I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
Spoiler alert: In this article I share plot details from the Amazon Prime series Patriot. Do not read if you haven’t seen the show and might like to.
Tragedy gives voice to what suffers in us and in others, and how we might become cognizant of that suffering, and work with that suffering, where suffering is that pathos that we undergo, where tragic passion is both something undergone and partially overtaken in action (I want to emphasize the word “partially”—agency in tragedy is ever partial).
Simon Critchley, Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us
I’ve been writing a newsletter article about living as the protagonist of your own story, and describing the tragic hero John Tavner from the Amazon Prime series Patriot. I consider him tragic because as the plot progresses, Tavner does not achieve his goals, and he is badly hurt in the process of not achieving them. The story ends with a kind of triumph, but also with injury and sadness and grief.
I have written before of tragedy, or at least hamartia, which refers to the fatal flaw or mistake or error in judgment that leads to the downfall of a tragic hero. There I concluded that in tragedy it is not just a person’s weakness or strategic mistake that leads to tragedy. I wrote:
Tragedy, whether in drama or in real life, is rarely just due to cosmic accident or internal personal defects. Rather, it comes about when many causes — and possibly actions of multiple people — interact to produce unwanted, sometimes terrible outcomes.
Critchley would agree, it seems:
We usually think of tragedy as a misfortune that simply befalls a person (an accident, a fatal disease) or a polity (a natural disaster, like a tsunami, or a terrorist attack like 9/11) and that is outside their control. But if “tragedy” is understood as misfortune, then this is a significant misunderstanding of tragedy. What the thirty-one extant Greek tragedies enact over and over again is not a misfortune that is outside our control. Rather, they show the way in which we collude, seemingly unknowingly, with the calamity that befalls us.
Tragedy requires some degree of complicity on our part in the disaster that destroys us. It is not simply a question of the malevolent activity of fate, a dark prophecy that flows from the inscrutable but often questionable will of the gods. Tragedy requires our collusion with that fate.
Yet even as Critchley proposes that people are to blame for the tragedies that befall them, at least the Greek-style tragedies that befall them, he writes that a key aspect of Greek tragedy is the moral ambiguity they present:
Very importantly, tragedy is the experience of moral ambiguity. The right is always on both sides and invariably also wrong.
In Patriot, main character John Tavner works as an undercover intelligence operative, seeking to deliver a large sum of money to a moderate Iranian presidential candidate, in the quest of preventing Iran from electing a pro-nuclear candidate and possibly acquiring a nuclear weapon. In this he has some form of right on his side. Many people believe Iran, and other non-nuclear nations, especially those as terrible as Iran, should not be allowed to build or otherwise obtain nuclear weapons.
But as Tavner pursues this directive, he hurts many people, and becomes hurt himself. This brings up difficult ethical questions. Is it ok for a small number of people to get hurt so that a large number of people are kept safe?
You can’t therefore reduce tragedy to simply a bi-causal story of tragic flaw combined with a setting in which the flaw activates and causes disaster. The presence of moral ambiguity makes it unclear whether someone has done something wrong or right as they pursue their life goals.
Seeing into life’s core
Critchley writes that with tragedy, we see into life’s core:
By watching tragic personages in the most extreme situations, such as the horrors that befall Phaedra and Hippolytus, we look into the core, the core of life, of aliveness, in all its burning intensity, moral ambiguity, emotional devastation, erotic doubling, and political complexity. Suspicious of the concept of catharsis as something that somehow explains the effect of theater, Anne Carson talks of tragedy as a process whereby something concealed shows up onstage and we look at “this hidden thing.” She goes on,”I think of walking around Detroit. Sometimes at night you might pass the Foundry—a place with molten metal inside. YOu can glance at it and see—you glance into the core. It’s burning away in there. Then you go down the street. What remains in the mind is the core.”
The quote from Carson is from Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, Carson’s translation of four of the eighteen surviving plays by Greek tragedist Euripides. In that collection, Carson writes, “Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”
Tragedy allows you to experience a full range of human emotion in context of the moral ambiguity, meaninglessness, mistakes, ill fortune, and other dark weather that is inevitable in human life.
Carson also writes:
Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.
And:
There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.
In tragic storytelling, we get in touch with the tragedies of our own lives, but in a way that provides the perspective and wisdom that rarely makes itself known at the time of personal tragedy.