The Concept of Tragedy

What is tragedy? What are the philosophic overtones of this concept? Tragedy is a spectacle of great suffering conduced nobly by man, thereby vindicating the essential human nobility and significance. It presents two forms of the sublime – the awe-­inspiring and inexorable power of Fate and the sublimity and valiance of human spirit confronting it. Each triumphs on its own plane. Sometimes Fate crushes man and sometimes man stands up to his moral superiority over the alien power. But of the two forms of the sublime, the sublimity of the human spirit is the more inspiring and reveals itself in utterances like “My suffering was not greater than I could bear.”

Further, tragedy does not consist of mere suffering or dumb endurance. There must be sublimity in the manner of confront­ing Fate. Man must not only endure but must ultimately prevail over his destiny and this consummation can only be achieved if he has faith in himself. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner declared, “I decline to accept the end of man. I believe that he will not merely endure, he will prevail. He is immortal because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion, and sacrifice and endurance.”

The central question of tragedy is the mystery of human suffering and the metaphysics of evil. All tragedians worth the name–from the time of the Greeks up to the moderns – pose this question in the tragic theatre. Aeschylus presents this problem in his play –Prometheus Bound. Prometheus has been condemned by Zeus to suffer for thirty thousand years because he brought salvation and enlightenment to mankind. “Yes, by my own free, will, I made my suffering” says Prometheus. There is a sheer tragic power in the spectacle of the hero crucified to a desolate rock and asserting his valiance over Zeus who symbolises Fate. Prometheus has become an imperishable symbol of humanity in his majesty of martyrdom, suffering in the cause of humanity, and of mankind. Aeschylus’s tragic spectacle reveals the mighty spiritual unity of suffering and knowledge and has a truly evangelical power of reforming and guiding the human spirit.

The Greek faith was a Stoical Fatalism – the belief that all things happen according to a pre-destined arrangement, necessity or inexorable decree. It assigned no place at all to the will and initiative of the individual. No tragedy has such pain, honour and yet a paradoxical sublimity as that of Oedipus who after answering the riddle of the Sphinx and being made King of Thebes discovers that he has killed his father and married his mother. He then blinds himself and becomes an outcaste beggar. Oedipus’s doom is fixed before his birth. Apollo ordains: Oedipus fulfils. In the acceptance of his fall, Oedipus keeps his essential nobility, while realizing the importance of human will and knowledge before the omnipotence of the gods.

The intense awareness of the piteousness and the grandeur of human suffering recalls to us the Primeval Universe when man had to face the harsh forces of nature relentlessly breaking upon human life. Such is the vision animating the epical tragedies of Thomas Hardy. His novel, “Tess of the d’Ubervilles” ends on a graveyard note: “The president of the immortals has ended his sport with Tess.” It is the glory and dignity of Tess to have boldly confronted destiny and endure its agonies, and such sublimity is not detracted by the fact that Fate triumphs ultimately. It is the struggle that matters, not the ultimate outcome of it.

Shakespeare’s tragic conception, for all the seemingly fatalistic overtones (King Lear exdaims, “As flies are to wanton boys, so are we to gods.” Hamlet says, “There’s a divinity that shape’s our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”) visualises man to be the ultimate arbiter of his destiny. It might be contended that Macbeth committed himself to a life of sin under the instigation of the witches with their supernatural powers. Yet it is vital to realize that he is free so far as the moral choice of good and evil are concerned. Romeo exclaims at the tragic turn of his love’s fortune: “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie/which we ascribe to the fated skies.”

We can thus delineate two strands of tragic conception – one the fatalistic view which makes Fate omnipotent and the humanis­tic view which insists upon human free-will. Eugene O’Neill, among the modern tragedians, has given a humanistic interpreta­tion of Fate, while Hemingway’s profound pessimism about the human situation and a stoic sense of tragedy, has characteristically Greek fatalistic overtones. O’Neill admitted the irrationality of man’s subconscious; nevertheless, he insisted on human free-will and judgement. Human unconscious is indeed a primordial reservoir of instinctual passions. But man also has the power of reason and it is entirely in his hands to determine his destiny by the manner he tames his instincts and sublimates them to larger purposes. Such is the philosophic position in Eugene O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra.”

Hemingway’s tragic philosophy was essentially nihilistic. In his short story, “A clean, well-lighted place” there is a parody built on the Spanish word nada, meaning nothingness. “Ournada, who art in nada, nada be thy name.” In “Death in the Afternoon”, he states his tragic creed flatly: “There is no cure foranything in life.” Nevertheless, Hemingway had flashes of the vision of the stoic power of the human spirit. “The Old Man and the Sea” ­is in effect a tragedy, but a tragedy that at last emerges without grief into beauty. Santiago says, “I’ll show what a man can do and what a man endures. Man is not made fordefeat. A man may be defeated, but not destroyed.”

To conclude: In tragedy, our soul rises to that imaginative activity by which we tend to escape from the personal and view human suffering against a larger ground of destiny. George Santayana, writing in his essay, “The Elements and Function of Poetry” comments, “This enlightenment by which tragedy is made sublime is a glimpse into the ultimate destinies of our will.”