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LITR 4370
TRAGEDY
Midterm2 Samples 2015 (midterm2 assignment)
Model Answers to Part 2. |
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Part 2. Learning about
Tragedy 2: Revise, continue, improve, & Extend Essay
begun in Midterm1
on learning experience with tragedy,
extending to include Sophocles's Family of Oedipus plays.
(Revise / improve midterm1 draft & add at least 5-7
paragraphs for 9-10 paragraph total.)
Part Two:
Staying Power: Comparing Ancient Tragedy and Comedy
I entered this course with what I'd consider
a strong grasp of American modernist tragedy and comedy but honest inexperience
in the territory of ancient Greek drama and concomitant philosophy. A few months
into the semester, I find myself making connections to books I have read using
helpful critical stances borne out of the western groundwork laid by Aristotle,
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Nietzsche. Studying old tragedies and comedies
throughout my undergrad career, I have come to the conclusion that tragedy holds
up better over time. Senses of humor evolve and mutate year to year, not to
mention century to century; and social climate necessitates unique reactionary
comedy. On the other hand, tragedy remains largely fixed: what is sad and
enigmatic in our time—death—is equally sad and enigmatic in Ancient Greece and
all places through all times, and so interest in the genre persists and expands.
This class has taught me that tragedy, to the exclusion of all its competitors,
really is the profoundest genre.
Comedy, already subjective to the beholder,
is tough to pin down. Its essence, E.B. White explains, is such that it "has a
certain fragility, an evasiveness" (qtd. in "Theories of Comedy"). According to
Aristotle, "comedy is . . . an imitation of characters of a lower type" (Poetics,
V). The audience does not empathize with these lower types because it does not
see them as worthy reflections. Scrutinizing Agamemnon, I was immediately
able to identify and differentiate between Apolline and the Dionysian traits
despite my unfamiliarity with such a literary binary two months prior; however,
I could not spot any great humor in the piece until Dr. White stepped in and
provided context which explained that when the Watchman in the first part of
The Oresteia relaxes on his "arms, just like a dog" (Aeschylus, 5),
lowlier comic type is the implication. And I'm sure the author's coevals
understood this. Centuries later, that simile merely strikes me as playful and
salient, not necessarily comical, and the rift created by this misunderstanding
is one main difference between comedy and tragedy and a reason why the former
fades and the latter tends to survive longer as a genre: death and sadness
require no such explanatory footnote. Some comedy, luckily, did strike a chord
with me. Just as I was tickled by Chaucer's magnificent fart jokes in "the
Miller's Tale", I am pleased to find out that ancient Greeks appreciated lewd
humor, as proven by all the comical erections in Lysistrata (5.5; 5.79).
The relative obscurity of the ribald comedy
Lysistrata in the eyes of posterity is telling, though. Even among the
most avid modern readers familiarity with Lysistrata is rare, whereas the
average student is aware of the Oedipus tales, because the wider social
consciousness retains that which it deems useful or notable. "To learn gives the
liveliest pleasure " (Poetics, IV), and apart from the overly facile—if
not completely futile—plea for love instead of war, and the mechanics and timing
of mildly amusing puns which are the equivalence of lame parlor tricks (3.71;
4.26; 5.79), Lysistrata and all similarly raunchy comedies, offer little
in the way of trusty precepts and divert minds away from contemplation of
pressing issues. Lucky to survive as a dusty academic reference-point to ancient
humor, it would be generous in the extreme to suggest much unique insight can be
squeezed from Lysistrata past a certain point. Like most comedy, it
simply delights rather than staggers, and thus its impact fades as new fancies
earn our passing middle-minded attention. As a modern American, I can only hope
that scholars two thousand from now will not be examining 21st century Adam
Sandler films with the same anthropological curiosity and fervor. However, my
experience in this class leads me to believe that, should his films somehow
survive, future generations will be as baffled by and alienated from Sandler as
any tasteful sane human is today. Always influenced by zeitgeist, comedy, in its
particulars and eccentricities, soon becomes dated—too quaint to be as boundless
as great ancient tragedy.
Where comedy generally deals with
inconsequential ephemeral matters, tragedy focuses on everlasting matters of
life and death close-to-home. I can imagine and perhaps even live with the idea
of murdering a hypothetical stranger or a far-off enemy; the distance either
blunts emotion or provides jingoistic incentive; war romances thrive on this
exact clear us versus them mentality. Good tragedies, however, writes Aristotle,
"are founded on the stories of a few houses" (13c). Whether it is Oedipus
committing accidental parricide, Agamemnon offering his daughter Iphigenia up to
the gods, or Christine poisoning her husband Ezra, it is the intimacy between
the killer and the killed that pushes the violence into the realm of unbearable
calamity and "excite[s] pity and fear, this being the distinctive mark" (Poetics,
XIII) of the greatest tragedy. Of course, I am repulsed by the prospect of
killing anyone so close to my heart, so much so that pondering it too much hurts
me and I must stop.
