Charles François Jalabeat, "Antigone Leads Oedipus Out of Thebes" (1849)

The tragic consciousness, for those who sieze upon this dimension of their humanity as the core of their aesthetic perspective, cannot be abandoned once embraced; it is not one of many possible consciousnesses, it cannot be picked up and dropped for another like one among a number of colorful balls with which a child plays; one who genuinely embraces it cannot turn from it for comedy, melodrama, or another consciousness, then check back every few weeks to see that the abyss continues to threaten — “Yep, just checking in, still there,” goes the response before one turns away again. It is an embrace that colors the whole of perception. Other operas pale in comparison to Tristan und Isolde, as other drama pales in comparison to an authentic tragic consciousness in drama and theatre.

That one can devote one’s aesthetic life to the investigation of this consciousness, as both creator and as spectator, is an avenue open to all: though tragedy as form and genre may be elitist, the tragic consciousness, available to anyone, is democratic. Of course, one enjoys comedies, for it’s always a delight to laugh at the follies of others and oneself; and there is no issue so serious that it can’t be eased with laughter. But it is eased: catharsis more readily inheres in comedy, not tragedy, which is why satire not only closes on Saturday night but is grossly ineffective for anything outside of amusement. For Schopenhauer, tragedy is an avenue to the compassion that forms the basis of the ethical life; the comedy or the musical is almost by definition condescending, places the spectator above the dramatic event in judgment upon the foolishness of a play’s characters. (Even Aristotle did not see judgment as a product of the tragic experience; pity and terror, yes, but not condescension upon the tragic figure.) Indeed, the true polar opposite to comedy, which produces laughs, is melodrama, which produces tears, not tragedy; tragedy produces awed silence. It is one of the great foolish cliches of our drama that it is harder to write a good comedy than a good tragedy; the opposite is the case; most of us would prefer to laugh than witness silently, making the comedian’s job that much easier.

Jean-Pierre Vernant writes on the tragic consciousness in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, considering what is repaid to the spectator for his inerrant, uncompromising and focused attention on the tragic perspective. I note that it is essentially a contemplative experience: that his acquisition of a tragic consciousness requires a perspective unavailable to the protagonists on stage, a recognition of ambiguity and conflict:

It is only for the spectator that the language of the text can be transparent at every level in all its polyvalence and with all its ambiguities. Between the author and the spectator the language thus recuperates the full function of communication that it has lost on the stage between the protagonists in the drama. But the tragic message, when understood, is precisely that there are zones of opacity and incommunicability in the words that men exchange. Even as he sees the protagonists clinging exclusively to one meaning and, thus blinded, tearing themselves apart or destroying themselves, the spectator must understand that there are really two or more possible meanings. The language becomes transparent and the tragic message gets across to him only provided he makes the discovery that words, values, men themselves, are ambiguous, that the universe is one of conflict, only if he relinquishes his earlier convictions, accepts a problematic vision of the world and, through the dramatic spectacle, himself acquires a tragic consciousness.

So for the ancient Greeks; I wrote about the tragic consciousness in the work of Howard Barker here.