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THE TRAGIC FORM
Richard B. Sewall
The vision of tragedy as it is revealed through the fully
developed form should now be clear. Job and Oedipus do not exhaust the
possibilities, of course; Kitto's book (among others) shows how many
distinctions should be made by the specialist on Greek tragedy alone.
But in the search for essences these two works are central. Values
have been incremental, but each new tragic protagonist (for instance)
is in some degree a lesser Jobor Oedipus, and each new work owes an
indispensable element to the Counselors and to the Greek idea of the
chorus. I wish, in this brief interchapter,to restate in summary form
the constants of tragedy we have so far established. But first a word
about some of the relevance of these differences to the subsequent
tradition.
The Book of Job, especially the Poet's treatment of the
suffering and searching Job, is behind Shakespeare and Milton,
Melville, Dostoevski, and Kafka. Its mark is on all tragedy of
alienation, from Marlowe's Faustus to Camus' Stranger, in which there
is a sense of separation from a once known, normative, and loved deity
or cosmic order or principle of conduct. In emphasizing dilemma,
choice, wretchedness of soul, and guilt, it spiritualized the
Promethean theme of Aeschylus and made it more acceptable to the
Christianized imagination. In working into one dramatic context so
great a range of mood---from pessimism and despair to bitterness,
defiance, and exalted insight---it is father to all tragedy where the
stress is on the inner dynamics of man's response to destiny.
Oedipus stresses not so much man's guilt or forsakeness as his
ineluctable lot, the stark realities which are and always will be. The
Greek tradition is less nostalgic and less visionary---the difference
being in emphasis, not in kind. There is little pining for a lost
Golden Age, or yearning for utopia, redemption, or heavenly
restitution. But if it stresses man's fate, it does not deny him
freedom. Dramatic action, of course, posits freedom; without it no
tragedy could be written. In Aeschylus' Prometheus Kratos (or Power)
says, "None is free but Zeus," but the whole play proves him
wrong. Even the Chorus of helpless Sea Nymphs, in siding with
Prometheus in the end, defy the bidding of the gods. Aeschylus'
Orestes was told by Apollo to murder his mother, but he was not
compelled to. The spirit with which he acquiesced in his destiny ( a
theme which Greek tragedy stresses as Job does not) is of a free man
who, though fated, could have withdrawn and not acted at all. Even
Euripides, who of all the Greek Tragedians had the direst view of the
gods' compulsiveness in man's affairs, shows his Medea and Hippolytus
as proud and decisive human beings. And, as Cedric Whitman says about
the fate of Oedipus, the prophecy merely predicted Oedipus' future, it
did not determine it. Had Oedipus wish to escape his
prophesied future, he might have killed himself on first hearing of it
or never killed a man or never married. The fact that he acted at all,
with such a curse hanging over him, explains why, perhaps, he is not
entirely a stranger to guilt. But the fact remains that Oedipus
presides over that mode of tragedy less concerned with judgement
(eschatology) than with being (ontology), less with ultimate things
than with things here and now; less with man and the gods as they
should be than with man and the gods as they are.
In the Christian era, except for an occasional academic
exercise or tour de force, there has been no tragedy identifiable as
pure Hebraic or pure Greek. When the writers of the Renaissance found
models and guides in Greek tragedy, in Aristotle, and in Seneca, they
came to them with imaginations inevitably Christianized. What resulted
from the amalgam of Hebraic, Greek, and Christian was still a third
mode of tragedy---"Christian tragedy"---which added to the
traditional modes its own peculiar tensions and stresses. What
remained constant and compelling was the ancient tragic treatment
of evil; of suffering; and the suggestion of certain values that may
mitigate if not redeem.
Evil. The Greek tragedies, the imitations of them
by Seneca, and the freer, more humanistic reading of the Old Testament,
especially Job, brought to the men of the Renaissance not only the
aesthetic delight and challenge of beautifully ordered structures and
of richly poetic language but a sense of common cause in the face of
insoluble mystery that centuries of Christian piety could not still.
The Greek plays and Job, the products of long traditions and
sophisticated cultures, spoke to latent anxieties and doubts which
the Renaissance, itself a sophisticated culture and the product of a
long tradition, was, in the general "freeing of the
imagination" of that period, beginning to seek means of expressing
more fully. The Greek plays and Job presented a view of the universe,
of man's destiny and his relation withhis fellows and himself, in
which evil, though not total, is real, ever threatening, and
ineluctable. They explored the area of chaos in the human heart and
its possibility in the heavens. They faced the facts of
cruelty, failure, frustration, and loss, and anatomized suffering with
shocking thoroughness but with tonic honesty. The Greeks affirmed
absolutes like justice and order, but revealed a universe which
promised neither and often dealt out the reverse. The poet of Job
showed a universe suddenly gone and brought it back to an uneasy
balance only by appeal to a religious revelation---and not before
giving a full view of his great protagonist, alone and
embittered, forced unjustly into a "boundary-situation" not
of his own making, where his only real help was himself. In the
thirty-two surviving Greek tragedies, in the length of Job's
complaints, and in the lesser examples of Hebraic literature of the
same cast, this basic theme of the "dark problem" appears in
many guises and in varying degrees of emphasis. The focus shifts, but
the vision is constant. The range and power of its manifestation in
the Hebraic poem and the Greek plays established it as the informing
element of tragedy. A way had been found of giving the fullest account
of all the forces, within and without, that make for man's
destruction, all that afflicts, mystifies, and bears him down, all that
he knows as Evil. Aristotle is singularly silent about it, but it is
the essence and core of tragedy.
