Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy by Goldhill Simon;

Author:Goldhill, Simon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

IV

The question remains, then: in continuing the debate about the tragic, to what degree are critics committed to the ideological frameworks in which the debate is formulated in the nineteenth century? Defining the tragic, it seems, depends not so much on aesthetic discrimination or formal literary arguments as on taking a stance about religion, politics, the self, nationalism. Eagleton is exemplary in his generalizing panache: “Tragic art is on the whole a Western affair”, he writes, trying and failing to step outside the nationalist thinking of the nineteenth century in the name of a more sensitive multiculturalism, “Only Western cultures need apply”.64 So, too, he adds, it is “a mistake to believe with George Steiner that Christianity is inherently anti-tragic”.65 “Steiner makes the same mistake about Marxism”.66 “Tragedy represents … a spiritual experience for the metaphysically minded few”.67 And so forth. To make tragedies the locus of the tragic requires a view – a declaration, it seems – of the grandest lineaments of human self-definition within history and culture, in a way which Aristotle’s Poetics or eighteenth-century fussing about the rules of the unities (say) eschew. That is both the lure of defining the tragic, and its danger: the lure, that it enables us to talk transculturally and transhistorically about some profound and significant literature, and a tradition of intense and serious criticism, at an engaged and serious level of abstraction; the danger, that it crushes cultural difference and literary variety and political specificity in the name of such generalization.

“‘The tragic’ is a central concern to anyone who wishes to come to terms with tragedy, Greek or other”, writes Michael Silk.68 I have suggested that one crucial move towards coming to terms with “the tragic” is to historicize the term, and thereby to see what the consequences are when it is applied with its full panoply of German Romantic associations to the genre of ancient Athenian tragedies, where “the tragic” as an abstract notion does not develop, for all the self-awareness of genre within the tragedies and the incipient critical tradition. The challenge for the critic remains to pay due attention to the specific socio-political context of ancient drama, while recognizing the drive towards transhistorical truth both in the plays’ discourse and in the plays’ reception. This double attentiveness should in turn inform each stage of the literary history of the genre – the fragmented and incremental development of the genre through social institutions of theatre, self-affiliation of writers and the strictures of critics. Here too the local, the political, and the polemical are in tension with the grandest gestures towards the long durée of the genre of tragedy. At each stage, tragedies and “the tragic” are in a productive and dialectical tension, a tension for which the idea of “the law of the tragic” and its failing/succeeding test-cases is likely to prove an unwieldy and distorting methodological model. What’s more, Greek tragic texts relentlessly shine a harsh light on the platitudes and general wisdom with which its characters try to come to terms with the political turmoil and personal suffering with which they are faced.

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