In my teaching persona, I tend to insist upon a few points. One is this: Just because something is sad, that doesn’t mean it’s a tragedy. Pedantically speaking, a tragedy is a specific kind of play whose origins are in ancient Greece. Probably a lot of people who teach tragedy insist on this point: we want to help our students distinguish between subject matter and genre. We want them to move beyond the casual, everyday use of the words tragedy and tragic to grasp their aesthetic and philosophical specifics.
But why? Poring over the primers on tragedy is embarrassing. Every overview of the genre discusses at least one horrific disaster, only to explain why this or that instance of mass death simply doesn’t count as tragic. Cue the cascade of philosophical justifications: Aristotle tells us that “tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and possessing magnitude; in embellished language.” Hegel explains that the essence of tragedy is a conflict between incompatible versions of the good. Nietzsche tells us that gazing into the abyss of human suffering allows spectators to joyfully affirm the meaningfulness of their own existence. Well, fine. But what is the genre for all the terrible things that don’t qualify as tragedies? What do you call representations of actions that are serious and possess magnitude, but are incomplete or still unfolding? What’s the genre for repeating, endless, everyday violence?
I don’t think I’m the only one interested in what is expelled from tragedy on technical grounds. The past few years have seen the publication of a number of books that are not tragedies, but that draw on tropes or structures borrowed from the genre, pressing ordinary suffering against the limits of tragedy’s ennobling alchemy. These include, most recently, Cassandra Troyan’s Freedom & Prostitution, which I’ll discuss here, but also books like Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, Joey Yearous-Algozin’s multi-volume Lazarus Project, Beth Piatote’s play Antíkoni, and Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Each of these books touches on tragedy in order to discuss the relationships between mourning, justice, and political action. They are all about the obligations that those of us who are living owe to those of us who are dead. But in each case, they engage the ordinary use of tragedy, bending and reconfiguring the genre so that it might speak to the daily devastations of structural violence.
Cassandra Troyan is well known as a poet and theorist of sex work, gender, and capitalism. Freedom & Prostitution is their fourth collection, following A Theory in Tears, a closely related project that traces the shifting meanings attributed to tears across a series of anonymous and high-profile incidents of rape and sexual assault: “Tears, or it didn’t happen / Tears, or who gives a fuck.” The title of Freedom & Prostitution offers a clear indication of its subject matter: this is a snowballing long poem whose revolutionary speed and analytic force contest the “human diction” that “mark[s]” certain people—women, sex workers, those who experience gendered violence—“as / disposable.” The book revels in the threat posed by the survival and resilience of those who’ve been most forcibly subject to “the limits of violence created and held within this category, woman.” Delivered as a series of short lyrics broken up by occasional swerves into descriptive prose, Freedom & Prostitution combines everyday details—“You don’t leave the bed” or “the pen keeps falling out of your hand”—with surreal, even emoji-like imagery: “Stack[s] of cash” take “flight / the movement of paper wings / gives rise / to a sublime sensation.” In small moments and across its structure, Freedom & Prostitution highlights the dizzying collision of “the fantasy of opposites— / how to live in the world / with those you don’t trust.”
While it’s possible to write about Freedom & Prostitution in any number of ways, I want to read it as a tragedy. This might be a strange proposition: after all, Freedom & Prostitution isn’t even a play. But my pedantry, as I mentioned earlier, compels me to point out that in many important ways Freedom & Prostitution is reminiscent of Sophocles’s Antigone, a comparison that is also made by Rachel Rabbit White in her review of the book. Philosophers have long considered Antigone the paradigm-setting tragedy, and Freedom & Prostitution pings off of this play’s basic premise as well as many of its major themes.
Antigone is often approached—and, I think, misunderstood—as being about mourning. We tend to remember Antigone as a sad, solitary figure, the only one willing to do the right thing. But what is dramatized in the play is Antigone’s social obligations—much of the tension in the plot derives from other characters’ decisions about whether and how to act along with her. Troyan amplifies these under-examined aspects of Antigone, taking up her refusal, her vengefulness, and, most importantly, the way she incites action in other characters. Antigone states that she owes her greatest allegiance to the dead because she’ll live among them in the underworld forever. Freedom & Prostitution similarly asserts proximity and indebtedness to “what is left behind.” At stake in both works is the composition of the community to whom we’re obligated: Troyan, like Antigone, articulates a vision of the social that stretches into the grave.
