Being a by-product of a diverse and often volatile polis still coming to grips with recent sociopolitical changes, tragedy was soon tasked with the job of dramatizing both the potential and pitfalls of Athens’ democracy. When all seemed new and hopeful, even when they seemed glib and set to lapse, the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were a source of relief and release for the citizens of Athens. Because of this, tragedy could rightly claim to be a uniquely democratic medium, one perhaps able to offer something that Athens’ bourgeoning Assembly, Council and various other institutions of democracy were not able to.
Having already provided a broad overview of democracy and tragedy in Chapter 1, this chapter now turns its attention specifically to the democratic impact of tragedy. Just how did this peculiar art form comment on democracy and the new challenges it raised for the very same citizens who had gathered in their tens of thousands to see the plays at the Festivals of the Dionysia and Lenaia? And what lessons might we be able to draw from tragedy, distant as we are from the time and mindset of the Greek city-state, to revitalize our own practices of democracy today?
There are, of course, no definitive answers to these questions. And it is not the book’s intention to provide them. Rather, in a less rigid and certainly less conventional fashion, it aims to put forward an answer that looks straight at the form and content of Greek tragedy. This it does by examining the so-called multivocal form of Greek tragedy and its ability to bring a variety of otherwise marginalized stories, characters and voices onto the public stage and into democratic debate.
Simply put, tragedy was a democratic institution because it reiterated, through multivocal form, democracy’s key message: that self-institution (or Being) must be and ultimately will be subjected to self-limitation (or Chaos). By populating their dramas with a diverse cast of actors and their not always salutary actions, the tragedians thus used drama to help the Greeks reflect on their own existence. As if sat before the reflective glow of a mirror pointed directly at them, what the audiences frequently saw was a polis that had, for too long, been drunk on the grandeur of its own achievements. They were reminded of the fact that whatever greatness they had claimed as their own would never be dissociated from the horrors of empire, warfare, slavery and exploitation that, together, comprised the democratic way of life.
And so, even though borrowed from the classics scholar Edith Hall, the term the ‘multivocal form’ will be used here to refer more broadly to tragedy’s democratic ability to publicize multiple realities, actors and actions in a way that challenged the existing Athenian order.1 Through the use of diverse plots, characters and languages, the tragedians therefore sought to capture an expansive spectrum of narratives, individuals and issues drawn from and recreated for the democratic polis. This, in short, is the characteristic of tragedy that most explicitly politicized what democracy had rendered unpolitical. Popularized in contemporary popular culture as an age of equality and freedom, we sometimes forget that the peak of democracy also bred xenophobia, patriarchy, violence and slavery, both in Athens and her many colonial outposts. Many individuals could not participate, vote or rule in the polis. Democracy, in this respect, was often its own worst enemy. Understanding this, the tragedians used the multivocal form to represent and incorporate marginalized figures as well as those issues which were too taboo to be debated via formal democratic processes. And while social and political inequalities were not always or immediately removed, tragedy did help to foreground the existence of hitherto silenced and unseen figures.
When it did this, tragic drama had the potential to do something remarkable. First, the effect of bringing a variety of otherwise marginalized stories, characters and voices onto the public stage and into democratic debate would have reminded the gathered audiences of what can be broadly described as the interplay between order and disorder. As Chapter 1 showed, central to the democratic push towards self-institution and self-limitation was the recognition that chaos perpetually lurks behind the order erected by humankind. In its own way, this was a theme central within the tragic corpus too: the need to entrench an enduring order while being taunted by the presence of chaos. But this recognition – that one’s fate lies firmly in the grasp of chaos – would have had the effect, perhaps, of also foregrounding the lives and struggles of individuals who had been routinely discriminated against in Athens.
That both tragedian and their audiences could do this though suggested their collective willingness to suspend their own reality in an effort to imagine other realities or the realities of others. This is how tragedy’s multivocal form would have spoken to democratic concerns in a second way. Itself a fictional source inspired from mythical tales, tragedy was emblematic of the need to question and extend reality. And it did this by resorting, paradoxically, to ‘fictional’ accounts. By moving swiftly between the realm of reality and fiction and back again, tragedians found themselves with the unexpected power to critique reality and foreground what might have been possible had citizens and statesmen acted differently from the way they did in reality. When interned by an unyielding political landscape that increasingly forecloses one’s freedom to imagine new realities, alternate sources of knowledge may therefore provide unforeseen insights. They can even help in our effort to better envision and cope with disorder. That was what tragedy’s multivocal form did in Athens.
It needs to be stressed that while the actual impact of its doing so may have been hard to quantify, it would have arguably disclosed a side of democracy that was not always visible through democratic deliberations alone. More precisely, the plots, characters and language that tragedy brought to bear highlighted those things which were visible and pertinent to everyday democratic life in light of what was democratically less visible and pivotal. Through fictional representations of unexpected characters, through dramatic lyrics and dance and through the performance of stylized plots and the retelling of myths (otherwise neglected) truths about democracy were entertained. This was why tragedy’s multivocal form was so penetrating: because it blended reality and fiction to bring out democracy’s paradox. It showed to the entire population that chaos lurked just beneath the order they had erected. This is what tragedies were apt to do: to revitalize democracy in its multivocal form.
In what follows, this chapter explores the democratic impact of tragedy’s multivocal form in three steps. First, it sets out to define and outline the key characteristics of tragedy’s multivocal form. Here, a working definition of the multivocal form will be provided that draws out the democratic impact of the fictional plots, characters and language of these tragic dramas. In particular, it will emphasize the multiple and often contradictory sets of stories, characters and voices which tragedies brought to the public stage and into democratic debate. The argument is that, this was what enabled tragedy to reiterate the crucial democratic interplay between order and disorder and reality and fiction. The chapter then turns its attention to the political implications that this cultural artifact may have for contemporary practices of democracy. However, in doing this, we are required to do two things. The first is to provide a broad political account of how the symbiosis of democracy and tragedy came to an end in classical Greece, as well as to flag the prospect for its continued relevance today. The second is to create an analytical framework of sorts, drawing from the key characteristics of tragedy’s multivocal form, that can allow us to read tragedy as a democratic text today. Though no longer something that is in vogue, the chapter will show that reading these multivocal dramas as democratic texts can place us, as it did the Greeks, in a better position to speak about and confront the promises and pitfalls of our own contemporary democratic challenges.
