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Overview
The notion of tragedy's migration from one genre to others indicates, however, rather sweeping modifications in the theory of tragedy. Achilles' Choice proposes a structural model for tragic criticism that synthesizes the almost scientific theories predominant since World War II with the irrationalist theories they replaced.
Originally published in 1975.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691644844 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Essays in Literature , #1414 |
| Pages: | 194 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.70(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Achilles' Choice
Examples of Modern Tragedy
By David Lenson
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1975 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06292-1
CHAPTER 1
Paradoxes of Tragedy
For my mother Thetis the goddess of the silver feet tells me /I carry two sorts of destiny toward the day of my death. Either, / if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans, / my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting; / but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers, / the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life / left for me, and my end in death will not come to me quickly.
(Iliad, trans. Lattimore, ix, 410f.)
Achilles' choice is the archetype of the decision faced by every tragic hero. In the City Dionysia of Athens it is built into the very construction of the theatre. Down below, the chorus performs its odes and dances, collective and nameless, while above them on the stage declaim the masks of ancient heroes, unending names. The heroes act; the song re-acts to them, just as long ago the ancestors of those singers might have passed from lip to lip a recent rumor from Troy. The polarity is expressed in every possible way: spatially, linguistically, ethically, religiously, temporally. Every unified vision of life is shattered.
Greek culture is always prone to the universal, not the unified. The only way to express the fullness of existence is to articulate the extremes, and this is what they do. Every member of the audience feels the dichotomy personally. Greece is, after all, at once the self-proclaimed, self-contained zenith of civilization, and at the same time a trading, exploring, colonizing power at arms. Accordingly, a man could be a farmer, living anonymously close to the seasons and the land, or he could be a soldier, seeking in the emptiness between small outposts a dream of glory, and a name. It is, in short, the dialectic between Ithaka and Ilion, between the Odyssey with its centripetal motion towards love and home, and the Iliad with its centrifugal reach into Asia Minor, into wrath. The Iliad is full of names. But Greece and Greek tragedy are the sum of both.
This kind of cultural immediacy seems distant to us now when we think of tragedy. Overheard on the street or from a radio, the word evokes the reaction, "Who died?" rather than, "In which theatre?" Only the very old or very evil escape it in their eulogies. It maintains a sense of sudden or undeserved catastrophe, or particularly public misfortune. Its association with a feeling of necessity makes it useful for relieving the living of their guilt and responsibility. Yet for all this if a writer chooses to label a literary work a tragedy, he still encounters an active convention against which his work will be judged in one way or another. Somehow a set of critical norms defines a tradition. The educated man who sneers at the common use of the word must have some more elevated notion in mind, yet if pressed on the matter he will probably be at a loss. In truth there is no coherent definition or even description of tragic art which has any wide subscription today. There is no single indispensable work on the subject, and no one writer who is universally acknowledged as the rightful heir of the tradition.
The two norms most often agreed upon are, unfortunately, useless and misleading. The first of these is generic, the assertion that tragedy is a type of drama. This thesis arose, not surprisingly, during those periods when tragedy was indeed flourishing on the stage. When it was not, during the Middle Ages for example, it was envisioned as a pattern of action, in Chaucer a kind of recapitulation of Boethian Fortune with its rise and fall. So too in the twentieth century, when drama is not the central genre, tragedy is frequently considered a philosophical system, or "sub-philosophy," as Unamuno calls it. In addition, we have lived through a century and a half during which the impulse to tragedy exceeded the dramaturgical skills of the best authors. Byron, Shelley, Browning, Mallarme, and James were failed playwrights who came, in time, to apply their understanding of tragic action to genres in which they were more talented. Novels and even lyric poems were written that attempted to recreate certain elements of Greek and Shakespearean plays.
It is a general rule that from the beginning tragedy tended to gravitate toward the literary and social centers of the times. It was so long allied with drama mainly because drama was the genre that satisfied this need. More practical factors, such as the desire of authors for economic survival, certainly enter into the picture. It should not be surprising to observe that tragedy followed the changes in generic predominance that took place during the eighteenth century, when drama was on the decline and the lyric and novel in the ascendant. To neglect the application of centuries of criticism simply to protect a preconceived idea of genre is clearly wrong, particularly since that critical strain has long been part of the mainstream of literary thought. Furthermore, there has been, as I hope to show, a particularly productive interchange between critics and practitioners during the last hundred and fifty years, and this interchange is not nullified by the fact that the critics were usually writing about the drama while the practitioners were engaged in other genres.
