Raymond William's Modern Tragedy (A Critical Analysis by Qaisar Iqbal Janjua)

MODERN TRAGEDY

Raymond Williams (1921-1988)

Raymond Williams was one of Britain’s greatest post-war cultural historians, theorists and polemicists. He was a distinguished literary and social thinker and was concerned to understand literature and related cultural forms not as the outcome of an isolated aesthetic adventure, but as the manifestation of a deeply social process that involved a series of complex relationships between authorial ideology, institutional process, and generic/aesthetic form. He was the author of many works; most notable among them is “Modern Tragedy”.

Fredric Jameson

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LIFE AND WORKS OF RAYMOND WILLIAMS Raymond Williams was born into a working-class family in Pandy, a village on 31 August 1921, in the parish of Llanfihangel, in Monmouthshire, Wales, and was educated at Abergavenny Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He became a member of the Communist Party in his first year as an undergraduate and collaborated with Eric Hobsbawm—an undergraduate contemporary —in writing a pamphlet in defence of the Russian invasion of Finland. Two undergraduate years at Cambridge were followed by conscription into the British Army in 1941, active service as a tank officer during the Allied invasion of Europe, and a further undergraduate year at Cambridge when the war was over. After a short period spent editing small-circulation magazines in London, he settled first in Sussex and later in Oxford as a salaried lecturer for the Oxford ExtraMural Delegacy (Oxford’s organization for adult education), expounding for the benefit of (putatively) working-class audiences that trust in culture and mistrust of capitalism, and that belief in D. H. Lawrence which some Marxists and ex-Marxists shared with the followers of F. R. Leavis. On joining the army, Williams seems to have lost touch with the Communist Party. Later he became a supporter of the Labour Party, but appears for a long time to have been interested less in the political than in the cultural objections to capitalism. After the Labour victory at the general election of 1966, he resigned from the Labour Party in protest against the elitist cynicism or ruling-class character of Mr. Harold Wilson’s leadership. In spite of resuming support for Labour later, he then became one of the half dozen or so freestanding Marxists who fostered the analytical outrage with which the English New Left and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament have embarrassed the Labour leaders, eased Mrs. Thatcher’s way electorally, and made the Labour Party as unelectable as like-minded Democrats have made successive Democratic presidential candidates in the United States. From an early stage, Williams wanted to be a writer rather than a don and a novelist as well as a critic and from his first period in Cambridge was a journalist and public speaker. Public speaking and small-circulation journalism remained with him for the rest of his life, along with an interest in film and television, while Border Country (1960)—his first and only tolerable novel—gave confusing insights into what he was trying to say morally and politically. Border Country gave a low-keyed account of relations between a father and a son. Though it dealt with politics, it was dominated not by politics but by gratitude, nostalgia, and death, and by its account of the idyllic solidarity of a rural Welsh village. The novel resisted the idea that the meritocratic son or the entrepreneurial trade unionist was better than the dying railway man, and there was an anti-intellectual implication that a natural, unreconstructed, conservative way of life was more real than the academic way of life, which the son had adopted. Border Country, though published later, was written at the same time as Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, which dealt with the academic problem from the academic end. But Amis had no experience he was willing to disclose in order to match the experience that Williams disclosed in Border Country, no yardstick except a satiric yardstick with which to compare a farcical university with the University of Oxford, and no more interest in explaining what he had learned from his mandarin education in Oxford than Williams had, as a novelist, in explaining what he had learned from his mandarin education in Cambridge. In 1961 Williams returned to Cambridge for a third time, now as a lecturer (later a professor) in the Faculty of English. At the same time he became a fellow of Jesus College, to which he was brought by M. I. Finley, the American Marxist historian, who

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was a fellow of the college already. In a similar way, Williams himself was later to bring Eagleton, who, in five works published in his twenties in the atmosphere of Vatican II, expounded a liberationist Catholicism which, though it looked to “Marxist, Third-World, Black-power and Hippie intensity” for help in converting “monopoly capitalism” into a “just community,” stood in contradiction to Williams’s irreligion. In a review of works by Eagleton and his collaborators in 1966, Williams gave a mistrustful welcome to “radical Catholicism”’s attempt to “find Christ in the world.” But nothing in the review or the rest of his writings suggests any interest in Christ or any wish to relate Christianity to the “civilized paganism” with which he half-identified himself then. In Williams’s writings religion scarcely existed and it was a central principle that a “common language” was more important than a “common faith.” At no point did he consider religion in its own terms, certainly not in The Long Revolution (1961), where it would have given backbone to boneless arguments, in The Country and the City (1973), where the Church of England would have been of central significance, or in Culture and Society, where many of the thinkers discussed were obsessed by Christianity. Williams’s mind was historical and meditative rather than theoretical; such standing as he had as a theorist derived from Marxism and Literature, in which he woke up to the fact that Lukacs, Gramsci, Plekhanov, Goldmann, Althusser, Benjamin, Barthes, Chomsky, Brechet, and Sartre (among others) had created a cultural Marxism, and that the amalgamation of linguistics, semiology, and Freudian psychology into “cultural materialism” had liberated Marxism from the “deformations” associated with Stalinist practice. Marxism and Literature denied that Marxism was reductive, or that Marx and Engels had had a rigid belief in a base/superstructure model of culture. It underscored their emphasis on “creation and self-creation,” questioned the idea that they had made a simple equation of the “social” with the “collective,” and argued that Marxism could overcome the “reified” or “abstracted … psychological” conception of determination” which was said to have been forced on it by capitalist society. What this meant was that thought and culture were to be understood not as “distortion” or “disguise” but as a Gramscian “hegemony” which “saturated the whole process of living” and came to exist “in the fibres of the self.” This was important, however obscurely expressed, because it suggested that theory could develop a “general consciousness within what was experienced as an isolated consciousness,” and that “tradition,” which orthodox Marxism had normally dismissed as “super structural,” could now be seen to have been “the most evident” or “shaping expression” of “hegemonic pressures and limits.” In other words, that “theory” could be exonerated from the charge of being ineffectual and could meet the perennial Marxist demand for criticism that would “change the world.” In the 1970s Williams was catching up—doing to Marxism what others had been doing in the 1950s and 1960s and what Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and many others had been doing to Christianity between 1840 and 1880—ridding it of features that made it unacceptable to the modern mind. But just as Carlyle, Arnold, and other fellow-labourers had thrown out so much of dogmatic Christianity that nothing distinctively Christian was left, so Marxism and Literature threw out so much of dogmatic Marxism that what was left was either vacuous and banal or not distinctively Marxist. In this connection, there is no need for conservative thought to be afraid of Marxism or to fail to turn its insights to advantage. To take only one example, the idea of hegemony—even of class hegemony as an element in culture—can be deeply illuminating so long as it is understood that hegemony, though distressing for those who wish to have hegemonic authority but are excluded from it, is necessary in the modern

