Modern Literature and the Tragic 9780748636747

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Modern Literature and the Tragic

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For Cate, Carol, Claire, and John

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Modern Literature and the Tragic

K. M. Newton

Edinburgh University Press

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© K.M. Newton, 2008 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Sabon and Futura by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3673 0 (hardback) The right of K.M. Newton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Ibsen’s Ghosts and the Rejection of the Tragic

vii 1 9

2. Anti-Tragic Drama after Ibsen

21

3. Chekhov and the Tragic

51

4. The Return of the Tragic in Fiction

63

5. Nietzsche and the Redefining of the Tragic

97

6. The ‘Tragico-Dionysian’ and D. H. Lawrence

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7. The Theatre of the Absurd and the Tragic

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8. The Tragic, Pragmatism and the Postmodern

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Index

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Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of the material on Hardy in Chapter 4 and Trollope in Chapter 8 can be found in ‘Modernising Tragedy in Hardy’s Later Fiction’, The Thomas Hardy Journal 23 (2007: 142–55), and in ‘Allegory in Trollope’s The Warden’, Essays in Criticism 54 (2004: 128–43). The discussions of Shaw and Tolstoy in Chapters 2 and 4 make use of and rework material from an earlier book, In Defence of Literary Interpretation: Theory and Practice (Macmillan Press, 1986). I’m grateful to Robert Clark for giving me the idea for this study by inviting me to write an article on Modern Tragedy for the Literary Encyclopedia.

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Introduction

This book is concerned with literary responses to the tragic in the modern period. The tragic is, of course, derived from tragedy as a dramatic genre but it tended to have an independent existence almost from the start. Plato – a near contemporary of the major tragic dramatists – discussed tragedy without referring to any specific tragic drama and mentioned writers of tragedies only in passing, so that the tragic became an idea or a concept partially separate from Greek tragedy as a genre. On the surface, Aristotle in his Poetics is more objective and literary in his approach as he focuses on the form of tragic drama, and judged Sophocles’ Oedipus the King to be the exemplary tragedy. It can be argued, however, that like Plato his real interest was in the tragic as an idea and that he valued the dramatic form of Oedipus because it could be aligned with his concept of the tragic, the play’s plot – for him the most important element in tragedy – ‘produce[ing] the distinctively tragic effect of engendering phobos and eleos [fear and pity]’.1 Aristotle in effect elevated himself above the writers of tragedy, just as Plato did, suggesting that he understood its nature better than literary practitioners. One consequence of this for later writers of tragedy was to make it difficult to separate tragedy in general from Aristotle’s poetics of tragedy, even if the play he had selected as his model tragedy was not necessarily typical of Greek tragedy in general. A consequence of Aristotle’s view that the purpose of form in tragic drama is to engender certain emotions that he identifies with the tragic is that there was scope for creating alternative dramatic forms that could also engender these or related emotions, so that tragedy was thus able to transcend its Greek origins. This made it possible for later writers, notably Shakespeare, to produce works which were called tragedies even if they were significantly different in form from classical tragedy. It has been argued, however, that though Aristotle created a poetics of tragedy that still has powerful influence, it was only with the German

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Idealists and post-Idealists that what could properly be called a philosophy of the tragic emerged. Peter Szondi writes: ‘Only since Schelling has there been a philosophy of the tragic. Composed as an instruction in writing drama, Aristotle’s text strives to determine the elements of tragic art; its object is tragedy, not the idea of tragedy.’2 Hegel was the most influential writer on tragic theory among German Idealists and post-Idealists, though the theories of contemporaries such as Schelling varied significantly from his. Perhaps a major factor in making writing that aims to be tragic or is related to the tragic different in the modern period from either the classical or early modern periods is that modern writers are not only aware of Aristotle’s poetics of tragedy and his claim that it is most fully manifested in Sophocles, but are also conscious of Shakespeare’s form of tragedy and philosophies of the tragic grounded in Hegelian dialectical thinking. Szondi argues that even though ‘the dialectic as such is almost never considered to be tragic’, it ‘is valid as a criterion for the definition of the tragic’.3 A collision between opposed ethical principles which can both be justified in their own terms is central to Hegel’s philosophy of the tragic and this had a particularly powerful influence in the nineteenth century, as is apparent, for example, in George Eliot’s and A. C. Bradley’s discussions of tragedy. Eliot saw Sophocles’ Antigone very much in Hegelian dialectical terms as embodying a ‘dramatic collision’ – Antigone being for Hegel the model tragedy – since ‘two principles, both having their validity, are at war with each other’.4 Schelling shared Hegel’s view of tragedy as collision but saw it in different terms: ‘The essence of tragedy is . . . a real conflict between freedom in the subject and objective necessity. This conflict does not end with the defeat of one or the other, but rather with both of them simultaneously appearing as conquerors and conquered in perfect indifference.’5 But whether the ‘dramatic collision’ was between ethical principles or between subject and object, I shall suggest that in considering the tragic in relation to modern literature Hegelian theory plays a significant role, since both elements or forces in any tragic conflict, even if not granted equal validity, at the very least need to be accorded respect, and that if that does not apply then something different from the tragic has emerged. Hegel’s theory has, however, been persuasively criticised for seeing tragedy as ‘ultimately purposive’ and emphasising ‘harmony, resolution, and reconciliation’: Hegel’s view of what constitutes a right works for some tragedies better than others. He is not eager to acknowledge the value of forces that serve morally dubious ends. These too can be rights in the sense on which tragedy insists . . . Hippolytus and Bacchae could never be Hegel’s favourite plays.6

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Yet it is not difficult to revise a dialectical theory of the tragic so that it can be applied to such plays or to Shakespearean tragedies such as King Lear and Othello. No one could be more ‘morally dubious’ than Iago yet Othello contemplates the otherness of Iago, after his villainy is revealed, almost with wonder. Iago represents some fundamental force in the world which is irreconcilable with Othello’s love for Desdemona and seeks to destroy it. Mere moral disapproval of Iago would be ridiculously inadequate. And of course that force is also a potential in Othello himself, since it was able to gain control over him, precipitating the tragedy, though one could argue that his final suicide represents a counter-force of mental resistance to the alien and destructive other that has destroyed his and Desdemona’s love in a material sense. What makes it possible to reconcile these plays with a theory of the tragic founded on a collision between opposed forces is that the alien or destructive ‘other’ embodied in Iago or Medea or Goneril and Regan should command the respect of the audience even in the face of moral disapproval or revulsion; intense hate or jealousy or lust are forces of nature and always a potential threat to civilisation and morality, that is, to human concepts of order and value that aim to transcend nature. Szondi spells out the effect of dialectics on the concept of the tragic in ‘the post-Idealist’, or modern, era: One can draw no other consequence from this than the one drawn from the crisis to which dialectical conception of the tragic in the post-Idealist era led: There is no such thing as the tragic, at least not as an essence. Rather, the tragic is a mode, a particular manner of destruction that is threatening or already completed: the dialectical manner. There is only one tragic downfall: the one that results from the unity of opposites, from the sudden change into one’s opposite, from self-division. But it is also the case that only the demise of something that should not meet its demise, whose removal does not allow the wound to heal, is tragic. The tragic contradiction may not be sublated in a superordinate sphere, whether immanent or transcendent.7

Though William Storm in his book, After Dionysus: A Theory of the Tragic, has formulated a post-Hegelian theory of tragedy that argues that fracturing or rending of the self – sparagmos – is central to tragedy, this theory retains significant links to dialectics as interpreted by Szondi: The [tragic] denotes the inevitability of separation and the irreconcilability of opposing polarities, which produce a corresponding pattern of rifting in depictions of selfhood and action. The term reflects the Dionysian cycle that cannot be completed, that is broken before the event of unification, leaving only fracture. The tragic, in short, is not simply that which is mournful, lamentable, or even catastrophic; it is that which is unmendable.8

Another theorist who is very relevant to a consideration of the tragic in the modern period is Jacques Derrida. Though Derrida’s philosophy

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can be seen as anti-Hegelian in that the deconstruction of oppositions is intrinsic to his thinking, his concept of ‘undecidability’ has close links with Szondi’s revision of Hegel, in which there is dialectical conflict without, as Szondi puts it, sublation – a translation of the Hegelian term, aufheben9 – ‘in a superordinate sphere’. Thus the dialectic is not transcended or superseded in any synthesis of oppositions. In Derrida’s concept of undecidability oppositions remain in place and can’t be transcended or synthesised, and this is integral to an implied ‘undecidable’ theory of the tragic, the tragic being situated within the experience of the subject rather than between opposed ethical principles or between the subject and some force external to it: ‘there would be no decision, in the strong sense of the word, in ethics, in politics, no decision, and thus no responsibility, without the experience of some undecidability . . . I am in front of a problem and I know that the two determined solutions are as justifiable as one another.’ Such a predicament he describes as ‘tragic’: At some point, however, for a decision to be made you have to go beyond knowledge . . . That is why the distinction between good and evil doesn’t depend on knowledge; that is why we should not know, in terms of knowledge, what is the distinction between good and evil. To have to make such a distinction, which depends precisely on responsibility, is, I confess, both a terrible and tragic situation in which to find oneself.10

With the classical tragedies that have been most influential on writers and theorists of tragedy and the tragic, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Antigone, undecidability is not foregrounded, as the protagonists are shown as fully committed to the decisions they have made: Oedipus chose to act in order to evade the prophecy of the oracle that he will kill his father and marry his mother, and came to believe that the human will was superior to the power of the Gods; and Antigone made the opposite decision in believing that divine law gave her the right to resist a human law. Undecidability, however, may be seen to operate at a more abstract tragic level as one can claim that both sides in the conflict between opposed forces are intended to command the respect of the audience. The decisions the protagonists make inevitably bring these forces into collision with catastrophic consequences. For Derrida, Hamlet is a model tragedy for the modern era since undecidability is the primary focus rather than the catastrophic results of the decision Hamlet made. Hamlet, unlike Oedipus and Antigone, experiences undecidability directly yet must make a decision, so that the protagonist’s situation of undecidability becomes arguably the most significant aspect in the tragedy:

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In the case of Hamlet, I try to show in Specters of Marx that the responsibility in front of his father’s call, for it to be a responsibility, demands that choices be made . . . So the son has to make a decision . . . as a finite being he has to select within the heritage and that is again the question of undecidability. Of course, that is the classical interpretation of Hamlet as a victim of undecidability, he doesn’t know and he gets paralysed. Nevertheless, if we assume that Hamlet is a figure of paralysis or neurosis because of undecidability, he might be also a paradigm for action: he understands what actions should be and he undergoes the process of undecidability at the beginning.11

It might be argued against Derrida that to choose to act against the murderer of your father and a usurper should not create very much undecidability; a son can hardly just walk away from the murder of his father any more than Oedipus could merely accept the inevitability of the Oracle’s prophecy and do nothing to resist it. Yet the conflict has shifted in this play from that which is at the centre of Sophocles’ two most famous tragedies. The decision Hamlet has to make is whether acting against the moral and political corruption of Denmark, which is centred in Claudius, could be anything but futile since he is aware that such corruption may be intrinsic – Denmark may be a prison but as Rosencrantz points out to Hamlet it is not different in kind from the world12 – and therefore attempting to destroy it would not only be pointless but may even make things worse; and of course incidents such as the killing of Polonius and especially the catastrophic climax, keep that question in play. For Derrida the lines that encapsulate undecidability and Hamlet’s tragic predicament are ‘The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,/ That ever I was born to set it right’ (I, v).13 Undecidability in this Derridean sense which locates tragedy within the human experience perhaps allows modern writers opposed generally to any philosophy of the tragic nevertheless to retain a connection with it through the representation of human dilemmas and choices, in which a decision has to be taken without having any secure knowledge that it is the right one: ‘No one can ever know, no one can ever be sure, in a theoretical and determinative judgment, that a responsible decision was made and that it will have been the best.’14 The literary and implied philosophical context of classical and Shakespearean drama needs to be kept in mind in discussing modern writers in relation to the tragic, as their writing incorporates an awareness of that context; and though the philosophy of the tragic, especially post-Hegel, may be of greater importance for considering modern writers, some were very conscious of the form of classical tragedy and created an interplay with it. George Steiner in The Death of Tragedy claimed that modern drama failed to achieve the literary and philosophical power of classical tragedy.15 However, I shall argue that in

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considering the tragic in the modern period one needs to take into account the fact that not only formally but philosophically the concept of the tragic becomes problematic even though the human issues it raises remain fundamental, and that this leads to a variety of responses to and confrontations with the tragic in modern literature. Some major writers rejected any philosophy of the tragic or endeavoured to find alternatives to it, often however creating interplay with aspects of Aristotle’s poetics of tragedy at the same time as undermining the tragic as a philosophy. After Hegel and German Idealism, tragedy as a dramatic form and the philosophy of the tragic become more radically separate. Such lack of congruency between a poetics of tragedy and a philosophy of the tragic means that discussion of the tragic can’t be confined only to drama (or even just to serious drama) but must also consider other types of literature, especially fiction. Since the main focus in this study is on responses to the tragic among representative modern writers from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century – whose concept of it would have been mainly influenced by Sophocles and Aristotle, Shakespeare, Hegelian dialectical theory, Schopenhauerian or Nietzschean revisionist theories – there is no attempt to produce a new theory of the tragic but to discuss in some detail literary works by such writers that can be seen as engaging with the tragic in these various aspects. It will be clear that the dialogic approach of this book with its detailed analysis of particular texts is very different from that of the most ambitious study in recent years of tragedy and the tragic, Terry Eagleton’s Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, which is essentially a polemical study.16 In the first two chapters playwrights who produced works that can be seen as anti-tragic are discussed, some – Ibsen in his middle period, Shaw, Brecht – being actively hostile to any philosophy of the tragic but often making use of formal features and devices associated with tragedy, others being anti-tragic without necessarily intending to be. Chekhov is an interesting case since the relation between his writing and the tragic is not easy to determine, and his work is discussed in Chapter 3. In contrast to anti-tragic writing, I suggest that certain writers of fiction took the view that modern intellectual developments – particularly Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Darwinian evolutionary theory – created a new basis for the tragic in modern times, and Hardy, Tolstoy and Conrad are discussed in that context in Chapter 4. The major influence on thinking about the tragic after Hegel is Nietzsche who took a revisionist view of Greek tragedy and attempted to create an alternative or Dionysian tragic theory. The fifth and sixth chapters consider writers who were influenced in various ways by Nietzsche’s ideas on the tragic,

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D. H. Lawrence being, as I argue, the most committed to Nietzsche’s revisionist tragic philosophy. The seventh chapter considers the relation between ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’ and the tragic and argues that though Samuel Beckett’s drama can’t be pinned down as being either tragic or anti-tragic, Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker has a strong claim to be a major modern tragedy. In the final chapter the focus is on the opposition between the tragic and the postmodern as represented by antifoundationalist thinking, with Trollope’s The Warden being discussed as a proto-postmodern work that is both anti-tragic and anti-foundationalist in several respects. By seeing modern writers as interacting with tragedy and the tragic in various ways, one can create what I hope are interesting connections between works which on the surface might appear to have little in common. Modern writers often appear to write from quite diverse perspectives but by considering their different and implicitly opposed responses to the tragic one sees them in effect entering into debate or dialogue with each other about the fundamental issues the tragic raises in the modern period.

Notes 1. Walter Kaufmann (1969), Tragedy and Philosophy, New York: Anchor Books, p. 65. 2. Peter Szondi (2002), An Essay on the Tragic, trans. Paul Fleming, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 1. 3. Ibid., p. 54. 4. George Eliot (1992), Selected Critical Writings, ed. Rosemary Ashton, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 244. See also A. C. Bradley (1909), ‘Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy’, in Oxford Lectures on Poetry, London: Macmillan, pp. 69–98. 5. Quoted in Szondi, p. 9. 6. Adrian Poole (2005), Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 59, 61. 7. Szondi, p. 55. 8. William Storm (1998), After Dionysis: A Theory of the Tragic, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 80. For a recent study of Greek tragedy that challenges philosophical approaches to tragedy by emphasising the performative, see Olga Taxidou (2004), Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 9. Aufheben is what replaces, in Hegelian dialectic, the original thesis and antithesis, both of which, however, remain saved or preserved in some sense in their ‘sublation’. 10. Jacques Derrida (1999), ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley

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Modern Literature and the Tragic (eds), Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, London: Routledge, p. 66. Ibid., pp. 67–8. See exchange between Hamlet and Rosencrantz in Hamlet, III, ii. See discussion of Hamlet in Chapter 1 of Jacques Derrida (1994), Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge. Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco (2004), For What Tomorrow . . .: A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 132. Emphasis in original. See George Steiner (1963), The Death of Tragedy, London: Faber and Faber. Terry Eagleton (2003), Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, Oxford: Blackwell. Eagleton argues for a new idea of the tragic that can accommodate Marxism, humanism and religion. The emphasis is on range of discussion and often scathing critique of alternative ideas of the tragic rather than detailed analysis of texts, and writers whose perspective on or attitude to the tragic Eagleton particularly disagrees with are dismissed in excathedra style.

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Chapter 1

Ibsen’s Ghosts and the Rejection of the Tragic

In his book The Death of Tragedy George Steiner famously and controversially argued that Ibsen’s middle period social realist plays in prose, and by implication the modern drama on social themes that emerged from them, were irreconcilable with tragedy: But these tracts, enduring as they may prove to be by virtue of their theatrical vigour, are not tragedies. In tragedy, there are no temporal remedies. The point cannot be stressed too often. Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unaltering bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world. But in these plays of Ibsen’s radical period, such is not the issue. There are specific remedies to the disasters which befall the characters, and it is Ibsen’s purpose to make us see these remedies and bring them about. A Doll’s House and Ghosts are founded on the belief that society can move toward a sane, adult conception of sexual life and that woman can and must be raised to the dignity of man . . . As Shaw rightly says: ‘No more tragedy for the sake of tears.’ Indeed, no tragedy at all, but dramatic rhetoric summoning us to action in the conviction that truth of conduct can be defined and that it will liberate society.1

By writing plays in which it is suggested that there are social solutions to human problems and in forsaking the heightening of language made possible by verse for dialogue based on ordinary speech, Ibsen, generally regarded as the first modern playwright, had in effect killed off tragedy. Although one may agree that Steiner is right to see Ibsen’s social realist plays as breaking with the tragic, he does not explain why there is nevertheless a fairly obvious interplay between Ghosts (1881) and classical tragedy, indeed no mention is made of this fact. Ibsen clearly has classical tragedy in mind in Ghosts, particularly Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, held by Aristotle in his Poetics to be the exemplary tragedy. Whereas Steiner suggests that Ibsen made an unfortunate literary decision in abandoning tragedy in favour of what he sees as an inferior social

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realism in his middle period plays, I shall argue that Ibsen very much realised what was at stake in artistic terms in going beyond traditional tragedy and that a play such as Ghosts is the outcome of the conscious adoption of an anti-tragic aesthetic: though inhumanity and destruction are always with us, in the modern era tragedy is no longer an appropriate artistic response to them. Ibsen, of course, before he turned to social realism, had written plays in verse, and one of the best known of these plays is Brand, clearly a tragedy in form and conception though it had been reworked from a poem that was epic in scale into a ‘dramatic poem’ not intended to be acted on the stage. Though it might appear to belong more to the Romantic idea of tragedy than to the classical, in that there is a clash between an individual of heroic potential and a world that fails to conform with or can’t live up to his ideals, the play can also be aligned with a Hegelian theory of the tragic. It has been suggested that Ibsen in his verse period was influenced by Friedrich Hebbel, a tragic dramatist influenced by Hegel’s theory, for whom the basis of tragedy lay in the conflict created by the inevitable fact that any assertion on the part of the individual will provoke necessarily a counter-assertion of the world will.2 The play recognises that Brand’s adherence to a philosophy of ‘all or nothing’, which he believes is demanded if people commit themselves fully to the will of God, is one that virtually no human being or human society can live up to. Nevertheless it is a heroic ideal even if the attempt to apply it is destructive both to Brand himself and to other people. The play does not set up a simple dichotomy between the heroic individual and a corrupt or flawed world as in more conventional Romantic drama: we see the negative consequences of Brand’s idealism, and ordinary humanity is not treated with contempt though its limitations are clear. There is both respect for Brand’s assertion of ‘all or nothing’ and respect for the pragmatism and compromise that characterises the resistant world in which the hero lives. Out of that fundamental conflict – which is essentially ahistorical or intrinsic – emerges the tragic. But when Ibsen moved on from verse and the heightened form of drama associated with it to a drama that employed modern prose with character and situation treated in accordance with this new form of dramatic language, a social and historical dimension was introduced that changed the nature of serious drama; in particular the tragic as traditionally conceived was called into question. Ghosts suggests that Ibsen was well aware that a move to social realism had major implications for tragedy.3 Steiner asserts that the conflicts at the root of classical tragedy are basic and constitutive to the human condition, and the Ibsen who wrote Brand may have agreed with him. When Steiner refers to ‘the

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unaltering bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world’, the key word is ‘unaltering’. Sophoclean tragedy assumes that human beings live in a world in which there are intrinsic conflicts, such as that between a transcendent moral or metaphysical order and natural human desire or an idea of the human good that is not necessarily reconcilable with laws of transcendent or divine origin. Thus Oedipus, when the Oracle foresees that he will kill his father and marry his mother, refuses to accept that fate even though the Oracle is in touch with an order superior to humanity. Of course in seeking to avoid his fate he precipitates it. But he displays hubris, from the gods’ point of view, in believing human beings do not need to accept the will of the gods: they can operate as independent agents. Although one can, of course, claim that the gods have set up Oedipus, it is arguable that this is not done lightly or mischievously but to bring home to human beings that the transcendent realm of the gods is ultimately more powerful than and thus superior to the human realm. Human beings need continually to be reminded that they are subject to the authority of a higher power. Yet there is an inescapable and irresolvable conflict of interest between gods and humanity and human beings would not be human if they did not rebel against transcendent power and the laws that sustain it. If Oedipus on hearing that he was fated to kill his father and marry his mother had merely accepted that fate as inevitable he would have compromised his humanity. And as this fate seemed avoidable, the only authentic human choice was to try to avoid it. But from the gods’ point of view, if human beings believe they can easily control and shape their lives without taking account of an authority that has a transcendent source then the gods will become redundant and thus there would be no order that transcends human desires and interests. In Sophoclean tragedy – the situation is more complex if one also considers classical tragedy as a whole, notably Aeschylus and Euripides – the human and the non-human realms are also conceived of as unchangeable: both are defined in essentialist terms. The non-human or transcendent realm is by definition unchanging and human beings have an essence or soul that is not determined by the body or anything material but is also conceived of as being beyond change. Thus the conflict between the two is non-contingent: it will always exist though it may take different forms. It is significant in Oedipus the King that when Oedipus learns the truth, he does not blame the gods or the fates: the authority and superiority of the world beyond the human is accepted. He has performed acts that are irreconcilable with laws that emanate from a non-human source and so are unchallengeable. Although he did not know the man he killed was his father or that the woman he married

