The Origin of German Tragic Drama by Walter Benjamin

Review by: Don Callen

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Autumn, 1978), pp. 103-104
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics
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Reviews
anterior to that of his epistemology" (p. 220).
Given that premise, Roy is surely correct, and
his book is a thorough account of Bachelard's
deviation from "scientificity." Bachelard, how-
ever, as one of the chief exponents of the scien-
tific attitude in his early and middle work, was
obviously aware of his deviation from that
norm, and while the flaws that Roy sees in his
work are definitely present and need to be dealt
with, it may be that the most important insight
of Bachelard, the archetypal scientific mentality,
is that the scientific attitude is not adequate in
itself, even in the century of scientificity.
Though this issue falls outside of the domain
of Roy's otherwise thorough work, one does
wish that he had, at least at some point, ques-
tioned his own scientific ideology.
JAMES S. HANS
Washington University
BENJAMIN, WALTER. The Origin of German
Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne, intro.
by George Steiner. London: NLB, 1977, 260
pp., $16.00.
This book is primarily for a student of Ger-
man literary history, its philosophical preten-
sions notwithstanding. Nonetheless, that per-
spective can be instructive for a reader inter-
ested in literary theory and, in particular,
tragedy, inasmuch as one sees in history as care-
fully painted as it is here how a genre is in-
evitably colored by its historical context. More-
over, there is a bit here to be learned con-
cerning Nietzsche's and Schopenhauer's views
of tragedy, if one has the patience to press
through a prose which raises some sympathy
for Cornelis, the "local aesthetician," who, ac-
cording to Steiner, found Benjamin's treatise
to be "an incomprehensible morass" (p. 11).
Steiner's introduction is a special aid to pene-
trating Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauer-
spiels. In it we learn that Ursprung was an
expanded doctoral thesis completed in 1925
and submitted to fulfill a requirement for secur-
ing a position in either the German or Aes-
thetics faculty of the University of Frankfurt
(pp. 8-9). It predates Benjamin's turn toward
Marxism and was born at a time which invites
some comparison in style with the dark aphor-
isms of Wittgenstein's Tractatus as well as
other cultural products of European Judaism
in the 1920s (pp. 14-15). Steiner suggests that
this intellectual atmosphere may help to explain
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103
the density of the work, if not excuse the
author for a somewhat pedantic fascination
with the arcane.
The term "arcane" seems appropriate to a
reader in the 1970s who is asked to probe a
text that deals principally with German ba-
roque drama. Scenes from the plays of Opitz,
Gryphius, and Lohenstein do not quickly-
or even slowly-come to the mind of such a
reader. But for Benjamin, these dramas provide
the phenomenal key to a Platonic reminiscence
of the Idea of tragedy (Tragodie) in distinction
from the Idea of the mourning play (Trauer-
spiel). In Benjamin's view, these "metapercep-
tual" ideas work rather like Leibnizian monads,
each mirroring in itself the world conceived
historically and consequently the other (pp. 45-
48). The Platonic-Leibnizian machinery adopt-
ed here, however naively, is not utterly gratui-
tous, for Benjamin is responding to a very real
problem. How can a Socratic inductive defini-
tion hope to tell us what tragedy is when the
sampling itself predetermines what our answer
will be? His central thesis is that just such
inductive procedures obscured the distinctions
which set German baroque drama, the Trauer-
spiel in particular, apart from antique tragedy
on the one hand and the neoclassic ideal on
the other (pp. 38-39). Also contributing to this
obfuscation is the fact that major literary his-
torians of the baroque like Stachel looked to
baroque literary theory, essentially Aristotelian
in nature, more than to the plays themselves
to construct their story. Consequently, the
Trauerspiel appears as an "incompetent renais-
sance of tragedy" tracing an ill-shaped figure of
the classic pattern (pp. 49-50).
The differences which Benjamin draws be-
tween Trauerspiel and tragedy are many, but
central and illuminating the others is that be-
tween the classic hero and the protagonist of
the mourning play. The latter is one of two
types, often appearing in one man. He is
either a prince who is martyred by faithless
friends or enemies, victimized by political in-
trigues of one sort or another, or a tyrant
whose actions are of greatest consequence, and
for that reason of high importance, though
lacking in the moral grandeur required for
true heroic quality (pp. 69-72). The martyr is
unlike the hero in that his sufferings glorify God
rather than himself, and as he is portrayed in
the Trauerspiel our attention is not drawn so
much to his deeds as to the dimensions of his
physical suffering (p. 72). Like Socrates, the
martyr goes to his death without defiance. He
 104
dies "voluntarily, with inexpressible superi-
ority" (p. 114). There is in him confidence that
through it all the good is being realized and
resignation to his fate. This points to the sec-
ondary role of the moral element in the
Trauerspiel. Here there is not the character
of the moral genius who conceives a new moral
order in his encounter with fate. Rather, there
is "the constantly repeated drama of the rise
and fall of princes, the steadfastness of unshake-
able virtue . . . the course of history, essential
in its permanence'' (p. 88).
