Tragedy
An uneasy intuition that runs through modern times, articulated by many, ranging—to pick two very different people—from Martin Heidegger to Norman Mailer, holds that the human race is moving further and further from deep feeling, that the surfeit of sensations and the reactions to those sensations have rendered humanity excitable but limp inside and lacking the dramatic stature that we denote by the word “tragedy”—true heights and true falls, generosity of soul and ghastly blindness. That is not to say that the word does not get used each day while we search for something to describe a disaster or a life ended prematurely or some situation that does not seem reconcilable. Earthquakes and children dying of leukemia and Israel and Palestine are all said to merit the word. In the sense of something occurring that is out of the regular sphere, the word is understandable. Any cruel event may feel like tragedy. Something like fate is impinging on the orderly mental narrative each person calls his or her life. Something inhuman is happening.
Fate, of course, is not a modern word but an old-fashioned, ancient word, a wary, respectful, fearful word. Thanks to science, technology, psychology, and a host of other aids, modern people could order their lives quite efficiently and carefully. That the tragic hero Oedipus became something called a “complex” said it all. Fate, if it was considered, was little more than coincidence. No one was fated about anything. To speak of fate was to indulge a weakness.
For the Greeks, fate spoke to human stature: the larger the fate, the harder the fall. Heroes, when they fell, resounded throughout time and space. There was, however, not only the fall, which, after all, is a crucial Christian word, but the animus the hero had to confront. If some curse was in place then it remained in place until expiated. The stature of the heroes was related to how much darkness they encountered. A hero was someone who entered an uncertain place, be it the journey of Odysseus beyond the world’s edge or Antigone’s refusal to heed a king’s decree. Life was inherently a dark place (literally, since the earth was not lit at night by millions of electric lights) but the hero went further than the precipices of mortality and grief. The hero faced, whether willingly or unwillingly, the inherent blindness of the human situation, the conflicts that arose out of dire intentions and unavoidable duties.
Inevitably, some flaw appeared in the human vessel. The nobility of the hero stood in contradistinction to the flaw. A hero without the flaw was neither interesting and nor human. In the human, time-bound sense the hero knew what he or she was doing. In the eternal, god-driven sense the hero could not possibly know. Even demigods like Achilles were flawed. For such a dilemma, pity—the very scouring of the soul—was appropriate.
For both the Greeks and the Elizabethans, vast, harrowing emotion went into those plays that related the downfalls of nobles and kings. We who come later cannot know how those audiences were thrilled and moved. We can imagine that what they heard and saw spoke to them with irrefutable truth. What mattered was the tale of human stature and its shattering: Antigone must die and Lear must bear Cordelia’s dead body.
Must? That word stands as a fulcrum upon which worlds tremble. The Book of Job is not a tragedy because wherever God is meaning and hope dwell. No novel can be a tragedy because in a novel a socialized world is somehow making sense. Only the bare stage can support tragedy and only when the bare stage is open equally to the dictates of sense and senselessness. The famous lack of motive in Shakespeare—Iago’s evil or Hamlet’s dithering—is connected to the rudimentary nature of tragedy: fate does what it does and so do people, who are tinder that time and circumstance set on fire. The tragedy is not that they could have done differently. Tragedy has no use for mercy or grace or latitude. The “if only” suppositions that somehow comfort us, often providing more agency than was ever there in the first place, are banished. As tragedy allows consequence to play out to the last remove, there is great use, as Lear testifies, for remorse. If we want to experience the furthest reach of human futility, we must go to tragedy.
We tend to not want to see that futility, which is understandable. We sense enough in daily life: our plans go awry; our simplest actions and words fail. Whereas kings and priests of one stripe or another once answered futility with the authority of power and glory, modern times witnessed the rise of explanation. Every night thousands around the planet explain on television what happened that day. Such explanation is accommodating, diverting, and consoling, but has no interest whatsoever in the comparison that tragedy held dear—the one between meaning and meaninglessness.
Antigone embraced a meaning that killed her but that embrace was preferable to letting her brother’s body lie where it was, an act which would have rendered his life and hers meaningless. Shakespeare’s protagonists peer into the abyss of meaninglessness—Desdemona’s supposed treachery or Hamlet’s father’s murder—while attempting (and failing) to construct some steadying sense of meaning. The stature such characters possess varies—Antigone is a woman, Othello is a mercenary, Hamlet is a prince who ponders the wages of responsibility—but they all feel keenly the presence of some treachery that is unbearable. Tragedy, and the stature of tragic characters, comes down to a relentless feeling, one that is worse than disaster or death, a feeling that can make a person feel less than a person or, in avenging whatever crime, poisonous with rancor. In face of the dehumanization that occurred on numerous fronts during modern times, tragedy displays the mortifying yet exhilarating travails of human blindness and human purpose. We cannot know but we can feel. We need not be “men of stones.”
Relentless feeling…