Greek Drama

I'm glad to see my friend Sara Rimensnyder has continued posting on her blog after a long layoff. Last week, she saw House Of Sand And Fog, a film with all the sadness of tragedy and none of the exaltation. Maybe the novel worked, but the movie is just too depressing for me. I also agree with Sara that Jennifer Connelly's character is a real screw-up and I have trouble sympathizing with her.

Anyway, Sara mentions Greek tragedy in passing, saying the stories are telegraphed and they're supposed to produce catharsis, though apparently they don't in her.

It's very hard to understand, much less feel, Greek tragedy today. Imagine if you were at an opera, with a superscript over the stage translating the text. Then imagine if the lights went out, so you couldn't see the costumes, or sets, or singers. Then the orchestra stopped playing and everyone stopped singing, and all you had was the translation. That, in essence, is all we have when we read Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides. Their original performances had dance, song, all sorts of stagecraft, fancy costumes and certainly acting, if of a stylized sort. (In fact, opera started when Europeans wanted to recapture the experience of classical tragedy.)

The most obvious barrier is language. Each of the three great tragedians (and they're about all we have--33 plays from them, plus fragments here and there) wrote in their own style, and used all sorts of linguistic tricks, lost to today's casual reader. One slight example is Greek playgoers were used to a long argument, then a few lines by the chorus, followed by an equally long counter-argument. Sometimes the playwright would set up this expectation and then have the counterargument be short and full of invective, suggesting this character can't defend his position.

Then there's another barrier. The stories told were (usually) well-known to the audience. What was interesting was the added information the playwrights brought to them, sometimes even changing them considerably, so it's hard to say the stories were "telegraphed." Now that we mostly study them as text, the live, uncertain excitement of performance is missing. It wasn't even known back then if there'd be a happy ending. Sometimes there'd be a deus ex machina, sometimes there'd be a feint toward one with nothing but despair instead. Sometimes characters you thought were noble turn out to be horrendous. Sometimes supposedly evil characters were oddly sympathetic. The plays might seem distant and removed to us, but, according to legend, the first appearance of the Furies in the Oresteia was so frightening that there were stillbirths in the audience.

To give you an idea of how a tragedian might work on audience expectation, let's look at Agamemnon. We know Agamemnon's fate is sealed, but how will he be portrayed? We eagerly await the king's entrance, but Aeschylus holds it off, with heralds and such. Finally, amidst tremendous pomp and circumstance, he appears--and he's full of himself. His wife, Clytemnestra, makes a grand speech of greeting and how does he respond, after being gone ten years?: "Your speech, like my absence, was far too long." What a jerk! Aeschylus has even brought along a concubine, Cassandra, in his chariot.

The action continues, and Clytemnestra tries to get Cassandra to come into the palace, but she won't respond. Now you have to understand that Aeschylus introduced the second actor into Greek drama, and the audience might figure that there won't be a third actor in this already overlong episode (the third actor was introduced by Sophocles). Clytemnestra leaves, so what they're expecting is a choral interlude. Instead, out of nowhere, Cassandra starts screaming, crying out to Apollo (who gave her the power to foretell the future, though no one will believe her). This kind of moment would startle an audience, but won't be noticed by the present-day reader. She's in pain but the chorus of old men can't understand her, which makes sense since they sing in a different meter.

Meanwhile, the audience, knowing their Homer, is waiting for Aegisthus, Clytemnestra's lover, to kill Agamemnon. But the joke's on them. Before they're ready for it, Agamemnon is dead and Clytemnestra did it! Only then does Aegisthus appear, after the play is essentially over, defying expectations yet again.

Agamemnon, and in fact the entire Oresteia, is full of such moments. But it's almost impossible to recapture the excitement the original audience felt.

By the way, as to all that catharsis stuff, and those other fancy concepts you hear about when studying tragedy, they come from Aristotle's Poetics, written a century after the golden era of Greek tragedy. Many playwrights centuries later tried to follow his rules, but he obviously had no effect on the Big Three, and I question how helpful his after-the-fact analysis is.

PS I just exchanged emails with Sara and apparently I didn't check the date very closely. In fact, she hasn't blogged anything new in a year. Oh well. Maybe this will prompt her.