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was his mother he accepts responsibility for his actions. He does not accuse the gods or the Oracle of deceiving him. He believed he could set human interests above the realm of the gods and he must therefore accept punishment for his hubris. When the inevitable conflict between the transcendent world beyond the human with its fixed and unchangeable laws and the world of human beings is irresolvable, tragedy and the tragic come into play. In Ibsen’s social realist drama this conflict between two unchanging and unchangeable forces is no longer tenable. What has changed in the modern era is that both the world external to the human – whether conceived of in terms of a metaphysical or natural order – and human identity are no longer perceived as having an autonomous and independent existence since they cannot be separated from the social; the naked confrontation, characteristic of a tragedy such as Oedipus, between the transcendent realm of the gods and an essential humanity disappears because society and by extension history have entered the picture. All conflicts are thus mediated by society – or perhaps better, the sociological – and history, an idea that would have been alien to Sophocles and his premodern era. Of course, it would be a caricature of classical or premodern tragedy as a whole to claim that society and social issues are absent from representation. However, what makes the modern context in which Ibsen wrote his social realist drama different in a fundamental way from pre-modern eras is that a sociological dimension shapes thinking about the world, human identity and the relation between the two. Even metaphysical ideas in the modern era have to be defended against those who see them as having social, cultural and historical origins. The most influential modern thinkers from various perspectives have argued that human beings do not have essences: human identity is determined – wholly or partially depending on point of view – by socio-historical forces such as class and ideology. There are thus no absolute laws and human acts cannot be judged in absolute terms independent of circumstances. A modern Oedipus who discovers he has inadvertently killed his father and married his mother need not be seen either by himself or his social world – at least in Western society – as having performed acts that are beyond redemption. He could question the absoluteness of the laws that condemn patricide and incest: do these not emanate from a particular socio-cultural matrix and therefore cannot be applied in different eras without further discussion? The modern Oedipus could also claim that his actions cannot be judged separately from his state of mind: the fact that he did not know that his father was his father when he killed him or his mother was his mother when he married her means that he cannot be guilty of patricide and incest in any real sense. He is merely a

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victim of circumstances. In all cases the particularities of the situation must be taken into consideration before any judgement can take place. Ghosts, I shall suggest, takes account of this changed context that undermines the fundamental assumptions of Sophoclean tragedy. Although the play is modelled on Sophocles’ Oedipus the King in various respects, the purpose of this interplay is not to claim tragic status for Ghosts but to highlight Ibsen’s implied view that classical tragedy is now impossible and that serious drama can no longer be tragic in any traditional sense. Steiner convincingly sees verse as distancing the language of drama from the trivia of life and thus creating heightened situations that transcend particularity. That in itself might account for Ibsen’s abandonment of verse, as the language of drama should no longer aim to transcend the specific: for the centrality of the social to be recognised a dramatic language based on ordinary speech must be substituted for verse. But Ibsen’s social realist drama is no slice of life: virtually nothing is irrelevant, everything in Ghosts has a structural, thematic or symbolic purpose. The play’s kinship to classical tragedy is apparent in the fact that it adheres to the unities – of time, place, and action – as Aristotle recommends, using Oedipus as his model. Mrs Alving is Oedipus-like in that she is confident that she can triumph by force of mind and will over the various forms of negativity that stand in the way of her happiness. In particular she believes that now that her husband is dead she can put the past behind her and move on with her son, Oswald, to a new life. If the play were a traditional tragedy this would be seen as a type of hubris, though clearly the play does not see it in such terms. She has been mentally liberated by reading the advanced books Pastor Manders so disapproves of. However, at the beginning of the play she has no desire to rebel outwardly against conventional society and its ideas: she has had an orphanage built to commemorate her late husband, Captain Alving, in order to reinforce the belief that he was a pillar of the community and to cover up any rumours to the contrary. She even goes along with Pastor Manders’ advice not to insure the orphanage as that might offend those who saw insuring such a charitable building as indicating a lack of confidence in divine providence. Her main aim, however, is to relegate her life with Captain Alving to the past by directing his money into this project so that neither she nor her son will have any obligation to him. She proclaims to Manders: ‘I didn’t want Oswald, my son, to inherit a single thing from his father . . . Anything my son gets is to come from me.’4 In the light of what is to happen, this speech embodies dramatic irony, a common device in tragedy, especially in Sophocles’ Oedipus as in Oedipus’ assertion: ‘The

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killer of Laius,/Whoever he was, might think to turn his hand/Against me; thus, serving Laius, I serve myself.’5 Ibsen’s use of dramatic irony is different from Sophocles’ as far as the audience is concerned, however, since the irony will be apparent only to those who have already seen or read the play, whereas in Sophocles’ drama the audience, potentially at least, would have known the myth on which the play was based and therefore would have recognised the irony at once. Sophocles’ audience therefore accepts the tragedy in advance, as it were, whereas Ibsen and modern drama more generally – though there will be exceptions such as historical plays – cannot make such a demand on their audiences. In place of ahistorical myth there is realism with its basis in historicism, empiricism, contingency or a perpetually changing reality. Like Oedipus, Ghosts is very much about the relation between past and present. In Oedipus the past proves to be inescapable, undermining any human attempt to be independent of fate or the realm of the gods. Mrs Alving also recognises a force independent of her will in the central speech in the play in which she talks about the ghosts of the title: I’m inclined to think that we are all ghosts, Pastor Manders, every one of us. It’s not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunts us. It’s all kind of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that. It’s not that they actually live on in us; they are simply lodged there, and we cannot get rid of them. I’ve only to pick up a newspaper and I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. Over the whole country there must be ghosts, as numerous as the sands of the sea. And here we are, all of us, abysmally afraid of the light. (232)

Significantly the absolute values upheld and defended by Sophocles’ gods are reduced to ‘old defunct theories’ and ‘old defunct beliefs’, social and ideological constructs that belong to the past. Mrs Alving recognises that the power of the ‘ghosts’ lies not in old theories and beliefs in themselves – she has liberated herself at an intellectual level from those; it is the fact that they are internalised in human beings and become enmeshed in their thinking and feeling that gives them a power that cannot be thrown off easily, as the play is to reveal. She nevertheless remains convinced, like Oedipus in his belief that he can act to avoid what the fates have forecast for him, that she can overcome these ‘ghosts’ and move into the future without being crushed by them. She is to discover, however, that the ‘ghosts’ do not merely have an influence on thinking or feeling; they have material effects that she has yet to face. Defunct theories and beliefs had the power to make her return to her husband and that act is to have inexorable consequences. The play shows her becoming more radical in the course of her various encounters with Manders and Oswald. The debate between her

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son and Manders in which Oswald defends bohemian life in Paris against Manders’ objections to it as immoral galvanises Mrs Alving into telling Manders the truth about her relationship with her husband: after Manders persuaded her to return to him when she had left him because of his dissipated behaviour he had not reformed but continued to live in the same way. At this point she sees herself as a victim of a dissolute monster but in the course of the play, like Oedipus, she gradually develops towards a greater understanding of her situation. It becomes clear that blame cannot be as easily assigned as she previously thought: both she and her husband, as she eventually realises, were caught up in a system that it was virtually impossible to escape from. Her marriage was an arranged marriage but her parents could not be blamed for it because, as she says, it would have been madness for them to have turned down such an offer. In her gradual understanding of the workings of this network of social forces Mrs Alving becomes aware that neither the parents, her husband nor she can be blamed for the marriage taking place: the socio-cultural system into which they have been born is to blame. But the system is not something merely external that one can easily rebel against; as Mrs Alving expresses it in her ‘ghosts’ speech, the system becomes internalised in human beings so that it seems natural. The culmination of her developing insight into her situation is provoked, after she learns of Oswald’s illness, by their discussion of the ‘joy of life’, which Oswald asserts is absent in Norway. At first she reverts to bourgeois stereotype – demonstrating the power the ‘ghosts’ still exert over her mind – when Oswald proclaims that Regine is ‘filled with the joy of life’, by being dismissive of it: ‘Can there be any salvation in that?’ (250). But this generates an experience of illumination that transforms her view of both herself and her situation: ‘Now I see for the first time. And now I can speak’ (251). In Sophoclean tragedy this sudden sense of recognition or discovery is defined by Aristotle as anagnorisis and leads to a major turning point or reversal of fortune (peripeteia) in the drama. In Oedipus the King it is the moment when Oedipus realises his relationship to the man he killed and for the first time has insight into how he himself and actions committed by him are connected with the crisis in Thebes. Mrs Alving has a similar insight but before she can articulate it Manders returns and the orphanage – Mrs Alving’s means of resolving a series of contradictions – burns down. It embodied lies that can no longer be suppressed. In Act 3 a radically changed Mrs Alving emerges. As Oedipus recognises that he is directly responsible for the plague that besets Thebes, Mrs Alving understands that her husband’s dissipated behaviour, and

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therefore everything that has arisen from it, was not something of which she was merely the victim: her husband’s actions were inextricably connected with her own behaviour and attitudes. Identifying ‘the joy of life’, as Oswald characterises it, with sin and immorality, regarding sex for a woman as mere duty, she had been directly responsible for her husband’s descent into dissipation and vice, having internalised the old defunct theories and beliefs so that they became part of the fabric of her consciousness and thus had specific effects on her relationship with her husband. It was not then mere dissoluteness or the outward repressiveness of the society in which Captain Alving lived that made him develop in the way he did. Mrs Alving, shaped by her upbringing and her identification with bourgeois respectability and puritanical Christian views of the body, brought no joy into Captain Alving’s life so that his ‘joy of life’ was perverted into dissipation and loose living. Far from being the victim, as she perceived herself to be at first, she recognises that she herself was at the root of the problem: ‘They’d taught me various things about duty and such-like, and I’d simply gone on believing them . . . I’m afraid I must have made the house unbearable for your poor father, Oswald’ (261). But of course the implication of this is that the self is not to be seen in essentialist terms as a unique soul; Mrs Alving’s self was a social and ideological construct. Whereas Oedipus’ actions are represented as stemming from his own nature, Mrs Alving is seen as the product of a repressive cultural system that determined her feelings and attitudes. She cannot therefore be blamed for the catastrophic outcome of events in the way that Oedipus can in Oedipus the King since his actions derive from his own human choices, not from ideological conditioning. But though Mrs Alving no longer sees herself as a victim of her dissipated husband and Manders’ weakness in refusing to take her in when she left Alving, she naively thinks that her insight is going to be liberating, that her consciousness of the situation will allow her to free herself from the forces that formerly shaped her and enable her to move on from them: ‘you’ll soon be able to work again, my darling. Now that you are rid of all those nagging and depressing thoughts that are worrying you’ (265). She cannot bring herself to accept the inexorability of her past actions which have taken on a power that is independent of her consciousness, and even when Oswald spells out what his inherited illness entails she cries, ‘It’s not true, Oswald! It’s impossible! It can’t be!’ (266). Oedipus as protagonist of Sophocles’ tragedy, in contrast, when he recognises his fate accepts it without struggle. The ending of Ghosts is almost as catastrophic as any in classical tragedy, with Oswald’s mind being destroyed by congenital syphilis,

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inherited from his father but transmitted to him through his mother, and Mrs Alving finally being faced with the dilemma of whether or not to agree to his demand to kill him and thus put him out of his misery when his mind gives way. The difference between Ghosts and Sophoclean tragedy, however, lies in the implied attitude to such catastrophe. In Sophocles’ classical tragedy the forces that destroy the tragic protagonist are accorded respect even though they may be alien to human hopes and interests. Oedipus does not blame the gods or any external forces for the situation he is in; though such forces may be destructive, that which transcends the human must be respected. The fundamental conflict between human hopes and interests and an otherness that is resistant to them is seen as intrinsic. But what destroys the lives of Mrs Alving and Oswald is not intrinsic in that sense: at the root of their destruction are social forces, dead ideas that live on, the dispiriting ideology of respectability. These social forces are accorded no respect in the play; on the contrary they are treated with obvious contempt. Whereas according to Aristotle the effect of tragedy on the audience should be one of catharsis, a purging of such emotions as pity and fear, the audience at the end of Ghosts ought to feel contempt for the socio-cultural system that has precipitated this disaster. Ibsen has chosen his characters carefully. Realism merges into symbolism. In constructing this family Ibsen creates a set of dramatic representations that will allow him to attack the foundation of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture: the sexually potent Captain Alving whose failure to find the ‘joy of life’ within marriage leads him into dissipation and disease; Mrs Alving, the product of respectable repressive moral values who becomes liberated too late; Oswald, representing the younger generation, the victim of disease that exists on both a physical and an ideological level. The other characters also fit in with the play’s symbolic scheme: Manders, completely imbued with the dead ideas of conventional society; Engstrand, cynically adapting himself to society’s hypocrisy by opening a lodging house for sailors – significantly to be named after Captain Alving – which is a front for a brothel; and the maid Regine, Engstrand’s supposed daughter who turns out to be Oswald’s half-sister, driven into virtual prostitution by choosing to become part of Engstrand’s sailors’ lodging house. Syphilis as a sexually transmitted disease is a particularly graphic symbol of dead ideas and beliefs which have become rotten and are destroying a new generation. These carefully chosen ingredients, powerfully represented in realist terms, combine to create an image with strong symbolic overtones. George Steiner, in contrasting Ibsen and tragedy, asserts that the dilemmas of Ibsen’s social realist plays, unlike those of tragedy, ‘may be

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resolved by rational innovation’. But though society can be reformed in order to overcome particular abuses, it would be utopian to believe that a society perfectly adapted to the desires, hopes and ideals of all its citizens could be created. There will always be a mismatch to a greater or lesser degree and Ibsen’s social realist plays are at bottom about this inevitable mismatch. But whereas a tragedian like Sophocles has respect for the forces that destroy humanity with the assumption that human beings must accept them since they can’t be overcome, Ibsen has little or no respect for the destructive social forces represented in his drama. The audience at the end of Ghosts ought to leave the theatre with a sense of outrage at such destruction of a family and a determination to resist the social forces that have brought it about. There is no sense of tragic acceptance as there is at the end of a classical tragedy like Oedipus, nor does a concept such as ‘liberal tragedy’, as formulated by Raymond Williams in a discussion that focuses on Ibsen, help as it obscures Ibsen’s questioning of the very foundation of tragedy.6 Steiner is right to claim that there are ‘remedies’ for Mrs Alving and her son’s particular situation, and one can see that the conditions that destroyed their lives – Calvinistic Christianity, bourgeois notions of respectability, practices like arranged marriages, even an illness like congenital syphilis – are no longer powerful in the twenty-first century in modern Western societies. Yet it is simplistic to claim, as Steiner does, that it was Ibsen’s purpose to promote ‘remedies’ for the social evils that affect the Alving family. The fact that Ibsen creates links with classical tragedy suggests that remedying specific social evils is not his major aim as an artist: he is concerned like Sophocles with a universal human conflict, but one between human beings and social forms rather than between humanity and the gods. Though no society can exist without institutions and belief systems that sustain social order, with the passing of time it is inevitable that these will become less adapted to changing social and cultural conditions and consequently a conflict will arise between human desire and aspiration and social forms that restrict such desire and aspiration. But a character like Mrs Alving is representative of a recurrent human situation: she is both a product of a particular society and culture who internalises its values and ideology and also someone who experiences desires and aspirations at variance with the very cultural norms that she has internalised. So no simple form of liberation is possible and the conflict is not merely between the individual and society but within the individual who cannot help but be a social product. It is a mistake to see Ibsen even in his middle period plays as only a social critic attacking specific targets, such as the subjugation of women in A Doll’s House or

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repressive bourgeois values in Ghosts. These plays rather suggest that as institutions and ideologies become ossified in time certain individuals will in consequence be crushed by these ossified forces. Resistance against them is essential but there is no sense of optimism that new institutions and different ideologies will not become similarly ossified, and inevitably human beings in the future will internalise such ossifications. Thus in Ghosts Calvinistic Christianity, life-denying bourgeois morality, hypocritical respectability should not only be seen in literal terms as the object of attack in the play; they also function metaphorically as representative examples of social ossification. A Steiner-like critic who sees the play as a kind of tract for the times misses the point. Certainly it is a scathing attack on what now tend to be called ‘Victorian values’ – as its reception when first produced in London in 1891 graphically illustrated – but anyone who reads or sees the play in the modern era and who responds to it metaphorically rather than literally ought to be aware that the Alvings transcend their nineteenth-century context as classical tragedy transcends its particular context. But whereas Ibsen implies through his allusions to Oedipus that tragedy as conceived by Sophocles promotes human acceptance of a power beyond the human, his drama recognises no such power: the nonsocial confrontation between the human realm and an order that transcends the human no longer obtains. What remain resistant to human desire and aspiration in Ghosts are only reified human forms of order, the product of past human desires, ideals and concepts that are perceived as having an objective and separate existence. Submission and catharsis are therefore rejected in favour of continual struggle. Mrs Alving and Oswald may be defeated but they refuse to submit mentally to that defeat or respect those forces that destroy their lives; they thus offer hope that the power of the particular forces that have crushed them can in time be overcome, but there is no assurance in Ibsen’s drama that the conflict between human desire and aspiration and ossified social forms – whose power is both external and internal – will ever end. However, though I have argued that tragedy in the classical sense is rejected in Ghosts, there is an alternative tragic dimension, one that anticipates Derrida’s concept of the tragic as the human experience of having to decide in a context of undecidability. When Mrs Alving realises the inexorable nature of Oswald’s condition she is faced with having to decide between watching his mind being destroyed by the disease or, as he urges, killing him when it is clear that he has reached the point of no return. This locates the tragic within the human realm itself as an existential dilemma, and thus implicitly redefines it so that it is not the outcome of a collision between the human and some force that

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transcends or is alien to it. The tragic emerges not in the choice she makes or its consequences but in the very undecidability of the choice she has to make, which the play highlights by not disclosing what her decision will be or what results from it.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

George Steiner (1963), The Death of Tragedy, London: Faber and Faber, p. 291. Steiner defends his view of tragedy against critics of it in ‘ “Tragedy” Reconsidered’, New Literary History, 35 (2004), pp. 1–15. For a discussion of the influence of Hebbel on Ibsen see David Thomas (1990), Henrik Ibsen, Basingstoke: Macmillan, p. 53. Szondi discusses Hebbel in An Essay on the Tragic (2002), trans. Paul Fleming, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 37–40. There are also some links between A Doll’s House – the play that preceded Ghosts – and tragedy with Nora contemplating suicide, a tragic solution to her problems, but then rejecting the tragic in favour of an alternative social solution: discarding marriage and the family. Henrik Ibsen (1970), Ibsen: Plays: ‘Pillars of Society’; ‘A Doll’s House’; ‘Ghosts’, trans. James Walter McFarlane, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 225. Page numbers will henceforth be incorporated in the text. Sophocles (1971), The Theban Plays, trans. E. F. Watling, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 29. Raymond Williams (1996), Modern Tragedy, London: Chatto and Windus, pp. 87–102.

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Chapter 2

Anti-Tragic Drama after Ibsen

Shaw and Saint Joan Shaw’s drama was clearly influenced by Ibsen’s middle period plays and it continues and takes further Ibsen’s anti-tragic perspective. As a Fabian socialist Shaw was one of the major social critics of his time and it is easy to see why he particularly admired the radical social critique presented in plays such as A Doll’s House and Ghosts. If one believed that social action could change the world for the better then tragedy could be interpreted as a conservative form that reinforced the status quo by naturalising pain and suffering and thus dissociating them from social structures and their supporting ideologies. As well as being an ardent social reformer, Shaw also sympathised with the Romantic and utopian idealism of writers such as Blake and Shelley, as he believed in a continuing developing humanity, thus his support for Lamarckian evolutionary theory in which the human will played a role in humanity’s purposeful development, and his attack on Darwinism which had no place for purpose or the individual will in its concept of the evolutionary process. For Shaw, not only could the world external to humanity be changed in order to undermine the tragic, but so could humanity itself. Shaw’s anti-tragic perspective in his drama often led to his being accused of not being a true dramatist, despite the fact that most of his plays were popular successes: ‘When I venture to say that Mr Shaw is no dramatist I do not mean that he fails to interest and stimulate and amuse us in the theatre . . . All that we mean is that when he happens to choose the play as the form in which he shall entertain us there is a certain artistic waste.’1 Many writers and critics attributed what they saw as Shaw’s failure to achieve ‘greatness’ to the absence of any tragic vision in his writing. Thomas Mann wrote of him: ‘That idea [of greatness] implies a certain human tragedy, of suffering and sacrifice . . . Was

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he beyond such things, or were they beyond him?’2 For Robert Brustein, ‘Shaw’s failure to penetrate his own existential rebellion has robbed him of a tragic vision.’3 His optimistic Lamarckian interpretation of evolution has been seen as undermining tragic seriousness: ‘Shaw converts to a comic pattern the material of tragedy . . . commendable variations (especially women imbued with the Life Force) survive, get married, and live happily ever after.’4 This kind of criticism of Shaw contains the assumption that tragedy is the highest dramatic form which all serious drama should aspire to and fails to recognise, as Shaw surely did, that after Ibsen and social realism the tragic had been called into question and thereafter tragedy becomes problematic as a form. The concerted attack on Ghosts by critics when it was first produced in London in 1891 reveals a refusal to accept serious drama as social critique. As Shaw points out in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, his own play Mrs Warren’s Profession, which dealt with prostitution, created similar outrage when it was performed in New York in 1905. This perception that a drama of social critique could not be reconciled with the tragic and was thus ipso facto on a lower artistic level helps to explain the acclaim with which Saint Joan was received when first produced in 1923: Shaw had at last realised the limitations of his previous dramatic approach and produced a play that aspired to tragic status. It was widely accepted as his greatest artistic achievement and compared to great tragedies of the past: ‘First of all it is the tragedy of Joan. It is also, as Shaw suggests, the tragedy of the harm done by well-meaning and sincere people; but it is also great because it shows a great individual winning out of material defeat and destruction a kind of spiritual victory. In this sense it is a classical tragedy, like Antigone or Lear.’5 For Edmund Wilson it was ‘the first genuine tragedy Shaw had written’.6 Even those who dislike it or have reservations tend to base those on the play not living up to tragedy: Joan ‘resembles Anne Whitefield, not Antigone; the Millionairess, not Medea’.7 For George Steiner, though it ‘comes nearer to a tragic ordering of life’ than other Shaw plays, ‘one cannot help feeling it falls short of the mark by some small, obstinate margin’.8 One reading does argue that it repudiates tragedy but only on the grounds that Joan is not worthy of being a tragic figure since she is represented as a naive idealist: ‘By balancing the two simpletons in his design [Joan and de Stogumger], Shaw effectively throws into relief the questionableness of the principles that Joan represents.’9 Tragedy has therefore been central to discussions of Saint Joan and critics have recognised the relationship between the play and Sophocles’ Antigone. This has led some critics to argue that Saint Joan conforms to

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the Hegelian conception of tragedy, since Antigone was central to Hegel’s argument: ‘The Hegelian attitude toward tragedy, that which holds that out of the division of the ethical substance comes a synthesis that transcends both lesser, sundered goods, is clearly Shaw’s in Saint Joan.’10 Maurice Valency has been the strongest proponent of a Hegelian reading: Hegel’s view of tragedy was relativistic . . . Tragic characters represent actual ethical forces in conflict. Their struggle represents, not the struggle between good and evil, but the collision between two incompatible goods, and the tragedy of such characters is the consequence of their inflexible partnership . . . Accordingly in tragedy both protagonist and antagonist are doomed to perish . . . It is from this idea that Saint Joan derives its magnitude. The source of its tragedy is not merely the agony of Joan – which is treated ironically, since she is ultimately triumphant – but the eternal agony of a race that burns its saints.11

Yet he finally admits Shaw fails to make the Hegelian logic dramatically convincing: ‘For in spite of his painstaking effort to present the trial of Joan as a clash of cosmic forces in which both tyrants and victim are tragically enmeshed, the logic of the situation is lost in the overwhelming fact that, no matter what is being said, a young woman will be burnt alive.’ Shaw could resolve this problem only, claims Valency, by using de Stogumber to point out the horror of Joan’s death, an ineffective conclusion in tragic terms: ‘Thus Saint Joan, after skirting with circumspection the borders of tragedy, plunges suddenly into melodrama. Shaw could hardly stop there. The comic epilogue was inevitable.’12 What this shows is that Saint Joan is unconvincingly interpreted as a Hegelian tragedy. Although Joan’s prosecutors are represented as acting out of principle and their arguments against Joan are powerful in their own terms, the play clearly favours Joan’s position and rejects that of her opponents, thus undermining any Hegelian dialectic. Nor is the attempt to see the play as tragi-comic any more convincing. Although one can agree that Joan’s ideas eventually triumph over those of her opponents, this does not lessen the impact of her death. The emphasis in the play is as much on the miracle of Joan herself as on her as a forerunner of Protestantism and nationalism and therefore the fact that these ideas emerge as powerful forces in the future cannot compensate for her destruction. As the epilogue shows, the future is no more ready to receive Joan than the past. One feature of Saint Joan that creates a difficulty for those who see it as tragic, whether Aristotelian or Hegelian or some mixed form, is that Joan accepts death only when she discovers that her recantation will not lead to her freedom but to life imprisonment. This is either seen as an

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artistic weakness or something that needs to be explained away. Louis Martz refers to Joan’s ‘one lapse in confidence – her brief recantation’, and describes it as ‘her only real error in the play . . . where her superb self-confidence breaks down in a panic of recantation’.13 The use of the word ‘panic’ is significant, since it suggests that Joan’s recantation is not an authentic choice on her part but the product of a temporary emotional disturbance, with the further implication that, if she had made a considered choice to recant, that would undermine the play as tragedy. Her recantation must therefore be explained away as ‘panic’ if the play’s tragic status is not to be undermined. Saint Joan has obvious affinities with Sophocles’ Antigone since both protagonists explicitly choose death, though one could argue that ultimately all tragic protagonists make such a choice, even if not literally. Antigone, however, is distinctive in welcoming death as a price worth paying for performing an act she believes to be right in absolute terms. She tells her sister Ismene: I will bury my brother; And if I die for it, what happiness! Convicted of reverence – I shall be content To lie beside a brother whom I love. We have only a little time to please the living, But all eternity to love the dead. There I shall lie for ever. Live, if you will; Live, and defy the holiest laws of heaven.

