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Chapter 1 Introduction: the Loss of Tragic Value and the Value of Tragic Loss Notes Chapter 1 Introduction: The Loss of Tragic Value and the Value of Tragic Loss 1. To cite just one instance: on the 1989 Penguin reprint of R. F. Foster’s Modern Ireland 1600—1972 is the New York Times Review of Books verdict that it was a ‘dazzling description of the nation’s tragedy.’ The use of the word in this context is pervasive. 2. Denis Donoghue, ‘Romantic Ireland’, We Irish: Essays on Literature and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), p. 24. 3. Brendan Bradshaw famously calls for a historiography that accommodates the ‘catastrophic’ dimension to Irish history. See his ‘Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. 26, no. 104 (November, 1989), pp. 329–51. 4. Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 81. 5. For a study that seeks to evaluate the tragic status of all these dramatists, see R. B. Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968). 6. It was commonplace in the twentieth century to declare the impossibility of tragedy in the modern climate. The most famous examples include J. W. Krutch, ‘The Tragic Fallacy’, The Modern Temper: A Study and a Confession (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930), pp. 115–43; George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber & Faber, 1961). Lionel Abel’s Metatheatre (New York: Hill & Wang, 1963) distinguishes between tragedy – a rarer genre than supposed, including the Greeks and Racine – and metatheatre, a modern tradition of subjective drama, inaugurated by Hamlet. See also, Susan Sontag, ‘The Death of Tragedy’, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966; New York: Doubleday, 1990), pp. 132–9. 7. Krutch, The Modern Temper, p. 119. 8. For a recent engagement with this venerable question, see A. D. Nuttall, Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 9. John Milton, ‘Of that Sort of Dramatic Poem which is call’d Tragedy’, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. H. C. Beeching (London: Humphry Milford, 1913), p. 505. 10. Joseph Addison, ‘English Tragedy’ (1711), Critical Essays from The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 210. 11. Clifford Leech, Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1969), p. 32. 12. Steven Connor, Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 11. 13. For the debate on genre in modern literary theory, see Jacques Derrida, ‘La Loi du genre/The Law of Genre’ in Glyph 7 (Spring, 1980), pp. 176–201, trans. Avital Ronell, pp. 202–32; Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Paul Hernadi, Beyond Genre: New Directions in 175 176 Notes Literary Classification (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), and Marjorie Perloff (ed.), Postmodern Genres (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988) esp. Ralph Cohen, ‘Do Postmodern Genres Exist?’, pp. 11–27. 14. For feminist commentary distrustful of a masculine ethos of tragedy which always portrays women as ‘victims’, see Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1982), and Eva Figes, Tragedy and Social Evolution (London: John Calder, 1976), esp. chapter 4, ‘Women’, pp. 93–136. 15. For instance, Augusto Boal sought to counter the conservative, Aristotelian notion of catharsis as ‘purgation’ with the idea that the emotional release of energy in tragedy could be put to radical ends. The Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilla Leal McBride (London: Pluto Press, 1979), especially ‘Aristotle’s Coercive System of Tragedy’, pp. 1–32. 16. See especially the chapter ‘Tragedy and Revolution’ in Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (1966; London: Hogarth Press,1992), pp. 61–84. 17. Bertold Brecht is an inevitable precursor to all materialist or historicist accounts of drama. See ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’ in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill & Wang, 1966), pp. 179–205. We have seen that Raymond Williams’s Modern Tragedy embodies this method, but for other historicist approaches, see John Orr, Tragic Drama and Modern Society: Studies in the Social and Literary Theory of Drama from 1870 to the Present (London: Macmillan – now Palgrave, 1981) and Figes, Tragedy and Social Evolution. Lucienn Goldmann’s The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. Philip Thody (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976) is also a foundational work in the area. 18. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 10. 19. Though Eva Figes has made a dexterous connection between this etymolog- ical root and the thematic functioning of the tragic hero as a sort of ‘scape- goat’, acting as a projection for the fears and psychological impurities of the audience. See Tragedy and Social Evolution, pp. 11–13. A more ingenious con- nection still comes from the commentator who saw in a goat’s body, with furry front and bald behind, a metaphor for tragic action as starting in success and ending in failure. 