Creating Tragic Spectators: Rebellion and Ambiguity in World Tragedy
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CREATING TRAGIC SPECTATORS: REBELLION AND AMBIGUITY IN WORLD TRAGEDY by Christopher D. Love A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Comparative Literature) in The University of Michigan 2009 Doctoral Committee: Professor Vassilios Lambropoulos, Co-Chair Associate Professor Yopie Prins, Co-Chair Associate Professor Santiago Colas Associate Professor John A.Whittier-Ferguson 2009 Christopher Davis Love All Rights Reserved Acknowledgments Above all, I want to recognize the important—the vital—contributions that others have made to this dissertation. My first thanks go to Yopie Prins and Vassilis Lambropoulos who have shepherded this project from inception to end. Both have gone far beyond the call of duty in providing invaluable direction, advice, insight, inspiration, friendship and encouragement. I absolutely could not have done it without them. Vassilis at one point noted that Yopie was the Olympic decathlete of dissertation advisors, and I can attest that this is absolutely true. Thank you, thank you. I am grateful, too, to Santiago Colas and John Whittier-Ferguson, who have, throughout my studies and research at the University of Michigan, patiently and generously guided me through many a maze of my own making, always taking the time to foster ideas and provide direction. I am also indebted to my colleagues in Comparative Literature and Great Books, who provided me with fond memories of my time in Ann Arbor. I would like to thank H.D. Cameron for his constant support, advice and friendship. Thanks to my cohort—Mike Kicey, Adeline Koh, Liansu Meng and Nicholas Theisen—with whom I shared my graduate experience and who provided me with valuable advice, support and debate along the way. I would like to thank my friends from San Diego—Nick, Lindland, Dan, and Jeff—for listening to my occasional madness on the phone, for keeping in touch despite my long spells in the cave, and for reminding me always of the temperature and conditions at the beach. Among my friends here in Ann ii Arbor, I would especially like to thank Dave Morse and Carrie Wood, who provided invaluable insights and assistance all along the way. Finally, I would like to thank my father and mother for their unwavering love, support and inspiration, and for encouraging me to pursue what made me curious (I never forget it all began with the Don Quixote my mother made me); my brother Scott, for his humor and for inspiring me with the passion he holds for his work (and for reminding me always of the temperature and conditions at the beach, in Hawaii); my brother Dukes, for being my best friend, my most prescient and helpful adviser, my most valued intellectual influence, and for exhausting me thoroughly on the impossibly steep hills surrounding Williamstown. And finally, I would like to thank my fiancée Alexi Wisher for her devotion, intellect, friendship, puns, patience, ideas, solace, spirit of inquiry, tremendous love and late-night hot chocolates. My deepest thanks to all of you. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgments................................................................................................... ii Abstract.................................................................................................................. vi Chapter One: Creating Tragic Spectators ............................................................... 1 Tragic Spectators Inside and Outside Tragedy ................................................. 13 The Idea of Tragedy After Camus .................................................................... 24 Chapter Two: Tragic Misreading in Roth and Coetzee ........................................ 35 Misreading Tragedy.......................................................................................... 39 The Life of Tragic Fiction................................................................................. 48 The Errant Paths of Tragedy............................................................................. 56 The Subject and Object of Tragic Language .................................................... 65 Chapter Three: Greek Gods in Baltimore ............................................................. 78 Reading Backwards Through the Oresteia ....................................................... 84 The Dialogue Speaks Back: Epigraphs and Repetitions................................... 85 The Tragic Staging in and of The Wire .......................................................... 104 Episode Listing for The Wire.......................................................................... 115 Chapter Four: Silence in Bintou’s Antigone ....................................................... 119 The Counter-Antigones of Kierkegaard and Kwahulé ................................... 123 Then a Silence Suffuses the Story... ............................................................... 131 The Violent Metamorphosis of Language ...................................................... 138 The Silent Spectator........................................................................................ 142 iv Facing Bintou in Brussels ............................................................................... 148 Afterword............................................................................................................ 150 Works Cited ........................................................................................................ 154 v Abstract This dissertation considers adaptations of Greek tragedy in contemporary novels, television, and theater in order to develop a theoretical and comparative perspective on the possibilities of tragedy today. Adaptations in various genres and media are considered within the context of modern theories of tragedy, including a lecture by Camus delivered in Athens in 1955, and more recent debates among critics such as George Steiner, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton about the death and rebirth of tragedy. Rather than assuming a continuum between ancient and modern cultures, the dissertation argues that there is a distinct formal process according to which modern tragedy creates its tragic spectators. The first chapter explores the idea of tragedy proposed by Camus, who argues that tragic consciousness is defined by rebellion and ambiguity, and the following chapters take up the implications of his call for the renovation of tragic form. Focusing on The Human Stain by Philip Roth and Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee, the second chapter demonstrates how these novels find a model of the spectator's relationship to tragedy in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus. The third chapter turns to The Wire, demonstrating how this HBO television serial uses epigraphs, repetitions of dialogue and self-consciously theatrical staging as a formal analogue to the symbolic network of Aeschylus' Oresteia. The fourth chapter demonstrates how Koffi Kwahulé from Côte d'Ivoire creates a counter-Antigone in Bintou, a play recently performed in Paris, London and New York. vi An emphasis on form in all these adaptations forces the spectator to acknowledge the aesthetic composition of tragedy and the process of modern adaptation itself. The dissertation crosses boundaries of genre and nation in order to reflect on the emergence of “world” tragedy at the turn of the millennium. It contributes to the field of classical reception studies and the study of ancient Greek drama and tragic theory, as well as twentieth-century literary theory, studies in the novel, and performance/media studies. vii 1 Chapter One Creating Tragic Spectators The public is tired of the Atridae, of adaptations from antiquity, of that modern tragic sense which, alas, is all too rarely present in ancient myths however generously they may be stuffed with anachronisms. A great modern art form of the tragic must and will be born. Certainly I shall not achieve this; perhaps none of our contemporaries will. But this does not lessen our duty to assist in the work of clearance which is now necessary so as to prepare the ground for it. We must use our limited means to hasten its arrival.1 – Albert Camus In 1955, at the French Institute of Athens, Albert Camus gave a speech entitled “On the Future of Tragedy” (A. a. J. G. Camus). It was Camus’ attempt to outline in clear terms the possibilities and challenges for an ancient Greek tragedy that could take shape in the middle of the twentieth century. Camus advances the thesis that tragedy arises only under particular historical circumstances, such as those that obtained in fifth-century Athens, Siglo de Oro Spain, Elizabethan England and Neo-classical France. Each of these epochs were transitions from forms of religious faith to forms of individualist and rationalist thought: in Greece, from the pre-Socratics to Socrates; in England, from the mysteries of the Christian era to the Enlightenment. In these fleeting tragic eras, “the individual” stands up against ancient religious devotion, but does not yet bow down before the triumph of reason, which, in fourth-century Greece and then again twenty-two centuries later in Europe, sapped the productive capabilities of tragedy almost entirely. In much of his lecture, Camus focuses on the imagined individual of history, as in this description of 1 Quoted in Raymond Williams Modern Tragedy: “Albert Camus’s comment as reported by Marc Blanquet in Opéra (12 September 1945)” (Williams 209). 2 her place within the evolution of the tragic genre: “...[a] tragic age seems to coincide with an evolution