TRAGEDY'S TRANSCULTURAL ETHICAL PSYCHOLOGY: SHAME, TFIE DENIAL OF THE BODY, AND THE WINDOW OF EMPATHY IN TRAGIC DRAMA
Fred Ribkoff
B.A., University of Western Ontario, 1984
M.A., Simon Fraser University, 199 1
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O Fred Ribkoff 1999 SIMON FRASER UMVERSITY March 1999
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The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive pennettant a la National Library of Canada to Bibliotheque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, pr2ter, distribuer ou copies of hsthesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette these sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format electronique .
The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriete du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d' auteur qui protege cette these. thesis nor substantial extracts fkom it Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celleci ne doivent Stre imprimes reproduced without the author' s ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. ABSTRACT This dissertation is an attempt to establish certain psychological principles of tragedy capable of demonstrating the essential kinship between works of tragic literature from ancient Greek to modem times. The first six chapters are a comparative study of tragic plays by AeschyIus, Sophocies. Euripides, Shakespeare, ibsen, and Arthur Miller. In the light of the findings from these six chapters on tragic works, the seventh chapter considers certain seminal studies of tragedy, including those of Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, George Steiner. Georg Lukrics. and Martha Nussbaum. This final, theoretical chapter also includes a brief illustrative analysis of plays not discussed in the body of the dissertation. Euripides's
Iphigr~liait1 Tariris. Ibsen's Ghosts, and Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotrerz, in order to reinforce the point that tragedy is "transcultural." Based on the analysis of selected tragic works and the consideration of seminal theoretical studies, it becomes evident that tragedy dramatizes specific psychological principles and processes. These processes involve a struggle by characters with shame and the denial of the body--sexuality and mortality--and the presence, or conspicuous absence, of empathy. This study investigates how those characters, who come to terms with shame, vulnerability and the lack of control associated with sexuality and mortality. as well as those who do not, are tragic. The results from this investigation suggest that not only do these two types of tragic characters exist, but they often coexist and form a "tragic tandem" in which the character who is able to come to terms with the realities of the body empathizes with the character who is not. Empathy from others, and not simply pity or love as some critics suggest, sometimes enables otherwise destructive, narcissistic characters to cope with shame and become part of an ethical community. On the other hand, although empathy can occur in an individual tragic character, it is rare that characters enter into a mutually empathic relationship. unless through a mourning process. This dissertation further attempts to show how one can claim that the audience of tragedy empathizes with those characters who remain immersed in shame and denial as well as those who learn to empathize. This study concludes that empathy forms the basis of ethical community in tragedy and its audience. Table of Contents
* * Approval...... II
.. * Abstract...... JII
Table of Contents ...... v Introduction: Establishing a Context for Re-opening the Debate Over the Origin and Nature of Tragedy ...... 1
Notes...... 14 Section I: Uncovering Tragic Paradigms in Ancient Greek Tnpdy...... 20
Chapter 1 : Two Paradigmatic Patterns of Tragic Action in Aeschylus's Persians and Prometheus Bound...... 2 1
Notes...... -45 Chapter 2: A Tragic Anomaly: Sophocles's Pliiloctetes and the Two Faces of Shame...... -62 Notes...... -98
Section 11: Ancient Greek and Modem Manifestations of the Tragic...... 1 1 1
Chapter 3: Empathy's Silence in King Lear and its Critics...... 1 12 Part I: A Survey of Readings on the Cordelia-Lear Relationship and the Empathic Alternative ...... 115
Part 11: Responding to Cavell and Zak on Shame and Love: A Reading of the Cordelia-Lear Relationship in the Light of Other Relationships and Characters in Lear..,...... -132 Notes...... -177
Chapter 4: The Bacchae and Heddn Gabler: The Denial of the Body, Mourning, and the Mockery of Mourning ...... 185 Part I: The Denial of the Body, Empathy, Mutual Recognition. and Mourning in Euripides's The Bacchae...... 186 Part LI: The Denial of the Body. the Absence of Empathy. and the
Mockery of Mourning in bsen's Hedda Gabler...... 201 Notes ...... -226 Chapter 5: The Modem Tragic Tandem of Willy and Biff Loman: Shame. Guilt. Empathy. and the Search for Identity in Death of A Salesman .....249 Notes ...... -273 Section ITI: The Question of Tragedy ...... -277 Chapter 6: The Life and Death of Tragedy in Literary Theory ...... 278 Part I: Aristotle's "Secular'* Theory and the Life of Tragedy .. -278 Part II: From Aristotle's "Secular" Theory to the Ethical Theories of Hegel and Nussbaum ...... 303 Part III: The Problem of Modem Tragedy: Lukiics. Steiner. Krutch. and the Case of Ibsen and O'Neill ...... -320 Notes ...... -350 Works Cited ...... 362 Introduction
Establishing a Context for Re-opening the Debate Over the Origin and Nature of
Tragedy
This is a work of tragic proportions. It is a psychological study of the genre of tragedy from ancient Greek to modem times. The psychological principles of tragedy developed in this study propose to account for tragic works by Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides, William Shakespeare, Henrik hen, Eugene O'Neill, and Arthur Miller. But it does not stop there. This study proposes to settle the theoretical debate over the origin and nature of tragedy initiated by Aristotle and carried on by the likes of such thinkers as
Hegel. Friedrich Nietzsche, George Lukics, George Steiner, Gerald Else, Oliver Taplin, and Martha Nussbacm. And, as if that is not enough, the principles of tragedy introduced in this study are built upon a variety of psychological theories of human nature and behavior which help to articulate the essential psychological con tent and processes of tragedy. Ultimately, given the tragic proportions of this project there are bound to be ail kinds of "loose ends," but I can only hope that the depth and scope of this endeavor serves to reopen and highlight the ongoing significance and relevance of the debate over the origin and nature of tragedy.
Despite the fact that this study accounts for literary and theoretical texts from various periods and cultures, it is by no means a historical-cultural study. The synoptic nature of this dissertation serves to broaden and deepen our understanding of tragedy and the human condition by presenting several close readings of texts in juxtaposition. The intention is for the reader to come away with a very clear sense of what animates, distinguishes, and perpetuates the tragic mode of expression. The intention is not, however, to provide a definition of tragedy; rather, it is to provide a context in which the
emotional understanding evoked by tragic works can be examined and appreciated as a
necessary, experiential form of understanding not normally accessible to consciousness.
In order to establish this context of appreciation the reader is first exposed to my
three principles of tragedy in application, and not simply in abstract or theoretical form.
The first five chapters (contained within the first two sections) are detailed analyses of
selected plays. The sixth, more theoretical chapter, which encompasses Section III, uses
the principles of analysis established in the previous chapters to critique some of the
major theoretical statements on tragedy.
The argument of this dissertation, which culminates in the final chapter, is
structured in order to illustrate the essential kinship between ancient Greek and modern tragedy. Tragedy is by its very nature psychological. and this essential kinship is most
apparent in the dramatization of three psychological principles and processes: shame, the denial of the body. and the need for empathy. In other words, tragic texts demonstrate certain paradigmatic patterns of action which are driven by certain psychological processes. This is. of course, a very controversial claim, the implications of which are not addressed fully until the final, sixth chapter. Consequently. before introducing the contents of the dissertation in more detail, it is important to clarify the choice of certain tcrrns or concepts employed to describe tragedy's psychological content.
Ernest Becker's passionate discussion of the process of denial in The Denial of
Delrrlz has been very influential in the development of my thinking on the denial of the body and what he refers to as the existential paradox: "the fact that he ['man'] is half animal and half symbolic" (26). In The Denial of Death, Becker stresses that human beings continually attempt to deny their sexuality and mortality in order to preserve a
sense of control and meaning. When I speak of the body in this dissertation, I am
referring to the overwhelming reality of human sexuality and mortality which tragic characters attempt to deny.
The process of denial that marks human beings is well suited to a discussion of the destructive states of mind which are manifest on the tragic stage. Given the varied, desperate struggles dramatized in tragic literature, denial seems a more appropriate term than terms like repression, resistance. or avoidance. Denial is a more flexible and accessible concept than repression, and more applicable than resistance and avoidance to the immediacy and intensity of the struggle with the body in tragedy. It can accommodate that which is repressed, unconscious, or distant, at the same time that it can accommodate that which is unavoidable, conscious, or immediate, and yet resisted.
Throughout this dissertation, I attempt to explicate the inextricable relation between the denial of the body and feelings of shame in tragedy. In his essay, "The
Avoidance of Love: A Reading of Kiug Lear." Stanley Cavell does not go into the issue of the body in the detail that 1 do, but he does unearth the roots of the relation between the body and shame in tragedy. Early in his essay on Lenr. Cavell distinguishes shame from guilt by pointing to the relation between shame and the body: "Under shame," Cavell writes, "what must be covered up is not your deed, but yourself. It is a more primitive emotion than guilt, as inescapable as the possession of a body, the first object of shame"
(49). In Chapter 3. I devote a great deal of attention to certain critical responses to
Shakespeare's King Lear (specifically those of Cavell and William F. Zak) largely because such responses are exceptional in literary criticism as they are attune to the central role of shame in the development of tragic tension in Lear. Lear is a good
example of what I see as a typical modern tragedy in which feelings of shame, which
originate in a struggle with the body, are so overwhelming and unbearable that certain
characters cannot escape the destructive habit of denial. In Greek tragedy, and not in
what I refer to as modem or post-Greek tragedy, the processes of denial are usually
defeated as the struggle with the body and shame is absorbed into and made bearable
through a communal' experience of mourning and empathy.
Shame's role in tragedy cannot be overstated. Bernard Williams's philosophical
study of ancient Greek culture and ethics, Shame and Necessip, is one of few studies
which foregrounds the role of shame in Greek tragedy. But Williams's mission in this
book is very much a philosophical one. My emphasis on shame in tragic literature is in
some ways an attempt to do for literary studies what Williams does for philosophical studies. At the end of Shame and -Necessity Williams reiterates that he is "not denying that the modem world is through and through different from the ancient world" ( 166), but he is responding to "[olne of the most persistent fantasies. at least of the Western world
. . . that there was a time when things were both more beautiful and less fragmented"
( 166). Williams's study of shame in ancient Greece is not a "search for a lost unity"
( 167), but an attempt to put ancient Greek conceptions of shame "to modem uses" (167).
In the Greek conception of shame he sees a way to broaden and deepen a modem ethical understanding which is centered around the concepts of guilt and the moral and immoral.'
By illustrating the crucial role of shame in tragedy from the Greeks to the modems. 1 hope to demonstrate the essential kinship between ancient Greek and modem tragedy, the common ethical, but not necessarily moral, concerns within Greek and modem tragedy. In addition, I hope to undercut a common, romantic conception of Greek tragedy, which holds that it arises out of and is defined by a cultural "unity" or "totality" which is lost in the modern context.
Both Williams, in Shame andNecessiry, and Helen Merrell Lynd, in On Sharne md the Search for identity. stress that shame is an emotion inextricably linked with a sense of identity. Given the link between shame and identity and the fact that tragedy dramatizes crises of identity, it should not be surprising that shame plays a critical role in the development of tragic tension. As a matter of fact, as I point out throughout this dissertation, how tragic characters respond to shame determines whether or not a tragedy ends in catastrophe or in relative harmony.' Because of its relation to identity, shame can be. as both Williams and Lynd suggest, a positive force in the development of identity as well as a negative one.' Moreover, at the root of identity crises in tragedy lie feelings of shame which are a product of a struggle with bodily vulnerability, and this vulnerability is most apparent in sexuality and mortality--those forces which are constantly reminding us that we are not always aware of, and in control of, ourselves.
In her book on shame, Lynd claims that "aspects of the phenomenon of shame can be understood only with reference to transcuItura1 vaiues, and that this awareness of values beyond one's own society is one of the distinctions between shame and guilt" (36).
Tragedy bears witness to the correctness of this claim. 1 claim that tragedy, like the shame which generates it, is "transcultural." Theorists of tragedy tend to stress the role of guilt in tragedy and not that of shame. This is an oversight rooted in what appears to be a modem, western, Judeo-Christian preoccupation with guilt. On the other hand, as part of the tragic tradition of dramatizing the struggle with the body and shame modem tragedies continue to explore the role of shame in shaping individual, and by extension, communal senses of identity. Tragedy's ongoing concern with shame has to do with the fact that. as
Williams says, guilt "can direct one towards those who have been wronged or damaged, and demand reparation in the name, simply, of what has happened to them. But it cannot by itself help one to understand one's relation to those happenings, or to rebuild the seif that has done these things and the world in which that self has to live. Only shame can do that, because it embodies conceptions of what one is and of how one is related to others"
(94). It is my view that tragedy documents how an understanding of shame can lead to ethical relations between "one" and "others." This is essentially Williams's view in
SIICOTIL?mzd Necessity as well- He states that "The structures of shame contain the possibility of controlling and learning from guilt. because they give a conception of one's ethical identity. in relation to which guilt can make sense. Shame can understand guilt, but guilt cannot understand itself' (93). Those critics who believe that tragedy is dead recognize neither tragedy's "transcultural" vaIue nor the extent of its therapeutic, ethical value; rather, as I argue throughout Chapter 6. they subscribe to the mistaken view that tragedy's existence is dependent on some very specific historical-cultural conditions which include. primarily, a "shared religious sensibility" and the experience of "totality.""
The tragic works from various cultures discussed suggest that the only way out of overwhelming feelings of shame and denial is through empathy. On the other hand, not all tragedies manage to dramatize an empathic process, but, as I argue throughout this study, they all dramatize, and thus suggest. the need or absence of empathy. In A Critical
Dietiortan of Psychoanalysis, Charles Rycroft defines empathy as The capacity to put oneself into the other's shoes. The concept implies
that one is both feeling oneself into the object and remaining aware of
one's own identity as another person. The word is necessary since
sympathy is only used to refer to the sharing of unpleasant experiences and
does not imply that the sympathizer necessarily retains his objectivity.
The capacity to empathize is an essential precondition of doing
psychoanalytical therapy. (41-3)"
Tragic characters may or may not be capable of experiencing empathy. but there is always the potential for the audience to empathize with characters caught in narcissistic states of mind. Within the tragic theater. the audience responds to different, dialogic voices' which engage its empathy and not simply sympathy. In tragedy, if characters demonstrate empathy, but especially if they do so mutually for one another, the audience witnesses how overwhelming bodiIy realities can be coped with through communal mourning, thus teaching how to build and maintain closer ties in human relationships. If characters do not demonstrate empathy and they are caught in denial, the audience, which witnesses how denial leads to alienated and destructive human relationships, is left to intuit the need for empathy. On the other hand, as I argue in the chapters on King Lear and Dmth of a Sulesman, modern tragedies often demonstrate how individual characters who confront shame and learn from it are able to mature and develop, despite the fact that those around them are unable to empathize with them or recognize the value of their empathic insight. In short, tragedy suggests that only empathy can begin to restore individual and communal values from the ravages of shame and denial. Empathy, and not love, pity, or even compassion, is the most appropriate term to
describe the complex, subtle process of recognition among human beings which tragedy
cries out for and fosters.% The Coming Fin De Siicle, Stjepan Megtrovi* states that
"Postmodernists forget the ancient wisdom that to commit wickedness. one must possess
not only cunning, but one must be able to suppress the seemingly natural tendency to
empathize" ( 108). In its compIex, psychological portrayal of human relationships,
tragedy fosters this "ancient wisdom." In this sense, tragic literature continues to
fascinate. because it appeals to our intuitive understandins that at the root of human
destructiveness is an absence of empathy--a particular kind of insight which is beyond
our everyday, polarized conceptions of reason and emotion. It is the work of tragedy to
evoke this kind of insight in its audience.
As I attempt to show in the final chapter. Aristotle's theory of tragedy. but
particularly his ideas on the tragic emotions of pity and fear and the process of catharsis,
can be understood more clearly in terms of the concept of empathy. Moreover, as I
discuss in this same chapter. my emphasis on the role of empathy in the tragic experience
serves to shed light upon some of the more ambiguous and controversial claims made by
theoreticians of tragedy about the dynamics of tragic action and the effect of that action
on the audience. Any discussion of this kind--specifically when it comes to the issue of
audience response-- is bound to be problematic. It is my hope, however. that once the
relation between the processes of shame, denial, and empathy have been explicated
through close readings of tragic texts, certain theoretical debates will be more clearly defined and. ideally, settled. Section I, "Uncovering Tragic Paradigms in Ancient Greek Tragedy," begins with a comparative study of Aeschylus's Persians and Pmmetheris Bormd. In Chapter 1,
"Two Paradigmatic Patterns of Tragic Action in Aeschylus's Persians and Prornetheris
Bowd," I contrast the movement from shame and denial through to mutual empathy in the Prrsiu~zswith the underlying and overwhelming feelings of shame which cripple any attempt at the experience of empathy in Prometheris Bolmd. In Chapter 2, "A Tragic
Anomaly: Sophocles's Philoctetes and the Two Faces of Shame," i look specifically at
"the two faces of shame" manifest in the "tragic tandem" of Philoctetes and Neoptolemus in the Philocreres. In the older, shame-ridden, more narcissistic character of Philoctetes, the audience witnesses the power of shame to prevent one human being from trusting the empathy of another. In the younger Neoptolemus. on the other hand, the audience is exposed to an individual who learns from shame and is consequently able to experience and act on empathy for the suffering Philoctetes. This tragic tandem is one of several tragic tandems which exhibit the dialogic dynamics of shame, denial, and empathy explored in this dissertation.
In essence. Section I proposes a critical paradigm shift. From the point of view of the dynamics of denial and the dramatization of the need of empathy in tragedy, certain previously anomalous characters, such as Neoptolemus, are granted the status of a tragic character in a tragic tradition, which includes what I refer to as flexible tragic figures as well as the more accepted inflexible ones; that is to say, characters who are capable. as we1 1 as those who are incapable, of accepting their own vulnerability and learning empathy are considered tragic within this new critical paradigm. Section 11, "Ancient Greek and Modem Manifestations of the Tragic," illustrates how the dramatization of the empathic way out of denial is handled differently in a modern context. In Chapter 3, "Empathy's Silence in Kittg Lear and its Critics," I attempt to shed new light on Shakespeare's Lear by contrasting my psychological reading of this seminal tragic text with that of various other critics. In this discussion, I examine the meaning of Cordelia's final. empathic silence within a dramatic world dominated by shame and denial and a critical world unaccustomed to using the concept of empathy to help to explain the nature of tragedy. Chapter 3 is divided into two parts: "A Survey of
Readings on the Cordelia-Lear Relationship and the Empathic Alternative" and
"Responding to Cavell and Zak on Shame and Love: A Reading of the Cordelia-Lear
Relationship in the Light of Other Relationships and Characters in Lenr." Chapter 4,
"The Bacclzne and Heddn Gabler: The Denial of the Body, Mourning, and the Mockery of Mourning," is also divided into two parts: "The Denial of the Body, Empathy, Mutual
Recognition. and Mourning in Euripides's The Bacchae" and "The Denial of the Body. the Absence of Empathy, and the Mockery of Mourning in Ibsen's Hedh Gabler." This fourth chapter is a discussion of the dramatic, psychological dynamics of the denial of the body and the experience of empathy--or the lack of it in the case of Hedda Gabler--within the context of communal mourning. Chapter 5. "The Modem Tragic Tandem of Witly and Biff Loman: Shame, Guilt, Empathy, and the Search for Identity in Death oj'a
Scrlesrncrn," examines the modem tragic tandem of Willy and Biff Loman and the relation between shame, guilt, empathy, and the search for identity. In this study of Arthur
Miller's seminal modem tragedy I focus on the dramatic relationship of father and son in order to demonstrate how the two faces of shame can manifest themselves within a
modem context.
After exploring my psychological theory of tragedy through close readings of
tragic texts in the first five chapters, in the sixth, final chapter, "The Life and Death of
Tragedy in Literary Theory," contained within Section III, "The Question of Tragedy,''
my ideas on tragedy are situated within the larger context of the debate over the origin and nature of tragedy. This more theoretical discussion is divided into three parts.
Part I, "Aristotle's 'Secular' Theory and the Life of Tragedy," explores the proposition that my observations on tragedy, as well as those of critics of Greek tragedy such as Gerald Else, Oliver Taplin, and Martha Nussbaum. are really extensions of, or qualifications on, Aristotle's more psychological, "secular" theory of tragedy in the
Poetics. I suggest that Aristotle's preference for Iphigertin in Tauris, a Euripidean tragedy which ends happiIy, reveals the degree to which this ancient Greek philosopher understood the psychoIogical significance of tragedy and the genre's most resilient features. By providing an examination of Aristotle's notions of pity and fear and catharsis in the light of seminal theories of tragedy which follow in the Poetics's footsteps. and a relatively brief analysis of Iphigenia irz Tariris, I hope to illustrate how it can be argued that the psychological and secular orientation of modem tragedy is a direct descendant of Greek tragedy. Integral to this first part of Chapter 6 is the critique of theories of tragedy (like those of Friedrich Nietzsche and George Steiner) which suggest that tragedy is dead.
In Part I1 of this find chapter. "From Aristotie's 'Secular' Theory to the Ethical
Theories of Hegel and Nussbaum," I discuss the importance of recognizing tragedy's on- going secular, ethical and psychological content when discussing the characteristics of tragedy. Both Hegel and Martha Nussbaum recognize what I refer to as the "ethical psychology" inherent to the tragic of mode of expression. Using the ideas of these two philosophers, I attempt to establish the link between the ethical and my trinity of psychological processes--particularly the link between the ethical and empathy. I conclude that tragedy is concerned with fostering ethical communities which find their origin in the process of empathy.
In Part 111, "The Problem of Modem Tragedy: Lukics, Steiner, Krutch, and the
Case of Ibsen and O'Neill," I look specifically at the failure of Georg Lukgcs's, George
Steiner's, and Joseph Wood Krutch's theories of tragedy to recognize the ethical, psychological origins of tragedy. and thus the life of tragedy in modem times. The arguments of these three literary theorists are in many ways typicaI of those who argue for the death of tragedy in the modern era. All three theorists tend to believe in the religious origins of tragedy which dictate the limited historical-cultural conditions within which tragedy can be written. In this last part of Chapter 6, in order to highlight the problem of modem tragedy for theories such as those of Lukscs, Steiner. and Krutch, I have included a relatively brief analysis of one play by Henrik Ibsen. Glzosts, and one by
Eugene O'Nei 11, A Moon for the Misbegotten.
Ultimately, as this concluding section suggests, the debate over the life and death of tragedy in literary theory comes down to whether or not one believes tragedy to be limited to specific historical-cultural conditions. I conclude that drawing a line between the tragic and non-tragic on the basis of such conditions leads to inadequate and misleading theories of tragedy. Lukjics, unlike Steiner and Krutch, seems to have sensed this fact. and in a late work, Realism in Our Time,he appears to alter his position on the life and death of tragedy to accommodate, among other things, the modern. late tragedies of Eugene O'Neill. This development is a product of what appears to be Luk5cs's growing sense of the ethical and psychological in tragedy. This late insight into the nature of the tragic art is not typical however. Most literary theorists of tragedy give too much weight to the external conditions within which tragedy is possible, and not enough weight to the ethical, and particularly the psychological, content of tragedy. Throughout this dissertation I counteract this theoretical tendency--implicitly in the first five chapters and explicitly in the final chapter--by arguing that tragic texts which emerge out of a variety of historical-cultural conditions can be distinguished by the dramatization of certain psychological processes. Notes
li his communal experience of mourning and empathy represents the basis of what
I refer to as ethical community. As I argue throughout this dissertation, tragedy suggests that the only way out of destructive human relationships into more constructive. ethical ones. which acknowledge the suffering associated with the body of others, is through the experience of empathy. As I point out specifically in Chapter 5, the ethical basis of community which emerges in the process of mourning at the end of certain Greek tragedies is missing from modem tragedies such as King Lear and Death of a Salesrnan in which individuals are united by mutual denial rather than mutual empathy.
'~hroughoutthis dissertation I use the term, ethical, to describe a kind of insight born of an ability to cope with and consider ambivalent feeling and ambiguous, complex situations in which a series of forces are at work. In essence, I am thinking of the ethical in Hegelian terms. On the other hand, I use the term. moral. to describe a kind of knowledge based on more rigid. more or less predetermined codes of conduct which are divorced from the immediate, often emotional, complexities of a given situation. The ethical is always in process whereas the moral tends to be more fixed, seeing human action in "black and white" terms. Tragic, empathic insight is by its very nature ethical and in touch with "the fragility of goodness," to use Martha Nussbaurn's phrase. These issues are discussed in more detail in Chapter 6.
o or a discussion of George Steiner's view that tragedy must end in catastrophe, see Chapter 6, Part I, especially pages 287-89 and pages 295-96.
"ee Lynd's definition of shame on page 72 for a more detailed explana~ionof what I refer to as the two faces of shame in Chapter 2. See also Lynd's statement in note 16 of Chapter 4 on the "positivs experience of revelation" which may follow a confrontation with shame.
'see Lukks's poetic description of the experience of "totality" within the
"integrated civilization" of ancient Greece on page 3 1 8 of Chapter 6, Pan II.
"See pages 138-39 of Chapter 3 for further discussion of the process of empathy.
'~ikhailBakhtin's understanding of the "dialogic." and literature in general. has been influential in the development of my thinking on the psychological processes of tragic drama. On the other hand, my use of Bakhtin's ideas on the creative process and reading experience in literature is unique and. to a certain extent. contrary to Bakhtin's intentions. Consequently. a comment on Bakhtin is in order here. without going into a full discussion of his work.
In Problems of DostoevsAy 's Poetics, Bakhtin defines the dialogic in the process of describing Dostoevsky's creative process:
In Dostoevsky's larger design, the character is a carrier of a fu Ily valid
word and not the mute, voiceless object of the author's words. . . . Thus
the author's discourse. . . is oriented toward the hero as if toward a
discourse, and is therefore dialogically addressed to him. By the very
construction of the novel. the author speaks not about a character, but with
him. And it cannot be otherwise: only a dialogic and participatory
orientation takes another's person's discourse seriously, and is capable of
approaching it both as a semantic position and as another point of view.
Only through such an inner dialogic orientation can my discourse find
itself in intimate contact with someone else's discourse, and yet at the same time not fuse with it, not swallow it up, not dissolve in itself the
other's power to mean; that is, only thus can it retain fully its
independence as a discourse. To preserve distance in the presence of an
intense semantic bond is no simple matter. But distance is an integral part
of the author's design, for it alone guarantees objectivity in the
representation of a character. (63-4)
The dialogic work is a product of the author's dialogic and, in essence, empathic orientation. but it also promotes empathy in its reader or audience. The various "fully valid voices" of a dialogic text or, in other words, the text's polyphony creates the opportunity for the reader of a novel or. I believe, member of a tragic audience to empathize with various characters simultaneously.
Despite Bakhtin's statements to the contrary in such works as Problems and
Tonpard ci Pllilosopll_\ of the Acr, I believe that the process of the dialogic necessarily involves the empathic, at least in so far as it is defined within psychoanalysis. For
Bakhtin, the author's ''dialogic and participatory orientation" "guarantees genuine objectivity in the representation of a character" and. according to Rycroft. for the psychoanalyst. "the capacity to empathize is an essential pre-condition of doing psychoanalytic therapy" as it fosters "objectivity." The psychoanalyst and the dialogic author must strike an emotional and intellectual balance in which they find themselves
"in intimate contact with someone else's discourse, and yet at the same time not fuse with, not swallow it up, not dissolve in itself the other's power to mean." Tragedy teaches that the capacity for the empathic and dialogic are essential to any serious attempt at understanding and working through traumatic. tragic conditions. at the root of which
lie the struggle with bodily vulnerability.
In Problenls, Bakhtin argues that "drama [and thus tragedy] is by its very nature
alien to genuine polyphony" (34). There are various reasons why Bakhtin does not
believe tragedy to be polyphonic and dialogic. In Chapter One of Problems.
"Dostoevsky 's Polyphonic Novel and Its Treatment in Critical Literature," in the context
of his discussion of Shakespeare, he lists three major reasons. all of which are related to
the idea that drama "cannot contain rzrrlriple worlds" (34). He states that "each
[Shakespearean] play contains only one fully valid voice of the hero, while polyphony
presumes a plurality of fully valid voices within the limits of a single work" (34) and that. perhaps most importantly for his purposes in this book. "the voices of Shakespeare are
not points of view on the world to the degree they are in Dostoevsky" (34). This last point about "degree" is the fairest of his judgments on drama. Otherwise, Bakhtin is more or less advocating a view of drama. and tragedy, which I take issue with throughout this dissertation: the view that tragedy is concerned with the hero and not the process of empathy which takes place. or can potentially take place. between characters and in the audience. In "Epic and Novel," collected in The Dialogic I~nuginarion.Bakhtin's conventional position on tragedy and the tragic hero is defined even further. He states that "The individual in the high distanced genres" (34), which include epic and tragedy,
"is a fully finished and completed being" (34). This view is quite contrary to my more organic view of Greek and post-Greek tragic characters as it is expressed in the following pages of this dissertation. In "Epic and Novel" Bakhtin goes on to state that There is not the slightest gap between his [the individual in the high
distanced genres] authentic essence and its external manifestation. . . . He
has already everything that he could become. and he couId become only
that which he has already become. He is entirely externaIized in the most
elementary, almost literal sense: everything in him is exposed and loudly
expressed: his internai world and all his external characteristics, his
appearance and his actions a11 lie on a single plane. His view of himself
coincides completely with others' views of him--the view of his society
(his community), the epic singer and the audience also coincide. (34)
This may be the case for the epic hero, but it is not the case for the hero or heroes of a tragedy. As I suggest in Chapter 3, Leafs view of himself certainly doesn't "coincide completely with others' view of him" and "everything in him" is certainly not "exposed and loudly expressed." This is also the case for Aeschylus's Prometheus, as I suggest in
Chapter 1. Moreover. the unconscious. the repressed, the denied, or the avoided--the struggle with the body--animates and colors that which is being "exposed" and
"expressed." but it remains internalized and unknown, at least for many tragic heroes, unless a given hero, such as Aeschylus's Xerxes or Euripides's Agave, as I suggest in
Chapters I and 4 respectively, manages to externalize and confront the roots of suffering and shame, ideally within the context of an empathic mourning process. As I attempt to explain in Chapter 4 specifically, tragedy is not as "naive" a form as most critics believe.
It dramatizes very complex, psychological processes and either the workings of, or need of, empathy in ethical terms. "ee my discussions of the distinction between empathy. pity. love, and compassion in Chapter 2 on pages 83-4 and note 19 and in Chapter 3 on pages 138-39.
For a discussion of empathy and mutual recognition see pages 196-97 and note 3 of
Chapter 4 and for a discussion of Aristotle's process of recognition see Part I of Chapter
6. Section I
Uncovering Tragic Paradigms in Ancient Greek Tragedy Chapter 1
Two Paradigmatic Patterns of Tragic Action in Aeschylus's Persians and
Prometheus Bound
My trinity of psychologicaf principles and processes--shame, the denial of the body, and empathy--reveal the complexity of Aeschylus's Persians and Prometheus
Bo~otrlin a new light. These two plays are early examples of the way in which tragedy conveys the need for empathy in order that individuals emerge from a destructive process of denial driven by extreme feelings of shame and the need to feel in control.' By focusing on Aeschylus's portrayal of a dialogic2process of mourning which involves transcending overwhelming and crippling feelings of shame by Xerxes in the Persians and the inability to do so on the part of Prometheus in Prometheus Bourzd this chapter challenges traditional views of these two plays and the characters of Xerxes and
Prometheus.
The confrontation with bodily realities and the tack of control they necessitate is at the heart of both plays and is illustrative of the problem of tragedy in general. The way in which the body becomes the focal point of tragic tension is, however, unique in both cases. Nonetheless. both plays are very clear examples of the way in which tragedy serves to illustrate that the only way out of the self-absorbed. narcissistic, inevitably destructive feelings of shame rooted in feelings of powerlessness and bodily vulnerability is through empathy.
Often critics tend to focus on what they see as the unique, "primitive" qualities of the Persians, specifically its apparent lack of conflict and complexity of character.' On the other hand. from the point of view of the relation between shame, denial, and empathy, which I see as distinguishing the tragic mode of expression, the Persians is a fully developed, paradigmatic example of tragic conflict at the center of which lies the psychologically complex characters of Xerxes and the Chorus of Persian elders. This conflict and complexity is generated within a mourning process which takes its participants from a state of denial into one of empathy--an acute awareness of vulnerability which begins by creating an antagonism between Xerxes and the Chorus and ends by bringing them together. The complexity of character of these two participants in mourning becomes evident once the dialogic. tragic nature of Aeschylus's play. particularly its final extremely emotive scene between Xerxes and the Chorus. is explored from the point of view of the dynamics of denial and empathy in action.
In this play, the forces of denial and fear of mortality which animate the action are evoked through a combination of three factors: ( 1 ) the intensity of the aged Queen and
Chorus's feelings of vulnerability, mortality and loss before and after young Xerxes mives and confirms that the male youth of the Persian nation have been destroyed in war: (2) the fact. revealed most profoundiy in the Ghost of Darius's statements about his son's disastrous actions. that Xerxes exceeds. and in essence. denies the bounds of reason and mortality as he
Changed sea to land--against all nature!--
Fettered the waves and made men march across.
A mortal playing god to gods!' (:. 748-50)
And finally, the fact of Xerxes's own personal feelings of shame shared by the Chorus.
The origin of the suffering and shame that Xerxes and his community experience lies in Xerxes's youthful sense of invincibility or the inability to recognize his own mortal limits. As the Ghost of Darius points out, when "We mortals lose control, the gods fa1 I in with it" (1. 742). Xerxes "provoke[d] the gods" (1. 830). The source of Xerxes's "corruption," manifest in his failure in war, lies in his own very human desire to
deny his own mortality. which takes shape in the denial of '-external ~ontin~ency.~"The
tragic tension generated by the denial of mortality leads to a confrontation with loss of a
sense of personal and communal identity.
When Xerxes enters mid-way through the play his feelings of shame are more or
less unbearable and his sense of isolation extreme. He is immediately the object of the gaze of the grief-stricken Chorus who is in the midst of absorbing the horror of its own
vulnsrabiiity. which is due in large part to Xerxes's failure as their leader. Xerxes's first
words to the Chorus are:
Yoh!
Unlucky! I! Spit fate,
No hiding, mine!
It bites, it feasts,
Eats Persia,
Pain on pain.
0 senators. so old. so wise,
My strength is water.
Zeus! Let me lie with them,
The dead ones.
Death shroud me, close my eyes. (11.908- 18)
Xerxes's desire to be shrouded by death and unseen is a common symptom of the experience of shame. In "The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear." Stanley
Cave11 distinguishes shame from guilt largely on the basis of this desire to go unseen: For shame is the specific discomfort produced by the sense of being
looked at: the avoidance of the sight of others is the reflex it produces.
Guilt is different: there the reflex is to avoid discovery. As long no one
knows what you have done, you are safe; or your conscience will press
you to confess it and accept punishment. Under shame, what must be
covered up is not your deed. but yourself. It is a more primitive emotion
than guilt, as inescapable as the possession of a body, the first object of
shame. (49)
Xerxes's first words suggest that the sight of the Chorus and their sight of him is too much to bear. His concern is largely for himself, although his sense of identity is never altogether separate from his community. "Unlucky! I!" he begins. There is "No hiding" and the sight of the "senators. so old. so wise" makes him feel powerless and long for death. The Chorus's response is just as self-absorbed. At this early point in its interaction with Xerxes its response is not to comfort and reassure the young king, but to go over the extent of its loss and Xer-ws's responsibility for it:
0-toto-tee. Majesty ! Good army.
Proud Persia's high renown.
Squadrons
Scythed down, made straw!
Earth cries for her sons,
All dead, for Xerxes dead.
You crammed Hell's jaws with them:
Rank on rank they marched,
Their country's flower, master-bowmen, rank on rank,
Ten thousand, a rniliion, gone.
Ai-ee! Who'll guard us now?
Our land, our Asia, Majesty,
Shame! Shame!
Is humbled, on its knees. (11. 9 18-30)
After listening to this litany of loss and blame Xerxes acknowledges aloud his responsibility for the fate of all:
0-ee. I did it. Our race.
Our land, our fatherland.
I blighted them. (11. 93i -33)
Whereas only "I," "my" and "me" exist in Xerxes's first set of words. in the second set, after the Chorus's first response, two "1's" frame three "Our's."" At one and the same time Xerxes realizes and acknowledges that he is responsible for his community's suffering and nonetheless that he remains an integral part of the community. He faces the crisis of reconciling his recent shameful actions in war with his communal and ancestral sense of himself.' Only by identifying his shame and pain in the process of it being acknowledged and expressed by his fellow citizens can this be accompiished.
He and the Chorus begin to recognize one another's shared pain and fate. They emerge from their own feelings of shame, loss and confusion associated with the horrific past into the present with empathy. Gradually a process of mourning is initiated where the burden of grief and shame is spread among the whole community. The Chorus responds to Xerxes's acknowledgment of responsibility and community by voicing its own feelings of ambivalence toward him in this way: How can we greet you home?
Our words are bruises,
Our whirling cries.
Take them, all stained with tears. (11. 937-40)
In a note to this passage in Anthony Podlecki's translation of the Persians, Podlecki states that "The Chorus does nothing to comply with the Queen's request earlier that they
'comfort' the returning king (530)' or with Darius' commmd to 'Counsel him with reasoning and good advice' (830)" (104). But this is not exactly true at this point. Here the Chorus "comforts" Xerxes by acknowledging the pain. grief, and tears which result from his actions--they mourn with him and thus share the experience of loss. It is the beginning of a mourning process in which feelings of vulnerabi!ity are expressed and offered to another so that the parties involved can emotionally understsnd each other and empathize. Xerxes is to "Take" the Chorus's "bruises" and "cries" "all stained with tears" into himself. The Chorus makes an offering and not simpiy an accusation. Xerxes accepts the Chorus's harsh greeting or blame as an offering and in this way the king at least partially redeems himself."erxes encourages the Chorus to "Cry. Shriek. Wail" as he accepts that "Fate I Falls full on me" (941-3)." The Chorus then feels free to ask further questions about the battle and those who have not returned. GraduaIly, through the Chorus's questions and Xerxes's answers, both come to accept the reality that "We're naked" (1. 1024). The "Tears flow" (1. 1065) and the Chorus slowly leads the king
"Home, home in tears" (1. 1069), as both parties support and confirm each other's pain.
Both the Chorus and Xerxes externalize extreme vulnerability in word and action so that they are fully known to one another. The final empathic words of the play are uttered by the Chorus: "Home now. We lead you home in tears" (I. 1077)."' The feelings of shame and grief have not disappeared; rather, they are under control. The extreme feelings of shame with which Xerxes enters are now bearable as he exits accepted for who he is, with the weight of his failure spread among his fellow
Persians who confirm every one of his painful steps and tears with their own. The sharing and physical expression of grief (in word and movement on stage) communally makes it common. human. and thus bearable. Xerxes and the Chorus continue to struggie with their mortality, but they do so tosether. The audience partakes in a painful. empathic, dialogic communal process of reconciliation which frames and amplifies the degree to which they and the characters on stage are normally out of touch with their own mortaIity and vulnerability.
The state of mutual empathy reached between Xerxes and the Chorus is extremely rare in tragic drama." The pain of both Xerxes and the Chorus demand on being heard and understood equally. The equality granted the conflicting parties of Aeschylus's
Ertmc.rlides is nothing like that experienced in the Persiurzs. In the Errrnenides, because the conflict is resolved rationally in court and not through the process of mourning, the conflicting feelings which underlie the claims of Orestes and the Furies remain polarized and neither party shows any sign of understanding the other." The exchange of feeling between Xerxes and the Chorus is unique largely because disaster has occurred in the past and the action of the play is concerned solely with integrating the homfic consequences of the past into a new conception of personal and communal identity through the mourning process. Both parties feel absolutely lost, vutnerable, and defenseless; thus they are open to one another's pain to the extent that they can reach a state of mutual empathy. Usually in Greek tragedy, there tends to be a more defined hero or heroine, or group of heroines in the case of a play like Aeschylus's Supplianr Maidens, whose disaster, and the suffering which follows from it, is the focus of the drama. Those who surround them during their suffering function as more of a means to reconciliation or further isolation than anything else.
In Aeschylus's Promethects Bormd, Prometheus needs the Chorus to witness and confirm his pain and the injustice of his punishment. But because his will is so strong and never broken, ultimately he remains alone in his suffering. His pain is beyond the divine Chorus and human suffering. Although Zeus is his tormentor. neither Prometheus nor the audience ever see Zeus. The play dramatizes the internal, psychological torture of
Prometheus's struggle to confirm the rightness of his actions--his betrayaI of Zeus for the sake of humanity. And yet there is something about his continual need for confirmation and his response to his fellow Titan. Ocean. that suggests that there is more to his resistance to Zeus than the concerns of humanity. but we will address this complicated issue as it arises in our analysis.
Aeschylus does something in Prornetherts Borcnd that is unparalleled. By using the god of foresight as his hero he suggests that human beings will never be abIe to bear the suffering that goes along with being fully corzsciorts of the reality of our bodily vulnerability"--that we are naked and exposed to death, "animal" bodily functions and desires and the shame that goes along with being subject to these forces1"--atthe same time that he illustrates the power of knowledge and a sense of justice in the face of such a reality. In the suffering of Prometheus's mind and naked body Aeschylus gives us humanity at its most vulnerable and most heroic. Ironically, the god's struggle to confirm the rightness of his mind in the face of the overwhelming power of Zeus dramatizes our own struggle to confront that which we normally cannot--our mortality. In Prometheris
Borcnd Aeschylus celebrates the seemingly futile, but at the same time necessary, effort to deny our bodily existence in presenting a god who does not have to do so. Prometheus himself does not deny his responsibility for his own suffering, although even he does not foresee the extent to which a body can suffer. Like all gods. including Zeus, he is vulnerable to the capriciousness of other gods and the Fates and Furies. His compassionate and generous acts for humanity lead to his being chained naked to a deserted mountainside in Scythia at the "End of the world" (I. I)." This physical isolation and suffering is, on the other hand, symbolic of his internal, psychological torment.
Aeschylus's Prornetherrs Boltnd, like his Persims. makes it quite clear that the source of suffering lies in the hero exceeding his own limits in attempting something unnatural or not intended by the gods. This is not to say, however. that Aeschylus's drama operates on the level of a morality that endorses the punishment of those who exceed their limits; rather, Aeschylus's tragedies, and those that follow, seem to be largely concerned with what drives individuals to such extreme behavior and how they respond to the lack of control that follows from passionate action. What AeschyIus does emphasize in the Persians and in Pron~ethe~rsBorrrzd is the fact that the choice to act against the gods is the hero's own. I6 After his first set of words to the Chorus Xerxes never again looks to avoid responsibility for his actions, despite the fact that there is no question that the gods were involved in determining his and his community's fate.
Prometheus is conscious of his responsibility for his own suffering from the outset of the play. But unlike the Persinrzs, Prornethe~tsBound suggests unjust punishment. Like other heroes. such as Oedipus in Oedipus the King, Prometheus suffers more by the end of the pIay than he does at its beginning. Initially he suffers for his denial of or resistance to the superior powers of Zeus, inherent in his rebellious act of giving gifts to humanity, and finally for his willful refusal to reveal his knowledge to Zeus's messenger, Herrnes.
Prometheus is unyielding, but is he as altruistic as he would Iike those around him to be~ieve?"
Although Prometheus is the god of consciousness and conscious choice, his choices are nevertheless driven by passionate and personal feelings of humiliation, anger, hate. love and compassion. He violates his kinship bond with the Titans and helps the
Olympians only once he has been laughed at and humiliated by the Titans:
I went to the Titans, children of Earth and Sky,
Offered them strategy. They laughed me down:
Their muscies promised strength wculd win. (11. 203-05)
This humiliation drives Prometheus crazy in the present as it did in the past." In the present there is the added irony and shame attached to the fact that his response to the
Titans's belief in power, and the sharing of his knowledge with Zeus. lead to the establishment of the muscle and power wielded against him. This muscle is embodied in the character of Might who oversees the binding of Prometheus to the cliff of rock:
"Might. Force. you are the word of Zeus" (I. 1 1). says Hephaestus in the beginning of the play. Prometheus reveals to the Chorus that
. . . . Shame gnaws my heart,
Rage at the outrage done to me.
It was I--you know it--[ and no other
Who handed these gods their power. (ll.437340)
This rage drives and feeds Prometheus's ongoing resistance to the physical power of
Zeus. Although there seems to be little doubt about Prometheus's compassion for humanity. there is something obsessive and defensive about the way he insists on naming every skill and gift he "found for them" (1. 477),lq his concluding statement after going over this list, and the dialogue with the Chorus that follows this statement:
Prometheus...... *.....*.--.*....
What more'? Who found for them
Wealth hidden in the ground: iron, copper, gold?
I did: admit it, all who believe in truth.
It's briefly told: whatever mortals know
They learned from me--
Chorus.
You gave them everything.
You've nothing left to give yourself.
But still we hope.
One day you'll be free.
You'll rival Zeus. (11. 499-5 10)
Prometheus needs the Chorus to confirm the value and significance of his sacrifice.''' ~e is unyielding in his defense of "truth." But is there any other possible conscious or unconscious motivation for his heroic actions and resilience?
Like the tortured 10, Prometheus's internal feelings of shame are manifest in external suffering. 10 chances upon Prometheus while wandering in madness after having been stung by a gadfly sent by the jealous Hera. In Aeschylus's version of the 10 story Hera, Zeus's wife. is jealous of I0 not for sleeping with Zeus, but for being one "Whose love flamed Zeus' heart" (1. 590). Zeus does not actually seduce 10. 10 reveals to
Prometheus and the Chorus that while living at home she had repeated dreams that asked:
Why still virgin?
Lucky girl, who could give yourself to power.
Zeus bums to sleep with you. (1. 647-48)
Instead of following her dreams and giving herself "to power" by meeting Zeus in the fertile fields of Lerna as her dreams demand. she telis her father. who sends "messengers to Delphi and Dodona / To ask what he should do or say to placate 1The gods" (11. 659-
6 1 )." After "A tangle of oracles and prophecies. I Impossible to unravel. . . . Apollo spoke I Clearly and simply. I[o] was to be banished (11.662-65). She is banished for her erotic dreams. It must seem to I0 that she is banished for an unnatural sexuality over which she has no control. Her feelings of alienation and shame are symbolized in the fact that Hera turns her into an object of shame, a cow with horns. Aeschylus makes it quite clear that the source of shame for 10 lies internally. in her dreams. artd not externally. in the physical world. The external forces of Zeus and Hera seem to symbolize and suggest the ambivalent feelings stimulated by the uncontrollable, unconscious world of body.
10's physical and symbolic torment reflects that of the suffering Prometheus.
Nevertheless, there is one major difference between 10's experience of torment and that of Prometheus: PrometheusTsknowledge of the future and the satisfaction and vengeance that this knowledge breeds in him. He experiences a strong sense of power and control despite the fact of his present helplessness. But, as a consequence of his sense of his own power, he can never fully expose his internal self to others. and thus himself. He remains blind to what is at the root of the actions which lead to his suffering. Before 10 can reveal her shameful feelings and inner self. she must trust Prometheus and the Chorus. She asks, "Should I trust you? Distrust you?" (1. 640).'just prior to revealing her innermost desires and problems. Prometheus, on the other hand, cannot risk exposure of his innermost feelings of shame and guilt because he will not, or cannot, acknowledge them as real--he is in denial of them.
Prometheus's shame has not only to do with the irony of his helping his persecutor, but also with his feelings about betraying his fellow Titans. As already mentioned. the encounter between Ocean, a fellow Titan, and Prometheus is most revealing in following through this line of thought. Ocean enters and begins by announcing that he has "travelled fast and far / To see you, beyond the boundaries" (11.
285-86). He continues speaking and then says:
I weep for what has happened.
Kin-duty--and more than that,
Warm friendship. We need
No flattery. you and I: Tell me the help you want,
It's yours. You'll never say
You've a truer friend than Ocean. (11. 289-95)
Prometheus's response is extreme: "Ocean! Have you too come to gape?"]. 298).
Perhaps the fact that Ocean goes unpunished for crimes he shared with Prometheus is too much for the bound god to take? Prometheus makes it clear that he doesn't want Ocean to
"meddle," but Ocean begins to give "advice" nevertheless. In response to Ocean's offer
Prometheus explodes in sarcasm, "Such loyalty! Such eagerness!" (I. 340), and then goes on to say he is "grateful" but that Ocean should
Do nothing. Stay away from it. How will it help my suffering
To share it with all my friends?
I weep for my brother-Titans: Atlas.
...... (11.343-47)
Why such feelings of ambivalence toward Ocean? At the conclusion of his extended speech about the suffering of his "brother-Titans," Prometheus asks:
Why do I tell you this? You know it.
Save yourself. I'll bear my Fate.
Endure it to the end--till Zeus relents. (11. 370-74)
Prometheus asks the right question. but his answer is incomplete. He goes on and on here and in other places because of his feelings of shame and guilt for his betrayal of his kin.
He channels or perverts these feelings of vulnerability into feeIings of invulnerability in the form of revenge and hatred: "till Zeus relents." Prometheus's desire not be "gaped" at by Ocean, and his overall extreme response to him, seems to be motivated by unconscious feelings of shame and guilt connected to his betrayal of his kin which wa, as we have already seen. motivated by feelings of humiliation.
Given this knowledge, Prometheus's seemingly pure and altruistic saving of humanity is suspect. The feelings associated with his betrayal of his kin were, if he did not already feel them, probably initiated by the thought of the suffering of his fellow
Titans, not simply after the war was over. but while it was going on and Zeus was in the process of defeating and torturing his enemies. Prometheus is thus faced with the double humiliation of his betrayal of his Titan kin and their suffering as a consequence of the power that Prometheus helped Zeus attain. So out of humiliation, the feeling which drove him to betray his kin, Prometheus makes a choice and betrays Zeus, and not solely out of compassion for humanity. He knows that this "act of humanity" on the part of a god is a challenge to Zeus's power and authority. But, ironically, he never imagined the extent of the pain he would have to suffer as a consequence of his rebellious actions. And this oversight on the part of the god of foresight is, I would argue. at the root of his physical. symbolic suffering, What drives his suffering is an absence made manifest by his struggle to deny his innermost feelings.
The themes of the violation of kinship bonds and choice run throughout the play and are first introduced by Hephaestus just prior to his reluctant chaining of Prometheus in the opening moments of the play. At the same time. Hephaestus also reiterates Might's claim that Prometheus violated the natural order when he "stole. your [Hephaestus's] fire.
/ Spark of all knowledge. To give to mortals!" (11. 6-7):
But I--how can I bring myself
To bind a kinsman here in this wintry place?
I must. To ignore Zeus' word is no careless thing.
Prometheus, noble-hearted son
Of Themis the counsellor,
Not I, not you, chose this.
I'll spike you here on this hill.
...... -.-..-..*..*.,
. . . . No blunting the tooth of pain.
Your rescuer's unborn, does not exist.
You chose it. Mortal-lover! Chose it yourself.
A god, you laughed at gods. You gave
What was theirs to mortals. Free choice! (11. 13-30) Hephaestus relieves himself of any guilt feelings, not so much by reminding himself that he has no choice but to bind Prometheus because of the threat of punishment behind
"Zeus' word". but. more likely, given his feelings of excitement. by the momentary realization that Prometheus is a "Mortal-lover!" who made a "Free choice!" to give away that which belongs to the gods. Hephaestus manages to momentarily forget the bonds of kinship in his excitement. But he immediately returns to thoughts of Prometheus's future suffering. "You'll groan. You'll curse. You'll shriek." (1. 33), so that Might responds with disgust. 'Time-wasting! Weeping! . . . He gave your pride to mortals" (11. 35-7), and
Hephaestus returns once again to the issue of kinship. "But kinship . . . fellowship . . ." (I.
38). The conflict created by Hephaestus's ambivalent feelings and Might's blind obedience and respect for power foreshadows the relationship between the ambivalent
Prometheus and the powers of Zeus manifest in the chains that bind the Titan god.
The pride Prometheus feels for saving humanity from their ignorance and hopelessness. from what appears to be the foreknowledge that Zeus's "power will end" (I.
760)." and from the knowledge that he cannot die, seem to enable him to bear his unbearable suffering. Nevertheless. as Prometheus reveals in the following speech from early in the play. the extent of his pain prompts him to doubt his actions:
I knew what would happen, from the start.
I chose. I chose. I'lt not deny it.
By helping mortals. I condemned myself.
But how could I foresee such punishment?
Chained to this giddy rock,
Alone in this wilderness, left to rot? (11. 265-270) There is more to experience than the rationalistic mind of the god of foresight
understands. He did not predict the extremity of the feelings of pain and isolation which
accompany the punishment that he did predict. Prometheus's understanding of himself is
limited by his faith in his own rational, prophetic powers and the pride it breeds in him.
He does not, and will not, understand those forces or, more specificaIly, feelings which
drive him to act. By exposing Prometheus's limits, Aeschylus, like those tragedians who
follow him. dramatizes the inextricable relation between feeling and intellect and the role
the two play in true emotional understanding, the ultimate expression of which is
empathy.
Unlike Xerxes, Prornetheus does not possess enough self-awareness to enable him
to emerge from a self-absorbed, narcissistic condition. Xerxes accepts full responsibility
for his and his community's suffering. despite the fact that there are other, external forces
involved. and as a result he exposes himself. emotionally naked to a process of mourning
which entails the sharing of pain and suffering. Prometheus momentarily acknowledges
feelings of shame. but he refuses to explore these feelings further. communally.
[mmediatsly after the Chorus compare Prometheus's punishment to that of his fellow
Titrtn. Atlas. Prometheus acknowledges certain feelings of shame directly:
Stiff-necked you think me? Too proud to speak?
Not so. Shame gnaws my heart,
Rage at the outrage done to me.
It was [--you know it--I and no other
Who handed these gods their power. No more
Of that. But hear how it was with mortals.
Blank minds. 1 planted seeds of thought, Intelligence. No shame to them in this:
I tell it to show how good my gift. (il. 4364)
Prometheus is ashamed of "handing" Zeus and the Olympian "gods their power." But at
least part of what triggers this admission is the feelings of shame and guilt he experiences for betraying Atlas and the rest of the Titans. Despite this apparent admission of responsibility he continues to see himself solely as a victim of betrayal. On a consciorrs level he is possessed by a "Rage at the outrage done to" him. He avoids his most disturbing feelings and returns to his accomplishments and, by implication, his "unjust" punishment.
Prometheus does, however, to a limited extent, willingly acknowledge and partake in the world of feeling. Although he does not take his own question, "How will it help my suffering /To share it with all my friends?" seriously at the moment that he asks it, probably due to his mistrust of Ocean and the fact that Ocean is a reminder of the Titans who suffer because of his betrayal of them. this question is a good one. Sharing his pain is the only way out of his blinding rage and self-absorbed condition. frometheus rejects the gaze of Ocean. but he has already accepted that of the Chorus of Ocean's Daughters.
Moments before Ocean's appearance the Chorus addresses Prometheus. outwardly acknowledging his suffering position:
Iron-hearted. carved from stone. Prometheus,
Are those who see your suffering. and find
No tears to shed. UnwilIing witnesses.
We see you now. Your anguish wrings our hearts. (11. 242-45) These sympathetic words prompt Prometheus to say: "Friends at least can look on me, and pity" (1. 246). As his unpredictable pain continues to strike. Prometheus says to the
Chorus:
Don't waste your tears on the suffering you see.
Come closer. . . step down . . . and hear the rest.
The future. Do as I ask. Do as I ask.
Share my sorrow. Pain's a restless wanderer,
Settles now here, now there. (11. 27 1-75)
Although the Chorus is given permission to "look on" him "and pity," they too are not to
"share it [suffering]" with him. David Grene's translation of the above lines from
PI-onwtltertsBound reads: "But do not sorrow for my present suffering; / alight on earth and hear what is to come" (11. 273-4). In order to bear his present suffering Prometheus must either glorify his past or his future. He lacks the humility and self-knowledge that would enable him to share the burden of the present. In essence, his present is his past and future. although he cannot see this through his psyche's defenses. He is obsessed with Zeus's betrayal of him to the extent that he cannot conceive of the way in which the shame and guilt associated with his own betrayal of his fellow Titans shapes his actions.
Prometheus demands that the Chorus hear (and confirm the rightness of his side of) his story. Since he refuses to share his "present suffering," and thus get too close to (the sources of> his suffering and accept the loss of power it embodies, he will continue to speak and act from unacknowledged feelings of shame and humiliation.
The audience may suspect that there is more to Prometheus's suffering and actions than he wishes to reveal; the Chorus, on the other hand. although they suggest that
Prometheus submit to Hermes's demands to avoid pain, show no sign of understanding what drives the god to whose fate they ultimately attach themselves. At the end of the
play Hermes threatens the Chorus with punishment if they do not "Go! Now" (I. 1060)
and abandon Prometheus, but they choose to stay. undermining Hephaestus's claim at the
outset of the play that he had no choice but to serve Zeus:
Try another time! New words!
Not this advice. You tempt,
You preach disloyalty.
How dare you? We stay,
We bear what he bears.
This we know, we learned from him:"
We spit on those who betray their friends. (11. 1063-7 1 )
Given Prometheus's own betrayal, these words, although I think they are meant to be taken seriously, point to the irony of Prometheus's position--something the Chorus cannot see as long as Prometheus is in denial.
Despite the Chorus's unyielding support and compassion for Prometheus's pain. the pain does not lessen. The implication seems to be that this could only happen if he chose to expose his "soul" (and the feelings of shame and humiliation which possess it) as much as he is forced to expose his body. But this does not happen--at least not in this one extant play of a trilogy. With characteristic recalcitrance and denial in his second to last speech, before loosing his capacity for speech altogether, Prometheus responds to the
Chorus's advice to "Give up your anger, seek out common sense" (I. 1036):
No word he [Hermes] yaps is new to me.
I'm at war, I'm wounded: no disgrace.
Let Zeus hurl lightning-spears, Rockets, knives of fire.
Shake air, tear sky,
Tornadoes splinter Earth,
Uproot, convulse.
Boil sea, dissolve the stars.
Lift me, break me, hurl me,
Black deeps in Tartarus.
Whirlwinds of fate.
Do all he likes, I'll never die. (11. 1040-53)
Once Herrnes exits after his and the Chorus's unsuccessful attempt to get Prometheus to name the "mamage you boast will topple" Zeus (I. 948). Prometheus's pain increases to such an extent that he can no longer tolerate words. He is caught in a -'storm" of feeling which overwhelms his intellect.
The punishment for Prometheus's willfulness is beyond any mortal experience of pain and yet it is perpetuated and intensified by very human feelings. The final words of the play spoken are those of the tortured god:
No more words. It's happening.
Earth writhes.
Thunder bellows from the deep.
Fire-tendri Is, lightning-flares.
Hurricanes hug dust,
Death-dervish-dance.
Wind leaps on wind,
Howling. tearing. Sky drinks sea.
Zeus did this. His storrn.
Themis, mother!
Sky-wheel that turns the stars!
See how unjust my suffering. (11. 1080-92)
Ideally. the audience "sees" more than either Prometheus or the Chorus. It is as if
Prometheus is forever dying and caught within a "Death-dervish-dance" and world that lacks aII definition and sense as the "Sky drinks sea." From Prometheus's point of view.
"Zeus did this." but from a dramatic point of view what we witness is Promethe~is's
"storm." his hell.
In this respect Prometheus is not all that different from Milton's Satan of Books I and I1 of Pcrrcrdise Lost as H.J. Rose suggests in A Corrzrnentcrn on the Srirvivirzg Plays of
Aescli~lrts( 1 1 ). Both Prometheus and Satan suffer for their ambitions as much as they do for unresolved, denied feelings of shame and humiliatiom-1 < I suggest that the reason why neither Prometheus nor Satan could predict the power of their antagonist and the extent of pain which follows from punishment is that neither understands the power of the feelings of shame and humiliation which drove them to rebel in the first place. Prometheus is flung into the chaotic underground worid of Tartarus, the ancient Greek version of Hell, because of a se!f-destructive rage driven by more than he knows . His physical, external pain is symbolic of the internal struggle to deny vulnerability--the mainspring of tragedy.
Like Xerxes while in denial, Prometheus wishes to bring on himself and suffer the same fate of those who have fallen because of his actions. Before Xerxes feels the pain of the Chorus of elders and comes to terms with his responsibility for his and his community's suffering, he expresses his desire to "lie with them, / The dead ones" so that he can "close" his "eyes" off from the sight of suffering reflected in the eyes of those around him. Responding to the words of the mortal 10. who feels it is "Better once to die
/ Than to drag out each day in misery" (11.750-75 1 ), Prometheus says:
And what of me?
How would you bear my pain?
Immortal: no death-hopes comfort me.
No end to misery, so long as Zeus is king. (11. 752-55)
At the play's end Prometheus lives out perhaps our greatest fear--a painful death--without the comfort of "death-hopes." Prometheus would appear to prefer "death-hopes" to his immortal. vulnerable position, but his knowledge that he will "never die" feeds his sense of invulnerability. Unlike Xerxes. Prometheus is driven further and further into denial by pride. shame and humiliation.'" It seems that he too wishes to join those who he has betrayed. the Titans imprisoned in Tartarus. rather than face the fact of his betrayal of them. and the final moments of the play indicate that his wish comes true.'7 He is unconsciously compelled to inflict on himself the same punishment his kin received due to his betrayal. He is engaged in an internal war with himself more than he is with any external force. No matter how much he feels in control of his future. his feelings. his self. he is out of control, and this is symbotized in his ongoing physical vulnerability and his find chaotic loss of language and physical disorientation.
The views of Aeschylus's frometheus and Xerxes articulated in this chapter serve to challenge traditional views of these characters, the plays in which in they appear, and tragedy in general. At the root of a tragic figure's crisis and heroism lies his or her own confrontation with bodily vulnerability. Most tragic figures go the way of Prometheus, and remain in denial of vulnerability, although, as 1 have tried to show here , the crisis of Aeschyius's god of foresight is a unique one. Other tragic figures. and there are relatively few. go the way of Xerxes, as they confront and acknowledge shame and develop the capacity for empathy. But. as I have already suggested. the Persians is extremely rare in that it presents a dialogic exchange between two parties that leads to a mutual state of empathy. The complexity of these two plays, and the tragic heroes who propel them forward, offer two paradigmatic patterns of tragic action born out in tragic literature from the Greeks on. Notes
'AS Martha Nussbaum states in 'The Oedip~csRex and the Ancient Unconscious." the ancient Greeks "understood the mind's deepest and most anxious preoccupations to be preoccupations--frequently unconscious on account of their upsetting character--about control and lack of control. security and the absence of security" (44). Tragedy explores or, in the case of a character like Prometheus, challenges what Ernest Becker in The
Dr~ricdof Death calls the "vital lie" or "defenses" which a child builds up in order to
"allow him to feel that he corztrols his life and his death" (55). Becker states that
it [a vital lie] is a necesstrl? and basic dishonesty about oneself and one's
whole situation. This revelation is what the Freudian revolution in thought
really ends up in and is the basic reason that we still strain against Freud.
We don't want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality.
that we do not really control our own lives. . . . All of us are driven to be
supported in a self-forgetful way. ignorant of what energies we really draw
on. of the kind of lie we have fashioned in order to live securely and
serenely. . . .
The defenses that form a person's character support a grand
illusion, and when we grasp this we can understand the full drivenness of
man. . . . It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms
us to a life that is never really ours. (55-56)
Becker's understanding is particularly bleak. Tragedy, on the other hand. and especially
Greek tragedy, suggests that empathy (for tragic characters empathy is usually experienced within a mourning process) can enable individuals and communities to cope with the breakdown or destruction of a "grand illusion." In the Persims this "optimism" is explicit and in Prornetlzerrs Bound it is implicit. In tragedy the empathy experienced by the audience, which is able to intuit or recognize the absence or presence of empathy and its therapeutic potential while engaged with a tragic piece of literature. forms the ultimate and consistent expression of tragedy's "optimism." The experience of empathy is an experience of vulnerability and not defensiveness. It is a permeable state of being.
Within a mourning context this experience enables the individual to integrate and reconcile personal and communal identity. Personal memories. losses. and iltusions, when externalized in mourning. are contextualized and complicated to the extent that they are no longer experienced as the product and burden of the individual alone.
o or a discussion of the meaning of and relation between empathy and the dialogic see note 7 of the Introduction.
:1n his study of Aeschylus's works. In Praise of Prornetlzerts. Leon Golden goes so far as to state that
In this play [the Persians], as Sidgwick notes. the conflict or agorl which
is of central importance in all other Aeschylean plays, including the
Suppliants, is completely missing. Conflict of some sort is the heart and
soul of drama as we regularly find it, and the absence of this element in the
Persians is a strong indication that it has not been designed to fit the
traditional mold. The conflict upon which this play turns has long since
been over, and the play itself represents a ceaseless and pitiable lament of
what has occurred. Atossa. Darius, Xerxes, and the chorus are passive
sufferers, not active agents in conflict with an adversary. (36) In The Origirz and Earl? Form of Greek Tragedy Gerald Else sees the Persians in a similar light for different reasons:
In the Persians the disaster has already taken place before the play begins:
all that remains is to bring its effect and its meaning home to us. The
action, so far as we can speak of an action, goes through four stages, each
having a definite relation to the disaster (the battle of Salamis). These
stages are: ( 1 ) apprehension (the chorus and the Queen). (2) verification
(the Messenger's report of the battle). (3) explanation (by the Ghost of
Darius), (4) emotional realization (the frantic lamentations of Xerxes and
the chorus). The play is not yet quite a drama. but Aeschylus has given it
considerable dramatic life. (87)
According to Else. Aeschylus's Persians represents an earlier form of tragedy that lacks the intensity of conflict or drama which characterizes later tragedy.
