Aristotle suggested, in his controversial treatise, Poetics, that ‘tragedy purifies through the operation of pity and fear’ leading to a state of catharsis. He believed that the purging of impure thoughts and feelings, for example: emotional disturbance, pain and irrational fears, could be achieved when the audience experienced them while observing tragedy in the theatre. He also felt, when the audience saw tragedy performed not as real-life events, but on stage through the process of mimesis or dramatic enactment, it would prompt the feelings of pity and fear for the characters. Aristotle went on to describe ‘katharsis’ (Greek spelling) as an emotional cleansing achieved by the release of these pent up and overpowering emotions. F.L. Lucas, in his translation of Poetics elaborated on the meaning of ‘purged’ stating that in the medical sense purging means the ‘complete elimination of […] physical abnormalities’. Aristotle’s connotation was more likely to mean a sense of purification, so the audience could regain their emotional equilibrium.
However, Plato argues, in Book X of the Republic, that the audience is actually thrilled when watching dramatic performances and less likely to use restraint with their own emotions stating, ‘Dramatic performances water our emotions when they ought to be left to wither’, in other words, encouraging rather than discouraging them. Freud suggested this concept of emotional purification as ‘pain converted into pleasure’ or emotional sadism, where the audience actively enjoys watching the pain and suffering of the actors on stage in order to gain a sense of release. In everyday life a person’s mental state changes throughout the day and feelings of happiness, sadness, anger or fear are among many emotions that impact on their wellbeing. When we watch a sad film, it can reduce us to tears, likewise, a scary film can have us scream out in the thrill of fear; the idea is that it is a cathartic experience, we feel better, a sense of relief, that we are no longer in that situation.
Pity can be seen as condescending in a modern context, however, in tragedy it is viewed as being sympathetic to the characters plight through the action of the play. In Antigone’s case the deed of covering Polynices addresses her moral duty to bury the dead, the Gods would be appeased, so when Creon then condemns her to death the audience is likely to feel not only sympathy for Antigone but also fear of the repercussions. Aristotle may be suggesting that what we pity in others, we fear for ourselves. Gerald F. Else, an American classicist (Poetics: the argument), redefined the understanding of catharsis in literature as:
‘The insight which arises out of the audiences climactic intellectual, emotional, and spiritual enlightenment, which for Aristotle is both the essential pleasure and essential goal of mimetic art.’
Suggesting there is a healing synergy between hamartia (tragic flaw), mimesis, and catharsis for the audience obtained through this experience.
There is also an element of humour in the Anouilh play with the exchange between Antigone and Jonas:
‘None of that! / Letter indeed! /Fat lot you care…/ It’s all the same to me. / Sucking the lead of his pencil / Funny sort of letter’.
Jonas mumbling the words as he writes helps to lighten the atmosphere slightly before Antigone is taken away to be walled up. Anouilh wrote this during the 1940s and Jonas’s language is appropriate for a soldier of that era and used for dramatic irony. Wartime humour was used to maintain morale in the ranks and here it would be light relief for the audience. Furthermore, Clayton and Rothstein talk about ‘enlargement of a familiar idea’ (figures in the corpus, p5), what Bakhtin calls ‘intertextuality’, a linking of texts. This can be seen when Creon states in his conversation with Haemon, ‘To every man there comes a day/[…]/ that he accepts he’s a man’. This echoes the intertextual link with Churchill’s, ‘To each there comes in their lifetime a day […] /their finest hour’. The audience would understand Creon’s words through recognition of Churchill’s speeches on the radio in 1944. Lexis used in this way stands out and helps to sharpen the viewers concentration, giving them renewed clarity of the situation.
All the versions of Antigone have at their heart a knowledge of the inevitable, that history has a part to play in the unfolding of events. During the second choral ode the Chorus in Sophocles’ play suggest it is the curse of the Oedipus family to meet misfortune:
‘When the house has been shaken by the gods/the ruin never leaves them, but creeps on/through generations of the family’.
In the agon between Haemon and Antigone, Anouilh reinforces this with:
‘the little boy we would have had…/I’d have shielded him/ he’d never have been afraid/you’d have had a real wife/oh Haemon, you did love me/I’d have been proud to be your wife…’.
This thought affirmation emphasises the sense of fatality she feels. It is techniques like this that show how Greek tragedy was designed to produce sensory responses from the audience for the characters. For Antigone to be a true tragic hero she needs to evoke powerful emotional reactions from the audience. During a quarrel with Creon, Antigone argues:
Antigone: ‘If I am to die before my time, I call that a gain/Perhaps I am convicted of folly by a fool.’
