Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Wednesday, 13 February 2008
Tragedy lies at the origin of theatre and the origin of philosophy; contemporaneous with Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were the pre-Socratics, including Heraclitus; the Poetics of Aristotle did not appear until at least two generations after the Oedipus, Plato's Republic about fifty years after the death of Sophocles.
Tragedy lies, too, at the nexus of the Judeo-Christian Word, the Logos, and the representational sexed body. Hesiod, of the sixth century BC, saw the foundation of the world (and consciousness, and Imagination itself) as the product of a metaphysical, mythological sexual congress, quite apart from the authoritarian, all-encompassing consciousness of the unsexed, Judeo-Christian deity:
In truth, first of all came Expanse; and then
wide-bosomed Earth, seat ever safe of all
the immortals who hold the heights of snowy Olympus,
and murky Tartarus in the recesses of the wide-pathed land,
and Love, who is fairest among the immortal gods,
loosener of limbs, who in the breasts of all gods and all men
overcomes thought and prudent purposing.
From Expanse came Darkness and black Night;
and from Night came Ether and Day
whom she conceived and bore after joining with Darkness in love.Hesiod, Theogony 104-138
"Love ... overcomes thought and prudent purposing": the irruption of the Irrational at the moment of consciousness' birth from night and darkness. It was this Irrationality that Plato and Aristotle sought to repress (and therefore the repression, too, of the tragic in Plato's Republic, as well as the rationalism of Aristotle's otherwise far-from-simple discussion of the form). The origin of the Judeo-Christian tradition lies with the authoritarian creator of Genesis I, but also with the creation myth contained in the Gospel of John:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
John 1
The light of consciousness is bodied, then, in Logos: word as life, the light of men.
If theatre is sick, then the sickness is a lack: the lack of the forgotten origin of the art. Between the irruption of the Irrational force surveyed in the pre-Socratics and its suppression in Socrates and Plato lies the period of the great Greek tragedies, the basis of theatre and drama, square one. If we worry that our examination of the tragic origins of the questioning consciousness is somehow ancient, recidivist, we must remember that the 2500 years between the time of the ancient Greeks and our own time is but the fraction of the time it takes to blink an eye, in relation to the long evolution of the race; even shorter than that, in the expanse of time and space of the cosmos. Even if it weren't: necessity consigns all contemplation of past and future to the immediate present. Science and technology may have progressed, but the bodied senses of consciousness have not. Nor, as Freud propounded, have we been able to suppress that Irrational force that leads to both ecstatic pleasure and ecstatic suffering, our awareness of which constitutes that original Beckettian sin of having been born.
Given this, why should tragedy be impossible now, as so many contemporary commentators on the form have it? The title of George Steiner's The Death of Tragedy speaks for itself, and even one of tragedy's most fascinating recent theorists, Walter Kaufmann, said in 1968:
[Contemporary playwrights] who try to write tragedies always run the risk of approximating contemporary architects who put up Gothic buildings. Whether they construct good copies or variations, their work cannot claim true excellence. Doing something really new and interesting with a form in which such great masters have performed so many towering experiments is so difficult that success in any number of other genres is much more probable. ... In comedy untried possibilities abound. It would be exceedingly surprising if the next hundred years should produce tragedies as great as the best we have. But they might well produce comedies as brilliant as any.
This, it seems to me, is surrender: a form of sour grapes, an unnecessary, cowardly and ultimately foolish rejection of possibility and imagination. In any event, it will not be for us to judge success and excellence (though critics egocentrically try to speak to some vague and ideologically-constructed standard); as any theatre artist knows, it is the here-and-now, and not posterity, with which we are concerned. Comedies we have, and we will continue to have. But if we are to have a theatre, whole and well, we need those tragedies too, those tragedies that reach for the torturous wonder at the cosmos and the lives and movements and language of men and women, the wonder that gave birth to tragedy and philosophy. In an age when both are desiccated, perhaps that coupling, too, can again give our theatre health.
Other material:
"95 Sentences About Theatre" (Prolegomena)
Posted at 9.34 am in /Organum
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Wednesday, 13 February 2008
If you're still looking for a Valentine's Day gift for your drama-minded special someone, here's an idea: a piece of a show -- and I don't mean a percentage of the gross. Today and tomorrow are the final days of the purchasing period of Democracy in America, the new production from Annie Dorsen and The Foundry Theatre. At their Web site, and for as little as $10.00, you can purchase text, lighting cues, songs and various other ephemera that will be incorporated into the show to be presented at PS122 beginning 1 April. You can't argue with the quality of the performers who are willing to say your words or even get naked for a few sawbucks: Philippa Kaye, Okwui Okpokwasili and Tony Torn have put their talent on sale to the lucky (and, hopefully, wealthy) few.
So buy your honey a piece of Democracy in America. Who knows? It could be the beginning of a beautiful -- and bargain-minded -- friendship.
Posted at 8.28 am in /Miscellaneous
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