Light Cue 23

In Tragedy we cannot imitate several lines of actions carried on at one and the same time; we must confine ourselves to the action on the stage and the part taken by the players. But in Epic poetry, owing to the narrative form, many events simultaneously transacted can be presented; and these, if relevant to the subject, add mass and dignity to the poem.
–Aristotle, The Poetics

One gets the sense reading Ajax that Sophocles was trying to break free from the conventions of the Dramatic Literature of his time through the bifurcation of the story he was telling. Ajax at once falls too neatly into two different sections for a dramatist as skilled as Sophocles to not be doing this intentionally. Further, the work feels like a mirror, or perhaps a parabola, extending infinitely in either direction from the event of the death of Ajax.

The death of Ajax is like a node where all the events from the first half flow to and all the events of the second half derive from. Blanchot does everything Sophocles wishes he could do. Yet in a way Sophocles does attain to this degree of effort. Ajax’s death is marked by the words of farewell a lover might give their beloved. He bids farewell to the sun and the earth, his father and his wife after asking forgiveness and pity from Zeus and the Furies. It is a ceremonial farewell spoken with words held as in religious ceremony, only to end the speech with a mildly ironic turn of phrase, “These are Ajax’ last words on earth: whatever else I say only the Dead will hear.”

Yet if we remember, we are but phantoms, “we’re counterfeits, we mortals, we’re shadows, blown on the wind.” Even in the certain actions of Sophocles we are uncertain, for we are but shadows. The madness of Ajax that brought us to this place of dramatic revelation could be continuing still. All action is become suspect. We know no more than Blanchot’s narrator if the ground we stand upon be true. The uncertainty of life continues to the uncertainty of death. The Hero turned base scoundrel and madman is persecuted by his own mind in life only to find exoneration and vindication in death. His worst enemy in life becomes his savior in death.

Unlike Blanchot’s Madness of Day where the destination is of far less importance than the journey, or Antigone where we watch two unwavering characters act out a battle of will, Ajax takes us on a journey that can only lead to despair and yet we do not. We can not despair. For Ajax was not a hero until vindicated in death. In life his deeds of the utmost bravery were ignored because of the clever words of Odysseus. His vengeful anger at this oversight triggered a madness that reduced him to little more than a common criminal. His suicide was neither noble nor redemptive. It was a cowardly act perpetrated by a man cornered in desperation. At the moment of his death he was no hero. He was the opposite of hero. He was in fact the most miserable character that could possibly be.

The very force of his fall was also cause for his restoration and redemption. His plight so extreme, he could only be raised to the highest of heights allowable to a mortal man. He is the opposite of Blanchot’s narrator, who through his too human suffering can go nowhere but back to where he began. Another aspect of this tension is alluded to by George. It is the play between poetry and prose, between literality and metaphor, madness and clarity that gives power to these works.

Ajax appears to achieve escape velocity from his prescribed fate and arrives in death a Hero. In mirroring his fall from grace, by showing us the opposite action in the second half of the play we are constantly reminded of the fall as we watch the ascent. In this way the two events, that lie upon a temporal spectrum, are compressed into a single experiential moment. Life and death and rebirth exist at one and the same time. We are able to see the Hero walk across the stage only after his mortal self has been taken from our world. Ajax is become immortal as Blanchot’s narrator becomes eternal. All of time and experience are compressed into this single moment, and for that instant, we too are forever.