Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic - Softcover

Eagleton, Terry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0631233601 ISBN 13: 9780631233602

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002

Synopsis

Terry Eagleton's Tragedy provides a major critical and analytical account of the concept of 'tragedy' from its origins in the Ancient world right down to the twenty-first century.

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• A major new intellectual endeavour from one of the world's finest, and most controversial, cultural theorists.
  
• Provides an analytical account of the concept of 'tragedy' from its origins in the ancient world to the present day.
  
• Explores the idea of the 'tragic' across all genres of writing, as well as in philosophy, politics, religion and psychology, and throughout western culture.
  
• Considers the psychological, religious and socio-political implications and consequences of our fascination with the tragic.

About this title

About the Author

Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow at the University of Manchester. His numerous works include The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), Literary Theory: An Introduction (second edition, 1996), The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth Century Ireland (1999), and The Idea of Culture (2000), all published by Blackwell, as are his dramatic writings, St Oscar and Other Plays (1997), and the Eagleton Reader (1997) edited by Stephen Regan. His memoir The Gatekeeper was published in 2002.

From the Back Cover

In this dazzling book Terry Eagleton provides a comprehensive study of tragedy, all the way from Aeschylus to Edward Albee, dealing with both theory and practice, and moving between ideas of tragedy and analyses of particular works and authors. This amazing tour-de-force steps out beyond the stage to reflect not only on tragic art but also on real-life tragedy. It explores the idea of the tragic in the novel, examining such writers as Melville, Hawthorne, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Manzoni, Goethe and Mann, as well as English novelists.

With his characteristic brilliance and inventiveness of mind, Eagleton weaves together literature, philosophy, ethics, theology, and political theory. In so doing he makes a major political–philosophical statement drawn from a startling range of Western thought, in the writings of Plato, St Paul, St Augustine, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Sartre and others.

This book takes serious issue with the idea of ‘the death of tragedy’, and gives a comprehensive survey of definitions of tragedy itself, arguing a radical and controversial case.

With his characteristic brilliance and inventiveness of mind, Eagleton weaves together literature, philosophy, ethics, theology, and political theory. In so doing he makes a major political–philosophical statement drawn from a startling range of Western thought, in the writings of Plato, St Paul, St Augustine, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Sartre and others.

This book takes serious issue with the idea of ‘the death of tragedy’, and gives a comprehensive survey of definitions of tragedy itself, arguing a radical and controversial case.

Reviews

"The aspects of tragedy I have in mind take with utmost seriousness the lethal as well as life-giving inheritances of which the present is partly made up, and which an amnesiac postmodernism has conveniently suppressed." With chapters on "The Value of Agony," "Pity, Fear and Pleasure" and "Freedom, Fate and Justice," British literary critic and political theorist Eagleton (whose well-received memoir The Gatekeeper is just out from St.Martin's) runs through the West's tragic literature, from Sophocles to Ibsen and beyond, to begin constructing a new, tragically informed language for the political left: "Don't settle for that set of shabby fantasies known as reality, but cling to your faith that the deathly emptiness of the dispossessed is the only source from which a more jubilant, self-delighting existence can ultimately spring." (Sept.)
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Sweet Violence

By Terry Eagleton

Blackwell Publishers

Copyright © 2002 Terry Eagleton
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780631233602

Chapter One

A Theory in Ruins

In everyday language, the word `tragedy' means something like `verysad'. We speak of the tragic car crash of the young woman at the busycrossroads, just as the ancient Greeks used the same epithet for a dramaabout the slaying of a king at a similar place. Indeed, it may well turnout that `very sad' is also about the best we can do when it comes to themore exalted realm of tragic art.

