Charles Pletcher Sophocles, Wittgenstein, and the Rules of Attic Tragedy As presented at (de-)Othering the Humanities at the University

of California, Berkeley

In the Poetics, Aristotle defines tragedy in one sweeping statement:

So tragedy is the representation of serious and complete action having magnitude, in embellished speech in each of its images separately in the parts [of the play], through people acting and not through narrative,1 through pity and terror accomplishing the catharsis of such emotions.2

He follows this definition with a ranked breakdown of the six parts of tragedy: plot, characters, diction, reasoning, spectacle, and song(-making). Aristotle refers to plot as the beginning and a sort of soul of tragedy, and so it seems the best place to center our discussion. In this talk, I want to lay out some new ways of approaching Aristotles definition of tragedy, with particular regard to the characters dubbed messengers (). To accomplish this task, I will approach Aristotles definitions as rules in a Wittgensteinian language-game, because, as Wittgenstein writes, It disperses the fog if we study the phenomena of language in primitive kinds of use in which one can clearly survey the purpose and functioning of the words.3 What, then, is a language-game? Wittgenstein offers an example of two construction workers, the builder A and the assistant B:
A is building with building stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs, and beams. B has to pass him the stones and to do so in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they make use of a language consisting of the words block, pillar, slab, beam. A calls them out; B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call. Conceive of this as a complete primitive language. 4

Its important that we remember how primitive this language is, because in this regard it differs significantly from the language well be looking at in the Antigone, but we must also take a closer look at what even this primitive language entails. How does a child, for instance, learn this language? The language provides no mechanisms for asking what its wordscan we call them words?mean, so a child or anyone can only learn by observing what happens when A makes a given utterance and B responds. We can break this example down into multiple language-games, but we can also refer to the whole as a language game. Think of a game of chess: the entire

1. I have to digress almost immediately to point out that the exclusion of announcements or apangellic narrative from tragedy does not exclude messengers from tragedy. In Narrative in Drama: The Art of the Euripidean Messenger Speech, Irene de Jong writes, At first sight this [passage] would seem to imply that messenger-speeches, which are after all a form of , are not at home in drama. This conclusion is, however, unwarranted, since by means the assuming of the role of narrator by the poet. ... This indeed never happens in drama (de Jong, 117). Aristotle here is talking about the role of the poet in tragedy, or rather, the lack of the poets role. 2. Poetics, 1449b24-28 3. Philosophical Investigations, 5 4. Ibid., 2 1

Charles Pletcher Sophocles, Wittgenstein, and the Rules of Attic Tragedy As presented at (de-)Othering the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley

operation of playing chess is analogous to a language-game, but so is the operation of moving each individual piece: there is a language-game for pawns, knights, rooks, etc. So the parts of tragedy are like pieces on a chess board, and just as we cant play chess (at least not well) without knowing how each piece moves, so we dont have tragedy unless all the parts act more or less in concert. Aristotle begins his discussion of these parts by defining the plot as a complete () or whole () action, meaning what has a beginning, middle, and conclusion.5 Aristotles definitions here begin to seem a bit tedious, but he is offering his readers something analogous to the primitive language-games that make up the language-game of tragedy. And like the primitive slab language-game, Aristotles games already entail a fair number of rules and restrictions. He defines a beginning as what is not by necessity after something else, but after which that other thing has naturally been or come to be.6 Importantly, a beginning does not necessarily have nothing before it, but rather has no need of whatever comes before it. This provision allows a complete tragedy to contain multiple beginnings; it allows there to be multiple complete language-games in play. To demonstrate this kind of beginning, I want to turn to the Messengers speech that begins the conclusion Sophocles Antigone. The speech begins,
Neighbors of the house of Cadmus and Amphion, there is no sort of human life that stands still, and so I will neither praise nor blame it. For fortune sets upright and fortune tears down both the fortunate and unfortunate at every turn. 7

The beginning of this speech could literally occur anywhere within the tragedyor even outside of it: I think I heard someone shouting something similar as I stepped off BART this morning. The Messenger does not need anything to come before his speech. It just so happens that most of the tragedy has preceded his address, but his speech does not require them. He offers in these five lines a concise summary of many of the tragedys main points: It is not easy to assign praise or blame to any life, because life itself brings too many unpredictabilities. Fortune, , has a hand in our daily affairs and sometimes puts the consequences out of our reach. Of course, the Messengers words take on slightly different meanings depending on their context: just as the
5. Poetics, 1450b23-26 6. Ibid., 1450b27-28 7. Antigone, 1155-1159 2

