Trustees of Boston University

Tragedy and the Tragic

Author(s): Robert J. Nelson
Source: Arion, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter, 1963), pp. 86-95
Published by: Trustees of Boston University
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 TRAGEDY AND THE TRAGIC

Robert J. Nelson

1 N HIS RECENT A DEFINITION OF TRAGEDY

(1961), Oscar Mandel begins his definition with the common

sensible assertion that "naturally, it would be absurd to propose
a definition thrusting out of the cannon a host of workers which
everyone has always taken for tragedies" (p. 6). Still, aware of
"the haziness of the word, the casual way in which, because it is
an honorific term, it has been employed," Mandel recognizes that
the "definer will be compeUed in turn to select and reject." And
indeed, it is one of the virtues of Mandel's book to demonstrate
the tenuous or nonexistent connection with the tragic of a great
many plays called tragedies by a great many people, if not "by
a great many
everyone." Reviewing plays, Mandel "tests" and
finds vaUd the foUowing definition:

A work of art is tragic if it substantiates the foUowing situa

tion: A protagonist who commands our earnest good will is
a given world by a purpose, or undertakes an
impelled in
action, of a certain seriousness and magnitude; and by that very
or action, to that same world,
purpose subject given necessarily
and inevitably meets with grave spiritual or physical suffering.
As the kernel of his definition Mandel stresses the notion of
inevitability. Though the notion itself is not new in tragic theory,
his stress on it in the history of that theory is, he beUeves, unique.
What seems to me even more useful to note in the Ught of that
history is Mandel's de-emphasis of what might be called the
response to the tragic situation both from within the universe of
the play and from without it?that is, either by the actors or
spectators. Such responses Mandel finds to be part not of the
tragedy but of the "post-tragic episodes:"
. . . is not coterminous with the work of art
tragedy necessarily
as a whole. The post-tragic episodes have a place in this inquiry
because they may carry us back to the tragedy itself, and make
the final emotional or philosophical commentary on the action.
It is here, rather than in the tragic action itself, that we may on
occasion find an uplift, a reconciliation, or on the other side a
final push into the abyss. Some authors may wish to re-estabUsh
a certain of mood, others to offer an intellectual
serenity prom
ise after the downfall, still others to end in redoubled negation.

This is an exceUent distinction, yet, it seems to me, Mandel's

threatens to obscure it. For, here and elsewhere, Mandel
syntax

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 Robert /. Nelson 87
seems to use the terms "tragedy" and "tragic" interchangeably,
with "tragic" being the adjectival form of the esthetic category
of "tragedy." That both terms are esthetic categories for Mandel
is clear from the synonymy between "the tragedy" and "the
action" in the passage. This identity between tragedy and tragic
as esthetic categories is also supported by Mandel's earlier useful
assertion that is not an essence or a but is rather
tragedy quaUty,
a "situation." However, in his understandable concentration on
works of art which depict this situation, Mandel perhaps leaves
the impression in some minds that the "tragic situation" exists only
in works of art. Mandel is properly skeptical of the changes in
response to various dramatic heroes and heroines: he cites the
critical rise and fall of certain Shakespearean and CorneUan heroes
?Shylock and Chim?ne are cases in point?and he might have
mentioned Rousseau's celebrated appraisal of MoUere's Alceste
("Le pauvre Alceste!"). The critic thus considers it scientifically
necessary to exclude from his definition emotional responses and
moral assessments of "the tragic situation." Yet in doing so he
is in danger of coming up with the "stable" definition that "a
work of art is tragic if it substantiates the assertion that Ufe is
hard for everybody." To invoke a distinction made by Gustave
Lanson in his Esquisse d'une histoire de la trag?die fran?aise
(1920), Mandel's stable definition is in danger of giving us a
definition of the pathetic rather than of the tragic:
...
le path?tique na?t de la souffrance et de la plainte; le
dramatique r?sulte du conflit, de l'incertitude, de l'attente
anxieuse: le est la manifestation, dans un cas doulou
tragique
reux, des Umites de la condition humaine et de la force invisible
qui l'?treint.
Il y a du path?tique sans tragique, du
dramatique sans
Le n'est pas n?cessaire
tragique. tragique, toujours path?tique,
ment dramatique, il l'est en proportion de l'incertitude et de la
lutte contient.
qu'il

