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Reflections on the Next American Tragedy

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Photo by Edith Maracle

In a recent piece in Foreign Policy magazine (“The End of History is the Birth of Tragedy”), the authors, both professors of strategic studies who have served in government—i.e., members of the “Washington elite,” by some lights—argued that, “Americans have forgotten that historic tragedies on a global scale are real. They’ll soon get a reminder.”

The article drew parallels between tragedy as an art form and public policy, so as a writer I was naturally intrigued. But although I found the article rich in food for deep thought—some of which I hope to bandy about here—I found other aspects puzzling.

The authors argue for an aesthetic that recognizes humanity’s own role in creating disaster, without which whole civilizations fail to recognize the potentially cataclysmic consequences of their own actions. With this I could not agree more wholeheartedly.

The prime example they provide is Athens in its Golden Age, the 5th century B.C.E., a culture that first developed the art form we now refer to as tragedy.

“This tragic sensibility was purposefully hard-wired into Athenian culture. Aristotle wrote that tragedies produce feelings of pity and horror and foster a cathartic effect. The catharsis was key, intended to spur the audience into recognition that the horrifying outcomes they witnessed were eminently avoidable. By looking disaster squarely in the face, by understanding just how badly things could spiral out of control, the Athenians sought to create a communal sense of responsibility and courage and to encourage both citizens and their leaders to take the difficult actions necessary to avert such a fate.”

There are at least two problems with this example, however.

One is its misunderstanding of what Aristotle meant by “catharsis.” The authors aren’t alone in this, of course, because Aristotle wasn’t perfectly clear. Arguments over that particular definition have been virtually continuous ever since he made it. I’ll have more to say on that below.

The second misunderstanding is one that, to their credit, the authors themselves recognize. The “tragic sensibility…purposefully hard-wired into Athenian culture” by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, among others, hardly spared their native Athenians from making horrible blunders.

Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, though the cost of the decades-long conflict, not just in terms of money but men and resources and influence, proved so draining to both sides that Sparta, the nominal victor, also fell into irreversible decline.

And how exactly did that come about, and what did it look like? For that we need to turn to a historian, Thucydides, not a tragedian:

“Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils. To this must be added the violent fanaticism which came into play once the struggle had broken out. Leaders of parties in the cities had programs which appeared admirable – on one side political equality for the masses, on the other the safe and sound government of the aristocracy – but in professing to serve the public interest they were seeking to win the prizes for themselves. In their struggles for ascendancy nothing was barred; terrible indeed were the actions to which they committed themselves, and in taking revenge they went farther still. Here they were deterred neither by the claims of justice nor by the interests of the state; their one standard was the pleasure of their own party at that particular moment, and so, either by means of condemning their enemies on an illegal vote or by violently usurping power over them, they were always ready to satisfy the hatreds of the hour. Thus neither side had any use for conscientious motives; more interest was shown in those who could produce attractive arguments to justify some disgraceful action. As for the citizens who held moderate views, they were destroyed by both the extreme parties, either for not taking part in the struggle or in envy at the possibility that they might survive.”

I doubt anyone reading that passage can miss the parallels to the present political moment. Just as anyone reading Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes could not see in contemporary world affairs man’s “many passions and his miserable ingenuity in error, always dazzled by the base glitter of mixed motives, everlastingly betrayed by a short-sighted wisdom.”

So if tragedy didn’t save the Athenians, how could it possibly make any difference to us? Similarly, why didn’t the next great era of tragedy, beginning with Shakespeare and ending with Corneille and Racine, do anything to mitigate the horrors of the Anglo-Spanish War, the English Civil War, and the Thirty Year’s War, the last being one of the longest, deadliest, and most destructive wars in European history? (I’m leaving out a number of ancillary conflicts, obviously, like Tyrone’s Rebellion and Cromwell’s devastation of Ireland.)

My point: as writers, why should we consider tragedy as a form any more important or relevant to current affairs than any other?

I mentioned above that I thought the authors of the article misunderstood what Aristotle meant by “catharsis.” Yes, Aristotle believed that great tragedy inspired feelings of pity and fear—pity for the character who suffers, fear for what we suspect is about to happen to him or her. But by catharsis he did not mean merely externalization of these two emotions for cautionary examination and inspiration.

Inherent in catharsis is a sense of wonder. And wonder is not a state that spurs anyone to act.

James Joyce addressed this in his Paris Notebooks, where he developed the aesthetic theories that Stephen Daedalus would advance in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Joyce read Aristotle avidly and admired him, considering him second only to Aquinas among western philosophers. Joyce argued that great art inspires us to seek nothing beyond the work of art itself. The sole aim of “proper” art is to provoke a sense of awe before its beauty.

Specifically, tragedy’s inspiration of feelings of terror and pity should not be confused with a sense of loathing, a wish to recoil from or do something about whatever aroused those feelings or correlates to them in the world, because whatever is truly grave in human existence, and thus worthy of tragedy, concerns what is “constant and irremediable in human fortunes.”

“Nor is an art properly tragic which would move me to prevent human suffering any more than an art is properly tragic which would move me in anger against some manifest cause of human suffering. Terror and pity, finally, are aspects of sorrow comprehended in sorrow.”

Joyce held much the same view of comedy, in that he believed it achieved its greatest perfection in an arrested awareness of joy, not a desire to fall in love or save the planet or make anyone, singular or plural, happy.

This contrasts with a distinction I heard recently in a lecture by Professor Marc Connor, who specializes in modern Irish and American literature:

“[T]ragedy is the domain of fate, of a world that cannot be changed. Comedy is the domain of transformation, the hopeful view that the world can be altered through human effort.”

Either way, it would seem that the authors of the article on the need for tragedy to inspire us to act not only misconceived catharsis, they arguably misunderstood the very nature of tragedy.

However, that doesn’t mean they’re wrong about the urgency of this particular moment, or that part of the problem isn’t cultural. But before launching off on proposed solutions and dragooning writers into them, maybe we should spend a moment asking: How did we get here?

