The Supreme Growth

THE HOPELESS DREAM OF BEING

Split natures and broken faces in Aeschylus and Bergman

Born out of the Satyr chorus under the religious auspices of the Dionysian festival in 6th century B.C.E, drama is that unfathomable moment in Western aesthetics when we see before us on the stage for the first time, a poor, suffering individual referring to himself as ‘egô’, ‘I’, yet plainly someone else—a performer. He is and is not the figure he pretends to be, a conceit facilitated by the Dionysian’s greatest tool—the mask. In the word prosopon is the tri-part meaning of face, mask and person. But the mask that the actor of the Greek stage wore was primarily a mechanism to efface his identity, and less to present him to the audience as some one in particular. The face is the salient point of our dealings with people, a gestural matrix that far outstrips speech in expressive power. It is, however, a tool of deception, a veil of seeming that only time can penetrate as we prosopa apply ourselves to the world, revealing our nature through action. The truth that doubles on the stage is a secondary mirroring of the play of human appearances, between being and seeming. This is the sinew of drama, again reflected in the divided nature of its parent god, Dionysus—the complex deity of the Greek stage who is male and female, mortal and divine, masked and intoxicated, youth and adult. He is nature and illusion in one. The strength of the dramatic form is the fragility of human personhood, realised with such perspicacity by the tragedians. 

Apollo, friends, Apollo—
He ordained my agonies—my pain on pains!
But the hand that struck my eyes was mine,
Mine alone—no one else—
I did it all myself! (II.1329-33 Oedipus The King)

The figure on the stage is neither Oedipus, nor is he one who has experienced a similar ordeal, nor does he recount what the historical figure Oedipus once said. Where the Lyrist spoke from a universal ‘I’ and the epic poet through a mythopoeic retelling, the figure on the tragic stage was a metaphoric apparition of Oedipus himself. Deploying such a technique implicitly magnifies the experience of human agency, an experience of utter horror to Oedipus and to the audience that witnesses his ruin. ‘I did it all myself!’ he cries, with that lump-in-the-throat terror that grips the individual realising himself as the architect and executor of his own ruin.

With this focus on the face, specifically the two eyes that anchored the mask, Greek tragedians were perhaps germinating the awareness that led to the 20th century close-up. It seems fair to suppose that for the greatest generations of artists working within a specific formal parameter, the choice of what to represent and how to do so is not compromised by the need to venerate or corrupt the azimuth of their art form. When newly born, the form is ill defined, rebellious, unruly. Nearing death, it self-consciously tries to adumbrate its nature (as we see in The Bacchae, with its fatuous emphasis on the rules of the Dionysiac). By returning to the mask the early generations of tragedians were not merely responding to the technical demands of a many-faced actor, but saying something of the deep changes in how they felt the world. Faith in the purity of their insight leads us to the Joycean conclusion that ‘a man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and the portals to discovery’ (Ulysses, 9). The fact that the apogees of tragic art and that of cinema hold within them a tempest of facial dynamics, suggests that cinema, at its purest, revisits the same ontological territory. Looking for examples of this, we come to two artists that, across millennia, speak in a caustic whisper of the same wounded human—those Aeschylus and Bergman. At first we can only awkwardly hold the two side by side, but with a measured grasp and a corrected incidence their correspondence can be glanced. An aesthetic topography of diaphanous faces and profile dynamics, encircled by dark chthonic forces is brought before us, and a weeping lament sounded for an absurd existence. Their setting about the comic-tragic project develops into a compelling echo.

