87200571 Williams R a Dialogue on Tragedy

7/30/2019 87200571 Williams R a Dialogue on Tragedy

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A Dialogue On Tragedy

Raymond Williams

Ridyear Certainly his death was a tragedy.Holt I agree, but I wonder if Clark agrees.Clark Of course I agree. I had a very great respect for him.Holt But that isnt what I was asking. I remember hearing you say once, with

such conviction that you almost convinced me, that an accident is not atragedy. And this death was an accident.

Clark I see. But all you are doing is taking meanings from quite separate ordersof fact. Certainly tragedy, as a dramatic form, excludes accident, because

accident has no significance, at least of a tragic kind. Its true that thesame word is increasingly used, in ordinary living, to describe someaccident or disaster, and I happen to think this is wrong. But in any casewe can discriminate, knowing when we are talking about one thing andwhen about another.

Ridyear Literary form and ordinary living being self-evidently different?Clark Yes, even self-evidently. A work of art is not a life. The more you look

at the detailed evidence, the more you realise this line has to be drawn.Singer Otherwise art is not valued at all, even by those who pretend to value it.

Its diminished to an aid to reflection. A visual aid!Ridyear Nobody doubts that there is a difference, or even that the line must be

drawn. But it depends what kind of difference, and what the line is for.Holt When art is separated from ordinary living, can anyone be quite sure what

ordinary living is? If you separate art, do you also separate thought? If youseparate thought, do you also separate consciousness? If you separateconsciousness, do you also separate activity? If you separate activity, doyou also separate work? I wonder what you will have left for your ordinaryliving.

Clark But this is absurd. This is really the new barbarism. We understand thingsby naming them, and the naming involves a distinction, though not


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necessarily, as you put it, a separation. To break all the distinctionsdown, into an undifferentiated mass, is to return to chaos: an intellectual

chaos that is profoundly subversive of our whole civilisation. Ultimately,yes, there is a unity, or at least a coexistence. But to exploit that to breakdown all the practical distinctions on which rational inquiry depends:this is vicious. Indeed its only in a half-educated society that such anattempt could even temporarily succeed.

Ridyear The names change, whether we like it or not.Reeve Yes. Surely the confusion is simply this: that tragedy is a dead metaphor,

like romance. Increasingly, since the Renaissance, terms deriving from arthave been applied to aspects of life, but at the same time theyve gone onbeing used, in a technical sense, in art. I dont see anything to get excitedabout in this. Its an inevitable process of language. To think that fishingaround in these verbal muddles is an inquiry into anything, except themuddles themselves, is surely the real error. Clark spoke about a half-educated society. Id put it the other way: you only get this kind ofverbalism in a decadent society. You are the new schoolmen. Instead offacing experience, you face the words: squaring up to them like intellectualgiants when in fact the shadows cast are those of pygmies.

Holt You didnt know him, Reeve, did you?Reeve No.Holt You wouldnt call his death a tragedy then?

Reeve I might have, before this discussion. But since the word has beenquestioned, I question it myself. Though not with any urgency. Ive gotused to being haunted by dead metaphors.

Ridyear May I ask what you would say?Reeve I dont know. I think I should probably say loss.Ridyear And if you had known him?Reeve Still loss, I think.Ridyear He was going on his motorbike to a meeting. It was a decisive meeting.

For weeks before it his whole energy had been concentrated on that singledecision. It seemed to mean everything to him. The decision, in a way, washis future, though it meant no personal advantage. He was killed on theway to it. The others didnt know till later.

Bird I remember seeing him once, when the road was dry in early summer.He went past me at an incredible speed, and there was a movement in hisarms, moving with the springs of the bike yet also, in its thrust, an imposedmovement. He was imposing a movement yet in another way its sourcewas the power of the bike, the road, his power.

Singer Its easy to exult at that speed.Bird Exult degrades it. It was an extraordinary intensity, of its own kind.

Reeve But to everyone else it was a young man going too fast on a motorbike.Ridyear Yes, he was going too fast. He was going too fast when he was killed.Holt In the accident.Clark Yes, Im afraid so. Poor devil.Holt The accident that is still not a tragedy.Clark Holt, you are taking a case of a man I liked and respected, a man killed

in an accident. You then try to blackmail me into admitting that the

accident was tragedy, in a quite different sense, for some general pointof your own.

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Bird His general point isnt important, in any case. To that extent, he is wrong.But I see the difficulty, as instance and abstraction come together. I think

this was an accident, in the ordinary sense, but I think also that it wassignificant, that the death had to do with the life.