Contrary to Golden and Else. in Greek Truged~H.D.F. Kitto distinguishes the
Persims (as we1 l as Pronletllerts Boruzd) as "Old Tragedy" in which Aesch y lus develops a different kind of conflict for different reasons. Kitto states that '*The essence of Old
Tragedy was not one character joined in conflict with another, but the solitary hero facing his own destiny or playing out an inner drama of his own soul . . ." (3 1-32). Later Kitto states that "The Persae is as purely dramatic, in conception, as any other play by
Aeschylus" (40). As is evident in this chapter, I more or less agree with Kitto on this point, although my emphasis is on the dialogic and at one point. conflictual. relationship between the "inner drama" of both Xerxes and the Chorus.
Where I do not agree with Kitto, or with Golden, is on the characterization of Xerxes. While introducing "Old Tragedy" in Greek Tragedy Kitto states that
The tragic implications of the second actor are even more important than
the dramatic ones. Since the situation moves, the hero must be of a certain
kind: he must--if we are to have tragedy--be of such a moral constitution
as to oppose himself to this movement, not to conform to it. . . . In other
words, the moving plot was designed to display and test moral character.
to give room for moral choice and for its results. (32-33)
Contrary to critical opinion on ancient Greek tragedy. with the exception of Martha
Nussbaum as expressed in The Frugilig of Goodness. I believe that the hero of tragedy is not necessarily "of such a moral constitution as to oppose himself to this movement. not conform to it" from beginning to end: rather. tragedy can incIude a tragic hero who begins by resisting his or her own vulnerability. but by the end of the play he or she has confronted and learned to come to terms with it through an empathic exchange with others. Tragic heroes who. in this sense. learn, learn to respond to the world outside and inside themselves on ethical. not moral, terms. (See Part LI and III of Chapter 6 for a discussion of the ethical, psychological basis of tragedy.) In short. to respond on ethical terms is to respond with empathy to those forces. including other individuaIs. beyond one's control. It is, for instance, cur ethicul choice lo lecrrn tllrozigh empathy that Xerxes makes and Prometheus (in Aeschylus's Prometheris Borrrzd) does not. (This learning process is more or less the subject of Chapter 2 on the centrality of Neoptolemus to
Sophocles's Philoctetes.) Aeschylus reveals the complexity of Xerxes's character and that of the Chorus as they come to terms with their losses and. in Xerxes's case, intense feelings of shame. From this point of view, the finai, highly emotive scene in which Xerxes and the Chorus react to one another's pain, as well as the complexity of character and structure of this play, become more comprehensible.
Kitto describes the final scene as one "of which the modern reader can make very little, the broken Xerxes limps home to port. Xerxes is not an impressive character-- hardly indeed a character at all" (4 1 ). What is "impressive" is Xerxes's ability to mourn and move from denial to empathy. I agree with Richard Kuhns. when, in the first chapter.
"Loss and Mourning in Aeschylus' Persians," of his Freudian based book, Tragedy:
Cmtradiction and Repression. he argues that "The success of Tlre Persians as a tragedy derives from its establishment of mourning as a positive. reconstructive act. not simply a collapse into infantile passivity" (33). Kitto and others like Golden do not acknowledge the tremendous significance of the msurning process. and the empathy it engenders. to tragedy and thus they miss the complexities of character and plot which distinguish a tragedy like the Persians. "The drawing of character in the Persictns. then." says Golden.
-'is unique in the corpus of Aeschyiean writings since in all the other plays. including the
SI(PJ~~~LIJZ~S.a more detailed md complex characterization of the principal figures is given'' (35). In the final scene of the Persiuus, in which the Chorus and Xerxes respond C to one another with utter vulnerability in an antiphonal manner, characters are dialogically complex. That is, character is a product of different, individuated consciousnesses responding to one another in dialogue. as separate, but mutually affective voices. Helen Bacon, in her essay on Aeschylus in AIIC~PIIIWriters: Greece and
Rome, Volume I. states that
It is ironic that many critics have found Persians. with the same basic
imagery and pattern of action as Sophocles' play [Oedipus the King], technically primitive and undramatic, too static and remote to be tragic. I
believe this is a misperception that arises from not recognizing the chorus'
central role in redefining the status of the fallen king. ( 1 18)
See Golden's study of The Persians in In Praise of Promeflwris for further discussion of
the "divergent critical opinions" with regard to "character portrayal and plot
development" (32) in the Persicins.
'~nlessotherwise stated, all quotations from the Persicuzs are taken from Anthony
Podlecki's translation of the play. His translation captures the dialogic exchange between
Xerxes and the Chorus particularly well.
'unlike Martha Nussbaum. whose "primary focus of concern" (7) in The Fragility oJ'Coodtwss is what she calls '"externd contingency'--of luck coming to the agent from the world outside of him" (7), my emphasis is on what she refers to as "'irrational parts of the soul': appetites, feelings, emotions" (7). My understanding of the role of vulnerability in Greek tragedy has been heavily influenced by Nussbaum's The Fragiliv ofGoothless. Nussbaurn's use of Greek tragedy to illustrate that the Greeks balanced the
"pursuit of self-sufficiency" through reason with "a vivid sense of the special beauty of the contingent and the mutable, that love for. . . riskiness and openness" (3). that "the peculiar beauty of hrirnan excellence just is its vulnembility" (2). has been particularly influential.
"other translators of the Persians such as Seth Benardete use other words to convey the progress of Xerxes's identity crisis. Benardete translates lines 93 1-33 as:
"Here am I, alas, 0 woe: / To my native and ancestral land / Woe is the evil I've become."
Although Benardete does not frame "1's" with "Our's." he manages to capture the fact that Xerxes is attempting to reconcile his "ancestral land" and past identity with that of what he and his ruined community and heritage have "become."
'Writing from a psychoanalytic perspective in Tragedy--Contradiction and
Rqression. Richard Kuhns explores "the familial conflicts [which] prevented his
[Xerxes] being able to mourn, when mourning was appropriate, at the death of Darius"
( 17) in order to explain Xerxes's actions in war and on stage upon his return home.
'In his own words (and those of Gilbert Murray) in the introduction to Tlze P ersor ofAesclz_vlus, H.D. Broadhead describes what I see as Xerxes's unusual, tragic heroic vulnerability and the Chorus's acknowledgment of it in the final scene of the play:
This final scene can be understood and appreciated only if we recognize
that Xerxes. unsuitable as he was for the role of traditional tragic hero. is
nevertheless the mainspring of the tragedy. In all earlier scenes he has
been present to our minds so that his appearance in the flesh is a veritable
climax, which must be reserved for the end of the play. Aeschylus. with
unerring instinct, made it follow upon the impressive denunciations of
Darius. which. no less than the charge to Atossa (833-4). prepare the
audience for the picture of the broken monarch, utterly overwhelmed by
the shame and disgrace he has incurred, confessing his responsibility for
his country's ruin, wishing that he had perished with his army. deeply
moved when he recalls the trusty comrades he has lost. answering meekly
the reproachful enquiries of the Elders, and finally participating in the
mournful antiphonal dirge that fittingly completes the picture of the depths
of misery to which the once glorious and triumphant Persia is reduced. If ( There is no chauvinism in this f ku Td,, and Gilbert Murray is surely right
when he remarks, "This lamentation is not only written with great
technical skill, but seems to combine an expression of utter defeat and
desolation with a certain nobleness and dignity. The conquered oppressor
is not mocked." (xxiii)
"AS Helen Bacon says in her essay on Aeschylus in Ancienr Writers: Greece and
Ronre: The implications of the Persian defeat must be experienced in the form of
the antiphonal lament by Xerxes and the Persian eIders in which every
source of grief and humiliation is agonizingly recalled. Tragedy is not a
simple reenactment but an act of assimilation. Not only the occurrence but
its implications must be lived through on the stage and by the audience.
This livingthrough is part of the event. its completion and validation, the
means by which, for all its brevity. the tragic moment becomes a
permanent possession of humanity. ( 108-9)
I0Helen Bacon captures the dramatic essence of the final moments of the Persicins:
The climax of this final revelation of Xerxes as fallible mortal is visual as
well as verbal and musical. The king of kings calls on the chorus to look
on the remnant of his followers (like the queen on her second entrance he
probably has one or two attendants), at his quiver almost emptied of
arrows, at his torn garments, and finally cries, "I am stripped [literally
"naked," grrmnos] of my escort" (1036). The new escort that conduct him
to his palace is a ritual acknowledgment of his new, vulnerable, merely human state, the mourning chorus. on foot. beating their breasts. lacerating
their cheeks, tearing their hair.
In providing this escort, so different from the one that has been
lost. the Persian elders implement the queen's parting instructions and in
some sense restore Xerxes to kingship. however drastically transformed.
The new escort objectifies and sums up the new state of affairs. in which a
semidivine king has been replaced by one who is human. fallible,
vulnerable. ( 120-2 1 )
"AS I point out in Chapter 1. a state of mutual empathy is also reached in the final exchange between Agave and Cadmus in Euripides's Bcrcchae.
"AS I suzgest in my discussion of Euripides's Iplrigenia bz Toriris in Section I of
Chapter 6. it takes more than a divinely sanctioned judicial process to enable Orestes to come to terms with the feelings of shame. guilt. and loss attached to his killing of his mother--it takes undergoing an empathic, mourning process with his sister, Iphigenia.
"ln The Derziai of Dccirh Ernest Becker goes so far as to ask, "What exactly would it mean on this earth to be wholly unrepressed. to live in full bodily and psychic expansiveness?" and immediately answers his own question, "It can only mean to be reborn into madness" (66).
I4 See pages 79-80 of Chapter 2 for Ernest Becker's vivid description cf "the fact that" we are "half animal and half symbolic" creatures.
1s Unless otherwise stated, quotations from Prometherrs Boiirrd are taken from the translation by Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish. Their translation is particularly effective at capturing the raw emotion and psychological complexity of Prometheus's suffering.
Ih In her essay on Aeschylus in Ancient Writers: Greece and Rome. Helen Bacon states that Aeschylus's emphasis "is not on conflict between or within individuals or on intrigue and the shocks and surprises it can generate, but on the obsessive states of mind that can lead to violation of the unwritten Iaws" ( 1 15). "Obsessive" seems an appropriate way of characterizing the tragic state of mind (especially that of Prometheus) given that
"choice" is more like compulsion for tragic characters caught in a vortex of shame and denial.
17 My critical view of Prometheus. which questions his motivations and by implication. the typical view of Zeus as the source of al; problems in the phy, is akin to the views of H.J. Rose in A Conzmentaq on the Srtnivirtg Plaxs of Aesclzylrrs, Gilbert
Murray in Aesclzyl~cs:The Creator of Tragedy, Anthony Podlecki in "Reciprocity in
Pronzetllerrs Bound," and D.J. Conacher in Aeschylrts ' Prometheus Bound. (For
Conacher's view see note 23 of this chapter.) In the introduction to his commentary on
PI-otrletllerisBo~trzd, Rose states that
Many generations of readers have come away from the Pronretherts Borezd
with the feeling that its hero has all the right on his side and is the noble
victim of a heartless and cruel enemy of himself and of mankind, to say
nothing of the older gods from whom he has taken his present position by
violence. That the poet temporarily suspended his most serious
convictions and was content to show his audience a purely mythological
Zeus, a character from an old story which they might believe or not as they chose, seems as incredibIe to me as a like suggestion would be in Milton's
case, if by some accident only Books I and I1 of Paradise Lost had come
down to us. Nor do I consider it at all likely that, as has been repeatedly
suggested, the Zeus of the second play was shown (or rather spoken of, for
there is not a scrap of evidence that he appeared in person) as grown
milder and juster with experience and the long lapse of time following
upon his quarrel with Prometheus. There is further difficulty, that he
seems never to have put into practice his threat to destroy mankind (P.V.,
234-35). surely an easy feat for his omnipotence, despite the bettering of
their condition through the arts taught them by the Titan. ( 1 1)
Responding to the same "generations of readers" who paint Prometheus as "the noble
victim of a heartless and cruel enemy." Murray states:
Thus we have in this play Zeus appearing as unredeemed tyrant, hating
men, torturing their divine champion, and making women the victims of
his lust. Yet the audience might suspect that this was not the whole truth.
for several reasons. . . . What if there is something quite wrong in the
present condemnation of Zeus as he now is? What if Prometheus and I0
herself are utterly mistaken, at any rate in their judgement of what seems
like his worst action? ( 104-9)
Although they raise similar questions as myself concerning traditional opinions on
Prometheus and Zeus, Rose and Murray rely largely on speculations about the two lost plays of the Promethean trilogy to develop their arguments about character in Prometheus
Boriud, whereas I am concerned with the dynamics of denial and shame and the suggestion of the empathic way out in the pIay itself.
In his article. "Reciprocity in Prornetlzeus Bound,'' on the other hand, Podlecki speculates on the content of the two lost plays to follow Prorrzetherrs Bound based on an argument that "Prometheus can, I think, be shown--and will perhaps have been shown in the sequel--to be guilty of many of the same faults and excesses he accuses his adversary of possessing" (287). Podlecki suggests that in the sequel "some of these unfavorable traits which Prometheus imputes to Zeus are to be pointed out to him in his own character, perhaps by his mother Themis-Gaia, perhaps by Heracles or one of the other persorzcte, and that the proud wisdom to which Prometheus repeatedly lays claim is shown to be lacking in this respect, that he does not know himself' (287). Behind the fact that Prometheus "does not know himself." and the "instances of. . . verbal repetition" (292) to which Podlecki points in order to prove his claim, lie the dynamics of denial and shame. In the final parasraph of his article. Podlecki "conjecture[s] that some of these themes were resolved in the sequel, that Prometheus and perhaps Zeus, too, were brought to a new understanding of themselves, their situations, their necessary relationship to each other. The two antagonists may even have been made to see that they were really not so dissimilar as they had assumed (292). suggesting something like the resolution of conflict through empathy which I see as integral to the tragic process.
I h In Greek Tragedy, Kitto argues that "Aeschylus is not simply explaining the situation for us, how it has arisen. What Prometheus has done for Zeus, what he has done for Man. are not only things which have led to the present situation: they are the present situation, part of Prometheus's present mind--for the essential drama is precisely his present mind" (58). I 'I Golden's view of the reasons for the inclusion of "the impressive catalogue of
Prometheus' gifts to man" ( 1 12) are quite different from mine. Golden believes that
AeschyIus included this "catalogue" to indicate "that he knew. just as we know today. of signal examples of the victories that man's intellect has won over a hostile nature [for
Golden, "hostile nature" is embodied in the figure of Zeus in Prornetheus Bound]" (1 12).
From everything I have read on ancient Greek literature, and certainly from Greek tragedy. the Greeks. or at least its tragic poets, had a more complex version of
"intelligence" in mind than Golden suggests. "Intellect" was not divorced from feeling.
As marth ha hrussbaum points out in The Fragility of Goodrzess. the two must work together in a good life in which humility and wisdom flourish. Prometheus's obsessive need to justify his actions and words is a sign of an individual whose state of mind is out of balance. It is not enough to possess the gifts of the intellect. Such "gifts," when not baIrtnced by self-awareness and knowledge in the area of feeling. lead to destruction. often destructive "victories."
'"~rometheusexhibits a form of maie narcissism in the demands he makes of the
Chorus of Ocean's Daughters. It strikes me now that the demands that Prometheus makes on the Chorus are not unlike the demands Lear makes of Cordelia in the opening scene of
Shakespeare's tragedy. Moreover, in both Ibsen's The Master Builder. in which Halvard
Solness. the "master builder." is the tragic figure, and When We Decrd Arr*crken,in which
Professor Arnold Rubek, a sculptor. is the tragic figure. young women serve to feed narcissistic images of these tragic figures to the extent that both men destroy themselves in a state of delusion. Lear, Solness, and Rub& are all characters, like Prometheus, whose intense feelings of shame and inability to cope with experiences of acute powerlessness and vulnerability lead to self-destructive behavior.
:I In telling her father and not acting according to Zeus's desires, like Prometheus.
10 more or less defies Zeus's will. On the other hand, whether or not Zeus or the jealous
Hera are actually responsible for 10's suffering is a question in the play. Conacher
discusses this issue thoroughly from pages 60 to 68 of his study of Prometheus Bound
and Bacon on page 133 of her essay on Aeschylus.
,- -'In David Grene's translation of Prornetheris Bound these lines read: "I know not how I should distrust you: clearly / you shall hear all you want to know from me."
UnIike the translation by Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish which I am using, here the suggestion is that lo comes to the realization that distrust is misplaced in dealing with the god of foresight. In either translation. however, 10 asks herself a very human. understandable question given her acute sense of her own vulnerabiiity.
-In7 1 Aesclylus' Prometheus Bound Conacher makes a convincing argument for the fact that Prometheus's prophetic ability is compromised by his moods, specifically when he states that Zeus's "power will end." Conacher suggests that
It is not until this final scene, before the entry of Hermes but after the full
effects of 10's visit have been accomplished, that Prometheus makes these
categorical statements about the fall of Zeus. This prophecy is not only
false (for, as we all know, Zeus does not fall from power); it also
represents a repudiation of that Necessity. of the Iinked fates of Zeus and
himself, which Prometheus has hitherto, though with increasing
reluctance, accepted.
That we are, for the reasons just indicated, to regard these statements of Prometheus as implying if not hybris at least an
overstepping of his rnaira seems an inevitable conclusion. Their
immediate result--the arrival of Zeus' emissary. Hennes--bears this
conclusion out. Hitherto, Prometheus has controlled himself to the extent
of remaining silent about the content of his secret. . . . (68)
Conacher's view of Prometheus is the most balanced I have encountered. He is the furthest away from the very common, and I would argue, simplistic view of Prometheus as victimized hero and Zeus as evil or, as Leon Golden sees him, the embodiment of the destructive forces of Nature in this play. Conacher's analysis of the play includes a thorough consideration and critique of much of the criticism on Prometheris Bormd, including that of Golden. He goes so far as to suggest that although Prometheus exhibits
"llybris" and a lack of "self-control" which typically "speH . . . doom" for tragic figures, in this play "we must accept these qualities as the right ones in the circumstances" (72).
Given the workings of denial and shame in this tragedy and others, I cannot agree with
Conacher that "we must accept these qualities as the right ones." Greek tragedy suggests that characters driven by denial and shame are doomed to destructive courses of action as long as they resist sharing their pain and shame communally. In Promerlleris Bound. the central character cannot do this; thus the Chorus's ability to empathize is limited and it is only the audience community who witnesses and. ideally, intuits and recognizes the roots of Prometheus's suffering and the empathy needed to emerge from it.
'h Ancient Wrirers, Helen Bacon describes Prometheus's generosity toward the
Chorus and his compassionate action for humanity, as well as the Chorus's decision to remain with Prometheus, as acts of klrctris. She explains that the constraining power exercised by Zeus through kratos [dominion or
might] and bia [violence or force] is contrasted with the liberating power
exercised by Prometheus, the power of mind and of the quality known as
khciris. The mind through knowledge of both past and future (Pronzethrris
means "foresight" ) can deiiver humanity from bondage to nature through
understanding the uses of fire. English has no single word that covers all
the meanings of kharis. It is a spontaneous grace or favor that evokes, or
should evoke, a like response, and may be pan of such personal
relationships as compassionate fellow feeling and passionate love. Our
word "charity" is derived from it. . . . The chorus, who in this scene as
earlier in the play have been counseling Prometheus to give up his
intransigence and surrender the secret, suddenly become choosers and
decide to share Prometheus' fate. . . . In return for his many acts of kllnris
in responding to their endless questioning. they bestow on him the only
klrnris that in their powerlessness they have to give. the willingness to
share his fate. Prometheus' gifts to the chorus bear fruit not just in a
mechanical exchange of favors but in understanding that leads to new
attitudes and choices. ( 134- 136)
Bacon argues that "Without the rest of the trilogy, there is much that we cannot know about the details of this wider action. It seems to point to an order in which bicr is complemented by kharis" ( 136-37). Her argument is convincing. although I would add that in Pronzethe~tsBorind the character of Prometheus is much more than simply a compassionate god: he is a god driven by a hate which originates in self-hatred and shame. In other words, Prometheus's responses to the Chorus's "endless questioning" are
fed by his obsessive need to justify and confirm his actions.
.< "I believe that in the case of Aeschylus's Prometheus and Milton's Satan.
characters take on a life of their own to the extent that they are dialogic beings who
operate beyond the reach of the moral and monologic. They are. in a sense, beyond the
author's control, thus tremendously complex, tragic creations.
'"Xerxes faces up to his shaming experiences fully and Prometheus does not. thus
Xerxes increases his insight and self-awareness and Prometheus increases his suffering.
1- -'Conacher puts it this way: "Again it is Prometheus who, in his last prophetic command, insists on the elemental confusion required to send him down to Tartaros"
(74). Chapter 2
A Tragic Anomaly: Sophocles's Philoctetes and the Two Faces of Shame
The audience of Aeschylus's Persians witnesses the working through of shame and denial and the subsequent development of mutual empathy, whereas. in Prometheus
Bound. it witnesses a tragic character so accustomed to responding to others based on feelings of shame and the habit of denial that there is no room for empathy in his tortured realm of experience. In Sophocles's Philoctetes. on the other hand. the audience witnesses a tragedy in which one tragic character, Neoptolemus. manages to work through shame and denial and experience empathy while another. more inflexible, tragic character, Philoctetes, remains caught in overwhelming feelings of shame to the extent that he will only trust the empathic wisdom of a god, Heracles. This play dramatizes a relatively typical situation in tragic literature: a situation where one character is capable of learning and expressing empathy and another is not.' And yet. Neoptolemus only overcomes shame and learns empathy because of the immensity of Philoctetes's shame and suffering. In this sense, the two form a tragic tandem. The younger, flexible
Neoptolemus is, however. not usually grznted the status of a tragic character by literary critics. His tragic dilemma and learning process is. indeed. anomaious within the conventional critical paradigm of tragedy which does not account for the genre's essential dynamics of shame, denial, and empathy.
In the Philocfetes, Philoctetes's dying, decaying body is the catalyst for a confrontation with vulnerability, specifically mortality, and the learning of empathy. In
Neoptolemus, Sophocles creates perhaps his only tragic character who is able to confront, and emerge out of, his own state of denial and shame into one of empathy. The experience of empathic understanding by a receptive audience is inherent to the tragic experience. but, despite the fact that many of the plays examined in this dissertation posses characters who experience this superior. ethical state of being. it is unusual for a tragic character, especially a central character, to do so. For this very reason it is important to recognize that Neoptolemus is such an unusual central character.' For one to arrive at this state he or she must first know themselves in a way that involves confronting their own feelings of vulnerability and shame. In the Plziloctetes. it is a confrontation with feelings of vulnerability attached to mortality which enable
Neoptolemus to work through his own shame and consequently empathize with
Philoctetes. On the other hand. Philoctetes's more intense feelings of shame and vulnerability serve to drive him away from other human beings into "savagery." These two responses to shame. that of Neoptolemus and Philoctetes, represent the two faces of shame which reflect and inform one another to form the central dramatic concern of this anomalous Sophoclean tragedy. which requires a more complex. ethical. psychological paradigm of tragedy in order for it to be fully appreciated.
-4lthough Martha Nussbaum does not look at the psychological issues of shame, denial and empathy in particular, in her study of ethics in Greek tragedy and philosophy,
The Frugili~of Goodrress. she defines a state of mind and body which characterizes the
"goodness" of an individual, using Neoptolernus as an example:
An honest effort to do justice to all aspects of a hard case, seeing and
feeling it in all its conflicting many-sidedness, could enrich future
deliberative efforts. . . . It is, of course, possible to work towards such a
just appreciation of the complexity of the claims upon us in the course of
ordinary life, without tragic conflict or tragic suffering. The tragedians,
however, notice that often it takes the shock of such suffering to make us Iook and see. Neoptolemus, in Sophocles' Plriloctetes, does not know
what it is to respect another person's pain until he, too, is made to cry in
pain. When, by pain, he learns how his ambitious plan conflicts with his
attachment to truth-telling and justice. he ceases to be called 'child', and
takes upon himself the responsibility of deciding. . . . Neoptolemus's
outcry, the Chorus's [Aeschylus's Chorus in Agarnernrzorr] sleepless
agonies, are not means to a grasp that is in the intellect by itself: they are
pieces of recognition or acknowledgement of difficult human realities.
There is a kind of knowing that works by suffering because suffering is the
appropriate acknowledgement of the way human life, in these cases, is.
And in general: to grasp either a love or a tragedy by intellect is not
sufficient for having real human knowledge of it. (45)
In an independent study of Plzilocteres, "Consequences and Character in Sophocles'
Plzifoctetes," Nussbaum states that
The man who has no clear sense of himself as an individual with a certain
character and to whom a certain standard of behavior is appropriate is
unlikely to accord others full respect as individuals, whether he is a
faceless Odyssean exploiter or a self-centered, obsessive recluse from
society and public life. Even the man of generally good dispositions can
be led to do injustice if he can be persuaded to forget his nature and his
heritage. The greatest hope for justice, this play argues. is in having
Ieaders who are self-respecting, meritorious individuals disposed to
behave with openness and honesty which is part of the aristocratic
standard. . . . (47-48) Philocretes is an unusual tragedy, particularly for Sophocles, largely because it presents a central character, Neoptoiemus, who is capabie of empathy. thus he can
"accord others full respect as individuals." But it is also not so unusual a tragedy. The dialogic roots of empathy3evident in the interaction between audience or reader and a tragic work of literature are, in the case of Plzilocteres and other tragedies, dramatized in the interaction between a "self-centered," shame-ridden individual and another whose shame is perhaps not as intense and is capable of considering and working through' a
"complexity of claims" and feelings which create uncertainty and ambivalence, a kind of
"negative capability" if you will. This dialogic process is the way in which tragic characters come to a "clear sense" of self, thus freeing themselves from debilitating feelings of shame and on-going denial.'
Martha Nussbaum often comes close to pointing to the relation between denial and empathy in the tragic in the context of her ethical studies in tragedy. In
"Consequences and Character in Sophocles' Philocteres," she makes a distinction between the "heroict'and "a disposition to truthfulness and fairness" which reveals the fact that, like other critics, she does not see the inextricable, dramatic, dialogic relation of these two natures in tragedy, but. on the other hand. in making this distinction she suggests why various critics refuse to see Neoptolernus as a central character in the
Pllilocretes. In the final section, "Neoptolernus," of her study of the three "competing human moral standards" (48) in the Philoctetes. represented by its three main characters.
Nussbaum explains that "Heroic merit can exist in a man--and be rewarded by the gods-- quite separately from a disposition to truthfulness and fairness. But the man who is most likely to care about the rights of others, and to respect their autonomy, is the one who has a clear sense of what he is and what actions are and are not consistent with a certain sort of character" (48). According to Nussbaum, one can be a "hero" and be "unjust." as long as one has performed exceptional deeds. In Philoctetes. Neoptolernus arrives on Lemnos having never proved himself in deed. On the other hand, as Nussbaum points out, by the end of the play he proves himself "just" because he is able to transcend his own suffering and see into the suffering of another and act on this emotional. ethical ufiderstanding.
Without the wounded, suffering "object" of shame, Philoctetes, to trigger his own feelings of vulnerability and shame. Neoptolemus could never reach such a balanced state of emotional understanding. It is not simply a matter of Neoptolemus learning from the moral standards exhibited by the two older men, Philoctetes and Odysseus, to whom he listens and with whom he interacts on this deserted island, as Nussbaum argues: on the other hand. at least Nussbaum recognizes the superior moral. but really ethical, condition in which Neoptolemus ends. and the fact that it is dependent for its existence on an interactive. what I am calling, dialogic process." The ethical is a dialogic, psychological process which Sophocles and other tragedians dramatize. "In the person of the pivotal character, Neoptolemus, we shall see how Sophocles suggests a merger of the merits of the other characters, which, because it is based on a firm grip of plulsis ['one's own essential nature' (32)J(with regard to which both Philoctetes and Odysseus are defective). will avoid their respective failings" (43). says Nussbaum in her article on Philoctetes. It is not exactly rt "merger." however, but a process of learning, which, I will argue later, goes beyond any predetermined nature inherited from Neoptolemus's father, Achi 1les.
Unlike Nussbaum, many critics insist on Neoptolemus's "secondary" status in this play, although, at the same time, like Nussbaum, they acknowledge the influence of
Philoctetes and Odysseus on Neoptolemus's "moral" development. In the first few pages of his chapter on the PIziloctetes in Sophocles the Pluywight, S.M. Adams declares that We see the characteristic firmness of the central figure [in Philoctetes],
together with that fine quality which goes to make the greatest Achaeans
in the Trojan War. The straightforward nobility of Philoctetes could not
better be displayed than by placing it in opposition to the subtle duplicity
of an Odysseus, with the youthful Neoptolemus as recipient of the
respective influences of these two men. The reactions of Neoptolemus are
of great concern to us, as they were to a Greek audience: but it is of
Philoctetes that we are meant to think especially: he is the tragic hero. We
must not look on Neoptolemus as the central figure just because he is
"romantically" young and inexperienced; his youth and inexperience are
used to reflect dramatically the aspirations and the motives of two maturer
men, and of those men Philoctetes is by far the greater as everyone admits.
( 135)
Adams's concIusions, like those of Bernard Knox. on the status of Neoptolemus are based on a conventional definition of a "tragic hero" more than they are on an analysis of the pIay.
Ironically, in their analysis of scenes from Plzilocte~es,both Adams and Knox suggest the dramatic centrality of Neoptolemus. Adams says of the pivotal scene in which Neoptolernus silently struggles with conflicting cIaims on him--duty and glory on the one hand, and compassion and his inclination for justice on the other--while
Philoctetes and Odysseus quarrel: "There is not a word of Neoptolemus: indeed, from
Odysseus' entrance until the scene is closing the young man does not speak at all. This. in my opinion. is one of the great dramatic silences. . . . With Neoptolemus looking on in silence. and still in possession of the bow, the quarrel is now between two adversaries who play the roles that nature fitted them to play" (152-53). In my opinion, and in a sense, Adams's. the "quarrel" serves to frame Neoptolemus's silence and the inner struggle that it reveals. In his chapter on the Pldocteres in Form and Meaning in Dmmu.
H.D.F. Kitto also stresses Neoptolemus's dramatic significance in this scene:
For a hundred verses (974 to 1073) Neoptolemus is silent. but though
silent he is very far from being dramatically inefficient. He stands there
with the stolen bow in his hands--and no sensible producer would put him
anywhere but in the middle of the stage--and he has to watch this terrible
revelation of the callousness of the Greek commander to whose plausible
arguments he reluctantly surrendered. ( 123-24)
For Podlecki, this pregnant, extended silence serves to communicate Neoptolemus's
"shame and confusion" (24 1 ). Here, without a word. Neoptolemus's implied, ambivalent thoughts and feelings dominate the stage, just as his words and actions (which manifest his psychological and "moral" development) do throughout the play.
In his book. The Heroic Temper Stdies in Sopltoclectn Tragedy, and in his article. "Second Thoughts in Greek Tragedy." Bernard Knox goes to great lengths to fit
Neoptolemus into a conventional conception. or paradigm rather. of tragedy.
Neoptolemus is, however. an anomaly necessitating a shift in paradigms. Like Adams,
Knox believes that "Philoctetes lives up to all that we have come to expect of a
SophocIean tragic hero. Nothing can bend him to compliance" ( 1 17), but there is more to this kind of heroism than such critics suggest. The dramatization of heroic inflexibility in tragedy reveals an intense process of denial and self-absorption and, in interaction with other characters, at least a suggestion of a way out of this condition through empathy. In the Philoc~eteswe get to witness heroic inflexibility in Philoctetes and heroic flexibility in Neoptolemus.' If tragedy is seen from the point of view of a new tragic paradigm
stressing the dynamics of denial and empathy, Sophocles's Philocttrres, and his flexible
hero, Neoptolemus, are no longer anomalous; rather, they are simply unusual. Moreover,
once this point of view is appreciated, the tragedies of Euripides, and, for that matter,
those of modem times. no longer appear so distinct from those of Aeschylus and
Sophocles as they do for so many critics like ~noxbhofollow in Nietzsche's footsteps
in The Birth of Tragedy.
Knox argues in The Heroic Temper that the Philocretes is "a Sophoclean tragedy
in a class by itself' because "The drama of the assaults on the hero's will and his refusal
to surrender is this time played out against a new background: the inevitability--more, the
desirability--of his surrender" ( 1 17- 18). On the other hand, I believe that if this play is
"in a class by itself," it is largely because of its focus on Neoptolemus's dialogic process of empathy. Because critics like Knox do not see Neoptolemus in this light they can grant him no more than a "secondary" status in the play. These critics offer some very
insightful readings of Neoptoiemus's character. but ultimately inadequate readings of his role in the play as a whole. In The Heroic Ternper, Knox says of the Philocteres:
In such a play, which avoids 'the incurable' . . . we are emotionally
engaged, to a greater extent than we are in tragedy proper, in the working
of the plot, the success or failure of the intrigue. In true tragedy there can
be no success, and we do not really want it; we are watching the fatal
career of a hero whose obstinacy dooms him to defeat, but whom we do
not wish to see surrender. As we watch Antigone. Ajax, or Oedipus, our
deepest emotions make us hope that the compromises offered the hero will
fail; in the Philocretes we hope for their success. In the other plays we know they \.till fail; in the Philoctetes we know that somehow they must
and will succeed. Consequently our attention is directed not only to the
central character but also to the methods used to influence him. . . . [I]n
the Philoctetes the methods used by Odysseus and Neoptolemus are just as
much our concern as the hero's reaction to them. . . . The methods used in
the attempt to sway the heroic will are, in the other Sophoclean tragedies.
of secondary importance, for they serve only to increase the hero's
intransigence, but in the Philocreres they are all-important; the choice of
method is crucial, for here there are right methods and wrong ones. and
somehow the right one must be found.
There are only three methods which may be employed to break
down the heroic will--force. persuasion. and deceit. . . . ( 1 I 8- 1 9)
Knox's assumptions about "tragedy proper" and "true tragedy" and what the audience
"wants" and "wishes" are not altogether convincing. Do "we" hope that the compromises offered Oedipus will fail? and do "we" hope that those offered Philoctetes will succeed? I don't, and I don't know that Greek audience members did either. According to Knox. because "we" "want" the "three methods" to succeed we are more interested than usual in the characters who are the vehicles of methodology.
One of the problems with this argument is that the characters of Odysseus and
Neoptolemus are in no way of equal psychological depth or dramatic importance. Knox more or less admits this in a footnote to the following thought: "In the Pllilocretrs we are emotionally involved in the nature of the methods used to sway the heroic will and the order in which they are used, consequently we are also fully involved in the character of the persons who make the attempt. The figures of Odysseus and Neoptolemus are more fully developed, more rounded, conceived in greater psychological depth than is usual for the secondary figures in Sophoclean tragedy" (120). The footnote that falls after these words states, among other things, that "Neoptolemus is of course one of Sophocles'
rCoreatest creations, but he is still secondary in the play. Everything he says and does is concerned with Philoctetes. . . . " (186). Despite the fact of the psychological depth of
Neoptolemus revealed while he is on stage--and he is on stage probably more than any other character--and the fact that his "moral" and psycholo,aical development is a major dramatic concern throughout the play, Knox and Adams. as well others. insist that he is
"secondary" because, basically. he is not what has come to be known as "the tragic hero."
"But," as Knox states later in his chapter on the Philactetes. "they [Odysseus and
Neoptolemus] have an importance of their own which is new in Sophoclean tragedy"
( 1 2 I ). Are Jocasta, Creon, or Tiresias any less important to Oedipus the King than
Odysseus is to the Philoctetes? Are they any less complex? The issue is certainly not a clear one.
Knox's argument and his view of the importance of each character hinges on his belief that the Plziloctetes is about the "methods used to sway the heroic will" and the rightness and lateness of the last used. persuasion. Certain Characters. such as
Neoptolemus. may be one of "Sophocles' greatest creations." but they are "secondary" nonetheless--a means to a method, if you will. "It [Neoptolemus's attempt to persuade
Philoctetes without deceit and according to his own aristocratic principles] is what should have been said at the beginning" (136), says Knox. He argues that this play is about the fact that Neoptolemus should have used this last "method" of persuasion first.
The problem I see with this argument is that Neoptolemus's final appeal to
Philoctetes is beyond "method" or persuasion; it is an empathic appeal to another human being to do what he feels is best for the other and the community. As Neoptolemus himself states to Philoctetes: "What I see fulfilled wili be best for you and me" (1. 138 l)."
Neoptolemus has chosen to listen to and witness Philoctetes's pain and feelings of hate. humiliation. and shame, and consequently. faced his own shame and learned from it. He has attained a level of ethical insight and self-awareness which can result from a confrontation with shame, as Charles Rycroft suggests in his definition of shame in his dictionary of psychoanalysis:
According to Lynd (1958) . . . shame has a close connexion with the sense
of IDENTITY and with CNSIGHT. It is provoked by experiences which
call into question our preconceptions about ourselves and compel us to see
ourselves through the eyes of others--and to recognize the discrepancy
between their perception of us and our own oversimplified and egotistical
conception of ourseIves. If faced up to. shaming experiences increase
insight and SELF-AWARENESS; if denied. they provoke the
development of a defensive carapace. ( 153)
In the Philoctetes we are witness to two such contrary responses to "shaming experiences." Through the wounded hero's strong responses to Neoptolemus's betrayal of him. as well as Neoptolemus's heritage as "son of Achilles", and the shame it produces,
Neoptolemus becomes more self-aware. Philoctetes. on the other hand. becomes more and more defensive as the thought of a second exposure of himself to the eyes of the
Greeks who cast him away becomes more of a reality. NeoptoIemus reveals to him
Helenus's pr~phecythat he will "come into hands that can heal you" (1. 1345) and that he will win "renown among them [the Greeks]" (1. 1347) at Troy after pointing out to
Philoctetes that "Your anger has made a savage of you" (1. 132 1 ). Philoctetes recognizes Neoptolemus's "friendship," but ultimately his feelings of hate and shame ovenvhelm any
trust he has of the "boy." The idea of "seeing" the eyes of those who do not see him, only
his "wound," is unbearable:
Hateful life, why should I still be alive and seeing?
Why not be gone to the dark?
What shall I do? How can I distrust
his words who in friendship has counseled me?
Shall I yield? if I do. how come
before the eyes of men so miserable?
Who will say word of greeting to me?
Eyes of mine, that have seen all, can you endure
to see me living with my murderers,
the sons of Atreus? With cursed Odysseus?
It is not the sting of wrongs past
but what I must look for in the wrongs to come. (11. 1348-59)
Philoctetes's anger is driven by the fact that he cannot perceive himself among the Greek
army other than as an object of shame beyond the humanity of others, despite
Neoptolemus's final, humane, and empathic treatment of him.
Neoptolemus tries to reassure the suffering man that he is a true "friend" several
times. but to no avail. Philoctetes does not understand and believe that "friendship" for
Neoptolemus now includes "[tlhe capacity to put oneself into the other's shoes" (Rycroft
43). empathy, and that his words and actions are in harmony. "Sir, learn not to be defiant
in misfortune" (1. 1387), Neoptolemus suggests, but Philoctetes replies, "You will ruin
me, 1 know it by your words" (1. 1388). Neoptolemus then says: "Not I. You do not understand. I think" (I. 1389). Unlike Neoptolemus, Philoctetes cannot go beyond
himself emotionally, even if intelIectually he knows that he should not "distrust / his
words who in friendship counseled" him--he cannot "understand." On the other hand. at
the time of Neoptolemus's last, empathic appeal, his intentions and feelings. like his
words and actions. are in hannony: "Why should one feel ashamed to do good to
another?" (1. 1383) he asks the incredulous, defensive Philoctetes. But Neoptotemus's
ultimate gesture of empathy is his statement, "If you will then, let us go" (1. I402), after
he has exhausted all "argument." The young man's last words before making this gesture
come in the form of a question. "What shall we do, since I cannot convince you / of
anything I say?" (11. 1393-94) followed by an answer which suggests a realization of his
own lack of control and ethical commitment, as well as his empathic knowledge of the
limits of Philoctetes's understanding and the strength of his will. hate, humiliation, and
shame: "It is easiest for me / to leave my argument, and you to live. / as you are living.
with no hope of cure" (11. 1394-6). Philoctetes teIls Neoptolemus to let him suffer and
reminds him of his promise to take him home, as he has "had enough of sorrow and
lamentation" (1. 1401). The "boy" now proves himself a man and "friend" by accepting
and acquiescing to this statement of retreat and the feelings of despair which animate it.
He risks the security of his own life and that of his people: "How shall I avoid the blame of the Greeks?" (1. 1406) he asks Philoctetes as he helps him to stand. Neoptolemus is
strongest when he is most aware of his own vulnerability. He takes such risks not simply
for the sake of keeping a promise, as so many critics suggest, but because of his feeling
for the necessity of this decision given Philoctetes's nature and state of mind as well as
his own."' It is the dialogic process by which Neoptolemus and Philoctetes come to this
understanding that is the central dramatic concern of this play. To speak of a single moral upon which this play is constructed is to deny it and its characters their true dramatic, tragic significance.
If the play was about the rightness of persuasion, why have this "method" "fail" in the end? To preserve the integrity and status of the inflexible hero? Perhaps. In
Soplroclean Trugedy, C.M. Bowra like Knox, argues for the rightness and lateness of
Neoptolemus's last, honest attempt at persuading Philoctetes, but for a different reason:
The first two failures arise because they involve means which are against
the gods' will. Odysseus' dishonest plan ends in the repentance of
Neoptolemus, the exposure of the stratagem, and the return of the bow.
Neoptolemus' plan, right though it is. fails because of the evil which has
preceded it. The treachery practiced on Philoctetes has aroused his
suspicion, resentment, hatred. and fear. The last failure is the fruit of the
first. Honesty is too late. when Philoctetes is on his guard and incapable
of listening to reason. By yieIding to Odysseus Neoptolemus has himself
created a situation which cannot be remedied simply by his own change of
heart or reversal of policy." (299)
For Bowra this play is about the "struggle between the will of the gods and the will of men" (26 1 ). The resistance to the will of the gods on the part of Philoctetes. Odysseus, and thus Neoptolemus, forms the central dramatic action of the play. But one of the central points of this play has to do with the fact that only after experiencing the inner conflict that comes with confronting Philoctetes's suffering and shame, and his own, is
Neoptolemus capable of a "change of heart." In this sense, this last attempt is not too late; rather, it occurs at the only time possible. it is the result of not simply a "change of heart or reversal of policy" or the adoption of a different "method"; it is the result of a complicated. conflictual. emotional and intellectual, dialogic process of understanding.
This tragedy, like all good ones. is about process. drama. as much as it is about a moral or morals. If the disagreement among critics is any indication. the moral issues of this play are more complicated than most would like to believe. Nussbaum states something to this effect when, in a footnote to "Consequences and Character in
Sophocles' P/docteres,"she says:
It seems that one main purpose of the apotheosis is to show us that the
gods--as has been impIied throughout--are guided by a standard of
behavior more nearly like that of Odysseus than that of Neoptolemus--i.e.
they do not (pace Philoctetes) care about justice, but rather about the
realization of a certain outcome. Philoctetes is said to be a fair. blameless
man, suffering undeservedly at the gods' hands. . . . Odysseus really is, as
he tells us . . . a pious man and Zeus' servant. Thus the second conclusion.
though it shows that the gods do not support Neoptolemus' principles,
does not represent a moral criticism of his decision. To say. "To the gods
all things are fair and just, while men consider some things to be unjust.
some things just" (Heraclitus, fr. 102) is not to say that men should
abandon their moral standards upon recognition of the divine will; in the
same way, Neoptolernus' claim to have justice on his side is not damaged
by the gods' backing of a different course.'' (52)
Neoptolemus does not "fail." He succeeds in finding himself over the course of his interaction with Odysseus and Philoctetes and because of this self-awareness he is able to recognize, understand. and respect the suffering of another human being, and he accomplishes this feat by confronting his own vulnerability and that of Philoctetes simultaneously.
If this play is about anything in particular, it is about transcending "method" or the art of persuasion into that of experiencing what it means to be truly dive to the vulnerability which connects all life. What distinguishes tragedy from other artistic and ritualistic" forms of expression is its aesthetic. mimetic. psychological presentation of intense suffering that is rooted in the denial of the body--specifically. in this play. the reality of death and the feelings of helplessness and isolation it engenders. And the only way out of this state of denial is to sense and, ideally, understand this condition in another. With this empathic experience comes a sense of coherence. resolve, and common humanity.
Neoptolemus's role as both actor and witness --of the quarrel between Odysseus and Philoctetes and of Phi loctetes's suffering-and his ongoing psychological and "moral" development evident in his silences, words, and actions make him one of two (the other being Philoctetes) dramatic centers of this play. The appearance of a central character capable of empathy and flexibility may be unprecedented in Sophoclean drama. but it is not within the context of tragedy as a whole.
In the Philocteres, Sophocles takes a dynamic which has always been present in tragedy, a process of empathic exchange usually embodied in a mourning process as. for example, in Aeschylus's Persicins and Euripides's Bcrcclzcre. and gives equal attention to the typical tragic hero caught in feelings of shame as well as the character who chooses loyalty to and empathy for this suffering figure. The focus of this play goes beyond the concerns of the hero. who, like Philoctetes or Oedipus in Oedip~rsthe King (or. I would argue, Oedipus in Oedipus at Colonus), refuses to recognize the position of the other and give up control and risk vulnerability. Philoctetes in himself does not carry the dramatic
interest of an Oedipus however. Over the course of Oedipris the King. Oedipus's control
and inflexibility begin to collapse and he is forced out of denial and. to a limited degree.
to come to terms with his own vulnerability and shame. This process is of central
dramatic concern. Philoctetes never undergoes this essential tragic process of identity
realization. Neoptolemus does.
On the other hand. I cannot bring myself to say unequivocally. like J.T. Sheppard,
that "Neoptolemus. not Philoctetes, is the hero." because of the dialogic nature of
NeoptoIemus's journey of self-discovery, which seems inconceivable without the
immense dramatic presence of the suffering Philoctetes. For this same reason I cannot
endorse Sheppard's view that the "interest" of the Philocretes "is hardly tragic. for the
hero. in spite of the title, is a fortunate and brilliant youth. Neoptolemus. the son of
Achilles" ( 1 17). Nevertheless. I think Sheppard makes an important point when he
argues that Sophocles's "greatest gift to literature is the representation of human nobility.
The passionate devotion of Antigone. the dogged love of Electra. the imperious will of
Oedipus. the gentleness of Deianeira. the generosity of Neoptolemus. the wounded honor
of Ajax" (121). From Sheppard's point of view. "the suffering. the dignity, the confidence of Philoctetes work a change in the youth for which coriversiorl is the obvious
name. . . . Thus the sacrifice of Neoptolemus is the theme. and the human drama, though
it is finally hamonised with the divinely-appointed destiny of Philoctetes and of Troy, is
in fact free and completely victorious" ( 120).14 From my point of view. Neoptolemus's
"sacrifice" and "conversion"" are not simply heroic. but also tragic, because they are
inextricably Iinked to and reflected in the "suffering" and shame of Philoctetes. In the
plight of both characters we witness Sophocles's ability to represent "human nobility." Such tragic. but distinct, noble struggles with vulnerability serve to distinguish and propel one another.
Indeed, the emphasis on the need for empathy in the face of denial and shame is always present in tragedy. If not enacted on stage. it is suggested to the audience by virtue of the limits of the characters who are incapable of taking, the emotional risks necessary to emerge from isolation like those taken by Neoptolemus. Neoptolemus's ambivalence, and his simultaneous growing sense of self and empathy. reflect the audience's experience of the conflicting claims and feelings enacted on stage. Part of this identification has to do with the fact that the audience, like Neoptolemus, is forced to confront and acknowledge the horror of Philoctetes's vulnerable physical condition and the psychological effects of his abandonment by his fellow Greeks because of this very horror.
Odysseus's pragmatism in the name of the interests of the Greeks and the plans of the gods. and his subsequent indifference to Philoctetes's suffering, represent the forces of denial of which Ernest Becker speaks in The Denial of Dearlr. In denying the animal- like. wound-festering, screaming, shame-ridden Philoctetes a place among other men, the
Greeks deny their own human vu lnerabi lity and paradoxical condition--something
Neoptolemus cannot do once confronted with the reality of this abandoned man's horrible condition. Following Erich Fromm and Kierkegaard, in The Denid of Death Becker states
that the essence of man is really his pamdoxicul nature, the fact that he is
half animal and half symbolic. . . . His body is a material fleshy casing
that is alien to him in many ways--the strangest and most repugnant way
being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he
sticks out of nature with a towering majesty. and yet he goes back into the
boround a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.
It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. . , .
[Elverything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny
and overcome his grotesque fate. (26-27)
Phi loctetes's decaying body, with a "disease / [which] always increases and grows worse"
(11. 258-9), and screams of pain inspire in his fellow Greeks a terror so palpable that he is treated like an animal and left to die in the wilderness in isolation. As Vernant and Vidal-
Naquet make clear in their study of the Philocreres in Tragedy and Myth in Ancient
Greece:
The wildness of this world is strongly emphasised by the setting itself.
Whereas the scene is usuaIly set at the palace doors, here we are presented
with the opening to a cave. . . . The word that best describes his
[Philoctetes's] condition is ayrios, wild. Ptiiloctetes has, in the strictest
sense. been made 'wild.' The vocabulary by which he is described is that
used of the wildness of animals. As has been well said. he has a 'close
connection--almost kinship--with animals.' The ill that tortures him, itself
described as ngrios, is the share of wildness that is in him. (1 80)
Anyone who comes into contact with this uncontrollable. "wild," illness, including
Philoctetes himself, is confronted with humanity's seemingly unbearable paradoxical condition as "half animal and half symbolic." Unlike Odysseus and the forces of denial he represents, the audience and Neoptolemus choose to witness Philoctetes's suffering and bodily vulnerability and the shame it produces--a vulnerability and shame to which we are all subject to some degree.
Since Philoctetes embodies their own vulnerability, on the way to Troy the Greeks abandon him'", denying him the dignity of a (social) human being. Philoctetes's bodily pain is so intense--and so overwhelming to others--that he is treated as if he is not human.
Instead of returning him to his home. or somewhere accessible to home, where he can be taken care of by family and friends, he is left to the wilds of an isolated island. out of sight. sound, and smell of other human beings. And, to make things worse, he is abandoned unknowingly while asleep. Soon after they first meet. Philoctetes tells
Neoptolemus the story of his abandonment:
They were happy
when they saw that I had fallen asleep on the shore
in a rocky cave, after a rough passage.
They went away and left me with such rags--
and few enough of them--= one might give
an unfortunate beggar and a handful of food.
May God give them the like!
Think, boy. of that awakening when I awoke
and found them gone; think of the useless tears
and curses on myself when I saw the ships--
my ships, which I had once commanded--gone,
all gone, and not a man left on the island,
not one to help me or to lend a hand
when I was seized with my sickness, not a man! In all I saw before me nothing but pain;
but of that a great abundance. boy. (11. 272-87)
Here. for the first time, the young Neoptolernus (and thus each audience member) is asked to put himself into another's shoes, to empathize, but he is inexperienced in the world of feeling as well as that of war and glory, and does not conceive of the scope and intensity of pain of which Philoctetes speaks.
In the above passage. Philoctetes reveals that the part of his pain that is unbearable and feeds his hate has to do with his feelings of abandonment and loneliness.
In the last two lines of these words, he stresses that only human companionship can relieve his bodily pain. It is this very relief that he asks of Neoptolemus when he asks him to "think" of what it would be like to feel what he felt when confronted with the reality of his isolation. Without this kind of human communication Philoctetes is isolated in his pain and the wild natural world to which he has been abandoned--a meaningless animaI existence. 17 The empathy of another human being makes his suffering more human. and thus more bearable. Before Philoctetes can emerge out of his isolated. shame-ridden state of being he must first believe that he can be known by another for who he is and all his suffering.'* In "The Power of the Word in Sophocles' Philocteres."
Podlecki. who sees the tragedy of the Philoctetes as "a collective one: there is a breakdown in that communication which is at the basis of human society" (233). in the context of his discussion of the "man-destroying pain" Philoctetes undergoes during sudden attacks of pain, states: "Isolation and pain: first the one and now the other prevent
Philoctetes' communication with his fellows. But these obstacles are overcome in the course of the action: Philoctetes does find another human being with whom to communicate and his pain subsides sufficiently to make intelligible speech possible" (235). But. this "communication" must have an empathic component to be trustworthy. and this only comes after Neoptolemus has confronted Philoctetes's extreme vulnerability and experienced his own.
Pity, or at least certain forms of it, are not enough. Throughout the play
Sophocles makes a point of having Philoctetes reconstruct the texture of his suffering in the past. present. and future so that other characters and the audience members have the emotional and intelIectual space to feel compassion and not simply pity. In Chapter XXI.
"Compassion." of Amelie Rorty's collection, E-rplairling Emotiorls, Lawrence Blum defines and distinguishes compassion and pity:
Compassion is not a simple feeling-state but a complex emotional
attitude toward another, characteristically involving imaginative dwelling
on the condition of the other person. an active regard for his good. a view
of him as a fellow human being, and emotionaI responses of a certain
degree of intensity.
Imaginatively reconstructing someone's condition is distinct from
several sorts of "identification" with the other person. For instance, it does
not involve an identity confusion in which the compassionate person fails
to distinguish his feelings and situation from the other person's. Such a
pathological condition actually precludes genuine compassion because it
blurs the distinction between subject and object. . . . .
Compassion also involves viewing the other person and his
suffering in a certain way. I can put this by saying that compassion
involves a sense of shared humanity, of regarding the other as a fellow
human being. This means that the other person's suffering (though not necessarily their particular afflicting condition) is seen as the kind of thing
that could happen to anyone, including oneself insofar as one is a human
being.
This way of viewing the other person contrasts with the attitude
characteristic of pity, in which one holds oneself apart from the afflicted
person and from their suffering thinking of it as something that defines
that person as fundamentally different from oneself. In this way the other
person's affliction is seen as deviating from the general conditions of
human flourishing. That is why pity (uniike compassion) involves a kind
of condescension. and why compassion is morally superior to pity. (509-
1 2)'"
Very soon after Philoctetes asks Neoptolemus to "think" of his suffering or empathize with him. Philoctetes himself seems to suggest that "pity" from others is not enough to make him feel human--part of a "shared humanity." He uses the example of the treatment he has received by the sailors who end up stopping at this island where "Sensible men make no voyages" (1.304):
When they have come here, boy. they pity me--
at least they say they do--and in their pity
they have given me scraps of food and cast-off clothes:
that other thing, when I dare mention it,
none of them will--bringing me home again. (11. 307-1 1 )
It is likely that these sailors did in fact pity Philoctetes in Blum's sense of the word. They clearly wished to hold themselves apart from this afflicted person and his suffering. They are incapable of experiencing, or unwilling to put themselves in, Philoctetes's suffering shoes. Philoctetes is a living and breathing embodiment of a vulnerability they cannot face in themselves. Ironically, following this speech by Philoctetes, the Chorus, part of the deception along with its leader. Neoptolemus, respond: "In this, I to@resemble your other visitors. / I pity you, son of Poias" (11. 3 18- 19). They may pity the suffering man. but this does not stop them from helping to deceive him. At least the horrified "visitors" do not deceive Philoctetes like the Chorus and Neoptolemus. At this point in the play the
Chorus's pity does not involve an empathic component, and neither does that of its leader."' Both maintain a "safe" distance from any feelings of compassion. Philoctetes is after much more than the "pity" he has experienced so far in his life on the island when he telIs his story of suffering to Neoptolemus.
Ultimately, however. it is the empathic experience triggered by Philoctetes's attacks of unbearable pain that confront Neoptolcmus with his own vulnerability. breaking down his emotional distance from Philoctetes. which will bring the young man to the point where he is ready to bring the dying hero "home again." Neoptolemus's response to Philoctetes's early appeal for empathy. following immediately after the
Chorus's response, is an intellectual denial of the suffering position Philoctetes has attempted to describe. Neoptolemus says:
I am a witness.
I also, of the truth of what you say.
I know it is true. I have deaIt with those villains,
the two Atridae and the prince Odysseus. (11. 320-23)
Ncoptolemus chooses to respond only to the issue of "those villains" (A,oamemnon,
Menelaus, and Odysseus) which occupies the final words of a very long speech by
Philoctetes. most of which I have cited above. The ambitious young man more or less ignores the issue of Philoctetes's suffering while on the island. only to continue his plan. as arranged previously with Odysseus, to speak of his own apparent betrayal by "those villains" who awarded his father's armor to Odysseus. Neoptolemus's words are strictly strategic and his feelings in control. Even if Neoptolemus genuinely feels betrayed by
"those villains." thus expressing "dormant but unforgotten wrath" (143) as Adams suggests. such feelings are expressed and contained within very formal, controlled speech concerned with the abstract "truth" of the matter. If there is a form of pity for the ancient
Greeks which involves compassion, the pity demonstrated by Neoptolemus and the
Chorus here is not of that form. Neoptolemus is simply a "witness" as he states. He may identify with Philoctetes's hatred of "the two Atridae. and that mighty Prince I Odysseus." but he does not understand Philoctetes's suffering. In order to feel compassion and experience a more complex emotional understanding he. like the audience witnessing this spectacle. will have to become more involved. They will have to experience both pity and fear. to use Aristotle's phrase.''
Only after Neoptolemus witnesses Philoctetes's sudden. "terrible" attacks of pain does he find himself caught in what David Grene translates as "A kind of compassion, I a terrible compassion [which] has come upon" (11. 966-67) him suddenly. In R.G. Ussher's translation. Neoptolemus describes himself as being "affected by strange compassion"
(81 ). and in Kenneth McLeish's translation Neoptolemus says. "I'm filled with a strange kind of pity" (207). This is not the pity which Blum describes as involving "a kind of condescension," but a "a strange kind of pity" or "terrible compassion" which triggers overwhelming feelings of ambivalence in the Prince for the first time. Neoptolemus has just witnessed "terrible" attacks of pain which are, to use Philoctetes's words, "beyond words' reach" (1. 760). The significance and horror of Philoctetes's attacks of pain and
Neoptolemus's response to them are captured by Knox in The Heroic Temper:
We understand now fully why the Achaeans abandoned him. "Screaming
and moaning." Odysseus said . . - . but we could not have imagined
anything like this. This animal scream of pain is more than other human
beings can stand; we Iive by forgetting that such pain exists. we shut it
away in sound-proof rooms and dull it with drugs. But Neoptolemos is
brought suddenly and brutally face to face with it; he has to watch the
momentary obliteration of personality, of all traces of humanity, under the
pressure of intolerable pain. It forces from him his first expressions of
sympathy. They are confused, incoherent, repetitive. unlike the smooth
and skillful rhetoric of his lies. . . . With Philoctetes asieep. and the bow
in his hands, he rejects the urgent. repeated appeals of the chorus to leave
the island at once. In a new meter. the hexameter. the medium of heroic
poetry and of divine prophecy. he states clearly what his objective has so
far been as he renounces it forever. . . . Faced with the unspeakable agony
of the man he has come to pity and admire. he understands the real
meaning of the prophecy of Helenos even though he has heard it only in
the carefully calculated version of Odysseus' spokesman. . . . To the
chorus' repeated exhortations to leave, fast and stealthily, he pays no heed.
Philoctetes comes to his senses. The easy solution, to take the bow and
leave and so avoid the reproaches of the sick man when he hears the truth,
is no longer possible. Neoptolernos is now launched on a course which, as
the chorus tells him, is full of insoluble difficulties. . . . ( 13 1 - 132) After witnessing Philoctetes's "intolerable" physical pain and listening to his story of abandonment Neoptolemus is forced to confront his own vulnerability and shame. He is drawn to witness and understand Philoctetes's pain. He is not repelled by it like the
Chorus. previous visitors to the island, and the Greek leaders. His pity and fear, or rather horror.--3, of Philoctetes's tortured situation initiate an Aristotelian recognition and catharsis, for both the spectator and Neoptolemus himself, which forwards human vulnerability." This paradigmatic tragic experience is an empathic one. It is simultaneously a discovery of what is common and of self."
Philoctetes's pain and shame serves not only to trigger that of Neoptolemus; both manifestations of human vulnerability are used to distinguish two very different forms of shame and two contrary responses to it. Philoctetes's bodily injury and pain and the shame and "disgust" it produces in him reflects the mental state of Neoptolemus. Knox's explanation of the climactic point at which Neoptolemus's attitude toward Philoctetes and himself shifts addresses this issue directly: "Neoptolemos is a prey to emotions that he / -- can no longer conceal, and they force from him a sudden cry-- ' -.-' -, (895). It is no ordinary exclamation; it is the same cry of agony we have heard Philoctetes utter in his torment. The agony of Neoptolemos is just as great, but it is of the mind" ( 132). This parallel, inextricable, dialogic dramatic relation between the "agony" of Philoctetes and
Neoptolemus goes even deeper however.
Philoctetes's struggle with his own vulnerability, manifest in feelings of shame and "cries of agony," serves to propel and distinguish Neoptolemus's struggle.
Philoctetes describes himself as "lost" whenever he experiences extreme physical or psychological pain. During the initial stages of his attack, which culminates in a calming sleep. Philoctetes attempts to fight his pain in silence, but. as he reveals to Neoptolemus, he cannot:
I am lost, boy.
T will not be able to hide it from you longer.
Oh! Oh!
It goes through me, right through me!
Miserable, miserable!
I am lost, boy. I am being eaten up. Oh! (11. 742-47)
Later, after Neoptolemus reveals that "a great necessity compels" (1. 924) him to take
Philoctetes to Troy, the tortured and helpless man responds:
Then I am lost. I am betrayed. Why, stranger,
have you done this to me? Give me back my bow. (11.925-26)
In both instances in which Philoctetes feels "lost" he feels utterly out of control and vulnerable. Moreover, Neoptolemus. helping Philoctetes to his feet after he awakes. feels himself "at a loss":
Neoptolenzrrs
Now is the moment. What shall 1 do from now on?
Philoctetes
What is it, boy? Where are your words straying?
Neoptolernrrs
I do not know what to say. I am at a loss. (11. 895-97)
Confronted with Philoctetes's bodily vulnerability, in the form of his attacks and the weakness that follows it which requires him to be lifted to his feet, Neoptolemus is forced to deal with his own feelings of shame and ambivalence. To feel "at a loss" is not the same as feeling "lost" h~wever.~His vulnerability and shame are less acute. At this point in the play Neoptolemus. unlike Philoctetes. has choices. And. although he reveals his intentions to Philoctetes here, he does not return the bow until later, and decide to take
PhiIoctetes home until he truly understands the degree of shame and inflexibility, at the root of which lies feelings of vulnerability, that rules the suffering man.
The man who is "being eaten up" in front of him serves to give Neoptolemus a
"taste" of death. In his chapter on Kierkegaard in 771e Denial of Dearh, Becker places
Kierkegaard in "the Augustinian-Lutheran" tradition which believes that "It is only if you
'taste' death . . . that you can know emotionally that you are a creature who will die" (88).
In support of this thesis Becker cites a passage from Jose Ortega which speaks to a process of seIf-discovery enacted in Sophocles's Plzilocteres:
The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those
fantastic "ideas" [the characterological Iie about reaIi ty] and looks life in
the face. realizes that everything in it is problematic. and feels himself lost.
And this is the simple truth--that to live is to feel oneseIf lost--he who
accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground.
Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked. he will look round for something to
which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance. absolutely sincere. because
it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the
chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas: the ideas of the
shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not
really feel himself lost. is without remission; that is to say, he never finds
himself, never comes up against his own reality. (89) Only after being confronted with the extremity of Philoctetes's vulnerability and impending death does Neoptolemus take this "tragic, ruthless glance" as he tries to make
"order" out of the "chaos" of his feelings. Before he can come to the point of understanding that he must tell Philoctetes the truth of his intentions and emerge from a state of denial. he must struggle with his feelings of shame and self-disgust. Only after going through this process can he begin to make the choices that will project him forward on the ethical road to "justice" and empathy.
On the other hand, at the end of the play, before Heracles appears, Philoctetes does have a choice and he chooses to follow the dictates of his feelings of shame and humiliation in his refusal to face the eyes of his fellow Greeks who abandoned him.
Phiioctetes's sense of identity is shaped by his affliction and the destructive feelings it generates. As Philoctetes himself says to Odysseus: "I have sorrow / because my very life is linked to this pain, / laughed at by you and your two generals" (11. 102 1-23).
Odysseus will not "exhibit me / in front of all the Greeks" (11. 629-30). says Philoctetes early in the play, and it is not until Heracles's divine intervention that Philoctetes seems to stop identifying himself as an object of shame. Only after Heracles reveals his "own story" (1. 1418) of suffering and "the winning of deathless merit" (1. 1420) does
Philoctetes believe in the possibility of ever emerging from his "cruel sickness" (I. 1425).
"All this must be your suffering too, / the winning of a Life to an end in glory, / out of this suffering" (11. 1421-23), says the god to Philoctetes. When Philoctetes trusted the "boy" fully. Neoptolemus did not truly understand him--empathize with him. At the end of the play Neoptolemus proves his empathy, but Philoctetes can no longer trust. And in both cases Philoctetes's shame rules him. But once Heracles, a god and friend whose bow has maintained Philoctetests life, identifies his heroic "sufferings" and "merit" with Philoctetes's, the shame-ridden man finally feels understood and trusts enough to conceive of the possibility of recovery in his own eyes and those of others. In a sense, because of Heracles, he can see his own suffering from the outside for the first time.'" In hearing Heracies's story of suffering first hand, Philoctetes's own suffering is put into a proper. more "human," perspective, much like Neoptolemus's witnessing of Philoctetes's suffering enables him to face and identify his own shame and act accordingly, justly. In order for both tragic figures to find themselves, they must first feel "at a loss" or "lost." It seems more than fitting that a god. who was once human, helps Philoctetes to see his own larger than life suffering as human and meaningful. Philoctetes does not simply obey the god, he decides that he "shall not disobey" (1. 1448) the "Voice that stirs my yearning when I hear" (1. 1446)." This living, breathing, although immo~tal,empathic "Voice" does not simply force obedience. it "stirs" understanding. so that he makes a personal. ethical choice. This is not simply some predestined. mythical fate in dramatic form: it is a dramatic. dialogic presentation of a series of psychological processes which are part of a process of recognition.'"
Unlike Philoctetes's final. more sudden change of mind. once Neoptolemus has witnessed the extremity of Philoctetes's vulnerability he undergoes a gradual process, the first part of which is acknowledging and feeling a loss of control, of self-awareness and recognition externalized for the audience through a mutually reflective dialogue between
Philoctetes and Neoptolemus. Following Neoptolemus's admission that he is "at a loss." the two continue to talk, thus establishing a link between bodily and psychological, more than simply moral, vulnerability and the experience of "disgust"" originating in feelings of shame:
Philoctetes Why are you at a Ioss? Do not say so, boy.
Neoptolerrrus
It is indeed my case.
Philoctetes
Is it disgust at my sickness? Is it this
that makes you shrink from taking me?
Neoptolernus
All is disgust when one leaves his own nature
and does things that misfit it. (11. 898-903)
In juxtaposing Phi loctetes's and Neoptolemus's experiences of "disgust" Sophocles dialogically equates the shame Philoctetes feels toward his own physical condition to that which Neoptolemus feels toward his own psychological condition,
Neoptolemus accepts that he is "indeed" "at a loss." Thus tie "has already begun to find himself." to use Ortega's words. But before he can "cling" to something to bring
"order" out of "chaos" he must first "come up against his own reality" of falIibility and vulnerabi lity--when resisted, a reality which breeds feelings of shame. Philoctetes mistakenly identifies the source of Neoptolernus's perplexity as "disgust at" his own
"sickness." But "All is disgust" (my italics) and shameful as long as Neoptolemus is in denial of "his own nature." Integral to his "nature" is the reality of vulnerability, specifically mortality. It is not in his "nature" to lie or deceive and do "things that misfit it." To lie or deceive is usually an attempt to control a situation which is already out of control without facing those forces, in this case another human being, beyond contrcl head on (and risk death) as in battle, something for which Neoptolemus's father is famous. Previous to this point of "loss" Neoptolemus chooses (what he later recognizes as) the "dishonorable" (I. 906) way of dealing with the unknown--0dysseus's way. Instead of facing forces beyond his control directly, on equal terms with respect for the other's vulnerability, Neoptolemus decides to cast "aside all shame" (I. 120); in other words, he acts in a shameful manner temporarily and puts his shameful feelings aside; or, as
Odysseus puts it. Neoptolemus will only have to act against his nature "For one brief shameless portion of a day" (1. 83). Until he is faced with Philoctetes's attacks of pain
Neoptolemus is in denial of not only the wounded hero's feelings of vulnerability; he is in denial of his own feelings of vulnerabilityr' and shame. but. apparently in a particular way native to the ancient Greeks. as explained by Bernard Williams in Shame and Necessih:
When Odysseus eventually persuades him. by appealing to the reputation
he will get for this success. Neoptolemus says:
All right, I'll do it, and put the shame aside.
The most natural translation of the word I have translated as "put aside" is
"get rid of' or "expel": but it can also mean "neglect" or "pass by"
something that is still there to be attended to. But I do not think that it can
mean, as has been proposed, "I'll put up with the shame." This he cannot
do: if it is present to him. he cannot put up with it. and this becomes clear
to him later, when he changes his mind. (87-88)
After witnessing Philoctetes's attacks of pain Neoptolemus recognizes that the shame he feels toward himself colors how he sees the rest of the world, or "AII." and he refuses to remain in this narcissistic state. Momentarily, he is a "shipwrecked" man looking "round for something to cling." In the midst of his more extreme physical vulnerability, shame, and humiliation Philoctetes longs for death, but while "at a loss" Neoptolemus reaches for truth. He chooses to learn from his shame.
Neoptolemus must find himself "at a loss" before he can feel a "temble compassion" and experience the empathy which enables him to choose to take Philoctetes home. fully aware of the risks to his own life and that of his people. It is only after he has made this decision that Philoctetes reveals that he and his invincible bow will be at
Neoptolemus's side if the Greeks decide to retaliate for his betrayal. Neoptolemus's decision is based on an empathic understanding which is the result of a gradual. dialogic process of self-discovery wherein self emerges in dialogue and interaction with another vulnerable human being. This dialogic process of learning occupies the central dramatic interest of the play. It is not enough to say. as Knox does in The Heroic Temper, that by the end of the play Neoptolemus "is back where he started before he became a disciple of
Odysseus: he is ready to lose honorably rather than win by deceit" ( 136). Neoptolemus does not know himself or his nature--emotionally--until he has faced and accepted his own vulnerability. Like Oedipus, he does not know who he truly is or what he is capable of until he emerges from a state of denial. But unlike Oedipus. or Philoctetes for that matter. his crisis of identity fosters the learning of empathy. How it does so is the subject of this play. This gradual process is reflected in Philoctetes's very different responses to shame and sudden change of mind at the end of the play. Knox acknowledges only part of Neoptolemus's accomplishment when he says in The Heroic Temper:
Neoptolemus' decision adds a new dimension to the nobility of his great
father. He sacrifices his own cherished ambition of glory to make up for
his shameful conduct. Through the ordeal of his surrender to Odysseus
and the triumphant reassertion of his own nature he has come to higher ideals of moral conduct than could have been expected of the boy who was
averse to lying but ready to use superior force against a sick man. . . . The
renunciation of his future glory to atone for his past misconduct shows a
nobility of soul whicn surpasses even that his father showed when he
yielded to old Priam's plea and gave up the body of Hector for burial.
( 138)
Neoptolemus does not simply "sacrifice" or "atone" "to make up for his shameful conduct."" He potentially "sacrifices" everything, his life, and that of his people. because he understands how shame can "eat up" an individual and turn "All" to "disgust." He learns this in PhiIoctetes's tortured presence and applies this learning in his final interaction with him. He comes to an emotional understanding of himself and Philoctetes which compels him to act nobly. His ability to see beyond himself into the suffering of others without losing himself--his empathy--develops gradually. but it is what distinguishes him from his father and other Sophoclean heroes, His "higher ideals of moral conduct" are based on transcending shame and denial and arriving at an emotional understanding of self and other--a process which involves coming to terms with human vulnerability personally.
In "Second Thoughts in Greek Tragedy," Knox suggests that Neoptolemus's character and his change of mind are something altogether new and foreign to Sophoclean drama, of "secondary" importance. and a product of Euripides's influence on the older
~o~hocles.''His conception of a change of mind is, however. too limited as it does not consider the dramatization of denial and the empathic process in this play and tragedy in general. Consequently, Knox (and others) cannot see Neoptolemus as a primary character in this play and he cannot see the closeness of Euripides's drama to that of Sophocles. In Philoctetes, Knox sees the tragic hero who will not change his mind, "it
takes a god come down from heaven to makc him change his mind" (2 15). but, as I have
tried to show, this is not altogether true. Philoctetes chooses to obey Heracles because of
his empathic gesture as well as his overwhelming divine presence and power. In the
Philocretes, Sophocles is interested in what is involved in the making of ethical choices
and exploring the bounds of empathy and its ability to respond to shame. The empathy
shown to PhiIoctetes by a god and the sudden change of mind it produces in the suffering. previously inflexible hero, reflects upon the process of self-discovery and learning experienced by the other, flexible hero. Neoptolemus. over the course of the play.
Empathy provides a window of opportunity for human beings caught in the often destructive processes of shame and denial. On the other hand, it is only Neoptolemus
who uses his shame constructively, showing a more positive face to the experience of shame.
Sophocles's Philoctetes challenges the conventional critical paradigm of tragedy which looks for the tragic hero in the inflexible individual alone. The play asks that we reconsider the roots of heroic destructiveness from a dialogic. ethical point of view in which a character Iike Neoptolemus can be seen as both heroic and tragic. The
Plziloctetes is an unusual tragedy in that it dramatizes not only the denial of the body and the need for empathy: in the character of Neoptolemus it presents a tragic hero whose flexibi!ity enables him to emerge from a condition of denial into one of empathy, a psychoIogica1 and dramatic process inextricable from that of the play's inflexible tragic hero. Philoctetes. Notes
'This situation is made evident in its variant forms in Chapter 3 with Cordelia and
Lear of King Lear, in Chapter 4 with Agave and Pentheus of The Bncclzne, in Chapter 5 with Willy and Biff Loman of Death of a Salesman,and in Chapter 6 with Josie and
Tyrone of A Moor2 for the Misbegotten.
There is no indisputable central tragic figure in this play. Contrary to what critics like Bernard Knox, S.M. Adams, and C.M. Bowra believe. the character of Philoctetes is not the tragic hero of the play. J.T. Sheppard believes that "Neoptolemus. not
Philoctetes, is the hero" (1 19). Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Anthony
Podlecki. and Martha Nussbaum suggest that Philoctetes is one of three central characters. Whether or not Philoctetes or any other character is seen as the central character seems to rest on what a given critic believes the principal moral of the play and the definition of a tragic hero to be.
'see note 7 of the Introduction on the relation and distinction between empathy and the dialogic.
The phrase. "working through." is meant to echo the process of self-discovery described in Freud's " Rememberi ng, Repeating, and Working-Through."
'1n his study of empathy. Perception. Ernpntlzy, and Jlidgment. Arne Vetlesen directs his reader to Hans-Georg Gadamer's Trrirlz and Method, which "teaches that the structure of understanding is dialogic. This entails that when we approach a text, we must be attentive to it in a twofold sense--we must allow it to question us no less than we intend to question it" (1 I). Although Vetlesen's study is not concerned with the empathic and dialogic character of tragedy, Gadamer's is. The kind of "self-knowledge" that Gadamer attributes to the spectator of a tragedy in Truth and Method is very much like the self-knowledge I am attributing to Neoptolemus. Gadamer states that "The spectator recognizes himself and his own finiteness in the face of the power of fate. . . . To see that
'this is how it is' is a kind of self-knowledge for the spectator, who emerges with new insight from the illusions in which he lives" (1 17). On the other hand, my emphasis is on the fact that, whether it be a spectator or a character, "new insight" and "self-knowledge" is a result of recognizing and coming to dialogic terms with mortality and the internal feelings of vulnerability and shame it breeds. which are reflected in others rather than in some external force or "fate." (This last point is. of course, where I disagree with most theorists of tragedy, as I explain in Chapter 7.) The kind of empathic "insight" or understanding I have in mind is dialogic in the sense that Mikhail Bakhtin speaks of it in
"Appendix 11: 'Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book"' contained in Problems of
DnstoetrsX~'~Poetics. Here he states: "I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another. through another, and with the help of another. The most important acts constituting self-consciousness are determined by a relationship toward another consciousness (toward a tlrort). Separation. dissociation. and enclosure within the self as the main reason for the loss of one's self' (287). As Caryl Emerson suggests in her article, "Solov'ev. the Late Tolstoi, and the Early Bakhtin on the Problem of Shame and Love." Bakhtin is concerned with distinguishing shame, "the sin of solipsism," and "'Shameful form,' in other words, . . . a sense of completedness where there should be a sense of potential" (664),from the "flux" and "the proper sort of love"
(664)--what I read as an empathic, aesthetic experience of the world during which one
"musterfs] enough intense force to grasp and retain the concrete multiplicity of existence without impoverishing or schematizing it" (665). This experience of the world is an ethical. permeable one in which "the othei' is present in his. her. or its "mutiplicity." and the basis of ethical community in an Hegelian sense. (See Part 11 and 111 of Chapter 7 for a detailed discussion of the ethical.)
"1n his essay, "Discourse in the Novel," collected in The Dialogic Imagination,
Bakhtin states that
Understanding comes to fruition only in response. Understanding and
response are dialecticaIly merged and mutually condition each other: one
is impossible without the other. . . . The speaker strives to get a reading on
his own word, and on his own conceptual system that determines this
word, within the alien conceptual system of the understanding receiver: he
enters into dialogical relationships with certain aspects of this system. The
speaker breaks through the alien conceptual horizon of the listener.
constructs his own utterance on aIien territory, against his. the listener's.
apperceptive background. (282)
'A major difference between a tragedy like Prornetlreus Borind and the Philocferes is the fact that in the Philocretes there is a detailed dramatization of the development of empathy. whereas in Pronretherts Bortrzd. the development of the Chorus's potential for empathy does not receive the same attention. In "Second Thoughts in Greek Tragedy,"
Knox states: "He [Prometheus] is one of the most inflexible figures in all Greek tragedy, but. although he will not change his mind, the action of the play consists of a series of attempts to make him do so, by persuasion, guile (the Oceanus scene) and force. The play, in fact, presents a Sophoclean hero in a Sophoclean situation, a hero whose greatness lies in his steadfastness and who is subjected. unsuccessfully. to tremendous pressure to make him change his mind" (214). Prometheus's heroism or "greatness" has to do with the fact of his unacknowledged confrontation with his own vulnerability and his feelings of shame and humiliation at the root of his "steadfastness"--the essential. defining experience for a tragic hero. The dramatization of this kind of heroism is part of evoking and exploring the need for empathy and ethical community in a civilized society.
Empathy is tragedy's window of opportunity when it comes to dealing with the struggle to deny the body. The fact of the external power of fate, or the gods, or in Prometheus's case. Zeus in particular, or environmental or hereditary forces in the modem context, is not what is being emphasized in tragedy; rather, tragedy is concerned with how individds cope with forces beyond their control. This is especially the case for Greek tragedy where the audience already knows the outcome. What is of primary interest is how Aeschylus's Prometheus. or Sophocles's Oedipus. respond to their fate. not the fate itself. (The issues of "fate." the "environmental." and the "modern" are explored more fully in the final, theoretical chapter of the dissertation.) In the Pldoctetes there are two fates at stake, that of Philoctetes and Neoptolemus, both destined to take Troy together.
The question is how they will respond to one another and the situation in which they find themselves.
see Knox's discussion in "Second Thoughts in Greek Tragedy" and the last note of this chapter on the issue of what Knox refers to as Euripides's "unheroic creed."
'Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from the Pldocreres are taken from David
Grene's translation of the play. Grene's translation is particularly sensitive to the role of shame in this tragedy. dams puts it this way in Sophocles the Pfayvriglzt: "An act of ruthless treachery committed years ago remains in the one man's mind as unforgivable as ever, dominating a11 thought of rescue, cure, and glory. This is asking only justice; and that is all the great Achaeans ever asked. These two men, the exile and the youth. are men of the same fibre. Like has called to like; and Neoptoiemus. though he knows that the will of the gods is thereby thwarted, gives up everything he hoped to win. Such is the rigid splendour of the Sophoclean Philoctetes. Humanly speaking. there could be no other outcome" ( 159). Adams also points out that Neoptolemus "is perfectly well aware of
Philoctetes' stubborness" ( 159) in a footnote to the previous thought. At the root of this awareness 1ies Neoptolemus's emotional, empathic. understanding.
"~owra'semphasis on the '-gods," but particularly "repentance" and "evil," prevents him from seeing the ethical, dialogic, processive nature of this tragedy. In essence. Bowra's terns of analysis suzgest that he is looking at tragedy from a Christian perspective foreign to the Greek. ethical way of life promoted in Greek tragedy, and as I arye throughout this dissertation. all tragedy. Tnis issue is addressed specifically in
Chapter 6.
his statement is an example of the ethical, Hegelian nature of Nussbaum's understanding of tragedy, which is discussed in detail in Part [I of Chapter 6. The
Hegelian view of tragedy is more or less a secular one--it places human and divine forces on equal ethical grounds.
"see Part I of Chapter 6, particularly pages 284-85. for a discussion of the "ritual fallacy." I J In Trageciy and Myth in Ancient Greece, Vemant and Vidal-Naquet describe
Neoptolemus as undergoing a "transformation" characteristic of the "Athenian ephebeia,"
a ritual rite of passage "from the state of childhood to that of adulthood that is to say of
the warrior" ( 175). Vernant and Vidat-Naquet compare Sophocles's treatment of the story
of Philoctetes to that of Pindar. Euripides, and Aeschylus. concluding that "Sophocles in
his turn makes an innovation by giving a crucial role to the young Neoptolemus, the son
of Achilles" ( 177). For Vernant and Vidal-Naquet. "In the Pililoctetes we have an example, unique in Sophocles' work, of a tragic hero who undergoes a transformation. . . .
This presents a striking contrast with the usual behaviour of Sophoclean heroes who clash
head on with both the world of the city and that of the gods and who are broken in the end
by the machination of the gods" ( 178).
"~heseterms tend to distort the psychological. self-reflexive. dramatic movement of the tragic. In Chapter 4, 1 discuss the misleading character of Renk Girard's sacrificial
view of tragedy and. in Chapter 6, the problems with looking at tragedy in religious. essentially Christian terms. "Conversion." and its association with the miraculous, is
inappropriate to the psychological character of the tragic process.
'"perhaps pan of the moral of this story is that in order for the Greeks to conquer
Troy they must first come to terms with vulnerability in the person of Philoctetes. In a
sense. in order to defeat the forces of Troy the Greeks must come armed with the strength
which comes with acknowledging and accepting vulnerability into the ethos of the community.
17 Speaking of Dostoevsky's polyphonic writing and the nature of consciousness
and meaning in "Appendix II" of Problems of Dostoevs~SPoetics, Bakhtin says: I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself
for another, through another. and with the help of another. The most
important acts constituting self-consciousness are determined by a
relationship toward another consciousness (toward a rhorc). Separation.
dissociation. and enclosure within the self as the main reason for the loss
of one's self. . . . The very being of man (both external and internal) is the
deepest cornrnrmion. To be means to cornrnrtnicnre. Absolute death (non-
being) is the state of being unheard. unrecognized. unremembered. . . . To
be means to be for another. and through the other, for oneself. A person
has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the
boundary: looking inside himself. he looks into the eyes of another or with
the eves of mother. (287)
"1n The Divided Sc[J. while discussing the need for empathy if the therapist is to understand a schizophrenic, R.D. Laing makes a simihr point about this crucial process of humanizing an individual's experience:
I think it is clear that by 'understanding' I do not mean a purely intellectual
process. For understanding one might say love. But no word has been
more prostituted. What is necessary. though not enough, is a capacity to
know how the patient is experiencing himself and the world, including
oneself. If one cannot understand him, one is hardly in a position to begin
to 'love' him in any effective way. We are commanded to love our
neighbour. One cannot. however, love this particular neighbour for
himself without knowing who he is. One can only love his abstract humanity. One cannot love a conglomeration of 'signs of schizophrenia.'
No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not 'got'
schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic. The schizopltrenic has ro be kno\~w
without being destroyed. He will have to discover that this is possible.
(34)(my italics)
Neoptolemus returns after leaving the Chorus to convince Philoctetes to come to Troy and attempts to calm the defeated hero with the words, "Be easy. I would only have you listen" (245). but Philoctetes's response reveals that he already feels "destroyed" in
Laing's terms: "I heard you before. and they were good words, too. 1 But they destroyed me when I listened" (245). For a discussion of the differences between love, empathy. and compassion. see pages 204-2 18 of Vetlesen's Perceptiorr, Empathy, and J~tdgmenr, some of which are cited in the following note.
'"Other than the fact that empathy is generally experienced for the "weal and woe"
(VetIesen) of another and compassion only for the woe, I do not see a significant difference between empathy and compassion in so far as Blum defines it. Nevertheless, for the purposes of my overall discussion of tragedy I find empathy a more effective term because of its very different, foil-like, counterpart in sympathy. Compassion. unlike empathy, seems to be more closely linked to the worid of sympathy, feeling and emotion. whereas empathy seems to embody a greater balance of emotion and intellect. Moreover. compassion seems to be something experienced momentarily, whereas empathy seems more processive--a product of a learning process like the one Neoptolemus undergoes in the Philoctetes. In other words, Neoptolemus feels compassion on his way to learning empathy. In Perception, Ernpathy, and Judgment, Arne Vetlesen argues for empathy as being humanity's basic emotional faculty. [which] contains a cognitive
dimension by virtue of which it , and it alone. discloses to us something
about another person--namely, his or her emotional experience in a given
situation. Empathy is a necessary prerequisite for the development of an
awareness and understanding of the emotions and feelings of another
person. . . . A formulation of Freud's may help cast more light on the
concept of empathy that I defend. "A path." writes Freud in 192 1, "leads
from identification by way of imitation to empathy, that is, to the
comprehension of the mechanism by means of which we are enabled to
take up any attitude at all towards another mental life." Freud's
formulation helps bring out what I intend by terming empathy humanity's
basic emotional faculty and by not equating empathy with one particular
feeling. Our basic capacity for reaching out through empathy as defined
here lies at the very bottom of the various "mature" emotional attitudes we
may assume toward another person, such as sympathy or compassion, to
name but two. (204-205)
Despite the fact that I find Vetlesen's study of empathy invaluable, intuitively I cannot bring myself to believe in empathy as a "faculty" in itself. The term, empathy, implies a process of understanding, which Vetlesen himself outlines in his book. which is more or less the same as the one Blum describes in his essay on compassion. In the end. whether or not I use either compassion or empathy in a given context has to do with what I feel the range of associations are for that term. d dams is right when he points out that at times the Chorus "speak from a genuine sympathy and understanding, reminding us effectively that this is an emotion
Neoptolemus, for all his inborn goodness, has yet to feel" (148). but it is only
Neoptolemus who moves from pity to compassion in the process of learning to act empath ical ly.
"The relation between Aristotle's "pity and fear" and empathy is discussed in Pan
I of Chapter 6.
'-In9 -7 a note to Aristotle's Poetics, Gerald Else states that "The mention of slzridclering with fear suggests that the fear Aristotle has in mind is a species of horror, or is closely related to horror" (96).
-'In-: his notes to the Poetics, Else compares "the usual interpretations of 'catharsis'
. . . [which] have in common a focus on the pity and fear which are aroused in the spc.cr(uor" to his own interpretation which argues that "the 'catharsis' is a purification of whatever is 'filthy' or 'polluted' in the patltas, the tragic act." The tragic act is proven pure
"by the remorse of the doer." This "'purification of the tragic deed" makes the tragic character "eligible for our pity" (98) and fear. Neoptolemus's shameful behavior seems far from "polluted" in the sense that Else and Aristotle have in mind, but he does experience his tragic actions with "disgust" and "remorse" as I explain in this chapter.
But. and this is one of the unusual aspects of the Pltilocretes, Neoptolemus is aIso a spectator of Philoctetes's tragic fate, thus, in a sense, he experiences a "catharsis" according to "the usual interpretations" and that of Else. It seems to me that tragedy is interested in exploring all kinds of taboo acts and the implications of them for the individual and society at large--acts which inevitably involve a confrontation with shame and human vulnerability. The Plzilocretes asks of its audience that they experience pity and fear for the lives of both Philoctetes and Neoptolemus. And yet, as Goethe suggests. the experience of pity and fear is not resewed for audience members alone--characters such as Neoptolemus clearly experience these emotions fully. In "Aristotle on the Effect of Tragedy," Jacob Bernays summarizes the major interpretations of Aristotle's definition of tragedy, including that of Goethe:
Goethe thus regarded it as essential to ban any moral aim from the
definition of tragedy: and in his own attempt at interpreting Aristotle's
words he let himself be guided by this conviction and tried to divert
catharsis away from the audience and on to the tragic character by means
of the following translation: 'Tragedy is the imitation of an important and
completed event that, after a passage through pity and fear, concludes its
business by baiancing such passions.' ( 155)
"ln his discussion of Aristotle's eleos and phobos in Trrdz and Method, Gadamer stresses that
The traditional translation of these two emotions by 'pity' and 'terror' gives
them a far too subjective tinge. . . . The English word 'distress' is a good
equivalent because it too refers not merely to an inner state, but likewise to
its manifestation. Accordingly, phobos is not just a state of mind but, as
Aristotle says, a cold shudder that makes one's blood run cold, that makes
one shiver- In the particular sense in which, in this definition of tragedy.
phobos is combined with eleos. phobos means the shivers of apprehension
which come over us for someone whom we see rushing to his destruction and for whom we fear. Distress and apprehension are modes of ecstasis,
being outside oneself, which testify to the power of what is taking place
before us. ( 1 15)
-< "Unlike Grene's translation of the PItiloctefes that I am using, other translations may not use the words, "lost" and "at a loss." The ones I have consulted, however, all show that Fhiloctetes's distress is simply more acute than that of Neoptolemus--not of a different species, if you will. Grene's use of the concept of "loss" is particularly effective in conveying the parallel and mutually reflective experiences of disorientation and vulnerability that I believe Sophocles had in mind.
'%t this point. Philoctetes feels that it is possible "to be known without being destroyed." to use Laing's terms once again. .- -'R.G. Ussher's translation reads: "You make your appearance after a long time / and speak with a voice that I have longed for: 1 and I shall not disregard your words"
( 109).
or a discussion of the process of recognition see Part I of Chapter 6.
'"1n his translation of the Philocreres. McLeish uses the words "cormpt" and "foul"
(204) instead of "disgust," but in either case the sense of "pollution" attached to the
"tragic act" or violation of a taboo which requires a "purification" or "catharsis" is at play here. (See note 23 on Eise's translation of the Poetics.)
Tt)Neoptolemus's denial of feelings of vulnerability extends to his denial of his feelings of loss and abandonment associated with his father's death. as Bowra suggests in
Soplloclecrn Tmgedv. Bowra states that "The mention of his father's death as a real event which concerns human feelings is not what he expects. He gives a brief unemotional account of it . . ., and manages to control his feelings, to continue his role. But again
Philoctetes invades his pretense by praising the dead man and pitying Neoptolemus for his loss . . ." (275).
I I Like Bowra's use of the term, "conversion," to describe Neoptolemus's process of recogition and growing ethical insight, Knox's use of the term, "atone," to describe an element of this process is. at the very least. misplaced and inadequate.
"tn "Second Thoughts in Greek Tragedy." Knox uses Euripides's Alcrstis, Mederi, and Hippofytris as examples of the development of "the new Euripidean view of human nature and conduct, the unheroic creed. 'That one's behavior in life should be rigid (strict, exact) brings, they say. disaster rather than joy"' (225-226), but I think that this message is present in the tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles as well. The "familiar pejorative metaphor of the heroic tradition" (222) "for change of mind" (222) may be absent from
Euripides's plays, but the dramatization and exploration of the processes of the denial of the body and shame which result in "disaster rather than joy" run throughout Greek and modern tragedy. Ultimately this exploration of human destructiveness serves to place its audience in a position to emotionally understand that the only way out of extreme denial and shame is through empathy. And in order to experience empathy, as we see through the character of Neoptolemus, it is necessary that one experience human vulnerability,
"pity and fear," while among other human beings. Section TI
Ancient Greek and Modem Manifestations of the Tragic Chapter 3
Empathy's Silence in King Lear and its Critics
In Sophocles's Philoctetes, Neoptolemus risks self-exposure and accepts the fact of his own vulnerability. As a result he manages to attain a level of self-awareness and ethical insight uncommon in tragic heroes. Although Philoctetes is largely self-absorbed, his future well-being depends on the young man discovering his own true humanity in the experience of empathy, and thus he intuitively invites and accepts Neoptolemus's vulnerability. Neither the young man's vulnerability nor the empathy which grows out of it threaten the isolate, decaying, dying hero; they offer the prospect of relief from his shame-ridden. unbearable "animal" existence. The prospect of liberation, however, is inconceivable to Philoctetes until Heracles speaks. Philoctetes believes that once he is taken home to die among those who love and respect him his feeiings of shame will be reduced dong with his feelings of isolation, but, as the final moments of the play suggest, other human beings, even those like Neoptolernus. who are capable of empathy, and those who love and respect him at home. would not be able to help him come to terms with the overwhelming feelings of shame and vulnerability symbolized in his festering wound.
Only a man-god can rid him of this "wound." Just another human being would not be able to convince Philoctetes that he or she understands the extent of his suffering, whereas the once mortal god, Heracles, conveys a "divine," empathic understanding of
Phi loctetes's predicament based on his own personal experience of suffering. Only after
Heracles demonstrates his empathy does Philoctetes believe in the possibility of being anything other than an object of shame.
On the other hand, the fact that in this play both central tragic figures manage to come to terms with shame and emerge out of denial through empathy is indeed rare. Empathy is by no means mutual as it is in The Persians, but it is potent and pivotal all the same. The process of learning empathy on Neoptolemus's part is essential to the structure of the play, even if his empathy is not the force which finally convinces
Philoctetes to retum to Troy. In modem or post-Greek tragedy empathy may be present, but. except for the odd exception, it lacks the potency and central position that it does in
Greek plays like The Persians and the Philoctetes. In ancient Greek tragedy empathy is born and nurtured within the context of mourning. Characters share and confirm feelings of loss openly with one another. In modem tragedy this kind of mourning is rare.
Consequently, although an individual character may empathize with another, this empathy is ultimately not trusted or not recognized. The ethos of the community is often too steeped in denial for individuals to expose themselves long enough to heal the wounds of shame. This is the case in Shakespeare's King Lear. The empathic liberation from shame evident on Sophocles's ancient Greek stage is absent from Shakespeare's modern one.
Shakespeare's King Lear is a paradigmatic example of a modem dramatic universe driven by shame and denial. The claim that characters in Letrr are driven by shame is not original with me however. Both Stanley Cavell, in "The Avoidance of
Love: A Reading of King Lenr." and William F. Zak. in Sovereign Sl~unze:A StrttZy of
King Lear, construct very convincing arguments in support of this claim. On the other hand. it is my contention that Cordelia is not simply the innocent, all-loving. virtuous victim of a world driven by shame and denial as critics like Cavell and Zak contend. As I will explain in more detail in this chapter, the critics are split on the character of Cordelia: there are those who see Cordelia as simply an innocent victim and those who see her as party to the destructive and defensive behavior which characterizes the opening abdication scene of the play. I think it is crucial to understanding King Lear's place in the tragic tradition that one consider Cordelia a psychologically complex character who undergoes a maturation process from defensive girl to empathic woman. I believe that in the character of Cordelia Shakespeare creates a character who learns to transcend the world of shame and denial embodied by her father, the King, only after she has undergone an identity crisis of her own--a crisis which enables her to sacrifice herself for her fdther's sake, not simply out of sympathy, but out of empathy. Her final silent expression of love is based on an empathic. emotional understanding of her father's vulnerability and her own strength as an individual separate from her father. The fact that she loves her father from beginning to end seems unquestionable, but love without empathy is not enough to prevent the conflict between father and daughter at the outset of the play. In typically modem tragic fashion. the audience is exposed to the absence of empathy. especially in the opening abdication scene. and once empathy does show its face in Cordelia's final interaction with her father it is too late and the monumental momentum of destruction continues until the tragic hero is dead. Cordelia's appearances on stage may be minimal when compared to those of other characters, but in order to understand the paradigmatically modem quality of King Lear, as well as the play's seminal place in the tragic tradition, it is important to recognize the potential complexity of Cordelia's character and her central role in the over-all working out of tragic tension in this familial tragedy. Together, Cordelia and Lear form a tragic tandem which is characteristically modem in its working out of the dynamics of denial and shame on the tragic stage. Part I: A Survey of Readings on the Cordelia-Lear Relationship and the Empathic
Alternative
The gods do not empathize with Shakespeare's King Lear. In the storm scene of
Act 111, the powerless king seeks divine confirmation of his suffering from "the great gods / That keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads" (3.2.49-50). but they do not respond.
Throughout fig Lear. the tragic hero is crippled by feelings of shame and isolation, and the delusion and acts of denial or "renunciation"' they breed. The outside world. human or elemental, cannot penetrate Lear's defenses long enough to save him. Nature, and other human beings, serve only to confirm his unconscious, shame-ridden sense of himself. He can admit to doing "wrong" and accept guilt, but his shame over his vulnerabi li ty--the feelings of vulnerability and lack of control associated with female sexuality and his mortality specifically--perpetuates his suffering.
Any genuine gestures of pity and love are repelled by Shakespeare's tragic hero.
Unlike the official. self-interested words of love spoken by Goneril and Regan at the outset of the play, real pity and love, from the point of view of Lear's fragile sense of self. threaten to expose his "weaknesses," shame and vulnerability to himself and others.
Empathy. on the other hand, does not threaten Lear's fragile sense of seiL2although it too fails to help him emerge from defensiveness and self-pity into a more balanced seff- awareness. Pity and love are embodied in the words and actions of, primarily,
Gloucester. Edgar, the Fool, Kent, and Cordelia- It is only Kent and Cordelia, however, who appear to crct empathically, and only after they have learned through experience that that is all Lear can tolerate in his shame-ridden, grief-stricken, self-pitying sphere of existence. Moreover, although Kent does reveal his empathy for Lear in word and action, it
is Cordelia's development of empathic understanding in relation to her father which is of central dramatic concern. Cordelia's turbulent journey of self-discovery and empathy reveals the subtle differences between pity, love. and empathy, or what one might calI her compassionate gestures;"t distinguishes the pivotal scenes with her father--scenes so provocative and ambiguous that they have fostered an incredible amount of diverse critical interpretations, particularly of Cordelia-and sets her apart from the rest of the characters in the play.
As Sophia Blaydes points out in her essay, "Cordelia: Loss of Insolence," "When we first see Cordelia she is a young girl. who possesses some wisdom and love but does not see clearly enough into her father's heart" ( 15). and in scene vii of Act N Cordelia "is moved by pity and love . . . but she cannot empathize with him [her father]" (17). What
BIaydes. and every other critic I have read on Lear. does not recognize is that it is empathy which enables Cordelia to transcend herself and not threaten her father's still fragile sense of self once he has insisted that the two go "away to prison" (5.3.8). In this chapter, I argue that it is not "the growth of love in both Lear and Cordelia" (Blaydes 22), but the growth of empathy in Cordelia alone which makes all the difference between the
Cordelia of Act I and the Cordelia of Act V. In "Great things of us forgot: seeing Lear better." David Simpson states that "Towards the end of the play, she [Cordelia] is redigested into the infantile fantasy of the broken-down king" (26),but, I would argue, this time. unlike in the beginning of the play before France voices his unconditional love of Cordelia.' she chooses to go along with this "infantile fantasy" knowingly, for fear of disturbing her father's tenuous hold on reality and fragile sense of identity. Cordelia has learned to separate her sense of self from that of her highly disturbed, emotionally dependent father. She does not appear to love her father any rnare by the end of the play,
but differerrrl~,in a more independent, "adult" manner.
Cordelia is not. however. immune to the forces of shame and denial, and the
absence of empathy, which characterize and propel tragic action. Only after undergoing
an identity crisis of her own, triggered by that of her father during the opening scene of
the play, which involves separating her sense of self from both father and sisters with the
help of the love and position she receives from France. does she know her self well enough to sacrifice her self and her independent life with France. Acknowledging
Cordeliats identity crisis, the storm of chaos which gains momentum in her absence, and
her growing empathic presence, is crucial to understanding Shakespeare's characters and plot in Lear, as well as the play's place in the tragic tradition.
Cordelia's final empathic presence. silence, sacrifice, and death point to the fact that Shakespeare's tragic sensibility is characteristically modem in its portrayal of a world unable to nourish and sustain empathy and the humility. born of a consciousness of vulnerability, from which it springs. In his essay. "Cordelia Absent." Arnold Isenberg makes an important point about the kind of insight which takes place unconsciously in the audience of Lear. While making this point he manages to link what I refer to as the dynamics of denial and the absence, and in one sense. failure, of empathy in a modern context:
Now Cordelia is one of Lear's three daughters. "his joy," "best object, /
The argument of your praise, balm of your age, / Most best, most dearest,"
and one whom in righteous wrath he has dismissed. Even in peaceful
times it would be natural to think back to her again and again. His failure
to recur to her amid the extraordinary strife within his family, in the utmost bitterness and distraction of spirit, is something not to be expected in the ordinary course of things. But the king who turns this way and that in his disconsolate quest; who can say, "Yet have I left a daughter
[Regan]"; who eats crow before Goneril; who fumes and rails in public and in private--can never, by way of taunt or reproach, recrimination or petition. mention his third daughter and express, to himself or others, the least regret. Nor frankly respond to the mention of her by another:
Knight. Since my young lady's going into France.
sir, the fool hath much pined away.
Lear. No more of that: I have noted it well. Go you
and tell my daughter I would speak with her. ( 1.4.79-82)
This is not neglect but avoidance. Lear is mute through an excess. not a deficiency. of feeling. His lips are sealed by force, as if the most oppressive of his sorrows had been too strong to be acknowledged and were expunged by violence from his brain. The relief of madness. which gives free rein to thoughts hitherto suppressed. does not cut the strangulating cord affixed to the idea of CordeIia: for there are crimes and griefs with the contemplation of which madness would lose its wits. As the play progresses and chance after chance is passed up for an easy expression of remorse and longing, a conviction settles down in the audience. Going by its own experience of life, it takes Lear's silence as a gag upon his feelings and evidence of their existence in an extreme degree: and decides, unknown to itself, not that he is not thinking about Cordelia but that he thinks of her too much. ( 130-3 1 ) This process of getting to know characters by witnessing the dynamics of denial or
"avoidance" on stage (or in the imagination while reading) is an empathic process integral to the tragic experience.' Cordelia's physical absence serves to foster the audience's
"conviction" and empathy as well as her own ability to empathize. Moreover, Cordelia's final empathic silence after Lear insists, "let's away to prison," reflects that of the audience, except that the audience's empathic silence reaches beyond Lear into the souls of Cordelia and the rest of Shakespeare's characters caught in the limits of a world dominated and "ruled" by shame." denial and the avoidance of sight and feeling. as
Edgar's final words, "Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say," suggest (5.3.330).
Critics such as Cavell, in "The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,"
Zak, in Sovereign Slzarrle: A Study of King Lear, and S. L. Goldberg, in An Essay on King
Lear. explore issues of vulnerability, shame, and denial or "avoidance." although they do not examine in any detail the anxiety over sexuality and mortality at the root of feelings of shame and vulnerability' --an anxiety which inhibits an individual from developing a sense of self strong enough to enable them to act empathically. On the other hand,
Cordelia's empathy and the audience's larger empathic scope are a product of the recognition of what Cavell appropriateiy characterizes as our "separateness." In his essay on Leal-. responding to critical debate over the meaning of Cordelia's final silence once
Lear resists her suggestion to "see these daughters and these sisters," Cavell says: "If
Cordelia resembles Christ" it is by having become fully human. by knowing her separateness. by knowing the deafness of miracles, by accepting the unacceptability of her love, and by nevertheless maintaining her love and the whole knowledge it brings"
(73). Cavell uses this concept of "separateness" to explain Cordelia's silence and lack of resistance as well as the audience's silence and inaction while witnessing the suffering of
Shakespeare's tragic characters:
There is nothing and we know there is nothing we can do. Tragedy is
me reveal is what I share with everyone else present with me at what is happening: that I am hidden and silent and fixed. In a word, that there is a point at which I am helpless before the acting and the suffering of others. But I know the true point of my helplessness only if I have acknowledged totally the fact and the true cause of suffering. Otherwise I am not emptied of help, but withholding it. Tragedy arises from the confusion of these states. Catharsis, if that is the question. is a matter of purging attachment from everything but the present. from pity for the past and terror of the future. My immobility, my transfixing. rightly attained, is expressed by the sense of awe. always recognized as the response to tragedy. In another word, what is revealed is my separateness from what is happening to them; that I am I, and here. It is only in this perception of them as separate from me that I make them present. That I make them other, and face them. And the point of my presence at these events is to join in confirming this separateness. Confirming it as neither a blessing nor a curse. but a fact, the fact of having one life--not one rather than two, but this one rather than any other. I cannot confirm it alone. Rather, it is the nature of this tragedy that its actors have to confirm their separateness alone, through isolation, the denial of others. What is purged is my difference from others, in everything but separateness. Their fate, up there, out there, is that they must act, they are in the arena in which action is ineluctable. My freedom is that I am not now in the arena. . . . [I]f I do nothing [when "faced with tragic events"] because there is nothing to do, where that means that I have given over the time and space in which action is mine and consequently that I am in awe before the fact that I cannot do and suffer what is another's to do and suffer, then I confirm the final fact of our separateness. And that is the unity ofourcondition. (101-1 10) The experience of "separateness," which Cavell ascribes to both the audience member and Cordelia, is, as he suggests, essential to tragedy. In order to reach this level of awareness of self and other, however, one does not have to experience feelings of love: rather. the process of understanding Cavell is describing is an empathic one. And this is an extremely important distinction to make when discussing a character like CordeIia or, for that matter. any character in Lear, and tragedy in general. Yes, Cordelia must learn to accept "the unacceptability of her love" by her father, but it is not her "love" which enabIes her to do so, but her empathy. As Cavell's discussion of an audience member's response to tragedy reveals, it is not necessary to experience love in order to experience "separateness." Once again, the process he is describing is an empathic one.' What is missing from, and needed to prevent the eruption of, the volcanic, opening abdication scene of Lear is empathy and not love. Nobody denies that Cordelia loves her father at the outset of the play. Blaydes, and others like Goldberg, do believe, however. that "Early in the drama, Cordelia not only loves but is selfish and proud" (Blaydes 20),and that there is a "growth" to her "love which enables her to live and die for Lear" (Blaydes 21). Goldberg. whose reading of the opening scene of the play I find most convincing, states that The division being already settled, he [Lear] was surreptitiously asking them, and especially Cordelia, rather to measure his love by the generosity of his gift."' Whatever his reasons for abdicating (and the very perfunctoriness with which they are mentioned is significant), he clearly saw himself as a good and just father bestowing notably splendid estates on his children, and the declaration he wanted from each of them was surely the acknowledgment of his own paternal and regal largeness of heart. That he gave Goneril and Regan their share without much evident affection to go with it does not make his action despicable (at least he has given them justice if not love): but it is precisely because he was giving Cordelia love with his gift that her response has hurt so badly. She has seemed to deny not so much the gift as the love. and she has done so. moreover. in a way that denies hi~nby denying his ability to respect himself as a man of careful justice, noble generosity, and love for (especially one of) his children. It is only later, when she can respond with the love and respect Lear needs, that he can cease to demand them. . . . The kind of love he wants would at once endorse the only image of himself he can respect and therefore acknowledge, remain silent about the need, and thereby enable him not to be conscious of the terrifying vulnerability from which it springs. . . . The king of France's remark is clearly relevant to both father and daughter. In different but related ways, both of them mingle love with 'regards that stand / Aloof from th'entire point.' helplessly tainting it with something else. The very simplicity and dignity with which France himself can pass by such regards only underlines the obvious fact that Lea and Cordelia are too open to hurt from each other to want less than too much: each of them demands the 'justice' necessary to the person it most pleases each to be, and so aborts his own feelings by refusing to let the other love in the only way he can at this point. In fact, neither really attends to the full reality of the other at all. since neither, it seems, can admit the whole of his own being into his consciousness. Each becomes locked in his self-conscious ego, and one driven ego becomes locked hard against the other: one imperfect consciousness against the other, one tightly knotted will against the other . . . Two wrongs don't make a right, but people who are close are often willing to take them as a very acceptable substitute. (26-28) Like Cavell, Goldberg suggests that by attending "to the full reality of the other1'-- something Cordelia manages to do in her final exchange with her father in Act V-- conflict can be avoided and personal integrity maintained. "It is." as Goldberg says, "only later, when she can respond with the love and respect Lear needs" (my italics). that she does not threaten Lear's fragile sense of self. The "respect" or "kind of love he [Lear] wants"" is, to a large extent at least. the subject of tragedy: empathy. Its absence or presence, and the forces which nurture or kill it. are at the core of the tragic experience. Only by emotionally understanding and accepting vulnerability, that of the self and others, can an individual engage in empathy and intuit the needs of others. And it is this kind of emotional understanding which is absent from Cordelia's opening words with her father and present in her final, silent response to him. Critical interpretations of Cordelia's interaction with her father in scene i. of the play seem to fall into two camps: 1) those, like Goldberg and Blaydes, who see her as acting "defensively" and "selt'ishly"; and 2) those, like Cavell, Zak, Ivor Mon-is, in "Cordelia and Lear," and Duncan Fraser, in "Much Virtue in 'Nothing': Cordelia's Part in the First Scene of King Lear," who see her as acting lovingly, with "calculation" and "irony." "making her love seem less than it is, out of love" (Cavell 63). Unlike Goldberg and Blaydes, who, like myself, see Cordelia as experiencing a crisis of her own, which cripples her from responding with compassion and empathy, this second group of critics believe that Cordelia intuitively and consciously understands the extent of Lear's shame from the start: her anxiety is merely the product of her concern for her father and not her own feelings of insecurity and shame. As I discuss later. these arguments are based on the assumption that Cordelia is caught in a "double bindv--that her choice is the only possible loving one. The idea that Cordelia could sped her true feelings of love for her father, despite the artificial circumstances. is not a real option for this second group. Zak explains: Moreover. now that we have looked at Kent's brutally direct speech to Lear defending Cordelia, we can easily surmise why she cannot say something more direct to Lea. even something along the matter-of-fact lines of Professor Goldberg's suggestion. Even if she could insure that such righteous truth saying would have no hint of Kent's self-righteous tone, Cordelia would decline such speech because in serving truth it would neglect the other-directed mercies of the heart. It would not happily reconcile but disproportionately prefer duty to affection. She fears that the naked truth would be brazen, cruelly shaming yet further the old man she loves even in his flight from shame. (87) So far as I can see, there is no reason why a truly empathic response, which considers her father's need for reassurance in love, could not speak "the other-directed mercies of the heart" successfully, as long as they are spoken from a position of empathic understanding, and not pity, with genuine affection. This is only possible if Cordelia is not threatened by her father's vulnerability and shameful behavior. but she is. Cordelia "dectine[s] such speech" because it threatens to expose her anger with and dependence on her father. As a matter of fact, Cordelia's early responses to her father in scene i, Act 1 can. at the very least. be read as attempts to assert her independence from her father and her superiority to her sisters. Lear does not simply fly off the handle once Cordelia responds to his offer of lands for love with "Nothing." Instead. he says: "Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again" ( 1.1.90). Cordelia responds: Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave My heart into my mouth. I love Your Majesty According to my bond, no more nor less. ( 1.1.9 1-3) These are not the words of a daughter concerned for the fragility of her father's mental condition. She is defending her virtue and attempting to set herself apart from the rhetoric of her sisters and the distasteful situation her father has placed her in. In her next response to her father's request. "Mend your speech a little" (1.1.94), Cordelia simply defines and clarifies her distaste, thus revealing her defensive and aggressive posture. In the following response Cordelia grants a degree of formal respect to her royal father, but I do not see any signs of "the other-directed mercies of the heart": Good my lord. You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I Return those duties back as are right fit, Obey you, love you, and most honor you. Why have my sisters husbands if they say They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed, That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry Half my love with him. half my care and duty. Sure I shall never marry like my sisters, To love my father al I. ( 1. I .95- 104) Pretty cold words, and certainly not words that reflect concern or. better yet. "the other- directed mercies of the heart.'' But we will return to these words. As stated earlier. Zakts interpretation of Cordelia's early responses to her father are very much like those of Morris and Fraser. lMorris argues that "Cordelia is opposing her father's will, but opposing it in order to protect him. She is not fighting the strong and tyrannous, but shielding the weak" ( 156). Her first words are an "act of irony" ( 156) misunderstood by her father and us, according to Morris. "They would be played . . . with a slight emphasis to suggest, as it were, a repeated invitation to Lea- to see the joke and to correct his misapprehension" (9). says Fraser. That's some joke. Those in the second camp, especially Cavell and Zak. go to great lengths to illustrate how many of the major characters of the play, with the exception of Cordelia, act unconsciously out of shame, denial, and a crisis of identity throughout the play. Indeed, many critics seem to believe that Cordelia faces something like what Alan Sinfield (following R. D. Laing), in his essay, "Lear and Laing," refers to a "double- bind" (7): In the same breath Lear both asks his daughters for personal affection and orders them to take part in an auction for their great profit. These two requirements are incompatible, for someone who loved Lear would not say loving things to him in order to gain reward, and because the kind of love that would answer to Lear's needs must be freely given and cannot be compelled. There can be no legitimate response to such a demand. . . . The more he [Lear] insists upon what she [Cordelia] has to lose, the more he makes it impossible for Cordelia to reply with a declaration of personal affection. Yet she has to say something, for silence is interpreted as hostile. . . . The cool tone of this profession has disconcerted Cordelia's warmest admirers. but no-one can evade a well-constructed double-bind. Her wish to tell the full truth--that her love for her father is beyond quantification--is impaired by her need to defend herself from the insinuation in the way Lear has phrased his demand. Any more fulsome response would be an admission that she is prepared to flatter him for gain: a careful analysis of his manipulation would inflict a public humiliation; silence is not permitted. Cordelia therefore takes up Lear's challenge and answers in terms of debt and payment: 'I 1 Return those duties back as are right fit.' She thus tells the truth, though not the whole truth, and at the same time rejects the double-bind in his question by exposing the element of bargaining in it. She is obliged to work within the rules of the game as Lear has set it up, but she repels this assault upon her integrity by interpreting those rules so narrowly--making her own bargain --that their unfairness is evident. (4-5) This reading of Cordelia's predicament can be countered by that of Goldberg. Speaking of Cordelia's surprising speech, "Good my lord, / You have begot me. bred me. loved me." and Lear's response to it, Goldberg provides what I feel is the most convincing expianation for Cordelia's words I have read: It is impossible not to sympathize with her: what else could she say in public circumstances like these that would not either be or sound false? A possible theme might have been something easier and lighter. like 'There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned'; but of course only someone more self-assured. less defensive, than Cordelia could have seen that or said it. . . . [Tlhere is so much about her sisters in it, it says far more clearly what she feels for them than what she feels for her father: at bottom. it is addressed more to them than to him. . . . [Hfer language does subtly negate Lear's identity . . . by ignoring altogether the unutterable plea for reassurance that prompts such questions as his. however ridiculous or embarrassing or improper they are. Consequently, his reply to her speech is doubly to the point--indeed it is the crucial test of her truth: But goes thy heart with this? The moment of silence before he asks that question is where we begin to feel for him; her answer--'Ay, my good Lord1--is where we may well begin to judge her. If there was still a degree of obstinate integrity in her earlier 'Nothing,' this--in the light of what she must know he wants, and in the light of the unyielding self-righteousness in the rhythms and syntax of her speech--is little more than an obstinate untruth. There is too much conscious rectitude, too much merely reactive ego, in her speech, too little actively ventured and given. for real integrity now. (22-23) As Goldberg suggests, what drives Cordelia's responses to her father's "ridiculous" "plea for reassurance" is her own fragile sense of self. "Since her identity includes her own consciousness of herself--a self-image, as it were, necessarily inadequate to the reality. but nevertheless necessary to define and regulate it--the need to commit herself in action while yet preserving the only sense of herself she can respect (a problem faced by many of Shakespeare's tragic figures, of course) inevitably makes her dilemma a cruel one" (Goldberg 2 1 ). She takes the competition for her father's "love" seriously: she points to "the ruthless hypocrisy of her sisters" (Goldberg 23) because she is competing with them. Her seriousness is often mistaken for something like empathy however. She does sense the dire seriousness and "needs" underlying the formality of the competition of love for lands. But her emotional dependency on her father's sense of his own authority and power. something he is extremely unsure of at this pivotal time in both of their lives, blinds her to the seriousness of her father's need to be reassured of her love. Lear's anxiety over his impending loss of power and authority. driven by his preoccupation with his own death and vulnerability more than anything else." activates. and more than likely, exacerbates, Cordelia's anxiety. She is put in a tremendously confusing position, but it does not have to be experienced as a "double-bind." The answer to her dilemma does not lie in "something easier and lighter," but in responding to her father with a "kind of love," empathy, which "would . . . endorse the only image of' Lear "he can respect and therefore acknowledge, remain silent about the need, and thereby enable him not to be conscious of the temfying vulnerability from which it springs," but she is not capable of such a "self-assured" gesture because she is undergoing an identity crisis of her own. To act empathically Cordelia would have had to express her love for her father freely, knowing that she risks sounding "false" to others because she is "true." This is what she believes she is doing: "So young, my lord. and true" ( 1.1.108). But she is far too self-conscious at this pivotal moment in her very young life to do so. If Cordelia is caught in a "double-bind," it is because at this early point in her personal development she is, like her father, coping with (her own) feeiings of vulnerability by resisting them. In Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross describes the stages of response to death typical of the dying and those who interact with them. The third and fourth stages she describes shed some light on Lear's actions and those of CordeIia. Kubler-Ross states that in the Third Stage: Bargaining" the terminally ill patient "most always [wishes for] an extension of life, followed by the wish for a few days without pain or physical discomfort," wishes that seem to be embodied in Lear's desire to "Unburdened crawl toward death" ( 1.1.4 1 ) in comfort. "With reservation of an hundred knights 1 By you to be sustained" ( 1.1.133-34) and "The name and all th' addition to a king" ( 1.1.136). Kubler-Ross states that "many of our patients also promised to give parts of or their whole body 'to science' (if the doctor's use their knowledge of science to extend their life)" (84), a promise not all that far from Lear's "promise" to donate and divide his kingdom or body politic (and, unconsciously, his sense of identity) so long as his "body" is used to "sustain" or "extend his life and "comfort." "Psychologically," Kubier-Ross says, "promises may be associated with quiet guilt," and Lear's promises are no exception. As Ivor Morris suggests in "Cordelia and Lear," Lear probably feels guilty for the "natural affection" he has not been free to show his daughters in the past because of the "terrible powers and duties of kinship, in so far as they stifle the expression of his own and his children's loves" ( 152). Kubler-Ross's "Fourth Stage: Depression" sheds light on the actions of both Lear and Cordelia in Act I. She states that The second type of depression is one which does not occur as a result of a past loss but is taking into account impending losses. Our initial reaction to sad people is usually to try to cheer them up, to tell them not to look at things so grimly or so hopelessly. . . . This is often an expression of our own needs. our own inability to tolerate a long face over any extended period of time. . . . When the depression is a tool to prepare for the impending loss of all the love objects. in order to facilitate the state of acceptance, then encouragements and reassurances are not as meaningful. . . . The patient is in the process of losing everything and everybody he loves. If he is allowed to express his sorrow he will find a final acceptance much easier, and he will be grateful to those who can sit with him during this state of depression without constantly telling him not to be sad. (86-7) As I argue more fully later in this chapter, Cordelia's behavior toward her father prior to France's acceptance of her as his queen is "an expression of. . . [her] own needs, . . . [her] own inability to tolerate" her father's vulnerability, shame, and guilt as it manifests itself in his bargain for love. Unlike the final exchange between father and daughter in Act V, where all that is required for her to cater to her father's "need" is for her to remain silent, in the opening scene she must speak or. rather, perform within a formal, ceremonial context. something she likely has little or no experience in doing. And to "perform" with integrity is something that takes getting used to. But it does not have to be a lie. To speak truly with clarity and without shame, from feeling. within a formal, pubtic context in which feeling is normally suppressed or heaviIy controlled, while conscious of other eyes on you, is to risk vulnerability and rejection. Cordelia is incapable of taking this risk in Act I. I would like to think that if she had it all to live over again, the more emotionally secure Cordelia of Act V would take this risk. On the other hand, in Act V, she seems quite aware of the fact that by following the dictates of Leafs "need" in remaining silent she risks her life, and not her (now secure) sense of identity." At this later point in the play, after witnessing her father's emergence from madness, she is far too aware of his vulnerability to risk challenging him. This vulnerability is something she does not face while her own sense of identity is being challenged and in crisis, probably for the first time in her life. Cordelia's identity crisis. and the degree to which it is triggered by that of her father, and its relation to her ability to learn to empathize. is an issue yet to be fully explored by the critics. Part 11: Responding to Cavell and Zak on Shame and Love: A Reading of the Cordelia-Lear Relationship in the Light of Other Relationships and Characters in bar After the studies of Cavell and Zak there seems to be little new that can be said about the way in which feelings of shame and vulnerability determine the actions of the major characters in Leur. Therefore, in order to distinguish my argument from, and build upon theirs, I will now proceed to respond to selected comments by both Cavell and Zak (with the help of other critics on Lear) on the CordeIia-Lea relationship, as well as their comments on Kent, the Fool, Edgar, Gloucester, and Albany, with the intention of underlining the dynamics of denial and empathy as they exist in this piece of modern tragic drama. Cavell's ability to penetrate the psychology of the characters propelling the strangely explosive events of this play, and tragedy as a whole, is truly impressive. In the introduction to Disowning Knowledge in Sir Plays of Sitakespetire, Cavell suggests that denial is rile motivating, destructive force behind tragedy (5-6). Moreover, in his Lenr essay Cavell states that "The cause of tragedy is that we would rather murder the wodd than permit it to expose us to change. . . . Lear and Gloucester are not tragic because they are isolated, singled out for suffering, but because they had covered their true isolation (the identity of their condition with the condition of other men) with hiddenness, silence. and position: the ways people do" (122). Although I agree with much of what Cavell has to say on Lear and tragedy, by expanding Cavell's conception of the tragic to include the denid of the body and the suggestion of an empathic way out of it. some of Cavell's interpretations. of the Cordelia-Lear relationship in particular. seem less convincing or, at least. incomplete. Something that I do not feel CavelI pays enough attention to in the consideration of Lenr is the fact that the King's abdication of his kingdom and his youngest daughter take place together. This point is not original with me. For example, David Simpson, in "Great things of us forgot: seeing Lear better," and Lynda Boose, in "The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare," discuss the duality of the abdication ceremony for their own argumentative purposes. Simpson argues that "Shakespeare has organized his play in such a way that we are prompted to identify with Lear" (16). This is what Simpson refers to as "the empathy syndrome. Why have we so often seen the play through Lear's eyes?" ( 17). Of course. this argument is contrary to my own, in that I claim that we, like Cordelia, do empathize with Lear, but we do not simply identify with him as Sirnpson suggests, which would mean that we lose our objectivity and sense of ourselves, leaving us both intellectually and emotionally blind to the highly disturbed. underlying "pathological fear of death and sexuality" in the play. Simpson's "empathy syndrome" implies that we identify with Lear to the extent that we cannot empathize with other points of view or voices as they are manifest in other characters. For Simpson, in Lear there is "a second pathology that is closely connected with the fear of death: fear of the female, and of the sexuaI urge that puts men into relation with women" (22). 1 am in agreement with Simpson on this last point. It is simply that I do not agree with the argument within which he frames this insight; that is to say, his argument that Shakespeare leads his audience into blind "empathy" with Lear. Boose's article frames the discussion of the abdication scene within a larger arpment concerned with Shakespeare's use of ritual in his plays. She captures what I wiII later refer to as Lear's inability to deal with his highly ambivalent feelings toward his power as king and father, at the root of which lies his anxiety over female sexuality and his impending mortality. Boose states that In Kirzg Lear, the father's grudging recognition of the need to confer his dmighter on younger strengths while he unburdened crawls toward death should be understood as the basal structure underlying his divesture of his kingdom. Lear has called his court together in the opening scene because he must at last face the postponed reckoning with Cordelia's two princely suitors, who "Long in our court have made their amorous sojourn, / And here are to be answer'd" ( 1.1.47-8). But instead of justly relinquishing this daughter. Lear tries to effect a substitution of paternal divestitures: he portions out his kingdom as his "daughters' several dowers," attaching to Cordelia's share a stipulation designed to thwart her separation. (332) The fact that Lear merges the abdication ceremony, which leaves him more or less powerless, with the ceremony of Cordelia's entrance into the world of marriage and sexual love is no coincidence. From the growing reality of his youngest and favorite daughter's sexuality grows the reality of his own mortality. These related bodily realities are unbearable for him. Within one public ceremoily Lear tries to shed or deny the i rnpact of these threatening natural forces. The abdication scene is one great scene of denial that leads to the destruction of a worId--a world perhaps dominated by the fear of female sexuality. In his article on Leal-. Simpson goes so far as to say that "Lear's challenge to mortality is premised upon or impIicated with a loathing of the female and of the sexual element in nature. . . . As it is. Shakespeare mounts a limited critique of absolute power and an ambivdent but basically supportive image of the destruction of the femaie principle by a man" (27-9). Moreover. in the main text of "The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare" and its notes Boose constructs an interesting argument for reading the actions of both Lear and Cordeliz as evidence of incestuous desire implicit in the marriage ceremony and "the wedding ring's dual sexual and material symbofism" (343)' although in the case of Cordelia's wedding, since Lear does not willingly partake in the "expressly physical symbolic transfer" (326) of daughter from father to husbar,d, the "taboo against human eroticism" (325) and "the incestuous attraction between father and daughter" (343) are left unresolved. On another level, the abdication scene is an act of revenge for feeling abandoned couched in grand gestures of generosity. Indeed, in "Lear and Laing" Sinfield gets at the root of Lear's character, and Shakepeare's use of the theme of generosity and the vulnerability it attempts to mask, when he states that Lear's "madness lies not in the (false) notion of unappreciated generosity, but in the growth of a simultaneous and contradictory awareness that he was not generous, that he is not the person he has taken himself to be" (13). The problem with Lear's plan of action is that it embodies his own unconscious feeIings of ambivalence. Political power is a burden, and yet it is also the source of his sense of identity. He loves his youngest daughter, but he cannot love her if she is sexual. Therefore. in this first pivotal scene of the play, Lear attempts to give away and keep his kingdom and his daughter at the same time. And it is Leafs ambivalence which tri,,overs CordeIia's. Cavell characterizes the cataclysmic opening scene and collision between Lear and Cordelia this way: This is the way I understand that opening scene with the three daughters. Lear knows it is a bribe he offers, and--part of him anyway--wants exactly what a bribe can buy: (1) false love and (2) a public expression of love. That is, he wants something he does not have to return in kind, something which a division of his property fully pays for. And he wants to look like a loved man--for the sake of the subjects, as it were. He is perfectly happy with his little plan, until Cordelia speaks. Happy not because he is blind, but because he is getting what he wants, his plan is working. Cordelia is alarming precisely because he ktrorvs she is offering the real thing. offering something a more opulent third of his kingdom cannot, must not, repay; putting a claim upon him he cannot face- She threatens to expose both his plan for returning false love with no love, and expose the necessity for that plan--his terror of being loved, of needing love. (6 1-2) I agree with Cavell's conception of the psycho10,oical dynamics of this scene until his explanation of why "Cordelia is alarming." Cavell goes to great lengths in his essay on Leur to demonstrate that all the members of both Gloucester's and Lear's family are motivated "by the attempt to avoid recognition. the shame of exposure, the threat of self-revelation" (57-S), except CordeIia. He sees in Cordelia the only family member who is capable of "offering the real thing" or, in other words. love. In essence. however, he sees her as the only family member capable of empathy--of seeing beyond her own feelings into that of another while maintaining "objectivity." Of Cordel ia's second aside after Regan professes her love for her father. "Then poor Cordelia! / And yet not so, since I am sure my love's / More ponderous than my tongue" (1.1.77-9). Cavell has this to say: Presumably. in line with the idea of a defiant Cordelia, this is to be interpreted as a reaffirmation of her decision not to speak. But again, it needn't be. After Lear's acceptance of Regan's characteristic outstripping . . . Cordelia may realize that she will have to say something. "More ponderous than my tongue" suggests that she is going to move it, not that it is immovable--which would make it more ponderous than her love. And this produces her second groping for an exit from the dilemma: to speak. but making her love seem less than it is, out of love. (63) Cavell attributes to Cordelia "a kind of love" and depth of awareness of the other I feel she is incapable of reaching at this moment given the challenges to her sense of identity and the world in this scene. The truth is that by making her love "seem less than it is" Cordelia demonstrates-- at best--that she does not tmly understand her father's "needs." If this is what she is doing here. it is an act of pity and love, and not one of empathy and love. Indeed, ultimately, for Cordelia tc act in the best interests of her father and the kingdom. and from this point of view. herself, she would have to act more from empathy than love. As Arne Vetlesen exphi ns in Perception, Empathy, and Judgement: In love I pursue the continual enhancement of what I perceive to be the unique value of the personality of the other. rendering him or her irreplaceable and unexchangeable. The focus of love is on the very being. the esse, of the beloved. What is lacking in empathy is precisely the emphasis on uniqueness. The person with whom I empathize is perceived as different. but not as unique. In empathy, the "otherness" of the other that I view as deserving recognition does not include the strong notion of that person being irreplaceable and unexchangeable to me. Rather, empathy consists in my taking an interest in how my cosubject experiences his or her situation. . . . Empathy is a necessary prerequisite for the development of an awareness and understanding of the emotions and feelings of another person. . . . 1 become aware that the other is in a situation of, say, distress. At this "first" stage, my empathy-based act of reaching out toward the other brings nothing more or nothing less than an initial awareness of and attentiveness to what kind of situation the other is involved in. I tune in to, I take an interest in, the other's situation; the other's feelings are part of that situation, without, however, exhausting it. In this reaching-out, the other remains an other to me; our distinctness as individual persons is not obliterated. Likewise, no identity of feelings takes pIace; my awareness of the other's situation as a specific piece of lived human reality neither presupposes nor implies that I actually feel what the other feels. . . . Empathy entails an intuitive and tentative judgement about the other's situation and faciIitates the ensuing development of a deeper and more comprehensive judgment. (204-205) It goes without saying that Leu is far too self-absorbed to respond to his daughter's crisis with empathy. but Cordelia also suffers from a similar kind of blindness. In her early words to her father she identifies too closely with her father to be able to see him as "other" and exercise empathic "judgment." At this point in her life her father is seemingIy "irreplaceable and unexchangeable" and her words. "That tord whose hand must take my plight shall carry / Half my love with him, half my care and duty" ( 1.1.10 1 - 102). can ring false, as easily as they can "less." These particular words on "care and duty" have fostered all kinds of interpretations. Although I do not agree with Morris's final interpretation of these words spoken by Cordelia, I sympathize with what appears to be Morris's more intuitive, initial response to them: "This, from a woman whose love and honor for her father transcends earthly bounds! I submit that this speech is absurd, and that Cordelia both knew it and intended it to be absurd; and, further, that it reflects, not Cordelia's attitude, but Lear's. For in apparently trying to weigh and juggle with imponderables, she is reproducing Lear's error--and it is my contention that she is doing this deliberately" (142-43). I doubt that her "absurdity," what I would prefer to call her awkwardness, is "deliberate"; but, even if it is, it demonstrates that she is not in touch with the severity of her father's feelings of vulnerability, otherwise she could not bring herself to make light of his "needs." The "absurdity" seems to stem from the fact that the warmest of Lear's daughters responds defensively, with the coldest of words. It is not necessarily an easy thing for a friend, or even a psycho-therapist to retain a "distinctness" of individuality in the face of another's crisis situation, but for a child to do so in the midst of their parent's own crisis is even more difficult. And what if the child's sense of self is as of yet indistinct or fragile? This is Cordelia's predicament. In "Lear and Laing." Sinfield states that "Shakespeare had clearly recognized the dependence of identity upon recognition by others" (1 1 ), but he explores this thesis only in terms of Lear's character: "His [Lear's] behaviour in the first scene led us to suppose that his sense of self was weak; subsequent events destroy it. Laing observes. 'It is difficult to establish a consistent identity for oneself--that is. to see oneself consistently in the same way--if definitions of oneself by others are inconsistent or mutually exclusive' (Selfcrnd Others, p.87)" ( 1 1 ). Sinfield only mentions the applicability of Laing's ideas on identity to Cordelia once, and in passing: "the play also leads us to reflect more specitlcally upon the relation between the uncalculating gift of love and the basic personal need for recognition by others of one's identity, and upon the vulnerability of the self--even of Cordelia--to manipulation by the desperate and the unscrupulous" ( 14). Is Cordelia never "desperate"? As already suggested, for Sinfield Cordelia is simply a victim caught in a "double-bind" created by Lear's contradictory demands. But what if we apply Sinfield's Langian insights to Cordelia? In order to act empathically. with "distinctness," an individual, and especially a child confronted with a father's "inconsistent" view of them, must have already established a very strong sense of self and stable identity in the world. Cordelia's early responses to her father, especially when compared to her later ones. suggest that such a fully integratec! sense of self is lacking in her at the outset of the play. This fully integrated sense of self is also lacking in Edgar, a child also faced with a father's "inconsistent" view. In the light of what I and critics like Cavell and Zak believe to be Edgar's unsuccessful struggle to stabilize his sense of self, Cordelia's more successful struggle is illuminated. Both Cavell and Zak argue convincingly that Edgar does not risk self-exposure and vulnerability with others as he is motivated. like Lear. by extreme feelings of shame. Zak explores what lies behind Edgar's astonishing delay in revealing his identity to his father and his decision. instead, however well intentioned, to remain disguised and drag Gloucester about the countryside in order to deceive him into a superstitious faith that his "life's a miracle" (3.6.55). He could much more simply confirm in Gloucester a genuine faith by performing a miracle himself (namely. by revealing himself), something that is and ever remains in his power to do. . . . In matters of love, and otherwise, too, Edgar consistently "stands 1 Aloof from th' entire point," fastidiously reserved and theatrically "distant" even from the people he cares for greatly. Whether costumed in self-pitying rhetoric of poor, naked Tom or in the hero's armor as chivalric knight restoring his unjustly sullied honor, Edgar is a1 ways somewhat "brazed" to full personal involvement with and responsiveness to others. From the beginning, when he readily falls the dupe of his brother's practice, he is never quite "all there" in any situation he undergoes. Act 5 certainly offers no exceptions to his distracted, preoccupied manner. (42-43) As Zak states in a note which acknowledges the kinship between his and Cavell's reading of Edgar. "As Cavell has suggested . . . it may be significant that Edgar only summons the strength to reveal his identity to Gloucester when he is armed. . . . [Edgar never] risk[s] presenting himself as himself to his father for his father's sake" (1 82). What Zak and Cavell do not seem to account for is the extremely fragile sense of self or "distinctness" which inhibits Edgar from ever "revealing" himself. Edgar never experiences himself as separate from others, specifically his family members. unless he does so in melodramatic terms which deny the complexity of self and other and one's feelings of ambivale~ce.Edgar is his father's son. What Cavell implies about the father, that his "failure to recognize others is a failure to let others recognize'' (49) him. applies to the son as well. The son has not simply inherited his father's sharne- ridden sense of self. he is inseparable from it. At the end of the play he adopts the feelings of shame expressed by his father while speaking to Kent about Edmund--that "knave [who] came saucily to the world" ( 1.1.2 1-22), that "whoreson [who] must be acknowledged" (I. 1.24)--as his own. Like the Gloucester of Act 1, the Edgar of Act V cannot get past his self-righteously moral, melodramatic understanding of his brother. Edgar trusted Edmund wholeheartedly in Act I, and in Act V he sees him as an object of shame, a "plague": My name is Edgar, and thy father's son. The gods are just, of our pieasant vices iMake instruments to plague us. The dark and vicious place where thee he got Cost him his eyes. (5.3-172-6) The horror and shame attached to (female) sexuality characteristic of Gloucester and Lear is carried on by Edgar. As Zak suggests, it blinds him to that which is noble in his brother and evident in Edrnund's response to the above words, "Th' hast spoken right. 'Tis true." (5.3.177), and his final gesture to save the lives of Lear and Cordelia, "Some good I mean to do, / Despite of mine own nature" (5.3.248-9). Edmund's words seem to sugzest that he buys Edgar's limited conception of him when he implies that his "nature" is bad. although in this dying moment he can act "good." Ultimately. Gloucester's shame-ridden sense of identity has been adopted by both sons. Edmund remains an object of shame to his whole family, and it seems, to himself. bur, as Zak suggests, the audience can see beyond this limited view of him. Through the dramatization of the dynamics of denial and shame on stage the audience is able to intuit complexity of character and empathize with not simply the "good'. characters, The audience cannot help but feel that when Edgar "readily falls the dupe of his brother's practice" he does so because he trusts others blindly as he does himseIf- He does not know himself nor does he know his brother and father as separate, vulnerable, fallible, potentially untrustworthy, human beings. Like the Cordelia who finds herself without position and love prior to France's acceptance. in so far as Edgar defines himself, he does so relative to other family members. "The process of individuation," says Erich Fromm in Escape From Freedom. "is one of growing strength and integration of its individual personality, but it is at the same time a process in which the original identity with others is lost and in which the child becomes more separate from them. This growing separation may result in an isolation that has the quality of desolation and creates intense anxiety and insecurity; it may result in a new kind of closeness and a solidarity with others if the child has been able to develop the inner strength and productivity which are the premise of this new kind of relatedness to the world" (3 1). Unlike Cordelia, whose "growing separation" "result[s] in a new kind of closeness," Edgar is plunged into emotional and literal "isolation" and "desolation" once confronted with the prospect of his father's mistrust and hatred. His father's view of him is everything and thus he feels like nothing once his father's hatred of him is confirmed by Edmund. Cavell asks. "Why does Edgar avoid his father's recognition?" (56) and his answers. at least the second, strike at the core of what drives Edgar and Cordelia in Act I: ( I ) He is himself ashamed and guilty. He was as gullible as his father was to Edmund's "invention." He failed to confront his father, to trust his love. exactly as his father had failed him. He is as responsible for his father's blinding as his father is. He wants to make it up to his father before asking for his recognition--to make it up instead of repenting. acknowledging; he wants to do something instead of stopping and seeing. So he goes on doing the very thing which needs making up for. (2)He cannot bear the fact that his father is incapable. impotent, maimed. He wants his father still to be a father, powerful, so that he can remain a child. For otherwise they are simply two human beings in need of one another, and it is not usual for parents and children to manage that transformation, becoming for one another nothing more, but nothing less, than unaccommodated men. That is what Lear took Edgar to be, but that was a mad, ironic compliment; to become natural again. human kind needs to do more than remove its clothes; for we can also cover up our embarrassment by nakedness. (56) Edgar "wants to make it up to his father" and "do something" not simply to avoid "seeing," but to regain the angelic, "good" sense of himself he saw reflected in his father's eye prior to Edmund's "invention." He (or Edmund) is either the "goodf'son or the "bad" son. Everyone in Gloucester's family seems to see themselves in such melodramatic terms. Edmund attempts to overcome this frame of mind. but ultimately he succumbs to it when he states that in attempting to save Lear and Cordelia he acts "Despite of mine own [evil or bad] nature" (5.3.249). For Edgar (and all leading characters, except perhaps Cordelia). there is no sense of there being, as Martha Nussbaum suggests in The Fmgilip of Goodness, an ancient Greek sense of the fragility of goodness which embodies and is, ideally, conscious of its vulnerability. This is where the audience's insight exceeds that of the characters who are in denial on stage. All along the audience hopes that Edgar will reveal himself to his father, knowing that this empathic gesture could solve much of both Gloucester's and Edgar's problems. But, as Cavell suggests, sensing that one is separate from and incapable of helping those on stage is part of the tragic experience. Edgar "goes on doing the very thing he needs to make up for" because he does not know who he is unless he is the "good" son. Everything else is simply a disguise. But we "know" better. The roles Edgar plays, the disguises he assumes. are expressions of who he is and how he feels; they are expressions of ambivalent feeling, part of which is the desire to punish his father for betraying and destroying their mutual conception of who Edgar is and what he is capable of. Edgar avoids "revealing" himself not simply because he fears that his father no longer loves and trusts him enough to see that he is innocent. The cruelty of his actions-- which amount to a kind of torture of Gloucester and the audience whose wish it is that he reveal himself--stem from the fact that he cannot forgive his father. After all, as Zak points out. Edgar hears Gloucester voice his remorse for not believing in him, and Edgar still does not reveal himself (Zak 42-43). Zak states that "Initially. of course, he avoided his father when a confrontation with Gloucester's suspicions, though admittedly a heroic risk. would have both confirmed a loving son's trust in his father and exposed Edmund's plot against him" (41), and he is right. But there is more to this. In a way. the fact that Edgar cannot "trust in his father" is beside the point. The son cannot forgive his father for his lack of trust in him in the first place. He cannot forgive him for not believing in his innocence--something Edgar cannot (consciously) doubt--or at least for not trusting him enough to confront him with the evidence against him before disowning him. He cannot forgive his father for not knowing him. The fact that his father does not know him, and thus thinks him capable of harming him, killing him, remains inconceivable to Edgar, although this is exactly what he unconsciously goes about doing to protect his and his father's original image of himself. The son is driven to rebuild himself in the image of his father's melodramatic sense of him as the "good" son. This necessitates, of course, that there be a "bad" son. The final challenge and defeat of Edmund "proves" this point and justifies Edgar's cruel treatment of his guilt-ridden father. What Cave11 says of the Lear we see at the end of the play, "Lear is reborn, but into his old self' ( 1 1 1), is true of Edgar in the end. He cannot reveal himself to others until he feels like his "old self." Until that time he feels like "nothing": "Poor Tom! / That's something yet- Edgar I nothing am" (2.3.20-21). "That's something" but "I nothing am." Whatever feelings of aggression and abandonment he may feel because of his father's betrayal of him and his sense of identity are channeled into destructive behavior toward himself and his father. Edgar no longer trusts his father's responses. Consequently. he can trust no one else, including himself. As Poor Tom, or the hero in armor, he done controls how he is to be perceived. He will only expose himself to others as the "good" son. otherwise he is "nothing." To feel like "nothing" is to be displaced from community and immersed in the natural world as if one can exist alone in the wilderness. but to know oneself is to acknowledge at some level one's place in the natural world of death. vulnerability, and the need of community. In denial of this paradoxical reality, while feeling like "nothing," Edgar has nothing to lose in combat with Edmund. In "Fool in Lear," William Empson points to the fact that Edgar "has the grace to say it was a 'fault' to keep on fooling his father, though at the time he claims to be healing his despair. . . . After Edgar has imposed a false death on the father who has wronged him he describes himself as he was till then as a sort of grotesque devil. . . . At any rate his words here seem to blame him for the part he is playing; he is a fool both to his own sorrow and to other people's, and the word means that he is both dupe and mocker to both kinds of sorrow" ( 14 1 ). Like Lear and Gloucester, Edgar can admit "fault" out of guilt, but, also like "the oldest who hath borne most" (5.3.33 I), the crippling feelings of shame which propel him from beginning to end remain unconscious and deadly. Edgar does not attempt to find himself in the present as himself interacting among other human beings; he looks to recover his past sense of self while in disguise as "some- thing" or, in other words, "something" other than human, and more like animal, which. paradoxically, allows him to act selfishly, with cruelty and inhumanity toward his father. He feels like an animal on the run who has "Escaped the hunt" (2.3.3). "I will preserve myself, and am bethought / To take the basest and most poorest shape / That ever penury. in contempt of man, / Brought near to beast" (2.3.6-9). says Edgar before renaming himself Tom. He feels like an object of shame who has the right to beg and deserves to be looked down upon. "Edgar keeps his terrible resolution and allows Gloucester hours of pain that he might well have spared him. yet the need to recreate and re-establish himself is stronger than pity" (86). says Andrew Dillon in "Edgar's Journey: Shame, Anger, and Maturity in King bar." But it is Edgar's self-pity and feelings of loss which are "stronger than pity." Moreover. his "need to recreate and re-establish himself' stems from a desire to deny ambivalent feelings about himself and his vulnerable, "animal" existence. and that of his "powerful" father, as well as a false assumption that identity is static and one's "nature" fixed: "I will preserve myself," says the shame-ridden Edgar determined not to let experience touch and shape him. (Leafs abdication of daughter and kingdom is the defining act of attempting to "preserve" the self and escape the "hunt" or, in other words, literal and psychological death.) "Pity" is largely a self-centered feeling. Consequently, it is not surprising that Edgar feels it and that it is overcome by his "need to recreate." Empathy or compassion, on the other hand, require of the person feeling them the ability to go beyond the concerns of the self into those of the other--seeing another human being as "nothing more, but nothing less, than unaccommated man." Unlike pity, which places a distance between the object of pity and the subject, these other-oriented experiences are in tune with human vulnerability and. in the words of Ernest Becker. the fact that the "essence of man is really his paradoxical nature. the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic" (26). Edgar risks physical vulnerability (as a naked beggar and while defending his father's life against Oswald and his honor against his brother) but he will not risk psychic vulnerability. He must always be doing something so that he feels in control. As he announces at the end of the play. he "became his [father's] guide. / Led him. begged for him, saved him from despair" (5.3.194-5). Edgar must be the active agent. He cannot stop to listen to and respond to his and his father's feelings of shame and vulnerability--to look them in the eye. you might say. He is running from and driven by these feelings. Feelings of vulnerability define Edgar because they rule him. He is, in essence. running from himself. Like Lea, Edgar assumes an "internal sovereign territory" which is the death of the self. "The very being of man." says Mikhail Bakhtin. "(both external and internal) is the deepest co~~zm~iniotz.TO be means to commtinicnt~i.Absolute death (non-being) is the state of being unheard, unrecognized. unremembered. . . . To be means to be for another. and through the other, for oneself. A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary: looking inside himself, he looks itzto the eyes of mother or with the eyes of nrzother" (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics 287). Edgar, Lear. and all those other tragic characters whose actions are governed by feelings of shame, deny this reality, although the audience cannot. The fragility of Edgar's sense of self inhibits him from recognizing that both his development and well-being, as well as his father's, can be served by revealing himself. Di 1 Ion admits that "Edgar may also feel some grim anger towards his father," but he qualifies this statement by adding that he "is bent now to serve his own integrity as one who must grow up by himself. He must never fall into the charms of letting a parent validate him again, no matter how attractive it would be to tell his father. at almost any point before he finally does, who he really is. Edgar's need to be finally his own man strengthens him as he cares for his father, but the renovation of his own shattered sense of worth is his main object" (88). 1 suggest, however, that his father's "validation" is simply no longer good enough. Edgar's sense of self is so fragile that he must convince everyone that he is still his father's "good" son by challenging, fighting, and defeating the "bad" son publicly. Like Lear in the opening scene, he is compelled to publicly prove and "re- establish" "himself' by performing like "himself," accordins to a pre-established plan, whatever the cost to others. Moreover. as Zak explains in Sovereign Shame: At the beginning of Act 5, for exampie, Edgar does two very curious things in quick succession. First, after secretly presenting Albany with Goneril's damning letter to Edmund urging, as he had earlier soliloquized. a "plot upon her virtuous husband's life" (4.6.272). Edgar unaccountably refuses to wait there until Albany has had a chance to read it. . . . Had he stayed, Edmund, who appears alone immediately thereafter, could have been harmlessly placed under arrest or, at worst, driven to a desperate attack on both his accusers with little likelihood of success. In any case, the completely unnecessary waste of life in the ensuing battle between France and England and the risk of danger to those Edgar cares for-- Gloucester, Lear, Cordelia, Kent, and Albany himself--might have been averted. (43) Edgar's need to become "something" because he feels like "nothing," and the denial of vulnerability and ambivalence behind it, echoes that of Lear, Albany, and the CordeIia of Act I. As Zak suggests in the case of Edgar. Albany, Lear, but not Cordelia, this need manifests itself in words and "pretense" which do not "suit" the person nor the "situation" (40). Of Albany, in Act V, Zak says: Nor does he cut much of a figure as he lamely tries to establish an official tone and juridical atmosphere in the midst of the unspeakable waste of life all about him and the deflating interruptions of Leafs nearly mad raving. It seems as if he cannot quite decide what else to do; and so he does what he presumes he is expected to do--assume a role of virtuous command. The pretense neither suits him nor the situation, however; consequentIy. he acts the fool, absurdly declaiming, for exampIe, given the circumstances. that "all friends shall taste / The wages of their virtue, and all foes / The cup of their deservings" (303-5).. . . (40) Of Edgar's final speeches. he says: His speeches, most of all. betray him. Their stiff. studied rhetoric. the absence of the supple responsiveness to the ever-contingent demands of personal interaction that makes all generous speech anxious, combines with the stylized nature of the chivalric challenge itself, already an antiquated, merely theatrical ritual in Shakespeare's day, to make the scene a kind of set piece staged with solemn deliberateness while the fates of Lea and Cordelia hang in dreadful peril at every moment. (45)" I would Iike to suggest that like Albany at the end of the play, the Cordelia of the beginning of the play "cannot decide what else to do; and so [slhe does what [slhe presumes [slhe is expected to do--assume a role." She assumes the role of independent adulthood with a "stiff, studied rhetoric" and "official tone" which she surmises "suits . . . the situation," but "The pretense neither suits . . . [her] nor the situation," nor her father's needs. She makes a "chivalric challenge" of her own (against her siblings) which is an attempt to deny the underlying "anxiety" and vulnerability of the situation: "Good my Lord, / You have begot me, bred me, ioved me. I / Return those duties back as right fit . . . Sure I shall never marry like my sisters.. . ." She adopts the language of exchange introduced by her father, but with a "stiffness" which makes a mockery of her true feelings and the "situation." Cordelia betrays herself and her father in assuming the role of adult in an attempt to rescue herself from nothingness. When she is first asked to "Speak," she feels like "Nothing." This feeling compels her to find "something" to be, as it does for Edgar. This is a point that Zak and Cavell cannot conceive of given their ideal vision of Cordelia. Because Cavell sees Cordelia as above the forces of denial and shame that permeate the opening scene of the play, he struggles with what appears to be her anomalous first words. He qualifies his all-loving vision of Cordelia immediately after asserting it however: But when the moment comes, she is speechless: "Nothing, my lord." I do not deny that this can be read defiantly, as can the following "You have begot me, bred me, lov'd me" speech. She is outraged, violated, confused, so young; Lear is torturing her, claiming her devotion. which she wants to give, but forcing her to help him betray (or not to betray) it, to falsify it publicly. . . . It may be that with Lear's active violation, she snaps; her resentment provides her with words, and she levels her abdication of love at her traitorous, shameless father: HappiIy, when I shall wed, That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry Half my love with him. (I, I, 100-2) The trouble is, the words are too calm, too cold for the kind of sharp rage and hatred real love can produce. She is never in possession of her siruation, "her voice was ever soft, gentle and low" (V, iii, 272-3); she is young. and "least" (I. i, 83). (This notation of her stature and of the quality of her voice is unique in the play. The idea of a defiant small girl seems grotesque, as an idea of Cordeiia.) All her words are words of love: to love is all she knows how to do. That is her problem. and at the cause of the tragedy of King Lea. (63) At the "cause of the tragedy of King Lear" is the fact that Lear's identity crisis triggers that of his youngest daughter. Yes. Cordelia is "never in possession of her situation" during this scene. But her "her voice was [not] ever soft gentle and low" as her father needs to believe in Act V when he speaks these words and in the abdication scene of Act I. While holding her dead body at the end of the play Lea completes this thought on Cordeiiats soft voice with the words: "an excellent thing in woman" (5.3.274). I would argue that simply "the idea of a defiant" woman "seems grotesque" to Lear. Women's sexuality threatens Lear's sense of power and control--his masculinity. Women's asexual love (although perhaps charged with unconscious incestuous desire) and submission. on the other hand, sustains his sense of power, control, and masculinity. Leu experiences sexuality's capriciousness as if it were an ancient Greek divine force which threatens to destroy his symbolic efforts to control his world." The abdication ceremony is a symbolic effort to control the bodily realities of both sex and death. Such symbolic efforts, although natural, as Becker suggests in The Derticd of Death, must accommodate and enact, as Nussbaum suggests in the The Ft-crgilir?. of Goodness, ambivalence and vulnerability. King kar, and tragedy in general. suggest that the ethical. empathic basis of symbolic action is dependent on the accommodation of feelings of ambivalence and vulnerability which are created by the realities of the body. Moreover, if symbolic action is detached from, and in denial of. the realities of the body. it is bound to explode in violence. Lear's perverse abdication ceremony is intended to prevent "future strife," but it serves to trigger the explosion of a culture immersed in denial. Shakespeare gives us the opportunity to witness and empathize with this explosion slowly . . . critically. In Shakespeare and the Denial of Death. James Calderwood uses ideas from Becker's The Denial of Death to bring new light to Shakespeare's plays. but his emphasis in his discussion of King Lenr is on "Man's need to deny death [which] is most apparent in myth and religion'' (6) and the fact that "culture as whole is in some degree a death- denying agency" (6). This emphasis on culture leads him to overlook the extent of tragedy's critique and analysis of the "death-denying" process. Unlike "myth and religion" and "culture," agencies of death-denial, tragedy insists on the confrontation with death and an integration of a sense of vulnerability into any conception of self and other, largely through the process of mourning. In this sense, tragedy is very much a critique of culture and its ideological paradigms. Calderwood believes that Shakespeare's tragedy is an uncritical endorsement of "the broader cultural effort to deny death and the human body" ( 137). But it is my position that it is the characters and not the play--the tragedy-- who deny death. Caldenvood, following Becker, is, however, correct to suggest that "Culture dresses up our deaths. It dresses up our sexual conduct too. Sex and death are weak points in culture's effort to surmount nature, because neither of them allows of clear-cut distinction between us and the 'lower* creatures. Of course it is not just sex and death but the place where sex and death take place--the human body--that must be dressed up if we are to transcend our origins" ( 137). On the other hand, tragedy suggests that we integrate our '-origins" into our sense of ourselves and our ethical, communal life. In other words, tragedy, and especially Shakespeare's Lear, present a detailed, complex critique of the struggle to deny the realities of both mortality and sexuality in dramatic form. Moreover. Lear seems to demonstrate a version of a virgin-whore complex (another form of melodramatic consciousness~rooted in anxiety over separation from the mother. The feelings of abandonment and anxiety connected with the process of separation from the mother in infancy, and later as the distance between the son and mother becomes more pronounced and visible with the child's growing sexuaI awareness. seem to underlie Lear's response to all his daughters. Le.u cannot love a daughter unless she is a girl without apparent sexuality or a mother figure also without apparent sexuality. He can no longer look upon Cordelia as his small girl because she is a sexual being about to marry. When Lear enters the throne room he already conceives of her as a mother figure. He is (perhaps unconsciously~grieving the simultaneous loss of his daughter's Iove and his power as father. There is far more to Lear's frustrated response to Kent, "I Iov'd her most, and thought to set my rest 1 On her kind nursery" ( 1.1.123-4), than anyone on stage or in the audience realizes. Lear knows what he is giving up in disowning Cordelia, but he does not really know why. Boose goes so far as to suggest that "The unnatural appetite of the father devouring his paternity is implicit even in the motive Lear reveals behind his plan to set his rest on Cordelia's 'kind nursery' ( 124), an image in which the father pictures himself as an infant nursing from his daughter. The implied relationship is unnatural because it allows the father to deflect his original incestuous proximity to the daughter, from whom the marriage ritual is designed to detach him" (334). The coilision between Lear and Cordelia is the main catalyst for the action of the play. When Cordelia enters the throne room she is faced with various, potential, confusing realities. namely her own feelings of abandonment and separation as she is about to be given away to either the Prince of Burgundy or France, and thus the reality of sexual identity, as well as her father's mortality and vulnerability. Perhaps not until her father begins talking is she confronted with the monumental nature of these new realities and her own lack of control over her feelings and the course of her life. Pt-ior to revealing his plan for his daughters to compete for the best lands, "Which of you shall we say doth love us most" ( 1.1 S2). Lear has already revealed that "we / Unburthen'd crawl toward death" ( 1.1.3 1 ). and made public Cordelia's sexuality with the words, "The princes, France and Burgundy, /Great rivals in our youngest daughter's love, / Long in our court have made their amorous sojourn, / And here are to be answer'd" ( 1.1 -45-8)- Disguising the shame he feels for his need to distance himself from his own feelings of abandonment and inability to reconcile his daughter's sexuality with his child-like vision of her within a public forum, Lear draws attention to her blossoming sexuality: "Now, our joy, / Although our last and least, to whose young love 1 The vines of France and milk of Burgundy / Strive to be interess'd, what can you say to draw / A third more opulent than your sisters''? Speak" ( 1.1.82-6). The forces of the youthful, wild and fertiie natural world of "vines" and "milk," Dionysian-like metaphors of sexuality, threaten, at least at some level, Lear's hopes of setting his rest on his youngest daughter's "unnatural," maternal, "kind nursery." Cordelia is bound to feel embarrassed, if not ashamed of her own sexuality at this point. What can she say? This is likely the first time her father has ever spoken of her to her in such sexual terms. Lear inadvertently transfers the burden of his own shame onto her.'" Zak, Morris, and Fraser do not believe Lear's crisis disturbs Cordei ia's gentIe, compassionate composure in any significant way. As a matter of fact, they read her first responses to Lear as a "joke" which is the product of a "calculated" and "reasoned" decision to "defuse this situation" (Fraser 8). According to Fraser, Cordelia is attempting to *'set Lear to recognize the dangers of the situation he is creating for himself and Cordelia" (8). Fraser goes so far as to suggest that Cordelia's first "Nothing" (and her second) "must be said somehow humorously, lightly. perhaps even with a touch of diffidence, but certainly with some indication from Cordelia to her father that she is both offering a jesting reply and inviting him to share that jest. proffering an anticipation of that hope-for response. and inviting him to share her position" (8). I suggest, however. that ifshe is joking here. she does so defensively, perhaps on the surface (consciously) to "defuse the situation," but also, unconsciously, out of her own sense of vulnerability, embarrassment, and hurt feelings, as well as a competitive spirit. Lear makes light of Cordelia's blossoming sexuality and marriage because he is ashamed of his feelings attached to his grown up child. Lear says exactly the wrong thing to his very confused and overwhelmed daughter. Not only does Cordelia face what she experiences as the problem of pretending "to love, where you really do love" (Cave11 62). but she must come to terms with a confusion of bodily realities. She faces an identity crisis perhaps as desperate as her father's." Like Edgar, while in the process of deciding to take on the identity of Poor Tom, Cordelia feels like "Nothing" when she says "Nothing." In questioning her love for him-- and insisting on her voicing it in public after exposing his own vulnerability and shaming her in front of others by making light of her "blossoming" sexuality--Lea strips her of a childhood sense of identity based on the farher's exclusive love of her. To alter Cavell's words about Edgar in a way that he probably would not approve of, "She wants her father still to be a father, powerful, so that she can remain a child. For otherwise they are simply two human beings in need of one another. and it is not usud for parents and children to manage that transformation. . . .I' If only at an unconscious level. she feels betrayed. Whether or not she is "joking" in her early responses to her father. as Zak and others argue. she demonstrates that she does not recognize her father's needs. otherwise she could not say what she does. His shame-ful behavior is as of yet unforgivable. His "inconsistent" view of her is resisted and she betrays her love of him out of a sense of betrayal. Feeling like nothing, like Edgar, she adopts a disguise or role, the adult, and speaks words which suit neither her nor her situation. "Cordelia is alarming," to use Cavell's terms. not "because he knows she is offering the real thing," but because she acts defensively, and eventually. aggressively, awkwardly,'* with a "pretense" which betrays her love and reveals her inability to empathize. This aggressive woman is as good as a monster to Lear. Remember that from the start of the play this is a man who intends to surrender himself to and become dependent upon the "kind nursery" of his daughters. When Goneril suggests Lear "disquantify" his train, Lear responds by attacking the very thing that threatens him most about her: her maternity and sexuality: Hear, Nature, hear! Dear goddess. hear! Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend To make this creature fruitful! Into her womb convey sterility; Dry up in her the organs of increase, And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honor her! (1 -4.274-80) Leu explodes in waves of language meant to overcome his feelings of impotence in the face of his daughter's power. In the opening scene of the play, after Cordelia speaks what she feels is "true." there is no turning back for either of them. Once Cordelia has asserted her sexuality and claimed to give "half my love" to the lord she "shall wed" ( 1.1.100-2) Lear sees her as no better than a "barbarous Scythian" ( 1.1. I 16), although he is the one who is acting and feeling like a monster." Cordelia does not "snap" as Cavell believes. She seems to be in the process of dealing with a whole new set of realities that are beginning to overwhelm her from the minute she enters the stage. She appears to come to the realization that she is utterly alone in the world. As in the case of Sophocles's Neoptolemus, Cordelia must first feel herself lost before she can find herself--lost to her old. childhood, dependent sense of self. that is. She feels abandoned and betrayed and the only thing she can now look forward to is the chance of love in mamage, hence her words: "Happily, when I shall wed, / That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry / Half my love with him . . . " (1.1.100- 3). Throughout this whole scene she cannot come close to feeling "the real thing1'--an empathically guided love--for Lear. Lear responds to Cordelia's defensive (a word I prefer to defiant) but aggressive words with the words, "So young, and so untender?" and she replies, "So young, my lord, and true" ( 1.1.106-7). Her words may be true, but the feelings which produce them are confused and full of aggression and the spirit of revenge. Her attachment to the truth is inherently destructive because it denies Lear his artificial reality. This is not meant as a moral judgment on Cordelia. To risk further exposure of herself given Lear's state of mind would be unbearable. Because she is not a fully individuated person she is forced to play along with Lear's unconscious vision of women and become another woman who abandons him. Contrary to what most critics believe, in Act I Cordelia. and the Fool and Kent for that matter, do not face an eitherfor situation when it comes to responding to Lear's contradictory demands and ambivalent desires. "Only Cordelia and the Fooi realize how terribly difficult and pai~ful,even, in a sense, impossible it is to 'speak what we feel' and converseIy how dreadful it would be--in fact intolerable, given the love they feel for Lear and their sense that the 'ought' must not be perverted--to retreat to the safety of a conventionally polite and ritualistic rhetoric. Only they, knowing how difficult either is. also know that there is no easy choice benveerz speaking what we feel and what we ought to say" (my italics) (5 1-52). says Zak. To see the situation in such polar terms is to adopt Edgar's point of view on experience. As I have already suggested, a Cordelia with a more secure sense of self (which would enable her to intuit her father's needs) has the added option of speaking what she feels nrzd what she ought to say simlfaneously. The fact that she cannot manage this is understandable, but it seems to me that an audience member might sense this other option and hope that at some point Cordelia might also recognize it. This is, of course, to ask of Cordelia more than she is capable of at the moment. She is yet to even begin the mourning process which would enable her to deal with the multiple losses which are taking shape in Act I. In Act I, and even once she returns from France later. as Boose suggests, she is in the process of "mourning for the father to whom she is still bound (335). Both Kent and the Fool respond to Lear similarly. Like Cordelia, Kent chooses to confront Lear with the "truth" and "reality" while oblivious to Lear's "reality." After Lear's warning, "The bow is bent and drawn. Make from the shaft" ( 1.1.143), Kent speaks what he feels and what he believes he ought to say: Let it fall rather, though the fork invade The region of my heart. Be Kent unmannerly When Lear is mad. What woutdst thou do, old man? Think'st thou that duty shall have dread to speak When power to flattery bows? To plainness honor's bound When majesty faIIs to folly. Reserve thy state. And in thy best consideration check This hideous rashness. Answer my life my judgment, Thy youngest daughter does not love thee Ieast, Nor are those emptyhearted whose low sounds Reverb no hollowness. ( 1.1.144- 155) As Cave11 and Zak make quite clear, Kent confronts Lear with that which he is trying to avoid. his shame and the feelings of vulnerability attached to his mortality. He cannot bear to be seen in this light, so he orders Cordelia and then Kent "Out of. . . [his] sight!" But the "truth" is that Lear is not exactly "mad" at this point, nor does Kent believe him to be. otherwise he would not attempt to reason with the king. The king is simply acting unreasonably. with "folly" and "hideous rashness." like an "old man." But the king feels as if he is on the brink of madness. He must have his way. He must "know," at some level at least, that his "youngest daughter does not love . . . [him] least." But this is not what he thinks, nor what he feels, at this pivotal point in his life. Everything must go according to plan, otherwise he is nothing. and, as we have already seen, he believes that "Nothing will come of nothing" ( 1.1.90). At the outset of the play, Kent and Cordelia still believe what Lear wants everyone to believe, including himself: that, although he is capable of rulin,o, his "intent / [is] to shake all cares and business from our age" ( 1.1.39- 30). The embodiment of divine power, the "King," is emotionally and psychologically dethroned before he abdicates, but nobody is willing to face up to this fact. He is being ruled by feelings of shame and vulnerability. Unfortunately for all, in responding to Leafs inability to cope with his own deteriorating sense of self and power, at the root of which lies anxiety which has to do with mortality and sexuality, first Cordelia and then Kent "cast . . . [themselves] in the role of a 'representative of reality"': Whether we are in the role of friend to a recently bereaved person or of therapist to someone who has suffered a bereavement many years ago and has failed in his mourning, it seems to be both unnecessary and unhelpful to cast ourseIves in the role of a 'representative of reality': unnecessary because the bereaved is, in some part of himself, well aware that the world has changed; unhelpful because, by disregarding the world as one part of him still sees it, we alienate ourselves from him. Instead, our role should be that of companion and supporter, prepared to explore in our discussions all the hopes and wishes and dim unlikely possibilities that he cherishes, together with all the regrets and the reproaches and the disappointments that afflict him. (Bowlby. Making and Breaking 94) Of course, given Lear's extreme state of denial, he is more than likely to reject any attempts at "discussing" his "hopes" and "regrets". etc., but by facing him with "reality" Cordelia and Kent "disregard" the way he sees the world and thus "alienate" themselves "from him." Lear is in the process of mourning the loss of his power and sense of invujnerabifity. On the other hand, his attempt to give up and keep the only role he knows how to play, King, reveals his "failure" to mourn successfully. Lear's loss is not of another "object," but of himself. In "Processes of Mourning," John Bowlby describes MeIanie Klein's understanding of mourning as it is evident in "her paper Mounting urzd irs Relorion ro Marzic-Depressive Stares," and in so doing. he captures what appears to be some fundamental features of Lear's process of mourning: Thus, she sees mourning as a phase of disorganization and of subsequent reorganization. and its painfulness as their consequence: 'The pain experienced in the slow process of testing reality in the work of mourning thus seems to be partly due to the necessity, not only to renew the links to the external world and thus continuously to re-experience the loss, but at the same time and by means of this to rebuild with anguish the inner world, which is felt to be in danger of deteriorating and collapsing.' The mourner, she believes, then has the task and must go through the pain of 're-establishing and re-integrating' his inner world. (325) Also in "Processes of Mourning," Bowlby describes Edith Jacobson's view of "the nature of moods" in mourning. Jacobson's view, and Bowlby's qualification of it, sheds light on Lear's attempt to let go of and keep that which he experiences as lost, as well as his extreme, and perhaps pathological, aggressive responses to those who resist him: She begins with two generalizations that I believe to be well founded: first, that following loss there are two common reactions, a yearning to regain the lost object and a tendency towards aggression; secondly, that the balance of these two reactions varies greatly from individual to individual and that on this balance turns whether the response remains healthy or becomes pathological. The way she proceeds, however, and in particular her contention that aggression is absent from grief. I regard as open to criticism. (327) Clearly Lear's aggression is ever-present in his grief and. in essence, incomplete mourning process. Like those patients engaged in the early and middle stages of dealing with their own death described by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in On Death and Dying, Lear attempts to deny and forestall his own death and his feelings of isolation, anger. and depression by bargaining with his daughters. Both Cordelia's and Kent's early responses to Lear's "madness" illustrate that "love" and "duty" blind them (in a way that they do not later in the play) to the King's will and needs--his physical and psychological vulnerability. This is not to say that there is a suggestion that anyone in Shakespeare's play can save Lear from himself. There is a suggestion, however. that a more empathic response to Lear's strange and extreme behavior might have saved others. And yet, an empathic response to Lear might not necessarily involve saying and doing nothing. Saying "Nothing" certainly failed. Kent's words and actions as Caius are those of an empathic "companion and supporter" of the old King. Kent learns from his mistakes. Perhaps he still attempts to bring his king around to seeing "reality" in subtle ways, but, as his words. "A sovereign shame so elbows him" (4.3.43), indicate, he is aware of the underlying feeling which drives Lear to madness (although he believes Lear's "shame" is simply due to his treatment of Cordelia). He responds to both his own and Lear's experience of "reality." When it comes to the Fool's responses to Lear, I tend to agree with William Ernpson when he states that "I am not sure that we need regard this [the Fool's attempts "to save his master's sanity"] as a rational kindness towards Led( 135). " [Tlhe malice which is part of his [the Fool's] role comes out plainly enough in his jokes to Leaf (Empson 133). I think Cavell (59) and Zak (5 1-55) equate the Fool's love and insight with Cordelia's too easily. Unlike Cordelia. the Fool never completes the mourning process triggered by Lear's disowning of Cordelia. Consequently, this "malice" is ever- present in his interactions with Lear. As I argue later in this chapter, we witness the advancement of Cordelia's mourning process and her development of empathy for her father. ~vhereasthe Fool does not undergo such growth. In the Fool's defense. however, his effort to mourn the loss of Cordelia arrd the old Lear are continually resisted by Lear. The Fool lacks the communal support which Cordelia seems to have experienced with France. Both Cavell and Zak excuse the Fool's destructive ridicule of Lear for different reasons. Cavell states that "the Fool keeps the truth present to Lear's mind, but it should be stressed that the characteristic mode of the Fool's presentation is ridicule--the circumstance most specifically feared by shame (as accusation and discovery are most feared by guilt)" (59). But, as I ask later, is the Fool's "truth" he "truth"? Zak points to the Fool's "shame for himself for having to do what he is doing to Lear" (1 14). "The alternatives to derision are indifference or some expression of sympathy; and neither of them would do anything but encourage Lear to indulge his self-pity. So derision it must be" ( 1 14), says Zak of the Fool. In a sense, both Cavell and Zak are right, in that the Fool's destructiveness is a product of the limits of this role as a Fool. But the play suggests that the only way out of destructiveness is through empathy. And what happens if you measure the Fool's "therapeutic" (Zak 1 13) worth against the concept of empathy, and not love as Cavell and Zak ultimately do? What if, as I argue throughout this dissertation, tragedy is concerned with communicating the need for empathy? Empathy is what is missing from the Fool's discourse. Its absence is behind his cruelty. Its absence or suppression is, for that matter, behind all acts of cruelty, as Arne Vetlesen, in his book on empathy, and Stjepan MeBtrovi*, in The Conzing Fin De Sikcfe. suggest. The Fool longs for a past in which he had a role, but Lear usurps that role. as Empson argues. The Fool is grief-stricken: "the Fool hath much pined away" ( 1.4.73). He feels betrayed by Lear and he makes Lear suffer for this betrayal. Like the Cordelia of Act I. the Fool is too self-absorbed emotionaIly to understand and act upon another's (his master's) "need." He cannot "remain silent about the need." Like Kent, he believes he knows the "truth," when all he knows is a "truth" which Lear is not willing to face. Like the Kent of Act I, who calls Lear "mad," the Fool sees Lear as a Fool and tells him so. When the Fool suggests Lea "beg another" coxcomb (or fool's cap) "of thy daughters" ( 1.4.106- 107). and Lear responds, "Take heed, sirrah--the whip" ( 1.4.108), the Fool "bites" back with, "Truth's a dog must to kennel" ( 1 -4.109). His well-meaning attempts to help the king to see the "truth" and "reality" fail like everyone else's. It seems to me that the need to assert the "truth" is not all that unlike the impulse to lie: both are attempts to stabilize and deny that which is already out of control. They are very human gestures of control and invulnerability. The Fool's attempts to help the king may be. like Edgar's attempts to help his father, bearable because disguised, but ultimately they are guided by pity and self-pity and not empathy. The Fool knows and says what Lear has done "wrong." "thou mad'st thy daughters thy mothers" ( 1.4.169- 170). and it seems as if he is at least partially responsible for Lear admitting: 0 most small fault, How ugly didst thou in Cordelia show! Which, like an engine. wrenched my frame of nature From the fixed place, drew from my heart all love, And added to the gall. 0 Lear. Lear. Lear! Beat at this gate [Striking his lzearCj that let thy folly in And thy dear judgment out! ( 1.4.265-271 ) But, like the king who can admit "fault" or guilt, aware of what he did "wrong," the Fool is to a large extent oblivious to the why--to the shame. As a matter of fact, the efforts of both the Fool and Cauis to help Lea- to regain himself. although helpful in getting Lear to admit to the "truth" of his "fault," serve to drive him toward madness. Ultimately, the Fool and Caius want what Lear wants: for the king to recover his "old self' and ignore the "reality" of his present vulnerability and feelings of impotence. Things have changed, however, and nobody is willing to accept this "reality"--not, that is, until Act V when Cordelia does not attempt to push her father to "see these daughters and sisters" for fear of her father's fragility. After his falling out with Goneril. Lear sends Caius ahead with a letter to Regan, and the Fool warns Lear that "thy other daughter . . . will taste as like this as a crab does to a crab" (1 .5.14,18). Lear suddenly says. "I did her [Cordelia] wrong" (1 3-24), and he is, of course, correct. The Fool continues on the theme of what Lear did "wrong." He points to what he believes is Lear's orginal sin or "wrong": "But I can tell why a snail has a house. . . . Why, to put 's head in. not to give it away to his daughters and leave his horns without a case" ( 1 S.27, 30-3 1 ). Was it "wrong" for Lear to give away his "house"? The critics certainly do not agree on whether or not it was or was not. As far as I am concerned, if the play proves anything. it is that Lear does not possess the self-confidence and self-control to rule successfully. He is dying and he desires to "crawl toward death." and he suffers from extreme psychological vulnerability. In The Masks of King Lenr. Marvin Rosenberg takes issue with critics who insist that Lear's abdication and division of the kingdom is an "unnatural" and "wrong" act. Rosenberg's argument is the most thorough and convincing I have read on this issue. It begins by stating that "The play has been seen as dominated by the consequences of unnatural action. and Lear, a prisoner to this theme. as initiating unnaturalness with his abdication" (40). In a footnote to these words he states that In this context, we can ask: given that Lear is designed to be already mad or senile, or susceptible to madness as he will turn out to be (the character may be shaped to fear this even at first), how wise and "natural" would he in fact be to go on ruling? Would a king do any better to wait until he died--or lost his mind--and so leave the kingdom to what he anticipates correctly would befiitrtre srriJe between the dukedoms? In fact. there will quickly be division between the dukes; would it be otherwise if Lear did without assigning powers to these sons-in-law? (40- 1 ) He then turns to "the logic of the play" to develop his argument: This [unnatural act] would presumably shock and alienate a Jacobean audience, trained to regard the act as improper. even blasphemous, a violation of the laws of God and the chain of being. The counter to this is not primarily to be found in further reasoning outside the logic of the play-although a political scientist. Harry Jaffa, has argued plausibly that Lear begins, in fact, as a very successful king who has ruled well. and whose plan for division is wise and practical. But the proper response is to the work of art: in its design. is the intent ~f Lear's act made to seem natural or not? The wiser men in Lear's court, Gloster and Kent, have spoken calmly of the expected division, and will only object when Cordelia is disenfranchised. There are no implied directions to make what he does now seem unnatural in the theatre. (40-1) Rosenberg goes on to give historical evidence for the appropriateness of Lear's abdication. On this point of "naturalness" I agree with Rosenberg, as I do with S.L. Goldberg in An Essay on King Lea. Goldberg states that "Lear's opening speech appears at first a perfectly natural beginning to a ceremony, even if rather a strange one" ( 1 7). In essence, I believe the problem lies in how and why Lear handles the giving up of his "house," and how others respond to this necessary act, and not simply the fact that he gives up his "house," as the Fool and those critics who identify with him believe. The Fool's insistence on facing Lear with what he believes his king to have done "wrong" serves only to fuel the old man's rage at himself and others. The Fool's words drive Lear to express feelings--"i will forget my nature. So kind a father!" (1 S.32)-- which are at the root of his madness: feelings of betrayal, abandonment, and loss of self. Lear, and everyone around him, are so busy trying to recapture his "nature" that he goes mad. He is, and never will be, the same man: he can bear no more than "The name and a1 1 tli' addition to a king" ( 1.1.136). Ironically, in Act IV, scene vii., after the Fool has disappeared,"' with the Doctor, Cordelia, and Cauis surrounding him, it is Lea who, momentarily, seems to accept the loss of his "old self." Lear's most lucid moment comes when he fears that "I am not in my perfect mind" (4.7.64). As Lear awakens, now under Cordelia's care after being rescued from wandering madness, Lear's lucidity arises out of feelings of vulnerability. disorientation and humility, and not control and power. His lucidity--and the ability to cope with ambivalence in particular--are triggered by Cordelia's insistence on him resuming his old. magisterial self. It seems that Cordelia needs Lear to assume the position of (power-ful) king before she can accept him as father. thus she addresses him simply as a subject, and not a daughter. Her first words to him are: "How does my royal lord? How fares Your Majesty?" (4.7.45). These (rhetorical) questions (which are really wishes) do not match Lear's sense of himself and thus he insists that "You do me wrong to take me out o' the grave." His surroundings suggest that he is in heaven, "Thou art a soul in bliss," but he feels like he is in hell. "but I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead" (4.7.47-49). His daughter's presence and words seem to contradict his unworthy and vulnerable sense of himself. In a sense, Cordelia does him "wrong" as she does not "see" all of him. There is no question that she is aware of his vulnerability, but she cannot accept it. Lear soon expresses a wish to be "assured" of the fact that he is alive, and Cordelia once again tries to revive Lear's divinely appointed xtd empowered sense of himself. She says, "0,look upon me, sir. / And hold your hand in benediction o'er me" and, as Cordelia's next words seem to suggest. Lear attempts to kneel before her. He feels powerless adundeserving, but his daughter immediately rejects this "reality," saying. "No. sir, you must not kneel" (4.7.59). Cordelia helieves she is helping her father recover his sense of identity. but. as Lear tells her, she only "mock[s]" him. Her denial of her father's vulnerability, and its manifestation in gestures of pity and self-pity, prompt Lear to insist on being treated according to the way he feels: Pray, do not mock me. I am a very foolish fond old man. Fourscore and upward. not an hour more nor less: And, to deal plainly. I fear I am not in my perfect mind. Methinks I should know you. and know this man, Yet I am doubtful; for I am mainly i, onorant What place this is, and all the skiil I have Remembers not these garments, nor I know not Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me. For, as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia. (4.7.60-7 1 ) Lear then acknowledges that Cordelia has "cause" for not loving him and she denies it: "No cause, no cause" (4.7.78), she responds. "However deeply moving and necessary is the truth of Cordelia's 'no cause, no cause' (and it is the only apology she makes)." says Goldberg early in his book, "this is still not the whole of the truth either. What happened in the first scene and has happened since is. . . also real. Lear has something to feel guilty about, even here his thoughts still tend irresistibly towards himself. . . . In short. to see him as Cordelia does, as deserving only pity, is to do less than justice to his all-too- human humanity" (3 1-2). But later Goldberg says of the Cordelia who has just uttered the words, "No cause, no cause": "Here, all self-consciousness loses itself in her awareness to his reality" ( 144). He says of Leu at this point in the play: "Similarily [to Cordelia], Lear has little room now for any protective sense of self to corrode his awareness of reality" (144). This may be true, but Cordelia does not answer to Lear's reaIity fully. because, as he suggests earlier, she is blinded by pity and, ultimately, self- pity. while in the process of corning to tenns with the loss of her powerful father. In this scene, and particularly in lines 60-71 quoted above, Lear's fragile words momentariiy reveal that he is capable of accepting himself as both an "old man" and a father crnd Cordcila as both a woman or "lady" and a daughter all at the same time. But. as the audience will see in Act V. when Lear refuses to see "these daughters and these sisters." he cannot reconcile this kind of personal understanding in vulnerability with the realities of survival in the public world. Lear cannot confront the full force of his feelings of shame and survive. He must retreat into roles of the past in order to maintain a measure of control. Although Cordelia's need to restore her father to a position of power blinds her to her father's "reality" in Act IV, by Act V she transcends this need. After literally losing the battle for the rctrtrn of her father's kingdom, Cordelia has come to terms with the loss of her father's power. After Edmund instructs his soldiers to keep "Good guard" over Lear and Cordel ia, Cordelia addresses her father. She speaks with a clarity. directness. and sensitivity born of experience: We are not the first Who with best meaning have incurred the worst. For thee, oppressed King, I am cast down; Myself could else outfrown false Fortune's frown. Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters? (5.3.2-7) When Cordelia begins, "We are not the first," she speaks as a fully individuated person who accepts and acknowledges her father's vulnerability. She now accepts the loss of her all-powerful father and her childhood sense of identity. In Act IV. she states that she has returned to complete the mourning which began in Act I, "0dear Father, / It is thy business that I go about: / Therefore great France / My mourning and importuned tears hath pitied" (4.5.23-26),and by the final act this is accomplished." Her sense of identity is no longer dependent on her father's power, nor the recovery of it. She experiences herself as a "We," "I." and "Myself' simultaneously. She is very clear on the difference between "thee" and "I." She goes so far as to suggest what she would do differently if it wasri't for the weight of her father's losses: "Myself could else outfrown false Fortune's frown." Cordelia's sense of self and world are not shattered by her father's "oppressed" nature. nor are they by "false Fortune's frown." Well aware of the fact that seeing her sisters before being sent off to prison will. at the very least. buy them time, Corddia asks her father whether he wishes to "see these daughters and these sisters?" And it is a genuine question. She has decided not to "outfrown Fortune" for her father's sake. She will abide by her father's needs and wishes, knowing full well what she is giving up: her life. and not her sense of identity. She fears for her fragile father far more than she does for her-self. I agree with Empson, who argues that Cordelia's final five lines, silence, and tears, suggest that "she is certain that her sisters mean to kill them both" (148). Empson's insight that Cordelia "punningly declared both her altruism and her tragic destiny" (26) in the line, "For thee, oppressed King, I am cast down" (5.3.5). is a very important one for understanding Cordelia and her position as a tragic, complex character. Moreover, at the same time that she knows that she must ask to "see these daughters and these sisters," she knows what she is asking of him. This kind of balanced, empathic sensitivity and understanding of self2 and other is missing from the Cordelia of Act I who asks, "Why have my sisters husbands if they say / They love you all?" In Act IV Cordelia kisses her father to "Repair those violent harms that my two sisters / Have in thy reverence made!" (4.7.28-29). In Act V "these sisters" are "daughters" first. Cordelia no longer feels the need to compete with them for her father's love. Her sense of identity is independent of them, but her father's is not. She is well aware that "these" are the same "daughters" who drove her father mad in the first place. Once Lear responds to her question in utter desperation, "No, no. no! Come, let's away to prison," Cordelia chooses to "remain silent about the need, and thereby enable[s] him not to be conscious of the terrifying vulnerability from which it springs." Immediately after his outburst Lear escapes into his imagination: "We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage. / When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down / And ask of thee forgiveness" (5.3.9- 1 1 ). This time. unlike in Act IV. Cordelia does not object to the idea of her father kneeling before her. Lear is defeated by his vulnerability, but at least he no longer wishes to conceal it from his daughter: "I'll knee1 down / And ask of thee of forgiveness." She responds to her father empathically . recognizing and acting on her father's needs, while retaining her now secure sense of self. This time, unlike in Act I, she says nothing because there is nothing to say. She can do notlling to save her father from himself, but she can "remain siIent about the need" and go along with his fantasy of being bodiless, immortal creatures. "God's spies" (5.3.17). not subject to the "ebb and flow by the moon" (5.3. W)." She faces her own death and that of her father. She is acutely conscious of the fact that although she could withstand "Fortune's frown," after having accepted the vulnerability of both her father and herself. her father cannot. Her final silence and tears suggest that she has reached a very complex state of emotional. empathic understanding. Cordelia's empathy, and her growing sense of "separateness" and selfhood, enable her to transcend the dynamics of denial which cripple her world. Without the concept of empathy through which to understand Cordelia's development critics have tended to idolize her. Her undeniable love for her father blinds her and the critics to the potential for empathic action. Her final silence and sacrifice is not simply a product of her love. It is the manifestation of the development of her capacity to empathize. Empathy, and not pity and love, enable her to understand her father's tortured, shame-ridden consciousness, and act in a way which does not threaten his fragile sense of self. Cordelia, unlike the Fool, and even Kent, no longer needs to recover her father's sense of his own invulnerability. In Act V she is beyond blaming--herself or anyone else. Lear, Gloucester, and Edgar. on the other hand, all blame themselves for their own "faults" or "wrongs" and admit guilt, but they never understand themselves because they do not face the feelings of shame which underlie their most deadly actions--feelings at the root of which lie fears of sexuality and mortality or, in other words, utter vulnerability. Cordelia is the only one who faces such vulnerability head on. After her father shatters her childhood sense of identity, and once she is shown Iove and given a place in the world by France, Cordelia is prepared to undergo a journey of self-discovery which eventually leads to her ability to transcend her own needs and listen to and respond to those of her father. Her empathic journey of self-discovery serves to link her with other tragic characters, like Neoptolemus, who emerge from the "madness" of a world dominated by the denial of vulnerability embodied in more narcissistic tragic figures like Philoctetes and Lear. Cordelia's empathy, and the audience's for that matter, grows out of a contiontation with a world driven by what appears to be a compulsive need to struggle against the fact that we are "half animal and half symbolic." Shakespeare's King Lear is no exception to the fact that tragedy frames the need for empathy in order for individuals to emerge from denial and the personal crises it engenders. Notes '1n the sixth chapter of The Structure of Complex Words, "Fool in Lear," William Empson provides a critical history and endorsement of the idea of "renunciation" in Kirlg Lear. As Empson points out, in Shooting an Elephant George Owell states that "The subject of Lear is renunciation, and it is only by being willfully blind that one can fail to understand what Shakespeare is saying*.( 125). 'cave11 is correct when he states that love's "touch wounds" (59)-but, as I will suggest in different ways throughout this chapter. empathy, and not love. is the better way to help another cope with intense feelings of shame and vulnerability. Empathy's "objectivity" and lack of self-interest reassures the other that you do not want or expect anything from them. or a discussions of empathy, love. pity and compassion see pages 83-84. note 19 of Chapter 2. pages 1 17- 18 of this chapter, and pages 138-39. '~uchof what Blaydes says with regard to the role of France in Cordelia's deveiopment and the opening scene of the play is convincing. Blaydes suggests that "France's betrothal is the key to Cordelia's unseen development" ( 17). On the other hand, I do not agree with her suggestion that Cordelia's development is complete once she returns from France. '1n the concluding paragraph to "Lear and the Lost Self." Warren Taylor points to a similar effect on the audience produced by Lear's "avoidance" or denial. Taylor states that "In the fullness of his own vision of Lear, at every turn, Shakespeare counters what Lear is with what he might have been. The tragedy of Lear is unmistakable: in this play Shakespeare is equally and always mindful not only of the self that Lear actually is but also of the self that circumstances brought within reach but that Lear himself irrecoverably lost" (5 13). "Speaking of Cornwall's blinding of Gloucester in his essay on Lpar, Cavell illustrates how different rulers of this realm are all implicated in the desire to avoid being seen out of shame. Cavell's analysis of shame in King Lear confirms my belief that shame and the absence of empathy, made present in the dynamics of denial, are inextricably linked in tragedy. Cruelty is the product of the absence of empathy and the presence of intense feelings of shame. 'David Simpson, in "Great things of us forgot: seeing Lear better." and Lynda Boose. in "The Father of the Bride in Shakespeare," do explore what I refer to as the denial of the body manifest in an anxiety over sexuality and mortality in Lear. although they do not address the relation between shame. vulnerability. and empathy. 'This statement appears in the context of Cavell's question: "Is this a Christian pIay'?" (73). Cavell explains that when this question "is answered affirmatively, Cordelia is viewed as a Christ figure whose love redeems nature and transfigures Led(73). "So far as this is intelligible to me." continues Cavell. "I find it false both to the experience of the play and to the fact that it is a play. King Lecrr is not illustrated theology. . . . If Cordelia exemplifies Christ, it is at the moment of crucifixion, not resurrection. But the moment of his death is the moment when Christ resembles us. finally takes the human condition fully into himself. . . . It is in his acceptance of this condition that we are to resembIe him" (73). "In the Philoctetes, Neoptolemus and Heracles do not "love" Philoctetes, but they do demonstrate "friendship" and an awareness of "separateness" in empathic action. "'ASIvor Morris, in "Cordelia and Lear," and Alan Sinfield, in "Lear and Laing." suggest in different ways, Lear is a king unaccustomed to open expressions of fatherly love. "He has," as Moms states, "for many years dwelt above the sphere of natural affection. and. now that he is putting off his authority and its demands. he craves to be reassured, and to enter at last into the humble--yet for him supremely real--joys of family life" ( 1 52). "AS I mention in note 18 of Chapter 2, in The Divided SeZfR. D. Laing voices the problem of using the word, "love," to describe the "kind of love" or "understanding" needed to help a schizophrenic. and in so doing he describes the process of empathy. Lains suggests that "The schizophrenic" can "be known without being destroyed" oniy through empathy. I think Cordelia is on her way to knowing Lear in this way in Act V, but. of course. she and her father are denied any kind of therapeutic context in which to foster this kind of empathic "understanding." "1n "The Theme of the Three Caskets" Freud links Lear's early rejection of Cordelia--a goddess who appears as "The Goddess of Love herself. who now took the place of the Goddess of Death." thus embodying "an ancient ambivalence" (299)--with his rejection of the reality of his own mortality. In "Great things of us forgot: seeing Lear better." David Simpson builds on Freud's insights into the play and, ultimately, takes issue with his concIusion that Lear "choose[s] death and make[s] friends with the necessity of dying" (30 1 ). Simpson ques that "instead of our being exposed to the realization of Lear's responsibility for Cordelia's death, he is presented as the single person who has tried to save her. . . . The final scenes are indeed harrowing, but not just because of what happens to Lear. For he effectively displaces the final responsibility for Cordelia's death on to the others- . . . He has in this sense, perversely. triumphed over death" (20). "He has," but I do not believe, as Simpson suggests, that individual audience members (and Shakespeare) necessarily believe in and identify with this "triumph." '9 will expand on this point in Part II of this chapter. 14 In his article, "Transactive Teaching: Cordelia's Death," Norman Holland includes a very telling written response to the final scene of the play by one of his students named Ira, which speaks directIy to this point: I suppose I'm angry at Shakespeare, not for killing Cordelia--that seems inevitable to me--but for what he makes me feel while he's doing it. There I am, as the play draws to its tragic close, knowing that Cordelia is being killed offstage, and knowing that no amount of denial (no-ing) can prevent it, and having to listen to everybody onstage actively ignoring what I know, For what seems like hours Edgar, Kent, Albany. et al., listen to each other provide information and discourse on justice, while I keep thinking about that soldier whom Edmund sent to kill Cordelia. It's as though the onstage characters are stalling, paying no attention to their own play--or, rather, only paying attention to their play. and forgetting about Lear's (and mine). I'm frustrated and helpless. I have the power of knowledge (I know what must happen; I cannot be surprised). along with the utter powerlessness of being unable to do anything except know. When, finally, Albany exclaims, "Great thing of us forgot!", and it looks as though my frustrated expectations will be attended to, there is still more delay. The bodies of Regan and Goneril are dragged in for more justified anger and regret which waste more time and make me feel more helpless. All this gratuitous dramaturgic delay I blame on Shakespeare, while simultaneously admiring the genius which re-creates the meaning of the play in my frustrated, angry, helpless response to the inevitable death I know will come. It's as though I'm standing petrified, as in a dream, before a huge truck that is rushing towards me. I can't move out of the way, but I have plenty of time to read the license number. (282-3) "~obertBagg's comments on the ancient Greek male's fear of female sexuality, as it is represented in the character of Pentheus in Euripides's Baccltue. help to explain the underlying anxiety over female sexuality in Shakespeare's tragedy of King Lear. In his introduction to the Baccltae Bagg says: When Pentheus says, "We are humiliated / when we let women act like this," hz is reverting to the Greek male's fear of women which pervades Greek literature of the age of tragedy. We see it, for instance, in Creon's paranoiac reaction to Antigone's rebelliousness, as well as in Jason's thoroughly justified terror of Medea. There were two aspects of this fear: fear of being dominated by women, and fear of being overwhelmed by their sexuality. Aristophanes devotes an entire play, the Tizesrnupl~orinzriscte,to the revenge taken by the women of Athens on Euripides for his supposed slanders against their sex. ( 10-1 1) In the Bacchae, the capriciousness of female sexuality takes the form of the god. Dionysus. and his female devotees, maenads, who embody the "animal," erotic forces which overwhelm normally "civilized" human beings. !h,My intention is to present a possible, consistent reading of the characters of Lear and Cordelia based on the premise that this play is an enactment of my three principles of tragedy. The fact that other readings are possible, more common, or perhaps more believable. does not alter my belief that the thoughts and feelings, both conscious and unconscious, that I am ascribing to characters provide the basis for a compelling and revealing production of this modem tragedy. Such a production would enact what I refer to as certain paradigmatic patterns of tragic action, thus making more sense of this play's seminal position in the history of tragedy. I7Cordelia, like Sophocles's Neoptolemus. is faced with working through feelings of shame and an identity crises due to an older. inflexible tragic figure's inability to cope with their own feelings of shame and loss of identity. Cordelia and NeoptoIemus are coerced into acting shamefully. but. unlike Lea and Philoctetes, they learn from shame to the extent that in the end they can act empathically and sacrifice themselves for the other. '"There is more to the "Good my Lord, / You have begot me, bred me, lov'd me" speech than "the sudden awkwardness of anyone who has assumed the self-evidence of the obvious, and is still called on to say what she means" ( 130) as John Danby states in SI~akespenre8sDoctrine of Natrtre: A Strrdv of King Lear. ear's image of the father," says Boose. "is the 'barbarous Scythian, / Or he that makes his generation messes / To gorge his appetite' ( 1.1.1 16- 18). The definition is opposite to the very character of ritual. It precludes the possibility of transformation, for the father devours the flesh he begets. Here, generation becomes primarily an autogarnous act, a retention and recycling of the procreative energies, which become mere extensions of private appetite feeding on its own production" (334). "'Ifind Empson's theory that "The Fool has not been required after the storm scenes, because the mad king has taken over his function completely" (152), provocative. In a sense. you might say that the Fool drives himself sane while driving the king mad, thus both lose their roles in society and self-destruct as a result. The Fool cannot see beyond what appears as a "double-bind." He is incapable of acting empathically. As Lear recognizes early, this is "A bitter fool!" (1.4.134) immersed in feelings of loss. His role in life is dependent on the king's power and he will accept nothing less than a return to the past's "truth." "~lthoughshe points out that in these words Cordelia "characterizes her life with France as having been one of constant mourning for the father to whom she is still bound" (335). Boose suggests that Cordelia's mourning is never complete because "the denial of the father's blessing [of the daughter's marriage] renders the separation incomplete and the daughter's future blighted" (334-5). .. "I would like to propose that Cordelia's final five lines suggest that she empathizes with herself as well as her father. This is. of course, contrary to normal conceptions of the workings of empathy. In "Development of Empathy with the Past and Current Self During Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy," Karen Lindner and Lee Sheingold state that "Empathy is usually considered an interpersonal concept rather than an intrapsychic one. In this paper we are concerned with development of the intrapsychic capacity for empathy in ourpatients--empathy for themselves" (143). The idea that one can develop empathy for the self is a provocative one. The "capacity for a mature, object- centered empathy, especially where it appIies to aspects of the past and current self, can develop and expand" ( 143), says Lindner and Sheingold. Cordelia's last words, and the fact of her acknowledgment that she is "cast down" in particular, suggest to me that her "current self' empathizes with her "past seIf." "I agree with Taylor. in "Lear and the Lost Self," when he states that "Momentarily, in the storm. Lear sees beyond the power and prestige of the king to a concern for the welfare of his subjects," but that on the whole, "Shakespeare holds Leafs new awareness of the fuller and deeper natures of man, father. and king to fitful and transient moments" (5 1 1 ). Chapter 4 The Bacchae and Hedda Gabler: The Denial of the Body, Mourning, and the Mockery of Mourning Ancient Greek tragic characters like Xerxes of The Persians, or Oedipus of Oediprs at Colonus for that matter', undergo a mourning process which enables them to establish a sense of self based on loss and a confrontation with extreme feeIings of shame. By sharing their feelings of loss and shame with other human beings these characters ueradually integrate previously denied shameful aspects of themselves and their own sense of vu!nerability into a new conception of self and the world. Both Xerxes and Oedipus manage to bear this new reality because they are supported by the empathy of others--for Oedipus such support is largely provided by his daughter Antigone, and for Xerxes by the Chorus of Persian elders. In the tragedies of Shakespeare (and post-Greek tragedians in general). this kind of empathic support is either absent. or. if it is present, it is often difficult. and at times impossible, for this empathy to penetrate the narcissistic armor of those characters who need it most. While waking from his bout of madness, Shakespeare's Lear experiences a moment of recognition in which he is absolutely vulnerable, but this state of openness is transitory, and he soon returns to his old, defensive, narcissistic self, and as a result Cordelia's final empathic gestures go unrecognized. In his most heavily ironic tragedies. Henrik Ibsen often frames the destructive results of a world in which characters are not only incapable of receiving empathy, but a world in which empathy appears to be absent altogether. ' This is particularly the case in Ibsen's Hedh GabZer. The degree to which Ibsen is pointing to the denial of the body and the absence of empathy in his modem world. and not simply, as George Steiner suggests in The Decrth of Tragedy, "where the conflict can be resolved through technical or social means" (8), becomes clear if we examine Hedda Gabler in the light of Euripides's Bacchae. Whereas the uninhibited Dionysian forces of sexuality and violence are played out and integrated into the Theban society of The Bncclrae, the bourgeois world of Hedda Gubler can only gesture at such elemental forces in what amounts to an ironic, and yet also tragic, portrayal of the Dionysian struggle with shame and the body and the need for empathy. Part I: The Denial of the Body, Empathy, Mutual Recognition, and Mourning in Euripides's 77ze Bacchae The final moments of Euripides's Bacchae are devoted to the dramatization of a mourning process in which an empathic exchange takes place between Agave and her father. Cadmus. On the other hand, Euripides presents two very distinct tragic figures and dramatic sequences in this play. Pentheus, the young king and son of Agave, is an inflexible, and in chis sense, conventional tragic hero whose feelings of shame and denial lead to his own destruction. The final moments of his life occupy the first three quarters of the play. The tragic fate of his mother is the focus of the remainder of the play. Euripides's Agave, like Aeschylus's Xerxes. Sophocles's Neoptolernus. and Shakespeare's Cordel ia. must first face her own vulnerability and shame before she can act with empathy. Gradually, with the help of her empathic father, Agave emerges from the Dionysian madness, which fosters a temporary sense of uninhibited animal-like invulnerability. In the context of mourning the death of the son she has helped to dismember. her sense of self is restored, but most importantly. reevaluated. and thus she can take responsibility for her seemingly inexplicable actions.' Unlike her son, Pentheus. who is overwhelmed by the horror of sexuality, both physically and psychologically, Agave. in living out and integrating that which is normally repressed and denied. learns to bear the realities of sexuality and mortality. Moreover, within a therapeutic.' empathic, mourning context she manages to come to terms with the reality of her own loss and vulnerability and that of her community. The Bacchae begins with Dionysus, the god of ecstasy, intoxication. and elemental desire, arriving in Thebes announcing that while "disguised as a man" (1. 5)' he will teach this city "its lesson" (1. 39). He is angry because the sisters of his mother, Semele. "said that Dionysus was no son of Zeus. 1 but Semele had slept beside a man in love / and fathered off her shame on Zeus--a fraud, they sneered, / contrived to protect his daughter's name" (11. 28-3 1 ). This angry god brings, upon those who deny his divine parentage and do not celebrate his mysteries, the reality of shameful desires in revenge for shaming himself and his mother. He announces at the outset of the play that he has already "stung" the sisters of Semele (one of whom is Pentheus's mother, Agave) "with frenzy, hounded them from home / up to the mountains where they wander, crazed of mind, / compelled to wear my orgies' livery" (11. 32-4). But it is the resistance of the hot- headed Pentheus to Dionysus, and his eventual possession by the god, which drive and sustain the tragic tension and principal actions of this play. He too will wear the "orgies' livci-j" of Dionysus. It is those who deny the elemental mysteries of sexuality and mortality most strongly that suffer the most shame and guilt. The young king is quick to boast that "In no time at all I sha!l have them [the women of Thebes possessed by Dionysus who run wild through the mountains] trapped / in iron nets and stop this obscene disorder" (11. 23 I-2), but Dionysus soon seduces him with his own unconscious desire to see and take part in the sexual orgies in the mountains. Pentheus's first detailed, public words of disapproval for these orgies reveal his fascination with them: "And then, one by one, the women wander off / to hidden nooks where they serve the lusts of men" (11. 222-3). The first time Pentheus sees Dionysus he admits the god's attractiveness: "So, / you are attractive, stranger, at least to women--" (11. 452-4). Pentheus's curiosity in this seemingly androgynous stranger is revealed in his questions about the rites of Dionysus, but eventually the young king decides to chain and imprison the god. Before exiting on his way to prison. Dionysus says: "You do not know / the limits of your strength. You do not know / what you do. You do not know who you are" (11.505-7). In not recognizing Dionysus in all his awesome elemental power, Pentheus demonstrates that he "does not know" himself; he "does not know" the "strength" and potentialiy self-destructive force of his own desires, but the god does and will reveal this "strength" to him once the young man is possessed. Dionysus humiliates Pentheus by having him "fed on his [own] desires" (1. 6 17). The king's anxieties over maintaining socia1 order and his own sense of power are unleashed in the imaginary burning of the palace described by Dionysus: Imagining the palace was in flames, Pentheus went rushing here and there, shouting to his slaves to bring him water. Every hand was put to work: in vain. Then, afraid I might escape, he suddenIy stopped short, drew his sword and rushed to the palace. There. it seems, Bromius had made a shape. a phantom which resembled me, within the court. Bursting in, Pentheus thrust and stabbed at that thing of gleaming air as though he thought it me. And then, once again. the god humiliated him. He razed the palace to the ground where it lies, shattered in utter ruin--his reward for my imprisonment. At the bitter sight, Pentheus dropped his sword. exhausted by the struggle. A man. a man, and nothing more, yet he presumed to wage a war with god. For my part, I left the palace quietly and made my way outside. For Pentheus I care nothing. But judging from the sound of tramping feet inside the court, I think our man will soon be here. What, I wonder, will he have to say? But let him bluster. I shall not be touched to rage. (11. 625-44)' Nothing appears or responds the way Pentheus expects, but the young king is yet to be humbled. Like the old king, Lear, after Cordelia's early, unexpected responses to him, or for that matter. on the heath raging at the universe and exhausting himself to the point that he is that much closer to madness,' Pentheus's rage is simply increased by a confrontation with his own impotence and ambivalence- Pentheus's humiliation, seduction, and doom continues to gather momentum as his own unconscious fears of sexuality, incest, and abandonment materialize while he is possessed by this god of relentless vengeance and indifference. In a state of Dionysian delusion Pentheus is seduced into dressing up as a female Maenad in a wig with long curIs. Earlier Pentheus cuts off Dionysus's "girlish curls" as a form of punishment. At one point Pentheus says that he "would die of shame" if he were to dress in "wonzanS dress" (11. 830- 1). He now acts without shame. Dionysus has Pentheus act out his repulsion and attraction to women by dressing him in "Maenad cloths" so he can. to use Dionysus's words, "go and spy / upon mother and her company" (11.9 15-6) and witness their orgies. His mother and her sisters become the object of sexual desire and voyeuristic pleasure as well as the means to a kind of infantile maternal oblivion. In his introduction to his own translation of The Bnkkllai, Robert Bagg speaks of "the absurd and ineffectual supermasculinity of the young king and . . . the irony of his public humiliation: the revelation that within him lies what he hates most, feminine narcissism and softness and yearning for oblivion" ( 10). Bagg goes on to describe Pentheus's response to women as a reversion "to the Greek male's fear of women which pervades Greek literature of the age of tragedy" ( 10). Moreover, it seems to me that underlying Pentheus's ambivalence toward women seems to be a fear of the homosexuality embodied in the chaotic, effeminate, ambiguous god who can assume different disguises and inspire women and men to leave the city and run wild in the mountains. This god transgresses, transcends and disrupts a11 boundaries, including the border between animal and human and male and female, those categories of species, gender, and identity by which individuals and societies distinguish themselves from others and maintain order and civilization via the family. As Martha Nussbaum states in her introduction to C.K. Williams's new version of The Bacchae, "Transgression. in fact. is everywhere" (xiv). Possessed by Dionysus, initiated into this world of uninhibited sexuality and an~orphousidentity. Pentheus begins to recognize the god in one of his typical forms as the buII. Dionysus lures Pentheus to his death by fulfilling the young man's desire to be "cradled in your mother's arms" (1. 972). Bagg captures the complexity and horror of Pentheus's predicament: "The ability of nostalgia to lure our adult selves back to a worry- free existence in the care of a mother could not be more powerfully shown. And since we will soon know that this same mother Agave will lead the sparugmos, the ritual tearing to pieces of her son, that nostalgia must seem horrible. The horror is increased by the fact that Euripides has imagined a dramatic situation in which. before our eyes. the yearning for infancy becomes an unacknowledged wish to die" (1 2). The Messenger witnesses the final moments of the young king's life and his homfic death and voices these traumatic events. Pentheus suggests to the "Stranger" (Dionysus) that "if I climbed that towering fir that overhangs I the banks. then I could see their shameless orgies I better" (11. 106 1 -63) and the god grants his wish. But this state of uninhibited bliss is shattered by Dionysus's order to his Maenads to "Take vengeance upon him" (1. 108 1) "who has mocked / at you and me and at our holy mysteries" (11. 1079-80). Again, as the horrified Messenger relates. Pentheus's possessed mother and her sisters tore the fir tree from the earth, and down, down from his high perch fell pentheus,' tumbling to the ground, sobbing and screaming as he fell, for he knew his end was near. His mother, like a priestess with her victim, fell upon him first. But snatching off his wig and snood so she would recognize his face, he touched her cheeks, screaming, "No,no. Mother! I ant Pentlzeus. your own son, rhe child ,OM bore to Eciziorz! Pie me, spare me, Mother! I have clone a wrong, bur do not kill your own son for m_t.offense." But she was foaming at the mouth, and her crazed eyes rolling with frenzy. She was mad, stark mad, possessed by Bacchus. (11. 1 1 10- 13) Instead of cradling her son. Agave and her sisters literally tear him apart limb from limb while he screams for recognition and forgiveness.' But his "crime" is not something that can be forgiven. His "offense"is rooted in his denial of his ambivalent feelings toward sexuality and his inability to accept his own vulnerability and mortality. Moreover, as Nussbaum states in her introduction to The Bacchae: So the risks that Dionysian worship brings with it cannot be avoided altogether; they are there in humanity itself. and the only way to avoid them is by a violent suppression. But the dissolution of humanity that certain Dionysian excesses bring is accomptished a11 the more surely by a life that suppresses and denies him. On the other hand, Dionysus is both beast and god. The risk involved in acknowledging him is a risk not just of vulnerability to strange influences; it is a risk of becoming, oneself. a beast. With its reference to the laws of Dionysian worship as firmly fixed in nature, the Chorus suggests that there is in humanity a permanent element that both fulfills and completes humanity and also seeks humanity's extinction, the extinction of the boundaries of civilization. the boundaries of ethical discourse. We cannot and should not, being humans, close ourselves off from that element; for it will rage out of us and devour us. But if we open ourselves to accept it, then it may also rage out and devour us. (xxxvi-vii) The shame attached to his vulnerability and the realities of the body drive Pentheus to attempt to destroy and deny Dionysus until it is too late. He is reduced to absolute vulnerability in the arms of his merciless, possessed. beast-like mother and her sisters who are driven to madness, beyond all civilized and ethical boundaries, because of their denial of Dionysus. Agave is beyond the point of recognizing her son's and her own humanity and identity. She is merciless and irrational like the god to whom she is presently devoted. Agave's gradual emergence from this Bacchic delusive state of mind and body and the overcoming of the resistance to the reality of her horrific actions are the basis of the tragic tension in the final portion of the piay. Slowly. through the gentle coaxing of her father's words, Agave emerges from her hypnotic, psychotic. state of Dionysian madness until she comes to the realization that the head she holds is not a lion's but that of her son and that she was her son's killer. As G. Devereux says in "The Psychotherapy Scene in Euripides' Bacchue": Cadmus' first move is to resocialize Agave: he induces her to modify her self-definition. The maenad, the self-contained, socially tieless, member of an unstructured tlliasos on the rampage, is made to recall and to reaffirm her belonging to a structured group: to recall her married state and her motherhood. . . . The doer, having recovered her sense of identity, must be made to recognise also her deed. Cadrnus' interrogation is, once more, technically flawless--which does not imply that it is not also tactful and tender: the therapist cannot achieve efficient objectivity unless he genuineIy feels for--and with--his patient. (42-3) In other words, Cadmus, the "psychotherapist," is successful in his attempt to bring his daughter back to reality, so that she is able to bear her suffering, guilt, and shame, because he empathizes with her. With the help of her father, Agave is able to integrate her seemingly inconceivable capacity for violence and the shame and "curse" of her son's blood. Cadmus does not simply let Agave shift responsibility for Pentheus's death onto Dionysus. Only after Agave demands on hearing the truth does Cadmus admit that "Yorr [Agave] killed him. 1 You and your sisters" (11. 1288-89). As Devereux reveals, Cadmus then "tells Agave that she--and the whole city with her--had been mad, but, very appropriately, makes this shocking confrontation psychologica~iybearable . . . by his 'you. brtr not only you' wording" (44): Agave But rve-- what were we doing on the mountain? Caclmrrs You were mad. The whole city was possessed. Agave Now. now I see: Dionysus has destroyed us all. Cadtnrrs You outraged him. You denied that he was truly god. (11. 1293-1300) Agave's responsibility, as well as her humanity as a member of a community vulnerable to the overwhelming forces of the god, is acknowledged, and she is thus ready to see the product of her madness. Agave now asks for her "poor boy's body" (1 302)."' Although "there is a break in the manuscript" (Arrowsmith 2 15) that soon follows, translators seem to agree that Agave asks her father to help her "put his body back together" (WiIIiams 82). Father and daughter remember and mourn the loss of the son and grandson together. At this point, it is not simply Cadmus who empathizes. as Devereux suggests. Agave's level of understanding and recognition becomes extremely complex and empathic. Just prior to re-membering the son and grandson together. Cadmus reveals the extent of his own grief and loss for the first time. Reassured of his daughter's sanity and ability to bear reality, the father, who, to paraphrase Devereux, "had previously managed to control his own grief in order to help his daughter" (41)- now expresses his feelings of loss openly as he "rrtnts and addresses the corpse": --To you my house looked up. Child, you were the stay of my house: you were my daughter's son. Of you this city stood in awe. No one who once had seen your face dared outrage the old man, or if he did. you punished him. Now I must go. a banished and dishonored man-- I, Cadmus the great, who sowed the soldiery of Thebes and harvested a great harvest. My son. dearest to me of all men--for even dead. I count you still the man I love the most-- never again will your hand touch my chin; no more, child, will you hug me and call me "Grandfather*?and say. "Who is wronging you? Does anyone trouble you or vex your heart, old man? Tell me, Grandfather, and I will punish him." No, now there is grief for me; the mourning for you; pity for your mother; and for her sisters, somow. If there is still any mortal man who despises or defies the gods, let him look on this boy's death and believe in the gods. (11. 1309-27) Cadmus expresses the depth and complexity of his feelings for his grandson without reservation. Pentheus is the "child" who, with what appears to be an infantile gesture in the '-touch" of a "chin,"" could evoke the strongest of "paternal" feelings (Cadmus is both father and grandfather to the "boy" whose father is dead), and yet also the "son" that protects the vulnerable old man from those who wrong him. Concomitantly with this experience of loss, Cadmus comes to terms with the reality that his grandson's death was a necessity. given the young man's defiance of the gods. Following this expression of complex and ambivalent feeling, the Coryphaeus (or chorus leader) expresses his "pity" for Cadmus. Cadmus experiences no shame in vulnerability and this makes it easier for the Chorus to "pity" him with empathy. In his confession Cadmus reveals ambivalent, comp1e.u feelings and the particulars of his relationship to his grandson. In doing so. he provides a foundation of affective detail upon which Agave can build an empathic relationship with him. This kind of tragic self-exposure is crucial in establishing the empathic basis for the mourning ritual performed by both father and daughter. Agave's expression of grief--a response to her father's confession and the sight of Pentheus's dismembered corpse--is just as, if not more, complex and revealing than that of her father. Following Cadmus's confession and the Coryphaeus's expression of pity for him. there is a section of text missing, so that translators of the play are forced to reconstruct Agave's response to Cadmus's confession "from frtrgrnerzw arrd later tnnrericrl which rnade use of the Bacchae" (Arrowsmith 215). William Arrowsmith (like Bagg and Williams in their translations) has Agave address her father directly. Father and daughter enter into a dialogic, empathic relationship which enables them to reconcile the irreconcilable and experience a complex of overwhelming feelings as human and thus bearable. Agave 0 Father. now you can see how everything has changed. I am in anguish now, tormented, who walked in triumph minutes past, exulting in my kill. And that prize I carried home with such pride was my own curse. Upon these hands I bear the curse of my son's blood. How then with these accursed hands may I touch his body? How can I, accursed with such a curse, hoId him to my breast? 0 gods, what dirge can I sing [that there might be] a dirge [for every] broken limb? ...... -.-*...... *...... *.*...*...... -*.**. Where is a shroud to cover up his corpse? 0 my child, what hands will give you proper care unless with my own hands I lift my curse? (2 15) In her father's confession. Agave recognizes the capacity of her father to grasp the depth and complexity of her own extremely ambivalent feelings of loss and shame. When she says. "0 Father. now you can see / how everything has changed. I am in anguish now . . . ." she expresses her faith that her father will empathize with her. Because she recognizes the depth of his "anguish" she feels compelled to express her own to him. Cadrnus confesses the incongruent, paradoxical fact that the man who is now totally vulnerable, "banished and dishonored," was once the seemingly invulnerable "Cadmus the great" (as long as his grandson was around to carry on and defend his name). and his daughter in turn expresses the paradoxical fact of her own tragic condition. She must come to terms with the fact that "that prize I carried home / with such pride was my own curse." Father and daughter are forced to reconcile the past self with that of the present and they manage to do so because they do so together within an empathic context. In the final moments of the play, Agave says to her father. "I pity you, Fathei' (1. 1373), and her father responds, "And I pity you, my child" (11. 1374-5). To use the "intersubjective" terms of Jessica Benjamin in The Bonds of hve, to describe the empathic, dialogic exchange between father and daughter. these two tragic figures experience "the need for tnrrtunl recognition, the necessity of recognizing as well as being recognized by the other'' (23). The distinct and separate nature of her father's suffering is unmistakable, but it is atso accessible and identifiable, and thus Agave feels free to invite and incorporate him into her vortex of loss and vulnerability." With the help of her father, Agave does manage to "touch his [Pentheus's] body." despite, and because of, her feelings of shame and guilt. The act of re-membering Pentheus with her father serves to restore dignity to the dead at the same time that it serves to enable both father and daughter to reconceive themselves on the basis of the loss which has resulted from the denial of the forces embodied in the god. In Williams's translation of Agave's speech while "She kneels to [he body of Pr~ztlre~ts."the attempt to reconfigure the present self in the light of the horrific events of the past is even more apparent than in Arrowsmith's translation. At this point, Williams has Agave say: Who is this person? Who is this corpse? Who am I? How can I, in all reverence, knowing that my hands dismembered him and are polluted with his blood, dare to touch him, dare take him to my breast, dare sing his dirge to him? But how can I not? What other hands can care for you, my child? 0 old man, come help me, help me touch this wretched boy. Show me where to lay his head. show me how to put his body back together. (8 1-2) Arrowsmith has Agave lift "~ipone of Pentlzerrs' limbs" and ask for "the help of Cudnrcts in piecing rlw body rogerher" (216) in his stage directions, whereas Williams has Agave herself state her need for help. Either way, I think it is crucial that the sudience clearly witness the vulnerability and trust embodied in this request, and, perhaps most of all, that the audience senses the degree to which the re-membering of the son's body symbolizes the re-rnembering of the father's, but specifically. the mother's self. Immediately following the words, "Who is this corpse?'are the words, "Who am I?" Her shame- ridden. "polluted" condition, is only made bearable once it is put in the context of a burial ritual which externalizes and confirms suffering and ambivalent feeling. In making her request for help Agave saves herself and her father from utter alienation. The job of reconstructing the dead body and the bereaved self requires that the two engage in a process of mourning and redefinition of the self together. In relating their personal experiences of loss to one another the two mourners are able to develop a more complex vision of the dead and themselves. Agave and Cadmus are forced to go beyond the limited, personal conception of Pentheus. based on their own experience of him in the past, and as a result they gain a more complex sense of themselves and the grand-son who is now lost. This mourning process involves an acute awareness of C vulnerability. Experienced within this communal context, the fact of human vulnerability. and the realities of sexuality and mortality that underlie it, are undeniable and no longer shameful. It simply is, in all its paradoxical reality. Agave is forced to move beyond what first appears as the paralyzing reality and shame attached to her polluted condition. She is forced to act in the world as a vulnerable human being subject to forces beyond her control. In all likelihood, if Cadmus, and particularly Agave, did not expose themselves fully and empathize with one another while coming to terms with the loss of Pentheus, they would go insane or kill themselves. Whether or not Agave and Cadmus, and the audience for that matter, consciously realize this is, in a way, beside the point. They are all confronted with the reality of human vulnerability and the consequences of the denial of the body. They are all face to face with what Ernest Becker refers to as the "existential paradox" that we are "half animal and half symbolic" creatures who are constantly engaged in a struggle with our bodily existence and the vulnerability it entails. The burial ritual performed by Cadmus and Agave is not, however, simply a symbolic escape from or displacement of or substitute for the realities of the body and the violence it produces; the ritual incorportrtes and makes bearable these realities and the lack of control associated with them--it is anything but a denial of them and their human, personal, psychological association. To say, as Renk Girard does in his discussion of The Bucclme in Violence nrld the Sacred, that "Dionysus is wholly responsible for Pentheus' murder" ( 132) and that "The metamorphosis from peaceable citizens into raging beasts is too terrifying and too transitory for the community to accept it as issuing from within itself' is to simplify the dramatic and psychological situation in Euripides's tragedy. Girard goes so far as to suggest that "As soon as calm has been miraculously restored. the past tumult will be looked upon as a supreme example of divine intervention" ( 1 34).12 Implicit in the exchange between Agave and Cadmus is the confrontation with personal responsibility and the integration of the capacity for violence into the conception of self. Euripides's play is not simply, or perhaps not at all. "religious" in Girard's terms." "Religion, then." concludes Girard, "is far from 'useless.' It humanizes violence: it protects man from his own violence by taking it out of his hands, transforming it into a transcendent and ever- present danger to be kept in check by the appropriate rites appropriately observed and by a modest and prudent demeanor" ( 1 34). The Bacchae does "humanize violence," but it does not simply do so by "taking it out of his hands." "Calm" is not "miraculously restored" in this tragedy, nor is it in others. As a matter of fact, "calm" is not "restored," it is. in a sense. earned and inherently problematic and "fluid." Whatever "calm" is established, it is a dialogic "calm," which exists by virtue of an on-going process or tidal movement, if you will. It is an empathic "calm" dependent on a process of mutual recognition which appears to be impossible to maintain outside of a communal. mourning context. The process of mourning, at least in Greek tragedy, fosters empathy in characters, as well as the audience who witnesses the details of a dialogic interaction and struggle with the realities of the body, and thus provides a way to come to terms with vulnerability and loss. In the post-Greek, modem tragic context, characters rarely get outside the perspective of their own grief and shame to experience empathy. Even when faced with the ernpathy of another character and the opportunity to mourn, characters like Shakespeare's Lear deny or avoid such an opportunity in favor of a retreat into madness or the past and illusion. Shakespeare's Hamlet is, it can be argued, tortured because he is denied the opportunity of any empathic communal mourning of the loss of his father. And the presence of a confidante, Horatio for Hamlet or Kent for Lear, is by no means "a sign." as Georg Lukiics suggests in "The Sociology of Modern Drama." "that the potential of absolute understanding among men . . . [is] never in doubt" ( 162). From the Greeks on, this "understanding" is always in doubt, if we take this understanding as based on empathy, which can never be taken for granted. If it is going to be mutual, it requires "absoIute" self-exposure, as in the case of Agave and Cadmus at the end of The Bacchae. As I argue in the previous chapter, Kent can be seen to have "absolute understanding" of Lear, but that understanding only comes through experience. Horatio, on the other hand, never seems to have "absolute understanding" of Hamlet--nobody does. Certainly, Hamlet trusts Horatio--who wouldn't? But like Lear, Macbeth. or Othello, Hamlet goes to his death alone and incapable of dealing with overwhelming Dionysian, bodily forces. These modem tragic characters suffer due to their inability to come to terms with the grief, shame, and guilt which drives them to act. This is not to say, however, that the confession of such feelings would save them and those around them. What they need, and what is granted in the Greek tragic context of The Bacclzae, is an empathic mourning experience of mutual recognition which, if it does not exactly make sense of suffering, at least it humanizes it to the extent that shame. and not simply guilt, becomes bearable." Part 11: The Denial of the Body, the Absence of Empathy, and the Mockery of Mourning in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler In Hedda Gubler, Ibsen dramatizes the absence of empathy and mourning. The fact that the empathic way out of denial and shame is not available to a character like Hedda Gabler. or other modern characters, does not, however, imply that tragedy is dead. What is crucial for a play to qualify as tragedy, is that the play dramatize the need of empathy in order to escape the cycle of destruction and suffering that follows from shame and the denial of the body. And Ibsen's Heddcc Gabler does exactly this. Moreover. in tragedy. it is the dramatization of the struggle with the body which creates tragic tension. This tension can be relaxed in the mourning process, but, as I suggested in my discussion of Girard's view of "calm," it is never altogether dissipated. At that point we are into the comic, farcical, or satiric. I think that Elinor Fuchs is correct to point out in "Mythic Structure in Hedda Gabler: The Mask Behind the Face" that Behind the modem bourgeois society which Ibsen projects, there lingers a mocking shadow of archaic (largely Dionysian] mysteries. now expressed as a vestigial outcropping of passion. now as a half-conscious enactment of ancient ritual. The story which Ibsen recounts in Hedda Gabler is an ironic recapitulation of the history of civilization. . . . The history of civilization is his satirical two-edged sword. He turns it on the modem society that denies ecstasy, silences the Hellenic echo; and he turns it on himself. as it were, mocking almost to the border of farce his ridiculous characters who. in their reduced and fumbling imitation. are pretentious enough to re-enact the mysteries. (210) On the other hand, later in her article. while considering Hedda Gabler in the light of Nietzsche's The Birtiz of Tragedy, Fuchs states that "Ibsen's reductive satire kills tragedy in Hetlda Gabler" (2 18). The final two sentences read: "That is the end of Hedda Gabler. No glory. no terror left anywhere" (220). From the point of view of the "mocking shadow of archaic mysteries" in Hedda GaDfer, I can see how one might miss the play's tragedy and terror. But there is more to the "archaic mysteries" dramatized in the tragic context than both Fuchs and Nietzsche suggest. In my study of Euripides's Bcrcclzae I have tried to demonstrate this. The fact that Nietzsche sees The Baccizae as an exception to Euripides's "non-tragic" drama illustrates the consequences of not recognizing that tragedy never simply substitutes the "religious" or ritualistic for "violence." Gerald Else, in The Origin and Early Fonn of Greek Tmgedy, and Oliver Taplin, in Greek Trtqe* in Action, suggest that critics, like Nietzsche. who "expect ritual patterns in Greek tragedy . . . underestimate . . . the extent to which classical Greek culture had gone beyond the 'primitive,' and moved on in the direction . . . taken since by Western civilization" (Taplin 162). Tragedy has always integrated the rational, critical, self-reflexive. therapeutic, and psychological with the "irrational" and ecstatic. The "sacrifice" of the tragic does not necessarily "restore harmony" as Girard suggests. And if it does. that "harmony" is usually quite fragile, and this fragility is the product of the integration of violence into the community at a relatively conscious level through a mourning process. Tragedy is always self-reflexive.'"t lacks much of the apparent innocence and "misunderstanding" Girard attributes to myth." The Bacchae is not an anomaly within the body of Euripides's work. nor is it within the tragic tradition. As Nussbaum states in her introduction to the play: The Bacchae seems uncharacteristic. calling for some special biographical interpretation. only if one accepts an account of Euripides' career such as the one given by Nietzsche, who claimed that until he wrote this one play Euripides had been the poet of the supremacy of the intellect, crisp and optimistic, totally insensitive to the power of irrational forces in human life, and to their beauty. But this interpretation cannot survive a scrutiny of the earlier plays. For even where rational debate is given prominence (as. for example, in The ;liojm Women), it is usually shown to be poweriess against other darker forces such as love, desire. and greed. (xxii) Tragedy, and Euripides's Bacchae and hen's Hedda Gabler are no exceptions, dramatizes not only the powerlessness of reason in the face of these "darker forces"; it dramatizes the processes of shame and denial produced by this confrontation and the need of empathy. and not necessarily the enactment of an empathic process. AIthough Ibsen mocks the limits of his world and those who people it, he does not make a mockery of the struggle to cope with the realities of the body and vulnerability. Hedda's struggle with the realities of the body, more than any other character in Hedda Gabler, is taken very seriously. The fact that the audience may not identify or sympathize with Hedda is beside the tragic point. Hedda's vitality. like that of Shakespeare's Richard HI, a character who is also driven by shame and the denial of the body'" may be demonic, but it is also poetic. "Buried deep within Hedda there is a level of poetry. But the environment frightens her. Suppose she were to make herself ridiculous,'' says Ibsen in his preliminary notes to Hedda Gabler (Playw-iglztson Playvritirzg 160)- Hedda, again like Richard ILI, is tragic largely because her life and death enact a process of self and other-destruction based on the need to deny the realities of her mortality and sexuality and the lack of control they necessitate. In Hedda, hen creates a character horrified by, and in denial of, her own body, and a "community" of characters so alienated from mortality that the black clothes they wear at the end of the play which symbolize their mourning become a mockery of mourning. Ironically, of ail the characters in this play. it is Hedda who is most aware of the reatities of the body; but her awareness manifests itself in the form of disgust and horror. As a woman of the nineteenth-century with male aspirations of power, Hedda cannot escape the limits that her body imposes on her. For Hedda Gabler, marriage, chi Id-bearing and the prospect of childbirth and motherhood, and the process of aging all threaten her already precarious sense of power and control. These forces which have to do with her sexuality and mortality create the immediacy and intensity of Hedda's crisis and the necessity of her suicide. Based on her experience of playing the part of Hedda. in "Hedda Gabler: the Play in Performance," Janet Suzman states that "I believe that she [Hedda] cannot equate living with compromise, and in that sense is more true to herself than anyone else in the play. . . . Her find act is a combination of expertise and taste. But it is also an absolute necessity. and in that sense it is an act of passion and commitment" (90). Driving Hedda's "necessity" and her "passion and commitment," and thus the tragic tension of Ibsen's play. is the confrontation and inability to cope with human vulnerability. Hedda is the one character who is closest to the experience of death. and ironically. life, by virtue of the fact that her whole sense of identity and control rapidly deteriorates over the course of the play. She may be the most violent and perverse of Ibsen's characters in Heticin Gcrbler, but she is also the most vulnerable and isolated. Hedda, unlike the other characters of the play, never ventures into the natural world outside. She is paralyzed by her own corporeality to the extent that she tries to satisfy her sexual and self-destructive desires by living through Eilert Lovborg's actions. It is only when this vicarious source of ecstatic feeling is destroyed in the most repugnant way imaginable to her that Hedda loses any hopes and fears of feeling life. At the root of Hedda's fear of making herself "ridiculous" is the inability to accept what Ernest Becker in The Derzial of Death describes as "the dualism of human nature. . . . [She] is both a self and a body, and from the beginning there is the confusion about where . . . ['she'] really 'is9--in the symbolic inner self or in the physical body. . . . The inner self represents the freedom of thought, imagination, and the infinite reach of symbolism. The body represents determinism and boundness" (41-42). The immediacy and intensity of Hedda's experience of this "existential paradox" drives her "poetry" to the surhce most profoundly at the end of Act Ill in the burning of the manuscript and in her final moments of existence. At the end of Act ID, alone and inspired after having sent Lov borg off to kill himself "beautifully," Hedda ritualistically separates herself from her pregnancy and the lack of control it symbolizes for her. At the end of Act IV. surrounded by individuals incapable of understanding the degree to which she feels helpless as a female body in a patriarchaI worId (not that Hedda would ever admit this to anyone), Hedda asserts her will and denies the realities and pressures of the body and the world. She commits suicide only after it is absolutely clear to her that if she does not do so she will never experience any sense of control and freedom. As is evident in her response to Judge Brack minutes before she kills herself, Hedda cannot bear this thought: "All the same, I'm in your power. Tied to your will and desire. Not free. Not free, then! (Rises impet~tocrslv.)No--I can't bear the thought of it. Never!" (302). As least through Lovborg she could imagine what it is like to express desire in physical action. But with Lovborg9sabsence and Brack's hold over her (302) there is only one alternative given Hedda's aristocratic, heroic imagination: to shoot herself in the temple "beautifully" and assert her will and control her destiny--something which is otherwise beyond control. What distinguishes Hedda from the rest of the characters in the play is that her belief in her ability to control her own life or that of others is never secure and as a result she not only feels and resists intensely her own vulnerability and consequent anxiety, but that of others as well. Like many tragic figures, at some level Hedda is forced to confront the limits of her human condition. Whether one is repulsed or attracted by the intensity of her feelings as they manifest themselves in action on stage, one is forced to respond. I think Ibsen makes it clear that Hedda's suicide is not simply a nonsensical waste of life, but an absurd act which calls into question the banal. bourgeois world which surrounds her, which is not to say that Ibsen necessarily endorses Hedda's vaiues: rather, Ibsen seems to address in dramatic form the need to consider what drives Hedda to her death and those around her to avoid the reality of death and thus life. What Hedda fears most is self-exposure, and the fear of exposure is rooted in the feelings of shame, powerlessness, and absurdity attached to her sexuality and mortality, and the whole natural world from which she shields herself as she never leaves her home over the course of the entire play. Her new home which, according to Hedda herself, has "the odor of death" (255). is the one place where she feels a measure of control. More or Iess the first thing Hedda notices when she first enters in Act I is that the "maid has left the door open--and the sunlight's just flooding in" (228). The thought of the sunlight exposing her aging and impregnated body is too much for her. Although Hedda finds the fact of her deteriorating youth distasteful, "I really had danced myself out, Judge. My time was up. (With n slight shudder.) Ugh! No, I don't want to say that. Or think it, either . . ." (251 ), it is the fact of her pregnancy and the lack of control over her own body that it involves, and thus the lack of control over her self, which tortures her consciousness and motivates action--her most perverse and violent actions in particular. I think Suzman's insight that Hedda's pregnancy draws "together every strand of the play so fundamentally that to doubt it for an instant would quite simply jeopardise the playing of it" (89) is absolutely correct. Driving Hedda's preoccupation with time, and thus the tension of this play, is the horror of her biological, maternal clock. "Apart from Auntie's broad hints," says Suzrnan, "there are at least a dozen references to it [Hedda's pregnancy] made by Hedda during the play. starting with. 'God yes. September already!' in Act I. Anyone who thinks this is a mere botanical reference to the state of the trees needs his head examined! It means, quite simply, that there are four months to go. And I never forget. although Tesman does, that she kills hvo people at the end of the play" (89). Ibsen's stage direction upon Hedda' s first entrance, "She wears a msrefril, rather loose-firting gown" (228). when coupled with a comment by Tesman to cheer up his old auntie, "Of course, you can't see it so well when she has that dressing gown on. But I, who have the opportunity to--" (230),simply underlines the significance of Hedda's pregnancy for all concerned. Hedda's response to Tesman's claim to masculine privilege is sudden and emphatic: "Oh. you have no opportunity for anything!" (230). As Gail Finney says in Worrzerz in Modem Drama, in its sixth chapter, "Maternity and Hysteria: Ibsen's Hedcia Gcihler," "gestures of nervousness or suffocation nearly always follow indirect references to her incipient maternity" (161). Hedda's pregnancy is the most powerful reminder of her "being forced into a standardized, mechanical, biological role" (Becker 42). In tragic characters such as Hedda and Lear there is an inextricable link between feelings of shame associated with the body and an underlying sense of impotence and vulnerability. Hedda can barely admit the realities of her body to herself, let alone to those around her. In Act 11, Hedda attempts to capture for Brack the "everlastingly" boring nature of her "six months" honeymoon, much of which was spent in "endless tete-a-tetes in railway compartments" (252) with Tesman. It was presumably during a short "overnight" reprieve from these "railway compartments" that Hedda "gave" herself to Tesman, although Ibsen's text is characteristically ambiguous on this subject. In Act HI, Tesman interrupts an intimate moment of conversation between the newly arrived Lovborg and Hedda when this detail is suggested. Feeling somewhat threatened by Lovborg in several ways (Lovborg's genius and sexual potency are inextricably linked throughout the play). Tesman tactfully reminds Hedda that Mrs. Elvsted. the woman of Lovborg's life, is going to be returning, but Hedda quickly shifts the topic to the photos from the honeymoon by asking Tesman if he remembers "this little village?'((264) in one of the photos. Tesman responds, "Oh, that's the one just below the Brenner Pass! It was there that we stayed overnight--" (264),and Hedda immediately cuts him off. It seems that the mountain air got the better of Hedda on this unforgettable night. Hedda cuts Tesman off with the words, "And met all those lively summer people," but the man of the house does not let go. He lets Lovborg know who has had the "opportunity" when he adds, "Yes, that's the place. Just think--if we could have had you with us, Eilert! My!" (264), before returning to Brack in the back room. But the connection between the "everlasting" honeymoon train trip and the breakdown of Hedda's will and the conception of the Tesman's child is introduced earlier in Act 11. The ever-perceptive and erotically inclined Judge cuts Hedda off after she says of her trip, "To be everlastingly together with--with one and the same person--" (250),to say, "Morning, noon, and night--yes. At every conceivable hour" (250). Brack's breakdown of the abstract concept of the "everlasting" is not appreciated. "I said 'everIastingly"' (250),says Hedda. Hedda soon explains to Brack that she feels as if life is one "endless" train ride-- that she has "only come to one stop on the line" (252)--and the ensuing conversation reveals the extent of Hedda's feelings of shame: Brack. Well, then what you do is jump out--and stretch yourself a little, Mrs. Hedda. Hedda, I' l l never jump out. Brack. Never? Hedda- No. Because tki~'~always someone on the platform who-- Brack. (with u l~iugh).Who looks at your legs, is that it? Hedda. Precisely. (252) Other than her mutually illusory, imaginative, sexually charged conversations with Lovborg about "vine leaves," Hedda's conversations with Brack are the closest she comes to intimacy and revealing herself. Hedda will not contemplate jumping from the safety of the train compartment of life for fear of exposing her shameful body and self and losing control. To risk self-exposure is to risk self-annihilation for Hedda- The natural processes of birth and death threaten to explode and expose her symbolic self to the "~giiness"'~of the determinism of the body. The vulnerability asociated with sexuality and maternity is inextricably related to that of mortality. The vitriolic taste of this mix of bodily forces is particularly potent whenever Hedda is faced with the reality of those "eternal aunts," Aunite Rina and Auntie Julie. Hedda's responses to the announcement of Auntie Rina's impending death and the suggestion that she witness this death are particularly revealing: Tesman. Dear, from Aunt Julie! What could that be? (Sets the ertvelope on the other taboret, operts the letter, skims rizrough it, and springs to his feet.) Oh. Hedda-she says poor Auntie Rina's dying! Hedda. It's no more than we've been expecting. Tesman. And if I want to see her one last time. I've got to hurry. I'll have to hop right over. Hedda. (sirppressing n srnile). Hop? Tesman. Oh, Hedda dearest, if you could only bring yourself to come with me! Think of it! Hedda (rises artd dismisses the tjtoug/tt rveurily). No, no, don't ask me to do such things. I don't want to look on sickness and death. I want to be free of everything ugly. (278-9) To see and touch the "ugliness" of death is unimaginable to Hedda. The world of the uncontrollable body and desire constantly threatens to corrupt and disrupt her heroic conception of herself and human invulnerability. Unlike her attitude to her own sexual desire, Hedda would prefer not to even imagine death and decay, even that of one of those "eternal aunts." When Hedda actually uses the phrase ''eternal aunts," it is after Tesman has just mentioned "how delighted Aunt Julie was all the same--because you'd filled out so nicely on the trip!" (253). Once this is said. Hedda rises, as she does at the thought of witnessing Aunt Rina's death, and "rtnder her breath" says: "Oh. these eren~alaunts!" [my italics] (253). There is no question that in this instance Hedda is disturbed by the reality of the impending birth of her child and the death of her self as she imagines it. The aunts represent the passage of time, the aging process, and the desire to continue the Family line through the coupling of Tesman and Hedda. It seems as if the desire to continue the family line is a product of the aunts' need to avoid the reality of their own death in the belief that they will live on in the accomplishments of their nephew and his offspring. This need to avoid death certainly feeds Aunt Julie's preoccupation with hedda's pregnancy. For Hedda, the mere thought of death drives her to restlessness and nervousness and not the calm which comes over her in her most inspired moments. Once Tesman suggests that Hedda "Think of it!" and join him at Aunt Rina's side, she no longer makes fun of Tesman from her comfortable sitting position. She "rises" (as she had done while feeling the pressure of those "eternal aunts" and her maternity earlier) and "dismisses the tlzorrgltt wearily." The thought of death penetrates her mind for a moment as she imagines herself in its presence. Her position of emotional detachment and self-control is immediately threatened. She "rises" and responds in the negative three times in succession, "No, no, don't ask me to do such things," before insisting that ''I don't want to look on sickness and death." Once again those "eternal aunts" remind her of her own impending death and decay, except this time more directly. "To be free of everything ugly" means to be free of any thoughts of the vulnerability now most apparent in her maternity, decaying attractiveness, and overall feelings of powerlessness. Death's momentary penetrations into Hedda's thought process are arguably the closest any individual in this play gets to imagining or sensing the reality of death. Moreover, it is not simply Hedda who exhibits a restlessness which reveals an anxiety that has to do with the fear of death; every other character in the play does so as well. They manifest this anxiety in movement however. Unlike Hedda, who cannot adapt to her new surroundings, the Tesmans, Brack. and Mrs. Elvsted manage to adapt to change by establishing familiar roles for themselves. This is, of course, an impossibility for Hedda. But all characters in the play, including Hedda and Lovborg, struggle to deny their own mortality by channeling their energy into someone else or something else in order to experience a sense of meaning, security, and immortality. In The Denial of Drtath. Becker describes this process in terms of a "cultural hero-system": It doesn't matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by cawing out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple. a cathedral, a totem pole. a sky-scraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count. When Norman 0. Brown said that Western society since Newton, no matter how scientific or secular it claims to be, is still as "religious" as any other, this is what he meant: "civilized society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible. (5) Whether consciously or not, tragic characters are faced with this "danger" in a more profound way than other characters, and Ibsen's Hedda Gabler is no exception. Hedda Gabler cannot "carve out a place" for herself in the Tesrnan world, no matter how hard she tries, and whatever efforts she does make are constantly being exposed as "fictitious and fallible." Hedda's suffering and search for meaning is that much more acute than other characters and at the root of her poetry. For most of the play she will not consider the possibility of motherhood--her "most solemn responsibility" (256) as Brack puts it. "Be quiet! You'll never see me like that!" (256)' barks Hedda back at Brack after he introduces the subject of motherhood. Hedda is up to more masculine and powerful pursuits. She considers the possibility of politics for Tesman as one possible way of finding something meaningful to do, but her hopes are quickly destroyed by the more realistic Brack. It is. ultimately. the prospect of living vicariously through Lovborg's actions that excites Hedda most. She imagines Lovborg's return from Erack's orgiastic bachelor party with "vine leaves in his hair--fiery and bold--" (27 1) as an assertion of her control over him. but she is soon disappointed."' In Act In, Lovborg returns. not as the courageous Dionysian figure of resolute will, but as a defeated man who has lost his "child"--a man who admits to Hedda that "It's the courage and daring for life--that's what she's ["Thea"] broken in me" (286). Hedda no longer believes her "fictitious" Dionysian escape from the reality of the limits of the body and her society: "I don't believe in vine leaves any more" (288), she says to the defeated Lovborg who she is about to send off to kill himself "beautifully." She does now believe in the "beauty'' of taking one's life from death. As Hedda reveals to Brack in Act IV, after he has delivered the more heroic version of Lovborg's "fatal" suicide: "he [Lovborg] had the strength and the will to break away from the banquet of life--so young" (298). And yet this "religious and heroic'' belief is soon in "danger." Indeed, it is Hedda's underlying sense of the fragility of her own belief-system which makes her actions so compelling and her character tragic. It is not until Hedda sends Lovborg off to kill himself "beautifully" that she is inspired to perform acts (the burning of the manuscript and her suicide) which border on the poetic and ritualistic. In utter denial of the realities of her body's and her society's determinism, Hedda is inspired to perform her most destructive, and also liberating, acts. Her destructive Dionysian delusional state of mind, which is based in feelings of shame, drives her to self-destruct "beautifutIy," There is no living god of Dionysus to deny, as is the case for the characters in The ~ncchae".but all that this god of ecstasy embodies animates Ibsen's tragedy, and especially his heroine's perverse, but "heroic" actions. By the end of Act 111 Hedda has something very clearly to live for. When Act IV opens Hedda is already inspired and can barely contain her excitement over the prospect of Lovborg's glorious, final "free and courageous action in this world" (298). At the end of Act 111. possessed by the thought of this glorious act, like the sisters of Sernele who are driven to a brutal act of dismemberment because of their denial of Dionysus, Hedda is driven by denial to create her own sacrificial rite of burial for the "child" or manuscript and her own child. In burning the manuscript she symbolically liberates Lovborg and herself from concern with the limits of the body and society into the heroic world of the will and invulnerability. The "child" of "Thea" and "Eilert" and that of "Mrs- Hedda" (298) are sacrificed to preserve the heroic concept of self which Hedda Gabler attempts to confirm in the world of experience through Lovborg's suicide. In the burning of "the child" Hedda's deepest feelings are channeled into a "slow- moving ritual. characteristic of all ceremonies" (Cirlot 26 1 ) in religious rites. After Hedda "puts the pistol in his [Lovborg's] breast pocket" and Lovborg "goes out the hall door" she "listerrs a rttonzent at the door" (288)and the ritual performance begins. A curiously intense calm is established as Hedda "goes over to the writing table, takes orit the erzvelope with the rnanirscript, glances inside, pulls some of the sheets half out nrld looks at them She then goes over to the armchair by the stove artd sits, with the envelope in her lap. After a moment, she opens the stove door, then brings our the manuscript" (288). "Throwing some of the sheets into thefire," she breaks this strange silence with whispers "to lierseij" (288). Punctuated by the throwing in of sheaves of paper into the stove, Hedda's four short sentences of similar length create an incantatory rhythm: "Now I'm burning your child, Thea! You, with your curly hair! (Tltrowing another sheaf in the stove.) Your child and Eilert Lovborg's. (Th-owing i~lthe rest.) Now I'm burning--I'm burning the child" (288). This destructive performance may be the product of an extremely disturbed mind, but it is also extremely imaginative and, in that sense, creative and poetic. In this ecstatic state of mind Hedda becomes a kind of priestess of destruction. The intensity of her need to deny her own vulnerability and to assert her own heroic vision has enabled her to enter what might be called a mythic state of mind." In the last sentence of her incantation Hedda hesitates as the final destruction of Mrs. Elvsted's, "Thea's," and Lovborg's "child" begins to symbolize for her the destruction of her own child. "rhe child" [my italics]." This ritual burning enables her to believe that she and the man through whom she is now living are free to act as if they are no longer bound by the limits of a bodily existence--"to break away from the banquet of life" (298). She is under this belief until in Act IV Brack *'disburden[s] . . . [her] of this beautiful illusion" (298). Except, as John Northam points out in Ibsen: A Critical Stitdy, Hedda's related ideas of spontaneity, of living after one's own fashion, of taking leave in one's own time. . . [are] more than merely aesthetically beautiful . . . . Brack's response shows how far he is from beginning to comprehend Hedda. For him her concern with 'beauty' is a 'pretty' illusion--the difference in stature between the terms is a measure of the difference between them at this point. He sets about demolishing what to him is a mere figment. ( 174-5) The poetry and ecstasy of Hedda's ritual burning and her reaction to the truth that Lovborg did not shoot himself deliberately in the temple or the chest, but "in the stomach--more or less" (299),testifies to the fact that Hedda's beliefs are far more than "pretty" illusions. They are desperate psychic structures which stave off the reality of her vuinerability and enable her to sustain an already precarious sense of meaning in life. Hedda's reaction to the news about the true location of Lovborg's fatal wound demonstrates the destruction of any hopes Hedda may have had of living a meaningful life: "(stares rip at him with a look of revulsion). That too! What is it. this--this curse-- that everything I touch turns ridiculous and vile?' (299). Lovborg is shot not in "the temple" as Hedda had imagined--the temple is symbolic of the higher, mentaI aspects of the human being--or "the chest" as Hedda later assumes-the region where the heart and symbolically, courage reside--but "in the stomach--more or lessv--the lower region of the human body which houses the digestive system--the bowelsx--and the primary sexual organs--the genitals3 Brack's "more or less" says it all. The exact location is unspeakable. It is either the thought of the bowels or the genitals that repulses Hedda at this moment---both work." Life is at its most "ridicui~usand vile" for Hedda here. Lovborg's vile death confronts her with feelings she cannot comprehend. UntiI this point in Act IV, under the belief that her brand of freedom is a possibility, Hedda has been trying extremely hard to adjust to the absurdities of the world which surrounds her. She goes so far as to more or less admit her pregnancy to Tesman. but only after feeling empowered by the prospect of Lovborg's "beautiful" act and by her sacrifice of "the child." She hesitantly and partially admits to Tesman what she could barely admit to herseIf previously: "Well, then it's best you know that--that I'm going to--(Impatiently hreakirzg 08)No, no--you ask your Aunt Julie. She's the one who can tell you" (293). Tesman cannot contain his excitement and Hedda can barely contain her feelings of shame and despair. "Good heavens, no! Is it actually that! Can it be? Uh?" (293).says the father-to-be. Containing her feelings of humiliation. Hedda asks Tesman not to "shout so. The maid can hear you" (293). Tesman continues and Hedda, "clenching her fists irz despair," says: "Oh, I'll die--I'll die of all this!" (293). "Of what, Hedda? Uh?" asks Tesman, and Hedda responds: "Of all these--absurdities--George1' (293). Tesman naturally asks: "Absurdities? What's absurd about my being so happy? Well, all right--I guess there's no point in my saying anything to Berta" (293). Hedda has given up resisting the Tesman world, "Oh, go ahead--why not that, too?" (293)' but only because she feels liberated from it by the prospect of Lovborg's "beautiful" act. She now 1 ives vicariously through Lovborg. Hedda dispossesses herself of her own body in the hopes of having her feelings of freedom enacted and confirmed by Lovborg's sacrifice to the god of the will, if you will. But Lovborg cannot deal with the ambivalent feelings created by the coexistence of body and mind. He is either the new man who denies himself the pleasures of the body in order to work on the book which will insure his immortality or he indulges himself in seemingly unlimited sexual pleasures. This in itself appears to be an attempt "to use sex in an entirely individual way in order to control it and relieve it of its determinism" (Becker 45). In this way, Lovborg is not all that different from Hedda, who must contain her sexual desires to the mind .- under the fear that if released, these desires would annihilate her heroic sense of identity." At the outset of Act IV. Hedda's heroic sense of identity is at its peak. In this iast act. Ibsen places his heroine. who feels free of "ugliness" (as she has temporarily divorced herself from the realities of the body). in the midst of what amounts to a situation which is a mockery of mourning. Hedda "enters the inner roonl" and for the first time in the play "several chords are heard on the piano."'h she feels liberated. She is "dressed in black," Berta "enters" and "goes" with "black ribbons on her cup" and "Miss Tesman, in rnorcrning, with a hat and veil, comes in from the hall. Hedda goes rortw-d her, extending her hand' (289). Hedda "goes rorvctrd' Aunt Julie? Things begin to look even more strange--or should I say normal, since Hedda is now playing the expected part of the concerned daughter-in-law of an Aunt in mourning quite successfully. Hedda responds to Miss Tesman's suggestion that Hedda's home is "the house of life" (an obvious reference to the life of Hedda's child) together with "the news of death" (Aunt Rina's) with apparent self-control: "That was very kind of you" (289), says the lady of the house. Miss Tesman then says, "Ah, Rina ought not to have passed on just now. This is no time for grief in Hedda's house," and Hedda replies: "(changing the srrbject). She had a peaceful death, then, Miss Tesman?'((289). This second allusion to the approaching birth of Hedda's child in this "house of life" penetrates Hedda's ecstatic armor momentarily and Hedda changes the topic tactfully. What should be most apparent from the audience's point of view is how strange it is that Hedda and Miss Tesman are in such good moods, especially in Miss Tesman's case. She has just Iost a sister who she has been caring for for years. The reality of death is consumed in her desire to see that her family line is perpetuated and the prospect of helping to care for the new member of the family. A few pages later, in response to Hedda's query about taking on the burden of a "poor invalid" and "stranger" (290-29 1 ). Miss Tesman says: "Oh, you soon make friends with an invalid. And I do so much need someone to live for--I, too. Well, thank God, in this house as well, there soon ought to be work that an old aunt can turn her hand to" (29 1). Hedda responds in utter frustration: "Oh. forget about us-" (29 1 ). Hedda's self-control has slipped even further after this sixth allusion made by Aunt Julie to the birth of Hedda's child in three pages of dialogue. Hedda cannot compete in this world where death and loss mean nothing, even when she believes she is free. Hedda is an anomaly in this society. Although her responses to her own corporal condition are those of desperation and denial and not acceptance, she is nevertheless the only character in the play who shows signs of acknowledging the reality of death- As Hedda reveals after Aunt Julie protests that Hedda should not let her life-bearing hands and thoughts dwell on death: "Ah. thoughts--they're not so easy to control--" (290). Meanwhile "George Tesman enters from the half' (290) and confirms how strange it is to find both Hedda and his Aunt Julie together carrying on a relatively amiable conversation: Hedda. Well, at last! It's about time. [Even "George" is a relief from "these eternal aunts'' and the subject of babies.] Tesman. Are you here, Aunt Julie? With Hedda? Think of that! Miss Tesman. I was just this minute leaving, dear boy. Well, did you get done all you promised you would? Tesman. No, I'm really afraid I've forgotten half. 1'11 have to run over and see you tomorrow. My brain's completely in a whirl today. I can': keep my thoughts together. Miss Tesman. But George dear, you mustn't take it that way. Tesman. Oh? Well, how should I, then? Miss Tesman. You should rejoice in your grief. Rejoice in everything that's happened, as I do. Tesman. Oh yes. of course. You're thinking of Auntie Rina. (290) And Tesman was not. He is preoccupied with trying to shape, or at least predict, his own future; or. in other words, he is trying to insure his own "immortality" like every other character in this play. There is no time for grief.'' Like Hedda, Tesman has trouble ccntrolling or keeping thoughts together. Except it is not birth nor death which disturbs and concerns Tesman. It is the condition of Eilert Lovborg which concerns both him and Hedda. except Hedda, unlike Tesman, cannot escape or forget the feelings of vulnerability generated by the existential paradox that we are both symbolic and animal, "ugly," creatures. Tesman manages to forget to get done all he promised to do for this one remaining aunt--presumably the promise entailed certain preparations for Aunt Rina's funeral. Once "Miss Tesman goes out the hall door" (29 l), Hedda probes Tesman for the true concerns of his conscious mind: Hedda. ~0110~sTestnarz with a cold, probing look). 1 almost think you feel this death more than she. Tesman. Oh, it's not just Auntie Rina's death. It's Eilert who has me worried. (29 1 ) Tesman is too "worried" about his career to notice death. The black dress these characters wear is a mockery of mourning. Except for Hedda, the reality of our paradoxical condition as symbolic animals never penetrates the thought process of Ibsen's characters in Hedda Gabler. Aunt Julie looks forward to following the custom which would "see her [sister's corpse] dressed and made ready" for the "grave" (290). Even when you're dead and underground all that's left of you is disguised. But then again, how many people want to go into the grave naked'? As Becker states: "to be wholly unrepressed. to live in full bodily and psychic expansiveness . . . meanis] to be reborn into madness" (66). The character of Hedda GabIer dramatizes the seemingly irrational repression of the horror of our bodily selves. The denial of death and sexuality never stops in real life or in He& Gnbler. Act IV ends as it begins, with a mockery of mourning. Except this time it is Lovborg's death and ultimately Hedda's which reveal the superficiality of mourning and grief in this world driven by the denial of the body. As long as Hedda believes that freedom--of her will or mind from her bodily condition--is a possibility in the world she will not take her own life. Once Lovborg's vile death is revealed and she realizes that she is in Brack's power, Hedda rises to begin what appears to be another spontaneously conceived slow-moving ritual which culminates in her own death. Brack's assurance that he will not "abuse . . . [his] position" does not reassure the woman who, in Act 11, states that "life might still be bearable" "If one only had that [courage]" (267). There is only one courageous option available from Hedda's point of view. Hedda's reply to Brack's civil gesture of reassurance reveals her growing commitment to the performance of her own courageous act: "All the same, I'm in your power. Tied to your will and desire. Not free, Not free, then! (Rises impetuorisly.) No--I can't bear the thought of it. Never!" (302). Brack then "looks at her halfmockingly" and says: "One usually manages to adjust to the inevitable" (302). Despite her best efforts, Hedda Gabler has never been able to "adjust," and there is no way for her to reconcile her present position of powerlessness with her heroic sense of self. The thought of death has penetrated Hedda's psychic defenses numerous times in various forms over the last few days. In her final moments she attempts to assert control over her destiny for the last time. "Yes, perhaps" (302) one does have to "adjust," but then again, perhaps not. The terms of Hedda's value-system are set. She must now act. She has acted cowardly in the past by not acting and she knows it- Her "outraged reaction to Lovborg's sexual overture years" (Finney 160) before may be a symptom of hysteria, as Finney points out, but one thing is clear: Hedda refuses to deal with the actual sensation of a sexual act because it disrupts her normally containable flirtation with Lovborg, which ailows her to imagine herself in the act."' As Hedda herself suggests to Lovborg in Act II, her "worst cowardice--that night" (266) was not that she "didn't dare shoot" (266) him, but that she did not act on her passionate feelings for him. Her "cowardice" is underlined by Lovborg moments after she admits to it. He taunts Hedda directly: "And then the courage she [Mrs. Elvsted) has, Mrs. Tesman, when it's put to the test. . . . Enormous courage--where I'm concerned'' (267). Not only does Mrs. Elvsted demonstrate the courage to "jump" from the train of conventional life when she leaves her husband. as Hedda acknowledges in her response to this shocking confession with the words, "that you could dare do such a thing" (240), but Mrs. EIvsted apparently acts where Hedda did not, where Lovborg is "concerned." On the other hand, at the end of the play Hedda herself does act courageously, at least in her own heroic terms, when she commits suicide and denies all outside and inside forces, including her decaying, pregnant body. The fact that she does act "courageously" is, of course, confirmed in the final response to her death by the man who "personifies community standards of conduct" (Fuchs 219)' Judge Brack: "People don't do such things!" (304)- Like Mrs. Elvsted, who defies the codes of conduct of her society when she ignores what people, notably her husband, "will say." and leaves her husband do what she "had to do" (240). Hedda does what she has to do to preserve the sense of her own invulnerability and control when she commits suicide. In taking her own life and that of the child who represents the future of the Tesman line, Hedda Gabler denies death, the dictates of time and the body, and the whole bourgeois world of those "eternal aunts." The characters who surround Hedda do not have to adjust to the reality of their bodily vulnerability because they manage to avoid even the thought of it. Hedda cannot do this. Her powerful imagination, aristocratic, heroic ideals and sense of identity. as well as her intense feelings of shame and fear of scandal, leave her absolutely isolated. She has nothing to live for. She confirms this fact for herself and us in her final ritualistic performance at the end of Ibsen's ironic tragedy. Mrs. Elvsted and Tesman have been attempting to "put together" (297) "the one thing that could have made his Lovborg's] name live on" (297) from the notes which Mrs. Elvsted has preserved in her dress pocket. This act of re-membering is in itself a mockery of both mourning and genius. Various critics agree on this point. Caroline Mayerson. in her article, "Thematic Symbols in Hedda Gabler," says it best: "Hardly having begun the mourning song for her Adonis. she [Mrs. Elvsted] brings forth her embryonic offspring from her pocket and proceeds to mold it into shape with the aid of a Tesman--an echo of the classic death and rebirth, to be sure. but one not likely to produce the glorious Third Kingdom of which Ibsen dreamed" (138). In response to Hedda's playing of "ci wild dunce melody on the piano" after she has retreated to her inner room to blow her head off, Tesman tears himself from his work with Mrs. Elvsted to say: "But Hedda dearest--don't go playing dance music tonight! Think of Auntie Rina! And Eilert. too!" (303). The poor, grieving nephew and friend, who intends to make a name for himself, in honor of "Eilert's memory" (297) of course, needs quiet. Well, although the audience must respect his wishes, Hedda does not choose to do so. After her wild death dance on the piano and Tesman's unconsciously ironic response, Hedda commits her final act of rebet lion and courage. Neither the significance of the music, nor Auntie Rina's and Eilert's death have penetrated Tesman's psyche-- especially not since he and Mrs. Elvsted found something new to live for. "I'll give my whole life to this!" (297), says the newly inspired scholar. Only Hedda senses the absurdity of it all. In his preliminary notes to Hedda Gubler, Ibsen himself is quite clear on how he saw this final collaboration between Tesman and Mrs. Elvsted, He refers to their effort as "comic" ( 164) and a "burlesque" ( 162)' but he is clearest when he says: "Then H. [Hedda] departs this worid. And the two of them are left sitting there with the manuscript they cannot interpret. And the aunt is with them. What an ironic comment on humanity's striving for progress and development" (Ibsen, Pkryvrights on Playwiting 157). The irony Ibsen speaks of in this preliminary note remains intact in the final version of the play. Moreover, it is the juxtaposition of the departure of the perversely poetic Hedda from this banal world with the ironic efforts of those that she leaves behind which makes the future of humanity look particularly bleak. As their final words reveal, neither Brack nor Tesman can comprehend Hedda's final actions: Tesman. (sltriekirlg to Brack). Shot herself! Shot herself in the temple! Can you imagine! Brack (in the armchair, prostrated). But good God! People don't do such things! (304) Normal people who are absolutely oblivious to their own bodily vulnerability that is. Hedda's suffering, and the final, powerfully imaginative actions which originate in a psyche tortured by societal and corporal limits, are way beyond the people she leaves behind. There is a certain degree of nobility to Hedda's final actions and words. Before retreating to the inner room to play the piano and eventually shoot herself through the temple, Hedda responds to Brack's comment about managing to "adjust to the inevitable" and begins a spontaneously conceived ritual of separation and isolation: Hedda (returning his look). Yes, perhaps so. (She goes over to the rvriting table. Srrppressing an in vol rrntaty smile, she imitates Tesrnan 's intonation.) Well? Getting on with it, George? Uh? Tesman. Goodness knows, dear. It's going to mean months and months of work, in any case. Hedda (as before). Imagine that I (Runs her hand lightly through Mrs. Elvsted's hair.) Don't you find it strange. Thea? Here you are, sitting now beside Tesman-just as you used to sit with Eilert Lovborg. Mrs. Elvsted. Oh, if I could only inspire your husband in the same way. Hedda. Oh. that will surely come--in time. Tesrnen. Yes, you know what, Hedda--I really think I'm beginning to feel something of the kind. But you go back and sit with Judge rack." Hedda. Is there nothing the two of you need from me now? Tesman. No, nothing in the world. (Tr~rnittghis head.) From now on, Judge, you'll have to be good enough to keep Hedda company. Brack (with n glance nt Heddu). I'll take the greatest pleasure in that. Hedda. Thanks. But I'm tired this evening. I want to rest a while in there on the sofa. Tesman. Yes, do that, dear. Uh? (302-3) Step by step Hedda confirms the fact that she is not needed and does not belong in this vile world. She seems to have already decided on, or at least seriously considered, her own suicide at this point. She is not altogether deluded however. On the contrary, I believe she is perversely inspired and insightful. She demonstrates that she is well aware of her surroundings and the fact of her own powerlessness and lack of freedom. And these limits are absolutely real and evident to her and us. She feels totally isolated, but manages to keep her composure and preserve a sense of dignity. She channels her tumultuous feelings into deliberate actions and bitterly sarcastic words, savoring her frustration and jealousy like hemIock. She knows there is no future for her in this world. She "i)?litatesTesrnnrz's intonation" and patterns of speech, mocking the life which would have her call him George and have his baby. She "runs her hand lightly through Mrs. Elvsred's Izuir." pointing out the irony that Thea is -'sitting now beside Tesman--just as you used to sit with Eilert Lovborg." Unlike her creator, Hedda probably does believe that in time Mrs. Elvsted will inspire Tesman in the same way she did Lovborg. But she can call Tesman by his first name and ask whether "there is nothing the two of you need from me now?" because she is in the process of separating herself from this world. Like a priestess of self-destruction Hedda blesses or acknowledges each person around her for who they are before committing her final act. In response to Brack's comment that he and Hedda wit1 "have great times here together, the two of us!" (303), Hedda replies: "(in cr clectr, ringing voice). Yes, you can hope so, Judge, can't you*? You, the one cock of the walk--" (303) and the "shot is heard rvitltin" (303). She sees through each person around her and their greedy desires and mocks them in jealousy and not any kind of moral condemnation. Although Hedda is not conscious of it, at the root of her jealousy and despair is the fact that she is incapable of successfully denying her vulnerability like those around her. Hedda's horror of the body. unsuccessful attempt at the denial of it, and suicide symbolize and frame the more effectively repressed feelings of those around her on stage and in the audience. The intensity of Hedda's experience of the existential paradox drives her to manifest this paradox on stage and engages us in a spontaneously conceived ritual process of denial which reveals not only her poetry deep down, but our own. The poetry is not in the perversity, but in the intensity of feeIing which generates it--the intensity of feeling experienced while in a world which makes a mockery out living, and not simply out of dyingx Characters of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler are driven by the denial of the body and in the final act of the play the degree to which an empathic, genuine mourning process is needed is highlighted by a situation which is simply a mockery of mourning. In the ancient Greek tragic context of Tjze Bacchae, Agave and her father piece together the dismembered body of a son and grandchild in mutual, communal mourning, whereas here the mediocre scholar. Tesman, and Mrs. Elvsted, attempt to "put together.' Lovborg's "child" from a bundle of "mixed up" notes. The passion with which Hedda attempts to deny her mortality and sexuality will, more than likely, lead to the deformed rebirth of Lovborg's "child." Perhaps, as Elinor Fuchs suggests. "The manuscript cannot be destroyed. Its resurrection is prefigured in the story Lovborg tells Thea: he tore the manuscript to bits and scattered it. like the body of the dead Dionysus, over the sea, where primordial life arose" (218). On the other hand, the manuscript and the future it apparently predicts, can be deformed and misread. Without recognizing and coming to terms with the denial of the body and the empathic, communal way out of this struggIe with vulnerability, the future is indeed bleak, as both Ibsen and Euripides suggest in the tragedies of Heddu Gabler and The Bacchae. Notes 'One of the most striking things about Oedipus in Oedipus at Colonrcs is the fact that although Oedipus clearly confronts his feelings of shame--he simply cannot avoid them as he is a walking object of shame, like Philoctetes, to those who come across him-- in the presence of his empathic daughter, Antigone, he nevertheless is incapable of empathy himself. This is particularly evident in his interaction with his son, Polyneices. In an extremely informative survey of readings of Sophocles's Oedipus plays in the seventh chapter of The Personal Myth in Psychoanalytic Theop, "Sophocles's King Oedipus and Self-Analysis," James Naiman and Paola Valeri-Tomaszuk address this problem directly: But the anger in Oedipus at Colonrts is the malevolent wrath of an old man from whom suffering has only sharpened the desire for revenge. Oedipus possesses the knowledge, of himself and human nature that he had acquired in Tvmnnus, but this knowledge. wrapped as it is in a monstrous desire to destroy, is devoid of any empathy toward people who cross his path. In a way his anger is self-defeating because it obfuscates reality. It also diminishes the tragic quality of the hero. It makes him a bit ridiculous. ( 14 1 ) This is my sense of the old Oedipus as well. He never manages to emerge from his own plight into that of the other as he never fully internalizes his sense of powerlessness and thus never amves at the truth of his vulnerability and a tragic state of humility. '~esidesHedda Gabler, I am thinking of The Master ktilder in particular. In this play, characters simply exist in their own isolated worlds of shame and guilt in a state of denial and arrested mourning largely because of an absence of empathy. 226 H› he recopition afforded Agave by her father. and her subsequent recognition of him, can be understood in the terms of Jessica Benjamin in The Borzds of Lave. Benjamin states that "Recognition is that response from the other which makes meaningful the feelings, intentions, and actions of the self. It allows the self to reaIize its agency and authorship in a tangible way. But such recognition can only come from an other whom we, in turn. recognize as a person in his or her own right" (12). 'In her introduction to Tlze Bacclzae. Martha Nussbaum states that "the idea of hidden impulses. and also of a therapy that works on the soul through the word, are ideas older than most formal philosophy and very important in literary works of many kinds" (xxxiii). In his article, "The Psychotherapy Scene in Euripides' Baccliue," G. Devereux makes a convincing argument for "the psychiatric plausibility of Euripides' description of the ps~chotherperrticprocess" (35). Devereux states that "Once the situation becomes clear. the bereaved Cadmus ceases to be wholly absorbed by the contemplation of his own grief. The mourning father and grandfather, controlling his own sorrow, assumes the stance of an objective, if tender, psychotherapist, The tactfully gradual manner in which he leads Agave, step by step, back to a painful but inescapable reality, is clinically flawless" (4 1 ). '~nlessotherwise stated, all quotations from the Bacclzac are taken from William Arrowsmith's translation of the play. Arrowsmith's translation is often more subtle than others. He is particularly effective in revealing the complexity of internal and external conflicts faced by different characters. "This scene between Pentheus and the phantom-like "Bromius" (an epithet of Dionysus) is strikingly similar to the scene in Act Two between the young, tragic character of Peer Gynt and the Boyg in Ibsen's Peer Gyrzt. In this scene, after "slashing cuzdflc~ilirzgabout with a great bough" pointlessly. Peer demands, "Who are you?" (48), and the "Voice" responds in characteristic cryptic fashion, "Myself8(48). Frustrated, Peer insists, "Get out of my way!" (49),"Slashing about him'' (49)blindly. When asked, "What are you, then?" (49), the "Voice" says. "The great Boyg" (49). Peer continues to insist on going "Straight on!" without getting anywhere until he retreats and attempts to make sense of the immaterial and inexplicable "Voice" which seems to embody Peer's own struggle with his own impotence and vulnerability. Peer says, [groping]. Neither dead nor alive. A slime. a mist. Not even a shape! It's worse than fighting A horde of growling, sleep-sodden bears! [Screanring.! Hit back, can't you? (50) and the "Voice" responds. "The Boyg isn't mad" (50), and later, after Peer attempts to provoke the mysterious "mist," it answers. "The great Boyg wins without battle" (50). The Boyg. like Dionysus, will "not be touched to rage," and the frustrated young man, full of himself, comes up against his own nightmarish limits. With the help of the "Bird- Cries." who appear to finish off the Boyg's job of humiliating and defeating Peer, Peer "sirzks dorvrz" in defeat before being saved by "Chrchbells clnd /z_vmrz-singing"(5 1) by women. The "Bird-Cries" remind one of Dionysus's foilowers, the Chorus of Asian Bacchae, who arrive with Dionysus in Thebes. These female forces of Dionysus, along with the women of Thebes who run wild as Maenads, thirst for Pentheus's blood to satisfy the god's vengeance. As Ibsen's "Bird-Cries" scream, "Boyg, he's down! Take him! Take him!" (5 l), Euripides's Chorus screams, 0 Dionysus, reveal yourself a bull ! Be manifest, a snake with darting heads, a lion breathing fire! 0 Bacchus, come! Come with your smile! Cast your noose about this man who hunts your Bacchae! Bring him down, trampled underfoot by the murderous herd of your Maenads! (11. 1016-2 1 ) just before the Messenger's description of the dismembering of Pentheus. Ibsen's Christian "Cizrtrch bells" and the salvation represented in the pure voices of women save Peer from the Boyg, but nothing can save Pentheus from Dionysus. and especially not women. In both The Bacclrae and Peer Gyjzt, a terrifying ambivalence toward female sexuality threatens to overwhelm the young hero, or antihero in Peer's case in particular. As already suggested in this dissertation, the surfacing of this ambivalence animates much of tragedy from the Greeks on. In the final moments of Peer Gym. as he hears Solveig's "song in the htr" ( 167) Peer manages to go "Straight to it, however narrow the path is!" rather than follow the words of the Boyg which recommend that he go "Round and about" ( 167) . He throws himself down at the feet of this "pure" and once "young boirl" and asks to be condemned, but is told that he has done nothing "wrong, my only boy!" (167). It seems that the only way for Peer to conquer himself and thus to know himself is for him to reach this state of utter need, helplessness, and vulnerability and not for him to use physical force and violence. In this sense, he is not all that different from the young Pentheus who must come face to face with his own vulnerability and confess his "wrong" to his mad mother. Of course, the Christian element of Ibsen's early drama is absent from Euripides's play. Unlike the virginal, mother Mary like figure of Solveig, Dionysus is merciless as is Pentheus's possessed mother. But in both plays it is not a matter of being forgiven; rather, it is matter of facing the overwhelming fact of their own vulnerability and the shame that drives them to deny it and go "Round and about" or thrash wiIdIy at. ultimately, themselves. It is the fear of self-exposure rooted in shame which appears to drive both of these tragic characters. '1t is interesting to note that Peer's humiliating encounter with the Boyg also takes place on a heath. Like Lear, whose narcissism leads him to believe that the storm on [he heath is an extension of his own turmoil and rage, Peer vents his turmoil and rage on what appears to be a mirror image of himself, "Myself." the Boyg, until he "sinks down1' in defeat. Both tragic characters rage against what appears to them to be outsideforces, but the audience knows better. I do not believe the case is all that much different in the context of Pentheus's struggle with Dionysus. Euripides's play is not simply a moral lesson which advocates that the audience should believe in the gods--or god, in the case of this new god, Dionysus--or else they will suffer the fate of Pentheus and his family. Dionysus's presence serves to cwercome denial and bring to the surface taboo desires. The god is a vehicle by which internal. psychic forces are unleashed. Even in a play like Oedipus he King there is an inherent scepticism expressed toward the belief in the gods as simply external beings, but that is another project. The audience of tragedy from the Greeks on is meant to experience the forces of the gods as manifestations of human desire and psychology. The cathartic affect or effect is largely a product of a common struggle with sexuality and mortality and not some common cultural belief system as Nietzche, Steiner, and Lukks contend. See Chapter 6 for a more thorough discussion of this topic. 'This scene is strikingly similar to the final scene in Ibsen's The Master Builder. in which Halvard Soleness, the master builder, climbs to the top of one of his newest creations, a home with a spire on top (one hell-of-a phallic symbol), possessed by a kind of Dionysian sense of invulnerability and rejuvenated masculinity, before tumbling to his death after waving to the women who wave back at him in awe of his "impossible" feat. These women (like Agave and her sisters for Pentheus), and one in particular, the young Hilde, who has emerged from the unresolved past to inspire this assertion of mascuIine prowess. excite Soleness to the extent that he loses his balance and falls to his death. Once the forces of sexuality and mortality are unleashed, after being strongly resisted. tragic characters like Soleness and Pentheus must die, unless they can manage to come tenns with these forces within an empathic context. Such a context is not available to either of these characters. In the case of Peer Gynt, I think Ibsen left Peer's fate uncertain because he sensed the inadequacy of Christian salvation when it comes to the struggle with the realities of the body and ambivalent feelings toward female sexuality in particular. At the end of Peer Gynt, Peer "cries out" to Solveig: "My mother; my wife; purest of women! / Hide me there, hide me in your heart!" ( 168). Women are either troll- like objects of lust or "pure" for Peer. Hiding in the arms of one (melodramatic) extreme form of woman will not enable him to come to terms with the paradoxical state of his human condition as both symbolic and animal. The dependency on this "pure" woman is a denial of the "animal" in both women and men and the forces of sexuality and mortality beyond human control. Peer's identity is in danger of being melted down because he is not capable of reconciling what he experiences as two mutually exclusive parts of himself. Before Solveig's final song at the end of the play, Ibsen has the Buttonmoulder remind us that Peer's struggle with his bodily condition (and I would argue Ibsen's) is not over: "We shall meet at the last cross-road, Peer; / And then we'll see whether--; I say no more" ( 169). Tragedy suggests that the forces of sexuality and mortality are too much to handle in isolation. as is evident in the case of Soleness and Pentheus. but the confession of simply guilt, as in the Christian context of Peer Gynr. is not sufficient either. What is needed is an empathic context capable of dealing with shame in particular. This we find in the final exchange between Agave and Cadmus at the end of Tl~eBnccllne. h he homfic feelings of abandonment by the mother experienced by Pentheus seem to mirror those of Dionysus himself with regard to his own mother, Semele. Dionysus is generally thought to born of Zeus's thigh after being removed from Semele's womb upon her death by Zeus's thunderbolt. Dionysus is the god whose mother. and thus identity, are being denied him twice over. He comes back to Thebes to assert his birthright as a god and the son of Semele. In overcoming those Thebans who deny the elemental forces that he embodies, it appears that Euripides gives us a god who attempts to conquer the shame and feelings of dislocation and abandonment related to his birth. In this sense, Pentheus's death by his mother is very much a sacrificial ritual enactment of the god's suffering. I0Once again, with this line spoken by Agave, I hear an essentiat kinship between the way in which Euripides handles the relationship between a "boy," his mother, and female sexuality in The Bacchae (or Hippolyrus for that matter) and Ibsen's plays, but particularly Peer Gym. The "pure" mother figure, Solveig, taking into her arms the defeated and helpless Peer, her "only boy," echoes Agave's appeal for her "poor boy's body." In his biography of Ibsen, Michael Meyer states that "It would be an exaggeration. perhaps. to say that Ibsen's plays are about sex, for they are about so much besides: but there is none of his plays, except Bmnd and An Etzerny of the People. in which sex is not a major and decisive element" (864). The predominance of the dramatization of the struggle with sexuality in Ibsen's plays has to with the essential tragic nature of his characters who attempt to deny the body and their ambivalent feelings toward women, as I have already suggested. It seems very appropriate that of all tragedians, Meyer chooses to compare Ibsen to Euripides while discussing ibsen's "contributions to the theatre": "he turned it from a place of entertainment and occasional catharsis into a place from which men emerged compelled to rethink basic principles which they had never before seriously questioned. Euripides had done this, but no dramatist since--or anyway not on the same scale" (864). Behind his rethinking of "basic principles" is Ibsen's exploration of the trngic processes of the denial of the body and the need of empathy first dramatized by fifth-century B.C. Greek tragedians like Euripides. he infantile gesture of the touch of the chin by the helpless "child" is an echoe of Pentheus's infantile gesture toward his mother--"he touched her cheeks7'--as she tears him apart limb from limb. "~lthoughhe does not break down the experience of pity between Agave and Cadmus into psychological terms as I do, in his introduction to The Bacchae, WiIliam Arrowsmith places this experience of pity and compassion--what I describe in terms of "rrzurrral recognition" and empathy--in the context of Euripides's work as a whole and ancient Greek society: For what we see in the exodus is, I think. the discovery of compassion, and in this the exodus of 77ze Bacchae follows good Euripidean precedent. One thinks of the Hippolyncs (so much like Tire Bacchae in so many ways) where. under the yoke of another inflexible necessity. compassion and understanding flower between Theseus and the dying Hippolytus; or of Heracles and the same discovery of love and need between the anguished hero and his friend and his father in the face of the bleak necessity of a careless. ruthless heaven. So here, beneath the inexorable harshness of that necessity called Dionysus, out of their anguish and suffering, Agave and Cadmus discover compassion, the pity that is born from shared suffering. In this they declare their humanity and a moral dignity which heaven, lacking those limits which make men suffer irlro dignity and compassion, can never understand or equal. This is their moral victory, the only victory the doomed can claim over the necessities which make them suffer. But it is a great victory; for by accepting their necessities in anguish, they claim the uniquely human skill of sopllin, the acceptance of necessity and doom which teaches compassion. It is that faith and that fate which, in Euripides, makes man human, not mere god. ( 152-3) In this dissertation I have been trying to show how and why characters come to experience this human skill of sophia and that all tragedy is attempting to articulate and dramatize the necessity of it and how it is fostered. In her introduction to The Bacchae, Martha Nussbaum also describes grief, pity and "mutual compassion" as the emotions which give "dignity" to human beings. But she goes further. She states that "these emotions" are "the source of integration and community in human life. the way we piece ourselves together" (xl-xli). Tragedy shows us "the way" to piece together ourselves and our community in its dramatization of the denial of the body and the need. and at times. the enactment of, empathy--a psychotogical process which involves, but is not limited to, both pity and compassion. '"~ra~ed~always insists on human responsibility from the point of view of the characters on stage and the audience. The "past tumult" is always problematic and never fully resolved and tragic titerature "knows" and shows it. The tragic is always critical and sceptical of the "miraculous." This appears to be what Girard is saying later in his discussion of The Bacclzae. He says that Tragic inspiration dissolves fictive differences in reciprocal violence: it demystifies the double illusion of a violent divinity and an innocent community. . . . Tragic inspiration demystifies the bacchanal; consequently, it destroys the delusion based on the cotlective transference upon which a major portion of the rite depends. The rite is not oriented toward violence, but toward peace. The tragic demystification discloses a bacchanaI that is pure frenzy, naked violence. ( 136) Although Girard does not appear to be suggesting this, integral to the "demystication" process is the dramatization of the roots of vioIence in denial of the body. And, so far as I can tell, the violence on stage is oriented toward a very specific, complex kind of psychological, emotional peace: empathy. '?o be fair to Girard, he does acknowledge the fact that The Bacchae does not fit his theory of sacrifice, but in a backhanded kind of way, and only after making the claims previously cited. In the concluding portions of his discussion of The Bacchae in Violence NIMI the Sacred, Girard says: The rite may stem from violence and be steeped in violence, but it still aspires to peace. In fact, it is a means of promoting harmony between the members of the community. Euripides tried to save the rite from destruction visited on all religious concepts by sacrificial crises and the tragic mode. But this effort was doomed to failure: the poet's tragic inspiration all too easily overcame his good intentions; and once the sacrificial and nonsacrificial have been mixed--like the two drops of Gorgon's blood--there is no separating them. ( 137) Was Euripides's trying "to save the rite from the destruction visited on all religious concepts"? Girard continues: The "problem of The Bacchae" would never have arisen if Euripides had fully acceded to the violent origin of the rite, the phying out of violence, and had acknowledged the generative act of unanimity preserved by the rite, lost in the onslaught of reciprocal violence and recovered through the mechanism of the surrogate victim. . . . (137) I am never altogether comfortable with Girard's "inference" of a singie, "violent origin of the rite." Earlier in his discussion of the The Bacchae he says: "Along with any known historicaf context, we can infer behind a myth like that of The Bacchae a sudden outbreak of violence so extreme as to threaten the very existence of the community" ( 134). Can we? Given my readings of tragedy and Homer, his Iliad in particular, it seems to me that sacrificial rituals are definitely linked to violence, but they are a means to integrating "past tumult" into the present on a conscious. as welt as an unconscious, level. I'm not so sure "primitive religion" is as blind or naive as Girard implies. Girard says later on in his discussion of The Bncclzae: Indeed, there would have been no problem if Euripides had been able to adopt the perspective of primitive religion, openly espousing the sacred while stripping man of his violence and reattributing it to divine influences. . . . ( 137-8) I think what Euripides is "trying to say" through his dramatization of a sacrificial crises is that the sacred is sacred because it provides a context in which a community can confront violence without having to deny it or responsibility for it. The fact that a character feels in control and responsible for his fate at the same time that he senses or knows that there are unknown forces in control of his fate is the irresolvalbe, but unavoidable, paradox. at Ieast for the Greeks so far as I read them. The gods respond to human action or inaction, they do not simply dictate it. Moreover, as Naiman and Paola Valeri-Tomaszuk state in "Sophocles's King Oedipus and Self- Analysis": The fifth-century Greeks did not think in our terms (either we believe in free will or else we are determinists) any more than Homer did: the debate about determinism is a creation of Hellenistic thought--Homeric heroes have their predetermined "portion of life"; they must die on their "appointed day"; but it never occurs to the poet or his audience that this prevents them from being free agents. Nor did Sophocles intend that it should occur to readers of the Oedipris Rex. Proff: I. t 230ff., where the Messenger emphatically distinguishes Oedipus's self-blinding as voluntary and self-chosen from the involuntary paricide and incest. Certain of Oedipus's past actions were fate-bound: but everything he does on the stage, from first to last, he does as a free agent. (132) Characters may say otherwise, but the paradox of their responsibility is always at play in their guilt and shame-ridden actions and suffering. Of course, my argument is that tragedy is not "after" peace so much as it is "after" empathy--that process which enables individuals to unite and bear loss with dignity, humility, and renewed awareness of self and other based on a confrontation with the realities of the body and vulnerability. I I h It is for this reason that shame is so centrsl to the tragic. As Helen Merrell Lynd says in On Shame and the Search for Identity It is no accident that experiences of shame are called self- consciousness. Such experiences are characteristically painful. They are usually taken as something to be hidden, dodged, covered up--even, or especially, from oneself. Shame interrupts any unquestioning, unaware sene of oneself. But it is possible that experiences of shame if confronted full in the face may throw an unexpected light on who onz is and point the way toward who one may become. Fully faced, shame may become not primarily something to be covered, but a positive experience of revelation. ( I 9-20) Tragedy dramatizes the destructive consequences of not facing that which we are ashamed of, and the "positive" value of facing shame within a communat, empathic context. ""once we have focused attention on the sacrificial victim, the object originally singled out for violence fades from view. Sacrificial substitution implies a degree of misunderstanding. Its vitality as an institution depends on its ability to conceal the displacement upon which the rite is based" (3,says Girard early in Violence arzd the Scrcred. although he does qualify this statement with the following: "It must never lose sight entirely, however, af the original object, or cease to be aware of the act of transference from the object to the surrogate victim; without that awareness no substitution can take place and the sacrifice loses all efficacy" (5). ''see the discussion of Richard 111 in Part IT of Chapter 6, pages 3 13- 14. I ')In A Doll House, the illusions by which characters relate to one another are also shattered by "ugliness." or, in other words, death. The open expression of sexual desire-- by women or men--is especially threatening to the conventional, repressive worlds in which Hedda and Nora live because it expresses a procreative, animal intinct to survive and live which to the human symboIic mind signifies its mortality and vulnerability. In A DoffHorlse and Hedda Gabler the expression of sexual desire is normally frustrated and perverted because it is continually being disguised and filtered through the symbolic self which looks to glorify itself and sustain the impression of security and meaning in life and not confront the seeming meaninglessness of being governed by chaotic animal intincts. In Act I1 of A Doll House, Nora refuses to face the reality of Dr. Rank's expressed love for her after her seductive, staged display of the "silk stockings" (82). but in Act 111, on the verge of death, approaching the time when she will have to sacrifice her life to facilitate a "miracle." Nora's dance of the tarantella is, according to her husband, "a bit too naturalistic--I mean it rather overstepped the proprieties of art" (98-9). although this wild dance of death makes his blood pound until he "couldn't stand it" ( 10 1 ). Torvald, like Nora in Act II, attempts to defuse the omnipotence of sexual desire while watching Nora during the party in which she dances the tarantella by filtering it through an imaginary, staged seduction: "I'm imagining then that you're my secret darling. my secret young bride-to-be, and that no one suspects there's anything between us" (101). The wild dancer of the tarantella is reduced to a "young bride-to-be." Towald's staged seduction is then interrupted by the dying Rank's "knock at the ortrside door" (101). Rank leaves and Nora announces his impending death. Torvald does not understand Rank's desire "to hide away like a wounded animal" (104). Of course. now that Rank is certain that "within a month I'll probably be laid out and rotting in the churchyard" (80). the fact that he is an animal is unavoidable--at least for him. Rank's intimate knowledge of death and decay alienates him from a world based on the denial of death. No wonder he "hide[s] away like a wounded animal." As Nora says to Torvald: "If it has to happen, then it's best it happens in silence" ( 104). Moments after Rank's impending death has been announced to him, Torvald embraces Nora and begins to defuse the reality of death by constructin_g another imaginary scenario in which he imagines Nora in "some terrible danger. just so I could stake my life and soul and everything, for your sake" (104). Once Nora tears herself away and asks how he can consider "staying with her" with a "dying friend on your mind" ( I@+),Torvald's sexually charged fantasies quickly disappear. He responds: "You're right. We've both had a shock. There's ugliness between us--these thoughts of death and conuption. We'll have to get free of them first. Until then--we'll stay apart*' ( 104). '"ln "Mythic Structure in Hedcia Gabler: The Mask Behind the Face." Fuchs explores Ibsen's detailed use of the myth of Dionysus in Hedrln Gubler. Fuchs illustrates Ibsen's ironic Dionysian framework for this play, drawing, for instance, parallels between Lovborg and Dionysus, Mlle. Diana and "the goddess as Nymph" whose "seasonal consort" (2 15) is Dionysus, and Brack and a "debased satyr chorus" (2 19). "whether or not a fifth-century Greek audience of The Bacclzne believed in Dionysus. or for that matter, whether Euripides wanted them to, is very much an open question. Personally, I do not think the audience believed. nor do I think Euripides intended them to do so. The birth and on-going life or survival of tragedy is dependent on the existence of a sceptical, self-reflexive capacity or psychology in its citizens. The repressed and denied is enacted at a distance and witnessed. There is an inherent distance between the passions or the ecstatic and the civilized that is integral to the tragic process and state of mind. The tragic theatre is not primitive ritual. but mimetic play, which assumes a certain fear of participating in a Bacchic frenzy, and it uses this fear to evoke pity, but, more specifically, empathy. * 7 --Fuchs places Hedda's burning of the manuscript in its Dionysian mythic context: The followers of Dionysus frequently sacrificed male children, although adult males and animals were also used. Children had divine significance since the god Dionysus was the "child" of the Triple Goddess, who brought forth the harvest, cut it down, and buried its seed beneath the earth. Hedda too sacrifices a "child." With incantatory mutterings, she consigns the manuscript to the flames. What we witness at the end of Act HI may be called a fertility rite. Lovborg's "child is sacrificed so that Tesman's child may be born. We note that Hedda acknowledges her pregnancy only in Act lV, at the very moment that she announces the burning of the manuscript. And Tesman will be enthroned on his academic chair only through Lovborg's death and the resurrection of his manuscript. The new king reigns when the old king dies. But Hedda does not "believe in vine leaves any more." Her disavowal is the price of her submission to bourgeois culture. (217) "I think Rolf Fjelde's use of the definite article, "the," is very effective. although it is not necessary to capture the cumulative symbolic effect of the manuscript for Hedda and the audience. The link between the "child" and Hedda's child is clearly established by the time this ritual burial takes place. In his translation of Hedclrr Gobler, lens Amp has Hedda end her incantation by repeating the words, "your child" (246). once again. "1n his Freudian based discussion of ''The Meaning of Anality" in The Denid of Death, Becker says of the child that "his main task in Iife becomes the denial of what the anus represents: that in fact, he is nothing birt [is that a pun?] body so far as nature is concerned. Nature's values are bodily values, human values are mental values, and though they take the loftiest flights they are built upon excrement, impossible without it. always brought back to it. . . . The tragedy of man's dualism, his ludicrous situation, becomes too real. The anus and its incomprehensible. repulsive product represents not only physical determinism and boundness, but the fate as well of all that is physical: decay and death" (3 I ). z~inneystates that Hedda's "anitpathy to sex-evident in her outraged reaction to Lovborg's sexual overture years before, in her coldness toward Tesman, and in her assurances to both Brack and Lovborg that she intends to remain faithful (despite her lack of feeling for her husband)--is akin to the disgust with the genitals of the opposite sex which Freud views as 'one of the characteristics of all hysterics, and especially of hysterical women.' , - . Hedda's hysteria is the response to her hysterization, or to the reduction of her to her femaleness" ( 160- 1 ). '"AS far as I am concerned Jens Arup's translation of Hedda Gabler fails because it does not adequately convey the ambiguity and shocking nature of Brack's suggestion as to the real location of the wound. Amp has Brack say: "No.. . he was shot in the abdomen" (259). Arup's translation generally tends to be more literal than that of the translation I am using by Rolf Fjelde. Of course, the degree of ambiguity suggested would depend largely on how the actor who plays Brack delivers this line. In his article, "The Function of Humour in the Later Plays of Ibsen," Jens Kruuse states that "the Norwegian has: i underlivet (abdomen), and Ingrnar Bergman has his actor point to what the English so nicely call 'his private parts.' This is a great director's understanding of the important difference between brystet [breast or chest] and ~~ndcrlivet,something %sen insisted upon here as an element or link of his audacious humour" (34). The the fact that Mlle. Diana shoots Lovborg in the genitals also works when looked at in the light of Fuchs's study of mythic structure in Hedda Gabler. Fuchs states that it is Diana's "role to play the goddess in orgiastic aspect, deriving her name from the Titaness 'Dione.' goddess of the oak, where the lascivious dove nests. Dione was in some traditions another name for Aphrodite. and in others she was mother of Aphrodite, goddess of love. She presided over the annual death-by-castration ritual of the oak-cult in which the death of the old king made way for the new" (2 12). ,- -'This inability to deal with ambivalent feelings created by seemingly overwhelming feelings that have to do with sexuality and mortality produces what I refer to in the previous chapter on Lear as a melodramatic consciousness. '"The secret sense of power that inspires Hedda to play "several chords" on the piano at the outset of Act IV is similar to that of Nora at the outset of Act I in A Doll Horrse. A Doll House opens with Nora "lr~intntirtg"to her self with pride in the fact that she is ultimately responsible for her family's, and Torvald's. prospective success once he assumes the postion of manager at the bank. "I'm the one who saved Torvald's life" (53). reveals Nora with pride to Mrs. Linde in Act I. She then tells Mrs. Linde that "I was the one most responsible" (55) for the financial survival of the family, not her husband. "It was almost like being a man" (55)- says the woman who plays the role of the "little Iark" wife while experiencing a secret sense of masculine-li ke power that she gets from "making money" (55). - I John Northam believes that at the beginning of Act IV Hedda withdraws from "the outside world that Hedda seemed so happy to intervene in during Act III" ( 17 1 ), whereas I believe that the burning of the manuscript at the end of Act In and the prospect of Lovborg's heroic suicide propel Hedda into the "outside world with a temporary sense of invulnerabiiity. But, as already suggested, she is not nearly as accomplished at denial as the aunt who can "rejoice in . . . grief." U)Hedda is a kind of sexual voyeur. This is revealed in her need to live out her sexual desires vicariously through Lovborg's stories. Moreover, near the end of Act II, she expresses her wish to attend Brack's little orgy or party as an "invisible" guest in order that she could, as she says to Brack, "hear z Iittle of your unadulterated liveliness" (27 1 ). In this sense, and others, she is very much like Euripides's Pcntheus. Appropriately, in her introduction to Tlze Bacclzue, Martha Nussbaum describes Pentheus as having a "preference for voyeurism" and an "interest in witnessing sexual acts without being ensnared in the ccmplexities of his own desires" (xxxiv). 1 I Seated at the front of the stage with Mrs. Elvsted. Tesrnan now urges Hedda to return to sit in the back with Judge Brack as he had done while she sat in the front with Lovborg in Act 11. This shift in the positioning of characters on stage serves to suggest the shift in power that has taken place from Act II to Act IV, thus underlining the necessity of Hedda's final act, which is, ultimately, both an act of retreat and revolt. "Ibsen's Hedda Gabler offers no solutions to the existential paradox. A major difference between Heddu Gctbler and A Doll House is the fact that there is not one character in Heddct Gnbler who demonstrates that there is any other way to live or die other than in utter denial. By the end of A Doll House, it seems as if Nora is facing her ambivalent feelings toward her sexuality and mortality, although as Bernard Paris suggests in /mngined Hwnan Beings: There is something decidedly cold-biooded about Nora at the end. She is not allowing herself to be aware of the complexities of her situation, to feel a sense of loss, or to experience tender emotions. . . . She has made contact with previously repressed feelings. such as rage and the desire to throw off her bonds, but this is not the same thing as getting in touch with her real self. Her discovery of her self-alienation is an essential first step. but it is difficult to see how she can recognize and relinquish her defenses without help, and none is available. At the end of the play Nora is like a person in an early stage of therapy who is so afraid of losing contact with her new perceptions and so determined that nothing shall interfere with her growth that she cannot be worried about doing justice to others or caring about their feelings. It is at this stage. of course. that many marriages break up. (46) What Nora needs is an empathic individual capable of helping her work through her feelings of ambivalence and loss. Nils Krogstad and Mrs. Linde are two characters who do seem to have faced their own mortality and vulnerability, and it could be argued that Mrs. Linde is an empathic individual capable of helping Nora, although Ibsen does not suggest that the two will engage in a mourning process which would enable Nora to learn to empathize with others. On the other hand, in bedsThe Lnrdy from the Sea. Dr. Wangel's empathy provides his wife, Ellida, with the opportunity to mourn, as Cadmus's empathy does for Agave in The Baccllae. In many ways, Wangel and Eilida are extensions of Torvald and Nora. Unlike Torvald and Nora, Wangel and Ellida manage to work through the illusory nature of a marriage based on a bargain in some ways not all that different from the one struck between Hedda and Tesman. Pointing to the fact that Wangel and herself have been "lying" to themselves for years, Ellida reveals the "truth" to her husband: "Oh, I wasn't one particle better than you. I met your offer-and sold myself to you" (296). Wangel comes to "see things now, as they are" (297), and the two agree that "The life we have rtorc7 is no marriage" (297), although Wangel must continue to listen and empathize with his wife before she can find herself and the two can enter a marriage of choice and "free will." Wangel comes to recognize the necessity of his wife's psychological need to be free to choose between himself and the strange sailor from her past: "Now you can pick up the thread of your own true existence again. Because now you can choose in freedom--on your own responsibility" (319), says Wangel to Ellida. Given this freedom, and the genuine empathy of Wangel, she is able to reconcile her past with her present. The Stranger from the past "become[s] a dead man" (320). The "unknown" "horror" is something that '-neither terrifies nor attracts" Ellida anymore. She no longer lives in denial of those forces which had driven her to the edge of madness. From now on, as Ellida tells Wangel, the two will live "with the shared memories of. . . their lives" (321 ). The sharing of memory and the process of communal mourning are inextricable. In the psychoanalytic terms of Andre Green in the fifth chapter of The Personal Myth in Psyclzoanalytic Theory, "On the Constituents of the Personal Myth," Ellida is able to "synchronize the elements of a present experience and to link it with their image of the past" (83) with the help of her empathic husband who has undergone his own process of self-realization. The Lady from the Sea, in contrast to the more pessimistic vision in Heddci GnbZer and the more ambiguous one in A Doll House, ends with the statement that "human beings--they can acclam--acclimatize themselves" (322), and this process of acclimatization clearly involves a confrontation with the realities of the body and the experience of empathy. These plays by Ibsen, and others by him. dramatize the denid of the body and the need of empathy in true tragic fashion. The distinguishing tragic feature of Ibsen's dramatic world is the fact that characters and societies are driven by the denial of the body. Perhaps Ibsen, like his creation in his last play, Wherl We Dead Awaken. the sculptor, Professor Arnold Rubek. had "no choice" (250) but to portray the "more complex" (250) vision of life which he saw with his "own eyes in the world around" (250) him, even if he could not live his everyday life conscious of such complexity. After he had "gained experience and knowledge" (250), Rubek could no longer portray his masterpiece. "The Day of Resurrection," as "something perfect and beautiful--a pure young girl, unstained by life, awakening to light and glory without having to free herself from anything ugly and unclean" (250). (The idealized, "pure young girl." like Solveig of Peer Gyt.who is Peer's final womb-like retreat from the world of sensuality and selfhood, is apparently something Ibsen, like Rubek, had outgrown as he recognized that at the root of all human suffering lies the reality of our struggle with the animal or bodily and perhaps the roots of his own ambivalent attitude toward female sexuality.) As Rubek states: "I enlarged the pedestal, I made it broad and spacious. On it I set a small lump of our curved and fissured earth. And out of the fissures swarmed people, rvirlr faces of beasts beneath /z~i~nanI~CIS~. Women and men, as I knew them, from life" [my italics] (250-25 1). "Women and men" are "half animal and half symbolic." To give form to this paradoxical condition Rubek uses clay and lbsen words. Chapter 5 The Modern Tragic Tandem of Willy and Biff Lornan: Shame, Guilt, Empathy, and the Search for Identity in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman The world, in a word, is moving into the same boat. For a time, their greatest time, the Greek people were in the same boat--the polis. Our drama, like theirs, will, as it must, ask the same questions, the largest ones. Where are we going now that we are together? For, like every act man commits, the drama is a struggle against his mortality, and meaning is the ultimate reward for having lived. (Miller, "On Social Plays" 64) Arthur Miller's statements on drama and, specifically, tragedy, are abundant and often extremely profound. In these statements Miller demonstrates his acute awareness of the links between ancient Greek drama and that of his own modem era, as well as the "struggle . . . against mortality" which underlies "every act man commits." This awareness is also clearly manifest in Miller's tragedies, and particularly in his early 1949 play, Death of a Salesman. Death of a Sulesnzan testifies to its author's sensitivity to the psychological principles of tragedy and their social implications, as well as the degree to which he is writing out of a tragic tradition of literature grounded in a belief in the idea of community and, in essence, empathy. As I have attempted to demonstrate in my analysis of King Lear, modem tragedy does not necessarily preclude the dramatization of the presence of empathy, but it does usually imply the absence of a communal forum on stage in which empathy and mourning can create and establish a positive, therapeutic atmosphere that would foster the re-establishment of community on ethical grounds. Nevertheless, whether it be in an ancient Greek or a modem tragic context, the suggestion is that in order for individuals to enter into an empathic relationship they must first undergo an identity crisis which involves coming to terms with feelings of shame which are rooted in fears of losing control--fears experienced most profoundly in confrontation with the natural forces of mortality and sexuality. The nature of such identity crises is particularly evident in tragedies. such as the Philoctetes and, to a more Iimited extent, Lear, which center on what I refer to as a tragic tandem. In Death of a Salesman, we have an excellent example of such a tragedy. In it, I believe. Miller presents two central, tragic figures1,Willy and Biff Loman, whose simultaneous and interdependent struggles with vulnerability and shame propel the play's dialogic tragic action. One might ask: What about guilt? There is no question that guilt pIays a major role in Miller's tragedy and that of tragedy in general, but, as I have suggested throughout this dissertation, tragedy is largely concerned with dramatizing the way in which feelings of shame shape an individual's sense of identity, and thus pope1 him or her into wrongdoing and guilt.' This chain of psychological causation is dramatized in Death ofn Salesman. Behind Willy Loman's destructive, culturally endorsed dreams of success, as we1 1 as his infideIity and the guilt associated with it, lie deeply seated feelings of shame. Moreover, such feelings lie behind Willy's elder son Biff's failure to live up to the familial and societal ideal of success, as well as his habit of stealing and the guilt associated with it. For son and father shame rules over love to the extent that the ways in which they act toward one another serve to increase feelings of guilt and feelings of alienation in both of them. As I discuss later in this chapter, this is the case until Biff manages to come to an empathic understanding of his father's shame-ridden sense of self. Exposing the audience to this kind of chain of psychological causation is integral to the creation of what Aristotle has called pity and fear in the audience. Miller himself. in his "Introduction to the Collected Plays," has stated that 'The ultimate justification for a genuine new form is the new and heightened consciousness it creates and makes possible--a consciousness of causation in the light of known but hitherto inexplicable effects" ( 168). Moreover, in his discussion of the distinction between the tragic and the pathetic in "The Nature of Tragedy." Miller states that the complete personalities of tragic characters must "be brought to bear upon the problem to the degree that you are able to understand not only why they are ending in sadness, but how they might have avoided their end" ( I 1 ). Behind this "why" and "how" lies the characteristic, paradigmatic relation between shame, guilt, empathy and identity in tragedy which is manifest in the tragic tandem of Willy and Biff Loman. By the end of Death of a Salesman, Biff understands , at the very least, the destructiveness of his father's dream of success and the feelings of shame and guilt it produces in himself and his father. On the other hand, his shame-ridden father and, as the final moments of the play demonstrate, Charley and the other members of the Loman family are incapable of such understanding. This symbolic community is far from existing as an ethical community in which shame and the reahties of the body can be integrated into social consciousness. The fact that much of the criticism on Death of a Salesman has focused on Willy's "fall" and overlooked Biff s tragic centrality, as well as the hope that his "self-realization" provides, suggests that shame and denial continue to cripple our capacity for empathy. Miller's statements on Death of a Salesman suggest that he had intended the characters of Willy and Biff to be of at least equal importance in the development of the play's tragic tension. On the first anniversary of the play, in "The Salesman Has a Birthday." Miller says that "there have been certain disappointments. one above all. I am sorry the self-realization of the older son, Biff, is not a weightier counterbalance to Willy's disaster in the audience's mind" (14). I can imagine Sophocles saying something similar about the "self-realization" of Neoptolemus in The Philoctetes and perhaps Shakespeare about the "self-realization" of Cordelia in Lear.' The pairing of a more narcissistic, inflexible, typically tragic figure such as Philoctetes, Lear, or Willy with a more flexible figure such as Neoptolemus, Cordelia, or Biff, a figure who is able to work through shame and emerge from denial into empathy, creates some of the most compelling drama and Dearlt of a Salesman is no exception in this regard. In this play, as in the Pitifoctetes and Lear, it is ~otsimply love, but empathy which is the key to the escape from a destructive course driven by shame and denial. Like many critics of tragedy, Miller actually uses the term, love, and not empathy, to describe the alternative "system" of a character like Biff to that of a more destructive, more typical tragic character like Willy. Speaking of Death of a Sulesrnart in "Introduction to the Collected Pfrys," Miller says: "My attempt in the play was to counter this anxiety [over success] with an opposing system which, so to speak, is in a race for Willy's faith, and it is the system of love which is the opposite of the law of success. It is embodied in Biff Loman, but by the time Willy can perceive his love it can serve only as an ironic comment upon the life he sacrificed for power and for success and its tokens" (149). Love without empathy, however, as tragedy from the Greeks on suggests, is not capable of leading an individual out of shame, guilt, and denial. Only the empathy which is learned from a confrontation with shame, loss and vulnerability can help tragic characters alter their destructive course. Empathy, that capacity to put oneself in another's shoes, which enables characters to fee1 and think beyond their own concerns and act less defensively, serves to help stabilize the self and foster "self-realization" in at least one of two members of any given tragic tandem. Indeed, in the process of witnessing the struggle with vulnerability, and the limits of individual characters and the societies which help to shape their sense of identity, the expectation is that the audience experiences a state of mutual empathy. I think that Miller is absolutely correct when he insists in his "Introduction to the Collected Plays" "that the lasting appeal of tragedy is due to our need to face the fact of death in order to strengthen ourselves for life" (146) and that "the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind: and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone" (122-3). As I suggest throughout this chapter, this "revelation" is a product of being exposed to the dynamics shame, guilt, empathy and the search for identity as they manifest themselves in tragedy, and Miller's Death of a Salesman in particular. In "The Nature of Tragedy," Miller states that "Tragedy, called a more exalted kind of consciousness, is so called because it makes us aware of what the characters might have been" (lo),and I would add that the road to what "might have been" in tragedy is always paved with empathy and the receptive audience senses this by virtue of their experience of mutual empathy in relation to the limited room empathy is given on the tragic stage, but particularly on the modem tragic stage. In order to understand the identity crises of Miller's tragic characters in Death of a Sdestmrr. and especially the late. climactic scene in which Biff confronts Willy with the "truth," it is necessary to understand shame's relation to guilt and identity. And as the following reading of Death of a Salesman illustrates, it is the confrontation with feelings of shame which enable Biff to "find himself," separate his sense of identity from that of his father, and empathize with his father: moreover. it is the denial of such feelings which cripples Willy and the rest of the Loman family. UntiI Biff stops to examine who he is, while in the process of stealing the fountain pen of his old boss, Bill Oliver, his sense of himself and his behavior is determined by feelings of shame based on a family and. ultimately, socially bred belief in a conception of success and manhood rooted in illusions of self-sufficiency' and invulnerability. The dream of success that Willy Loman chooses to follow is embodied in the mythical figure of Dave Singleman, the seemingly immortal salesman of eighty-four years old who needs only to "pick up his phone and call the buyers, and without ever leaving his room, at the age of eighty-four, he made his living" (8 1). The alternative dream of success which Willy gives up in order to pursue the one embodied in Dave Singleman is embodied in the elusive, mythical figure of his brother Ben, whose words. "William, when I walked into the jungle, I was seventeen. When I walked out I was twenty-one. And, by God, I was rich!" echo, appear, and recede from the darkness of Willy's tortured consciousness. shaping his tremendously fragile sense of self-worth and sense of identity. To Willy, Ben. like Dave Singleman, is totally self-sufficient and invulnerable, to the extent that he is untouched by, and symbolically conquers, the unknown, "dark," untamed. frontier worlds of AIaska and Africa. Ironically. although the mythical "jungle1*which houses the elusive "diamonds" of success represents the key to feelings of invulnerability for Wil ly it becomes a symbol of his impending death and unbearable, fragile mortal condition. When Willy is finally close to committing suicide he is under the impression that he can guarantee his eldest son, Biff's, success, and thus his own, with the money from his life insurance policy. In his final moments of life Willy decides to rewrite the past and conquer his feelings of inadequacy and failure within the confines of his own deluded mind by joining his brother Ben on the mythical "boat" which will take him into the ever- elusive (underworld) world of success. Willy is lured into the "dark" "jungle," believing in his and his brother's immortality and invulnerability. "The jungle is dark but full of diamonds. Willy" ( 134). "It's dark there, but full of diamonds" (1 33,states the mythical figure of invulnerability and, ultimately, psychological and physical Death, just prior to Willy's final exit. It is this dream of self-sufficiency and invulnerability, and the shame and guilt which are a product of attempting to live up to it, which plague and propel the son, Biff. Even before discovering his father with "The Woman" in Boston, Biff s sense of self-worth. like that of his brother, Happy, is dependent on his father's conception of success and manhood, and his father's approval. In fact, because Willy is abandoned at the age of three by his father, his elder brother, Ben, becomes the measure of success and manhood for his sons to live up to. Ben is, in Willy's own words, "a great man!", "the only man I ever met who knew the answers" (45). "That's just the way I'm bringing them up, Ben--rugged, well liked, all-around," says Willy while re-living Ben's visit in the past. Midway through Act One of the play, as Willy's memories materialize before the audience the makings of a familial disaster are revealed. Bernard attempts to put both Willy and his favorite son, Biff, in touch with the reality that unless Biff studies he will "nunk" math, but Willy silences this voice of reality with the words, "Don't be a pest, Bernard! To his boys: What an anemic!" (33). We then see a teenaged Biff through the proud memory of his father: Willy asks Biff, "Bernard is not well liked, is he?" and Biff replies, "He's liked, but he's not well liked" (33). From his father Biff inherits an extremely fragile sense of self-worth dependent on the perceptions of others. "Be liked and you will never want" (33), says the proud father of two sons who are, in his own words, "both built like Adonises" (33), after one of them has just repeated his own heroic creed back to him. Shame, and the sense of inadequacy and inferiority manifest in the need to prove oneself to others, is evident in both Lornan sons. and of course, the fatherless father, Willy. In Act One. Willy begs Ben to stay "a few days" more. and, in ihe process of doing so, reveals the degree to which he feels incomplete and inadequate: WILLY, lortgingly: Can't you stay a few days? You're just what I need. Ben, because I--I have a fine position here, but I--well. Dad Ieft when 1 was such a baby and I never had a chance to talk to him and I still feel-- kind of temporary about myself. (5 1 ) The fact that Willy feels "kind of temporary about" himself is reflected in his inability to complete a thought after he has raised the issue of his identity--the "I." This confession is riddled with dashes--or, in other words, uncomfortable, self-conscious pauses. While in the presence of his god-like brother, Ben, Willy, out of shame, constantIy attempts to cover up the sense of failure and inferiority which threatens to expose his sense of inadequacy and weakness every time he is about to say what the "I" really feels- Willy is driven to commit his greatest wrong by feelings of shame which arise out of his sense of inadequacy as a man. His adulterous affair with "The Woman" in Boston, which haunts both him and his son, Biff, is a desperate attempt to confirm and maintain his self-esteem. In the middle of Act One, while re-living the past, Willy confesses to his wife that "people don't seem to take to me" (38), that he "talk[s] too much. A man oughta come in with few words. One thing about Charley. He's a man of few words, and they respect him" (37). After this confession, 'The Woman" appears "behind a scrim" as his feelings of guilt for the betrayal of his wife surface in his words to her. Just prior to "The Woman's" first spoken words and interruption, Willy attempts to make sense of his betrayal without mentioning it: WILLY, with great feeling: You're the best there is, Linda, you're a pal. you know that? On the road--on the road I want to grab you sometimes and just kiss the life outa you. (38) "The Womarz has come from behind the scrim . . . lnriglzing" (38), and Willy continues: 'Cause I get so lonely--especially when business is bad and there's nobody to talk to. 1 get the feeling that I'll never sell anything again, that I won't make a living for you, or a business for the boys. (38) Willy believes that he turns to another woman out of loneliness for his wife, Linda. But. at the root of his loneliness, and his need of a woman, are feelings of shame he cannot face. His feelings of inadequacy as a man and provider for his family, and his underlying sense of his own mortality or vulnerability and inability to stand alone as a single-man, manifest themselves in his infidelity. He is out of control, atthough. ironically, he attempts to use his sexuality to gain a measure of control. He is driven by feelings of inadequacy and failure to seek himself outside of himself in the eyes of others. "The Woman" makes him fee1 that he is an important salesman and powerful man. After she interrupts Willy with the words, "I picked you," Willy immediately asks, "'pleased: You picked me?" (39). Again, on the same page, after she says, "And I think you're a wonderful man," Willy asks. "You picked me. heh?" (39). Just prior to leaving, 'The Woman" makes a point of saying exactly what Willy wants to hear. "I'll put you right through to the buyers," she says, and, feeling full of masculine power, "slapping her horrom." Willy responds. "Right. Well. bottoms up!" (39). The father's bravado is the son's shame. But. unlike his father, he faces, and learns from. his shame. Consequently, the play suggests that he can rebuild his sense of self-worth and re-establish his relation to others on more insightful grounds. He makes sense of his guilt by confronting the shame buried deep in his sense of identity. Ultimately, the ability to do so enables him to empathize with his father. Biff s inherited sense of inadequacy and inferiority send him "running home" in springtime from the outdoor life out West--a life which reflects his own desires and needs. And yet, it is his father's wrong, a shameful act of adultery, coupled with Biff s failure to pass math and go to university to become a football star, as he and his father had hoped. which shatters Biff s already fragile sense of identity, and sends him out West in the first place. His own desires and needs cannot hold him still. He is plagued by his father's. and his society's, measure of a person--the mighty dollar, and the dream of "building a future." Until he discovers his father with "The Woman" in Boston, Willy is as good as a god to Biff. Biff arrives at the hotel in Boston under the belief that if his math teacher "saw the kind of man" (1 18) his "Dad" is that all his problems would disappear. But once Biff realizes that his father has betrayed his mother, and thus his father's self-perpetuated image of invulnerability. he loses all faith in his father and himself. "He [the math teacher] wouldn't listen to you" (120), says the son whose whole sense of identity has been shattered along with his idealized image of his father. So, rather than expose his father's shame, which, at some level, he experiences as his own, Biff runs, and attempts to hide from the collapse of the ideal, invulnerable. infallible image of his father. In doing so, the source of his sense of identity in shame goes unquestioned. He continues to steal and move from job to job, not so much because he feels guilty, but because he feels ashamed of himself for not living up to an image of success which has already been proven to be a "fake." After he witnesses his father give "The Woman" "Mama's stockings!" ( 12 1 ). Biff calls his father a "liar!" a "fake!" and a "phony little fake!" ( 12 1 ). He does not, however, reconcile this image of his father with his sense of himself: that is, not until he is in the process of stealing the fountain pen of his old boss, Bill Oliver. As he says to his father, "I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw--the sky" (132)--the same sky which is obscured from view by the "towering, cingrrlar shapes . . . strrrormding" the Loman home "on all sides" ( 1 1 ), and which also forms part of the "inspiring" outdoor world Biff has left behind. Biff goes to see Oliver in a futile attempt to fit his, if you will, circular self, into an "angular" world--a world in the process of crushing both the son and the father--men far more adept at using their hands than they are at using a pen. After revealing to his father that he has taken Oliver's pen. and that he cannot face Oliver again. Willy accuses him of not wanting "to be anything" ( 1 12), and Biff, "now angry at Will? for lot crediting his sympathy" ( 1 12). exclaims, "Don't take it that way! You think it was easy walking into that office after what I'd done to him? '4 team of horses couldn't have dragged me back to Bill Oliver!" ( 1 1 2- 13). There is no question that Biff feels guilty for what he has "done to" Oliver, first. by stealing "that carton of basketballs" (26) years ago, and second, by stealing his fountain pen. On the other hand, he also feels extremely ashamed of himself. Biff's inherited sense of shame drives him to steal and perform for his father. The fact that he steals does not, however, bother his father too much. Guilt can be concealed and. perhaps. forgiven and forgotten. Willy suggests as much when he advises Biff to say to Oliver: "You were doing a crossword puzzle and accidentally used his pen!" (1 12). But Biff's sense of himself is at stake and he knows it. He knows that he cannot bear to be seen (the classic sign of shame) by Oliver. He can no longer separate his sense of himself from the act of stealing- Biff says to his father: "I stole myself out of every good job since high school!" (13 1). But, in essence, as Biff now realizes, his self was stolen by his inherited. shame-ridden sense of identity. He never had a chance to see himself outside of his father's point of view. Willy feels attacked by Biff s confession that he "stole" himself "out of every good job," and responds: "And whose fault is that?" ( 13 1). Biff continues: "And I never got anywhere because you blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody! That's whose fault it is!" (13 1). Biff only understands his relation to others, notably his father, after he literally goes unnoticed and unidentified by someone he thought would recognize him: Bill 01 iver. Biff comes to the realization that there is no reason why Oliver should have recognized him, given that he couldn't recognize himself. That is, as Biff says to Happy, "I even believed myself that I'd been a salesman for him! And then he gave me one look and--I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been. We've been talking in a dream for fifteen years. I was a shipping clerk" (104). Unlike his father, whose true seif is immersed in shame and guilt, Biff's self surfaces and stays afloat because he learns about his guilt from his shame. Willy's insistence that Biff is "spiting" him by not going to see Oliver, prompts Biff to voice what he sees as the meaning behind his theft and his inability to face his old boss again: "I'm no good. can't you see what I am?" (1 13). Presumably he steals because he feels that he has to prove something to himself and others or, in other words, he feels "no good," or at least not good enough. His acts of theft are a way of making up for a sense of inadequacy and inferiority. His sense of inferiority is particularly clear given the fact that his latest theft is of the gold pen of his old boss--the man who, in the eyes of both son and father, holds the key to Biff's self-worth and future. In this case, it is not simply Biff s wrongdoing which makes him identify himself as "no good*'; he has now grasped the fact that behind his habit of breaking the law lies feelings of shame. "A sense of guilt arises from a feeling of wrongdoing, a sense of shame from a feeling of inferiority. Inferiority feelings in shame are rooted in a deeper conflict in the personality than the sense of wrongdoing in guilt" (22),says Lynd in On S/zanze and the Search for Ideu rig. Biff s question to his father, "can't you see what I am?" represents the beginnings of Biff s separation of his own identity from that of his father. By the end of Act Two, Biff is certain, as he says to his brother, that "The man don't know who we are!" (131). At this point he is determined to force his father to "hear the truth--what you are and what I am!" ( 13 1 ). He knows who he thought he was, and thus, why he steals Oliver's pen. As he reveals to his whole family: I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw--the sky. I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time to sit and smoke. And I looked at this pen and said to myself, what the hell am I grabbing this for? Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am! Why can't I say that. Willy? He tries to make Will! face lzirn, but Willy pulls uwa~and moves to the left. ( 132) "Willy." the father who has been transformed from "Dad" into simply a man in his son's eyes. cannot bear to have his dreams, and his heroic vision of his son, himself, and his own brother and father--the vision by which he lives and dies--exposed. Therefore, he "p~tllsrtrc*cl_v" in shame, before standing his ground and yelling, b'\vith hatred, tlzrenteniizgly:The door of your 1ife is wide open!" ( 1 32). Unlike the scene in the restaurant, in which Biff presents Happy with "the rolled-up hose" with which Willy intends to commit suicide, and tells his brother that he "can't bear to look at his [father's] face!" out of shame, this time Biff does not turn away from his father. He insists on the truth being truly heard by his father. It is only after he realizes that this is an impossibility that he "pulls away." 'There's no spite in it any more. I'm just what I am, that's all" ( 133), says the son to his father. He now knows that he is only "nothing" under the umbrella of his father's destructive vision. By the end of Act Two, Biff has a relatively clear understanding of who he is, or, at the very least, who he is not. "I am not a leader of men," he says to his father in a 'frtn?," before "he break down, sobbing" (1 32-33). But his father cannot empathize with him because he is incapable of facing his own feelings of guilt and shame. To Willy, Biff's tears symbolize simply his son's love, and not, in any way, the struggle to separate from him. Biff demonstrates that he does in fact love his father, but at the same time this love is baianced by the recognition that if there is any chance of saving himself and his father he must leave home for good. The complexity of his feelings for his father goes unrecognized however. Willy's response to Biffs breakdown is: "Oh, Biff! Staring wifdIy:He cried! Cried to me. He is choking with his love, and now cries out his pronrise: That boy--that boy is going to be magnificent!" (133). What Biff wants from his father he ends up giving, without getting it back. He wants not only love. but empathy. Moreover, after confronting his own shame and discovering who he is not--that is, not the "boy" his father belie.~eshim to be--Biff demonstrates his ability to separate from his father, and, consequently, his ability to empathize with him. In tears, he asks his father: "Will you let me go, for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and bum it before something happens?" (133). He is not simply asking for his own freedom from the shame produced by not living up to the dream of success and being "well liked"; he is asking for his father's freedom from shame and guilt as well. He feels for his father, ar?d recognizes how "that phony dream" tortures him. at the same time that he retains his own sense of identity. But nothing can save Willy from his inability to accept the failure to live up to his own expectations--not even his son's empathy and forgiveness. Both are powerless in the face of shame.' In Requiem. the final moments of Miller's modem tragedy, Biff is alone in his empathic understanding. Even Charley does not understand the meaning of Biff s final words about his father: "He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong. . . . He never knew who he was" ( 138). As John Hagopian says in "Arthur Miller: The Safestnuri's Two Cases." "the dialogue of the 'Requiem' shows that Biff is a new man. that he--and only he--truly understood his father" (41 ). Happy is "ready to fight" after Biff states that his father "had the wrong dreams," and Charley responds to this statement by saying "to Bifi Nobody dast blame this man. You don't understand: Willy was a salesman" (l38)." But. as Linda suggests prior to these sympathetic words by Charley, "He was so wonderfui with his hands" (138), and it is this very suggestion which triggers Biff s final, telling statement about his father's dreams. Willy Loman was more himself, relatively free of guilt and shame, when he worked with his hands, than at any other time in his life. Driven by shame, he kills himself in order to preserve his dream of being "well liked" and a successful father and salesman. Of course, the irony is that because of his suicide the odds are very good that neither of his sons will benefit from his sacrifice, and nobody from his world of sales comes to his funeral. Linda's words at the end of the play, "We're free and clear" (139). reveal the degree to which she and her husband lived in denial, in fear of exposing the man who hid in shame behind the idea of being a salesman. Unlike Biff, Willy does not confront and come to terms with his shame. and therefore he can never understand his guilt, nor his son's pain and his responsibility for it. On the other hand, a complex relationship between shame, guilt, empathy and the search for identity is made more accessible to the audience through Miller's use of the tragic tandem of Willy and %iff. The two very different responses to shame on the part of father and son qualify and inform one another to the extent that they reveal the two faces of shame I spoke of in Chapter 2. Willy, like Sophocles's Philoctetes, is crippled by shame. and Biff, like Sophocles's Neopiolemus, manages to use feelings of shame to propel him out of a more narcissistic frame of mind into a more empathic one. Like Shakespeare's Lear, Willy has his moments of relative clarity, or at least humility. when, for instance, he appears to acknowledge to his wife, Linda, that one does not necessarily have to be like "Ben--rugged, well liked, all-round (49), as long as one is like Charley. "a man of few words" (37) who is respected by others. But, ultimately, unlike his friend Charley, WilIy cannot "see" others through his shame-ridden sense of himself, therefore he feels "foolish" and does not earn their respect. "I'm fat. I'm very-- foolish to look at, Linda" (37), says the man who feels that the only response to his sense of inadequacy and feelings of shame is to "overcome" them. In this sense, he is not all that different from Prometheus, Philoctetes, Lear, and Hedda. Moreover. Miller, like Sophocles in the Pkiloctetes and Shakespeare in King Lear, and unlike Aeschylus in Prometllerts Bound and Ibsen in Hedda Gabler, provides us with what he calls an 6. opposing," essentially empathic "system of love," embodied in the character of Biff, which enables at least one member of a tragic tandem to move beyond patterns of behavior governed by the defenses of the narcissistic self in denial. In Requiem, we are witness to a more or less failed mourning ritual as Biff's empathic understanding goes unrecognized by his fellow mourners. but the audience, in theatrical circumstances ideal for the experience of empathy, is prepared to recognize Biffs insight and the more limited views of those who surround him. Based on Biff s more successful confrontation with shame and experience of the "truth," he is able to re- trace and thus transfigure the character of personal and familial memories, particularIy those of the heroic, more or less mythical father. Based on my reading of tragedy and personal experience, it seems that this process of memory transfiguration is essential to successfuI mourning. In communal mourning situations, like that at the end of The Persinrls or The Bacclzae, the shameful, horrific truths of the past are integrated into personal and social memory, so that the present fabric of memory meshes with the memories of all mourners effected by communal losses. The problem in Miller's modem tragedy is that within the fragile community of the Loman family, which clings to myths created and held together by denial, there seems to be no avenue to share the "truth" for the more enlightened Biff. Both Loman brothers, and especially Biff, are extremely protective of their mother, and Linda is the guardian of Willy's dreams and ego. Biff s attempt at altering the idealized and, ultimately, destructive myth of the father--"He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong. . . . T --is not accepted by those around him. The myth of the invulnerable father and "rugged" manhood (which began with Willy's father and was carried on by Willy 's older brother, Ben, both of whom presumably traveled to the frontier world of Alaska) is tremendously seductive--so much so that Willy believes he is following Ben into the frontier world, which houses the secret to success, when he takes his own life. Biff s statement about his father's misguided dreams is an anomaly which represents only the potential for a familial paradigm shift. This anomalous, potentially therapeutic statement is, if you wil1, the tip of an iceberg raising its head above the surface of a sea of illusions and memories based on denial and shame. Below the tip of this iceberg of truth lies a vortex of truths, at the center of which iies the truth of Willy's infidelity and the reasons for it. The tip of the iceberg of anomalous memory and knowledge--insight born of a confrontation with shame and empathy and not resentment as other characters (and certain readers) of Miller's play suppose--is rejected however. Biff s knowledge and memory of his father's infidelity, shame, and guilt, could not be tolerated. thus the community is doomed to continue on its destructive course. As a matter of fact, Willy's destructive legacy will continue on with the son who is most like him. Happy Loman. Happy's final words to Biff, ''All right, boy. I'm gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. . . ." (138-9), say it all. Biff's taboo knowledge will die with him out west. Uniike in ancient Greek tragedies, such as Sophocles's Oedipus plays, in Miller's modem tragedy, Death of cr Sdesrncrn. the taboo is not integrated into communal memory and as a result, as in Shakespeare's Lear or Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, the community's fate is poignantly bleak, and the audience "knows" why. The trazic tandem of Willy and Biff serve to dramatize a series of complex, but comprehensible, related psychological processes which are fundamental to the tragic experience. In ''Tragedy and the Common an,"' Miller states that "In [tragedies] . . . , and in them alone, lies the belief--optimistic if you will--in the perfectibility of man," and in Death of a Salesman he suggests, perhaps unintentionally, that the path to "perfection" lies in a confrontation with feelings of shame which enable one to understand guilt and arrive at a more clear sense of identity, as well as to empathize with others. In a tragedy such as Death of a Salesman the audience has the opportunity to witness the interaction between two tragic characters, one who manages to travel on this path to "perfection" and one who is incapable of such a journey. Willy's suicide and unsuccessful struggle to deny the body and Biff s "self-realization" and final alienated empathic condition serve to symbolize the inherent difficulty of ever establishing an ethical community in a modern world in which the "father" is narcissistic and ineffectual. Indeed, the total collapse of the patriarchal system of human relations and worldview seems to be at least part of what distinguishes modem tragedy from its ancient Greek ancestor. I believe, as I suggest in the following chapter, that the birth of tragedy is a response to a crisis in Greek society. Based on my reading of Greek tragedy, the patriarchal system of familial and communal relations in fifth-century Greece was in the process of breaking down. although it remained very much intact. The anxiety over female sexuality and power evident in tragedy from the Greeks on seems to be a manifestation of this breakdown."n the other hand, in the ancient Greek world represented on stage in tragedy the idea of the patriarchal family and ethical community seem inextricable. In the modem world represented in modem tragedy, however, the family becomes a symbolic community seemingly incapable of an ethical existence. In Greek tragedy, one's patriarchal identity is not always what one thought it was, as is the case for Oedipus in Oedipus the King, or the father is dead, as is the case for Neoptolemus in the Philoctetes, Pentheus in the Bacckae. and Xerxes in the Persiuns. The tragic children who suffer in their father's absence must learn to behave ethically with the help of the community through a mourning process. The shame which drives these children, and their horrific actions, is integrated into a larger communal framework which leads to a complex sense of identity and ethical relations. In Greek tragedy, until individuals expose themselves within an empathic framework of mourning they suffer from overwhelming feelings of shame and Ioss as they struggle to deny the body without empathy from others, something which does not happen in Homeric epics. Homeric heroes take for granted a stable sense of identity based on secure patriarchal kinship bonds and an ethical community in which death and mourning is part of everyday life.'' Death of a Salesman and Kirzg Lear are paradigmatic examples of a modem tragic world in which the collapse of the patriarchal system has led to the absence of ethical community. The mutual empathy which characterizes the closing moments of mourning in the Persiuns and the Baccltae is impossible at the end of Death of a Salesman and Lear. The fact, however, that one character in each of these two modern plays manages to empathize with another character leaves open the possibility that at some point in the future modern society may be able to foster empathy and ethical communities. But this possibility is dependent on finding alternative ways of conceiving of the self and the other which involve the acknowledgment of vulnerability and the lack of control most evident in mortality and sexuality. Death of a Salesman and Lear dramatize the collapse of the image of the invulnerable father and patriarchy. That is to say, the father and his inherent powers and value can no longer be taken for granted in the modern worlds of these two plays. In the opening scenes of both plays, the father's prominence and power is already in question. From the outset of Death of a Salesman, the father, Willy. is possessed by the fact that he is not going to leave anything of (monetary) value behind for the "boys." At an unconscious level, he knows that his "name" is worthless. Moreover, Death of a Salestnun and King LRar open with the announcement by the father that he is dying. Willy explains to Linda that he is "tired to death" and that he "couldn't make it" ( 13) out of Yonkers to begin his week's work. He cannot pay his bills and he is incapable of securing a successfuI financial future--the only "futurew-for his "boys." But Willy's dream of the "future" is all-consuming and he intends to "start out [again] in the morning" ( 13). Lear, on the other hand, announces his desire to "crawl toward death" "Unburdened." The security of the king's future and identity rests on the value he and his children place on his "lands" and royal powers and the link they make, or do not make. between his power and his paternity. In Lear, Lear and Gloucester suffer largely because children betray a sense of identity which is based on inherent respect for the father. Part of Lear's tragedy is that he does not recognize that the "power, / Preeminence. and all the large effects / That troop with majesty" (I.i, 130-20), which he grants to his daughters and "sons," are the key to his sense of identity, for himself and his children. The fact that he "retain[s] I The name and all th' addition to a king" and his position as father does not amount to much in this modem world. In essence, Lear believes that his value lies in his "name," but, as he perhaps glimpses while mad and while emerging from madness, this is not the case. If this play proves anything, it is that a sense of identity must be based on much more than one's position in a family or a society. At least two of Lear's children place no value on the "name" of king or father. Lear adopts a position in his society, king and father by "name" only, which reflects how he feels about himself. He is in need of "kind nursery." But his vulnerability, both politically and personally. represents only weakness for Goneril and Regan. Until Act V his vulnerability threatens the youngest daughter, Cordelia. On the other hand, in Act V Cordelia's empathic silence demonstrates the only ethical response to the collapse of the father and the patriarchal system for which he stands. This kind of response is beyond the shame-ridden Edgar who intends to carry on the tradition of the "fathers" without understanding how or why it has failed. In Death of n Salesnzun, Willy's vision of "success" and manhood will be carried on by his son Happy. Biff, like Cordelia. is alone in his acceptance and understanding of the breakdown and destructiveness of the father's image of invulnerability and the dream of "success." Biff recognizes that the vision of his father is an empty one. Like his own father, Willy abandons his sons and himself in the midst of a quest for the "success" that he feels guarantees him a sense of belonging and significance or, in other words, a sense of identity and immortality. Willy, the fatherless father, is an abandoned child who longs for the recognition and vision of a father. The image of a father that he ends up latching onto rests in his brother, Ben. But Ben's image, and fleeting presence. serve only to exacerbate Willy 'sshame-ridden sense of identity and drive him to self-destruction. Any challenge to the ideal image of the invulnerable father and "salesman" is subject to denial by alrrzost all members of this broken community where "success" and identity are so closely tied. Thus, while caught in denial, this community cannot see the value of empathic insight embodied in Biff's final words about his father. The stable sense of identity which Lear and Willy seek to secure is something that comes naturally to Homer's heroes, but for the heroes of Greek tragedy it comes with a fight. and with modem heroes it rarely comes at all. Ultimately, there is nothing of any inherent, lasting value in a modern world, not even one's position as "successful" father or king. There is one exception however: the capacity to come to terms with oneself as one among many vulnerable human beings subject to the realities of the body. Tragedies. both modern and Greek, suggest that this kind of awareness opens up the world of empathy and ethical community. Notes 'In "Arthur Miller: The Salesnrun 's Two Cases," John Hagopian argues that Biff is "the main figure in Death of a Salesman'' (35) based on the assumption that "The protagonist of a drama must be the one who struggles most for understanding, who faces the most crucial question, who achieves the most transforming insight. and whose motives, decisions. and actions most influence the total situation" (35). 'AS I suggest in Chapter 3, the fact that shame propels tragic characters into wrongdoing and guilt is particularly evident in Shakespeare's King Lea. See pages 5-6 of the Introduction for a detailed discussion of the distinction and relation between shame and guilt. See also note 17 of Chapter 6 on this issue. 'I can also imagine Ibsen saying something similar about Mrs. Alving of Ghosts. I argue for Mrs. Alving's central tragic role in Part I11 of Chapter 6. 'In "The Salesman Has a Birthday." Miller says: I remember the rehearsal [for the first production of Death of a Salesman] when we had our first audience. Six or seven friends. The play working itself out under the single bulb overhead. I think that was the first and only time I saw it as others see it. Then it seemed to me that we must be a terribly lonely people, cut off from each other by such massive pretense of self-sufficiency, machined down so fine we hardly touch any more. We are trying to save ourselves separately, and that is immoral, that is the corrosive among us. ( 1 3) iff s relationship with his father is remarkably similar to Cordelia's with her father. In both cases, it is the favorite child, in need of empathy from the father, who is forced to learn to empathize due to the father's narcissism. Biff and Cordelia fail in their attempts to get the father to see the "truth" and eventually they are faced with the father's limits and vulnerability. As adult chiidren Biff and Cordelia must mourn the loss of the invulnerable father and develop a sense of self independent of the father. This independence is manifest in Cordelia's decision to go along with her father's final, shame-driven choice to retreat from political and bodily realities--from life-- into prison and death. For Biff this independence is manifest in his decision to leave home for good for the sake of both his father and himself. In either case, the child's empathy and forgiveness does not save the father from himself, but it does demonstrate to the audience how to live ethically, according to "the fragility of goodness." "ASHagopian points out, in the fifth section of "Introduction to the Collected Plaj.~,''Miller defends Death of a Salesrrzan as "a work of art" that "cannot be equated with a political philosophy" (150). In this same fifth section Miller also states that "The most decent man in Death of a Salesman is a capitalist (Charley) whose aims are not different from Willy Loman's. The great difference between them is that Charley is not a fanatic" ( 150). Hagopian's response to such statements is telling. He argues that given such statements. and others made by lMiller on Death of a Sczlesmurt, it is clear that Arthur Miller does not understand his own play. For one thing Charley's aims regarding his son are manifestly different from Willy's, but even on the socio-economic level Miller's remarks are misleading. To be sure, in its larger dimensions Death of a Salesman is not primarily concerned with politics or economics. Nevertheless, to the extent that it is concerned with these problems the play is clearly an indictment of the profit motive, of competitive salesmanship, and of planned obsolescence-- three principal features of capitalistic society that distinguish it from other socio-economic systems. (4 1 ) I am in full agreement with Hagopian here. I would add that Miller does not seem to be aware of the fact that Charley's find words suggest that individuals. such as Charley or Willy, who accept, and even admire, "sales" and the capitalist way of life uncritically. tend to see themseives as commodities who are necessarily subject to the forces of "supply and demand" to the extent that it is common to feel. like WilIy. "kind of temporary" about oneself. Charley clearly pities the "salesman." during and after Willy's life is over, but he also accepts Willy's fate as normal and natural. "And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat. and you're finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream. boy. It comes with the territory" ( 138), concludes Charley in Requiem. Charley, like Willy, cannot separate the man from his role in the capitalist system. Biff, on the other hand, can. At his father's funeral Biff demonstrates that he understands that a sense of identity should be based on much more than the capitalist dream of success and it is for this reason that he can understand and empathize with his father. This kind of understanding is beyond Charley--he is too comfortable in his capitalist shoes. Charley may be a "decent man," but his pity, like Edgar's for Lear at the end of Shakespeare's play, offers little hope for a community in ruins. Crn the other hand, Biff s empathic insight into his father's death does suggest that individuals can see beyond the limits of a world in which human relationships are, in essence, governed by shame and denial. 'In "Tragedy and the Common Man." written in 1949. Miller's arguments for the existence of modem tragedy, or "the tragedy of the common man," are different from, although generally c~mpatiblewith, my own. The parts of Miller's argument I find least compatible with my own have to do with two issues: I) Miller's emphasis on socioIogical. outside forces, and not internal, psychological ones, which challenge a tragic character's "sense of personal dignity" (4) and 2) the fact that Miller does not acknowledge that this "sense of personal dignity" and the "indestructible will of man" (7) manifest in tragic characters are largely misguided and driven by shame and denial. On the other hand, in his "Introduction to the Collected Plays," written in 1957, Miller does acknowledge "that the closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism" (1 18). My argument is that at the root of such "fanaticism" lies shame and denial. %I Tragic Ways of Killing n Wornan, Nicole Loraux explores the function of the sacrifice and death of women in ancient Greek tragedy and society. She suggests, among other things, that Greek tragedy both extends the normal reach of, and controls, female sexuality and power. "seePart 11 of Chapter 6, pages 3 14-20 in particular, for a discussion of the more "integrated civilizations" represented in Homer's works. Section III The Question of Tragedy Chapter 6 The Life and Death of Tragedy in Literary Theory In the preceding chapters, by analyzing selected plays I have attempted to illustrate how the psychological processes of shame, denial, and empathy serve to distinguish the tragic mode of expression. In this find. more theoretical chapter, I examine some of the most prominent statements on the history and character of tragedy and drama in the light of my psychological principles of tragedy. By doing so, I hope to reveal how my observations on the psychological-ethical content of the genre relate to, extend or qualify, and, in some cases, help to expose the weaknesses of, certain seminal theories of tragedy. Part I: Aristotle's "Secular" Theory and the Life of Tragedy Much like the genre of tragedy itself, Aristotle's observations on tragedy in the Poetics have been the subject of ongoing critical debate. At the heart of this debate lies the meaning of, and relation between, Aristotle's pity and fear, and the related issue of the meaning of catharsis.' With the help of Stephen Halliwell's Aristotle's Poetics and Gerald Else's notes to his translation of the Poetics and his Aristotle's Poetics: The Arg~tnzerzt,I hope to shed further light on such Aristotelian terms by illustrating what I see as the essential kinship between my principles of tragedy and Aristotle's. But in order do so it is important to examine Aristotle's view of tragedy in the context of the debate over the origin and nature of Greek tragedy. Despite Aristotle's claim in chapter 6 of the Poetics that "tragedy is an imitation not of men but of life, an action . . . [and that] a tragedy cannot exist without a plot, but it can I without characters" (27), I would like to suggest that what animates tragedy's, and thus Aristotle's, plot and action is the struggle with bodily vulnerability. As I have tried to show in the previous chapters, integral to every tragic action is the struggle with the body embedded in the entire play. This struggle is capable of precipitating either a pathos, which Aristotle describes as "a destructive or painful act" (37), or an empathic response, a kind of pity which involves a very specific psychological and dialogic experience, on the part of characters and audience members. Ar-istotle obviously did not think in such terms, but he does stress the importance of human agency and psychology in determining the character of action and, ultimately, both pity and fear. As Halliwell states: Scrutiny of the theory of tragedy outlined in the Poerics warrants us. I believe, in concluding that Aristotle is concerned to exclude from the structure of a plot all those sources of causation which are external to the actions of the human figures themselves. These sources encompass. most importantly, the full range of traditional religious explanations for events in the world. The figures of tragedy are primarily characterised as 'the agents' because it is this description which best fits the agent-centred perspective within which dramatic poetry is seen in the treatise: it is the agents themselves who are the prime causative force in the action of the play; it is they who direct, or, through the failures of action for which lzarnartia stands, misdirect, the development of events which gives the plot its structure and unity. (146) Whether or not a tragic figure "directs" or "misdirects" the course of events is dependent on the way in which they respond to the confrontation with vulnerability and a subsequent lack of control. If tragic figures acknowledge shame and vulnerability, to the extent that they can receive or express empathy, then they do not continue to act destructively. (As we have seen in previous chapters, characters as different as Xerxes. Neoptolemus and Philoctetes, Agave, Cordelia, and Biff undergo this kind of transition.) This act of acknowledgment is integral to the processes of recognition, catharsis. and pity. To acknowledge the forces of the body is to recognize that part of identity which is normally experienced as shameful, and thus denied or repressed. This is a very particular kind of knowledge or recognition--a form of self-knowledge held together by humility.' If "catharsis is not a change or end-product in the spectator's soul, or in fear and pity (i.e., the dispositions to them) in his soul, but a process carried forward in the emotional material of the play by its structural elements. above all by the recognition" (439) of a tragic character, as Else suggests in his version of the Poetics (98) and Arisrotle 's Poetics: The Argument (438), the process of catharsis is dependent on this form of self-knowledge grounded in the confrontation with vuinerability. On the other hand, 1 do not think that Else is correct in what appears to be his, and thus, apparently, Aristotle's assumption, that for the audience to undergo a catharsis the tragic figure must be "purified" of the shame and guilt attached to the tragic, destructive act. For Eke. the catharsis, in so far as it is propelled by the recognition of a character, is "precedent to the release of pity, and ultimately of the tragic pleasure" (Aristotle's Poetics 439). He suggests that the tragic figure who, for instance, murders one of his own kin (an act of pollution) must demonstrate a purification process through the expression of grief and remorse and "subsequent behavior": "And the complex plot offers precisely this kind of certification, in the recognition and the hero's subsequent behavior. It is Oedipus' self- blinding. his transport of grief and remorse when he learns the truth, that finally assures us of his 'purity' and releases our tears" (438). Oedipus does clearly express and act on remorse in Oedipris the King, but the extent to which he is able to express his grief within a communal, empathic context is minimal, thus his guilt, but particularly his shame, is unbearable for him.' He is by no means "purified." Recognition does not mean complete self-knowledge or humility for Aristotle. Oedipus looks to avoid his shame. and not to understand it. To use Aristotle's definition of shame in the Rhetoric, Oedipus "shrink[s] from the disgrace itself and not from its consequences" ( 109). The apparent fact of Oedipus's guilt is. in a way, beside the tragic point. His guilt cannot help him to understand his relation to what he has done. If he faces his shame, on the other hand, he can begin to rebuild his sense of self based on a confrontation with the realities of the body which horrify him and those who surround him.' But he cannot bear to see what he is and how he is related to others. He takes out his own eyes, the literal and symbolic vehicle of shame. He then begs to be hidden, "to be forever / out of your [the Chorus's] sight" (11. 14 12- 13), or to be killed. As Aristotle points out in the Rhetoric, "we feel more shame when we are likely to be continually seen by, and go about under the eyes of, those who know of our disgrace" (I 1 1). At the end of Sophocles's Oedipus the King, the tragic hero is overwhelmed by feelings of shame to the extent that he is incapable of the kind of self-knowledge and humility which is the product of coming to terms with lack of control and vulnerability. Oedipus insists that Creon "not take them [his daughters] from him" (1. 1524) and immediately Creon reminds him "not [to] seek to be master in everything" (1. 1525). Oedipus's shame is yet to be placed in a communal. humanized context through empathy and mourning. His part in Else's process of catharsis is, in this sense, incomplete, but this does not imply that the audience's catharsis is incomplete. Tragic characters differ in the degree to which they are capable of coming to terms with their own vulnerability, and thus. in a sense, the degree to which they are able to "purify" themselves. One thing seems certain. however. and I believe this is implicit in (although not necessarily intended by) AristotIe's statements about tragedy, and that is, that at the root of tragic action lies the struggle to deny the body and the attempt, on the part of the dramatist, to articulate the empathic process.' For me, and in his own terms, I think for Aristotle. the extent to which a tragedy dramatizes this struggle and this process is the measure of its success. The mimetic experience of tragedy is not, on the other hand, an inherently religious one. Although I agree with Halliwell's conclusion that Aristotle's theory of tragedy stresses human agency over external sources of causation. I do not agree with his statement that Aristotle's "conception of tragedy" comes into conflict "with the general status of the gods in Greek myth, and hence in tragedy, as active forces which lie at and beyond the limits of human comprehension, and which therefore cannot be reduced to the level of steady and rational expectations. The discrepancy between such an outlook and the requirements of Aristotle's view of tragedy is ineliminable" (my italics) (233). I believe that Halliwell does something misleading. and typical, when he equates "the general status of gods in Greek myth" with those in tragedy. If there is a "discrepancy," it appears to be between the presentation of the gods in Greek myth and tragedy, and not simply between the gods in Greek myth and Aristotle's "requirements." The actions of the gods in tragedy are always qualified within a dramatic, self-reflexive context which seems foreign to Greek myth. The tragedy of a piece of literature has to do with the fact that the actions of a tragic figure cannot be judged except on his or her own terms--according to a personal, peculiar necessity, and not simply some predetermined plan. This goes for Aeschylus's Prornetheus as well as Ibsen's Hedda Gabler- The fact of actors on stage playing gods as well as men and women of heroic and mythic stature, and the Fact that, as Aristotle suggests, in the best of tragedies the audience is always simultaneousIy implicated in, but distant from. the actions and feelings performed, creates a critical context very different from that of myth. The point I think Aristotle is making. and really takes for granted. is that tragic plots are driven by the actions of human beings, and not gods. despite the fact that the active influence of the gods is present in the plays and native to the original myths which act as a foundation for the playwright's creation." The characters of the drama may believe or not believe that events are determined by the gods to a greater or lesser degree. and this may have been true of the fifth-century l3.C. audience as well, but the point is that characters are held responsible for, and feel responsible for their fate. no matter how irrational or paradoxical it may be. The complex tragic plot secures this level of responsibility, and thus the essential tragic experience of the paradoxical reality that, although we may not be in control. we are responsible, active, free human agents. Although I do not believe that the Greeks of Homer's day, nor those of the heroic mythical times about which he writes, thought of themselves in relation to the gods in the same way that the fifth-century B.C. Greeks did, 1 think that Naiman and Valeri-Tomaszuk are more right than others when they insist that although fifth-century Greeks thought that "Homeric heroes . . . must die on their 'appointed day' . . . it never occurs to the poet or his audience that this prevents them from being free agents? Speaking along the same lines in Greek Tragedy it2 Actiorr, Oliver Taplin claims that "it is the action which takes place on stage which is important. and is part of what the play is about: the action off-stage is only of interest in so far as it is given attention on stage. . . . [Tlhe stuff of tragedy is the individual responses to such events ['the huge violent events of narrative history' which take place in the past of the play or off-stage]; not the blood, but the tears. It is the life-sized actions of this personal dimension which are the dramatist's concern, and which he puts on stage" ( I6 1 ). Addressing the "misconception that Greek tragedy basically shows the working of Fate, of men fastened to the puppetry of higher powers" (165), Taplin states that "[mlost of the time they [trasic characters] are presented as free agents working out their own destinies" (165). Moreover, the fact that Aristotle suggests that causation occurs at the level of human agency, and not the gods, does not mean that the process of causation is "reclriced to the level of steady and rational expectations" (my italics). Plays which Aristotle admires most. Oediplis the King and Iphigeniu in Taitris for example, are compelling and tragic because certain events, which are, I have argued, driven by certain psychological processes, take shape according to certain principles. "The price of Aristotle's philosophical rupprochenlent with tragic poets." says Halliwell, "turns out, at the level of ideal theory, to be secularization'' (233). I don't believe that Aristotle felt that he was paying any such "price" and for good reason. Halliwell seems to buy into the romantic view of Greek tragedy as ritual and religious event held by Friedrich Nietzsche, George Steiner, and others. Taplin refers to this view as the "ritual fallacy" ( 165). Although they do so differently, both Taplin, in Greek Tragedy in Action, and Else, in The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy, expose the inherent problems with the view that tragedy has its origins in Dionysiac religious cult. Consideration of the question as to "the origin and early form of Greek tragedy" is crucial to the discussion of the meaning of the Poetics and tragedy in general. It seems that if Greek tragedy is inherently religious and ritualistic, the Aristotelian emphasis on human agency and my emphasis on the psychological processes which animate and structure cragic action, appear to misrepresent the genre. Rethinking The Birth of Tragedy in part four of his "Attempt at Self-Criticism," Nietzsche asks. "Indeed, what is Dionysian'?" (20). Is this the right question to ask? Is tragedy inherently "Dionysian"? In Greek Tragedy in Action, Taplin argues: For the Athenians the great Dionysia was an occasion to stop work, drink a lot of wine, eat some meat, and witness or participate in the various ceremonials, processions and priestly doings which are part of such holidays the world over. It was also the occasion for tragedy and comedy; but I do not see any way in which the Dionysiac occasion invades or affects the entertainment. Some Athenians complained that tragedy was 'nothing to do with Dionysus' (cf. our Christmas): but whatever everyone else went for it was evidently not another ritual, nor in any obvious or overt sense for a religious experience. To put it another way, there is nothing intrinsically Dionysiac about Greek tragedy. ( 162) in his "Attempt at Self-Criticism," Nietzsche speaks of the caution he would exercise if he were to once again approach "such a difficult psychological question as that concerning the origin of tragedy among the Greeks" (2 1). But he is convinced that the "tragic and comic art developed out of "Dionysian madnessv--a kind of "neuroses of health" (21). Nietzsche asks, "What experience of himself, what urge compelled the Greek to conceive the Dionysian enthusiast and primeval man as a satyr?" (2 1). In The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy, Else attacks this approach head on. He asks whether or not the birth of tragedy had anything to do with Dionysian cult and dithyramb or satyr-drama, or, in other words, whether "its source was a certain primitive ritual sequence" (3). For Else. the origin of tragedy lies specifically in the sixth-century B.C. creations of Solon, a poet of politics, who in the performance of his poetry "places himself before us as a public person, and the way to his self-revelation was not through passion but through rational insight into men's characters and motives--other men's as well as his own"' (43), and Thespis, "the first tragic poet to appear at the Dionysia" (57 j, whose tragedy is characterized by what Else cc?lls the moment of "the hero's pathos" which involves "a self-presentation . . . of the hero's sitrtntion, his fate. And this situation has a special focus: not what the hero does but what he suffers; not his display of prowess, his moment of glory on the battlefield or in council, but his moment of disaster or failure: death, loss, humiliation" (65). Else believes that These two categories [of chorus found in the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles respectively] represent groups bound to the hero by special ties: in one case a feudal, quasi-familial relationship, in the other a civic one. There is no visible reason why both types should not go back to Thespis. The citizen chorus is the root manifestation of the political element in Greek tragedy, an element which distinguishes it clearly from epic. Through it the audience is bound into a special relationship with the hero. . . . Thus in mourning the hero the chorus, and through it the audience, is lamenting its king or great man and so lamenting in its own cause. The expression of sorrow is a communal act, a shared experience of the whole body politic- I would urge that this was an essential, indeed rhe essential. feature of Thespian tragedy. (66-67) Tragedy appears to have always been concerned with dramatizing the need for a communal expression of sorrow which emerges out a confrontation with "death. loss, humiliation"--utter vulnerability. Moreover, I believe that the crises of vulnerability, and more specifically, the dynamics of denial and shame, as well as the psychological processes involved in the communal act of mourning, are fundamental processes which dictate the structure of tragic plots. In The Birrlt of Tragedy, Nietzsche states that "Through tragedy the myth attains its most profound content, its most expressive form; it rises once more like a wounded hero" (75), but the considerable extent to which tragedy represents a rvorrnded mythic, heroic way of life is something Nietzsche, Halliwell. and, as I will discuss later. Georg Luk5cs and George Steiner. do not seem to recognize. This neglect leads to some questionable conclusions about tragedy, and particularly Euripidean tragedy, In fact, in the light of the views of Taplin and Else on the origins of Greek tragedy, and Walter Kaufmann's Tragedy and Philosophy (which exposes the inherent flaws in Nietzsche's attack on Euripides and Nietzsche's romantic conception of the Dionysian in the drama of Aeschylus and Sophocles), Nietzsche's claim that the combined rational forces of Euripides and Socrates sealed the fate of tragedy becomes more or less untenabie. In the thirty-seventh section of Tragedy and Plzilosophy, "Aeschylus' 'optimism,"' Kaufmann points out that the rational, judicial procedure which solves the conflict between Orestes and the Furies in very patriotic fashion in The Elirneniclrs. is "almost entirely Aeschylus' own invention" (207). He goes on to say that "In The Ezimerzides, finally, we encounter in absotutely climactic form that rationalism and optimism of which tragedy is said to have died--and find them at the culmination of the greatest work of the so-caIled creator of tragedy" (207). At the end of "Aeschylus' 'optimism"' Kaufmann summarizes his argument against those critics iike Nietzsche and Steiner who believe that tragedy must end pessimistically in catastrophe: We have already seen that Sophocles' last three plays were not tragedies in the narrow, modern sense either, and that only his Arttigone, Womert of Trachis and Oedipus Tyrartnus end in complete catastrophe. And according to Nietzsche, tragedy died under Euripides' violent hands. Clearly, Nietzsche's reputation, too, is at stake; for from what we have found it appears that he was utterly wrong both about Aeschylus and about the alleged death of tragedy. And yet more is at stake. It has been said that it was "not between Euripides and Shakespeare that the Western mind turns away from the ancient tragic sense of life. It is after the late 17th Century." [These last words are those of George Steiner in The Death of Tragedy.] What becomes of the ancient--or any--"tragic sense of life"? If the Greek tragic poets lacked it no less than Ibsen and the modems, was it merely an Elizabethan phenomenon? . . . and are there any good reasons for saying that tragedy is dead? (2 1 1 ) There seems to be little doubt that both the rational and optimistic, and the passionate or irrational and pessimistic, are part of the origins of tragedy, but the assumption that the origins of tragedy lie in the religious and ritual does appear to be highly questionable. Aristotle's Poetics confirms these conclusions. Halliwell seems to be correct when he concludes that "the Poetics posits a type of tragedy from which divine agency is to be excluded" (233). but the fact that he claims that Aristotle "secularizes" the religious is inherently problematic and misleading in terms of Aristotle's Poetics, Greek tragedy. and tragedy in general. The romanticization of Greek tragedy as religious experience leads critics like Nietzsche and Steiner to believe that tragedy is dead. In typically direct fashion, in Greek Tragedy in Action Taplin attacks those who adhere to the "ritual fallacy": I would go further and suggest that it was a necessary precondition of the great age of Greek tragedy that the drama should not have been a ritual. It had to be human and various, beyond the control of repeated superstition, ancestral taboo, actions stylized and codified beyond anything mimetic--it had to exploit ritual, not just conserve and subserve it. This break with the repetitiousness of ritual may well have been one of the great achievements of tragedy's creators. The impulse among modem critics to impose ritual patterns was largely inspired by the rise of comparative anthropoIogical studies. For when it was seen how rituals. including some semi-dramatic rituals, are so extremely important in primitive societies, it was an obvious step to expect ritual patterns in Greek tragedy. What this approach, which is still active, underestimates is the extent to which classical Greek culture had gone beyond the 'primitive,' and moved on in the direction, whether or not one regards it as a beneficial progress, taken since by Western civilization. ( 16 1-2) Taplin's view of the origins of tragedy meshes well with that of Aristotle. Aristotle's mimesis is. it seems, the exploitation of ritual in order that an audience arrive at a very specific form of emotional understanding. As HaIliwell states: "When functioning properly, emotions such as pity and fear are consistent with reason and are a reflex of its judgments; if this were otherwise, the Poetics' whole emphasis on the artistic means for eliciting them would lose its point and force" (196).' According to Halliwell, Aristotle's secular theory of tragedy is "contrary to the practice of the tragedians themselves" (233) because it "puts human ignorance and fallibility at the center of the genre. making these the active yet innocent causes of the great disturbances in fortune which furnish tragedy's characte~isticsubject-matter" (233). On the other hand, this emphasis on the fallible and vulnerable as the catalyst for tragic action is. so far as I am concerned, the source of Aristotle's greatest insight into the essence of tragedy. Halliwell is consistent in pointing out that Aristotle's theory of tragedy is based on philosophical and psychological insights into the human condition revealed in other works such as the Rhetoric and the Polirics. Indeed, Aristotle's discussion of the emotions of shame, pity, and fear (or terror) in the Rheroric, reveals a philosopher well aware of the inseparable relationship between the philosophical and the psychological and the rational and emotional. The articulation of this awareness in the context of his discussion of tragedy is, as scholars like Halliwell have suggested, likely a response to Plato's attempt to divorce the ethical from the political or, in essence, the practical and rational from the emotional. Nietzsche's TCze Birth of Tragedy, with its idealization of the apparent ecstatic, ritualistic roots of tragedy, is more of a response to a Platonic and Hegelian view of tragedy than it is to an Aristotelian one. In his study of the Poetics, Halliwell argues convincingly for the "interlocking nature of pity and fear" (177) and the "objective and subjective elements in Aristotle's conception of the tragic experience" (177). He does so by comparing Aristotle's discussion of pity and fear in the Rhetoric to his discussion of these terms in the Poetics. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle makes it quite clear that in order to feel pity one must be "between extremes," so that one feels "near" the suffering of others, but not too "near": "'For our feeling is no longer pity [but terror] when the danger is near ourselves"' (Rlzetoric 1 14). What Halliwell ends up describing in his discussion of pity and fear, without labeling it as such, is an empathic process: What this passage [in the Rhetoric] therefore allows us to see is that the sort of sympathy which pity entails requires a certain distance between pitier and pitied; if this distance is removed, the predominantly altruistic emotion of pity is obliterated by a practically complete affective identification between oneself and the other. Hence, for the tragic experience of pity and fear, the altruistic must outweigh the self-regarding, though some degree of the latter is actually implied, we have seen, in the former. Yet the predominance of the altruistic does not in itseif mean the predominance of pity over fear, since tragic fear is focussed in the first place on the fictional agents of the drama, not on ourselves. Moreover, tragedies of averted catastrophe, which Aristotle recommends in ch. 14, may even give more scope to fear than to pity. But it seems prudent not to try to do what the Poetics itself avoids doing, namely to tilt the balance in fwour of one of the two emotions in the compound of pity and fear: but instead to concentrate on the apparent inseparability of these two elements in Aristotle's theory of the experience of tragic drama. This inseparability is strengthened when we return to the Poetics' own succinct requirements for pity and fear-innocence, and likeness to ourselves, in the characters of tragedy. These requirements are attached respectively to pity and fear, but it is probable that each of them is also at least a partial condition for the other emotion too. ( 178) "[Tlhe special character of this [tragic] kind of poetry" (38) has to do with the imitation "of fearful and pitiable happenings" (37-8). says Aristotle in chapter 12 of the Poetics. I believe that the experience of empathy, or "that sort of sympathy which pity entails [that] requires a certain distance between pitier and pitied," is inseparable from the experience of the struggle with vulnerability most apparent in the confrontation with human sexuality and mortality. In Arisrorle's Poetics, Halliwell concludes "that Aristotle's theory of the emotional experience of tragic poetry presupposes a strong sympathy which does not take the spectator or reader out of himself, but entails a deeper sense of the vulnerability of his own place in the world" (183). I suggest that at the root of this vulnerability and the "likeness" which provides the grounds for "sympathy" lies the mutual struggle with bodily vulnerability. Behind the fact of the vulnerability associated with a change in fortune in tragedy, lies the common experience of the vulnerability associated with the body. Given the fact of this underlying and animating vulnerability in tragedy from the Greeks on, it is my contention that for a pIay to qualify as a complex tragedy which evokes pity and fear it is not necessary that the tragic figure be "innocent." nor is it necessary that he or she fall between the extremes of virtuousness and wickedness, as Aristotle suggests in chapter 13 of the Poetics. Aristotle's theory has no place for the .'wickedness" of a Richard III or a Hedda Gabler. Our "sympathy" is not simply dependent on a character's quality or degree of virtue, but more importantly, on what he or she has in common with us as suffering human beings alienated from one another because of the shame attached to the body. The way in which this commonality is structured and dramatized is, I believe, what Aristotle is attempting to explain. In Greek Tragedy in Action, Taplin, like Halliwell in his discussion of the Poetics, recognizes the "order and significance it [tragedy] imparts to suffering" (170), as well as the inseparability of pity and fear and the ernotionaI distance and cognitive value of the tragic experience. But he does so without attempting to explore or suggest the nature of the suffering which is at the root of the experience of tragedy. In the find paragraphs of his chapter on "Emotion and Meaning in the Theatre," Taplin concludes "that our emotions in the theatre, far from driving out thought and meaning are indivisible from them; they are simultaneous and mutually dependent. . . . Tragedy makes us feel that we understand life in its tragic aspects. We have the sense that we can better sympathize with and cope with suffering, misfortune and waste. . . . For it [tragedy] gives the hurtful twists of life a shape and meaning which are persuasive, which can be lived with" (170). This "shape and meaning" arises out of a particular kind of empathic encounter with acute feelings of vulnerability which animate and propel "the hurtful twists of life." How can we live with such feelings? asks tragedy. Sometimes it answers this question more clearly and fully than others. As much as tragedy can evoke the emotional understanding and feeling that the "hurtful" "can be lived with" in its audience, it can also do so for its characters. In the tragedies where characters themselves confront shame and experience empathy, we find the clearest answers to our paradoxical condition as symbolic animals. I think that behind Aristotle's preference for tragedies in which catastrophe is averted, Iphigenia in Tawis for example, is the appeal of the dramatization of an empathic process which enables tragic figures to deal with and live with previously denied, ambivalent feelings of vulnerability before they explode into destructive, tragic acts. In chapter 14 of the Poetics. Aristotle states: "Better is to perform it [the tragic act] in ignorance and recognize what one has done afterward (no. 3); for the repulsive quality does not attach to the act, and the recognition has a shattering emotional effect. But the best I is the last (no. 4): I mean a case like the one in the Cresp/zontes where Merope is about to kill her son but does not do so because she recognizes him first; or in Iplrigerzia in Turrris the same happens with sister and brother" (42). Unlike the recognition in Oediprrs the King, where Oedipus recognizes what he has done and who he is "afterward," in Iplrigerlia in Tartris the recognition is mutual (as Aristotle points out at the end of chapter 1 1 of the Poetics), as Iphigenia and Orestes gradually learn that they are indeed brother and sister. But the process of recognition does not simply stop once they discover that they are family. This literal recognition of one another's identity is the beginning of a very complex and essentially tragic process of recognition or insight which takes place within a larger empathic mourning process. Together, brother and sister mourn and face ambivalent feelings that are rooted in the experience of vulnerability--something Oedipus in Thebes is not able to do because he lacks the humility and empathic context in which to do so. Before Iphigenia and Orestes can escape "this town of Tauris. this abode / Of savage men ruled by their uncouth king, / Thoas" (11. 30), a place where Iphigenia is forced to take part in human sacrifice, the two must first come to terms with their experiences of loss, death, murder and ambivalent feeling. This play suggests that it is only in the speaking of the homers of the psyche, the shedding of tears, and the experience of empathy, that individuals become free to act, not destructiveiy out of shame. but creatively out of an integrated sense of identity and humanity. "Perhaps / The morning will dispel it ['a deathly dream' in which Orestes dies] if I speak it" (11.42-3). announces Iphigenia in the early moments of the play. This play is a play about how, in speaking, sister and brother come to terms with death. but not. ironically, simply Orestes's (impending) death. It is about coming to terms with unresolved feelings for the dead and the prospect of death and averting catastrophe in a very specific way which involves the confrontation with shame and the experience of empathy within what amounts to a mourning process. I believe that Aristotle's preference for Iphigerlicl in Tmris suggests that he sensed this distinguishing tragic quality, but this same quality is clearly beyond the theories of both Nietzsche and Steiner. The fact that the "tragic action" of the Eumenides and Oedipiis at Colortrls "closes on a note of grace" is not "exceptional" (7), as Steiner insists in the opening pages of The Death of Tragedy. Tragic catastrophe is a process, and, as Else points out, so is tragic catharsis. The process is always the point in tragedy. and not some "end-product." Euripides's Iphigenia in Taliris begins with Iphigenia in mourning and crisis and it ends with her escape from Tauris, but, most importantly, from despair. This tragedy does not simply close "on a note of grace." A process of confrontation with death and shame dominates this play from the outset. Although I believe that it is largely about Iphigenia's mourning process, both sister and brother are crippled by unresolved feelings of shame attached to the past and a parent, until, that is, both recognize one another and speak and share such feelings. With the help of her brother's empathy. Iphigenia escapes from her unresolved past into a communal present. While on stage she comes to terms with her ambivalent feelings toward her father and the past. As a result she can plan her escape and conceive of life beyond the walls of Tauris before she actually physically escapes. The actual escape, which is confirmed by the words of Athena near the play's end. and takes place according to the plan of the gods. occurs off stage. It does not generate the tragic tension, but the process of facing feeli ngs of shame and the process of mourning do. When the play opens, Iphigenia has lost hope and , she believes, all compassion. She believes herself "a woman beyond tears" (1. 352), but she and her brother will soon learn that "tears," and the process of externalizing pain, are the only means by which they can cope with their shame. The theme of "tears" runs throughout this play. In the beginning, Orestes does not believe that any "good can come from meeting death with tears" (1. 484). but he soon sheds tears of "joy" and "sorrow" after recognizing his sister. Both Iphigenia and Orestes are in an arrested state of mourning until they discover one another's identity and humanity while in the process of voicing pain and "pity." The play opens with lphigenia believing "Orestes dead!" (1. 152) and her "father's house . . . fallen" (i. 15 1). She pours a funeral offering for her brother. This process of acknowledging her helplessness and isolation, and the death of the only son of the family. coincides with the as of yet unknown presence of Orestes in the savage and isolate world of Tauris. This "coincidence" is no accident on the playwright's part. Iphigenia is. in a sense, dead. until, that is, she acknowledges her vulnerability and lack of control. She is not only dead to those who matter to her, but even the memory of her dies with the (imagined) death of her only brother, the one who was to carry on her family's, and thus her own. identity. The appearance of Orestes symbolizes the opportunity for Iphigenia to rebuild her personal and familial sense of identity (inextricable entities for her) based on ambivalent, shame-ridden feeling. Her brother, however, amves tortured by the Furies who continue to seek revenge for the blood of his mother. The early description of him by the Herdsman as the mysterious stranger from Greece reveals the extent to which Orestes is still riddled with the shame of killing his mother, despite the fact that the court of Athens and Athena have decided that his act was not one of wrongdoing."' The fact that Euripides has the Herdsman say. "That if a Fury wasn't chasing him / He thought there was in every sound he heard" (11. 293-4), suggests Euripides's psychological orientation. Simply the "thought" of his crime and the "avenging Furies" is enough to drive Orestes "insane." Orestes is not "insane" however. He reveaIs to his sister later, "Anyone seeing me might think it madness" (1. 933). But he is being pursued by "The Furies--the avenging Fiends" (1. 93 1 ). "[Tlhe Furies" are the cause of irrational behavior, but from the point of view of the tragic, dramatic process of the play, unresolved, unin tegrated, shame-ridden feeling is the "cause" of Orestes's "madness." It is a "madness" which can be cured if he returns home with the statue of Artemis, but for this seemingly impossible task to be accomplished, he and his sister must undergo an empathic process of mourning first. Addressing the mysterious stranger (Orestes) who has just revealed why "Her own [Clytaemestra'sj son killed her" (1. 556), Iphigenia states that she pities this son (her brother), but the stranger replies that "no God pities him" (I. 559). It is only once brother and sister have revealed and exposed themselves to one another that Iphigenia's pity can help her brother. Divine acquittal has not helped him deal with his tortured psyche. but his empathic exchange with his sister will. It is this exchange which enables Orestes to carry oat "His mission" (1.979) for Phoebus: "Once I have carried home in these two hands / The image of the Goddess, I am rid / Of madness!'' (11.980-2) says brother to sister. "Help me, sister!" (1. 979) pleads Orestes after telling his "bitter narrative" (1. 939) of "unforgivabIe sin" (I. 941)- and Iphigenia does exactly that. But she is only capable of doing so after she has come to terms with her own unresolved feelings of shame with the empathic help of Orestes himself. After hearing the news of the "Strangers" from Greece and stating that they "will find in me woman beyond tears" (1. 352), Iphigenia reveals that the source of her lack of humanity lies in her feelings of abandonment, betrayal, revenge, and hatred attached to her sacrifice by the Greeks at Aulis in the past: Unhappiness, 0 friends, can harden us Toward other sorrow harsher than our own." If but some heaven-sent wind, forcing a ship Between the Clashing Rocks, might bring me Helen, The Helen whom I hate. and Menelaus, That I might make of them the sacrifice, Let a new Aulis expiate the old, And vent my vengeance! It was Helen's fault And his, that Greek hands lifted me at Aulis And led me like a beast where, at the altar, My father held the sacrificial knife. I live it all again. My fingers. groping, Go out to him like this and clutch his beard And cling about his knees. I cry to him: "It is you yourself. yourself, who brought me here, You who deceived my maidens and my mother! They sing my marriage-song at home. they fill The house with happiness, while all the time Here am 1 dying at my fhther's hands! You led me in your chariot to take Achilles for my lord, but here is death And the taste of blood, not kisses, on my lips!"" (11. 353-7 1 ) This dramatic moment, and in essence, this tragedy as a whofe, is anti-sacrificial. Greek religion and gods are called up, but not as belief; rather, Euripides is asking his audience to feel deeply and think critically about the workings of "fate" and human relationships. Iphigenia cannot make any sense of her horrible past as human sacrifice. Nor can she make any sense of her horrible present as priestess of human sacrifice. No matter how many times she sacrifices other human beings, she cannot understand her father's sacrifice of her. Everything she thought herself and her father to be was shattered when her father betrayed and attempted to kill her. She is doomed to repeat her father's crime. to "live it all again," in her mind and in life until she is able to express her confused and ambivalent feelings to someone who she believes and perceives can understand her." That someone is her brother, and it is not until she repeats her tale of woe and reveals her feelings of shame to him that she is be able to emerge from her overwhelming feelings of abandonment, betrayal, revenge, and hatred. The audience witnesses Iphigenia "live it all again" in front of her maidens, but at this point Iphigenia does not emerge from despair as she is unable to put the source of her hatred into words. As Orestes begins tc realize that his sacrificer is his sister, Iphigenia repeats her horrific story of the past one more time in order that Pyiades (Orestes's loyal friend who is to return to Argos with her memorized letter) deliver her letter to Orestes in Argos: And tell him this, "My father, Not looking when he struck, believed me dead. Artemis brought me here." The letter ends. (11. 784-86) Orestes gradually confirms that the woman who holds his fate in her hands is his sister. and then he slowly proves to her that he is her brother. During this process of recognition, Orestes asks Iphigenia if she remembers the "bath perfumes" sent as "a present for your wedding, / . . . by your mother to Aulis" (11.8 19-20), and she responds, "1 live each bitter moment of that day" (1. 82 1). The day of her intended death, which is subsequently associated with the loss of everyone and everything meaningful to her. including her dreams of marriage, dominates her life from that day onward. She is indeed caught in an arrested state of mourning until she exposes her deepest feelings to her brother. Iphigenia's need to resolve the feelings attached to her incomplete death by sacrifice is only satisfied in the presence of her (shockingly) empathic brother. After describing the scene of intended sacrifice, Iphigenia asks Orestes. And do you see what I remember there? The treachery, the misery, the shame! (11. 855-6) and Orestes soon responds, 0 desolate daughter of a desolate father! I see his face. I see his haunted face! (11. 862-3) "But why feel pity for the pitiless man / Who caused all this?" (11. 864-5) replies Iphigenia immediately after he has spoken these shocking words. Her father is, after all. the man who, "Not looking when he struck. believed me dead" (1. 785)--the man who could not meet her sympathetic eye, probably for fear of feeling too much and losing his resolve, and perhaps out of his own feelings of shame. The fact that her father could not look upon her, that he did not acknowledge, recognize, and "see" her, that he chose not to "know" her. has been internalized and confused her sense of identity to the extent that when she believes her brother dead, she feels as if she is no longer capable of feeling for others. It is not until Orestes, in an attempt to explain her father's actions on that almost fatal day, illustrates that we are not always in control of what we do that Iphigenia emerges from the depths of shame, hate. and despair so that she is able to act and think creatively in bringing about the group's escape. Orestes suggests to his sister that her position as sacrificer is no different from that of her father at Aulis: she "might have caused today" the death of "your own brother*' (11. 866-67). Of course. Orestes identifies with his father's dilemma, since he still carries the shame attached to the "unforgivable sin" of kilIing his mother according to a god's will. It is Iphigenia. however, whose grief and ambivalence is the focus of this tragedy, and, after experiencing her brother's empathy, and the two revealing their "bitter narrative[s]," she can say to Orestes: Even of his whose hand reached for my blood! Now that no blood of yours stains my own hand, I have no anger left. . . . (11.992-4) At some level, in seeing the relation between her vulnerable position as sacrificer in the present and her father's in the past, she now understands her father's vulnerability. In this light. she is not all that different from the empathic daughter, Cordelia, at the end of Shakespeare's Lear. Iphigenia's father's act of "Not looking" at her no Ionger carries with it those feelings which made her feel ashamed of herself and hatred toward her father. Her "anger" has been purged through an empathic exchange and mourning process. I would suggest that "Euripides . . . still is felt by the audience to be I the most tragic" (Poetics 39) because he grasps more fully than the other Greek tragedians the extent to which complete recognition or self-knowledge is inextricably linked with the confrontation and acknowledgment of vulnerability in an empathic, mourning context. As a matter of fact, I think that despite what most critics believe, Euripides is the most tragic of the three Greek tragedians because his plays are the more self-reflexive and psychological; that is, his plays dramatize in detail the processes of shame and denial and the need of empathy so that the audience comes away with a clear sense of what Hegel calls "the rationality of destiny." Aristotle's catharsis is no religious, ecstatic emotion; it is the product of witnessing the dynamics of denial on stage and the emergence of a window of empathy through which characters cope with suffering communally. In this sense, the psychological and secular orientation of modem tragedy is a direct descendant of Greek tragedy. For Aristotle, in the best of tragedies, as in Ipizigenicr in Tarrris, the recognition takes pIace prior to a tragic act being committed, and thus catastrophe is averted. Behind the preference for this kind of tragedy seems to be the belief that in order to activate the tragic emotions of pity and fear it is inadvisable for the playwright to overwhelm the audience to the extent that they cannot maintain sufficient distance from the characters on stage. A balance must be struck between the emotional and the rational. The characters reach a state of utter vulnerability, but the audience must simply recognize and empathize with this state. Part 11: From Aristotle's "Secular" Theory to the Ethical Theories of Hegel and Nussbaum Martha Nussbaum confirms this Aristotelian view in her study of Greek tragedy and ethics, Tile Fragilig of Goodness. She points out that rationalism was looked upon by ancient Greeks as a cure to pain and not a cause of it. Whereas Nietzsche and Steiner believe the origins of tragedy to lie in the Dionysian and religious, Else in the political, Kaufmann. and particularly Nussbaum, see tragedy in more ethical terms. Nussbaum sees tragedy as an arena in which the Greeks struggled with the problem of eudainronia. which "To the Greeks," according to Nussbaum, "means something like 'living the good life of a human being"' (6). In the first chapter of her book, Nussbaum examines Pindar's very provocative use of the plant to represent the beauty of human excellence: "Human excelIence is seen, in Pindar's poem and pervasively in the Greek poetic tradition, as something whose very nature is to be in need, a growing thing in the world that could not be made invulnerable and keep its own peculiar fineness" (2). For Nussbaum, the ancient Greek's experience with luck and the world of contingency outside the realm of rational control are what threaten and at the same time highlight this fragile state of excellence- Nussbaum believes that Greek "tragedies characteristically show a struggIe between the ambition to transcend the merely human and a recognition of the losses entaiIed by this ambition" (8). She announces in the opening chapter of her book that "the primary focus of our concern" (7) will be that which is externally contingent, but she also directs her reader to what I feel is probably the most distinguishing feature of tragedy from the Greeks to the present: But we must also raise a third problem, concerning the relationship between self-sufficiency and the more ungovernable parts of the human being's internal makeup. We will be led by our other two problems to ask. in particular, about the ethical value of the so-called "irrational parts of the soul": appetites, feelings, emotions. For our bodily and sensuous nature. our passions, our sexuality, all serve as powerful links to the world of risk and mutability. . . . And even when passional activities are not deemed in themselves valuable, the passions can still figure as sources of the disruption, disturbing the agent's rational planning as if from without and producing distortion of judgment, inconstancy or weakness in action. (7) These internal "sources of disruption" and the attempt to deny them are at the root of Greek tragedy and all tragic tension or conflict. The way in which human beings conceive of contingency or necessity, whether in terms of the natural or divine (both inextricably related ideas in Homer's heroic, epic universe), changes over the course of time. But as is evident in tragic works of literature from the Greeks on, the internal contingencies which spring from the bodily remain constant. as do the ways in which human beings tend to cope with them. All tragedy seems to be characterized by the struggle to deny bodily vulnerability--that which links us to all life. to Spirit, to essence1'--and thus provides the grounds for emotional, empathic. ethical understanding. In tragedy the denial of the body inevitably leads to not simply a disruption. but an eruption of passion and conflict. or to use Hegel's term. collision. Such collisions destroy social order and drive characters who will not or cannot expose their innermost desires and feelings to another character within an empathic context into psychic and, at times, physical isolation, madness or to suicide. These traditional, inflexible, self-absorbed tragic characters are at least temporarily cut off from "the good life" and a communal, ethical sensibility. On the other hand, all tragedy necessarily involves, as Else says, "the hero's pathos" and a communal response to such suffering which is not always compassionate or empathic. It is the capacity for empathy experienced within a communal context of mourning which tends to set Greek tragedy apart from its descendants. As Else suggests of Thespian tragedy, the hero's cause becomes that of the community, and through it. that of the audience. What happens when the modern-day equivalent of the chorus, those individuals who surround the central tragic figure, are incapable or unwilling to mourn and empathize with him or her? Where does this leave the audience's feelings? I suggest that in such a context where the melancholy and pain is unbearable for not only the hero or heroine, but also for the other members of the community of characters, that the struggle with vulnerability and need of empathy at the root of suffering become a kind of absence framed within the dramatic experience, so that the audience is able to empathize. In this way tragedy's ethical content remains very much alive. It may in fact be the case that in situations where feelings, and the horrifying realities which underlie them, are so unbearable that the animating absence, the repressed. or that which everyone seeks to avoid or deny, becomes that much more tangible or accessible due to the intensity and wide spectrum of denial, leading to a more empathic feeling in the audience. And, if empathy (that process of emotional understanding which enables one to see beyond the self and into the experience of the other without losing a sense of self and place within a larger whole or "field of force"") is the basis of ethical communal experience, as I believe and tragedy suggests, one can say that tragedy provides the grounds for an ethical community. According to my reading of Shakespeare's Lear. the abdication scene and Gloucester' s journey to Dover with Edgar are probably the most clear instances of this kind of framing of absence and the subsequent fostering of empathy in the audience. In both the Greek and modem dramatic context, the audience witnesses the dynamics of denial. And yet, the aesthetic-mimetic, dialogic. tragic context provides the audience with enough distance from the suffering of characters so that it can empathize and not simply identify with characters. The audience does not identify with the suffering; rather, it identifies with the process of adapting to and struggling with contingency and forces beyond human control--in other words, Hegel's ethical, rational universe of Spirit to which each individual belongs. On the other hand, the debate over the capacity of authors since the Greeks to write tragedy and the capacity of the audience to experience tragedy has been going strong at least since Hegel's various writings on tragedy. The issue of the difference between the Greek tragic experience and that of the modem is a major concern of Hegel's thoughts on tragedy as well as those of Georg Luk5cs. whose ideas on the fate of the tragic and the development of the novel in "The Sociology of Modem Drama," Realisrrl irz Our Time, and The Theon, of the Novel seem to find their foundation in Hegelian thought. Like Else, Hegel believes that "in the case of [Greek] drama it is not actual exploit [as in epic], but the exposition of personal passions which is here the main thing. This personal life, however, in contrast to the expanse of the phenomenal world, is concentrated in simple emotions, sentences, decisions, and the like . . . " (14). But unIike Else. Hegel does not seem to see the hero's pathos in the same way. The hero's pathos, his or her emotional direction or drive, is not merely subjective, but substantive. It is a manifestation of one aspect of the universal ethical pathos or necessity--Spirit (what Lukh seems to refer to as essence)--in the world. The individual's pathos inevitably collides with another aspect of pathos in the form of another human being or god. For Hegel, like the human beings who invent them, Greek OIympian gods are subjectively animate beings subject to contingency. The Greek gods are not abstractions or symbols, "but the expression in which Spirit manifests itself' (307). In the collision of the two "equally justified but different ethical powers" (237) or "aspects" the one-sided mode is canceled out, and the undisturbed ideal harmony brings back again that condition of the chorus, which attributes without reserve equal honor to all the gods. . . . Only so far is misfortune and suffering not the final issue, but rather the satisfaction of spirit, as for the first time, in virtue of such a conclusion, the necessity of that particular individual's experience, is able to appear in complete accord with reason, and our emotional attitude is tranquilized on a true ethical basis; rudely shaken by the calamitous result to the heroes, but reconciled in the substantial facts. And it is only in so far as we retain such a view securely that we shall be in a position to understand ancient tragedy. We have to guard ourselves therefore from concluding that a derzortement of this type is merely a moral issue conformably to which evil is punished and virtue rewarded. . . . We have nothing to do here with this who1 ly personal aspect of a self-reflecting personality and its conception of good and evil, but are concerned with the appearance of the affirmative reconciliation and the equal validity of both powers engaged in conflict, if the collision is complete. To as little extent is necessity of the issue a blind destiny. or in other words a purely irrational, unintelligible fate. identified with the classical world by many; rather it is the rationality of destiny. . . . (71) I do love that phrase, "the rationality of destiny." And the reason I find it so attractive is that it makes sense of both my experience of living and my feelings after reading or seeing a tragic work, although Hegel apparently only means it to apply to the Greek experience here. In Theory of the Novel, Lukjics carries forward Hegel's concern with the essential, but he does not see essence, or the tragic which manifests it, in the modem context of the novel or drama. On the other hand, I believe that in the modem dramatic context, where there is usually no formalized chorus embodying the "undisturbed harmony" which can. according to Lukics, "without suffering collapse, combine within itself the voice of lowly creature-reason. which demands tragic refutation. and the voice of the higher super- reason of destiny" (Theory of Novel, 42-3), there still remains, at least potentially, the opportunity to experience the feeling of "the rationality of destiny," no matter how horrible the circumstances of a tragic piece of literature. My theory of tragedy proposes that tragedy fosters this sense of the rational in the horrible through the dramatization of the denial of the body and the need of or act of empathy. Hegel's Greek tragedy, like the movement from denial to empathy in tragedy in general. is beyond morality or the simpIy Socratic (Hegel calls Socrates the "Inventor of Morality" (346) in The Pltilosophy of History)lh. Some of the most astute critics of tragedy, however, do not seem to consider Hegel's distinction between the moral and ethical when pointing to the "flaws" of his view of tragedy. In Tragedy cuzd Philosophy, at the end of section forty-two, "Hegel's 'theory of tragedy,"' Kaufmann states: Before we take leave of Hegel to return our full attention to Sophocles, we must bring out the fatal flaw of Hegel's conception of tragic collision, for this helps to account for the fact that it applies better to the two more philosophical tragic poets than it does to Sophocles. Hegel assumed not only that in such conflicts some good was to be found on both sides but also that both sides were equally justified. In the plays by Aeschylus and Euripides that I have given as examples this may be so; in Sophodes it never is. (248) The only explanation for Kaufmann's inability to fit Sophocies's tragedies into Hegel's conception of the collision seems to be that Kaufmann does not recognize the degree to which Hegel is speaking of forces in col lision as equul universal, ethical powers, manifest in the world through individual pathos, which have nothing to do with our moral feelings as to whether or not one is more justified or right than another. Hegel is thinking of ethical, not moral. justice. In his lecture. "Hegel's Theory of Tragedy," which appears in the appendix of Hegel on Tragedy, A-C. Bradley states: The last omission I would notice in Hegel's theory is that he underrates the action in tragedy of what may be called by a rough distinction moral evil rather than defect. Certainly the part played by evil differs greatly in different cases, but it is never absent, not even from tragedies of Hegel's favourite type. If it does not appear in the main conflict, it appears in its occasion. You may say that, while Iago and Macbeth have evil purposes. neither the act of Orestes nor the vengeance of the Furies, neither Antigone's breach of the edict nor even Creon's insistence on her punishment, springs from evil in them; but the situation with which Orestes or Antigone has to deal, and so in a sense the whole tragedy, arises from evil, the murder of Agamemnon, and the attempt of Poi yneices to bring ruin on his native city. (379-80) Neither the "act of Orestes nor the vengeance of the Furies. . . ." nor "the murder of Agamernnon, and the attempt of Polyneices to bring ruin on his native city" are evil given Hegel's ideas on the relationship of the individual pathos to the universally ethical or substantive--to necessity. The fact that Clytaemestra's murder and Polyneices's attack on his native city do not have a god or the Furies openly backing their actions does not make their pathos or actions any less a part of the overall working out of necessity. Does the fact that Orestes murders on the advice of Apollo make it is any less of a murder than CIytaemestra's, so that her murder remains a murder and his is elevated to the status of an "act"? And besides, to apply the term "evil" to the actions of these larger than life characters who operate within a dramatic world of cosmic proportion seems totally inadequate and misplaced to say the least. Hegel's conception of tragedy implicitly grants to the internal, passionate life of an individual and the horrific actions which originate in it, sense, or in a specific way, rationality. This sense is of the essence in the tragic experience. In the best of tragedies the actions of characters, the "main conflict," and even the "occasion" (by virtue of being contained within a larger tragic context), are beyond a concept like "evil." Tragedy is an attempt to covey "the rationality of destiny," which, I would argue. is manifest in the struggle with bodily vulnerability. If a character or "occasion" is accepted as simply "evil," then the complexity, ambiguity, and ethical value of the tragic experience is lost. The audience rests comfortably and essentially undisturbed once the characters of a play are reduced to the level of "good and evil." To separate Macbeth's "evil purposes" from Macbeth is to diminish the complexity of Shakespeare's character and drama. We can empathize with Macbeth because we witness and relate to his very complex struggle with vulnerability. Furthermore. to labei Iago's "purposes" as bbevil"is to diminish the value of this enigmatic character and the tragic tension of Othello itself. Although we may never come to a clear understanding as to what drives Iago to act the way he does, we are compelled by the drama to ask why he does act the way he does. Aeschylus writes about Clytaemestra in Agamemnon and Sophocles about Polyneices in Oedipus at Colonrcs in order that we come to understand, at some level at least, what drives them to do what they do. Greek and modern tragedy insists on the ethical value of the tragic experience and the inadequacy of moral categories when it comes to understanding human experience. Our feelings and actions may not be comprehensible or right from a societal point of view, but they are related, or connected to more than we can ever know--to such an extent that ultimately they are beyond any rational, scientific, even psychological, thinking in terms of cause and effect--they operate in the world of contingency. The problems created by the sense of incomprehensibility and lack of control attached to our feelings and the actions which they generate is of central importance to both Greek and modem tragedy and life. In considering the alternative views of Greek tragedy articulated by Plato and Aristotle, Nussbaum concludes that The great tragic plots explore the gap between our goodness and our good living, between what we are (our character, intentions, aspirations, values) and how humanly well we manage to live. They show us reversals happening to good-charactered but not divine or invulnerable people, exploring the many ways in which being of a certain good human character falls short of sufficiency for eudaimonia. (In the extreme case, some of these ways may include damage or corruption to the originally good character itself. In such cases, however, it is important that the change should come not from deliberate wickedness, but from the pressure of external circumstances over which they have no control. Thus the damage will still display the gap between being good in deliberately formed intentions or values, and managing to live out a fully good life.) (382) Although Nussbaum sees the gap that appears in the tragic arena between what we are and what we do as resulting, in extreme cases, from "the pressure of external circumstances over which they have no control," I believe that the source of this "corruption" lies in the internal pressure created by the denial of body. Moreover. in the modem context there may be no gap at all. In the case of Shakespeare's Richard m.there is no gap between "being good" and "managing to live out a fully good life." There is no "good" person to corrupt, only a man driven by disgust in his own physical deformity, envy, and hatred. And as we have seen in Iphigenia's case, and for that matter, in that of characters such as Prometheus, Philoctetes and Lear. shame is often at the root of hatred. In his opening soIiioquy, Richard announces that he is determined to escape the feelings of shame that the "I" is forced to endure: Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to see my shadow in the sun And descant on mine own deformity. And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover To entertain these fair well-spoken days. I am determined to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days. (I, i, 24-3 1) Richard's need to out-run his own deformed shadow drives his action. He identifies himself with his deformity and looks to escape his seemingly inhuman self at any cost. His attempt to overcome his sense of inadequacy. inferiority." and powerlessness, particularly in the world of sexuality. drives him to act destructively. The intensity of his need to transcend his physical, animal condition and unattractiveness makes him more than and less than human. He is beyond good and evil and tragic because of the forces of denial that animate his every action. Richard's sense of identity springs from the horror of his own body to such an extent that he has nothing to lose by destroying his world and himself." His sense of vulnerability is so acute that he turns against the world--against life--in an inevitably futile effort to overcome and deny his lack of control in plotting the course of the world around him. On the other hand. Richard's destructive energy of denid is contagious. He, and in a sense. the audience through him, are liberated from the body in action in a drive toward death. Shakespeare's Richard 111 is not all that different from other tragic figures because of his struggle to deny certain bodily realities which threaten to annihilate an already fragile sense of identity and power. One of the differences between Homer's heroes and the characters of Greek and modem tragedy seems to be that the Homeric hero is absolutely at home in the world of internal and external contingency. The characters of tragedy, however, fight to control their destiny and preserve a sense of identity. It takes them far more to accept that they are indeed not in control. To arrive at this state of humility and self-knowledge is onty possible through the expression of suffering in a communal, empathic context. It is a process of mourning a loss of some kind. Homer's Iliad is basically structured around communal mourning rituals and sacrificial rites that deal directly with human mortality and vulnerabiIity. Consequently, Homer's heroes never experience the sense of isolation inherent to the tragic experience. in other words, heroes of Greek tragedy only experience a sense of integration and community (native to Homeric heroes) once they have struggled with and confronted an isolated and alienated state of being driven by shame and denial within an empathic, mourning context. Contrary to what Hegel believes, Greek tragic figures tend to believe in their rational control, or they are indecisive because their rational mind is overwhelmed by the thousht of contingency and bodily forces, until at some point they are compelled to act. Their limits reflect our limits. Hegel says of Achilles weeping over the prospect of his own early death in The Iliad: "The thought can indeed make him sad, but only momentarily; things are so, but this disturbs him no further; he may indeed be sad, but he cannot be vexed or annoyed. Vexation or annoyance presupposes an end, a demand on the part of modern free will, which considers itself warranted and justified in indulging this feeIing if any such end should not be realized" (323-24). Since Achilles does not make the demands of the will that we modems do, he is not a tragic figure. Once again, contrary to what Hegel believes, tragedy from the Greeks on is driven by the conflict and "vexation" that result from the individual's attempt to deny the overwhelming reality of desires and fears that originate in our bodily existence. On the other hand, in essence, Hegel's ideas on what drives the tragic hero are also based on a concept of denial: to live according to individual pathos is to deny and, consequently, bring on a confrontation with other ethical manifestations or powers. Hegel's conflicting ethical powers serve to frame and bring into focus that which is beyond the individual's and the chorus's control, but at the same time that which can be accepted. This awareness of the process of denial on Hegel's part accounts for what appears to be the fact that he does not think tragedy dies in the modem world. It seems as if Hegel believes that the tragic experience does not die with the rise of rationalism, subjectivity and moralism: it changes. Spirit, essence, necessity, and the human part in it, simply is, although the denial of this reality may be more widespread and intense in the modern psyche and world. The potential to arrive at an ethical understanding of this reality is still possible. Tragic experience dies for Nietzsche however. Hegel anticipates Nietzsche's claims in the "Attempt at Self-Criticism" and Tlze Birth of Tragedy that "the world is jrtsrified only as an aesthetic phenomenon . . . 