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world not only in the interests of peace and stability but also, where historic liberties and equalities have been established, in the interests of liberty and equality. Williams was too limp a thinker to understand this as either a Marxist or a conservative truth, and wobbled uneasily between wishing to protect intellectual autonomy within a Marxist or socialist consciousness and accepting Mao Tse Tung’s vision of writers being absorbed into “new kinds of popular … collaborative writing.” So much so that the more closely one looks at Marxism and Literature, the more difficult it is to see what was left of Marxism, beyond the name, once Williams’s “complexities … tensions … shifts … uncertainties and confusions” had been applied to it as Carlyle and Arnold had applied theirs to Christianity. If Marxism and Literature lacked bite and edge, it also carried Williams out of his depth. He had been much more in his depth in discussing the English situation that had led up to Culture and Society twenty years earlier. In Culture and Society, English society had been the victim of the cultural corruption of which Leavis had made himself the enemy, industrial society had been the enemy of both culture and community, and the English language—the only real guarantor of community—was being emasculated by the class-oriented imposition of Standard English. Culture and Society took the form of critical exposition of the social doctrine that Williams found in approximately fifty British thinkers since Burke, and in making his critical dispositions he worked with three conceptions. First, that English society before the eighteenth century had been “organic,” however defective it had been in humanity; second, that the English thinkers with whom it dealt had been reacting primarily to the upheaval created by industrialization and democracy; and, finally, that “culture” had provided these thinkers with a “court of appeal” and a “scale of integrity” for evaluating the “way of life” and “driven impulse” of the new kind of society that had been “reaching for control.” Burke and Southey from one side, and Owen and Cobbett from the other, were shown writing from their experience of “the old England” in criticism of the new. “One kind of conservative thinker” and “one kind of socialist thinker” were shown uniting subsequently to criticize laissez-faire ideology by reference to the life of society as a whole, and “organic” was declared to be a central term through which “Marxist thinking” and “conservative thinking” could identify “liberalism” as the common enemy in the 1960s. It was hardly surprising, in these circumstances, that William Morris was said to be “pivotal,” since he, more than anyone else—according to Williams—had found a political role for art and culture in contrasting with established forms of life the possibility of an alternative form of life in the future. In the closing pages of Culture and Society Williams made the first widely read statement of his political opinions, defending a “democratic attitude” against “fear and hatred” and inserting into the aging socialism of the 1950s a Luddite or Leavisite version of the resentments of the 1930s. Williams did not have to invent for himself the workingclass persona which public-school Marxists like Auden and Spender (or an alienated Etonian like Orwell) had had to invent for themselves twenty-five years earlier, and he was thus in a better position to write sympathetically about the “ethic of service” and “real personal selflessness” which had been inculcated by the public schools, the professions, and the regular army. On the other hand, he attacked the scholarship “ladder” which working-class boys like himself had been able to “climb,” denouncing it not only because it “sweetened the poison of hierarchy” but also because it pretended that the “hierarchy of birth and merit” was different from the “hierarchy of birth and wealth,” when in fact both were hierarchies (or elites) that were diminishing “community” and obstructing the “effort” that “every man” ought to make to value his own skill and the “skill of others.” In Culture and Society Williams did not advocate violent revolution, which it would have been ridiculous to do in England in 1958. What he said instead was that

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democracy was “in danger,” that there was a “sullenness” and “withdrawal” which would end in the “unofficial democracy” of the “armed revolt” if they were not dealt with, and that the only way to deal with them was to deprive newspapers, television, cinema, and radio of the “dominative character” that was enabling the “insincerity of a minority” bent on protecting its own culture and power to persuade the masses to “act, think and know as it wished them to.” About equality Culture and Society was vague. “A common culture” was not “at any level an equal culture,” there was no need for equality in “knowledge, skill and effort,” since “a physicist would be glad to learn from a better physicist” and “a good physicist” would not think himself “a better man than a good composer … chess player … carpenter or runner.” Equality was nevertheless crucial, and societies from which it was missing were said not only to “depersonalize … and degrade” but also— as though Japan had never existed—to raise “structures of cruelty and exploitation” that “crippled human energy.” Williams was a class warrior as surely as Orwell had been. He had Orwell’s sense of complexity, and also Orwell’s mistrust of panaceas. In the discouraging circumstances of 1958, his virtuous but self-defeating conclusions were that freedom was “unplannable,” that the “human crisis” was always a “crisis of understanding,” and that culture was a “natural growth” which could only be achieved by comprehending the “long revolution” that had been going on since the eighteenth century “at a level of meaning which it was not easy to reach.” Culture and Society supplied a historical and theoretical basis from which The Long Revolution vacuously, Communications (1962) piously, and the May Day Manifesto of 1967 politically, deduced policy conclusions about the ways in which public ownership and control could make the media minister to a common culture. These did not, however, expand the structure that Culture and Society had established. It was only in Modern Tragedy that expansion was effected. Like Culture and Society, Modern Tragedy discussed texts—the main tragic texts and texts about tragic theory that had been written in Europe and the United States since Ibsen—and extracted from them a political message about the inadequacy of individuation and about the desirability of revolution. Modern Tragedy was written in a dense, coded prose. Decoded, it manifests the confusion between the cultural elite and the people which was a feature of Williams’s doctrine throughout his work and which became particularly troublesome in this book, where dramatic and fictional tragedy were presented as realizations of the “shape and set” of modern “culture,” and the dramatists and novelists who had produced it were assumed to represent “our” minds and experience. This thesis was both elitist and anti-elitist, naïve about the prospect of bridging the gap between the cultural elite and the people but emphasizing the affiliations that kept Williams, as a member of the former, in conscious empathy with the latter. The effect was nevertheless odd, implying that Strindberg, Brechet, and Arthur Miller, for example, were not arcane, and amalgamating the “we” who went to their plays or listened to Williams’s lectures in Cambridge with the “we” who had been described appreciatively in Border Country. However deep Williams’s desire was to make “critical discrimination” relevant to the people among whom he had grown up, moreover, it neglected the consideration that critical discrimination was in fact a minority activity which spoke meaningfully only to those who had already heard Leavis’s voice. John Higgins opines about the personality of Raymond Williams. “Raymond Williams died in January 1988. The immediate response was overwhelming: progressive intellectuals throughout the world mourned the passing of one of the foremost socialist thinkers, intellectuals and cultural activists of the postwar period. In the obituary

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columns of leading newspapers, at conferences and on television, and in the pages of academic journals, we saw the public mourning of a figure who was, in Patrick Parrinder's words, `father figure to thousands', who was, for Juliet Mitchell and many more like her, `an intellectual and moral touchstone'. Who was this remarkable figure and why should his work continue to hold our interest and attention? We can begin to answer these questions by looking briefly at the background and career of Britain's most distinguished socialist thinker on culture of the past forty years”.

