Translating tragedy: Molora and Yaël Farber’s adaption of Aeschylus’ Oresteia for the South African community

Abstract

The article takes the case of Yaël Farber’s performance Molora (an adaption of the ancient Greek tragedy Oresteia to the specific historical South African moment of transition to democracy and the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) as a departing point to delve into the question of the translatability of tragedy. With such a proposition in mind, the argument is informed by the relatively new field of cultural translation studies. Against this background, the translatability of the epistemological conditions of the Aristotelian concept of tragedy and its Western legacy will be considered. By proposing to translate the traditional notion of tragedy as literary dramatic genre to conceive of tragedy as event the article will delve into ethical questions concerning the human condition in relation to fate, which enhance guilt, judgement, the collision of force and law and the quest for justice. To connect these questions to tragedy, a distinction has to be made between the ethos of tragedy as an artistic form and the pathos (the grief) of those who experience a disaster or ruin in a situation of everyday life.

Keywords:

• Tragedy as event
• commoning
• justice
• violence
• reconciliation

Klytemnestra's final words in MoLoRa are, ‘We are still only here by grace alone.’ To speak for the community I come from, the white community in South Africa, there was an act of grace that enabled the rest of us to go forward and still call South Africa home. It avoided what could have happened: the expected outcome, some kind of violence and bloody overthrow. (Yaël Farber 2010)

Introduction

In the following I will take the case of Yaël Farber’s performance, Molora (2003/2007),¹ as a departure point to delve into the question of the translatability of tragedy. By translatability, I do not mean here the translation of the text of a tragedy from one language into another, nor the problem of adapting a classical drama for a contemporary stage production. Instead, I will discuss the translatability of the Aristotelian concept of tragedy itself. This article is informed by the relatively new field of cultural translation studies (Bassnett 1998, Benjamin 2004a; Chakrabarty 2000, Snell-Hornby 2006, Buden & Nowotny 2009). More precisely, it shares the inherently specific intention ‘to steer the translation concept […] on the level of epistemological impulses – without cordoning off the power relations and asymmetries of global relations’ (Bachmann-Medick 2009, pp. 4–5). Against this background, I aim to consider the epistemological conditions of the Aristotelian concept of tragedy and its Western legacy, in terms of translatability into a specific historical South African context. To do so, I propose to translate the traditional notion of tragedy as literary dramatic genre in order to conceive of tragedy as event.

The case of Molora

Why do I place the production, Molora, at the centre of this discussion? First of all, Molora in itself has to be conceived of as a radical translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Adapting this tragedy about the birth of democracy in Athens to the transition process to democracy in South Africa at the end of the twentieth century, Farber connected the mythical plot of the Oresteia with the historical moment of the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1995. The TRC unfolded in a court-like setting bearing witness to and recording, crimes relating to human rights violations during apartheid, and in some cases granting amnesty to the perpetrators of such crimes. It was also mandated to offer reparation and rehabilitation to the victims. The extent to which Molora translated the ancient trilogy, in form as well as in content, into South African reality, resonates in the following announcement:

Multiple international award winning Molora is Yaël Farber’s radical adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia Trilogy. Using this ancient text, Farber re-imagines the story of the cursed House of Atreus in the context of Apartheid South Africa’s aftermath, and its Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As mother and daughter, perpetrator and survivor, face each other over wooden tables and through microphones – memory falls between two tables of testimony, and we face the past in all its raw brutality and fragility. The ancient Chorus is reinvented in the potent form of the matriarchs who are members of the The Ngqoko Cultural - Traditional Xhosa musicians and throat singers. It is Farber’s vision, the unrestrained sacrifice of the three actors who form the House of Atreus, and the unearthly presence of this extraordinary Chorus of Xhosa matriarchs – that have brought critical acclaim and continued invitations for Molora to be presented around the world.²

