On Tragedy

The following provides an initial introduction to tragedy, including:

• "What is Tragedy?" -- a definitional discussion of the various senses that tragedy can have;

• "Origins and Developments of Tragedy" -- a discussion of the origins of Greek tragedy and its medieval and Elizabethan successors; and

• "Theories of Tragedy" -- a discussion of various philosophical interpretations of the tragic form by Aristotle, G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Pierre Vernant.

What is Tragedy?

Approaching any literary work we are confronted with the question of genre. We may ask ourselves, for instance, whether or not King Lear or Othello or Medea are truly “tragic” or “tragedies”.  This presupposes a preliminary understanding of “what is tragedy?” This form of the traditional “what is” question may not get us too far initially since the word “tragedy” has grown quite amorphous and has come to mean all things to all people. I think the question can be posed in the following, more specific articulations:

Literary Form

What is tragedy as a literary form?

Here Aristotle’s formal definitions are a good point of departure and serve to articulate the distinctions between comedy (which is also dramatic, but not of the same magnitude, seriousness etc) and epic (which is serious etc, but not dramatic, not temporally focussed). It is within the purview of this literary / formalistic question that one can properly pose questions such as: “Is Julius Caesar or Brutus the ‘tragic hero’” of Shak’s play?”, “Is Medea a tragic hero?”

The question of different historical or cultural manifestations of “tragedy” also presents itself: can “Elizabethan Tragedy” be considered tragedy under this formalistic understanding?  It does not have a “Chorus”, generally speaking.  It does not always adhere to the “rules” concerning the “unities”, hamartia (error), peripeteia (reversal) and anagnorisis (recognition).  Can tragedy as a dramatic form evolve to suit different historical situations?

In this vein, Arthur Miller wrote on Tragedy and the Common Man – insisting that in the 20th C tragedy does not need to focus on the “great”, or that tragedy is more aptly the tragedy of the ordinary man – partly because we live in a “Democratic Age,” in Viconian terms – we do not believe in heroes or the inherently greater individual anymore according to this thesis.

In this context, is Death of a Salesman a “tragedy”, although admittedly a modern version of the tragic?  Max Scheler, I think, would have thought not.  For him, “[o]nly where there is high and low, nobleman and peasant, is there anything like a tragic event … The tragic appears in objects only through the interplay of their inherent values” (“On the Tragic”).

Of course, this is not an exclusively 20th C phenomenon.  Elizabethan Tragedy witnessed a sub-genre of “Domestic Tragedy”, concerned with ordinary folk and their pedestrian, domestic concerns – as opposed to the fate of King Lear which is tied to the fate of the nation and, strangely, to the macrocosm of existence itself (e.g. of domestic tragedy: Arden of Faversham; also, as I mentioned while studying Othello, it is sometimes discussed in relation to domestic tragedy … I disagree, which was the point of my highlighting the references to the way in which the moral disruptions of an Iago are tied to the four elements etc)

In the 18th C this type of domestic tragedy became more popular (much as did the that most bourgeois of literary forms, the novel – to the dismay of Pope and Swift) and came to be known as “Bourgeois Tragedy” (“Bürgerliches Trauerspiel” as it was originally termed in German)

Cultural Form

What is tragedy as a cultural form?

Here I would think the sub-questions revolve around the functions of tragedy religiously, politically, psychologically – less what it is in itself. Of course, the Greek version was originally part of a religious festival.  The tragic figure is tied to a religious ritual, with the sacrifice of an animal – a goat, nb: “tragedy” etymologically means “goat song”, from tragos (goat) + aeidein (to sing). Within the tragic ritual, the sacrifice of the goat becomes the symbolic sacrifice of the human individual (usually in a goatskin) as scapegoat (pharmakos) that helps to purify the community – Oedipus is the classic example of a plot that preserves this connection.

Politically, as Aristotle notes, the tragedy can help to temper or educate the audience in virtues and the control of the passions suitable to the community (cf Politics Book VIII) – again, arguably a type of purification – or, for Plato, it can bring with it the danger of improperly forming these virtues. 

Similarly, psychologically, there is the strange fact that the audience takes a form of pleasure in witnessing the suffering of the characters – which seems to be explained by Aristotle in terms of catharsis.

