The Definition of Tragedy
Introduction
For the past month I have been meditating on the meaning of "tragedy". There is a certain difficult in approaching this topic, for at first it is a kind of chicken/egg question: did we have the tragedies or theory of tragedy first? As far as literary history shows, we had tragedies first. Aristotle's Poetics was written well after the height of Greek tragedy. The situation is similar with Shakespeare's tragedies, which are totally different from Greek tragedies. Again, Shakespeare wrote the plays first, and so far we do not have a systematic definition of what Shakespeare means by "tragedy". Then we also have our everyday usage of the word - "Oh that's such a tragedy." The task of thinking and defining the principles of tragedy is then to abstract a theory out of the critical examinations of Greek tragedies, Shakespearean tragedies and our everyday usage of the word. The task, even now afterI've thought it through, is formidable. A lot of the "tragedies" are theoretical contradictions. For example, if we accept the tragic hero suffers (but not necessary dies), how do we explain a play like Romeo and Juliet, in which both of the characters do not suffer? They grief, yes, but if one insists on saying that the star-crossed lovers did suffer, then their suffering is nothing like Sophocles' Electra or Lady Macbeth. Or take Euripides' Medea as an example. What kind of tragedy is that? Here we have a woman who turns her anger into destructive energy and kills her own children in order to make her husband suffer. She then safely flees to Athens. Can this even be considered as a tragedy? If so, who is the tragic character? What is so "tragic" about this particular play? One ends up asking a lot of circular questions and coming up with many circular arguments. I suppose the best thing that I can do is come up with an arbitrary definition of tragedy as abstracted from all the tragedies that are circulated in the community, and critically defend my definition.
Definition
Tragedy is a play that involves with one or more "tragic moments" (the Greek term is apparently anagnorisis). A "tragic moment" is when a character, after various toils during the course of the play, comes to a recognition of his own imperfection and helplessness as a human being. It is this moment in which the tragic hero defines himself, and tragedy defines itself.
-By "recognition" I mean that a character comes to a moment of epiphany by stepping out of his situation in a critical reflection and acknowledging his own condition.
-By "imperfection", I do not mean the notion of the "tragic flaw", in which an essentially good person is brought down by this one flaw among his qualities. "Imperfection" is the inability to do what should have been done. It relates to Aristotles' notion of hamartia or the tragic error, which is made with free will, but not deliberated; this error is a profoundly human error, which is made in a moment of care-less-ness. Gods do not make these errors, only human beings do.
-By "helplessness", I mean the uselessness of willed actions to change the outcome of the situation, which is usually some kind of suffering. "Willed actions" can mean actions of the past and decisions of the present.
Tragic Situations
Hence tragedy is profoundly human, and deals at a fundamental level of human existence, which very importantly and necessarily includes the idea of free will. Bad fortunes or suffering alone is not tragic: there is nothing "tragic" about someone who got struck by lightning or a person suffering pain from a paper cut. A situation becomes tragic when human free will becomes a necessity and the person knows it. In general, there are three situations in which this happens:
1. hamartia: when a person makes a mistake, the mistake (which is a freely willed action turned negative in consequence) comes back to haunt him in the future. He comes to realize his own mistake, tries to remedy it and fails. This is the case with Oedipus the King, who made the mistake of killing his father in his youth, then much later comes to realize that he has killed his father and married his mother. In Sophocles' play the tragic moment is when he fully recognizes his situation (his imperfection as a human being and his helplessness to remedy what has already happened) and as a result plucks his eyes out.
2. hubris: when a person, who is essentially good as a human being, strives to contend with the divine by boasting himself, and as a result he is struck down by the gods or some kind of divine agent, but realizes his own transgressive pride before he dies. In Macbeth, Macbeth's ambition to transgress the natural (and therefore divine; "divine" is to be understood as opposition of the human) order is restored by Macduff, who is clearly a divine agent of punishment (it's too much of an coincident that Macduff should just happened to be the person to kill Macbeth and to be rip out of his mother's womb). The tragic moment in Macbeth is when Macbeth, after the death of his wife, recognizes his imperfection as "a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage" and his helplessness even making all the "sound and fury" which signifies nothing.
