Abstract
If we go back in time for a brief consideration of the ancient Greek drama, we do so in order further to determine the meaning of our central term: irony, in this case tragic irony. If tragic irony is a universal literary category, why did it not make itself felt before the time of Friedrich Schlegel and the advent of romanticism? Certainly it is not an invention or discovery of the modern mind, and yet Aristotle, that astute and far-ranging philosophical critic, makes no reference to it at all, not in our sense of the term. Not until many centuries later do critics make much of the element of irony but only as a rhetorical device that brings out the contradiction between what a character says and what he actually means. The concept of tragic irony (what Thirlwall loosely called “the irony of fate”) does not establish itself on the literary scene until the romantic revolt breaks out in full force. Why did the modern sensibility stress so obsessively that to which the classical mind seemed utterly blind?
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References
E. R. Dodds, in The Greeks and the Irrational, undertakes to show that the Greeks, far from being creatures of the rational enlightenment, were subject to spells of the irrational. They were not unaware of the contrasted worlds of dream and waking, day and night. They wavered in their conception of man; he is a winged, inspired creature and he is the beast crawling out of the primordial slime. Aristotle stressed the divine element in man, but gradually, by the time of the third century B. C., the Greeks were overwhelmed by a fear of freedom. They betrayed all the symptoms of panic as they felt within them “those irrational elements in human nature which govern without our knowlegde so much of our behaviour....” (E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1959, p. 254). This reversal of form indicates that the Greeks, as Nietzsche had maintained in The Birth of Tragedy, were never mere rationalists; “that is to say, they were deeply and imaginatively aware of the power, the wonder, and the perils of the Irrational.” (Ibid., p. 254).
The dithyramb is closely associated with the worship of Dionysus, performed at the Dionysiac festivals. The worship of Dionysus came to Athens from abroad. The tragic form celebrated the death and rebirth of life. Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, regarded the Dionysiac element, as opposed to the Apollonian, as “the eternal and original power of art, since it calls into being the entire world of phenomena.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Francis Golffing. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1956, p. 145.) A. W. Pickard-Cambridge denies that Greek tragedy bears witness to the epiphany of the God. The evidence, he holds, does not support this conception of the origin of tragedy. See
A. W. Pickard-Cambridge, Dithyramb, Tragedy and Comedy. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1927.
See Herbert J. Müller, The Spirit of Tragedy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956, p. 94.
One critic indignantly rejects the interpretation that Oedipus was the victim of a blind, inscrutable fate that no human power could possibly withstand. The Greeks, he contends, were not fatalists. “There is no fate (in the usual sense) in Greek tragedy.” (William Kelly Prentice, Those Ancient Dramas Called Tragedies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942, p. 112.) It is not to be disputed, however, that Sophocles was justifying the absolute power of the gods, however ambiguous the role they play in the drama of man. “The gods are always right and should not be opposed.” (
C. M. Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1944, p. 367.) The plays of Sophocles end on a note of resignation and proclaim the theme that the lesson of destiny is learned through suffering. The twentieth-century writer, on the other hand, does not believe that suffering necessarily makes for wisdom. Suffering simply illustrates the dominant principle of the irrational. Cesare Pavese was convinced that man has no justifiable claim on life. As he put it, “nothing is due us.”
Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living. Edited and translated by A. E. Murch. London: Peter Owen Limited, 1961, p. 203.
As Alfred Cary Schlesinger points out, a profound change took place in the structure of tragedy after the fifth century. A new form emerges, what Schlesinger calls fate tragedy, a form conditioned by a fundamental change in man’s relationship to the universe. Whereas Sophoclean tragedy stressed the ideal of human responsibility, even though the protagonist may not perceive the cause-and-effect connection between his character and destiny, the new tragedy discloses the intrusion of the inexplicable, the unforeseen and the unforeseeable, the unintelligible. Behind fate tragedy “lies either a belief or a temporary assumption that human character is irrelevant to the course of events. Fate tragedy should show.... that events occur in spite of human character, and that human action has no important results.” (Alfred Cary Schlesinger, Boundaries of Dionysus. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963, p. 24.) Defined in these terms, fate tragedy fittingly describes the rationale that informs the work of such modern tragic ironists as Chekhov, Hardy, Malraux, Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett, and Ionesco.
