Pity and Fear?

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.