Mario Teló, GREEK TRAGEDY IN A GLOBAL CRISIS Reading through Pandemic Times

Bloomsbury 2023 p/b p. 296 9781350348127 £17.99

This is an unusual book about Greek Tragedy.  It has been written not only after the pandemic but even after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and makes the plague the leitmotiv of the full text. The enlightening introduction confirms that this is really: “Reading Greek Tragedy through Pandemic Times”.

How can Greek Tragedy address urgent contemporary troubles? The author sets on the table a list of famous unforgettable icons of Greek tragedy inviting us to have a look at them with absolutely renewed eyes. Four thematic axes make up the structure of the text: Air Time Faces, Communities, Ruins, Insurrections.

Air Time Faces deals with Oedipus, then with Teiresias, Cadmus and Dionysus in Bacchae, and finally with Iphigenia. The author considers that these three plays supply inklings of pandemic feelings: sensory and atmospheric oversaturation, achrony, waiting, decisional anxiety. Oedipus the King is the pandemic play par excellence according to Teló. He then analyses the textual feel of miasma or contagion all through the play. The author compares the contagion of Dionysian intoxication in Bacchae to the windless air of Aulis before the Trojan expedition.  No doubt, contagion, intoxication, lack of air are three icons of the pandemic to be found in Greek Tragedy.

Communities deals with Alcestis and Suppliant Women. The author explores the consequences of reading tragic relationalities in pandemic times. He first examines Alcestis pointing out the idea (somehow legitimized by the pandemic) that maybe certain lives are more valuable than others: female behind male, an old man behind a young one. Concerning Suppliant Women Teló is able to make the connection by evoking the funeralization of the city orchestrated by the Argive women separated from their dead children with the awful dramatic picture of the worst days of the pandemic when funerals were banned in places of worship and funeral homes were even closed, becoming mass graves: a terrible daily image on the screen of every television.

The third part of the book, Ruins, deals with the relationship between tragedy and the end of the world, a prospect that, according to the author, the pandemic and climate change have made palpable. Sophocles’ Antigone and Aeschylus´ lost Niobe are analysed in detail; both plays imagine the origin and the future of the world through minerality and stony materiality.

Insurrections forms the fourth part of the book.  Teló points out how tragic form connects with the protest of our days. Then Prometheus, Hecuba and The Trojan Women are examined in a very unusual way.

A short Epilogue, (p.189-195) apparently closes the book, but not the volume; indeed nearly 50 pages (196-250) includes a large number of footnotes. A selected bibliography covers p. 250- 276.  At the end, a quite remarkably strange index is to be found, covering a wide range of concepts, plays, authors in alphabetic order.

This is no doubt a serious work achieved by the author. It is really difficult to write an exhaustive review of this kind of book. There is a mixture of journalism, sociology and philology. Most of the footnotes are the best witness. Of course, this book exists mostly because of the pandemic that unfortunately was a pancosmic reality; daily news here and there, uncertain evolution, the struggle of the doctors and scientists all over the world made the journalists be more recognized than ever. At the same time human behaviour was smashed and tested by social pressures that we could never imagine. Even so all Classicists were keeping ancient Classical texts as the only weapon to be used to survive.

It is noticeable that even if some of Teló’s points of view seem quite difficult to accept, I must declare that I have been fascinated by some very detailed analysis of the classical texts. I should mention pages 24-27 on Oedipus the King; when analysing in detail stylistic details in the voices of Oedipus, the chorus leader and the chorus itself, not to mention the detailed reference to verse 1313-1318 and later on 1386-89 when the hero chooses self-blinding. Something similar happens in pages 44-45 when commenting on Bacchae in the short dialogue Cadmus-Teiresias gerôn  geronta, monoi, monoi.

Regarding Iphigenia there is an excellent analysis of every character, Agamemnon and his daughter being the very focus of the plot. Iphigenia’s final gesture sacrificing herself for the community aligns itself with the biological and necropolitical discourse on the disposability of certain lives that became shockingly explicit at the outbreak of the pandemic; Teló underlines once again this idea previously mentioned in the introductory chapter.

Also excellent is the accurate analysis of a farewell to life by Antigone (p. 117 -119) including the speech of the Messenger (p. 120-121).  I have enjoyed the taste of Ovid Metamorphoses VI 301-309, commented in p. 128-141.  At time I am writing this review, the ruins of Gaza are everyday on the screen of every television. Have a look exactly at the photograph (p. 139) and you will be surprised when at the same time you read in lines 1-15 the connection between Niobe and the Palestinian woman looking at the so-called Niobe mural in Gaza. The photograph dates from 2015! Teló is right; things get worse and worse!

I will also invite the readers of this review to have a look at p. 172 about the entrance on the stage of the ghost of Polydorus and Hecuba and p. 179 about the accurate examination of verses 1288-1292 from a stylistic point of view.

This is a strange book but a deep, seriously documented volume. It seems that the author is seriously upset with the whole world, and he is clever enough to find Greek Tragedy as a kind of consolation and provocation at the same time. Some modern versions are mentioned - as mentioned before - from different countries, in different shapes, with Greek Tragedy either a starting point, or a referential one to analyse situations and events of everyday life. You could agree or disagree with the author; some points of view call for discussion or challenge but they will not leave you indifferent. This book makes us think once again about human life, about human existence, about individual and society which are, of course, the eternal subjects of Greek Tragedy.

José Luis Navarro