What is the function of the Chorus in Greek tragedy?
Nietzsche considers and then dismisses two possible roles for the Chorus in Greek tragedy.
1. THE CHORUS AS 'THE PEOPLE'
Nietzsche dismisses the idea that the chorus represents "the people" (which would give the plays a democratic tenor). Nietzsche dislikes this idea for two reasons. First, because he seems rather hostile to democratic values in general, and second (perhaps the more compelling reason), because this theory is hard to reconcile with the idea that Greek tragedy arose from the Chorus, and once was all Chorus. In other words, how could the Chorus be there to include the King's people when there was no King to begin with?
A few things to keep in mind: Just because Nietzsche dismisses the idea that the Chorus represents "the people" doesn't mean we have to discount this idea. After all, the opening sequences of Oedipus the King seem to invite the reading that
the Chorus represents "the people" of Thebes. The leader of the procession of Priests who comes to Oedipus's
palace gate says "You see us before you now, men of all ages / clinging to your altars. Here are boys, / still too weak to fly from the nest, / and here the old, bowed down with the years" (ll. ll. 16-20). If that isn't a depiction of "the people," what is?
2. THE CHORUS AS 'THE IDEAL SPECTATOR'
Second, Nietzsche dismisses Schlegel's idea that the chorus represents "the ideal spectator." According to this theory, the Chorus's comments, opinions and actions model the ones the audience should be having. Nietzsche dislikes this argument because it overlooks a key distinction between the Chorus and the audience: the Chorus is part of the play and thanks that the action is real, whereas the audience is only suspending their disbelief. If audiences responded like the Chorus, according to Nietzsche, they might run onto the stage to try to prevent some act of violence that was unfolding. A sensible member of the theater audience knows that the action isn't real. For this reason, an audience should NOT take the Chorus as its role model.
A few things to keep in mind: Nietzsche has a good point here that there is a key distinction between being part of the play like the Chorus and being a member of the audience, which is outside the play. Still, it's useful to consider a more moderate version of this idea. What if we think about the ways that the Chorus's moods, opinions, and actions may
indeed be influencing the audience's sense of the action onstage? Surely, even if they are not our "ideal" spectator, they are still giving us some important cues (or perhaps interesting miscues, through their own biases) about which characters we should sympathize with, how we should interpret events, etc. Perhaps the Chorus and the audience are not identical in their roles or relation to the play, but they are, after all, both spectators to the events unfolding, and hence, have an interesting and complicated relationship to one another. They may not be the "ideal spectator," but they are certainly a group of fellow spectators and perhaps some kind of double for the audience. Consider the words of the leader of the Chorus of Antigone following Antigone's speech in which she stands up to Creon:
"Like father like daughter / passionate, wild.../she hasn't learned to bend before adversity" (ll. 82). Here the Chorus is telling us what to think and suggesting that we consider Antigone's family lineage at this key moment in the play. We might disagree with his assessment of Antigone's problems or history, but we will certainly take this moment to call to mind the connection between Antigone's career and that of her father Oedipus. Ideal or not, the Chorus's spectatorship of events is bound to condition ours.
Eventually, Nietzsche finds an idea of the Chorus that he likes:
3. THE CHORUS AS 'A LIVING BARRIER'
This theory, borrowed from Schiller, holds that the Chorus is there as an anti-naturalistic device to remind the audience
at all times that they are watching a play. To remember this concept, I like to picture the Chorus as a group
of actors holding hands and standing in a chain across the front of the stage. This human wall means that the audience is always seeing the play through a protective barrier, and so is never able to get fully absorbed in the action. It seems that for Nietzsche the appeal of this model lies in its emphasis on the "artiness" of art: the content of the Chorus is not as important here as its formal function of guarding against an artistic tendency that Nietzsche dislikes: naturalism. Naturalism was a style that was fashionable when Nietzsche was writing in the late-nineteenth century, and one whose goal was to reduce the seeming distance between art and life. Nietzsche preferred that the life/art distinction be maintained and even emphasized. One name for such a view is Aestheticism, a movement that gained popularity as a backlash against naturalism and realism.
