A Dialogue On Tragedy

Raymond Williams

Ridyear Holt Clark Holt Clark

Ridyear Clark Singer Ridyear Holt

Clark

Certainly his death was a tragedy. I agree, but I wonder if Clark agrees. Of course I agree. I had a very great respect for him. But that isnt what I was asking. I remember hearing you say once, with such conviction that you almost convinced me, that an accident is not a tragedy. And this death was an accident. I see. But all you are doing is taking meanings from quite separate orders of fact. Certainly tragedy, as a dramatic form, excludes accident, because accident has no significance, at least of a tragic kind. Its true that the same word is increasingly used, in ordinary living, to describe some accident or disaster, and I happen to think this is wrong. But in any case we can discriminate, knowing when we are talking about one thing and when about another. Literary form and ordinary living being self-evidently different? Yes, even self-evidently. A work of art is not a life. The more you look at the detailed evidence, the more you realise this line has to be drawn. Otherwise art is not valued at all, even by those who pretend to value it. Its diminished to an aid to reflection. A visual aid! Nobody doubts that there is a difference, or even that the line must be drawn. But it depends what kind of difference, and what the line is for. When art is separated from ordinary living, can anyone be quite sure what ordinary living is? If you separate art, do you also separate thought? If you separate thought, do you also separate consciousness? If you separate consciousness, do you also separate activity? If you separate activity, do you also separate work? I wonder what you will have left for your ordinary living. But this is absurd. This is really the new barbarism. We understand things by naming them, and the naming involves a distinction, though not

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Ridyear Reeve

Holt Reeve Holt Reeve Ridyear Reeve Ridyear Reeve Ridyear

Bird

Singer Bird Reeve Ridyear Holt Clark Holt Clark

necessarily, as you put it, a separation. To break all the distinctions down, into an undifferentiated mass, is to return to chaos: an intellectual chaos that is profoundly subversive of our whole civilisation. Ultimately, yes, there is a unity, or at least a coexistence. But to exploit that to break down all the practical distinctions on which rational inquiry depends: this is vicious. Indeed its only in a half-educated society that such an attempt could even temporarily succeed. The names change, whether we like it or not. Yes. Surely the confusion is simply this: that tragedy is a dead metaphor, like romance. Increasingly, since the Renaissance, terms deriving from art have been applied to aspects of life, but at the same time theyve gone on being used, in a technical sense, in art. I dont see anything to get excited about in this. Its an inevitable process of language. To think that fishing around in these verbal muddles is an inquiry into anything, except the muddles themselves, is surely the real error. Clark spoke about a halfeducated society. Id put it the other way: you only get this kind of verbalism in a decadent society. You are the new schoolmen. Instead of facing experience, you face the words: squaring up to them like intellectual giants when in fact the shadows cast are those of pygmies. You didnt know him, Reeve, did you? No. You wouldnt call his death a tragedy then? I might have, before this discussion. But since the word has been questioned, I question it myself. Though not with any urgency. Ive got used to being haunted by dead metaphors. May I ask what you would say? I dont know. I think I should probably say loss. And if you had known him? Still loss, I think. He was going on his motorbike to a meeting. It was a decisive meeting. For weeks before it his whole energy had been concentrated on that single decision. It seemed to mean everything to him. The decision, in a way, was his future, though it meant no personal advantage. He was killed on the way to it. The others didnt know till later. I remember seeing him once, when the road was dry in early summer. He went past me at an incredible speed, and there was a movement in his arms, moving with the springs of the bike yet also, in its thrust, an imposed movement. He was imposing a movement yet in another way its source was the power of the bike, the road, his power. Its easy to exult at that speed. Exult degrades it. It was an extraordinary intensity, of its own kind. But to everyone else it was a young man going too fast on a motorbike. Yes, he was going too fast. He was going too fast when he was killed. In the accident. Yes, Im afraid so. Poor devil. The accident that is still not a tragedy. Holt, you are taking a case of a man I liked and respected, a man killed in an accident. You then try to blackmail me into admitting that the accident was tragedy, in a quite different sense, for some general point of your own.