This is because tragedy entails perplexing
suffering and forces humanity to confront the utter misery of life. We
understand the humor in an erection or the sweetness of typical romantic lovers,
but cannot so easily grasp the speculative mystery of intensities such
Antigone's suicide, Oedipus and Jocasta's incest, or the internecine violence
featured in The Oresteia. Instinctual self-preservation in mind,
Jocasta begs Oedipus to stop "investigating" (Oedipus Rex, 1270) the true
nature of his sordid past. She believes she "will suffer" (1271) if the truth is
revealed. Like readers who bristle at tragedy or reject it completely, she
recognizes the magnitude of the emotion she would have to endure. People in this
stubborn camp refuse that to grow—or in Aristotelian terms undergo the great
pleasure of learning—are self-consigned to incomplete, lukewarm
existences. Elderly, returned from exile, veteran of grief, blind and wise like
Tiresias, Oedipus, expressing the taxing intended effect of tragedy, impresses
upon his daughter Antigone that he is "taught by suffering" (Oedipus at
Colonus, 5). Once an unwilling participant, has evolved and embraced
painful nuance. Having tracked the struggles of Oedipus and felt the
characteristic fear and pity best provoked by tragic circumstance , I now better
appreciate the humble transformative trauma of learning.
The main characters of tragedy seize our
prolonged attention because in them is the vigorous representation of human
complexity. Comic and romantic figures fit into clearly demarcated tropes:
there's the jolly fat guy and his hyperactive small friend, the dashing hunk and
the beautiful small-town girl. But in tragedy "no mortal man is ever blessed" (Oedipus
Rex, 1431), and the stakes are hardly so simple. Standing quite apart,
tragic figures defy easy classification and present more realistic psyches. In
his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, modernist tragic novelist William
Faulkner—who, following in the footsteps of Aeschylus, Shakespeare and the rest,
inflicted classic familial agony on the Compsons, Snopeses, and Sutpens, to name
a few clans—claims that the only topic truly worth writing about is "the human
heart in conflict with itself". Tragic figures either make tough internal
decisions or are subjected to tough internal suffering regardless of choice.
When Agamemnon, caught in that selfsame conflict of the heart, sacrifices his
daughter, he is not taking up the plain mantle of villainy; he is ensuring the
survival of his people by gaining favorable traveling winds from the gods.
Antigone, rebuffed at every turn by tradition and orders from her superiors,
forsakes sedately observed division of right and wrong when she illegally buries
her slain brother Polynices. In the aftermath, she complies with law's
procedure, having transcended boundaries. Even the lowly guard, used to thinking
in simple binaries, recognizes the tender balance Antigone has struck, claiming:
"it's a joy / escaping troubles which affect oneself, / but painful to bring
evil on one's friends" (Antigone, 493-5). However, "tragedy does not
always have to be dark" (Hollen), as epitomized by Antigone's brave rebellion
and again by the restoration of peace and order in the final part of The
Oresteia. External forces may warrant curiosity, but externality causes
disengagement which disincentives the introspection tragedy aims to provoke.
Certainly complex and perhaps unpalatable, tragedy makes the audience
contemplate the singular inward potential for both good and evil (Antigone,
417).
Another reason tragedy survives is the
larger-than-life characters whom the audience deem worthy of imitation and
respect. The audience seeks improvement in mirroring the behavior of the heroes
since they are depicted as "better than in actual life" (Poetics, II).
Given the opportunity, we would rather become stately, influential, brave, and
noble—like Oedipus, Antigone, Agamemnon, and Orestes—than aloof, lowly, and
undignified—like the forgettable Watchman in Agamemnon or the galling
jokesters in Lysistrata. Suffering admirably against all odds,
acting beyond insular self-interest, representative of society's values, tragic
heroes, warts and all, gain reputations as eminent synecdoches. Their stories
register with us, packing the varied enigmatic punch known as catharsis. We
"feel an enlargement before great or good work, an expansion," explains the
renowned poet William Carlos Williams, because "it gives the feeling of
completion by revealing the oneness of experience" (The Collected Poems,
194). While entertaining to an extent, comedic and romantic figures, rather than
prompt growth and essential illumination, reinforce unadventurous
preconceptions. Aristotle would no doubt agree that great tragic figures "rouse
rather than stupefy the intelligence" (Williams, 194).
Death, the focus of tragedy and the
universal end which we all share, remains an obsession to this day. Humanity can
neither solve it nor get shut of it. A persistent mystery, it triggers the
extremest pity and fear. Learning being the greatest pleasure, we are denied by
death because it does not divulge its secrets. Antigone hangs herself, and
thousand plus years later Hamlet is still asking the most fundamental question:
"To be or not to be" (Shakespeare, 3.1.58). The morbid curiosity furthermore
reverberates into the 20th century. Eugene O'Neill's drama Mourning Becomes
Electra is nothing if not an American modernization of the classics
written by Aeschylus. Then there's William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom!,
a tragedy wherein a suicidal daughter significantly named Clytemnestra is just
one of the doomed branches on the Sutpen family tree. Along with cultivated
interest in the Greek classics and these updates, we have an indication: a
desperate attempt to grasp the enormity of life and death. Where comedy recedes
into a cultural oddity, tragedy precludes any reduction of gravity.
We flock towards comedy as comforting
temporary respite from the truth. We indulge in romance because we wish a
narrative so agreeable and clear-cut could replace the truth. We
initially shy away from tragedy because it refuses to sugarcoat the brutal
truth, but come to learn that it presents humanity for what it really is, both
triumphant and piteous. The frustration, the very irreducibility of universal
and inscrutable themes, is precisely what makes it a worthwhile object of study.
Tragically, tragedy is here to stay.
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