Germane to the art of tragedy is its negotiation with the idea of awareness or understanding, either by the tragic characters whom the audience pities or by the audience themselves. In the absence of this negotiation, tragedy is arguably deprived of its tragic quality, lacking the primary vehicle through which it achieves its affect. As such, tragedy has a stake in dramatizing the notion of awareness that is immanent to the genre. This essay considers the question of whether tragedy arises from man being aware or unaware of his fate. By examining, in turns,Agamemnon, Oedipus the King, King Lear, and W.B. Yeats's poem "Leda and the Swan," I will first argue that the formal aspects of tragedy—or more specifically, the use of the chorus and its odes—evince the changeable quality of man's awareness and knowledge. Not only is knowledge inconsistent, tragedy suggests that the tools and organs by which man establishes what he knows are often unreliable too. The trope of blindness, both physical and metaphorical, is a generic feature that is unsurprisingly salient in the plays discussed; the manipulation of which in tragedy lends credence to the idea that human sight and, by extension, any understanding that is grounded in a limited perspective inform a modus operandi even as they are epistemologically undependable. Man's use of it to navigate the tenebrous world around him results in error that paves the way to tragic outcomes. It is interesting to consider, in Agamemnon's prophetess Cassandra, the other scenario, where the possession of a surfeit of knowledge seems as tragic as having to endure the limitations of knowledge and understanding. Reading "Leda and the Swan" after the figure of Cassandra perhaps supports a nihilistic conclusion, that to know too much or anything at all seems inconsequential either way in the avoidance of suffering.
I.
To each his sufferings: all are men
Condemn'd alike to groan
The tender for another's pain,
The unfeeling for his own.
Yet, ah! why should they know their fate,
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies?
Thought would destroy their Paradise.
No more;—where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise. (Gray, ll.91-100)
The paradox in the final stanza of Thomas Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" warns that the forfeiture of happiness is concomitant with increases in man's knowledge and his awareness of fate. This, too, the Chorus in Aeschylus' Agamemnon cautions: "The future / you shall know when it has come; before then, forget it. / It is grief too soon given" (251-253). Yet for man to not confront the unavoidable, to shun it and go on living with the vague awareness of the sorrow or grief which he knows fate has in store for him and will eventually come is to have one's happiness thoroughly shot through with, and punctured by, a troubling irony. There lies the dilemma: one has to either brace oneself for the traumatic disclosure of truth and consequent suffering, or, if he decides to remain in the dark in spite of some foreknowledge, to engage in Orwellian doublethink. Both impulses are, as some of the texts suggest, at war with each other and mixed antithetically in man's nature.
An embodiment of this dueling duality in man apropos awareness and knowledge may be found in the staging of the chorus in Sophocles's Oedipus the King. In this section I discuss how the tragic is a function of man's partial knowledge of divine intentions, and how the form of tragedy dramatises this problem. One of the dramaturgical features of some Greek tragedy — the Chorus's dance from right to left across the stage when they perform the strophes of the choral ode and from left to right and back to their original position during the antistrophes—is especially evocative in this regard. The chorus's lateral movement on the stage may be read as a visual representation of the vacillation experienced by man as he is torn between the polar desires for awareness and for unawareness. The chorus's spatial sweep to the left and right of the stage conjures the gruesome image of man "stretched on the rack of doubt" (153).
