Modern Literature and the Tragic

Although Ibsen has been accused of being responsible for the ‘death of tragedy’, Ken Newton argues that Ibsen instead generates an anti-tragic perspective that had a major influence on dramatists such as Shaw and Brecht. By contrast, writers such as Hardy and Conrad, influenced by Schopenhauerean pessimism and Darwinism, attempt to modernise the concept of the tragic. Nietzsche’s revisionist interpretation of the tragic influenced writers who either take pessimism or the ‘Dionysian’ commitment to life to an extreme, as in Strindberg and D. H. Lawrence. Different views emerge in the period following the Second World War with the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ and postmodern anti-foundationalism.

• Combines literary interpretation with philosophical discussion, e.g. of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Derrida, Rorty

Jacket illustration: Old Man with His Head in His Hands by Vincent van Gogh © Francis G. Mayer/Corbis Design: www.riverdesign.co.uk

www.eup.ed.ac.uk ISBN 978 0 7486 3673 0

Edinburgh

Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square Edinburgh EH8 9LF

T RAGIC

K. M. Newton

Professor Ken Newton teaches at the University of Dundee. He specialises in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and literary theory. He has published several books on George Eliot and numerous articles on her and nineteenth-century fiction generally, as well as books, articles, and anthologies on literary theory.

AND THE

T RAGIC

• Provides detailed readings of particular texts including Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Ibsen’s Ghosts, Strindberg’s Miss Julie, Brecht’s Mother Courage, Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, Shaw’s Saint Joan, Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love

M ODERN L ITERATURE

AND THE

Key Features • Broad coverage of drama and fiction by British, European, and American writers

M ODERN L ITERATURE

THIS BOOK EXPLORES MODERN LITERATURE’S RESPONSES TO THE tragic. It examines writers from the latter half of the nineteenth century through to the later twentieth century who respond to ideas about tragedy.

K. M. Newton

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Modern Literature and the Tragic

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For Cate, Carol, Claire, and John

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Modern Literature and the Tragic

K. M. Newton

Edinburgh University Press

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© K.M. Newton, 2008 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Sabon and Futura by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3673 0 (hardback) The right of K.M. Newton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Ibsen’s Ghosts and the Rejection of the Tragic

vii 1 9

2. Anti-Tragic Drama after Ibsen

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3. Chekhov and the Tragic

51

4. The Return of the Tragic in Fiction

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5. Nietzsche and the Redefining of the Tragic

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6. The ‘Tragico-Dionysian’ and D. H. Lawrence

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7. The Theatre of the Absurd and the Tragic

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8. The Tragic, Pragmatism and the Postmodern

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Index

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Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of the material on Hardy in Chapter 4 and Trollope in Chapter 8 can be found in ‘Modernising Tragedy in Hardy’s Later Fiction’, The Thomas Hardy Journal 23 (2007: 142–55), and in ‘Allegory in Trollope’s The Warden’, Essays in Criticism 54 (2004: 128–43). The discussions of Shaw and Tolstoy in Chapters 2 and 4 make use of and rework material from an earlier book, In Defence of Literary Interpretation: Theory and Practice (Macmillan Press, 1986). I’m grateful to Robert Clark for giving me the idea for this study by inviting me to write an article on Modern Tragedy for the Literary Encyclopedia.

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This book is concerned with literary responses to the tragic in the modern period. The tragic is, of course, derived from tragedy as a dramatic genre but it tended to have an independent existence almost from the start. Plato – a near contemporary of the major tragic dramatists – discussed tragedy without referring to any specific tragic drama and mentioned writers of tragedies only in passing, so that the tragic became an idea or a concept partially separate from Greek tragedy as a genre. On the surface, Aristotle in his Poetics is more objective and literary in his approach as he focuses on the form of tragic drama, and judged Sophocles’ Oedipus the King to be the exemplary tragedy. It can be argued, however, that like Plato his real interest was in the tragic as an idea and that he valued the dramatic form of Oedipus because it could be aligned with his concept of the tragic, the play’s plot – for him the most important element in tragedy – ‘produce[ing] the distinctively tragic effect of engendering phobos and eleos [fear and pity]’.1 Aristotle in effect elevated himself above the writers of tragedy, just as Plato did, suggesting that he understood its nature better than literary practitioners. One consequence of this for later writers of tragedy was to make it difficult to separate tragedy in general from Aristotle’s poetics of tragedy, even if the play he had selected as his model tragedy was not necessarily typical of Greek tragedy in general. A consequence of Aristotle’s view that the purpose of form in tragic drama is to engender certain emotions that he identifies with the tragic is that there was scope for creating alternative dramatic forms that could also engender these or related emotions, so that tragedy was thus able to transcend its Greek origins. This made it possible for later writers, notably Shakespeare, to produce works which were called tragedies even if they were significantly different in form from classical tragedy. It has been argued, however, that though Aristotle created a poetics of tragedy that still has powerful influence, it was only with the German

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Idealists and post-Idealists that what could properly be called a philosophy of the tragic emerged. Peter Szondi writes: ‘Only since Schelling has there been a philosophy of the tragic. Composed as an instruction in writing drama, Aristotle’s text strives to determine the elements of tragic art; its object is tragedy, not the idea of tragedy.’2 Hegel was the most influential writer on tragic theory among German Idealists and post-Idealists, though the theories of contemporaries such as Schelling varied significantly from his. Perhaps a major factor in making writing that aims to be tragic or is related to the tragic different in the modern period from either the classical or early modern periods is that modern writers are not only aware of Aristotle’s poetics of tragedy and his claim that it is most fully manifested in Sophocles, but are also conscious of Shakespeare’s form of tragedy and philosophies of the tragic grounded in Hegelian dialectical thinking. Szondi argues that even though ‘the dialectic as such is almost never considered to be tragic’, it ‘is valid as a criterion for the definition of the tragic’.3 A collision between opposed ethical principles which can both be justified in their own terms is central to Hegel’s philosophy of the tragic and this had a particularly powerful influence in the nineteenth century, as is apparent, for example, in George Eliot’s and A. C. Bradley’s discussions of tragedy. Eliot saw Sophocles’ Antigone very much in Hegelian dialectical terms as embodying a ‘dramatic collision’ – Antigone being for Hegel the model tragedy – since ‘two principles, both having their validity, are at war with each other’.4 Schelling shared Hegel’s view of tragedy as collision but saw it in different terms: ‘The essence of tragedy is . . . a real conflict between freedom in the subject and objective necessity. This conflict does not end with the defeat of one or the other, but rather with both of them simultaneously appearing as conquerors and conquered in perfect indifference.’5 But whether the ‘dramatic collision’ was between ethical principles or between subject and object, I shall suggest that in considering the tragic in relation to modern literature Hegelian theory plays a significant role, since both elements or forces in any tragic conflict, even if not granted equal validity, at the very least need to be accorded respect, and that if that does not apply then something different from the tragic has emerged. Hegel’s theory has, however, been persuasively criticised for seeing tragedy as ‘ultimately purposive’ and emphasising ‘harmony, resolution, and reconciliation’: Hegel’s view of what constitutes a right works for some tragedies better than others. He is not eager to acknowledge the value of forces that serve morally dubious ends. These too can be rights in the sense on which tragedy insists . . . Hippolytus and Bacchae could never be Hegel’s favourite plays.6

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Yet it is not difficult to revise a dialectical theory of the tragic so that it can be applied to such plays or to Shakespearean tragedies such as King Lear and Othello. No one could be more ‘morally dubious’ than Iago yet Othello contemplates the otherness of Iago, after his villainy is revealed, almost with wonder. Iago represents some fundamental force in the world which is irreconcilable with Othello’s love for Desdemona and seeks to destroy it. Mere moral disapproval of Iago would be ridiculously inadequate. And of course that force is also a potential in Othello himself, since it was able to gain control over him, precipitating the tragedy, though one could argue that his final suicide represents a counter-force of mental resistance to the alien and destructive other that has destroyed his and Desdemona’s love in a material sense. What makes it possible to reconcile these plays with a theory of the tragic founded on a collision between opposed forces is that the alien or destructive ‘other’ embodied in Iago or Medea or Goneril and Regan should command the respect of the audience even in the face of moral disapproval or revulsion; intense hate or jealousy or lust are forces of nature and always a potential threat to civilisation and morality, that is, to human concepts of order and value that aim to transcend nature. Szondi spells out the effect of dialectics on the concept of the tragic in ‘the post-Idealist’, or modern, era: One can draw no other consequence from this than the one drawn from the crisis to which dialectical conception of the tragic in the post-Idealist era led: There is no such thing as the tragic, at least not as an essence. Rather, the tragic is a mode, a particular manner of destruction that is threatening or already completed: the dialectical manner. There is only one tragic downfall: the one that results from the unity of opposites, from the sudden change into one’s opposite, from self-division. But it is also the case that only the demise of something that should not meet its demise, whose removal does not allow the wound to heal, is tragic. The tragic contradiction may not be sublated in a superordinate sphere, whether immanent or transcendent.7

Though William Storm in his book, After Dionysus: A Theory of the Tragic, has formulated a post-Hegelian theory of tragedy that argues that fracturing or rending of the self – sparagmos – is central to tragedy, this theory retains significant links to dialectics as interpreted by Szondi: The [tragic] denotes the inevitability of separation and the irreconcilability of opposing polarities, which produce a corresponding pattern of rifting in depictions of selfhood and action. The term reflects the Dionysian cycle that cannot be completed, that is broken before the event of unification, leaving only fracture. The tragic, in short, is not simply that which is mournful, lamentable, or even catastrophic; it is that which is unmendable.8

Another theorist who is very relevant to a consideration of the tragic in the modern period is Jacques Derrida. Though Derrida’s philosophy

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can be seen as anti-Hegelian in that the deconstruction of oppositions is intrinsic to his thinking, his concept of ‘undecidability’ has close links with Szondi’s revision of Hegel, in which there is dialectical conflict without, as Szondi puts it, sublation – a translation of the Hegelian term, aufheben9 – ‘in a superordinate sphere’. Thus the dialectic is not transcended or superseded in any synthesis of oppositions. In Derrida’s concept of undecidability oppositions remain in place and can’t be transcended or synthesised, and this is integral to an implied ‘undecidable’ theory of the tragic, the tragic being situated within the experience of the subject rather than between opposed ethical principles or between the subject and some force external to it: ‘there would be no decision, in the strong sense of the word, in ethics, in politics, no decision, and thus no responsibility, without the experience of some undecidability . . . I am in front of a problem and I know that the two determined solutions are as justifiable as one another.’ Such a predicament he describes as ‘tragic’: At some point, however, for a decision to be made you have to go beyond knowledge . . . That is why the distinction between good and evil doesn’t depend on knowledge; that is why we should not know, in terms of knowledge, what is the distinction between good and evil. To have to make such a distinction, which depends precisely on responsibility, is, I confess, both a terrible and tragic situation in which to find oneself.10

With the classical tragedies that have been most influential on writers and theorists of tragedy and the tragic, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Antigone, undecidability is not foregrounded, as the protagonists are shown as fully committed to the decisions they have made: Oedipus chose to act in order to evade the prophecy of the oracle that he will kill his father and marry his mother, and came to believe that the human will was superior to the power of the Gods; and Antigone made the opposite decision in believing that divine law gave her the right to resist a human law. Undecidability, however, may be seen to operate at a more abstract tragic level as one can claim that both sides in the conflict between opposed forces are intended to command the respect of the audience. The decisions the protagonists make inevitably bring these forces into collision with catastrophic consequences. For Derrida, Hamlet is a model tragedy for the modern era since undecidability is the primary focus rather than the catastrophic results of the decision Hamlet made. Hamlet, unlike Oedipus and Antigone, experiences undecidability directly yet must make a decision, so that the protagonist’s situation of undecidability becomes arguably the most significant aspect in the tragedy:

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In the case of Hamlet, I try to show in Specters of Marx that the responsibility in front of his father’s call, for it to be a responsibility, demands that choices be made . . . So the son has to make a decision . . . as a finite being he has to select within the heritage and that is again the question of undecidability. Of course, that is the classical interpretation of Hamlet as a victim of undecidability, he doesn’t know and he gets paralysed. Nevertheless, if we assume that Hamlet is a figure of paralysis or neurosis because of undecidability, he might be also a paradigm for action: he understands what actions should be and he undergoes the process of undecidability at the beginning.11

It might be argued against Derrida that to choose to act against the murderer of your father and a usurper should not create very much undecidability; a son can hardly just walk away from the murder of his father any more than Oedipus could merely accept the inevitability of the Oracle’s prophecy and do nothing to resist it. Yet the conflict has shifted in this play from that which is at the centre of Sophocles’ two most famous tragedies. The decision Hamlet has to make is whether acting against the moral and political corruption of Denmark, which is centred in Claudius, could be anything but futile since he is aware that such corruption may be intrinsic – Denmark may be a prison but as Rosencrantz points out to Hamlet it is not different in kind from the world12 – and therefore attempting to destroy it would not only be pointless but may even make things worse; and of course incidents such as the killing of Polonius and especially the catastrophic climax, keep that question in play. For Derrida the lines that encapsulate undecidability and Hamlet’s tragic predicament are ‘The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,/ That ever I was born to set it right’ (I, v).13 Undecidability in this Derridean sense which locates tragedy within the human experience perhaps allows modern writers opposed generally to any philosophy of the tragic nevertheless to retain a connection with it through the representation of human dilemmas and choices, in which a decision has to be taken without having any secure knowledge that it is the right one: ‘No one can ever know, no one can ever be sure, in a theoretical and determinative judgment, that a responsible decision was made and that it will have been the best.’14 The literary and implied philosophical context of classical and Shakespearean drama needs to be kept in mind in discussing modern writers in relation to the tragic, as their writing incorporates an awareness of that context; and though the philosophy of the tragic, especially post-Hegel, may be of greater importance for considering modern writers, some were very conscious of the form of classical tragedy and created an interplay with it. George Steiner in The Death of Tragedy claimed that modern drama failed to achieve the literary and philosophical power of classical tragedy.15 However, I shall argue that in

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considering the tragic in the modern period one needs to take into account the fact that not only formally but philosophically the concept of the tragic becomes problematic even though the human issues it raises remain fundamental, and that this leads to a variety of responses to and confrontations with the tragic in modern literature. Some major writers rejected any philosophy of the tragic or endeavoured to find alternatives to it, often however creating interplay with aspects of Aristotle’s poetics of tragedy at the same time as undermining the tragic as a philosophy. After Hegel and German Idealism, tragedy as a dramatic form and the philosophy of the tragic become more radically separate. Such lack of congruency between a poetics of tragedy and a philosophy of the tragic means that discussion of the tragic can’t be confined only to drama (or even just to serious drama) but must also consider other types of literature, especially fiction. Since the main focus in this study is on responses to the tragic among representative modern writers from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century – whose concept of it would have been mainly influenced by Sophocles and Aristotle, Shakespeare, Hegelian dialectical theory, Schopenhauerian or Nietzschean revisionist theories – there is no attempt to produce a new theory of the tragic but to discuss in some detail literary works by such writers that can be seen as engaging with the tragic in these various aspects. It will be clear that the dialogic approach of this book with its detailed analysis of particular texts is very different from that of the most ambitious study in recent years of tragedy and the tragic, Terry Eagleton’s Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, which is essentially a polemical study.16 In the first two chapters playwrights who produced works that can be seen as anti-tragic are discussed, some – Ibsen in his middle period, Shaw, Brecht – being actively hostile to any philosophy of the tragic but often making use of formal features and devices associated with tragedy, others being anti-tragic without necessarily intending to be. Chekhov is an interesting case since the relation between his writing and the tragic is not easy to determine, and his work is discussed in Chapter 3. In contrast to anti-tragic writing, I suggest that certain writers of fiction took the view that modern intellectual developments – particularly Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Darwinian evolutionary theory – created a new basis for the tragic in modern times, and Hardy, Tolstoy and Conrad are discussed in that context in Chapter 4. The major influence on thinking about the tragic after Hegel is Nietzsche who took a revisionist view of Greek tragedy and attempted to create an alternative or Dionysian tragic theory. The fifth and sixth chapters consider writers who were influenced in various ways by Nietzsche’s ideas on the tragic,

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D. H. Lawrence being, as I argue, the most committed to Nietzsche’s revisionist tragic philosophy. The seventh chapter considers the relation between ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’ and the tragic and argues that though Samuel Beckett’s drama can’t be pinned down as being either tragic or anti-tragic, Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker has a strong claim to be a major modern tragedy. In the final chapter the focus is on the opposition between the tragic and the postmodern as represented by antifoundationalist thinking, with Trollope’s The Warden being discussed as a proto-postmodern work that is both anti-tragic and anti-foundationalist in several respects. By seeing modern writers as interacting with tragedy and the tragic in various ways, one can create what I hope are interesting connections between works which on the surface might appear to have little in common. Modern writers often appear to write from quite diverse perspectives but by considering their different and implicitly opposed responses to the tragic one sees them in effect entering into debate or dialogue with each other about the fundamental issues the tragic raises in the modern period.

Notes 1. Walter Kaufmann (1969), Tragedy and Philosophy, New York: Anchor Books, p. 65. 2. Peter Szondi (2002), An Essay on the Tragic, trans. Paul Fleming, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 1. 3. Ibid., p. 54. 4. George Eliot (1992), Selected Critical Writings, ed. Rosemary Ashton, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 244. See also A. C. Bradley (1909), ‘Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy’, in Oxford Lectures on Poetry, London: Macmillan, pp. 69–98. 5. Quoted in Szondi, p. 9. 6. Adrian Poole (2005), Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 59, 61. 7. Szondi, p. 55. 8. William Storm (1998), After Dionysis: A Theory of the Tragic, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 80. For a recent study of Greek tragedy that challenges philosophical approaches to tragedy by emphasising the performative, see Olga Taxidou (2004), Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 9. Aufheben is what replaces, in Hegelian dialectic, the original thesis and antithesis, both of which, however, remain saved or preserved in some sense in their ‘sublation’. 10. Jacques Derrida (1999), ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

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Modern Literature and the Tragic (eds), Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, London: Routledge, p. 66. Ibid., pp. 67–8. See exchange between Hamlet and Rosencrantz in Hamlet, III, ii. See discussion of Hamlet in Chapter 1 of Jacques Derrida (1994), Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge. Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco (2004), For What Tomorrow . . .: A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 132. Emphasis in original. See George Steiner (1963), The Death of Tragedy, London: Faber and Faber. Terry Eagleton (2003), Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, Oxford: Blackwell. Eagleton argues for a new idea of the tragic that can accommodate Marxism, humanism and religion. The emphasis is on range of discussion and often scathing critique of alternative ideas of the tragic rather than detailed analysis of texts, and writers whose perspective on or attitude to the tragic Eagleton particularly disagrees with are dismissed in excathedra style.

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Chapter 1

Ibsen’s Ghosts and the Rejection of the Tragic

In his book The Death of Tragedy George Steiner famously and controversially argued that Ibsen’s middle period social realist plays in prose, and by implication the modern drama on social themes that emerged from them, were irreconcilable with tragedy: But these tracts, enduring as they may prove to be by virtue of their theatrical vigour, are not tragedies. In tragedy, there are no temporal remedies. The point cannot be stressed too often. Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unaltering bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world. But in these plays of Ibsen’s radical period, such is not the issue. There are specific remedies to the disasters which befall the characters, and it is Ibsen’s purpose to make us see these remedies and bring them about. A Doll’s House and Ghosts are founded on the belief that society can move toward a sane, adult conception of sexual life and that woman can and must be raised to the dignity of man . . . As Shaw rightly says: ‘No more tragedy for the sake of tears.’ Indeed, no tragedy at all, but dramatic rhetoric summoning us to action in the conviction that truth of conduct can be defined and that it will liberate society.1

By writing plays in which it is suggested that there are social solutions to human problems and in forsaking the heightening of language made possible by verse for dialogue based on ordinary speech, Ibsen, generally regarded as the first modern playwright, had in effect killed off tragedy. Although one may agree that Steiner is right to see Ibsen’s social realist plays as breaking with the tragic, he does not explain why there is nevertheless a fairly obvious interplay between Ghosts (1881) and classical tragedy, indeed no mention is made of this fact. Ibsen clearly has classical tragedy in mind in Ghosts, particularly Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, held by Aristotle in his Poetics to be the exemplary tragedy. Whereas Steiner suggests that Ibsen made an unfortunate literary decision in abandoning tragedy in favour of what he sees as an inferior social

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realism in his middle period plays, I shall argue that Ibsen very much realised what was at stake in artistic terms in going beyond traditional tragedy and that a play such as Ghosts is the outcome of the conscious adoption of an anti-tragic aesthetic: though inhumanity and destruction are always with us, in the modern era tragedy is no longer an appropriate artistic response to them. Ibsen, of course, before he turned to social realism, had written plays in verse, and one of the best known of these plays is Brand, clearly a tragedy in form and conception though it had been reworked from a poem that was epic in scale into a ‘dramatic poem’ not intended to be acted on the stage. Though it might appear to belong more to the Romantic idea of tragedy than to the classical, in that there is a clash between an individual of heroic potential and a world that fails to conform with or can’t live up to his ideals, the play can also be aligned with a Hegelian theory of the tragic. It has been suggested that Ibsen in his verse period was influenced by Friedrich Hebbel, a tragic dramatist influenced by Hegel’s theory, for whom the basis of tragedy lay in the conflict created by the inevitable fact that any assertion on the part of the individual will provoke necessarily a counter-assertion of the world will.2 The play recognises that Brand’s adherence to a philosophy of ‘all or nothing’, which he believes is demanded if people commit themselves fully to the will of God, is one that virtually no human being or human society can live up to. Nevertheless it is a heroic ideal even if the attempt to apply it is destructive both to Brand himself and to other people. The play does not set up a simple dichotomy between the heroic individual and a corrupt or flawed world as in more conventional Romantic drama: we see the negative consequences of Brand’s idealism, and ordinary humanity is not treated with contempt though its limitations are clear. There is both respect for Brand’s assertion of ‘all or nothing’ and respect for the pragmatism and compromise that characterises the resistant world in which the hero lives. Out of that fundamental conflict – which is essentially ahistorical or intrinsic – emerges the tragic. But when Ibsen moved on from verse and the heightened form of drama associated with it to a drama that employed modern prose with character and situation treated in accordance with this new form of dramatic language, a social and historical dimension was introduced that changed the nature of serious drama; in particular the tragic as traditionally conceived was called into question. Ghosts suggests that Ibsen was well aware that a move to social realism had major implications for tragedy.3 Steiner asserts that the conflicts at the root of classical tragedy are basic and constitutive to the human condition, and the Ibsen who wrote Brand may have agreed with him. When Steiner refers to ‘the

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unaltering bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world’, the key word is ‘unaltering’. Sophoclean tragedy assumes that human beings live in a world in which there are intrinsic conflicts, such as that between a transcendent moral or metaphysical order and natural human desire or an idea of the human good that is not necessarily reconcilable with laws of transcendent or divine origin. Thus Oedipus, when the Oracle foresees that he will kill his father and marry his mother, refuses to accept that fate even though the Oracle is in touch with an order superior to humanity. Of course in seeking to avoid his fate he precipitates it. But he displays hubris, from the gods’ point of view, in believing human beings do not need to accept the will of the gods: they can operate as independent agents. Although one can, of course, claim that the gods have set up Oedipus, it is arguable that this is not done lightly or mischievously but to bring home to human beings that the transcendent realm of the gods is ultimately more powerful than and thus superior to the human realm. Human beings need continually to be reminded that they are subject to the authority of a higher power. Yet there is an inescapable and irresolvable conflict of interest between gods and humanity and human beings would not be human if they did not rebel against transcendent power and the laws that sustain it. If Oedipus on hearing that he was fated to kill his father and marry his mother had merely accepted that fate as inevitable he would have compromised his humanity. And as this fate seemed avoidable, the only authentic human choice was to try to avoid it. But from the gods’ point of view, if human beings believe they can easily control and shape their lives without taking account of an authority that has a transcendent source then the gods will become redundant and thus there would be no order that transcends human desires and interests. In Sophoclean tragedy – the situation is more complex if one also considers classical tragedy as a whole, notably Aeschylus and Euripides – the human and the non-human realms are also conceived of as unchangeable: both are defined in essentialist terms. The non-human or transcendent realm is by definition unchanging and human beings have an essence or soul that is not determined by the body or anything material but is also conceived of as being beyond change. Thus the conflict between the two is non-contingent: it will always exist though it may take different forms. It is significant in Oedipus the King that when Oedipus learns the truth, he does not blame the gods or the fates: the authority and superiority of the world beyond the human is accepted. He has performed acts that are irreconcilable with laws that emanate from a non-human source and so are unchallengeable. Although he did not know the man he killed was his father or that the woman he married

