The Tragic Protest

288 Pages·1963·6.415 MB·English

by  Zygmunt Adamczewski (auth.)

THE TRAGIC PROTEST
ZYGMUNT ADAMCZEWSKI
THE TRAGIC PROTEST
•
THE HAGUE
MARTINUS NIJHOFF
1963
Copyright I963 by Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
Softcover reprint o/the hardcover 1st edition 1963
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form
ISBN 978-94-011-8716-9 ISBN 978-94-011-9556-0 (eBook)
DOl 10.1007/978-94-011-9556-0
I wish to acknowledge here my debt of gratitude which can not be
repaid:
To Montana State University, where this work has evolved from
notes gathered for lectures I gave there under the title: "Philosophy
in Literature"; and where it was generously supported by research
grants for the purpose of preparing the manuscript -
To the following copyright holders who gave me the privilege of
quoting:
Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound translated by G. Murray - George
Allen & Unwin Ltd;
Sophocles' Oedipus the King translated by T. H. Banks - Oxford
University Press;
Goethe's Faust translated by L. Macneice - Oxford University Press
and Faber & Faber;
Ibsen's An Enemy of the People - Walter J. Black;
Miller's Death of a Salesman - The Viking Press;
Sartre's The Flies translated by S. Gilbert - Alfred A. Knopf Inc. and
Hamish Hamilton Ltd;
Vercors' The Insurgents translated by R. Barisse - Harcourt, Brace &
World Inc;
Camus' The Fall translated by J. O'Brien - Hamish Hamilton Ltd;
Beauvoir's Les Bouches Inutiles - Librairie Gallimard;
Dostoyevsky's The Possessed translated by C. Garnett - W. Heine
mann Ltd and The Macmillan Co, N.Y.
- IV -
To all those who awakened and modeled my reflections on the
tragic theatre in existence, who impressed these - some from un
knowing distance but some in personal ties - and without whom the
present exploration could not have been attained: W. Tatarkiewicz,
Theodor Erismann, H. Windischer, A. Lesky, C. E. M. Joad, R. L.
Saw, James Gutmann, John Wild, Charles Morris, Henry Bugbee, also
John Gielgud, Hans Hotter, Paul Muni and Jerzy Nowiak-
To the great man to whom this book is properly dedicated because
from him I have - insofar as I have - learned to think:
MARTIN HEIDEGGER
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Table of Contents
I THE TRAGIC - INTRODUCTION I
II THE TRAGIC DEFIANCE - TITAN PROMETHEUS 28
Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound
III THE TRAGIC FEAR - OEDIPUS KING 44
Sophocles: Oedipus the King
IV THE TRAGIC CONSCIENCE - PRINCE HAMLET 64
Shakespeare: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
V THE TRAGIC STRIVING - FAUST 97
Goethe: Faust
VI THE TRAGIC IDEA - STOCKMANN, THE PEOPLE'S ENEMY I43
Ibsen: An Enemy of the People
VII THE TRAGIC LOSS - LOMAN THE SALESMAN I72
Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman
VIII THE TRAGIC LIBERATION - ORESTES OF THE FLIES I93
Sartre: The Flies
IX THE TRAGIC PROTEST 226
INDEXES 277
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CHAPTER I
The Tragic - Introduction
From the chorus of god-drunken satyrs celebrating nature's mystic
revival in the green Hellenic spring-time - to the thick blackness of
arresting headlines stamped by the midnight presses: this is the long
transformation of the word "tragic" through the history of the
Western world. No wonder then that if someone proposes to deal with
what is tragic, there is hardly any initial orientation about the trail
his ideas are to follow. Will it be historical pursuit of formal growth
of a genre in the literary arts? Or a nontemporal analysis of some few
specific canons to rule all art? Will it be, quite differently, a psycholo
gy of misfortune, of common thirst for sensation, of the malaise in
the present times? Or a flight toward some immutable values pur
chased only in suffering? Such treatments there have been in the
hands of philosophers, historians, critics, linguists, journalists. Will
"tragic" yield to an approach which does not try to emulate any of
these? What way of access could this be and of what import?
On the following pages an attempt will be made to steer a definite
course between two equally inviting strands, one being the territory
of tragic art, the other the tragic provinces of life. That such a course
should be possible, is clearly attested by the conception underlying
everyday usage of the word "tragic." In this usage there may be a tie,
more than derivatory, to the stage or to literature; but there need not
be. And this usage surely corresponds to something, if word is any
more than noise. What is a man's intent, when the word "tragic"
appears on his lips? Is it no more than a reference to spectacles he
may see, read about, experience, or is it of some inner concern, too?
Such a question, if it can be properly put, definitely transcends the
field of linguistic analysis of meaning of a particular word. It is not
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THE TRAGIC
the semantics of the word "tragic" but rather what it may open a
view of, that will be unveiled here, if the attempt succeeds.
There is a deeper justification of the proposed sense of exploration.
That is embedded in a primitive condition of the human mind, naive
and unspoiled yet by the grooves of criterion setters. It is easily for
gotten in the usual, only too adult adjustment, and may be invoked
through fairy tales which serious people spare no time for. That stage
of mind is one where the awesome question of reality is neither raised
nor settled. Can it be true that man so lightly outgrows his childish
faith in dragons, nymphs, and magicians, thereafter knowing that
these are not real? Can it be true that dragon-slaying, nymph-ado
ration, magical conquests, are no constituents of an adjusted, mature
person's life? Can it be true that all people, after a certain age, know
perfectly well what is real and what is not, that those who try and
often fail to pin down this distinction are just yielding to aberration?
Or is it not more likely that ordinary assumption of cri.teria for reality
results not from reasoned conviction but from tired inadequacy, that
it is undertaken provisionally and with limited scope, that it is
promptly discarded not only in lunacy, not only in nightly desires,
but wherever daily pursuits seem not to thrive on it? If this be so,
then this primitive conscious vision lies close at hand; where one need
not ask if what is there for him is there for anybody else, where one's
courage draws on one's own illusions, where what may be seen as well
as what is seen is up to one's choice. This kind of mental expression is
open, even if surreptitiously, to the most hard-boiled character, since
it is due to what is more indubitably present in all humanity than soul,
