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Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow at the University of Manchester. His numerous works include The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), Literary Theory: An Introduction (second edition, 1996), The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth Century Ireland (1999), and The Idea of Culture (2000), all published by Blackwell, as are his dramatic writings, St Oscar and Other Plays (1997), and the Eagleton Reader (1997) edited by Stephen Regan. His memoir The Gatekeeper was published in 2002.

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In this dazzling book Terry Eagleton provides a comprehensive study of tragedy, all the way from Aeschylus to Edward Albee, dealing with both theory and practice, and moving between ideas of tragedy and analyses of particular works and authors. This amazing tour-de-force steps out beyond the stage to reflect not only on tragic art but also on real-life tragedy. It explores the idea of the tragic in the novel, examining such writers as Melville, Hawthorne, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Manzoni, Goethe and Mann, as well as English novelists.

With his characteristic brilliance and inventiveness of mind, Eagleton weaves together literature, philosophy, ethics, theology, and political theory. In so doing he makes a major political–philosophical statement drawn from a startling range of Western thought, in the writings of Plato, St Paul, St Augustine, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Sartre and others.

This book takes serious issue with the idea of ‘the death of tragedy’, and gives a comprehensive survey of definitions of tragedy itself, arguing a radical and controversial case.

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In this dazzling book Terry Eagleton provides a comprehensive study of tragedy, all the way from Aeschylus to Edward Albee, dealing with both theory and practice, and moving between ideas of tragedy and analyses of particular works and authors. This amazing tour-de-force steps out beyond the stage to reflect not only on tragic art but also on real-life tragedy. It explores the idea of the tragic in the novel, examining such writers as Melville, Hawthorne, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Manzoni, Goethe and Mann, as well as English novelists.

With his characteristic brilliance and inventiveness of mind, Eagleton weaves together literature, philosophy, ethics, theology, and political theory. In so doing he makes a major political–philosophical statement drawn from a startling range of Western thought, in the writings of Plato, St Paul, St Augustine, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Sartre and others.

This book takes serious issue with the idea of ‘the death of tragedy’, and gives a comprehensive survey of definitions of tragedy itself, arguing a radical and controversial case.

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Sweet Violence

Blackwell Publishers

Chapter One

In everyday language, the word `tragedy' means something like `verysad'. We speak of the tragic car crash of the young woman at the busycrossroads, just as the ancient Greeks used the same epithet for a dramaabout the slaying of a king at a similar place. Indeed, it may well turnout that `very sad' is also about the best we can do when it comes to themore exalted realm of tragic art.

But surely tragedy involves more than this. Is it not a matter of fateand catastrophe, of calamitous reversals of fortunes, flawed, high-bornheroes and vindictive gods, pollution and purgation, deplorable endings,cosmic order and its transgression, a suffering which chastens and transfigures?In any case, isn't this to mistake the tragic for the pathetic?Tragedy may be poignant, but it is supposed to have something fearfulabout it too, some horrific quality which shocks and stuns. It is traumaticas well as sorrowful. And doesn't the tragic differ from the pathetic inbeing cleansing, bracing, life-affirming? Susanne K. Langer speaks of the`sad but non-tragic character of the French classical drama' - non-tragicin her view because such drama deals in misfortune rather than destiny,lacks any rich realization of individual personality, and is rather tooenamoured of the rational. Racine and Corneille, she suggests, write`heroic comedies' rather than tragedies, which will no doubt come as asurprise to anyone who has sat through Andromache or Polyeucte. TheFrench must have a strange sense of humour.

Tragedy, some will claim, is surely a technical term, whereas `very sad'is plainly not. One can, in fact, use the word in both senses together, asin a sentence like `What is really tragic about Beckett is that tragedy(heroic resistance, exultant self-affirmation, dignified endurance, thepeace which comes from knowing that one's actions are predestined, andthe like) is no longer possible'. And one can call something very sad - the peaceful, predictable death of an elderly person, for example - without feeling the need to dub it tragic. One can also be sad over nothingin particular, in the manner of Freud's melancholia, but it is hard to betragic over nothing in particular. `Tragic' is a more transitive term than`sad'. Moreover, `tragic' is a strong word, like `scum' or `squalid', whereas`sad' is embarrassingly feeble. Geoffrey Brereton notes that it is hard tocome up with a synonym of `tragic', a truth stumbled on by a fellow-studentof mine at Cambridge, who realized that a suitably witheringutterance of the word `Tragic!' could effortlessly trump almost any othercomment, however witty, acerbic or impassioned. The problem is hownot to rob the word of this peculiar charge while not being jealouslyexclusive about it either.

