As a matter of fact it is hard to say anything really meaningful on Greek tragedy. We can hardly imagine the significance of the yearly festivities and rituals of which the performance of the Greek tragedy was only a part, nor can we imagine its impact on the city life. These ceremonies involved the entire community (apart from slaves and women) and public life was put on hold during its ongoings. The audience was invited and paid to witness something unimaginable, something that submitted all categories of life to a poignant process of inquiry: what is justice? What is law? What is the relationship between man and gods? How blind can one be? What is legitimate violence? What means responsibility? What are the consequences of hubris? What is the meaning of morality? The Dyonisia was a festival that took the shape of a contest which lasted for several days and involved choruses, authors and actors alike. The tragic consciousness within this festival was counterbalanced by its antipode, the satyr plays, plays which reserved their leading role for a phallus that mounted anything it could.
The central notion within Greek tragedy is one of ripping apart, stretching, tearing apart, and tearing apart that which once was acceptable, normal, whole. This is primarily a purely physical notion: within Greek culture the body was a central entity, treated with care and training and discipline. That body was to stay whole, clean and in harmony with itself and its surroundings, master to all its capacities. It is precisely that peaceful balance of the contemplative body and the instrumental body that would be so sorely tried and tested in Greek tragedy, because tragedy, first and foremost, is a corporeal suffering. Its characters are torn apart in a brutal and horrific manner. The clean exterior makes way for that which is hidden from sight and at the same time unimaginable: the dismantling of unity into fragment; a world fallen to pieces. Tragedy shows us the wreckage of what was once called man, now fallen prey to vultures and hounds. Greek tragedy is chiefly an elegy for what remains after that initial sparagmos, when man has fallen apart. Sparagmos breaches the borders between interior and exterior, between body and chaos, between order and loss of structure. The horror that plunges forth from that breach cries to heaven.
The obscene category of sparagmos is simultaneously in play in another facet of tragedy: the ritual of purgation. The seams of man, of law, and of morality are torn apart. Tragedy is a pair of scissors, stabbed into open eyes to gain renewed sight from blindness. The extreme suffering to which the characters – and with them the audience – are exposed, must also redeem the horror, as if blood is washed with blood. Catharsis is again, primarily a physical notion, used in a medical context to relieve the body of poison. Tragedy propels the horror upwards until it becomes almost unbearable, until it is almost literally spewed out. Everything that has lodged itself in organs and muscle tissue and even deeper, on the cellular level, is irrigated and, in doing so, liquidated. Through all crevices it pours, catharsis is a form of slime and of snot and of sweat and of piss.
All shit must be cleansed in a grand theatrical enema. Through fear and pity (eleos and fobos) over what affects the Greek tragic heroes so ruthlessly, the spectator is able to exude his own suffering as well. Catharsis rips open the viewer, it makes him vulnerable to the unimaginable horror within himself to release him from it. That is, until the next tragedy comes along, which brings with it new horrors – or the satyr play, which celebrates all obscenities in a grand phallic feast in which all that once was pure is now troubled again.
We know remarkably little about Greek tragedy, or about what that meant, that tearing apart, that obscenity, that cleansing. But it is exactly that essential unknowableness and unimaginableness that is at stake in Mount Olympos. Mount Olympos is not an actualization of Greek tragedy. It is an examination of the unrepresentability of what tears us apart and purges us once more.
Luk Van den Dries, 24 October 2014