of connection and unifi¬ cation, it produces an effect of rending and fragmentation. It is in this paradox, with its own Dionysiac character, that we find the clearest and most indelible stamp of the tragic field—and also the source for one of tragedy's more potent dialectics.

The Case of Agamemnon

THERE IS an ancient Grecian vase, a calyx-krater, on which the death of Agamemnon is depicted. In accord with fifth-century redfigure technique, the individuals portrayed retain the coloration of the clay itself, with the background in black. And in keeping with the style of the era—this particular krater dates to circa 470 b.c.—the vase paint¬ ing simulates a narrative scene in which a moment of action is stylisti¬ cally frozen in time. What is remarkable about this particular moment, strictly in terms of the investigation here, is the volume of information that is imparted, even in so terse and elegant a medium as an Attic vase. In the scene, Aegisthus holds a sword in his right hand, and with his left subdues the figure of Agamemnon, who is wounded at the side of the chest. Surrounding these two characters are a number of others: Clytemnestra, who holds a small ax, and several other women, probably the daughters Electra and Chrysothemis, and also Cassandra. The com¬ position is frontal and dance-like; the positioning of the bodies, and in particular the frozen arcs of raised arms and hands, is formal and com¬ plementary, as if in a classic ballet. Agamemnon, mortally injured, is also ensnared; his body is draped in a diaphanous robe that surrounds him like a net.1 Such is the picture the eye receives. Yet the content of the krater's nar¬ rative is not simply the product of an artful arrangement of figures. It re-

1. T. H. Carpenter, Art and Myth in Ancient Greece (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981). The krater is described on page 236 and shown in figure 351; the technique of red-figure vase painting is briefly referred to on page 10.

The Case of Agamemnon

119

suits also from an implicit background, composed of the specific rela¬ tionships among the depicted characters and their panoramic story, which has here been reduced to its telling moment. The informed owner or observer of this krater—and the fifth-century Athenian would be so informed—is aware of exactly what this vase painting is dramatizing, and of the legendary events that have given rise to its static moment. In truth, the only bit of information needed is that the netted victim is Agamemnon. With that piece in place, all the rest of the story and action is palpably at hand, if only because this character will always—in any depiction—carry his long and ensnaring story along with him. The krater that I have described precedes the Aeschylean trilogy by a dozen or so years, and there are obvious differences between the two renderings of Agamemnon's death. In Aeschylus's version it is Clytemnestra, not Aegisthus, who does the killing; and whereas the dramatist favors a confrontation between husband and wife only, the vase painter looks to a larger cast of witnesses. While the painter chooses the moment of murder as the foregrounded subject, the playwright makes the arrival of Agamemnon in Argos, and a fateful stepping upon sacred tapestries, into a centerpiece. Yet the essential story of Agamemnon—and the im¬ plicit reasons behind his murder, by whatever hand—are contained in the very act of depicting this storied character, through whatever medium is chosen. On the krater as in the play, the figure of Agamemnon is lent promi¬ nence and centrality. And the ground against which the figure is por¬ trayed is essentially the same in both cases: it is the ground of story, of the complex weave of ancestry, divine interdiction, war, and familial re¬ lations that bring Agamemnon to his fated telos. Indeed, the figure of Agamemnon cannot, in this sense at least, ever be depicted in a solitary way. Once he is identified, all the other figures in his story are immedi¬ ately present, if only by implication. It is the intricate nature of this fig¬ ure/ ground relation, and of the "field" in its relation to this character, that presents a compelling art problem, and one that is fundamentally "tragic" in its nature. There is a distinct way in which the "character" of Agamemnon is also the dense and complicated "story" that he carries with him—a sense, in other words, in which he simultaneously represents both figure and ground, character and field. And in this respect he is not unique among the prominent characters of Greek drama. Indeed, he is representative of a set of stipulations that might just as well apply to Antigone or to Phae¬ dra. While the krater that depicts Agamemnon's death moment does not

120

After Dionysus

include, for instance, the characters of Atreus, Menelaus, or Iphigenia, they must nonetheless be included in a full reception of the image por¬ trayed, if only because of what one knows about the motives and reasons behind this event of murder. This scene of culmination therefore stands for a much broader canvas, for a lengthy history, and for the activities of many other figures. It is for this reason that the character of Agamemnon asks to be considered in phenomenal terms, and analyzed in ways that will explore this artistic procedure of juxtaposing a foregrounded mo¬ ment with a complex background comprised of a character's lineage and history. When considered phenomenally, there is certainly a respect in which Agamemnon is intrinsically elusive, if not chimerical. This is not surprising, considering the sheer number of portrayals his story has engendered. Even today the archeological search continues for the "real" Agamemnon, that Achaian king who—in fact, legend, or both— led an armed force against Priam's Troy.2 It is in ancient myth, cer¬ tainly, that we find the sharpest delineation of Agamemnon's familial heritage—complete with such forebears as Tantalus and Pelops—and of his position within the House of Atreus. In Homer, of course, the figure is portrayed in the context of the Trojan War—the circum¬ stances that prompted it, the battles themselves, and the aftermath of the conflict. The character one meets in The Iliad, consequently, seems less determined by his ancestry in the House of Atreus than by his sta¬ tus as the preeminent king in Greece and his qualities as leader and warrior. In Homer, Agamemnon is not merely an equal among the several kings of the land but is rather the "most powerful king in Greece."3

2. For example, a recent news article begins as follows: "Archeologists have uncovered strong evidence that the Trojan War described by the poet Homer in The Iliad/ one of the first and most important books in Western literature, actually occurred" (Thomas H. Maugh II, "Archeological Evidence of Homer's Trojan War Found," Los Angeles Times, 22 February 1993, Ai, 18). While Troy ceased to be thought of in strictly mythological terms after the discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann, excavations in Turkey have not yet solved the problem of Agamemnon's identity or historical presence. Schliemann's claim to have dis¬ covered the gold funerary mask of Agamemnon in a grave shaft at Mycenae has long since been discounted. 3. In Michael Wood's phrasing, Agamemnon "wielded some sort of loose overlordship over the other independent kings of mainland Greece, of Crete, and some of the islands" (In Search of the Trojan War [New York: New American Library, 1985], 143).

The Case of Agamemnon

121

And yet, if Agamemnon were portrayed exclusively in terms of his strength and breadth of influence, he would be a much less compelling and paradoxical figure than he in fact is, in Homer and elsewhere. In the characterizations of both Aeschylus and Euripides, Agamemnon is a man of station and command, but he is also a man beset by marked feel¬ ings of ambivalence. This is also the case in The Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, in the introductory passages to his translation of Homer, com¬ ments with respect to Agamemnon, "a king is what he is; not the biggest Achaian, says Priam to Helen, but the kingliest; a bull in a herd of cattle; a lord who must be busy while others rest, marshalling his men for or¬ dered assault." But Lattimore also provides the ambivalent contrast, call¬ ing the king a "worried, uncertain man" and one who "drifts in his thinking." Agamemnon "veers between two poles of thought: that he can take Troy at once, without Achilleus; that he will be lucky if he gets any of his men home alive."4 Here, then, are two major iterations of the character of Agamemnon— the legendary tale of his ancestry in the House of Atreus and the treat¬ ment by Homer, centering mostly on the events of the war for Troy. Aeschylus, one might say, combines elements of each, even as he adds his own aspects of personality and behavior to the character and empha¬ sizes the interactions with Clytemnestra. Euripides also provides a par¬ ticular range of traits for the figure, concentrating as he does so on events that occur prior to the war, in Aulis rather than Argos. It is difficult to imagine how the Athenian of the fifth century b.c. would regard these variations on the theme of Agamemnon. Such a per¬ son might be familiar with the myth. The Iliad, the Oresteia, and Iphigenia

in Aulis, not to mention plays that have been lost to us and other artistic depictions such as that on the calyx-krater. It would seem, given this fa¬ miliarity, that keeping these various iterations of the character discrete from one another would be a formidable challenge. In truth, the opposite effect is likely the more natural one—that is, for the multiple versions to flow into one another, encouraging the impression of a composite char¬ acter of myth, history, and drama. And, as a result of this process, the "figure" of Agamemnon would naturally gain in magnitude while his "ground" would increase in size and inclusiveness.

4. Homer, The Iliad, trans., intro., Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 8-49.

122

After Dionysus

I alluded earlier to the fact that this energetic mutuality of figure and ground is not unusual, but instead is typical in Greek characterization. Indeed, this phenomenon is one source of the magnitude that Attic dra¬ mas achieve simply by existing in each other's company. To some de¬ gree, this effect is a result of the relatively small cast of characters that emerges from the Greek drama when such is considered as a whole—as Aristotle points out, only a few families are appropriate for tragedy. But the effect also comes from the fact that major Greek characters are fea¬ tured in a number of plays, by different writers, produced at varying times, with the overall field of depiction continually expanding and be¬ coming more collective as a result. From our own vantage point, and with the knowledge of the surviving plays in the canon, the proposition that individual dramas might coexist in this way is fairly straightforward. But even for the Greek citizen, par¬ ticularly one living in Athens near the close of the fifth century, this kind of infiltration could well have been apparent.5 What must be empha¬ sized, however, is not only the tendency of Greek tragic character to be¬ come collective, in perception as well as in origin, but the degree to which an element of simultaneousness results from the repeated itera¬ tions of character. Even though there are cases where versions of the same personage are very dissimilar—the Orestes of Euripides, as op¬ posed to that of Aeschylus, to cite an extreme instance—the more general rule is that characterization in Greek drama tends not to be a matter of strictly individual portraiture. The collective ground is generally too in¬ clusive for that to be the case. Aristotle gives scant attention to what one might call "story" (in con¬ trast to muthos), and this is understandable given that Greek characters carry such a surfeit of story along with them, wherever they may ap¬ pear. Because such stories are not completely individuated and do not

5. There are, certainly, viewpoints that contradict this one. For example, Jones argues that the background of Agamemnon's relationship to Artemis, though "well known in its main outlines, was circulating during the fifth century in versions which differed very ma¬ terially from one another over the crucial issue of the offence offered to Artemis." In sup¬ port of this contention, Jones cites the Aeschylean scholar Eduard Fraenkel: "It must be re¬ garded as an established and indeed a guiding principle for any interpretation of Aeschylus that the poet does not want us to take into account any feature of a tradition which he does not mention" (John Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy [New York: Oxford University Press, 1962], 76-77; Jones is quoting Fraenkel's Aeschylus' "Agamemnon," vol. 2, p. 97).

The Case of Agamemnon

123

result from any one iteration of character, there is a built-in range of im¬ plications that necessarily involves a spectrum of figures—even when only one is introduced. Simply put, Greek tragic characters bring each other to the stage, in the encompassing perceptual sense if not in the ac¬ tual terms of a given drama. Thus, when Orestes appears—in any play—he brings Electra with him, whether she is physically present in the drama or not. When Electra appears—in any play—she brings Orestes, Clytemnestra, and Agamemnon with her, and so forth. These characters are implicit in one another, not only because of their family linkage, but also because of their commonality in a shared archetypal drama. Again, it is the factor of simultaneity that asks to be stressed in this context. The singular character who appears in one play takes on a tem¬ poral plurality as soon as he or she appears in another play. The individ¬ uated character becomes an increasingly collective one as various plots, actions, and motives accrue over time and through the treatments of var¬ ious dramatists or, indeed, other artists. Here is how this works: When, as a young girl, Antigone stands at the side of her blinded father in Oedi¬

pus Rex, she is already—indeed, at the same time—hanging herself in a cave following Creon's edict. Even as we observe Antigone and Ismene in the one scene, we can envision the debate they engage in, in a differ¬ ent play, over whether the one will assist the other in burying their brother. Neither Electra nor Orestes nor Iphigenia is a direct part of the stage action of the Agamemnon, yet each one is implicitly alive in the ac¬ tion. And when Euripides writes of Agamemnon, as he does in Iphigenia

in Aulis, he cannot depict an entirely individuated character in the atten¬ dant development of that one play's action. Euripides is, by necessity if not by choice, using a character who has become progressively more in¬ tricate and layered—in a word, collective—through his appearances in other plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles. All of this contributes to what makes Agamemnon so logical a choice of subject for the tragic dramatist. He conforms, certainly, to several of the criteria set forth by Aristotle: he belongs to the appropriate sort of family, one of stature but also of suffering, a house in which terrible events have taken place; the crimes associated with this family are among blood relations; and finally, he fulfills the qualifications of the "median" hero, one who combines an explosive mix of positive and ad¬ verse traits. In fact, however, the aptness of Agamemnon as a tragic sub¬ ject results from a particular elaboration of these matters.

124

After Dionysus

One might, no doubt, conclude that his appropriateness comes from the background, or "story," that he necessarily brings with him to any artistic treatment. Here it would be significant that he belongs to a par¬ ticular family—the House of Atreus—but also that such a family carries with it a set of built-in relationships, ones that have produced particular actions, events, and repercussions. In a collective model of Greek charac¬ ter, such a rich and varied background would likely arise from a number of contributory sources, even at the point when Aeschylus was writing. Although the dramatist goes to considerable lengths, in the Agamemnon, with the expository preparation for his title character's entrance, it re¬ mains the case that whenever this figure steps upon the stage, he comes laden with an enormous weight of past and future associations—that is, of story. Yet even this elaboration is less than satisfying. To fully apprehend the ripeness of this character for tragic development, one must consider the layers of interconnectedness to which he belongs and is in fact embed¬ ded—namely, the tragic field that he is necessarily a part of, a field that surrounds and inevitably consumes him. The figure of Agamemnon is inextricably wedded to a ground that is not merely a richness of back¬ ground or story but a live field of interconnective elements and energies. Indeed, in the context of a field analysis of this characterization, I will suggest that the core tragedy of Agamemnon, along with its requisite sparagmos, is a direct result of the struggle of this figure against an in¬ surmountable ground of interrelations, a ground that he cannot stand apart from because he is implicated and included in its mechanisms. Employing the proposed "choric" model of field analysis, one can readily identify certain of the ways Agamemnon is connected to a dramatis personae that transcends the particular cast of any given play in which he appears. Beginning with his family relations, one thinks im¬ mediately of the wife and children, brothers and forefathers who are in¬ strumental to the action of the Agamemnon or Iphigenia in Aulis, a family directly linked to the lineage of Atreus and Thyestes, Pelops, and so on. Tracing this ancestry will ultimately lead us to Zeus, the father of Tanta¬ lus. But Zeus is by no means a peripheral figure in these plays. He is, in a number of respects, the motivating agent for the actions they contain. And, in keeping with the familial component of the choric model, Zeus is necessarily connected on the divine plane to his son and daughter, Apollo and Artemis—namely, the two other chief gods who hold sway over the action at Argos, Aulis, and Troy. Thus, the immediate family of

The Case of Agamemnon

125

Agamemnon is connected to the ancestral family, these ancestors to the gods, the gods to the war, and the war to the killing of Iphigenia and, by extension, Agamemnon. Located in this inclusive arena is one of the primary indicators of the tragic field in operation—namely, the tendency of these interrelated ele¬ ments to be at once cohesive and divisive. The ancestral and immediate families that are linked in blood relations are at the same time wrenched apart through blood feuds. The curse that follows the Atreidae produces its own order—of reciprocity for deeds committed—but the conse¬ quences of this order are gruesome and deadly. The ancestral and imme¬ diate families are connected to a realm of divine action, yet the interven¬ tion of the gods—who are often at odds with one another—produces disjuncture on the mortal plane of activity. Correspondingly, the perva¬ sive effects of dike and ate, divine abstractions of justice and destruction, produce their own patterns of order coupled with ruination in the human sphere. Taken as a whole, the tragic field around Agamemnon represents an intricate web of connectiveness among the family, the war, and the gods—a system in which alterations in any one area have rami¬ fications for the entire mechanism. And yet, as ordered and as balanced as this system is, the effect produced on its focal character is one of rup¬ ture and disunion. The members of Agamemnon's line are not, of course, tied to one an¬ other only through familial relations or through their mutual associa¬ tions with the edicts of the gods and with the Trojan War. They are linked by another constituent part of the tragic field: the pervasive spirit of the daimon. It is this spirit, incarnate in the revenge motive of the sev¬ eral family members, that adheres to the Atreidae throughout their his¬ tory, at least to the end of the Ewnenides. John Jones, describing the reac¬ tion of the Chorus to Agamemnon's death cries, refers to their "horror of the evil spirit (daimon) which has been seen through successive genera¬ tions of the house of Atreus, and which is now at work again." For Jones, this daimon has the "power of lending opposed individuals a deeper harmony in wrongdoing"—once again an implicit linkage of cohesive¬ ness and fracture.6 And to reiterate Vernant's contention, the manifesta¬ tion of character (ethos) cannot be truly separated from this daimonic force. Agamemnon's death may come at the hands of Clytemnestra, but

6. Jones, On Aristotle, 91.

126

After Dionysus

its motivating impulse is equally attributable to a field energy—the daimon that includes and survives both of these characters. Again, my aim here is to consider the purely tragic nature of the figure of Agamemnon from a phenomenological standpoint, in a way that firmly roots the character in the action of specific plays yet at the same time abstracts it from such particular groundings and allows for a more total, if supra-contextualized, perspective. My particular interest is in distilling the operations of the Dionysian field that characterizes this broader drama, and in identifying the particular type of sparagmos that brings about a rending of selfhood in this context. Here again, however, one is confronted with the problem of "self," a matter that requires a bit of further elaboration in this particular instance. As mentioned earlier, there are those who caution justifiably against assessing ancient Greek characters by contemporary criteria, particularly when it comes to the differences between an Aristotelian idea of ethos and matters of "consciousness" and "personality" that might be con¬ strued as the impositions of later eras. Yet this remains tricky ground, given the psychological archetypes that have been aligned—most no¬ tably by Freud—with certain figures from Attic drama. How, one might ask, can the Greek character be allowed "psychology" without granting that figure "inwardness"? Yet perhaps this apparent conundrum need not be so severely drawn, especially if "psychology" is considered in the context of motive, or of the patterns of externalized behavior that can be readily associated with Aristotelian "types" of character. Indeed, it may be just this distinction—between what is externalized in action or traits and what is interior—that provides the most useful, even if highly gen¬ eralized, criterion for judgment. In particular, the concept of selfhood in ancient tragedy need not be aligned so much with interiority as with identity, or with a sense of indi¬ viduality. Even if one concurs with Jones that "Aristotle's stage-figure is the mask," this representation of exterior countenance need not be at odds with a depiction of selfhood—especially not if the mask, as Jones would have it, is perceived as "a lucid isolation of essentials." This point of distinction is, I believe, especially germane when it comes to the case of Agamemnon. A sizable part of his character, in any depiction, is a re¬ flection of an exteriorized status, or station: he is a king, a warrior, a leader of armies. And yet, at the same time, there is the persona that he assigns to himself, projected as an identity that demands to be recog¬ nized according to its own merits, apart from the entitlements of office.

