Tragedy and Madness
The deepest yet most common meaning underlying the words
‘tragedy’ and ‘tragic’ is that events so described are those which
challenge one's reason for or belief in living. The questioning of
existence and of meaning is an inevitable response to disaster and a
constant feature of tragedy. Frequently (and, in fact, it is the accepted
logic of most clichés on the subject), the outcome of an overwhelming
personal catastrophe is mental breakdown. The air-plane crash, the
natural disaster, the genocidal massacre, the assassination, the
maternal infanticide--all are rightly described as "tragic" in so far as
they have the potential to throw out of contention the conviction that
existence is reasonable and significant, and thereby imply or promote
aberrant behaviour or perceptions. This intuitive and logical
connection between what is "tragic" and what is "mad" is, I believe, a
key feature of those dramas we typically call tragedies.
Primitive ritual vs alienation
Despite this potential correlation, forthright treatment of the relationship between tragedy and madness is rare in the literature of both psychology and literary criticism. One exception to this tendency is Ralph J. Hallman's The Psychology of Literature: A Study of Alienation and Tragedy. Hallman adopts what might be described as a psycho-anthropological approach to tragedy. He argues that the origin of tragedy lies in the collision of primitive
rituals which, through the enactment of death and rebirth, were psychically sustaining, and rationality, which alienated the individual from this psychological sustenance. Primitive ritual underlines the positive sense, the rejuvenation, of death leading to rebirth; rationality discredits this vision, and pre-empts the immediacy and spontaneity, and the sense of community and self affirmation brought about by the ritual. Tragedy expresses the general sense of alienation inherent in this situation. It re-enacts the atavistic desire to die as a means of recapturing life's spontaneity and, at the same time, its rationality
invalidates this death. Rationality furthers the alienation it has
engendered because it fails to revivify the sense of self as ritual had
done. Hallman writes:
. . . the great tragedies re-enact this death drama--its necessity
and meaninglessness; they depict the alienation of man, and
because man's rational faculty establishes the alienating
conditions, tragedy depicts the bankruptcy of intelligence as a
measure which one must take in vain effort to escape the final
estrangement. 1
In Hallman's view "alienation" and "estrangement" are inevitable to
tragedy.
Tragedy signifies man's failure to achieve identity; it traces out
his efforts to discover who he is and what he ought to do and
how he fits into the general scheme of things. In the broadest
sense tragedy reports the failure of personality formation and
consequently installs those conditions which destroy the values
which are normally associated with individual personality. 2
Madness in Ancient Literature
While many studies note the presence of madness in tragedy, few
explicitly acknowledge or extensively consider a basic connection
between tragedy and the breakdown of personality as Hallman has
done. In Madness in Ancient Literature, Ainsworth O'Brien-Moore
catalogues examples of madness from the tragedies of Aeschylus,
Sophocles and Euripides, and distinguishes each of the dramatists'
treatment of madness, but he reaches no conclusions about the
relationship between madness and tragedy.
Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece
More promising is Bennett Simon's Mind and Madness in Ancient
Greece in which he confirms that "tragedy reveals a great interest in
madness, which it shows as arising from a matrix of deep ambivalence
and unbearable conflict." 3 "The heroes of tragedy who go mad,"
Simon observes, "do so when their world is collapsing around them.
Their madness is part of a frantic attempt to hold on to what they
know and think right. Their world involves issues of state, the gods,
the family, and the microcosm of their own conflicted ideals and
passions." 4 Simon's comments are only intended to describe
madness as it is portrayed in ancient drama but, as my forthcoming
argument will reveal, the terms of his description are tantamount to a
definition of tragedy.