The democratic impact of tragedy’s multivocal form in Athens
First, it is necessary to clarify how this book will define tragedy’s multivocal form. As a starting point, it may be worth reminding ourselves that in fifth-century Athens, tragedy was ‘a unique invention, a scary gift given to the Greeks because the ethical revolution and the freedoms of experimental democracy converged here, allowing the outrageous to be said’.2 Tragedy asked poets, actors and spectators alike that they not suppress ‘the paradoxical tendencies of Greek culture’ but, instead, to ‘question and exceed such boundaries in the name of the diversity of life’.3 Tragedy – its production, performance and reception – became a forum to test Athenian democracy, to stretch it to its limits: to see what democracy could and could not tolerate, what could and could not be tolerated by its citizens. Through dramatic plots, characters and language, Athens could see itself reflected. But that reflection rarely corresponded with how it chose to perceive itself – as it ought to be. Rather, what glared back, through the tragedies staged at the Dionysia and the Lenaia, was Athens as it actually was – in its multivocal form.4
By bringing a variety of otherwise marginalized stories, characters and voices onto the public stage and into democratic debate, tragedy’s multivocal form therefore reflected Athens as it really was. Which, as we sometimes forget, was a city-state rife with slaveholding, patriarchy, xenophobia, pettiness, hypocrisy and warmongering. Despite its many advances, Athens was no utopia. Within certain parameters, democracy had unquestionably carved out new rights, institutions and possibilities. Outside these parameters, however, things were less certain. The realities of everyday life, complex and amorphous as they were, could not always be incorporated into the public life of democratic Athens. What needed to be said could not always be said free of risk. Often, what needed to be done could not be done without threat of reprisal. Because of this, democratic debates and institutions did not go nearly far enough. They may have broken new ground. But they did not necessarily always fulfill their radical promise thereafter.
For these reasons, tragedy’s multivocal form effectively took on a democratic tone when it illuminated Athens as it really was. In these dramas, it was possible to see not just a myriad of individuals but also the issues and ideas that marked out their different worlds.5 By demonstrating to the polis that only through a polyphony of voices can truth and understanding be acquired, it was an institution that generated a political space dependent upon open and dramatic debate.6 As such, through these tragic plays, old and new voices, even strange and uncomfortable perspectives from outside the Greek world, were given centre stage – encapsulating the unstable but truly democratic spirit.
But, at a more precise level, the reason why tragedy’s multivocal form was ‘multivocal’ was because it represented the sum of its parts, its parts comprising the elements of the tragic plot, characters and language. But, it was also multivocal to the extent that each part – the plot, the characters and the language of tragic drama – was characteristically multidimensional, enabling tragedians to make politically experimental and even politically incorrect claims in dramatic ways. This is why the focus here is on otherwise marginalized stories, characters and voices: to permit us a glimpse of how tragedy addressed the inequalities of democratic Athens’ slave economy, its wars of imperialism and the tempestuousness and avarice of its political bureaucracy.7
Tragic plots
Though they cannot be so reduced, it is not wrong to say that tragic plots habitually brought into relief those aspects of Greek society that had become sidelined or cordoned off from political debate. As a defining feature of both the tragic genre and, most specifically, its multivocal form, Aristotle went so far as to stress that more than any other aspect of tragedy it is the plot that sets the art form apart. The rationale he offers for his verdict is based on the fact that tragic plots are ‘complete, whole and of magnitude’.8 They are representations, commonly based around a reversal of fortune and the recognition of one’s fatal flaw, that strive to increase or enlarge reality. Unlike episodic scenarios that do not follow the laws of probability and necessity, tragic plots avoid the flaws of those dramatic representations which do not possess a beginning, a middle and an end.9 Such is the majesty of their structure that, for Aristotle, ‘even without seeing it performed, the person who hears the events that occur experiences horror and pity at what comes about’.10
It is hard to disagree with Aristotle – for this is what customarily defines a tragic plot. But, what can be said about Aristotle’s account is that it is based primarily on a formalist reading of the elements that make up a tragic plot. For him, the political dimensions that these plot lines would have had at the peak of their popularity in fifth-century Athens are perhaps not so important. As such, if what interests us about tragic plots is more the latter than the former, then we may need to look further afield.
Importantly, it is crucial that we do look further afield because tragic plots quite commonly had a distinctive social and political component about them. Given that they were typically enacted around some insurmountable crisis or conflict, they had the effect of capturing competing values and dueling wills which were momentous enough to shake the foundations of society. As Hall writes, these were stories that would frequently ‘enact the outbreak and resolution of a crisis caused by imminent or actual death, adultery, exile, pleas for asylum, war, or the infringement of what Antigone calls the “unwritten and unshakable laws” of the gods’.11 This is why Jean-Pierre Vernant argues that tragic plots thrust individuals – both the characters on stage and even the audiences off it – into a vortex of moral choice.12 It was precisely this vortex that engendered in the audience a heightened sensitivity towards the world’s heterogeneity. Audiences were quickly reminded that, though dominant, theirs was not the only world view within the polis. And having revealed this social and political multiplicity, tragic plots would go on to demonstrate the ‘tragic’ consequences of those who hubristically rejected the claims of others.
This being the case, classics scholar Page duBois believes that the ‘oxymoron, the incompatible’ was always latent within tragic plots, meaning that ‘the prescriptions and oppositions of political discourse’ were never far away.13 Tragedy, in other words, disrupted the order of the polis by bringing ‘the spectator to a moment of recognition that exceeds the homogenous civic community, to an acknowledgement of his or her place among humankind, as mortal’.14 It brought the spectator to the peak of their limits, which is another way of saying that tragedy brought the spectator to the point of self-limitation.
To this end, a key capacity of tragic plots was their inherent capacity to link individual actions with the broader social, political and existential milieu. Even though these actions would inevitably involve only specific individuals at a particular time and place, the lessons and themes generated would implicate society as a whole. Such plots nurtured connections and associations between individuals, their actions and the consequences that ensued from them. They revealed the differing ethical commitments, personal rationales and structural limitations present in any crisis or conflict. As Paul Woodruff puts it, ‘since a good plot presents actions to us, and actions flow from choice, we should expect a good plot to show us the kind of situations in which choices are made’.15 Such situations, along with the choices and actions they generate, are the stuff from which tragic plots emerge.
Tragic characters
What differentiates the characters that one typically finds within tragedy from characters in other forms of drama is that they seem to be good, admirable figures – not individuals prone to depravity – which for Aristotle is a defining feature of tragic characters.16 Given this, he is not altogether concerned about the fact that characters within tragedy are commonly made to embody the moral crisis dramatized through the plots. Nor is he particularly taken by the diverse range of individuals, ranging from kings and queens to slaves and servants, who are regularly drawn together to make up the cast. The political bearing that such characterizations would have had in reality was not Aristotle’s primary concern because, according to duBois, ‘Aristotle’s is not the attitude of a democratic citizen of Athens toward tragedy as a ritual and political institution of democracy’.17 Consequently, the actual political connotations of a barbarian or a slave interacting with a king, as in Aeschylus’ Oresteia or Euripides’ Andromache, for example, would have only been second-order concerns. Yet, for us, it is precisely the political consequences of such taboo interactions that are of interest here.
