Tragic Poetry and the Cultural Foundation of Power: A Re-examination of Franco Moretti’s Theory of Tragic

Abstract

Franco Moretti posited in his 1983 book, Signs Taken for Wonders, that we live in a post-tragic and anti-tragic age in which tragic has been replaced by compromise both in fiction and in the modern lyric. The present article tries to re-examine Moretti’s conjecture in a historic period which has given up compromise and revived the tragic. In Moretti’s terms, tragic’s condition of existence involves “a civilization irreparably divided between hostile entries and values”. Whenever history allows this radical division between two irreconcilable systems of values, tragic finds a literary form of expression. In this article, tragic’s main contemporary elective form in Ukraine is poetry, while fiction seems somewhat slower in keeping pace with the rapid tragic of history. Moreover, the diary as a confessional genre closer to poetry is also a medium more suitable for the contemporary tragic than fiction. Read by tens of thousands, maybe even more, Ukrainian poetry and diaries are the direct proof of a return to a tragic era, confirming Moretti’s 1983 diagnosis: tragic works within and against the absolutist ideologies. Tragedy may indeed be “an unrepeatable ‘exception’ in the history of literary forms”; but the substance of tragic finds its contemporary expressions in this age of anti-compromise in confessional poetry and, to a lesser extent, in other confessive genres (diaries and memoirs). Tragic poetry is a response to the reappearance of the cultural foundation of absolutist power; its confessional nature is an attempt to rehumanize a history unleashed against the human.