This false generic norm has long impeded wide understanding of the nature of tragedy. But it is overshadowed by the second false norm, one which involves much more complex and difficult issues. This is the idea that tragedy must have an unhappy ending, and that closing disaster is the earmark of the tradition. The Oresteia ought to have shattered this notion from the very start, yet it persists largely because of Shakespeare, Racine, and their successors, with their terminal bloodbaths. But consider the Oresteia. It shares with catastrophic tragedies a fundamental sense of extremes, a collision of forces which, as Hegel indicated, are as right as they are contradictory. In the clash of right and right, there are only two possibilities: either one or both of the forces will be destroyed, or else the world must be substantially altered to comprehend both. The Oresteia, and one might nearly say only the Oresteia, presents the latter possibility. Here the heroic, active world of Orestes, Apollo, and Athena is successfully reconciled with the revenging, re-active world of the Furies. The world is made whole. This seems like an act of the strongest optimism, yet to describe it as such does it little justice. In the first place, it devalues the price paid in blood for the closing unanimity. The scream of Cassandra is not silenced by the final processional, nor does it seem unimportant by comparison, but rather that suffering, and the suffering of Agamemnon, Orestes, and Clytemnestra, keeps the conclusion from an ex machina facility. So too, tragedies with disastrous endings are just as optimistic as the Oresteia, and the Oresteia is equipped with just as complete a pessimism as theirs. Tragedy depends upon a balance between these poles. We might call this element "compensation," a phenomenon by which every misfortune has a positive by-product, and by which every triumph is paid for in full with suffering. A hero dies; but this means that a hero has lived. A contradiction is reconciled; and we count the dead.
Most tragedies, then, are dramas with unhappy endings. But to see this generalization as central or normative to the nature of the problem is self-destructive, particularly in the study of tragedy since 1800. The generic assertion is damaging since it disallows an empirical recognition of change, and the assertion about endings causes a distortion in critical emphasis. In fact, it is curiously true that almost any simple claim made for tragedy as a whole leads to similar misunderstandings and misplaced emphases. For every aspect of the problem that we expect to yield a norm, we find another paradox, until we begin to suspect that paradox itself is the only norm. What becomes important, then, is not the fact of paradox so much as the places in which it is found. To a great extent the definition of the tragic tradition depends upon this realization.
Consider, for example, the question of tragic language. We read Aristotle's discussion of the element of "thought" as if it were a unified proposition. But it is not so. Tragedy from its origins possesses a language divided against itself, a fusion of choric, collective utterance and the more uniform, individual meters of the epic tradition. The first actor, a development from choric verse said to have taken place in the sixth century in the plays of Thespis, apparently did not use the same language as did the chorus from which he arose. He spoke in iambic trimeter, or an ancestor thereof, while the chorus ordered its songs according to strophe, antistrophe, and epode rather than according to any metric line in particular. When we read of the physical change involved in the advent of this first actor, we are also considering an evolving dichotomy of speech. The character who individuates himself must function as a focal point, a narrator of a singular and unique series of events, distinguishing himself from the cyclic relationships of man to god and earth with which the chorus is concerned. By the time of the Eumenides, the dialectic of speech had flowered into contrasting modes of life and thought. They are related to the poles of Achilles' choice: Should one live briefly as a completely defined individual? Or should one only endure in the timeless anonymity in which life, love, and death are passed as burdens from generation to generation — but in which even such burdens are a cause for exhilaration?
The paradoxes of the tragic tradition always radiate in this way. The apparently ethical and social fusion that takes place at the end of the Oresteia is also a prophecy about language: that the diction of the stage shall be eternally wedded to the diction of the chorus, that dance and song will not exist in this tradition without rhetoric. Still, the fusion leaves a vast flexibility. Stage language may be as honest as Orestes, as just as Athena, as manipulative as Apollo. Choric language, without the burden of action upon it, need not be forever public as must the speech of a god who cannot escape the strong light that falls ceaselessly across his mask. It can collectivize private reaction, paradoxically, into a thing as public as mass song.
Certain of these paradoxes, of course, seem to have only a historical validity. Why, for example, did the chorus vanish from the stage? Perhaps, as man becomes more sophisticated, he demands increasingly indirect statements of truth. Although we may feel as vigorously involved in the world and its variety as we did in adolescence, we no longer read the authors who once spoke so well to early appetite. On the one hand, this is a sign of maturation in our tastes, but on the other hand it is a symptom of a jaded sensibility. The clarity and simplicity of construction in Greek theatre, with the chorus in the foreground and the actors rising singly above and behind them, may have come to express too much at once, too much religion, too much politics, ethics, aesthetics, linguistics, and emotion too directly. Like a metaphor heard too often, its justice may have waned into cliche. Without it, however, it is hard to see what continuity the Elizabethans could have seen between their serious drama and that of the Greeks. One can of course cite the study of Seneca in the schools, and the publication of university translations of Roman drama. But is there a deeper, more meaningful affinity?
For the Elizabethans, this is Achilles' choice:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them.
