Blog 1: response to January 30th

Posted on February 1, 2007

One thing to keep in mind about tragedy: there is no one single model that unlocks its "true" meaning; that is, there is no reason to think that there is ONE, and only one, correct theory of tragedy (though you may be more inclined to one over another ... or you may create your own).

That said, a simple, fairly inclusive, definition of tragedy might go something like this: tragedies are stories that deal with the limits of human experience and the catastophes that ensue when such limits are either ignored or recognized too late ... but this definition leaves a lot of room for different sorts of theories.

Aristotle's theory of the tragic plot is tempting because its ethical vision essentially corresponds to moderners' sense of freedom, moral responsibility, and the fundamental intelligibility of experience on a human plane ... that is, a world-view that limits the supernatural and privileges instead the rational or scientific (in short, a Western world-view). Of course, even in the "modern West" (that is, European culture as that exists in Europe and in Europe-influenced cultures like the US and Canada), we find residual religious elements (often quite dominant, as in American politics). And, for better or worse, these religious elements often critique Western rationality itself. Moreover, modern tragedies (whether Memento, Chinatown, Angel Heart, Jacob's ladder, etc) are often directed precisely at the limits of moral rationality, and to this end they often, but don't always, incorporate some sense of the supernatural--that "something beyond" Frye mentions; this can mean a religious sphere of experience, in which some supernatural force (God, gods, fate) sets some sort of limit upon human action (forcing us to act or preventing us from acting).

In that context, it's worth asking if what Eaton calls the "unredeemable" in Chinatown is a manifestation of a supra-human realm ... an "evil" that pervades our experience but for which humans are not solely responsible. That is, does Polanski (the film's director) see the "evil" of the story simply as the "natural" perversity of the human or as something more "mysterious," inexplicable, fundamentally unintelligible? Keep in mind that Polanski's wife, Sharon Tate, was killed by Charles Manson: is Manson's evil merely human or is it part of the mystery of things that a Szondi or a Nietzsche sees in cosmic terms? (We haven't done Girard properly yet--that's my fault--but when we do finally get to him we'll see that he sees the "gods" as a projection of the human; so, in a sense, Girard inverts Szondi and Nietzsche ... but we'll have to wait a bit to get back to his theory of the "sacrificial crisis.") END