She distinguishes herself sharply from Ismene, who does not feel strong enough to resist Creon and who regards Antigone’s act as folly: ‘You chose; life was your choice, when mine was death.’14 Unlike Oedipus, Antigone identifies with the absolute perspective of the gods – ‘the holiest laws of heaven’ – rather than with Creon’s human perspective and is prepared to die for her choice. Although both perspectives deserve respect, in Sophocles’ tragic universe that of the gods inevitably triumphs at a terrible human cost, which includes Antigone’s death. If Joan had chosen to be true to her voices and had gone to her death rather than repudiate them, then Saint Joan would be very similar in structure to Antigone. But when Joan realises that she is on the point of being burnt as a heretic, she resembles Ismene rather than Antigone when she states, ‘I have dared and dared; but only a fool will walk into a fire: God, who gave me my commonsense, cannot will me to do that.’15 Martz’s view that she signs the recantation in panic is difficult to sustain given her ambiguous response when she is asked if she believes that what she is signing is true: ‘It may be true. If it were not true, the fire would not be ready for me in the market place’ (999). This casuistry implies

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calculation rather than panic. The recantation scene suggests that for Joan life comes first, and defining herself by a principle comes second, whereas for a tragic protagonist like Antigone life and principle are one. When Joan finally does choose death, it is not to serve any principle or larger purpose or because she believes she was wrong to repudiate her voices to save her life; she chooses to die only because she cannot have life on the terms that would make it worth living. This creates a clear division between Joan and Sophocles’ tragic protagonists since neither Oedipus nor Antigone would think of adjusting to events in order to live. The tragic effect depends on the protagonist accepting that the values that define his or her sense of self cannot be reconciled with the situation with which he or she is faced. Antigone will thus accept no compromise with Creon’s human laws as she identifies her selfhood with laws that transcend human considerations and is ready to die rather than submit. Sophoclean tragedy accepts that though it may be understandable for more ordinary human beings, such as Ismene, to seek to avoid death or destruction by compromising with the demands of a superior force, humanity would be diminished if there were not such individuals as Antigone who refuse to do so. Although Creon is acting against what Antigone sees as divine law, his position is nevertheless worthy of respect as one sees from the sympathetic attitude of the Chorus. Even Antigone recognises the extremity of her own position when she tells Ismene that she would not disobey Creon’s law over a husband or a child, but a brother who cannot be replaced because her parents are dead is a unique case. Joan, however, has no such respect for the Church, and any respect the audience might have is undermined by its decision to burn Joan. The conflict in Saint Joan at first seems similar to that of Antigone: Joan is totally committed to her voices while the Church to preserve its institutional power and, as it sees it, social order, seeks to undermine them and destroy the basis of Joan’s belief in the values for which she fights. The reader of the play who has tragic expectations assumes that Joan identifies her fundamental self with her voices as Antigone identifies her self with a higher law than human laws. For Joan to deny her voices then would be to destroy the basis of her existence. Thus, her willingness to sign a piece of paper which states that she repudiates her voices undermines the play’s tragic effect, as this is an ignoble act that diminishes her status as tragic protagonist. Critics who see the play as tragic find Joan’s action deeply problematic and therefore try to find ways of accounting for it. If one sees the play in the light of Ghosts and Ibsen’s other social realist dramas, a different reading presents itself. Joan’s willingness to sign the recantation indicates her contempt for the forces that are

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threatening to destroy her. In signing the recantation she does not repudiate her voices and accept the Church’s position in order to save her life; she only pretends to, as the casuistical remark quoted earlier indicates. Of course if Shaw’s aim is to write a tragedy, this is deeply problematic since Joan is prepared to compromise with a more powerful force in order to save her life, with her denial of her voices being merely an adaptive move. In tragic terms it must be seen as an ignoble act. In such model tragedies as Oedipus and Antigone, both sides of the conflict are accorded respect, the tragedy arising from the impossibility of reconciling them. No blame is attached to that which collides with and ultimately destroys the tragic protagonist. Indeed it is out of such conflict or opposition that human identity emerges. The values and beliefs that are regarded as intrinsic to humanity and to human identity do not have an independent existence but are integrally connected with the existence of certain opposed or resistant forces, which may take various forms, such as the rigidities of divine law which ignore human considerations or the necessities of the state. It is because the tragic protagonist believes that the values that are intrinsic to human identity are defined by their opposition to such forces that he or she chooses to die rather than compromise human identity. Sophoclean tragedy, as Antigone’s statement makes clear, recognises that only the few will be capable of making a tragic choice: most people will try to avoid collision and seek compromise – the Ismene position. But Joan’s recantation and repudiation of her voices in order to save her life cannot be seen as such a compromise. Unlike the tragic protagonist, Joan has no respect for the forces which oppose her and which refuse to acknowledge the validity of her voices. She has no interest in the Church’s position and refuses to take it seriously. If one sees the play in tragic terms, this may appear a weakness: ‘Joan’s trouble is that she cannot hide a somewhat contemptuous attitude toward authority. The Archbishop speaking on religion and Dunois on war can hardly hold her attention. Joan as a rebel against the established order of society appears to be too obviously impatient with men who act from the lessons of their experience.’16 However, if Joan has only contempt for the authorities that have it in their power to destroy her, it would be absurd from her point of view to let herself be burnt at the stake if she can be free merely by signing a piece of paper these authorities have prepared. Unlike Antigone, Joan does not seek to define herself in opposition to a resistant force which commands respect. She does her best to avoid death, and when she chooses to die she has no thought for the authorities that are strong enough to destroy her.

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It may be argued that though Joan has no respect for the Church, Shaw’s presentation of Cauchon and the Inquisitor indicates that he does and that the play is therefore critical of Joan for her lack of such respect. Certainly Shaw’s treatment of the Church shows none of the contempt that Ibsen displays towards the bourgeoisie and its values in Ghosts. However, Shaw’s sympathetic presentation of Cauchon and the Inquisitor does not imply intellectual respect for their ideas. It is clear from Shaw’s writing in general that he has only scorn for static views of the world that resist change and development. He may allow the churchmen to make a good case, revealing them to be men of integrity and principle by their lights, but he has no respect for their point of view. He and Joan are at one on that. There is therefore no division between Shaw and the Ibsen of Ghosts despite their different approaches to the representation of the forces that destroy their protagonists. Saint Joan is also anti-tragic in its implicit denial that either the protagonist or the forces that oppose her exist in a static relation of conflict. Although Joan identifies with certain values, as Antigone does, she is not defined by these values; they are not absolutes in the way that Antigone’s values are. It is implicit in the play that Joan’s ‘nationalism’ and ‘Protestantism’ are necessary to overcome feudalism and medieval Catholicism and usher in a new era in the history of civilisation. But nationalism and Protestantism are not seen as static systems of belief – like feudalism and Catholicism – that will have eternal validity: the Joan whom the characters in the Epilogue would not wish to return to the world would not be supporting such ideas but different ones appropriate to changed circumstances: ‘Protestant individualism and nationalist autonomy . . . are not to be seen as ultimate ideals . . . With hindsight we know that the new freedom in its turn becomes institutionalized.’17 For Joan, life is the prime value and it is prior to any set of principles or beliefs, whereas for Antigone this separation could not be made. Both self and world are seen as in continual movement and this breaks down the idea that there is a fundamental division between the two. Since the world can be changed by human action with human consciousness continually developing as a result, the static conflict between the human realm and that which transcends it, characteristic of Sophoclean tragedy, is broken down. The argument that Joan’s pride and sense of her own superiority are forms of tragic flaw, thus keeping the play within the realm of traditional tragedy – ‘It is the choices of action determined by the not quite perfect character of the hero . . . that determine the tragic hero’s doom. And it can be shown that it is The Maid’s freely-made choices, made in the exultation of pride, that bring her to the stake’18 – is difficult to sustain.

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The play shows that Joan’s pride is fully justified. Indeed, it can be categorised as pride only from the ideological position that believes the individual human being is of no importance in comparison to the Church and its traditions. The Church accuses her of ‘terrible pride and self-sufficiency’ (998) but these are defined in the Church’s terms. The limitation of the Church’s viewpoint is shown by its belief that in wearing men’s clothes she has ‘blasphemed abominably’ (999), whereas for Joan this is the plainest common sense. Nor is the argument that a Hegelian model is being followed in which there is a dynamic dialectical relation between Joan and her antagonists any more convincing. In Hegel’s dialectical scheme oppositions are transcended in a synthesis which includes the opposed elements. But in Saint Joan there is no such synthesis. Joan is destroyed physically by the forces opposed to her, and her spiritual survival in the play’s Epilogue shows her as continuing to exist as an opposing force to any authority that is likely to emerge. In this play and Shaw’s work generally, the desire that motivates a character like Joan is essentially formless and inchoate and can be given form only by being incorporated in whatever vehicles the imagination can invent through using the materials that are presented by the world. Joan’s commitment is to this inner desire rather than to the various inadequate forms it will take during the course of history. Joan remains in essence untransformed by the dialectical process that includes her. Some critics have argued that the philosophy that underlies the play is essentially pragmatic. J. L. Wisanthal writes: ‘The pragmatic ethic of Saint Joan is made most explicit in the Epilogue’, and goes on to quote Charles: ‘provided they can no longer say that I was crowned by a witch and a heretic, I shall not fuss about it if it came all right in the end: she was not that sort: I knew her’ (1003). Wisanthal comments: ‘Charles is right about Joan: after all she was prepared to sign a total recantation of which she did not believe a word in order to gain her freedom’ and sees this as ‘judging actions by results’.19 Alfred Turco calls Joan ‘A Shavian pragmatist’ and says more broadly: ‘Whenever Shaw is talking about art, morality, or politics, the same point is emphasised. Concrete action is preferable to unfounded aspiration.’20 Both critics place great emphasis on Joan’s failure and interpret the play not as a traditional tragedy but as tragic in the wider sense. Turco comments on Joan’s final words: Without the epilogue, we would have concluded that Joan’s death was a necessary catalyst for the evolution of consciousness that leads men at last to recognize her greatness . . . In asking ‘O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?’ . . . the saint foresees a future that will never escape the bonds of history . . . Saint Joan is a tragedy, not in spite of, but because of, the epilogue.21

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Wisanthal takes a similar view: ‘This concluding speech brings into great prominence the basic and most pessimistic reason for Joan’s failure: that the superior person and the ordinary world cannot live together.’22 The weakness of this pragmatic reading is that like attempts to interpret the play as a traditional tragedy or a Hegelian tragedy it still sees it in terms of a static conflict between essentially opposed elements: even though Joan acts pragmatically she is still destroyed by the world. But Joan is placed in a rather limited context if ‘judging actions by results’ and ‘[c]oncrete action’ are the criteria by which we should regard her life and achievements. As I argued earlier, Joan’s commitment to the aims of Protestantism and nationalism is not absolute but should be seen in relation to her times. A modern Joan would have different aims. The pragmatic view does not accommodate easily this implied relativity since its emphasis is on results. Although Joan’s achievement in furthering what the play sees as historical progress is important, the underlying desire of the subject not only not to be defined by the resistant object but to impose its idealistic will upon it, is more important. Joan may be destroyed in this struggle but the desire she embodies is not destroyed. The torch is only handed on to someone else and the struggle continues.

The Devil’s Disciple and Arms and the Man Shaw’s critique of a philosophy of the tragic can be found in other plays which on the surface have no connection with tragedy as a dramatic form, thus showing how the tragic as a philosophy need not depend on tragedy as a poetics. The Devil’s Disciple (1897) is constructed as a melodrama but it is centrally concerned with issues related to a philosophy of the tragic. In his preface Shaw claimed that reviewers could not grasp Dick Dudgeon’s motive in choosing to take the place of another man, the minister Anthony Anderson, on the scaffold when he is mistaken for Anderson by the British, who have decided to execute an American rebel as an example: ‘But then, said the critics, where is the motive? Why did Dick save Anderson?’23 In contrast to Joan, Dudgeon chooses to die, not as an act of protest that he cannot live on his own terms, but for a fundamental principle that he discovers is intrinsic to his nature: I had no motive and no interest: all I can tell you is that when it came to the point whether I would take my neck out of the noose and put another man’s into it, I could not do it. I don’t know why not: I see myself as a fool for my pains; but I could not and I cannot. I have been brought up standing by the law of my own nature; and I cannot go against it, gallows or no gallows. (239)

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This act of Dudgeon expresses the spirit of the tragic. Here we have a clash between self and world. Dudgeon could survive if he adapted himself to the superior force of the world – in this instance the British army – by informing the British that he is not Anderson, and thus doomed Anderson and not himself. To act in this way would be false to a principle which he believes is basic to his sense of self, and to preserve that principle is more important than physical survival in a world that is alien to such principles and which Dudgeon accepts as a given. Although the world may destroy Dudgeon physically, as it destroyed the traditional tragic protagonist, it will not triumph over him spiritually, just as Antigone’s spirit survives to be an example to humanity at large even if most human beings are not capable of such heroic self-sacrifice. But Dudgeon’s act assumes that the only options are the subject’s refusing to compromise with the object even if this leads to death, or adapting to the object’s demands in order to preserve life. When Anderson discovers what Dudgeon has done for him, we see the limitations of Dudgeon’s tragic decision. Although a Christian minister, Anderson changes his identity from that of a man of peace and religion to that of a soldier and takes action to prevent the British from executing Dudgeon. He arouses the Springtown militia and returns with a safe-conduct as its commander and saves Dudgeon from execution. Anderson has shown that there is a third option when faced with the fundamental conflict that Dudgeon had to confront. He neither accepts the self as something given nor assumes that the forces that exist beyond the self are unalterable. He finds a new role for the self that allows him to be master of the situation; his new self acts to change the object and thus alters the relation between subject and object so that the subject achieves mastery over it. At the end of the play, Dudgeon realises that he might have chosen to act as Anderson has done: ‘if I had been any good, I should have done for you what you did for me, instead of making a vain sacrifice’ (249). As mentioned in the Introduction, it has been argued that fundamental to the tragic is an irreconcilability that is ‘unmendable’,24 but Shaw is deeply antagonistic to such a concept which he sees as static and defeatist. Dudgeon had believed also that he was in an undecidable situation and compelled to make a decision, but the play implies his situation is only superficially undecidable: he could act to change its nature. Shaw thus not only rejects traditional concepts of the tragic, but is suspicious of attempts to redefine the tragic in terms of irresolvable human dilemmas. Another implication of Dudgeon’s choice is its implicit elitism: it assumes that humanity is divided between those who are capable of

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performing such heroic acts as Dudgeon’s and those who are not. Dudgeon expects that, when Anderson finds out what has happened, he will choose to flee for his life and allow Dudgeon to die in his place. He is so absorbed in what he feels he must do that he has no thought as to how Anderson might feel about another man’s dying for him. When Anderson’s wife, Judith, tells Dudgeon that Anderson has, as she mistakingly thinks, fled for his own safety, he replies, ‘Well, that’s what I meant him to do. What good would his staying have done. Theyd only have hanged us both’ (238). In fact, we find out later that this will not happen. As Major Swindon puts it, ‘The execution will take place at 12 o’clock as arranged; and unless Anderson surrenders before then, you shall take his place on the gallows’ (245). If Anderson acts in the spirit of Dudgeon and comes forward since he refuses to let another man die in his place, Dudgeon’s act will be rendered pointless, or the situation will be made worse if the British choose to execute both. Dudgeon’s view that flight is Anderson’s only option assumes that Anderson is the kind of man who can easily live with the thought that he has let another man die in his place. When at the end of the play Dudgeon asserts that his sacrifice would have been a vain one, Anderson replies, ‘Not vain my boy. It takes all sorts to make a world – saints as well as soldiers’ (249). This suggests that a comparison can be made between Dudgeon and Joan. But though she is ultimately made into a saint, Joan is much more akin to Anderson than to Dudgeon. Her impulse is to change her self so that she can master the world, and her change from peasant girl into soldier is much more radical than Anderson’s. Although she calls herself a saint at the end of the play – ‘O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints?’ (1009) – she is not a saint in the sense of having chosen to be martyred for some idea or principle that is held to be superior to life itself, in contrast to Dudgeon. She is regarded as a saint by the world at large only because her death is seen in terms of a conventional martyrdom, but, as I suggested earlier, death is accepted only under protest. In addition, she does not view her final choice of death as one that makes her stand apart from human beings in general. Life imprisonment is seen as intolerable not only for someone of her superiority of spirit but for any human being: ‘but without these things I cannot live; and by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil, and that mine is of God’ (1000). There is no assumption that she is superior to ordinary humanity in the choice she makes. There is, however, in The Devil’s Disciple an alternative to the antitragic position which is depicted in powerful terms. The play presents

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a character, General Burgoyne, who has no interest in the tragic and sees no point in acting in the manner of a Dudgeon or an Antigone. But neither would he adapt passively to circumstances in order to survive or to serve his own advantage nor would he change the self drastically in order to master the world like Joan or Anderson. Burgoyne recognises that the world that confronts the self is one which is difficult to reconcile with human ideals and values. For example, he is faced with a situation in which a man is to be executed for no fault of his own but purely to serve as an example to others. Burgoyne’s subordinate, Major Swindon, is a man who can adjust to such events without having any moral qualms. He obeys orders quite passively. Burgoyne, however, is a man of humanitarian feeling with no great respect for orders, but like Swindon he is quite prepared to go through with the hanging on the grounds that ‘We are bound to make an example of somebody’ (244). Whereas a character like Joan believes that the self should employ its energies to transform the world so that it will correspond more closely to her messianic human hopes and aspirations, Burgoyne possesses no such belief. For him, the world will always be unjust and corrupt or merely bizarre, and little can be done to change it. The reason for the loss of the American colonies is a striking example: ‘Jobbery and snobbery, incompetence and Red Tape’ and orders not sent because ‘Some gentleman in London forgot to despatch them: he was leaving town for his holiday, I believe’ (246). Burgoyne like Joan has no respect for those forces in the world that resist human ideals and aspirations but equally he can’t take human ideals seriously either. To die for a human ideal as Dudgeon is prepared to do and thus to achieve a spiritual victory over a recalcitrant world would for him be absurd, and unlike Joan he has no desire to confront and change that recalcitrant world. Yet mere passive adaptation to reality in the manner of Major Swindon would also be anathema. His strategy is rather to face the world with wit and style. Although this does not alter the fact that a man is going to be unjustly executed, he achieves a certain mastery over the situation by seizing on those aspects of it that he can use to create a style that stands between self and world. He is not trapped in his role, like Major Swindon, but distanced from it by irony. He can turn virtually any situation to his advantage by wit as when, refusing to let Anderson’s last minute rescue of Dudgeon perturb him, he states that he would not dream of hanging anyone by an American clock. For Burgoyne, such acts as the execution of Dudgeon, though unjust, are unfortunate necessities of war, but wit and style prevent the self from being dehumanised or becoming merely the creature of such

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necessities. Burgoyne therefore represents an alternative to both the tragic and anti-tragic position. It is an alternative based on aestheticism and it is likely that Burgoyne represents Shaw’s response to the aesthetic movement and its leading figure, Oscar Wilde. The implied weakness of Burgoyne’s position, from Shaw’s implied anti-tragic point of view, is that though it might achieve a mental transcendence of reality it does nothing to change the world or move it forward. Like tragedy it is ultimately static. On the surface Arms and the Man (1894) is one of Shaw’s lightest comedies but like The Devil’s Disciple it also offers a critique of the tragic. Maurice Valency writes that ‘Sergius and Bluntschli haunt the plays of Shaw very much as Brand and Peer Gynt recur in the works of Ibsen’, and argues that is a mistake for actors to play Sergius as a clown: ‘Everything indicates that, while Shaw meant to ridicule his extravagance as a character, he took the problem of Sergius seriously and intended his comic anguish to border on the tragic.’25 This is borne out by a stage direction: By his brooding on the perpetual failure, not only of others, but of himself, to live up to his ideals; by his consequent cynical scorn for humanity; by his jejune credulity as to the absolute validity of his concepts and the unworthiness of the world in disregarding them . . . he has acquired the half tragic, half ironic air . . . by which Childe Harold fascinated the grandmothers of his English contemporaries. (103)

He would rather die than compromise the ideals fundamental to his sense of self: ‘Oh, (fervently) give me the man who will defy to the death any power on earth or in heaven that sets itself up against his own will and conscience’ (116). In the course of the play Sergius becomes disillusioned with both the self and the world. The realities of soldiering reveal that his heroic charge in which he was prepared to sacrifice his life for the ideal of patriotism was merely ridiculous. Both sides in the war operate with a utilitarian philosophy which Sergius regards with contempt: ‘Soldiering, my dear madam, is the coward’s way of attacking mercilessly when you are strong, and keeping out of harm’s way when you are weak’ (104). There would thus be no spiritual triumph in dying in such a situation. Even his own side would view his action with derision. The other sphere that he regards as worthy of tragic commitment, romantic love, also disappoints, for human inconstancy like the nature of war renders any heroic sacrifice ridiculous. Sergius retreats into cynicism. The ideal concepts by which the tragic hero defines himself are soiled by their interaction with a world that can command no respect, so that the clear-cut separation between subject and object that creates the basis for tragic choice is undermined.

