Churchill's Tragic Materialism; or, Imagining a Posthuman Tragedy

Abstract

It would seem impossible to wrench dramatic tragedy away from humanism. In their encounters with fate, capricious gods, or a corrupt polis, tragedy's protagonists confront the injustice and futility of existence, and in their suffering and defeat they affirm the “indomitability of the human spirit,” the preeminent value of human life. Certainly this is George Steiner's view in The Death of Tragedy (1961), although his conservative hierarchies (no gods, no tragedy) have been refuted by critics who argue that there is profound tragedy in ordinary life (Williams; Eagleton; Poole) and that tragedy “continually adapts itself to the conditions of experience” (States 199). However, even Steiner's debunkers embrace his notion of tragedy as extremity, as an encounter with extrahuman forces and suffering far exceeding human guilt. So, I argue here, does the British playwright Caryl Churchill, who in 1994 produced a diptych of contemporary tragedy: The Skriker, first mounted in January 1994, and her translation of Seneca's Thyestes, staged just four months later. Taken together these plays absorb the “conditions of experience” of the mid-1990s in the West. Along with the horrors of the Bosnian War and continuing environmental and economic crises, such conditions might well include the widely touted mapping of the human genome, begun in 1990 and concluded in 2003, and, concurrently, a popular and scholarly fascination with affects, intensities, and “the lively immanence of matter” (Coole and Frost 9). What happens to the humanist foundations of tragedy when understandings of the human are subjected to these “new materialisms”? Churchill's The Skriker, along with her translation of Thyestes, invites us to imagine a seeming oxymoron, a posthuman tragedy.