Clark Exactly. That is the whole logical deception being practised. A case istaken which is not pure accident. I agree with what Bird said, about thedeath and the life. There were real connections, as in certain kinds ofaccident there often are. But where that kind of significance begins, youleave accident in the ordinary sense behind, even if you still dont arrive attragedy.

Holt You mean that you know about this case, so you cant dismiss it so lightly.It isnt the sort of instance, the instance that strictly means nothing, thatyou can throw out in a lecture. If you or I went out and got run over bya bus, that would not be tragedy. But you can only go on saying that whileyou and I are insignificant, while were just names without blood.

Clark Im only trying to make rational distinctions. In such an accident therewould be pain and grief, there would be suffering and mourning, butthere would not be tragedy in any sense I understand.

Holt Although it would be called tragedy, by those concerned.Reeve Calleda tragedy, perhaps. At least in the newspapers.Holt Not only what the papers say. What people say.

Ridyear Do people really say tragedy?Bird Only about lesser things, in fact.Holt The point is still there. On what principle do you exclude significance

from this kind of accident?Reeve Surely just because its accident. That is what accident means.Holt Yet Clark has already admitted that in some accidents there is significance.Clark Of course. To the degree that it ceases to be pure accident, it moves

towards some kind of significance. That significance may still not be tragic.Ridyear Then what?Bird Yes, that is what Im asking. In an experience which contains death,

disintegration, or any great suffering, where does the line fall, betweentragic and non-tragic?

Singer Tragedy is not the facts, but the response to the facts. This is how youinevitably go wrong, if you confuse art and life.

Bird Response being confined to art?Singer Not necessarily. Though to the degree that it becomes significant it

becomes art.Holt Significant there meaning what?

Singer It is more than an expression of feeling. The feeling becomes significantsignificant to others, that isin becoming articulate. It becomes articulatein having to submit itself to the struggle with an actual medium: thestruggle with stone or with language; the discovery, in stone or in language,of a new dimension. The meaning is created, not given.

Clark This is the right emphasis. Tragedy is a form of experience which creates, inits spectators, both pity and terror. It is a form capable of holding thesecontrary emotions in balance. Where there is only pity, you dont get thetragic but the pathetic. Where there is only terror, you dont get tragedy

but the thriller. Pity involves us in a particular human condition; terrordrives us back from it, and creates awe. In the balance of tragedy we



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see into the heart of a particular condition, yet we see it also in terms ofa larger order. We not only sympathise and fear, but also we understand.

Bird I follow all that until order turns up so suddenly. Pity and terror I canunderstand, but your order seems to turn up from nowhere.Reeve Not only seems but does. Clark begins rationally, as Aristotle taught

him to do. But then, at the critical point, he introduces, covertly, thispurely metaphysical notion. In his own terms hes bound to do this. Hesbound to bring in order from the outside, because that is where hehabitually looks for it. Yet surely everybody feels this strain and jumpin the argument. Particular human emotions are described with greataccuracy, but then suddenly this mode is abandoned, in favour of

something that is not in experience at all.Clark You mean that order is not in experience?Reeve Of course it is there, the feeling of it is there, but we must describe it

empirically. All art is an acting-out of certain characteristic human emotionsand situations. The distinction of tragedy is that it takes our deepestfeelingsboth pity and fearand by intensifying them creates a worldin which they can be faced without evasion yet without either danger ordistraction. What this amounts to is a regulation of our feelings, in thehighest sense. This regulation is in fact the sense of order we experience.

Holt A primitive form of psychoanalysis, in fact.Reeve Not a primitive form. The supreme form.Clark I find it very difficult to be patient. But just think, Reeve, of your kind

of humanism, that finds order in a mans nervous system rather than inthe universe. Though I suppose I shouldnt be surprised. The humanisthas always mistaken his own stomach for God.

Singer He knows the highest when he sees it. What has humanism producedin the end but a society of complacent consumers?

Reeve Do I need to point out, even to people with a classical education,that the stomach is not the nervous system?

Ridyear Theyre right though, in a way. Order must be more than individual.Reeve Of course its more. The regulation occurs in one individual, but in a

different form of the same statement it occurs in many, if the processhas been accurately described.

Ridyear And then they all somehow add up?Reeve Simply that to regulate ourselves is to regulate our relationships.Holt And then the tragic regulation is the social contract.

Reeve Not only the tragic regulation. The same thing happens in all kinds of art,using different emotions and situations. Bad art can be distinguished

because it doesnt regulate, which is only another way of saying whatwe all commonly say, when a work fails, that it doesnt satisfy us.

