By GABRIELA BRUSCHINI GRECCA*
The present time has proven increasingly essential for us to regain contact with Greek tragedies
Prologue – Alexandre, a great
It was early 2010, in the rooms on the top floor of block G34, at the State University of Maringá, when I was introduced to the discipline program that would change my entire relationship with literature. The subject was titled, as it is today, “Literary Text Reading Practices”. In my class, the teacher responsible was Professor Alexandre Villibor Flory.
I owe to everything I learned with Alexandre Villibor Flory the content for the construction of a sentence that, whenever I can, I repeat publicly, especially if this audience is made up of undergraduate students: literature is too much to want to hear about it using only our visual sense. When I propose to read a book for pleasure, this cannot lead to passive reading – “I have no commitments or deadlines in relation to this book, therefore, I can be here and not be here, treating it with a certain carelessness”.
On the contrary. When I read, I don't just want to read; I want to discover all the meanings that a being, alone, can discover while reading. I need to put compositions from the same historical period to be heard. I need to compare the work with other written manifestations. Open other pages, tactilely feeling the dialogue being created between more than one work, based on the touch of your own hands. I need to hear what other voices have to say about that work. I need paintings, sleep, daytime dreams and walking.
I don't just want to see the book. I want to hear it, swallow it, challenge myself to enter its temperature, great the discomfort, feel its textures, unpredictable the pain. I want to be able to tie and untie your ties at all times.
This was taught to me by Alexandre Villibor Flory. I clearly remember every class in which this teacher walked through the classroom door carrying a radio, with CDs in his briefcase. He had us listen to Schubert so he could talk about the 19th century in a German context; he used “Construction” to teach us about the lyrical genre and the strange rhyme; he called us on Saturdays to watch the film version of Luchino Visconti's death in venice.
But, even when not equipped with technology, one thing always caught my attention about Alexandre Villibor Flory: that teacher brought the actor's body to the classroom every day – from his years of theatrical learning, from his studies on theater. There wasn't a class on dramatic genre (or any other) in which Alexandre's body wasn't the central “technology”: he intoned the lines, dramatized the dialogues at unexpected moments. He brought the characters to life. He made the front of the room his private stage.
The first time I caught myself doing the same in the first period of Literature, about ten years later, with Creon and Tiresias in Oedipus Rex, embodying by mimicking a character uttering insults to each other, both at the same time, all together and mixed, I remembered Alexandre Villibor Flory once again. Not that I hadn't understood him before – but it fascinates me how, year after year, I understand more and more the steps he took and the vision about training that he carried behind them.
Including what he did when, to that girl who had just turned seventeen, he gave the piece in her hands Forgive me for betraying me, by Nelson Rodrigues, suggesting, as if he didn't want anything, a scientific initiation. Alê: time passed, and I understood.
From Schubert to Schöenberg
I did not continue with the research on dramatic texts. I've never done a month of theater in my life, I've never had any connection or participated in any form of traditional show. Apart from that, I developed all the love in the world for drama. I followed the subjects on modern theatrical text with Alexandre as far as I could, up to the Master's degree at the same institution, and, so many years later, I found fulfillment as a literature teacher – Emília Gallotti, Nora Helmer, Polly Peachum (and so many other people I never met and that live in my head!). In front of the students, semester after semester, I learned that, even when the topic of the class is not about theatrical text, every class is a theatrical situation. All the time.
I also learned to make the room my favorite experimental field of action – in which I never claim protagonism, but make myself available to be crossed so that something can emerge beyond the body that I need to take there. At the same time, how de-oppressing it is, on a daily basis, to be able to have another role to embody. Today I understand the fascination with theater classes – which I never took – and the power of having a moment to replace the face with a prosthesis that is not the narcissistic prosthesis itself.
This process of incorporating characters and narratives constantly reminds me of the flexibility and empathy that theater practice requires and fosters. In the classroom, I am both director and actress, all at the same time, to the point of exhaustion – orchestrating discussions and acting out theories, allowing texts to come to life and resonate, at the same time as I need to disturb the students. In order to disturb your thoughts and affectionately sympathize with your reports and expressions. If it's not meant to be like that, then I'm sure there wouldn't be any point in wanting to do what I do.