There is, of course, another distinction here: between the

major
tragic and the dramatic, between, that is, a moral category and
an esthetic one. Now this distinction may be found in the inter
stices of Mandel's discussion as well, but because in his case and
in Lanson's both the syntax and the
emphases of the critics tend
to obscure this useful distinction, I would Uke to make it more
expUcit and sharper than either of these critics do.
Both critics are, of course, interested in artistic renditions of the
tragic, adducing a great many works of art which, to recall
Mandel, substantiate the situation. In Lanson's case, this
tragic
esthetic bias leads, (it seems to me) to certain falsifications:
especially in the case of Corneille he stresses the dramatic, that
is, the "incertitude" and "la lutte," to the neglect of the concept of
"des limites de la condition humaine." The autonomy of the

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 88 TRAGEDY AND THE TRAGIC

tragic, its specifically moral character, is thus obscured and Lan

son is curiously in accord with the emphasis on
suffering which I
find Mandel's discussion as well. In Mandel's case, the
obscuring
distinction between the moral and the esthetic referends is better
maintained (to be sure) but (1) because it ismade less explicit
or, more accurately, is not emphasized and (2) because Mandel
rigorously insists on excluding "value judgments" in his definition,
the usefulness of both the impUcit and expUcit components of
Mandel's "stable definition" is not so great as itmight be.
Aware of the "essentiaUstic" connotation of substantives, I
would (hasten to) agree with Mandel that the tragic is a situa
tion, but I would add that it is also a relation: the tragic is that
relation of values in which a higher value is sacrificed to a lesser
value or in which a value is sacrificed to a non-value. This defini
tion inevitably involves the "unstable" spectator reactions of which
Mandel has been so properly skeptical in view of the history of
tragic theory. Yet, that it is impossible to exclude value as a cate
gory Mandel himself impUcitly recognizes in his inclusion of such
as "our earnest will," "an action, of a certain
concepts good
seriousness and magnitude," "grave spiritual or physical suffering"
(itaUcs mine). Furthermore, the definition I have proposed sug
gests only the morphology of situation?it points, I repeat, to a
relation between values. That one value is "up" in one epoch and
"down" in another in no way detracts from the viabiUty (or
universaUty, if you wish) of the definition or relation. The very
basis of Mandel's distinction between the "tragedy" and the "post
tragic episode" Ues in the integrity or, estheticaUy speaking, com
pleteness of the "tragic situation." And when Mandel excludes the
possibiUty of including what might be called redemptive episodes
as of the situation, more when
parts importantly, among post
tragic interludes Mandel distinguishes between these redemptive
episodes and those which give "a final push into the abyss,"?then
it (seems to me) is clear that to the kernel of his definition he
must add not only necessity and inevitabiUty but irrevocability
or, to maintain the religious terminology I have employed, ir
redemption.
In moral terms, the tragic is irrevocable loss of value. Viewed
as a moral the is thus more than
category, tragic comprehensive
the frequent interchange of the terms "the tragic" and "tragedy"
allows. Like Paul Val?ry's poetic state, the tragic "state"?or to
use terms common in theories of tragedy: the tragic outlook, the
or view?is
tragic sense of Ufe, the tragic vision something which
all men may know: peasant as well as king, poUtician as well as
artist. It is the recognition that the values which man forges for
himself are ultimately inadequate, it is the awareness of Ufe's
Umitations. To borrow a from modern this aware
concept physics,
ness may be said to faUwithin a "tragic field," potentiaUy includ
ing the most trivial of our daily frustrations and definitely includ

