Reading the Greeks: The Libation Bearers , Antigone and The Bacchae
II: Antigone
III: The Bacchae
Reading Shakespeare: The Negation of Being and Becoming in Othello and Macbeth
I: Macbeth
II: Othello
Reading Modern Tragedy: Hedda Gabler , A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman
I: Hedda Gabler
III: Death of a Salesman
Conclusion: Reading Tragedy in the Negative
Foreword
After decades of extensive and meticulous argumentation outlining the rejection of “grand narratives,” the malfeasance of totalization, the oppression of the canon, the failures of liberal humanism, the problematization of the subject and identity, and the futility of genre studies, why present a study which attempts to link a single genre, tragedy, across three millennia and consequently risk failing the test of each of these shibboleths? The direct answer to the question is that in the recent processes of redrawing the boundaries something has been left out. More specifically, the style and discourse of postmodernism and poststructuralism have, it seems to me, excluded and pre-empted the modern (pre-postmodern) debate about the relationship between tragedy and the modern age.
What follows in these pages then is an attempt to connect tragedy and the modern period (of which I take the postmodern era to be, in many aspects, an extension) through the concept of madness. Madness has been an extensive and ostensive preoccupation of both tragedians and modernists. However, scholars of tragedy like George Steiner in The Death of Tragedy and Joseph Wood Krutch, in his essay, "The Tragic Fallacy," have constructed the genre and the modern as mutually exclusive categories. Commentators on madness and schizophrenia like Louis A. Sass in Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought, John Vernon in The Garden and the Map: Schizophrenia in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture and R.D. Laing in The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (re)construct madness as having distinct and special connections with modernism. The bridging argument I have presented here is that tragedy, across its millennia-long history, has presented individuals in prototypically “modern” situations, struggling with the here-and-now world around them, finding themselves compelled toward profound personal introspection, social rebellion, and eventually madness--the most commonly claimed features of modernism.
Although this monograph is neither a Renaissance study per se nor an analysis of the nature of subjectivity, it could be taken as an elaboration of Catherine Belsey’s observation in The Subject of Tragedy that “[u]tterance–and action–outside the range of meanings in circulation in a society is psychotic,” 1 and at the same time, a calling into question of the middling tone of her introductory claim that “[t]he choice of tragedy as the starting-point for a discussion of the construction of the subject is in one sense an arbitrary one.” 2 Although Belsey is obviously right that “[a]ll signifying practice is the province of such a project,” 3 I would nonetheless point out and will argue the case that tragedians have been engaged in just such a project for two thousand, five hundred years and, therefore, that tragedy is the obvious, requisite starting point for just such a discussion. However, I must at the same time underline that throughout this text I have chosen to use the near synonymous terms ‘individual’ and ‘self’ rather than ‘subject’. As Jonathan Dollimore points out in Radical Tragedy , materialist analysis, the dominant discourse of postmodernism, has shown a clear preference for the term ‘subject’ over the term ‘individual’ “[b]ecause informed by contradictory social and ideological processes, the subject is never an indivisible unity, never an autonomous, self-determining centre of consciousness” (269). 4
The argument I have presented here comes close to Charles Taylor’s claim in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity that “[s]elfhood and the good, or in another way selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes.” 5 The use of the term ‘subject’ with its implications of an already fractured, problematized notion of self is simply the leading example of how the postmodern lexicon would pre-empt the kinds of observations and insights which the study of madness in tragedy can provoke.
Taking tragedy as a portrayal of the negation of an individual’s sense of reality, this book provides readings of eight plays: The Libation Bearers (from The Oresteia ), Antigone , The Bacchae , Othello , Macbeth , Hedda Gabler , A Streetcar Named Desire , and Death of a Salesman . On the one hand, the plays have been selected because they are frequently acknowledged examples of tragedy. On the other hand, the modern plays have been sources of debate concerning the nature of tragedy and the mutual exclusivity of tragedy and the modern. The Greek plays have each been widely acknowledged as tragedies, but in addition show some of the variation within tragedy from The Libation Bearers with its lyrical focus on a single character and an internal conflict, to Antigone with a more plot-driven situation and greater sense of an independent, external conflict between protagonist and antagonist, to The Bachaae, a play that I take to be at the limits of tragedy , in which the negation of an individual’s reality is subsumed in the highly intellectualized structure of a metatragedy. The Shakespeare plays fall easily within the range established by the Greek dramas and, at the same time, display a contrast of lyrical and melodramatic leanings, as well as that individual selfhood can be as much aspiration as fact, as much a process of becoming as a state of being. Finally, the modern plays fall comfortably within the range and variations established by the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies.
Each of the plays is analysed in terms of the struggles of individuals to attain or maintain a sense of selfhood within the world in which they operate. In each of these plays a sense of reality is negated or falsified or fragmented or dislocated when the matrix of event, idea and character creates a double-bind, no-win situation in which, no matter what course of action or inaction might be adopted, the result is the denial or destruction of aspirations, of self-identity and of a particular understanding of the world. Characters may, for example, be dispossessed of their sense of a position or role in society and/or discover themselves to be in contradiction with their own most basic ideas and beliefs and/or estranged, if not exiled, from their physical environments. Individuals reach or breach the limits of their rational universe and enter a malaise of ontological insecurity of which madness is both a symptom and a symbol. This study confirms the process of madness as a central motif in each of these tragedies and demonstrates how attention to this process brings us to read these plays as examples of modernity, the changing here and now of individual characters, as it has existed throughout the millennia.
Notes
1. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (New York: Routledge, 1985), p. 5.
2. Ibid, p. 9.
3. Ibid, p. 9.
4. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries , 2 nd ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 269.
5. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 3.
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