BMCR 2008.12.12, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Greek Tragedy

Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Greek Tragedy. Blackwell Introductions to the
Classical World.  Malden, MA:  Blackwell Pub., 2008.  Pp. xii, 218.
ISBN 9781405121606.  $74.95.

Reviewed by Jeremy B. Lefkowitz, University of Pennsylvania
([email protected])
Word count:  1332 words
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Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz's engaging introduction to Greek tragedy is the
latest volume in Blackwell's new series of "Introductions to the
Classical World." Written by "the most distinguished scholars in the
field" (the list page includes Barry Powell's Homer, Daniel Hooley's
Roman Satire, and Thomas Habinek's Ancient Rhetoric and Oratory; ten
more volumes are in preparation), the series aims to "provide concise
introductions to classical culture in the broadest sense."[[1]] Rather
than choosing to follow a traditional author-by-author, play-by-play
arrangement, Rabinowitz has organized Greek Tragedy thematically, with
an emphasis on two main ideas: (1) in order to understand the plays,
one must first learn about their ancient performance, political, and
ritual contexts; and (2) these plays raised certain troubling questions
for Athenians and they allow us to ask similar questions about our own
life and times. Greek Tragedy is written in an informal, appealing
style--this must be the only book on the subject of tragedy that uses
the word "fun" in its final sentence[[2]]--with frequent allusions
(some more explicit than others) to contemporary events (e.g., the war
in Iraq at 42, 47, 90, 93, 107, 138, 140, 146, and 187) and a number of
questions posed directly to the reader designed to encourage
comparisons between ancient and contemporary problems (e.g., at 122,
discussion of Euripides' Elektra concludes with the question, "What
pressures shape today's youth into martyrs?"). Greek Tragedy can be
recommended to students who have no previous knowledge of the subject,
although those wanting more systematic coverage in a more traditional
format may prefer another recent Wiley-Blackwell book, A Guide to
Ancient Greek Drama (Ian Storey and Arlene Allen, 2005). As its Preface
and Introduction suggest, Greek Tragedy is especially well-suited to
those students who are skeptical about the relevance of Greek tragedy
to their own lives and to those who may wonder whether an interest in
tragedy (or Classics in general, 2-3) is compatible with their
commitments to feminism, multiculturalism, or other progressive
beliefs.

Rabinowitz's overview of the Athenian context of Greek tragedy (11-84)
is divided into three chapters ("What was Tragedy?"; "Tragedy and the
Polis"; "Tragedy and Greek Religion") and includes everything you might
expect: performance practices, ancient views on tragedy, Athenian
ideology, religious rituals, the festivals, etc. Rabinowitz brings a
fresh perspective to familiar material by calling attention again and
again to the ambiguities and challenges presented by our sources;
whether discussing imperialism, tensions between inclusivity and
exclusivity in Athenian civic life, traditional life-cycle events and
rites of passage, or the vexed question of whether women attended the
theater, Rabinowitz emphasizes the multiplicity of voices with which
our sources speak and the correlated polyphony of contemporary
scholarly debates on their meanings. For example, in a brief subsection
entitled "Referentiality" (48-51), Rabinowitz pauses in her discussion
of the physical and social setting of the performances in order to
address some of the few references to contemporary events and
institutions in the plays. There is, Rabinowitz points out, no easy
answer to questions about what the references to the Council of the
Areopagus in Eumenides amount to or how they should influence
interpretation; discussing Trojan Women (produced in 415), Rabinowitz
suggests that Melos must have been in everyone's mind, but she stresses
that there is still ambiguity surrounding how the play and the real
world relate; when considering Oedipus Tyrannus in light of the recent
plague in Athens, Rabinowitz remarks that "certain elements might have
reminded the audience of their own lives" but "not every member of the
audience will get the same set of allusions, nor will they respond to
them in the same way" (51). The result is a basic introduction to
contextual approaches that is free of simple answers--the reader will
come away with a sense of some of the things classicists have done to
recreate the original contexts of the plays, but also with an awareness
that such an appreciation is really just the first step toward
interpretation.

