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.

 Also, whilst you’re at it, take a look at some Wagner:  here‘s a YouTube clip of Jessye Norman in Von Karajan’s version of Tristan und Isolde (1865); and here is Nina Stemme singing from the same opera.  Is this stuff as stupendous as Nietzsche claims it is?  [There's some background on the opera here; turns out it was inspired by Wagner's reading of, guess who, Schopenhauer...]

 On Schopenhauer’s affinities to (and adoption of) Eastern and especially Buddhist philosophical traditions, have a look at this [JSTOR] essay by Peter Abelson.  Could there, do you think, be a fully Buddhist aesthetic of tragedy?

If you’re looking forward to the first class after Reading Week (on George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss), you might want to glance at this Jean Sudrann essay on Schopenhauer and Eliot: it’s mostly on Daniel Deronda, but it includes some interesting things nevertheless.

 Hegel never wrote a book called On Tragedy; rather his thoughts on the subject are mostly to be found in the sereis of lectures on Aesthetics he delivered between 1820 and 1829.  The slightly scatterered nature of this makes a simple link tricky to orchestrate; but you can search inside Henry Paolucci’s book on Hegel and Tragedy.  Here (or here, if you prefer a pdf) is Mark Ochre’s summary of Hegel’s tragic theory; it’s a useful introduction.  Otherwise you might prefer to browse the Hegel wiki, or check out the many articles that a google search throws up (like these).

 Schopenhauer is an easier philosopher to get a handle on, in part because (apart from some shorter essays) he only wrote one book: The World as Will and Idea (sometimes that title gets translated into English as The World as Will and Representation).  We’re interested in books 3 (and to some extent 4) of this work, and it’s available online here.

The ecstasy of the Dionysian state, with its destruction of the customary manacles and boundaries of existence, contains, of course, for as long as it lasts a lethargic element, in which everything personally experienced in the past is immersed. Through this gulf of oblivion, the world of everyday reality and the Dionysian reality separate from each other. But as soon as that daily reality comes back again into consciousness, one feels it as something disgusting. The fruit of this condition is an ascetic condition, in which one denies the power of the will.

In this sense the Dionysian man has similarities to Hamlet. Both have had a real glimpse into the essence of things. They have understood, and it now disgusts them to act, for their actions can change nothing in the eternal nature of things. They perceive as ridiculous or humiliating the fact that they are expected to set right a world which is out of joint. The knowledge kills action, for action requires a state of being in which we are covered with the veil of illusion. That is what Hamlet has to teach us, not that really venal wisdom about John-a-Dreams, who cannot move himself to act because of too much reflection, too many possibilities, so to speak. It’s not a case of reflection. No! The true knowledge, the glimpse into the cruel truth overcomes every driving motive to act, both in Hamlet as well as in the Dionysian man. Now no consolation has any effect. His longing goes out over a world, even beyond the gods themselves, toward death. Existence is denied, together with its blazing reflection in the gods or an immortal afterlife. In the consciousness of once having glimpsed the truth, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of being; now he understands the symbolism in the fate of Ophelia; now he recognizes the wisdom of the forest god Silenus. It disgusts him.

Here, when the will is in the highest danger, art approaches as a saving, healing magician.  Art alone can turn those thoughts of disgust at the horror or absurdity of existence into imaginary constructs which permit living to continue. These constructs are the Sublime as the artistic mastering of the horrible and the Comic as the artistic release from disgust at the absurd. The chorus of satyrs in the dithyramb is the saving fact of Greek art. Those emotional moods I have just described play themselves out by means of the world of these Dionysian attendants.

In the lecture I discussed Greenblatt’s suggestive reading of the play in Hamlet and Purgatory in the cultural context of the aftermath of Reformation, of a Protestantism still spectrally haunted by the ‘ghost’ of Catholicism; and the way the play subtly problematises certain key figures of faith that were in contention at this time—Puragtory, the eucharist bread, authority and succession.

In seminars we talked about the ways in which the play strings itself between, or perhaps superposes one upon the other, two incompatible worldviews: this is a dramatic world in which death can be simultaneously the road to a pagan or medieval Catholic afterlife of purgatory, ghosts and judgment, and also that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns; in which the ghost himself can simultaneously be a ‘real’ ghost, witnessed by many people in the world and a hallucination in Hamlet’s mind (in the closet scene); in which Hamlet can be simultaneously only playing at being mad (retaining the knowledge of both hawk and handsaw and, more importantly, the difference between them) and actually be mad (stabbing people without knowing who they are, babbling and hurling himself into fights and the like). A sort of stereoscopic Hamlet, in other words.

We discussed the place of the aleatory in the play—the killing of Polonius is an accident, although the deaths of the second half of the play (Ophelia’s suicide, Laertes duty to revenge, the final bloodbath) flow from it. We talked about the question of whether an accident can be truly tragic—doesn’t tragedy, as many critics have argued, require a sense of fatal inevitability?