Madness in Shakespearean Tragedy
H. Somerville broaches this insight in his book, Madness in
Shakespearean Tragedy, when he points out that in tragedy, "in the
case of an insane character it may well be asked: Is the catastrophe in
his death or in his madness?" 5 However, Dr. Somerville retreats
from any further consideration of a link between tragedy and madness,
choosing instead to "explain some of the difficulties occurring in the
speeches, as well as those arising out of the strange and puzzling
behaviour of the principal characters during their attacks of insanity."6
The Mad Folk of Shakespeare
J.C. Bucknill, in his book, The Mad Folk of Shakespeare, published
in 1867, observes that "abnormal states of mind were a favorite
study of Shakespeare." 7 However, Bucknill does not specifically
align madness with tragedy.
The Birth of Tragedy
In fact, the intuition of a connection between tragedy and madness, it might be argued, is distinctly modern and has only come to us since Nietzsche. Prior to The Birth of Tragedy we find little connection between tragedy and madness in the critical analyses of tragedy. The absence of this recognition, I would contend, is due not to the lack of
episodes of madness in extant tragedies, nor to the analysts' failure to note them, but to the dominance of idealist or systemic approaches to tragedy which automatically made madness a low priority or even an extraneous feature of tragedy.
Aristotle's Poetics
Gerald Else in his introduction to Aristotle Poetics notes the paucity
of discussion of "poetic madness" or "inspiration" in the Poetics
despite this phenomenon having been frequently discussed by Plato.
Whatever the reason (and to my notion the status of poetic
Inspiration had been oblique and precarious even in Plato's
thinking), Aristotle does not in fact make any significant use of
the idea. There is one passing reference to poetic madness, in
section 17; but however interpreted, it clearly does not belong
to the main structure of Aristotle's theory. 8
If we consider section 17 on the "Essential procedures in converting a
plot into a play," we find Aristotle's argument for realistic portrayals of
passion.
Also one should work the appropriate figures and forms of
speech into the text, as far as possible. For people in the grip of
passions are most persuasive because they share the natural
tendencies we have, and it is the man who conveys dejection or
rages with anger in the most natural terms who makes us feel
dejection or anger. (Hence the composition is an affair of either the wellendowed
or the manic individual; for of these two types the
ones are impressionable while the others are liable to be
"possessed" from time to time.) 9
Clearly, high passion is part of Aristotle's understanding of tragedy--he
makes "fear and pity" the center of his definition and he considers one
of the "better" forms of anagnorisis that which carries "a shattering
emotional effect" 10 --yet madness, in his analysis, remains an
extraneous or ornamental aspect of tragedy. For example, still in
section 17, Aristotle suggests that in constructing a tragedy, first the
plot should be outlined, then the characters' names and "other" scenes
should be added. Aristotle includes the madness of Orestes as an
example of one of these "other" scenes. While these affective and
even passionate elements are present in Aristotle's vision of tragedy,
they must eventually be subordinated to his sense of the higher order
of rationalism.
Hegel on Tragedy
Hegel, like Aristotle, submits tragedy to the tyranny of the "Idea." Hegel's typical tragedy is the case of a hero who becomes totally identified with a principle, an idea, a commitment, who then finds himself in an "unmediated contradiction" between his principles and
his concern for a loved-one, which eventually destroys him. In Hegel's analysis, as in Aristotle's, we can see the possibility of madness being a feature of tragedy; however, both these philosophers attach tragedy
to a larger, absolutist vision of the universe, which reduces the here-and-now world of the tragic hero, and his psychological conflicts, to incidents which are valued only in so far as they reflect or symbolize the idealized universe.
The Dionysian and Schopenhauer
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche sets out with the intention of
avoiding the theodicies of his predecessors. He creates a new
category of concern, "the Dionysian," in which the sensuous, the
immediate, the communal, abandon, frenzy, intoxication, ecstasy and
madness are upheld and valued in counterbalance to the "Apollonian"
values of form, discipline and control. However, in his conclusion
that the tragic hero abandons individuality and plunges himself into
the primordial will Nietzsche surrenders his argument to
Schopenhauer's theodicy of the will and returns madness to mysticism.
