Is Shakespeare "more tragic" than the Greeks?

[Sitaram]

I was in a bookstore, the other night, buying a copy of Sophocles Antigone & Oedipus Rex, to help out in another thread on fate/destiny,

http://online-literature.com/forums/...ad.php?t=12791

and someone asked me if I thought that the tragedies of Shakespeare are more tragic than the tragedies of the ancient Greeks. This seems an interesting, imaginative question, so I thought I would post here, and see what others think.

Title lines are not always large enough to accommodate a title which will truly do justice to a topic.

The title of this thread is Is Shakespeare "more tragic" than the Greeks?

but perhaps a fuller title, to do justice, would be:

Is Shakespeare "more tragic" than the Greeks, and are modern tragedies most tragic of all, in light of Existentialism's definition of freedom and responsibility?

In other words, can we detect, from ancient through medieval to modern drama an ongoing progression away from fate and God and religion and predestination and towards a humanist vision of freedom and responsibility?

As a little aside remark, regarding freedom and responsibility, I would like to quote to you an anecdote related to my by a long-time pen-pal living 2 hours journey North of Kuala Lumpur.

She grew up on a rubber plantation. One day, she complained to her father asking him why he would not give her more freedom. He wisely answered "I am happy to give you all the freedom you desire once you have shown me that you are capable of shouldering all the responsiblity which such freedom entails."

[mono]

Dictionary.com defines 'tragedy' as:

1. a. A drama or literary work in which the main character is brought to ruin or suffers extreme sorrow, especially as a consequence of a tragic flaw, moral weakness, or inability to cope with unfavorable circumstances.
b. The genre made up of such works.
c. The art or theory of writing or producing these works.

2. A play, film, television program, or other narrative work that portrays or depicts calamitous events and has an unhappy but meaningful ending.

3. A disastrous event, especially one involving distressing loss or injury to life: an expedition that ended in tragedy, with all hands lost at sea.

4. A tragic aspect or element.

With lots of committment, I have managed reading all of the tragedies (and comedies) of William Shakespeare, and quite a few tragedies from the ancient Greeks. Whether one can term Shakespeare's tragedies more "tragic" than Oedipus Rex, for example, seems more a matter of opinion than fact.
Shakespeare really wrote some tragic material (read Hamlet, MacBeth, and Titus Andronicus, for example), but a reader can see where he may have had some influence from some of the ancient Greeks, including Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus; but, no doubt, those brilliant Greek playwrights gained inspiration and influence from other sources also, but perhaps not as much from literature.
Interesting question. Thanks, Sitaram.

[Sitaram]

The question "are Shakespearean tragedies more tragic than Greek tragedies" arose during a conversation about fate/destiny/necessity/predestination/election vs. freedom. And that discussion arose because I am trying to help the person who posted in the Sophocles sub-forum regarding fate/destiny in Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannis.

What I had been saying (to the person in the bookstore) is that there is a kind of spectrum which ranges from the gods of Hesiod and Siddhartha Gautama, who are subject to fate and necessity and karma, ranging to Allah, who is not even bound by Allah, but may abrogate*** and revoke and change rules, and ranging all the way to a godless world of Sartre in which we are CONDEMNED to be free, and condemned in the sense that we must take total responsibility for all actions and consequences. SO, the idea is that, somehow, for the Greeks, someone like Oedipus is predestined or fated to suffer certain things, and there is nothing he can do to escape it,.... whereas for Shakespeare, there is perhaps MORE freedom of choice available to his characters, and hence MORE TRAGIC in the sense that those who suffer COULD have conceivably acted otherwise... so, when something tragic is unavoidable, then perhaps it is less tragic and more inevitable that something which COULD have been avoided. This is more or less where the question is coming from. I don't know if all this casts the question in a different light, or sheds more light.

<=============F O O T N O T E S==============>
***

(There is a noticible difference in these three translators' interpretation, but I think that the underlying idea is the same, when stripped of all rhetoric.)

YUSUFALI: None of Our revelations do We abrogate or cause to be forgotten, but We substitute something better or similar: Knowest thou not that Allah Hath power over all things?

PICKTHAL: Nothing of our revelation (even a single verse) do we abrogate or cause be forgotten, but we bring (in place) one better or the like thereof. Knowest thou not that Allah is Able to do all things?

When I look at my old copy from 1970, I find that it reads "Surah 2, verse 106, "Such of Our revelations as We abrogate or cause to be forgotten, we bring (in place) one better or the like thereof. Knowest thou not that Allah is Able to do all things?

SHAKIR: Whatever communications We abrogate or cause to be forgotten, We bring one better than it or like it. Do you not know that Allah has power over all things?

He who is master of himself is slave to himself. Hence a Deity who is bound by its own word and is therefore voluntarily self-limiting (think of Tsimtsum, the divine contraction, which we encounter in the Life of Pi by Yann Martel), is not quite as powerful as a Deity who is not even bound or limited by its own words but may abrogate or change anything.

Compare and contrast with the Judaeo-Christian portrait of the Deity

"with Whom there is no shadow of turning" (James 1:17),

Who is "the Lord, who changeth not" (Malachi 3:6),

Whose Word "endureth forever" (I Peter) 1:23-25

for God cannot lie (Heb. 6:18),

[mono]

What I had been saying (to the person in the bookstore) is that there is a kind of spectrum which ranges from the gods of Hesiod and Siddhartha Gautama, who are subject to fate and necessity and karma, ranging to Allah, who is not even bound by Allah, but may abrogate and revoke and change rules, and ranging all the way to a godless world of Sartre in which we are CONDEMNED to be free, and condemned in the sense that we must take total responsibility for all actions and consequences. SO, the idea is that, somehow, for the Greeks, someone like Oedipus is predestined or fated to suffer certain things, and there is nothing he can do to escape it,.... whereas for Shakespeare, there is perhaps MORE freedom of choice available to his characters, and hence MORE TRAGIC in the sense that those who suffer COULD have conceivably acted otherwise... so, when something tragic is unavoidable, then perhaps it is less tragic and more inevitable that something which COULD have been avoided. This is more or less where the question is coming from. I don't know if all this casts the question in a different light, or sheds more light.