This translational attitude can be observed on various levels. First of all, the text of the original trilogy (458 BC) – consisting of the three tragedies Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides – was radically rewritten. Farber wove together central quotes from Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers with quotes from Sophocles’ Electra and Euripides’ Electra as well as Iphigenia in Aulis, focusing clearly on the female characters of the trilogy. This patchwork of quotations (all indicated in footnotes in the play text) is complemented with texts in Xhosa which are translated on stage by an additional character, called ‘Translator’. Thus, translation in itself forms an important part of Molora and it resonates right at the beginning of the production when an ‘[…] elderly Xhosa woman emerges from the audience, and moves in silence into the performance arena’, singing softly in Xhosa: ‘Ho laphala’igazi’ [BLOOD HAS BEEN SPILT HERE].³ When all singers of the chorus have moved onto the stage and finished the song, the actress playing Klytemnestra – ‘a white woman in middle age’ (Farber 2008, p. 20) pulls the microphone towards her, saying the lines:

KLYTEMNESTRA: A great ox –

As they say –

Stands on my tongue.

As she begins to speak – the CHORUS all turn their heads to the right, to listen to her.

TRANSLATOR: Ndise ndayinkukhw’ isikw’umlomo.

[A GREAT OX … 

AS THEY SAY … 

STANDS ON MY TONGUE.]⁴(p. 22)

This textual translation is complemented by a topological translation of the original events happening in the Greek House of Atreus. Farber staged the play in 2007 at the Barney Simon Theatre at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg in a bare room that resembles, as she has said, the drab and simple venues where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) testimony was heard. Finally, the decision to situate the original plot in the very historical moment of the transition to democracy in South Africa was intended to take the ancient story as ‘[…] a powerful canvas on which to explore the history of dispossession, violence and human-rights violations in the country I grew up in’ (Farber 2008, p. 8). In doing so, Farber adapted the Oresteia’s mythical plot about the violent cycle of vengeance (Agamemnon killed his daughter Iphigenia for the sake of victory in the Trojan war, Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon for having killed their daughter, Orestes killed Clytemnestra for having killed Agamemnon) to explore the themes of revenge and forgiveness that resonated during the TRC hearings which enabled South Africa to confront the murderous past of apartheid. In Molora, mother and daughter, victim and perpetrator face up to each other. Elektra, played by a black actress, is undergoing mistreatment in front of the eyes of the audience – cigarette burns and wet bag torture – at the hands of her white mother, Klytemnestra, who wants to force her to reveal where Orestes is hiding. These scenes refer directly to the testimonies heard at the TRC hearings, deviating from the text of the ancient tragedy while at the same time maintaining the roles of Klytemnestra and Elektra:

ELEKTRA (Testimony) Years passed between us.

Mother and daughter.

But I was not permitted to sit at the table.

You fed me like a dog.

 I was a servant in the halls of my father’s house.

No-one ever talks about the night you spilled my father’s blood.

It is as though the past never happened.

But a daughter remembers.

Sisiyatha sodwa esingalibala ukubulawa kuka tata waso.

[ONLY A FOOL WOULD FORGET HER FATHER'S MURDER].

Every day you tried to break my strength.

Every day you tried to destroy my spirit.

She comes out from behind her table and stands before a seated Klytemnestra.

Please, demonstrate for this commission

How you tried to get information out of

Me as to my brother’s whereabouts. (Farber 2008, pp. 43–44)

Like the ancient trilogy, Molora tells the story of transition from the law of retribution (an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth) to the administration of justice. At the end of the Oresteia, the goddess Athena calls up a jury representing citizens to judge Orestes, overcoming the Furies’ demand for vengeance. And although Farber stuck to this narrative, her translation caused a radical change in the plotline. While in the Oresteia, Orestes and Electra decide to accomplish the murder of Clytemnestra for the sake of revenge, in Molora, the women of the Chorus prevent the siblings killing their mother demanding to break the cycle of revenge. What follows is a prayer of the Diviner which calls up the names of the communal ancestors to pray for the children ‘that they may stop crime and killing each other’ (Farber 2008, p. 78). In doing so, she performs testimonies from both perpetrators and victims, blurring the lines between them.