Perhaps the passion I developed for dramatic texts, in addition to Master Alexandre's teachings, has to do with the passion for the intensity of literature – for having learned to see, hear, swallow and touch literature, expressions I used above. Therefore, the experience of the strike at the State University of Minas Gerais, just over a month after it began, caused me concern.
You need to understand the context. The State University of Minas Gerais (UEMG) is a public university whose stateization process took place once and for all only in 2014. Known for a long time in the cities where it is located for the private foundations that existed before being absorbed by stateization – in my case, at the Divinópolis unit (it is not yet a campus, and yes, a unit), many Divinopolitans still call the institution “FUNEDI” and think that it is necessary to pay monthly fees to study there – more than 85% of the university’s students come from public schools.
The State University of Minas Gerais
The State University of Minas Gerais is a popular university, with 22 units spread between the capital and the interior of Minas Gerais, which welcomes children from the working class, and even has the peculiarity of offering, like few in Brazil, a program of places in the entrance exam for candidates through Regional Inclusion – designed to encourage access to university for those who are residents of the state of Minas Gerais and who completed three years of high school in a public network (state, municipal or federal).
Despite all the precariousness that surrounds the university, whose reports created from the recent fifty days of strike are diverse on the internet (including one on this website), the State University of Minas Gerais is recognized as the 3rd largest public university in Minas Gerais in number of students, with more than 21.000 students enrolled and approximately 2.000 teachers.
Since the first major competition (in number of vacancies) held throughout 2019, after which I left the last city I lived in – Araraquara – to take up the position, not only did several masters and doctors begin to occupy the university bringing with it its academic training from different regions of Brazil, but, little by little, it is also possible to see male and female students from more states beginning to take part in more of the seats occupied in the classroom.
However, at University, everything is a process. In recent years, I witnessed the first departmentalizations in my unit – before, when I joined, there were only courses, without Departments – in which I helped document the process. I have held and still hold accumulated management and representation positions due to a lack of sufficient teaching staff (our Department of Literature, for example, only has nine permanent professors and we only offer Literature – Portuguese/English at night, plus none, as we still cannot find a workload possible for the number of teachers we have to justify, for example, the creation of a Language course in the morning, or any other qualification).
I attended the inauguration of the first head of the Department. I was one of the hands who created, in the last three years, the first pedagogical course project carried out by the teachers of the literature course. But I still don't have a teachers' room (there was a room until recently with a table and about six chairs, but it was locked and became something else). I don't have an office or bathroom just for teachers. There is no secretariat for each Department. There is no certified analyst or technician at the Unit. Wi-fi only works (poorly) in specific parts of the campus. A canteen only opened last year – but there are still zero copiers/photocopiers in the entire unit. The unit, reused from FUNEDI, is still a pure vestige of that Foundation that no longer exists for so long.
But I have the reason to leave home every day and want to teach: excellent, interested students, who have always welcomed me very well. In five years, I was a class paramount twice, and an honored teacher once. The emotional response they give us is constant, and many know what it was like to live in a city where studying at a public university was a practically impossible dream; people who mostly work, emerge as the first in their family and/or community to have a higher education diploma; people who today began to occupy contracts in public and private schools, who began to enroll in Master's programs in other places.
When I joined, how many times did I need to tell them what a master's degree was – or that “postgraduate” was not just “specialization” – or that there were research grants they could apply for. Today, my first-year students enter knowing that there is a research program, extension, academic monitoring – something completely unknown to students from previous years.
This is how I enter, week after week, with books under my arm, in subjects mainly English-language literature and literary theory. Before the strike, in “Theory of Literature I”, we were just beginning to uncover the Poetics of Aristotle and tragedies as part of what usually tends to be called dramatic genre. As the days of strike progressed, the anguish of being absent from the classroom began to affect me. However, knowing that the strike is also pedagogical, I started thinking about how I could call my students from the 1st year and from other periods of Literature (and other courses) to come to the Unit and do something related to literature. I remembered where I had left off. But could I bring a classic tragedy to a strike experience? It was then that I thought again about what I learned from Alexandre, and decided to propose the activity, even if it failed.
