THE DEATH OF TRAGEDY THE DEATH OF TRAGEDY GEORGE STEINER OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS New York Copyright© 1961, 1980 by George Steiner First published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1961 First issued in paperback by Hill and Wang, 1963 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, New York, with a new Foreword, 1980 Reprinted by arrangement with the author Librar y of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Steiner, George, 1929- The death of tragedy. Reprint, with new foreword, of the ed. published by Knopf, New York. Includes index. I. Tragedy. 2. Tragedy-History and criticism. 3. Drama-History and criticism. I. Title. PNI892.S7 1980 809.2'51 79-21658 ISBN 0-19-502702-7 pbk. Printed in the United States of America F 0 R MY FATHER Acknowledgments IN A SHORTER, more schematic version, this book was firstpresented at a Gauss Seminar at Princeton University. Those who have attended these occa­ sions will know how much the speaker owes to the chairmanship and cross-fire of R. P. Blackmur and to the erudite vigilance of Professors E. B. E. Bor­ gerhoff and Edward Cone. I wish to add a special thanks to Roger Sessions, who gave to the seminar the warmth and authority of his presence. The expansion of the book into its present form was made possible by a grant from the Ford Foun­ dation administered through the Council of the Humanities of Princeton University to foster work in comparative literature. This grant enabled me to get on with the job while teaching only part-time. vii AcKNOWLEDGM ENTS My warmest thanks go to Professor \Vhitney Oates and Professor R. Schlatter. I am the more grateful as this book does not represent precisely what its learned sponsors had in mind. But writers tend to be mutineers, �ven against generosity. I owe particular thanks to my edito�Mr. Robert Pick, of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. The counsel he gave and the pleasure he took in the work were both of great value to me. Principally, however, this essay belongs to my father. The plays I discuss in it are those which he first readto me and took me to see. If I am able to deal with literature in more than one language, it is because my father, from the outset, refused to recognize provincialism in the affairs of the mind. Above all, he taught me by the example of his own life that great art is not reserved to the specialist or the professional scholar, but that it is best known and loved by those who live most intensely. G. S. Foreword to the Galaxy Book Edition IT IS AN AMBIGUOUS PRIVILEGE to be allowed to write a new foreword to a book which is now twenty years old. One is not the same writer as was the author at the time. And one is not the same reader. This is true in two respects. I do not read, I do not try to interpret today the texts cited in The Death of Tragedy as I read and interpreted them before 1960. But, this displacement being the more disconcerting, I do not even read myself as I then did. Inevitably, this book has taken on an identity of its own. It stands somewhat out­ side what I now (inexactly) remember to have been its aim and conduct of persuasion. It has induced a certain second­ ary literature. Other readers have approved of the argument or rejected it, proposed addenda and corrections, used one or another of its sections for their own purposes. Today, these external readings are bound, in some measure, to in­ terleave with my own. If I was to rewrite The Death o{Tragedy(and my favourite critic was the one who lamented the waste of so fine a title IX FoREWORD on this particular work), I would attempt a change of em­ phasis at two significantpoints. Furthermore, I would try to develop a theme which, as I now see it, was implicit in the argument from the outset, but which I did not have the nerve or acuity to make explicit. The book begins by stressing the utter uniqueness of "high tragedy" as it was performed in fifth-century Athens. Despite suggestive attempts by comparative anthropology to relate Greek tragedy to more archaic and widespread forms of ritual and mimetic practise, the fact remains that the plays of Aeschylus, of Sophocles and of Euripides are unique not only in stature but also in form and technique. No fertility or seasonal rites however expressive, no dance-dramas of south-east Asia however intricate, arc at all comparable in inexhaustibility of meaning, economy of means and personal authority of invention with Greek clas­ sical tragedy. It has been argued, plausibly, that Greek trag­ edy, as it has come down to us, was devised by Aeschylus, that it represents one of those very rare instances of the crea­ tion of a major aesthetic mode by an individual of genius. But even if this is not the case in any strict sense, and even if Aeschylaean drama stems from a multiple background of �ic idiom, .J?