A few things to keep in mind: There's nothing wrong with this idea per se-- in fact it's a very interesting one. It certainly helps to explain why the chorus sings, dances, and does other things that we don't associate with realist or naturalist drama. But if we agreed with Nietzsche that it was the only correct way of thinking about the function of the Chorus, we would lose many interesting interpretations of the plays enabled by the other two models. Let's keep all three ideas of
the Chorus on the table, and generate some of our own too.
And now, here is Nietzsche himself laying out the ideas described above:
"...tradition tells us quite unequivocally that tragedy arose from the tragic chorus, and was originally only chorus and nothing but chorus. Hence we consider it our duty to look into the heart of this tragic chorus as the real proto-drama, without resting satisfied with such arty clichés as that the chorus is the “ideal spectator” or that it represents the people in contrast to the aristocratic region of the scene. This latter explanation has a sublime sound to many a politician—as if the immutable moral law had been embodied by the democratic Athenians in the popular chorus, which always won out over the passionate excesses and extravagances of kings…
Much more famous than this political interpretation of the chorus is the idea of A. W. Schlegel, who advises us to regard the chorus somehow as the essence and extract of the crowd of spectators—as the “ideal spectator.” This view, when compared with the historical tradition that originally tragedy was only chorus, reveals itself for what it is—a crude, unscientific, yet brilliant claim that owes its brilliancy only to its concentrated form of expression…and to our momentary astonishment. For we are certainly astonished the moment we compare our familiar theatrical public with this chorus, and ask ourselves whether it could ever be possible to idealize from such a public something analogous to the Greek tragic chorus....
An infinitely more valuable insight into the significance of the chorus has already been displayed by Schiller in the celebrated Preface to his Bride of Messina, where he regards the chorus as a living barrier which tragedy constructs round herself to cut off her contact with the world of reality, and to preserve her ideal domain and poetical freedom.
With this, his chief weapon, Schiller combats the ordinary conception of the natural, the illusion usually demanded in dramatic poetry. Although it is true that the stage day is merely artificial, the architecture only symbolical, and the metrical language purely ideal in character, nevertheless an erroneous view still prevails in the main: that we should not excuse these conventions merely on the ground that they constitute a poetical license. Now in reality these "conventions" form the essence of all poetry. The introduction of the chorus, says Schiller, is the decisive step by which war is declared openly and honorably against all naturalism in art."
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), in Daniel Gerould, ed., Theatre/Theory/Theatre, New York, Applause Books, 2000 (p. 340-342).
The Apollonian and Dionysian Strains of Greek Tragedy
Extract from the first two pages of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy handout:
"We shall do a great deal for the science of aesthetics, once we perceive not merely by logical inference, but with the immediate certainty of intuition, that the continuous development of art is bound up with the Apollonian and Dionysian duality; just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual strife with only periodically intervening reconciliations. The terms Dionysian and Apollonian we borrow from the Greeks, who disclose to the discerning mind the profound mysteries of their view of art, not, to be sure, in concepts, but in the impressively clear figures of their gods. Through Apollo and Dionysus, the two art-deities of the Greeks, we come to recognize that in the Greek world there existed a sharp opposition, in origin and aims, between the Apollonian art of sculpture, and the non-plastic, Dionysian, art of music. These two distinct tendencies run parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance; and they continually incite each other to new and more powerful births, which perpetuate an antagonism, only superficially reconciled by the common term "Art"; till at last, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic will, they appear coupled with each other, and through this coupling eventually generate the art-product, equally Dionysian and Apollonian, of Attic tragedy.
