Tragedy
1.
Our fear of failing at various tasks would likely be much less were it not for our awareness of how harshly failure tends to be viewed and interpreted by others. Fear of the material consequences of failure is thus compounded by fear of the unsympathetic attitude of the world towards those who have failed, exemplified by its haunting proclivity to refer to them as “losers”—a word callously signifying both that they have lost and that they have, at the same time, forfeited any right to sympathy for losing.
So unforgiving is the tone in which the majority of ruined lives are discussed, indeed, that if the protagonists of many works of art— among them Oedipus, Antigone, Lear, Othello, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler and Tess—had had their fates chewed over by a cabal of colleagues or old school acquaintances, they almost certainly would not have emerged well from the process. They might have fared even worse if the press had got hold of them:
Othello:
Love-Crazed Immigrant Kills
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Senator’s Daughter
Oedipus the King:
Royal in Incest Shocker
Madame Bovary:
Shopaholic Adulteress Swallows
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Arsenic after Credit Fraud
If something about these headlines seems incongruous, it may be because we are used to thinking of the subjects to which they refer as being inherently complex and naturally deserving of a solemn and respectful attitude, rather than the prurient and damning one that newspapers all but automatically take vis-à-vis their victims. But in truth, nothing about these figures makes them inevitable objects of concern or respect. That the legendary failed characters of art seem so noble to us has little to do with their individual qualities per se and almost everything to do with how we have been taught to consider them by their creators and chroniclers.
There is one art form in particular that has, since its inception, dedicated itself to recounting stories of great failure without recourse to mockery or judgement. While not absolving its subjects of responsibility for their actions, it has nonetheless succeeded in offering and eliciting for those involved in catastrophes—disgraced statesmen, murderers, the bankrupt, emotional compulsives—a level of sympathy owed, but rarely extended, to every human.
2.
At its inception, in the theatres of ancient Greece in the sixth century B.C., tragic drama followed a hero—usually someone highborn, a king or a famous warrior—from prosperity and acclaim to ruin and shame, a downfall always brought on by some error of his own. The telling of the story—the way it was told—was intended to leave audiences at once hesitant to condemn the protagonist for what had befallen him and humbled by the realisation of how easily they might be ruined if ever they found themselves in a similar situation.
If the newspaper, with its lexicon of perverts and weirdos, failures and losers, lies at one end of the spectrum of understanding, then tragedy lies at the other. In its ambition to build bridges between the guilty and the apparently blameless, in its challenging of ordinary conceptions of responsibility, it stands as the most psychologically sophisticated, most respectful account of how a human being may be dishonoured without at the same time losing his or her right to be heard.
3.
In his Poetics (circa 350 B.C.), Aristotle attempted to define the core constituents of an effective tragedy. There needed to be one central character, he postulated; the action had to unfold in a relatively compressed length of time; and, unsurprisingly, “the change in the hero’s fortunes” must be “not from misery to happiness” but, on the contrary, “from happiness to misery.”
There were two additional, more telling requirements. A tragic hero had to be someone who was neither especially good nor especially bad, an everyday, regular kind of human being at the ethical level, someone to whom the audience could easily relate, whose character combined a range of good qualities with one or more common defects—for example, excessive pride or anger or impulsiveness. And finally, this figure must make a spectacular mistake, not out of any profoundly evil motive, but rather due to what Aristotle termed in Greek a hamartia (an “error in judgement”), a temporary lapse, or a factual or emotional slip. And from this would flow the most terrible peripeteia, or “reversal of fortune,” over the course of which the hero would lose everything he held dear before at last almost certainly paying for his blunder with his life.
Pity for the hero, and fear for oneself based on an identification with him, would be the natural emotional outcome of following such a tale. The tragic work would educate us to acquire modesty about our capacity to avoid disaster and at the same time guide us to feel sympathy for those who had met with it. We were to leave the theatre disinclined ever again to adopt an easy, superior tone towards the fallen and the failed.
Aristotle’s great insight was that the degree of sympathy we will feel regarding another’s fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake. How could sane, normal people do such things, we may wonder upon hearing of real-life lapsers who have married rashly, slept with a member of their own family, murdered their lover in a jealous frenzy, lied to their employer, stolen money or allowed an avaricious streak to ruin their career. Confident that cast-iron walls separate our nature and situation from theirs, comfortable in the well-broken-in saddle of our high horse, we have exchanged our capacity to be tolerant for detachment and derision.
It is the tragedian’s task, then, to force us to confront an almost unbearable truth: every folly or myopia of which any human being in history has been guilty may be traced back to some aspect of our collective nature. Because we each bear within ourselves the whole of the human condition, in its worst and best aspects, any one of us might be capable of doing anything at all, or nothing, under the right—or rather the most horribly wrong—conditions. Once theatregoers have experienced this truism, they may willingly dismount from their high horses and feel their powers of sympathy and humility return, enhanced. They may accept how readily their own lives might be shattered if certain of their more regrettable character traits, which have until now invited no serious trouble, were one day to coincide with a situation that allowed them unlimited and catastrophic dominion, leaving these heretofore innocents no less shamed and wretched than the unfortunate soul suffering beneath the headline “Royal in Incest Shocker.”