20. Arthur Miller, ‘Introduction’ to Collected Plays (London: Cresset Press), pp. 31–2. 21. This point is made by John Drakakis and Naomi Conn Liebler in the Introduction to Tragedy [Longman Critical Readers] (London and New York: Longman, 1998), p. 3. 22. For instance, Simon O. Lesser, Fiction and the Unconscious (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), Roy Morrell, ‘The Psychology of Tragic Pleasure’ in Essays in Criticism, no. 6 (January 1956), pp. 22–37, Bennett Simon, Tragic Drama and the Family: Psychoanalytic Studies from Aeschylus to Beckett (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), and Richard Kuhns, Tragedy: Contradiction and Repression (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1991). 23. See for instance Michelle Gellrich, Tragedy and Theory: The Problem of Conflict since Aristotle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 8–22; Booth, Notes 177 King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy, pp. 82–90; Murray Krieger, The Tragic Vision: Variations on a Theme in Literary Interpretation (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960), pp. 3–5; H. A. Mason, The Tragic Plane (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 3, 100 and passim. 24. Gellrich, Tragedy and Tragic Theory, p. 10. 25. For an elaboration of the differences between the three playwrights and, in particular, the radical humanist and anthropomorphic turn in Euripides, see H. D. F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study (1939; 3rd edn London: Methuen, 1961). 26. While Johnson and Schlegel often had fulsome praise for Shakespeare’s achievement, they did not suppose he wrote tragedies, as his plays differed so vastly from the Greek prototype. But the definition, as the regard in which these plays were held increased, broadened to include them. For a delin- eation of this process, see Clayton Koelb, ‘“Tragedy” as an Evaluative Term’, Comparative Literature Studies vol. XI, no. 1 (March 1974), pp. 69–84. 27. John Dennis, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (London: Rich. Parker, 1701), sig. A6v. 28. T. R. Henn, The Harvest of Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1956), p. 282. 29. Mason, The Tragic Plane, p. 1. 30. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson 3rd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 241. 31. Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Peoples, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch, intro. Salvador de Madriaga (London: Macmillan, 1921), p. 17. The notion of life as inherently tragic is often associated with Schopenhauer. Yet he usually restricts his usage of the term to the dramatic or literary meaning, though he frequently compares dramatic tragedy to real life. Occasionally, however, the weight of his pessimism bursts the dis- tinction and, in an anticipation of Unamuno, he moves beyond metaphor to describe life itself as a tragedy: ‘The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized is really a tragedy … The never-fulfilled wishes, the frustrated efforts, the hopes mercilessly blighted by fate, the unfortunate mistakes of the whole life, with increasing suffering and death at the end, always give us a tragedy.’ Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1818, 1844, 1859), trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols (New York: Dover, 1966), I: 322. 32. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953). 33. Hegel famously read Antigone as concerned with the clash of valid but partial ethical imperatives: those of family (represented by Antigone) and those of state (represented by Creon). This conflict ultimately contributes to the ongoing revelation of world-spirit or Geist. See G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), II: 1212–16. Many would now question Hegel’s reading of this play, as well as his general ideas on tragedy. However, if his notion of tragic reso- lution and progress has fallen into disrepute, his emphasis on conflict and dialecticism has endured. A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1904; London: Macmillan – now Palgrave, 1957) is possibly the most famous neo- Hegelian interpretation of tragedy. 178 Notes 34. Steiner, The Death of Tragedy. More recently, Steiner has extended his con- ception of tragedy as utter bleakness and the absence of redemption or hope. See his ‘Absolute Tragedy’, No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1996 (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1996), pp. 129–141. 35. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), p. 189. H. A. Mason’s more recent remarks echo this Yeatsian sentiment: ‘Tragedy speaks to us all in so far as we are human, and the fuller the better.’ The Tragic Plane, p.
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