[Digital publication] ‘A coup de theatre in the Odyssey’ (original) (raw)
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Theatre Journal, 1980
When this book was first published, its burden-that Greek tragedies make more sense when they are treated as plays for performance-was fairly novel, or at least it was preached more than it was practised. In the few years since then, it has become an orthodoxy, and stagecraft is now given due attention in nearly all new books. While happy about that, I am not happy that my name is cited as a 'ringleader' of those who maintain that we should concentrate on performance rather than words. I do not endorse that: the power of the Greek theatre rests on its extraordinary combination of word and embodiment. To neglect one is to impoverish the other. I trust that this book does not encourage anyone to set the performative dimension in competition with the verbal. I hope it does not seem fickle to say that there are things here which I would not write in the same way today. The revised bibliography gives some idea of how fast the water is flowing under the bridges of scholarship. I would also acknowledge more openly in chapter 1 the selectivity of any account of the 'author's meaning'. And in the last chapter I would stress more that it is the place of books like this to suggest and to prompt rather than to dictate to the professional theatre. The use made of my work by the National Theatre Oresteia in London in 1981-2 shows that such a relationship can work. This book is, in fact, about ancient Greek culture and about the theatre, and it is meant for the 'general reader' who is interested in either or both. I hope professional Hellenists will read it, but it was not written primarily for them. While I have had students in mind above all, students of drama or English literature or Classical civilization, any student who encounters Greek tragedy, anyone who is fascinated by the Greeks, who loves the theatre, anyone who is prepared to be enriched by the great literature of the past may find these pages worth while. But there is a condition. The core of the book (chapters 3-9) demands and assumes that the reader already knows all, or at least some, of the nine tragedies it concentrates on (they are listed on p. 22). Furthermore, it is probably best read with a translation (or text) open to hand, preferably a translation which has the line numbers in the margin (there are recommendations on pp. 197-8). This book is in no way a substitute for reading the plays themselves-and, if possible, seeing them. Indeed, I should like to think that the book has encouraged and will encourage theatres to stage these great dramas, and might help to find them audiences. I quote from the tragedies liberally. All quotations are translated and all the translations are my own. I am only too aware how stilted and imperfect they are; but I thought it essential to translate high poetry into something which suggests its lofty and arresting style. The language of Greek tragedy was not that of everyday speech, and I had rather turn it into bad verse than into pedestrian prose. In the earlier Preface I stressed how much this book owed to the inspiration and to the help of Colin Macleod. Since his death in December 1981, at the age of 38, everything that preserves his insight, however diluted, has become that much more concentrated. If this study succeeds at all in getting beneath the surface, that is owed to him. Magdalen College, Oxford March 1985 Oliver Taplin viii 1 The visual dimension of tragedy Behind the dialogue of Greek drama we are always conscious of a concrete visual actuality, and behind that of a specific emotional actuality. Behind the drama of words is the drama of action, the timbre of voice and voice, the uplifted hand or tense muscle, and the particular emotion. The spoken play, the words which we read, are symbols, a shorthand, and often, as in the best of Shakespeare, a very abbreviated shorthand indeed, for the actual and felt play, which is always the real thing. The phrase, beautiful as it may be, stands for a greater beauty still. This is merely a particular case of the amazing unity of Greek, the unity of concrete and abstract in philosophy, the unity of thought and feeling, action and speculation in life.
Tapping the wellsprings of action: Aristotle's birth of tragedy as a mimesis of poetic praxis
2018
In Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector , James Redfield shows how the Iliad 's tragic qualities are bound up with cultural contradictions. He thus illuminates many murky areas of Aristotle's Poetics by the light of Homer and develops a philosophical anthropology of the Homeric heroes. In this essay I return to the way the Poetics and the Iliad cast light on one another, with special attention to Aristotle's insistence on "one complete action" and his account of the genesis of drama. I argue that, for Aristotle, the light shed by drama on action goes beyond what is conveyed by its plot. Aristotle sees in Homer a dramatic thought-action that culminates in moments where the performer appears to reach into the sources of his ongoing performance and to be enlivened by them. These "enlivening" moments are related to Aristotle's "one complete action," a certain kind of plot. Aspects of performance are harder to describe than plot, but they can, to a limited extent, be imitated, even in prose: and this is what Aristotle has done. Aristotle does not only admire Homer's "one action" on the level of plot. For Aristotle, Homer discloses or taps the roots of action in a way that shows he understands what action is. Aristotle's imitation of the dramatic thought-action found in Homer, and particularly in Homeric ring composition, conveys in prose a moment of culmination associated with performance, a kind of "possession" or reaching back to past generations that enlivens the ongoing performance. First, then, I show how an appreciation of Homeric ring composition is reflected in Aristotle's Poetics , in his account of the birth of tragedy; here I summarise and make explicit what is left implicit in another study (Kretler 2018). I then indicate parallels to Aristotle's account elsewhere in Greek poetry. These make plausible the schema I bring out in Aristotle but also further clarify its shape and internal workings. Aristotle draws on a general poetic pattern but is fueled mainly by Homeric technique. I offer these reflections in gratitude to James Redfield, whose teaching and writing stimulate so many to return to the well of ancient Greek poetic thinking. One whole complete action: the shape of the Iliad and a pivotal speech Aristotle insists that tragedy is a mimesis of praxis (action) that is one, whole and complete, having a beginning, middle and end (Poetics 1459a19; cf. Tapping the wellsprings of action Aristotle's birth of tragedy as a mimesis of poetic praxis Katherine Kretler * Diagram 5.1 Calendar of the Iliad.