4.
The play that most perfectly accorded with Aristotle’s conception of the tragic art form was Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, first performed in Athens at the Festival of Dionysus in the spring of 430 B.C.
Sophocles’ Oedipus, the king of Thebes, is worshipped by his people for his benevolent rule and for the wisdom he displayed many years before in outwitting the Sphinx and driving it from the city— which exploit earned him his throne. For all his good qualities, however, the king is not flawless: most notably, he is impetuous and prone to rage. Long ago, in fact, during one particularly violent outburst on the road to Thebes, he killed an obstinate old man who refused to get out of his way. That incident was largely obscured, though, by subsequent events, as Oedipus’s victory over the Sphinx was followed by a period of prosperity and security for the city. During this time, Oedipus also married the beautiful Jocasta, widow of his predecessor, King Laius, who had died under unexplained circumstances while fighting with a young man just outside Thebes.
As the play opens, a new disaster no less menacing than the Sphinx has descended upon the city: a peculiar plague for which no cure can be found is ravaging the population. Desperate, the people turn to the royal family for help. Oedipus’s brother-in-law, Creon, is dispatched to seek answers from the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, who gnomically explains that Thebes is being forced to pay the price for an unclean thing within its walls. Creon and others at court decide this must be an allusion to the unsolved murder of the previous monarch. Oedipus agrees and vows that he personally will see to
it that the killer is found and mercilessly punished.
Jocasta’s face darkens as she hears all this. As if for the first time, she remembers another prophecy from long ago, when King Laius was warned that he would perish by his son’s hand. To avert that outcome, Laius had ordered that the baby boy Jocasta later bore him be taken to a mountainside and left there to die.
But of course, there was no getting around fate: the shepherd charged with the task took pity on the infant and instead, in secret, gave him to the king of Corinth to raise as his own. When this boy reached maturity, yet another oracle revealed to the Corinthian king and queen that he would someday kill his father and marry his mother. Determined to avoid such crimes, Oedipus left his adoptive home and travelled the length of Greece, ending up … on the road leading into Thebes.
Jocasta, the first to comprehend what has happened, retires to her rooms in the royal palace and hangs herself. Oedipus finds her swinging from the rafters, cuts down her body and pierces his own eyes with the brooch from her dress. He embraces his two daughters, Ismene and Antigone, who are yet too young to understand the nightmare that is their parents’ situation, and then sends himself into exile, to wander the earth in shame until his death.
5.
We might, here, offer the rejoinder that patricide and incest are judgement errors of a sort that not many of us are liable to make. But the extraordinary dimensions of Oedipus’s hamartia do not detract from the more universal features of the play. Rather, the story moves us insofar as it reflects shocking aspects of everyman’s character and condition: the way apparently small missteps can result in the gravest of consequences; the blindness we often suffer with regard to the effects of our actions; our fatuous tendency to presume that we are in conscious command of our destiny; the speed and finality with which everything we cherish may be lost to us; and the mysterious and unvanquishable forces—for Sophocles, “fate”—against which our weak powers of reason and foresight are pitted. Oedipus is by no means without fault: he hubristically believes himself to have escaped the oracles’ prophecies and lazily accedes to his subjects’ high opinion of him. His pride and hot temper cause him to pick a fight with King Laius, and his emotional cowardice thereafter prevents him from linking the murder to the earlier prophecies. And his self-righteousness permits him to ignore the crime for many years and then to chide Creon for hinting at his guilt.
Ye t even if Oedipus bears responsibility for his own fate, the tragic art form renders any easy condemnation impossible. It apportions blame to him without denying him sympathy. As Aristotle imagined, the audience must leave the theatre appalled yet compassionate, haunted by the universal implications of the concluding message of the chorus:
People of Thebes, my countrymen, look on Oedipus.
He solved the famous riddle with his brilliance,
He rose to power, a man beyond all power.
Who could behold his greatness without envy?
Now what a black sea of terror has overwhelmed him.
Now as we keep our watch and wait the final day,
Count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.
6.
If a tragic work allows us to feel a much greater degree of sympathy for others’ failings than we ordinarily might, it is principally because the form itself seeks to plumb the origins of failure. To know more is, in this context, necessarily to understand and forgive more. Tragedy leads us artfully through the minuscule, often innocent acts that connect heroes’ and heroines’ prosperity to their downfall, disclosing along the way the perverse relationships between intentions and consequences. Thus well informed, we are unlikely to maintain for long the indifferent or vengeful tone we might have clung to had we merely read the bare bones of the very same stories of failure in the popular press.
In the summer of 1848, a terse item appeared in many newspapers across Normandy. A twenty-seven-year-old woman named Delphine Delamare, née Couturier, of Ry, a small town not far from Rouen, had tired of the routines of marriage and, after running up huge debts on extravagant purchases of clothing and household goods, had embarked on an affair. Under emotional and financial pressure, she had at last taken her own life by swallowing arsenic. Madame Delamare had left behind a young daughter and a distraught husband, Eugène, who had once studied medicine in Rouen. In his post as a health officer in Ry, the papers noted, Delamare was loved by his patients and respected by the community.