Therefore, I asked the local strike command to include, in one of the weekly agendas, on 04/06, a night of collective reading of Antigone, by Sophocles. On the day, there were around twenty people, only three of whom were teachers (me and two more from the Department of Literature), and the rest, to my surprise, were students (I hadn't seen so many there for weeks!). We made a circle of plastic chairs in the middle of the Unit's administrative hall, and I had previously requested that everyone could download a translation of Antigone on their cell phones, after all the Wifi doesn't work properly in the Unit, providing the link to the PDF on the banner who made the virtual call.
There were students from courses other than literature – and a graduate of the journalism course, who had been invited by one of my students to be there too. Two students had traveled a little more than 90 km to be there that night, having left their hometown, Arcos, hours before, by privately hiring seats in a van that was leaving the city heading to Divinópolis.
Due to the aforementioned social context, many students do not live in a public house in the university's destination city, but remain working and living with family in their cities of origin, paying for vans (or requesting them from city councils), and traveling for hours every day to study there at the Unit. I highlight this because I recognize, on the part of students like these, that being there literally came at a high cost.
I explained to them that we would follow a dynamic – and I exposed, from the beginning, the plural, signaling that no one would remain silent that night. At first, I just said that the reading would last about an hour, followed by some time to have a coffee (suggested and organized, mainly, by a student from the 1st period of the Literature course), and then another time of debate – in my prediction, a half-hour debate, which actually lasted another half hour. Before, I told them there was a primary question to answer: Why Antigone?
Why Antigone?
At that moment, I tried to share with them the reasons why I have increasingly believed that the present time has proven increasingly essential for us to regain contact with Greek tragedies – contrary to what one might believe. I explained to the audience what Sophocles' Theban trilogy was about, about the mythical and tragic fable of Oedipus to contextualize Antigone as a character in the trilogy, as well as when we learned about the events surrounding her. Furthermore, given the diversity of the audience, I felt it was important to make brief comments about the historical and political period in which this play was performed, as well as the role of tragedies – both in Dionysian rituals and in the Greek hospital complex, of which the amphitheater was one of the fundamental parts (hence the importance of catharsis). I always prefer it to be repetitive for some, if it means leaving everyone aware of the same important premises. I never give up trying to reach everyone, as much as “everyone” can mean.
Finally, I explained to the students what a dramatic reading was as a scenic practice. I made some considerations about the importance of resuming collective reading, in general, as an act that unites us around literature and reminds us that it was not born in the isolation of subjects, even though our idealization of the role of the author when producing (and of the reader when consumed) leads us to believe otherwise.
In particular, I highlighted to them that, unless I was mistaken, no one there was an actor/actress, nor was it necessary to be. The idea was to let go, express yourself and try to feel, as you read, how the dramatic curve is constructed in a classic tragedy. I wanted them to realize that there is no comic relief, no relaxation of tension, and how we only laugh when there is dramatic irony – which, after all, ends up bringing more distress and tension to us, who follow the plot, than relaxation.
After assigning roles – those who were left without a specific character were automatically agreeing to be part of the choir – I turned on a speaker and told them that I would play five minutes of a composition to be heard, but that it was in no way possible. saying that there was a parallel between the creation of the 1899 composition (with 1917 orchestral instrumentation) and the creation of Antigone, especially because the composition has an explicit dialogical relationship with another literary work, by Richard Dehmel – but, in any case, there was a meaning that I wanted to reinforce with it, as a way of helping each person to enter into their role.
It was the first few minutes of the first movement of Excellent night (op. 4), by Arnold Schöenberg – the Transfigured night. I asked the students to close their eyes, if they felt comfortable, and just let their imagination circulate in silence – because, if I endorse the need to read with multiple senses, I also believe that one should also listen by provoking the senses of vision.