It turns out America has a very rich history of tragedy, a lot of it still relevant. Start wherever you want: The Scarlet Letter revealed the destructive power of sanctimonious hypocrisy. Moby Dick, though a flop in its day, has become a classic not just because of its marvelous whaling detail but because of its prophetic demonstration of our powerlessness against the forces of nature. As both misfortunes still afflict us, it’s difficult to say how effective these books were in alerting us to the prospect of disaster, or inspiring anyone to take action. Maybe that wasn’t the point.

In the 20th century, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams developed a distinctly American theatrical tradition steeped in tragedy with characters as varied as Edmund Tyrone, Willy Loman, and Blanche DuBois. I’d add Faulkner to that list, as Camus did. This tradition arose in the midst of two world wars and the Great Depression, and those who took the playwrights’ messages to heart—and let’s not fool ourselves, it was hardly the majority; all of Faulkner’s novels were out of print when he won the Nobel Prize—understood quite well that world-wide cataclysm wasn’t just possible and real, it had become the norm.

In the 1960s, after the studio system imploded, American cinema enjoyed a decade when “the lunatics ran the asylum,” and with the Vietnam War as background produced some of the greatest films ever made in the U.S., many with a tragic ethos: Bonnie & Clyde, Midnight Cowboy, Dog Day Afternoon, Catch-22, A Woman Under the Influence, Chinatown.

Then something happened. In a keynote talk at the San Miguel de Allende Literary festival two years ago, screenwriter Kirk Ellis (John Adams) talked about the death of humanism in American cinema, and provided a precise date for its demise: May 25th, 1977. That’s the day Star Wars opened in American theaters. (I’d argue that the death rattle started two years earlier with Jaws, and continued into 1976 with Rocky.)

Those three films reminded Hollywood what a blockbuster looked like, and how much money could be made, especially in comparison to the critically acclaimed but downbeat flops of the previous decade.

Shortly, the major studios were enforcing a tacit rule: Enough with bummer endings. Audiences don’t want them. It’s exactly the kind of lie that becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” got swept away by a landslide desire for “Morning in America.” Before long focus groups were rubber-stamping this fecklessness, whole generations grew up with relentlessly chipper endings, and American storytelling found itself toeing the edge of a void.

A similar phenomenon occurred in publishing with the succession of mergers that corralled the various houses into a few conglomerates. One of my mentors, Oakley Hall, remarked about this in the 1980s, warning that the obsession with profit at every turn for every author that this trend signaled would inevitably lead to a marginalization or even elimination of superb books that didn’t suit the market, i.e., had no hope of being money-makers, no matter the quality or importance of the work.

Yes, there remain works with a tragic sensibility that not only succeed but become bestsellers, some even get adapted into film: Mystic River, The House of Sand and Fog, The 25th Hour, In the Bedroom, to name only a few. I’d add a personal favorite, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, though no film adaptation has yet appeared. I’m sure you can name some as well.

But I’d argue this remains the exception, not the rule, and even novels with a distinctly tragic sensibility, like Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, all too often get gussied up with optimism once in the hands of filmmakers. “It’s the nature of the form,” some argue. I wonder.

I agree that the general American cultural gestalt is distinctly resistant to tragedy. Blame perhaps “American optimism” (versus “European pessimism”), or the sheer muscle of the market where the most people made happy equals not just success but quality.

Regardless, and here I agree as well with the authors of the article I cited at the outset, this can have disastrous consequences.

Tragedy embraces the notion that we are, by our very nature, inclined to error. We can’t help ourselves. Our very psychology and biology conspire to lead us astray: into virtuous indecision, misbegotten confidence, blind loyalty, premature self-congratulation. And worse. Much worse.

I agree with Aristotle and Joyce that great tragedy stops us cold, forces us to realize that the problems we face are hard-wired, inscrutable, and not amenable to facile solution.

But I also agree with the Foreign Policy authors that an acquaintance with tragedy over time can train both the mind and the heart to understand oneself, mankind, and history with a certain wary humility. I’d add that such a view is necessary for a functional republic. I’d also add that it’s relatively rare.

That humble self-awareness—or self-suspicion—forms the logic underlying checks and balances. Only such a vision recognizes the need to rein in our innate craving for power, our lust for glory, our belief in the salvation of secrecy, our vain delusion that we’re the historical exception.

Strip away tragedy, you’re left with bread and circuses. Sappy clowns and matinee heroes. Sooner rather than later, they begin to grate. The prattle rings hollow. One does get sick of being lied to.

Or maybe not. And perhaps that’s where the actual tragedy lies. We can write all the bitter endings we can dream up. We can’t make our readers take what we’ve written to heart, or do anything once they close the book—presuming they bothered to read it in the first place.

Coretta Scott King once remarked:

“Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation. That is what we have not taught young people, or older ones for that matter. You do not finally win a state of freedom that is protected forever. It doesn’t work that way.”

The tragedy waiting to be written, and perhaps played out on the world stage, concerns when that state of freedom is lost, perhaps forever. Not in some antiheroic tale where the protagonist never possessed the greatness necessary, nor in some dystopian fantasy where the worst has already happened and those who might have prevented it remain conveniently offstage. But in that moment when there remained a chance we might pull through—except, you know, it was us.

Do you think writers have any obligation to address what must be “earned and won and re-learned” with every generation?

What books with a tragic sensibility have impressed you, haunted you, inspired you? How? Why?

Are you letting a tragic sensibility inform your current work? 

What do you make of the conviction that great literature’s purpose is not to inspire action, but to create a state of arrested understanding and wonder?

About David Corbett

David Corbett is the author of six novels: The Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime, Blood of Paradise, Do They Know I’m Running?, The Mercy of the Night, and The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in a broad array of magazines and anthologies, with pieces twice selected for Best American Mystery Stories, and his non-fiction has appeared in numerous venues, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Narrative, Zyzzyva, MovieMaker, The Writer, and Writer’s Digest (where he is a contributing editor). He has taught through the UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program, Book Passage, LitReactor, 826 Valencia, The Grotto in San Francisco, and at numerous writing conferences across the US, Canada, and Mexico. In January 2013 Penguin published his textbook on the craft of characterization, The Art of Character, and Writer’s Digest will publish his follow-up, The Compass of Character, in October 2019.