Chorus: ‘It is clear; this girl is the violent child of a violent father. She does not know how to yield to misfortune’.
At this point the audience could be confused about their feelings towards Antigone, who, being the Protagonist, has come across as a disobedient adolescent not deserving of their compassion.
Anouilh discards the Chorus as the voice of the citizens and instead uses a single person Prologue to describe the events and characters on stage in the opening scene. The Prologue speaks in the present tense, co-existent with the audience, aware they are in the room:
‘She’s thinking she’s going to die […] Her name is Antigone, and she’s going to have to play her part right through to the end’, implying she is destined to fulfil a role.
By introducing the characters in this way, the Prologue is compelling the audience to see them and acknowledge their circumstances, this allows, what Fraser describes as ‘Brechtian alienation’, where the audience maintain some distance so as not to lose themselves in the play. The audience grow fearful of impending danger as the characters on stage address them, this ‘addressivity’ creates a vital role for the audience as judge and jury. Anouilh further omits Tiresias, who provides the moralistic conscience for Creon in the Sophocles play, and this redirects the focus towards Antigone as the hero. The chorus in Sophocles’ play on the other hand, are used as a device to provide a moral interpretation of what is happening on and around the stage for the audience. During the fifth choral ode they implore the ambivalent god, Bacchus, to bring peace once again:
Thebes, of all cities/You hold highest in honour/[…] /Now, as the whole city is gripped/By a violent plague/Come on your healing way/Over the heights of Parnassus/Or across the sighing strait.
I have examined one excerpt from each text to look at different perspectives of the same action; Sophocles’ section spotlights Creon rushing to release Antigone, ‘I will go as I am/I who bound her will untie her in person’. Meanwhile, in Anouilh, Antigone is going off to be walled up, ‘Hail, then, my grave, my marriage bed, my underground home!’ Aristotle seems to suggest that both characters reach their demise due to poor judgement rather than bad intent:
‘Who is not of outstanding virtue and judgement […] and who because of some mistake comes to disaster: this is tragic.’
Lucas sees this as:
‘The misfortunes of a man who is neither very good nor very bad and who acts under the influence of hamartia, not frailty as opposed to badness, but error as opposed to evil intent’.
Similarities of character traits can thus be seen between Creon and Antigone with both experiencing anagnorisis, awareness of an error in judgement, at the last minute. Creon’s realisation comes when he is alone with the Chorus as Creon states, ‘I am in turmoil. It is dreadful to yield, but terrible too to resist’. Antigone is alone with Jonas when she confesses twice ‘I don’t know any more what I’m dying for…I’m afraid’ just before she is led away. The audience could be fearful but also sympathetic to their plight at this point because the characters finally understand the flaws in their judgement, but it is too late to do anything about them.
In order for the audience to experience the disturbing feelings of pity and fear but not be so overcome with agitation or emotion that it could cause them pain, they require aesthetic distance, an understanding that what they are seeing is mimesis and not reality. This would appear crucial for the cathartic experience to be achieved. The audience will have been able to visualize points in their own lives that they can relate to, especially where they have argued with loved ones, and tried to do the best for them, such as Creon trying to save Antigone, ‘If you’ll only keep quiet and give up this foolishness […] I may be able to save you’. Freud calls this ‘transference’; the audience transfer their own repressed thoughts and emotions onto the characters. This is also known as ‘abreaction’ a psychoanalytical term, whereby repressed traumas can be transferred emotionally to the characters and thus eliminated from the viewer. When the play ends they can regain their thoughts and make sense of what they have seen and feel all the negative emotions leave them.
This concept of emotional purging in literature and other media has persevered through time. The most striking parallels can be found between, for instance, versions of Antigone, and the film, The Purge, where, for one night a year, people are allowed to express their most violent tendencies and emotions by killing or maiming anyone they deem to have wronged them, experience a thrill. The suggestion is that they feel better about themselves when cleansed of these feelings, and so are able to continue their daily lives with a clear conscience. I would suggest that these purifying feelings would not last long before being replaced by remorse when the gravity of what they had done took hold. There is a universality to the tragic figure and the way tragedy helps us recognize the things and people we care for in our own lives. In this respect we can learn the true value of what we have through the action of pity and fear. By re-experiencing unconscious emotions, it allows self-analysis whereby the viewer can identify with the character and in turn look inwards to his repressed emotions through an element of transference. In this way the Aristotelian view of katharsis being achieved through the manifestation of pity and fear can be seen as valid.
