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Monday, June 26, 2006
Seneca’s Thyestes
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born in AD 1, in Spain. He was the son of a famous philosopher (Seneca the elder) and went on to become an even more famous philosopher himself. Of the ten tomato-coloured volumes of the ‘Loeb Classical Library’ Seneca only two are drama: the rest are letters and philosophical works that express his controlled and Stoic approach to life. But it’s his take on tragedy that interests me here, specifically in response to the aesthetic tenets laid down so famously by Aristotle, katharsis and so on. (That’s kat’hharsis, by the way, not kaþarsis. But this is by the bye).
All the best classical tragic drama is, if you believe the critics, Greek: thousands of monographs on the Aeschylean and Sophoclean and Euripidean stuff, and only a few specialists resurrecting the musty violence of the Latin. It’s difficult to deny that Attic drama has a much greater importance for our current literatures than the Roman plays. But of course there’s one sense in which Seneca has been even more influential on the development of tragedy. This is because it was Seneca, and not particularly the Greeks, who exercised the greatest influence on English Renaissance drama, and therefore upon the world’s single most significant writer of tragedy—I mean Shakespeare, of course. It’s a old chestnut of Shakespearean studies how much he took from Seneca, not only effectively rewriting the Thyestes (in Titus Andronicus) but also developing the very Senecan, very Thyestian (and profoundly un-Greek) theme of revenge in a play such as Hamlet. It can, then, be something of a disappointment actually to read a play like the Thyestes. It really does come over as rather crude, as unpleasant, nasty in a non-Christina-Aguilera sense.
It’s not dramatically very interesting: the five ‘acts’ (though ‘act’ needs to go in inverted commas, since there’s nothing in the original text to indicate that it was designed to be broken down into separate scenes or acts despite the Renaissance assumptions on that score)—the five acts are rather discontinuous from one another. First we have the ghost of Tantalus and his goading Fury; after they exit they never return to the stage. Then we have a scene with Atreus planning his revenge, followed by a scene in which Atreus greets his brother with a false bonhomie: neither is very dramatic, there’s very little action, no development of character or plot. There are a couple of minor characters, but the whole drama depends really on only these two players. Then there is a scene in which a messenger reports actions from offstage—exciting if revolting, but removed from the audience by being reported at second hand. Only in the last act, in which Atreus gloatingly reveals his hideous crime to his brother, do we see some dramatic action.
In other words, and for the benefit of those who aren’t as familiar with the play as perhaps they should be, here’s a summary of its structure:
‘Act 1’ The ghost of Tantalus is summoned from Hades by a Fury to work evil in the royal house of Argos, his own descendents. Tantalus is reluctant, but is compelled.
Choral ode 1: A prayer that the gods will end the tradition of evildoing that has dogged the house of Argos.‘Act 2’ Atreus prepares to take revenge on his brother, Thyestes. His attendant is horrified by his schemes.
Choral ode 2: True kingship is not about power over others but power over oneself. The chorus praises the life lived in rustic obscurity.‘Act 3’ Thyestes returns to Argos from exile. He does not trust his brother, but is persuaded by his son. Atreus greets him warmly and dresses him in royal robes.
Choral ode 3: The chorus praises the change from hatred to love in the relationship between the two brothers, noting with unwitting irony that nothing endures.‘Act 4’ A messenger describes how Atreus sacrificed Thyestes sons, cut their bodies up and cooked them.
Choral ode 4: An ode of horror at the violation of the natural order—there is darkness at noon, and surely the world is coming to an end.‘Act 5’ Thyestes is enjoying the feast that Atreus has prepared for him, but has strange misgivings. Atreus reveals what he has been eating his own offspring. Horrified Thyestes prays to the gods for justice, but without response.
As drama and judged by the standards we now tend to apply to theatrical work, Thyestes is a static, awkwardly constructed piece, saved from a wholly debilitating clumsiness only by the dark intensity and unremittingness with which it treats its central topic. On the other hand many critics see in the play’s pared down focus an startling modern, almost absurdist potency lacking in other classical drama: more Beckett or Anouilh than Euripides.