A Dialogue On Tragedy

Bird

Clark

Holt

Clark Holt Reeve Holt Ridyear Bird Holt Reeve Holt Clark Ridyear Bird Singer Bird Singer Holt Singer

Clark

His general point isnt important, in any case. To that extent, he is wrong. But I see the difficulty, as instance and abstraction come together. I think this was an accident, in the ordinary sense, but I think also that it was significant, that the death had to do with the life. Exactly. That is the whole logical deception being practised. A case is taken which is not pure accident. I agree with what Bird said, about the death and the life. There were real connections, as in certain kinds of accident there often are. But where that kind of significance begins, you leave accident in the ordinary sense behind, even if you still dont arrive at tragedy. You mean that you know about this case, so you cant dismiss it so lightly. It isnt the sort of instance, the instance that strictly means nothing, that you can throw out in a lecture. If you or I went out and got run over by a bus, that would not be tragedy. But you can only go on saying that while you and I are insignificant, while were just names without blood. Im only trying to make rational distinctions. In such an accident there would be pain and grief, there would be suffering and mourning, but there would not be tragedy in any sense I understand. Although it would be called tragedy, by those concerned. Called a tragedy, perhaps. At least in the newspapers. Not only what the papers say. What people say. Do people really say tragedy? Only about lesser things, in fact. The point is still there. On what principle do you exclude significance from this kind of accident? Surely just because its accident. That is what accident means. Yet Clark has already admitted that in some accidents there is significance. Of course. To the degree that it ceases to be pure accident, it moves towards some kind of significance. That significance may still not be tragic. Then what? Yes, that is what Im asking. In an experience which contains death, disintegration, or any great suffering, where does the line fall, between tragic and non-tragic? Tragedy is not the facts, but the response to the facts. This is how you inevitably go wrong, if you confuse art and life. Response being confined to art? Not necessarily. Though to the degree that it becomes significant it becomes art. Significant there meaning what? It is more than an expression of feeling. The feeling becomes significant significant to others, that isin becoming articulate. It becomes articulate in having to submit itself to the struggle with an actual medium: the struggle with stone or with language; the discovery, in stone or in language, of a new dimension. The meaning is created, not given. This is the right emphasis. Tragedy is a form of experience which creates, in its spectators, both pity and terror. It is a form capable of holding these contrary emotions in balance. Where there is only pity, you dont get the tragic but the pathetic. Where there is only terror, you dont get tragedy but the thriller. Pity involves us in a particular human condition; terror drives us back from it, and creates awe. In the balance of tragedy we

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Bird Reeve

Clark Reeve

Holt Reeve Clark

Singer Reeve Ridyear Reeve Ridyear Reeve Holt Reeve

Ridyear Reeve Bird

Holt

see into the heart of a particular condition, yet we see it also in terms of a larger order. We not only sympathise and fear, but also we understand. I follow all that until order turns up so suddenly. Pity and terror I can understand, but your order seems to turn up from nowhere. Not only seems but does. Clark begins rationally, as Aristotle taught him to do. But then, at the critical point, he introduces, covertly, this purely metaphysical notion. In his own terms hes bound to do this. Hes bound to bring in order from the outside, because that is where he habitually looks for it. Yet surely everybody feels this strain and jump in the argument. Particular human emotions are described with great accuracy, but then suddenly this mode is abandoned, in favour of something that is not in experience at all. You mean that order is not in experience? Of course it is there, the feeling of it is there, but we must describe it empirically. All art is an acting-out of certain characteristic human emotions and situations. The distinction of tragedy is that it takes our deepest feelingsboth pity and fearand by intensifying them creates a world in which they can be faced without evasion yet without either danger or distraction. What this amounts to is a regulation of our feelings, in the highest sense. This regulation is in fact the sense of order we experience. A primitive form of psychoanalysis, in fact. Not a primitive form. The supreme form. I find it very difficult to be patient. But just think, Reeve, of your kind of humanism, that finds order in a mans nervous system rather than in the universe. Though I suppose I shouldnt be surprised. The humanist has always mistaken his own stomach for God. He knows the highest when he sees it. What has humanism produced in the end but a society of complacent consumers? Do I need to point out, even to people with a classical education, that the stomach is not the nervous system? Theyre right though, in a way. Order must be more than individual. Of course its more. The regulation occurs in one individual, but in a different form of the same statement it occurs in many, if the process has been accurately described. And then they all somehow add up? Simply that to regulate ourselves is to regulate our relationships. And then the tragic regulation is the social contract. Not only the tragic regulation. The same thing happens in all kinds of art, using different emotions and situations. Bad art can be distinguished because it doesnt regulate, which is only another way of saying what we all commonly say, when a work fails, that it doesnt satisfy us. Satisfy though? And regulate? Is it really like that? Youre reacting against the bad senses. The satisfaction is not an appetite appeased, but a discovery. The regulation is not cramping; it is a new kind of synthesis. This is so symmetrical that Im lost. Its like the balance of pity and terror, which seems to me to come from a different kind of thinking from any in which actual pity and terror are possible. Our fathers experienced; we measure. Exactly. That was exactly Aristotles situation.

