Is Tragedy Dead?

July 25, 2017 | Autor: R. Bhattacharya | Categoria: Genre studies, Literary Criticism, Tragedy (Philosophy), Modern Tragedy
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Is Tragedy Dead?

Ramkrishna Bhattacharya
George Steiner's The Death of Tragedy (1961), as the title suggests, was
conceived as a sort of sequel to Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy
(1872). The title, however, is rather misleading. Steiner seems to
suggest on the one hand that the grand era of European tragedy ended with
the Elizabethan-Jacobean age. On the other hand, he goes to trace the new
directions that tragedy took on the continent, especially in the eighteenth
century. Thus he speaks of Goethe and Schiller, Kleist and Büchner, then
moves on to Ibsen and Chekhov, stopping finally at Eliot and Brecht. He
concludes his work with a clear declaration that tragedy "is now dead
because His (God's) shadow no longer falls upon us as it fell on Agamemnon
or Macbeth or Athalie."
However, even after calling the curtain down on tragedy, Steiner in
the very next paragraph refers to Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her
Children and suggests that tragedy may not be altogether dead, perhaps it
has merely altered in style and convention. The book ends with the positive
assertion that there is still a possibility – "though I judge it remote" –
that the tragic theatre may have before it a new life and future. As an
instance, he refers to a documentary film that showed the activities of a
Chinese agricultural commune. The workers formed into a large Chorus and
began chanting a song of hatred against China's foes. Then a group leader
leapt from the ranks and preformed a kind of violent intricate dance. He
was acting out in pantomime the struggle against the imperialist bandits
and their defeat by the peasant armies. The ceremony closed with a recital
of the heroic death of one of the founders of the local Communist Party.
He had been killed by the Japanese and was buried nearby.
Steiner was profoundly impressed by the documentary. He concludes
his book with the following question: "Is it not, I wonder, in some
comparable rite of defiance and honour to the dead that tragedy began three
thousand years ago on the plains of Argos?"
This brings us to the crux of the matter. To Steiner, tragedy, in
the grand historical sense of the term, appears to be dead in modern times.
Steiner's is not an eccentric view; it is probably shared by several
others. But they are not yet prepared to sign the death certificate. The
hesitation is probably due to a wishful hope that there is still a
possibility of its resurrection. After all, tragedy did come back nearly
two thousand years after the Greeks.
But there are also critics who differ from Steiner's views. Raymond
Williams, for instance, was never in doubt regarding the vitality of
tragedy even in the twentieth century. In his Modern Tragedy (1964, 1979),
he traces the development of tragedy in the post-Elizabethan era, starting
from Lessing and ending with Brecht. His book offers a guided tour through
the different sub-genres of tragedy (liberal tragedy, bourgeois tragedy,
etc.). He labels the plays of Strindberg, O'Neill and Tennessee Williams
'private tragedy'. The novels of Tolstoy and Lawrence are also included in
the discussion of tragedy (Raymond Williams, apparently, gives greater
importance on the outcome of any work of art, dramatic or narrative, than
the form) and calls them "social and personal tragedy". Chekhov,
Pirandello, Ionesco and Beckett (a strange bracketing of names) are said to
represent 'Tragic deadlock and stalemate'. Eliot and Pasternak are
discussed in a separate chapter entitled 'Tragic Resignation and
Sacrifice'. Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre are said to embody 'Tragic
Defeat and Revolt'. The last chapter is devoted to Brecht with an
unexpected title, 'A Rejection of Tragedy'.
Dictionaries of literary terms, entries in the encyclopedias and
students' handbooks do not subscribe to the view that tragedy is dead.
Clifford Leech (1969), for example, includes Tom Stoppard, Edward Bond,
Harold Pinter and John McGrath, author of a play with a very interesting
title, Events while guarding the Bofors Gun (1966). Tragedy, to Leech and
many others, is still thriving. So there is no question of treating it as
dead. Hence there is no need to speculate on its revival.
Yet the fact remains that modern playwrights and critics of
contemporary plays are disinclined to use such categories as 'tragedy' and
'comedy'. The terms are mostly reserved for pre-modern drama. When we go
to see a contemporary play, or even sit down to read it, we do not enquire
whether it is a tragedy or a comedy. Hamlet's well-known observation, "The
play's the thing" (II.ii.600-01), seems to anticipate this diffidence of
modern playwrights. And it is nothing unexpected. Classical tragedies,
Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies, the tragedies of Corneille and Racine
and of Calderon had one thing in common: all of them had an unambiguous
ending, more often than not, in the death of the protagonist or some such
doom. Many modern plays, on the other hand, end in stalemate, in a
situation that is inconclusive. Just think of Look Back in Anger (1956) by
John Osborne. You can't call it a comedy, or a tragedy proper. The theme
of the play, however, is serious, there is plenty of suffering for both the
male and the female characters, yet the play ends at the middle of nowhere,
from the real world of pain and suffering into an 'unholy priest hole' of
private fantasy. What a let-down! The let-down is compounded in Dejavu
(1992), a sequel to Look Back in Anger and Osborne's last play. (Déjà vu,
lit. 'already seen', is a French phrase, current in English too, which
suggests 'the illusion of having already experienced present situation').
In Dejavu we discover J.P. (Jimmy Porter) thirty five years later, a
wealthy man of sixty years, living in a country house with fifteen rooms.
And in the introduction Osborne observes: "J.P. is a comic character. He
generates energy, but like, say, Malvolio or Falstaff, an inescapable
melancholy" The classical concept of 'end', the point
to which the beginning and the middle lead inevitably, no longer seems to
be viable. Bernard Shaw could write on very serious themes and yet call
his plays comedies. The Aristotelian definitions of tragedy and comedy –
the first dealing with some serious issue, the second, with something
ludicrous (Poetics, chs. 5 and 6) – no longer hold good.
But are there not plays still which may be called tragicomedies?
Samuel Beckett himself subtitled his Waiting for Godot "a tragicomedy in
two acts". Here too, we are in a fix. If we are to accept that play in
which "nothing happens twice" as a tragicomedy, we have to throw all
earlier tragicomedies to the winds. A tragicomedy by definition is "a play
that combines elements of tragedy and comedy, either by providing a happy
ending to a potentially tragic story or by some more complex blending of
serious and light moods." One may wonder and wonder how Waiting for Godot
would fit this definition.
Nowadays there is a tendency to redefine old categories. "In its
broadest sense", Baldick says, "the term (sc. tragicomedy) may be applied
to almost any kind of drama that does not conform strictly to comic or
tragic conventions – from the medieval mystery play to the epic theatre of
Brecht …". This again is too wide a definition, conveniently used whenever
one is in doubt whether a particular play is to be called a tragedy or a
comedy. In fact, the growing disuse of such brand names as tragedy and
comedy in contemporary critical writings is a pointer to the inadequacy of
applying these terms. Contemporary English plays show a marked tendency to
bring forth very serious moral dilemmas (Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (1998)
is a case in point) in which there is little action. The interest of the
play depends almost solely on a series of arguments and counter-arguments
leading to no solution whatsoever. These plays in fact defy such
convenient pigeon-holes as tragedy or comedy although they address problems
of serious import on man's fate. Such plays as these may better be called
problem plays.
Are we then to conclude that the term 'modern tragedy' is a misnomer,
a wrongly used name? Again, here we are faced with a dilemma. So far as I
can gather, G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), the German philosopher, was the
first to use this term. His idea of the modern, of course, goes back to
Shakespeare and Pedro Calderon (1600-81), Goethe (1749-1832), Schiller
(1759-1805) and other dramatists of his own times. The distinction Hegel
makes between Greek tragedy and modern tragedy cannot be readily
comprehended. He pinpoints "the principle of subjectivity". Even at the
risk of baffling many of you, let me quote Hegel's own words (in English
translation):
Modern Tragedy accepts in its own province from the first the
principle of subjectivity. It makes, therefore, the personal intimacy
of character – the character, that is, which is no purely individual
and vital embodiment of ethical forces in the classic sense – its
peculiar object and content. It, moreover, makes, in a type of
concurrence that is adapted to this end, human actions come into
collision through the instrumentality of the external accident of
circumstances in the way that a contingency of a similar character is
also decisive in its effect on the consequence, or appears to be so
decisive.