Aristotle suggested, in his controversial treatise, Poetics, that ‘tragedy purifies through the operation of pity and fear’ leading to a state of catharsis. He believed that the purging of impure thoughts and feelings, for example: emotional disturbance, pain and irrational fears, could be achieved when the audience experienced them while observing tragedy in the theatre. He also felt, when the audience saw tragedy performed not as real-life events, but on stage through the process of mimesis or dramatic enactment, it would prompt the feelings of pity and fear for the characters. Aristotle went on to describe ‘katharsis’ (Greek spelling) as an emotional cleansing achieved by the release of these pent up and overpowering emotions. F.L. Lucas, in his translation of Poetics elaborated on the meaning of ‘purged’ stating that in the medical sense purging means the ‘complete elimination of […] physical abnormalities’. Aristotle’s connotation was more likely to mean a sense of purification, so the audience could regain their emotional equilibrium.
However, Plato argues, in Book X of the Republic, that the audience is actually thrilled when watching dramatic performances and less likely to use restraint with their own emotions stating, ‘Dramatic performances water our emotions when they ought to be left to wither’, in other words, encouraging rather than discouraging them. Freud suggested this concept of emotional purification as ‘pain converted into pleasure’ or emotional sadism, where the audience actively enjoys watching the pain and suffering of the actors on stage in order to gain a sense of release. In everyday life a person’s mental state changes throughout the day and feelings of happiness, sadness, anger or fear are among many emotions that impact on their wellbeing. When we watch a sad film, it can reduce us to tears, likewise, a scary film can have us scream out in the thrill of fear; the idea is that it is a cathartic experience, we feel better, a sense of relief, that we are no longer in that situation.
Pity can be seen as condescending in a modern context, however, in tragedy it is viewed as being sympathetic to the characters plight through the action of the play. In Antigone’s case the deed of covering Polynices addresses her moral duty to bury the dead, the Gods would be appeased, so when Creon then condemns her to death the audience is likely to feel not only sympathy for Antigone but also fear of the repercussions. Aristotle may be suggesting that what we pity in others, we fear for ourselves. Gerald F. Else, an American classicist (Poetics: the argument), redefined the understanding of catharsis in literature as:
‘The insight which arises out of the audiences climactic intellectual, emotional, and spiritual enlightenment, which for Aristotle is both the essential pleasure and essential goal of mimetic art.’
Suggesting there is a healing synergy between hamartia (tragic flaw), mimesis, and catharsis for the audience obtained through this experience.
There is also an element of humour in the Anouilh play with the exchange between Antigone and Jonas:
‘None of that! / Letter indeed! /Fat lot you care…/ It’s all the same to me. / Sucking the lead of his pencil / Funny sort of letter’.
Jonas mumbling the words as he writes helps to lighten the atmosphere slightly before Antigone is taken away to be walled up. Anouilh wrote this during the 1940s and Jonas’s language is appropriate for a soldier of that era and used for dramatic irony. Wartime humour was used to maintain morale in the ranks and here it would be light relief for the audience. Furthermore, Clayton and Rothstein talk about ‘enlargement of a familiar idea’ (figures in the corpus, p5), what Bakhtin calls ‘intertextuality’, a linking of texts. This can be seen when Creon states in his conversation with Haemon, ‘To every man there comes a day/[…]/ that he accepts he’s a man’. This echoes the intertextual link with Churchill’s, ‘To each there comes in their lifetime a day […] /their finest hour’. The audience would understand Creon’s words through recognition of Churchill’s speeches on the radio in 1944. Lexis used in this way stands out and helps to sharpen the viewers concentration, giving them renewed clarity of the situation.
All the versions of Antigone have at their heart a knowledge of the inevitable, that history has a part to play in the unfolding of events. During the second choral ode the Chorus in Sophocles’ play suggest it is the curse of the Oedipus family to meet misfortune:
‘When the house has been shaken by the gods/the ruin never leaves them, but creeps on/through generations of the family’.
In the agon between Haemon and Antigone, Anouilh reinforces this with:
‘the little boy we would have had…/I’d have shielded him/ he’d never have been afraid/you’d have had a real wife/oh Haemon, you did love me/I’d have been proud to be your wife…’.
This thought affirmation emphasises the sense of fatality she feels. It is techniques like this that show how Greek tragedy was designed to produce sensory responses from the audience for the characters. For Antigone to be a true tragic hero she needs to evoke powerful emotional reactions from the audience. During a quarrel with Creon, Antigone argues:
Antigone: ‘If I am to die before my time, I call that a gain/Perhaps I am convicted of folly by a fool.’
