Tragedy

John Drakakis, Naomi Conn Liebler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317894193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This wide-ranging and unique collection of documents on one of the most enduring of literary genres, Tragedy, offers a radical revaluation of its significance in the light of the critical attention that it has received during the past one-hundred and fifty years. The foundations of much contemporary thinking about Tragedy are to be found in the writings of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard; in addition, the dialectical tradition emanating from Marxism, and the psycho-analytical writings of Freud, have extended significantly the horizons of the subject. With the explosion of interest in the areas of post-structuralism, sociology of culture, social anthropology, feminism, deconstruction, and the study of ritual, new questions are being asked about this persistent artistic exploration of human experience. This book seeks to represent a full selection of these divergent interests, in a series of substantial extracts which display the continuing richness of the debate about a genre which has provoked, and challenged categorical discussion since the appearance of Aristotle's Poetics.

1 Introduction

ANDREA: Unhappy the land that has no heroes!

[…]

GALILEO: No. Unhappy the land where heroes are needed.

Bertold Brecht, Life of Galileo

‘The search for a definition of tragedy’, as the Shakespearean critic Stephen Booth astutely observes, ‘has been the most persistent and widespread of all nonreligious quests for definition.’¹ It is a search that takes us back to Aristotle, and from there forward, through the Renaissance, to nineteenth-century European philosophers such as Marx, Nietzsche, Hegel and Kierkegaard, thence into the political science of Althusser and Goldmann, the stage theory of Augusto Boal and Antonin Artaud, the psychoanalytical theories of Freud and his successors, especially Jacques Lacan and André Green, and the social anthropology of Victor Turner and René Girard. Literary and cultural critics such as George Steiner and Raymond Williams have also joined the search, as indeed have linguistic philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr, while playwrights such as Bertold Brecht (himself as much a political theorist as he was a dramatist), Arthur Miller and Wole Soyinka have all offered major pronouncements on this the most ubiquitous of Western dramatic forms. Some feminist writers, such as Eva Figes or Linda Bamber, have found the genre difficult to engage with on the grounds that it privileges a masculine ethos either by victimising women or by relegating them to the allegedly more hospitable form, comedy, which is presumed to afford women more positive role models. More radical forms of feminism, however, have suggested that tragedy implicates ‘woman’ in a hierarchy of discourses, the unravelling of which discloses, among other things, the constitutive features of gendered subjectivity itself. Indeed, as Nicole Loraux has provocatively argued, in the ancient world, tragedy was preeminently the genre that, ‘as a civic institution, delighted in blurring the formal frontier between masculine and feminine and freed women’s deaths from the banalities to which they were restricted by private mourning’. In classical tragedy death is always violent, and it is Loraux’s contention that ‘men suffered from this convention no less than women. So for a while at least, a balance was reestablished between the sexes’.² Thus a central issue for modern critical theory involves the construction of the tragic subject as ‘hero’, and its definition within a range of social, political, sexual, moral, ethical, philosophical, cultural and aesthetic discourses.

Historically, tragedy is thought to have originated in a choral performance to celebrate the Greek god Dionysos, but it has evolved as the dramatic form which stages the relationship between suffering and joy in a universe which is often perceived as at best inimical, or at worst radical in its hostility to human life. It deals, above all, with the relationship between harmony and discord, which may be interpreted inter alia in positive terms, as Nietzsche has done when he argues that: ‘The delight created by tragic myth has the same origin as the delight dissonance in music creates. That primal Dionysiac delight, experienced even in the presence of pain, is the source common to both music and tragic myth’,³ or in negative terms as the pain and anguish attendant upon an assertion of will in the face of metaphysical despair. Instances of the latter might be the claim made by I. A. Richards that ‘Tragedy is only possible to a mind which is for the moment agnostic or Manichean’,⁴ or A. C. Bradley’s neo-Hegelian dialectical account of how ‘order’ generates its antithesis:

The whole or order against which the individual part shows itself powerless seems to be animated by a passion for perfection: we cannot otherwise explain its behaviour towards evil. Yet it appears to engender this evil within itself, and in its effort to overcome and expel it, it is agonized with pain, and driven to mutilate its own substance and to lose not only evil but priceless good.⁵

