Why are we compelled to watch tragedies when we know they all end badly?
Aristotle tells us that a "perfect tragedy" should "imitate actions which excite pity and fear, this being the distinctive mark of tragic imitation" (p. 75, Aristotle's Poetics, tr. S. H. Butcher, Hill and Wang, New York: 1961). He goes on to specify that "pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves," and that this misfortune "should come about as the result not of vice, but of some great error or frailty" (p. 76).
His advice is perhaps more practical than philosophical, for he doesn't delve here into why the great poets should aim to elicit pity and fear in the first place. Instead, the Poetics explores the mechanics of tragedy: its constituent elements, its sequential parts, and the irresistible motion of its plots, which proceed, not like flowers unfolding to reveal a single, secret truth, but like strange engines coming to life. Each action -- each lever falling, each gear turning -- emerges necessarily from the preceding action; the end is always inevitable, inscribed both in the very first movement and in the structure of the machine itself. "Fear and pity may be aroused by spectacular means," he says, "but they may also result from the inner structure of the piece, which is the better way" (p. 78).
According to Aristotle, the end of a tragedy, although inevitable, is evident neither to the characters as they stumble forward nor to the audience, as they watch, riveted. The end thus lays bare our collective ignorance and our inability to understand the genealogy of events, to anticipate the progeny of our decisions.
And yet, the majority of tragedies, even in Aristotle's day, were based on popular myths and the histories of a few well-known families. Imagining an audience watching "Medea" without knowing how it ends is like imagining Eve in her garden, lounging, willowy, among the trees , deciding she's really just not that into fruit. The myths founding most tragedies are defined by their endings: Oedipus is guilty from the start, as Medea, as Eve; they are made up of guilt, as days are made up of minutes. Furthermore, although Aristotle points out that fear is stirred by identification with an ill-fated hero, there are few characters in these classical plays I can relate to. They are all noble and rich, damned and lost. Theirs is a passion distilled. There is no "everyday" in tragedy, none of the familiar routines or patterns or moods or moments that I recognize. Without surprise and without identification, whence the pity and whence the fear?
I think the pleasure of tragedy lies entirely elsewhere, and I would analogize it with the pleasure of S&M. It is the pleasure of aesthetic awe and structured excess. The aesthetic awe is inspired by the poetry of tragedy, laced tight along the spine of the characters' desire, and by the careful design of the plot in which each element is necessary and none are missing. The excess is of emotion, structured by both the plot and the verse. This structure, in which we know the fate of each character, allows us to experience -- even to wish for -- their demise without being afraid that their misfortune will spill out of the play and onto us. Their loss is contained. Even the ir passion, infinite, reaches the edge of the stage and drops off. We can sink into emotions we might not otherwise have access to, condemning the frail, reciting their downfall, grieving for those whom we chose to watch fall. The characters' pain, and our own, is sharpened through constraint, but the points of its constraint, like the ribs in a corset, are also objects of beauty.
Friday, November 24, 2006
Friday, November 10, 2006
The more things change...
How do languages change? Certain errors persist; words, expressions, conjugations, entire tenses fade. Perhaps we hear something new, snatch up a cute saying on a trip abroad or adopt a locution we hear on TV. Scorn gives way to apathy: soon we can't remember how we used to say things, and what was once an exception is now accepted; soon, everyone else is saying it, too.
Some people assume that one of the driving forces behind language change is laziness, and that more difficult constructions will always fall away in favor of easier ones. I'm not sure that's true: after all, two of the most common verbs, "to be" and "to have," are irregular in all the language I know, and therefore more difficult to learn and retain, but because we use them so often we remember their forms and aren't tempted to police them into the standard mold (I am, you am, he/she/it ams, we am, you am, they am; I ammed, I was amming, etc). So I think frequency has something to do with forestalling language change, or at least with helping difficulties endure. Perversely, frequency can also lead to language change, at least according to wikipedia, which blames the irregularity of "to be" on its very prevalence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_be). The more something reproduces (ie, the more a word is spoken and written), the more chances it has to mutate.
Recently, a coworker of mine who studied historical linguistics explained the phenomenon of language change to me in richer terms. According to him, there are two forces constantly pushing against languages that work to change them: the first is the set of phonetic rules that dictate which sounds precede or follow one another. Now here's where it gets sticky: sometimes, through chance, a verb conjugation that is inflectionally correctly may be phonetically incorrect. This verb conjugation will have to be modified: it will become irregular. So the force of phonetics is a central source of irregular verb conjugations, plurals, possessives, etc. In an attempt to regularize the sound patterns of the words themselves, morphemic patterns are disrupted.
