Tragedy and the Return of the Dead (Rethinking the Early Modern) - Hardcover

Lyons, John D

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810137100 ISBN 13: 9780810137103

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2018

Synopsis

Early modernity rediscovered tragedy in the dramas and the theoretical writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Attempting to make new tragic fictions, writers like Shakespeare, Webster, Hardy, Corneille, and Racine created a dramatic form that would probably have been unrecognizable to the ancient Athenians. Tragedy and the Return of the Dead recovers a model of the tragic that fits ancient tragedies, early modern tragedies, as well as contemporary narratives and films no longer called “tragic” but which perpetuate the same elements.

Authoritative, wide-ranging, and thought provoking, Tragedy and the Return of the Dead uncovers a set of interlocking plots of family violence that stretch from Greek antiquity up to the popular culture of today. Casting aside the elite, idealist view that tragedy manifests the conflict between two equal goods or the human struggle against the divine, John D. Lyons looks closely at tragedy’s staging of gory and painful deaths, ignominious burials, and the haunting return of ghosts. Through this adjusted lens Le Cid, Hamlet, Frankenstein, The Spanish Tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, Phèdre, Macbeth, and other early modern works appear in a striking new light. These works are at the center of a panorama that stretches from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon to Hitchcock’s Psycho and are placed against the background of the Gothic novel, Freud’s “uncanny,” and Burke’s “sublime.”

Lyons demonstrates how tragedy under other names, such as “Gothic fiction” and “thrillers,” is far from dead and continues as a vital part of popular culture.

 

About this title

About the Author

JOHN D. LYONS is Commonwealth Professor of French at the University of Virginia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Tragedy and the Return of the Dead

By John D. Lyons

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2018 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-3710-3

Contents

Preface, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
Chapter 1 Home and Hearth, 
Chapter 2 Burial and the Care of the Dead, 
Chapter 3 Specters, 
Chapter 4 The Aesthetics of Fear, 
Conclusion What's in a Word?, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Home and Hearth

Agamemnon's return home was not a happy one. He found his palace shared by his wife and her lover, but he did not have long to ponder what had changed while he was away at the siege of Troy. He and his captive Cassandra were swiftly murdered by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. In Racine's Phèdre (1677), the return of the warrior father has deadly effects. Thésée himself survives his homecoming, but within hours of his arrival his son, his wife, and her confidant are all dead. In Corneille's Rodogune (1644–45), twin princes are welcomed back after having lived for several years with their uncle, and within twenty-four hours one has been stabbed to death by his mother and the other has narrowly escaped the poison that she offers him on his wedding day. If the home is bad for family members, it is certainly not safe for guests. King Duncan would have been better off in a tent on the moors than in Macbeth's castle. And in Gryphius's Catharina von Georgien, the hospitality afforded her by her host, Shah Abbas — hospitality that includes an offer of marriage — ends up with her death when she is flayed and then burned alive at the stake.

It is not surprising that most tragedies and tragic stories take place at home, for it is a simple fact of the tragic tradition in both antiquity and early modernity that domestic violence — killing and injuring family members and close friends — constitutes the core action. The home is where the members of these seething, secretive, plotting families find themselves together. The return home — the nostos — is a major motif of classical literature. And the home, or house, is also a figure for the family itself. They carry the "house" (their oikos) with them, it is the symbol or metonym of the collective identity of people who are born of one another and who will eventually kill or die together before being interred in the all-important family tombs. The "house of Atreus" stands as a signal example of the tragic perpetuation of hatred and revenge.