3. Psychomachia: I use this term as the original Greek mean - soul-fight, or the conflict of the soul. This means that it does not just imply to the Christian doctrine of the Good and Evil, it can also mean other forces that split an individual apart and forces the individual to choose. The tragic psychomachia is when either of the choices are problematic. When one recognizes the futile options avaliable proposed by the opposing forces, one feels one's own imperfection as a human being and the helpless of one's choice. The tragic moment of Richard III is when Richard is torn into two by his will to power and his conscience. In his case, it is not simply a choice between good and evil (because that would be all too easy) but the gender binary that attaches to the two choices: "will to power" is masculine, and "conscience" is feminine. On the one hand, his society urges Christian ethics; on the other, the manly virtue of power. Either way Richard loses. Hence Richard, at the beginning of the play, is driven to choose hyper-masculinity; at the end of the play, his conscience comes back to haunt him, and for a time Richard is in his tragic moment, as he recognizes his dilema.
All three situations above directly tackles the definition of the tragic moment as "a recognition of [a character's] own imperfection and helplessness as a human being." A tragedy, however, only needs one of the three situations for it to become a tragedy. Of course, the more situations you have, the more tragic the play is. What is interesting about this definition of "tragedy" is that now even "evil" characters can be tragic. Richard III is as evil as one can get, but my definition allows us to understand what is going on within Richard's mind, and as a result we come to see how an "evil" person come into being, and that they too are human beings and are sites of tragic moments.
The Ultimate Tragedy: Sophocles' Ajax
Aristotle's favourite tragedy is Sophocles' Oedipus the King. He basically grounds his theory of tragedy in that one play. I am working the other way around: now that I have completed in the abstract my theory of tragedy, and after I've examined some of the tragedies from ancient Greece as well as from Shakespeare, I am going to conclude that Sophocles' Ajax is the most tragic of all tragedies. This does not mean it is the best tragedy. The criteria in judging the greatness of a tragedy as drama would involve an entirely different discussion on the theory of drama, which I am not planning to do here. But Ajax is the most tragic because it includes all three tragic situations.
Ajax commits hubris well before the beginning of the play. The chorus recounts how Ajax twice denies the help of Athena in battle, boasting that he does not need it. He commits the hamartia of trying to kill the sons of Atreus at the beginning of the play, after they have awarded Achilles' armour to Odysseus. True enough Ajax was mad, but his madness was only after he has made the decision of following his angry passion to kill the generals; Athena made him mad in order to save the generals' lives. Ajax then runs into a psychomachic problem, when after he realizes his own folly, whether to stay alive and protect his kinsman, or to kill himself honourably. The dilema is roughly one of femininity (it is Tecmessa who urges him to stay alive) and masculinity.
As there are three tragic situations, so Sophocles stacks up the three moments of recognition. The first one, for his hamartia, comes actually in Tecmessa's speech early in the play, in which she reports that Ajax, after coming to his senses, "Refusing food and drink, he sits there motionless". After which, we get Ajax himself coming to recognition of both his hamartia and his hubris. He realizes that he is "hated by the gods", and that "when God / Strikes harm, a worse man often foils his better." Then Ajax and Tecmessa argue if Ajax's life is still worth living, in which Ajax eventually lies about his change of mind and exits to prepare to kill himself. Ajax, in this final tragic moment, recognizes the inevitablity of his death (he and Hector exchanged gifts, both of them are destined to be weapons to their deaths), asks the gods to take him quickly to Hades (a recognition of himself as a mortal and therefore imperfect) and take care of his parents (hence the attempted reconciliation with the masculine/feminine binary), finally falls on his own sword and dies.
Of course, the play does not end there; in fact, a good third of the play is still remaining. Nonetheless, after this analysis, there is no doubt in my mind that Ajax is the most tragic of all tragedies. Sophocles was able to build a tower of moments in which we as audience come to pity Ajax. Ajax's noble exit out of life is made especially memorable (if not admirable) by the many trials that he has to go through during the course of this play.
Concluding Remarks
The definition of tragedy is really quite up for grabs. After all, the original Greek word only means "goat-song". The real definition of "tragedy" back in the time of Aeschylus is "any of the first three the plays that are performed in the annual competition at the City Dionysus." (The fourth play is a satyr play.) My hope is that my definition has captived the essence of what we now think is tragic. The definition not only still awaits for further critical scrutiny, but it awaits a case of contradiction. I want to suggest that Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, as examined by my definition, is in fact not a tragedy. But since so many scholars agree that Julius Caesar is a tragedy, the discussion is going to become very interesting.
