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LITR 4370
TRAGEDY Model Assignments Midterm2 Samples 2017 (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
. . . to include Sophocles's Family of Oedipus plays.
(Index)
Clark
Omo
3
April 2017
The Tragic and Comedic Experience
My
experience with both Tragedy and Comedy has been an interesting one. In more
than one way, I have seen how startlingly different the two genres of literature
are, and yet, at the same time, how undeniably linked they are. Both have proven
capable of sparring with ideas and themes integral to the construction of our
culture. While Tragedy will often take the most dire and jarring route to reach
this goal by forcing us to acknowledge the ever-present evils of injustice and
our flawed natures, Comedy will take the lighter and smoother path by asking us
to laugh at circumstances that we all have to face and inevitably overcome.
Therefore, both Tragedy and Comedy, though different as can be, ultimately
accomplish the same goal; they both explore the world around us and point out
the flaws. Tragedy forces us to deal with the dark side of existence while
forcing us to remember that the end is not always pleasant, while Comedy reminds
us that there is a lighter side to world and that happy endings do exist. Though
opposite, Comedy and Tragedy compliment each other in various ways, ultimately
proving that they are, unquestionably, different sides of the same coin.
To
understand this paradoxical dichotomy, Tragedy must first be explored. The
narrative of Tragedy, despite this seemingly all-encompassing label, has proven
itself capable of tackling many issues through its often harrowing story lines.
As the Oxford English Dictionary
defines the word, tragic is “Of
or relating to an event, situation, etc., that causes great suffering,
destruction, or distress, esp. one that involves death on a large scale or
premature death; catastrophic, disastrous, devastating.” While this proves true
in many a work classified as a “Tragedy”, dating from Eugene O’Neill to
Shakespeare to Sophocles, Tragedy is not restricted to the simplistic label of
basically being a “sad story”. Tragedy involves much more than that. As our
course website states, Tragedy narratives often evoke questions in regards to
morality, justice, and the limits of humanity. Tragedy, in many ways, wishes to
sift through the layers of society and culture and forces the audience to
confront the contradictions and disparities that exist the daily world. And, as
is the inherent job of literature, reminding the world of its unfairness and
imperfections is exactly what Tragedy strives to accomplish. Tragedy reflects
the harder course of life that existence inevitably follows at one point. And
yet, with this harder path that Tragedy follows, it does not ultimately leave a
sour taste at the end of its stories. Catharsis, the ultimate goal of Tragedy,
states that understand the beauty of our world, we must, at the same time, we
must “face its terror and chaos” as the course website defines it. As Aristotle
put it, “Tragedy . . . is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete,
and of a certain magnitude . . . ; through pity and fear effecting the proper
purgation of these emotions”. Tragedy makes us fear and feel terror at its
expositions of human nature. It asks us to look inside ourselves and feel the
horror at how despicable humans can be.
Perhaps the best example of this can be seen with Sophocles and his Theban
Trilogy. As we have seen in these stories, characters are often forced to
confront the results of their actions, leading to cathartic moments and endings
imbued with terror and chaos. In Oedipus
Rex, Oedipus is forced to confront the fact that he killed his own father,
married his mother, and then had kids by his mother. Catharsis enters the scene
when Oedipus realizes this unfortunate truth, runs to his bedroom and finds
Jocasta (his mother/wife) hanging from their bed posts. He then takes the
brooches from her dress and proceeds to gouge out his own eyes as penance.
Oedipus’s response is a classical form of Catharsis; at realizing his error, he
then strikes himself blind. There is a beauty of terror in this moment that
somehow appeals to the chaotic nature of the world we live in. And this how the
story ends. Though Tragedy may face a loss of comfort because of this obsession
with chaos and terror presented by catharsis, it does reflect a necessity for
the Tragic ending. As Weiland asks “Is that what we’re doing when we write sad
stories? Are we squelching hope, beauty, and wonder? Or are we perhaps just
exploring the opposite side of the same coin?” (n.pg.). This is an extremely
important point to understand. Human experience does not include just happiness.