As a shorthand for the frequent tragic situation of returning home and there encountering violence, we can make a distinction between the "epic" and the "tragic," but this distinction, though useful for the purpose of the present investigation, requires some qualification. The comparison of these two types of representation is often made in terms of form and of content. Epic, for instance has been defined as "a long narrative written in hexameters (or a comparable vernacular measure) which concentrates either on the fortunes of a great hero or perhaps a great civilization and the interactions of this hero and his civilization with the gods." This definition combines formal qualities (narrative mode) with a set of persons (hero, gods) and themes (greatness, interactions). While there is a fairly clear distinction between dramatic and narrative modes (as Aristotle mentions them briefly in the Poetics, chapter 3), the relation between what is described as tragic and what is described as epic is, in antiquity, more complex. Plato groups Homer with the tragic poets and Aristotle says that "epic shares all the same elements [as tragedy] apart from lyrics and spectacle" (chapter 24). By the time of the Renaissance, however, the pattern of distinction that emerged empirically through the reading and imitation of the ancients was in part one of setting. The action of the Iliad, the first half of the Odyssey, most of the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, and almost all the Aeneid take place away from the "home" of the main characters. In the Renaissance, such epics as The Lusiads, Jerusalem Delivered, and the unfinished Franciad stress travels far from home. Thus, though recognitions, betrayals, and murders are plot elements in epic and evoke similar dark emotions — the anger of Achilles and his grief for Patroclus stand as the most memorable examples — dramatic tragedies and, in early modernity, "tragical histories" not only show a predilection for settings within households but also specifically emphasize family ties.

The thematic valence of the distinction between killing that takes place at home and killing that takes place away from home is particularly well illustrated in French early modernity by a long poem that is frequently called epic even though its author gave it the title Les Tragiques. Most often literary historians refer to Agrippa d'Aubigné's long verse narrative (published in 1616) as an epic. But d'Aubigné himself, near the start of the first of the seven books of Les Tragiques, invokes Melpomene, the muse of tragedy:

J'appelle Melpomène en sa vive fureur,
Au lieu de l'Hippocrène éveillant cette sœur
Des tombeaux rafraîchis, dont il faut qu'elle sorte,
Echevelée, affreuse, et bramant de la sorte
Que fait la biche après le faon qu'elle a perdu.

I call on Melpomene in all her fury, waking her not at the
Hippocrene fountain but instead at the fresh-dug graves from
which she comes, disheveled, hideous, and howling the way the
doe calls for the fawn she has lost.

The poet specifies that he wakes the tragic muse where she dwells, not in the serene place of the muses at the Hippocrene spring but rather among the tombs of the recently dead. In a brilliant article, Richard Regosin was among the first to take seriously the title of this poem. He points out that "for the modern critic ... as well as for his nineteenth-century predecessors, Les Tragiques bears little or no relationship to dramatic tragedy" and further notes the poet's own explicit references to tragedy. Regosin recalls that "the medieval tradition ... did not ... include a dramatic requirement in its definition of tragedy." Regosin's subsequent comments about the "occurrence of the tragic deed within the family" leads the way to understanding the poet's vigorous insistence on portraying the French civil wars of the sixteenth century as fratricidal violence within the family and within the family home. Through a series of shifting allegories, d'Aubigné represents the civil wars within the inventory of tragic, rather than epic, actions and situations. At the core is the inversion of the place that should be safe, the home, and of the alien space outside: "Tout logis est exil" (All dwellings are exile), he writes in describing the devastation of a war of the French against the French. What d'Aubigné expresses is the absence of a space that is safe, a space of home within which the protection bestowed by a family upon its members would prevail. Les Tragiques is a reminder that when the ancient tradition of tragedy returned to European culture, the sinister, violent home — rather than the welcoming, hospitable one — was at the center of this cultural concept. For d'Aubigné, France was itself a tragic home, and the many early modern English plays set in France show that the poet was not alone in this perception.