A Dialogue On Tragedy

Bird Reeve Bird

Holt

Ridyear Singer

Clark Holt Ridyear Singer

Ridyear Singer Clark

I dont know either way about that. But here and now I see this again and again. Men seem to close their eyes and construct a conceptual world. If they ever look again, it is through these patterns. We all have to learn to see, in just that way. Not by closing our eyes. I can only say what Ive actually felt, about tragedy. And it isnt a balance of anything; it isnt even the same thing, in some regular series. Its many quite different feelings, and some of them I go on finding important. I really dont find it helps when someone tries to gather these up into a single abstraction, with a capital letter. A sort of machine really, and then Im told how the parts work. I agree. But I knew we were in for it once Aristotle was mentioned. Not even Aristotle the Greek, by the way, but his mediaeval succubus. Aristotle the authority, whether he is named or not. In fact there are many of these pockets in intellectual life, in which the discredited procedures of a dead period somehow survive and even dominate. We dont think about tragedy any more. We think about Aristotles definitions of it. I suggest we go back to ordinary tragic experience. Of the kind all men have, sooner or later, and which they are bound to try to understand. No. Because if life means what it usually means, when its opposed to art, and if ordinary means what it all too evidently is, when compared with excellence of any kind, we must avoid what Ridyear wants like the plague. We mustnt go back to this ordinary tragic experience; we must go back to actual tragedies. I agree, and I think we shall find, in fact, that genuine tragedy defines itself. You see. Genuine tragedy. You can tell, always, when Clark is on the track of a substance. Down to the capital letter and the jealous zeal in routing pretenders, this is merely the cult of a tribal god. Leave it though now. Let be for a moment. What impresses me is this. Tragedy is uncommon, historically. Only certain periods, certain kinds of civilisation, seem capable of it. And though I suspect what Clark calls order, because I believe he doesnt mean order at all but merely some system, still, at root, this is the significant factor. Tragedy is only possible, it seems, when this order is real. With the Greeks and the Elizabethans, you can feel the pressure of this order, as something absolutely central to the sense of tragedy itself. Youre not suggesting that Greek and Elizabethan ideas of order were the same? No, but in each case the order was significantly there: that is the real point. Their ideas of order were alike in this: that in each of them there was a frame of reference beyond man himself. Men were not reduced to an attempt to understand themselves in their own sole terms. There were forces more important than human life, and in their light what was actually important in life could be recognised. Without that reference, the way is open to all kinds of sentimentality, self-pity, pathos: the very feelings which tragedy transcends. When man is his own measure, or, worse, when the attributes of God are transferred to man or to life, you simply cannot have tragedy. Thats why the Romantics, for example, got nowhere near it, though they tried hard enough. If man is infinite, if human life is infinite, tragedy is impossible. The sense of an order beyond

