THE CONCEPT OF TRAGEDY
S. RAGHUNATH
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. “Our
nada, who art in nada, nada be thy name.” In “Death in the
Afternoon”, he states his tragic creed flatly: “There is no cure for anything
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.
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 background 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.”