Wow, Sitaram, I never thought of it that way, but I certainly see what you mean - how fascinating!
How true that in Shakespeare's plays (and even in contemporary plays), there seemed a decreasing trend in advising oracles, and knowing one's future, though inevitable (as in Oedipus' case, for example). Out of all of the Shakespearean tragedies, I feel most familiar with Macbeth and Titus Andronicus, and, in neither of them, no characters knew what trouble followed.
Whether this makes Shakespeare plays more 'tragic' necessarily than the ancient Greek plays, I still question, but I see how the events' spontaneity could contribute to its tragedy. Thinking of it: what would you feel would make a larger tragedy in your life - knowing something approaches that would forever and inevitably ruin your life (even if you attempted escaping it), or something entirely unpredictable that would additionally ruin your life?
What happened to Lavinia in Titus Andronicus seemed absolutely out-of-the-ordinary, unpredictable, and very tragic, which anyone can admit; yet, no doubt, what happened to Oedipus seems also tragic, but, according to his oracle and Tiresias, the future king proved doomed to such a fate, no matter how diligently he tried avoiding it.
How interesting to think about - which sounds more tragic: being doomed to an inevitable fate, or catching tragedy by chance?
Such a question, I think, may really depend on a person's beliefs and psychological disposition. Julian Rotter in the 1960's formed the psychological theory of the "Locus of Control," in which a person tests either with an internal locus of control or external. Someone with an internal LOC tends to believe he/she determines fate and/or destiny through determination, diligence (basically, that one has control over his/her life); on the contrary, someone with an external LOC tends to believe that external forces (fate, destiny, luck, chance) have control over his/her life.
Knowing this, some of the playwrights' beliefs, I think, shine through. Could the characters of Macbeth have made wiser choices to avoid their tragedy? Perhaps. Could Oedipus have made wiser choices? No, Sophocles made his fate unavoidable.
Wow, this thread will keep my head wandering all evening.

[Sitaram]

I am so glad if I can come up with a thread which is "unsettling", not that it is my wish to bother people, but I would like to come up with a good question once in a while. And to unsettle a mind of Mono's calibre is something of a feather in my cap (aside to the audience, I admire Mono's posts).



After four years of St.Johns-Annapolis-seminars-on-the-great-books, I became quite frustrated that there seemed to be no answers, but only unanswerable questions. I even came up with the notion that the unanswerable question is the unmoved mover of the soul.

I apologize that this thread, this train of thought on which I am about to embark, may seem not so related to Shakespeare. But I ask the readers' indulgence, since I feel for several reasons that the Shakespeare sub-forum is the best place for this thread. Shakespeare's tragedies are midway, historically between the ancient Greek tragedies and modern tragic novels and movies. People with a broad foundation and interest in Shakespeare may likely be drawn to this forum. And I would really like to see a discussion develop which could clearly integrate our understanding of a Shakespearean tragedy with the ancient Greek understanding and the modern understanding, and perhaps tie it all in with free choice versus fate/necessity.

I think I remember Could'a Should'a Would'a being the title of some popular self-help book on Cognitive Therapy, the brand of therapy where you learn to see your glass as half full rather than half empty.

Some people waste their lives, tormenting themselves with:
I could have majored in this field,
I should have married that person,
I would have done more traveling if it were not for my mother's neediness.



I have always been haunted by the underworld scene in the final pages of Plato's Republic, where all the souls draw lots to choose new lives to be born into. Each soul is driven to choose what it assumes to be something opposite to the sufferings of its former life. A tyrant chooses to become a peaceful swan. A slave chooses the life of a tyrant, only to discover in horror that he is destined to eat his own children. Only Odysseus, who chooses last, chooses wisely by choosing a middle of the road citizen in a free society.

I suppose one might call "Death of a Salesman" a modern tragedy. I'm not sure. I am "in over my head" in these matters.


I am thinking of recent movies I have seen on DVD. One in particular, sticks in my mind as a modern tragedy; "Damaged" with Jeremy Irons.

What I am about to write is a

S * P * O * I * L * E * R

for anyone who has not seen this movie,
so read on at your own risk.

It seems to me that there are three figures in the movie which might be potentially called tragic, but for me it is only Jeremy Irons, in the closing scene, who is the real "tragic figure". I just now intentionally avoided the word "hero" because what Jeremy Iron's character does is considered by society to be heinous and despicable. Jeremy Irons plays a very successful, respected, well-to-do, high ranking government official with a wonderful attractive wife and a fine grown son. The son is involved in a serious relationship (marriage bound) with a young woman. It is the young woman who is "damaged", which we learn as the story develops. As a child, she was involved in an incestuous relationship with her brother for literally years and years. In her late teens, she developed an interest in other men and wanted to break off things with her brother. She locks him out of her bedroom one night and he spends hours outside her door wailing and moaning with inconsolable grief, because he is totally addicted to her. Then, there is only silence. She comes out of the room to discover that the brother has committed suicide. It is this incest/suicide which forever damages the young woman in the sense that it makes her addicted to the thrill of very dangerous reckless forbidden incestuous behavior and also makes her quite amoral and unfeeling, perhaps amoral to a psychopathic degree.

When this "future fiancée" first sees the strikingly handsome and distinguished Jeremy Irons, from across a crowded room, she instantly sets her sights upon him as her victim of prey.

