The Mythos of Autumn: Tragedy

 Notes from Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

 

From the Third Essay —ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM (THEORY OF MYTHS):

The mythos of spring: Comedy

The mythos of summer: Romance

... the Mythos of winter: Irony and satire

The mythos of autumn: Tragedy

(206): "Without tragedy, all literary fiction might be plausibly explained as expression of emotional attachments, whether of wish-fulfilment or of repugnance: the tragic fiction guarantees, so to speak, a disinterested quality in literary experience." 'Realism' as emancipation from dream. Tragedy is not confined to drama or to disastrous endings. The source of tragic effect is not in the mood but in the mythos (Aristotle). Comedy is based on social groups; tragedy focuses on the individual, between the divine and the all too human. 

(207): "The tragic hero is very great as compared with us, but there is something else, something on the side of him opposite the audience, compared to which he is small." The hero is our mediator, wrapped in the mystery of that communion, isolated. What is beyond? (208) "Tragedy seems to lead up to an epiphany of law, of that which is and must be." Fate, etc.—a law superior to the gods themselves (cf. the Father's will, vs. Christ's). 

Revenge tragedy has a simple, binary structure (as opposed to threefold comedy). Revenge may come from another world. The law of nature comprises it as well. Diké, justice; the righhting of the balance = nemesis. Nemesis happens impersonally, unaffected by the moral quality of the human motivation involved. 
- Fate is not external to the hero all the time: normally only after the tragic process has been set going. Admixture of heroism necessary (unlike in irony). 
 - Also, the moral interpretation of tragedy is reductive.  Hamartia is not equivalent to sin. Hybris is frequent as the cause of the hero's downfall. But the morally intelligible process is only a part; catharsis cannot be reduced to a moral interpretation.  At the core: is the innocent sufferer a tragic figure? Tradedy is not concerned with it; it eludes the antitheses good / evil and moral responsibility / arbitrary fate. An archetypal tragic situation in Paradise Lost: man is "sufficient to have stood, though free to fall". Otherwise, we would be in irony or in romance. Proairesis or moral choice as a use of freedom to lose freedom; to come under the consequences of one's act and fate. 

(212): "And just as comedy often sets up an arbitrary law and then organizes the action to break or evade it, so tragedy presents the reverse theme of narrowing a representatively free life into a process of causation". At the end, the hero recognizes the determined shape of the life he has created for himself.

Aristotle's hamartia is a condition of being, not a cause of becoming. At a point, the audience can see both what might have been and what will be. Nemesis is involved with time, whose movement is fatal to the tragic hero as it is beneficial to the comic hero. In irony, unlike tragedy, there is no sense of contact with a timeless world.

Each theory of tragedy is based on a particular tragedy: Aristotle's on Oedipus the King,  Hegel's on Antigone, here Paradise Lost. There are analogies between tragedy and sacrificial ritual; pity and fear are crucial, too, a sense of rightness and wrongness.

(214): "just as the literary critic finds Freud most suggestive for the theory of comedy and Jung for the theory of romance, so for the theory of tragedy we naturally look for the psychology of the will to power as expounded in Adler and Nietzsche." Dionisiac dreams  will impinge upon an Apollonian sense of external order. The vision of the death of the herodraws survivers into a new unity. The hidden world and its remoteness has become visible. Tragedy is a part of quest-myth, a prelude to comedy. It is virtually impossible to make a comedy end somberly; it is not 'natural'. Comic actions in tragedies are contained in underplots, not in the main plot.

Characterization:

The source of the nemesis is an eiron. The withdrawn eiron of comeddy is here a god or a ghost or an invisible force. The "vice" is here a soothsayer or prophet, or a Machivellian villain, who is also an architectus or projection of the author's will. 

The tragic hero is an alazon (unlike in comedy). He is self-deceived by hybris, and often holds a tyrannic or unlawful power: the rightful owner is often a victim. 

Parental figures have the same ambivalence as in other forms. 

The bomolochoi turn here into suppliants, destituted females... They are pathetic, nor tragic. There are terrible consequences if they are rejected, they arouse pity and fear. 

The agroikos here is an outspoken plain dealer, a chorus character. (218) "In comedy a society forms around the hero: in tragedy the chorus, however faithful, usually represents the society from which the hero is gradually isolated." There is an embryonic germ of comedy in tragedy, just as the refusal of festivity is tragic in comedy. 

Love and society are not integrated in tragedy: love is reduced to passion and social activity to duty: cf. Antigone. 

The phases of tragedy go from heroic to ironic. The first three correspond to teh first three of romance; the last three correspond to the last three phases of irony.

1) The hero is given the greatest dignity  in contrast to others: the stag pulled down by wolves. Often a calumniated mother.

2) The tragedy of innocence in the sense of inexperience. Often characters survive, adjusted to adult situations.

3) An emphasis on the completeness of the hero's achievement. The paradox of the downfall which is a triumph, or a triumph with an impending tragic resolution.

4) The typical fall of the hero through hamartia (the tragic flaw).

5) In this phase the heroic element decreases, the ironic one increases; the characters are seen from further away and in a smaller perspective. The ironic perspective is attained by putting characters in a state of lower freedom than the audience (e.g. cultural inferiority). Tragedies dealing with existential projections of fatalism belong here. They deal with metaphysical or theological questions rather than social and moral ones.

6) A world of shock and horror, with central images of sparagmos (dismemberment), mutilation, cannibalism and torture. The hero is too agonized to achieve a heroic status; often a villainous hero. Demonic epiphanies, glimpses of undisplaced demonic vision. The chief symbols are teh prison, the madhouse, the torture chamber. The victim experiences horror at being watched by public exposure.