Tragic Homecomings

The prototype of tragic homecomings must be Agamemnon's return in Aeschylus's tragedy, which stands in stark and deliberate contrast to Odysseus's return after the fall of Troy. The play steadily builds an atmosphere of foreboding from the very first verses, in which the watchman, sleeping on the roof of Agamemnon's royal palace as he has done for years while awaiting the signal fire that will announce the fall of Troy, tells of his fear and his pity for the house of Agamemnon. Here the house as architectural construction and the house as the symbol of the family are united under the term oikos. The watchman even imagines what the house — the physical structure — would say if it could speak: "The house itself, were it to find voice, might speak very plainly" (v. 36). The watchman here refuses to speak plainly about what has been going on in the house, announcing, "I am deliberately forgetting." In this way, even for all the readers and viewers who already know the secret to which the watchman alludes (and readers of classic plays probably, in a way, play the game of "deliberate forgetting" in order to experience once more the gradual unfolding of the story), the house takes on the quality of a threatening, mysterious place, the sort of thing that it might be dangerous to talk about. Much later in the play we learn that the people who now live in the palace threaten the people outside with bodily harm if they say too much, but in these first verses it is already clear that the building before us radiates fear outward. Right from the start of the tragedy, the house seems to be a place to avoid.

The chorus follows the watchman's opening words with a look back at the story of Agamemnon's departure to attack Troy, the winds that fail and that keep the Achaean army and ships becalmed at Aulis, and the seer Calchas's interpretation of the omens that require the death of the general's daughter Iphigenia. The seer's words, as the chorus reports them, also emphasize the house both as family and building, variously as tekton and stegos (roof). He foresees that "there awaits, to arise hereafter, a fearsome, guileful keeper of the house, a Wrath that remembers and will avenge a child." These words are, says the chorus, "fateful for the royal house" (oikos).

A considerable amount of time passes as the chorus, a herald, and Clytemnestra discuss the veracity of the news of the defeat of Troy, and while this time of a half hour or so cannot really correspond to the time it took Agamemnon's ships to cover the same distance as the light passing from one mountaintop beacon to another, it does allow suspense to build and for the ominous allusion of the watchman to undermine the cheery confidence of the herald, who salutes the house brightly as if it held no threat: "Hail, palace, beloved home of my kings ... as you welcome your king home in glory at long last" (v. 518). As Agamemnon is presumed to be drawing closer to Argos, the mentions of the house and the terror it holds within become more insistent. There is, for instance, the extended allegory of the lion cub raised inside a house, at first harmless and "well loved by children / and a delight to the old" (vv. 720–23) but whose nature in time was revealed. "The house was steeped in blood, / an uncontrollable grief to the household, / a great calamity with much killing" (vv. 732–34). Though raised "as an inmate of the house," it was "a priest of Ruin." Here again the point seems to be that the danger comes from within the house, from an unexpected source, against which the walls of the house offer no protection. Indeed, the walls are what prevent escape.

Shortly afterward, Agamemnon enters with Cassandra, the princess who is now his slave and his beloved. He is happy to "enter my palace, come to the hearth of my home" (dómous ephestios). However, before he can cross the threshold, he begins to feel that there is something wrong, and he hesitates. Clytemnestra greets her husband with beaming, exemplary marks of devotion. In fact, she lays it on too thickly, even for a victorious general who must be accustomed to the highest praise and must feel that he deserves it. She has had tapestries brought out from the palace so that her husband will not even have to touch his feet to the earth: "Let his way forthwith be spread with crimson, so that Justice may lead him into a home he never hoped to see" (vv. 910–11). Even in the midst of tragedy there is room for dark comedy — as Racine and Shakespeare later realized — and Clytemnestra is clearly enjoying her parody of the dutiful wife greeting her husband after ten years of war. Agamemnon finds her speech too long and that it is not a wife's role to praise her husband (perhaps having the power to praise also implies having the power to blame — this would show a fine understanding on Agamemnon's part of his wife's ironic intent), but he is particularly disturbed by the symbolism or ritual of the textiles: "It is gods, you know, who should be honored with such objects; to my mind, for a mortal to tread on beautiful embroideries cannot be anything but perilous. I tell you to revere me like a man, not a god" (vv. 922–25).

