Goat Song: The TragiBlog

Goatiness Redux

Life is just one damned thing after another. I have just had the pleasing idea that Tragoidia is not “goat-song” but “songs of lamentation” shot from my hands by Nick Lowe, classicist, narratologist and technology connoisseur. “Can't be,” he points out mildly, “because that's just not how words were formed. Give me another example. Just one. Go on. You can't.” And nor can I. Which reluctantly leads me to reconsider the damned goat...

...

...

...nope. The goat simply will not do, despite the good authority of Dr Lowe. (And what's bad authority, given that authority is itself strictly neutral, describing a power relationship rather than a moral quality? What's the difference in authorities addressed by tragedy on the one hand, comedy on the other?)

Blogs, Pepys and Me, Me, Me

Anyone who happens to find themselves in Cambridge and at a loose end on Saturday 17th is welcome to a public discussion I'm chairing on blogs, diaries, Pepys, Big Brother and so forth -- the exaltation of the self and who the hell do they (we?) think we're writing for?

5:15 pm in Benson Hall at Magdalene College. Speakers to include the ever-glamorous Rowan Pelling, who is NOT Belle du Jour no matter what anyone says; the distinguished and witty Laurie Taylor; blogger extraordinaire Tim Worstall (also, curiously, the world's leading scandium dealer); and me. Drinks by courtesy of Magdalene and the Year In Literature festival sponsors. It'll be a blast.

Details here.

Here's Your Money. Now Sit Down - or, the Theoric Fund Revisited

When they built the new theatre, the Athenians levied an admission charge of two obols, equivalent to a working man’s daily wage. A kitty -- the Theoric Fund -- was established to defray that admission charge, initially (it appears) to enable those who were hard up to come to the theatre, later (it seems) extended, under the argument of fair play, to anyone who wanted it. The fund was hypothecated, and it was illegal even to suggest diverting the money to other purposes. Why do you think tragedy (and, of course, the comedy that rounded off the 5-day Dionysia) was so important to the Athenian polity? And how does that differ — if it does differ — from our own subsidised theatre?

Banality Redux

While the course of a tragedy can more often than not be pretty rococo, its resolution is almost invariably banal (discuss). Does the banality have to have a minatory complexion (some sort of exile, preferably death, or, alternatively, an endless retribution -- as in Faustus or even Sisyphus’s rock or Prometheus’s liver)? Or can we imagine a tragic trajectory leading, yes, to a banal but almost comical resolution? Imagine, for example, a tragic protagonist who, at the end, is condemned for all eternity to be... Father Christmas. (You might ask yourself whether the Ahasverus/Wandering Jew myth is a tragedy-in-miniature, even though the order of dramatic events is jumbled: hubris, then nemesis, and finally — slowly-dawning — peripeteia.)

Peripeteia

The word derives from peri, around, and piptein, to fall. Literally, the point at which everything begins to fall around (the protagonist’s ears). Usually it’s read as the sudden reversal of fortune in the tragic trajectory. Reading tragedy as the controlled play of ironies, you might find it more illuminating to think of peripeteia as the moment of the protagonist’s awareness of the falling-apart, the reversal of fortune, the obvious and inescapable understanding that the jig is up and its being too late (or is it?) to alter the course which will lead to disaster.
Think about the way in which we are bound up with our “fortune”: is it something imposed on us from outside (for example by the mediaeval topos of the Wheel of Fortune) in the face of which we are helpless? Is it something that we can court, evade or alter (how valid is the Appointment in Samarra scenario here: you can run but you can’t hide)? Or is our fortune something which we make and remake at every fork in the road (e.g. Oedipus) or throw of the dice?
Furthermore... if much of tragedy is concerned with the play of ironies, how important is it for the affective response that the audience sees the jig’s up before the protagonist does? (Think, perhaps, of Waiting for Godot: we can see that Godot is a no-show long before the protagonists... or can we?) In other words: is peripeteia a device which demands receptive irony: not the irony in which I say one thing but mean another, but the irony in which I enact something which means one thing within the diegesis and another to the spectators (“dramatic irony”, that feeble and overused term, won't serve here).
And where do we then locate anagnorisis? Aristotle seems to suggest that reversal and recognition should in the “best tragedies” happen simultaneously, and specifically cites the Oedipus. But surely in Oedipus Tyrannos we (the audience) catch on long before Oedipus does (even excluding the prior knowledge which – we assume – the original audience brought to the theatre).

