Absence of tragedy in Asian drama
In no way can the importance of a conceptual basis for tragedy be better illustrated than by a look at other drama-producing cultures with radically different ideas of the individual, human nature, and destiny. While the cultures of India, China, and Japan have produced significant and highly artistic drama, there is little here to compare in magnitude, intensity, and freedom of form to the tragedies of the West.
In Buddhist teaching, the aim of the individual is to suppress and regulate all those questioning, recalcitrant, rebellious impulses that first impel the Western hero toward his tragic course. The goal of nirvana is the extinction of those impulses, the quieting of the passions, a kind of quietus in which worldly existence ceases. Western tragedy celebrates life, and the tragic hero clings to it: to him, it is never “sweet to die” for his country or for anything else, and the fascination for Western audiences is to follow the hero—as it were, “from the inside”—as he struggles to assert himself and his values against whatever would deny them. In Asian drama there is no such intense focus on the individual. In the Japanese Noh plays, for instance, the hero may be seen in moments of weariness and despair, of anger or confusion, but the mood is lyric, and the structure of the plays is ritualistic, with a great deal of choral intoning, dancing, and stylized action. Although a number of Noh plays can be produced together to fill a day’s performance, the individual plays are very short, hardly the length of a Western one-act play. Noh plays affirm orthodoxy, rather than probing and questioning it, as Western tragedies do.
The drama in India has a long history, but there too the individual is subordinated to the mood of the idyll or romance or epic adventure. Perhaps one reason why the drama of India never developed the tragic orientation of the West is its removal from the people; it has never known the communal involvement of the Greek and Elizabethan theatres. Produced mainly for court audiences, an upper-class elite, it never reflected the sufferings of common (or uncommon) humanity. Only in the mid-20th century did the drama in China embrace the vigour and realism of the common people, but the drama was in the service not of the individual but of a political ideology, which replaced the traditional themes of ancestor worship and filial piety. In all this, the mighty pageant figure—Oedipus, Prometheus, Lear, or Ahab standing for the individual as he alone sees and feels the workings of an unjust universe—is absent.
An example from the Noh plays will illustrate these generalizations. In The Hoka Priests, by Zenchiku Ujinobu (1414–99), a son is confronted with Hamlet’s problem—i.e., that of avenging the death of his father. He is uncertain how to proceed, since his father’s murderer has many bold fellows to stand by him, while he is all alone. He persuades his brother, a priest, to help him, and disguising themselves as priests, they concoct a little plot to engage the murderer in religious conversation. There are a few words of lament—“Oh why, / Why back to the bitter World / Are we borne by our intent?”—and the Chorus sings lyrically about the uncertainties of life. The theme of the conversation is the unreality of the World and the reality of Thought. At an appropriate moment, the brothers cry, “Enough! Why longer hide our plot?” The murderer places his hat on the floor and exits. The brothers mime the killing of the murderer in a stylized attack upon the hat, while the Chorus describes and comments on the action: “So when the hour was come / Did these two brothers / By sudden resolution / Destroy their father’s foe. / For valour and piety are their names remembered / Even in this aftertime” (translated by Arthur Waley, The Nō Plays of Japan, 1921).
Thus, Noh avoids directly involving the audience in the emotions implicit in the events portrayed on the stage. It gives only a slight hint of the spiritual struggle in the heart of the protagonist—a struggle that is always speedily resolved in favour of traditional teaching. In play after play the action does not take place on stage but is reenacted by the ghost of one of the participants. Thus, the events presented are tinged with memory or longing—hardly the primary emotions that surge through and invigorate Western tragedy at its best.
Loss of viability in the West
The absence, even in the West, of a continuing great tragic theatre may be explained by the pantheon of panaceas in modern life. Politics, psychology, social sciences, physical sciences, nationalism, the occult—each offers a context in terms of which one might act out one’s destiny, were it not crowded out by the others. The individual is not tested but harried and not by gods but, too often, by demons. In the dramas of Athens and England, tragedy was born of the impossibility of a clear-cut victory in the human struggle with powers greater than oneself. In the modern drama, the struggle itself seems impossible.
The would-be hero is saved from a meaningful death by being condemned to a meaningless life. This too, however, has its tragic dimension, in its illustration of the power of evil to survive from millennium to millennium in the presence or the absence of the gods.
Tragedy is a means of coming to terms with that evil. To assume that tragedy has lost viability is to forget that this viability was seriously questioned by the first Western philosopher to address himself to the problem. An account of the development of the theory of tragedy will reveal a resourcefulness in critical powers that can help to compensate, or occasionally even supersede, lapsing creative powers.