Comments

  1. A deep post Dave, great thoughts to carry into my writing time! Although I’ll admit a lot of the points you made here went a bit over my head, one thing that did stick for me is the idea that Moby Dick was a flop in its day. That says something about writers who capture tragedy for the sake of instilling wonder and arrested understanding. Will our audience act or not? I think as writers, unless we are writing a manifesto we plan to use as part of a public movement, then really we have no way of knowing just what impact our message will have on the world at large, in our lifetime or later. Did Star Trek’s creators know they’d inspire the cell phone? I doubt it — they were just making a fun show that made people think. Thanks for putting Aristotle and Aquinas on my radar, sounds like two I should read soon.

    • Hey, John:

      I agree that we can’t know how our readers will respond to our work and should suffer too much over the point, except to use the reader as a conscience, to keep us honest.

      And I would take my Aristotle and Aquinas in bite-size chunks. (I’d suggest getting a Teaching Company course on their work and reading along with that.) We are no longer schooled in the kind of patient reading and analysis that’s required to work through their writings. That kind of education unfortunately died a couple generations ago. That said, those morsels can be greatly rewarding.

      Good luck with your writing day.

      • I am forever looking for ways to learn — thanks for pointing me toward the Teaching Company courses. I want to learn from thinkers old and new, but you’re right that learning from the old requires context and direction. (An aside: I listen to educational podcasts every time I’m in the car and couldn’t recommend the BBC In Our Times podcast highly enough!)

        • I love the Teaching Company. The professor I mentioned in the post, Marc Connor, has a course on Irish Identity as seen through politics and literature. Elizabeth Vandiver is superb on Greek myths and tragedy, and Peter Sacco is excellent on Shakespeare and mid-century British drama. I also have been listening to a course on mystery and suspense fiction by Professor David Schimd I’d recommend.

        • I LOVE In Our Time! An English friend turned me on to it and set me to happily exploring its archive. I especially appreciate its wide range of subjects and the way they are categorised for easy browsing.

  2. Hey David-

    You knew Oakley Hall? Warlock is a classic, and his writing on writing is terrific. Jeez, did you know Aristotle too?

    To business. I’m a bit unclear about your wish. Are you arguing for a return to tragedy in literature? You also say that tragedies don’t change us, so…?

    Don’t get me wrong. I’m not defending mindlessly optimistic, singularly heroic, no-fail happy ending entertainment. Nor am I an apologist for corporate book publishing, though it produces some great books even now.

    I believe in the power of fiction to change us, however, and I suspect we’re on similar pages. Knowing you, I think you are in favor of flawed characters. “We are, by our very nature, inclined to error.” Quite so.

    It’s a vexing issue for fiction writers, because while we know darn well that characters need flaws and are most affecting when they are on journeys of change, we also know that readers must care. It’s a dilemma. Protagonists must screw up. Protagonists must make us cheer. How can they do both?

    Tragedies can help us. While they are underway, the characters in tragedies do not know they are in tragedies. Just as characters in comedies do not think that what is happening to them is funny.

    Characters feel justified. Every crime is committed for a good reason. No one intends to screw up. Even dictators who trash critics, build walls and bring us to the brink of war believe that they are acting for our common good. Flawed beings are fooling themselves.

    Thus, perhaps the key to flawed characters, and to what makes tragedies tolerable to watch, is causing us to feel that such characters are right, at least in their own minds, don’t intend to hurt anyone, and have the power to recognize their errors and change.

    Something like that? Tragedy and comedy will always be with us, ask me, because we live that way. I just hope the slow motion tragedy being enacted in Washington currently doesn’t end too horribly for us all.

    We can hope. But that is a topic for another post. That’s some meaty stuff for a Tuesday morning, David. Can feel my brain. That’s good, right?

    (https://writerunboxed.com/?s=the+current+hope)

  3. I’m not sure that as writers, we are obligated to address “what must be earned and won “, but I believe that doing so is intrinsic in what we do. I’ve always thought of artists as the default social commentators of their times. Writers, in telling any story, are bound to reveal innate human flaws that result in tragedy. Mis-communication, greed, fear of ‘other’. The frightening thing for me is that we so easily forget how these things led to past horrors. We repeat the same mistakes. so yes, reminders are important.
    I’m a student of fairytales and myths, most of which are just such reminders, populated with archetypes of human behavior embodied by demi-gods or evil stepmothers, showing us again and again how our foibles lead us astray. I’ve seen these archetypes in every novel I’ve ever read, in one form or another. The Gods are still with us! And yes, there is a tragic sensibility in my work. Humanity is tragically fascinating. But there’s comedy, too. Tragedy with carbonation?? The flip side of the coin, anyway. And hopefully we inspire awe and wonder. But the people who are inspired to action by the wondrous, messy, miraculous nature of existence, are I suspect, the most interesting heroines and heroes. Great morning juice!!

  4. Dearest Don:

    Well, it’s good if you can feel your brain in a metaphorical sense. If you can reach up and feel gray matter, I’d suggest a trip to the ER.

    Yes, I knew Oakley Hall. I met him through the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and he had a great influence on me and my writing–particularly, his insistence on quality and honesty. (And I agree his book on the craft of writing is an essential text.)

    And, yes, I knew Aristotle. Old Tottles, we called him, though never to his face.

    I’ll agree my argument is a bit problematic, because I’m trying to see it from several different angles.

    I do believe in honing a tragic sensibility (as to why, I’ll get to it a moment), but I don’t agree that this will somehow guarantee the populace absorbs the lesson and turns to a certain way of conducting themselves in the public square.

    The great lesson of the 20th Century was that culture cannot save us. I think the authors of the article oversell the goods. But the goods still have value, just for different reasons, and at a different cost.

    Tragedy isn’t merely about flawed characters. It is about characters with great promise as well as considerable flaws, but their insight into those flaws comes too late to save themselves (and others) from disaster.

    I think that’s the real lesson of tragedy–we have both great promise and ruinous flaws. And our flaws lead not just to our own suffering but the suffering of others–in some cases, great suffering.

    American tragedy tended to democratize tragedy and bring it down to the level of everyman: Willy Loman, Blanche DuBois. But their promise and their flaws spoke to larger themes: America’s obsession with success and the sexual vibrancy of youth. Willy’s suicide and Blanche’s nervous breakdown (after being raped by Stanley) reveal the destructive falsity in those ideals.