It is the nature of the male to be very vulnerable to any slight chance for sexual pleasure, especially of the forbidden variety, and opportunistic in circumstances which appear to lend themselves to success.

No words pass between Juliette Binoche (the "damaged" voluptuous young woman) and Jeremy. She makes eyes at him, he is somewhat shocked, his mouth dropping ever so slightly, but senses that there is willingness and opportunity. Later, he receives a mysterious phone call requesting that he come to her apartment. He unhesitatingly complies and goes to see her. Again, no words are spoken. They instantly commence to violent love-making.

I suppose Jeremy reasons that it is just a secret fling of excitement and that no one will ever find out. One could hardly imagine that Jeremy would choose this course of action with his eyes wide open IF he could foresee that it would mean his own son's death, his public scandal, loss of home and job, divorce from a wonderful wife, and a wretched life in a remote village, brooding daily on a wall-sized enlargement of a photograph of Juliette, his son, and himself.

At one point, Jeremy approachs Juliette with an offer of marriage. He naievely assumes that somehow his son will one day understand. Juliette's response is so interesting: "You mean to say, you want to marry me, and wake up every morning with me beside you, and sit with me each morning at the breakfast table, reading your paper, before work?" "Yes, of course!" he answers. "But," Juliette continues, "you already have that with your wife. And it bores you. What we have is exciting, forbidden, unspeakable, hidden..." I am paraphrasing all this from memory, but I think you get the gist and drift of it.


For me, Jeremy Irons plays the tragic figure, because, although he does have the freedom to choose to at least try to forget and move on with his life, he remains mesmerised before that photographic enlargment, which fills the wall of his single room, in his remote village. The character played by Juliette moves on with hardly a thought. She has gone beyond equanimity and become truly psychopathic, with a little black hole vortex in place of a soul, where each an every monstrous act and thought can dissapear with never a twinge of guilt, remorse, regret. She reminds me of Daisy in Gatsby, who can walk away from the guilt of vehicular homicide without a second thought. At least, Lady MacBeth has the common decency to go mad and scream "Out damn spot!".

One of the greatest wisdoms expressed in the Bhagavad-gita is the wisdom of equanimity, the well-tempered, even-keeled spirit, which does not lose its balance in the face of great joy or great sorrow. But, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. As Nietzsche said, "Beware, when you stare into the void, the Void begins to stare back into you."

It is a measure of guilt and shame which keeps us decent in the face of indecent desires and impulses.

Balance seems to be key. The middle way is essential. Too much guilt and conscience and we become melancholy, neurotic, mawkish, maudeline, hopeless and depressed. No guilt or conscience at all and we become psychopaths, serial killers, Hannible Lechters, smacking our lips at the thought of eating someone's liver. with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

[Sitaram]

I suppose this rambling that I am engaged in demonstrates one way to make the classics come alive as part of our daily life and thoughts.

Modern drama, at least some of it, is the product of people who have been at some point students of Shakespeare and the classics.

And what can we see in history which constitutes "tragedy"? Our word "tragedy" has taken on such broad dimensions. Mass genocides, mass suicides such as in "Jonestown, Guyana", suicide bombings and the threat of nuclear or biological world war are certainly some of the lyrics to the theme songs of modern tragedy.

If human life ends as a result of global warming, or an ice age, or an asteroid impact, then we would deem that a tragedy, but not so tragic as an avoidable tragedy, let us say, our irrevocably upsetting the delicate balance of the ecosystem through the wanton tampering of our genetic engineering. The real fuel to the flames of any hell is our eternal regret, that we could have avoided so much suffering if only we had acted differently.

What is the last tragedy? Will the last tragedy even have an audience to applaud or boo it, or critics to give it rave reviews or a "thumbs down"? What is the ultimate tragedy?

The thought occurred to me yesterday that the ultimate tragic figure is an omniscient and omnipotent deity who fails in his creation. But then, the merest hint or suggestion of such a tragic deity is blasphemy in any religion. God is beyond good and evil!

Another good movie to consider as an example of tragedy is Forbidden Planet

S * P * O * I * L * E * R

A scientist lands on a deserted, dead world, once inhabited by the most godlike, technologically advanced race the universe has ever known, the Krell. The Krell discovered how to harness limitless power to be at the beck-and-call of their own thoughts, but they forget about the "monsters of the id", and hence they destroyed themselves. The scientist, with his daughter, taps into this same power and technology. A rescue party fails to heed the warning not to land, and the entire tragedy is reenacted. Though there is the element that the scientist himself was not aware of "the monsters of the id". It is only the dying words of the ship's officer which reveal the terrible secret.

We may, in theory, repent of sin, and perhaps even be forgiven or forgive ourselves, but can we ever repent of tragedy?

Socrates debates whether the same person might be the master of both comedy and tragedy.

It seems to me that tragedy is at it's most tragic when someone is the sole author of their own tragedy, and had the means to foresee such tragedy and destruction from the very begining, and yet chose to proceed with their destructive course of action in spite of their knowledge of the consequences.

[Sitaram]

As Kierkegaard once said, “Life must be lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards."

Is great literature our portal to understanding life in retrospect?

Happiness is such a fragile bubble, such a delicate balance of having what we want and wanting what we have. Upset that balance, burst that bubble, and we have tragedy inchoate.


Was Pharoah of Egypt, drowning in the Red Sea, a tragic figure?

To this day, Jews commemorate the suffering of the Egypt in the Passover Haggadah with ten drops of wine from the goblet, one drop for each of the ten plagues and mourn the suffering and loss of the Egyptians.

There is an obscure but fascinating "river of fire" theology among the Greek Orthodox Christians which suggests that heaven and hell are the same place, the same divine love of God, which simultaneously comforts the righteous and torments the wicked.