Drawn from Athens’ mythical past so as to capture its present, it is interesting to note that tragic characters were, as described by Michael Chayut, often ‘multidimensional, sublime, profoundly complex, whole — all character traits without which no tragic fall could have been possible’.18 Even more relevant for present purposes are the ‘zones of interaction’ generated by the tragedian to allow characters, both individuals and groups, with different backgrounds and clashing perspectives to come into direct contact with each other.19 Think here of Athenians interacting with foreigners, adults with youths, males with females, the free with the enslaved and all with all. But frequently, it was not interaction so much as inversion which the tragedians made their characters undergo. Marginal figures, to this end, would almost be forced to take centre stage while, at the same time, the prominent heroes are subjected to befall a ghastly change of circumstance. Nothing then about these characters or what happens to them is really clear. Nothing about their predicament is ever predictable, even though the sense of dread prevails. Constituted by others, these characters therefore reveal that individuals, though inevitably of a particular ethnicity, class and gender, are never just that. They are incomplete in and of themselves, that is, until they are completed by others: by their ethnicities, class and gender. In this way, what tragic characters make possible, both then and now, is an ‘exploration of the Self through the Other’, a central democratic aspiration.20
But, there is a further symbolic component that would have had political connotations as well: the characters’ use of masks within the tragic performance. Though largely symbolic, especially for us today, the donning of masks meant that the identity of the actor was fused with the identity of the character being played.21 Technicalities aside, what is important for present purposes is how opposing identities could have been said to merge without clashing and obliterating the other. By doing so, the actor, a Greek male, complicated his identity – for himself and for those observing the tragedy – as he transposed into characters that were often marginalized within Athens.
But, identities would have merged also for the viewing audience as they came to identify themselves with the characters on stage. Specifically, as Alvin Gouldner claims, tragic choruses offered a form of release from the rational, instrumental and subdued self valued within certain quarters of Greek society.22 The choruses, in particular, embodied or represented individuals that Athens had forgotten, repressed or exploited in reality: the weak, old, servile and fallen. Through them, audiences could see something of those lives which were often quite foreign to their own. And it was the same for those who were actually weak, old, servile and fallen, as they saw the turn of fate, the downward spiral, for the strong and heroic. The point here was that through the fictional characters of tragic drama, individual audience members were provoked to see themselves from the perspectives of others, to invert their reality through the reality of someone else and to confront that inversion even with its manifest sense of discomfort.23 It was through transformations like these that authorized the ‘freedom of others’ points of view [to] reveal themselves’.24
Tragic language
In this respect, the third component of the multivocal form, the language of tragedy, became particularly poignant given its ability to express the ‘many-voicedness’ of the polis.25 Considered by many scholars as ‘a democratic property owned collectively by all who use it’, tragic language offered ‘individuals whose ethnicity, gender, or status would absolutely debar them from public debate in democratic Athens [the opportunity to] address the massed Athenian citizenry’.26 This was perhaps the multivocal form at its most literal and democratic: the many united to voice their difference. The cacophony of voices that rang out in the theatre, we can only imagine, must have disrupted the celebratory tone and the ‘affective communion’ of the festivals of the Dionysia and Lenaia.27
Yet, the value of the language within these dramas was not purely a matter of form or content alone. Tragic language was powerful precisely because it represented a convergence of both. The impact of the language, as such, was as much dependent on the point as on how that point was conveyed. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the dichotomy between heroic dialogue and choral lyric.28 The hero/protagonist and the anonymous chorus were two contrasting categories of form and content – or rather form as content – in these tragic dramas. The content or purpose of heroic prose was made to recapture the glories of Athens’ mythic past. The way it did so was through rational dialectic. As an example of logical and deductive reason, heroic prose pitted protagonists together who would each approach the crisis at hand from differing perspectives. By doing so, it provided audience members within the theatre with a model of how they themselves should debate when addressing the Ekklesia, the Boule and the courts.
Tragic choruses, on the other hand, sought to capture Athens as a collectivity. They represented an alternate experience to that of the hero.29 Often amorphous entities played by some 15 actors, the choruses conveyed a disparate assortment of fears, hopes and opinions. They symbolized collective sentiment, minority opinion and forgotten voices. As a consequence, the message expressed by the chorus was rarely ever set, but rather oscillated as the tragedy progressed; as a counterweight to the heroes’ perspectives. Without any simple or clear message, rather a representation of diverse and chaotic emotions, tragedy instituted choral lyric and dance to express what could not be easily and definitively captured in prose. It expressed what logical reasoning could not.
Yet, now as then, it is not always easy to hear and understand what we have become deaf to. And so, if the audiences heard anything at all, it sometimes seemed indiscernible or, worse still, inane. To untrained ears, this is what choral lyric can sound like. The anxiety and uncertainty of it could make those restrained by heroic prose uneasy even if that was what it was precisely intended to do in Athens. The form of choral lyric was its content. Its beauty came close to terrifying, and this was precisely its message. By contrast, heroic dialogue was composed of prose, which was measured, elegant and possessed a timeless feel. Publically, this was the language which that Athens prided itself on. Taking the characters ‘at their word’ therefore meant taking them seriously.30 This, above all else, meant that audiences had to learn to regard – and not discard – the worlds that had given voice to these words.
When read together then, what conclusion can we draw about tragedy’s multivocal form? What overall political effect, if any, can we say that it had? Obviously, any answer that is provided to this question will to some extent be conjectural in nature and, if not that, certainly biased, depending on one’s reading. The answer provided here is no different.
Looking predominantly at the democratic potential and impact of tragedy, we can perhaps say that tragedy’s multivocal form did one of two things to critique and help rectify the day-to-day problems of democratic politics in Athens. First, it dramatized before the gathered audiences the democratic insight that disorder exists at the heart of all orders. This, in effect, reiterated the message that chaos lurks just beyond the civilizational constructs created by humankind, something which a democracy should increasingly uncover through the processes of self-limitation. The second point that was conveyed through tragedy’s multivocal form concerned the legitimacy of those sources of knowledge which helped to broaden factual understandings of political reality. When faced with intractable political obstacles, new ways of thinking may well provide a better grasp of reality. And that, as the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides demonstrated, could often be located in the least expected and most unconventional of places.
As a construct that had been conceived to defy every closed system of thought, it was a central tenet of democracy to continuously seek to uncover the chaos which had been shrouded by the polis.31 Perceived as the space ‘in which the world takes shape’, chaos was effectively where the Greeks looked to for inspiration and renewal of what currently existed.32 It was also where they were most likely to unearth the hidden hypocrisies and brutalisms enacted by their own civilization. In this sense, chaos denoted all that the Greeks considered uncertain, different, abhorrent and unknown. It captured what could not be easily understood or quantified. But, far from being overwhelmed by what caused them apprehension and indignity, the Greeks had a complicated relationship with chaos, viewing it as something that could not, in essence, be shunned from their existential landscape. Chaos was central to the order of everyday existence. It complicated everyday existence, opening it up to a broader range of stories, characters and voices than had legitimately existed under aristocratic rule. Together, order and chaos brought a unity to the Greek world.33 In the realm of politics, achieving this unity became the task of the West’s first great democracy: ‘the unity of humanity within a wider unity, bound together by reason; a unity, however, which is not homogeneous, but complex, comprehending within itself the different sexes, classes, and races’.34
Unfortunately, as with any political assemblage, democracy did not always reach this ideal. When this occurred, tragedy entered the political arena to publicize what democracy had failed to. In its dramatizations, tragedy gave back to Athens the democratic awareness that order depends upon disorder. Tragedy, in the words of Paul Monaghan, made people aware that
[a]t any unexpected moment, the pores of the known universe might suddenly open wide and our orderly world, or at least our sense of an orderly world, may be disastrously ruptured by the intrusion of destructive or bestial or divine forces from beyond or indeed from within.35
In this sense, tragedy acted in concert with democracy, quickly becoming an officially sanctioned democratic forum.36 Where democracy excluded, enslaved and abused, tragedy did its best to alert audiences to the hidden perils of doing so.
