Aristotle and the Arc of Tragedy by Leon Golden

Author:Leon Golden [Golden, Leon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781635762594
Publisher: Radius Book Group
Published: 2017-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

Willy Loman as Tragic Hero: The Question of Hamartia

In his introduction to his Collected Plays, Arthur Miller confronts the issue which has troubled many critics of Death of a Salesman: the status of Willy Loman as a tragic hero in comparison with classical and Shakespearean representations of such a hero. It is with eloquence and passion that Miller defies the critics who deny Willy classical tragic status (and I will prove to be one of them) and advocates an anti-Aristotelian theory of tragedy that would make him a worthy partner of Oedipus and Othello in the phenomenon we recognize as the tragic concept of human existence. I cite below important passages of his introduction that justly inspire and require an Aristotelian response:

The play was always heroic to me, and in later years the academy’s charge that Willy lacked the “stature” for the tragic hero seemed incredible to me . . . . I set out not to “write a tragedy” in this play, but to show the truth as I saw it. However, some of the attacks upon it as a pseudo-tragedy contain ideas so misleading, and in some cases so laughable, that it might be in place here to deal with a few of them.

Aristotle, having spoken of a fall from the heights, it goes without saying that someone of the common mold cannot be a fit tragic hero. It is now many centuries since Aristotle lived. There is now no more reason for falling in a faint before his Poetics than before Euclid’s geometry, which has been amended numerous times by men with new insights; nor, for that matter, would I choose to have my illnesses diagnosed by Hippocrates rather than the most ordinary graduate of an American medical school, despite the Greek’s genius. Things do change, and even a genius is limited by his time and the nature of his society . . . . There is a legitimate question of stature here, but none of rank, which is so often confused with it. So long as the hero may be said to have had alternatives of a magnitude to have materially changed the course of his life, it seems to me that in this respect at least, he cannot be debarred from the heroic role (italics mine).

The question of rank is significant to me only as it reflects the question of the social application of the hero’s career. There is no doubt that if a character is shown on the stage who goes through the most ordinary actions, and is suddenly revealed to be the President of the United States, his actions immediately assume a much greater magnitude, and pose the possibility of a much greater meaning, than if he is the corner grocer. But at the same time, his stature as a hero is not so utterly dependent upon his rank that the corner grocer cannot outdistance him as a tragic figure—providing, of course, that the grocer’s career engages the issues of, for instance, the

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