Reading the Greeks: The Libation Bearers , Antigone and The Bacchae

 Reading the Greeks:   The Libation Bearers , Antigone and The Bacchae 

In Gerald Else's vision of its development, outlined in The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy , tragedy came about "as a sequence of two  creative leaps, by Thespis and Aeschylus." 1  However, in Else's view, the original progenitor of what would become tragedy is the statesman and poet, Solon.   The prototype for tragedy was the rhapsodist, the minstrel poet, but Solon provided the impetus of the "I" willing to speak of religious questions on the strength and authority of intellect and experience.  Thespis, the "actor," would become that "I" before an audience, and Aeschylus transformed that lyric "I" of the poet into an action, a ‘drama’.   In opposition to the myth-and-ritual school of thought, Else suggests a generic image of an individual poet performing the epic hero before a  chorus which would in turn reflect and reconsider the hero's history, actions and state of mind as the precursor of tragedy.  This set-up would create what Else calls  a "double vision"; that is, the visions of hero and chorus would repeatedly merge and diverge as the play progressed. 

Else’s thesis not only sets forward the pre-conditions of a double-bind situation, but it suggests the developmental range of tragedy.  I take the origin and centre of tragedy, along with Aristotle, Neitschze and Else, to be the lyric. In addition, I understand lyric, as James Joyce suggests through his mouthpiece Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to be that form of art  “wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself . . . .” 2 

I see that lyricism as continuing to pronounce itself in tragedy, creating the impression which Richard Sewall describes in   The Vision of Tragedy that 

The writing of a tragedy is the artist's way of taking action, of defying destiny, and this is why in the great tragedies there is a sense of the artist's own involvement, an immediacy not so true in the forms, like satire and comedy, where the artist's position seems more detached. 3 

The lyricism of tragedy continues to reside throughout its history in the soliloquy, in the conjoining of character and fate, in the self-inflicted and climactic nature of  madness, and, above all, in the extreme reciprocity between the inner world, the mindscape, of the hero and the external world of setting, plot, conflict and other characters.  As tragedy expands, moving centrifugally from this centre, identifying the hero becomes problematic, the plot and conflicts become  increasingly separable and autonomous from a single individual; madness can be explicitly and intentionally provoked by an antagonist; the style and structure of the play broach melodrama; asides begin to displace soliloquies.  At its furthest removed from the lyrical form, tragedy becomes metatragedy.  Author and reader are at their furthest removed from the hypnotic, mesmerizing experience of empathy with a tragic hero.  The tragedy becomes a moment in the structure of the drama; madness is subsumed in the economy of the narrative.  We sense the ironic distance from which the play was written and is to be read, a distance that permits, for example, an increase in dramatic irony. Redemption and  reason come to dominate the concluding moments of  the drama.  The three plays I have selected for analysis were chosen in part to display this centrifugal movement and, consequently, the range of tragedy. 

Notes

1.  Gerald Else, The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy , (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 7. 

2.  James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Middlesex:  Penguin Books, 1960), p. 213. 

3.   Sewall, p. 5.