Monday, January 26, 2004
(9:13 PM) | Anonymous:
Tragedy and Postmodernism with a short section on Marxism-Christianity
I've been reading Myth and Tragedy by Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet as a source of secondary literature in my Tragedy class. It is a collection of essayies concerning different Greek tragedies and their use and source in society. I have mentioned the book quite a bit in previous posts concerning Vernant's analysis of The Bacchae and that smacked of postmodernism too, not in the sense that Vernant is a postmodernist but that the Greek culture (though not Plato) had a society that was based on what we would now call postmodern principles (and, yes, postmodernism does have principles).
In postmodernism there is a certain understanding that ideas govern our lives, everything is ideology, and this fits preciously with the way Greeks understood religion. The gods of ancient Greece were not so much a hierarchy of real entities but rather they were a pantheon of ideas; the systematic way of explaining the (dis)order of the kosmos. When you have a system of thought such as this there is a recognition that humanity is the center of the universe, in that he organizes the universe and gives that organization an objective position outside himself through art, religion and philosophy. Vernant explains the basic theory of man in his essay “Ambiguity and Reversal”:
The ambiguity one finds in Oedipus Rex is quite different [than the normal ambiguity that one finds in the word plays of other tragedies]. It is concerned neither with a conflict in meanings nor with the duplicity of the character controlling the action and taking pleasure in playing with his or her victim. In the drama in which he is the victim, it is Oedipus and only Oedipus who pulls the strings. [...]So it is easy to see how it is that, from the point of view of ambiguity, Oedipus Rex has the force of a model.
In Oedipus we see both the highest of human beings as the King of Thebes and the lowest as the murderer of his father and the incestuous relationship he holds with his mother. In Greek philosophy we see the notion that one must balance their life, that the extremities are too extreme to have “good digestion” as Aristotle describes the Good Life. To that end the Greek’s had carnival where all order was reversed, sexual laws were lifted, theft become legal and the court jester was crowned as king. At the end of the carnival the jester would be put to death and with him the week of disorder so that the city would then live in perfect order having got the desire for anarchy out of their system, literally, until the next year.
In postmodernism we see the desire to get things out of our system as well. Foucault’s whole project can be viewed in this light, in Madness and Civilization I think he is arguing that by pushing the insane out of society we are driving ourselves mad. We need to see the insane to know that we are sane. To know that we are differant.
Christianity and its modern equivalent Marxism (since both are basically dead) seem to argue for the exact opposite. They don’t want to have a day of carnival, but to live in carnival. Where the rich become poor and the poor become rich. The king of kings is actually just the insane man who thinks he is the messiah and, even though we can see his insanity, we want him to rule anyway. During the liturgy on Sunday we celebrated Paul’s conversion and read the passage where he says God gave him “words and a [emphasis mine] wisdom.” What this can mean, I don’t know.