The Case of Agamemnon

127

It is this latter persona, I suggest, that calls for the particular assigna¬ tion of selfhood; this is where the character's sense of his own identity abides. But here also is found the strain of ambivalence—the "worried, uncertain man," in Lattimore's words. Between the polarities of these two images of character—between the warrior-king and the ambivalent husband and father—is the interstice where a Dionysian strain obtrudes and prepares this subject for sparagmos. Of critical significance here is the way in which the self of Agamemnon, this core of personal identity, is continually antagonized by the field of tragic and kinetic energies that surround it. Indeed, the cumulative effect of the tragic field—as it is symptomatized in both the Agamemnon and in Iphigenia in Aulis—is to confront this figure with a dilemma of terrible proportion. In each of these cases, the result is a rending of character and the tearing apart of a conception of cohesive selfhood. It may be tempting, given the customary grisliness of the Dionysian sparagmos, to correlate the tragic rending of Agamemnon with his death moment. Both the depiction of this scene on the krater and the treatment of it by Aeschylus—offstage, yet audible to the audience—are appropri¬ ately wrenching in this respect. In truth, however, the sparagmos of this character is not dramatized in nearly so bloody or overt a fashion, nor is it fully manifest in any single play in which Agamemnon appears. While the sparagmos is strongly apparent in symptomatic ways in all of the it¬ erations of this figure, it is only in the totality of these representations that the Dionysian effect can be adequately apprehended. There are, to be sure, moments of extreme disjuncture within the character, or self, of Agamemnon in treatments by Euripides as well as Aeschylus; yet the more embracing Dionysian pattern can only become apparent if one ap¬ proaches the character in the context of his phenomenal and collective status. In the Agamemnon, the process of disunion within character is not only dramatized but crystallized in the brief sequence that is indeed the play's centerpiece—the interaction between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra that leads toward his fateful step, down from his chariot and onto the sa¬ cred tapestries. This interchange, taken along with the entrance of the king and his behavior toward the assembled chorus of elders, is among the most dramatically tense and heightened sequences in all of Greek tragedy. To appreciate why this is so, however, one needs to consider not only the eminent theatricality of the entrance and subsequent action, but also the type and degree of background that informs the behavior of the

128

After Dionysus

several characters involved. It is necessary, in other words, to assess the sheer breadth of "ground" that is borne by the "figure" of Agamemnon at this moment in the play's development, a ground that is indeed made manifest before the figure utters his first words. The Agamemnon is a triumph of magnitude, and the reason for this lies to a large degree in a trick of its architecture—or, one might say, in its ma¬ nipulation of the figure/ground relationship. The appearance of the title character is extremely brief: he has precisely three speeches of length, six lines spoken in stichomythia, and two exclamations from offstage—and yet this appearance is invested with enormous size and scope. This is at¬ tributable, to a large extent, to the lengthy passages that prepare for the entrance of Agamemnon and Cassandra—namely, the utterances of the Chorus and the Herald and their respective exchanges with Clytemnestra. And yet, the quality of magnitude and intensity achieved in the en¬ counter between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra is more truly a conse¬ quence of a cumulative play of rifting energies—that is, a developing tragic field—than of an orchestrated revelation of information. By the time Agamemnon enters Argos, the air is charged with the an¬ ticipation of his arrival. From the moment at the beginning of the play when the Watchman sees the beacon light that signals the army's home¬ coming from Troy, the drama is focused on intensifying the repercus¬ sions around the king's return. The Chorus, in particular, is greatly con¬ flicted about what Agamemnon's return may portend. With all the knowledge these elders have—about the war, the participation of the gods, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and the recent behavior of Clytemnes¬ tra—there can only be great apprehension and ambivalence on their part, even at this long-awaited moment. In the lengthy parodos, the Cho¬ rus reminds us of the prophecies of Calchas and dramatizes past appeals to Apollo and to Artemis. The intensification of the collective field in the Agamemnon results, in no small degree, from an architecture used by Aeschylus to create a per¬ sistent convergence of past and future, and one that acts to complicate the present moment of action. The voice of memory is continually placed in contrast with one of prophecy, creating a temporal density that accu¬ mulates as the drama develops. The play consistently reaches beyond the borders of its immediate and present moments, juxtaposing the rec¬ ollections of, for example, the Chorus or Clytemnestra with the visions of Calchas and Cassandra. The effect of this, significantly, is not only to ex¬ pand upon the complex range of factors affecting a current stage mo-

The Case of Agamemnon

129

ment but also to wed these factors to one another. Again, it is this web of interconnectedness—among circumstances arising primarily from fam¬ ily history, the war, and the interventions of gods, with events in one area producing effects in another—that allows for the tragic field and amplifies its forcefulness. The Chorus, with its "mantic heart/' cannot avoid the presentiment of doom, even as its members furiously endeavor to make sense of past events and to divine what these may portend for the future. Thus, the in¬ tense drama of the Agamemnon's early sequences results most notably from the agitation of a worried Chorus, a drama that centers on the col¬ lective effort to locate a cosmic order in a situation that appears to the ap¬ prehensive choral members as potentially—and increasingly—chaotic. Aeschylus orchestrates this struggle by alternating choral recollection and supplication with interrogatory passages in which the characters of the Herald and Clytemnestra strike the elders as, at differing moments, either trustworthy or unreliable. The larger effect of these passages is not only to establish certain primary forces that are at play in the field of ac¬ tion, or to underscore the interrelations among these factors, but also to indicate just how volatile the field is at this convergent moment. The ag¬ itation of the Chorus is, in other words, a mirror of how unstable and available to fracture the tragic cosmos is at the point just prior to Agamemnon's entrance into the city. Here, in these early interactions, one can discern how Aeschylus has prepared the ground against which his central figure will be cast. It is in this setting that Agamemnon will be faced with one of the two primary dilemmas that tear at his "ambivalent" nature—in the case of this one play, the decision to do Clytemnestra's bidding and step down upon the tapestries. Yet, Aeschylus has already prepared us for the intensity of this dilemma by letting us know, in the early choral passages, about the other dilemma—the character's decision to consider the sacrifice of Iphigenia. It is in this sense that the focal event dramatized years later by Eu¬ ripides, in Iphigenia in Aulis, is brought into the action of the Agamemnon. Of equal significance, however, is the precise characterization Aeschy¬ lus has assigned to his title character in advance of that figure's entrance. The Agamemnon who is introduced to us in the early choral passages is indeed a man of deep personal ambivalence, torn between fatherly de¬ votion and the demands of his station as king and leader of armies. Here it is noteworthy that the Chorus provides Agamemnon with an immedi¬ ate and human presence. Rather than simply describing his actions, they

130

After Dionysus

quote precisely what he has to say in response to the voice of the seer and to the will of Artemis: "My fate is angry if I disobey these, but angry if I slaughter this child, the beauty of my house, with maiden blood shed staining these father's hands beside the altar. What of these things goes now without disaster? How shall I fail my ships and lose my faith of battle? For them to urge such sacrifice of innocent blood angrily, for their wrath is great—it is right. May all be well yet." Agamemnon's dilemma is clear, even in so brief an iteration. The strong feelings he has for his daughter are set starkly against the demands of duty and position. But then, the character whom we have just heard, who comes across in his own voice as a man trapped between terrible alternatives, is utterly changed by the exigencies of "necessity," as the Chorus reports: But when necessity's yoke was put upon him he changed, and from the heart the breath came bitter and sacrilegious, utterly infidel, to warp a will now to be stopped at nothing. The sickening in men's minds, tough, reckless in fresh cruelty brings daring. He endured then to sacrifice his daughter to stay the strength of war waged for a woman, first offering for the ship's sake.7 What is conveyed by the Chorus in these two passages, the former a per¬ sonal quotation and the latter not, is a foreshadowing of precisely what is witnessed upon Agamemnon's entrance into Argos—namely, the con¬ trast between the depiction of a "self," reflecting both identity and a per¬ sonal process of thought, and one of an exteriorized figure driven by a range of necessities. The entirety of this background—that is, of this field of interactive stresses—comes to bear on the centerpiece of the drama in which 7. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, trans. Richmond Lattimore, in Greek Tragedies, vol. 1, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 11.

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131

Agamemnon and Clytemnestra confront one another. It is in this se¬ quence that the character's sparagmos occurs, at least within the para¬ meters of this particular play. Here again we see the ambivalent but selfaware man set against the demands of his own station, and also against a range of inevitable circumstances and "necessities." While it may ap¬ pear that Agamemnon steps down from the chariot as a concession to Clytemnestra's seductive argument, the unseen agents of dike and ate are also participants in his apparently voluntary action. This sequence, seemingly a transaction between these two prominent characters only, is concurrently being transacted in what Vernant calls the "border zone"— that realm where human volition is tied inextricably to divine powers. Taken together, all of these factors indicate how the dramatist could be so economical with this scene yet reach the level of magnitude that is achieved here. The interpersonal drama between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, ripe enough as it stands, is intensified further by the silent presence of Cassandra. Yet the primary source of tension and scope in this sequence comes not from the characters who are on stage but rather from the elaborate development of the background with which Agamem¬ non is invariably burdened. And this, indeed, is precisely the cause of the sparagmos as it is enacted within the centerpiece of this play. Quite sim¬ ply, the "self" of this character—the core of his own sense of identity— cannot survive the impress of these exterior forces and circumstances. The personal voice of Agamemnon—as opposed to the voice of his duty or station—is clearly heard in the interchange with Clytemnestra: ... do not try in woman's ways to make me delicate, nor, as if I were some Asiatic bow down to earth and with wide mouth cry out to me, nor cross my path with jealousy by strewing the ground with robes. Such state becomes the gods, and none beside. I am a mortal, a man; I cannot trample upon these tinted splendors without fear thrown in my path. I tell you, as a man, not god, to reverence me. Then, in a line that, in its brevity, captures and clarifies the entirety of this character's plight, Agamemnon claims, "My will is mine."8 But this figure's will is not his own, and he cannot prevent himself from taking the step down from the chariot. His will, in his own words, was "bent to

8. Ibid., 33.

132

After Dionysus

listen" to Clytemnestra, but at the same time his behavior is prompted by larger cosmic forces, including both dike and ate.9 Agamemnon may argue with a voice that is expressive of his own con¬ victions and sense of identity, but such an iteration of selfhood cannot withstand the rending power of these and other pressures. The "self" of Agamemnon, torn with ambivalence as he confronts Clytemnestra, can¬ not take any other step but the one that leads to his murder. The powers that Aeschylus has set in motion place his title character in a terrible dou¬ ble bind, with respect to his own will, that of the gods and of daimonic forces, and in the context of the curse that always attends the Atreidae. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, in his investigation of the "guilt" of Agamemnon, suggests both the enormity of this character's dilemma and how it is in¬ tertwined with the powers at large. In Lloyd-Jones's scenario, Zeus uses Agamemnon as his instrument for the defilement of Troy, and yet the certain consequence of this action is the affront to Artemis and the sacri¬ fice of Iphigenia. A question is posed, then, in regard to Zeus: "Why, in using Agamemnon to punish Troy, has he chosen a course which must lead inevitably to the ruin of Agamemnon?" The answer, for LloydJones, is that the ancestral curse on the House of Atreus is pervasive and instrumental, even in these actions and events that may not seem directly related to it—the sacrifice of Iphigenia and the destruction of Troy. In Lloyd-Jones's words, "such guilt as the King contracts from the sacrifice of his daughter and from the annihilation of Troy with its peoples and temples is only a consequence of the original guilt inherited from Atreus; the curse comes first, and determines everything that follows."10 In the architectural and temporal structure designed by Aeschylus, it is noteworthy that an emphasis on the omnipresent curse on the Atrei¬ dae, which precedes the sacrifice and the war, only appears near the end of the Agamemnon, in references by Clytemnestra and, at greater length, Aegisthus. Once more we see that a play of time on the part of the dramatist results in a different sort of convergence of events and influ¬ ences than a strictly linear progression would seem to imply. And again,

9. When the king walks on the purple carpets, says H. D. F. Kitto, "it is indeed clear that Dike is guiding his steps" (Form and Meaning in Drama [London: Methuen, 1956L 24). As D. W. Lucas writes, when Agamemnon yields to the will of Clytemnestra, it is "a sign that Ate is in the ascendent. No one but a man ripe for doom would do such a thing" (The Greek Tragic Poets, 2d ed. [London: Cohen and West, 1950], 95). 10. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, "The Guilt of Agamemnon," in Greek Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Erich Segal (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 63, 71.

The Case of Agamemnon

133

the effect of this technique is to bring all of these determining forces into the tightly focused, co-present moments of the play's immediate action. In the context of my investigation here, these myriad and yet connected forces comprise the tragic field from which an iteration of selfhood can¬ not escape. Agamemnon is connected to this field on all sides, and he is trapped within it. For his solitary expression of identity, consequently, there can be no outcome other than a Dionysian fragmentation of self¬ hood—not only as a victim of Clytemnestra's will, but in the face of this god-ordered, family-ordered cosmos. And yet, the larger phenomenon of "Agamemnon" transcends the boundaries of this one play that bears his name. The "life space" of the character cannot be contained by the parameters of any single depiction; instead, it expands with each successive artistic treatment. It is in this context, indeed, that the relation of the Agamemnon to Euripides' Iphige-

nia in Aulis is particularly intricate. The unique juxtaposition of these two dramas—both historically and in terms of the respective actions they contain—is especially noteworthy in regard to the larger character field that I have assigned to Agamemnon, and to his sparagmos as well. Iphi-

genia in Aulis was performed at the City Dionysia some fifty years after the Agamemnon was first seen, and yet the actions that it dramatizes pre¬ cede those of the earlier play. The effect of this temporal situation is an interdependence of mise-en-scene and a co-infiltration of character and incident. Euripides' play centers on the event that is among the primary moti¬ vating causes for the murder of Agamemnon as interpreted by Aeschy¬ lus—the sacrifice of Iphigenia at the behest of Artemis. And, as noted, the Agamemnon includes this particular story in one of its recollective choral passages. Yet one could also say that Iphigenia in Aulis contains as¬ pects of its counterpart—at least to the degree that its events are so ut¬ terly crucial to the outcome of the Aeschylean drama and to Agamem¬ non's ultimate fate. Thus, in spite of the fact that several decades separate the composition of the two works, the history of events as told by the plays themselves creates a natural mutuality. It is in this latter his¬ torical context that the individual dramas merge and complement one another at various points in their respective treatments of the character. And, as I have argued, an effect of characterization in Greek tragedy— where the same figures are dramatized by different playwrights—is not only a collective quality but also a factor of simultaneousness, in which a singular character takes on a temporal plurality through repeated articu¬ lation.

134

After Dionysus

When one adopts this broadened perspective, which I believe is im¬ plicit and necessary in a phenomenal consideration of Greek tragic char¬ acter, it is possible to explore the ways in which these two iterations of Agamemnon interact, not just with other characters in their respective dramas but with one another. The dramaturgical approaches of Aeschy¬ lus and Euripides differ vastly in many respects, and the contrast be¬ tween these two plays—in the sense of structure, use of the chorus, and style of speech—is great. In Iphigenia in Aulis the role of Agamemnon is much larger than in the preceding work, in terms of lines spoken, length of speeches, and the time the character spends on stage. Euripides allows us a closer look than does Aeschylus at the thoughts of his central char¬ acter, and at his emotional disposition as well. It remains the case, however, that when these two figures are under¬ stood as symptoms of a much larger and more cumulative expression of character, the result is an inevitable cross-pollination. The two characters share each other's fate; the Euripidean figure commits the act that prompts much of the Aeschylean action. As an expression of "self," the Agamemnon of Aeschylus makes his counterpart starker; conversely, the Agamemnon of Euripides conveys a depth of feeling that adds to the emotional ground against which the events at Argos might be cast. This collective and interactive effect is especially resonant in the rela¬ tionship between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra—that is, in the context of a tragic field that elucidates and intensifies the space between them. Here, of course, there is a twist on a central pairing of characters which the two plays hold in common: the husband apprehensively waiting to face his wife in Euripides must always be seen in relation to the wife awaiting the husband in Aeschylus, with the same fate at stake in each instance. In the Agamemnon, as noted, the relatively brief exchange be¬ tween the two figures is heightened immeasurably by the ground of story and interconnective forces that are its backdrop. There, before the palace at Argos, we witness the culminating moments of a personal his¬ tory that began years before, including the vengeance that is wrought by Clytemnestra, chiefly for the murder of her daughter as dramatized by Euripides. The scene that is transacted in Argos is in this way directly linked to an exchange between the two characters in Aulis—a confronta¬ tion that occurs just prior to the sacrifice. In the Euripidean scene, the field is equally charged, but it is the ground of future events, not of past actions, that makes it so. Here, when Clytemnestra castigates her hus¬ band at length, she speaks directly to events that only become apparent in the Aeschylean treatment:

The Case of Agamemnon

135

But think now. If you leave me and go To this war, and if your absence there From me is stretched over the years. With what heart shall I keep your halls in Argos? With what heart look at each chair and find it Empty of her; at her maiden chamber And it empty always; or when I sit Down with tears of loneliness and for A mourning that will have no end.11 It is within this shared temporality of the two plays that, ironically, the later drama can foreshadow the earlier one. Or, as H. D. F. Kitto points out, in his commentary on the length of Clytemnestra's diatribe when brevity may have sufficed, "how much more elegant and interesting it is for us to see Clytemnestra getting into her stride and threatening Agamemnon with the Agamemnon,"12 The emphasis of Iphigenia in Aulis, however, is focused less on the confrontational moments with Clytemnestra than on the severe up¬ heaval within Agamemnon's character—or, one might say, on his spiri¬ tual sparagmos. Here, as in the Agamemnon, the character is shown to be greatly ambivalent, and once again he is faced with a dilemma of terrible proportion—in this case, a struggle against the will of Artemis and the impossible choice of the sacrifice versus the abandonment of his armies and his mission. The character is torn from both sides, and vio¬ lently so. He must decide, and yet either decision will certainly bring about his ruin. And again, the result is a Dionysian rending of selfhood, in which the compassionate father is wrenched apart from the allegiant king and war¬ rior. Agamemnon does not die in the course of Iphigenia in Aulis, and yet there is a strong sense in which his destruction is not only foretold but completed. In Euripides' play, more so even than in the Agamemnon, we see a character caught in a nexus that is authentically "tragic" in Scheler's sense of the term, where the logic of causal events is utterly dispassion¬ ate with respect to the values that are held to be sacred. For Agamemnon, with no escape from this nexus, a disjunctive rending of character can be the only result.

11. Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis, trans. Charles R. Walker, in Euripides IV, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 277. 12. H. D. F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study (1939; London: Methuen, 1984), 367.

136

After Dionysus

Once more, it is a tragic field that is configured in such a way that the Dionysian effect upon character will be accomplished. Moreover, it is the same tragic field that is always at work when Agamemnon becomes the subject of artistic treatment. The confluence of forces that brings about a spiritual sparagmos in the Agamemnon is identical to the array of influ¬ ential powers that leads to a similar result in Iphigenia in Aulis. Significant in each case is the interconnectedness among certain primary elements— events surrounding the Trojan War; the will of the gods (predominantly Zeus and Artemis); the pervasive effects of dike and ate; the relationship with Clytemnestra; and, inevitably, the background of the family curse on the House of Atreus. While the field may be perceived from the dif¬ ferent angles that the two plays necessarily offer, with certain of its prop¬ erties more overtly apparent in one play than the other, the essential con¬ stitution and dynamics of the field are apparent in each drama. And, in both instances, the "effect" of the collective action is the same with respect to character. The figure of Agamemnon, ambivalent and torn in opposite directions at Argos and at Aulis, cannot stand up against the full weight of factors that come to bear on his moments of choice. This character's own conception of selfhood, including the perception of himself as one who could refuse to step down on the tapestries or pre¬ vent the sacrifice of his daughter, will invariably be exposed as illu¬ sory—and then taken away. It is in this sense, then, that Agamemnon can be best appreciated as a character who is an ideal subject for tragedy. As I suggested earlier, this status is caused by more than his conformity with Aristotelian prescrip¬ tions regarding the tragic hero and tragic families. It also results from the fact that Agamemnon carries with him—in any incarnation—a field of interconnected elements that, because of their intrinsic relationships to one another, will of necessity destroy the self that is represented. Agamemnon, as a figure who is always available to a Dionysian rending, who is wedded forever to the daimon that haunts the House of Atreus, and who is connected to familial and divine patterns that are at once co¬ hesive and divisive, becomes a paradigmatic figure. It is, in fact, in just such a pattern of connectedness that we can discern the relationship of Agamemnon to many other characters in Greek tragedy who are suscep¬ tible to a such a collective field of tragic duress. Even as Agamemnon is the victim of the tragic field and its divisive energies, he must always carry the field with him, as its human embodiment and consistent incar¬ nation.

The Case of Agamemnon

137

Indeed, it is in this particular juxtaposition that one can locate the final occasion for this character's sparagmos, and one that transcends the other, more localized instances I have mentioned. As indicated, the Dionysian rending of Agamemnon results from the fact that he is at once a figure of tragedy and also its ground—with these two factors being ir¬ reconcilable. We have noted the degree of magnitude that accrues to this character simply as a result of the vast background of events and ances¬ tral antagonisms that are implicit when he appears on stage. But such a background is more than a history, and more even than a story; it also in¬ cludes this dynamic array of innately opposed interrelations that, when taken together, will guarantee destruction. The figure of character, seen as the represented "self" of Agamemnon, struggles for assertion against the weight of this interactive ground, but such a project is, of necessity, doomed. The Dionysian effect will ensure that "figure" and "ground" will be wrenched asunder. With respect to Agamemnon, and within the par¬ ticular dynamism between these two terms, the one cannot possibly con¬ tain the other. Agamemnon is linked by blood to his forebears and to his children, and he is wedded to Clytemnestra; but he is equally tied to a web of inescapable daimonic and Dionysian stresses. The tragic, as a process involving divisive energies, is built into the very being of this character, and the progress of his story will always lead toward spiritual dismemberment. There is only one moment in the long history of Agamemnon when the figure of his selfhood can be freed of the ground of his ancestry and actions—the moment, that is, which is depicted on the calyx-krater, when the sword has pierced his side.

Invocations of the Tragic in King Lear

THE DRAMATIST, as the mediator between a tragic condi¬ tion and an aesthetic process, is drawn to precisely such paradigmatic figures as Agamemnon, characters who can put the face of selfhood on a purely tragic exertion. Yet the manner in which a Greek playwright fash¬ ions such a character is naturally different from the approaches of other writers in later periods. Apart from such fundamental considerations as setting, speech, and behavior—not to mention the highly variable ele¬ ments of psychology and interiority—the components of the tragic field itself are likely to be vastly dissimilar in the contexts of subsequent eras. There is, however, a key point of commonality that can be identified, with respect to the ways in which the dramatic figure is placed against a ground of connective and yet inherently disjunctive forces. Although such forces will not be identical to those that are aligned with Agamem¬ non, they are productive of a like result. It is in this regard that a figure from the Renaissance drama—notably Shakespeare's Lear—can be un¬ derstood as equally representative, as a nexus of character and cosmos and as a personification of the purely "tragic" effect of dismemberment. The playwright who arbitrates this relation of the tragic to tragedy re¬ quires the sort of dramatic figure—exemplified by Solness or Faustus as well as Lear and Agamemnon—who can both invoke and embody the tragic process. Depending upon the respective actions of the plays in which such characters appear—and, we might add, upon the field of en¬ ergies that accumulates as a result of these actions and their motivating backgrounds—there will naturally be a range of traits that, when associ-

Invocations of the Tragic in King Lear

139

ated with a given figure, will produce this tragic effect. Here one can readily identify several characteristics that belong to Lear's emotive and behavioral constitution that lend him an appropriateness in this context. The character's rage, the extremity of his reactions generally, his contra¬ dictory and solitary nature, his rebellion against age and the diminution of his powers—all of these are familiar and yet necessary components of his individuality. In addition, however, Lear is fashioned as a supremely effective em¬ bodiment of the collision of cosmic and chaotic tendencies. The drama¬ tist has ensured that within the mind and being of his title character, a struggle for the sensical will always coexist with a disposition toward the irrational. In the larger scheme of the play, this aspect of Lear's disposi¬ tion is reflective of a field of mutually cohesive and divisive energies—a tragic field that is made all the more volatile by the fact that the strain of disorder in the action is so dominant by comparison with the frailty of the countermovement toward cohesion. It is in the context of this corre¬ lation, between the antithetical impulses in Lear's personality and the stresses that are reflected in his world, that one can perceive, in the very makeup of this character, an invitation to "the tragic." Lear's calling forth of this disjunctive force is not, of course, simply a result of the antagonisms within his character or the juxtaposition of traits which the playwright has assigned to him. The character's efforts in this regard are energetic and vociferous, and they are evident from the opening moments of the play's action. King Lear is concerned, to a very large extent, with the nature and the effects of tragic divisiveness. The play begins on this note and continues to reiterate the motif throughout its development—from the instigating division of the kingdom to the battles that shake the cosmic realm. In fact, the very first speech of Lear's, in which he expresses his "darker purpose," may be read as an "invoca¬ tion" of the tragic—an utterance that, because of its extreme range of im¬ plications, will result in an explosive intrusion of severing and disman¬ tling energies. These energies reach their most concentrated pitch in act 3, in the se¬ quences referred to collectively as the storm scenes. Here, during Lear's passion and transformation on the heath, his confrontation with the tragic force that he has summoned is brought to a climax. It is here, too, that his internal disorder is analogized by a cosmic disruption. Significantly, these scenes are introduced by yet another invocation of the tragic, which appears in Lear's outcry near the close of act 2:

140

After Dionysus

No, you unnatural hags, I will have such revenges on you both That all the world shall—I will do such things. What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be The terrors of the earth. You think I'll weep; No, I'll not weep: I have full cause of weeping, but this heart Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws Or ere I'll weep. O Fool! I shall go mad. (93-94)1

At this moment, the mounting storm is first heard in the distance. The next time that we encounter Lear he is out in the tempest, addressing its ferocity. In terms of the play's tragic invocations, however, Lear has al¬ ready invited the forces of terror, madness, and fragmentation that he will contend with so furiously during the scenes in act 3. The storm scenes themselves provide the most strenuous of Lear's tragic invocations and confrontations, and the remainder of this chapter is concerned with examining this well-known sequence in the play. My am¬ bition here is twofold: to assess the "character" of the storm itself, in a manner that is markedly different from the ways it has traditionally been conceived; and to indicate how this characterization might be aligned, not only with my larger discussion of the relationship of the tragic to tragedy, but with the position of dramatically rendered selfhood in this relation. Although these scenes are often referred to collectively in the critical discourse, they are discrete sequences in the play's action. For the pur¬ pose of this inquiry, I understand the storm scenes to include act 3, scene 1, in which Kent and the Gentleman encounter one another on the heath; scene 2, in which Lear and the Fool—and later, Kent—suffer the storm's fury together on the open plain; and scene 4, where these three are joined in a hovel first by Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, and then Gloucester. In the first of these, the Gentleman conjures a picture of the storm and places Lear within it: the king is "contending with the fretful elements"; he "tears at his white hair, / Which the impetuous blasts, with eyeless rage, / Catch in their fury, and make nothing of" (96). It is Kent, how¬ ever, who in scene 2 provides us with the fuller sense of the disruption:

1. William Shakespeare, King Lear, The Arden Shakespeare, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1972); page numbers are given parenthetically in the text.

Invocations of the Tragic in King Lear

141

Since I was a man Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder. Such groans of roaring wind and rain, I never Remember to have heard; man's nature cannot carry Th' affliction nor the fear. (102) The focus throughout these scenes is, of course, placed upon Lear himself. The drama centers on his unique and personalized experience of the storm, and on his interactions—not to say his dialogue—with it. It is, indeed, the old king who appears to incite the storm to an ever increasing pitch of fury, and it is he who pits body and spirit against a monumental force of nature. To characterize this storm as a force of nature, however, is inadequate— or at least incomplete. While such a storm may certainly be understood as a natural event, this one has been more frequently described as a universal disruption, the collective response of angry gods, or as analogous to the tor¬ tured emotional state of the one who is braving it. It is a storm that, tradi¬ tionally in the critical response, signals a "convulsion" in Lear's mind, or in this kingdom, or in all of nature. As various scholars have indicated, it can be read as passion, turmoil, upheaval, chaos, or a manifestation of incipient madness. The storm has been seen as representing destruction, confusion, and disorder, but it has also been judged in salutary—or at least sensical— ways as a purification, or as a logical relation of Lear's "little world" to the larger workings of the macrocosm. Lear himself refers to "this tempest in my mind" in scene 4 (107), and considerable attention has been given to the "correspondence" between the acts of man and the movements of the spheres as these relations were understood in Shakespeare's day. The question of what incites the storm has also been emphasized in scholarly discussion. Although my own point of view is that the storm occurs as a manifestation of the tragic itself, there are other, more tradi¬ tional questions that pertain to its onset in the play. Is the storm brought about by the Gods that Lear addresses, or is it meant to be understood as the voice and physical representation of these Gods? Is it to be regarded as weather, as a meteorological event that is by chance affecting this part of Britain, or is it a more cosmic disturbance whose effects are felt in the world at large? Does Lear's own agitation produce the storm? And if so, is it his rage, his madness, his disbelief at the treachery of his daughters, or the specter of diminishment from kingship toward "nothing" that leads to such a result? And, once initiated, is the storm meant to be appre¬ hended as a force that is acting upon Lear, or one with which he interacts?

142

After Dionysus

f

Are his apostrophes and imprecations directed toward a deaf and dis¬ passionate cosmos, or are they meant to be heard as part of a dialogue in which a cosmic order is the co-participant? Such questions have been integral to the critical inquiry into the storm scenes over the past two centuries. What is surprisingly rare, however, is a discussion of how these scenes might be specifically correlated with Lear's "tragedy" per se or, in the context of our investigation here, how they relate to the particularly "tragic" nature of Lear's experience on the heath. While it is not my intention to document the lengthy progress of this scholarly debate in detail, a brief description of its historical con¬ tours will be useful, if only to indicate the degree to which a tragic read¬ ing of the storm scenes may differ from what has traditionally been em¬ phasized.

The Historical Context During the nineteenth century, and especially in the Romantic period that began it, critical commentary focused, not surprisingly, on the emo¬ tive qualities of the storm scenes. Themes of passion and madness were frequently emphasized, often with a style of language so embellished as to conjure the affective attributes of the storm itself. At the same time, however, the more cerebral qualities that might be associated with the storm scenes were considered. And, as a related issue, there was critical debate over whether or not the tumultuous sequences in act 3 could be evoked theatrically in a convincing way or if the experiences of Lear in the storm might be apprehended better by the reader than by the spec¬ tator. A. W. Schlegel posed a question that, since his day, has lost none of its currency. "But who can possibly enumerate all the different combina¬ tions and situations by which our minds are here as it were stormed by the poet?"2 Even as Schlegel alludes to the sensory impact of the storm, his emphasis remains on how "our minds" are engaged by the event, as though the storm scenes were offering a primarily cognitive, as opposed to emotive, effect. Charles Lamb's deprecations concerning King Lear's purely theatrical potentials are well known. Writing in the same year (1811) as Schlegel, Lamb declared the play "essentially impossible to be represented on the stage." For him, the drama is at its most potent when

2. A. W. Schlegel, "Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature," in Shakespeare, King Lear: A Casebook, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Macmillan, 1969), 31.

Invocations of the Tragic in King Lear

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it creates a transaction between the mind of Lear and that of the reader, not the observer.3 And William Hazlitt, employing an aptly tempestuous language with respect to the storm scenes, evokes their passionate effects yet at the same time echoes Lamb's emphasis on the cerebral. Having re¬ ferred to "this force of passion, this tug of war of the elements of our being," Hazlitt conjures an image of Lear's embattled mental condition: "The mind of Lear, staggering between the weight of attachment and the hurried movement of passion, is like a tall ship driven about by the winds, buffeted by the furious waves, but that still rides above the storm, having its anchor fixed in the bottom of the sea."4 Coleridge, in marked contrast to contemporaries who favored those impressions best received by the reader, responded strongly to the purely visual impact of one of the storm scenes—act 3, scene 4. "What a world's convention of agonies," Coleridge proclaims; "Surely, never was such a scene conceived of be¬ fore or since. Take it but as a picture for the eye only, it is more terrific than any a Michel Angelo inspired by a Dante could have conceived, and which none but a Michel Angelo could have executed."5 It is not until the late nineteenth century that one sees an increased em¬ phasis on the element of insanity as it is dramatized—or analogized—in the storm scenes. Richard Moulton, like the Romantics before him, at¬ tends to the passionate tenor of these sequences yet is careful to distin¬ guish "passion" from the "madness" that he sees as the operative ele¬ ment among the characters on the heath. Having observed that "the Centerpiece of the play is occupied with the contact of two madnesses, the madness of Lear and the madness of Edgar," Moulton argues that these madnesses do not simply coexist; rather, they "mutually affect one another, and throw up each other's intensity." Here again there is a cor¬ relation, in the language that is used, between character behavior and conditions of weather. Although Moulton is not referring, in a specific

3. Charles Lamb, "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare," in The Reflector, 1810-11; Kermode, ed., Shakespeare, King Lear, 43. For Lamb, "The greatness of Lear is not in corporal di¬ mension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infir¬ mities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear, we are in his mind...." 4. William Hazlitt, "Characters of Shakespeare's Plays," in Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. D. F. Bratchell (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 124. 5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1960), 59.

144

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sense, to the storm within character and the storm without, his image of the interior forces that "throw up each other's intensity" can be ascribed either to the interplay of the mad figures on stage or to the interaction of lightning, rain, and topography that creates the intensity of the storm.6 It is perhaps ironic that twentieth-century criticism of King Lear— which gravitated toward a markedly pessimistic tone—may be said to have begun with A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy of 1904. Bradley, who often demonstrates an empathetic understanding of the figures that he studies, reacts in kind to the characters in the storm scenes, casting their interactions in a warm-spirited light. Bradley is, however, in agree¬ ment with Lamb with respect to the purely theatrical possibilities of the play. When set on the stage, he writes, "The storm scenes in King Lear gain nothing and their very essence is destroyed."7 Still, his overall re¬ sponse to these scenes is unusually, even uniquely, affirmative. Where other commentators locate a vision of chaos and derangement, Bradley finds evidence of love and assurance. For him, the hovel that only barely shelters Lear and the others from the storm's fury is "the inmost shrine of love." And as the third act progresses, the castle Lear has left behind is a "room in hell," while the ravaged heath is a "sanctuary." Even as he ad¬ mits to the strain of pessimism in the play, Bradley's comment is that the realm of this tragedy is "a place where heavenly good grows side by side with evil, where extreme evil cannot long endure, and where all that sur¬ vives the storm is good, if not great."8 Acknowledged, too, are the "more terrible impressions" that King Lear evokes and the ways in which the storm scenes contribute to these. But even here, Bradley finds a way of affirming the "greatness" of man, pointing to the "powerlessness of out¬ ward calamity or the malice of others against his soul."9

6. Richard G. Moulton, "How Climax Meets Climax in the Centre of King Lear," in King Lear: Critical Essays, ed. Kenneth Muir (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1984), 28-29. Moulton's foremost concern, it should be emphasized, is with the "madnesses" of the various participants. In a way that foreshadows later, more nihilistic interpretations of the play, Moulton underscores the deranged and nonsensical qualities of the interactions within the storm sequence. For him, these encounters dramatize "a terrible duet of madness, the wild rav¬ ings and mutual interworkings of two distinct strains of insanity, each answering and outbid¬ ding one another." When the participation of the Fool is considered along with Lear and Edgar in these moments, Moulton sees a "trio of madness" at work in the very center of the play. 7. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904; New York: Fawcett Premier, Ballantine, 1983), 221. 8. Ibid., 236, 271-272. 9. Ibid., 261.