The question of the historical possibility of this type of “tragic culture” or “tragic age” would need to be posed – are there ages within which true tragedies in the sense of dramatic form can flourish (Elizabethan London, Ancient Athens) and is this tied to a more broadly understood “tragic culture” that sees this form as somehow tied to their spiritual and political “diseases”, and to the “purification” of these diseases. It would be in this sense that Nietzsche speaks of the “tragic age of the Greeks”. 

The special conditions permitting the flourishing of tragedy (a “tragic age” or “culture”) seem to be rare, occurring perhaps twice in all of human history, in two middle-sized cities, Elizabethan London and Ancient Athens. In both cases, in terms of the history of ideas, tragedy arises at the time of the confluence of traditional myth or belief and the birth (or re-birth, renaissance) of philosophico-scientific inquiry. In both cases, tragedy arises in a city whose sea-faring, imperial and commercial ventures are beginning to burgeon – that is, in cities where the contradictions between the varying values and conventions of different communities would be brought to light.  

Moral Category

What is tragedy as a moral category?

This is the type of thinking about the tragic that most people undertake for the most part.  Something is deemed “tragic” because it is an unwarranted disaster or misfortune: a kid falls down a well and dies and it is pronounced as a “Tragedy” by the local papers – the kid was a kid “more sinned against than sinning” we could say in the words of Lear. 

I would call this a moral category because it presupposes a specific community’s determination of what constitutes the relative innocence of the tragic victim as well as what constitutes the victim’s misfortune; it is also a “moral” category in that the word is used here outside of any literary dimension or in terms of its possible religious / political (i.e., “cultural”) functions.

This type of use of the term tragedy is arguably historically or culturally specific – what is deemed high misfortune for us may be different from another community or another time.

For Nietzsche, Greek tragedy highlights that there is no moral order or justification for existence – suffering in this world is not justified by an other-worldly redemption of suffering.  Rather, it is only in the form provided by the tragic artist or philosopher that existence attains any meaning: “It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified” (Birth of Tragedy).

Ontological Category

What is tragedy as an ontological category?

In this sense, tragedy is thought of in relation to the essence of existence as a whole or at least (and this may amount to the same thing) human existence – the tragic is not just an art form but “an essential element of the universe itself” (Scheler, On the Tragic).

All of the great theories of tragedy (those postulated by Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger), it seems to me, articulate a sense in which tragedy defines the essence of (human) existence; or, tragedy provides a privileged perspective on being as a whole. We could also say that their respective theories of tragedy provide a privileged view of their respective philosophies of Being: Aristotle’s non-historicist understanding vs the historicism of Hegel, for instance. 

Aristotle: all human action is in a sense like tragedy in being an imitation of an action, a representation of the end state of an action which one has posited. Thought, too, is a putting of this together with that (syllogizesthai), wherein we determine that this is like that. Thus, the pleasure derived from the knowing-apprehension of things (see Metaphysics 980a) is tied to the pleasure derived from mimesis – of recognizing that this is (or is like) that – as described in the Poetics 1448b6-15:

“Representation is natural to human beings from childhood. They differ from the other animals in this: man tends most towards representation and learns his first lessons through representation. Also everyone delights in representations. An indication of this is what happens in fact: we delight in looking at the most proficient images of things which in themselves we see with pain … The cause of this is that learning is most pleasant, not only for philosophers but for others likewise (but they share in it to a small extent)”.  

Man is not only the animal with language (zoon logon echon), he is also the one with representation (homo mimetikos, we might say), and it is the philosopher who is the most fully human. Humans in their understanding of and acting in the world must articulate the world and their place in it in a way that gives it a form and a definite end. Otherwise existence and human actions fade into the abyss of causal necessity or chance that marks the first lines of the Medea (I wish this had not happened, which caused this, which caused this …).  Humans are poets in setting limits to this becoming and the highest form of the poetic is tragedy. The tragedy of human representational interaction with beings is that in their poetic construction of wholes humans always err (hamartia); they must always mis-represent beings as they are in order to give them form. Perhaps human existence, for Aristotle, is essentially tragic in this erring, and in the reversal and recognition effected by this error—ironically, Aristotle’s own account or representation of the nature of the tragic must consist of essential errors. 