    But something seems to have gone off the rails. Focus groups, for lack of a better immediate victim. Money, for an ever-convenient one. They work in concert, obviously. And yes, I realize this is hardly a modern problem.

    I wish I could recount the entirety of the wonderful talk that Kirk Ellis gave at San Miguel concerning humanism in cinema. The centerpiece of course is Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, which the great Indian director Satyajit Ray said was the first movie he ever saw that didn’t lie to him.

    And I think the great disastrous flaw currently at work in America is the full-throated willingness to be lied to. And the tragedy that is coming — and, sadly, I do believe it’s coming, is inevitable, and will involve considerable devastation — will largely result from the willful disregard for truth. Just as it was for the Athenians. (Trust me, Thucydides could not be more au courant.)

    I agree in the power of great literature — great art in general — to change us. But that change comes one mind, one soul at a time. It’s a bit much to expect art to save the day on a nationwide, let alone worldwide, scale. It’s necessary, but not sufficient. (That said, art has had a crucial impact in the realm of race, gender, and ethnic equality.)

    So my point, in the end, is that a return to a more tragic understanding of life, one in which the good guys don’t by their very nature prevail and happiness inevitably returns, with utterly shattering repercussions, is a crucial part of the solution, but just one part. The rest will take place in the halls of power. And the streets.

    This reminds me of a couplet from a poem by Wallace Stevens, which unfortunately I have to paraphrase because I can’t remember exactly which poem and don’t have the time to plow through the entire Selected Poems. It goes something like this:

    I will face my enemies in the noble poses of the museum.
    But my enemies avoid the museum.

    • Yes, I follow. I think. And agree. Particularly: “I agree in the power of great literature — great art in general — to change us. But that change comes one mind, one soul at a time.”

      True enough, but that said we should not, I think, underestimate the power and pervasive influence of our culture in general, to which we contribute with greater effect than we may believe.

      To wit, in your comment there are two relevant threads:

      “The great disastrous flaw currently at work in America is the full-throated willingness to be lied to.”

      Competing with…

      [as Oakley Hall said] and “insistence on quality and honesty.”

      Lying versus honesty. It’s a strange debate where fiction is concerned, but fiction can show us how we truly are and what is most important for us to do.

      In this age of lies, that may be a rear-guard action, but it’s incredibly important.

      • Funny. The first time I ever heard someone come out in the open and call fiction lying, it was Oakley Hall. And by that he meant the writer needs to understand the very serious and difficult task at hand, using the techniques of deceit to reveal truth.

        I don’t mean to underestimate the power of art or literature or ideas. I just don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking they alone can save us, or can develop a nationwide mindset that will serve as armor against horrible blunders.

        Politics is a contact sport, as they say. What we’re talking about is power. And we’re living in a time when people can choose the “truth” they want with particular ease, and are targeted by trolls precisely on the basis of what lies they’re not just willing but eager to swallow.

        I don’t know how many episodes of House of Cards it will take to turn that around, or if that’s anything but a cheap bon mot. But I agree we have to keep writing. Absent that, the abyss.

        BTW: I loved this: “Yes, I follow. I think. And agree.” I could almost hear Christopher Walken reading it aloud.

  5. Dear Susan:

    I apologize for not appropriately hitting “reply” and thus responding to your and Don’s comments as part of the main thread. Still early. Need coffee.

    I think you touch on a key point: the lack of remembrance. And this is why not only must rights be fought for in every generation, but writers must find new ways to convey old truths so that each generation sees them as though discovering them for themselves, or at least awakening to them in a new way.

    The struggle is always between power and truth. Art, I believe, must always serve truth. Which is why the commercialization of art can be so insidious and destructive.

  6. David: A serious and deep post that inspires lines of thought running like ribs off a backbone. Donald Maass’s comment ties your thoughts into the craft itself. I’m going to have to take some time to process all this but it will be worth the effort. Thanks for helping me organize my thinking about why I write and what I hope to accomplish.

    • Yes, Don is great at the craft aspect. I’m the “idea guy” (which was the term we used when I was a PI to describe a con man).

      If I helped organize you’re thinking, given the somewhat disorganized nature of my post, then thank god for miracles. Regardless, glad I helped in any way, shape or form in your writing day.

  7. David,

    a wonderful departure from the norm here. Not the ‘how to put words on a page that get published.’ Rather, what is the purpose of our art and how does it fit into the hard-wired mindstream of the species? A meta-view of art. The philosophy of it.

    I have long suspected the rise of tragedy in a culture is inversely proportional to ignoring tragedy’s roots and mechanisms. For example, the ignoring aspect and willful suppression of Morning in America heralded deep-seated ignorance of what has bound this American experiment together through all kinds of storms, ignored even its founding documents. And I believe as a culture we are in the ‘paying the piper period’ of that. Though as the Greeks demonstrated, even focusing on tragedy isn’t the panacea. (Which brings us more to the Buddhist sensibility of suffering.)

    In attempting to capture life as it is, (which includes the lofting and crash of characters as well as the systems they use and struggle against, and the mixed motives that plague every character, author and reader) my work does carry tragedy as a thread—sometimes as a cable. And my endings are laced with it as well. At best, happiness is built on the rubble of tragedy. So much so, that my last two editors have both unconsciously, then consciously, tried to rewrite the ending of my pervious novel.

    “Do you think writers have any obligation to address what must be “earned and won and re-learned” with every generation?” Yes, at some point in their careers, I do, because we have the soapbox and the gift to speak, the latter being what defines us as a species.

    The books I remember longest and most fondly are those that leave underlying questions—the ones that history asks over and over again, because as a species we keeping finding ourselves back at Square One. Any of the works of McCarthy, Matthiessen, Le Carré, McEwan, Coetzee , Proulx and Erdrich fit this category—tragedy wound with brilliance.

    • Hi, Tom:

      I can’t help but ask: how did the situations with those two editors turn out?

      For whatever reason, as I was reading your list of inspirations, I thought of a book that definitely does NOT serve as a tragedy, but nonetheless possesses a tragic sensibility, which is why its relatively positive ending feels so justly earned: To Kill a Mockingbird.