To this end, the crucial lesson that tragedy’s multivocal form imparted to the democrats went something along these lines: ‘The only purification lies in denying and excluding nothing, in thus accepting the mystery of existence, the limitations of man, in short the order where men know without knowing’.37 Beyond exposing the perceived injustices of autocracy and the openness of democratic institutions, tragedy also wrestled from the individual and the polis their claims to absolute truth, sovereignty and permanence. No single individual, institution or way of life can accommodate and explain all existence. Meaningful existence rests as much on a solid and knowable order as it does on the unsettling presence of chaos. When heroic figures and sage individuals befell a ghastly change of circumstance, though they had striven to do their best, audiences were reminded of the unsettling presence of the chaos that wrenches from us our claims to knowledge, permanence and security. Far from leaving audiences indignant or powerless though, tragedy made them more open to those forces they were unable to control and grasp. Tragedy – through its diverse plots, characters and language – asked each individual to seek out marginalized stories, individuals and voices so that they might be better placed to minimize or, rather, embrace the menace of chaos.
But, to do this in a world where nothing was absolutely certain or known completely for a fact meant that the political resources that the Greeks had to draw upon were near limitless. To truly grasp chaos, rational accounts of reality only had limited use. Because what exists beyond the realm of the known did not always accord neatly with the demarcations established through pre-existing theories of knowledge, fictive sources became as legitimate and expedient as their non-fictional counterparts in the conduct of politics. It was normal – even prudent – to draw from a range of political, philosophical and aesthetic sources in an attempt to resolve democratic dilemmas.
This explains why tragedy’s multivocal form had such an impact on democratic politics. In a world where what was considered real had yet to be meaningfully separated from what was merely myth, Edith Hamilton maintains that the ‘imagination was vividly alive and not checked by reason’.38 In matters of life, the creations of poetry and drama complemented scientific observation and quantification. Fiction was not distinct from but actually gave rise to reality. It helped fashion ‘a humanized world’, and freed humans ‘from the paralysing fear of an omnipotent Unknown’.39 Knowing as much as modern schoolchildren might know about the universe, the ancient Greeks drew from what they could to give order to their world. ‘[A]rt and conduct alike proceeded from the same imperative impulse, to create a harmony or order’, which G. Lowes Dickinson reiterates was central to the creation of unity.40
In the realm of politics, political fictions had a direct impact on the creation of political order in reality. Fiction was like the ‘other’ to what we understand as history, politics, philosophy and science today.41 It captured what these pursuits could not. Because of this, artistic drives were ‘pervasively integrated into all aspects of life and was perceived to be of fundamental significance. Art told the archaic Greeks who they were and how it was best for them to act’.42 Unlike today, art was far from incidental to national ethics, politics and thought. It was, instead, what gave rise to them: the energy that allowed these Greeks to institute life, knowledge and civilization. The product was the foundation of a new order and reality.43 Accordingly, ‘art [was] not expression of what was there before, waiting to be expressed, but discovery of what was not there until it was discovered; it is creation’.44 Yet, being the imprecise science it was, it inevitably meant that Greek narratives had to, as Alastair Blanshard notes, ‘dance to a different tune, one that prefers to couple rise with fall, success with disaster, pleasure with pain, and sanity with madness’.45 And one might add self-institution with self-limitation in the realm of democratic politics. Drawing on fiction gave these Greeks the veracity to face the consequences of these fluctuations and paradoxes in reality.
Practically, tragedy’s multivocal form interweaved reality and fiction in a very particular way. Using the available evidence, contemporary scholars suggest that tragedy rarely entered politics in an explicitly prejudicial or polemic manner.46 (Except, perhaps, for Aeschylus’ Persians, which is the only extant play that explicitly dramatized an actual historical event.) What we know of tragedy suggests that they were commonly devoid of explicit references or biases towards specific events, figures, decisions and opinions – which is not to say that they did not comment on them. Instead, they were more metaphoric, constantly blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction.
Through techniques of zooming and distancing, Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood argues that tragedy brought mythical figures and tales, set in faraway lands, into the world of democratic Athens.47 And this was what brought Athens and the Athenians into a world other than the one they lived. With the use of distancing techniques, tragedians publicized what would otherwise have been left unsaid, even unthought, precisely because the political climate rendered certain things unspeakable and unthinkable. This is the virtue of distancing – the resort to fictional myths, figures and exotic lands. But by dramatizing them in Athens, and during an occasion of immense political significance, they were made to zoom into political reality; the allusions in some cases being too palpable to ignore.
And so, that order and disorder and reality and fiction fused in ways that impacted directly on Athenian society meant that tragedy was not primarily ‘literary or aesthetic but social and political’.48 It was a political institution set up alongside the Assembly, Council and courts.49 Even Aristotle acknowledges this, saying, ‘[t]he earlier [tragic] poets made their characters talk “politically”’.50 To be sure, however, the point made here is not that drama was more political than artistic. Rather, it merely reiterates the logic of the day, which was that poetry and thought, fact and myth, emotion and reason, art and politics all mattered in reality.51 Consequently, tragedy was not politically peripheral but, in the words of Paul Cartledge, ‘an active ingredient, and a major one, of the political foreground, featuring into the everyday consciousness and even the nocturnal dreams of the Athenian citizen’.52
Through tragedy’s multivocal form, the Athenians were enabled to see how their lives, knowledge and civilization could not be meaningfully separated from those elements which had sustained them in reality: the slaves in the city, the women at home, the colonies and colonized both near and afar, just to name the obvious few. But that was just depicting existence as it actually was – a hubristic life taunted by unknowns and the onset of death, a knowledge that erected certainty and boundaries so that the uncertain and unknowable could be tamed or otherwise subjugated, a civilization that flourished often by means of exploitation, warfare and violence. None of this, at one level, was startling. Yet, because we humans too often shun who we are or have become, a mirror is needed to reflect these flaws as our flaws. Through its multivocal form, tragedy was that mirror, offering to the Athenians this rare glimpse of themselves.
Tragedy’s political decline
We know that this is no longer the case today; the world which perceived tragedy’s multivocal form as a legitimate democratic discourse is one that seems very foreign to our own. But why, precisely, is it that something so central to the development of democracy, which is still very much in vogue, is no longer seen as a politically relevant resource capable of commenting on the state of contemporary democratic configurations? Why do we not invoke tragedy as a mirror that can reflect ourselves – in our multivocal form?
