TRAGEDY: Quoted from
Bergman, David and Daniel Mark Epstein. The Heath Guide to Literature, 3rd Ed. D.C.
Heath, 1992.
p. 1027 "a tragedy is a play that shows the change in the protagonist's fortunes from good to bad. The incidents must inspire fear and pity. . . We fear most deeply for characters who are like ourselves, when they are in danger. What threatens them may threaten us: sickness, old age, betrayal, fire. . .
1027: "It is particularly fearful to watch someone fall from a position of high rank or power. The heroes of classical tragedy are always members of the nobility. Their fates are terrifying to us, for we sense that if these great, privileged figures are vulnerable, then none of us is safe.
1027: "Pity is the final proof of tragic drama. In order to feel pity, we must believe that the protagonist's suffering is undeserved, the punishment greater than the crime. Yet tragic heroes must not be totally guiltless. . . A flaw must contribute to their undoing if we are to feel pity as well as fear. . .
1027: [The hero should come to an understanding which comes gradually from] "several scenes of recognition that occur from climax to catastrophe of a tragedy. The Greeks used the word anagnorisis (recognition) to refer to any change from ignorance to knowledge. In scenes of recognition the protagonist may learn the true nature of his predicament, or he may learn what weakness of his character has caused it. He may learn both at once.”
1027: "In the broadest sense the action of any play is a reversal, from bad to good fortune in a comedy, and from good to bad fortune in a tragedy. But in most plays there are one or more points in the action when the reversal of fortune is particularly conspicuous or violent. The Greeks called these peripeteia. The peripeteia is especially moving when the characters' actions have an effect opposite to what they intended. This is tragic irony. . . .”
1027: "Recognition sometimes brings on a reversal of fortunes, and sometimes a reversal, or peripeteia, brings about an important recognition . . . “
CATHARSIS
1028: “When the catastrophe comes at least, we are not surprised. We feel sorry for the hero and may weep, caught up in a mixture of sadness for him and for ourselves, and a bittersweet feeling of relief. After all that dread, the thing we most feared has happened. Yet we are still alive and somehow better off for what we have witnessed. Leaving the theater, we may feel the comfort of one who has awakened from a nightmare, or walked away from an automobile accident unharmed.. . These feelings and thought that follow tragedy Aristotle called catharsis.”
1028: "In ancient Greek, catharsis was originally a medical term that meant 'cleansing.' .. . Aristotle suggests that tragedy is good for us because it cleanses us of violent and mean emotions in a controlled environment. The debate still rages between censors who believe drama is dangerous, and the advocates of free expression who believe the emotional adventures of drama are healthy. . .”
THE TRAGIC HERO
1028: " . . the hero of Greek tragedy is an extraordinary man or woman who separates himself or herself from others. This separation is central to all tragedies. . . “
1029: "In the Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye examines the causes and implications of the tragic hero's isolation. 'The tragic hero is typically on top of the wheel of fortune, half-way between human society on the ground and the something greater in the sky . . . Tragic heroes are so much the highest points in their human landscapes that they seem the inevitable conductors of the power about them, great trees more likely to be struck by lightning than a clump of grass .. . .tragic heroes are wrapped in the mystery of their communion with that something beyond which we can see only through them, and which is the source of their strength and their fate alike.' That 'something beyond' may be called God, or nature, or society, but in all cases it reveals some sort of eternal law, of the way things are or must be. Tragedy gives us an image of the hero struggling against that law, alone. Further struggle leads the hero into further isolation."
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quotes from Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, Atheneum, 1966.
[p. 36 - he associates tragedy with autumn and sunset]
p. 214 "Anyone accustomed to think archetypally of literature will recognize in tragedy a mimesis [imitation] of sacrifice. Tragedy is a paradoxical combination of a fearful sense of rightness (the hero must fall) and a pitying sense of wrongness (it is too bad that he falls).”
p. 216 "tragedy is like comedy in reverse"
p. 218 "In comedy a society forms around the hero: in tragedy the chorus, however faithful, usually represents the society from which the hero is gradually isolated. . . Comedy is much concerned with integrating the family and adjusting the family to society as a whole; tragedy is much concerned with breaking up the family and opposing it to the rest of society.”
p. 221 “the typical fall of the hero through hybris [hubris] and hamartia . . . “
p. 237 [a type of tragedy] looks at tragedy from below, from the moral and realistic perspective of the state of experience. It stresses the humanity of its heroes, minimizes the sense of ritual inevitability in tragedy, supplies social and psychological explanations for catastrophe, and makes as much as possible of human misery seem . . . ‘superfluous and evitable’”