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was his mother he accepts responsibility for his actions. He does not accuse the gods or the Oracle of deceiving him. He believed he could set human interests above the realm of the gods and he must therefore accept punishment for his hubris. When the inevitable conflict between the transcendent world beyond the human with its fixed and unchangeable laws and the world of human beings is irresolvable, tragedy and the tragic come into play. In Ibsen’s social realist drama this conflict between two unchanging and unchangeable forces is no longer tenable. What has changed in the modern era is that both the world external to the human – whether conceived of in terms of a metaphysical or natural order – and human identity are no longer perceived as having an autonomous and independent existence since they cannot be separated from the social; the naked confrontation, characteristic of a tragedy such as Oedipus, between the transcendent realm of the gods and an essential humanity disappears because society and by extension history have entered the picture. All conflicts are thus mediated by society – or perhaps better, the sociological – and history, an idea that would have been alien to Sophocles and his premodern era. Of course, it would be a caricature of classical or premodern tragedy as a whole to claim that society and social issues are absent from representation. However, what makes the modern context in which Ibsen wrote his social realist drama different in a fundamental way from pre-modern eras is that a sociological dimension shapes thinking about the world, human identity and the relation between the two. Even metaphysical ideas in the modern era have to be defended against those who see them as having social, cultural and historical origins. The most influential modern thinkers from various perspectives have argued that human beings do not have essences: human identity is determined – wholly or partially depending on point of view – by socio-historical forces such as class and ideology. There are thus no absolute laws and human acts cannot be judged in absolute terms independent of circumstances. A modern Oedipus who discovers he has inadvertently killed his father and married his mother need not be seen either by himself or his social world – at least in Western society – as having performed acts that are beyond redemption. He could question the absoluteness of the laws that condemn patricide and incest: do these not emanate from a particular socio-cultural matrix and therefore cannot be applied in different eras without further discussion? The modern Oedipus could also claim that his actions cannot be judged separately from his state of mind: the fact that he did not know that his father was his father when he killed him or his mother was his mother when he married her means that he cannot be guilty of patricide and incest in any real sense. He is merely a

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victim of circumstances. In all cases the particularities of the situation must be taken into consideration before any judgement can take place. Ghosts, I shall suggest, takes account of this changed context that undermines the fundamental assumptions of Sophoclean tragedy. Although the play is modelled on Sophocles’ Oedipus the King in various respects, the purpose of this interplay is not to claim tragic status for Ghosts but to highlight Ibsen’s implied view that classical tragedy is now impossible and that serious drama can no longer be tragic in any traditional sense. Steiner convincingly sees verse as distancing the language of drama from the trivia of life and thus creating heightened situations that transcend particularity. That in itself might account for Ibsen’s abandonment of verse, as the language of drama should no longer aim to transcend the specific: for the centrality of the social to be recognised a dramatic language based on ordinary speech must be substituted for verse. But Ibsen’s social realist drama is no slice of life: virtually nothing is irrelevant, everything in Ghosts has a structural, thematic or symbolic purpose. The play’s kinship to classical tragedy is apparent in the fact that it adheres to the unities – of time, place, and action – as Aristotle recommends, using Oedipus as his model. Mrs Alving is Oedipus-like in that she is confident that she can triumph by force of mind and will over the various forms of negativity that stand in the way of her happiness. In particular she believes that now that her husband is dead she can put the past behind her and move on with her son, Oswald, to a new life. If the play were a traditional tragedy this would be seen as a type of hubris, though clearly the play does not see it in such terms. She has been mentally liberated by reading the advanced books Pastor Manders so disapproves of. However, at the beginning of the play she has no desire to rebel outwardly against conventional society and its ideas: she has had an orphanage built to commemorate her late husband, Captain Alving, in order to reinforce the belief that he was a pillar of the community and to cover up any rumours to the contrary. She even goes along with Pastor Manders’ advice not to insure the orphanage as that might offend those who saw insuring such a charitable building as indicating a lack of confidence in divine providence. Her main aim, however, is to relegate her life with Captain Alving to the past by directing his money into this project so that neither she nor her son will have any obligation to him. She proclaims to Manders: ‘I didn’t want Oswald, my son, to inherit a single thing from his father . . . Anything my son gets is to come from me.’4 In the light of what is to happen, this speech embodies dramatic irony, a common device in tragedy, especially in Sophocles’ Oedipus as in Oedipus’ assertion: ‘The

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killer of Laius,/Whoever he was, might think to turn his hand/Against me; thus, serving Laius, I serve myself.’5 Ibsen’s use of dramatic irony is different from Sophocles’ as far as the audience is concerned, however, since the irony will be apparent only to those who have already seen or read the play, whereas in Sophocles’ drama the audience, potentially at least, would have known the myth on which the play was based and therefore would have recognised the irony at once. Sophocles’ audience therefore accepts the tragedy in advance, as it were, whereas Ibsen and modern drama more generally – though there will be exceptions such as historical plays – cannot make such a demand on their audiences. In place of ahistorical myth there is realism with its basis in historicism, empiricism, contingency or a perpetually changing reality. Like Oedipus, Ghosts is very much about the relation between past and present. In Oedipus the past proves to be inescapable, undermining any human attempt to be independent of fate or the realm of the gods. Mrs Alving also recognises a force independent of her will in the central speech in the play in which she talks about the ghosts of the title: I’m inclined to think that we are all ghosts, Pastor Manders, every one of us. It’s not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunts us. It’s all kind of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that. It’s not that they actually live on in us; they are simply lodged there, and we cannot get rid of them. I’ve only to pick up a newspaper and I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. Over the whole country there must be ghosts, as numerous as the sands of the sea. And here we are, all of us, abysmally afraid of the light. (232)

Significantly the absolute values upheld and defended by Sophocles’ gods are reduced to ‘old defunct theories’ and ‘old defunct beliefs’, social and ideological constructs that belong to the past. Mrs Alving recognises that the power of the ‘ghosts’ lies not in old theories and beliefs in themselves – she has liberated herself at an intellectual level from those; it is the fact that they are internalised in human beings and become enmeshed in their thinking and feeling that gives them a power that cannot be thrown off easily, as the play is to reveal. She nevertheless remains convinced, like Oedipus in his belief that he can act to avoid what the fates have forecast for him, that she can overcome these ‘ghosts’ and move into the future without being crushed by them. She is to discover, however, that the ‘ghosts’ do not merely have an influence on thinking or feeling; they have material effects that she has yet to face. Defunct theories and beliefs had the power to make her return to her husband and that act is to have inexorable consequences. The play shows her becoming more radical in the course of her various encounters with Manders and Oswald. The debate between her

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son and Manders in which Oswald defends bohemian life in Paris against Manders’ objections to it as immoral galvanises Mrs Alving into telling Manders the truth about her relationship with her husband: after Manders persuaded her to return to him when she had left him because of his dissipated behaviour he had not reformed but continued to live in the same way. At this point she sees herself as a victim of a dissolute monster but in the course of the play, like Oedipus, she gradually develops towards a greater understanding of her situation. It becomes clear that blame cannot be as easily assigned as she previously thought: both she and her husband, as she eventually realises, were caught up in a system that it was virtually impossible to escape from. Her marriage was an arranged marriage but her parents could not be blamed for it because, as she says, it would have been madness for them to have turned down such an offer. In her gradual understanding of the workings of this network of social forces Mrs Alving becomes aware that neither the parents, her husband nor she can be blamed for the marriage taking place: the socio-cultural system into which they have been born is to blame. But the system is not something merely external that one can easily rebel against; as Mrs Alving expresses it in her ‘ghosts’ speech, the system becomes internalised in human beings so that it seems natural. The culmination of her developing insight into her situation is provoked, after she learns of Oswald’s illness, by their discussion of the ‘joy of life’, which Oswald asserts is absent in Norway. At first she reverts to bourgeois stereotype – demonstrating the power the ‘ghosts’ still exert over her mind – when Oswald proclaims that Regine is ‘filled with the joy of life’, by being dismissive of it: ‘Can there be any salvation in that?’ (250). But this generates an experience of illumination that transforms her view of both herself and her situation: ‘Now I see for the first time. And now I can speak’ (251). In Sophoclean tragedy this sudden sense of recognition or discovery is defined by Aristotle as anagnorisis and leads to a major turning point or reversal of fortune (peripeteia) in the drama. In Oedipus the King it is the moment when Oedipus realises his relationship to the man he killed and for the first time has insight into how he himself and actions committed by him are connected with the crisis in Thebes. Mrs Alving has a similar insight but before she can articulate it Manders returns and the orphanage – Mrs Alving’s means of resolving a series of contradictions – burns down. It embodied lies that can no longer be suppressed. In Act 3 a radically changed Mrs Alving emerges. As Oedipus recognises that he is directly responsible for the plague that besets Thebes, Mrs Alving understands that her husband’s dissipated behaviour, and

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therefore everything that has arisen from it, was not something of which she was merely the victim: her husband’s actions were inextricably connected with her own behaviour and attitudes. Identifying ‘the joy of life’, as Oswald characterises it, with sin and immorality, regarding sex for a woman as mere duty, she had been directly responsible for her husband’s descent into dissipation and vice, having internalised the old defunct theories and beliefs so that they became part of the fabric of her consciousness and thus had specific effects on her relationship with her husband. It was not then mere dissoluteness or the outward repressiveness of the society in which Captain Alving lived that made him develop in the way he did. Mrs Alving, shaped by her upbringing and her identification with bourgeois respectability and puritanical Christian views of the body, brought no joy into Captain Alving’s life so that his ‘joy of life’ was perverted into dissipation and loose living. Far from being the victim, as she perceived herself to be at first, she recognises that she herself was at the root of the problem: ‘They’d taught me various things about duty and such-like, and I’d simply gone on believing them . . . I’m afraid I must have made the house unbearable for your poor father, Oswald’ (261). But of course the implication of this is that the self is not to be seen in essentialist terms as a unique soul; Mrs Alving’s self was a social and ideological construct. Whereas Oedipus’ actions are represented as stemming from his own nature, Mrs Alving is seen as the product of a repressive cultural system that determined her feelings and attitudes. She cannot therefore be blamed for the catastrophic outcome of events in the way that Oedipus can in Oedipus the King since his actions derive from his own human choices, not from ideological conditioning. But though Mrs Alving no longer sees herself as a victim of her dissipated husband and Manders’ weakness in refusing to take her in when she left Alving, she naively thinks that her insight is going to be liberating, that her consciousness of the situation will allow her to free herself from the forces that formerly shaped her and enable her to move on from them: ‘you’ll soon be able to work again, my darling. Now that you are rid of all those nagging and depressing thoughts that are worrying you’ (265). She cannot bring herself to accept the inexorability of her past actions which have taken on a power that is independent of her consciousness, and even when Oswald spells out what his inherited illness entails she cries, ‘It’s not true, Oswald! It’s impossible! It can’t be!’ (266). Oedipus as protagonist of Sophocles’ tragedy, in contrast, when he recognises his fate accepts it without struggle. The ending of Ghosts is almost as catastrophic as any in classical tragedy, with Oswald’s mind being destroyed by congenital syphilis,

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inherited from his father but transmitted to him through his mother, and Mrs Alving finally being faced with the dilemma of whether or not to agree to his demand to kill him and thus put him out of his misery when his mind gives way. The difference between Ghosts and Sophoclean tragedy, however, lies in the implied attitude to such catastrophe. In Sophocles’ classical tragedy the forces that destroy the tragic protagonist are accorded respect even though they may be alien to human hopes and interests. Oedipus does not blame the gods or any external forces for the situation he is in; though such forces may be destructive, that which transcends the human must be respected. The fundamental conflict between human hopes and interests and an otherness that is resistant to them is seen as intrinsic. But what destroys the lives of Mrs Alving and Oswald is not intrinsic in that sense: at the root of their destruction are social forces, dead ideas that live on, the dispiriting ideology of respectability. These social forces are accorded no respect in the play; on the contrary they are treated with obvious contempt. Whereas according to Aristotle the effect of tragedy on the audience should be one of catharsis, a purging of such emotions as pity and fear, the audience at the end of Ghosts ought to feel contempt for the socio-cultural system that has precipitated this disaster. Ibsen has chosen his characters carefully. Realism merges into symbolism. In constructing this family Ibsen creates a set of dramatic representations that will allow him to attack the foundation of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture: the sexually potent Captain Alving whose failure to find the ‘joy of life’ within marriage leads him into dissipation and disease; Mrs Alving, the product of respectable repressive moral values who becomes liberated too late; Oswald, representing the younger generation, the victim of disease that exists on both a physical and an ideological level. The other characters also fit in with the play’s symbolic scheme: Manders, completely imbued with the dead ideas of conventional society; Engstrand, cynically adapting himself to society’s hypocrisy by opening a lodging house for sailors – significantly to be named after Captain Alving – which is a front for a brothel; and the maid Regine, Engstrand’s supposed daughter who turns out to be Oswald’s half-sister, driven into virtual prostitution by choosing to become part of Engstrand’s sailors’ lodging house. Syphilis as a sexually transmitted disease is a particularly graphic symbol of dead ideas and beliefs which have become rotten and are destroying a new generation. These carefully chosen ingredients, powerfully represented in realist terms, combine to create an image with strong symbolic overtones. George Steiner, in contrasting Ibsen and tragedy, asserts that the dilemmas of Ibsen’s social realist plays, unlike those of tragedy, ‘may be

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resolved by rational innovation’. But though society can be reformed in order to overcome particular abuses, it would be utopian to believe that a society perfectly adapted to the desires, hopes and ideals of all its citizens could be created. There will always be a mismatch to a greater or lesser degree and Ibsen’s social realist plays are at bottom about this inevitable mismatch. But whereas a tragedian like Sophocles has respect for the forces that destroy humanity with the assumption that human beings must accept them since they can’t be overcome, Ibsen has little or no respect for the destructive social forces represented in his drama. The audience at the end of Ghosts ought to leave the theatre with a sense of outrage at such destruction of a family and a determination to resist the social forces that have brought it about. There is no sense of tragic acceptance as there is at the end of a classical tragedy like Oedipus, nor does a concept such as ‘liberal tragedy’, as formulated by Raymond Williams in a discussion that focuses on Ibsen, help as it obscures Ibsen’s questioning of the very foundation of tragedy.6 Steiner is right to claim that there are ‘remedies’ for Mrs Alving and her son’s particular situation, and one can see that the conditions that destroyed their lives – Calvinistic Christianity, bourgeois notions of respectability, practices like arranged marriages, even an illness like congenital syphilis – are no longer powerful in the twenty-first century in modern Western societies. Yet it is simplistic to claim, as Steiner does, that it was Ibsen’s purpose to promote ‘remedies’ for the social evils that affect the Alving family. The fact that Ibsen creates links with classical tragedy suggests that remedying specific social evils is not his major aim as an artist: he is concerned like Sophocles with a universal human conflict, but one between human beings and social forms rather than between humanity and the gods. Though no society can exist without institutions and belief systems that sustain social order, with the passing of time it is inevitable that these will become less adapted to changing social and cultural conditions and consequently a conflict will arise between human desire and aspiration and social forms that restrict such desire and aspiration. But a character like Mrs Alving is representative of a recurrent human situation: she is both a product of a particular society and culture who internalises its values and ideology and also someone who experiences desires and aspirations at variance with the very cultural norms that she has internalised. So no simple form of liberation is possible and the conflict is not merely between the individual and society but within the individual who cannot help but be a social product. It is a mistake to see Ibsen even in his middle period plays as only a social critic attacking specific targets, such as the subjugation of women in A Doll’s House or

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repressive bourgeois values in Ghosts. These plays rather suggest that as institutions and ideologies become ossified in time certain individuals will in consequence be crushed by these ossified forces. Resistance against them is essential but there is no sense of optimism that new institutions and different ideologies will not become similarly ossified, and inevitably human beings in the future will internalise such ossifications. Thus in Ghosts Calvinistic Christianity, life-denying bourgeois morality, hypocritical respectability should not only be seen in literal terms as the object of attack in the play; they also function metaphorically as representative examples of social ossification. A Steiner-like critic who sees the play as a kind of tract for the times misses the point. Certainly it is a scathing attack on what now tend to be called ‘Victorian values’ – as its reception when first produced in London in 1891 graphically illustrated – but anyone who reads or sees the play in the modern era and who responds to it metaphorically rather than literally ought to be aware that the Alvings transcend their nineteenth-century context as classical tragedy transcends its particular context. But whereas Ibsen implies through his allusions to Oedipus that tragedy as conceived by Sophocles promotes human acceptance of a power beyond the human, his drama recognises no such power: the nonsocial confrontation between the human realm and an order that transcends the human no longer obtains. What remain resistant to human desire and aspiration in Ghosts are only reified human forms of order, the product of past human desires, ideals and concepts that are perceived as having an objective and separate existence. Submission and catharsis are therefore rejected in favour of continual struggle. Mrs Alving and Oswald may be defeated but they refuse to submit mentally to that defeat or respect those forces that destroy their lives; they thus offer hope that the power of the particular forces that have crushed them can in time be overcome, but there is no assurance in Ibsen’s drama that the conflict between human desire and aspiration and ossified social forms – whose power is both external and internal – will ever end. However, though I have argued that tragedy in the classical sense is rejected in Ghosts, there is an alternative tragic dimension, one that anticipates Derrida’s concept of the tragic as the human experience of having to decide in a context of undecidability. When Mrs Alving realises the inexorable nature of Oswald’s condition she is faced with having to decide between watching his mind being destroyed by the disease or, as he urges, killing him when it is clear that he has reached the point of no return. This locates the tragic within the human realm itself as an existential dilemma, and thus implicitly redefines it so that it is not the outcome of a collision between the human and some force that

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transcends or is alien to it. The tragic emerges not in the choice she makes or its consequences but in the very undecidability of the choice she has to make, which the play highlights by not disclosing what her decision will be or what results from it.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

George Steiner (1963), The Death of Tragedy, London: Faber and Faber, p. 291. Steiner defends his view of tragedy against critics of it in ‘ “Tragedy” Reconsidered’, New Literary History, 35 (2004), pp. 1–15. For a discussion of the influence of Hebbel on Ibsen see David Thomas (1990), Henrik Ibsen, Basingstoke: Macmillan, p. 53. Szondi discusses Hebbel in An Essay on the Tragic (2002), trans. Paul Fleming, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 37–40. There are also some links between A Doll’s House – the play that preceded Ghosts – and tragedy with Nora contemplating suicide, a tragic solution to her problems, but then rejecting the tragic in favour of an alternative social solution: discarding marriage and the family. Henrik Ibsen (1970), Ibsen: Plays: ‘Pillars of Society’; ‘A Doll’s House’; ‘Ghosts’, trans. James Walter McFarlane, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 225. Page numbers will henceforth be incorporated in the text. Sophocles (1971), The Theban Plays, trans. E. F. Watling, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 29. Raymond Williams (1996), Modern Tragedy, London: Chatto and Windus, pp. 87–102.

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Chapter 2

Anti-Tragic Drama after Ibsen

Shaw and Saint Joan Shaw’s drama was clearly influenced by Ibsen’s middle period plays and it continues and takes further Ibsen’s anti-tragic perspective. As a Fabian socialist Shaw was one of the major social critics of his time and it is easy to see why he particularly admired the radical social critique presented in plays such as A Doll’s House and Ghosts. If one believed that social action could change the world for the better then tragedy could be interpreted as a conservative form that reinforced the status quo by naturalising pain and suffering and thus dissociating them from social structures and their supporting ideologies. As well as being an ardent social reformer, Shaw also sympathised with the Romantic and utopian idealism of writers such as Blake and Shelley, as he believed in a continuing developing humanity, thus his support for Lamarckian evolutionary theory in which the human will played a role in humanity’s purposeful development, and his attack on Darwinism which had no place for purpose or the individual will in its concept of the evolutionary process. For Shaw, not only could the world external to humanity be changed in order to undermine the tragic, but so could humanity itself. Shaw’s anti-tragic perspective in his drama often led to his being accused of not being a true dramatist, despite the fact that most of his plays were popular successes: ‘When I venture to say that Mr Shaw is no dramatist I do not mean that he fails to interest and stimulate and amuse us in the theatre . . . All that we mean is that when he happens to choose the play as the form in which he shall entertain us there is a certain artistic waste.’1 Many writers and critics attributed what they saw as Shaw’s failure to achieve ‘greatness’ to the absence of any tragic vision in his writing. Thomas Mann wrote of him: ‘That idea [of greatness] implies a certain human tragedy, of suffering and sacrifice . . . Was

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he beyond such things, or were they beyond him?’2 For Robert Brustein, ‘Shaw’s failure to penetrate his own existential rebellion has robbed him of a tragic vision.’3 His optimistic Lamarckian interpretation of evolution has been seen as undermining tragic seriousness: ‘Shaw converts to a comic pattern the material of tragedy . . . commendable variations (especially women imbued with the Life Force) survive, get married, and live happily ever after.’4 This kind of criticism of Shaw contains the assumption that tragedy is the highest dramatic form which all serious drama should aspire to and fails to recognise, as Shaw surely did, that after Ibsen and social realism the tragic had been called into question and thereafter tragedy becomes problematic as a form. The concerted attack on Ghosts by critics when it was first produced in London in 1891 reveals a refusal to accept serious drama as social critique. As Shaw points out in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, his own play Mrs Warren’s Profession, which dealt with prostitution, created similar outrage when it was performed in New York in 1905. This perception that a drama of social critique could not be reconciled with the tragic and was thus ipso facto on a lower artistic level helps to explain the acclaim with which Saint Joan was received when first produced in 1923: Shaw had at last realised the limitations of his previous dramatic approach and produced a play that aspired to tragic status. It was widely accepted as his greatest artistic achievement and compared to great tragedies of the past: ‘First of all it is the tragedy of Joan. It is also, as Shaw suggests, the tragedy of the harm done by well-meaning and sincere people; but it is also great because it shows a great individual winning out of material defeat and destruction a kind of spiritual victory. In this sense it is a classical tragedy, like Antigone or Lear.’5 For Edmund Wilson it was ‘the first genuine tragedy Shaw had written’.6 Even those who dislike it or have reservations tend to base those on the play not living up to tragedy: Joan ‘resembles Anne Whitefield, not Antigone; the Millionairess, not Medea’.7 For George Steiner, though it ‘comes nearer to a tragic ordering of life’ than other Shaw plays, ‘one cannot help feeling it falls short of the mark by some small, obstinate margin’.8 One reading does argue that it repudiates tragedy but only on the grounds that Joan is not worthy of being a tragic figure since she is represented as a naive idealist: ‘By balancing the two simpletons in his design [Joan and de Stogumger], Shaw effectively throws into relief the questionableness of the principles that Joan represents.’9 Tragedy has therefore been central to discussions of Saint Joan and critics have recognised the relationship between the play and Sophocles’ Antigone. This has led some critics to argue that Saint Joan conforms to

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the Hegelian conception of tragedy, since Antigone was central to Hegel’s argument: ‘The Hegelian attitude toward tragedy, that which holds that out of the division of the ethical substance comes a synthesis that transcends both lesser, sundered goods, is clearly Shaw’s in Saint Joan.’10 Maurice Valency has been the strongest proponent of a Hegelian reading: Hegel’s view of tragedy was relativistic . . . Tragic characters represent actual ethical forces in conflict. Their struggle represents, not the struggle between good and evil, but the collision between two incompatible goods, and the tragedy of such characters is the consequence of their inflexible partnership . . . Accordingly in tragedy both protagonist and antagonist are doomed to perish . . . It is from this idea that Saint Joan derives its magnitude. The source of its tragedy is not merely the agony of Joan – which is treated ironically, since she is ultimately triumphant – but the eternal agony of a race that burns its saints.11

Yet he finally admits Shaw fails to make the Hegelian logic dramatically convincing: ‘For in spite of his painstaking effort to present the trial of Joan as a clash of cosmic forces in which both tyrants and victim are tragically enmeshed, the logic of the situation is lost in the overwhelming fact that, no matter what is being said, a young woman will be burnt alive.’ Shaw could resolve this problem only, claims Valency, by using de Stogumber to point out the horror of Joan’s death, an ineffective conclusion in tragic terms: ‘Thus Saint Joan, after skirting with circumspection the borders of tragedy, plunges suddenly into melodrama. Shaw could hardly stop there. The comic epilogue was inevitable.’12 What this shows is that Saint Joan is unconvincingly interpreted as a Hegelian tragedy. Although Joan’s prosecutors are represented as acting out of principle and their arguments against Joan are powerful in their own terms, the play clearly favours Joan’s position and rejects that of her opponents, thus undermining any Hegelian dialectic. Nor is the attempt to see the play as tragi-comic any more convincing. Although one can agree that Joan’s ideas eventually triumph over those of her opponents, this does not lessen the impact of her death. The emphasis in the play is as much on the miracle of Joan herself as on her as a forerunner of Protestantism and nationalism and therefore the fact that these ideas emerge as powerful forces in the future cannot compensate for her destruction. As the epilogue shows, the future is no more ready to receive Joan than the past. One feature of Saint Joan that creates a difficulty for those who see it as tragic, whether Aristotelian or Hegelian or some mixed form, is that Joan accepts death only when she discovers that her recantation will not lead to her freedom but to life imprisonment. This is either seen as an

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artistic weakness or something that needs to be explained away. Louis Martz refers to Joan’s ‘one lapse in confidence – her brief recantation’, and describes it as ‘her only real error in the play . . . where her superb self-confidence breaks down in a panic of recantation’.13 The use of the word ‘panic’ is significant, since it suggests that Joan’s recantation is not an authentic choice on her part but the product of a temporary emotional disturbance, with the further implication that, if she had made a considered choice to recant, that would undermine the play as tragedy. Her recantation must therefore be explained away as ‘panic’ if the play’s tragic status is not to be undermined. Saint Joan has obvious affinities with Sophocles’ Antigone since both protagonists explicitly choose death, though one could argue that ultimately all tragic protagonists make such a choice, even if not literally. Antigone, however, is distinctive in welcoming death as a price worth paying for performing an act she believes to be right in absolute terms. She tells her sister Ismene: I will bury my brother; And if I die for it, what happiness! Convicted of reverence – I shall be content To lie beside a brother whom I love. We have only a little time to please the living, But all eternity to love the dead. There I shall lie for ever. Live, if you will; Live, and defy the holiest laws of heaven.

