Tragedy and the
Common Man
Arthur Miller –
1949
In this age few tragedies are
written. It has often been held that the lack is due to a paucity of heroes
among us, or else that modern man has had the blood drawn out of his organs of
belief by the skepticism of science, and the heroic attack on life cannot feed
on an attitude of reserve and circumspection. For one reason or another, we are
often held to be below tragedy--or tragedy above us. The inevitable conclusion
is, of course, that the tragic mode is archaic, fit only for the very highly
placed, the kings or the kingly, and where this admission is not made in so
many words it is most often implied.
I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for
tragedy in its highest sense as kings were. On the face of it this ought to be
obvious in the light of modern psychiatry, which bases its analysis upon classic
formulations, such as the Oedipus and Orestes complexes, for instance, which
were enacted by royal beings, but which apply to everyone in similar emotional
situations.
More simply, when the question of tragedy in art is not at
issue, we never hesitate to attribute to the well-placed and the exalted the
very same mental processes as the lowly. And finally, if the exaltation of
tragic action were truly a property of the highbred character alone, it is inconceivable
that the mass of mankind should cherish tragedy above all other forms, let
alone be capable of understanding it.
As a general rule, to which there may be exceptions unknown
to me, I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence
of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one
thing--his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the
individual attempting to gain his "rightful" position in his society.
Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it,
sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound
from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity, and its
dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's
total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.
In the sense of having been initiated by the hero himself,
the tale always reveals what has been called his "tragic flaw," a
failing that is not peculiar to grand or elevated characters. Nor is it
necessarily a weakness. The flaw, or crack in the character, is really
nothing--and need be nothing--but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in
the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of
his rightful status. Only the passive, only those who accept their lot without
active retaliation, are "flawless." Most of us are in that category.
But there are among us today, as there always have been,
those who act against the scheme of things that degrades them, and in the
process of action, everything we have accepted out of fear or insensitivity or
ignorance is shaken before us and examined, and from this total onslaught by an
individual against the seemingly stable cosmos surrounding us-from this total
examination of the "unchangeable" environment--comes the terror and
the fear that is classically associated with tragedy.
More important, from this total questioning of what has been
previously unquestioned, we learn. And such a process is not beyond the common
man. In revolutions around the world, these past thirty years, he has
demonstrated again and again this inner dynamic of all tragedy.
Insistence upon the rank of the tragic hero, or the
so-called nobility of his character, is really but a clinging to the outward
forms of tragedy. If rank or nobility of character was indispensable, then it
would follow that the problems of those with rank were the particular problems
of tragedy. But surely the right of one monarch to capture the domain from
another no longer raises our passions, nor are our concepts of justice what
they were to the mind of an Elizabethan king.
The quality in such plays that does shake us, however,
derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in
being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this
world. Among us today this fear is as strong, and perhaps stronger, than
it ever was. In fact, it is the common man who knows this fear best.
Now, if it is true that tragedy is the consequence of a
man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly, his destruction in the
attempt posits a wrong or an evil in his environment. And this is precisely the
morality of tragedy and its lesson. The discovery of the moral law, which is
what the enlightenment of tragedy consists of, is not the discovery of some
abstract or metaphysical quantity.
The tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in
which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself. The wrong is
the condition which suppresses man, perverts the flowing out of his love and,
creative instinct. Tragedy enlightens--and it must, in that it points the
heroic finger at the enemy, of man's freedom. The thrust for freedom is the
quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable
environment is what terrifies. In no way is the common man debarred from such
thoughts or such actions.
Seen in this light, our lack of tragedy may be partially
accounted for by the turn which modem literature has taken toward the purely
psychiatric view of life, or the purely sociological. If all our miseries, our
indignities, are born and bred within our minds, then all action, let alone the
heroic action, is obviously impossible.
And if society alone is responsible for the cramping of our
lives, then the protagonist must needs be so pure and
faultless as to force us to deny his validity as a character. From neither of
these views can tragedy derive, simply because neither represents a balanced
concept of life. Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by
the writer of cause and effect.
No tragedy can therefore come about when its author fears to
question absolutely everything, when he regards any institution, habit, or
custom as being either everlasting, immutable, or inevitable. In the tragic
view the need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star, and
whatever it is that hedges his nature and lowers it is ripe for attack and
examination. Which is not to say that tragedy must preach
revolution.
The Greeks could probe the very heavenly origin of their
ways and return to confirm the rightness of laws. And Job could face God in
anger, demanding his right, and end in submission. But for a moment everything
is in suspension, nothing is accepted, and in ' this stretching and tearing
apart of the cosmos, in the very action of so doing, the character gains
"size."' the tragic stature which is spuriously attached to the royal
or the highborn in our minds. The commonest of men may take on that stature to
the extent of his willingness to throw all he has into the contest, the battle
to secure his rightful place in his world.
There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck
in review after review, and in many conversations with
writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied
to pessimism. Even the dictionary says nothing more about the word than that it
means a story with a sad or unhappy ending. This impression is so firmly fixed
that I almost hesitate to claim that in truth tragedy implies more optimism in
its author than does comedy, and that its final result ought to be the
reinforcement of the onlooker's brightest opinion of the human animal.
For, if it is true to say that in essence the tragic hero is
intent upon claiming his whole due as a personality,
and if this struggle must be total and without reservation, then it
automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of man to achieve his
humanity.
The possibility of victory must be there in tragedy. Where
pathos rules, where pathos is finally derived, a character has fought a battle
he could not possibly have won. The pathetic is achieved when the protagonist
is, by virtue of his witlessness, his insensitivity, or the very air he gives
off, incapable of grappling with a much superior force.
Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy
requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And
it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after
century, are the tragedies. In them, and in them
alone, lies the belief--optimistic, if you will--in the perfectibility of man.
It is time, I think, that we who are without kings took up this
bright thread of our history and followed it to the only place it can possibly
lead in our time--the heart and spirit of the average man.