Outrageous Fortune: The Case for Tragedy
By Emilie-Noelle Provost | August 28, 2024 |
In 2016, when the film Manchester by the Sea was released, I went to see it with a friend. The movie, directed by Kenneth Lonergan, tells the story of a reclusive, down-and-out janitor, played by Casey Affleck, who has lost his children in a house fire caused by his own negligence. Depressed and antisocial, he’s forced back into the land of the living after the sudden death of his brother, when he becomes the legal guardian of his teenage nephew.
Although the movie was sad, it spoke volumes about our ability as individuals to overcome almost unbearable circumstances, grounding and humanizing the sort of horrendous catastrophe that is all too often politicized or used to boost ratings by the mainstream media.
As my friend and I were walking out to the car after the movie, my friend said, “If I’d known how depressing that was going to be, I would have stayed home.”
I didn’t mention it at the time, but I loved Manchester by the Sea. I wasn’t the only one. The film was nominated for six Academy Awards and won two: Best Actor and Best Screen Play.
In Poetics, Aristotle’s famous essay on Greek drama, he wrote that the purpose of tragedy is to “arouse sensations of pity and fear, and to purge [the audience] of these emotions so that they leave the theater feeling cleansed and uplifted, with a heightened understanding of the ways of gods and men.”
Anyone who enjoys listening to the blues knows how this works. It’s also the reason that some of the most revered and beloved works of literature in the English language are tragedies.
Because they offer insight into the human condition, often exhibit circumstances that foster societal plight, and promote critical thinking, tragedies were once standard curriculum in high school and college English classes.
In the late 1980s, when I was in high school, we read Shakespeare’s Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar.
As freshmen, we cringed and wrung our hands after learning the fate of Thomas Hardy’s Tess, the protagonist of his masterwork, Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Poor Tess never had much of a chance.
My sophomore year, we spent a week discussing the suicide of Willy Loman, the sad-sack anti-hero of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
I’ll never be able to forget Melville’s luckless Billy Bud, hanged by his neck from the yardarm for a crime he didn’t commit, or the murder of Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lovesick millionaire, shot to death in his own swimming pool.
These works of literature and others like them can be tough to get through. But, in my opinion at least, the cultural, ethical, and spiritual enlightenment tragedies offer outweighs any emotional burden they might impart.
And yet, sometime over the last thirty or so years, tragedies fell out of favor. Novels like Of Mice and Men and The Scarlet Letter make up a large percentage of the books that have been banned in certain parts of the country. Perhaps this is a result of the general backlash against anything even remotely intellectual that’s run rampant in the U.S. for the past few decades, or maybe it’s a consequence of the current trend of not letting students, or anyone, see or read anything that could trigger negative feelings or that presents a point of view with which they or their fellow citizens might disagree.
In tragedy’s absence, we have fostered the creation of a culture that worships at the altar of Hallmark, with all of its hollow characters and contrived happy endings. Our society is more polarized and divided than at any time since the Civil War. We kill one another in the streets; gun down schoolchildren in cold blood, and yet claim not to have the stomach to read Elie Wiesel’s Night.
It’s time we brought Anna Karenina and Oedipus Rex back.
We need Revolutionary Road and The Bluest Eye because these types of stories lead us to an understanding of the human condition that evokes empathy. They help us learn to forgive one another’s missteps and imperfections and to recognize, even rail against, injustice, regardless of the sex, color, religion, sexual orientation, age, or ethnicity of its victims.
Tragedies teach us that life is unpredictable and unfair; time is precious; love and loyalty are often stronger than the forces that seek to undermine and destroy them, and that it’s possible to be resilient when confronted by forces beyond our control.
One of my favorite novels is Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Set during the French Revolution, the book spins a dramatic tale of true love, monstrous corruption, and unjust death in a way that only Dickens can. I still cry every time I get to the end of the last page, not because the ending is sad, although it is, but because the circumstances it describes always feel far too familiar.
What is your favorite tragedy and why?
What do you think tragedy’s place is in contemporary literature?
Emilie-Noelle Provost is a writer, editor, and author who lives in a northeastern Massachusetts mill town with her husband, daughter, and three crazy rescue cats. She is an avid hiker and a fan of European crime dramas.
Emilie-Noelle has worked as an editor for four magazine titles and has written and published hundreds of articles. She is the author of two novels. The Blue Bottle, a middle-grade adventure with sea monsters, was published by North Country Press in 2018. Her second novel, The River Is Everywhere, the coming-of-age story of a Franco-American teenager, was a finalist for a 2023 National Indie Excellence Award, a 2023 American Fiction Award, and a 2024 American Legacy Book Award. The novel was published in March 2023 by Vine Leaves Press.
