Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature

A Philosophical Perspective

Richard Gaskin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351017015
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

This book offers a unique interpretation of tragic literature in the Western tradition, deploying the method and style of Analytic philosophy. Richard Gaskin argues that tragic literature seeks to offer moral and linguistic redress (compensation) for suffering. Moral redress involves the balancing of a protagonist's suffering with guilt (and vice versa): Gaskin contends that, to a much greater extent than has been recognized by recent critics, traditional tragedy represents suffering as incurred by avoidable and culpable mistakes of a cognitive nature. Moral redress operates in the first instance at the level of the individual agent. Linguistic redress, by contrast, operates at a higher level of generality, namely at the level of the community: its fundamental motor is the sheer expressibility of suffering in words. Against many writers on tragedy, Gaskin argues that language is competent to express pain and suffering, and that tragic literature has that expression as one its principal purposes.

The definition of tragic literature in this book is expanded to include more than stage drama: the treatment stretches from the Classical and Medieval periods through to the early twentieth century. There is a special focus on Sophocles, but Gaskin takes account of most other major tragic authors in the European tradition, including Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Virgil, Seneca, Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Büchner, Ibsen, Hardy, Kafka, and Mann; lesser-known areas, such as Renaissance neo-Latin tragedy, are also covered. Among theorists of tragedy, Gaskin concentrates on Aristotle and Bradley; but the contributions of numerous contemporary commentators are also assessed. Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature: A Philosophical Perspective offers a new and genuinely interdisciplinary perspective on tragedy that will be of considerable interest both to philosophers of literature and to literary critics.

Part I

Tragedy and Moral Redress

1 Oedipus

Hamartia, Freedom, and the Supernatural

1 A Question of Blame

Nothing in the study of tragedy has been the subject of so much controversy as the question of the guilt or innocence of Sophocles’ Oedipus, who, having been told by Apollo’s oracle that he would murder his father and marry his mother, shunned Corinth, where he had been brought up by Polybus and Merope. He did this because he assumed that Polybus and Merope were his real parents, despite the fact that his birth had been called in question (admittedly by a drunkard) at a feast, that, on being asked to satisfy him on the point, his supposed parents had prevaricated, and that Apollo, too, when asked by Oedipus who his real parents were, had evaded the question. Travelling from Delphi, Oedipus arrived at a crossroads where he encountered an older man, clearly a nobleman of some sort, riding in a carriage and accompanied by servants. These ordered Oedipus to get out of the way, he refused and struck out, they retaliated, and in the ensuing fracas Oedipus killed the lord and, as he thought, the entire entourage (in fact one retainer escaped). He found his way to Thebes, which was being terrorized by the grisly Sphinx; Oedipus solved the latter’s famous riddle, and so routed it. Since Thebes’ king, Laius, had recently been killed, Oedipus was offered the throne, which he accepted together with the hand of Laius’ widow, Jocasta. Thus the play’s background: during the course of Sophocles’ drama it turns out that the older man whom Oedipus killed was Laius, king of Thebes and his own father, and that Jocasta is his mother. When the facts emerge, Jocasta commits suicide, and Oedipus blinds himself. The play begins some years into Oedipus’ reign. As king of Thebes, he is called upon to cure the city of a strange plague: his attempts to ascertain its causes lead, step by agonizing step, to the discovery of his origin and past deeds; the play ends with Oedipus’ separation from his children, a scene which is ‘one of the most overwhelming moments in the Western imaginative tradition, bearing comparison with Priam’s kissing of Achilles’ hands, or Lear’s final entry with Cordelia’s body in his arms, or Wotan’s Farewell’.¹