Of course he had a specific purpose in mind. Transfigured night It is a fundamental work in musical expressionism, dense and harmonically audacious for the time. In the first movement, which he had performed for the students, the harmonies and thematic treatment are extremely chromatic, almost atonal, with a lot of dissonance. The result is pure tension, without relief – just like in a classical tragedy, in which, for Aristotle, there should not be moments that distract the spectator from the construction of the upward movement of the dramatic curve – and its subsequent vertiginous fall.
André Cílio Rodrigues, in “The Shape of the Night: a proposal for formal analysis of the Transfigured Night” (2021, p. 188), citing Anton Webern himself in a 1912 text, reveals that he called Transfigured night of “a free fantasy” [frei phantasierend]. I think that, somehow, I understand what Anton Webern meant. I still remember a night of chills and feelings that I had never experienced before when I repeatedly put on Transfigured night to accompany me as I read one of the most harrowing chapters (in my opinion) of the magic mountain, by Thomas Mann – “Snow” – in which Hans Castorp gets lost in a snowstorm while intending to ski.
I bring alive within my memory the sensation of each piece of that section as the movements of Schöenberg's composition were repeated and I felt lost in that storm with Hans Castorp, at the same time as I crossed other amounts of residue and storm of my own life. It had been a practically psychoanalytic experience. Therefore, it was not a theoretical concern that I wanted to provoke – it was of the order of experience, of someone who wanted to share what they knew was, perhaps, possible for someone else to feel. Starting to enter into Antigone's afflictions even before the play of the same name began to be read – first through the ears, only then through the eyes.
When I interrupted the music, I gave up the position of theorizing a lot with the students about it, since, as I had said, the provocation was not of a theoretical nature. I chose to trust that there would be a tacit understanding of what was happening – precisely in the unnameable, in what language could not translate at that moment. It is often important that we, teachers, know when to do this. I only commented superficially on the issue of expressionism, and that I believed that that moment would help us add layers to the network of representations we were entering as we said goodbye to the administrative lobby – which was now a stage – and the supposed stability of our identities. – since we were now playing different roles. A few heads nodded in my direction. I knew they understood. It was time for us to actually get into Antigone.
Thus, the collective reading took place in one hour. But, before commenting on where it took us, I must say, about the difficulty of getting in and out of roles, that it wasn't just Schöenberg or Sophocles who blew into my ears that night. It was also, more discreetly, Winnicott.
From Schöenberg to Winnicott
No matter how varied the resources for calling on students to take on roles in scenic practices may be – and one should not give in to silence, one should not extinguish the chances of there being new organizational forms that emerge out of necessity – it is, nevertheless, , make them mobilize. It took long minutes and a lot of patience for all the papers to be Antigone were assumed. I notice this same problem in relation to my former students who have become teachers, especially of teenagers – complaints that they don't participate, they don't take part in simulations.
This is not a problem (yet!) for teachers of children. I don’t think it’s a coincidence – especially because, the times I needed to ask “So-and-so, would you take on this character?” for students who were visibly struggling to say something or not, the invitation was accepted without delay. Therefore, it was not a problem with demand, but rather with voraciously accepting it publicly without direct requests.
I couldn't help but go home, during my twenty-minute drive, thinking about Donald Winnicott and, more specifically, about “playing” after childhood, another recent concern in my personal reflections. In Play and reality (1971), Winnicott attests to the thesis that “[it is] in playing, and only in playing, that the individual, child or adult, can be creative and use their integral personality: and it is only by being creative that the individual discovers the self (self)” (1975, p. 89).
Playing, expressing creativity, playing a character in make-believe: it is curious that, for children, none of this is a problem. As we advance into adolescence and adulthood, at the same time that we become these beings full of (unresolved!) fantasies, we begin to see proximity to play as something that should be denied or rejected when faced with children or children. large groups.
In an extremely sensitive article by Fábio Belo, professor of Object Relations Psychoanalysis at UFMG, the author identifies a closeness between Winnicott and Schiller, for whom man is only complete when he plays (Belo, 2013, p. 93). Schiller would have created his own term to support this statement – play instinct, the playful impulse: “an area or transitional stage that allows reason and sensitivity to act together without one overlapping the other” (p. 98) – an area created precisely by the game/playing. As we begin to feel part of the institutions, of the culture, it seems to me that publicly denying play is part of a macabre ritual that we agree, without signing anything, to participate.