Gnomon, 2019
This book, stemming from the author's PhD dissertation (Harvard, 2009), analyzes several works of Greek literature, concentrating on moments in which characters reflect and comment on their actions, consider the consequences, and subsequently evaluate them. This process whereby agents become spectators often brings a change of perspective on the part of the characters themselves. There are four chapters, an introduction, a copious bibliography, and index. The first chapter is devoted to Homer's Iliad, whereas the other three are on tragedy: one on Sophocles' Trachiniae, one on the murders of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra in Aeschylus' Oresteia and Sophocles' and Euripides' Electras and one on Sophocles' Philoctetes. Each chapter begins with a brief summary of its contents. Passages in which agents become spectators turn out to be more common in both epic and tragedy than one might have anticipated. Examining the texts in this light reveals new insights into how characters are constructed and the audience's expected response to them. Characters reflect on their actions in three contexts: simultaneously with the action itself, after it has been performed, or before it takes place, when a character anticipates the likely outcome of his/her action and modifies it accordingly. These passages constitute first-person or homodiegetic narratives and are variations on the traditional messenger speech of tragedy, though with several differences, most notably that messenger speeches are delivered by anonymous secondary figures, while the passages examined in this book concern major characters. In the Introduction Allen-Hornblower (hereafter A.-H.) presents the book's contents, defines its aims, and defines her method, indicating her particular attention to emotions. The first chapter, on the Iliad, begins by analyzing responses to human suffering on the battlefield, very often pity, noting differences between divine and human reactions. When the gods pity their favorite heroes they intervene to help them, with patterned actions expressed in formulaic language (pp. 25-29). If they are unable to prevent the death of their favorites, as with Sarpedon and Hector, the pattern is nevertheless similar: divine scenes precede the event and exhibit the gods' reaction, with a formula of 'seeing and pitying' (τοὺς δὲ ἰδὼν ἐλέησε Κρόνου παῖς ἀγκυλομήτεω, 16. 431). Patroclus' death is unique, however, in that no audience debates over or witnesses it and no attempt is made to delay or prevent it. Patroclus dies alone, without pitying spectators and witnessed only by the aggressive Apollo, who attacks him in a way unprecedented in the Iliad (p. 45). But a series of apostrophes addressed to Patroclus by the poet materialize a voice heard by the external audience. These apostrophes, notable for their number, become more frequent as the hero's death nears. A.-H. shows how the 'metalepses' addressed to Patroclus and Menelaus share formulaic, thematic and structural elements, which allows her to highlight what is specific to the narrative of Patroclus's death: The successive apostrophes «generate a sense of aprehension in the audience and ... gradually build up the tension underlying the entire episode» (p. 50). Sarpedon's and Hector's deaths are lamented by their philoi beforehand. By contrast, Achilles
Greek Tragedy in Theory and Praxis
Maske und Kothurn, 1989
Greek tragedy was fashioned and instated in Athens a single act when Pisistratus, the Athenian tyrant, invited the poet-actor Thespis, to perform for the Athenians in the Dionysia festival of 534 B.C. 1 This political act integrated tragedy irreversibly into the religious/social/cultural context of the Athenian Polis. The origin of tragedy as well as the mode of its initial representation are obscure to us, and we cannot know for certain the changes that took place during the first generations of its poets, between Thespis and Aeschylus 2. Nevertheless, the information that we do have of its first performances helps us define the essential characteristics of the primary form of Greek tragic performance: a plot played out through dialogue between the actors and a chorus, performed in a defined place, in front of a live audience on a special occasion-the Dionysia festival 3. It is clear that from its first civic production, tragedy has been associated with its "performance", and the location of that performance-a theatre. It is Aristotle's removal of tragedy from this context for the purposes of his discussion, in the Poetics, that poses the problem area of this article. Theatre by its very nature, comes to fruition through three stages: the drafting of the plot (the text), the rehearsal process, and the enactment in front of an audience within the framework of a particular event. Each of these stages incorporates unique components, yet all three function towards one goal: the theatrical event, the total performance in front of an audience. This is the raison d'être for which they work simultaneously. Two irrefutable/irreversible conditions are needed for a theatrical event to take place: the first is the special combination of play, rehearsal and performance 4. The 1 For a collection of the important passages of evidence in regard to Thespis Cf. A. W. Pickard-Cambridge, Dithyramb, Tragedy and Comedy, 2 nd ed., London: Oxford University Press, 1962, pp. 69-89. 