In order to grasp these two tendencies, let us first conceive of them as the separate art-worlds of dreams and drunkenness. These physiological phenomena present a contrast analogous to that existing between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. […]
This joyful necessity of the dream-experience has been embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo; for Apollo, the god of all plastic energies, is at the same time the soothsaying god. He, who (as the etymology of the name indicates) is the "shining one," the deity of light, is also ruler over the fair appearance of the inner world of fantasy. The higher truth, the perfection of these states in contrast to the incompletely intelligible everyday world, this deep consciousness of nature, healing and helping in sleep and dreams, is at the same time the symbolical analogue of the soothsaying faculty and of the arts generally, which make life possible and worth living. But we must also include in our picture of Apollo that delicate boundary, which the dream-picture must not overstep--lest it act pathologically (in which case appearance would impose upon us as pure reality). We must keep in mind that measured restraint, that freedom from the wilder emotions, that philosophical calm of the sculptor god. His eye must be "sunlike," as befits his origin; even when his glance is angry and distempered, the sacredness of his beautiful appearance must still be there. And so, in one sense, we might apply to Apollo the words of Schopenhauer when he speaks of the man wrapped in the veil of Maya: (The World as Will and Idea, I): "Just as in a stormy sea, unbounded in every direction, rising and falling with howling mountainous waves, a sailor sits in a boat and trusts in his frail barque: so in the midst of a world of sorrows the individual sits quietly, supported by and trusting in his principium individuationis." In fact, we might say of Apollo, that in him the unshaken faith in this principium and the calm repose of the man wrapped therein receive their sublimest expression; and we might consider Apollo himself as the glorious divine image of the principium individuationis, whose gestures and expression tell us of all the joy and wisdom of "appearance," together with its beauty.
In the same work Schopenhauer has depicted for us the terrible awe which seizes upon man when he is suddenly unable to account for the cognitive forms of a phenomenon, when the principle of reason in some one of its manifestations seems to admit of an exception. If we add to this awe the blissful ecstasy which rises from the innermost depths of man, aye, of nature, at this very collapse of the principium individuationis, we shall gain an insight into the nature of the Dionysian, which is brought home to us most intimately perhaps by the analogy of drunkenness.
It is either under the influence of the narcotic draught, which we hear of in the songs of all primitive men and peoples, or with the potent coming of spring penetrating all nature with joy, that these Dionysian emotions awake, which, as they intensify, cause the subjective to vanish into complete self-forgetfulness."
Nietzsche considers and then dismisses two possible roles for the Chorus in Greek tragedy.
1. THE CHORUS AS 'THE PEOPLE'
Nietzsche dismisses the idea that the chorus represents "the people" (which would give the plays a democratic tenor). Nietzsche dislikes this idea for two reasons. First, because he seems rather hostile to democratic values in general, and second (perhaps the more compelling reason), because this theory is hard to reconcile with the idea that Greek tragedy arose from the Chorus, and once was all Chorus. In other words, how could the Chorus be there to include the King's people when there was no King to begin with?
A few things to keep in mind: Just because Nietzsche dismisses the idea that the Chorus represents "the people" doesn't mean we have to discount this idea. After all, the opening sequences of Oedipus the King seem to invite the reading that
the Chorus represents "the people" of Thebes. The leader of the procession of Priests who comes to Oedipus's
palace gate says "You see us before you now, men of all ages / clinging to your altars. Here are boys, / still too weak to fly from the nest, / and here the old, bowed down with the years" (ll. ll. 16-20). If that isn't a depiction of "the people," what is?
2. THE CHORUS AS 'THE IDEAL SPECTATOR'
Second, Nietzsche dismisses Schlegel's idea that the chorus represents "the ideal spectator." According to this theory, the Chorus's comments, opinions and actions model the ones the audience should be having. Nietzsche dislikes this argument because it overlooks a key distinction between the Chorus and the audience: the Chorus is part of the play and thanks that the action is real, whereas the audience is only suspending their disbelief. If audiences responded like the Chorus, according to Nietzsche, they might run onto the stage to try to prevent some act of violence that was unfolding. A sensible member of the theater audience knows that the action isn't real. For this reason, an audience should NOT take the Chorus as its role model.
