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Cycle as Tragedy•
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Ibsen's
Cycle as Tragedy
by Brian Johnston
The Comfortless Zone of Tragedy
The Modern World as a Defective Work of Art; The Theme of Alienation
Addressing the Scale of Modern Alienation; Archetypal Recollection
IV. The Comfortless Zone of Tragedy
Tragedy lures us into an arena where we have to give up the defenses we otherwise use to protect ourselves. It creates a thematic logic so imperative that (the opposite of our reaction in everyday life) we would be indignant if the catastrophe were somehow pragmatically averted. Tragedy, in this (Greek) sense, is tough for a culture to assent to. Samuel Johnson, along with his contemporaries, famously could not bear to let the conclusion of King Lear stand:
A play in which the wicked prosper, and the virtuous miscarry, may doubtless be good, because it is a just representation of the common events of human life: but since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded, that the observation of justice makes a play worse; or, that if other excellencies are equal, the audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue.
In the present case the publick has decided. Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And if my sensations could add any thing to the general suffrage, I might relate, that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.[11]
That last sentence pulls us up before we start to laugh at eighteenth-century squeamishness. Johnson obviously responded to the tragic situation more keenly than most of us, and took its moral implications very seriously. There was a point in which he could no longer go along with the rules of the game Shakespeare was offering. He could not enter a tragic space that asked him to set aside his deepest moral feelings. Unlike the Greek audiences, sincere Christians such as Johnson could not believe that the cosmos, created by a God expressly for the benefit - or at least the fair triaI - of humanity, ultimately could not satisfy a human sense of justice. It is why they (along with Enlightenment rationalists like Voltaire) found it so hard to follow the Greek example of allowing tragedy to open onto an abyss where human rationality and divine or cosmic reality no longer coincided: where an Ajax could be cruelly toyed with and destroyed by Athena, an Oedipus made the object of a ghastly cosmic joke, or a Hippolytus, Pentheus or Phaedra hideously destroyed by unjustly indignant deities. (The formula of the "tragic flaw" seems a desperate misreading of Aristotle's harmartia to inject some moral comfort into the bleak zone of Greek tragedy.) The gods of Greek tragedy are amorally powerful forces and, like the cosmic forces of modern scientific thinking, they ultimately elude the human categories by which we try to identify them. This is the vision so unsettlingly recovered in Ghosts, where the tragic nemesis lies waiting in the blood of its innocent victim, and an indifferent sun rises to illuminate the scene of human devastation.
The understandable tendency of modern audiences is to protest, like Johnson, against the tragic rhythm taking over events. It simply is not fair that Helene or Osvald Alving, the most admirable characters in Ghosts, should suffer so appallingly even as the playbuilds up the logic that requires them to. Tragedy requires us to override moral perspectives and to recognize the tragic structure ultimately underlying reality. Tragic impartiality goes against the way in which we react to events in the world. There is a natural tendency to pull tragedy down from its uncompromising stance, to rehabilitate it in our world where we sensibly resist it by all means possible: moral, medical, legal, social, financial.
Roland Barthes describes the French interpretation of Racine which seeks
to domesticate Racine, to strip him of his tragic elements, to identity him with ourselves, to locate ourselves with him in the noble salon of classic art, but en famille; it seeks to give the themes of the bourgeois theatre an eternal status, to transfer to the credit of the psychological theatre the greatness of the tragic theatre. . [It is necessary] to renounce looking for ourselves in this theatre: what we find of ourselves there is not the best part, either of Racine or ourselves As with the ancient theatre, Racine's theatre concerns us much more, and much more valuably, by its strangeness than by its familiarity: its relation to us is its remoteness. If we want to keep Racine, we must keep him at a distance.[12]
The idea of Ibsen that emerges from much well-intentioned interpretation is of a troubled photographic recorder of nineteenth-century Norway and its social ills. The Norway he presents to us for deprecation, with some aesthetic license conceded to the constraints of the theatrical medium, is, we often are told, one that would have been recognized by any similarly shrewd and concerned observer of the scene (the enlightened commentator, perhaps?). The actual absurdity of this should be apparent to anyone who reflects on the plays and what they are depicting. Knock on any Norwegian door, the claim seems to say, and it will be opened by a haggard Karsten Bernick, a distraught Torvald Helmer, a devastated Helene Alving, a beleaguered Thomas Stockmann, a messianic Gregers Werle, a suicidal Rosmer and Rebekka, a near-schizophrenic Ellida Wangel, or a Hedda with her gun, and so on, all caught in mid-peripety-and-anagnorisis, perhaps-even without including a wandering cast of ghostly white horses, drowned sailors (called Johnston), uncannily summoned sirens, Rat Wives, and walking statues.
11. Samuel Johnson, "Notes on Shakespeare's Plays: King Lear," in Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 8 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 704.
12 Roland Barthes, On Racine, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 149.