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A CRITIQUE OF MODERN TRAGEDY “Modern Tragedy” by Raymond Henry Williams is a compilation of eleven essays written on various aspects of tragedy and a play “Koba”. These essays were published from 1962 to 1964 in various magazines like Kenyon Review, New Left Review, Studies on the Left, and Critical Quarterly. These essays were published in book form by the title of “Modern Tragedy” in 1966. The book was thoroughly revised and again published in 1979. "Modern Tragedy", is perhaps the most important twentieth-century inquiry into the ideas and ideologies that have influenced the production and analysis of tragedy. Williams sees tragedy both in terms of literary tradition and in relation to the tragedies of modern society, of revolution and disorder, and of the experiences of all of us as individuals. Like Culture and Society, Modern Tragedy discussed texts—the main tragic texts and texts about tragic theory that had been written in Europe and the United States since Ibsen—and extracted from them a political message about the inadequacy of individuation and about the desirability of revolution. Modern Tragedy was written in a dense, coded prose. Decoded, it manifests the confusion between the cultural elite and the people which was a feature of Williams’s doctrine throughout his work and which became particularly troublesome in this book, where dramatic and fictional tragedy were presented as realizations of the “shape and set” of modern “culture,” and the dramatists and novelists who had produced it were assumed to represent “our” minds and experience. This thesis was both elitist and anti-elitist, naïve about the prospect of bridging the gap between the cultural elite and the people but emphasizing the affiliations that kept Williams, as a member of the former, in conscious empathy with the latter. The effect was nevertheless odd, implying that Strindberg, Brechet, and Arthur Miller, for example, were not arcane, and amalgamating the “we” who went to their plays or listened to Williams’s lectures in Cambridge with the “we” who had been described appreciatively in Border Country. However deep Williams’s desire was to make “critical discrimination” relevant to the people among whom he had grown up, moreover, it neglected the consideration that critical discrimination was in fact a minority activity which spoke meaningfully only to those who had already heard Leavis’s voice. “Modern Tragedy” owns three major parts. The first part is about the history and criticism of ideas regarding tragedy, and follows in some respects, the work attempted in his famous books Culture and “Society and The Long Revolution”. The second part follows from “Drama from Ibsen to Eliot”, though the questions raised here are different. Over four years, Williams gave a series of lectures on Modern Tragedy in the English faculty at Cambridge, and this second part is a revised version of those lectures. The third part consists of a play called “Koba” which the writer has been working on intermittently to the other writings on Tragedy. The literature of ideas and of experience is a single literature. Tragedy is the most important example of this complex and necessary unity. So, the writer says, the book is about the connections, in modern tragedy, between event and experience and idea, and its form is designed at once to explore and to emphasise these radical connections. The contents of the book are as follows; PART ONE: TRAGIC IDEAS 1. Tragedy and Experience. 2. Tragedy and the Tradition. 3. Tragedy and Contemporary Ideas. 4. Tragedy and Revolution.

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5. Continuity (A brief summary of the previous four articles). PART TWO: MODERN TRAGIC LITERATURE 1. From Hero to Victim: The making of Liberal Tragedy, to Ibsen and Miller. 2. Private Tragedy: Strindberg, O’Neill, Tennessee Williams. 3. Social and Personal Tragedy: Tolstoy and Lawrence. 4. Tragic Deadlock and Stalemate: Chekhov, Pirandello, Ionesco, Beckett. 5. Tragic Resignation and Sacrifice: Eliot and Pasternak. 6. Tragic Despair and Revolt: Camus, Sartre. 7. A Rejection of Tragedy: Brechet. PART THREE: “KOBA”, A TWO-ACT PLAY Raymond Williams has prearranged the summary of his book in a short note entitled “Continuity”, in which he is of the view,

“I began from the gap between tragic theory and tragic experience, and went on to inquire into the history of the idea of tragedy: and to criticise what I see as a dominant contemporary ideology. I then argued the relationship between tragedy and history, and in particular the contemporary relationship between tragedy and revolution. In the rest of the book (part two) may emphasis will be different. What I have written about tragedy and revolution is in a sense a preface to my third part. What I have written more generally, on tragic ideas and experiences, needs another kind of discussion, of modern tragic literature, and this is the substance of my second part. The test of what I have argued will come again there in a quite different form.” The following three essays are included in the M.A. English Punjab University Syllabus for Critical Study: 1. Tragedy and the Tradition (Essay No.2 of Part-I) 2. Tragedy and Contemporary Ideas (Essay No. 3 of Part-I) 3. A Rejection of Tragedy: Brechet (Essay No. 7 of Part-II)

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MOST EXPECTED QUESTIONS Q:

WHAT DOES RAYMOND WILLIAM REMARK ABOUT TRAGEDY IN “MODERN TRAGEDY”?

Ans: Raymond Williams was not only an important writer and-thinker about culture and politics, literature and drama, television and communication; he was also a socialist writer and activist. He came from a Welsh working class background, spent fifteen years teaching for the Workers' Educational Association, was a participant in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the New Left from the late 1950s, coordinated an important socialist manifesto in 1967 and 1968, welcomed the student/worker strikes of 1968, and in the 1970s and 1980s supported socialist, feminist, ecological, and peace movements. His political intentions are evident in all of his work, especially in his keen attention to what is silenced by the dominant cultural and political discourses. Williams' writing in the post-war period had a kind of existentialist motif of blocked individual liberation. This co-existed with other themes: a very complex sense of the active making of community, an emphasis on language, and on the history of cultural forms. Williams' most important writing is organized about several tropes: the ways in which keywords operate through their semantic instability; the complex development of subjunctive discursive forms which Williams calls the ‘knowable community’ in the novel and `complex seeing' in drama. "Modern Tragedy", first published in 1966, is perhaps the most important twentieth-century inquiry into the ideas and ideologies that have influenced the production and analysis of tragedy. Williams sees tragedy both in terms of literary tradition and in relation to the tragedies of modern society, of revolution and disorder, and of the experiences of all of us as individuals. Like Culture and Society, Modern Tragedy discussed texts—the main tragic texts and texts about tragic theory that had been written in Europe and the United States since Ibsen—and extracted from them a political message about the inadequacy of individuation and about the desirability of revolution. Modern Tragedy was written in a dense, coded prose. Decoded, it manifests the confusion between the cultural elite and the people which was a feature of Williams’s doctrine throughout his work and which became particularly troublesome in this book, where dramatic and fictional tragedy were presented as realizations of the “shape and set” of modern “culture,” and the dramatists and novelists who had produced it were assumed to represent “our” minds and experience. This thesis was both elitist and anti-elitist, naïve about the prospect of bridging the gap between the cultural elite and the people but emphasizing the affiliations that kept Williams, as a member of the former, in conscious empathy with the latter. The effect was nevertheless odd, implying that Strindberg, Brechet, and Arthur Miller, for example, were not arcane, and amalgamating the “we” who went to their plays or listened to Williams’s lectures in Cambridge with the “we” who had been described appreciatively in Border Country. However deep Williams’s desire was to make “critical discrimination” relevant to the people among whom he had grown up, moreover, it neglected the consideration that critical discrimination was in fact a minority activity which spoke meaningfully only to those who had already heard Leavis’s voice. Raymond Williams has encoded the ideas of his book in a short note entitled “Continuity”, in which he is pf the view,