The question of tragedy

Most production reviews unanimously praised ‘the extraordinary relocation of Greek myth to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing in South Africa’ (Marlowe 2008), be it in South Africa, or the UK, where the production premiered at the Oxford Playhouse in 2007. The production made a huge impression, not only because of Farber’s ‘astounding direction’ (Pedroza 2008), but also because of the successful translation of the tragic impact of the ancient text into South African reality: ‘Those warm hearts of the Ngqoko Cultural Group send us home with a song, reminding us that in South Africa, as well as in Greek tragedy, strong beliefs exist to break down any revenge cycle’ (Doolan 2007).

But if we take a look at scholarly discussions of Molora, we are confronted with the striking consideration that while the performance is meant to have created a ‘strong affective dimension’ (Odom 2011, p. 47), it does not entirely match the genre of tragedy. It has to be asked what is meant by tragedy here and what notion of tragedy is underlying this claim. Odom makes a clear distinction between tragedy and reconciliation aesthetics:

Tragedy and reconciliation contain contradictory impulses: tragedy requires a universal space, whereas reconciliation tends to emphasize a specific, monumentalized space; tragedy removed individuals from community, whereas reconciliation subsumes the individual story within the communal; tragedy involved the expiation of emotions by means of catharsis, whereas reconciliation requires both the expiation of emotion and the creation of new emotion; tragedy requires closure, whereas reconciliation is explicitly continuous. (Odom 2011, p. 47)

Moreover, he affirms that reconciliation takes place in a narrative of past events which tends to restorative rather than retributive justice. Molora, he concludes, is neither the one nor the other, but portrays the past events ‘on an individual and a communal level as the unfulfilled desire to seek a satisfactory resolution’ (Odom 2011, p. 61.) While Odom is relying on a quite idiosyncratic Aristotelian notion of tragedy, in her article, ‘On the Tragedy of the Commoner: Elektra, Orestes, and Others in South Africa’ (2012), Loren Kruger tends, in consideration of ‘the drama of the failed revolution in South Africa,’ to Raymond Williams’ notion of ‘tragedy of a distinctly modern kind’ (p. 357). Pleading for the merging of cultural and testimonial elements, and primarily for the force of the text, she critically considers the production ‘less effect[ive], when text and performance more directly mimicked the events or testimony from the hearings’ (p. 366). So, according to Kruger, the montage of the re-enactment of the hearings into the trilogy did not work, because it damaged the effect of the (ancient) texts. As I have already stated, I wonder to what extent the notion of tragedy that underlies this critical statement supports this conclusion. In other words, to what extent does this very notion of tragedy that is underlying this statement not allow one to provide a cultural translation of the ancient tragedy into South African reality? To consider this question, in what follows, I will firstly connect the current discourse on the concept of tragedy to the concept of tragedy of the commons in order to, secondly, explore the possibility of translating the classical dramatic concept of tragedy into a contemporary concept of tragedy as event.