Zoroastrian eschatology describes a "lake of fire" which is soothing to the righteous, like warm milk, but scalds the wicked.


Can heaven and hell be the same place?

(Can the tragic and the comic unite?)

God is a consuming fire. (Heb. 12:28-29)


The three children in the firey furnace, in the Book of Daniel, are joined by a forth, angelic, figure, nor are they consumed or harmed by the flames, but the kings guards who approach the furnace door for a closer look are instantly burned to a crisp by the inferno.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...r=7&version=50

The Book of Daniel, Chapter 7, verse 9

Vision of the Ancient of Days
"I watched till thrones were put in place,
And the Ancient of Days was seated;
His garment was white as snow,
And the hair of His head was like pure wool.
His throne was a fiery flame,
Its wheels a burning fire;
A fiery stream issued
And came forth from before Him.

How does one exctract an entire theology from this short passage?

God will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.

Yet, in Exodus, we read that ten times, Moses came to Pharoah and said "Let my people go" but God hardened Pharoah's heart.

Why does God harden Pharoah's heart if he desires that all be saved? What can this mean. Why doesn't God soften Pharoah's heart and lead him into the wilderness with Moses?

http://www.christiansonline.cc/forum...9&page=4&pp=10

This does not mean that God on purpose made Pharaoh sinful. For God to make it impossible for a man to obey Him, and then punish him for his disobedience, would be both unjust and contrary to the fundamental Jewish belief in Freedom of the Will. The phrase most often translated 'hardening of the heart' occurs nineteen times; ten times it is said that Pharaoh hardened his heart; and nine times the hardening of Pharaoh's heart is ascribed to God. There thus seem to be two sides to this hardening. When the Divine command came to Pharoah, 'Set the slaves free,' and his reply was, 'I will not,'; each repetition of Pharaoh's persistent obstinacy made it less likely that he would eventually listen to the word of God. For such is the law of conscience: every time the voice of conscience is disobeyed, it becomes duller and feebler, and the heart grows harder. Man cannot remain 'neutral' in the presence of Duty or of any direct command of God. He either obeys the Divine command, and it becomes unto him a blessing; or he defies God, and such command then becomes unto him a curse. 'It is part of the Divinely ordered scheme of things that if a man delibertately chooses evil, it proceeds to enslave him; it blinds and stupefies him, making for him repentance well-nigh impossible.' (Rabbi Raihm) Thus, every successive refusal on the part of Moses froze up his better nature more and more, until it seemed as if God had hardened his heart. But this is only because Pharaoh had first hardened it himself, and continued to do so. The Omniscient God knew beforehand whither his obstinacy would lead Pharoah, and prepared Moses for initial failure by warning him that Pharaoh's heart would become 'hardened.'

We are created from dust, and the dust becomes clay, and the clay becomes hardened and irrevocably shaped by our every freewill choice, and then placed in the furnace for eternity.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Existence precedes essence.

From a Judaeo-Christian perspective, God, who is outside of the temporal, foreknows the outcome of all of our freewill choices and yet that foreknowledge in no way robs us of our freewill at the moment we make the choice.

It is sort of like Shroedinger's famous quantum cat, which is neither dead nor alive, until it is observed.

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. ~ Joseph Stalin

The quality of mercy is not strained, but can the quality of tragedy be amplified; a million Oedipus here, a billion Hamlets there, six billion Romeos and Juliets?

And who shall be left to draw the stage curtains upon the final scene?

It's curtains for ya all, SEE! Curtains!

(exit stage left)...

[Sitaram]

http://www.rwe.org/comm/index.php?op...=25&Itemid=203

Take a look at Emerson's essay on Fate

People are born with the moral or with the material bias; -- uterine brothers with this diverging destination: and I suppose, with high magnifiers, Mr. Frauenhofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to distinguish in the embryo at the fourth day, this is a Whig, and that a Free-soiler.

The secret of the world is, the tie between person and event. Person makes event, and event person. The "times," "the age," what is that, but a few profound persons and a few active persons who epitomize the times? -- Goethe, Hegel, Metternich, Adams, Calhoun, Guizot, Peel, Cobden, Kossuth, Rothschild, Astor, Brunel, and the rest. The same fitness must be presumed between a man and the time and event, as between the sexes, or between a race of animals and the food it eats, or the inferior races it uses. He thinks his fate alien, because the copula is hidden. But the soul contains the event that shall befall it, for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts; and what we pray to ourselves for is always granted. The event is the print of your form. It fits you like your skin. What each does is proper to him. Events are the children of his body and mind. We learn that the soul of Fate is the soul of us, as Hafiz sings,

Alas! till now I had not known,
My guide and fortune's guide are one.

Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity. If we thought men were free in the sense, that, in a single exception one fantastical will could prevail over the law of things, it were all one as if a child's hand could pull down the sun. If, in the least particular, one could derange the order of nature, -- who would accept the gift of life?

Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity, which secures that all is made of one piece; that plaintiff and defendant, friend and enemy, animal and planet, food and eater, are of one kind. In astronomy, is vast space, but no foreign system; in geology, vast time, but the same laws as to-day. Why should we be afraid of Nature, which is no other than "philosophy and theology embodied"? Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements, we who are made up of the same elements? Let us build to the Beautiful Necessity, which makes man brave in believing that he cannot shun a danger that is appointed, nor incur one that is not; to the Necessity which rudely or softly educates him to the perception that there are no contingencies; that Law rules throughout existence, a Law which is not intelligent but intelligence, -- not personal nor impersonal, -- it disdains words and passes understanding; it dissolves persons; it vivifies nature; yet solicits the pure in heart to draw on all its omnipotence.