The other force at work is the tendency that speakers have to regularize verbs by analogy. It's why little kids say "I sleeped." Why should some words not follow the rules that others do? As these two forces do battle for the souls of verbs, irregularities rise like air bubbles, only to be smoothed out down the road.
Furthermore, certain changes are cyclical, occurring and reccurring like seasons. The example he gave was a comparison between the French passé composé and futur simple tenses. The first is what we refer to as the present perfect in English: I have burnt the pie, and is made up of the conjugated auxiliary verb "to be" or "to have" followed by the past participle of the main verb. The second is a future tense for which we have no equivalent. Je brûlerai le gâteau means "I will burn the pie" but looks something like "I burnill the pie," in that the ending of the auxiliary verb has been stuck onto the end of the main verb. In the passé composé , only the auxiliary verb is conjugated. In the futur simple, the main verb itself is conjugated.
So learning and using the passé composé is in some ways easier than the futur simple, because there is far less conjugating to do, and, as everyone knows, conjugating is a pain.
HOWEVER, some of you may have noticed that the endings of the verbs in the futur simple are the same as the endings of the various French conjugations of "to have." The reason for this is that long ago, in Latin, the future was formed like this: "I read will." Over time, those words got smushed together, so what was a simple conjugation (infinitive + auxiliary verb) became a somewhat messier affair. Perhaps, in a few hundred years, the passé composé will be a similar mush; perhaps other complicated tenses will sprout auxiliary verbs only to absorb them further down the line.
I thought about this news for a while; I found it somewhat astonishing. All of a sudden, the thick, static bodies of verbs flew apart and their inner bits seemed to fill the air, and all these shreds still shift before me, joining and shedding each other like the shapes at the end of a kaleidoscope.
But the question remains: who, exactly, is turning the lens?
Some people assume that one of the driving forces behind language change is laziness, and that more difficult constructions will always fall away in favor of easier ones. I'm not sure that's true: after all, two of the most common verbs, "to be" and "to have," are irregular in all the language I know, and therefore more difficult to learn and retain, but because we use them so often we remember their forms and aren't tempted to police them into the standard mold (I am, you am, he/she/it ams, we am, you am, they am; I ammed, I was amming, etc). So I think frequency has something to do with forestalling language change, or at least with helping difficulties endure. Perversely, frequency can also lead to language change, at least according to wikipedia, which blames the irregularity of "to be" on its very prevalence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_be). The more something reproduces (ie, the more a word is spoken and written), the more chances it has to mutate.
Recently, a coworker of mine who studied historical linguistics explained the phenomenon of language change to me in richer terms. According to him, there are two forces constantly pushing against languages that work to change them: the first is the set of phonetic rules that dictate which sounds precede or follow one another. Now here's where it gets sticky: sometimes, through chance, a verb conjugation that is inflectionally correctly may be phonetically incorrect. This verb conjugation will have to be modified: it will become irregular. So the force of phonetics is a central source of irregular verb conjugations, plurals, possessives, etc. In an attempt to regularize the sound patterns of the words themselves, morphemic patterns are disrupted.
The other force at work is the tendency that speakers have to regularize verbs by analogy. It's why little kids say "I sleeped." Why should some words not follow the rules that others do? As these two forces do battle for the souls of verbs, irregularities rise like air bubbles, only to be smoothed out down the road.
Furthermore, certain changes are cyclical, occurring and reccurring like seasons. The example he gave was a comparison between the French passé composé and futur simple tenses. The first is what we refer to as the present perfect in English: I have burnt the pie, and is made up of the conjugated auxiliary verb "to be" or "to have" followed by the past participle of the main verb. The second is a future tense for which we have no equivalent. Je brûlerai le gâteau means "I will burn the pie" but looks something like "I burnill the pie," in that the ending of the auxiliary verb has been stuck onto the end of the main verb. In the passé composé , only the auxiliary verb is conjugated. In the futur simple, the main verb itself is conjugated.
So learning and using the passé composé is in some ways easier than the futur simple, because there is far less conjugating to do, and, as everyone knows, conjugating is a pain.
