Tragic Art Research Articles

Introduction

To rethink tragedy is, of necessity, to acknowledge a history of prior thought. Indeed, the magisterial bulk and sheer weighti- ness of that history still cast a long shadow over the present. The subject of tragedy has preoccupied a formidable range of thinkers, from Aristotle to Hegel, from Schopenhauer to Lacan. Moreover, while the creation of tragic art may have waned in the modern era, interpretations of tragedy multiplied and proliferated. Greek tragedy, in particular, was often hailed as an exemplary source of insight into ethical and philosophical questions; in its very remoteness from the present, it could throw light on the dilemmas of modernity. As Dennis Schmidt has argued, the growing self-doubt of philosophy, the questioning of reason, analytical method, and conceptual knowledge as primary values, has much to do with the turn to tragedy, as the form that most eloquently dramatizes the stubborn persistence of human blindness, vulnerability, and error.1

Limits of the Story: Tragedy in Recent Virtue Ethics

I examine the role of tragedy within the ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre and Iris Murdoch. MacIntyre argues for a narrative conception of the self, stressing the need for coherence and intelligibility and for the virtues which promote them. Tragic dilemma presents a successful self with severe frustration but not with destruction of its overall project. Murdoch, on the other hand, holds little hope for the self's coherence, and in fact champions tragic art's capacity for disturbing and even disrupting the self's fantasies of control and coherence. Her virtues correspondingly help the agent to confront the tragic realities of life. I suggest one way to bring these two accounts, of tragedy and the virtues, together: by considering tragic experience in the context of moral pedagogy.

"Unidade de estilo" e educação dos impulsos em escritos de juventude de Friedrich Nietzsche

O presente artigo aborda a concepção de "unidade de estilo" forjada por Nietzsche nos escritos da época de professorado na Universidade de Basiléia. Pretende-se mostrar a conexão entre tal concepção e a defesa da necessidade de educação dos instintos, nesse momento da obra ainda fortemente associada ao conjunto de um povo ou cultura; no caso, a cultura grega. Ao centro, o desafio de se compreender a duplicidade de apolíneo e dionisíaco, para além da esfera estrita da arte trágica.

On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life (review)

Tragedy and philosophy have long been locked in a life and death struggle. By banishing the tragic poets from his ideal, philosophically cultivated community, Plato established philosophy's authority atop the corpse of tragedy. But more than two millennia later, the recognition of the limits of metaphysical thinking led some to call for a rebirth of the question of tragedy. Certain German philosophers, all united in a concern for the ethical and political significance of the exhaustion of Western philosophical thought, have thus come to reverse Socrates' banishment and have begged the poets back into thought's domain. Dennis Schmidt has written a thought-provoking study of the development of this peculiar interweaving of tragedy, philosophy, death, and (re)birth, focusing on the rehabilitation of ancient Greek tragedy by Hegel, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. After two preliminary chapters on the assessment of tragedy's political and ethical significance in Plato and Aristotle, Schmidt proceeds to examine what each of the German philosophers contributes to the rehabilitation of the question of tragedy. On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life purports to test the hypothesis that an examination of how all six of these thinkers evaluate and appropriate tragic art "provides unique insights into the possibilities for the ethical and political assumptions working in those philosophers" (3). As Schmidt shows, despite the varying assessments of tragedy by the Greek and German philosophers examined, the topic of tragedy asserts itself always as an urgent, ethical question of our shared existence in time.

BOOK REVIEW: Bernard Benoliel.PARRY BEFOREJERUSALEM: STUDIES OF HIS LIFE AND MUSIC WITH EXCERPTS FROM HIS PUBLISHED WRITINGS.Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1997.