The torturous doubt is extended in the structure of the choral verse itself. It has already been pointed out that, in their first ode, the chorus invokes a host of gods, including Phoebus Apollo or the Lycean King, Athene, Artemis, Zeus, and Dionysus (the Bacchic God) to "speak to [them]" (156), "come to [them] now" (165) and "combat" (213) Ares, the War God, whom they understand is the source of the plague that ravages Thebes. The citation of Dionysus, who is associated with darkness, madness, irrationality, is striking, and perhaps peculiar, especially in the context of the story in which the protagonist is bent on clarifying prophecies and using his rationality to discover the truth. There are at least two considerations that are available here. The first is, although in the strophe the elders declare their desire for illumination: "Whatsoever escapes the night / at last the light of day revisits" (197-8), this diurnal metaphor completes itself with a return to (and of) the nocturnal in the prayer to Dionysus mere moments later in the antistrophe. The return should hardly be surprising in a play that is originally staged in festivals that honoured the same patron deity of Greek theatre. The invocation of Dionysus is therefore a nod towards the constellation of ideas which he represents: opacity, secrecy, concealment. It is not difficult to see why these notions have some value in the play when we appreciate and respond to Oedipus's suffering as a result of his anagnorisis. The intensity of his anguish appears proportional to his desire to verify what he thinks he knows and to access the knowledge that the prophet warns him about approaching. As with all tragedy with some perepeteia involved, we entertain the hypothetical, and wonder if Oedipus's misery might have been attenuated if he did not rabidly seek out a truth that was previously unintelligible, and whether, consequently, successive generations—which include Antigone, Ismene, Polyneices and Eteocles—might not then inherit or be apportioned a share of "all the evils that stem from Oedipus" (Antigone 3).
Another consideration that the chorus's odes invite is to do with the pointedness with which the audience is made aware of the theological context in which Greek tragedy situates itself, that is, a polytheistic universe where the signs from gods are mixed and often impenetrable. Man's understanding of the world is therefore laden with the potential of being riddled with contradictions. The plurality of the gods in the Olympian pantheon, whose celestial affairs and whims influence the human realm in ways that are sometimes direct, sometimes oblique, renders the Greek universe a confusing, over-determined one. Perhaps this explains the desperate manner in which the chorus in Oedipus applies to a range of gods in the first ode. Already, the Thebans whose lives are sundered by calamity have to struggle to interpret signs everywhere, from cryptic oracles and screaming birds to other coded messages from the divine, which are unintelligible to all except the rare gifted prophet. The desire to read signs from the gods and the perceived necessity of reading those signs are frustrated by the inadequacy of the bulk of humanity in the field of divine semiotics.
What augments the pathos of man's general unawareness is the difficulty he experiences in attempting to arrive at a coherent understanding of causality while witnessing tragic events unfold. The plague which Thebes is (according to the elders) subjected to occurs presumably because of Ares' wrath: "There is no clash of brazen shields but our fight is with the War God, / a War God ringed with the cries of men, a savage God who burns us" (190-191). "The God that is our enemy," they say, "is a God unhonoured among the Gods" (213-215). Yet moments earlier in the first strophe, the elders appear to connect their plight with not Ares' but Apollo’s power when they plead: "O Delian healer, and I worship full of fears for what doom you will bring to pass, new or renewed in the resolving years"(emphasis mine). In the span of one ode, the elders posit myriad explanations that involve different gods: here charging Ares with causing the plague, there attributing imminent doom to Apollo; here calling for the trio of Athene, Artemis and Phoebus to avert Fate (yet another culprit), there implying that Athene, who controls fertility and childbirth, withholds assistance from the people and heeds not the suppliant moaning of the city's mothers and wives. The final ode performed by the chorus charts a graver alteration. It begins with a profession of religious piety:
Strophe
May destiny ever find me
pious in word and deed
prescribed by the laws that live on high:
laws begotten in the clear air of heaven,
whose only father is Olympus;
no mortal nature brought them to birth,
no forgetfulness shall lull them to sleep;
for God is great in them and grows not old. (864-871)
But veneration and awe transmute into raving agnosticism by the final antistrophe:
No longer to the holy place
to the navel of earth I'll go
to worship, nor to Abae
nor to Olympia,
unless the oracles are proved to fit,
for all men's hands to point at.
O Zeus, if you are rightly called
the sovereign lord, all-mastering,
let this not escape you nor your ever-living power!
The oracles concerning Laius
Are old and dim and men regard them not.
