In Our Time - Tragedy

Episode Date: December 2, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of the ancient genre of tragedy and examines whether we have a psychological need for it, either as catharsis or Schadenfreude. You could be forgiven for thinking that in our century, of all centuries, the notion of the death of a tragedy would be comical. But there is a view that in its broad theatrical sense, tragedy, as defined by Aristotle and accepted to the time of Racine, has indeed lost its place and power as a form. Aristotle in his poetics held that tragedy figured men and women, often greater than ourselves, heroic, whose fall excited sensations of pity and fear which purged the emotions in the spectator, provoking a catharsis. And Chaucer defined it as a story “of hym that stood in greet prosperitee/And is yfallen from heigh degree/Into myserie, and endeth wretchedly”. Tragedy has been redefined many times and in many ages, but does it have a place in our own time? Or is the genre “dead for a ducat”. Not in life - the twentieth century is a monument to tragedy - but in art.With Professor George Steiner, critic, Extraordinary Fellow, Churchill College, Cambridge and author of The Death of Tragedy; Professor Catherine Belsey, Chair of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Cardiff and author of The Subject of Tragedy.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Aristotle said it could help us. It purged our emotions. It was cathartic. Chaucer defined it as a story of him that stood in great prosperity

and is it fallen from high degree into misery and endeth wretchedly. Tragedy has been redefined many times and in many ages, but does it have a place in our own time, or is the genre dead for a docket? Not in life, the 20th century is a monument of tragedy, but in art. With me to discuss the prospect for tragedy, our author and critic Professor George Steiner,

Extraordinary Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, who has written much on tragedy, including his major work on the subject, The Death of Tragedy. I'm also joined by Professor Catherine Balsey, who's chairman of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory in the University of Cardiff, and the author of the subject of tragedy.

George Steiner, for Aristotle, tragedy embodied the notion of catharsis. Can you outline for us what Aristotle said in his poetics about tragedy and why it was so definingly important in Western culture for so long? Scholars have long quarreled and sometimes very loudly about just what that rather mysterious ancient Greek word means. Roughly, it seems to say, there is a paradox. You go, you pay your seat in the theatre,

you volunteer to be harrowed. Something like, why do you volunteer to be harrowed? And secondly, I think even more difficult, why do you keep going back to be harrowed again, often by the same tragic play? And he said, when it works, you leave with your emotions, certainly not scoured away.

no, actively richer and perhaps a little more in balance, that in lives, which like for all of us, no personal tragedy, social tragedy, political tragedy, you're a little better equipped to take a balanced, a sane view. And that's something like that, perhaps, is meant by cassis. It has been the most influential, as you say, single definition. Whether it's true is another. question. Do you agree with George Stein as a rather tentative appraisal of Aristotle,

or do you think you can come in harder and think that catharsis really means something that people would generally now accept as a real purge of emotion? I think George does justice, of course, to Aristotle, but I'm interested in the point he makes about the voluntariness of our attendance at tragedy. We like it. People pay good money to go and see tragedies. and the question is why, and I'm not absolutely certain, and I'm not certain that George is certain, that sanity is the reason why we do that,

that the fact that it does us good is the reason why we do that. I think I'd be inclined to say that it's something to do with the treatment. It's the way they tell them in tragedies that makes us go back for more. In other words, as Tolstoy says, if you reduce King Lear to its story, it's about a silly old man locked out on a windy night. But if you look at the way the story is told, the huge images in which Lear defines his pain, then I think you begin to see why it is that we pay to sit in the stalls not just once but again and again.

Well, that's a very interesting distinction. Would you hold of that, George Stani, because there was an idea that starting two and a half thousand years ago, there is a form called tragedy. It follows various rules. There are unities of place and time and various things happen. there are heroes who fall, there is a tragic flaw, and so on. What Catherine is saying is this is in the writing, not in the structure and the plotting.

