The Beauty of a Bad Ending: The Virtue of Tragic Stories

Abstract

The Beauty of a Bad EndingThe Virtue of Tragic Stories Sr. Elinor Gardner OP (bio) In recounting his youthful adventures in Carthage, the middleaged Augustine wonders how the tragic shows in that city could have so enthralled him. "Why is it," he asks, "that a person should wish to experience suffering by watching grievous and tragic events which he himself would not wish to endure?"1 What is this but amazing folly? For the more anyone is moved by these scenes, the less free he is from similar passions. Only, when he himself suffers, it is called misery; when he feels compassion for others, it is called mercy. But what quality of mercy is it in fictitious and theatrical inventions? … But at that time, poor thing that I was, I loved to suffer and sought out occasions for such suffering.2 Augustine raises two questions about tragedy and enjoyment: first, what is pleasant about tragedy? Why do we love watching people suffer things that we would hate if they were happening to us or to any of our acquaintances? Second, does this paradoxical "tragic pleasure" serve some greater good? Augustine ultimately seems to reject tragic pleasure, seeing in it [End Page 103] no positive good and, given the provocative, obscene, and idolatrous elements found in Roman theater, positive evil. In the City of God, Augustine mentions approvingly Plato's banishment of poets from the city: "Should we not here award the palm to a Greek: to Plato, who, in formulating his account of what a city should be like, prescribed that poets should be banished from the city as enemies of the truth? Truly, he could not bear to see base injury done to the gods, and he refused to have the souls of his citizens tainted and corrupted by falsehood."3 Yet Plato's view on poetry was not universally held by Greek philosophy. His disciple Aristotle presents a picture of tragedy as a form of art that belongs to a proper education in a well-ordered city. His famous definition of tragedy in the Poetics contains the seeds of an answer to both questions posed by Augustine: what is pleasant about tragedy and what good it serves. In what follows, I will examine Aristotle's definition, defending a certain interpretation of it in connection with moral education, and finally, suggest why tragedy still plays an important role in Christian education. Aristotle's Poetics The Poetics is a book about tragedy, though it also includes a discussion of epic poetry. In the sixth chapter, Aristotle offers a precise definition of the tragic play: "Tragedy … is an imitation of an action that is of stature and complete, with magnitude, that, by means of sweetened speech, but with each of its kinds separate in its proper parts, is of people acting and not through report, and accomplishes through pity and fear the cleansing of experiences of this sort."4 Like Plato, Aristotle conceives of art in general as imitative (mimetic).5 Imitation itself comes naturally to man and is naturally pleasing: "For just as to imitate is natural to human beings from childhood (and in this they differ from the rest of the animals in that they are the most imitative and do their first learning through imitation), so also it is natural for everyone to take pleasure in imitations."6 What [End Page 104] is being imitated in tragedy is action. The characters are revealed through the actions, but the actions are primary. When we go to see a drama, we expect to see the doings of the characters, to see them acting virtuously or viciously, doing good or evil, and not merely to hear their characters described. Imitations vary, says Aristotle, according to what is being imitated, the medium used for the imitation, and the manner or mode of imitation. Tragedy is specified in all three ways in the definition just cited: the kind of actions imitated must be of stature and complete, with magnitude; the medium of imitation is acting as opposed to report; and the manner of imitation is "sweetened speech," arranged in its proper parts. These elements will be discussed in more detail in...