In Time

by C K Williams

  The terror we feel, then, is at best moderated, because terror implies in some way or another suspense, the unknown, the unanticipated—and in fact, there is almost no suspense in Greek theater. Anxiety, the unknown we fear enough to make us tremble, has finally to do with outcome, with what will or might come to pass to terrorize us, and that is never the real issue in Greek tragedy. Although we hold our breath when in the Bacchae we hear the recounting of Pentheus’s death and dismemberment, our interest is not in what has happened to him—we are assumed to already know that—but with the poetry in which these terrible events are expressed and, just as important, with how we will respond to them.

  I’ll offer a counterexample. In a film I saw recently, two characters play a game of Russian roulette, aiming at their heads a gun that has one cartridge in the otherwise empty cylinder and pulling the trigger. I found myself in a state of terrific anxiety as I watched this absurd game: I was actually covering my eyes the way I did in the movies when I was child. I couldn’t bear to behold what might happen. Though I knew the characters were fictional and that the actors playing them weren’t about to allow their skulls to be blown apart for the sake of their art, it still felt as though what was going on was too much for me, that I was going to be overwhelmed. Needless to say I wasn’t, but when I thought afterward about that frightening, really stupid business, I felt cheated, as though my emotions had been trifled with and, more important, that my sensitivity, my capacity to respond to real or potential suffering, had been violated. We never feel this about the great tragedies. Even if we do characterize our response to their dreadful rendings as fear, it is a fear mediated by a different, more complex, probably more mature portion of our consciousness than that with which we reflexively protect ourselves when we cover our eyes or ears.

  The function of what we call pity plays in our response to tragedy is more subtle. There is no question we do often feel a quite surprising and rending sympathy for those ancient beings caught in their webs of sad destiny. I once worked for a few weeks with a group of young actors who were doing a production of my version of the Bacchae. I’d worked on the translation of the play on and off for ten years and knew it nearly by heart. Yet at the opening performance, at the moment when Pentheus’s mother Agave realizes that the head she is carrying is that of her own son whom she’s murdered, the actress screamed in grief, and all my familiarity and objectivity vanished, and tears came to my eyes. I had to struggle to keep from sobbing aloud.

  Why should this be? I’m not really certain. Pity is an elusive phenomenon. Sometimes I feel that the pity we often pride ourselves on as a symbol of our humanity can, in fact, become an easily available titillation, a spiritual self-indulgence. If there is an Aristotelean catharsis in that compassion, perhaps we should be skeptical about it. Still, even if we can purify our pity of our own gratification, from whence does it arise? Is there an intrinsic complex of empathy for others in our affective system, or is there something that, no matter how hard we try, actually keeps our feelings of pity ultimately directed towards ourselves, at least until we have striven to put ourselves in a disinterested charitable relation with another?

  Modern psychology has given us the useful term “identification,” and certainly we can identify with Agave’s grief, especially those of us who are parents, just as we can all feel another sort of identification with Pentheus, when he suffers the indignation and unreasonable horror of his fate. Somehow though, identification is at the end a limiting term. It describes our marvelous capacity to participate in someone else’s anguish, but I think finally the concept isn’t a sufficient representation of our spiritual interests. For one thing, it implies a too easy and too complete connection to the person whose pain we are beholding. When we see Oedipus with his eyes put out, we surely know that nothing like this is very likely to happen to us. Neither is there any course of events we can conceive in which we would kill our father, nor that we’d marry and have children by our mother. It is even less likely that we will ever, like Pentheus, have a god appear in our lives to challenge our characters and cause our mothers to tear off our heads.

  As we participate in tragedy, this knowledge of our ultimate non-involvement protects us from trivial theatrical illusion, and yet we still feel strongly that our interests, our most personal interests, are somehow bound up with these all but impossible narratives. Our connection to the characters in tragedy and to their grotesque ordeals isn’t abstract or theoretical; we don’t merely behold them from afar: we use them, and we know that they are productive for us in a profoundly intimate way, but of what does that productiveness actually consist?

  I’ve come to think that the key to understanding why we find these radically implausible events so important to us has to do with certain discrepancies between the way we actually experience ourselves emotionally and the descriptions and meanings our mind has at its disposal to deal with that experience. I believe, in short, that our emotions are too large for us, too grand, that they just don’t fit the reasons for them that the world we actually live in makes available to us. Basically, we might say, our feelings are too acute for our cognition of them: without our even being aware of it, they overwhelm our intellectual circuits.

