THE EATING OF THE GODS: AN INTERPRETATION OF GREEK TRAGEDY
by JAN KOTT
Translated by BOLESLAW TABORSKI and EDWARD J. CZERWINSKI
334 pages. Random House. $8.95.
Explanations of Greek tragedy have all too often been left to professors with comfortable tenures writing in tidy studies. Words like hubris (head-spinning pride) and catharsis (purgation by pity and terror) begin to assume a certain noble abstractness. A sense of transcendental symmetry emerges, and on cue, a stately chorus preaches its final sermon of moderation to all those really excessive heroes. "Greek tragedy, my dear, decorum," Jean Genet wrote sarcastically in The Blacks. "The ultimate gesture is performed offstage."
Where would Greek drama be without the messenger? The six suicides and one attempted suicide in Sophocles' seven plays are indeed reported rather than witnessed. Yet blood, Jan Kott insists, still happens to be what Greek tragedy is about. Kott, one of postwar Poland's most distinguished critics, now teaches at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He sights at Greek tragedy, however, along the smoking chimneys of Auschwitz. As he did with his harshly brilliant Shakespeare Our Contemporary, Kott reads his Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides for audiences who "have come to know from their own experience about corpses thrown into a rubbish heap."
Howls of pain and madness echo through these pages: Heracles tearing at the poisoned shirt on his back as a dead monster's venom scalds his veins; Ajax on the plains of Troy—big, dumb Ajax, crazed by the goddess Athene—slashing bulls' throats and breaking the backs of sheep dogs under the delusion that he is slaying his enemies.
Tyrant. Kott's approach to tragedy is almost too empathetic. He begins and ends with the supreme sufferer, Prometheus. The classic hero, he suggests, enters a world that is either mismanaged or overmanaged. The tyrant may be a king or he may, as happened in the case of Prometheus, be Zeus himself. Out of compassion for the tyrant's suffering victims, out of a superb but frightening presumption, the hero ultimately proposes himself as "mediator and savior." He will rebel. He will disturb the existing order—even risk chaos—to secure a new covenant with power.
If he succeeds, Kott implies, he becomes the new tyrant. If he overreaches himself and fails, he becomes a scapegoat. In either case there must be a letting of blood, a climax of cruelty. Sons will devour fathers or fathers will devour sons. Call it cannibalism or call it sacrament, a ritual will take place, and out of that moment of utter darkness there will come a light: the illumination that turns ritual into drama.
Prometheus, chained to his rock, his liver torn and eaten by Zeus's eagle, cannot escape his destiny, but he can escape his fate. "Fate," Kott writes, "is non-awareness." And Prometheus, like all heroes of Greek tragedy, finally becomes pure awareness, at the pitch of ecstatic agony.