[mono]

Wow, Damaged and Forbidden Planet both sound like some interesting films; I will have to search around for them.
In an odd manner, I think this thread haunted me yesterday and this morning, and I still cannot deviate Shakespeare's tragedies from those of the ancient Greeks, besides, what you suggested, Sitaram, the immense involvement of fate and destiny in Greek plays, as opposed to the more abrupt, but not unexpected, events of Shakespeare's plays.
Even more odd, you read my mind when you printed this:

Existence precedes essence.

From a Judaeo-Christian perspective, God, who is outside of the temporal, foreknows the outcome of all of our freewill choices and yet that foreknowledge in no way robs us of our freewill at the moment we make the choice.

It is sort of like Shroedinger's famous quantum cat, which is neither dead nor alive, until it is observed.

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. ~ Joseph Stalin

The quality of mercy is not strained, but can the quality of tragedy be amplified; a million Oedipus here, a billion Hamlets there, six billion Romeos and Juliets?

.
Regarding what you posted, this morning, I began thinking of George Berkeley (bishop and philosopher in existentialism and metaphysics). In essence, the whole of two of his corresponding works (Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonus) state that "for everything perceived, there must exist a perceiver" (slightly different from what John Locke wrote). You read my mind in mentioning "existence precedes essence," the concept of a temporal Superior Being, Schrodinger's cat, and the quote from Stalin (which sounds especially true, much like the question: "if a tree fell in the woods, and no one heard it, would it make a sound?").
Indeed, neither Romeo nor Juliet's death would have mattered had someone never noticed - the same for Hamlet, Banquo, Macbeth. However, I find it interesting that Tiresias and the oracle consulted by Oedipus already perceived what would inevitably occur in the future; tragedy, in their minds, had happened before the actual event. How painful that must have felt, but what would feel worse - the psychological turmoil of some tragic upcoming event, or the event in itself?
Surely, at the end of your quote, several representations of Oedipus, Hamlet, Romeo, and Juliet could all die, but there must always subsist someone who carries the burden, calling it a tragedy, as the word 'tragedy' proves man-made, but death humankind can cause, yet never make; there always persists a perceiver of the event, because death proves Absolute, creating the tragedy in one's mind. In the latter parts of Oedipus Rex, one could call the "perceiver" Antigone, and in Romeo and Juliet the remaining Capulets and Montagues had to cope with such an event.
Well, I think that makes all my strange mind can type for now, but, no doubt, my head will persist its whirring on the subject, and I will probably type more. Thank you, again, Sitaram, for such a thought-provoking thread.

[Sitaram]

Forbidden Planet came out in the late 1950s and was the very first movie to have a sound track composed entirely of electronically synthesized music (e.g. moog synthesizers, I suppose)...

.....

All these things could make for a very interesting paper, since the subject involves literature, religion, philosophy, and even physics (quantum)... as well as political theory I suppose....

I am thinking of Hume's "gap" between "IS" and "Ought", that there is no fact which undeniably dictates some moral imperative..... (perhaps I am mistating Hume's gap)

.....

I want to see if I can dig more deeply into these matters.

I just did a google search on : shakespeare hamlet macbeth psychoanalysis philosophical theological

and came up with this worthwhile link:

http://www.designwritingresearch.org...ontinuum-3.doc

is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, where she has taught since 1989. She received her Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies from Yale University. She is the author (with Kenneth Reinhard) of After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Cornell 1992), and the author of Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford 1996) and Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (University of Chicago 2005). In addition to specialized articles in scholarly journals, Lupton has contributed to three MLA Approaches to Teaching volumes, and to the Bedford Companion to Tragedy (2005) and the Cambridge Guide to Marlowe (2003). Current projects include an essay on the sexualization of thinking for Alternative Shakespeares III.

Macbeth is as much about the cognitive causes and psychological after-effects of murder as it is about the crime itself. Shakespeare’s dramas of jealousy, Othello and The Winter’s Tale, stage the failure to think, its tragic husbands avoiding the risks of thought by hiding behind a screen of paranoid images.

...

Thinking “with” or alongside Shakespeare about matters of continuing urgency: Thinking is not an object of historical study or thematic representation, but rather an ongoing possibility for human being. Thinking “with” Shakespeare means using the plays as a means of approaching such issues as sexuality and subjectivity (Hamlet), minority and majority (The Tempest), autonomy and group membership (The Merchant of Venice), and politics and personhood (Measure for Measure) – in each of these plays, but also in our current moment.

In the play’s excruciating turning point (Act Three, Scene Three), Othello first resists, and then finally succumbs to, the “monster” lurking in Iago’s “thought,” “too hideous to be shown.” Shakespeare diagnoses jealousy as a monster of thought, a figment of the imagination that assumes a virtual reality in Othello’s mental world, directing his actions and ultimately destroying himself and his beloved. When Othello allows this monster to take root within his consciousness, he does so by accepting a debilitating image of himself as racially inferior and sexually inadequate:

Haply for I am black
And have not those soft parts of conversation
That chamberers have, or for that I am declined
Into the vale of years – yet that’s not much –
She’s gone, I am abused, and my relief
Must be to loathe her. (III.iii.267-71).

How interesting it is to compare this monster with the "monsters from the Id" in Forbidden Planet.

The ancient Greeks seemed more concerned with gods and fate, while Shakespeare and modern drama seems more concerned with "self".

The Bhagavad-gita says that the self can be the best friend or the worst enemy.

"Let a man lift himself by himself. Let him not degrade himself. Certainly self is friend to the self and self is also the enemy of the self.

"He who has controlled his self by his self, certainly his self is his best friend, but for him who has not conquered his self his self is his enemy.

"The self-conquered peaceful person is but the Supreme Self. For him cold or heat, happiness or sorrow, respect or disrespect are the same.