Ridyear Satisfy though? And regulate? Is it really like that?Reeve Youre reacting against the bad senses. The satisfaction is not an

appetite appeased, but a discovery. The regulation is not cramping; it isa new kind of synthesis.

Bird This is so symmetrical that Im lost. Its like the balance of pity and terror,which seems to me to come from a different kind of thinking from any inwhich actual pity and terror are possible. Our fathers experienced;

we measure.Holt Exactly. That was exactly Aristotles situation.


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Bird I dont know either way about that. But here and now I see this againand again. Men seem to close their eyes and construct a conceptual

world. If they ever look again, it is through these patterns.Reeve We all have to learn to see, in just that way.Bird Not by closing our eyes. I can only say what Ive actually felt, about

tragedy. And it isnt a balance of anything; it isnt even the same thing, insome regular series. Its many quite different feelings, and some of themI go on finding important. I really dont find it helps when someonetries to gather these up into a single abstraction, with a capital letter.A sort of machine really, and then Im told how the parts work.

Holt I agree. But I knew we were in for it once Aristotle was mentioned. Not

even Aristotle the Greek, by the way, but his mediaeval succubus.Aristotle the authority, whether he is named or not. In fact there aremany of these pockets in intellectual life, in which the discreditedprocedures of a dead period somehow survive and even dominate. Wedont think about tragedy any more. We think about Aristotles definitionsof it.

Ridyear I suggest we go back to ordinary tragic experience. Of the kind all menhave, sooner or later, and which they are bound to try to understand.

Singer No. Because if life means what it usually means, when its opposed to art,and if ordinary means what it all too evidently is, when compared withexcellence of any kind, we must avoid what Ridyear wants like the plague.We mustnt go back to this ordinary tragic experience; we must go backto actual tragedies.

Clark I agree, and I think we shall find, in fact, that genuine tragedy defines itself.Holt You see. Genuine tragedy. You can tell, always, when Clark is on the

track of a substance. Down to the capital letter and the jealous zeal inrouting pretenders, this is merely the cult of a tribal god.

Ridyear Leave it though now. Let be for a moment.Singer What impresses me is this. Tragedy is uncommon, historically. Only

certain periods, certain kinds of civilisation, seem capable of it. And thoughI suspect what Clark calls order, because I believe he doesnt mean orderat all but merely some system, still, at root, this is the significant factor.Tragedy is only possible, it seems, when this order is real. With the Greeksand the Elizabethans, you can feel the pressure of this order, as somethingabsolutely central to the sense of tragedy itself.

Ridyear Youre not suggesting that Greek and Elizabethan ideas of order werethe same?

Singer No, but in each case the order was significantly there: that is the real point.

Clark Their ideas of order were alike in this: that in each of them there was aframe of reference beyond man himself. Men were not reduced to anattempt to understand themselves in their own sole terms. Therewere forces more important than human life, and in their light what wasactually important in life could be recognised. Without that reference, theway is open to all kinds of sentimentality, self-pity, pathos: the veryfeelings which tragedy transcends. When man is his own measure, or,worse, when the attributes of God are transferred to man or to life, yousimply cannot have tragedy. Thats why the Romantics, for example, got

nowhere near it, though they tried hard enough. If man is infinite, ifhuman life is infinite, tragedy is impossible. The sense of an order beyond



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the essentially limited powers of man is in fact the tragic condition. It is inmans breaking this order that tragedy is generated. Oedipus breaks it;

Creon breaks it; Macbeth breaks it; Lear breaks it.Bird I dont understand. How do men break an order that is beyond theirpowers?

Clark I have put it loosely. I might more reasonably have said that the orderbreaks man. Yet it is in the attempt of men to transcend or disregard thisorder that tragedy begins.

Singer This is literally true. Man flies against the nature of things, and quiteinevitably falls. Yet the sense of the nature of things in fact gives life. Thetragic fall is significant in just this way. When we lose the sense ofsuch an order, when we say in effect that man is capable of everything,we are reduced to mere silence when catastrophe in fact occurs. We canexperience death, waste, accident, emptiness, but nothing beyond these,for we have said that there is nothing. Men can drown their world indeath and suffering, as they have done in this century, but they can find nomeaning; they are only first shocked and then calloused.

Clark This is the real point. Tragedy as Holt or Ridyear describe it, the barefacts of suffering and death, of course still exists. But tragedy as a formwhich can interpret them significantly is only a memory. When, as with theGreeks and the Elizabethans, there was an order beyond human life,

the bare facts could be illuminated and transcended, because there werefacts beyond them to which they could relate.

