What is the good of seeing a terrible state of soul displayed onstage, disclosed in all its humiliation and rage?
After my first morning of classes at Wyoming Catholic College on August 27, I returned to the office to find the news of the shootings at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis all over the internet. The political assassination of Charlie Kirk last week now commands more attention, but I cannot forget the unique dismay of that attack on children at Mass, not least because of what I had been teaching that morning, Sophocles’ Ajax. The shooter in Minneapolis carefully plotted the murder, carried it out, and then took his own life, leaving behind notes, apologies to his parents, hateful screeds, detailed drawings of the church, and a history of profound confusion, including a legal name change and a decision to identify as a woman without taking surgical or hormonal steps. In most regards, he hardly resembles the great Iliadic hero of Sophocles’ play; on the other hand, Ajax plots to murder all the leaders of the Achaian army, carries it out (or thinks he has), and then kills himself. The conjunction of these two figures was a strange coincidence; but thinking with my classes about the play before seeing the terrible news felt peculiarly revelatory, not about the specifics of the school shooting, but about the need for the public ritual called tragedy.
As the play begins, Ajax has been cheated of the great prize he had most coveted, the armor of Achilleus famously described in Book XVIII of the Iliad. He is convinced that Odysseus, who received the armor, colluded with the leaders of the Achaian army to get it, and he believes that Achilleus would have certainly meant for him to be honored with it instead. In revenge for this mortal insult, Ajax murders Agamemnon, Menelaos, Odysseus, and all the others who have insulted him — or, rather, he believes he has. When he first appears in the play, he brags that he has Odysseus inside his tent, where he will bind him to a pole and whip him before killing him. In fact, Athena has afflicted him with madness, and he has actually slaughtered the herds of animals kept for sacrifice by the army.
When Athena dispels the madness and he comes to his senses, Ajax realizes that he has exposed himself to the laughter of his greatest enemies. Already deprived of the honor he deserves—the second best to Achilleus himself—he now sees his heroic standing collapse completely, so much so that cannot imagine any way forward except to demonstrate that he prefers death to a life in dishonor. The desperate plea of his war-bride Tecmessa, closely patterned on Andromache’s appeal to Hektor in Iliad VI, appears to move him, and he pretends to experience a change of heart. But instead, he goes off alone to fall on the sword that Hektor himself once gave him after their duel. The rest of the play revolves around the suicide—the body on the stage. Agamemnon and Menelaos want him to be left for the dogs and birds (an echo of Creon’s impiety toward Polyneices in Antigone), but Odysseus, the man Ajax hated most, prevails upon them to allow Ajax the rites of honorable burial.
What drives Ajax—and not only Ajax—to murder and suicide? Milton, describing the motive of Satan, calls it the “sense of injured merit”—the belief that one has been deprived of a good that would have justified one’s existence. Who does this depriving? Is it “God” or “the gods,” in which case a kind of metaphysical fouling is in play? Ajax, by the way, explicitly refuses the help of the gods on more than one occasion, because he wants the credit for his achievements to be his alone. Or if not “God” or “the gods,” is the depriver a self-satisfied, conventional community that has no place for the complexity and depth of who one really is? Perhaps it’s not possible for the killer to say, and in that sense, his violence is always symbolic and always futile, as Athena’s redirection of Ajax’s rage onto the animals already suggests. I think of Ahab’s claim that he will “strike through the mask” of the White Whale.
What is the good of seeing a terrible state of soul displayed onstage, disclosed in all its humiliation and rage? Why should we have to see Ajax kill himself before our eyes–the kind of act usually narrated by a messenger, such as Oedipus’ self-blinding or Antigone’s suicide? Sophocles must have understood it as dramatically necessary for this kind of character that we see his last, inevitable act of self-destruction. Performed before an audience of Athenians during the festival of Dionysus, it was not entertainment and not something meant for “aesthetic” experience, either. Rather, it was a ritual of healing disclosure in which the most private and inward and tormented aspects of a certain kind of proud soul were laid before the city for the public good. Why? Because souls like these are profoundly dangerous. They need to be recognized, both for their sake and for ours; they need to be understood tragically—that is, publicly—in terms of a deeper mercy toward the deeper malady of our time.
As Louise Cowan writes in her introduction to The Tragic Abyss, tragedy is “a liturgical confrontation of a deep-seated dread which, when brought to light, can be borne only through the medium of poetic language.” The poetry tempers the experience to the minds that must suffer it. And at the moment, public suffering is very much the point. As Cowan puts it, “unalleviated tragedy provides no protection for us, no way out by means of psychological detachment. In its authentic appearances, the tragic experience is irreducible, inexplicable, offered directly to the audience.” Perhaps catharsis, as Aristotle describes the effect of tragedy, is a crucial release from the symbolic violence that threatens to overcome us.
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The featured image is “Seven Heroes of the Iliad” (before 1829), by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein , and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.