Caryn Livingston

24 February 2016

I.             Web Review: Seeing Through the Eyes of the Tragic Figure

The idea from Aristotle’s Poetics that tragedy is a form of mimesis, or imitation of life, seems to have become a lens through which all of the tragedies in the class, both Greek and African, are interpreted. He argues that imitation is a human instinct through which we learn our earliest lessons and gain considerable pleasure, as “to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to people in general” (IV a). While the lessons learned by the students in the prison class may not always be pleasant ones in themselves, Jayson Hawkins, Isaac Villanueva, and John Buice all discuss what can be learned from the triumphs and the failures that result from decisions made by major figures in Greek and African tragedies.

In his essay “The Times They Are A-Changin’ . . .” Jayson Hawkins argues that tragedy is intended as a commentary on cultural changes and the effects they have on people within a culture. The tragic hero is meant to stand in for the culture as a whole, and according to Hawkins, “tragedy, then, is the story of a cultural shift as seen through the eyes of a representative of that culture.” During the events of a tragedy, “this representative undergoes a cathartic experience, either synthesizing his identity as part of the old world with the ways of the new or failing utterly to do so. Either way, the protagonist offers the audience an answer to dealing with their own tragedies—even if it is the wrong one.” The concept Hawkins is addressing here is mimesis, with the events in the tragedy representing some sort of cultural upheaval and the protagonist representing a person within the culture, from which the audience can learn.

Similarly, Isaac Villanueva focuses on the importance of tragedy as mimesis in his essay “The Value of Learning by Experiencing Tragedy and Africa.” He writes, “During one of our first meetings, we discussed how a simple definition of tragedy could be ‘when good men go wrong.’ This is the definition that stuck in my mind and this is how I view Tragedy from what we have studied so far.” Villanueva focuses on the duality of good and evil found in humans, saying “we all have good and bad in us and, when compared with works of romance and comedy, tragedy is most like real life.” Through focusing on the ways tragic characters are flawed, but not necessarily evil, Villanueva stresses that the primary outcome of tragedy is instruction. In his examination of Oedipus the King, Villanueva discusses the way Jocasta and Oedipus fail to consider the final outcome of the prophecy due to their fear at what the truth of the prophecy would indicate.

John Buice’s essay “The Tragic Irony of Irony in Tragedy” also addresses tragedy as an imitation of life, through his claim that it “is a universal expression and explication of our basic human condition, which to me is an existence in a meaningless and amoral universe that typically ends in tragedy despite our attempts to elevate ourselves above this fate.” Buice focuses on what he sees as the ironies of the human condition, and writes that dramatic ironies in tragedy both reflect the human condition through representation and also “provide a means to understand and ultimately accept in a positive manner our futile attempts to transcend the human condition.” Buice attempts to explain the audience appeal of a play like Oedipus the King, when the audience already knows the outcome of the play. “The audience participates because they have all the information about Oedipus in advance, yet they are as impotent as Oedipus to stop the tragedy unfolding before them,” he writes. Despite the overall negative outlook Buice has on the human condition, he emphasizes that the overall lesson of Greek tragedy is the importance of persevering through action even in the face of failure. “Interestingly, the dismal and futile attempts of the Greeks to overcome the basic human condition of tragic existence did not lead them to a nihilistic interpretation of life,” he writes. “They continued to improve their lot all the while knowing their efforts were practically useless.”

The potential problem threaded throughout the student submissions is the tendency to set up the Greek sources as a model of tragedy against which the modern African sources are measured. One of the primary questions under consideration in this class relates to examining humanity and genre across cultures, and asking whether people truly are all the same or whether unique histories and cultures actually make people different. The potential differences between the Greek and African sources are generally glossed over in favor of establishing similarities. Hawkins uses the Greek sources to establish his essay before examining Things Fall Apart through the lens of the Greek sources. He writes, “Achebe presents a tragic tale that aligns almost perfectly with the Greek works discussed here,” but doesn’t discuss the real differences between African and Greek Tragedy that we have discussed in class, with the many points that make the African works unique. Buice goes so far as to declare, based on his readings, that “Tragedy is a universal expression and explication of our basic human condition,” with absolutely no distinctions between modern African and ancient Greek tragedy. Villanueva allowed for the most differences between the two, writing “we must understand that differences also exist in how both the traditional and the modern can be viewed as tragic,” which provides the clearest path to understanding the relation between the different depictions of tragedy.