Suffering. But the tragic poets of antiquity had made another
great discovery. They had found a way of presenting and rendering
credible in a single, unified work of art, and hence at one and the
same time, not only all that harasses man and bears him down but much
that ennobles and exalts him. They found in dramatic action the clue
to the rendering of paradox---the paradox of man, the "riddle of
the world." Only man in action, man "one the way,"
begins to reveal the possibilities of his nature for good and bad and
for both at once. And only in the most pressing kinds of action,
action that involves the ultimate risk and pushes him to the very
limits, are the fullest possibilities revealed. It is action
entered into by choice and thus one which affirms man's freedom. And
it leads to suffering---but choice of a certain kind and suffering of a
certain kind. The choice is not that of a clear good or clear evil; it
involves both, in unclear mixture, and presents a dilemma. The
suffering is not so much that of physical ordeal (although this can be
part of it) but of mental or spiritual anguish as the protagonist acts
in the knowledge that what he feels he must do is in some sense
wrong---as he sees himself at once both good and bad, justified yet
unjustified. This kind of suffering presupposes man's ability to
understand the full context and implications of his action, and thus it
is suffering beyond the reach of the immature or brutish, the confirmed
optimist or pessimist, or the merely indifferent. To the
Greek tragedians, as to the Poet of Job, only the strongest natures
could endure this kind of suffering---persisting in their purpose in
spite of doubts, fears, advice of friends, and sense of guilt---and
hence to the Greeks it became the mark of the hero. Only the hero
suffers in this peculiar, ultimate way. The others remain passive,
make their escape, or belatedly or impulsively rally to the hero's
side, like the Sea Nymphs in Prometheus. Even murderesses like
Clytemnestra and Euripides' Medea, whose monstrous crimes make
them anything but heroic in the romantic and moral sense, are dignified
by their capacity for this kind of suffering.
Values. Suffering of this kind does more than prove man's
capacity to endure and to perceive the ambiguity in his own nature and
in the world about him. The Greeks and the Poet of Job saw the
suffering endured by these men of heroic mold to be positive and
creative and to lead to a reordering of old values and the establishing
of new. This is not to say that they recommended it, as in St. Paul's
exhortation to "glory in tribulation";Job never glories in
his tribulations, and no Greek hero embraces his destiny gladly. He is
characteristically stubborn and resentful. Nor did the tragic writers
see these new values as ultimately redemptive. But suffering
under their treatment lost its incoherence and meaninglessness. It
became something more of a sign of the chaos or malignity at the center
of being. They showed that, for all its inevitable, dark, and
destructive side, it could lead under certain circumstances not only to
growth in the standard virtues of courage, loyalty, and love as they
operate on the traditional level, but also to the discovery of a higher
level of being undreamt of by the standard (or choric) mentality. Thus
Job's challenge to Jehovah, for which the Counselors rebuke him, opened
up realms of knowledge---even truth, beauty, and goodness---of which
the Counselors were ignorant. And Oedipus' pride, which makes
the Chorus fearful, led to discoveries, human and divine, which make
their moralizings seem petty indeed. Tragedy, as the Greek plays
defined it and The Book of Job did not, stresses irretrievable loss,
often signified by death. But suffering has been given a structure and
set in a viable relationship: a structure which shows progression
toward value, rather than denial of it, and a relationship between the
inner life of the sufferer and the world of values about him. Thus the
suffering of Job and Oedipus, of Orestes and Antigone and Medea, makes
a difference. If nothing else, those about them see more clearly the
evil of evil and the goodness of good. The issues are sharpened as
never before. Some of the tragedies end more luminously than others.
There is nothing like the note of reconciliation at the end of Medea,
for instance, that there is in the final scenes of the ;Oresteia and
Oedipus. But Medea, by the end of the play, has (like
Clytemnestra) displayed qualities of "a great nature gone
wrong," and the play as a whole asserts values that transcend her
enormities. The emphasis is on "greatness," and because of
her action the dark ways are both more and less benighted than they
were before. Though nothing fully compensates (the plays say) there is
some compensation. There has been suffering and disaster, and there is
more to come. But the shock has to some degree un-shocked us. We are
more "ready."
Such is the approach to the question of existence, and such the
appraisal of the stuff of experience, that constitute the form of
tragedy as the artists of antiquity achieved it. They did not make
permanent laws of tragedy, nor did Aristotle, whose distinction lay in
seeing that a form was there and in cutting beneath theatricality to
give it statement. The Poetics was a powerful influence in directing
the writers of the Renaissance to the plays. They found them to have
well-ordered structures, which, when the time was ripe, they turned to
for suggestive models. And, informing these structures, giving them
their shape and body, was that characteristic vision of evil,
suffering, and value which we have learned to call tragic.
*The Vision of Tragedy: Tragic Themes in Literature from The Book of
Job to O'Neill and Miller. Paragon House, 1990.