Tragedy: A Curious Art Form

PREFACE
Tragedy: A Curious Art Form
NOTE
Numbers in the margins refer to the lines of the
present translation; numbers at the top right of
the pages to the lines of the original Greek text.
Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you
full of rage? Because you are full of grief. Ask a headhunter why
he cuts off human heads. He'll say that rage impels him and rage
is born of grief. The act of severing and tossing away the victim's
head enables him to throwaway the anger of all his bereavements.
I Perhaps you think this does not apply to you. Yet you recall
the day your wife, driving you to your mother's funeral,
turned left instead of right at the intersection and you had to
scream at her so loud other drivers turned to look. When you tore
off her head and threw it out the window they nodded, changed
gears, drove away.
Grief and rage-you need to contain that, to put a frame
around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin
having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories
about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you-may
cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits
of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for
you? Isn't that why they are called actors? They act for you. You
sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy
of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself]
act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You
can be aware ofyour own awareness of this nature as you never are
at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices
a moment of his own life in order to give you a story ofyours.
1. Renato Rosaldo, "Griefand the Headhunter's Rage," Text, Play, and Story, edited
by E. M. Bruner (Washington, D.C.: American Ethnological Society, 1984),
pp. 178- 195.
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Preface
Preface
Curious art form, curious artist. Who was Euripides? The best
short answer I've found to this is an essay by B. M.W Knox, who
says of Euripides what the Corinthians (in Thucydides) said of
the Athenians, "that he was born never to live ip peace with himself
and to prevent the rest of mankind from doing so." Knox's essay
is called "Euripides: The Poet As Prophet."2 To be a prophet,
Knox emphasizes, requires living in and looking at the present, at
what is really going on around you. Out of the present the future
is formed. The prophet needs a clear, dry, unshy eye that can
stand aloof from explanation and comfort. Neither will be of interest
to the future.
One thing that was really going on for much of Euripides' lifetime
was war-relatively speaking, world war. The Peloponnesian
War began 431 Be and lasted beyond Euripides' death. It brought
corruption, distortion, decay and despair to society and to individual
hearts. He used myths and legends connected with the
Trojan War to refract his observations of this woe. Not all his
plays are war plays. He was also concerned with people as people-with
what it's like to be a human being in a family, in a fantasy,
in a longing, in a mistake. For this exploration too he used
ancient myth as a lens. Myths are stories about people who become
too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into
other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.
To be present when that happens is Euripides' playwriting technique.
His mood, as Walter Benjamin said of Proust's, is "a perfect
chemical curiosity."3
There is in Euripides some kind of learning that is always at
the boiling point. It breaks experiences open and they waste
themselves, run through your fingers. Phrases don't catch them,
theories don't hold them, they have no use. It is a theater of sacrifice
in the true sense. Violence occurs; through violence we are
intimate with some characters onstage in an exorbitant way for a
brief time; that's all it is.
2. Directions in Euripidean Criticism: A Collection of Essays, edited by Peter
Burian (Duke University Press, 1985), pp. 1-12.
3. Walter Benjamin, "The Image of Prousr," Illuminations, edired by Hannah
Arendt, rranslated by Harry Zohn (Schocken, 1968), pp. 203-204.
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