Responding to Tragedy
Eva
picking your brains.
I'm trying to understand our response to the tragic in art. Some of the
greatest art depicts loss, grief, death, loneliness, and despair at the
emptiness of the world. Putting it bluntly, these things aren't fantastic.
Nobody wants to suffer, yet when suffering appears in art we describe it as
great (assuming it's done well, of course).
Why do we enjoy art of this kind? Is it because we tend to look on the
bright side of things and tragic art affords us a frisson of honesty as a
counterbalance to optimism? Is it cathartic to experience tragic art, and
if so what does catharsis give us--a purging of our darker feelings?
I'm confused about this process. Why should the depiction of misery give us
pleasure?
Leonard Tillman
The answer, respective of individual differences, could be any of
the sensations you've thus far described. Some people actually derive
pleasure of sorts, from observing moments of negativity, not only as a
counterbalance, but for their sharp contrasts, to the usually-sought
optimism and the cheerier aspects of life.
My own theory is that we feel an assurance and confirmation when
experiencing the visually and/or musically tragic items, -- largely due
to their creators' and interpretors' seeming "sympathy", and the works'
possible relevance, to our own similar feelings - stemming from
recollections of life-moments that have become integral parts of us.
Best,
LT
Dennis M. Hammes
As simply as you put the question (only), it gives us something to
be Better Than.
In the general case, it's more for the company (as in "misery
loves company"), the "same" ("love" = "same").
If you surround it with all the professional effort of opera, it
makes it More Important, more Authoritative, to be Better Than, than
slugging beer while watching WWF on Ch 2 or Springer on Ch 4.
Pogo put it well: "We has met th' enemy, an' he is us."
You can find some more of my blathering on this (well, closely
related) topic on "The Big Lie" thread on this group (aapc).
--
------(m+
~/:o)_|
The Holy Ghost comes in many forms,
and nicotine is one of them.
http://scrawlmark.org
Dale Houstman
I think Dennis' response is the usual cynical/post-modernist idea: we
enjoy tragedy in art because it makes us feel "better" than the tragic
figures pictured. Frankly, I think that's bullshit, and reduces an
entire history of art to a level of stupidity that is hard to imagine a
real artist joining in with. When tragedy is done well in art, we
respond to it because we sense that the artist has captured something
real about our own lives, and the lives of those about us, and what we
know of life in general: it other words, it "rings a bell." It gives
form to sometimes repressed anguish of our own. In art the tragedy is
usually "dramatized" and made big, but that's the usual run for at, and
is related to the same process by which we can identify with the "royal"
figures in Shakespeare. Hamlet is a tragic figure, but we don't like it
because we feel superior to him: it's because we all understand what
vindictiveness and indecision and lack of concern for those about us can
do to our lives and theirs. It gives us "pleasure" because we are
watching great emotions put into a beautiful form, and it helps us to
see those emotions in ourselves. The Greeks called it "katharsis" and it
is a powerful process. Dennis's answer is glib and false.
dmh
Ancona21
Ancona
Ward Hardman
: Hi, I'm a lurker to both the above newsgroups, but I hope you won't mind me
: picking your brains.
Read "The Birth of Tragedy," by Friedrich Nietzsche for succinct insights
into this question.
--Ward Hardman
"The older I get, the more I admire and crave competence, just simple
competence, in any field from adultery to zoology."
- H.L. Mencken
Pat Finley
======================
For a short answer, skip down to the second dotted line. But, if
you're in the mood for a long answer ...
From the earliest attempts at literary criticism (in the western
tradition, at least) philosophers have pondered the nature of tragedy.
Plato himself touched on precisely your question. But first it is
important to draw distinctions, between different aspects of sorrow
and suffering in art.
Disaster or calamity (an earthquake, the death of a child, airplane
crash) is not tragedy.
Pathos, the compassionate (NB with passion) reaction we have to both
disaster and tragedy, does not, in and of itself, define 'tragedy' in
the sense that 'tragedy' is used in art. The death of Hamlet is
tragic; the death of Ophelia is pathetic. Hamlet, like Agamemnon and
Oedipus and Antigone before him, is guilty of 'hamartia', a tragic
error or misjudgment. He is by turns vengeful, indecisive, and
injudicious; Ophelia, on the other hand, is merely weak, at least in
her ability to endure great stress. The oft-heard translation of
hamartia as 'tragic flaw' is not very satisfactory: flaws are passive;
error, on the other hand, is active.