      And that book has had a profound effect on the culture.

      Thanks for the thought-provoking comment, Tom.

  8. David–You wrote not long ago that one of the best decisions you ever made was to leave the ivory tower of academe in order to “get my nose bloodied” and learn the truths of the real world. Obviously–and to our benefit–you never wandered far afield from the tower.
    As to your questions:
    What is the writer’s obligation? To know, each day, that her isolation is spent in the service of work that is worthy of herself, and of others’ time. Writing itself is anti-social, but writers want most of all to be read and understood by others. Whitman said that the greatest poet (i.e. artist) was the greatest lover. He wasn’t talking about sexual or romantic love. I take him to mean that only those who do honor to the world by loving it are the ones who can achieve greatness.

    I was and remain haunted by the tragedies of Shakespeare. As for Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, one reader’s tragedy is another’s melodrama.

    Do I seek for a tragic element in my work? Not really. But even if I did, whether anything of tragedy could be found in my writing wouldn’t be for me to say.

    What makes great literature great? I would say by having the power to move readers to reflection and deep feeling, states of heart and mind well beyond amusement and distraction.

    But great works demand readers who can be so affected. As to how this relates to our time, I want to believe literature still has redemptive power, that this word so bandied about actually means something beyond commerce. But I find redeeming moments mostly in personal terms, not in art. In the maelstrom of trivia that demands most of my waking moments, I often remember lines from Macbeth. They’re spoken to conceal personal guilt for regicide, but are ultimately true for the tragic meaning of the play:
    Had I but died an hour before this chance,
    I had liv’d a blessed time; for from this instant
    There’s nothing serious in mortality:
    All is but toys: renown and grace is dead,
    The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
    Is left this vault to brag of. (II.iii, 91-96)

    But still there are those experiences in private life–lots of them–and they are redemptive. Macbeth cuts himself off from all of them. Of course I mean children, friends and family, neighbors being unconsciously generous and kind, me realizing after the fact that I’ve done something not entirely self-serving or dumb. When those moments happen, they provide a counterweight to the ephemeral maelstrom.

    • “What is the writer’s obligation? To know, each day, that her isolation is spent in the service of work that is worthy of herself, and of others’ time. Writing itself is anti-social, but writers want most of all to be read and understood by others.”

      I like that. Rings very true to my ears.

  9. Thanks, Barry, for the thoughtful comment. I particularly appreciate (I almost wrote “love”) the Whitman reference.

    Your concluding remarks remind of a line from Yeats, which like my previous attempt to conjure a line from Wallace Stevens is currently eluding me. But the point is that if paradise lacks the simple graces of daily life, who needs it?

    • For Stevens, maybe you are thinking of “Sunday Morning,” a poem that champions a romantic tenant of faith: death is the mother of beauty. No death, no tragic, inevitable end = the absence of that which makes our time here on planet earth both tragic and beautiful. As you say, if paradise lacks the simple graces, who needs it? And: “In heaven, does ripe fruit never fall?” Exactly. No death would mean no meaning. Without it, how could anything be serious?

      • It just came to me. Excuse the title, but it’s “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery.” The exact lines:

        Shall I grapple with my destroyers
        In the muscular poses of the museums?
        But my destroyers avoid the museums.

        (I love “Sunday Morning,” btw.)

  10. People understand tragedy too well with the connectedness of the world as well as the personal tragedies that surround us from family and friends. That’s why they most often choose hope in their entertainment.

    I wrote and worked within the romance community for years, and author friends and I often shared fan mail where a person sitting by the bedside of a dying family member wrote that our books helped ease the pain for a brief time. It gave them hope that love of all kinds was a very powerful force.

    Books/media that deal with tragedy tend to be much more palatable during happy times.

    • That’s an important point, Marilynn. But I don’t believe it’s universally true.

      The two great eras of tragedy, as I point out, were hardly peaceful. The American playwrights I discussed did, indeed, tend to produce most of their work before or after the great wars, but despite the often-cited claim that the Eisenhower years were idyllic, they certainly weren’t for writers and intellectuals. McCarthyite anti-communism created a constant drumbeat of threat and paranoia.

      Where I think your observation is true is that people are most able to approach this work or that when they are ready for it . But I disagree that tragedy only appeals to us in happier times. Quite the contrary, in my experience.

      After my wife died, I actually sought out poetry and fiction that didn’t trivialize what I was experiencing–and thus dealt with death and grief and isolation. I couldn’t abide “The Lovely Bones” for that reason. I found it treacly and cheap.

      In contrast, Donald Hall’s collection of poems, “Without,” written when his wife, Anne Kenyon, was dying of cancer; Anna Akhmatova’s poetry; and Robinson Jeffers’ poem, “The Deer Lay Down Their Bones,” were all comforting. Their honest depiction of devastating loneliness and the need for tenderness in the face of the seeming pointlessness of suffering made me feel less alone.

      I also believe there is a difference between hardship and tragedy. Tragedy assumes a great promise or essential good that fails to come to pass, whether through the working of fate or our own misjudgment. It was right there, within our grasp, but…

      Death is sad, but also universal. It only qualifies as tragic if some great hope died as well.

      So, yes, I don’t believe in shoving tragedy down people’s throats. But I think the currently pervading silence on the prospect of great promise betrayed through our own misjudgments is dangerous. And I think, despite the darkness of the hour, people may find themselves craving exactly the kind of light that tragedy provides.

  11. I’m mildly pessimistic by nature (I just call it realistic though) and I have always preferred dark comedy and tragedy to comedy alone. I think tragicomic stories are so much more true to life. They help us accept imperfection yet still yearn for and strive for ideals.

    • You made me smile, Erin — how many pessimists DON’T consider themselves realists?

      Again, I want to point out a distinction between stories with dark elements and actual tragedy. In tragedy, we have to feel the hopefulness, the promise, so that its destruction haunts us, terrifies us–awakens us to the awful truth that the worst can happen. Lassie doesn’t come home. Boo Radley doesn’t show up to save Jem.

      I actually think comics are better at dealing with this right now than mainstream fiction. But the fiction that does deal with it haunts me in a way that, curiously, makes me all the more aware of what it means to be alive.