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Q: Q:

“I began from the gap between tragic theory and tragic experience, and went on to inquire into the history of the idea of tragedy: and to criticise what I see as a dominant contemporary ideology. I then argued the relationship between tragedy and history, and in particular the contemporary relationship between tragedy and revolution. In the rest of the book (part two) may emphasis will be different. What I have written about tragedy and revolution is in a sense a preface to my third part. What I have written more generally, on tragic ideas and experiences, needs another kind of discussion, of modern tragic literature, and this is the substance of my second part. The test of what I have argued will come again there in a quite different form.” WHAT IS THE MEANING OF TRADITION AND HOW IT IS CONNECTED WITH THE CHANGE IN TRAGEDY? GIVE A SATISFACTORY DISCUSSION. WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE TRADITION AND THE TRAGEDY AND WHAT KIND OF EXPERIENCES ARE THAT WE MISTAKENLY CALL TRAGIC IN MODERN TIMES ACCORDING TO WILLIAMS?

Ans: “Tragedy and the Tradition” is the second essay of part one of Raymond Williams’ book “Modern Tragedy”. The essay is a discussion on the common and the traditional interpretations of tragedy. Williams has used his power of perception and has come with a strong thesis on the evolution of tragedy in the essay. In a previous essay, Raymond tells the basics of tragedy in these words;

“We come to tragedy by many roads. It is an immediate experience, a body of literature, conflict of theory, an academic problem.” According to Williams, tragedy has not been the death of Princes; it has been at once more personal and more general. He has compared his own sense of tragedy with the conventions of the time. Tragedy is not simply death and suffering, and it is certainly not accident. Nor is it simply any response to death and suffering it is, rather, a particular kind of event, and kind of response which are genuinely tragic, and which the long tradition embodies. In this article, he has tried to examine two questions: (a) What is the meaning of tradition? (b) What is the relation between the tradition to tragedy and the kinds of experience that in modern times, we mistakenly call tragic? The writer proposes to examine the tradition, with particular reference to its actual historical development, Williams remarks, “Tragedy comes to us, as a word, from a long tradition of European Civilization, and its is easy to see this tradition as a continuity in one important way: that so many of the later writers and thinkers have been conscious of the earlier and have seen themselves as contributing to a common idea or form.” We usually try to make a contrast between the traditional and the modern, and try to compress and unify the various thinking of the past into a single tradition. The tradition, Williams explaining this point says: “It is a question, rather, of realising that a tradition is not the past, but an interpretation of the past: a selection and valuation of ancestors, rather than a neutral record. And if this is so, the present, at any time, is a factor in the selection and valuation. It is not the contrast but the relationship between modern and traditional that concerns the cultural historian.” Williams further remarks:

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“To examine the tragic tradition, that is to say, is not necessarily to expand a single body of work and thinking, or to trace various within an assumed totality. It is to look critically and historically, at works and ideas which have certain evident links, and which are associated in our minds by a single and powerful word. It is above all, to see these works and ideas in their immediate contexts as well as in their historical continuity, and to examine their peace and function in relation to other works and ideas, and to the variety of actual experience.” According to Williams, out of some three hundred Greek plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and many others, thirty two plays have survived. Yet what survives has an extraordinary power: some eight or ten plays are amongst the greatest dramas of the world. This major achievement has affected the subsequent development of tragic drama in all degrees from general awareness to conscious imitation. Yet there has been no recreation or reproduction of Greek tragedy because its uniqueness is genuine, and in important ways not transferable. Even in itself, Greek Tragedy is resistant to any kind of systematisation: there are intractable differences between the three major tragedians. The reason is that the three issues of tragedy i.e. Fate, Necessity and the nature of the Gods were not systematised by the Greeks. The particular dramatic form is also least imitable. This is not an isolable aesthetic and technical achievement: it is deeply rooted in a precise structure of feeling. This is where the modern system most clearly misinterprets the plays: it looks at the mainspring of the action as the isolation of the hero. In fact, what the form embodies is not an isolable metaphysical stance, rooted in individual experience, but a shared and indeed collective experience. The specific and varying relations between chorus and actors are its true dramatic relations. When this unique Greek culture changed, the chorus which was the crucial element of dramatic form was discarded. With it, the unique meaning of tragedy was also lost. We can see this clearly in the transition from the classical to the mediaeval world. It is now generally agreed that there was little or no tragedy in mediaeval literature. This agreement seems to rest on two grounds: first, that tragedy was then understood as narrative, rather than as drama; second that the general structure of mediaeval belief had little place for the genuinely tragic action. In this major historical period, the word ‘tragedy’ was used in a quiet specific sense. The most famous English mediaeval definition of tragedy is in Chaucer’s Prologue to the Monk’s Tale: Story of a person falling from height to low degree. The emphasis here is obviously on a change of worldly condition, dramatised by the reference to ‘high degree’. In the Monk’s Tale, the element of chance is also included in the meaning of tragedy. Williams concludes: “The story of tragedy, then, is the change from prosperity to adversity, determined by the general and external fact of mutability.” Medieval tragedies are usually collected examples of the operation of a general law, and the keyword is fortune. Williams quotes many examples to explain this point that the ground of tragic action was the operation of this arbitrary and incomprehensible power. The medieval idea of tragedy was worldly as fortune was taken to be worldly success. The falls of heroes were examined in the light of the doctrine of fortune. Behind the particular sins was a more general sin: that of trusting to fortune in the sense of seeking worldly success. The pride of the world involved all other vices, and the remedy was to put no trust in the world but to seek God. These developments brought about the exclusion of conflict from the tragedy, and tragedy came to be considered as a story, an account, but not an action. A main source of Renaissance tragedy was the emphasis on the falls of famous man. But, with the dissolution of the feudal world, the practice of tragedy made view connections. Williams quotes Sidney to explain that the theme of mutability is still dominant, and its exemplary character. But the political distinction between King and Tyrant has replaced the simple exposure of eminence, and the emphasis of ‘affects’