The hero's tragic flaw is a flaw of self, in self.

The mind is a good servant but a cruel master.

The mind is its own beautiful prisoner. - e.e. cummings

[Sitaram]

This morning, I would like to touch upon something Milan Kundera brings up, regarding tragedy, both in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and also in The Art of the Novel.

We shall be striving to articulate the nature of tragedy in modern drama, and how it differs (if it differs) from the tragedy of Shakespeare, and how they both differ from the tragedies of Sophocles.

As a preface to our exploration of what Kundera said, let us consider our own choices in a hypothetical scenario in which we are the victim.

Imagine yourself and your child being held prisoner by a madman who has total control over you both. Now, some who read this will be male and others, female, some shall be old, some shall be young, some with children of your own. You are free, in this what-if scenario, to imagine yourselves as a mother with a daughter, or with a son, or as a father with a daughter or a son.

Now, this mad man, who presently has you in his clutches, is quite well known. He always operates in exactly the same fashion. He is absolutely notorious for keeping his word in the bizarre offers of alternatives that he makes to his prisoners. Since it is a given that the madman will abide by his word, you must not allow into your reasoning that if you make a certain choice, that the madman will fail to live up to his word.

Consider this exercise a moral calculus, a what-if scenario in the spreadsheet of the imagination. It is an interactive create-your-own-tragedy in which fate, necessity, and your freewill all interact.

The madman has you and your child both securely bound. You see before you a surgical table with instruments, and next to it a bed. The madman tells you that you have several choices. Once you both make your choices and agree to it, he will makes certain that your choice is carried out, and then you will both be free to go, with no further harm. This scenario is a modern day Oedipus with a Sophie's Choice twist.

Here are the two broad choices that he presents to you.
Either, (1) You will choose between you which of you will climb upon the operating table and have your eyes surgically removed,

OR (2) you will both elect to climb upon the bed and perform some incestuous act.

Within the framework of these two main choices, you have some leaway of permutations and combinations of who suffers what and who does what to whom.

Your captor tells you that you will have one day to discuss your options, and then he will return and ask for your decision, and see that it is carried out.

He warns you that if you both fail to agree, and fail to make a choice, then you will both be tortured in the most hideous fashion imaginable, a fate worse than death, which shall last for weeks before you finally die.

If we really wanted to make this interesting, we could give our madman a weapon of mass destruction. He could tell you that if you refuse to choose, then he shall destroy the entire world together with all humanity and human culture. If we allow this, then you place yourself in a Christ-like position, as savior of the world, if you choose, at the price of taking sin upon yourself (for it is said that Christ literally became sin taking upon himself all the sins of all mankind, past present and yet to be born).


Now remember, Oedipus hears a prophecy that he shall kill his father and marry his mother, and when he discovers that it has come to pass, he puts out his own eyes.

One instructive assignment would be for you to write this as a story, and compose the dialogue which transpires between parent and child.

Sometimes, life itself is our cruel captor, forcing upon us terrible choices. Consider the expectant mother who is told that her fetus is seriously abnormal and the child will be born into a dreadful, pointless life of suffering and misery. You are then offered the choice of terminating the pregnancy or giving birth to the child.

I personally knew a man in his eighties who was diagnosed with cancer. He had the choice of undergoing very uncomfortable chemo and radiation therapy, in the hope that he might gain several extra years of life. He chose instead to take his one year of life expectancy, in relative comfort. During that year, he was able to do a little traveling, eat well, take a drink or two.


While you are pondering your predicament with your madman, I will now tell you what Milan Kundera says about Oedipus.

Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiently that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.

I am always mindful of Socrates point that no person willingly desires what is bad. Everyone by nature desires what they deem to be good (even madmen).

I am also always aware of Plato's Euthyphro problem: "Is the good good, ipso facto, by fiat, simply because God loves it, OR is there something objective, some inherent quality, in the nature of Goodness that inspires God to choose it. God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Sarah asks Abraham to father Ishmael. Madmen try to play God, but God never plays the role of madman.

Another movie I am going to suggest for consideration in this exploration of tragedy is Indecent Proposal. I shall mention more about that movie later, and it will be a SPOILER, so, forewarned is forearmed.

TULOB page 176 -

Then everyone took to shouting at the Communists; You're the ones responsible for our country's misfortunes...

And the accused responded: We didn't know! We ere deceived! We were true believers! Deep in our hearts we are innocent!

In the end, the dispute narrowed down to a single question: Did they really not know or were they merely making believe?

...

Is a fool on a throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?

...

It was in this connection that Tomas recalled the tale of Oedipus:

Oedipus did not know he was sleeping with his own mother, yet when he realized what had happened, he did not feel innocent. Unable to stand the sight of the misfortunes he had wrought by "not knowing," he put out his eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes.

When Tomas heard Communists shouting in defense of their inner purity, he said to himself, As a result of your "not knowing," this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt? How can you stand the signt of what you've done? How is it you aren't horrified? Have you no eyes to see? If you had eyes you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes!

The analogy so pleased him that he often used it in conversation with friends, and his formulation grew increasingly precise and eloquent.

I will now turn to what Milan Kundera says about Oedipus in The Art of the Novel

Afterwards, I will try to gather my thoughts and bring some of this to bear upon our original question regarding the nature of Tragedy (ancient, Elizabethan, and modern) and the connection between Tragedy and Deity, fate, destiny, predistination, necessity, chance and freewill choice.

Since each post is limited in string length to something like 100,000 characters, I shall continue this in a new post.

(continued as post #14 "The Art of the Novel" - Milan Kundera below)

[Scheherazade]

The madman has you and your child both securely bound. You see before you a surgical table with instruments, and next to it a bed. The madman tells you that you have several choices. Once you both make your choices and agree to it, he will makes certain that your choice is carried out, and then you will both be free to go, with no further harm. This scenario is a modern day Oedipus with a Sophie's Choice twist.

