Emotional Trauma in Greece and Rome

Representations and Reactions

Andromache Karanika, Vassiliki Panoussi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351243391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This volume examines emotional trauma in the ancient world, focusing on literary texts from different genres (epic, theatre, lyric poetry, philosophy, historiography) and archaeological evidence. The material covered spans geographically from Greece and Rome to Judaea, with a chronological range from about 8th c. bce to 1st c. ce.

The collection is organized according to broad themes to showcase the wide range of possibilities that trauma theory offers as a theoretical framework for a new analysis of ancient sources. It also demonstrates the various ways in which ancient texts illuminate contemporary problems and debates in trauma studies.

Part 1

War trauma

1 Aspects of violence, trauma, and theater in Sophocles’ Ajax

Trigg Settle

Violence and death are central to tragedy as a genre. Sometimes they are threatened and narrowly averted, other times they are fully realized with devastating effect; yet they constitute a constant feature of tragic storytelling (Aristotle, Poetics 1453b.14–1454a.16). From at least the mid-twentieth century to the present day, the widely accepted explanation for the avoidance of violence on the ancient stage is that it was prohibited by rules or conventions.¹ But viewing its violence through the negative lens of prohibition has limited our understanding of Greek tragedy. If we can step away from the idea that the ancient tragedians avoided onstage violence because they were constrained or prohibited from doing so, or even the larger assumption that they would have put violence on the stage absent such constraints, we will be able to understand tragedy and its violence even better. Trauma studies provide different ways of conceptualizing and discussing Greek tragedy’s extreme events and their emotional impact.

In this chapter, I discuss Sophocles’ Ajax and argue that there is a striking resemblance between the pattern of representation surrounding Ajax’s killing and torture of the Argive flocks and patterns of traumatic experience analyzed by contemporary trauma theory. My argument focuses on identifying the immediate pattern of repetition and deferral, what I call the play’s core trauma pattern, which surrounds Ajax’s killing of the animals. Tracing this pattern helps us see how Greek tragedy’s displaced violence integrates the representational elements of theater writ large, a medium defined by its uniquely focused and singular use of space and time into an emotional and psychologically complex depiction of violence.

Trauma core pattern and theoretical perspectives

Influenced by the work of Jonathan Shay, studies on trauma in the ancient world have focused heavily on clinical, pathological notions of trauma.² By turning to literary and historical accounts of war and violence in the ancient world for signs of trauma in specific individuals according to generalized notions of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or related pathologies, such studies have sought to affirm the universality of the disorder with fruitful results. I should acknowledge here at the outset, however, that my approach to trauma is different even from many others in this volume: I do not attempt to claim that any individual, figure, or group was “traumatized” or suffered from some form of PTSD. Furthermore, while PTSD and trauma are related and mutually derivative concepts, I trace important distinctions between them—the former represents a specific symptomology designed to aid the highly trained specialist in the task of diagnosis; the latter is, at its heart, a philosophical and cultural response to the implications of that pathology, especially its wide-ranging influence on how we, in the broader culture beyond the clinic, view ourselves, our capacities, and our experiences.

Whether the ancient Greeks had a concept of trauma is a key question. But here again the debate has been limited by our thinking about trauma in clinical terms, which has led to disagreements about the propriety of such projects, and how we should interpret the considerable differences between ancient and modern societies and warfare, and especially our attitudes toward violence, be it martial and statist or inter-personal, sexual or gendered, and so on. In his introduction to one of the first scholarly volumes dealing with trauma in the ancient world, David Konstan argues for an apparent “absence of a concern with combat trauma” among the Greeks because they would not have recognized violent or antisocial behaviors associated with PTSD as abnormal, and therefore would not recognize the disorder and its causality (Meineck and Konstan 2014: 8). Peter Meineck, on the other hand, speaking of the Athenian theater as a theater of veterans for veterans, has argued that Greek tragedy as we know it offered a “‘catharsis’ or form of ‘cultural therapy’ by providing a place where the traumatic experiences faced by the spectators were reflected upon the gaze of the masked characters performing before them” (2012: 6).³ Meineck’s argument is attractive to anyone who studies Greek theater; Konstan’s argument, however, demonstrates the downside to the model from pathology—its rigidity and inability to account for differences and similarities between distant cultures makes it an easy target for wholesale dismissal, while the tendency of the diagnostic model to think in stark “yes” or “no” binaries can frame our thinking about complex cultural representations in black and white terms.

To say that Greek tragedy possessed a concept of trauma is to say that it demonstrates a cultural awareness of two essential notions. The first is that communities tend to define themselves through shared histories, defined by recognizable traumas—events impart a sense of a common peril, suffering, disaster, victimization, or even shame and remorse. The second notion is that cultural performances, narratives, and literature are an essential repository for such shared histories or “traumas,” a communal space where they are processed, memorialized, marked, and re-marked, not only as worth remembering, but also as “our own.” When we think about trauma in this way, it does not seem too far-fetched to say that some notion of trauma is clearly recognized in Greek tragedy. But such a claim doesn’t appear remarkable either, given the vast body of scholarship on the social and civic functions of Greek tragedy, especially in the formation of civic identity in fifth-century Athens. Instead, what is remarkable is how stories like the Ajax structure the experience of their central “trauma,” which is similar to the way that traumatic events are marked, processed, and discussed in modern literature and culture. As such, reading tragedy through trauma not only enables us to explore the discourses that distinguish certain events as tragic, traumatic, or both, but also allows us to see how aspects of the ancient theater are uniquely suited to the representation of violence as trauma.

