Freshman Language Paper
Mr. Rawn
March 12th, 2010
The Tragedy of Ajax
In the Poetics, Aristotle, in classic style, lists the six requisite elements for tragedy: Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, and Song. Aristotle asserts that plot is the most important element in tragedy– for tragedy is not about men, but action– specifically the imitation of action. Tragedy’s end is a mode of action, not a quality. While some poor poets may write about the life and character of a man, the story will never be a powerful tragedy. Character, Aristotle says, is like paint across a canvas: color without form. While it may be visually striking, no amount of color will ever match the simple power of a figure drawn in chalk. Therefore in examining tragedy, look first to the chalk outlines: the events, which unfolding through the laws of necessity, produce the tragic.
The plot has certain requirements in itself: it must be completed within a rotation of the sun, there must be a “reversal of the situation”: a turn of events expected to end well should (through necessary progression of the plot) result in quite the opposite, ideally coupled with recognition: a change from ignorance to knowledge. This Reversal and Recognition will produce in the audience either pity or fear: pity for the unmerited misfortune, fear for the misfortune of a man like ourselves.
Aristotle’s second key element, the tragic character, must also conform to certain rules. He calls for, “a man who is not eminently good, and just– yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. He must be one who is highly renowned or prosperous.” (Aristotle, Poetics, part XIII). Aristotle also uses character to distinguish tragedy from comedy: in comedy, men are imitated by the poet as worse than they are, in tragedy, as better.
Underneath Aristotle’s analytical scrutiny, tragedy seems to bare itself before us. He becomes so specific in his requirements that, he claims, were many tragedies to be performed in competition on a single day; they could be timed by the water clock. We can view Ajax through Aristotle’s lens as a fulfillment of these formulae: a highly renowned or prosperous man, not eminently good, is subject to the inevitable outcome of events set in motion: Ajax expects to kill the Achaeans, but is thwarted by Athena (Reversal of circumstances), and in his Recognition of the truth, he is necessarily driven to suicide, evoking both pity and fear in the audience: pity for his misfortune, fear that the same could happen to us.
Throughout the Poetics, Aristotle continually asserts that the core element in tragedy (or any art) is imitation– the poet must aim, in character and plot, at the necessary, or probable. The imitative aspect (and the credibility of the necessity which moves the plot) creates the bridge between the artist’s dream world, and the real world of the audience. Without imitation, and necessity, the audience will never experience the levels of pity and fear needed to awaken in them a sense of the tragic.
While Aristotle acknowledges the importance of imitation, he leaves many questions unanswered. How does the dream-world of the stage, however accurately imitative it may be, stir real emotion in the audience? Can tragedy be explained as merely an empathy with the tragic hero? What significance does the chorus have in mediating between the dream-stage and reality? If tragic plot is a succession of necessary outcomes, did Ajax have no other choice than to fall upon his own sword? And, what role does Odysseus play in Ajax– if he, too, is a hero, what sort of hero does he represent?
In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche hints at the answers to many of these questions. Unlike Aristotle, who attempts to examine tragedy as a whole and break it into its component parts, Nietzsche begins his inquiry by exploring the origins of Greek art, out of which tragedy was inevitably born. He alludes to a Dionysian universe, out of which rose the Apollonian individual: the man with principium individuonis– the principle of individuality. This man, for the first time in history, could dream: he could imagine for himself an ideal world, sheltered from the destructive and all-assimilating Dionysian forces around him. He could compare his subjective dream world to the waking one, and begin to reshape the external forces of chaos based on the (subjective) logic and order within his head. From this dream came Law: the codification of morality. From this dream came the Gods: an imitation of men, but ideal– free from man’s suffering. Nietzsche refers to the Gods as man’s Aesthetic Mirror, by means of which, “the Greek will opposed suffering and the somber wisdom of suffering that always accompanies artistic talent.” (Birth of Tragedy, Ch. 3). Though the Greek man could dream, he could not live wholly “caught in the Veil of Maya,” and his daily struggle with the Dionysian forces of the natural world produced, perhaps, the world’s first suffering: in the unbridgeable void between the subjective dream state, and the objective reality.
The artist, as imitator, is thrust fully into that void– for in imitation, the artist must construct the Apollonian out of the Dionysian. The artist has no choice but to suffer. To remain Apollonian involves no imitation: this wholly subjective artist is, as Nietzsche says, “the striving individual bent on furthering his egoistic purposes– [and] can be thought of only as an enemy to art, never as its source.” (Birth of Tragedy, ch. 5). To be a Dionysian artist is equally impossible: the Dionysian world allows no imitation. It is, in a very Heraclitean sense, necessity, and only necessity. Dionysian art is not art: it simply is. Therefore the tragic artist must be “dream artist” and “ecstatic artist” in one, and in facing the divide between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, accept all the suffering that comes with creation.