He warns you that if you both fail to agree, and fail to make a choice, then you will both be tortured in the most hideous fashion imaginable, a fate worse than death, which shall last for weeks before you finally die.

If we really wanted to make this interesting, we could give our madman a weapon of mass destruction. He could tell you that if you refuse to choose, then he shall destroy the entire world together with all humanity and human culture. If we allow this, then you place yourself in a Christ-like position, as savior of the world, if you choose, at the price of taking sin upon yourself (for it is said that Christ literally became sin taking upon himself all the sins of all mankind, past present and yet to be born).

That is not a tragedy! That is an ordinary, low budget Hollywood action movie! The only thing tragic about it would be actually watching it.

[Sitaram]

Aren't you slightly curious about what Kundera has to say, and where this inquiry might lead in the minds of various readers who take up the challenge? My suspicion is that it could be quite rewarding for some, say Mono.

But the secret to success is to hold our judgment in abeyance and not jump upon one detail in isolation and make some judgment or pronouncement regarding it. We must try to see the forest for the trees, and not commence to chopping wildly at the first tree we encounter which does not suit our fancy.

Even if it is the case that what I write each day is wrong or foolish or in bad taste, at least I make an extreme effort each and every day of my life to think hard and write hard and at least try to come up with something new. There must surely be some socially redeeming merit, earning me an "A" for effort, if nothing else. And when we crawl out on that limb, ever day, trying to come up with something new, we face criticism from many. It is a risky business to try and be original. But, at least, it is a business, if only monkey-business. It is preferable to idleness and burying our one talent in the sand, like that fellow in the parable.


Perhaps, one day, there shall be a mighty Judgment Day in cyberspace, and a virtual Shakespeare or Socrates will float down from heaven, click on our profiles, one by one, and sort each and every post in the scales of a balance, the worthwhile and interesting on the right, and the vacuous and trivial on the left. And on that fearful day, shall we see those ill-fated words "You have been weighted and found wanting" being traced by some divine finger upon our monitor?

Here we are, arch-enemies, dueling in cyberspace with our light-sabers. The fate of the entire universe is at stake! But which of us is Darth Vader? The real key to victory does not lie in chopping off one hand, because the cyborg surgeons just sew on a new, better hand. Anyone who feels like it may post in this thread, and single out one sentence or paragraph or comment, and disagree with it, and disagree violently. But the real victory will not be for someone to take their hachet and chop down one tree in the forest, and fashion it into a fancy coffee table. The real victory will be with the person who posts one single link. And that link will point to their entire work, where they do it right, the way Sitaram should have done it but failed, analyzing tragedy and fate and necessity and freewill from ancient to modern times, in one breathtaking night of power where we soar up to the highest heaven of heavens and bargain with Moses, and soar down to the lowest hell to learn unspeakable mysteries. Yes, imagination is the highest form of blasphemy. But I shall share in their victory, for my poor thoughts and failures will have served as their jumping-board of inspiration.


This is kind of a fun thread, is it not? We allow our minds freedom to wander far and wide over many things.

But then, Nabokov warns us that "Curiosity is the highest form of insubordination."

Mono, what do you say, since you are in on this.... shall we continue with our inquiry and allow our minds to range freely over the centuries, over all the many volumes in Borges "Library of Babel", or... is this curiosity of ours too insubordinate?

I will grant you that my what-if scenario does not fit the classical definition of Tragedy, and I do not claim that it has the makings of a literary masterpiece. It is an exercise, to get people to think long and hard about what is really important to them. Even silly mental exercises can lead to profound results, occasionally. As a teenager, Einstein imagined himself riding on a beam of light. Some people might see that as preposterous. But somehow, his armchair experiment led him to his more serious theories.

I just did a google search on : "sophie's choice" tragedy

and I come up with over two thousand links where people have chosen to speak of it as a tragedy. Perhaps it is not a tragedy by classical definition, but nevertheless a number of people have used the words tragedy to describe it, and you must admit, my example bears more than a little resemblance to the scenario in "Sophie's Choice". My example, by design, bears some resemblance to Oedipus, since it involve incest and self-inflicted blindness, and murder (patricide), if you add in the option of world destruction.

Perhaps the tragedy of Tragedy itself is that it has evolved into something second-rate for the general consumer public. Music becomes Muzak.

Which work do you feel most worthy to be called a modern Tragedy? I am sure there are several worthwhile candidates to consider. Perhaps Death of a Salesman?

Which movie in the past 50 or so years comes close to a classic definition of tragedy (and no fare citing movie version of Shakespeare or Sophocles)?

After all, this is just a thread, not stone tablets coming down from Mt. Sinai. We are just having some fun, at least I am.

These posts get into the search engines and potentially attract a wide audience of readers. Even poor posts of foolishness, like mine for example, can be good showmanship in the sense that they lure unsuspecting readers with poor taste to the forum, but then, little by little, they wake up to the foolishness of what I write, and move on to be genuinely educated by the posts of the truly knowledgeable. Think of it as Plato's Noble Lie, which ultimately makes good citizens out of everyone.

[Sitaram]

(a continuation of Milan Kundera on Tragedy from post # 11 above)

We have seen what Milan Kundera says about Oedipus in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (TULOB).

Oedipus is a figure who becomes aware of his crime and then seeks his own punishment of self-inflicted blindness.

Now, let us look at what he says about crime and its punishment in The Art of the Novel (TAOTN).

Kundera discusses the Comic and the Tragic in the world of Kafka.

We may see Kafka as that elusive fellow which Socrates spoke of in the Symposium, the one who is master of both Comedy and Tragedy.

