It has become common to think that tragic time is “now,” binding the characters—the actors of the catastrophe—in the anxiety and horror of a blinding present moment. As Northrop Frye observed in his Fools of Time, “the basis of the tragic vision is being in time, the sense of the one-directional quality of life, where everything happens once and for all, where every act brings unavoidable and fateful consequences, and where all experience vanishes, not simply into the past, but into nothingness, annihilation” (3). This sense of the present constantly moving forward feels like our everyday sense of how we live in this world: in David Kastan’s words, “tragic time is, then, the experiential time of human life—a time, that like life itself to which it is inextricably tied, is directional, irreversible, and finite” (80).
Critics often contrast this sense of tragic time with that of comedy. For example, Matthew Wagner sees Shakespearean comedy as generating what he calls the “suspended time of the theater,” a kind of “heterotemporality” that is “separate from, but in dialogue with, the time of our everyday lives.” In his thinking, this “suspended time is the forward motion of time […] slowing or stopping altogether” (79). Wagner echoes here other critics’ views that comedy generally takes place in a space—a tavern, country house, a forest—where clocks neither work nor matter. In tragedy, in contrast, it seems that the clock never stops: as Marlowe’s Faustus knows in his final hour, no matter how much he cries out for more time, “The stars move still; time runs; the clock will strike” (A-Text 5.2.75).
This anxiety about tragic time also anticipates that both in a play and in our lives, all must come to an end. In establishing the meaning of being in time (or Dasein), Martin Heidegger came to focus on the end that is our death: “Only in dying,” he wrote with profound pessimism, “can I to some extent say absolutely, ‘I am’” (cited in Hoffman 222). When it comes to tragedy, as the Player in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead explains, it seems like the plot “never varies—we aim at the point where everyone who is marked for death dies” (79). We draw on Aristotle’s painfully familiar words, that a tragedy must have a beginning, a middle, and most importantly, an end, both in a text and in performance. Classical tragedy ended with the exodus of the chorus, and Shakespeare’s plays with a death march, an epilogue, or a song or jig. Now we know a play is over when the curtain closes or the house lights brighten. A tragedy must find its own way to an end, for characters, readers, and spectators alike.1
Yet while tragic performance may generate that feeling of a one-directional present, tragic temporality is surely more complicated than that, if only because the present is never solely present. In his Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time with Bruno Latour, Michel Serres posits that time is not linear, but rather it is “an extraordinarily complex mixture, as though it reflected stopping points, ruptures, deep wells, chimneys of thunderous acceleration, rendings, gaps—all sown at random or at least in a visible disorder” (57). For Serres, this is both theory of historical time and an assertion that every object is multitemporal, folding into itself many moments in time. Serres’s thinking about time, linked to mathematical concepts of topology, was preceded by Edmund Husserl’s as well as Heidegger’s influential formulations of temporality. Husserl argued that we must reject the notion of time simply as “being,” time as a sequence of moments of “now.” Rather, in Robert Dostal’s words in describing Husserl’s thought, “we might say the present is ‘thick’ to the extent that, within the present, we find both the past and the future; that is, we find [there] all three dimensions of time […]. [A]ny moment is what it is in virtue of what it retains of the past (retention) and what it anticipates of the future (protention)” (Dostal 125–6; see also Wagner chs. 1–2).
Tragedy thus could be said to generate for characters, readers, and audiences alike the anxiety of existing in the present, trembling between the awful certainty of the past and the unknown future. Yet that present is never fully and solely present. Rather, it is Husserl’s “thick” present; it is Serres’s folded time, in which the past erupts into the present, and we feel, as Lady Macbeth puts it, “the future in the instant” (1.5.66). Tragedy also brings its characters into collision with a temporality outside of everyday experience, the time of the gods or Providence, the divine beings that see past, present, and future simultaneously. Jean-Pierre Vernant has described how in Greek tragedy the audience experiences “a human, opaque time, made up of successive and limited present moments”: this is the time which the audience understands as the present—as their present—in the enactment. Yet, he wrote, tragedy concurrently evokes the existence of “divine time” in which the confusion and contraction of human experience find their explanation and cause (19).
