Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames: Rewriting Tragedy 1970-2005 (Classical Presences) 9780199664115, 0199664110

Table of contents :
Cover
Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Contents
Author´s Note
Introduction: Tragic (Trans)Formations: Greek Tragedy and Postmodernism
1: Tragedy and Modern Critical Debate
Tragic Theory from Modernism and Beyond
Greek Tragedy and the Dionysiac Turn
2: Viewing through the Frame of Tragedy
Re-Viewing the Histories of Tragedy
Viewing the Tragedies of History
Tragedy and the Politics of Viewing
3: Tragic Absences and Metatheatrical Performances
Metatragedy
Tragic Repetitions
From Tragic Performances to Acts of Resistance
Tragedy and Popular Performance
Metatheatre, Tragedy, Adaptation
4: From Author-God to Textual Communion
Textuality and Ownership
Rewriting the Male Hero
Les Belles infidèles
From Textual Paternity to Cultural Fluidity
Towards a `Dionysiac´ Translation
5: Textual Fragments and Sexual Politics
Somatizing the Tragic Text
The Polyphonic Fragment
The Dancing Fragment
The Synthetic Fragment
Destruction/Deconstruction/Reconstruction
Conclusion
Bibliography
Primary Texts
Secondary Literature
Index of Names
General Index

Citation preview

CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors LORNA HARDWICK

JAMES I. PORTER

CLASSICAL PRESENCES Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames Rewriting Tragedy 1970–2005

ELEFTHERIA IOANNIDOU

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Eleftheria Ioannidou 2017 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2016942215 ISBN 978–0–19–966411–5 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

for Artemis

Acknowledgements I am most grateful to my doctoral supervisor, Fiona Macintosh, who saw this work developing from the initial stages. Her unparalleled supervision, indefatigable guidance, and thorough critique made this book possible. Not least, I thank her for showing me the significance of classical reception as well as for being my role model for women in academia. To Dimitris Papanikolaou I owe much sharp criticism and enthusiastic support during my time in Oxford and ever since. His radical thinking has changed the way I view the field and myself in it. I am grateful to my examiners, Erika Fischer-Lichte and Oliver Taplin, for their insightful comments, which helped me to turn the thesis into a book. Christopher Pelling and Stephen Harrison offered invaluable suggestions as internal examiners. The playwrights Tony Harrison, Pavlos Matesis, and Andreas Staïkos have assisted my study of their works with stimulating conversations. I would like to express my appreciation to Edith Hall, Lorna Hardwick, and Eva Stehlíková for the opportunity to present and publish parts of this work while it was still in the making. I would like to thank Cécile Dudouyt and Marilena Zaroulia for their invaluable criticism on the revised version of chapters alongside the reassurance they offered closer to the submission of the typescript. Thanks are also due to Laura Monrós Gaspar and Efi Papadodima for their friendship and companionship during years of study as well as for their help with translations and references. The help of Christina Exarchos on German literature was significant. Conor Hanratty and William McEvoy shared their comments towards the last stages of the thesis. Special thanks should be given to the Archive of Performances and Greek and Roman Drama, and especially Amanda Wrigley for the generous access to materials. I am grateful to the State Scholarships Foundation of Greece (IKY) for funding the major part of my doctoral study and my IKY supervisor Chara Baconicola for her comments on the progress of the thesis. I would like to thank my partner Richard Rushby for his patience and support throughout the time of endless revisions and rewriting. The book is dedicated to my sister, Artemis,

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Acknowledgements

for showing me a great deal about empathy in many different ways; with this dedication, I hope to pay part of the debt due to our parents, Charis and Georgia. Birmingham 20 December 2014

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 21/11/2016, SPi

Contents Author’s Note Introduction: Tragic (Trans)Formations: Greek Tragedy and Postmodernism

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1. Tragedy and Modern Critical Debate

13

2. Viewing through the Frame of Tragedy

39

3. Tragic Absences and Metatheatrical Performances

73

4. From Author–God to Textual Communion

103

5. Textual Fragments and Sexual Politics

131

Conclusion

167

Bibliography Index of Names General Index

173 187 191

Author’s Note All citations from the Greek texts are taken from the following Oxford Classical Texts editions: Aeschylus: D. Page (1972), Sophocles: H. Lloyd-Jones and N. Wilson (1990), and Euripides: J. Diggle (1981, 1984, 1994). The translations into English are taken from the volumes in the Loeb series and the Greek text is provided in the footnotes throughout. The abbreviated titles for the Greek plays in the footnotes follow the house style of the third edition of The Oxford Classical Dictionary. The collected edition of the modern plays is cited, when available, unless there are specific reasons to prefer the first edition. In the main text, the dates in brackets next to the titles of plays indicate the year of first publication and production. In the footnotes and the bibliography, the date of original publication of both primary and secondary sources is supplied next to that of the edition cited. All quotations from primary sources and secondary literature appear in a published English translation. In cases where a published English translation was not available, the quoted passages appear in my own translation. The characters’ names in dramatic dialogues are capitalized throughout. Modern Greek names and titles are transliterated in the Bibliography. Ephemera, theatre programmes, and audiovisual material are cited only in the footnotes, not in the Bibliography.

Introduction Tragic (Trans)Formations: Greek Tragedy and Postmodernism

Canons rarely speak to histories of inclusion and exclusion; part of their legitimacy comes from the power to efface the artistic practices, institutions as well as the larger cultural politics at work in the process of their formation. Yet, the various responses to canonical texts across time can break these processes open anew. In the case of Greek tragedy, the responses are not limited to the philological debates on the ancient texts themselves, but involve long-standing controversies over the definition of tragedy and the tragic. These controversies reveal the cultural and political stakes in tragedy, even in cases where the aesthetic autonomy of the genre is being fervently advocated. Philosophical discourses as divergent as Hegelian dialectics and Nietzsche’s irrational pessimism take recourse to the Greek tragedy in developing their key concepts and categories. The central place of tragedy within modern intellectual traditions reinforces the canonical authority of the classical texts, while at the same inviting readings and reworkings that seek to question it. Since the 1970s there has been a proliferation of adaptations that use the Greek tragic texts as a means to interrogate the foundational narratives of modernity. Evoking the postmodern critique to the literary and philosophical canons, the revisiting of the classical text uncovers the value systems and power relations embedded therein. In these adaptations, the canon is treated as the product of material, discursive, and cultural transformations laid bare in the act of rewriting. Rewritings of Greek tragedy prompt an understanding of intertextual relationships beyond formalist approaches. Even though adaptation

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inevitably deals with questions of genre, in the case of tragedy these questions are complicated by the troubled relationship between tragedy and modern criticism. The impossibility to come to grips with the aesthetic and philosophical implications of tragedy has been proclaimed from different critical standpoints. Following Nietzsche’s view that tragedy does not sit comfortably with a rational world view, George Steiner argued that tragedy has become extinct in modern drama. In a less mournful manner, Bertolt Brecht’s call for an epic or dialectical theatre for a scientific era pronounced the death of tragedy.1 Steiner’s argument that Brechtian drama makes room for tragedy, in spite of or against its Marxist dialectics,2 is consistent with his general view of tragedy as a strictly aesthetic category. On the other hand, the critical efforts to reconcile tragedy with the materialist perspective entail a disavowal of tragic metaphysics. In fact, it is the unbreakable unity between tragedy as a dramatic genre and tragic occurrences in real life that materialists have been keen to maintain. The more recent contribution to this debate is Terry Eagleton’s book Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Eagleton embarks on the twofold project of demonstrating Marxism’s tragic perspective as well as affirming tragedy as part of human experience. The links between the aesthetic and philosophical category of tragedy and tragedy in real life are argued to lie in bodily pain and suffering. Yet, even in Eagleton’s inclusive view, there remains a theoretical and cultural position that is deemed as inherently inimical to tragedy—namely, postmodernism. If anything, according to Eagleton, tragedy strives to make sense of suffering and therefore, ‘if human beings are in fragments, they are not even coherent enough to be the bearers of tragic meaning [ . . . ]’.3 Although Marxist criticism views both the tragic genre and the tragic feeling to be susceptible to transformations, the possibility of experiencing tragedy in today’s theatre or in contemporary reality remains in question. According to Eagleton, whereas poststructuralism does not preclude the possibility of tragedy, postmodernism entails a conscious repudiation of it: ‘while poststructuralism remains ensnared in high modernist melancholia, postmodernism seizes a chance to leap beyond the tragic by tapping into the diffuse, provisional, destabilizing forces of post-metaphysical capitalism.’4 Eagleton identifies the anti-tragic strand of postmodernism in the tendency 1 3

Brecht (1964/1948). Eagleton (2003: 64–5).

2

Steiner (1961: 348–9). 4 Ibid. 240.

Introduction

3

to devise theoretical means in order to elude the tensions of modernity. In his view, even though postmodern theory is a resurgence of Nietzscheanism, it transcends all the violence and pain that, according to Nietzsche, lie at the foundations of tragic perception and art. Instead, according to Eagleton, in the postmodern dematerialized reality, tragic joy degenerates into ‘political pessimism on the one hand, and aesthetic or theoretical jouissance on the other.’5 Paradoxically enough, Eagleton coincides with the conservative critics he sets out to refute in declaring tragedy at stake. His view of tragedy is based on the physical experience of pain that defies postmodern textual interplay as a means of communicating the tragic. Nonetheless, adaptations of Greek tragedy that employ key devices of postmodern art abound not just in contemporary playwriting but across media. That alone, of course, does not provide adequate grounds to judge postmodernism’s theoretical disposition towards tragedy. The encounter between the tragic genre and postmodern modes of challenging the classical canon does not suffice to counter the claim that tragedy and postmodernism are incompatible or even mutually exclusive. Yet, the question regarding the possibility of tragedy in a postmodern world of deconstructed narratives, proliferating images, and textual pastiche is a persistent one in understanding the return to the Greek tragic texts. The present book aims to provide a renewed materialist view of the tragic genre, analysing the prevalent modes in rewriting Greek tragedy since the 1970s. As much as tragedy is a dramatic form that ascribes shape and meaning to human suffering, it is also a discursive frame used to determine whose suffering is meaningful. Tragedy defined as the fall of a great protagonist in theatre seems to cohere with the everyday uses of the word: a term originating in Greek art and providing the basis of European tragic philosophies can be owned only by those subjects whose lives matter. While the term tragedy is often employed to refer to individual or collective death and suffering happening close to home, massive loss and catastrophe outside Western contexts rarely qualify as tragic. To adopt a deconstructive approach to tragedy does not equal dematerializing the tragic experience, but rather wishes to question the exclusions entailed in aesthetic readings and cultural discourses of tragedy. Rewritings of

5

Ibid. 227.

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Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames

Greek tragedy that share the postmodern problematics of text and textuality, interrogate canons and literary hierarchies alongside structures of feeling underlying cultural conceptualizations of pain and death. Undoing the tragic texts is a gesture that strives to do away with the systems of exclusion or oppression that have been inscribed in them within a long history of reception, including those theories claiming that the (post)modern era is unworthy of tragedy. Any attempt to appraise the transformations of tragedy in postmodernism should take into account the new significance that the notions of loss, suffering, and catastrophe have acquired in the light of parallel developments on the political, social, and global planes. In condemning the military action of the United States that followed the 9/11 attacks, Judith Butler recalls an example from Greek tragedy: To remember the lessons of Aeschylus, and to refuse this cycle of revenge in the name of justice, means not only to seek legal redress for wrongs done, but to take stock of how the world has become formed in this way precisely in order to form it anew, and in the direction of non-violence.6

The use of Aeschylus as a means to reflect on the perpetuation of violence seems appropriate not because the ending of the Oresteia alluded to in the above passage reveals the shortcomings of legal institutions; most importantly, Aeschylus offers precisely what these institutions are short of: an insight into their own tragic genealogies. In this sense, Greek tragedy itself is subjected to critique both as a category used to legitimize acts of retribution as well as a dramatic form that epitomizes the historical paradigm of the Western world, not least in its failings and discontents. This book focuses on rewritings of Greek tragedy between 1970 and 2005, and, although it does not intend to offer an exhaustive record of plays in this period, it aspires to provide analytical tools in order to understand the dominant tendencies in the reception of classical antiquity within postmodernism. The above time frame does not mean to demarcate the limits of postmodernism; it is rather defined by the rising debate on the notions of text and textuality in the late 1960s and the discussions around tragedy and the tragic alongside the contemplation of loss, suffering, and grievability at the dawn 6

Butler (2004: 17).

Introduction

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of the twenty-first century. The little critical attention paid to these plays appears to be all the more striking, considering the surge of interest in the performances of the Greek tragic texts within the same period, which, in addition, share similar characteristics to their contemporary textual reconfigurations.7 Although stage adaptations of Greek tragedy enjoy a privileged position within the fields of both classical reception and theatre studies, a comprehensive study of textual reworkings is still due. Furthermore, unlike the sociopolitical background of the late twentieth-century reception of Greek tragedy, which is discussed in many articles and books, the affinities between the theoretical enquiries of postmodernism and the adaptation of the Greek texts have not been adequately analyzed.8 The study of classical reception has demonstrated the dynamic role of theatre in shifting perceptions of Greek drama. The burgeoning interest in the performance of the Greek tragic plays seems to be inextricable from the broader questioning of the dramatic text.9 While since the 1960s the relationship between performance and the written word has been seen in terms of antagonism or resistance, within the same period prominent playwrights have produced radical adaptations of Greek tragedy. What these plays share with their contemporary forms of performance is not solely an iconoclastic and subversive take on the dramatic text; they rather attest to a larger synergy between writing strategies, performance practices, and theoretical preoccupations. In that regard, the binary opposition of text

7 The theatrical performances of Greek tragedy provide the subject of numerous studies, often with a focus on individual plays—e.g. Hall, Macintosh, and Taplin (2000) on Euripides’ Medea; Macintosh, Michelakis, and Hall (2005) on Agamemnon, Macintosh (2009) on Oedipus the King. The role of Greek tragedy as a means of renewing contemporary theatre aesthetics has been addressed by both classical reception and theatre studies, e.g. Hall, Macintosh, and Wrigley (2004), Fischer-Lichte and Dreyer (2007), and Goldhill (2007). Dreyer (2014) discusses performances of Greek tragedy since the 1960s, applying key concepts of tragic theory. The diachronic reception of specific plays or mythological figures in both literature and theatre is the topic of several edited collections, e.g. Clauss and Johnston (1997), De Martino (2006), and Beltrametti (2007). 8 McDonald and Walton (2002), Hall, Macintosh, and Wrigley (2004), and Goff (2005) focus on the sociopolitical concerns articulated in recent adaptations of Greek tragedy. Laera (2013) analyses performances of Greek tragedy in Europe against the political and cultural discourses going back to classical antiquity. 9 The quest to consider theatrical performance independently of the dramatic literature led to the establishment of the new discipline of Theaterwissenschaft in the early twentieth century. See Fischer-Lichte (1999c; 2008: 29–37).

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and performance fails to grasp the ways in which theatrical performances shape perceptions of textuality. Stephen Greenblatt concedes that, ‘as soon as you collapse everything into something called textuality, you discover that it makes all the difference what kind of text you are talking about’.10 This collapse, in Greenblatt’s view, calls attention, to genre and rhetorical mode, to the text’s implicit or explicit reality claims, to the implied link (or distance) between the word and whatever it is—the real, the material, the realm of practice, pain, bodily pleasure, silence, or death—to which the text gestures as that which lies beyond the written word, outside its textual mode of being.11

The emphasis on the text’s references to the material and bodily experiences outside the written word (as well as the use of the term gesture itself) proposes a conceptualization of the text in terms of performance, which arguably extends beyond the scope of Greenblatt’s analysis. If performance by definition involves a certain tension with the dramatic text, rewriting allows us to follow the process of textual transformation and observe the extent to which the classical text is followed, invoked, or resisted. Of course, dialogues between texts in their innumerable permutations provide the basis of every adaptation.12 However, the modes adopted in recent adaptations of Greek tragedy suggest a shift of paradigm. Since the 1970s plays based on Greek tragedy do not just offer reworkings of well-known tragic plots and themes; intertextuality here takes the form of an extended preoccupation with the prototype as a textual entity. What was predominantly an adaptation of the tragic myth gives its place to the rewriting of the classical text. This turn in the adaptation of Greek tragedy can be understood in the context of poststructuralist ideas of the text formulated in the late 1960s. Not only do these recent plays shift emphasis from myth to textbut they do so posing issues of textuality that have been debated extensively within poststructuralism. The treatment of the literary text as a fluid and polyphonic cultural product whose meaning is bestowed upon the successive reading communities does not occur in theory alone, but can also 10

11 Greenblatt (1997: 16). Ibid. Genette’s seminal study (1997/1982) offers a thorough analysis of the spectrum of textual metamorphoses. The interest in adaptation as a distinct field of study, as evinced in several specialized publications and academic journals, has shifted the focus from texts to media and from adaptive practices to the receiving communities. 12

Introduction

7

be evinced in the way tragedy is adapted. While the classical text is invested with an authority that often resists radical interpretations—in a way evocative of Roland Barthes’s notion of the Work13—at the same time it lends itself to deconstructive readings. In that regard, rewritings of Greek tragedy seem to align with the theoretical challenges to canon and textual canonicity alongside other forms of authority. Whether intentional or not, this tendency shows that major playwrights have been amenable to the theoretical investigations of poststructuralist theory, which, in turn, help to articulate concerns of postmodernism, more broadly.14 Even when these plays are not directly influenced by the theory, they can still be seen as products of the same intellectual climate. The study of rewriting can acquire a particular significance for the field of classical reception, by inviting the dialogue between reception theory and the growing literature on adaptation. The model suggested here seeks to reconcile the different implications of the term reception itself: reception theory, as launched by Hans Robert Jauß, pushed the study of literature in a historicizing direction, by focusing on the significance of the artwork for the receiving communities, both contemporary and future.15 In classical reception studies, however, the term is mainly used to describe the Nachleben of classical antiquity in later artworks, not necessarily with reference to readers’ or audiences’ responses. The transformations of the Greek plays urge critical discourse to shift away from the close analysis of the product and to lay emphasis on the processes of production and reception in line with recent theories of adaptation.16 The processes of reception are more intricate than a formalist comparative study between ancient and modern artworks can ever evince; nor can they be sufficiently studied

13

Barthes (1977/1971: 155–64). It is important to stress at this point that in the following chapters the terms poststructuralism and postmodernism are not used interchangeably. Although both terms are used with reference to the plays under examination, I use ‘poststructuralist’ to refer to the textual concerns and the relationship with the prototype, while I turn to ‘postmodern’ when discussing the wider problematics explored in these plays. 15 See Jauß’s pivotal essay ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’ in Jauß (1982/1970). This was Jauß’s inaugural lecture at the University of Constance in 1967. An earlier version of the text in English appeared in New Literary History in 1969. 16 Hutcheon’s (2006: 6–9) tripartite definition views adaptation as product, process of (re-)creation, and process of reception. 14

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by focusing exclusively on the reactions of a certain receiving community, which are often hard to pin down. By offering rereadings and reinterpretations of a prior text, these rewritings reify the processes of reading and interpretation. Oliver Taplin argues that the wide range of issues and emotions that Greek tragedy encompasses is the very reason of its durability ‘mutatis mutandis’.17 The analysis of the plays offered in the following chapters espouses Raymond Williams’s materialist view of tragedy, which resists austere definitions based on given tragic patterns. Williams’s argument is used to maintain that, similarly to the classical text, the tragic genre is defined through its wide susceptibility to change and adaptation. The first chapter (Tragedy and Modern Critical Debate) reviews the twentieth-century critical debate about the demise of tragedy in the modern era, drawing on theorists from Steiner and Walter Benjamin to Williams and Eagleton. Since numerous adaptations of Greek tragedy share the concerns of poststructuralism and postmodernism, I question Eagleton’s conviction that tragedy is completely at odds with the postmodern mindset. The wider debate over the demise of tragedy, not surprisingly, reveals how readily tragedy has been adapted to accommodate the professed tastes and distastes of theory. The chapter undertakes the materialist analytical approach introduced by Williams—and adopted for the most part in Eagleton’s analysis—to maintain that tragedy has undergone various interpretations and appropriations in the course of time. If both the tragic genre and the classical text are defined through their susceptibility to adaptation, there is no sense in which the postmodern assault on the ideologies invested in the classics is intrinsically inimical to tragedy. On the contrary, the rewritings that are resonant of postmodern and poststructuralist tenets can demonstrate a significant relationship between tragedy and postmodernism, and this is the hypothesis pursued in the subsequent chapters. Linking back to the debate about the changing structures of tragic feeling, the second chapter (Viewing through the Frame of Tragedy) discusses the recourse to Greek tragedy in response to collective predicament and catastrophe. In Steven Berkoff ’s Greek, an adaptation of Oedipus Tyrannus, the tragedy of the individual hero becomes a means to depict the sociopolitical crisis in early 1980s Britain.

17

See Taplin (2007: 5).

Introduction

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About a decade later, Hélène Cixous’s play La Ville parjure, ou le réveil des Erinyes (The Perjured City, or the Awakening of the Furies) adapted the Eumenides to dramatize the scandal of HIVcontaminated blood in her contemporary France. In both cases the refashioning of the classical text is reminiscent of the poststructuralist idea of textuality, while the adaptation of tragic themes and patterns involves a critique of tragedy and its histories of reception. The more recent example of Martin Crimp’s 2004 adaptation of Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis challenges Western perceptions of tragedy in a more overt manner, resisting the polarizing discourses reproduced by the mainstream media in the aftermath of 9/11. Interestingly, the play’s title Cruel and Tender resonates with the idea of sweet violence that Eagleton borrows from Sir Philip Sidney in formulating his definition of tragic art as an aestheticization of painful experience. The third chapter (Tragic Absences and Metatheatrical Performances) concentrates on rewritings of Greek tragedy that treat the tragic text as the play-within-the-play and/or employ other metatheatrical devices to exhibit the artificiality of theatre. The actual encounter of tragedy and metatheatre in these plays can redefine the largely contested relationship between tragedy and metatheatre, which have been designated by both classicists and theatre scholars as mutually exclusive dramatic forms. The chapter explores the links between the rewritings and the poststructuralist ideas of representation, while it also views the plays as a response to the impasses of poststructuralism. In the discussed rewritings, the stance towards the classical text and the critique of representation are inextricable. The struggle over Greek tragedy is the subject of The Roar (I Voui) by Pavlos Matesis. In Klytaimnistra? by Andreas Staïkos, Living Quarters by Brian Friel, and The Island by Athol Fugard the oppression within the condition of representation becomes synonymous with the tyranny of the classical text. However, in The Island as well as in La Medea by Dario Fo the theatrical stage provides the means of escape from the confines of representation, not by exiling the classical text in any Artaudian fashion, but by implementing its wide versatility. The fourth chapter (From Author–God to Textual Communion) discusses rewritings of Greek tragedy that follow closely the plot and the structure of the original text, while also attempting significant inscriptions upon it. The hybrid form that oscillates between translation and adaptation unsettles the distinction between different textual formations. The chapter relates the free appropriation of the

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original text to the death of the transcendental Author, as coined by Roland Barthes in the late 1960s. Ted Hughes’s Alcestis and Simon Armitage’s Mister Heracles adapt the figure of Heracles to present the demise of the male hero via a translational practice that embodies the demise of the male Author. In Brendan Kennelly’s versions of Greek tragedy, the same practice is adopted to voice the silenced female stories. In The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite by Wole Soyinka, the end of authorial patriarchy warrants the cultural fluidity of the classical text. The chapter finally reflects upon the elimination of the borders between translation and adaptation as a Dionysiac revolt against order and hierarchy, affirming Eagleton’s assertion that Nietzschean terms regularly return in poststructuralist guise. However, the plays under examination make manifest that the resurgence of Nietzschean ideas is not necessarily linked to a depoliticized reading of tragedy, as argued by Eagleton. The display of textual fragments in recent rewritings of Greek tragedy provides the focus of Chapter 5 (Textual Fragments and Sexual Politics). Erika Fischer-Lichte relates the emphasis on the fragment in German performances of Greek tragedy in the 1970s to the contemporaneous interest in the ritual aspects of tragedy.18 Fischer-Lichte employs the ritual notions of sparagmos and ōmophageia to describe the rupture of the dramatic text, which gives rise to the theatrical performance. I argue that the recent rewritings depart from the ritualist readings of Greek tragedy and meet with the pursuits of deconstructive criticism. Yet, in all the plays under examination, the reordering of the fragments aims to introduce new forms of textuality along with alternative ways of defining and experiencing the self. The collage of the diachronic appropriations of Euripides’ Medea in Tony Harrison’s Medea: A Sex-War Opera puts in historical perspective the act of infanticide. In Caryl Churchill’s A Mouthful of Birds the fragmentation of the Bacchae and the dance element complement each other in resisting the everyday violence involved in gender division and socially prescribed roles. Finally, in Heiner Müller’s Medeamaterial the sparagmos of the tragic text depicts the fragmentation of Medea’s body as well as the disintegration of the writing subject in the ruins of post-war Europe. The landscape, the human body, and the text coincide in their efforts to

18

See Fischer-Lichte (1999a, b; 2004).

Introduction

11

refashion themselves into new, more inclusive, and open-ended forms. Although the selected plays originate in different countries, the affinities they present in adapting their prototype texts justify their examination as a distinct corpus. Comparative literature and reception studies have enhanced critical approaches that challenge the solidity of national literatures. Since the classics have provided a common base for European culture as a whole—and in turn have been instrumental in exerting its colonial power—the study of classical reception necessitates the application of transcultural methods of study. Classical reception studies challenges the traditionalist idea of the classical heritage, with all its high-cultural focus; instead they affirm cultural commonalities across a broad geographical and socioeconomic range.19 The affinity between the recent rewritings of the classical text and the theory of poststructuralism would appear to be one such commonality itself. While aesthetic definitions of tragedy are unable to contain the strong ethical and political implications accruing from the genre’s history of appropriations, the displacement of the Greek tragic plays from the high-cultural referential environments claims tragedy as a medium that can articulate contemporary preoccupations. In this respect, postmodernism does not mark the demise of tragedy; on the contrary, the interest in the classical text in the light of poststructuralist theory has triggered new encounters with the Greek tragic texts. The plays under examination in the following chapters indeed uncover a significant dialogue between tragedy and postmodern theory, while also suggesting that the genre of tragedy is precisely a plane upon which the contested politics of postmodernism can be re-evaluated. Contemporary adaptations of tragedy help to expose current framings and representations of pain, while also providing the means to frame suffering in radically new fashions. Butler takes issue with the representation of the 9/11 attacks in public discourse and stresses the need for representational practices that do not hinder critical response and reflection. Instead of turning the experience of loss and mourning to a justification of aggression and longestablished (in fact, since antiquity) binarisms between civilization 19 On the appropriations of classics in the postcolonial world, see Hardwick and Gillespie (2007). On the reception of tragedy in various media, see Brown and Silverstone (2007).

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and barbarism, Butler suggests that the acknowledgement of human vulnerability should lead to an egalitarian and non-violent ethics. Tragedy’s value as a means of contemplating loss and mourning does not only account for the proliferation of adaptations of the Greek plays recently, but also resists claims about its demise in the modern and the postmodern era. This way, the materialist approach to tragedy allows us to re-evaluate postmodernism’s controversial political agenda. Diachronic adaptations of Greek tragedy have been drawing on the Greek texts as well as on prior adaptations. What is a standard practice in adaptation has recently become an effective means to uncover the power structures and hegemonies embedded in the Greek plays as well as in their modern uses and appropriations. Such a transformation of the classical text is particularly evident in, yet not limited to, feminist and postcolonial readings and rewritings. Far from being symptomatic of a miscommunication with tragedy, the textual interplay with the Greek tragic texts signifies an attempt to respond to loss and suffering by invoking the histories that shape and reshape the cultural perceptions of the tragic. The recognition of familiar elements of the Greek plays establishes structural and conceptual analogies with tragedy, prompting a strong response to the exigencies that these plays articulate. In this respect, textual reconfigurations of tragedy seem to have ethical and political stakes that extend beyond the intellectual self-indulgence that postmodernism is often associated with; rewriting the Greek plays emerges as a radical act of reclaiming tragedy for the silenced, the excluded, and the oppressed.

1 Tragedy and Modern Critical Debate Tragedy is something you will have to invent for yourselves F. R. Leavis, quoted in Mason, The Tragic Plane

The relationship of tragedy to contemporary ethics and aesthetics emerges as a vexed issue in the debate about the alleged demise of tragedy in the modern world. Specific elements of Greek tragedy seem to be particularly appealing to both writers and theatre practitioners, whose work is informed by postmodern theory. The French sociologist Michel Maffesoli claims that postmodern societies welcome a resurgence of the tragic feeling; according to Maffesoli, this resurgence is primarily witnessed in the collapse of the individual subject and the relinquishment of linear historical progress.1 On the other hand, one of the central arguments that permeates Terry Eagleton’s recent study on tragedy is that postmodernism is entirely at odds with the concept of tragedy: it renounces, in his view, notions such as meaning, coherence, and value, which constitute the indispensable elements of tragedy.2 Moreover, Eagleton’s account identifies a strong link between postmodern theories of tragedy and the earlier conservative criticism that had declared the death of tragedy, arguing that both approaches privilege the irrational. Eagleton’s own analysis of the tragic, by contrast, is to a large extent nurtured by the Enlightenment narrative of progress, which underpins the Hegelian view of tragedy. Eagleton’s conviction begs critical examination, precisely because other world views and aesthetic movements of the past have been regarded as being responsible for the death of tragedy. 1

Maffesoli (2004). According to Eagleton (2003: 26), tragedy needs value and meaning ‘if only to violate them’. 2

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The genealogy to Eagleton’s theory helps in paving the way for an exploration of the relationship between postmodernism and tragedy.

TRAGIC THEORY FROM MODERNISM AND BEYOND From modernism to postmodernism, tragic theory has debated the demise of tragedy at length but without consensus. The principal theorists are George Steiner and Raymond Williams, who in the 1960s formulated their diametrically opposite views on the possibility of modern tragedy. In the 1940s Eric Bentley3 and Bertolt Brecht had already problematized the place of tragedy in contemporary drama; but the roots of the debate go back much further to Nietzsche and from him to Walter Benjamin.4 To a large extent post-war tragic theory responds to their earlier forebears. Nietzsche’s enormously influential The Birth of Tragedy, published in 1872, inaugurates the discussion,5 since it articulates the hypothesis that fuels modern critical debate. His lament over the death of tragedy is resonant of the nostalgia for the lost sustaining myths of modernity.6 All the above theorists are concerned with the possibility of modern tragedy: Steiner regrets the death of tragedy and privileges the past in the Nietzschean mould; Benjamin and Brecht acknowledge the ‘pastness’ of tragedy, but, unlike Nietzsche, turn to other dramatic forms, which they consider more relevant to the preoccupations of the modern era. Bentley, Williams, and Eagleton, however, take a historical materialist 3 Bentley’s ideas on tragedy first appeared in the United States in 1946 in a volume called The Playwright as Thinker. All citations here are from the second American edition (Bentley 1967). 4 Benjamin (1977/1928). The study Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama) was Benjamin’s Habilitationsschrift and was published in 1928. For a detailed account on the writing of Benjamin’s treatise and its troubled history in the German academia, see Steiner’s introduction to the English edition of the book. 5 On the debate preceding Nietzsche, see Silk and Stern (1981: 297–331). 6 According to Lyotard (2001/1979), the mourning over the lost grand narrative is distinctively modernist. Lyotard’s discussion primarily focuses on the incredibility of scientific knowledge, but it touches upon the crisis of narrative knowledge, which encompasses art and myth. In some sense, tragedy also appears to be a grand narrative, which has lost its meaning-making power in the modern era.

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approach, challenging the Nietzschean tenet, and detect manifestations of tragedy in different forms across time. Nietzsche’s understanding of Greek tragedy similarly provides the main terms and ideas that have been dividing critics ever since. Despite all the emphasis made by Nietzsche on the dynamic collision between the Dionysiac and the Apolline, which he sees as intrinsic to tragedy, we regularly find subsequent critics who deny either the Dionysiac or the Apolline, as if they were mutually exclusive elements rather than interdependent tragic components.7 For ‘Apolline’ theorists, the individual hero and the austerity of the form are among the qualities that serve as the hallmarks of tragedy (Steiner, Benjamin), whereas ‘Dionysiac’ critics identify the collectivity and the destructive—and deconstructive—forces as the exclusive preserve of the tragic realm (Maffesoli). Nietzsche’s privileging of the irrational appears to unite Steiner’s ‘Apolline’ theory of tragedy with postmodern speculation, and Eagleton uses this link to unveil the conservative agenda of postmodernism. Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy appears to be largely influenced by the key convictions articulated in The Birth of Tragedy. Steiner adopts the Nietzschean idea that tragedy presupposes an irrational perception of life and, thus, that the decay of the tragic genre emanates from the prevalence of rationalism in the modern world. Steiner agrees with Nietzsche that myth is a prerequisite of tragedy because it provides an expression of the irrational perception of the world.8 For Steiner, however, the decline of tragedy happens in the Enlightenment of modern Europe9 and not in the so-called ancient Greek enlightenment, as it did for Nietzsche, who castigates

7 On the reciprocity between the Apolline and the Dionysiac, see Silk and Stern (1981: 266): ‘the Apolline and the Dionysiac are not translatable into constant analytical equivalents: the embodiment of each varies according to the embodiment of the other.’ Silk and Stern also point out the fluidity of the terms in Nietzsche’s discussion: the poetic conception is associated with the Apolline as opposed to the Dionysiac myth; elsewhere Nietzsche opposes the Apolline dialogue, actors, and drama to Dionysiac music, lyrics, and chorus, while, at another point, the Dionysiac music becomes the counter to the Apolline myth. 8 Vickers (1979) provides an interesting reversal of this idea. For him, the myth represents a rational world of transgression and retribution, whereas tragedy distorts the mythic normality, by illustrating the inconsistency between gruesome punishments and innocent deeds. 9 Steiner (1961: 186–98).

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Socrates and Euripides for the conscious repudiation of the tragic sense of life. Steiner goes further in suggesting that, since tragedy is an expression of total and irremediable despair, it did not survive Christianity’s faith in the final redemption nor the narratives of progress proffered respectively by Romanticism and Marxism.10 However, in Steiner’s schema the idea of the individual hero is developed further in order to sustain an aristocratic view of tragedy that is markedly different from Nietzsche’s conception of the Apolline individual. In Nietzsche, the act of individualization is described as a detachment from the community, which becomes the source of tragic suffering and creates an imbalance, which is ultimately restored once the individual is destroyed. For Steiner, the tragic hero appears a priori differentiated from the community, since his noble social status distinguishes him as tragic.11 For Steiner, both the embodiment of the Dionysiac myth and the representation of the Apolline individual are achieved through the sublimity of the artistic form. Verse, according to Steiner, functions as an obstacle to identification, an emotion that is to be avoided when the suffering of the tragic hero is represented.12 This assertion appears to be problematic in its implication that tragic verse reflects an organic and consistent world view, something that would not accord with Nietzsche’s view of tragedy as a reaction to existential abyss; nor would it be corroborated by major tragedies, which, though written in verse, nonetheless reveal a chaotic universe. Verse does not, pace Steiner, set the tragedy off from the ‘flux of disorder and compromise prevalent in habitual life’;13 it could be understood as an attempt to contain the disorder inherent in the tragic situation, as later theorists argue. Steiner’s analysis examines long periods of modern dramaturgy, from the Renaissance to Brecht, in order to trace the demise of tragedy. In Steiner’s view, the tragic tenor in drama waned after the heyday of French neoclassicism, which culminated in the works of Jean Racine. His theoretical method consists of constructing a coherent pattern of tragedy, based mainly on the specific features of Greek tragedy, and applying it to dramatic forms of different 10

Ibid. 4–10, 124–85, 323–4, 331–2, 342–3. Ibid. 241: ‘there is nothing democratic in the vision of tragedy.’ 12 In support of this claim, Steiner (ibid.: 246) identifies large masks and lofty shoes as a means of establishing the requisite distance between heroes and audience. Neither was, in fact, used in the classical Greek theatre. See Blume (1978: 95–103). 13 Steiner (1961), 246. 11

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eras in order to deduce that, after French neoclassicism, there is no other dramatic form that merits the designation tragedy. For this reason, Steiner can proclaim that, ‘till the moment of their decline, the tragic forms are Hellenic’.14 However, Steiner does not preclude the possibility of a rebirth of the tragic genre; and, like Nietzsche, he envisages this rebirth happening ‘out of the spirit of music’.15 Such a critical method of inductive reasoning that extrapolates the norms of the genre from the common features shared by some representative artworks is what Benjamin firmly renounces in his Origin of German Tragic Drama. For Benjamin, any critical attempt to categorize artistic forms is not only vain but also philosophically erroneous, since induction reduces the idea of tragedy to a mere concept.16 Benjamin argues that philosophical reflection on tragedy should seek the metaphysical substance of the form, which can be evinced even from one single paradigm. He also renounces the critical understanding of modern artworks as epigones of past forms and, consequently, the comparison of artistic genres belonging to different historical periods as a means of evaluation. His own recourse to Greek tragedy to contemplate German baroque drama (Trauerspiel) does not use Greek tragedy as a model in order to judge the later form. Although Benjamin acknowledges the autonomy of the idea of the tragic, what he considers as ‘the tragic’ is mostly related to the aesthetic form of tragedy and not a sense of life. Benjamin does not accept the use of the term tragedy with reference to real-life experience. In his view, the content of tragedy resides exclusively within language and ‘a fate in the pragmatic entanglement is never tragic’.17 Benjamin’s disregard for the linguistic usage of the word ‘tragedy’ is surprising, especially since he acknowledges the fact that in the seventeenth century

14

Ibid. 3. Ibid. 284–9. The full title of Nietzsche’s treatise is Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music). Nietzsche hailed Wagnerian opera as the creation of a new mythology through which tragedy would re-emerge. In the late 1870s Nietzsche turned into a severe critic of Wagner, renouncing both his music and his ideas. On the various phases of the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner, see Silk and Stern (1981: 24–30, 52–61, 79–83). 16 According to Benjamin (1977: 27–38), the concept only contributes to the knowledge of phenomena, whereas the idea, in a Platonic sense, provides access to the truth. 17 Ibid. 118. 15

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the word Trauerspiel—which was perceived as descendant of tragedy in its time—was used to describe plays and historical events alike.18 The view of tragedy as a reaction to and embodiment of an irrational perception of the world is the most blatantly Nietzschean idea articulated in both Benjamin’s and Steiner’s tragic theories. Yet, their definite dissociation of tragedy from experience would appear to contradict Nietzsche’s conceptualization of the tragic as an integral part of human life. Benjamin acknowledges the pervasiveness of the ideas of the tragic and the comic as well as their independence from their expression in art: It is equally inconceivable that the philosophy of art will ever divest itself of some of its most fruitful ideas, such as the tragic or the comic. For these ideas are not simply the sum total of certain sets of rules; they are themselves structures, at the very least equal in consistency and substance to any and every drama, without being in any way commensurable. They therefore make no claim to embrace a number of given works of literature on the basis of certain features that are common to them. For even if there were no such things as pure tragedy or pure comic drama, these ideas can still survive.19

Yet, Benjamin’s discussion does pursue manifestations of tragedy in drama beyond Greek antiquity. His study focuses on the essential differences separating the two dramatic genres. Benjamin takes tragedy to be only ancient Greek tragedy but, unlike Steiner, does not attempt to use the ancient form as a model. Benjamin indicates the inappropriateness of Aristotle’s theory of tragedy to provide an accurate framework for a discussion of baroque drama, while also embarking on a critique of Nietzsche’s emphasis on the aesthetic qualities of tragedy. Although Benjamin recasts the main points of Nietzsche’s theory about the individual hero and the demise of tragedy, he provides a radically different reading of Greek tragedy. His major departure from Nietzsche lies in the accent he places on the moral parameters of tragedy, instead of the aesthetic ones. In Benjamin’s analysis, the tragic hero remains individual, yet his death is described as a rite of sacrifice.20 This sacrifice does not assign him back to the collective, but proves him to be ethically beyond the

18

Ibid. 63.

19

Ibid. 44.

20

Ibid. 106.

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communal gods. The fatal catastrophe both ‘invalidates the ancient rights of the Olympians, and it offers up the hero to the unknown god as the first fruits of a new harvest of humanity’.21 From this perspective, the hero establishes a new order through transgression instead of affirming a pre-existent order, as in Steiner, or the lack of any cosmic order, as in Nietzsche. Benjamin’s conviction is that modern theatre has never produced any dramatic form that resembles Greek tragedy. Any insistence on relating modern drama to the tragedy of antiquity is considered symptomatic of the cultural arrogance of generations who refuse to acknowledge the chasm between antiquity and the modern world. Specifically, he claims that critics who relate Trauerspiel to tragedy are misled by the common element of the royal protagonist.22 Closely following Nietzsche here, Benjamin views the figure of Socrates as the antithesis of the tragic hero and counterposes his conscious death to the tragic sacrifice. The pedagogic discourse of the Platonic dialogues, as opposed to tragic silence, says Benjamin, inaugurates the language of modern drama.23 Counterposing tragedy to Trauerspiel, Benjamin notes a major difference that lies in the expression of mourning in each genre. Tragedy is characterized by an attitude of reticence, which does not allow mourning either as an awakening of emotion in the spectator or as a stance of the chorus. The absence of any reference to mourning in the Poetics is invoked by Benjamin in order to support his argument. Yet, in this regard, the author appears to pay more credit to Aristotle’s view than to the ancient tragic texts themselves, where lamentation plays a significant role.24 Unlike Nietzsche or much later Steiner, Benjamin does not grieve for the death of tragedy. What attracts his interest is the peculiar tone of the Trauerspiel, which appeals not only to the baroque mentality but also to the temper of his contemporary world. In vivid contrast to the poetics of reticence of tragedy, the strident expression of Trauerspiel corresponds to the emergent movement of expressionism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Benjamin grounds his theory of Trauerspiel in a conception of origin (Ursprung) as a dialectical

21

22 23 Ibid. 106–7. Ibid. 110–11. Ibid. 113–15. Ibid. 108–10, 118. Taxidou (2004) attempts to reconcile tragedy with Benjamin’s view, stressing the function of mourning in the Greek plays. For Macintosh (1996) the lament plays a key role in the reception of the tragic, by being a form of repetition that invites recognition across cultures and centuries. 24

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process of becoming and disappearance. Artistic forms have a preand post-history, which opposes the idea of continuity. It is, in fact, the origin that eradicates all the material produced in the process of genesis. Origin and genesis are argued to be entirely at odds. Benjamin’s study appears to be particularly pivotal in its interpretation of origin as a process of becoming and disappearance of artistic forms, which anticipates the later materialist readings of tragedy. Marxist theorists will also emphasize the notion of change, but they will suggest that, despite the transformations of the tragic form in the course of time, it is still possible to speak about tragedy in the modern world. In his later writings, Benjamin went on to argue that the ‘untragic hero,’25 praised by Plato, finds his ideal embodiment in Brecht’s Epic theatre, which replaces the tragic hero with the thinking man. In Benjamin’s view, the Brechtian model suggests an alternative to tragedy and succeeds in bridging the gap between dramatic action and reality.26 Indeed, Brecht could well be seen as the major twentieth-century intellectual figure to challenge the value of tragedy. Brecht recognizes that different societies produce different artistic expression, and, thus, he deduces that tragedy reaches a vanishing point in a scientific era dominated by reason. To a great extent, his assumption arises from the Marxist urge to break with the tradition of bourgeois theatre. Brecht’s dramatic and theatrical theory proposes a Marxist conception of the function of theatre against the Aristotelian dramaturgical model. Motivated by confidence in human perfectibility and historical progress, Brecht aspired to transform the theatrical stage into a tool in the struggle for social change. This was to be accomplished by a theatre that replaces the traditional notion of empathy— based on pity and fear, which, in his view, leads to passive spectatorship—with a critical alertness on the part of the audience

25

Benjamin (1998: 5). When Benjamin (1998: 1) describes the orchestra of the ancient theatre, the terms he uses are highly suggestive of Nietzsche’s metaphysical understanding of tragedy: ‘the abyss which separates the actors from the audience like the dead from the living, the abyss whose silence heightens the sublime in drama, whose resonance heightens the intoxication of opera, the abyss which, of all the elements of the stage, most indelibly bears the traces of its sacral origin, has lost its function’ (emphases added). 26

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towards the dramatic event and, by extension, to reality.27 This new stance involves a critical orientation towards society and potentially results in social action leading to a change in the status quo. It is the idea of necessity and fate that Brecht wishes to attack by repudiating tragedy. Brecht’s most concrete theoretical statement, formulated in the Short Organum for the Theatre, appears to be as much anti-Nietzschean as it is anti-Aristotelian.28 The theatre of reason, required by the scientific era, challenges both a theatre based on empathy and the tragic model described by Nietzsche. Despite the absence of any explicit reference, behind Brecht’s firm opposition to any irrational and metaphysical dimension of theatre lies his latent critique of The Birth of Tragedy. When interpreting catharsis as a notion involving pleasure without any further metaphysical implications,29 Brecht has little recourse to Aristotle, whose much debated use of the term catharsis, as Stephen Halliwell remarks, belongs to an ethical and psychological, rather than a religious, context.30 Despite the generally held claims, especially those of Nietzsche’s successors, about the common origins of ritual and theatre,31 Brecht asserts that theatre was made possible only after its separation from ritual. An antithesis towards Nietzsche underlies Brecht’s disregard of Wagner’s opera, which, like dramatic theatre, he argues, should be abolished to give rise to an Epic opera. In Epic opera, music plays a communicative and critical role instead of solely provoking sensual pleasure, as is the case, according to Brecht, with Wagnerian opera.32 As a dramatist and theatre practitioner, Brecht developed a series of methods and techniques to materialize his vision on stage. Brecht’s Epic theatre employs devices that evoke the conventions of Greek and Shakespearean theatre. Greek tragedy—and 27

As E. Wright (1989: 25) notes, Brecht wants to transform Furcht (fear) and Mitleid (pity) into Wissenbegierde (desire for knowledge) and Hilfsbereitschaft (readiness to help). Brecht’s view of empathy recalls the Platonic overall repudiation of the tragic sense as dangerous to social normality and order. On Plato and tragedy, see Halliwell (1996). 28 29 See Silk (1996: 183–90). Brecht (1964/1948: 180–1). 30 Halliwell (1987: 89–90). 31 Although not interested himself in the ritual origins of tragedy, Nietzsche had a strong impact on the Cambridge Ritualists. See relevant discussion later in this chapter. 32 For a codified comparison between Epic theatre and Wagnerian opera, see Bentley (1967: 216).

