Tragic Stalemate

...Ibsen writes social pamphlets because the elimination of syphilis will cure the illness of the hero of Ghosts...

...The pain and hope of sacrifice have clearly moved him greatly...

...Thus pain had become localized in individuals rather than generalized in universals...

...Yet his involvement in a "total exposure to suffering," defined only in revolutionary terms, seems too particular...

...I am terrified that I, or my friends may be killed there...

...In the initial section of Modern Tragedy we are reminded of several axioms about the nature of the form...

...The works he identifies in part two of his book as most demonstrably tragic in their assumptions and effects are Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and Brecht's Mother Courage...

...In his own book, quoting the ending of Brecht's An die Nachgeborenen, he sounds the language of one who seemed to think it is: For we knew only too well: Even the hatred of squalor Makes the brow grow stern...

...Indeed, Marx's theory of history, with its metaphors of inevitable redemption and a final, blissful order is, with Christianity, precisely what we are told infected tragedy with its cancer...

...In 1961 George Steiner, a colleague of Williams at Cambridge, published The Death of Tragedy, a deliberate inversion of the proclamation of Nietzsche...

...Further, tragedy demanded that these views be shared, and communicated through drama to the community, bearing witness to the unlucky histories of the race and the misfortunes that befall its rulers...

...This is the matter of fact stuff of life...

...Yet, he recognizes, it is the revolution that provokes, now, the greatest suffering...

...Modern Tragedy is really two books...

...He feared that the old myths were passing from immediate public consciousness and that the ritual re-enactments of those myths were losing their resonance...

...As a teacher and critic, he recognizes competing views of the nature of tragic literature but finds them, finally, irrelevant to an age that did not make and witness the tragedies as contemporary documents...

...Such theory is neat...

...He rejects the notion, ascribed to Sartre, of violence as a purifying end of revolution, and insists that while one nation attempted to murder a race in concentration camps, several nations fought to save the race...

...I pity an American killed in Vietnam...

...It is almost inevitable that we should try to go beyond it...

...Alas, we Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness Could not ourselves be kind...

...We felt no terror because a connection had been removed that reminded us that when Oedipus put out his eyes, it stood for something that could happen to us...

...What runs through the book with the persistence of the bass note of a Bach fugue is Williams' insistence on a revolutionary political and moral posture...

...I pity a Viet Cong killed there...

...Reviewed by GEOFFREY WOLFF Book Critic, "Washington Post" Tragedy, the critics have been telling us since Aristotle first described it, is at least terminally diseased, if not dead...

...Finally, Williams seems to say with Brecht that "the sufferings of man appall me because they are unnecessary...

...Williams looks to a revival of tragedy's central meanings through the rediscovery of events from life and literature that continue to be "exemplary" of tragedy, and impulses which "connect" us to those events...

...It is first of all an indictment of the harshness of a poetic which seems to have said that the way a man's ending is arranged on paper is more important than the fact of his death...

...Thus the theory of the form gives us the set and feel of an age, but it cannot exile reality or banish the horror of the history we live with...

...Real tragedy could live only where two axes intersect: the tragic interpretation of events and a public theater which people attended by communal reflex...

...A man who asserts that another man dead in an automobile accident did not die tragically tells us much about his esthetic nostalgia, but the automobile that did the killing is the stuff of life and of literature...

...the second section collects his lectures on works from Ibsen to Pinter given as a course in the Tragedy Tripos at Cambridge over the past few years...

...Yet are they "unnecessary...

...Nothing less will do than the abolition of class and economic distinctions...

...Modern tragedy, according to most who exercise their critical muscles on the vast playground of the form, is an oxymoron: to be modern is to exclude tragedy...

...Hope rests, for Williams, with his conviction that it is not the inevitable way of man to do harm to his fellows...

...But this is how we get out by getting in: After an act of sacrifice, say by a soldier on either side of a battleline, "there is not a renewal of our general life, but often a positive renewal of our general guilt, which can move us more deeply than the consummation of any order of life...

...Revolution as such is in a common sense tragedy," he writes...

...Thus Williams insists that tragic thinking no more banishes social hope than that social hope banishes tragedy...

...Williams concludes his book with a plea that we not regard the suffering of revolution as a fixed position, as an abstract condition of man or evolution that becomes a "tragedy halted and generalized at the shock of catastrophe...

...And tragedy, especially, demands a point of view, a direction, which the ambiguities of revolution hardly allow unless the ambiguities themselves are the tragedy...

...Williams ignores such complexities...

...For Steiner, tragedy tells us one thing and one thing alone: "The spheres of reason, order and justice are terribly limited and no progress in our science or technical resources will enlarge their relevance...