Theater’s relationship to live performance imbues it, as an artform, with its own elusiveness.⁴ A theatrical performance is a singular event that is wholly unique: it cannot be paused, replayed, or reproduced without some essential aspect of that event or experience being lost or altered. The drama, on the other hand, can be subject to numberless performances and productions, endless repetition. As such, the spatial and temporal contingency of theater as an artform approximates the immediacy and elusiveness of trauma in several key ways. From the perspective of archival history, the attempt to reclaim a theatrical event or production yields only hints or traces; it appears that nothing else remains.⁵

Paul Woodruff’s invocation of theater as “the art of watching and being watched” reminds us that it cannot escape its fundamental reliance on living bodies in the present, and that the living bodies in the audience are just as vital as those on the stage (Woodruff: 2008).⁶ The nature of theater, then, is inherently two-fold: it is, first of all, a meeting of two worlds in one place, the historical or “real” world of the theater and the audience, and the performed or fictional world of the play, each of which inhabit their own space within the theater. Similarly, in assuming a role, the actor or performer is neither completely herself nor entirely the character, but something in-between, retaining and discarding aspects of both identities in the same body at the same time. Space and time undergo a similar doubling. A stage in Athens becomes the Argive camp in Troy, or the city of Thebes; three hours in the theater can become a day, and so on. But the “real” dimensions of place, time, and duration do not disappear; rather, they mingle with and mirror their dramatic doubles in our experience. We should not overlook, then, when plays like the Ajax take a specific, definitive event and then double it, investing it with two competing visions of that single event—one marked as “real” and the other as “not real”—and then explicitly locate that event elsewhere beyond the visible stage. In doing so, the audience is made to experience that event through an additional temporal doubling: the restoration of the moment on the stage against a distinctly other and unseen time and place, beyond the stage but within the drama’s fictive world.

In all its liveness, immediacy, and duplicity, the theater is well suited to the depiction of traumatic violence, a violence that is at once immediate and overpowering despite, or perhaps because of, its fundamental elusiveness and its representation in terms that consistently underline its repeated, restored, and belated nature.⁷ I argue that the offstage violence in the Ajax, and much of Greek tragedy, is established through a focused and comparatively literal pattern of repetition—a staging that draws attention away from itself in its persistent gesturing toward another place and time. In defining this sequence as the core trauma pattern, I draw from the work of Cathy Caruth as it expands upon and is corroborated by the clinical definition of PTSD and related disorders.⁸ While contemporary scholarship provides different ways of understanding and defining trauma, one common thread, and a central feature of my analysis, is the element of repetition. “Re-experiencing symptoms” or “intrusion symptoms” are an essential element of the diagnostic criteria for PTSD and the basis of what Caruth describes as “the peculiar temporal structure” of traumatic experience, its “belatedness.”⁹ In observing that trauma can neither be reduced to the “nature of the traumatic event itself” or to an internal “reaction or distortion” of that event, Caruth argues that “the pathology consists, rather, solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it” (1995: 4).¹⁰

The opening scenes of Sophocles’ Ajax exhibit much of the “structure and reception” of the traumatic experience described by Caruth. In the Ajax, a central act of violence is subject to a spatial and temporal displacement or doubling; it is only felt in juxtaposition with the moment onstage. Unseen and located offstage before the play begins, the slaughter of the animals is at the center of a perseverative process of repetition in which the violence is reexperienced by the audience who, alongside and through different characters and interpretive groups within the play, bears witness to the disturbing violence again and again. In the Ajax, this immediate pattern of removal, deferral, and repetition centers on the elaborate narratives of Athena and Tecmessa as they are accompanied or offset by the intervening reactions of Odysseus and the chorus, respectively. As the immediate aftermath of the violence becomes the site of its recurrence, the boundary between the event and its impact becomes blurred. The aftermath takes on its own aspects of elision and deferral. Thus, characters and audience, indeed the play itself, seem possessed by the violence.

The “core trauma pattern” of Sophocles’ Ajax

Sophocles’ Ajax is a tour de force in its exploration of the role and limits of human knowledge and perception because it interrogates so fully the assumption that sight is the most direct and reliable form of perception and knowledge. Structurally unusual among Sophocles’ extant plays, it is divided somewhat unevenly by Ajax’s death scene, which is isolated in the text by the exit (813) and reentrance of the chorus (866). The latter is marked by a second choral entry song or epiparodos (866–90).¹¹ The first movement contains most of the plot (1–866), up to and including the he...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• PART 1 War trauma
• PART 2 Women and trauma
• PART 3 Collective trauma
• PART 4 Natural disasters, exile, captivity
• PART 5 Communicating trauma
• Index