Tragedy

5. Germany

In the mid-eighteenth century, Johann Christoph Gottsched led a movement aiming to bring a strict and pedantic version of neoclassic French tragic theory and practice along the lines of Boileau to Germany. Though tragedy carried literary prestige, the forms prescribed by the rules were increasingly felt to be forced and unnatural, the elevated diction to be stilted, and the practice of èloignement – the distancing of characters and their actions from the audience in status, time and place – to be too remote from most people’s experience.Gotthold Ephraim Lessing gradually acknowledged the need to change the forms. His Miss Sara Sampson has been called the first really ‘modern’ tragedy; it is written in prose, with fictional (rather than mythological or historical) characters from the lower fringe of the nobility, and has a contemporary setting. His Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–8) articulates later ideas about tragedy, notably that the hero should not be admired but pitied, and that tragedy should enhance the audience’s moral awareness through this pity. Both Friedrich Schiller (see Schiller, J. C. F. §2) and Goethe wrote so-called ‘bourgeois tragedies’, spurning the requirement that tragedy should portray persons of noble birth.

Schiller’s views on tragedy grew out of Kantian metaphysics. He claims that the ‘play impulse’ unifies the phenomenal world (of determinism) with the noumenal world (of free choice). He thought that neoclassic French tragedy erred by overemphasizing reason: to be truly effective tragedy must strike a balance between reason and passion. The tragic hero is challenged by suffering to choose freely what is morally right.

August Schlegel sees the conflict between our aspirations to know both the (noumenal) infinite and our own (phenomenal) finite existence as the essence of tragedy. Our pleasure derives from the affirmation of human striving for something beyond ourselves, even though we suffer in the effort and are perhaps doomed to fail. Goethe’s Faust is a tragedy on this view, and Oedipus is tragic in that he attempts to do good, as opposed to what he was fated to do.

Hegel introduces a new paradigm for tragic theory in making the struggle between conflicting moral demands, each of which is justified on its own terms, central to the concept. By contrast, Aristotle does not include agon – conflict or struggle – in his account of tragic plots. According to Hegel, conflicts arise among various duties we have to family, the state and religion; and conflicts fester because each duty claims power over a greater domain than is warranted. These conflicting ethical claims form a dialectic that may, at least theoretically, lead to their rational reconciliation, in contrast with what he takes to be the ancient concept of tragedy, which focuses on suffering and depicts people as victims of overwhelming irrational forces, such as fate.

Hegel cites Antigone as the most perfect example of tragedy because the conflicts between the duties of Antigone and Creon are intimately connected with their lived relationships to each other. Creon, as king, commands obedience, doubly so from Antigone, who is betrothed to his son. She, however, chooses to pursue her filial duty to her brother Polyneices, even though it violates Creon’s command. They both refuse to recognize the justification of the obligation pursued by the other, and, in the end, both are destroyed. Antigone is entombed alive (the ironic converse of Creon’s command that Polyneices’ dead body remain unburied), with her sister (a tragic irony, given her desire to fulfil her duties toward her family at all cost). Creon is destroyed by the suicide of his son and then of his wife (more irony in implying that having no family is the only situation in which his ignoring claims on behalf of family would be justified).

According to Arthur Schopenhauer (see Schopenhauer, A. §§4–6), the essence of tragedy lies not in the conflict and hence struggle between two moral demands, as Hegel proposes, or in unforeseen consequences of our actions, as Aristotle has it, but in suffering itself. Suffering is due to the blind, irrational force of the Will and its unceasing demands. Schopenhauer borrows the idea of nirvana – the state of release from the compulsions of human will and desire – from Buddhist philosophy, and argues that the greatest tragedies show the resignation or surrender of the will, including the will to live. It is not replaced by a will to die, but by the disinterested pleasure in the momentary release from ‘the penal servitude of willing’.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) portrays two competing forces at work in human nature. The Apollonian force is calm, orderly, structured, harmonious and rational. It exemplifies the glory of the individual and the wisdom of the ancient Greek maxim, ‘Know thyself’. The Dionysian force is, by contrast, intoxicated, irrational, aggressive, disorderly, destructive and wilful. The tragic hero represents the Apollonian side, and the chorus, where individual identity disappears, the Dionysian. Recruiting the ancient notion of sparagmos or ritual dismemberment, the hero is annihilated, but in his destruction there is an affirmation of (Dionysian) life in a cosmic sense, which is united, as it was for the ancients, with dance and music. Nietzsche thus develops his own way of overcoming the conflict that is central to tragedy, rejecting Schopenhauer’s resignation to fate and instead championing the joyful identification with nature and, like Schopenhauer, the need to rise above the limitations inherent in concern for the individual self. (see Nietzsche, F.)