She distinguishes herself sharply from Ismene, who does not feel strong enough to resist Creon and who regards Antigone’s act as folly: ‘You chose; life was your choice, when mine was death.’14 Unlike Oedipus, Antigone identifies with the absolute perspective of the gods – ‘the holiest laws of heaven’ – rather than with Creon’s human perspective and is prepared to die for her choice. Although both perspectives deserve respect, in Sophocles’ tragic universe that of the gods inevitably triumphs at a terrible human cost, which includes Antigone’s death. If Joan had chosen to be true to her voices and had gone to her death rather than repudiate them, then Saint Joan would be very similar in structure to Antigone. But when Joan realises that she is on the point of being burnt as a heretic, she resembles Ismene rather than Antigone when she states, ‘I have dared and dared; but only a fool will walk into a fire: God, who gave me my commonsense, cannot will me to do that.’15 Martz’s view that she signs the recantation in panic is difficult to sustain given her ambiguous response when she is asked if she believes that what she is signing is true: ‘It may be true. If it were not true, the fire would not be ready for me in the market place’ (999). This casuistry implies

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calculation rather than panic. The recantation scene suggests that for Joan life comes first, and defining herself by a principle comes second, whereas for a tragic protagonist like Antigone life and principle are one. When Joan finally does choose death, it is not to serve any principle or larger purpose or because she believes she was wrong to repudiate her voices to save her life; she chooses to die only because she cannot have life on the terms that would make it worth living. This creates a clear division between Joan and Sophocles’ tragic protagonists since neither Oedipus nor Antigone would think of adjusting to events in order to live. The tragic effect depends on the protagonist accepting that the values that define his or her sense of self cannot be reconciled with the situation with which he or she is faced. Antigone will thus accept no compromise with Creon’s human laws as she identifies her selfhood with laws that transcend human considerations and is ready to die rather than submit. Sophoclean tragedy accepts that though it may be understandable for more ordinary human beings, such as Ismene, to seek to avoid death or destruction by compromising with the demands of a superior force, humanity would be diminished if there were not such individuals as Antigone who refuse to do so. Although Creon is acting against what Antigone sees as divine law, his position is nevertheless worthy of respect as one sees from the sympathetic attitude of the Chorus. Even Antigone recognises the extremity of her own position when she tells Ismene that she would not disobey Creon’s law over a husband or a child, but a brother who cannot be replaced because her parents are dead is a unique case. Joan, however, has no such respect for the Church, and any respect the audience might have is undermined by its decision to burn Joan. The conflict in Saint Joan at first seems similar to that of Antigone: Joan is totally committed to her voices while the Church to preserve its institutional power and, as it sees it, social order, seeks to undermine them and destroy the basis of Joan’s belief in the values for which she fights. The reader of the play who has tragic expectations assumes that Joan identifies her fundamental self with her voices as Antigone identifies her self with a higher law than human laws. For Joan to deny her voices then would be to destroy the basis of her existence. Thus, her willingness to sign a piece of paper which states that she repudiates her voices undermines the play’s tragic effect, as this is an ignoble act that diminishes her status as tragic protagonist. Critics who see the play as tragic find Joan’s action deeply problematic and therefore try to find ways of accounting for it. If one sees the play in the light of Ghosts and Ibsen’s other social realist dramas, a different reading presents itself. Joan’s willingness to sign the recantation indicates her contempt for the forces that are

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threatening to destroy her. In signing the recantation she does not repudiate her voices and accept the Church’s position in order to save her life; she only pretends to, as the casuistical remark quoted earlier indicates. Of course if Shaw’s aim is to write a tragedy, this is deeply problematic since Joan is prepared to compromise with a more powerful force in order to save her life, with her denial of her voices being merely an adaptive move. In tragic terms it must be seen as an ignoble act. In such model tragedies as Oedipus and Antigone, both sides of the conflict are accorded respect, the tragedy arising from the impossibility of reconciling them. No blame is attached to that which collides with and ultimately destroys the tragic protagonist. Indeed it is out of such conflict or opposition that human identity emerges. The values and beliefs that are regarded as intrinsic to humanity and to human identity do not have an independent existence but are integrally connected with the existence of certain opposed or resistant forces, which may take various forms, such as the rigidities of divine law which ignore human considerations or the necessities of the state. It is because the tragic protagonist believes that the values that are intrinsic to human identity are defined by their opposition to such forces that he or she chooses to die rather than compromise human identity. Sophoclean tragedy, as Antigone’s statement makes clear, recognises that only the few will be capable of making a tragic choice: most people will try to avoid collision and seek compromise – the Ismene position. But Joan’s recantation and repudiation of her voices in order to save her life cannot be seen as such a compromise. Unlike the tragic protagonist, Joan has no respect for the forces which oppose her and which refuse to acknowledge the validity of her voices. She has no interest in the Church’s position and refuses to take it seriously. If one sees the play in tragic terms, this may appear a weakness: ‘Joan’s trouble is that she cannot hide a somewhat contemptuous attitude toward authority. The Archbishop speaking on religion and Dunois on war can hardly hold her attention. Joan as a rebel against the established order of society appears to be too obviously impatient with men who act from the lessons of their experience.’16 However, if Joan has only contempt for the authorities that have it in their power to destroy her, it would be absurd from her point of view to let herself be burnt at the stake if she can be free merely by signing a piece of paper these authorities have prepared. Unlike Antigone, Joan does not seek to define herself in opposition to a resistant force which commands respect. She does her best to avoid death, and when she chooses to die she has no thought for the authorities that are strong enough to destroy her.

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It may be argued that though Joan has no respect for the Church, Shaw’s presentation of Cauchon and the Inquisitor indicates that he does and that the play is therefore critical of Joan for her lack of such respect. Certainly Shaw’s treatment of the Church shows none of the contempt that Ibsen displays towards the bourgeoisie and its values in Ghosts. However, Shaw’s sympathetic presentation of Cauchon and the Inquisitor does not imply intellectual respect for their ideas. It is clear from Shaw’s writing in general that he has only scorn for static views of the world that resist change and development. He may allow the churchmen to make a good case, revealing them to be men of integrity and principle by their lights, but he has no respect for their point of view. He and Joan are at one on that. There is therefore no division between Shaw and the Ibsen of Ghosts despite their different approaches to the representation of the forces that destroy their protagonists. Saint Joan is also anti-tragic in its implicit denial that either the protagonist or the forces that oppose her exist in a static relation of conflict. Although Joan identifies with certain values, as Antigone does, she is not defined by these values; they are not absolutes in the way that Antigone’s values are. It is implicit in the play that Joan’s ‘nationalism’ and ‘Protestantism’ are necessary to overcome feudalism and medieval Catholicism and usher in a new era in the history of civilisation. But nationalism and Protestantism are not seen as static systems of belief – like feudalism and Catholicism – that will have eternal validity: the Joan whom the characters in the Epilogue would not wish to return to the world would not be supporting such ideas but different ones appropriate to changed circumstances: ‘Protestant individualism and nationalist autonomy . . . are not to be seen as ultimate ideals . . . With hindsight we know that the new freedom in its turn becomes institutionalized.’17 For Joan, life is the prime value and it is prior to any set of principles or beliefs, whereas for Antigone this separation could not be made. Both self and world are seen as in continual movement and this breaks down the idea that there is a fundamental division between the two. Since the world can be changed by human action with human consciousness continually developing as a result, the static conflict between the human realm and that which transcends it, characteristic of Sophoclean tragedy, is broken down. The argument that Joan’s pride and sense of her own superiority are forms of tragic flaw, thus keeping the play within the realm of traditional tragedy – ‘It is the choices of action determined by the not quite perfect character of the hero . . . that determine the tragic hero’s doom. And it can be shown that it is The Maid’s freely-made choices, made in the exultation of pride, that bring her to the stake’18 – is difficult to sustain.

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The play shows that Joan’s pride is fully justified. Indeed, it can be categorised as pride only from the ideological position that believes the individual human being is of no importance in comparison to the Church and its traditions. The Church accuses her of ‘terrible pride and self-sufficiency’ (998) but these are defined in the Church’s terms. The limitation of the Church’s viewpoint is shown by its belief that in wearing men’s clothes she has ‘blasphemed abominably’ (999), whereas for Joan this is the plainest common sense. Nor is the argument that a Hegelian model is being followed in which there is a dynamic dialectical relation between Joan and her antagonists any more convincing. In Hegel’s dialectical scheme oppositions are transcended in a synthesis which includes the opposed elements. But in Saint Joan there is no such synthesis. Joan is destroyed physically by the forces opposed to her, and her spiritual survival in the play’s Epilogue shows her as continuing to exist as an opposing force to any authority that is likely to emerge. In this play and Shaw’s work generally, the desire that motivates a character like Joan is essentially formless and inchoate and can be given form only by being incorporated in whatever vehicles the imagination can invent through using the materials that are presented by the world. Joan’s commitment is to this inner desire rather than to the various inadequate forms it will take during the course of history. Joan remains in essence untransformed by the dialectical process that includes her. Some critics have argued that the philosophy that underlies the play is essentially pragmatic. J. L. Wisanthal writes: ‘The pragmatic ethic of Saint Joan is made most explicit in the Epilogue’, and goes on to quote Charles: ‘provided they can no longer say that I was crowned by a witch and a heretic, I shall not fuss about it if it came all right in the end: she was not that sort: I knew her’ (1003). Wisanthal comments: ‘Charles is right about Joan: after all she was prepared to sign a total recantation of which she did not believe a word in order to gain her freedom’ and sees this as ‘judging actions by results’.19 Alfred Turco calls Joan ‘A Shavian pragmatist’ and says more broadly: ‘Whenever Shaw is talking about art, morality, or politics, the same point is emphasised. Concrete action is preferable to unfounded aspiration.’20 Both critics place great emphasis on Joan’s failure and interpret the play not as a traditional tragedy but as tragic in the wider sense. Turco comments on Joan’s final words: Without the epilogue, we would have concluded that Joan’s death was a necessary catalyst for the evolution of consciousness that leads men at last to recognize her greatness . . . In asking ‘O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?’ . . . the saint foresees a future that will never escape the bonds of history . . . Saint Joan is a tragedy, not in spite of, but because of, the epilogue.21

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Wisanthal takes a similar view: ‘This concluding speech brings into great prominence the basic and most pessimistic reason for Joan’s failure: that the superior person and the ordinary world cannot live together.’22 The weakness of this pragmatic reading is that like attempts to interpret the play as a traditional tragedy or a Hegelian tragedy it still sees it in terms of a static conflict between essentially opposed elements: even though Joan acts pragmatically she is still destroyed by the world. But Joan is placed in a rather limited context if ‘judging actions by results’ and ‘[c]oncrete action’ are the criteria by which we should regard her life and achievements. As I argued earlier, Joan’s commitment to the aims of Protestantism and nationalism is not absolute but should be seen in relation to her times. A modern Joan would have different aims. The pragmatic view does not accommodate easily this implied relativity since its emphasis is on results. Although Joan’s achievement in furthering what the play sees as historical progress is important, the underlying desire of the subject not only not to be defined by the resistant object but to impose its idealistic will upon it, is more important. Joan may be destroyed in this struggle but the desire she embodies is not destroyed. The torch is only handed on to someone else and the struggle continues.

The Devil’s Disciple and Arms and the Man Shaw’s critique of a philosophy of the tragic can be found in other plays which on the surface have no connection with tragedy as a dramatic form, thus showing how the tragic as a philosophy need not depend on tragedy as a poetics. The Devil’s Disciple (1897) is constructed as a melodrama but it is centrally concerned with issues related to a philosophy of the tragic. In his preface Shaw claimed that reviewers could not grasp Dick Dudgeon’s motive in choosing to take the place of another man, the minister Anthony Anderson, on the scaffold when he is mistaken for Anderson by the British, who have decided to execute an American rebel as an example: ‘But then, said the critics, where is the motive? Why did Dick save Anderson?’23 In contrast to Joan, Dudgeon chooses to die, not as an act of protest that he cannot live on his own terms, but for a fundamental principle that he discovers is intrinsic to his nature: I had no motive and no interest: all I can tell you is that when it came to the point whether I would take my neck out of the noose and put another man’s into it, I could not do it. I don’t know why not: I see myself as a fool for my pains; but I could not and I cannot. I have been brought up standing by the law of my own nature; and I cannot go against it, gallows or no gallows. (239)

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This act of Dudgeon expresses the spirit of the tragic. Here we have a clash between self and world. Dudgeon could survive if he adapted himself to the superior force of the world – in this instance the British army – by informing the British that he is not Anderson, and thus doomed Anderson and not himself. To act in this way would be false to a principle which he believes is basic to his sense of self, and to preserve that principle is more important than physical survival in a world that is alien to such principles and which Dudgeon accepts as a given. Although the world may destroy Dudgeon physically, as it destroyed the traditional tragic protagonist, it will not triumph over him spiritually, just as Antigone’s spirit survives to be an example to humanity at large even if most human beings are not capable of such heroic self-sacrifice. But Dudgeon’s act assumes that the only options are the subject’s refusing to compromise with the object even if this leads to death, or adapting to the object’s demands in order to preserve life. When Anderson discovers what Dudgeon has done for him, we see the limitations of Dudgeon’s tragic decision. Although a Christian minister, Anderson changes his identity from that of a man of peace and religion to that of a soldier and takes action to prevent the British from executing Dudgeon. He arouses the Springtown militia and returns with a safe-conduct as its commander and saves Dudgeon from execution. Anderson has shown that there is a third option when faced with the fundamental conflict that Dudgeon had to confront. He neither accepts the self as something given nor assumes that the forces that exist beyond the self are unalterable. He finds a new role for the self that allows him to be master of the situation; his new self acts to change the object and thus alters the relation between subject and object so that the subject achieves mastery over it. At the end of the play, Dudgeon realises that he might have chosen to act as Anderson has done: ‘if I had been any good, I should have done for you what you did for me, instead of making a vain sacrifice’ (249). As mentioned in the Introduction, it has been argued that fundamental to the tragic is an irreconcilability that is ‘unmendable’,24 but Shaw is deeply antagonistic to such a concept which he sees as static and defeatist. Dudgeon had believed also that he was in an undecidable situation and compelled to make a decision, but the play implies his situation is only superficially undecidable: he could act to change its nature. Shaw thus not only rejects traditional concepts of the tragic, but is suspicious of attempts to redefine the tragic in terms of irresolvable human dilemmas. Another implication of Dudgeon’s choice is its implicit elitism: it assumes that humanity is divided between those who are capable of

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performing such heroic acts as Dudgeon’s and those who are not. Dudgeon expects that, when Anderson finds out what has happened, he will choose to flee for his life and allow Dudgeon to die in his place. He is so absorbed in what he feels he must do that he has no thought as to how Anderson might feel about another man’s dying for him. When Anderson’s wife, Judith, tells Dudgeon that Anderson has, as she mistakingly thinks, fled for his own safety, he replies, ‘Well, that’s what I meant him to do. What good would his staying have done. Theyd only have hanged us both’ (238). In fact, we find out later that this will not happen. As Major Swindon puts it, ‘The execution will take place at 12 o’clock as arranged; and unless Anderson surrenders before then, you shall take his place on the gallows’ (245). If Anderson acts in the spirit of Dudgeon and comes forward since he refuses to let another man die in his place, Dudgeon’s act will be rendered pointless, or the situation will be made worse if the British choose to execute both. Dudgeon’s view that flight is Anderson’s only option assumes that Anderson is the kind of man who can easily live with the thought that he has let another man die in his place. When at the end of the play Dudgeon asserts that his sacrifice would have been a vain one, Anderson replies, ‘Not vain my boy. It takes all sorts to make a world – saints as well as soldiers’ (249). This suggests that a comparison can be made between Dudgeon and Joan. But though she is ultimately made into a saint, Joan is much more akin to Anderson than to Dudgeon. Her impulse is to change her self so that she can master the world, and her change from peasant girl into soldier is much more radical than Anderson’s. Although she calls herself a saint at the end of the play – ‘O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints?’ (1009) – she is not a saint in the sense of having chosen to be martyred for some idea or principle that is held to be superior to life itself, in contrast to Dudgeon. She is regarded as a saint by the world at large only because her death is seen in terms of a conventional martyrdom, but, as I suggested earlier, death is accepted only under protest. In addition, she does not view her final choice of death as one that makes her stand apart from human beings in general. Life imprisonment is seen as intolerable not only for someone of her superiority of spirit but for any human being: ‘but without these things I cannot live; and by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil, and that mine is of God’ (1000). There is no assumption that she is superior to ordinary humanity in the choice she makes. There is, however, in The Devil’s Disciple an alternative to the antitragic position which is depicted in powerful terms. The play presents

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a character, General Burgoyne, who has no interest in the tragic and sees no point in acting in the manner of a Dudgeon or an Antigone. But neither would he adapt passively to circumstances in order to survive or to serve his own advantage nor would he change the self drastically in order to master the world like Joan or Anderson. Burgoyne recognises that the world that confronts the self is one which is difficult to reconcile with human ideals and values. For example, he is faced with a situation in which a man is to be executed for no fault of his own but purely to serve as an example to others. Burgoyne’s subordinate, Major Swindon, is a man who can adjust to such events without having any moral qualms. He obeys orders quite passively. Burgoyne, however, is a man of humanitarian feeling with no great respect for orders, but like Swindon he is quite prepared to go through with the hanging on the grounds that ‘We are bound to make an example of somebody’ (244). Whereas a character like Joan believes that the self should employ its energies to transform the world so that it will correspond more closely to her messianic human hopes and aspirations, Burgoyne possesses no such belief. For him, the world will always be unjust and corrupt or merely bizarre, and little can be done to change it. The reason for the loss of the American colonies is a striking example: ‘Jobbery and snobbery, incompetence and Red Tape’ and orders not sent because ‘Some gentleman in London forgot to despatch them: he was leaving town for his holiday, I believe’ (246). Burgoyne like Joan has no respect for those forces in the world that resist human ideals and aspirations but equally he can’t take human ideals seriously either. To die for a human ideal as Dudgeon is prepared to do and thus to achieve a spiritual victory over a recalcitrant world would for him be absurd, and unlike Joan he has no desire to confront and change that recalcitrant world. Yet mere passive adaptation to reality in the manner of Major Swindon would also be anathema. His strategy is rather to face the world with wit and style. Although this does not alter the fact that a man is going to be unjustly executed, he achieves a certain mastery over the situation by seizing on those aspects of it that he can use to create a style that stands between self and world. He is not trapped in his role, like Major Swindon, but distanced from it by irony. He can turn virtually any situation to his advantage by wit as when, refusing to let Anderson’s last minute rescue of Dudgeon perturb him, he states that he would not dream of hanging anyone by an American clock. For Burgoyne, such acts as the execution of Dudgeon, though unjust, are unfortunate necessities of war, but wit and style prevent the self from being dehumanised or becoming merely the creature of such

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necessities. Burgoyne therefore represents an alternative to both the tragic and anti-tragic position. It is an alternative based on aestheticism and it is likely that Burgoyne represents Shaw’s response to the aesthetic movement and its leading figure, Oscar Wilde. The implied weakness of Burgoyne’s position, from Shaw’s implied anti-tragic point of view, is that though it might achieve a mental transcendence of reality it does nothing to change the world or move it forward. Like tragedy it is ultimately static. On the surface Arms and the Man (1894) is one of Shaw’s lightest comedies but like The Devil’s Disciple it also offers a critique of the tragic. Maurice Valency writes that ‘Sergius and Bluntschli haunt the plays of Shaw very much as Brand and Peer Gynt recur in the works of Ibsen’, and argues that is a mistake for actors to play Sergius as a clown: ‘Everything indicates that, while Shaw meant to ridicule his extravagance as a character, he took the problem of Sergius seriously and intended his comic anguish to border on the tragic.’25 This is borne out by a stage direction: By his brooding on the perpetual failure, not only of others, but of himself, to live up to his ideals; by his consequent cynical scorn for humanity; by his jejune credulity as to the absolute validity of his concepts and the unworthiness of the world in disregarding them . . . he has acquired the half tragic, half ironic air . . . by which Childe Harold fascinated the grandmothers of his English contemporaries. (103)

He would rather die than compromise the ideals fundamental to his sense of self: ‘Oh, (fervently) give me the man who will defy to the death any power on earth or in heaven that sets itself up against his own will and conscience’ (116). In the course of the play Sergius becomes disillusioned with both the self and the world. The realities of soldiering reveal that his heroic charge in which he was prepared to sacrifice his life for the ideal of patriotism was merely ridiculous. Both sides in the war operate with a utilitarian philosophy which Sergius regards with contempt: ‘Soldiering, my dear madam, is the coward’s way of attacking mercilessly when you are strong, and keeping out of harm’s way when you are weak’ (104). There would thus be no spiritual triumph in dying in such a situation. Even his own side would view his action with derision. The other sphere that he regards as worthy of tragic commitment, romantic love, also disappoints, for human inconstancy like the nature of war renders any heroic sacrifice ridiculous. Sergius retreats into cynicism. The ideal concepts by which the tragic hero defines himself are soiled by their interaction with a world that can command no respect, so that the clear-cut separation between subject and object that creates the basis for tragic choice is undermined.