  In the Bacchae, for instance, the young Pentheus, realizing that all the women and girls of his city have fled to the mountains with a stranger who claims to be a god, becomes furious and desperate and undertakes a series of self-destructive acts. But it doesn’t take as much as all that to make us feel and act in ways we know will very likely be counterproductive, if not simply foolish. Merely having one person, if that person is the object of our intense affections, sever his or her attachment to us can be enough to make us act so. We all know what can happen then. We brood, we sulk, we suffer, we become desperate, our whole character and our whole reality are called into question. We find that we are grieving, as though for ourselves, as though we had died to ourselves as well as having been wounded by the other. Finally, if our drama goes on long enough, we focus obsessively not only on our loss but on our offended feelings; we lose control—there is no other term for it—over our minds, over ourselves. We find we are inflicting even more suffering on ourselves through our imaginings and fantasies than the fact of the loss that afflicts us. All reality can become distorted; we become what we call depressed, so that when we look out of ourselves into the world, the misery and the human imperfection, the unreasonableness we see there, reflects and intensifies our misery: everything becomes tainted with its contrary. All we reflect on becomes contaminated with evidences of the meaninglessness of existence, as well as of death. Death, in fact, becomes so insistent within us that we may even begin to believe that death itself, actual death, might be more bearable than this pain that seems so much like death. Sometimes someone will actually try to affect this release, because the reason can become so capsized by the intensities of feeling that it is forgotten that we know that even the most exacerbated emotion one day, however long in the future, will for no particular reason decay and fade, and that the excruciating vacancies of loss will absorb less and less attention. But while our pain is still with us, while any overpowering emotional struggle is actively underway, our vision of what is happening to us isn’t adequately served by the concepts and symbols we have at our disposal to describe it. They seem always trivial in comparison to the vast, excruciating violence of the emotions within us, which are so strangely detached from will and from our intellectual effectiveness. Those who can deal rationally and objectively with their own anguish can seem cold, disconnected from themselves, and so from others—in a word, neurotic. Or worse.

  My thought is that great tragedy is the enactment of the way we actually, affectively experience ourselves, how we really “feel” about the way we are situated in relation to both the universe and our inner reality, to that conglomeration of sentiment, intellection, and remembered or projected experience that though so mysterious to us finally is us. Our inner life, as we experience, it is v
ast, almost grotesque, in its enormity. The actual reality any human has to deal with seems incidental, nearly paltry, compared to the cosmic emotions and expectations within us: the movements of these feelings of ours are gigantic, their force overwhelming—we gratefully employ the term “irrational” to describe our perception of them.

  When Freud turned to tragedy to illuminate his theory of psychological development, I believe the crucial point he was making had less to do with whether the infant boy really wants to murder his father and marry his mother and had more to do with capturing the intensity of our infantile experience, which remains within us and absurdly conflicts with our adult expectations. Murder and incestuous marriage capture much more effectively the violence of the feeling of the mixture of cosmic exclusiveness the child, or the self remembering the child, experiences. Similarly, although there is nothing we call the “Pentheus complex” for the young adolescent who has the sense that because of his inexperience and shyness all his possible amorous partners are forbidden to him, the image of all the women he knows going mad and fleeing from him is of just the proper absurdity to embody the confusion and seemingly irresolvable helplessness he feels about ever accomplishing a sexual and emotive union with one of these unattainable beings of that other, wildly different and obdurately recalcitrant gender.

  The illusory world of tragedy presents us with a reality unlike our own, but the events in it match in their intensity the radical drama that is our inner life. That life is mirrored by tragedy in several ways. With a few exceptions, Greek tragedy occurs in the context of a family, a family that always also has some public identity, some essential function in its community. In the Bacchae, even the god Dionysus is a member of the protagonist’s family: his first cousin. This focus on family, on the first circle of the individual’s allegiances, intensifies the connections we feel to our inner reality. For in our social and political existence, there is the much more real possibility for us to be afflicted with the kind of horrors our inner life constantly deals with. We are surely susceptible to the violence of war, to oppression, to various kinds of public disaster; we carry an awareness of those possibilities within us at all times, too, but that menace is of another order.

  Although it is clear that in certain circumstances people will involve themselves in public violence—even to their own jeopardy—as a way of making their outer reality match their inner, no matter how enmeshed in matters of larger public violence we become, our experience of such incidents remains by its very nature the exception: it is the abnormal that certainly can entangle us in its snares but that always remains outside us, beyond us. War, as an example, is the material of epic, and our emotional experience of epic is of an entirely different nature from that of tragedy. We don’t use the characters of epic the way we do those of tragedy. We are enthralled by them, we admire or despise them, but we don’t possess them in the way we do characters in tragedy. We can also admire, or even love, successful political figures, but what they do for us, in life or art, has to do with our identities as parts of social groupings, not with ourselves as beings alone with our ultimate identities and with those puzzling emotions that drag us through a world that can never really account for them.

