Conclusion: Reading Tragedy in the Negative
“A man says that he is lying. Is what he says true or false?”
The readings of these eight plays establish, in each case, that at or near the centre of a tragedy is the story of an individual suffering the negation of a sense of reality. The tragic individual in each of the plays struggles to attain or maintain a sense of being-in-the-world, a sense of self unity and connection with the world. This requirement for cohesion and integration, which might be answered by a recognized position in society, and/or by a set of principles, and/or by physical relations to the world, is unmet in each of the plays. The matrix of the drama creates a double bind, a no-win, paradoxical, self-contradictory situation in which the individual destroys him or herself, destroys her/his own sense of reality, in the act of trying to be or to become a fully conscious self. Madness, the result of this negation of reality, becomes the marker and key symbol of tragedy.
This understanding of tragedy is a valuable insight for a variety of reasons. First, it breaks down the barrier of criticism which has been erected between tragedy and the modern/postmodern age. The contentions, invoked by modern and postmodern critics, that tragedy is necessarily based on religious faith, or confidence in the self, or a prescribed order of the universe, or that it necessarily presents epiphanies of knowledge have been shown to be unwarranted. Furthermore, the claims that tragedy is based on a universality that is somehow exclusive of social reality and that the “great” tragedies unequivocally resolve the dilemmas they enact are also countered by the analyses of these eight plays. These readings also dispute the vision of tragedy as drama which, by definition, emerges from the greatness or sublimity of character or the stamina of values or the strength of community or the dominance of myth.
Secondly, the understanding of tragedy as a portrayal of the negation of reality, confirmed in these tragedies, demonstrates that tragedy is about uncertainty and equivocation, about the necessity and difficulty of change, about the fragility of human knowledge and values, about an individual’s groping for a place in the community and in the universe and for self-identification. In other words, tragedy necessarily questions the myths within which it presents itself. Therefore tragedy is not a reaffirmation of dominant mythologies but, on the contrary, as Else has suggested, it is a penetration of myth from the inside.
Thirdly, this understanding of tragedy as a portrayal of the negation of reality is a useful rule of thumb, a guide for approaching tragedy. Tragedy cannot be accounted for by a collection of formal features, nor is it dependent on any particular system of values or theodicy or cult or religious vision. This selection of tragedies demonstrates that tragedies across the millennia can be approached in terms of individuals struggling to determine their proper places in the universe and the questioning of existence which arises from that struggle. These tragedies invariably demonstrate the sense of crisis, of urgency and of emptiness, which arises from the immediate necessity of answering the riddle of existence and concomitantly realizing that no answer is possible. I am reassured by the fact that I, and any other reader of this literature, can approach the tragedies of Aeschylus, or Sophocles, or Shakespeare or Arthur Miller on this basis and understand much of what they have to say.
Fourthly, the readings of these tragedies have underscored a number of features--a sense of initiation ritual, a demand for disguise, a double-bind situation, and madness--as typical of tragedy. Each of the tragedies considered has involved some intimation of initiation. Orestes must initiate himself into manhood not only through ritual but by recapturing his position and properties. We come upon Creon at his inauguration into kingship. Pentheus is an unwilling initiate into the cult of Dionysus. Macbeth seems newly arrived into the world of wars and rebellions and here he carries out his search for what it is to be a man. Both Othello and Hedda Gabler are newly married and unbalanced by the new roles they must play. We find both Blanche Dubois and Willy Loman being initiated into the new world, the new America.
In each of the tragedies, circumstances seem to demand disguises or "false selves." Orestes must disguise himself as a foreigner. Creon must bluster against opposition. Pentheus is an exception in that his disguise in the play--woman's clothing--actually reveals his behaviour as an unbending Apollonian figure as a facade. Macbeth proclaims the necessity for false fronts. Othello's suave perfection, as seen through Iago's eyes, also begins to appear a facade. As Othello becomes convinced of Desdemona's infidelity, his obdurate and inscrutable behaviour becomes a necessary cover for his true feelings. Hedda Gabler plays a constant game of hypocrisy marked by a studied frivolity, a feigned sense of sorority with Thea, and a hollow sense of propriety. Blanche Dubois' airs of a southern Belle and Willy Loman's bravura on the American Dream, are both fanatical attachments to appearances designed to camouflage fear and guilt and failure.
The double bind of each of these tragedies arises in part from the necessity of disguises. The characters are trying to be themselves but the process and circumstances seem to require that they adopt disguises in order to achieve that end. The process of the negation of reality is one in which the reality to which the character adheres or aspires seems increasingly to require falsehoods and disguises and, more significantly, that that reality itself comes to appear a disguise and a falsehood. Orestes must be a traveller come to announce his own death in order to carry out the act which will destroy his sense of reality, the murder of his mother. Creon requires the bombastic facade of authoritarianism in order to carry out the execution of Antigone which he feels is a requirement of his sense of reality, but which is in fact the act through which he destroys his world. As the Bacchae is an ironic, metatragedy we are less aware of Pentheus's double bind but it is apparent that he is destroyed by the fact that he has attempted to suppress that half of his own nature which seemed to him counter to modern, rational civilization and to his self-dominating image of his own stoicism. Macbeth begins by feigning friendship and loyalty; eventually, because of the program of falseness and evil which he undertakes to prove himself, all that he requires to achieve a sense of himself as a man becomes hollow, false, or impossible. Othello's perfection as the eloquent warrior is undermined first by marriage and then more pointedly by the machinations of Iago. Othello's marriage makes him more than perfect and thus makes his perfection dubious, questionable and beyond his control. Desdemona completes Othello but gives him reason to question his own sense of wholeness. She makes his life and mars it. She enlivens his confidence and gives him reason for humility and doubt. She lovingly integrates herself into his life and at the same time that love is an independent, foreign and, therefore, threatening presence in his universe. He must kill Desdemona to remain himself and killing Desdemona is an act of suicide. Hedda Gabler's role as a Victorian gentlewoman traps her between her fear of scandal and her yearning for life. Blanche Dubois' faded caricature of a Southern Belle locks her into an unresolvable struggle between death and desire. Willy Loman's inability to retreat from a false image of himself as a son of the American Dream makes him a living emblem of the contradictions and incongruities of that dream. The necessity of disguises guarantees the failure of the integration of the self as real and true. One cannot gain a sense of the reality of the self and its integration in the world if one's operations in the world constantly require the use of disguises and gambits as a means of survival.