But surely tragedy involves more than this. Is it not a matter of fateand catastrophe, of calamitous reversals of fortunes, flawed, high-bornheroes and vindictive gods, pollution and purgation, deplorable endings,cosmic order and its transgression, a suffering which chastens and transfigures?In any case, isn't this to mistake the tragic for the pathetic?Tragedy may be poignant, but it is supposed to have something fearfulabout it too, some horrific quality which shocks and stuns. It is traumaticas well as sorrowful. And doesn't the tragic differ from the pathetic inbeing cleansing, bracing, life-affirming? Susanne K. Langer speaks of the`sad but non-tragic character of the French classical drama' - non-tragicin her view because such drama deals in misfortune rather than destiny,lacks any rich realization of individual personality, and is rather tooenamoured of the rational. Racine and Corneille, she suggests, write`heroic comedies' rather than tragedies, which will no doubt come as asurprise to anyone who has sat through Andromache or Polyeucte. TheFrench must have a strange sense of humour.

Tragedy, some will claim, is surely a technical term, whereas `very sad'is plainly not. One can, in fact, use the word in both senses together, asin a sentence like `What is really tragic about Beckett is that tragedy(heroic resistance, exultant self-affirmation, dignified endurance, thepeace which comes from knowing that one's actions are predestined, andthe like) is no longer possible'. And one can call something very sad - the peaceful, predictable death of an elderly person, for example - without feeling the need to dub it tragic. One can also be sad over nothingin particular, in the manner of Freud's melancholia, but it is hard to betragic over nothing in particular. `Tragic' is a more transitive term than`sad'. Moreover, `tragic' is a strong word, like `scum' or `squalid', whereas`sad' is embarrassingly feeble. Geoffrey Brereton notes that it is hard tocome up with a synonym of `tragic', a truth stumbled on by a fellow-studentof mine at Cambridge, who realized that a suitably witheringutterance of the word `Tragic!' could effortlessly trump almost any othercomment, however witty, acerbic or impassioned. The problem is hownot to rob the word of this peculiar charge while not being jealouslyexclusive about it either.

`Tragic' and `very sad' are indeed different notions; but this is notbecause the former is technical while the latter is drawn from ordinarylanguage. `Sad but not tragic' is not the same kind of distinction as `erraticbut not psychotic', `cocky but not megalomaniac' or `flabby but notobese'. The long-standing spouse of the expired elderly person might wellfeel the event as tragic, even though it is neither shocking, fearful, catastrophic,decreed by destiny or the upshot of some hubristic transgressionof divine law. `Tragic' here means something like `very very sad' forthe spouse, and just sad or very sad for everyone else. R. P. Draper tellsus that `there is an immense difference between the educated and uneducatedintuitions of the meaning (of tragedy)', but it does not follow,as he seems to imagine, that `educated' intuitions are always the mostreliable. One might still protest that tragedy involves more than justsorrow, and in a sense one would be right. But so does sorrow. Sorrowimplies value. We do not usually grieve over the fading of a bruise, orfeel the scattering of a raindrop to be a melancholic matter. These are notdestructions of what we rate as especially valuable.

This is why there are difficulties with Paul Allen's definition oftragedy as `a story with an unhappy ending that is memorably andupliftingly moving rather than simply sad'. We shall see later that notall tragedies in fact end unhappily; but it is also hard to know what'simply sad' means. Can a work be sad but not moving? Perhaps `upliftingly'moving makes the difference; but it is not clear that Blasted,Endgame or A Farewell to Arms are exactly that, which is no doubt whyconservative commentators would refuse them the title of tragedy in thefirst place. But they would probably confer it on Titus Andronicus, TheJew of Malta or Antonio's Revenge, whose edifying effects are almost asquestionable. And Aristotle says nothing of edification. For one kindof traditionalist, Auschwitz is not tragic because it lacks a note of affirmation.But how far is the invigorating quality of a good tragedy thatof any successful work of art? And are we enthralled by the sadness,or despite it? Doesn't sadness in any case depend on a sense of humanvalue which tempers it, so that `simple sadness' is a somewhat spuriousentity?

