Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? by A. D. Nuttall

Author:A. D. Nuttall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2008-09-04T19:54:00+00:00

3

THE GAME OF DEATH

My last chapter ended with Freud and with the question, `Does the admission of a dark side of the mind-an unconscious-have a bearing on the problem of the pleasure of tragedy?'

Behind this darkening of the mind, however, there lies another darkening, of our picture of the ancient sources of European literature. Antiquity, formerly given over to the Ego, becomes itself the province of the Id. Roughly speaking, a sunlit, rational, enlightened world, peopled as it were by marble figures in a state of tranquil felicity (think of Winckelmann) was replaced, retrospectively, by an opposite world: blood guilt and sacrifice, dream and vision, orgiastic music, unreason. One way of expressing this change is to say that the pretence of Augustanism was dropped: instead of assuming that antiquity was somehow full of eighteenthcentury rationalists having either no religion or a religion etiolated and simplified to the point of minimal Deism, it was at last noticed that the ancient world pullulates with spirits and deities, is crammed with unreasonable, alarming powers. This, by the way, is simply true.

Within this general darkening we find a particular thesis about Greek drama-namely, that Greek tragedy was fundamentally ritual, that it was religious in ways which moderns find difficult. There is an entry in one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks which reads, `The sun has never seen any shadow." Leonardo is here thinking like a good Albertian perspectival painter; it has suddenly struck him that for an eye which is itself the source of light, shadows will always be on the far side of any object. For such an eye darkness is essentially and systematically suppressed. For the Greek the sun was Apollo (called `most powerful eye' in Sophocles' Trachiniae, 101). But Apollo, god of unshadowed light, was not the only deity in the pantheon. There was also, for example, Dionysus, the god not only of intoxication but also of wildness, green nature, of the irrational. One way to represent the change of which I am speaking might be to say, `Apollo had been honoured for centuries; now Dionysus was given his due.' And of course this antithesis is Nietzschean.

The effects of the transformation are all around us in modernist writing. Joyce's Ulysses is not just a twentiethcentury mock-heroic; Joyce used the Odyssey as a quarry, not of rational certainties to be subverted, but for magic and metamorphosis. Eliot in The Waste Land deployed a Frazerian intuition: ancient European history and blood sacrifice linked to fertility. The movement appears in different forms in many places. Jane Harrison's Themis and Gilbert Murray's writings on the Dionysiac Year Spirit, as we shall see, belong in this line.

Nor was Nietzsche the first to notice the murky side of the ancient world. Earlier rationalists were sometimes either too learned or too sharp to preserve the inherited blindness. Frazer's The Golden Bough itself is in some ways a nineteenth-century rationalist work, finding the courage to be critical of antiquity for its very failures in enlightenment. Time and time again,

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