As reality fades and fails, madness reigns. Orestes murders his mother, hallucinates and runs off in a frenzy. Creon begs for death and is led off to the isolation of his empty house and the haunting of the Furies. Pentheus hallucinates, dresses as a woman and goes off to meet his death spying on the baccantes. Macbeth grows increasingly homicidal and, as the final battle begins, vacillates wildly between his conviction that he cannot be killed and melancholic considerations of how to end it all. Othello turns madly jealous, has a seizure, begins to hallucinate, murders Desdemona and commits suicide. Hedda Gabler burns a valuable manuscript, counsels Loevborg's suicide and commits suicide herself. Blanche Dubois' fibs and fantasies turn to delusions and hallucinations, and she is taken away to the asylum. Willy Loman finally submits completely to the instructions of his hallucinations of his brother, Ben, and commits suicide. In each case the significance of these acts and perceptions is not what they are or how they appear in themselves but that these acts and attitudes result from the fact that the individual's sense of how the world is held together cannot withstand the contradictory, self-defeating circumstances of a tragic situation.
Reading tragedy as the negation of an individual's sense of reality is an intermediate, neutral stance between materialist and idealist philosophies, between notions of tragedy as demonstrations of hubris and blindness and notions of tragedy as illustrations of arête and epiphanies of new knowledge, between existential and transcendental visions of tragedy, and between visions of tragedy as the zenith of harmony in the universe and a reaffirmation of values, and visions of tragedy as the nadir of alienation and anomie. In speaking of tragedy from the perspective of particular individuals and primarily in negative terms, in terms of absence and loss, we avoid reading tragedy categorically, as providing an absolute demonstration of any one of these features.
For example, we can avoid the preoccupations faced by the Halletts as they come to recognize that the Elizabethan tragic heroes and tragic situations they have considered do not conform to those features which, according to traditional wisdom, are characteristic of tragedy.
In being forced to fall back on his inner resources--to look within himself for the ordering principles he cannot find in the external world--the revenge hero is like the Greek tragic heroes before him. But unlike Orestes and Oedipus at least, he cannot find within himself that epiphany of knowledge that would warrant our saying that, though he suffered greatly, the knowledge he won by it more than justified the pain. Hieronimo learns nothing. Antonio is self-deluded and Hamlet's insight that "readiness is all" is small comfort for the carnage it cost. Revenge tragedy, then, does not conform to what is commonly regarded as the basic format of the tragic vision do-suffer-know . The revenge hero never achieves tragic knowledge. What he does is all that can be expected of a hero in a society incapable of producing saints or heroes with tragic insight. The revenge hero enacts the tragic journey into the self. That it is an aborted journey does not diminish the heroism of the effort. 1
As we approach tragedy as a negation of the individual's sense of reality we do not embrace these contentions of tragic insight or the orderliness of the universe as necessary truths. We do, however, attach ourselves to what is incontestably present in the particular tragedy and is present in all tragedies; that is, the loss that the tragic individuals suffer. From this perspective the consistency of tragedy is in what individuals lose in the unfolding of events. What they gain or that they gain anything through their own tragedies seems to me an unresolved and perhaps unresolvable issue. Tragedy itself is equivocal on this issue. Even if there are tragedies which evoke epiphanies of knowledge and a vision of an ordered universe, this feature is very apparently not a consistent feature of tragedy over the ages.
The argument that tragedy concludes in madness allows a variety of conclusions about how tragedy may ultimately be interpreted. For example, both Hallman and Jaspers intimate a connection between tragedy and madness: Hallman connects tragedy with "alienation" and Jaspers equates it with "breakdown." However, as we have seen, Hallman describes tragedy as "the failure of personality formation." Jaspers, on the other hand, argues that: “When man encounters the hard fact of tragedy, he faces an inexorable limit. At this limit, he finds no guarantee of general salvation. Rather, it is in acting out his personality, in realizing his selfhood even unto death, that he finds redemption and deliverance.” 2 In other words, madness appears a kind of empty symbol waiting to be filled with significance.
Laing argues that through madness the human spirit transcends the ego to become "the servant of the divine." 3 Feder describes the madness of literature as "a confrontation not with the divine, but with the human in society, and the self in all its grandiose projections and painful limitations." 4 Do tragic heros necessarily achieve tragic knowledge? Is their madness transcendent? If their madness is transcendent what do they transcend to? Divinity? Chaos? Social awareness? Self awareness? The absurdity of existence? The harmony of the universe? Approaching tragedy as the negation of an individual reality does not provide categorical answers to these questions. However, this seems perfectly appropriate because, as is obvious from the lack of consensus on these issues, tragedy itself is equivocal on these questions. Do tragic heros become seers in their blindness? Do they join the gods in their madness? Does their suffering reiterate the divine order of things? Or, do tragic heros touch another kind of truth in their madness--the truth that there is no truth? We need not answer these questions because, clearly, tragedy itself is inconclusive about these questions. Tragedy as a portrayal of the process of madness affirms only that the individual has reached the limits of a sense of reality.