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comedy—makes extensive use of narration and music, and Shakespearean stage is characterized by its theatricality being demonstratively anti-illusionist: The classical and medieval theatre alienated its character by making them wear human or animal masks; the Asiatic theatre even today uses musical and pantomimic A-effects. Such devices were certainly a barrier to empathy, and yet this technique owed more, not less, to hypnotic suggestion than do those by which empathy is achieved. The social aims of these old devices were entirely different from our own.33

Brecht became interested in the anti-illusionist conventions used in Greek theatre, yet giving them a radically different function. In the prologue to his Antigonemodell, produced around the time his Organum was published, he establishes similarities between Greek drama and his theatre: ‘Greek dramaturgy uses certain forms of alienation, notably interventions by the chorus, to try and rescue some of the freedom of calculation which Schiller is uncertain how to ensure.’34 Brecht’s Epic theatre, as opposed to dramatic theatre, employs narrative instead of the dramatic plot. The Verfremdungseffekt—referring both to the relationship between hero and actor as well as to that between auditorium and stage—is achieved through a critical confrontation of the dramatic role but also through the exposure of the medium, which interrupts the continuity of action in order to prevent the spectator’s identification. Brecht does not differentiate between formal features and the content of ideas that the form serves. As he explains, the V-effect in Epic theatre is used to stress the unfamiliarity of social phenomena, that habit and routine have made familiar, thereby calling for reaction, whereas similar techniques in earlier theatrical traditions are used to stress the unalterability of social status. Recently tragic theory has argued that the reaction of the spectator in tragedy wavers between empathy and distanciation, which brings

33 Brecht (1964/1948: 192). Citations from the Organum are taken from Willett’s translation. 34 Brecht (2003: 204–5). In the commentary on his staging of Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus for one evening at the Berlin Staatstheater in 1929, Brecht describes Oedipus at Colonus as an ideal illustration of his conception. See Brecht (1964/1948: 50).

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tragedy closer to the Brechtian model. As Eagleton writes, the notions of pity and fear constitute a ‘dialectic of otherness and intimacy’.35 The response to tragedy consists of emotional as well as intellectual reactions. H. A. Mason sees in the reaction to tragedy a state of dédoublement, in which, while giving way to particular grief, the mind contrived to be outside it. The spectator recognized pathos as tragic when he was thus enabled in one act of perfection to feel the particular and the general together and to move outwards and onwards from the normal arrest of the pained mind, which would otherwise develop the expression of pain beyond all limits. Brecht’s critique of tragedy emanates from his aversion to bourgeois drama, which he considers to be the modern version of tragedy.36

Whether Brecht’s theatre, in fact, offers examples of a tragic dramaturgy, given the specific theoretical framework of his work, has always puzzled his critics. Surprisingly, Steiner argues that Brechtian dramaturgy discredits Brecht’s Marxist belief in redemption.37 In vivid contrast to Steiner, Williams views the unnecessary suffering in the dramaturgy of Brecht as a conscious rejection of tragedy.38 To a large extent, Bentley’s attempt to redeem tragedy as well as to identify the tragic in modern bourgeois drama is developed in direct response to Brecht’s dramatic theory.39 Bentley returns to the Nietzschean understanding of tragedy, but he is reluctant to view tragedy as an exclusive product of Greek antiquity. Bentley also resists the tendency of the twentieth century to ‘dehydrate tragedy and 35 Eagleton (2003: 161). Ismene Lada (1996) uses the model of Greek theatre as a riposte to Brecht’s claim that emotion eliminates critical perception and reaction. However, Brecht is mainly suspicious of empathy (Einfühlung) and not of emotion in general. See E. Wright (1989: 25). 36 Mason (1985: 150). 37 Steiner (1961: 344–9) reads Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children as a tragedy, since the power of the dramatic character of the Mother invites the audience to identify and prevails over Brecht’s Marxist redemptive dialectics: ‘Brecht stands midway between the world of Oedipus and that of Marx. He agreed with Marx that necessity is not blind, but like all true poets, he knew that she often closes her eyes’ (p. 349). Bentley (1967: 220) also stresses the discrepancies between Brecht’s theory and practice: ‘His art makes up for his criticism. In his art there is stage-illusion, suspense, sympathy, identification.’ 38 Williams (1966: 190–204). 39 Bentley had worked closely with Brecht during the 1940s, but he was not in accord with various aspects of Brecht’s theory of theatre. On Bentley’s criticism of Brecht’s theory, see Bentley (1981).

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make of it an ideological scheme only, a “tragic view of life”’.40 He argues that, although Nietzsche was the inaugurator of this ‘dehydrating’ tendency, Nietzsche himself avoided the error of reducing tragedy to philosophy, by maintaining that the fulfilment of tragedy was possible only through the creative impetus of the tragedian who transfuses the abstract world views into a poetic work. Bentley then follows Nietzsche closely in interpreting the dialectic of tragedy as a process of cosmic disturbance—which evokes the strife between the Dionysiac and Apolline elements—and he regards the aesthetic object as a response to and transcendence of that disturbance: ‘tragedy embodies an experience of chaos, and the only cosmos that the tragic poet can guarantee to offset it with is the cosmos of his tragedy with its integration of plot, character, dialogue, and idea.’41 If the experience of chaos alludes to a Dionysiac state, all the elements that counterbalance it are Apolline. Like Benjamin, Bentley also acknowledges the moral parameters of tragedy arguing that the ‘aesthetic transcendence of suffering, disorder and meaninglessness has a moral value.’42 Bentley focuses on tragedy, drawing a division of the dramatic genres into the ‘higher’ forms of tragedy and comedy and the respective ‘low’ forms of melodrama and farce. Despite his high appraisal of the tragic form, Bentley does not equate artistic excellence with the serenity of form, as Steiner does. On the contrary, he concedes that ‘tragedy does not discard the bizarre, macabre, and morbid elements of melodrama’, but ‘exploits them further. In tragedy, there is even more mental sickness, even more destructive and monstrous passion.’43 Bentley’s contribution is that he grounds the discussion in more pragmatic terms than Nietzsche, by highlighting the psychological aspects of tragedy, and especially the condition of suffering. For Bentley, there is no common denominator for the different tragic forms, apart from a profound interest in the life of the individual. Thus, he recognizes that the tragedy of modernity originates in bourgeois drama and reaches its maturity in the dramaturgy of Ibsen and Strindberg. The abandonment of grandeur and the subsequent espousal of the middle-class hero suggest a new model that is capable of embodying the tragic sense of modern life. Comparing Wagner with Ibsen, Bentley concludes that it is the latter who 40 42

Bentley (1966: 278). 43 Ibid. Ibid. 272.

41

Ibid. 293.

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achieved tragic expression, despite the Wagnerian vision of reviving Greek tragedy.44 Similarly, Williams attempts to map out the various appropriations of tragedy over the course of time. His delineation of tragedy abandons the Nietzschean schemes and ideas completely, while also firmly resisting the idea of tragedy’s decline. In many regards, Williams’s treatise provides a coded reply to The Death of Tragedy. Williams relates the different manifestations of the tragic genre to the preoccupations of different eras, and he challenges the theorists who reject the possibility of contemporary tragedy, providing an interpretation based on a method of historicizing and contextualizing the tragic forms. His study traces the variations that the meaning of tragedy acquires in both theory and dramatic writing from ancient Greece to nineteenth-century Germany in order to demonstrate the flexibility and adaptability of the term:45 Greek tragedy, in his view, embodied a collective experience ‘at once and indistinguishably metaphysical and social’,46 expressed in dramatic form; in the Middle Ages a story representing the fall of a man of high rank and prosperity was a tragedy; for neoclassical theorists tragedy emanates from a flaw in the dramatic hero. Williams reaches the conclusion that: Tragedy is then not a single and permanent kind of fact, but a series of experiences, conventions and institutions. It is not a case of interpreting this series by reference to a permanent and unchanging human nature. Rather, the varieties of tragic experience are to be interpreted by reference to the changing conventions and institutions.47

Arguing that the abundance of tragic writing in the twentieth century can discredit any argument about the demise of the genre, Williams goes on to discuss the ways in which different playwrights have articulated the tragic. Williams’s main concern—as well as major contribution to the debate—is to ascribe to tragedy a particular content instead of a specific form, by relating the common use of the word to the genre 44

Ibid. 31–7, 55–64. Gellrich (1998) offers a deconstructionist reading of tragic drama and tragic theory from Aristotle to the German philosophy of Romanticism, arguing that theory tends to stress the importance of rules and order, whereas the texts themselves testify to a more open conception of both the form and content of tragedy. 46 47 Williams (1966: 18). Ibid. 45–6. 45

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known by the same name. In his analysis the notions of tragedy and ‘tragedy’ (to maintain Williams’s telling punctuation) are interchangeable, while the effort to discriminate between them is a pseudo-problem and appears to be politically suspect.48 In contrast to Benjamin’s view, Williams seems to imply that consideration of the common use of the term tragedy is needed in order to adumbrate tragedy as an aesthetic category. The designation of tragedy offered in his study contests a series of critical commonplaces about the genre. Williams challenges the aristocratic tragic vision of Steiner, while ‘redeeming’ tragedy in a way that would make it reconcilable with the Brechtian perspective. The view that ‘where the suffering is felt, where it is taken into the person to another, we are clearly within the possible dimensions of tragedy’49 is opposed to the usual persistence that ‘mere’ suffering is not tragic. The tragic is described as an experience of disorder, which is defined not in relation to a pre-existent and given order but as preceding the emergence of a new order. Such a conception is in vivid opposition to the idea that a higher order, divine or not, is a basic presupposition according to which human predicament merits the characterization tragedy, as Steiner argues, but it evokes Benjamin’s conviction that the tragic hero makes an act of transgression that liquidates ethically the gods of the community and establishes a new order. Williams indicates which elements are those that realize the potentiality of tragedy. The major event that is illuminated in a tragic light is revolution, and, retrospectively, this frame of analysis provides a Marxist approach to tragedy itself. Williams argues that Marx substituted the conflict, described by Hegel as a spiritual process, by the strife materialized in social and historical terms. Applied to tragedy, the above idea replaces the ethical forces that Hegel saw as the agents of tragedy with social ones. Revolution can be envisaged as a tragic process as it activates human power against humanity involving a great amount of disorder. According to Williams, the Marxist description of revolution provides an authentically tragic world view as the struggle of a sphere ‘which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all the other spheres of society, without therefore emancipating all these other spheres; which is, in short, a total loss of humanity and

48

Ibid. 49.

49

Ibid. 47 (emphasis added).

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which can only redeem itself by a total redemption of humanity’.50 Williams sees an affirmation of the dialectic process in this ‘disordered struggle against the disorder’.51 The acknowledgement and experience of such a dialectics as tragic entail the continuation of revolution, since the experience of a given condition as suffering will necessitate further revolutionary action. Williams’s association of tragedy with Marxist dialectics appears to be particularly radical in its implication that tragedy can be a collective experience. Williams also develops a critique of Western societies, which dismiss revolutionary action in the name of consensus, without, though, abstaining from armament and military alliances in order to be in a position to impose their liberating vision universally. Modern Tragedy testifies itself to the diachronic transformations of the idea of the tragic, since the theory of tragedy it proposes could be related to the intense opposition between Marxist and liberalist principles amid the outburst of radical movements around the world in the 1960s. Published three decades later, Sweet Violence by Terry Eagleton follows up the discussion launched by Williams, to whose book Eagleton seems to be largely indebted. Like Modern Tragedy, Eagleton’s analysis contests the theorists who insist on the demise of tragedy in the modern world, but it also addresses a cluster of adversaries from different areas. Eagleton accuses left-wing critics of disregarding the genre of tragedy owing to its supposed defeatism and determinism, which contradict their belief in progress. However, Eagleton’s main target is postmodern theory; in his view, the neoNietzschean postmodernists, overemphasizing the irrational qualities of tragedy, find themselves in accord with conservative criticism. Eagleton offers a sophisticated discussion of the interdependence of tragedy as a literary genre and the common use of the term, pointing out that the Renaissance uses of the term tragedy in order to describe real-life events are already saturated by an awareness of the literary implications of the word.52 While Williams identifies two interpenetrating meanings of tragedy, one referring to ordinary life

50

51 Marx quoted in Williams (1966: 75). Williams (1966: 83). Eagleton (2003: 14): ‘In the best Wildean fashion, tragedy begins as art, which life then imitates. And the earlier real-life uses of the world still retain a resonance of its origins in stage or story, which can later drop out altogether. The word thus progresses from art, to life with an echo of art, to life.’ 52

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and another to art, Eagleton distinguishes a third use of the word: in addition to artworks and real-life events, he identifies tragic world views or structures of feeling. Regarding the definition of the dramatic genre of tragedy, Eagleton notes that tragedy can be designated only through a series of overlapping features, using Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblances.53 In contrast to the historical approach offered by Williams, Eagleton’s discussion balances the contextualization of tragedy with its manifestation in art: Tragic art involves the plotting of suffering, not simply a raw cry of pain. And while this very mise-en-scène may endow suffering with a spurious shapeliness, lending it an intelligibility which seems to betray the ragged incoherence of the thing itself, it is hard to see how we could even use words like ‘tragic’ outside some social or moral contextualizing, in life as much as in art. Tidying up the tragic may thus be part of the price we pay for articulating it. But such articulation is also a way of trying to transcend it [ . . . ]54

The emphasis placed on the tragic form at this point should be distinguished from the tragic formalism advocated by Steiner. Whereas for Steiner the ‘Apolline’ tragic form is a reflection of an organic world view, for Eagleton the shapeliness of the tragic form counterbalances the lack of any consistency in tragic strife: ‘Perhaps things are tragic not because they are ruled by a pitiless law but precisely because they are not.’55 Eagleton and Williams share an understanding of tragedy grounded in dialectical thinking. Eagleton notes that, since the core of tragedy does not lie in the lethal end but in the conflict and suffering that the struggle towards progress or redemption involves, the Marxist perspective is tragic. Eagleton’s analysis appears to be original in its drawing of parallels between Marxism and Christianity as tragic conceptions of the world. The riposte here to Steiner’s claim that Christianity and Marxism

53

Silk (1988: 9) has also used Wittgenstein’s concept in order to designate tragedy. Eagleton (2003: 63). 55 Ibid. 111. A similar idea is articulated by Mason (1985: 25) in relation to the hero’s perception of the tragic situation: ‘The tragic note lies between two extremes. If the hero regards himself as a mere puppet at the mercy of all that he calls his Fate or Destiny, then he cannot properly be called tragic. If he thinks he is in control of all his affairs, he is a deluded fool, and if the play as a whole supports him in his delusion, it does not deserve to be numbered among the world’s greatest tragedies.’ 54

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offer an anti-tragic world view56 is that both Christianity and Marxism are placed amid tragic conflicts and experience the predicament despite their aspiration to resolve and redeem the conflict. Eagleton’s final reply to those who advocate the demise of tragedy in the modern world is that tragedy does not vanish, but it mutates into modernism. The tragedy of modernity resides in the ensnarement of that epoch in its own contradictions, in the form of an oscillation between humanist values and practices that go against these values, an idea also articulated by Williams. In a similar way, modernism is envisaged as ‘a reaction to boredom, banality, suburban staleness—but lacking much faith of its own it can undo this spiritual inertia only from the inside, by mordant scepticisms and elaborate intellectual parodies which seem to mimic the same qualities they abhor’.57 Like tragedy, modernity is fed by its own mythology; the difference is that modern mythology consists of both belief in instrumental reason and inner energies that this very reason discards. The relationship between myth and modernity is profoundly contradictory: ‘Myth and modernity are thus both adversaries and mirrorimages.’58 Although Eagleton espouses a Hegelian understanding of tragedy over the allegedly neo-Nietzschean tenets of poststructuralist and postmodern theory, his own idea of tragedy as the conflict between primordial forces and civilization would seem to hark back to Nietzsche. While the polarities between nature and culture, order and disorder, primitivism and sublimity underlie the Dionysiac– Apolline rivalry, they are not of central, if of any, importance in Hegelian tragic dialectics. Employing the analytical tools of Marxist criticism, neither Williams nor Eagleton abandons the dialectical schema in dealing with tragedy. Williams relates tragedy to Hegelian conflict; Eagleton vests tragedy not only with conflict, albeit a resolvable one, but also with the Aristotelian notion of peripeteia. In Eagleton’s view, Stalinism, unlike fascism, is worthy of the characterization tragedy, exactly because the tragic signifies not mere destruction but also the reversal of noble intentions into their opposite. Eagleton’s criticism of postmodernism as a sworn enemy of tragedy is conceptualized in terms of an antithesis between the Hegelian

56

Steiner (1961: 260).

57

Eagleton (2003: 246).

58

Ibid. 226.

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and the Nietzschean reflections on the tragic, summarized in the following passage: Hegel is the great Enlightenment theorist of tragedy, seeking to rescue its depth, seriousness and intensity from sentimentalist dilutions, but striving at the same time to reconcile it with Enlightenment reason. The great counter-Enlightenment philosopher is Friedrich Nietzsche [ . . . ] For him tragedy is the supreme critique of modernity, which is one reason why the subject looms so large in an age undistinguished for its actual tragic act. It is a question of myth versus science, ‘life’ against morality, music versus discourse, eternity rather than progress, the ravishment of suffering in the teeth of callow humanitarianism, heroism rather than mediocrity, the aesthetic at war with the ethico-political, the barbaric against the civic and cultural, Dionysian madness contra Apollonian social order. It is a syndrome which has re-emerged in our time in the shape of some postmodern theorizing, much of which has been Nietzschean without fully knowing it.59

Eagleton seeks to restore the links between tragedy and the Enlightenment, arguing that their supposed animosity undermines the affirmative and genuinely humanist character of tragedy. In his view, Enlightenment rationalism nourishes rather than resists tragedy, by providing the ground that enables all humanity to be a possible participant in it, as proved by the very birth of tragedy in the democratic polis. Certain similarities between Maffesoli’s analysis of the tragic and Steiner’s theory partly uphold Eagleton’s critique of the affiliations between postmodernists and earlier Nietzsche-inspired critics of tragedy. Maffesoli maintains that modernity is deprived of the tragic sense because it renounces fate and necessity in the name of freedom and progress. For Maffesoli, the experience of the tragic is entirely at odds with the teleological perspective, which anticipates progress or synthesis. This argument is reminiscent of Steiner’s idea that tragedy presupposes inexorable fate and not just strife and suffering that might come to an end, as well as his dictum that modernity has made the tragic genre redundant. However, Maffesoli proclaims the resurgence of the tragic feeling in postmodern societies, whereas Steiner denies any possibility of a re-emergence of tragedy.60 The 59

Ibid. 52–3. Four decades after The Death of Tragedy, Steiner appears to be entirely convinced about the irrevocable demise of tragedy. See Steiner (1996, 2004). 60

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excess of hedonism and the rise of mass culture, especially among the young, denote, in Maffesoli’s view, a reconciliation with the inevitability of death, which is a highly tragic stance. Maffesoli’s discussion of the tragic follows Nietzsche in its emphasis on myth, the irrational, and an organic sense of collectivity and primordial forces. Maffesoli’s own supra-historical interpretation of the tragic is in line with Nietzsche. Yet, his critique would hardly lend credence to Eagleton’s argument that postmodern approaches to tragedy have a suspicious political agenda, which denies the potential participation of all humanity in tragedy. Far from offering an exclusivist view of tragedy, Maffesoli’s analysis embraces the collective element, which Steiner discards. The passionate experience of collective feeling, argues Maffesoli, is part of a genuinely tragic stance towards life. Paradoxical as it may be, Maffesoli and Eagleton are here in complete agreement that the interdependence of human beings within society constitutes a tragic situation: for both theorists, the tragic is endemic in the fact that individual existence depends on the submission of the self to the community.61 The emphasis on the collective element provides the point of encounter between Marxist and postmodern theories of tragedy.

GREEK TRAGEDY AND THE DIONYSIAC TURN The turn towards the ‘Dionysiac’ qualities identified by Eagleton on the intellectual plane finds its parallel in recent approaches in classical scholarship that insist on the essential relationship between tragedy and ritual. Similar to the resurgence of Nietzschean premisses in postmodern theory, the lineage of these classical approaches can be traced back to Nietzsche. The idea that god Dionysus lies behind the tragic hero in all Greek tragedies receives its first 61 Maffesoli (2004: 140): ‘This is indeed the intensity and exultation of the tragic condition, the condition, let us remember, of Nietzsche’s amor fati: being free in a necessity filled with love. In short, it is a form of dependence full of serenity, in that individuals fulfill themselves in a “surplus being” [plus être] that reveals them to themselves.’ Cf. Eagleton (2003: 153): ‘How can we not be guilty, when, given that we are bound up with each other as intimately as breathing, the most innocent of our actions may breed dire consequences in the lives of others?’

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articulation in Nietzsche.62 Nietzsche himself is not interested in the origins of tragedy—at least no more than Aristotle, to whom he refers in order to underpin his assumption.63 Yet, his claim about the links between the tragic hero and Dionysus has fuelled many discussions among classicists about the Dionysiac residues in Greek tragedy. Theories dating from the beginning of the twentieth century developed by the so-called Cambridge Ritualists and Gilbert Murray provide different reformulations of Nietzsche’s idea.64 The Cambridge Ritualists viewed the destruction of the tragic hero, in particular, as a re-enactment of the ritual sacrifice of the year-god; the tragic performance itself was seen as dramatization of the ritual related to the cyclical patterns of death and revival in nature.65 The debate over the presence of Dionysus in Greek tragedy has been separating classicists loosely into ‘Dionysiacs’ and ‘Apollines’ ever since the appearance of the first ritualist readings.66 However, the almost immediate widespread repudiation of these theories by classical scholars did not affect the appeal of the ‘Dionysiac’ to the later critical and creative reception of Greek tragedy.67 The question of ritual and tragedy has remained a vexed one in classical studies and very influential within literary and theatrical contexts. The influence of the ritualist approaches is evident in Francis Fergusson’s theory of drama, which suggests that dramatic forms of different periods can be read according to recurrent ritual patterns.68 Modernist poetics also espoused Nietzschean tragic ideas and notions: 62 Nietzsche (1993/1872: 51): ‘But we may claim with equal certainty that, until Euripides, Dionysus never ceased to be the tragic hero, and that all the celebrated characters of the Greek stage—Prometheus, Oedipus and so on—are merely masks of that original hero.’ 63 Nietzsche bases his theory on the testimony provided in the Poetics that tragedy developed from the dithyramb, but does not pursue this further. See Nietzsche (1993/ 1872: 35–6), in particular. 64 For a concise discussion on Nietzsche’s influence on the ritualist approaches to Greek tragedy, see Goldhill (1997: 331–6). 65 See Vickers (1979: 33–51) and Goldhill (1997). 66 In another respect, this division between the ‘Apolline’ and ‘Dionysiac’ seems to have been inaugurated when Wilamowitz-Moellendorff attacked the unsystematic and radical approach of Nietzsche to tragedy, which he regarded as lacking the qualities of classical rigor. See Silk and Stern (1981: 90–109) and Goldhill (1997: 324–31). 67 Vickers (1979) writes that Pickard–Cambridge liquidated this theory putting an end to the discussions. Goldhill (1997) examines its impact in the later structuralist approaches by René Girard and Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. 68 Fergusson (1949).

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Ezra Pound’s fascination with the heroic ideal and W. B. Yeats’s concept of ‘tragic joy’ are recognizably Nietzschean. A more recent tragic theory influenced by the ritualist approaches to Greek tragedy is offered by the theatre theorist William Storm.69 In Storm, the experience of sparagmos is removed from its ritual context and reinterpreted as the fragmentation, corporeal or psychological, of the hero that characterizes not only Greek tragedy but the tragic genre in general. The tragic division of the self as a fundamental condition of being is related by Storm to mortality, which may or may not find expression in drama. It is what he terms the ‘Dionysian’, which, albeit not synonymous to the tragic, enables the theatrical incarnation of the tragic in a process that appears to repeat the Dionysiac sparagmos. For Storm, theatre is the only art that can embody the tragic, since only the bodily dimension can warrant the necessary immediacy and identification.70 However problematic in its essentializing psychological definition of the Dionysiac element, Storm’s study offers testimony to the pervasiveness of ideas associated with the supposed origins of Greek tragedy.71 The impact of the Dionysiac on the performance reception of Greek tragedy has also been significant. The staging of Murray’s translation of the Bacchae at the Royal Court Theatre in 1908 was the earliest theatrical manifestation of the ritualist interpretations of Greek tragedy.72 After this production, Dionysus seems to retreat from the theatrical stage until his overwhelming comeback in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69 in New York,73 Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite in London,74 and Klaus-Michael Grüber’s Die Bakchen in Berlin, all 69

Storm (1998). Eagleton discusses the representation of the tragic in the modernist novel. On the contrary, Silk (1988: 6) accepts the possibility of tragedy only in drama because of the very quality of drama to combine characteristics that are indispensable for tragedy, such as ‘concentrated action, heightening and a cumulative logic’. 71 Fischer-Lichte’s employment of the notion of sparagmos in reference to specific modern performances of ancient tragedy demonstrates the historical specificity of the Dionysiac resurgence, providing a good counter to Storm’s undifferentiated and rather reductionist recourse to the term. See Fischer-Lichte (1999a, 2004). See further Chapter 5. 72 On Murray’s interpretation and translation of the Bacchae and on the disjunctions between Murray’s ideas and William Poel’s production, see Macintosh (2007a). 73 See Zeitlin (2004) on the emphasis on politics of ecstasy and sexual liberation, which, in her view, obliterated the political potential of the production. 74 See the discussion in Chapter 3. 70

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testify to a confluence of Dionysiac trends and the theatrical avantgarde. The associations ascribed to Dionysus in these productions are no less divergent than the conundrum that the multifaceted ancient god himself poses to classical scholarship:75 for Schechner, Dionysus embodies the call for sexual liberation and transgression of social norms; following Murray’s Christian view of Dionysus, Soyinka creates a syncretic figure who transgresses boundaries between cultures; in Grüber’s production, the Dionysiac sparagmos stands for the confrontation with the fragments of the ancient past.76 The interest in the Dionysiac ritual has reappeared in studies that tend to focus on the ritual elements in tragedy rather than on tragedy as ritual. It is mainly the subversion of the ritual patterns in tragedy that attracts critical attention nowadays. For example, Richard Seaford argues that the Dionysiac subversion in the plays stands for the destruction of the oikos and the consequent establishment of the polis;77 for Charles Segal, the ritual becomes the theatrical medium that enhances the audience’s identification with the enacted drama;78 and Simon Goldhill views the performance of tragedy as a subversion of the ritual celebrations that precede its demonstration in the City Dionysia.79 Scott Scullion, more recently, has argued that the claims about the ritual origins of tragedy are based upon a series of misinterpretations of textual sources and archaeological testimonies, concluding that tragedy did not have any relationship with the worship of Dionysus.80 According to Rainer Friedrich, the Dionysiac turn takes the form of an ‘obsession with the primitive, savage, the irrational, the instinctual, the collectivist’,81 which misreads tragedy projecting upon it modern or postmodern preoccupations.82 What is significant when we look at Eagleton’s attack on postmodernism and the ritual debate in classical scholarship is that in both cases the ‘Dionysiac’ trend is ascribed a politically suspect agenda. 75 On the multiple faces of Dionysus, see Faraone’s introduction in Carpenter and Faraone (1993). 76 77 See further Chapter 5. Seaford (1995: 328–67; 1996a). 78 79 Segal (1996). Goldhill (1990). 80 Scullion’s essay first appeared in Classical Quarterly, 52/1 (2002). A revised version of this paper is published in Blackwell’s Companion to Greek Tragedy. See Gregory (2005). 81 Friedrich (1996: 257). 82 Henrichs (1993) also observes that not only tragedy but also Dionysus himself has been misinterpreted as a god of disruption and destructive impulses, whereas the god had a domestic and peaceful aspect, which was equally important.

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Both Friedrich and Scullion criticize the approaches that demonstrate interest in the Dionysiac as depoliticizing Greek tragedy, displacing it from the context of the democratic city that bred it. However, this conclusion is rather misplaced, since Seaford, Segal and Goldhill do acknowledge the civic character of tragedy and tragic performance. Indeed, their very focus of interest is on the function of the Dionysiac ritual within Athenian democracy. The discussion of the Dionysiac ritual offered by Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet is pivotal between the ritual and the poststructuralist readings of tragedy. In Vernant and VidalNaquet, Dionysus is associated with all the notions that are frequently dismissed as postmodern obsessions: otherness, transgression, theatrical illusion, and ecstasis.83 Yet, Vernant and VidalNaquet’s idea of Greek tragedy is highly informed by their Marxist background.84 Their discussion of the ritual aspects proffers a view of Greek tragedy as a cultural phenomenon deeply situated in the particular historical and political context of classical Athens. The struggle, which in Nietzsche takes place on an abstract plane, is restored here to its political context, since the tension between irrational myth and reason is employed to describe a historical condition and not a struggle of cosmic forces. Vernant and VidalNaquet have studied the relationship between tragedy and the context of the democratic city extensively, suggesting that tragedy emerged in a historical moment of transition from a mythic cosmos to the reality of polis.85 From that perspective, Athenian democracy produced tragedy precisely because it permitted the revisiting of a still vivid mythic past, and not because the sphere of the myth had been abandoned.86 Greek tragedy did not simply depict this transition; it also made use of the myth in order to uncover the weaknesses of the polis. Bentley observes that in the twentieth century the idea of tragedy has been transformed into a means of polemic, used to confront

83 On the appeal of the polarities of Dionysus to French poststructuralist readings of tragedy, see Henrichs (1993: 29–39). 84 On that, see Hall (1990). 85 This idea evokes Benjamin’s conception of the tragic hero as being ethically in advance of the communal gods. 86 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1988/1972); Vickers (1979: 210–343).

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ideological opponents.87 This statement is nowhere more clearly evidenced than in Eagleton’s use of tragedy against postmodernism. Discussing the various ideological investments in the notion of the classical, James Porter concludes that: ‘Unpacking the historical mechanisms of classicisms is a good way to observe and discover how ideologies come to function and take hold of subjects, most of all through finely spun webs of implication that take effect precisely because they are not named.’88 No less than the notion of the classical, tragedy has lent its name to diverse intellectual pursuits and functions: it provides the cornerstone of Nietzsche’s modern mythopoetic, Brecht’s rival in the creation of a new theatrical model and Eagleton’s recruited ally in his attack on postmodernism; it represents the determinism that has to be eradicated in the Marxist vision as well as embodying the perfection and sublimity that modern drama has allegedly never achieved. The death of tragedy emanates from the modernist melancholia over a lost totality, while its resurgence is invoked to celebrate the irrational in postmodernism. Following Williams’s methodology of basing the discussion of tragedy upon its theatrical articulations, it is possible to use the plays of a particular period as apt paradigms upon which the dialogues with tragedy can be tested. Before Williams, F. R. Leavis had suggested that tragic theory is only a ‘blackboard diagram’,89 which has to be substantiated by the language of the works of art themselves. In a similar manner, Jennifer Wallace suggests that the study of tragedy in performance can assist the exploration of the ideas of the tragic more effectively than abstract philosophical thinking.90 Playwrights and theatre practitioners whose work engages with postmodern aesthetics have provided contemporary theatre with a proliferation of adaptations of the Greek plays. The encounter between postmodernism and Greek tragedy, as exemplified in these adaptations, makes it possible to examine the attractions and repulsions between tragedy and postmodernism. The recent rewritings of Greek tragedy are distinguished not so much as revisitings of the Greek myth, but mostly as close textual reworkings of their source texts. Umberto Eco analyses the pleasure derived from repetition in postmodern art with reference to the use of given patterns in the art of antiquity, and especially in Greek 87 89

Bentley (1966: 278). Leavis (1984 /1952: 135).

88

Porter (2006: 9) (emphasis in original). 90 Wallace (2007: 8–9).

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tragedy, where the process of recognition played a key role.91 In recent rewritings, the recognition of tragic patterns not only involves the interplay with the classical texts but entails a confrontation with the modern discourses of tragedy and the tragic. Whether or not a modern tragedy is the outcome of rewriting an ancient one, these plays certainly invite us to engage with the diachronic metamorphoses of tragedy and, as Leavis suggests, to (re)invent tragedy for the contemporary era.

91

See Eco (1997).

2 Viewing through the Frame of Tragedy It is no longer possible to write The Persians, Agincourt, Chevy Chase: some blunderer has driven his car on to the wrong side of the road—that is all. W. B. Yeats, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 (1936) They don’t care about our tragedy. Yousef, Syrian refugee, Independent, 22 August 2015

A few months after the attacks of 9/11, a wide range of theatre scholars were invited to contribute to a forum discussing the meaning of tragedy in the light of events that had generated chaos and suffering across the globe.1 The conflict that ensued on the international level triggered a dialogue that challenged the belief that tragedy belongs within the confines of theatre.2 Although a few forum contributors maintained that any references to tragedy were inappropriate as the catastrophe lacked the organization and the coherence of art,

1 The forum was organized by David Román and included contributions by prominent theatre theorists, such as Richard Schechner, Marvin Carlson, and Elin Diamond, to name just a few. It was published in Theatre Journal in March 2002. A recurrent question in this forum was the part that the intellectual community is summoned to play in times of crisis. Many of the academics asked whether the study of theatre, or even theatre itself, matter when world populations are confronted with large-scale calamity. The APGRD conference on the performance reception of Agamemnon took place in Oxford one week after 9/11. The discussions at the conference also offered testimony to the concerns that the attacks had raised within academia. The need to study tragedy in the contemporary world without postmodern intellectual games was the theme of at least one discussion. I am grateful to Fiona Macintosh for this information. 2 See, e.g., Taylor (2002: 95–6).

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for the majority of the participants, tragedy was admitted to be a useful notion for understanding large-scale loss in a reality replete with images and representations. Much of the discussion in the forum reflected upon the ways in which the attacks were mediated and the various discursive frames imposed in Western media reports. While the immediate—and even simultaneous—coverage of the attacks would seem to reinforce a sense of reality, the representational practices at work unavoidably conjured up images from action movies. The aesthetic analogies were enhanced by the symbolic significance of the targets: the Twin Towers as the economic centre of the global metropolis, and the Pentagon as the emblem of the United States’ military power. The symbolic readings rendered the destruction liable to receptive processes similar to those deployed in the analysis of artistic products. In this regard, the recourse to tragedy as a form associated with pain and catastrophe through the means of theatrical representation was rather unsurprising. The impact of the news images on the spectating community was captured in the words of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen that the attacks were the ‘greatest work of art that there has ever been’.3 Stockhausen’s provocative statement seemed to propose an aestheticization of terror and destruction that threatened to eclipse the political significance of the event. As one of the forum participants pointed out, the contemplation of September 11 as tragedy comes about through a ‘blurring of genres, the disturbing but inherent interplay of representation, performance, and reality’.4 The name of Antonin Artaud cropped up several times in the forum on the meaning on tragedy after 9/11. The aestheticized catastrophe of the Twin Towers evoked Artaud’s vision of a visceral theatrical experience; but the reference to Artaud had implications regarding the reception of tragedy as well. According to Richard Schechner, the impact of the events of 9/11 on the American public could be compared to the effect of Artaud’s theatre; it was a shock that made manifest the contingency of terror.5 In the context of the forum debate, Artaud’s warning that theatre must be an unsettling experience, ‘else we might as well abdicate now without protest,

3 Stockhausen quoted in Balme (2002: 115). For a discussion on Stockhausen’s statements in this Forum, see pp. 113–16, in particular. 4 5 Elam (2002: 103). Schechner (2002: 132).

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and acknowledge we are fit only for chaos, famine, bloodshed, war and epidemics’,6 acquired a particular significance. However, the ethical implications of Artaud’s call cannot be satisfied by the exposure to a shocking experience, especially for today’s desensitized audiences. By contrast, the recurring references to tragedy seemed to offer a more apt means to fathom the ethical and political complexities of 9/11. The use of the term tragedy with reference to 9/11 was not just a way of verbalizing the extent of pain and suffering caused. It drew attention to tragedy as a pervasive reality in the face of proliferating media representations that seemed to undermine the notion of reality itself. At the same time, however, the emphasis of the world’s superpower on its own tragedy exposed its obliviousness to war and crises ravaging countries outside the West. Unlike the repeated transmission of the image of the blazing Twin Towers, the ongoing ordeal of non-Western populations was generally less visible and did not even register as tragedy. As noted by Brian Singleton: The US–British bombardment of Afghanistan is not as tragic as the September 11th, as it is not perceived to be so, because the media has little presence there to capture the theatre of war. [ . . . ] Is it not ‘tragic’ that the valiant AIDS-awareness efforts of South-African Theatre-inEducation activists battle on against what need not be inevitable?7

The invocation of tragedy to refer to suffering that happens close to home is not simply a case of selective use of the term. Tragedy provides a concept that determines what constitutes significant loss and catastrophe. The idea that ‘ordinary’ death is not tragic, in fact, links back to the conviction that tragedy can occur only in art. The ‘blunderer who has driven his car on to the wrong side of the road’ offers, according to W. B. Yeats, no material for tragedy.8 The elitist principle of literary criticism seems to re-emerge in the way Western media discourses tend to incorporate references to tragedy. Suffering outside art is characterized as tragic, depending on who is the subject experiencing it, and, in turn, to describe the suffering of an individual or a community as tragedy provides a performative affirmation that reproduces the system of values that defines which lives matter more than others. The exclusive claim on tragedy implied in media uses of 6 8

Artaud (1970/1938: 60). Yeats (1936: p. xxxiv).

7

Singleton (2002: 119).

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the term goes back to the narrative that places the dramatic form of tragedy at the foundations of Western culture. In a similar way that the classics were used to justify the colonial practices of the past, the references to tragedy in discussions about grief and loss in the West would appear to legitimize the action taken by the tragic sufferers against those whose death is not deemed as grievable. Yet, tragedy, in all its intricacy and transformations as both dramatic form as well as cultural discourse, provides more than a means of establishing hierarchies of suffering. The strong associations between the tragic genre and questions of agency and responsibility is what has historically rendered tragedy a means of self-reflection. Even though these two possibilities are not easy to separate, the reception of the Greek tragic texts from classical antiquity to the present, in fact, encompasses both self-celebratory as well as self-reflective uses and appropriations. Tragedy, establishes a continuum between painful events and tragic art, which inevitably featured significantly in dealing with suffering that was highly mediatized. It is important to note that references to tragedy provided the means to resist the aestheticization of 9/11. As the forum made manifest, contemplating the loss suffered on a large scale in terms of tragedy did not equal viewing catastrophe as a scene from a movie, nor did it entail collapsing the destruction into an artistic masterpiece, as Stockhausen had it. In this particular case, references to tragedy helped to shape responses that went beyond the tendency to aestheticize the catastrophe and offered an ethical apparatus to reflect on loss.9 Paradoxical as it may be, the long-standing idealization of tragedy in the West as the most philosophical of art forms could be turned on its own head and become a call to surpass self-victimization, questioning, first and foremost, the ways suffering was represented within dominant discourses, including the very uses of the term tragedy. The use of tragedy as a frame distinct from media representations did not ascribe an orderliness and meaningfulness that the events did not have, such as providence or teleological perspective. The analogy with tragedy rather urged the public to make these events meaningful through the contemplation of human agency and their own involvement, as both spectators and potential participants. The forum 9 Halliwell (2005) shows that similar debates were present in philosophy and criticism in antiquity, which tackled the intersection of drama and life with reference to tragedy.

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demonstrated that the references to tragedy could unsettle the binary between victims and perpetrators. The catchphrase ‘every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists’10 was immediately coined to defend the military action undertaken by the USA. Running counter to the growing ideological and religious biases, the reference to tragedy put the events in perspective, questioning the power politics that had preceded the outbreak of international terrorism. Jennifer Wallace argues that tragedy is primarily defined through its capacity to elicit the spectator’s response to suffering, which explains why it has traditionally been associated with the art of theatre.11 In sharp contrast to mainstream media representations, tragedy provides a framing that does not disregard the pain of others, invoking the notion that intertwines tragic art and the experience of suffering—namely empathy. Greek tragedy is deeply enmeshed in Western perceptions of suffering and continues to shape responses to warfare, calamity, and crisis. To a great extent, the cultural processes that form these perceptions include 3the numerous appropriations of the Greek plays as well as their dominant representations within the media and the public sphere.12 Although adaptations and theatrical productions of Greek tragedy across time have participated in the ethical and political struggles, towards the end of the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries playwrights and theatre makers have adapted tragedy to respond to specific contemporary events or historical realities. From Peter Sellars and Robert Auletta’s 1993 version of The Persians set during the first Gulf War, which drew strong associations with the defeated Iraqis, to Yael Farber’s Molora in 2003, which transferred the plot of The Oresteia to a Xhosa village during the Truth and Reconciliation Committee hearings in post-Apartheid South Africa,13 the 10 George Bush, quoted in Lane (2002: 110). In the Forum, Arrizón (2002: 117) observes: ‘But while terror will forever define the morning of September 11, the call for unification in the name of patriotism and war will intensify the sense of tragedy.’ 11 Wallace (2007: 3). 12 Hall (2004: 173) discusses recent political appropriations of Aeschylus, focusing on the use of Greek tragedy ‘to evade the more implicit, unconscious, consensual, and culturally endorsed policing of the represented and the representable’. 13 Van Zyl Smit (2010: 132) distinguishes Molora from other post-Apartheid adaptations of the Atreides myth, pointing out that ‘Farber is unique in her close scrutiny and selection of passages not only from the different ancient plays, but often from different translations of one play’. On the amalgamation of different translations

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references to the respective historical moments that the plays contemplate are obvious. The value of similar approaches does not lie in the immediate, often easy, analogies they create between tragic texts and modern contexts, but rather in that the negotiation with the classical sources and their reception histories proposes more inclusive definitions of tragedy and helps to re-evaluate established perceptions of conflict and suffering. The plays adapting Greek tragedy in response to real-life ordeal and suffering reclaim tragedy for our contemporary era. It is precisely the recognition of the tragic models in the process of audience reception that affirms the fact that suffering falls within the compass of tragedy. The continuum between the tragic art and tragedy in real life, underlined in contemporary rewritings of the Greek tragic plays, demonstrates, with Raymond Williams, the ethical imperative of tragedy: The events that are not seen as tragic are deep in the pattern of our own culture: war, famine, work, traffic, politics. To see no ethical content or human agency in such events, or to say that we cannot contest them with general meanings, and especially with permanent and universal meanings, is to admit a strange and particular bankruptcy, which no rhetoric of tragedy can finally hide.14

Similar takes on Greek tragedy can be used to challenge the critical commonplace that the classical texts are universal and timeless. Instead, they demonstrate the need for a time-specific revisiting to speak to different circumstances. The unerring focus on the real-life tragedies in these plays paired with the dependence upon the ancient texts is altogether an acknowledgement, and perhaps a manifestation, of the reciprocity between tragic structures of feeling and tragic forms. The adaptation of the Greek plays invites contemporary audiences to an intricate process of spectatorship in which tragedy shapes and conditions responses to real-life catastrophe, exposing the representational politics through which suffering is viewed. In most cases, the call for new definitions of tragedy involves a radical rewriting rather than an affirmative take on the classical text.

and adaptations as well as of formal traits of Greek tragedy in Farber’s play, see Hardwick (2010). 14 Williams (1966: 49).

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Rather than celebrating Greek tragedy as a timeless and universal means of contemplating suffering, rewritings of the Greek plays enter a dialogue with tragedy’s histories of reception in order to uncover its canonical uses. The following discussion will focus on three recent plays that rewrite Greek tragedy with reference to real-life crisis, loss, and catastrophe. It can be argued that rewriting here offers a renewed understanding of tragedy, reclaiming it for those whose suffering has been excluded from what has largely been an upper-class, male, Western rhetoric.

