For the chorus knows that up to a certain limit everyone is right and that the person who, from blindness or passion, oversteps this limit is heading for catastrophe if he persists in his desire to assert a right he thinks he alone possesses. The constant theme of classical tragedy, therefore, is the limit that must not be transgressed. On either side of this limit equally legitimate forces meet in quivering and endless confrontation. To make a mistake about this limit, to try to destroy the balance, is to perish.
The idea of a limit no one should overstep, beyond which lies death or disaster, also recurs in Macbeth and Phèdre, though in a less pure form than in Greek tragedy. This explains, finally, why the ideal drama, like Romantic drama, is first and foremost movement and action, since what it represents is the struggle between good and evil and the different incidents in this struggle.
The ideal tragedy, on the other hand, and especially Greek tragedy, is first and foremost tension, since it is the conflict, in a frenzied immobility, between two powers, each of which wears the double mask of good and evil. It is of course true that between these two extreme types of tragedy and melodrama, dramatic literature offers all the intermediary stages.
But if we restrict ourselves to the pure forms, what are the two forces, in Greek classical tragedy for example, that enter into conflict? If we take Prometheus Bound as typical of this kind of tragedy, we can say that there is, on the one hand, man and his desire for power, and on the other, the divine principle reflected by the world.
Tragedy occurs when man, through pride (or even through stupidity as in the case of Ajax) enters into conflict with the divine order, personified by a god or incarnated in society. And the more justified his revolt and the more necessary this order, the greater the tragedy that stems from the conflict.
Consequently, everything within a tragedy that tries to destroy this balance destroys the tragedy itself. If the divine order cannot be called into question and admits only sin and repentance, there is no tragedy. There can only be mysteries or parables, or again what the Spaniards call acts of faith or sacramental acts, that is to say, spectacles in which the one truth that exists is solemnly proclaimed.
It is thus possible to have religious drama but not religious tragedy. This explains the silence of tragedy up to the Renaissance. Christianity plunges the whole of the universe, man and the world, into the divine order. Hence there is no tension between the world and the religious principle, but, at the most, ignorance, together with the difficulty of freeing man from the flesh, of renouncing his passions in order to embrace spiritual truth.
Perhaps there has been only one Christian tragedy in history. It was celebrated on Golgotha during one imperceptible instant, at the moment of: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” This fleeting doubt, and this doubt alone, consecrated the ambiguity of a tragic situation. The divinity of Christ has never been doubted since.
The mass, which daily consecrates this divinity, is the real form religious theater takes in the West. It is not invention, but repetition. On the other hand, everything that frees the individual and makes the universe submit to his wholly human law, especially by the denial of the mystery of existence, once again destroys tragedy. Atheistic or rationalist tragedy is thus equally impossible. If all is mystery, there is no tragedy.
If all is reason, the same thing happens. Tragedy is born between light and darkness and rises from the struggle between them. And this is understandable. In both religious and atheistic drama, the problem has in fact already been solved. In the ideal tragedy, just the opposite, it has not been solved. The hero rebels and rejects the order that oppresses him, while the divine power, by its oppression, affirms itself exactly to the same extent as it is denied. In other words, revolt alone is not enough to make a tragedy.
Neither is the affirmation of the divine order. Both a revolt and an order are necessary, the one supporting the other, and each reinforcing the other with its own strength. There is no Oedipus without the destiny summed up by the oracle. But the destiny would not have all its fatality if Oedipus did not refuse it. And if tragedy ends in death or punishment, it is important to note that what is punished is not the crime itself but the blindness of the hero who has denied balance and tension.
I am talking, of course, of the ideal tragic situation. Aeschylus, for example, who remains close to the religious and Dionysiac origins of tragedy, granted Prometheus forgiveness in the last section of the trilogy; the Furies are replaced by the Kindly Ones. But in Sophocles the balance is most of the time scrupulously maintained, and it is in this respect that he is the greatest tragedian of all time.
Euripides, on the other hand, will upset the tragic balance by concentrating on the individual and on psychology. He is thus a forerunner of individualistic drama, that is to say, of the decadence of tragedy. Similarly, the great Shakespearean tragedies are still rooted in a kind of vast cosmic mystery that puts up an obscure resistance to the undertakings of its passionate individuals, while Corneille ensures the triumph of the individual ethic and by his very perfection announces the end of the genre.
People have thus been able to write that tragedy swings between the two poles of extreme nihilism and unlimited hope. For me, nothing is more true. The hero denies the order that strikes him down, and the divine order strikes because it is denied. Both thus assert their existence at the very moment when this existence is called into question. The chorus draws the lesson, which is that there is an order, that this order can be painful, but that it is still worse not to recognize that it exists.
The only purification comes from denying and excluding nothing, and thus accepting the mystery of existence, the limitations of man—in short, the order where men know without knowing. Oedipus says “All is well,” when his eyes have been torn out. Henceforth he knows, although he never sees again. His darkness is filled with light, and this face with its dead eyes shines with the highest lesson of the tragic universe. What can be drawn from these observations?
A suggestion and a working hypothesis, nothing more. It seems in fact that tragedy is born in the West each time the pendulum of civilization is half way between a sacred society and a society built around man. On two occasions, twenty centuries apart, we find a struggle between a world that is still interpreted in a sacred context and men who are already committed to their individuality, that is to say, armed with the power to question.
In both cases, the individual increasingly asserts himself, the balance is gradually destroyed, and the tragic spirit finally falls silent. When Nietzsche accuses Socrates of having dug the grave of ancient tragedy, he is right up to a certain point—to exactly the same extent that it is true to say of Descartes that he marks the end of the tragic movement born in the Renaissance. At the time of the Renaissance, the traditional Christian universe is called into question by the Reformation, the discovery of the world, and the flowering of the scientific spirit.
Gradually, the individual rises against the sacred order of things and against destiny. Then Shakespeare throws his passionate creatures against the simultaneously evil and just order of the world. Death and pity sweep across the stage and once again the final words of tragedy ring out: “A higher fife is born of my despair.” Then the pendulum moves increasingly in the opposite direction. Racine and French tragedy carry the tragic movement to its conclusion with the perfection of chamber music.
Armed with Cartesianism and the scientific spirit, triumphant reason then proclaims the rights of the individual and empties the stage: tragedy descends into the street with the bloody scaffolds of the Revolution. No tragedies, therefore, will spring from romanticism, but only dramas, and among them, only Kleist’s or Schiller’s reach true greatness.
Man is alone, and thus confronted with nothing but himself. He ceases to be a tragic figure and becomes an adventurer; dramas and the novel will depict him better than any other art. The spirit of tragedy consequently disappears until our own day, when the most monstrous wars have inspired not a single tragic poet.
What then leads one to hope for a renaissance of tragedy among us? If my hypothesis is valid, our only reason for hope is that individualism is visibly changing today and that beneath the pressures of history, little by little the individual is recognizing his limits.
The world that the eighteenth-century individual thought he could conquer and transform by reason and science has in fact taken shape, but it’s a monstrous one. Rational and excessive at one and the same time, it is the world of history. But at this degree of hubris, history has put