      • Yes, I realize that dark elements do not a tragedy make. I recently watched Atonement (I know, I should have read the book…but, Netflix), a tragedy for certain. I felt awful at the end of it, but I loved it. Maybe it’s because so many of us have thus far lived lives so insulated from real tragedy that to read or watch tragedy feels…not cathartic, but like a participation in feelings and emotions we’ve yet to reach. We flirt with sorrow, terrified of experiencing it for real, but aching for a life that is not quite so shallow as ours has been.

  12. Fascinating that Greek thinkers could foretell what humans might always be tempted to do, their actions from ego and mistrust leading to the tragedy that humans are unable to make changes that endure. But we have models in our poetry and literature. If only the populace would take them to heart. Maybe the human condition requires that some of us go off and write and weep and feel profound concern for community, the earth, the future. And from that comes enduring literature. I loved Barry bringing up Whitman: “those who do honor to the world by loving it are the ones who can achieve greatness.” So we write in our corners, read words that inspire us. I’m not trying to say here anything all writers don’t know. We take in life, we react, and we go to the page. Everything swirling around us has an effect. The Greeks are still relevant and for today’s readers, maybe we are too.

    • Agreed. All true. But I think the time may be coming when we will be unable to afford the luxury of our corners. The ramparts will beckon. It may break our hearts, the way the failure of the Paris Commune made Flaubert want to “climb into my ivory tower and piss on them all.” Joyce felt equally contemptuous toward all sides in both world wars, it prompted his falling out with Beckett, who considered the Nazis and Fascists different. But America’s conflict is looking more and more like civil war, and in conflicts that pit brothers and sisters against each other, there is little hope of remaining aloof. We all may find ourselves forced to choose a side. And that, indeed, will be tragic.

      • I agree, David. I have already chosen mine. Thus I spend time calling senators and reps, tweeting people and organizations I agree with, fighting for truth the best way I can. I also write a blog that has covered such topics as education for all our children, saving our national parks from privatization, fighting for healthcare, and finding jobs for our youth instead of a prison cell. Your words today are valuable. The ivory tower has to extend into the real world.

      • And whose side will you take? This guy’s?

        “The man who opened fire on a Congressional Baseball Game practice in Virginia appeared to be volunteer with Bernie Sanders’ failed presidential campaign, the Vermont senator said in a statement.”

        The people we see on the news adopting the tactics of the 1930’s Nazis — the online SJWs who try to destroy the carers and businesses of Trump supporters, the masked rioters, the people promoting and attempting assassination — are “liberals,” not Trump supporters.

        Is that the side you’re going to take?

        I’m not going to take any sides in your predicted conflagration. If it comes, I’m going to sit out while the extremists on both sides to destroy each other, defending what I love only if attacked, and then I’ll help rebuild.

        I “won’t be fooled again,” to quote The Who.

  13. I wasn’t going to take the time to read this right away…but you got me hooked in the opening. (Have sent it to many already!) I think this article was brilliant! Thank you so much for such insight. When it comes to art…and maybe even life…I like to best describe our society as pedestrian. It is sad to me but I feel we are in the dark ages. But with dark, comes light, and an articles like yours will help us with the renaissance. It is coming, just give it time. Like you said, we are humans who run in cycles, and if we don’t always learn from out history, we have the chance to discover all over again from experience.

    • Indeed. Experience is the great educator.

      I’m glad you took the time to read the piece, Elizabeth, and thanks for sharing it.

      America’s “dark ages” seem to be part of its cultural fabric. Anti-intellectualism is hard-wired (that term again) into the national mindset. It can be part of a healthy skepticism or an unhealthy rejection of demonstrable fact. regardless, you’re right, we labor on, hoping for just a bit more clarity and light.

  14. I’m hesitant to comment. For all that WU occasionally features valuable posts about writing, politically it’s an echo chamber, and contrary opinions are invariably deleted.

    But nonetheless, here I am, penning a comment that will soon vanish, “like teardrops in the rain.”

    There will be no dark ages, no civil war. For the vast majority of Americans, their comfortable lives will continue, complete with all the little unappreciated luxuries (water on tap, cheap electricity, hot showers, and relatively high health and security) that most of the world has never experienced. They’re not going to give that up for politicians of either stripe. They know politicians are (almost) all liars. Their proxies in the media too. Demonstrably.

    If all politics is local, all tragedy is personal.

    The Holocaust wasn’t the most horrific tragedy of modern times because a lot of people were or were not deported, or gained or lost health care benefits, or were or were not forced to bake a wedding cake. It was six million individual horrific tragedies, six million people who each suffered more, far more, than you or I, comfortable Americans with Internet access, can ever truly understand, or would ever want to understand.

    And there will not be another Holocaust, not here. If there’s one thing I and most Americans, left, right, or neither, would give up their hot showers and cellphones for, it’s that.

    If you don’t believe that, if you instead believe that people in general are that bad, that debased, that cowardly, that -yes- evil, then why is democracy in any form a good idea?

    • Thanks for commenting Flip, though I wish your confidence in us was as great as your confidence in … whatever convinces you “It can’t happen here.”

      If you’d read the article in Foreign Policy that inspired the post, you’d have a better idea of the kind of international calamity those authors (and I) fear is only too possible. Their perspective is not guided by a misunderstanding of history. Quite the opposite.

      I shared this post with a friend of mine who happens to have been both the commander of SOUTHCOM and the Supreme Allied Commander for Global Operations at NATO. His response: “Just read your piece and it is powerful and on point.”

      It is difficult to appraise your belief that our fears are groundless when you offer no evidence to the contrary, just a litany of things you believe will not happen.

      I will, however, take issue with your formulation that all tragedy is personal. You might add that all suffering is solipsistic, which it isn’t. I suffer when others I love suffer, when ideals I cherish are savaged. It wasn’t just individuals who suffered in the Holocaust. It was families, friends, whole neighborhoods and communities that were wiped out. I’d also argue it was a way of seeing the world that got summarily destroyed. That’s what made it a Holocaust, not a string of disconnected murders.

      Also, you seem to believe that the animus behind the Holocaust is wholly different than that which currently seeks to deport people, deprive people of health care, etc. Again, the only proof you offer is proof by assertion, which is no proof at all. I hope you’re right, but hope is not an argument.