Hegel: tragedy provides a privileged window on the dialectical unfolding of the Spirit. Antigone, for instance, presents two competing claims as to what is right – Creon’s claim is rooted in the right claimed by the polis; Antigone’s claim is rooted in the right claimed by the oikos, or by the gods. Tragedy presents the confrontation of two historical forces or manifestations of Spirit as right and the dialectical sublation of these two forces in such a way that a new historical synthesis is pointed to – another example he uses is the Oresteia. For Hegel, the hamartia arises due to the exclusive attachment of a character to one moral claim as being the all-encompassing claim, which from the broader perspective of the Spirit as ethical substance as a whole is a limited claim. In the conflict, which is essentially a conflict of Spirit (Being) in its unfolding, each claim, although valid in its own way, becomes wrong in that it ignores the right of the other.  

Origins and Development of Tragedy

Greek Origins of Tragedy (5th century BCE)

Early forms of Greek theatre grew out of the ritual poems and dances (Dithyrambs = “twice born”) performed during the worship of Dionysus

Dionysus was the god of wine and madness; the violence and intoxication associated with his worship are still evident in the earliest tragedies – as that which is in tension with civilized, political life.

Sacred animal of Dionysus was the goat (Gk = “tragos”); from whose name we get the word “tragedy”, meaning goat-song.

Satyrs and Maenads (male and female worshippers of Dionysus) performed wild rituals in honour of the god: involving intoxication, sacrificing and eating raw flesh of the goat, wearing the skin of the goat in order to become the goat-god. (Satyr = mythical creature, half-man, half-goat)

This ecstatic state of changing into someone else could be the beginning of acting, playing a character other than oneself.

Gradually a masked actor telling a story (subject matter from heroic saga) is separated from the satyr-chorus; this actor dialogues with the chorus; eventually more actors added to stage.

Aeschylus’ Oresteian Trilogy

• Agamemnon: Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus, kill Agamemnon when he returns from the Trojan War;

• The Libation Bearers: Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, seeks revenge for his father’s death kills his mother (Clymnestra). 

• The Eumenides: The Furies (spirits of blood revenge) seek to avenge Clytemnestra’s death; Orestes seeks divine help from Apollo, then Athena. The latter institutes the Athenian court in order to hear the cases of each side. The jury is split and Athena sides in favour of Orestes.

Where does the Dionysian ritual fit into this type of tragedy ?  In terms of the content; the Furies and the blood guilt and instinct for revenge which they represent is a manifestation of the Dionysian and its natural justice. The Apollonian arises as the cultural limitation of this wild, natural justice.

Dionysian also present as symbol of feminine: of duty owed by natural bonds, by ties to the earth -- this again limited by the Apollonian bonds of culture and our duty as social animals to be faithful to oaths (spoken bonds). 

The theatre as a social ritual which is crucial to the polis: involving a taming of sorts of the frenzy of Dionysian worship; a putting of that frenzied ritual within social limits.

In the theatre, as in the court and in the assembly, we have the polis on display and at work. All involve, to some extent, a battle of accounts (logos) of what is just or good. With each account put into conflict or strife with others, each account is put into its limit; rather, than assuming it is the whole account or truth. 

 A question raised by tragedy: free will versus destiny ? This is often called the “tragic dilemma”: a situation in which the hero faces two equally unacceptable choices; both will lead to disaster (for eg., Orestes; note also Oedipus).

Medieval Tragedy

In the Middle Ages (ca. 500 to 1500), with the hegemony of Christian belief, the notion of the tragic changes so drastically that it can hardly be called tragic anymore. 

If tragedy is the affirmation of human fate in the midst of the Dionysian violence and meaninglessness of existence, for the medieval Christian we have only the affirmation of human fate as it is redeemed from this fallen world in our next, spiritual life.

For the medieval Christian, tragic occurences only seem so from our limited, physical perspective. From the grand, spiritual perspective, all of existence is a Divine Comedy (Dante). 

Tragic seen as a fall from prosperity, as a warning not to set too much stock in this world.

Elizabethan Tragedy:

Medieval morality and mystery cycles lead to first permanent theatres in London (late 16th century).