A distinguishing feature of the world of Athens of the sixth and fifth centuries BC was the absence of many of the dichotomies and boundaries that we have, in more modern epochs, come to regard as essential and even natural.53 ‘Harmony, in a word’, as Lowes Dickinson once said, ‘was the end they [the Greeks] pursued, harmony of the soul with the body and of the body with its environment’.54 But lacking the dichotomies and boundaries that partitioned order from disorder and reality from fiction, the times, though harmonious, were not always stable. Order existed only at the behest of disorder, and life was a fragile affair. Unlike now, subjectivity then was never considered a given.55 This, the Greeks attributed to the capriciousness of their gods and to fate. However, in actuality, it had more to do with the fact that there remained so many unknowns in their world, a world which had only been partially grasped and domesticated. Theirs, as Richard Tarnas puts it, was ‘an outflung world bright with color and drama’, one that ‘was both ordered and mythic’.56 With no distinctions between the human and natural worlds, where even the immediate future remained mysterious, reality, therefore, unfolded somewhat like ‘a drama in which each thing played its part’.57
Because of all these factors, Giacomo Gambino believes that Greek civilization can only be summed up as a ‘collective enterprise’ wherein poets, statesmen and philosophers all engaged in the creation of the whole – that whole being the order and the reality in which the people of the day would live out their daily existence.58 The norm before the so-called division of forms of knowledge and reflection in disciplines and canons meant that political matters could not be meaningfully disconnected from pursuits in philosophy and the arts.59 Sensual faculties legitimately supplemented rational ones, and vice versa, in political deliberations.60 This, for example, implied that tragic theatre frequently ‘introduced, in stylised form, the politics of myth, as well as the limits of politics’; the suggestion being that ‘[t]he plays were as important as philosophy and public debate’.61 Through the stories, characters and voices that tragedy dramatized, democrats were reminded that if any one thing was at fault, it was the ‘universality’ accorded to notions like reason and justice in Athens.62 This was the wisdom at the heart of tragedy’s multivocal form: that nothing was universal just as no single form is eternal. Everything, as Camus once quipped of tragedy, is right and necessary within limits.63 Beyond that, there is much we do not know. There is, in short, disorder. This was the order tragedy erected in reality.
As expected, the fragility, the sense of powerlessness and the utterly unpredictable nature of flux that was part and parcel of this world became a heavy burden for some to bear. That burden, they reasoned, was further accentuated because institutions such as tragedy continuously erected a heterogeneous political reality, celebrating in some ways a ‘darkened picture of a lived world’ where nothing was stable or actually known in fact.64
A departure was needed. And in Greece, that came with the rise of rationalism. According to the philosopher Wendy Hamblet, rationalism was valued because it was perceived as a way of leading ‘thought to a certainty beyond the disturbing flux of fleshly and death-ridden existence and the whimsical omnipotence of the gods’.65 As she continues, ‘[t]hrough rational and logical discourse, reason seeks the knowable in fixed forms and structures and attempts an escape from the despair of the tragic’. In this way, the desire for fixed forms and logical systems of knowledge that supposedly only rationalism could procure thus indicates what was thought of as undesirable: the disturbing flux and despair of the tragic. Instead of the multivocal form of tragedy, rationalism soon emerged as the overarching, unitary form of political discourse.
The origins of this departure can be traced back to the early sixth century BC and the Ionian city of Miletus.66 Led by proto-philosophers like Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, it was held that the fictional world of myth populated by gods and predetermined by fate was ill-conceived. Rather, as they deduced, there had to be a foundational order to all things. Key to their break with tradition was their use of prose and systematic observation of physical phenomena, not poetry or fiction, to understand the true underlying characteristics of both the human and natural worlds. In the place of dramatic imagery and poetic songs, new ways of thinking inevitably brought about new ways of being. In this regard, even as far back as the sixth century BC, as Eugenio Benitez states, ‘philosophers were the great de-mystifiers of things’.67
And so, slowly from the world of myth emerged a world increasingly driven by philosophical inquiry.68 The result would prove disastrous for the symbiosis of democracy and tragedy. With regard to democracy, the trend became increasingly about educating citizens to question and live philosophically so that they could minimize the hazards of flux.69 This led to an increase in the rhetorical capacity of citizens, whose consciousness began to shift from the collectivity to the rational self. Abstraction, deliberation and aggregation became the highest political tools and objectives.70 And human beings, not gods, became the measure of all things. As this occurred, the myths and gods, which had previously given life meaning, were gradually rebuked and discredited as mere fiction.
Rationalism’s key objective was to replace the disorder that had lurked beneath mythic order with something more real and more ordered. This, which Plato later attributed to Socrates, would only materialize when humankind deploys dialectical reasoning to expose the archetypes, the true Forms or Ideas, which embody the absolute essence of any one thing.71 Reasoning of this kind can only be realized if it takes place at the level of the mind’s eye, not at the level of everyday lived experience. At that level, beyond all conjecture, illusion and uncertainty, the universe’s core order can become visible. These are the universals that dictate the rhythms and patterns of both the human and natural worlds – universals previously only speculated at with the help of fictional creations in the form of myths and gods. But thanks to Socrates and Plato, ‘the Greek search for clarity, order, and meaning in the manifold of human experience had come full circle’.72
These transformations represented no less than an epochal crossroad. With myth deposed, the political legitimacy of tragedy’s multivocal form was at stake. For some two-and-a-half centuries following Homer, Greek civilization had been mythic.73 Myth or fiction, for these Greeks, captured the world of potential: of other realities that existed beyond the dominant reality. By exploring what may happen and in giving expression to the yet undiscovered, mythic expressions attempted to supplement existence with becoming and creation.74 Poets were interpreters of life and the great works of poetry became revered moral and political treatises.75 Democrats depended on tragedies and tragedians entered political debates in an explicit manner. Yet, after Socrates ‘called down philosophy from the skies’, the corruption of the mythic world began.76 Henceforth, ‘[k]nowledge of man and knowledge of self become the chief tasks of reflection, just as knowledge of nature becomes the business of research. Reality is no longer something that is simply given’.77 That was the beginnings of what we can call the Greek Enlightenment.
In light of this, democracy was increasingly discarded for a more sanitized, stable and technocratic brand of politics or, as it is better known, political philosophy. Pressed by the new demands asked of it by the Peloponnesian War, Athenian democracy slowly unraveled during the course of the fifth century BC. The twists and turns that stemmed from the mistakes and miscalculations of war – mistakes and miscalculations that had been democratically endorsed – rocked the confidence of many Athenians while it simply outraged others. Suffering from a lack of effective leadership and control, Athens fell prey, time after time, to ‘class conflict, individualism, and a spirit of criticism which replaced the earlier creative effort’.78 In such an environment, wisdom and virtue were at a premium. By that time, democratic thinking and institutions had descended into what for many was mob rule or, as Plato would have it, ‘the anarchy of mere opinion’.79 Given that it legitimated direct rule by all men and not just by the best or best-educated men, this was seen as inevitable.80 In this way, democracy posed only as a threat to order; threatening to fragment political unity even further.