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145

The issue of whom or what Lear is addressing with his imprecations has, of course, long been a subject of critical questioning. In scene 2 in particular, is Lear's defiance directed at the "elements"—that is, at the storm itself? Or, is he meant to be heard by the "heavens" and the pow¬ ers that be? Lear shouts directly to the components of the storm—rain, lightning, wind, thunder—and he appeals to "the great Gods, that keep this dreadful pudder o'er our heads" (99-103), yet despite the seeming clarity of these targets of his passion, there has been considerable dispute over exactly how these are meant to be understood. And again, the ques¬ tion of whether Lear's discourse is one-sided or a dialectic with other forces has been a point of contention. In the mid-twentieth century, a number of Shakespearean critics focused their attention on the powers at work in the storm scenes, with particular concentration placed on who— or what—these "great Gods" might be. Discussion in this area is especially intricate, in that the range of possi¬ ble implications is broad. The fundamental issue has been the degree to which the events of act 3 can be understood in a transcendent or religious context rather than interpreted on a strictly human scale or in terms of human experience aligned with purely natural phenomena. An implicit corollary question naturally pertains to what Shakespeare himself might have intended with respect to the play's more metaphysical connota¬ tions, and to what his audience may likely have understood in the frame¬ work of its own time. We know, at least, that the text of King Lear pro¬ vides its own range of speculation with respect to this opposition of the earthly and the transcendent—as, for example, when Edmund character¬ izes Gloucester's astrological leanings as the "excellent foppery of the world" in act 1, scene 2. Another key issue here is one that has also been remarked upon frequently—at least since the play's suitability for live staging became a point of dispute—namely, the ability of the dra¬ maturgy itself, the scenic structure and the playwright's range of poetic implications, to communicate convincingly a metaphysical event in sensate, as well as imaginative, ways. The storm scenes are contextualized by G. Wilson Knight, Robert Heil¬ man, and John Danby as—respectively—primarily naturalistic, reli¬ giously oriented, and metaphysical in relation to "Nature." Even as Knight acknowledges that man's "relation to the universe" is the play's theme, he puts the action of the play—and the gods themselves—in a naturalistic context. For him, the gods that Lear calls upon are "slightly vitalized" and "more natural than supernatural." Rather than having a

146

After Dionysus

transcendent presence and power, these gods are, for Knight, "manmade."10 In Heilman's view, the religiosity in King Lear is forcefully con¬ veyed; indeed, the king himself is a "religious spirit." In this perspective, there is little ambiguity about the transcendental authority of the powers at work in the drama. In fact, Heilman notes "a pervading consciousness of deity, not a self-conscious adoption of suitable modes of religious ex¬ pression, but a largely unconscious, habitual reliance upon divine forces whose primacy is unquestioned." Lear's prayers are not only heard but answered, and there is an awareness, on the king's part, of "superhuman beings upon whom man may call. The very storm suggests to him that the gods will bring justice upon the evil, however well the evil deeds have been concealed... ."n The focus of Danby's study is on nature—or Nature. For him, "King

Lear can be regarded as a play dramatizing the meanings of the single word 'Nature.'"12 Danby does not, however, mean naturalistic, at least not in the manner Knight uses the term, in a way that would seem to ex¬ clude the metaphysical. Danby's investigation, in fact, deals not so much with the gods per se as with manifestations of the "super-natural." With respect to the storm scenes, Danby singles out the element of "Thunder" for specific analysis, interpreting both its voice and its identity ("a pro¬ foundly ambiguous creature"). The Thunder is "first [Lear's] agent," then the "'servile minister' of his daughters," and finally "merely the sign of some vague disturbance among the great gods."13 For Danby, un-

10. In Knight's view: "The 'gods' so often apostrophized are, however, slightly vitalized: one feels them to be figments of the human mind rather than omnipotent ruling powers—they are presented with no particular conviction.... The gods here are more natural than supernat¬ ural; the good and bad elements in humanity are, too, natural, not, as in Macbeth, supernatural. King Lear is throughout naturalistic. The 'gods' are mentioned in various contexts where hu¬ manity speaks, under stress of circumstance, its fears or hopes concerning divinity: they are no more than this" (G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy [Ox¬ ford: Oxford University Press, 1930; reprint, London: Methuen, 1949], 178,186-188). 11. Robert Bechtold Heilman, This Great Stage: Image and Structure in King Lear (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1948; reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967), 267, 271, 268-269. 12. John F. Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), 15. 13. Ibid., 183,184. In regard to the "Thunder," Danby writes, "The clue to Shakespeare's meaning is to be sought, I think, as far back as Julius Caesar where the nature of Thunder is first debated. In King Lear as in Julius Caesar the Thunder has metaphysical status. It is the supernatural and the superrational and the superhuman. It belongs not only with the Thun¬ der in Julius Caesar but with the ambiguous ghost in Hamlet, the delphic Cassandra in Troilus and Cressida, the doubtful witches of Macbeth.”

Invocations of the Tragic in King Lear

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like Knight, these gods seem to exist apart from man's imagination, yet they do not necessarily attend to mankind's needs in the way that Heil¬ man proposes in his commentary concerning Lear's answered prayers. Throughout the critical discourse on King Lear, attention is given to the opposition of the microcosm and the macrocosm, and to the ways in which one reflects the other. The storm scenes are, of course, especially suggestive in this context. The question of what is exterior to Lear's being, as opposed to what is related to his inner awareness and psychic turmoil, is perpetually reiterated and reinterpreted. L. C. Knights, for ex¬ ample, focuses on the experience of interior consciousness when con¬ fronted with the storm's duress. It is the nature and magnitude of Lear's inner conflicts and torments that Knights sees dramatized in the storm, collisions that lead to the character's madness on the heath: "It is this warring of contradictory impulses that the storm, a vividly evoked in¬ stance of elemental conflict, serves to define." Lear struggles to assert his own conception of self, but it is through the storm, Knights says, that "re¬ ality breaks into a mind willfully closed against it."14 Radical changes in the critical perception of King Lear came about dur¬ ing the decade of the nineteen-sixties. The storm scenes, and the storm it¬ self, were seen not only in terms of madness or tumult, as a reflection of passion or as metaphysical dialectic, but rather as a representation of nonsense, chaos, utter destruction, the end of civilization. Correlations with the World's End, to Armageddon, were not uncommon.15 The "Gods" and the cosmos, once engaging Lear in dialectic, are now deaf, unresponsive, without meaning. By this time. King Lear had found what some felt was a natural context in the twentieth-century pattern of global war, mass destruction, and genocide—and discussion of the play was often conducted in an climate of absurdist and post-existential nihilism. Jan Kott, himself affected by the destruction of eastern Europe at the mid-century, writes in reference to Lear's environment of "the cold end¬ less night which has fallen on the world."16

14. L. C. Knights, "King Lear," in Muir, Critical Essays, 174. 15. See, for example, John Holloway, "King Lear," in Kermode, Shakespeare, King Lear, 204; and Maynard Mack, King Lear in Our Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 85. 16. On the subject of the gods, and how references to them evolve in the drama, Kott ob¬ serves, "At first gods have Greek names then they are only gods, great and terrifying judges high above, who are supposed to intervene sooner or later. But the gods do not intervene. They are silent. Gradually the tone becomes more and more ironical. The ruin of a man in¬ voking god is ever more ridiculous" (Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary [New York: W. W. Norton, 1964], 141,158).

148

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It is in this atmosphere that Northrop Frye characterizes Lear's activity in the storm in a way vastly different from the image of an aged king finding a personal discourse with the elements. The storm-wracked heath is, for Frye, the setting where "a mad shadow confronts a mad shadow-world, for the storm is described in a way that makes it not sim¬ ply a storm but chaos come again, the cracking of nature's moulds."17 Even though some thirty years have passed since critics such as Kott, Frye, and others responded to the play in these ways, this particular type of perception of King Lear has not been altered appreciably. This is not to say that other scholars have not had a good deal to say about the play in recent decades; it is rather to observe that the viewpoint that was ad¬ vanced during the nineteen-sixties, one that seemed congruent with the violent chronology of the century, became paradigmatic and continues to be so.18 Images of Lear's possible redemption, his reunion with a for¬ giving Cordelia, and other evidence of good will all came to pale beside the chaotic and purposeless verdict of the storm scenes as they were characterized on the modern world's own terms.

Storm Scenes and the Tragic This brief overview highlights the major issues that have characterized a wide-ranging inquiry—carried on by scholars over a period of nearly two hundred years—into what is dramatized in the scenes on the heath in the third act of King Lear. One can see that, despite the notable diver¬ sity of the tone and content of these interpretations, certain motifs have been reiterated and, indeed, have become part of a familiar vocabulary with respect to these scenes. Such a vocabulary might be understood as including the "correspondence" of Lear's agitated mind with the storm's convulsions; an emphasis on his "passion" and "madness"; the relation¬ ship of nature and Nature, on both human and universal scales; the im¬ plications of "chaos"—in Lear's consciousness, in the kingdom, and in the world at large; the opposition of such chaos with a sensical cosmos; the possible existence of "gods" and the question of how—or if—their

17. Northrop Frye, Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), 105. 18. I do not mean to imply a lack of other viewpoints, or that a tone of pessimism has characterized all of the scholarly response to the play since the 1960s. For contrasting views, see, for example, William R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1966); or Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972)-

Invocations of the Tragic in King Lear

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voices are heard in the thunder; and the related issue of dialectic—is the voice of Lear heard, in turn, by the storm? These ideas have been scruti¬ nized and contextualized, in ways that reflect a more or less positive or pessimistic reading, since the Romantic period. As I have indicated, however, the relation of the storm scenes to Lear's own tragedy, or to dramatic tragedy in its more embracing context, or to the tragic as a condition or a means of artful representation, has received comparatively scant attention. The tendency has been, in short, to exam¬ ine the storm scenes interpretively or thematically rather than dramatur¬ gically or theoretically. Even when the criticism has been philosophical , in nature, it has generally questioned the various powers and personali¬ ties that are at work in the storm scenes rather than investigated the re¬ lation of tragedy or the tragic to the interactions—and the weather—on the heath. I do not mean to suggest that commentary has neglected the range of implicit relations between the storm scenes and conditions that are com¬ mon, not to say inherent, in tragedy's ancestral and philosophic identity. This is by no means the case, and there is a surfeit of critical discussion of

King Lear that pertains to man's relation to the gods and the universe, his infirmity and concurrent stature, his effort toward the sensical in the face of chaos, and so on. In this regard, Barbara Everett's terse yet inclusive statement may be seen as representative: "In the storm scenes Lear is at his most powerful and, despite moral considerations, at his noblest; the image of a man hopelessly confronting a hostile universe and withstand¬ ing it only by his inherent powers of rage, endurance, and perpetual questioning, is perhaps the most purely 'tragic' in Shakespeare."19 Such a passage can certainly stand for a lasting posture of character and cir¬ cumstance in tragedy, if not for "the tragic" as I am characterizing it in more specific terms. It seems to me that despite all the attention that has been given to Lear's interaction with heavenly and cosmic forces—however they are named—the question of what is being transacted on this tragic stage can be pursued further, in dramaturgical and theoretical contexts. My focus, consequently, is placed primarily on what the storm may represent with respect to "the tragic" and its exertion upon character, and also on how the central figure of Lear relates to the "character" of the storm itself. In the correspondence of Lear and the storm, obviously, we have a quintes¬ sential model of character-cosmos interaction. Yet there is also evidence 19. Barbara Everett, "The New King Lear," in Kermode, Shakespeare, King Lear, 195.

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After Dionysus

of the playwright's position in this relation, as the conduit between a tragic condition and the dramatic character who is fashioned so as to call it forth in the artistic process. My own belief is that, beginning with Lear's powerful exit at the close of act 2 and continuing into his exhorta¬ tions in act 3 ("Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! / You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout / Till you have drenched our steeples, drown'd the cocks!"), through to his question later on ("What is the cause of thunder?"), what we are witnessing is an invocation of a purely "tragic" exertion, instigated by the dramatist and accomplished through a confrontation between this character and a concentrated tragic duress. Simply in the context of classical tragic dramaturgy, it is noteworthy that the storm scenes demonstrate a number of Aristotelian principles. For example, each of the six elements the philosopher indicates are nec¬ essary in the construction of tragedy are illustrated in this sequence. The contestable assertion of Harley Granville-Barker (that the storm is not "dramatically important") notwithstanding, in truth the storm can readily be understood as a function of Plot.20 Its mechanism, and its ef¬ fect upon the characters—bringing Lear to the point of maximum dan¬ ger—motivates a number of events and dictates their succession through the middle of the play. The storm strips Lear, isolating him in his con¬ frontation with a cosmic force, but it also brings him together with his al¬ lies. The storm can also be understood as an expression of Thought, in that a central dialectic in the play, that between the mind of Lear and its reflection in the macrocosm, is played out for the most part in the scenes on the heath. The storm is Diction and Song as well as Spectacle. Even as we are led to imagine the size and fury of this meteorological display, we are called upon to hear its voice and to listen for its message. We are pressed to speculate not only on the "cause of thunder" but on what the thunder says. Most important, though, the storm takes on the particular guise of Character, although certainly not in the purely Aristotelian sense of ethos. That qualification aside, what is conjured by the dramatist in act 3 is the representation of a highly emotive state, a force with traits of per¬ sonality, No matter whether the storm is apprehended as an expression of the gods or a reflection of the troubled mind and heart of Lear, a char¬ acterization is what we behold. The storm is addressed in anthropomor¬ phic terms ("rumble thy bellyful"), and it demonstrates its own passions.

20. Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, vol. 1 (1946; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 266.

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It can in fact be seen, along with Gloucester and the Fool, as among Lear's most intimate dialectical partners. The storm also provides, in Aristotelian terms, the components neces¬ sary for "complex" tragedy; that is, the sequence creates the occasion for anagnorisis, peripeteia, and pathos, aULat once. Lear's multiple recogni¬ tions—that he is "not ague-proof," that the storm will not "peace" at his command, that the elements he invokes may not take his side, that there is a "tempest" in his mind, that he is a man "more sinn'd against than sinning"—all come during, or as a direct result of, his experience on the heath. So, too, are the storm scenes an occasion for the reversals that1 change the vengeful, wrathful king into the madman, and then the con¬ trite father. They offer—particularly in act 3, scene 4—the requisite scene of suffering, in which the "passion" of the central character is enacted. "Filial ingratitude" drives the king's rage; he fights against the madness that he has both summoned and denied; he identifies himself with all of the "poor naked wretches," with their "houseless heads and unfed sides," during his moments of prayer in this scene; and again, a recogni¬ tion: "O! I have ta'en too little care of this." Earlier I referred to a range of traits that belong to Lear, and suggested that when such characteristics are embodied they constitute a virtual in¬ vitation to the tragic. The antithetical strains in his nature, the mutually cohesive and divisive energies in both his mind and his behavior, taken together with the extremes of his emotional make up, all become part of this larger susceptibility. One might say, then, in the terms of this analy¬ sis, that the dramatist has put a human face on the tragic by creating a character with Lear's disposition and placing him under these given con¬ ditions of duress. This tragic face, however, is considerably different from the one fashioned by Aeschylus and by Euripides, and the way in which Lear is forced to the point of spiritual dismemberment is brought about by other kinds of forces. That Lear suffers a severe disjuncture within his concept of selfhood is a given. From the moment he sets a pattern of divisive energies in motion at the play's beginning, up to his disorientation and madness in the storm scenes, the action of the play is overtly motivated toward this re¬ sult. What is more compelling, in terms of our discussion here, is not simply the fact of Lear's interior sparagmos but rather the way in which it is brought about by the playwright. Lear's character is not pulled apart in the same manner as Agamemnon is, in accord with the figure and ground relation that I have identified with respect to Greek tragic char¬ acter. Even as Lear, like Agamemnon, is directly linked to connective

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After Dionysus

patterns of war and familial relations, and to the behaviors of fates and destinies, his interior separation is dramatically manifested in a different way. Lear's spiritual dismemberment results, indeed, primarily from conscious internal promptings—or, as one might say, from the charac¬ ter's "interiority." Interiority, indeed, is a particularly appropriate modifier for Lear's characterization. Not only do we know his thoughts and innermost feel¬ ings—because Shakespearean dramaturgy is deliberately expository in this way—but we have in Lear a character who is unusually closed in, and who is unreceptive to other voices, at least until the play's later se¬ quences. One is reminded here of Knights's description of a "mind will¬ fully closed" against reality. With the possible exception of the Fool, Lear is most conversant with the heavens and the gods—and, indeed, with the storm. Shakespeare has fashioned Lear as an imminently suitable receptor for the divisive, "tragic" exertions in the drama, in a way that is fundamen¬ tally reliant upon the character's inward conception of selfhood. More¬ over, the playwright has ensured that schisms existing within this mind and self will, under given pressures, yield to fracture and encourage a dismantling process toward "nothing." Lear is, in the course of the drama's early action, dismantled by the daughters who would deprive him of his knights and authority, just as he is further taken apart—"anat¬ omized"—by the storm on the heath. The potential for this disintegra¬ tion, however, is fully manifest in the composition of Lear's particular image of selfhood. Significant here is the need, on the part of the tragic dramatist, for a character or group of characters who will act as the ideal sensor or sen¬ sors for a tragic field. In the case of Agamemnon, we noted how the char¬ acter carries the field with him as an innate and perpetually exertive background of incident and interaction. In the case of Lear, by contrast, we have a figure who does not require such an elaborate background or history to bring about a tragic effect. His interior characteristics, juxta¬ posed so as to literally invoke a tragic disturbance, are more than suffi¬ cient to create a pattern of dislocation that, while not proceeding from a Greek sense of ancestral fatality, is equally inevitable. Lear's movement toward this inward separation, though by no means voluntary, is nonetheless cieliberate in that it is caused by a personality and set of convictions that cannot possibly retain their cohesiveness. I have proposed that the tragic dramatist often chooses to place, in a cen¬ tral agon, a character's determined quest for selfhood against a Dionysian

