Tragedy and the Tradition is the second essay of part one of Raymond Williams book Modern Tragedy.

The essay is a discussion on the common and the traditional interpretations of tragedy. Williams has used his power of perception and has come with a strong thesis on the evolution of tragedy in the essay. In a previous essay, Raymond tells the basics of tragedy in these words; We come to tragedy by many roads. It is an immediate experience, a body of literature, conflict of theory, an academic problem. According to Williams, tragedy has not been the death of Princes; it has been at once more personal and more general. He has compared his own sense of tragedy with the conventions of the time. Tragedy is not simply death and suffering, and it is certainly not accident. Nor is it simply any response to death and suffering; it is, rather, , and kind of response to a particular kind of events which are genuinely tragic, and which the long tradition embodies. In this article, he has tried to examine two questions: (a) What is the meaning of tradition? (b) What is the relation between the tradition to tragedy and the kinds of experience that in modern times, we mistakenly call tragic? The writer proposes to examine the tradition, with particular reference to its actual historical development, Williams remarks, Tragedy comes to us, as a word, from a long tradition of European Civilization, and it is easy to see this tradition as a continuity in one important way: that so many of the later writers and thinkers have been conscious of the earlier and have seen themselves as contributing to a common idea or form. We usually try to make a contrast between the traditional and the modern, and try to compress and unify the various thinking of the past into a single tradition. Williams explaining this point says: It is a question, rather, of realising that a tradition is not the past, but an interpretation of the past: a selection and valuation of ancestors, rather than a neutral record. And if this is so, the present, at any time, is a factor in the selection and valuation. It is not the contrast but the relationship between modern and traditional that concerns the cultural historian. Williams further remarks: To examine the tragic tradition, that is to say, is not necessarily to expand a single body of work and thinking, or to trace various within an assumed totality. It is to look critically and historically, at works and ideas which have certain evident links, and which are associated in our minds by a single and powerful word. It is above all, to see these works and ideas in their immediate contexts as well as in their historical continuity, and to examine their place and function in relation to other works and ideas, and to the variety of actual experience. According to Williams, out of some three hundred Greek plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and many others, thirty two plays have survived. Yet what survives has an extraordinary power: some eight or ten plays are amongst the greatest dramas of the world. This major achievement has affected the subsequent development of tragic drama in all degrees from general awareness to conscious imitation. Yet there has been no recreation or reproduction of Greek tragedy because its uniqueness is genuine, and in important ways not transferable. Even in itself, Greek Tragedy is resistant to any kind of systematisation: there are intractable differences between the three major tragedians. The reason is that the three issues of tragedy i.e. Fate, Necessity and the nature of the Gods were not systematised by the Greeks. The particular dramatic form is also least imitable. This is not an isolable aesthetic and technical achievement: it is deeply rooted in a precise structure of feeling. This is where the modern system most clearly misinterprets the plays: it looks at the mainspring of the action as the isolation of the hero. In fact, what the form embodies is not an isolable metaphysical stance, rooted in individual experience, but a shared and indeed collective experience. The specific and varying relations between chorus and actors are its true dramatic relations. When this unique Greek culture changed, the chorus which was the crucial element of dramatic form was discarded. With it, the unique meaning of tragedy was also lost. We can see this clearly in the transition from the classical to the mediaeval world. It is now generally agreed that there was little or no tragedy in mediaeval literature. This agreement seems to rest on two grounds: first, that tragedy was then understood as narrative, rather than as drama; second that the general structure of mediaeval belief had little place for the genuinely tragic action. In this major historical period, the word tragedy was used in a quiet specific sense. The most famous English mediaeval definition of tragedy is in Chaucers Prologue to the Monks Tale: Story of a person falling from height to low degree. The emphasis here is obviously on a change of worldly condition, dramatised by the reference to high degree. In the Monks Tale, the element of chance is also included in the meaning of tragedy. Williams concludes: The story of tragedy, then, is the change from prosperity to adversity, determined by the general and external fact of mutability. Medieval tragedies are usually collected examples of the operation of a general law, and the keyword is fortune. Williams quotes many examples to explain this point that the ground of tragic action was the operation of this arbitrary and incomprehensible power. The medieval idea of tragedy was worldly as fortune was taken to be worldly success. The falls of heroes were examined in the light of the doctrine of fortune. Behind the particular sins was a more general sin: that of trusting to fortune in the sense of seeking worldly