According to tradition, Plato, (who was the teacher of Aristotle,
whose "Poetics" lays the cornerstone for our conception of tragedy)
was a poet and playwright in his youth, but renounced his works in
that vein when he met Socrates, whom many scholars view as
antagonistic to poetry and drama. Thus the so-called 'ancient
quarrel' between philosophy, the old learning, and poetry, the new.
Plato felt that the pursuit of truth and justice was better served
by philosophy than poetry; poetry (drama), after all, rouses emotions
in a way that is at odds with reason. Plato himself had written
dithyrambs, the ancient Greek poems that were set to music -- and you
all know how affecting, how emotional, music can make us feel. In his
ideal Republic, Plato banishes poetry from his utopian world
altogether -- because it is not didactic, it is not practical. After
all, do Homer's famous phrases 'gray-eyed Athena' or 'wine-dark sea'
teach us theology or seamanship?
In fact, Plato raised the very question you have raised, 'how can
representations of suffering be pleasurable?' In doing so, he clearly
regarded this as irrational, which to him was just about the greatest
of all evils.
It was for Aristotle, Plato's protege, to take up the challenge,
to prove that poetry (including drama & tragedy) was well worthy of
man's study.
Aristotle did so by demonstrating that because poetry has form, it
requires skill, not merely inspiration -- thus appealing to the
rational streak in the Platonists. He also asserted that poetry
represented life in a useful way from which we can learn; poetry
comprehends universal ideals, while history and science deal with
specific cases. Furthermore, poetry (drama) is useful because it
informs us of the actions of virtuous men.
Aristotle also wrote (and we're getting closer to your specific
question now)that poetry is 'useful' (a sine qua non to the
Platonists) because it arouses our emotions in a manner that allows us
to improve our capacity for controlling them -- i.e. catharsis, which
is often defined as the 'transcendence of pity and fear'.
What is catharsis and why is it important? There are several aspects
to it.
First, from the dramatic point of view, we forgive the protagonist's
error; he is both redeemed and cleansed by the catharsis of his
catastrophe.
From the personal point of view, catharsis purifies our own feelings
of pity (compassion for the one experiencing "pathos") and
fear/terror (identification with the character experiencing "phobos")
so that we better understand those emotions and hence ourselves.
Catharsis also purges our pity and fear, leaving us in better control
of our emotions; it also is psychically beneficial in that it teaches
us that our own sorrows and sufferings are usually rather
insignificant compared to the sorrows of heroes who generally endure
their downfalls with such grandeur.
Perhaps the greatest lesson of catharsis is how it can teach us to
manage fear (phobos). Only fools live without fear, but cowards let it
rule their lives. Who among us cannot be inspired by the way Chenier,
Cavaradossi, and Liu overcome their fears?
One last little byway. Aristotle believed that the protagonist of a
tragic drama must not be so irreproachable that we are outraged by his
downfall. By this interpretation, the Passion in the New Testament, no
matter how sorrowful, how pathetic, can not be 'tragic'in an artistic
sense. Jesus, (at least in the eyes of believers in the New
Testament), was entirely virtuous. Thus there can be no tragedy, in
the artistic sense, in Jesus's lamentable fate. Extrapolating from
this, Christian scholars have argued whether for Christians there can
ever be such a thing as true tragedy -- since we are rewarded in the
afterlife according to our deserts, no earthly calamity should
frighten us unduly. Will not any unjust suffering that we undergo in
this life be recompensed with interest once we shuffle off this mortal
coil?
This is why we have to peer back through the murky theological
obfuscations of the Christian era to the pagan days of Plato and
Aristotle, to understand the nature of western tragedy.
=============================================================
After that perhaps tedious discourse, let me re-state your final
question:
> I'm confused about this process. Why should the depiction of misery give us
> pleasure?
The depiction of wholesale misery per se doesn't give us pleasure; no
sensitive person could derive pleasure from watching scenes of
widespread famine, disease, or the horrors of war.
But we do enjoy, in a strange way, the suffering of a person, or a
small group of people on stage. We watch tear-jerkers over and over
again -- Cyrano's "reading" of "Christian's" last letter in the
deepening twilight of the convent; the parting of Rick and Ilse on
that windswept tarmac in West Africa; Sidney Carton's pronouncement on
the scaffold that it is a better place he goes to than he has ever
known.
We like tear-jerkers, I think, because they make us feel alive, they
make us feel we are at one with the tragic figure and thus with all
humanity. In a small way we feel that we share in the altruism of
Violetta and the nobility and dignity of Cio-cio-san. Implicit perhaps
is the belief that if we have compassion for humanity, it will one day
return that favor and shed a tear on our behalf.
Pat
Ancona21
make us feel we are at one with the tragic figure and thus with all
humanity. >>
Precisely.
Ancona
Trish Brown
Hi! I'm a lurker too! But I have to compliment you on posing a wonderfully
stimulating question - one which has brought all these mind-boggling answers out
of the woodwork! Good on you!
My own (this is the truncated version) opinion is that depictions of tragedy
speak to our 'greater' selves. We are thus given the opportunity to ponder on
forms of self-sacrifice, nobility of purpose and the potential to triumph over
fearful odds. Themes such as earning salvation at the cost of human life are
always attractive to those who subscribe to a Faith. Winning a war at the cost
of innocent lives appeals to the perceived 'justness' of the conflict. Even the
sinking of a great ship provides opportunities for bravery and martyrdom!
Anything which aggrandises the human spirit, especially in the portrayal of a
'Higher Purpose', has to appeal to our inner nobility (can't think of a better
word to describe it - 'agape' perhaps?)
Anyway, I'm sure I'll come up with a much more complex response to this question
after thinking for a while and I thank you again for asking it! :-D
--
Trish {|:-}
Newcastle, NSW, Australia
Aidan Tynan
Pat Finley wrote in message ...
<snip>
>
> In fact, Plato raised the very question you have raised, 'how can
>representations of suffering be pleasurable?' In doing so, he clearly
>regarded this as irrational, which to him was just about the greatest
>of all evils.
>
> It was for Aristotle, Plato's protege, to take up the challenge,
>to prove that poetry (including drama & tragedy) was well worthy of
>man's study.
>
I think the essence of tragedy is the sublime, a collision of pleasure and
pain, or perhaps will and intellect, as in the transgression of a limit
(Hamlet pondering the consequences of parricide, etc). Now, Aristotle saw
this as a kind of purging. But I'd like to emphasise the Romantic element in
this. Take the example of Wordsworth, as a child, stealing a boat and
sailing out into the lake. As he watches the cliffs loom above him, he
experiences the sublime: the terror and beauty of nature, the failure of the
traditional philosophical concept of adequation, that which links the self
to the stream of experience. The overpowering of this link by the tremendous
force of nature leads inevitably to the sublime. Burke on writes: "The
passion caused by the great and sublime in nature is astonishment, and
astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are
suspended, with some degree of horror. The mind is so entirely filled with
its object that it cannot entertain any other, nor reason on that object
which fills it." Now, Burke wrote about the French Revolution as a sublime
(in his sense) event. That Burke was evidently appalled by the Revolution is
another matter. Blake, writing around the same time, composed "The Tyger"
which, imo, is a poem about the failure of Lockean notions of adequation.
What hand or eye can frame the Tyger's symmetry? What mode of adequation
between subject and (sublime) object will do justice to human experience? Is
this an anonymous, universal movement (as in Schopenhauer's theory of will,
and Hegel's conception of Reason as the movement of absolute spirit) or an
individual, autonomous journey into the wilderness? Wordsworth was content
to assert the persistence of the autonomous self, the self which in the
throes of terror can rise like a vapour off the surface of a sea to arrest
the ego's dissolution. But then, enter Hegel, who argued that tragedy as the
force of absolute spirit extinquishes the ego in the sublation of "goods":
tragedy is not a matter of good against evil, it is "good against good", and
the fact is that there is only enough room for one good, one has to be
negated in sublation. That is the properly "tragic" moment, the universal
expanse of Reason. Now Burke says that "passions which concern
self-preservation, turn mostly on pain and danger". Self preservation for
Burke, extinction of the self for Hegel. But Hegel is the optimist.
Perhaps, and this is what I've been trying to establish, the extinction of
the self and the preservation of the self through suffering are actually the
same thing. I'm heading into Freudian territory: the ego, as silenced by the
superego, comes to wish its own death; the egotism of self destruction ("to
be or not to be ...").