But where truth doubles on the stage, its fragments flicker on the screen. Film language draws equally on classically dramatic principles as plot and characterisation, as it does on the mechanism of the camera—that magical box of mirrors and refracting glass. Vitreous motifs mark frail personhood since the early modern period, but I would argue (returning briefly to Sophocles) that Oedipus removing his glassy aides is part of the same passage from singular individual to shattered aggregate that holds such pertinence in Occidental thought. With the tormented Oedipus in mind, Shakespeare’s Richard II is a dead ringer for the same affliction. He says, staring into a mirror:

A brittle glory shineth in the face: As brittle as the glory is the face
[Dashes the glass against the ground]
For there it is, crack’d in a hundred shivers.
Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport
How soon my sorrow hath destroy’d my face. (IV.i.281-91)

Reality taking on a marked transparency, the selves of tragic art are placed in an impossible position where they are required to act in a world so visibly duplicitous it destroys the will to act at all. Placed up against the liminal tissue of culture, its universalisms warp before their eyes and the glassy sphere of their diminished reality can only be justified in its (temporary) destruction. The face emerges as the topos of this battle, heralded by the Dionysian’s prosopon, a tissue of seeming that can be several times stripped throughout the play—with unnatural ease. The fictitious enunciator staring out into the audience is never the full compliment—never Orestes himself—only a compelling simulation of the man that leaps into dramatic reality in the suspended sphere of seeming that the play affords. Aeschylus’ masks were coloured rags with holes for eyes, not elaborate headpieces, which in the setting would blur into obscurity beyond the first dozen rows of seating. The tragic mask first appears as a dismemberer of identity, rather than an elaborate design. It provides the actor with a distance from the disposition of his character, and the audience with a distance from the actor, mediating audience and performer in order to enable the dramatic apparition to be born. The eyes are all that remain of the civil arrangement, but drawn into the reality of the play as if they were just as much part of the mask. The shifting between the present ‘I’ of the actor and the performed ‘I’ of the protagonist never rests on one absolute of the dramatic axis—one wraps around the other in an active unity, with the eyes at the centre.
 
Given the prolificacy of the dramatic form, these observations of its base processes might seem redundant to generations of cinema audiences, but in its prototypical phase, drama takes on only the features that issue from a specific ontological field, features that are spontaneous more than prescribed. All it’s aspects—religious, dialogic, optic—are different layers of the same polyphonic fugue. Dionysus, as the god of wine and masks, implicitly glorifies the mutual construction of appearance and reality; the mask composes a surface truth whilst wine elicits a deeper one. Out of the musical mood of the Satyr chorea come characters that for reasons of necessity, avarice, confusion or fear, are forced to apply their deceptive tongues and gestural artistry to fashion a spurious self. Seeming overtakes solid identity and that which is without measure is shown to be the real stuff of personhood. ‘I am change’ could be the Dionysiac’s axiom, reveling in the universal confusion of identities by endlessly stripping reality of its mask, only to regenerate other realities in its place.
 
Caught in this aesthetic gyre, the tragic hero is a split individual, unable to marry his frail notions of life to the uncompromising bind of a painful fate. The Moiras (the Fates) are a complimentary religious concept, which, like the similarly feminine Dikas (Justice), pull the individual from his starry ideals into the relentless gravity of the actual, forbidding the unchecked progress of a striving intellect. No matter the clarity of ethos, Justice and the Fates will pay their retribution, whether for blasphemy or the killing of kin, even if generations need perish before the thread is fully spun. Time, fate and (specifically Aeschylean) justice will reveal all, and in the process shiver the self into a fragmentary puzzle of appearances. The frightening chorus of Eumenidies (said to have inspired miscarriages in its audience) warns of this decomposition into ineffective aggregate:
 
For this is the office that relentless Fate spun for us to hold securely: when rash murders of kin come upon mortals, we pursue them until they go under the earth; and after death, they have no great freedom. (Eumenides 335-40)

The fear of an unsatisfactory ontic union with earthly substance (a second death of sorts) is an admission of longing to restore unity on the human plane, generally taking shape in the pursuit of Eros. The split nature of the individual can be healed in various forms of love—for the gods or for another human. Essentially, we are born as halves, and halves cannot form unity in and of themselves. The domestic ruin of tragic visions fall upon universal forms of ‘twoness’, between husband and wife, father and son, mother and child, sister and brother. If broken, the happy polarity unfurls into a gory dismemberment of family and ultimately of self.
 