success. The pride of the world involved all other vices, and the remedy was to put no trust in the world but to seek God. These developments brought about the exclusion of conflict from the tragedy, and tragedy came to be considered as a story, an account, but not an action. A main source of Renaissance tragedy was the emphasis on the fall of famous man. But, with the dissolution of the feudal world, the practice of tragedy made new connections. Williams quotes Sidney to explain that the theme of mutability is still dominant, and its exemplary character. But the political distinction between King and Tyrant has replaced the simple exposure of eminence, and the emphasis of affects provides as link to a new interest. Within the exemplary tradition, and the continuing emphasis on the affairs of Kings, there is a new interest in the actual workings of tragedy. Two different traditions- the medieval emphasis on the fall of princes and the new Renaissance interest in tragic methods and effects gave birth to a new tradition. It was Sidney who gave more attention to the methods of writing tragedy than to any moral or physical idea. The idea of tragedy ceased to be metaphysical and became critical, though this development was not complete until the neo-classical critics of the seventeenth century: Over the next two centuries, until the radical Hegelian revision, the idea of tragedy comprises mainly methods and effects. In this period, the new significance of exalted rank in tragedy appears a continuity from the past. Socially, this is an aristocratic rather than a feudal conception. Rank in tragedy became important because of its accompanying style. The increasing secularisation of tragedy is related to the new understanding of dignity. Dryden argued thatexalted rank was necessary to show that no condition was exempt from the turns of fortune. But now a change was visible. The moving force of tragedy was now quite clearly a matter of behaviour, rather than either a metaphysical condition or a metaphysical fault. Error was related to the action, which was in itself a general mutability. Now the emphasis is on an increasingly isolated interpretation of the character of the hero: the error is moral, a weakness in an otherwise good man, who can still be pitied. The noble way to handle suffering appears in the widespread discussion of tragic effect. Within such an idea of tragedy, both hero and spectator are conscious consumers of feeling, and their actions are limited to occasions for displaying their modes of consumption. Lessing (1729-81) was a noted German Critic and dramatic poet. His major contribution to the idea of tragedy is (a) a theoretical rejection of neo-classicism, (b) a defence of Shakespeare, (c) and an advocacy and writing of bourgeois (middle class of society) tragedy. In Lessing, the whole previous tradition was reinterpreted in terms of a pressing contemporary interest and valuation. Neo-classicism was false classicism, the real inheritor of the Greeks was Shakespeare; the real inheritor of Shakespeare was the new national bourgeois tragedy. Raymond Williams does not agree with Lessing and holds that Shakespeare was not the inheritor of the Greeks; he was a major instance of a new kind of tragedy. The character of Elizabethan tragedy is determined by a very complicated relationship between elements of an inherited order and elements of a new humanism. If the historical development of the idea of tragedy is to be fully understood, we must consider the complicated process of secularisation. In one sense, all drama after the Renaissance is secular, and the only fully religious tragedy we have is the Greek, Elizabethan drama is thoroughly secular in its immediate practice, but undoubtedly retains a Christian consciousness. The increasing emphasis on a rational morality affected the tragic action in one important way: that it insisted on relating suffering to moral error, and so required the tragic action to demonstrate a moral scheme. Tragedy in this view shows suffering as a consequence of error, and happiness as a consequence of virtue. Any tragedy which fails to do this must be reformed or re-written, to meet the demands of what is called poetic justice. The spectators will be moved to live well by the demonstration of the consequences of good and evil. Within the action itself, the characters themselves will be capable of the same recognition and change. In this tradition, the response to suffering is inevitably redemption, and the response to evil is repentance and goodness. But this scheme called poetic justice might be demonstrated in a fiction, but could not negotiate much actual experience. Unexplained and irrational suffering in the real world eventually over-threw not only this version of consequence but of its whole moral emphasis. Hegel (1770-1831), a famous German philosopher, did not reject the moral scheme that had been called poetic justice, but he described it as the triumph of ordinary morality, and the work that embodied it as social drama rather than tragedy. This new emphasis marks the major emergence of modern tragic ideas. What is important in tragedy, for Hegel, is not suffering as such mere suffering but its causes. Mere pity and fear are not tragic. Tragedy recognises suffering as suspended over active characters entirely as the consequence of their own act. It does not take into consideration the external contingency or the circumstance beyond the control of the individual, such as illness, loss of property, death and the like. For a genuine tragic action, there should be present the principle of individual freedom and independence. This conscious individuality is the only condition of tragedy. Through it, the essential tragic action can occur an action of necessary conflict and resolution. In Hegels version of the tragic action, valid but partial claims come into inevitable conflicts; in the tragic resolution, they are reconciled; even at the cost of the characters that stand of them. Williams points out two differences between the ancient and modern tragedies. First, in the ancient tragedy, the characters clearly represent the substantive ethical ends; in modern tragedy, the ends are wholly