Nonetheless, Nietzsche's discussion of tragedy so unbalanced all
previous approaches to tragedy that tragedy could never again be
spoken of in the same way. Refined discussions of dulce and utile now
seem feeble, the great Wheel of Fortune appears little more than a
quaint metaphor, and madness itself, through Nietzsche, has arguably
become the positive value of tragedy. What we find in the modern age
are not simply new definitions of tragedy but new ways of defining it.
Consistent in these myriad approaches to tragedy is the intimation of
madness or at least the conditions of madness as definitive of what is
tragic.
Tragedy and Tragic Vision
In Tragedy and Tragic Vision , Murray Krieger describes tragedy
and the modern world as linked by "tragic vision" but separated by the
mitigating aesthetic form of traditional tragedy and the unrelieved
tragic vision of the modern age. Yet madness, in his assessment, is
implied to exist in both traditional tragedy and in the literature of
"tragic vision." For example, Krieger describes the evolution of tragic
vision as follows:
. . the tragic vision was born inside tragedy, as a part of it: as a
possession of the tragic hero, the vision was a reflection in the
realm of thematics of the fully fashioned aesthetic totality
which was tragedy. But fearful and even demonic in its
revelations, the vision needed the ultimate soothing power of
the aesthetic form which contained it--of tragedy itself--in order
to preserve for the world a sanity which the vision itself denied.
11
We should recognize that Krieger's polarization of the traditional
form called "tragedy" and the modern theme called "tragic vision" is
based on the assumption that the aesthetic form of tragedy asserts a
resolution of harmony, a return to an ordered universe, and the
reaffirmation of a transcendent moral order. Krieger describes the
modern "unrelieved tragic vision" as follows:
. . . in its seizing upon the particular and its denial of any
totality it is an heretical vision; and in its defiance of all rational
moral order it is a demoniac vision. Finally, in a very special
sense it is a casuistic vision; and it is this characteristic,
perhaps, that makes it especially accessible to literary portrayal.
The tragic vision, a product of crisis and of shock, is an
expression of man only in an extreme situation, never in a
normal or routine one. Literature dealing with it frequently
dwells on the exceptional man; and when it does choose a
normal man it does so only to convert him, by way of the
extremity he lives through, into the exceptional man. 12
The paradox of tragedy is that it presents madness, chaos and the
demise of humanity yet, at the same time, tragedy as an aesthetic form
remains sane, ordered, and exalting of humanity and human passions.
This paradox is an unavoidable fact of tragedy, as true for the
American tragedians of the 1940's as it was for the Greeks of the 5th
century BC. Unmitigated tragic vision is a logical impossibility.
Tragic vision is always mitigated, in fact, contradicted by the fact that
it is found within an aesthetic form. On the other side of his
argument, Krieger overstates the case for the catharsis of traditional
tragedy achieved through aesthetic form and the restoration of the
morally ordered universe. When I consider Creon and Lear and Willy
Loman, I find little difference in the degree to which these men are
lost and equally little in their life experiences to offset the pathos
which their destinies engender. When I consider Oedipus and
Macbeth and Hedda Gabler, I find little indication in the plays of
mitigation of their catastrophic destinies except the plays themselves
as aesthetic forms, and this is true in each of the three cases.
Tragedy Is Not Enough
In Karl Jasper's Tragedy Is Not Enough we find the merging of
existential and transcendental visions of tragedy and, I would contend,
an implicit argument for madness as the common denominator of
both. Like Steiner, Jaspers insists upon transcendence as being
essential to tragedy, but Jaspers offers a much broader notion of
transcendence, and invites the conclusion that mental breakdown
precipitates transcendence. Jaspers argues that "breakdown and
failure reveal the true nature of things." 1 As he involves himself in
the tragic, "man's mind fails and breaks down in the very wealth of its
potentialities." 2 This breakdown automatically implies
transcendence.
