Ajax has stopped being a soldier out of spite, and the very minute he stops catering to this military identity, he is socially dissociated and excluded. Philoctetes falls ill and equally stops 'producing' military services and is from then on excluded. Deianeira is excluded from the group of young virgins, with whom she speaks.
She no longer performs the role of an eligible young woman, but equally, she has finished with her wifehood to Heracles. For this reason, Deianeira does no longer produce anything, not perform any specific function. She is a singular, excluded character on the set of Trachis where no-one really understands her. Her husband Heracles will not fare substantially better. His work in the wild country where he combats monsters and where he will fall prey to a shriveling poison compounded by the Hydra's blood and mixed by the hand of the centaur turns him from isolated superman into an abject creature in the court of monsters. In this way, Heracles will be excluded from the entirety of humankind. The same goes for Tereus and Procne, who are transformed into birds as a result of their supremely horrid actions, that make them lose their place in the community of humans. Electra and Orestes are excluded from the house of Aegisthus, because they do not perform their social roles as prince and princess in this new royal household, which they do not recognize as such. Failing to produce the affirmation of this new order, Orestes is sent into exile, while Electra is given the option to stay, but shrivels on the outdoors, for she does not enter into her role and remains stuck in limbo for a time. As a result, there is talk of locking her away into a dungeon of the palace. Oedipus goes through a number of stages, for he is a
Theban who does not realize that he is a Theban. He is at first integrated into Thebes in his capacity as a riddle-solver who rid the town of an epidemic disease, but will be excluded once again when the epidemic raises its head again, and it is understood that he is no longer performing this sanitary service to the town, quite the opposite. Although the drama of his realization of his own incest is more central than the sub-plot of the plague at Thebes and Oedipus’ role in keeping it checked, it is actually the fact that citizens are once again falling ill that hurries Tiresias into telling Oedipus that he is the culprit of the crime he is investigating and thus precipitates the terrible realization of who he really is.65 These descriptions of social exclusion only offer a few rudimentary categories, but what is clear is that these exclusions practically all result from a change in identity and social role. In no case are we dealing with the exclusion of someone who simply is an outsider as he always was. We are dealing with issues of identity, self-identification, dis-identification, change and re-assignment of identity within a set, performed either or both by self and/or others.
Each observable exclusion scenario has a gradual transformation process at its heart. The exclusion from humankind altogether, best exemplified by the story of Tereus and Procne, is the most drastic form of exclusion. The threat of exclusion from humankind at large is latent in Sophocles' portrayals of exclusion from various sets or sub-sets of society (familial home, army, etc.). As I will argue, imagery and literary tropes of bestiality and monstrosity are attached to nearly all excluded characters in Sophocles, even if they do not portray an animal transformation
65 On the relation of the plague scenario to characterization of Oedipus, see also Meinel (2015), 53-4.
directly. For instance, undertones of an exclusion from human society underwrite much of the discourse of disease in Philoctetes, tending towards a discourse of bestiality instead of disease. There are many patterns and micro-patterns relating to social exclusion in Sophocles, such as de-humanizing profiling based on ill health, animal-like profiling based on sexual characteristics, the discourse of rationality versus irrationality used as an argumentative weapon, where the concept of wildness plays out in deprecatory characterization.
Identities are created and are used all the time in order to warrant inclusion or exclusion from groups, towns, armies, even human society at large. Affirmation of a certain identity, especially a collective identity, is a classic instrument of persuasion in rhetorical speeches of every kind, from the ancient court room to modern immigration politics. Identity can be a weapon, apt to make certain others invisible; and a loss of identity, or lack of a clearly defined one, becomes a predictor for exclusion. Important studies have certainly placed contemporaneous Athenian court debates in parallel to the events unfolding in the plays (Loraux 1986; Scodel 2006; Chanter 2011), but in complement to this, it has to be considered that the legal framework is not fit to provide the whole explanation for the events related by Greek tragic texts.
