If this is not a tragedy of Greek proportions, then what is? The United States (US) presidential debate between an incoherent, physically and intellectually impaired man who cannot even enunciate some of his best ideas and a chronic liar is a theatrical coup that nobody in the world thought they would see in their lifetime.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden are seeking re-election this year and, if neither pulls out, one of them will become the President of the US, holding the reins of a much larger global territory than the geography of the US. There’s a strong sense of foreboding, “an impending sense of doom”, as literary critic Frank Kermode says, that is gripping almost every observer of US realpolitik everywhere in the world.
Biden’s friends and staunchest supporters have already written essays on why he should bow out of the presidential race in the interest of the Democratic Party and the nation at large. It is, after all, a tall order to make Trump come across as a better politician!
Pessimism much? Philosophers and literary critics, Friedrich Nietzsche being the foremost, have long argued about the relationship between pessimism and tragedy. “Tragedy … is in its essence pessimistic. Existence is in itself something very terrible, man something very foolish,” said the German philosopher. What is even more interesting, and bang for the buck in the present moment, is Nietzsche’s proposition that all tragedy emanates from time. “All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: The passage of time,” philosopher Simone Weil took the idea further. The tragedy of the 2024 US elections is, paradoxically, predicated on time — the age of the president, the cut-off period for an abortion to remain legal and the deadline for the ceasefire in Palestine.
“Just how far will a leader go in order to save face and secure a military victory in the East?” In 2004, a campaign in London ran on these lines. Only, it was for a National Theatre production of Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis and the “leader” in question was the Greek king Agamemnon, the man who burnt the “topless towers of Ilium”, and not Tony Blair, in cahoots with George W Bush, burning Iraq down. This is just to show how everything we see on the stage of western politics today has its roots in the Greek classical literary traditions. Hence, the two men in the present instance, vying for the presidential post in the world’s oldest democracy, are nothing more than two performers in the polis — the public space.
One of the defining features of Greek tragedy, according to Aristotle, is terror. Only when terror is unleashed and the twin emotions of fear and pity are heightened can there be the cleansing of the said emotions. The moment of catharsis.
Seeing Biden lose his grip on reality, quite literally, during the debate was both a moment of terror and pathos. Similarly, Trump’s astute use of the debate platform foreshadows the days to come. Not very confidence-inspiring, is it? One, then, begins to question the very purpose of such an exercise. What did the viewers and voters get out of it?
In 1980, behavioural scientist Constantine G Lyketsos published his findings on the effects of ancient Greek drama on patients with chronic psychiatric issues. Taking the Aristotelian view forward, that frenzied people have the ability to empathise with tragic heroes, performances of various Greek tragedies had been used in Athens’s Dromokaition Mental Hospital as a means of psychotherapy. The findings suggested that “drama is not merely a recreational activity for mental patients: On the contrary, a unique psychotherapeutic effect is produced by the power of plot and language”.
Is the presidential debate, then, an act of intervention for the public at large in the US and abroad? It would seem so, going by the public response to the debate.
The only catharsis offered here, however, is to the non-US citizens who are heaving a sigh of relief that they are not poor Americans saddled with an impossible choice this November.
Nishtha Gautam is an author, academic and journalist. She’s the co-editor of In Hard Times, a Bloomsbury book on national security. The views expressed are personal