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Related to but more fundamental than the hollowness of ideals is the fact that, as Sergius discovers, the self lacks unity. There is no single Sergius but a ‘half dozen Sergiuses who keep popping in and out of this handsome figure of mine . . . Which of the six is the real man? that’s the question that torments me. One of them is a hero, another a buffoon, another a humbug, another perhaps a bit of a blackguard . . . And one, at least, is a coward: jealous like all cowards’ (106). For the tragic hero there should be no separation of self and principle; he should feel defined like Antigone by his beliefs, ideals or principles; but Sergius cannot help but perceive that the self is split and his commitment to the tragic is replaced by disillusionment and cynicism. He is prepared to die for the ideal of courage in defence of his country but, as the servant Louka points out to him, he lacks the courage to outface public opinion. He realises, however, that a different kind of tragic choice is still open to him: a refusal to accept the banality of the world and the instability of the self by choosing to kill himself: ‘Shall I kill myself like a man, or live and pretend to laugh at myself?’ (116). But lacking a sense of a unified self he can’t summon up the resolution to take the tragic decision to reject life because it is irreconcilable with the highest conceptions of the human mind; he can only continue to live and accept that ‘Life’s a farce.’ Opposed to Sergius in the play is Bluntschli, and virtually every critic has pointed out that the ‘realist’ is contrasted with the ‘idealist’. Whereas Sergius aspires towards a heroic death, Bluntschli’s interest is in living as long as possible: ‘It is our duty to live as long as we can’ (95), and to preserve his life he is prepared to perform acts which an idealist like Sergius would reject out of hand, such as obtaining the protection of a woman by threatening to shame her. But though Bluntschli is prepared to adapt to the world, he will do this only up to a point and this fact must qualify the view that he is a realist or a pragmatist. One can contrast Bluntschli with a character who will make any adaptation necessary to survive or to serve his own purpose – the male servant Nicola. Nicola’s constant message to Louka is that the way to success is not to rebel against her role as a servant but to adjust herself to it and then exploit it for her self-interest. Although engaged to Louka, when he discovers that Sergius is interested in her he has no qualms about giving her up, since he will be able to make more out of her as a customer when he sets up his shop than he would if she were his wife. Both Nicola and Bluntschli are practical and capable. Bluntschli, whose special talent is in dealing with the mundane problems of war that bemuse Sergius and Major Petkoff, admires Nicola’s ability and thinks he would make an excellent hotel manager. Unlike Sergius, he is not in the least worried about Nicola’s motives in giving up his claim to Louka. He is also no

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more given to sentiment than Nicola: when he finds out that his father has died, he gives no sign of feeling any sadness or regret. But the significant contrast with Nicola and the later Sergius is that Bluntschli does not completely reject idealism. Although he is prepared to use unheroic and undignified means to save his life, when it comes to the point he is prepared to die fighting rather than submit weakly. He also withdraws his threat to shame Raina when his discovery seems certain, and throws her a cloak. He confesses to having an ‘incurably romantic disposition’ (121) which made him choose to go into the army instead of the family business and to try to escape capture by the Bulgarians by climbing a balcony rather than, more sensibly, by skulking in a cellar. Raina calls him ‘a romantic idiot’ (121) when he mistakes her for a girl of 17. Bluntschli, however, does not succumb to disillusionment like Sergius when the romantic ideal of war turns out to be irreconcilable with the reality of it. He accepts that there is an unstable relationship between the ideal and the reality and evolves various unromantic means to survive. He realises that the ideal has only a mental reality and that the world cannot be expected to conform to it. He has remained a soldier even after experiencing the nature of war. The romance of soldiering and the realities of war exist in a state of irresolvable tension; the one does not eliminate the other but Bluntschli is aware of both and attempts to hold them in balance though such a balance will always be unstable. Unlike Sergius, Bluntschli refuses to despair because the self lacks unity. He accepts the many-sidedness of the self. He has a romantic and an idealistic side but also a low shopkeeping side although he does not seek to impose unity on them. He can have a more exciting life as a soldier than he could as part of his father’s business, but at the same time he takes practical steps to minimise the risk of death. He has been romantically attracted to Raina from the first, but since he thinks she could not be interested in someone such as himself, he makes no declaration as this would be to risk rejection or humiliation. But he does not let his being made to look ridiculous in assuming her to be 17 stand in his way by making any attempt to restore his dignity. Rather he seizes the opportunity to make an offer now that it is clear that he has a chance of success. In contrast, Sergius’ rigidity allows Louka to trap him into marriage. Bluntschli uses the many-sidedness of the self as a means to master the world rather than merely passively adapt himself to it in the manner of Nicola. He thus avoids the opposed positions of Sergius’ idealism with its subsequent disillusionment and the calculating realism of Nicola who is not disillusioned only because he never had any illusions in the

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first place, having, as a stage direction describes him, ‘the imperturbability of the accurate calculator who has no illusions’. When Sergius discovers that the contemptible nature of the world and the contradictions of the self undermine the any clear-cut clash of opposed forces that is basic to his concept of the tragic, he retreats into a cynical acceptance of and adjustment to both self and world. Being without ideals, Nicola is immune from cynicism, but his identification of the self with mere selfinterest and his effort to adapt passively to events without fundamentally affecting either self or world make him similar to the later Sergius except in mental attitude. For Bluntschli as for Sergius it would be absurd to die in a tragic manner given the nature of the world that is opposed to the self. As a romantic, Bluntschli cannot help possessing ideals, but the value of an ideal for him is that it can be brought into an active confrontation with the world and bring about change, though the ideal may be sullied in the process. Sergius, in contrast, holds ideals passively and gives them up in despair when, like love, they are vulnerable to other forces in the world, such as human changeableness. But Bluntschli can love Raina despite the instability of human feeling. From an anti-tragic point of view the value of the ideal of love is that it provides a measure of control over that instability. Bluntschli can also combine an awareness of the romantic aspect of being a soldier with the negotiating and organisational skills necessary to produce concrete benefits from war, as in his arrangement of an exchange of prisoners. By bringing idealism into relation with realism and pragmatism Bluntschli can change the world for the better whereas Nicola’s unidealistic pragmatism serves only his own self-interest. Bluntschli shows that the self can achieve a degree of mastery over the world and thus avoid the tragic, cynical disillusionment, and passive adaptation to the world.

Brecht’s Mother Courage and Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons The rejection of the tragic contained within Ibsen’s middle period plays and the plays of Shaw that I have discussed is taken to an extreme, at least theoretically, in Brecht’s Marxist drama. Marxism and traditional concepts of tragedy as exemplified in Sophoclean tragedy, supported by such Aristotelian concepts as pity, terror and catharsis, are irreconcilable at a philosophical level since Marxism refuses to accept that there is a fundamental division between humanity and that which transcends the human. In Marxism the human subject is socially determined – as Marx famously put it: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines

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their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness’ – and though the non-human world of nature may be resistant or indifferent to human hopes and ideals, such resistance or indifference can be overcome or at least controlled by collective social action. The fact that humanity remains oppressed by the world is not due to any intrinsic conflict between subject and object but, primarily, to the dominance of pre-Marxist ideologies. Brecht as the major Marxist dramatist thus attacks the tragic more ideologically than Ibsen or Shaw, writers who from his point of view were still infected by bourgeois thinking, especially in regard to the individual. Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), like Ghosts or Saint Joan, is on the surface similar in structure to traditional tragedy, with its protagonist struggling to survive in a world resistant to human hopes and ideals, but as with Ibsen and Shaw tragedy is invoked only to be repudiated. Mother Courage is viewed ironically rather than tragically as she accepts the world she lives in as a given and believes that the best option is to adapt oneself to it in order to survive and benefit in individual terms, but the contradictions of that world eventually crush her. However, in contrast with critical perception of Ghosts and Saint Joan, critics have been well aware that Brecht’s purpose was to undermine the tragic. Yet this has not stopped the play being performed and interpreted as a tragedy: ‘[Mother Courage’s] main concern to bring her children through the war unharmed has our sympathy, so much so that some producers have found it easy to present her as a tragic figure who is noble and courageous but is destroyed by an anonymous and uncontrollable fate in the shape of war. Brecht’s intention was otherwise.’26 To anyone not determined to impose a tragic reading on the play no matter what, it is clear that tragedy is subject to radical critique in Mother Courage. Whereas the relation between the Sophoclean tragic protagonist and his or her reality is one of conflict or opposition, Mother Courage from the beginning sets out to adapt to her world in order to profit from the conditions created by war. The war is seen as an economic opportunity by her, allowing Brecht to satirise bourgeois individualism. The world that gradually destroys her and her family is not in the power of a nonhuman source such as the gods but has been humanly produced. Unlike a tragic protagonist like Oedipus she never achieves insight into her situation; even at the end she is struggling to adapt. The audience should of course draw the Marxist conclusion that such an oppressive world can and should be changed. Brecht’s ‘epic theatre’ also undermines tragic form since it presents a series of episodes rather than a plot, which Aristotle saw as the most important element in tragedy, incorporating such devices as peripeteia, anagnorisis, catastrophe and catharsis.

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What makes the play open to a tragic reading despite Brecht’s rejection of tragedy at both an ideological and formal level is that directors, actors and certain critics can claim the world which the play depicts is one that is essentially unchanging, with the opposition between the human individual and a war-torn world being seen as intrinsic. Mother Courage can thus represent the human struggle to survive in such a world, so that instead of viewing her as an ironic depiction of a doomed bourgeois individualism, in which her character and fate are merely typical of her class, she can be seen as a unique individual dignified by her refusal to be defeated by her suffering, determined to preserve her humanity despite experiences that would reduce ordinary mortals to despair or madness. George Steiner is well aware that to see the play in tragic terms is to read it against the grain: ‘Brecht would have us revile the old harpy for her stupid greed. He would have us understand that waste is neither noble nor tragic, but simply and horribly useless. That is the whole point of the play.’ But Steiner nevertheless believes that in Mother Courage the poet in Brecht overwhelms the moralist and ideologue: She is the salt of the earth, destructive yet zestful. We cannot detach ourselves from the play and merely pass judgement on her faults . . . In the duel between artist and dialectician, he allows the artist a narrow but constant margin of victory. By that margin, Mutter Courage is tragedy; incomplete perhaps, because of the redemptive politics which surround it, but real and consuming nevertheless.27

Raymond Williams also, in his study of tragedy, recognises that there is a ‘rejection of tragedy’ in Brecht’s drama, but in Mother Courage he argues that ‘[t]he final paradox is genuinely tragic . . . It is action illuminated by a tragic consciousness’ and he concludes that though ‘[t]ragedy in some of its older senses is certainly rejected . . . The major achievement of Brecht’s mature work is this recovery of history as a dimension for tragedy.’28 That a play like Mother Courage can be interpreted as a tragedy despite Brecht’s anti-tragic intentions shows the power of the tragic at an ideological level. Yet Brecht’s depiction of a war-torn world is artistically problematic – at least from an anti-tragic point of view – since it is easy for actors or theatre directors to regard this world as a non-historical representation of a universal phenomenon that has always beset human beings, so that the play can be seen as less effective in artistic terms as an anti-tragic drama than, for example, Ghosts. A play influenced by Brechtian dramatic methods whose relation to the tragic is also ambiguous is Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons (1960). Significantly Bolt does not see Brecht, in his practice at least, as

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an anti-tragic writer: ‘perhaps there was something daemonic in Brecht the artist which could not submit to Brecht the teacher. That would explain . . . why in Mother Courage, which is to demonstrate the unheroic nature of war, the climax is an act of heroism which Rider Haggard might have balked at.’29 Though Bolt does not share Brecht’s Marxist perspective and presents a popularised version of ‘epic theatre’, he initially appears like Brecht to call into question traditional tragedy, even though audiences may have responded to the protagonist, Sir Thomas More, as a tragic character with similarities to Sophocles’ Antigone. There are, however, obvious differences between the two. Although More cannot reconcile himself to the political necessities of the state as he believes that religious principle must have priority over human considerations, unlike Antigone he does everything possible to avoid confrontation with state power, using all legal devices available to prevent such a confrontation taking place. Whereas Antigone is eager to embrace death in order to serve the higher principle that defines her identity, More shows no such desire for tragic martyrdom. For Antigone, Creon’s policy of refusing burial to her brother as an example and deterrent to other Thebans who engage in war against their own city is so contrary to divine law that she must actively resist it. More, in contrast, does his utmost to avoid confrontation, and if King Henry and Thomas Cromwell had left him alone he would have remained silent in his opposition to Henry’s determination to marry Anne Boleyn. It is only the fact that More’s silence might be perceived as dissent which, if tolerated, might encourage opposition to Henry’s rule that provokes action against More. There might seem to be a stronger connection between More and Shaw’s Saint Joan, as both have no desire for death and accept it only as a last resort when there is no more room to manoeuvre. Joan and More are also linked in their contempt for the powers that ultimately kill them, whereas Antigone has no such contempt for Creon: one does not need to embrace Hegel’s reading of the play in toto to see Creon as someone whose position deserves respect since he is, initially at least, trying to do what is right by his humanist lights. No such respect is accorded to Henry VIII’s regime in A Man for All Seasons, and therefore death will not be the outcome of a tragic struggle between two opposed principles which can be justified in their own terms, but is merely brought about by naked political power. The audience is left in no doubt that figures such as Henry and Cromwell are motivated by corrupt values which the death of More will do nothing to change; in Antigone, in contrast, the tragic consequences of the impasse have the power to overwhelm the political arguments of Creon, who becomes

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part of the final catastrophe, and in some readings of the play has been seen as the main tragic figure. Yet Bolt’s introduction to the play suggests that unlike Ghosts, Saint Joan and Mother Courage, A Man for All Seasons is an attempt to reformulate the tragic in modern terms. Bolt does see an irresolvable conflict as central to the drama: ‘The economy was very progressive, the religion was very reactionary . . . And when an economy collides with a religion it is living men who collide, nothing else (they collide with one another and within themselves)’ (x). He distances himself from the content of More’s refusal to submit to the will of the king; he admits he does not share the Catholic principles that make it impossible for More to state on oath that he approves of Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn: ‘I am not a Catholic nor in any meaningful sense of the word a Christian’ (xiii). What Bolt admires about More is that he was ‘a man with an adamantine sense of his own self . . . but at length he was asked to retreat from that final area where he located his self’ (xii). In refusing to perjure himself by stating on oath what he did not believe More becomes for Bolt ‘a hero of selfhood’ (xiv). As More puts it in discussion with his daughter: ‘When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands’ (83), and later he states: ‘Yes, a man’s soul is his self!’ (93). This is to make More something of an existentialist hero: it is ‘commitment’ in something like a Sartrian sense as a form for the self that is valued rather than the content of any such commitment. If that commitment is threatened by the world beyond the self, the hero refuses to compromise as his commitment is identified with a core of self that must remain intact. If one allows that core to be breached then one’s human identity becomes vulnerable. What Bolt represents as in fundamental opposition to More’s defining human commitment is the socio-economic world of political power and necessity which has to be given at least a grudging respect. Henry VIII’s regime is a particularly brutal form of it, but not different in kind from more benign forms. It is inevitable that there will be discordance between the commitment that defines the individual self and the political necessities of the state, any state, not just Henry’s autocratic form of rule. More, unlike Antigone, does his best to avoid confronting that discordance. For him, nothing is to be gained by such a confrontation, as discordance between self and state is inevitable and in any confrontation the state will win; but when circumstances force him into such a confrontation, he is prepared to die rather than lose connection with the core of his self. There is no scope in Bolt’s form of modern tragedy for catharsis arising out of conflict between two opposed principles. The political world is essentially unchangeable in its basis; religious

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principles of the kind which form the basis of More’s core of selfhood can never be fully reconciled with the political and economic necessities that drive the state. The main opposition to More in the play is Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell rejects the idea of commitment to any essential core of self: for him the self must continually adapt to survive. As More points out to his son-in-law, using somewhat anachronistic language: ‘What, Cromwell? Pooh, he’s a pragmatist – and that’s the only resemblance he has to the Devil, son Roper; a pragmatist, the merest plumber’ (66). For Cromwell, any means that will allow the individual to thrive and prosper in the material world is justified, while More believes that the individual, to remain genuinely human, should resist mere adaptation to the power of the state by adhering to certain moral and religious values: ‘But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all . . . why then perhaps we must stand fast a little – even at the risk of being heroes’ (84). Cromwell in contrast has no principles beyond what will further his own power and material self-interest. If Cromwell is the theorist for such a philosophy, Richard Rich – whom Cromwell uses as the instrument to bring about More’s condemnation by persuading Rich to commit perjury – represents it in practice, as does to a lesser extent the play’s chorus figure, the Common Man, who nevertheless feels some guilt at rejecting what More represents in favour of pragmatism. In the original London production of the play there was an alternative ending in which the audience is implicated in such pragmatism by the Common Man’s final address to it: ‘If we should bump into one another, recognise me.’ Where the play is problematic as tragedy is that the opposition between the individual self and state power is not as ineluctable as the opposition at the centre of a Sophoclean tragedy like Antigone. Can there ever be in modern drama a core of self defined by principles that remains wholly separate from the socio-political considerations that drive the state? More, for example, disapproves of a marriage between Henry and Anne Boleyn on the grounds of religious principle, as the Catholic Church refuses to sanction the marriage as it declares it irreconcilable with Catholic doctrine. But would he have maintained that position if the Church had given its consent to the marriage? The separation between Catholic religious principle and political realities that More asserts is called into question by the Church’s and organised religion’s inevitable involvement in politics. The Church had originally allowed Henry to marry his brother’s widow – despite the fact that this contradicted strict religious doctrine – because at the time this was seen

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as politically advantageous. However, when Henry wishes to have this marriage dissolved in order to marry Anne Boleyn, the Church, under political pressure from Catholic powers such as Spain, refuses to sanction it. But if such a marriage had been deemed politically advantageous to the Church, who could doubt that some means would have been found to sanction it, as in the case of Henry’s original marriage to Catherine of Aragon. If More had then continued to withhold approval of Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn even if the Catholic Church sanctioned it, he would be asserting the superiority of individual conscience over the authority of the Church, a position close to the Protestantism to which he was ideologically opposed. Both Antigone and More resist state power on behalf of religious principle. But religious values are viewed by Antigone as pure, since for her they derive from a realm quite separate from the world of human affairs. The conflict between Antigone and Creon is therefore absolute. But in the modern era such an absolute division has become problematic: though the Church may claim that religious doctrine and principle emanate directly and purely from a divine source it can’t avoid being inextricably implicated in the socio-political world and the ideologies associated with it. The Church is thus inevitably caught up in power politics and the very principles that More identifies with his essential self – his commitment to the basic doctrines of his religion – cannot be completely dissociated from human history and ideology. The other pillar of More’s sense of selfhood is the value he attaches to the law, but the law is no more immune from the power of the state than religion: lawyers are open to corruption, witnesses can be bribed to lie, laws can be rewritten. With Antigone it is certain that nothing that Creon could have done would have made her waver in her resolve, such was the power of her religious certainty. It’s clear in the play that More would have been less firm. If Henry and Cromwell had threatened to torture his wife and daughter, would he have refused to take the oath? His eagerness to persuade his family to leave the country suggests he could not have held out against that. At such an extremity religious conviction would have been outweighed by human considerations, in contrast to Antigone. Therefore, A Man for All Seasons has to acknowledge, perhaps despite itself, the anti-tragic position of Ibsen, Shaw and Brecht. The absolute division between the human realm and that which transcends it, the world of nature or divinity, no longer obtains. A tension between the individual self and the forces of the state may always exist but the individual by force of example, like More, or by acting with others can bring about change, so that tyrannical autocracies such as the regime of Henry VIII can be replaced by alternative socio-economic structures. These will

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generate new tensions between self and state rather than eliminating conflict completely, and out of such interaction not only will the state change but selfhood will change. The audience at the end of Ghosts may reflect that the fates of Mrs Alving and Oswald were not inevitable but socially produced. Similarly the death of More is not inevitable: it was brought about by a political regime determined to crush all resistance, even that which was mental and posed no physical threat. At the end of A Man for All Seasons the audience may conclude that though the existence of the state in some form may be unavoidable, it is not inevitable that the state crush all mental resistance. Any state that could execute a man such as More must be changed by social and political action. Antitragic literature is thus fundamentally on the side of change, both for society and for the self, the two being not fully separable.

