Revisiting the Ancient Eyewitness Accounts and Messenger Speeches in the Wake of Last Week's Tragedy
I reread Pericles' Funeral Oration the other day. It has one or two good lines in it about death and heroism, which is the reason I mention it. I wasn't actually looking for the Funeral Oration when I called up the text of The History of the Peloponnesian War on the Internet. I'd been thinking about eyewitness accounts and the messenger speech and wanted to look at Thucydides' description of the plague. I'd forgotten that it comes right after the Funeral Oration. It's a clinical rather than an emotional response to calamity. Thucydides himself was a plague victim, having survived an early brush with the infection toward the beginning of the epidemic, a circumstance that allowed him, during the height of the sickness, to go about nursing others and studying the course of the disease.
I got onto eyewitness accounts and messenger speeches because of those first few hours of World Trade Center coverage. I'd been amazed at the degree to which footage one had seen again and again continued to look fresh and unfamiliar, and found myself thinking, first of all, that it had something to do with the way memory works. That isn't, after all, what generally happens with disaster footage, which?in America, anyway?is something we've learned to equate with hours of inane chatter and pointless "visuals," and, for that reason, to associate it with a certain amount of low-grade irritation. That embarrassing recourse on the part of television to broadcasting the same image over and over until, however shocking and profound it really is (as in the case of something like the Challenger disaster), it begins to seem prosaic and banal, or (in the case of something like the disappearance of John Kennedy Jr.'s plane two summers ago), its insistence on filling the screen with totally meaningless footage, merely because television abhors a vacuum. That was a story about absence, really?a hole left by a plane that might or might not have fallen out of the sky, a lack of information. But you can't televise emptiness; so the networks and cable stations had chosen to fill the void with endless footage of a blank sky and a calm sea, its surface broken only by a lone rescue Coast Guard cutter trudging uselessly along.
But the images last Tuesday morning never lost their hold on you, however many times you saw them. There were only a handful. Later in the day, as new footage began drifting in, there were other images, equally implausible. And there would be images from life?mild, quiet ones, if you were uptown, though no less unforgettable: a group of people clustered around a television in a shop window; a flag draped over a wire someone had stretched between the two towers of one of the grand old apartment buildings on Central Park West; the facade of the Union League Club draped in black bunting; floods of people streaming home from work on foot?like refugees, like something in a John Ford movie or a Springsteen song.
During that first hour or so, however, you really only saw the same few images over and over: the tower with its gaping hole, then the second tower bursting into flames as a plane snuck up behind it, then the collapse of the one building, then the other, then the crowds of people running in the street. Marveling at how unfamiliar each piece of footage seemed, no matter how often or how recently I'd seen it, I began to feel I was getting a lesson in the essential unreliability of the eyewitness account. If each time I saw the second tower explode I felt as though I were seeing that shot for the first time, perhaps it was because in a sense I was. Unprecedented, unimaginable experience has to be processed by the human psyche, filtered through a consciousness informed by all manner of things?by emotion, by sense of context, by previous experience and what we think we know. Turning away from a deeply moving image, we need to transform it, simplifying perhaps, or embellishing?who knows why? Perhaps that's the only way we have of coping with uninterpretable material: we interpret it, distorting it in the process.
Between one viewing of the plane creeping up on the building and the next?and it only looked like that to me the first time?my memory had altered the truth. It was ever so slight an adjustment, probably, but it was enough to make the previously viewed seem unfamiliar. Of course, there was another reason for the abiding freshness of the coverage, its inability to pall no matter how vapid and inadequate the commentary seemed. We were waiting for something, something that never came?information, an explanation, some indication that the incident was over?and it created a tension (one almost wants to say "dramatic" tension) that previous national tragedies have lacked. In the case of the Challenger we knew that the story was over: it had ended as it broke; with the Kennedy plane, we felt there would be no resolution.
But here we were looking for more. Mostly, I think, we were waiting for the messenger speech. It's the stage version of the eyewitness account?the flip side, really, since in plays messenger speeches are nearly always unmoving. It's a device, after all, born of a convention whose embedded purpose was to make a virtue of the inherent limitations of a highly limited art form. By making it a rule that anything important, i.e., violent, had to remain offstage, the conventions of Attic drama were relieving the form of theater of an onus it could not readily accommodate, and transferring it to the actor and playwright. It would be their artistry and virtuosity that the play showcased in that moment when, as would always happen, something indescribable had to be described. But we who chiefly get our pity and terror from big-budget Hollywood movies cannot listen to messenger speeches without becoming aware that we are watching a play and that it is a messenger speech we're attending to.
There are exceptions. When Talthybius in The Trojan Women comes in to tell Andromache that the child Astyanax has been executed, flung from the walls of Troy, it's moving because he can't do the job, can't bring himself to tell her. That's Euripides playing around with the convention: the messenger whose news is beyond speech. (Talthybius is, to the best of my knowledge, the only messenger in all of Greek tragedy who is given an actual name in place of the designation "Messenger.")
For the most part, though, the messenger speech seems boring and embarrassing to us, reared on more sophisticated forms of exposition. It's perhaps for this very reason?because we're accustomed to being unmoved by messenger speeches when we hear them?that the phenomenon plays differently in real life. I'm not just talking about eyewitness accounts of calamity. I remember an incident during the O.J. Simpson trial that moved me intensely, and not because of anything having to do with the information it involved. It was a minor incident?so minor that I can't even recall the details, only that for some reason cameras had been barred from the courtroom. Reporters had been locked out, too?all except one, Linda Deutsch, the Associated Press correspondent whose task was to attend the event and then report to the others. Watching the coverage of her press conference?coverage of a reporter reporting to reporters?I remember being moved by the mere realization that we were witnessing a real-life messenger speech, an occasion on which someone had to describe an incident to people who had not been present, because of some arbitrary rule. But there was something else, too: a lovely abstract quality to the gravity with which the reporter seemed to view her mission; regardless of the inconsequentiality of the actual information being conveyed, there was a centuries-old respect for the idea of the message.
Most information that comes to us via eyewitness accounts, I reckon, is pretty inconsequential in any concrete sense. That's the paradox inherent in the phenomenon of eyewitness account. It's not historically important. It couldn't and shouldn't be?memory is too fragile and imprecise a vessel. But that's not what we're after when we wait and wait to hear some individual's account of something that happened. We're looking for something much more intangible, that has to do with that very unreliability: a human agency or force exerted on something that is ungraspable in human terms.
This is the underlying premise of Thucydides' description of the plague. Thucydides starts off saying that there's no cure for the disease, no remedy, no relief. His point is that from any practical perspective, there's no point in his describing it, since even if it were to happen again, there'd be nothing anyone could do. But, he says, he's going to describe it anyway, because it might happen again, and this way, if it ever did, people would at least be able to recognize what it was. The unspoken assumption behind it is that there are some situations and experiences in which the mere knowledge of what is happening to you, or to someone else, the ability to put a name to it?to say, "Yes, I see, this is the plague that hit Athens in the second year of the Peloponnesian war," or "this is murder," or "this is an act of war"?might be of some comfort. I've always found that incredibly moving.