For Bradley tragedy is a ‘painful mystery’,⁶ an experience articulated through the plight of the hero, which in the final instance resists analysis. That painful mystery is tied up with what it is to be ‘human’, a process which simultaneously recognises fatalism and elicits human fortitude in the face of irresolvable difficulty. That difficulty invariably involves suffering, which Adorno defined as ‘objectivity that weighs upon the subject’.⁷ It involves also an interiorising of the dynamic forces which contribute to the psychology of the human subject, and, paradoxically, an assertion of dignity set against irreparable loss. This is not the ‘absolute tragedy’ which George Steiner, following Schopenhauer, has recently described as the ethos in which ‘it is the crime of man that he is, that he exists’, but rather a ‘negative ontology’⁸ with some qualifications. Steiner goes on to observe:

in the theatre, more probably than in any other representational mode, likeness, credibility, the underlying gravitational force of the reality principle, are persistent. As they are in the Homeric epics, which are the font of drama. Niobe has seen her ten children slain. Her grief makes stones weep. But as it ebbs, she takes nourishment. Homer insists on this. It is an interposition of daylit truth cardinal also to Shakespeare. The organic is tragi-comic in its very essence. The absolutely tragic is, therefore, not only insupportable to human sensibility: it is false to life.⁹

It is not difficult to locate in this notion of ‘nourishment’ an essential humanity which inevitable suffering is alleged to disclose, but which tragedy is alleged to compensate for. It is with this inevitability of suffering, and with the compensatory creation of the figure of the ‘tragic’ hero that Brecht’s Galileo takes issue, implying that heroism is, in fact, the result of a clash of determinate social forces rather than the metaphysically inaugurated means by which the human essence reveals its potential. At one level the ‘human’ is made to define itself against those transcendental forces from which it seeks liberation, but at another level, the challenge is to the liberal humanist notion that suffering is itself formative. However, even this conclusion can be problematical: as Morris Weitz has observed, no ‘true, real definition’ of tragedy is possible, since the form is ever open to new historical possibilities. Weitz insists that ‘It is simply a historical fact that the concept, as we know and use it, has continuously accommodated new cases of tragedy, and, more important, the new properties of these new cases.’¹⁰

The force of Weitz’s historical argument notwithstanding, the formal Aristotelian categories used to describe tragedy have, for the most part, remained current although their discursive force has been transformed over time. However we interpret the concept of mimesis – and the current shift from the emphasis upon imitation to representation offers us a case in point – the view that ‘A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action’, which is both ‘serious’ and has ‘magnitude’, and which is ‘complete in itself’, continues to provide the core of the representation of tragic action. Moreover, the tragic action consists of a series of related ‘incidents’ which are formally organised into elements of plot involving such processes as peripeteia (reversal) and anagnorisis (recognition). Through these processes tragedy arouses ‘pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions’.¹¹ The overall effect is the production of catharsis, which has traditionally been translated as the ‘purgation’ of the specific emotions of pity and fear:¹²

The true tragic fear becomes an almost impersonal emotion, attaching itself not so much to this or that particular incident, as to the general course of the action which is … an image of human destiny.…

The spectator who is brought face to face with grander sufferings than his own experiences a sympathetic ecstasy, or lifting out of himself. It is precisely in this transport of feeling, which carries a man beyond his individual self, that the distinctive tragic pleasure resides. Pity and fear are purged of the impure element which clings to them in life. In the glow of tragic excitement these feelings are so transformed that the net result is a noble emotional satisfaction.¹³

Much controversy surrounds the concept of catharsis and the Aristotelian claim that tragedy is a liberating form. Clearly the ‘purgation’ of pity and fear and the return to some sort of psychic equilibrium may be read as a cautionary device. In this sense tragedy can be said to liberate its audience through a recognition and an articulation of those very forces which conspire to undermine civic identity. In this respect ‘liberation’ is perhaps a misleading term to use insofar as the freedom which it promises turns out to be a very positive recognition of human limitation, an acknowledgement and an acceptance of boundaries beyond which the heroic representative of humanity transgresses at his or her peril.