Redemption and Tragedy

Without the final element of resurrection, would the Christian proto-narrative be a tragedy? What rôle does the redemptive “moral” of the story play? Can a tragedy end in either triumph or a general (or indeed specific) redemption? Is the arguably crucial element of peripeteia present? If it is present, where is it located? You might think, also, whether a Muslim (who regards the Christian mythos as a true account of a prophet, but disregards the claims of Christ's divinity) would consider the story a tragedy.

Re-visiting tragedy...

In their original productions at the Great Dionysia in C5 BC, the tragedies of e.g. Aeschylus, Sophocles & Euripides were given for just one performance each. The gaze (of the audience) was intense but circumscribed in time and space. Now we pore over, dissect, analyse and repeatedly revisit tragedy, both in text and performance. The notion of tragedies — or indeed any performances — as epameroi is foreign to us. What might the consequences of that be for our understanding?

What Is It About Actors?

Here's an experiment. Get the Sunday papers; not just the red-tops or the fear-and-loathing Mail on Sunday, but the whole lot. Go through them carefully and count up the number of “stories” about actors. Then try to decide what the hell that tells us about our culture.

And consider whether it sheds any light on earlier societies' apparently disproportionate interest in The Drama. (I won't mention Athens. See; I didn't mention Athens.)

You might like to think about “realism”, mimesis, the ability convincingly to dissemble, the fragmentation of personal identity, the calculated irony of postmodern utterance, or just the general weirdness of it all.

The Right Summons For The Job

On the question of dikê and hybris it might be useful to bear in mind the “prototypic” meaning of the former as “custom” or “right way of doing things”, and the latter as “wanton violence” or “insolence”. Continuing to work our way through Liddle & Scott [1] we find that hubris in the sense of lewdness is set opposite sophrosûne; that in Pindar it comes to mean an “outrage against the person” or a “violation”; and, finally, that

in attic law, hubris comprehended all the more serious injuries done to the person, grievous assault, the slighter kind being aikia . . . hence hubris was remedied by public indictment graphê, aikia by private action dikê.

And if that doesn't thoroughly complicate matters for you, I can't imagine what will . . .

[1] Liddell and Scott. An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889)

Technorati Tags: ancient greece, literature, tragedy

You May Feel Cleansed But I Still Feel Grubby

<HETERODOX AND UNSUSTAINABLE ARGUMENT>
Aristotle identifies katharsis as the act of purging the audience by letting them experience, from the safety of the stage, pity and terror. It seems odd, not least because you didn't go home from an Athenian tragedy: you either went back in to another tragedy, or to a Satyr-play, and then you went home. If the purgation were to work upon the mind after the show had come down, then the purgation — the cleansing — would have been accomplished by the satyr-play... that, after all, is the last drama you would have seen before going home.

It might be more useful to think of the katharsis as happening within the tragedy; that the pity of the heroic fall and the terror of the disproportionality of response are the elements which cleanse or purge the disorder within the diegesis; just as the tying-up of loose ends in the cop story is more about “closure” for the teleplay rather than the audience.

Er. . . discuss.

</HETERODOX AND UNSUSTAINABLE ARGUMENT>

Get Your Coat On, Sergeant, We're Descending From Olympus

Drama on television, insofar as it still exists, is now almost exclusively about policemen; and even more exclusively, about policemen investigating murders.