Reviewed by: Parry Before Jerusalem: Studies of His Life and Music with Excerpts from His Published Writings Nigel Burton (bio) Parry Before Jerusalem: Studies of His Life and Music with Excerpts from His Published Writings, by Bernard Benoliel; pp. x + 233. Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1997, £49.95, $84.95. E. J. Dent once wrote of Sir Hubert Parry: “He differs from all other historians of music in that he approached musical history as a composer” (qtd. 177). Herein precisely lies the strength of the present volume: Bernard Benoliel has consistently adopted the composer’s standpoint in assessing Parry’s musical achievements. Thus one ignores the tiny flaws (the missed full stops, quotes without footnotes, and musical examples without tempo markings) as one is swept along in the maelstrom of the author’s passionate enthusiasm for his eponymous hero, and buoyed up by his shrewd and perceptive critical judgements. Parry was an artistic polymath, and to estimate his stature in the history of British music is no easy task. Benoliel makes the point that he was a Victorian through and through, despite his distrust of the upper classes (of which he was a member), his radical politics, and his “avid agnosticism” (4). As a man, he really was the near-saint that his pupils at the Royal College of Music made him out to be; yet “for all [his] many-faceted gifts—his warmth, generosity, [and] exalted nobility of feeling—he lacked the heart of darkness necessary to create tragic art” (68). Therein lies the root of the problem, for Benoliel is right in saying that if Parry now has any claim to immortality, it is on account of his compositions. Here, though, the author is in something of a cleft stick: he objectively and unsparingly identifies the causes of Parry’s limited powers, but subjectively cannot always accept them. Lavish praise is sometimes bestowed on music which is, frankly, ordinary; this is particularly true of the opening theme of the Piano Quartet in A flat (1879): the author calls it “a great tune” (43), adding that, with it “we hear for the first time since Purcell an authentic English voice” (41). This will not do, on two counts: firstly, the “great tune” turns out to be bowdlerized Robert Schumann, to which a coat of brown varnish from Johannes Brahms’s workshop has been applied; secondly, it takes no account of the many authentic native voices which existed in English music between 1695 and 1879. Benoliel takes this stance because he believes in the old shibboleth of the “English Musical Renaissance,” of which he calls Parry “the seminal creator” (116). This view—that Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford, and their followers were responsible for a sudden rebirth of British music from the 1880s onwards—is one that the perspective of time is failing to endorse. Evolution, not revolution, has been continual; it was this process which Parry enhanced (both as composer and musical historian), so that to claim he endowed British music with “a new vitality” (74) is just. Parry believed that the composer should be a public servant and moral instructor (Parry never needed to compose for money). As the author says, this was “not a wholly positive role-model for later English composers” (4). He makes a convincing case for concluding that Parry (subconsciously) “lacked love” (14), as a result of which he equated being solitary with being lonely. Here Benoliel the composer makes a vital point: solitude, for the artist, is sine qua non, since a precondition for “the [creative] process is concentrated self-removal from everyday life” (39). Moreover, Parry’s multiple duties did not permit enough time for dedicated composition, and he was scrupulously careful financially. The outcome was “a life that never focused around composition” (30). [End Page 556] Considering all this, it is perhaps remarkable that Parry the composer achieved as much as he did. Benoliel suggests that he was “capable of composing an effective opera” (36), but this seems highly unlikely, since Parry had little sense of the theatrical. Poetry was another matter, however; it always acted as an effective stimulus to his musical imagination, even though he believed (correctly) that “it...

Fascination: Faulkner's Fiction, 1919-1936 by Michel Gresset (review)