Miller’s Death of a Salesman The American dramatists Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller have been notable for attempting to reconcile modern drama with classical tragedy. Most obviously O’Neill adapted Aeschylus in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) while Miller drew on Sophoclean tragic form for his best known play, Death of a Salesman (1949). It’s likely that Miller was influenced by or was at least responding to O’Neill since there are some connections between Death of a Salesman and O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1946). Both plays deal with the relation between dream and reality and the main character of O’Neill’s play, Hickey, is an ex-salesman. O’Neill equates the tragic with pessimism, based on his interpretation of polarities within Nietzschean philosophy that he saw as unbridgeable.30 Miller in his essay, ‘Tragedy and the Common Man’, takes a different view and denies that ‘tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism’.31 He claims that tragedy as a dramatic form does not require protagonists of high rank. He places the emphasis on the tragic protagonist rather than the forces that destroy him or her; indeed he has little regard for the latter: 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.32

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He follows Aristotle in believing that the tragic protagonist should always reveal a ‘tragic flaw’, a concept which has been much debated, but Miller is uncomfortable with the negative associations of ‘flaw’: 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 . . . [T]here 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.33

The fact that Miller refers to the ‘seemingly stable cosmos’ and places ‘unchangeable’ in quotation marks indicates that he does not accept that the world beyond the tragic hero which is resistant to his ideals or sense of dignity cannot be changed in order to overcome that resistance. There is little respect for the cosmos or environment that overcomes the tragic hero; his fate and the terror and fear that it produces should be a call to action on the part of human beings to overcome such a cosmos or environment in the interests of human ideals: 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 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.34

This suggests that Miller’s real alignment is with the anti-tragic drama of middle period Ibsen and Shaw. Miller suggested his affinity with Ibsen’s social realist dramas when he adapted Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, in the process making its main character a more unambiguously positive figure in his fight against the corruption and lies of his society. However, Death of a Salesman presents a more complex representation of the ‘tragic’ hero in terms of Miller’s concept of tragedy. Willy Loman is both a product of his social world and unconsciously in revolt against it. As a salesman he has internalised the dominant ideology of his time which is designed either to cover up or to naturalise the contradictions within an economic system founded on capitalism and a social structure founded on materialistic values and consumerism. Inequalities such as wealth and status being given to the few but denied to the many are accepted by Willy as natural and right since he is committed to the ‘American Dream’ that sees America as a land of

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opportunity in which every person can succeed, which he refines by believing that those who do succeed deserve to do so because of their special qualities. When his sons propose to sell sporting goods Willy asserts: ‘That is a one-million dollar idea! . . . You guys together could absolutely lick the civilized world.’35 His fundamental faith is that in America anyone with the right qualities can become not only rich and successful but fulfilled in human terms, and that American capitalism will provide such opportunities. The play reveals a basic conflict between Willy’s idealistic belief that life in America has value and meaning, and actualities in Willy’s world that seem to be in contradiction with that. He does not recognise, however, that there is any such conflict even though it is made clear to the audience that in reality that world has become corrupted by unbridled capitalism and a business environment increasingly indifferent to human considerations. Willy continues to believe that success in business is a reflection of a person’s higher qualities, qualities that transcend measurement in conventional terms: Bernard can get the best marks in school, y’understand, but when he gets out in the business world, y’understand, you are going to be five times ahead of him. That’s why I thank Almighty God you’re both built like Adonises. Because the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates a personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. (25)

But the experience of Willy’s sons of the modern business world would testify that it has little to offer the human spirit other than mere materialism. Biff tells Happy: ‘Shipping clerk, salesman, business of one kind or another. And it’s a measly manner of existence . . . To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying . . . And always to have to get ahead of the next fella’ (16). Happy confirms Biff’s account: ‘I don’t know what the hell I’m workin’ for. Sometimes I sit in my apartment – all alone. And I think of the rent I’m paying. And it’s crazy. But then, it’s what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women’ (17). The dominant ideology appears to accommodate Willy’s ideals and values and therefore he possesses no conscious alternative to it that would allow him to subject it to critique or move beyond it. Why he himself is in the situation he is in – comparatively poor, on the point of being thrown on the scrapheap by the firm for which he has worked all of his working life – and why his son Biff has ended up as one of society’s failures despite in Willy’s view having all the qualities that would guarantee success, are mysteries to him. None of the explanations he considers leads him to question whether capitalism and the business practices it creates can be reconciled with his idealism and its central assumption that those who gain

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success in this land of unrestricted opportunity do so on the basis of their superior individual merits and admirable spiritual qualities. The people in the play who do achieve success in this society, Charley and his son Bernard, do so by adjusting to the prevailing system. Charley has made money as a businessman but he has done so without the need for the idealistic beliefs that Willy holds to. He does possess a moral sense but his values are traditional: supporting his family and being willing to help a friend in need. Willy does not attach such importance to traditional moral values, as one sees in his regarding Biff’s stealing as insignificant and also his view of his own minor affair as a trivial matter. Charley had not filled Bernard’s head with the grandiose notions that Willy instils into Biff. Like Willy, Charley accepts that selling underlies the American socio-economic world but unlike Willy he has no illusions about it: ‘The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you’re a salesman, and you don’t know that’ (76–7). Bernard’s success as a lawyer derives from traditional qualities like application and hard work. For Charley, Willy’s attempts to relate success to physical attractiveness and to spiritual qualities such as being well-liked are misconceived: ‘Why must everyone like you? Who liked J. P. Morgan? Was he impressive? In a Turkish bath he’d look like a butcher’ (77). When Charley offers Willy a job he can’t bring himself to accept it, as this would be to admit not only that Charley has been right all along while his idealistic dreams have been an illusion, but also that the world is only about adaptation and survival and that there is no meaning and value beyond that. What makes Willy a significant figure for Miller, worthy of a tragedy, to whom ‘attention must be paid’ (44) as Willy’s wife Linda asserts, is that his belief that there should be meaning and value in the world beyond mere adaptation and survival is fundamentally admirable and that this elevates him above those who live in the world without any need for ideals, even the likes of Charley. The content of his idealism may be open to critique, but the underlying desire for meaning and value in human and social life remains valid. What makes the play depart from tragedy in the Sophoclean sense and resemble the anti-tragic drama of middle-period Ibsen and Shaw is that the world that destroys Willy and his idealistic hopes is one that is not worthy of respect and that can be changed by human action. It doesn’t need to be the case, for example, that people who have worked all their lives are discarded when they no longer serve a narrow and mechanical set of economic interests that elevate profit and efficiency over the human dimension. Miller tries to incorporate some devices associated with Sophoclean tragedy into the play, notably anagnorisis or a moment of recognition

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that leads to knowledge, but this merely reveals the difference between Death of a Salesman and a classical tragedy like Oedipus. As with Oedipus, there is a puzzle at the centre of Willy’s life: for Oedipus it is why the gods have inflicted a plague on Thebes; for Willy it is why Biff, who embodies all Willy’s idealistic hopes and dreams for achieving success on his terms, turns out a failure: ‘Why didn’t [Biff] ever catch on?’ he asks Bernard. ‘His life ended after that Ebbets Field game. From the age of seventeen nothing good ever happened to him’ (72). Willy’s exchange with Bernard reveals that it was Biff’s decision not to go to summer school which prevented him graduating and which can be seen to be the root of this failure, leading Bernard to ask Willy why Biff changed his mind about the summer school: ‘Bernard, that question has been trailing me like a ghost for the last fifteen years. He flunked the subject, and laid down and died like a hammer hit him!’ (73). In the course of discussion it emerges that it was the effect of Biff visiting Willy in Boston and finding him in a compromising situation with a woman – as we learn later – that seems to have led to this change of mind. Like Oedipus in his eventual awareness that his own actions are inextricably connected to the plague in Thebes, Willy has to face the fact that Biff’s failure to make any effort to achieve success lies with Willy himself. The difference, however, is that Oedipus’ past actions which reflect his human confidence that he can overcome the power of the gods is related directly to the plague and to the conflict between humanity and the gods, whereas Willy’s having a sexual liaison has little to do with the philosophy of life he has inculcated into Biff. If Willy had adhered to a strict moral code, one could understand Biff becoming disillusioned with his philosophy but a strict moral code has little to do with that philosophy, indeed as mentioned above Willy is relatively indifferent to traditional moral values. Miller’s use of anagnorisis becomes merely a plot device that is not centrally related to the play’s major concerns. Moreover, whereas anagnorisis leads Oedipus to knowledge of the true nature of his situation, in Willy’s case it distorts knowledge. It allows him to believe that Biff could have achieved the success that would have validated Willy’s idealistic hopes for him if he had not found Willy in a compromising situation and therefore had gone to summer school. Biff’s failure in life, at least as Willy conceives it, can then be explained away as the result of an unfortunate turn of events rather than something more fundamental which could lead to Willy questioning the nature of his idealism. Biff himself never mentions the effect of his not graduating as the reason for his failure to live up to Willy’s hopes. Indeed Biff comes to resemble Hickey in The Iceman Cometh when he continually tries to make Willy recognise that his optimistic hopes are

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‘pipe dreams’ and accept that reality is at odds with his idealism, telling him for example that he was only a shipping clerk when he worked for Bill Oliver, and most crucially: ‘Pop! I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you!’(105). Willy can’t face up to the obverse of his elevation of the successful: that the few who achieve great success are inevitably outnumbered by those who end up as failures and mediocrities if judged in relation to an ideology that makes getting to the top and being rich the main criteria for being successful in life. Such an elevation of success inevitably makes those who don’t achieve high status and riches view themselves as failures and mediocrities, as one sees with Biff’s description of himself as a dime a dozen. And even those who are successful in Willy’s terms are not necessarily the superior beings Willy thinks of them as being, but people like his employer Howard, on a small scale, and J. P. Morgan, on a large scale; men whose success owes little to having the kind of qualities that Willy associates with it. In any case, their rise had little to do with America being a land of opportunity in which everyone can succeed, but rather derives from inheritance. Arthur Miller was no doubt aware that J. P. Morgan inherited a successful company and more than 50 million dollars from his father. Though Willy shows occasional recognition of the difference between reality and his version of the ‘American Dream’ when faced with his treatment by Howard, how his sons have turned out, and the deterioration of the environment in which he lives, even at the end he cannot give up his hopes and dreams. His death – unlike that of a Sophoclean protagonist who has to confront with tragic insight irresolvable contradictions to which death, or in the case of Oedipus something equivalent, seems the only possible outcome – is partly motivated by a desire to provide Biff with insurance money that will allow him to get started and go on to achieve success. Yet though Willy’s ideology of success is subject to radical critique, together with his refusal to come to terms with the real nature of American capitalism and business, the play refuses to side with Biff or with O’Neill’s pessimistic identification of dreams of a better future with ‘pipe dreams’, and suggests that Willy is essentially right to reject Biff’s acceptance that he is second rate: ‘I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!’ Certainly Willy’s idealism is flawed and can easily be manipulated to serve the interests of capitalism, but Biff’s disillusioned realism is more profoundly called into question in the play by Willy’s response to Biff. Without an idealistic aim or vision or dream, there would only be a passive acceptance of a system based not only on inequality of wealth but also on inequality in terms of human value. Willy is an unconscious rebel against that system. But he never faces the fact that as a result of his confusing human value and

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dignity with success in business terms the consequence for Biff, who is not adapted to the world of business and buying and selling and who will thus never be rich, is that he sees himself as ‘nothing’: ‘Pop, I’m nothing! I’m nothing, Pop. Can’t you understand that?’ (105). Biff’s pessimism is not of the philosophical sort that one finds in O’Neill but is a product of a social system and its supporting ideology. Even if Willy fails to arrive at any conscious insight into the meaning of his ‘tragedy’ and its underlying social causes, the audience should.

Notes 1. T. F. Evans (ed.) (1976), Shaw: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. 111. 2. Ibid., pp. 401–2. 3. Robert Brustein (1965), The Theatre of Revolt, London: Methuen, p. 209. 4. Sylvan Barnett (1956), ‘Bernard Shaw on Tragedy’, PMLA 71: 892. 5. Homer E. Woodbridge (1973), George Bernard Shaw: Creative Artist, Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, p. 124. 6. Edmund Wilson (1952), The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects, London: John Lehmann, p. 180. 7. Barnett, p. 899. 8. George Steiner (1961), The Death of Tragedy, London: Faber and Faber, p. 312. 9. Margery M. Morgan (1972), The Shavian Playground: An Exploration of the Art of George Bernard Shaw, London: Methuen, pp. 252–3. 10. John Fielden (1957), ‘Shaw’s Saint Joan as Tragedy’, Twentieth Century Literature 3: 61. 11. Maurice Valency (1973), The Cart and the Trumpet: The Plays of George Bernard Shaw, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 379–80. 12. Ibid., pp. 380, 385. 13. Louis Martz (1955), ‘The Saint as Tragic Hero: Saint Joan and Murder in the Cathedral’, in Cleanth Brooks (ed.), Tragic Themes in Western Literature, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 159–60. 14. Sophocles (1971), The Theban Plays, trans. E. F. Watling, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 128, 141. 15. The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw (1937), London: Constable, p. 998. Page numbers will henceforth be incorporated in the text. 16. Stanley J. Solomon (1963–4), ‘Saint Joan as Epic Tragedy’, Modern Drama 6: 445. 17. Robert F. Whitman (1977), Shaw and the Play of Ideas, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 270. 18. Fielden, p. 64. 19. J. L. Wisanthal (1974), The Marriage of Contraries: Bernard Shaw’s Middle Plays, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 178–9. 20. Alfred Turco, Jr (1977), Shaw’s Moral Vision: The Self and Salvation, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 269, 282.

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21. Ibid., p. 270. 22. Wisanthal, p. 191. 23. Bernard Shaw (1946), Three Plays for Puritans, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. xxvii. 24. See William Storm (1998), After Dionysus: A Theory of the Tragic, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 43, 80. 25. Valency, pp. 109–10, 112. 26. E. Speidel (1982), ‘The Individual and Society’, in Graham Bartram and Anthony Wayne (eds), Brecht in Perspective, London: Longman, p. 57. 27. Steiner, pp. 348–9. 28. Raymond Williams (1966), Modern Tragedy, London: Chatto and Windus, pp. 190, 199, 202. 29. Robert Bolt (1986), A Man for All Seasons: A Play of Sir Thomas More, London: Heinemann, p. xvii. Page numbers will henceforth be incorporated in the text. 30. For a discussion of the influence of Nietzsche on O’Neill, see Patrick Bridgwater (1972), Nietzsche in Anglosaxony: A Study of Nietzsche’s Impact on English and American Writers, Leicester: Leicester University Press, pp. 184–90. 31. Bernard F. Dukore (ed.) (1974), Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winstone, p. 894. 32. Ibid., pp. 894–5. 33. Ibid., p. 896. 34. Ibid., p. 895. 35. Arthur Miller (1961), Death of a Salesman, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 50. Page numbers will henceforth be incorporated in the text.

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Chapter 3

Chekhov and the Tragic

Like the writers previously discussed, Chekhov is very aware of the tragic in his writing. Hamlet, for example, resonates in several of his plays. However, deciding whether Chekhov’s drama is in the spirit of the tragic or the anti-tragic is much more difficult than with playwrights such as Ibsen in his middle period or Shaw. For George Steiner, ‘Chekhov lies outside a consideration of tragedy,’1 but this view is much too categorical and does not take sufficient account of various affinities between Chekhov and the tragic. The root of the problem, however, is that what appear to be tragic elements in his writing interact with comedy, farce and social realism. The tragic is unable to dominate the others and may even be undermined by them. Though Hamlet would seem to be the most important tragedy for Chekhov – it is clearly a significant presence in The Seagull (1896) – one can also see a relationship between The Seagull and Racine’s Andromaque, though instead of reinforcing the connection with the tragic, it rather reveals how Chekhov distances his drama from it, both formally and philosophically. In Andromaque one character is in love with another character who is in love with a third character in a chain of frustrated desire that eventually has a tragic outcome. The tragic effect is created by a radical discontinuity between human desire and the world beyond that desire. Racine’s Jansenist form of Christianity is perhaps a key to his concept of the tragic, since for Jansenism only the grace of God can save humanity, which makes salvation a mystery that can’t be influenced by the human will, which is in any case intrinsically perverse. This creates a separation between the realm of the human and that which transcends the human, similar to that found in Sophocles. In Andromaque characters are defined by their desires, refuse to give them up or compromise in the face of rejection by the other, with the result that a tragic outcome is virtually inevitable. Such single-minded commitment on the part of these characters, though almost mad and

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disastrous in its effects, is treated with respect by the tragic dramatist even if it is clear that such a total refusal to compromise with regard to desire is irreconcilable with human happiness or even with life itself. In The Seagull there is a similar chain: Masha is in love with Konstantin, Konstantin loves Nina, who loves Trigorin. Chekhov’s chain is not as absolute as that of Racine, for example Konstantin and Nina appear to be in love until she encounters Trigorin, though Konstantin’s love is clearly much the stronger. Whereas Racine’s verse tragedy excludes considerations that would interfere with the intensity of the interactions between the characters suffering from unrequited love, Chekhov includes various factors that for Racine would have been extraneous. Racine is not concerned with psychological realism in the modern sense, or the wider social and cultural context in which human beings live out their lives, but such factors are a fundamental part of Chekhov’s drama. Many of his plays have characters who are quite oblivious or indifferent to the concerns of the main characters because they are preoccupied with their own, often trivial pursuits. Thus in Ivanov (1887) the excise officer Kosyh is obsessed with card games and every time he comes on stage he begins discussing a game in which he’s been involved with the main characters of the play, who are usually in the midst of some crisis. The effect is to undermine the tragic intensity that Racine achieves in his tragedies. Chekhov’s characters are also not as completely defined by their love as are Racine’s in Andromaque. Chekhov interprets love with a Schopenhauerian awareness of its psychological determinants which leads him to view it with a certain irony. For example, rejection is shown as having the psychological effect of increasing desire as a result of the will being frustrated, whereas if love is reciprocated and intense initially, its power tends to diminish after a while as gratification usually leads to boredom. In The Seagull, Trigorin is at first rapturous that Nina loves him: ‘You are so beautiful . . . Oh, how happy I am to think that we shall be seeing each other soon! . . . I shall see these wonderful eyes again, this indescribably beautiful, tender smile . . . these sweet features, the expression of angelic purity! My darling . . . [A prolonged kiss].’2 In the next act we learn that they have had an affair in Moscow, that she has had a child who died, and that Trigorin has eventually drifted back to his old way of life. Nina’s love for him is as strong as ever, as her will has been denied gratification, but he has fallen out of love with her. A similar pattern emerges in other plays: in Three Sisters (1902) Masha had an intense love and admiration for her schoolmaster husband when she first met him, but having been married to him for years these feelings have quite evaporated.

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If in Ibsen’s middle-period plays a traditional sense of the tragic is called into question by the inclusion of a sociological dimension that undermines an absolute conflict between the human and the divine central to the structure of Sophoclean tragedy, in Chekhov it is the presence of psychology and temporality that plays the main destabilising role. Whereas the intense love characters experience in a tragedy such as Racine’s is a kind of force of nature and thus not reducible to psychological factors or vulnerable to boredom over time – and this intensity is accentuated by the observing of the dramatic unities of time, place and action – the love of Chekhov’s characters exists in a world in which psychology and temporality are constitutive elements. It is not allowed to stand on its own. In Uncle Vanya (1899), Vanya’s consuming love for the professor’s wife, Hélène, can’t be dissociated from his sense that he has wasted his life, that he now regards the professor, for whom he’s spent years of his life working, as a fraud, together with the realisation that he could have married Hélène when they first met but at that time wasn’t interested. Chekhov’s implied attitude to his characters is one of ironic detachment so that their suffering is not treated with the same seriousness as the suffering of characters in Andromaque, which does not mean that it is dismissed as trivial. The Hamlet connections in The Seagull are treated similarly. Though it clearly alludes to Shakespeare’s play, with Konstantin being Hamlet-like in several respects, most obviously in his relationship with his mother, the decentred nature of the play, like Chekhov’s mature plays in general, prevents a tragic protagonist emerging who can dominate in the manner of Hamlet. Such decentring tends to undermine or dissipate tragic intensity. Yet a strong tragic undercurrent remains, even if only in a more general sense. In A Dull Story (1889), for example, an elderly professor is the narrator. His life has been a great success: he’s a famous academic who has been successful both as a teacher and in his published work. He married the woman he loved and had children and is very well off in material terms. But despite all of this success he’s not happy; his life seems to him wasted and useless yet he has no idea as to how he could have lived otherwise: ‘I gaze at my wife in childish wonder. Bewildered, I ask myself: is it possible that this corpulent, ungainly old woman . . . was once the slender Varya whom I so passionately loved for her fine clear mind, her pure soul, her beauty, and, as Othello loved Desdemona, “that she did pity me”?’3 However, other stories subject such pessimism to critique, notably the novella, Ward Six (1892). Its main character, Ragin, is a doctor in charge of a mental hospital. Though material conditions in the hospital are dreadful and patients are abused by a sadistic warder, Ragin does nothing since on philosophical grounds that have

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some relation to the religious teachings of the later Tolstoy, he thinks it futile to try to change things for the better: And, indeed, why keep people from dying since death is normal, the decreed end for everyone? What if the life of some huckster or official is prolonged by five or ten years? And if one thinks the aim of medicine is the alleviation of suffering by means of drugs, the question inevitably arises: why alleviate it? In the first place, suffering is said to lead man to self-perfection, and in the second place, if man learns to ease his suffering with pills and drops he will completely abandon religion and philosophy, wherein till now he has found not only a defense against every adversity, but happiness itself. Pushkin suffered agonies before his death, Heine was a paralytic for years; why, then, should an Andrey Yefimytch or a Matryona Savishna be spared illness when their insipid lives would be as empty as an amoeba’s were it not for suffering?

This pessimistic and quietist philosophy is attacked by a patient who arouses Ragin’s interest: ‘We are kept here behind bars, tortured, left to rot; but that is all very fine and rational, because there is absolutely no difference between this ward and a warm comfortable study. A convenient philosophy: you have nothing to do, your conscience is clear, and you feel you’re a sage . . . No, sir, this is not philosophy, not thought, not breadth of vision, but laziness, pretense, mental torpor . . . Yes!’ Ivan Dmitritch grew angry again. ‘You despise suffering, but if you pinched your finger in that door, you’d probably start howling at the top of your voice.’