Holt But this is so unhistorical as to be quite incredible. In fact fifth-centuryAthens and early seventeenth-century England, where we agree thegreatest tragedies were achieved, are characterised not by order, but bythe actual and imminent disintegration of order.

Reeve Yes, this was my whole point. The supreme regulation which tragedyoffers is necessary at precisely such times. Where death and suffering canbe understood by reference to some order of belief or some settled

institution, or if not understood at least mediated, then you do not getthe tragic inquiry; you get faith, you get reassurance, you get explanation.

Bird I agree. I think the reality of tragedy is tension: the pressure of theexperience, the absence of any system that will interpret or comprehend it.Yet the memory of such an order may be necessary: the breakingreminder that there has been significance.

Reeve This may be so. But in any case what you get, in that tension, is thatunmistakeable cry, that battering of life to make it yield some meaning,that pride and rage and magnificence in the presence of despair and

insignificance and defeat. Because life has to continue, in any event.The safety of a system has gone, even if it is still formally acknowledged.There are still, in ordinary life, the evasions and the rationalisations whichdisguise the condition, but tragedy, by its very intensity, breaks these downand forces through the reality. When that final cry is heard, it isunmistakeable.

Holt And this is the balance of pity and terror?Reeve The balance is not in the man who cries, but in us. In the intensity of

this reality we learn new ways of feeling. That is what I mean by regulation.

Ridyear Something is right here, but arent we tempted, still, towards a simpleoverall explanation? The bare facts of tragedy are always present, in


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human life at any time, but the variety of response to them is surely verygreat. I think that tragedy, as a dramatic tradition, includes many of these

responses. I think it is not a single right response but a particulardimension of experience. There is the cry Reeve describes, and that iscertainly tragic. But there is also the illumination, the quiet after thestorm, which in some works is undoubtedly, as Clark and Singer argued,the discovery of a ratifying order, whether the will of God or the laws offate, or even the order of nature. We dont have to agree with the detailsof what is discovered before we can feel the illumination the discoverybrings, in the particular work before us. And I dont see, either, whythis discovery should always be non-human in essence. I think a man canlive through a tragic experience and indeed be remade. We can feel thathappening, whether or not we understand it, and whether or not it is givensome external explanation.

Clark But surely if there is reparation or redemption it is no longer tragedy.The tragic conclusion is not justice or mercy, but the very opposite ofthese: the truly irreparable.

Ridyear Yes, that is a tragic mode. But it isnt the only one. Very few works thatwe call tragedies in fact end with the destruction of the hero. Certainly heis destroyed, but some new order, some new balance, succeeds him.Indeed I thought this was your whole case. When we say that there can beno reparation, we are unconsciously confining ourselves to one kind ofexperience which in our own civilisation we tend to take as the whole.We are unconsciously confining ourselves to the individual. But in fact,over a very wide range, we see this transcended, in tragedy. Life does comeback, life ends the play, again and again. It may be interpreted as havinglearned to walk in the ways of God, or as having generated a new order inthe state, or as having seen some pattern in things, or as merely stubbornreawakening. But the end of most tragedies I know is not disintegrationbut reintegration. It may not be justice or mercy, but it is unquestionably

the continuation of life.Bird Except in some modern tragedy, and this may be the real key. The

characteristic ending in Ibsen is the death of the hero. Osvald is destroyedas he cries for the sun.

Ridyear Yes, this must be important. It is the same emphasis, really, as in moderntheories of tragedy, which all centre, unconsciously, around the tragichero. At the beginning and at the end of individualism, as a theory ofsociety, the tragic hero is indeed central. Yet whereas in the beginningthe rest of life was still there, and the threads were picked up even after

the hero had been destroyed, in the end of this movement the death of thehero is everything; there is literally no more to be said.

Holt The tragic flaw is a good example of this, because of course it is a flaw in aparticular man, not in all men.

Reeve The tragic flaw is a bit of leftover mediaeval psychology. Its like theimbalance in humours: Hamlet hasnt enough fire, Macbeth has too much.That we can seriously go on discussing human behaviour in theseterms is fantastic. It could only happen in a literary criticismwholly insulated from other kinds of knowledge.

Ridyear It is probably in any case a mistranslation: tragic flaw instead of errorof judgment. But all the same it is a significant mistranslation, setting the



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tragic condition in the individual rather than in the universe or in society.Holt It is still unreasonable, because it is a flaw in an ideal type. As such it is

reactionary, in the way tragedy has so often been. The flaw in thisindividual connects with a general flaw. The comet has spoken. What itneeded somebody to say was just this: I am not breaking the law of thegods, and I am not breaking the order of nature; I am breaking the lawof this particular society, and for good reasons.