A few things to keep in mind: Nietzsche has a good point here that there is a key distinction between being part of the play like the Chorus and being a member of the audience, which is outside the play. Still, it's useful to consider a more moderate version of this idea. What if we think about the ways that the Chorus's moods, opinions, and actions may
indeed be influencing the audience's sense of the action onstage? Surely, even if they are not our "ideal" spectator, they are still giving us some important cues (or perhaps interesting miscues, through their own biases) about which characters we should sympathize with, how we should interpret events, etc. Perhaps the Chorus and the audience are not identical in their roles or relation to the play, but they are, after all, both spectators to the events unfolding, and hence, have an interesting and complicated relationship to one another. They may not be the "ideal spectator," but they are certainly a group of fellow spectators and perhaps some kind of double for the audience. Consider the words of the leader of the Chorus of Antigone following Antigone's speech in which she stands up to Creon:
"Like father like daughter / passionate, wild.../she hasn't learned to bend before adversity" (ll. 82). Here the Chorus is telling us what to think and suggesting that we consider Antigone's family lineage at this key moment in the play. We might disagree with his assessment of Antigone's problems or history, but we will certainly take this moment to call to mind the connection between Antigone's career and that of her father Oedipus. Ideal or not, the Chorus's spectatorship of events is bound to condition ours.
Eventually, Nietzsche finds an idea of the Chorus that he likes:
3. THE CHORUS AS 'A LIVING BARRIER'
This theory, borrowed from Schiller, holds that the Chorus is there as an anti-naturalistic device to remind the audience
at all times that they are watching a play. To remember this concept, I like to picture the Chorus as a group
of actors holding hands and standing in a chain across the front of the stage. This human wall means that the audience is always seeing the play through a protective barrier, and so is never able to get fully absorbed in the action. It seems that for Nietzsche the appeal of this model lies in its emphasis on the "artiness" of art: the content of the Chorus is not as important here as its formal function of guarding against an artistic tendency that Nietzsche dislikes: naturalism. Naturalism was a style that was fashionable when Nietzsche was writing in the late-nineteenth century, and one whose goal was to reduce the seeming distance between art and life. Nietzsche preferred that the life/art distinction be maintained and even emphasized. One name for such a view is Aestheticism, a movement that gained popularity as a backlash against naturalism and realism.
A few things to keep in mind: There's nothing wrong with this idea per se-- in fact it's a very interesting one. It certainly helps to explain why the chorus sings, dances, and does other things that we don't associate with realist or naturalist drama. But if we agreed with Nietzsche that it was the only correct way of thinking about the function of the Chorus, we would lose many interesting interpretations of the plays enabled by the other two models. Let's keep all three ideas of
the Chorus on the table, and generate some of our own too.
And now, here is Nietzsche himself laying out the ideas described above:
"...tradition tells us quite unequivocally that tragedy arose from the tragic chorus, and was originally only chorus and nothing but chorus. Hence we consider it our duty to look into the heart of this tragic chorus as the real proto-drama, without resting satisfied with such arty clichés as that the chorus is the “ideal spectator” or that it represents the people in contrast to the aristocratic region of the scene. This latter explanation has a sublime sound to many a politician—as if the immutable moral law had been embodied by the democratic Athenians in the popular chorus, which always won out over the passionate excesses and extravagances of kings…
Much more famous than this political interpretation of the chorus is the idea of A. W. Schlegel, who advises us to regard the chorus somehow as the essence and extract of the crowd of spectators—as the “ideal spectator.” This view, when compared with the historical tradition that originally tragedy was only chorus, reveals itself for what it is—a crude, unscientific, yet brilliant claim that owes its brilliancy only to its concentrated form of expression…and to our momentary astonishment. For we are certainly astonished the moment we compare our familiar theatrical public with this chorus, and ask ourselves whether it could ever be possible to idealize from such a public something analogous to the Greek tragic chorus....
An infinitely more valuable insight into the significance of the chorus has already been displayed by Schiller in the celebrated Preface to his Bride of Messina, where he regards the chorus as a living barrier which tragedy constructs round herself to cut off her contact with the world of reality, and to preserve her ideal domain and poetical freedom.