Benjamin sees in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy
the theoretical framework which grounds his
own thesis concerning the relationship be-
tween tragedy and Trauerspiel. His argument
here is even more opaque than elsewhere in the
book, but the central point seems to be that
Nietzsche realized that his age deceived itself
if it believed that it could straightforwardly
participate in the tragic as it was known by the
Greeks. What was needed was an awakening
of the spirit to consciousness of its place in
history and hence of its difference from the
antique (pp. 101-2). But if Nietzsche's in-
sight into the illusions of his own age with re-
spect to tragedy went halfway toward showing
that the Idea of tragedy is not necessarily real-
ized in a given time, he himself failed to see
that Greek tragedy itself was conceived histor-
ically. Indeed, he saw the connection between
it and legend, but he failed to see that legend
in historical terms, as "the primordial history
of the nation" (pp. 102-6). Consequently,
Benjamin disputes what he reads in Nietzsche
as the altogether illusion-fashioning character
of Attic experience of the drama. In particular,
he denies that the spectators and chorus become
one, a Nietzsche suggests (pp. 103-4).
But it is Schopenhauer who, even in the
midst of an essentially anti-historical meta-
physics, appreciated tragedy in terms of the
categories of Trauerspiel, according to Benja-
min (pp. 111-13). "What gives to everything
tragic, whatever the form in which it appears,
the characteristic tending to the sublime, is the
dawning of the knowledge that the world and
life can afford us no true satisfaction, and are
therefore not worth our attachment to them. In
this the tragic spirit consists; accordingly, it
leads to resignation" (The World as Will and
Representation, trans. E. F.J. Pavne, II, 433-
34). To be sure, the Christian superstructure
of premises that make the resignation that of a
martyr or saint is missing from Schopenhauer.
But the similarities attest to the Leibnizian
behavior of the Ideas of tragedy and Trauer-
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REVIEWS
spiel which so much of Benjamin's book as-
sumes. Fortunately, however, its worth as a
piece of literary history does not depend upon
its dubious philosophical assumptions.
DON CALLEN
Tenmple University
SPILKA, MARK, ed. Towards a Poetics of Fiction.
Indiana University Press, 1977, 359 pp.,
$12.50.
In 1967 Novel announced itself as another
journal, this one devoted to the "desire to
report on the novel's newness, to define its
protean nature, and to accommodate its rich-
ness and variety through comparative, historical
and comprehensive approaches." Now, a decade
later, its chief editorial force from the start,
Mark Spilka, has gathered a collection of its
best theoretical essays. What the essays display
are, of course, the character of the journal. But
I immediately reflect on how easy it is to speak
of the character of a journal and how hard it
must be to achieve that character. The char-
acter of Novel is a stunning attractiveness of
format that, in contrast to most academic jour-
nals, invites the eye; an eclecticism that admits
any method and sensibility that carries with it
mind and rigor; a generosity in its editorial
policy that transcends schools and loyalties; and
a fondness for discursive prose which is well-
made, crisp, precise, and interesting. It has
been, and is, not only the best journal which
addresses itself to extended prose fiction; it is
also, through the genius of the group of editors
who have made it what it is, the most readable.
One expects that one can come to it, finding an
essay on anything from a fourth-rate novelist
about whom one does not care to the latest
French trend, with the anticipation of some-
thing to be learned-the anticipation, moreover,
both of lucidity and of a special joy in the
imaginative and stylistic power on display. How
one insures such an effect as an editor I do not
know. But there it is.
The volume contains a pair of essays by
seminal theorists, Wayne Booth andIan Watt,
re-assessing their major works from the perspec-
tive of the present; a section of "reappraisals,"
in which the claims and accomplishments of
structuralism, Georg Lukacs, Chicago criticism,
and F. R. Leavis are held up to scrutiny; a brief
section on biography and theory, in which the
controversies between Virginia Woolf and
Arnold Bennett, Henry James and Walter