Tragedy and Identity

I first became interested in tragedy in 2004, studying abroad in Paris. I signed up for a course called "La Littérature de la Tragédie" or something to that effect, under the mistaken impression that "tragédie" was being used in the colloquial sense of "something really really bad/sad that happens," which is often used to describe things like natural disasters, fatal accidents, young people succumbing to sudden illnesses. The course was actually about the literary genre, introduced by the ancient Greeks, that is both highly structured and superbly beautiful, if a bit stiff at times. The lecturer was a small bearded man who gave lots of examples of I was never quite sure what.

Although not exactly what I expected, the course had a big impact on me: I went on to write an undergraduate thesis on a neoclassical French tragedian and have been fascinated by the subject ever since. We read Medea, Hofmannsthal's Elektra, and Ibsen's The Ghosts in French, and King Lear in English. I think the other students found something ironic in my having moved 3000 miles to study a book in English. I found it surprising how well they knew and how much they loved Shakespeare -- I even found a Lear reference in the name of a bookstore, Le Roi Lire, across the street from the coldly geometric Jussieu.

One aspect of tragedy that intrigues me is the number of them, which is not many: the same handful of very famous tragedies are studied by everyone, again and again, year after year, century after century. They are pored over, plunged, and reconfigured in essays, musical adaptations, oil paintings. The possibility of writing new ones is often disputed and may very well be impossible; no one is certain. Compared to the abundance of novels, and even short stories, which spill these days from handbags and airport bookstores and overflow the pages of the weekly reviews that we skim frantically, hoping to get the gist of all those pages we will never have time to sit down and read properly, the lonely tragedies seem to shine, precious, apart.

This repetition raises a question, which perhaps would only come up now, in the age of the novel, when novelty is taken as the stamp of a true artistic venture: why do we read the same stories, over and over, even when we know how they end? For it seems to me that is one of the fundamental characteristics of a tragedy: the ending is a given, and so it becomes a sort of starting point. We do not go to see how everything will turn out but to see it turn at all.

I have puzzled over this for a long time, probably because I had no more than a smattering of Freud in college.

But recently, reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, the answer suddenly occurred to me, so obvious I wonder if I haven't actually heard it somewhere before and forgotten it. We return collectively and without cease to the tragic plays as we return individually to personal traumas we have witnessed or sustained. It is a way of dealing with loss and with the fear of loss, to worry it like a gap where a tooth has gone missing, to replay it, to quite literally re-tell it, not just to repeat it but to tell it in a different way as if an alternate wording might somehow fix or forestall what went wrong. That is what I've understood, at least, from reading her account of loss.

There is another reason, too, that I've come to from my own experience as a reader: tragedy is a form of inoculation. We know things do not work out well for Medea or for Phaedra or, most of the time at least, for Iphigenia. But that is who they are. They are here, quite simply, to err and to suffer and expire on our stages, at our feet, on our lips. If tragedy is a part of who they are, we are the living, clapping politely at the end of each act, trying not to knock against our neighbors' knees as we squeeze past them on the way to the restroom or the lobby, leaning against a stone column drinking a plastic cup of white wine and talking softly about how rousing the production is.

I bought Joan Didion's book at Dog-Eared Books on Valencia St. knowing exactly what it was about. Because I knew what it was about, I had not been interested in reading it until a close friend said it was the most accurate account of grief she had read. Before I read it I had, almost without realizing it, cast its author as a tragic heroine, someone to whom loss clung, someone destined for misfortune. I thought this way because thinking this way is a form of inoculation. If she is a tragic heroine than I must not be, because I am the friend or the nurse or because I am outside the story altogether and I can close the book whenever I want to.