How Greek Tragedy Works

A Guide for Directors, Dramaturges, and Playwrights

Brian Kulick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000291513
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

How Greek Tragedy Works is a journey through the hidden meanings and dual nature of Greek tragedy, drawing on its foremost dramatists to bring about a deeper understanding of how and why to engage with these enduring plays.

Brian Kulick dispels the trepidation that many readers feel with regard to classical texts by equipping them with ways in which they can unpack the hidden meanings of these plays. He focuses on three of the key texts of Greek theatre: Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Euripides' The Bacchae, and Sophocles' Electra, and uses them to tease out the core principles of the theatre-making and storytelling impulses. By encouraging us to read between the lines like this, he also enables us to read these and other Greek tragedies as artists' manifestos, equipping us not only to understand tragedy itself, but also to interpret what the great playwrights had to say about the nature of plays and drama.

This is an indispensable guide for anyone who finds themselves confronted with tackling the Greek classics, whether as a reader, scholar, student, or director.

PART I

Conversing with shadows

On the interpretation of ancient texts

1
RAISING THE DEAD; OR, THEATRE AS THANATOLOGY

Notes from the underground #2

I often think that those of us who work with classics are in the resurrection business, communing with shades and entreating them to come back with us to the above world. It is painstaking work. Our tools are neither chisel nor spade, but rather imagination and sympathy. So, how to begin? Where does one start? What preparation is necessary to ensure a meaningful encounter with these long lost ancestors of ours? Zbigniew Herbert, the great Polish poet, calls this process a delicate dialogue with the dead: “A careful listening for the voices of those that have left us, a touching of stones on which partially erased inscriptions of past fates are still discernible, a calling up of shades so they may feed on our compassion… .”¹ Herbert is onto something when he speaks of our encounter with the ancient Greeks as a conversation with shadows. They do indeed continue to haunt us, often within the penumbra of our language.

This sort of lexical reincarnation can be found at the dawn of the Greek language with the advent of the word sêma. Sêma can mean either sign or tomb, and therefore points to the fundamental intersection between these two concepts, which on the surface seem to have little in common with one another. How could two such dissimilar terms be equated? Well, each sign (word) entombs a certain meaning for all eternity; every time we encounter that specific sign, the interred meaning is brought back to life in the form of a phantasm (mental representation). In this respect language can be seen as a resurrection machine: entombing meanings in signs that when read or spoken, bring the spirit of their meaning back to life.

And so, philology can be thought of as a kind of thanatology; an ever so patient attempt to disinter these ancient meanings and associations from their contemporary lexical moorings.

It is usually at this juncture that a student of mine gently interrupts:

“But how – exactly?”

“ ‘How exactly’ what?” I ask back.

“Do we go about talking to the dead?” another says.

“That is the question.”

“But is there an answer?”

“Yes, but I’m not sure you’re going to like it.”

“Well?”

“It has to do with – ”

“Yes?”

“A god.”

“A god?”

“Yes.”

“Which one?”

“Hermes.”

“The one who ushered souls to Hades?”

“Yes, but all these Greek gods did double duty. In addition to being a guide to the underworld, Hermes was also the god who …?”

“Invented language for mortals.” proffers another student.

“It’s why his name becomes part of our modern-day word for hermeneutics.” says a second.

“This god loves the depths of things, whether that’s beneath the ground or in the roots of words.” I say, adding, “We need to follow in his fleet footsteps.”

“Where?”

“To the center of the text and ourselves.”

“Meaning?”

“That the journey to the center of a text is also a journey to the center of ourselves, which is also, very much, like a journey to the underworld. We need to start digging.”

“And when we ‘dig’ our way to this ‘center of ourselves,’ what are we supposed to find?”

“Our imagination.”

“And what does that do?”

“It helps us inhabit these ancient works.”

“But how?”

How indeed. This is the subject of much philosophical speculation. A whole host of thinkers from Plato, through Marsilio Ficino, all the way to the likes of Freud and Jung believed that a certain set of primordial meanings exist deep within our psyche. Henry Corbin, the philosopher turned Islamist, takes this thinking a step further by conceiving of a very distinct province within our imagination which he calls the imaginal. The job of Corbin’s imaginal realm is to take all the mythological, metaphysical, and mystical intimations we have and transform them into concrete and tangible images. Depending on one’s imaginal skill and tenacity, these images can go on to achieve the seeming solidity of an alternate objective reality.² To arrive at these transformative powers we need to follow the likes of Hermes as he transforms himself from Hermes-the-guide-to-the-underworld to Hermes-the-guide-to-the-underground-of-texts. The one informs the other. This slow historical transformation is, as I’ve said, instructive. It is a descent with a long and venerable history, both literal and figurative. It bespeaks a deep (no pun intended) intuition on the part of our ancestors. It is ultimately a journey that will eventually lead to Corbin’s imaginal realm where we can enter into a dialogue with the past; once there, we can visualize it, decipher it, and, if we’re lucky, bring a part of its potential meaning back to the light of day. And so, without further ado:

Downward ho! a brief history of going under

The ancient Greeks called it nekyia, the rite for persuading the dead to speak. The most famous literary example of this can be found in the eleventh song of the Odyssey. Here, Odysseus employs the directions of Circe to famously speak with Achilles and other residents of Hades. This becomes the basic template for many future journeys to the underworld. Aeneas will follow a similar path in the sixth book of the Aeneid.

These fantastical travels were not just reserved for poets, but also for early Greek philosophers. Heraclitus will speak of being lured by bathus (aka “the depths”), writing, “You could not find the ends of the soul though you traveled every way, so deep is its logos.” Other philosophers like Parmenides and Empedocles, ignored Heraclitus, and searched for the secrets of the soul through the ritual of katabasis. This is the practice of sustained incubation deep within the recesses of various caves. When you break this word in two, you have kata = down and basis = step; which is what these two philosophers did. Parmenides describes his own youthful ritual of katabasis in the prologue of his great poem on the nature of being. Empedocles also practiced this underground art in order to acquire a state of epopteia (“the beholding” of the most ancient wisdoms). Yulia Ustinova, in her Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind, believes that such “incubations” functioned as a form of sensory deprivation, where the human being is secluded from the external stimuli or “noise” of life. Once the mind is relieved of processing this continual stream of sensory input, it has the tendency to turn in on itself. The result of such a process, according to Ustinova, is “an intensive discharge of inner imagery” which changes the brain, not only experientially but also physiologically and biochemically, leading to altered states of consciousness.³ This demand for such otherworldly contact became a “big business” for late antiquity when, due to the volume of would-be-visitors, entire caves were converted into veritable cities of nekyomanteia. Here the general public could undertake their own katabasis, usually with some sort of guide or pyschopompós (psukhe = soul, pompos = conductor). Although these practices have long been abandoned, they have left a significant trace in the way we conceive of meaning as having a certain depth that must be plumbed in order to lead to any sort of deep understanding. Even in this last phrase, “deep understanding,” we can see the trace of this ancient desire still at work in our everyday language. Meaning is not just hidden in our imaginations but buried and in need of further textual excavation.

Nowadays when we think of interpreting an ancient text, we tend to think of it like a kind of textual archeology. The discovery of multiple meanings in the text is similar to the experience of the modern traveler who, while visiting the excavations of Troy, discovers the fact that there were seven Troys that lay one on top of another. When we encounter a classic text, we are often moving through strata after strata of previous meanings and interpretations. Freud was a great fan of Henry Schliemann, the amateur archeologist who discovered Troy. The father of psychoanalysis fancied himself an archeologist of the mind with his conception of the unconscious as something buried deep within us, ever in need of psychic excavation. Freud will write to his colleague Wilhelm Fliess about an early patient that, “Buried deep beneath all his fantasies, we found a scene from his primal period … in which all the remaining puzzles converge … I scarcely dare believe it yet. It is as if Schliemann had once more excavated Troy, which had hitherto been deemed a fable.”⁴ And later, in penning the case study on his famous patient Dora, Freud compares himself to a conscientious archaeologist, “… I had no choice but to follow the example of those discoverers whose good fortune it is to bring to the light of day after their long burial the priceless though mutilated relics of antiquity… .”⁵ Out of such thought would grow Eugen Bleuler’s concept of Tiefenpsychologie, which we translate as depth psychology. This brings us to the doorstep of Carl Jung’s rather vague notions of the “collective unconscious” and “archetypal thinking.” It is through the help of Jung that the thinker Henry Corbin emerges with a significantly more rigorous (and far more evocative) notion of the functions of what he believes to be a very archaic region/faculty of humankind’s imagination. What he calls:

The realm of the imaginal

This is a relatively modern conceptual paradigm that Corbin begins to articulate in the late 1940s. It is built on the foundation of ancient Greek and Arab theories of phantasia, a word which is often translated as “mental representation” or “image.” Aristotle tells us in De Anima (3.7–8) “the soul never thinks without phantasmata.” He goes on to designate three types of resulting interior activity: phantastikon (the forming of mental representations), dianoêtikon (forming of opinions from these mental representations), and mnêmoneutikon (the storing and recalling of these mental representations). Zeno, the Stoic, speaks of human...