Is Tragedy Dead?

July 22, 2017 | Autor: R. Bhattacharya | Categoria: Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Modern Drama, Tragedy
Share Embed


Descrição do Produto

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?”

2 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 postElizabethan 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.

3 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.

4 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 counterarguments 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.

5 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

6 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.

Lihat lebih banyak...

Comentários

Copyright © 2017 DADOSPDF Inc.