II.           Essay: Encountering Africa through Tragedy

The average literature student, even at the graduate level, approaches the subject matter of this class from a disadvantaged position compared to how they might approach material in American or English literature classes. Many students in this class have at least a passing familiarity with some of the Greek material, especially with events related to the Trojan War and its fallout as depicted in the Oresteia, and most of us are also somewhat familiar with Shakespearian tragedy, which has permeated western culture significantly. However, our literary backgrounds typically have left us without any context for approaching African literature in general, which is usually seen as totally “other” from a western perspective, and we may be even less equipped to understand African tragedy, as the stories it tells are unfamiliar to us. So far, using a foundation of Greek tragedies is allowing us to build a framework from which to approach Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, but even though this gives us one route to better place African literature within a universal context, it also has its own risks. The primary risk that seems to have emerged in the class to this point is the risk of establishing Greek tragedy and theory relating to Greek tragedy as an ideal against which we should measure African tragedy, with the accompanying assumption that African tragedy is only an expression of a universal human trait and not necessarily unique to African cultures specifically.

          Our introduction to tragedy through the Oresteia trilogy rather than through the African literature is an effective way to establish the tone of the class while also ensuring that we have a passing familiarity with the general foundation of the western idea of Tragedy. This also allows for introduction of theory relating to tragedy, especially Aristotle’s Poetics and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Aristotle’s explanation of tragedy as “an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude . . . ; in the form of action, not of narrative, through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions,” (VI a) gives seminar students a basis for evaluating tragedy and understanding its potential purpose, even while acknowledging that in some ways tragedy may be less enjoyable on its face than comedy.

          As with Aristotle, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy understands Tragedy as specifically Greek, making the class introduction to Tragedy via Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides the most effective approach to Tragedy as a genre before transitioning to the more modern African Tragedy. Nietzsche’s conceptualizing of Tragedy as the opposing art worlds of dream and intoxication, or the Apolline and Dionysiac, was easier to become acquainted with in the Greek context, which Nietzsche drew his ideas from originally and which gives concrete examples for us to understand from a story model that we are already largely acquainted with—that of Greek heroes and gods (Nietzsche 14).

Using recorded performances from Greek Tragedy, specifically Agamemnon, to communicate the theatricality of classical Tragedy as we understand it gave us a context for the Apolline ideas of exchange of dialogue, as depicted by the character of Clytemnestra. It also communicated the Dionysiac aspect of Tragedy through its depiction of the Chorus of indistinct identities, which were then incorporated into the larger experience of the differentiated characters. Without the classical Tragic archetypes we encountered in the Oresteia, it would have been more difficult to identify the ways African Tragedy like Death and the King’s Horseman carries on the traditions established by Greek Tragedy. For example, a western reader who is familiar with the idea of a Greek Chorus might not identify the young girls who mock Sergeant Amusa as one because their festive air, dialogue loaded with sexual innuendo, and the overall mocking tone they maintain during the scene with Amusa seem more like comic relief than like the traditional Greek Chorus that reveals exposition to the audience. With an introduction of a variety of Choruses, from the old men in Agamemnon to the Furies themselves in The Eumenides, we were able to gain a greater understanding of the roles the Chorus can play and how different depictions of the Chorus might still represent the Dionysiac aspect of Tragedy.

In class, we have used both Greek and African Tragedy to discuss the idea of the “tragic flaw” raised by Aristotle’s Poetics, where he described the tragic hero as “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” (XIII b). This was a major transitional idea into African Tragedy in class, because the protagonist of Death and the King’s Horseman, Elesin Oba, seems to fill the role of the tragically flawed hero so perfectly. When the time comes for Elesin to fulfill his role as the horseman, and repay all of the benefits afforded to him for that role by committing ritual suicide to keep his world in balance, he loses his will to carry out the task that his entire role depends on and laments “my weakness came not merely from the abomination of the white man who came violently into my fading presence, there was also a weight of longing on my earth-held limbs” (Soyinka 53). Elesin’s longing for life and the pleasures of his beautiful young bride lead to a failure of his will and brings about the eventual death of his son Olunde, who, “because he could not bear to let honour fly out of doors, he stopped it with his life” (61-62).

