"Tragedy is more important than love."

Tragedy is a precious word. We use it to confer dignity and value on violence, catastrophe, agony, and bereavement. ‘Tragedy’ claims that this death is exceptional. Yet these supposedly special fatalities are

in our ears and eyes every day, on the roads, in the skies, out there in foreign lands and right here at home, the latest bad news.

Is the word now bandied around so freely that it has lost all meaning?

Do our conceptions of tragedy have any real connection with those of the ancient Greeks, with whom it originated two and half thousand years ago as the description of a particular kind of drama?

How did tragedy migrate from the Greeks to Shakespeare and Racine, from drama to other art forms, from fiction to real events?

Though its origins are shrouded in obscurity, ‘tragedy’ first emerged into the light in Athens around 533 bc with the actor Thespis (from whom we get ‘thespian’= actor ). It enjoyed a long high noon through the

following century, from which a handful of masterpieces have survived in their entirety, seven attributed to Aeschylus, seven to Sophocles and 19 to Euripides, the great trio of playwrights.

Sophocles alone is said to have composed 130 – and it’s sobering to realize what a small fraction has come down to us. The honour of having their work performed at the Festival of the Great Dionysia was restricted

to three dramatists selected to compete for the prize of ‘best tragic poet’. Each had to supply three tragedies and a satyr play, a grotesquely comic after-piece featuring a chorus of satyrs

(half-man and half-beast), of which only one complete example, the Cyclops of Euripides, has survived. There were other competitions for comedy and dithyramb (a form of choral song).

Special occasions, special people: tragedy portrayed the fate of famous men and women – legends such as Oedipus and Medea – in elevated style and language. The word ‘tragedy’ seems to be derived from two Greek words, for ‘goat’ and ‘song’. Nobody quite knows why. Was the goat once a prize?

Later commentators thought the goat expressed a truth about the fall of great men, who look good to begin with but end up badly. Just like a goat, said Francesco da Buti in 1395, who has ‘a prince-like look in the front (horns and beard) but a rear end that is filthy and naked’, and Giovanni da Serravalle a few years

later, going one better: ‘for a goat has a beautiful aspect, but when it passes it gives off a mighty stink from its tailquarters’.

"We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look."

--Aldous Huxley

"I've never thought of my characters as being sad. On the contrary, they are full of life.

They didn't choose tragedy. Tragedy chose them."

--Juliette Binoche

 

Many people do not see the point to tragedy. Much of American pop culture tends to embrace the comic vision of art, finding tragedy depressing or disturbing. However, in the 5th century B.C.E., the classical Greek writers thought that facing tragedy was a healthy and necessary antidote to human foolishness. It taught humans to know themselves in a way comedy could not. The Greek philosopher Plato, quoting Socrates, admonished his listeners, "Know thyself." Part of that is how we might react in a tragic situation similar to what the protagonist faces.

 

"Tragedy is more important than love. Out of all human events, it is tragedy alone that

brings people out of their own petty desires and into awareness of other humans'

suffering. Tragedy occurs in human lives so that we will learn to reach out and comfort

others"

--C. S. Lewis

Likewise, the Romantic poets and later Victorian viewers valued tragedy as an emotional exercise helping viewers learn compassion. Watching people suffer on stage could help the audience sympathize with

another's pain. The rise of the sentimental novel in the late 1700s and early 1800s reveals a cultural interest in this process, and Romantic poets like Shelley, Byron, and Keats went into ecstasies over Shakespeare. Their poetic works are perhaps a distant cousin to the great tragic dramas of earlier years.

"If a single person dies in front of you, it is a tragedy. If a million people die on the

other side of the earth, it is a statistic."

--Josef Stalin

So what exactly counts as a literary tragedy? What does not? Comedians jokingly refer to tragedy as "the

plays in which everybody dies." But the genre is more complex than that. Many plays, movies, and stories contain death, violence, and unhappy endings. Though depressing, these traits do not make a tragedy per se.

The classical definition comes from Aristotle:

"Tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain

magnitude, in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several

kinds being found in separate parts of the play . . . through pity and fear effecting the

proper purgation of these emotions."

--Aristotle, The Poetics

The word catharsis (translated  as "purgation") implies that tragedy purges, removes, or unclogs negative emotions such as pity and fear that build up within the human spirit. Thus, watching a tragedy might be a sort of psychological Draino. However, the word catharsis can also be translated as "purification," implying that somehow tragedy purifies pity and fear, turns them into something healthy or good. Catharsis can also mean "distillation," the sense that purifying something involves concentrating it into a more potent form. Somehow tragedy takes all these negative emotions people feel and intensifies them. Depending upon how you translate that single word, the purpose and definition of tragedy varies greatly.

 

The first component of tragedy is the tragic hero. In traditional Greek drama, the hero must be somebody of great social importance--a prince or ruler or hero far removed from the everyday Joe-onthe-street. The tragic hero had to be someone basically likeable; he had to have traits that the audience admired. Often, it is this same admirable trait that causes the hero's downfall. For example, we admire Macbeth initially for his ambitious, go-get-'em attitude. His up-and-at-'em philosophy takes Macbeth to glorious heights in the military. However, the same trait causes his ethical and political self-destruction when he plots to kill his liege lord. In the same way, we may admire the passion in Romeo and Juliet's young romance, but that same inability to live apart results in their messy double-suicide. We admire Brutus for his patriotic concern for Rome, but it is that same love of country that leads him into betraying his best friend. At some point, the hero falls from glory. His own hubris, his own desire to reach beyond what is possible, ensures such a fall.

Tragedy also involves a weird mixture of personal choice and fate. To be a tragedy, the hero must have personal choice and agency. If a teenager is shot at random in a drive-by shooting, his death does not count as a literary tragedy because the victim did nothing to bring such misfortune upon himself. He had no choice in the matter. Such a death can only be fashioned into tragedy if the subject makes some kind of personal or moral decision. The decision (always made out of free will) then results in a chain of unstoppable and unforeseen negative events. That sudden shift from upward glory to tragic decline is called the peripetea. After the peripetea, the hero confronts social forces so huge and irresistible the tragedy seems like the hand of fate.

Another important component of tragedy is anagnorisis. For the tragedy to meet the bill, the hero must realize his mistake and its horrible results. If a character never understands what occurred and why, the result may be brute suffering, but that does not constitute tragedy in the literary sense.
  Part of the pain a tragic hero must face is his own realization of personal culpability and error. However, that new insight always comes too late for him to change the coming disaster. By the time Macbeth realizes his approaching downfall, he has become a hollow shell of humanity, devoid of former ethics, and he cannot wash the blood from his hands. By the time Brutus realizes the ultimate results of Caesar's assassination, Julius' adopted heir has already claimed the imperial scepter and roused the mob against the assassins. Anagnorisis refers to the moment of tragic recognition, in which the truth, especially a universal or transcendent Truth-with-a-capital-T, reveals itself to the hero.

"What makes a tragedy so tragic is not that the noble individual falls into ruin, but that

his fall causes so much suffering in others."

--Charmezel Dudt.

Finally, tragedy spirals out behind the hero himself. Not only does he suffer, his choice inflicts misery upon other innocent people, and he knows it.
The error may be King Lear's, but Cordelia is the one hanged. Romeo and Juliet made the choice, but Tibalt and Mercutio also die. Tragedy is when a noble individual's poor choice destroys that admirable individual and also causes suffering, pain, and death to others he holds dear.
The interest lies in how the hero reacts to this knowledge. How does he respond to the no-win situation resulting from his earlier choices? Macbeth responds with nearly psychotic fatalism. Othello with grieving tears. Hamlet with long overdue action.