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provides as link to a new interest. Within the exemplary tradition, and the continuing emphasis on the affairs of Kings, there is a new interest in the actual workings of tragedy. Two different traditions- the medieval emphasis on the fall of princes and the new Renaissances interest in tragic methods and effects – gave birth to a new tradition. It was Sidney who gave more attention to the methods of writing tragedy than to any moral or physical idea. The idea of tragedy ceased to be metaphysical and became critical, through this development was not complete until the neo-classical critics of the seventeenth century: Over the next two centuries, until the radical Hegelian revision, the idea of tragedy comprises mainly methods and effects. In this period, the new significance of exalted rank in tragedy appears a continuity from the past. Socially, this is an aristocratic rather than a feudal conception. Rank in tragedy became important because of its accompanying style. The increasing secularisation of tragedy is related to the new understanding of dignity. Dryden argued that

“exalted rank was necessary to show that no condition was exempt from the turns of fortune.” But now a change was visible. The moving force of tragedy was now quite clearly a matter of behaviour, rather than either a metaphysical condition or a metaphysical fault. Error was related to the action, which was in itself a general mutability. Now the emphasis is on an increasingly isolated interpretation of the character of the hero: the error is moral, a weakness in an otherwise good man, who can still be pitied. The noble way to handle suffering appears in the widespread discussion of tragic effect. Within such an idea of tragedy, both hero and spectator are conscious consumers of feeling, and their actions are limited to occasions for displaying their modes of consumption. Lessing (1729-81) was a noted German Critic and dramatic poet. His major contribution to the idea of tragedy is (a) a theoretical rejection of neo-classicism, (b) a defence of Shakespeare, (c) and an advocacy and writing of bourgeois (middle class of society) tragedy. In Lessing, the whole previous tradition was reinterpreted in terms of a pressing contemporary interest and valuation Neo-classicism was false classicism, the real inheritor of the Greeks was Shakespeare; the real inheritor of Shakespeare was the new national bourgeois tragedy. Raymond Williams does not agree with Lessing and holds that Shakespeare was not the inheritor of the Greeks; he was a major instance of a new kind of tragedy. The character of Elizabethan tragedy is determined by a very complicated relationship between elements of an inherited order and elements of a new humanism. If the historical development of the idea of tragedy is to be fully understood, we must consider the complicated process of secularisation. In one sense, all drama after the Renaissance is secular, and the only fully religious tragedy we have is the Greek, Elizabethan drama is thoroughly secular in its immediate practice, but undoubtedly retains a Christian consciousness. The increasing emphasis on a rational morality affected the tragic action in one important way: that it insisted on relating suffering to moral error, and so required the tragic action to demonstrate a moral scheme. Tragedy in this view shows suffering as a consequence of error, and happiness as a consequence of virtue. Any tragedy which fails to do this must be reformed or re-written, to meet the demands of what is called ‘poetic justice’. The spectators will be moved to live well by the demonstration of the consequences of good and evil. Within the action itself, the characters themselves will be capable of the same recognition and change. In this tradition, the response to suffering is inevitably redemption, and the response to evil is repentance and goodness. But this scheme called ‘poetic justice’ might be demonstrated in a fiction, but could not negotiate much actual experience. Unexplained and irrational suffering in the real world eventually over-threw not only this version of consequence but of its whole moral emphasis.

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Hegel (1770-1831), a famous German philosopher, did not reject the moral scheme that had been called poetic justice, but he described it as the triumph of ordinary morality, and the work that embodied it as social drama rather than tragedy. This new emphasis marks the major emergence of modern tragic ideas. What is important in tragedy, for Hegel, is not suffering as such – ‘mere suffering’ – but its causes. Mere pity and fear are not tragic. Tragedy recognises suffering as ‘suspended over active characters entirely as the consequence of their own act’. It does not take into consideration the external contingency or the circumstance beyond the control of the individual, such as illness, loss of property, death and the like. For a genuine tragic action, there should be present the principle of individual freedom and independence. This conscious individuality is the only condition of tragedy. Through it, the essential tragic action can occur an action of necessary conflict and resolution. In Hegel’s version of the tragic action, valid but partial claims come into inevitable conflicts; in the tragic resolution, they are reconciled; even at the cost of the characters that stand of them. Williams points out two differences between the ancient and modern tragedies. First, in the ancient tragedy, the characters clearly represent the substantive ethical ends; in modern tragedy, the ends are wholly personal. Secondly, in ancient tragedy, there is not only the downfall of conflicting persons and ends in the achievement of eternal justice. An individual may surrender his partial and under a higher command; in modern tragedy, the whole question of resolution is more difficult because the character is more personal. Justice itself is more abstract and colder. Reconciliation, when it comes, will often be within the character and will be more complicated. Hegel’s interpretation of tragedy is part of a general philosophy rather than a historical criticism. Williams concludes the discussion on Hegel’s idea of tragedy in these words:

“Thus Greek tragedy has been seen as the concrete embodiment of the conflict between primitive social forms and a new social order. Renaissance tragedy has been seen as the embodiment of the conflict between a dying feudalism and the new individualism. It is not eternal justice, in Hegel’s sense, that is affirmed in the tragic issue, but rather the general movement of history, in a series of decisive transformations of society. Not all conflicts of this kind lead to tragedy. There is only tragedy when each side finds it necessary to act, and refuses to give way”. Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and Nietzsche (1844-1900) are German philosophers. Their views also contributed to the development of the idea of tragedy. Before Schopenhauer, tragedy was associated with (a) ethical crisis (b) human growth and (c) history. The German philosopher secularised the idea of fate when he said, “The true sense of tragedy is the deeper insight, that it is not his own individual sins that the hero atones for, but original sin, i.e. the crime of existence itself.” What Schopenhauer offers is the quite different sense of a general human fate which is above and beyond particular cases. In this respect, he is the forerunner of an idea of tragedy which seems now to be dominant: that it is an action and a suffering rooted in the nature of man, to which historical and ethical consideration are irrelevant. So the meaning of tragedy is this recognition of the nature of life, and the significance and the tragic hero is his resignation, the surrender not merely of life but of the will to live. The heroes of tragedy are purified by suffering in the sense that the will to live, which was formally in them, becomes dead. Within this negation, Nietzsche found a new kind of tragic affirmation. Tragedy, in his view, dramatises a tension which it resolves in a higher unity. There hero, the highest manifestation of the will, is destroyed, but the eternal life of the will remains unaffected. The metaphysical delight in tragedy is this active and communicated process. According to him, the action of tragedy is not moral, not purgative, but aesthetic. Nietzsche’s

