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Thresholds of the Tragic: A Study of Space in Sophocles and Racine
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Extract
You have turned the page, and thus have already opened a door.
A door to the text.
A text about doors.
Or, to be more precise, about the recurrence of doors and their function in Sophocles and Racine.
Our purpose in focusing on plays in which the door or gate has a significant role for the individual and his being-in-the-world is to delineate the passageway which leads the tragic character to a boundary situation and, from there, to a possible transgression of that situation. That which is on each side of the door, the spaces created by the thresholds, will thus help locate the place of the tragic event. This spatialization of the tragic event as the transgressing of a boundary situation is emphasized by the way in which both Sophocles and Racine determine the parameters of the action as it is structured within a specific space.
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- Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1989
References
Notes
1. Sophocles, . Greek Tragedies. Vol. I. Oedipus the King. Trans. Greene, David. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago: 1960. line 353.Google Scholar
2. Freud at the end of The Dream and its Interpretation says that the appearance of a door in a dream almost always symbolizes an orifice of the body.
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10. It is interesting to note the recurrence of the interaction of inside and outside in Antigone, which can also be read along with Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes, since both share the same origin. In both plays, the action returns to Thebes, the place of Oedipus's banishment. In both plays, inside and outside meet in a deadly clash. Eteocles in Seven Against Thebes walks to the seventh gate, and there, on the threshold, meets his brother Polyneices. There they are reconciled by the sword, merging their dissensions in blood. Eteocles walks knowingly to his death and therefore re-enacts to some extent Oedipus's own death, and yet, he does not cross the limit of the city, he does not lapse into the external reality. In this sense, Antigone goes farther as she crosses the city's boundaries to bury Polyneices, left to rot on the battlefield. By crossing the city's limits, she weaves her story into Oedipus's, and parts with life. She is tragic and yet beyond the tragic in her choice. In both cases, what we witness on stage is, in a sense, the redemption of the tragic hero. All it took was the crossing of the city's limits to inform her destiny, just as for Oedipus, the crossing of various limits enabled the awakening and rebirth of Oedipus to himself.
11. The cabinet is the space on which we are going to focus most, and, as such, its English translation is of the utmost importance. It has no direct translation and therefore is to be seen in the tension offered by different translators. Samuel Salomon makes of it a ‘vestibule’ and a ‘grand secluded chamber’. Lady Lockert renders it as ‘room’ and ‘a private room’. None of these translations being perfectly accurate, we will refer to the French word ‘cabinet’.
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