One thing that critics of ‘tragedy’ have tried to decide, then, is whether this Roman development of the form simply negates Aristotelian aesthetic tenets: a new focus on the nihilistic, godless extremes of human violence; a shift from an emphasis the place of catharsis in provoking psychological health to unremitting horrors that are likely to provoke only disgust and despair. Where does this leave tragedy? Any place good?
Norman Pratt identifies two separate sorts of tragic impulse. He takes Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy as representative of what he considers a particular Greek form of tragedy. Then he looks at Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play famous for its Senecan horrors, (plop, and out go Gloster’s eyes! And on stage too!), the extreme and horrific degeneration of a noble king into madness and beggary and so on.
Oedipus is trying to make sense in a world that does not make sense. He is in a divinely ordered system where his rational purpose is disastrously turned against him by the force of capricious circumstance. The divine order brings disorder to human experience. If in this fashion we can say that Oedipus transmits the picture of disorder in nature, Shakespearian criticism is in substantial agreement that King Lear expresses the theme of nature in disorder. The terms “disorder in nature” for Sophocles and “nature in disorder” for Shakespeare are only superficial catch phrases, but they show a contrast between two types of tragedy, radically different in their conceptions of evil. In Oedipus nature wounds human life. Suffering is built constituently into the nature makeup of how things are …. In Lear nature itself is not defective, but only part of it, the human dimension. [Norman T. Pratt, Seneca’s Drama (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1983), p.6]
Here’s a very notable oddity. In Seneca’s plays, and despite the fact that they unmistakeably take place in the pagan universe of ancient Greek and Roman myth (a world in which gods and mortals promiscuously interact, and even appear on stage), characters repeatedly wonder where the gods are, or pointedly deny that the gods even exist. This is a very puzzling thing. When Thyestes returns to Argos he talks of ‘my native soil and the gods of my father (if there really are gods)—( si sunt tamen di)’ [406-7]; and the play ends with Thyestes praying for the gods of vengeance to come--a prayer that remains noticeably unanswered. The last line of the play is giving over to Atreus’s mockery, not to any deus dangling down from any machine to mete and dole justice. In Seneca’s Medea, Medea kills her own children to spite her husband Jason; and the play ends with her flying away in a chariot pulled by flying dragons. The last lines of that play are Jason’s: ‘travel on high through the lofty spaces of heaven, and bear witness where you ride that there are no gods’ [testare nullos esse deos 1027].
To restate Pratt’s view in more banal terms: the story of Thyestes and the ruthless violence of Atreus is not so much about the cruelty of the cosmos as it is about the evil in men’s hearts. Accordingly there is an inward, choking, human corporeality about the plays. It is the revolting intimacy of Thyestes devouring his own children, which turns us away from the ‘higher’ concerns of any spiritual realm.
For Alessandro Schiesaro there are unmistakeable incestuous overtones in this horrible practice of eating your offspring. As he puts it: ‘incest “pollutes” the body with the seed of a close relation … eating one’s own children is a similar form of unacceptable ingestion’ [Schiesaro, Alessandro, The Passions in Play: Thyestes and the Dynamics of Senecan Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 2003) 94]. Instead of being quite separate things, Atreus ‘identifies between these two very different gestures [incest, familial cannibalism] a common element which becomes central to his thinking’. In doing this he is, says Schiesaro, ‘follow[ing] a form of logic that is akin to the logic of the unconscious.’ It seems inevitable that Freud must come into the critical equation: ‘it is one of the greatest achievements of post-Freudian thought to have realized that this strange logic, where symmetry replaces the rigid conventions of Aristotelian thought, is actually an ineliminable component of the mind, given free rein in the workings of the unconscious but normally kept at bay during conscious activity’. This, in a nutshell, and sic as regards the inelegant neologism ‘ineliminable’, is the approach Schiesaro takes to the Thyestes.