2 Walter Burkcrt, in his important article on the ritual origins of Greek tragedy, summarizes the complexity of the question: "We may collect exact information or formulate precise hypotheses as to the external organization of the Dionysia in the Polis Athens in the sixth century B.C.: temple and theatre, chorus of citizens and choregos, poietes, didaskalos, upokrites, masks and actors' dress, musical instruments, figures of dancing, musical and literary techniques in the tradition of choral lyric and the iambos. But whoever tries to grasp the unique kairos in the history of the human mind which brought forth tragedy, to understand the intellectual, psychological, and social motives involved, enters a field of basic ambiguity."
THE BIRTH AND THE LASTING NEWNESS OF ANCIENT GREEK TRAGEDY
In our effort to understand tragedy as a kind of cultural creation in such range, we should go back to the initial time of its conception, creation and formatting stage as entity during the 5th century in Athens. In our approach, we find that the historical reality, which means the objective events that some people might have heard through mythological stories or their literary versions that once occurred in the distant past, converted in the haze of history into legend and then molded through the passage of time in myth (Trojan war, argonautica). These, in turn, formed the thematic framework of which the cases of works written quite later than the leading Greek tragedians raised, after being converted from mythological tales into dramatic representations and formatted on stage by actors, addressed to viewers. In this way tragedy addresses the legend rather than the original magical-religious significance, but its later signification of space and time of literature, which turns it into a dynamic semiotic system of symbols and meanings that constitute a literary text (JP Vernant-P. Vidal-Naquet 1981). Because, as we know, the beginnings of theatrical expression are lost in the depth of prehistory and are linked to the myth, which refers to cosmic entities and formulates social situations, which attach value that exceeds the fragmentation of the phenomena (Roudhardt 1977: 315). This is a causal reason for the consciousness of primitive (Frye 1988), communication system with the environment, similar to the psyche (Eliade 1963: 174). But the understanding of the world is not enough. Creative intervention is required as well in it, with an incentive or deterrent effect that will ensure the survival and guarantee the continuity of life. This is done through a magical and religious ritual, which is based on purely "theatrical" situations and recommends the theater starting point. It features the distinction between the action space from the monitoring area for action (stage / square), actors (actresses) and participants (audience), theatrical disguise, movement and improvisation, preparation for the "role" and "acting ". Bearing these data in mind, it appears that the right conditions to develop the drama had been created. What remains is dialogue to be added, which did not exist in this original category of primitive events and homeopathic relationship between actors / participants turn into illusory relationship betwen actors / spectators, resulting in a mutation of the original "ecstasy" into "catharsis".
Le présent article cherche à établir les influences possibles sur la théorie aristotélicienne de la tragédie. Les études érudites des influences textuelles en poétique ont jusqu’ici essayé de mettre en lumière ce que les théories post-aristotéliciennes de l’art doivent à l’Art Poétique d’Aristote, comment elles s’en écartent ou lui résistent. Cependant, la question de savoir à qui/quoi la théorie d’Aristote pourrait être redevable est restée marginale jusqu’à ce jour. Ce travail tente de combler ce vide épistémologique et heuristique. Il soutient que, comme Aristote a écrit son ouvrage au moins deux siècles après l’institutionnalisation de la tragédie en Grèce, sa théorie formaliste doit avoir été influencée par la pratique des plus grands poètes tragiques de l’âge d’or de la tragédie classique grecque. Pour étayer cette opinion, l’article essaye de dépister et d’illustrer les principes aristotéliciens de la construction dramatique dans Œdipe Roi de Sophocle, une tragédie qui est ici considérée comme l’une des influences majeures probables sur l’Art Poétique d’Aristote.