Both the exceptional man and the sublime order have their own
limits, beyond which they break down. What conquers in
tragedy is the transcendent--or rather even this does not
conquer, for it makes itself felt only through the whole
situation. It neither dominates nor submits; it simply exists. 15
Anatomy of Criticism
Though not explicitly stated, intimations of madness seem to hover
about tragedy even in Northrop Frye's "scientific" study of literature,
Anatomy of Criticism. Frye basically attempts to make tragedy a
mere category to be subsumed under a pseudo-scientific
superstructure. The shortcoming of a structuralist approach is that,
while it may place tragedy coherently within the body of literature and
art, it tells us little about the meaning and value of tragedy. The
structuralist tendency is to forgo the question of tragedy's
correspondence to life in order to maintain the internal coherence of a
theory. This, however, is not to deny that insight can be gained from
the comparison of tragedy to comedy or epic or satire. For example,
Frye's discussion of the "tragic mode" fuels our present hypothesis:
“. . . there is a general distinction between fictions in which the hero
becomes isolated from his society, and fictions in which he is
incorporated into it. This distinction is expressed by the words ‘tragic’
and ‘comic’ . . . .” 16 Though Frye's notion of the tragic touches upon
alienation, his vision of tragedy in "The Mythos of Autumn" is
inconclusive as to a connection between tragedy and madness.
Modern Tragedy
Raymond Williams' approach to tragedy in Modern Tragedy is
historical; that is, he sees tragedy not as fixed but as an experience that
is rediscovered within new circumstances and conventions. When
Williams comes to describe what he calls "liberal tragedy," which
extends roughly from Marlowe and Shakespeare to Ibsen and Miller,
he writes:
Much of the new drama, even when its reference points are
familiar categories, takes its most active life from a
consciousness of the self in a passing moment of experience: a
self-consciousness which is now in itself dramatic, and which
new dramatic resources are employed to express. The common
process of life is seen at its most intense in an individual
experience.
Tragedy, according to Williams, is now rooted in "the nature of a particular man" and the process by which he discovers his external limits.
But the limits men reach, in their challenge to order, are not
only of this kind. There are new limits, within man himself.
Order can break there, within the personality, as decisively and as tragically. Breakdown and madness, as private experiences, are quite newly realised and explored. The emphasis, as we take the full weight, is not on the naming of limits, but on their intense and confused discovery and exploration. 17
Williams has, of course, repositioned the dividing line between modern and traditional tragedy. From our present perspective we must ask of William's dividing line: Is there really such a difference between Orestes' "public" madness and Hamlet's "private" madness? Is there such a difference in the way Creon's world falls apart and the
way Lear's world falls apart? Furthermore, can we separate a man's
discovery of his external limits from his discovery of his internal
limits? Are the two not inseparably intertwined? Are they not, in
fact, one? For example, isn't Oedipus's discovery of the fate the gods
have in store for him, in fact, a collision with his own internal limits,
just as Willy Loman's bumping into the limits of the American dream
is for him an internal crisis? In other words, if we bridge Williams'
historical distinctions, tragedy appears as the consistent experience of
reaching one's limits and the consequent breakdown of one's sense of
order and self.
In Summary
Despite the variety of these approaches we should recognize that
madness, though never focused on, remains an implicit element of
tragedy. In the formalist approach of Aristotle we discover the
"passion," the "shock," and "the shattering emotional effect" of
tragedy; in the idealist aesthetics of Hegel we hear of the unresolvable
contradiction which destroys the individual; in Nietzsche's Dionysian
approach we learn of the necessary destruction of individuation. In
Krieger's analysis the tragic hero becomes an existential visionary
compelled to see beyond sanity. In Jasper's melange of secular
existentialism and religious transcendentalism, the destruction of the
individual mind is again predicated by tragedy. Even Frye's
mythopoeic structuralism concedes the alienation inherent in tragedy.
And, as we have just seen, Williams' historical/cultural analysis
places madness at the middle point of our history of tragedy.