Is this right? Does Thyestes represent the supercession of rational, ordered Aristotelian tragedy by something irrational, driven and subconscious? I could put this another way. We might want to see Aristotle’s Poetics, with its firm rule and its assurance that literature like tragedy can be accounted for, defined and determined, as the conscious element; and the weird horrors of Senecan tragedy, its dissociated nightmare-like succession of images, its unrestrained expression of the most brutal impulses of humanity towards revenge and violence, as the subconscious element in the Tragic mind. Critics often talk in these terms about literature more generally, or more precisely, they often work within this kind of unstated paradigm: as if, for instance, the balanced, rational fictions of Jane Austen embodies the ‘conscious’ mind of late eighteenth-century literature, where the buried horrors and haunted catacombs of the Gothic novel represent the ‘subconscious’.
If I have one main problem with Schiesaro’s approach it is this: I can think of few dramas that are less sexually conceived than Thyestes. It is a play almost entirely purged of erotic charge; or perhaps it would be close to the truth to say that all the erotic charge is sublimated into the more primal appetites of revenge, self-glorying, of eating and drinking. There are no female characters at all in this play, which is a very striking thing, when you think about it. Neither do these various male characters express any sensual or homosexual impulses. Where’s the sex? It has been, we might say, crowded out by the horror. Some people get turned on my silk stockings; some by gas masks; but I don’t know the name given to the perversion whereby people become sexually aroused at the prospect of a father literally devouring the flesh of his children
But is this the way horror actually works? Isn’t the reverse the case? I’m thinking of how sexualised most Gothic horrors are, or most horror films today: the logic of the genre is that it almost has to be sexy young teens being terrorised by violent ghosts and monsters precisely because the libidinal response and the excitements of fear and thrill are so closely associated for most of us. So why is Thyestes so thoroughly unsexy?
Maybe this question comes across as merely fatuous, but I ask it to try and get to something that I think is important about the way the play figures. And Schiesaro may well be right to argue that Freud provides a very useful way of understanding how the play works. Take for instance Freud’s interest in inversion, the way some obsession or fascination in the subconscious mind only emerges into consciousness in inverted form. To decipher one’s dreams or neuroses it is often necessary, Freud suggests, to look to the opposite of what they apparently mean.
One thing that critics have often noticed about Thyestes is that, despite being one of the darkest and most distressing plays ever written, it nevertheless takes the form of comedy: or more specifically that the play inverts comic topoi. John Fitch notes the ‘familiar comic pattern’ by which ‘young people escape the control of their elders and establish themselves as adults’. And again, the feast is often a central feature of comic drama, the celebration of life and healthy appetite at which everybody eats their fill of good food and drinks themselves happy. Both these tropes get spun about in Thyestes: most obviously the ‘comic feast’ is hideously inverted; nothing further from the joyful celebration of life can be imagined. Fitch notes that ‘the inversion of natural processes is particularly clear when children are thrust back into the body of the parent in a travesty of birth and pregnancy (see lines 999-1000, 1041-44)’ [Fitch, 226]. When we look further into the matter we find that the key dramatic devices of the Thyestes are precisely the mainstays of comic drama: a character misled by another, trickster character; the misunderstanding which brings the main character low and so on.
Reading Thyestes though the lens of psychoanalysis might give us the feeling that we’re making sense of its otherwise rather baffling perversity. And it does seem to me that the perversity of this play has indeed baffled commentators, some of whom have been disinclined to call the play tragic at all. Here’s Fitch again:
Though unmistakeably a masterpiece, is Thyestes’ effect that of tragedy? It does not evoke that sympathy for the victims of disaster on which many Greek tragedies base their emotional effect: for Thyestes is too weak-willed, too gross in his feasting, too dim-witted in comparison with his brother, to command much sympathy. Atreus himself is paradoxically far more attractive, at least initially: in his exuberant ruthlessness, in his frank devotion to power as the only good, in his macabre wit, he has an appeal like that of Shakespeare’s Richard III. But he becomes repellent in his demented sacrificing of the youngsters, and in his sadistic toying with Thyestes. [Fitch, 225]
The way out of this cul-de-sac is not to see the play as being about ‘character’ in the full sense (and certainly not about ‘character’ in the Greek sense), so much as it is about appetite itself. Indeed, one way of taking Thyestes would be to see it as a dramatic exaggeration of appetite until that alone becomes the sole substantive constituent of human character. The actors in this drama are like children without authority figures to control them in; children giving absolute free rein to their urges. Perhaps it’s this very childishness that explains the absence of sex in this play. Young children understand some appetites very well (food, anger, joy, misery) but have no purchase on the post-pubertal peculiarities of sex.
