"Remoteness from the immediate here and now, required by tragedy and guaranteed by legendary material, is here [in Aeschylus' "The Persians"] to a great extent achieved by placing the scene in the heart of Persia, so far away and guarded from Greeks that to the audience it might have seemed almost as legendary as the Troy of Hector or the Thebes of Oedipus."
The above is from Richmond Lattimore's introduction to the Oresteia, my latest reading in my Greek Project, and it has me thinking about why we've never been able to quite recapitulate Greek tragedy in modern form.
I wonder if part of the issue is what Lattimore alludes to above: tragedy must in some sense be enacted by beings that stand at some distance from us in either time or space. In that way the characters can take on a stature that familiarity cannot find contempt with, despite their often flawed and human nature. That's the balance, after all, that these larger-than-life personalities must maintain - enough greatness to be archetypal, enough humanness to be relevant. And even if myth, yet still somewhat believed in.
But our modern world doesn't have any corners left. Physically we've covered it all, mapped it, seen it clearly from space. There is no longer any far off land that can be left to the imagination. The same is also true of time. We know too much about our own history now; the legends of the past are either validated by fact or dismissed as only myth. The same is true of the people, where we are all too aware that they were only human too, and it is with a betrayed vindictiveness that we eviscerate the character of all our previous heroes. As such, there's nowhere for an Agamemnon or a Clytemnestra to hide from critical archeology and its accompanying psychoanalytic dismemberment.
The other idea that also came earlier today is related. I was reading Middlemarch and came across this line:
"Nay, are there many situations more sublimely tragic than the struggle of the soul with the demand to renounce a work which has been all the significance of its life - a significance which is to vanish as the waters which come and go where no man has need of them? But there was nothing to strike others as sublime about Mr. Casaubon, and Lydgate, who had some contempt at hand for futile scholarship, felt a little amusement mingling with his pity. He was at present too ill acquainted with disaster to enter into the pathos of a lot where everything is below the level of tragedy except the passionate egoism of the sufferer."
I recall reading once about the Greek concept of pathos in an art book: "...means suffering, but particularly suffering conveyed with nobility and restraint so that it touches rather than horrifies us" (Jansen's History of Art for Young People). I also recall reading, I do not recall where from, that Aristotle stated suffering is made heroic because it leads to some insight. Suffering without wisdom is just pathetic (in the modern sense of the word).
Since the nineteenth century a focus on people as a whole, rather than only a nobility or an elite, has become increasingly the norm. We have to account for the experience of the commoner's life as well as the hero's, and the truth is that most of our lives fall far below the level required for heroic tragedy. I wonder if part of the problem is that the Greeks simply... cannot conceive of writing a play about meaningless suffering. It is almost as though by definition anybody who was crushed under their suffering was not a noteworthy or valuable person; the fact they did not rise to greatness under the pressure demonstrates this. The sense that the lost and downtrodden are valuable awaits for a later, more Christian era. Yet this freedom from charity would perhaps also allow for a purity of expression; no nagging doubts that great people are anything other than great by simple demonstration of their acts. They can be written on with total conviction that they are superior to the average person while retaining their personhood.
As I close this little post, I wonder if the two theories above are related in some way. It is all a type of removing remoteness, that we can no longer see the relevance in something that did not happen (unless it is long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away or in the previous era of Middle Earth, both of which as remote as Persia) or if it does not somehow represent all of us, the link with the archetypal somehow having been severed. I am unsure; something to continue to think on.
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