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Bird Clark Singer

Clark

Holt

Reeve

Bird

Reeve

Holt Reeve Ridyear

the essentially limited powers of man is in fact the tragic condition. It is in mans breaking this order that tragedy is generated. Oedipus breaks it; Creon breaks it; Macbeth breaks it; Lear breaks it. I dont understand. How do men break an order that is beyond their powers? I have put it loosely. I might more reasonably have said that the order breaks man. Yet it is in the attempt of men to transcend or disregard this order that tragedy begins. This is literally true. Man flies against the nature of things, and quite inevitably falls. Yet the sense of the nature of things in fact gives life. The tragic fall is significant in just this way. When we lose the sense of such an order, when we say in effect that man is capable of everything, we are reduced to mere silence when catastrophe in fact occurs. We can experience death, waste, accident, emptiness, but nothing beyond these, for we have said that there is nothing. Men can drown their world in death and suffering, as they have done in this century, but they can find no meaning; they are only first shocked and then calloused. This is the real point. Tragedy as Holt or Ridyear describe it, the bare facts of suffering and death, of course still exists. But tragedy as a form which can interpret them significantly is only a memory. When, as with the Greeks and the Elizabethans, there was an order beyond human life, the bare facts could be illuminated and transcended, because there were facts beyond them to which they could relate. But this is so unhistorical as to be quite incredible. In fact fifth-century Athens and early seventeenth-century England, where we agree the greatest tragedies were achieved, are characterised not by order, but by the actual and imminent disintegration of order. Yes, this was my whole point. The supreme regulation which tragedy offers is necessary at precisely such times. Where death and suffering can be understood by reference to some order of belief or some settled institution, or if not understood at least mediated, then you do not get the tragic inquiry; you get faith, you get reassurance, you get explanation. I agree. I think the reality of tragedy is tension: the pressure of the experience, the absence of any system that will interpret or comprehend it. Yet the memory of such an order may be necessary: the breaking reminder that there has been significance. This may be so. But in any case what you get, in that tension, is that unmistakeable cry, that battering of life to make it yield some meaning, that pride and rage and magnificence in the presence of despair and insignificance and defeat. Because life has to continue, in any event. The safety of a system has gone, even if it is still formally acknowledged. There are still, in ordinary life, the evasions and the rationalisations which disguise the condition, but tragedy, by its very intensity, breaks these down and forces through the reality. When that final cry is heard, it is unmistakeable. And this is the balance of pity and terror? The balance is not in the man who cries, but in us. In the intensity of this reality we learn new ways of feeling. That is what I mean by regulation. Something is right here, but arent we tempted, still, towards a simple overall explanation? The bare facts of tragedy are always present, in

A Dialogue On Tragedy

Clark Ridyear

Bird Ridyear

Holt Reeve

Ridyear

human life at any time, but the variety of response to them is surely very great. I think that tragedy, as a dramatic tradition, includes many of these responses. I think it is not a single right response but a particular dimension of experience. There is the cry Reeve describes, and that is certainly tragic. But there is also the illumination, the quiet after the storm, which in some works is undoubtedly, as Clark and Singer argued, the discovery of a ratifying order, whether the will of God or the laws of fate, or even the order of nature. We dont have to agree with the details of what is discovered before we can feel the illumination the discovery brings, in the particular work before us. And I dont see, either, why this discovery should always be non-human in essence. I think a man can live through a tragic experience and indeed be remade. We can feel that happening, whether or not we understand it, and whether or not it is given some external explanation. But surely if there is reparation or redemption it is no longer tragedy. The tragic conclusion is not justice or mercy, but the very opposite of these: the truly irreparable. Yes, that is a tragic mode. But it isnt the only one. Very few works that we call tragedies in fact end with the destruction of the hero. Certainly he is destroyed, but some new order, some new balance, succeeds him. Indeed I thought this was your whole case. When we say that there can be no reparation, we are unconsciously confining ourselves to one kind of experience which in our own civilisation we tend to take as the whole. We are unconsciously confining ourselves to the individual. But in fact, over a very wide range, we see this transcended, in tragedy. Life does come back, life ends the play, again and again. It may be interpreted as having learned to walk in the ways of God, or as having generated a new order in the state, or as having seen some pattern in things, or as merely stubborn reawakening. But the end of most tragedies I know is not disintegration but reintegration. It may not be justice or mercy, but it is unquestionably the continuation of life. Except in some modern tragedy, and this may be the real key. The characteristic ending in Ibsen is the death of the hero. Osvald is destroyed as he cries for the sun. Yes, this must be important. It is the same emphasis, really, as in modern theories of tragedy, which all centre, unconsciously, around the tragic hero. At the beginning and at the end of individualism, as a theory of society, the tragic hero is indeed central. Yet whereas in the beginning the rest of life was still there, and the threads were picked up even after the hero had been destroyed, in the end of this movement the death of the hero is everything; there is literally no more to be said. The tragic flaw is a good example of this, because of course it is a flaw in a particular man, not in all men. The tragic flaw is a bit of leftover mediaeval psychology. Its like the imbalance in humours: Hamlet hasnt enough fire, Macbeth has too much. That we can seriously go on discussing human behaviour in these terms is fantastic. It could only happen in a literary criticism wholly insulated from other kinds of knowledge. It is probably in any case a mistranslation: tragic flaw instead of error of judgment. But all the same it is a significant mistranslation, setting the