Among those who saw this item was a twenty-seven-year-old aspiring novelist named Gustave Flaubert. The story of Madame Delamare would stay with him, becoming something of an obsession (it even followed him on a journey around Egypt and Palestine) until, in September 1851, he settled down to work on it. Madame Bovary would be published in Paris six years later.
One of the many things that happened when Madame Delamare, the adulteress from Ry, turned into Madame Bovary, the adulteress from Yonville, was that her life began to expand beyond the dimensions of a black-and-white morality tale. As a newspaper story, the case of Delphine Delamare had been seized upon by conservative provincial commentators as an example of the declining respect for marriage among the young, of the increasing commercialisation of society and of the loss of religious values. But for Flaubert, art was the very antithesis of crass moralism. It was a realm in which human motives and behaviour could for once be explored in real depth, with a sensitivity that would make a mockery of any desire on the part of the reader to construe saints or sinners. Flaubert’s audience would hear of Emma’s naive ideas about love, but they would also learn where these had come from: they would follow her back to her childhood, read over her shoulder at the convent, sit with her and her father through long summer afternoons in their kitchen in Tostes, as the squeals and clucks of pigs and chickens drifted in from the yard. They would watch as she and Charles stumbled into an ill-matched marriage, and then witness Charles’s seduction by his own loneliness and a young woman’s physical charms. They would feel Emma’s need to escape her cloistered life, ironically fuelled by her lack of experience with men outside thirdrate romantic literature. Readers would be able to—would have to—sympathise equally with Charles’s complaints about Emma and with Emma’s about Charles. Flaubert seemed to take an almost deliberate pleasure in everywhere unsettling his readers’ inclination to find comfortable answers: no sooner had he presented Emma in a positive light, for example, than he would undercut her with a mordant remark. And then, just as readers were losing patience with her, just as they began to think her nothing more than a selfish hedonist, he would draw them back to her, tell them something about her inner life that would make them cry. By the time she lost her status in her community, crammed arsenic into her mouth and lay down in her bedroom to await her death, few who knew her history would be disposed to judge her.
We set down Flaubert’s novel feeling a mixture of fear and sad-ness—at how we are all made to live before we can even begin to know how, at how limited is our understanding of ourselves and others, at how great and catastrophic are the consequences of our actions, and how often pitiless and uncompromising the responses of upstanding members of the community when we err.
7.
As members of the audience of any tragic work, whether dramatic or literary, we are as far as it is possible to get from the spirit of the headline Shopaholic Adulteress Swallows Arsenic, insofar as the genre of tragedy itself will have inspired us to abandon ordinary life’s simplified perspective on failure and defeat, and rendered us infinitely more generous towards the foolishness and transgressions endemic to human nature.
A world in which a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.
Comedy
1.
The summer of 1831 found King Louis-Philippe of France in a confident mood. The political and economic chaos of the July Revolution, which had brought him to power the year before, was gradually giving wa
y to prosperity and order. He had in place a competent team of officials led by his prime minister, Casimir Périer, and on tours around the northern and eastern parts of his realm had been given a hero’s welcome by the provincial middle classes. He lived in splendour in the Palais-Royal in Paris; attended weekly banquets in his honour; loved eating (especially foie gras and game) and had a vast personal fortune and a loving wife and children.
But there was one cloud on Louis-Philippe’s otherwise sunny horizon: in late 1830, an unknown twenty-eight-year-old artist by the name of Charles Philipon had launched a satirical magazine, La Caricature, in which he now graphically transformed the head of the king (whom he also accused of corruption and incompetence on a grand scale) into a pear. Unflattering as Philipon’s cartoons were, depicting Louis-Philippe with swollen cheeks and a bulbous forehead, they carried an additional, implied disparagement: the French word poire, meaning not only “pear” but “fathead” or “mug,” neatly conveyed a less-than-respectful sentiment regarding the monarch’s administrative abilities.
Enraged by the dig, Louis-Philippe instructed his agents to stop production of the magazine and to buy up all unsold copies from Parisian kiosks. When these measures failed to deter Philipon, prosecutors in November 1831 charged him with having “caused offence to the person of the king,” and summoned him to appear in court. Speaking before a packed chamber, the caricaturist sardonically thanked the government for arresting such a dangerous man as himself, but then he suggested that the prosecutors had been negligent in their pursuit of the king’s detractors. They should make it their priority, he insisted, to go after anything in the shape of a pear; indeed, even pears themselves should be locked up. There were thousands of them on trees all over France, and every one a criminal fit for incarceration. The court was not amused. Philipon was sentenced to six months in prison, and when he dared to repeat the pear joke in a new magazine, Le Charivari, the following year, he was sent straight back to jail. In all, he spent two years behind bars for drawing the monarch as a piece of fruit.
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