Ragin enjoys his discussions with the patient but remains unconvinced by his attack, after all the patient is mad, but Ragin’s enemies conspire against him and he ends up certified and confined in the hospital, thus experiencing suffering directly. Being beaten by the sadistic warder, he has a radical change of mind: He felt as if someone had taken a sickle, and twisted it several times in his breast and bowels. He bit the pillow and clenched his teeth with pain; and all of a sudden out of the chaos there clearly flashed through his mind the dreadful, unbearable thought that these people, who now looked like black shadows in the moonlight, must have experienced this same pain day in and day out for years. How could it have happened that in the course of more than twenty years he had not known, had refused to know this?4

It’s been argued that Ragin’s philosophical shift reflects Chekhov’s direct experience of extreme human suffering when in 1890 he spent three months in Sakhalin, an island off the coast of Siberia, where Russia’s hardest criminals were kept, and observed conditions there. Looking at Chekhov’s work as a whole, however, it is hard to detect a fundamental change in viewpoint after Sakhalin that would justify dividing his writing into pre- and post-Sakhalin; a doubleness of perspective

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permeates his writing over his whole career and it would be rash to try to pin him down to the one position. The play in which the influence of Hamlet is most obvious is the earliest of his major plays, Ivanov, in which the central character does dominate the action, as in Hamlet, despite as mentioned above the interventions of a character like Kosyh. The eponymous protagonist suffers from a pessimism and languor that has links with the professor in A Dull Story and Ragin in Ward Six, but his obvious literary analogue is Hamlet, who is also of course subject to pessimism: ‘Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till ’a find it stopping a bunghole?’5 Ivanov, however, has none of the heroic aspect of Hamlet’s nature that finally leads to his killing of Claudius at the expense of his own life. Chekhov’s devaluation of the tragic grandeur of Hamlet is indicated by the choice of name for his main character, Ivanov being one of the most common of Russian names; in effect Hamlet has been renamed Smith. Whereas tragic protagonists traditionally stand apart from common humanity, Chekhov’s protagonist is not a unique individual representing humanity at its highest, but by implication indicative of a state of mind widespread in Russia at the time. Thus in contrast to the uniqueness of the tragic protagonist, Ivanov is a representative product of his culture, a similar situation to Ghosts in which Mrs Alving’s predicament is historicised. The division within Hamlet that leads to delay and deferment in the exacting of his revenge on Claudius becomes transformed in Ivanov into a mental block when it comes taking any interest in practical matters, such as running his estate. His steward, Borkin, says to him: You’re a good man and an intelligent man, but you haven’t got that touch of – you know what I mean – you haven’t got any drive. If only you could take a good smack at something, enough to make the sparks fly, I mean . . . You’re a neurotic, a weakling. If you were a normal man, you’d be making a million a year. (40)

Hamlet is thus redefined by Chekhov in his characterisation of Ivanov as neurotic and suffering from a lack of drive. Ivanov himself invokes Hamlet only to deny any similarity: ‘My whining inspires you with a sort of reverent awe, you seem to think you’ve got hold of a second Hamlet in me . . . but in my opinion this neurotic state of mine and all the symptoms that go with it are just something to laugh at, and nothing else!’ (93). Whereas Shakespeare’s character can be seen as embodying the emergence of the self-conscious hero who can no longer act with the single-mindedness of traditional heroes, Ivanov is merely a victim of a malaise of cultural origins that makes any effort seem pointless. As well as being unable to summon the energy to do anything, he suffers from a kind of emotional disintegration. He was in love with his

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wife when he married her, but all that feeling has drained away and even the fact that she is dying has little effect: I was passionately in love with her when I got married and I swore I’d love her for ever, but . . . Well five years have passed, and she still loves me, but I . . . [Makes a helpless gesture with his hands.] Here you are, telling me that she’s soon going to die, and I don’t feel any love or pity but just a sort of indifference and lassitude . . . To anyone looking at me it must seem dreadful; but I don’t understand myself what’s happening to me . . . (45)

Ivanov’s antagonist in the play, the doctor Lvov, accuses him of ‘heartless egoism’ and ‘cold inhumanity’, but such moral judgements assume that Ivanov is responsible for his actions. Whereas Hamlet believes that he only needs to exert his will in order to act, thus his criticism of himself for failing to act, Ivanov’s will is paralysed by forces beyond his control; instead of action being deferred, as in Hamlet, it is negated in Ivanov. It is perhaps because Ivanov is subject to forces beyond his control that Chekhov makes no critical judgement of him. The moralistic doctor emerges as the more unsympathetic character even though his criticism of Ivanov is quite accurate: His unhappy wife’s only pleasure in life is having him near her; he’s the breath of life to her; she implores him to spend at least one evening a week with her, but he . . . he can’t. He finds his home suffocating, there’s not enough scope here! Just one evening at home and he’d shoot himself for sheer boredom! (48)

Whereas Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ is assumed, even if it has been argued that it becomes transformed into genuine madness, Ivanov’s state of mind is pathological from the start. He is subject to feelings that overcome his conscious will. Sitting with his wife and pretending to love her is unbearable, and his mood fluctuates between a consuming boredom and anguish: ‘As soon as the sun goes down, a sort of anguish begins to torment me. And what anguish it is! Don’t ask me why. I don’t know myself’ (50). The play ends with the suicide of Ivanov but there is no tragic climax. His wife having died, he is on the point of marrying again when the doctor denounces him as the wedding is about to take place. A chaotic scene ensues, and Ivanov, unable to stand the situation any longer, shoots himself. It is the last straw for Ivanov, but his suicide solves nothing; it’s an escapist act done on impulse. Instead of catharsis in the traditional tragic manner, there is an embarrassing shouting match with people hurling abuse at each other and an impulsive suicide. Although a man dies in despair, the effect is as much comic or farcical as tragic. Even in Chekhov’s most ‘tragic’ play in terms of its impact, on most audiences at least, it’s doubtful if his perspective has changed. In Three

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Sisters the sisters’ longing for Moscow and their failure to achieve their goal can’t be seen outside the context of psychology and temporality. If they had succeeded in escaping to Moscow, would it have lived up to their ideal hopes? The play raises the question as to whether any such hopes for future bliss have any substance. This applies not merely to the sisters but to such characters as Vershinin who believes that life in the future will have purpose and meaning. Characters’ beliefs and hopes cannot be dissociated from the psychological effect of their situations. Vershinin’s unhappy personal life is clearly a factor in his idealising of the future; the passing of the sisters’ former privileged life influences attempts to escape mentally to an idealised Moscow, though what they would do there and exactly how their lives would be transformed remains vague. The various characters of the play have a psychological need for meaning both in their own lives and in the world in general, but the play does not suggest that such meaning exists. It might be argued that Chekhov, even if he undermines tragedy as a dramatic form, can clearly be connected with the tragic in the wider philosophical sense, since his work suggests an affinity with Schopenhauerian pessimism. The novellas previously discussed suggest his familiarity with Schopenhauerian ideas, perhaps also reinforced by the mediation of Tolstoy, who was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer. This may link Chekhov with the writers I shall discuss in the next chapter, for whom Schopenhauer was central to a new conception of the tragic in the modern period. However, though Chekhov may have been influenced by a Schopenhauerian philosophical perspective, his work suggests that this led him as much in the direction of absurd comedy as in the direction of the tragic. Thus characters are prepared to commit suicide for unrequited love, yet it’s also strongly suggested that if their love were requited it would inevitably decline in intensity or even become transformed into hatred or tedium. Significantly, one character’s experience of unrequited love and the suffering it causes does not make that character any more sympathetic to such suffering on the part of others, as with Konstantin in The Seagull: though he knows what it is like to be rejected by the woman he loves, this does not make him in the least sympathetic to Masha’s unrequited love for him. He can’t bear her and only wants her out of his sight. In Chekhov, human beings tend to be irretrievably egotistical and seldom achieve a sense of tragic insight that transcends their ingrained egotism. Chekhov’s resistance to the tragic as a concept is suggested by his description of plays like The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard as comedies; even Ivanov was originally called a comedy. One of Chekhov’s best known short stories, ‘The Lady with the Dog’ (1899), confirms both an attraction to and distrust of the tragic. It is

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typical of his short stories in that it combines realism – accentuated by the avoidance of obvious literary devices and of moral or philosophical comment – with an understated symbolic quality, a combination which gives his work its unique atmosphere. The content of the story is on the surface very conventional but it is Chekhov’s treatment of this content, which creates recognition and identification on the part of the reader yet is also defamiliarising at the same time, that gives the work its power, and part of that power lies in its implied concern with issues related to the tragic. Gurov, a bank official from Moscow whose marriage offers him no fulfilment and who has had numerous affairs, is on holiday alone in Yalta. He is attracted by a young woman with a Pomeranian dog, a new arrival in Yalta. When they meet she is the first one to speak, and she then blushes and lowers her eyes, indicating an attraction towards him. Thus it is clear that the philandering Gurov will have little difficulty in persuading her to have an affair with him. Her name is Anna and her life is as unfulfilled as his, and a week later they begin an affair, with Anna feeling guilt and worrying that Gurov will despise her after the affair has been consummated. So far so conventional, but afterwards they sit looking at the sea and there follows a striking passage: The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spell-bound in these magical surroundings – the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky – Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.6

Chekhov’s writing is characterised by idealistic declarations of utopian hope for the future together with an acknowledgement of the external world’s ‘complete indifference to the life and death of each of us’, with death offering only ‘eternal sleep’. A similar dichotomy is present in Three Sisters, in which characters such as Vershinin and Toozenbach express idealistic hope in the future but also have doubts as to whether life has any meaning. Vershinin says to Masha: ‘Yes, we shall all be forgotten. Such is our fate and we can’t do anything about it. And all the things that seem serious, important and full of meaning to us now will be forgotten one day – or anyway won’t seem important any more’

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(259–60), but he goes on to say later that ‘in two or three hundred years life on this old earth of ours will have become marvellously beautiful’ (263), and Toozenbach who continually urges the need to work and looks forward to ‘a terrific thunder-cloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm . . . coming to freshen us up!’ (253), later, in response to Masha’s ‘Isn’t there some meaning?’, replies: ‘Meaning? . . . Look out there, it’s snowing. What’s the meaning of that?’ (282). Even though the roar of the waves suggests the eternal sleep of death and nature’s indifference to humanity, paradoxically, rather than Gurov being made to feel pessimistic, he feels part of a never-ceasing movement of life and reflects that everything in the world is beautiful. However, at first it seems that Gurov’s vision of the world as beautiful is merely a temporary and transient state of mind since the affair develops in conventional terms, and when Anna is summoned home by her husband, Gurov does not seem particularly unhappy, regarding it at this point as just one more affair. He has earlier thought of her in comparison with other women he has seduced and found her sense of guilt tiresome. Back in Moscow he expects to forget Anna within a month but he finds that he cannot. All of the activities of his life, at home, at work and at leisure, seem pointless. For Gurov and also for Anna virtually all aspects of conventional social life are stultifying, suggesting a fundamental conflict between the world of civilised social order and human desires that are irreconcilable with it, a conflict with tragic potential. Anna has earlier confessed to Gurov her disillusionment with marriage and respectable social life. Now she realises her husband is merely a ‘flunkey’: ‘I was twenty when I was married to him. I have been tormented by curiosity; I wanted something better. “There must be a different sort of life,” I said to myself. I wanted to live! To live, to live! . . . I was fired by curiosity . . . you don’t understand it, but, I swear to God, I could not control myself; something happened to me: I could not be restrained. I told my husband I was ill, and came here . . . And here I have been walking about as though I were dazed, like a mad creature . . . and now I have become a vulgar, contemptible woman whom any one may despise.’

Gurov is similarly disillusioned after his return to Moscow: What savage manners, what people! What senseless nights, what uninteresting, uneventful days! The rage for card-playing, the gluttony, the drunkenness, the continual talk always about the same thing. Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one’s time, the better part of one’s strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it – just as though one were in a madhouse or a prison.7

He decides to travel to the town where Anna lives and eventually meets her. She discloses that she has also been unable to forget about

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him, but his arrival fills her with dread. Shocked by his kisses she promises to see him in Moscow and lies to her husband that she has to see a gynaecologist. Both are now reconciled to leading double lives and though they hope to ‘be free from this intolerable bondage’ and that ‘in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin’, the ending gives no promise of that happening: ‘it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long way to go, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning’.8 It can be argued that the story is an implicit attack on conventional society and its repressive nature. On the other hand it can be read as suggesting that there can never be any complete congruency between social norms and individual desire; that the only option for those caught up in such a conflict is outwardly to conform but to find a way of fulfilling desire, as in the case of Gurov and Anna, through ‘secrecy . . . deception . . . living in different towns and not seeing each other for long at a time’. Whatever view one takes, neither alternative is tragic. The love of Gurov and Anna is not a consuming passion: it has to be understood in the context of the barrenness and banality of their ordinary lives. The story does not make clear why these two people end up loving each other so intensely. Why does this woman prove so special to Gurov when he has had many similar affairs in the past? In numerous other works Chekhov shows love to be based on illusion and egotism. That is not denied in this story but it is less important than Gurov and Anna’s desire to find something that gives their lives meaning and significance. They are minor rebels against the social pressures and conventions that have driven them into unfulfilling marriages and boring domestic situations. Their experience raises the question as to whether repression is a price worth paying for social stability and order. Chekhov’s calling his heroine Anna, a woman married to a man who is the epitome of dullness and respectability, surely alludes to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Indeed the story may be seen as in some respects a kind of commentary on Tolstoy’s novel. Tolstoy’s Anna is destroyed by rejecting her social life and social self in favour of a new self that does not inhibit passion and impulse. Tolstoy dramatises Anna Karenina’s desires with great power, but they ultimately prove to be destructive, which may be seen as tragic, as I shall discuss in the next chapter. Chekhov in contrast presents the desire to escape repression and liberate impulse and passion in a much more positive light, though suggesting that the chances of success are slight. Both negative social forces and the self’s vulnerability to boredom and egotism have almost overwhelming power and the open ending gives no assurance that Gurov

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and Anna may not become bored with each other or drift back to their previous routine lives or some other such negative outcome. Yet there remains some hope in the story, with the lovers expecting a new and beautiful life but also aware of the many difficulties and complications that lie ahead. In Chekhov there are moments of vision even if they are fleeting and unstable, and in other works ideal hopes are often subject to satire, as with Trofimov’s optimistic philosophy in The Cherry Orchard. Though society may be predominantly oppressive it can be resisted, even if that may involve a certain amount of lying and deception, and there is always the hope for radical change in the future, which Chekhov’s works continually look forward to with some irony but not total scepticism. An interesting stylistic feature of the story is the use of the colour grey as a recurrent motif. Such devices in Chekhov’s stories create symbolic resonances. In this story the colour grey is pervasive. Anna has grey eyes, the dress of hers Gurov likes best is grey, the fence surrounding her house is grey and studded with upturned nails. In the hotel where Gurov stays when he travels to see Anna, the room is described as having a grey carpet and a grey blanket. An inkstand on the table surmounted by a headless horseman is covered in grey dust, and at the end of the story Gurov notices in the mirror that his hair is turning grey. This greyness is contrasted with the whiteness of the dog and the whiteness of the clouds as Gurov and Anna look over the sea, in the second section. Chekhov’s symbolism is seldom subject to easy decoding, but the colour grey is not one that would normally be associated with the tragic. In this story it suggests that in contrast to the high romance of the Anna– Vronsky relationship in Anna Karenina, Gurov and Anna exist on a much more ordinary human scale but are nevertheless capable of passion. And even though they seem to be trapped by their domestic situations, they do not lapse into despair or contemplate suicide, but find a middle way by conducting their affair secretly while outwardly conforming to society. In that context grey is an appropriate colour to be associated with them, and one which suggests muted hope for their relationship. In this story there is thus some prospect of a better life and a better world. Certain writers contemporary with Chekhov, however, some of whom can be linked to the pessimistic aspects of his writing, could not share even his muted hope that some kind of higher vision was possible and that life might be better in the future. These writers were prepared to develop Schopenhauerian ideas or combine them with others in order to create a modern form of the tragic. Some of these writers will be considered in the next chapter.

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

George Steiner (1963), The Death of Tragedy, London: Faber and Faber, p. 301. Anton Chekhov (1977), Plays, trans. Elisaveta Fen, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 164. Page numbers will henceforth be incorporated in the text. Anton Chekhov (1965), Ward Six and Other Stories, trans. Ann Dunnigan, New York: Signet, p. 166. Ibid., pp. 20, 37, 58. Shakespeare, Hamlet, V, i. Anton Tchehov (1953), Selected Stories, trans. Constance Garnett, London: Chatto and Windus, pp. 15–16. Ibid., pp. 14, 20. Ibid., p. 27.

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Chapter 4

The Return of the Tragic in Fiction

Thomas Hardy and the Tragic Though Ibsen in his social realist plays and playwrights such as Shaw who were influenced by him take an anti-tragic view of the world and the human situation, as I have argued, certain novelists contemporary or nearly contemporary with them implicitly contested that view, notably Hardy whose fiction has often been categorised as tragic.1 However, critics have tended to regard the tragic, particularly as manifested in Hardy’s last two major novels, as flawed because it is seen as lacking the sense of the inexorable associated with classical tragedy. From this perspective Hardy can be accused of manipulating the plots of his novels in order to impose his own subjective, pessimistic vision on the world. A particular worry is that a recurrent feature of his fiction – seemingly trivial events bringing about consequences that are far from trivial – creates a disproportionality that offends against the dominant critical view, influenced by Aristotle’s Poetics, that in authentic tragedy the catastrophic outcome is produced by necessity and not governed by chance and coincidence. It can also be argued that the tragic is alien to the novel as a form: whereas classical tragedy observed the unities and was written in verse – thus eliminating or at least suppressing the contingent, the random, the quotidian – the realist novel in the nineteenth century could not be reconciled with such formal conventions and inevitably would situate the tragic action in a social context that potentially could undermine it. George Steiner’s argument that Ibsen’s social realism in his middle-period plays was contrary to the tragic because ‘[i]n tragedy, there are no temporal remedies’ but only ‘the unaltering bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world’, might seem to be more powerful if directed at fiction, the tragic being even more called into question by the realism of the novel, since society as mediating any confrontation between

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humanity and recalcitrant forces in life and the world was inescapable in realist fiction. Yet such objections to Hardy as a tragic writer don’t take account of a crucial consideration: the emergence of a cultural context in the latter half of the nineteenth century which provided the basis for a new conception of the tragic that is grounded in pessimism about life and the nature of the world; and arguably the novel is a particularly appropriate form for the tragic in that cultural context. Developments in philosophy and science had generated in a revised form the fundamental opposition that underlay tragedy in the classical era: the discontinuity between human purposes and values and that which transcended or was indifferent or alien to these human purposes and values. Schopenhauer and Darwin are the central figures here, and though their influence on Hardy has been much discussed by previous critics, the important point is that taken together their ideas can be interpreted as creating a modern version of this discontinuity. Schopenhauer identified his pessimism with the ‘tragic spirit’: What gives everything tragic, whatever the form in which it appears, its characteristic tendency to the sublime, is the dawning of the knowledge that the world and life can give no true satisfaction, and are therefore not worth our attachment to them. It is this in which the tragic spirit consists. Accordingly, it leads to resignation.2

All living things are driven by a will that urges them to live, but in the case of human beings this can provide no fulfilment: as soon as one desire or appetite is gratified another inevitably takes its place in a neverending and meaningless process that only ends with death: We are like lambs in a field, disporting ourselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey. So it is that in our good days we are all unconscious of the evil Fate may have presently in store for us – sickness, poverty, mutilation, loss of sight or reason. No little part of the torment of existence lies in this, that Time is continually pressing upon us, never letting us take breath, but always coming after us like a taskmaster with a whip. If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the misery of boredom.3

What gave this philosophy much greater force was that it was easily reconcilable with Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Many were able to interpret Darwin in optimistic terms, taking Herbert Spencer’s redefinition of natural selection as ‘survival of the fittest’ to mean that species which survived the evolutionary process deserved to survive, thus building purposive development into Darwinism. A less consoling interpretation was that natural selection was irreconcilable with purpose or meaning and that species which survived did so largely through

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mutations produced by chance which proved advantageous for adapting to a perpetually changing world. Darwin had referred to the ‘the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature’4 and his contemporary Ernst Haeckel proclaimed that natural selection destroyed all basis for belief in a moral order: ‘the “moral ordering of the world” is evidently a beautiful poem which is proved to be false by the actual facts . . . It exists neither in nature nor in human life . . . The terrible and ceaseless “Struggle for Existence” gives the real impulse to the blind course of the world.’5 It was thus easy to align the Darwinian ‘Struggle for Existence’ with Schopenhauer’s blind will. The role of chance in Darwin’s theory of evolution caused particular outrage: ‘That this ordered Cosmos is not from necessity or chance, is almost self evident . . . Is it by chance that light and heat cause plants to carry on their wonderful operations . . .?’6 Darwin himself accepted it would be difficult for people to believe that the origin of man as a species was ‘the result of blind chance’.7 Shaw’s reasons for rejecting Darwinism in favour of Lamarckian evolutionary theory are significant in this context, especially as he admitted that Darwin’s theory was ‘not finally refutable’. What was objectionable to him about Darwinism was that it had two existential implications that were irreconcilable with an anti-tragic philosophy: first, since the survival of species in a perpetually changing world was a matter of passive adaptation through chance mutation, there was no role for the active will; and second, if this idea was applied to the human situation it suggested that the only choice available was either to adapt or to refuse to do so and be defeated by life, the tragic option. Whereas Darwinism offered only ‘improvement . . . through some senseless accident’, the ‘Lamarckian evolutionary process’ provides the alternative of ‘an extension of consciousness and of power’.8 It is clear, however, that Shaw recognises the connection between Darwinism and a tragic world view and that his rejection of Darwin was on philosophical rather than scientific grounds. There seems little doubt that Schopenhauerian philosophy and Darwinian evolutionary theory are central to Hardy’s tragic representation of life in his fiction. However, Hardy is unlike Schopenhauer in that he does not advocate resignation or suggest that the social and material dimension of life is not worth caring about. Indeed, in the later fiction in particular, his criticism of the social world is scathing and his support for social and moral reform obvious. Arnold Kettle’s claim that Hardy’s fiction is about the destruction of a rural culture in England is a legitimate critical interpretation.9 No reader of Jude the Obscure (1896) can miss its critique of divorce laws, the educational system, the Church, and

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its concern with the effect of economic change on the agricultural working class. All of these have drastic consequences for the lives of his characters. Yet though social critique and support for the improvement of the human lot are strongly present in his fiction, the claim that they are its driving force would be difficult to defend in critical terms. Hardy is one of the most notable of post-Darwinian writers in that he understood that Darwin’s theory of natural selection fundamentally changed the nature of the relation between humanity and the world. Though matters were complicated by the fact that most human beings interacted with a socially created world and not with nature in any pure sense, nevertheless Darwinism could not be ignored in thinking about the relation between humanity, society and the world in general. Basic to Darwin’s theory is the idea that no species is perfectly adapted to survive in the world. Evolution produces through genetic variation species that are well enough adapted to the world to survive and reproduce, at least for a time, in the struggle for existence. The relation between humanity and society, however, is clearly different from that of non-human species in relation to nature, since human beings can change society and even nature to a considerable degree rather than merely adapting to them. Why then, it may be asked, if society can be changed by human action and idealism, is there nevertheless what is widely perceived as a fatalism in Hardy’s depiction of the relationship between human beings and their world? Does this not create the kind of contradiction that critics have perceived in his fiction: for example, a character like Tess in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) can be said to be both a victim of social forces and fated to be destroyed by some intrinsic recalcitrance that exists in the world. How can the one be reconciled with the other? Though Hardy may be unequivocally critical of society’s values and institutions, especially in the last two major novels, he does not imply that reforming those will lead to human beings and social structures becoming perfectly adapted to each other. All societies construct social forms that are designed to create order and stability in the human world. But such forms will tend over time to take on a life of their own and thus become reified or thing-like and thus potentially oppressive, so that inevitably they will be in conflict with the needs, interests or desires of certain human individuals. Though those social forms may eventually be changed or even replaced, some individuals who cannot or refuse to adapt will be crushed before such change or replacement can take place. This is an unavoidable process and will apply to every society in varying degrees. To take an obvious example, Jude Fawley in Jude the Obscure lives in a society in which higher education and the institutions founded