This ideological formulation of liberation, which offers the spectator the freedom to conform, is to be distinguished from Antonin Artaud’s much more modern recognition of the theatre as a space which offers the possibility of liberation from the dead hand of romantic and early-twentieth-century reiterative social complacencies. In tragedy, when the ordered relations of a community are disrupted, the hero draws to herself or himself all of the ambiguity and crisis present in the community, in the same way that an organism fighting a disease localises antibodies at the site of infection. This is the operation of Artaud’s influential analogy of theatre and plague. Artaud’s argument for what he calls a ‘Theater of Cruelty’ springs from his objections to the vacuity of Western theatre during the first half of the twentieth century. This theatre, he believed, had long since lost touch with the momentous theatre of the ancients which was still available, in some exempla, to audiences in Jacobean England but by the twentieth century had all but disappeared in the West, supplanted by a vitiated theatre for dilettantes. He calls for a regeneration of the kind of theatre that, as he puts it, exercises a profound cruelty, not that of dismembered bodies and brutal human behaviour but one that reenacts the cruelty of the universe. Such a theatre encompasses the foundational rituals of its producing culture within the frame of the narratives that it performs. This emphasis is represented in this volume in a number of ways, from Nietzsche’s account of the birth of tragedy through social anthropological accounts of the dramatisation of ritual in Northrop Frye’s The Anatomy of Criticism,¹⁴ in the work of Kott, Girard and Soyinka, and the critique of those foundations to be found in Derrida.

Restraining evil and disease is as much the aim of ritual in tragedy as it is in traditional cultures. As Mary Douglas explains in Purity and Danger, defilement, dirt, is ‘matter out of place.… It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order’; ‘Uncleanness or dirt is that which must not be included if a pattern is to be maintained.… It involves us in no clear-cut distinction between sacred and secular’.¹⁵ But as Antonin Artaud observed, in his The Theater and Its Double, no communal structure has permanent immunity from such danger: ‘We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads and the theater has been created to teach us that first of all’.¹⁶ In so saying, Artaud aims to return Western theatre not to specific narratives of ancient Greek tragedy but to the kind of impact upon modern audiences that Greek tragedy undoubtedly had upon its own patrons. Artaud believed it was still possible to restore the mystery and the terror that Greek tragedy originally brought into the theatre, and like Kott and Brecht he found exemplary models for that drama in the gestural performances of the Eastern world.

Artaud begins from a position which, initially, appears to echo a number of nineteenth-century philosophers of tragedy. Schopenhauer, for example, had spoken about how ‘In tragedy the terrible side of human life is presented to us, the wail of humanity, the reign of chance and error, the fall of the just, the triumph of the wicked; thus the aspect of the world which directly strives against our will is brought before our eyes.’¹⁷ His perception of what was positive in tragedy is cast in the form of a negative humanism:

At this sight we feel ourselves challenged to turn away our will from life, no longer to will it or love it. But just in this way we become conscious that then there still remains something over to us, which we absolutely cannot know positively, but only negatively, as that which does not will life. As the chord of the seventh demands the fundamental chord; as the colour red demands green, and even produces it in the eye; so every tragedy demands an entirely different kind of existence, another world, the knowledge of which can only be given us indirectly just as here by such a demand. In the moment of the tragic catastrophe the conviction becomes more distinct to us than ever that life is a bad dream from which we have to awake. So far the effect of the tragedy is analogous to that of the dynamical sublime, for like this it lifts us above the will and its interests, and puts us in such a good mood that we find pleasure in the sight of what tends directly against it.¹⁸

For Artaud, the delight in tragedy is generated from another source, the danger of enslavement coming not from the gods but from the cultural and psychological constructions with which modern Western humanity has deluded itself. Those constructions have their anchoring point in a structure of re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Philosophy of Tragedy
• 3 Historical Materialism and Tragedy
• 4 Tradition and Innovation
• 5 Psychoanalysis and Tragedy
• 6 Feminism and Tragedy
• 7 Ritual and Tragedy
• 8 Deconstructon and Tragedy
• Further Reading
• Index