The concept of tragedy and the tragedy of the commons

The concept of tragedy, in dramaturgical terms, is deeply rooted in a Western legacy of poetics. Since first described in Aristotle’s Poetics, tragedy, as a literary genre, has undergone various transformations in terms of the poetic laws that Aristotle had defined, most notably in the works of Corneille and Lessing, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While nowadays literary theory has announced ‘the death of tragedy’ (Steiner 1996), a striking renewal of artistic and scholarly interest in the exploration of the tragic has emerged quite recently (Critchley 2019). This renewed interest includes a focus on particular theatre and performance practices beyond the dramatic genre (Dreyer 2014, Gruber 2016, Lehmann 2016). This shift derives, in part, from a renewed understanding of the relevance of the experience of catastrophe in post-democratic societies, associated with the so called tragedy of the commons. It calls, as I claim in this article, for a new dramaturgy of the tragic that takes into account the relevance of the experience of catastrophe in democratizing societies in the global South. Looking at Molora as an exemplary case to discuss the translatability of tragedy against this background, urges us to include the question to what extent is it necessary and possible to translate the Western concept of the tragic and tragedy if we confront the tragedy of the commons in the global South as a consequence of socio-economic injustices and hierarchical divisions of global power? This approach makes even more sense if we follow the argument of Yaël Farber that Molora was not only created in the wake of ‘the negotiated transition to democracy’(in Kruger 2012, p. 365) but also reacts to a much broader history of injustice reaching out of the African continent:

Africa is so often portrayed as the begging bowl of the world. Of course it’s a continent that's been ravaged by colonialism and by civil wars; it’s a continent that’s been imploded from the centre in so many different ways and stripped of its resources. The devastating consequences that act themselves out, in the worst possible ways, show what human nature is capable of, as it does in Europe or anywhere we’ve seen genocide unfold. (Farber in Woods 2010)

As the history of tragedy is closely connected to the history of democracy, I further ask in a more general way, to what extent can tragedy translate itself to the current specific historical period that is marked by a crisis of democracy, perceived in terms of a deep crisis of the communal body on a global scale. I claim that this crisis calls for new forms of tragedy in the present time, especially when ‘the tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin 1968) is currently regaining considerable attention. While the notion of ‘the commons’ is grounded in a desire for the conditions necessary to promote social justice, sustainability and contentment for all, the ‘tragedy of the commons’ in turn points to socio-economic injustices and hierarchical divisions of power, environmental catastrophes and stressed-out and alienated lives (De Angelis 2009). In short, it points to the conflict between individual desire and common good. Commons are not simply resources we share. Conceptualizing the commons involves, according to Massimo De Angelis, three things at the same time: first, the pool of resources, second the set of communities, and third and most important, the conceptualizing of the commons as the verb ‘to common – the social process that creates and reproduces the commons. In recent times the notion has gained increased attention through a large variety of social movements, due to the fact that neither states nor markets have been able to tackle topics like the global economic crisis, social and political crises in the global South and with this the crisis of migration. I will not delve into the complex discussion about the commons and communing⁵ here, instead I will question the possible contribution of performances of tragedies to the social process to create and reproduce commons, as a form of a communal democratic body in the global South. Before examining the possible translational processes of the Aristotelian laws of tragedy that a performance itself implements, I will briefly outline the notion of tragedy that Kruger is basing her critical argument on.

Kruger’s analysis of Molora relies on Raymond William’s idea of the tragedy of the commoner as a distinctly modern one. In his book Modern Tragedy published in 1966, he set out to articulate something of a response to George Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy (1961). But Williams did not formulate a direct refutation of Steiner’s position. Having recognized a new historical and social conjuncture in that time – transitions from Fordist to post-Fordist labour, from coloniality to post-coloniality and the emergence of a new cultural logic of post-modernity – he sought to identify and delineate the historical and social conditions for the various kinds of possible tragic experiences and their associated dramatic forms. In this way, he tried to defend the tragic experiences of modern mankind or the commoner, the civic individual, against Steiner’s argument that tragedy cannot survive in a modern, rationalized world. According to Kenneth Surin,

[i]t was not too difficult for Williams to show that Steiner's argument was vitiated both by a propensity to universalize in a specious way what was really a very particular and specialized rendition of tragic experience, and by an understanding of the history of a set of artistic forms that failed to take that history's variety and complexity sufficiently into account. (1995, p. 44)

But while Williams expressed his conviction that it is necessary to look for ‘the structure of tragedy in our own culture’ (in Surin 1995, p. 146), he did not question tragedy in its literary, dramatic form. Rather, he stuck to the dialectical construction of tragedy which Hegel adapted from the formal laws of tragedy that Aristotle had defined. By doing so, he only partly succeeded in overcoming Steiner’s argument and thereby did not offer Kruger a discourse that would allow her to adequately translate the old concept of tragedy into the current (post-colonial and democratic) historical moment of South Africa.