Invocations of the Tragic in King Lear

153

force that will of necessity bring about the rending of character. Such is the case with Lear, but his particular tragedy results when the effort to impose his own will and self-conception is sabotaged by the extraordi¬ nary divisiveness within that very self. Why, then, does Shakespeare send this character into a storm rather than, say, a battle? Our historical precis of interpretations suggests a number of possible replies. One might that say Lear needs to be con¬ fronted not only with a great disturbance but one that is both cosmic in its scope and chaotic in its behaviors. Perhaps he needs to be faced with a mirror of his own passion, agitation, or madness; or possibly he should be seen as instigating the storm's intensities through the exercising of these very traits. One could propose, as well, that Lear must be brought into a fierce struggle, not with a mortal opponent but with a force of Na¬ ture that will push his own nature to its limits. This character, one might say, needs to be placed in conversation with the gods, the heavens, the cosmic powers that confound him. Or, in the context of a modern read¬ ing of the play, perhaps Lear must be pitted against an adversary that is especially violent, uncaring of his needs and particularity, and one whose purpose is unknowable, nonsensical, or nonexistent. Any of these propositions could, no doubt, be used to justify the storm sequence with respect to its necessary impact upon this character and to Shakespeare's possible intentions. Another question that arises, though, concerns the degree to which the storm can be attributed to any one—or any few—of these interpretations to the exclusion of any of the others. By posing this question I do not mean to assess the pertinence of any single reading of these scenes or to ignore the fact that various understandings may find their application in the context of different eras and philosoph¬ ical climates. Instead, I am addressing the likelihood that the storm may be justified most successfully as a phenomenon that is inherently allencompassing, that resists a singular characterization in favor of a col¬ lective and, indeed, connective one. The storm may be seen, in other words, as representing a unified complex of energies—a field—yet these energies, when taken together and understood in the context of how they affect one another, may be understood as authentically "tragic" with re¬ spect to this character. A field approach, with its dependence upon the interconnective strata that may attend a singular phenomenon, is naturally an amenable one with respect to Renaissance tragedy. Shakespearean metaphor and pat¬ terns of association have a basis in the world view of the era, which was V,

I

—

suggestive in its own way of a "cosmic web." Nature was organized, in

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After Dionysus

this view, as a "chain of being" that connected human affairs to the realms of animals and of transcendent powers, and to the movements of the spheres. Significant, of course, in this connective system is the rela¬ tion of the microcosm and the macrocosm, and the correspondences that arise from a belief that each one can not only represent but can behave like the other. "Commonest of all correspondences in poetry," writes E. M. W. Tillyard, "is that between the storms and earthquakes of the great world and the stormy passions of man. And though here we are often in the realm of metaphor, it is still metaphor strengthened by literal belief. Lear in the storm provides the greatest of all examples."21 The Elizabethan audience was well-acquainted with the analogies that could be drawn from a fa¬ miliar structure of interrelated realms. As W. R. Elton writes, "Levels of existence, including human and cosmic, were habitually correlated, and correspondences and resemblances perceived everywhere. . . . Blending faith with knowledge, actuality with metaphysics, analogy also joined symbol with concept, the internal with the external world. Analogy, in¬ deed, provided the perceiver with the impression of aesthetically and philosophically comprehending experience."22 It is worth noting, however, that despite the generally complementary qualities of this system of analogies, it may also be possible to view some of these apparently reflective elements as oppositional, or as related in a specifically "tragic" way. In a recent study, McAlindon emphasizes the polarities of chaos and cosmos in King Lear, but the author's viewpoint does not conform to the generally accepted ideas concerning the "analo¬ gies" that characterized the Renaissance cosmos. McAlindon asserts that "it would be wrong to infer that correspondence is the primary inform¬ ing idea in the tragedy, since the effect of all the correspondences is to show that everywhere, at every level of reality, there is duality and op¬ position." It is, indeed, an "oppositional principle at the heart of the play" that finds its greatest expression in the storm scenes.23 Along such

21. E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (1943; New York: Vintage Books, n.d.), 93. 22. W. R. Elton, "Shakespeare and the thought of his age," in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 17-18. 23. T. McAlindon, Shakespeare's Tragic Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 159-160,163.

Invocations of the Tragic in King Lear

155

lines, the correspondences themselves would contain the necessary com¬ ponent for 'Tragic" divisiveness. The idea that Lear's interaction with the storm is paradigmatic with re¬ spect to the relation of character and cosmos—or of microcosm and macrocosm—is self-evident. Still, such an observation remains incom¬ plete with respect to the field of energies at work in these scenes. The in¬ terconnected elements that, when taken together, constitute the full pas¬ sion that is analogized by the storm must be taken into account— elements such as Lear's age, his relation to his daughters and to "filial in¬ gratitude," his kingship and loss of power, his rage and incipient mad¬ ness, and so forth. All these factors bear on one another, and a central function of the storm is to wed them in such a way that a forceful totality of elements exerts itself upon Lear all at once, as a collective passion and as a whole that transcends its component parts. Thus, the appropriateness of the storm as a tragic field arises from what I have called a cohesiveness—in this instance an ability to consoli¬ date and intensify the components of an integrated phenomenon—cou¬ pled with the overall effect of this consolidation, namely the divisive and dismantling effect on Lear's concept of selfhood and identity. The storm is "tragic" in just this way, and can be understood as appropriate to Shakespeare's dramaturgy for precisely this reason. Moreover, and as an elaboration of this idea, one might say that as a tragic phenomenon, the f storm is particularly suitable because it represents a "condition" of the tragic that is reflected in an aesthetic "process." It is not man-made, but is rather a cumulative expression of a law of nature, and of humankind's intrinsic vulnerability to interior fracture. There is yet another corre¬ spondence, in this sense, between the disjunctures within Lear's mind and the storm as a consolidation of purely divisive intensities. What Shakespeare has fashioned in the character of Lear is a singu¬ larly effective means, not only of invoking the tragic but of providing its conduit. Given the components of this characterization, the figure cannot help but draw the tragic exertion around himself. This is the process that comes to a climax in the storm scenes, and Shakespeare accomplishes it in a way that—to depart from Lamb and Bradley—is eminently theatri¬ cal as well as dramatic. Lear's invocation of the tragic is apparent in terms that are made visual and auditory as well as emotive. In the rela¬ tion of the microcosm—seen here as the "tempest" in Lear's mind—and the macrocosm of the exterior storm, there is a mutuality in which the growing chaos in the king's perception and the mounting severity of the

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weather feed one another's magnitudes in spectacle as well as in thought. Seen from this angle, Lear is not only a participant in the storm's gath¬ ering process but is the inevitable target of its explosive force. In his pas¬ sionate address to the heavens, Lear deliberately beckons the storm's en¬ ergies inward and proposes himself as the highest and most available point of grounding for its tragic lightning; he bids the storm, with its "thunderbolts," to "singe my white head" (100). Here one is reminded of Frye's observations concerning tragic heroes—that they "are so much the highest points in their human landscape that they seem the inevitable conductors of the power about them," and that such conductors "may of course be instruments as well as victims of the divine lightning."24 In the furious third act of King Lear, we are allowed to visualize the lightning, to hear the thunder, and to witness the singular and passionate struggle of this unprotected, "unaccommodated" man. A storm, as a meteorolog¬ ical phenomenon, is quite literally a "field" of energies—a collaboration of gravitational and electromagnetic forces. In Shakespeare's play, the storm can be read metaphorically as a tragic field in action, exercising its rending powers against a character who is designed for exactly this sort of confrontation. It is by no means the least of Shakespeare's achieve¬ ments in the storm scenes to have made "the tragic" overtly manifest and theatrical in the drama, in a way that is unparalleled if not unique.

24. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 207.

Tragic "Nonentity" in The Seagull

THE

FOCUS of this chapter is on a highly representative

character from the period of early modernism, Constantine Treplev, and on yet another means of associating the spiritual dismemberment that an individual figure suffers with the tragic field that brings about this re¬ sult. Once more I am concerned with the particular manner in which the dramatist—in this case, Chekhov—puts a human face on the tragic, and how, in so doing, is able to translate a fundamental condition into an artistic process. Here again the issue is not only selfhood but also "interiority// a quality that acquires a markedly different cast and complexity as one approaches the contemporary historical period. It is in this con¬ text, indeed, that Constantine Treplev will serve as an especially appro¬ priate figure for analysis. A character's interiority is, of course, the site of any disjuncture that is spiritual in nature. Nonetheless, the specific means through which an impression of inner selfhood is evoked in the drama, and the manner in which it is connected to a surrounding action, will differ considerably in accord with, among other factors, the era in which that character emerges. In the case of Constantine, indeed, we have a figure whose in¬ terior divisions and patterns of self-negation may be seen as harbingers of a more contemporary range of dispositions. In the previous chapter it was noted that Lear's inner character be¬ comes manifest in ways that are, generally speaking, highly overt. Our understanding of Lear's innermost thoughts and feelings arises not only from an observation of his behavior but from his tendency toward direct

158

After Dionysus

address. Like Hamlet and other Shakespearean heroes, Lear is predisposed to speak his mind, to engage in vociferous dialectic, to assert the range and depth of his selfhood in a manner that is assuredly deliberate. If one were to look for points of possible comparison between the characteriza¬ tions of Constantine and Lear, there would likely be few points of direct similarity, and yet one feature that can be identified is this very tendency to speak one's mind in direct address.1 Constantine has much to tell us—in his discourse with Nina, Irina, and Sorin in particular—about his loves, drives, insecurities, and ambitions. He speaks plainly, and there is no particular reason to distrust what he has to say. Yet at the same time his dialogue is laden with subtext—with what is not said, not known, not yet realized. Moreover, what is hidden in the presentation of Constantine is directly and intimately linked to what is subtextual with respect to other characters in the play, most no¬ tably his mother Irina and his love object, Nina. It is not, consequently, only the concealed motives of a singular character that we must pur¬ sue—as an actor of this role might—but rather the collective field of subtextual interrelations that mark the character's relationship to the play as a whole. The tragic field in The Seagull is identified, to a much greater degree than in the other plays examined thus far, by a nexus of purely psychic energies and motives. The dramatist himself called his play a comedy, and there are undoubtedly a number of justifications for this controver¬ sial designation, including the play's tendency to underscore a range of particular juxtapositions and ironies. Yet simply in the context of Con¬ stantine's experience in the play, which leads to his interior fragmenta¬ tion and culminates in his suicide, the drama is "tragic" in precisely the terms I have identified. There is a dismemberment of selfhood in the face of an insurmountable field of connective and divisive forces—which in this case are psychological in nature. Whereas Lear struggles against a concept of "nothing" in Shakespeare's iteration, Constantine's battle is with the designation of "nonentity," which he applies to himself early in the action in what might be understood as his own invocation of tragic energies. In order to assess how this figure proceeds from this moment of

1. While a comparison of Constantine to Lear may be less than fruitful with respect to given traits, motives, and relationships, a comparison to Hamlet—who has often been aligned in commentary with Russian characters—would yield a number of salient correla¬ tions.

Tragic "Nonentity" in The Seagull

159

self-characterization to death at his own hand, one needs to identify the psychic field to which he is bonded—and do so by primarily psychoana¬ lytic means. It is necessary, in this regard, to look not only at the interiority of this character alone but to examine a more cumulative manifestation. We must attend, in other words, to the psychic interiority of the play as a whole, as symptomatized by the collective participation of several char¬ acters who, while retaining their individuality, are nevertheless intimate participants in one another's motives and behaviors. To entertain the idea that a play—or any artistic work—may exhibit signs of its own psy¬ chic workings, while by no means unusual, may still be seen as risking a certain degree of textual anthropomorphism. Yet, while it is not my in¬ tention here to consider the broader purview of this approach to psycho¬ analytic critique, it bears noting that such a perspective may be espe¬ cially valid with respect to Chekhovian drama. Leonid Andreev, writing not many years after the first performances of The Seagull, describes what he calls the "panpsychism" in Chekhov's plays. For Andreev, Chekhov's dramas are "animated," not only by the performers and characters but by all that surrounds them, including stage properties. When these elements are taken together, all compo¬ nents of the play become "one thing," and that is "psyche." In this total world of all that is presented, Andreev finds that "Things are not so much things as the scattered thoughts and sensations of a single soul." All component parts of the drama are contributory to "panpsychism," and these are felt "not as items from reality or true-to-life-sound and its utterance, but as the protagonists' thoughts and sensations disseminated throughout space."2 While Andreev is not referring here to The Seagull— or any one play—specifically, he is identifying a phenomenon that he sees as characteristic of Chekhovian drama generally, one that empha¬ sizes what is shared or collective as opposed to what accrues to indi¬ vidual figures alone. It is an idea that resembles what Andrey Bely calls the "spirit of music" in Chekhovian drama, a spirit that can "penetrate all the characters of a given play equally." Every character is, for Bely, a "string in the general chord" of the play.3

2. Leonid Andreev, "Letters on the Theatre," in Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists, translated and edited by Laurence Senelick (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 239-241. 3. Andrey Bely, "The Cherry Orchard," in Senelick, Russian Dramatic Theory, 91.

160

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Of particular interest here is the "space," to borrow Andreev's word, within which this panpsychic activity is manifest. Andreev describes this space in terms that refer to elements that are external—including objects and scenic components—and also with reference to what is internal and sensate, pertaining to the thoughts and feelings of the characters. It is this very evocation of an inclusive dramatic space that suggests a means of approaching the psychic interiority of The Seagull, a means of taking into account what is manifest in the drama on the mimetic level and at the same time relating these factors to the submerged strata of ideation that also characterize the play's "single soul." Proceeding from such a model of collective interiority, we will be prepared to consider the accumula¬ tion of psychic effects—in this case, the tragic field—in which the char¬ acter of Constantine is both participant and inevitable victim. The challenge, then, is to find an appropriate access to this psychic in¬ teriority, one that will emphasize the collective dynamics and at the same time reveal the tragic effect on a single representation of selfhood. To this end I will use an ordinary term—"entrance"—to denote those moments in the manifest action of The Seagull that can most effectively lead into the "space" of the play's interior dynamics. In consideration of the play at large, one might naturally look for those symptoms, as they appear in dialogue and interaction, that will provide a suitable means of diagnosis. What I am looking for, however, is not merely symptomatol¬ ogy; rather, I mean to identify points of access that will provide not only windows on the play's interiority but vectorial lines of approach that can probe that interior and suggest relationships with other trajectories of entrance. As a ready example of this type of access, we might look first at what the play offers in its opening moments, in these familiar lines between the schoolteacher and the young woman that he admires: Medvedenko. Why do you wear black all the time? Masha. I'm in mourning for my life. I'm unhappy. (73)4

It is much too early in the action for this statement by Masha to carry the degree of implication it might later on, when we are better acquainted

4. All quotations from the text of The Seagull are taken from Five Major Plays by Anton Chekhov, translated and introduced by Ronald Hingley (New York: Bantam Books, 1982); page numbers are given parenthetically in the text.

Tragic "Nonentity" in The Seagull

161

with her circumstances. Seen as an introduction to one of the drama's primary fixations, however, the line refers to considerably more than Masha's disillusionment and self-dramatization. The reference, indeed, is to a funereal obsession that will infuse the play throughout. The con¬ tinual allusions—on the part of several of the characters—to dying, bur¬ ial, and the grave, creates the impression of a pervasive attitude that be¬ longs not only to Masha. "Mourning," in fact, is at large among the people who congregate at Sorin's estate. More than a recurrent motif in the dialogue, it is rather a primary psychic predisposition that influences the action of The Seagull and affects the various characters, to a greater or lesser extent, simultaneously. "Desire" is another such predisposition; and moreover, it exists as the opposing strain, and the dialectical partner, to "mourning" in the play's sub textual strata. Masha, in mourning her life, is the negative of desire. Nothing she believes she has wanted in her life has come to be, nor will it. Sorin, as the self-characterized "Man Who Wanted," provides an ex¬ emplary case of an expression of desire that is continually foiled, a lifepattern of thwarted "wants." Desire, like mourning, is also at large and pervasive in The Seagull's interactions and utterances. One finds it in Nina's yearning to be free and be loved, in Irina's yearning to be loved and to be young, in the wanting on the part of several characters for a re¬ quited passion or an alternative future. With these polarities in mind, one can point—as Lacan does in his discussion of Hamlet—to the primary strains of mourning and desire as salient in the drama, if not strictly in Lacanian terms.5 My reference to desire, in fact, pertains to its ordinary usage—as wishing for a defined object or specified goal—and also to Lacan's sense of a motive that is perpetually unfulfilled and displaced, and which implies a continual state of "lack."6 My allusions to mourning are to the natural reaction that attends a loss or death, but also—and more significantly—to an

5. Jacques Lacan, "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet/' Yale French Studies 55-56 (1978): 11-52. 6. Jacqueline Rose describes Lacanian desire as "the 'remainder' of the subject, some¬ thing which is always left over, but which has no content as such. Desire functions much as the zero unit in the numerical chain—its place is both constitutive and empty" (Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds.. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne, trans. Rose [New York: W. W. Norton, 1985], 32). Or, in Anthony Wilden's words, "we do not desire objects, we desire desire itself" (System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange [New York: Tavistock Publications, 1980], 22-23).

i6z

After Dionysus

attitude that characterizes the expectation of such loss. Death and be¬ reavement are ever-present in The Seagull, not only in the sense of being talked about but also in the way they are dreaded and anticipated at virtually any moment. There is a pervasive sorrow over absences, whether for Nina's absent mother or Constantine's absent father, or for the more generalized losses of youth and opportunity. It is this under¬ lying expression of sorrow—coupled with an ever-present prospect of loss, as opposed to active grief—that infuses the play's action as "mourning." My proposition is that these two primary energies, which are symptomatized in the play's manifest action but whose exertion occurs in the subtextual or submerged strata of action, are most succinctly embodied in the characters of Irina (mourning) and Nina (desire). I find a strong in¬ dication that when The Seagull is examined in the context of these anti¬ thetical strains, the action can be characterized according to two dra¬ matic and oppositional patterns—or, in the simplest terms, as Irina's play and Nina's. Moreover, and most significantly in terms of this dis¬ cussion, it is the character of Constantine who is caught in the dissonance between these polarities. This is precisely the setting in which this figure becomes "tragic," in that his conception of selfhood is rended by a field of related energies, a field identified in this case by the cohesive and yet divisive interplay of mourning and desire. We have seen that Chekhov begins the play with a signal that mourn¬ ing will be among its preoccupations. Looking further at the early action, we see that the dramatist has placed the character of Constantine directly between the two primary exertive strains, as personified by Irina and Nina. Soon after the play begins, Constantine and Sorin are in discus¬ sion, the ostensible context being their anticipation of the performance of Constantine's play. The focus of their interchange, however, is on Con¬ stantine's relationship to his mother ("She loves me, she loves me not") and her associations with the successful artists and writers—including, of course, Trigorin—whom Constantine seems to envy. Their discussion is interrupted, significantly, by the arrival of the breathless Nina, Constantine's other love object and the sole actress in his play. When viewed in the context I am describing, even this early se¬ quence in the action shows Constantine as caught between the two com¬ pelling forces represented by Irina and Nina. In time, the inevitable effect of this juxtaposition will be a bifurcation, a literal and unsurvivable tear¬ ing of Constantine's character and selfhood in two directions. As a sig-

Tragic "Nonentity" in The Seagull

163

nificant early portent of this effect, the character describes himself to Sorin as a "nonentity" with respect to the artistic friends of his mother. Again, this self-characterization is prophetic; as a tragic invocation, it points directly at Constantine's trajectory toward interior fragmentation and death. It is in the context of this tragic dialectic, then, that we look for "en¬ trance" into The Seagull's drama of mourning and desire. The effort is to locate symptomatic moments—an interaction, a line of dialogue, a reac¬ tion on the part of a character—that will provide not only interpretive ac¬ cess but an interior vector and pattern of association within the play's collective "panpsychism." Keeping in mind the incipient quality of mourning that pervades the play, one might look for another point of en¬ trance, apart from Masha's appearance in funeral black, that will signal this prospect and expand its range of implications.