RE-VIEWING THE HISTORIES OF TRAGEDY Greek by Steven Berkoff is not just a modern adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus but a bold displacement of the ancient play in a historically specific context; the sociopolitical convulsions of early 1980s Britain provide the backdrop for Eddy’s (Oedipus) story. In Greek Berkoff incorporates what he defines as ‘classical’ into the piece in order to serve an anti-naturalistic performance style. Three white panels are used as part of the austere scenery to ‘indicate Greek classicism’.15 Similarly, the adaptation of the mask-like white makeup is related to the tragic mask, as well as to Berkoff ’s training with Jacques Le-Coq in Paris.16 All the roles are undertaken by four actors, who also function as the chorus throughout the play, producing aural effects or miming the characters’ monologues. Typical of Berkoff ’s language, his rewriting of Sophocles is infused with an extreme physicality, which creates a sharp antithesis to the classical form.17 Greek is characterized by a much looser reliance on the ancient text than Berkoff ’s earlier adaptation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.18 In Agamemnon Berkoff follows closely the Aeschylean plot and reproduces long parts of the ancient text in a condensed and bold translation.19 The most significant interventions to the ancient text 15

Berkoff (1992: 100). On Berkoff ’s theatrical training, see brief note by Berkoff (1992: 9). 17 Greek was adapted by Berkoff himself for an opera composed by Mark-Anthony Turnage, first performed in Germany in 1988. 18 Berkoff ’s Agamemnon evolved from a workshop running from 1973 to 1976. The final text was published in 1977. 19 For a detailed discussion of similar adaptive strategies, see Chapter 4. 16

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are the introduction of Thyestes’ monologue describing the feasting on his own flesh at the beginning of the play, and the brief enactment of past events narrated by the chorus, such as Agamemnon’s decision to sacrifice Iphigeneia. In his autobiography Berkoff says that he decided to rewrite the play in order to stage it, since he found most previous translations ‘full of stilted, overrespectful heroic verse with no resonance of human life’.20 The harshness of language and the visualization of action in Agamemnon seem to anticipate the much more drastic rewriting of the classical structures that we find in Greek.21 The tensions with the classical text in Greek are to a large extent stimulated by the acknowledged affinities between Berkoff ’s theatre and Artaud’s theory,22 as with many postmodern theatre practitioners. Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty aimed to create an overwhelming visceral performance that attained the fierceness and physicality of life. According to Artaud, this would be possible only in a theatre that is no longer subservient to the venerated literary text. In his famous essay called ‘No More Masterpieces’, Artaud makes particular reference to Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus.23 Aristotle’s model tragedy is invoked by Artaud as a literary masterpiece, only to be dismissed from his theatrical vision. Artaud overtly says that Sophocles’ play might have been powerful in ancient times, but is of no relevance to modern audiences. Yet, he notes that the themes of the Sophoclean play could still resonate with the contemporary masses that ‘tremble at railway disasters, are familiar with earthquakes, plagues, revolutions and wars as well as being sensitive to the disturbing anguish of love and are capable of becoming conscious of all those grand ideas.’24 Artaud’s attack on Oedipus would have 20

Berkoff (1996: 51). Berkoff produced a second version of Oedipus in 2000, which, unlike Greek, follows closely the ancient text. Yet, his rewriting was underpinned by an opposition to the magnitude usually associated with classical style. As Berkoff (2000: 155) explains, his version sought ‘to examine the play and occasionally peer beneath the tendency to strut and pose, to high-blown rhetoric and an air of self-importance somehow unavoidable in versions of Greek tragedy’. 22 The playwright’s note to the edition of his Agamemnon and The Fall of the House of Usher is highly reminiscent of Artaud’s theatrical manifestos. See Berkoff (1977: 7): ‘What we attempted in the following plays was a grotesque, surreal, paranoiac view of life such as is conjured up in dreams . . . the schizoid personality of man as he undoubtedly is . . . and the staging took on this manner in its exaggerated and enlarged forms.’ 23 This essay is included in The Theatre and its Double. 24 Artaud (1970/1938: 56). 21

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played some role to Berkoff ’s interest in the play. Berkoff ’s own rewriting emphasizes the relevance of the play by creating strong analogies between the ancient story and his contemporary social reality. The emphasis on the theme of the plague in Berkoff ’s Greek also alludes to Artaud’s view of theatre as a plague that both contaminates and heals the community. As in the ancient play, the plague caused by the tragic hero’s wrongdoings pollutes the entire country in Berkoff. Teiresias’ line 353 in Sophocles25 is the only line of the ancient text that is reproduced closely in Berkoff ’s rewriting, but it is now delivered by Eddy himself: ‘I am the rotten plague.’26 With the absence of Teiresias from Berkoff ’s play, the divine implications of pollution are eliminated. The plague is not sent as a punishment for the hero’s past deeds, since it precedes Eddy’s parricide and incest. Furthermore, the plague in Greek is firmly located in the British reality of the beginning of the 1980s, and it is stripped of the therapeutic power Artaud ascribes to it. As Berkoff ’s explains: ‘The play dealt with the idea of an emotional, social plague—apart from the actual biological one—that I saw was eating away at the heart of this nation.’27 In Greek the nation is suffering a severe sociopolitical crisis, experienced in both the public and the domestic spheres. Eddy’s story is set in a world of poverty, riots, police violence, xenophobia, and neo-Nazism. The stage directions at the beginning of Greek leave no doubt that the world of the play is 1980s Britain: the place is London and the time is the present.28 In Berkoff ’s rewriting the ancient play is remoulded into the modern topography of the city: Greek came to me via Sophocles, trickling its way down the millennia until it reached the unimaginable wastelands of Tufnell Park—a land more fantasized than real, being an amalgam of the deadening war zones that some areas of London had become.29

The temporal and local specificity is never allowed to go out of sight in the play, as there are several references to everyday reality, such as place names, as well as overt references to contemporary British

25 OT ὡς ὄντι γῆς τῆσδ’ ἀνοσίῳ μιάστορι (since you are the unholy polluter of this land!). 26 27 28 29 Berkoff (1994: 138). Ibid. 139. Ibid. 100. Ibid. 97.

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politics. ‘Maggot is our only hope, love,’30 says Eddy’s Mum in a dialogue with Dad, in which both highly metaphoric language and explicit references are combined in order to comment on contemporary political disorder. The word maggot has strong connotations both of the imagery of putrefaction as well as of the contemporary political circumstances, being a pun on Margaret Thatcher’s nickname.31 In Greek the ancient plague is translated as the violence, social conflict, and instability in the era of Thatcherism. The ending of Sophocles’ play, with Jocasta’s suicide and Oedipus’ act of selfblinding, is invoked much before the revelation of truth in Greek to comment upon social strife. Eddy finds himself fighting with an Irish woman in a riot, shouting: OH, MAGGOT SCRATCHER HANG THE CUNTS HANG THEM SLOW AND LET ME TAKE A SKEWER AND JAB THEIR EYES OUT LOVELY GREEK STYLE.

32

Immediately afterwards, Eddy acknowledges that violence rebounds to affect everyone in the society: Hanging’s no answer to the plague madam you’d be hanging every day I am human like us all we’re all the same, linked if you kick one his scream will hit my ears and hurt my mind to think of some poor cunt in shtuck.33

Eddy suffers this social plague as much as he lies at the heart of it. This inseparability between individual and society becomes evident in his futile attempts to escape the violence, while being himself part of it. The ‘Skidrow’ airport, described as a ‘gateway to the world’,34 is the crossroads where he will meet with his destiny. During a quarrel with the manager of the airport café, Eddy murders the man,

30

Ibid. 110. Maggot Scratcher appears among the characters in Berkoff ’s later play Sink the Belgrano! (1994, first published 1986). 32 Berkoff (1994: 112) (capitalization in original). 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 113. The pun is on the place name. In the second occurrence in the play, the airport is referred to as Heathrow. 31

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without knowing that he is his father, and promises to take his widow as wife. Although Berkoff maintains a loose reference to the element of fate, what leads Eddy to the parricide is mostly a generalized aggression and anger that infiltrates deep into the social fabric of the country, leaving no individual unaffected. Eddy’s refusal to follow his ancient counterpart in the act of selfblinding is a major departure from Sophocles. As Berkoff explains: In writing my ‘modern’ Oedipus it wasn’t too difficult to find contemporary parallels, but when I came to the ‘blinding’ I paused, since in my version it wouldn’t have made sense, given Eddy’s non-fatalistic disposition, to have him embark on such an act of self-hatred—unless I slavishly aped the original.35

Yet, the deviation from the ancient play does not arise from an opposition to the discourse of formal perfection and plot ingenuity that follows Oedipus, since Aristotle’s analysis in The Poetics.36 Berkoff ’s rewriting, in fact, treats Oedipus’ story as the foundational myth of the modern subject, challenging first and foremost the Freudian interpretation of the ancient play.37 Although the twentieth century counts several political appropriations of Greek tragedy, a politicized adaptation of Oedipus, in particular, seems to be a vexed issue in a post-Freudian era. Freud’s interpretation focuses on male desire and family relationships, dissociating the play from its historical and political context and 35 Ibid. 98. In the ancient text Oedipus justifies his act of self-blinding, saying that he could not commit suicide because he would have to face his dead parents in Hades. In vivid contrast, Eddy says that he could not bear not to see his mother’s face again: Berkoff (1994: 138): ‘Why should I tear my eyes out Greek style [ . . . ] Oedipus how could you have done it, never to see your wife’s golden face again, never again to cast your eyes on her and hers on your eyes.’ The above passage provides a blatant reversal of, and possibly a conscious response to ΟΤ 1371–6: ἐγὼ γὰρ οὐκ οἶδ’ ὄμμασιν ποίοις βλέπων/πατέρα ποτ’ ἂν προσεῖδον εἰς Ἅιδου μολών,/οὐδ’ αὖ τάλαιναν μητέρ’, οἷν ἐμοὶ δυοῖν/ἔργ’ ἐστὶ κρείσσον’ ἀγχόνης εἰργασμένα (For I do not know with what eyes I could have looked upon my father when I went to Hades, or upon my unhappy mother, since upon them I have done deeds that hanging could not atone for). Berkoff ’s later Oedipus offers a further variation on this theme: the tragic hero blinds himself because he does not want to see the world without Jocasta. See Berkoff (2000: 214). 36 The description of Eddy’s face by the Waitress–Wife can be read as a subtle reference to the privileged status of Oedipus in the history of reception as the perfect tragedy. See Berkoff (1994: 120): ‘Your face is like all Greek | and carved from ancient marble.’ 37 See Macintosh (2004: 319).

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ascribing the conflict to an ahistorical psyche.38 Any attempt to reinvest Oedipus with historical context is confronted with the reception of the play, and especially with Freud’s mark on twentiethcentury readings and performances. The violence described in Greek seems to underlie the process of appropriation of the ancient text itself. Berkoff describes the treatment of the subject matter as an act of violence to Sophocles’ text and its diachronic reconfigurations: ‘Greek was my love poem to the spirit of Oedipus over the centuries. I ransacked the entire legend. So this is not simply an adaptation of Sophocles but a recreation of the various Oedipus myths which seemed to apply.’39 It is possible to read Berkoff ’s play within the context of a larger turn from the Oedipal model to Kleinian psychoanalytical theories, which increasingly gained precedence over Freud after the 1970s.40 Such a move is evident at the end of Greek, when Eddy justifies his incestuous love for Jocasta as a desire to return to the mother’s womb. This incest heals the birth trauma signifying a prelapsarian unity with the maternal body, as revealed in the play’s concluding line (‘exit from paradise | entrance to heaven’).41 The Sphinx, which in Sophocles is only alluded to, is presented here on stage and provides an embodiment of the mother figure.42 The encounter between Oedipus and the Sphinx features a fierce sex war that is mostly reminiscent of readings of Greek tragedy proffered by radical feminists in the mid-1970s. French psychoanalytical theorists resisted what they saw as phallocentric privileging

38 It is not fortuitous that the tendency to read Oedipus through the receptive filters of Freudian interpretation has been challenged by postcolonial reworkings. Ola Rotimi’s 1968 play The Gods Are not to Blame adapted Oedipus to tackle issues of colonialism. Simpson (2007: 91) argues that Rotimi’s adaptation is a ‘reinscription of the Oedipus complex’, which recasts Oedipus’ question of origin as the heritage of the ancient plot weighing upon the new text. More recently, Rita Dove’s The Darker Face of the Earth (1999) transposed the story of Oedipus to the early nineteenth-century American South in order to contemplate the predicament of slavery. 39 40 Berkoff (1992: 139). See Macintosh (2004: 314). 41 Berkoff (1994: 139). 42 There is an allusion to Jean Cocteau’s La Machine infernale, where the figure of the Sphinx is central to the play’s exploration of social turmoil. See Cocteau (1962/ 1934: 108–9): ‘The Sphinx is to blame if we starve to death, if prices go up, if bands of looters swarm over the countryside. And the Sphinx is to blame if business is bad, and the government’s weak and one crash follows another, if the temples are glutted with rich offerings whilst mothers and wives are losing their breadwinners, if wealthy foreigners are leaving the town.’

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of Oedipus, while also turning to the Oresteia in order to deconstruct the emergence of cultural order through an act of matricide.43 Along with the parricide, Greek questions the ultimate taboo of incest, which marks the post-Freudian reception of Oedipus. Eddy explicitly protests against the prohibition of lovemaking between mother and son in a society that tolerates acts of hatred. This overall scrutiny of the Oedipal model with all its focus on family relationships foregrounds the social exigencies portrayed in the play. For Berkoff the conflicts within the individual hero are inseparable from the tensions felt within the community. There seems to be an intrinsic link between the anti-Oedipal strain and the retelling of Oedipus’ story in the historical context of contemporary Britain. Jean-Pierre Vernant contests Freud’s interpretation of Oedipus in the essay ‘Oedipus without the Complex’, originally published in 1967;44 Vernant’s main critique of Freud is that his psychoanalytical model flagrantly disregards the historicity of the ancient play. Freud’s use of the dream of allegedly universal significance provides, according to Vernant, an insufficient model of interpretation of the text, which is the product of a particular social and intellectual context. In that regard, the emphasis on the sociopolitical struggles in Berkoff ’s Greek seeks to break with the ahistorical Freudian legacy that marks the modern reception of the play. Less than a decade after Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s AntiOedipus,45 Berkoff ’s play seems to undertake a similar critique of the Oedipal model. For Deleuze and Guattari as much as for Berkoff, the concept of Oedipal desire is treated as the organizing principle of capitalist society. While Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the family should overcome Freudian self-containment and be opened up to society as a whole, Berkoff ’s rewriting of Oedipus departs from the emphasis on family relationships to embrace the social.46 Yet, the plot

43 See Hélène Cixous’s discussion of the Oresteia in ‘Sorties’, published in Cixous and Clément (1996/1975), and Luce Irigaray’s challenge to the universality of the Oedipal complex in the Speculum of the Other Woman, in Irigaray (1985/1974). 44 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1988/1972). 45 Deleuze and Guattari (1984/1972). 46 In Cixous’s libretto Le Nom d’ Œdipe: Chant du corps interdit (1978) the mother– son bond is channelled through the female voice of Jocasta. The separation of the son from the mother coincides with Oedipus’ entrance to the ‘city’. As in Greek, the shift from the Freudian to the Kleinian model signifies a move from the domestic to the public realm. On Cixous’s and André Boucourechliev’s opera and its place within the reception history of Oedipus, see Macintosh (2007b).

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comes to an impasse: as long as the social and political situation remains unchanged, the desire for the family will be even more intense, as revealed by Eddy: ‘Yeh I wanna climb back inside my mum. What’s wrong with that? It’s better than shoving a stick of dynamite up someone’s ass and getting a medal for it.’47 In a Kleinian fashion, however, the mother–son bond that replaces the Freudian family triangle provides an organizing principle that is less antagonist by excluding male rivalry.48 Berkoff ’s transfer of Oedipus into a contemporary context involves an engagement with tragic themes and patterns, which transforms both the ancient text and its modern reception in an attempt to redefine its wider cultural significance. In Hélène Cixous’s play La Ville parjure ou le réveil des Erinyes (The Perjured City or the Awakening of the Furies),49 a similar take on Greek tragedy involves a much more intricate and extensive reconfiguration of the formal characteristics of the classical text.

VIEWING THE TRAGEDIES OF HISTORY The primary story of matricide which provides the topic of Aeschylus’ Eumenides is recast as a story of infanticide in Cixous’s La Ville parjure.50 This major twist to the plotline is not the only way Cixous radicalizes the ancient text. In her rewriting, infanticide is not presented as the deed of the tragic protagonist; it is a crime both committed and suffered by the entire community and, as such, it is symptomatic of a deep social pathogeny that is irreducible to individual responsibility. ‘Yet, this is not a fable’, reads Cixous’s introductory note to the play.51

47

Berkoff (1994: 138–9). Some Freudian echoes are heard in the struggle between Eddy and the Manager. Eddy uses the verbs ‘overpower’ and ‘overcome’. Berkoff (1992: 116): ‘MANAGER: Weaker and weaker | EDDY: Stronger and stronger | MANAGER: Weak | EDDY: Power / MANAGER: Dying | EDDY : Victor.’ The outcome could be read as the Freudian emergence of the younger male subject. Cf. Berkoff ’s later version of Oedipus. In Berkoff (2000: 163), Oedipus says about King Laius: ‘Sometimes my wife doth make comparison. | I shrink beneath the legend of the man!’ 49 Henceforth La Ville parjure. 50 All quotations are to the published Anglophone translation by Bernadette Fort (Cixous 2004). 51 Cixous (2004: 90). 48

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Cixous’s adaptation of the Eumenides was written in response to an event that entailed the loss of hundreds of people in France, among whom were several children. In 1988 the director of the French National Centre of Blood Transfusion Michel Garretta and members of his research team were accused of knowingly authorizing the transfusion of HIV-contaminated blood to patients, mainly haemophiliacs, for a period in the mid-1980s. The case shook the French public’s confidence not only in the healthcare system, but also in the legal and political authorities of the country. The outcome of the trial did not seem to satisfy the common sense of justice, since the sentences given to the accused were considered to be too lenient in relation to the charges. La Ville parjure was written in 1992–1993, while the trial was still in progress, and it was produced by Ariane Mnouchkine at the Théâtre du Soleil the following year.52 The collaboration with the Théâtre du Soleil marked a watershed for Cixous, propelling her to go beyond what she terms as chamber theatre and embrace the large proportions and universalizing perspective of Mnouchkine’s work. As Cixous narrates, the exploration of twentieth-century historical events offered her a way to understand Mnouchkine’s search for a present that could apply to all times. Her first play for the Théâtre du Soleil, Sihanouk, told the story of Cambodia, drawing parallels with Elizabethan England through the use of intertextual references to Shakespeare.53 It can be argued that Cixous’s encounter with tragedy was a similar way of amalgamating the political and the mythological. While doing research on the Vietnam War for the Théâtre du Soleil, Cixous felt that Mnouchkine was actually seeking ‘the story of a people—the theatre is itself a people—whose tragic destiny could be the image of other tragedies, of other contemporary stories’.54 Dramatizing the story of the tainted blood appeared to be a peculiarly thorny issue for Cixous owing to the close proximity of suffering. While the story was constantly debated in the media, Cixous’s intention was to avoid any direct reference to the ongoing discussions and to picture the event ‘torn away from the newspaper page’.55 Most 52

Fort’s interview with Cixous in Fort (1997: 426). 54 See Cixous (2004: 12–13). Ibid. 13. 55 Ibid. 18. Cixous opposes the role of theatre to the media elsewhere. See Cixous in Fort (1997: 440): ‘The scene reproduced by the media, filmed, photographed, recorded, carries discourse that is pathetically impoverished. Either the characters of these scenes are impoverished, or they impoverish themselves by prudence, they 53

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significantly, she was also highly conscious of the ethical complexities that the potential presence of the victims and their families among the audience would entail. As she explains, Aeschylus’ Eumenides emerged as a means to transpose the current affair in order to assist its representation beyond the specific context of contemporary France.56 The turn to tragedy in this case is reminiscent of Terry Eagleton’s argument that tragic art emerges as an attempt to ‘tidy up the tragic’ by bestowing shape upon the amorphous and incoherent suffering in real life.57 The rewriting of the ancient text in Cixous’s play could be viewed as a means to give shape to the suffering experienced in France at the time of the play’s creation. La Ville parjure harks back not to the Greek myth, but to its poetic articulation by Aeschylus: ‘This can only take place in a mythical universe where there will be Aeschylus, the Eumenides. Something that is poeticized in such a strong way that the suffering will find expression in extremely poetic words.’58 The ancient tragedy does not provide the narrative template for Cixous’s play either; instead, the Eumenides is treated as a repository of themes and formal characteristics, from the mythical figures of the Furies to the use of a chorus and lyrical laments. While Berkoff situates the ancient story in a specific contemporary context, in La Ville parjure the contemporary story is drafted onto the canvas of the ancient play. Cixous had worked closely on the Eumenides, which she translated for Mnouchkine’s production Les Atrides in 1990.59 Her familiarity with the ancient text is tangible in the rewriting of Aeschylus. The central scene of the play draws on the tribunal presented in the employ a discourse that is reserved, distrustful, when they stand before the tape recorders. In these scenes, there is the right to feign, as if this right were included in the rights of man, of political man, homo politicus, the right to lies that are not called lying. The Theatre has the opposite aim: it attempts to deconstruct the fake.’ 56 The mixed audience responses with which the production of the play was met proved Cixous right in that. See Théâtre/Public, 121 (January–February 1995), 45. 57 See Eagleton (2003: 63). A similar view was expressed earlier by Taplin (1983: 12): ‘The “tragedies” of real life, unlike those of the stage, are often shapeless, sordid, capricious, meaningless [ . . . ] It is not human to be content with this useless, even if ultimate, truth. We must try to understand, to cope, to respond’ (p. 5). Wallace (2007: 191) compares tragedy to the memorials where the ephemeral is made lasting and meaningful: ‘They transform the terrible atrocities into stone; they shape the chaos of experience into aesthetic pattern which can be confronted, reflected upon and lamented.’ 58 Cixous (2004: 18). 59 On Mnouchkine’s work on the ancient texts, see de la Combe (2005).

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Eumenides, offering a commentary on the actual trials taking place in France at the time. Many of the adaptive strategies adopted by Cixous in her reworking of the Eumenides fall within the general trends in rewriting of Greek tragedy since the 1970s. The element of metatheatricality is key in the play: Aeschylus appears in the role of the caretaker of the cemetery where the Mother comes to mourn her dead children, while all the dramatis personae repeatedly exhibit the fictionality of the situation, in many cases by alluding to the Eumenides, as, for example, at the point when the Furies are afraid that Aeschylus is trying to summon another tribunal.60 At the same time, La Ville parjure provides a close rereading of parts of the ancient play, while it also features textual fragments and nods towards other texts, mainly to Shakespearean drama.61 For Cixous, the close engagement with the adapted text that characterizes the process of rewriting is underpinned by a bodily response to it: ‘I choose to work on the texts that ‘touch’ me. I use the word deliberately because I believe there is a bodily relationship between reader and text. We work very close to the text, as close to the body of the text as possible.’62 Aeschylus in Cixous’s play is not the omniscient classical author.63 Even though he is said to have read all the books,64 his control over the dramatic action is limited. The role as carrier of memory and poetic justice as well as mitigator of the tensions dramatized (possibly an ironic reference to Aeschylus’ resolution of the tragic conflict in the Eumenides) has been discussed before.65 What has not been noted is the metatheatrical function of his role, which links the contemporary reality to the world of tragedy. This function can be compared to the allusions to Shakespeare in her Sihanouk, which Cixous names as ‘genealogical traces’ and ‘signatures’: It is not intertextual, but it’s a way of reminding myself and whoever can perceive it that this is a work of theatre or a work of art; it is not

60

Cixous (2004: 119). The endnotes to the published play text in Cixous (2004) provide a detailed account of the intertextual references as well as of the references to contemporary reality. See subsequent chapters in this book for a detailed examination of adaptive strategies in rewriting Greek tragedy. 62 See Cixous, quoted in Sellers (1988: 148). The idea evokes Cixous’s feminist quest to ‘write the body’, articulated in her famous essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’. 63 64 See the discussion in Chapter 3. Cixous (2004: 152). 65 On the role of Aeschylus in La Ville parjure, see Fort’s interview with Cixous in Fort (1997: 445–7; 2000). 61

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something realistic. The genealogy has its sources in history, in the real events that it formalizes, that it transfigures, and also to the other world which is the world of literary creation. There are two worlds. There is the political world and the literary world, and I cross-pollinate them.66

It is in a metatheatrical moment in La Ville parjure that Cixous explains why she did not include explicit references to the actual story in her play: the Furies do not name the murderers of the children because ‘the police will appear and stop this play here’.67 The names of Michel Garretta and Jean-Pierre Allain, who were the two doctors mainly involved in the blood scandal, are never mentioned in the play and, characteristically, Cixous names them X1 and X2. The play opens with the Mother, who flees the city and comes to dwell in the cemetery where her two children are buried. The antithesis between the city and the cemetery is established from the outset; the cemetery is the counter site to a city that is ruled by perjury and injustice.68 There the caretaker Aeschylus gives shelter to the Mother and hides her from the lawyers of the doctors who are responsible for her children’s death. The lawyers come after the Mother to offer her a compromise so that her mourning does not disrupt the civic order. In these first scenes of the play the resonances of the Choephoroi are stronger, especially when the lawyers discover the flowers on the children’s tombs and understand that she has visited the cemetery, just as Electra discovers Orestes’ lock and realizes that he had been to Agamemnon’s tomb.69 The reliance of Cixous’s play on the Eumenides is displayed in the next scene, in which the goddess Night runs in aid of the Mother in order to confront the ‘insinuation, masked violence and nefarious speech’70 of the lawyers. The allusion to intervention of Athena in the Eumenides is explicit; the Night says she rushed so she did not put on her stars, just as Athena comes without her wings in Aeschylus’ play.71 The relationship with the Eumenides is displayed more explicitly when the Furies make their entrance.

66

67 Cixous (2004: 14). Ibid. 113. Cixous refers to the cultural meaning of the cemetery as well as to its function in the play as an anti-city. See Fort’s interview with Cixous in Fort (1997: 442–3). 69 70 Cixous (2004: 95). Cf. Cho. 168. Cixous (2004: 99). 71 Ibid. 98: NIGHT: I came as quickly as possible, preceding myself by an hour | And without even putting on my stars. Did you notice?’ Cf. Eum. 403–4. The footnotes in the English edition of Cixous’s play note the reference. 68

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The trial scene is situated in the heart of Cixous’s play and is, in many respects, a refashioning of Orestes’ tribunal. Interrogated by the Mother and the Furies, the doctors and their lawyers deploy various means in order to deny their responsibility. When the doctors claim that the responsibility is that of the state, the Furies evoke Orestes’ claim that he acted under Apollo’s orders. The use of official language itself is also being questioned: ‘X2: Who’s talking about crime? | Until now one said homicide.’72 Apart from the formal and thematic analogies with the Eumenides, La Ville parjure establishes a more fundamental link between Greek tragedy—and, through the Shakespearean resonances, the tragic genre—and the contemporary real-life tragedy. Cixous reads into Aeschylus’ play the motif of spilt blood that cannot be recovered, drawing links to the blood scandal. For Cixous, the contaminated blood is the ultimate metaphor for tragedy: Actually the blood scandal didn’t become a metaphor, it was immediately the metaphor. I was looking for a metaphor of tragedy in our time, today, in our civilization, and this appeared to me as the most obvious metaphor itself. It couldn’t be stronger. I never thought of it in terms of ‘a case’.73

Cixous’s play traces back the history of cultural associations of blood with purity and pollution. The metaphor of contaminated blood bears associations to the HIV-phobia as well as to racism and antiSemitism, emphasized by the names Benjamin and Daniel Ezekiel given to the dead boys in the play. At the end of the court scene, the doctors are asked by their judges to look into a mirror and recognize themselves among other great slaughterers of tragedy and history. The following passage is the point where not only the tragic genre and painful experience, but also real-life tragedies of all times merge: Did you see this? Night tells him: Go and lean over this mirror And, full of sacred terror, behold The procession of the children, dressed in red, slain In all the famous slaughterhouses of tragedy. Behold the children sliced and diced

FURIES

72 73

Cixous (2004: 142). Fort’s interview with Cixous in Fort (1997: 430) (emphasis in original).

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Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames The children of Thyestes, the children of Agamemnon Behold the children of Edward And black little Eli, Behold the little ones carved in smoke, All the little smoky ghosts Flying around chimneys Above the—what do you call them? Ghettos? 74 MOTHER Concentration Camps.

Apart from the direct symbolism of the mirror for the art of theatre itself, here Cixous also refers to the form of tragedy, which provides a mirror to look upon the experience of suffering. When the doctor does not react to the image he sees in the mirror, the Furies say to the Mother: ‘He knows neither terror nor pity. | That is why your tragedy is so tragic.’75 Cixous’s interest in the Oresteia, and especially in the last part of the trilogy, predates her collaboration with Mnouchkine by several years. In her seminal essay ‘Sorties’, written in 1975, Cixous had offered a post-feminist critique of the Oresteia, reading the final resolution at the end of the trilogy as the rise of phallocentrism.76 It seems that by the time she was working on La Ville parjure, Cixous’s interpretation had shifted. At that later stage, Cixous was more inclined to think of the Aeschylean resolution as latent critique of the deception of the Furies by Apollo.77 In La Ville parjure the feminist critique of the Eumenides gives place to a politicized appropriation of the tragic text. It is telling that Cixous refused to ascribe a feminist agenda to her play. Even making the Mother a central role was not meant to present a female story; the Mother represented for Cixous the ‘survivor’ and the character who gives speech back to those excluded and silenced.78 Even though the Furies’ role in La Ville parjure is central, Cixous does not follow Aeschylus in giving them the part of the chorus, but presents them as the three Furies Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera known from Greek mythology.79 They are the ruthless retaliators of 74 76 77 78 79

75 Cixous (2004: 170). Ibid. See Cixous and Clemént (1996/1975: 63–132). See note 43. Fort’s interview with Cixous in Fort (1997: 446–7). Ibid. 444. The names are also given in the introductory notes. Cixous (2004: 90).

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murder known from the beginning of the Eumenides; however, here they do not defend the matriarchal order from the offence of matricide, but persecute the doctors who are responsible for the death of the children. Their resistance to the tribunal is not so much against the establishment of the court as in the Eumenides, but against the trials happening in France at the time of the play’s production.80 Yet, the actual chorus of La Ville parjure creates an interesting parallel with the ancient Furies; the chorus of the homeless who inhabit the outskirts of the cemetery81 are social outcasts living on the margins of the city, just as the Furies are the outcast deities in Aeschylus’ play.82 While in the ancient play the Furies are turned into benevolent deities and integrated into the civic cult, the homeless people in Cixous’s play are never admitted into the city. By contrast, they remain the outlaws who lay bare the frailties of law and order. The replacement of the chorus of Furies with social outcasts is a choice related to Cixous’s political interpretation of the ancient chorus itself. For Cixous, the chorus in tragedy embodies the powerlessness of the citizens in democracy.83 Like the ancient choruses, the homeless offer their support to the Mother, but are unable to punish the culprits. This view of the chorus is, in turn, intrinsically linked to the painstaking questioning of modern democracies in the play. Cixous uses the metaphor of the plague that we encountered in Berkoff ’s rewriting of Oedipus; but, while in Berkoff the plague stands for social and political havoc, for Cixous the plague affects the democratic state: The Perjured City gives a ruthless diagnosis of the moral Plague that reigns in our political kingdoms. But careful: that perversion is not new today. It is inaugural. The City—the polis—, said to be democratic, the creation of which we see in Aeschylus’s Eumenides, was born perjured, in and out of perjury. The entire history of democracy has only been a way of dissimulating the congenital defect beneath ethical pretensions.

80 Cixous (2004: 119): ‘No more tribunals; never again. | There’s no condition as unbearable | As that of plaintiffs sent to court | When their tongues have been cut beforehand.’ 81 In Mnouchkine’s production Les Atrides the Furies were bag ladies. Cf. Tony Harrison’s production of The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus in London in 1988, in which the chorus was presented as a group of London vagrants. 82 See Eum. 179–97. Apollo dismisses the Furies of his sanctuary as detestable to the gods (ἀπόπτυστοι θεοῖς). 83 Cixous in Fort (1997: 443).

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This is why the Furies were obliged to return in 1994 after 3500 years underground, upon the ground of my play. What I want to bring to light in this play is that ‘nothing has changed on this earth, aside from the telephone’; but the Evil of Democracy has invented new forms of contempt.84

Unlike the Eumenides, the tribunal in Cixous’s rewriting does not sanction a new law but rather exhibits the discrepancies between law and justice. The play ends in a celestial celebration of love away from the city and its politics. This was a second epilogue that Cixous developed during the rehearsals, mainly out of concern about the potential effect of the original ending, in which everyone died, on the actual victims.85 Although the escapism of the epilogue is bereft of political affirmation and seems to transfer the resolution to a metaphysical realm, there is no sense in which Cixous’s reading depoliticizes the tragic conflict. While in the Eumenides the acquittal of Orestes signifies the defeat of the primordial forces represented by the Furies and the emergence of civic order, in La Ville parjure the acquittal of the filicide reveals the cracks and internal instabilities of modern democracy. The return of tragedy to the heart of the community in La Ville parjure would seem to fall in with Raymond Williams’s (and Eagleton’s) rebuttal of the view of tragedy as the downfall of the individual hero, proffered in earlier theories of tragedy. Cixous’s play takes a further step towards the democratization of tragedy by resisting the commonly stated belief that ‘ordinary’ or ‘unnecessary’ suffering does not qualify as tragic. Monsieur Capitaine, one of the secondary characters in the play, says: ‘For the first time, the blind man I once was can see | I see the carnage of the unfortunate flock. | The thing wasn’t necessary, and now it’s too late.’86 If there is an echo of Oedipus’ words in these lines, it is only to negate the idea of tragic necessity: while Oedipus meets his tragic destiny, Cixous’s character realizes that communal suffering is not preordained. As Williams shows, the emphasis on the rank of the tragic hero and the persistent distinction between ‘tragedy’ and ‘accident’87 are, in fact, complementary. What underlies both ideas is not only an essentialist reading of tragedy, but an alienation of the

84 86

85 Ibid. 429 (emphasis in original). Ibid. 448–9. 87 Cixous (2004: 178). See Williams (1966: 46–56).

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human subject from the social and historical forces that inflict suffering and pain: There is the exclusion, already evident in the language of Hegel, of ordinary suffering, and this is surely the unconscious attachment of significant suffering to (social) nobility. But there is also the related and deeper exclusion of all that suffering which is part of our social and political world, and its actual human relations. The real key, to the modern separation of tragedy from ‘mere suffering’, is the separation of ethical control and, more critically, human agency, from our understanding of social and political strife.88

The doctors in La Ville parjure try to convince the unsanctioned court that the transfusion of the contaminated blood was an accident.89 Their claim lays bare that the invocation of the accident is a means to disavow their responsibility and to downplay the role of human agency in calamity. The revisiting of the tragic in Cixous’s drama has been discussed as a perpetual suspension, a whirlwind of possibilities within which the act of writing is embroiled.90 Cixous’s persistent preoccupation with the creative process emanates from a realization of the chasm between writing and life: ‘Writing is the ambivalent place which allows life at its extreme limit to be described, perceived, reflected on, and yet which at the same time is always suspected of being incapable of a close rendering of the aliveness of reality.’91 The rewriting of Greek tragedy could be understood as an attempt to restore the links between writing and the experience of suffering. It is an act of aesthetic and ethical intervention that interrogates the teleological structures that underlie both the history of the tragic genre as well as the perception of history as tragedy. Cixous concedes that her plays ‘present the tragic in a performative manner by asking questions about the tragic, calling into question the tragic, trying to interrupt the end, the teleological, trying to rewrite History in which “there is still some blank space”—still some indetermination’.92 In La Ville parjure the lawyer Brackmann says: History will put its true face back on, And we’ll write the story for eternity, I say.

88 90 91 92

89 Ibid. 48–9. Cixous (2004: 143). See Gruber (2000) on the tragic in Cixous’s theatre. Cixous (1988), 115. Cixous (2004: 30) (emphasis in original).

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Cixous’s rewriting of Aeschylus constitutes an act of poetic justice that resists the allegedly objective history of the victors. After quoting the famous line from Prospero’s last monologue in The Tempest in the original language, Aeschylus in La ville parjure says: ‘It seems to me, sometimes that I am an Other, | But I do not fear him.’94 The lines comment in a playful manner on the encounter between Aeschylus and Shakespeare at this point, but also prompt us to reflect on Cixous’s own relationship with tragedy as well as on the act of rewriting, more broadly, as an engagement with the otherness of Greek tragedy that warrants that the unwritten tragedies of history do not go unseen.

TRAGEDY AND THE POLITICS OF VIEWING Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender rewrites Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis from a post-9/11 perspective. The play was commissioned for a co-production between the Wiener Festwochen, Chichester Festival Theatre and the Young Vic in 2004, at a time the War on Terror was at the centre of public interest following the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. While already working on the adaptation of the Sophoclean drama, Crimp became aware of the misleading claims concerning the Iraq War with which the British people had been presented. Responding to the generalized concerns, Crimp turned his project into an exploration of political involvement in warfare. Since Crimp did not wish to reduce drama to a journalistic account, Greek tragedy seemed to provide a distancing medium that could be used to comment on current events.95 At a time when technological means facilitate the dissemination of fragmentary bits of reality and the fabrication of information, the line between truth and fiction is finer than ever. 93

94 Ibid. 96. Ibid. 114. Crimp in an interview with Robin Usher (2005). The article contrasts Crimp’s play to David Hare’s take on the same topic in Stuff Happens, in which politicians such as Tony Blair and George Bush appear as dramatis personae. See also Edith Hall (2004: 180) on Peter Sellars’s view of theatre as a ‘substitute of journalism’. 95

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Crimp’s play would seem to alert to the practices of representation that participate in the construction of mainstream narratives. Even though the focus in The Women of Trachis is not on the predicament of the victims of war,96 as it is in Euripides’ Trojan tragedies, the play certainly offers reflection on the theme of war, albeit from a different perspective. Deception is a main theme in Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis. Deceived by the centaur Nessus, Dianeira uses his blood bestowed upon her as a love potion, causing the death of Heracles when this turns out to be lethal venom. In addition to this extradramatic plot element, a scene of deception is enacted within the play. Soon after Dianeira has received the news of Heracles’ victorious return from the battle, his true motive for going to war against king Eurytus is revealed to her; Heracles besieged the city of Oechalia in order to obtain Eurytus’ daughter, Iole. This revelation arises from confrontation between the two different versions of the same story given by Lichas and the Messenger. Lichas’ first account to Dianeira is misleading, but eventually he is forced to concede that the Messenger’s version is true. The episode with Lichas and the Messenger provides insights into the narratives spun in justification of war. Unleashing this aspect of the Sophoclean text, Crimp’s Cruel and Tender becomes an anatomy of political hypocrisy during the Iraq War. The reliance of Cruel and Tender on the ancient text is stronger than revealed at first sight.97 Even though the action is set in a contemporary context, The Women of Trachis provides the basis for Crimp’s script. Crimp keeps the main characters and the plotline of Sophocles; the play opens with the monologue of the wife of a General, Amelia, who is worried by the long absence of her husband on a mission. Like Dianeira, Amelia is advised by the women of the house to send her son to find out if her husband is alive. In the

96 Dianeira refers to the miserable state of the captive women and sympathizes with them. See Trach. 243: οἰκτραὶ γάρ, εἰ μὴ ξυμçοραὶ κλέπτουσί με (They deserve pity, if their calamity does not deceive me), and Trach. 298–302: ἐμοὶ γὰρ οἶκτος δεινὸς εἰσέβη, çίλαι,/ταύτας ὁρώσῃ δυσπότμους ἐπὶ ξένης/χώρας ἀοίκους ἀπάτοράς τ’ ἀλωμένας,/αἳ πρὶν μὲν ἦσαν ἐξ ἐλευθέρων ἴσως/ἀνδρῶν, τανῦν δὲ δοῦλον ἴσχουσιν βίον (Yet, a strange pity comes upon me, dear women, when I see these unhappy ones homeless and fatherless, astray in a foreign land; perhaps they were formerly the childern of free men, but now their life is one of slavery). 97 Easterling (2010) offers a detailed listing of verbal and thematic allusions to the Women of Trachis in Crimp’s play.

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meantime, the news that the General is returning reaches Amelia. Prior to his arrival, the General sends home two survivors from the city of Gisenyi, which was devastated by his troupes. As it soon transpires, the General’s motives for attacking Gisenyi were not related to the service of his country. One of the two survivors is Laela, a young girl who is the General’s mistress. Upon discovering the fact, Amelia sends him a chemical that is supposed to make a soldier seek the love of his closest person in order to make him return to her. The gift, however, is a powerful substance that poisons the General. When Amelia realizes what she has done, she kills herself, like Dianeira. The General does not die but appears in the last part of the play damaged, until he is carried off to face charges for crimes against humanity. Despite the different ending, Cruel and Tender follows the ancient play closely in terms of dramatic economy. Even details of the ancient text, such as metaphors, are recast in the rewriting, as, for example, Dianeira’s lines 31–3 commenting on the absence of Heracles, which are rendered in a relatively close translation by Crimp: ‘only sees this child at distant intervals | like a farmer inspecting a crop | in a remote field.’98 The plot in Cruel and Tender revolves around deception in order to uncover the strategies adopted in media representations of war. The reliability of the information that Richard, the journalist, conveys is questioned several times. Amelia doubts the news of the General’s return, and she reacts to Richard’s version about the General’s relationship with Laela, saying: ‘What truth? What does a man like you know | about truth?’99 The irony is that Amelia resorts to Jonathan, a government minister, in order to find out the truth. Jonathan lies to her about the General as much as he lies to his people about the war. In his dialogue with Richard about the two children, Jonathan manipulates language to serve his narrative: JONATHAN RICHARD JONATHAN RICHARD

Their parents—I have explained this—are dead. Murdered. What? Their parents have been/murdered.

98 Crimp (2004: 2). Cf. Trach. 31–3: κἀçύσαμεν δὴ παῖδας, οὓς κεῖνός ποτε/γῄτης ὅπως ἄρουραν ἔκτοπον λαβών,/σπείρων μόνον προσεῖδε κἀξαμῶν ἅπαξ (We had, indeed, children, whom he, like a farmer who has taken over a remote piece of ploughland, regards only when he sows and when he reaps). 99 Crimp (2004: 17).

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Their parents have not been ‘murdered’, Richard— please grow up, please grow up—Seratawa was /a terrorist.100

JONATHAN

At first Jonathan’s reluctance to use the word ‘murdered’ seeks to exonerate the General for his war crimes. Even when Jonathan admits the killings, they are justified as an act against terrorism. Evidently, Crimp alludes to the political rhetoric deployed by the governments of both the United States and the United Kingdom in order to justify the military action taken against Afghanistan and Iraq. The talks about terrorist attacks and weapons of massive destruction were proffered as arguments not only for the righteousness but also for the necessity of these wars. Although Crimp places the war in Africa instead of Iraq, the cultural references are far more reminiscent of the Islamic world, offering a commentary on the Western power politics in the Middle East and the means employed at home to justify the wars.101 It is not fortuitous that at the beginning of the play we are told that the General ‘was supposed to be in Asia but they’re saying he’s now in Africa’.102 The critique of power politics in Cruel and Tender is not limited to the exposure of political hypocrisy, but also interrogates the role of the West in the escalation of world conflict. Crimp draws attention to the deeper links between international terrorism and Western warfare. The contradiction inherent in perpetuating violence and crime while struggling to eliminate them is introduced in the very first lines of the play. In her opening monologue, Amelia says that her husband’s fails to realize that ‘the more he fights terror | the more he creates terror— | and even invites terror’.103 The products of terror are evidenced later in the play, when Laela, almost in a state of trance, repeats several times that boys need to fight and kill.104 The mechanical repetition of the phrase demonstrates her fanaticism, but also implies that violent attitudes have been forced upon—or even taught to—her. No less than terrorist practices, the lethal poison that

100

Ibid. 20 (emphasis in original). For example, in Crimp (2004: 9) Amelia says that she does not have friends with beards and in Crimp (2004: 49) the Housekeeper mentions a Turkish restaurant called the Star of Ismir, which is the ‘hotbed of international terrorism’. Nonetheless, the director Luc Bondy refers to the more obvious connections with the war in Rwanda; see Luc Bondy, interview with Cristoph Hirschmann, ‘Terror gibt es überall’, Bühne (May 2004), 20–1. 102 103 104 Crimp (2004: 4). Ibid. 2. Ibid. 27–8. 101

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destroys the General is the product of Western militarism. The charm that Amelia sends to her husband was given to her by a chemist she used to know from university. Amelia remembers that, when they met each other again several years afterwards, he took her to the facility he was working conducting top-secret military research. The portrayal of the chemist as a keen campaigner for peace in his university years, as repeated twice in Amelia’s monologue,105 goes further into questioning the Western narratives of peacekeeping. The severing of words from their common referents at this point serves to stress the deceptiveness of the humanist discourses; the name of the chemical weapon developed by the chemist is ‘humane’.106 Terror and brutality in Cruel and Tender do not only permeate international affairs, but lie deeply into familial and friend relationships. The characters are incapable of showing tenderness and affection to one another. Amelia refers to the children as ‘terrorists | who refuse to negotiate’107 and speaks of men ‘who fuck you the way they fuck their enemy’.108 Amelia herself is acting with a ruthlessness that contrasts with Dianeira’s character in the Greek play. In this context, humanitarian ideas are but a pretext for violence. Jonathan reports to Amelia the total devastation of Seratawa city and the rescue of Laela and her brother, asking her at the end to welcome the two children who remind of ‘our common—I hope— humanity’.109 The pejorative portrayal of the General in Crimp’s play is to a large extent based on the representation of Heracles in The Women of Trachis, who elicits less sympathy than Dianeira. The use of the epithet kallinikos,110 which occurs not in The Women of Trachis but in Euripides’ The Madness of Heracles,111 certainly creates a link with the Euripidean portrayal of the hero. Yet, unlike Euripides’ Heracles, the General is not granted the excuse of divine madness. Crimp’s depiction is mostly reminiscent of recent adaptations in which the hero’s superhuman power lapses into the performance of inhuman deeds.112 The General boasts of killing the Nemean lion as well as of his fights against nuclear weapons and child terrorists. Heracles’ reference to the purification as part of the Labours in 105

106 107 Ibid. 28, 29. Ibid. 30, 36. Ibid. 7. 109 110 111 Ibid. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 58. HF 582, 961. 112 For a discussion of the contemporary appropriations of the figure of Heracles, see Chapter 4 and the cited bibliography. 108

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line 1061113 is recast by the General with reference to the eradication of terrorism: Because I have purified the world for you. I have burnt terror out of the world for people like you. I have followed it through the shopping malls and the school playgrounds tracked it by starlight across the desert smashed down the door of its luxury apartment learned its language intercepted its phone calls smoked it out of its cave thrown acid into its eyes and burned it to carbon.114

Later in the play, the General asks to state in front of the cameras how he has ‘purified and cleansed the world’.115 Although there is no sense in which the General is redeemed, the play views his deeds as part of the political game that perpetuates war crimes. Unlike Heracles, the General does not die after receiving Amelia’s gift. While being taken to face charges for crimes against humanity, he repeats the phrase ‘I am not the criminal | but the sacrifice’.116 The enigmatic presence of Iolaos, who does not appear in The Women of Trachis,117 in this scene stresses the hero’s isolation from his former environment. Iolaos, close companion of Heracles in mythology, in Crimp is introduced at the end of the play to carry out the General’s arrest under Jonathan’s orders. Although Iolaos mentions that the General had saved his life in the past, he executes the order in cold blood. As is the case with several modern adaptations of Greek tragedy that eliminate or omit the theological references of the original, there is hardly space for gods in the world of Cruel and Tender. Yet, Crimp reintroduces the theological element in his play in an ingenious way. In the scene of the arrest of the General, the hero asks persistently if there are going to be cameras recording the event. After he has 113 Trach. γαῖαν καθαίρων ἱκόμην (I came to my purifying work). Cf. Cixous in Fort (1997: 432) for discussion of genocide as ‘cleansing’: ‘And to do this the murderer must first reject the desired victim out of humanity: the murderer de-figures, disguises his object as “masses”, as “race”, as “cattle”, as sludge. This is how in the end he claims he is not killing, but cleansing.’ 114 115 116 Crimp (2004: 57–8). Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68–9. 117 On Iolaos in Greek mythology, literature and art, see LIMC i. 686–701, ii. 459–65. See also dictionary entries in Smith (1880), Roscher (1890–1897), Grimal (1986/1951), and Price and Kearns (2004: 285).