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Related to but more fundamental than the hollowness of ideals is the fact that, as Sergius discovers, the self lacks unity. There is no single Sergius but a ‘half dozen Sergiuses who keep popping in and out of this handsome figure of mine . . . Which of the six is the real man? that’s the question that torments me. One of them is a hero, another a buffoon, another a humbug, another perhaps a bit of a blackguard . . . And one, at least, is a coward: jealous like all cowards’ (106). For the tragic hero there should be no separation of self and principle; he should feel defined like Antigone by his beliefs, ideals or principles; but Sergius cannot help but perceive that the self is split and his commitment to the tragic is replaced by disillusionment and cynicism. He is prepared to die for the ideal of courage in defence of his country but, as the servant Louka points out to him, he lacks the courage to outface public opinion. He realises, however, that a different kind of tragic choice is still open to him: a refusal to accept the banality of the world and the instability of the self by choosing to kill himself: ‘Shall I kill myself like a man, or live and pretend to laugh at myself?’ (116). But lacking a sense of a unified self he can’t summon up the resolution to take the tragic decision to reject life because it is irreconcilable with the highest conceptions of the human mind; he can only continue to live and accept that ‘Life’s a farce.’ Opposed to Sergius in the play is Bluntschli, and virtually every critic has pointed out that the ‘realist’ is contrasted with the ‘idealist’. Whereas Sergius aspires towards a heroic death, Bluntschli’s interest is in living as long as possible: ‘It is our duty to live as long as we can’ (95), and to preserve his life he is prepared to perform acts which an idealist like Sergius would reject out of hand, such as obtaining the protection of a woman by threatening to shame her. But though Bluntschli is prepared to adapt to the world, he will do this only up to a point and this fact must qualify the view that he is a realist or a pragmatist. One can contrast Bluntschli with a character who will make any adaptation necessary to survive or to serve his own purpose – the male servant Nicola. Nicola’s constant message to Louka is that the way to success is not to rebel against her role as a servant but to adjust herself to it and then exploit it for her self-interest. Although engaged to Louka, when he discovers that Sergius is interested in her he has no qualms about giving her up, since he will be able to make more out of her as a customer when he sets up his shop than he would if she were his wife. Both Nicola and Bluntschli are practical and capable. Bluntschli, whose special talent is in dealing with the mundane problems of war that bemuse Sergius and Major Petkoff, admires Nicola’s ability and thinks he would make an excellent hotel manager. Unlike Sergius, he is not in the least worried about Nicola’s motives in giving up his claim to Louka. He is also no

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more given to sentiment than Nicola: when he finds out that his father has died, he gives no sign of feeling any sadness or regret. But the significant contrast with Nicola and the later Sergius is that Bluntschli does not completely reject idealism. Although he is prepared to use unheroic and undignified means to save his life, when it comes to the point he is prepared to die fighting rather than submit weakly. He also withdraws his threat to shame Raina when his discovery seems certain, and throws her a cloak. He confesses to having an ‘incurably romantic disposition’ (121) which made him choose to go into the army instead of the family business and to try to escape capture by the Bulgarians by climbing a balcony rather than, more sensibly, by skulking in a cellar. Raina calls him ‘a romantic idiot’ (121) when he mistakes her for a girl of 17. Bluntschli, however, does not succumb to disillusionment like Sergius when the romantic ideal of war turns out to be irreconcilable with the reality of it. He accepts that there is an unstable relationship between the ideal and the reality and evolves various unromantic means to survive. He realises that the ideal has only a mental reality and that the world cannot be expected to conform to it. He has remained a soldier even after experiencing the nature of war. The romance of soldiering and the realities of war exist in a state of irresolvable tension; the one does not eliminate the other but Bluntschli is aware of both and attempts to hold them in balance though such a balance will always be unstable. Unlike Sergius, Bluntschli refuses to despair because the self lacks unity. He accepts the many-sidedness of the self. He has a romantic and an idealistic side but also a low shopkeeping side although he does not seek to impose unity on them. He can have a more exciting life as a soldier than he could as part of his father’s business, but at the same time he takes practical steps to minimise the risk of death. He has been romantically attracted to Raina from the first, but since he thinks she could not be interested in someone such as himself, he makes no declaration as this would be to risk rejection or humiliation. But he does not let his being made to look ridiculous in assuming her to be 17 stand in his way by making any attempt to restore his dignity. Rather he seizes the opportunity to make an offer now that it is clear that he has a chance of success. In contrast, Sergius’ rigidity allows Louka to trap him into marriage. Bluntschli uses the many-sidedness of the self as a means to master the world rather than merely passively adapt himself to it in the manner of Nicola. He thus avoids the opposed positions of Sergius’ idealism with its subsequent disillusionment and the calculating realism of Nicola who is not disillusioned only because he never had any illusions in the

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first place, having, as a stage direction describes him, ‘the imperturbability of the accurate calculator who has no illusions’. When Sergius discovers that the contemptible nature of the world and the contradictions of the self undermine the any clear-cut clash of opposed forces that is basic to his concept of the tragic, he retreats into a cynical acceptance of and adjustment to both self and world. Being without ideals, Nicola is immune from cynicism, but his identification of the self with mere selfinterest and his effort to adapt passively to events without fundamentally affecting either self or world make him similar to the later Sergius except in mental attitude. For Bluntschli as for Sergius it would be absurd to die in a tragic manner given the nature of the world that is opposed to the self. As a romantic, Bluntschli cannot help possessing ideals, but the value of an ideal for him is that it can be brought into an active confrontation with the world and bring about change, though the ideal may be sullied in the process. Sergius, in contrast, holds ideals passively and gives them up in despair when, like love, they are vulnerable to other forces in the world, such as human changeableness. But Bluntschli can love Raina despite the instability of human feeling. From an anti-tragic point of view the value of the ideal of love is that it provides a measure of control over that instability. Bluntschli can also combine an awareness of the romantic aspect of being a soldier with the negotiating and organisational skills necessary to produce concrete benefits from war, as in his arrangement of an exchange of prisoners. By bringing idealism into relation with realism and pragmatism Bluntschli can change the world for the better whereas Nicola’s unidealistic pragmatism serves only his own self-interest. Bluntschli shows that the self can achieve a degree of mastery over the world and thus avoid the tragic, cynical disillusionment, and passive adaptation to the world.

Brecht’s Mother Courage and Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons The rejection of the tragic contained within Ibsen’s middle period plays and the plays of Shaw that I have discussed is taken to an extreme, at least theoretically, in Brecht’s Marxist drama. Marxism and traditional concepts of tragedy as exemplified in Sophoclean tragedy, supported by such Aristotelian concepts as pity, terror and catharsis, are irreconcilable at a philosophical level since Marxism refuses to accept that there is a fundamental division between humanity and that which transcends the human. In Marxism the human subject is socially determined – as Marx famously put it: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines

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their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness’ – and though the non-human world of nature may be resistant or indifferent to human hopes and ideals, such resistance or indifference can be overcome or at least controlled by collective social action. The fact that humanity remains oppressed by the world is not due to any intrinsic conflict between subject and object but, primarily, to the dominance of pre-Marxist ideologies. Brecht as the major Marxist dramatist thus attacks the tragic more ideologically than Ibsen or Shaw, writers who from his point of view were still infected by bourgeois thinking, especially in regard to the individual. Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), like Ghosts or Saint Joan, is on the surface similar in structure to traditional tragedy, with its protagonist struggling to survive in a world resistant to human hopes and ideals, but as with Ibsen and Shaw tragedy is invoked only to be repudiated. Mother Courage is viewed ironically rather than tragically as she accepts the world she lives in as a given and believes that the best option is to adapt oneself to it in order to survive and benefit in individual terms, but the contradictions of that world eventually crush her. However, in contrast with critical perception of Ghosts and Saint Joan, critics have been well aware that Brecht’s purpose was to undermine the tragic. Yet this has not stopped the play being performed and interpreted as a tragedy: ‘[Mother Courage’s] main concern to bring her children through the war unharmed has our sympathy, so much so that some producers have found it easy to present her as a tragic figure who is noble and courageous but is destroyed by an anonymous and uncontrollable fate in the shape of war. Brecht’s intention was otherwise.’26 To anyone not determined to impose a tragic reading on the play no matter what, it is clear that tragedy is subject to radical critique in Mother Courage. Whereas the relation between the Sophoclean tragic protagonist and his or her reality is one of conflict or opposition, Mother Courage from the beginning sets out to adapt to her world in order to profit from the conditions created by war. The war is seen as an economic opportunity by her, allowing Brecht to satirise bourgeois individualism. The world that gradually destroys her and her family is not in the power of a nonhuman source such as the gods but has been humanly produced. Unlike a tragic protagonist like Oedipus she never achieves insight into her situation; even at the end she is struggling to adapt. The audience should of course draw the Marxist conclusion that such an oppressive world can and should be changed. Brecht’s ‘epic theatre’ also undermines tragic form since it presents a series of episodes rather than a plot, which Aristotle saw as the most important element in tragedy, incorporating such devices as peripeteia, anagnorisis, catastrophe and catharsis.

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What makes the play open to a tragic reading despite Brecht’s rejection of tragedy at both an ideological and formal level is that directors, actors and certain critics can claim the world which the play depicts is one that is essentially unchanging, with the opposition between the human individual and a war-torn world being seen as intrinsic. Mother Courage can thus represent the human struggle to survive in such a world, so that instead of viewing her as an ironic depiction of a doomed bourgeois individualism, in which her character and fate are merely typical of her class, she can be seen as a unique individual dignified by her refusal to be defeated by her suffering, determined to preserve her humanity despite experiences that would reduce ordinary mortals to despair or madness. George Steiner is well aware that to see the play in tragic terms is to read it against the grain: ‘Brecht would have us revile the old harpy for her stupid greed. He would have us understand that waste is neither noble nor tragic, but simply and horribly useless. That is the whole point of the play.’ But Steiner nevertheless believes that in Mother Courage the poet in Brecht overwhelms the moralist and ideologue: She is the salt of the earth, destructive yet zestful. We cannot detach ourselves from the play and merely pass judgement on her faults . . . In the duel between artist and dialectician, he allows the artist a narrow but constant margin of victory. By that margin, Mutter Courage is tragedy; incomplete perhaps, because of the redemptive politics which surround it, but real and consuming nevertheless.27

Raymond Williams also, in his study of tragedy, recognises that there is a ‘rejection of tragedy’ in Brecht’s drama, but in Mother Courage he argues that ‘[t]he final paradox is genuinely tragic . . . It is action illuminated by a tragic consciousness’ and he concludes that though ‘[t]ragedy in some of its older senses is certainly rejected . . . The major achievement of Brecht’s mature work is this recovery of history as a dimension for tragedy.’28 That a play like Mother Courage can be interpreted as a tragedy despite Brecht’s anti-tragic intentions shows the power of the tragic at an ideological level. Yet Brecht’s depiction of a war-torn world is artistically problematic – at least from an anti-tragic point of view – since it is easy for actors or theatre directors to regard this world as a non-historical representation of a universal phenomenon that has always beset human beings, so that the play can be seen as less effective in artistic terms as an anti-tragic drama than, for example, Ghosts. A play influenced by Brechtian dramatic methods whose relation to the tragic is also ambiguous is Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons (1960). Significantly Bolt does not see Brecht, in his practice at least, as

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an anti-tragic writer: ‘perhaps there was something daemonic in Brecht the artist which could not submit to Brecht the teacher. That would explain . . . why in Mother Courage, which is to demonstrate the unheroic nature of war, the climax is an act of heroism which Rider Haggard might have balked at.’29 Though Bolt does not share Brecht’s Marxist perspective and presents a popularised version of ‘epic theatre’, he initially appears like Brecht to call into question traditional tragedy, even though audiences may have responded to the protagonist, Sir Thomas More, as a tragic character with similarities to Sophocles’ Antigone. There are, however, obvious differences between the two. Although More cannot reconcile himself to the political necessities of the state as he believes that religious principle must have priority over human considerations, unlike Antigone he does everything possible to avoid confrontation with state power, using all legal devices available to prevent such a confrontation taking place. Whereas Antigone is eager to embrace death in order to serve the higher principle that defines her identity, More shows no such desire for tragic martyrdom. For Antigone, Creon’s policy of refusing burial to her brother as an example and deterrent to other Thebans who engage in war against their own city is so contrary to divine law that she must actively resist it. More, in contrast, does his utmost to avoid confrontation, and if King Henry and Thomas Cromwell had left him alone he would have remained silent in his opposition to Henry’s determination to marry Anne Boleyn. It is only the fact that More’s silence might be perceived as dissent which, if tolerated, might encourage opposition to Henry’s rule that provokes action against More. There might seem to be a stronger connection between More and Shaw’s Saint Joan, as both have no desire for death and accept it only as a last resort when there is no more room to manoeuvre. Joan and More are also linked in their contempt for the powers that ultimately kill them, whereas Antigone has no such contempt for Creon: one does not need to embrace Hegel’s reading of the play in toto to see Creon as someone whose position deserves respect since he is, initially at least, trying to do what is right by his humanist lights. No such respect is accorded to Henry VIII’s regime in A Man for All Seasons, and therefore death will not be the outcome of a tragic struggle between two opposed principles which can be justified in their own terms, but is merely brought about by naked political power. The audience is left in no doubt that figures such as Henry and Cromwell are motivated by corrupt values which the death of More will do nothing to change; in Antigone, in contrast, the tragic consequences of the impasse have the power to overwhelm the political arguments of Creon, who becomes

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part of the final catastrophe, and in some readings of the play has been seen as the main tragic figure. Yet Bolt’s introduction to the play suggests that unlike Ghosts, Saint Joan and Mother Courage, A Man for All Seasons is an attempt to reformulate the tragic in modern terms. Bolt does see an irresolvable conflict as central to the drama: ‘The economy was very progressive, the religion was very reactionary . . . And when an economy collides with a religion it is living men who collide, nothing else (they collide with one another and within themselves)’ (x). He distances himself from the content of More’s refusal to submit to the will of the king; he admits he does not share the Catholic principles that make it impossible for More to state on oath that he approves of Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn: ‘I am not a Catholic nor in any meaningful sense of the word a Christian’ (xiii). What Bolt admires about More is that he was ‘a man with an adamantine sense of his own self . . . but at length he was asked to retreat from that final area where he located his self’ (xii). In refusing to perjure himself by stating on oath what he did not believe More becomes for Bolt ‘a hero of selfhood’ (xiv). As More puts it in discussion with his daughter: ‘When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands’ (83), and later he states: ‘Yes, a man’s soul is his self!’ (93). This is to make More something of an existentialist hero: it is ‘commitment’ in something like a Sartrian sense as a form for the self that is valued rather than the content of any such commitment. If that commitment is threatened by the world beyond the self, the hero refuses to compromise as his commitment is identified with a core of self that must remain intact. If one allows that core to be breached then one’s human identity becomes vulnerable. What Bolt represents as in fundamental opposition to More’s defining human commitment is the socio-economic world of political power and necessity which has to be given at least a grudging respect. Henry VIII’s regime is a particularly brutal form of it, but not different in kind from more benign forms. It is inevitable that there will be discordance between the commitment that defines the individual self and the political necessities of the state, any state, not just Henry’s autocratic form of rule. More, unlike Antigone, does his best to avoid confronting that discordance. For him, nothing is to be gained by such a confrontation, as discordance between self and state is inevitable and in any confrontation the state will win; but when circumstances force him into such a confrontation, he is prepared to die rather than lose connection with the core of his self. There is no scope in Bolt’s form of modern tragedy for catharsis arising out of conflict between two opposed principles. The political world is essentially unchangeable in its basis; religious

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principles of the kind which form the basis of More’s core of selfhood can never be fully reconciled with the political and economic necessities that drive the state. The main opposition to More in the play is Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell rejects the idea of commitment to any essential core of self: for him the self must continually adapt to survive. As More points out to his son-in-law, using somewhat anachronistic language: ‘What, Cromwell? Pooh, he’s a pragmatist – and that’s the only resemblance he has to the Devil, son Roper; a pragmatist, the merest plumber’ (66). For Cromwell, any means that will allow the individual to thrive and prosper in the material world is justified, while More believes that the individual, to remain genuinely human, should resist mere adaptation to the power of the state by adhering to certain moral and religious values: ‘But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all . . . why then perhaps we must stand fast a little – even at the risk of being heroes’ (84). Cromwell in contrast has no principles beyond what will further his own power and material self-interest. If Cromwell is the theorist for such a philosophy, Richard Rich – whom Cromwell uses as the instrument to bring about More’s condemnation by persuading Rich to commit perjury – represents it in practice, as does to a lesser extent the play’s chorus figure, the Common Man, who nevertheless feels some guilt at rejecting what More represents in favour of pragmatism. In the original London production of the play there was an alternative ending in which the audience is implicated in such pragmatism by the Common Man’s final address to it: ‘If we should bump into one another, recognise me.’ Where the play is problematic as tragedy is that the opposition between the individual self and state power is not as ineluctable as the opposition at the centre of a Sophoclean tragedy like Antigone. Can there ever be in modern drama a core of self defined by principles that remains wholly separate from the socio-political considerations that drive the state? More, for example, disapproves of a marriage between Henry and Anne Boleyn on the grounds of religious principle, as the Catholic Church refuses to sanction the marriage as it declares it irreconcilable with Catholic doctrine. But would he have maintained that position if the Church had given its consent to the marriage? The separation between Catholic religious principle and political realities that More asserts is called into question by the Church’s and organised religion’s inevitable involvement in politics. The Church had originally allowed Henry to marry his brother’s widow – despite the fact that this contradicted strict religious doctrine – because at the time this was seen

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as politically advantageous. However, when Henry wishes to have this marriage dissolved in order to marry Anne Boleyn, the Church, under political pressure from Catholic powers such as Spain, refuses to sanction it. But if such a marriage had been deemed politically advantageous to the Church, who could doubt that some means would have been found to sanction it, as in the case of Henry’s original marriage to Catherine of Aragon. If More had then continued to withhold approval of Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn even if the Catholic Church sanctioned it, he would be asserting the superiority of individual conscience over the authority of the Church, a position close to the Protestantism to which he was ideologically opposed. Both Antigone and More resist state power on behalf of religious principle. But religious values are viewed by Antigone as pure, since for her they derive from a realm quite separate from the world of human affairs. The conflict between Antigone and Creon is therefore absolute. But in the modern era such an absolute division has become problematic: though the Church may claim that religious doctrine and principle emanate directly and purely from a divine source it can’t avoid being inextricably implicated in the socio-political world and the ideologies associated with it. The Church is thus inevitably caught up in power politics and the very principles that More identifies with his essential self – his commitment to the basic doctrines of his religion – cannot be completely dissociated from human history and ideology. The other pillar of More’s sense of selfhood is the value he attaches to the law, but the law is no more immune from the power of the state than religion: lawyers are open to corruption, witnesses can be bribed to lie, laws can be rewritten. With Antigone it is certain that nothing that Creon could have done would have made her waver in her resolve, such was the power of her religious certainty. It’s clear in the play that More would have been less firm. If Henry and Cromwell had threatened to torture his wife and daughter, would he have refused to take the oath? His eagerness to persuade his family to leave the country suggests he could not have held out against that. At such an extremity religious conviction would have been outweighed by human considerations, in contrast to Antigone. Therefore, A Man for All Seasons has to acknowledge, perhaps despite itself, the anti-tragic position of Ibsen, Shaw and Brecht. The absolute division between the human realm and that which transcends it, the world of nature or divinity, no longer obtains. A tension between the individual self and the forces of the state may always exist but the individual by force of example, like More, or by acting with others can bring about change, so that tyrannical autocracies such as the regime of Henry VIII can be replaced by alternative socio-economic structures. These will

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generate new tensions between self and state rather than eliminating conflict completely, and out of such interaction not only will the state change but selfhood will change. The audience at the end of Ghosts may reflect that the fates of Mrs Alving and Oswald were not inevitable but socially produced. Similarly the death of More is not inevitable: it was brought about by a political regime determined to crush all resistance, even that which was mental and posed no physical threat. At the end of A Man for All Seasons the audience may conclude that though the existence of the state in some form may be unavoidable, it is not inevitable that the state crush all mental resistance. Any state that could execute a man such as More must be changed by social and political action. Antitragic literature is thus fundamentally on the side of change, both for society and for the self, the two being not fully separable.

Miller’s Death of a Salesman The American dramatists Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller have been notable for attempting to reconcile modern drama with classical tragedy. Most obviously O’Neill adapted Aeschylus in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) while Miller drew on Sophoclean tragic form for his best known play, Death of a Salesman (1949). It’s likely that Miller was influenced by or was at least responding to O’Neill since there are some connections between Death of a Salesman and O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1946). Both plays deal with the relation between dream and reality and the main character of O’Neill’s play, Hickey, is an ex-salesman. O’Neill equates the tragic with pessimism, based on his interpretation of polarities within Nietzschean philosophy that he saw as unbridgeable.30 Miller in his essay, ‘Tragedy and the Common Man’, takes a different view and denies that ‘tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism’.31 He claims that tragedy as a dramatic form does not require protagonists of high rank. He places the emphasis on the tragic protagonist rather than the forces that destroy him or her; indeed he has little regard for the latter: As a general rule, to which there may be exceptions unknown to me, I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing – his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his ‘rightful’ position in his society. Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity, and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.32

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He follows Aristotle in believing that the tragic protagonist should always reveal a ‘tragic flaw’, a concept which has been much debated, but Miller is uncomfortable with the negative associations of ‘flaw’: Nor is it necessarily a weakness. The flaw, or crack in the character, is really nothing – and need be nothing – but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status . . . [T]here are among us today, as there always have been, those who act against the scheme of things that degrades them, and in the process of action everything we have accepted out of fear or insensitivity or ignorance is shaken before us and examined, and from this total onslaught by an individual against the seemingly stable cosmos surrounding us – from this total examination of the ‘unchangeable’ environment – comes the terror and the fear that is classically associated with tragedy.33

The fact that Miller refers to the ‘seemingly stable cosmos’ and places ‘unchangeable’ in quotation marks indicates that he does not accept that the world beyond the tragic hero which is resistant to his ideals or sense of dignity cannot be changed in order to overcome that resistance. There is little respect for the cosmos or environment that overcomes the tragic hero; his fate and the terror and fear that it produces should be a call to action on the part of human beings to overcome such a cosmos or environment in the interests of human ideals: Now, if it is true that tragedy is the consequence of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly, his destruction in the attempt posits a wrong or an evil in his environment. And this is precisely the morality of tragedy and its lesson . . . The wrong is the condition which suppresses man, perverts the flowing out of his love and creative instinct. Tragedy enlightens – and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man’s freedom.34

This suggests that Miller’s real alignment is with the anti-tragic drama of middle period Ibsen and Shaw. Miller suggested his affinity with Ibsen’s social realist dramas when he adapted Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, in the process making its main character a more unambiguously positive figure in his fight against the corruption and lies of his society. However, Death of a Salesman presents a more complex representation of the ‘tragic’ hero in terms of Miller’s concept of tragedy. Willy Loman is both a product of his social world and unconsciously in revolt against it. As a salesman he has internalised the dominant ideology of his time which is designed either to cover up or to naturalise the contradictions within an economic system founded on capitalism and a social structure founded on materialistic values and consumerism. Inequalities such as wealth and status being given to the few but denied to the many are accepted by Willy as natural and right since he is committed to the ‘American Dream’ that sees America as a land of

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opportunity in which every person can succeed, which he refines by believing that those who do succeed deserve to do so because of their special qualities. When his sons propose to sell sporting goods Willy asserts: ‘That is a one-million dollar idea! . . . You guys together could absolutely lick the civilized world.’35 His fundamental faith is that in America anyone with the right qualities can become not only rich and successful but fulfilled in human terms, and that American capitalism will provide such opportunities. The play reveals a basic conflict between Willy’s idealistic belief that life in America has value and meaning, and actualities in Willy’s world that seem to be in contradiction with that. He does not recognise, however, that there is any such conflict even though it is made clear to the audience that in reality that world has become corrupted by unbridled capitalism and a business environment increasingly indifferent to human considerations. Willy continues to believe that success in business is a reflection of a person’s higher qualities, qualities that transcend measurement in conventional terms: Bernard can get the best marks in school, y’understand, but when he gets out in the business world, y’understand, you are going to be five times ahead of him. That’s why I thank Almighty God you’re both built like Adonises. Because the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates a personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. (25)

