Dan
A Very Tragic Business
By ANTHONY BURGESS
'Newwant comfort, says the Savage in Brave 'New World. '1 want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, 1 want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.' And Mustapha Mond, the Controller, sums up for him : in fact, you're claiming the right to be unhappy.' He is, and he's also claiming the right to find Sophocles and Shakespeare intelligible, for, unless life is tragic, there can be no art of tragedy. We don't have to go to AF 632 to find a world whose rulers have settled for the liquidation of the raw material of Oedipus or Hamlet; ask any good union man today, or psychologist or new-wave religious apologist, and he will probably say that society ought not to need tragic heroes or victims.
As for progressive dramatists, we have the words of Brecht : 'The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are unnecessary.' Meaning the tragic victim-hero-scapegoat, the necessity for whose sufferings—in the pre-Brechtian dispensa- tion—was taken for granted. This seems to be where the modern and the traditional views of tragedy part company. The Hellenic and Renaissance conceptions of man saw what Raymond Williams calls in his new study* 'a fixed position—an abstract condition'; in Brecht we meet 'the new tragic consciousness of all those who, appalled by the present, are for this reason firmly committed to a different future.' The human condition as a permanency; the human condition as changeable history—take your choice. Your choice will depend on those convictions that have shaped, among other things, your politics.
It is not necessarily typical of Mr Williams's own political position that he should be prepared to see the term 'tragedy' spill over from art into life, taking as his subject-matter the area where all roads meet—it is an immediate experience, a body of literature, a conflict of theory, an academic problem.' We are all past the time when the academic pundits could flail with impunity the broadening of a technical term to enclose meanings unratified by etymology or classical tradition. This is an age of semantics, and it is the scholar's task to discover the common root of diverse modes of usage. Moreover, the term 'comedy' has, unimpeded by guardians of terminological propriety, long been allowed to describe true events, not merely artistically contrived ones; in addition it has never been a very precise term even in literature (The Divine Comedy; The Comedy of Errors; Graham Greene's The Comedians).
But perhaps because Aristotle laid down rules for tragedy, and in consequence the academicians have been strict in the dramaturgical application of the term, there has been a resistance among the educated to its loose application to sad or shocking events. Some will not accept 'Jobs Tax Split with Labour a Tragedy' (Daily Telegraph, May 31), though they may agree with the news- papers in finding Dylan Thomas's death tragic (great man driven fo self-destruction by flaws of character; poet-scapegoat—tragos, a goat; life- enhancer still enhancing fife posthumously, etc.).
MODERN TRAGEDY. (Chatto and Windus, 30s.) A child may be cured of a deadly disease only to be run over and killed on leaving the hospital. Tragic? Too much there (vide The Anti-Death League) of the nasty joke dealt by God in the guise of chance, the black border of comedy. I knew a man who, having been engaged for seventeen years, died on his wedding-night. It would require great boldness to admit publicly the comic element in that, though let one start to smile and the rest will. Mr Williams, I think, would not smile.
Mr Williams's point is that tragedy is not a fixed classical form but an impulse that is re-shaped by an ever-changing sensibility. He recognises the dangerous alienation of the traditionalists, their deliberate refusal to engage the power of human sympathy beyond certain frozen limits, so that a man of rank can die tragically, but not a slave or retainer. And (this is where art and life meet) there is an undue limitation in that theory which, seeing no tragic significance in 'everyday tragedies,' holds that 'the event itself is not tragedy, but only becomes so through shaped response'—in other words, the event is a mere 'accident' if it cannot bear a general meaning. This, says Williams, might be in order if 'the event chosen for argument was a death by lightning,' but 'the events which are not seen as tragic are deep in the pattern of our own culture: war, famine, work, traffic, politics.'
Despite the Aristotelian pedants, tragic drama developed, as Williams reminds us, into forms capable of accommodating middle-class heroes (not merely citizens but apprentices as well) and views of the universe highly sceptical about Providence. So now we can corral practically all the 'serious' dramatists and novelists of the last hundred years and give them the tragic brand: Ibsen and Miller (Liberal Tragedy); Strindberg, O'Neill, Tennessee Williams (Private Tragedy); Tolstoy and Lawrence (Social and Personal Tragedy—we're given a very good account of the probable influence of Anna Karenina on Women in Love); Chekhov, Pirandello, Ionesco, Beckett (Tragic Deadlock and Stalemate); Eliot and Pasternak (Tragic Resignation and Sacrifice); Camus, Sartre (Tragic Despair and Revolt). Readers sympathetic to the extension of a category once chillingly narrow may still feel dubious about the width of this embrace.
