Tragedy and the Return of the Dead by John D. Lyons (review)

In this erudite and wide-ranging account of tragedy, John D. Lyons suggests that in asking what tragedy was or in pronouncing its death, we are blind to what tragedy continues to be today: ‘widespread and unrelenting’ (p. 5), albeit mostly in non-theatrical form. Writing against the dominant nineteenth-century idealist vein, which has depicted tragedy as fleetingly rare and beautifully sublime, Lyons attunes us to the darker enduring themes and forces of tragedy so as to recognize ‘the continuum between the characteristics of early modern tragic texts and similar later texts [that] were and are designated by other terms’ (p. 193). Concomitant to the claim that tragedy persists is the notion that its emotional foundations have largely remained the same. The kinds of actions that fuelled the passions that the Ancients designated as tragic — horror/disgust, fear, and grief — are still operative in works of the present day. As a result, tragedy is knocked off its lofty pedestal and applied to popular culture. Lyons’s demonstration is strikingly pedagogical in tracing tragedy’s extension from the Greeks and Romans to the early modern period, up to twentieth-century cinema, ranging from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (dir. by Don Siegel, 1956) and Psycho (dir. by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) to La Jetée (dir. by Chris Marker, 1962), and, revealing his viewing habits, the Spanish Netflix teenage drama series, El Internado (2007–10). Since the working concept of the tragic does not hinge on genre, the applications seem almost limitless as long as a ‘sudden, usually violent, misfortune [.. .] befalls someone or some group in a way that seems particularly sad or even unjust’ (p. 6). Each of the four chapters considers the various facets of tragedy’s enduring motifs (‘Home and Hearth’, ‘Burial and Care of the Dead’, ‘Specters’, and ‘The Aesthetic of Fear’), seeking to understand the continuities from Sophocles to Hitchcock outside of a precise historical context or audience. In following the persistent horrors associated with tragedy across the centuries, the study is enlightening in its jumps across genres and eras, but it can also feel dizzying in its leaps from one work to another. For instance, in the chapter on spectres and the ‘undead return’ (p. 135), over just a few pages Lyons moves from illustrating Racine’s ‘imaginary spectral time’ via Thésée’s return from the under-world as a kind of time-travelling ghost, to a consideration of Martin Guerre’s doubled body return, put in parallel to Corneille’s Héraclius, and culminates in identifying how The Invasion of the Body Snatchers ties into Aristotle’s Poetics. At times, the works verge on serving as vignettes of the broad tragic themes identified, but the early modernist Lyons reveals himself to be surprisingly deft at moving from author to author. In fact, some of his most brilliant readings address Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe, and Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquète (2013) as part of a legacy, reaching back to Antigone, according to which we ‘deflect phantoms’ by building literary monuments to the dead (p. 96). Devoid of jargon and exceedingly clear, this study persuasively illuminates the Western world’s enduring depiction of and attraction for the tragic.