19/10/2015

Reversing Chronology

-How to navigate through the tradition of tragedy? This course of lectures offers various
models.

-Theory – particular moments in texts might create a tradition of influence by subtly

invoking others. Some of those calls make the history of tragedy look different.

-We have to listen carefully to the models of tragedy different texts invoke.

-From last week – Shakespeare’s reading of tragedies by engaging with ‘turns away’ from
the tradition. Shakespeare put ‘philosophical’ roots of tragedy back into the tradition.
Shakespeare deliberately enters into a rhetorical/philosophical tradition.

-Seneca’s intervention in tragedy traditions is tendentious. Seneca’s later works might

affect how we read earlier works. What is the influence of later works on earlier ones?

-Shakespeare’s work has exerted a strong influence on how we see tragedy before
Shakespeare. It has changed our definition of what tragedy is.

-How have Waiting for Godot and Endgame changed the way we read Lear? Lear has
changed Lear’s centre of gravity. The heath becomes the text’s centre of gravity – where
the seriousness lies. Moments when characters consider the pessimistic course of the
world are most central

-On handout – Peter Brooks production of Beckett

-Jan Kott’s book – Shakespeare as proleptic of post-holocaust view of the world.
Fundamental pessimism.

-In picture – Cordelia and Lear bound, as Lear and the Fool were – the rope by which
Pozzo and lucky are connected. This production partakes of how Beckett and Lear are
entwined. ‘Nothing will come of nothing” – Beckett-like, and so they sound different in
a post-Beckett world.

Theoretical Context – Mid-century questioning of the stability of literary works. Theory

of allusion shifts to one of intertextuality. All texts interact with one another, so
chronology starts to act differently/non-linearly. Barthes S/Z is a good example, but see
handout B for more examples.

-Not only does Virgil remind us of Homer, but Homer reminds us of Virgil. See Stephen
Hinds’ book for an interesting comparison of allusion/intertext.

-What are the consequences of reversing the allusion model?

-See Eliot quote on handout: Significance is in relation to dead poets/artists. Eliot

thinking of the authority of tradition. New work must be seen in terms of the old. But,
the influence has to happen in both directions. See last sentence on quote.

-Intertextuality born out of French tradition of anti-authority, Eliot’s model coming from
a different place – conservatism?
Handout C
-Intertextual model puts authority with reader, rather than with author.

-How might literary texts implicity/explicitly propose their own place in the tradition of
tragedy? How do certain works lace themselves in a history of suffering that they offer?

Handout q.3
-How does this engage us in a conversation with Learn ‘Never’ ‘Nothing’ ‘Weep’ are
grounds for opening that conversation.

-You must learn to suffer better....’

‘But I feel too old and too far...’
‘Little trail of black dust’

-This is a voice from Beckett claiming a place in the duration of suffering – a world we
might also see in Lear. These characters have been around too long, they are post-
climactic. Yet, they are unavoidably in suffering.

Compare with handout 4

‘The wonder is....he but usurp’d his life’

-Like the Beckett collapsed chronologies, Edgar portrays the future as shorter and less
eventful than the past, and this is hopeful. This is the best it can muster in terms of
positivity. Suggests a decline of suffering/meaningfulness.

Handout 5
-stage directions v. interesting
-Another version of the minimum one can say about human progress. No progress, just
still human.

-No simple relation between 2 texts – just 2 texts trying to imagine how the history of
suffering is in dialogue with itself. Both see something common, repeating, and wearing
in the human condition. This is not particular, or unique, it is the tragedy of things being
normal, but implicitly horrific.

-Both texts contest that they might have the last word on tragedy/suffering.

Handout D
-Ways of remembering the past that doesn’t contest the present’s relation to it.

-Translation? A medium that aims to be transparent – to efface itself as it goes on. But it
rarely adheres to this model.

-Sometimes the surfaces of this transparency are suddenly visible

6
‘The rest is action’ – this creates a resonance with Hamlet 7 ‘the rest is silence’
-Hamlet in dialogue with Libation Bearers.

-Aposeiapoesis – truncated speech

-Hamlet’s indeterminacy vs Libation action

-This doesn’t demand much reinterpretation of one in the light of another. But still an
interesting thing. This translation is like a gesture in the tradition that doesn’t necessarily
intervene in it.

Handout 8
‘kick against the pricks’
-The translation mixes metaphors – Ocean struggling to find right means of getting
Prometheus to move.

-A prick is a goad, a spur – you can only kick against it for so long.
9+10 Biblical examples of this
-Message is that there is no point in resisting force.
-Is there something Christ-like about Prometheus here?
-And Beckett? More Pricks than Kicks

-This doesn’t necessarily tell us very much about Prometheus, or the Bible, but adds a
kind of textual shimmer

Handout E
Move from strong – neutral – weak influences/misreadings

-Tragedy makes strange claims about ‘what all this is about’. These works often contest
themselves, the tradition, but often they do not make the impact they claim to.

-Kleist’s play (11) is full of explicit ideas about what is really meaningful, but perhaps
misses what we would see as meaningful. Tragedies try to make a claim for ‘this is where
the heart of the matter lies’ , but some seem to miss the target.

-Kleist is a Romantic tragedian, and this play a story of an Amazon queen who
encounters Achilles. Full of passionate encounters, and is strangely organized. Its
proposition is that meaningfulness lies in great, transgressive passion. This is strange and
wonderful, but this attempt to define tragedy perhaps doesn’t work. If passion isn’t
central, what is?

11
Interesting moment – questions tropes in tragic tradition – names don’t matter, tokens
don’t matter
-This play says none of this matters, only the extremity of passion matters. It has an idea
of what is really important, and pursues it.

12
-Attacks metaphor for dressing up passion. This verges on literal devouring.

Steiner quote engages with Romantic tragedy – tragedy died at some point post-
Enlightenment. But problems with his argument (will return to this later).

-Kleist attempts to relocate the core of tragedy, but falls flat. Doesn’t claim the territory
it wants to.
Conclusion
-Getting tragedy wrong goes all the way back – full of voices that think they know what
it all means, but they are often wrong.

14
-Euripides finds ‘surprise’ at end – risk in that gesture of thinking unforseeability is the
root/what it boils down to. Might be a red herring –suggesting it’s all the gods
-understatement hard to do in translation – looks like you’re not trying.

Danger of trying to sum up human condition too tritely

15
-Othello channels Aristotle’s idea of tragic hero – he must be good, but have some
failing.

-This is a version of that, but he goes too far perhaps – culpability of Othello is
complicated, not as reductive as he presents it.

-Is blaming the hero what matters in the final analysis? This is proposing smth character-
based, which is perhaps an excessive claim in trgedy.

-Tragedies keep questioning/asserting things about the tradition of tragedy they are in.
Interrogation of literary history/history of suffering.

-Othello quote back to tradition of reporting – Ludovico has to go to Venice and tell
them what happened. Worry that he’ll say Brabantio was right, that O should not have
married D.

-Ludovico has this job of summing it up – their job to do so. Interesting quirk.