In the final analysis tragedy is neither necessarily transcendent nor necessarily mundane; neither necessarily success nor necessarily failure, neither inevitable hamartia nor inevitable arête , and the tragic hero is neither predestined to be the scapegoat of redemption and order, nor fated to be the existential visionary of chaos and absurdity. Tragedy simply indicates that the limits of a particular reality have been reached, which as a process might accept any one of these possibilities. What we think tragedy to be, and whether or not it has significance for the third millennium, is generally predetermined by our choice of approach to the subject. That is, if we approach tragedy as transcendentalists then we are likely to find tragedy to exemplify those values of transcendentalism which have apparently been lost to the modern and postmodern age. If we approach as existentialists, tragedy, we will find, repeatedly proves the absurdity of existence. A shared understanding of tragedy requires that we avoid presumptions of an ultimate reality--be it an ordered universe or primordial chaos. As all tragedies are stories of an individual or individuals dealing with a significant problem, I would suggest that our analysis of tragedy should therefore strive to deal with tragedy in terms of these individuals in the here-and-now world in which they live, in terms of their modernity, while "bracketing" any notion of ultimate or absolute reality. If we remove from the discussion of tragedy the contradictory visions of a transcendent moral order, on one hand, and the abyss, on the other, what remains as the common denominator, the consistent pattern of tragedy, is the distinctly modern situation of an individual attempting to deal with an extreme and challenging situation which eventually defeats an apprehension of reality.
We find authority for approaching tragedy in terms of an individual struggle with the circumstances of his phenomenological universe in a wide variety of critical literature. For example, Herbert J. Muller takes as the central slogan of The Tragic Spirit , that tragedy is the supreme demonstration that "the mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven." The implication here is that tragic individuals may vary and the tragic circumstances may be divergent but what remains consistent in tragedy is the energy which emerges from this combination of human spirit and opposing circumstances. Tragedy allows many philosophies, many conventions and ontologies, and many conclusions, but ultimately tragedy takes place within the self as the self struggles with a surrounding universe. 5
This does not imply that the tragedian sets out with the goal of penetrating to the transcendent essence of the self. On the contrary, the history of tragedy indicates the playwright's desire to deal with the ideas of his/her age. I would argue that it is the fact that the playwright, first, is a committed intellectual force in his or her own right and, second, is by the nature of the art forced to deal with a culturally accepted scope of ideas, that tragedy necessarily intimates alienation and the inevitably explosion of the reality it creates.
Arthur Miller highlights the importance of the "idea" to the dramatist in the introduction to his collected plays. However, as he points out, "it is time someone said that playwrights, including the greatest, have not been noted for the new ideas they have broached in their plays." 6 Miller argues that
a genuine invention in the realm of ideas must first emerge as an abstruse and even partial concept. Be it Christianity, Darwinism, Marxism, or any other that can with reason be called original, it has always been the product of proofs which, before they go to form a complete and new concept, require years and often generations of testing, research, and polemic. At first blush a new idea appears very close to insanity because to be new it must reverse important basic beliefs and assumptions which, in turn, have been institutionalized and are administered by one or another kind of priesthood with a vested interest in the old idea. 7
In the face of this situation which, as Miller describes it, reflects the fact that "the conflict between a new idea and the very notion of drama is remorseless and not resolvable," 8 what remains for the dramatist is to deal with ideas which are "in the air." Thus the playwright is not easily at liberty to broach new ideas but "once an idea is ‘in the air’ it is no longer an idea but a feeling, a sensation, an emotion, and with these the drama can deal." 9
From this perspective the writer of tragedies is a playwright of intellectual integrity willing to probe the notions of his or her culture as profoundly as the drama will allow. It is this independent, probing intellectuality, the determination to speak from "personal experience and hard personal meditation, without benefit of revelation or cult" 10 which, according to Else, in The Origin and Early Development of Greek Tragedy , underlies the origin of tragedy. As Else points out: “Nowhere else in archaic or classical Greece do we find this strange mixture of religious individualism and responsibility; nowhere else does the individual poet presume to speak to his people about the gods on his own responsibility, on the basis of his own unassisted wrestling with the problem.” 11
A consequent feature of Solon's poetry, which Else counts as the prelude to tragedy, is "the total absence of mythology." 12 Else goes on to note this paucity of myth in Attica as a whole.
This quasi-vacuum or low density of mythological tradition in Attica was perhaps in the long run her greatest asset for the development of a tragic drama based on myth; for it meant that her poets were free to choose those myths that best suited the tragic idea, without regard to status in local tradition, that is, their pre-established appeal to Attic pride or piety. Thus Athens was uniquely fitted to become what she in fact became in the fifth century: residual legatee and reinterpreter of the pan-Hellenic stock of myth for the whole Greek nation. She did this, in the persons of her great poets from Aeschylus onward, by virtue of a new penetration of the myths from within , a new way of facing up to them and asking their general import in terms of human experience. 13
Whether or not we accept Else's analysis as a complete and accurate account of the origins of tragedy, his contentions do bring to light the fact that tragedies consistently show the determination of a playwright to struggle with profound human dilemmas on the strength of personal intellect. This determination is reflected in tragedy in that the tragic hero's dilemma can never be happily resolved by simply resorting to established myth.