But the experience of Willy’s sons of the modern business world would testify that it has little to offer the human spirit other than mere materialism. Biff tells Happy: ‘Shipping clerk, salesman, business of one kind or another. And it’s a measly manner of existence . . . To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying . . . And always to have to get ahead of the next fella’ (16). Happy confirms Biff’s account: ‘I don’t know what the hell I’m workin’ for. Sometimes I sit in my apartment – all alone. And I think of the rent I’m paying. And it’s crazy. But then, it’s what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women’ (17). The dominant ideology appears to accommodate Willy’s ideals and values and therefore he possesses no conscious alternative to it that would allow him to subject it to critique or move beyond it. Why he himself is in the situation he is in – comparatively poor, on the point of being thrown on the scrapheap by the firm for which he has worked all of his working life – and why his son Biff has ended up as one of society’s failures despite in Willy’s view having all the qualities that would guarantee success, are mysteries to him. None of the explanations he considers leads him to question whether capitalism and the business practices it creates can be reconciled with his idealism and its central assumption that those who gain

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success in this land of unrestricted opportunity do so on the basis of their superior individual merits and admirable spiritual qualities. The people in the play who do achieve success in this society, Charley and his son Bernard, do so by adjusting to the prevailing system. Charley has made money as a businessman but he has done so without the need for the idealistic beliefs that Willy holds to. He does possess a moral sense but his values are traditional: supporting his family and being willing to help a friend in need. Willy does not attach such importance to traditional moral values, as one sees in his regarding Biff’s stealing as insignificant and also his view of his own minor affair as a trivial matter. Charley had not filled Bernard’s head with the grandiose notions that Willy instils into Biff. Like Willy, Charley accepts that selling underlies the American socio-economic world but unlike Willy he has no illusions about it: ‘The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you’re a salesman, and you don’t know that’ (76–7). Bernard’s success as a lawyer derives from traditional qualities like application and hard work. For Charley, Willy’s attempts to relate success to physical attractiveness and to spiritual qualities such as being well-liked are misconceived: ‘Why must everyone like you? Who liked J. P. Morgan? Was he impressive? In a Turkish bath he’d look like a butcher’ (77). When Charley offers Willy a job he can’t bring himself to accept it, as this would be to admit not only that Charley has been right all along while his idealistic dreams have been an illusion, but also that the world is only about adaptation and survival and that there is no meaning and value beyond that. What makes Willy a significant figure for Miller, worthy of a tragedy, to whom ‘attention must be paid’ (44) as Willy’s wife Linda asserts, is that his belief that there should be meaning and value in the world beyond mere adaptation and survival is fundamentally admirable and that this elevates him above those who live in the world without any need for ideals, even the likes of Charley. The content of his idealism may be open to critique, but the underlying desire for meaning and value in human and social life remains valid. What makes the play depart from tragedy in the Sophoclean sense and resemble the anti-tragic drama of middle-period Ibsen and Shaw is that the world that destroys Willy and his idealistic hopes is one that is not worthy of respect and that can be changed by human action. It doesn’t need to be the case, for example, that people who have worked all their lives are discarded when they no longer serve a narrow and mechanical set of economic interests that elevate profit and efficiency over the human dimension. Miller tries to incorporate some devices associated with Sophoclean tragedy into the play, notably anagnorisis or a moment of recognition

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that leads to knowledge, but this merely reveals the difference between Death of a Salesman and a classical tragedy like Oedipus. As with Oedipus, there is a puzzle at the centre of Willy’s life: for Oedipus it is why the gods have inflicted a plague on Thebes; for Willy it is why Biff, who embodies all Willy’s idealistic hopes and dreams for achieving success on his terms, turns out a failure: ‘Why didn’t [Biff] ever catch on?’ he asks Bernard. ‘His life ended after that Ebbets Field game. From the age of seventeen nothing good ever happened to him’ (72). Willy’s exchange with Bernard reveals that it was Biff’s decision not to go to summer school which prevented him graduating and which can be seen to be the root of this failure, leading Bernard to ask Willy why Biff changed his mind about the summer school: ‘Bernard, that question has been trailing me like a ghost for the last fifteen years. He flunked the subject, and laid down and died like a hammer hit him!’ (73). In the course of discussion it emerges that it was the effect of Biff visiting Willy in Boston and finding him in a compromising situation with a woman – as we learn later – that seems to have led to this change of mind. Like Oedipus in his eventual awareness that his own actions are inextricably connected to the plague in Thebes, Willy has to face the fact that Biff’s failure to make any effort to achieve success lies with Willy himself. The difference, however, is that Oedipus’ past actions which reflect his human confidence that he can overcome the power of the gods is related directly to the plague and to the conflict between humanity and the gods, whereas Willy’s having a sexual liaison has little to do with the philosophy of life he has inculcated into Biff. If Willy had adhered to a strict moral code, one could understand Biff becoming disillusioned with his philosophy but a strict moral code has little to do with that philosophy, indeed as mentioned above Willy is relatively indifferent to traditional moral values. Miller’s use of anagnorisis becomes merely a plot device that is not centrally related to the play’s major concerns. Moreover, whereas anagnorisis leads Oedipus to knowledge of the true nature of his situation, in Willy’s case it distorts knowledge. It allows him to believe that Biff could have achieved the success that would have validated Willy’s idealistic hopes for him if he had not found Willy in a compromising situation and therefore had gone to summer school. Biff’s failure in life, at least as Willy conceives it, can then be explained away as the result of an unfortunate turn of events rather than something more fundamental which could lead to Willy questioning the nature of his idealism. Biff himself never mentions the effect of his not graduating as the reason for his failure to live up to Willy’s hopes. Indeed Biff comes to resemble Hickey in The Iceman Cometh when he continually tries to make Willy recognise that his optimistic hopes are

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‘pipe dreams’ and accept that reality is at odds with his idealism, telling him for example that he was only a shipping clerk when he worked for Bill Oliver, and most crucially: ‘Pop! I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you!’(105). Willy can’t face up to the obverse of his elevation of the successful: that the few who achieve great success are inevitably outnumbered by those who end up as failures and mediocrities if judged in relation to an ideology that makes getting to the top and being rich the main criteria for being successful in life. Such an elevation of success inevitably makes those who don’t achieve high status and riches view themselves as failures and mediocrities, as one sees with Biff’s description of himself as a dime a dozen. And even those who are successful in Willy’s terms are not necessarily the superior beings Willy thinks of them as being, but people like his employer Howard, on a small scale, and J. P. Morgan, on a large scale; men whose success owes little to having the kind of qualities that Willy associates with it. In any case, their rise had little to do with America being a land of opportunity in which everyone can succeed, but rather derives from inheritance. Arthur Miller was no doubt aware that J. P. Morgan inherited a successful company and more than 50 million dollars from his father. Though Willy shows occasional recognition of the difference between reality and his version of the ‘American Dream’ when faced with his treatment by Howard, how his sons have turned out, and the deterioration of the environment in which he lives, even at the end he cannot give up his hopes and dreams. His death – unlike that of a Sophoclean protagonist who has to confront with tragic insight irresolvable contradictions to which death, or in the case of Oedipus something equivalent, seems the only possible outcome – is partly motivated by a desire to provide Biff with insurance money that will allow him to get started and go on to achieve success. Yet though Willy’s ideology of success is subject to radical critique, together with his refusal to come to terms with the real nature of American capitalism and business, the play refuses to side with Biff or with O’Neill’s pessimistic identification of dreams of a better future with ‘pipe dreams’, and suggests that Willy is essentially right to reject Biff’s acceptance that he is second rate: ‘I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!’ Certainly Willy’s idealism is flawed and can easily be manipulated to serve the interests of capitalism, but Biff’s disillusioned realism is more profoundly called into question in the play by Willy’s response to Biff. Without an idealistic aim or vision or dream, there would only be a passive acceptance of a system based not only on inequality of wealth but also on inequality in terms of human value. Willy is an unconscious rebel against that system. But he never faces the fact that as a result of his confusing human value and

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dignity with success in business terms the consequence for Biff, who is not adapted to the world of business and buying and selling and who will thus never be rich, is that he sees himself as ‘nothing’: ‘Pop, I’m nothing! I’m nothing, Pop. Can’t you understand that?’ (105). Biff’s pessimism is not of the philosophical sort that one finds in O’Neill but is a product of a social system and its supporting ideology. Even if Willy fails to arrive at any conscious insight into the meaning of his ‘tragedy’ and its underlying social causes, the audience should.

Notes 1. T. F. Evans (ed.) (1976), Shaw: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. 111. 2. Ibid., pp. 401–2. 3. Robert Brustein (1965), The Theatre of Revolt, London: Methuen, p. 209. 4. Sylvan Barnett (1956), ‘Bernard Shaw on Tragedy’, PMLA 71: 892. 5. Homer E. Woodbridge (1973), George Bernard Shaw: Creative Artist, Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, p. 124. 6. Edmund Wilson (1952), The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects, London: John Lehmann, p. 180. 7. Barnett, p. 899. 8. George Steiner (1961), The Death of Tragedy, London: Faber and Faber, p. 312. 9. Margery M. Morgan (1972), The Shavian Playground: An Exploration of the Art of George Bernard Shaw, London: Methuen, pp. 252–3. 10. John Fielden (1957), ‘Shaw’s Saint Joan as Tragedy’, Twentieth Century Literature 3: 61. 11. Maurice Valency (1973), The Cart and the Trumpet: The Plays of George Bernard Shaw, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 379–80. 12. Ibid., pp. 380, 385. 13. Louis Martz (1955), ‘The Saint as Tragic Hero: Saint Joan and Murder in the Cathedral’, in Cleanth Brooks (ed.), Tragic Themes in Western Literature, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 159–60. 14. Sophocles (1971), The Theban Plays, trans. E. F. Watling, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 128, 141. 15. The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw (1937), London: Constable, p. 998. Page numbers will henceforth be incorporated in the text. 16. Stanley J. Solomon (1963–4), ‘Saint Joan as Epic Tragedy’, Modern Drama 6: 445. 17. Robert F. Whitman (1977), Shaw and the Play of Ideas, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 270. 18. Fielden, p. 64. 19. J. L. Wisanthal (1974), The Marriage of Contraries: Bernard Shaw’s Middle Plays, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 178–9. 20. Alfred Turco, Jr (1977), Shaw’s Moral Vision: The Self and Salvation, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 269, 282.

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21. Ibid., p. 270. 22. Wisanthal, p. 191. 23. Bernard Shaw (1946), Three Plays for Puritans, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. xxvii. 24. See William Storm (1998), After Dionysus: A Theory of the Tragic, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 43, 80. 25. Valency, pp. 109–10, 112. 26. E. Speidel (1982), ‘The Individual and Society’, in Graham Bartram and Anthony Wayne (eds), Brecht in Perspective, London: Longman, p. 57. 27. Steiner, pp. 348–9. 28. Raymond Williams (1966), Modern Tragedy, London: Chatto and Windus, pp. 190, 199, 202. 29. Robert Bolt (1986), A Man for All Seasons: A Play of Sir Thomas More, London: Heinemann, p. xvii. Page numbers will henceforth be incorporated in the text. 30. For a discussion of the influence of Nietzsche on O’Neill, see Patrick Bridgwater (1972), Nietzsche in Anglosaxony: A Study of Nietzsche’s Impact on English and American Writers, Leicester: Leicester University Press, pp. 184–90. 31. Bernard F. Dukore (ed.) (1974), Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winstone, p. 894. 32. Ibid., pp. 894–5. 33. Ibid., p. 896. 34. Ibid., p. 895. 35. Arthur Miller (1961), Death of a Salesman, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 50. Page numbers will henceforth be incorporated in the text.

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Chapter 3

Chekhov and the Tragic

Like the writers previously discussed, Chekhov is very aware of the tragic in his writing. Hamlet, for example, resonates in several of his plays. However, deciding whether Chekhov’s drama is in the spirit of the tragic or the anti-tragic is much more difficult than with playwrights such as Ibsen in his middle period or Shaw. For George Steiner, ‘Chekhov lies outside a consideration of tragedy,’1 but this view is much too categorical and does not take sufficient account of various affinities between Chekhov and the tragic. The root of the problem, however, is that what appear to be tragic elements in his writing interact with comedy, farce and social realism. The tragic is unable to dominate the others and may even be undermined by them. Though Hamlet would seem to be the most important tragedy for Chekhov – it is clearly a significant presence in The Seagull (1896) – one can also see a relationship between The Seagull and Racine’s Andromaque, though instead of reinforcing the connection with the tragic, it rather reveals how Chekhov distances his drama from it, both formally and philosophically. In Andromaque one character is in love with another character who is in love with a third character in a chain of frustrated desire that eventually has a tragic outcome. The tragic effect is created by a radical discontinuity between human desire and the world beyond that desire. Racine’s Jansenist form of Christianity is perhaps a key to his concept of the tragic, since for Jansenism only the grace of God can save humanity, which makes salvation a mystery that can’t be influenced by the human will, which is in any case intrinsically perverse. This creates a separation between the realm of the human and that which transcends the human, similar to that found in Sophocles. In Andromaque characters are defined by their desires, refuse to give them up or compromise in the face of rejection by the other, with the result that a tragic outcome is virtually inevitable. Such single-minded commitment on the part of these characters, though almost mad and

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disastrous in its effects, is treated with respect by the tragic dramatist even if it is clear that such a total refusal to compromise with regard to desire is irreconcilable with human happiness or even with life itself. In The Seagull there is a similar chain: Masha is in love with Konstantin, Konstantin loves Nina, who loves Trigorin. Chekhov’s chain is not as absolute as that of Racine, for example Konstantin and Nina appear to be in love until she encounters Trigorin, though Konstantin’s love is clearly much the stronger. Whereas Racine’s verse tragedy excludes considerations that would interfere with the intensity of the interactions between the characters suffering from unrequited love, Chekhov includes various factors that for Racine would have been extraneous. Racine is not concerned with psychological realism in the modern sense, or the wider social and cultural context in which human beings live out their lives, but such factors are a fundamental part of Chekhov’s drama. Many of his plays have characters who are quite oblivious or indifferent to the concerns of the main characters because they are preoccupied with their own, often trivial pursuits. Thus in Ivanov (1887) the excise officer Kosyh is obsessed with card games and every time he comes on stage he begins discussing a game in which he’s been involved with the main characters of the play, who are usually in the midst of some crisis. The effect is to undermine the tragic intensity that Racine achieves in his tragedies. Chekhov’s characters are also not as completely defined by their love as are Racine’s in Andromaque. Chekhov interprets love with a Schopenhauerian awareness of its psychological determinants which leads him to view it with a certain irony. For example, rejection is shown as having the psychological effect of increasing desire as a result of the will being frustrated, whereas if love is reciprocated and intense initially, its power tends to diminish after a while as gratification usually leads to boredom. In The Seagull, Trigorin is at first rapturous that Nina loves him: ‘You are so beautiful . . . Oh, how happy I am to think that we shall be seeing each other soon! . . . I shall see these wonderful eyes again, this indescribably beautiful, tender smile . . . these sweet features, the expression of angelic purity! My darling . . . [A prolonged kiss].’2 In the next act we learn that they have had an affair in Moscow, that she has had a child who died, and that Trigorin has eventually drifted back to his old way of life. Nina’s love for him is as strong as ever, as her will has been denied gratification, but he has fallen out of love with her. A similar pattern emerges in other plays: in Three Sisters (1902) Masha had an intense love and admiration for her schoolmaster husband when she first met him, but having been married to him for years these feelings have quite evaporated.

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If in Ibsen’s middle-period plays a traditional sense of the tragic is called into question by the inclusion of a sociological dimension that undermines an absolute conflict between the human and the divine central to the structure of Sophoclean tragedy, in Chekhov it is the presence of psychology and temporality that plays the main destabilising role. Whereas the intense love characters experience in a tragedy such as Racine’s is a kind of force of nature and thus not reducible to psychological factors or vulnerable to boredom over time – and this intensity is accentuated by the observing of the dramatic unities of time, place and action – the love of Chekhov’s characters exists in a world in which psychology and temporality are constitutive elements. It is not allowed to stand on its own. In Uncle Vanya (1899), Vanya’s consuming love for the professor’s wife, Hélène, can’t be dissociated from his sense that he has wasted his life, that he now regards the professor, for whom he’s spent years of his life working, as a fraud, together with the realisation that he could have married Hélène when they first met but at that time wasn’t interested. Chekhov’s implied attitude to his characters is one of ironic detachment so that their suffering is not treated with the same seriousness as the suffering of characters in Andromaque, which does not mean that it is dismissed as trivial. The Hamlet connections in The Seagull are treated similarly. Though it clearly alludes to Shakespeare’s play, with Konstantin being Hamlet-like in several respects, most obviously in his relationship with his mother, the decentred nature of the play, like Chekhov’s mature plays in general, prevents a tragic protagonist emerging who can dominate in the manner of Hamlet. Such decentring tends to undermine or dissipate tragic intensity. Yet a strong tragic undercurrent remains, even if only in a more general sense. In A Dull Story (1889), for example, an elderly professor is the narrator. His life has been a great success: he’s a famous academic who has been successful both as a teacher and in his published work. He married the woman he loved and had children and is very well off in material terms. But despite all of this success he’s not happy; his life seems to him wasted and useless yet he has no idea as to how he could have lived otherwise: ‘I gaze at my wife in childish wonder. Bewildered, I ask myself: is it possible that this corpulent, ungainly old woman . . . was once the slender Varya whom I so passionately loved for her fine clear mind, her pure soul, her beauty, and, as Othello loved Desdemona, “that she did pity me”?’3 However, other stories subject such pessimism to critique, notably the novella, Ward Six (1892). Its main character, Ragin, is a doctor in charge of a mental hospital. Though material conditions in the hospital are dreadful and patients are abused by a sadistic warder, Ragin does nothing since on philosophical grounds that have

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some relation to the religious teachings of the later Tolstoy, he thinks it futile to try to change things for the better: And, indeed, why keep people from dying since death is normal, the decreed end for everyone? What if the life of some huckster or official is prolonged by five or ten years? And if one thinks the aim of medicine is the alleviation of suffering by means of drugs, the question inevitably arises: why alleviate it? In the first place, suffering is said to lead man to self-perfection, and in the second place, if man learns to ease his suffering with pills and drops he will completely abandon religion and philosophy, wherein till now he has found not only a defense against every adversity, but happiness itself. Pushkin suffered agonies before his death, Heine was a paralytic for years; why, then, should an Andrey Yefimytch or a Matryona Savishna be spared illness when their insipid lives would be as empty as an amoeba’s were it not for suffering?

This pessimistic and quietist philosophy is attacked by a patient who arouses Ragin’s interest: ‘We are kept here behind bars, tortured, left to rot; but that is all very fine and rational, because there is absolutely no difference between this ward and a warm comfortable study. A convenient philosophy: you have nothing to do, your conscience is clear, and you feel you’re a sage . . . No, sir, this is not philosophy, not thought, not breadth of vision, but laziness, pretense, mental torpor . . . Yes!’ Ivan Dmitritch grew angry again. ‘You despise suffering, but if you pinched your finger in that door, you’d probably start howling at the top of your voice.’

Ragin enjoys his discussions with the patient but remains unconvinced by his attack, after all the patient is mad, but Ragin’s enemies conspire against him and he ends up certified and confined in the hospital, thus experiencing suffering directly. Being beaten by the sadistic warder, he has a radical change of mind: He felt as if someone had taken a sickle, and twisted it several times in his breast and bowels. He bit the pillow and clenched his teeth with pain; and all of a sudden out of the chaos there clearly flashed through his mind the dreadful, unbearable thought that these people, who now looked like black shadows in the moonlight, must have experienced this same pain day in and day out for years. How could it have happened that in the course of more than twenty years he had not known, had refused to know this?4

It’s been argued that Ragin’s philosophical shift reflects Chekhov’s direct experience of extreme human suffering when in 1890 he spent three months in Sakhalin, an island off the coast of Siberia, where Russia’s hardest criminals were kept, and observed conditions there. Looking at Chekhov’s work as a whole, however, it is hard to detect a fundamental change in viewpoint after Sakhalin that would justify dividing his writing into pre- and post-Sakhalin; a doubleness of perspective

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permeates his writing over his whole career and it would be rash to try to pin him down to the one position. The play in which the influence of Hamlet is most obvious is the earliest of his major plays, Ivanov, in which the central character does dominate the action, as in Hamlet, despite as mentioned above the interventions of a character like Kosyh. The eponymous protagonist suffers from a pessimism and languor that has links with the professor in A Dull Story and Ragin in Ward Six, but his obvious literary analogue is Hamlet, who is also of course subject to pessimism: ‘Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till ’a find it stopping a bunghole?’5 Ivanov, however, has none of the heroic aspect of Hamlet’s nature that finally leads to his killing of Claudius at the expense of his own life. Chekhov’s devaluation of the tragic grandeur of Hamlet is indicated by the choice of name for his main character, Ivanov being one of the most common of Russian names; in effect Hamlet has been renamed Smith. Whereas tragic protagonists traditionally stand apart from common humanity, Chekhov’s protagonist is not a unique individual representing humanity at its highest, but by implication indicative of a state of mind widespread in Russia at the time. Thus in contrast to the uniqueness of the tragic protagonist, Ivanov is a representative product of his culture, a similar situation to Ghosts in which Mrs Alving’s predicament is historicised. The division within Hamlet that leads to delay and deferment in the exacting of his revenge on Claudius becomes transformed in Ivanov into a mental block when it comes taking any interest in practical matters, such as running his estate. His steward, Borkin, says to him: You’re a good man and an intelligent man, but you haven’t got that touch of – you know what I mean – you haven’t got any drive. If only you could take a good smack at something, enough to make the sparks fly, I mean . . . You’re a neurotic, a weakling. If you were a normal man, you’d be making a million a year. (40)

Hamlet is thus redefined by Chekhov in his characterisation of Ivanov as neurotic and suffering from a lack of drive. Ivanov himself invokes Hamlet only to deny any similarity: ‘My whining inspires you with a sort of reverent awe, you seem to think you’ve got hold of a second Hamlet in me . . . but in my opinion this neurotic state of mine and all the symptoms that go with it are just something to laugh at, and nothing else!’ (93). Whereas Shakespeare’s character can be seen as embodying the emergence of the self-conscious hero who can no longer act with the single-mindedness of traditional heroes, Ivanov is merely a victim of a malaise of cultural origins that makes any effort seem pointless. As well as being unable to summon the energy to do anything, he suffers from a kind of emotional disintegration. He was in love with his

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wife when he married her, but all that feeling has drained away and even the fact that she is dying has little effect: I was passionately in love with her when I got married and I swore I’d love her for ever, but . . . Well five years have passed, and she still loves me, but I . . . [Makes a helpless gesture with his hands.] Here you are, telling me that she’s soon going to die, and I don’t feel any love or pity but just a sort of indifference and lassitude . . . To anyone looking at me it must seem dreadful; but I don’t understand myself what’s happening to me . . . (45)

Ivanov’s antagonist in the play, the doctor Lvov, accuses him of ‘heartless egoism’ and ‘cold inhumanity’, but such moral judgements assume that Ivanov is responsible for his actions. Whereas Hamlet believes that he only needs to exert his will in order to act, thus his criticism of himself for failing to act, Ivanov’s will is paralysed by forces beyond his control; instead of action being deferred, as in Hamlet, it is negated in Ivanov. It is perhaps because Ivanov is subject to forces beyond his control that Chekhov makes no critical judgement of him. The moralistic doctor emerges as the more unsympathetic character even though his criticism of Ivanov is quite accurate: His unhappy wife’s only pleasure in life is having him near her; he’s the breath of life to her; she implores him to spend at least one evening a week with her, but he . . . he can’t. He finds his home suffocating, there’s not enough scope here! Just one evening at home and he’d shoot himself for sheer boredom! (48)

Whereas Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ is assumed, even if it has been argued that it becomes transformed into genuine madness, Ivanov’s state of mind is pathological from the start. He is subject to feelings that overcome his conscious will. Sitting with his wife and pretending to love her is unbearable, and his mood fluctuates between a consuming boredom and anguish: ‘As soon as the sun goes down, a sort of anguish begins to torment me. And what anguish it is! Don’t ask me why. I don’t know myself’ (50). The play ends with the suicide of Ivanov but there is no tragic climax. His wife having died, he is on the point of marrying again when the doctor denounces him as the wedding is about to take place. A chaotic scene ensues, and Ivanov, unable to stand the situation any longer, shoots himself. It is the last straw for Ivanov, but his suicide solves nothing; it’s an escapist act done on impulse. Instead of catharsis in the traditional tragic manner, there is an embarrassing shouting match with people hurling abuse at each other and an impulsive suicide. Although a man dies in despair, the effect is as much comic or farcical as tragic. Even in Chekhov’s most ‘tragic’ play in terms of its impact, on most audiences at least, it’s doubtful if his perspective has changed. In Three