One critic contends that in this play “the hero’s will is absolutely free and he is fully responsible for the catastrophe.” Bernard. M. W. Knox, Oedipus at Thebes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957, p. 5.
G. M. Kirkwood, A Study of Sophoclean Drama. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1958, p. 248.
G. M. Grube, The Drama of Euripides. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1961, p. 43.
L. H. G. Greenwood, Aspects of Euripidean Tragedy. Cambridge: The University Press, 1953, p. 3.
Shakespeare provides what one critic calls “tragic relief,” breaking up scenes of terrifying intensity with comic elements. Howard Baker, Induction to Tragedy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1939, p. 161.
Alex Comfort writes: “The most vivid impression which we get from the study of the universe is not that a God created man, but that man created God.” (Alex Comfort, The Pattern of the Future. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1949, p. 13.) This is, of course, by no means a new discovery.
“The tragic idea survived the loss of the gods and it survived the loss of the aristocratic hero. It adapts itself to the thought and the ethos of every age — to the Greek pantheon and the goddess Themis, to Christianity, to feudalism, to sentimental deism, to social humanitarianism, to materialistic skepticism, to communism, to existentialism.” Oscar Mandel, A Definition of Tragedy. New York: New York University Press, 1961, p. 61.
Heidegger’s description is that man finds himself “thrown” into the world. See Vincent Vycinas, Earth and Gods. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961, p. 43.
Haakon M. Chevalier, The Ironic Temper. New York: Oxford University Press, 1932, p. 47.
“He is guilty in the sense that he is a member of a guilty society, or living in a world where such injustices are an inescapable part of existence.” (Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, p. 41.) Frye goes on to say that the term irony indicates “a technique
Horace M. Kallen indicates that “the absurd” has a long lineage, an ancient tradition; “the absurd is the free, the absurd is the truth, the absurd is the truth which saves.” Horace M. Kallen, Freedom, Tragedy, and Comedy. De Kalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University, 1963, p. 3.
Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1962, p. 155.
Frank E. Manuel declares: “Present-day mythographers — supported by the findings of archeology — have accepted the bestial, cruel, brooding gods of the older fear-theorists and have turned away completely from the more pleasant and smiling deities, the gods with cornucopias, the pampered, pink-fleshed gods of abundance and love... the joyful gods. The depth psychologists who are now probing the ancient myths discover in them an eternal expression of the tragic drama of the human soul.” Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959, p. 312.
Toward the latter part of his life, H. G. Wells saw the world at the end of its tether. He feared that the brute forces of Nature would triumph. “The old apparent relationship between the evolving mind of humanity and the implacable will of the cosmos had dissolved.” W. Warren Wagar, H. G. Wells and the World State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961, p. 13.
Significant of the changing temper of literature and art was Dada’s “affirmation” of the meaningless, its belief that there was no point to existence. Life was absolutely absurd. Hence Dada practised an art of perverse negation. Richard Hulsenbeck writes: “If the Dadaist movement is nihilism, then nihilism is a part of life, a truth which would be confirmed by any professor of zoology.” (Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets. New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1951, p. 44.) Again he says: “Death is a thoroughly Dadaist business, in that it signifies nothing at all.” (Ibid., p. 44.) Dada, in short, is a creative expression of the ineradicable absurdity of the world. See also
Marcel Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism. Translated by G. M. New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1950, and
Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1958, the latter for its picture of Jarry, the author of Ubu Roi.
In her Chapter on “Paradox of the Comic,” Marie Collins Swabey takes up Schopenhauer’s treatment of comedy and tragedy. She remarks: “In comedy we are confined to the realm of existence and sensible phenomena, whereas in tragedy we penetrate the veil of Maya and rise for a moment to intuition of a supersensible world.” Marie Collins Swabey, Comic Laughter. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1961, pp. 168–169.
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© 1969 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Glicksberg, C.I. (1969). Tragic Irony: Ancient and Modern. In: The Ironic Vision in Modern Literature. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-0977-0_2
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