The task now was to teach the citizens to distinguish between true wisdom and mere irrationalities.81 This was no easy charge and could not be filled from any quarter. Only rationalism would do. Left to its own devices, democratic politics was too unpredictable, and whatever progress it brokered could be easily undone. After all, as Paul Fairfield has quipped, democracy is hardly a guarantor of reasoned deliberation and action.82 Mass rule, in this sense, oftentimes appeared no different from mass deception, domination, incompetence, prejudice, hysteria, cynicism, posturing, blind faith and gossip. For Plato, at least, these were the root of all the evils which had ravaged Athenian society.
And so , by as early as 403 BC, the Athenians began to conceive of the polis anew. Previously, as Constantinou makes clear, ‘the polis was in its essence a divided one’, and the city in which democracy flourished was considered a ‘polyphonic space that bred disunion’.83 But increasingly this conception of the polis was discredited, branded as ‘destructive factionalism and insurrection’. Thanks to Plato’s intervention, the polis became idealized ‘as a harmonious whole that had universal and permanent interests’.
Tragedy and tragedians were not immune to these shifts. Indeed, it is widely agreed that the later tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides reflected the broader societal moves towards absolute truth aided by dialectical reasoning.84 This argument is a well-canvassed one and need not be rehearsed at length. Simply put, tragedy became increasingly susceptible to what Nietzsche referred to as ‘aesthetic Socratism’, an approach which believes in correcting the world through knowledge, in life led by science.85 The result, if one agrees with Nietzsche’s diagnosis, was that soon ‘[e]verything [had to become] conscious in order to be beautiful’.86
Despite these changes, tragedy nevertheless declined in public importance and became detached from serious politics. ‘Rather than having committed suicide’, as Neal Curtis points out, it was more the case that ‘tragedy [was] incrementally disabled and marginalized’.87 The reasons for this are varied, but three are particularly relevant. The first had to do with the simple fact that as democracy changed – and was then superseded by the political philosophy espoused by Plato – the poetic wisdom of tragedy began to speak less to democracy, indeed, to politics more generally.88 Politics was now secularized, less mythical and, because of this, articulated through prose genres. Nothing that tragedy did mattered, given that political wisdom no longer came from the world of myth and poetic creations. It came, instead, from philosophy. The second related reason for tragedy’s decline had to do with the gradual political marginalization of dramatists. As the polis changed, dramatists found themselves slowly relieved of their role as the city’s political educators and thinkers.89 Resigned to their political insignificance, they began to create theatre that dramatized the travails of the private life. Politically ignored, they turned their attentions elsewhere. And so, the final reason for the political decline of tragedy in the polis: the purported advancements of rationalism. Basically, the existential reality that tragedy had dramatized as insurmountable was slowly proven to be easily surmountable if rationality was applied. Furthermore, it might even be easily preventable, if guided by the right frame of mind.90 Particularly at blame was tragedy’s multivocal form, which gave credence to the whole spectrum of evils in the diverse plots, characters and languages that it would allow to grace the tragic stage.
These sentiments were most explicitly relayed by Plato in Book Seven of his Laws.91 In this dialogue, Plato holds that the philosophers themselves now ‘aspire to be poets/makers of the finest and best tragedy [and that their] whole state/constitution is constructed as a representation of the finest and best life’.92 Effectively, Plato is saying here that philosophers now do for the city what tragedians had done in times past, which is to preserve the ‘finest and best life’. Rationalism does for the city what poetry did once upon a time. With this, the city is made to live under a new order and reality. As for the old order and reality, it had to be denied access into his city, the public sphere of the polis, where affairs of state take place.
And so, as democracy changed and declined in political importance, so tragedy became more an artistic and cultural phenomenon. As a corollary of the political ascendancy of rationalism, the democratic impact of tragedy’s multivocal form found itself slowly delegitimized. The work of art – of which tragedy was a key example – was now simply a matter of aesthetics, which as taste was now deemed inferior to the realm of the political. Whereas tragedy’s multivocal form epitomized the collective enterprise of poetry, politics and philosophy, the rise of rationalism would only recognize formal reason. In the end, when the interplay between order and disorder and reality and fiction gave way to a new order and reality, the path that both democracy and tragedy had shared began to diverge.
Reviving the democratic impact of tragedy’s multivocal form today
This goes some way to explaining why when people began to speak again about democracy, as they did during the period classified as the European Enlightenment, tragedy was no longer of any consequence. By then, tragedy had primarily become a form of dramatic entertainment and not something that was sufficiently rational or fit for the political arena.
Particularly from the time of the eighteenth century on, when Enlightenment thinkers in Europe began to revalue the say of scientific endeavours in human affairs, the blueprint laid by Plato stuck; apt to remain in the minds of anyone who would favour order and fact over disorder and fiction without really quite knowing why. After all, this Enlightenment was, as Richard Tarnas says, ‘the inheritor of the basic Platonic belief in the rational intelligibility of the world order, and in the essential nobility of the human quest to discover that order’.93 In our own generation, what Plato said now almost goes without saying. We are, as Isaiah Berlin’s quote goes to show, no less concerned with efforts to ‘tidy up the world, to create some kind of rational order, in which tragedy, vice and stupidity, which have caused so much destruction in the past, can at last be avoided by the use of . . . universally intelligible reason’.94
Today, we are more likely to recall George Steiner’s famous diagnosis, thinking ‘[i]t is virtually indecent to envisage high tragedy engaging recent and current events as Greek tragedy engaged the Persian Wars or the massacre at Miletus. We distrust the truths of eloquence’.95 The echoes of Steiner’s sentiment, who in turn echoes Plato, are well felt in contemporary politics. Take, for example, the borrowed words that Hillary Clinton chose to attack her Democratic rival, Barack Obama, with during the 2008 U.S. presidential primary campaign: ‘You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose’.96 Poetry, in other words, sways the emotions; prose cultivates the intellect and is the stuff of serious politics.
In order to cultivate intellect and locate political truth in our own age, we now do as John Locke once said we must, which was to refuse ‘all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented’ because they ‘are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, then thereby mislead the judgment’.97 In a similar vein, Immanuel Kant is attributed with the warning that ‘the art of persuasion, i.e. of deceiving by a beautiful show (ars oratoria)’, is harmful to reasoned judgement and individual freedom.98 It must not therefore ‘be recommended either for the law courts or for the pulpit’.
The implication is that questions and practices of politics, serious as they are, can now only be conducted via rational dialectic, observation and deduction. Politics as a science requires a clear mind, and government itself should be governed by non-arbitrary laws of order and logic.99
There is no place for entertainment, illusion or pleasure in these matters. But, by so ‘reducing the world to a single, meaningless form, by equating truth with formal reason’, Morton Schoolman makes the crucial point that politics increasingly begins to eschew a reality ‘composed of a diversity of differences that prefigure aesthetic receptivity’.100 There is no place for tragedy – neither the art form nor the way of life – in such a milieu. Tragedy teaches people to live by a fusion of their various faculties and depicts a world through its multivocal form as an entity that is not fully known or knowable, where fate remains the single, greatest determinant. No overarching order or knowable reality exists in this world. What this means is that tragedy must necessarily be separated from pursuits that take place in the law courts and in the pulpit – in the running and ruling of the city. It has to, if politics is to have a chance of becoming enlightened.
