Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Fieldings The History of Tom Jones (+y) is partly built around the plot of
the Sophoclean Oedipus, especially the scandalous scene at Upton in which Tom sleeps with
the woman whomthe reader has every reason to think is his long-lost mother. It also contains
self-conscious references to the conventions of the tragic stage and discussion of styles of
contemporary tragic acting.
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a year after /++, certainly made the cynical war-mongering of his obnoxious spin-doctor
Odysseus seem terrifyingly topical.
What Kertesz, Kadare, Wolf and Unsworth have heard in Euripidean tragedy is the
plurality of voices, the polyphony, indeed the antiphony. Rather than reading Greek tragedy
as a homogeneous narrative, or as the life story of individual heroes and heroines, the very
struggle for narrative authority, indeed for the last word, has come centre stage in their
ction. In this, of course, they are responding to Euripides own use of the polyphonic tragic
dramatic form to explore the contradictions and social inequities of the world in which he
lived, and in which the voices of the powerless or the annihilated were in reality silenced.
What distinguishes these particular novelists engagements with Greek tragedy is that in
their work it signies a modality by which the public past and indeed present are inter-
rogated, produced and made knowable.
:
Like much of the allied genre of Postmodern
historical ction, these novels rest on the premise that history was contested and that ction
can uncover the power relations that determined the process by which history was made:
these novelists are unconvinced that there is a single unitary truth of the past waiting to be
recovered, and are more interested in who has or had the power to compose truths
about it.
:
These four works of ction were written in the late +yos, the +8os, the +os and the rst
decade of the third millennium, respectively. They are interested in epistemology and ethics,
but more in ethics as it is manifested in the political rather than the domestic sphere. They
ask how we know the truth about anything in worlds where individual histories are erased
and false histories manufactured. But this is not done in a neutral, extreme relativist way that
denies the existence of underlying truths, nor refuses to take a moral position in respect of the
conicting accounts. These novels in fact, like Richard Rortys pragmatic relativism in
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (+y), underline the ethical and political implications
of the very epistemological conundrum they expose. The epistemology is kept grounded in
a moral universe by the inclusion of creative individuals who are internal equivalents of the
novelists themselves Kerteszs Commissioner rewrites Iphigenie auf Tauris; the narrator
in Agamemnons Daughter works in television; Christa Wolfs Medea includes theatrical
impresarios, and Unsworths characters include a bard and a publicist.
:j
Such are the apparent similarities in the cluster of strategies by which these authors
involve Euripides in foregrounding the epistemological and ethical/political ramications
of subjectivity in Narration. It is important, therefore, to ask howthey look froma diachronic
perspective. Is this cluster of strategies something presaged in the Greek tragic interests of
Eliot and Hardy, or is it a new departure better explained in terms of cultural developments
: See especially, Hutcheon (+88: +); Morrison (:oo: +).
: Middleton and Woods (:ooo: :+).
:j Both Claire and Quinn, the married couple whose relationship breakdown parallels that of Medea
and Jason, are writers: she a classical scholar and specialist in Greek tragedy, and he an aspiring
Boston novelist. Claire is a sympathetic modern Medea, in particular in her conviction that her
intelligence will allowher to defeat her enemies (a phrase she enjoys translating into Latin, +:) and
in her excellent role playing. Claire takes charge of the plot like her Euripidean predecessor and
writes herself the role not only of primary subject but of dominant and highly creative agent. That
both the Jason and the Medea gures are writers crystallizes the struggle for control of the narrative
and for dominant subjectivity that I think lies at the heart of recent novelists attraction to
Euripides.
E D I T H H A L L
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contemporary with it, including the renaissance of Greek tragedy in performance since the
late +os? The attraction of Greek tragedy to novelists partly results from its importance to
some of their canonical nineteenth-century forebears, and subsequently to some distin-
guished Modernist and Postmodernist ction writers, as we shall see. There is, for example,
a genealogy to be traced in novels by women engaging with Sophocles Antigone that can be
traced back to Eliot but extends, via Ch. of Virginia Woolfs The Voyage Out (++j), to
Margaret Drabbles The Ice Age (+yy). Yet, novelists exposure to Greek tragedy in ction
through experience of the works of previous practitioners in their own medium has been
supplemented and even replaced in importance over the last decades by experience of Greek
tragedy in performance and on lm. Although that line of Antigone novels by women does in
fact lead back to Eliots experience of the play in an unprecedented and extremely rare
production of a Greek tragedy in performance in a modern-language translation in the
+8os, the Mendelssohn Antigone,
:
authors today have had more opportunities to expe-
rience the ancient plays in performance, whether in the theatre or in the cinema, than their
Victorian forebears. In some cases, interviews with the authors can establish that a particular
production made a signicant impression. Although some people meet Greek tragedy by
quite different means, for example on law courses, where the Oresteia and Antigone are often
compulsory reading,
:y
the revival of Greek tragedy since the +os, and especially the dis-
covery of its radical potential for investigating issues relating to race and gender must have
contributed in no small measure to the experiments with Greek tragedy in the novel.
