The mask of tragedy at the Cutler Majestic Theatre at Emerson College in Boston, MA, a 1903 "Beaux Arts" style theater.
It is more useful to think of comedy and tragedy not as genres — those critic-concocted aspics in which individual plays are set — but as qualities of consciousness, of the recognition of metaphysical truths that arise from experience. They are the first principles through which the world is regarded by an individual. Perhaps the earliest expression of a central quality of the tragic consciousness was the choral statement that it were best that we were never born at all in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus; among the fullest philosophical expressions of these qualities may be found in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy and Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation; King Lear its greatest expression of the Renaissance; and more recently the plays of Samuel Beckett, Howard Barker and Sarah Kane. This conception frees us from the necessity of thinking of tragedy as a mere pigeonhole for multifarious works and more as a quality of imagination and perception, available not only to dramatists and artists but also to each individual spectator. The conception of human experience as tragic can arise either through time, over a period of years, or as epiphany, in the manner of Krapp on the jetty. It also allows us a greater flexibility in determining the operation of the tragic consciousness through works which might be considered comedies. There are, for example, the works of Jonathan Swift — nearly all of them parodic or satiric in intent, but underlying all a recognition of human suffering and stupidity of the most sublime, clear and tragic vision. In addition, Shakespeare’s late comedies and romances may also be conceived as comedies driven by a tragic imagination (thus confounding the attempt to rest these plays in the Procrustean bed of genre).
Once we have accepted the tragic as a quality of a dynamic, multidimensional individual human consciousness, we free it from the aesthetic sphere and place it in the realm of the experiential, where that quality may grow, change, become deeper. While its expression through various modes may be elitist (dependent on the valorization or rejection of this quality by the Culture Industry), the quality itself is not: it is a conception (arising from subjective perception) that colors experience and has profound consequences for human behavior, particularly in the expression of compassion. Once one has recognized the deepest, darkest manifestations of the tragic in one’s own self and world, it is impossible to then turn on a dime to a more amelioristic or comic consciousness without risking an untenable schizophrenia or pathological denial of those manifestations. If suicide is not a viable option or course (as Schopenhauer believed), the question then becomes, in the brief light between birth and death, what one is to do with oneself, how to perceive and interpret the world and behavior with which one is presented, and how one is to conduct oneself in a world fallen by its very nature. (The tragic consciousness seems to be the only means by which the twentieth century itself makes sense; to view it through a comic or melodramatic prism is either madness or idiocy.)
There are as many responses to those questions as there are sharers in the tragic consciousness. In common, however, they increase their awareness of the world as fallen, of progress and amelioration as illusions, and of humanity itself as inevitable, if unnecessary. In the realm of aesthetic creation, the tragic consciousness operates not only through the dramatist or individual writer; in the theatre, the tragic consciousness can also operate through performers, directors and designers, as it can operate through any individual. Their creative mission then becomes the exploration and expression of this consciousness and the means by which the Thing-in Itself, the Schopenhauerian Will, manifests itself in the world in human action. Out of this exploration and expression any number of works may grow: music, dance, poems, comedies, satires, and of course tragedies. But the single thread traceable through them is the tragic consciousness, and the contemplation of the world through that sublime perspective.
George -
Sidebar first: If our world is “fallen,” was there some earlier time, some halcyon, pre-tragic age, perhaps the one presented in Riane Eisler’s “The Chalice and the
Blade” or something else?
The main point: Say we accept the view of humanity that is basic to the tragic consciousness, could we, or should we, then be motivated to kindness, charity, tolerance, heroism (outside of the military context), and other virtues that might, if not transform the “fallen” world, at least improve material conditions and provide some degree of relief, however marginal?
Since your posts here focus on theater and the arts, such a question is probably outside the scope of Superfluities Redux, but I’m still interested in the question. If you wish, feel free to point me to sources that discuss such issues.
The emergence of consciousness itself could be said to be the act of the original Will that creates the “fallen world.” In human experience there could not be said to be a pre-tragic age, at least not one open to our experience, in this case.
The fourth book of WWR (as well as the two essays in AS’s “The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics”) sets out the argument that a “tragic consciousness” (and I must point out that this is not Schopenhauer’s coinage but my own) must inevitably lead to those values such as kindness, charity and benevolence — writ large, “compassion” — that make human experience, if not habitable exactly, then less cruel.
From a slightly different perspective, in Volume I of the collection “Parerga and Paralipomena,” you can find “Aphorisms and the Wisdom of Life,” Schopenhauer’s “guide to life.” From the introduction:
“In these pages I shall speak of The Wisdom of Life in the common meaning of the term, as the art, namely, of ordering our lives so as to obtain the greatest possible amount of pleasure and success; an art the theory of which may be called Eudaemonology , for it teaches us how to lead a happy existence. Such an existence might perhaps be defined as one which, looked at from a purely objective point of view, or, rather, after cool and mature reflection — for the question necessarily involves subjective considerations,— would be decidedly preferable to non-existence; implying that we should cling to it for its own sake, and not merely from the fear of death; and further, that we should never like it to come to an end.
“Now whether human life corresponds, or could possibly correspond, to this conception of existence, is a question to which, as is well-known, my philosophical system returns a negative answer. On the eudaemonistic hypothesis, however, the question must be answered in the affirmative; and I have shown, in the second volume of my chief work (ch. 49), that this hypothesis is based upon a fundamental mistake. Accordingly, in elaborating the scheme of a happy existence, I have had to make a complete surrender of the higher metaphysical and ethical standpoint to which my own theories lead; and everything I shall say here will to some extent rest upon a compromise; in so far, that is, as I take the common standpoint of every day, and embrace the error which is at the bottom of it. My remarks, therefore, will possess only a qualified value, for the very word eudaemonology is a euphemism.”
You can find a text of this online here:
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/wisdom/
Victor,
One needn’t slog through all four volumes of WWR to understand Schopenhauer. I read the Everyman abbreviated version, which you can find here:
http://www.amazon.com/World-Will-Idea-Everymans-Library/dp/0460875051
I wouldn’t call it a “slog,” exactly — the full work achieves an architectonic, symphonic majesty that the abbrieviated version can’t match, and nearly every page contains unique pleasures and insights. There’s much positive to be said about the Haldane/Kemp version that Dan references, but the E.F.J. Payne translation remains standard.
At least, it did until now. Cambridge University Press has just released a new translation by Christopher Janaway, Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman in their Cambridge Edition of the complete works series, which may well supercede it. I’ll be writing about this sometime in the future.
George:
Thanks for the excerpts. They answer my question sufficiently enough that I don’t have to wonder why you didn’t just drink yourself to death, and why you actually brought more human beings into the world.
For theological reasons (I won’t elaborate unless requested) I can’t myself adopt the tragic consciousness, but I acknowledge the dark side of humanity that informs it and understand how our long and tragic history could produce such a response.
Doesn’t the distinction between tragic and comic become even murkier in live theatre, where those terms are immortalized in a WingDing hieroglyph, the comedy-tragedy masks? A laugh is something more complicated than a pleasurable discharge of tension. There are as many kinds of laughs as there are tears, orgasms or people. And if humor is a form of perception (we call it our “sense” of humor, after all) then can’t it be a form of cognition, too? Yes, there is an ameliorative laugh, but not all laughing ameliorates. An audience may cohere around laughter, but just as often, they fracture over a misplaced laugh: whenever we laugh at something and hear the echo of our laugh as others watch quietly, or find ourselves the lone stone face in a pack of hyenas.