The definitions of “erotic tragedy” as a genre and a “New Expressionism” as one of the forms of its exploration are not without considerable historic, philosophical or aesthetic precedent. I am not one for list-making,  but thought it would be prudent to remind myself (if not others) of some of the origins of this thinking, and perhaps to lead others to their own explorations. Consider this a “part one,” which I will hope to fill out over the next few weeks. I am told that doctoral students must, before writing their dissertations, present a  bibliography of the work they intend to use in preparation of their projects. I am neither a doctoral student nor an academic. But if I were, I suppose this would have to be the first step towards that fictitious dissertation.

Many of these books and papers are not explicitly about either theatre or drama, though a few of them are. But I press on; somebody once said, “They know nothing of drama who only drama know,” or something like that. I suppose this should be written atop the gate that leads to the path.

Arthur Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Representation

Schopenhauer is not alone in considering the tragic drama as one of the highest forms of human artistic expression,  but his true innovation was this: “The presentation of a great misfortune is alone essential to tragedy.”[1] In ridding the tragic of the necessity for Aristotelian cathexis and the “fall of the great man,” Schopenhauer paved the way for contemporary tragedies such as Woyzeck; and if this misfortune is a metaphysical rather than historical misfortune, the misfortune of “being born,” and the role of the irrational and the protean nature of personality in human affairs, it also welcomes the dissolution of both traditional character and narrative. Because Schopenhauer also recognized the place of the sexual and erotic drive as central in the striving of human beings, he laid the groundwork for a marriage of the erotic and the tragic. It underlies both the erotic tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra that came before Schopenhauer and the Tristan und Isolde that came after him. Schopenhauer goes on:

But the many different ways in which it is produced by the poet can be brought under three typical characteristics. It can be done through the extraordinary wickedness of a character, touching the extreme bounds of possibility, who becomes the author of the misfortune. … Again, it can happen through blind fate, i.e., chance or error … in general most of the tragedies of the ancients belong to this class.  … Finally, the misfortune can be brought about also by the mere attitude of the persons to one another through their relations. Thus there is no need either of a colossal error, or of an unheard-of accident, or even of a character reaching the bounds of human possibility in wickedness, but characters as they usually are in a moral regard in circumstances that frequently occur, are so situated with regard to one another that their position forces them, knowingly and with their eyes open, to do one another the greatest injury, without any one of them being entirely in the wrong. This last kind of tragedy seems to be far preferable to the other two; for it shows us the greatest misfortune not as an exception, not as something brought about by rare circumstances or by monstrous characters, but as something that arises easily and spontaneously out of the actions and characters of men, as something almost essential to them, and in this way it is brought terribly  near to us. … We see the greatest suffering brought about by entanglements whose essence could be assumed even by our own fate, and by actions that perhaps even we might be capable of committing, and so we cannot complain of injustice. Then, shuddering, we feel ourselves already in the midst of hell.[2]

Georges Bataille: Erotism: Death & Sensuality

Bataille’s masterpiece defines the human body, death and Eros as the dynamic in which the self strives for dissolution in the ecstasy of union with another, also a theme of Antony and Cleopatra and Tristan und Isolde; its fusion with the destructive, violent quality of the will is what lends it contemporary significance. Bataille’s central recognition is that the extremes of this quality in the twentieth century necessitate further transgressive extremes in the life of Eros. The extremes can be turned to an impossible ecstasy in the fused moment; the erotic tragedy demonstrates this but necessarily cannot be identical to it. Because the experience of drama and theatre is among the most time-bound aesthetic experiences possible, it provides a stage for Bataille’s concept of “dissolution of the person as he exists in the realm of discontinuity.”[3] Bataille continues:

In the process of dissolution, the male partner has generally an active role, while the female partner is passive. The passive, female side is essentially the one that is dissolved as a separate entity. But for the male partner the dissolution of the passive partner means one thing only: it is paving the way for a fusion where both are mingled, attaining at length the same degree of dissolution. The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives. …

Bodies open out to a state of continuity through secret channels that give us a feeling of obscenity. Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognised and stable individuality. Through the activity of organs in a flow of coalescence and renewal, like the ebb and flow of waves surging into one another, the self is dispossessed, and so completely that most creatures in a state of nakedness, for nakedness is symbolic of this dispossession that heralds it, will hide; particularly if the erotic act follows, consummating it. … In antiquity the destitution (or destruction) fundamental to eroticism was felt strongly and justified linking the act of love with sacrifice. When I come to religious eroticism which is concerned with the fusion of beings with a world beyond everyday reality I shall return to the significance of sacrifice.[4]

Howard Barker’s recent concern with sacrifice as an element of tragedy should be seen in the light of the stage, which should ideally provide no place for this nakedness, real or metaphorical, to hide — and to present the spectator with the possibility of erotic sacrifice of the self in the service of ecstasy. These touch our deepest concerns of the self not only as self-possessed subject but also our body as object for the Other: as a possession which at the same time is no possession, but a giving up, a dissolution in the body of the Other. This is disturbing — culturally, politically and emotionally — in that we possess a desire to have our bodies used as sexual and erotic objects, possessed and helpless in the arms of another, in search of a freedom from the violent destructive will that underlies all experience instead of a freedom of that will. Its ultimate impossibility in our world, and what we do when we recognize that ultimate impossibility, is the basis of the tragic catastrophe, and another of what Schopenhauer called humanity’s “great misfortunes.”

1. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation. Translated by E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, 1966, Volume 1, p. 254. [↩]
2. Ibid., pp. 254-255. [↩]
3. George Bataille: Erotism: Death & Sensuality. Translated by Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986, p. 17. [↩]
4. Ibid., pp. 17-18. [↩]