will, or reason: imagination. It is to this imaginative consciousness
that appeal must be made, when fact and fiction are to be harnessed
together, not because a distinction between them is wanting, but
because it is not wanted. And that is precisely the case when entities
of creative art are to be treated as though they belonged to real life
or when life is to trust the mirror of art without reservation. That is
the case in the exploration of what is tragic.
It may seem to follow that "tragic" is not a category of rational
order but only a mold of human imagination. This in a way is true,
but in what way precisely, that cannot be said at this stage. Even the
strength of "only" would be now tending toward misinterpretation,
not to speak of more obscure matters. These may come into light
later, but not before some lamps are lit. With introductory words
anticipations only may be gathered or discarded.
One of the latter is aesthetic, in the popular sense of the word. That
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INTRODUCTION
is, what has been said already says that no anticipations of aesthetic
theory are in place here. When research stays on the level of primitive
imagination, prior to the distinction between real and unreal, to merge
art with life, it cannot serve as guideline for thoughts on what is
distinctive within art. No canons of composition can be forthcoming,
even the very concept of composition, implying a composer, must
remain inadmissible; since, unlike the one of tragic art, the composer
of tragic life will be here in question. No analysis of form need be
expected, and when a form of vision is described, it will not be what
artistic critics are used to dissect. Purely aesthetic instruments, such
as plot, contrast, harmony, proper pitch, likene3s, recognition, com
pleteness, will be of no use and no relevance at all. And it hardly need
be mentioned that the age-fortified classification of artistic kinds
remains strictly out of bounds.
Here is perhaps the proper place to introduce a stylistic apology.
I t is clear to everyone with a neat sense of seemliness in language that
the use of unattached adjectives is very awkward in English. No one
reading these paragraphs can be blamed for fidgeting when molested
again and again with "the tragic" instead of "tragedy." The excuse
has perhaps transpired in the preceding passage. It may not yet be
apparent what the pages to follow will be about, but it should be more
than apparent that they will not be about tragedy, understood as a
literary composition, capable of performance in a theatre, preferably
in language embellished by versification, and comprising a beginning,
a middle, and an end. On later pages perhaps the word "tragedy"
will turn up; but if so, this term will not be the noun from which the
adjective "tragic" derives, but rather it will be a noun obtained from,
and depending for its sense on, that adjective the sense of which is
still to be elucidated. Thus no relief for a linguistic purist can be
promised until the operations on "tragic" are joined with those
involving the noun it is to qualify. That noun will be "protest."
If the word "tragic" is not to be associated with a spectacle, not
to be used as an aesthetic conception of form, then a very irritating
problem can be avoided. It is the problem which scores of serious
questioners have left unresolved, the problem concerning the source
of tragic beauty. What is it that men enjoy in viewing a tragic specta
cle? How is such enjoyment possible and in what terms could it be
justified? In a great many cases the commitment to such questions
suggests a feeling of guilt, a moral perplexity on the part of the
questioner who misleadingly pretends to be asking about a purely
aesthetic value. But even where this search for absolution from guilt
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THE TRAGIC
is not satisfied, another absolution has already taken place: that of
the viewer from the viewed. What is tragic is then to be found only
among the objects exposed to the supposedly separate subject who
does not partake in it. What is tragic is then not his, though he may
claim possession of its beauty; it remains but a spectacle. This
aesthetic absolution of man from the tragic may indeed be what
prevents him from its deeper understanding. To resolve the tragic
essence may be possible not for the man who absolves himself from
it as enjoyment and environment but rather for someone whose
existence is involved, surrounded, and penetrated by it. To the ex
istence of such men imaginative access will be attempted here.
Not only does the view of a mere spectacle bar thorough penetration
into its being tragic, it also lightly entices toward conceptual mis
direction. This is due to the colloquial near-equivalence of some allied
conceptions. In very many contexts, aesthetic, journalistic, conver
sational, where the word "tragic" occurs, the word "dramatic" could
be used instead, this in turn could be replaced by "eventful," and
that perhaps even by "exciting." That ordinary discourse of ordinary
people pliantly fuses some kin of ideas, is neither objectionable nor
avoidable. But kinship is far from identity. The exploration of the
tragic must not be burdened by extraneous and haphazard fusions of
meaning. Some preventive disentanglement is required, and it should
also serve to eliminate other feasible misconceptions about the lines
of approach to follow.
In their historical roots lodged in the soil of Greek artistic creation,
the tragic and the dramatic are certainly related. Tragic poetry
actually constitutes only a species of the dramatic genus whose other
species is comic. Thus even a very superficial glance makes clear that
what is dramatic need not be tragic, as long as mere spectacle is in
question. Divorced from this original aesthetic application the
concepts still carry that divergence. Yet out of the theatre the logical
subordination no longer holds. If it did, one could not think of any
thing tragic which is not dramatic. Can that be done or not? To answer
that, less superficial considerations must be introduced.
What is dramatic in present human life and thought remains more
close and faithful to its artistic roots than what is tragic; or, to put
it differently, the word roots of the tragic go deeper into the matter
of existence while those of the dramatic remain in the more shallow
layers of form. Dramatic political announcements are made, dramatic
developments occur in scientific or economic affairs, there are dra
matic moments in sports, dramatic effects in interior decoration,
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