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been assured that the events will be covered, his next question is about the gods: GENERAL IOLAOS

And the gods? Will the gods be watching? The gods are always watching, General.118

This ultimate search for the gods could be read as a self-referential comment on the absence of the divine in modern tragedy, while the parallel drawn between gods and cameras implies that in the contemporary world the omnipresent media provide a new type of metaphysics. The ethical ambiguity that surrounds the deed of Greek tragic hero is evoked in Crimp’s disavowal of the binary between good and evil. Amelia’s final words are revealing. The silent exit of Dianeira to commit suicide is here recast in a monologue that confesses that violence and terror dwell in both sides. Amelia asks Laela to go to the airport where they can have their bodies X-rayed: There’s obviously something inside us Laela some sharp object some spike something inside of us a prohibited object we didn’t know about but that will show up on the screen close because I think it must be very close to our hearts119

The monologue goes on to say that both women will be suspected of terror. Amelia will then avow having hidden the weapon on purpose: Because otherwise I could be mistaken for a victim and that’s not the part Laela that I’m prepared to play.120

Amelia’s words could be read as a comment on the self-victimization of Western populations following the 9/11 attacks. A closer comparison of these lines with the corresponding in the ancient text reveals a radically different portrayal of the character. In The Women of Trachis 465–8, Dianeira pities Iole for her beauty, which has inflicted

118

Crimp (2004: 66).

119

Ibid. 46.

120

Ibid.

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misery upon her and her country. Her pity seems to be stimulated by some sort of empathy for the captive; Dianeira’s opening monologue says that she was afraid that her beauty would be the source of sorrow.121 Amelia’s identification with Laela in Cruel and Tender is based not on victimization but on their involvement in ongoing conflict and violence. There is a notable similarity between Cruel and Tender and Mark Ravenhill’s brief reference to tragedy in Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat in terms of deconstructing the evil–good binary reproduced during the War on Terror. Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat was a project of stand-alone short plays that was first produced for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2007 under the title Ravenhill for Breakfast. The ‘epic cycle’,122 as described by Ravenhill himself, includes a piece entitled Women of Troy, in which a chorus of contemporary women under a state of attack address an imaginary enemy, imploring to be spared as they are ‘the good people’.123 The invocation of Greek tragedy here arises mainly from the title, which offers an ironic comment on the women’s self-victimization. But Ravenhill’s irony seems to go further; the title of the play can be read in relation to the women’s celebration of the values of tolerance, freedom, and democracy, which, like tragedy itself, are means of Western selflegitimation. In Cruel and Tender the classical text is used as a bridge to the tragic genre rather than as part of the canon. Nevertheless, the ending appears to question the classics in a more overt manner. In the final scene, we see Laela reading aloud a passage from Hesiod’s Works and Days. This part of Hesiod’s poem describes life in the Iron Age of Man.124 As the quoted lines recount, in this age humans are faced with the greatest toils: illness and death triumph, family bonds are broken, cities are reduced to dust, and divine wrath reigns; truth and lies have collapsed, while deception is a source of power. The scene features the following exchange between Laela and the physiotherapist: I wish I was dead or still un . . . un . . . 125 PHYSIOTHERAPIST Unborn—not born yet. LAELA

121 123 125

122 Trach. 25. Ravenhill (2008: 5). 124 Ibid. 7–17. See WD 174 ff. Crimp (2004: 70).

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The allusions to the famous lines of the chorus in Oedipus at Colonus126 and to Nietzsche’s quotation of Theognis on the Silenus’ myth127 at this point create a strong link to the idea of the tragic. What is most significant is that Hesiod’s passage is put in the mouth of Laela, at the very point she becomes the wife of James, the General’s son. The reading of a Greek text would seem to emphasize Laela’s westernization; her last line is a statement of emancipation, but also a declaration of power: Laela refuses to tidy up the house and says to the housekeeper: ‘That is your job.’128 It is possible to consider the refashioning of the chorus in Cruel and Tender in relation to Crimp’s rewriting of Greek tragedy as a means of dealing with conflict and warfare. The chorus consists of three women, the Housekeeper, Beautician, and Physiotherapist, whose role is vaguely evocative of certain functions of an ancient chorus, as, for example, in the scene they prepare the house for the General’s return, while a recording of Billie Holiday is playing.129 The three women offer both physical and emotional comfort to Amelia, while the Housekeeper often intervenes to alleviate the tension between the characters. It is an interesting detail that, although they are given names that are used in the dialogue, they are always cited with reference to their profession. For the most part of the action, the three women remain present on stage and, similarly to the Greek choruses, they witness the fall of the protagonists. The Housekeeper describes Amelia’s room after the suicide to the other two, mentioning that she has been asked to testify to the authorities.130

126 OC 1225–7: μὴ çῦναι τον ἅπαντα νι-/κᾷ λόγον τὸ δ’, ἐπεὶ çανῇ/βῆναι κεῖθεν ὅθεν περ ἥ-/κει πολὺ δεύτερον ὡς τάχιστα (Not to be born comes first by every reckoning; and once one has appeared, to go back to where one came from as soon as possible is the very next thing). 127 Nietzsche (1993/1872: 22): ‘Miserable, ephemeral race, children of hazard and hardship, why do you force me to say what it would be much more fruitful for you not to hear? The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second-best thing for you—is to die soon.’ Nietzsche does not mention his ancient source, but Silenus’ words derive from Theognis 425–8, while there is also an echo of OT 1080: παῖδα τῆς Τύχης (child of the event that brought good fortune) (emphasis in original). 128 Crimp (2004: 700) (emphasis in original). 129 Ibid. 33. Some of the choral parts of the Greek play are recast in the background music of Billie Holiday’s songs. 130 In Timberlake Wertenbaker’s adaptation of Dianeira, the chorus protests for always being the ones witnessing the catastrophe. See Wertenbaker (2002: 362): ‘THIRD CHORUS: I don’t want to see any of this | SECOND CHORUS: Why do we always have to witness these horrors?’

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The chorus have no part in the catastrophe, but they are the ones who saw it happen. The first staging of Cruel and Tender by Luc Bondy at the Young Vic in 2004 emphasized the element of viewing by placing the chorus behind a window on the stage wall through which, at certain points, they were watching the protagonists. Juxtaposed to the panoptical view of large-scale catastrophe enabled by media technology, tragedy as an act of viewing does not simply offer a critique of the dominant representations of suffering, but also calls into question their underlying power structures and mechanisms. The rewriting of the Greek tragic texts to contemplate contemporary events provides a frame that challenges the established definitions of tragedy and, at the same time, expands its semantic and political horizon through appropriation. Not only do these rewritings propose a new ethics of appropriation of the canon, but they also introduce a politics of viewing that transposes the ethical question into the process of reception. The agency and responsibility, normally associated with the tragic protagonist, here seem to lie with the spectator. By demonstrating tragedy’s deep enmeshment in pain and suffering, these plays break with tragedy as a category that reaffirms aesthetic hierarchies and cultural hegemonies and invite audiences to reflect on the ways in which suffering is mediated, contained, and evaluated.

3 Tragic Absences and Metatheatrical Performances The return of Nietzschean tragic theory, identified by Terry Eagleton in poststructuralist and postmodern readings of tragedy, can also be evinced in the fascination with the Dionysiac elements of Greek tragedy since the 1970s. In many adaptations this fascination takes the form of a search for ritual patterns in the Greek texts themselves, or even espouses the view of drama and theatre as ritual. However, Nietzsche’s recourse to the Dionysiac origins of Greek tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy relates less to a preoccupation with the ritual aspects of the Greek plays than to his own conception of the Dionysiac principle as a core constituent of Greek tragedy. In the late twentieth century, classical scholarship departed from the idea of the tragic hero as ‘a mask of Dionysus’,1 to reinvent Dionysus as the god of mask, metamorphosis, and theatre.2 The term metatragedy is introduced by Charles Segal in his discussion of Euripides’ Bacchae in order to analyse the ‘selfconscious reflection by the dramatist on the theatricality and illusioninducing power of his own work [ . . . ]’.3 If for Nietzsche the return of Dionysus in The Bacchae provides Euripides’ ultimate concession to the tragic art he undermined consistently in his earlier plays, for Segal it offers4 an exploration of the limits of tragedy. Yet, for Segal, this exploration does not signify the demise of tragedy, but rather relates to the theme of theatrical illusion impersonated by Dionysus himself.

1

Nietzsche (1993/1872: 51). In a similar manner, Segal argues that the worship of Dionysus in antiquity collapsed the barriers between reality and illusion. See C. Segal (1997/1982: 215). 3 4 Ibid. 216. Nietzsche (1993/1872: 60). 2

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The self-referential theatricality, or metatheatre, characterizing numerous rewritings of Greek tragedy produced since the 1970s would seem, in this sense, to be another face of the alleged Dionysiac resurgence. The relationship between tragedy and metatheatre is much debated, whether by tragedy one refers specifically to Greek tragedy or, more broadly, to the tragic genre. Responding to classical scholarship that seeks metatheatrical allusions in the Greek tragic texts, Oliver Taplin argues that Greek tragedy, in marked contrast to Old Comedy, does not tend to expose theatre’s artificiality; such a display, argues Taplin, would suspend the empathy for the tragic character and would not allow tragedy to accomplish its effect on the spectator.5 Lionel Abel, who was the first to coin the term ‘metatheatre’ in the early 1960s,6 defines the distinctive qualities of the metaplay in contrast to tragedy. For Abel, metatheatre does not just mark a departure from tragedy in playwriting, but provides the philosophical alternative to it. The juxtaposition of metatheatre to tragedy is grounded on certain ideas about the tragic genre, which go back to the debates about tragedy in the modern era. According to Abel, while tragedy affirms the reality in which the tragic struggle takes place, the metaplay blurs the borders between theatrical illusion and reality. Abel seems to find an ally in Bertolt Brecht, as he believes that the tragic genre is alien to modern audiences; more specifically, both Abel and Brecht denounce the realist and naturalist dramatists’ attempts to produce modern tragedy. If for Brecht the adherence of modern playwrights to the Aristotelian tragic model runs counter to the

5 Taplin (1986) contra, e.g., Segal (1997: 215–71), who discusses the implications of illusion in Euripides’ Bacchae. See Ringer (1998) for an exploration of the selfconscious aspects in Sophoclean drama. 6 Abel first drew the line separating tragedy and metatheatre in his study Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form (1963). The 1963 book, together with the author’s later essays on this issue, was republished posthumously in 2003 under the title Tragedy and Metatheatre. Pavis’s dictionary (1998: 210) relies on Abel for the following definition of metatheatre: ‘This phenomenon does not necessarily involve an autonomous play contained within another, as in the “play within the play”. All that is required is that the represented reality appears to be one that is already theatrical, as in plays in which the main theme is life as theatre [ . . . ] Metatheatre, thus, defined becomes a form of antitheatre, where the dividing line between play and real life is erased.’ (emphasis in original).

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Marxist understanding of progress,7 for Abel it reveals a failure to exploit the potential of metatheatre.8 Tragedy and metatheatre are often argued to represent different stages in the history of dramatic forms. Although there is no agreement on the emergence of metadrama, metatheatricality is largely identified as the distinctive quality of modern drama, culminating in Pirandello and Brecht.9 The view of metatheatre as the paradigmatic modern dramatic form alongside its counterposition to tragedy relates to the argument about the demise of tragedy. Abel opposes George Steiner’s idealized view of tragedy—to whom his argument seems to respond directly—to celebrate the metaplay: ‘Shall we not stop lamenting the “death” of tragedy and value justly the dramatic form [i.e. metaplay] which Western civilization only—and that civilization only—has been able to create and to refine?’10 Abel is resistant to the idea that the tragic genre undergoes transformations in the course of time, yet he does not rule out the possibility of tragedy in the modern world.11 However, in his analysis the high cultural status of tragedy as the exclusive product of Western theatre is accorded to metatheatre. For Steiner, tragedy offers a representation of suffering and heroism that is ‘distinctive of the Western tradition’,12 and is sharply distinguished from death in Oriental art or the sense of justice that is central to Judaism.13

7 Brecht’s (1964/1948: 30) polemic against tragedy underscores the inability of the tragic form to articulate modern preoccupations: ‘simply to comprehend the new areas of subject-matter imposes a new dramatic and theatrical form. Can we speak of money in the form of iambics? [ . . . ] Petroleum resists the five-act form; today’s catastrophes do not progress in a straight line but in cyclical crises; the “heroes” change with the different phases, are interchangeable, etc.; the graph of people’s actions is complicated by abortive actions; fate is no longer a single coherent power [ . . . ] Even to dramatize a simple newspaper report one needs something much more than the dramatic technique of a Hebbel or an Ibsen.’ The formal characteristics and themes recalled by Brecht (iambics, five-act form, heroes, fate) make manifest that his critique refers to Greek tragedy and its later revivals. 8 Abel (1963: 107–13). 9 Abel (1963) and Nelson (1958) locate the emergence of metatheatre in Shakespearean dramaturgy; Troisi (1996) identifies metatheatrical elements in both the tragedy and comedy of antiquity, but she stresses the inclination of twentieth-century playwrights towards metatheatre. Abel (1963: 111–12) discusses Pirandello and Brecht as the exemplary metatheatrical playwrights. 10 Abel (1963: 113). 11 Ibid. 112: ‘[Realist so-called tragedy] implies an acceptance of values which contemporary writers are unlikely to hold. I shall not say that tragedy is impossible, or, as George Steiner has suggested, dead.’ 12 13 Steiner (1961: 3). Ibid. 3–4.

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Similarly, Abel’s appraisal of metatheatre is underpinned by a purist view of genre that culminates in a celebration of Western culture. The self-referentiality of metatheatre provides the par excellence use of theatre as a metaphor of human life,14 exposing the frailty of the notion of reality itself. Metatheatre is the theatrical form that has best illustrated the epistemological impasses encountered in modernity. The failure of human perception to grasp reality and the entrapment within an inscrutable world is for the modern man no less agonizing than the plights of Greek tragic characters. Robert Nelson examines the play-within-the-play convention from Shakespeare down to Pirandello and Anouilh, arguing that especially in twentiethcentury theatre the tragic feeling is moulded in the metatheatrical mode: ‘Like Molière, Pirandello invites us to the view of human life as itself theatrical. However, the mask which the modern Italian sees as an integral part of reality is not the smiling visage of comedy, but the downcast countenance of tragedy.’15 Since modernist playwrights have repeatedly employed the metatheatrical mode in order to articulate a tragic perception of the world, it might be impossible for contemporary audiences not to view Greek tragedy through the filters of metatheatre or to read metatheatrical allusions into the classical texts themselves. Eagleton accuses postmodernism of, among other things, an aestheticization of reality that is in sharp opposition to tragedy’s preoccupation with suffering.16 What Eagleton suggests seems to agree with Abel’s argument that metatheatre and tragedy are completely at odds on the grounds of a different perception of reality. The actual encounter between Greek tragedy and metatheatre in contemporary rewritings offers a plane upon which the largely contested relationship between tragedy and metatheatre can be analysed.17 These rewritings employ a variety of metatheatrical devices beyond 14 The baroque topos of theatrum mundi has appealed particularly to phenomenological approaches to theatre. For Wilshire (1982), the bracketing apparatus of theatre provides insights into questions of identity, involvement, and authorization. Pearce (1980) also explores the multiple stages device as an interplay of objectivity and subjectivity through which human perception comes to terms with the world. 15 Nelson (1958: 132). Troisi (1996: 138–45) focuses on the use of metatheatre in twentieth-century drama in order to depict negativity and crisis. 16 Eagleton (2003: 227). 17 Self-reflective techniques and devices are also employed in several cinematic adaptations of Greek tragedy, e.g. The Dream of Passion (1978) by Jules Dussin, Der Fall Ö. (The Case for Decision Ö.) (1991) by Rainer Simon, and Antigone (1992) by

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the convention of the play-within-the-play to engage with their source texts. The metatheatrical interplay here entails a reflection on Greek tragedy, featuring certain tensions with both the classical texts as well as tragedy as a genre. It is worth distinguishing metatheatrical rewritings of Greek tragedy under examination here from earlier manifestations of metatheatre. As Federica Troisi argues, ‘observing the beginning and the function of metatheatre means to historicize, at least to a certain extent, the evolution of the idea of theatre from the modern era to our days’.18 The rewritings that employ metatheatre in rewriting the Greek plays can be discussed with reference to the postmodern problematics of theatrical representation. In these plays, theatre is depicted no longer as the symbolic topos of dream and illusion, but as the site of enactment of a prior text. In most cases, the tragic text is superimposed onto the dramatis personae, while the live act of performance, far from signifying the liberation from the written word, is no less tyrannical than the enacted text. The following analysis explores the peculiar relationship between tragedy and metatheatre in rewritings of Greek tragedy, by focusing on plays that adopt metatheatrical devices to deal with the classical text and, through this, with tragedy itself: the modern Greek plays I voui (Roar) by Pavlos Matesis (1998) and Klytaimnistra? (Clytemnestra?) (1974/5) by Andreas Staïkos; Living Quarters: After Hippolytus (1977) by the Irish Brian Friel; the postcolonial reworking of Antigone, Τhe Island (1973) by Athol Fugard; and La Medea (1977) by the Italian theatre practitioners Dario Fo and Franca Rame. The plays under discussion represent a range of responses to Greek tragedy, from the nostalgic search for the tragic genre to the tyranny of the classical text, and from the reconciliation with both text and genre to the radical appropriation of the classical canon. In Matesis’s Roar, metatheatre alludes to illusion and dream as much as to the miscommunication with the ancient past. Matesis employs metatheatre in order to question the place of Greek tragedy amid classical images and representations. In Clytemnestra? and Living

Jean-Marie Straub. Michelakis (2004) notes the self-awareness of recent cinematic appropriations of Greek tragedy. 18 Troisi (1996: 16) (my translation).

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Quarters the actors/characters are ensnared within the dramatic text as much as within the confines of theatrical illusion; in both plays the inescapability of representation provides, I argue, the postmodern manifestation of a tragic deadlock. The characters in The Island also experience the oppression of the text, but eventually succeed in adapting it in a way that affirms both theatre and tragedy. Finally, the displacement of Greek tragedy on the popular stage in Fo and Rame’s version of Medea would actually seem to break with both the classical text and representational theatre altogether.

METATRAGEDY Matesis’s Roar revisits ancient Greek tragedy from a metatragic standpoint.19 The prefix meta- in this context should be understood with reference to both the time of the dramatic action as much as to the questioning of the tragic genre. The play is set in the desolate palace of Mycenae centuries after the fall of the House of the Atreides. There the ghosts of Clytemnestra, Electra, and Aegisthus revive the past deeds of the tragic heroes within their dreams. The play features an extended scene in which a group of tourists visit the Mycenaean palace. The scene is staged as a typical guided tour in an archaeological site, parodying the banal representations of antiquity promulgated by the tourist industry in modern Greece.20 As the agent says to the tourists, the ancient statues ‘constitute [the] country’s future in tourism, the highlight of [the] programme’.21 These revivals of antiquity give way to a long metatheatrical scene in which an itinerant troupe gives a performance for the ghosts. In Matesis’s play, theatre is used as a metaphor for the absence characterizing the relationship with the ancient past. Greek tragedy, and along with

19

On the tragic elements in Matesis’s drama, see Pefanis (2001: 201–25). While the players were trying to find the palace, they were told that there was only a restaurant called Mycenae (Matesis 1997: 56). Matthias Langhoff ’s controversial production of the Bacchae in 1997 for the National Theatre of Northern Greece alluded to the folklore representations of the ancient past and the commodification of antiquity in contemporary Greece. 21 Matesis (2002: 150). 20

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it the world of antiquity, is lost and unavoidably mediated by erratic representations, theatrical or otherwise.22 The whole action in Roar wavers between dream and illusion. The ghosts of Clytemnestra, Electra, and Aegisthus dream that they have come back to life and perform the memorial service on the anniversary of the Thyestean banquet. The visit of the travelling players is situated within the dream of the characters. Furthermore, Aegisthus takes part in their performance, while dreaming that he has become Agamemnon. The play ends with Electra taking the role of Clytemnestra. The multiple layers of metatheatricality illustrate that the revival of the tragedy is possible only within the realm of illusion. Rather than disrupting the spectator’s sense of reality, metatheatre here puts at stake the access to the ancient past and, in particular, to tragedy. The travelling players who give performances of epic and tragedy claim the genres from the sphere of high culture, while at the same time questioning the validity of the tragic myth itself. During the play, it becomes clear that the heroes and heroic deeds of the myth owe their existence to the performances of the itinerant players. The lowbrow performances of the troupe are the substitute for tragic acts that never happened as ‘the Trojan war DIDN’T take place’.23 The actors débuted in Aulis with a melodrama, Achilles and Hector were extras, and Hecuba joined the group to play the tragedy she did not experience. The rendering of the first lines of the Iliad in a translation dating from 164024 sustains the idea that antiquity is mediated by various interpretations that obscure rather than provide access

22 Metatheatrical devices are used in several adaptations of Greek tragedy, e.g. the trilogy To Gramma ston Oresti, Parodos Thevon, Deipnos (Letter to Orestes, Theban Parodos, The Banquet) (1992) by Iakovos Kambanellis and Oi ithopoioi (The Actors) (2001) by Giorgos Skourtis. This appeal of the metatheatrical mode to Greek adaptors of the ancient texts is certainly triggered by modern Greece’s relationship with the classical past. The haunting presence of antiquity over the modern country resembles the art of theatre as defined through the interplay between presence and absence. Kambanellis’s and Skourtis’s reworkings of the Greek myth, however, do not problematize the relationship with the classical text per se. 23 Matesis (2002: 172). The line is an allusion to Jean Giraudoux’s La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935) (capitalization in original). 24 Matesis (1997: 61) cites the 1975 Greek edition of the translation printed in Venice in 1640. The English translation of Matesis’s play uses Alexander Pope’s 1715 translation. See Matesis (2002: 167).

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to it. The remainder of their show is a pastiche of references drawn from different tragedies, with the ghosts of the Atreides themselves exchanging parts: Aegisthus plays Agamemnon, Electra wants to play Clytemnestra, and Clytemnestra can choose between Andromache and Hecuba, but she ends up playing herself in the sacrifice of Iphigeneia. The void tragic mask in the metatheatrical scene could be seen as a metaphor for Greek tragedy itself. The actors change masks as they perform different tragic roles, while Aegisthus puts on the mask of Agamemnon and claims to be the dead king. Here it is not the notion of reality but the world of Greek tragedy that vanishes behind the multiple layers of illusion. The ancient statue is another key symbol in Roar. According to the stage directions at the beginning of the play, there are three statues on stage. The tourist guide will later explain to the visitors that these are the statues of the royal houses of Mycenae and Troy and show the dismembered statue of Hecuba. The connotations of the ancient statue at this point suggest a departure from Greek modernist poetics. In the poetry of Giorgos Seferis, the statues have a petrifying power over the modern poet, but they also come to life in apocalyptic moments and invigorate poetic imagination.25 For the modernist Seferis the ancient statues are bodies that breathe, connecting ancient and modern Greece;26 Matesis, by contrast, wonders: ‘Is it the statues that are breathing? We don’t know.’27 The statues in Roar are vestiges of a past that can be revived only within illusion; the statues of Clytemnestra, Electra, and Aegisthus come to life within a dream, while the statues described in the opening directions participate in the itinerant group’s performance. The decline of the ancient world is demonstrated in the play’s setting as much as in the characters who inhabit the haunted palace. The hall resembles a ‘palace or, very vaguely, a museum’,28 and the Atreides are in their declining years. Clytemnestra bears the axe stabbed in her back and Aegisthus is crippled and mute. Thyestes’ toilet is the tomb of his children, and, at the end, one of the tourists unknowingly uses it. Nowhere is the decay so evident as it is in the memorial service where the tourists feast on the remains of the Thyestean banquet. While the banquet is being dispersed throughout the hall, Electra 25 On the symbolisms of the statue in Seferis’s poetry, see Keeley (1982: 25–7), Hadas (1985: 46–89), and Beaton (1991: 39–49). 26 27 28 Seferis (1977: 155). Matesis (2002: 146). Ibid. 132.

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complains: Leftovers. A hundred years of leftovers . . . look . . . [ . . . ] They’ve grown mouldy. They’ve dried up covered in mould! [ . . . ] Disgusting . . . all green with mould . . . the moths have left cocoons on them . . . empty ones.’29 They play ends with a tableau of the petrified banqueters. The scene could be read as the complete reversal of the Bakhtinian banquet ‘[which] is the triumph of life over death [ . . . ] The victorious body receives the defeated world and is renewed.’30 In blatant contrast, the tourists’ feast in the play denies antiquity any regenerating power. The impossibility of renewal through communication with the past is explicitly linked to the demise of tragedy. Orestes arrives with the tourists and declares his failure to revive tragedy. His soliloquy echoes Steiner on the incompatibility of tragedy and Christianity as well as on the incapability of modern drama to articulate tragedy in its elliptical and fragmentary language, which privileges silences over words: All my life, my one dream was for us to become a tragedy. But now, how can I make a tragedy out of us? Dostoyevsky is about as far as we can go. Mother and son, Christians, infected by guilt and remorse. And you, arrogantly guilty—how am I going to perform a tragedy? With silences?31

Clytemnestra, exasperated at Orestes’ constant grievances, will say to him: ‘Don’t start playing Hamlet on me now.’32 Interestingly, Abel designates Hamlet as the play marking the emergence of metatheatre as the counter genre to tragedy. In Matesis’s Roar, the death of tragedy gives rise to the metatheatrical interplay. The world of illusion and the vestiges of the ancient past are woven together in an encounter between the modernist mourning over the absent antiquity and the postmodern awareness of its multiple performances and representations.

TRAGIC REPETITIONS In both Clytemnestra? by Staïkos and Living Quarters by Friel, the metatheatrical interplay with Greek tragedy questions theatre as a repetition of a predetermined text. In Staïkos’s play, two women 29 31

30 Ibid. 138. Bakhtin (1968: 283). 32 Matesis (2002: 184). Ibid. 185.

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rehearse the roles of Clytemnestra and Electra from Sophocles’ Electra. Living Quarters: After Hippolytus enacts the quasi-theatrical reconstruction of a family reunion at a General’s house ending in a catastrophe when the affair between his wife and his son is revealed. Both plays challenge the foundations of the art of theatre in ways that correspond to the critique of the notion of representation in poststructuralist thought. In Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive reading, the vision of Antonin Artaud for a non-representational theatre interrogates not merely the tradition of Western text-based theatre but also the logocentrism of Western metaphysics.33 According to Derrida, Artaud sought to eradicate the duality that is intrinsic to representation (Darstellung): ‘The stage is theological for as long as it is dominated by speech [ . . . ] by the layout of a primary logos which does not belong to the theatrical site and governs it from a distance.’34 Artaud renounced the idea of performance as a mise en scène of a prior text and envisaged instead a theatre liberated from the written word that would acquire the form of a cataclysmic living experience. The attack on the dramatic text in Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty involved a call to eradicate the literary masterpieces of the past from the stage, and Greek tragedy in particular, as foreign and incommunicable.35 Recent rewritings of Greek tragedy seem to participate in a similar questioning of the classical text, but, unlike Artaud, they also question the idea of a theatre liberated from textual logos. Staïkos’s Clytemnestra? emerged from a workshop with Antoine Vitez in Paris.36 Staïkos follows Artaud in privileging the performance over the dramatic text, but he does not seem to agree on the need to break with the classics. In vivid contrast, the dialogue with classical drama is viewed as an indispensable part of creating new work: The creation of modern Greek plays-performances [ . . . ] will be shaped and completed during the process, by the parallel and constant dialogue with the works of the past [ . . . ] the actor will re-conquer his lost

33

34 See Derrida (1978/1967: 232–50). Ibid. 235. Artaud (1970/1938: 55–63). 36 Clytemnestra? was originally written in French in 1974–5; the title of the unpublished French script was Clytemnèstre peut-être. The Greek play was published for the first time in the Greek theatre journal Theatro, 57–8, in 1977. All citations here follow the 2001 edition of the play (Staïkos 2001). 35

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initiative and the responsibility or creation [ . . . ] while the writer and the director will retain their place on stage, which they have also lost.37

The action of the play is presented as a theatrical rehearsal; the scene opens with Clytemnestra fixing her coiffure, while Electra is helping her to put on her make-up. The set consists of ‘a landscape of seats’,38 which Electra fails to arrange as in a theatre auditorium. Although the performance will not materialize, the confinement of the characters within the theatrical condition is the prevalent theme throughout the play. At the beginning, the women recite two monologues from Sophocles’ Electra in the 1909 verse translation by Yannis Gryparis.39 Clytemnestra interrupts the recitation to ask ‘How do I look?’, blurring the boundaries between actress and role.40 Alluding to the question mark in the title, Clytemnestra will eventually confess that she is neither Clytemnestra nor herself.41 It is not fortuitous that make-up takes the place of the mask and accessories. Electra powders Clytemnestra’s face with dust and paints a necklace and earrings on her body.42 If mask and costume are the means by which the actor transforms into the character, this somatic inscription eliminates the distance that the actor must traverse to embody the role. The transformation of the two actresses into artificial beings is intensified by the classical text, which recalls Artaud’s assertion that the subservience to drama prevents theatre from restoring its continuity with life. The depiction of Clytemnestra and Electra focuses less on the deeds of the tragic heroines than on their being dramatic characters. Like Don Quixote as described by Michel Foucault, their ‘whole being is nothing but language, text, printed pages, stories that have already been written down’.43 The use of an outdated translation, however tuneful and mellifluous, sounds alien to a contemporary audience, underlining the alienation of the characters from the Greek text. It is not without significance that

37

Staïkos quoted in Sivetidou (2000: 67) (my translation). Staïkos (2001: 115). Sivetidou (2000: 25) acutely notices the reference to Eugène Ionesco’s The Chairs. 39 The recited monologues are from Sophocles’ Electra 86–99, 516–51. 40 Staïkos (2001: 118). The recurrent references to Clytemnestra’s beauty throughout Staïkos’s play allude to Euripides’ Electra 1069–75, where the eponymous heroine blames her mother’s interest in her appearances as a trait of a debauched woman. 41 42 43 Ibid. 149. Ibid. 115. Foucault (1989: 46). 38

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the recitations cannot be completed and that each phrase is repeated several times. As soon as Clytemnestra abandons Gryparis’s translation to deliver the same monologue in vernacular language, she is able to complete the part uninterrupted.44 Yet, the liberation from the classical text is never achieved. The characters continue to speak as Clytemnestra and Electra throughout the play. Every time Clytemnestra tries to tell her story as that of a woman in love with Aegisthus, Electra reminds her of her acts of adultery and murder.45 Apart from the monologues from Electra by Sophocles, the script is interspersed with textual references to the Oresteia and Euripides’ Electra. Clytemnestra bemoans the fact that she ‘nursed a snake’, evoking Clytemnestra’s dream in the Oresteia.46 Her uncertainty about whether she or Aegisthus killed Agamemnon alludes to the different versions of the story: ‘Listen, the lover was holding him tight and I was killing him—or the opposite.’47 When Electra tries to kill Clytemnestra, she hesitates at the sight of Clytemnestra’s breast like Orestes in The Libation Bearers.48 Staïkos’s Clytemnestra herself is aware that the construction of the self is predetermined, confessing: ‘That’s how nature made me and the others.’49 The false moon that Electra suspends on stage at the beginning of the performance and takes down before the end, as if the entire action has taken place within one night, emphasizes theatre’s artificiality, while also offering an ironic reference to the pseudo-Aristotelian unity of time followed in neoclassical tragedy. The two characters of the play are haunted as much by their theatrical being as they are by the classical texts and their modern versions.

44

It is indicative that the text from this point onwards is no longer italicized. See also the characters of Hamlet and Ophelia in Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine. As Erika Fischer-Lichte (2002: 342) observes, they are ‘citations of figures whose drama has already taken place. Their roles are fixed forever in Shakespeare’s text. This raises a problem which confronts Müller’s two quotational dramatic figures from the very beginning: should they follow their texts, which were created of them and written down elsewhere or should they break with the roles handed down to them and create new ones?’ 46 Staïkos (2001: 133). Cf. Choephorae 928. 47 Staïkos (2001: 129). In Agamemnon Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon, whereas, according to the older versions of the myth, Aegisthus was supposed to have accomplished the murder. On the role of Clytemnestra in the murder of Agamemnon in Aeschylus as well as in later representations, see Hall (2005). 48 Staïkos (2001: 141). Cf. Cho. 896–9. 49 Staïkos (2001: 126) (emphasis in original). 45

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Theatre seems to be antithetical to life in denying the characters the possibility of a sensual experience. Clytemnestra’s erotic encounter is described as a perpetual fall that thwarts any sense of fulfilment: ‘The dawn came—alas—and I miserable alone, all alone, I woke up . . . and I am falling from precipice to precipice and from precipice to precipice and from precipice to precipice, I found myself in the precipice—oh, dark awakening.’50 Almost simultaneously, the exit from the theatrical illusion appears to be an emergence into reality, but Clytemnestra finally finds herself on the theatrical stage, as Electra interrupts her monologue to suggest that they should ‘play theatre’.51 The affinity between Clytemnestra? and Jean Genet’s The Maids has not escaped critical attention.52 In Genet’s play the poisoned infusion puts an end to the sisters’ repetitive role-playing. Clytemnestra in Staïkos’s drama craves for the poisonous wine ‘that seals the eyes’.53 Aphrodite Sivetidou discusses the symbolism of wine as the drink of Dionysus.54 In contrast to the venom that provides the resolution in Genet’s play, the wine as a symbol of theatre itself bears no promises of life or death, but it is used to emphasize the idea of endless repetition. According to the stage direction, before the start of the performance there are pieces of broken glass on the stage floor.55 In the last scene, the glasses break and the wine spills; the characters/actors have returned to the beginning and are ready to start their performance over again.56 A similar sense of entrapment permeates Friel’s Living Quarters: after Hippolytus. However, there are some significant departures from the Euripidean plot.57 In Friel’s play, the young wife of the General, Anna, commits adultery with his son, while the General is away on service; yet Anna is not overwhelmed by Phaedra’s fervent passion for her stepson Ben, nor is Ben preoccupied with celibacy like Hippolytus. Moreover, after the revelation of the illicit affair, it is the Commandant Frank Butler who commits suicide. In fact, the domestic surrounding is more reminiscent of a Chekhovian setting rather

50

51 52 Ibid. 146. Ibid. 149. Sivetidou (2000: 29–31). 54 Staïkos (2001: 149). Sivetidou (2000: 29). 55 56 Staïkos (2001: 115). Ibid. 150. 57 On the presence of the classical past in Ireland, see Stanford (1976), Macintosh (1994), and McDonald and Walton (2002). 53

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than ancient tragedy,58 and there are no allusions to the ancient text embedded in the dramatic texture as in Clytemnestra? Nonetheless, Living Quarters poses similar questions about the prototype text as well as about the art of theatre. The metatheatrical interplay here takes the form of a re-enactment of events that had occurred during a family reunion.59 As Richard Cave notes, Living Quarters is different from earlier metatheatrical dramas as it allows the audience no access to a dimension of reality that would function as a frame. Instead, ‘the characters of Living Quarters are by contrast allowed only one dimension of reality in which to exist on stage before us as audience: the dimension occasioned by the scripted play’, and, thus, it is ‘a play-within which has no further play to situate itself ’.60 The dramatic action oscillates between performance and rehearsal; yet, it lacks the basic prerequisites of theatre, at least in the conventional sense. The characters of the play do not perform a play; they re-enact actual events of their past in a setting where, as Sir asserts to one of the characters: ‘There are no spectators, Charlie. Only participants.’61 The subtitle after Hippolytus poses questions, which cannot be explained solely in relation to the interplay with the Greek text nor to the multiple levels of illusion.62 Michael Lloyd’s discussion of the play uncovers a deeper relationship between Friel’s rewriting and Greek tragedy on the basis of self-determination and fate.63 This dimension could also be related to the metatheatrical and textual preoccupations articulated in the play. As in Staïkos’s Clytemnestra?, the reference to the ancient play involves a critique of theatrical representation as the enactment of a fixed text. The family story in Living Quarters is fully documented in a ledger; and a particular character, Sir, is the holder and executor of the ledger, a ‘human Hansard who knows those tiny little details and interprets them accurately’.64 Sir has been

58 Timmermans’s doctoral study (1994) on Friel explores Chekhovian influences on his plays in detail. 59 The re-enactment of the family catastrophe lasts one day, evoking again the unity of time. 60 61 Cave (2002: 109). Friel (1984: 181). 62 F. R. Jones (1996) argues that Friel uses the Greek reference in order to create an additional textual level and to play with audience expectations. 63 64 Lloyd (2000). Friel (1984: 178).

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summoned ‘out of some deep psychic necessity’65 of the characters, who have performed their play in their imagination ‘endlessly raking over those dead episodes that can’t be left at peace’.66 The action, which in Clytemnestra? is set in a theatre, is in Friel’s play located in the mindscapes of memory, where the events are being re-enacted. The role of the omniscient and ubiquitous Sir has been paralleled to that of the Greek chorus.67 However, Sir’s control of the dramatic action and lack of compassion would hardly justify the comparison. His role is more similar to that of Aphrodite and Artemis in Hippolytus rather than to the functions of the ancient chorus. In Friel’s play the ledger takes the place of tragic necessity. Sir’s power over the characters emanates from his possession of the ledger, which records the events, allowing no digressions from the prescribed plot.68 In Living Quarters the act of representation seems to enhance textual determinism rather than resisting it. Sir’s role is certainly reminiscent of that of the director in Pirandello’s metatheatrical dramas; but Sir, more than an auteur or metteur-en-scène, is in many ways an embodiment of the dramatic text. Not only does he make explicit that he is not the creator of what lies in the ledger,69 but he also introduces and describes the characters in the form of stage directions. The irreversibility of the ledger has a dehumanizing effect on the characters. Their unsuccessful rebellions against Sir are essentially an expression of their desire to be human as well as a protest against the definitiveness of the past. This is reminiscent of Derrida’s discussion of written speech as a trace of a bygone presence; in this sense, the written sign is linked to lifelessness.70 Transforming the characters from real-life persons into fictional figures, the ledger

65

66 Ibid. 177. Ibid. For example, McDonald (1998: 40) and Lloyd (2000: 247). Timmermans (1994: 53) more accurately identifies Sir, among others, with Friel himself, but he does not discuss the implications created by the use of the classical play as a reference point. 68 A similar replacement of divine punishment with textual authority occurred in Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69, which also made use of metatheatrical allusions: CADMUS: Joan, your sentence is too hard. | JOAN: I’m sorry. Long ago Euripides wrote these things. It’s too late. The corresponding line in Euripides reads, Bacch. 1349: πάλαι τάδε Ζεύς οὑμός ἐπένευσεν πατήρ (Long ago Zeus my father ordained this). 69 Friel (1984: 198). 70 Derrida (1978/1967), 169–95 and 232–50. 67

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does not permit any kind of determination of action or characterization. Like Clytemnestra in Staïkos’s play, Tom reacts against the description of his character, but Sir makes it explicit that, once identity has been written in the ledger, it becomes indisputable.71 Charlie is not allowed to assume a role other than the one he originally had,72 while Anna fails to precipitate the denouement, as everything has to be repeated according to the letter.73 When Helen complains that the performance does not capture the actual atmosphere of the day, Sir assures her that the account of the ledger is entirely true to the events.74 The most notable protest against Sir in the play is that of Frank before he exits the stage to commit suicide. Frank complains about the injustice that has been done to him.75 The finality of the ledger becomes tantamount to tragic finality, which involves a certain kind of injustice, yet, the irreversibility of tragedy can be realized only retrospectively. Catastrophe in Friel’s play is not inescapable, and it is exactly the failure to prevent it that is perceived as tragic. When Tom strives to stop Frank’s suicide, Sir’s response is adamant: You had your opportunities and you squandered them [ . . . ] Many opportunities, many times. We’ll have none of your spurious concern that it’s all over. So sit down and shut up!’76 In both Staïkos’s Clytemnestra? and Living Quarters the metatheatrical interplay takes the form of a repetition that entails the endless torture for the characters. Similarly, in Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69, the punishment inflicted upon the tragic characters was paralleled to the very act of performing; in Dionysus’ words in the show: ‘I condemn you to perform this play over and over again until you learn to submit to me.’77 Staïkos’s Clytemnestra urges Electra to ‘throw away the dreadful mask of tragedy to the nettles—[to] be serious at last—[to] be seductive and flippant’.78 How true is it that contemporary rewritings of Greek tragedy throw away the tragic mask? It would be more accurate

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72 73 Friel (1984: 179–80). Ibid. 181. Ibid. 202–3. 75 76 Ibid. 188. Ibid. 240–1. Ibid. 242. 77 Cf. Schechner (1970: n.p.): ‘First you, Richard Dia [the performer’s name], Pentheus. You came to us in rage and you connected with your anger, but what you didn’t do is connect with your love for me. As a result, the death you suffer you suffer justly. Your curse it that you must continue performing this play again and again until you finally realise that I am not acting, that I am a god, and that nothing less than your total submission to me and my demands can ever save you from a false death.’ 78 Ibid. 127. 74

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to argue that they use the tragic text as a mask in order to portray the deadlocks of theatre. For Bruce Wilshire, metatheatre’s self-reflective mode is what renders it genuinely tragic: ‘Theatre can ground itself only when it uncovers its own limits—only when the artistic genre itself becomes tragic, beyond all the usual contrasts between tragedy and comedy.’79 The metatheatrical plays discussed in this section raise questions about theatre as the art that turns presence into a sign. By emphasizing the absence that is inherent in the notion of representation, both plays seem to suggest that the very core of theatre lies in loss. Repetition has no place in the theatre of Artaud, who famously proclaimed that, ‘once spoken, all speech is dead and it is only active as it is spoken’.80 While avant-garde theatre readily followed Artaud in privileging the actor’s presence over representation,81 rewritings of Greek tragedy seem to align with Derrida in that it is not possible to transcend the duality of representation within theatre. The rupture of representation is possible only when there is no separation between spectator and actor, as in the festival: The signifier is the death of the festival. The innocence of the public spectacle, the good festival, the dance around the water hole would open a theatre without representation. Or rather a stage without a show: without theater, with nothing to see. Visibility [ . . . ] is always that which, separating it from itself, breaches [entame] the living voice.82

Although Clytemnestra? and Living Quarters acknowledge the tyranny of the written word and the confinement within repetition, they dispense with the aspiration to create the non-representational theatre envisioned by Artaud. According to Staïkos’s note to the Greek edition of his text, the play was meant to be a theatrical exercise: ‘More specifically, it was the attempt to explore a gift for an actress, a gift that possibly does not exist.’83 Instead of abolishing classical repertoire in order to revolutionize the stage, these rewritings engage 79

80 Wilshire (1982: 245). Artaud (1970: 56). See Carlson (1993: 454–504), de Marinis (1987: 47–69), and Patsalidis (2004). 82 Derrida (1976/1967: 306). Cf. Bakhtin (1968: 7): ‘In fact, carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. Footlights would destroy a carnival, as the absence of footlights would destroy a theatrical performance.’ 83 Staïkos (2001: 113) describes the play using the Greek expression ‘πράσιν’ άλογο’, which is a corruption of the expression ‘πράσσειν άλογα’, which literally means to act irrationally (emphasis added). 81

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with the Greek tragic texts in a metatheatrical manner that helps to illustrate that the disruption of representation essentially signifies the end of theatre. Derrida, referring to the inescapability of repetition in every act of representation, concludes that ‘what is tragic is not the impossibility but the necessity of repetition’.84

FROM TRAGIC PERFORMANCES TO ACTS OF RESISTANCE In The Island by Fugard, the prisoners Winston and John embark on putting on a performance of Sophocles’ Antigone in the Apartheid prison on Robben Island. Initially, Winston does not share John’s enthusiasm about staging a Greek play, which he considers alien to his ordeal. By the end of the play, he has grown to experience a strong identification with the ancient heroine in his fight for freedom and self-determination. The tragic text and the theatrical condition, which in the rewritings discussed earlier imprison the dramatic characters within the endless repetition of an absent past, in The Island provide the means of liberation. What makes the reconciliation with Greek tragedy possible is an act of appropriation to the play’s colonial setting. Fugard’s recourse to Greek tragedy in order to contemplate the political strife in South Africa predates The Island. In 1971 the playwright produced an adaptation of Orestes with reference to a terrorist attack in a railway station in Johannesburg. The play amalgamated elements from Aeschylus and Euripides, presenting the terrorist John Harris as a modern Orestes.85 But Fugard had turned to Sophocles’ Antigone even earlier; as he explains,86 Antigone was the most obvious choice while he was working with the theatre group of black actors Serpent Players, in Port Elizabeth, a town under the most severe Apartheid oppression and censorship laws. Despite the police’s

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Derrida (1978/1967: 248) (emphasis added). The play text of the production is unpublished, but Fugard (1979) offers a reconstruction of it. On Fugard’s project, see also McMurtry (1998). 86 Fugard (2002) provides a detailed description of the different stages in the production of The Island. 85

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harassment, the production took place in New Brighton in 1965, and it was received as an act of resistance. In The Island, Fugard engages with the ancient text and the tragic genre in a much more intricate way than before. The interpenetration of life and theatre underlies the whole process of the production of The Island. While the Serpent Players were rehearsing Sophocles’ Antigone, the actor Sharkie (Sipho Mguqulwa) playing the part of Haemon was arrested and sentenced to imprisonment on Robben Island. The Island is based on Sharkie’s letters and notes, which testify to his own staging of Antigone in prison.87 Sharkie staged the final scene between Antigone and Creon relying on his memory of the play. The process of staging was hindered by the concerns of the actors about the prisoners’ response and the initial reluctance of Sharkie’s cellmate to play a female part. The letters that Sharkie sent from Robben Island provided Fugard with the material for the play, which dramatizes the staging of Antigone by two convicts on Robben Island.88 According to Fugard, the short piece presented by Sharkie was ‘the greatest fulfilment of this magnificent play’s message since Sophocles first staged his Antigone in Athens in about 440 BC’.89 In The Island the engagement with reality prevails over the metatheatrical interplay, as witnessed in the very process of the play’s production. The published text is the performance script, composed collaboratively with the actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona. Fugard willingly dispensed with the more economical dramatic structure that individual writing would warrant in favour of the experience the actors brought to the piece: ‘Their truth eclipses my aesthetics,’ as he notes.90 Real-life names are employed here to challenge the boundaries between fiction and reality. No less significantly, Fugard neither provides a mere representation of reality nor confuses the boundaries between reality and illusion; his aim instead was to create dramatic situations that would strongly affect 87 The Island is not the only appropriation of Antigone originating in Sharkie’s staging. As Fugard (2002: 134) says, the information about Sharkie’s short piece inspired the famous staging of the full play on Robben Island some years later, in which Nelson Mandela played the role of Creon. 88 Another founding member of the Serpent Players, Norman Ntshinga, was arrested and imprisoned on Robben Island for political reasons. See Fugard (2002: 135). 89 90 Fugard (2002: 143). Vandenbroucke (1986: 178).