Charles Pletcher Sophocles, Wittgenstein, and the Rules of Attic Tragedy As presented at (de-)Othering the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley

pretext of the tragedy would color the words differently than we hear them now, so any modern performance of the speech or the tragedy would resonate differently with its audience than the Antigone first resonated with the Athenians. These truisms lead us to the doorstep of the Wittgensteinian mantra Meaning is use which is to say, the meaning of a word is not exactly analogous to a picture, but we can picture the meaning of a word. When we look at how the Messenger speaks, how he employs his words, we gain insight into the rules of his language-game and how it differs from the language-game of, say, Antigone herself. We need to take care, however, not to let our interpretation of the Messengers rules interfere with their meaning. Wittgenstein offers two warnings here:
Its as if we could grasp the use of a word at a stroke. Well, that is just what we say we do. That is, we sometimes describe what we do in these words. But there is nothing astonishing, nothing strange, about what happens. It becomes strange when we are led to think that the future development must in some way already be present in the act of grasping the use and yet isnt present. 8

and
But how can a rule teach me what I have to do at this point? After all, whatever I do can, on some interpretation, be made compatible with the rule. No, thats not what one should say. Rather, this: every interpretation hangs in the air together with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support. Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning.9

Understanding what the Messenger says is a perfectly normal process; we do not need to employ any advanced hermeneutics to discuss his speech. But if we try to tie our understanding or his use to our interpretation of his speech, we find tumbling down the rabbit hole of infinite regress we start asking unnecessary questions about knowing as if our understanding the use of a word couldnt stand on its own. That is not to say that interpretation isnt useful, but interpretations do not offer meanings. An interpretation is like setting down a signpost: it represents, in some fashion, the meaning that we are after, but its not until we correctly follow the signpost that we can say we understand. What, then, should we make of the opening lines of the Messengers speech? We are not Cadmeans, but the universality of his subsequent claims makes it clear that the Messenger is not speaking simply to those on stage but that he is rather addressing everyone present. In this way, the Messenger occupies a space between the realm of the performance and the realm of the
8. Philosophical Investigations, 197 9. Ibid., 198 3

Charles Pletcher Sophocles, Wittgenstein, and the Rules of Attic Tragedy As presented at (de-)Othering the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley

audience. He does not serve a purely narrative (or diegetic) function because he is integral to the unfolding of the action; but neither do he exist entirely in the realm of the tragedyhe obtains authority because of his neutrality even as he speaks from personal experience: Creon, he says,
was deserving of jealousy, it seems to me, at one time, saving the Cadmean land from enemies and seizing the station of absolute monarchy he ruled well, and his offspring flourished. 10

The game that the Messenger plays spans tragedy and real life. The successes of Creon should have been obvious to the Cadmean land, to whom the Messenger initiates his address. The recap, then, is for our benefit: he means to give the audience some foothold on the action of the tragedy. This foothold in turn makes the action remarkably Aristotelian. Aristotle defines pity as some pain at an apparent destructive or painful evil that happens to someone undeserving, which also oneself might expect to experience or someone of ones own and this whenever it appears near.11 Pity, according to Aristotle, is one of the main channels through which tragedy accomplishes its catharsis. Put another way, tragedy does its work by showing the audience how the events on stage apply to their own lives. Tragedy thus always has an ethical dimension. By encapsulating this ethical dimension in the compartments of tragedy, Aristotle allows us to break down the components of complex emotions like pity and fearhe allows us to see their use. To continue our discussion of these compartments, Aristotle defines conclusion as the converse of beginning: what is naturally after something else, either by necessity or for the most part by necessity, but after which there is nothing else.12 Aristotle loosens the precedence requirement for conclusions: they dont absolutely have to come after something else, but they should come after something else for the most part necessarily; and the fact the something precedes the conclusion makes its placement natural. Notably, Aristotle defines conclusion before he defines middle; in so doing, he emphasizes the fact that a conclusion is the converse of a beginning. Our Messengers final words illustrate this definition of conclusion nicely: Striking herself with her own hand into her gut, when / she heard this