There is sorrow, loss, guilt, and wrong. Weiland goes on to affirm this by
stating “Life is just as full of sadness as it is of happiness. To ignore that
fact is to limit both our personal experience of the human existence and our
ability to write truthfully about life.” (n.pg.). Sadness is as important to
humanity as is happiness. In order to save the human soul, God had to sacrifice
his only Son. And so to save ourselves, we must understand sacrifice and sorrow.
That is what Tragedy asks us to do: to understand the darkness.
Beyond basic Tragedy, the Romance narrative also seems to have become infused
into a few our plays, most notably the Theban Trilogy. We have seen before that
O’Neill managed to accomplish this very same thing by bringing in an almost
Transcendent goal for Captain Brant in
Mourning Becomes Electra. But we have also seen that this infusion predates
O’Neill by millennia, for even Sophocles managed to present some similar
elements that could be classified as Romantic by modern literary standards. In
Antigone, for example, Antigone’s and
Hemon’s choice to commit suicide possesses a Transcendent note to it, for they
have finally transcended the injustices of Creon and achieved a sort of victory
together. Much is also true with Oedipus
at Colonus, who also manages to escape the world by a vague sort of
ascension to Heaven: “It
was a messenger from heaven, or else\Some gentle, painless cleaving of earth's
base;\For
without wailing or disease or pain\He
passed away” (12.1786-90). Oedipus ascends above the world, blind and broken,
but finally obtaining peace in “an end most marvelous” (1790). Returning to
Antigone, the eponymous heroine could
also substitute as a Romantic character, for she is a heroic woman trying to
obtain justice through sacrifice, in a world that does not understand or wish to
comply. Antigone strives against the established social order, evidenced by her
constant rebellion against Creon’s wishes concerning the burial of her brother,
Polynices. And yet, to finally achieve this goal, she must commit a sacrifice
upon herself by suicide, and then, Hemon, Creon’s son and promised to marry
Antigone, commits the same action, followed by Eurydice, Creon’s wife,
forcing Creon to examine his decisions: “Then
take this foolish man away from here\I killed you, my son, without intending
to\and you, as well, my wife. How useless I am now.” (1484-87). Thus Tragedy
seems to accomplish many of its goals by implanting Romantic themes, thus
forcing the audience even more to see the beauty in the terror. And yet, though
one way to learn of the world’s problems is by confronting them in the dark,
there can also be light.
Seemingly opposite to Tragedy stands Comedy. Comedy, as seen throughout this
class, is highly dependent upon a multitude of comedic tropes to serve as
vectors for its messages. Often this includes the use of excess or exaggeration,
where normally trivial circumstances are inflated to outrageous proportions to
paradoxically emphasize their unimportance. Such is the case of
Lysistrata. In the opening scene of
this comedy, Lysistrata is approached by Kleonike, who emphasized the
disconcerted look on Lysistrata’s face: “Good day, Lysistrata; but tell me, why
this dark, forbidding face, my dear? Believe me, you don't look a bit pretty
with those black scowling brows.” This is a common motif in Comedy; to make a
big deal out of nothing. And yet this transitions into the overall conflict of
the play: the men are at war, and the home is neglected. Furthermore, as the
play’s story continues, the women of Athens decide to have a sex strike against
their men in order to bring an end to the Peloponnesian War. Again, this is an
overemphasis on the status of sex in Greek society, that at the same has a hint
of truth in it. Did the Athenians not perform their Olympic races without
clothes on? Are not the satyrs and centaurs symbols of rampant sexuality? And
does not Zeus, the head god of the Greek pantheon, have a problem by mating with
bovines? Sex, although this play makes a mockery of it, seems to have an
especial level of importance to the men of Greece. As Hazlitt states “Man is the
only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with
the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be” This is
essentially what Lysistrata plays off
of, as do many other comedies. They ask their audiences to acknowledge the fact
that everything in their world has been severely blown out of proportion and
that, at their core, existence and society have a state at which they must be