Richard Sewall's assessment of the "negative capability" of the writers of tragedy, in The Vision of Tragedy , reinforces the contentions presented by Miller and Else. According to Sewall "tragic vision"
is not for those who cannot live with unsolved questions or unresolved doubts, whose bent of mind would reduce the fact of evil into something else or resolve it into some large whole. Though no one is exempt from moments of tragic doubt or insight, the vision of life peculiar to the mystic, the pious, the propagandist, the confirmed optimist or pessimist--or confirmed anything--is not tragic. 14
Else's characterization of Aeschylus colours the tragedian in different tones from that of Sewall's visionary but the essential feature, an inquiring and stalwart mind, remains consistent.
Aeschylus accepted the pathos as something co-ordinate with the hero's greatness. But he was the kind of man who could not accept it, in the long run, unless it made sense: that is, unless it could be understood as flowing from certain events or conditions and issuing in others. In his search for causes Aeschylus is the Athenian counterpart, in the moral and religious sphere, of the great Milesians who "invented" philosophy in the generation or two before his birth. 15
Whether the impetus of tragedy is visionary or intellectual, we repeatedly find the content of extant tragedies to be stories of individuals whose dilemmas defeat their understanding of the world, their attachment to belief and value systems, and even their knowledge of themselves. Given this content, tragedy must, ipso facto , be considered a challenge to complacent visions of reality and a taking to task of blind acceptance of prevalent mythologies.
Though Nietzsche proceeds on the assumption of tragedy's mystic, ritual origins, his theme in The Birth of Tragedy is (not unlike Else's) tragedy's purging of established mythologies. He describes tragedy as discarding "the mendacious finery of that alleged reality of the man of culture." 16 Nietzsche repeatedly identifies the process of tragedy penetrating cultural reality, "the whole world of appearances," "the lie of culture," and "the world of illusions."
Sewall's description of tragedy as "boundary situations" impelled by the artist's tragic vision reinforces this image of tragedy.
It [tragic vision] impels the artist, in his fictions, toward what Jaspers calls "boundary situations," man at the limits of his sovereignty--Job on the ash-heap, Prometheus on the crag, Oedipus in his moment of self-discovery, Lear on the heath, Ahab on his lonely quarterdeck. Here with all the protective covering off, the hero faces as if no man had ever faced it before the existential question--Job's question "What is man?" or Lear's "Is man no more than this?" 17
The shift in perspective I have been proposing is away from what Nietzsche calls, in The Birth of Tragedy , the "truth of nature" or the "eternal core of things," and the "thing-in-itself," to the phenomenal, cultural, actual realities of the individuals in question. From this perspective tragedy lies in "the protective covering" and the process by which it is stripped off rather than the supposed "tragic knowledge" to which this process leads, or the presumed "tragic vision" which impelled the process in the first place. Our focus therefore becomes not simply tragic individual but, more significantly, the reality which they define and inhabit, and must eventually abandon.
This vision of tragedy is reinforced by socio-historical analyses of tragedy. As Raymond Williams concludes in Modern Tragedy :
Important tragedy seems to occur, neither in periods of real stability, nor in periods of open and decisive conflict. Its most common historical setting is the period preceding the substantial breakdown and transformation of an important culture. Its condition is the real tension between old and new: between received beliefs, embodied in institutions and responses, and newly and vividly experienced contradictions and possibilities. 18
Jaspers also contends that “great tragedy, Greek as well as modern, arises in eras of transition: it comes up like a flame from the fires that consume an epoch. It declines in the end to mere decoration.” 19
In the same vein Timothy Reiss argues, in Tragedy and Truth , that "in Western history tragedy seems to have appeared at moments that, retrospectively, are marked by a kind of ‘hole’ in the passage from one dominant discourse to another." 20 In other words, the historical conditions of tragedy would seem to be a well established mythology, or sense of reality or cultural identity or a dominant discourse which is in the process of being fractured by sub-terrestrial rifts. As an analogue to this socio-cultural condition, tragedy shows individuals attempting to resolve their situations but it does not avail them successful recourse to the gloss of a convenient myth and, in fact, the individuals’ understanding of reality itself is called into contradiction and question.
This description of tragedy may seem at odds with traditional portrayals, particularly with those written under the influence of Aristotle's confident pronouncements of the "tying and untying" of the plot in tragedy. Though Aristotle does not address the issue directly, between the lines of the Poetics we find the repeated implication that the "thought" or "problem" is resolved in a tragedy. However, from the perspective of a tragic subject, in the course of a tragedy the situation is only ended not resolved. Although the Poetics is a secular and empirical study, it pays little attention to the vagaries of tragical paradox and equivocation, concerning itself instead with the clean, clear lines of form, category and type. That Aristotle should almost entirely overlook the subjective nature of tragedy is in keeping with the bent of idealism which dominated fourth-century thinking.