There’s one particular feature of Seneca’s portrayal of this play’s horrible scelus, or crime, that particularly strikes me: and that’s the way a purely human atrocity infects the whole of the natural world. The sky goes dark in the face of such infamy. The messenger, reporting Atreus’ murder of the children, addresses the sun: ‘O patient Phoebus … you have fled backwards, snatched the day from mid-heaven’ [776-7] such that ‘the evil deed is smothered in strange darkness by oppressive night at an alien time’ [786-7]. The chorus pick up the theme: Phoebus has left the sky in disgust at this human iniquity, and surely the end of the world is foretold:
The regular cycles of heaven are lost;
sunset and sunrise will not exist.
The dewy mother of dawning light,
accustomed to hand the eastern reins
to the god, is stunned
by such disorder on her kingdom’s threshold [813-18][The Sun] bids the darkness rise, yet night
is not yet ready;
no stars appear in their turn, no fires
gleam in the ether,
no moon disperses the heavy shadows.
…
Our hearts are shaken and trembling, trembling
with enormous fear
lest the shattered cosmos fall in the ruin
ordained by fate,
lest gods and humans be engulfed once more
in formless chaos …. [823-33]
Of course the world doesn’t end. Despite the enormity of the chorus’s (and perhaps of our) horror, the world continues on its way. In fact, despite the artistic rightness of this perhaps melodramatic insistence on darkness at noon, there is when we reflect upon it something rather pitifully naive about it. All our experience teaches us that, horrible though Atreus’s crime, human beings have committed crimes, and uncountably many of them, that are much worse; and moreover that when these things happen the cosmos takes absolutely no notice at all. The sun rises and sets no matter how beastly we are to one another. George Steiner’s Death of Tragedy book ends with a coda that relates a true-life story from WWII. Captured Russian officers were being kept by Nazi guards in a Polish castle. Supplies of food, erratic towards the end of the war, ceased entirely in the winter of 1944-45. The guards ate what they had, but there was nothing for their dogs, so they turned the hunger-maddened Alsatians on the Russian prisoners. Shortly after this the Nazis retreated, leaving the remaining Russian officers locked in the castle’s cellar. Those who survived did so by devouring their colleagues. Advancing Russian troops found the last few alive. They gave them a good meal and then shot them all, lest the Russian soldiers see to what depravity their commanding officers could be driven. The castle was then burnt to the ground.
This is a very nasty story, made all the nastier by the fact that it is true. Steiner does not consider it tragic because he thinks the Holocaust, in its meaningless and nihilistic hideousness, has emptied the significance from the very concept of tragedy and rendered it void. For Steiner this story is merely horrible, with a deep horror of the sort that Kurtz famously glimpsed in his last moments. But what interests me here is how sickeningly familiar this sort of thing is to our sensibilities. Accordingly, when we hear this story we don’t, of course, expect also to hear that the sun fled the sky in disgust, or that the stars refused the glint the darkness because of man’s iniquity. The enormous indifference of the cosmos to every human being is one truth that every person needs to learn as they grown out of childhood and into adulthood.
This in turn makes me wonder whether Seneca’s pathetic fallacy undermines and even, in a peculiar way, trivialises the story of Atreus and Thyestes. It is in a strict sense childish to think that our transgressions are directly mirrored in the universe as a whole, like Pip in Great Expectations stealing food and a file for Magwitch and then running through a landscape he sees as accusing of his crime: every cow looking at him seems to be saying ‘stop thief’ and the fog he runs through symbolically embodies his own ethical confusion. In Dickens’s novel this is more obviously the pathetic fallacy, because we understand that the guilt is in Pip’s mind, not the external world, even as we understand that his guilt is colouring his perspective on the outside world. But in Thyestes the starless darkness at noon is presented as an objective fact. What are we to make of it?