We also touched on notions of violence, and in particular the ‘sacred violence’ that René Girard is famous for considering: the notion of tragedy as violence not in the literal sense (Hamlet stabbing an old man to dead with a knife is, clearly, violent in this way) but in a formal or conceptual sense, the way certain events rupture our frames of reference, or the metanarrative logics that structure our world. As was said in one of the seminars, attending the funeral of your parents is sad, but attending the funeral of your children is tragic, because we expect our children to outlive us.

With a play as culturally ubiquitous as Hamlet the business of linking to useful resources and the like could be neverending. But, having said that, you might find the following interesting, or useful.  MIT’s Shakespeare resource, Hamlet on the Ramparts, is pretty good; Stuart Burns keeps a Hamlet blog (of all things); and I didn’t have time, in the lecture, to talk about one of the most celebrated (or, if you prefer, notorious) recent–relatively recent–theoretical interventions into the tradition of Hamlet: Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, a book that constellates Hegel’s ‘World-Spirit’ or Geist, Marx’s dialectic, Derrida’s own deconstruction, and Hamlet’s father’s ghost.  Excerpts from Derrida’s book are available online here, and the whole book is in the library.

 The question: is Ledger’s death a tragedy? Or is it just sad?

 If you’re interested in Stoicism, there’s a whole website called stoics.com, which is bound to be worth a look.  Quite apart from anything else, they have the whole run of Seneca’s prose output for you browse, should you be so inclined.

 In the seminars we discussed, amongst other things, the notion that although he sets his plays in the traditional cosmology of Attic tragedy — gods, goddesses, punishment after life for crimes and so on — elements in Seneca’s play either subvert or outright deny that there is any such thing  as gods (Thyestes himelf declares ‘fugere superi’, ‘the gods above have fled away!’ [that's line 1021]; and Atreus goes so far as to dismiss, or send away, the gods: ‘dimitto superos’, [line 888]).  Critics, such as Eckard Lefèvre, in this [JSTOR] essay, have discussed this (‘throughout many long passages,’ he says, ‘Seneca’s tragedies present a world without God’).  In seminar we talked about whether the play, in some sense, marks out a tragic transition from a world ordered by the gods, pitiless as they might be, and one in which human power was its own divinity, and the gods as gods had fled.  Not the deus ex machina, ‘god from the machine’ (here’s a good definition of that), but a godless machine, a machina vacua (I just made that last phrase up).  We were discussing whether that makes the tragedy more intense, or robs it of its power; and we talked about the need to distinguish between tragedy in art and in life.  I suppose we might want to argue that banishing gods and supernatural machinery from our concept of life throws responsibility back on us; that it is existentially liberating.  But I wonder, thinking about it, whether living under gods, even capricious, cruel and tyrannical gods, isn’t preferable to most human beings than living in a godless universe.  Might this be because ‘gods’ is a shorthand not for actual deities, real or metaphorical, but for ‘something, even something malign, that makes sense of this suffering’?  In Seminar B we talked a little about the death of Diana.  Al Fayed lost his son in that car crash, which is of course a very painful loss to bear; but he has shown himself emotionally invested in proving a giant conspiracy, that the Royal Family and the British Secret Services plotted to murder Diana and Dodi.  You might think this must make the loss of his son more painful to him: first by drawing out the grieving process, and second — if he were to succeed — by demonstrating that the world is run by wicked, powerful forces, which is very far from being a comportable thought.  But all this is, on some level, preferable to him than the simpler (and almost certainly truer) explanation: it was an accident.  Rather believe that your child was persecuted by wicked forces than that he just died for no reason.  The disproportionateness and arbitrariness of human suffering is what is so hard for us to swallow.  So this is the question: does art, by tending to provide a shape, form and ‘plot’ for experience, give us this comforting sense that everything has a place in a larger scheme, mimic this understanding of the cosmos as ordered?  Is it, perhaps, a lie in that sense?  Might that be the difference between tragedy in art and tragedy in life?

Ah well: let’s not dwell on these troubling questions.  Instead let us look again at this snapshot of the supergroup, Plato, Seneca & Aristotle, performing their greatest hit ‘Don’t Be A Slave To Your Passions, Baby’.  Dig their trendy threads!

Catharsis: Click here to be taken to a brief essay by the course director himself, no less, on Catharsis.

If that fails to light your candle, check out the wealth of JSTOR accessible articles and reviews on the subject.

Hamartia: J. M. Bremer’s Hamartia: Tragic Error in the Poetics of Aristotle and in Greek Tragedy (1969) is in the Library [888.ARI/B].  We talked a little about A C Bradley’s old-school but fairly influential perspective on Shakesperean tragedy as proceeding from a tragic flaw; that book [Shakespearean Tragedy: lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (1904)] is in the Library too [824 S/BRA].  There are more up to date treatments of the same topic available, of course.