Yet having confirmed the presence of madness or the etiology of
madness in this variety of approaches to tragedy, we are left with little
assurance of a shared understanding of tragedy itself. Not only does
each of these critics employ a different methodology but the
methodology is in turn applied to different bodies of literature. It is
perhaps this critical Tower-of-Babel situation which compelled Oscar
Mandel to write A Definition of Tragedy. Hard definitions of tragedy
are a rarity in recent times. 18
A Definition of Tragedy
In A Definition of Tragedy, Mandel confronts the existential
visionaries and traditional formalists with a direct and definitive
approach to tragedy. Mandel rejects both the "tragic vision" of
modern existentialists and the theodicies of Hegel and Schiller. He
also dismisses inward looking structures such as those developed by
Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism. Mandel's argument
against ethical and existential interpretations of tragedy is "the
anarchy of subjective and historical interpretation" which they
impose.19 His refutation of structuralist categorizations is that a
definition of tragedy "is acceptable only on condition of being in
some manner true to the world which supplies it with materials." 20
Mandel offers the following definition:
A work of art is tragic if it substantiates the following
situation: A protagonist who commands our earnest good will
is impelled in a given world by a purpose, or undertakes an
action, of a certain seriousness and magnitude; and by that very
purpose or action, subject to that same given world, necessarily
and inevitably meets with grave spiritual or physical suffering.
21
In the defence of his definition Mandel argues against catharsis ,
anagnorisis , and "nobility" being essential to tragedy. As well,
Mandel, like Aristotle and Frye, focuses on the fact that tragedy
describes "a situation." However, as Mandel is quick to point out
himself, the book is more about definitions than about tragedy. Even
if we were to accept this legalistic definition, we would be at a loss to
determine what it tells us about tragedy.
Tragedy in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy
At this point we should rightly ask: if, as Mandel contends, these
various formal, traditional, transcendental, existential, and structuralist
theories have proven inadequate, is any theory of tragedy definitive?
For that matter, is it possible to derive or deduce a final formulation
for tragedy? At this point in the long history of literature and of
literary criticism a final definition of tragedy seems beyond the
possibility of consensus. As Morris Weitz points out in his article,
"Tragedy," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, given the divergence
of artifacts and opinions, it is not possible to determine "a set of
necessary and sufficient properties" which account for the concept of
tragedy. Nor is it possible, as Weitz indicates, to give the final
definition of a concept like tragedy, when new tragedies may yet be
written which will change our understanding of the concept.
Tragedy is not definable (in the theory sense of true, real
definition) for another reason, namely that its use must allow
for the ever present possibility of new conditions. 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 properties of these cases. One cannot state the
necessary and sufficient conditions for the correct use of a
concept whose very use entails the requirement that the concept
be applicable to new conditions. 22
Weitz concludes that
. . . no set of necessary and sufficient properties is common to
all [tragedies]. Nor will further examination of the human
situation furnish us with a theory of tragedy, because there is no
tragic fact in the world about which a theory of tragedy could
be true or which would corroborate such a theory. 23
Weitz contends that when we speak of tragedy, "such discourse is
intelligible." However, I would note that in discussing tragedy
without the benefit of an accepted definition contemporary critics are
forced to limit themselves to defensible topics like "tragic myth" or
"the masks of tragedy" or "themes in tragedy" or "features of tragedy"
while adopting an ostensive definition of the term. The fact that there
is little agreement on a canon of tragedies seems to jeopardize or,
more to the point, trivialize even these arguments. If we compare
Sewall ( The Vision of Tragedy ) and Steiner ( The Death of Tragedy ),
we discover that Sewall's basic tenet is that the essence of tragedy is
the knowledge gained through suffering; whereas Steiner's central
theme is that the core of tragedy is the awareness of transcendence
discovered through suffering. On the surface they present
complementary points of view, but when it comes to the specifics of
individual tragedies they differ widely. Sewall sees the story of Job as
one of the two pillars of the tragic worldview. Steiner, however, is
unequivocal that there is nothing tragic in the story of Job. Sewell
lists Long Day's Journey into Night , The Trial , and Absolon, Absolon
as examples of tragedy. Steiner's thesis is that tragedy ended with the
neo-classical period.