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Holt

Ridyear

Reeve

Holt Singer Ridyear

Bird Reeve

Bird

tragic condition in the individual rather than in the universe or in society. It is still unreasonable, because it is a flaw in an ideal type. As such it is reactionary, in the way tragedy has so often been. The flaw in this individual connects with a general flaw. The comet has spoken. What it needed somebody to say was just this: I am not breaking the law of the gods, and I am not breaking the order of nature; I am breaking the law of this particular society, and for good reasons. Of course this was said, in the end. The individual became tragic, not through some flaw in a static condition, but through a dynamic reaching out, setting his will against what could be seen as a universal order but could be seen also as a set of human conventions. He reaches out, really, to find the human limits, and he is often destroyed. But he takes the responsibility, and suffers it, and we see, watching him, that what destroys him is human. I think of Faustus in this. His desire for a new kind of knowledge broke a set of human rules that were represented as a divine order. The whole struggle of the century following Marlowes play was an attempt to establish that such knowledge is lawful, but Marlowe lived on the edge of this, and his play is profoundly ambiguous. For he couldnt be clear which kind of law was being broken. The bargain with the devil is for knowledge, but the practice Faustus goes on to is not knowledge at all, but a set of ordinary sins, belonging clearly to the devils world. If Faustus had gone on to free scientific inquiry, as he intended, Marlowe could not in fact have destroyed him with such conviction. Yes, and Macbeth killed a king, and the witches were on the heath, but it was only forty years before men would kill a king by daylight, with different minds and with different results. Were the results really so different? The point is that they can be argued. Once the flaw is individual it is negotiable. At the end of this process you get the quite different position, of the tragic hero against society but the society false. The hero is limited, rejected and in the end destroyed by his society: in part because he represents human values which the society excludes; in part because he is, inevitably, a man within that society, and includes its destructive inheritance in himself. The long journey from the prince to the rebel, as the type of the tragic hero. It is a long and a curious journey. Think how often, in early English tragedy, the emphasis is really on the fall from prosperity to adversity. For a long time, perhaps, this summed up a general truth, about the illusion of prosperity in the world. But it became the straight struggle for power: tragedy was in power, in its arbitrariness and sudden reversals, yet still something to which men were bound to be committed. As power became rationalised, set into conventions, you got a different tragedy: the struggle between passions and conventions. But then power, as a talisman, was replaced by money, and early bourgeois tragedy is quite moving in its certainty that money provokes tragedy and yet that men are committed to struggling for it. Finally, this struggle, and the society it produces, were seen as false, and the hero was the rebel, making quite different human demands. The movement wasnt only at this public level. Tragedy became private;

A Dialogue On Tragedy

Clark Ridyear Holt Clark

Singer

Ridyear

Holt Bird Holt Clark Holt

Singer Clark Ridyear

Clark

this also was the bourgeois claim. Tragedies within a family became as important as tragedies in a state. The whole emphasis on personal relations opened up a quite new tragic area. At this level, and at the public level, the prince was no longer significant. Tragedy, being the sufferings of men, included all men. Let not your equals move your pity less. What you are describing, really, is the dwindling of tragedy to the problem play. Exactly. The condition was negotiable and so the action, inevitably, was argument. I dont see, anyway, why we should be frightened when somebody says problem play. Weve been taught to lift our lips at the phrase, but on what real grounds? It depends on the problems. The limits on man, in these plays, are deliberately trivial. With better plumbing in the municipal baths, Ibsens Stockmann need not have been a hero at all. If there had been a cure for syphilis, Osvald need not have died. If there had been a proper scheme of social insurance, Willy Loman need not have killed himself. It is worse than triviality. These problems only mask the real human difficulties. And in fact, when these are encountered, there is just endless sentimentality: what you cant achieve in significance you attempt in endless tears. Brecht said it was a bad society which needed heroes. Thats fair enough. Tragedy then became the tragedy of society. But in the cases Clark mentioned, is his reading conceivable? Surely the problems simply expose a particular tension, and it is the tension that it is the tragedy. If there had been a properly organised funeral service, or even a sanitary squad, Antigone need not have died burying her brother. Yes, that would be just as trivial a reading. Though there are real distinctions between problem plays; that is why the phrase is so bad. It is only inferior writers who take the problems for their own sake. Why shouldnt they be taken for their own sake? They are quite as important as who was to rule Scotland. This is really absurd. No. Search it right through. It is only romanticism that would have tragedy always exotic. The unnecessary death of any man is as tragic as the death of Agamemnon or Duncan. Youre still reacting to fabulous names, not to death. It is because the names are fabulous that we are able to react at all. And in any case the names are great because they stand for more than themselves, for more than individual men. A whole order is destroyed in the one death; a chance individual in the other. Not a chance individual. I think the tragedy of environment is real, though it is only one kind. I think of Hauptmanns The Weavers, but the material is endless. Even if the environment could have been different, still its actual pressure is on these men and women. It may be like other problems, that if they hadnt started they wouldnt be problems. But they have started, they are there, and men suffer in their shadow. This is not chance and even if it were it is still tragedy. Yes, but you answered this in what you said about the individual. All the emphasis is on him. And when there is nothing more than the individual

