Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre

Hans-Thies Lehmann, Henry Erik Butler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317276272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This comprehensive, authoritative account of tragedy is the culmination of Hans-Thies Lehmann's groundbreaking contributions to theatre and performance scholarship. It is a major milestone in our understanding of this core foundation of the dramatic arts. From the philosophical roots and theories of tragedy, through its inextricable relationship with drama, to its impact upon post-dramatic forms, this is the definitive work in its field. Lehmann plots a course through the history of dramatic thought, taking in Aristotle, Plato, Seneca, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lacan, Shakespeare, Schiller, Holderlin, Wagner, Maeterlinck, Yeats, Brecht, Kantor, Heiner Müller and Sarah Kane.

Part I Theory/theatre/the tragic

Chapter 1 Palaia diaphora – an “old quarrel” between philosophical theory and tragedy

DOI: 10.4324/9781315640198-1

Aristotelian themes: “mythos”, logos, catharsis, anagnorisis

For Aristotle, who profoundly shaped European discourse about art, tragedy is fundamentally a reality conceived according to the logos; it is para-logical. Although it cannot be pure logos, its value consists of proximity to it. Many explicit statements attest to this idea, as does the entire train of thought in the Poetics. Many categories of the structure of tragedy – peripeteia, metabole, anagnorisis, proper magnitude, and so on – are parasitically logical concepts, oriented on the model of logical structure. Like the progression of thought in an argument, the plot hinges on peripeteia and reveals something new. As in a learning process, (re-)cognition provides the essential moment. The catastrophe takes place as if it were the logical conclusion, and its logicality is all the more impressive if it holds under improbable conditions. Proper magnitude assures the required “completeness” of the tragedy – no differently than what is demanded of a sequence of thoughts: the scale of the tragedy should be just large enough to contain a change from fortune to misfortune that one can follow logically. In the Poetics, the theory of dramatic sequence (of action) serves logical progression toward generality. Tragic narration stands under the law of law. It is subject to the law of crafting a logical structure that gradually proves recognizable. According to Aristotle’s reasoning, tragedy brings out a hidden order of things – a logos – according to necessity or probability. That is why tragedy is “more philosophical” than history. Its core energy is “learning”. Through reporting, information or the narration of events alone – that is, through mythological storytelling (even though what is recounted is also constituted a-logically) – this logos cannot come to light properly. What is required is logically ordered composition and dramaturgy – as Aristotle puts it, the mythos of tragedy. By this term, he understands an effective and, above all, a logically compelling arrangement of events: the “plot”.

To formulate matters more precisely, the Poetics conceives tragedy as if it were constituted in the manner of theory at the core. Tragedy articulates an order for thinking; in this sense, it represents an occasion for – indeed, it already is a formulation of – mathesis, “learning”. This is also the context for Aristotle’s claim, which is more than curious, that theatre actually exists for people who do not wish to think, because the greatest part of human beings only has a “modest share” in the joys of learning. Tragedy offers the masses medicine for insight – appetizingly prepared, as it were. A thinker does not need such “dressing”. What is more, the theatre is not necessary for catharsis to occur: Scholars often fail to notice that Aristotle thinks the famous effect of catharsis occurs even without staging, as soon as the tragedy is read. Even if catharsis has been discussed over and over as an effect of the theatre, this is not Aristotle’s position (as is commonly believed). It was not performance that mattered to him but the text – more precisely its logos-like structure. Even if Aristotle speaks of language that is “embellished”, ² he viewed the aesthetic or affective aspect of tragedy as a phenomenon that does not differ significantly from its logical aspect. Logos is adequate to the text. The text fulfills logos.

Spectacle is emotionally potent but falls quite outside the art and is not integral to poetry; tragedy’s capacity is independent of performance and actors, and, besides, the costumier’s art has more scope than the poet’s for rendering effects of spectacle. ¹