The threat is echoed in the Symposium (189c–139d) with a further set of implications. Plato’s Aristophanes begins his deliberation on the god Eros by charting man’s genesis from primal unity to divided individual. The androgunon was the first humanoid, a comic creation with four arms and four legs, two Janiform faces, that got around in a wild cart-wheeling fashion, plotting schemes against the gods. So significant was its power that Zeus ordained to have the creature cut into two separate entities, each sewn up with their genitals and facial aspects twisted so as to face one another, in that moment giving birth to Eros, the only force through which the divided creature could return to its archaian phusin [beginning feature]. Not stopping there, Aristophanes warns of a further division that awaits the individual out of line with the gods or unmoved by Eros, a division that would turn the symmetrical blasphemer into a lower form of sumbolon, that like a profile rendering on a tomb, could only hop about on one leg in confused circles. The secondary division is psychological, whereas the first is sexual, yet both describe the weakness of half-being.
 
Divisions among the sexes and within the mind comprise the majority of our undoings, indeed they prey upon each other. The choleric mind of the hyperactive introvert is the source of his social ills. Unable to love, the suspicious recluse sacrifices his functional link to the world and to others in order to become the artificial icon of self-reflective identity. Plato’s ruminations on the monopod in the Eros allegory and his comparison to traditional painting conventions seem to describe a rule; the archetypal self shows itself in profile. So when Aeschylus has a second actor walk onto the stage, we are confronted with a new dynamic that includes the profile, and with diagrammatic precision the secondary division between individual and ‘archetype’ is played out in the agon. With this in mind, drawing Bergman into the discussion is less unsettling.
 
From the start, Bergman, like Aeschylus is working within a religious atmosphere. Dionysus is replaced with Christ—that poor shepherd who dies abandoned on the cross in a bloody fit of pathos. One might ask why Bergman (not a believer) chooses to position God in the firmament of his art. Allied to the miracle of aesthetic awareness more than a divine being, his convictions are closer to the Dionysiac’s. His aim is katharsis, a purgation of the self and a union with primal being. The artist has named his personal gods as Beethoven and Bach, but it is the Christian god that subs in for the aesthetical in the world of his characters. In Through a Glass Darkly Bach becomes the chorus, providing the musical mood from which the action springs. The fictive god of the film is no cello suite, but a harsh, destructive presence. Like the silent Apollo in Euripides’ Ion, God is seen through the eyes of feminine madness, as an arachnid no less, and one that is intent on raping Karin as Apollo raped Creusa. The horror of a silent god is, for Bergman, a universal feature of religiosity, not a modern affliction. The pastor of Winter Light is haunted by the niggling feeling that his faith lies upon something wholly non-existent, a void that revealed itself in the death of his wife. The community suffers for his selfish faith that mistook private love for that of Christ’s. Similarly, the Knight of The Seventh Seal is forced to justify his lot without the glowing goodness of a tangible deity, seeking solace in memories and the company of others. Religion is hideous to the plague-era crusader.

Despite the consonance between Dionysus and Christ, the latter is a far more melancholy figure. As the warden of Winter Light makes known to Ericsson, Christ was beaten out of his own faith, yielding to the belief that his father had forsaken him on the cross. Not only is this a dark admission that Christianity is founded on the works of a blasphemer, but a more Bergmanesque description of the eternal incommensurability between thoughts and actions. Christ’s beauty is in his performance of death and hopelessness after a life on the naïve path of the good, through which he reaches life’s final antithetical justification. It has a touch of Jung’s enantiodromia; where the sustained magnitude of a significant force brings about the opposite of its nature, similarly felt by Shakespeare’s Lear; ‘the lamentable change is from the best, the worst proceeds to laughter’ (IV.i.5-6). The cyclical overcomes the linear rise and fall of the historical, and in doing so the whole universe is embraced in a movement that does not exclude the unjust in favour of the just, seeing two motions of a singular phenomenon. The ever-present Fates of Aeschylean drama and the implicit blasphemy of Christ’s final suffering are images of cyclical undoing and describe the singular ‘I’ as a temporary illusion fashioned and disintegrated by all encompassing forces.
 