(In The Castle) it is a small consolation to the engineer to know that his story is comic. He is trapped in the joke of his own life like a fish in a bowl; he doesn't find it funny. Indeed, a joke is a joke only if you are outside the bowl; by contrast, the Kafkan takes us inside, into the guts of the joke, into the horror of the comic.

In the world of the Kafkan, the comic is not a counterpoint to the tragic as in Shakespeare; it's not there to make the tragic more bearable by lightening the tone; it doesn't accompany the tragic, (the Comic) destroys (and annihilates the Tragic) in the egg (while it is still inchoate and nascent) and thus deprives the victims of the only consolation to be found in the (real or supposed) grandeur of tragedy. The engineer looses his homeland and every body laughs.

(Sitaram experiments with adding a soundtrack of applause and laughter to Silence of the Lambs)

Raskolnikov cannot bear the weight of his guilt, and to find peace he consents to his own punishment of his own free will.

In Kafka, the logic is reversed. The person punished does not know the reason for the punishment. The absurdity of the punishment is so unbearable that to find peace the accused needs to find a justification for his penalty: the punishment seeks the offense.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/enc/stories/s70778.htm

David Zane Mairowitz: Well of course Jews in Prague at that time are Jews anywhere in Eastern Europe at that time who were always considered to be the outsiders and did not have all the rights that non-Jews had, and couldn't work wherever they wanted and so on. And for someone like Kafka, who immediately accepts the moral judgement of society against himself, if somebody points to him on the street and said, 'Dirty Jew', instead of defending himself, he takes that upon himself. One thing we know about Kafka is that he was always fascinated by animals. You find animals in his stories all the time. Of course he transforms himself into a cockroach and a dog, and a mouse, and so on. And a lot of this has to do with real epithets that were used against Jews at that time on the streets. Someone would see a Jew and say, 'You dirty dog', or 'You're nothing more than a cockroach', or something like that. For Kafka, this became a kind of literal condemnation which he accepted into himself. OK. 'You point a finger at me and call me a dog, the next thing I have to write is a story about a dog,' in which a dog has human qualities; or he transforms himself into a cockroach. A lot of this has to do with the anti-Semitism that was absolutely rampant all around him at the time.

...

the mythical Bible, that is, the (Old Testament) is a huge book of stories where man is ... totally rotten, it's not at all like the New Testament. In the Bible you see no-one is saved, the (essential nature of man) is to fail, to be evil; David is an adulterer... So I think Kafka knows about that but he has the freedom that Jews have (this is my opinion of course, it's not at all something that I can theorise in a way that would be orthodox). I think there's a kind of freedom that Jews have because there's no dogma. You know, the Bible is Shakespeare before Shakespeare; it's just a mass of Macbeths, of King Lears, of Richard IIIs, but it's a vision of mankind which is absolutely merciless, and so it's true to reality. So I think that it gives Jews the freedom to look at human beings as being tempted. They're tempted beings. They're not saved, they're tempted.

http://spurious.typepad.com/spurious/tragedy/

The tragic heroine is thrown against necessity; she is abandoned to what she cannot know and cannot determine. Freedom, necessity: the former breaks against the latter. The grandeur of tragedy lies in her rebellion. She is dashed to pieces - but for a time, she brought herself into a splendid freedom.
...

Hamlet is a mutation of the violent revenge tragedy, a play focused on dilemma and not revenge. Its protagonist does not have the reassurance of the mastery of thought or of action; Hamlet vacillates – not because he is planning perfect actions; when he acts, he does so rashly and his actions miscarry. Nor is it to give him time to think for he allows thinking to fall back to that region where decision is impossible, to a madness of indecision, a yes-no without resolve.

‘To be or not to be …’ Hamlet longs for death, but he fears hell; he will not take his life for fear of what will happen to him after death. But if he cannot make an alliance with death, he cannot live, either. He cannot open a path to resolute decision; he does solitary combat with the absurd.

...

Hamlet ‘understands that the “not to be” is perhaps impossible and he can no longer master the absurd, even by suicide’. ‘Hamlet is precisely a lengthy testimony to this impossibility of assuming death’; ‘To be or not to be’ is a sudden awareness of this impossibility of annihilating oneself’. Hamlet cannot escape; to exist, not to exist are each as impossible as one another. In the third act of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet cries ‘I keep the power to die’; Hamlet does not have this power. Freedom does not triumph over fate, but is overwhelmed by it.

...


What can be retrieved of Greek tragedy today? Schelling and Hölderlin understood each in his own way the fatedness of the tragic for our age.



‘Our age’: but what does this mean? Schmidt, to whose excellent On Germans and Other Greeks I am indebted here, gives a clue: Kant argues that limits do not merely belong to human experience but are its condition; then it is possible to write what might be called a ‘tragedy of reason’. See the opening sentence of the first Critique with the reference to the ‘peculiar fate of reason’.

By the way, take a look at what L. James Hammond has to say about Tragedy and "the desire to die".

http://www.ljhammond.com/cwgt/02.htm#33

[Sitaram]

If you did choose to do the exercise of the "what-if" scenario, and if you chose self-inflicted blindness, then it seems to me that you choose to imitate Oedipus in his horror at the thought of incest. Why does Oedipus blind himself. Does Oedipus have a choice?

For me, the greatest tragedy in Oedipus is that he chose to blind himself when he could have chosen to get on with his life.

If I were in the what-if scenario, I would definitely choose incest over blindness, and if faced with the choice of blinding myself vs. the destruction of the human race, I hope I would have the courage to preserve the human race at any personal cost to myself.

Hamlet resists the temptation to harm himself, and in the end, he gains revenge and justice, even if it costs him his life.

There are honorable and valiant ways to sacrifice ourselves, and then there are tragic and selfish ways.