Irina's Terror Sorin. You're a nice, kind woman. I think highly of you, indeed I do. But there's something wrong with me again. (Staggers.) I feel dizzy. (Grips the table.) I feel unwell and so on. Irina (terrified). Peter! (Trying to support him.) Peter, darling! (Shouts.) Help me! Help! (106) Sorin recovers quickly from this incident in act 3, and Constantine as¬ sures his mother that she need not be frightened. Near the play's end, however, Irina is once again summoned to the estate because of her brother's ill health. She is, in fact, put in a more or less continuous posi¬ tion of responding to her brother's maladies. In the exchange above, Irina is "terrified" at what appears to be Sorin's imminent collapse. But why should her reaction be so extreme, especially if such lapses are not uncommon? The answer, I believe, lies not in what has actually oc¬ curred—perhaps only a passing moment of dizziness for Sorin—but in what Irina expects to happen. Her anxiety is so marked because she con¬ tinually imagines her brother's death to be near. Her "terror," conse¬ quently, arises from the anticipation of a sudden loss and grief that she knows are promised. Late in act 3, when Irina is bidding farewell to those who remain at the estate, she suggests that they may all be together the following summer.

164

After Dionysus

"if we're alive and well." This reference, in the context of her ongoing anxiety, must be seen as having a double edge. On one level, it simply points to the possibility of a cheerful reunion among friends and rela¬ tions; yet at the same time a doubt is implied, as is the possibility that they may likely meet again when all of them are not "alive and well" but when Irina must once again attend to her brother's debility, if not his death. Irina's terror concerns not only the prospect of Sorin's death but the implications of her own aging process. Indeed, the prospective loss of youthfulness, vitality, and attractiveness is on Irina's mind through much of the action. In act 2 she asks Dorn whether she or Masha appears the youngest. When Dorn responds predictably that Irina does, she re¬ sponds, "Exactly. And why? Because I work, I feel. I'm always on the go, while you just stay put—you're only half alive. And I make it a rule not to look into the future, I never think of growing old and dying. What is to be will be" (90). Given Irina's evident preoccupation concerning her age (which Constantine has already described), it is difficult to accept such a line at face value. The more likely implication is that Irina regu¬ larly looks into the future, precisely because it holds so much dread for her. She continually thinks about "growing old and dying" because this unalterable process impacts so strongly upon her career as an actress, her self-image, and her perception of her own sexual appeal. Irina's fear of aging is made all the more acute by the presence of Nina, and in particular by the threat that the younger actress may become Trigorin's lover. When Irina confronts Trigorin with his infatuation, he ad¬ mits to an attraction: Trigorin. You know how people sometimes sleep-walk? Talking to you now, I feel as if I was asleep, dreaming of her. I'm possessed by visions of delight. Do set me free. Irina (trembling). No, no, no. You can't talk to me like that. I'm only an ordi¬ nary woman. Don't torture me, Boris. I'm terrified. Her "terror" increases, and as the sequence continues, we see her fear¬ fulness transformed into pretense—here the portrayal of a much younger woman. In Chekhov's direction, Irina kneels beside Trigorin, grasps his knees, and kisses his hands: My dear, reckless boy, you want to do something crazy, but I won't have it, I won't let you. (Laughs.) You're mine, mine, mine. This forehead's mine.

Tragic "Nonentity" in The Seagull

165

these eyes are mine, this lovely silky hair's mine, too. You're mine, all of you. You're so brilliant, so clever, you're the best writer of our day.... (109-110) She calls herself the "only one who tells you the truth, my wonderful darling," thereby setting herself apart from another, presumably Nina. And yet we have just witnessed Irina in the act of becoming what she imagines Nina to be, enacting the superficial effects that she assumes the younger woman must exert on the infatuated Trigorin. Here again is an expression of Irina's "terror." In her impossible attempt to "be" Nina— the woman who can transport Trigorin into what he has called a "makebelieve world"—she reveals her stark fear at the prospect of a decline that she knows is already in progress. Irina's terror is the extreme example of a generalized fearfulness in the face of aging, debility, and death that marks the other characters as well, and which has its basis in the play's underlying matrix of mourning. Yet because this mourning is pervasive in the play's action, the grief which is expected among the characters can find no single outlet or cathartic mo¬ ment. There is a free-floating preoccupation with bereavement, and one can sense in this a characteristic symptom of Freud's "melancholia": a feeling of "unknown loss" that attends to no specified source of grief.7 Like Masha, The Seagull is in mourning without a death—at least until its final moments. At that point, of course, the generalized and diffuse pat¬ tern of expected loss will be coalesced around a real and immediate death: the suicide of Constantine. Mourning, at this final stage of the ac¬ tion, is no longer characterized by anxiety or expectation; it becomes fully actualized in the drama and personified in character. Here, in brief outline, is the dramatic pattern in The Seagull that I have called "Irina's play." Her "terror," when seen not only as a symptom of one woman's emotional state but as a term of entrance into the play's substrates, leads directly from her reaction to Sorin's debility into the dramatics of mourning and desire. In its vectorial pattern, "terror" con¬ nects the manifest action of the play with the antithetical tension be¬ tween its primary underlying matrices—and with the dynamic field of interaction that marks the play's psychic interiority. The full impress of this interior drama will come to bear on Constantine, with the result that

7. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," in A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. John Rickman (New York: Anchor Books, 1957), 127.

i66

After Dionysus

I indicated earlier in regard to a conception of selfhood. In order to ap¬ prehend the full effect of this exertion on his character, however, it is nec¬ essary to look closely at a representation of The Seagull's drama of de¬ sire—that is, at "Nina's play."

Nina's Dream Nina (comes to the front of the stage, after some reflection). It's all a dream. (101)

The Seagull is so rife with allusions to "dream" that one can safely look beyond the many individual references made by the various characters to the manner in which dreaming—and nightmares—are, as analogs of desire and mourning, symptomatic of the play's sub-drama. Even as many of the characters refer to dreams and dreaming, however, it is in Nina that we find the most concentrated and potent representation of the dream motif and its connection to the play's drama of desire. Nina's ar¬ dent wish to be on the stage—"Oh, that's what I dream of"—is but one symptom of a more pervasive state of dreaming that, through this char¬ acter, is rooted in the matrix of desire. As a term of entrance, therefore, I propose not only to consider the implications of this line ("It's all a dream") but to deliberately stretch the potential range of its implications. For these purposes then, I will take the line simply at face value, assum¬ ing not only that "all" of what Nina responds to is a dream but that the dream referred to is her own. My aim here is to assess what emerges from The Seagull's psychic infe¬ riority if the play's action is understood as a dream—or, indeed, as Nina's lucid dream, one that is to some degree self-aware and which con¬ tains an element of cogent, if subconscious, purpose. One might imagine, in this scenario, that as a lucid dreamer Nina is able to invent coherent projections of her inmost wishes and dreads, that she can direct the ac¬ tion of the dream to some degree, and also perform the role of herself in both a literal and a symbolic enactment. Simply put, my intention is to consider Nina's "dreamwork" as a symbolic manifestation of The Sea¬

gull's latent and interiorized content. As such, her dream pattern reflects one of the stronger exertions in the play's sub-drama, in that it embodies a powerful gravitation toward desire and away from mourning. In fact, Nina's dreaming can be seen—within the hypothetical context that I am proposing—as a deliberately constructed means of access to desire and escape from mourning. Significantly, and with respect to the purely

Tragic "Nonentity" in The Seagull

167

"tragic" effect of this sub-drama, it is notably Constantine whom Nina must dream her way free of. In the imagery of Nina's "dream," The Seagull proposes the extremes of black and white as symbolic of mourning and desire. Two of the more potent images in the dream are the funeral dress in which she costumes Masha and the white bird that signifies her own purity, vulnerability (as potential victim), and impulse toward the desired goals of freedom and flight. Masha, in this opposition, is Nina's negative double, a dreamed projection of her gravest apprehensions and dreads. The Masha who mourns her life is utterly defeated by the existence that she helplessly acts out. She takes refuge in alcohol and cynicism, loves the wrong man, and marries another wrong man only to have babies she does not want. Rather than find a means of freeing herself, Masha can only solidify the walls of her own prison. She is, in other words, the direct opposite of Nina's image of desire fulfilled, an image of reciprocal love, rewarded artistry, and—on the subconscious level—a successful transaction with literal, symbolic, or substitute parents. For the dreamer, consequently, Masha is a warning personified; as the negative of desire, she embodies what Nina must never become. The seagull, by contrast, is the symbol Nina assigns to herself, the sig¬ nificance of which she alludes to early on but fully discovers only through the development of the drama's overall action, that is, in the course of her dream work. In this context, the seagull is less important as a means to suggest someone else's (Trigorin's) "plot for a short story" than as an instigating image for Nina's own plot—the idea for a dream. Nina fears becoming, like the seagull, a helpless victim, but she also dreads becoming a fiction—that is, the inauthentic projection of someone else's needs, demands, or "story." Her tactic in the dream, therefore, is to cast herself in an alternative "plot"—one that belongs (she believes) only to her as dreamer, and one that can provide access to the imagined yet authentic self that is the true target of her desire's gravitation. In this re¬ spect, significantly, it is not only Constantine but also Nina who kills the seagull. She does so first of all by imagining Constantine's apparently senseless act and then—at the dream's end—by transcending the sym¬ bolic status that she herself has assigned to its victim, leaving the seagull as a stuffed relic before Trigorin's unrecognizing eyes. The Sorin estate, in Nina's view, is a dreamworld indeed, a physically beautiful and enchanting territory populated by the artists she admires. When she arrives there in act 1, the dreamer is in a marked state of anxi¬ ety and excitement, afraid because she is violating her parent's wishes

168

After Dionysus

but at the same time thrilled with her temporary escape. She breathlessly describes the landscape she has crossed—the red sky, the rising moon— but the dream's imagery soon becomes that of the play by Constantine in which she is featured. Here we have her projected fantasy of a deadened future world in which she emerges as the "World Spirit" who can "relive in my own being every other life"—in itself a barely disguised iteration of her ambition to succeed as an actress. Earlier, Nina has been charac¬ terized by Constantine as a "prisoner" in her parent's house. Now, in the context of his play, she proclaims: Like a prisoner flung into a deep, empty well, I know not where I am or what awaits me. All is hidden from me except that in the cruel, unrelenting struggle with the Devil, the principle of Material Force, I am destined to tri¬ umph. (82) The play is abruptly cut short, but Nina has already used it to portray herself as a prisoner, to imagine the battle that lies ahead for her, and to signal her ultimate victory. In the context of her parental associations— both literal and associative—this victory can be seen not only as the win¬ ning of personal freedom (the prisoner released from the well) but as her triumph over a dominant father figure, projected here first as the Devil. One readily senses, as the dream progresses, that Nina is fearful of Constantine, although she has little understanding—at first—of why this should be so. Medvedenko remarks, near the dream's beginning, that Nina and Constantine are "in love and this evening they'll be spiritually united in the effort to present a unified work of art" (73). While Nina may realize intuitively that she is "spiritually united" with Constantine, it is not as his lover but rather within a familial dynamic that she subcon¬ sciously knows is a threat to her. When she tells him there are "no living people" in his play, she is voicing her dread of being personally drawn into the deadened world the play refers to—that is, the realm of mourn¬ ing. When he responds by saying that life should be shown "as we see it in our dreams," he is stating precisely what the dreamer herself is in¬ tending. However, in her own "unified work of art," in her dream, Nina will be sure to incorporate what she tells Constantine a play needs—a "love interest." Nina's repressed fear of Constantine comes fully to the surface in the second act when he shoots and kills the seagull, the symbol she has taken as her own. When he lays the dead bird at her feet, she asks, "What does that signify?"—and, after some further exchange, says, "I'm too simple

Tragic "Nonentity" in The Seagull

169

to understand you" (96). But Nina is not "too simple" to understand the seagull as her signifier; it is merely too early in the dream for her to have fully deciphered its meaning. When Nina picks up the fallen bird in this sequence, she is enacting an early attempt to nurture and protect herself. In dreaming this particular interaction, she is deliberately warning her¬ self of the danger Constantine represents, and assuring herself that as a lucid dreamer she recognizes a threat. When Constantine departs, of course, Nina's "love interest" enters the dream in the person of Trigorin. It is the exchange between the two of them, with the dead seagull lying on the bench throughout, that leads directly to the writer's "plot for a short story" and also to the dreamer's alternative plot: "It's all a dream." During act 3, Nina's vulnerability to Trigorin increases notably, and she has no interaction whatsoever with Constantine. The dreamer identi¬ fies her love interest with a father substitute, and she yields herself com¬ pletely to this father/lover. Presenting Trigorin with a medallion that has one of his own lines inscribed on it, Nina spells out this vulnerability: "If you should ever need my life, then come and take it" (109). This is the ac¬ tion that ultimately contributes not to the dream of fulfilled desire but to the nightmare that ensues after her affair with the older man—abandon¬ ment, a dead child, and ostracism. In the third act, though, we still see the dreamer confusing "father" and "lover," as she remains torn between impulses to be loved and to be free of an imprisoning relationship. Both impulses are enacted at once, at the close of the act when Nina tells Trig¬ orin, "I'm leaving Father and throwing everything up to start a new life." At this point the father/lover tells her where to meet him in Moscow, and the act concludes with "a lengthy kiss" (113). In act 4, the nightmarish tone returns, beginning with a vision of Masha, the negative of Nina's desire, in her hellish marriage to Medvedenko. The setting is no longer the enchanting location that Nina comes upon at the dream's beginning. Now it is dark, the wind is howling, and the stage where Constantine's play was performed is, in Medvedenko's words, "bare and ugly as a skeleton." The action proceeds toward the ag¬ itated sequence near the play's end, when Nina and Constantine con¬ front one another and she dreams herself free, not only from him but from all those who would make her a victim. Nina insists, in this se¬ quence, upon being an "actress" and not a "seagull," and here again we have an indication of the primary direction of her desire. Not only has she struggled to free herself of familial and Oedipal entrapments, but she has fought to make the "plot" her own and to identify her own freedom and selfhood in a way Constantine cannot possibly manage.

170

After Dionysus

Treplev (sadly). You've found your road and you know where you're going, while I still drift about in a maze of dreams and images, not knowing who needs my stuff or why. (128) While Constantine is still caught in his "maze of dreams," Nina, having "found her road," can awaken. She has found, in fact, the road of her de¬ sire, which may or may not lead to success or fulfillment on the stage but will, at the very least, lead away from the world of mourning and vic¬ timization that she rejects. As the play comes to an end, Nina recites a passage from Constantine's play that predicts a lifeless world—and then she quickly exits. The dreamer's rejection of the world of mourning, and of those who would draw her into it, is punctuated by a single rifle shot. It is, of course, the case that the process of dreaming belongs not only to Nina but to many of The Seagull's characters, and in this sense the many references to dreams are evidence of a drama that is more collabo¬ rative than individualized. Nonetheless, it is through the term of en¬ trance associated with Nina, described here as the foremost agent of the play's dreaming tendency, that one finds a direct connection between the manifest action and the sub-drama of mourning and desire. "Dream," as one vector into the play's psychic interiority, is the primary indicator of the force of desire that is exerted upon the overt action, whereas "terror" proposes incipient mourning as the equally pervasive influence. Desire, as embodied in Nina, must not succumb to mourning, as represented by Irina, Masha, or Constantine. Thus, the manifest action of the play di¬ rectly mirrors the perpetual underlying conflict between these matrices, a struggle enacted within the total "space" of the play's "panpsychic" in¬ teriority. In the context of this entrance into the drama's collective psy¬ che, one could say that even as The Seagull "dreams" desire, its concur¬ rent and complementary nightmare is of mourning.