For the past month I have been meditating on the meaning of "tragedy". There is a certain difficult in approaching this topic, for at first it is a kind of chicken/egg question: did we have the tragedies or theory of tragedy first? As far as literary history shows, we had tragedies first. Aristotle's Poetics was written well after the height of Greek tragedy. The situation is similar with Shakespeare's tragedies, which are totally different from Greek tragedies. Again, Shakespeare wrote the plays first, and so far we do not have a systematic definition of what Shakespeare means by "tragedy". Then we also have our everyday usage of the word - "Oh that's such a tragedy." The task of thinking and defining the principles of tragedy is then to abstract a theory out of the critical examinations of Greek tragedies, Shakespearean tragedies and our everyday usage of the word. The task, even now afterI've thought it through, is formidable. A lot of the "tragedies" are theoretical contradictions. For example, if we accept the tragic hero suffers (but not necessary dies), how do we explain a play like Romeo and Juliet, in which both of the characters do not suffer? They grief, yes, but if one insists on saying that the star-crossed lovers did suffer, then their suffering is nothing like Sophocles' Electra or Lady Macbeth. Or take Euripides' Medea as an example. What kind of tragedy is that? Here we have a woman who turns her anger into destructive energy and kills her own children in order to make her husband suffer. She then safely flees to Athens. Can this even be considered as a tragedy? If so, who is the tragic character? What is so "tragic" about this particular play? One ends up asking a lot of circular questions and coming up with many circular arguments. I suppose the best thing that I can do is come up with an arbitrary definition of tragedy as abstracted from all the tragedies that are circulated in the community, and critically defend my definition.
Definition
Tragedy is a play that involves with one or more "tragic moments" (the Greek term is apparently anagnorisis). A "tragic moment" is when a character, after various toils during the course of the play, comes to a recognition of his own imperfection and helplessness as a human being. It is this moment in which the tragic hero defines himself, and tragedy defines itself.
-By "recognition" I mean that a character comes to a moment of epiphany by stepping out of his situation in a critical reflection and acknowledging his own condition.
-By "imperfection", I do not mean the notion of the "tragic flaw", in which an essentially good person is brought down by this one flaw among his qualities. "Imperfection" is the inability to do what should have been done. It relates to Aristotles' notion of hamartia or the tragic error, which is made with free will, but not deliberated; this error is a profoundly human error, which is made in a moment of care-less-ness. Gods do not make these errors, only human beings do.
-By "helplessness", I mean the uselessness of willed actions to change the outcome of the situation, which is usually some kind of suffering. "Willed actions" can mean actions of the past and decisions of the present.
Tragic Situations
Hence tragedy is profoundly human, and deals at a fundamental level of human existence, which very importantly and necessarily includes the idea of free will. Bad fortunes or suffering alone is not tragic: there is nothing "tragic" about someone who got struck by lightning or a person suffering pain from a paper cut. A situation becomes tragic when human free will becomes a necessity and the person knows it. In general, there are three situations in which this happens:
1. hamartia: when a person makes a mistake, the mistake (which is a freely willed action turned negative in consequence) comes back to haunt him in the future. He comes to realize his own mistake, tries to remedy it and fails. This is the case with Oedipus the King, who made the mistake of killing his father in his youth, then much later comes to realize that he has killed his father and married his mother. In Sophocles' play the tragic moment is when he fully recognizes his situation (his imperfection as a human being and his helplessness to remedy what has already happened) and as a result plucks his eyes out.
2. hubris: when a person, who is essentially good as a human being, strives to contend with the divine by boasting himself, and as a result he is struck down by the gods or some kind of divine agent, but realizes his own transgressive pride before he dies. In Macbeth, Macbeth's ambition to transgress the natural (and therefore divine; "divine" is to be understood as opposition of the human) order is restored by Macduff, who is clearly a divine agent of punishment (it's too much of an coincident that Macduff should just happened to be the person to kill Macbeth and to be rip out of his mother's womb). The tragic moment in Macbeth is when Macbeth, after the death of his wife, recognizes his imperfection as "a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage" and his helplessness even making all the "sound and fury" which signifies nothing.