Clearly, the dialogue we have been establishing between Greek and African tragedy has been beneficial for our understanding of and interaction with both. Although most of the class was familiar with some of the background story of the Trojan War, in-depth familiarity with the Classics has generally fallen out of favor in at least the undergraduate and early graduate levels of literary study as the canon has expanded to include traditionally underrepresented voices. We are unfamiliar with the story in Death and the King’s Horseman, even though it is based on a historical event important in Africa’s colonialist history, but it still depicts characters who are our contemporaries or near-contemporaries, and whose motives and culture we might be able to more easily understand than those of the ancient Greeks. When we understand that Soyinka’s play is not meant to instruct only through what Elesin’s failure of will might say about human failure but is also a commentary on the conflicts colonialism brought to the Yoruba people, we also may broaden our understanding of Greek Tragedy. The play The Trojan Women by Euripides, a production of which we attended at the Obsidian Theatre, was originally produced concurrent with the colonization of Melos by the Athenians (Delahoyde). The terrible fate befalling the conquered women of Troy in the play is an effective commentary on the brutality of the Athenians’ own colonial abuse of the people of Melos, a situation that modern postcolonial writing like Death and the King’s Horseman makes much more relatable to modern students than discussions of conflicts between ancient civilizations.

          As we discussed in our Colonial-Postcolonial literature class, one danger we face when expanding our knowledge of literature from outside of the traditional western canon is falling into an unconscious acceptance of the self-other dichotomy. Especially when approaching dramatic literature like Death and the King’s Horseman, students must be aware of the human tendency to view things outside of our own cultural comfort zone as an alien “other”—a fact that is especially important to keep in mind with a play like Soyinka’s, as we aren’t given the benefit of an internal understanding of the characters the way we are with novels. The Yoruba culture depicted in the play is distinct from mainstream American culture in several ways that we might consider very backwards, including Elesin’s mandate to commit suicide as part of a cultural ritual and the community’s decision to give him a woman who catches his eye as a bride without her own feelings entering into the equation at all. Greek Tragedy gives us a way to relate the Yoruba culture and events depicted in the play to western tropes we are more familiar with, like Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia. However, by merely finding a way to view African Tragedy as basically the same as the western canon, we are still falling into the self-other trap. In this way, we are merely including the African play in our own expanded tradition instead of accepting that perhaps it is unique in some ways from our culture, but no less valid or valuable on its own merits.

          Overall, the experience of reading Greek and African Tragedy within the same course is very valuable as a method of illuminating the ways they are both similar and distinct, and for the opportunity to develop a context for approaching literature outside of the traditional canon. If we remain mindful of our human tendency toward tribalism and resist an analysis of the African literature we approach as either “like us” and therefore acceptable or “not like us” and therefore inferior, this course should be an interesting approach to meeting African Tragedy on its own terms and possibly using what we learn from it to better understand Greek Tragedy, as much as we learn from the Greek sources new ways to approach the African literature.

Works Cited

          Delahoyde, Michael. “The Trojan Women.” Mythology and Humanities in Ancient Western Culture. Washington State U, Dec. 2015. Web. 23 Feb. 2016.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. NY: Penguin, 1994. Print.

Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman.  NY: Norton, 2002. Print.

III.          Project Proposal: Cultural Costumes of the Yoruba and Igbo Peoples

I’d like to attempt the research posts. I’ve been interested in the possibility of expanding my cultural knowledge surrounding the literature we’ve been reading, but last semester I was unable to find enough scholarship pertaining to my interest to proceed with the project. Because my knowledge of African cultures is so thin, I feel like I’m missing a lot of the depth depicted in the literature I’m encountering. Researching subjects of cultural and historical significance related to some of the literature we’re studying would help me feel less unfamiliar in approaching it.

The first post I had in mind was on the Egungun garment and its spiritual significance. I find the garment very interesting due to its performative nature, especially after watching the production of Agamemnon that also obscured the actual actors through masks. While reading Death and the King’s Horseman, it’s clear that the Pilkings’ use of the costumes is extremely sacrilegious, but it wasn’t entirely clear to me why it was so horrible, other than that it was the use of items of cultural significance as a kind of joke. It didn’t occur to me that as a woman, Jane would be committing the greater crime against tradition by wearing the costume, but preliminary research has suggested to me how strictly the separate roles for women and men were upheld in Egungun ritual. I’d like to look into the subject more to better understand the role of women in the ritual.

     For my second post, I would like to continue research into masquerade as a sort of religious or cultural tradition, with a focus on the Igbo people. The ceremony depicted in Things Fall Apart as part supernatural and part judicial is very interesting, and would be beneficial to explore in my second reading of the novel. I enjoyed last semester’s reading of Achebe’s novel but frequently felt disconnected from it and occasionally was very horrified by some of the cultural practices, like the abandoning to death of infant twins. Understanding the reasoning behind cultural practices has always helped me connect to literature portraying that culture, so I hope researching those from Things Fall Apart will help me connect with the world it depicts.