With this, his chief weapon, Schiller combats the ordinary conception of the natural, the illusion usually demanded in dramatic poetry. Although it is true that the stage day is merely artificial, the architecture only symbolical, and the metrical language purely ideal in character, nevertheless an erroneous view still prevails in the main: that we should not excuse these conventions merely on the ground that they constitute a poetical license. Now in reality these "conventions" form the essence of all poetry. The introduction of the chorus, says Schiller, is the decisive step by which war is declared openly and honorably against all naturalism in art."
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), in Daniel Gerould, ed., Theatre/Theory/Theatre, New York, Applause Books, 2000 (p. 340-342).
The Apollonian and Dionysian Strains of Greek Tragedy
Extract from the first two pages of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy handout:
"We shall do a great deal for the science of aesthetics, once we perceive not merely by logical inference, but with the immediate certainty of intuition, that the continuous development of art is bound up with the Apollonian and Dionysian duality; just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual strife with only periodically intervening reconciliations. The terms Dionysian and Apollonian we borrow from the Greeks, who disclose to the discerning mind the profound mysteries of their view of art, not, to be sure, in concepts, but in the impressively clear figures of their gods. Through Apollo and Dionysus, the two art-deities of the Greeks, we come to recognize that in the Greek world there existed a sharp opposition, in origin and aims, between the Apollonian art of sculpture, and the non-plastic, Dionysian, art of music. These two distinct tendencies run parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance; and they continually incite each other to new and more powerful births, which perpetuate an antagonism, only superficially reconciled by the common term "Art"; till at last, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic will, they appear coupled with each other, and through this coupling eventually generate the art-product, equally Dionysian and Apollonian, of Attic tragedy.
In order to grasp these two tendencies, let us first conceive of them as the separate art-worlds of dreams and drunkenness. These physiological phenomena present a contrast analogous to that existing between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. […]
This joyful necessity of the dream-experience has been embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo; for Apollo, the god of all plastic energies, is at the same time the soothsaying god. He, who (as the etymology of the name indicates) is the "shining one," the deity of light, is also ruler over the fair appearance of the inner world of fantasy. The higher truth, the perfection of these states in contrast to the incompletely intelligible everyday world, this deep consciousness of nature, healing and helping in sleep and dreams, is at the same time the symbolical analogue of the soothsaying faculty and of the arts generally, which make life possible and worth living. But we must also include in our picture of Apollo that delicate boundary, which the dream-picture must not overstep--lest it act pathologically (in which case appearance would impose upon us as pure reality). We must keep in mind that measured restraint, that freedom from the wilder emotions, that philosophical calm of the sculptor god. His eye must be "sunlike," as befits his origin; even when his glance is angry and distempered, the sacredness of his beautiful appearance must still be there. And so, in one sense, we might apply to Apollo the words of Schopenhauer when he speaks of the man wrapped in the veil of Maya: (The World as Will and Idea, I): "Just as in a stormy sea, unbounded in every direction, rising and falling with howling mountainous waves, a sailor sits in a boat and trusts in his frail barque: so in the midst of a world of sorrows the individual sits quietly, supported by and trusting in his principium individuationis." In fact, we might say of Apollo, that in him the unshaken faith in this principium and the calm repose of the man wrapped therein receive their sublimest expression; and we might consider Apollo himself as the glorious divine image of the principium individuationis, whose gestures and expression tell us of all the joy and wisdom of "appearance," together with its beauty.
In the same work Schopenhauer has depicted for us the terrible awe which seizes upon man when he is suddenly unable to account for the cognitive forms of a phenomenon, when the principle of reason in some one of its manifestations seems to admit of an exception. If we add to this awe the blissful ecstasy which rises from the innermost depths of man, aye, of nature, at this very collapse of the principium individuationis, we shall gain an insight into the nature of the Dionysian, which is brought home to us most intimately perhaps by the analogy of drunkenness.
It is either under the influence of the narcotic draught, which we hear of in the songs of all primitive men and peoples, or with the potent coming of spring penetrating all nature with joy, that these Dionysian emotions awake, which, as they intensify, cause the subjective to vanish into complete self-forgetfulness."