10. Antigone, 1161-1165 11. Rhetoric, 1385b13-16 12. Poetics, 1450b29-30 4

Charles Pletcher Sophocles, Wittgenstein, and the Rules of Attic Tragedy As presented at (de-)Othering the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley

lamentable suffering of her son.13 We definitely missed something. This conclusion offers us no information other than that a female figure struck herself, ostensibly in an act of suicide, when she heard of something horrible (, wailed with shrill () cries) happening to her son. The Messenger, we must remind ourselves, still plays by the rules of Aristotelian tragedy: a conclusion should naturally and for the most part necessarily come after something else, so unlike a beginning, a conclusion doesnt help us get our bearings. We can see the Wittgensteinian signpost, but we cannot say, Now I know how to go on. Wittgenstein writes somewhat aphoristically, Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.14 When we started to investigate the Messengers speech from its beginning, our reading of the signpost gave us a good idea of its use; now, however, we cannot determine the meaning of the Messengers speech even though we approach the same middle ground, because we are approaching it from the opposite end. What, we must ask, is the middle ground we are seeking? Aristotle writes, A middle is what both comes after something else and has a different thing after it.15 Unsurprisingly, a middle is the mean between a beginning and a conclusionit fits in nicely with Aristotles doctrine of the mean, but a discussion of his Ethics as such lies outside of our scope for today. In the Antigone, the Messengers speech is interrupted by the appearance, as the Chorus announces, of Creons wife Eurydice. She enters after the Messenger has explained the death of Haemon, Creon and Eurydices son, to the Chorus of Elders. Eurydice has one of the smallest parts in extant tragedy, speaking only nine lines before the Messenger launches into further monologue. She explains: All you citizens, I learned your words as I was going out, when I was going to supplicate the goddess Pallas with my prayers; and I was just releasing the bolts of the gate to pull it back, but a cry of my houses blight
13. Antigone, 1315-1316 14. Philosophical Investigations, 203 15. Poetics, 1450b31 5

Charles Pletcher Sophocles, Wittgenstein, and the Rules of Attic Tragedy As presented at (de-)Othering the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley

struck my ears.16 Here she offers her reason for coming out, which places this middle after the beginning of the Messenger speech. Further, the Messengers subsequent narration, where he details the hotly contested burial of Polyneices, elaborates on the death of Haemon, and describes the death of Antigone, provides the necessary preconditions of his speechs conclusion: the woman in the conclusion is none other than Eurydice. Weve moved rather quickly through a huge chunk of text. I have purposely omitted parts of Antigone not relayed in the Messengers speech (and summarized much of what the Messenger does say) to show that the rules of tragedy, like the rules in a language-game, can be broken down into subunitstheres a certain way in which messenger speeches function as minitragedies, though most prefer to write them off as mini-epics and call it a day. But what can we say about the ethical dimension that Aristotle seems to insist on even in his treatise on Poetics? By unpacking the Messengers speech the way that Aristotle unpacks plot (beginning, conclusion, middle) we have demonstrated the importancethe centrality, if you willof the mean. The consequences of the events conveyed in the Messengers speech remove Creon from the excesses of his rule, sink him to the depths of deficiency when his wife and son commit suicide, and finally place him back on the middle ground where the Messenger claims he began he does, after all, continue on as king of Thebes. The crime at stake in Antigone is not one of pure wrongdoing but of excessive doing well; Hegel notably read the central conflict between Antigone and Creon not as good against evil but as one good against another. The capital-G Good is the mean between these two poles. I want to leave you with a line from Wittgenstein: (Remember that we sometimes demand explanations for the sake not of their content, but of their form. Our requirement is an architectural one; the explanation of a kind of sham corbel that supports nothing.)17

16. Antigone, 1183-1188 17. Philosophical Investigations, 217 6

Charles Pletcher Sophocles, Wittgenstein, and the Rules of Attic Tragedy As presented at (de-)Othering the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley

Bibliography Aristotle. Ars Rhetorica. Edited by W. D. Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. Aristotle. Poetics. Edited by D. W. Lucas. New York: Clarendon Press, 1981. Arrington, Robert L. Following a Rule. Wittgenstein: A Critical Reader. Edited by HansJohann Glock. Blackwell Publishers, Malden, MA: 2001. Barrett, James. Staged Narrative: Poetics and the Messenger in Greek Tragedy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. de Jong, Irene J. F. Narrative in Drama in Narrative in Drama: The Art of the Euripidean Messenger Speech. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1991. Janko, Richard, trans. Aristotle: Poetics. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987. Konstan, David. Aristotle on the Tragic Emotions. The Soul of Tragedy: Essays on Athenian Drama. Edited by V. Pedrick and S. M. Oberhelman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006: 13-25. Sophocles. Antigone. Edited by Mark Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Sophocles. Antigone in Sophocles I. Translated by David Grene. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Fourth Edition. Blackwell Publishers, Malden, MA: 2009. (Originally published 1953)