Filed under: Tragedy
In Monday’s class we talked through some of the theorists of tragedy we’ve been looking at on the course so far, and I floated the notion (with the aim that we discuss it, perhaps even shoot it down) that tragedy, being about death, is in some important if not necessarily straightforward way about parents and children. To this end I quoted from Peter Szondi‘s An Essay on the Tragic (1961; translated by Paul Fleming, Stanford University Press 2002):
There is no such thing as the tragic, at least not as an essence. Rather the tragic is a mode, a particular manner of destruction that is threatening or already completed: the dialectical manner. [55]
As he puts it in his discussion of Sophocles’ Oedipus plays, tragedy is ‘the unity of salvation and annihilation’ [59]–a dialectical unity: ‘it is not annihilation that is tragic, but the fact that salvation becomes annihilation; the tragic does not take place in the hero’s downfall, but rather in the fact that man meets his demise along the very path he took up to escape this demise.’ For example:
Laois’s oracle, the origin of the entire action, is transmitted in several versions. According to Aeschylus, Laois is told that Thebes would survive only if he remained childless. In order to have descendants, he must renounce having descendants; the heir, who otherwise saves the lineage from demise, would in this case bring about its demise. The tragic dialectic of salvation and annihilation is thus already present at the very beginning. [60]
In seminar we discussed the ways in which having children, which is on one level of course a process of creating new life, is also in some ways the inauguration of one’s own death; and we re-read the tragic texts the course has covered noting how often the tragic agon parses father and son, or parent and child: the Oedipal short-circuit whereby Oedipus fathers life on his own mother and thereby brings death to Thebes; Seneca’s savage fable of parents literally devouring their children; Hamlet’s inability to outlive his father, who spectrally propels his own son on a course that will lead to his death; the familial logic of Mill on the Floss; Sylvia Plath’s father-angst. We also discussed a key locus classicus for the father sacrificing the son, the story of Abraham and Isaac. I mentioned that the great Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard wrote a fascinating short book about precisely that sacrifice: Fear and Trembling (1843) [the whole book in English is here; and a commentary here]. We talked about the way this notion, of parents bringing about the death of their children, enacts a specifically tragic violence upon our sense of the balance of life. We mentioned Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy of novels about the First World War, fiction which works the thematic symbolism of Abraham and Isaac cannily throughout. It did come up, of course, that one reason why the metaphysical complexification of parents and children loomed so large in my discussion of tragic theory might be personal. There may be something in that.
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