This week, it’s all too much for Diogenes. What with the trial at the Hague, the plagiarism of Claudine Gay and Neri Oxman, what with the attack on the Houthis and the Iowa Caucus – thoughts keep bouncing off thoughts and one essay after another hits the wall -- peters out.
What does Diogenes do when he’s in the middle of a shit storm? He retreats to the Theatre of Dionysus – to the tragedians who also lived in interesting times. He goes to Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides not for consolation, but for perspective. He opens a play – say, The Bacchae. He pulls out one of the lectures from his teaching days.
Right up front, Dionysus would like to credit Jean-Pierre Vernant whose ideas in the book, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece[i] have deeply influenced his thinking. The same for Simon Critchley, whose masterful Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us [ii], is all over this essay. Not to mention Nietzsche, Freud, and dear old Aristotle. It’s difficult to say where their ideas leave off and mine begin.
The function of Theatre
Start with the fact that, in Periclean Athens, attendance at the Festival of Dionysus was required of all citizens. The reason, in my view, wasn’t because of its function as entertainment, or religion for that matter, but because the drama was a necessary element of political discourse. Theatre served a socio-political function that the debates at the Pnyx could not. While political orators attempted to persuade by rhetoric related to current concerns, playwrights took that rhetoric, those concerns, and framed them in another way.
The characters the actors portrayed on stage were not contemporary, yet they were. They were not archetypes, yet they were. The stage was not meant to be a political forum nor a predictive crystal ball, yet it could be. What the theatre did was to place contemporary "debate" in another frame, at once removed from the here and now and very much in the here and now. Drama, by its nature, puts everything in the present. The actors perform here, in the Theatre of Dionysus; now on a fresh spring day in March or April 405 BCE.
Theatre emerged not only from religious ritual, and dithyrambic competition, but from the Agora -- the law courts that were the battlegrounds of sophistry. The principal characters in tragedy debate. They fling rhetoric at each other. And they do it in public, not just in front of the thousands of spectators in the theatron, but in front of a specific chorus written into the play. There is no such thing as private tragedy in Athenian tragedy or comedy. No Ibsen here.
The Space
Two features of the architecture are important. The first is that the orchestra -- the dancing ground of the chorus spatially connects, extends to the audience if you will, the conflicts of the principal actors. Second, the audience is positioned so that it is a distant observer, looking down on the drama from godlike perches. The Greek theatre was not a black box where the tiny emotions of the moment fill the room. They require huge vocalizations and gestures.
Below, in the rounded orchestra is the chorus – representing the polis, the community. The agon – the struggle above affects the society below as the chorus interrogates, celebrates, looks on helplessly, begs, laments, like an American community, say, in the wake of a mass shooting.
The Performances
Standing on elevated shoes (corthornoi), on the high proskenion, actors, with specific, masked personae -- portray powerful kings and heroes. The mask is key to the power of the actor.
The entire construction of the mask leads the actor towards a state of increased energy and presence, during which the actor senses the experience of a bodily and vocal expansion—a state of communication. In this way, the mask creates the necessary corporeal and mental conditions for the metamorphosis of the actor and it allows him (or her) to become a fractal of the common body of the chorus. The mask is a resonance chamber, a link in a chain of sound that starts with the actor and ends with the theatre space.
The tragic mask represents this state of mind and this is the state of mind the actor has to assume on stage. We define this state of body/mind as a state of kenosis (emptying, depletion) and the tragic mask as the mask of kenosis. The mask has no expression (though is by no means a neutral mask), but it is not a character mask either. The mask of kenosis has no physiognomic traits that make it possible for the audience to define the character of the stage figure through the appearance of the mask. The mask does not present on stage any fixed human types. Instead, its features correspond only to indications of sex, age, ethnic origins, social status and other dichotomies such as human or divine, living or dead[iii].
Crucially, however, the performers were not portraying contemporary persons. No actor played the role of Pericles, or Alcibiades, or Plato. The setting was never present day Athens. The action (except in Aeschylus’ Persians) was distanced in time and place -- Mycenae, Thebes, the Trojan War. the reign of Pentheus. This enabled Athenian citizens to reflect on current issues in a different way from the political arena. Rather than in the heat of present crisis, they could contextualize and clarify issues like power, warfare, suffering, family, and, most important, human choice in a way that engaged their imaginations, not just their immediate concerns.
When audiences suspend their disbelief, they enter a contrived actuality. They participate as observers, yes, but also as participants.
This is essential in civic discourse.
Right now, we are engaged in the horrific war in Gaza. In Euripides’ Trojan Women, we may also be engaged in the smoking ruins of Troy. We may know Gaza all the better for that. Here is Vanessa Redgrave playing Andromache as her child is taken by the conquering Greeks. Watch it.
Agon -- Struggle
From the beginning, plays resembled law courts. Theatre was always contentious, political. The Agora in Athens was a battleground. But so was the Theatre of Dionysus. Both places were filled with rhetoric, but in the latter, at least in the tragedies, nobody won.
The great tragedians do something sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists and even psychiatrists can't do. All these social "sciences" are descriptive. Theatre is mimetic. The actors engage each other as human beings caught in actual situations, not as theories, or dots on a chart, or pieces on a chess board.
They suffer.
And they argue! protagonist v antagonist! They lay out their thoughts, their passions, their flaws not as abstractions, but embodied in characters like Clytemnestra, like Oedipus, like Pentheus. These plays are not philosophical or political treatises. No Plato here. No Thucydides. You’re not thinking about it, or reading about it. You’re there and it’s happening.