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the spectators: ‘But I didn’t just want to illustrate what happened to men on Robben Island; I wanted to subject the audience to the same experience.’91 In The Island metatheatre tests the limits between theatre and reality, but, in conclusion, it is not reality that is revealed to be an illusion; instead, tragedy is proven to resonate with the historical experience, giving the ‘chance to examine the myths, clichés, lies— the reality of this society this time’.92 The use of the performers’ real-life names acquires a particular significance in the theatrewithin-the-theatre scene at the end of The Island. In the absence of an onstage audience, the spectators watching The Island become the prison audience in front of which John and Winston perform their version of Antigone. In a Brechtian moment at the end of their performance, Winston rips off his costume and pronounces the final words of Antigone, crossing the line between role and actor as well as between the tragic heroine and the prisoner.93 In The Island, Winston treats Antigone with scepticism. While trying to learn his part and understand the basic elements of the plot, he disapproves of the accusation and punishment of Antigone, since her offence, was an act she had every right to perform. Apart from his objections to the Sophoclean play, Winston is also suspicious of the whole project of staging a Greek play. Not only is the classical text alien to him, but it also seems to contradict the prisoner’s reality. Winston proclaims his refusal to perform Antigone on the basis of the irrelevance of the ancient play to his ordeal. His refusal to participate takes recourse to the old binary between myth and history: Only last night you tell me that this Antigone is a bloody . . . what you call it . . . legend! A Greek one at that. Bloody thing never even happened. Not even history. Look, brother, I got no time for bullshit. Fuck legends. Me! . . . I live my life here! I know why I’m here, and it’s history, not legends . . . Your Antigone is a child’s play, man.94

Winston finds it impossible to identify with his role for the additional reason that he is being asked to play a female part. When he rehearses in costume, he fiercely refuses the representation of the eponymous character as ridiculing. Although the everyday rituals of the prisoners’

91 93

Fugard (2002: 144). Fugard (1993: 227).

92 94

Fugard (1983: 185). Ibid. 210.

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routine involve some sort of theatricalization, none of them requires them to embody another being. The ‘bioscope’,95 as they call it, is a way of entertainment that includes the narration of a movie with mimetic movements, while another pastime they have devised is the imitation of imaginary telephone calls to their hometown.96 The exploration of otherness in Greek tragedy has become a major focus of classical scholarship, providing significant conclusions regarding the ideological function of Greek theatre as a means of self-definition.97 It is remarkable that in The Island Greek tragedy itself becomes the Other with which the characters are confronted. Similarly, the confrontation with Sophocles’ heroine becomes for Winston a process of disillusionment and self-definition, involving the reconciliation with Greek tragedy. The turning point in Winston’s stance is the reduction of John’s sentence, which makes him realize that he is destined to spend the rest of his life imprisoned. At this point, the plight of Antigone, also trapped between life and death, resonates with his own suffering. The merging of actor and role does not emphasize the deadlocks of representation, as in Clytemnestra? and Living Quarters, but marks the reconciliation with Greek tragedy. The Island ends with Winston and John’s performance of a play entitled The Trial and Punishment of Antigone. Their version of the Greek play focuses on the conflict between Antigone and Creon in order to unveil the hypocrisy lurking behind the rhetoric of power. Winston finally gets to recognize the Sophoclean play as a powerful way of articulating individual and political strife. Rush Rehm argues that political resistance and the theatrical embodiment of the female role are inextricable in The Island, because playing the woman means also to play the oppressed.98 Winston’s identification conveys a message of resistance as well as of overcoming gender and cultural divides. This resolution enables Winston to play the female Other as well as to adapt a Greek classic associated with the colonial canon.99 It might not be fortuitous that Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona turned to

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96 Ibid. 204. Ibid. 205–6. 98 See, in particular, Hall (1989) and Zeitlin (1995). Rehm (2007). 99 The Nigerian director Femi Osofisan also produced a metatheatrical adaptation of Antigone entitled Tegonni: An African Antigone in 1994. See Goff (2007) for an examination of the use of metatheatre in relation to Osofisan’s political appropriation of the ancient text. 97

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Sophocles’ Antigone, one of the few Greek tragic plays in which the polarity between the Greek and barbarians does not feature. Going back to the production process of The Island, it seems that Fugard himself came closer to the form of Greek tragedy in his rewriting at a later stage. What the playwright initially had in mind was based more on the Theatre of the Absurd. Fugard’s initial idea was to write a play for eight characters.100 As revealed by his notebooks, the final image of this early version would be ‘some lunatic pointless movement (repetitive) of the remaining group of prisoners around the stage. Intermittent despairing cries, noises as they circle endlessly.’101 Fugard felt that the form of a play about Robben Island would necessitate a certain ‘distance’, ‘elevation’, and ‘objectivity’, qualities he associated with the ‘“classical” in the sense of a cool detachment’.102 The playwright’s description indicates that his play moved away from the Absurd Theatre to the form of tragedy. Fugard’s relationship to Absurd philosophy and The Theatre of the Absurd is evident in the long opening scene of The Island. In this scene Winston and John dig the sand, fill a wheelbarrow, and push to empty it where the other digs.103 There is an allusion to Antigone’s deed, who is caught while trying to bury Polyneices for a second time, after the corpse had been disinterred by the guards of Creon.104 Later, Winston complains that rehearsing Antigone is an imposed task, tantamount to the diverse labours that he is forced to accomplish: ‘Learn to dig for Hodoshe, learn to run for Hodoshe, and what happens when I get back to the cell? Learn to read Antigone!’105 A parallel can be drawn between the ubiquitous, albeit unseen, Hodoshe, who suppresses the prisoners, and the dramatic text as a logos that is superimposed upon the theatrical stage. According to Steiner, the punishment of the two prisoners is a parody of Antigone’s task, asserting that ‘Fugard’s is the satyr play to all preceding Antigones’.106 However, the repetitive futile tasks of Winston and John seem to relate to a particular idea of the tragic

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101 102 Fugard (1983: 185). Ibid. 186. Ibid. 209. The actual duration of this scene in performance became a powerful experience for the audience. See Wertheim (2000). 104 See, in particular, Ant. 407–31. Cf. Anouilh’s Antigone, where Antigone says to Creon that there is no point in releasing her, since she will perform the burial as many times as necessary. See Anouilh (1957/1946: 40–1, 44–5). 105 106 Fugard (1993: 200). Steiner (1984: 144). 103

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proffered by Fugard. While Antigone is Hegel’s privileged drama of Greek antiquity,107 Fugard’s rewriting of the play reveals a conception of the tragic that is essentially anti-Hegelian and relies instead on Albert Camus’s Absurd thought.108 Fugard claimed to have found his ‘true climate’ while reading Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus.109 Camus envisages a universe that continues to be tragic despite and precisely because of the absence of metaphysical props, which existential philosophy renounces. The tragic feeling is constituted by the human insistence on ascribing coherence to a meaningless world. In this sense, it is not some kind of Hegelian synthesis but the very lack of it that for Fugard constitutes the tragic. Winston and John resemble Sisyphus, not least because they are perfectly aware of the absurdity of their ordeal. According to Camus, ‘if this myth is tragic, this is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?’110 The adaptation of Antigone played by the two prisoners omits the suicide of the heroine at the end, in line with Camus’s idea that the Absurd hero decides to exhaust, and live through, the punishment. What Camus says about the Absurd hero could be applied to metatheatre. As in Clytemnestra? and Living Quarters, in Fugard’s play the metatheatre operates to ascribe the art of theatre a tragic dimension. Camus views the actor as a profoundly Absurd figure, the absurdity lying in the ephemeral nature of his art as well as in the ability to embody the Other.111 Although Camus emphasizes the endless punishment of Sisyphus, he does not refer to the notion of repetition when discussing the actor’s art. Winston experiences the absurdity as both a Sisyphean labourer as well as an actor who incarnates the role. However, his performance of Antigone at the end of the play takes place only once, resisting the idea that theatre is defined through repetition. In The Island the self-referentiality of metatheatre questions the power of both the classical text and the theatrical representation to speak for the oppressed. Yet, the reconciliation with tragedy implies 107

Hegel (1962: 178, 325). Wertheim (2000: 90): ‘The essence of The Island is contained between its Sisyphean beginning and its Sophoclean end, and it is concerned with the way in which the plight of Sisyphus can be contained with and transformed into the power of Antigone.’ 109 Fugard (1983: 105). 110 111 Camus (1975/1942: 117). Ibid. 75–82. 108

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that, even if it is not possible to transcend the dualities of theatrical representation, theatre can overcome its own limitations by offering the means to embody political struggle and rebellion. This embodiment resignifies Greek tragedy, embracing its otherness and turning difference into a means of resistance to both textual and political oppression.

TRAGEDY AND POPULAR PERFORMANCE The classical text as an authority that is imposed on the actors in Clytemnestra?, Living Quarters, and, to some degree, The Island does not feature in Fo and Rame’s La Medea. The metatheatricality of Fo and Rame’s short play mainly arises from the use of the selfreferential devices of popular performance. In La Medea there is no complex interplay between actor and role or between different layers of theatrical illusion. The play starts out with the performer Franca Rame coming before the audience and offering a commentary on the Greek play and an introduction to the version she is going to present. Then she carries on with a monologue based vaguely on Euripides, in which she plays the parts of Medea, chorus, and Nurse. Rame’s performance could be seen as an example of a theatre that has broken free from the dramatic text as well as from the textual logos of representational theatre. La Medea belongs to a series of monologues produced by the two theatre makers for a one-woman show under the collective title Tutta casa, letto e chiesa (All Home, Bed, and Church). The monologues were expanded at a later stage to include, among others, an adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata performed in the Roman dialect.112 The overriding theme of all the monologues is the oppression of 112 Apart from La Medea and Lisistrata romana, Fo’s takes on Greek drama include a one-act play called The Tragedy of Aldo Moro, written in 1989. Mitchell (1989: 86) notes that the latter play was an adaptation of Philoctetes. The play was a dramatization of some letters by Moro presented by a Jester and including dances of satyrs and bacchanals. Fo discarded this play; in his words, ‘I have been working on the Moro play for a long time now, but I have had great difficulty finding a direction and a style for the second act, because current events keep on overtaking the development of the play [ . . . ] I am left with a format—that of Greek tragedy— fifteen characters, but no performance date.’

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women within domestic and social relations.113 The Italian edition of La Medea follows the structure of many of the monologues, which consist of an anteprologue and a discorsetto (little speech). There is no questioning of the boundaries between theatre and life, nor is there an attempt to illustrate the stalemates of theatrical representation. On the contrary, metatheatricality is established from the outset and celebrates the act of performance. The self-celebration of theatre in La Medea is, I suggest, inextricable from the celebration of the new woman who emerges on the popular stage. The theatrical model developed by Fo and Rame relies on the Italian traditions of the medieval popular performer giullare and the storyteller known as fabulatore.114 The acting technique of the giullare implements metatheatrical devices extensively, whereas the performance of the fabulatore constantly traverses the borders between enactment and storytelling. Fo’s theatre poetics developed in opposition to the dramatic text by recognizing the actor as the spontaneous scripter of the performance text.115 Fo referred to the long tradition of popular performers in his Nobel lecture at the Swedish Academy in 1997, which was itself a performance act based on drawings rather than written notes. When asked by his biographer to distinguish between the different tasks of the actor and the playwright, Fo advocated the primacy of performance, maintaining that, for long periods in the history of theatre, the staging actually preceded the publication of the play script. Even though Fo establishes a lineage that goes back to Shakespeare and Molière, his emphasis on the physical language at this point is more reminiscent of Artaud’s polemic against the dominance of a prior dramatic text. In Fo’s words, ‘the word can become written only after it has been used, after it has been chewed many times on the set’.116

113 La Medea has been translated into English by Stuart Hood (Fo and Rame 1981) and Gillian Hanna (Rame and Fo 1991). In both translations Rame’s prologue to the audience is omitted so the metatheatrical effect is reduced drastically, yet not entirely effaced. All quotations here are from Rame and Fo (1991), except for references to the prologue, where the Italian 1989 edition is used. 114 On these issues, see Scuderi (1998), De Pasquale (1999), and Farrell and Scuderi (2000). 115 Fo called his Nobel award a ‘vindication of the actor’, quoted in Farrell and Scuderi (2000). 116 Interview of Fo to Chiara Valentini, quoted in Farrell and Scuderi (2000: 201).

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The traditions of the giullare and the fabulatore are present in La Medea through the use of a narrative mode that addresses the audience in a direct manner. Furthermore, the break with the dramatic text that characterizes Fo and Rame’s practice is evident, as demonstrated by their recourse to folk songs and mimes on Medea’s story from Pistoia, in the archaic dialect of central Italy. Fo and Rame rely on the Euripidean play loosely, yet they take it as a reference point not only in terms of storyline but also in defining the politics of their own version. Unlike several feminist appropriations, La Medea does not question the portrayal of women in the Greek play117 but the textual culture it represents. The relationship to the Euripidean text is established in the prologue to the audience: ‘Our Medea harks back to the Umbro-Tuscan May rites, it is a popular Medea that follows the tragedy written by Euripides, but the motives for the killing of the children are very different.’118 The radical departure from the classical text and the rupture of theatrical illusion in Fo and Rame’s reconfiguration of tragedy are distinct from the avant-garde pursuit of presence in the theatre. The renewal through the recovery of past forms that Fo and Rame aspire to achieve is grounded in a circular conception of time, which appears to be manifestly postmodern in its overt opposition to the Enlightenment concept of linear progess(ion): The Enlightenment idea of society as a continual state of becoming [ . . . ] leads us to believe that the medieval period, for example, was one step, then gradually we progressed, one step at a time, and history turned out to be as it is today. But the middle ages are still with us.119

The histrionic devices of popular performance deployed in La Medea are integral to the feminist perspective proffered by the play. It could be argued that the opposition between the enactment of a classical text and popular performance operates in parallel with the woman as defined according to prescribed gender roles and the new woman who disrupts social norms. The function of popular festive forms as a subversion of social and religious hierarchies described by

117

Rame argues that Euripides’ so-called misogyny is erroneous in her discussion of Alcestis in Rame and Fo (1991: 206–8). 118 Fo and Rame (1989: 69) (my translation). 119 Fo quoted in Maeder (2000: 70).

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Mikhail Bakhtin could be of relevance here. In La Medea, the rewriting of Euripides’ text as a piece of popular performance subverts the patriarchal discourses inscribed in the play and its history of reception. The consistent undermining of the written word seeks to erase the male representations of femininity, while the popular stage provides the very space of feminine inscription. In La Medea the exclusive use of female voices denotes that the emergence of the new woman entails the rewriting of the original script. The departure from Euripides’ Medea seems to be a prerequisite for a feminist re-reading. Fo and Rame adapt only the female parts of Euripides’ play, while Jason is addressed but has no voice or presence on stage. It is also telling that the acquiescent lines of the Nurse and the chorus in La Medea are the parts that are more reminiscent of the prototype text. It would be possible to use the dramatic text that precedes its theatrical realization as an analogy to the prescriptions of femininity that define the manifestation of gender identity. As Judith Butler notes: What is ‘forced’ by the symbolic, then, is a citation of its law that reiterates and consolidates the ruse of its own force. What would mean to ‘cite’ the law to produce it differently, to ‘cite’ the law in order to reiterate and coopt its power [ . . . ]120

Butler denies the analogy between the performative model and theatre, since her definition of performativity does not permit ‘free play’ and theatrical self-presentation. However, the dramatic text that precedes the performance allows limited play; it is ruled by a logic that resembles the citation of the law that reproduces social and gender roles, while, in many cases, its theatrical reproduction provides one of the most powerful cultural processes of similar citations. In that regard, it comes as no surprise that the promotion of radical politics in a great deal of twentieth-century theatre has often been intertwined with the undermining or the renouncement of the dramatic text. Fo and Rame’s La Medea seeks to unravel the ideological constructions that underlie the conceptualization of gender. The prologue of the actress makes manifest that the differences between men and women actually function to preserve male domination. In the discorsetto, the 120

Butler (1993: 15).

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Nurse and the chorus advise Medea to be reconciled with women’s ageing and decaying as the ‘law of nature’.121 The heroine refuses to succumb to a destiny that is meant to be biologically determined. Fo and Rame make a comment on the discursive reproduction of female stereotypes by women themselves. In their version, Medea’s rebellion against the patriarchal norm urges women to recognize the discourse of biological determinism as prescribed: What law are you talking about? Who dreamed up this law? Did all you women think it up? Write it down? Did you go out into the streets and get up on your soapbox and bang your drum and say ‘This is the law! This is Holy Writ!!’ It was men . . . men who dreamed it up and . . . they wrote it down, they signed and sealed it and said it came down from Heaven on tablets of stone . . . and then the King gave it his seal of approval . . . and they did it to use it against us—against women.122

Most significantly, the legitimization of male narratives is described as a process of embedding within language, and especially written speech, which is also invested with theological implications. The act of performance not merely repudiates a prescribed idea of femininity as product of a patriarchal culture, but also challenges the logocentric mechanism of its reproduction. The relationship between the canon and the classical text is similarly underpinned by a mutually reinforcing reiteration of the norm. The value of the classical work is granted by the established canon, which the inclusion of this work affirms and perpetuates. Operating on the margins of high culture, popular performance can circumvent its aesthetic norms and canonizing discourses. The performance of Medea drawing on popular stories as well as on devices of popular theatre undermines the authority of the classical text, while also dismantling the authority of male discourse. La Medea resists the stereotypical ascription of frenzy and irrationality to the female, which characterizes debates around the Greek play as well as the later versions of Medea’s story.123 Medea’s filicide in this version is not triggered by jealousy or revenge; neither is it a sorcerous or barbaric act, as depicted in numerous pictorial, operatic, and 121

Rame and Fo (1991: 63). Ibid. The words ‘scritto’ and ‘scrittura’ are used in the Italian text (emphases added). 123 Euripides’ Medea had already in late antiquity stimulated philosophical discussions about the relationship between vigor (θυμός) and reasoning (λογισμός). See Dillon (1997). 122

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theatrical representations of the heroine. It rather involves a refusal to confine the female gender to the performance of maternal and conjugal roles. Animal imagery is invoked in the play to depict the subordination of the feminine. Medea’s act of filicide is a conscious repudiation of the traditional role of the woman, which is paralleled to that of a domestic animal: I know I’ll always be remembered as a wicked mother, a woman who was driven out of her mind with jealousy . . . but it’s better to be remembered as a wild animal than forgotten like a pet nanny goat! Milk her, clip her, then throw her out. Send her to the market and sell her . . . she won’t even make a single bleat in protest! I have to kill my sons.124

The particular emphasis on milk and wool alludes to the productive role of women within a male-dominated familial and social economy. Medea’s wish to be remembered as a wild animal denies the idea of female productivity, which is linked to fecundity, childbirth, and childcare. Her rebellion against the preordained pattern of motherhood is intended to give birth to a new woman. The metatheatrical nod to Medea’s vilification is explicit at this point; Fo and Rame’s Medea is fully aware that her choice not to be domesticated will generate the narrative of the evil mother that will be further appropriated within the male discourses and reverberate in future appropriations of her story. Butler identifies a transcendental dimension in the performative reiteration of gender: ‘The gaze of the other sets certain expectations and self-styled gender may find itself in comic or tragic opposition through the gender that others see through.’125 This seems to be particularly true for female acts of violence that challenge social and cultural norms of gender. Euripides’ play has been instrumental in regarding female transgression across time; Medea’s act has been invoked to vilify women but also to celebrate female acts of selfdetermination in feminist readings. The emergence of the new woman in Fo and Rame’s La Medea is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s account of the tragic deed as an invalidation of the established moral order and the emergence of higher moral standards.126 Remarkably, this is described by Benjamin as an act that falls 124

125 Rame and Fo (1991: 64). Butler (1993: 35). The relationship of Fo’s theatre to the tragic genre appears to be multifarious. His Brechtian perspective does not relate only to the narrative styles; it also affects the conceptualization of the tragic genre. Fo is reluctant to accept the defeatist tone of tragedy. See Rame and Fo (1991: 187). 126

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outside the symbolic: ‘The paradox of the birth of the genius in moral speechlessness, moral infantility, constitutes the sublime element in tragedy.’127 This is not to say that amorality constitutes the tragic, but that the tragic is ushered in at the very moment when conventional morality is tested, found wanting, and consequently extended. Medea in Fo and Rame’s short play engages in a dialogue with tragedy precisely by continuing the violent struggle for selfhood that starts with the ancient story of filicide.

METATHEATRE, TRAGEDY, ADAPTATION The metatheatrical mode in the rewritings discussed in this chapter arises from a range of textual encounters with Greek tragedy. Bruno Gentili applies the term metatheatre when he discusses ‘the construction of plays upon previous texts’.128 In this sense, every adaptation of a dramatic text, and especially of a classical one, would seem to hold metatheatrical allusions which are unleashed in the process of reception. By reaffirming, mutating, or subverting familiar patterns, adaptations invite the audience to unravel the dialogue between texts. The metatheatrical rewritings of Greek tragedy engage in a dialogue, not only with the Greek texts, but also with the genres of metatheatre and tragedy. In Roar, Clytemnestra?, and Living Quarters, this dialogue reveals the deadlocks of theatrical representation. In all three plays, the classical text, alien and yet omnipresent, acquires the dimension of both tragic inevitability and theatrical repetition for the characters. The examples of The Island and La Medea, by contrast, demonstrate that classical tragedy can be resisted and offer the means of resistance through the act of rewriting. In these instances, the act of performance provides the means to remould the tragic texts in ways that overcome the inescapability of repetition and the confines of prescribed roles, whether these are experienced under inhuman political conditions or within oppressive social structures.

127

Benjamin (1977/1928: 110).

128

Gentili (1979: 15).

4 From Author–God to Textual Communion Although the figure of Heracles has not been granted the paramount position of Oedipus or Antigone in modern discussions about self and agency,1 in the second half of the twentieth century dramatic representations of Heracles reflecting on similar issues were not uncommon. In the cases of Archibald MacLeish’s Herakles and Heiner Müller’s Herakles 5 the remoulding of Heracles as the emblematic modern hero entails a total refashioning of the Euripidean text. In Ted Hughes’s Alcestis and Simon Armitage’s Mister Heracles,2 the critique of the supernatural hero is entwined with a translational practice that challenges the individual male author.3 Both Hughes’s Alcestis and Armitage’s Mister Heracles oscillate between translation and adaptation; they follow the prototype closely, but also take significant liberties with it. The versions by Hughes and Armitage are characterized by what one could describe as a creative reading of the ancient text, which becomes evident when they are juxtaposed with their prototypes. The translated lines correspond closely to the Greek text, the dramatis personae are the same, and certain verbal conventions of ancient

1 Leonard (2005) offers a detailed analysis of the various encounters between the figures of Oedipus and Antigone and French structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers, tracing their links to German Idealist philosophy. 2 Ted Hughes’s text was posthumously published in 1999, while Simon Armitage’s play was published in 2000. The striking similarities between the plays make the hypothesis of the latter being in dialogue with Hughes particularly tempting. 3 Riley (2008) argues that the interpretation of Heracles’ insanity as intrinsic in the heroic nature already marks a departure from Euripides and is mainly based on Seneca’s representation of the hero.

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drama, such as the lyric and stichomythia, are reproduced.4 In most cases the chorus is attributed functions analogous to those it has in the ancient text. Nonetheless, the playwrights make significant departures from the Greek text, varying from anachronisms and cultural references to the interpolation of entire scenes between the parts of what is on the whole a close reading. The inscriptions upon the prototype demonstrate that the production of meaning is not a gradual decipherment of the text but an intricate process in which the classical text and contemporary sensibilities merge. The fusion of two texts, which is endemic in every act of translation, here becomes a translational strategy of rewriting the source text. Far from being solitary cases, Hughes’s and Armitage’s appropriations of Greek tragedy belong to a substantial dramatic corpus against which the conventional distinction between translation and adaptation can be tested and contested. Lorna Hardwick identifies the ‘creative blurring of the distinction between different kinds of translations, versions, adaptations and more distant relatives’5 as a major trend in the translation of the classics in the second half of the twentieth century. The inclusion of these hybrid forms within the domain of translation attests to the amplification of the category of translation—a fact related to the contemporaneous development of translation studies—but also to the peculiar relationship of these works to their Greek sources. It has been remarked that towards the end of the twentieth century the number of translations of Greek drama exceeded that of adaptations.6 Both the proliferation of versions of tragedy and the increasing number of translations signal a turn towards the classical text. Although the new translational practice identified by Hardwick may be seen to be underpinned by certain theoretical premisses, translators of Greek tragedy are often regarded as ‘a species of commercial merchandise [that] need to make their way in a highly competitive market’.7 Yet, in a similar manner to the metatheatrical adaptations of tragedy, the late twentieth-century interventionist translations should be viewed in terms of a close textual

4 On the other hand, certain conventions, linked to the practicalities of ancient theatre, such as the announcement of entrance and exits, are eliminated. 5 Hardwick (2000: 12). 6 These statistical data are presented by Altena and Mavromoustakos (2010). 7 Garland (2004: 145).

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engagement that seeks to interrogate the authority of the classical text alongside the forms of authority invested in the classical canon.8 The temporal relationship between earlier translations and their sources is replaced by a spatial relationship here; the classical text is not any more a point of departure, but a surface upon which the translator attempts various inscriptions. This is not to say that the close rereading of the Greek text has never been a legitimate practice for translators in the past. John Dryden in his famous essay on translation argues that the ideal translation (paraphrase) balances between the two extremes of a verbatim transposition of the text (metaphrase) and a creative metamorphosis of it (imitation).9 The paraphrase legitimately reworks the original in order to make it accessible to the reader. The word-for-word and the sense-for-sense are not complementary, but opposed to each other. Dryden concedes that I have both added and omitted, and even sometimes very boldly made such expositions of my authors, as no Dutch commentator will ever forgive me. Perhaps, in such particular passages, I have thought I have discovered some beauty yet undiscovered by those pedants, which none but a poet could have found.10

Racine’s adaptations of tragedy draw heavily on the Euripidean texts, while Hofmannstahl’s Electra and Oedipus take Sophocles as a source.11 Nevertheless, it is extremely rare before the late twentieth century to find a play that blurs the categories of translation and adaptation so radically as these recent versions of tragedy. Additionally, in vivid contrast to modernist remouldings of the myth with their desire for authenticity, the versions under discussion would seem to affirm the propinquity of original creation and re-creation. If there is a genealogy for the recent hybrid versions of tragedy, Bertolt Brecht’s Antigone, produced in 1947–8, springs to mind as the twentieth-century precursory play. For, rather than merely adapting the story, Brecht bases his version on Hoelderlin’s translation and intervenes to the dramatic structure so as to convey his own politicized 8 Although this chapter focuses on Anglophone plays, it covers a wide area of cultural contexts including Irish and African versions of tragedy. My intention is not to provide an exhaustive account of the recent translations/versions of Greek tragedy, but to address the major theoretical questions invoked by the translational practice under examination. 9 10 Dryden (1992/1680: 17). Ibid. 22. 11 On Hofmannstahl’s adaptations, see Bennett (2002).

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reading. The use of Hoelderlin’s Antigone signifies a dialogue with German poetic tradition, which Brecht relates to his ‘return to the German-speaking world’ after the Second World War.12 Furthermore, Hoelderlin’s close reconstruction of the Greek text in German produces an estranging effect, which served Brecht’s purpose of turning Antigone into an epic piece of theatre. In Brecht’s version the critical linguistic choices and omissions, as well as the interpolated passages and changes to the dramatis personae, offer a reading of the Sophoclean play as an allegory of Nazi Germany.13 Brecht’s particular use of Greek tragedy corresponds to the Marxist idea that each generation provides new insights into the classical literary canon. Some years later, in contrast to his Herakles, Müller’s Philoktet (1965) demonstrated a similarly Brechtian espousal of fidelity and interventionism towards its Sophoclean source text. Manfred Kraus notes the status of Müller’s Philoktet as a ‘reworking’ (Bearbeitung) as opposed to either a translation or an adaptation.14 Yet, most of Müller’s reworkings of the classics differ from later hybrid versions of Greek tragedy in that he either treats the prototype texts more freely or translates very closely from standard German translations, offering a displaced reading of the ancient texts.15 The textual hybridity, that serves both Brecht’s and Müller’s political rewritings became the norm in translations of Greek tragedy towards the end of the twentieth century, especially in the Anglophone world. While the proliferation of similar versions in Britain could well be correlated to the particular conditions in the British theatre,16 where the commissioning of a translation for the 12 Brecht (2003: 197). See Steiner’s extensive references (1975) to the exemplary status of Hoelderlin’s translations of Greek tragedy. 13 Brecht adds an introductory scene presenting two sisters in Berlin after the end of the Second World-War; the role of Tiresias is changed so that it no longer bears theological references, and Creon’s role as a totalitarian ruler is reflected in the mode of address directed towards him, ‘Führer’. The play closes with the announcement of the death of Creon’s second son Megareus, who is not in Sophocles’ Antigone, but is in Euripides’ Phoenissae. See Brecht (1949, 2003), Willett (1959: 55–6), and Fuegi (1972). 14 Kraus (1985: 301): ‘Just as far from a complete recreation as from a bare translation, Müller’s Philoktet represents a genuine literary reworking in the strictest sense of the word’ (emphasis in original). Kraus offers a detailed comparison between Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Müller’s version, indicating the influence of the Brechtian method of Durchrationalisierung on Müller’s appropriation. On the relationship between Müller’s Philoktet and its Greek source, see also Kaute (2005). 15 As, for example, in his Ödipus Tyrann. See Müller (2004). 16 According to the information provided by the APGRD database, established poetic translations are often revived in Germany, while in Italy and Greece the institutionalization of performance of ancient drama entails the repetition of canonical translations, probably as an attitude of respect towards tradition.

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requirements of a specific production is more common than in other European countries, the fact that these versions share qualities with other Anglophone versions means that explanations need to be sought elsewhere as well. Leading Irish poets and playwrights tackle political questions through bold transformations of Greek tragedy, notably Tom Paulin in The Riot Act (first produced 1984, published 1985) and Seize the Fire (1989, published 1990), and Seamus Heaney in The Cure at Troy (1990, published 1991).17 Brendan Kennelly’s Antigone (1986, published 1996), Medea (1988, published 1991), and The Trojan Women (1993), and Liz Lochhead’s Medea (2000, published 2001), all explore the place of women in the translators’ local communities. A similar translational approach occurs in postcolonial revisitings of classical tragedy, such as The Bacchae of Euripides (1973) by Wole Soyinka and The Women of Owu: An African Re-Reading of Euripides (2003, published 2006) by Femi Osofisan.18 It is, thus, not, fortuitous that the term ‘version’ is often preferred to both ‘translation’ and ‘adaptation’ in order to describe these reworkings.19 Furthermore, the difference between these plays and a conventional translation is regularly denoted by the adoption of a new title, as in the cases of Paulin, Heaney, Osofisan, and Armitage and, partially, Soyinka, whose version of the Bacchae is subtitled A Communion Rite.

TEXTUALITY AND OWNERSHIP The late-twentieth-century dramatic texts that oscillate between translation and adaptation invite reflection on the classical canon in relation to Barthes’s discussion of the Author and the Text.20 Counterposed to the fixed entity of the Work, the Text, according to Indicative of this attitude is that the INDA productions at the Ancient Theatre of Syracuse, Italy, tend to use translations produced by poets in collaboration with a classicist. 17 On Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, see Taplin (2004). 18 Budelmann (2007) examines the relationship between Osofisan’s text and the Euripidean play in detail. See also Budelmann (2005) on postcolonial adaptations of tragedy, more generally. 19 The ‘version’ will be retained for the purposes of the discussion. 20 Barthes (1977/1968: 142–8, 155–64). Barthes’s essay ‘The Death of the Author’ first appeared in English in the American journal Aspen, 5–6 (1967). The French text was published in Manteia, 5 (1968). All citations here are to Heath’s 1977 English translation of the 1968 text.

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Barthes, signifies a process of perpetual production. Being resistant to hermeneutic closure, the Text encompasses a plurality of meanings and allows limitless play. Although Barthes contends that his idea of intertextuality should be distinguished from the relationship with prior literature,21 it is still feasible to comprehend the function he attributes to the Text as analogous to that of the ancient text in its various rereadings and adaptations across time. Barthes, however, seems to define the Text in terms that reproduce the logocentric assumptions he sets out to dismantle. There are certain parallels between Barthes’s theory of textuality and Walter Benjamin’s ideas on translation. Benjamin’s seminal essay ‘The Task of the Translator’,22 written in 1923, views translation as a survival (Überleben) and amplification of the original, initiating a process of endless evolution and dynamic interaction between different eras. Even though Benjamin openly contests the idea of the translation as an inferior copy of the original text, Jacques Derrida identifies Benjamin’s concept of pure language (reine Sprache), the affinity between languages that warrants the translatability of all texts, as a firm reiteration of the idea of origin.23 Similarly, the adversaries of poststructuralism have argued that Barthes’s theory suffers from the internal contradiction of replacing the Author with a transcendental concept of the Text or with the idea of language as the ultimate origin of all texts.24 The versions of Greek tragedy can be used to show that the recourse to language or even to the Text itself provides a fallacious displacement of the theocratic Author. Instead, these texts necessitate that the discussion of textuality be grounded in more material terms, as they testify to the reliance of the text on its social, historical, and cultural contexts. The similarities between poststructuralist ideas of textuality and the way the classical text is treated in recent translations attest to the correspondences between broader theoretical debates and the reception of tragedy. Most significantly, the plays under examination demonstrate that texts are products not of an 21 Ibid. 160: ‘The intertextual in which every text is held, itself being the textbetween of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find the “sources”, the “influences” of a work is to fall within the myth of filiation; the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are citations without inverted commas’ (emphasis in original). 22 Benjamin (1992). 23 See Derrida’s analysis (1985) of Benjamin’s essay. 24 See Fish (1980: 181–96), Eagleton (2003: 110–30), and Burke (1992: 20–61).

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abstract process within language, but of certain historical circumstances and responses to exigent sociopolitical conditions. The hybrid quality of these versions—close to the original, yet also freely creative in certain parts—challenges established ideas about authorship and ownership of texts in an era when poststructuralist theory has scrutinized the notions of the Author and the Text. They provide, moreover, the ground upon which the interface between translation and poststructuralist theory becomes evident. This is not simply to reiterate that these plays are resonant of theoretical debates. My discussion will take into full account the counterarguments to poststructuralist theory, and consider how the versions themselves challenge the validity of the poststructuralist idea of authorship and suggest alternative models of textuality. The translation of classical literature provides a plane upon which originality and authorship can be readily debated. Translation has played such a major role in the dissemination of the works of classical antiquity that it is difficult to define in the first place what the ‘original’ is. But classical texts destabilize the idea of the original in an even more fundamental sense. As many of the extant ancient texts have been transmitted in fragments, the philological reconstitution of the text already involves a basic ‘rewriting’. The original is not a single text but it is constituted by a corpus of peripheral texts, such as ancient scholia and commentaries, not to mention essays and introductions that are usually included in scholarly editions.25 Especially, in the case of ancient drama, no translation—not least the most literal one—can ever ensure the restoration of the prototype, as the dramatic text is by definition a script intended for performance.26 The inadequacy of the doctrine of fidelity to the original arises as a natural outcome of the polyphonic processes that condition literary

25 For a discussion of textual transmission of Greek tragedy generally, see Kovacs (2005). 26 The complexities of translating the classics inevitably recast the question of faithfulness as one of scope. Bassnett (1991) argues that it is the process rather than the product of translation that needs to be analysed. The translational process involves a network of sociocultural factors that determine the specific linguistic choices, corresponding to the functions attributed to a particular translation. The translation of the classics acquires different functions within given cultural fields, which vary from education and academia to the reading community and theatrical production. The successful fulfilment of the prescribed purpose provides a more apt criterion to evaluate translation than its sheer juxtaposition to the original.

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production. Not only rewriting but also original writing have been redefined with reference to translation. The notion of intertextuality is now viewed by many translation theorists as well as writers as a translation of past literature into new literary works.27 Octavio Paz notes: Each text is unique, yet at the same time it is the translation of another text. No text can be completely original because language itself, in its very essence, is the translation of another text [ . . . ] However, the inverse of this reasoning is also entirely valid. All texts are originals because each translation has its own distinctive character. Up to a point, each translation is a creation and thus constitutes a unique text.28

The resemblances between (re)writing and translation bring to the fore one of the most prominent questions of literary criticism in the second half of the twentieth century: if the translator rewrites and the (re)writer translates, then who is the ultimate producer and owner of the text? These plays recall Barthes’s late 1960s displacement of the Author and the redefinition of textuality, in which the text does not have a single meaning bestowed by the author and awaiting decipherment by the reader. It is now the successive readers who create the meaning in the process of a creative interaction with the text. The affirmation that there is no single meaning of the text seems to assign greater liberties to the translator. If Barthes’s critique of authorship aims to eradicate the theological implications of the Author as the originator of the text, translation studies have similarly abolished the notion of the ‘sacred’ original that is dictated by an alterity and is, thus, untranslatable or venerable. While Barthes proclaims that the demise of the author gives rise to the reader, in the role of the translator the author and reader seem to merge. The confluence of writer and reader is even more evident in versions of tragedy that closely follow the ancient text. Here the act of translation is grounded in the experience of reading, which is no longer defined as a disclosure of a single meaning. This reading fully acknowledges that every interpretations involves a re-writing of the source by exhibiting its inscriptions onto the translated text. Showing

27 For Eagleton (1977), every text is in itself a translation, since it interweaves intertextual references. 28 Paz (1992: 154).

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rewriting and creative reading to be inseparable, these versions of Greek tragedy seem to escape the anxieties that, according to Barthes, characterize modern encounters with past texts: ‘I cannot re-write them (that it is impossible today to write “like that”) and this knowledge, depressing enough, suffices to cut me off from the production of these works, in the very moment their remoteness establishes my modernity.’29 Recent theory has challenged the view of translation as a mere interlingual transfer of meaning, emphasizing its dynamic role in the reception of a text. George Steiner describes the impossibility of genuine understanding to conclude that authentic translation is an irrational endeavour. Far from disdaining the translational practice, this view invigorates the idea of translation as transformation from ‘the “deep structures” of inheritance—verbal, thematic, iconographic—into the “surface structures” of social reference and currency’.30 The late-twentieth-century translations of tragedy reveal the translational process to be one of cultural exchange rather than of inheritance. In what follows, I will show how this interchange takes a variety of forms to destabilize the idea of authorship: it rewrites the male hero, it redefines the insubordinate female as the belle infidèle of translational metaphor; it celebrates collectivity and communion in textual reception, refusing the authorial patriarchy of colonial culture.

REWRITING THE MALE HERO In both Hughes’s Alcestis and Armitage’s Mister Heracles the pejorative representation of Heracles is intrinsically linked to the broader questions raised by the plays. Heracles may be criticized here as a superhuman hero and a slayer of his family, but it is the hybrid form of the plays that offers the sharpest critique of patriarchy, by challenging the male Author in particular. Not only do these versions dispense with the quest for fidelity to Text as the unique product of an Author, but they do so in order to question conventional patriarchal structures and theological principles. In both plays 29

Barthes (1977/1968: 163) (emphasis in original).

30

Steiner (1975: 429).

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the demise of the Author is coincidental with the demise of god as well as with a rupture of the superhuman male hero who has substituted god in a modern post-religious context. Kathleen Riley notes that, ‘for Simon Armitage, writing in the post-feminist era, the Herakles who is a paradigm of militarism is also necessarily a comment on the way society construes masculinity and the cultural and political authorization of male violence’.31 This observation would be accurate for Hughes’s Alcestis as well. Although this is a rewriting of Alcestis, the interpolation of a middle section makes Heracles the protagonist of Hughes’s version. Both plays dramatize the complete bankruptcy of the male hero by unveiling the ideological mechanisms that underpin the heroic ideal. For Hughes and Armitage, the tragedy of Heracles resides in a fundamental contradiction lurking behind the conceptualization of the heroic model. While the hero is constituted through the commonly approved exertion of violence in the public sphere, he turns out to be gruesome only at the point his violence impinges on domestic life. However, both writers also seem to suggest that Heracles’ destruction of his own family is not a perversion but the inescapable end of his superhuman endeavours. In Hughes’s Alcestis, Heracles and Admetos create an interesting analogy, not only because they are both responsible for the death of their wives, but also because they enjoy particular privileges to the detriment of their households. Even in Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis, where Heracles is killed by his wife Deianira, he remains the play’s undoubted hero.32 Hughes’s text makes explicit that Admetos is the public figure whose life must be spared at any cost. From such a perspective, Hughes’s ennoblement of Admetos’ character might be more ambiguous than it appears at first sight.33

31

Riley (2008: 314). In Ezra Pound’s translation (1969/1956) of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, the heroization of Heracles is extreme. The part of Heracles is given much emphasis, while that of Dianeira is diminished. For example, note the stage directions in the death scene of Heracles (p. 67): ‘He turns his face from the audience, then sits erect, facing them without the mask of agony; the revealed make-up is that of solar serenity. The hair golden and as electrified as possible.’ The translation is characterized by its rather dubious sexual politics, as evident in the use of a language laden with phallic connotations. On Pound’s translation, see Xie (1999). 33 Parker (2003) argues that Hughes improves the image of Admetos. 32

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Alcestis and Mister Heracles are close to what has been termed as ‘violent modernization’,34 where contemporary references and archaic elements merge. The elimination of the theological references in the Greek text is not simply designed to make the prototype more easily accessible to a contemporary audience, as in many recent versions of Greek tragedy.35 Müller’s elimination of the theological intervention in his Philoktet was part of his wider project to rationalize the Sophoclean play in order to emphasize the historical process and the position of the human subject within it.36 In Hughes and Armitage, this translational choice seems to serve the recontextualization of Greek tragedy in a godless world.37 In Hughes’s and Armitage’s versions, gods are replaced by technological triumph and nuclear power. In the opening scene of Alcestis, Apollo calls Aesculapius ‘maker of the atom’38 and the Titans ‘electro-technocrats’.39 Consequently, man as the holder of technology is endowed with divine power. Heracles freed Prometheus ‘to grope his way into the dark maze of the atom.’40 In Armitage, Heracles’ descent to Hades is substituted by the excess of the speed of light.41 Reminiscent of Nietzsche’s famous proclamation of the death of god, the second choral ode in Mister Heracles, originally a hymn to the gods, is dedicated to Heracles himself, and later the chorus says: ‘Heracles was born | Zeus died but life goes on.’42 The talk about illicit loves of gods at the end of the play is rendered as a contemplation of the death of god.43 The emancipation of Prometheus by Heracles marks the emergence of the sovereign human subject, who can, therefore, defy divine agency. In any case, in the absence of divine intervention, Heracles is rendered fully responsible for his crimes against his family. Armitage erases the roles of Madness and Lyssa, while in Hughes’s version of Alcestis the uxoricide and filicide are presented almost as a continuation of the Labours.

34

Jones (2006). See, e.g., Frank McGuinness’s Electra (1997) and Hecuba (2004). 36 Kraus (1985: 312–27). 37 The absence of gods is expressed eloquently in the translation of HF 1115: ἃ κἂν θεῶν τις, εἰ μάθοι καταστένοι, which is translated as ‘enough to make even a desert weep’ in Armitage (2000: 43). 38 39 40 Hughes (1999: 1). Ibid. 2. Ibid. 58. 41 42 Armitage (2000: 24). Ibid. 51. 43 In the introductory note to his translation, Armitage (2000: p. viii) mentions that Euripides himself expressed scepticism over the existence of gods. 35

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Both versions of Greek tragedy entail more of a critique than a celebration of the superhuman hero. The heroic model as personified by Heracles is either parodied or repudiated. In that respect, the representation of Heracles manifests a post-Nietzschean rather than a neo-Nietzschean mindset. The way in which Mister Heracles and Alcestis construe violence is far removed from Nietzsche’s view. Violence is dismantled from any Dionysiac creative drives or from claims of immanence in human nature. In Armitage’s version, all references to Dionysus in the Greek text are translated as ‘violence’,44 which might be less polyvalent than the Greek word, but is certainly particularly astute when the prototype and rewriting are read in juxtaposition. By showing violence as a core constituent of narratives of masculinity and heroism, the postmodern critique offered by the plays deconstructs the hero in a radical way.45 Metatheatrical interpolations occur many times in both versions. The metatheatrical gloss on the representation of Heracles in Alcestis and Mister Heracles prompts an understanding of violent acts as performances of the male self.46 In both Hughes’s and Armitage’s plays, the murders of Heracles ensue from the quasi-theatrical or cinematic revival of his heroic deeds. Hughes’s Heracles projects the killing of his family when he re-enacts the Labours. Before committing the murders, Armitage’s Heracles experiences a state of mental disorder that ‘whips up a version of his life’.47 The mechanical performance of the murders is the climax of a series of acts, which are generally regarded as heroic. Theatricality is linked to the repetitiveness of killing as well as to the accomplishment of a role normally assigned to the heroic subject.48

44 In Hughes (1999: 7) Death offers a Nietzschean presentation of Apollo: ‘You and your bright ideas, for one | You fill the minds of human beings | With lunatic illusions | A general anaesthesia | A fuzzy euphoria’. 45 In Armitage (2000: 31), Heracles confesses ‘I like fighting | It seems to keep me alive.’ 46 In Euripides’ play, the line describing Heracles’ sons standing next to him as ‘a chorus’ could be read as a metatheatrical allusion itself. See HF 925: χορὸς δὲ καλλίμορçος εἱστήκει τέκνων (His childern stood by as a lovely chorus). 47 Armitage (2000: 35). 48 Herakles 5 by Heiner Müller (2000, written in 1964–1966) bears striking similarities. Before cleaning the Augean stables, Heracles re-enacts some of his past Labours in the mode of a performance. The hero wears a mask, while the Thebans watch and applause enthusiastically in the place of an audience. In Müller’s play, the heroism of Heracles is also imposed by the community. See Müller (2000).