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Bird Ridyear

Clark

Holt Clark

Singer

when even Ibsens avalanche, the voice crying through it, the white horses, the sun, have been discardedthen it is really over. Then there is no tragedy; there is only death. There is a new tragedy. I thought this was what Ridyear was arguing. There is always death, but the response to it changes. There is always tragedy, but there are always new tragic responses. When I said the new tragedy I didnt mean this limitation to the individual, though that, in its time, was new. I meant, indeed, something like a recovery of the general tragic condition, though in our own terms. I think, for instance, of the tragedy of Stalin, and it was a tragedy, not merely a story of evil. I see how we can still interpret it, if we see it as tragedy at all, in the familiar terms of the prince. It could be Richard the Third again, but that would be empty. For to call it the cult of the individual is simple evasion. The same evasion, oddly, as the familiar version of the mad dictator. Do you remember Pasternak said he had been thinking, as an artist, about Stalin? I think he had touched this different dimension. It is there, with much else, in Zhivago. For what you have to face is the change in Stalin, and the change is related to the fundamental tensions of a wider condition. Death spreads there till it sickens, and it breaks this man, even while he instigates the deaths. It is like Macbeth, in some ways, the historical Macbeth who ruled for seventeen years in Scotland and did much for his country, while he was still the murderer we remember. This drifts away, too easily, into apologia, and that is not the point. I think we have to see the evil and see the breaking together; I think we have to see what was being broken, and what the breaking released. The temptation is continually to make a case, one way or the other. We have almost forgotten any other kind of inquiry. What I call the tragic dimension may be lost, in that sense, though I dont think it is lost altogether. I can recognise it, occasionally, in a particular voice, a particular way of looking. I think it is having to struggle even harder, to come through as a new feeling, because it is immediately loaded with all the forms of older tragedy, and all the reactions we have learned and tired of. But I think it is a living response all the same, and the experience of our century will be empty until it is formed. Stalin presents no problems to me, but that is by the way. Surely first humanism and liberalism, then the whole flood of socialism and communism, denied the tragic response altogether. If man can change himself and his condition, tragedy is merely irrelevant. The conditions that lead to it will simply be altered. And about time too. Exactly. But then in art and in social thinking, there is mere triviality. Because men wont face evil, because they have projected it into external conditions, they cant even respond to tragedy at any depth. Five million deaths will be written off when you can look at five hundred power stations. And since so much is written off, art cannot be held to at all. It is reduced to a mere agency of the change. This is what humanism has really to face, in its own characteristic world. Millions have been killed, and in the end they are no more than statistics. Nobody can think of that many individuals, and there is no other way of thinking left. So you get a familiar barbarism. Forty per cent

