Tragedy, It’s That Good

          Learning occurs through experience. We are all ignorant until we explore a concept through experience. If you ask an individual, with little to no experience in a tragedy course, to explain what tragedy involves, they will likely reply with a statement including, but not limited to, references to sadness, gore, and devastation. I confess that I too held such ideas prior to my experience in this course. Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised at the level of enthusiasm I felt over “tragic” material, namely Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra: The Homecoming and Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. Finding passion in literature fuels my dedication to education. Tragedy, for me, is this new, exciting passion of which I crave more of the further I delve into it. In order to describe what exactly it is about tragedy that I find so compelling, I must illustrate the emotions that the mechanics of tragedy excite.

In Poetics, Aristotle explains the “perfect tragedy” as one that imitates a serious, complete action and excites “pity and fear effecting the proper purgation (catharsis) of these emotions” (XIII[a], VI). In Oedipus the King, we develop a fear of discovering truth in regards to Oedipus’ parentage because it would confirm the prophecy that he would kill his own father and sleep with his mother. We then have pity for him, developed with assistance from the Oedipus-praising chorus, based on the idea that punishment should not go to those lacking necessary knowledge. In this case, Oedipus lacked knowledge of identity regarding his father, Laius, and his mother, Jocasta, and therefore could not properly assess the scenarios. These emotions provide a similar aesthetic experience with that of the sublime because it “mixes beauty (which attracts us to something) with terror or fear (which repels us).” To do this, Aristotle explains, the tragedy must reflect the character of “a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty” (XIII[13b]). Thus we have the tragic flaw, which “satisfies [the] common impulse to isolate or localize blame in the faults of individuals” rather than in social institutions. The tragic flaw often arises as a topic of discussion in tragic plays because it encompasses the goal of tragedy to put forth characters that are neither evil nor good. Rather, tragic characters drive the narrative in its development of “human actions and consequences.”

          Although the characters of tragic plays act as vehicles through delivering the playwright’s intended message, the plot, according to Aristotle, is the soul of tragedy. The plot, or narrative, of tragedy often focuses on whether or not the characters are “ethically innocent or blameworthy.” In Bacchae, King Pentheus visibly disrespects his elders, Cadmus and Tiresias, by deeming their Bacchus dress as foolish and ridiculous, and in doing so, defies the god Dionysus. At first glance, Pentheus does not seem likeable to any extent; however, it is important to take into consideration that he was just trying to do his job as king and prevent his city from total anarchy led by Bacchus-crazed worshippers. His tragic flaw, like most tragic characters, ends up being his downfall since he ends up torn to pieces by his own Bacchus-obsessed mother. This brings us to another basic element of tragedy—the family.

Orphan or one out of seventeen children, some sort of family connection exists. Tragedy plays off of this idea because it centralizes the family as the source of conflict and problems. Within the family exists both love and hate, which coexist as “their fates are bound together.” For example, the Oedipal Complex involves a male child who sexually desires his mother and opposes his father, such as in Hamlet.  The term derives from the legend of Oedipus (Three Theban Plays) who did not stand a chance against fate—prophesied by the oracle during infanthood that he would marry his mother and kill his father. Similar, but vice versa, is the Electra Complex, seen in The Libation Bearers of The Orestia Trilogy, where Agamemnon’s daughter, Electra, detests her mother, Clytaemnestra, for killing her father. These twisted relationships fuel the excitement of pity and fear, and hit on striking a balance between right and wrong. In other words, tragedy allows the audience to experience the Sublime—a state excited by purging the emotions of pity and fear.

Prior to this course, my only understanding of “sublime” existed as that of the name of a band and the concept of “wow.” However, through reading various tragedies in addition to other informational sources of the Sublime, I now understand it as the entire justification for labeling tragedy as the greatest genre. Unlike other genres, tragedy takes the typical “aesthetic standards of unity, probability, and cause and effect” and intensifies them with fear. We develop an attraction to tragic characters because we admire their nobility but also because they have a downfall of some sort, which leads us to have pity on them. When this pity for a character attaches to a narrative, such as in Oedipus the King, we experience a combination of pain and pleasure, what Edmund Burke describes as “the strongest emotion in which the mind is capable of feeling.” Pain, he explains, has an intense effect on the human mind and heart greater than that of pleasure. Therefore, that intense, concrete feeling that tragedy leaves us with is due to its capability of reaching so deep within our souls. By comparison, modern romance excites feelings of comfort, happiness, and contentment, while avoiding “negative” emotions, and thus does not penetrate beneath our first layer of being. However, the human mind and heart know these emotions exist and can even be enjoyable if witnessed at a great enough distance (Burke). Tragedy succeeds in reaching art’s purpose, to imitate life, because it pins its audience down and carefully injects them with syringes filled with a variety of real emotions, while satire, romance, and comedy merely paint our skin with watercolors. To properly explain the dimensions of tragedy, and what those dimensions consist of, I look towards the brilliant Friedrich Nietzsche.

In Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche discusses the coupling of the Apollonian and Dionysian by a “metaphysical miracle” to produce a balanced work of art (14). These two art gods, Nietzsche claims, reside at the core of tragedy. As I continue to research Nietzsche, the Apollonian, and the Dionysian, I develop a clearer understanding of how tragedy reflects being human.  Perhaps this accounts for the assertion of tragedy as the greatest genre. We seek, in our imitation of life, a challenging experience that questions the nature of true human character. This challenging experience, for me, is studying tragedy and Nietzsche, which I explain in great detail in my following essay. For now, I revert you back to the modernization of tragedy.

Although tragedy has been and will always be the most powerful genre of literature, it too is susceptible to the ever-changing times. One of the main ways in which tragedy has modernized includes its incorporation of other narrative genres, namely romance and comedy, in order to expand its appeal. For instance, Agamemnon begins with a watchman searching for the “fiery blaze from Troy” that will signal the homecoming of Agamemnon and the end of the ten-year-long war with the Greeks (10). Typically, comedy imitates “characters of a lower type,” meaning they are represented in a physical manner, rather than in a spiritual or ethereal manner as most tragic characters are. However, comedic characters can also be of a “high” type such as in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, where the characters are members of the upper class and present humor through wit and intellect. In tragedy, discovery of characters often occurs through repression of spectacle (i.e. killing offstage), whereas in comedy spectacle is necessary. By explaining his work in a way that resembles a dog, the watchman demonstrates an expression of spectacle, something unlike that of traditional tragedy.

In addition to incorporating elements of comedy, tragedy has also added elements of romance, which in my opinion broadens its audience to include more female observers. As discussed in class, many secondary schools have replaced teaching Oedipus the King with Antigone. The most obvious reason for this is that Antigone incorporates both tragedy and romance in its narrative while demonstrating a strong image of individualism. We see the romance in the play between Antigone and her fiancé, Haemon, primarily in the “Romeo/Juliet-esc” ending scene where Antigone’s suicide causes Haemon’s suicide as an act of uniting lovers. Due to this, teenage girls may find it more interesting than the Theban Plays. Antigone’s civil disobedience—an act atypical of tradition—is popular among young people because it evokes a sense of individualism to conquer wrongs of government. In a way, it resembles the narrative of teen dystopias, yet it still remains a tragedy. Modernization of tragedy also exists within the genre itself, namely in the change from Aeschylus and Sophocles to Euripides where the characters begin to take on more relatable, less noble, personas.

Particularly in Euripides’ Hippolytus, we see this fluctuation in the statuses of tragic characters. Nietzsche explains that these characters “speak only counterfeit, masked speeches” as a result of Euripides’ abandonment of Dionysus and Apollo (54). They lack the critical states of tragedy, present in Sophocles and Aeschylus, of the “primal or ecstatic reaction to the sublime” and “beauty and order.” In Hippolytus, the characters seem more relatable than Agamemnon or Creon—the relationship between Phaedra and her nurse is familiar. Audiences envision themselves on the same playing field as the two whereas one could never imagine having a beer with Agamemnon. It is this power of stature and godly admiration that gives traditional tragedy its weight and prominence. However, Euripides’s plays have been extremely popular due to his ability to create characters that audiences can relate to. I cannot argue with Nietzsche that traditional tragedy died after Aeschylus and Sophocles, but I do believe that Euripides’s plays provide the literary world with an extension of tragic drama.

          Tragedy situates itself in a place within both my soul and my brain. It requires a serious effort to expand ideals beyond comfortable and even understandable concepts. Strangely enough, this state of being excites and awakens a part of you that you had no idea existed. Anything that has the ability to ignite a fire for learning is worth sharing, for me, that is not a particular play but rather tragedy as a whole. I am happy to say that I have found something that has the capability to keep my attention for the long run—tragedy has no limits and therefore can never be completely understood.

          As a learning essay, I hope to have illustrated my understandings of the course and its subject material while expressing my fascination with tragedy in general. Comparing my understandings of tragedy now with that prior to the course, my jaw drops. It completely exceeded my expectations in both the content of the course itself and its ability to alter and improve my way of thinking and learning. I genuinely believe that passion is critical for authentic learning, and I will do my best to provide my future students with material capable of exiting that passion. As a student, I learned the truth about tragedy and as a future teacher I learned the truth about myself. Easy learning means nothing, it has no dimension; when you challenge yourself and push your mental limits, you gain an experience from learning void of a description.