Whatever it is, the tragic seems to elude any rational conception of it. Is
it, as Dennis says, mere schaudenfraude? Or is it the classical purging, the
catharsis, the recognision of the flawed nature of man and the necessity to
keep reminding ourselves of this? I think tragedy walks the hinterlands of
the nomadic ego, where the death drive keeps watch, thwarting meaning in its
dumbshow of extinction in which we, like Hamlet eternally watching Claudius
for signs of guilt, wait for the all important revelation.
-Aidan
stephenmead
"Pat Finley" <capa0...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:ce68920e.03080...@posting.google.com...
> "Eva" <e...@invalid-e-mail.com> wrote in message
news:<bgvr9t$5i5$1...@newsg4.svr.pol.co.uk>...
> > Hi, I'm a lurker to both the above newsgroups, but I hope you won't mind
me
> > picking your brains.
> >
> > I'm trying to understand our response to the tragic in art.
> ======================
> For a short answer, skip down to the second dotted line. But, if
> you're in the mood for a long answer ...
<big snip>
=============================================================
>
>
>
> After that perhaps tedious discourse,
<nip>
> Pat
Hi just wanted to say that your discourse wasn't tedious at all, deeply
impressive. Eva certainly got a full answer to her question and I'm not
being sarcastic when I say I almost feel this essay you wrote in reply is
too good to be posted on this board and then vanish - somebody ought to
publish it!
Cheers!
Dennis M. Hammes
>
> Eva wrote:
> > Hi, I'm a lurker to both the above newsgroups, but I hope you won't mind me
> > picking your brains.
> >
> > I'm trying to understand our response to the tragic in art. Some of the
> > greatest art depicts loss, grief, death, loneliness, and despair at the
> > emptiness of the world. Putting it bluntly, these things aren't fantastic.
> > Nobody wants to suffer, yet when suffering appears in art we describe it as
> > great (assuming it's done well, of course).
> >
> > Why do we enjoy art of this kind? Is it because we tend to look on the
> > bright side of things and tragic art affords us a frisson of honesty as a
> > counterbalance to optimism? Is it cathartic to experience tragic art, and
> > if so what does catharsis give us--a purging of our darker feelings?
> >
> > I'm confused about this process. Why should the depiction of misery give us
> > pleasure?
> >
> >
>
> I think Dennis' response is the usual cynical/post-modernist idea: we
> enjoy tragedy in art because it makes us feel "better" than the tragic
> figures pictured. Frankly, I think that's bullshit, and reduces an
> entire history of art to a level of stupidity that is hard to imagine a
> real artist joining in with.
Whereas real illiterates rush in.
She put "tragedy," not "tragedy overcome."
The Greeks called "tragedy overcome," "Comedy."
So do I.
Later on, it was called "Romance."
So do I.
/Le Nozze/, e.g., is one stupid "tragedy" after another. Until
the "resolution" sextet-plus-chorus where they Live Happily Ever
After.
Some tragedies are harder to overcome than others.
Comedy says /how/ to overcome them.
Romance says how to do it well.
> When tragedy is done well in art, we
> respond to it because we sense that the artist has captured something
> real about our own lives, and the lives of those about us, and what we
> know of life in general: it other words, it "rings a bell."
And therefore you drool.
So far, you've said /what/, that's different from what I put?
> It gives
> form to sometimes repressed anguish of our own. In art the tragedy is
> usually "dramatized" and made big, but that's the usual run for at, and
> is related to the same process by which we can identify with the "royal"
> figures in Shakespeare. Hamlet is a tragic figure, but we don't like it
> because we feel superior to him: it's because we all understand what
> vindictiveness and indecision and lack of concern for those about us can
> do to our lives and theirs. It gives us "pleasure" because we are
> watching great emotions put into a beautiful form, and it helps us to
> see those emotions in ourselves. The Greeks called it "katharsis" and it
> is a powerful process. Dennis's answer is glib and false.
Dennis' answer put into one word is "/katharsis/."
Dennis did not go beyond the question.
To mention that Comedy teaches an answer to the problem.
Where Tragedy merely identifies something to be avoided.
While Babies only see /both/ as something to be Better Than, as
Dale described himself as doing so that he could say it was
"different."
