Tragedy and the Return of the Dead (Rethinking the Early Modern) - Hardcover

Lyons, John D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810137100 ISBN 13: 9780810137103

Verlag: Northwestern University Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Early modernity rediscovered tragedy in the dramas and the theoretical writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Attempting to make new tragic fictions, writers like Shakespeare, Webster, Hardy, Corneille, and Racine created a dramatic form that would probably have been unrecognizable to the ancient Athenians. Tragedy and the Return of the Dead recovers a model of the tragic that fits ancient tragedies, early modern tragedies, as well as contemporary narratives and films no longer called “tragic” but which perpetuate the same elements.

Authoritative, wide-ranging, and thought provoking, Tragedy and the Return of the Dead uncovers a set of interlocking plots of family violence that stretch from Greek antiquity up to the popular culture of today. Casting aside the elite, idealist view that tragedy manifests the conflict between two equal goods or the human struggle against the divine, John D. Lyons looks closely at tragedy’s staging of gory and painful deaths, ignominious burials, and the haunting return of ghosts. Through this adjusted lens Le Cid, Hamlet, Frankenstein, The Spanish Tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, Phèdre, Macbeth, and other early modern works appear in a striking new light. These works are at the center of a panorama that stretches from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon to Hitchcock’s Psycho and are placed against the background of the Gothic novel, Freud’s “uncanny,” and Burke’s “sublime.”

Lyons demonstrates how tragedy under other names, such as “Gothic fiction” and “thrillers,” is far from dead and continues as a vital part of popular culture.

 

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JOHN D. LYONS is Commonwealth Professor of French at the University of Virginia.

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Tragedy and the Return of the Dead

By John D. Lyons

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2018 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-3710-3

Contents

Preface, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
Chapter 1 Home and Hearth, 
Chapter 2 Burial and the Care of the Dead, 
Chapter 3 Specters, 
Chapter 4 The Aesthetics of Fear, 
Conclusion What's in a Word?, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Home and Hearth

Agamemnon's return home was not a happy one. He found his palace shared by his wife and her lover, but he did not have long to ponder what had changed while he was away at the siege of Troy. He and his captive Cassandra were swiftly murdered by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. In Racine's Phèdre (1677), the return of the warrior father has deadly effects. Thésée himself survives his homecoming, but within hours of his arrival his son, his wife, and her confidant are all dead. In Corneille's Rodogune (1644–45), twin princes are welcomed back after having lived for several years with their uncle, and within twenty-four hours one has been stabbed to death by his mother and the other has narrowly escaped the poison that she offers him on his wedding day. If the home is bad for family members, it is certainly not safe for guests. King Duncan would have been better off in a tent on the moors than in Macbeth's castle. And in Gryphius's Catharina von Georgien, the hospitality afforded her by her host, Shah Abbas — hospitality that includes an offer of marriage — ends up with her death when she is flayed and then burned alive at the stake.

It is not surprising that most tragedies and tragic stories take place at home, for it is a simple fact of the tragic tradition in both antiquity and early modernity that domestic violence — killing and injuring family members and close friends — constitutes the core action. The home is where the members of these seething, secretive, plotting families find themselves together. The return home — the nostos — is a major motif of classical literature. And the home, or house, is also a figure for the family itself. They carry the "house" (their oikos) with them, it is the symbol or metonym of the collective identity of people who are born of one another and who will eventually kill or die together before being interred in the all-important family tombs. The "house of Atreus" stands as a signal example of the tragic perpetuation of hatred and revenge.

As a shorthand for the frequent tragic situation of returning home and there encountering violence, we can make a distinction between the "epic" and the "tragic," but this distinction, though useful for the purpose of the present investigation, requires some qualification. The comparison of these two types of representation is often made in terms of form and of content. Epic, for instance has been defined as "a long narrative written in hexameters (or a comparable vernacular measure) which concentrates either on the fortunes of a great hero or perhaps a great civilization and the interactions of this hero and his civilization with the gods." This definition combines formal qualities (narrative mode) with a set of persons (hero, gods) and themes (greatness, interactions). While there is a fairly clear distinction between dramatic and narrative modes (as Aristotle mentions them briefly in the Poetics, chapter 3), the relation between what is described as tragic and what is described as epic is, in antiquity, more complex. Plato groups Homer with the tragic poets and Aristotle says that "epic shares all the same elements [as tragedy] apart from lyrics and spectacle" (chapter 24). By the time of the Renaissance, however, the pattern of distinction that emerged empirically through the reading and imitation of the ancients was in part one of setting. The action of the Iliad, the first half of the Odyssey, most of the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, and almost all the Aeneid take place away from the "home" of the main characters. In the Renaissance, such epics as The Lusiads, Jerusalem Delivered, and the unfinished Franciad stress travels far from home. Thus, though recognitions, betrayals, and murders are plot elements in epic and evoke similar dark emotions — the anger of Achilles and his grief for Patroclus stand as the most memorable examples — dramatic tragedies and, in early modernity, "tragical histories" not only show a predilection for settings within households but also specifically emphasize family ties.

The thematic valence of the distinction between killing that takes place at home and killing that takes place away from home is particularly well illustrated in French early modernity by a long poem that is frequently called epic even though its author gave it the title Les Tragiques. Most often literary historians refer to Agrippa d'Aubigné's long verse narrative (published in 1616) as an epic. But d'Aubigné himself, near the start of the first of the seven books of Les Tragiques, invokes Melpomene, the muse of tragedy:

J'appelle Melpomène en sa vive fureur,
Au lieu de l'Hippocrène éveillant cette sœur
Des tombeaux rafraîchis, dont il faut qu'elle sorte,
Echevelée, affreuse, et bramant de la sorte
Que fait la biche après le faon qu'elle a perdu.

I call on Melpomene in all her fury, waking her not at the
Hippocrene fountain but instead at the fresh-dug graves from
which she comes, disheveled, hideous, and howling the way the
doe calls for the fawn she has lost.

The poet specifies that he wakes the tragic muse where she dwells, not in the serene place of the muses at the Hippocrene spring but rather among the tombs of the recently dead. In a brilliant article, Richard Regosin was among the first to take seriously the title of this poem. He points out that "for the modern critic ... as well as for his nineteenth-century predecessors, Les Tragiques bears little or no relationship to dramatic tragedy" and further notes the poet's own explicit references to tragedy. Regosin recalls that "the medieval tradition ... did not ... include a dramatic requirement in its definition of tragedy." Regosin's subsequent comments about the "occurrence of the tragic deed within the family" leads the way to understanding the poet's vigorous insistence on portraying the French civil wars of the sixteenth century as fratricidal violence within the family and within the family home. Through a series of shifting allegories, d'Aubigné represents the civil wars within the inventory of tragic, rather than epic, actions and situations. At the core is the inversion of the place that should be safe, the home, and of the alien space outside: "Tout logis est exil" (All dwellings are exile), he writes in describing the devastation of a war of the French against the French. What d'Aubigné expresses is the absence of a space that is safe, a space of home within which the protection bestowed by a family upon its members would prevail. Les Tragiques is a reminder that when the ancient tradition of tragedy returned to European culture, the sinister, violent home — rather than the welcoming, hospitable one — was at the center of this cultural concept. For d'Aubigné, France was itself a tragic home, and the many early modern English plays set in France show that the poet was not alone in this perception.

Tragic...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Northwestern University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0810137100
• ISBN 13: 9780810137103
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 276
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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