Apollo is nowhere clear in honour; God's service perishes. (897-910)
Skepticism and disaffection ensue, as the people have had to contend with "old and dim" oracles with messages that are often inscrutable. In fact, at several points inOedipus, metaphors that derive from archery abound, underscoring man's ignorance of what the gods have in store for them. The chorus, for instance, wishes to know "how we may best hit the God's meaning for us" (407). Earlier, Teiresias remarks to Oedipus:
Yes, but I see that even your own words
miss the mark; … (324-5)
which returns to the idea of falling short of targets. The enjambment after "your own words" visually represents the ironic disjunction and disconnection between the intention behind many of ignorant Oedipus's statements and the resonances that are attached to his words. By the antistrophe above, when the Chorus protests that "Apollo is nowhere clear in honour," the pun on "clear" establishes the dependence, of man's belief in divine credibility, on the transparency of the gods' messages. Obfuscation of the meaning of those same messages begets incredulity and the crisis of faith. [In Agamemnon, the wearied chorus, despondent over the long war, is quick to suspect the message sent of Troy's fall via fire: "If this be real / who knows? Perhaps the gods have sent some lie to us" (477-8).] The opacity of knowledge and the disconcerting difficulty that besets interpretation have taken their toll on the people and bring the chorus to the brink of blaspheming against Apollo and Zeus.
Yet curiously enough, on the heels of this instance which manifests the chorus's faithlessness, Sophocles has Jocasta enter on stage bearing garlands and gifts of incense and making her way to the gods' temple to propitiate Apollo—in ironic contradistinction to the chorus's virtual agnosticism. Reading together the various moments in the drama in which a multitude of gods are invoked in desperation and man's attitude toward the divine fluctuates erratically, one realises that the dramatic helter-skelter behaviour that the chorus exhibits boils down, it would seem, to the sheer unknowability of how it is exactly that the gods, or even which gods, are, firstly, responsible for human suffering, and secondly, able to redress human grievances and bring deliverance. The oscillations between faith and doubt may be read as an understandable ('human', as it were) reaction to limited knowledge, the provisional and tentative nature of which prevents man from holding steadfastly to any opinion.
While Oedipus the King is primarily concerned with the titular character's will-to truth, anagnorisis and suffering, it is arguably the chorus, and the performance of their odes, that symbolise more fittingly the common man's condition in the same universe. It is a condition that is also tragic—even if it is Tragedy writ small or less significant—where a reassessment of what man knows is continually demanded of him, and the grounds on which man organises his worldview are, in times of crisis, continually undermined and precariously shifting. The calamitous events that affect the state are, because of the smallness of the individual's stature and status, more alarming and bewildering. The common man, such as the children and the priest who open the play, or the "grey haired mothers and wives" (181), suffer in the margins because of the plague brought upon them by the gods whose main sport appears to be with Oedipus. On top of suffering as a result of incomplete awareness that cannot be perfected to the level of god-like omniscience, the common man must feel even less responsibility for or control over his suffering than the likes of Oedipus, Laius or Jocasta. He is confined to hovering uncertainly, even schizophrenically, between anxiety and despair, optimism and faithlessness.
It is not surprising, then, that given the difficulty for the common man to obtain, let alone hold onto, any meaning or knowledge that does not undergo revision after revision during protracted crises, there is a tendency for the chorus in Greek tragedy (Sophoclean tragedy, at least) to trot out simplistic and reductive lessons at the close of the drama when their world is more stable, in line with the human desire to try to take something away from experience. Beckett famously concludes The Unnamable with a chant which bears repeating here: "I don't know, I'll never know: in the silence you don't know. You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on." (418) Though banal and hackneyed, the final choral pronouncements that conclude the play may therefore be more generously understood as a means for the common man to cope with the otherwise unbearable incomprehensibility of a slippery universe.
II.
If we consider man's quest for knowledge—as a means of limiting the deficiency in his awareness of the relation between him and the divine—a key thematic concern in tragedy, it is likely to be productive to also investigate how tragedy treats those who are made aware of the truth of their realities, or who are gifted or cursed with foreknowledge. Relevant to this consideration are, besides Oedipus, Lear's Gloucester, Teiresias, and Agamemnon's Cassandra.
Blindness is a trait shared by several characters in some of the most memorable tragedies, who are entangled in narratives of knowing and unknowing. The conceit of sight as knowledge and man's subsequent dispossession thereof plays out in the subplot of Lear. Gloucester correctly discerns between Edgar and Edmund only after his eyes are put out. The point of tragedy which thematises sight and blindness may be reduced to a recognition of the failure of human sight in enabling one to read oneself, other people, or one's destiny. The notorious phrase "vile jelly" (III.vii.86)—by which Cornwall refers to Gloucester's eyes—is germane where it draws on the more archaic sense of the word 'vile,' that is, of having little value, when eyes are worthless in helping man perceive the truth before him.