Tragedy, however, was born out of an era dominated by an entirely different brand of philosophy, that of Sophistry. W.T. Stace, in A Critical History of Greek Philosophy , offers the following encapsulation of Sophistry: “Protagoras was the author of the famous saying, "Man is the measure of all things; of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not." Now this saying puts in a nutshell, so to speak, the whole teaching of Protagoras. And, indeed, it contains in germ the entire thought of the Sophists.” 21 Tragedy first emerged in an epoch philosophically dominated by individualism, by what Stace calls "the rights of the subject." Aristotle's system of thinking, by contrast, as Stace points out, was "founded on the Idea, and is an attempt to found an idealism free from the defects of Plato's system. It is in fact a development of Platonism." 22
Approaching tragedy from the standpoint of Platonic idealism would certainly encourage significantly different conclusions from those engendered by an individualistic approach. The fact that tragedy emerged during the epoch of the Sophists is, of course, additional justification for approaching tragedy from the perspective of the individual. Furthermore, we might well ask if tragedy has not in fact been correlated with eras of sophistic enlightenment throughout Western history. According to Stace these periods of "illumination," of which the era of the Sophists is one, emerge in the wake of significant intellectual advancement. This intellectual advancement necessarily causes widespread scepticism and as a result
. . . authority, tradition and custom are wholly or partially destroyed. And since authority, tradition, and custom are the cement of social structure, there results a general dissolution of that structure into its component individuals. All emphasis is now laid on the individual. Thought becomes ego-centric. Individualism is the dominant note. Extreme subjectivity is the principle of the age. 23
The historical argument then, would be that tragedy arises out of the cracks in these periods of "enlightenment" or social tension or gaps in discourse or shifts in philosophy, culture or modes of perception. During these periods tragedies emerge because, while there exists an apparently unified fabric of prevailing myths, there is also a growing movement of intellectualism and individualism. Tragedy requires a unified mythology, a shared awareness of how the world is said to be held together, but tragedy also reflects heightened individualism and a willingness or newfound facility to breach existent myths of reality.
Though the historical argument would be too broad to fully elaborate here, as we have noticed, tragedy repeatedly alludes to the integration or potential integration of existence but records its disintegration. Tragic heroes aspire to the fulfilment of idealized realities. Tragedy recognizes the texture and detail of existing or dreamed of realities and yet brings to bear the intellectualism, the individualism, and the force of will to expose the incongruities and portray the eventual rending of that cultural fabric. This seems a likely description of the ages of creation themselves--times at which the world of the artist appears to have coalesced to the limits of its density and, at the same time, to have given birth to the intellectual undercurrents which test that same unity. In other words we find the same schizophrenic shifts of perception which Vernon identifies in The Map and the Garden .
Critics who focus on the eras of heralded tragedy lend support to this impression of tragedy and of the historical periods in which these dramas were written. In Tragedy and Civilization , Charles Segal notes Greek tragedy's implicit undermining of the Greek mind and sense of self. In the tragedies the Greek sense of order gives way. “Doubt and self questioning surface from other strata of the mind. The ordered framework of differences and degrees cracks apart to reveal something like the primal magma of existence.” As Segal argues: “The self no longer stands apart from the world in calm mastery, but loses control, becomes confused, falls prey to dark impulses and passions. The self defined by social position, noble birth, competence, intelligence, dies and gives birth to a new unknown self, alone, in pain, exposed to the vastness of an inscrutable universe.” 24
This image of tragedy as a portrayal of social instability and the consequent crisis of the individual sense of self and significance is echoed in Reed's description of the social background of Jacobean tragedy. Reed observes that "many an intellectual Jacobean, whether disturbed by England's political and social unrest or by the breakdown of the Ptolemaic theory, was a recurrent interpreter of the causes that seemed to have determined the instability of human society." 25 To the tragic playwright, according to Reed, the human being "had become little more than a cog, an ineffectual puppet, in a universe that often and intangibly destroyed him." 26 The Halletts also contend that tragedy arises from "civilizational crisis" as myth falters and individualism flourishes: “It is the quality of being isolated and confused that marks the revenge hero as an archetype for the Elizabethans. The highly ordered, systematic world picture with its degrees and correspondences had become an illusion covering a growing spiritual chaos . . . .” 27 What the revenge hero faced on stage was, according to the Halletts, a crisis much like the underlying disintegration of civilizational values and symbols which Elizabethan society was experiencing. The tragic hero was called upon to act but his world, like the world of his audience, offered no foundation, no substantial sense of direction or guidance for his action.
While the Halletts describe the background of Elizabethan tragedy and the pattern of revenge tragedy as anomalous, I would argue that in tragedies of all periods we find a reflection of social alienation and "civilizational crisis." Myth, cult and community, as many modern critics have argued, are necessary to tragedy; however, not, as they are wont to claim, because tragedy is necessarily a reaffirmation of particular values or beliefs, but because tragedy portrays individuals’ exploration of the limits of their culture and a buffeting of the myths and values which govern or rather fail to govern the world of the play. A popular awareness of the myths or hierarchies or principles which are said to order existence together with a growing measure of individualism, independence and doubt would seem to be the typical historical setting for the writing of great tragedy. This, in any event, is the pattern which the salient tragedies themselves reveal.
An understanding of tragedy as it bridges millennia requires a shifting of our focus from individual characters in relation to ultimate reality to individuals in relation to the phenomenological, relative, individual reality in which they live and which they necessarily define. An individual reality may be dominated by a community of values or by private principles, by a religious vision or a political doctrine; it may be backgrounded by a vision of universal principles or a nihilistic vision of chaos. However, what remains consistent in tragedy is that it is exactly this world of appearances and mutual understandings, this individual reality (and consequently the individual's sanity) which is at stake. Tragedy has consistently portrayed a battering of presiding myths of reality, and its means of doing so is to point out the ironies, paradoxes and contradictions of those realities.
