1 Tragedy, we might say, attempts to stage what might otherwise, by virtue of its extreme, harrowing nature, be considered unstageable (Jennifer Wallace). To what extent does tragedy stage the unstageable? The purpose of this essay is to explore how far Sophocles and Samuel Beckett give tragic content aesthetic form on stage. I will argue that interpretations of tragedy will always fall short of the mark because tragedy reveals a problem with representation. To understand tragedy, we would need to understand human suffering. Watching tragic drama and trying to understand what we are watching creates friction between seeing and knowing. In order to understand, we need to be able to find meaning. But tragedy is fundamentally meaningless, the emotional punch which tragedy packs derives from our inability to understand the worst events we experience and from our unwilling recognition of the cruel justice and injustice of the world, 1 as I will explore in Oedipus Rex and Endgame. I will expand Wallace s suggestion that tragedy is a machine for making sense of things 2 to analyse conventions used by Sophocles and Beckett in dramatic form. My central focus is on tragedy s attempt to stage suffering, despite the fact tragedy knowingly fails to represent it. Sophocles and Beckett had something to say to their people and used the opportunity of saying it on stage. 3 This something is unstageable because it is something that we cannot comprehend therefore it cannot be fully represented. In the attempt to stage the unstageable, language is arbitrary and I will consider how this disorder is staged through riddle and double meaning, what transmits the tragic message, when it is understood, is precisely that in the words exchanged between men there exist zones of opacity and incommunicability. 4 It seems to be the problem and the intention of tragedy to fall through gaps of understanding, That is how someone suddenly jerks upright after climbing the top step, climbing further, and stepping into the void. 5 1 Jennifer Wallace, The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 8. 2 Wallace, Introduction to Tragedy, 3. 3 E. R. Dodds, On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), accessed 18 December 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/642354, 45. 4 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), 476. 5 Theodor Adorno, Trying to Understand Endgame (Durham: Duke University Press, 1982), accessed 18 December 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/488027.pdf, 135.
2 Oedipus Rex In the case of Oedipus Rex, inevitability constitutes the unstageable: You are fated to couple with your mother, you will bring a breed of children into light no man can beat to see you will kill your father, the one who gave you life! I heard all that and ran. I abandoned Corinth, from that day on I gauged its landfall only by the stars, running always running toward some place where I would never see the shame of all those oracles come true. 6 The unravelling action moves towards crisis. In his Poetics, Aristotle says tragedy is the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions, 7 which suggests a convention of tragedy to show rather than tell. This supports the claim that tragedy detaches our experience from our understanding. Traditionally, Greek plays were performed in masks which function as a reminder that the play is a performative representation of human suffering. Watching the performance on stage, the audience become emotionally invested in Oedipus (the actor who is playing Oedipus on stage). Throughout the play, we learn about Oedipus past and events that have already taken place; events that lead to his demise (killing his father, sleeping with his mother). The events outside of the play remove the possibility to change the course of action on stage, introducing ideas of fate. Whatever happens outside of Oedipus Rex has already happened, it is written in the past and cannot be reached from within the play, it is an essential critical principle that what is not mentioned in the play does not exist [ ] we are examining the intentions of a dramatist. 8 This reflects similar ideas about human experience as we cannot change our position within the world nor whatever laws (human or divine) govern us from without. If such laws were comprehensible within our world then 6 Sophocles, Oedipus The King, (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 205. 7 Aristotle. Poetics (London: Penguin, 1996), 51. 8 Dodds, On Misunderstanding, 40.
3 they would no longer govern us. As a result of Sophocles dramatic structure, the outer objective knowledge is privileged, while the inner subjective experience falls short, Oedipus is a kind of symbol of the human intelligence which cannot rest until it has solved all the riddles even the last riddle, to which the answer is that human happiness is built on an illusion. 9 Sophocles sets up the investigation, the detective plot, Banish the man, or pay back blood with blood/murder sets the plague-storm on the city. 10 The investigation into the murder soon becomes the investigation of Oedipus. Who is Oedipus? When he wishes, like Oedipus, to pursue the investigation of what he is, man discovers himself enigmatic, without stability or a domain proper to him, without fixed connection, without defined essence, oscillating between the equal of a god and the equal of nothing. His real greatness consists in the very thing which expresses his enigmatic nature: the question. 11 Oedipus is the question, not the answer. The play presents this fact via its painful inevitability without reconciliation. Oedipus is a question constantly seeking its reply. Oedipus is the splint wedged between human discourse and divine discourse. Vernant argues, Oedipus is double. He constitutes by himself a riddle whose meaning he will guess only by discovering himself in every respect opposite of what he believed himself and seemed to be, 12 which helps to understand pity for Oedipus humiliation. However, I would argue that acts of pity seem to contribute to fulfilling the prophecy. At the beginning, Oedipus acts on pity in response to the suffering of Thebes, I would be blind to misery not to pity my people kneeling at my feet. 13 There is also the pity of the Shepherd who did not kill Oedipus as an infant, I pitied the little baby, master. 14 This seems all the more tragic, as good intentions have a negative impact on the plot. It shows the indifference of whatever cause either we believe in free will or else we are determinists 15 is driving Oedipus to his doom. Does Oedipus suffer from his fate or his free will? Jocasta says, Fear? What should a man fear? It s all chance, chance rules our 9 Dodds, On Misunderstanding, 48. 10 Sophocles, Oedipus, 164. 11 Vernant, Ambiguity and Reversal, 495. 12 Ibid., 477. 13 Sophocles, Oedipus, 159. 14 Ibid., 232. 15 Dodds, On Misunderstanding, 42.