But the connotation of 'cruelty' is also apposite particularly in Gloucester's case, as I will argue. In the play, his eyes fail him in more than one sense. Not only is he unable to discern with any certainty if the handwriting of the letter Edmund produces is truly Edgar's, the act of reading the letter—one notes that he repeats his demand "Let's see"(I.ii.32-36) thrice—proves to be a faulty epistemological apparatus that fatally assists in the creation of an illusion of 'awareness'—here, of the betrayal by one of his sons (in fact, the wrong one). This illusion Gloucester credits almost immediately as the truth. The 'awareness' he 'gains' with his eyes is misleading. Eyes here defeat what ought to have been a firmer knowledge of Edgar's filial piety. After Regan reveals Edmund's betrayal it is Gloucester's appreciation of the irony and his realization of Edgar's innocence that leads him to rationalize his maiming in the heath:
Gloucester
I stumbled when I saw. Full oft 'tis seen,
Our means secure us, and our mere defects
Prove our commodities. Ah! Dear son Edgar. (Lear IV.i.24-26)
Sight is useless or, worse still, the cause of one's errors if, with it, man not only cannot discern between good and bad but even mistakes one for the other. That which allowed Gloucester to interpret made him over-secure in the false information he gathered, and it is in the experience of physical blindness, which one would ordinarily have despised, that reveals what is truly valuable.
Teiresias, who appears in Sophocles' tragedies such as Oedipus the King andAntigone, embodies just this special paradoxical condition of possessing insight and knowledge at the cost of, or in exchange for, physical sight. Oedipus the King’s final moment reinforces just this point and enacts it with the audience in the theatre ortheatron (the etymological roots of which word has to do with seeing) when the chorus implores them to "behold" (1524) the self-blinded protagonist. In reflecting on the mute image of Oedipus blindly staring back, the audience registers the tragic inversion: to have eyes is to possess markers of our very bodily humanity, and to be ordinarily human is to be dispossessed of all knowledge or awareness except the particular and self-centred. We arrive, through the experience of tragedy that tropes blindness and sight, at the acute awareness that, as eyes are intrinsically corporeal, their situation in the body—in the front of the head—metonymizes the various limitations that circumscribe man's perspective on any matter. George Eliot's famous optical analogy in Middlemarch presents this point from another angle:
Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel … will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little
sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent … (Chapter 27, 194-5)
Tragedy insistently reminds its audience that man's awareness is always a function of perspective. In his ego-centric interpretation of any situation, meaning is imposed on events which are otherwise arbitrary or which non-exclusively lend themselves just as well to the production of other possible meanings to other people. These interpretations take on a tragic cast when man, unable to see beyond his own point-of-view from another/another's perspective, acts selfishly on that incomplete awareness. We note this in the tragedy of Antigone where Creon, acting in the capacity of statesman (as opposed to the role of uncle), refuses to compromise on his political commitments or to recognise the validity of his niece's familial obligations —at the eventual cost of the death of the notion of 'family' that is symbolised by his family's suicide. We note something similar in the tragedy of Lear, where the king, assessing Cordelia's affections through the myopic lens of his royalty, is blind to the nuance that, when she says "I love your majesty / according to my bond; no more nor less" (I.i.74-75) she sees her bond to him not as that of a subject to her monarch but as daughter to father—a view of their relationship he reciprocates finally, after much trial and suffering, in the French camp: "For, as I am a man, I think this lady / To be my child Cordelia" (IV.vii.78- 79). Deafened by his obsequious elder daughters' hyperbolic professions, Lear is unable to pick up on Cordelia's quieter desire to simply "love and be silent" (I.i.43), and reads her infamous response—"nothing"—as nothing short of insolence when it means instead, from her perspective, that no words can express her affection. Tragedy is a product from the condition of man's basic inability to transcend the limitations of perspective and adopt a god's-eye view. The potential for tragedy inheres, therefore, simply in the fact that man is, by definition, not god.