      The point of this post was to address the need to resurrect a tragic aesthetic to remind ourselves the worst can happen. History informs us on this point. It has happened here in this country in the form of slavery, the Civil War, the Indian Wars, Jim Crow, union busting, the Sedition Act, etc.–and if there has been progress on any of these fronts it is not because people believed there was no problem in the first place. Or that it was only one person enslaved at a time, etc., so why get upset?

      People do not have to be debased to find themselves drawn into intractable conflict. As for whether democracy is a good idea, I defer to Winston Churchill, who remarked it’s the worst form of government imaginable, until compared to all the others. (Plato and Aristotle and practically everyone else believed otherwise until the Enlightenment. A great many still do.) Democracy is not a magic wand. It requires its citizens to believe in civil society, the rule of law, and public institutions. Those do not appear out of thin air, or function autonomously.

      I’m sorry you believe that you will be silenced here. I do not share your fear. I think your post will remain up, and again, I thank you for making it.

      • I have hope because most of the people in my life, some of whom vote one way and some another, are good loving people, and I don’t see any reason why that should be the exception rather than the rule.

        If that’s not true for the people you know, I’m sorry. Or if that is true for you but you think you’re special in that regard, I’d like to know why you think so.

        My reality and my hope is grounded in the world I experience directly, not in TV or Twitter. I trust my own experience over what passes for news, because news tries to make the exceptions look like the rule: “scientists discover people are generally nice” doesn’t sell papers or generate clicks.

        My stories reflect the world and the people I know first-hand with all the boring parts taken out, so they are stories of love, kindness, and hope. Hatred, cruelty, and suffering are there — just as they have been in my own life — and the main character is of course a focus for them, but even in the fictional world she lives in, that’s the exception, not the rule. And sorry, tragedy lovers, although she suffers a lot, in the end, she’s triumphant. Not a happily-ever-after, but living a life she loves.

        I couldn’t stand to write (or read) a story where hate and cruelty weren’t the exceptions, it offends me too much. But perhaps that’s just me.

        • Well, Flip, maybe you should get out more. I worked for twenty years in the justice system, and have been deeply involved in my hometown’s local politics, and speaking from my own personal experience, despite the fact I have dozens of lovely, wonderful people in my life, I know that a bowl of cherries ain’t waiting when I walk out my door.

          Also, the whole premise of the article that launched the post concerned cataclysms on a global scale. The Depression. Two World Wars. The Cold War. Global terrorism. Climate change. I realize you don’t pay attention to the news, but perhaps, if you paid a bit more attention to history, you’d be a bit less glib about what happens beyond your backyard.

          Last, to insinuate that anyone who recognizes the threats we face and the prospect of catastrophe is somehow living a dreary, loveless life is simply ridiculous. And petty. My God, do you know anyone in a position of power, or who is obliged to make decisions with serious real-world ramifications? I do. Many. And they aren’t miserly or crippled of soul Quite the opposite.

          Last, clearly your supposition that your post would “soon vanish, ‘like teardrops in the rain,” has proven untrue. In fact, that supposition was based on a far more negative view of people than anything else expressed in this post or the comment thread.

          Next time you want to make others out to be lesser-than-thou, I’d suggest a short trip to the nearest mirror. Because if you’d bothered to read the other comments in this thread, you’d have recognized a generous, communal capacity for give and take, respect, and honesty.

          Give that a whirl, in your life if not your fiction.

          • And now you sink to unfounded personal attacks on someone you don’t know anything about. Now what follows may look like I’m pretending to know who you are, but it isn’t. Everything I say below is firmly rooted in what you wrote, which I know, as opposed to who you are, which I don’t.

            Did I attack you just because you hold a different opinion? No. Did I post unfounded libels like the childish “you should get out more””and the accusation that I “don’t pay attention to the news” ? No. Not blindly believing the media isn’t the same as not paying attention, unless you completely lack critical thinking skills.

            I didn’t even “insinuate” anything, I just asked, and presented two contrary options. Shame on you for pretending otherwise: anyone can look at my post and see you are wrong.

            You’re demonstrating what’s wrong with our society today, why rational discourse is headed the way of the dodo: you don’t refute what I wrote, you try to refute me, personally, instead, using a series of ad hominem techniques.

            Your logically invalid and ultimately counter-productive response is all-too-obvious to me, no doubt because of my many years as first an engineer trained in science and logic and then as an attorney trained in argument and the ways of the world. (Not for nothing is law school — a T10 school, BTW — called the only remaining true liberal arts education. )

            Oh, and I forgot to mention my participation, when I was young, in USENET flame wars. You think online discord is at all new? Not at all. It existed even back when access to the “Internet” (called ARPAnet back then) required permission from the government, and mere mortals had to make do with UUCP. I cut my teeth on online argument in the most unforgiving environment you can imagine, where PhDs outnumbered teenagers 10-to-1 or more. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.” — Rutger Hauer, Bladerunner.

            And yeah, I know people. So what? That doesn’t make my arguments more or less valid, or my experience more or less real or typical. After all, Trump knows people too, probably more people than you do. Is he right and you wrong?

            There’s a reason characterizing an argument as “ad hominem” is not a compliment.

            Finally, while these posts haven’t disappeared yet, two others have. Check with the WU administrators, I’m sure they have records.

              • My comments about ad hominem stand, and receive additional support.

                You attack the man, not the argument. I shall posit that you’ve taken the low road because the high road is unavailable to you.

  15. Remarkable post, David, to the point and insightful. And the comments thread is in fact, and perhaps unsurprisingly, extremely interesting too. I am commenting here only because I think (humbly!) I may have a couple of things to add…

    First, a disclosure: I am European and the first literature I was brought up in was not English but French. For me, books like Camus’ La Peste or Hervé Bazin’s Vipère au Poing, not to mention Malraux’s La Condition Humaine, have moved me deeply and informed my view of the world and my understanding of what “tragic catharsis” means in the 20th century – now, as you point out, this may have to be revised: We’re into the 21st century and Malraux supposedly said of it: ” Le 21ème siècle sera mystique ou il ne sera pas.”