The Aristotelian idea, that perspective, sorry, not perspective, that idea really drove through. So can you talk a little bit more about why was its staying power so tenacious? It's a very mysterious question, because we know the story, yet we're unutterably surprised. every time it happens. And could I invoke the name of Freud, who really worried about this one a great deal,

and then watched very young children playing, throwing away their most beloved toy, and pulling it back, throwing it away again. And he said, maybe tragedy is somewhat like that. We test our own ability to live with the grief. and the emotion, not to master it in any cheap way, but to live with it and to draw from it a certain positive, perhaps strengths is the wrong word, a kind of positive modesty or a kind of creative humility in front of human suffering and sadness. And we come back again and again because something is going on that is both very intimate and immensely public. We share with others the shock and the experience. And I just want to throw on the

table one little thought experiment. Why is it that if one in a million times they cheated, as a great moment in the play Oedipus, which was Aristotle's model, where the queen, knowing that there is unspeakable suffering ahead, says enough, stop it, stop asking these questions they will lead to absolute hell. as a producer, told us that right. It is going to say, you're quite right. We're going to stop here and go to lunch. Now, why would we be so unutterably disappointed? Almost to the point of nausea. In the dark, sometimes you miss the step at the end of a staircase, and you hit your foot on the wrong, and it's not fright, it's kind of nausea. It comes. Or if Hamlet said, look, let's avoid this sword play, somebody's going to get hurt. I want to be. we'd be so bereft. Now that's a very curious fact. You're talking about, sorry.

Sorry, so that adds to the question of our coming back, and Catherine says, of our loving something very deeply in a form that is so powerfully the same. Can I just take up one strand there, before I come back to something else about Greek treacherously, George has used images there which turn the business or the fact of seeing and being at a play, let's use that for the moment,

into a physical reaction. He used the word nausea and catharsis. We talk about purging, and you've talked about sanity as well. Is there any proof, as a matter of fact, are there any medical, almost, proofs? When you come out of the Oristaya, you have had a catharsis. Has anybody slapped bits and bobs all over you and sort of tested it in your...

Not as far as... Not that I know of, there wouldn't it be interesting if they did. But I think most people would share that feeling of excitement, of living at a sort of a higher pitch as you come out of a really good play. My feeling would be that it is something still to do with our existence in language. We are linguistic animals. We are talking animals. And what you see in Kinglia or indeed a nidipus is language strength.

to its limits to accommodate something which seems to be outside language, which seems to be beyond what you could talk about. I want to come back to George's Freud instance, where the little boy throws away the cotton reel and pulls it back. And how Freud understands that moment is that the child is symbolising the unbearable absences of his mother. His mother has to go away, of course, and the child hates it, but begins to be able to master it,

first of all, by this reenacting of the event at another level with the cotton reel. But second, in that the child now begins to talk. And so as it throws away the cotton reel, it says Fort, GOM. And then as it pulls it back, it says, duh, here. And an elementary language is beginning to be within its purview. This is a child of 18 months. and that pleasure in language might well be something that's sustained into our excitement about Oedipus. You say wouldn't it be a loss if we didn't get the final stage of his recognition?

And it seems to me that it's the scale of that shame that Oedipus experiences in the words he speaks there that are exciting for us. Can I just move it on slightly, George here? You've made a distinction which I thought was fascinating. a difference between Greek tragedy and the Judeo-Christian form, let us say, Old Testament stories just put down. I'd like to take up a language because language is quite difficult, is translated from the Greek, we don't know what we are, although Ted Hughes is new translations of there are Stey and Alsestis.

I think that is quite, well, I haven't got time to go down that road. But this distinction between the Greek tragedy, which is where, and why you think that that sort of tragedy is of a different sort from Judeo-Christian and why art in a sense isn't tragedy. Can you just explain that? Judeo-Christian vision of the world must contain within it hope, that is to say, either of resurrection, of redemption, of forgiveness, taking many forms.

It is, and Dante insists on this, a comedia, a comedy not in any laugh sense, but it ends well. Tragedy ends badly and is a very special, peculiar form. In about the 7th century BC, the Greeks we don't know who said, the best thing is not to be born. After that, to die very young, the worst is to live long. Oh, Leah will echo this. And this midnight view that we are somehow guests on an earth that is hostile or enemies of the gods or the objects of vengeance. If Job, the actual old archaic Joe probably stopped in the dialogue with God.