`Tragic' and `very sad' are indeed different notions; but this is notbecause the former is technical while the latter is drawn from ordinarylanguage. `Sad but not tragic' is not the same kind of distinction as `erraticbut not psychotic', `cocky but not megalomaniac' or `flabby but notobese'. The long-standing spouse of the expired elderly person might wellfeel the event as tragic, even though it is neither shocking, fearful, catastrophic,decreed by destiny or the upshot of some hubristic transgressionof divine law. `Tragic' here means something like `very very sad' forthe spouse, and just sad or very sad for everyone else. R. P. Draper tellsus that `there is an immense difference between the educated and uneducatedintuitions of the meaning (of tragedy)', but it does not follow,as he seems to imagine, that `educated' intuitions are always the mostreliable. One might still protest that tragedy involves more than justsorrow, and in a sense one would be right. But so does sorrow. Sorrowimplies value. We do not usually grieve over the fading of a bruise, orfeel the scattering of a raindrop to be a melancholic matter. These are notdestructions of what we rate as especially valuable.

This is why there are difficulties with Paul Allen's definition oftragedy as `a story with an unhappy ending that is memorably andupliftingly moving rather than simply sad'. We shall see later that notall tragedies in fact end unhappily; but it is also hard to know what'simply sad' means. Can a work be sad but not moving? Perhaps `upliftingly'moving makes the difference; but it is not clear that Blasted,Endgame or A Farewell to Arms are exactly that, which is no doubt whyconservative commentators would refuse them the title of tragedy in thefirst place. But they would probably confer it on Titus Andronicus, TheJew of Malta or Antonio's Revenge, whose edifying effects are almost asquestionable. And Aristotle says nothing of edification. For one kindof traditionalist, Auschwitz is not tragic because it lacks a note of affirmation.But how far is the invigorating quality of a good tragedy thatof any successful work of art? And are we enthralled by the sadness,or despite it? Doesn't sadness in any case depend on a sense of humanvalue which tempers it, so that `simple sadness' is a somewhat spuriousentity?

The truth is that no definition of tragedy more elaborate than `very sad'has ever worked. It would, to be sure, be false to conclude from this thatworks or events we call tragedies have nothing significant in common.Nominalism is not the only alternative to essentialism, whatever postmoderntheory may consider. On the one hand, there are full-bloodedessentialists such as Paul Ricoeur, who believes that `it is by grasping theessence [of tragedy] in the Greek phenomenon that we can understand allother tragedy as analogous to Greek tragedy'. For Ricoeur, one assumes,A Streetcar Named Desire is best illuminated by the Agamemnon. On the otherhand, there are nominalists such as Leo Aylen, who declares that there isno such thing as tragedy: `There are only plays, some of which have alwaysbeen called tragedies, some of which have usually been called tragedies'.But this, as with most nominalism, simply pushes the question back a stage:why have these plays always or usually been called tragedies? Why havesome of them not been called pastoral or pantomime instead? RaymondWilliams notes that `tragedy is ... not a single and permanent kind of fact,but a series of experiences and conventions and institutions'. But thoughthis is true enough, it fails to answer the question of why we use the sameterm of Medea and Macbeth, the murder of a teenager and a mining disaster.

In fact, tragedy would seem exemplary of Wittgenstein's `family resemblances',constituted as it is by a combinatoire of overlapping featuresrather than by a set of invariant forms or contents. There is no need tolanguish in the grip of a binary opposition and suppose that because themembers of a class lack a common essence, they have nothing incommon at all. As early as 1908, the American scholar Ashley Thorndikewarned his colleagues in his work Tragedy that no definition of tragedywas possible beyond the egregiously uninformative `all plays presentingpainful or destructive actions', but few seem to have taken his point.Aristotle's description of tragedy in the Poetics in fact makes little referenceto destruction, death or calamity; indeed he speaks at one point ofa `tragedy of suffering', almost as though this might be just one speciesof the genre. The Poetics is well into its argument before it begins to usewords like `misfortune'. As an early instance...