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powerful linking of tragedy with myth, the rejection of science and political reaction has been of major importance. As a consequence of this, in tragic theory, the emphasis is on myth as the source of tragic knowledge, and on ritual as a description of communicated action. The central thesis of Nietzsche’s book Birth of Tragedy is: the ritual origin of Greek tragedy as well as the interdependence of myth and ritual in all primitive cultures. Later on anthropologists also emphasized the importance of myth and ritual in different cultures. Then this came to be known as the latest mode of an idea of tragedy. We should examine this idea in its historical and ideological context as it has played a crucial interpretative role. The terms ‘myth’ and ritual seem capable of infinite extension. What we need to clarify is the difference between ‘myth’ as heroic legend and ‘myth’ in the Nietzsche and sense of a supra-rational source of spiritual wisdom. There is a plenty of evidence connecting tragedy of all periods with the former. The heroic legend, in the Greeks and others, is neither rational nor irrational, in the modern sense, because it was primarily taken as history. The ways dramatising it have been various. Similarly ritual in the sense of a form of worship of a particular god cannot be glibly identified with the many forms of dramatic action, in which there is no properly ritual action at all. The fact is that ‘myth’ and ‘ritual’ are being used, in this modern idea of tragedy, as metaphors. The meaning of the tragic action, in this version, is a cyclic death and rebirth, linked to the seasons and centring on a sacrificial death which through lament and discovery becomes a rebirth: the death of the old is the triumph of the new. Now the essential movement described here is indeed a common tragic meaning. But we cannot identify this interpretation as “the tragic vision” as established by facts of tragic origins, which have somehow persisted through so many historical periods. What this idea of tragedy seems essentially to teach is that suffering is a vital and energising part of the natural order. To participate in this version of the life-process is seen as the ‘tragic’ response, as opposed to the ‘moral’ or ‘optimistic’ or a ‘rational’ response Williams concludes:

Q: Q: Q:

“At the centre of this “ritual” action, after all, is the tragic hero, whose inner conflict is the whole tragic action, and whose crisis and destruction can be seen as the ritual tearing-to-pieces and sacrifice for life. Thus, not only do we find the use of myth in a specifically modern sense to rationalise a post Christian metaphysics, but the conversion of the ritual figure to a form of the modern hero the hero who in liberal tragedy is also the victim, who is destroyed by his society but who is capable of saving it.” GIVE A CRITICAL APPRECIATION OF WILLIAMS ESSAY “TRAGEDY AND CONTEMPORARY IDEAS”. HOW TRAGEDY IS AFFECTED BY ITS CONTEMPORARY ERA? TRAGEDY MUST BE AFFECTED BY THE AGE IN WHICH IT IS PRODUCED, DO YOU AGREE WITH WILLIAMS?

Ans: “Tragedy and Contemporary Ideas” is the third essay of part one of Raymond Williams’s book “Modern Tragedy”. As the name suggests, this essay is a discussion of tragedy in relation to contemporary idea. Williams has tried to reinterpret the varieties of tragic experience by reference to the changing conventions and institutions. Tragic experience, because of its central importance, commonly attracts the fundamental beliefs and tensions of a period. Through tragic theory, the shape and set of a particular culture is often deeply realised. The major contributions to tragic theory were made in the 19th century before the creative period of modern tragedy. Modern age is a major period of tragic writing directly comparable in importance with the periods of the past. The writer has discussed the major points of the tragic theory; which are: Order and accident; the

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destruction of the hero; the irreparable action and its connections with death; and the emphasis of evil. It is generally said that there is no significant tragic meaning in “everyday tragedies” because the event itself is not tragedy, but only becomes so through shaped response. Williams does not agree with this view. He cannot see how it is possible to distinguish between an event and response to an event, in any absolute way. In the case of ordinary death and suffering, when we see mourning and lament, when we see men and women breaking under their actual loss, we are in the presence of tragedy. Other responses are also possible: indifference, justification, even relief or rejoicing. But where the suffering is felt, where it is taken into the person of another, we are clearly within the possible dimensions of tragedy. But it is also possible for some people to hear of a mining disaster, a burned out family, a broken career, or a smash on the road without feeling these events tragic in the full sense. Such events are called accidents and are not connected with any general meaning in them. Williams mentions Yeast’s and Hegel’s exclusion from tragedy of certain kinds of suffering as “mere suffering”. This modern separation of tragedy from “mere suffering” is the separation of ethical control and human agency from our understanding of social and political life. What we encounter again and again in the modern distinction between tragedy and accident and in the related distinction between tragedy and suffering is a particular view of the world which gains much of its strength from being unconscious and habitual. The events not seen as tragic are deep in the pattern of our own culture: War, famine, work, traffic, and politics. To see no tragic meaning in them is a sort of our bankruptcy. We can only distinguish between tragedy and accident if we have some conception of a law or an order to which certain events are accidental and in which certain other events are significant. In the definition of tragedy as dependent on the history of a man of rank, some deaths mattered more than others, and rank was the actual dividing line, the death of a slave was no more than incidental and was certainly not tragic. Ironically, our own middle class culture began by appearing to reject this view: the tragedy of a citizen could be as real as the tragedy of a prince. The extension from the prince to the citizen became in practice an extension to all human begins. The emerging bourgeois society rejected the emphasis on rank in tragedy: the individual was neither the state nor an element of the state, but an entity in him. In this view, there was both gain and loss: gain-the suffering of a man of no rank came to be regarded as important; loss-in the stress on the fate of an individual, the general and public character of tragedy was lost. Eventually new definitions of general and public interest were embodied in new kinds of tragedy. But the idea of a tragic order had to exist with the loss of any such actual order. What happened, at the level of theory, was then the abstraction of order and its mystification. What had been a whole lived order, connecting man and state and world became, finally, a purely abstract order. Order, in tragedy; is the result of the action. In any living belief, this is always the relation between experience and conviction. Specifically in tragedy the creation of order is directly related to the fact of disorder, through which the action moves. There is an evident variation in the nature of tragic disorder. It can be the pride of man set against the nature of things, or it can be a more general disorder which in aspiration man seeks to overcome. In different cultures, disorder and order both vary, for they are parts of varying general interpretations of life. We should see this variation as an indication of the major cultural importance of tragedy as a form of art. It is often argued that tragedy was dependent, in the past, on ages of faith, and is impossible now, because we have no faith. This relation between tragedy and stability of belief seems to be almost the opposite of the truth. The ages of comparatively stable belief, and of comparatively close correspondence between beliefs and actual experience, do not seem to produce tragedy of any intensity. On the contrary, tragedy depends more

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on an extreme tension between belief and experience than on an extreme correspondence. Williams concludes this discussion with these words:

“Important tragedy seems to occur neither in period of real stability, nor in periods of open and decisive conflict. Its most common historical setting is the period preceding the substantial breakdown and transformation of an important culture. Its condition is the real tension between old and new: between received beliefs, embodied in institutions and responses, and newly and vividly experienced contradictions and possibilities” The most common interpretation of tragedy is that it is an action in which the hero is destroyed. This fact is seen as irreparable. At a simple level this is so obviously true that the formula usually gets little further examination. But it is, of course, still an interpretation, and a partial one. If attention is concentrated on the hero alone, such an interpretation naturally follows. Not many works that we call tragedies in fact end with the destruction of the hero. Certainly in almost all tragedies the hero is destroyed, but that is not normally the end of the action. Some new distribution of forces, physical or spiritual, normally succeeds the death. In Greek tragedy this is a religious affirmation in the words or presence of the chorus. In Elizabethan tragedy, it is ordinarily a change of power in the state. To our consciousness, the important action has ended and affirmation, settlement, restoration or new arrival is comparatively minor. This kind of reparations is not credible; it looks much too like a solution, which 20th century critics agree is a vulgar and intrusive element in any art. It is not the business of the artist to provide answers or solutions, but simply to describe experience and raise questions. When we say that in tragic experience, the action is followed right through until the hero is dead; we are taking a part for the whole, a hero for an action. We think of tragedy as what happens to the hero, but the ordinary tragic action is what happens through the hero. When we confine our attention to the hero, we are unconsciously confining ourselves to the individual. The tragic action lies in the fact that life does not come back, that its meanings are reaffirmed and restored after so much suffering and after so important a death. Death gives meaning and importance to life. Human death is often the form of the deepest meanings of a culture. When we see death, it is natural we should draw together – in grief, in memory, in the social duties of burial-our sense of the values of living, as individuals and as a society. Death is absolute, and all our living simply relative. Death is necessary, and all other human ends are contingent. Within this emphasis, suffering and disorder of any kind are interpreted by reference to what is seen as the controlling reality. Such an interpretation is now commonly described as a tragic sense of life. To read back life from the fact of death is a cultural and sometimes a personal choice. A choice is always variable. To tie any meaning to death is to give it a powerful emotional charge which can at times obliterate all other experience in its range. Death is universal, and the mean in tied to it quickly claims universality. Other readings of life, other interpretations of suffering and disorder, can be assimilated to it with great apparent conviction. The connection between tragedy and death is of course quite evident, but in reality the connection is variable, as the response to death is variable. What is generalised is the loneliness of man, facing a blind fate, and this is the fundamental isolation of the tragic hero. To say that man dies alone is not to state a fact but to offer an interpretation. For indeed, men die in so many ways: in the arms and presence of family and neighbours: in the blindness of pain or the blackness of sedation; in the violent disintegration of machines and in the calm of sleep. To insist on a single meaning is not reasonable. When men die, the experience is not only the physical dissolution and ending; it is also a change in the lives and relationships of others. Our most common received interpretations of life put the highest value and significance on the individual and his

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development, but it is indeed inescapable that the individual dies. What is most valuable (life) and what is most irreparable (death) are, then, set in an inevitable relation and tension. The tragic action is about death, but it needs not end in death unless this is enforced by a particular structure of feeling. Death, once again, is a necessary action. Evil is a traditional name but it has been appropriated by a particular ideology, which offers itself as the whole tragic tradition. What tragedy shows us, it is argued, is the fact of evil as inescapable and irreparable. Mere optimists and humanists deny the fact of transcendent evil, and so are incapable of tragic experience. Tragedy is then a salutary reminder, indeed a theory, against the illusions of humanism. The true nature of man is now dramatically revealed against all the former illusions of civilisation and progress. The current emphasis of Evil is not the Christian emphasis. Within that structure, evil was certainly generalised, but so also was good. The struggle of good and evil in our souls and in the world could be seen as a real action. Culturally evil is a name for many kinds of disorder, which corrode or destroy actual life. As such, it is common in tragedy, through in many particular and variable forms; vengeance, ambition, pride, coldness, lust, jealousy, disobedience, rebellion. In every case, it is only fully comprehensible within the valuations of a particular culture or tradition. Tragedy commonly dramatises evil, in many particular forms. A particular evil, in a tragic action, can be at once experienced and lived through. In the process of living through, we come not so much to the recognition of evil as transcendent but to its recognition as actual and indeed negotiable. Good and evil are not absolute. We are good or evil in particular ways and in particular situations, defined by pressures we at once receive and can alter and can create again. Tragedy, as such, teaches nothing about evil, because it teaches many things about many kinds of action. Yet it can at least be said, against the modern emphasis on transcendent evil, that most of the great tragedies of the world end not with evil absolute, but with evil both experienced and lived through. Williams concludes this essay in these words:

Q:

Q: Q:

“If we find a particular idea of tragedy, in our own time, we find also a way of interpreting a very wide area of our experience; relevant certainly to literary criticism but relevant also to very much else. And then the negative analysis is only part of our need. We must try also, positively, to understand and describe not only the tragic theory but also the tragic experience of our own time.” WHAT ARE THE REASONS OF REJECTION OF TRAGEDY IN MODERN AGE? HOW DOES WILLIAMS MAKE A FORCEFUL DISCUSSION? GIVE AN OVERVIEW. GIVE A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF RAYMOND WILLIAMS’ ESSAY “A REJECTION OF TRAGEDY”. WHAT IS THE OBSERVATION OF WILLIAMS ABOUT THE CAUSES OF REJECTUION OF TRAGEDY BY BRECHET?

Ans: “A Rejection of Tragedy” is the 7th essay of Part Two of Raymond Williams’s book “Modern Tragedy”. This essay is a study of the rejection of tragedy in the modern age with special reference to Bertolt Brechet (1898-1959), the German dramatist and poet whose cynical and satirical works are characteristic of the period between the two World Wars. He left Germany in 1933 for Russia, went to the United States in 1941, and returned to East Germany after the War. In 1928, his play “The Three Penny Opera” made him famous. From 1930 onward, his work became explicitly communistic, marked by the rejection of the individual in favour of a social ideal. The most permanent features of his mature drama are the Epic form and alienation effect, both developed in reaction to the traditional form which he dubbed “Aristotelian”. According to him, drama should

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not be ritual but debate. The spectator should be a detached observer calmly investigating the view of the world that confronts him, rationally considering argument, and stimulated to decisive social action. So he developed his epic or narrative play, loosely constructed with a sequence of individual scenes, functioning as independent dramatic illustrations or quotations to the narrative. He has used a variety of techniques to establish the narrative tone: actual story teller on the stage; explanatory verses relayed before the scene; banner headlines which foretell the events to be portrayed. Bertolt Brechet’s contribution to the modern world drama is enormous. Unavoidable suffering and inevitable defeat or death had been the controlling principles of tragedy and with the passage of time; they became the tradition of tragic idea. Bertolt Brechet rejected this conventional view of tragedy by reference to these two points. He is of the view that we have to see not only that suffering is avoidable, but that it is not avoided. And not only has that suffering broken us, but that it needs not to break us. Brechet’s own words are the precise expression of this new sense of tragedy:

“The sufferings of this man appeal me because they are unnecessary.” Williams quotes from one of his poems “An Die Nachgeborenen” to show Brechet’s response to suffering. Here he has presented two modes: first, the main cause of suffering in the world is the political system; second, there is a hope in the fight against it. But it is not always so. In his early work, Brechet expressed one of the main alternative reactions: a cynical disillusion about the co-existence of public virtue and public murder, public morality and public poverty. In his work of the 1920s we find the characteristic sickness of a mind calloused by so established a coexistence. If the substance of suffering enters, with its natural weight, the spectator will be broken, for he will become a participant. Yet as a participant, he can only comprehend or condemn the suffering by some active principle, and this he cannot find. Principle, it seems is part of the world he rejects. An evil system is protected by a false morality. Human beings can “make themselves heartless at will”; sometimes pity and sympathy can deceive and exploit us. So in a tragedy, instead of sympathy, there must be direct shock such a shock is necessary to shake up the established false consciousness. It is always something unpredictable that gives birth to a shock. According to Brechet, the function of the theatre is to practise “Complex seeing”; Thinking above the flow of the play is more important than thinking from within the flow of the play”. Brechet formed his theory of tragedy in the idea of “complex seeing”, but its practice was not there, in the actual play. He had considered that his “epic style” would enforce “thinking above”, whereas the “narrative style” of “Aristotelian drama” enforced “thinking from within”. He had used distancing effects to push the spectator into “the attitude of one who smokes at ease and watches”. The play, in fact, fitted easily into “what the spectator wishes to see”: crime and coldness not structural in the society, but lived out in a romantic and theatrical district. In this section of the article, Williams has discussed six plays of Brechet to explain his point of view, and to illustrate his sense of a new tragedy: (a) The Three Penny Opera: In this play, Brechet shows people buying and selling each other with cold hearts but with colour and wit. That is what life is: the playwright seems to convey the moral that we can all pretend to be livelier and brighter than we are. In ways like this, the writer who “shocks by his rejection of conventional morality”, becomes rich and admired and this is no paradox: he has done the state some service even when he is disposed to deny it. Brechet thought he was detaching himself from this by calling it bourgeois morality, but in this play this is so eternal so really casual, that it is in effect an indulgence. In the idea of “complex seeing”, Brechet has his new star. He set himself to oppose false society by the idea of a true society. In his first conscious acceptance of this principled opposition, he simplified both his feeling and his plays.

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(b) Saint Joan of the Stockyard: In this play, the clarity of Joan Dark in the labour struggles of Chicago is not only shown as a false morality, covering crime and exploitation, but as a feeling to be consciously rejected and replaced by a new hardness. Brechet remarks, “Only force helps where force rules”. For saying this, Joan is of course, first suppressed, and then canonised, in her former charitable innocence. (c) Die Massnahme: In this play, Brechet offers what he takes to be a revolutionary morality: that the party worker who shows too much human sympathy endangers the revolutionary effort and must be killed. Here murder is guilt but it is necessary. This is not any dialectical transformation of goodness into its opposite; it is a willing rejection of goodness. The weight of the choice of killing , in experience is tragic. The revolutionary who talks of necessary killing is like the honest criminal or the generous whore. This connection between the decadence and a positive response to it has been widely and dangerously overlooked. The extraordinary thing about Brechet is that he was able to grow through this position. He learned to look into the genuine complexity: the connections and contradictions between individual goodness and social action. (d) The Good Woman of Sezuan: In this play, Brechet invites us to look at what happens to a good person in a bad society: not by assertion, but by a dramatic demonstration. Shen Te is a conventional kind hearted prostitute. Through her, Brechet seeks to show how goodness is exploited by gods and men. Where goodness cannot extend, but is merely used and abused, there is a split in consciousness. The only consistent way out is through sacrifice: an acceptance of sacrifice which can become redeeming, as in Chris. Brechet rejected such acceptance, as he similarly rejected the idea that suffering can ennoble us. He had the courage to reject sacrifice as a dramatic emotion. He asks: Is it not a sin against life to allow oneself to be destroyed by cruelty and indifference and greed? In this drama, goodness under pressure turns into its opposite and then back again, and then both co-exist. The play becomes, in its essential movement, a moral action. (e) Mother Courage and Her Children: It is a dramatisation of conflicting instincts, conflicting illusions and commanding insights that are not lived through. Its crisis is reached in the frantic drumming of the dumb girl: a desperate articulation of the blood, to protect the city. The final paradox is genuinely tragic: the dumb girl, speaking for life, and being killed; the living going on with a living that kills. The writer’s central question is: what else can we do, here, where blind power is loose, but submits, chisel, try to play safe? And by doing these things a family is destroyed. The question is no longer “are they good people?” nor is it, really “what should they have done?” it is brilliantly both “what are they doing?” and “what is this doing to them?” All Brechet’s dramatic skill is deployed to lead us to these essential questions. The action is continually open, through the fact of contradictions in characters. It is not the inevitability of tragedy, as in the traditional tragic acceptance or the modern tragic resignation. (f) The Life of Galileo: In this play, the consciousness is the action. In abstraction, the choice presented to Galileo is: accept our terms or be destroyed. Because he is conscious, he can not only foresee consequence and calculate it. He stands also for more than himself. In his own person, he is reason and liberation. The question is not: should we admire or despise Galileo? Brechet is not asking this. He is asking what happens to consciousness when he is caught in the deadlock between individual and social morality. Galileo’s submission can be rationalised and justified, at the individual lever, as a way of gaining time to go on with his work. But the point this misses is what the work is for. If the purpose of science is that all men can learn to understand their world, Galileo’s betrayal is fundamental. To detach the work from

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its human purpose is, Brechet sees, to betray others and so betray life. It is not, in the end, what we think of Galileo as a man, but we think of this result. The play brings this issue to consciousness, not as a problem, but as a living action. Galileo, committed to a universal and humanist view of science, has been trapped by another view: the imperatives of a different loyalty, to the ruling group that maintains him, to produce for the market and war. It is not that as an individual he is a hypocrite. It is that under real pressures, he embodies both a true consciousness and a false consciousness; the fact of their coexistence is what Brechet invites us to see. The movement of the play is from the ironic acceptance of false consciousness to the point where false consciousness becomes false action and is not irony but tragedy. Tragedy in some of its older senses is certainly rejected by Brechet. There is nothing inevitable or ennobling about failure in tragedy. It is a matter of human choice, and the choice is not once for all; it is a matter of continuing history. The major achievement of Brechet’s mature work is his recovery of history as a dimension for tragedy. The sense of history becomes active through the discovery of methods of dramatic movement. He struggled towards this transformation and in part achieved it.

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