Yet, introducing Woolf into the discussion necessitates reecting further on the
Modernist novelists use of Greek tragedy if the works of Kertesz, Kadare, Wolf and
Unsworth are to be seen in historical perspective. Greek tragedy already exerted a fascination
over some of the authors of the harbingers of Modernist ction that reacted against the
nineteenth-century tradition. Thomas Mann modelled the story of Aschenbachs psycho-
sexual journey of self-discovery in Death in Venice (++:) partly on Euripides Bacchae.
:8
In
Stevie Smiths pioneering Novel on Yellow Paper (+), an archetypally Modernist novel in
form (it consists of random stream-of-consciousness effusions the bored secretary-narrator
has poured out onto her typewriter at work), amongst the numerous texts in her conscious-
ness are Euripidean tragedies (Bacchae, Medea, Trojan Women, Hippolytus and Racines
Phe`dre).
:
The passages of engagement with Greek tragedy are fragmentary and complex,
but they certainly reect on the novels main themes (ambivalence towards childbearing, the
temptations and horrors of anti-Semitism, doomed relationships between men and women).
Amongst literary critics, there is a widespread consensus that what Roman Jakobson
would have called the dominant key of Modernist ction is epistemological.
o
Modernist
novels revolved around the epistemological question of what constituted knowledge of any
kind. This is crystallized in its uses of Greek tragedy. In his Les Enfants Terribles (+:), for
example, Jean Cocteau bafes his readers by demanding that they piece together fragments
of information, thus subjecting them to a stiff epistemological workout. This extends to
: On which, see Hall and Macintosh (:ooj: Ch. +:).
:y Bryan (+y: +:j, n. +).
:8 It has recently been argued that in doing so he consciously adopted a Euripidean persona in order to
defend the possibility of an ethical art against Nietzsche.
: Smith (+8o [+]: ::, j:, 8, :oo, :+8).
o His pathbreaking lecture The Dominant, rst delivered in +j, is translated in Jakobson (+8+:
yj+).
G R E E K T R A G E D Y A N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F S U B J E C T I V I T Y
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explicit references to Greek tragic theatre when the troubled siblings Paul and Elizabeth face
leaving the strange room in which they have been secreted for years, and try to make sense of
the world around them:
They don the buskins of the Attic stage and leave the underworld of the Atrides behind them. Divine
omniscience will not sufce to shrive them; they must put their trust in the divine caprice of the
Immortals. (+8+)
Faulkners Absalom, Absalom! (+), published ve years after the premiere of Eugene
ONeills Oresteia translated to the South in Mourning Becomes Electra, is perhaps the
most famous example of Modernist ction to have a strong relationship with Greek tragedy:
Aeschylus Agamemnon is a crucial undertext, both facilitating and obfuscating the readers
understanding of what has gone on in the family of Thomas Sutpen. His black daughter by a
slave, Clytie (or, as another character wonders, was she called Clytie mistakenly instead of
Cassandra?) ends up burning his house down.
The epistemological conundra of Modernist ction, therefore, in some senses pregure
the epistemological focus of the more recent novels which have been considered earlier in
this article, although the subject positions that are often so bafing in the Modernist exam-
ples have been replaced in the recent category by more certainty about the identity of the
narrator(s); there is also now a much greater sense of the importance of history, and of social
and political commitment. By the end of the +os, Modernist ction was with some jus-
tication being castigated by left-wing critics for having abandoned the representation of the
real and historical in favour of politically and socially bankrupt technical experimentation. In
a famous essay of +8, Georg Lukacs accused many Modernist writers of abandoning their
responsibilities to represent society. He criticized James Joyces Ulysses for failing to analyse
the very cultural breakdown of which it was a part, and here he contrasted Joyce with Mann,
whom he saw as at least contextualizing the cultural disorientation around him and offering
the reader some understanding of how it had emerged from a moment in history.