Elizabethan and Jacobean Tragedy (ca. 1561 – 1640) based on Senecan Tragedy: the Roman philosopher-poet Lucius Annaeus Seneca (ca. 4 BCE – 65 CE). They are composed of 5 acts with intervening choruses, employ long, rhetorical speeches, with off-stage action often recounted by a messenger (nuntius). They included bloody revenge plots, with horrible crimes and ghosts. 

Elizabethans get their bloody “revenge tragedy” and its 5 act structure from Seneca.

As opposed to the Greeks, Elizabethan tragedy finds its narrative in the embellishment of history rather than myth. 

Theories of Tragedy

Poetry is a representation (mimēsis) (Poetics 1447a 14-18) with types of poetry differentiated by:

• Media: rhythm, song, verse

• Objects: good characters or bad

• Manner: narrative (diegesis) or drama.

Poetry is both natural and pleasurable: humans naturally represent and learn from this (cf. 1448b 4-20); there is a pleasure and education in seeing the form (thus even a pleasure in seeing the tragic).

Definition of tragedy according to its essence (1449b20-32):

• A representation of a serious, complete action in itself;

• Of a certain magnitude;

• With embellished speech;

• With separate elements (verse/song);

• Dramatic, not narrated;

• Arouses pity and fear to effect the catharsis of the emotions.

Various elements of tragedy: spectacle, melody, diction, reasoning (thought), character, plot.

Of these, plot is the most important: tragedy is a representation of action not of character, and plot is the structure of the incidents. (1450a15-24). So, plot is the soul of tragedy (1450a38-b5): the origin-function-end of tragedy; similar to the visible form in painting.

Plot should represent a single complete action: with beginning, middle and end. So, episodic plot is the worst.

Single action of proper magnitude: so that the unity and wholeness of action are brough forth before the viewer. As with animals whose beauty in not in being too small or too big (1450b25-1451a15).

Unity of plot is from the logic of the action, not from representing a single character (like Odysseus).

Poetry represents the universal; history represents particulars – this is a point Sidney picks up. So poetry is more philosophical; it represents the action as a structured whole. (1451a37 – 1451b32).

Parts of plot:

• Reversal (peripeteia): change of action to its opposite. Eg., the messenger in Oedipus Rex.

• Recognition (anagnorisis) (agnoia to gnosis; ignorance to knowledge): the realization of the hero; recognition of who they really are.

• Suffering (pathos). (1452a22 – b12)

Types of plot:

• Good person with bad fortune (simply shocking)

• Bad person with good fortune (most untragic)

• Bad person with bad fortune (only morally satisfying, not tragic; no pity or fear)

• Intermediate person with bad fortune (because of an error (hamartia)) (this as most tragic). (1452b32-53a17)

In different phases of Greek history, one or the other of these forces has held sway – in the tragic age of the Greeks, they were mixed in equal measure, allowing for the birth of Tragedy as an aesthetic form and of Greek tragic culture more generally:

• Pre-Homeric age (pre-literate, pre-1000 BCE): Dionysian

• Homeric age (ca 1000 – 700 BCE): Apollonian

• Tragic age (ca 700 – 400 BCE): Apollonian/Dionysian

• Socratic age (400 BCE– present): Apollonian

In tragic experience: 

• Beauty (the Apollonian) justifies the Horror (the Dionysian) of existence

• The more chaos/horror one experiences, the more order/beauty is needed

For Nietzsche, all other philosophic-religious justifications of existence are “other-worldly”, or transcendental – they reject the present life in favour of the other; suffering and insufficiencies of this world are justified in another:

• Platonism:     particulars vs forms

• Kantianism:  phenomena vs noumena (thing-in-itself)

• Buddhism:    Dukkha (1st noble truth: existence is suffering) / Samsara (cycle of rebirth) vs Nirvana

• Christianity:  Physical/temporal vs Heaven

Nietzsche sees in the tragic culture of the Greeks a model for saying Yes and Amen to our life as it is with no additions or subtractions: rather than a TRANSCENDENT goal, N’s is IMMANENT

This tragic affirmation of life and its suffering is a preview of the concept of the Eternal Return, expounded later in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (see an “Introduction to Nietzsche’s Philosophy”).

It may be true that existence is meaningless and terrifying, but we cannot live and cannot act with this knowledge, this is a deadly truth. For Nietzsche, this is highlighted by the tragic situation of Hamlet: “In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion” (BT 7).