Modern Tragedy by Raymond Williams

Author:Raymond Williams
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-11-30T04:30:00+00:00

5

TRAGIC RESIGNATION AND SACRIFICE

ELIOT AND PASTERNAK

THE RHYTHM OF tragedy, it is said, is a rhythm of sacrifice. A man is disintegrated by suffering, and is led to his death, but the action is more than personal, and others are made whole as he is broken.

As a matter of fact we need particular contexts, if we are to discuss sacrifice at all. It has been said that tragedy took its origin, in Greek culture, from an active ritual of sacrifice. But this is at best an hypothesis, and has been vigorously disputed. In its most popular forms, it is based on a romantic anthropology, which characteristically took patterns of ritual from this culture and from that. Integration was at the level of the abstracted patterns, which appeared available in literary evidence, rather than at the level of actual relationship between a particular ritual pattern and the body of the society in which it was practised. Significance, then, was a general arrangement of patterns, irrespective of actual societies and irrespective of history.

Sacrifice, even if it is a single kind of action, can have many meanings in particular contexts. Yet behind the powerful word, is it not possible to see, in fact, different kinds of action? In our own culture, the idea of sacrifice is profoundly ambiguous. The simplest form of sacrifice, in which a man is killed so that the body of men may live or live more fully, we have almost wholly abandoned. We know the idea, from other cultures and periods, but it retains emotional significance in one case only: at the centre of Christian belief. There, the manner of its retention proves the distance we have moved away from the idea as such, since the man Jesus is also, for believers, the Son of God, and the action, if it is to be significant, must be seen as part of a divine rather than a merely human history. Other apparently comparable cases, deprived of this sanction, are seen as essentially primitive—the scattering of the body for fertility, the sharing of the blood of the man who died. If it is not a divine action, it is a primitive magical action, and flat comparison of one with the other is even offensive. Here the decisive importance of context is most ironically proved.

In a continuing religious tradition, the martyr can be seen in the rhythm of sacrifice. He dies in order that the faith may live, or the result of his death is a general renewal of faith. This interpretation has been extended, beyond the context of religion: notably, in the history of political movements and parties. Even to mention the variation is to be reminded of the decisive significance of context: martyrdom will be denied, another name will be found for it, if the faith is not shared. An evident instance of this continual variation is the case of the soldier who dies in war. He is ordinarily seen, by the men of his own country, as having made what is still called the supreme sacrifice, and any questioning of this can be profoundly offensive.

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