...The facts as Pasternak and Brecht found them hardly accorded with the theory...

...But our experience, Williams reminds us, is that people are broken by life and they die, often needlessly, and that we are accustomed to describe such events as "tragic...

...Even anger against injustice Makes the voice grow harsh...

...This crucial distinction is surely ignored by a man who can write in this context that "public and private facts are not in kind to be distinguished...

...He looks in this book to general truths rather than individual dilemmas, yet the immediate example is always close to his imagination...

...Belief and experience appear to intersect here to produce what the author calls in another context "tragic stalemate...

...It is significant that both are products of imaginations quickened by the hope and disappointment of Marxism, and both end with something close to that despair which George Steiner and others have told us "is a mortal sin against Marxism...

...Drama simply imitated the actions of a contingent and dangerous universe...

...art, perhaps, allows no such diffusion of sentiment...

...The first problem Williams addresses is one of semantics...

...It is a time of chaos and suffering...

...It depended upon a sense of life, the product of direct experience, that held there was no assurance of justice in this world, and probably none in the next...

...There is, after all, no "comedy" paper in the Cambridge Tripos...

...While the tragic paradox of Doctor Zhivago is one of "saving by losing," Williams is aware that more often than not the word we assign our martyrs is "scapegoat...

...But he insists on using the word: Nothing less than "tragedy" will do because it has for so long been such a revealing index of the Western imagination...

...He also fails to distinguish between our responses to the private experience of reading a novel and the communal experience of attending a play with our fellows...

...Williams finds it astonishing that "the events which are seen as untragic are deep in the pattern of our own culture: war, famine, work, traffic, politics...

...we witnessed a parade of eccentrics whom we pitied, but the crucial bridge of the chorus, leading from the action to the audience, had been broken and with it that blending of pity and terror which was the marrow of tragedy...

...In such assertions Williams breaks, characteristically, with proofs to assert an act of faith...

...Shakespeare writes tragedy because old-age homes cannot commute the sentence of Lear...

...And it is just that hiatus, between theory and experience, that Williams finds tragic...

...Personally engaged by the word in its literary and experimential applications, the author recognizes that arbitrary academic and theoretical definitions and redefinitions have badly blunted its precision...

...Steiner said "the tragic voice in drama has been blurred or stilled" since the time of Shakespeare and Racine because of our belief in institutions, most notably the institutions of science and Marxist progress...

...Is evil, as Williams will have it, not absolute and inexorable...

...Life is more complicated than Raymond Williams sees it...

...Williams is a great hulking bear of a man, yet his voice is soft and his response compassionate...

...Raymond Williams, going to life as well as art for his documents, rejects this view and concludes that political revolution, a modern attempt to solve ancient dilemmas, is a central tragic phenomenon...

...Most often lamented by the obituary writers has been the passing of a dramatic form, closely defined, which in their view depends on a sense of life together with a kind of artistic communalism that reached its apogee in Periclean Greece and again in Elizabethan England...

...I do not rely on what is almost certain to happen: that this tragedy, in its turn, will become epic...

...Later, Hegel found a worse disease in the form...

...They are, at the very least in our response to them...

...Modern Tragedy is the work of a moralist...

...The first part charts the course of tragic theory from Aristotle onward...

...To break the stalemate he looks to beliefs rather than institutions...

...The Elizabethan imagination had cast forth heroes of such enormous magnetism that the modern age, living in their shadows, subordinated events to characters rather than seeking the universal principles that dramatic action imitated...

...Cannot tragedy be as much a function of a fight to halt revolution as it is of the suffering of the revolutionary...

...When Aristotle delivered himself of his hunches about tragedy in the Poetics, (hunches which the neo-Classicists would harden into brittle and arbitrary "rules"), he felt it unnecessary to distinguish between tragedy as experience and tragedy as drama...

...We use "tragedy" to describe four things: "an immediate experience, a body of literature, a conflict of theory and an academic problem...

...What is in question," he says, "is not only a word.' The scrambling of its meaning, though, has signalled an evasion of general truths about the nature of suffering and its causes that has had grave moral and political, as well as esthetic, consequences...

...For the believing Christian or Marxist what happens in this world is an insignificant prelude to what will follow in the world to come: It can interest and surprise but never demonstrate that injustice is anything more than a momentary and eccentric departure from universal justice...

...But even he expressed grave doubts about the health of the genre...

...Hope lies in the promise of revolution, tragedy in the suffering imposed by revolutionary institutions that betray revolutionary ideas...

...He is outraged by suffering and injustice, seemingly without sophistication...

...He is looking for the way out of something by living deep within it...