Constantine and Nonentity" "

The two terms—"mourning" and "desire"—are complementary in the sense that one is the negative reflector of the other in the sub-drama of The

Seagull; however, they are also antagonistic, insofar as their coexistence implies an active conflict between diametrically opposed tendencies. Be¬ cause of this mutuality, the exertion of the two stresses needs to be under¬ stood in collective terms or, indeed, as a single field of action that under¬ lies the manifest drama of the play. At the same time, this field asks to be identified in "tragic" terms, as one that is both cohesive and divisive with

Tragic "Nonentity" in The Seagull

171

respect to character. In the analysis thus far, I have focused on the degree to which certain characters in the play—Irina and Nina, in particular—are strongly representative of one of these strains over the other. It is, how¬ ever, in the representation of selfhood afforded by Constantine Treplev that one finds an embodiment of both forces in severe and concentrated opposition. In this situation, the Dionysian effect becomes inevitable, and the character cannot withstand the rending tension of the field that sur¬ rounds and includes him. Here the factors of desire and mourning are made to cohabit in a manner that can only lead to interior disjuncture. To a large degree, the tragic effect arises in this case from the relation of the one character's interiority to that of the play as a whole. That is, even when examining the internal promptings of this one character—or this one "mind"—one cannot help but consider the degree to which an ex¬ pression of Constantine's nature is inextricably wedded to the "panpsy¬ chism" of the play at large. The stresses that have been identified in the play's sub-drama are, of necessity, manifest in the nature and the behav¬ ior of its characters. It is, however, only in the case of Constantine where the embodiment is such that one term is not strongly prevalent over the other. In his case alone, the conflict between these opposed influences is so acute that, in effect, they cancel one another out, leaving only a void. The void in Constantine's character is what leads to his selfacknowledged, and then fully realized, status as "nonentity." It is sig¬ naled by a pattern of absences, and of Lacanian "lack," that finally re¬ duces the possibility of exertive selfhood to zero. Constantine is, at first, merely ineffectual; but in the face of the inescapable mechanisms of the play's interior drama he becomes utterly powerless and without alterna¬ tives. In order to correlate the simple ineffectuality of the character with this more profound situation, it will be useful to examine a final point of "entrance"—one that connects the manifest action of The Seagull to the interior world where Constantine is also a participant:

Irina (tenderly). And you make it up to him, too. We can't have a duel, can we? Treplev. All right. But I don't want to meet him, Mother, do you mind? This business depresses me, I can't cope (Trigorin comes in.) Treplev. Oh—I'll go. (109) Constantine's confession—"I can't cope"—coming as it does after the in¬ tensely emotional and revelatory confrontation with Irina in act 3, provides

172

After Dionysus

a key point of access to a character marked by a generalized state of powerlessness. This figure is, in fact, virtually immobilized by the com¬ plex of familial relationships—some literal, others symbolic—that beset him on all sides. The true nature of these relationships is, quite naturally, a mystery to the person who both represents and contains them. Apart from those alliances, familial and otherwise, that are manifest in The

Seagull's overt drama, the relationships to which Constantine is in thrall exist primarily in the play's subconscious strata, and in what Lacan would call "the discourse of the Other."8 It is, in fact, this character's utter inability to recognize or make sense of the complex of forces ex¬ erted around him that leads him, first, to the state of extreme apprehen¬ siveness that is evident in this moment with Irina and Trigorin, and fi¬ nally to the only action he can conceive of that will solve—or bring closure to—his situation. To say that Constantine is ineffectual does not mean that he makes no effort toward a realized selfhood. Quite the opposite is true, and from the play's early moments onward—from the presentation of his play through the interactions with Irina, Nina, and others—he makes a more or less continual, if vain, attempt to find the appropriate access to such a realization. These attempts, however, can only be futile. Constantine is caught within an incomplete Oedipal triangle, the third party to which, though influential, is missing: no father is present. When the triangle threatens to renew and complete itself with the addition of Trigorin—the suitor to Irina and a potent artist—Constantine still cannot pursue the "duel" that would be part of his Oedipal drama's symbolic enactment. Indeed, in the passage quoted earlier, we see this very triangle take form on stage—at the moment of Trigorin's arrival—and just as it does so, Constantine must hurriedly exit. Yet even if Irina were to marry, plac¬ ing Trigorin more directly in the father role, Constantine would still not act out his Oedipal duel. The vacuum that has been left to him by the lost, real father cannot be filled—by Trigorin or anyone else. Here again is a direct reflection of The Seagull's sub-drama of mourning and desire, which in the case of Constantine produces an overriding sense of an unfillable absence. The "business" that "depresses" Constantine at this point is the dimly perceived shadow of an important familial nexus—de-

8. Lacan's “formula" (“the unconscious is the discourse of the Other") is referred to in one instance in his “Seminar on The Purloined Letter/" trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, in The Pur¬ loined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 32.

Tragic "Nonentity" in The Seagull

173

sire (for mother-love) complicated and intensified by mourning (for the lost father). Constantine can find no means of making this drama his own, or of making these conflicts tangible. For him, desire can only be misdirected, while mourning remains unacknowledged. His overt wishes—to prove himself an artist and an "entity," to woo Nina—are but the manifesta¬ tions of a more profound desire, and one that can only come up against unmendable gaps. It is precisely in this sense, in which the character is made to confront a hopeless void no matter his efforts to the contrary, that Constantine's position is untenable and finally unsurvivable. What he believes he wants at any particular stage of action is always eclipsed by his unconscious demands, the nature of which he hasn't the tools to discover. Much in the manner of Lacan's Hamlet, Constantine is a figure "who has lost the way of his desire."9 Even when he sabotages the performance of his own play (while blaming his mother), Constantine seems to be dimly aware that this artistic effort, ostensibly designed to explore new dramatic ground and to redefine himself in the eyes of Irina and Nina, will not be adequate to fill the persistent absences in his existence. His debt is to the unconscious drama, to the drama of Lacan's "Other," a psychic terrain to which he lacks passage. Indeed, Constantine is utterly at the mercy of the psychic "Other," the unrealized mechanisms of which can only deny him selfhood and autonomy. The achievement of self¬ hood, in truth, is precisely what is made impossible in this context.10 With reference to Lacan's essay on desire in Hamlet, one can see in The

Seagull, too—and especially with respect to Constantine—"the extent to which the play is dominated by the Mother as Other."11 Constantine stabs verbally at Irina just as Hamlet stabs blindly at the arras, but Con¬ stantine—like Lacan's Hamlet—is fatefully unaware of what his target truly is. In the play's first interaction between Constantine and Sorin, the older man insists, "your mother adores you," at which point Constantine plucks the petals from a flower in the familiar cadence of loves me, loves

9. Lacan, "Desire," 12. 10. Malcolm Bowie comments, "More consistently than any other of Lacan's terms, 'the Other' refuses to yield to a single sense; in each of its incarnations it is that which introduces 'lack' and 'gap' into the operations of subject and which, in doing so, incapacitates the sub¬ ject for selfhood, or inwardness, or apperception, or plenitude, or mutuality; it guarantees the indestructibility of desire by keeping the goals of desire in perpetual flight" (Freud, Proust, and Lacan: Theon/ as Fiction [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 117). 11. Lacan, "Desire," 12.

174

After Dionysus

me not. He concludes, "Mother doesn't love me," but this is in fact the only possible outcome of his game—the flower as feminine signifier will always, for Constantine, have the odd number of petals. Irina cannot "adore" Constantine, not merely because his presence reminds her of her lost youth, but because she too is a participant in the incomplete Oedipal triangle. Bereft of her absent husband, she scornfully assigns Constan¬ tine to that man's prior role, as "provincial shopkeeper," and calls him a "nobody" (108). In spite of such deprecations, though, Constantine must continue to pursue his Oedipal quest; he must go on courting Irina's love and respect, in the vain effort to fill the gap of his parentage and to achieve the full status of "entity," as both the beloved son and admired artist. Constantine's quest for selfhood is further stymied by the fact that he is caught up in a phase of childhood. In act 3, in the scene with Irina re¬ ferred to earlier, he says, "Just lately, these last few days, I find I love you as tenderly and devotedly as when I was a little boy" (107). It is part of the pathos of this character that he no doubt believes his feelings here to be characteristic of "these last few days," when in fact his status as "little boy" is constant and, in the context of his subconscious familial pattern, unalterable. This status derives as much from his relationship to Nina as to Irina. Ostensibly, and in the play's manifest action, Constantine pur¬ sues Nina as an object of sexual love. But he is truly not, in his subcon¬ scious motive, in search of a lover; rather, he is expressing what for him can only be incestuous desire. In Nina, Constantine finds not a lover but a surrogate sister. To illus¬ trate this hypothesis, it will be useful to propose a psychological geogra¬ phy for the play. Here, the play's territory is not simply a rural district where two estates (Sorin's and that of Nina's father) exist in close prox¬ imity. In the context of the play's interiority, one might envision a psy¬ chic landscape that can be represented by two triangles, one beside the other and each signaling an Oedipal configuration. Constantine exists in one of these triangles (with a mother and an absent father—and the fa¬ ther's possible replacement), while Nina abides in the other one (with a father and the stepmother who has replaced her natural parent). In their respective triangles, Constantine and Nina both occupy the child posi¬ tion, and it is indeed this status that defines their intercourse, not the possibility of physical union. Both of these characters exist within a familial structure that is perpet¬ ually incomplete. Thus, when Nina comes over to the Sorin estate that she is so fond of, she is seeking not only an escape from the claustropho-

Tragic "Nonentity" in The Seagull

*75

bic strictness of her household; she is subconsciously looking for the truer parents—the artist parents—that she desires. In reference to our tri¬ angular model, when she arrives at the Sorin estate in act 1, breathless and excited, she has crossed not just a physical terrain but a psychic ge¬ ography between these Oedipal structures, hoping subconsciously to re¬ configure her familial drama. (She will, of course, end up by creating an¬ other triangle, this time with a dead child and a father who abandons them.) It is a bond of absence that draws Constantine and Nina together, but only in the context of a psychically related brother and sister in search of parents. Consequently, it is predictable that Nina's quest leads her not to Constantine but to Trigorin; here the sexual union is possible, whereas it never could be with the younger man. Constantine is arrested at the incestual phase, yet he cannot act out the confusion of his incestu¬ ous impulses. Constantine's drama is continually transacted at the crossroads of mourning and desire. Strictly in Lacanian terms, he is in "mourning for the phallus" as the signifier of (displaced) desire.12 In this context, the void in Constantine can be seen as a function of desire in purely Lacan¬ ian terms—as a displacement, or condition of inevitable unfulfillment— but also as a function of mourning that is, in this relation, quite specifi¬ cally a grief for the absences that result from unmet desire. The connection of these two terms, in the case of Constantine, creates an ef¬ fect of mutual self-cancellation and a condition of absence that the sub¬ ject cannot survive. In the context of The Seagull's manifest action, the void that Constantine confronts is accentuated by a series of "tragic" rifts and separations. Constantine is, in the course of the play, utterly sepa¬ rated from all he believes he wants—artistic success, the love of his mother and of Nina, acceptance as a respected "entity"—those factors, in other words, that comprise for him an image of realized and successful selfhood. Whom did Constantine mean to slaughter when he chose the seagull as a substitute? Unable to "kill" the absent father, or Trigorin in the imagined duel, or the "impossible as object of desire"13 as incarnate in Nina, Constantine can produce only a symbolic votive offering, the sig¬ nificance of which he marginally perceives as connected to his own selfannihilation—"I shall soon kill myself in the same way" (96). With his suicide at the play's end, the condition of "nonentity," which is reiterated

12. Ibid., 46-49. 13. Ibid., 36.

176

After Dionysus

in the final scene with Nina, is fully and tragically achieved. The pattern of absence that is in this case the inevitable by-product of the play of mourning and desire finds its analog not only in the void in Constan¬ tine's character but in that character's own self-cancellation. It should be noted that, as a term of entrance into the play's interiority, Constantine's inability to "cope," and his status as "nonentity," are to some degree symptomatic of a condition that all of The Seagull's characters share. These factors are, in other words, representative of a condition of ab¬ sence, of gaps in existence, for which the other characters continually at¬ tempt to compensate. But Constantine's is the extreme case, and it is within the interiority of this one figure that the antagonisms within the play's tragic field reach their most acute and concentrated expression. At the end of The Seagull, just prior to the suicide, Constantine says to his love object, "Nina, I cursed you, hated you, tore up your letters and photographs, but all along I've known that my whole being is bound up with you for ever. I can't help loving you, Nina" (127). In his confusion of love and hate, he cannot possibly realize the extent to which he is "bound up" with her, or the degree of their mutual participation in the drama of mourning and desire. Within the "cosmos" of The Seagull's psy¬ chic interiority, this character can only be left powerless, unable to rewrite his drama, unable to stop miscasting its participants, and with only one recourse that remains. The end that is reached by Constantine Treplev is authentically "tragic" in precisely the terms that I have set forth: in the face of a collective field of related but divisive energies, an image of selfhood is dismembered, leaving only a condition of unmendable fracture.

Afterword: The Face of the Tragic

EVEN IF there is no one face that can be assigned to the multi¬ form Dionysus, there remains the face of dramatic character, individu¬ ated and specific, that continues under tragic circumstances to stand for the Dionysian experience. And here again it is necessary to differentiate "the tragic" from "tragedy," so as to emphasize that a character such as Constantine Treplev can be understood as equally representative of an array of dismembering energies, originally associated with the ancient god and sparagmos, that I have identified in relation to characters in the Attic and Renaissance settings. Unlike Agamemnon and Lear, Constan¬ tine Treplev is not a figure of tragedy per se. Still, he presents us with a highly representative case of the process of the tragic as it is exerted upon character in drama. He stands, in this regard, for yet another in¬ stance in which both the tragic condition and is aesthetic process can be understood on their own terms, apart from the implications of tragedy it¬ self. In this context, indeed, he is but one of the many characters in drama who, though not participants in high tragedy, are rent by tragic energies and suffer the requisite dismemberment of self. Still, and in spite of this similarity, the manner of Constantine's death provides for a significant point of differentiation. Even as the event of suicide may occur in the drama of other ages—as in the Hippolytus, say, or

Romeo and Juliet—the death of Constantine has a distinctly modern con¬ notation. The gunshot that ends The Seagull may be echoed in the play's own time in Hedda Gabler, yet there is also a resonance with later dramas, and with a mood that has been more characteristic of the contemporary era. For Constantine, the act of suicide is not only one of extreme nega¬ tion of selfhood but one that proceeds from an unfillable void within his

178

Afterword

character and in his circumstances. It is an act that results primarily from the character's interior workings, and those of the play itself, rather than from the externalized action. It is here that his experience of nullity is suggestive of more recent con¬ ceptions of existential "nothingness," and of a dramatic world more closely aligned with those of, for instance, Sartre, Pinter, or Beckett. Even in the context of The Seagull, Constantine Treplev is represented as a tran¬ sitional figure, one who rejects the art of his forebears in favor of new forms of expression. Yet in the broader sense, and in the context of this discussion, Constantine can be identified with a movement from one sort of "tragic" experience to another, and from the world of manifest action and event toward a realm where interiority and a purely psychological disjuncture are more often emphasized. In the experience of Constantine, the Dionysian force is once again demonstrated, ensuring that a spiritual rending will be accomplished in the drama that surrounds and includes him. And again, even as the req¬ uisite dismemberment is necessarily situated in the individuated "self" of character, it is more fully realized and understood as the result of an inclusive and interconnective operation. As in our exemplary case of

Macbeth, the relationship that is shared by Constantine and Nina—or by Agamemnon and Clytemnestra—is marked by a convergence of related forces, cohesive and yet divisive, a totality that always transcends the more immediate and particular interactions in which the characters par¬ ticipate. The tragic field that comes to bear so acutely on Constantine is, clearly, quite different from those that are manifest in the Agamemnon or King

Lear—in terms of both composition and dramaturgical behavior. It is in this respect, indeed, that the structure of any individual play must be consulted as to its own particular components of collective interactivity. The psychic interiority of The Seagull proposes not only a different dra¬ maturgy but a different means of investigation from, say, the relation of character figure and contexual ground in the Agamemnon. The stresses that divide Constantine are clearly not, by necessity, the same forces that are at play in the lives of the other characters I have examined. It is quite likely, in fact, that the particular range of tensions that arises in any given play will be as fully individuated as the riven character himself or her¬ self, at least in terms of specific associations. What is more significant here, however, is the fact that even as the component parts of a tragic field may differ broadly from one play to an¬ other, the concept of the field itself retains its validity and range of ap-

Afterword

179

plication. It is the case, moreover, that in spite of the possible variety of interactive configurations that may constitute the field in various in¬ stances, the final effect of this tragic operation is the same. Despite the variations in structure, that is, the resulting impression upon the face of character will be identical—to wit, the inability of the solitary figure to withstand the array of dismantling energies that cohere in the drama yet disunite the self. Strictly in terms of methodology, then, the analytic strategy must proceed not from a conviction that one field of connective components will be fashioned like another, but rather from a recognition of the connective paradox itself: that is, the idea that a cohesive set of in¬ terrelations in the drama will become immiscible in their impression upon character, and in so doing will bring about a "tragic" divisiveness in the subject. It is from this fundamental observation that a diagnostic means can issue, a method that is applicable to the characterization pat¬ terns and dramaturgical strategies of many different playwrights, from vastly different cultures and historical eras. The tragic, as a condition of existence, is chaotic, not in terms of its un¬ varying stipulations but rather in its haphazard occasions and visita¬ tions. As a dramatic process, however, the tragic is made cosmic in the sense that its depictions must exist within an overarching contextual order. As an organizing principle, the field concept assists in the under¬ standing of this translation from the random to the logical, from the chaotic to the cosmic. The cosmos of The Seagull, in its localized associa¬ tions and references, is naturally quite different from that of King Lear, of

Agamemnon, or of countless other dramas. Yet there is still the tragic cos¬ mos that includes all of these plays, the cosmos in which a tragic exertion has been confronted and then managed, time and again, through the ex¬ perience of dramatic character. It is finally in this relation of a depiction of selfhood to an embracing tragic cosmos that the dramatist has been able, after Dionysus and over centuries, to assign the human face of char¬ acter to an eternal condition, to order that condition artistically and, in no small degree, to lend it sense.