and stay,
This
conclusion, of course, seems opposite to the Romance elements present in a
Tragedy. Comedy depends on the restoration of the social order so that jokes and
questions raised can come again and again, so that there is no final release,
but rather an acknowledgment that these issues are what we all must contend
with, even to the end of our lives. Comedy depends on its uses of “low humor” by
presenting characters that are crude and often of a lower social status (i.e.,
the artisans in A Midsummer’s Night Dream)
to state that, although life is full of contradictions and incongruences, it is
nonetheless life. We must live it and deal with it. Perhaps this is the reason
that so many sitcoms, such as How I Met
Your Mother or Friends, end with
a gathering in a living room or some other locus of social gathering, as if the
day’s events had never happened. So, Comedy keeps its partakers trapped in a
perpetual cycle that can never be escaped, unlike Romance, whose entire
existence is based upon escape and Transcendence. Comedy, on the other hand, is
not concerned with these themes of release and finality. It wants you to keep
coming back, so that it may continue to guide you through life’s many obstacles,
rather than let you fend for yourself.
Despite their different approaches at how they deal with their different
subjects and incorporate Romance, Comedy and Tragedy both ultimately accomplish
the same thing: they reveal to their audiences the facts of life. Tragedy tends
to reveal these truths through much darker means, and rarely does it focus on
giving us any kind of relief from the deepening tensions that dominate
throughout much of the narratives. In
Oedipus Rex, for example, the play constantly goes from bad to worse to
worst as Oedipus slowly realized his grave and fated mistakes. As mentioned,
this reflects the unfair elements that sometimes seem to regulate life. Many a
time does one feel as though no matter what they do or what they choose, things
are just going to go bad. The terrible will always come. That is what
Oedipus Rex teaches us. And this is a
fact of actual life. For Comedy, the same kind of life lessons are taught, but
the methods are much different. Again, using
Lysistrata, human fixation on sex is
rife throughout the play’s story and exaggerated to almost cartoonish
proportions. Yet, within this comedic excess, there lies the truth that humans
do make a big deal out of sex. The Greeks certainly did. Beyond that,
Lysistrata seems to indicate that the
very war that Athens’s men are away fighting is ridiculous as well, and
therefore justifies ridiculous means to be ended. Thus, the outrageous sex
strike. Again, like Tragedy, Comedy tackles real world issues, just through
different means. By exaggeration, over-inflation, and vulgar mockery, Comedy
expresses the truths that humans tend to make crises out of nothing and at times
there are wars that just seem unnecessary to us.
Such
has been my experience with Tragedy and Comedy. In different ways, they both
seek to tell their audiences the same thing: life is full of problems and it is
sometimes hard to confront them. Tragedy prefers to do this by means of
Catharsis and unhappy storylines. Such methods force the audience to ask
questions regarding the world around them, especially concerning issues of
injustice, unfairness, and corruption. Tragedy also tends to blend Romantic
themes in it as well, which dates all the way to the days of Sophocles. We see
elements of Transcendentalism in the ends of
Antigone and
Oedipus at Colonus, for in both
plays, the characters achieve a final status of release. And Comedy makes light
of society’s problems through vulgar humor and exaggeration, often bringing
light to serious issues by inflating them to ridiculous proportions. And yet,
despite these differences, both Comedy and Tragedy ultimately accomplish the
same goals: they both ask their audiences to step out of their usual mindsets
and take a deeper, more critical look at the world around them. Such has been my
experience with Tragedy and Comedy so far this semester. And in this course I
have learned that, although Tragedy may be regarded as the ‘greatest genre’
Comedy has its purposes too. And they are both, in many ways, inseparable.
Works
Cited
Weiland, K.M. “Are Happy Endings a Must?”
helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com, 29 May 2011.
http://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/are-happy-endings-must/.
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