Tragic Drama & the Idea of Human Quality

1,630 words

The vinyl library record was ancient and warped – apparently a prior library patron had left it in the sun too long – and every time it reached Desdemona’s line: “Tell me Emelia, where did I leave that handkerchief?” the needle would get locked in the groove and repeat the line over and over. Yet that piece of old warped plastic was to me a crack in the universe through which I, rapt and breathless, could eavesdrop on a nobler world: the world of tragic drama.

The record, of course, was of Shakespeare’s Othello. At that time I was 23 and living with my parents on their farm in western Colorado. I had recently graduated from a liberal arts college and was filled with an insatiable enthusiasm for literature and philosophy (finding a steady, real job was not a priority). The Othello play fascinated me. I probably listened to it 20 times, often experiencing that profound catharsis—from pity and fear—that Aristotle describes in his Poetics.

Thus began a lifelong absorption with tragic drama – listening to it, reading it, occasionally trying to write it, above all trying to understand it philosophically. Why, I would ask myself, would a person feel more grounded, spiritually tougher, more defiant and unafraid of life’s trials, more protective of his or her unique essence, from watching in horror as a poor deceived man, perplexed in the extreme, strangles his loving and innocent wife? I hasten to add another effect of tragic drama: greater sensitivity to beauty. Even now I hear Othello’s dreadful words as he approaches Desdemona’s bed to commit his awful deed:

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul. Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars! It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood; nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, and smooth as monumental alabaster.

Vast and varied is the philosophical literature that has addressed the conundrum of tragic drama. Aristotle, Hume, Hegel, Nietzsche, and a profusion of lesser names have grappled with this question. Terry Eagleton’s comprehensive study of tragedy, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, gathers together the perspectives and insights of over a hundred philosophers, critics, and authors on this inscrutable art form, which many contend is among the greatest and most distinctive achievements of Western Civilization.

I have a modest contribution to make to this host of commentators. It arises from an experience I had about the same time I began listening to the Othello record. During my year on my parents’ farm, I engaged in a quixotic endeavor to read my way through the University of Chicago’s Great Books of the Western World. At one point I was reading Darwin’s Origin of Species. I add parenthetically that western Colorado, with its many dinosaur fossil sites and dramatic landscapes of long-vanished oceans, is an ideal place to gain a sense of the passage of huge spans of time, so necessary to properly conceive evolutionary theory.

Perhaps I’m oversimplifying, but Darwin’s theory, as I understood it, involves four basic propositions. First, every species has an innate drive to procreate beyond the carrying capacity of its environment. Second, each individual member of the species is a unique variant, however minute the variation. Third, each species’ tendency to overpopulate sets the stage for competition and the natural selection of variants best suited to survive. Fourth, over time the accumulation of small variants via natural selection leads to new species.

So much for evolutionary theory from an objective point of view. Hiking in the Colorado mountains one day, it occurred to me with intense clarity that there is a subjective, experiential aspect to evolution that is deeply embedded in our human consciousness and maybe the consciousness of all sentient creatures. Essentially this subjective aspect is this: terror of being culled out. On the one hand, each of us is charged with an unending responsibility to advance our unique DNA through whatever selective matrix or process confronts us. On the other hand, this selective process is fraught with the terrifying risk of annihilation, and a path to safety is to stay with the herd, preferably near the middle of the herd — but at a cost to our individuality. If it is not too pretentious, I call this fear of being culled out “existential anxiety.” Try as we might to avoid, drown out, or turn off this anxiety, it seemed to me in my vision – and still seems to me – that it actuates most of us most of the time, even if unconsciously.

So having this idea of existential anxiety in my head and listening to Othello over and over again, I asked myself could existential anxiety explain the catharsis of tragic drama? it seemed to me it could, at least to a considerable extent, if I added one additional element: the human propensity for assessing human quality. It is difficult to talk candidly and with precision about this propensity in our day and age, with its militant zeitgeist of human equality. One might even say a taboo surrounds it. But a moment’s honest introspection reveals our consistent tendency to ferret out what Thomas Jefferson called the natural aristocracy among our fellow humans (not to be confounded with the titled aristocracy whom Jefferson despised).

It is this element, to my mind, that explains why tragic drama is more than merely stories with sad endings, as some have postulated, or a kind of morality play against our primal urges of ambition and jealousy, as others have argued. Bad things happening to ordinary people may arouse our sympathy but not tragic catharsis. We need to feel at a deep emotional level that someone better than we are is suffering the fate we are terrified might be ours, of being singled out in public for annihilation, or to quote Othello again, of being “made a fixed figure for the time of scorn to point his slow unmoving finger at.” If a great man can suffer such a fate and remain a great man, we think, then why can’t I, a lesser man, do so as well? Why do I need to curry the favor of the herd? Or in the words of Edgar, a character in Shakespeare’s King Lear:

When we our betters see bearing our woes
We scarcely think our miseries our foes…
How light and portable my pain seems now
When that which makes me bend makes the king bow.

Having this theory, I tried to deploy it on several questions that frequently arise with regard to tragic drama—for example, can tragic drama arise only in a stratified society with an aristocracy at the top of its social order that supports this art form? Certainly Classical Greece, Elizabethan England, the 17th century France of Racine, and even perhaps the pre-revolutionary Russia of Anton Chekhov’s era were stratified in this way. With my Jeffersonian distaste for hereditary nobility, however, I need to acknowledge that my theory of tragic drama may not be fully supported by these historical facts. Every society has an elite and in this sense has an aristocracy. It does seem credible, though, that tragic drama can thrive only where differences in human quality are frankly acknowledged and not suffocated by doctrinaire egalitarianism. As far as I know, no tragic drama worthy of the name has ever emerged from communist or hard left socialist regimes.

Another question I explored was why, by general consensus, tragic drama has arisen only in Western Civilization and not in other cultures. Perhaps I am presumptuous to invoke on this topic Professor Kevin MacDonald’s Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition but it appears to me my theory of tragic drama, i.e., that it is a powerful medicine that liberates from the herd instinct and inspires those touched by it to take ownership of their own unique individuality, is consistent with his argument that European humanity has a distinctive affinity for strong individualism. It is perhaps not surprising, accordingly, that tragic drama and its beautiful child, tragic opera, e.g., Verdi’s Othello, could arise and be nurtured only in the West and not in cultures that prize group conformity. It is hard to imagine Othello or King Lear being written, staged, supported, and acclaimed in cultures whose table of values puts staying small and orthodox at the pinnacle.

Let me close not with my own mundane words but with lines from Othello. They may not be relevant to the logic of my arguments. But they are to me of sublime, coruscating beauty:

Iago (deceitfully warning Othello against jealousy): O beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster that doth mock the meat it feeds on.

Othello (approaching the sleeping Desdemona with a candle in his hand): Put out the light, and then put out the light. If I quench thee, thou flaming minister, I can again thy former light restore should I repent me. But once put out they light, thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature, I know not where is that Promethean heat that can thy light relume. When I have plucked the rose I cannot give it vital growth again.

Othello (responding when Emelia, Desdemona’s attendant and Iago’s wife, tells Othello Desdemona was faithful to him): Had she been true, if heaven would make me such another world of one entire and perfect chrysolite, I’d not have exchanged her for it.

Othello (before he dies): When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice. Then shall you speak of one who loved not wisely but too well; of one not easily jealous, but being wrought, perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand, like the base Indian, threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe.