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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO THE POETICS OF LISTENING IN SOPHOCLES A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS BY ABIGAIL AKAVIA CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2018 Table of Contents Acknowledgments iii 1. Listening and the Sophoclean Chorus 1 1.1 The Tragic Chorus 1 1.2 Choral Song in Oedipus Tyrannus 13 1.3 Choral Listening 16 1.4 Case Study: Oedipus Tyrannus 1297-1368 21 1.5 Structure of the Dissertation 26 2. The Voice of Empathy and the Ethics of Listening 29 2.0 Introduction 29 2.1 Listening and Empathy: The Therapeutic Model 33 2.2 Case Study: Antigone 801-82 44 2.3 Voice, Listening, and Intersubjectivity 57 2.4 The Voice of Suffering 65 2.5 Case Study: The Parodos of Philoctetes 70 3. Manipulative Listening: Mourning and Revenge in Electra 82 3.0 Introduction 82 3.1 Lamentation and Electra’s Listening 90 3.2 Listening to Electra’s Lamentation: Kommos 103 3.3 Revenge and the Limits of Listening 112 3.4. Non-Listening: Matricide Duet 125 4. Empathy and Action in Philoctetes 133 4.0 Introduction 133 4.1 The lyricism of iambic dialogue 139 4.2 Listening in Action: Neoptolemus and the Chorus 155 4.3 Manipulative Listening: Philoctetes and the Chorus 168 4.4 Listening to Heracles 181 5. Farewell to Listening: Song and Mourning in Oedipus at Colonus 190 5.0 Introduction 190 5.1 Voice and Body: Listening in the Parodos 197 5.2 Empathic Reinterpretation: Second Amoibaion 220 5.3 Oedipus’ Speech and the End of Listening 225 5.4 Mourning and the Aftermath of Listening 231 Conclusion 246 Bibliography 251 !ii Acknowledgments As a beginning graduate student, whenever I picked up an academic book, I started reading straight from the chapter that seemed most relevant to my current project, hoping to cut to the chase as quickly as possible. I now always start by reading the acknowledgments, trying to gauge who this author is—literally, where she is coming from—and hoping to get those most genuine glimpses of her first-person voice. On an early draft of a chapter from this dissertation, one reader commented that my guts are showing. While I hope to have covered myself up decently enough in the chapters to come, I can happily leave more of myself exposed in these first couple of pages, where it is my honor to thank the people who have helped bring this project into fruition. My deepest gratitude goes to Sarah Nooter. Role-model and advisor extraordinaire, tireless reader and re-reader of my work, she has offered incisive comments on every page. Since arriving in Chicago, I have been her student in the original sense of the term. Her intelligence and the generosity with which she shares her wisdom are a source of inspiration. Sarah has also offered me emotional support and practical advice on more instances than I wish to remember, and I am simply incredibly lucky to have had such a wonderful person on my team. I wish to thank the other members of my dissertation committee, Glenn Most, Mark Payne, and David Wray, who have, each in his own way, pushed me to define what it is, precisely, that I hope to contribute in this dissertation. Glenn’s exacting eye has forced me to an even greater attention to detail. Mark continuously challenges me to think outside my comfort zone. David, who has been a supporter of this project since its inception, has helped me see what was worth insisting on at crucial crossroads along the way. !iii I have learned much from all my teachers at the department of Classics at the University of Chicago. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Clifford Ando, Alain Bresson, Helma Dik, Jonathan Hall, and Michèle Lowrie, who have made this department an intellectual home. The final stages of my work were made possible through a University of Chicago Provost Dissertation Completion Fellowship. I would like to thank the Provost’s Office for their generous funding and support. The germs of this project were planted during courses I took at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem years ago. Thanks go to Prof. Sanford Budick, who got me started on this journey, and to Prof. Ruth HaCohen, whose insights on intersubjectivity in music keep resonating with me. Special thanks go to Alexandra Hui for her mentorship, and to Nolan Epstein for being the perfect combination of friend and colleague. Thanks also to Rachel Z Cornell, who has reminded me how to trust my instincts. *** Working on this dissertation, which was at first supposed to be “just” about choral lyrics in Sophocles, gradually became a constant thought-experiment about what it means to be with someone who is