It was unbearable. So he tack on that he will get recompense, compensation, new children, new herds, new wealths. You can't really have, I think, a great Christian tragedy. And people have wrestled with this since Renaissance. The Greeks saw damnation as in life, in the world. and that's a pretty bleak doctrine. Yes, you're quoting you,

that great book of yours, you say the forces which shape or destroy our lives lie outside the governance of reason or justice. The Homeric warrior knows that he can neither comprehend nor master the workings of destiny. The burning of choice finally because it's brought about by the fierce sport of human hatreds and the wanton, mysterious choice of destiny.

And just one final question, which I think is a terrific sentence, is their Antigone and Edipus stride to their fierce disasters in the grip of truths more intense than knowledge. So we're talking about a world without redemption, without hope, without purpose, without... We're talking of the world which one of the very few, I may be wrong, but one of the very few towering tragic sensibilities,

which is Samuel Beckett, sums up in a single unbearable sentence, he doesn't exist, comma, the bastard. A sentence which has the whole structure tragedy. God doesn't exist, if he doesn't exist, it's a hideous bastard. If he does exist, he makes our lives hell. Beckett can do this, and the Greeks would have understood this sentence perfectly. Now, do you see this distinction?

What do you draw from it, Catherine? I absolutely go along with the idea that in a Judeo-Christian cosmos, there's justice. And that possibly that the whole Christian story or the whole Judaic story come to that is not in its essence tragic. But I'm not sure there can't be Christian tragedy. I would think, for example, of Faustus who makes the wrong choice. It seems to me that in that play, repentance is an available option for Faustus all the way through. He simply can't take it. He personally simply can't take it.

But God is just, it's fastest who can't choose the right option. Isn't it, don't we come up against Shakespeare here in the sense of he must come out of the Judeo-Christian tradition, as well as others, he drew a great deal in. But we look at Othello, for instance, all you mentioned Leah, so let's look at Othello for a change. Would you describe that as a tragedy, and if so, what basis for a tragedy compared with Greek tragedy? I would have thought again that, Othello makes the wrong choice, catastrophically, as wrong as it could be. But that's a very simple pinhead on which to base the whole idea of tragedy.

A fellow makes the wrong choice equals tragedy. No. Equals a bit of comedy sometimes. I wouldn't. I wouldn't. My position, as I wanted to say from the beginning, is that tragedy consists not in the story. I wouldn't want to say that you can define it by a content,

because the content, it seems to me, varies from one tragedy to another and from one epoch to another. It is a question. in my view of the treatment of the story. It's the way you tell it that makes it tragic. So what's grand about Faustus is particularly that final speech, see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament, or what's grand about Othello is his recognition of the appalling thing he's done.

And again, he thinks of the last judgment. And Desdemona, like a pearl, lost to him forever. And that seems to me to be, it's that moment at which the last. language does justice to the pain that we feel the tragedy, not a question of a content or an attitude to the world. Well, we could come back to that because you might be, I know you're interested in films and tragedy, and we're not talking so much about language there. We're talking about something like, George, what about this difference between, how does

Shakespeare affect your view or define your view of the distinction between Greek tragedy and the Judeo-Christian tragedy? I'm not trying to be clever. Please believe me. I do not believe Shakespeare is it... I do not believe Shakespeare is a tragedian in any pure sense. I believe Dr. Johnson was totally right. In fact, to disagree with Dr. Johnson is a bad idea at any hour of the day

when he said comedy was natural to Shakespeare tragedy rather forced. What I would put it slightly differently, it is tragic comedy. Somebody is having a birthday party. in the house when somebody else is being murdered. Shakespeare is the totality of life. He will not accept a single note, a monocorn. We don't see it in most productions. There is a fool in Othello.

