The Tragic Critic after 9/11

Abstract

In the Autumn of 2002, I Gave a Lecture on Mourning the Dead to Final-Year Undergraduates at the University of Cambridge studying the compulsory course on tragedy. The lecture covered the care devoted to the dead body in Sophocles'sAntigoneand Hamlet's reflections, over Ophelia's grave, on the “fine revolution” of the material corpse (5.1.82-83). But it also extended its range to include the then very recent excavation, for eight and a half months, at Ground Zero in search of the remains of the dead victims of the attack on the World Trade Center, and the simultaneous daily publication in theNew York Timesof “Portraits of Grief.” These portraits, I maintained, fulfilled a similar function to tragic drama by refocusing attention on the individual life and by finding a narrative arc to each victim's story, like Aristotle's tragic plots, which must have “a beginning, a middle, and an end” (26). While the firefighters' digging equipment at Ground Zero searched in vain for the missing remains of about 1800 people and eventually hit bedrock, the newspaper reinvested each lost person with significance, finding a value and a pattern in the person's life.