_ublic mythology, lyric lament and the cthicai­ .£Oiiticalpostulate of compelling civic and personal issues as we find it in Solon, such drama nevertheless constitutes a !,!nique phenomenoE. No other Greek polis, no other an­ tique culture, produced anything that resembles fifth­ century Attic tragic drama. Indeed, the latter embodies so specific a congruence of philosophic and poetic energies, that it flourished during only a very brief period, some sev­ enty-five years or less. X FoREWORD The book is unequivocal on this peint. What I ought to have made lainer is the fact that within the co us of ex­ tant Greek tragic plays those which mani est "tragedy"in an absolute form. which give to the word "tragedy"the rigour and weight I aim at throughout the argument, are very few. What I identify as "tragedy"in the radical sense is the dra­ matic representation or. more precisely, the dramatic test­ ing of a view of reality in which man is taken to be an un­ welcome guest in the world. The sources of his estrangement-German Vnheimlichkeit conveys the ac­ tual meaning of "one who is thrust out of doors"-� various. They can be the literal or metaphorical conse­ quences of a "fall of man" or primal chastisement. They can be located in some fatality of over-reaching or self­ mutilation inseparable from man's nature. In the most drastic cases, the human estrangement from or fatal intru­ sion upon a world hostile to man can be seen as resulting from a malignancy and daemonic negation in the very fab­ ric of things (the enmity of the gods). tiut absolute tragedy exists only where substantive truth is assigned to the Sopho­ clean statement that "it is best never to have been born" or where the summation of insight into human fortunes is ar­ ticulated in Lear's fivefold "never." The plays which communicate this metaphysic of des­ peration would include The Seven Against Thebes, King Oedipus, Antigone, the Hippolytus and, supremely, the Bacchae. They would not include such dramas of positive resolution or heroic compensation as the Oresteia and the Oedipus at Colonus (though the epilogue makes of the lat­ ter an ambivalent case). Absolute tragedY, the image of man as unwanted in life, as one whom the "gods kill for their XI FoREWORD s_port as wanton boys do flies," is almost unendurable to hu­ man reason and sensibilitY. Hence the verv few cases in which it has been rigourouslyjlrofessed. My study should have made this classification sharper and should have been more thorough in differentiating between the theological implications of absolute and of"tempered" tragedy. At the close of The Death of Tragedy, I put forward the opinion that the works of Beckett and of the "dramatists of the absurd" will not amend the conclusion that tragedy is dead, that "high tragic drama" is no longer a naturally avail­ able genre. I remain convinced that this is so, and that the masters of drama in our century are Claude!, Montherlant and Brecht (Lorca over brief, lyric stretches). But the dis­ cussion ought to have been fuller, and I should have tried to show in what ways the minimalist poetics of Beckett be­ long, for all their express bleakness and even nihilism, to the spheres of irony, of logical and semantic farce rather than to that of tragedy. It is as if the best of Beckett's, of lonesco's, of Pinter's plays were the satyre-plays to unwrit­ ten tragedies, as Happy Days is the satiric epilogue to some distant "Prometheus." If there has been a recent tragedian in a genuine sense,jt is probablv Edward Bond. But both Bingo and his variations on Lear are literary, almost aca­ demic reflections on the nature and eclipse of tragic forms rather than inventions or re-inventions in their own right. The third point is the major one. Inherent in this book, but insufficiently stated and never pressed home, is the inti­ mation of a radical split between true tragedv and Shake­ spearean"tragedy." I have said that there are verv few writers \,Yho have chosen to dramatize a stringentlv negative. de­ spairing view of man's presence in the worlci They include the Creek tragedians, �e. Buchner and, at certain XII FoREWORD I!Qints, �ndberg. The same vision animates Lear and Ti­ mon of Athens. Shakespeare's other mature tragic plays have in them strong, very nearly decisive, counter-currents of repair, of human radiance, of public and communal res­ toration.