Given the general devaluation of sensory experience as “mute”, so to speak, the significance attached to voice in the Poetics carries little weight, even if it does receive mention. At the same time, it should be noted that private reading still meant reading aloud in antiquity: the habit of reading in silence was not yet common. Presumably, Aristotle bore this in mind when advancing the claim that reading suffices for tragedy to prove cathartic. Yet Aristotle is not concerned with the senses, but with demonstrating that a logos can be read in, and abstracted from, tragedy. The higher goal is insight and knowledge – mathesis – which tragedy is meant to achieve for the spectator. The term that applies to tragedy as it is experienced through reading, uninfluenced (or undisturbed) by staging, is anagignoskein, “to recognize” – once more, this term stresses the moment of insight. The concept of anagnorisis ³ obeys (at first glance) the extreme logification of the aesthetic that has produced such enormous consequences in the history of art theory. Aristotle uses the concept of recognition, anagnorisis, in order to define the subject of tragedy – the hero and his (or her) destiny – through an essentially epistemological moment: the insight that takes place within. Thus, one may affirm – at any rate under certain conditions – that the “logic of form” grabs hold of the work’s content in anagnorisis: ⁴ From a modern or postmodern standpoint, it is easy to see that the Poetics, by deeming tragedy a medium of insight and a process of learning, in many ways amounts to a Trojan Horse that Aristotle gave to art – and to the theatre, in particular. The famous statement that tragedy is “more philosophical” than historiography vividly expresses as much. According to Aristotle, history only holds onto what has really happened or what happens as a rule; tragedy, on the other hand, describes what always happens according to necessity or probability – that is, it is a matter of logical order, not empiricism. By seemingly elevating its status to philosophy, this gesture subordinates tragedy to the jurisdiction of the abstract concept; ultimately, it is conceptual thinking alone that determines the worth of tragedy. What is more, the distinction implies that tragedy has an obligation to its higher, “more philosophical” nature. Ever since, communis opinio has held that dramaturgy – systasis ton pragmaton, or the arrangement of events (as Aristotle defines the concept of mythos in the text) – serves to render a law and an order of reality apparent; from the Baroque fabula docet to Lessing’s fable-allegory, and on to Brecht’s instructive fable, “meaning” has been constituted through dramaturgy. If it holds that the theory of art has entailed the logification of the aesthetic from the start, that it amounts to a para-phenomenon of logos, then such logification concerns the phenomenon of tragedy in especially complex and manifold fashion. Tension arises from the fact that tragedy, and for good reason, has time and again been understood as something involving experiences that shatter the ideal of coming to terms with the world in a rational manner. Against this backdrop, one may affirm what first seems paradoxical: in the poetics and theory of tragedy, the theatre which represents it as a realm of the senses and affect has been conceptually negated, wiped out as much as possible, in favour of the logos of plot and discourse.

In Iphigenia … the plot is at least partly a function of anagnorisis. That is, it proceeds from the plot but opens up unexpected prospects for action. Thereby, what is supposed to be learned from the play occurs in the play. The case that Aristotle considers here touches on tragic mathesis. In anagnorisis, as it is understood here, the tragic form so to speak reaches beyond itself and incorporates an element of what is intended as an effect into the course of the plot. ⁵

Chorus, text, performance

The Poetics does not grant tragedy a position above epic, say, because it offers more intensive possibilities, but because it displays greater logicality. Aristotle holds that tragedy is more concentrated and possesses greater internal unity. When he mentions the claim (which he then disputes) that epic represents the higher form of imitation because it addresses an audience that does not need the “schemata” of the chorus, ⁶ he employs a term that refers to dance-gestures. Exceptionally, in this phrase, Aristotle shows awareness of the affective power in tragedy’s choral component; otherwise, he abstracts almost entirely from the chorus in order to focus on plot. It is all the more significant, then, that he promptly stresses that spectacle is superfluous. On the whole, the chorus – perhaps the most conspicuous element of ancient tragedy, which was obviously so important for the way it was experienced – has no place in his account. The corporeal dimension of (choral) dance provides as slight a theme in the Poetics as do the dimension of ritual, matters of religion, and even phenomena represented in the content of the plays that later came to define “the tragic”. And this even though the chorus occupied the very centre of tragedy, both in spatial terms and (it is safe to say) in terms of the affectivity that interests Aristotle when he discusses terror and pity – eleos and phobos; and in spite of the fact that this affectivity likely stood at the centre of tragedy from the beginning. “Tragedy arose with the cult of heroes, around their early graves. Choruses gathered to dance to their fame – and rich patrons to rehearse the choruses and provide for them for months at a time”. ⁷

European theories of tragedy (and of art as a whole) have for the most part repeated Aristotle’s consistent devaluation of the “performative” dimension and, with it, of modes of perception that we experience by the senses (or that are, at any rate, modulated by them in decisive ways) – ways of perceiving which are connected to performance and yet do not yield anything like knowledge, insight, or thinking. Not least because of the dominance of written culture, it has been “forgotten” that – unlike what holds for the reading culture of bourgeois modernity – ancient tragedy was above all and almost exclusively a theatre experience, and that as such it impressed itself on the bodies and minds of those who witnessed it. This thesis is not refuted but confirmed by the fact that tragedy may be viewed as an “answer” to the culture of writing that emerged around the same time in Athens. ⁸ Texts of tragedies existed; they were submitted for evaluation before competitions, and actors had them at their disposal. But for all that, the tragic works admired as literary masterpieces by posterity did not circulate in written form during the classical age. They made their mark and garnered praise as part of a theatrical event, as a sensory and affective experience in the setting of the theatre. Even Homeric epic is affected by the general distortion that has occurred because texts alone – and not contexts – can enter the archive. Epic survived throughout the ages as an object of textual exegesis, too; later times could hardly understand it as the social and sociable event – one with thoroughly “theatrical” traits – that it had been. The singer (aoidos) did not simply speak; he sang the epic narratives. The enjoyment of song was intimately tied to festive conviviality – the overflowing sensuality of the company at the feast, the eating and drinking in which the singer also took part. The singer already resembled an actor inasmuch as he was the “mask” of the muse, who spoke through him – just as, later, the dramatis personae would speak through actors onstage. ⁹