>
> dmh
Dennis M. Hammes
>
...
>
> Whatever it is, the tragic seems to elude any rational conception of it. Is
> it, as Dennis says, mere schaudenfraude? Or is it the classical purging, the
"/Schadenfreude/." I said both.
Dale egged me beyond that to Comedy and Romanticism, but that
wasn't the question, so I hadn't put it.
...
Else, "what you said."
Dennis M. Hammes
/Agape/, the love that learns, learns to be noble. And tragedy
portrays something to be got beyond by that learning, yes. "An
Invitation to Romance," as it were.
>
> Anyway, I'm sure I'll come up with a much more complex response to this question
> after thinking for a while and I thank you again for asking it! :-D
>
> --
> Trish {|:-}
> Newcastle, NSW, Australia
Gonçalo Rodrigues
Just one comment: I do not believe that Hamlet is guilty of 'hamartia'
and much less that he is indecisive and injudicious. As Nietzche saw
very clearly and states it in the Birth of Tragedy, the problem with
Hamlet is that he thinks too well for his own good and ends up dying
of the truth.
As for the rest, Thanks for the post.
With my best regards,
G. Rodrigues
Capa0848
>From: Gonçalo Rodrigues op7...@mail.telepac.pt
>Date: 08/09/2003 4:28 AM Pacific
>
>Just one comment: I do not believe that Hamlet is guilty of 'hamartia' and
much less that he is indecisive and injudicious.
Would you not say that he is indecisive about how to approach the woman he
loves, being at times gentle and considerate and at times aggressively vulgar?
Would you not say that he is indecisive about suicide?
"Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into an everlasting dew."
"To be or not to be: that is the question."
Would you not say that he's indecisive about whether there's an afterlife?
"For in that sleep of death what dreams may come... But that the dread of
something after death
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will.
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?"
And that he's indecisive about killing his murderous uncle at an opportune
moment?
"Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;
And now I'll do it. And so he goes to heaven;
And so am I revenged. That would be scann'd:
A villain kills my father; and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven."
Most scholars, I think, would agree that Hamlet's
"native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."
(I've responded to your comments about "The Birth of Tragedy" in a separate
post)
Regards,
Pat
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went
before it and wiser than the one that comes after it.
George Orwell
Capa0848
>From: Gonçalo Rodrigues op7...@mail.telepac.pt
>Just one comment: I do not believe that Hamlet is guilty of 'hamartia' and
much less that he is indecisive and injudicious. As Nietzche saw very clearly
and states it in the Birth of Tragedy, the problem with
>Hamlet is that he thinks too well for his own good and ends up dying
>of the truth.
I don' t think Nieztsche's comments are at odds with my contention. The
telling passage in "The Birth of Tragedy" is:
"In this sense Dionysian man might be said to resemble Hamlet: both have looked
deeply into the true nature of things, they have gained knowledge and are now
loath to act. They realize that no action of theirs can work any change in the
eternal condition of things, and they regard the imputation as ludicrous or
debasing that they should set right the time which is out of joint. Knowledge
kills action, for in order to act we require the veil of illusion—such is
Hamlet's doctrine, not to be confounded with the cheap wisdom of Jack the
Dreamer, who through too much reflection, as it were a surplus of
possibilities, never arrives at action!— What, both in the case of Hamlet and
of Dionysian man, overbalances any motive leading to action, is not reflection
but knowledge, the apprehension of truth and its terror."
>
Perhaps we have only a semantic difference here, but "they have gained
knowledge and now are loath to act" bespeaks indecision in my book.
Speaking of indecision, Nietzsche himself, of course, was guilty of perhaps the
most famous artistic volte-face in history.
His "The Birth of Tragedy" is in some respects a paean to Wagner, whom at the
time (1871-72) he viewed as the true inheritor of the Greek tradition.
By 1888, though, his "The Case of Wagner" is an amusingly bitchy, carping
indictment of the great composer, who, it is worth noting, had been dead for a
few years, although his popularity was probably near its zenith.