But, is there really no limit to the supposed universality of intelligible reason? And is there no space in our own day for the type of democratic insights which tragedy’s multivocal form provided in ancient Athens?
The answer, in both cases, is no – not in ancient Greece and not today. In fact, it is too often overlooked that at the peak of the Greek Enlightenment, represented by Socratic and Platonic thought, an unusual reversion to the state of myth occurred. As Euben indicates, there is a paradox that can be located in Plato’s Republic which, despite its overwhelming resort to dialectic reasoning, inevitably deployed poetic devices, such as allegory, imagery and metaphor.101 It is not always easy to understand Plato’s intentions, given that he ‘uses many literary techniques that were used in different kinds of writing in his day, including those of tragedy, to make his points’.102 Scholars have explained this contradiction in one of two ways: first, that Plato only used poetry to talk about the mythic past and, second, that it was done to communicate with those who had no philosophical training.103
There is, however, another way of looking at it. To do so requires us to scrutinize what transpired when the promises of rationalism reached their limits at the peak of the Greek Enlightenment. When this occurred, both Socrates and Plato found themselves thrust back into the darkened world of myth which both had hoped to escape. The pinnacle of their rationalistic achievements, in this sense, brought with it a terrifying and unanticipated revelation: that irrationalism is the inevitable by-product of rationalism.
At the height of rationalism, the threat of irrationalism is at its greatest. To confront this threat, and face the indefinite, other resources are required. Indeed, as the man who single-handedly shifted the course of Western civilization discovered at death’s gate, only a reversion to what his philosophy had systematically repressed would do: art and myth.104 Likewise, in Plato, philosophical rationalism was never fully detached from myth. As Hamblet identifies, when Plato reached the limits of rationalism, his dialogues reverted to myth.105 But, his myths were not of the world as it is: in its multivocal form, where rationalism is just one of many forms needed to understand and make the world. Instead, Platonic myths aspired to an ideal state, a just realm where the death of his teacher, Socrates, would have never transpired. Tragically, as the death of Socrates showed, Plato’s ‘republic’ was neither part of nor meant for reality – and perhaps this is something that Plato realized all too well.106 This may be why he resorted to myth or fiction. But neither were his ‘laws’ for that matter, which had to be conveyed by way of noble lies. Thus, as Hamblet explains,
it must be said in regard to Platonic myth that – despite a valiant effort at purifying the old myths and replacing them with less dangerous content, despite the reconfiguration of the gods and the openings pried in fate to make room for ethical choice – ultimately the most dangerous element of myth remain. The imagery of the “falleness” of humankind – the inevitable downward spiral of all things mortal and bodily and the tragedy of man’s silly concern for self-knowledge in the futility of the efforts of the best of us – is carried along in the new imagery and infects the entire project.107
In Plato, as in any search for a single order and genuine reality, we are confronted with the irreducible complexities of the human being and of lived experience that cannot be condensed to any single order or reality.
Tragedy’s multivocal form most explicitly reminds us that order and reality are inevitably more complicated than they may appear. When the Athenians elevated tragedy to check the newly established democratic order, it was done so in recognition of their own frailties and the complexities of their world, which democracy had asked each citizen to confront anew. ‘In tragedies’, Dennis Schmidt writes, ‘we are reminded that we live in a world larger than that of our own making or control, and yet a world to which we are answerable’.108 Such an understanding dispels the notion that we can, or are even able to, deploy reason to erect a definitive order in reality. Rather, all that we can do is be mindful that, though necessary, our order and reality remain answerable to what exceeds them. This is as true today as it was in Socrates’ and Plato’s day.
And so, though tragedy may not according to Alex Danchev be ‘what it used to be’, it nevertheless remains a theme of enduring significance.109 Indeed, despite repeated proclamations that we are living in an age of unparalleled progress, equality and freedom, a palpable sense of dread and doubt prevails. We are, at a communal level, no less afraid of death and false expectations, no less immune to those limits that we typically ignore until too late and certainly no less in need of the simplicity and sincerity that have been jettisoned by some of our most cherished cultural norms.110 After two world wars, the gulag, a seemingly endless Cold War, the natural disasters of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which now seem so destructive simply because we no longer appreciate how truly vulnerable we are, after September 11, the ‘War on Terror’ and now taunted by financial and environmental instability – we begrudgingly acknowledge that we might share more than just a heritage with the ancient Greeks. Though separated by millennia of change, our conditions are not always so different. We are rational, sovereign agents often left with little or no choice; swept up by diverse, overwhelming socioeconomic forces, which in previous times were epitomized by the gods and by fate.111
Furthermore, these realities are, in many instances, intrinsically symptomatic of contemporary democratic society. As Rita Felski writes, ‘[d]emocracy, after all, does not guarantee happiness, but promises at best the pursuit of happiness, a pursuit that can all too easily result in disastrous judgements, Faustian over-reaching, or the agony of being torn apart by conflicting desires or values’.112 The (im)possibility of having it all, mixed with the (false) promises of a progressive teleology, are very much democratic double binds which have led many individuals to question the totality proclaimed by the self, the state and even the world as we perceive it.113 The ancient Greeks knew this. They used their tragedy – among other things – to remind themselves that this was so.
What do we use? Or, to put this more bluntly, might we use tragedy to engage democratic politics today?
These are important questions because tragedy, both its form and content, still speaks to and for those who cannot speak for themselves even in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is especially so if we read tragedy through its multivocal form. As Hall notes with reference to the famous playwright Peter Sellars, ‘tragedy can offer a venue for saying the otherwise unsayable, to represent the unrepresentable’.114 As drama, it has been habitually invoked and interpreted in a political light. At a deeper level, a resort to tragedy has often meant a resort to what has been lost or suppressed by Platonic political philosophy. That is to say, a resort to tragedy is what can reinvigorate ‘the memory of revolt and otherness that’, as Constantinou writes, ‘is the condition of our (and any) state of being’.115 The understanding that nothing is closed or stable but, rather, subject to constant change and encroachment by others is both a tragic and a democratic predicament. If that is the case, then tragedy may still be capable of providing arresting democratic insights, at the very least an alternative democratic form, precisely because it is removed from now conventional political debates and democratic customs. Being exempt from the limitations of political reality, it can encompass more than would be otherwise politically expedient to do. Whether cast in dramatic form or as a category of thought, the tragic sense of life continues to haunt the daily experiences of many.
And so, even though tragedy has become separated from what we now regard as legitimate political discourse, there may still be much we could learn about democratic politics and the nature of democracy if we were to revive and read them in that light. To help us along this path, the final portion of this chapter will now offer an analytical framework of sorts, one which draws its inspiration from the key characteristics of tragedy’s multivocal form to help us today to read tragedy as a democratic text. Such a framework will enable us to draw democratic insights from tragedies – both ancient and modern – in two interrelated ways. The first is to enable us to analyse the multivocal forms of tragedy today. And the second is to use that analysis as the basis for an alternate source of democratic insight. Recovering aspects of democracy which have become lost or dissociated from contemporary democratic discourses, through resorting to tragedy’s multivocal form, may potentially facilitate our efforts to revitalize democracy in our current age of globalization.
