Neil Bowen on
Theorists of tragedy - Aristotle, Hegel, Freud, Foucault
The most important things
Aristotle: catharsis (releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions), importance of plot then character then the rest, hamartia (fatal flaw), reversal/recognition/a scene of suffering
Hegel: Conflict between legitimate rights and institutions, not a moral conflict between right and wrong; if the hero yields, they live; if they don’t yield then they die.
Foucault: recuperating the tragic, bringing it back from the critical and moral realm to an emotional, physical, instinctual realm.
Aristotle
Greek philosopher and polymath from the 4th century BC
Taught by Plato
Wrote his ‘Poetics’ on the theory of tragedy, possibly also on comedy
First substantial work of literary criticism
Writing 200 years after the Dionysia began and 150 years after the golden age of Athenian tragedy began
Therefore, writing in retrospect
Another book on comedy?
Trying to prove that poetry and theatre could be useful to society (against Plato)
Epic is ‘descriptive’ while theatre is ‘imitative’, epic tells rather than shows
“Tragedy is an imitation [mimēsis] of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude…through pity and fear affecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions.”
Hamartia: from archery, meaning ‘missing the mark’ = frailty, fatal flaw
Tragic plot: 1. reversal (peripeteia, just when you think something is going okay, it changes), 2. recognition (anagnorisis, they finally recognise something), 3. a scene of suffering
Catharsis experienced by fear and pity should be produced in the spectator.
Discovery must occur within the plot.
Narratives, stories, structures and poetics overlap.
The poet should incorporate complication and dénouement within the story, as well as combine all of the elements of tragedy.
The poet must express thought through the characters' words and actions, while paying close attention to diction and how a character's spoken words express a specific idea.
Aristotle believed that all of these different elements had to be present in order for the tragedy to be well-done
Six elements of Tragedy in order of importance (according to Aristotle)
Plot: “soul of a tragedy”, most important, good to bad or bad to good, used to evoke emotion, surrounding family
Character: “The tragic hero must be neither a villain nor a virtuous man but a “character between these two extremes,…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 [hamartia].”
Good: understandable moral motivation
Propriety: exemplify virtues
Realistic:
Consistent
Note: this is not exactly the same as what WE think as modern audiences. EG., we believe in character growth and change as a good thing, rather than ‘consistence’ being necessary
Thought: a moral/logical idea put forth in the tragedy
In direct contrast to Plato’s idea that theatre is to persuade
Diction: speaking the words in a particular way (although this is apparently focussed on the writing, not the acting)
Spectacle: doesn’t like it much
Song: doesn’t like it much: holds “the chief place among the embellishments”)
Hegel
(1770-1831, ‘most important figure in German idealism’, influenced Nietzsche and Marx)
The essence of tragedy is conflict between legitimate rights and institutions, not a moral conflict between right and wrong, ie. between two goods that are too stubborn, or a hero who is good but too stubborn and an institution that is also good
Eg. Sophocles’ Antigone: conscience vs law
Aristotle’s statement of morally-in-between characters does not fit with Hegel’s idea; he would have them be very, very good and too stubborn about their particular goodness to live.
The norms of ethical life are threatened
The tragic hero: convinced of their rectitude, stubborn and refusing to change themselves or their opinion, violating another’s legitimate right.
Refuses to recognise what they should honour
‘Tragic resolution’ (like Aristotle):
If they yield, the drama does not have to end tragically
If they do not yield then the hero is destroyed by the power they refuse to recognise
Tragic resolution holds a fundamental contrast:
the destruction of one who is noble and excellent
Avoidance of a conflict and loss of essential institutions that hold everything together
The final issue of tragedy is not the misfortune and suffering of the tragic antagonists but rather the satisfaction of spirit arising from “reconciliation.”
Hegel agrees with Nietzsche that the destruction of the hero, whose one-sided action threatens to destroy ethical life, is necessary, and is a healing, not as a fusion with primal being but rather the upholding of the essential rights and institutions of ethical life, the one as counterbalanced by the other.
Foucault: “A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason”
Tragic experience (eg. of madness) has given way to a critical and moral one.
Nietzsche = a return to the tragic dimension of experience
Pronounced shift in our experience of madness—that Other which, in various ways and at various times, has been excluded from thought, analysis, rationality , society, and literary works.
All about recuperating the tragic, bringing it back from the critical and moral realm
The Renaissance idea that the mad were in contact with the mysterious forces of cosmic tragedy or the seventeenth-eighteenth-century view of madness as a renouncing of reason
Renaissance: 15th and 16th centuries
Art: insane people as possessing wisdom (knowledge of the limits of the world),
Literature: insane as people who reveal the distinction between what men are and what men pretend to be.
Insane people as intellectually engaged with reasonable people, because their madness represented the mysterious forces of cosmic tragedy
Objective way of thinking about and describing reason and unreason, vs subjective descriptions of madness from the Middle Ages.
Classical: Age of Reason, 17th century
“the Great Confinement” of insane people in the countries of Europe, the initial management of insane people was to segregate them to the margins of society, and then to physically separate them from society by confinement,
anti-social people as being in moral error, for having freely chosen...
Modern: (end of the 18th century)
medical institutions for confining mentally insane people under the supervision of medical doctors
Both to confine and to cure