This is the premise in a number of Shakespeare's plays. Lear, seeking to retreat from the public light into the choric namelessness of his retainers; Hamlet, trapped between his songlike language and his sword; Macbeth, taunted by a witch-chorus into leaving a life of service for a dream of action, a hallucinated dagger. Now the choric impulse is released through other outlets: the comic scenes, with their anonymous, type-named characters, where the language of the masses is spoken, and where songs arc sung. In the speech of the actors also, there are soliloquies which, as in classical choruses, stop the forward motion of events. Now it is the hero showing his reflective side; now it is no longer a structural metaphor of the theatre, but the brute fact of the disunity in every man. Where the Greeks' disjuncture could once, at least, be assembled into a processional of hope, now the contradiction is half joined, half sundered, like the co-existence of spirit and animal in the same form of man. Push and pull as they may, the two poles can never again be pure. For every assertion will come the inevitable and equal reaction of the other. The language of the streets meets the language of the courts on a single stage, and all strata of London society sit in hierarchical sections of the same house. Yet, this theatre fosters no Aeschylean feeling of national unity. It is a place more than slightly immoral to frequent, a place one forbids women to enter, a place that the church dream of spiritual sovereignty cannot endure.
"Drama flourishes best in the center of the life of its time," wrote Francis Fergusson, and this is hardly the simple statement it may seem at first glance. What becomes of the tragic tradition when it becomes the property of court society exclusively, even in a situation where the court is the center of the life of its time? Characters in Corneille and Racine describe their passions in magnificent language. But that act itself, the enumeration of feelings like the symptoms of a disease, belies the veracity of their existence. If I am capable of analyzing my overwhelming passion, then I am not truly overwhelmed. For French Classical tragedy, reason is too often the index of the irrational, emotion is seen as an admirable but guilty departure from the norms of logical behavior. Hence there is not only no chorus, there is nothing that assumes its function. The interest in "higher" mental operations is coincident with the limitation of social interest to a tiny elite. From this follows a complete formalization into acts, until every plot is fundamentally the same. The definition of catastrophe is broadened to include not only traditional forms of death and blinding, but also in Le Cid, the act of entering a cloister.
The continuation of the tension between chorus and stage depends upon universal accessibility to the work of art. Only a potentially scoffing proletariat will prevent the preening of the aristocracy and the abstract talk of reason. Yet, say what we may, drama during the last hundred and fifty years has moved even further from "the center of the life of its time." Instead of forging a new style, it has generally modelled itself on Athens, London, or Paris of the great periods. This is certainly true of Romantic drama, with Schiller interested mainly in Shakespeare, Byron in Marlowe, and Shelley in Aeschylus. Now poetry and the novel are closer to the center than drama, and all intent of performance disappears from works such as Faust, Manfred, and Prometheus Unbound. These works, remote descendants of Samson Agonistes, mark the end of the alliance between tragedy and the stage, and if tragedy has a theatre thereafter, it is often the theatre of a single mind confronting the work of art in privacy.
But this does not mean that the choric element disappears. Interestingly enough, there is always an equivalent tension of language in works that owe large debts to the tragic tradition. When Kleist, Melville, or Faulkner uses a strange syntax, it is sometimes an echo of something old and dark and oracular. As long as the work of art remains verbal, there can be a choric counterpart, a rebirth of the paradox. This affirms the importance of words to tragedy, and ought to be enough refutation for those who feel that tragedy has broken free of literature and now circulates freely as "the Tragic." For only words can give form to the choice of Achilles and all its emotional concomitants. Tragedy can take place only in literary worlds, since its language must be regarded as more than a tool for communication. There is, in brief, no tragedy without poetry of one kind or another. This is an example — and only one example — of a genuine tragic norm.
Criticism of tragedy needs to make a compromise between a purely historical and purely formalistic understanding of the tradition. One may interject at this point that Hegel has already accomplished this, or that Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy has provided the necessary tools. Yet it is curiously true that there exists an overriding dialectic between these two dialecticians. Hegel is ultimately rational, so that his analysis of tragedy is dependent largely on the action as it is played by stage-figures in classical drama. The famous critique of the Antigone is really a highly sophisticated examination of the relationship of named characters as abstract ethical absolutes, confronting each other on the surface of the action, the plot. Nietzsche, on the other hand, assigns the dialectical tension to the opposition of stage-figures and chorus, a contrast of larger modes which makes the antagonism of the characters seem superficial by comparison. Hegel's method depends on linear and temporal factors, like a syllogism; but Nietzsche's is atemporal since the relationship of chorus and characters is the same at any moment of the play, and is fixed that way by the very origins, by the birth of tragedy itself.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Achilles' Choice by David Lenson. Copyright © 1975 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Prefatory Note, pg. vii
- Table of Contents, pg. xi
- 1. Paradoxes of Tragedy, pg. 1
- 2. Case of Migration through Genres, pg. 24
- 3. Tragedy in Prose Fiction: Moby-Dick, pg. 40
- 4. Toward Lyric Tragedy: W. B. Yeats, pg. 65
- 5. Classical Analogy: Giraudoux versus Faulkner, pg. 98
- 6. Choric Equivalents in Modern Drama, pg. 117
- 7. The Other Tragedy, pg. 137
- 8. Afterword, pg. 159
- Bibliography of Works on Tragedy, pg. 173
- Index, pg. 175