Part Two (85-179) contains four chapters on the following themes: war
and empire; the family; violence; and relationships to power. A total
of ten plays receive focused attention, but Rabinowitz emphasizes the
overlapping and blurring of each of her four categories (87), and
passages from other plays are introduced for contrast and comparison.
Rabinowitz draws on feminist, post-colonial, and marxist approaches in
these chapters, but the primary lens through which the themes are
examined is structuralism, whose "matrix of binary oppositions" (4-5)
is introduced early in Greek Tragedy; in particular, Rabinowitz
emphasizes how productive and influential the work of Louis Gernet,
J.-P. Vernant, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet has been for the study of Greek
tragedy (e.g. 33, 51, 65, 71, 168). As Rabinowitz explains,
structuralism's attention to binary oppositions (e.g. male-female,
city-household, human-animal, free-slave, inside-outside) and their
mediation in society, myth, and poetry, not only provides a framework
for producing revealing readings of the plays, it also can help us
re-imagine the patterns of thought through which ancient Greek
audiences may have understood them (cf. 103 et passim). This approach
has its obvious limits, which are not sufficiently addressed, but it
works extremely well in the highly distilled format of the
short-introduction genre: Rabinowitz is able to lead the reader quickly
to the central issues of a play, often with reference to key terms or
ideas already brought up in the "context" chapters, and then to explore
those ideas as pairs of irreconcilables in a way consistent with her
overall emphasis on the ambivalences, ambiguities, and unresolved
problems tragedy poses to ancient and modern audiences alike. For
example, in her discussion of Persians (85-95), Rabinowitz emphasizes
the ways in which the barbaros-Greek dualism (already developed at 40)
becomes intertwined with the female-male polarity through the
feminization of the Persians (90-91); this leads to consideration of
how the ancient audience could have responded. Two alternatives are
presented: Athenians may have experienced a kind of vicarious grief or
they may have ignored the cautionary tale against empire and displaced
the folly onto the Persians. In a pattern repeated throughout Greek
Tragedy, the section on Persians concludes with reflections on how the
audience today might take the play: again, two alternatives are put
forward, a "securely distant" reading or an openness to seeing the
Persians' "irreligious desire for conquest" (94) as comparable to the
presence of the U.S. and U.K. in Iraq (94-95).

An epilogue on modern performances of Greek tragedy (180-198), written
with Sue Blundell, focuses primarily on the UK and US theater, but also
touches on productions by Ariane Mnouchkine, Tadashi Suziki, and Yukio
Ninagawa, and adaptations by Wole Soyinka and Seamus Heaney, among
others. The emphasis is on adaptations of canonical texts (especially
in recent decades) as forms of resistance or critique of the dominant
order.

Readers with a background in Classics will find nits to pick here and
there. There is some question as to whether current undergraduates,
most of whom were young children in the 1990s, will appreciate the
allusions to the Culture Wars (now entering their fifth decade) that
frame Greek Tragedy (1-2 ff. and 180ff.), featuring figures such as
William Bennet and Lynne Cheney. But Greek Tragedy is especially likely
to raise the antennae of those who find that the emphasis on original
performance-context limits appreciation of the literary dimensions of
the plays. Rabinowitz's presentation gives what some may find to be an
unwarranted primacy to cultural or historical "realities" at the
expense of what makes each play distinctive. A traditional
structuralist framework, which provides an essentially timeless
mega-system of human behavior, can compound this problem, making it
seem as though the purpose of Greek tragedy is to typify this or that
pre-existing aspect of Athenian life.

Greek Tragedy is attractively produced, with a striking image of
Medea's escape from Corinth (from a Lucanian calyx-krater in the
Cleveland Museum of Art) set against a glossy-black background. It
includes seven illustrations; an index; suggestions for further reading
at the end of chapters 1, 2, 3, 7, and 8; and a bibliography. I found
only one error ("Epebes" 66).

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Notes:


1.   Blackwell Publishing Online
(http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/seriesbyseries.asp?ref=ICWZ)

2.   "That is the fun of working with the far distant past" (198).