The Inference of Staging from Deictics, with some Pointers towards Sophocles’ Trachiniae

Abstract

Deictic pronouns, especially the most immediate ὅδε etc., are far more frequent in plays than other poetic forms, because they embody the story rather than narrating it. It is argued that they indicate various possible or probable gestures, movements and stagings. They may be used of vividly envisaged people and events off-stage as well as those directly visible. The employment of deictics in Sophocles’ Trachiniae is especially complex and interesting. This is because the past is vividly evoked, and because Iole is inside the house and Heracles is still away from home for most of the play. Deictics are also particularly used to speak allusively, and sometimes quite explicitly, of sexual matters, especially Heracles’ driving passions. In contrast with the middle scenes, the final part when Heracles has returned uses hardly any deictics. This reflects his lack of emotion or regret over the victims of his monstrous lust, Deianeira and Iole. It is argued that this may bear on whether his ending on the pyre on Oeta is to be regarded as a reward or a punishment for his exploits.

The immediate “first person” or “proximal” deictic pronoun, ὅδε etc., had to wait until the invention of Tragedy for its greatest period in Greek narrative poetry. It was the theatre and its physical staging that transmuted its applicability from a narrator’s evocation of presence to actual embodied presence.1 And that, as I hope to show, opened up further dimensions of envisaging, reenactment, implication, and even innuendo.

Warmest thanks to Piero Totaro, whose enthusiasm and organisational skills made the conference in Bari in May 2019 such an enjoyable reality. I am also indebted to Nancy Felson for helpful deictic advice.

At the risk of becoming tediously repetitive, I do not think it can be emphasised too often how great a narrative revolution theatre brought about: it was not a gradual development, it was a quantum leap.2 There are, of course, important ways in which tragedy grew out of pre-dramatic epic and lyric,3 but it was the physical enactment that created a vital new art-form, one that would sweep through the Greek world in the next two centuries. So far as we know there was no form of story-telling that was enacted, as opposed to narrated, before the late sixth century BCE. And this story-telling revolution brought with it a whole nexus of tangible innovations which revolutionised both the organisation of the performance and the audience’s experience. Most obviously there are the actors and chorus-members who become the participant agents, no longer tethered in the world of the ambient occasion, but transported to the time and place of the story. The actors bring to this enterprise deployments of voice and gesture and body-language that go far beyond anything that could be achieved by even the most versatile of rhapsodes. And it is very likely that the physicality of the chorus was also far more expressive that any non-dramatic choral performance. In addition to all this, there is the whole range of resources that were provided by the skeuopoios; costumes, portable props, stage furniture, and so forth. Instead of being verbally evoked, however vividly, these are given solid physical substantiation.

Once it is appreciated that spoken deictics make the leap from being solely oral/aural to being physically directed, it is easy to see why ὅδε-deictics occur far more frequently in tragedy than in epic, let alone lyric.4 The person, parts of their bodies, objects, altars, doors and so forth are all there, visible and tangible, so that they can be directly indicated. And the actors’ accompanying gestures would, of course, be appropriately matched. Just one illustration of the kind of difference it would make. At Iliad 1.233ff. Achilles takes an oath that he will make Agamemnon regret his behaviour, swearing by the speakers’ sceptre — ναὶ μὰ τόδε σκῆπτρον … (by this sceptre …). At the end of his speech the narrator tells how after these words Achilles threw the skeptron to the ground (245–246). A lively rhapsode might well have made a grand gesture of lifting up and dashing down an imaginary skeptron. But if this scene were to be dramatised in a tragedy, the actor of Achilles would be holding an actual skeptron (supplied by the skeuopoios), and will then have actually thrown it on the ground, most probably accompanying the action with words. Something like this can be seen when Cassandra throws off her prophetic paraphernalia at Aeschylus’ Agamemenon 1264ff., employing deictics as she does so: τάδε καὶ σκῆπτρα καὶ μαντεῖα περὶ δέρηι στέφ … τοῖσδε κόσμοις (… this staff and ribbons round my neck … this prophet’s rigmarole.)5

Some initial idea of the range of uses for ὅδε-deictics in tragedy may be gauged by looking at three passages in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos before turning to Trachiniae for more detail. The great majority of the material uses of ὅδε in pre-dramatic poetry refer to people or things that are present — ad oculos6 — in the here and now of the narrative. This is the case whether used by the narrator, or, as more often, a character in direct speech within the narrative. It is hardly surprising, then, that the same is true in the entirely direct-speech genre of Tragedy. What is more, because of the embodiment of the performance, this can be all the more effectively deployed. The kind of extra dynamic that can be reinforced by direct physicality may be seen in the passage in Oedipus Tyrannos where Oedipus is recalling how he killed a man — in fact his father Laius, of course — at the place where three tracks meet. At lines 810–812 he tells how he struck the old man:

συντόμως

σκήπτρῳ τυπεὶς ἐκ τῆσδε χειρὸς ὕπτιος

μέσης ἀπήνης εὐθὺς ἐκκυλίνδεται·

κτείνω δὲ τοὺς ξύμπαντας.

I struck him sharply with my stick; and knocked down by this hand of mine, he toppled headlong from the wagon. I kill them, every man.

In this vivid recollection (with the historic present verb κτείνω) there can be little doubt that the verbal deictic ἐκ τῆσδε χειρός would be expressed in action — translated from page to stage. At the moment of re-enactment Oedipus raises this very hand with which he struck back then. It is further likely, though not provable, that Oedipus holds up his skeptron,7 symbol of the royal power which he has in a sense obtained through the violent prior use of his crude traveller’s skeptron on the road.

So-called “deixis am Phantasma”, in distinction from “ad oculos”, means the vivid conjuring of something that is not physically present but vividly present in the mind. There is relatively weak form of this that is known as “anaphoric”, when the deictic simply resumes the reference to something that has been recently talked about or narrated. In drama, however, the physicality of the person speaking can add an extra degree of significance, often giving the deictic more than a textual reference, and calling for enacted expression on the stage. There is a good example a little earlier in the same speech of Oedipus in OT. At 798–804 he is telling his wife what happened after he left the Delphic oracle and set off in a direction away from Corinth. He recalls how he then encountered a man fitting the description of Laius at the specific place in the region of Phocis where three tracks meet, as mentioned by Jocasta:

στείχων δ’ ἱκνοῦμαι τούσδε τοὺς χώρους ἐν οἷς

σὺ τὸν τύραννον τοῦτον ὄλλυσθαι λέγεις.8

And as I journey on, my path comes to that region where you say this king of yours was killed.

This is closely followed by another deictic signpost specifying τριπλῆς… κελεύθου τῆσδε (“this three-road place”). These may be classified as ‘anaphoric’ in that they refer back to a previously highlighted locality,9 but there is more than that going on here. It is indicated again by the historic present verb (ἱκνοῦμαι) that there is an immediacy indicating that Oedipus is in effect re-living the events. He sees this place in front of him, and then this splitting of the ways. We can never know, of course, precisely how this was acted out on the Sophoclean stage, but it is most unlikely that there was no motion or gesture to reinforce these words. It may be that Oedipus took some steps as though approaching the spot; and it may be that he conveyed the junction by a forking gesture with his hands. The deictics must be treated...