The power of place : spatial practice in Greek tragedy

• Main Author: Abbott, P. J.
• Published: University of Cambridge 2006
• Subjects: 880
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.595320

This study explores the dramatic and poetic evocation of place in Greek tragedy through close readings of eight days and the application of modern theories of place and space. Social space, rather than being an inert and homogeneous container of objects, is continually being produced and reproduced by human activity. Within that space, bodily orientation and the identification of spatial dimension occurs as a function of anatomical configuration. Social space is profoundly entangled with the fleshly facticity of the human body, and the founding of place—a more-or-less bounded region of space marked by affect, value and a capacity for gathering—is realised by that selfsame body, a realisation defined by its continually metamorphic nature. Places evolve (and devolve) over time as they are practiced and articulated by the bodies that inhabit them. Over the course of this articulation places, particularly the cherished place of the home, accrue histories and narratives, becoming coloured by human encounter and involvement. The human connection to places such as the dwelling is defined, moreover, by reciprocity. As the human body produces its cherished places and invests them with lived history, so those places influence and affect the bodies that dwell within. The result of this interchange is to bind tightly man and place in an enmeshing that renders human shelter immensely vulnerable to violent, ruinous incursion. Social space, and places of human care in particular, far from being impartially uniform, are powerfully and infinitely affective-for good and for bad. Such an analysis offers a way to illuminate the places and spaces of Greek tragedy and to show how tightly bound tragic men and women are to the places in which they dwell.