In the course of dealing with their situations individuals elaborate and define their reality. We become aware of the tragic reality not simply through the tragic individual but through the whole world of characters, events and ideas which the tragedy presents. Tragedy does not depend simply on the characteristics of a hero but, as Aristotle, Frye and Oscar Mandel have pointed out, tragedy depends on cause and effect, the chain of events, and the situation thus created. Furthermore, the tragic situation frequently claims more than one victim. Nonetheless, our understanding of tragedy must begin with a single tragic individual, a tragic hero, for this is where tragedy itself begins, and the individual is the only focal point which can make the tragic situation truly meaningful to us as individual observers. In other words we recognize tragedy as the whole matrix of a situation but this matrix is only meaningful to us, can arouse our pity, fear, dismay, concern, or any affect, in so far as it is reflected in and reflects upon an individual. We can come to a full reading of a tragedy through a persistent effort to apprehend the individual reality it constructs and, at the same time, to recognize the incongruities and conflicts which that reality inflicts upon itself.
That Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism , aligns tragedy with irony and satire is telling. Frye comments that "irony with little satire is the non-heroic residue of tragedy, centering on a theme of puzzled defeat." 28 Tragedy, like satire, is an ironic treatment of life's incongruities. Satire, however, tends to be conclusive and pretends a clear understanding of its object--what is being satirized. Tragic irony is adamant, it refuses resolution; it cannot be untwisted and straightened out. The reality which is the object of a tragedy struggles (under the guidance of the author, like the tragic hero him or herself) to evade its destiny. That struggle increases the entanglements and knots, strengthening the ostensible inevitability of the tragedy. The search for justice produces evil, the creed of authority produces fatal anarchy, innocent righteousness becomes guilty vengeance, the struggle for manliness produces weakness and fragility, introspection breeds reckless havoc, and paternal devotion unleashes filial venom. The reality of tragedy produces, or finds within itself, its own antithesis but without the synthesis of the dialectic.
For the individual faced with tragic reality no reasonable response is possible. From the perspective of the subject, madness is the only response which tragedy allows. Stereotyped behaviour, the symptoms of madness, in themselves, tell us little. Self-mutilation, suicide, hallucination, flat affect and silence--all are possible expressions of the negation of reality. The conclusion of a tragedy, from the point of view of the tragic individual, is that nothing more can be said: "the rest is silence." Madness is the expression of this situation. Its function is to signify nothing with an appropriate fullness of sound and fury.
Notes
1. Halletts, p. 124-5.
2. Jaspers, p. 42.
3. The Politics of Experience , p. 119.
4. Feder, p. 283.
5. H. J. Muller, The Spirit of Tragedy (New York: Washington Square Press, 1965), pp. 17-19.
6. A. Miller, "Introduction," Arthur Miller's Collected Plays (New York: Viking, 1957), p. 9.
7. Ibid, p. 9.
8. Ibid, p. 10.
9. Ibid, p. 11.
10. Gerald Else, The Origin and Early Development of Greek Tragedy , p. 37.
11. Ibid, p. 37.
12. Ibid, p. 38.
13. Ibid, p. 38.
14. Richard B. Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 5.
15. Else, p. 83.
16. Nietzsche, p. 61.
17. Sewall, p. 178.
18. Williams, p. 54.
19. Jaspers, p. 29.
20. Timothy J. Reiss, Tragedy and Truth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 284.
21. W.T. Stace, A Critical History of Greek Philosophy (London: MacMillan, 1953), p. 112.
22. Ibid, p. 255.
23. Ibid, p. 120.
24. C. Segal, Tragedy and Civilization , p. 58.
25. Reed, p. 78.
26. Ibid, pp. 78-9.
27. Halletts, pp. 122-3.
28. Frye, p. 224.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources
Aeschylus. Aeschylus 1: Oresteia . Trans. R. Lattimore. Chicago: Phoenix
Books,1969.
_________. Aeschylus II . Trans. D. Grene and R. Lattimore. New York: Washington Square, 1967.
Euripides. The Bacchae . Trans. W. Arrowsmith. Euripides V . Ed. D. Grene and R. Lattimore. Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1968.
Gassner, J., ed. Best American Plays . Third Series--1945-1951. New York: Crown, 1952.
Ibsen, H. Ibsen Plays: Two . Trans. M. Meyer. London: Eyre Metheun, 1980.
Shakespeare, W. The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare . Ed. S. Barnet. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.
Sophocles. Sophocles I . Trans. D. Grene and R. Lattimore. New York: Washington Square, 1967.
Secondary Sources
Abel, L. Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form . New York: Hill and Wang, 1963.
Adamson, J. Othello as Tragedy: Some Problems of Judgement and Feeling . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Anderson, R.L. Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare's Plays . University of Iowa Humanistic Studies, vol. 3, no. 4. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1927.
Bamber, L. Comic Woman, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare . Stanford: Stanford University, 1982.
Bateson, G. et al. "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia," Behavioral Science . Vol. 1, 1956, pp. 251-264.
Belsey, C. The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama . New York: Metheun, 1985.
Beye, C.R. Ancient Greek Literature and Society . Garden City, New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1975.
Birenbum, H. Tragedy and Innocence . Washington: University Press of America, 1983.
Blackham, H.J. ed. Reality, Man and Existence: Essential Works of Existentialism . Toronto: Bantam, 1965.
Boyers, R. ed. R.D. Laing and Anti-Psychiatry . New York: Octagon Books, 1974.
Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth . New York: St. Martins, 1904.
Brecht, B. Brecht on Theatre . Ed. Trans. J. Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.
Brereton, G. Principles of Tragedy . London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968.
Brockman, J., ed. About Bateson . New York: Dutton, 1977.
Brodwin, L.L. Elizabethan Love Tragedy 1587-1625 . New York: New York University Press, 1971.
Bromberg, W. From Shaman to Psychotherapist: A History of the Treatment of Mental Illness . Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1975.