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to provide it, notably universities, are not accessible to working-class people. The assumptions underlying such arrangements derive from a past in which social divisions were virtually absolute and the idea of the working class receiving higher education would have been hardly conceivable. Though such assumptions are still powerful and reflected by the admissions policy of a university such as Christminster, Jude’s desire for higher education is reflective of emergent ideas that question such assumptions. Education as a social form will eventually have to confront such desires from Judes of the future and those who believe they are legitimate, and after much resistance this will lead to significant change in the form of higher education to take account of the emerging social and cultural forces which Jude exemplifies. Both Jude and Sue Bridehead are aware that they are victims of social forms no longer appropriate to them or their world. Jude states: ‘I perceive there is something wrong in our social formulas’10 and for Sue ‘the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to real star-patterns’ (214). As Jude is oppressed by the social form of higher education, so Sue is oppressed by marriage as a social form. It is significant, however, that she refers not to Victorian civilisation but civilisation as such, implying that such conflict as she and Jude face is a universal situation, which suggests that any particular society and its institutions can’t be blamed. There is a dual perspective in Hardy’s fiction, one which can accommodate both social critique and the tragic. Though Jude the Obscure is clearly a severe attack on the system of higher education and marriage as an institution at the particular time in which Jude and Sue are living, this should be distinguished from an attack on social forms and institutions as such. In contrast to Ibsen in Ghosts, Hardy’s social critique in his later fiction can be assimilated to the tragic. Society in order to function requires social forms and institutions, but it is nevertheless inevitable that eventually they will become oppressive to individuals such as Jude and Sue in advance of their time who cannot adapt or refuse to do so and are therefore crushed. This conception of the relation between society and the individual, clearly influenced by Darwinian thinking, can be seen as one aspect of the novel’s tragic perspective. Unlike Ibsen, for Hardy in the conflict between society and the individual both have right on their side if one moves beyond the particular instance to the abstract: social forms are necessary in every society and it would be mere fantasy to believe that they could continually change in order to meet every human need and desire, but equally those individuals like Jude and Sue who develop desires or ideals that can’t be reconciled with prevailing social forms also deserve respect. The fates of

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Jude and Sue may be specific to their Victorian era, but the intrinsic discontinuity between emergent human ideals and desires and existing social and ideological structures will continue to generate similar conflicts leading to similar results in the future. Though both will change over time the fundamental conflict will remain, destroying or damaging severely the lives of individuals like Jude and Sue and those in a similar situation in the future. Another aspect of Hardy’s tragic perspective that reflects the influence of Darwinism in particular is his emphasis on apparently trivial events that have major consequences. Any reader of Darwin’s Origin of Species must be struck by the number of times the word ‘chance’ occurs in the text. Natural selection undermined standard concepts of order, theological or secular, and suggested there is no linear or purposive progress but only perpetual change. That survival or non-survival depended on chance both in terms of mutation and in terms of a world subject to unpredictable and directionless change implied also that luck played a significant role in evolution. This called into question notions of order in the world founded on proportionality, and Hardy’s fiction reflects this undermining of traditional ideas of order. Sophoclean tragedy is grounded in a sense of proportionality. Oedipus could of course have said that killing his father and marrying his mother were the result of a series of mischances or bad luck, but he refuses to do so and accepts that there is an intrinsic order underlying existence. He accepts responsibility for his actions even if he acted in ignorance and had no intention of bringing about what resulted from them. The interests of human beings and those of the gods may be incongruent but the gods represent a world beyond the human world which has its own kind of order, even if it’s a form of order that human beings inevitably enter into conflict with or rebel against. Hardy’s concept of the tragic is less consoling since it replaces the realm of the gods with an indifferent world and disproportionality is central to the relation between humanity with its hopes and fears and that indifferent world, creating a form of the tragic appropriate to the modern, or postDarwinian, era. The continual emphasis on how people’s lives can be affected by mischances, accidents, lost opportunities and random happenings undermines the deep-seated desire for order and significance that Hardy sees as governing human thought about life and its meaning; and clearly the novel could capture this more effectively than any other literary form. The human sense of proportionality which underlies concepts such as justice or the ethical is undermined, as there is no relation of scale from the human point of view between cause and effect, apparently minor

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happenings being able to produce major consequences, even tragic situations. Obvious examples in Tess of the d’Urbervilles are the clergyman’s casual mentioning to Tess’s father of his noble lineage which creates a disastrous chain of events and, notoriously, Tess’s letter to Angel Clare going under a carpet and not being read. If the human dimension is removed, concepts like proportion or mischance disappear, as there is no reason why one event is any more significant than another; but Hardy’s fiction suggests that humanity in general can never come to terms, existentially at least, with such implications of Darwinism and Schopenhauerian philosophy: the great majority of human beings can’t help but think in accordance with ideas of order, proportion and morality since these are part of what it means to be human. Unlike Schopenhauer, Hardy does not condemn the world or see life as not worth living: both the world which is indifferent to human concerns and humanity with its hopes and desires deserve respect. Undoubtedly there is anger in Hardy’s fiction, particularly in Tess and Jude, but it is not directed at a morally indifferent reality, but rather at the denial of or refusal to accept it on the part of religion or optimistic forms of thought.

George Eliot as Precursor of Hardy Hardy was not the first English novelist to see the tragic in such terms. A similar awareness that reality is morally indifferent is evident in George Eliot’s fiction. In Romola, published in 1863 less than four years after Darwin’s Origin, the narrator states: ‘Who shall put his finger on the work of justice, and say, “It is there”? Justice is like the Kingdom of God – it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning’ (Chap. 67). Anticipating Hardy, Eliot often shows how trivial acts can inadvertently have major consequences, thus emphasising a lack of proportion in the nature of things with the implication that concepts of order such as justice in an absolute sense become purely human constructs. In The Mill on the Floss (1860), for example, which Eliot was writing even while she was reading Darwin’s Origin, Mr Tulliver cannot come to terms with the fact that he lives in ‘a puzzling world’ and his mind gives way when that world proves indifferent to his notion of justice. Mrs Tulliver’s innocent and well-meaning attempts to help her husband have the paradoxical effect of bringing about disaster, such as her warnings to him not to go to law having the opposite effect and her attempt to dissuade Wakem from buying the mill, after her husband has lost a lawsuit against him, putting the idea into his head. Eliot’s narrator’s modification of Novalis is relevant both to her own fiction and to

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that of Hardy in that it recognises that circumstance can’t be left out of account in any consideration of human life and that our concept of the tragic needs to be modified to accommodate this: For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within. ‘Character’ – says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms – ‘character is destiny’. But not the whole of our destiny. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive Hamlet’s having married Ophelia, and got through life with a reputation of sanity notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some moody sarcasms towards the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the frankest incivility to his father-in-law. (The Mill on the Floss, Book 6, Chap. 6)

Hardy also refers to Novalis’ aphorism in The Mayor of Casterbridge, rendering it as ‘Character is Fate’ (Chap. 17), and though he doesn’t mention Eliot’s qualification of it, almost certainly he would have agreed with it. And the corollary to tragic outcomes being prevented by particular circumstances is that circumstance can create such outcomes from situations that may have no obvious tragic potential. For both writers this both deepens and widens the tragic nature of the human situation. Eliot was interested in the tragic and tragedy as a form both critically and philosophically and discussed them in several essays. Her most ambitious piece of tragic writing is her verse drama, The Spanish Gypsy (1868), in which the heroine, Fedalma, who has been brought up in Spain in separation from her Gypsy origins, is forced to choose by her father Zarca between her love for a Spanish knight, Don Silva, and duty to her Gypsy people. Choosing the latter she becomes subject to a deep sense of self-division. The influence of Hegel’s theory of tragedy is obvious in that there is a ‘dramatic collision’ between ‘two principles . . . at war with each other’, but Eliot is also aware of Shakespeare. Like Hamlet, Fedalma is urged by her father to make a choice that gives her no joy and which precipitates a disastrous set of consequences since Don Silva, vainly trying to cast off his Spanish identity for love of Fedalma and join the Gypsies, kills Zarca, thus ending all realistic hope for the Gypsy people. Fedalma’s life is tragic in that she is left to lead a people in a context of hopelessness both for them and for herself. Though Felix Holt has strong connections with classical tragedy, perhaps the ending of The Mill on the Floss is the most powerful tragic episode in her fiction. Maggie Tulliver’s ethical decision to refuse to marry Stephen Guest despite their inadvertent elopement – even though there is strong mutual sexual desire between them and marriage now seems the only practical option – and return home with her reputation apparently irretrievably destroyed and with no possibility of restoring

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previous relationships, is a tragic choice made in a context of undecidability. Arguably this is the tragic centre of the novel rather than the deaths of Maggie and Tom in the flood, though that shows another aspect of the tragic that Hardy also emphasises: nature’s indifference to human hopes and values. The arguments of the many critics of the novel who have attacked Eliot over Maggie’s decision are called into question by the novel’s proto-Derridean concept of the tragic. Though nothing can now be done about the suffering of Lucy and Philip by going back she cannot make a ‘choice of joy’ that at the same time would be a choice of ‘conscious hardness and cruelty’. Happiness for herself would be built on others’ pain. Yet Guest’s argument that nothing can now be done about that pain and that returning may even make things worse as well as also inflicting as much pain on him as on Lucy or Philip, is not refuted. Eliot is less willing than Hardy to give the tragic the last word. Though it can’t be transcended, time can’t be left out of account as life inevitably moves on. In the conclusion to The Mill on the Floss Eliot offers some human hope despite the tragic aspects of Maggie’s undecidable predicament and the deaths of her brother and herself in the flood. Nature recovers from the destruction of the flood – ‘Nature repairs her ravages’ – though it takes five years and the narrator emphasises that ‘there can be no thorough repair’. There is also the suggestion that time can also partially heal in the human world, since two of those who have survived and visit the graves of Maggie and Tom have been able to rebuild their lives. In Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), the plot of The Spanish Gypsy is reworked in such a way that the latter’s Hegelian form of the tragic is deflected. Daniel Deronda is able to reconcile love with duty to Mordecai’s ideal of Jewish nationhood even if there is a suggestion that love as overwhelming passion – which Gwendolen Harleth could have offered him – has to be sacrificed. Unlike Fedalma, who until her father re-enters her life has no thought of Gypsy nationhood as an ideal, Deronda had been searching for some vocation to which he could commit himself wholly, and when he discovers Mordecai’s ideal he is able to accept his Jewish identity joyfully. However, though the Hegelian tragic model as collision of ethical principles no longer applies, the tragic as undecidability remains as Deronda is faced with a choice between his desire to devote himself to the ideal of Jewish nationhood and his responsibility to a specific other, namely Gwendolen, whom he fears may be engulfed by her demons without his support. Forced to decide, he chooses the latter though having a sense of tragic awareness of the ‘risk’ to Gwendolen and of his ‘cruelty’: ‘Deronda’s anguish was intolerable. He could not help himself. He seized her outstretched hands and held them together, and kneeled at her

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feet. She was the victim of his happiness’ (Chap. 69). For Eliot, sometimes the claim of the other may have to be rejected but it must always be a tragic choice in human terms, and Deronda can have no knowledge of the consequences of his decision while the open ending also denies the reader such knowledge. According to Aristotle’s view of tragedy in his Poetics, catharsis – by purging pity and fear in the audience – paradoxically allowed an audience to transcend the despair that tragic events may seem to induce, but such catharsis is no longer available in modern post-Darwinian concepts of the tragic, as is all too clear in both Hardy’s and Eliot’s work. Eliot, however, resists the kind of post-Darwinian hopelessness that Hardy’s work, especially the later fiction, can be seen to reflect. Her characters humanly confront the tragic and its dilemmas with two human weapons, the ethical sense and ideals. Neither can promise to be successful in overcoming a reality indifferent to human notions of order, and adapting to or accepting passively the indifference of non-human reality is alien to her humanism. Human value remains and is not negated even if particular human beings are defeated by a world incommensurable with their hopes or ideals.

The Tragic in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure In Hardy’s fiction there is little sense that the ethical or ideals can allow human beings to deflect the naked confrontation with an indifferent or recalcitrant world that inexorably leads to tragic consequences. The later novels show a particular scepticism about idealism, treating it in an almost Schopenhauerian sense as a function of the will blindly seeking to impose meaning on a resistant reality. Since ideals are inevitably projected onto the world in the belief that there are structures in reality correspondent with them, irony predominates in Hardy’s treatment of idealism. In Jude the Obscure he relentlessly exposes the failure of any of Jude’s ideals to have any correspondence with reality. Despite numerous instances of a mismatch between his ideal expectation and reality, he can never liberate himself from them. At the root of this is his fear that there might be no reason for or value in his existence: ‘Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an undemanded one, he lay down with his back on a heap of litter near the pig-sty’ (22). The fundamental attraction of Christminster is that there he will discover that there is harmony in the universe and that in being part of the university his life will have value: ‘It had been the yearning of his heart to find something to anchor on, to cling to – for some place which he

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could call admirable’ (30). Jude’s idealism about Christminster is continually contradicted by his experience of the place, but to give up the ideal is impossible for him as that would be to accept that there is a tragic mismatch between human life and hopes and the world: ‘it is the centre of the universe to me, because of my early dream: and nothing can alter it’ (331). Another aspect of this idealism is his recurring expectation that the world will exhibit the order he believes it should have. Thus he routinely judges by appearances, expecting the world to conform to his projected hopes and inevitably is disappointed, as with the letters he receives from the masters of colleges he chose to write to because their ‘physiognomies seemed to say to him that they were appreciative and far-seeing men’. But instead of such experiences making him question his idealism he shores it up by blaming himself and absolving them: ‘Why couldn’t I know better than address utter strangers in such a way? I may be an impostor, an idle scamp, a man with a bad character, for all that they know to the contrary’ (122). It is this ingrained idealism that leads him to think continually in terms of fate and providence. When he is on the way to Christminster he passes across a field in which, as he believes, he had disgraced himself with Arabella, and sees this as significant and not just as a matter of chance. When things go wrong, he takes this as just punishment: though meeting Arabella makes him unable to see Sue Bridehead, this is ‘perhaps an intended intervention to punish him for his unauthorised love’ (190). He also engages in ritual activities in an attempt to prevent disorder overpowering his ideals: after the marriage with Arabella ends he burns her picture, and when he realises his desire for Sue can’t be reconciled with the letter of religion, he buries his religious books. It would be wrong, however, to see the novel as simply a satire on idealism. Neither Jude’s ideals nor the world’s indifference are attacked: both deserve respect but they can’t be reconciled. Jude’s moral sense that the world should allow both human beings and birds to co-exist harmoniously is in conflict with the Darwinian reality that what is in the interests of one species may not be in the interests of another. Jude’s human belief, however, that such discontinuity is objectionable and should be resisted is somewhat equivalent to Oedipus’ belief that the prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother also ought to be resisted despite its supernatural source. What makes human beings inherently different from animals is that they are not adaptive: they can change the world, or try to, in order that it conform with a human vision of how it could or should be; or they can choose to resist adaptation in the face of an overpowering world even if death may result. Ideals are

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central to this and are double edged as they may supply the force to change the world, or, as in the case of Jude, they may make a person totally ill-adapted to survive, so that Jude can be seen as tragic. The conflict between human beings and the world as understood in Schopenhauerian and Darwinian terms does not just apply to the question of social forms and human ideals. Perhaps an even more fundamental conflict is created by humanity’s dual heritage in being the product of both natural and cultural evolution. As a result of the emergence of social structures, language and everything that has followed on from that, human beings are no longer animals in any natural sense: they have become partially separated from their animal origins by the development of a human mind which makes them different from all other species. But this development is of course comparatively recent in terms of humanity’s animal origins, and the implication of Darwinism is that human beings, being the product of natural selection, can never completely transcend their animal inheritance: mind is merely the tip of the iceberg, to use the obvious metaphor. It is no exaggeration to claim that the cultural impact of Darwin’s evolutionary theory was cataclysmic in that it seriously undermined the belief that humanity was created by God in his own image and was therefore different in kind from and superior to the so-called lower animals. After Darwin, that division can no longer be seen as absolute. The belief that humanity was created by God in his own image entailed that human feelings and impulses that could be described as ‘animalistic’ – most obviously sexuality and violence – ought to be controllable by the will: they were a deviation from what should be expected from beings made in the image of God. Those subject to these deviations could be legitimately blamed for their actions even if religious concepts such as original sin or the grace of God implied no human being could achieve the ideal. But Darwinism called all of this into question. ‘Animalistic’ impulses or behaviour could no longer be seen as deviations; they were intrinsically part of human nature. Condemnation of them became problematic: it would be like condemning the behaviour of animals, such as killing prey, in moral terms. Could morality legitimately apply if human beings could no longer be seen as essentially different from animal species, and instincts and impulses associated with animals were built into human nature as a result of evolution? The relevance of this to the tragic is that there was now a fundamental conflict within the human psyche: human beings were both the product of civilisation in the broad sense – which either condemned ‘animality’ or found ways of reformulating it in different terms – and of an evolutionary process that linked them inextricably with animal

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behaviour over millions of years. With such a conflict both sides must be respected: neither one nor the other can completely triumph nor is there any possibility of synthesising them. The result is a psychological form of tragic division in which the conflict is within the psyche or within human nature, a conflict Hardy sees as ‘unmendable’, to use William Storm’s term. This underlies Hardy’s treatment of sexuality in his fiction. What makes Tess one of his most striking characters is the conflict between her idealistic nature and her sexuality, and this is fundamental to the tragic outcome of her life. Angel Clare represents for her an ideal form of love free of any element of the crudely animalistic, yet Tess’s bodily form as a product of evolution appeals not just to one particular man but to men in general. She has no desire to appeal to such men but inadvertently she does so through her ‘pouted-up deep red mouth’11 and her ‘bouncing handsome womanliness’ (23), attributes that have evolved to make her sexually attractive. This leads to what Hardy terms ‘the “tragic mischief” of her drama’ when she encounters Alec d’Urberville: She had an attribute which amounted to a disadvantage just now; and it was this that caused Alec d’Urberville’s eyes to rivet themselves upon her. It was a luxuriance of aspect, a fulness of growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was . . . Thus the thing began. Had she perceived this meeting’s import she might have asked why she was doomed to be seen and coveted by the wrong man, and not by some other man, the right and desired one in all respects. (52–3)

Tess’s body is part of a nature governed by Schopenhauer’s blind will. From nature’s point of view it makes no difference if life continues through Tess having a child by the man she loves or by her being raped by a man like Alec in whom she has no sexual interest. She becomes conscious of this split between her human aims and feelings and the effect of her body on men in general, and takes steps to make herself as physically unattractive as possible. Alec d’Urberville is as much a victim of nature as Tess. She arouses in him a sexual desire that nature has implanted in him, just as nature has given her attributes correspondent to such desire. Human beings are, of course, different from animals because they can choose to resist nature, but given the power of nature as an amoral force, moral condemnation of the likes of Alec can never be absolute as it could be in pre-Darwinian thinking about sexual temptation. The novel does not state categorically that Tess was raped by Alec, but the divided nature of human beings inevitably creates the potential for ambiguity in such situations. Hardy’s provocative subtitle to the novel, ‘A Pure Woman’, implies that whether Tess was raped or responded to Alec’s desire, no blame should be

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attached to her. Given the power of nature it is certain that in some situations human resistance to it will crumble. Clearly, this does not mean that ethical resistance to nature is futile, but absolutist moral positions become difficult to sustain in the light of the fact that control over animal impulses and desires can never be total. What gives Tess’ situation tragic potential is that she is unable to reach a position of compromise in the conflict between human ideals and a nature resistant or indifferent to such ideals. She idealises Angel Clare because she sees his love for her as transcending desire for her body: To her he was, as of old, all that was perfection, personally and mentally. He was still her Antinous, her Apollo even; his sickly face was beautiful as the morning to her affectionate regard on this day no less than when she first beheld him; for was it not the face of the one man on earth who had loved her purely, and who had believed in her as pure! (432)

Alec in contrast loved her for her body, and even though her body may have responded she rejects such desire in herself as being impure: ‘He has come between us and ruined us, and now he can never do it anymore. I never loved him at all, Angel, as I loved you’ (431). Her killing of Alec is motivated by idealism, for she kills the man who rendered her impure in the eyes of Angel, and she also tries to kill the embodiment of physical desire in herself that can’t be reconciled with her concept of purity. In killing him she chooses death in effect, as she must know the necessary consequence of what would be seen as murder. She refuses to adapt to the world beyond her ideal conception by continuing to live with Alec or even by merely leaving him. That ideal of a human love which transcends animal sexuality will always be sullied if she does not expel Alec and what he represents, even if death is the price she has to pay for such expulsion. The conflict between human ideals and indifferent and resistant forces in nature is presented in particularly stark terms in Jude the Obscure, most obviously when Arabella attracts Jude’s attention by throwing a pig’s genitalia at him. Before this Jude had been lost in spiritual thought: ‘And then he continued to dream, and thought he might become even a bishop by leading a pure, energetic, wise, Christian life. And what an example he would set!’ (42). Arabella on the other hand is at the opposite pole: She had a round and prominent bosom, full lips, perfect teeth, and the rich complexion of a Cochin hen’s egg. She was a complete and substantial female animal – no more, no less; and Jude was almost certain that to her was attributable the enterprise of attracting his attention from dreams of the humaner letters to what was simmering in the minds around him. (44)

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Unlike Tess, Arabella has no difficulty in accepting her animal sexuality. Jude, although attracted to her, resembles Tess in never being comfortable with sexuality separate from the idealistic and spiritual dimension. Yet there is a bond between Arabella and him that can’t be denied , an ‘affinity in posse, between herself and him, which, so far as Jude Fawley was concerned, had no sort of premeditation in it’ (44). Nature in the form of sexuality strikes Jude who had thought women had no relevance to his life ‘but had vaguely regarded the sex as beings outside his life and purposes. He gazed from her eyes to her mouth, thence to her bosom, and to her full round naked arms, wet, mottled with the chill of the water, and firm as marble’ (46). Though aware that what she represents is ‘quite antipathetic to that side of him which had been occupied with literary study and the magnificent Christminster dream’ (47), the ‘will’ in the Schopenhauerian sense draws him to her, and despite his conscious decision not to see her again ‘a compelling arm of extraordinary muscular power seized hold of him – something which had nothing in common with the spirits and influences that had moved him hitherto’ (49). Jude can’t allow the overwhelming sexual desire he initially feels for her to define him yet at the same time it can’t be suppressed. A major reason why he is drawn to Sue Bridehead is that unlike Arabella she can be harmonised with his idealism: ‘she remained more or less an ideal character, about whose form he began to weave curious and fantastic day-dreams’ (96). Her refusal to identify her womanhood with sexuality is for him a positive attraction: ‘I have not felt about [men] as most women are taught to feel – to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man – no man short of a sensual savage – will molest a woman by day or by night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him’ (154). Sue inadvertently articulates what Jude feels about himself in his desire for Arabella, that he is ‘a sensual savage’. The fact that Sue does not possess the sexual characteristics of Arabella – he calls her a ‘disembodied creature . . . hardly flesh at all; so that when I put my arms round you I almost expect them to pass through you as through air!’ (255) – is central to his attraction because it makes him believe his feelings for her are idealistic and transcend the physical. Hardy suggests that her determination to be treated as if she were a man and to deny conventional ideas of womanhood – ‘I have mixed with [men] . . . almost as one of their own sex’ (154) – has made her use her sexuality as a means of exerting power over men, even to the point of cruelty. She confesses to Jude that her refusal to give way sexually to a man she lived with in London may have played a part in his death: ‘His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty’ (155). But this makes her all the