HOWEVER, some of you may have noticed that the endings of the verbs in the futur simple are the same as the endings of the various French conjugations of "to have." The reason for this is that long ago, in Latin, the future was formed like this: "I read will." Over time, those words got smushed together, so what was a simple conjugation (infinitive + auxiliary verb) became a somewhat messier affair. Perhaps, in a few hundred years, the passé composé will be a similar mush; perhaps other complicated tenses will sprout auxiliary verbs only to absorb them further down the line.
I thought about this news for a while; I found it somewhat astonishing. All of a sudden, the thick, static bodies of verbs flew apart and their inner bits seemed to fill the air, and all these shreds still shift before me, joining and shedding each other like the shapes at the end of a kaleidoscope.
But the question remains: who, exactly, is turning the lens?
According to Legend
Myths rarely end in surprise. I am speaking of the Greco-Roman myths, the ones I grew up reading, the ones so often adapted by authors of the Western cannon. We do not read them for their unexpected twists and turns. Like classical tragedies, many of which are based on myths, we fall into them and they lead us back.
Myths have an interesting relationship to time. They posit origins, offering us the stories behind the things we can't not remember being part of our lives. Their writing necessarily post-dates the objects they create. There was no myth to explain the Earth before the Earth was here, and even once it arrived, how could there be a myth without people to tell it and people to hear it? All myths explain, then, at least indirectly, why we are here. We are here so someone would tell the story of how we got here.
I have been rereading recently Ted Hughes' translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis, called "Tales from Ovid." The first time I read it, a year ago, I was fascinated by the idea of people enacting rhetorical figures: the lean, ragged man, as fierce as a wolf; the willowy, tearful woman, as clear as a stream; the vain, young hunk, beautiful as a flower. I decided that some of the heroes' transformations were metaphors and some similes.
A metaphorical death was sudden, it would cast you up into the stars. Your constellation had little to do with a particular attribute. Rather, one minute you were a person, and the next, a cluster of stars. Your forever arrived swiftly.
Metamorphosis by simile was the gradual process of your new shape engulfing you inch by inch, first grabbing a finger and then slithering up your arms, over your head. Your new form was either a punishment or a gift, but it stemmed directly from whatever was most true about you.
Two rhetorical figures, metaphor and simile, like two sides of a silhouette with one meaning: the afterlife of fiction is reality.
Now I am more interested in the fact that a myth is not just the story of a thing but the story of that thing's name. It is etymology personified. Are they really separable, a thing and its name? Or are they two sides of the same coin, two incarnations of the same being? Narcissus was a man, long ago, and now he is a flower. Or was there a flower, long ago, and now there is the story of a man? Can you recall which you heard about first -- the flower or the man? Are they really separable, a thing and the story of how it got there?
Myths have an interesting relationship to time. They posit origins, offering us the stories behind the things we can't not remember being part of our lives. Their writing necessarily post-dates the objects they create. There was no myth to explain the Earth before the Earth was here, and even once it arrived, how could there be a myth without people to tell it and people to hear it? All myths explain, then, at least indirectly, why we are here. We are here so someone would tell the story of how we got here.
I have been rereading recently Ted Hughes' translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis, called "Tales from Ovid." The first time I read it, a year ago, I was fascinated by the idea of people enacting rhetorical figures: the lean, ragged man, as fierce as a wolf; the willowy, tearful woman, as clear as a stream; the vain, young hunk, beautiful as a flower. I decided that some of the heroes' transformations were metaphors and some similes.
A metaphorical death was sudden, it would cast you up into the stars. Your constellation had little to do with a particular attribute. Rather, one minute you were a person, and the next, a cluster of stars. Your forever arrived swiftly.
Metamorphosis by simile was the gradual process of your new shape engulfing you inch by inch, first grabbing a finger and then slithering up your arms, over your head. Your new form was either a punishment or a gift, but it stemmed directly from whatever was most true about you.
Two rhetorical figures, metaphor and simile, like two sides of a silhouette with one meaning: the afterlife of fiction is reality.
Now I am more interested in the fact that a myth is not just the story of a thing but the story of that thing's name. It is etymology personified. Are they really separable, a thing and its name? Or are they two sides of the same coin, two incarnations of the same being? Narcissus was a man, long ago, and now he is a flower. Or was there a flower, long ago, and now there is the story of a man? Can you recall which you heard about first -- the flower or the man? Are they really separable, a thing and the story of how it got there?
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