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 Robert J.Nelson 89

ing the dreaded faU of kings. In this perspective, the relation of

the "pathetic" to the tragic is problematic. The pathetic may be
said to lie between two magnetic fields of force?the tragic and the
comic?and depending on the strength of the respective fields, it
is drawn to one rather than the other. Thus, that f amiUar example
of the pathetic victim, the child killed in a traffic accident, may
be said to be a manifestation of the force of the "tragic field":
the child?or his who are the co-victims, the "witnesses,"
parents
of the event?learns at the fringes of the field what the "tragic
hero" learns at the heart of the field where he appUes man's
values in their fullest validity: the irrevocable loss of value. As for
the inevitabiUty of the "pathetic event," a consistently tragic view
would note the fact of the child's death?which might be called
an instance of biological determinism. Moreover, with a sufficient
adjustment of focus, the particular instance might be shown to
have been of an irrevocable chain of events, a manifestation
part
of psychic or reUgious determinism. The pessimism of a Freud or
of a Pascal easily matches the pessimism of a Euripides or a
Seneca. On the other hand, the "pathetic event" might be shown
to have been unnecessary, that is, be drawn into the "comic field":
greater knowledge of themselves and of their offspring, safer
driving conditions, etc., could be adduced as being capable of
preventing the event. As for the irrevocabiUty of the child's death,
a
consistently comic view would regard this as a fact of life.
As an esthetic category, tragedy is the artistic embodiment of
the experience of the tragic?or has been in certain plays of
Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Shakespeare, Racine. For many
plays which have been designated "tragedy" by critics (and
dramatists?Corneille is an transcend or skirt the
example) tragic
as such, the notion that man is a creature of limited resources in a
universe which is at best indifferent and at worst hostile to his
fondest aspirations. This discrepancy between the tragic and
tragedy goes back to the much-mooted question of the origins of
tragedy. To the death of the god-king figure which Ues at the
root of the form, two distinct developments took place: in the one,
the figure simply suffered defeat and death; in the other, the
figure suffered defeat and death, but regeneration as well. The
former development is that depicted by SirWilliam Ridgeway in
the "Origin of Tragedy," (1910) as a ritual lamentation over the
dead "hero;" its emotional impUcations are pessimistic. The latter
development, emphasizing the Dionysiacal element, is a cathartic
and regenerative celebration pointing to the cyclical renewal of
nature; its emotional impUcations are optimistic. It goes beyond
the tragic.
The latter interpretation has been a persistent one. From
Aristotle's concept of catharsis through Hegel's annulment of the
unmediated contradiction and on to Pirandello's concept of eternal
form, theoreticians and practitioners have, in Reinhold Niebuhr's

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 90 TRAGEDY AND THE TRAGIC

to some
phrase, gone "beyond tragedy" notion?reUgious, psy
chological, ethical?in which the fact of limitation is, in the end,
either expUcitly denied or, what comes to the same thing, sub
sumed into a higher order of understanding in which the defeat
of the "tragic hero" is paradoxically vindicated. These artists and
critics recoil from the unremitting sense of defeat, the
profound
pessimism which is the first "lesson" of the tragic experience.
Sophocles's Oedipus the King and the criticism of it is a case in
point. In the terms of a recent theoretician of tragedy, Oedipus's
story, Uke Job's, is one which states the problem of tragedy in its
extreme form: "is there in a world where, for no reason
justice
clear to the ethical understanding, the worst happens to the best?"
Confronted with the demonstration that the "worst does happen
to the best," few critics have been content to accept as the final
meaning of the play the image of the helpless, self-exiled king
who pleads with his successor to restore his children to him. Some
retroactively apply the meanings of Oedipus at Colonus to the first
play, seeing in the faUen king's "acceptance" the first signs of the
transcendental, charismatic figure of the later play. Others, con
tent to remain with the evidence of the first play, do in fact
justify Oedipus's fate. Aristotle's concept of the "tragic flaw" puts
the blame on Oedipus?or at least this is the way it has at times
been read, although precisely what the flaw is (o'enveening
pride? anger?) or to what extent Oedipus can be said to be re
for it are more controversial than "orthodox" com
sponsible
mentary might lead one to expect. Other critics have been less
concerned to assess blame, content to Aristotle's view of
accept
Oedipus as somehow flawed, but to go beyond this acceptance to
an interpretation which vindicates Sophocles if not his hero. Thus,
in Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study (1939), H. D. F. Kitto views
as one who the moral balance of the universe, one
Oedipus upsets
whose "punishment" may be viewed as excessive with relation to
his crime but one who nevertheless is punished according to the
pattern of natural laws, a pattern which "may harshly cut across
the life of the individual, but at least we know that it exists, and
we may feel assured that piety and purity are a
large part of it."
The catharsis is ours if not Oedipus's and, in fact, with its cosmic
focus, Kitto's interpretation robs Oedipus of his heroism (he is
men of their heroism?
"imprudent," says Kitto). But it robs all
except, of course, the artist who reaUzes the logos which under
lies man's fate. Kitto sees as noncommittal: "whether
Sophocles
or not it [the pattern] is beneficent, Sophocles does not say."
more keenly than most the
Again, a Pirandello may have felt
pain of inevitably "perishing value:" "conflict between Ufe-in
movement and form is the inexorable condition not only of the
mental but also of the physical order. The Ufe which in order to
exist has become fixed in our corporeal form Uttle by Uttle kiUs
that form. The tears of a nature thus fixed lament the irreparable,