In part it is a very accurate embodiment of the cosmic pretensions of tragedy itself: the suffering in tragedy is always a particular, human suffering. Yet so many critics want to claim that the significance of tragedy is precisely that it articulates a universal significance. Isn’t this just based on a misunderstanding of the relationship between human life and the universe?
Thyestes is a childish tragedy; and I use the adjective neither flippantly nor pejoratively. It inhabits a mode of childish intensity, one in which those appetites that loom most large for children (hunger and physical appetites; rage and the desire to get your own back) assume monstrously god-blotting-out proportions. It is a sexless world because it is in touch with the primary experience of all of us: the child’s vehemence. It is an intimate world, physically and spiritually, because when you are a child everything is close to you. It is a universe that is both god-filled (every corner bears the mark of the magical authority of the gods) and godless precisely because children comprehend the godlessness of the cosmos, even if they cannot articulate it. What I mean by this last shocking assertion is that, although many children believe in God they do so from a structure of belief and experience in which the conceptualising of God (as caring, as the rulemaker, as the horizon of the world) elides for young children very precisely with their experience of their parents, and adults in general. God is both a magical presence, and merely another sort of adult. And because Seneca’s play is all these things it makes the most profound point about our adultish appropriation of tragedy. We flatter ourselves that we understand tragedy in a way that children cannot; their lives are too limited, they can’t count to six million and therefore can’t grasp the holocaust. This is very wongheaded of us. The anxieties we experience (Is there a god? Does my wife really love me? Will I lose my job?), whilst real, are milk-and-water compared to the enormity that children face every night with the monster in the closet, or in the shadows of the corner of their bedroom. For adults, angst and even tragedy is a portion of our lives; but for children, moment by moment, it is everything and all consuming. And that’s what Seneca’s strangely over-focused and horrifying play captures.
Comments
I’ve not read Tyestes and, to be honest, I’ve not read most of this post either. But I’ve read bits and pieces of it, the last paragraph in particular. Those final lines resonate:
The anxieties we experience (Is there a god? Does my wife really love me? Will I lose my job?), whilst real, are milk-and-water compared to the enormity that children face every night with the monster in the closet, or in the shadows of the corner of their bedroom. For adults, angst and even tragedy is a portion of our lives; but for children, moment by moment, it is everything and all consuming. And that’s what Seneca’s strangely over-focused and horrifying play captures.
What those words resonate with is something that would seem to be far and away from classical tragedy. As you know, I’ve become interested in animation. And that means entertainment for children, though obviously not for children only, not by a long stretch. Some animation is targeted at what I think of as “universal kid space,” which I’ve glossed in my notes as follows:
I am interested in a certain public-cultural “space” which I associate with the phrase “for kids of all ages” and with the animated feature films produced by Disney studios starting with “Snow White” and “Pinocchio” in the late 1930s. What I find so interesting an peculiar about those films is that they are intelligible and entertaining both to fairly young children and to their parents and grandparents. That is so say, Norm’s grandchildren can enjoy these films on their own terms, but so can Norm. Norm might take special pleasure in viewing these films with his grandchildren, but he doesn’t need to be with them in order to take pleasure in the films; he doesn’t need to borrow his pleasure from theirs.
Your closing comments, and your comments on childishness and tragedy, suggest ways of beginning to think about how this universal kid space operates.
Think of Miyazaki’s films. He’s quite clear that, for most of them, children are his audience. But he also insists that, by making films for children in just the right way, they will appeal to adults, as indeed they do.
Think about, for example, My Neighbor Totoro or Spirited Away. The children in those films a confronted with what seems like the absolute certainty that their world is gone forever. You talk about appetite being out of control—any of that in Spirited Away?
There’s alot to think about here.
Thanks Bill. I agree; there is something less equivocal, something more nakedly apocalyptic, in the best children’s art I think.
Judging by the notable absence of a stampede to comment here I’d say that you’re very far from being the only Valve-reader neither to have read Seneca nor this post.
I wouldn’t say that Seneca was talking about appetites and using an intense focus to explicate matters. I’d say that Seneca was being a lazy ass who thought he could get away with producing a first draft.