Eliot called The Cocktail Party a comedy. Was he mistaken or was he being ironic? Celia Coplestone, rejecting the ginny chatter of the world of illusion, elects for reality, which for her means martyrdom. 'Sacrifice,' says Mr Williams, 'is what saints are for, but we, we go on with the cocktail party.' If Celia has died to sustain the life of a group which cannot rise above the unconscious—unsaintly—level of subsistence (as Oedipus suffered to restore his kingdom to health), then the play is tragic in that all its personages are involved in a sacrificial act—sacrifice not only done but seen to be done. But Eliot seems to intend here a background of reality—of which mankind cannot bear very much—to contrast with the ordinary messy world; the symbol of the latter is a failing marriage which, given the right medicines, can be reorientated to a mildly happy
rehabilitation—the best of a bad job, as Eliot poetically puts it. A little life getting into a mess and then clearing it up is comic, but the larger comedy springs from the contrast of that with the bigger life, whose end looks like a mess but isn't. The danger is that, if we loosen the term too much, we shall find comedy itself a tragic form (Malvolio as tragic victim : discus.). Doesn't Socrates in the Symposium tell Aristophanes that the qualities required for writing tragedy and comedy are the same, and that a tragic genius must also be a comic genius? The special use of the word 'absurd,' bequeathed to us by Camus, represents a significant pivot. Man's lot is an absurdity, for the gap between the aspiration and the potency can never be bridged, man is an alien in the universe, etc. etc. (the existential slogans are already becoming clichés).
If man is a tragic figure (or 'absurd,' or comic), all his art is the same, and hence it is inappropriate to talk of tragic art as a separate category. So we have to start all over again, and we might as well use 'tragedy' for a narrow compartment of art, one which sees the human dichotomy as terrible rather than ridiculous, accepts the need for sacrifice to the power that has cursed man by making him what he is, and knows that hubris must be punished. Delimitation is no bad thing. Up to the time of Elgar, everybody knew what a symphony was—a work for orchestra in three or four movements, sonata-form in at least two of them, the hegemony of a key. Now all that people expect of a symphony is that it should be some- thing 'serious' for orchestra. We don't want tragedy to end up as something 'sad' for the stage.
Sir Philip Sidney wrote of the 'sweet violence' of tragedy, an oxymoron pointing the mystery of our taking pleasure in the sight of enacted horror and suffering. Mr Williams leads us expertly through the mazes of traditional theory—the privy relief of catharsis, Bradley's 'self-division and self-restitution,' Nietzsche's metaphysical delight in the momentary identification with 'the primal Being,' which manifests its 'extravagant fecundity' in creating phenomena (the Hero being the highest of these) only to destroy them. The modern age has produced better comic theory than tragic, but perhaps it has concluded that the older aesthetics of tragedy was really so much humbug, and that our pleasure in watching people enact self- destruction needs no explanation. Our joy in lying in bed is intensified by knowing that other people are going to work; our safety is defined by other people's danger and, more keenly, by their untimely deaths. Somebody has to die; let it not be us. The enactment of the death of one of our group is apotropaic, a magical ritual which averts the thunderbolt from ourselves. We find the greatest physical pleasure in voiding—either seed or excrement. The greatest non-physical pleasure is the voiding of fear. When the tragic hero contrives the purgation for us, we can afford to repay him with a measure of pity.
What reaction Mr Williams expects from us in the third part of his book. which consists of his own play Koha. cannot, I think, be defined in terms of innocent entertainment. It is political, didactic, prosy, but its being there at all is some- thing of an embarrassment. He seems to say: I have taught you all I can about the modes of contemporary tragedy; now I have cooked up a sample for you. What he actually says, dis- armingly, in his Foreword, is: 'If any reader is good enough to find one kind of work useful, but not the others, he is welcome to use the book accordingly.' But so evidently unified a treatise has to be eaten entire. It is very tough eating, heavy, unleavened by joy or humour. It makes tragedy a very tragic business.
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