However, if this were true, that the potential for tragedy inheres in man's ungod-likeness, why then is Cassandra in Agamemnon tragic when she is blessed with the gift of foreknowledge that eludes most mortals? As the chorus suggests when it questions her, Cassandra possesses supra-human abilities of clairvoyance. The elders ask her if she is "ecstatic in the skills of God" (1209), and ecstasy, the root of which word is in ekstasis in the Greek, while connoting insanity, also applies to the "withdrawal of the soul from the body, [a] mystic or prophetic trance" (OED). With Apollo's gift, Cassandra transcends beyond the bodily limitations that define man's capacity for knowledge and awareness. We might understand why we—like the Chorus—pity Cassandra in spite of her 'gift' if we turn to Karl Deutsch's cogent formulation of tragedy and its relation to awareness (which may be found in his introduction to Karl Jaspers' Tragedy is Not Enough):
Tragedy occurs wherever awareness exceeds power; and particularly where awareness of a major need exceeds the power to satisfy it. The thirst that cannot be quenched, the compassion with human suffering that cannot as yet be alleviated—these are inseparable from human existence. As human powers grow, and old needs are satisfied, awareness will have grown as much or more, and new needs and new tragedies will have been discovered. Tragedy thus may be said to occur at the margin of awareness beyond power, where men can sense and suffer beyond their ability to act and win success—a margin that can and should shift its position, but which perhaps does not shrink. The alternative to recurrent tragedy, the abolition of this margin of awareness, might well destroy the humanity of man. A person whose limits of awareness should coincide precisely with his limits of successful action would be unlikely to suffer. (Jaspers 17-18)
Apart from 'awareness', Deutsch introduces another variable into determinations of tragedy, that is, 'power' or the lack thereof to effect change prompted by the awareness of danger or evil. In the light of his observation, it is clear that the abject tragedy facing Cassandra stems from her powerlessness: she suffers from a fundamental inability to even articulate foreknowledge, let alone translate knowledge into action to save herself or Agamemnon from Clytaemestra. Where she desires communication and comprehension, she receives ineffectual pity instead, "O poor wretch, I pity the fate you see so clear" (1321). Like Sophocles, Aeschylus borrows from the language of archery when he has Cassandra describe her visions to the chorus: "Did I go wide, or hit, like a real archer?" (1194). But where she differs from the blind prophet Teiresias is the site of the production of black irony: even though her prophecy hits the bull's-eye, nobody around her grasps its significance; they "wander still far from the course" of her meaning (1245).
Cassandra's course of foreknowledge is one that she treads solitarily, as a mortal whom Apollo has wilfully differentiated from her fellow men. All she can do is gesture imprecisely or "make with [her] barbarian hand some sign" (1061). Her supra-human prescience designates her as a barbarian in more than the sense of 'foreigner from Troy' which Clytaemestra appears to intend. Cassandra's otherness in these aspects singles her out as a tragic figure, whose tragedy comprises of her existence in various margins. At a theoretical level she occupies the margin that Deutsch describes, of awareness that exceeds power to effect change.
But in the tragedy of Agamemnon she ends up as collateral damage in Clytaemestra's grand scheme of revenge, a practically meaningless kill that is subordinate to the main victim of the slaughter—Agamemnon himself. She is only too aware of her peripheral involvement in the extended family saga when she prays that the avengers will remember her "one simple slave who died, a small thing, lightly killed" (1326). What's Atreidae to her, or she to Atreidae, that she should helplessly die for them? Foreknowledge renders her fate more tragic than many of the other marginal figures who are innocently sacrificed in the tradition of Greek tragedy, such as Medea's children, Iphigeneia, or Thyestes' children, who are all slain and butchered by kin and relations—because to her end Cassandra "walk[s] to the altar like a driven ox to God" (1297-8) with full knowledge of an impending violent death that few men ever foresee. Awareness intensifies the poignancy of the tragic where it fashions the individual, who submits to a fate that is barbarous in contrast, as the calm at the centre of a storm. We see this quality in Hardy's Tess of D'urbervilles lying down serenely at the Stone Henge in full readiness for her arrest, or in the image of the man rooted before a tank at Tiananmen, or in Hedda Gabler's suicide. That there is hardly any further resistance, because resistance is futile ("There is no escape for any longer time," 1299) augments the tragic quality of Cassandra's slow but inescapable entry into the bathhouse. Forced, as Clytaemestra notes, to "take the curb" (1066) in a foreign land, and entangled in the "net of death" (1115) that is cast over the accursed house of Atreidae, the captive princess, in being drawn into the house, is symbolically domesticated, finally and violently.