Tragedy as event

Against this background, I propose to translate the traditional notion of tragedy as literary dramatic genre to conceive of tragedy as event. Although the body of research on tragedy is extensive, the conceptualization of tragedy as event adds a qualitatively new dimension that allows an opening up of the ‘still necessary engagement with the actual relevance of the tragedy’ (Benthien 2012, p. 460). The concept of event should be grasped from two perspectives: theatrical and philosophical. Following recent arguments in theatre studies (Dreyer 2014, Lehmann 2016) that tragedy in our time no longer has to take the shape of a dramatic process (as literary genre), but may with superior legitimacy appear in moments of performance, the concept of event helps to conceive of this transformation more clearly. From the perspective of theatre studies, ‘event’ refers to performative and embodied acts that constitute a performance in the here and now, in the co-presence of actors and spectators. In this context, ‘event’ is explicitly marked as a ‘category of the present’ that opens up to a bodily experience for the audience as something that descends upon them (Mersch 2002, p. 45). This perspective allows for taking into account the interplay between performed and perceived tragedy as a community-building act that provides tragic experience. Furthermore, the philosophical-existential approach towards the concept of event (Derrida 1994), allows for differentiating the specific dimension of the collective and individual experience of the tragic in the present social and political context of the commons. This approach conceives of event as, essentially, a rupture with the established order of things. This includes an opening up for something unknown to come to appearance in the future. At this point the problem of an operational distinction between the tragic and tragedy is called into play. In spite of the fact that defining the tragic provokes an ongoing and unresolvable discussion in the humanities, recent studies propose to ‘think […] of the tragic as a mode’ (Felski 2008, p. 12) that in its common form relates to the pathos of immeasurable human grief and mourning, the topos of the victim and the submission of the human being to a certain (catastrophic) destiny that includes the violent confrontation with death. But the tragic is not necessarily an aesthetic category. While the tragic is the subject of tragedy, the latter provides a formal and aesthetic reflection on the tragic that enables an attitude of spectatorship (theoros) (Ette 2011). This reflection includes ethical questions concerning the human condition in relation to fate, which enhance guilt, judgement, the collision of force and law and the quest for justice. In other words, there is a difference between the ethos of tragedy as an artistic form and the pathos (the grief) of those who experience a disaster or ruin in a situation of everyday life.

In Molora, this point is utterly relevant. One could say that Farber was staging a tragedy as event to the extent that she stressed the performative mode of the actions on stage, to create an artistic form to enable an attitude of spectatorship (ethos) for those who (in South Africa) had experienced a disaster (pathos) that is brought centre stage by calling up the TRC hearings. Moreover, this disaster or catastrophic destiny is visualized in the mise en scène (which is described in great detail in the published playscript), providing evidence of the importance of the performative elements alongside the textual elements of the staging that explicitly reach out to the past which should be recalled by the audience/community:

mise en scène […] The ideal venue is a bare hall or room – much like the drab, simple venues in which most of the testimonies were heard during the course of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Two large, old tables – each with a chair – face one another on opposite ends of the playing space. Beneath Klytemnestra’s testimony table is a large bundle wrapped in black plastic. Upon each table is a microphone on a stand. Between these two tables is a low platform which demarcates the area in which past/memory will be re-enacted. Centre of this platform is a grave filled with red sand of Africa. […] Along the back of the playing area, upstage and facing the audience, are seven empty, austere-looking chairs, upon which the CHORUS of WOMEN – who will come to hear the testimonies – will sit. The audience is seated in front of and around the performance area, as incorporated into the testimonies. They are the community that provides the context of the event. (Farber 2008, p. 19, italics are mine).

