final exam assignment

LITR 4533 TRAGEDY  Final Exam Samples 2010 Essays & Excerpts for Part B: Special Topics

Whitney Evans 

Part B:  Tragedy and Spectacle, Including the Sublime (Obj. 2)

          Tragedy does not rely on flash or over exaggerated visual stimuli to prove its point.  Instead, it seeks to eliminate nearly all excess in order to present a purer plot.  It does not rely on the easy feelings of laughter and happiness to win over its crowd.  Tragedy is more focused on the words and choices of characters rather than the gluttony of showiness and excessive breaks of humor.  The old cliché holds true with the immensely raw genre of tragedy:  with spectacle, less is more. 

          Spectacle in the sense of superficial emotion has no place, and will not be found in tragedy.  Simple emotions like happiness and carefree love will not be found because they do not mimic reality.  Yes, happiness and love are abundant and evident emotions, but life more typically seems to focus in on the negative, troubling issues that never go away.   Succinctly, life is not simple; therefore our literature and art should not be simple.  To limit ourselves in our art only to that which is easy and superfluous would drastically halt self-knowledge.  We must replicate true problems in our psyche and society in our art in an effort to study it and broaden our ideas of the self.   Aristotle states, “First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in [humanity] from childhood, one difference between [the human] and other animals being that people are the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation, we learn our earliest lessons (Poetics handout).”  It is only natural our instinct of repetition. 

To pretend that dark, taboo issues like incest, infanticide, and patricide do not exist in our world would be to deny our true reality.  In contrast to tragedy, comedy and/or romance do not present the innate, terrible realities of life.  Often, comedy and romance serve as an escape from the subject matter of tragedy.  It is much easier to pretend something does not exist than to face it head on and try to understand it.  It is also easier to look at something pretty for a distraction from the ugly truth.  This “something pretty” is often referred to as spectacle.  For example, in the film You’ve Got Mail, the “problem” involves a woman who is falling in love with two separate men:  the man who is going to put her out of business, and the man who she is secretly conversing with online.  Instead of having to make a difficult decision regarding whom she will spend the rest of her life with, (like one would be forced to do in real life) the entire dilemma is just pushed to the side, because the two men are, in fact, the same man!  How easy it would be if life worked out so well.     

Spectacle does not have to be pretty.  It does not have to be a punch line and a “happily ever after.”  Most of the obvious spectacle seen in present day art is that of violence and action.  The horror movies of today rely on sickeningly close-up shots of knives on throats and intestines flying all over the place.  The audience is unsettled to see their insides displayed in such a way.  Adrian Hernandez refers to this as the “O-M-G factor.”  Adrian goes on to say that nowadays the public is bombarded with the overuse of gore and special effects.  It’s nearly impossible to go an entire day without hearing about some sort of gruesome crime or disgusting horror movie (Hernandez, model assignment). People leave the movie theater or turn off the news only to lie down in bed and see that gross shot of innards or the crime scene.  We’ve become so desensitized to this flash that we are no longer truly affected by it.  What this overt spectacle fails to provide is the genuine, pit-of-the-stomach feeling that something is truly, innately wrong. 

What spectacle fails to offer is a good reason.  Yes, the bad serial killer in the slasher film is “evil,” but do we ever discover why?  What happened to this person to cause them to turn into this monster?  Tragedy provides the why.  If we were to just hear about Oedipus, the incestuous murderer, we would never be on his side.  But what tragedy does by limiting the use of spectacle is create the sublime.  The idea of the sublime is that which is, according to Aristotle, beautiful and terrible, pleasurable and pitiful, sympathetic and repulsive.  While the audience is disgusted with Oedipus’ actions, they are also considering the fact that his plight was placed upon him.  He is nearly without fault, because it was the prophecy of Apollo that ordained his destiny.  Yes, he killed his father, but he did so unknowingly.  When you contrast Oedipus’ good intentions with his actions, it’s hard to place blame on him alone and entirely.  He left his home willingly, left his family and all he knew to keep from allowing the prophecy to come to fruition.  This alone shows that Oedipus, at the very least, was repulsed by the idea of murdering his father and bedding his mother. 

Jennifer Clary states, “The sublime allows the reader of a tragic play to merge their own human characteristics with those of the [tragic] character (Clary, model assignment).”  This is the true success of tragedy as a genre.  It intermingles true human emotion into its discourse.  The audience is intricately woven into the feelings and thoughts of the characters because they aren’t merely static, but real, mistake-making people.  We are the characters on the stage, in some way.  We cannot completely cut ourselves away from their problems.  Tragedy cuts straight to the psyche and extracts that which all of us, in some way, have within.  Rather than being able to label a “bad guy,” we are instead left with the troubling fact that the tragic hero had good, redeeming qualities he (or she) made choices we ourselves could have made.  We are able to see both sides and argue them, but in the end, there is no good or bad guy. 

It is “a powerful mixture of pleasure and pain (Aristotle, sublime handout)” that keeps the line of good and bad from being drawn.  The sublime doesn’t let us off easy.  Where we are completely disgusted by Oedipus’ actions, he pleases us because he saved Thebes.  He solved the riddle of The Sphinx.  While the audience is disgusted with Oedipus’ actions, they are also considering the fact that his plight was placed upon him.  He is nearly without fault, because it was the prophecy of Apollo that ordained his destiny.  Yes, he killed his father, but he did so unknowingly.  When you contrast Oedipus’ good intentions with his actions, it’s hard to place blame on him alone and entirely.  He left his home willingly, left his family and all he knew to keep from allowing the prophecy to come to fruition.  This alone shows that Oedipus, at the very least, was repulsed by the idea of murdering his father and bedding his mother.

The construct of tragedy to repress this use of spectacle speaks to its potency.  It stands on its own without need of pomp and circumstance.  The audience does not need to see Oedipus sleep with his mother to be completely grossed out by it.  Spectacle in tragedy would serve only to spoon-feed the audience.  The situations and deep psychological problems stand on their own without need of show.  When you have characters that are so deeply flawed and real, spectacle is not needed and would only serve to dilute the story.