SOME REFLECTIONS ON TRAGEDY

1 R S O M E R E F L E C T I O N S O N T R A G E D Y C . K . W I L L I A M S In the course of working on my translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, translated with Gregory Dickerson (1978), and Euripides ’ Bacchae (1990), I have had the occasion to read a great number of theories about tragedy. With all I’ve read, though, I’ve been left in my own reflections on the subject with an essential puzzle to which I have never found a satisfactory answer. The puzzle consists of the simple question of why we inflict tragedy on ourselves, why we allow ourselves to be put into an aesthetic situation in which, at the very least, we will be in proximity to terrible anguish and su√ering, and why, when we are in this proximity, when we are so close to these obsessions and slaughters, these insane vengeances and self-devouring families, do we feel that something worthwhile is happening to us? Aristotle has given us the concept of catharsis, the idea that by beholding the tragic activity, by submitting ourselves to the pity and the terror it entails, we are mysteriously psychologically and spiritually purified, taken out of ourselves and cleansed. But when I consider what actually happens to me when I read or see tragedy on the stage, this isn’t a very accurate description of my responses, or my thoughts about those responses. All these unlikely goings on, 2 W I L L I A M S Y these obsessions and slaughters, these insane vengeances, these self-devouring families: to have pity be such a large factor in describing our response to tragedy seems to me not enough. The Greeks, as we’re well aware, knew these myths and stories by heart. Educated people even today are presumed to have at their command at least a cursory knowledge of those tales and myths that play such a large part in our cultural heritage. But even if we didn’t, we would still quickly realize that the force of the tragic doesn’t lie in the surprise or the suspense it o√ers us; our most a√ecting, poignant, readings of tragedy are never the first: as with lyric poetry, our responses are instead intensified by our second or fifth or tenth reading. The terror we feel, then, is at best moderated, because terror implies in some way or another suspense, the unknown, the unanticipated , and in fact there is almost no suspense in Greek theater. Anxiety, the unknown we fear enough to make us tremble, has finally to do with outcome, with what will or might come to pass to terrorize us, and that is never the real issue in Greek tragedy. Although we hold our breath when in the Bacchae we hear the recounting of Pentheus’s death and dismemberment, our interest is not in what has happened to him – we are assumed to already know that – but with the poetry in which these terrible events are expressed , and, just as important, with how we will respond to them. I’ll o√er a counterexample. In a film I saw recently, two characters play a game of Russian roulette, aiming at their heads a gun that has one cartridge in the otherwise empty cylinder and pulling the trigger. I found myself in a state of terrific anxiety as I watched this absurd game: I was actually covering my eyes the way I did in the movies when I was child. I couldn’t bear to behold what might happen. Though I knew the characters were fictional and that the actors playing them were not about to allow their skulls to be blown apart for the sake of their art, it still felt as though what was going on was too much for me, that I was going to be overwhelmed. Needless to say I wasn’t, but when I thought afterward about that frightening, really stupid business, I felt cheated, as though my emotions had been trifled with and, more important, that my...