But, on the other hand, it may be difficult for us, teachers, to recreate collective practices that involve student action – we, so enthusiastic about students with autonomy! We, who read so much about active methodologies! us, the Freireans! – because we deal with young people and adults whose relationships with play have become more and more blocked, especially for digital natives. Perhaps for a long time we have also been fed the idea that the last thing a teacher expects is to be able to be creative in front of them.
Would we be people who welcome the possibility of students playing with their own mistakes, mistakes and incompleteness in front of us? Are we people who authorize ourselves to put before students the fact that we also have faults and that we are willing to fantasize about them? Would they – among them – be a generation that has known how to fantasize without the authoritarianism of internet influences that daily convince them about how they should supposedly fantasize?
From Winnicott to Sophocles
Regarding the discussions we had, I begin by remembering that one of those present, even before we paused to swallow (figuratively!) Antigone, had said the following sentence: “Ultimately, the outcome of the play is about 'here's the play: obey the gods, follow the prediction or destiny is death'”.
From this, I began returning to our circle, drawing the students' attention to the fact that we could not be naive in relation to expectations about a classical theater play: through the entire context summarized before reading the play, from the rituals to the “ hospitals”, it is necessary to remember that one of the most important issues for the theater was the promotion of catharsis, aiming, through this, to also endorse a type of civil education, following what is expected of an ideal citizen – who does not fear death, but yes to servitude, and not to stand out above the gods (how can we forget the choir that, in Oedipus the King, says that he does not believe in Oedipus because he believes in him as much as one would believe in a god, but rather because he has prior support for the actions performed by him regarding the Sphinx?).
At this moment, even before finishing the explanation, a student from another course asks me about the choir: what were they like? Did they even enter the scene? What position should they occupy? It was then that I found myself in the interesting position of remedying our strangeness regarding what the role of the choir would be in theater today. I then thought about how this has everything to do with our position as adults who are saying goodbye to references from the past (even those that we ourselves never got to know).
It’s as if I found myself in front of a younger person who asked me: “Tell me, what place did this body that you, in some way, know, occupy?” Isn't that what we do when our loved ones are gone, time passes and they become names in our heads? Could it be death and the past that invite us to improve our skills as narrators, at the cost of losing them forever if we don't?
So I found myself in a kind of puzzle to explain to him: “this body was like this, it came here, presented itself in such a way, played such roles”. Again, I felt the shiver of seeing myself, in the act, presenting the past – as well as mine, because, presenting the past as I knew it, was also the past as Alexandre had taught it in class. Maybe there really is a reason why we don't write so much about our classes and speaking experiences: seeing ourselves lost in this kaleidoscope of times and spaces is truly terrifying. And all this trusting that what we have to say is the best at that moment – and hoping, throwing it to the wind, so be it.
Continuing. After talking about the choir and returning to the question about education and catharsis, perhaps the place I went to frustrated the students if they wanted me to talk about the Antigone that is within us. What I did was the opposite: I made some comments about the Creon that lives within us. The tyrant. Perhaps it would even be easier to say that Antigone is to Creon what we strikers are to the tyranny of the State. But I wouldn't be able to do it – because it would be completely dishonest with Sophocles' play itself. Terror and pity is built around Creon's obstinacy in not allowing Antigone's release – and this obstinacy is also part of us.
Creon's tyranny inhabits several different spaces, including institutions, but how much is it not equally present in the subject's reaction when the other denies him something he wants? Who, I asked them, has never felt an unbridled desire to possess a situation or a feeling, which needed to be contained, and felt compelled to do something about it – blindly and obstinately? How to deal with the Creon that arises when we feel certain that our position over the other is definitive and possible to exist?
Of course, this was not a mere provocation. She intended to tune them (and me!) with the increasingly growing tendency, under the guise of dignity, to achieve the exact opposite: an increasingly disguised moralism. Creon does not serve us to think about autocratic inflexibility only when it encounters the State, but also when it appears as the destination of our drives. If it was to address injustice, oppression and gestures of refusal in the strike, this could only make sense if it was actually in the strike, and not for the strike. That it would not instrumentalize the students, but that Sophocles could be part of their repertoire the day after tomorrow.