The truth is that no definition of tragedy more elaborate than `very sad'has ever worked. It would, to be sure, be false to conclude from this thatworks or events we call tragedies have nothing significant in common.Nominalism is not the only alternative to essentialism, whatever postmoderntheory may consider. On the one hand, there are full-bloodedessentialists such as Paul Ricoeur, who believes that `it is by grasping theessence [of tragedy] in the Greek phenomenon that we can understand allother tragedy as analogous to Greek tragedy'. For Ricoeur, one assumes,A Streetcar Named Desire is best illuminated by the Agamemnon. On the otherhand, there are nominalists such as Leo Aylen, who declares that there isno such thing as tragedy: `There are only plays, some of which have alwaysbeen called tragedies, some of which have usually been called tragedies'.But this, as with most nominalism, simply pushes the question back a stage:why have these plays always or usually been called tragedies? Why havesome of them not been called pastoral or pantomime instead? RaymondWilliams notes that `tragedy is ... not a single and permanent kind of fact,but a series of experiences and conventions and institutions'. But thoughthis is true enough, it fails to answer the question of why we use the sameterm of Medea and Macbeth, the murder of a teenager and a mining disaster.

In fact, tragedy would seem exemplary of Wittgenstein's `family resemblances',constituted as it is by a combinatoire of overlapping featuresrather than by a set of invariant forms or contents. There is no need tolanguish in the grip of a binary opposition and suppose that because themembers of a class lack a common essence, they have nothing incommon at all. As early as 1908, the American scholar Ashley Thorndikewarned his colleagues in his work Tragedy that no definition of tragedywas possible beyond the egregiously uninformative `all plays presentingpainful or destructive actions', but few seem to have taken his point.Aristotle's description of tragedy in the Poetics in fact makes little referenceto destruction, death or calamity; indeed he speaks at one point ofa `tragedy of suffering', almost as though this might be just one speciesof the genre. The Poetics is well into its argument before it begins to usewords like `misfortune'. As an early instance of reception theory, thework defines tragedy rather through its effects, working back from theseto what might structurally best achieve them. A wicked person passingfrom misery to prosperity, for example, cannot be tragic because theprocess cannot inspire either pity or fear. This leaves open the questionof what one calls a work which is structured to arouse pity and fear butin fact doesn't. Is a comedy which fails to arouse the faintest flicker ofamusement a poor comedy or not a comedy at all?

The more laconic one's definition, the less chance it has of inadvertentlypassing over whole swathes of tragic experience. Schopenhauerclaims that `the presentation of a great misfortune is alone essential to[tragedy]', and such cautiousness is well justified. It is a pity, then, thathe goes on to claim that resignation and renunciation are of the essenceof the form, a case which forces him to downgrade the ancient Greeksand implausibly upgrade some more stoically minded moderns. SamuelJohnson, no doubt equally eager to sidestep a whole range of thornyissues, defines tragedy in his dictionary as `a dramatic representation ofserious actions', which for all its studied vagueness comes close, as weshall see in a moment, to how the medievals understood the matter.'Serious', for all its apparent lack of exactness, is a key component of thewhole conception, from Aristotle to Geoffrey Chaucer. The former makeswhat he calls spoudaios central to the whole business. Indeed, it is stillcentral as late as Pierre Corneille's Discours de l'utiliti et des parties du pohmedramatique, which describes tragedy as `illustre, extraordinaire, sirieuse'.Horace remarks in `On the Art of Poetry' that `tragedy scorns to babbletrivialities'. For a long time, tragedy really means nothing much morethan a drama of high seriousness concerning the misfortunes of themighty. It makes no necessary allusion to fate, purgation, moral flaws,the gods, and the rest of the impedimenta which conservative critics tendto assume are indispensable to it. As F. L. Lucas puts it: tragedy for theancients means serious drama, for the middle ages a story with anunhappy ending, and for moderns a drama with an unhappy ending.It is hard to get more imprecise than that.