We try out attitudes, and find them all worthless. The forces are too strong…The horrible forces. (Esther, The Silence 1963)
 
Such forces are overwhelmingly associated with femininity. The Fates and Justice follow the feminine passage of a slow, cyclical application of power. Similarly, Christ’s passion is laden with feminine symbolism; in the presence of blood, the loss of self, the penetration by the spear of Longinus and the subsequent birth of the Sacraments from his left side. The females of Bergman carry on the theme (i.e. Esther above). Unnamed diseases accompanied by madness are the symptoms of his modern Bacchic women, prone to visions, prophecy and destructive of the established order. The presence of these (un)natural women upsets the happy sphere of order that male culture delimits, as they propagate the Dionysiac’s axiom, ‘I am change’. The sexualised division between culture and nature is the interpersonal manifestation of a deeper psychological division between archetype and flesh and blood human. The restored Alma of Persona, once freed from her former anxiety – the strings of her culture – is able to see deep into the reality of personhood. She can shift, as the mask stripping actor of the Attic stage, between natures, even inhabit another persona.

The wild passions of Karin (Through A Glass Darkly) scrape at the brittle ego of her artist father, whose callous obsession with documenting her suffering contaminates his filial bonds. ‘One draws a magic circle around oneself to keep everything out that doesn’t fit one’s games’. In the ecstasy of her disease, which she experiences as both euphoric and terrifying, Karin must remain beyond measure, a constant counterpoint to the vain novelist’s fantasy of knowing her true nature. In keeping with the musical threat of consonance overthrown by dissonance, the feminine soul, untuned to Apollonian measure, shatters the cultural glass and all that is ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘us’, ‘they’. A nauseating freedom robs actions of their purposive strength and only as aesthetic phenomena within the reality of dramatic art can such unjustifiable ends meet in harmony. This is the ‘holy freedom of art, the holy slackness of art’ (Shame 1961).

A specific surface emerges in the Bergman’s treatment of man’s twofold dividedness. His lifetime obsession with depicting the face is, like Aeschylus’s second actor, a diagrammatic exploration of split natures. Endlessly we are shown the face in profile, half-shadow or an arrangement of profile and frontal aspect. Bergman and Nykvist’s complex language visualises the play between 1st and 2nd person, ruler of the discourse and interlocutor, archetype and imperfect human. The feuding sisters of The Silence perform this dynamic of faces, shifting before the camera in helices that map a twofold conflict. Power is never confined to either aspect. The profile intimidates with its cold stare into history, silently reflecting upon itself to solidify its status as archetype, yet tremendously weighed down in the stick of such introspection. The eyes that face the camera are exposed to the emotional barrage of existence, but this emotion confers completeness and a meaningful link to the corporeal world, hence it may act. Only Anna is able to juggle the two functions with any success. Her transitions between archetypal ‘mother’ and ‘nymph’ are seen alongside Esther’s self-destructive passage between hollow intellectual and drunken maenad. Where Anna succeeds in her roles, Esther succeeds in another sense, as the shattered initiate of the ‘masking’ process itself—a wounded Bacchant. ‘Faces’ and ‘hands’, she inscribes on a note for her nephew, bestowing the base truth of the dramatic form, and with it the higher polarity between essence and manifestation. Faces show, hands do; faces veil the truth, hands uncover it. Anna is able to unify sexuality with motherhood, a combination unsettling to Esther and Johan, the former out of inescapable envy, the latter from a necessary male illusion—the separation between archetypal virgin and mother (Johan’s peculiar interest in the Rubens depicting a satyr and nymph seems to legitimise such an appeal to The Silence’s mythic awareness).