She is currently working on a series of novels set in Île d’Orléans, a historic island in the Saint Lawrence River near Québec City.
[coffee]
I appreciate this thoughtful post, though I take a slightly different (but related) view: what we need are stories that offer complexity, ambiguity, and—yes, acts of nobility.
Life is hard, and people are familiar with loss, fear, disappointment, and depression. Thus, the popularity of stories with upbeat endings that let us participate (briefly) in a world where everything works out in the end. It’s understandable. But, personally, I look for stories about unexpected acts of goodness and generosity in the face of uncertainty, imperfection, and the general messiness of life. Not comedies. But not tragedies either. Stories that call us to be better than we thought we could be …
I loved this!
Probably the first tragedy I actually read was Gone With the Wind then the Iliad. But in the course of time, I don’t knock the Hallmarks anymore because too much tragedy in your face and then one must escape. Somewhere. Like Hallmarklandia. Or the guaranteed HEA.
Your post speaks to my point of view, because when I taught English to juniors in high school, many of the works you listed were what we read and discussed. This was a group of young people who didn’t have much, but they did have imaginations and they did have empathy. Our discussions often led to their comparing the characters to their own lives, which works when you are in your teens. Literature has many positives to offer us, and being able to inspect our own lives in comparison to a character in a novel, is often the true benefit for readers…young and old. But in our current culture, readers, young people are so influenced by material things, that when I might have dreamed of being a queen like those in literature, good or bad, today it is Taylor Swift. Our tendency for fun, brightness and money comes to us from inner sadness, immaturity and misunderstanding. Maybe that is why I am having trouble finding an agent for my novel, which speaks to real life, to sorrow and the strength we take from it. Great post.
Tragedies caution us, too. They make a point. They come about because of human flaws and social shortcomings. The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird are tragedies. Mystic River is one from recent decades, a favorite of mine.
One element that matters in a tragedy is the narrator who survives to tell the tale. Someone must witness, weave the context and tell us that we will survive. Tragedies are sad but need a way for us also to hope. The surviving narrator is that note of hope.
Great post! My favourite tragedies were Gone With the Wind, To Kill A Mockingbird, Mystic River, Revolutionary Road.
Frankly, I’ve been surprised that one of my novels, which brings readers to tears, has been so successful. Set in what is now Ukraine, the story shows how one woman manages to survive despite what life throws her: wartime, life in a refugee camp, typhus epidemic, the Bolshevik revolution, her daughter’s forbidden love, and losses no mother should endure. We learn from tragedies. We identify with struggle and sometimes connect with those in our own families who’ve soldiered on despite the dark clouds hanging over them. There’s comfort in knowing we are not alone; there are others who’ve suffered hardship, too.
I could not agree more, Emilie-Noelle. I found this part of your post especially on point: “these types of stories lead us to an understanding of the human condition that evokes empathy. They help us learn to forgive one another’s missteps and imperfections and to recognize, even rail against, injustice.”
Tragedy as a form took its earliest step into the foreground during the rise and ultimate decline of Athenian democracy as it lost the Peloponnesian War. I believe that tragedy, by focusing on human limitation and weakness, is crucial to dispelling the hubristic narcissism, vanity, and resentment that corrupts the democratic sense that we are all in this together, none of us exists on an exalted or more virtuous plane above the rest, and that even the great have damning faults. It is the antithesis of hero worship.
Camus argued that there are only two great periods of tragedy in the west–the Athenian period and that from Shakespeare to Corneille–because these were periods when a fundamentally deistic interpretation of the human condition was giving way to a more secular, humanistic one.
About 15 years ago I wrote an essay titled, “Noir, Tragedy, and Other Dreary Bummers,” in which I contrasted tragedy with noir and made the following few points of possible relevance here:
Sophocles is credited with the invention of the tragic hero and he used the word “deinos” as a descriptive. It is normally translated to mean “terrible, wondrous, strange,” and his heroes were seen as both repellent and admirable.
The Sophoclean hero was also unique at that time for his isolation, especially in relation to the gods, who were largely absent. Euripides, a successor of Sophocles, went one better. His gods weren’t absent, they were regrettably all too present: petty, callous, and vengeful.
In the plays of both Sophocles and Euripides, the protagonist faces a crisis in which disaster can only be averted by a compromise that, in the hero’s view, would constitute betrayal of something he or she holds to be supremely important. The hero refuses to make this compromise and, as a result, is destroyed.
Aristotle, writing a century later in his Poetics, argued that the best tragic protagonist was neither a righteous nor villainous man, but “a man not pre-eminently virtuous and just, [but] whose misfortune . . . is brought upon him not by vice or depravity but by some error of judgment.”
