An
Introduction
Just
as automatically as we associate comedy with laughter, we associate tragedy
with death. And just as was the
case with the relationship between laughter and comedy, a Renaissance
tragedy--though it will always include at least one death--is not actually about death.
Or, to put it another way, it is not precisely the death(s) that makes
the play tragic. A great deal of
ink has been spilled by critics trying to theorize the experience of tragedy;
in this introduction I will briefly summarize a few of the most influential of
those theories and then discuss at some length the approach I'd like us to
focus on in this course.
I. Aristotle, The Poetics
Undoubtedly
the most influential book of literary criticism ever written, Aristotle's Poetics was the first written attempt to theorize the complex
experience of Greek tragedy. Using
as his chief example the plays of his contemporary, Sophocles, and particularly
Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, Aristotle talks about the enormous
suffering and violent action (both physical and mental) that take place in any tragedy and identifies the
chief emotions associated with these plays as pity and fear. His
main task in the Poetics, however, is to describe the
structure of the tragic plot:
a) the plot must include a hero(ine) who has distinguished him/herself as
"great" in some significant way
b) the hero commits some sort of violation, which
Aristotle calls hamartia
c) there is a notable reversal or plot twist as a
result of that violation, which Aristotle refers to as peripeteia
d) the hero suddenly recognizes his/her own
responsibility for that sudden change of fortune, called anagnorosis
e) the tragedy ends with a purging of the emotional
catastrophe (for both the characters and the audience), often the death of the
hero at his/her own hands; Aristotle calls this catharsis
II. The Experience of Tragedy
In
many ways, Aristotle's description of the form of tragedy, which I have only
(and purposely) briefly outlined, will be useful to us in our reading. The form alone, however, does not
adequately account for the complexity of the tragic experience, it does not
even tell us what kind of experience tragedy is and
that's where more recent critics come in.
Tragedy
has been variously described as:
a)
a moral experience where the characters, and the
audience, learn some sort of lesson as a result of the hero's catastrophe. This approach has real limitations, as
the critic Northrop Frye points out: "The tragic catharsis passes beyond
moral judgment, and while it is quite possible to construct a moral tragedy,
what tragedy gains in morality it loses in cathartic power" ("The
Argument of Comedy" 64). In
other words, the moral tragedy is boring, predictable, and generally not the
kind of play we would study in this course. To read the tragedies we will study as simple lessons in
morality is to do them a great disservice.
b)
a personal/psychological/emotional experience. This is a mainly secular reading of tragedy that stresses the growing
self-knowledge of the hero.
Tragedy, in this instance, rehearses the limits and the hidden resources
of the individual self.
c)
a theological experience. This begins to take us into some pretty interesting
territory. One of the critics most
associated with this theory of tragedy is Northrop Frye. Frye takes Aristotle's point about
enormous suffering and translates it into a chiefly Christian concept:
suffering makes us noble, it grants a kind of dignity to the actions of a
character who cannot control his or her own destiny but who is neither exempt
from making decisions. The
emphasis here, as in (b) above, is almost completely on character, the tragic
hero(ine), and that character's relationship with some sort of divinity. Here is Frye on the tragic hero:
Tragic
heroes are wrapped in the mystery of their communion with that 'something
beyond' which we can only see through them, and which is the source of their
strength and their fate alike....In all tragedies there is a sense of some
far-reaching mystery of which the morally intelligible process is only a
part. The hero's act has thrown a
switch in a larger machine than his own life, or even his own society. ("The Mythos of Autumn")
Here he is again, describing the tragic catharsis (you
might want to refer back to the brief sketch of Frye in the essay on
"Comedy" to refamiliarize yourself with what I describe there as his
anthropological view of literature--his discussion of "ritual" here
will round out that picture a little):
Many
things are involved in the tragic catharsis, but one of them is a mental or
imaginative form of the sacrificial ritual out of which tragedy arose. This is the ritual of the struggle,
death, and rebirth of a God-Man, which is linked to the yearly triumph of
spring over winter. The tragic
hero is not really killed, and the audience no longer eats his body and drinks
his blood, but the corresponding thing in art still takes place. The audience enters into communion with
the body of the hero, becoming thereby a single body itself. ("The
Argument of Comedy" 64)
"Transcendence" is the key word in this
approach to tragedy: the tragic hero(ine) is not even quite human because of
his/her relationship to the divine impulse. In Frye's scheme, tragic heroes are usually seen as a type
of Christ, sacrificing themselves in a transformative act that might be
described as redemptive.