114Reviews The Ambassadors should figure as a whipping boy, as a mere "web of words" (p. 136) through which James tries to " 'save' us from life by means of style" (p. 137). Although Strether often seems lost in dream sequences, James fully intends his hero to perceive the difference between the sense-satisfying, vari-colored life of Paris and the impoverished world of Woollett. Moreover, if Strether's refusal of Maria Gostrey's love makes him appear negative and renunciatory, he transcends Woollett's facile morality in counseling Chad Newsome to continue his adulterous relationship and he demonstrates intellectual growth in rejecting the affluence and security offered by the redoubtable Mrs. Newsome. Finally, a closer scrutiny than McWhirter ventures of the early novels will hardly substantiate the claim that James' protagonists, though they often fail to marry, are creatures trapped in desire and incapable of love. Washington and Jefferson CollegeJames W. Gargano Gresset, Michel. Fascination: Faulkner's Fiction, 1919—1936. Trans, by Thomas West. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1989. 306 pp. Cloth: $45.00. "On 7 May 1958 at the end of a rather unexciting interview with the psychiatrists of the University of Virginia, and after evading the inescapable question about why he wrote," Michel Gresset reminds us, "Faulkner volunteered the following statement after a somewhat meaningful pause: 'It may be that I took up writing as— what do you call it?—a protest to being—against being small and insignificant, that I wanted to be big and brave and handsome and rich, it could be that' " (p. 270). The author's late comment serves Gresset as the explanation of much of the early work, the relatively unstudied poems and early short fiction, in which Faulkner seeks stature, greatness, permanence through art (p. 13). He made himself different in "the back country" (pp. 1—18) by making himself an aesthete; and by making himself recognize his own tendency toward and need for narcissistic writing, he made himself count (pp. 22—23). Sex and death were his two obsessions, as he himself notes in Soldiers' Pay, and sex as death. But what the artist's eye saw was, essentially, projections of the self. Writing, then, was paradoxically both an avoidance of self and an obsession with self, an act both of fascination and of shame, an act of what Freud would call attraction-repulsion. It was, in fact, only when Faulkner was able to displace the self into the time span of Southern history—when the horizontal and spatial was made vertical and chronological—with the Sartoris family in Flags in the Dust that Faulkner was able to get enough distance on his own desires and needs to produce a mature art. His initial imaginary philanderings, here called the "theater of eros," realized at greater length in his first two novels, here called "the ballet of desire," concerned with "perversion" (Parts One and Two) find "focus" on "glamour " and "shame" as the two consequences of sight, of "the psychology of the gaze" (Part Three). Cresset's study is largely directed by French thinkers and critics, by Lacan's theory of the gaze, most frequently by Sartre's chapter on the gaze in Being and Nothingness, even by Malraux's analysis of fascination in his preface to Sanctuary: " 'Fascination is a psychological state on which almost all tragic art depends and which has never been studied because aesthetics do not reveal it' " (pp. 127—28). Gresset glosses this in a key passage: "Like fascination, glamour isolates, immobilizes, tends to paralyze. In attracting the subject away from oneself, it prevents that person Studies in American Fiction115 from moving, both physically and mentally, in any direction other than toward an identification with the object. This is precisely the uncanny force of glamour; like fascination, it reverses the relationship between subject and object. The contemplator embellishes the object contemplated; by doing this, he defines himself as experiencing some shortcoming, and the relationship with the object becomes, from his point of view, a pouring out or emptying of the self as the seat of emotions and free will" (p. 128). The best example in the canon, and one which Gresset turns to repeatedly, is Horace's...

Tragedy and the art of questioning in depth psychotherapy.

Abstract This essay examines how the art of questioning is central to depth psychotherapy. Conceiving of depth psychotherapy as a tragic art suggests the kind of inquiry unique to psychotherapy is that oriented to pathos. To explicate the art of pathic inquiry, this essay draws upon Nietzsche's depiction of Greek tragedy as structured by the relations between the artistic deities Apollo and Dionysus. As a tragic art, the structure of pathic questioning is formed by the principles these gods embody: reason and passion. Their intertwining within a psychotherapeutic discourse stimulates a liberative self‐knowledge, exemplified here by the differing approaches of Eugene Gendlin and James Hillman.

Can We Define the Nature of Shakespearean Tragedy?

To attempt a definition of the nature of Shakespearean tragedy, one need not assume that Shakespeare theorized about tragedy the way Jonson theorized about comedy. One need assume only that Shakespeare was a skilled as well as inspired dramatist, one who consciously refined his artistic techniques and who had, from the start, a conception of tragic drama which he sought to realize in his plays, a conception which altered and evolved as his artistic vision and powers matured. He obviously did not pay much attention to the pronouncements of contemporary literary theorists, and he had no single authoritative model in tragedy which he might be tempted to imitate. The turgid academic tragedies of his contemporaries did not interest him, and he did not learn much from formless historicaltragical-comical plays like Cambyses which took their somewhat muddled idea of tragedy from The Mirror for Magistrates and de casibus tales. Although he was impressed and influenced by the poetic and dramatic power of plays like Tamburlaine and The Spanish Tragedy, he charted his own individual course in tragedy, and we can attempt to describe that artistic progress even as we can attempt to describe his progress in the writing of comedies and history plays. It would be easier to describe his pattern of development if the greatest of the tragedies Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth were the final and supreme expression of his tragic art. But after Macbeth came Antony and Cleopatra, which has too much comedy and too little suffering to qualify as great tragedy; and after Antony and Cleopatra came the somewhat

