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Issue 10. The Visualization of the Subaltern in World Music. On Musical Contestation Strategies (Part 1)

Rethinking tragedy

Author: Karel Vanhaesebrouck
Published: March 2005

"Rethinking tragedy",
New Literary History ,
vol. 35, winter 2004, number 1

Under the title of 'Rethinking Tragedy', New Literary History , the journal of theory and interpretation, presented in its winter issue an intriguing collection of essays on the notions of the tragedy and the tragic. The result is a very diverse series of texts by a number of authors who should all be considered as fundamentally different thinkers, both on an academic and an ideological level. The majority of authors presented in this collection try to broaden the scope of the traditional research on the tragic genre tackling the issue of the tragic as a leverage for more general - and fundamental - critical reflection and thus offering a highly needed correction on the canonical history of theatre. This issue is an attempt to broaden the terminological frame of reflection which has up to now been largely influenced by 19 th century philosophy. At the same time this collection proves that the notion of the tragic transcends theatre history as such and that it is at the very heart of all debates on for example popular culture and film noir. However, the editors have deliberately chosen to pay attention to the classical reflective corpus against which the majority of the texts included in this issue reacts. For this reason it makes sense to include a text by George Steiner who should then be considered as the very embodiment of this stringent, old-fashioned and almost elitist frame. By including Steiner's text the editors have chosen to draw back in the authors who represent the nucleus of all critical reflection on the tragic genre and who embody at the same the Old School of pre-cultural-studies reflection ignoring the larger societal impact of art.

In her introduction Rita Felski distinguishes three ways of "rethinking tragedy". Firstly, there is the classical philosophical frame à la Steiner in which the tragic is considered as the very embodiment of the human blind-alley situation, of utter hopelessness. In this view the tragic condition should be explicitly considered as limited in time and space. The tragic hero is then by definition an aristocratic loner, a special case and tragedy itself is then reduced to an undemocratic and elitist universe in which the philosophical questions are a privilege of a limited number of "great men". In this way Steiner deliberately limits his reflection to the archetypical tragedy and reduces it - according to his academic opponents - to an archaeological artefact. The second possible approach would then be the critical Brechtean approach. In his ideological view Brecht considered the tragedy as an enemy of politics as it promoted hopelessness, thus defending a political status quo . The third possible attitude towards the genre of the tragedy is a radical correction of the anachronistic approach in which the 19 th century tragic concept is projected on the entire history. In this view the tragic is considered as a fundamentally fluctuating category, which exceeds the tragic genre as such. And this is the reason why an author such as Michel Maffesoli argues that we should not look for the tragic in the tragedy itself, but that it should be sought in popular youth culture: "we can say (.) that the theatricality of everyday life, the pursuit of the superfluous, even the frivolous, and of course the importance given to carpe diem , not to mention the cult of the body in its diverse forms, are all expressions of such a tragic consciousness" (p. 135).

Even though this point of departure is debatable - one cannot ignore the fact that Mafessoli reduces youth culture to a monolithic block in which its first preoccupation would be its own hedonism - the work of Mafessoli and others such as Terry Eagleton is a necessary correction of all previous theoretical frameworks. In this collection diverse authors attempt to prick through the very tight and hermetic discursive framework of Steiner. Authors such as Heather K. Love - who provides a very interesting contribution on the lesbian love in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive - thus continue the work which Raymond Williams started in his Modern Tragedy . Williams considered the 20 th century as the tragic century par excellence. The scale of the tragic was extended - the Holocaust being the most cruel example of this expansion - and tragedy was democratized: "while modern tragedy has overcome the elitism of classical tragedy, there is a sense in which we can only understand is as tragic that, in modernity, everyone is exposed to tragic suffering" (p. 118). No individual will escape his or her tragic destiny - it is no longer an exclusively white, male affair. Expressions such as the 'tragic mulatto', the 'tragic women' and the 'tragic lesbian' thus entered the discursive environment. The diversity of the articles in this issue of New Literary History testifies of this broad perspective, giving a new actual relevance to the existing terminology. However, an introductory article which retraces the discursive history of the notions of 'tragedy' and 'the tragedy', would have been a welcome aid. As a whole the collection lacks terminological clarity as the authors use these notions in their own way. Some of them make a clear distinction between the tragedy as genre and the tragic as philosophical category, others use the first term when they refer to the second, thus hampering a discussion at daggers drawn. Besides this minor but fundamental remark "Rethinking Tragedy" provides its readers with a fascinating collection of texts of which the inter-resonance , i.e. the way in which they question and criticize each other, should be considered as their primary strength.

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