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Sisters the sisters’ longing for Moscow and their failure to achieve their goal can’t be seen outside the context of psychology and temporality. If they had succeeded in escaping to Moscow, would it have lived up to their ideal hopes? The play raises the question as to whether any such hopes for future bliss have any substance. This applies not merely to the sisters but to such characters as Vershinin who believes that life in the future will have purpose and meaning. Characters’ beliefs and hopes cannot be dissociated from the psychological effect of their situations. Vershinin’s unhappy personal life is clearly a factor in his idealising of the future; the passing of the sisters’ former privileged life influences attempts to escape mentally to an idealised Moscow, though what they would do there and exactly how their lives would be transformed remains vague. The various characters of the play have a psychological need for meaning both in their own lives and in the world in general, but the play does not suggest that such meaning exists. It might be argued that Chekhov, even if he undermines tragedy as a dramatic form, can clearly be connected with the tragic in the wider philosophical sense, since his work suggests an affinity with Schopenhauerian pessimism. The novellas previously discussed suggest his familiarity with Schopenhauerian ideas, perhaps also reinforced by the mediation of Tolstoy, who was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer. This may link Chekhov with the writers I shall discuss in the next chapter, for whom Schopenhauer was central to a new conception of the tragic in the modern period. However, though Chekhov may have been influenced by a Schopenhauerian philosophical perspective, his work suggests that this led him as much in the direction of absurd comedy as in the direction of the tragic. Thus characters are prepared to commit suicide for unrequited love, yet it’s also strongly suggested that if their love were requited it would inevitably decline in intensity or even become transformed into hatred or tedium. Significantly, one character’s experience of unrequited love and the suffering it causes does not make that character any more sympathetic to such suffering on the part of others, as with Konstantin in The Seagull: though he knows what it is like to be rejected by the woman he loves, this does not make him in the least sympathetic to Masha’s unrequited love for him. He can’t bear her and only wants her out of his sight. In Chekhov, human beings tend to be irretrievably egotistical and seldom achieve a sense of tragic insight that transcends their ingrained egotism. Chekhov’s resistance to the tragic as a concept is suggested by his description of plays like The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard as comedies; even Ivanov was originally called a comedy. One of Chekhov’s best known short stories, ‘The Lady with the Dog’ (1899), confirms both an attraction to and distrust of the tragic. It is

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typical of his short stories in that it combines realism – accentuated by the avoidance of obvious literary devices and of moral or philosophical comment – with an understated symbolic quality, a combination which gives his work its unique atmosphere. The content of the story is on the surface very conventional but it is Chekhov’s treatment of this content, which creates recognition and identification on the part of the reader yet is also defamiliarising at the same time, that gives the work its power, and part of that power lies in its implied concern with issues related to the tragic. Gurov, a bank official from Moscow whose marriage offers him no fulfilment and who has had numerous affairs, is on holiday alone in Yalta. He is attracted by a young woman with a Pomeranian dog, a new arrival in Yalta. When they meet she is the first one to speak, and she then blushes and lowers her eyes, indicating an attraction towards him. Thus it is clear that the philandering Gurov will have little difficulty in persuading her to have an affair with him. Her name is Anna and her life is as unfulfilled as his, and a week later they begin an affair, with Anna feeling guilt and worrying that Gurov will despise her after the affair has been consummated. So far so conventional, but afterwards they sit looking at the sea and there follows a striking passage: The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spell-bound in these magical surroundings – the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky – Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.6

Chekhov’s writing is characterised by idealistic declarations of utopian hope for the future together with an acknowledgement of the external world’s ‘complete indifference to the life and death of each of us’, with death offering only ‘eternal sleep’. A similar dichotomy is present in Three Sisters, in which characters such as Vershinin and Toozenbach express idealistic hope in the future but also have doubts as to whether life has any meaning. Vershinin says to Masha: ‘Yes, we shall all be forgotten. Such is our fate and we can’t do anything about it. And all the things that seem serious, important and full of meaning to us now will be forgotten one day – or anyway won’t seem important any more’

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(259–60), but he goes on to say later that ‘in two or three hundred years life on this old earth of ours will have become marvellously beautiful’ (263), and Toozenbach who continually urges the need to work and looks forward to ‘a terrific thunder-cloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm . . . coming to freshen us up!’ (253), later, in response to Masha’s ‘Isn’t there some meaning?’, replies: ‘Meaning? . . . Look out there, it’s snowing. What’s the meaning of that?’ (282). Even though the roar of the waves suggests the eternal sleep of death and nature’s indifference to humanity, paradoxically, rather than Gurov being made to feel pessimistic, he feels part of a never-ceasing movement of life and reflects that everything in the world is beautiful. However, at first it seems that Gurov’s vision of the world as beautiful is merely a temporary and transient state of mind since the affair develops in conventional terms, and when Anna is summoned home by her husband, Gurov does not seem particularly unhappy, regarding it at this point as just one more affair. He has earlier thought of her in comparison with other women he has seduced and found her sense of guilt tiresome. Back in Moscow he expects to forget Anna within a month but he finds that he cannot. All of the activities of his life, at home, at work and at leisure, seem pointless. For Gurov and also for Anna virtually all aspects of conventional social life are stultifying, suggesting a fundamental conflict between the world of civilised social order and human desires that are irreconcilable with it, a conflict with tragic potential. Anna has earlier confessed to Gurov her disillusionment with marriage and respectable social life. Now she realises her husband is merely a ‘flunkey’: ‘I was twenty when I was married to him. I have been tormented by curiosity; I wanted something better. “There must be a different sort of life,” I said to myself. I wanted to live! To live, to live! . . . I was fired by curiosity . . . you don’t understand it, but, I swear to God, I could not control myself; something happened to me: I could not be restrained. I told my husband I was ill, and came here . . . And here I have been walking about as though I were dazed, like a mad creature . . . and now I have become a vulgar, contemptible woman whom any one may despise.’

Gurov is similarly disillusioned after his return to Moscow: What savage manners, what people! What senseless nights, what uninteresting, uneventful days! The rage for card-playing, the gluttony, the drunkenness, the continual talk always about the same thing. Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one’s time, the better part of one’s strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it – just as though one were in a madhouse or a prison.7

He decides to travel to the town where Anna lives and eventually meets her. She discloses that she has also been unable to forget about

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him, but his arrival fills her with dread. Shocked by his kisses she promises to see him in Moscow and lies to her husband that she has to see a gynaecologist. Both are now reconciled to leading double lives and though they hope to ‘be free from this intolerable bondage’ and that ‘in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin’, the ending gives no promise of that happening: ‘it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long way to go, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning’.8 It can be argued that the story is an implicit attack on conventional society and its repressive nature. On the other hand it can be read as suggesting that there can never be any complete congruency between social norms and individual desire; that the only option for those caught up in such a conflict is outwardly to conform but to find a way of fulfilling desire, as in the case of Gurov and Anna, through ‘secrecy . . . deception . . . living in different towns and not seeing each other for long at a time’. Whatever view one takes, neither alternative is tragic. The love of Gurov and Anna is not a consuming passion: it has to be understood in the context of the barrenness and banality of their ordinary lives. The story does not make clear why these two people end up loving each other so intensely. Why does this woman prove so special to Gurov when he has had many similar affairs in the past? In numerous other works Chekhov shows love to be based on illusion and egotism. That is not denied in this story but it is less important than Gurov and Anna’s desire to find something that gives their lives meaning and significance. They are minor rebels against the social pressures and conventions that have driven them into unfulfilling marriages and boring domestic situations. Their experience raises the question as to whether repression is a price worth paying for social stability and order. Chekhov’s calling his heroine Anna, a woman married to a man who is the epitome of dullness and respectability, surely alludes to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Indeed the story may be seen as in some respects a kind of commentary on Tolstoy’s novel. Tolstoy’s Anna is destroyed by rejecting her social life and social self in favour of a new self that does not inhibit passion and impulse. Tolstoy dramatises Anna Karenina’s desires with great power, but they ultimately prove to be destructive, which may be seen as tragic, as I shall discuss in the next chapter. Chekhov in contrast presents the desire to escape repression and liberate impulse and passion in a much more positive light, though suggesting that the chances of success are slight. Both negative social forces and the self’s vulnerability to boredom and egotism have almost overwhelming power and the open ending gives no assurance that Gurov

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and Anna may not become bored with each other or drift back to their previous routine lives or some other such negative outcome. Yet there remains some hope in the story, with the lovers expecting a new and beautiful life but also aware of the many difficulties and complications that lie ahead. In Chekhov there are moments of vision even if they are fleeting and unstable, and in other works ideal hopes are often subject to satire, as with Trofimov’s optimistic philosophy in The Cherry Orchard. Though society may be predominantly oppressive it can be resisted, even if that may involve a certain amount of lying and deception, and there is always the hope for radical change in the future, which Chekhov’s works continually look forward to with some irony but not total scepticism. An interesting stylistic feature of the story is the use of the colour grey as a recurrent motif. Such devices in Chekhov’s stories create symbolic resonances. In this story the colour grey is pervasive. Anna has grey eyes, the dress of hers Gurov likes best is grey, the fence surrounding her house is grey and studded with upturned nails. In the hotel where Gurov stays when he travels to see Anna, the room is described as having a grey carpet and a grey blanket. An inkstand on the table surmounted by a headless horseman is covered in grey dust, and at the end of the story Gurov notices in the mirror that his hair is turning grey. This greyness is contrasted with the whiteness of the dog and the whiteness of the clouds as Gurov and Anna look over the sea, in the second section. Chekhov’s symbolism is seldom subject to easy decoding, but the colour grey is not one that would normally be associated with the tragic. In this story it suggests that in contrast to the high romance of the Anna– Vronsky relationship in Anna Karenina, Gurov and Anna exist on a much more ordinary human scale but are nevertheless capable of passion. And even though they seem to be trapped by their domestic situations, they do not lapse into despair or contemplate suicide, but find a middle way by conducting their affair secretly while outwardly conforming to society. In that context grey is an appropriate colour to be associated with them, and one which suggests muted hope for their relationship. In this story there is thus some prospect of a better life and a better world. Certain writers contemporary with Chekhov, however, some of whom can be linked to the pessimistic aspects of his writing, could not share even his muted hope that some kind of higher vision was possible and that life might be better in the future. These writers were prepared to develop Schopenhauerian ideas or combine them with others in order to create a modern form of the tragic. Some of these writers will be considered in the next chapter.

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

George Steiner (1963), The Death of Tragedy, London: Faber and Faber, p. 301. Anton Chekhov (1977), Plays, trans. Elisaveta Fen, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 164. Page numbers will henceforth be incorporated in the text. Anton Chekhov (1965), Ward Six and Other Stories, trans. Ann Dunnigan, New York: Signet, p. 166. Ibid., pp. 20, 37, 58. Shakespeare, Hamlet, V, i. Anton Tchehov (1953), Selected Stories, trans. Constance Garnett, London: Chatto and Windus, pp. 15–16. Ibid., pp. 14, 20. Ibid., p. 27.

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Chapter 4

The Return of the Tragic in Fiction

Thomas Hardy and the Tragic Though Ibsen in his social realist plays and playwrights such as Shaw who were influenced by him take an anti-tragic view of the world and the human situation, as I have argued, certain novelists contemporary or nearly contemporary with them implicitly contested that view, notably Hardy whose fiction has often been categorised as tragic.1 However, critics have tended to regard the tragic, particularly as manifested in Hardy’s last two major novels, as flawed because it is seen as lacking the sense of the inexorable associated with classical tragedy. From this perspective Hardy can be accused of manipulating the plots of his novels in order to impose his own subjective, pessimistic vision on the world. A particular worry is that a recurrent feature of his fiction – seemingly trivial events bringing about consequences that are far from trivial – creates a disproportionality that offends against the dominant critical view, influenced by Aristotle’s Poetics, that in authentic tragedy the catastrophic outcome is produced by necessity and not governed by chance and coincidence. It can also be argued that the tragic is alien to the novel as a form: whereas classical tragedy observed the unities and was written in verse – thus eliminating or at least suppressing the contingent, the random, the quotidian – the realist novel in the nineteenth century could not be reconciled with such formal conventions and inevitably would situate the tragic action in a social context that potentially could undermine it. George Steiner’s argument that Ibsen’s social realism in his middle-period plays was contrary to the tragic because ‘[i]n tragedy, there are no temporal remedies’ but only ‘the unaltering bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world’, might seem to be more powerful if directed at fiction, the tragic being even more called into question by the realism of the novel, since society as mediating any confrontation between

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humanity and recalcitrant forces in life and the world was inescapable in realist fiction. Yet such objections to Hardy as a tragic writer don’t take account of a crucial consideration: the emergence of a cultural context in the latter half of the nineteenth century which provided the basis for a new conception of the tragic that is grounded in pessimism about life and the nature of the world; and arguably the novel is a particularly appropriate form for the tragic in that cultural context. Developments in philosophy and science had generated in a revised form the fundamental opposition that underlay tragedy in the classical era: the discontinuity between human purposes and values and that which transcended or was indifferent or alien to these human purposes and values. Schopenhauer and Darwin are the central figures here, and though their influence on Hardy has been much discussed by previous critics, the important point is that taken together their ideas can be interpreted as creating a modern version of this discontinuity. Schopenhauer identified his pessimism with the ‘tragic spirit’: What gives everything tragic, whatever the form in which it appears, its characteristic tendency to the sublime, is the dawning of the knowledge that the world and life can give no true satisfaction, and are therefore not worth our attachment to them. It is this in which the tragic spirit consists. Accordingly, it leads to resignation.2

All living things are driven by a will that urges them to live, but in the case of human beings this can provide no fulfilment: as soon as one desire or appetite is gratified another inevitably takes its place in a neverending and meaningless process that only ends with death: We are like lambs in a field, disporting ourselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey. So it is that in our good days we are all unconscious of the evil Fate may have presently in store for us – sickness, poverty, mutilation, loss of sight or reason. No little part of the torment of existence lies in this, that Time is continually pressing upon us, never letting us take breath, but always coming after us like a taskmaster with a whip. If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the misery of boredom.3

What gave this philosophy much greater force was that it was easily reconcilable with Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Many were able to interpret Darwin in optimistic terms, taking Herbert Spencer’s redefinition of natural selection as ‘survival of the fittest’ to mean that species which survived the evolutionary process deserved to survive, thus building purposive development into Darwinism. A less consoling interpretation was that natural selection was irreconcilable with purpose or meaning and that species which survived did so largely through

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mutations produced by chance which proved advantageous for adapting to a perpetually changing world. Darwin had referred to the ‘the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature’4 and his contemporary Ernst Haeckel proclaimed that natural selection destroyed all basis for belief in a moral order: ‘the “moral ordering of the world” is evidently a beautiful poem which is proved to be false by the actual facts . . . It exists neither in nature nor in human life . . . The terrible and ceaseless “Struggle for Existence” gives the real impulse to the blind course of the world.’5 It was thus easy to align the Darwinian ‘Struggle for Existence’ with Schopenhauer’s blind will. The role of chance in Darwin’s theory of evolution caused particular outrage: ‘That this ordered Cosmos is not from necessity or chance, is almost self evident . . . Is it by chance that light and heat cause plants to carry on their wonderful operations . . .?’6 Darwin himself accepted it would be difficult for people to believe that the origin of man as a species was ‘the result of blind chance’.7 Shaw’s reasons for rejecting Darwinism in favour of Lamarckian evolutionary theory are significant in this context, especially as he admitted that Darwin’s theory was ‘not finally refutable’. What was objectionable to him about Darwinism was that it had two existential implications that were irreconcilable with an anti-tragic philosophy: first, since the survival of species in a perpetually changing world was a matter of passive adaptation through chance mutation, there was no role for the active will; and second, if this idea was applied to the human situation it suggested that the only choice available was either to adapt or to refuse to do so and be defeated by life, the tragic option. Whereas Darwinism offered only ‘improvement . . . through some senseless accident’, the ‘Lamarckian evolutionary process’ provides the alternative of ‘an extension of consciousness and of power’.8 It is clear, however, that Shaw recognises the connection between Darwinism and a tragic world view and that his rejection of Darwin was on philosophical rather than scientific grounds. There seems little doubt that Schopenhauerian philosophy and Darwinian evolutionary theory are central to Hardy’s tragic representation of life in his fiction. However, Hardy is unlike Schopenhauer in that he does not advocate resignation or suggest that the social and material dimension of life is not worth caring about. Indeed, in the later fiction in particular, his criticism of the social world is scathing and his support for social and moral reform obvious. Arnold Kettle’s claim that Hardy’s fiction is about the destruction of a rural culture in England is a legitimate critical interpretation.9 No reader of Jude the Obscure (1896) can miss its critique of divorce laws, the educational system, the Church, and

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its concern with the effect of economic change on the agricultural working class. All of these have drastic consequences for the lives of his characters. Yet though social critique and support for the improvement of the human lot are strongly present in his fiction, the claim that they are its driving force would be difficult to defend in critical terms. Hardy is one of the most notable of post-Darwinian writers in that he understood that Darwin’s theory of natural selection fundamentally changed the nature of the relation between humanity and the world. Though matters were complicated by the fact that most human beings interacted with a socially created world and not with nature in any pure sense, nevertheless Darwinism could not be ignored in thinking about the relation between humanity, society and the world in general. Basic to Darwin’s theory is the idea that no species is perfectly adapted to survive in the world. Evolution produces through genetic variation species that are well enough adapted to the world to survive and reproduce, at least for a time, in the struggle for existence. The relation between humanity and society, however, is clearly different from that of non-human species in relation to nature, since human beings can change society and even nature to a considerable degree rather than merely adapting to them. Why then, it may be asked, if society can be changed by human action and idealism, is there nevertheless what is widely perceived as a fatalism in Hardy’s depiction of the relationship between human beings and their world? Does this not create the kind of contradiction that critics have perceived in his fiction: for example, a character like Tess in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) can be said to be both a victim of social forces and fated to be destroyed by some intrinsic recalcitrance that exists in the world. How can the one be reconciled with the other? Though Hardy may be unequivocally critical of society’s values and institutions, especially in the last two major novels, he does not imply that reforming those will lead to human beings and social structures becoming perfectly adapted to each other. All societies construct social forms that are designed to create order and stability in the human world. But such forms will tend over time to take on a life of their own and thus become reified or thing-like and thus potentially oppressive, so that inevitably they will be in conflict with the needs, interests or desires of certain human individuals. Though those social forms may eventually be changed or even replaced, some individuals who cannot or refuse to adapt will be crushed before such change or replacement can take place. This is an unavoidable process and will apply to every society in varying degrees. To take an obvious example, Jude Fawley in Jude the Obscure lives in a society in which higher education and the institutions founded

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to provide it, notably universities, are not accessible to working-class people. The assumptions underlying such arrangements derive from a past in which social divisions were virtually absolute and the idea of the working class receiving higher education would have been hardly conceivable. Though such assumptions are still powerful and reflected by the admissions policy of a university such as Christminster, Jude’s desire for higher education is reflective of emergent ideas that question such assumptions. Education as a social form will eventually have to confront such desires from Judes of the future and those who believe they are legitimate, and after much resistance this will lead to significant change in the form of higher education to take account of the emerging social and cultural forces which Jude exemplifies. Both Jude and Sue Bridehead are aware that they are victims of social forms no longer appropriate to them or their world. Jude states: ‘I perceive there is something wrong in our social formulas’10 and for Sue ‘the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to real star-patterns’ (214). As Jude is oppressed by the social form of higher education, so Sue is oppressed by marriage as a social form. It is significant, however, that she refers not to Victorian civilisation but civilisation as such, implying that such conflict as she and Jude face is a universal situation, which suggests that any particular society and its institutions can’t be blamed. There is a dual perspective in Hardy’s fiction, one which can accommodate both social critique and the tragic. Though Jude the Obscure is clearly a severe attack on the system of higher education and marriage as an institution at the particular time in which Jude and Sue are living, this should be distinguished from an attack on social forms and institutions as such. In contrast to Ibsen in Ghosts, Hardy’s social critique in his later fiction can be assimilated to the tragic. Society in order to function requires social forms and institutions, but it is nevertheless inevitable that eventually they will become oppressive to individuals such as Jude and Sue in advance of their time who cannot adapt or refuse to do so and are therefore crushed. This conception of the relation between society and the individual, clearly influenced by Darwinian thinking, can be seen as one aspect of the novel’s tragic perspective. Unlike Ibsen, for Hardy in the conflict between society and the individual both have right on their side if one moves beyond the particular instance to the abstract: social forms are necessary in every society and it would be mere fantasy to believe that they could continually change in order to meet every human need and desire, but equally those individuals like Jude and Sue who develop desires or ideals that can’t be reconciled with prevailing social forms also deserve respect. The fates of

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Jude and Sue may be specific to their Victorian era, but the intrinsic discontinuity between emergent human ideals and desires and existing social and ideological structures will continue to generate similar conflicts leading to similar results in the future. Though both will change over time the fundamental conflict will remain, destroying or damaging severely the lives of individuals like Jude and Sue and those in a similar situation in the future. Another aspect of Hardy’s tragic perspective that reflects the influence of Darwinism in particular is his emphasis on apparently trivial events that have major consequences. Any reader of Darwin’s Origin of Species must be struck by the number of times the word ‘chance’ occurs in the text. Natural selection undermined standard concepts of order, theological or secular, and suggested there is no linear or purposive progress but only perpetual change. That survival or non-survival depended on chance both in terms of mutation and in terms of a world subject to unpredictable and directionless change implied also that luck played a significant role in evolution. This called into question notions of order in the world founded on proportionality, and Hardy’s fiction reflects this undermining of traditional ideas of order. Sophoclean tragedy is grounded in a sense of proportionality. Oedipus could of course have said that killing his father and marrying his mother were the result of a series of mischances or bad luck, but he refuses to do so and accepts that there is an intrinsic order underlying existence. He accepts responsibility for his actions even if he acted in ignorance and had no intention of bringing about what resulted from them. The interests of human beings and those of the gods may be incongruent but the gods represent a world beyond the human world which has its own kind of order, even if it’s a form of order that human beings inevitably enter into conflict with or rebel against. Hardy’s concept of the tragic is less consoling since it replaces the realm of the gods with an indifferent world and disproportionality is central to the relation between humanity with its hopes and fears and that indifferent world, creating a form of the tragic appropriate to the modern, or postDarwinian, era. The continual emphasis on how people’s lives can be affected by mischances, accidents, lost opportunities and random happenings undermines the deep-seated desire for order and significance that Hardy sees as governing human thought about life and its meaning; and clearly the novel could capture this more effectively than any other literary form. The human sense of proportionality which underlies concepts such as justice or the ethical is undermined, as there is no relation of scale from the human point of view between cause and effect, apparently minor

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happenings being able to produce major consequences, even tragic situations. Obvious examples in Tess of the d’Urbervilles are the clergyman’s casual mentioning to Tess’s father of his noble lineage which creates a disastrous chain of events and, notoriously, Tess’s letter to Angel Clare going under a carpet and not being read. If the human dimension is removed, concepts like proportion or mischance disappear, as there is no reason why one event is any more significant than another; but Hardy’s fiction suggests that humanity in general can never come to terms, existentially at least, with such implications of Darwinism and Schopenhauerian philosophy: the great majority of human beings can’t help but think in accordance with ideas of order, proportion and morality since these are part of what it means to be human. Unlike Schopenhauer, Hardy does not condemn the world or see life as not worth living: both the world which is indifferent to human concerns and humanity with its hopes and desires deserve respect. Undoubtedly there is anger in Hardy’s fiction, particularly in Tess and Jude, but it is not directed at a morally indifferent reality, but rather at the denial of or refusal to accept it on the part of religion or optimistic forms of thought.