Still, I wouldn’t call Freedom & Prostitution an adaptation of Antigone. It’s more like an expansion or a dilation of the play’s premise and conflict. In Troyan’s poetry the positions occupied by the play’s characters proliferate and repeat everywhere that power is exercised. Perhaps you remember that Antigone opens with a scandal: following a civil war that pitted two brothers, Polynieces and Eteokles, against one another and left both of them dead, the new king, their uncle Kreon, rules that as a dissuasion against future uprisings, Polynieces’s corpse must be left unburied. Anyone who disobeys the ruling will be stoned to death. But Antigone, the younger sister of the two dead men, refuses to obey the law and buries her brother repeatedly, embracing the consequences. While other characters share her grief, Antigone holds “the weight of … all the rage / that no one else can be bothered to carry,” to borrow a phrase from Freedom & Prostitution. Troyan doesn’t recycle or rework the Antigone narrative; rather than letting any individual bear “suffering as / punishment and tool against you,” Freedom & Prostitution traces the collective practices that arise in response.
Aileen Wuornos is the first Polynieces of Freedom & Prostitution. What I mean is that she is the first person “to be killed without the dignity of death,” as Troyan puts it in a later poem. The book opens with an excerpt from an interview between Wuornos, a sex worker who was convicted of killing six men and executed by lethal injection in 2002, and Nick Broomfield, a documentarian who has made two films about her life. Long quotations from Wuornos, presented with minimal framing commentary, establish the problem that Freedom & Prostitution discusses: “a raped woman got executed,” Wuornos says; “you don’t take fucking human life like this and just sabotage it and rip it apart like Jesus on the cross.” Wuornos is talking about herself, but she is also speaking in general terms; she mixes the past tense with an imperative (“you don’t”) that points toward the future. In this refusal to accept her own abandonment, and in her apparent embrace of her own death (“I’m leaving, I’m glad”), Wuornos isn’t just Polynieces, she’s also Antigone—she’s willing to die in response to an injustice. Like the daybreak dialogue between Antigone and her sister Ismene that opens Sophocles’s play, where Ismene struggles to understand why her sister is so “hot for chilling deeds,” Troyan uses Wuornos’s discussion with Broomfield to depict the tension crackling between one person who lives within and accepts the limits of the law, and another who, in her impossible situation, refuses to do so.
Although its opening alludes to a canonical tragedy, Freedom & Prostitution immediately exceeds this classical precursor. In Troyan’s depiction, Wuornos is extra-Antigone. Whereas Sophocles’s character is willing to risk death to address injustice, Wuornos is ready to kill. While Antigone says “it’s fine” to die, Wuornos says “I’m glad.” These shifts presage the book’s fundamental transformation of tragedy: the scandal in Freedom & Prostitution is not that the unthinkable has happened in Wuornos’s singular case. The scandal is that similar things happen over and over, all the time. Troyan discusses the seemingly infinite violence that women face in sex work and in intimate relationships, approaching it not through the representative example of a single character but from a Foucauldian understanding of power as diffuse, distributed, and discursive. Freedom & Prostitution forces tragedy to accommodate this pervasive, atmospheric violence, retrofitting the genre so that it stretches across the span of the social structure, and so that it shrinks tight around the nuances of specific encounters.
If it seems that I’m shifting into an abstract, theoretical register, I should specify that Troyan grounds Freedom & Prostitution in the details of specific events. While Polynieces figures proliferate and the locations of their makeshift graves are tracked across the landscape, they are always and insistently depicted as real people. Midway through the book, a sequence of prose elegies addresses Wendy Lee Coffield, Gisele Ann Lovvorn, Debra Lynn Bonner, Marcia Fay Chapman, Cynthia Jean Hinds, Mary Sue Bello, Opal Charmaine Mills, Debra Lorraine Estes, Mary Bridget Meehan, Linda Jane Rule, and thirty-nine other named and unnamed women and girls murdered in Washington State during the 1980s and 1990s. At once representing themselves, the impossibility of adequate memorialization, and the incalculable number of people killed while doing sex work or by their partners, these real, named women and girls raise a problem of scale: “How many deaths do these women die, what does it mean if you died loved, if you died cherished. If your family mourned your loss, if your father drank himself to death. It’s a kind of terror to repeat these fragments, the residue of a life that circles around itself,” the speaker says in reference to their own spare recitation of the details of sixteen-year-old Opal Charmaine Mills’s life and death. These individuals are not held up as case studies or instructive examples; they are nestled among countless others who are similarly dragged toward death, pulled by the wrist, by the hair, by the throat.