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In Mister Heracles Amphitryon says that the return of Heracles is ‘the last plot’;49 Theseus assures Heracles that he has ‘followed the script exactly as planned’,50 while at the end Heracles hopes to be given shelter in a circus, ‘as circuses house freaks’.51 Since the heroic performances of Heracles result in the murder of his family, Heracles leaves the theatre of action to become part of a freak show, where he will be stared at. Similarly, the burlesque re-enactment of Heracles’ Labours in Hughes’s version also consigns the hero to the world of lowbrow spectacle.52 Armitage merges the metatheatrical element with the erasure of the theological references, rendering Theseus’ line about Heracles’ murders ‘This is Hera’s work’53 as ‘Tragedy, friend, is what you look upon’.54 The term tragedy here is not merely used in its everyday sense to describe the aftermath of Heracles’ deed. The interplay between the name of the dramatic genre and the catastrophe dramatized at the end of the play is so intricate that Armitage might well be inviting the reader to read his own rewriting of Euripides’ text as a tragedy. The way that the male hero is represented in both Hughes’s and Armitage’s versions differs significantly from the conceptions of the tragic hero, which have recourse to Nietzschean tragic models. Neither Armitage nor Hughes construes tragedy as the detachment of the individual hero from the community and the consequent destruction of the individual, which affirms and reinforces the community. In a blatant reversal of this view, the community in these plays appears to foster and perpetuate an ideal of heroism, which causes its own destruction once it has been fully embodied by the male hero.

LES BELLES INFIDÈLES Seán Burke suggests that, instead of ostracizing the author, it would be preferable to reposition him as the conduit of sociopolitical processes.55 49

Armitage (2000: 19). Ibid. 52. Here the classical text is given a transcendental dimension, as in Living Quartets by Brian Friel. See Chapter 3. 51 Armitage (2000: 51). 52 There is an additional level of self-referentiality here with the burlesque representation of Heracles, since the afterlife of Alcestis on the British stage includes many burlesque adaptations. See Macintosh (2001). 53 54 55 HF 1189. Armitage (2000: 46). Burke (1992). 50

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The late-twentieth-century versions of Greek tragedy seem to point towards a solution to the theoretical impasses of poststructuralism. The amalgamation of translation and adaptation in recent versions of Greek tragedy resists the notion of the Author as the sole originator of the text, showing that language governs the process of writing. However, language here is not the abstract process conceived by Barthes, but a commonality that enables the text to communicate cultural, social, and political experience. Neither a manifestation of the authorial self nor an immediate expression of individual anxieties, the text is rather a reservoir of collective stories. Such a perspective rectifies the text’s links with actuality, without retreating into the traditional view of the text as a reflection of reality. Late-twentieth-century versions of Greek tragedy show that the text is a product of language, as far as language is defined not as an abstract process, but as a common ground that the author shares with the community.56 In Kennelly’s versions of Greek tragedy, the close translation of the prototype is imbued with the experience of the playwright’s community. The use of Greek tragedy to communicate this experience is intertwined with questions of female oppression and resistance in Ireland.57 In Kennelly’s The Trojan Women the displacement of the individual male author appears to be twofold: in the first place, it is denoted by the emphasis on the female perspective on the level of dramatic narrative; but it is also witnessed in the translational practice that rewrites the prototype to voice the experience of women within the local communities. The representation of the female characters in Kennelly’s Trojan Women gives rise to a different idea of heroism from that criticized by Hughes and Armitage. Kennelly’s version of Euripides’ play, written in 1993, is the third part of a Greek ‘trilogy’, following his Antigone in 1984 and Medea in 1988.58 Irish poets have been particularly

56 This is very evident in the cases of versions of Greek tragedy that make use of specific idioms, such as Medea by Lochhead, who uses the clash between Scots and standard English. 57 Cf. Lochhead’s Medea and Thebans, which were commissioned by Theatre Babel. 58 Kennelly’s Antigone was written in the summer of 1984 and first performed in 1986. See published scripts of Medea in Kennelly (1991) and Antigone in Kennelly (1996).

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amenable to the translational tendency that mixes translation and adaptation. There is a proliferation of plays that appropriate Greek tragedy in order to address Ireland’s postcolonial identity.59 These plays have either been welcomed as a project of political understanding through and of classical drama,60 or discredited as mistranslations of Greek tragedy.61 Their permeability to translation theory as well as their similarity to rewritings of Greek tragedy outside Ireland have been notably downplayed, despite the fact that such a use of the classical text could be viewed as a questioning not only of authorial power but of power and authority in a broader sense. Kennelly’s versions of Greek tragedy challenge the gender politics in Ireland and at the same time adopt a translational approach that evokes the poststructuralist idea of the text. In Kennelly’s versions, most of the theological, topographical, and mythological references of the prototypes are removed, while the drastic lexical choices and interpolations take precedence over linguistic equivalence. Although there are no explicit allusions to the Irish context, Kennelly’s rewritings reterritorialize Greek tragedy with particular reference to the women of Ireland. The female perspective voiced by Kennelly and the hybrid nature of the text appear to be complementary, as they both undermine the patriarchal principle,62 resisting its sociopolitical configurations as well as its embodiment in the authorial figure. The act of writing lies at the heart of Kennelly’s community. His version of The Trojan Women reflects the mentality of the women of his homeland as it is invested in their own language. Thus, the text appears to be a product of language only to the extent that this language provides the means to articulate the women’s experiences. The relationship with Greek tragedy is also embedded within the language. As noted in the playwright’s introductory note to the play: ‘I heard women in the village where I grew up say of another woman, “She’s a Trojan”, meaning she had tremendous powers of endurance and survival [ . . . ] and seemed eternally capable of renewing herself.’63 59

See McDonald and Walton (2002) for a list of these plays. See Wilmer (1996), McDonald and Walton (2002), and McDonald (2005). 61 O’Rawe (1999). 62 Kennelly (1991: 8) discusses the mixed reception of his Medea: while the play was well received by many women spectators, Kennelly has been labelled as a misogynist by others. 63 Kennelly (1993: 5). 60

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It should be noted here that Medea was begotten after Kennelly’s close contact with women in St Patrick’s Psychiatric Hospital, where he was recovering from alcoholism.64 According to the author’s description, writing becomes a process during which the authorial self is eliminated and the text seems to compose itself: ‘I wrote the first draft of the play in less than a month. I was in touch with that electricity which means that a play or poem goes a long way towards writing itself.’65 In Kennelly’s Trojan Women warfare is depicted as an exclusively male activity involving slavery and ill-treatment of women. The vocabulary employed to lay emphasis on the sexual exploitation of the Trojan captives by their conquerors is much more sexually charged than Euripides’ language. It is repeatedly said that Hecuba is destined to become a concubine of Odysseus,66 unlike her Euripidean antecedent. Andromache is heading toward ‘a Greek’s bed’67 and Cassandra says that ‘the virgin must lie down | with that old bagful of sin and sperm and war and death’.68 In Kennelly’s version, Talthybius and Menelaus become far more negative characters than in the prototype. Although their lines of sympathy to the victims are preserved, they are given added lines in which they appear particularly abusive (when, for example, Talthybius leads Cassandra to Agamemnon). Apart from depicting female suffering, the play unveils common male narratives that are fabricated to justify the exploitation of women. Talthybius’ interpolated lines reproduce the common male discourse about the deceitful and erratic nature of women.69 It is not without some significance that the rage of Kennelly’s Trojan women is directed not only to their Greek masters, but also to the dead Trojan men. In a fierce invocation addressed to Priam, Hecuba protests against the male view that objectifies women.70 Andromache’s lines offer a critique of male narratives of femininity, which become performative as they shape feminine attitudes; the single word λέγουσι in Euripides’ line 665 is translated as follows:

64

65 Kennelly (1991: 6). Ibid. 7 (emphasis added). 67 68 Kennelly (1993: 31, 73, 77). Ibid. 35. Ibid. 9. 69 Ibid. 27. 70 Ibid. 74: ‘I am not a decoration or an ornament, | I am not a bit of scandal or a piece of gossip, | I am not something to be shown off or pointed at, | I am not something to be used at someone’s beck and call, | I am not a thing, I am not a fuck.’ 66

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Men who have studied their own lust will tell you that a single night in a man’s arms will tame the wildest woman [...] and I must be a slave and take my chances on the sea and be the kind of woman that a man will say I have to be.71

Kennelly’s version goes further in expressing distrust of myth and literature. The interrogation of poetic truth as opposed to the actuality of presence is eloquent in Hecuba’s following lines: I am not fooled by songs or plays or tales and legends because I have stood there, in the presence of men [ . . . ].72

The reality of suffering experienced by the women is here opposed to the fabricated male accounts. This interpolation could also be read as a self-referential exposure of the failures of the text; a writing process that channels female experience seems to be the only antidote to the intrinsic frailties of writing.73 Like Hughes’s and Armitage’s versions of Greek tragedy, Kennelly’s Trojan Women uncovers the ways in which male narratives and violent acts are interlinked. But here the repudiation of the male hero gives rise to a new heroic model embodied by the women. Resisting the criticism against Euripides’ play, Kennelly discovers a ‘strong, active, resolute and shrewd note’ in the ‘apparent passivity of victims’.74 The agonistic principle rests in the ability for survival that characterizes the female characters in Euripides’ play. Kennelly presents Cassandra’s madness, Andromache’s dignified stance, and Hecuba’s endurance, as different acts of resistance to the predicament of their country. In this framework, even Helen’s deceit of Menelaus can be read as a means of survival. Since tragedy is defined through suffering and endurance rather than through the individual deed of

71

72 Ibid. 39. Ibid. 75. Kennelly’s reworkings of Antigone and Medea also explore the relationship between truth and words, especially literature. 74 Kennelly (1993: 5). 73

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the tragic character, it is reclaimed alongside the text as a collective experience.75 In Trojan Women Kennelly draws an explicit parallel between woman and land. As the woman of the chorus says: Women, we are become this city, we are become its untold loss its forgotten truths, commemorated lies, its unspoken and unwritten history.76

The play ends with an interpolated section in which the sack of the city is paralleled with the devastation of the women.77 In the same passage, Kennelly also uses the metaphor of the sea in order to illustrate the female power of endurance. Feminist criticism has deconstructed the gender relations entrenched in the metaphors of translation.78 The so-called derivative translation has been traditionally linked to the feminine, while originality is bestowed upon the male writer. As epitomized in the adage les belles infidèles, the conceptualization of (mis)translation as female and the male dictate for fidelity are inextricable; translation must be faithful to the original text like an obedient woman to her spouse.79 It could be argued that Kennelly’s The Trojan Women offers a positive re-evaluation of the feminine metaphorics of translation. Translation emerges here as female, not because it betrays the source text, but because it is characterized by the qualities of survival and renewal.80

Ibid. 40. A member of the women’s chorus says to Andromache: ‘You have already gone where I must go | You know completely what I must try to know.’ 76 77 Ibid. 34. Ibid. 71–9. 78 Chamberlain (1992) and Bassnett (1993). 79 The tendency of female writers to rewrite the literary canon completely might well be an additional reason why, when it comes to commissioning new translations, women translators of Greek drama are so strikingly outnumbered by men. 80 Cf. David Greig’s abbreviated and ‘free’ version of Oedipus. Discussing his translational practice, Greig, quoted in Hardwick (2002), uses the idea of survival: ‘It is not Sophocles’ work but nor is it entirely mine. It belongs neither to Greek culture nor to Scots. It is neither truly old nor truly new. It is a hybrid, a mongrel creation. But mongrelisation is, of course, the secret of survival in a species.’ 75

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FROM TEXTUAL PATERNITY TO CULTURAL FLUIDITY In Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite the cultural exchange inherent in the act of translation seems to condition the peculiar translational approach adopted. The cross-cultural reading forms the basis of the playwright’s encounter with tragedy; Soyinka reads the Bacchae via the Yoruba, Greek, and Christian myths, while Greek tragedy, in particular, is used to feature the profoundly tragic vision that Soyinka finds in both the Yoruba cosmology and the historical reality of colonial Nigeria. The hybrid form of the play provides a reassessment of prevailing ideas about tragedy, suggesting that translation is a process of transformation, in which both texts and cultural referents are fluid. Although Soyinka describes The Bacchae of Euripides as an adaptation,81 the hybridity of the play is denoted already by the paratextual elements.82 The original title is maintained, but the play is attributed to Soyinka and not to Euripides. In a quasi-paradoxical way, the name of Euripides becomes part of the title, which is thus differentiated from the prototype title.83 The subtitle A Communion Rite reveals that the ritual element provides the principal idiom of Soyinka’s Bacchae. The concomitance of two authorial voices resists the idea of a single originator. The prominent question of authorship is readdressed here as a question of cultural ownership of texts. Soyinka’s version shows that the text is not produced in a vacuum through the single operation of language but in a process of reception involving diverse cultural currents as well as past texts. The postcolonial quest of rewriting the Western canon provides the contemporaneous parameter that creates new modes of dealing with the ancient source. The adopted hybrid form would appear to 81

Soyinka (1973: acknowledgements, n.p.). Genette’s analytical method (1997/1987) suggests that the paratextual elements (titles, cover, prefaces, etc.) inform the response to the literary work. The attention to such elements would be interesting with regard to the reception of the classics, since the mode of presentation of the classical texts by publishers and theatre programmes can reveal particular attitudes towards evaluation and canonization. 83 There is a striking similarity with Haraldo de Campos’s Brazilian translation of Goethe’s Faust, which was published in 1981 under the title Deus e o diabo no Fausto de Goethe (God and Devil in Goethe’s Faust). Bassnett (1993: 138–61) and Vieira (1999: 95–113) discuss this translation with reference to the postcolonial appropriation of the Western canon. 82

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warrant the transposition of the classical text into a different cultural register. Susan Bassnett notes that, from the colonial perspective, the cultures of the colonies were seen as an imitation of the original metropolitan culture.84 Soyinka offers a version of the Bacchae that is not a derivative of Euripides’ work, but a text that claims equal status, challenging the supposed superiority of the Western canon. This is achieved through a textual strategy that renounces the conventional dichotomy between original and translation, and the subservience of the latter to the former. It is possible to view Soyinka’s interventionist translation as a subversion of the cultural hierarchies that sustained the subjugation of the colonized peoples. It is not only the idea of the sacred original, but the original in its most essential sense, that is rendered fallacious in the case of Soyinka’s Bacchae. For Soyinka, the original is constituted, not by a single text, but by a corpus of past translations. His version is based on the translations of Murray, Arrowsmith, and Cavander,85 although the author may well have had some limited access to the ancient text. Femi Osofisan, a Nigerian writer and translator of classical literature himself, discusses the issue of the access to classical culture in the postcolonial era. While Greek and Latin were part of the curriculum in colonial times, the priority given to modern European languages after decolonization entailed the dissemination of Anglophone translations: ‘when we talk of classical Greek theatre [ . . . ] in Nigeria, we are talking of such theatre as given to us through the efforts of English-speaking translators and also, as well, through written texts.’86 This conceptualization of text as a palimpsest rather than as a concrete self-enclosed entity is exemplified by Soyinka’s version of The Bacchae. The use of past translations that mediate between Soyinka and the classical text undermines the idea of translation as an immediate linguistic transfer. Evoking different transformations of tragedy, the dependence on past texts legitimizes the activity of rereading as rewriting.

84

Bassnett (1993). Soyinka (1973: acknowledgements, n.p.). Soyinka refers to Cavander’s text as a translation for stage and radio but does not mention a particular edition. 86 Osofisan (2009: 328). Cf. Lefevere (1992: 109–10): ‘for readers who cannot check the translation against the original, the translation is the original’ (emphasis in original). 85

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Unlike several contemporary versions of Greek tragedy, Soyinka does not modernize Euripides’ text in order to communicate it to the target audience by means of eliminating the mythological references or including allusions to specific events. On the contrary, the mythological basis of the prototype is kept intact, while elements of the Yoruba mythical cult are layered upon it. Yet, rather than a manifestation of difference, the rewriting of the classical text becomes an indication of cultural affinities. In Soyinka’s version, the fusion of the ritual elements emphasizes the common aspects shared by the Dionysian, Ogun, and Christian visions. Soyinka’s version being firmly grounded in the resemblances between cultures recalls Benjamin’s claim that the kinship of languages is the prerequisite and the raison d’ être of the translational praxis. The indebtedness of Soyinka’s play to Gilbert Murray goes far beyond the use of his translation.87 Indeed, The Bacchae of Euripides is one of the most overtly ritualistic rewritings of Greek tragedy.88 The deployment of ritual patterns has been one of the most contested aspects of Soyinka’s work. The recurrent rivalry between Nietzschean and Hegelian tragic theories89 pervades the critical reception of Soyinka’s play. Anticipating Eagleton’s general attack on Nietzschean and neo-Nietzschean conceptualizations of tragedy, Marxist critics argued that Soyinka privileges myth and ritual over historical perspective. The transposition of conflicts to the cosmic plane, according to many critics, espouses a deterministic view that undermines human agency in the fight for political change.90 Osofisan has described Soyinka’s dramas as 87

See Macintosh (2007a) on Soyinka’s debts to Murray. The play was commissioned by the British Royal National Theatre in 1973, just four years after Schechner’s Dionysus in 69 and one year before Grüber’s Die Bakchen, which were also characterized by the strong emphasis on the ritual elements in Greek tragedy. See Chapter 5. 89 For a detailed presentation of this debate, see Chapter 1. 90 Gurr (1980: 145) notes: ‘The philosophies inherent in the Greek, Christian, and Yoruba forms of tragedy are not the only instruments of fatalism, of course. Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus, a central document in the philosophy of the Absurd, upholds as a supreme virtue of the Absurd hero an absolute clarity of vision. Sisyphus facing the endless task of rolling his rock up the mountain knows absolutely that his fate is endless. Utterly devoid of hope, like Oedipus in his blindness he sees reality and nonetheless concludes that “all is well”. Here is not so much the opposite of the “visionary hopes” of Soyinka’s Promethean rebel as the reverse side of the same coin. Both figures are resigned to their fate, frozen in the paralysis which comes from “profound understanding”.’ It is worth noting that Fugard’s tragic vision in The Island is similarly indebted to Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. See further Chapter 3. 88

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powerful rituals that nonetheless express ‘idealist illusion’ and ‘spiritual homeostasis’.91 With particular reference to the version of the Bacchae, Derek Wright notes: ‘Soyinka halts, optimistically, at the wine and the rebirth and omits the threnody, thus implying a finality that takes the event out of the fatalistic cycle of alternation and gives it the permanence of a change to end changes.’92 Soyinka’s tragic theory has also provoked scepticism over its supposedly undue adherence to Western epistemological patterns, which are extraneous to the cultural particularities of Africa.93 However, it would be possible to view his Bacchae as a plane upon which Western patterns are reread and rewritten; not just the text, but also its peculiar ritual patterns. The act of rewriting, in this sense, refers not merely to the Western canon but also to the ritual patterns, which, no less than the classical text itself, undergo a process of transformation.94 The synthesis of the Dionysian, Ogun, and Christian rituals in the Bacchae needs to be theorized in the framework of the layering of texts and cultural references that the play creates. The ritual legacy goes back to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, which also has a significant input in Soyinka’s view of the tragic. Soyinka’s reading of the Yoruba foundation myths is informed by Nietzsche’s concept of conflict between the Apolline and the Dionysiac, as testified in Soyinka’s seminal essay ‘The Fourth Stage’.95 The perception of ritual as a collapse of barriers between man and nature as well as between peoples sustains an idea of oneness, which evokes Nietzsche. However, Nietzsche’s idea of Dionysiac ritual is transformed as it engages with the Ogun cult. In Soyinka’s words: Such virtues place Ogun apart from the distorted dances to which Nietzsche’s Dionysiac frenzy led him in his search for a selective ‘Aryan’ soul, yet do not detract him from Ogun’s revolutionary 91

The specific choices of a tragic play by Soyinka and Osofisan seem to be germane to their ideological rivalry. Soyinka translated the ‘Nietzschean’ Bacchae, whereas Osofisan chose Hegel’s privileged tragedy, Antigone. 92 D. Wright (1993: 64). 93 Decreus (2007) is inclined to view tragedy as a Western concept with no relevance to contexts outside the West. 94 In order to describe Soyinka’s work, Quayson (1997: 16–17) coins the term ‘interdiscursivity’, which ‘may be used to describe the discernible relationships that inhere between literary texts and the field of conceptual resources’. On the use of myth and ritual in Soyinka, see Quayson (1997: 65–100). 95 For a discussion on the relationship between Soyinka’s essay and Nietzsche, see Rhodes (2007).

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grandeur. Ironically, it is the depth-illumination of Nietzsche’s intuition into basic universal impulses which negates his race exclusivist conclusions on the nature of art and tragedy.96

The abstract—and, for Soyinka, dubious—oneness of the Nietzschean vision is redefined as a materially grounded unity across ethnicities and cultures. In this light, the tragic experience as a cultural privilege of the West is being questioned. The attention to the ritual in Soyinka’s version of The Bacchae does not signify a nostalgic return to the highly contested ritual origins of tragedy.97 Soyinka’s conviction that tragedy was not begotten in ancient Greece seems incompatible with any clear designation of origin: ‘I read at the time that tragedy evolved as a result of the rites of Dionysus. Now we all went through this damn thing, so I think the presence of eradication had better begin.’98 The amalgamation of rituals from different cultures in Soyinka’s play thus provides the undermining of any supposed ‘origin’. Rather than a beginning of the tragic genre, the ritual becomes a reservoir of the tragic world view. This detachment of the ritual from the question of origin marks Soyinka’s departure from Murray. In Soyinka’s Bacchae the ritual and the political aspects are not mutually exclusive, but appear to complement each other. The deployment of the ritual involves a cultural practice that is by no means bereft of sociopolitical perspective. The Dionysiac ritual does not decontextualize tragedy but becomes the vehicle for a political reading of the Bacchae. In the introduction to his version, Soyinka criticizes the institutionalization of rituals as a means of political oppression,99 an idea that is further explored in the play. In the opening scene it is made explicit that the scapegoat that is sacrificed for the sake of the city is usually chosen from the slaves. In marked contrast to the institutionalized rituals, the Dionysiac and Ogun rites warrant social equality. According to Charles Segal, Dionysus eliminates the difference between ‘god and beast and between man and wild nature, but also between reality and illusion’.100

96

Ibid. 22. The ritual origins of tragedy continue to be challenged by classical scholarship. See, most recently, Scullion (2005: 23–37). Eli Rozik (2002) has repudiated the theories that trace the ritual origins of the art of theatre, in general. See further Chapter 1. 98 Soyinka quoted in Olaniyan (1995: 45). 99 100 Soyinka (1973: pp. v–xi). C. Segal (1997/1982: 215). 97

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Soyinka’s translation amplifies the god’s power to abolish the boundaries of age and class, which is latent in the prototype:101 ‘He [Dionysus] has broken the barrier of age, the barrier of sex or slave and master. It is the will of Dionysos that no one be excluded from his worship.’102 The boundaries between cultures are challenged in a similar way. The topography of the play is expanded to include the African world, as Ethiopia is mentioned as a stop in Dionysus’ journey from Asia to Thebes.103 The most explicit statement against cultural hierarchy is given in the following passage, which in terms of translation provides an example of amplification of the original lines: PENTHEUS DIONYSUS

We have more sense than barbarians Greece has a culture Just how much have you travelled Pentheus? I have seen even among your so-called Barbarian slaves natives of lands whose cultures beggar yours.104

The use of the classical canon to establish the superiority of the colonizers over the colonized was a common cultural practice of colonialism: here this power dynamic is subverted through the rewriting of the canon. The affirmative character of Soyinka’s version is evident in the closure of the play. It has been argued that Agave’s lament contains the affirmative meaning of compassion and dignity.105 Soyinka unceremoniously omits the last lines of the play (mutilated as they are), but the elimination hardly testifies to a supposed retreat into fatalism. Soyinka leaves no place for Agave’s individualized selfapprehension or the triumph of the avenger Dionysus. The epiphany here demonstrates the communal character of the god, and resolution is achieved through the communion rite, which becomes an act of unity. In the preface to his Bacchae, Soyinka views the Dionysiac sparagmos as an expression of the human impulse to partake in nature’s process of death and regeneration: 101

102 103 Bacch. 208–9, 421–2. Soyinka (1973: 26). Ibid. 2. Ibid. 43. 105 Cf. Murray’s reading (2005/1905: 89) of the Bacchae 1120: ‘This note of unselfish feeling, of pity and humanity, becomes increasingly marked in all the victims of Dionysus towards the end of the play, and contrasts the more vividly with the God’s pitilessness.’ 104

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I see the Bacchae, finally, as a prodigious, barbaric banquet, an insightful manifestation of the universal need of man to match himself against Nature. The more than hinted-at-cannibalism corresponds to the periodic needs of humans to swill, gorge and copulate on a scale as huge as Nature’s on her monstrous cycle of regeneration.106

Once more, the Bakhtinian perspective of the banquet provides a pertinent metaphor for textual renewal. The cannibalism theme can be carried further and related to the discussion of postcolonial translation proffered by Haraldo de Campos. De Campos views translation as an act of cannibalism and vampirization in which the translator devours the Western original in order to nourish her/his own culture.107 Here the old Romantic principle of foreignization in translation is recast, but there is a notable shift in emphasis from the linguistic to the cultural. The advocates of verbatim translation, Schleiermacher and Humboldt, assert that the literal translation that preserves the foreignness of the prototype enriches the receiving language.108 The cannibalism metaphor implies that textual transformation is a sine qua non of the invigoration of the target culture. Bassnett argues that the image of translation as cannibalism relates to ‘post-modernist post-colonial translation theory [ . . . ]; for what all have in common is a rejection of the power hierarchy which privileged the source text and relegated the translator to a secondary role’.109 Soyinka’s Bacchae can be read as a translation that absorbs rather than devours the prototype text(s) as well as predominant Western ideas about tragedy; and it absorbs in order to produce a text introducing new elements in his own culture. Just as the tragic sparagmos is offset by the festive resolution at the end of the play, the translational strategy adopted by Soyinka also surpasses the violence implied in the metaphorics of cannibalism. Soyinka’s version is not a demonstration of difference, but an erasure of difference on the grounds of cultural kinships. The practice of translation as rewriting is made possible by the tragic vision inherent in both the Dionysian and the Ogun cults. The act of communion, which closes the play, emerges here as a more pertinent metaphor for Soyinka’s use of the prototype. Michael Walton has adopted the term transubstantiation 106 107 108 109

Soyinka (1973: pp. x–xi). See Bassnett (1993: 138–61) and Vieira (1999: 95–113). Schleiermacher (1992/1813) and Humboldt (1992/1816). Bassnett (1993: 155).

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discussing the translation of classical literature.110 Communion involves a process of transubstantiation (wine into blood, bread into flesh), which culminates in a symbolic act of unity. Soyinka’s version transubstantiates the classical text in order to commun(icat)e it beyond cultural boundaries. From a poststructuralist angle, this metaphor appears to be reinvesting the original with theological connotations. Yet Soyinka’s Bacchae, rather than advocating the sacredness of the prototype, proposes a symbiosis of texts that erases difference between translation and prototype as well as between communities and cultures. The interplay between the Yoruba myth, the colonial predicament, and the form of tragedy accomplishes the ascription of the text into a particular context, while also reinforcing its wide-embracing dynamic. Soyinka’s version aspires to establish the feeling of collectivity—central to the author’s reading of the Bacchae—by adopting a translational praxis grounded in affinity through difference.

TOWARDS A ‘DIONYSIAC’ TRANSLATION While translators have often treated the classical text as a supreme plastic artefact that they aspire to restore in its wholeness and perfection, the versions of Greek tragedy under discussion use their prototypes as fragments of antiquity that can be conceived only in the process of perpetual metamorphosis. The hybridity characterizing these versions proposes a new translational poetics that seems to mark a ‘Dionysiac’ turn, moving away from the preoccupation with ‘Appoline’ classical form. These versions not only tolerate but positively encourage the Dionysiac to be ushered into the source text. The resurgence of the Dionysiac is witnessed in aspects of the plot, themes, and imagery, but is also pervasive in the writing modes that govern the refashioning of the classical text. Hughes’s Alcestis breaks the bounds of the Euripidean play to include the scene of Heracles’ Labours. Soyinka’s dumb-shows and interpolations similarly challenge the structure of the classical text. In the case of Kennelly, the challenge is felt on the lexical level as well in Kennelly’s 110

Walton (2005).

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translational idiom that encompasses bathetic expletives to poetic flights. The demonstrable parallels between these ‘Dionysiac’ versions of Greek tragedy and the basic tenets of poststructuralist theory render the recurring argument that poststructuralism marked a return to the Nietzschean theoretical premisses particularly plausible. Translations of Greek tragedy that claim fidelity to the original tend to approach the classical text as a depository of universal values that can be communicated in the sole act of linguistic transfer. The high status bestowed upon Greek tragedy often seems to disdain any attempt at a translation. In vivid contrast, the recent hybrid versions resist the universalizing view of the ancient text; instead they recontextualize it in order to communicate it to contemporary audiences. Resisting the idealization of the original, the translational practice that blurs translation and adaptation signifies an egalitarian conceptualization of the classical text, which is no longer owned by the erudite elites nor the hegemonic cultures within and across countries. The resistance to clear-cut distinctions between translation and adaptation may be considered ‘Dionysiac’ in that it entails both a challenge to order and hierarchy as well as a break with traditional literary categories. Recent translation theory tends to consider translation and adaptation not as sharply distinguished textual formations, but rather as parallel and frequently interlacing activities. Theo Hermans remarks that translation is but ‘one mode of textual recycling among others’.111 The affirmation of translation as a creative act is partly based on the impossibility of drawing definite boundaries between the many variations that textual reconfiguration can acquire: ‘The gradations between artificial poles like “sense for sense” and “word for word”, or “domesticating” and “foreignizing”, or even “translation” and “non translation”, are not only potentially but actually infinite.’112 The demise of the Author as an individual and his/her reemergence as a conduit of collective experiences and preoccupations might appear to be an all too Nietzschean a claim, recalling as it does 111 Other forms of textual recycling mentioned by Hermans (2000: 14) are adaptation, pastiche, sequel, commentary, remake, and plagiarism. 112 Robinson (2000: 20). Cf. the purist distinction between translation and adaptation proffered by Eco (2003: 170): ‘Many adaptations are therefore excellent examples of creative use of a previous text. But insofar as they are freely creative, they are not translations, since a translator has always to tame, in some way, his or her “creative” impetus.’

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the loss of the individual in the community that Nietzsche identifies as the core of tragic art. In this sense, the argument about the neoNietzschean currents in poststructuralist thought seems justified. However, these late-twentieth-century versions of Greek tragedy contradict the claim that poststructuralism involves a depoliticized theoretical position. As we have seen, there is no sense in which the plays under discussion dispense with the Author in order to replace him with an abstract idea of language or of a transcendental Text. In lieu of the theological Author, the writing subject here emerges from the cultural processes through which texts take shape. Either by adapting the classical text in the modern era or by focusing on collective experiences and ordeal, these versions of Greek tragedy make manifest that it is possible to reflect—no matter to what degree avowedly—the main tenets of poststructuralism, while evading the self-indulgent abstractionism that they often entail.

5 Textual Fragments and Sexual Politics In his discussion of twentieth-century literature, Ihab Hassan employs the dismemberment of Orpheus as a metaphor for the crisis of literary form and language culminating in the self-defeat of literature. Hassan traces the lineage of authors whose work testifies to the impasses of literary expression from Marquis de Sade down to Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett. In his words, ‘vanishing Orpheus leaves behind a lyre without strings’.1 In Tony Harrison’s play The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, based on Sophocles’ lost satyr drama Ichneutai, what the modern trackers seek is not Apollo’s lyre, as in the ancient play, but the fragments of Sophocles’ satyr drama. While for Hassan the dismemberment of Orpheus is viewed as a moment in which the ‘violated being gives rise to the tragedy of literary forms’,2 in many late-twentieth-century appropriations of Greek tragedy it is the tragic text itself that is torn apart. In response to different aesthetic and intellectual demands, Greek tragedy has become the object of imitation, recontextualization, disguise, and, more recently, rupture. Major playwrights since the 1970s have treated the corpus of the Greek tragic texts as a depository of fragments, producing iconoclastic rewritings, in which passages of both the Greek texts and other past works feature prominently, at the very same time that a similar textual montage is not uncommon in productions of Greek tragedy.3 The dismemberment of the text in these rewritings, rather than a negation of art, could be seen as a means of renewing dramatic forms through a close engagement with the classical text. Erika Fischer-Lichte argues 1

2 Hassan (1971: 6). Ibid. 247. See Fischer-Lichte (1999a, b, 2004) on Antikenproject I at the Berlin Schaubühne in 1974. 3

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that, whereas in Beckett the fragmentation of past literary works is an expression of crisis, Heiner Müller’s reordering of fragments is a poetics of ‘reception/production’.4 As the example of Müller demonstrates, this poetics is largely grounded in the encounter with the Greek tragic texts. The tendency to rupture the classical text cannot be considered independently of the broader interrogation of textual structure launched in deconstructive criticism in the same period.5 The preoccupation with textual fragments in rewritings of Greek tragedy needs, however, to be distinguished from earlier modern imaginings of the fragment. The notion of fragmentation is constitutive of modernity in a twofold way: on the one hand, fragmentation lies at the core of the modern experience, while, on the other, modernity is defined through its aspiration to reconstitute this experience in its imagined totality. As Linda Nochlin argues: We can now begin to see that it is by no means possible to assert that modernity may only be associated with, or suggested by, a metaphoric or actual fragmentation. On the contrary, paradoxically, or dialectically, modern artists have moved towards its opposite, with a will to totalization embodied in the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the struggle to overcome the disintegrative effects—social, psychic, political—inscribed in modern, particularly modern urban experience, by hypostatizing them in a higher unity. One might, from this point of view, maintain that modernity is indeed marked by the will towards totalization as much as it is metaphorized by the fragment.6

The reception of Greek tragedy seems to reflect the different responses to fragmentation, from the modernist urge to overcome it to the more recent tendency to exhibit it. The display of textual fragments in appropriations of Greek tragedy in recent decades is attuned to postmodern distrust of unity and totalizing narratives. The challenge to the idea of unity in iconoclastic rewritings of Greek tragedy runs the risk of being identified as symptomatic of the postmodern Zeitgeist, which, according to Eagleton, is at odds with tragedy. In demarcating modernism from postmodernism,

4

Fischer-Lichte (2002: 324–51). For an introduction to deconstructive criticism, see Norris (1982), Culler (1983), and Bloom et al. (2004). 6 Nochlin (1994: 53) (emphasis in original). 5

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Hassan draws a series of dichotomies, such as form versus antiform, purpose versus play, totalization versus deconstruction, and genre versus text. It is, though, questionable whether the engagement with the text in recent rewritings of Greek tragedy contradicts the dialogue with the tragic genre, insofar as genres do not exist independently of their textual manifestations. Besides, the dismantlement of the Greek text(s) in these plays is rather distinct from the avant-garde destruction or derision of the cultural past, as Hassan’s discussion implies.7 These recent rewritings of Greek tragedy correspond to the poststructuralist approach to text and textuality, by privileging ‘Dionysiac’ fragmentation over ‘Apolline’ formal integrity. Moreover, the dismemberment and disorder, which for Nietzsche define the tragic experience, are now transposed onto the textual plane, lending credence to Eagleton’s remarks about the disengaged and hedonistic stance of poststructuralist and postmodernist thought: Poststructuralism and postmodernism inherit this tragic strain of thought, but in a post-tragic spirit. Dionysus returns not as a tragic sacrifice but as the infinite proliferation of play, power, pleasure, difference and desire as an end in itself. Nietzsche’s aestheticizing of reality is re-echoed, but the violence and brutality needed to achieve it are thrust aside.8

The ‘proliferation of play’ would seem a pertinent remark in relation to recent rewritings that cut and paste fragments of the extant tragic texts or quote other texts and genres. The leaning on poststructuralist ideas of the text and textuality as well as the interrogation of gender discourses, politics, and ideology make these rewritings an apt response to Eagleton’s critique. However, these rewritings do not seem to eliminate the cruelty and pain of tragedy or to indulge in a celebration of textual interplay. Yet Eagleton’s concern about the

7 One of the major weaknesses of Hassan’s analysis is his tendency to treat the artistic practices of early twentieth-century avant-garde movements, such as Dadaism and Surrealism, and the common techniques of postmodern criticism and literature as inseparable, taking no account of the fundamental differences between them. 8 Eagleton (2003: 227). Also Nuttall (1996: 69): ‘The notion of a potent Nothingness which by a converse energy becomes ontologically stronger than mere things is of course endemic in post-Nietzschean Existentialism [ . . . ] Postmodernist deconstruction, conversely, but predictably, re-asserts the néant by demonstrating the purportedly rational discourse.’

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aestheticization of reality that poststructuralist and postmodern thought entails persists: are these takes on Greek tragedy typical of the tendency to evade the violence and brutality, not merely in Nietzschean terms, but as an inexorable reality of the contemporary world? A close examination of examples can show that the violence against the text is neither playful nor an end in itself; instead, the textual sparagmos is an embodiment of the violence inherent in a reality constituted by power, desire, pleasure and difference.

SOMATIZING THE TRAGIC TEXT In the recent performance history of Greek tragedy, the preoccupation with the fragment often complements the emphasis on the Dionysiac elements, thereby affirming the links between Nietzsche and poststructuralism. Fischer-Lichte thinks of Klaus-Michael Grüber’s production of Euripides’ Bacchae, the second part of the Antikenproject I of the Berlin Schaubühne in 1974, as a sparagmos and ōmophageia of the Euripidean text.9 It is not fortuitous that FischerLichte adopts terms derived from the sacrificial practices of the Dionysian ritual to discuss Grüber’s staging. The notions of sparagmos and ōmophageia, apart from being a figurative means of referring to Grüber’s various interventions and interpolations to the text,10 provide a theoretical model for the peculiar tension between text and performance that characterized his production. Grüber’s staging seems to be very much a product of its own era. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, other landmark productions of Greek tragedy explored the alleged ritual origins of Greek tragedy, with reference not only to Nietzsche’s famous proclamation but to his adherents in the fields of cultural anthropology and classical studies. Around the time of Grüber’s Bakchen, other productions of the same play on both sides of the Atlantic had emphasized the ritual elements,

9

Fischer-Lichte (1999a, b, 2004). On Grüber’s production, see also Remshardt (1999). 10 Musical excerpts from Stravinsky and passages from Wittgenstein’s diaries were used in the performance. See Fischer-Lichte (1999a: 15).

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Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69 and Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite in 1973 providing the most notable examples. Apart from the emphasis on the ritual aspects of Greek tragedy, Schechner’s and Grüber’s productions offered a montage of various texts;11 the implications, however, of both the ritual elements and the fragmented text(s) in each case were significantly different. While Schechner’s use of ritual elements signified to a large extent a search for the origins of theatre, in Grüber’s production they were meant to exhibit the cultural distance between past and present. The ritual background of Euripides’ play was emphasized by Grüber in order to illustrate the relationship between the Greek text and modern theatre as well as between text and performance, more broadly. As Fischer-Lichte shows, the prioritization of the performer’s body over language characterized the entire Antikenproject I: its first part, entitled Exercises for Actors, directed by Peter Stein, illustrated the elimination of the body with the rise of language, quoting a fragment of Prometheus Bound after the exhibition of the actors’ preparation. The production of the Bacchae developed this idea further by making explicit that theatre presupposes the ‘sacrifice’ of the text, since the performance comes into being only at the expense of the dramatic script. Grüber’s production is pivotal within the ‘ritual turn’ in the reception of Greek tragedy, but, unlike Schechner’s descent into the ritual, it abandons the question of origins for a different understanding of tragedy to emerge. As Fischer-Lichte argues, the question of tragedy’s origins was invoked by Grüber only to negate the possibility of providing an answer: The past is lost and gone forever. What remains are only fragments— play texts torn out of their original context—which cannot convey their

11 The performance script states the texts used. See Schechner (1970: n.p.): ‘Of the more than 1300 lines in Arrowsmith’s translation of The Bacchae, we use nearly 600, some more than once. We also use sixteen lines from Elizabeth Wycoff ’s translation of Antigone and six lines from David Greene’s Hippolytus. The rest of our text we made ourselves—some of it written at home, some worked out in workshops. The textual montage, the arrangements and variations, developed organically during rehearsals and throughout the run.’

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original meaning. They are mute, distant, alien, and because of this it is not possible to stage them as if they were contemporary plays.12

The performance made the remoteness of the text visible by showing Agave and Cadmus endlessly sewing Pentheus’ contemporary suit in the closing scene. Given the lacunose ending of Euripides’ play,13 Grüber’s enactment of the scene was particularly effective, in unveiling the irony that lurks behind the fact that the scene presenting the lament over the sparagmos of Pentheus has itself come down to us in fragments. Fischer-Lichte’s concept of sparagmos remains pertinent with reference to later rewritings of Greek tragedy, although there is no sense in which these plays are concerned with the ritual aspects of Greek tragedy or the question of tragedy’s origin. Textual sparagmos here gives rise to a ‘corporeal’ understanding of tragedy, urging us to view the text as a body that is torn apart and pieced together. This somatization of the classical text would appear to contradict Eagleton’s argument about the aestheticization of reality by poststructuralist theory. Besides, in most cases the sparagmos of the textual body of Greek tragedy illustrates the disintegration of human bodies. Through the display of fragments, these rewritings establish strong thematic links between the materiality of the text and the dimension of physical pain, which is vital to tragedy.14 In many respects, Grüber’s last scene anticipated the rewritings of Greek tragedy that privilege the exhibition of fragments. Like the ending of Grüber’s Bacchae, these rewritings acknowledge the fragmentary and palimpsestic character of the ancient texts that have come down to us. Yet, the nostalgia for completeness characterizing his production would seem to be missing in the later rewritings of

12

Fischer-Lichte (2004: 340). The last lines of the Bacchae have been handed down to us mutilated and philologists have reconstructed them using later versions. See Dodds (1960: esp. pp. lii–lvi, 222) and Seaford (1996: 252–3). 14 See Eagleton (2003: p. xiv). Eagleton uses the example of Philoctetes’ pain in order to stress the importance of physical agony in tragedy: ‘But as far as his agony goes, we understand Philoctetes in much the same way as we understand the afflictions of those around us. It is not that such a response is “unhistorical”; it is rather that human history includes the history of the body, which in respect of physical suffering has probably changed little over the centuries.’ 13

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tragedy. These plays enjoy a relationship with antiquity that relinquishes the idea of reconstitution for what could be described as a poetics of replenishment. The Italian director Mario Martone describes his concept of ‘suspended’ visual signs that invite the spectator to ‘fill’, drawing an interesting analogy with Greek tragedy: ‘This suspension in the vacuum is amplified by a Greek tragedy which is in itself a ruin in which we cannot find any completeness, but only fragments, traces, evocations immersed in a fatal sense of lacking.’15 The displaced fragment might be permeated by a sense of absence, but it also awaits recontextualization and reinvestment with new significations. The replenishment of the ancient fragment should not be understood in terms of an unlimited play with a free-floating text; instead, it is a dialectical relationship with the remnants of antiquity, involving an ongoing dialogue between past and present. If the reconstitution of the classical text is meant to warrant its authority, its rupture, by contrast, provides the means to challenge textual canonicity. There are several ways in which these recent rewritings of Greek tragedy engage with the fragments of the past, varying from the use of actual lines or passages to the preoccupation with the idea of the fragment in a more abstract sense. Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale (1989) dramatizes the story narrated in Sophocles’ extinct drama Tereus, of which only fragments survive.16 The fragments of the past, both ancient and modern, have a significant place in Tony Harrison’s work;17 the quotation of lines from the ancient texts (The Labourers of Herakles, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus) and their adaptations across time

15

Fusillo and Martone (2002: 140) (my translation). The technique of collage was extensively employed on the visual level in Martone’s productions Filottete (1987) and La seconda generazione (1988), a dramaturgical collage on the story of Neoptolemus based on Sophocles, Euripides, and Virgil as well as on the modern Greek poet Yannis Ritsos. 16 On Tereus, see Pearson (1917). 17 Carlos Iniesta’s rewriting of Elektra, produced by the theatre company Atalaya in Seville in 1998, is a textual collage from both ancient and modern plays, from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers and Sophocles’ Electra to Hugo von Hofmannstahl’s Elektra and Heiner Müller’s Elektratext and Hamletmaschine. At various points the fragments from the Greek texts are quoted in the original language. I am grateful to Laura Monrós Gaspar for the play script.