Aeschylus emphasizes once again the danger of the house as a place, as a physical entity, when Agamemnon gives in to his wife's request and walks over the tapestries through the door. This movement triggers another spasm of fear (deima) from the chorus: "Why, why does this fear / persistently hover about?" (vv. 975–76). Agamemnon's hesitation to cross the threshold had been awakened by something excessive, something perhaps even mocking in his wife's invitation to do so. This suspense-building dramaturgy is now amplified by Cassandra's much more pronounced fear of entering a palace that is now explicitly designated as a death trap. At first she refuses even to get out of the chariot in which she had traveled with her captor-protector (he had instructed, "This foreign woman — please welcome her kindly," v. 950). Clytemnestra gives up trying to get the new slave out of the chariot and in doing so mentions an ostensibly innocuous yet menacing circumstance: "I don't have any more time to waste staying out here. The sheep are already standing, ready for slaughter, in front of the altar in the very centre of the palace" (vv. 1055–57). Once again the palace is designated in its physical, spatial concreteness, and though the fact of having an altar for the offering of animal sacrifices is not in itself anything unusual, Cassandra understands only too well what is coming, and it is interesting to juxtapose what is about to happen with the situation in Euripides's Iphigenia in Aulis, in which the imminent prewar sacrifice of Iphigenia is miraculously prevented by the substitution of an animal for the expected human sacrifice (a deer in the place of Iphigenia, just as a ram was offered in the place of Isaac). Here Cassandra knows that in this case humans will be substituted for the expected animals. The chorus detects some such ambiguity in Cassandra's presence, saying of her, "She has the manner of a wild beast just trapped" (vv. 1062–63).

Cassandra's prophetic gift allows her to foresee — and thus for the audience to preview — what is going to happen inside the house. In this way not only does the suspense continue to build but the playwright also implements an ingenious solution to a technical theatrical problem, the problem of reporting exactly what does happen, and what has happened, in this deathly, haunted house. Much of what happens offstage, and therefore almost all accounts of killing, is reported by an eyewitness. But who will report on the murders of Agamemnon and Cassandra? The perpetrators, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, will give a particularly unfeeling and limited version. So Aeschylus has Cassandra report Agamemnon's death in advance, at first metaphorically and then literally: "Oh, oh! See, see! Keep the bull / away from the cow! She traps him / in the robe, the black-horned contrivance, / and strikes — and he falls into the tub full of water" (vv. 1125–29).

Later she tells the chorus, "No longer will I give you information through riddles" (v. 1183). At this point in the play the house as a container, as a place of horrors, becomes thoroughly woven together with the house as a family. Thus we can see that the watchman's opening remark about what the house would say if it could speak prepares for Cassandra's evocation of the earlier murders and cannibalism in the house of Atreus: "I want you to testify that I am following close on the scent of evils perpetrated in former times. There is a group of singers that never leaves this house. They sing in unison, but not pleasantly, for their words speak of evil ... This revel band drinks human blood" (vv. 1184–88).

As Cassandra goes into the palace, her physical repulsion is impressively evident. Even though she had intellectually and emotionally resigned herself to the slaughter that she knew was inevitable, her body recoils at the smells emanating — perhaps only to her finer sense of smell, perhaps actually to the chorus and others who fear to speak of it — from the house: "The house breathes blood-dripping murder! ... The scent is very plain — just like the whiff of a grave!" (vv. 1309, 1311). It is not long afterward that Agamemnon's two cries are heard from within, when he is struck the first time and then again. Later, the doors are opened so that the chorus and the audience can see the corpses of the king and his slave, and Clytemnestra, covered in blood ("he coughed up a sharp spurt of blood and hit me with a black shower of gory dew"), explains in cool detail the technique of the murder, one that is consummately domestic, not only because it happens within the dómos but also because it was performed by a member of the family, a member, we might say, of the victim's own network. It is the murderer herself who speaks of the net in which Agamemnon was trapped, a net that was set up inside the already-dangerous walls of the house that trapped him: "How else could anyone, pursuing hostilities against enemies who think they are friends, set up their hunting-nets to a height too great to overleap?"

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810137100
• ISBN 13: 9780810137103
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288