In this context it is important to know that the Ngqoko Cultural Group which provides the women of the chorus are committed to the indigenous music, songs and traditions of the rural Xhosa communities. Farber worked with these women from the beginning of the creation of the production. They contributed significantly to the ethical topos of reconciliation which dominates the tragic plot. In a society like that of the Xhosa, it is particularly true that the structure of reconciliation prohibits forgetting the past, and in fact, relies on repeated cycles of witnessing, as ancestors are immediately present as part of the community. ‘Within the Ngqoko group are two spiritual diviners’, Farber comments, ‘who are trained in the channelling of ancestral powers […], their authority in spiritual conduct allows a moment in which the audience may experience a deep participation in a prayer to our ancestors for an end of the cycle of violence in South Africa – and indeed the world’ (Farber 2008, p. 13).

The last phrase refers to the initial event that inspired the production, Molora, which literally means ash: ‘In the long nights following the devastating attack on the World Trade Center, amid the grief, recriminations and the Bush administration’s indiscriminate wielding of revenge, a fine, white powdery substance gently floated down upon heart-broken New York’ (Farber 2008, p. 8). It is this powdery substance, this ash, these cremated remains which is not only delivered by Orestes to his mother, but which delineates the whole production until the very end: ‘The full company stands in silence looking out at the audience. A fine powdery substance gently floats down on them – As lights fade to black’ (Farber 2008, p. 79). With this final image, Molora points to the ethical questions intrinsic to tragedy, concerning the human condition in relation to fate, which enhances guilt, judgement, the collision of force and law and the quest for justice. The decision to break the cycle of vengeance by sparing Klytemnestra’s life and hence changing the original plot does not yet mean an escape from the dilemma of action, as Farber comments:

Clearly, justice must be done when murder has been committed. But what action does justice, while preventing the blood curse of vengeance from corrupting the next generation, and the next? What just action interrupts the lockstep of consequence after consequence, judgment necessitating further judgment in turn, blood requiring more blood? (Farber in Wood 2010)

In this sense, Molora indeed makes a claim for healing, but nevertheless performs the ethos of tragedy.

Translating the ethos of tragedy

With Farber’s question in mind, I will dedicate the last part of this article to the discussion of the translatability concept of tragedy itself. This discussion will focus mainly on the topic of law which is intrinsic to the ancient concept of tragedy, as I will explore in the following. To do so, as a first step, I will reflect on the Hegelian concept of tragedy on which Kruger relies. As a second step I will propose a conceptual translation of the Aristotelian tragic conflict into a post-colonial and democratic context.

Hegel – to put it briefly – adapted the Aristotelian model of tragedy to his philosophy of Spirit (1977), transforming ‘the oppositions and diremptions that lie at the heart of tragic conflicts’ into speculative thinking (Surin 1995, p. 159). This thinking was structured according to a dialectical scene that leads to the tragic conflict being ‘“sublated” (that is, overcome without being abolished) by the higher unity that is absolute spirit’ (Surin 1995, p. 159). The tragedy he took as paradigmatic for this dialectical telos was Sophocles’ Antigone. ⁶ The tragic conflict between the political law of the state (represented by Creon) and the private law of kinship (represented by Antigone), unfolding because Antigone wants to bury her brother Polyneices which has been forbidden by the law of Creon, is structured by the asymmetrical opposition between the law of the particular and the law of the general. This is an opposition that entails a whole series of further pairs of oppositions, like family and state, man and woman, life and death etc.. Consequently, the building up of the conflict is translated into a dialectical procedure that leads to an abstraction in the realm of ideas. This abstraction is moral justice, more precisely moral justice as a concept, as a result of the totalitarianism (and closed structure) of the dialectical form that violently excludes those who do not obey the law, like Antigone who, enclosed in her brother’s tomb by Creon, takes her owns life.⁷ Hence, for Hegel ‘[…] the opposition of finite beings, while it is not eliminated, is nonetheless reconciled in Spirit … as the supreme identity of identity and difference’ (Surin 1995, p. 159).