A couple of passages:
"To the artist of décadence {RW} —there we have the crucial words. And here
my seriousness begins. I am far from looking on guilelessly while this
décadent corrupts our health—and music as well! Is Wagner a human being at
all? Isn't he rather a sickness? He makes sick whatever he touches,—he has
made music sick —
and later:
"That people in Germany should deceive themselves about Wagner does not
surprise me. The opposite would surprise me. The Germans have constructed a
Wagner for themselves whom they can revere: they have never been psychologists,
their gratitude consists in misunderstanding. But that people in Paris, too,
deceive themselves about Wagner! though there they are hardly anything anymore
except psychologists. And in St. Petersburg! where they guess things that
aren't guessed even in Paris. How closely related Wagner must be to the whole
of European décadence to avoid being experienced by them as a décadent!
I disagree profoundly with N's point of view in "The Case of Wagner", but it's
a much more lively work than the weighty "Birth of Tragedy." It's curious that
on this subject the young Nietzsche was profound and ponderous, while the
middle-aged man proves to be much more witty and ironic.
I've always felt that a good bit of Nietzsche's turnabout had to do as much
with a contrarian streak in his nature as anything else. ** He was Wagner's
greatest booster during the lean years. But once most of the intelligentsia of
the day had come to revere the heir of Dionysus, as Nietzsche had once called
him, Nietzsche slid around and took a stance on the far side of the ring of
Wagnerian criticism.
** Nietzsche claimed to be revolted by the philosophical excesses of Parsifal
>As for the rest, Thanks for the post.
>With my best regards,
>G. Rodrigues
>
Thanks and regards,
Eva
on real life and on characters from Plato to Violetta in a fascinating way.
Ward, I spent the morning reading *around* your recommended Nietschze prior
to plunging in, maybe tonight or tomorrow. "Aristotle and his modern
critics" by Patrick Madigan is fascinating, but I'm sure you're aware of him
already.
Pat, as someone else has already said, your message was a model of clarity;
and it was kindly tempered with examples a layperson (i.e. me) could easily
grasp... wonderful.
Trish, Aidan, Dennis, and Leonard, thank you also very much.
Capa0848
>> After that perhaps tedious discourse,
>
><nip>
>> Pat
>
somebody ought to publish it!
>Cheers!
=========
Thanks for the thought, Stephen. I'm sitting right here waiting for the phone
to ring. :-)
To the legion of publishers who are no doubt stampeding toward my doorstep at
this very moment:
I regret that I will be unable to authorize the publication of this historic
parvum opus unless you give me leave me to work in the phrase 'lake of illogic'
somehow or other.
It's my favorite phrase, you see. I stole it from this guy in South Florida
and now he's demanding royalties, and ... well, it's a long story, but maybe
this will get him off my back.
Pat Finley
Just a couple of thoughts on your wide-ranging essay
> >
>
> I think the essence of tragedy is the sublime, a collision of pleasure and
> pain, or perhaps will and intellect, as in the transgression of a limit
> (Hamlet pondering the consequences of parricide, etc). Now, Aristotle saw
> this as a kind of purging. But I'd like to emphasise the Romantic element in
> this.
Remember though, that romanticism was a reaction against the
classical point of view. The romantics held that man's creative
powers are at their fullest when man's imagination is unconstrained,
whereas restraint is the very byword of classicism. Consider the
difference between the Prometheus of Aeschylus and the "Prometheus
Unbound" of Shelley. Or better yet, the Modern Prometheus
(Frankenstein) of his wife.
Even Aristotle, the staunch defender of poetry (drama), insisted on
the observation of the unities of time and space and so on.
While great tragedy should always approach the sublime, all that is
sublime is not tragic.
> Take the example of Wordsworth, as a child, stealing a boat and
> sailing out into the lake. As he watches the cliffs loom above him, he
> experiences the sublime: the terror and beauty of nature ... Burke writes: "The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature is astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. The mind is so entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other, nor reason on that object which fills it."
Awesome, as the young people say.
>Wordsworth was content to assert the persistence of the autonomous
self, the self which in the throes of terror can rise like a vapour
off the surface of a sea to arrest the ego's dissolution.
Wordsworth was at his best, I think, when he wrote of the prosaic,
not the sublime. As a young man he had a way of exalting the ordinary
as few poets have done before or since..
That best portion of a good man's life.
His little nameless unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love. {Tintern Abbey}
"I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity" {ibid}
"I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills" {I travelled among unknown
Men}
"My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky" {My Heart Leaps up}
snip/snip
>
> Whatever it is, the tragic seems to elude any rational conception of it.