Richard B. Sewall The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaTheory of tragedy
Classical theories
As the great period of Athenian drama drew to an end at the beginning of the 4th century bce, Athenian philosophers began to analyze its content and formulate its structure. In the thought of Plato (c. 427–347 bce), the history of the criticism of tragedy began with speculation on the role of censorship. To Plato (in the dialogue on the Laws) the state was the noblest work of art, a representation (mimēsis) of the fairest and best life. He feared the tragedians’ command of the expressive resources of language, which might be used to the detriment of worthwhile institutions. He feared, too, the emotive effect of poetry, the Dionysian element that is at the very basis of tragedy. Therefore, he recommended that the tragedians submit their works to the rulers, for approval, without which they could not be performed. It is clear that tragedy, by nature exploratory, critical, independent, could not live under such a regimen.
Plato is answered, in effect and perhaps intentionally, by Aristotle’s Poetics. Aristotle defends the purgative power of tragedy and, in direct contradiction to Plato, makes moral ambiguity the essence of tragedy. The tragic hero must be neither a villain nor a virtuous man but a “character between these two extremes,…a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty [hamartia].” The effect on the audience will be similarly ambiguous. A perfect tragedy, he says, should imitate actions that excite “pity and fear.” He uses Sophocles’ Oedipus the King as a paradigm. Near the beginning of the play, Oedipus asks how his stricken city (the counterpart of Plato’s state) may cleanse itself, and the word he uses for the purifying action is a form of the word catharsis. The concept of catharsis provides Aristotle with his reconciliation with Plato, a means by which to satisfy the claims of both ethics and art. “Tragedy,” says Aristotle, “is an imitation [mimēsis] of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude…through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions.” Ambiguous means may be employed, Aristotle maintains in contrast to Plato, to a virtuous and purifying end.
To establish the basis for a reconciliation between ethical and artistic demands, Aristotle insists that the principal element in the structure of tragedy is not character but plot. Since the erring protagonist is always in at least partial opposition to the state, the importance of tragedy lies not in the character but in the enlightening event. “Most important of all,” Aristotle said, “is the structure of the incidents. For tragedy is an imitation not of men but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality.” Aristotle considered the plot to be the soul of a tragedy, with character in second place. The goal of tragedy is not suffering but the knowledge that issues from it, as the denouement issues from a plot. The most powerful elements of emotional interest in tragedy, according to Aristotle, are reversal of intention or situation (peripeteia) and recognition scenes (anagnōrisis), and each is most effective when it is coincident with the other. In Oedipus, for example, the messenger who brings Oedipus news of his real parentage, intending to allay his fears, brings about a sudden reversal of his fortune, from happiness to misery, by compelling him to recognize that his wife is also his mother.
Later critics found justification for their own predilections in the authority of Greek drama and Aristotle. For example, the Roman poet Horace, in his Ars poetica (Art of Poetry), elaborated the Greek tradition of extensively narrating offstage events into a dictum on decorum forbidding events such as Medea’s butchering of her sons from being performed on stage. And where Aristotle had discussed tragedy as a separate genre, superior to epic poetry, Horace discussed it as a genre with a separate style, again with considerations of decorum foremost. A theme for comedy may not be set forth in verses of tragedy; each style must keep to the place allotted it.
On the basis of this kind of stylistic distinction, the Aeneid, the epic poem of Virgil, Horace’s contemporary, is called a tragedy by the fictional Virgil in Dante’s Divine Comedy, on the grounds that the Aeneid treats only of lofty things. Dante calls his own poem a comedy partly because he includes “low” subjects in it. He makes this distinction in his De vulgari eloquentia (1304–05; “Of Eloquence in the Vulgar”) in which he also declares the subjects fit for the high, tragic style to be salvation, love, and virtue. Despite the presence of these subjects in this poem, he calls it a comedy because his style of language is “careless and humble” and because it is in the vernacular tongue rather than Latin. Dante makes a further distinction:
Comedy…differs from tragedy in its subject matter, in this way, that tragedy in its beginning is admirable and quiet, in its ending or catastrophe fouled and horrible…. From this it is evident why the present work is called a comedy.
Dante’s emphasis on the outcome of the struggle rather than on the nature of the struggle is repeated by Chaucer and for the same reason: their belief in the providential nature of human destiny. Like Dante, he was under the influence of De consolatione philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy), the work of the 6th-century Roman philosopher Boethius that he translated into English. Chaucer considered Fortune to be beyond the influence of the human will. In his Canterbury Tales, he introduces “The Monk’s Tale” by defining tragedy as “a certeyn storie… / of him that stood in greet prosperitee, / And is y-fallen out of heigh degree / Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly.” Again, he calls his Troilus and Criseyde a tragedy because, in the words of Troilus, “all that comth, comth by necessitee… / That forsight of divine purveyaunce / Hath seyn alwey me to forgon Criseyde.”