Freedom & Prostitution insists on a closeness or togetherness with anyone who has been through this kind of thing: “to die with you, to die in this ditch, to die strangled in the woods, is not histrionics it is embodied mourning.” This insistence on being “with” a dead person is directly and specifically Antigonean—generations of classicists and philosophers have wrung their hands over Antigone’s stated desire to “lie there … with” her “dear” dead brother. These lines are typically interpreted as evidence of a perversity that disqualifies Antigone from normal human relation and, eventually, from life itself, sealing her fate as a (if not the) tragic hero. But Troyan draws something else out of this impulse to with-ness: in Freedom & Prostitution the Antigonean insistence on proximity to the dead “is not histrionics,” it is an “embodied” practice of political community—one that cannot just be avowed, but must be coordinated, performed, and enacted. Just as these Polynieces figures proliferate, requiring redress, vengeance, or justice, so do the Antigones who insist that they must receive it, who lie with them and give it to them.
Given this emphasis on being like and being with, Freedom & Prostitution is, of necessity, a little crowded. There is not one singular, unique speaker. Despite its overall consistency in tone, the book is explicitly constructed as a collage of voices. The opening passage from the Broomfield documentary makes this clear. Other references—quotations from the theoretical works of Jacques Lacan and Andrea Dworkin, or bits of court cases involving the criminalization of sex workers and survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence—are recent or familiar enough to ring a bell. (Troyan also includes a provocative commentary on the politics of citation in their afterword.) Although the poems have a clear basis in and relationship to other texts, they always feel intimate; that personal quality that we expect from lyric poetry is lambently present in numerous passages that feel like alienated recollections, like the retelling of one’s own experience to oneself. Other moments sound like self-coaching, self-soothing, or self-talk: “remember / that you can do almost anything / for an hour.”
What I find most striking about this book’s construction of poetic “selfiness” is that it is achieved without relying on the I/you dyad that defines lyric poetry. Traditionally, what prompts the “I” to speak in a lyric poem is the absence of the “you”—the lyric’s condition of possibility is that someone isn’t there. Usually, that someone is a woman; often, the speaker conjures her in verse because in real life she is dead. It’s worth noting how closely this structural absence aligns with the apparently subjectless, completed-but-unperformed violence in which women—and especially sex workers—are said to go missing, to have disappeared. Freedom & Prostitution is built differently. Instead of a singular speaking “I” whose presence is constituted by the necessary absence of a “you,” whoever it is who addresses “you” is not “I,” but more “you.” Everyone in Freedom & Prostitution is “you,” speaker as well as addressee. Instead of a foundational absence this book is built on foundational proximity and foundational likeness. The all-you structure of Freedom & Prostitution constitutes another Antigonean demand. It insists on the presence of “you,” the non-separation of “you” from the scene of utterance, and the capacity of “you” to be here, “speaking like any other dead girl.” Every instance of this pronoun is a calling-into-presence of, and an insistence on togetherness with anyone who’s been killed or disappeared, and with anyone else who could be. It is a refusal of distinction or separation from such people, an insistence that not even death breaks the bonds with them.