I disagree (as would Plato) ;-) For a fine, rational analysis of the
nature of tragedy in Shakespeare, I would recommend "Shakespearean
Tragedy" by A C Bradley -- a rather unremarkable title for a most
remarkable book. The best book on literary criticism that I have ever
read.
>Is it, as Dennis says, mere schaudenfraude?
There may be an element of that or something akin to it. It is
possible that subconsciously we judge that since lightning has struck
Lear, it is less likely to strike us.
Or is it the classical purging, the catharsis, the the recognition
of this?
Re-cognition, is it not?
I think tragedy walks the hinterlands of the nomadic ego, where the
death drive keeps watch, thwarting meaning in its dumbshow of
extinction in which we, like Hamlet eternally watching Claudius for
signs of guilt, wait for the all important revelation.
Wow, now there's a metaphormidable!
But not to worry.
For murder, though it have no tongue,
Will speak with most miraculous organ
Pat
Ancona21
not the sublime. As a young man he had a way of exalting the ordinary
as few poets have done before or since.. >>
If only Wordsworth had lived as long as Keats and Keats as long as Wordsworth.
Ancona
Lookingglass
--
PEACE... Dave www.Shemakhan.com
...we know what we are, but know not what we may be.
Shakespeare
"Pat Finley" <capa0...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:ce68920e.03080...@posting.google.com...
Capa0848
>Date: 08/09/2003 10:23 AM Pacific Daylight Time
>Message-id: <20030809132335...@mb-m07.aol.com>
Yes, like Mascagni, he accomplished wonders before he was thirty and then hung
around for decades without coming close to matching his youthful success.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of another composer of whom the same
could be said -- a great success before thirty, and then, relatively, pftttt,
during the rest of a long career. Stravinsky would be close -- his three great
ballets were all written before thirty-five.
Am I forgetting anyone?
Wordsworth, incidentally, lived nearly as long as Keats + Shelley + Byron put
together. 80 - 26, 30, and 36 respectively. The latter died in 1821, 1822,
and 1824 respectively -- three hammer blows of fate in as many years.
It wasn't the Era of Good Feeling in Britain.
Pat
When a man laughs at his troubles he loses a good many friends. They never
forgive him the loss of their prerogative.
H L Mencken
Aage Johansen
> Yes, like Mascagni, he accomplished wonders before he was thirty and then
> hung
> around for decades without coming close to matching his youthful success.
>
> Off the top of my head, I can't think of another composer of whom the
> same
> could be said -- a great success before thirty, and then, relatively,
> pftttt,
> during the rest of a long career. Stravinsky would be close -- his three
> great
> ballets were all written before thirty-five.
>
> Am I forgetting anyone?
Sibelius ? Did he produce much in his later years?
--
Aage J.
Matthew B. Tepper (posts from uswest.net are forged)
to be typed in news:20030809155952...@mb-m19.aol.com:
> Off the top of my head, I can't think of another composer of whom the
> same could be said -- a great success before thirty, and then,
> relatively, pftttt, during the rest of a long career. Stravinsky would
> be close -- his three great ballets were all written before thirty-five.
>
> Am I forgetting anyone?
Among opera composers, Rossini comes to mind.
--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
My personal home page -- http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/index.html
My main music page --- http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/berlioz.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
War is Peace. ** Freedom is Slavery. ** It's all Napster's fault!
REG
to be strugging with conveying something about a sense of inner experience
that "prefigures" some of the modern sense of self; perhaps that's true, but
there often seems to me to be a lot of reading between the lines to get
there, and certainly that's not enough (enough at least for me) to let the
writing stand on its own feet.
"Ancona21" <anco...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20030809132335...@mb-m07.aol.com...
REG
Some would say this of Hahn; after the early songs, there's not much new.
I"d say it of Schoenberg. Really I would.
Also Richard Adler; Pyjama Game and Damn Yankees, and that was it.
"Capa0848" <capa...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20030809155952...@mb-m19.aol.com...
REG
50s.
"Aage Johansen" <aagj...@offline.no> wrote in message
news:oprtnm2a...@news.online.no...