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(Medea: A Sex-War Opera)18 in Harrison provides a relentless interrogation of the process of appropriation. In other cases, passages are extracted from the corpus of the text and recontextualized to allow different readings. Heiner Müller’s dramatic monologue Herakles 13 (1992) recasts Euripides’ Heracles 922–1015, based on Peter Witzmann’s verbatim translation; the decontextualized lines offer a sarcastic comment of the hero’s murderous frenzy, which is here dissociated from its divine cause.19 In a similar way, Colin Teevan’s Iph . . . (1999), a version of Iphigeneia at Aulis, opens with a condensed version of the Agamemnon;20 the fusion of the two plays suggests a reading of the Oresteia that redeems Clytemnestra’s revenge. Charles Mee’s numerous works on Greek tragedy offer a paradigm of the trend to tear apart the Greek text and to fuse it with other texts and cultural references; the playwright even mentions his sources at the end of his plays.21 Although Müller’s Medeamaterial (1982) and Caryl Churchill’s A Mouthful of Birds (1986) and Lives of Great Poisoners (1991) use only citational resonances of the tragic text, the idea of fragmentation is central to their reworking of tragedy.22 Similar treatments of the tragic texts depart radically from the view of the classical as a rounded organic whole, simplex et unum [‘simple and unique’]: it ends in resolution, ‘all passion spent.’ Antiquity is a closed system, providing a canon of texts, whose perfection is beyond time: criticism of those texts is an eternal return, the rediscovery of the timeless verities that they contain.23

The practice of tearing apart the classical text characterizing recent rewritings of Greek tragedy is a means to disrupt the ideologies that 18

Anca Visdei’s comic adaptation of Medea entitled La Médée de Saint-Médard, staged in 1996 by the Comédie de Saint-Étienne in central France, used various fragments and allusions to previous plays. 19 Müller (1998). 20 Teevan (1999). The play oscillates between translation and adaptation. See Chapter 4. 21 Mee’s plays are published online at (accessed 4 July 2016) under the general title The (Re)making Project along with a theoretical statement about the originality of texts. The lines quoted here refer to Mee’s view of Greek drama: ‘There is no such thing as an original play. None of the classical Greek plays were original; they were all based on earlier plays or poems or myths.’ 22 Some of the metatheatrical takes on Greek tragedy discussed in Chapter 3 also make use of fragments of the tragic texts. 23 Fowler quoted in Decreus (2007: 251).

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have been invested in the idea of a timeless and universal text. This does not entail an overall dismissal of the classical texts as ideologically suspicious; the rewritings under discussion can be theorized with reference to the deconstructive method of analysis. In order to undo the hegemonic discourses embedded in the text, a deconstructionist reading emphasizes plural meaning, while also identifying the binaries that govern the process of writing. Texts are equally able to conceal or reveal the discourses which have been embedded in them. The display of the fragments becomes a means of exposing the discourses involved in both the production and the reception of the Greek tragic plays. Besides, the emphasis on the process of textual transformation proves the cultural dynamic of the classical text to be inseparable from its canonical power, questioning the very role of adaptation in reinstating the canon. Harrison’s Medea, Churchill’s A Mouthful of Birds, and Müller’s Medeamaterial provide the main focus of the following discussion. Since deconstruction offers a means of challenging power relations, it is no surprise that in these rewritings the display of the fragment coincides with the exploration of gender politics. Yet, although Harrison’s rewriting of Medea remains effective as a deconstructive approach to the texts it quotes, as well as a critique of the classical text, in general, it partly subscribes to the discourses it wishes to denounce. In Churchill’s play, by contrast, the employment of dance in order to rewrite a classical text gives the example of an écriture féminine, while Müller’s Medeamaterial shows the text and the female body to be inextricable in their quest to overcome fragmentation. Textual and bodily disintegration in both Churchill and Müller give rise to new textual configurations as well as to alternative possibilities of gender and sexuality.

THE POLYPHONIC FRAGMENT Harrison’s encounters with the classical texts appear in multiple forms, in drama, poetry, film, and opera.24 Many of his reworkings negotiate their relationship with their source text as well as with 24 For further discussion on Harrison’s revisiting of antiquity, see Hardwick (1999).

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antiquity by displaying actual fragments from the ancient texts. Whether Harrison uses Greek drama to explore the struggle between the sexes, the sociopolitical turmoil of Britain, or the historical predicament of colonialism and the Holocaust, the classical past is never appropriated to articulate contemporary concerns alone, but remains itself constantly under scrutiny. Harrison’s appropriations emerge as a work-in-progress dealing with the cultures to which Greek tragedy itself was both a response as well as a constituent; as such it has historically contributed to the formation of the status quo as much as it has provided the means to resist it.25 The various ways in which classical literature has been accommodated and appropriated within modern culture is a recurrent theme in Harrison’s work, and especially in his rewritings of Greek drama. However, Harrison’s preoccupation with textual transmission is distinct from Grüber’s nostalgic view of a bygone past; his concern is rather with the omissions made by those who formulated the syllabi and with the losses and exclusions entailed in the process of textual canonization for subsequent generations: It’s the idea of a word like ‘refinement’ . . . someone being ‘refined’, this means that you purge away the things that really are too difficult to absorb, it seems to me. So that you have an art which is ‘refined’. And what happened to history’s view of Greek theatre was that it became refined. And our view of culture became one about refinement. Now, it seems to me, that by making culture a matter of refinement it stops doing the job of culture, which is to allow us to unite, even for the brief duration of a play, or a novel, or a poem, those elements of ourselves that we are always encouraged to separate by religion, or refined culture, or by social convention.26

For Harrison, then, the use of fragments is an anti-elitist act of including what has been left out of the canon. Harrison uses the fragment not to reconstruct the past, but in order to question the tailoring of antiquity that has resulted in the extant classical corpus. On the 25 Harrison’s interview with John Haffenden in Astley (1991: 245): ‘At the time when I was being pushed to finish a Ph.D. on the verse translations of Virgil’s Aeneid, I saw the relativity of translations, the way in which the Classics are always used as a prop to the status quo. I want to make that prop less solid. We think that Milton used classical texts as a revolutionary, and that the Victorians used them for Tory mythology, and yet they often used the same texts. There’s a lot of vested interest in the Classics as being a rather aseptic foundation of our culture.’ 26 Harrison’s interview with Marianne McDonald in McDonald (1992: 131).

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other hand, for Harrison, the textual fragments are the remnants of antiquity and, even though they cannot be reconstituted, it is still feasible to accommodate them within contemporary culture and ascribe them new relevance. Harrison uses the fragment to foreground aspects of antiquity that have been less known or neglected. The fragment in his plays is a polyphonic means that participates in the democratization of the classics. Harrison’s acquaintance with classical literature certainly plays a role in his ability to bring the texts of antiquity into dialogue, engendering revealing combinations and variations. Oliver Taplin remarks that Harrison’s plays ‘have a new and challenging relationship to the Greek originals, fluidity [as they] mov[e] in and out of direct translation, and integrating contemporary and “incongruous” material without any disruption or apology.’27 Both The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (1988)28 and The Labourers of Herakles (1995)29 draw on fragmentary Greek texts and fragments,30 while offering an exploration of the reasons behind their exclusion from the classical canon. For Harrison, the privileging of a ‘refined’ image of antiquity accounts for the scant interest in the preservation of the satyr dramas. However, since the satyr drama was an indispensable part of the tragic tetralogy, Harrison views our limited access to the genre as a serious impediment to understanding tragedy itself: The satyrs are included in the wholeness of the tragic vision. They are not forgotten or forced out by pseudo-‘refinement’. Without the satyr play we cannot know enough about the way in which the Greek spirit coped with catastrophe. The residue of a few tragedies might give us the illusion of something resolutely

27

Taplin (1997: 459). Henceforth The Trackers. The play was first performed in the ancient stadium of Delphi in 1988 and was revised for the production of the National Theatre in London in 1990. The Delphi script was published in 1990, while the 1991 and 2004 editions contain both the Delphi and the NT texts. 29 Henceforth The Labourers. The play has an alternative title in Greek: Η αυτοψία του Φρυνίχου. Apart from the collected plays of Harrison, The Labourers is also published in Arion: a Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 4/1 (Spring), 115–42. References here are to Harrison (2004). 30 It seems not to be accidental that both The Trackers and The Labourers were produced for the ancient drama festival that takes place in the archeological site of Delphi. The revival of the lost pieces of tragic performance in the tangible ruins of a Greek site acquires further significance. 28

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high-minded, but it is a distortion, with which post-Christian culture has been more comfortable than with the whole picture.31

In The Trackers the lines of Sophocles’ fragmentary satyr drama Ichneutai are reshaped and become the play-within-the-play, while the very process of their discovery in Oxyrhynchus provides the main action. In Sophocles the trackers are the satyrs looking for the lost cows of Apollo, which have been stolen and turned into the lyre by Hermes. In Harrison’s script the trackers are the fellaheens excavating the rubbish dumps of Oxyrhynchus led by the Oxford classicists Grenfell and Hunt, and they end up putting on the play. The analogy created between the theatre-within-the-theatre scene and the lyre seems to imply that theatrical recreation can offset the inevitable loss of the classical text. The Trackers does not aspire to reconstitute a fragmentary play, but uses the fragments in order to revive the lost satyric mode.32 Similarly, The Labourers employs metatheatrical devices to deal with the fragments of antiquity. When the Labourers working on the construction of a new theatre in Delphi33 are stuck in the cement, Herakles asks them to perform Phrynichos’ tragedies, in order to be set free. Their performance is a recitation of the few surviving titles and fragments of Phrynichos in the original language. As soon as they reach the point of doing The Sack of Miletus, the Labourers come to a standstill realizing that the title is all that survives from the play. Herakles’ comment on the urge of the Athenians to ban Phrynichos’ play becomes a statement about the politics underlying the reception of tragedy, starting already in antiquity: Even in Athens (but no friends of Herakles!) reactionary voices said Greek cities should appease. The appeasers were ready to let Ionia stay, with no fellow Greek assistance, beneath barbarian sway. Medizing appeasers banned The Fall of Miletos and fined, for his politics the poet Phrynichos.34

HERAKLES

31

Harrison’s introduction to The Trackers (2004: 8). Commenting on The Trackers, McDonald (1992: 133) says: ‘It’s a beautiful postmodernist gesture to revive a culture that no one knows existed, in a sort of substratum of language that we also don’t know, but which you have revived. You’ve signified the trace.’ 33 The dramatic space is the same as the actual space where the play was staged. 34 Harrison (1996: 126) (emphasis in original). 32

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Herakles, who here represents male power, rejoices over the Greek triumph in the Persian Wars, while later he agrees with the ban on The Fall of Miletos because Phrynichos introduced female characters in his dramas: ‘The politics I approved of, what I found distressing | was all those men in drag, all that cross-dressing.’35 The performance of Phrynichos’ fragments as the play-within-theplay in The Labourers provides a performance of antiquity in a broader sense. While Harrison is much interested in the fragmentation of antiquity and the losses entailed in the process of reception, nonetheless his play provides a positive means to deal with the fragments. As the Spirit of Phrynichos36 reveals to the Labourers, in order to be able to perform The Sack of Miletus, they should ‘incline their heads north-west a few degrees, | to see the moral madness of the modern Herakles’.37 The lost play emerges here as an empty signifier to be replenished by future cultures and adjusted to their contemporary concerns. The creation of a play about the atrocities of the modern world, particularly the Holocaust and the war in the former Yugoslavia, is the only way to recover Phrynichos’ lost text: Halosis Miletou, a title with no play but the text’s in front of you in Bosnia today.’38

The appropriation of the past to address contemporary warfare seems to provide a release from the immobilizing effect of the classical canon that the Labourers’ entrapment in the cement symbolizes. The Labourers associates the exclusion of certain Greek texts from the classical canon with the suppression of the female voice, and, in the case of Phrynichos’ play, the lament of the women. The theme of silencing the female is recalled in a twofold way in Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale, in which Tereus rapes Philomele and cuts out her tongue to prevent her from telling what happened. The play draws on the Sophoclean Tereus, one of the ‘silenced’ texts of antiquity. Unlike Harrison, Wertenbaker does not address issues of textual preservation and transmission, 35

Ibid. 127. The role of Phrynichos was played by Harrison himself, something that is not without importance. Authorial power was invoked by the presence of the playwright onstage to be undermined through the emphasis on the processes of appropriation. 37 38 Harrison (1996: 143). Ibid. 150. 36

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at least not in an explicit way. Rather than an exhibition of the preserved Sophoclean fragments, the play offers a retelling of the story, probably drawing on other sources on the same theme.39 The epigraphs to the play though indicate that the playwright was aware of the Sophoclean play. Fragment 528, in which Procne (probably) bemoans the misfortune of women, seems to be crucial in her feminist reworking. As in Harrison’s case, the transformation of the classical text in Wertenbaker seems to rectify the loss, not in the sense of philological reconstitution, but by giving voice to the discourses that have been excluded from the canon. While the word ‘silence’, repeated by Echo in the play, closes two of the scenes in which Procne waits patiently for Tereus, after Procne’s and Philomele’s revenge against Tereus the closing words of the chorus are the following: ‘IRIS: Transformation. | ECHO: Metamorphosis.’40 Although Medea: A Sex-War Opera (1980, published 1985)41 precedes The Trackers and The Labourers by a decade or so, the reordering of textual fragments participates in a similar interrogation of the canon. Harrison’s take on Medea questions the cultural politics that condition the formation of the classical canon from a different standpoint: while the later plays are preoccupied with lost or mutilated texts, Medea explores the accretions that the canonical text acquires in the course of time and the way in which these are resonant within modern culture. The script alludes to a plethora of previous appropriations of Medea’s myth by integrating lines and passages from past translations, rewritings, and opera libretti inspired by Medea’s myth. What appears to be at stake in Harrison’s Medea is neither the vicissitudes of classical texts in the formation of high culture nor the subsequent ‘inaudibility in our culture, and especially in “high” artistic culture, of the voices of the working class’,42 but rather the inaudibility of textual culture to the female voice. Harrison’s 39

The Bacchic scene occurs in Ovid; see Pearson (1917). Wertenbaker (1996/1989: 352). 41 The opera was commissioned by the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1980, but was left unfinished owing to the death of the composer, Jacob Druckman. Although conceived as a libretto, Harrison’s Medea has been produced for the stage in 1991– 1992 by the Volcano Theatre Company in Edinburgh and London. It is published in Harrison (1985). 42 Hall (2004: 187). 40

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translation of The Oresteia also provides an exploration of the gender politics in the Aeschylean play. In Harrison’s Medea, the textual collage of past adaptations is a deconstructive reading that places the quoted passages out of context in order to unmask the gender discourses that have been embedded in the different appropriations of the myth. Harrison uses tragedy as a means of scrutinizing the plights but also the flaws of Western culture. Harrison’s Medea is an appropriation of Euripides’ eponymous play as well as of later re-creations of it. It maintains a strong female focus, yet challenging the commonly held view that the female perspective originates in the Euripidean prototype, in the form of a prefigurative meaning awaiting to be unleashed in later appropriations and readings. In marked contrast, Harrison identifies an anti-feminist strain in classical tragedy43 and argues that what originates in Euripides’ Medea, and is reverberated in later appropriations, is precisely the discourse of a male-dominated order. Harrison instead contrasts Euripides’ play and its subsequent reconfigurations to a preEuripidean version of the myth, according to which it was the Corinthian people who killed the fourteen sons of Medea and later accused her of the filicide. The following passage, which comes towards the end of the play, encapsulates Harrison’s treatment of his subject. The characters of Downstage Woman and Downstage Man argue about the murder: This isn’t true. It was the mother. That’s the male version. Now watch the other. DSM Why all these children? There were only two. DSW Only according to male pigs like you. DSM No, according to the stories, the proper ones. DSW NO, the true story is there were fourteen sons. . . . . . DSM Euripides says there were only two and that it was the mother who slew. DSW Another male plot to demean woman’s fertility. Fourteen! Fourteen!44 DSM

DSW

Harrison’s play tries to restore the versions that have been eliminated in order that the ‘proper’ stories about women are established. There

43 44

Harrison quoted in Astley (1991: 235). Harrison (1985: 431) (emphasis in original).

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is, indeed, a strong political imperative in Harrison’s use of the past, which unveils ‘the silenced: the repressed and the oppressed’.45 More than a decade later, Christa Wolf ’s Medea: Stimmen (1996) similarly took recourse to the version preceding Euripides’ play in order to provide insights into the construction of the narratives that sustain a male-dominated society.46 Harrison’s play and Wolf ’s novel share not only the recourse to the pre-Euripidean myth, but also the use of narrative techniques that warrant pluralism. In Medea: Stimmen the story is channelled through several voices, each of which provides a different view. In Medea Harrison exploits the innate polyphony of the operatic medium itself, in order to achieve an effect analogous to Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition of polyphony as a parallel communication of different and often contradictory perspectives. The play orchestrates the struggle between the sexes by employing a male and a female chorus,47 in addition to the chorus of the Argonauts as well as the roles of the Downstage Man and the Downstage Woman, who present different views of the myth. The three main male characters of Jason, Heracles, and Bytes represent different stances towards the female. Most significantly, though, the polyphonic effect of Harrison’s play is achieved by recourse to a number of appropriations of the myth of Medea throughout the centuries. The overture of Harrison’s libretto consists of lines and passages derived from Euripides, Buchanan, Corneille, Durdick, Seneca, Mayr, Cherubini, and Calderon; each of these passages is quoted in the original language, while a line reference is given in the play script. Harrison composes a ‘fragmentary version of the chant of hate for the child-killer’,48 invoking the history of Medea’s vilification. Medea has been named, among others, as ‘παιδολέτορ’, ‘exécrable tigresse’, ‘barbara’, ‘divelysh despret dame’, and ‘murd’rous witch’.49 These past appropriations are exposed as a male discourse that considers the transgressive female as violent and disruptive. Harrison’s iconoclastic version deconstructs the story of Medea’s infanticide along with the texts that dramatized it over the centuries. 45

Kellecher (1996: 18). Wolf ’s novel was adapted for the radio in 1997. See Turner (1999). 47 Cf. Harrison on the use of an all-male chorus in the production of Eumenides as a way to ‘lock the play into an all male statement’. See Harrison in an interview with Astley (1991: 224). 48 Harrison (1985: 366). 49 The characterizations are recurring in Harrison’s play. 46

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Many of the passages incorporated in Harrison’s Medea are derived from operatic adaptations of Medea, something that is only partially related to the script’s initial conception as an opera libretto. Harrison questions the operatic works for their eminently monophonic representation of Medea. The vilification of the heroine in the operatic afterlife of Euripides’ play has been extreme, and most operas follow Seneca in exaggerating Medea’s witchcraft and destructiveness. In Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s and Thomas Corneille’s Médée (1693) the heroine uses sorcery to summon madness and at the end destroys the palace and sets the whole city ablaze. In Cherubini’s and Mayr’s operas Medea invokes the Furies in order to accomplish her revenge. Harrison’s Medea uses not only lines from the past libretti, but also elements of the imagery, such as the Furies. The female Chorus and the Downstage Woman refer explicitly to famous operatic heroines, questioning the victimization of women in opera. Tosca, Carmen, Butterfly, it seems all women do is to die in music drama. A woman is what men desert; in opera (as in life!) men hurt and harm her.50

And later: What male propaganda lurks behind most operatic works that Music’s masking? Beneath all Greek mythology are struggles between HE and SHE that we re still waging. In every quiet suburban wife dissatisfied with married life is MEDEA, raging!51

Hélène Cixous has problematized the motif of the dying woman on stage, offering a critique of the theatrical medium as a site in which the male anxiety over the female body is enacted: With even more violence than fiction, theatre, which is built according to the dictates of male fantasy, repeats and intensifies the horror of 50 Harrison (1985: 369). Cf. Brendan Kennelly’s similar questioning of poetry discussed in Chapter 4. 51 Harrison (1985: 370–71).

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murder scene which is at the origin of all cultural productions. It is always necessary for a woman to die in order for the play to begin. Only when she has disappeared can the curtain go up.52

Euripides’ play, joined by the later Senecan version, might have offered a vilifying representation of Medea, but, in contrast to his epigones, Euripides appears to have provided the heroine with more justification. Harrison’s retelling of the myth is based on a fragment of Euripides quoted in the original Greek text as well as in a Latin and a French translation. It is the part where the chorus expresses their certainty that the stories of women and men would have been articulated from a different perspective, had women been granted the art of writing poetry. This comes as a response to Medea’s earlier statement that women are capable of all evil, summarized in the Latin phrase ‘malorum machinatrix facinorum’, which is used as a leitmotiv in Harrison’s play. Heracles has appeared in other adaptations of Medea, such as in Apollonius’ Argonautica and Cavalli’s opera Giasone. In Harrison’s version this character is given an important role because he is depicted as the male equivalent of Medea. Heracles also committed infanticide but did not engender as many pejorative representations as Medea. On the contrary, according to Euripides, his infanticide is shown as the result of divine madness, whereas Medea’s deed, if any justification is to be granted, is caused by a state of mind that no divine intervention can mitigate. Harrison’s version seems to imply that already in Euripides’ dramaturgy the infanticide is a case of double standards. His response is to present Heracles as an obsessive misogynist and to stress his act of murdering his children. The play ends with the projection of actual newspaper cuttings about mothers who have committed infanticide, but the last piece displayed reads ‘A 53 FATHER CUTS HIS 4 KIDS’ THROATS’. As the two epigraphs in the published version of Medea make explicit, for Harrison what matters is the plurality of the myth. Harrison uses the Lévi-Strauss’s assertion that ‘we define the myth as consisting of all its versions’ as well as William Irwin Thompson’s

52 Cixous (1984: 546). See also Clément (1989/1979) on the theme of dying women in nineteenth-century opera. 53 Harrison (1985: 448) (capitalization in original).

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description of myth as ‘a polyphonic fugue for many voices’.54 Harrison’s Medea does not mix different mythological elements merely in order to restore the primary myth or to create his own mythology of Medea’s story. As he admits in an interview, his interest is ‘chiefly [ . . . ] not so much essentially the myths as the invention of drama, especially tragedy’. Instead, he uses elements from past versions of the myth to call into question the discourses invested in the tragic texts and their modern adaptations. The whole play is permeated by a tension between myth and its textual embodiments, making it impossible to separate from each other. What matters more is the juxtaposition of different versions or even the discord among them as long as it can contribute to the uncovering of the underlying discourses. In Ezra Pound’s translation The Women of Trachis, the dying Heracles experiences a primordial unity in which ‘all coheres’.55 Unlike Pound’s totalizing vision of tragedy, in Harrison’s Medea things do not cohere. The play shows that myths and texts complement and contradict each other, producing diverse cultural representations. By offering ‘a version about versions’,56 Harrison calls into question the notion of rewriting itself and no less his own appropriation of Medea.

THE DANCING FRAGMENT Although Harrison’s Medea is successful in laying bare the patriarchal narratives underlying the various representations of Medea already present in antiquity, nonetheless the portrayal of the female character in his play would not be impregnable to feminist scrutiny. In her seminal essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Cixous contests the conceptualization of the female as a dark continent, impossible to explore, as a male fantasy that has alienated women from their own body and sexuality: ‘They riveted us between two horrifying myths: between the Medusa and the abyss.’57 The Chorus of Women in Harrison’s Medea is aware of the ‘making a monster of MEDEA | like 54 56

55 Ibid. 364. Pound (1969/1956: 67). Macintosh (2000: 27) (emphasis in original).

57

Cixous (1976/1975: 885).

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the Medusa’.58 Yet, the play’s imagery is not free of the idea of the unfathomable female, which poststructuralist feminists have consistently challenged. The ancestral line between Medea and the archaic female deities pronounced in Harrison’s play upholds an essentialist view of the female, which sits oddly in a piece aiming to unmask the male ideologies lurking behind the appropriations of the tragic heroine.59 The goddess is referred to as ‘the primordial mother’ and the ‘Earth’60 who gives birth, destroys, and restores to life. Furthermore, the sexualized imagery employed to depict the dramatic space and its economy of exits and entrances assigns the female to invisibility, associating it with darkness, absence, and death. In a pantomimic scene narrating the punishment of Medea, the heroine is electrocuted and ‘sinks into the pit, leaving a hole in the stage, which for the moment is to be a well but also serves as the entrance for the GODDESS when she emerges as the image of the ancient 3 in 1 GREAT MOTHER’.61 To make things less subtle, later in the play this pit becomes ‘the pool in which HYLAS is drowned, dragged below by the voices of water nymphs.’ It is also a place of burial of Creusa and, at the end of the play, of Jason. While Churchill’s Lives of the Great Poisoners dispenses completely with the filicide Medea in favour of the less emphasized aspects of the heroine as an expert in poisons, her remoulding of The Bacchae in A Mouthful of Birds offers a radical enquiry into gender and sexuality. Although both plays include citational nods to the Euripidean texts as well as other textual fragments, the deconstructive strain in Churchill’s writing primarily consists of undermining not so much the specific ancient texts, but the notion of textuality per se. For poststructuralist feminists, any text is by definition suspect, conditioned as it is by male systems of discourse and representation. It is within this framework that Cixous’s call for an écriture feminine that ‘writes the body’ into the text can be understood as something more substantive than a literary abstraction. Churchill’s rewritings realize Cixous’s idea, not only as texts written by a woman negotiating issues 58

Harrison (1985: 432) (capitalization in original). Cf. Wolf ’s Medea: Stimmen (1996), which is efficacious in challenging the alleged dissociation between the female and reason. Contrary to the portrayal of Medea as a powerful witch, in Wolf ’s novel Medea’s ability to master things emanates from the practice of reason. 60 61 Harrison (1985: 432). Ibid. 371 (emphasis added). 59

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of female identity, but because the employment of the dance element challenges the textual logos by somatizing the text.62 In Elin Diamond’s view, Churchill’s A Mouthful of Birds should be seen not as an écriture feminine celebrating the body, but as a politicized reading into the representational apparatus that prevents the body from ‘writing itself ’.63 Diamond points out the significance of dance in the piece as a ‘non-representational, nonlogocentric alterity’.64 An evaluation of the dance element as a formal constituent of the play, rather than as an augment to the stage action, demonstrates that dance inscribes the body into the text. Viewed as an alterity to the classical text, in particular, dance in Churchill’s rewriting of Greek drama seem to offer a female counter to the written word as well as a feminist critique of it. The dance element in Churchill’s A Mouthful of Birds performs the sparagmos of the classical text. The Bacchae is drafted into short dance scenes intercalated with scenes enacting moments of daily life. The few lines enunciated in these dance scenes refer to particular moments in the plot of The Bacchae, in the form of specific allusions to Euripides. In one of the first dance scenes Agave says: ‘I put my foot against its side and tore out its shoulder. I broke open its ribs’;65 later the same line is recast as: ‘I broke open his ribs. I tore off his head.’66 The change of the pronoun (it and his) is reminiscent of Agave’s realization that she has not killed a lion but her own son. Furthermore, there is an echo of the Euripidean lines that describe the act of sparagmos.67 In these scenes dance provides a physical language that, by not being strictly representational, is able to perform acts that the conventions

62 A Mouthful of Birds was co-authored with David Lan for the Joint Stock Theatre Company. Churchill (1998: p. vii) gives equal credit to Lan for the creation of the play and stresses the contribution of the rest members of the company. Both published versions of Birds and Lives stress the primary role of dance in performance. See Churchill (1998: 185). 63 64 65 Diamond (1988: 189). Ibid. 200. Churchill (1998: 16). 66 Ibid. 50. 67 Bacch.1125–7: λαβοῦσα δ’ὠλέναις ἀριστερὰν χέρα,/πλευραῖσιν ἀντιβᾶσα τοῦ δυσδαίμονος/ἀπεσπάραξεν ὦμον (Taking his right hand in her grip and planting her foot against the poor man’s flank, she tore out his arm at the shoulder); also Bacch. 1209–10: ἡμεῖς δέ γ’ αὐτῇ χειρὶ τόνδε θ’ εἵλομεν/χωρίς τε θηρὸς ἄρθρα διεçορήσαμεν (We caught the beast with our bare hands and tore him limb from limb); and Bacch. 1284: οὔκ, ἀλλὰ Πενθέως ἡ τάλαιν’ ἔχω κάρα (No: in my misery I hold Pentheus’ head!).

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of ancient theatre bestowed exclusively upon words. The ecstatic dances of the women and the dismemberment of Pentheus,68 as well as the poisoning of Creusa in Lives, recounted by the Messenger’s speech in the Greek plays, in Churchill’s plays are enacted through intense movement. The sparagmos and the somatization of the classical text evoke the twofold endeavour of écriture feminine: the inscription of the body, which simultaneously is a disruption of patriarchal textual and symbolic order. In A Mouthful of Birds the rupture of the representational economy of the text generates alternative forms of textuality as well as new possibilities of sexuality. The liminality of the play itself between drama and dance piece testing the limits of theatre has its equivalent in the liminal bodies of the characters that challenge the established gender norms and categories. The dialogue between the two policemen discloses the uneasiness of the official language in its attempts to define Dan’s gender, which resists normative categories (‘It was him when we admitted her’).69 Later in the play, Herculine Barbin, Michel Foucault’s famous case study of a nineteenth-century hermaphrodite, will also say: ‘Hermaphrodite, the doctors were fascinated, how to define this body, does it fascinate you, it doesn’t fascinate me, let it die.’70 Derek is the character of the play to be possessed by Herculine Barbin and also the one to be dismembered ‘into a dance of the whole company in which moments of extreme happiness and violence are repeated’.71 This dismemberment, enacted in dance, is the surgical sexual transformation that liberates the character from the confines of his male body as revealed in the soliloquy in the last part of the play (‘My skin used to wrap me up, now it let the world in’).72 Diamond is right, however, in distinguishing Churchill’s conceptualization of the body from Cixous’s unhistorical biologicism. It is explicit that the characters in the play are confronted with specific social codes that shape their relationship to their bodies, often through repressive mechanisms. The dance scenes signify the violation of these codes within the play’s sequence, while the dancing body is, generally, characterized by its tendency to liberate 68

Hersh’s analysis (1992) notes that the enactment of the dismemberment of Pentheus on stage is important to the feminist agenda of the play, but does not make mention of the role of dance. 69 70 71 72 Churchill (1998: 24). Ibid. 37. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 52.

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itself from the physical and social restrictions that govern it. However, in these scenes, the quoted action and lines from The Bacchae do not allow the discursive norms that constitute the body to go off-stage. Even as ‘a disrupted and disruptive narrative’,73 the classical text is a constant reminder of the representational order that the dancing body strives to resist; in a similar way, ecstasy and violence provide reactions to the gender constraints entailed in domestic and social functions rather than an outbreak of inherent impulses of an unhistorical transcendental body. The Bacchae does not merely endow Churchill and Lan with a powerful imagery to articulate issues of possession and violence, but it upholds their explicitly anti-essentialist view of gender: There is a danger of polarising men and women into what becomes again the traditional view that men are naturally more violent and so have no reason to change. It seems important to recognise women’s capacity for violence and men’s for peacefulness. There is a difference between women able to be peaceable because they wave men off to war and women who recognise their own capacity for violence but choose not to use it. The Bacchae is about a violent murder done by women [ . . . ]74

Churchill has explained that her departure from the Euripidean ending, in which Agave withdraws from participating in the rites of Dionysus, was intended to show that violence changes the lives of the women. Yet, the end of the piece would appear to challenge, not The Bacchae, but the discourses about female violence that originate in the Euripidean play. Allison Hersh argues that female violence in A Mouthful of Birds does not conform to the sacrificial model René Girard proposes in his discussion of Greek myth and tragedy: Murder in Churchill’s play does not function to ‘restore harmony to the community’, as Girard claims, but rather to disrupt the illusory harmony of the community and to make tangible both the gender divide and the power imbalance inherent in this divide. It is precisely the mythology of harmony which feminist re-visions of The Bacchae expose as being illusory and, to some extent, fraudulent.75

73 75

Hersh (1992: 411). Hersh (1992: 416).

74

Churchill and Lan (1986: 5).

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The distribution of violence in A Mouthful of Birds could be viewed as a reversal of the symmetry of Girard’s sacrificial model. For Girard, the abolition of sexual difference is symptomatic of the sacrificial crisis;76 after the restoration of harmony, though, men and women resume their fixed gender roles. By contrast, in A Mouthful of Birds the crisis emanates in the gender divide, while the sacrifice eliminates sexual difference. Initially struggling with their fixed identities, the characters go through possession and violence and transgress the norms that ascribe certain roles to men and women. Lena kills her baby and abandons domestic life to offer support to elderly people; Yvonne enjoys doing the conventionally masculine job of a butcher, while her former addiction to alcohol is linked to the performance of her femininity, as shown in the scene before the possession where she dresses up and puts on her gold shoes to go out and drink. Churchill’s rewriting of The Bacchae seems to be attracted to those aspects of the Greek play that appealed to Nietzsche: dance, ecstasy, violence, pleasure in horror, and irreconcilable disorder. This accounts for the similarities between A Mouthful of Birds and Schechner’s staging of The Bacchae. In Schechner’s production the classical text is torn apart, while the blurring of the boundaries between performer and role and the interactive relationship with the audience destabilized theatrical representation. Furthermore, the production culminated in a direct call for the vehement release of libidinal energy and destructive instinct against social oppression. Dionysus’ final words to the audience before leaving the theatre to continue the struggle on the streets were the following: ‘Torn limb from limb! I love the smell of riots, the orgasms of death and blood! We will tolerate no more false revolutions, no more false rituals and phony bloodbaths! We want the real thing!’77 Froma Zeitlin takes issue with the exaltation of violence in Dionysus in 69, which, together with the production’s absence of a clear political agenda, gave expression to what she terms ‘ecstatic fascism’.78 Two decades after Schechner’s production, Churchill’s play performed a much more disillusioned sparagmos of the classical text. The Messenger in Dionysus in 69 says that ‘to destroy property to get women will not set you free’; similarly, Lena’s phrase in the postpossession scene in A Mouthful of Birds acknowledges the power of 76 78

Girard (2005/1972: 136). Zeitlin (2004: 75).

77

Schechner (1970: n.p.).

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violence, while also renouncing the use of it: ‘The power is what I like best in the world. The struggle is every day not to use it.’79 But if, in Schechner’s production, the fascination with the ritual elements prevented a more politicized understanding of violence from coming through, this is definitely not the case in Churchill’s play. Even if the last scene demonstrates that female violence challenges patriarchal structures, violence is not celebrated as a means of transforming these structures. Besides, as Raima Evan’s astute reading of A Mouthful of Birds shows, the way the play depicts the changes in the personal lives of the women in the wake of their violent deeds is highly ambiguous.80 The ritual allusions in A Mouthful of Birds seem to emphasize the threatening rather than the ecstatic side of the Dionysian sparagmos. One of the Euripidean lines incorporated in the play is about the ‘joy in eating raw flesh’;81 however, the line is here modified to become ‘sensuous pleasures of eating and the terror of being torn up’.82 The play closes with the words of Doreen, the woman who was possessed by Agave: I can find no rest. My head is filled with horrible images. I can’t say I actually see them, it’s more that I feel them. It seems that my mouth is full of birds which I crunch between my teeth. Their feathers, their blood and broken bones are choking me. I carry on my work as a secretary.83

The ambiguity of Doreen’s words has been discussed elsewhere.84 What has not been noticed is the omophagic theme communicated through the metaphor of the bird. Not unlike the Euripidean Bacchae, Churchill’s play would appear to disavow any jouissance taken in pain and destruction.

79 Churchill and Lan (1986: 51). Churchill’s Medea also refers to the possibility of destroying or creating: ‘Yes I can bring the dead to life. But not for you. It is no thrill healing, I’d rather kill’; see Churchill (1998: 216). 80 Evan (2002). 81 Bacch.139: ὠμοçάγον χάριν (the glad meal of raw flesh). 82 Churchill and Lan (1986: 16) (emphasis added). In the introductory note to the play, Churchill’s reading of the Bacchae repeats the same view: ‘It is about the pleasure of physical power, the exhilaration of destruction, and finally a recognition of its horror.’ See ibid. 5. 83 Ibid. 53. 84 About the metaphor of the bird in the play, see Evan (2002: 284).

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While Cixous regards singing as the foremost female expression,85 feminist criticism has emphasized the effectiveness of dance in embodying the female voice. Catherine Clément discusses the performance of the tarantella by women as one of ‘tragic happiness’,86 providing the antidote to the narratives of the ‘hysterical’ and the ‘sorceress’ used by patriarchal society as a means to control female transgression. However, in Clément’s view, this dance is not a temporary release followed by the return to patriarchal order. It is a celebration destined to end as soon as it gives rise to the woman who has swept away male representations of femininity.87 Churchill’s view in A Mouthful of Birds is similar: ecstasy and violence seem to be necessary as long as normative gender categories suppress the performance of sexuality. In a similar manner, the dancing female body will be allowed to stop and repose only after it has somatized the classical text, creating forms of textuality that are no longer subjected to male authorial discourses.

THE SYNTHETIC FRAGMENT In Müller’s Medeamaterial, the landscape, the human body, and the text itself are pictured as sites of destruction. Dismemberment as a metaphor for the fragmentation of the classical text in recent adaptations of Greek tragedy becomes here an analogy upon which Müller’s play is built. Medeamaterial consists of three parts: as evident in the title, Verkommenes Ufer (Despoiled Shore), is set in a deserted land; the middle part, which lends its title to the whole piece, presents the story of Medea; the last part Landschaft mit Argonauten (Landscape with Argonauts), is the monologue of a disintegrated subject in a post-war scenery.88 Despite the clear focus of each of 85 Cixous refers to singing both in ‘Sorties’, published in Cixous and Clément (1996/1975) and in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ in Cixous (1976/1975). For Cixous, singing is closer to the idea of writing the body, through uniting text and rhythm. 87 86 Cixous and Clément (1996/1975: 20). Ibid. 88 These parts were written in different periods. The writing of the first part precedes the publication of the complete play by thirty years, while an extended part of Medeamaterial is also fifteen years older. The Landschaft mit Argonauten was the last part to be written. On the process of the play’s production, see Müller’s autobiography (2005/1992: 250–3). Müller names among his sources Euripides,

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the play’s parts, the themes of the ruined landscape, Medea’s violated body, and the fragmented self intertwine throughout the play. The fragmentary character of Müller’s text itself allows us to draw parallels between the text, the landscape, and the body. There is a strong affinity between Müller’s idea of a ‘dramaturgy of the fragment’89 and poststructuralist and deconstructionist theoretical tenets. As it has been observed, in Müller’s plays, ‘the entropic deconstruction of established models is at the same time the universal discourse of montage, claiming the total openness to other texts and other voices’.90 There is no doubt that the classical text is among the ‘established models’ deconstructed in Medeamaterial. This deconstructive move, however, is not exhausted in a montage challenging canon and authority, but it could be seen as producing textual configurations that are juxtaposed to the static classical text. Barnard Turner asserts that ‘Müller is an “anatomist”, a familiar “post-classical” classicist genre, as appears variously in his texts; in its more literal sense of a concern with the human body [ . . . ] or in the principle of playing with fragments’.91 The paradigm of Medeamaterial proves the ‘concern with the human body’ and the ‘play with the fragments’ to be absolutely complementary. At the same time, this parallel between text and body works to restore substantiality to the text.92 Müller’s dialectics of creation and destruction has been associated with Nietzsche’s idea of art. His concept of the ‘synthetic fragment’ is an encounter between Apolline unity and Dionysiac sparagmos. His take on Medea provides an example of a ‘synthetic fragment’, balancing between deconstruction and formal unity. The emphasis on the substantiality of the text in Medeamaterial replaces that of textual structure. While in Harrison’s Medea the polyphonic fragments expose the manipulation of Medea’s story in its various textual versions, the fragments in Müller’s rewriting seem to Seneca and the German playwright Hans Henny Jahnn; the third part also draws on T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland and Ezra Pound. 89 See Keller (1992: 81–4). 90 Teraoka (1985: 179). Also Weber in (Müller 1984: 17) notes that Müller’s dramaturgy ‘could be defined as “post-structuralist” and “deconstructionist”.’ 91 Turner (1995: 190). 92 Interestingly enough, the first ancient fragment quoted in Harrison’s The Labourers refers to the agony of the body: σωμα δ’αθαμβες γυιοδονητον / τειρει (sic). Harrison (1996: 120).

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embody the rupture of both Medea and the landscape. Texts are not torn apart in order to recast the story of Medea; they are rather disrupted like the violated land, the betrayed Medea, and the human bodies. The relationship between Medea and the land becomes explicit in the light of Müller’s statement that the figure of the Argonaut represents the European man as a colonizer and abuser of land.93 To a large extent the employment of Greek tragedy serves to recount the historical predicament of colonization. The theme of the Argonaut as an abuser of the landscape has already been introduced in the second lines of Despoiled Shore. Not only does the text refer to the devastated landscape and the Argonaut’s limited perspective in tandem (‘Despoiled Shore Tracks | of flatheaded Argonauts’),94 but it also continues with the emphatic phrase ‘THIS TREE WILL NOT OUTGROW ME’,95 which attributes the destruction of nature to male conceit. Especially in this play, though, Müller’s recourse to the ancient plot and themes is not a direct appropriation, but it involves a radical re-reading of the classical text through which a new dramaturgical model emerges. Despoiled Shore closes with the explicit reference to Medea: Yet on the ground Medea cradling The brother hacked up to pieces She expert In poisons96

The emergence of Medea in the violated contemporary landscape—and especially the use of the word Grund alluding to both ground and foundations—can be read as a self-referential comment on the use of Greek tragedy to reflect on the present. The figure of Medea is acknowledged as a powerful cultural icon offering the means to deal with atrocity and revenge. Medea holding her dismembered brother, in this sense, would seem to visualize the idea of rewriting as an act of dismemberment of the tragic text.

Maraka (2000) offers a comprehensive analysis of the use of Medea’s figure in Müller’s dramaturgy with particular emphasis on the parallel between Medea and land, both abused by man. 94 95 96 Müller (1984: 127). Ibid. (capitalization in original). Ibid. 93

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The fragmentary economy of Medeamaterial is evident in the tripartite structure and the line breaks that often interrupt the dramatic dialogue. Moreover, the text amalgamates quotations, often modified, and citational nods to previous literary works with popular clichés and slogans. This way Müller is in a constant open dialogue with both the literary past and broader cultural references. Even the three parts of the play could be related to the ancient trilogy but, most likely, to Franz Grillparzer’s Das Goldene Vliess, the last part of which was the canonical version of Medea, at least in the German-speaking countries.97 However, Medeamaterial could be defined only through its opposition to Grillparzer’s adaptation; while Grillparzer’s trilogy recounts the myth tracing the line of events from Colchis to the filicide, Müller’s technique of collage shifts the focus to the classical text. Müller’s engagement with Greek tragedy does not aspire to recreate the myth. In a reversal of the Aristotelian model, Müller stresses the importance of history over myth, arguing that the myth should interest us only as a primary stage of historical development.98 Müller’s privileging of history seems to be related to the systematic use of past literary works in his plays. As written testimonies, the texts provide insights into the historical processes, whereas the myth is largely associated with prehistorical time. The urge to abandon myth and to focus on history is shared by Harrison. The Spirit of Phrynichos advises the Labourers to cast aside mythology and fables and look at genocide! Cast aside mythology and turn your fearful gaze to blazing Miletos, yesterday’s, today’s.99

The display of fragments in Müller’s dramaturgy is a writing method that enables reflection upon history. For Müller, the abundance of fragmentary works in German history has its reasons in specific historical circumstances.100 His concept of the ‘dramaturgy of the fragment’ corresponds to his view of history as deprived of coherence and form. Like the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, the

97 See Macintosh (2007b). For example, the only character used in Müller’s rewriting, apart from Medea and Jason, is the Nurse. This is evocative of Grillparzer’s version, in which the role of the Nurse is important. 98 99 See Maraka (2000: 168–9). Harrison (1996: 145). 100 See Keller (1992).

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fragmentation in Müller exposes the process and motivates critical participation on the part of the audience: ‘The fragmentation of an event stresses the character of process, hindering the disappearance of the production in the product, namely the commercialization, and makes the image an experimental area, upon which the public can co-produce.’101 The quotation of fragments in Müller’s plays not only performs a critical displacement of the past dramatic and literary works quoted or alluded to, but leads to a broader understanding of the textual production as a cultural process. In this respect, the playwright’s method offers an encounter between the practice of deconstruction and the key means of materialist analysis. The different ways in which Müller adapted Medea testify to his increasingly closer engagement with poststructuralism. The short pantomimic scene102 Medeaspiel [Medea play], written in 1974, makes its feminist point rather explicitly: the piece uncovers the cruelty and repression that marriage and childbirth involve for women and presents the infanticide as a form of female rebellion.103 By contrast, in Medeamaterial the feminist problematics is inextricable from the broader preoccupation with European history, while the interrogation of textuality and the authority of the canon is crucial. The parallels between Medea, the landscape, and the text recur throughout the play. The theme of dismemberment, probably a resonance of Seneca, occurs also in Medeaspiel. The scene ends with the direction ‘the woman takes off her face, rips up the child, and hurls the parts in the direction of the man. Debris, limbs, intestines fall from the flies on the man.’104 In Medeamaterial mutilation and dismemberment acquire further connotations. In the opening dialogue of the centrepiece of the play between Medea and the Nurse, Medea asks: ‘How are you living in your body’s ruins.’105 The part continues with the heroine’s vehement monologue that narrates her journey as a story of bodily destruction, starting with her dismemberment of 101

Müller quoted in Keller (1992: 81) (my translation). Parts of the story, such as the wedding of Medea and Jason or the murder of the Princess, in Harrison’s adaptation are also presented in extended pantomimic scenes. 103 Müller (2001) had also started working on a feminist adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata around the same period, most likely in the beginning of 1970. See Weber (2005). 104 105 Müller (1984: 47). Ibid. 128. 102

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her brother and culminating in her filicide. The betrayal and the abandonment are also described with reference to both the body and the land: That was our home an alien country now I stand disjointed in its mesh The ashes of your kisses on my lips Between my teeth the sand of our years On my skin only my own sweat106

Medea’s revenge against Creusa begins in the dissolution of her own body, which becomes the deadly bodily consumption of her rival: The bridal gown of the barbarian has The gift to weld an alien skin with death Wounds and scars they make a splendid poison107

What is most important is that the murder of Creusa is described as an inscription onto the body: ‘It’s on her body that I write my play.’108 Both text and body emerge as spaces of inscription and rupture. At this point, the somatization of the text involved in the process of its sparagmos is complemented with the view of the body as a text. Medea’s murder of the children is a plea for the restoration of her body: ‘Give back to me my blood out of your veins | Back into my womb you who are my entrails.’109 Similar to numerous feminist descendants of the Euripidean heroine, Müller’s Medea achieves her emancipation through the act of killing. Like Churchill’s characters in The Mouthful of Birds, Medea here transgresses existing gender divides, being ‘no woman and no man’.110 The use of the obsolete pejorative word for woman Weib in the German script at this point bears strong associations to female subjugation within a maledominated language. Medea, who at the beginning defines herself through Jason,111 ends up not recognizing him.112 While in the opening phrase Medea addresses him by his name, now she refers to him as ‘man’. The restoration of her body passes through bodily destruction, while the new text emerges from the rupture of past works. Besides, the generic hybridity of Medeamaterial between 106 109 110 111 112

107 108 Ibid. 128. Ibid. 131. Ibid. Ibid. 132. Ibid. 132: ‘no woman and no man’. Ibid. 128: ‘My first one and my last one.’ Ibid. 133: ‘Nurse Do you know this man.’