Ridyear Of course this was said, in the end. The individual became tragic, notthrough some flaw in a static condition, but through a dynamic reachingout, setting his will against what could be seen as a universal order butcould be seen also as a set of human conventions. He reaches out, really,to find the human limits, and he is often destroyed. But he takes theresponsibility, and suffers it, and we see, watching him, that what destroyshim is human.

Reeve I think of Faustus in this. His desire for a new kind of knowledge broke aset of human rules that were represented as a divine order. The wholestruggle of the century following Marlowes play was an attempt toestablish that such knowledge is lawful, but Marlowe lived on the edge ofthis, and his play is profoundly ambiguous. For he couldnt be clear whichkind of law was being broken. The bargain with the devil is forknowledge, but the practice Faustus goes on to is not knowledge at all,

but a set of ordinary sins, belonging clearly to the devils world. IfFaustus had gone on to free scientific inquiry, as he intended, Marlowecould not in fact have destroyed him with such conviction.

Holt Yes, and Macbeth killed a king, and the witches were on the heath, butit was only forty years before men would kill a king by daylight, withdifferent minds and with different results.

Singer Were the results really so different?

Ridyear The point is that they can be argued. Once the flaw is individual it isnegotiable. At the end of this process you get the quite different position,

of the tragic hero against society but the society false. The hero is limited,rejected and in the end destroyed by his society: in part because herepresents human values which the society excludes; in part because he is,inevitably, a man within that society, and includes its destructiveinheritance in himself.

Bird The long journey from the prince to the rebel, as the type of the tragic hero.

Reeve It is a long and a curious journey. Think how often, in early Englishtragedy, the emphasis is really on the fall from prosperity to adversity.For a long time, perhaps, this summed up a general truth, about the

illusion of prosperity in the world. But it became the straight struggle forpower: tragedy was in power, in its arbitrariness and sudden reversals, yetstill something to which men were bound to be committed. As powerbecame rationalised, set into conventions, you got a different tragedy: thestruggle between passions and conventions. But then power, as a talisman,was replaced by money, and early bourgeois tragedy is quite movingin its certainty that money provokes tragedy and yet that men arecommitted to struggling for it. Finally, this struggle, and the society itproduces, were seen as false, and the hero was the rebel, making quite

different human demands.Bird The movement wasnt only at this public level. Tragedy became private;


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this also was the bourgeois claim. Tragedies within a family became asimportant as tragedies in a state. The whole emphasis on personal relations

opened up a quite new tragic area. At this level, and at the public level,the prince was no longer significant. Tragedy, being the sufferings ofmen, included all men. Let not your equals move your pity less.

Clark What you are describing, really, is the dwindling of tragedy to theproblem play.

Ridyear Exactly. The condition was negotiable and so the action, inevitably,was argument.

Holt I dont see, anyway, why we should be frightened when somebody saysproblem play. Weve been taught to lift our lips at the phrase, but on

what real grounds?Clark It depends on the problems. The limits on man, in these plays, aredeliberately trivial. With better plumbing in the municipal baths, IbsensStockmann need not have been a hero at all. If there had been a cure forsyphilis, Osvald need not have died. If there had been a proper scheme ofsocial insurance, Willy Loman need not have killed himself.

Singer It is worse than triviality. These problems only mask the real humandifficulties. And in fact, when these are encountered, there is just endlesssentimentality: what you cant achieve in significance you attempt

in endless tears.Ridyear Brecht said it was a bad society which needed heroes. Thats fair enough.Tragedy then became the tragedy of society. But in the cases Clarkmentioned, is his reading conceivable? Surely the problems simplyexpose a particular tension, and it is the tension that it is the tragedy.

Holt If there had been a properly organised funeral service, or even a sanitarysquad, Antigone need not have died burying her brother.

Bird Yes, that would be just as trivial a reading. Though there are realdistinctions between problem plays; that is why the phrase is so bad. It isonly inferior writers who take the problems for their own sake.

Holt Why shouldnt they be taken for their own sake? They are quite asimportant as who was to rule Scotland.

Clark This is really absurd.Holt No. Search it right through. It is only romanticism that would have

tragedy always exotic. The unnecessary death of any man is as tragic asthe death of Agamemnon or Duncan. Youre still reacting to fabulousnames, not to death.