d)
a social experience. If the emphasis in Frye's approach is on Fate, conditions otherworldly around which the
hero(ine) cannot move, a description of tragedy as primarily a social
experience would stress the more materialist social/political forces that
impinge on the hero(ine), fate. Choice (or lack thereof), in this
formulation, is not determined by God, but by oppressive social practices and
beliefs (see "ideology" in the essay on "Comedy"), often in
flux, that entrap the hero(ine).
The
materialist reading of tragedy sees it as a historical process that plays a
crucial role in the course of cultural change. Timothy Reiss, in his
book Tragedy and Truth, points out, for instance, that
in "each of its major appearances [one of the most significant of which is
the Renaissance], tragedy has accompanied the rupture of a familiar order, in
the which the essential relationships between physical, social, and religious
life are now losing their reference to any `experience of totality'"
(34). In the Renaissance, tragedy
signals a break with what we might call "mythical thinking," a
metaphysical system in which everything has its place. Materially, that metaphysical system
might be associated with feudalism.
Tragedy, then, represents the clash of feudalism with possessive
individualism. It is the clash of
a system in which everything has its divinely-ordained place with a system in
which individual freedom and independence determines an individual's place in
society--the concept of self-determination that we are familiar with from
nothing less than "The Declaration of Independence."
So
what makes it tragedy then? If
Renaissance tragedy signals the establishment of a new order that is all about
the freedoms of the individual why isn't it more triumphant? The answer to that lies in the
realization that it is only retrospectively that we are able to make sense of cultural change. Timothy Reiss says that in Western
history, tragedy seems to have appeared at moments that are marked by a kind of
"hole" in the passage from one dominant system of thought to
another. The tragic hero(ine)
falls into that hole, an absence of meaningfulness. To us, they may seem almost prophetic, ahead of their
time--like Hamlet or Othello. They
themselves, however, are unable to theorize their actions in the same way; they
fall prey to the social and political forces around them that convince them
that their actions or beliefs are meaningless, irrational, even dangerous.
Each
character that we will identify as a tragic hero(ine) attempts to be
responsible for his or her own discourse--by discourse I mean not just
language, but an entire way of thinking.
Othello, for instance, is an example of a character attempting to
enunciate for himself his own individualism but who, in enunciating it,
produces disorder in his own subjectivity: his own status as a person is
unclear. He is unable to grasp any
definitive articulation of his self, but he is also forced to rely on a society
that casts him as "Other" (he is a Moor, a black African). Caught between the two, his response is
a kind of madness.
Postscript
William
Arrowsmith, in his introduction to Hecuba, says
Man
continues to demand justice and an order with which he can live...and without
the visibility of such order and justice, he forfeits his humanity, destroyed
by the hideous gap between his illusion and the intolerable reality. (quoted by
Reiss 34)
The prevalence of madness in nearly all the tragedies
we read speaks, perhaps, to the "hideous gap" to which Arrowsmith
refers. It might also, however,
represent the complexity of our own responses to these troubling plays which,
especially if we are able to view them--a much more immediate experience than
reading--confuse us. If you find
yourself lost in the tragedies, unable to decide what you are supposed to think
about the situations we encounter and frustrated that there are no easy
answers, you are not alone. That
confusion--which is perhaps what Aristotle was getting at when he talked about
the mingling of pity and fear--is, ironically, the great "pleasure"
of tragedy: its fascinates us, perplexes us, obsesses us, amazes us, inspires
us. It is what allows people like
me to teach Macbeth every year and to find it
compelling, and just a little bit different, every single time.