This chapter, and this book as a whole, will focus on how tragedy engages us in a sense of a present “thick” with past and future when it stages a crisis: a moment of decision in which everything changes. When Jacqueline de Romilly writes about Greek tragedy’s being made possible by a new “consciousness of time” (5), she sees that “a short, continuous crisis, the origins and consequences of which cover a large span of time and distant connections […] seems to be the double requirement of tragedy, and its double relationship to time” (12). That crisis of the moment requires a decisive action, action that may be informed by the past and determine the future, but which is experienced in the panic of the present. Once the action is taken, it appears that there can be no going back.2 However, once we complicate the notion of tragic temporality, to see it as more multidirectional than merely linear, we can open up new ways of thinking about tragic causality and how choice operates in present time.
Positing that the present moment of decision may still be radically contingent, this chapter argues that in Greek and Shakespearean tragedy choice in a crisis can undermine as well as reinforce the kind of determinism that we conventionally associate with those plays. The first part of this chapter concerns the relationship between choice in time and dramatic character. A conventional view of tragedy assumes that a decision made in a moment of crisis springs from the hero’s character, that is, choice is latent in his or her self, with its source a “tragic flaw.” But I will consider how tragic character can be defined through choice, anticipating the deconstruction of character formation that will be explored in Chap. 4’s discussion of videogames. In those anxious, blind moments of decision, the tragic characters become what they choose. This chapter’s second part also questions the assumption that the tragic protagonist’s choice might be equally constrained by the power that human beings have called the gods, fate, or destiny. While I declare here my bias in favor of free will, I do not aim to disentangle the paradoxes of fate and free will in tragedy once and for all in this short book. But I do take up the role of agency in the unfolding of events in present time: to what extent are we asked to imagine that the protagonist could act otherwise in a story that has already been written? As Frank Kermode has posed the task, we must then “concern ourselves with the conflict between the deterministic patterns any plot suggests, and the freedom of persons within that plot to choose and so to alter the structure, the relations of beginning, middle, and end” (Sense 30).
Such a short book also cannot responsibly consider the whole range of tragedy, and I make no claim to speak for all of it. Rather, I identify some examples where one could find the kind of openings to possibility that would lead a reader or actor to look for them elsewhere. So I will illustrate my points about the relationship of choice in time to character and consequences through a small set of plays: Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Sophocles’s Theban plays, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hamlet. I have chosen these plays because my readers are likely to know them. Further, even when they are not being explicitly imitated, they continue to serve as powerful paradigms for the construction of tragic temporality and choice in time in many media.
Choice, Character, and Consequences in Greek Tragedy
Anyone who writes about tragedy, time, character, choice, and consequences must come to terms with Aristotle’s Poetics, not because this “natural history” of tragedy is necessarily true, but rather because it has been so deeply influential. As a natural philosopher, Aristotle recognized that everything is constantly changing, like a tree that begins as a seed, grows tall, and dies (see Herman chap. 4). So too, when he lectured about plays, Aristotle observed that tragedy concerns the change in human lives over time. Tragedy enacts a structured version of that change, and, in Kathy Eden’s words, holds out the hope that “fiction will disclose the causal connection between events and so deepen our understanding of those events—why they happened as they did” (45).
For Aristotle tragedy is “the mimesis not of persons (anthropōn) but of action and life (praxēos kai biou),” for “the events and the plot are the goal of tragedy.” So, he says, “it is not in order to provide mimesis of character (ēthē) that the agents act; rather their characters are included for the sake of their actions” (Poetics 51). This formulation often confuses modern readers, who try to imagine plots without “characters”; plots do need people, for action, but what then is character? In defining ēthos, Aristotle wrote first that character is “that in virtue of which we ascribe certain qualities to the agents” (49); then he clarifies the point that “character is that which reveals a moral choice” (52–3). The Poetics thus connects character with choice, but what does Aristotle mean when he says that it “reveals” or clarifies choice? Edward Burns interprets the passage as saying that such moments of choice may indeed “show” the elements of a character (20), but “though we each possess a particular ethos, that is not for the Greeks the source of our defining reality; it is not ‘ourself.’ We are defined by the end to which our life tends, and that is achieved through our actions” (26). That is, the Poetics suggests that rather than characters being the wellspring of action, action and character function through mutual influence.
The relationship between character, choice, and action naturally entails questions of causality: if tragedy is about change, what precipitates it? How is that change connected to the idea that choice “reveals” character? The Poetics addresses these critical matters when discussing the tragic situations most likely to produce pity and fear. Aristotle specifies that the person experi...