Tragic Bodies

Edges of the Human in Greek Drama

Nancy Worman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350124370
• eBook ISBN: 9781350124387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Drama
• Index: Literature

Winner of the PROSE Award (2022) for Classics This book argues for a new way of reading tragedy that attends to how bodies in the ancient plays pivot between subject and object, person and thing, living and dead, and so serve as vehicles for confronting the edges of the human. At the same time, it explores the ways in which Greek tragedy pulls up close to human bodies, examining their physical edges, their surfaces and parts, their coverings or nakedness, and their postures and orientations. Drawing on and advancing the latest interplays of posthumanism and materialism in relation to classical literature, Nancy Worman shows how this tragic enactment may seem to emphasize the human body, but in effect does something quite different. Greek drama instead often treats the body as a thing that has the status and implications associated with other objects, such as a cloak, an urn, or a toy for a dog. Tragic Bodies urges attention to key scenes in Greek tragedy that foreground bodily identifiers as semiotic materializing. This occurs when signs with weighty symbolic resonance distil out on the dramatic stage as concrete sites for contention and conflation orchestrated through proximity, contact, and sensory dynamics. Reading the dramatic script in this way pursues the felt knowledge at the body's edges that tragic representation affords, a consideration attuned to how bodies register at tragedy's unique intersections – where directive and figurative language combine to highlight visual, tactile, and aural details.

CHAPTER 1

TOUCHING OEDIPUS: PROXIMITIES, CONTACT, AND AFFECTIVE INTIMACIES

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The tragic and sublime fate of Oedipus sums up and displaces the mythical defilement that situates impurity on the untouchable “other side” constituted by the other sex, within the corporeal border—the thin sheet of desire…

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

This study begins close in to the body, with a consideration of the ways in which proximity, touch, and affective dynamics are envisioned on the tragic stage and an ultimate focus on Sophocles’ Oedipus. I use the term “envisioned” purposefully, since the genre dictates that touch—alone among the other senses typically represented, which chiefly include sight and hearing but largely exclude smell and taste—remains just that: directly presented to the eye and witnessed as an object of vision or described and offered only to the mind’s eye. It is thus the one represented sense in which the audience cannot participate directly, at least in its most fully haptic form, that is, as touch rather than resonance, sense memory, or multi-sensory experience. And yet, as Alex Purves has noted, touch is also the most embodied and essential of the senses.¹ As such it serves as a primary analogy for sense experience more generally, as well as undergirding both early ancient theories of sense perception and contemporary arguments about the types of embodied knowledge that interactions among the senses and sense memories afford.² Orchestrations of tragic scenes often suggest such interactions and thus seem to encourage an embodied knowing in the audience, a recognition and “feeling with” that is culturally shaped and determined.³ This type of experience, which has led contemporary theorists of aesthetics and affect such as the film theorist Vivian Sobchack to treat spectatorship as an “address of the eye,” draws upon shared bodily consciousness. A sensory awareness catalyzed by viewing fosters a sense of lived inhabitation as “mine” but also capable of extension from the body doing the watching to those depicted and back again.⁴

As I note in the Prologue, in the past theorists of tragic effect often privileged viewing and spectacle when analyzing what constitutes its distinctive aesthetics, although in recent years a growing number of scholars have supplemented this focus by attending to sound, movement, and touch.⁵ Touch on the dramatic stage is an effect of sight—that is, internal and external audiences view it, rather than feeling it on their own skins. And yet since touch depends on proximities between bodies, it models the sharing of physical spaces and sensations, as well as activating awareness of how affect circulates among those engaging with each other in this way.⁶

One of the most notable aspects of this “group experience” is just how male-centered and -generated it is. Given the remarkable preponderance of powerful female characters in tragedy, it may seem strange that extant plays do not focus for the most part on female bodies in pain.⁷ Some of the tragedies show more concern with male suffering, as is especially the case with those of Sophocles, while others appear more interested in female characters’ emotional distress, which is especially true of those of Euripides. This emotional agony sometimes arises in relation to the heroes and/or family members they mourn, but only one or two dramas stage the physical pain of females: Io in Aeschylus’ (or Ps.-Aeschylus’) Prometheus Bound and perhaps Phaedra in Euripides’ Hippolytus. Even if we consider as well the unusual and pain-free death onstage of Alcestis in Euripides’ play of that name and the terrible demise of the Corinthian princess in the messenger speech of Medea, this remains a tiny fraction of bodies depicted in physical anguish in the extant plays. Why should this be?

