Could Greek tragedy provide us with our example? Kierkegaard certainly thought so, for one of the key essays in Either/Or is the essay, in Part I, entitled ‘The Ancient Tragical Motif as Reflected in the Modern’, in which he seeks to bring out the essential difference between ancient and modern tragedy. Our age is more melancholy than that of the Greeks, and so more in despair, says Kierkegaard. The reason for this is that today each person is deemed to be entirely responsible for his actions while ‘the peculiarity of ancient tragedy is that the action does not issue exclusively from character, that the action does not find its sufficient explanation in subjective reflection and decision’. We can see this in the very form of ancient and of modern tragedy. Modern tragedy, like all modern drama, proceeds by means of dialogue; in ancient Greek drama dialogue formed only one component of the play, alongside monologue and, above all, the chorus. ‘The chorus’, says Kierkegaard, ‘indicates … the more which will not be absorbed in individuality.’ (And this, incidentally, explains why opera, as Kierkegaard demonstrates in the previous essay in the volume, on Mozart's Don Giovanni, can say so much more than drama — music, in opera, has taken over the role of the chorus in ancient Greek drama.)
What is this ‘more’? Why does it define ancient tragedy? And why is it absent from its modern counterpart?
The reason for this naturally lies in the fact that the ancient world did not have subjectivity fully self-conscious and reflective. Even if the individual moved freely, he still rested in the substantial categories of state, family and destiny. This substantial category is exactly the fatalistic element in Greek tragedy, and its exact peculiarity. The hero's destruction is, therefore, not only the result of his own deeds, but it is also, suffering, whereas in modern tragedy, the hero's destruction is really not suffering, but is action.
The hero of Greek tragedy was not an autonomous individual. He was caught in and made by a whole web of different interpenetrating elements. These were what led to tragedy but also what absolved him from full responsibility. Terrible things might happen to him, but he could not blame himself, or, to put it in terms of Greek tragedy itself, he might be polluted but he was not guilty. In modern tragedy, on the other hand, ‘the hero stands and falls entirely on his own acts’. ‘Our age has lost all the substantial categories of family, state and race. It must leave the individual entirely to himself, so that in a stricter sense he becomes his own creator, his guilt is consequently sin, his pain remorse; but this nullifies the tragic.’ For the Greeks, ‘life-relationships are once and for all assigned to them, like the heaven under which they live. If this is dark and cloudy, it is also unchangeable.’ And, argues Kierkegaard, this is what gives Greek tragedy its soothing quality. It is, he says, surprisingly but acutely, like a mother's love, whereas modern tragedy, where the whole burden is placed on the responsibility of the hero, is (like the father, he implies) ethical, cold and harsh. Tragedy leads to sorrow, ethics to pain. ‘Where the age loses the tragic’, he concludes, ‘it gains despair.’
Early on he makes a vitally important point which, like so much else in his essay, it is easy to pass over at first reading. He has been talking about the chorus and he says: ‘In ancient tragedy the action itself has an epic moment in it; it is as much event as action.’ To grasp fully what he means by ‘an epic moment’ and to show how what he is saying here and elsewhere in his essay can help us understand the nature of Modernism, we need to turn from Kierkegaard to another remarkable study of Greek tragedy which has not received its due, a book written by an Oxford English don trained in the law, John Jones. The book, written in 1962, is entitled On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy. Surprisingly, Jones, who seems to have read everything, makes no mention of Kierkegaard's essay, but his book can and should be seen as a more scholarly and sustained attempt to tease out its implications.
Jones begins with a chapter on Aristotle's Poetics, arguing that we have misread this seminal text because we have been obsessed with the notion, quite alien to Aristotle, of the Tragic Hero. Aristotle, as Kierkegaard had noted, subordinates character to action: ‘Tragedy is an imitation not of human beings’, says Aristotle, ‘but of action and life.’ It is the mimesis of a praxis, the imitation of an action. Jones demonstrates how nineteenth-century translators of the Poetics, though many of them were notable scholars, consistently mistranslated it because their (essentially Romantic) world view led them to read into Aristotle what was not there. Take, for instance, the Aristotelian notion of the plays showing us a change of fortune from good to bad.
The truth is, they are unable to ask themselves whether Aristotle means what he says; they are prevented by an almost invulnerable habit of mind which discredits the situational autonomy of [Aristotle's] ‘change of fortune’, forces a kind of human dependency on it, attaches it to the heroic, suffering solitary who is supposed to stand at the centre of the stage and of attention, like Hamlet.
Jones shows how this affects every decision the translator has to make and how a series of local choices leads in the end to the creation of a quite unreal figure, the Tragic Hero, more Lear than Oedipus, more Lady Macbeth than Clytemnestra (actually more a Romantic reading of Lear and Lady Macbeth and Hamlet than a truly Shakespearian one).
This does not of course mean that Aristotle does not imagine that tragedy deals with human beings. ‘Aristotle's treatise begins and ends, as any sane aesthetic might, with art confronting life in an effort of interpretation’, Jones sensibly remarks. Yet tragedy is not the imitation of human beings, it is the imitation of an action which involves human beings. As Kierkegaard points out, we tend to think of action as issuing from the solitary consciousness, ‘secret, inward, interesting’. For us action is adjectival, it tells us something about character. But, says Jones, ‘to our sense of characteristic conduct Aristotle opposes that of characterful action’. Drama based on this view will have no notion of Hamlet's ‘I have that within which passes show’, because in it a person ‘is significantly himself only in what he says and does’. That is why Greek drama is essentially a masked drama. To us moderns a mask hides something, to the Greeks it revealed. ‘Masking’, says Jones, incidentally revealing that the good critic must be an etymologist, a psychologist, an anthropologist and someone with his finger on the pulse of the present, ‘flourishes in totemistic societies — the mask, like the wooden body of the totem, shows forth the psychophysical and institutional solidarity of the descent group’. And masked drama implies that what we see enacted before us is not a fiction or a reconstruction, but in some sense a re-enactment: ‘What was done by the man in the story is done again by the mask.’ For ‘the actor-mask is not a portrait; it presents, it does not represent; it gives us King Oedipus.’
In the light of these remarks, Jones goes on, in the bulk of his book, to analyse the plays of the three tragedians whose work has come down to us. He brings out how little we will understand the Oresteia of Aeschylus, the oldest of the three, unless we realise that it is first and foremost not about individuals but about the house (oikos) of Atreus (as we still speak of ‘the House of Windsor’). The oikos consists of ‘house and household, building and family, land and chattels, slaves and domestic animals, hearth and ancestral grave: a psycho-physical community of the living and the dead and the unborn’. It is on this house that the lookout stands to speak the opening lines of the play; it is to this hearth that Agamemnon returns; it is the physical wealth of the house that Clytemnestra tempts him to trample underfoot as she begs him to walk on a richly woven carpet; it is the house that suffers a blow as Agamemnon is cut down; the house that is restored as Orestes avenges his father's murder. We make a great mistake, Jones points out, to try and make the carpet symbolic; it is part of our mistaken search for what lies behind, instead of focusing on what lies before us. The carpet is precious, a lot of work has gone into it, to tread on it is to despoil the house — that is enough.