In Euripides’ The Bacchae, Dionysus, God of Intoxication, God of Fluidity, God of Theatre confronts Pentheus, the powerful, rigid ruler of Thebes. Each rhetorically throws his entire being at the other. Who possesses the most power?
Then, suddenly, Dionysus entices Pentheus to reveal another part of his psyche. In order witness the women’s’ orgies, Dionysus tells Pentheus, he must disguise himself as a woman. In a stunning theatrical moment, the young King morphs into a drag queen. Rand Paul becomes Ru Paul.
Here is a link to excerpts from a production by Wole Soyinka.
Politics is about power -- but that power is embodied and embedded in character. Character is multifaceted, fluid and ultimately unknowable.
Drama is not an analysis of flaws. Rather, it sets one flawed character against another, and against his flawed self. Then the conflict thrusts the agon –struggle -- into the chorus and into the audience. That’s the point.
You can't say one side is right and the other wrong. That's not what tragedy does. It leaves the spectators with questions rather than conclusions.
Theatre is the proper vehicle for estranged discourse. The actors/characters are double. They are/are not the roles they portray. They are embodiments, bundles of breath and heartbeat. The performance itself is simultaneously artifice and reality. Antigone is real and an actress on the stage.. You cannot approach a living performance of Oedipus Rex the same way you might by reading about it in Aristotle’s Poetics.
So, what are we looking at, for example, with Biden’s recent decision to execute a murderer? Well, in a tragedy, there might be an imagined moment where the two collide and confront -- president and killer. Where we see flawed human beings that must live with (or kill with or die with) their actions. Both are right. Both are wrong. Both are killers. The chorus not only observes, it questions and reacts. At the end, we are left with suffering, which is the real rhetorical product of tragedy -- the lament.
Tragedies are not melodramas. Conflicts are not between the good guys and the bad guys.
Power
But they do offer a critique of power. Oedipus, for example, is the powerful King of Thebes. He is the smartest guy in the room. He has the best of intentions. He wants to end the plague. What's wrong with that?
Well, we know. And it's not as simplistic as hubris. It's the engendered blindness that affects anyone in power -- even Henry Kissinger. He is the plague he seeks to alleviate. Oedipus is right. Oedipus is wrong. King and exile. Father and brother. Husband and son. He chooses his own fate; His fate is chosen for him.
Clytemnestra is a mother. Clytemnestra is a queen. Clytemnestra is an adulteress. Clytemnestra is a butcher. She is locked in the vicious, cyclical DNA of the House of Atreus.
Unlike the hero of a melodrama, the tragic hero is the problem, not the solution. Inevitably, the subject of all tragedy is loss.
The Greeks had an idea that is always on stage: ethos and daimon. Ethos is the part of our life we can control: the decisions we make, the actions we engage in, our conscious choices. Daimon is the part of our lives we can't control: our birth, our family, our unconscious urges, our bodily diseases — our demons, Ethos + Daimon = fate.
Current Events
So, to look at what's happening in Georgia, Fani Lewis' daimon has led to ethical choices -- actions that affect the polis -- and that's the entire USA , not just the city of Atlanta.
Aristophanes may have had a different slant on Fani and Nathan. In his satires, they might have been named and mocked.
Comedy gives us another perspective. It lampoons the powerful and reminds us that they all have phalloi.
Dr. Strangelove is a brilliant Aristophanic comedy that presents our great leaders as being are more connected to their penises than their seed.
Need I say more?
So now?
In our current catastrophe, the ending of The Bacchai may apply. I sort of see Biden as the elderly Cadmus, founder of Thebes and father-in-law of Pentheus. Trump is Dionysus. Obama is Pentheus. The latter tried to rule from the cerebral cortex, trusting the rational exercise of power. Trump -- the Liberator -- came dancing in with his maenads -- and promised orgies of blood and semen.
Grab 'em by the pussy!
I am your Retribution.
Freud: Obama = super-ego; Trump = id.
Nietzche: Obama = Apollonian; Trump = Dionysian
Trump has shaken the polis to its foundations. So far, the chains of the justice system are not able to contain him. Cadmus/Biden is from another generation. His end is pathetic as he recognizes the severed head of his son -- a terrifying moment. The corpse has undergone ripped apart by the women. But, more terrifying, the final tearing apart – the sparagmos -- of Pentheus is also the sparagmos of Thebes. In the end, there is nothing left of the city.
But my analogy is frivolous — as wrong as it may be right.
AS I said before, the Bacchae, and other Greek tragedies don’t correspond to current events. They didn’t in 405 BCE. They don’t now. Tragedies don’t equate. they reveal.
Brilliant essay (excerpted in the Washington Post) by Professor Wendy Gan, whom I had the pleasure to teach many years ago. She still has Antigone on her mind—and in her dreams.
https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/antigone-in-hong-kong/
[i] Vernant, Jean-Pierre: Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece Zone Books, 1990
[ii] Critchley, Simon: Tragedy, The Greeks and Us. Pantheon, 2019
[iii] Thanos Vovolis and Giorgos Zamboulakis: The Acoustical Mask of Greek Tragedy. Didaskalia. https://www.didaskalia.net/issues/vol7no1/vovolis_zamboulakis.html - :~:text=The face is expressionless, in,as the mask of kenosis.
Brilliant! I never considered the Trial of Ideas framing. It's so present in our current cultural Catharsis .