3. Psychomachia: I use this term as the original Greek mean - soul-fight, or the conflict of the soul. This means that it does not just imply to the Christian doctrine of the Good and Evil, it can also mean other forces that split an individual apart and forces the individual to choose. The tragic psychomachia is when either of the choices are problematic. When one recognizes the futile options avaliable proposed by the opposing forces, one feels one's own imperfection as a human being and the helpless of one's choice. The tragic moment of Richard III is when Richard is torn into two by his will to power and his conscience. In his case, it is not simply a choice between good and evil (because that would be all too easy) but the gender binary that attaches to the two choices: "will to power" is masculine, and "conscience" is feminine. On the one hand, his society urges Christian ethics; on the other, the manly virtue of power. Either way Richard loses. Hence Richard, at the beginning of the play, is driven to choose hyper-masculinity; at the end of the play, his conscience comes back to haunt him, and for a time Richard is in his tragic moment, as he recognizes his dilema.
All three situations above directly tackles the definition of the tragic moment as "a recognition of [a character's] own imperfection and helplessness as a human being." A tragedy, however, only needs one of the three situations for it to become a tragedy. Of course, the more situations you have, the more tragic the play is. What is interesting about this definition of "tragedy" is that now even "evil" characters can be tragic. Richard III is as evil as one can get, but my definition allows us to understand what is going on within Richard's mind, and as a result we come to see how an "evil" person come into being, and that they too are human beings and are sites of tragic moments.
The Ultimate Tragedy: Sophocles' Ajax
Aristotle's favourite tragedy is Sophocles' Oedipus the King. He basically grounds his theory of tragedy in that one play. I am working the other way around: now that I have completed in the abstract my theory of tragedy, and after I've examined some of the tragedies from ancient Greece as well as from Shakespeare, I am going to conclude that Sophocles' Ajax is the most tragic of all tragedies. This does not mean it is the best tragedy. The criteria in judging the greatness of a tragedy as drama would involve an entirely different discussion on the theory of drama, which I am not planning to do here. But Ajax is the most tragic because it includes all three tragic situations.
Ajax commits hubris well before the beginning of the play. The chorus recounts how Ajax twice denies the help of Athena in battle, boasting that he does not need it. He commits the hamartia of trying to kill the sons of Atreus at the beginning of the play, after they have awarded Achilles' armour to Odysseus. True enough Ajax was mad, but his madness was only after he has made the decision of following his angry passion to kill the generals; Athena made him mad in order to save the generals' lives. Ajax then runs into a psychomachic problem, when after he realizes his own folly, whether to stay alive and protect his kinsman, or to kill himself honourably. The dilema is roughly one of femininity (it is Tecmessa who urges him to stay alive) and masculinity.
As there are three tragic situations, so Sophocles stacks up the three moments of recognition. The first one, for his hamartia, comes actually in Tecmessa's speech early in the play, in which she reports that Ajax, after coming to his senses, "Refusing food and drink, he sits there motionless". After which, we get Ajax himself coming to recognition of both his hamartia and his hubris. He realizes that he is "hated by the gods", and that "when God / Strikes harm, a worse man often foils his better." Then Ajax and Tecmessa argue if Ajax's life is still worth living, in which Ajax eventually lies about his change of mind and exits to prepare to kill himself. Ajax, in this final tragic moment, recognizes the inevitablity of his death (he and Hector exchanged gifts, both of them are destined to be weapons to their deaths), asks the gods to take him quickly to Hades (a recognition of himself as a mortal and therefore imperfect) and take care of his parents (hence the attempted reconciliation with the masculine/feminine binary), finally falls on his own sword and dies.
Of course, the play does not end there; in fact, a good third of the play is still remaining. Nonetheless, after this analysis, there is no doubt in my mind that Ajax is the most tragic of all tragedies. Sophocles was able to build a tower of moments in which we as audience come to pity Ajax. Ajax's noble exit out of life is made especially memorable (if not admirable) by the many trials that he has to go through during the course of this play.
Concluding Remarks
The definition of tragedy is really quite up for grabs. After all, the original Greek word only means "goat-song". The real definition of "tragedy" back in the time of Aeschylus is "any of the first three the plays that are performed in the annual competition at the City Dionysus." (The fourth play is a satyr play.) My hope is that my definition has captived the essence of what we now think is tragic. The definition not only still awaits for further critical scrutiny, but it awaits a case of contradiction. I want to suggest that Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, as examined by my definition, is in fact not a tragedy. But since so many scholars agree that Julius Caesar is a tragedy, the discussion is going to become very interesting.
posted by Tristan at 4:35 p.m.
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