This problem raises the question of how the tragedy of law (the ultimate topic of any tragedy) relates to the law of tragedy (the Aristotelian poetic norms of the dramatic composition of tragedy). I would argue with Walter Benjamin (2004b) and against Hegel that it is the very principal (the law) of tragedy to bring forth the law as a form of justice (Gerechtigkeitsform) that in its essence is violent. The tragic in tragedy happens at a turning point that defines the tragic conflict without a just solution that counts for all.

Without wanting to take away the essence of the tragic conflict, I am asking myself whether it is possible to encounter the violence of the law (that is also the violence of the concept of tragedy as Western law) in a translational way. It might help to conceptualize the translational process adapted in Molora in a less schematic way than that which resonates when Kruger identifies ‘the desire of reviewers of Molora to find in the interruption of violence a turn in the play and in South Africa away from tragedy of vengeance to the comedy of reconciliation’ (Kruger 2012, p. 373) overlooking thereby – I assume – the performance’s power of adapting the tragedy to the communal tragedy at work in the transition process. Therefore, in the following I would like to propose an alternative concept of tragedy that allows one to take into account the performative alterations of the ancient tragic plot and – with this – those who are violently kept outside the closed Hegelian concept of moral justice. This proposal is built on the interventions of Hölderlin and Derrida.⁸

Hölderlin and Hegel met and discussed together their ideas about tragedy amidst the devastating terror following the French Revolution, and the violent and unresolved conflict between private and public law that was at stake at that time. While Hegel finally adapted Antigone to foresee the course of history through philosophy, for Hölderlin the opposite was true. The latter conceived the uniqueness, the Greekness of tragedy, as a work (organon) that is not identically repeatable and not transferable, neither to the realm of ideas, nor to his actual time. This was the reason that he thought that antique tragedy was only able to survive by a transformation into a modern tragedy, and modern meant for him: different, resistant, a disorganized model of tragedy, a tragedy out of joint. The way to do this, was for Hölderlin the work of translation as a disarticulation of tragedy. Hölderlin introduced the notion of caesura to define this means of disarticulation. With caesura he meant those parts in tragedy that resist the totality of its form.

Hölderlin’s modern approach to a theory of tragedy results from a dramaturgical interest in deconstruction. For Hölderlin, ‘[…] modern tragedy only exists in the form of deconstruction of antique tragedy. Similarly a theory of the tragic and tragedy was only possible in the deconstruction of classical poetics’ (Lacoue-Labarthes 2003, p. 52). This form of deconstruction has to be understood as an adaption of the violence of tragic catastrophe. Hölderlin proposed to comply with the law of the tragedy only so far as the catastrophe of its original meaning would be turned into the catastrophe of occupancy or appropriation (Aneignung) through the dramaturgical processing. This catastrophe of occupancy occurs in terms of mimesis, and not catharsis as in Hegel’s view. And here it is important to know that mimesis in English also means occupancy or appropriation (Kelly 1998, p. 233). Dramaturgical processing is understood thus as a mimetic act of translation as the catastrophe of translating the catastrophic plot of tragedy into modernity. In this sense the dramaturgical process comes close to the work of mourning, which brings me to Derrida.