George Eliot as Precursor of Hardy Hardy was not the first English novelist to see the tragic in such terms. A similar awareness that reality is morally indifferent is evident in George Eliot’s fiction. In Romola, published in 1863 less than four years after Darwin’s Origin, the narrator states: ‘Who shall put his finger on the work of justice, and say, “It is there”? Justice is like the Kingdom of God – it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning’ (Chap. 67). Anticipating Hardy, Eliot often shows how trivial acts can inadvertently have major consequences, thus emphasising a lack of proportion in the nature of things with the implication that concepts of order such as justice in an absolute sense become purely human constructs. In The Mill on the Floss (1860), for example, which Eliot was writing even while she was reading Darwin’s Origin, Mr Tulliver cannot come to terms with the fact that he lives in ‘a puzzling world’ and his mind gives way when that world proves indifferent to his notion of justice. Mrs Tulliver’s innocent and well-meaning attempts to help her husband have the paradoxical effect of bringing about disaster, such as her warnings to him not to go to law having the opposite effect and her attempt to dissuade Wakem from buying the mill, after her husband has lost a lawsuit against him, putting the idea into his head. Eliot’s narrator’s modification of Novalis is relevant both to her own fiction and to

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that of Hardy in that it recognises that circumstance can’t be left out of account in any consideration of human life and that our concept of the tragic needs to be modified to accommodate this: For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within. ‘Character’ – says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms – ‘character is destiny’. But not the whole of our destiny. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive Hamlet’s having married Ophelia, and got through life with a reputation of sanity notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some moody sarcasms towards the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the frankest incivility to his father-in-law. (The Mill on the Floss, Book 6, Chap. 6)

Hardy also refers to Novalis’ aphorism in The Mayor of Casterbridge, rendering it as ‘Character is Fate’ (Chap. 17), and though he doesn’t mention Eliot’s qualification of it, almost certainly he would have agreed with it. And the corollary to tragic outcomes being prevented by particular circumstances is that circumstance can create such outcomes from situations that may have no obvious tragic potential. For both writers this both deepens and widens the tragic nature of the human situation. Eliot was interested in the tragic and tragedy as a form both critically and philosophically and discussed them in several essays. Her most ambitious piece of tragic writing is her verse drama, The Spanish Gypsy (1868), in which the heroine, Fedalma, who has been brought up in Spain in separation from her Gypsy origins, is forced to choose by her father Zarca between her love for a Spanish knight, Don Silva, and duty to her Gypsy people. Choosing the latter she becomes subject to a deep sense of self-division. The influence of Hegel’s theory of tragedy is obvious in that there is a ‘dramatic collision’ between ‘two principles . . . at war with each other’, but Eliot is also aware of Shakespeare. Like Hamlet, Fedalma is urged by her father to make a choice that gives her no joy and which precipitates a disastrous set of consequences since Don Silva, vainly trying to cast off his Spanish identity for love of Fedalma and join the Gypsies, kills Zarca, thus ending all realistic hope for the Gypsy people. Fedalma’s life is tragic in that she is left to lead a people in a context of hopelessness both for them and for herself. Though Felix Holt has strong connections with classical tragedy, perhaps the ending of The Mill on the Floss is the most powerful tragic episode in her fiction. Maggie Tulliver’s ethical decision to refuse to marry Stephen Guest despite their inadvertent elopement – even though there is strong mutual sexual desire between them and marriage now seems the only practical option – and return home with her reputation apparently irretrievably destroyed and with no possibility of restoring

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previous relationships, is a tragic choice made in a context of undecidability. Arguably this is the tragic centre of the novel rather than the deaths of Maggie and Tom in the flood, though that shows another aspect of the tragic that Hardy also emphasises: nature’s indifference to human hopes and values. The arguments of the many critics of the novel who have attacked Eliot over Maggie’s decision are called into question by the novel’s proto-Derridean concept of the tragic. Though nothing can now be done about the suffering of Lucy and Philip by going back she cannot make a ‘choice of joy’ that at the same time would be a choice of ‘conscious hardness and cruelty’. Happiness for herself would be built on others’ pain. Yet Guest’s argument that nothing can now be done about that pain and that returning may even make things worse as well as also inflicting as much pain on him as on Lucy or Philip, is not refuted. Eliot is less willing than Hardy to give the tragic the last word. Though it can’t be transcended, time can’t be left out of account as life inevitably moves on. In the conclusion to The Mill on the Floss Eliot offers some human hope despite the tragic aspects of Maggie’s undecidable predicament and the deaths of her brother and herself in the flood. Nature recovers from the destruction of the flood – ‘Nature repairs her ravages’ – though it takes five years and the narrator emphasises that ‘there can be no thorough repair’. There is also the suggestion that time can also partially heal in the human world, since two of those who have survived and visit the graves of Maggie and Tom have been able to rebuild their lives. In Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), the plot of The Spanish Gypsy is reworked in such a way that the latter’s Hegelian form of the tragic is deflected. Daniel Deronda is able to reconcile love with duty to Mordecai’s ideal of Jewish nationhood even if there is a suggestion that love as overwhelming passion – which Gwendolen Harleth could have offered him – has to be sacrificed. Unlike Fedalma, who until her father re-enters her life has no thought of Gypsy nationhood as an ideal, Deronda had been searching for some vocation to which he could commit himself wholly, and when he discovers Mordecai’s ideal he is able to accept his Jewish identity joyfully. However, though the Hegelian tragic model as collision of ethical principles no longer applies, the tragic as undecidability remains as Deronda is faced with a choice between his desire to devote himself to the ideal of Jewish nationhood and his responsibility to a specific other, namely Gwendolen, whom he fears may be engulfed by her demons without his support. Forced to decide, he chooses the latter though having a sense of tragic awareness of the ‘risk’ to Gwendolen and of his ‘cruelty’: ‘Deronda’s anguish was intolerable. He could not help himself. He seized her outstretched hands and held them together, and kneeled at her

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feet. She was the victim of his happiness’ (Chap. 69). For Eliot, sometimes the claim of the other may have to be rejected but it must always be a tragic choice in human terms, and Deronda can have no knowledge of the consequences of his decision while the open ending also denies the reader such knowledge. According to Aristotle’s view of tragedy in his Poetics, catharsis – by purging pity and fear in the audience – paradoxically allowed an audience to transcend the despair that tragic events may seem to induce, but such catharsis is no longer available in modern post-Darwinian concepts of the tragic, as is all too clear in both Hardy’s and Eliot’s work. Eliot, however, resists the kind of post-Darwinian hopelessness that Hardy’s work, especially the later fiction, can be seen to reflect. Her characters humanly confront the tragic and its dilemmas with two human weapons, the ethical sense and ideals. Neither can promise to be successful in overcoming a reality indifferent to human notions of order, and adapting to or accepting passively the indifference of non-human reality is alien to her humanism. Human value remains and is not negated even if particular human beings are defeated by a world incommensurable with their hopes or ideals.

The Tragic in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure In Hardy’s fiction there is little sense that the ethical or ideals can allow human beings to deflect the naked confrontation with an indifferent or recalcitrant world that inexorably leads to tragic consequences. The later novels show a particular scepticism about idealism, treating it in an almost Schopenhauerian sense as a function of the will blindly seeking to impose meaning on a resistant reality. Since ideals are inevitably projected onto the world in the belief that there are structures in reality correspondent with them, irony predominates in Hardy’s treatment of idealism. In Jude the Obscure he relentlessly exposes the failure of any of Jude’s ideals to have any correspondence with reality. Despite numerous instances of a mismatch between his ideal expectation and reality, he can never liberate himself from them. At the root of this is his fear that there might be no reason for or value in his existence: ‘Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an undemanded one, he lay down with his back on a heap of litter near the pig-sty’ (22). The fundamental attraction of Christminster is that there he will discover that there is harmony in the universe and that in being part of the university his life will have value: ‘It had been the yearning of his heart to find something to anchor on, to cling to – for some place which he

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could call admirable’ (30). Jude’s idealism about Christminster is continually contradicted by his experience of the place, but to give up the ideal is impossible for him as that would be to accept that there is a tragic mismatch between human life and hopes and the world: ‘it is the centre of the universe to me, because of my early dream: and nothing can alter it’ (331). Another aspect of this idealism is his recurring expectation that the world will exhibit the order he believes it should have. Thus he routinely judges by appearances, expecting the world to conform to his projected hopes and inevitably is disappointed, as with the letters he receives from the masters of colleges he chose to write to because their ‘physiognomies seemed to say to him that they were appreciative and far-seeing men’. But instead of such experiences making him question his idealism he shores it up by blaming himself and absolving them: ‘Why couldn’t I know better than address utter strangers in such a way? I may be an impostor, an idle scamp, a man with a bad character, for all that they know to the contrary’ (122). It is this ingrained idealism that leads him to think continually in terms of fate and providence. When he is on the way to Christminster he passes across a field in which, as he believes, he had disgraced himself with Arabella, and sees this as significant and not just as a matter of chance. When things go wrong, he takes this as just punishment: though meeting Arabella makes him unable to see Sue Bridehead, this is ‘perhaps an intended intervention to punish him for his unauthorised love’ (190). He also engages in ritual activities in an attempt to prevent disorder overpowering his ideals: after the marriage with Arabella ends he burns her picture, and when he realises his desire for Sue can’t be reconciled with the letter of religion, he buries his religious books. It would be wrong, however, to see the novel as simply a satire on idealism. Neither Jude’s ideals nor the world’s indifference are attacked: both deserve respect but they can’t be reconciled. Jude’s moral sense that the world should allow both human beings and birds to co-exist harmoniously is in conflict with the Darwinian reality that what is in the interests of one species may not be in the interests of another. Jude’s human belief, however, that such discontinuity is objectionable and should be resisted is somewhat equivalent to Oedipus’ belief that the prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother also ought to be resisted despite its supernatural source. What makes human beings inherently different from animals is that they are not adaptive: they can change the world, or try to, in order that it conform with a human vision of how it could or should be; or they can choose to resist adaptation in the face of an overpowering world even if death may result. Ideals are

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central to this and are double edged as they may supply the force to change the world, or, as in the case of Jude, they may make a person totally ill-adapted to survive, so that Jude can be seen as tragic. The conflict between human beings and the world as understood in Schopenhauerian and Darwinian terms does not just apply to the question of social forms and human ideals. Perhaps an even more fundamental conflict is created by humanity’s dual heritage in being the product of both natural and cultural evolution. As a result of the emergence of social structures, language and everything that has followed on from that, human beings are no longer animals in any natural sense: they have become partially separated from their animal origins by the development of a human mind which makes them different from all other species. But this development is of course comparatively recent in terms of humanity’s animal origins, and the implication of Darwinism is that human beings, being the product of natural selection, can never completely transcend their animal inheritance: mind is merely the tip of the iceberg, to use the obvious metaphor. It is no exaggeration to claim that the cultural impact of Darwin’s evolutionary theory was cataclysmic in that it seriously undermined the belief that humanity was created by God in his own image and was therefore different in kind from and superior to the so-called lower animals. After Darwin, that division can no longer be seen as absolute. The belief that humanity was created by God in his own image entailed that human feelings and impulses that could be described as ‘animalistic’ – most obviously sexuality and violence – ought to be controllable by the will: they were a deviation from what should be expected from beings made in the image of God. Those subject to these deviations could be legitimately blamed for their actions even if religious concepts such as original sin or the grace of God implied no human being could achieve the ideal. But Darwinism called all of this into question. ‘Animalistic’ impulses or behaviour could no longer be seen as deviations; they were intrinsically part of human nature. Condemnation of them became problematic: it would be like condemning the behaviour of animals, such as killing prey, in moral terms. Could morality legitimately apply if human beings could no longer be seen as essentially different from animal species, and instincts and impulses associated with animals were built into human nature as a result of evolution? The relevance of this to the tragic is that there was now a fundamental conflict within the human psyche: human beings were both the product of civilisation in the broad sense – which either condemned ‘animality’ or found ways of reformulating it in different terms – and of an evolutionary process that linked them inextricably with animal

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behaviour over millions of years. With such a conflict both sides must be respected: neither one nor the other can completely triumph nor is there any possibility of synthesising them. The result is a psychological form of tragic division in which the conflict is within the psyche or within human nature, a conflict Hardy sees as ‘unmendable’, to use William Storm’s term. This underlies Hardy’s treatment of sexuality in his fiction. What makes Tess one of his most striking characters is the conflict between her idealistic nature and her sexuality, and this is fundamental to the tragic outcome of her life. Angel Clare represents for her an ideal form of love free of any element of the crudely animalistic, yet Tess’s bodily form as a product of evolution appeals not just to one particular man but to men in general. She has no desire to appeal to such men but inadvertently she does so through her ‘pouted-up deep red mouth’11 and her ‘bouncing handsome womanliness’ (23), attributes that have evolved to make her sexually attractive. This leads to what Hardy terms ‘the “tragic mischief” of her drama’ when she encounters Alec d’Urberville: She had an attribute which amounted to a disadvantage just now; and it was this that caused Alec d’Urberville’s eyes to rivet themselves upon her. It was a luxuriance of aspect, a fulness of growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was . . . Thus the thing began. Had she perceived this meeting’s import she might have asked why she was doomed to be seen and coveted by the wrong man, and not by some other man, the right and desired one in all respects. (52–3)

Tess’s body is part of a nature governed by Schopenhauer’s blind will. From nature’s point of view it makes no difference if life continues through Tess having a child by the man she loves or by her being raped by a man like Alec in whom she has no sexual interest. She becomes conscious of this split between her human aims and feelings and the effect of her body on men in general, and takes steps to make herself as physically unattractive as possible. Alec d’Urberville is as much a victim of nature as Tess. She arouses in him a sexual desire that nature has implanted in him, just as nature has given her attributes correspondent to such desire. Human beings are, of course, different from animals because they can choose to resist nature, but given the power of nature as an amoral force, moral condemnation of the likes of Alec can never be absolute as it could be in pre-Darwinian thinking about sexual temptation. The novel does not state categorically that Tess was raped by Alec, but the divided nature of human beings inevitably creates the potential for ambiguity in such situations. Hardy’s provocative subtitle to the novel, ‘A Pure Woman’, implies that whether Tess was raped or responded to Alec’s desire, no blame should be

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attached to her. Given the power of nature it is certain that in some situations human resistance to it will crumble. Clearly, this does not mean that ethical resistance to nature is futile, but absolutist moral positions become difficult to sustain in the light of the fact that control over animal impulses and desires can never be total. What gives Tess’ situation tragic potential is that she is unable to reach a position of compromise in the conflict between human ideals and a nature resistant or indifferent to such ideals. She idealises Angel Clare because she sees his love for her as transcending desire for her body: To her he was, as of old, all that was perfection, personally and mentally. He was still her Antinous, her Apollo even; his sickly face was beautiful as the morning to her affectionate regard on this day no less than when she first beheld him; for was it not the face of the one man on earth who had loved her purely, and who had believed in her as pure! (432)

Alec in contrast loved her for her body, and even though her body may have responded she rejects such desire in herself as being impure: ‘He has come between us and ruined us, and now he can never do it anymore. I never loved him at all, Angel, as I loved you’ (431). Her killing of Alec is motivated by idealism, for she kills the man who rendered her impure in the eyes of Angel, and she also tries to kill the embodiment of physical desire in herself that can’t be reconciled with her concept of purity. In killing him she chooses death in effect, as she must know the necessary consequence of what would be seen as murder. She refuses to adapt to the world beyond her ideal conception by continuing to live with Alec or even by merely leaving him. That ideal of a human love which transcends animal sexuality will always be sullied if she does not expel Alec and what he represents, even if death is the price she has to pay for such expulsion. The conflict between human ideals and indifferent and resistant forces in nature is presented in particularly stark terms in Jude the Obscure, most obviously when Arabella attracts Jude’s attention by throwing a pig’s genitalia at him. Before this Jude had been lost in spiritual thought: ‘And then he continued to dream, and thought he might become even a bishop by leading a pure, energetic, wise, Christian life. And what an example he would set!’ (42). Arabella on the other hand is at the opposite pole: She had a round and prominent bosom, full lips, perfect teeth, and the rich complexion of a Cochin hen’s egg. She was a complete and substantial female animal – no more, no less; and Jude was almost certain that to her was attributable the enterprise of attracting his attention from dreams of the humaner letters to what was simmering in the minds around him. (44)

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Unlike Tess, Arabella has no difficulty in accepting her animal sexuality. Jude, although attracted to her, resembles Tess in never being comfortable with sexuality separate from the idealistic and spiritual dimension. Yet there is a bond between Arabella and him that can’t be denied , an ‘affinity in posse, between herself and him, which, so far as Jude Fawley was concerned, had no sort of premeditation in it’ (44). Nature in the form of sexuality strikes Jude who had thought women had no relevance to his life ‘but had vaguely regarded the sex as beings outside his life and purposes. He gazed from her eyes to her mouth, thence to her bosom, and to her full round naked arms, wet, mottled with the chill of the water, and firm as marble’ (46). Though aware that what she represents is ‘quite antipathetic to that side of him which had been occupied with literary study and the magnificent Christminster dream’ (47), the ‘will’ in the Schopenhauerian sense draws him to her, and despite his conscious decision not to see her again ‘a compelling arm of extraordinary muscular power seized hold of him – something which had nothing in common with the spirits and influences that had moved him hitherto’ (49). Jude can’t allow the overwhelming sexual desire he initially feels for her to define him yet at the same time it can’t be suppressed. A major reason why he is drawn to Sue Bridehead is that unlike Arabella she can be harmonised with his idealism: ‘she remained more or less an ideal character, about whose form he began to weave curious and fantastic day-dreams’ (96). Her refusal to identify her womanhood with sexuality is for him a positive attraction: ‘I have not felt about [men] as most women are taught to feel – to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man – no man short of a sensual savage – will molest a woman by day or by night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him’ (154). Sue inadvertently articulates what Jude feels about himself in his desire for Arabella, that he is ‘a sensual savage’. The fact that Sue does not possess the sexual characteristics of Arabella – he calls her a ‘disembodied creature . . . hardly flesh at all; so that when I put my arms round you I almost expect them to pass through you as through air!’ (255) – is central to his attraction because it makes him believe his feelings for her are idealistic and transcend the physical. Hardy suggests that her determination to be treated as if she were a man and to deny conventional ideas of womanhood – ‘I have mixed with [men] . . . almost as one of their own sex’ (154) – has made her use her sexuality as a means of exerting power over men, even to the point of cruelty. She confesses to Jude that her refusal to give way sexually to a man she lived with in London may have played a part in his death: ‘His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty’ (155). But this makes her all the

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more attractive to him as this completely dissociates her from the sexually voracious Arabella. Yet Jude merely fools himself that his love for Sue transcends sex. Paradoxically her lack of obviously sexually attractive attributes and her apparent lack of interest in sex make her all the more sexually appealing to him. Nature is not to be so easily denied. In a letter to Edmund Gosse, Hardy pointed out that he could not depict their sexual relationship as fully as he wanted: You are quite right: there is nothing perverted or depraved in Sue’s nature. The abnormalism consists in disproportion: not in inversion, her sexual instinct being healthy as far as it goes, but unusually weak & fastidious; her sensibilities remain painfully alert notwithstanding, (as they do in nature with such women). One point illustrating this I cd not dwell upon: that, though she has children, her intimacies with Jude have never been more than occasional, even when they were living together . . . This has tended to keep his passion as hot at the end as the beginning, & helps to break his heart. He has never really possessed her as freely as he desired.12

Jude tries in vain to stifle sexual passion by means of religion: He passed the evening and following days in mortifying by every possible means his wish to see her, nearly starving himself in attempts to extinguish by fasting his passionate tendency to love her. He read sermons on discipline; and hunted up passages in Church history that treated of the Ascetics of the second century. (200)

There is thus no acceptance on his part that any compromise with his ideals should be contemplated. If the ideals can’t be reconciled with other aspects of life, that is not the fault of the ideals but of human failure to live up to their demands, a conclusion treated ironically by the narrator: though his kiss of that aerial being had seemed the purest moment of his faultful life, as long as he nourished this unlicensed tenderness it was glaringly inconsistent for him to pursue the idea of becoming the soldier and servant of a religion in which sexual love was regarded as at its best a frailty, and at its worst damnation. (226)

But though Hardy satirises religion’s attitude to sex, he does not suggest that human beings can identify in any complete way with their sexual being. Arabella may be represented in animalistic terms and associated with pigs, but even she is not totally devoid of a human dimension that transcends animal nature. What attracts her to Jude in the first place is certainly his physicality, but the fact that Jude does not define himself by it as she does arouses that attraction to the level of uncontrollable passion: ‘I want him to have me – to marry me! I must have him. I can’t do without him. He’s the sort of man I long for. I shall go

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mad if I can’t give myself to him altogether!’ (55). Knowing that Jude’s mind is subject to spiritual and ethical forces that detach him from animal impulse and cunning, she can manipulate this and fool him into thinking she is pregnant so that he feels it is his human duty to marry her. Though Arabella, in contrast to Tess and Jude, is able to adapt to the world and survive, the logic of the novel suggests that mere animal existence isn’t enough for human beings, even for such as Arabella. Her feelings don’t change and the landlord of the lodging in which they stay after her return from Australia ‘had doubted if they were married at all, especially as he had seen Arabella kiss Jude one evening when she had taken a little cordial’ (398). There is even some element of the tragic in her life, since she has to face the fact that a man like Jude could never love anyone like her beyond the physical level. Jude’s religious ideals may be subject to satire in the novel, but his conviction that there ought to be harmony in the world is not. That what is good for human beings is not necessarily reconcilable with the good of other creatures continually troubles him. This is, of course, highlighted in the pig-killing scene. The fundamental difference between Jude’s idealism and Arabella’s amoral acceptance of the world is revealed most drastically in this incident, when they are forced into killing the animal themselves when the pig-killer fails to turn up. For Arabella, there is no conflict: ‘Pigs must be killed’ (71). For Jude this is another occasion in which there appears to be an intrinsic disharmony in the world. Hardy’s anthropomorphic treatment of the pig – ‘his glazing eyes riveting themselves on Arabella with the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing at last the treachery of those who had seemed his only friends’ (71) – may appear to create a melodramatic and artificial conflict. Hardy perhaps even goes as far as comparing the killing of the pig to the murder of King Duncan by Macbeth and his wife, since Arabella’s offering Jude the ‘sticking-knife’ (70) seems to allude to Lady Macbeth’s urging her reluctant husband to ‘screw your courage to the sticking-place’. But again there may be Darwinian influence. Since both human beings and animals are the product of an evolutionary process, with human beings having evolved from animals, there could be no metaphysical justification for regarding animals merely as designed by the creator for human exploitation. It may be that human needs demanded that animals be treated as a human resource, but such treatment could no longer have any theological justification. After Darwin it could be coherently argued that there was no essential difference between killing a pig and killing a human being. Arabella is not wrong to say ‘Pigs must be killed’ as she sees it as an economic necessity to kill their pig, but Jude’s sense that they have collaborated in a

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kind of murder is not wrong either, as he can’t reconcile it with his religious longing for harmony even if conventional religious belief remains untroubled by such dilemmas. The impossibility of reconciling these two views is at the heart of Hardy’s tragic perspective on life. Arabella adapts herself to the world and is a survivor, but Jude would rather choose death than adapt to a world in which human ideals such as the belief in harmony, justice and ultimate purpose are revealed as merely products of the mind. He can’t accept that events in the world have no necessary connection with human feeling, a state of affairs that often creates a disproportion in the relation between cause and effect from the human point of view. He cannot accept that chance or accident might determine events: chance must be redefined as providence, so that missing a letter from Sue is seen as ‘another special intervention of providence to keep him away from temptation’ (205). Despite his numerous rejections by Christminster and abundant evidence of its failure to live up to his ideals, he cannot give up his conception of it as the ‘heavenly Jerusalem’ (25), reconciling learning and religion, and which answers to ‘the yearning of his heart to find somewhere to anchor on’ (25). Even near the end of his life, this dream remains intact. Yet everywhere he is surrounded with disorder in the world and life, not least the deaths of his children, that is completely irreconcilable with his idealism.