+
Moreover, there was no smooth passage even from the epistemological focus of Cocteau,
Faulkner and Smith to the epistemological interests of Kertesz, Kadare, Wolf and
Unsworth. What lay between the Modernist epistemological novel and the ethico-political
epistemological novel was something altogether dissimilar and customarily labelled the
Postmodern novel. Here the primary philosophical focus is different. In his seminal
Postmodern Fiction (+8y), Brian McHale argued (however much he tried to play it down
in subsequent works
:
) that there was an identiable shift from the epistemological concerns
that dominated Modernist ction in the +:os and +os and the newly ontological questions
raised by the Postmodernist novels of the post-war period. In novels with an epistemological
dominant, such as Absalom, Absalom!, the world that is portrayed is real and stable, but
presented through unclear, fragmented, unstable types of discourse and subject positions,
through shifting modes of consciousness.
In the Postmodern novels with an ontological dominant, on the other hand, a labile,
elusive and uctuating world is perceived through an immutable, stable and unidentiable
subjectivity. This hyper-objective subject asks a fundamentally ontological question: what
+ Lukacs (+8: ).
: In his Constructing Postmodernism (+:), McHale acknowledges that the two dominants are already
both apparent in different sections of the Modernist novel par excellence, Joyces Ulysses (+::).
E D I T H H A L L
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is the status of the story and the worlds it creates? As Alain Robbe-Grillet argued in For a
New Novel (+), the writer has nothing to say: all that counts is the way that he says it. He
demonstrated this paradigmatically Postmodern principle in The Erasers (Les Gommes, +j),
a send-up of genre ction (the detective story). It is elaborately structured around the
Oedipus myth and its expression in Sophocles tragedy a series of murders is investigated
by a man who eventually discovers that the murderer is himself. Les Gommes is a paradig-
matic Postmodernist text because of its ontological focus: it portrays a thoroughly nebulous
world perceived through as uninected, unidentiable and immutable a subjectivity as
Robbe-Grillet could muster.
Oedipus was equally important to one of the other handful of novels always cited in the
high Postmodern pantheon, John Barths Giles Goat-Boy (+). The subject in this novel,
even though he may be a goat or a man, is thoroughly stable; it is the world about himand the
status of the novel itself that are debatable and permanently on the point of dissolution. In
one scene, the hero actually encounters a woman who is reading not only Giles Goat-Boy, but
the very scene from the novel in which she is a participant. As slow on the uptake as his
archetype Oedipus, Barths hero fails to be alerted to the truth of his situation.
An even
greater ontological instability marks Barths Anonymiad (+), in which the sustained I
voice, ostensibly that of a bard who tells a prose epic based on the Iliad and Agamemnon
before ending up stranded by Aegisthus on a desert island, in a moment of existential bravura
remembers how he invented the art of ction (+):
For eight jugsworth of years thereafter, saving the spells of inclement weather aforementioned,
I gloried in my isolation and seeded the waters with its get, what I came to call ction. That is,
I found that by pretending that things had happened which in fact had not, and that people existed
who didnt, I could achieve a lonely truth which actuality obscuresespecially when I learned to
abandon myth and pattern my fabrications on actual people and events: Menelaus, Helen, the
Trojan War.
He subsequently composes different versions of his ction (in which Agamemnon kills his
brother and marries Helen, or Clytemnestra marries Paris and becomes empress of both
Hellas and Troy, with Helen as her cook) until Orestes kills them all. This culminates in his
idea for another new genre, taking the form of an Iphigenia which combines tragedy and
satire (+y).
The Postmodern experiment with Greek myth culminated in Christine Brookes-Roses
Amalgamemnon (+8), written entirely in future and conditional tenses, thus erasing reality
completely. The world it creates is hypothetical. But it is, as far as it is safe to infer, the
ruminations of a female professor of literature in a time when the humanities have become
irrelevant and her own subjectivity is destabilized by the increasing technologization of the
recording of experience. The novel draws on the discourses of computer science, but frag-
ments of the womans former identity and consciousness drift in and out; besides Platonic
and Herodotean references, there is an importunate male suitor, perhaps the
See McHale (+:: +::).
Barth (+: +).
G R E E K T R A G E D Y A N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F S U B J E C T I V I T Y
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Amalgamemnon of the title. Early on in the novel all the future tenses and conditionals are
focused on an imminent apocalypse (y):
Soon the economic system will crumble, and political economists will y in from all over the world and
poke into its smoky entrails and utter soothing prognostications and well all go an as if.
As if for instance I were someone else, Cassandra perhaps, walking dishevelled the battlements of
Troy, uttering prophecies fromtime to time unheaded and unheeded, before being allotted as a slave to
victorious Agamemnon.
Brookes-Rose brilliantly uses the foundation texts of Western humanism Homer and
Greek tragedy in order to open her assault upon it, and the gure of Cassandra, known to
speak in the future tense, to erase all possibility of a determinate text in a realizing tense.
