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September 1, 2002
ARTICLES: Why tragedy?
To be born is to have known suffering. A hardened pessimist might even argue that a person is most alive at moments of greatest pain. Yet, the majority among us, given a choice, would prefer to live without pain, suffering, separation or loss.
So, isn’t it the greatest contradiction in human nature that we enjoy watching and reading tragedies? In fact, the sadder the story, the more poignant the treatment meted out to the protagonist, the more touching and memorable the story becomes.
Generations of people have cried on reading Cyrano de Bergerac’s last letter to Roxanne — the woman he loved all his life but never gathered enough courage to declare his feelings, as he had the visage of a clown. In this memorable work by Edmond Rostand, Cyrano is immortalized through his sacrifices and a touching portrait emerges of an intelligent, noble, and witty individual with one flaw — a gnawing insecurity about his appearance. However, when Hollywood adapted this play into a movie ‘Roxanne’, and changed the ending into a happy one where the hero and the heroine “live happily ever after”, this movie failed to create ripples.
There could be several reasons why a movie fails to do well, but in this case, could it be possible that the chief charm of the play Cyrano lay in its tragic moments? That we tend to remember tragedies more than we recall comedies, and “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought” (Shelley).
This is in no way an attempt to demean one genre at the expense of another, but the fact is that memories of Sophocles’ Prometheus and Euripides’ Antigone and Oedipus are more powerful than even those of Aristophanes’ comic masterpiece The birds. In art, as in literature, this principle seems applicable. Amongst hundreds of Picasso’s painting, the most memorable one remains to be “Guernica”. This painting which depicts violence, death, torture and ravages of war is better known than his colourful arrangement titled “Les Demoiselles Avignon”, based on “Joie de Vivre” the “Joy of life”, painted by Matisse.
Laughter and mirth seem to be momentary impulses, quickly forgotten, while pain exudes a stronger grip and lingers for longer in one’s thoughts. We will forever remember and feel sorry for “poor Oedipus” at whose birth it is ordained that he will kill his father and marry his mother. A crime too terrible even to contemplate is his destiny. When he finds about his crime unwittingly committed, his horror and his anguish is for all to feel.
The vibrating 2,500 year old pain is communicated to the very essence of a present-day reader’s being. Who can forget or be untouched by the poignancy of his cry “Hide me at once, for God’s love, hide me away/Away! Kill me! Drown me in the depths of the sea.” Or be unaffected by the wise chorus chanting “Then learn that mortal man must look to his ending/And none be called happy until the day he carries/ His happiness down to the grave in peace”.
It has been said that tragedies became the dignified answer of man to merciless destiny. An expression of the most desperate thoughts coupled with a magnanimous acceptance of fate. An emotional journey for the reader, who by vicariously experiencing the protagonist’s ordeals became wiser and calmer, connected to humanity through the universal bond of suffering. (In fact, Plutarch tells us that some Athenian captives who, after the disaster at Syracuse, obtained liberty by reciting Euripides’ tragic works).
In Poetics, Aristotle claimed that tragedies are popular as “through pity and fear, they accomplish the catharsis of emotions”. For Aristotle, Oedipus represented a perfect tragedy. Obviously impressed by this play he described the structure of a tragic plot as possessing 1) a protagonist who has distinguished himself 2) the protagonist commits a violation (‘hamartia’) 3) there is a notable plot reversal and a change of fortune as a result of the violation 4) the protagonist recognizes his/her responsibility for the sudden change of fortune (‘anagnorosis’) 5) the tragedy ends with a purging of the emotional catastrophe both for the protagonist and the audience (‘catharsis).
Aristotle’s ideas were generally popular until the twentieth century, when Schopenhauer in his best known work The world as will and idea wrote “the true sense of tragedy is the deeper insight, that is not his own individual sins that the hero atones for, but original sin, i.e. the crime of existence itself”. This was disputed by Nietzsche in The birth of tragedy, who argued that the Dionysian experience led the Greeks to come face to face with the essential horrors and absurdity of life. Tragedy helped counteract this phenomenon, which would have otherwise led to a “nauseous lethargy” and a “negation of the will”.
Conversely, many modern tragedies dwell precisely on this negation of will. Camus’ novel The stranger, describes a man unrelated to anything or anyone, a man for whom everything is meaningless. A man who murders and feels nothing, and who ends his tale with the thought “For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained was the hope that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and they should greet me with howls of excretion”. What an antithesis to Oedipus who feels such mental anguish at his sin committed unwittingly that he pierces his eyes! In modern plays the condition is one of alienation, particularly in the works of Beckett, Ionesco and Genet. This can be summed up in Brecht’s work In the Jungle, where one character says “If you crammed a ship full of human bodies till it burst, the loneliness inside would be so great, that they would turn to ice...so great is our isolation that even conflict is impossible”.
On reading a play dwelling on a post-modern existence, the predominant experience is of alienation, a listless disinterest in life and a fragmented existence. There is no conflict, there is no catharsis. Instead, a reader gets sucked even more into a black hole of despondency and despair. According to Nietzsche, the birth of tragedy took place through the interaction of the Apollonian and Dionysian experiences.
But is it possible that “perfect tragedy” as a form of art that could elevate the reader, has lived out its natural life and died with the industrial revolution? At the precise moment when mass production became a reality and the individual ceased to matter. Or is it possible return to a Dionysian love for life, a belief in the importance of an individual, a joy in existence, where through art even pain is manipulated to be a source of pleasure. If the answer is yes, then maybe there could be some hope that life could mean little more than a cycle of endless suffering.
Writer’s email: ambernagori@yahoo.com
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