Cassandra's plight moves audiences because they empathize with her, and this may be attributed to the structure of the theatrical experience. She and they are structural doubles: not only are they aware of how the tragedy is to unfold even before it does, they, like her, are powerless to alter the course of the inexorable narrative. Unlike the other characters, especially Aegisthus and Clytaemestra, the audience has, at the end of the play, picked up on Cassandra's prophetic vision of Orestes's vengeance (1278-1285) and know that any 'good order' the murderous couple think they have returned the house to is merely transient against the backdrop of the protracted violence that spans generations. They are aware of the play's situation in the Oresteia trilogy, of the inheritance of violence from the generation of Atreus and Thyestes that does not end with Agamemnon's death; they note, perhaps, that the beating wings spoken of and heard, even if figuratively, by the chorus—
Why must this persistent fear
beat its wings so ceaselessly
and so close against my mantic heart?
Why this strain unwanted, unrepaid, thus prophetic? (975-78)
—seem an ominous allusion to the Erinyes, earlier in the play also called "the black Furies stalking the man" (463), which will descend on Orestes at the end of The Libation Bearers. Knowledge leaves the audiences entangled alike in the experience of tragedy, through which fear and pity are aroused in them especially when they identify with those who are aware that the tragic impulse may not be stayed.
Cassandra's possession by Loxias is reminiscent of Zeus's rape of Leda as represented in W.B. Yeats' "Leda and the Swan," a poem which, like the figure of Cassandra, renders problematic any insistence on the usefulness of awareness:
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
On a rhetorical note, the repeated use of synecdoche—where parts stand in for the whole (such as 'dark webs' for the feet of the swan, body parts for the animal)—suggests the way in which the massive totality cannot be perceived and Leda's subjective experience of the event is fragmented, partial, in bits and pieces. This is telling, already and again, of the limitations of human awareness.
However, there is a distinct moment, related in the sestet, where it is ambiguous if during the rape Leda momentarily accessed the future and saw—via divine knowledge invested in or shared with her—the history (though, for her,future) of violence that, for modern day readers and historians, characterizes the Greek epoch. One might be tempted to ask, from whose perspective is seen the momentous events, and is forged the narrative that connects causally the rape to the birth of modern history? But the question that follows quickly after is, what does it matter? The final line abruptly stops short the inquiry as it recognises that any such moment of penetrative insight into the future which Leda might have experienced during the rape is at best ephemeral and achieves little as the "indifferent beak … let[s] her drop" soon after. Ultimately Leda falls away from that moment of piercing anagnorisis to play her due part in history. Awareness, if one gains any at all, of how the gods act through man (or, in this case, woman) is hardly ever commensurate with the severely limited action that the human can take to derail or prevent the violence that she or he foresees engendered by the violation. Whether they behave "like … wanton boys" or manifest as wanton birds, the gods and their sport nullify the usefulness of any knowledge; divine caprice always has the potential to render any gaining of awareness ultimately in vain.
In conclusion, it appears that a tragic worldview maintains that knowledge and awareness are, to an extent, desirable, but they are a gift with a heavy price attached, never bestowed on man without some degree of suffering exacted from him first or later. "Knowledge by suffering entereth," says Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yet, as a consideration of Yeats's Leda and Aeschylus' Cassandra suggests, to have or to lack knowledge may be
Koh Beng Huat, Bernard graduated from NUS with a first in English literature. He was chief editor of PRISM: USP Undergraduate Journal and a writing assistant with the USP Writing Centre. His research interests include J.M. Coetzee, postcolonialism, and film. Currently he teaches at a secondary school.