Ignore the reality that most policemen never get to see a murder in their careers. Ignore the reality that most policemen of any seniority spend most of their time either on courses or filling in pointless paperwork designed by public service knaves for the bafflement of political fools.

Focus on the policemen, and the murders.

There is little room for complexity here, but we don’t want complexity on the telly; we run screaming from it; complexity disturbs our sleep and lies like a thicket of briars between us and our gratification. No; murder is an unequivocal disorder, no grey area there; and the cop is unequivocally the force of order re-established.

It is the inverse of Athenian tragedy, which begins with incipient disorder which, breaking out, is then purged (katharsis) by death; but it is every bit as formalised, every bit as structurally predictable. Watching yet another detective (with yet another appealing hubris or lovable flaw) solve yet another murder, one is tempted to wonder: Did the Athenians of the 5th century BC sit at the City Dionysia thinking ‘Oh no; not more bloody Gods’?

Academics vs Blogs

Off-topic -- or is it? Mark Bernstein, hypertext guru, author of Tinderbox and one of my heroes, takes up the cudgels raised by Matt Kirshenbaum against what he identifies as a rather foolish essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education “that describes ways that some academic bloggers hurt their chances to land a job at Professor Tribble's small, midwestern college.

Tribble (a pseudonym) says that some academic bloggers published things they shouldn't have written, or revealed too much about their interests: in one shocking piece of closed-minded bigotry, he seems to say his department decided not to hire a candidate who seemed to know too much about computers.”

This, Bernstein points out, is about publication -- or, rather, about not publishing in case you say something which comes back to haunt you by being wrong, mistaken or just plain foolish.

Fair enough, possibly (but only just fair, and only just possibly) if it's a question of formal academic publishing. And even that can be, and should be, subject to revision or recantation where necessary. How many mistakes, how many horrors in the wider world could have been avoided if people didn't find it so damn hard to say “Oops; we were completely wrong there; backtrack, dudes”? Recall Cromwell's words, which should be blazoned above the gates to anything with pretensions to being a civilization:

“I beseech ye, in the bowels of Christ, consider ye may be mistaken.”

(And, when anyone asks you how come you changed your mind, remember that the correct answer is “Because that's what it's for”.)

But when it comes to education, to teaching and thinking, it's a different story. Or at least is should be. This blog contains assertions, speculations and observations, some of which may strike any given reader as daft, ill-founded, puerile, nonsensical, delusional and whatever you're having yourself. Some of them strike me that way, too, actually.

Which is precisely the point of it. Higher education (any education worthy of the name, actually) should promote the notion that there is no idea so absurd or counter-intuitive that it should be suppressed. Only when we make fools of ourselves happily, in front of others, can we hope to go on to become wise.

I hope this blog makes that point by example. If it pops into my head, I'll say it. There are places for factoring in the internal censor -- exams, for example -- but the seminar, the blog, the supervision and the pub are not those places. For anyone to suggest otherwise suggests, in its turn, that they have rather missed the point of what it's all about.

Size Does Not Matter

Edg King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter ta'en
Give me thy hand; come on.
Glou. No further, sure, a man may rot even here.
Edg. What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure
Their going hence even as their coming hither,
Ripeness is all. Come on.
Glou. And that's true too. Exeunt.

[King Lear, 5.2]

“Ripeness is all.” Yes. . . a famous quote, and rightly so. But is that where the pivotal power of this scene comes from? Imagine an almost unbearably prolonged pause between that and the (very quiet) “Come on.” A hand extended to help him up. Another pause and, almost to himself, “And that's true too” as they leave.

And how about Oedipus at Colonus. The blinded, tattered once-King Oedipus in the groves of the Eumenides at Colonus (myrtle, wild thyme, birds and olive trees and the faint tang of the sea from Piraeus over the hills: you can still smell it today), an hour's gentle walk from the Athenian Acropolis. Eyes scarred, his history defaced, his honour broken, guided by Antigone his daughter, betrayed by his sons and now come to beg the favour of an umarked grave from the Athenian king, Theseus.