I am afraid that all this is not very transparent. So let me quote another
passage from Hegel's Aesthetics which may be a little more intelligible:
Generally speaking, however, in modern tragedy it is not the
substantive content of their object in the interest of which men act,
and which is maintained as a stimulus of their passion; rather it is
the inner experience of their heart and individual emotion, or the
particular qualities of their personality, which insist on
satisfaction.
This is indeed a very good distinction: tragedies after the Greeks did
take a sharp turn towards the subjective, "the inner experience" and
"individual emotion". Orestes was never in doubt that the murder of his
father, Agamemnon, had to be avenged: Hamlet, however, is torn within
himself whether he should go the whole hog in taking vengeance on his
uncle.
In more recent times, more particularly after the Second World War,
the issues that pose themselves before the dramatists defy any ready-made
solution. Gone are the days when one could think of conflicts between two
individuals or families, or even two social groups. Today an individual
often finds himself pitted against socio-economic forces of a magnitude
which he finds beyond his power to control. Even a short-term solution
eludes him. The dramatists too have to stop at a point and can't move any
further. Nora, the icon of the latter-day feminists, in Ibsen's A Doll's
House simply walks out of her husband's home. It is futile to ask what
happened after that. Doctor Ridgeon in Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's
Dilemma, which is subtitled 'A Tragedy in Five Acts', ultimately chooses a
course, following his own rationalist code, only to discover that he has
'committed a purely disinterested murder'. Predicament, rather than a
tragic ending, has come to occupy much of the contemporary dramatic and
theatrical tradition. Tragedy may not be dead, but all serious plays
dealing with suffering as their theme may not be identified as tragedy.
The dramatist himself may refuse to do so.
In spite of this new crop of plays in recent times, when each play is
supposed to be unique, I would not say that tragedy is dead. Robert Bolt
and John Osborne dealt with the lives of Thomas More and Martin Luther in
two of their plays which have a truly tragic impact. Both Anouilh and
Brecht adapted Sophocles's Antigone as did Sartre in his version of
Euripides's Trojan Women. They made them fit in with modern circumstances
concerning war and peace. Tragedy does not negate optimism, which is why
Vsevolod Vishnievsky could write a play called The Optimistic Tragedy
(1934). A full company of Red marines in the then USSR died heroically.
"[B]ut we are not meant to regard their sacrifice as tragic, for it
contributes to the final victory of the Party – and the Soviet Union".
Bertolt Brecht's The Life of Galileo has all the elements of tragedy,
notwithstanding the fact that the dramatist refused to call it so. Despite
Galileo's recantation and imprisonment (in the form of house arrest), his
scientific discovery continues to thrive. We may conclude on the note that
so long as the earth is not ready to receive the saints (in the words of
St. Joan in Bernard Shaw's play, Saint Joan) tragedy will be with us.
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