What does it mean to designate an atrocity as a tragedy?

What does it mean to designate an atrocity as a tragedy? How do the echoes of an ancient religious and theatrical ritual insinuate themselves into our language of memorialization? Porte Parole’s Projet Polytechnique foregrounds this question by looking at the aftermath of the Polytechnique massacre over thirty years later.  

When we call an outcome “a tragedy”, we often subtly suggest that it was unpreventable. Perhaps our understanding of tragedy as inevitable emerges from famous tragedies like Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, where the play unfolds around Oedipus discovering that he has already fulfilled his seemingly long-avoided fate, to kill his father and marry his mother. So “the tragedy” has already happened, but the play’s affective force comes, as Aristotle says, from Oedipus’s “discovery” (anagnorisis) of that tragedy and his own role within it. But Aristotle makes a clear distinction between tragedies like that of Oedipus, who was “ignorant”, and those like that of Medea, who knew full well what she was doing when she responds to her husband Jason’s infidelity and betrayal by killing his new wife as well as their own children. So while tragedy sometimes emerges from discovering a perceived inevitability, it can also find its affective catharsis in the audacious, even “evil” actions of its protagonists, mortals and immortals alike who seek vengeance against perceived wrongs.  

This creates a deep ambivalence in navigating “tragic” feelings around a real-life massacre: do we risk removing agency altogether, only grieving the inevitable outcome? Or do we elevate the perpetrator to tragically heroic heights? 

Therin lies one of the challenges and provocations at the heart of Porte Parole’s project. Can we say the massacre at Polytechnique was like a tragedy? Can we stage it as such? As documentary theatre, Porte Parole strikes a fascinating balance. Unlike Denis Villeneuve’s film Polytechnique, which represents the shooting from the perspective of two students, Porte Parole’s play is set today, dramatizing conflicting attempts to find meaning in the historic massacre.  

“J’ai vraiment l’impression d’être dans une tragédie grecque!” says one of the survivors, to which the character of the co-creator, Marie-Joanne, says to the other co-creator, Jean-Marc, “Elle parle de tragédie grecque pis on fait un show de théâtre!” But as the piece unfolds, the play’s creators explore a series of ongoing, related issues, asking: Is the “tragedy” our still-present culture of misogyny, now given new life in on-line forums? Is it the North American epidemic of mass school shootings, enabled by an entrenched guns-rights lobby?  

The play offers no answers to these burning questions, instead giving polyphonous perspectives that reflect Greek tragedy’s often aporetic chorus. The chorus, like the protagonists Marie-Joanne and Jean-Marc and their interlocutors, serve as audience avatars, commentators outside the tragedy’s main actions, who worry out loud, “may this never happen to me” just as regularly as they say, “this has happened before”, or, more poignantly, “this will happen again.” Yet amidst the numerous perspectives, one character stands in relief. The Imam Hassan Guillet, who, after the Quebec mosque shooting, claimed of the shooter Alexandre Bissonnette, “Avant de mettre des balles dans la tête de ses victimes, quelqu’un a mis dans sa tête des idées plus dangereuses que ses balles. Avant d’être un tueur, il a été une victime.” In a gesture of profound humanism, Guillet troubles the idea of the killer’s agency, echoing the logic of some of the Greek tragedies.  

Marie-Joanne then asks if Jean-Marc could ever see Marc Lepine as te 15^th victim, Jean-Marc replies that he could up to 17h10, the time when Lepine committed the massacre, not after. Then, asks Maire-Joanne, what about the incels who memorialize Lapine as a hero, who have not yet committed any violence? 

A final agon takes place between Jean Marc and a seventeen-year-old incel who speaks of Lepine as a saint, (who he blesses with a “heil Saint Lepine”) as one who fought on behalf of all incels. Unlike classic agons, Jean Marc fights with himself to feel compassion for the tormented seventeen-year-old, comforting him about his inciting trauma—his mother’s treatment of his father during their divorce when he was eight years old. The scene leaves the audience uneasy, considering the seventeen-year-olds’ possible future actions and how much or little Jean Marc’s interventions may help – in other words, what may or may not be tragically inevitable.  

The play begins and ends with powerful forms of memorialization, inspiring a sense of awe at how the violence of mass shootings has spread. At the beginning, Jean Marc yearly posts the names of the victims of Polytechnique on Twitter, while the show ends with projections of the hundreds of victims of mass shootings since. A final postscript links the epigrammatic, often pessimistic, choral endings of Greek tragedies with our desperation at realizing the scope of mass shootings. It reads, “Pense bête: Nombre de jours disponibles dans une année sans tueries. Une phrase de conclusion sur la tragédie grecque.”  

Joseph Shragge

Lynn Kozak