Tragedy and Pathology

One of the central questions posed by scholars of tragedy is whether or not one can write a modern tragedy. Is it a living genre that could nourish itself on our current crises of war, nationalism, and inequality, and could in turn sustain us with its inescapable, compelling contradictions? Or is it fixed, like a photograph of someone turning away from us: an image we can return to again and again but that will never again return our gaze?

Jane Smiley's novel A Thousand Acres (1991: Knopf), an adaptation of or response to King Lear set on a 1970s mid-Western farm, uses the tools of contemporary narrative to pose that question. For anyone who has read the Shakespeare play, spotting the dozens of superficial points of intersection between the two works is an enjoyable diversion. Lear here is renamed Larry, or Laurence, Cook and he is the proud and powerful owner of 1000 acres of land -- by far the largest plot owned by a single farmer anywhere in the area. His daughters, Ginny and Rose, have been raised to fear and obey him; only his youngest daughter, Caroline, feels she can empathize with him, although in the end it seems she doesn't know him very well at all. The action begins when he decides to incorporate his farm and divide it up between his children, even though he is still in good health, and doesn't end until every character has died or lost all recognizable pieces of their former identity. There is a storm, a fool, a blinded man. There is incest, abuse, and poison.

But the book is not just a transposition in which the elements of a well-known plot are renamed and relocated. It is a gaping mouth, an unfurled question mark beckoning to us to put aside our pat understanding of human consciousness and face a darkness filled with everything we don't know and can't control about each other, for nowadays we tend to pathologize difference and so distance ourselves from suffering and loss. Viewing tragic dilemmas as symptoms of a treatable pathology means neutralizing the tragedy, refusing to face it, and instead replacing it with a bland moral.

In A Thousand Acres, the characters grapple with formidable issues. For example, following a church supper in which Larry's friend Harold (Gloucester) publicly denounces and humiliates Ginny and Rose, the two girls discuss what is happening to their father whose behavior has become increasingly erratic of late:

"Listen, I can't tell you how it makes me feel that Daddy's taking some sort of refuge in being crazy now. You know who they blame, don't you? But it isn't even that."
"What is it?"
"Now there isn't even a chance that I'll look him in the eye, and see that he knows what he did and what it means. As long as he acts crazy, then he gets off scot-free."

In this scene, and throughout the book, Rose (the first speaker here) is the angry one, self-righteous and demanding of justice, while Ginny, the narrator, attempts to accept her lot and avoid conflict. Both of them try, in their own way, to incorporate their father's behavior into a narrative framework they can make sense of and they suffer when those narratives don't fit together.

In Shakespeare's play, Lear goes mad. That's not a term we use anymore: we say, sick, ill, disabled, altered. Mental illness belongs to the realm of things we don't understand and can't control, but because of that it is often closed off to us in popular discourse. A diagnosis, whether mental or physical, is, in many stories, an answer. But in Lear, as in A Thousand Acres, there are no words to hide people behind. Larry's madness is a question for his daughters and for the reader, another inscrutable part of his character, just like his aggression, his stubbornness, and, in the fictional past that precedes the narrative's start, his predictability.

Likewise, the law plays a large role in the novel. When the farm is incorporated, papers are signed, lawyers are consulted. And when the family starts to fall apart, again there is a trial in which Larry tries to win back what he gave away. In the original play, too, there is a trial: it is in a barn during a rainstorm and a footstool is one of the main participants. The Acres trial takes place in a real courtroom and seems like it should be more definitive, more meaningful, than the mock version it is based on, but it is not clear that it really settles anything.

Ultimately, these questions -- who is right and who is wrong, who owns what and for how long, what it means to be sane and how that definition shapes human interaction, what a family is and what holds it together -- are questions that inhabit us. They fill people's lives. Ideas of justice and reason, truth and meaning, are the ghosts we try to net in tomes and textbooks, decisions and diagnoses. Medical and legal code can help us negotiate these questions as a society, they can help people heal and can preserve order to a certain extent. Pathologizing is far better than it's predecessor, demonizing, but not the same as empathizing, or trying to. A jury's verdict, a doctor's prescription, is the beginning of a journey not the end of one. If we are to use these tools to their fullest then we can't treat words like fences to separate ourselves from misery's plot of land: they must be bridges, gateways that open always onto further discussion.

Smiley's book ends with Ginny pondering her inheritance:

"I can't say that I forgive my father, but now I can imagine what he probably chose never to remember -- the goad of an unthinkable urge, pricking him, pressing him, wrapping him in an impenetrable fog of self that must have seemed, when he wandered around the house late at night after working and drinking, like the very darkness. This is the gleaming obsidian shard I safeguard above all others."

At the end of it all, all she can do, all we can do, is continue our impossible struggle to relate.