| I was reading The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (which I've enjoyed thus far!) and here are some notable excerpts: (On the delineation between Tragedy and tragic events) French philosopher Henri Gouhier: "Tragedy belongs to literature and to theatre, the tragic belongs to life." ...Countering this aesthetic definition, the Marxist critics Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton charge those who are prepared to divorce the term 'tragedy' from its normal, everyday usage with being elitist and indifferent to ordinary suffering... Williams shows that events which are dismissed as 'merely accidental' actually arise from widespread conditions of social injustice and exploitation. 'The events which are not seen as tragic are deep in the pattern of our own culture: war, famine, work, traffic, politics,' Williams writes. 'To see no ethical content or human agency in such events, or to say we cannot connect them with general meanings... is to admit a strange and particular bankruptcy.' Eagleton, meanwhile, points out that the 'lunatic' distinction between aesthetic tragedy and merely terrible events in life is based on the false assumption that 'real life is shapeless and art alone is orderly.' (On the correspondences shared between the responses to real tragedies and tragic theatre) During the civil war in the former Soviet republic of Moldova... one local man confronted the savage slaughter of his family in a way that the ancient Greeks in their theatre in Athens would have recognised. Loading the bodies onto his farm trailer, he drove around the village to parade the corpses to its inhabitants... 'Do not seek to justify or explain their killing,' the man was saying, 'but bear witness to this atrocity.' (On desensitisation) According to Susan Sontag, our diminishing capacity to feel shocked is not based upon a surfeit of images nor the fact that our sensibilities are jaded, but rather it is produced by our sense of powerlessness.... We have been shown images of war or famine so many times before and nothing we do seems to change that situation. Playwrights and photographers have perenially responded to what is popularly known as 'compassion fatigue' by outdoing each other in the graphic violence of their representations; Sontag regards shock as only useful if it can galvanise us into action. ...Good stuff! I wholeheartedly agree that "to be mechanisiatic or rigidly prescriptive about (tragedy) is to deny the power of tragedy and to fail to explain its recurring hold over the cultural imagination". What takes form in literature arises from the influence of reality, and the emotions elicited are echoes of our ordinary responses, therefore to draw distinctions in Tragedy would be artificial and arbitrary. Besides, I don't believe in a formulaic approach to the genre. Where shock is concerned, I don't think it is an ethical necessity in tragic re-productions. Tragedy takes many forms, as understated as it may be overt. Where events are beyond our power to alter, marrying tragedy and shock is cruel. Reconciliation, as a process, is already ridden with enough obstacles. The symbolism of an event may be magnified, but to what ends? Lending gravity to a situation alone is inadequate without a larger purpose - of remembrance or of preventing a similar occurrence. |
I like the midnight jaunts and stupid moments but best of all, I like your company 