The Birth of Tragedy and The Great God Brown

The Birth of Tragedy and The Great God Brown MICHAEL HINDEN • EUGENE O'NEILL'S DEBT to the philosophy of Nietzsche, particularly his enthusiasm for Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by now is a matter of record.! O'Neill discovered Nietzsche's writings in the spring of 1907.2 Later, in a letter to Benjamin De Casseres dated June 22, 1927, he wrote: 'Zarathustra,' although my work may appear like a pitiable contradiction to this statement and my life add an exclamation point to this contradiction, has influenced me more than any other book I've ever read. I tan into it, through the bookshop of Benjamin Tucker, the old philosophical anarchist, when I was eighteen and I've always possessed a copy since then and every year or so I reread it and am never disappointed, which is more than I can say of almost any other book.3 A copious note-taker, O'Neill eventually copied passages from some fifty of the book's eighty chapters;4 at Harvard in 1914 he even,struggled through a copy in the original German with the help of a German grammar and a dictionary.5 O'Neill's acknowledgement of Nietzsche's influence continued throughout his life. In his 1936 Nobel Prize acceptance speech he paid homage to Nietzsche as his mentor, acknowledging the importance of his influence as well as that of Sweden's own son, Strindberg: "For me, he remains, as Nietzsche remains, in his sphere, the master, still to this day more modern than any of us, still our leader.,,6 But if O'Neill's debt to Zarathustra is well known, the specific influence of The Birth of Tragedy on his plays has not yet been adequately studied. It is to be said first that documentation of O'Neill's earliest encounter with Nietzsche's exegesis on the origin of tragedy is rather difficult to assemble. Cyrus Day believes that O'Neill read the book along with Zarathustra during his New London days before the first world war,7 a perfectly reasonable 129 130 MICHAEL HINDEN assumption. Oscar Cargill, on the other hand, feels that O'Neill did not "adequately digest" The Birth of Tragedy until after he had written The Great God Brown. 8 Yet this view apparently is contradicted by Barrett Clark's account of meeting O'Neill at the Hotel Lafayette in New York in 1926 and watching him stuff "a worn copy of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy into his pocket" before hurrying over to the Greenwich Village Theater to watch a rehearsal of that very play.9 One thing certain is that in the playbill of The Great God Brown, produced later that year, there were two considerable quotations from The Birth of Tragedy.lO The remaining question, it would seem, concerns the year in which O'Neill first read the book or when it was that he first read it carefully. As noted earlier, specific evidence for the date of a first reading is unavailable. Yet it is difficult to believe that the young O'Neill, a confirmed Nietzsche enthusiast and already determined in 1914 to become "an artist or nothing,"U would wait more than a decade before consulting his favorite philosopher on the subject of tragedy and art. It now seems clear that what most fascinated O'Neill in The Birth of Tragedy was Nietzsche's view of the origin and symbolic meaning of Greek tragedy which Nietzsche associated with a spirit of irrational ecstasy growing out of the performance of a chorus of satyrs celebrating the ritual destruction and reunification of their god, Dionysus. To Nietzsche the Dionysian rituals of the Greeks symbolized an intuitive apprehension of what Schopenhauer had described as the eternal struggle of the suffering "world will." The tragic art created by the Greeks, argued Nietzsche, succeeded in imposing Apollinian form upon the tumultuous struggle of the will in its perpetual cycle of fragmentation and return to unity, the Dionysian hero representing a personal embodiment of this struggle - an individual powerfully striving for self-realization who unconsciously is driven to reveal the true nature of his identity as the embodiment of an irrational force. "In light of...

Humanism and Tragic Redemption

When George Steiner announced The Death of Tragedy, in 1961, it was already somewhat unclear whether tragedy was said to be dead or dying, or in fact on the way to being reborn. Since then, Leo Aylen’s Greek Tragedy and the Modern World has challengingly affirmed the possibility of actual equivalents to Greek tragedy in our time. And now Raymond Williams flatly entitles his own critical diagnosis: Modern Tragedy.These questions of course extend far beyond the theatre. Ultimately they concern the entire substance of our culture, and especially our age’s increasing estrangement from religion. For Tragedy — whether Greek, mediaeval, Elizabethan or neo-classical – has, typically, sprung from societies rooted in religion; although the greatest moments of tragic art were precisely those moments when received beliefs stood under radical historical challenge. To ask why traditional tragic forms have increasingly been abandoned in the theatre of our time is thus, to raise questions we might otherwise not even be able to formulate about our epoch’s relations to religion – and about the resources of humanist faith.Raymond Williams’ confrontation of these questions seems to me crucial, in several ways. Unmistakably at the growing-point of humanist consciousness, his work is at once a critique of tragic theory, a socio-critical map of modern tragic literature, and a reassertion in depth of revolutionary imperatives in the face of objections to revolution truly wrestled with. Significantly, the book concludes not with any theoretical summing up but with an actual drama of revolution.