Even good scholars deny this. There's a fool who a series of very humorous, rather boredy exchanges with this to mona. He's usually cut out. There is a sense of the plenitude of life, with the exception of one fragmentary, enormous play to me, Time and of Asson's, and Time and of Asson's is the only time in the whole of Shakespeare

that we get the line, let language end. Now, it's the only time Shakespeare invokes the possibility of an end of language, of which he's the supreme master. So Shakespeare says to you, look, this Greek view of the French, Great Christ, Racine, the universe is one black hole of the, this moment? He answers, no. It never is. But is it never? I mean, at the end of Lear, the fool is dead,

and my poor fool dead. Lear, Cordelia, goneril, Regan, Albany, away we go. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. And the whole play goes to, I'm fascinated by the distinction. Just because the fool made a few,

not a few, that's silly, just because the fuel acted as the light to the shadow of Lear in the first half of the play, It doesn't actually seem to me to make it less of a tragedy. If that isn't a tragedy, then what are we talking about? No, it's a very complex, mixed form like a great novel, like a great Dostoevsky or Tolstoy novel. There is a pulse of life will beat at the end.

Fortin Brass will be a much better ruler than Hamlet would have been. McBess's successors will restore Scotland to fortune. Cassio will be an excellent governor of Cyprus, and that is brought home to us. Yes, Lear and Tyman, which belong very closely together, may be as close as he gets to that unforgiving, monotone, monotone in an almost technical sense, so one note of horror which fills a Greek play. Except Edgar's left still, isn't he, Lear?

Yes, yes. And life probably is very much, as Shakespeare tells us, it is, and it is very rarely as absolute tragedians say it is. So would you see the death of tragedy in the sense that George Stein is talking about it? I think I wouldn't probably share George's premises. I think what he's saying is extraordinarily interesting characteristically, but I think it also indicates how relative this classification is. In other words, there is no continuing timeless essence of something

tragic. It seems to me there's simply our use of the word, our use of the classification, if we choose to use it, in order to say something interesting. And I think George is saying something very interesting about a form of art which depicts a nihilistic universe. And he wants to call that tragic. And I think that I'm more interested in other questions and therefore perhaps not wanting to go as far down that road as George does. If you take that definition, then I think you end, to answer your question, with your 20th century version as probably Beckett,

and Beckett's last place, particularly. There is a question whether we usefully call Beckett tragic at all. Bleak? Bleak, certainly, but tragic, I'm not sure. I know of my point. Waiting for God, oh, Beckett, himself. called a comedy, of course, and it is extraordinarily funny. It certainly isn't pure in the way that George is describing.

But I would find my echoes of what I think of as a continuing line of dissent, whether we need to classify it as tragedy or not, from, say, Marlowe and Shakespeare, I would find that line of dissent picked up in cinema now rather than on the stage, I think. Can you develop that bit? Because there's a question I want to come to George Ongch. Take us the last phase of this discussion. Let's develop the cinema. You find that tragedy is more than possible in cinema.

You find it there in certain films. Yes. I would think of something like the Third Man, for example, where now we have to move from a stage which is primarily verbal to a medium, a form which is primarily verbal. visual and so I would see the grandeur in the imagery, the film imagery there. But I'm thinking that the third man is not really about the individual characters in the film. It's about the ruins of civilization after the war. It's set, you remember, in Vienna. And what we see

endlessly is the rubble of one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. And the story ends in the sewers, in Vienna's own underworld. And it's set in the interworld. And it's set in the international sector of Vienna. It doesn't quite end up it, it doesn't matter. It doesn't quite never. I'm being pedantic. Good enough. It's set in the international section, and what I think you have a sense of there

is a whole civilization having collapsed, being itself in ruins. And that seems to me to pick up on the sort of end of King Lear, as you were describing it, where again you have a whole civilization having collapsed. And if Edgar survives, it's only to say, we that are young, shall never. see so much, not live so long.