'beyond good and evil'" (22). But Nietzsche seems to see in Christianity the end of the opportunity for the audience to experience Hegel's sense of coherence and reconciliation. Nietzsche sums up his point of view on the effects of Christianity on tragic sensibility: "For, confronted with morality (especially Christian, or unconditional, morality), life must continually and inevitably be in the wrong, because life is something essentially amoral--and eventually, crushed by the weight of contempt and the eternal No, life must be felt to be unworthy of desire and altogether worthless" (23). On the other hand, Nietzsche and Hegel seem to agree on the fact that Shakespeare's tragedies are indeed tragic. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche sees in Hamlet, for instance, his Dionysian origin of tragedy (60). And yet, as far as I can tell, Hegel does not fully explain why (not that Nietzsche does either), given the absence of the chorus (the chorus respects "Spirit" in all its divine and worldly manifestations) in the modern, Shakespearean and post-Greek context, he fiels the art of tragedy continues to exist. He does. however, explain that in the modern context "the real collision" (83) occurs not within the realm of universal ethical powers, or even moral claims, so much as that of "the particular personality. the inner life . . ." (83). Hegel states that "Greek heroes also no doubt act in accordance with their particular individuality; but this individuality, as before noted, if we take for our examples the supreme results of ancient tragedy. is itself necessarily identical with an ethical pathos which is substantive. In modem tragedy the peculiar character . . . forms its resolves under the dictate of personal wishes and necessities. or among other things purely external considerations" (84). According to Hegel, modem tragedy loses "the essential basis and objective condition of the depth and beauty of the tragic drama" because of the "the divided character of ends, passions. and the life wholly personal to the individual" (84). However, if, as I believe, the "essential" is rooted in the bodily and unconscious life of the hero or heroine, which clashes and potentially merges at the level of feeling, in the form of empathy. with that of other characters, thus creating a framing effect for the audience, modem tragedy retains its "objectivity." The idea that the audience empathizes with the competing, dialogic voices of tragic texts without "taking sides" is not, in some ways. all that different from Hegel's conception of the tragic process: "Out of this situation [equally justified ethical powers in collision]," says Hegel, "there arises the right and wrong of both parties and therefore the true ethical Idea, which, purified and in triumph over this one-sidedness, is thereby reconciled in rrs" (237). From the point of view of the feeling of the audience there arises "the rationality of destinyw--something individual characters rarely experience. The sense of "the rationality of destiny" or "Spirit" is framed in the tragic experience in all its sensuality. It is above, or perhaps more appropriately, below or before the morals of any one religion or individual consciousness. For the inhabitants of what Lukjics refers to as an "integrated civilization" the sense of essence (Hegel's "Spirit") is an everyday experience because they live not simply as separate individuals, but within a community that feels itself intimately tied to all life. In the first paragraph of The Theory of the Novel Lukrics appropriately speaks of this way of Iife in poetic terms: The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that bums in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another, for fire is the soul of all light and dl fire clothes itself in light. Thus each action of the soul becomes meaningful and rounded in this duality: complete in meaning--in sense--and complete for the senses. . . . (29) The absence of this experience of "totality" is not simply a modem situation. as LukAcs believes. The total experience of "the immanence of the essence" (35) peculiar to "integrated civilizations," like that of the heroic age described by Homer in his epics, is. if ancient Greek tragic texts are taken as representative, no longer possible by the time of Thespis. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Like the fifth and sixth-century Greeks already distant from the mythic experience and the body, we have to evoke this sensibility within the tragic forum. In Greek tragedy the individual identity crisis remains a communal crisis no matter how much the hero or heroine doubts this fact. The community--gods. other individual family members. the chorus--lives through the crisis along with the individual. so that the crisis and change of identity based on the confrontation with vulnerability becomes a communal one. The community can, although it does not always, absorb and take responsibility for the horror, shame, and suffering in the present within a mourning process, which is not to say that these feelings ever disappear. On the contrary, they are confirmed and integrated within a communal context. In Homer's mythic world there does seem to be a high level of integration which is taken for granted, but in Greek tragedy this is not the case. The fifth-century Greek is compelled to write and witness the tragedy of the loss of a sense of integration. This sense of loss is. however, usually temporary. Suffering is absorbed in the communal process of empathy and mourning, On the other hand, in the case of both Greek and post- Greek tragedy, it is the struggle with the body and subsequent feelings of dienation and despair which generate tragic tension. And whether or not an empathic process takes place for the characters themselves, the proposition is that the receptive audience senses the need of empathy in order for characters to escape from the unbearable and destructive condition of denial. What the audience is sensing in its empathic capacity is the ethical basis of community. In other words, the tragic, empathic experience enables audience members to move beyond the self into the recognition of a world of others. Even if individual tragic characters cannot emerge from their narcissistic, self-absorbed condition, the audience's empathy for such characters--who are, in essence, caught in the process of making ethical choices (even though they may not be aware of it)'Y--provides the grounds for an understanding of what it means to lead "the good Iife," as a vulnerable, permeable being subject to forces beyond control and in collision. Part 111: The Problem of Modern Tragedy: Lukacs, Steiner, Kmtch, and the Case of Ibsen and O'Neill The ethical value of tragedy from ancient Greek to modem times is inaccessible without a sense of the psychological dynamics inherent and essential to the genre. Within their philosophical theories of tragedy, Aristotle. Hegel, and Nussbaum possess this "sense" and accord tragedy what I will call an ethical psychology. In tragedy, life is portrayed as a series of forces in Hegelian collision, but animating and structuring this collision are certain psychological processes: shame, the denial of the body, and the need of empathy. This psychoIogical, and in essence, ethical trinity of tragedy is not dependent for its existence on certain historical-cultural conditions or religious beliefs. The essential link and kinship between ancient Greek and modem tragedy is in the secular realm of ethical psychology and not the realm of religious sensibility, as many literary theorists believe. Three such theorists are George Steiner, Joseph Wood Krutch, and the early Georg Lukics. These three theorists, like Nietzsche before them, tend to romanticize ancient Greek tragedy and the culture from which it springs. This tendency to romanticize or idealize leads to futile attempts at drawing the dividing, historical line between those cultures that are capable, and those that are incapable, of producing tragedy. Steiner's The Death of Tragedy,Krutch's 'The Tragic Fallacy," and Lukiics's The Theon,of the Novel and "The Sociology of Modem Drama" have this tendency, and more, in common. This commonality is most apparent in the fact that all three use Ibsen's plays as the example of non-tragic, modem drama. On the other hand, in Realism in Our Time, written after the second world war. Lukgcs's views of tragedy appear to be based on more ethical, psychological terms. In the work of specific modem novelists and dramatists Lukiics finds an "affirmation" of "human substance" and a "faith in the future of humanity""' (84) characteristic of ancient Greek literature and what he refers to as nineteenth-century realistic, as opposed to naturalistic, iiterature. He asserts the kinship between plays by the modem playwright, Eugene O'Neill. and other pieces of realistic literature which manage to ''affirm . . . a basic integrity in human personality" (84). In the earlier writings of The Theory of the Novel, written in the 19 14- 15 period, and "The Sociology of Modem Drama," a work finished in 1909, Luk5cs limits this capacity for "affirmation" to literature produced within more "integrated civilizations." In Tlze Theon?of the Novel, Luk6cs draws some very clear distinctions between the novel and its heroes and tragedy and its heroes. These distinctions become problematic by the time he writes Realism in Our The. In The Theory of rite Novel he states that The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God. The novel hero's psychology is demonic; the objectivity of the novel is the mature man's knowledge that meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that, without meaning, reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality. These are merely different ways of saying the same thing. They define the productive limits of the possibilities of the novel-- limits which are drawn from within--and, at the same time. they define the historico-philosophical moment at which great novels become possible, at which they grow into a symbol of the essential thing that needs to be said. The mental attitude of the novel is virile maturity, and the characteristic structure of its matter is discreteness, the separation between interiority and adventure. (88) In other words, the "limits" of the novelistic form, which reflect the limits of the "historico-philosophicaI moment," are insurmountable. A world without God is a world where "meaning can never quite penetrate reality." It seems that all novelists can do is to give "structure" to the experience of "separation" and alienation. The essential relation, unity. or totality between self and soul. self and other, and self and world is simply inaccessible in the world of the novel. On the other hand, as Luk5cs states further down on the same page: the tragic hero has attained his soul and therefore does not know any hostile reality: everything exterior is. for him. merely an expression of a pre-determined and adequate destiny. Therefore the dramatic hero does not set out to prove himself: he is a hero because his inner security is given a priori, beyond the reach of any test or proof; the destiny-forming event is, for him, only a symbolic objectivation, a profound and dignified ceremony. (The essential inner stylelessness of modem drama. and of Ibsen in particular, derives from the fact that his major figures have to be tested, that they sense within themselves the distance between themselves and their soul, and, in their desperate desire to pass the tests with which events confront them. try to bridge that distance. The heroes of modem drama experience the preconditions of drama; the drama itself unfolds in the process of stylisation which the dramatist should have completed, as a phenomenological precondition of his work, before beginning to write it.) (88-9) In the light of an examination of Realism in Orrr Time and the theories of tragedy of Steiner and Krutch, I hope to demonstrate the inadequacy of the above claims from The Theon of the Novel. For now, it is enough to contrast these ciaims with a statement made by Lukdcs years later in Realism in Our Time. Speaking of the "treatment of motive and perspective" (85) in a novel, Lies and Magic, by the Italian novelist. Elsa Moranti, Lukiics states: Thus. the true subject-matter of the story, the world of temps retrortve is not removed to a mere etat d'arne. The motives are derived from actual life; they are the passions, though informed by 'false consciousness'. that are at the root of men's actions. The reader--as in the traditional epic--is granted an omniscience allowing him to see the totality of the world portrayed. The winnowing of the authentic from the inauthentic is not effected by the personal intervention of the author. It is the concrete contradictions embodied in her characters, their complex interrelations, that accomplish the process. The novel becomes. in fact. a grandiose parable of modern man's ethical condition, . . . Purely individual and purely class characteristics, carefully distinguished, are yet fused in unity rarely found outside classical realism. (85) It strikes me that the reader's "omniscience," in relation to "the concrete contradictions embodied in her characters," is a similar process to the one I have been attempting to describe in terms of tragedy in the modern world, where the audience tends to empathize with the more limited and self-absorbed characters motivated by denial who come into conflict with one another and themselves. In Bakhtinian terms, Lukics is describing a dialogic. polyphonic novel which fosters empathy in the reader. This novelistic experience grants to the reader "an omniscience allowing him to see the totality of the world portrayedw--something that Lukics seems to have reserved for "the traditional epic" in The Theory of the Novel. This development in Lukics's thought is a reflection, I believe, of his growing sense that "affirmative," ethically-minded literature such as tragedy. can be produced within all kinds of societies or historical-cultural conditions. In this concluding part of this final chapter, 1 intend to show how Lukics's orowing "sense" relates to my principles of tragedy and clarifies much of the debate over 4z the existence of trazedy. Moreover, in considering the views of tragedy held by Lukics, Steiner. and Krutch, and, in particular, the debate over whether or not Ibsen's plays are tragic, the nature of my disagreement with much of the criticism on tragedy becomes quite clear. In The Theory of the Novel and "The Sociology of Modem Drama," Lukics, like Nietzsche and Steiner, concludes that tragedy is only possible to write and experience under certain historical-cultural conditions." In "The Sociology of Modem Drama," Lukiics says: We said previously that new drama is bourgeois and historicist; we add now that it is a drama of individualism. And in fact these three formulas express a single point of demarcation; they merely view the parting of ways from distinct vantage-points. The first perspective is the question of sociological basis, the foundation on which the other two are based and from which they grow. It states simply that the social and economic forms which the bourgeoisie opposed to remaining vestiges of the feudal order became, from the 18th century onward, the prevaifing forms. Also, that life proceeds within this framework, and in the tempo and rhythm it dictates, and thus the problems this fact provokes are precisely the problems of life; in a word, that culture today is bourgeois culture. (15 1-2) True tragedy. "the old drama, by which we mean here primarily that of Renaissance" ( 154). suggests Lukics in "The Sociology of Modem Drama," cannot spring from "bourgeois" soil. Steiner, in The Death of Tragedy, and Lukics, in Titeoy of fie Novel and "The Sociology of Modem Drama," speak in terms of a "lost totality of Greek drama" (Steiner 32) when discussing the prospect of tragedy after Shakespeare and the Greeks. "It is the triumph of rationalism and secular metaphysics," writes Steiner, "which marks the point of no return. Shakespeare is closer to Sophocles than he is to Pope and Voltaire. To say this is to set aside the realness of time. But it is true, nevertheless. The modes of the imagination implicit in Athenian tragedy continued to shape the life of the mind until the age of Descartes and Newton. It is only then that the ancient habits of feeling and the classic orderings of material and psychological experience were abandoned" (193). The experience of "totality" found in the "integrated civilizations" of the ancient Greeks becomes the measure of the tragic for both Steiner md Lukics. According to the trarislator of "The Sociology of Modem Drama," Lee Buxandall : Luk5cs argues that truly bourgeois plays were first written by the Germans Lenz, Grabbe, Goethe, Schiller, and others who were the first dramatists to develop historicist ideas. Emphasis upon reasoned argument, together with environmental determinism, is seen to distinguish bourgeois playwrights from their predecessors, who had enjoyed spontaneous communication with their audiences by virtue of shared religious sensibility. ( 147) Steiner's reference points and. to afi extent, purpose for writing The Death of Tragedy, are often different from those of Lukics in "The Sociology of Drama," but both critics emphasize "environmental determinism" and the lack of "spontaneous communication" and "shared religious sensibility" in pronouncing tragedy dead. or in LukGcs's words. "problematic." On the other hanci, the two critics do not agree on when it is that the world of "totality" and "shared religious sensibility" disappeared and eliminated the possibility of genuine tragedy. For Lukics, it is presumably in the late eighteenth-century or early nineteenth-century and for Steiner, "certain essential elements of social and imaginative life, which had prevailed from AeschyIus to Racine, receded from western consciousness after the seventeenth-century-- . . . the seventeenth-century is the 'great divide' in the history of tragedy" (1 13). And yet there are always "exceptions" to the rule. As I have already suggested in the context of the discussion of the issue of catastrophe in tragedy in the first part of this chapter, there are no "exceptions," only inadequate theories of tragedy that, by virtue of stressing certain qualities or circumstances of the tragic over others, misrepresent the genre. I cannot buy the assumption that tragedy originated in. and if it is going to continue to survive, must take place within, a society in which there is a "shared religious sensibility." Literary texts themselves reveal that human beings of different historical times and cultural backgrounds create and continue to create tragedy. Given my reading of tragedy, .4ristotle7searly, "secular" theory of tragedy, Hegel's ethical conception of the tragic, Else's argument for the rational origins of tragedy, Nussbaum's emphasis on the rational path to ertdaintoniu for the Greeks, and Taplin's critique of the "ritual fallacy," the statement made by Lukics in "The Sociology of Modem Drama" that "By contrast, the foundations of the new drama are rational: from its origins it hcks the quality of mystical religious emotion" ( 156) does not hold water. Underiying what Lukics and Steiner see as a "religious sensibility" or "mystical religious emotion" characteristic of Greek and Elizabethan tragedy is an ethical psychology. But this essential, distinguishing, animating characteristic of the tragic goes unrecognized. especially by Steiner. The fact that Steiner equates the "imaginative designs or mythologies" (196) of "Christianity" with "Classic mythology" suggests how it is that he manages to miss tragedy's ethical, psychological heritage, and thus the life of tragedy in modem times. Steiner says: Until the advent of rational empiricism the controlling habits of the western mind were symbolic and allegonc. Available evidence regarding the natural world, the course of history, and the varieties of human action were translated into imaginative designs or mythologies. Classic mythology and Christianity are such architectures of the imagination. They order the manifold levels of reality and moral value along an axis of being which extends from brute matter to the immaculate stars. . . . I mean such concepts as the presence of the supernatural in human affairs, the sacraments of grace and divine retribution, the idea of preordainment. . . . I refer to the notion that the structure of society is a microcosm of the cosmic design and that history conforms to patterns of justice and chastisement as if it were a morality play set in motion by the gods for our instruction. These conceptions and the manner in which they were transposed into poetry or engendered by poetic form are intrinsic to western life from the time of Aeschylus to that of Shakespeare. . . . They are the essential force behind the conventions of tragedy. (196) Steiner misses the ethical basis of "Classic mythology" and Greek tragedy altogether because he sees the Greeks in Christian. moral terms. By doing so, he reduces tragedy to the level of a "morality play." The ethical, psychotogical forces at work in tragedy, and the audience's empathic relationship to them, are absent from Steiner's religious ideal of tragedy. The "rationality of destiny" and the psychological processes which characterize and perpetuate the tragic mode of expression are simply invisible to Steiner, and, to an extent, the early Lukics, because both theorists are fixated on, and convinced of the central role of, the divine forces--there "for our instructionv--manifest in Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. On the other hand, there are claims made by Lukgcs in ''The Sociology of Modem Drama" which are perhaps more problematic for my theory at the same time that they are also quite typical of claims made by critics who believe that tragedy is dead. In 'The Sociology of Modem Drama," Lukjlcs draws a clear distinction between the old drama of the Greeks and Shakespeare in which "we can easily distinguish between man and his environment. or, speaking from the viewpoint of drama, between the hero and his destiny" (149) and the new drama in which the hero is driven into a struggle "which he cannot resist: it is not his to decide whether he even wishes to resistv-the line between "man and his environment" is. in other words. lost. "The heroes of the new drama--in comparison to the old--," says Lukgcs, "are more passive than active; they are acted upon more than they act for themselves; they defend rather than attack: their heroism is mostly a heroism of anguish. of despair, not one of bold aggressiveness. Since so much of the inner man has fallen prey to destiny. the last battle is to be enacted within. We can best summarize by saying that. the more the vital motivating center is displaced outward (i-e.. the greater the determining force of external factms), the more the center of tragic conflict is drawn inward; it becomes internalized, more exclusively a conflict in the spirit" (150- 1 ). (This is, more or less, Hegel's view.) Given the immense feelings of shame which drive characters such as Xerxes, Prometheus, Philoctetes. and Lear. I would argue that they are essentially no different from characters such as Hedda Gabler and Willy Loman. Determining whether tragic characters are "acted upon more than they act for themselves" has always been problematic. This problem is essential to the medium, at the level of character and audience. For the above tragic characters, there is always a personal element of responsibility which transcends the environmental or divine forces helping to shape a destiny. And it is, as Else and others suggest. the personal, because dramatized in a tragic context, that becomes universal. Shame and the forces of the body continuaily undermine a sense of control and identity and generate a tragic struggle. Ultimately, characters of the "old drama" are no more active than those of the "new." They experience no less "anguish" or "despair" than the "new." Prometheus and Lear may have acted with "bold aggressiveness" in the past, but while on stage they are subjected to the overwhelming limits of the body and, consequently, they suffer the "heroism of anguish, of despair." They do a lot of protesting, but do they act and feel all that differently from the tragic heroes of modem drama? And, in the end, so far as I am concerned, the fact that tragic heroes are driven by shame and denial provides the avenue .- for the audience to empathize with them,- and not simply identify, or sympathize with, or. in the more conventional sense of the word, pity them. Lukks, like Steiner, distinguishes the "~ld,"tragic drama from the "new," non- tragic drama based on the nature of a play's ending and the external conditions which apparently shape it. But, unlike Steiner, Lukjlcs groups the French neo-classical drama of Corneille and Racine in the category of the "new." In "The Sociology of Modem Drama," Lukics lists examples of the "new" drama's "least obtrusively pathetic denouements" (1 58), and in doing so he groups the drama of Ibsen with that of Corneille and Racine: "When . . . Ibsen's Hedda . . . dies . . . the death partakes of the very same tone as did the emotions of heroes in Corneille and Racine. In the face of death, the heroes of Greek and Shakespearean drama were composed; their pathos consists of bravely looking death in the eye, of proudly bearing what is not to be averted. The heroes of the new drama always partake of the ecstatic; they seem to have become conscious of a sense that death can vouchsafe them the transcendence, greatness, and illumination which life withheld . . . and together with this a sense that death will fulfill and perfect their personalities" (159). This same denial of death and life embodied in the "ecstatic . . . sense that death can vouchsafe them the transcendence . . . which life withheld" is clearly evident in Oedipus ar Colonus and arguably evident in Lear. Are these plays "exceptions"? or is Lukiics's distinction inadequate? If nothing else, Lukgcs, and Iater, Steiner, do not recognize the degree to which the denial of death and sexuality is integral to sustaining tragic tension from the Greeks on. The fact that drama after the Greeks and Shakespeare tends to end the way Lukics describes, does not eliminate the fact that the denial of the body permeates and generates a11 tragedy. It does, however, point to the fact that (within at least the Greek context) there appears to be greater faith in and understanding of the empathic process. I believe that this faith and understanding in empathy is at the root of "the shared religious sensibility" that both Steiner and Lukiics feel distinguishes the tragic from the non-tragic context. Empathy is the foundation for an ethical, psychological form of understanding that is not dependent for its existence on a "religious sensibility." The fact that plays end without directly demonstrating this faith and understanding in the actions of characters does not imply that plays do not suggest the need of empathy to the audience. As Lukiics himself states in Realism in Our Time: "All great drama, after all, must find means to transcend the limited awareness of the characters presented on the stage" (88). Indeed, in this same late work, Lukics considers "tragicomedy" within the light of more subtle and inclusive concepts and distinctions. In Realism irr Our Time, Lukaics sets up a distinction between what at one point he refers to as "bourgeois critical realism and bourgeois modernism" (60). In essence, he sees in modernism a trend toward the "worshipping [of] the void created by God's absence" (44) and in "critical realism" the ability to see beyond the "void and a subjective and despairing view of reality. In his comparison of the drama of Ibsen and Chekhov with that of O'Neill. Lukjlcs points to the "faith in the future of humanity" evident in O'Neill's drama and not that of Ibsen and Chekhov: That is O'Neill's originality. Seeing the situation as he does, he is yet able to affirm, with his own brand of tragicomic defiance, a basic integrity in human personality. For all the apparent gloom. this is the message of later dramas Iike A Moon for the Misbegotten. . . . In other words, O'Neill's return to Ibsen and Chekhov is at the same time a protest against the dominance of modernism and a confession of faith in the future of humanity (84) The "faith" in Moon does indeed seem to distinguish it from much of O'Neill's earlier work and the work of playwrights such as Ibsen and Chekhov. but. on the other hand. because Lukics misses the degree to which the tragic. or the "tragicomic," is driven by the denial of the body and the need of empathy, he misjudges much of modem literature. particularly that of Ibsen- The strength in Lukics's distinction between "modernism" and "critical realism" is that it allows him to see that within similar historical-cultural conditions there arises both writing which is essentially tragic and that which is not. In other words, the suggestion is that ultimately external conditions do not determine the tine between the tragic and the non-tragic, but the level of ethical insight and objectivity of the author does. In Realism in Our Time, O'Neilt is considered one of those "writers of major talent" (83) whose "attitudes sprang from the ethical conviction that though changes in society modify human nature, they do not abolish it" (83). According to Luk5cs, within the "new'' human beings are portrayed as manipulated by environmental forces to the extent that they are passive and pathetic. 0'NeilI's "faith," however, transcends this modernist trend. 0'Neil1 "is interested not so much in the way human beings can be manipulated in the name of 'Freedom,' as in whether. and how, the human substance can survive such a process" (84). Here Luk5cs strikes at the core of the "Greeknessi* of O'Neill's tragedy. That is to say, the "faith" evident in Moorz, like that of Greek tragedy, is grounded in the understanding that the only way to bear the at times unbearable fact that we are not always in control and subject to the forces of the body is to mourn communally and experience empathy. In Moorz we have O'hTeill's most explicit example of this understanding. Underlying the comic elements of Moon is the tragic struggle with the sexual body which manifests itself in shame and denial and the search for empathy. In Act HI of the play, Josie Hogan and James Tyrone, Jr. undergo a mourning process which eventually leads to Josie's ability to love and empathize with the more shame-ridden Tyrone. Before Josie is able to empathize with Tyrone, however, she must first confess and come to terms with the "shame and humiliarion" (924) attached to her feelings of se~ualinadequacy and her virginity. Feeling loved by Tyrone, Josie drops the mask of the whore and reveals her love for him. She is then confronted with the fact of Tyrone's extreme ambivalence toward women: he cannot b'love" and trust her unless she is a maternd. sexless figure for him. Recognizing his pain and need to cry on her (maternal) breast she sacrifices her desires in order that he can "repent" and be "forgiven." And despite the Christian confessional language of these characters, confession in OTNeill's later plays is very much about coming to terms with shame, and not simply guilt.3 These later plays are concerned with the struggle to mourn a past which colors the present with relentless. extreme feelings of shame. As Tyrone reveals to Josie before confessing his most shame-ridden feelings, "There is no present or future-only the past happening over and over again--nowv (920). Shame cripples Tyrone as it does Iphigenia in Iphigenia in Tcrrrris. Tyrone confesses to Josie the unbearable feelings of shame and ambivalence attached to the loss of his mother and his subsequent "revenge" upon her after she has abandoned him and confirmed his shame-ridden conception of himself. Until this point he is in an arrested state of mourning similar to the one suffered by Iphigenia in Iphigerricr irr Tcrrtris. Tyrone cannot rid himself of the guilt, but particularly the shame. attached to the fact that before dying his mother "closed her eyes so she couldn't see" (930) her drunken son. A few pages before he begins his tortured confession to Josie. Tyrone, in shame, "closes his eyes . . . as if he had to hide from sight" (929)- Tyrone tells the story of how. in the past. he responded to his mother's death, and as a result the source of his present feelings of shame become quite clear to the audience. His mother's sudden death throws his already fragile sense of self into absolute turmoil: And one day she suddenly became ill. Got rapidly worse. Went into a coma. Brain tumor. The docs said, no hope. lMight never come out of coma. I went crazy. Couldn't face losing her. The old booze yen got me. I got drunk and stayed drunk. And I began hoping she'd never come out of the coma, and see I was drinking again. That was my excuse. too--that she'd never know. And she never did. (He pauses--then sneeringly) Nix! Kidding myself again. I know damned well just before she died she recognized me. She saw I was drunk. Then she closed her eyes so she couldn't see, and was glad to die! (930) Tyrone's tortured memory of the fact that his mother turns away from him when he needs her most. and the shame which results from this rejection, is quite similar to Iphigenia's tonured memory of her father as he turns away from her in order to sacrifice her. In either case, the child experiences the parent's lack of acknowledgment as a shaming. The child's internalized sense of shame breeds overwhelming hatred for the absent parent who has. from the child's point of view, abandoned him or her. Tyrone's confession to Josie is far more self-reflexive than Iphigenia's to Orestes however. This kind of self-reflexive confession of shame is not uncommon in O'Neill's later. tragic plays." On the other hand, this ability to temporarily emerge from denial and self-lies into truth does not ensure that characters are able to sustain this kind of insight, nor that they will ever emerge from their crippling shame-ridden condition. Tyrone continues to live as a "corpse" because he cannot rid himself of his extreme feelings of ambivalence and shame. His understanding is powerless in the face of his overwhelming feelings. As he reveals to Josie, he is aware that the fact that his mother turns away from him in shame drives him to seek "revenge" on her by having sex with "a blonde pig" on the train home with his dead mother "in the baggage car ahead" (93 1): It was like some plot I had to carry out. The blonde--she didn't matter. She was only scjmething that belonged in the plot. It was as if I wanted revenge--because I'd been left alone--because I knew I was lost, without any hope left--that all I could do would be drink myself to death, because no one was left who could help me. (Hisface harderzs and a look of cruel virzdictiveness comes into it--with a strmzge horrible satisfaction in Itis tone) No, I didn't forget even that pig's arms! I remembered the last two lines of a lousy tear-jerker song I'd heard when I was a kid kept singing over and over in my brain. "And baby's cries waken her In the baggage coach ahead." (93 1-2) Feeling abandoned and full of shame and hate, Tyrone takes a kind of oedipal "revenge" out on his dead mother by having sexual intercourse with "the blonde pig" in the train. At first Josie cannot bear to hear this and she is "drawn away from him" (932). Tyrone's shame-ridden sense of self is confirmed: "Don't want to touch me now, eh? (932). he says to her. But she "moves nearer him" as her "horrorT*subsides and "Izer love and prorecrive cornpassion returns" (932). Tyrone feels forgiven, if only momentari 1y, and he 7 < "sobs" at her breast before falling asleep.-- Just before the curtain falls at the end of Act 111. Josie recognizes the limits of her love to help Tyrone and demonstrates her empathy: "Asleep. (in a tender crooning tone like a lullaby) That's right. Sleep in peace, my darling. (thert with sudden anguished longi~g)Oh, Jim, Jim, maybe my love could still save you, if you could want it enough! (Slze shakes her head.) No. That can never be" (933-1).'" Josie is left staring up at the moon, "with the dead hugged to my breast" (934). as she says. Despite her personal desires, she is now self-aware enough and objective enough to recognize that Tyrone is incapable of altering his shame-ridden, seIf- destructive drive toward death, and his extreme ambivalence toward women- She comes to terms with her own feelings of shame by interacting with the more shame-ridden Tyrone. and is thus able to sacrifice her own needs based on empathy, and not simply love. In this sense, she is a descendant of such tragic figures as Sophocles's Neoptolernus and Shakespeare's Cordelia- The process of mourning and confession, in combination with Josie's maternal love and empathy, enable Tyrone to temporarily find relief from his shame-ridden self, but the implication is that his wounds are too deep to be healed. Unlike Josie, who is able to confront and learn from her shame and thus empathize. Tyrone's shame-ridden sense of self is too overwhelming. In this sense, the relation between Josie and Tyrone is very much like that of Neoptolemus and Philoctetes. In Moon, O'Neill's own brand of Greek- like tragedy is at its best as he illustrates the struggle with the body and the need of empathy. and thus a "faith in the future of humanity," to use Luk5cs's words. I believe that Lukacs sees "faith" in the later tragedies of O'Neill because the confrontation with shame, ambivalence, and loss, even if only temporary, occurs communally, and thus with dignity. But O'Neill's characters do not usually come to terms with their most disturbing and overwhelming feelings. Josie is an exceptional character in this respect. Most of O'Neill's later tragic figures (Jim Tyrone in Moon, James Tyrone, Jr. in Long Day's Journey into Night, and Parritt and Hickey in Tlze Icemcin Corrretlr, for example) may confront and enact their shame, ambivalence, and loss. but they are incapable of coping with such feelings. They are acutely aware of their own vulnerability and they are compelled to escape this vulnerability through booze and death. Empathy is either absent from their lives, or it comes too late, as in the case of Tyrone in Moorz. Josie, however, confronts and comes to terms with her own vulnerability, and as a result she is able to choose life and community. She manages to let Tyrone go, remain on the farm with her father, and resume her "teasing." playful, "old manner" with the "old goat" (945) with greater self-knowledge. By the end of the play, she is a more self-aware and humble individual because of her confrontation with her feelings of shame and loss as well as those of the corpse-like Tyrone. Given Josie's capacity for suffering, her increased self-awareness, and the resumption of familial and communal relations, the play's "faith in the future of humanity" is undeniable. It is therefore not surprising that in Moon Luk5cs sees a clear example of a "faith" in how "the human substance can survive" (84). This "substance" survives on empathy and not some given "shared religious sensibility." In the plays of Ibsen, Lukjics believes this kind of "faith" is altogether absent. In O'Neill's drama, Luk5cs says, "the ethical-dramatic dialectic is no longer that between absolute imperatives and the impossibility of their realization" (84). He admires O'Neill's drama. as opposed to that of Ibsen, because in O'Neill's drama "We are now concerned with the scope and possibilities of human action" (84). I believe that Lukrics misses the tragedy, and thus the "faith," in Ibsen since he focuses on what he refers to as "Ibsen's moralizing" and "imperatives" (84) and not the dramatization of the processes of shame, the denial of the body, and the need of empathy which shape his plays. This neglect is common in Ibsen criticism, and it leads critics to the conclusion that Ibsen's plays are clearly not tragic. Since ibsen is to a large extent the father of modem drama, critics find it is easy to rule out the possibility of tragedy in the modern world once they have classified Ibsen's plays as non-tragic. On the other hand, in Realism in Our Time, LukGcs, unlike Steiner and Krutch, does not suggest that in modem times tragedies can no longer be written. In O'Neill's late plays Lukrics sees "human substance." But this "substance" or "essence" (as Luk5cs calls it in T12e Theory of the Now[) is also being evoked in Ibsen's plays. It is perhaps harder to see because, at least on one level, Ibsen's plays attribute the struggle with the body to sociological forces. Yet. as I have attempted to illustrate in my reading of Heddn Gabler, animating Ibsen's concern with the way in which a repressed society creates tragic lives is the dramatization of the denial of the body and the need of empathy. Ibsen is usually the test case in any study of the history of tragedy. Once a critic is convinced that tragedy is dependent for its existence on simply certain social, historical-cultural conditions and the view of humanity they breed, it is a foregone conclusion that tragedy is dead. For example, in beginning of the fifth chapter, "The Tragic Fallacy," of The Modern Temper, KNtch states that No increased powers of expression, no greater gift for words, could have transformed Ibsen into Shakespeare. The materials out of which the latter created his works--his conception of human dignity, his sense of the importance of human passions, his vision of the amplitude of human life-- simply did not and could not exist for Ibsen, as they did not and could not exist for his contemporaries. God and Man and Nature had all somehow dwindled in the course of the intervening centuries, not because the realistic creed of modem art led us to seek out mean people, but because this meanness of human life was somehow thrust upon us by the operation of that same process which led to the development of realistic theories of art by which our vision could be justified. Hence, though we still apply, sometimes, the adjective "tragic" to one or another of those modern works of literature which describe human misery and which end more sadly even than they begin. the term is a misnomer since it is obvious that the works in question have nothing in common with the classical examples of the genre and produce in the reader a sense of depression which is the exact opposite to that elation generated when the spirit of a Shakespeare rises joyously superior to the outward calamities which he recounts and celebrates the greatness of the human spirit whose travail he describes. Tragedies, in that only sense of the word which has any distinctive meaning, are no longer written in either the dramatic or any other form, and the fact is not to be accounted for in any merely Iiterary terms. (80- 1) Given Krutch's exclusive terms, neither the piays of O'Neill nor those of lbsen can come close to qualifying as tragedy. The "human substance" and "faith" Lukics sees in O'Neill is beyond the limited conception of tragedy articulated by Krutch. But Krutch does not consider O'Neill's plays in his famous theoretid statement on "The Tragic Fallacy." For the reasons already mentioned, the main object of his attack is the drama of Ibsen. In "The Tragic Fallacy" Krutch goes on to compare Harnlet to Ghosts in order to prove his point. "Yet the journey from Elsinore to Skien [Ibsen's birthplace]," says Krutch, "is precisely the journey which the human spirit has made. exchanging in the process princes for invalids and gods for disease" (90). Of course, Krutch, like many critics, focuses on Osvald Alving and his disease, consequently he misses the fact that the tragic tension of this play is largely driven by the struggle with the body and discovery of empathy manifest in Mrs. Alving's process of recognition. Mrs. Alving's interaction with her son is, however, critical to the progress of this process. Mrs. Alving and Osvald are pan of a tragic tandem through which the tragedy of the denial of the body and the need of empathy are dramatized. (In this sense, this tandem has a great deal in common with other tragic tandems, such as Philoctetes and Neoptolemus in 77ze Philoctetes, Iphigenia and Orestes in Iphigenicr in Tnrcris, Lear and Cordelia in King Lear. Witly and Biff in Death of a Salesman, and Tyrone and Josie in A Moon for the Misbegotten.) Ghosts is structured so that by the end of the play Mrs. Alving's capacity for empathy is tested. Until Act II Mrs. Alving is a woman who believes that her promiscuous, dead husband was simply "dissolute--in his desires" (66). On the other hand. she also feels that it was a "crime against" (77) herself and Pastor Manders when she gave "into . . . duty and obligation" (77) by returning to a Ioveless mamage. In other words, Mrs. Alving is a woman who is aware of tne repressive values of her society, but she is also a woman who, after rebelling against such values unsuccessfully in her first year of marriage, chooses to perpetuate the values of that society by perpetuating an idealized image of her husband which is symbolized in "the Captain Alving memorial Orphan's Home." She does regret this choice however: Mrs. Alving (dntmming on the wirzdorv pane). I never should have covered up Alving's life. It was all I dared do then--not only for Osvald. but to spare myself. What a coward I was! (74) By the middle of Act II Mrs. Alving is liberated from the repressive values of her society in mind oniy. After she admits that she was a coward to protect herself and Osvald from societal opinion by covering up her husband's "dissolute" life, Mrs. Alving admits to Manders that she is a coward in the present for not acting on her own opinions: Mrs. Alving. If I weren't such a wretched coward, then I'd say to him [Osvald]: "Marry her meginaj, or live any way you like--but just be honest together." (75) The thought of an incestuous marriage between Osvald and Regina is, of course, "barbarous" to Manders, but Mrs. Alving realizes, as she says to Manders, "that, out here in the country. there are numbers of married coupIes who are just as closely related" (76- 7). In the middle of Act I1 Mrs. Alving states that she "can't stand . . . these webs of obligation" (74) and that "I've got to work my way out to freedom" (74). It is only in her interaction with her son at the end of Act I1 that she is able to "see how it all fits together'' (95). and thus work her way further out toward "freedom." Osvald explains to his mother that "here everyone's brought up to betieve that work is a curse and a punishment and that life is a miserable thing that we're best off to be out of as soon as possible" (95)' and his mother responds, "A vale of tears, yes. And we ingeniously manage to make it that" (95). Mrs. Alving recognizes the truth of her son's insight into the way things work "here-" But the "freedom" to speak the truth and reconsider the past comes as a product of listening to her son, the painter who has spent the majority of his life in Paris, discuss "the joy of life" and the fact that it is impossible to experience such joy "at home" (95). "Mother, have you noticed how everything I've painted is involved with this joy of life? Always and invariably, the joy of life. With light and sun and holiday scenes--and faces radiant with human content. That's why I'm afraid to stay on at home with you" (95), says the son on the verge of death to the mother who is on the verge of discovering what "the joy of life" means in terms of her own life. Osvald's explanation done is not enough to trigger Mrs. Alving's recognition of who she was and what she believes in and is willing to act upon. She has not yet fully grasped the degree to which she has been acting on the repressive, destructive values of her society within her own home. The following exchange occurs immediately after Osvald's explanation of "the joy of life": Mrs. Alving. Afraid? What are you afraid of here with me? Osvald. I'm afraid that everything that's most alive in me will degenerate into ugliness here. Mrs. Alving (lookingfrxedly at him). Would that happen, do you think? Osvald. I'm sure it would. Live here the same as down there--and it still wouldn't be the same life. Mrs. Alving (who has been listening intently, rises, her eyes large and thoughtfrrl). Now I see how it all fits together. Osvald. What do you see? Mrs. Alving. I see it now, for the first time. And now I can speak. Osvald (getting up). I don't understand you, Mother. Regina (who has also gotten up). Shouldn't I go? Mrs. Alving. No, stay here. Now I can speak. Now, my son, you have to know everything-and then you can choose. Osvald! Regina! (95-6) This moment of recognition is interrupted by the burning of the orphanage. With recognition comes the reconciliation of the past and the present. Osvald watches as the symbol of his father's purity and invulnerability bums to the ground. The ideal. manufactured memory of the father is thus sacrificed and the truth of who the father and mother are rises from these symbolic ashes. In Act III Mrs. Alving speaks in order to relieve her son from the "remorse and self-reproach" ( 104) attached to his illness. Mrs. Alving reveals that while Osvald was speaking of "the joy of life" "it was as if a new light had been shed over the whole of my life" (104). "You should have known your father when he was just a young lieutenant. He had the joy of life, he did!" (104) explains mother to son. Mrs. Alving no longer sees her husband simply in the light of the values of her society. Her vision is now far more complex. She confesses to Osvald: They'd drilled me so much in duty and things of that kind that I went on here all too long putting my faith in them. Everything resolved into duties--my duties, and his duties, and--I'm afraid I made this home unbearable for your poor father. ( 105) "I only saw the one thing: that your father was a ravaged man before you were born" (1O5), says the woman who can now empathize with her husband. Mrs. Alving does not simpIy blame her society, she takes responsibility for and further understands her actions in the past, and thus she can "see" life from the point of view of her husband and son. She has transcended the rigid morality of her society and the taboos attached to sexuality. She no longer sees her husband as "dissolute" and "ravaged." What Mander's referred to as the "monstrous union!" (76) between Osvald and Regina is, if anything, encouraged by Mrs. Alving. In order that the two "children" have the chance to "'just be honest together," within the confines of her own home, despite Manders and the repressive society for which he stands, Mrs. Alving speaks the truth and informs her son and Regina that they are both the Captain's offspring. Mrs. Alving's new insight and empathic vision is tested at the close of the play. Her son asks for the empathy necessary for her to have the strength to give him a lethal dose of morphine pills. He attempts to make her understand his overwhelming "fear" of reverting "back to a helpless child again" (i 10) after his next "attack." In essence, Mrs. Alving is asked to put aside her needs, desires, and fears, of death in particular, and give her son "the sunw--asymbol for "the joy of iife" throughout the play. Mrs. Alving is at first horrified by her son's request, but after he asks, "Have you no mother-love for me at all--to see me suffer this unbearable fear!" (1 12), she responds, "(crfier a moment's silerrce, corrtrolling her voice). Here's my hand on it" ( 1 12). At the end of the play we discover that it takes a lot more than a handshake to act on her son's needs and request. In the final moments of the play, Mrs. AIving tries to deny the reality of her son's impending death and his horrifying request. She imagines herself caring for her son "just like when you were a little child" (1 13). Her fantasy is similar to the one experienced by Lear before he and Cordelia are sent away to prison. In both Mrs. Alving's and Lear's case. the need to deny the reality of vulnerability, and death in particular. drives the fantasy of an idyllic return to the past where the thought of death does not exist and the parent is perceived as invulnerable and the child as helpless. At the end of Ghosrs, as "Bright sunlight" (1 13) shines in and the fantasy of recovering an intimate, familial past crumbles, Osvald, "with his back toward the distant view" (I 13) and facing the audience, becomes a symbol of human vulnerability. He is "motionless," and all he can do is repeat "in a dull monotone" (1 13), "The sun. The sun" (1 13). It takes Mrs. Alving a few moments before she emerges from denial and her fantasy is shattered. "Oswid appears to cnunple irzrvard!y in the chair'' ( 1 13), and she responds: "(sitakirrg rvi~hfear). What is it? (?n a shriek.) Osvald! What's wrong! (Drops to her knees beside him and shakes Ititn.) Osvald! Osvald! Look at me! Don't you know me?" (1 13). Again, like Lear. who. while cradling the dead body of Cordelia in his arms before he dies, believes his daughter alive, Mrs. Alving cannot at first accept that her son is no longer capable of responding to her. Her son repeats his request, 'The sun-the sun" "in the same monotone" (1 13)' and she is, and we are, faced with the reality of her dilemma as the play ends: Mrs. Aiving (springs to her feet in anguish, tears at her itair rvirit both hands and screams). I can*t bear this! (Whispers as if paralyzed by fright.) I can't bear it! Never! (Suddenly.) Where did he put them? (Her hand skims across his chest.) Here! (She shrirlks back several steps and shrieks.) No. no, no!--Yes!--No, no! (She stands a few steps away frorn him, her fizgers thnrst into her hair. staring at hiin in speechless horror.) Osvald (sitting rnotionless, as before). The sun--the sun. ( 1 13-4) How can she kill her own son? Mrs. Alving will not kill the son she loves because she herself cannot bear to live with his condition. That kind of self-centred motivation is something Osvald expected of the more "fearless," as he calls her, Regina. Given his mother's more selfless love, the only thing that is going to save Osvald from his greatest "fear" is his mother's empathy. The play ends and we do not know whether Mrs. Alving will be able to overcome her own horror and attain the kind of objectivity in empathy necessary for her to kill her own child. There are no gods around to force her in either direction. And she is already beyond the values of her society. It seems quite clear that Ibsen is suggesting that what is needed is for Mrs. Alving to empathize with her son and for her to act on that empathy. By the time she is able to empathize with her husband he is already dead and gone, but in her son's case she has the opportunity to act on empathy and allow her son to die with dignity by giving him the "sun," that (ironic or paradoxical?) symbol of "the joy of life." Mrs. Alving must overcome her horror of death and come to truly understand that Osvald fears death in life far more than he fears life in death. There is a lot more to hen's plays than Krutch, Lukics, and Steiner suggest. Beyond what Luk5cs refers to as "Ibsen's moralizing" and "stem imperatives," and what Steiner refers to as his "dramatic rhetoric summoning us to action in the conviction that truth of conduct can be defined and that it will liberate society," is Ibsen's dramatization of the struggle with the body and the need of empathy. Steiner misses the essence of the tragic when he states that In tragedy, there are no temporal remedies. The point cannot be stressed too often. Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unaltering bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world. But in these plays of Ibsen's radical period, such is not the issue. There are specific remedies to the disasters which befall the characters, and it is Ibsen's purpose to make us see these remedies and bring them about. A Doll's House and Ghosts are founded on the belief that society can move toward a sane, adult conception of sexual life and that woman can and must be raised to the dignity of man. (291 ) Ghosts is one of lbsen's most "rhetorical" plays, but it is a tragedy nevertheless. The "rational innovation" it advocates is in the dramatization of a complex process of recognition and an identity crisis characteristic of all tragedies. In the apparently uninhibited and ideal life of Paris as it is related to us by Osvald, there is the suggestion that society is to blame for "inhumanity and destruction," but the tragic pattern of this play suggests more: that the only way to come to terms with the fact that we are essentially vulnerable human beings subject to the forces of the body beyond our control is through empathy, and in turn. through empathy a more ethical community can be built. Ibsen himself may have felt that there are "temporal remedies," probably at certain times more strongIy than others, but his plays are tragedies because they do not offer simple social "remedies"; rather, they offer in depth. complex explorations of tragic characters who struggle to relate to other characters while in the midst of a struggle with vulnerability. As long as human beings struggle with their sexuality and mortality, the odds are very good that tragedies will continue to be written and appreciated. The fact that authors from ancient Greek times and on have produced works of literature which dramatize this struggle and the need of empathy in order to come to terms with what Becker calls the *'existential paradox," "the fact that he ['man'] is half animaI and half symbolic" (26), suggests that tragedy transcends societal boundaries. Tragic texts always offer a detailed (and in so far as a mimetic literary process can be rational) rational and evocative account of human destructiveness. Moreover, tragedy dramatizes how the denial of the body leads to human destructiveness at the same time that it suggests how to cope with and avoid this destructiveness through empathy. It dramatizes an essentially human struggIe with the body. It repeatedly suggests that the only way out of the shame, alienation, and destruction which results from this struggle is through a communal, empathict mourning experience. This way out, which is really a way in, is not always available to the characters on stage, but the audience is taken on a journey in which they can witness and empathize with the dialogic suffering before them. Tragedy is, in other words, the medium through which suffering at the hands of internal, potentially overwhelming forces is humanized--made more common, comprehensible, and bearable-- thus granting to our lives what HegeI calls "the rationality of destiny." Tragedy asks us to think and feel in ethical, psychologicai terms about the foundation of community. Contrary to what Steiner believes. "the bias . . . toward inhumanity and destruction" evident in tragedies is not "unaltering." The "bias" is in us and not in some nebulous "drift of the world." Ultimately. the psychological portrayal of human suffering in tragic literature is an ..empathic bridge,"" to use Heinz Kohut's phrase, to understanding and avoiding human destructiveness. Even at its bleakest and most ironic, tragedy is "a confession of faith in the future of humanity" because it provides a window of empathy. Notes here may be many reasons for the emphasis on these terms in particular. Certainly one of them has to do with a fact of the Poetics described by Gerald Else in his Arisrotle 's Poetics: The Argrtment: "It is clear that Aristotle thought the pathos the basic. indispensable 'part' of the tragic plot, since (1) peripety and recognition are limited to complex plots while the pathos is not, and (2) the calculations of the tragic quality of a play ( 14. 53b14ff.) are based upon the way the pathos is brought about, revealed, averted, etc. The purpose of Aristotle's survey there is to determine which of the . . . pathe . . . are pitiable and fearful. There are in fact pathe which are bloody or painful enough but which do not arouse either pity or fear, or not in the desired amount" (229). The fact that catharsis is only mentioned once ("Except," as Else points out. "in one passage . . . which has nothing to do with 'catharsis"' (225)), in the last clause of the definition of tragedy offered in chapter 6 is, of course, another major reason for the emphasis on this ambiguous term and its related emotional processes of pity and fear. '1n "Sophocles's King Oedipus and Sel f-Analysis," Naiman and Vaieri-Tomaszuk suggest that "when we speak of Oedipus's knowledge, we are speaking of his ability to solve riddles; when we speak of the knowledge he acquires during the play, we speak of self-knowledge. The former's connotations are mastery and power, the latter's humility. The Athenians of the fifth-century B.C. would be familiar with this distinction" (1 30). '1'm not sure if Else is aware of the two primary meanings of remorse which are, I would argue, quite different. As is the case in The Random House Dictionary, the first meaning of remorse in dictionaries has to do with a "deep and painful regret for wrongdoing" ( 12 14) or, in other words, feelings of guilt. Again, as in The Random House, the second, more obsolete meaning has to do with "pity; compassion" (1 214). In Oediprts the King there is no indication that Oedipus feels anything but guilt and shame to the extent that he wants to disappear and die. His main impulse is to escape the eyes of others--hence his blinding of himself. He experiences his shame-ridden sense of himself as beyond human comprehension and he cannot imagine living among others in such a seemingIy inhuman condition of pollution. He is beyond the experience of compassion in this self-absorbed, narcissistic state of mind. He cannot forgive or accept himself. Of course, the notion of pollution is a human construct dependent on communal values and taboos, and the only way out of this condition is within a communal, empathic, mourning process. The humanizing of his polluted condition is reserved for Oedipus at Colonus. 'These conclusions on the therapeutic value of shame are based on Bernard Wiltiams's statements on the distinction between guilt and shame cited on page 6 of the Introduction. h he notion of process is critical to understanding tragedy and Aristotle's theory of it as Else argues: "this reading makes catharsis a process, not an end-result, and a process operated by the poet through his 'structure of events.' It foIlows that some tragedies will accomplish it supremely well, others less well, still others, it may be, not at all. If catharsis depends on the constructive activity of the poet, it ceases to be a standard result, automatically attained by any play called 'tragedy"' (230-1). Based on my readings of Aristotle's works, it seems clear that Aristotle is always concerned with the art of living; that is, responding to live contexts in process within the framework of certain principles. There is no formula for tragedy as there is no formula for the practice of rhetoric. It is a matter of creating the tragic and the rhetorical out of what is given with a clear understanding of human nature and psychology. At the outset of chapter 2 of Book 1 of the Rhetoric, Aristotle states that "Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" (24). ""What matters," says Oliver Taplin in Greek Tragedy in Action. "for the dramatist and his audience, is the way he has shaped the story, the way he has turned it into drama. The constraint is minimal: the scope for artistry enormous" (163-4). 'see note 14 of Chapter 4 for the full citation of this passage. "n his introduction to AristotIe's Rhetoric, Edward Corbett cites the translator of the Rhetoric, W. Rhys Roberts, who outlines Book II of the Rhetoric: '"Study human nature. Observe the characters and emotions of your audience, as well as your own character and emotions" (xv). Aristotle and Solon are extremely interested in the psychology of human nature to the extent that both, like the psychoanalytically trained psychotherapist, are well aware of the need to understand their own psychology in order to "move" their audience. If one understands "your own character and emotions" the likelihood is that one will be less apt to identify with the audience or analysand and more apt to empathize with them, and thus retain objectivity and a sense of self and separateness. This kind of objectivity or distance is critical to the tragic, cathartic process for Aristotle as Halliwell points out. 'In his book on the Poetics, Halliwell goes into great detail on the subject of the meaning of catharsis to Aristotle in the Poetics by exploring other sources such as the Polirics. I will simply quote one section of his discussion to reinforce the point of the distance between ritual ecstasy and tragic catharsis operating in Aristotle's theory: Where Aristotle talks in the Polirics of the experience of orgiastic music, he refers to 'possession' and obviousIy has in mind an all- engrossing frenzy or delirium. To suppose that something comparable holds for tragedy is out of the question, since it is incompatible with the conscious cognition which is essential for the appreciation of a dramatic plot-structure. Such cognition is not coldly cerebral, but forms the ground of the strong affective response evoked by tragedy. Nonetheless, this picture of the experience of tragic drama leaves no opportunity for anything comparable to 'possession,' and for this reason too we must accept a separation of orgiastic and tragic katharsis, despite their common or analogous foundation in a homeopathic psychological process. ( 194) I0 In a sense, you might say that Orestes has been forgiven of guilt, although he remains shame-ridden, As Bernard Williams states in the context of his discussion of shame and guilt in ancient Greek society, "It is often thought that forgiveness sgedcs more effectively to guilt than to shame: if the people who have been wronged forgive me, then perhaps the case is withdrawn from the internal judge, but their forgiveness has less power to repair my sense of myself' (9 1). And as both Williams and Helen Merrell Lynd (in On Sizorne and the Search for Idenfity)say in different ways, shame is more closely tied to one's sense of identity than guilt. Iphigenia ha.. done nothing wrong, but she feels intense shame with regard to her killing, and Orestes arrives full of shame, despite his acquittal. Up until this meeting, the two have been unable to integrate feelings of shame into their sense of themselves. I I In the Rhetoric, Aristotle states that pity "is therefore not felt by those completely ruined, who suppose that no further evil can befall them, since the worst has befalIen them already" (1 13). In her present state of despair, Iphigenia feels pitiless. But her brother's presence enables her to deal with her shame and hatred and experience pity once again. Indeed, the simultaneous reversal of fortune and recognition which occurs in this play works extremely well with AristotIe's sense of human psychology and the best type of tragedy. I' The sacrifice scene described by Iphigenia here is strikingly similar to the scene in the Baccltae in which Pentheus is described as being dismembered by his mother and her sisters at the same time that he desperately appeals to his mother to recognize him. Both scenes are too horrible to be witnessed first hand, and thus. in order that the audience retain enough distance so that they can pity or empathize with suffering, we hear of these horrific events in the past tense. In both Euripidean plays these horrific scenes where recognition does not take place are followed by scenes in which characters emerge from a state of overwhelming feeling into recognition and empathy. In the Bacchne it is the parent who is left to deal with the reality of the feelings and desires which led to the inability to recognize her own child and in Iphigenia in Tcrrtris it is the child who is left to deal with her own ambivalent feelings toward the father who did not recognize her and was about to kill her. "In these terms, Iphigenia is not unlike Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. except that the Mariner does not seem able to engage in a dialogic exchange with those who listen to his tale. The mystery of his crime and its motives and the intensity of his shame and guilt doom him to repeat his tale to a transfixed audience. The listener can barely get a word in. There is no empathic space created in Coleridge's poem, at least not for the characters. The audience is another story. 'These last two terms are Hcgelian. They are clarified within the following discussion of Hegel's ethical theory of tragedy. ?he American poet, Charles Olson, uses this phrase to describe the position of the poet while in the act of composition. The poet writes "projective verse" from within a "field of force." 16 It seems obvious that Nietzsche was influenced by Hegel, but Nietzsche's romantic views of Dionysian tragedy are not those of Hegel. Socrates, and of course, Euripides, kill tragedy for Nietzsche, but not for Hegel. The two philosophers end up with some very different positions on the issue of tragedy. and hopefully this becomes apparent in my discussion of the two in this chapter. 17 In her discussion of the distinction between shame and guilt in On Shame and the Senr~hfor Identity, Lynd paraphrases the view of Franz Alexander: "Guilt, he believes, gives rise to the feeling 'I am no good' in contrast to the feeling in shame 'I am weak' or inadequate. A sense of guilt arises from a feeling of wrongdoing, a sense of shame from a feeling of inferiority. Inferiority feelings in shame are rooted in a deeper conflict in the personality than the sense of wrongdoing in guilt" (22). I h Richard's need to deny the realities of the body and shame is far more advanced than a character like Iphigenia in Tauris, to the extent that he is exactly like that person who Aristotle describes in the Rhetoric as one who cannot feel pity because he "suppose[s] that no further evil can befall . . . [him], since the worst has befallen . . . [him] already" ( 1 13). 19 The abdication scene early in Lear is a perfect example of an ethical arena in which characters (acting according to their own Hegelian pathos) in collision make "mistaken" ethical choices. When I say "mistaken," I mean it in the sense of Aristotle's hunrcrrria as it is defined by Nussbaum in The Fragilify of Goodness. Nussbaum states: They [Aristotle's ethical "varieties of reversal"] can also be used to increase our understanding of tragic hnmartia, or missing-the-mark. . . - Hamartia and hamartema are sharply distinguished from flaw or defect of character, both here and elsewhere. . . . They are also distinguished from atrrchenta, or a mischance that has a purely arbitrary and external origin. (An example of the latter is probably Aristotle's case in which someone is killed when a statue happens to fall down on him.) To come to grief through hamarria is, then, to fall through some sort of mistake in action that is causally intelligible, not simply fortuitous, done in some sense by oneself; and yet not the outgrowth of a settled defective disposition of character. Further examination indicates that lranlartia can include both blameworthy and non-blameworthy missing-of-the-mark. . . . (382-3) The abdication scene is so ethically. and thus, I would argue, psychologically charged that it remains the example of the workings of tragic tension. No one, including the audience, is fully aware of the forces which drive individual characters to act and the ethical. communal implications of these actions. On the other hand, the audience is in an empathic position to "know" when a given character is "missing-the-mark." '"I do not always agree with LukLs's choice of those novelists and dramatists who manage to "affirm" "human substance" and those who do not, but the point is that Lukics is capable of establishing a link between works of literature from different historical-cultural periods and different genres based on what appears to be essentially ethical, psychological criteria. "Is man the helpless victim of transcendental and inexplicable forces," asks Lukics, "or is he a member of a human community in which he can play a part, however small, toward its modification or reform?" (80). What Lukiics never seems to grasp, and what tragedy teaches us, is that it is empathy, and its ability to work through shame and denial into otherness. which acts as the foundation for ethical insight and healthy communal relations. Without a sense of this ethical psychology, Lukics wrongly condemns the works of many authors (including those of Ibsen) because he cannot see the "faith in the future of humanity" evident in the framing of the absence, and thus need, of empathy. "Given Steiner's enthusiastic endorsement of Lukgcs's work in his Preface to the translation of Realisrn in Our Time by John and Necke Mander, and the similarity of some of Steiner's ideas on tragedy to those of Lukscs, I think it is safe to assume that Lukics's views on tragedy influenced those of Steiner. '-In7.7 his psychoanalytic reading of tragedy, "Analytic Prolegomena to the Study of Western Tragedy," M.D. Faber suggests that the audience's empathic response has its roots in the traumatic. infantile process of separation from the mother which is evoked in the "tragic spectacle": Because the mother holds the key to survival and because separation from the mother which begins at birth and continues through weaning, always in conflict with a strong incorporative aim, is an unavoidable problem in human maturation, the inevitable imperfection of the early interaction is fated to create some basic anxiety over loss of the mother and possible extinction. A11 of this, allow me to note, is not to negate the positive contribution to personality which derives from the early period; it is only to stress the negative contribution so that we may better understand the very existence of tragedy in the west, the ability of each imperfect individual to participate empathically in the tragic spectacle-narrative or dramatic as the case may be-, and the tendency of the tragic writer to explore characters who manifest huge regressive predilections rooted in the vicissitudes of early object relations. (38) 3 In Sharne and Necessity, Bernard Williams points to the problematic tendency in the modem world to separate guilt and shame. He discusses how the Greeks made no such separation. Williams states that "The truth about Greek societies, and in particular the Homeric, is not that they failed to recognize any of the reactions that we associate with guilt, but that they did not make of those reactions the special thing they became when they are separately recognized as guilt" (9 1 ). In a sense, you might say that O'Neill's plays, and the struggles of his characters, undermine any clear distinctions that the playwright or characters may be taking for granted. Williams points out that One thing that a marked contrast between shame and guilt may express is the idea that it is important to distinguish between "moral" and "nonmoral" qualities. Shame itself is neutral on that distinction: we, like the Greeks, can be as mortified or disgraced by a failure in prowess or cunning as by a failure of generosity or loyalty. Guilt, on the other hand, is closely related to the conceptions of morality, and to insist on its particular importance is to insist on those conceptions. It is said that we make a lot of the distinction between the moral and the nonmoral and emphasise the importance of the moral. But how far, and in what ways, is this really true of our life, as opposed to what moralists say about our life? Do we even understand what the distinction is. or how deep it really goes? There is perhaps no single question on which an understanding of the Greeks can join more helpfully with reflection on our experience. We paralyse both that understanding and that reflection if we simply take it for granted that the distinction is at once deep, important, and self- explanatory. (9 1-2) O'Neill's tragic form and content--and the overall "Greekness" of the dialogic suffering on his stage--transcends this kind of distinction. As I will argue shortly, even Ibsen's apparent moral, "stem imperatives" are transcended by virtue of his portrayal of the tragic struggle with the body and the need of empathy. At the root of our "immoral" acts lie feelings of shame which originate in denial of the body and what Becker calls the existential paradox. Tragedy, from the Greeks on, dramatizes this fact. As WilIiams says, "if we want to . . . distinguish the harms we do voluntarily from those that we do involuntarily, we shall hope to succeed only if we ask what kinds of failing or inadequacy are the source of the harms, and what those failings mean in the context of our own and other people's lives. This is the territory of shame; it is only by moving into it that we may gain some insight into one of the main preoccupations of the morality that centres itself on guilt" (94). "This kind of tragic, self-reflexive confession based in shame is also common in Dostoevsky's novels. The narrator of Notes from Underground is in some ways remarkably similar to some of O'NeiliTscharacters, but particularly Tyrone in Moon. Like Tyrone, the Underground Man confesses that sexual intercourse becomes a "means of revenge" ( 137) on a woman for making him feel ashamed of himself. Tht: Madonna- like Liza's love is too much for the extremely defensive Underground who must punish her by dominating her in sex because her love and. it seems, empathy, has prompted him to expose himself and break into a flood of tears. At the same time that the Underground Man confesses that he "broke down too and sobbed as I had never sobbed before" (145), a page later he confesses: "I was ashamed to look at her, another feeling suddenly flared up within me. . . the need to dominate and to possess.. . . How I hated her, and how drawn I was to her at that moment!" ( 146). His ability to capture his own ambivalent feelings in this self-reflexive confession is truly amazing. In the beginning of chapter X. after he has presumably taken "revenge" on Liza through sex, the Underground Man states: "This time she knew everything. I had dealt her the final insult. yet . . . well, there is nothing more to say. She guessed that my outburst of passion was precisely my means of revenge. of inflicting new humiliation upon her, and that my previous, almost objectless hatred was now augmented by personal, envious hatred of her. . . I do not insist, however, that she understood all this completely; but she realized clearly that I was a despicable man and, most important, incapable of loving her*' (147). This need to dominate in sex to cover up shame, ambivalence. and vulnerability is also apparent in Tyrone with Josie, although in their case Tyrone is stopped by Josie from following through on this desire. "There7 < are various paralIels between this scene in Moon and the final scene in Peer G?rrttin which Peer "hides hisface in" Solveig's maternal, all-forgiving and all- loving lap. On the other hand, Josie is far more than some Christian Madonna figure. She is part of a tragic tandem. 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