Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction Book

I can't recall why I randomly picked this while going through a Wikipedia list of VSIs looking for something on Napoleon or Russia. The difference in a VSI on science/philosophy written by a scientist and one on the arts written by an artist is really telling. The writing flows much better within sections, and the prose is much prettier, while the sections themselves are hard to mentally organize and the width of references overwhelming in their range and speed, it's like walking through a corridor to see 10 different doors opening all at once and 10 doors within each of those doors also threatening to open at any second. I was gently eased through this book, a comforting swell on the surface of waters whose depths I glimpsed at briefly without really registering anything. It constantly reminded me of a very enjoyable long-read on Aeon or similar, written beautifully and depressing in its knowledge of plays, metaphors, and character complexities.

Of the 1000s of plays referenced, I've only read Oresteia, and my Shakespeare penury was highlighted once more, filling me with grim conviction that this time when I brush the dust off my giant Shakespeare collected works it will not be to do two sets of dumbbell curls to estimate the task ahead of me before quietly placing it back into the cupboard, in a different shelf from where I found it, as if something had changed between picking it up and replacing it. It must take such a stunning expertise of these works and characters that for every little philosophical statement there is a ready example at hand, not some direct reference like 'remember that time when Agamemnon sacrifices Iphigenia', but an exploration of ideas never mentioned in the text but consistent with the snapshot that is represented in it.

I read a lot of this book thinking of the current context of Covid-19, with questions like, is it a disaster or tragedy or comedy, is it tragedy or farce or business as usual, is it lachesism in an age devoid of true tragedy, is it nobody's fault somebody's fault or everybody's fault. Every chapter felt relevant and it added to the Aeon long-read feel of the whole thing, a reflection on the biggest event of our lives against the backdrop of the history of tragedy, heroism, and our attitudes towards life and death. I've been reading some of the stuff Agnes Callard has been putting out during this period and generally see the zeitgeist as ripe for deeper appreciation for philosophy and the arts. I could've read an entire chapter on analyses of tragedy in paintings, the Flaying Of Marsyas was one of my favorite sections in the entire book.

On that note, to the bookshelf and beyond, for some biceps gains.

Notes
Heroes belong in epics not tragedy, here they are more ambiguous. Out of place. Agamemnon and Coriolanus. Macbeth and Marc Anthony.

Ghosts became psychological in modern era, with Freud. Inner demons. Hell on earth, living death, empty, drained of meaning purpose joy.

Ghosts in all forms. Looming specter of unborn child in who's afraid of Virginia Woolf

Greek for ghost is eidolon, whence we get idol.

Greek creation of desert island, where man and beast are brought to same level. Philoctetes. Circe. Still they're loathe to leave it. Lear. Heracles returning from madness. Oliver sacks describes similar extreme behaviour of patients revived from sleeping sickness.

Dickens wanted to name little dorrit as nobody's fault. Act of God, politicians will say, stuff happens. Or someone else's fault. Dickens said it is everybody's business and fault.

Who is to blame for tragedy. Greek tragic hero. Fates like Romeo Othello. Aristotle's hamartia, fatal flaw, tragedy interested in what ppl do not what they think or how they are. Good character with specific fallibility.

God or daimon joins human will to make fatal error. Aphrodite and Phaedra. Poseidon and Pasiphae. Two agents absolute minimum.

Crete was that dark place from which pre Olympians came. Whatever inspired Minotaur. Furies.

Tragedy shows us what we miss. Characters act out our repressed desires, Freud. Reason and seriousness hide blood and horror, Nietzsche.

Are all victims scapegoats? Iphigenia, Astyanax son of hector.

Are martyrs tragic?

George Eliot on God, immortality and duty, the movers of men. How inconceivable the first, unbelievable the second and peremptory and absolute the third.

Hegel first to provide theory of tragedy, conflict, resolution and elevation. But no moral dubiousness, basement dark cellar like Freud Nietzsche.

Plato attacks tragedy as inflaming ppls passions, siding unthinkingly with the victim, or worse with the villain.

Philosopher and tragedian are rivals. Philosopher abstracts, tragedian particularises. Tragedy dethrones generalisation, though not exiling them

Today, criticism of tragedy turns from conservative Plato style to the left. Brecht says tragedy turns suffering into inevitable, an obstacle to political progress.

Roland barthes, tragedy assembles subsumes misfortune, justifying it as necessary, wise or pure.

Schopenhauer's wille und vorstellung or representation as Dionysus and Apollo. Nietzsche in birth of tragedy,

Apollo tends towards rigidity, Dionysus violent liberation.

Mel brooks: tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.

Oscar Wilde on death of little Nell in Dickens old curiosity shop: one needs a heart of stone to read it without laughing.

Point of tradition of dithyramb, satyr play to Dionysus after three tragedies was comic relief.

Racine Seneca Wagner don't acknowledge the body. Few times Racine's characters sit down are very dramatic. Neither weather nor nature

Hegel said important events occur twice. Marx added, first time tragedy second time farce.

Third time? Business as usual?

World has been flattened. Now we want to be tragic. Masha from Chekhov's seagull, Hamm in Beckett's endgame. Pseudo tragedy in a world where tragedy is no longer possible. Modern tragedy exists only in pathological forms as nostalgia. Farce.

Sisyphus laughs at his hell. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

What a dream to be articulate when in midst of passion, anger, grief, desire. Art gives us that.

While Greeks were stoically silent in grief, allowing audience to inject feeling, Seneca was given to excessive emotion like European renaissance opera and symphonies.