As limited as our knowledge may be of audiences in the ancient world, it is clear that both epic and theatre involved a very different experience than simply reading what stood written. What is more, vis-à-vis diegetic epic song, the theatre represented another, new kind of mimetic experience. The actor came into view as the hero “in person”. The protagonist was no longer woven into the fabric of narrative like a figure on a tapestry, so to speak, but constituted the centre of experience visible to the senses. (It may be possible, in the future, to gain better access to this mode of mimetic experience and its affective dimension via scientific studies of processes of perception – for example, the workings of mirror neurons.) One can also formulate matters rhapsodically – as does Friedrich Kittler, who writes as if he had been present himself:

When we, the most imitative of all animals, do not just read about such heroines and heroes, but rather perceive them through our two senses that operate at a distance, then they draw incomparably nearer than in sagas, no matter how grandiose the telling. We see/hear how – against the dark shadows of the skene, this suggestion of a Mycenaean palace – the heroes who hitherto have only been hymned now appear, as if for the first time. ¹⁰

Philosophy and tragedy: a rivalry

Aristotle inaugurated a tradition of philosophical/theoretical distaste for the superficiality, temporariness and unrest of the theatre. The task is to take apart this disinclination critically and to reflect, more particularly, on how it belongs to an even older quarrel between tragedy and philosophy. Aristotle, then, is in no way to be pilloried as an enemy of the theatrical art. The Poetics abound in observations of merit for all epochs, and the text has exercised huge influence for good reason. Rather, the matter concerns the way of thinking that occurs throughout the work, which has no trust in the proper, “spontaneous” logic of the senses and sensations, but instead holds that conceptual thinking creates everything on its own. Such a priority – which is no less spontaneous – of conceptual insight has entailed an almost compulsory rejection of the theatre in Occidental thinking. To a large extent – whether we know it or not – this is still the case today. Time and again, the effects can be observed in debates...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• The theory of tragedy and theatrical experience
• Tragic experience and aesthetic experience
• Tragedy after drama
• “Dramatic tragedy” and the core tragic motif
• Overview
• Contemporary tragedy
• PART I Theory/theatre/the tragic
• 1 Palaia diaphora – an “old quarrel” between philosophical theory and tragedy
• Aristotelian themes: “mythos”, logos, catharsis, anagnorisis
• Chorus, text, performance
• Philosophy and tragedy: a rivalry
• Plato, mimesis, the state
• The anti-tragic theatre of philosophy
• Phantasia and “seeing”
• The ghostly, terror, death
• Tragic experience
• Distance and dis-dance, beyond form
• Shape, artist, do not speak!
• The “vegetal” hero, experience, concept
• “Stammerings in a foreign language”
• Thinking on the stage
• 2 Approaches to the tragic
• The tragic mode
• The tragic in everyday language and in the study of literature and theatre
• Aspects of the tragic
• Two models: conflict and transgression
• Versions of transgression
• 3 Casus Seneca: Tragedy and the hyperbole of revenge
• Hyperbole, nefas, furor
• Revenge and the tragic theatre
• “Medea fiam”
• The subject as hyperbole
• 4 Theatre/experience and the tragic
• On the concept of experience
• Aspects of tragic experience
• Playacting and watching: homo spectator
• Catharsis and anagnorisis
• 5 The model of Antigone
• Shaky order
• Heidegger
• Kinship and “prepolitical opposition”
• PART II Drama and tragedy
• 6 The dramatization of tragedy
• On predramatic tragedy in antiquity
• Dramatization and representation
• The characteristics of dramatic theatre
• The theatre of terror
• The production of Othello
• Dramatic tragedy and the tragic subject
• 7 Pure dramatic tragedy: Racine
• Neoclassical theory and practice
• Racine, Lacan and the Imaginary
• 8 Tragoedia and Trauerspiel: Tragedy and mourning
• Play, tragedy, Trauerspiel
• Mourning in antiquity and modernity
• Baroque politics and theatre
• Trauerspiel and dramatic tragedy
• 9 Crises of dramatic tragedy: Schiller, Hölderlin, Kleist
• Enlightenment and the tragic motif
• Schiller
• Hölderlin
• Kleist
• PART III Dramatic and postdramatic tragedy
• 10 The dissolution of the dramatic: Lyric tragedy
• Maurice Maeterlinck
• Turning away from dramatic dialogue
• The tragic of the everyday
• Hugo von Hofmannsthal
• William Butler Yeats
• 11 Tragedy and postdramatic theatre
• Historical avant-gardes: Artaud, Reinhardt, Brecht
• “The death of tragedy”
• Insistence on the tragic
• Death of tragedy?
• The subject and the tragic
• Tragic theatre today
• “Tragedy of play”, caesura and ritual
• Index