Either that, or he’s an example of someone with a well earned reputation in one area, who falls on his face in another. People forget that just because a man is an expert in moose calls, it doesn’t mean he knows anything about the function of cadence in Samoyed chanting.
I did read the whole post, and with all due respect to mythusmage I think it deserves a rather more attentive response than “Seneca was a lazy ass.” So here’s my shot at it:
- I think the lack of overt sexual or erotic content in the play would not seem, to a psychoanalytic critic, to be on point as a response to the argument about incest. Of course, one of the signal flaws of psychoanalytic (and especially Freudian) criticism is that it can read sex into virtually anything—but all the same, absence of overt eroticism does not necessarily mean absence of sexual tensions, or absence of the mobilization of sexual taboos. In this case I think there’s reasonably compelling reason to wonder, if the locus of the horror is in a pre-sexualized and unrestrained “childish” appetite, why the consumption of one’s own offspring is made the focus. That’s a very specific choice that “childish” appetite doesn’t seem adequate to explain, particularly since I suspect an argument could be made that the play is really structured around the divine response to the crime (Thyestes, having transgressed nature, is ineligible to receive help from the gods even though he was deceived).
- Obviously there’s lots of eroticism in Gothic and modern horror, but all of this comes from a dually repressed and obsessed theological sin / punishment framework that Seneca isn’t using, so it doesn’t seem especially relevant.
- Re: tragedy and the Holocaust. When you say:
In part it is a very accurate embodiment of the cosmic pretensions of tragedy itself: the suffering in tragedy is always a particular, human suffering. Yet so many critics want to claim that the significance of tragedy is precisely that it articulates a universal significance.
There seems to be some misidentification going on. Surely the point of most modern critics is not that genocides and war crimes evoke a cosmic revulsion, but rather that these particular, human sufferings have general implications outside their immediate context. (Hence thus-far-abortive attempts to put anti-genocide legal frameworks in place, for example.)
- It can be fairly said that the scale and bleak absurdity of the Second World War’s atrocity represents something that’s well outside the classical Greek concept of tragedy. (Hence, perhaps, Stalin’s apocryphal quotation that “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.") This makes it necessary to discard a purely Aristotelian definition of “tragedy,” as has been evident for a long time in any case; it doesn’t really matter that horrific stories of pointless murder piled on pointless murder are not the kind of tragedy that occurred to the classical literary mind.
- I think this:
The anxieties we experience . . . whilst real, are milk-and-water compared to the enormity that children face every night with the monster in the closet, or in the shadows of the corner of their bedroom.
... really fails to convince. I remember some of my childhood anxieties and imagined tragedies fairly vividly (in particular I had an abject terror of the undead that resulted in being unable to sleep for a week after seeing Ghostbusters, no word of a lie)—but in no way would I say this amounted to having a more vivid sense of the tragic than I do as an adult. Surely one of the most unambiguous signals of being differentiated from childhood is having the conscious realization that things that seemed all-consuming at the time in fact were not that important compared with the pain of, say, losing a friend or a loved one.
Some things to think about if you choose to develop this line of thinking further. (And I’m not saying it’s uninteresting, just that the above points are where I tend to balk.)
Something I’m curious about: had you read Seneca when you were writing some of your books (I have Salt particularly in mind, for some reason)? And if so, did that reading consciously influence your approach in any way?
Dr S., thank you for your intelligent and thoughtful reaction to this piece; and thanks too for wading through the whole thing. You raise some fascinating points:
“ I think the lack of overt sexual or erotic content in the play would not seem, to a psychoanalytic critic, to be on point as a response to the argument about incest. Of course, one of the signal flaws of psychoanalytic (and especially Freudian) criticism is that it can read sex into virtually anything—but all the same, absence of overt eroticism does not necessarily mean absence of sexual tensions, or absence of the mobilization of sexual taboos.”
This is true, of course, and it’s one of the joys of Freud that’s sex in a text indicates a sexual text but no sex at all in a text indicates in anything an even more sexual text. I didn’t mean to make a general sweep at Seneca ‘he’s not sexy’; I meant my specific response to this specific play is to be struck by how little sexual tension, symbolism, mood or tone there is in it. I may be too repressed myself to see it, but I’m knocking around alternate explanations. Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar after all.