In noir, however, one often finds a protagonist whose misfortune is brought upon precisely by vice or depravity—his own. Think Frank Chambers in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Think George Neff in Double Indemnity.
But though it shares a lack of sentimentality with tragedy, noir discards the necessity for “the moral nobility of suffering” one often finds in tragedic drama. In noir, even nobility is seen as sentimental.
Interestingly, however, one thing noir and the Greek tragedies have in common is their appearance in the course or aftermath of a lost war. The “neo-noir” films of the late 1960s and early 1970s—The King of Marvin Gardens, Scarecrow, Mean Streets, Midnight Cowboy, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Dog Day Afternoon, The Friends of Eddie Coyle and, of course, Chinatown—are a case in point. Though America had not yet “lost” Vietnam when some of these movies appeared, there was an overwhelming sense that it had lost something.
Sorry if I went on a bit too long. Fascinating topic. Thanks for bringing it up here. And thanks for mentioning Redemption Road–I’m returning to it at the moment, and finding it astonishing.
Lost war produces tragic literature? Wow, yes. Economic depression produces comedy? Makes some sense.
So where are we now? What do we need from our literature?
Dennis Lehane–I agree with you about Mystic River, btw–once remarked that we saw a resurgence of noir, which he defined as “blue-collar tragedy,” during the 1990s because the supposed great prosperity of the tech revolution and its battle cry of “Innovation!” left most working class communities behind. That disconnect created the need for stories about the forgotten refusing to be discarded so easily.
That situation has hardly improved, with polarization worsening, to the extent a candidate for president can claim that the real enemy of America is not external but internal.
I’m not sure if there’s a particular form that speaks exclusively to that, but I think stories about people striving to find common ground in pursuit of something bigger than themselves would serve the moment pretty well.
Interesting side note: In the wake of WW2, which we won decisively, there was nevertheless a number of stories in its aftermath that addressed corruption, prejudice, greed. The post-war honeymoon didn’t last long–1944, while we were arguably turning the tide, saw some of the best crime dramas of the decade: Phantom Lady, Double Indemnity, Gaslight, Laura, The Woman in the Window, Murder My Sweet). People wanted to be entertained but not with simplistic or sentimental fare.
P.S. There was a “hip” priest in our parish in the late 1960s who gave a sermon once about Easy Rider and other films of that time, comparing them to the Neo-Realist films of Germany and Italy after WW2, noting that both those former films and the contemporaneous ones in the US, with a similar sense of defeat, often had journey motifs as the characters traveled across the country as though to ask, “Who are we now?”
I remember (I think I remember) that, according to Aristotle, one of the conditions of a tragedy was that its tragic figure had to be someone of significance–in ancient times, a king or royal figure, later, someone who represented something greater than just his/her person. Willy Loman as Everyman (Anyman of his time), maybe. The point, I think was that a sad story is not necessarily a tragedy; to achieve that distinction, it had to depict a figure and an event in which we could see ourselves in relation to a great (universal?) truth. This provoked a lot of discussion about which plays were tragedies and which were imposters, and then whether modern tragedies, that is those with modern tragic figures, were even possible.
It seems to me that the essence of tragedy has to do with the idea that one of our ideals has been violated or defeated. Something’s happened that shouldn’t have, that feels wrong, or as someone said unfair, and that that is the way of things whether we like it or not, and is significant for that reason. That’s where the mysterious feeling of catharsis, the purging of pity and fear, arises–that the event has greater significance than just the action.
Or maybe that’s just me.
“Yes, Bob, it’s just you,” says no one. :-)
I like the idea of a seeing ourselves in relation to a great truth, that our ideals have been violated or defeated. I think that’s on the money.
Great post, Emilie-Noelle! (And I use that word sparingly.) I’m afraid the lack of interest and appreciation of tragedy is part of a lack of empathy in society in general. Witness the rise in acts of violence, racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism — the list is alarmingly long. A current of suspicion and hostility is being fomented by certain political leaders who stand to benefit from it.
“…these types of stories lead us to an understanding of the human condition that evokes empathy. They help us learn to forgive one another’s missteps and imperfections and to recognize, even rail against, injustice.” This really resonated. My favorite tragedies are that of Thomas Hardy. I’ve wept reading Tess and Jude. Oh, the sorrow over the unfairness of life. One hopes they have reconciled with their Maker so that eternity is love and light for them. Then there are the Bible stories too, the rich man who walks away from Jesus, the older brother of the prodigal…I often wonder about their lives after the story ends. They also serve as a cautionary tale. But I love the HEA equally. It’s so satisfying. This is what we’re made for–to love, to be loved. These stories also serve to show how one can get there after being tested in the crucible.
Be sure to leave a foreboding, a hint of tragedy in your happy endings.
Ah, a play on the twisted wish :)