John Orr claims that `the essential tragic experience is that of irreparablehuman loss', though he rather tarnishes the impressive terseness ofthis by going on to develop a more elaborate theory of tragedy as alienation.Richard Kuhns speaks with airy anachronism of the conflictbetween the private, sexual and psychological on the one hand, and thepublic, political and obligatory on the other, as being central to all tragedy,including the ancient Greeks. It is not clear in what sense the sexual orpsychological were `private' for classical antiquity. The Oxford EnglishDictionary gives for tragedy `extreme distress or sorrow', though ironicallyit goes on to illustrate this definition with the sentence `the shootingwas a tragic accident', which for some classical tragic theory would be anoxymoron. Tragedies, on this traditional view, cannot be accidental.

The OED also gives `pity or sorrow' for `pathos', thus bringing it closeto the common sense of tragedy. There are, however, grammatical differencesbetween the two terms. For the informal meaning of `pathetic',the OED offers `his ball control was pathetic', which one could hardlyreplace with `his ball control was tragic' even in the lower ranks of thefootball league. We say that someone looked sad but not, without a slightsense of strain, that she looked tragic, since the former term tends todenote a response and the latter a condition. But Walter Kaufmann, inone of the most perceptive modern studies of tragedy, refuses to distinguishbetween the tragic and the merely pitiful, and doubts that theancient Greeks or Shakespeare did either. He does, however, suggestthat for the classical view suffering has to be `philosophically' interestingto qualify as tragic, which would no doubt rule out such philosophicallytrivial matters as having your feet chopped off or your eyeballs gougedout.

For all these grim caveats, critics have persisted in their hunt for theHoly Grail of a faultless definition of the subject. Kenneth Burke's definitionof tragedy in A Grammar of Motives, like Francis Fergusson's in hisimmensely influential The Idea of a Theater, involves an essential momentof tragic recognition or anagnorisis, but while this may be true ofOedipus, it holds only doubtfully for Othello and hardly at all for ArthurMiller's Willy Loman. In the case of Phaedra, no such recognition isneeded because everything has been intolerably clear from the outset.David Hume, by contrast, believes that an individual `is the more worthyof compassion the less sensible he is of his miserable condition', findingsomething peculiarly poignant about a wretchedness which seemedunaware of itself. Georg Simmel observes that `in general we call a relationshiptragic - in contrast to merely sad or extrinsically destructive - when the destructive forces directed against some being spring from thedeepest levels of that very being'. We shall have occasion to revisit thisinsistence on the immanent, ironic or dialectical nature of the tragic, incontrast with the purely extrinsic or accidental; but it is worth remarkingnow that, like every other general formula in the field, it holds onlyfor some tragedy and not for the rest. The downfall of Goethe's Faust, orPentheus in Euripides's The Bacchae, may be sprung in just this way, butit is hard to argue a similar case about the death of Shakespeare's Cordeliaor Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

A. C. Bradley holds that a tragedy is `any spiritual conflict involvingspiritual waste', while in a brave but imprudent flourish, Oscar Mandeloffers as an all-inclusive definition of the form a situation in which `aprotagonist who would command our earnest good will is impelled in agiven world by a purpose, or undertakes an action, of a certain seriousnessand magnitude; and by that very purpose or action, subject to thatsame given world, necessarily and inevitably meets with grave spiritualor physical suffering'. This, for all its White House bureaucratese andjudicious sub-clausal hedging, falsely assumes with Simmel and othersthat tragedy is always immanent or ironic, staking too much on what theGreeks call peripeteia. It also throws in for good measure an emphasis onnecessity which, as we shall see later, is equally unwarranted. Aristotle,for example, is for the most part silent on the question. Leo Aylen believesthat tragedy is largely about death, while generously conceding that sometragedies are not. In an insight of positively Kantian intricacy, he informsus that in the face of death, `Certain things become much less important,others much more'. For Geoffrey Brereton, `a tragedy is a final andimpressive disaster due to an unforeseen or unrealized failure involvingpeople who command respect and sympathy'. This suggests that we donot find tragic those for whom we have limited sympathies, a commonbut debatable proposition of tragic theory. It also implies rather oddly thatsome disasters are unimpressive.



Continues...

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Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0631233601
• ISBN 13: 9780631233602
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352