It helps to remember, then, that in a lyric poem, “you” is the beloved, the one who (even unwittingly) makes something beautiful happen and is worthy of poetry’s gorgeous excess. In some ways, Troyan’s use of “you” is reminiscent of Claudia Rankine’s in Citizen: An American Lyric, and it could also be compared to Paul Celan’s in his late work. In each of these cases, “you” is social and reciprocal; it serves as a transit between the particularity of a singular life and the scope of life in general. In Freedom & Prostitution, “you” similarly refers to real, specific people and to the things that have happened to them: “You look at your face, the new version of your face after you almost died. You still do not recognize this face. Your mouth shaped differently by the loss of so many teeth.” Moments like this one have a documentary quality; they seem to be drawn from life, although we don’t know whose. While discussions of the use of “you” in contemporary poetry often emphasize this specificity, focusing on the way that it addresses—or even touches—the reader, this understanding strikes me as too closely tied to the second person singular, which is the narrowest version of “you.” What seems more important in Freedom & Prostitution is the second person plural—“you” has a radical capacity to expand and to gather. In Celan’s work, “you” specifically mediates between the singular and the general as it calls into life whatever it is that is “lost, estranged, or helplessly removed from the self,” in the words of Joanna Klink. In Freedom & Prostitution, “you” calls out to everyone who has been “killed without the dignity of death,” but instead of talking about them, this book talks to them and with them—I’d even say that poetic speech is predicated on the potential to become them. Freedom & Prostitution insists that its invocation of “you” is “not a fantasy”—it actually works. Rather than positioning poetry as a compensation for the real-life loss of “you,” the climactic moment in Freedom & Prostitution is an address and a ritual performance that summons the whole army of you-Polynieceses “Out of the grave / and into the streets!”
This brings me to Troyan’s most radical engagement with the genre of tragedy. If we’re thinking in traditional terms, the conflict in a tragedy—also known as the agon—is relatively contained. Although it resonates along the axes of broad themes, it unfolds in the narrow place between the main characters. Tragedy is often understood as a battle of wills: in Antigone, it’s Kreon against Antigone, a gendered and generational conflict that we interpret as state against non-citizen, law against morality, or society against kin. What happens on the stage is mediated for the audience by the chorus, a group that sings, dances, and opines about the play’s goings-on. Choruses can have a range of relations to the action, from the dispassionate observers of Euripides’s Phoenician Women to the emotional, even panicked chorus that debates with the characters in Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes. However, choruses tend to be positioned aside the conflict, even if they are sometimes used to demonstrate its rippling effects. By shifting the agon from a contest between individual characters to a broad structural condition—the designation of a proportion of the population as “woman,” and the “impoverish[ment of] everyday life” that is experienced as a result—Troyan twists tragedy, pulling the chorus to its center. Tragedy traditionally demands analysis and judgment of its audience. In Freedom & Prostitution, these demands are made through the chorus’s restless and vengeful effort: “Let’s look at this crowbar, what do you see?” The chorus’s bodily synchrony, it’s direct address, means that judgment is more than a detached act of contemplation. Here, the chorus confronts us as a movement that it’s possible to join.
Recently, the writer-scholar Saidiya Hartman has also turned to the chorus, combining the collective of witnesses seen in the ancient theater with the mesmerizing lineups of singers and dancers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Hartman fuses archival research, theory, and fictional narrative in a Black feminist practice that she calls critical fabulation. Using this strategy to document the restless, desirous movement of city-dwelling Black women and gender nonconforming people who refused both grinding labor and good behavior, Hartman explains that the word chorus refers etymologically to “dance within an enclosure.” She describes the chorus in her book as articulating a “long history of struggle,” and a “ceaseless practice of black radicalism and refusal,” one that is comprised of upheaval, rebellion, collaboration, and improvisation unfolding within a space defined by limitation. Hemmed in on all sides, the chorus is a figure of collectivity, transformation, and possibility, “an assembly sustaining dreams of the otherwise.”
Hartman’s overt theorization of her own chorus is helpful for understanding Troyan’s. Just like in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, the chorus in Freedom & Prostitution is “where the headless group incites change, where mutual aid provides the source for collective action … where the untranslatable songs and seeming nonsense make good the promise of revolution.” At first, Troyan’s “chorus of sex workers” is mostly “in the background.” They “call out” and are heard but remain largely off-stage. As Freedom & Prostitution progresses, though, the chorus speaks more. It moves to the center, providing disruption, succor, or relief: “The chorus arrives and you are / on the move again no longer afraid.” This gathering mass, “tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, you lose count” exceeds the thrill and size of riot; its “tactile expanding body … communicates beyond and without in this unwieldy shifting mass, a joy not unlike revenge, fills you with possibility.”
