Freytag is done, and now I’m reading an update or adaptation of Freytag, which I’ll post in a bit. But it’s got me considering the basis of tragedy…
The original tragedy springs from pity which springs from identification or at least empathy, with the tragic hero. Aristotle was right about this, but what his notes don’t mention is that crucial to this feeling of ‘purgation’ is something else: broadly put, the blamelessness of the hero for his fate.
This gives us the two basic roots of tragedy:
- We empathize with the hero
- We cannot blame the hero for his downfall
Old Tragedy
In what I’ll call the ‘Old Tragedy,’ this blamelessness can come from one of two sources:
- Fate or chance has decreed the hero’s downfall
- The hero is caught in a double-bind, and damned if he does or doesn’t
Fate Decrees
Oedipus Tyrannos by Sophocles is the classic of all classic old tragedies, the starting-point for every consideration of tragedy, and one of the finest tragedies of all time, even though it doesn’t fit the mold of the tragic hero as today we think of it under New Tragedy rules.
Oedipus is doomed from before he is even born. His parents try to avert the evil by exposing him as a newborn, but a shepherd saves him. He is raised far away by an unsuspecting royal couple and as fate would have it returns to his native country, where his first act is to kill his own father, the country’s king, over a meaningless pissing match (pissing matches are very important to kings and nobles and war-types and CEOs in general). He goes on to save Thebes by solving the Riddle of the Sphinx, and weds Queen Jocasta (his mother, though neither of them know this) as reward, and settles in to be the nouveau-ruler of the land.
A plague strikes Thebes, and good king Oedipus does all he can to uncover the cause, why the gods are mad at Thebes, in order to cure it. (This part might be interpreted as a double-bind: Oedipus might be a little more lax in searching out the plague’s cause, as several people warn him to be; but then he will stand by and watch his city-state suffer and die, and maybe the plague will reach him, his wife-mother, or their children. Damned if he does, and if he doesn’t.)
Regardless of what Oedipus, his parents, or anybody decides to do, Oedipus is doomed to carry out the prophecy that Fate has decreed. This means that Oedipus is not responsible for killing his father, sleeping with his mother, or bringing a plague upon Thebes. Therefore, we can pity him. In one sense, the audience is caught in a double-bind here: we can neither defend nor blame the hero; we can cry out warnings from the hall, but we know Oedipus is helpless to follow our good advice. (And when the play opens, all is set and determined already: the father is murdered, the incest committed, the plague has come.)
Consider if Oedipus were a mere upstart who comes into a land, murders its king, rapes and marries its queen, lords it over its citizens. We detest him, we feel no identification for him, no empathy for him, and when we see him fall, we feel no pity. But this is melodrama of the anti-heroic kind, and not tragedy.
In this sense we can define ‘tragedy’ simply by its effects upon us in the audience.
The Double-bind Admits No Escape
Antigone is an example of the double bind. Antigone’s brother has rebelled against Thebes, but his revolution, or coup, has failed, and he has been killed in the uprising. Now Creon, the new king, decrees that as an example, none of the revolutionaries shall be given proper burial, but their bodies shall rot, and their shades left as ghosts or ghouls, forbidden the vales of paradise. But Antigone loved her brother. She determines to bury him in defiance of the law. Her fiancé, Creon’s own son, is also torn, but supports her. And Creon himself, knowing the eyes of the citizens are upon him, decides that the law must be obeyed, even if it means executing his own daughter-in-law and dooming himself to his own son’s hatred. Antigone is walled up with a little drink and food, and left there to die.
The double bind for Antigone springs from two different directives. Demands of blood call for her to care for her brother’s corpse. Demands of good citizenship call for her to spit upon her brother’s corpse and leave it to rot.
Which demand should she follow?
The double-bind tragedy arises out of social changes. The circumstances attend a time when Old Laws are being replaced by New Laws, but people still feel the pull of the Old Laws. They are then caught in between the old laws and the new. Is Antigone a citizen of the state, or her brother’s kinswoman? In the tale of Orestes, a similar change is implied, as Orestes is caught between the demands of his father’s ghost, that wants blood paid to its murderess, and the demands of his mother’s self, who murdered Agamemnon. Is Orestes his father’s son, or his mother’s? Which is he to follow, the patriarchal cult of the new state and its military laws, or the old matriarchal earth-cult the new state has displaced, with its magic and mysteries? In the Nibelungenlied a similar double bind catches Kreimhild. Her brothers murdered her first husband Siegfried, and she went along with that. Now she is married to Atli, who plans to destroy her brothers. Is she her brothers’ sister or her husband’s wife?
The double bind leaves the hero blameless, because he is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. But it’s also significant that among the double-bind plots I know, the hero (almost) always chooses to obey the Old Law and falls, therefore, as part of the passing of the old ways.
(The Oresteia is the other case: Orestes follows the new patriarchal system, kills his mother, and is tormented by the avenging, ancient, furies. But in the finale of the trilogy, Orestes is given peace, as Athena, I think, embraces the new system of laws. Thus the trilogy is not truly a tragic one.)
New Tragedy
Somewhere in Aristotle’s train, the idea of the ‘tragic hero’ arose. This is the hero who (as Aristotle stated) was ‘neither all good nor all bad.’ This gave rise to the notion of hamartia or the ‘tragic flaw’ – that one weakness in an otherwise-noble soul, that would lead to his downfall.
Here the ‘otherwise-noble’ part of the formula helps us to identify and empathize with the hero; and the ‘one weakness’ makes it at least logical that he will fall, without having to resort to Fate or devils. This accords with a view of the world as essentially rational, and not governed by spooks or God.
The ‘tragic flaw’ must be further defined as the sort of flaw they say you should admit in a job interview as a weakness – that is, something that is essentially good, only you carry it too far. It should be a flaw that we in the audience can identify with, or sympathize with, or excuse at least – or else how can we empathize with the hero? (And if we don’t empathize with him, we will not pity his downfall, we will not experience the purging of our souls in tears and grief and sadness, and we will walk out unmoved from a play that was not, after all, a tragedy – or was a failed one.)
Myself, I find the ‘tragic flaw’ somewhat weaker (as exculpatory device) than the hand of cruel Fate – and both weaker than the double bind. For the tragic flaw makes the hero responsible wholly from his downfall, and moreover renders that downfall avoidable; whereas Fate leaves him wholly blameless, but smells of a cruel irrational world; and only the double-bind allows us to see that the hero can choose, and has chosen, but his downfall is nevertheless implicit in his very situation – there really was no way out. The double bind also, in invoking the conflict between the Old Way and the New, gives rise to philosophical dispute. We can argue about whether the Old Way was better, and what might have befallen the hero had he clung to the New Way instead. But note that in preferring the Old Way, most of the tellers of these tales (the Gothic Age was rife with them) were at heart conservatives mourning the passing of a fallen era.
(Composed on keyboard Saturday, March 28, 2009)