If the divide between the Apollonian and the Dionysian is the birthplace of suffering, the power of Tragedy must lie within this void. A challenge arises, though: how does the tragic artist share his suffering with an audience, when the non-artist immediately averts his gaze from the Dionysian, and fixes it firmly upon his Morality, Gods, and Law? Nietzsche gives a powerful example of how the non-artist might experience this duality, “In relation to these immediate creative conditions of nature every artist must appear as “imitator,” either as the Apollonian dream artist or the Dionysian ecstatic artist, or, finally (as in Greek tragedy, for example) as dream and ecstatic artist in one. We might picture to ourselves how the last of these, in a state of Dionysian intoxication and mystical self-abrogation, wandering apart from the reveling throng, sinks upon the ground, and how there is then revealed to him his own condition– complete oneness with the essence of the universe– in a dream similitude.” (Birth of Tragedy, ch. 2). The awakening Dionysian “oneness with the universe” could destroy the Apollonian man, but not when safely contained within the dream. The dream, and likewise the Tragedy, is an Apollonian looking glass, through which the non-artist can briefly peer into the Dionysian oneness beneath the illusion of society, experience its suffering, and withdraw before his principium individuonis is destroyed by it.
Nietzsche makes an unusual claim about the origin of the tragic chorus, that, “tradition tells us in no uncertain terms that tragedy arose out of the chorus and was, to begin with, nothing but chorus.” (Birth of Tragedy, Ch. 7). It’s hard to imagine a tragic performance consisting only of chorus, until Nietzsche presents a first chorus as one of satyrs– an embodiment of nature and the Dionysian. The first tragedy, then, could be seen as a Dionysian revelry within the Apollonian illusion of the stage. The audience could look upon chaos within the safety of a dream, but something inexplicably escapes the safety of the illusion, and touches the audience member: “Till then, there lives only in the innermost depths of his consciousness the wholly obscure presentiment that all this is indeed not really so strange to him, but has a connection with him from which the principium individuonis cannot protect him. From this presentiment arises that ineradicable dread… …which suddenly seizes [him].” (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation Vol. 2,p. 353). The audience member can awake from the dream, and go home, though puzzled and discomforted by an unidentifiable feeling of dread.
The chorus in Ajax is not one of satyrs, nor can it be identified as specifically Dionysian. This seems contrary to Nietzsche’s hypothesis, but could be explained by an evolution of Tragedy itself, and the role of the chorus along with it. In the Poetics, Aristotle hints at the continuing development of tragedy: “Aeschylus first introduced a second actor; he diminished the importance of the Chorus, and assigned the leading part to the dialogue. Sophocles raised the number of actors to three” (Aristotle, Poetics, part IV). If Aeschylus shifted some of the chorus’ Dionysian influence into the dialogue, and Sophocles continued the trend, perhaps Nietzsche’s Dionysus can still be found within the text.
It is here that Nietzsche meets Aristotle. While the early audience felt some connection with the Dionysian satyrs, they were unable to identify with anything but their deepest natural drives, and so the tragic effect was limited. In the New Tragedy of Sophocles, the audience is given a character with which they can immediately identify: Aristotle’s “man who is not eminently good, and just– yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity” (Aristotle, Poetics, part XIII): Ajax. In Ajax we find the ultimate Apollonian man: strong, self reliant (enough so to tell Athena she needn’t fight beside him), and wholly subjective.
Ajax’s extreme individualistic mentality can be best understood by contrasting it with Odysseus’ serene acceptance of the Dionysian. While Ajax comes to understand the world absolutely through sight, Odysseus is not as concerned with seeing. He recognizes Athena in the dark without seeing her, and he repeatedly declines to look upon Ajax in his torment. Odysseus seems to be able to accept the Dionysian in nature, almost in the same way the spectator accepts the Dionysian within the tragedy: he sees the world as an illusion, as he tells Athena, “I see that we who are alive are nothing but deceptive forms and a fleeting shadow-picture.” (Sophocles, Ajax, 125). This mentality shelters his principium individuonis from being destroyed/assimilated by Dionysus.
Ajax, in contrast, lives a subjective existence governed by sight, which is obscured by Athena at the beginning of the play. This one event begins Ajax’s tragic downfall. When, through finally seeing clearly, he gains Recognition of the Reversal of Circumstances that caused him to slaughter and torture the livestock, he has no filter between himself and the recognition of his inner Dionysian nature. He is not watching an illusion he can wake from, and with the full knowledge of his un-freedom comes the dissolution of the self. As Schopenhauer puts it, “It then reaches the point where the phenomenon, the veil of Maya, no longer deceives it. It sees through the form of the phenomenon, the principium individuonis; the egoism resting on this expires with it. The motives that were previously so powerful now lose their force, and instead of them, the complete knowledge of the real nature of the world, acting as a quieter of the will, produces resignation, the giving up not merely of life, but of the whole will-to-live itself. Thus we see in tragedy the noblest men, after a long conflict and suffering, finally renounce for ever all the pleasures of life and aims till then pursued so keenly or cheerfully and willingly give up life itself.” (The World as Will and Representation, p. 253). The tragedy in Ajax is not in glimpsing the Dionysian, but in watching a man who does, and experiencing the fear in the realization that he is not so very different from us. While the illusion of the stage may protect us today, there is no guarantee that we will not someday be exposed to the same recognition, and suffer the same fate.