suffering. At its (or my) darker moments, the dissertation offered an unremitting reminder that all too often, we cannot truly be with someone else in their suffering, for we cannot truly understand it. This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my sister, Na’amah Akavia. The inaccessibility of your suffering will remain my greatest regret. Luckily, the joy and brilliance you left us shines on. !iv Thanks go to my friends, who have truly been with me through thick and thin, who have given me perspective and spoken truths to me: Janine Biskind, Inbal Brickner Braun, Michal Hermon, Liat Kahana, Tal Kohavi, Norma Musih and Dani Szpruch, Yael Rosen, Yuval Yifat and Rona Gepstein, and Bambi Zucker. Thank you, Shlomit Haber-Moshayov, the ur-listener. It would be impossible to recognize my debt of gratitude to my family. My brother, Uri David Akavia, is forever my person with. My parents, Ariella and Gideon Akavia, have supported and sustained me in ways too numerous to list. Their books have nourished me from before I knew the meaning of those strange words I saw on the shelf, “Virgil The Aeneid”. I have inherited my love for the Greeks and for theater from them; they are truly great intellectuals. Finally, I wish to thank my guys. Gilad Nir, my partner in all: thank you for making me a better writer and a better person. My boys, Zohar Shalev Akavia and Amitai Noam Akavia: you make words utterly unnecessary. !v 1. Listening and the Sophoclean Chorus 1.1 The Tragic Chorus Can one person truly listen to another’s grief and suffering? Is there a sound of listening? This dissertation explores these questions through the sung dialogues of Sophocles. These songs, I argue, dramatize situations in which the active listening of the characters to each other is the main action. The sonic and in particular the metrical features of the songs allow us to hear how listening transpires. In this sense the sung dialogues offer us a poetics of listening. Broadly put, listening is here understood as an active mode of communication, an embodiment of empathic responsiveness, reflected through vocalization and especially through the poetic qualities of the singing voice. The notions of listening and empathy I use stem from readings in the fields of psychotherapy and phenomenology, and are explained in chapter 2. In chapters 3, 4, and 5, I explore the interaction between the characters, choruses included, of Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus. The dissertation focuses on lyric dialogues, or amoibaia, as scenes of shared song in which listening and responding make up the dramatic action.1 It is precisely through their mutual musical engagement with one another, I will argue, that the chorus and the protagonist significantly interact. My approach to these texts involves reading the chorus first as a character and second as a group whose listening is a significant action in the play. Throughout, I use the grammatical plural but the term character (or participant) in the singular to refer to the chorus. The plural is meant to stress their identity as a group. To the extent that we may consider them a character, they are, generally speaking, a unified one, but we should always keep in mind that it is made up 1 I use the term lyric dialogue or the Greek amoibaion (for which see section 1.3) to refer to any scene where two or more characters interact and where at least one has a singing role. Tragic choral lyrics is technically a “misnomer,” for tragedy was accompanied by the aulos rather than the lyre. See Wilson 1999.76. For more on the aulos player, see Wilson 2002 and Wiles 1997.91. !1 of many members.2 The dramatic function of the chorus is tied to their lyric role; in particular, I focus on the way the sonic and metrical aspects of their voice as a singing entity on stage constitute their dramatic involvement. I propose that their participation in the drama as a character is most important, and most fully in view, when they perform dialogic songs with other characters.3 Scholarship on tragic choruses for the most part stresses the way they are distinct from the other characters, whether the focus is on the civic, ritual or aesthetic aspects of the choral entity. The divide between characters and chorus, and the way it is assumed as an interpretive premise, is apparent in comments such as this: “no member of the audience would ever confuse the choral ensemble and the cast of characters.”4 For the most part, little attention is paid to those moments in tragedy where the space between chorus and characters is bridged, figuratively and, in some cases, also literally, through the mode and content of the interaction.