A Dialogue On Tragedy

Clark

Bird Clark Holt Clark Holt Clark Holt Clark Singer Bird

Reeve

Bird Holt

might survive a nuclear attack, but this is reducing humanity to the status of an animal population. That has always been implicit. Politics has long ceased to be about human beings at all. The animal population will be better fed, better housed, better organised. Is anything more than that ever really proposed? By any of the sects into which humanism has divided? Except that it is a human population, not animals. That is a distinction without a difference, in your metaphysics. All I know is that men do change their conditions, and that abuse wont deter them. As for art, surely any real art must keep in touch with the change. Real art does, but it involves stripping down the pretensions. Naturalist art, socialist realism and the rest, simply confirm the deceived in their deception: that there is nothing beyond their own sense of reality. The changes not being real at all? Contingencies change. Secondary characteristics change. The essential human condition does not change. Because men die, you mean? That is only one fact. Perhaps the only one clear, though, to the average contemporary mind. But in any case it can illuminate the others. It isnt only death. Its the failure of connection in life, the permanent failure which we describe by analogy as the fall. Yes, the condition is real, though there was no fall. The fall is a comforting dream, just as an original paradise is a dream. Each puts our condition in time, and gives the possibility of variation. But in fact there is no variation, at this level. We can live and we can see, but only in a blind world, a permanently indifferent and haphazard world of things, from which we are necessarily estranged. The religious can dream of salvation from this, in an imagined supernatural order which seems to me no more than an illusion to protect their sanity. Social reformers of all kinds dream of an escape from it: the perfect order will come. But the reality persists, as it must, and in fact when we are alone, or in pain, or when we have to face death, our own or anothers, we recognise the true condition. And this is my point about tragic response. For us, now, there is no serious alternative. Our recognition of this blind and indifferent world is in fact the tragic experience. There is no God, or in any case he has become indifferent to us. There is to be no millenium and no Utopia; in our aspirations towards them we have convulsed and may still destroy our whole world. Yet, on such terms, life has to continue. In such terms, we have to choose how we shall live. This, now, is the material of tragedy. I find this rhetoric no more persuasive than when it had a church to support it. It is the persistent conditioning of an irrational society, which can only survive while it keeps men irrational. For what does it matter, in the end, that the world of inanimate things is indifferent to us? Whether it is indifferent or not, we have learned quite successfully to control it, and even to change it, to make a fuller life possible. We shall go on doing this, against every kind of obscurantism. Does it not even matter to you that the sun will die and the earth with it? These things dont matter, in fact, to any sensible man. He has a sense of proportion, he knows how far these events are away, and above all he has

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Singer Holt Bird Holt

Ridyear Holt Ridyear Holt

Bird

Ridyear Holt Ridyear

Holt

confidence that men can meet this problem as they have met so many others. The middle name of the humanist being Micawber. On the contrary. What is necessary is only blind while it is still imperfectly understood. We are only blind while we still imperfectly see. You mean that quite literally of course? I mean that we mistake for a permanent condition what we have not yet discovered a way of changing. Bird said that we are necessarily estranged from an indifferent world. But is this not a very striking description of the facts of capitalist society? We live in a world which divides men from each other, by the nature of its productive relations, and which even divides man from himself and from his own products, so that the estrangement can indeed, to any particular man, seem absolute. But to think of this as a permanent condition is in fact, objectively, a defence of existing society and existing productive relations. It is not a permanent condition but a persistent kind of conditioning. By human agents, consciously or unconsciously, and in any case by institutions, which teach their own temporary version of reality. If you want tragedy, there it is: that human life is crippled and destroyed by just these factors: that men could be free but are kept chained. Kept chained by men. Yes. But doesnt that seem a difficulty? Not at all. Life isnt in one piece. It is a permanent conflict, which cannot be cut short. The poor, for many centuries, were quickly beaten even when they fought. Now they cannot be beaten, but equally they cannot quickly win. Those who oppress them may still destroy the world rather than give way. What you have described, in optimistic terms, seems to me a very plausible theory of tragedy. Men could be free but are kept chained by men. To break free, other men must be broken. To live in peace, men must fight. In this fight the world and even all life may be destroyed. It happened quite suddenly, this substantial change. Not only to socialists, who could once bear defeat, could resolve individual tragedy, by the certainty of socialism ahead. The certainty is in fact still there. I agree that it is there, if life at all is to be there. But we are faced, for the first time, with the clear possibility that all life may be destroyed. This, in consciousness, is really an end. Men have endured death for all sorts of reasons, but the most common reason, in many different forms, has been the certainty of a future. If not a heaven, then a victory. If not a victory now, then at some point a better world. Or far more common than these: if no more life for me, then life for my children, and for their childrens children. All these were certainties, in their varying forms. Men have in fact conceived total death before, but only as an annunciation. Now we have to conceive it as announcing nothing and achieving nothing. The children will die with their parents, and the seed with the flower. Except that we can prevent this happening. We can fight against it happening.

