Classical Blood

By Melvin Maddocks

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.

"If mediation does not, never did and never will exist," Kott concludes, pushing himself and his heroes against the wall, "if cruelty is the rule of the universe, one can confirm it even with one's own agony." What the tragic hero knows at last is that he is in rebellion against life itself--against the very terms of human mortality. No wonder the tragic hero became obsolete even in his own time, replaced as a heroic prototype by the crafty, adjustable Odysseus--a survivor who was excessive only at compromise, the perfect artist of the possible.

For the latter-day equivalent of Greek tragedy, Kott recommends, as a salient example, the spectacle of a paralyzed man confronting a woman half-buried alive: Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, "the final version of the Prometheus myth." Nor does Kott fail to provide the unerringly apt caption--Sophocles' dread-filled line, "Nothing surpasses not being born."

If most academics are too sublimating, is Kott too abominating? Characteristically he keeps his intellectual balance on the brink of nihilism by reaching out, not to Aristotle but to a Resistance fighter named Albert Camus. In paraphrase of Camus, Kott writes: "Prometheus' greatness is his revolt without hope." Like a banner he majestically raises Camus' fine and all-important distinction: "Being deprived of hope is not despairing." No 20th century margin shaver could come closer to making Sophocles a contemporary. Melvin Maddocks

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