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina It is interesting to compare Hardy and Tolstoy in relation to the tragic. Anna Karenina (1877) has often been called a tragic novel, though ‘tragic’ tends to be used in a rather general sense: ‘Anna’s tragic fate yields values and enrichments of sensibility that challenge the moral code which Tolstoy generally held and was seeking to dramatize’;13 ‘The action of Anna’s tragedy is that she leaves one inadequate man for another’;14 ‘Tolstoy invited his readers to contemplate the implications of a vast, disturbing, gloomy tragedy’;15 ‘Anna Karenina is a full-dress tragedy’.16 For Tolstoy as for Hardy, Schopenhauer was a major influence and provided the basis for a powerful new conception of the tragic – greatly augmented in Hardy’s case by Darwinian evolutionary theory – in that his philosophy suggested that there was a basic division between nature and the human mind in so far as it had managed to transcend nature. The blind will that drove everything in the natural world, including human beings as bodily creatures, was fundamentally in conflict with humanity’s mental achievements, namely culture and civilisation. It has been suggested that Tolstoy’s fiction in general arises out of

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a confrontation and debate with Schopenhauer. Tolstoy even contemplated translating Schopenhauer into Russian and his influence on him was at its height in the period in which he wrote Anna Karenina. Interestingly Tolstoy at first conceived of Anna as a character in the mould of Arabella, driven by animal sexuality: ‘He saw her as the incarnation of lechery and, oddly enough, did not even make her beautiful.’17 Though his conception of the character changed, sexuality remains central to her characterisation. The driving force of her character is the Schopenhauerian will which easily overcomes the civilised constraint of her conscious moral will: In that brief glance Vronsky had time to notice the suppressed animation that played over her face and flitted between her sparkling eyes and the slight smile curving her red lips. It was as though her nature were so brimming over with something that against her will it expressed itself now in a radiant look, now in a smile. She deliberately shrouded the light in her eyes but in spite of herself it gleamed in the faintly perceptible smile.18 (Emphasis added)

And again, when Kitty observes her at the ball: She saw that Anna was intoxicated with the admiration she had aroused . . . She saw the quivering, flashing light in her eyes, the smile of happiness and excitement that involuntarily curved her lips, and the graceful sureness and ease of her movements . . . Every time [Vronsky] spoke to Anna, her eyes lit up joyously and the smile of happiness parted her red lips. She seemed to be making an effort to restrain these signs of joy but in spite of herself they appeared on her face. (95) (Emphasis added)

Critics have tended to see such passages as presenting Anna in a positive light, as they show spontaneity as a value even though they recognise that such a reading is not reconcilable with Tolstoy’s declared – and, as they see it, moralistic – intentions. Also, how can Anna be condemned if that spontaneity is beyond the control of her conscious will? If she were eager to give way to animal impulse then one might have reason to make an adverse moral judgement, but she struggles in vain against her passion: ‘She tried with all her strength of mind to say what ought to be said. But instead of that her eyes rested on him, full of love, and made no answer’ (156). Even if Tolstoy believed that marriage was a sacrament and adultery a sin, how can Anna be condemned because the sexual side of herself overpowers her moral will? Is not Tolstoy then presenting a similar situation to those depicted in such novels as Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure where human beings can’t resolve a conflict between two irreconcilable forces, both of which are fundamental to what it is to be human but also in conflict? Though the novel can be read in that way, such an interpretation can’t be reconciled with Tolstoy’s conscious intention. This is suggested by his

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treatment of another adulterer in the novel, Anna’s brother, Oblonsky. Like his sister he is subject to physical forces which overpower his conscious will, as one sees in his response to his wife’s discovery of his affair with their former French governess: He had been unable to assume an expression suitable to the situation in which he was placed by his wife’s knowledge of his guilt. Instead of taking offence or denying the whole thing, instead of justifying himself or begging forgiveness or even remaining indifferent – any of which would have been better than what he actually did – in spite of himself (‘by a reflex action of the brain’, now thought Oblonsky, who had a leaning towards physiology), in spite of himself he suddenly smiled his habitual, kind, and somewhat foolish smile. (14–15) (Emphasis added)

The parallel between Oblonsky’s involuntary smile and Anna’s when she meets Vronsky is clear, a parallel accentuated by the fact that they are brother and sister. Is moral judgement as inappropriate in his case as it is in Anna’s? Some critics have thought so: ‘the simple moral absolutes are so unreliable that Stiva Oblonsky . . . survives all such potential judgements more or less unscathed’;19 ‘that involuntary movement of the lips . . . somehow reflects credit on him’.20 Oblonsky’s involuntary smile can be interpreted as both motiveless and essentially innocent and thus preferable to conventional lying and hypocrisy. Yet Tolstoy suggests that impulse or spontaneity is only involuntary in a superficial sense. Why does Oblonsky respond with a smile ‘in spite of himself’ when his wife confronts him about his affair? There are several likely reasons: he has had numerous affairs before; he feels no real sense of guilt; the morality of the matter is of little or no interest to him; he had assumed that his wife knew about his affairs and accepted the situation; since she is faded and plain while he is still attractive, she should surely be indulgent. The smile is thus not a pure impulse, a mere ‘reflex action of the brain’, but the product of his past life, behaviour and thinking. His character has been gradually determined by habitual conduct and thinking in the past, with the result that an act of insensitivity towards his wife breaks free from the control of his conscious will. Oblonsky may not be directly responsible for an involuntary act as it was beyond his conscious control, but Tolstoy holds him responsible for the implicit philosophy of life and the decisions he has made in the past which have determined his character and his impulses. A life lived in accordance with religion and a morality based on it would produce a different character which would not be irreconcilable with moral conduct resistant to destabilising impulses. Anna’s relationship to Vronsky can be seen in similar terms. If Oblonsky’s smile testifies to the religious and moral emptiness of his life,

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is the same not true when Anna is unable to prevent herself from smiling at Vronsky? For Tolstoy the answer would be yes, though readers of the novel have refused to accept this even if that may have been his conscious intention, and have argued, following Lawrence, that one should trust the tale and not the teller, and concluded that the dramatic force of the novel presents Anna as a tragic figure. Yet where Tolstoy differs from Hardy is that he believes that even if human beings are in thrall to Schopenhauer’s blind will, this should command no respect; it should and can be resisted if one has a sufficiently powerful religious belief and a related morality. What makes Anna Karenina a challenging novel for the modern reader is that the ‘blind will’ that should be resisted is not represented as a violent or aggressive impulse, but as a passion that it is easy for the reader to identify or at least sympathise with given that Anna’s marriage to Karenin is one that offers her no fulfilment. Yet for Tolstoy the intensity and overpowering nature of this passion has its origin in the moral emptiness of Anna’s life, since she has no understanding of the sacramental nature of marriage, which Tolstoy believes should be regarded as sanctioned by an authority beyond human interests and desires. If a person has no belief in or commitment to a religious authority that transcends the realm of the human, then it is inevitable that the will in the Schopenhauerian sense will overwhelm civilised constraints on it. It is clear that Anna has married Karenin with little consciousness that marriage is anything more than a social arrangement. Thus when Vronsky arouses her sexual passion, there is little contrary force within her which can resist this impulse. She barely has any choice in the matter. She does feel a conflict between her love for her son and her passion for Vronsky, but this is not essentially a moral conflict, since her love for her son is also a matter of spontaneous feeling that has no connection with any religious or moral duty. Not having identified with any set of values that she regards as superior to spontaneous feeling, she is in a situation in which she is drawn in different directions by opposed feeling states with no means of negotiating that conflict. Tolstoy’s powerful dramatisation of Anna’s animation and spontaneity at first is attractive to the reader as it is in marked contrast to the temperament of her husband, who is, as F. R. Leavis puts it, ‘without any spontaneity of life in him and unable to be anything but offended and made uncomfortable by spontaneity of life in others’.21 But Tolstoy gradually reveals the negative side of that spontaneity: the conflict between desire for Vronsky and love of her son; the inconsistency of her feelings, seeking reconciliation with Karenin when she thinks she is dying and being filled with revulsion for him when she recovers; her

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increasing irrationality in her jealousy which leads to a desire to kill herself when she is swept along by the force of a destructive impulse which she cannot control. Like Tolstoy, Eliot is distrustful of impulse and spontaneity, being aware of how easily they can be taken over by egotistic drives, but she believed that negative impulse can be restrained by human feeling states that take into account the social and the civilised, so that the ethical is fundamentally related to feeling rather than to moral absolutes that have their basis in religious doctrine. For Tolstoy, however, such humanism would not have sufficient stability and power to be capable of providing the otherness necessary to subjugate the Schopenhauerian will. The obvious contrast to Anna in the novel is Levin, who is by nature as spontaneous as she is. But he is continually in quest of an objectivity beyond subjective desire which he can serve, and he seeks this in marriage, in his relationship with the land, in work. To be sure, Levin has great difficulty in governing his spontaneity, but his commitment to the transcendence of human desire enables him to control impulse and for the most part to channel it in accordance with a fundamentally religious vision, whereas Anna feels little of no connection with anything beyond her own impulses. Tolstoy then, unlike Hardy, refuses to accept a philosophy of the tragic; though he reveals an intrinsic conflict between the Schopenhauerian blind will and a resisting human dimension, the latter can become a force powerful enough to overcome the former if it is identified with religious faith and its absolute values. If the blind will can thus be subjugated by religion, tragic conflict can be avoided. Anna’s fate may be pitiful but from Tolstoy’s religious point of view it is not tragic: she is a victim of society’s turning away from religious faith towards secularism and humanism. The critics who dismiss or ignore Tolstoy’s intention and who see Anna as a tragic figure do not, however, see her tragedy as arising from an opposition between irreconcilable forces. Rather, Anna is regarded as motivated, even if unconsciously, by a desire for radical freedom, but this desire is frustrated and distorted by the repressive nature of her society and by the fact that Vronsky proves to be too much a product of that society to respond fully to her love. Society is ultimately the source of her death: it offers her almost no alternative other than remaining married to Karenin, and as Leavis asserts, ‘whatever the old Leo (as Lawrence calls him) would have pronounced, the book confronts us with the impossibility, the sheer impossibility, of Anna’s going on living with Karenin’.22 No respect is accorded on this view to the world that destroys Anna; she is thus not tragic in any classical sense but a victim of a repressive society, resembling characters in Ibsen’s social realist plays, such as Nora in A Doll’s House or Mrs Alving in Ghosts.

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However, it can be argued that though Tolstoy rejects the tragic at a philosophical level, he does, even if inadvertently, suggest that life can only be tragic for those who cannot make the kind of commitment to religion that he, and his surrogate, Levin, were able to make. Society may be repressive but for Tolstoy this is not the fundamental cause of the catastrophe. Like Hardy, he recognises that there will never be congruence between human desires and hopes and social institutions which are inevitably imperfect. A perfect society that could satisfy all desires and eliminate all conflict is impossible to achieve. Though Anna experiences social prejudice and exclusion as a result of rejecting her marriage in favour of passion, these play a minor role in her fate. At the root of her decision to kill herself is the impossibility of reconciling the consuming sexual passion she feels for Vronsky with her feelings as a mother for Seriozha, her child by Karenin. Her tragic predicament is thus rooted in an undecidability that is inevitable when religious values that have a transcendent source are rejected in favour of human hopes and desires. She is aware that this situation can be resolved only by making a difficult decision, but she can’t make that decision on her own account and Vronsky fails to help her make it: ‘If . . . he were to say to her firmly, passionately, without a moment’s hesitation: “Throw up everything and come with me!” she would give up her son and go away with him’ (338). With this conflict unresolved and thrown back on their own resources without social supports, inevitably the relationship comes under stress. Critics who have claimed that Vronsky is unworthy of Anna, such as Raymond Williams, oversimplify the novel by seeing Anna’s fate as determined by external factors. Just as one cannot expect society to be perfect, one cannot in this novel expect human beings to be ideal. Tolstoy’s interest is in exploring a relationship based on sexual passion that casts aside marriage as an institution embodying religious values. The love of Anna and Vronsky is shown as powerful and deep but both characters have weaknesses and make mistakes. But to interpret Vronsky’s flaws as a ‘fatal lack’ that dooms Anna undermines her tragic fate by giving it an external cause. In the context of the novel, Vronsky is well above average in passion, responsibility and sympathy. To see him as inadequate implies that Anna’s tragic situation had its source in an unfortunate choice rather than in something more intrinsic. In representing a relationship that sets human needs and desires above religious principles and the moral precepts that derive from them, Tolstoy suggests that Western humanism and secularism will produce irreconcilable conflict and contradictions that will have a tragic effect on human lives. In a relationship in which there is no intermediary such as marriage as an institution validated by God, conflict, tension and instability are

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seen as inevitable and unavoidable. Anna’s instinctive radical humanism in her relationship with Vronsky is shown by her indifference to marriage: she refuses to take advantage of the opportunity to divorce Karenin while he is willing that would have enabled her to marry Vronsky. She also breaks the link between sexuality and reproduction by practising contraception in order not to have more children, implicitly rejecting religious views that this is to place human interests above the authority of God. She even equates pregnancy with illness: ‘Do not forget, I have a choice of two alternatives: either to be with child, that is, an invalid, or to be the friend and companion of my husband – practically my husband’ (669). As a result of this her sexuality becomes increasingly dominant in her relationship with Vronsky. It could be argued that if Vronsky had felt the same need for radical liberation as Anna her tragic fate could have been avoided, his lack of radicalism being shown in his desire for regularisation of their relationship in marriage and his hope that they will have more children. However, at the beginning of their relationship he had been as indifferent to anything other than their relationship as she; it is only in the difficult later phase that he looks to external supports. Having chosen to live together without the religious and social validation marriage would provide, they are thrown back on their personal resources to sustain their affair. This is particularly difficult for Vronsky: ‘Sixteen hours of the day must be filled somehow, living abroad as they were, in complete freedom, cut off from the round of social life that had absorbed so much time in Petersburg’ (491). A relative decline in the intensity of his love creates a relative increase in the intensity of hers, so that an imbalance is created, without there being anything beyond their relationship to prevent this imbalance becoming a serious threat through jealousy and resentment. When Oblonsky’s wronged wife visits them, Tolstoy presents the scene from Dolly’s point of view and goes so far as to suggest that a marriage such as that between Dolly and Oblonsky, in which love has virtually evaporated and only marriage as an institution holds them together, is ultimately preferable to an affair based on love and passion. Whereas some force beyond the relationship gives Dolly a sense of security and identity despite Oblonsky’s repeated infidelities, no such mediating power exists for Anna. As the less secure, Anna is constantly afraid that Vronsky will cease to love her and feels she must continually arouse his sexual desire to keep his love, shocking Dolly. The result is that the relationship goes into a downward spiral: ‘Neither would give expression to their grievance, but each thought the other in the wrong and seized every opportunity to prove it’ (772).

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Tolstoy is, of course, writing in a cultural context in which belief in absolute religious values is being eroded in favour of secularism and humanism, and the realist novel as a form was one of the main forces promoting such a cultural change. Anna Karenina, however, uses the realist novel against itself, as it were, to suggest that the consequences of this would be tragic: without there being any secure counter-force to the Schopenhauerian will, inevitably there will be conflict and power struggle with little possibility of secure resolution. Even with a relationship based on love and passion at the highest level as with Anna and Vronsky this proves to be the case. Faced with a conflict between a human passion that she feels is essential to her human identity, and a reality that appears to be irreconcilable with it, Anna would rather not live than settle for anything less: ‘If he does not love me, but treats me kindly and gently out of a sense of duty, and what I want is not there – that would be a thousand times worse than having him hate me. It would be hell! And that is just how it is’ (796). Yet Vronsky does still love her, but the tensions in their relationship have become irresolvable and he becomes an almost equally tragic figure. For Tolstoy tragic consequences will inevitably follow from living a humanly centred life in a cultural context defined by Schopenhauerian philosophy and materialist interpretations of the world such as Darwinian evolutionary theory.

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness Conrad, like the writers discussed above, is a writer of fiction whose work has a strong relation to the concept of the tragic, arising out of Schopenhauerian philosophy and a Darwinian view of nature, but taking these ideas much further in the direction of an extreme pessimism. This is clearly apparent in his letters to R. B. Cunninghame Graham: There is a – let us say – a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold! – it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled . . . And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself; made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident – and it has happened. 23

He elaborates in a later letter: And the machine will run on all the same . . . The attitude of cold unconcern is the only reasonable one. Of course reason is hateful – but why? Because it demonstrates (to those who have the courage) that we, living, are out of life – utterly out of it. The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods

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of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of a humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence.24

Graham is tragic for being unable to accept this: ‘You seem to me tragic with your courage, with your beliefs and your hopes.’ 25 Conrad sums up his position: What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. To be part of the animal kingdom under the conditions of this earth is very well – but as soon as you know of your slavery the pain, the anger, the strife – the tragedy begins. We can’t return to nature, since we can’t change our place in it. Our refuge is in stupidity, in drunken[n]ness of all kinds, in lies, in beliefs, in murder, thieving, reforming – in negation, in contempt – each man according to the promptings of his particular devil. There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that whether seen in a convex or a concave mirror is always but a vain and floating appearance.26

A tragic perspective emerging out of Schopenhauer and Darwinism could hardly be clearer, but Conrad’s tragic pessimism is similar to Hardy’s in that it does not prevent his work being critical of social practices and institutions. Heart of Darkness (1902), for example, is a ferocious exposure of colonialism and imperialism, at least as practised by non-British colonialists. Marlow, the narrator, believes that colonialism can be redeemed only by an idea: ‘An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea’27 and his being pleased to see ‘a vast amount of red’ on the map suggests that he thinks British imperialism is motivated by an idea and not merely exploitative. Modern critics have, however, tended to focus on the text as an attack on imperialism and colonialism per se. Despite its critique of imperialism, the novella has been accused of promoting racism, notably in a much reprinted essay by Chinua Achebe in which Conrad is accused of being ‘a thoroughgoing racist’.28 For many recent critics influenced by post-colonialist theory this makes the text problematic even though it has been hailed as one of the key works of Modernism: ‘What does it mean to have as one of the best-known and most influential texts about Africa a work from which African history, culture, language, art, customs, ideas and religions are wholly absent?’29 Neither Modernist nor post-colonial criticism has tended to consider Heart of Darkness in the context of the tragic. To do so will not resolve critical debate between these opposed critical perspectives in regard to the work, but it may present some of the issues in a different context.

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Modernist criticism has often, at least implicitly, tried to deflect accusations of racism and Eurocentrism from Conrad by arguing that Marlow should be seen as a not completely reliable narrator whose views should not necessarily be identified with Conrad’s. It is highly unlikely, however, that though Conrad distances himself from Marlow, that this means he disagrees with his representation of the Africans as ‘savage’: ‘The glimpse of the steamboat had for some reason filled those savages with unrestrained grief’ (107). Conrad would certainly not have been alone in associating Africans with savagery. For example, Conrad’s contemporary, Gustav Mahler, expressed the following opinion in an interview about American popular music: [I]t seems to me that the popular music of America is not American at all, but rather that kind of music which the African Negro transplanted to American soil has chosen to adopt. It must be remembered that the music of the African savage, be he Zulu, Hottentot, Kafir or Abyssinian, rises but a trifle above the rhythmic basis. When these people, the ancestors of the present American Negroes, made their compulsory voyages from the jungles of the Dark Continent to the New World it should be remembered that they were in most cases savages pure and simple.

However, Mahler – like Conrad, as I shall argue – sees the savage condition of Africans as a historical phenomenon, not as something that differentiates Africans in a fundamental way from Europeans: It is not reasonable to expect that a race could arise from a savage condition to a high ethnological state in a century or two. It took Northern Europe nearly one thousand years to fight its way from barbarism to civilization. That the Negroes in America have accomplished so much is truly amazing.30

Darwin’s view of the Fuegians as expressed in The Descent of Man may have been a significant influence on Conrad: ‘But there can hardly be any doubt that we are descended from barbarians. The astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of Fuegians on a wild and broken shore will never be forgotten by me, for the reflection at once rushed into my mind – such were our ancestors.’ Darwin goes on to say he would as soon be descended from a monkey or a baboon ‘as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions’.31 Marlow’s views are similar but darker, in that the savagery and barbarism associated in the text with Africa exist for him not far below the surface in European civilisation. This is not sufficiently taken into account in the following position: Conrad’s critical stance toward European ‘civilisation’ and the behaviour of its representatives is perhaps the strongest argument in his favour, but this

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defence is powerfully countered by Terry Eagleton’s point that the novella shows Western civilisation to be ‘as barbarous as African society – a viewpoint that disturbs imperialist assumptions to the precise degree that it reinforces them’. That is, in showing London as also a ‘heart of darkness’, Conrad presupposes the ‘darkness’ or ‘savagery’ of Africa.32

Though Heart of Darkness shows that Europeans can become degenerate, for Conrad London or Western civilisation is not a ‘heart of darkness’ and subject to barbarity or savagery; he shows civilisation as being at the other end of the spectrum from the savagery of life in the African jungle. However, the story emphasises that Africans are not inherently different from white peoples of Europe, since the Ancient Britons were in an equally savage state when colonised by the Romans. Nineteenthcentury racist discourse saw Africans and Europeans as descended from different species – the ‘polygenist’ as opposed to the ‘monogenist’ position which claims all human beings belong to a single species33 – but Conrad, like Darwin, appears to reject the polygenist view. Where Marlow and his listeners sit ‘also . . . has been one of the dark places of the earth . . . Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages, – precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink’ (48–9). A Roman would feel that ‘savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him, – all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men’, and would experience the ‘fascination of the abomination’. Only ‘efficiency’ offers protection. The Romans, like those Europeans exploiting the Belgian Congo, were ‘no colonists’ but ‘conquerors’ who ‘grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got’ (50). Thus it is the British Isles at the time of the Roman conquest and Africa at the end of the nineteenth century that are equated by Marlow. Marlow’s reason for drawing this parallel is to impress on his listeners – the first narrator and three professional Englishmen: the director of companies, the lawyer and the accountant – the fragility of the civilisation they complacently take for granted. He refers several times to their unthinking acceptance of their civilised world: Here you all are, each moored with two good addresses, like a hulk with two anchors, a butcher round one corner, a policeman round another, excellent appetites, and temperature normal – you hear – normal from year’s end to year’s end . . . You can’t understand. How could you? – with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you. (114–16)

Unlike Marlow they are unconcerned with the fact that human beings have evolved from lower animals through a struggle for existence and that this inheritance can never be completely transcended: ‘The mind of

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man is capable of anything – because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future’ (96), and that past includes humanity’s evolutionary heritage. The Africans are different from Europeans only because they are closer to humanity’s essential animality since they are untouched by civilisation, at least as Marlow, and no doubt Conrad, understood it: ‘They still belonged to the beginnings of time – with no inherited experience to teach them as it were’ (103). The most shocking thing for Europeans is to recognise a kinship with them and feel an attraction to their activities: ‘They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar’ (96). Marlow’s narrative is a warning about the fragility of Western civilisation, and this of course is a major reason why Heart of Darkness has become one of the most discussed of literary texts, since the history of the twentieth century bore out the fears expressed in the text that savagery and barbarism could overpower civilised values in Europe, generally perceived at the time Conrad was writing, of course, as the most advanced form of civilisation. The behaviour of the Europeans in the Belgian Congo – especially Kurtz – is an anticipation of what ‘civilised’ white people are capable of when not subject to civilised constraints. Marlow himself resists any temptation to succumb to the amoral greed of Europeans in the Congo by remaining loyal to traditional values such as professionalism and self-discipline. He thus sees the looting of ivory as an ‘imbecile rapacity’ (76) which has ‘no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe’ (87). Why then does Marlow admire Kurtz who becomes the most rapacious of these European exploiters? For Marlow Kurtz is a tragic figure. He went to Africa not for material gain but to write a report for the ‘International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs’. Motivated by the belief that Europe represents civilisation at its height, his aim is to replace savagery with civilised values: He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings – we approach them with the might as of a deity’, and so on, and so on. ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded’, etc. etc. (118)

Marlow is overawed by such idealism: ‘It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence – of words – of burning noble words.’ Yet Kurtz, one of the higher representatives of European civilisation – ‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’

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(117) – whose combination of idealism and eloquence is able to change the lives of those he encounters, inserts into his report the ominous sentence, ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ Not only does he succumb to greed, but savagery and barbarism completely overwhelm his earlier idealism. His power of personality and eloquence become harnessed to dominating his savage African world: ‘He had the power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witchdance in his honour’ (119). Whereas Marlow avoided any real encounter with the destabilising power of Africa, having only ‘peeped over the edge himself’, Kurtz in contrast ‘had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating fo