Tragedy as event of mourning

Derrida accuses Hegel of making an example of Antigone by removing her from the history of tragedy and forcing her into a paradigmatic and universal ‘truth’ for modernity under the condition of her exclusion. In other words, Hegel enclosed Antigone in her tomb, so that nothing should survive Antigone, and nothing should emerge out of her. While Hegel’s announcement of her death had to ring in the absolute end of history in the name of the spirit, in Spectres of Marx, Derrida (1994) opens the tombs for the return of the dead: the spectres of Hamlet’s father, and Oedipus’ daughter! This appearance poses the question of law and justice anew, not for law, for the calculation of restitutions, the economy of vengeance or punishment, but beyond an economy of repression (Verdrängung!) whose law implies it to exceed itself in the course of history. According to Derrida, justice is always in excess of the law, because – thinking in line with Walter Benjamin – instituting the law requires ‘law-making violence’ and the existing order requires ‘law-preserving violence’ (Benjamin 2004b, p. 241) to ensure its perpetual existence. Justice can never be codified into law, and remains a promise. Even though it can never be fully achieved, it however remains the lever that can be used to transform the system of law. This is a tragic mode.

What Derrida in the course thereof is aiming towards is to bring up ‘ethics itself: to learn to live’ which can only happen ‘between life and death’ (Derrida 1994, p. XVII). Remembering and mourning the dead means therefore an attitude of a politics of memory and of generations:

No justice […] seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they the victims of war, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations. (1994, p. XVIII, italics mine)

Liberating Antigone – who called for justice – out of her tomb where she had been enclosed for the law, means to bring the spirits of the dead onto stage for the ongoing (tragic) claim for justice.

In this sense Derrida is claiming ethics that needs the theatre, because the theatre brings up anew the genuinely tragic question of justice as a question for justice ‘where it is not yet, not yet there’ (1994, p. XVIII, emphasis in original). In this performative mode of ‘as if’, justice is not reducible to the law. For this question cannot be asked, according to Derrida, ‘without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or not yet present and living’ (1994, p. xviii, emphasis in original), for those who had been placed outside the law, like Antigone. It is a question that ‘deserves the name of event’ (1994, p. 17, emphasis in original).

Molora: a tragedy as event

With tragedy as event in mind, Molora might be perceived as a production that translates not only the violence of Western epistemology (like the notion of tragedy) by appropriating it, but also by performing a mimetic act of translation as the catastrophe of translating the catastrophic plot of tragedy into the South African modernity. Therefore, one might conclude, Molora created a theatrical space for mourning by calling for justice for those who are not there, for those who are no longer present and living, for those who have been placed outside the law. Opening the tombs for the return of the dead, Molora poses the tragic question of law and justice anew. Bringing up justice that ‘is not yet’, that happens in-between life and death, it provides exactly that threshold which is only made present in the theatre, performing the ethics of tragedy in a formal and aesthetic reflection on the tragic experience enabling an ethical attitude of spectatorship. This perspective on tragedy as event allows for taking into account the interplay between performed and perceived tragedy as a community-building act that reflects on tragic experience, including the ancestors in an act of mourning to produce an end to the cycle of violence in South Africa, while maintaining an awareness of the dilemma of action.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Research Foundation: [Grant Number 99082].

Notes

1 The production premiered at the Grahamstown National Festival of the Arts in 2003. Farber developed the script of the performance further at the Market Theatre of Johannesburg where it was staged in 2007 to a very positive response. It got several awards and toured successfully from then on in Europe and the US.

2 See http://www.yfarber.com/molora (accessed 29 April 2019).

3 I am reproducing here the way of notating as indicated in the text.

4 The quote is from The Watchman in Agamemnon (LM), p. 14 [36].

5 See, for instance, Centre Tricontinental (2017).

6 See, e.g. Oliver (1996).

7 Farber herself refers to Antigone to compare the topic of violence and justice with the fate of Electra: ‘Here, we don’t face the question of justice as much as the dilemma of it. When you’re Elektra, the daughter of a mother who has killed your father, you face conflicting responsibilities to family, to justice, and perhaps to mercy. Antigone faces conflicting duties to religion, to the state and to her family. The fundamental allegiances of both women are placed at odds with one another. Repeatedly, the Greeks ask, “What do we do as a culture when such allegiances are in conflict?”’ (Farber, 2010).

8 See for a more extensive discussion of the following passage, Röttger (2016).