    In short, we are in an age of religious intolerance. Indeed, intolerance is the key word here to describe our times. And intolerance is the foundation of tragedy – which is my second point. I am struck by the fact that characters in tragedies are unbending, rigid, convinced they are right – and thus they walk to their tragic end, without a side swerve, straight as an arrow. The straighter, the more tragic, we can feel the tension building. We just know this is a train wreck, it will all end badly but we are powerless to stop it.

    That’s what we enjoy in a tragedy. Our own powerlessness to prevent it. Tragic main characters do not go through an experience that “changes” them, there is no “arc” here, no learning from experience (and I mean MCs, minor characters around them may change and often do; with their comparative emotional growth, they help the audience get the point as to why the MC is truly tragic).

    For example, in “Vipère au Poing”, Hervé Bazin’s mother is a horrible woman, domineering and cruel, from the first page of the book to the last. That’s what makes it such an incredibly powerful tale. I can multiply the examples,particularly those drawn from classic Greek tragedies, but I won’t, no space here, but you get my point.

    Main characters that “grow” belong in comedies (or tragi-comedies) and we can empathize with them more readily, they are like most people we know, they are like ourselves. A truly tragic character is normally a rare thing. But I think that the argument you are making here is that as America becomes increasingly politically polarized, more tragic (unbending) individuals emerge more often and may even get to the higher reaches of power. Trump is certainly showing himself to be unbending, holding on to all the extraordinary promises he made in his campaign and in his (frightening) America First inaugural speech. Surely the kind of political position that leads to war.

    What is a writer to do? That is your next question and I totally agree with your answer. We surely must try our best to prevent Society’s boat from straying and sinking in muddy waters!

    • Thank you, Claude, for the wonderful, thoughtful, and moving comment.

      I’m particularly struck by your depiction of the tragic hero as unbending. I find myself trying to look for counter-examples — the character who changed but shouldn’t have, let’s say — but that only speaks to an underlying trait (a willingness to be swayed or influenced) that’s the real issue. Even in Chinatown, the tragedy is caused because Jake thinks he’s put the past behind him, i.e., changed, but hasn’t. (I actually use Chinatown in my teaching and I’ve never actually realized that point before.)

      There is a kind of story that lies between comedy and tragedy that I think the term “tragi-comedy” doesn’t quite serve. It’s where the main character recognizes the flaw within himself and the need to “change or die.” People don’t change easily, so such stories always require an “encounter with death” and a “dark night of the soul.” I’m hoping we can come up with stories of this kind to save us being driven over the cliff into an abyss of our own making.

      In Barbara Tuchman’s “Guns of August” about WWI, she notes that world leaders were asked after the war was over what caused it. “If we only knew,” was their response.

      That’s what I fear most. The small, seemingly negligible steps that, once the spark erupts, cannot be retraced. The words that cannot be taken back. The atrocities that demand vengeance.

      I think it was Confucius who said: If you go out to seek vengeance, dig two graves.

      A more positive version comes from the Celtic druids: The noblest vengeance is the one not taken.

      May we be so wise. Thanks so much for the contribution. You enriched my day.

      • I’m happy you liked my comment and that it helped throw a light on the concept of the tragic hero!

        Your references to Confucius are intriguing, and spot on: indeed, the spiral of violence unleashed by taking revenge is un-ending and very typical of the Mediterranean world (not just China!). Vengeance is a tradition here too, I know, I live in Rome…

        It’s probably a universal feature, a basic human trait, and a big part of tragedy. And of war, like the current one in the Middle East. Can we escape it? Good question. But the first step is to recognize it for what it is. And that’s where the writer has a role to play…

      • For both Claude and David I am curious if you both have seen the Correspondence dinner video (on YouTube if you missed it) where Obama shames Trump. David, you have written awesome posts on shame, and to the quote about Vengeance, I believe all of Trump’s efforts are to undo everything Obama created (TPP and ACA) just for revenge. And to that point, there will be many graves.

  16. Sitting in the passenger seat during a long drive home, I had the luxury of catching up on a few weeks of unread Writer Unboxed essays that had collected in my inbox. Reading them on mobile, the author’s name appears at the bottom of the article, but after reading only the first few sentences, I knew it was the brilliant David Corbett. I soak up his posts because they are always relevant to what I am currently reading and writing.
    It did not surprise me that David’s post discussed Athenian culture and Aristotle since I am currently making my way through All Things Shining – Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly). David’s piece has helped coalesce much of what I have read in the chapter Aeschylus to Augustine, and Chapter 3 on Homer and Athenian culture. Distilling the fate of city-states and nations, I am fascinated with the fate of afflicted individuals – their personal tragedy and possible redemption. In the Murakami novels, Colorless Tsukuru and Kafka on the Shore, which has a direct allusion to Oedipus, the characters have a loyalty to the truth. Ian McEwan always leaves me breathless – particularly Chesil Beach and The Comfort of Strangers in which the characters are traumatically changed by unexpected circumstances that bring to my mind Camus’s The Fall, and perhaps wisdom through suffering in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych. These stories interest me far more for their effect on emotional recovery and catharsis than catching a murderer or domesticating a playboy. The tragic sensibility is palpable in several of my favorite stories: Legends of the Fall, The Land at the End of the World, and A Little Life. These novels have inspired the main character in my published novel, The Sleeping Serpent, and my current WIP where the character undergoes the process of catharsis by releasing repressed emotions. I am disheartened when readers have expectations of “happily ever after” but I understand the social angst we are living with and the need to escape. I can’t write to the marketplace. I obsessed with a character’s evolution and my own desire to explore motivation and the provocative feelings of loss, shame and fear. Though I read this essay days after its publication, it turns out to be the perfect piece I needed this week. Thank you, David Corbett

    • Thanks so much for the kinds remarks, Luna. I’m glad you enjoyed the piece — and I too very much enjoyed everyone’s comments. You’ve also just added several titles to my TBR pile. Thanks for that as well!

      • LOL – and please let me know when you read A Little Life – I want to know what you think of it. Please email me, as this blog doesn’t send me an email notification when you comment, like WordPress (Why?). I had to go back and look for it. btw, do you review on Goodreads? I should follow…

 

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