NOTES ON TRAGEDY from Aristotle's Poetics

Tragedy: goat song (tragos ode)

Tragedy is an imitation of a noble action (process of change) which is complete and has the proper magnitude, and achieves through the representation of pitiable and fearful (terrifying) incidents, the catharsis of such pitiable and fearful emotions.

Catharsis: purgation, purification, clarification
--the concept of arousing a passion in order to "purge" it; it is a learning

Pity: a feeling of pain caused by the sight of some evil, destructive or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it, and which we might expect to befall ourselves. The events of tragedy presumably are pitiable because they seem "undeserved" and fearful because we (the spectator) fear that they might happen to us.

Tragic Hero: is a "great man" in the respect that his actions have significance for both the whole society and the cosmos. Although he is just and virtuous, he is not "perfect." He is possessed with a tragic flaw or hamartia.

Tragic Flaw or hamartia: tragic error, tragic flaw, "missing the mark," miscalculation, sin, misunderstanding of things as they are, tendency to err created by lack of knowledge.

The tragic hero begins the action of the play in ignorance of precisely the information that he most desperately needs to have. At the climax, a recognition occurs that brings with it a change from ignorance to knowledge. The movement of the plot then changes directions--toward a fatal conclusion.

Recognition (anagnorisis): A change from ignorance to knowledge brought about by the incidents of the plot. The "self knowledge" that tragic figures are supposed to achieve through their suffering. Or simply, the change in knowledge.

Reversal (peripeteia): a change of fortune in the play to the opposite state of affairs.

Character: character is subordinate to plot because it is only through actions that character is revealed. In the best of tragedy there must be a relation between character and destiny.

Relevant Quotations

"Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause." (from James Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.)

"... kartharsis ('a purification of the community from the taints and poisons of the past year, the old contagion of sin and death') ... was the function of the festival and mystery play of the dismembered bull-god Dionysus [Bacchus]. The meditating mind is united, in the mystery play, not with the body that is shown to die, but with the principle of continuous life that for a time inhabited it, and for that time was the reality clothed in the apparition (at once the sufferer and the secret cause), the substratum into which our selves dissolve when the 'tragedy that breaks man's face' has split, shattered and dissolved our mortal frame.

Appear, appear, whatso thy shape or name,
O Mountain Bull, Snake of the Hundred Heads,
Lion of the Burning Flame!
O God, Beast, Mystery, come!

This death to the logic and the emotional commitments of our chance moment in the world of space and time, this recognition of, and shift of our emphasis to, the universal life that throbs and celebrates its victory in the very kiss of our own annihilation, this 'amor fati,' love of the fate that is inevitably death, constitutes the experience of the tragic art: therein the joy of it, the redeeming ecstasy." (Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, p.26-7)

"It is vain to try to deduce the tragic spirit from the commonly accepted categories of art: illusion and beauty. Music alone allows us to understand the delight felt at the annihilation of the individual. Each single instance of such annihilation will clarify for us the abiding phenomenon of Dionysiac art, which expresses the omnipotent will behind individuation, eternal life continuing beyond all appearance and in spite of destruction. The metaphysical delight in tragedy is a translation of instinctive Dionysiac wisdom into images. The hero, the highest manifestation of the will, is destroyed, and we assent, since he too is merely a phenomenon, and the eternal life of the will remains unaffected. Tragedy cries, "We believe that life is eternal!" and music is the direct expression of that life." (from The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Neitzche, p. 101-2)