From one angle it seems that female bodies are effectively domesticated in tragic representation, meaning that they and their various sensations and sufferings are treated as appropriately more cordoned off from public viewing. It is also the case that familial, mysterious, or hidden emotional distress is more conventionally associated with female characters, while male characters—including the one who is also divine—suffer such psychic anguish in the open, largely as a result of wounds to reputation or body. Compare, for instance, the agonies of Prometheus, Ajax, or Hippolytus versus the sorrows of Atossa, Deianeira, or Alcestis. While this insight, if such it is, is too schematic and polarizing to capture properly the subtleties of tragic representation—as, for instance, we may recognize Clytemnestra, Medea, and Electra as insistently public and murderous, while Cassandra, Antigone, and Phaedra (among others) expose their pain on stage—it has the dubious merit of conforming to fifth-century gender prejudices.

An additional complication is the fact that tragedies do depict in abundance the physical effects of emotional distress, as these are played out on bodies, especially on the surfaces of female bodies as their flesh and skin bear the marks of the wearing, scoring, and melting that come with grief. Other chapters examine in detail sorrow’s ravages, while this one centers on more directly physical sources of pain: the eating of male (and occasionally female) flesh by venom, poison, or madness and its piercing by sharp objects. The scenes that display such effects highlight with terrible specificity what has happened and is still happening to these bodies in pain, as if encouraging with this intimate catalog shared bodily sensations and affective responses.

Again, among the canonical tragedies the few extant plays of Sophocles stand out for the consistency with which they center on the male body in physical pain, while Euripides’ tend to focus more on emotional distress, especially of female characters. The few remaining dramas of Aeschylus suggest some interest in various types of mania and the extremities of fear and sorrow, but none of these results directly in physical agony (e.g., Cassandra, Orestes, Xerxes, the Danaids). The only play, and this one only perhaps by Aeschylus, that centers on extreme torture is the one that also sets the limit for it as tragic spectacle. This is Prometheus Bound, in which the anguished god is permanently pinned to a rock at the edge of the world (and center stage) and exchanges information with Io, a more fleeting but nonetheless quite distinctive enactment of female pain onstage. While I take up this play and a few of Euripides in the next sections, the chapter focuses for the most part of Sophocles’ sustained interest in reacting to and handling male human suffering.

1. Sensing Bodies

In this chapter I focus on viewing the body in pain and touch in relation to pain’s representation, as well as its affective impact on characters and audience. My discussion thus inflects arguments in favor of sensuous, embodied ways of knowing with a focus on one of the more nebulous aspects of perceptual experience, as Elaine Scarry has explored in detail.⁸ In Sophoclean tragedy especially, this sense of proximity is often more horrifying than otherwise, as heroes in pain are usually tainted by their deeds and suffering for them, sometimes to disgusting effect, as with Oedipus’ gouged-out eyes. Such figures serve as still center points that radiate sensorily and affectively outward by means of significantly embodied prostheses: think of Ajax pierced on his enemy’s sword, Philoctetes’ residue of stinking rags, the poisonous cloak that unhinges Heracles’ joints and flesh. This is the type of sensory horror Kristeva dwells on when discussing the abject, emphasizin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Skin to Skin in Greek Tragedy
• 1 Touching Oedipus: Proximities, Contact, and Affective Intimacies
• 2 The Sibling Hand: Manual Erotics and Violence
• 3 Familial Coverings: Skin, Cloaks, and Other Outerwear
• 4 Strange Containers: Bodies and Other Tragic Vessels
• 5 Bodily Alterations: Undress, Prosthesis, and Assemblage
• 6 Mysterious Objects: Corpses, Ghosts, Statues
• Final Scenes: Beyond the Human
• Bibliography
• Index Locorum
• General Index
• Copyright