The question I wish to address first in this book is whether Oedipus is guilty. Is he to blame for his fate? This has often, especially since the onset of the early-modern period, been considered to be the play’s central problem.² An influential statement was that of André Dacier, who in his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics declared that Oedipus’ transgression was ‘the fault of a man who, consumed by anger at the insolence of a coachman who tries to move him aside against his will, kills four men two days after the oracle had warned him that he would kill his own father’, and that he was beset by ‘pride, violence and a fit of anger, temerity and imprudence’ (1692, 192). In a sense, Dacier conceded, Oedipus’ punishment was unjust, because his acts of parricide and incest were involuntary; but though he was ignorant he was also foolish, reckless, and subject to passion. His vices are just those ‘of which Sophocles wants us to rid ourselves’.³ If Dacier imagined that he had spoken the last word on the question of Oedipus’ guilt he was sadly mistaken, and the matter has been vigorously debated ever since. Sophocles’ tragedy, according to many, is not about guilt and punishment; rather, it aims to be an imago humanae vitae, and in particular to insist on the frailty of human happiness. Such critics have often held Oedipus to be morally innocent. Thus, in his influential book on Aristotle’s Poetics, first published in 1894, S. H. Butcher construed the facts of the Oedipus story rather differently from Dacier, opining that, ‘though of a hasty and impulsive temperament’, Oedipus was not, ‘broadly speaking’, brought down by ‘any striking moral defect’, for ‘his character was not the determining factor in his fortunes. He, if any man, was in a genuine sense the victim of circumstances. In slaying Laius he was probably in some degree morally culpable. But the act was certainly done after provocation, and possibly in self-defence’ (1951, 320). Others have gone further than Butcher and affirmed Oedipus to be entirely free from blame. So in 1899, two hundred years after Dacier’s déclaration, the foremost classicist of the age, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, spoke ein großes Machtwort: ‘Oedipus hat sich nichts vorzuwerfen’, he pronounced; ‘Oedipus has nothing to reproach himself with’ (1935–72, vol. 6, 209). And therewith he certainly intended to end the dispute once and for all.

But the opposition could not be so easily dismissed, and in the chapter that he contributed to his son Tycho’s book on Sophocles, Wilamowitz Vater stated that the verbiage about Oedipus’ guilt would never end, because there would always be people who den getretenen Quark weiter treten. ‘But they should at least admit that they thereby claim to understand Sophocles better than he understood himself’ (1996, 350). I shall be treading the same quark again here; do I claim to understand Sophocles better than he understood himself? Well, Sophocles may or may not have understood his own play, and what we, Sophocles’ modern readers and spectators, are interested in is not what he, the man, thought his work meant, but what it did, and does, mean.⁴ But if Wilamowitz’s talk of how Sophocles understood his play is just a roundabout way of referring to the meaning of the work (as such talk often is), then clearly someone who treads the same quark again is not going simultaneously to concede that he or she misunderstands that work. Whichever way you cut the cake, then (if that is what the quark is for), Wilamowitz’s remark misfires. Still, many recent commentators could have wished that he had laid the whole matter of Oedipus’ guilt to rest. As E. R. Dodds discovered at Oxford in the early 1960s, undergraduate heads were simply chock-full of heresy. Whereupon Dodds spoke ein kleines Machtwort for the edification of the young and impressionable, in his article ‘On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex’, hoping therewith to consign such views as Dacier’s to the archive for good. Dodds’s essay is often regarded as a classic,⁵ and as having put the whole issue beyond dispute. But, alas, it was again not to be: Dacier’s approach lives on, and it has even been revived in recent years in Wilamowitz’s own land by such able commentators as Eckard Lefèvre and Arbogast Schmitt.

‘The plays of Sophocles, it is often supposed, exalt heroic individuals who surmount the worst that can be put upon them by gods indifferent or cruel’, remarks Robert Parker, continuing: ‘But there is much to be said for a more Aristotelo-Bradleian view, whereby Sophocles’ world is one marred, above all, by the disastrous flaws endemic in human personality’ (1999, 23). Against this stands a pervasive modern view that the ‘tradition of humanistic, secularized, and psychological readings’,⁶ championed by Bradley and in some sense also by Aristotle, is in error. I shall defend the ‘Aristotelo-Bradleian view’, with nuances, here in connection with Oedipus Rex, and in the next chapter with Antigone. Further, I shall suggest in this part that the view applies quite generally to the protagonists of Western tragedy. In brief: typically, tragic protagonists fall through their own fault. I start my defence of the ‘Aristotelo-Bradleian view’ with Aristotle; we shall come to Bradley in due course.

2 Aristotle and the Concept of Hamartia

In chapter 13 of the Poetics Aristotle argued that the best form of tragedy concerns a hero or heroine who is neither morally outstanding nor morally base, but somewhere in between, or is rather better than worse, but who falls, in such a way as to elicit the emotions of pity and fear in the audience, because of some significant (megalē) hamartia.⁷ The translation of this last word has vexed commentators and critics endlessly. Dodds remarks that the concept of hamartia covers both false moral judgement and intellectual error, and that ‘the average Greek did not make our sharp distinction between the two’.⁸ (In English the use of the term ‘ignorant’ in a social or moral sense is still found in some places, or was until recently.)⁹ Dodds might have gone further, and pointed out that the distinction itself is suspect. In his article ‘Hamartia in Aristotl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Tragedy and Moral Redress
• Part II Tragedy and Linguistic Redress
• Bibliography
• Index