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 Robert J.Nelson 91

continuous aging of our bodies." But the modem ItaUan dramatist

a form,
goes on to assert: "All that lives, by the fact of living, has
and by the same token must die?except the work of art which
lives forever in so far as it is form." (Both passages from Eric
to Six Characters in Naked
Bentley 's translation of the "Preface"
Masks, 1952). Tragedy?art?transcends the tragic: the illumina
tion is the artist's?and ours?as he creates and we that work
enjoy
inwhich our humanity finds its noblest, most complete expression:
the work of art. The artist, not the tragic victim, is the true "tragic
hero." The more strain of
prevalent regenerative tragic theory
puts the hero in his "proper" place: hero. Both before and after
the catastrophe the victim is heroic. An analogue of such a theory
is found in reUgious interpretation of the Oedipus The King in
saint.
light of Oedipus at Colonus in which the victim becomes
But where for the reUgious transcendentalist the illumination or
acceptance is the key event of the play, for the heroic transcen
dentaUst, the seff-blinding is the key event: "It was ApoUo,
friends, Apollo,/ that brought this bitter bitterness, my sorrows to
was none but my own"
completion./ But the hand that struck me/
(11. 1329-1333 in David Grene's translation, The Complete
Greek Tragedies, Vol. II: Sophocles, University of Chicago,
1959). Punishment is not the Lord's, but man's; man is his own
as such, is free. Thus, in his Tragedy (1957), WilUam
judge and,
G. McCollom rejects Loewenberg's analysis of the tragic situation
in which "the illusion of free voUtion on the part of the agent and
the recognition of it as illusion by the spectator are comple
mentary aspects of tragedy viewed as a work of art." For McCol
lom "the character must be seen as a force, a
tragic dynamic being
whose self is more than the sum total of what has
always hap
pened to it" and McCollom goes on to reject the "tragic irony"
pointed to by Loewenberg because it would allow of no other
"enUghtenment" than the "reaUzation that the hero never had a
chance." And for Robert Brustein the profound pessimism which
he finds in tragedy is ultimately less significant than the
"unflinching acceptance of the human condition" (my itaUcs).
Indeed, for Brustein, Greek tragedy "is the noblest act of re
sistance in Uterature." ("The of Heroism," Tulane Drama
Memory
Review, March 1960.)
For such theorists the catharsis produced by tragedy results
from an interaction not of pity and terror but of these emotions
and courage. They see in tragedy an ultimate rejection of the
thesis stated by the Choms in Anouilh's Antigone: ". . . c'est
reposant, la trag?die, parce qu'on sait a
qu'il n'y plus d'espoir, le
sale est est enfin comme un rat, avec
espoir; qu'on pris, qu'on pris
tout le ciel sur son dos, et n'a ?
qu'on plus qu'a crier,?pas g?mir,
non, pas ? se plaindre,?? gueuler ? pleine voix ce qu'on avait ?
dire, n'avait dit et ne savait m?me
qu'on jamais qu'on peut-?tre
encore. Et rien: se le dire ? soi, pour
pas pour pour l'apprendre,

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 92 TRAGEDY AND THE TRAGIC

soi." (Nouvelles Pi?ces noires, Paris, La Table Ronde, 1958, p.

161. ) To be sure, transcendental theorists also view the end result
of tragedy as "reposant" but the repose is not the derisive state
pointed to by Anouilh's nihi?stic conclusions. It is one, rather,
which vindicates the tragic catastrophe. As Brustein puts it:
"Through the attempt to fulfill these impossible hopes, the tragic
hero develops a vision deeper than that of his choral com
mentators?deeper and more piercing because it has been reached
through frenzy and suffering. Daring to transcend philosophy,
daring to outface necessity, the hero stretches the outer boundaries
of his Umitations to their utmost, and, in the consequent rending
and tearing, estabUshes new boundaries towards which men may
strive."
The overtones of such transcendental theories are, as we would
nowadays put it, existentiaUst. Man is constantly confronted with
painful, unavoidable choices and no choice is definitive in the
never-ending dialectic whereby one choice only gives way to
another. Yet, tragedy?the artistic embodiment of the experience
of the tragic?may be described as the uncompromising expos? of
the illusion that "where there is Ufe, there is hope." The cultiva
tion of this iUusion by various characters may be said to provide
the dynamism of which McCollom speaks, but in certain tragedies
(that is in specific works), this dynamism is brought to rest as the
iUusion is destroyed, as the hero is c&s-illusioned, as he is brought
to Existentialists also fulminate "le sale
despair. against espoir,"
but they do so against hope as a psychological datum understood
as a sop, whereas their very dialectic (McCoUom's dynamism)
forces them to it as a datum synonymous with
regard metaphysical
possibiUty. According to a "tragedy" of engagement, action?
whether of deed or thought?is reaUty, the means to self-fulfill
ment; action, to the view and certain
according tragic specific
tragedies, is illusory, the path to self-negation.
One cannot deny that many plays denominated as tragedies
and regarded as such among reasonable men justify the regenera
am not con
tive interpretation ("justify" on esthetic grounds?I
cerned here to question such interpretations on moral grounds).
There may be dispute about the validity of such theories concern
ing Oedipus the King: the play may be said to be one thing, the
lessons we derive from it another?or several others. But of Ham