In the absence of a final theory or definition of tragedy or some fact
of life to which tragedy appeals, all statements about tragedy broach
tautology. How can any statement about tragedy be "proven" when a
body of plays must be selected to induce a particular notion of tragedy,
and then the same body of plays must then be used to prove the
validity of the notion?
In any discussion of tragedy, what is at issue is the reasons given for
the use of the term. One theory may compete with another in terms of
erudition, or verisimilitude, or coherence, or its appeal to intuition,
but no theory can claim to correspond to truth. The purpose of such
discussion, then, is merely to inch closer to the truth by adding to
awareness and enlarging understanding. As Weitz points out:
Each theory of tragedy expresses an honorific redefinition of
tragedy that restricts the use of the term to a selection from its
multiple criteria. It is this selection, as a recommendation to
concentrate upon certain preferred criteria or properties of
tragedy that are neglected, distorted, or omitted by other
theories. If we attend to these criteria or properties instead of to
the unsuccessful attempts of essentialist definitions, we shall
have much to learn from the individual theories about what to
look for in tragedies as well as how to look at them. 24
The point of any discussion of tragedy is, therefore, not so much to
prove as to persuade. The purpose of that persuasion is to enhance
understanding, to illuminate new perspectives, to provide insights.
Thus we can now speak of definitions and theories of tragedies from
the comfortable perspective of the shared understanding that absolute
terms are not possible, and that final definitions and ultimate theories
are beyond the hope of consensus. We can therefore take the liberty
of speaking of an understanding rather than the definition of tragedy.
Our goal, then, is to consider eight plays written over three millennia,
each of which has been widely discussed in terms of tragedy, as
portrayals of a process of madness and the insights which that process
reveals.
Notes
1. Ralph J. Hallman, Psychology and Literature (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1961), p. 21.
2. Ibid, p. 15.
3 . B. Simon, Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1978), p.89.
4. Ibid, p. 90.
5. H. Somerville, Madness in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: The
Richards' Press, 1929), p. 14.
6. Ibid, p.15.
7. J.C. Bucknill, The Mad Folk of Shakespeare (New York: Burt
Franklin, 1867), p. xi.
8. G. F. Else, "Introduction," Aristotle Poetics (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1970), p. 5.
9. Ibid, section 17, p. 48.
10. Ibid. See sec. 9. p. 25 for the basic definition, and sec. 15, p. 42 for
the discussion of "the recognition" having "a shattering emotional
effect"--though here, in contradiction to earlier claims, Aristotle seems to
prefer for tragedy to end happily, and in sec. 16, p. 47 he again refers to
the "emotional shock" brought about by probable cause.
11. M. Krieger, "Tragedy and Tragic Vision," Tragedy: Vision and Form, ed., R.W. Corrigan (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965), p. 20.
12. Ibid, p. 33.
13. K. Jaspers, Tragedy Is Not Enough, trans. H.A.T. Reiche et al
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), p. 43.
14. Ibid, p. 42
15. Ibid, pp. 51-2.
16. N. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1957), p. 35.
17. R. Williams, Modern Tragedy (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1966), p.89.
18. G. Brereton offers another example of a "hard definition" in his
Principles of Tragedy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 20
19. O. Mandel, A Definition of Tragedy (New York: New York
University Press, 1961), p. 56.
20. Ibid, p. 56.
21. Ibid, p. 20.
22. M. Weitz, "Tragedy," The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed., P.
Edwards (New York: MacMillan, 1967), p. 160.
23. Ibid, p. 160.
24. Ibid, p. 160.