  These are questions that of course are current in all ages and that art in all ages attempts to express. Many contemporary commentators have expressed dissatisfaction with the tragedies that have been written in our own time, and perhaps there is a clue in all of this as to why. In modern drama, the protagonists are not kings, princesses, warriors, or gods; they are our neighbors, or at least those we pass in the street: lawyers, doctors, workers, salesmen. The destiny of these people is often painfully sad, as wretched as in traditional tragedy. The problem, I think, is that modern protagonists are too close to us, our primary connection to them is identification—we know them too well. In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, when Willy Loman is annihilated by his life and by the weaknesses in his character, we know just what he feels; in his shoes, we would feel just as he does, and we would probably act out our grief in the same way. But this knowledge, at least in terms of the real tragic experience, is a disappointment.

  Though we might believe we know ourselves better by contemplating Willy’s fate, the knowledge we already have of our own spiritual and emotional reality is merely reinforced, it isn’t extended. In the characters of ancient tragedy, the impossible distance between them and us and the uncanny discrepancy in the dimensions between the reasons for their suffering and ours are just what makes them crucial to us. That frightening distance is for me one of the very fundamentals of the philosophical identity of Greek tragedy.

  And the choruses in tragedy, the function of which can be so difficult for us to understand, serve to reinforce this discrepancy in scale. The chorus in tragedy, a kind of group consciousness, is an enactment of the phenomenon of many minds working as one, and it helps to make the larger experience of tragedy, the connection of self to what is beyond it, even more coherent and compelling. The chorus says everything, proclaims everything, but, except in the purely lyrical passages, what it is always attempting to do is to fuse the analytic and the didactic that are the primary components of moral meditation. The chorus is continually generating ethical energy and, just as continually, consuming or exhausting it; its individual members are not really quite up to the task that defines them.

  The psychology of the chorus is further reflected in the characters themselves. Aristotle suggests that before everything else, the tragic character defines itself in action, and this action is determined by what he calls “moral bent” and “thought.” By moral bent, Aristotle doesn’t mean what we do when we speak of character, or personality; he means the identity of the protagonist as it is revealed in tragic action. There is much debate over what Aristotle specifically means here, but I think he is distinguishing between what we call personality and something more mysterious that these characters from the world of myth and poetry embody. It’s very difficult for us to consider humans’ actions without also considering their psychological status; psychology is an essential part of our Romantic vision of ourselves as radical individuals. There is no question that the psychological vision is useful, but we should also recognize its limitations.

  When we submit tragic characters to merely psychological explanations, they, and our response to them, are taken out of the realm of mystery, removed from the world of those unfathomable forces that possess our inner existence. They become modern, like us, and merely dramatic, rather than tragic. In the dramas of our own time, in the theater or in fiction, it can be difficult not to hope in the course of it that someone will show up to rush its tormented characters to a psychiatrist’s couch, to keep them from destroying themselves.

  In genuine tragedy, it isn’t appropriate, or useful, to think this. The first thing Euripides’s Phaedra would do on the psychiatrist’s couch would be to kill herself; her role in Hippolytus really takes place between her resolve to do just that and a brief period of hesitation. The “reasons” why Phaedra feels what she does are absolutely incidental to her tragedy; they are in fact, in Aristotle’s terminology, the “action.” Emotions in the tragic sense are merely acts that take place within people rather than between them. Certainly characters in tragedy think about their plight, and about their characters, but the crucial truth in tragedy, and in our own inner world, is that actions begin at the very limit of reflection, at the point at which there is nothing left to think; what is finally effected or not comes after moral argument has been abandoned. There is nothing more to think about because everything has already been thought—and discarded as inadequate to the struggle.

  Euripides’s Bacchae offers a powerful example of this. The sources of the young king Pentheus’s struggles in the play are essentially mysterious to him; they are beyond his capacity for self-examination because he cannot believe that such questioning would have anything to do with what is happening to him. The society of which Pentheus is the ruler is being dism
embered; he is struggling against that dismemberment, and he believes, not unreasonably, that there is simply nothing more to think or say about this catastrophe. He must act, he must struggle, with all the means at his disposal against what is happening.

  The tragedy of Pentheus is that he is not mature enough for real moral reflection; when it is offered him, when Dionysus gives him the chance to approach the rebellious Bacchae in a peaceful, rather than a belligerent way, he misconceives the necessity for patience, for withholding, which social contemplation must entail, and instead takes what Dionysus offers him as an opportunity for self-forgetting and self-indulgence.

  Pentheus allows Dionysus to convince him to think about the implication of his actions, about alternatives to them, but then Pentheus loses sight of his social responsibilities as king of Thebes: he allows himself to be seduced into an amputated vision of himself as the sexually curious young man he is. The psychological term “regression” is painfully apropos here. Pentheus regresses from his adult role as a forceful leader, an implement of social cohesion, to that of a voyeuristic adolescent, and then, with Dionysus’s hypnotic encouragement, he regresses further, to the intellectual and emotional condition of a small child, whose only desire is to be held in his mother’s arms.