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dramatic monologue, poetry, and drama resists definitive genre categories, in the same way that Medea’s rebellion culminates in her transgression of gender. Medea’s revenge alienates Jason from his own self. The opening of his monologue in Landschaft mit Argonauten attests to the impossibility of self-definition: Shall I speak of me I who Of whom are they speaking when they do speak of me I Who is it113

The undoing of the Argonaut is described again in terms of bodily dissolution: ‘Bloody rag hung out’,114 or most explicitly later on, I felt MY blood come out MY veins And turn MY body into the landscape Of MY death115

The last part of Müller’s play situates the Argonaut within the ruined landscape. Along with the body and the land, the past culture appears to be in pieces (‘Among broken statues’,116 ‘A shred of Shakespeare’117). The use of the word shred (Fetzen) to describe both Jason and the remnant of Shakespeare links the fortune of the body to that of the author, suggesting that Jason’s state in this last part may also stand for the dissolution of the writing subject. Despite the eschatological imagery employed at this point, the disintegration of the individual into the collective, clearly stated in the stage directions, comes as a solution to the fragmentation of subjectivity. The quest for collectivity seems to underlie the display of fragments in Medeamaterial. In bringing together disparate materials and allowing their symbiosis, Müller’s ‘synthetic fragment’ is reminiscent of Soyinka’s syncretization of texts and rituals. It is not fortuitous that Hans-Thies Lehmann describes Müller’s drama as a ‘“blood transfusion” effected by the reworking or translation of older texts, a “vampiristic activity”’,118 metaphors that have also been used with reference to postcolonial translation.119 The textual collage in Medeamaterial appears to be revolutionary in another sense: it resists not only a single authorial voice, but also the authority of conventional representation. Müller has 113 116 118

114 Ibid. 133. Ibid. 117 Ibid. 134. Ibid. Lehmann (1995: 88).

115 119

Ibid. 135 (capitalization in original).

See Chapter 4.

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often declared his distaste for naturalism and envisaged a nonrepresentational theatre.120 The use of past literary texts operates on an intraliterary level, by acknowledging and displaying the other texts that mediate between the dramatic text and its subject matter. The engagement with classical themes and texts is not allowed to become an interplay for the erudite spectator. When in 1978 Müller took part in an academic forum on postmodernism, he openly challenged Hassan’s idea about the crisis of contemporary literature. In response to Hassan, Müller also takes recourse to Ovid’s recounting of the Orpheus myth in the Metamorphoses, but stresses that in this version the Maenads kill the poet with the tools left behind by some farm workers. The vanishing song of the individual poet under the farmers’ ploughs is what, for Müller, shows that ‘literature is an affair of the people’.121 Much has been said about the so-called defeatism of Müller’s dramaturgy, a defeatism that reaches the point of negating theatre itself. Rather predictably, this defeatism has been linked to the explosion of the past literary masterpieces that characterizes Müller’s work. Reiterating Hassan’s foreboding about the self-negation of postmodern art, Johannes Birringer discusses Müller’s synthetic fragments as ‘scenographies of implosive thinking that describe the necessary disappearance of theatre.’122 Fischer-Lichte’s comment would do more justice to Müller’s dramaturgical project: ‘A new text body has been reborn out of the fragments of foreign texts—out of the dismembered text corpus of Western culture.’123 The paradigm of Medeamaterial could refute the pronouncements of theatre’s demise, by demonstrating that the deconstructive tendency does not equal the negation of the theatre, but anticipates and participates in its renewal. However disintegrated, the Argonaut in the third part of the play says: ‘Between rubble and ruins it’s growing | THE NEW.’124

120

On the relationship between Artaud and Müller, see Kalb (1998: 104–26). Teraoka (1985: 19). Müller’s essay for the forum ‘Der Schrecken, die erste Erscheinung des Neuen: Zu einer Diskussion über Postmodernismus in New York’ was originally published in the journal Theater heute, 20 (March 1979). 122 Birringer (1991: 53). Cf. Hassan (1971: 23): ‘Postmodern literature moves, in nihilistic play or mystic transcendence, toward the vanishing point.’ 123 Fischer-Lichte (2002: 350). 124 Müller (1984: 134) (capitalization in original). 121

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The fascination with the fragment characterizing recent adaptations of Greek tragedy could be seen as a ‘Dionysiac’ defiance of form and order, which appears to uphold Eagleton’s claim about the resurgence of Nietzschean tenets in the guise of poststructuralism and postmodernism. Subsequently, the use of ritual metaphors to discuss the rupture of the classical text(s) would equally seem to disclose the pervasiveness of the Dionysiac principle in the reception of Greek tragedy. However, the rewritings discussed in this chapter show that the rupture of the classical text(s) is not a textual interplay performed at the expense of pain and suffering in Greek tragedy; neither is the rupture an ecstatic reverie in destruction deprived of political engagement, in a way commensurate with Nietzsche’s depoliticized interpretation of the tragic conflict. What Victoria Wohl argues about sparagmos in The Bacchae is also true with reference to the rupture of the ancient text in the recent rewritings of Greek tragedy; if sparagmos signifies the emergence of multiple forms of sexuality, the rupture of the text(s) in the discussed rewritings engenders a similar multiplicity on the textual plane: The sparagmos too is part of the bacchants’ pleasure: if their strength is erotic, this is their orgasm, a frenzied ripping and bursting of flesh. The sparagmos is the ultimate anti-Oedipal manifestation of sexual difference: polymorphous dispersion instead of integration and structure. [ . . . ] Yet even this destruction is productive.125

The sparagmos of the text would, thus, seem to amplify textuality in the same way the Bacchic sparagmos in rewritings of Greek tragedy expands the boundaries of sexuality. By disrupting the ancient text, these rewritings resist textual order, giving rise to new formations, as in Müller’s synthetic fragments. Not surprisingly, the disruption of the classical text often results in generic hybridity. Most of the plays discussed in this chapter do not fit within the usual genre categories: Harrison’s Medea was written as an opera libretto,126

125

Wohl (2005: 150). It is interesting to note that for Cixous, the transformation of a classical text into an opera would appear to be central in the emphasis on the female voice. See Cixous and Clément (1996/1975: 107): ‘An endless choir swollen by sobs and silences, 126

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while it also has a life as an autonomous dramatic piece; in both The Labourers and The Trackers singing is used extensively; Churchill’s play is based on dance as much as on speech;127 the writing modes adopted in Müller’s Medeamaterial, from dramatic monologue to theatrical dialogue, also resist fixed genre categories. Textual fragmentation in the examined rewritings testifies to the anti-Oedipal strain in the recent reception of Greek tragedy. The Oedipal parricide is forsaken in this period; instead the plays of antiquity in which violence is turned against the offspring seem to appeal more to contemporary sensitivity.128 Towards the end of the twentieth century, the filicidal heroes and heroines of Greek tragedy seemed to have a particular appeal to both playwrights and directors, as demonstrated by the popularity of the ancient plays in which the killing of children has a central place.129 Most of the adaptations that disrupt the classical text draw upon tragedies that involve filicide, like Iphigeneia at Aulis, Tereus, Heracles, The Bacchae, or Medea. In The Love of the Nightingale the filicide takes place in a Bacchic celebration. It would seem that at a time the popularity of Oedipus appears to wane in theatrical repertoires, we find plays concerned not with the Oedipal anxiety of influence in any Bloomian sense,130 but with the agony for survival and continuation.

breathless gasps, hysterics’ coughs. That is the origin of opera. And I say that only men capable of that emission, those tormented ones who give in to their femininity, can love opera.’ 127 Cf. the use of music in Charles Mee’s reordering of ancient fragments. 128 See Macintosh (2007b) on the late-twentieth-century dethronement of Oedipus and the privileging of Medea in theatrical repertoires. 129 The numbers of theatrical productions testify to this trend. The APGRD database records 588 productions of Medea from 1970 to 2016, whereas 443 productions of Oedipus are documented within the same period. The shift of interest is manifest if one takes into account the numbers of productions of the two plays from 1900 to 1970, when stagings of Medea (259) are outnumbered by those of Oedipus (373). The same is manifest in the reception of Euripides’ Heracles: the play is staged sixteen times from 1900 to 1970, while it counts twenty-seven stagings between 1970 and 2016. The above data include stagings, stage adaptations, and plays based on the Greek texts. 130 Harold Bloom coined the term ‘anxiety of influence’ in 1973 referring to the relationship developed between the nascent poet and his literary predecessors. Bloom applies the Freudian analogy of Oedipus to argue that the evolution of the poetic self is founded on the conflict and the prevalence over a previous poet, who functions as the poetic father figure.

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This agony is also evident in the reluctance of these plays to deal with the theme of filicide directly; Harrison—and Wolf—opt for the pre-Euripidean version, where the filicide is not committed by Medea, while in Churchill’s Lives of the Great Poisoners the filicide is not invoked at all. Although Lena in Churchill’s A Mouthful of Birds murders her infant daughter in her possession scene, the omophagic scene of the Bacchae is rendered through the metaphor of the bird. On the textual level, this agony for survival would seem to manifest itself as a poetics of reconstruction that seeks to overcome the rupture of form. In Müller’s famous quotation, the reception of the past is described as a sparagmos and ōmophageia: ‘To know [the dead] you have to eat them and then you spit out the living particles.’131 For Müller, the devouring of the past seems to enrich contemporary culture with those elements that resist consumption and become part of a productive process. The important place of Greek tragedy within Western culture makes the tragic texts particularly susceptible to such a sparagmos and ōmophageia. The fragments of the classical text(s) incorporated in the rewritings of Greek tragedy could be seen precisely as these ‘living particles’. Textual fragmentation is, in this respect, an effective means of re-energizing the classical past. The sparagmos of Greek tragedy somatizes the classical text by treating it as raw flesh that is torn apart; this is a deconstructive act of undoing the canon both as an embodiment as well as as a powerful mechanism of reproducing dominant discourses and representations. These plays piece together textual fragments, while also engaging with established tragic modes and ideas. The texts of Greek tragedy and the tragic genre itself are treated as cultural fragments, constantly de- and recontextualized. In the process of appropriation, the receiving culture devours the classical past; and this sacrificial feast turns out to be a Bakhtinian banquet in which transformation and renewal overpower the mourning over a lost antiquity.

131

Müller quoted in Hardwick (2000: 70).

Conclusion The last decades of the twentieth century marked an allegedly festive departure from modernist preoccupations, which was described as symptomatic of a crisis: the theoretical stance of postmodernism was frequently associated with intellectual diversion, political disengagement, and a depoliticized celebration of difference. While modernism valued high art, if self-reflective and introspective, as a way of dealing with personal and political dilemmas, the postmodern cultural climate was feared to be overthrowing high art indiscriminately to replace it with void pastiche and popular culture subsumed to the logic of commercial capitalism. The postmodern critique of the core values of modernity was thus argued to entail an inimical stance to a category normally associated with both artistic perfection and ethical valence—namely, tragedy. In this schema, tragedy has been ‘defeated’, both as artistic form and as a way to perceive human suffering in a meaningful way. For cultural materialism, art actively responds to social reality, and this response should not be understood in terms of reflection; it involves, as reception theory emphasizes, the adaptability of artistic forms to the changing tastes and concerns across time. Raymond Williams’s materialist approach traces the manifestations of the tragic genre since antiquity on the basis of a close correspondence between tragedy in theatre and historical predicament. For Williams, the tragic dialectics is defined by the enmeshment in social and political crisis that ultimately affirms revolution as much as it entails the transformation of the tragic genre. The negation of the Hegelian tragic dialectics in favour of the Nietzschean tragic joy, according to Terry Eagleton, provides the anti-tragic strand of postmodernism. The theoretical stance of postmodernism entails, in Eagleton’s view, the degeneration of political determination into intellectual narcissism

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and the repudiation of the very notion of reality, precluding the dialogue with tragedy, and thus the possibility of engendering new tragic forms. The diagnosed crisis of tragedy in postmodernism is, paradoxically enough, embodied by Dionysus himself. If, for Nietzsche, the return of Dionysus in the Bacchae denotes Euripides’ belated repentance for having contaminated tragedy with reason,1 for Eagleton, the postmodern critique of progress and the predilection for the irrational marks a resurgence of the Dionysiac principle, which is at odds with tragedy. The ‘Dionysiac’ turn is not limited to the resurgence of interest in the ritual aspects of Greek tragedy in readings and adaptations or even to the popularity of Euripides’ Bacchae itself since the 1970s.2 Eagleton identifies the presence of the Dionysiac in the ‘infinite proliferation of play, power, pleasure, difference and desire as an end in itself ’.3 The disruptive tendencies of postmodern theory are deemed as antithetical to the affirmative character of what is, in his view, genuine tragedy. Charles Segal’s poststructuralist reading of the Bacchae engages with all the notions mentioned by Eagleton; nonetheless, for Segal the Dionysiac characteristics in Euripides’ play seem to provide a renegotiation rather than a negation of tragedy.4 In the light of Segal’s assertion, the peculiar dialogue between recent adaptations of Greek tragedy and poststructuralist and postmodern theory cannot be readily dismissed. At a time when adaptation emerges as one of the most prominent modes of writing, it is no surprise that the Greek tragic plays lend themselves to various reconfigurations. In the recent rewritings of Greek tragedy, Dionysus, god of metamorphosis, takes the form of textual disruption and hybridity, indeterminacy of meaning, and the jouissance of repetition. Rewritings of Greek tragedy from the 1970s to the beginning of the twenty-first century in many ways correspond to the main theoretical preoccupations of poststructuralism and postmodernism: the metatheatrical rewritings evoke the critique of representation; versions of Greek tragedy oscillating between translation and adaptation are resonant of the critique to authorship and textual ownership; plays performing the sparagmos of the text embody textual deconstruction in the most literal sense. However, in none of these rewritings does 1 2 3

Nietzsche (1993/1872: esp. 60). On the adaptation of Euripides’ Bacchae, see Chapters 3 and 4. 4 Eagleton (2003: 227). C. Segal (1997/1982: esp. 215–16).

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the engagement with postmodern modalities rely on an intellectual interplay to compensate for political disengagement. In vivid contrast, the employed writing strategies prompt us to probe the theory, by showing ways to overcome certain shortcomings and contradictions inherent in postmodernism: they illustrate how theatrical representation can outdo the tyranny of the written text and at the same time become a performance of (and for) self and other; they restore the author to the heart of the collective as the conduit of unheard voices; finally, they usher the fragments into textual reconfigurations that enrich and widen the idea of the canon, while also allowing for new representations and performances of gender and sexual identity. Edith Hall has argued that Greek tragedy is preoccupied with the question why suffering occurs; the answers given by the Greek plays to this question, says Hall, entail ontological, epistemological, and ethical issues.5 In the examined plays these three tropes of philosophical enquiry are deployed in order to expand the relationship with tragedy itself: the metatheatrical rewritings explore the epistemological and ontological questions of knowing self and role; similarly, hybrid translations invoke the question of agency, by examining the status of the writing subject and the limits of knowledge and control; rewritings featuring textual fragments problematize the understanding of the past, while the bodily disintegration they present has certain ontological connotations; last but not least, the invocation of tragedy in order to contain wide-scale catastrophe and disorder not only poses ethical questions about agency and responsibility but also affirms the political investment in the category of tragedy per se. What distinguishes the rewritings produced between 1970 and 2005 from previous adaptations of Greek tragedy is a particularly close engagement with the classical texts, which provides the means to elaborate on the notion of textuality. These plays are confronted with the reception history of the Greek plays; they enter into a dialogue with the processes of textual transmission, reconstitution, and corruption as well as of interpretation and appropriation, not least in theatre and performance. Most significantly, they encompass discourses about the tragic genre and the tragic feeling that have

5

Hall (2007: 20).

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taken the Greek tragedies as paradigms. In rewriting the classical text, these recent plays inevitably invite reflection on tragedy and the tragic beyond the textual concerns they articulate. If artistic genres are impossible to define strictly by their form, this is even more the case for tragedy, which is used to refer to different dramatic forms and real-life events alike. Formal elements are nonetheless vehicles for generic features, shaping both the synchronic and diachronic responses to the tragic texts. What we find in these rewritings is, in fact, a form of generic survival in textual transformation, which suggests which postmodernism did not signify the end of tragedy in textual interplay, but rather provided the means of contemplating established perceptions of the tragic genre in order to propose new ways of articulating the tragic. Notwithstanding the intense interest in the Greek tragic texts, the debate about the demise of the tragedy has almost become orthodoxy. The preoccupation with the text has been said to have displaced the tragic conflict onto the textual plane, thereby trivializing the embroilment in real-life suffering to the point of both tragedy’s and reality’s extinction.6 However, as I hope to have shown, the examined dramatic works are anchored in their surrounding reality as much as in their prototype sources. The deconstructive take on the canonical text is an act of appropriation that reclaims tragedy, both as a genre that can articulate postmodern problematics as well as a frame to view current experiences of suffering. Amid all the enthusiasm over the indeterminacy of meaning in poststructuralism, rewritings of Greek tragedy make manifest that meaning is produced through a dynamic interaction between past texts and present contexts. The difficulty of telling apart what the text poses and what the interpretative communities ‘impose’ upon it points to the impasses of criticism. What the rewriting of the classical texts can reveal is precisely the intricate dialectics between familiarity and recognition that characterizes tragedy from antiquity and all the way through its modern appropriations. Similarly to the ancient plays that offered variations on known plots and themes derived from a shared mythological material, rewritings of Greek tragedy examined in this 6

Fernie (2007) discusses the links between tragedy and the Lacanian Real, proffering an essentialist understanding of tragedy that is admittedly unhistorical. Such an approach would seem to justify Eagleton’s attack on postmodern dehistoricizing approaches to tragedy.

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book evoke the classical texts as part of a common cultural topos. Yet, the return to this topos does not mean to reaffirm tragedy as an aesthetic and ethical category lying at the foundations of Western culture. By constantly interrogating both the ancient texts and their modern receptions, these rewritings invoke the predicaments that have been excluded from the dominant discourses of tragedy. They rework their sources in order to frame suffering and calamity in the contemporary world, and, by doing so, they expand the frames of tragedy set by canonical uses of the classical texts. The postmodern anxieties surrounding the notion of textuality underpin an interrogation of the classical texts, which, similarly to Walter Benjamin’s testimonies of both civilization and barbarism, are paradigmatic not least of the tragic genealogies and the histories of suffering in which they are implicated.

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Index of Names Abel, Lionel 74, 75, 76 Aeschylus Eumenides 9, 52–60 The Libation Bearers 84 Oresteia 4, 43, 51, 58, 84, 138, 145 Prometheus Bound 135 Allain, Jean-Pierre 56 Aristophanes, Lysistrata 96, 160n103 Aristotle and catharsis 21 on Oedipus 49 peripeteia 29 Poetics 19, 32n63 theory of tragedy 18, 19, 20, 32, 46, 74 Armitage, Simon Mister Heracles 10, 103–4, 111–15 Arrizón, A. 43n10 Artaud, Antonin Berkoff and 46, 47 ‘No More Masterpieces’ (essay) 46 and 9/11 40, 41 on theatre 83, 89, 97 Theatre of Cruelty 46, 82 Auletta, Robert, The Persians 43 Bakhtin, Mikhail 89n83, 99, 146 Barthes, Roland 7, 10, 107, 108–10 Bassnett, Susan 109n26, 121n83, 122 Beckett, Samuel 132 Benjamin, Walter The Origin of German Tragic Drama 14n4, 17–20 ‘The Task of the Translator’ (essay) 108 on tragic hero 26, 35n85, 101, 102 on tragic theory 14, 15 on translation 108, 123 Trauerspiel 17, 18, 19 Bentley, Eric 14, 23–4, 35 Berkoff, Steven Greek 8, 45–52 Oedipus 52n47, 59 Birringer, Johannes 163 Bloom, Harold 165n130 Bondy, Luc 65n100, 71

Boucourechliev, André 51n45 Brecht, Bertolt Antigone 22, 105, 106 on The Birth of Tragedy 21 Epic theatre 2, 20, 21, 22–3 and metatheatre 75 Mother Courage and her Children 23n37 Short Organum for the Theatre 21, 22 on tragedy 14, 74, 75 Budelmann, F. 107n18 Burke, Seán 115 Bush, George 43n10 Butler, Judith 4, 11, 12, 99, 101 Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus 95, 123n90 Cave, Richard 86 Charpentier, Marc-Antoine and Corneille, Thomas, Médée 147 Cherubini, Luigi, Médée 147 Churchill, Caryl Lives of the Great Poisoners 138, 150, 151 A Mouthful of Birds 10, 138, 139, 150–6, 161, 166 Cixous, Hélène on female body 147, 148, 152 on female voice 156, 164n126 ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (essay) 150 Le Nom d’ Oedipe: Chant du corps interdit 51n45 on purification 67n112 Sihanouk 53, 55 ‘Sorties’ (essay) 58 La Ville parjure, ou le réveil des Erinyes (The Perjured City, or the Awakening of the Furies) 9, 52–62 Cixous, Hélène and Clément, Catherine 164n126 Clément, Catherine 156 Cocteau, Jean, La Machine infernale 50n42 Crimp, Martin, Cruel and Tender 9, 62–71

188

Index of Names

de Campos, Haraldo Deus e o diabo no Fausto de Goethe (God and Devil in Goethe’s Faust) 121n83 on translation 127 Decreus, F. 124n93 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, Anti-Oedipus 51 Derrida, Jacques 82, 87, 89, 90, 108 Dove, Rita, The Darker Face of the Earth 50n38 Dreyer, M. 5n7 Dryden, John, on translation 105 Eagleton, Terry on intertextuality 110n27 and modernism 33n70 on Nietzschean tragic theory 73, 164 on postmodernism 8, 13, 14, 27, 29, 34, 36, 76, 132, 133, 134, 164, 167, 168 on poststructuralism 10, 133, 134, 136, 164 Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic 2–3, 9, 27–30 and tragic theory 23, 54, 60 Easterling, P. E. 63n96 Eco, Umberto 36, 37 Euripides The Bacchae 121–8 and death of god 113n43 Electra 83n40, 84 Iphigenia at Aulis 138 The Madness of Heracles 66, 114n46, 138 Medea 10, 99, 144, 148, 159, 160, 165n129 Nietzsche on 16 Evan, Raima 155 Farber, Yael (Molora) 43 Fergusson, Francis 32 Fernie, E. 170n6 Fischer-Lichte, Erika on Grüber 134, 135, 163 on Hamletmaschine 84n45 on Müller 131, 132 on ritual 10 on sparagmos 33n71, 136 Fo, Dario and Rame, Franca, La Medea 9, 77, 96–102 Foucault, Michel 83 Fowler, D. 138n23

Freud, Sigmund 49, 50 Friedrich, Rainer 34, 35 Friel, Brian, Living Quarters: After Hippolytus and classical text 9 and metatheatre 77, 78, 81, 82, 86–9, 90, 102 Fugard, Athol, Antigone, The Island 9, 78, 90–5, 96, 102, 123n90 Fusillo, M. and Martone, M. 137n16 Garretta, Michael 53, 56 Gellrich, M. 25n45 Genet, Jean, The Maids 85 Genette, G. 6n12, 121n82 Gentili, Bruno 102 Girard, René 153, 154 Goldhill, Simon 32n67, 34 Greenblatt, Stephen 6 Greig, David, Oedipus 120 Grillparzer, Franz, Das Goldene Vliess 159 Grüber, Klaus-Michael, Die Bakchen 33, 34, 134–6, 140 Gryparis, Yannis 83 Gurr, A. 123n90 Hall, Edith 43n12, 169 Halliwell, Stephen 21, 42n9 Hanna, Gillian 97n114 Hardwick, Lorna 104 Harrison, Tony 140–9 The Labourers of Herakles 137, 141–3, 157n92, 165 Medea: A Sex-War Opera 10, 137–9, 141, 144–9, 157, 164 The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus 59n80, 131, 137, 141–2, 165 Hassan, Ihab 131, 133, 163 Hegel, Georg and Antigone 95 Eagleton on 30 on tragedy 13, 26, 29, 123 Henrichs, A. 34n82 Hermans, Theo 129 Hersh, Allison 152n68, 153 Hesiod, Works and Days 69, 70 Hoelderlin, Friedrich 105, 106 Hofmannstahl, Hugo von 105 Hood, Stuart 97n114 Hughes, Ted, Alcestis 10, 103–4, 111, 112–14, 128

Index of Names Humboldt, W. von 127 Hutcheon, L. 7n16 Ibsen, Henrik 24 Iniesta, Carlos, Elektra 137n18 Jauß, Hans Robert 7 Jones, F. R. 86n62 Kani, John 91 Kennelly, Brendan 10 The Trojan Women 116–20, 128 Kraus, Manfred 106 Lada, Ismene 23n35 Laera, M. 5n8 Lan, David 151n62 Langhoff, Matthias 78n20 Leavis, F. R. 13, 36, 37 Le-Coq, Jacques 45 Lefevere, A. 122n86 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 162 Leonard, M. 103n1 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 148 Lloyd, Michael 86 Lochhead, L. 116n57 Lyotard, Jean-François 14n6

189

sparagmos and ōmophageia 166 Murray, Gilbert 32, 33, 34, 123, 125, 126n105 Nelson, Robert 75n9, 76 Nietzsche, Friedrich Bentley and 24 The Birth of Tragedy 14–16, 21, 73, 124 and death of god 113 Eagleton on 30 on fragmentation 133 and Maffesoli 31 metaphysics 20n26 and modernist poetics 33 and modern mythopoetic 36 and Müller 157 and postmodernism 73 and poststructualism 73, 134 on ritual 31, 32 tragic theory 2, 3, 10, 17, 18, 70, 73, 123–5, 129–30, 164 Nochlin, Linda 132 Ntshinga, Norman 91n89 Ntshona, Winston 91 Nuttall, A. D. 133n8 Osofisan, Femi 122, 123, 124

Macintosh, F. 19n24 MacLeish, Archibald, Herakles 103 Maffesoli, Michel 13, 15, 30–1 Mandela, Nelson 91n88 Maraka, L. 158n93 Martone, Mario 137 Mason, H. A. 23, 28n55 Matesis, Pavlos I Voui (Roar) 9, 77, 78–81, 102 Mayr, Simon, Medea in Corinto 147 McDonald, M. 142n32 Mee, Charles 138 Michelakis, P. 77n17 Mitchell, T. 96n113 Mnouchkine, Ariane 53, 54 Müller, Heiner Hamletmaschine 84n45 Herakles 5 103, 114n48 Herakles 13 138 importance of history 159 Medeamaterial 10, 138, 139, 156, 157–63, 165 Philoktet 106, 113 and rewriting 131

Parker, L. P. E. 112n33 Pavis, P. 74n6 Paz, Octavio 110 Pearce, H. D. 76n14 Phrynichos, The Sack of Miletus 142, 143 Pirandello, Luigi 75, 76 Plato 19, 20 Porter, James 36 Pound, Ezra 33, 112n32, 149 Quayson, A. 124n94 Racine, Jean 16, 105 Rame, Franca 96–101, 102 Ravenhill, Mark, Shoot/Get Treasure/ Repeat 69 Rehm, Rush 93 Riley, Kathleen 103n3, 112 Roar (I Voui) (Matesis) 9, 77, 78–81, 102 Robinson, D. 129n112 Román, David 39n1 Rosik, Eli 125n97

190

Index of Names

Rotimi, Ola, The Gods Are not to Blame 50n38 Schechner, Richard 40 Dionysus in 69 33, 34, 87n68, 88, 135, 154–5 Schiller, Friedrich 22 Schleiermacher, F. 127 Scullion, Scott 34, 35, 125n97 Seaford, Richard 34 Segal, Charles 34, 73, 125, 168 Sellars, Peter, The Persians 43 Shakespeare, William 53, 55, 57, 62, 76, 81, 162 Sharkie (Sipho Mguqulwa) 91 Sidney, Sir Philip 9 Silk, M. S. 33n70 Silk, M. S. and Stern, J. P. 15n7 Singleton, Brian 41 Sivetidou, Aphrodite 85 Socrates 16, 19 Sophocles Antigone 90–5, 96 Electra 83 Ichneutai 131, 142 Tereus 137, 143 The Women of Trachis 9, 62, 63, 66, 68, 112, 149, 112n32 Soyinka, Wole The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite 10, 33, 34, 107, 121–8, 135, 162 ‘The Fourth Stage’ essay 124 Staïkos, Andreas, Klytaimnistra? (Clytemnestra?) 9, 77, 81, 82–9, 93, 96, 102 Stein, Peter 135 Steiner, George on Brecht 23 The Death of Tragedy 15–17, 25 on Fugard 94 on tragedy 2, 14–15, 26, 28, 30, 31, 75 on translation 111 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 40 Storm, William 33, 33n71 Strindberg, August 24

Teevan, Colin, Iph . . . 138 Tegonni: An African Antigone 93n100 Teroaka, A. A. 163n121 The Women of Owu 107 Thompson, William Irwin 148, 149 Timmermans, G. H. 86n58, 87n67 Troisi, Federica 75n9, 76n15, 77 Turnage, Mark-Anthony 45 Turner, Barnard 157 Van Zyl Smit, B. 43n13 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, ‘Oedipus without the Complex’ (essay) 51 Vernant, Jean-Pierre and Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 35 Vickers, B. 15n8, 32n67 Vieira, E. R. P. 121n83 Visdei, Anca, La Médée de SaintMédard 138 Vitez, Antoine 82 Wagner, Richard 17, 24, 25 Wallace, Jennifer 36, 43 Walton, M. J. 127 Weber, C. 157n90 Wertenbaker, Timberlake Daneira 70n129 The Love of the Nightingale 137, 143, 144 Wertheim, A. 95n109 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. von 32n66 Williams, Raymond 25–9 on Brecht 23 on ethical stance 44 materialist approach 8, 14, 15, 167 on tragic hero 60 Wilshire, Bruce 76n14, 89 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 28 Witzmann, Peter 138 Wohl, Victoria 164 Wolf, Christa, Medea: Stimmen 146 Wright, Derek 124 Wright, E. 21n27 Yeats, W. B. 33, 39, 41

Taplin, Oliver 8, 54n56, 74, 141 Taxidou, O. 19n24

Zeitlin, Froma 154

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General Index aestheticization Benjamin on 17 Bentley on 24 and contemporary performance 5n7 discourses on 1, 2, 3 Eagleton on 3, 13, 76, 134, 136 Fugard on 91 Nietzsche on 18, 24, 133 9/11 9, 40–2 postmodernism and 3, 36, 76 poststructuralism and 134, 136 of reality 76, 133, 134, 136 and rewriting 61 Wallace on 54n56 Williams on 26 Agamemnon (Aeschylus) 45, 84n47, 138 Agamemnon (Berkoff ) 45, 46 Alcestis (Hughes) 10, 103–4, 111, 112–14, 128 ancient statues, as symbolic 78, 80, 162 Anglophone translations 106, 107, 122 Antigone (Anouilh) 94n105 Antigone (Brecht) 22, 105, 106 Antigone (Kennelly) 116 Antigone (Sophocles) 90–5, 96 Antigone, The Island (Fugard) 9, 78, 90–5, 96, 102, 123n90 anti-illusionism 22 Antikenproject I Berlin Schaubühne 134, 135 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari) 51 anti-semitism 57 antitheatre 74n6 APGRD conference 39n1 Apolline Armitage and 114 and cosmic disturbance 24 and metatheatre 74 Nietzsche on 30, 73, 124 postmodernism and 168 poststructuralism and 133, 134, 164 and ritual 124, 125–6 sparagmos 155, 157 Steiner and 15, 16, 28 and tragic hero 31, 32–5, 73, 125, 126, 133, 168

aristocratic view of tragedy 16, 26 artificiality, theatrical 9, 74, 83, 84 Atrides, Les (Mnouchkine) 54, 59n80 Author (Barthes) 10, 107, 108–12, 116, 129, 130 Bacchae, The (Euripides) 121–8 Dionysiac 15, 24, 29, 30, 124, 168 and metatragedy 73 and A Mouthful of Birds 10, 150–1, 153–5 and representation 78n20 ritualist interpretation 33 sparagmos and ōmophageia 134, 164, 166 Bacchae of Euripides, The: A Communion Rite (Soyinka) 10, 33, 34, 107, 121–8, 135, 162 Bakchen, Die (Grüber) 33, 34, 134–6, 140 Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche) 14–16, 21, 73, 124 blood and contamination 9, 53, 57, 61, 63 boundaries, blurring of 74, 83, 91, 104, 105, 129, 154 bourgeois drama 20, 23, 24 Cambridge Ritualists 32 catharsis 21 Choephoroi 56 chorus Furies 58, 59 and gender 69, 70, 146, 147, 148, 149 interventions 22, 46 as spectators 71 Christianity and Marxism 28, 29 Soyinka and 121, 123, 124 and tragedy 16, 81 cinema adaptations 76n17 classical reception 5, 7, 11 collective experience and author 111, 129, 169 language and 16 tragedy as response to 8, 9, 15, 25, 27, 31, 120, 128 colonialism 90–5, 96, 121–8, 158

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192

General Index

conservative criticism 13, 15, 27 Cruel and Tender (Crimp) 9, 62–71 cultural materialism 2, 3, 8, 12, 20, 160, 167 dance 10, 139, 149, 150–6, 165 Darker Face of the Earth, The (Dove) 50n38 Darstellung 82 Death of Tragedy, The (Steiner) 15–17, 25 deception 58, 63–5 deconstructionism Churchill and 150 Derrida on 82 and evil-good binary 69 Gellrich on 25n45 Harrison and 145, 146 Müller and 157, 160, 163 Nuttall on 133n8 postmodernism and 114 psychoanalytical approach 51 sparagmos 166, 168 and rewriting 7, 139, 170 and textual fragments 132 dédoublement 23 defeatism 27, 102n127, 163 democracy 30, 35, 59, 60–1, 141 determinism 27, 36, 87, 100, 123 Deus e o diablo no Fausto de Goethe (God and Devil in Goethe’s Faust) (de Campos) 121n83 diachronic transformations 5n7, 10, 12, 27, 37, 50 Dianeira (Wertenbaker) 70n129 Dionysiac Armitage and 114 and cosmic disturbance 24 and metatheatre 74 Nietzsche on 30, 73, 124 postmodernism and 168 poststructuralism and 133, 134, 164 and ritual 124, 125–6 sparagmos 155, 157 Steiner and 15, 16, 28 and tragic hero 31, 32–5, 73, 125, 126, 133, 168 Dionysus 31, 32, 32n62, 33, 34, 34n75, 34n82, 35, 35n83, 73, 73n2, 85, 87n68, 88, 114, 123n88, 125, 126, 126n105, 133, 135, 153, 154, 168 Dionysus in 69 (Schechner) 33, 34, 87n68, 88, 135, 154–5

dismemberment 156, 158, 160–1 distanciation 22 duality 82, 89 écriture feminine 139, 150, 151, 152 Electra (Euripides) 83n40, 84 Electra (Sophocles) 83 Elektra (Iniesta) 137n18 empathy 20, 21–3, 43 Enlightenment 13, 15, 30, 98 Epic opera 21 Epic theatre 2, 20, 21, 22–3 essentialism 60, 150, 170n6 ethical ambiguity 68 Eumenides (Aeschylus) 9, 52–60 existentialism 95, 133n8 expressionism 19 fabulatore 97, 98 feminist approach The Bacchae 151, 152n68, 153 and dance 151, 156 Eumenides 58 Medea 10, 98–9, 101, 149, 160, 161 and poststructuralism 150 and psychoanalytical approach 50, 51 and translation 120 and Wertenbaker 144 see also Cixous filicide 60, 100–2, 113, 145, 159, 161, 165–6 Filottete (Martone) 137n16 fragmentation, textual 10, 33, 131–66 dancing 149, 150–6 polyphonic 139–49 somatization 134–9 synthetic 156, 157–63 French neoclassicism 16 Freudian interpretation 49–52 gender Cixous on 149–50 and essentialism 150 female oppression 10, 96, 97, 98–101, 115, 116–20 and political resistance 93, 160–1 psychoanalytical approach 50, 51 genre categories 164, 165 Gesamtkunstwerk 132 giullare 97, 98 Gods Are not to Blame, The (Rotimi) 50n38

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General Index Goldene Vliess, Das (Grillparzer) 159 Greek (Berkoff ) 8, 45–52 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 81 Hamletmaschine (Müller) 84n45 Herakles (MacLeish) 103 Herakles 5 (Müller) 103, 114n48 Herakles 13 (Müller) 138 historical materialism 14 HIV 9, 53, 57 I Voui (Roar) (Matesis) 9, 77, 78–81, 102 Ichneutai (Sophocles) 131, 142 idealization 42, 75 Iliad, The (Homer) 79 illusion 35, 73–4, 77–81, 85, 96, 98, 125 individual hero 15, 16, 18, 19 infanticide 10, 52, 59, 146, 148, 160 inscriptions 9, 10, 104, 105, 110 interdependence 27, 31 intertextuality 6, 53, 108, 110 Iph . . . (Teevan) 138 Iphigeneia at Aulis (Euripides) 138 Iraq War 62, 63, 65 Ireland 117 irrationality 15, 18, 36, 168 Kleinian interpretation 50, 52 Klytaimnistra? (Clytemnestra?) (Staïkos) 9, 77, 81, 82–9, 93, 96, 102 Labourers of Herakles, The (Harrison) 137, 141–3, 157n92, 165 Libation Bearers, The (Aeschylus) 84 Lives of the Great Poisoners (Churchill) 138, 150, 151 Living Quarters: After Hippolytus (Friel) and classical text 9 and metatheatre 77, 78, 81, 82, 86–9, 90, 102 logocentrism 82, 100, 108 Love of the Nightingale, The (Wertenbaker) 137, 143, 144 Lysistrata (Aristophanes) 96, 160n103 Machine infernale, La (Cocteau) 50n42 Madness of Heracles, The (Euripides) 66, 114n46, 138 Maids, The (Genet) 85 male author 10, 103, 111, 116 male hero 10, 111, 112–15, 119 Marxist approach

193

Brecht and 2, 23, 106 determinism 36 Eagleton on 28, 29 function of theatre 20 and progress 75 and Soyinka 123 and tragedy 16, 31 and Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 35 Williams on 26, 27 masks in tragedy 45, 76, 80, 83, 88, 89 matricide 51, 52, 59 Medea (Euripides) 10, 99, 144, 148, 159, 160, 165n129 Medea (Kennelly) 116, 118 Medea, La (Fo and Rame) 9, 77, 96–102 Medea: A Sex-War Opera (Harrison) 10, 137–9, 141, 144–9, 157, 164 Medea in Corinto (Mayr) 147 Medea: Stimmen (Wolf ) 146 Medeamaterial (Müller) 10, 138, 139, 156, 157–63, 165 Medeaspiel (Müller) 160 Médée (Charpentier and Corneille) 147 Médée (Cherubini) 147 Médée (Mayr) 147 Médée de Saint-Médard, La (Visdei) 138 media representation 40–2, 53n54 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 163 metaphysics 2, 17, 21, 60, 68, 82, 108 metatheatre 9, 74–7, 102 in Alcestis 114 in The Labourers of Herakles 142 in Mister Herakles 114, 115 and past 78–81 in Roar 78 self-referentiality 95 self-reflection 89 in La Ville parjure 55, 56 metatragedy 73, 78–81 mirror, symbolism of 57, 58 Mister Heracles (Armitage) 10, 103–4, 111–15 modernism 14–15, 24, 29–30, 32, 33, 167 Modern Tragedy (Williams) 26, 27 Molora (Farber) 43 moral parameters 18, 24, 101, 102 Mother Courage and her Children (Brecht) 23n37 mourning 11, 12, 19, 56, 166 Mouthful of Birds, A (Churchill) 10, 138, 139, 150–6, 161, 166

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/11/2016, SPi

194

General Index

Oedipal desire and capitalism 51 Oedipus (Berkoff) 52n47, 59 Oedipus (Greig) 120 Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles) 22, 70 Oedipus Tyrannus (Sophocles) 8, 45, 46, 47 Freudian interpretation 49, 50–1 Ogun mythology 123, 124, 125, 127 ōmophageia 10, 134, 166 opera 17n15, 20n26, 21, 144 see also Medea: A Sex-War Opera (Harrison) Oresteia (Aeschylus) 4, 43, 51, 58, 84, 138, 145 Orestes (Fugard) 90 Origin of German Tragic Drama, The (Benjamin) 14n4, 17–20 Otherness 15n7, 93, 95 Ovid, Metamorphoses 163

Philoktet (Müller) 106, 113 plague as metaphor 47–8, 59 play-within-the-play 9, 76–7, 142, 143 Poetics (Aristotle) 19, 32n63 polis 30, 34, 35, 59 polyphonic fragments 139, 140–9, 157 post-colonialism 50n38, 107, 117, 121, 122, 127, 162 post-feminist approach 58, 112 postmodernism 1–12 as aestheticization of reality 76 and art 36 Eagleton on 8, 13, 14, 15, 27, 29, 34, 36, 76, 132, 133, 134, 164, 167, 168 and the hero 114 irrationality in 36 and La Medea 98 Maffesoli on 13, 30–1 and representation 46, 77 poststructuralism Barthes and 108–9 and deconstructionism 157 Dionysiac elements 35, 128, 129–30 Eagleton on 2, 10 feminism 150 and modern rewriting 11, 116, 168 Müller and 160 and representation 82 Segal and 168 and textuality 6, 7, 9, 117 Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus) 135 psychoanalytical approach 49–51, 52 pure language (reine Sprache) (Benjamin) 108

paratextuality 121 patriarchy 99–100, 111–15, 155, 156 textual 10, 99, 111, 117, 120, 149, 152 performance 5–6 Dionysiac element and 33, 34 German 10 Greek 45 Grüber 134, 135, 136 and postmodernism 36 primacy of 82, 97 and ritualism 32, 33, 34 and Theatre of Cruelty 46 see also metatheatre performativity 41, 61, 99, 101 peripeteia 29 Persians, The (Sellars and Auletta) 43 Philoctetes (Sophocles) 96n113

racism 57 rationalism 15, 30 Ravenhill for Breakfast (Ravenhill) 69 recognition 37, 44, 170 repetition 81, 82–9, 90 in Antigone, The Island 95 in Cruel and Tender 65 and Dionysiac element 168 lament as 19n24 in metatheatre 102 resistance 5, 91–5, 96, 102, 106, 119 retribution 4, 15n8 ritualist approach 10, 31–5, 73, 123, 124–5, 134, 135 Roar, The(I Voui) (Matesis) 9, 77, 78–81, 102 Robben Island 90, 91, 92, 94

myth in Medeamaterial 159 and modernity 29 plurality of 148, 149 and tragedy 15 Myth of Sisyphus, The (Camus) 95, 123n90 neo- Nietzschean postmodernism 27 Nigeria 121–2 9/11 4, 9, 11, 39–44, 45, 62 Nom d’ Œdipe, Le: Chant du corps interdit (Cixous) 51n45 non-representational theatre 82, 89

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/11/2016, SPi

General Index Romanticism 16, 25n45 Royal Court Theatre 33 Sack of Miletus, The (Phrynichos) 142, 143 sacrifice 18, 19, 32, 46, 80, 125, 154 satyr drama 94, 131, 141–2 Seconda generazione, La (Martone) 137n16 Seferis, Giorgos 80 self-reflection 42, 76n17, 89 Shakespearean theatre 21, 22 Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat (Ravenhill) 69 Short Organum for the Theatre, A (Brecht) 21, 22 Sihanouk (Cixous) 53, 55 somatization 134–9, 151, 152, 156, 161, 166 South Africa 43, 90–5, 96 sparagmos Fischer-Lichte and 10, 134 gender and 151, 152, 154, 155, 161, 164 Grüber and 34, 136, 157 Müller and 166 Soyinka and 126, 127 Storm and 33 Wohl and 164 Sphinx 50 Stalinism 29 Stuff Happens (Hare) 62n94 Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Eagleton) 2–3, 9, 27–30 synthetic fragment 156, 157–63 Tegonni: An African Antigone (Osofisan) 93n100 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 62 Tereus (Sophocles) 137, 143 Text (Barthes) 107, 108–9, 111 textual hybridity 106, 109, 111, 117, 121, 128–9, 164 textuality and ownership 107, 108–11 Theaterwissenschaft 5n9

195

Théâtre du Soleil 53 theatre of reason 21 Theatre of the Absurd 94–5, 123n90 theatre-within- the-theatre 92, 142 theatrum mundi 76n14 theological references 67–8, 100, 106n13, 110, 113, 115, 128 Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, The (Harrison) 59n80, 131, 137, 141–2, 165 Tragedy of Aldo Moro, The (Fo) 96n113 tragic absence 89, 137, 150 translation and blurring of boundaries 104–5 as cannibalism 127 and cultural exchange 121–8 and gender 120 as rewriting 109–11 transubstantiation 127, 128 Trauerspiel (German baroque drama) 17, 18, 19 Trojan Women, The (Kennelly) 116–20, 128 Tutta casa, letto e chiesa (All Home, Bed, and Church) 96 ‘untragic hero’ 20 Ursprung (origin) 19 uxoricide 113 Verfremdungseffekt 22 Ville parjure, La, ou le réveil des Erinyes (The Perjured City, or the Awakening of the Furies) (Cixous) 9, 52–62 War on Terror 62, 69 Western theatre 75, 82 Women of Trachis, The (Sophocles) 9, 62, 63, 66, 68, 112, 149 Women of Troy (Ravenhill) 69 Work (Barthes) 7, 107 Works and Days (Hesiod) 69, 70 Yoruba mythology 121, 128