Singer It is because the names are fabulous that we are able to react at all.Clark And in any case the names are great because they stand for more than

themselves, for more than individual men. A whole order is destroyed inthe one death; a chance individual in the other.

Ridyear Not a chance individual. I think the tragedy of environment is real,though it is only one kind. I think of Hauptmanns The Weavers, but thematerial is endless. Even if the environment could have been different, stillits actual pressure is on these men and women. It may be like otherproblems, that if they hadnt started they wouldnt be problems. But theyhave started, they are there, and men suffer in their shadow. This is notchance and even if it were it is still tragedy.

Clark Yes, but you answered this in what you said about the individual. All theemphasis is on him. And when there is nothing more than the individual



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when even Ibsens avalanche, the voice crying through it, the whitehorses, the sun, have been discardedthen it is really over. Then there

is no tragedy; there is only death.Bird There is a new tragedy. I thought this was what Ridyear was arguing.There is always death, but the response to it changes. There is alwaystragedy, but there are always new tragic responses.

Ridyear When I said the new tragedy I didnt mean this limitation to theindividual, though that, in its time, was new. I meant, indeed, somethinglike a recovery of the general tragic condition, though in our own terms.I think, for instance, of the tragedy of Stalin, and it was a tragedy, notmerely a story of evil. I see how we can still interpret it, if we see it as

tragedy at all, in the familiar terms of the prince. It could be Richard theThird again, but that would be empty. For to call it the cult of theindividual is simple evasion. The same evasion, oddly, as the familiarversion of the mad dictator. Do you remember Pasternak said he hadbeen thinking,as an artist, about Stalin? I think he had touched thisdifferent dimension. It is there, with much else, in Zhivago. For whatyou have to face is the change in Stalin, and the change is related to thefundamental tensions of a wider condition. Death spreads there till itsickens, and it breaks this man, even while he instigates the deaths. It islike Macbeth, in some ways, the historical Macbeth who ruled forseventeen years in Scotland and did much for his country, while he wasstill the murderer we remember. This drifts away, too easily, into apologia,and that is not the point. I think we have to see the evil and see thebreaking together; I think we have to see what was being broken, andwhat the breaking released. The temptation is continually to make a case,one way or the other. We have almost forgotten any other kind of inquiry.What I call the tragic dimension may be lost, in that sense, though I dontthink it is lost altogether. I can recognise it, occasionally, in a particularvoice, a particular way of looking. I think it is having to struggle evenharder, to come through as a new feeling, because it is immediately loadedwith all the forms of older tragedy, and all the reactions we have learnedand tired of. But I think it is a living response all the same, and theexperience of our century will be empty until it is formed.

Clark Stalin presents no problems to me, but that is by the way. Surelyfirst humanism and liberalism, then the whole flood of socialism andcommunism, denied the tragic response altogether. If man can changehimself and his condition, tragedy is merely irrelevant. The conditions thatlead to it will simply be altered.

Holt And about time too.Clark Exactly. But then in art and in social thinking, there is mere triviality.

Because men wont face evil, because they have projected it into externalconditions, they cant even respond to tragedy at any depth. Five milliondeaths will be written off when you can look at five hundred power stations.And since so much is written off, art cannot be held to at all. It isreduced to a mere agency of the change.

Singer This is what humanism has really to face, in its own characteristicworld. Millions have been killed, and in the end they are no more than

statistics. Nobody can think of that many individuals, and there is noother way of thinking left. So you get a familiar barbarism. Forty per cent


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might survive a nuclear attack, but this is reducing humanity to thestatus of an animal population.

Clark That has always been implicit. Politics has long ceased to be about humanbeings at all. The animal population will be better fed, better housed,better organised. Is anything more than that ever really proposed? By anyof the sects into which humanism has divided?

Bird Except that it is a human population, not animals.Clark That is a distinction without a difference, in your metaphysics.Holt All I know is that men do change their conditions, and that abuse wont

deter them. As for art, surely any real art must keep in touch with thechange.

Clark Real art does, but it involves stripping down the pretensions. Naturalistart, socialist realism and the rest, simply confirm the deceived in theirdeception: that there is nothing beyond their own sense of reality.