personal. Secondly, in ancient tragedy, there is not only the downfall of conflicting persons and ends in the achievement of eternal justice. An individual may surrender his partial and under a higher command; in modern tragedy, the whole question of resolution is more difficult because the character is more personal. Justice itself is more abstract and colder. Reconciliation, when it comes, will often be within the character and will be more complicated. Hegels interpretation of tragedy is part of a general philosophy rather than a historical criticism. Williams concludes the discussion on Hegels idea of tragedy in these words: Thus Greek tragedy has been seen as the concrete embodiment of the conflict between primitive social forms and a new social order. Renaissance tragedy has been seen as the embodiment of the conflict between a dying feudalism and the new individualism. It is not eternal justice, in Hegels sense, that is affirmed in the tragic issue, but rather the general movement of history, in a series of decisive transformations of society. Not all conflicts of this kind lead to tragedy. There is only tragedy when each side finds it necessary to act, and refuses to give way. Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and Nietzsche (1844-1900) are German philosophers. Their views also contributed to the development of the idea of tragedy. Before Schopenhauer, tragedy was associated with (a) ethical crisis (b) human growth and (c) history. The German philosopher secularised the idea of fate when he said, The true sense of tragedy is the deeper insight, that it is not his own individual sins that the hero atones for, but original sin, i.e. the crime of existence itself. What Schopenhauer offers is the quite different sense of a general human fate which is above and beyond particular cases. In this respect, he is the forerunner of an idea of tragedy which seems now to be dominant: that it is an action and a suffering rooted in the nature of man, to which historical and ethical considerations are irrelevant. So the meaning of tragedy is this recognition of the nature of life, and the significance and the tragic hero is his resignation, the surrender not merely of life but of the will to live. The heroes of tragedy are purified by suffering in the sense that the will to live, which was formally in them, becomes dead. Within this negation, Nietzsche found a new kind of tragic affirmation. Tragedy, in his view, dramatises a tension which it resolves in a higher unity. There hero, the highest manifestation of the will, is destroyed, but the eternal life of the will remains unaffected. The metaphysical delight in tragedy is this active and communicated process. According to him, the action of tragedy is not moral, not purgative, but aesthetic. Nietzsches powerful linking of tragedy with myth, the rejection of science and political reaction has been of major importance. As a consequence of this, in tragic theory, the emphasis is on myth as the source of tragic knowledge, and on ritual as a description of communicated action. The central thesis of Nietzsches book Birth of Tragedy is: the ritual origin of Greek tragedy as well as the interdependence of myth and ritual in all primitive cultures. Later on anthropologists also emphasized the importance of myth and ritual in different cultures. Then this came to be known as the latest mode of an idea of tragedy. We should examine this idea in its historical and ideological context as it has played a crucial interpretative role. The terms myth and ritual seem capable of infinite extension. What we need to clarify is the difference between myth as heroic legend and myth in the Nietzsche and sense of a supra-rational source of spiritual wisdom. There is a plenty of evidence connecting tragedy of all periods with the former. The heroic legend, in the Greeks and others, is neither rational nor irrational, in the modern sense, because it was primarily taken as history. Similarly ritual in the sense of a form of worship of a particular god cannot be glibly (superficially) identified with the many forms of dramatic action, in which there is no properly ritual action at all. The fact is that myth and ritual are being used, in this modern idea of tragedy, as metaphors. The meaning of the tragic action, in this version, is a cyclic death and rebirth, linked to the seasons and centring on a sacrificial death which through lament and discovery becomes a rebirth: the death of the old is the triumph of the new. Now the essential movement described here is indeed a common tragic meaning. But we cannot identify this interpretation as the tragic vision as established by facts of tragic origins, which have somehow persisted through so many historical periods. What this idea of tragedy seems essentially to teach is that suffering is a vital and energising part of the natural order. To participate in this version of the life-process is seen as the tragic response, as opposed to the moral or optimistic or a rational response Williams concludes: At the centre of this ritual action, after all, is the tragic hero, whose inner conflict is the whole tragic action, and whose crisis and destruction can be seen as the ritual tearing-to-pieces and sacrifice for life. Thus, not only do we find the use of myth in a specifically modern sense to rationalise a post Christian metaphysics, but the conversion of the ritual figure to a form of the modern hero the hero who in liberal tragedy is also the victim, who is destroyed by his society but who is capable of saving it.