The women of Cries and Whispers (1972) are similarly differentiated. Ingrid Thulin, a decade after her role as the academic Esther, gives us Karin, an acerbic matriarch that, like Cervantes’ Vidriera, is characterised by a constant comparison to glassware. Her brittleness is psychosomatic, shielding herself from physical human contact and privately inflicting wounds upon herself with that symbolically heavy substance—glass. She stares into a three-way mirror repeating to herself ‘a tissue of lies’, before performing the bizarre act of cutting into her genitals with a small shard of glass. Her private ritual attempts to artificially unite her cultured visage to a deeper nature through the simple thrill of pain and sexual gratification. The masturbating Esther, and the masochistic Karin are nightmarish visions of individuals trapped in a hall of mirrors, simulating reality within the confines of their own person. Glass is the model of their undoing. Only as a shattered aggregate can the two worlds in question—the inner notion and the outward manifestation—finally meet.
 
‘Twoness’ is at the base of Ingmar Bergman’s explorations of the human soul. Reading him alongside the master of the 2nd actor, he and Aeschylus seem to body forth a similar awareness, wedded to the psychosocial pall of lost meaning, the biting disjuncture between being and seeming. ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known’ is the Corinthians passage from which Bergman’s ‘faith’ trilogy rises. In its context, referring to the opaque glassware of the time (not until 13th century Venice is colourless glass popularised), the wisdom associates what is face-to-face with truth and clarity. Hence, it leaves the brittle glass formula to the ‘dark’ outward glance or profile. Glass, unlike earthenware, never absorbs its contents. It retains its crystalline identity, or is shattered. Tragic art is a vision of shattering, gathering itself into a profound reflection of the maleficent tendency of the individual to construct a private reality on selfish terms. To re-augment the farcical privation of truth, the living icon explodes itself on the stage and the cathartic detritus settles to be rebuilt anew. Beneath these psychical cataclysms are sexual forces, something of a faded plurality in the 21st century. For Aeschylus and Bergman, the female was an entirely different creature. Characters like Alma and Clytemnestra underscore the ease with which the female may travel the passage from archetype to complex ethos (and back again), where men are mired in privilege, hubris and naiveté. When Clytemnestra lectures the chorus of elders on ‘putting appearance before truth’ and ‘forcing their faces into smiles’ while fawning on great men with ‘watery affection’, she is drawing together the sexual, psychological and societal amplitude of such false seeming (Ag. 790-796). As Aeschylus is prone to do, he positions the chorus and the antagonist at sexual opposites, elevating the divisiveness of the social plane into a sexual contest. Ironically, it is Clytemnestra who proves the deceptive sycophant, but this is far from a hypocritical flaw. So well does she play the game of appearances that the hapless Agamemnon is lured down the blood-purple carpet to his slaughter in the feminine waters of the bath. The art of Through A Glass Darkly’s David pales in significance to Karin’s ability to move between entirely different worlds. None of the men of the film ever see into Karin’s visions, only lament the impending loss of her beauty to (an unnamed) schizophrenia. Death breaks them, gutting art and faith of its former integrity. David’s ‘so called art’ is Pastor Ericsson’s so called God, that in the absence of a loving, breathing other loses its glow. And there is always the Swedish twilight as a constant reminder of death’s slow, unrelenting bind.

BIBLIO

Nietzsche, F. 2000, The Birth Of Tragedy, trans. Douglas Smith, Oxford.

Calarme, C. 1986, The Tragic Mask in Ancient Greece, History of Religions Vol. 26 No.2 pp.124-122, University of Chicago.

Foley, H.P. 1980, The Mask of Dionysuse, Transactions of the American Philological Association, Vol. 110, pp.107-133, Johns Hopkins.

Knox, B.M.W. 1972, Aeschylus and the Third Actor, American Journal of Philology, pp. 104-124, Johns Hopkins.

Stanford, W.B. 1954, ‘The Looking Glass of Society’ in Aeschylus, The Classical Review Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 82-85, Cambridge.

Marshall, C.W. 1999, Some Fifth Century Masking Conventions, Greece & Rome (2nd Series) Vol. 46 No. 2, pp.188-202, Cambridge.

Aeschylus II, 1971, trans. H.W. Smith, Harvard