The first supporter of this view is Aristotle, who notes early on in the Poetics that murder among friends is particularly suited for tragedy, which works best at achieving the greatest fear and pity when it deals with ill-doing and disaster within family or close friends circles. Moving forward to the exposition of character and thought in tragedy which often has been reduced to the final conclusion that “character is destiny”, Aristotle argues that in tragedy, |πέφυκεν α τια δύο τ ν πράξεων ε ναι, διάνοια και[& / =
θος] και[ κατα[ ταύτας και[ τυγχάνουσι και[ ποτυγχάνουσι
> ,
πάντες.66 In short, διάνοια and θος are “the dual origin of deeds,>
and according to them, every one fares well or ill – so the story line (plot) is in fact the representation of deeds”. There are two types of proof in the Rhetorics, τεχνοί and ντεχνοι the former* 3 are mostly empiric, they adduce legal or testimonial evidence; the ντεχνοι by contrast are the artifice of the speaker, thought up in 3
accordance with their personality, or character. Artificial proofs are thus automatically "ethical" (i.e. belonging to the θος who>
makes them).67 “It is the entechnos quality of the way that arguments and actions are thought to progress in drama, which warrants that dialectical technique can understand every thought and action from a character based on the understanding of this character's identity, and especially, his self-coherence”,68 writes Katherine Eden, glowingly highlighting the profound unacceptability of change implied in Aristotle's idea of character and identity. This is precisely the sore point of those tragic protagonists who make the journey from inclusion to exclusion.
With this in mind, we can easily understand Philoctetes' keen zeal to tell Neoptolemus exactly who he is, and appreciate the great injury Odysseus could inflict on Philoctetes by investing all his argumentative finesse into keeping Neoptolemus ill-informed of the full picture of Philoctetes, and who Philoctetes is. Philoctetes' contestation of Odysseus' portrayal, and refusal to be instrumentalized by Odysseus' demands, demonstrate a pattern of societal tension that is played out similarly outside the house of
66 Ar. Poet. 1450 a1.
67 on character, Sophocles, Aristotle and being “out of character”, see essay by Easterling (1977).
68 See Brunschwig (1996), 42.
Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus in Electra, on the burial grounds of Ajax in Ajax. The sheer multitude of such instances tells us that exclusion and its discourse promise to be a fruitful focus for reading Sophocles, and one that is always and always broadly open to contextualization within instances of exclusionary discourse from our own times.
Many structural threads – of characterization, of dramatization, down to shared imagery in the representation of self and other – link up Sophoclean scenarios and characters in ways that transcend a case-by-case analysis. These shared structural threads or traits offer not so much an image of the tragic protagonist as the excluded individual, as of the community at large and its shortcomings in the firm retention of all who belong to it. For in every case, the exclusion devolves from a state of prior inclusion of the person, in other words, a previously well-situated and socially accepted person is lost to the community out of a variety of circumstantial changes (each case has to be viewed on its own).
What is more, Sophoclean drama eludes an analysis of narrative focalization in which the audience's point of view should be identical to those characters in the drama who either antagonize or seek to calm down the tragic protagonist. Thus, Sophocles does not merely set up the protagonist and their tragic fate as material for discussion, but also sets up the surrounding personages, who all together roughly fall into what might be called a community, as an object of contemplation and discussion by the audience. As has been copiously observed by scholars, Sophoclean drama thrives on tragic communication failures; communication failures that the spectator can anticipate given his more omniscient position outside the scene. The community that Sophocles represents certainly and first and foremost offsets itself against the
main protagonist, whom it excludes on various grounds. Secondly, but no less importantly, the fictional community presented by Sophocles acts as a more or less distorting mirror of the real community of Athenian people gathered to witness the tragedy, and invites critique, or auto-critique, upon itself.
Sophoclean drama is first and foremost the presentation of a community and how the community reacts and frames the fall from grace of one individual and how really, the community engineers the individual's exclusion. In so doing, cognitive leaps are needed again and again. A mixture of fictions, myth (not only religious myths; also social mythology) and evidence gets meshed together into narratives of departure from the social or even human norm. This narratives becomes the source of arguments in favour of social exclusion. There is a big disconnect between protagonist and the community. This disconnect is glossed over many times, and manifests itself in (tragic) lags of cognition. Why is this the case? Eventually, this question may abut on to a discussion of responsibility and blame in tragedy. No-one ever wants to take the blame for tragic events, that is almost a universal fact. The contemplation that Sophocles' tragic community disconnects itself from the tragic protagonist, but glosses over the disconnect by issuing oblique statements of pity, consolatory remarks or encouragement to a certain behaviour that the protagonist can not possibly adopt. Through its actions and the cumulative value of its comments and encouragements, the tragic entourage ultimately expresses the truism that the person to whom terrible things have happened “only have themselves to blame”. I argue that Sophocles invites every one to recognize this to be a truism, to be an engineered social mechanism of exclusion, and to evaluate it ethically, and critically.