Aristotle does not talk about what happened when the audience went home and still found maybe Pa, maybe Junior, dying in a back room, as must have often been the case. Art can perform the service of catharsis, but it can’t cure a body or whisk it away, and the best the play could hope to do was to leave people better steeled for the loved one’s demise. There in the theater, though, a person is allowed to do the un-useful thing and fall apart, and other people in the audience are sure to be weeping too. So no one needs to feel absurd about losing his or her mind for a little while.
(In the early days of my disease, I suspected my friends of presenting a false front if they weren’t willing to go a little crazy with me. I wanted us to get crazed and drunk and beat our breasts and rip our tunics and rage and weep, which is what the ancient poets tell us to do if we are to respond to bad news in authentic manner. But lately I’m less inclined to that kind of falling-apart. When faced with a crisis like grief over the fallen house, the kind of person you want hanging around is someone who is handy with a hammer, somebody like the manic-whirlwind energetic God who knows how to get the house rebuilt.)
One essential aspect to a successful tragic plot, according to Aristotle — and this is art I’m talking about, I need to maintain the distinction between tragedy in art and tragedy in life, a distinction oddly smudged in many scholarly discussions of the subject — is that it should be quick, or quickish: the action “endeavors to keep as far as possible within a single circuit of the sun, or something near that.” It also should be complete in itself, a whole that has a beginning, middle, and end. “Beauty is a matter of size and order, and therefore impossible either (1) in a very minute creature, since our perception becomes indistinct as it approaches instantaneity, or (2) in a creature of vast size — one, say, a thousand miles long — as in that case, instead of the object being seen all at once, the unity and wholeness of it is lost to the beholder.”
This is where art and life part company. Thanks to hightech surgical excisions and pharmaceutical assaults on the body, the form that tragedy now takes in life is often a slowish downward slide, which doesn’t suit the demands of literature because it is too big and long. (Thomas Hardy found this out when he wrote his novel Jude the Obscure—with its long, relentlessly plunging trajectory — and was savaged by critics, to the point that the book was burned. He then turned to writing lyric poems, their brevity giving him the freedom to air his laments.)
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I have plenty of friends who will not watch movies if their plotlines plunge. As a culture we have little use for lamentation and instead choose laughter for our cathartic agent. So why, then, does tragedy make up the bulk of the stories that we lug with us into the future? We remember Macbeth and Hamlet and King Lear better than we remember all of Shakespeare’s happy lovers. The tormented are more indelible.
“It is not the worst,” says a character in Lear, “so long as we can say it is the worst.” This sounds reasonable enough until you remember oh Jimke the pain the pain and the unspeakable desire to chop off the legs. Shakespeare hadn’t reckoned on modern medicine’s ability to attenuate disease, nor had his almost-contemporary Michel de Montaigne, who dispensed with the problem of pain by stating that if it was intense, it would be over soon, or, if it wasn’t intense, it could be withstood. Pain that was intense and long could be found in only the goriest myths. If you want to hear about that kind of pain, your man is Prometheus.
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Though I never studied Greek or Latin, I do have on my shelf a small collection of ancient tragedies. Other people must have been eager to be rid of them, seeing as these books came from the kind of used-book sales where, if you arrive at their tail ends, you are charged by the number of brown paper shopping bags you fill. These were the books that nobody wanted to read, or could bear to read, and I bought them in my youth because I was eager to smarten myself up, though I could not pronounce the name Aeschylus.
I knew who Prometheus was, though — the god who got chained in a crag so his liver could be pecked out by eagles. The story is a profound one for anyone who lives in the grip of a nonlethal illness, as his liver mysteriously regenerates each night so the attack can be repeated—“each changing hour will bring successive pain / to rack / your body”—and since he is immortal, he can’t just die and escape his pains.
Zeus has ordered this perpetual torment because Prometheus stole fire from the other gods and gave it to men. But that was not his worst offense, he who could see the future, his name meaning “wise before the event.” He also made it possible that humans no longer foresaw their deaths. Instead, Prometheus had “planted firmly in their hearts blind hopefulness.”
The worst thing about disease is how it undoes Prometheus’s good deed and gives the patient a flash glimpse at his or her possible death — a flash that’s never exactly accurate, of course, because we all ride the plotlines of our singular, inevitable physical demise. Disease is notoriously inconsistent. And yet the flash is still horrifying, frightening beyond belief, because it might contain some truth after all.
Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound describes the god’s crucifixion, the result of his unwillingness to say he’s sorry for his deeds. The poem about Prometheus is of the same approximate vintage as the poem about Job, though Prometheus is the anti-Job, steadfast in his refusal to give up lamenting his fate. Sarcastically, he tells his tormentors: “Oh, it is easy for the one who stands outside / The prison-wall of pain to exhort and teach the one / Who suffers.” Unlike Job, who starts with this kind of sarcasm and is coaxed — then divinely commanded — away from it, Prometheus never gives it up.
The catharsis that’s supposed to come from watching a tragic drama is the final revelation that its victim is not us after all. We walk out of the theater and discover that we are not pinioned on the rock; our children, in fact, are home with the babysitter. This is the problem tragic art presents to those who live at the center of tragedy, or at least what could be called tragedy from the outward view. The center-dwellers have too much in common with the protagonist.
But suffering is also transformed into something else when you’re the one looking outward from inside of it — I shouldn’t have even called it suffering. No one lives at the center of the tragedy because at the center there is no tragedy, the way a fish in a bowl doesn’t see the bowl, instead it sees the distorted world beyond. From the outside, it may look like my body has become more still, but it’s a stillness that’s also busy. Busy with the complex logistics of getting from place A to B, and busy also with its inner life, the inner life that grows so large it consumes the body. In my case, I hope the sufferer has turned into a sentinel, trying to figure out which bird gave that shrill cry outside the window, the cry that sounded like it could have come from a red-tailed hawk.
And so with Prometheus, who keeps his eye on the landscape even while the eagles shred him:
Now it is happening: threat gives place to performance.
The earth rocks; thunder, echoing from the depth,
Roars in answer; fiery lightnings twist and flash.
Dust dances in a whirling fountain;
Blasts of the four winds skirmish together,
Set themselves in array for battle;
Sky and sea rage indistinguishably.
The cataclysm advances visibly upon me,
Sent by Zeus to make me afraid.