Along these lines, it was also not difficult for students to quickly reach issues linked to tyranny and gender issues.
What to think, I asked the students, about a question like the one posed by Creon, upon learning that Polynices had been buried: “What do you say? Who? What man dared to do so?”
At that moment, in addition to the various contributions and speeches, mainly from the female wing of the student body, I believe that one of the most interesting questions came from one of the students who was already studying Literature Theory I with me. Going back to the reading we had done about the Poetics, by Aristotle in the classroom, she asks for the second time a question she had asked before reading the play (because she hadn't held back her anxiety and read it before!). Her question was formulated more or less this way: “We read that, for Aristotle, in tragedies, the hero's error is caused by the hybris which, excessively, ends up causing a failure of judgment [hamartia], fundamental for the occurrence of this error. In other words, you brought up, in your classes, that for Aristotle, error does not come from character deviation, but from lack of knowledge. But something bothers me: it doesn't seem to be the case that Antigone. I didn’t understand: is the error always due to lack of knowledge?”
While I returned to the circle with another question: “In Antigone, to start the conversation, it is the heroine who has the hybris? Is it the heroine who fails?” During much of what happened, I wanted to show the students how, for each perspective, a totally different possibility of reading emerged. If it is Antigone who has the hybris, it certainly does not come from ignorance, but from the refusal to give in. If it is not Antigone, but Creon, we have the case of an antagonist who assumes the role of hybris – and which would also be precisely the refusal to give in. Whether in one case or the other, the hybris comes from refusal.
Therefore, the student was correct: the error does not always come from lack of knowledge, as in classical Greek theater. Hence another power of Antigone: it also forces us to reconsider what and where the subject's fault is. It is the uniqueness of the conflicts that brings to light the uniqueness of this issue.
The student's intervention was also fundamental on another point, with regard to being able to return to an idea so expensive (and increasingly rare) that every humanities student should remember – the obvious one that cannot be forgotten in any instant: the literary object does not come to serve theory. What had happened to the student was that she had to deal with the subversion of her expectations, allowing herself to be challenged by theoretical categories, which, pre-established in the classroom, she took as a guide, but she had (thankfully! ) autonomy to question – and he got the question right. Wouldn't that also mean that the student allowed herself to play with her thoughts? And how much reason would she have found, so early in her Literature course, through her movement in the game?
What does it mean that Antigone's penalty was to bury her alive? Would Creon have acted tyrannically precisely because of the instability of power, which fell into his hands due to circumstances? How much does the female body still circulate in experiences that are more of an object than a subject in society? Who has the right, in society, to a basic funeral rite – and what does it mean to deny it? Who deserves respect at the time of death – and who doesn’t? What gap exists between the Law and the interpretation of the law? (In this sense, I am with Jorge Luis Borges, in Kafka and his precursors [1951]: if, in Zeno's paradox, “the mobile and the arrow and Achilles are the first Kafkaesque characters in literature” [p. 127], in the imbroglio between Antigone and Creon also lies Kafka's idiosyncrasy!).
The questions above, among one and another that certainly must have also appeared, are the ones that remained in my memory as other important triggers of the discussion on that June 04th. I don’t know how much of that day will remain in the memories of those present – thinking about it is like sitting on the banks with the lyrical self of The Waste Land , by TS Eliot, while Hieronimo goes crazy again. It was with these fragments that I supported my attempt.
I know that, in the end, I hope to have invited you to allow yourself to be disturbed by the open questions that remain of what it means to think about refusal, intransigence, the motivation for social justice, and that you can open up more to the dilemmas of our time, whose complexity is not easy to abstract – requires a long, calm, collective look, out loud. And, of course, showing your desire to fantasize in the open can also be an important gesture of refusing discomfort.
*Gabriela Bruschini Grecca is a professor in the Department of Literature at the State University of Minas Gerais – Divinópolis unit.
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