“It can be fairly said that the scale and bleak absurdity of the Second World War’s atrocity represents something that’s well outside the classical Greek concept of tragedy.”
I really wonder about this. I’m honestly not sure I know. The Greeks had a pretty first-hand experience of everything up to and including the systemic extermination of the population of entire states (how many times in the Peloponnesian War did the Athenian militaty capture a recalcitrant polis and then kill all the adult males, and sell all the woman and children into slavery? Many times).
“This makes it necessary to discard a purely Aristotelian definition of “tragedy,” as has been evident for a long time in any case; it doesn’t really matter that horrific stories of pointless murder piled on pointless murder are not the kind of tragedy that occurred to the classical literary mind.”
But there are tragedies that involve mass death; the Trojan Women, say. Or death that is deliberately posited as beyond comprehension, as in Medea or the Bacchae. You don’t think, then, that one of the reasons classical tragedy remains so popular in the academy is that to read it is to be struck, time and again, but how modern it feels? Is now really the time to discard Aristotle?
“- I think this: The anxieties we experience . . . whilst real, are milk-and-water compared to the enormity that children face every night with the monster in the closet, or in the shadows of the corner of their bedroom.... really fails to convince. I remember some of my childhood anxieties and imagined tragedies fairly vividly … but in no way would I say this amounted to having a more vivid sense of the tragic than I do as an adult.”
I can’t argue with this; it’s a personal sense of childhood/adulthood, isn’t it? What I wrote describes my personal experience of childhood, but naturally that’s not a universal template. In an absolute sense of course ‘things that seemed all-consuming at the time in fact were not that important compared with the pain of, say, losing a friend or a loved one’. I say of course in a rational sense; because I’d still maintain that it doesn’t regsiter on the pulses according to the rational schema.
“(in particular I had an abject terror of the undead that resulted in being unable to sleep for a week after seeing Ghostbusters, no word of a lie)”
Since we’re playing No Word of a Lie, here’s a little anecdote from my childhood. When I was growing up in London I had nightmares and day-terrors and became unresponsive, withdrew from the world. My parents became so worried they took me to see a child psychiatrist. He uncovered the thing that had so traumatised me; not Dr Who, as my Mum suspected, or some other terrible stimulus, but Carry On Screaming. I think in particular it was the Frankenstein’s-monster creature Oddjob, who loses his finger (it just falls off I seem to remember). Kenneth Williams put the finger in a special machine and quick-grows a brand new Oddjob. And as a child that just … Freaked. Me. Out.
“Something I’m curious about: had you read Seneca when you were writing some of your books (I have Salt particularly in mind, for some reason)? And if so, did that reading consciously influence your approach in any way?”
Really interesting. Despite doing a Classics degree I came to Seneca’s dramas only much later, a few years ago, and not before I wrote Salt. The intertextual angle is the right one, I’d say; except that with Salt the intertexts are more Le Guin’s Dispossessed, some bits of Browning, Nabokov and a touch of Lucretius. An odd blend.
I could put up post about my own fiction wiritng, of course, but part of me thinks that that would be a vainglorious and pettyproud thing to do. Plus surely many more Valveastes have read eg Seneca than any of my novels?
I wonder about the whole idea of approaching the Thyestes as a work written for performance, or even as something intended for reading in some sort of aesthetic context.
It’s been a long time, but I recall that, in a once commonly accepted view, Seneca’s tragedies were “recitation plays” written in the first instance as instructional aides during his tenure as tutor to the young Nero. I admit that sounds overly pat as an explanation, and I notice that there are persuasive voices placing the Thyestes in the “retirement” period of Seneca’s life. Nevertheless, it makes sense of much that is “missing” from this play when we look at it as drama, that the text was not meant to contain its own moral or aesthetic resolution, but to provide a provocative and extremely clear basis for a subsequent discussion or lesson.
There doesn’t seem to be any need to resort to theories of the subconscious to explain the absence of conventional judgements or of closure within the text.