But Hollis advised at the end of the third man, too, doesn't he walks back away from DeGrive, and he goes off to write his popular novels. Can I bring this in that, in another sense, bringing the outside world to Bowen tragedy? You make a very good point. I have to be compressive, but it's a do with... When masses of people read newspapers, took newspapers as it were into the theatre, then the whole game changed. And it seems to me that.

what you're saying there as a metaphor for the world crashing in on everybody. We know so much. We who know so much. We know Eurasia, Yugoslav. We know any superficially, but we know they're there happening, East Tim. And when we go into the theatre, therefore, we go with all that in our heads, and what's the match going on there? What's the game between us and this presence of an artificia in front of us? Now, it seems to me that that is something that you, it's pivotal to your argument. The English language, one wonderfully distinguishes between knowingness and knowledge. Now, perhaps we come in full of knowingness with the newspaper in our pocket,

which was Goethe's own image saying, now everything's going to change. How can I reach that audience? But knowledge possibly comes from intense concentration and a certain simplification tragedy does simplify in a very cruel sense and helps us come back to certain fixities, the desolation of the death of a child, the useless. One case, we can barely take in the press headline about the massacres of hundreds, we can try and grapple with the single case, as a tragedy does. And the movies can bring that almost unbearably intense and close

by engaging our visual responses, our whole body. responses, sometimes even more intensely than in the traditional theatre. But the forms are melding. We're entering a period of such hybrid forms. We don't have time. We'd have to talk about modern opera, which has much of the greatest. One cannot speak about modern tragedy without Britain's Peter Grimes. I would argue is absolutely crucial to an argument.

The end of Peter Grimes, the sense of loss, that's with a child, the boat out at sea, belongs to any discussion, great tragedy. And the music tells us things, which, in your case, quite rightly, the language has in more traditional forms. And it, I think, helps us enormously be serious. It's a silly phrase, but be serious about ourselves. But remember, the underlying truth is very hard to take. Near the end of his life, young friend asks Kafka angrily.

Kafka stories, is there then no hope? And he answers, there is abundance of hope, but none for us. And that is also what Yeats says at the end of purgatory at last play, which I think is one of the few great modern tragedies, though so brief as to ask more questions and it answers. That's a hell of a view of existence. Yes, it is. Well, you can find it again and again in these new huge translations of the Orestahe.

Actually, there's another dimension that comes in, doesn't it, because of the way that knowledge grows now behind Peter Grimes. When I watch Peter Grimes now, I know quite a bit as one's learned about the story behind the story it came from, which is much worse, as it were, than the story that Britain wants to tell. And so there's a sort of confusion of messages coming there. Can we just come back to the notion of the cinema,

which one of the things you're saying seems to me, Catherine, is that the cinema can bring in the outside world, can bring it into bear because of the range of images, simply because when you shoot Orson Wells, famously on top of the big wheel, which we've now transferred to South Bank of London, and looking down, then you not only get those words,

but you get a view in double sense of his view of humanity. Do you think it's because of that, that it can maybe address itself to the sort of tragedies that matter to us more than any other medium at the moment? I think cinema, is there. The thing that the 20th century will be remembered for, it's the form that seems to me to be the one we've chosen above all

as the place where we find images that, in some mysterious ways, satisfy us. It's something to do, I think, with the scale. If you have a 70-foot image of this thing, it tends to have an impact. My disappointment is in the video generation, I just feel they don't know what they're missing. The small domestic version of Scorsese or Tarantino seems to me to be a pitiful thing by comparison with the cinema version.

So you're almost talking about the size gives it the heroic stature. Not inevitably, of course. I'm just sort of playing around here as we come to the end. But the idea of the hero, the Greek, the heroic idea has taken a great bashing this. And yet that seemed to at one stage to be central to the notion of tragedy. We still are very embarrassed at the moment about heroes. Something makes us cringe at the notion, but deep inside us, I think we have them.

And the key surely is there is every year, the great Shakespearean and often the Greek tragedies, the Antigone on now, continue to bring in a large and fascinated audience so that over two and a half, thousand years, something has absolutely held. And what do you think that has held, Catherine Melsley, what do you think has held for two and a half thousand years? I'm not sure I'd put it in those terms, unless it is the heroic.

That would be the thing that I'd single out as a constant. And I think then of perhaps something like Citizen Kane, where if you look at the character, there isn't much to offer. But if you look at the images where the camera points upwards at Orson Wells, so you see him against the ceiling. He's huge. Thank you very much, George Steiner, and Catherine Belze, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.