let, for example, there can be no doubt: "Not a whit," Hamlet tells
Horatio when the latter would postpone the fencing bout, "we
a special a sparrow.
defy augury; there's providence in the fall of
If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, itwill be now;
if it be not now, yet itwill come: the readiness is all. Since no man
knows aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be"
(V. ii). And, as Hamlet dies: "Now cracks a noble heart. Good
night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest"
(V.ii). The resolution is reUgious, the transcendence is the hero's

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 Robert J. Nelson 93

and not merely the spectator's. But the transcendence takes place
within the play, which is to say that the tragedy ceases to be
tragic. There is, as in Kitto's interpretation of Oedipus the King,
an order to the universe is indeed a traverse and not a
things;
chaos. Moreover, what was a matter of in
merely conjecture
Kitto's Oedipus the King (according to Kitto) is a reaUty in
Hamlet: the order is not in man's hands, but the hands which do
hold it are beneficent. The order is divine, and being specifically
Christian, Hamlet is not a tragedy, but a part of a Divine Comedy,
the fulfillment of a possibiUty, not the end of one.
That is, the outcome of the "Tragedy of Hamlet" is not tragic,
but its opposite. By habit of thought we think of the "opposite" of
as comedy?or, in view of the basic distinction of this
tragedy
paper, the opposite of the "tragic" as the "comic." Until recently?
certainly as recently as the "new" theater of Beckett and others
with their "dark comedy"?but perhaps as long ago as those
Romantics who found in Moli?re the expression of their own
rire amer?until such manifestations, I repeat, the concept of the
comic as the opposite of the tragic would not be surprising. To be
sure, the prestige of the genre of tragedy has traditionally rele
gated comedy to second place: the concerns of comedy were the
concerns of less serious if indeed un-serious people, that is to say,
the lower classes. And it is curious to note that even so a
great
critic as Erich Auerbach impUcitly shares this bias: the history of
the representation of reaUty inWestern Uterature (the subtitle of
his Mimesis) may be defined as the progressive assimilation of
formerly "comic" types into the "tragic field." Indeed, it is pre
cisely this assimilation?whether progressive and necessary or
fortuitous and random?which leads Mandel to exclude
merely
matters of value from his definition. Yet, setting aside such socially
derived definitions of both tragedy and comedy and regarding
the comic, as we did the tragic, as a relation or the morphology
of situations, it is indeed possible to think of Hamlet as "comic."
For the comic is that relation inwhich higher value triumphs over
lesser value or in which value over non-value.
triumphs
Traditionally, this relation has been expressed through the
satirical depiction of human foibles in which the laughter is
dissociated from the butt of the comedy. This is how we have
thought of the comic because this is what most comedies have
"been about." Nevertheless, the recent of the "new"
emergence
dramatists, of the "dark comedy" and of the "sick comedians" is
an indication that, like
pathos in relation to the tragic and the
comic, satire and ridicule may be drawn into either "field of
force." To the extent that the foibles are considered ineradicable,
satire and ridicule may be viewed as species of tragedy and their
artistic projections as tragedies. But satire and ridicule may
presuppose that the foibles they point to are not ineradicable
limitations (foible?faible?weak) in man, but aberrations. Thus,