Index

Aeschylus, 36,151; Agamemnon, 118-137; Eumenides, 4,123; Libation Bearers, 37, 103,122; origins of tragedy, 13-14, 79; and the sparagmos of character, 127; and temporal structure, 132-133; and the tragic field, 128-129,134- $ee a^so Agamemnon, character of; tragic field, in Agamemnon Agamemnon, character of, 7, 4on, 102, 118-138,178; compared to King Lear, 151-152; compared to Constantine Treplev, 177; depictions of, 118-121; histor¬ ical figure, 120 Andreev, Leonid: panpsychism in Chekhov, 159-160 Antigone, character of, 42,119,123 Apollo, 124,128 Archilochus of Paros, 13 Aristotle, 11, 39,48n, 91,122; anagnorisis, 46, 48n, 51, 54, 61,151; dramatic structure, 30, 32; eleos and phobos, 38; ethos, 5, 47,126; hamartia, 47-49; katharsis, 38; muthos, 46,122; origin of tragedy, 13-14, 68; peripeteia, 44, 46, 48n, 54, 61,151; Poetics, 13, 38, 45-49^ 50, 68,150-151; praxis, 51; qualities of tragic character, 123 Arnheim, Rudolf: gestalt, figure and ground relation, 100 Arnold, Matthew: "Dover Beach," 56-57 Arrowsmith, William, 8n; Dionysian life force, 25 Artemis: and Agamemnon and Iphigenia in Aulis, i22n, 124,128,132,135-136; and Hippolytus, 49

ate, 48; and Agamemnon, 125,131-132,136; "Ate-sequence," 114-115 Bachelard, Gaston: inside and outside dialectic, 85-86 Bank, Rosemarie, 98n Barthes, Roland: the acme in tragedy, 4°n, 45 Beckett, Samuel, 2, 178 Bely, Andrey: spirit of music in Chekhov, 159 Benjamin, Walter: inductive reasoning, 77 Bouchard, Larry D.: the tragic and the a priori, 81-84 Bowie, Malcolm: Lacan's "Other," i73n Bradley, A. C.: storm scenes in King Lear, 144/155 Brereton, Geoffrey: and Goldmann's tragic individual, 88; on Unamuno and the tragic sense, 58 Burke, Kenneth, 92; character recipe, 107; cluster analysis, 106-107,111; dialecti¬ cal structure of drama, 44; dramatism in relation to field concept, 104-111; ten¬ sion ("psychosis"), 107, 116; and the tragic spirit, 55, 90 Burkert, Walter: on daimon, 114; tragedy and the maenad, 28 Butcher, S. H., 1311, 47n Carpenter, Thomas H.: depictions of Dionysus, 79n; illustration of calyxkrater, 11811; and the multiform Diony¬ sus, 1011-iin

182

Index

Cartwright, Dorian: field theory in rela¬ tion to group and individual, ioon-101 chaos: in Agamemnon, 129; and hamartia, 48; in King Lear, 139,149,155; and the tragic, 179. See also cosmos character: Aristotelian, 47-48; collective, 122-123, *33/ 136; and cosmos, 1, 4, 41, 43, 48, 54, 62, 71, 83,113,138, 149,133; and Dionysus, 26-27, 45-46; and field, 96; Hegelian, 42; literary versus dra¬ matic, 5-6, 93-94; and Nietzsche, 23-24; and the Romantics, 71-73; and storm scenes. King Lear, 150-151; as ter¬ minology, 4-6; and the tragic, 38, 40-41, 43, 46, 49, 75, 85, 91-92,177; and the tragic individual, 21, 53, 62-67, 9°; as tragic visionary, 56, 59, 61-62. See also interiority; selfhood Chekhov, Anton, 2, and panpsychism, 159; The Seagull, 7,157-179; and the tragic, 157 choric model, 102-104,124. See also tragic field City (Great) Dionysia, 12,15,133 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 71; on storm scenes, 142 condition (of the tragic), 1, 7, 29, 32-34, 38-40, 68, 70-71, 78, 80, 82-84, 89, 91-92,138,155,157, 177,179. See also process (of the tragic) Corneille, Pierre, 34 cosmos, 39, 41-42, 67, 81; in Agamemnon, 129,132-133,179; and chaos, 4, 43-46, 64, 84,129,139,179; historical perspec¬ tive, 2-4; history and time, 34-35; in King Lear, 141-142,147,154-155; and Nietzsche, 23; in The Seagull, 176; as ter¬ minology, 1-4; tragic, 26, 45, 81,115, 129,179. See also character daimon, 25, 113-116,125,136 Danby, John F.: storm scenes, 145-147 desire (in The Seagull), 161-163, 166-167, 169-170,172-173,175-176. See also mourning Detienne, Marcel: on the Dionysian force, 25 dike, 125,131-132,136 Dionysus: and character, 11,16-20, 22, 26-27; death of, 20-21; depictions of, 17-18; Dionysian latency, 73, 81-86, 89;

god of theatre, 7, 9,12, 16-17; g°d of wine, 18; life cycle, 22; natural associa¬ tions, 18, 24-26, 84; "Nothing to do with Dionysus," 15-17; origins of tragedy, 11-17, 79/ 82, 84; as "render of men," 21, 24, 71, 79, 81, 84,112; and sparagmos, 11,18-21, 25-26, 46, 115-116, 127,135-137; and the tragic, 1, 8, 24, 45, 79-81,112; and the tragic field, 112-113,116,137,178-179; uni¬ fied versus multiform identity, 9-11, 17-18,177; worship of, 18-19. $ee a^so sparagmos; the tragic dithyramb, 12-16, 68, 84 Dodds, E. R.: on Dionysus and nature, 25; on sparagmos and omophagia, 19 Dolan, Jill, 93n Dufrenne, Mikel, 78, 81; and the a priori, 76 Easterling, P. E., 5on ekstasis, 18, 21 Eliot, T. S.: "Ash Wednesday," 70 Else, Gerald F., 11, 45; on Aristotle and Dionysus, 13; on Dionysus and the Greek tragic actor, 24n; on Dionysus and origins of tragedy, 14-15; hamartia in relation to plot, 48n; theories of eleos and photos, 38n; translations of hamartia; 47n Elton, W. R., i48n; on Elizabethan anal¬ ogy/ 154 enthusiasmos, 18, 21 Euripides, 8, i9n, 151; Bacchae, 8-9, 17-20, 22, 25-26, 45; Hippolytus, 59, 177; Iphigenia in Aulis, 7, 121,123-124, 127, 129,133-136; Medea, 137; and Nietzsche, 16, 23 Everett, Barbara: and storm scenes in King Lear, 149 Faraone, Christopher, 79n; and the multi¬ form Dionysus, lon-nn Fergusson, Francis, i3n, 47n; Dionysian ritual and sparagmos, 27n field theory, 98-102,106,108. See also tragic field figure and ground relation, 100,111,116, 151,178; and Agamemnon, character of, 119,121-122,124,128,134,137 Fraenkel, Eduard: on Aeschylean inter¬ pretation, i22n

Index

Fraser, J. T.: temporality in tragedy, 87 Frazer, James George, 14 Freud, Sigmund: and Greek character, 126; and melancholia, 165 Friedrich, Rainer, ion, i5n Frye, Northrop: "being in time," 87; on hamartia, 47; storm scenes in King Lear, 148,156 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 38n; guilt and expiation, 43; and the tragic, yy-y8n Golden, Leon, 47n~48n Goldhill, Simon: Dionysus and the Great Dionysia, i2n Goldmann, Lucien, 65-67^ 88; and the "hidden God," 65 Granville-Barker: Harley, on the storm scenes in King Lear, 150 hamartia, 47-49, 61, 86. See also Aristotle Hardison, O. B.: Aristotelian character, 47n~5on; hamartia in relation to plot and character, 4811 Harrison, Jane Ellen, i4n, 27n Hayles, N. Katherine: field theory and the "cosmic web," 99 Hazlitt, William, 71, on storm scenes in King Lear, 143 Hegel, G. W. F., 64, 71; compared to Scheler, 74; dialectic compared with that of the tragic, 83; dialectics, 42-43 Heilman, Robert B.: storm scenes in King Lear, 145-146 Henrichs, Albert, i4n; on multiform Dionysus, 9-10 Herington, John, i3n Hesiod, 33 Hippolytus, character of, 27n, 39, 49, 5on Homer: Iliad, 120-121 Horace, 32 hubris, 48, 86 Husserl: Edmund, and Scheler, 74 Ibsen, Henrik, 2; expository history, 34; Hedda Gabler, 177; and vision, 53, 59-61. See also Solness, character of interiority, 138; and Greek character, 126; and King Lear, 152; and The Seagull, 157, 159-160,165-166,171,176,178. See also selfhood

183

irony: and dramatic structure, 44; in rela¬ tion to tragedy and the tragic, 39-41; and tragic vision, 54 Ivanov, Vyacheslav: tragedy and mae¬ nad, 28 Jaspers, Karl: on tragic opposition, 89 Job, Book of, 53, 63n Jones, John: on Agamemnon, i22n, 125; Aristotelian character, 49n~5on, 126 Kaufmann, Walter, 74n; critique of Scheler, 78-79 Kerenyi, Carl, 13, i5~i6n; on Pentheus and Dionysus, 20 Kierkegaard, Soren, 64 King Lear, character of, 39, 49, 70, 84, 111-112,138-158,177 Kitto, H. D. F.: on Agamemnon, I32n, 135 Knight, G. Wilson: storm scenes in King Lear, 145-146 Knights, L. C.: interior conflict in King Lear, 147,152 Kott, Jan: on King Lear, 147-148 Krieger, Murray: and the tragic visionary, 64~6yn Kristeva, Julia: genotext and phenotext, 110-111 Krutch, Joseph Wood: and the tragic spirit, 55 Lacan, Jacques, 161,171-173,175. See also desire; mourning Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 92~93n Lamb, Charles, 142-144; on storm scenes in King Lear, 155 Langer, Susanne K., 94n Lattimore, Richmond, 8, i3on; character of Agamemnon, 121,127 Lewin, Kurt: field theory in social science, 100-102 Lloyd-Jones, Hugh: guilt of Agamem¬ non, 132 Lucas, D. W.: ate in Agamemnon, ijzn Lucas, F. L.: on hamartia and "tragedy of error," 4811 Lukacs, Georg: prominence of selfhood, 51; timelessness and tragic drama, 87

184

Index

Macbeth, character of, 23, 33, 94-97,111 Mack, Maynard, i47n maenad, 9-10,18-19, 21, 28 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 37 Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faustus, 84, 138 Maugh, Thomas H., i2on McAlindon, T.: oppositional principle, 134 Melpomene: in relation to pity and ter¬ ror, 39 Melville, Herman, 53 Morowski, Stefan: tragic relation of self and world, 89-90 Moulton, Richard G.: on storm scenes in King Lear, 143-144 mourning (in The Seagull), 163-168,170, 172-173,173-176. See also desire Muller, Herbert J., i8n; on Aristotle, 47n; on tragic suffering, 43 Murray, Gilbert, 13^-14, 27n Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10,14-150, 23-26, 33, 64, 71; character and Dionysus, 16; Dionysian/Apollonian relation, 22-24, 102-103; metaphysical solace, 86; and tragic dialectic, 83 Oedipus, character of, 16, 23, 39, 6i, 71 omophagia, 19. See also sparagmos O'Neill, Eugene: character of Edmund Tyrone, 61; in relation to tragic vision, 39-61 Otto, Walter F., ion; on the "contradic¬ tory" Dionysus, 18; on the "render of men," 20-21 Padel, Ruth, io, 12; on the "Atesequence," 114-113; on daimon, 114-113; and maenads, 28 panpsychism (in Chekhov), 139-160, 163, 170-171 Pentheus, character of, 24, 27, 3on; and sparagmos, 8-9,19-20, 22. See also Euripides, Bacchae Phaedra, character of, 39,119 Phrynichus, i3n Pickard-Cambridge, Arthur: on dithy¬ rambs and Dionysus, 13-14; on "Noth¬ ing to do with Dionysus," i3n Pinter, Harold, 178

Plutarch, i3n process (of the tragic), 1, 40, 70-71, 76, 78, 80, 82-84, 91-92/ !38/ *55/ !57/ *77/179See also condition (of the tragic) Prometheus, character of, 16, 23 Quinones, Ricardo: "tragic contraction," 87 Racine, Jean, 34 Reynolds, Joshua: "Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse," 39n Ricoeur, Paul, 30 Ridgeway, William: dithyrambs and Dionysus, 13 Rose, Jaqueline: on Lacanian desire, 16m Rosenberg, Marvin, 1480 Rueckert, William: on Burkean terms and methodology, 105-1070 Sachs, Mendel: continuous field concept, 99n Sartre, Jean-Paul, 178 Scheler, Max: and the phenomenon of the tragic, 73-78, 80-82, 89,133; and the tragic a priori, 73, 76-78; and tragic guilt, 63; and the "tragic knot," 74-73, 77 Schelling, F. W. J.: freedom and necessity, 41; and tragic guilt, 63 Schlegel, A. W.: on the storm scenes, 142; and the "tragic tone of mind," 72-73 Schliemann, Heinrich, i2on Seaford, Richard: Dionysian pattern in tragedy, i3n Segal, Charles, 3on, n6n; on Dionysus and the Bacchae, 17, 26, 43; dismember¬ ment of Pentheus, 20 selfhood, 3-6, 21, 26-28, 31, 68, 84, 86, 117, 138,179; in Agamemnon, 126-127, 131-137; and Agave, 9; and Dionysus, 3-6,16, 18, 46, 71, 92,133; and irony, 41; in King Lear, 140,131-132,133; in The Seagull, 137-138, 162,166,171,173-174, 176-178; and the tragic, 1, 6-7, 43, 46, 49-50, 67, 71, 80, 85, 87-90, 94,158 Sewall, Richard B.: and the "boundary situation," 67; on the tragic cosmos, 2; on tragic vision, 60; on the tragic vision¬ ary, 63-640, 66 Shakespeare, William, 4, 53, 57; Hamlet, 37,108-111,1460, i58n, 161,173; King

Index

Lear, 7, 138-156,179; Macbeth, 94-96, 14611,178; medieval and Renaissance sensibilities, 33-34; Richard III, 35; Romeo and Juliet, 34, 177; and the tragic, 152,155-156; and tragic vision, 59. See also King Lear, character of Silk, M. S., 1011 Smiley, Sam: defines tragic vision, 60 Solness, character of (The Master Builder), 35, 39, 61, 84,138. See also Ibsen, Henrik Sophocles, 53, 57, 59,123; Antigone, 34, 43; Oedipus Rex, 48n, 123. See also Antigone, character of; Oedipus, character of sparagmos: in Agamemnon, 126-127,131/ 133,135-137; in the Bacchae, 8-9; of Dionysus, 21; and hamartia, 49; in King Lear, 151; and the maenad, 28; natural associations, 25-26; and o?nophagia, 19; of Pentheus, 22; prominence of, 27; as a rending force, 1,18, 20, 24, 26-28, 38, 43, 51, 67, 70-71, 83, 94,116-117,127/ 135/153/171/177; and the tragic, 21, 43, 45-46, 92, 94,112; signature mark of tragedy, 18, 91,115-116. See also Diony¬ sus; the tragic Stanislavski, Constantine: given circum¬ stances, 96 States, Bert O.: critical neglect of fictional and dramatic character, 9311; and dra¬ matic character, 5n, 108; extremity in tragedy, 6yn; and Ophelia, 109-111; relation of individual and group char¬ acter, 108-112; relation of tragedy and vision, 35-36; on tragic vision, 59; "world character" in Hamlet, 109 Steiner, George: death of tragedy contro¬ versy, 55 Strindberg, August, 59

Taplin, Oliver: on Dionysus and tragedy, 15 Thespis, 13-14 Tillyard, E. M. W.: on Elizabethan corre¬ spondences, 154 tragedy: definition of, 30-51; and dialec¬ tics, 39, 41-44; and dismemberment, 21; and dramaturgy, 44-51; and history, 32-36, 86; and the maenad, 28; origins, 11-17, 83; and philosophy, 36-43; rela¬ tion to the tragic, 28, 32, 73, 82; and self¬ hood, 50-51; as terminology, 1, 27, 36;

185

and theatrical identity, 30; thematic ten¬ dencies, 36-37; and time, 34-35. See also the tragic; the tragic field; vision, tragic tragic, the, 70-91; in Agamemnon, 137; a priori, 73, 76-78, 81-82, 84, 86; and Aristotle, 47; contrasted to tragedy, 29, 32, 34-36, 73, 78, 80-83, x77/ and dialec¬ tics, 43; and Dionysus, 1, 8, 24, 29, 45, 67, 70-71, 79-81, 97; and disunion, 27, 51, 75, 83-84, 90, 97,107,179; and the dramatist, 84-85, 88, 92-93,138,150; and dramaturgy, 69, 91-94; and hamar¬ tia, 47; and irony, 40-41; in King Lear, 139,141-142,149,151-153,155-156; in relation to eleos and phobos, 38-39; in relation to maenads, 28; in The Seagull, 157,175-176, 178; as situation, 90-91; source of drama, 81-84; as terminology, 29, 35-36, 52-53, 70, 78-81; and time, 35-36, 86-88; and vision, 67-68, 71-73, 78, 80-81. See also condition; process; Dionysus; sparagmos tragic field, 6, 96,102-117,138,178-179; in Agamemnon, 119, 124-129, 133-136; cohesive and divisive, 116-117, x79, in King Lear, 139,152-153,155-156; orga¬ nizing principle, 179; in The Seagull, 157-158,160,170,176,178. See also field theory Unamuno, Miguel de: tragic sense of life, 29, 57-59 Van Gogh, Vincent, 100 Van Laan, Thomas: relation of tragedy and vision, 55 Vernant, Jean-Pierre: advent of tragedy in Greece, 30-31; "border zone" in tragedy, 131; Dionysian presence, 18; Dionysus and mimesis, 16-17; describes Great Dionysia, i2n; ethos and daimon, 113-114,125-126; on hamartia, 48-49^ 61; on the historical moment of tragedy, 30-33, 35; multi¬ form identity of Dionysus, 112; tragedy and vision, 54~55n Vickers, Brian, i3n; "Nothing to do with Dionysus," i5n Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 1211, i7n-i8n, 3m, H2n, 11411

i86

Index

vision, tragic, 29, 33, 44-45, 52-69, 72, 90; and the author, 59-62; and char¬ acter, 60-62; contrasted with thematics, 36-37; contrasted with tragedy, 1, 53-56, 68; contrasted with the tragic, 1, 67-69, 90-91; and dra¬ maturgy, 61, 68, 91; and point of view, 34, 37, 52, 56, 58, 62, 66; as ter¬ minology, 1, 27, 36

Weinsheimer, Joel, 511 Wilden, Anthony: on Lacanian desire, 16m Wood, Michael: and the historical Agamemnon, i2on Zeitlin, Froma, i2n; Dionysus and tragic dramaturgy, 17 Zenobias, i5n Zeus: and Agamemnon, 124, 132,136