Holt The changes not being real at all?Clark Contingencies change. Secondary characteristics change. The essential

human condition does not change.Holt Because men die, you mean?Clark That is only one fact. Perhaps the only one clear, though, to the average

contemporary mind. But in any case it can illuminate the others.Singer It isnt only death. Its the failure of connection in life, the permanent

failure which we describe by analogy as the fall.Bird Yes, the condition is real, though there was no fall. The fall is a comforting

dream, just as an original paradise is a dream. Each puts our conditionin time, and gives the possibility of variation. But in fact there is novariation, at this level. We can live and we can see, but only in a blindworld, a permanently indifferent and haphazard world of things, fromwhich we are necessarily estranged. The religious can dream of salvationfrom this, in an imagined supernatural order which seems to me no morethan an illusion to protect their sanity. Social reformers of all kindsdream of an escape from it: the perfect order will come. But the realitypersists, as it must, and in fact when we are alone, or in pain, or when wehave to face death, our own or anothers, we recognise the true condition.And this is my point about tragic response. For us, now, there is noserious alternative. Our recognition of this blind and indifferent world is infact the tragic experience. There is no God, or in any case he has becomeindifferent to us. There is to be no millenium and no Utopia; in ouraspirations towards them we have convulsed and may still destroy ourwhole world. Yet, on such terms, life has to continue. In such terms, we

have to choose how we shall live. This, now, is the material of tragedy.Reeve I find this rhetoric no more persuasive than when it had a church to

support it. It is the persistent conditioning of an irrational society, whichcan only survive while it keeps men irrational. For what does it matter, inthe end, that the world of inanimate things is indifferent to us? Whetherit is indifferent or not, we have learned quite successfully to control it,and even to change it, to make a fuller life possible. We shall go on doingthis, against every kind of obscurantism.

Bird Does it not even matter to you that the sun will die and the earth with it?

Holt These things dont matter, in fact, to any sensible man. He has a sense ofproportion, he knows how far these events are away, and above all he has



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confidence that men can meet this problem as they have met somany others.

Singer The middle name of the humanist being Micawber.Holt On the contrary. What is necessary is only blind while it is still imperfectlyunderstood. We are only blind while we still imperfectly see.

Bird You mean that quite literally of course?Holt I mean that we mistake for a permanent condition what we have not yet

discovered a way of changing. Bird said that we are necessarily estrangedfrom an indifferent world. But is this not a very striking description of thefacts of capitalist society? We live in a world which divides menfrom each other, by the nature of its productive relations, and which

even divides man from himself and from his own products, so that theestrangement can indeed, to any particular man, seem absolute. But tothink of this as a permanent condition is in fact, objectively, adefence of existing society and existing productive relations. It is not apermanent condition but a persistent kind of conditioning. By humanagents, consciously or unconsciously, and in any case by institutions,which teach their own temporary version of reality. If you wanttragedy, there it is: that human life is crippled and destroyed by just thesefactors: that men could be free but are kept chained.

Ridyear Kept chained by men.Holt Yes.

Ridyear But doesnt that seem a difficulty?Holt Not at all. Life isnt in one piece. It is a permanent conflict, which

cannot be cut short. The poor, for many centuries, were quickly beateneven when they fought. Now they cannot be beaten, but equally theycannot quickly win. Those who oppress them may still destroy theworld rather than give way.

Bird What you have described, in optimistic terms, seems to me a very plausibletheory of tragedy. Men could be free but are kept chained by men. Tobreak free, other men must be broken. To live in peace, men must fight.In this fight the world and even all life may be destroyed.

Ridyear It happened quite suddenly, this substantial change. Not only tosocialists, who could once bear defeat, could resolve individual tragedy,by the certainty of socialism ahead.

Holt The certainty is in fact still there.Ridyear I agree that it is there, if life at all is to be there. But we are faced, for the

first time, with the clear possibility that all life may be destroyed.This, in consciousness, is really an end. Men have endured death for all

sorts of reasons, but the most common reason, in many different forms,has been the certainty of a future. If not a heaven, then a victory. If not avictory now, then at some point a better world. Or far more commonthan these: if no more life for me, then life for my children, and fortheir childrens children. All these were certainties, in their varying forms.Men have in fact conceived total death before, but only as anannunciation. Now we have to conceive it as announcing nothing andachieving nothing. The children will die with their parents, and the seedwith the flower.

Holt Except that we can prevent this happening. We can fight againstit happening.


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Reeve Not only that, but in fact we know that this conclusion is exaggerated.We have been faced by the apocalypse before.

Bird We havent had it in our hands before. It might strike from outside, butwe have never had it in our own hands, as a thing subject to choice.Ridyear Yes, weve abandoned the tragic universe, and weve lived past the tragic

hero. We have reached, definitively, the tragic society.Singer If this death comes it will be a death for the rights of man. That is the

only tragic irony left. It will be at the very height of humanism that allhuman life will be destroyed. Man decided to make his own order, andthis is what he has made.

