Modern Tragedy

257 Pages·2006·1.034 MB·English

by  Raymond Williams, Pamela McCallum

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“A serious, unorthodox book on a much vexed subject....
Is tragedy an event in our lives, or a literary form,
or a body of dogma? Williams’ analysis here
is especially fi ne.” New Society
“An impassioned, powerful book...
splendid.” The Guardian
Modern Tragedy, fi rst published in 1966, is a study of the
ideas and ideologies which have infl uenced the production
and analysis of tragedy. Williams sees tragedy both in terms of
literary tradition and in relation to the tragedies of modern
society, of revolution and disorder, and of individual experience.
Modern Tragedy is available only in this
Broadview Encore Edition, now edited and with
a critical introduction by Pamela McCallum.
Raymond Williams (1921-1988) was one of the
twentieth century’s foremost literary and cultural critics.
His work bridged the divides between aesthetic and
socio-economic inquiry, between Marxism and mainstream
liberal thought, and between the modern and post-modern
world. Among his other major works are The Long Revolution
(also available from Broadview Press) and Keywords.
Pamela McCallum is Professor of English
at the University of Calgary.
cover: “ The Great Nave: Wounded soldiers performing Arts Drill
at the end of their medical treatment, Grand Palais, Paris,” c. 1915.
Photographer unknown.
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Modern Tragedy
RAYMOND WILLIAMS
edited by Pamela McCallum
broadview encore editions
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© 2006 Raymond Williams
Introduction and notes © 2006 Pamela McCallum
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by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval
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from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), One Yonge Street, Suite 1900,
Toronto, ON M5E 1E5–is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Williams, Raymond
Modern tragedy / Raymond Williams ; edited by Pamela McCallum.
(Broadview encore editions)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-55111-634-0
1. Tragic, The. 2. Tragedy—History and criticism. I. McCallum, Pamela, 1949-
II. Title. III. Series.
PN1892.W54 2005 809’.9162 C2005-907748-4
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Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Introduction: Reading Modern Tragedy in the Twenty-First
Century 9
A Note on the Text 23
Modern Tragedy
Acknowledgements 27
Foreword 29
PART ONE: TRAGIC IDEAS
1. Tragedy and Experience 33
2. Tragedy and the Tradition 37
3. Tragedy and Contemporary Ideas 69
4. Tragedy and Revolution 87
5. Continuity 109
PART TWO: MODERN TRAGIC LITERATURE
1. From Hero to Victim: The Making of Liberal Tragedy, to
Ibsen and Miller 113
2. Private Tragedy: Strindberg, O’Neill, Tennessee
Williams 133
3. Social and Personal Tragedy: Tolstoy and Lawrence 149
4. Tragic Deadlock and Stalemate: Chekhov, Pirandello,
Ionesco, Beckett 169
5. Tragic Resignation and Sacrifi ce: Eliot and
Pasternak 189
6. Tragic Despair and Revolt: Camus and Sartre 209
7. A Rejection of Tragedy: Brecht 227
Works Cited and Further Reading 243
Index 245
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Acknowledgements
For particular advice I am grateful to Sabine Grebe, Stephen Heath,
Anne McWhir, J. Hillis Miller, and David Oakleaf. Heather Joyce
was a diligent research assistant. Leonard Conolly at Broadview
Press was an exemplary editor. Several paragraphs have been revised
from my contribution to Cultural Dialogues on Cultural Studies:
Interviews with Contemporary Critics, ed. Wang Fengzhen and
Shaobo Xie (Calgary: U of Calgary P, 2002). As always, Keith
McCallum was generous with his knowledge of European intel-
lectual history.
7
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Introduction: Reading Modern Tragedy
in the Twenty-First Century
At a time when he was beginning to think about the project that
would become Modern Tragedy Raymond Williams wrote to his
London publisher, Chatto and Windus, outlining his ideas. The let-
ter (20 July 1962) remains in the company’s fi les. “The fi rst two
parts,” he suggested, “will not be technical analyses with footnotes
but more like printed talks.” The third part would be a play of
his own based on the life of John Milton, the great seventeenth-
century poet and supporter of the English Revolution against
Charles I. He was well aware that this brief proposal did not follow
the conventions of an academic book. “I know this adds up to
an unusual book,” he went on, “but it might be read, don’t you
think? I just can’t, now, go back to straight professional literary
criticism, and anyway that has abundantly proved it can’t handle
tragedy” (qtd. in Inglis 180). There is no doubt that what Williams
proposed was a book that broke with academic conventions. And
yet, his comment about the failure of literary criticism to “handle
tragedy” is unquestionably puzzling. From the famous passages on
tragedy in Aristotle’s Poetics, through Philip Sidney’s Apologie for
Poetry, S.T. Coleridge’s writings on Shakespeare, to the twentieth-
century classic studies by A.C. Bradley, H.D.F. Kitto and G. Wilson
Knight, it would seem that literary criticism had amply engaged
tragedy. W hat might Williams’s remark signify? How might literary
criticism fall short in its negotiations of tragedy?
In 1961 Williams left a position as an adult education instructor
to take up an appointment in the English Faculty at Cambridge
University. By doing so, he shifted from teaching adults who were
often pursuing their education while engaged in fulltime employ-
ment to teaching young undergraduates primarily from privileged
backgrounds. Williams faced no small challenge in nudging his
new students towards his cultural materialist theories of tragedy.
During Lent (winter) term 1962 he off ered a course of lectures on
“The Nature of Tragedy in Modern Literature”; renamed “Modern
Tragedy” the following autumn, the series of lectures was subse-
quently given from 1962–64. The shift in the title of the lectures
introduction 9