Word: prometheus
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Tyrant. Kott's approach to tragedy is almost too empathetic. He begins and ends with the supreme sufferer, Prometheus. The classic hero, he suggests, enters a world that is either mismanaged or overmanaged. The tyrant may be a king or he may, as happened in the case of Prometheus, be Zeus himself. Out of compassion for the tyrant's suffering victims, out of a superb but frightening presumption, the hero ultimately proposes himself as "mediator and savior." He will rebel. He will disturb the existing order-even risk chaos-to secure a new covenant with power...
...Prometheus, chained to his rock, his liver torn and eaten by Zeus's eagle, cannot escape his destiny, but he can escape his fate. "Fate," Kott writes, "is non-awareness." And Prometheus, like all heroes of Greek tragedy, finally becomes pure awareness, at the pitch of ecstatic agony...
...latter-day equivalent of Greek tragedy, Kott recommends, as a salient example, the spectacle of a paralyzed man confronting a woman half-buried alive: Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, "the final version of the Prometheus myth." Nor does Kott fail to provide the unerringly apt caption-Sophocles' dread-filled line, "Nothing surpasses not being born...
...serious physicists who believe that such a breach is imminent is Columbia University's Gerald Feinberg, who suggests in his book The Prometheus Project that man may eventually find the means to achieve immortality. Feinberg thinks that psychic transmissions may one day be linked to as yet un discovered elementary particles, so-called mindons or psychons. Other scientists, however, give less credence to such will-o'-the-wisps than they give to another conjectured particle championed by Feinberg: the tachyon, which always travels faster than the speed of light, the theoretical speed limit of the universe...
Even at its most eloquent moments, however, this Prometheus Bound is no more than good acting and clever staging, and the reason for the drama's failure lies in the nature of the Prometheus myth itself. The idea of an indifferent God whose supposed wisdom seems more like folly is familiar today; the words of those who urge the rebel to conform ring true. What is incredible about an expression of the Prometheus myth today is the concept of a savior of mankind. About the Titan's successful defiance of tyranny the play revolves; upon the distance of this idea...