Holt It hasnt happened yet. It need never happen.

Clark Do you seriously think anyone will give up his own version of the rightsof man? And do you think it is an accident that there are conflictingversions, that will destroy everything that gets in their way, even to thelimits of the world? A single and actual order was rejected. Now thealternative orders will fight it out, to a finish.

Bird Already, in this century, there are eighty million dead, in this actualconflict. Do you suppose it can suddenly be stopped?

Reeve We can learn from tragedy. This was my whole argument.Ridyear The spectators can learn: that is what you said. But in this there are no

spectators. We are all in fact participants. Tragedy has, if you like, brokenout of its frame.

Singer The frame was broken, deliberately, and men even congratulatedthemselves. From then on, just watch, they would make their own frames.They would not look for meanings, they would make meanings.And the end of that is a world in which one death means no more thananother, and then none means anything.

Ridyear Or a society in which one individual matters no more than another, andthen nobody matters at all.

Clark Exactly. That is just what we have been offered.Singer And what some of us reject, breaking through to our own kinds of

individual significance and freedom.Ridyear I wanted this to be said. I wanted it to be said with such conviction that it

really breaks through. Until this is touched, nothing that matters istouched. And to ignore this condition is to talk beside the point.

Holt Youre changing sides rather rapidly, arent you?Clark No, for he still talks about the tragic society. As if some change in that

could make a difference.Ridyear I dont know how to put this. I have no words for it, or none that I can

be sure of. Yes, I said the tragic society, but I didnt mean the tragicenvironment. And I acknowledged the break for individual significance,but still I spoke of it as a condition, as ageneralfact. Perhaps this cant beargued at all; it can only be shown. And yet it will be dragged back,even then, to what I dont mean. I can feel what I am saying as a shape inmy mind, and I see this shape, again and again, when I look, not atpeople, not at society, but at what to me is actual experience, in whichthese are not separate. I see this in different modes, but in tragedy mostclearly. Yeats spoke of tragedy as breaking the dykes between man and

man, and I have always remembered the phrase and been moved by it.But did he only mean sympathy? The generation of sympathy? I think



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that is real, but it is not only that. And I have been moved, beyond thought,before thought, by mens actual solidarity in suffering: a coming together,

and a giving, that seem absolute, while they last. Yet again it is notonly that. The softening and the turning away; remaking the dykes andsetting our standards on them; the justified bitterness, the angry struggleto win, the chain of killing and deposition; the lying and the reductionto numbers; the simple forgetting, the necessary forgetting, and then thehaunting, first in the dark and then at your elbow in the street, theshadowy figures that were and are men: all these, also, are responses totragedy. But the shape holds them, or seems to hold them. In the figurechained on the rock, the hands are held, quite distinctly, by otherhands, the fingers just holding. Or the man kneeling, to be shot in theback of the neckI am thinking of an actual manand you see peoplekneeling in the street, and the sound of the shot, in the enclosed room, isthe loud slam of a door and a man shut out and moving away. And whichof these, in the end, can be the individual, and which society? What Iknow as tragedy is neither, and the tragedy is in the fingers just holding,the one man kneeling as many have knelt, the thrust of the arms on thebike, the eagerness of decision, and the sound of the shot again, the slamof the door, the sharp clash and resonance of metal in the impactwith the lorry, and people running into the road, and people sitting at

the table and making the decision. The tragedy seems to be, our tragedyseems to be, in the images of connection: the particular action that isexperienced as general, and in the experience the connection is lost, thecontinuity is lost, the death is a break in continuity and is absolute, andin seeing it the connections are made again, made new. This, at least,is of our own time, and the connection and the breaking come throughagain and again in easier and more intellectual forms, and we can talk ofthem, quite in public, but always, I find, with this edge of silence, where wecannot yet speak, where we havent the nerve, the articulation, to name

the roots of what, above ground, is easy.Bird We have not even named this man whose death we began by discussing.Holt It wasnt necessary. We took him as an instance.

Reeve Rightly or wrongly, what we conclude from him we conclude for others,in similar circumstances.

Clark I have said from the beginning that the particular case would distract us.These are matters of rational theory, beyond personal instance andbeyond rhetoric.

Singer It is only real, nevertheless, while we hold on to that actual experience.

Bird It is only real when we name him. When we give him identity.Ridyear When we give him identity he will have many names. That is theaction of tragedy.

87200571 Williams R a Dialogue on Tragedy

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Transcript of 87200571 Williams R a Dialogue on Tragedy