Re-awakening for a New Project: Classical Echoes

Back in 2011, I started this blog with the intention of writing regularly on Classics for a broad audience of non-Classicists.   Then the challenges of dissertation-writing and the job market, and being a Lecturer, a Visiting Assistant Professor, and then an Assistant Professor took over and this was set aside more or less as quickly as it started.

Now, in the summer of 2018, I'm going to restart this with a specific project in mind: a series of (drafts) of essays on Classical echoes in contemporary theatrical pieces.  This builds on ideas that have come from a course entitled "America and Antiquity" I have taught multiple times (and in multiple incarnations).  As part of that course, I noticed, developed, and led students through a series of tantalizing parallels between elements of American culture (namely theater and film) and ancient culture.   

 

Some of these are straightforward and obvious: Kirk Douglas' and Stanley Kubrick's 1960 film Spartacus is connected in obvious ways with the figure of Spartacus in the ancient world, but Trumbo's script also dealt with contemporary political concerns.  Hedwig and the Angry Inch clearly continues a conversation that Plato started--or at least contributed to--in his "Symposium" about the nature of "love" (or sexual desire, eros) and its relationship to knowledge (and power).  These are examples of what scholars usually call "Classical Reception," people intentionally and meaningfully engaging with the Greco-Roman world.

Others parallels were less straightforward, and fall into this category that I call "classical echoes." Willy Loman, in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, undergoes a public humiliation, which leads him to suicide, retracing the steps of the Greek hero, Ajax.  Both are men out of time, and are tremendously concerned with their public reputation.   And yet, of course, the specifics are radically different.   Whereas Ajax is one of the great and lofty Homeric heroes, Willy is literally a "low man."  Miller's play is not a tragedy in the ancient Greek style, with a hero, as Aristotle describes, "better than in actual life."  It is, indeed, the tawdriness of a Willy Loman's life that moves us.  Even to a man such as him, "Attention must be paid."

Despite the similarities, I do not see evidence that Miller was directly adapting or intentionally evoking Sophocles' Ajax.   It's entirely possible that he had read the play at some earlier point and that the play influenced him as he was constructing his tragic play.  But it is also possible, and perhaps more likely, that the similarities are simply the result of two talented and inspired playwrights constructing emotionally effective dramas rooted in the same fundamental challenges we face as human beings. Reading the plays together, however, brings into focus their shared concerns and their distinctive differences in a way that is not possible from reading either alone.   As Miller echoes Sophocles, we hear overtones which speak to the nature of heroism, the ways in which time is our enemy, the ways in which our limitations can and cannot become lethal.

We, like bats and dolphins, can read the distortions of these echoes, and through this echolocation better understand the landscapes of both the past and the present, of both our own culture and the many cultures of the Greeks and the Romans. That is the aim of this project, to start exploring these echoes, to find them, to probe them, to start to make out the shape of the landscape they allow us to see.

The echoes I choose to explore are primarily driven by my own awareness and interests.Certainly, one could explore an almost infinite number of such connections.  My own interests include contemporary musical theater and that is where I will be focusing for now.  Like many others, I've listened to the soundtrack to Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton repeatedly, at times obsessively.  On recent listens I've been distracted by what I think are Classical Echoes reverberating through the score of this contemporary phenomenon.

I intend to post regularly this summer (no less than weekly) exploring some of the ways antiquity is echoing in Hamilton and gathering my thoughts.  This writing is a first step for what may eventually turn into a book chapter, an article, or at least a conference paper, and so the ideas may be half-formed, or wrong, but I hope that by writing them, I can get them in order and that you readers will be interested in seeing me work through them. I hope to be done with this particular focus by the end of the summer, so I hope I can channel Alexander's legendary prolificness. Thanks for reading and for sharing any thoughts!