4 lives. Not a man on earth can see a day ahead, groping through the dark. Better to live at random, best we can. 16 By contrast, is he playing into the hands of the gods? Paying attention to the form of the play and as Dodds argues, to ask about a character in fiction Was he a good man? is to ask a strictly meaningless question: since Oedipus never lived we can answer neither Yes nor No. 17 Sophocles does not stabilize Oedipus on good/bad acts, instead he is destabilized in the void of moral intent, caught in random cosmic fatality. The play is riddled with triggers for its inevitable resolve. The mechanics expose double meanings in language, How wrong it is to take the good for bad, purely at random, or take the bad for good, 18 in which arbitrariness represents conflict between seeing and knowledge, when Oedipus reaches the disturbing point of anagnorisis: the agony! I am agony where am I going? where on earth? where does all this agony hurl me? where s my voice? winging, swept away on a dark tide My destiny, my dark power, what a leap you made! 19 The lines are fragmented as Oedipus becomes his suffering. As playwright, Sophocles asserts god-like position by constructing the narrative. By putting this on stage, Sophocles provides distance from the action and a privileged view of the events, from which we experience pleasure as a result of pity and fear. This aesthetic experience is unstageable, but sits at the core of tragic drama. It reinforces our stability, at a safe distance from harm, however the issues with witnessing a performance raises issues of the audiences embodiment and shared experience of pain and pity, of its ambiguous sense of detachment, of the actor s presence in time prevent the study of tragedy from becoming over-abstract and removed from emotional difficulty. 20 We need to witness this instability to be able to measure our own, likewise a measure of human suffering. If Oedipus fate is determined by divine 16 Sophocles, Oedipus The King, 215. 17 Dodds, On Misunderstanding, 39. 18 Sophocles, Oedipus The King, 194. 19 Ibid., 239. 20 Wallace, Introduction to Tragedy, 9.
5 powers, fate would operate as a formula in which the outcome is always the same, in the objective order it is acts that count, not intentions. 21 We feel pity for Oedipus and terror for a world whose laws we do not understand. 22 If we did not feel pity for Oedipus then the play would not be a tragedy. Terror as a response to the world that Sophocles creates, recognisable to Athenian audiences, constitutes the unstageability of the play as something that we are within but cannot escape from. Oedipus is trapped within the laws that we cannot make sense of. This is unstageable and our place within the constructs of the world, much like the characters within the mechanics of the tragic play, is what we cannot grasp in order to comprehend. Like Oedipus, we are searching it for truth, stability, some purpose but in vain. How are we to represent something like that? The machine of tragedy is indifferent to suffering, exposing our frailty and vulnerability. 23 In form and content, the tragic drama explores the frictions between human and divine, two different discourses weave themselves and confront each other in the same language: a human discourse, a divine discourse. In the beginning, the two discourses are quite distinct, as if cut off one from the other; at the end of the play, when all is made clear, the two discourses are rejoined. 24 Endgame The unstageable is beyond the human condition, it sits outside of the world, taking an objective view over our subjective experience. It has an influence on us, a feeling we are being watched. Our anxieties are often projected out there as in Sophocles play. But in Beckett s the unstageable is the absence of anything outside the room. Remnants of a recognizable world exist in the text but are instantly extinguished into nothing, it s finished. 25 Endgame destroys what is beyond the human condition, Outside of here it s death. 26 There is nothing outside of the Bare interior. Grey light, 27 the audience cannot 21 Dodds, On Misunderstanding, 44. 22 Ibid., 40. 23 Wallace, Introduction to Tragedy, 8. 24 Vernant, Ambiguity and Reversal, 478. 25 Beckett, Endgame, 5. 26 Beckett, Endgame, 9. 27 Ibid., 5.
6 even comprehend the world that Clov and Hamm inhabit. There are aspects we might recognize but nothing quite ties together to form any definite meaning. The problem with representation asks how we can give meaning to human suffering. Being able to represent tragic events would aestheticize suffering and make it seem meaningful. The point of tragedy is its meaninglessness. Endgame is a riddle that resists interpretation, Understanding it can mean nothing other than understanding its incomprehensibility, or concretely reconstructing its meaning structure that it has none. 28 Beckett stages the predicament that his characters cannot express the thing that is making everything miserable. The setting is a dystopian room with only hints at a world beyond the windows, in which the beginning calls for an end, Finished, it s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. 29 The narrative is built on patterns of repetition and unresolved events. In contrast to Oedipus Rex, where answers cause suffering, suffering in Endgame is caused by unanswered questions: CLOV: Why do you keep me? HAMM: There s no one else. CLOV: There s nowhere else. 30 Questions are never answered directly, and raise yet more questions. The plays arbitrary language carefully evacuates what we look for to make meaning and falls into absurdity. Beckett operates the machinery of tragedy to represent very specific conditions of the twentieth century, After the Second War, everything is destroyed, even resurrected culture, without knowing it; humanity vegetates along, crawling, after events which even the survivors cannot really survive, on a pile of ruins which even renders futile self-reflection of one s own battered state. 31 This is a moment in history when human progress turns on itself, destabilizing meaning and structures of meaning, that results in non-events that feel 28 Adorno, Understand Endgame, 120. 29 Beckett, Endgame, 6. 30 Ibid., 8. 31 Adorno, Understand Endgame, 122.