While so many aspects of tragedy are bogged down and overdetermined by tradition, there’s an interpretative openness that comes with the chorus. When I last taught Antigone, soliloquizing via YouTube to my own nearly anonymous chorus of students, I told them that of all the parts of Greek tragedy, we know the least about the chorus. We know that they sang, but we don’t know what it sounded like. We know that they danced, but the choreography hasn’t survived. We aren’t sure how audiences understood the relationship between the chorus and the main characters or the plot, still less how they understood the relationship between the chorus and themselves. What we do know is that the chorus is a collective; we know that its lines have a particular poetic density. Troyan, like Hartman, draws out the full potential of these motile, difficult-to-understand, collective figures. For both, the chorus offers an apparatus for describing things that a lot of people experience. It is a place where tragedy’s concern with justice can be expanded beyond the narrow frame of a couple of characters, and where it is possible to imagine the complex choreography of violence enacted by the state and by those who take it upon themselves to carry out its spoken and unspoken objectives. More importantly, it is through the chorus that we can picture the coordinated movements that arise in opposition, and therefore the production (to use a theatrical term) of alternatives.
For a long time—at least since Hegel—tragedy has been understood more as a philosophical idea and less as a dramatic form. By focusing on the structure of tragedy, Hegel moved it out of the theater and reimagined it as a force of tensions and resolutions animating the progress of history. In an essay on his own novels, the French writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet infamously criticizes this “systematic tragification of the universe,” attacking the way that ideas of tragedy elevate “suffering into a sublime necessity.” Tragedy, he says, “tries to make us love our misery” so that we “forget all about trying to find a remedy for it.” Like a number of other mid-century leftist intellectuals, Robbe-Grillet objected to the way that tragedy ennobles anguish, purifying it and making it capital-M meaningful. Quite rightly, Robbe-Grillet insisted that it is necessary to reject this insidious justification of suffering. In moments, Troyan provides a related critique of the systematic tragification of sex work, and of the way that the violence sex workers face appears an intractable decree of fate, not as the consciously created political problem that it is. But Freedom & Prostitution departs significantly from the critiques offered by Robbe-Grillet and others: Troyan never reduces tragedy to the set of philosophical abstractions arising from the foreordained torments of its heroes. Instead, Freedom & Prostitution reveals that the coordination of embodied actions in space and time, undertaken with others, are equally essential to the genre—these offer a means of extending and expanding its relevance, of making tragedy address the proliferation and distribution of everyday assaults.
Near the end of the book, Troyan shifts into an instructional mode reminiscent of procedural poetry’s imperatives to act:
You create a ceremony
you sit in a room facing forward
making small sounds
since you cannot look at anyone
you are permitted to cry
weeping bodies make a rustling that begins
slowly gaining in heat and friction
the entire building vibrating
shifting in landscapes
territories continents
until the dead are here
What strikes me most about this moment is the insistence on its realness: soon after, Troyan writes, “This is not a fantasy / you are in the room with the dead.” And aren’t we? In tragedy, as in the world, the dead make their demands on those of us who are still living. In Freedom & Prostitution, this encounter exceeds any page-bound conception of poetry. The collision with drama—and specifically with its troupes of singers and dancers—allows us to think of Freedom & Prostitution as providing a script for performance, by which I mean a set of instructions for actually doing something. This book ends on a loud, distinctly Antigonean note of incitement. Much as Antigone’s insistence on lying with her dead brother caused numerous other characters to undertake wild acts of their own, I read the turn to ritual and revolution at the end of Freedom & Prostitution as demanding the enactment of a different political community. The contours of this community are not fully specified, but we are asked to picture it as a “chorus of sex workers” moving fluidly from the graves to the streets, and remaking their own bodies and the “spilling architecture” of the social as they do so.
Freedom & Prostitution amplifies the forces of revenge, destruction, freedom, and beauty, showing how these can “command the frame,” break the “cyclical motion / of harm” and “cut the world in stars.” This returns me to my opening mantra: just because something is sad, that doesn’t mean it’s a tragedy. It’s equally true that just because something is a tragedy doesn’t mean it’s only sad. In Troyan’s poetry, it becomes clear that tragedy is also about getting mad, getting even, and—most of all—getting into our positions within an unstable choreography of resistance.