When Theseus finally arrives, you'd expect a scene of high dramatic ceremony, pomp, status and elevated rhetoric. But Sophocles is an old, old man now and knows his craft (knows precisely where he is setting this, too: in Colonus, the place of his birth) and instead we get a moment of great sweetness and massive power as Theseus looks for a long moment at the ruined Oedipus before saying quietly:

“Son of Laius. Yes.”

And how that unpacks and unfolds the entire tragedy. . .

We think of tragedy as the art of disproportionate consequence, but perhaps the real art lies in, having expanded the small hamartia into tremendous catastrophe, distilling it down again into those tiny moments of aching precision.

(Which may also be why writers have such terrible love lives. They cannot bring themselves to believe that the great storms and sleeps of love can be conveyed in such trite little phrases as “I have never felt like this before” or, bless 'em, “I love you.” And so they cast around desperately for a rhetoric which will do full justice to their emotions; and, before they find it, the moment has passed. They should learn from Shakespeare and from Sophocles. “Come on.” “Yes.”)

Goat Song: Nothing To Do With Goats

How many thousands of academical hours have been spent trying to work out precisely why Tragoedia, which seems to mean “goat song”, seems to mean “goat song”? Put briefly, where's the bloody goat?

“Bloody” literally, probably. Did the Athenian Dionysia begin with a goat sacrifice? Was it because of the hairy (goaty) legs of the satyrs in the satyr-plays? B. Lukács (President of the Matter Evolution Subcommittee of the Geonomy Scientific Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; in tragedeological circles, we speak of little else) points out, the sacrifice was more usually a bull, and the Attic satyrs had horses' legs.

These, and other, “cloudlets” (as Lukács calls them) cast a shadow over the sunlit uplands of our struggling New Historicism, as it so richly deserves. But an alternative etymology has been offered, for example in the otherwise rather pedestrian and canonically-minded essay in Required Reading, which suggests that:

“'Tragedy' is a 14th century word that comes to us from the Middle English tragedie, lifted from Middle French, which in turn came from Latin tragoedia, and ultimately from the Greek tragaeidia, a combination of the Ancient Greek words for `goat' (tragos) and `to sing' (aeidein).” So far, so conventional; but:

“To sing of goats? Goat song? Probably not. The word for goat is very close to traegein, which means `to gnaw'. A tragedy, then, is a song of gnawing, an ode (a word also descendant from aeidein) that tells of suffering, of a consuming or devouring pain.”

A song of consuming pain. Now doesn't that make more instinctive sense? And how much sense does instinctive sense make when it comes to considering these things?

What Did Shakespeare Read?

Who knows? But he was certainly eligible for a grammar-school education; and the list of authors approved for study at St Paul's School, London, in 1580 comprises Terence, Cicero, Caesar, Sallust, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Valerius Maximus, Seneca, Persius, the younger Pliny, Juvenal, Quintilian and Silius Italicus. [1]

No Catullus; the Juvenal -- as was the practice right into the great J E B Mayor's (late C19) day -- almost certainly excluding the nastier Satires [2]; no Pliny the Elder (but Philemon Holland's translation of the Naturalis Historia as The Historie of the World (1600) was immensely influential, as the original Latin had been since the mid-first-century AD.

Now we might ask ourselves questions about canons and who makes them and who is conjoined with them. . .
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1. Baldwin, T W, William Shakespere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana, 1944) (St Paul's system cited in Martindale, Redeeming the Text 26)

2. And on the subject of Mayor, Professor of Latin at Cambridge and a guiding spirit behind the University Library, do, please, see Henderson, John, The Professor Who Lived On 2d A Day (Cambridge Philological Society). Off-topic but magnificent and unforgettable.