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In his article on tragedy (Diogenes, No. 7), Mr. Charles G. Bell has offered us some provocative insights and opinions. I am compelled to question, however, some of the basic concepts he brings to the interpretation of tragedy.
It would seem that Mr. Bell, despite the depth of his thinking, has embraced several of the current clichés, which perhaps have their origin in the writings of A. C. Bradley. Critics adhering to this school hold that, for one reason or another, it is not possible to write tragedy in the twentieth century and that no work ending in bleak pessimism or despair is tragic. Mr. Bell, combining literary and historical criteria, is particularly severe in his limitation of the field of tragedy and the possibilities open to it. If I read him aright, only Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and the earlier Sophocles (before he fell from grace) have ever really earned admission to the exclusive realm.
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- Copyright © 1956 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
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1. And in particular the sense of his soliloquy. "What a piece of work is a man…." See my article, "Hamlet, Don Quijote and La vida es sueno: the quest for values," Publications of the Modern Language Association, 1953. It is enough to state here that Mr. Bell's quotation from Schopenhauer, which he considers a perversion or misinterpretation of tragedy, applies precisely to Hamlet's experience: "We are brought face to face with great suffering and the story and stress of existence; and the outcome of it is to show the vanity of all human effort … we are … prompted to disengage our will from the struggle for life."
2. The disillusion and bitterness for which Mr. Bell condemns Ibsen is true also of Hamlet and Othello. Ghosts is not tragic, because it meets none of the conditions of the tragic ex perience, and not because it makes us feel that "life should be beautiful." For again, this is precisely Hamlet's feeling, and the root of his troubles. But Mr. Bell does not perceive, in the quotation with which he closes his article, Hamlet's defeat and apathy, his resignation to the futility of human effort.
3. In closing the doors of life behind her, Lavinia reaches the highest tragic stature. Proud ly, she assumes full responsibility—existentially. She defiantly rejects ethical guilt or atonement, which a Raskolnikov, for instance, or Calderón's Segismundo accepts, losing their position as exceptional beings. In a valueless universe, in a night without stars, she asks no one to forgive her but herself. But she is perfectly aware of having trespassed beyond the limits life allows, aware of the necessity of her defeat, the impossibility of escape from "the infernal machine." After the greatness of carrying will to the confines of human possibilities, she has the greatness to reject death as the easier way, and seeks an even more tragic punishment. In tragedy, man achieves a victory, for he has dared to defy the unbeatable forces that oppose him; he emerges from the conflict the loser, but the greater in his existential stature. Mourning Becomes Electra leaves us with an unforgettable impression of Lavinia's indestructible integrity, of her in vincibility even in defeat. She satisfies Bradley's requirement, that the tragic hero must have great qualities of mind and heart that have been used with wrong, so that we carry away a feeling of tragic waste.