Capa0848
>Date: 08/09/2003 4:27 PM Pacific Daylight Time
>Message-id: <NrfZa.111729$852....@twister.nyc.rr.com>
>
>I keep trying to "get" Wordsworth and I don't. I "understand" that he seemed
>to be strugging with conveying something about a sense of inner experience
>that "prefigures" some of the modern sense of self; perhaps that's true, but
>there often seems to me to be a lot of reading between the lines to get
>there, and certainly that's not enough (enough at least for me) to let the
>writing stand on its own feet.
>
Well, as Ancona suggested, almost all of Wordsworth's later stuff (after 1807)
is pretty tedious. But his works in "Lyrical Ballads" a volume he and
Coleridge put out in 1797or 8, and which includes STC's "Rime of the Ancient
Mariner" as well as WW's "Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey" are very nice.
And in the next few years he wrote 'Intimations of Immortality" "Ode to Duty"
"My Heart Leaps Up" and many, many others.
The preface to "Lyrical Ballads" incidentally, is one of the manifestos of
romanticism. A couple of famous passages:
"There neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of
prose and metrical composition."
"Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned
expression which is the countenance of all science."
"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin
from emotion recollected in tranquility."
And this last -- which applies equally to composers:
"Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original,
must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished."
Wordsworth's complete works (or nearly so, at least, some 900 of them), are at
Bartleby.com.
Capa0848
>Date: 08/09/2003 1:26 PM Pacific Daylight Time
>Message-id: <oprtnm2a...@news.online.no>
No, but he was 35 at the time of Finlandia, in 1900. His Fifth Symphony,
written during WW I, is fairly well known, too.
Capa0848
>oyþ@earthlink.net
>Date: 08/09/2003 1:47 PM Pacific Daylight Time
>Message-id: <Xns93D28C28EFD...@129.250.170.100>
>
>capa...@aol.com (Capa0848) appears to have caused the following letters
>to be typed in news:20030809155952...@mb-m19.aol.com:
>
>> Off the top of my head, I can't think of another composer of whom the
>> same could be said -- a great success before thirty, and then,
>> relatively, pftttt, during the rest of a long career. Stravinsky would
>> be close -- his three great ballets were all written before thirty-five.
>>
>> Am I forgetting anyone?
>
>Among opera composers, Rossini comes to mind.
Yes, he's in the ballpark. I think Rossini was about 36 when he wrote William
Tell, and he pretty much hung it up after that.
The curious thing about Mascagni, though, is that he kept at it, for many
years, with occasional minor successes, but never anything comparable to
Cavalleria which he had written at about 27 or 28.
James Kahn
>I've always felt that a good bit of Nietzsche's turnabout had to do as much
>with a contrarian streak in his nature as anything else. ** He was Wagner's
>greatest booster during the lean years. But once most of the intelligentsia of
>the day had come to revere the heir of Dionysus, as Nietzsche had once called
>him, Nietzsche slid around and took a stance on the far side of the ring of
>Wagnerian criticism.
Wasn't it more the result of a personal falling out between the two?
At least that would help to account for the extreme bitterness. Also,
to his credit, Nietzsche became appalled by Wagner's antisemitism.
--
Jim
New York, NY
(Please remove "nospam." to get my e-mail address)
http://www.panix.com/~kahn
Operatunenity
The Jungians will tell us that it's archtypes. The existentialists will tell
us that it all about dealing with one's own demise and meaninglessness. The
escapists will tell us that it is a mechanism if distancing, the masochists
will tell us that it gives us a sense if belonging. The comedians will tell us
that tragedy is merely the other side of the same coin. Neurologists will tell
us that it is the way the brain is wired. Psychologists will say that it is a
form of empathy and identification. Actors will tell us that artiface induces
real feelings of tragedy in the mind of the audience. The Ancient Greeks would
have told us it was fate.
It's all these things or at least most of them depending on what you believe.
Whether tragedy is a styilzed form of art, or merely the human mind reflecting
on the tragedies of their fellow man, it is most definitely a universal human
condition that is inevitably reflected in our art.
Aage Johansen
>>> ...
>>> Am I forgetting anyone?
>>
>>
>> Sibelius ? Did he produce much in his later years?
>
> No, but he was 35 at the time of Finlandia, in 1900. His Fifth Symphony,
> written during WW I, is fairly well known, too.
His last (7th) came in 1924, and he died in 1957.
--
Aage J.