Brown, J. R., ed. Focus on Macbeth . Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
Bucknill, J.C. The Mad Folk of Shakespeare . New York: Burt Franklin, 1867.
Burian, P., ed. Directions in Euripidean Criticism . Durham: Duke University Press, 1985.
Campbell, L. Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion . New York: Barnes & Nobel, 1970.
Carleson, Marvin. Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present (expanded edition). Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Clurman, H. Ibsen . New York: Macmillan, 1977.
Collier, A. R.D. Laing: The Philosophy and Politics of Psychotherapy . New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.
Cook, A. Enactment: Greek Tragedy . Chicago: Swallow Press, 1871.
Corrigan, R.W., ed. Tragedy: Vision and Form . San Francisco: Chandler, 1965.
___________., ed. Arthur Miller: A Collection of Critical Essays . Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969.
Coulter, J. Approaches to Insanity: A Philosophical and Sociological Study . London: Martin Robertson, 1973.
Cruttwell, P. The Shakespearean Moment and its Place in the Poetry of the 17th Century . London: Chatto and Windus, 1954.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking Press, 1977.
de Man, P. Aesthetic Ideology . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
__________. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism . Second Edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1983.
Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference . Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
Devereux, G. Dreams in Greek Tragedy: An Ethno-Psycho-Analytic Study . Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1976.
___________. "The Psychotherapy Scene in Euripides' Bacchae," Journal of Hellenic Studies , 1970, 90: 35-48.
Dodds, E.R. The Greeks and the Irrational . Berkeley: University of California Press. 1951.
___________. "Introduction," Bacchae . Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1960.
Dollimore, J. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Downs, B.W. Ibsen: The Intellectual Background . New York: Octagon Books, 1969.
Dillon, J. Shakespeare and the Solitary Man . London: MacMillan, 1981.
Dudley, E. and Novak, M.E., eds. The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism . Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972.
Eagleton, T. William Shakespeare . New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
Eliot, T.S. "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca," Selected Essays . London: Faber and Faber, 1964.
Ellis, John M. Against Deconstruction . Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Else, G.F., trans. and comm. Aristotle Poetics . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970.
__________ . The Madness of Antigone . Heidleberg: Carl Winter, 1976.
___________. The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.
Fagels, R., ed. trans. Aeschylus, The Oresteia . London: Wildwood House, 1976.
Fairchild, H. Shakespeare and the Tragic Theme . Folcroft, PA.: Folcroft Press, 1944.
Falk, S.L. Tennessee Williams . New York: Twayne, 1961.
Fass, E. Tragedy and After: Euripides, Shakespeare, Goethe . Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1984.
Feder, L. Madness in Literature . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Felman, S. Writing and Madness . New York: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Fergusson, F. The Idea of a Theatre: A Study of Ten Plays . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949.
Figes, E. Tragedy and Social Evolution . London: Calder, 1976.
Foucault, M. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason Trans. R. Howard. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.
Frazer, J.G., ed. trans. Pausanias's Descriptions of Greece . London: MacMillan, 1898. vol. IV.
___________. Studies in Greek Scenery, Legend and History . London: MacMillan and Co., 1919.
___________. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion . New York: MacMillan, 1944.
Freedman, A.M. et al., eds. Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry . Vol. 1. 2 nd ed., Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1975.
Friedrich , Otto. Going Crazy : An Inquiry into Madness in our Time . New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976.
Frye, N. Anatomy of Criticism . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
__________. Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967.
Gardner, H. Religion and Literature . London: Faber and Faber, 1971.
Glicksberg, C.L. The Tragic Vision in Twentieth Century Literature . Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963.
Grant, B.W. Schizophrenia: A Source of Social Insight . Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975.
Greenblatt, S. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Greene, W.C. Moira: Fate, Good, and Evil in Greek Thought . New York: Harper & Row, 1944.
Guerin L.W. et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature . 2nd ed., New York: Harper and Row, 1979.
Hadas, M., ed. Greek Drama . New York: Bantam Books, 1965.
Hallett, C.A. and E.S. The Revenger's Madness: A Study of Revenge Tragedy Motifs . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980.
Hallman, R.J. Psychology of Literature: A Study of Alienation and Tragedy . New York: Philosophical Library. 1961.
Hayman, R. Arthur Miller . New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972.
Hayse, J.M. Madness on Stage, the History of a Tradition in Drama . unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1976.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Hegel on Tragedy . Ed. Anne and Henry Paolucci. Wilmington, DE: Griffon House Pub., 2001.
Herington, J. Aeschylus . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.
Holton, O.I. Mythic Patterns in Ibsen's Last Plays . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970.
Hunter, R. and MacAlpine I. Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry 1535 to 1860 . Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1963.
Jaspers, K. Tragedy Is Not Enough . Trans. H.A.T. Reiche et al. Boston: Beacon Press, 1952.
Jorgensen, P. A. Our Naked Frailties: Sensationl Art and Meaning in Macbeth . Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971.
Kitto, H.D.F. The Greeks . Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1957.
Krieger, M. "Tragedy and Tragic Vision," Tragedy: Vision and Form , ed., R.W. Corrigan (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965), 19-39.
Krutch, J. W. "The Tragic Fallacy," in Tragedy: Vision and Form , ed. R.W. Corrigan (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965), 271-283.
Knox, Bernard. "Euripides: The Poet as Prophet," Directions in Euripidean Criticism , ed. P. Burian (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985), p. 6-19.
__________. The Oldest Dead White European Males: And Other Reflections on the Classics . New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.
Laing, R.D. Knots . Markham, Ontario: Penguin, 1970.