Given its purpose then, the framework asks contemporary readers and audiences of tragedy several leading questions so as to draw their minds broadly to the type of democratic concerns that tragedy was apt to dramatize in antiquity. As a framework that strives to gauge the democratic impact of tragedy today, it is not as concerned with the overly technical, linguistic and dramatic conventions that normally inform such analyses. Instead, it points to four broad-based components evident in the preceding analysis of tragedy’s multivocal form, each then divided into two subcomponents:
1. Plot: What is the play about?
i. Does it enact a real crisis or conflict, which invokes a duel between values, wills and circumstances serious enough to shake the foundations of society? What are they?
ii. Does the plot dramatize the world’s complexity and foster an understanding that our world view, though dominant, is not the only or even the best world view?
2. Characters: Who are the characters?
i. Are the characters real, that is to say, are they ‘multidimensional, sublime, profoundly complex, whole — all character traits without which no tragic fall could have been possible’?116
ii. Are there ‘zones of interaction’ where central, familiar and adorned figures interact and trade places with marginal, strange and despised figures?117 Does this help foster an ‘exploration of the Self through the Other’?118
3. Language: Who speaks and how?
i. Is there a ‘many-voicedness’? Does the language allow for or provoke the ‘freedom of others’ points of view to . . . reveal themselves’?119
ii. Does rational discourse coincide with non-rational voice? Does the non-rational – poetry-lyric, music, dance, silence, for example – communicate anything that rational discourse cannot always express?
4. Overall: Does the multivocal form bring a variety of otherwise marginalized stories, characters and voices onto the public stage and into democratic debate?
i. Does the multivocal form dramatize the interplay between order and disorder?
ii. Does the multivocal form dramatize the interplay between reality and fiction?
Put in purposely simple and open-ended terms, with all technical language and disciplinary baggage removed, this framework is prescriptive only to the extent that it asks leading questions. How one chooses to answer them, or indeed to supplement them with one’s own questions, is left entirely up to individual preference. Because of this, the framework acts more as a loose guide with the aim of training our eyes and ears to approach tragedy not merely as the antiquated art form or form of high entertainment it has become but, rather, as a political resource or, more specifically, as a democratic text which can be read alongside the more traditional and commonly accepted canons of democracy.
But this, of course, is an extremely difficult, not to mention a somewhat odd undertaking. As such, to ensure that we move in the right direction, it is useful to keep an additional set of four factors in mind when analysing tragedy today.
The first factor is the need to acknowledge that when reading (and this obviously includes viewing for our purposes) any text or fragment of language, a large number of possible interpretations exists.120 Whether understood as a translation, adaptation or performance of a tragedy, the same applies. For some, the number of possible interpretations is near limitless ‘because the text is open to infinity’.121 Each time we read, view and analyse a text, we increase the number of feasible interpretations and generate new texts. The result: we create new meanings.
As a consequence, the second stipulation is that when reading a text, the aim is not to reduce or refine the text to its essence, to provide definitive answers and destroy multiple perspectives. Instead, what we are striving for is to open the text up: to conceive of it ‘as a polysemic space where the paths of several possible meanings intersect’.122 Interpreters do not remain, as conventional wisdom states, external to a work that is closed and finite.123 Exteriority is a myth. We enter the text and the text becomes a crucial part of our reality. Denying exteriority, as Roland Barthes reminds us, does not necessarily compel us to then deny those interpretations which claim to be objective and ahistorical. We can use them as our base and include them as one of many possible interpretations. In this regard, interpretations produced through the canonical sciences, like philology, can and should be employed, albeit partially, freely and relatively.124 This is why this framework can so freely draw on certain characteristics of the multivocal form of tragedy.
Third, it is helpful to remember that the act of reading a text is one that intervenes directly into the social environments and realities which are represented within that text.125 But doing so also provides the very tools and practices needed to reconstruct the social environments and realities that we live in. To appreciate the ‘textuality’ of our world is to appreciate the constructed, fictive nature of our reality: that how reality is represented through our predominant social and political texts affects how it is perceived in ‘fact’.126 Consequently, a particular way of representing social relations, political power, violence and justice, for example, will impact how these phenomena are conceived and manifest in future. A particular notion of democracy – as conveyed by the ancient Athenians through their tragedies – may help rectify deficiencies in our own practices of democracy today. Reading certain texts, and reading them in a particular way, is imperative as it situates us in the world we aspire to create. Such texts present the very tools and practices – the very language and discourse – that can bring these aspirations to fruition. Read enough times by enough people, such texts then become legitimate, prudent and common sense. The political and the aesthetic can blend. Fiction enters the realm of reality and becomes instructive of it.
Because of this, the fourth point to remember is that reading tragedies today can be a necessarily political and even democratic act if that is the brand of democracy we hope to inspire. Though not wishing to deny other interpretations, the purpose of the following analysis is to use the framework established here to read tragedies explicitly as democratic texts. DuBois reminds us that too frequently in the contemporary age, tragedy has been reduced solely to the great man or woman, the tragic hero, as the apotheosis of the modern sovereign subject.127 When this is done, tragedy loses its democratic potential. Indeed, what makes tragedy so evocative – and so democratic – are particularly those times ‘when that subject has been called into question by a variety of kinds of fragmentation, dislocation, and difference’.128 Reviving this aspect of tragedy means that ‘a much richer and more diverse set of bodies and questions than Aristotle and modernity bequeath to us’ can once again be entertained. Tragedy, in other words, can once again begin to stage a uniquely democratic cast. This is the interpretation that this framework hopes to highlight and revive. Moreover, the point is to learn to read tragedies democratically once again and not solely as an artistic, fictional artifact of history. As Daniel Mendelsohn writes,
[W]e must be careful, when evaluating and interpreting the works [of Athenian tragedy], of our own tendency to see drama in purely personal terms, as a vehicle for psychological investigations. If anything, Athenian tragedy seems to have been useful as an artistic means of exploring concerns that, to us, seem to be unlikely candidates for an evening of thrilling drama: the nature of the state, the difficult relationship – always of concern in a democracy – between remarkable men (tragedy’s “heroes”) and the collective citizen body.129
This is how the ancient Athenians likely perceived tragedy, which explains why it became such a valued political institution. If this interpretation were to become legitimate today, what we would effectively be doing is to perceive tragedy as if it were no different from any other great democratic text. And that, in turn, would impinge on how we come to interpret democratic texts more generally, given that a text ‘is necessarily read in relationship to [other texts]’.130 The goal of this project then is to read tragedies democratically, so that we can draw on them as legitimate sources of democratic insight. That is how this book will read the tragedies that follow; a crucial move if the proposed framework is to have its desired political effect.