7 chaotic and painful, Nothing is funnier than unhappiness. 32 Eagleton says, We live forward tragically, but think back comically, 33 which is represented in Endgame. The world is falling away, all aspects of life are in decay; bodies, buildings, nature, language. The environment is dysfunctional, high up, two small windows, 34 for bodies that are damaged: HAMM: How are your eyes? CLOV: Bad. HAMM: How are your legs? CLOV: Bad. HAMM: But you can move. CLOV: Yes. HAMM: [Violently] Then move! 35 The characters minds are damaged too, inflicting psychological attacks on each other, The violence of the unspeakable is mimicked by the timidity to mention it. Beckett keeps it nebulous. One can only speak euphemistically about what is incommensurate with all experience. 36 Endgame is a place where nothing happens, but nevertheless something has to happen. This seems to be part of the tragedy; the persistence of life in a world where nothing is left is extreme and harrowing by nature: HAMM: Nature has forgotten us. CLOV: There s no more nature. [ ] HAMM: But we breathe, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals! 37 32 Becket, Endgame, 14. 33 Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 42. 34 Beckett, Endgame, 5. 35 Ibid., 9. 36 Adorno, Understand Endgame, 123. 37 Beckett, Endgame, 10.
8 Nature still exists so long as they breathe and decay. The effects of time still linger on with apocalyptic uncertainty of what is beyond the walls of the stage, [Beckett] does not leave out the temporality of existence all existence, after all, is temporal but rather removes from existence what time, the historical tendency, attempts to quash in reality. 38 Beckett removes the implications of the historical conjunctures, though it is heavily implied in the narrative, as Adorno suggests. Shifting the focus to the human condition, Endgame turns tragedy inside out as the causal law that governs the characters is the destructive power of man. There is no nature and there is no god, The bastard! He doesn t exist, 39 therefore human law is responsible for tragic descent. Society is unbalanced, with vast and varied experiences of the world, across the scales of justice/injustice, rich/poor, male/female, black/white, beautiful/ugly. The circumstances of our position on these scales, in all their variations, subvert our understanding and ability to comprehend with a lack of meaning or purpose, to which we apply the world, fate or the gods 40 to explain or justify suffering. But dramatists of tragedy ask us not to justify or explain by showing us that tragedy is fundamentally unexplainable and unjustifiable in its cruelty. Tragedy evades reason. In tragic drama, then, it is the task of content and form to pattern suffering into narrative on stage to make it bearable. But for Williams, tragedy deals with widespread conditions of social injustice and exploitation. 41 Tragedy can be viewed as a cyclical process of staging and evaluation. If staging the unstageable is to represent the unrepresentable by creating distance, it forces us to consider our position on the social scale while imparting shock, Sontag regards shock as only useful if it can galvanize us into action. 42 It brings us into a communality of meaning and suffering that attempts to balance different senses of reality in a shared experience of staged catastrophe. The inevitability of Oedipus Rex constitutes the unravelling of tragedy but the root of the cause is unrepresentable. The voice of the gods, chance, free will, and acts of pity as I have suggested, bind together in a collision of consequence, making it difficult for us to fix on a stable meaning of suffering. The loss of meaning in Endgame is a result of these forces being 38 Adorno, Understand Endgame, 124. 39 Beckett, Endgame, 34. 40 Wallace, Introduction to Tragedy, 3. 41 Ibid., 2. 42 Ibid., 6-7.
9 dispelled, leaving only meaningless human suffering to contend with. Both works of tragedy show something unrepresentable in language, that critics such as Vernant, Dodds and Adorno apply to riddle and double meaning. It is representative of the unstageable that language falls short of its meaning, in relation to the friction between seeing and knowing. The emotion that this evokes seems to me the unstageable aspect of Oedipus (pity and fear) and Endgame (uncertainty).
10 Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. Trying to Understand Endgame in New German Critique, No. 26, Critical Theory and Modernity. Durham, US: Duke University Press, 1982. Accessed 18 December 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/488027.pdf. Aristotle. Poetics. Edited by Malcolm Heath. London: Penguin, 1996. Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. Dodds, E. R. On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex, in Greece & Rome, Second Series, Vol. 13, No, 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. Accessed 18 December 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/642354. Eagleton, Terry. Sweet Violence: the idea of the tragic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Sophocles. Oedipus The King. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 1984. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex in New Literary History, Vol. 9, No. 3. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978. Accessed 18 December 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/468451.pdf. Wallace, Jennifer. The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.