TRAGEDY

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 is 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
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, territory about which we will get quite specific in the weeks to come. 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). If you are on top of things, you will be making the connection already to discussions we have had about the comedies (particularly The Merchant of Venice), and you will not be surprised that it is this approach to tragedy that will dominate our discussions for the remainder of the term.

 Each tragedy we look at will give us the opportunity to get specific about the kinds of social forces at work in determining the outcome of play. Here, I would like to talk generally about the critical impulses behind this approach.

 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--as we'll see especially in plays like The Duchess of Malfi and Othello--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 retroactively 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 the Duchess of Malfi, 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." Caught between the two, his response is a kind of madness. (The BBC production of Othello, which stars Anthony Hopkins as Othello and Bob Hoskins as Iago, captures this rupture in the hero's subjectivity superbly; it is one of the finest productions of any Shakespeare play you will ever see.)

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 in them 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: it fascinates us, perplexes us, obsesses us, amazes us, inspires us.

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