Against this background, the uses of Greek tragedy by more recent novelists become
distinctive. The non-existent world, hypothetical idiom and fragmenting consciousnesses
in Barth and Brookes-Roses novels, in which ethics are sidelined, could scarcely be more
different from the agonized narrators and all-too-real world, historical and contemporary,
that mark the four novels considered above. My proposition is simply this: from nineteenth-
century realist ethics to Modernism (epistemology) to Postmodernism (ontology), we have
moved into a new place where the dominant mode is once again ethical, but that those ethics
are inseparable from a new interest in the politics of subjectivity. They are no longer secular-
ized metaphysics, like the social and ethical interests of the nineteenth-century novel. They
are, if you like, ethicalepistemological. Which character gets to tell the tale from his or her
perspective has become the central, and usually politicized, interest.
Yet these novels, although marking a new way of using Greek tragedy, are not at all
exceptional when considered in a synchronic light which encompasses wider trends in con-
temporary writing, especially its re-instatement of the human subject at the heart of the
literary project.
j
In +8+, three years before the publication of Amalgamemnon, and four
after the original Hungarian publication of Kerteszs The Pathseeker, Yves Bonnefoy suc-
ceeded Roland Barthes to the Chair of Comparative Poetry at the Colle`ge de France. In his
famous inaugural lecture, he dened what he saw as an imminent shift in the Postmodernist
theory of discourse which some now see as marking the beginning of late Postmodernism,
away from the interrogative ontological mode and towards addressing wider issues.
The
time was right, he insisted, for a re-turn to being or presence and a reux of language to
human relations.
y
The ethical novels under discussion here, with their emphasis on human
interaction and its rival representations, seem to instantiate exactly the shift that Bonnefoy
had intuited. Moreover, it was the +8os that sawacross the world of contemporary writing a
re-turn to subjectivity (as Ihab Hassan called it in +8y in The Postmodern Turn), and to re-
mythication of experience. In Historical Studies, meanwhile, the practice of oral history
began to be taken seriously as a methodology (the International Journal of Oral History was
founded in +8o), transforming historians understanding of the processes and presentation
of memory,
8
and opening up the possibilities of the study of subjectivity by historians.
But the novel did not die. A key factor in its resurgence in its newly ethical form has been
the impact of the questioning of the traditional canon entailed by Postcolonial writing.
Authoritarian histories that belonged to the era of imperialism have been displaced, as
Homi Bhabha has put it, by a range of other dissonant, even dissident histories and
voices.
j
This has been exemplied in works such as Toni Morrisons Beloved (+8y),
which have consciously challenged the ofcial versions of history and set out to excavate
the silenced, cancelled and unrepresented dimensions of the past, the subjectivity of the
disremembered.
This is what Giulio Angioni has been attempting to do with his African
and Sardinian wage slaves in a contemporary Milanese factory, whose experiences are
explored in Una Ignota Compagnia (:oo); this title, a quotation from Aeschylus
Suppliants, asks the reader to associate their plight with that of Egyptian asylum seekers
in the ancient tragedy. Other writers have even been challenging the conventional, Hegelian
opposition of subject and object, which dened consciousness as the incisive, masterful,
knowing subjects experience of the passive, known object. Of enormous signicance here is
Robert Burns Steptos study of black narrative, From Behind the Veil (+y). From studying
the biographical accounts of nineteenth-century slaves, and the ways that they were pater-
nalistically framed by white emancipationists, Stepto develops a critique of the whole notion
of narrative control, a critique in which objects become subjects and subjects interact with
other subjects.
This process of polyphonic challenge to Unitarian history has coincided with accelerating
global economic interdependence and cultural impingement, which have acted to make it
o Lakoff (+8:: :o).
+ Barth (+yj).
: See Morrison (:oo: ).
Fiedler (+j: +yo, see also +y+, +yy).
Bowers (+8o: +jo); see also Bigsby (+8o).
j Bhabha (+: j).
Beloved can scarcely have failed to bring with it meanings related to the text with which it is now so
often compared, since Margaret Garner was being described as the modern Medea as long ago
Thomas Satterwhite Nobles lithograph The Modern Medea (+8y).
G R E E K T R A G E D Y A N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F S U B J E C T I V I T Y
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impossible to maintain any form of local or individual history in isolation from all the other
histories.
y
Globalization has inevitably enlarged the scope of the conversation and the
collective memory that it constructed in the narration of histories.
8
Post-war culture, with
all its hybridizations and cultural exchanges, has rendered obsolete the very idea of a self-
contained, nationally or ethnically dened sense of history or heritage.