Antigone

     Antigone is the conclusion to Sophocles' pseudo-trilogy that scholars sometimes refer to as "the Theban plays." It chronicles Antigone's decision to ignore Creon's earthly edict in order to obey a higher law - the law of nature, the law of the gods - in burying her brother Polynices. In so doing, the play deals with several societal issues - the importance of civil versus natural law, the nature of citizenship (and how it can be lost, as by Polynices in rebellion), the meaning of family, and so forth.

     The true tragic nature of Antigone is not that many of the characters die. Antigone dies, but only after she fulfills her duty to her brother; Haimon dies, but only because he would rather die than live without Antigone. Creon, in fact, survives the play outright, but suffers horribly from the results of his decree.

Before the Law

     "Before the Law" is a short story by Franz Kafka. In the parable, a country man comes to a door behind which is kept the Law. The doorkeeper denies him access, but says that he will let the man in eventually. The man waits his entire life, and on the threshold of death asks why nobody but him has ever begged for admittance. The doorkeeper replies that nobody but the country man would ever be allowed to enter, and as he is about to die, the door will be shut.

     The country man is the hero in this minute tragedy; he fails to gain access to the Law, but in his constancy demonstrates its purity and importance.

The Burial at Thebes

     In Ancient Greece, there was no separation of church and state, which made sense because everybody was of the same religious persuasion. As an interesting tidbit, the Greek word for a gathering-together of equals as in the Athenian assembly was ekklesia, which would later be used in Christian circles as the name of a book in the Old Testament (Ecclesiastes) and an adjective (ecclesiastical). The Greeks were firm believers in social hierarchy - slaves, the poor, the wealthy, the gods. However, as Greek, particularly Athenian, democracy flourished, the people began to develop an awareness of the conflict between man-made laws and religious codes.

     This theme - church vs state - is the central conflict in Antigone. The titular character's appeal to a higher law, the law of the gods, gave her a license to violate the laws of man, Creon's decree that Polynices was not to be buried. This is the reason Antigone is still relevant today - we daily confront the same problem that Sophocles wrote about, particularly in America. One high-profile struggle was the decision made by her husband to remove Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, effectively killing her. Clergy and government officials sided with Mrs Schiavo's family and against her husband, claiming that God did not give man the power to delegate death.

On Wall Street, Pride Signals a Fall

     Hubris is another word for pride, or cockiness. This presumptuousness is particularly wrathful on Wall Street, with several wildly succesful companies growing sure of themselves, and then suffering losses bordering on the catastrophic. These companies, like Enron and Winstar, reach for what Aristotle called "godly heights" and plunged to their doom, like the fabled Icarus - they acted as if they were above the world, and were brought crashing down without wings or a trampoline.

     The assumption that hubris negatively affects companies is not ungrounded - companies whose chairmen or CEOs appeared on magazine covers suffered a 10% negative growth over the next two years, compared to a 20% positive growth in the overall market. In general, as well, companies who pay to have sports arenas named after them also suffer in the years following.

The Tragic Fallacy

     Aristotle said that tragedy is the "imitation of noble actions." In the time since classical Greece, however, society's idea of "imitation" has changed - the Romantics of the nineteenth century felt "imitation" was too naive, preferring to use the term "expression." Furthermore, "noble" is a somewhat ethereal word, since nobility is a human construct without objective criteria. The idea of what is noble and what is not changes over the centuries - Achilles' desecration of Hector's body seemed noble to Homer, but not to us.

     That being said, nobility is necessary for tragedy. Tragedy reveals this nobility of human character even as its heros and heriones perish. Juliet dies only after demonstrating the beauty and power of love, for example. Nobody can write a good tragedy unless they believe in the nobility of the human spirit, since tragedy is an expression of that nobility's "triumph over the outward universe." Indeed, the best tragedies were written in the time of Sophocles and Shakespeare, in the Periclean and Elizabethan time periods, when the Greek and later English cultures were at the height of their cultural influence and power. Joseph Krutch says that these were "people[s] fully aware of the calamities of life [but] nevertheless serenely confident in the greatness of man." One could paraphrase this by saying that it takes a fundamentally happy people to write and have good, solid tragic drama. For these people, tragedy is almost a religion - a way to explain the cruelties of the world, and to overcome them.

Oedipus

Oedipus is perhaps the archetypal tragic hero. He kills his father, and marries and begets children by his mother, all a result of him trying to avoid doing those things. He rips out his eyes and exiles himself from the city he once ruled. He punishes himself so because he ordered exile on pain of death for the man who killed Laius, and he stands by his orders even when it is he who must bear his own wrath and the wrath of the people of Thebes. In this sense, Oedipus retains his nobility even in his downfall.

In 1949, soon-to-be-blacklisted playwright Arthur Miller penned an essay called "Tragedy and the Common Man." In it he remarked that the 20th century thus far had not seen very many tragedies written, but disagreed with the hypothesis that it was due to "a paucity of heroes." He claimed that the common man could be just as useful a hero in tragic drama as could nobility and demigods. He emphasized personal dignity as the key to tragedy, and that the tragic hero seeks to attain or retain his or her "rightful" place in society, which for the common man probably is a basic level of dignity.

Art and Tragedy

The story of tragedy can be told in almost any way you can imagine, and it manifests itself in art as often as it does in drama and literature. In art, you get a smaller segment of the story, but you can see it instead of hear it or read it, and in that way I think it becomes more visceral. For example, "Oedipus" by Matthew Holloway is just a head. But it's solemn and blue and elongated and tilted slightly, with darkness for eyes and darkness surrounding. It's an immediately sad piece of work, and it can be fully understood by someone without knowledge of the tale of Oedipus because it is so simple.

The Modern Tragedy of Success

According to Alain de Botton, our modern society's idea of success causes a lot of emotional distress for people who aren't millionaires and models. He says that in a society that says anybody can do anything - a "meritocracy" - is a source of low self-esteem across the board. If you're on top, you're on top because of your abilities and worth, but if you're on the bottom of society, you're on the bottom because you deserve to be on the bottom. He brings tragedy into the picture by saying that tragedy is good because, even though it traces the story of people's stark and utter failures, it accords the characters a level of sympathy that is missing from, say, the tabloids.

First thoughts on tragedy

Tragedy started out as a kind of play in ancient Greece. According to Aristotle, tragedy is defined as a story that deals with an important deed and purges the audience of emotion. Over the next two thousand years or so tragedy evolved, but stayed basically sad. In the 1600s a French playwright said that tragedy deals with "matters of state" and comedy deals with love. This seems like a pretty good basic definition. In earlier times, tragedy revolved around upper-class characters, but in the last century or two everybody has been seen fit to be in a tragedy. A tragedy doesn't have to have a sad ending, but it helps.