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 94 TRAGEDY AND THE TRAGIC

to the extent that are ameliorative and corrective in purpose,

they
satire and ridicule are of a confidence in
negative expressions
human nature, an affirmation of life's It is not without
possibiUties.
significance that in spite of the fame of its "satirical" first part,
Dante's great poem is called a Comedy, for it celebrates man's
over the inescapable tragic fact of death; The Divine
triumph
Comedy celebrates everlasting Ufe. In CathoUc eschatology, as
that modem viewer Unamuno has one over
tragic recognized,
comes the sense of Ufe." Comedy is the
"tragic generic word for
forms of drama in the Middle ages not because of a lack of "tragic
genius," but because the dominant outlook is anti-tragic. To recall
Niebuhr, Christianity is "beyond tragedy." Within Hamlet, then,
as within many other
"tragedies," the transcendence of the tragic
is "one of the laws of the universe of the play," a concept I borrow
from Lucien Goldmann's brilUant Jean Racine: dramaturge (Paris,
1956), Hamlet is resolved, so to speak, not by a Deus ex machina,
but by a Deus in machina. It moves through the tragic, projecting
both the fact of human limitation and a positive response to it.
However, other show a consonance be
playwrights greater
tween their form and the tragic: the tragic and the tragedy are, to
use Mandel's terms, "coterminous." Seneca, the Shake
Euripides,
speare of King Lear, the Pirandello of Six Characters (of which
Pirandello is, of course, only another critic in the comments given
above). Within the play the "hero" suffers, for no reason clear to
his ethical the worst of fates. Such are
understanding, playwrights
not or for this consonance
necessarily morally esthetically superior
between tragedy and the tragic. In the Poetics (ch. 13) Aristotle
may have simply been describing or he may have been evaluating
Euripides in calUng him the "most tragic of all poets" precisely
because he illustrious men to an end. Seneca
brought unhappy
has undoubtedly been as much maUgned for the unremitting
horror of his unhappy endings as he has for his outlandish rhetoric
and his bookish construction. But the moral assessment of partic
ular playwrights or works ismore a matter of the judge's personal
one of objective criticism.
psychic and cultural orientation than
Confronted with a particular "tragedy," the objective critic is
concerned not with judgment but with a description of the rela
tion between the tragic and the response to it within the work.
One of the chief concerns of the critic must surely be the timing
of such response?or responses?by the people (the characters) of
the work's universe. The timing of illumination of the tragic hero
is of the dramatic for, once he has been
greatest consequence,
illuminated, being a man of intelUgence and reasonable virtue, he
will make the to the
only appropriate response tragic: acceptance.
(I repeat: if we of his as a means of transcend
speak acceptance
ing his Umitation, it iswe?not he?who move "beyond tragedy").
With almost all theoreticians of tragedy I stress the importance of
the "hero's" virtue and intelligence. His intelUgence must be great

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 Robert J. Nelson 95

enough for him to perceive his limitation; his virtue must be great
enough for him to act honorably and realistically on the reality he
has perceived: only a fool would deny the tragic; only a knave
would attempt to profit from his perception at the expense of less
illuminated fellows. In this light one can also perceive a possible
for Aristotle's selection as model of a man without
explanation
extreme virtue or With extreme or even absolute
intelligence.
in such attributes the hero would sense so soon the fact
perfection
of the tragic?that is, the fact of his and all men's limitation?that
he could not act (or, in light of his integrity, would not act,
knowing how futile such action would be). A man of such initially
great insight and integrity, who might be described as pre-tragic,
would not be dramatically interesting. This fact has not prevented
many dramatists from such French Renaissance
creating figures:
is with them. Where as well as
tragedy replete protagonist spec
tator enjoy foreknowledge there is no irony, no thrill of appre
hension. True, the distinct emotional cUmate of is appre
tragedy
hension, but it depends precisely on the spectator's knowing what
the character does not know. More are those
"tragic" complicated
cases of pre-tragic who are rendered
figures actively tragic?that
is, characters whose dramatic is a in and out of
trajectory moving
awareness. Racine is the master creator of such how
tragic figures:
skillfully he leads Oreste, Hermione, Pyrrhus, Hippolyte, Ph?dre
and so others to cultivate, their own best
many against judgment,
the illusion of hope; how masterfully he creates situations in
which they may expect fulfillment of their desires?only to return
them to their own first awareness of limitation and frustration.
Indeed, it iswell to end with Racine with his supreme insight into
the of the into art. Both in his theo
problems rendering tragic
retical his little-known commen
writings (especially marginal
taries on Aristotle) and in his plays we learn that to write a
successful it is not to be aware of the
tragedy enough tragic.
One must also be aware of dramatic art.

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