Chorus: ‘It is clear; this girl is the violent child of a violent father. She does not know how to yield to misfortune’.
At this point the audience could be confused about their feelings towards Antigone, who, being the Protagonist, has come across as a disobedient adolescent not deserving of their compassion.
Anouilh discards the Chorus as the voice of the citizens and instead uses a single person Prologue to describe the events and characters on stage in the opening scene. The Prologue speaks in the present tense, co-existent with the audience, aware they are in the room:
‘She’s thinking she’s going to die […] Her name is Antigone, and she’s going to have to play her part right through to the end’, implying she is destined to fulfil a role.
By introducing the characters in this way, the Prologue is compelling the audience to see them and acknowledge their circumstances, this allows, what Fraser describes as ‘Brechtian alienation’, where the audience maintain some distance so as not to lose themselves in the play. The audience grow fearful of impending danger as the characters on stage address them, this ‘addressivity’ creates a vital role for the audience as judge and jury. Anouilh further omits Tiresias, who provides the moralistic conscience for Creon in the Sophocles play, and this redirects the focus towards Antigone as the hero. The chorus in Sophocles’ play on the other hand, are used as a device to provide a moral interpretation of what is happening on and around the stage for the audience. During the fifth choral ode they implore the ambivalent god, Bacchus, to bring peace once again:
Thebes, of all cities/You hold highest in honour/[…] /Now, as the whole city is gripped/By a violent plague/Come on your healing way/Over the heights of Parnassus/Or across the sighing strait.
I have examined one excerpt from each text to look at different perspectives of the same action; Sophocles’ section spotlights Creon rushing to release Antigone, ‘I will go as I am/I who bound her will untie her in person’. Meanwhile, in Anouilh, Antigone is going off to be walled up, ‘Hail, then, my grave, my marriage bed, my underground home!’ Aristotle seems to suggest that both characters reach their demise due to poor judgement rather than bad intent:
‘Who is not of outstanding virtue and judgement […] and who because of some mistake comes to disaster: this is tragic.’
Lucas sees this as:
‘The misfortunes of a man who is neither very good nor very bad and who acts under the influence of hamartia, not frailty as opposed to badness, but error as opposed to evil intent’.
Similarities of character traits can thus be seen between Creon and Antigone with both experiencing anagnorisis, awareness of an error in judgement, at the last minute. Creon’s realisation comes when he is alone with the Chorus as Creon states, ‘I am in turmoil. It is dreadful to yield, but terrible too to resist’. Antigone is alone with Jonas when she confesses twice ‘I don’t know any more what I’m dying for…I’m afraid’ just before she is led away. The audience could be fearful but also sympathetic to their plight at this point because the characters finally understand the flaws in their judgement, but it is too late to do anything about them.
In order for the audience to experience the disturbing feelings of pity and fear but not be so overcome with agitation or emotion that it could cause them pain, they require aesthetic distance, an understanding that what they are seeing is mimesis and not reality. This would appear crucial for the cathartic experience to be achieved. The audience will have been able to visualize points in their own lives that they can relate to, especially where they have argued with loved ones, and tried to do the best for them, such as Creon trying to save Antigone, ‘If you’ll only keep quiet and give up this foolishness […] I may be able to save you’. Freud calls this ‘transference’; the audience transfer their own repressed thoughts and emotions onto the characters. This is also known as ‘abreaction’ a psychoanalytical term, whereby repressed traumas can be transferred emotionally to the characters and thus eliminated from the viewer. When the play ends they can regain their thoughts and make sense of what they have seen and feel all the negative emotions leave them.
This concept of emotional purging in literature and other media has persevered through time. The most striking parallels can be found between, for instance, versions of Antigone, and the film, The Purge, where, for one night a year, people are allowed to express their most violent tendencies and emotions by killing or maiming anyone they deem to have wronged them, experience a thrill. The suggestion is that they feel better about themselves when cleansed of these feelings, and so are able to continue their daily lives with a clear conscience. I would suggest that these purifying feelings would not last long before being replaced by remorse when the gravity of what they had done took hold. There is a universality to the tragic figure and the way tragedy helps us recognize the things and people we care for in our own lives. In this respect we can learn the true value of what we have through the action of pity and fear. By re-experiencing unconscious emotions, it allows self-analysis whereby the viewer can identify with the character and in turn look inwards to his repressed emotions through an element of transference. In this way the Aristotelian view of katharsis being achieved through the manifestation of pity and fear can be seen as valid.