_________. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness . Markham, Ontario: Penguin Books, 1965.
_________. The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise . Markham, Ontario: Penguin Books, 1967.
Lawall, S.N. Critics of Consciousness: The Existential Structures of Literature . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968.
Leavis, F.R. "Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero," The Common Pursuit . London: Chatto & Windus, 1952.
Leavitt, R.F., ed. The World of Tennessee Williams . New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1978.
Lebeck, A. The Oresteia: A Study in Language and Structure . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.
Lentricchia, F. After New Criticism . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Lidz, T. Hamlet's Enemy: Madness and Myth in Hamlet . New York: Basic Books, 1975.
________. The Origin and Treatment of Schizophrenic Disorders . New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Long, M. The Unnatural Scene: A Study in Shakespearean Tragedy . London: Metheun, 1976.
Lyman, S.B. and Scott, M.B. The Drama of Social Reality . New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.
MacDonald, M. Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth Century England . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Mandel, O. A Definition of Tragedy . New York: New York University Press, 1961.
Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading . Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
Margeson, J.M.R. The Origins of English Tragedy . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.
Martine, J.J. Critical Essays on Arthur Miller . Boston: G.K. Hall, 1979.
McElroy, B. Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Meyer, M. Ibsen: A Biography . Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1971.
Miller, A. Authur Miller's Collected Plays . New York: Viking, 1957.
Muller, H..J. The Spirit of Tragedy . New York: Washington Square, 1965.
Murray, E. Arthur Miller, Dramatist . New York: Frederick Ungar, 1967.
Natoli, J. Psychological Perspectives on Literature: Freudian Dissidents and Non-Freudians--A Casebook . Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1984.
Nietzsche, F. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner . Trans. W. Kaufman. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
Nelson, B. Tennessee Williams: His Life and Work . London: Peter Owen, 1961.
Nepveu, Pierre. L’Écologie du réel . Montréal: Boréal, 1988.
O'Brien-Moore, A. Madness in Ancient Literature . Weimar: R. Wagner Sohn, 1924.
Podlecki, A.J. The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966.
Raphael, F. and McLeishe, K., trans. The Serpent Son: Aeschylus: Oresteia . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Reed, R.R. Bedlam On the Jacobean Stage . New York: Octagon Books, 1970.
Reiss, T.J. Tragedy and Truth: Studies in the Development of Renaissance and Neoclassical Discourse . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.
Reznek, Lawrie. The Philosophical Defence of Psychiatry . New York: Routledge, 1991.
Roberts, D.H. Apollo and his Oracle in the Oresteia . Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984.
Roberts, P. The Psychology of Tragic Drama . Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.
Rosen, G. Madness in Society: Chapters in the Historical Sociology of Mental Illness . New York: Harper & Row, 1968.
Rosenberg, M. The Masks of Macbeth . Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978.
Rothstein, E. Restoration Tragedy: Form and the Process of Change . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967.
Salkeld, Duncan. Madness and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. Manchester, UK : Manchester University Press, 1994.
Sass, L.A. Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art,
Literature, and Thought . New York: Basic Books, 1992.
Schumaker, W. Literature and the Irrational: A Study in Anthropological Backgrounds . Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1960.
Schuman, B. "The Double-Bind Hypothesis a Decade Later," Psychological Bulletin . vol. 68, no. 5, Nov., 1967, pp. 409-415.
Segal, C. Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides' Bacchae . Princeton: Princeton Univeristy Press, 1982.
_________. Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Sewall. R.B. The Vision of Tragedy . New ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.
Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics . New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Simon, B. Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece: The Classical Roots of Modern Psychiatry . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.
Smith, A.C. Schizophrenia and Madness . Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1982.
Smith, Paul. Discerning the Subject . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Smith, P.M. On the Hymn to Zeus in Aeschylus' Agamemnon . Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1980.
Sokal, Alan and Jean Brickmont. Impostures Intellectuelles . Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 1997.
Somerville, H. Madness in Shakespearian Tragedy . London: The Richards Press, 1929.
Spalding, T.A. Elizabethan Demonology . London: Chatto and Windus, 1980.
Spitzer, R.L. et al. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders . 3rd ed. American Psychiatric Association, Washington D.C., 1980.
Stace, W.T. A Critical History of Greek Philosophy . London: Macmillan and Co., 1953.
States, B.O. Irony and Drama: A Poetics . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971.
Steiner, G. The Death of Tragedy . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961.
Szasz, T. Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences . New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1987.
_________., ed. The Age of Madness: The History of Involuntary Hospitalization Presented in Selected Texts . New York: Jason Aronson, 1974.
__________. The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement . New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Thomson, G. The Oresteia of Aeschylus . Amsterdam: Adolf M. Happert, 1966.
Tuke, D.H. Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles . Reprinted from the London version of 1882. Amsterdam: E.T. Basset, 1968.
Vaughan, A. Madness in Greek Thought and Custom . Baltimore: J.H. Feirst, 1919.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece . Trans Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books, 1990.
Vernon, J. The Garden and the Map: Schizophrenia in Twentieth Century Literature and Culture . Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1973.
Vellacott, P. The Logic of Tragedy: Morals and Integrity in Aeschylus' Oresteia . Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984.
Weitz, M. "Tragedy," The Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Vol. 7 & 8. Ed. P. Edwards. New York: Macmillan, 1967.
Welland, D. Arthur Miller . New York: Grove, 1961.
__________. Miller: The Playwright . New York: Metheun, 1983.
Williams, R. Modern Tragedy . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966.
Wilson, E.S. On the Design of Shakespearian Tragedy . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957.
No comments:
Post a Comment