A Dialogue On Tragedy

Reeve Bird Ridyear Singer

Holt Clark

Bird Reeve Ridyear Singer

Ridyear Clark Singer Ridyear Holt Clark Ridyear

Not only that, but in fact we know that this conclusion is exaggerated. We have been faced by the apocalypse before. We havent had it in our hands before. It might strike from outside, but we have never had it in our own hands, as a thing subject to choice. Yes, weve abandoned the tragic universe, and weve lived past the tragic hero. We have reached, definitively, the tragic society. If this death comes it will be a death for the rights of man. That is the only tragic irony left. It will be at the very height of humanism that all human life will be destroyed. Man decided to make his own order, and this is what he has made. It hasnt happened yet. It need never happen. Do you seriously think anyone will give up his own version of the rights of man? And do you think it is an accident that there are conflicting versions, that will destroy everything that gets in their way, even to the limits of the world? A single and actual order was rejected. Now the alternative orders will fight it out, to a finish. Already, in this century, there are eighty million dead, in this actual conflict. Do you suppose it can suddenly be stopped? We can learn from tragedy. This was my whole argument. The spectators can learn: that is what you said. But in this there are no spectators. We are all in fact participants. Tragedy has, if you like, broken out of its frame. The frame was broken, deliberately, and men even congratulated themselves. From then on, just watch, they would make their own frames. They would not look for meanings, they would make meanings. And the end of that is a world in which one death means no more than another, and then none means anything. Or a society in which one individual matters no more than another, and then nobody matters at all. Exactly. That is just what we have been offered. And what some of us reject, breaking through to our own kinds of individual significance and freedom. I wanted this to be said. I wanted it to be said with such conviction that it really breaks through. Until this is touched, nothing that matters is touched. And to ignore this condition is to talk beside the point. Youre changing sides rather rapidly, arent you? No, for he still talks about the tragic society. As if some change in that could make a difference. I dont know how to put this. I have no words for it, or none that I can be sure of. Yes, I said the tragic society, but I didnt mean the tragic environment. And I acknowledged the break for individual significance, but still I spoke of it as a condition, as a general fact. Perhaps this cant be argued at all; it can only be shown. And yet it will be dragged back, even then, to what I dont mean. I can feel what I am saying as a shape in my mind, and I see this shape, again and again, when I look, not at people, not at society, but at what to me is actual experience, in which these are not separate. I see this in different modes, but in tragedy most clearly. Yeats spoke of tragedy as breaking the dykes between man and man, and I have always remembered the phrase and been moved by it. But did he only mean sympathy? The generation of sympathy? I think

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Bird Holt Reeve Clark Singer Bird Ridyear

that is real, but it is not only that. And I have been moved, beyond thought, before thought, by mens actual solidarity in suffering: a coming together, and a giving, that seem absolute, while they last. Yet again it is not only that. The softening and the turning away; remaking the dykes and setting our standards on them; the justified bitterness, the angry struggle to win, the chain of killing and deposition; the lying and the reduction to numbers; the simple forgetting, the necessary forgetting, and then the haunting, first in the dark and then at your elbow in the street, the shadowy figures that were and are men: all these, also, are responses to tragedy. But the shape holds them, or seems to hold them. In the figure chained on the rock, the hands are held, quite distinctly, by other hands, the fingers just holding. Or the man kneeling, to be shot in the back of the neckI am thinking of an actual manand you see people kneeling in the street, and the sound of the shot, in the enclosed room, is the loud slam of a door and a man shut out and moving away. And which of these, in the end, can be the individual, and which society? What I know as tragedy is neither, and the tragedy is in the fingers just holding, the one man kneeling as many have knelt, the thrust of the arms on the bike, the eagerness of decision, and the sound of the shot again, the slam of the door, the sharp clash and resonance of metal in the impact with the lorry, and people running into the road, and people sitting at the table and making the decision. The tragedy seems to be, our tragedy seems to be, in the images of connection: the particular action that is experienced as general, and in the experience the connection is lost, the continuity is lost, the death is a break in continuity and is absolute, and in seeing it the connections are made again, made new. This, at least, is of our own time, and the connection and the breaking come through again and again in easier and more intellectual forms, and we can talk of them, quite in public, but always, I find, with this edge of silence, where we cannot yet speak, where we havent the nerve, the articulation, to name the roots of what, above ground, is easy. We have not even named this man whose death we began by discussing. It wasnt necessary. We took him as an instance. Rightly or wrongly, what we conclude from him we conclude for others, in similar circumstances. I have said from the beginning that the particular case would distract us. These are matters of rational theory, beyond personal instance and beyond rhetoric. It is only real, nevertheless, while we hold on to that actual experience. It is only real when we name him. When we give him identity. When we give him identity he will have many names. That is the action of tragedy.