BMCR 2009.03.16, Margaret Rachel Kitzinger, The Choruses of Sophokles'

Margaret Rachel Kitzinger, The Choruses of Sophokles' Antigone and
Philoktetes: A Dance of Words. Mnemosyne Supplementa 292.
Leiden/Boston:  Brill, 2008.  Pp. 146.  ISBN 9789004165144.  $113.00.


Reviewed by Victor Bers, Yale University ([email protected])
Word count:  1265 words
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[The reviewer apologizes for the late delivery of this notice, but
assigns a small portion of the blame to an airline that failed to
retrieve his copy of the book that he left on a seat.]

Rachel Kitzinger traces her interest in Sophoclean choruses back to the
"helplessness"" she felt explaining them to students. Many readers will
think of the challenge to their own pedagogical resources as they drove
and pulled their classes through the lyrics of tragedy, and a
substantial subset will remember that E.R. Dodds opens The Greeks and
the Irrational  by relating an encounter with a disgruntled young man
looking at the Parthenon frieze in the British Museum. But few
Hellenists have, like Kitzinger, directed tragic productions in Greek,
an experience she reports as providing a handle on the chorus. Also
unusual are the monograph's organization and range. She offers a close
study of the choral sections, kommoi included, of two Sophoclean plays.
The book's title and announced program might suggest a series of
atomistic analyses, but the author has the entirety of each play in
mind throughout. I found her readings acute, closely argued, and
attentive to a quite enormous bibliography (among major treatments I
missed only Kaimio[[1]]).  All who teach or write about these two plays
should have this book at hand.

Where I balk at the book's analyses, the impediment  most often rises
from my having a different --and, I admit, minority-- opinion of what
baggage the chorus may be assumed to be carrying along from its earlier
turns on stage or in the community beyond the theater. In her
introduction, Kitzinger declares a general adherence to a view of the
chorus as retaining a ritual role (4,6), as argued inter alios by
Vernant, Vidal-Naquet, and Henrichs; I see this approach as nearly a
fetish in much scholarship on Greek tragedy.[[2]]  At the same time,
she rightly insists that the three major tragedians worked the
relationship of chorus to actors in different ways; moreover, she
demonstrates that between her two target plays there are, besides the
similarities, significant differences.
My other criticism is that, to my eyes at least, a few of her readings
are weakened by recourse to metatheatrical speculation, another
approach endorsed by many scholars.

Kitzinger's treatment of the parodos of the Antigone can serve to
illustrate my first doubt. She shows how the anapests carry a
self-conscious imitation of the two armies' actions, whereas in the
aeolic meters the chorus "interprets its own mimetic action as a
representation of universal order" (14). The former is akin to
metaphor, the latter to metonymy.  "The movement of the strophes and
antistrophes to interpret the battle, as it has been mimed in the
anapests, is a manifestation of divine order which only song and dance
can make present" (19). I think that she is really on to something in
the organization of the lyrics, and the claim that divine order has
been made "manifest" seems to me to rest with some security on two
details she does not make quite explicit, though they might be stated
somewhere in the secondary scholarship she cites. Figured as a trace
horse that, implicitly, runs in tandem with, but also pulls the weaker
horse, i.e., the human component of the action,[[3]] Ares embodies the
notion of the stronger power working with human will, a force routinely
perceived as autonomous. Second, the call to celebrate and forget that
closes the parodos is a literal call to ritual action in a ritual
space. But where the text does not frankly refer to ritual, I think it
is a mistake to assume that it is ubiquitous matter, just below the
surface, whenever a chorus sings and dances on the tragic stage.

Commenting on the Antigone's first stasimon (<greek>polla\  ta\
deina/</greek>) Kitzinger is broadly right in saying that the "choral
performance can express categories and their relationships as fixed and
can appeal to a higher power to bring into being what its song and
dance picture," but the chorus cannot participate as a decisive agent
in the fictive "real" world of the play (29); the remark deserves a
cross reference to a point Kitzinger makes on p. 64, that though Creon
appeals to the chorus for guidance, he ignores the temporal order of
their instructions when he rushes off to build a tomb for Polyneices,
thereby postponing Antigone's release from the cave too long to save
her life  --and Haemon's and Eurydice's. I am not sure, however, that
we can go very far with her assertion that "gesture and steps achieve
meaning when patterned into a dance" (28). My own sense is that there
are multiple, constant changes in register throughout the tragedies,
arising from the difference between massed and single voice, speaking
and singing, agonistic or reflective content, and so on, all
influencing "meaning."  Rarely can we say with any specificity what a
modulation implies (an exception: Neoptolemus's " sudden switch to
hexameters at Philoctetes 839-842, generally understood as a mark of
authentic prophecy; cf. Kitzinger 115-116 with n87). And as it happens,
Kitzinger is fastidious when it comes to generalizations, as she is
alert to the fragility or even disintegration of the very forms to
which she attributes persistent, immediately recognizable, properties.
To take one instance, she argues (53-54) that Antigone spurns the
chorus' lyric consolation as painfully inappropriate to her particular
circumstances. In commenting on the especially elusive stasimon at
lines 944-987, with its string of mythological exempla, she is rightly
skeptical of Sourvinou-Inwood's reading because it leaves out of
account the "extremely elliptical form of the narrative" (60n92). I
myself doubt that choral interventions were ever stable enough in form
and function that it would be clear to characters and audience that a
sort of cliche/ of tragic drama (the chorus is a ritual body, the
chorus speaks from and for traditional wisdom, etc) had come apart in a
particular realization.

The moral instability of the chorus takes central stage, as it were, in
Kitzinger's reading of the Philoctetes, and the play certainly does
present startling anomalies, including the split stasimon (391-402,
507-518) and that the chorus lapses into total silence after the close
of the kommos at 1217, some 250 lines short of the end. There are
valuable aperc,us, such as the use of the "homely" word
<greek>a)/mpuc</greek> to denote the wheel to which Ixion is affixed
(101n64) and (132) the metrical identity of lines 1176, spoken by the
chorus, and 1177, in which Philoctetes very gruffly tells it to move
off now. Kitzinger's main thesis grows from observations of the many
points at which the chorus dissembles and contradicts itself (a
particularly clear example: her remarks [128] on the oxymoron the
chorus addresses to Philoctetes at 1095). My reservation here applies
to her suggestion that the play "brings song itself into question as a
resource for creating an expansive moral understanding of what happens
in the world" (77). If, as I think, the dramatic chorus was from its
outset a highly plastic component, it is unlikely that Sophocles'
audience in 409 B.C. would entertain notions along such lines because
it had seen the chorus compassionate at one moment, an energetic
co-conspirator in the intrigue against Philoctetes at another.
Sophocles might have fallen under Euripidean influence in devising
Heracles' epiphany, but we have no text in which he ventured an
explicit reference to poetry, as at Medea 421, or a nearly explicit jab
at another tragedian, as at the parody in his Electra of Aeschylus'
recognition scene. Luckily this debatable theorizing does not obscure
the great value of Kitzinger's sensitive and erudite analysis.

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Notes:


1.   M. Kaimio, The Chorus of Greek Drama within the Light of the
Person and Number Used, Helsinki, 1970.

2.   Not, of course, that there are no other skeptics: in several
recent articles S. Scullion has presented an especially trenchant
criticism of ritual theories in their contemporary form.

3.   Lines 139-140, on which see John Jones, On Aristotle and Greek
Tragedy, London, 1962: 172.