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more attractive to him as this completely dissociates her from the sexually voracious Arabella. Yet Jude merely fools himself that his love for Sue transcends sex. Paradoxically her lack of obviously sexually attractive attributes and her apparent lack of interest in sex make her all the more sexually appealing to him. Nature is not to be so easily denied. In a letter to Edmund Gosse, Hardy pointed out that he could not depict their sexual relationship as fully as he wanted: You are quite right: there is nothing perverted or depraved in Sue’s nature. The abnormalism consists in disproportion: not in inversion, her sexual instinct being healthy as far as it goes, but unusually weak & fastidious; her sensibilities remain painfully alert notwithstanding, (as they do in nature with such women). One point illustrating this I cd not dwell upon: that, though she has children, her intimacies with Jude have never been more than occasional, even when they were living together . . . This has tended to keep his passion as hot at the end as the beginning, & helps to break his heart. He has never really possessed her as freely as he desired.12

Jude tries in vain to stifle sexual passion by means of religion: He passed the evening and following days in mortifying by every possible means his wish to see her, nearly starving himself in attempts to extinguish by fasting his passionate tendency to love her. He read sermons on discipline; and hunted up passages in Church history that treated of the Ascetics of the second century. (200)

There is thus no acceptance on his part that any compromise with his ideals should be contemplated. If the ideals can’t be reconciled with other aspects of life, that is not the fault of the ideals but of human failure to live up to their demands, a conclusion treated ironically by the narrator: though his kiss of that aerial being had seemed the purest moment of his faultful life, as long as he nourished this unlicensed tenderness it was glaringly inconsistent for him to pursue the idea of becoming the soldier and servant of a religion in which sexual love was regarded as at its best a frailty, and at its worst damnation. (226)

But though Hardy satirises religion’s attitude to sex, he does not suggest that human beings can identify in any complete way with their sexual being. Arabella may be represented in animalistic terms and associated with pigs, but even she is not totally devoid of a human dimension that transcends animal nature. What attracts her to Jude in the first place is certainly his physicality, but the fact that Jude does not define himself by it as she does arouses that attraction to the level of uncontrollable passion: ‘I want him to have me – to marry me! I must have him. I can’t do without him. He’s the sort of man I long for. I shall go

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mad if I can’t give myself to him altogether!’ (55). Knowing that Jude’s mind is subject to spiritual and ethical forces that detach him from animal impulse and cunning, she can manipulate this and fool him into thinking she is pregnant so that he feels it is his human duty to marry her. Though Arabella, in contrast to Tess and Jude, is able to adapt to the world and survive, the logic of the novel suggests that mere animal existence isn’t enough for human beings, even for such as Arabella. Her feelings don’t change and the landlord of the lodging in which they stay after her return from Australia ‘had doubted if they were married at all, especially as he had seen Arabella kiss Jude one evening when she had taken a little cordial’ (398). There is even some element of the tragic in her life, since she has to face the fact that a man like Jude could never love anyone like her beyond the physical level. Jude’s religious ideals may be subject to satire in the novel, but his conviction that there ought to be harmony in the world is not. That what is good for human beings is not necessarily reconcilable with the good of other creatures continually troubles him. This is, of course, highlighted in the pig-killing scene. The fundamental difference between Jude’s idealism and Arabella’s amoral acceptance of the world is revealed most drastically in this incident, when they are forced into killing the animal themselves when the pig-killer fails to turn up. For Arabella, there is no conflict: ‘Pigs must be killed’ (71). For Jude this is another occasion in which there appears to be an intrinsic disharmony in the world. Hardy’s anthropomorphic treatment of the pig – ‘his glazing eyes riveting themselves on Arabella with the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing at last the treachery of those who had seemed his only friends’ (71) – may appear to create a melodramatic and artificial conflict. Hardy perhaps even goes as far as comparing the killing of the pig to the murder of King Duncan by Macbeth and his wife, since Arabella’s offering Jude the ‘sticking-knife’ (70) seems to allude to Lady Macbeth’s urging her reluctant husband to ‘screw your courage to the sticking-place’. But again there may be Darwinian influence. Since both human beings and animals are the product of an evolutionary process, with human beings having evolved from animals, there could be no metaphysical justification for regarding animals merely as designed by the creator for human exploitation. It may be that human needs demanded that animals be treated as a human resource, but such treatment could no longer have any theological justification. After Darwin it could be coherently argued that there was no essential difference between killing a pig and killing a human being. Arabella is not wrong to say ‘Pigs must be killed’ as she sees it as an economic necessity to kill their pig, but Jude’s sense that they have collaborated in a

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kind of murder is not wrong either, as he can’t reconcile it with his religious longing for harmony even if conventional religious belief remains untroubled by such dilemmas. The impossibility of reconciling these two views is at the heart of Hardy’s tragic perspective on life. Arabella adapts herself to the world and is a survivor, but Jude would rather choose death than adapt to a world in which human ideals such as the belief in harmony, justice and ultimate purpose are revealed as merely products of the mind. He can’t accept that events in the world have no necessary connection with human feeling, a state of affairs that often creates a disproportion in the relation between cause and effect from the human point of view. He cannot accept that chance or accident might determine events: chance must be redefined as providence, so that missing a letter from Sue is seen as ‘another special intervention of providence to keep him away from temptation’ (205). Despite his numerous rejections by Christminster and abundant evidence of its failure to live up to his ideals, he cannot give up his conception of it as the ‘heavenly Jerusalem’ (25), reconciling learning and religion, and which answers to ‘the yearning of his heart to find somewhere to anchor on’ (25). Even near the end of his life, this dream remains intact. Yet everywhere he is surrounded with disorder in the world and life, not least the deaths of his children, that is completely irreconcilable with his idealism.

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina It is interesting to compare Hardy and Tolstoy in relation to the tragic. Anna Karenina (1877) has often been called a tragic novel, though ‘tragic’ tends to be used in a rather general sense: ‘Anna’s tragic fate yields values and enrichments of sensibility that challenge the moral code which Tolstoy generally held and was seeking to dramatize’;13 ‘The action of Anna’s tragedy is that she leaves one inadequate man for another’;14 ‘Tolstoy invited his readers to contemplate the implications of a vast, disturbing, gloomy tragedy’;15 ‘Anna Karenina is a full-dress tragedy’.16 For Tolstoy as for Hardy, Schopenhauer was a major influence and provided the basis for a powerful new conception of the tragic – greatly augmented in Hardy’s case by Darwinian evolutionary theory – in that his philosophy suggested that there was a basic division between nature and the human mind in so far as it had managed to transcend nature. The blind will that drove everything in the natural world, including human beings as bodily creatures, was fundamentally in conflict with humanity’s mental achievements, namely culture and civilisation. It has been suggested that Tolstoy’s fiction in general arises out of

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a confrontation and debate with Schopenhauer. Tolstoy even contemplated translating Schopenhauer into Russian and his influence on him was at its height in the period in which he wrote Anna Karenina. Interestingly Tolstoy at first conceived of Anna as a character in the mould of Arabella, driven by animal sexuality: ‘He saw her as the incarnation of lechery and, oddly enough, did not even make her beautiful.’17 Though his conception of the character changed, sexuality remains central to her characterisation. The driving force of her character is the Schopenhauerian will which easily overcomes the civilised constraint of her conscious moral will: In that brief glance Vronsky had time to notice the suppressed animation that played over her face and flitted between her sparkling eyes and the slight smile curving her red lips. It was as though her nature were so brimming over with something that against her will it expressed itself now in a radiant look, now in a smile. She deliberately shrouded the light in her eyes but in spite of herself it gleamed in the faintly perceptible smile.18 (Emphasis added)

And again, when Kitty observes her at the ball: She saw that Anna was intoxicated with the admiration she had aroused . . . She saw the quivering, flashing light in her eyes, the smile of happiness and excitement that involuntarily curved her lips, and the graceful sureness and ease of her movements . . . Every time [Vronsky] spoke to Anna, her eyes lit up joyously and the smile of happiness parted her red lips. She seemed to be making an effort to restrain these signs of joy but in spite of herself they appeared on her face. (95) (Emphasis added)

Critics have tended to see such passages as presenting Anna in a positive light, as they show spontaneity as a value even though they recognise that such a reading is not reconcilable with Tolstoy’s declared – and, as they see it, moralistic – intentions. Also, how can Anna be condemned if that spontaneity is beyond the control of her conscious will? If she were eager to give way to animal impulse then one might have reason to make an adverse moral judgement, but she struggles in vain against her passion: ‘She tried with all her strength of mind to say what ought to be said. But instead of that her eyes rested on him, full of love, and made no answer’ (156). Even if Tolstoy believed that marriage was a sacrament and adultery a sin, how can Anna be condemned because the sexual side of herself overpowers her moral will? Is not Tolstoy then presenting a similar situation to those depicted in such novels as Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure where human beings can’t resolve a conflict between two irreconcilable forces, both of which are fundamental to what it is to be human but also in conflict? Though the novel can be read in that way, such an interpretation can’t be reconciled with Tolstoy’s conscious intention. This is suggested by his

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treatment of another adulterer in the novel, Anna’s brother, Oblonsky. Like his sister he is subject to physical forces which overpower his conscious will, as one sees in his response to his wife’s discovery of his affair with their former French governess: He had been unable to assume an expression suitable to the situation in which he was placed by his wife’s knowledge of his guilt. Instead of taking offence or denying the whole thing, instead of justifying himself or begging forgiveness or even remaining indifferent – any of which would have been better than what he actually did – in spite of himself (‘by a reflex action of the brain’, now thought Oblonsky, who had a leaning towards physiology), in spite of himself he suddenly smiled his habitual, kind, and somewhat foolish smile. (14–15) (Emphasis added)

The parallel between Oblonsky’s involuntary smile and Anna’s when she meets Vronsky is clear, a parallel accentuated by the fact that they are brother and sister. Is moral judgement as inappropriate in his case as it is in Anna’s? Some critics have thought so: ‘the simple moral absolutes are so unreliable that Stiva Oblonsky . . . survives all such potential judgements more or less unscathed’;19 ‘that involuntary movement of the lips . . . somehow reflects credit on him’.20 Oblonsky’s involuntary smile can be interpreted as both motiveless and essentially innocent and thus preferable to conventional lying and hypocrisy. Yet Tolstoy suggests that impulse or spontaneity is only involuntary in a superficial sense. Why does Oblonsky respond with a smile ‘in spite of himself’ when his wife confronts him about his affair? There are several likely reasons: he has had numerous affairs before; he feels no real sense of guilt; the morality of the matter is of little or no interest to him; he had assumed that his wife knew about his affairs and accepted the situation; since she is faded and plain while he is still attractive, she should surely be indulgent. The smile is thus not a pure impulse, a mere ‘reflex action of the brain’, but the product of his past life, behaviour and thinking. His character has been gradually determined by habitual conduct and thinking in the past, with the result that an act of insensitivity towards his wife breaks free from the control of his conscious will. Oblonsky may not be directly responsible for an involuntary act as it was beyond his conscious control, but Tolstoy holds him responsible for the implicit philosophy of life and the decisions he has made in the past which have determined his character and his impulses. A life lived in accordance with religion and a morality based on it would produce a different character which would not be irreconcilable with moral conduct resistant to destabilising impulses. Anna’s relationship to Vronsky can be seen in similar terms. If Oblonsky’s smile testifies to the religious and moral emptiness of his life,

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is the same not true when Anna is unable to prevent herself from smiling at Vronsky? For Tolstoy the answer would be yes, though readers of the novel have refused to accept this even if that may have been his conscious intention, and have argued, following Lawrence, that one should trust the tale and not the teller, and concluded that the dramatic force of the novel presents Anna as a tragic figure. Yet where Tolstoy differs from Hardy is that he believes that even if human beings are in thrall to Schopenhauer’s blind will, this should command no respect; it should and can be resisted if one has a sufficiently powerful religious belief and a related morality. What makes Anna Karenina a challenging novel for the modern reader is that the ‘blind will’ that should be resisted is not represented as a violent or aggressive impulse, but as a passion that it is easy for the reader to identify or at least sympathise with given that Anna’s marriage to Karenin is one that offers her no fulfilment. Yet for Tolstoy the intensity and overpowering nature of this passion has its origin in the moral emptiness of Anna’s life, since she has no understanding of the sacramental nature of marriage, which Tolstoy believes should be regarded as sanctioned by an authority beyond human interests and desires. If a person has no belief in or commitment to a religious authority that transcends the realm of the human, then it is inevitable that the will in the Schopenhauerian sense will overwhelm civilised constraints on it. It is clear that Anna has married Karenin with little consciousness that marriage is anything more than a social arrangement. Thus when Vronsky arouses her sexual passion, there is little contrary force within her which can resist this impulse. She barely has any choice in the matter. She does feel a conflict between her love for her son and her passion for Vronsky, but this is not essentially a moral conflict, since her love for her son is also a matter of spontaneous feeling that has no connection with any religious or moral duty. Not having identified with any set of values that she regards as superior to spontaneous feeling, she is in a situation in which she is drawn in different directions by opposed feeling states with no means of negotiating that conflict. Tolstoy’s powerful dramatisation of Anna’s animation and spontaneity at first is attractive to the reader as it is in marked contrast to the temperament of her husband, who is, as F. R. Leavis puts it, ‘without any spontaneity of life in him and unable to be anything but offended and made uncomfortable by spontaneity of life in others’.21 But Tolstoy gradually reveals the negative side of that spontaneity: the conflict between desire for Vronsky and love of her son; the inconsistency of her feelings, seeking reconciliation with Karenin when she thinks she is dying and being filled with revulsion for him when she recovers; her

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increasing irrationality in her jealousy which leads to a desire to kill herself when she is swept along by the force of a destructive impulse which she cannot control. Like Tolstoy, Eliot is distrustful of impulse and spontaneity, being aware of how easily they can be taken over by egotistic drives, but she believed that negative impulse can be restrained by human feeling states that take into account the social and the civilised, so that the ethical is fundamentally related to feeling rather than to moral absolutes that have their basis in religious doctrine. For Tolstoy, however, such humanism would not have sufficient stability and power to be capable of providing the otherness necessary to subjugate the Schopenhauerian will. The obvious contrast to Anna in the novel is Levin, who is by nature as spontaneous as she is. But he is continually in quest of an objectivity beyond subjective desire which he can serve, and he seeks this in marriage, in his relationship with the land, in work. To be sure, Levin has great difficulty in governing his spontaneity, but his commitment to the transcendence of human desire enables him to control impulse and for the most part to channel it in accordance with a fundamentally religious vision, whereas Anna feels little of no connection with anything beyond her own impulses. Tolstoy then, unlike Hardy, refuses to accept a philosophy of the tragic; though he reveals an intrinsic conflict between the Schopenhauerian blind will and a resisting human dimension, the latter can become a force powerful enough to overcome the former if it is identified with religious faith and its absolute values. If the blind will can thus be subjugated by religion, tragic conflict can be avoided. Anna’s fate may be pitiful but from Tolstoy’s religious point of view it is not tragic: she is a victim of society’s turning away from religious faith towards secularism and humanism. The critics who dismiss or ignore Tolstoy’s intention and who see Anna as a tragic figure do not, however, see her tragedy as arising from an opposition between irreconcilable forces. Rather, Anna is regarded as motivated, even if unconsciously, by a desire for radical freedom, but this desire is frustrated and distorted by the repressive nature of her society and by the fact that Vronsky proves to be too much a product of that society to respond fully to her love. Society is ultimately the source of her death: it offers her almost no alternative other than remaining married to Karenin, and as Leavis asserts, ‘whatever the old Leo (as Lawrence calls him) would have pronounced, the book confronts us with the impossibility, the sheer impossibility, of Anna’s going on living with Karenin’.22 No respect is accorded on this view to the world that destroys Anna; she is thus not tragic in any classical sense but a victim of a repressive society, resembling characters in Ibsen’s social realist plays, such as Nora in A Doll’s House or Mrs Alving in Ghosts.

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However, it can be argued that though Tolstoy rejects the tragic at a philosophical level, he does, even if inadvertently, suggest that life can only be tragic for those who cannot make the kind of commitment to religion that he, and his surrogate, Levin, were able to make. Society may be repressive but for Tolstoy this is not the fundamental cause of the catastrophe. Like Hardy, he recognises that there will never be congruence between human desires and hopes and social institutions which are inevitably imperfect. A perfect society that could satisfy all desires and eliminate all conflict is impossible to achieve. Though Anna experiences social prejudice and exclusion as a result of rejecting her marriage in favour of passion, these play a minor role in her fate. At the root of her decision to kill herself is the impossibility of reconciling the consuming sexual passion she feels for Vronsky with her feelings as a mother for Seriozha, her child by Karenin. Her tragic predicament is thus rooted in an undecidability that is inevitable when religious values that have a transcendent source are rejected in favour of human hopes and desires. She is aware that this situation can be resolved only by making a difficult decision, but she can’t make that decision on her own account and Vronsky fails to help her make it: ‘If . . . he were to say to her firmly, passionately, without a moment’s hesitation: “Throw up everything and come with me!” she would give up her son and go away with him’ (338). With this conflict unresolved and thrown back on their own resources without social supports, inevitably the relationship comes under stress. Critics who have claimed that Vronsky is unworthy of Anna, such as Raymond Williams, oversimplify the novel by seeing Anna’s fate as determined by external factors. Just as one cannot expect society to be perfect, one cannot in this novel expect human beings to be ideal. Tolstoy’s interest is in exploring a relationship based on sexual passion that casts aside marriage as an institution embodying religious values. The love of Anna and Vronsky is shown as powerful and deep but both characters have weaknesses and make mistakes. But to interpret Vronsky’s flaws as a ‘fatal lack’ that dooms Anna undermines her tragic fate by giving it an external cause. In the context of the novel, Vronsky is well above average in passion, responsibility and sympathy. To see him as inadequate implies that Anna’s tragic situation had its source in an unfortunate choice rather than in something more intrinsic. In representing a relationship that sets human needs and desires above religious principles and the moral precepts that derive from them, Tolstoy suggests that Western humanism and secularism will produce irreconcilable conflict and contradictions that will have a tragic effect on human lives. In a relationship in which there is no intermediary such as marriage as an institution validated by God, conflict, tension and instability are

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seen as inevitable and unavoidable. Anna’s instinctive radical humanism in her relationship with Vronsky is shown by her indifference to marriage: she refuses to take advantage of the opportunity to divorce Karenin while he is willing that would have enabled her to marry Vronsky. She also breaks the link between sexuality and reproduction by practising contraception in order not to have more children, implicitly rejecting religious views that this is to place human interests above the authority of God. She even equates pregnancy with illness: ‘Do not forget, I have a choice of two alternatives: either to be with child, that is, an invalid, or to be the friend and companion of my husband – practically my husband’ (669). As a result of this her sexuality becomes increasingly dominant in her relationship with Vronsky. It could be argued that if Vronsky had felt the same need for radical liberation as Anna her tragic fate could have been avoided, his lack of radicalism being shown in his desire for regularisation of their relationship in marriage and his hope that they will have more children. However, at the beginning of their relationship he had been as indifferent to anything other than their relationship as she; it is only in the difficult later phase that he looks to external supports. Having chosen to live together without the religious and social validation marriage would provide, they are thrown back on their personal resources to sustain their affair. This is particularly difficult for Vronsky: ‘Sixteen hours of the day must be filled somehow, living abroad as they were, in complete freedom, cut off from the round of social life that had absorbed so much time in Petersburg’ (491). A relative decline in the intensity of his love creates a relative increase in the intensity of hers, so that an imbalance is created, without there being anything beyond their relationship to prevent this imbalance becoming a serious threat through jealousy and resentment. When Oblonsky’s wronged wife visits them, Tolstoy presents the scene from Dolly’s point of view and goes so far as to suggest that a marriage such as that between Dolly and Oblonsky, in which love has virtually evaporated and only marriage as an institution holds them together, is ultimately preferable to an affair based on love and passion. Whereas some force beyond the relationship gives Dolly a sense of security and identity despite Oblonsky’s repeated infidelities, no such mediating power exists for Anna. As the less secure, Anna is constantly afraid that Vronsky will cease to love her and feels she must continually arouse his sexual desire to keep his love, shocking Dolly. The result is that the relationship goes into a downward spiral: ‘Neither would give expression to their grievance, but each thought the other in the wrong and seized every opportunity to prove it’ (772).

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Tolstoy is, of course, writing in a cultural context in which belief in absolute religious values is being eroded in favour of secularism and humanism, and the realist novel as a form was one of the main forces promoting such a cultural change. Anna Karenina, however, uses the realist novel against itself, as it were, to suggest that the consequences of this would be tragic: without there being any secure counter-force to the Schopenhauerian will, inevitably there will be conflict and power struggle with little possibility of secure resolution. Even with a relationship based on love and passion at the highest level as with Anna and Vronsky this proves to be the case. Faced with a conflict between a human passion that she feels is essential to her human identity, and a reality that appears to be irreconcilable with it, Anna would rather not live than settle for anything less: ‘If he does not love me, but treats me kindly and gently out of a sense of duty, and what I want is not there – that would be a thousand times worse than having him hate me. It would be hell! And that is just how it is’ (796). Yet Vronsky does still love her, but the tensions in their relationship have become irresolvable and he becomes an almost equally tragic figure. For Tolstoy tragic consequences will inevitably follow from living a humanly centred life in a cultural context defined by Schopenhauerian philosophy and materialist interpretations of the world such as Darwinian evolutionary theory.

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness Conrad, like the writers discussed above, is a writer of fiction whose work has a strong relation to the concept of the tragic, arising out of Schopenhauerian philosophy and a Darwinian view of nature, but taking these ideas much further in the direction of an extreme pessimism. This is clearly apparent in his letters to R. B. Cunninghame Graham: There is a – let us say – a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold! – it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled . . . And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself; made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident – and it has happened. 23

He elaborates in a later letter: And the machine will run on all the same . . . The attitude of cold unconcern is the only reasonable one. Of course reason is hateful – but why? Because it demonstrates (to those who have the courage) that we, living, are out of life – utterly out of it. The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods

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of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of a humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence.24

Graham is tragic for being unable to accept this: ‘You seem to me tragic with your courage, with your beliefs and your hopes.’ 25 Conrad sums up his position: What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. To be part of the animal kingdom under the conditions of this earth is very well – but as soon as you know of your slavery the pain, the anger, the strife – the tragedy begins. We can’t return to nature, since we can’t change our place in it. Our refuge is in stupidity, in drunken[n]ness of all kinds, in lies, in beliefs, in murder, thieving, reforming – in negation, in contempt – each man according to the promptings of his particular devil. There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that whether seen in a convex or a concave mirror is always but a vain and floating appearance.26

A tragic perspective emerging out of Schopenhauer and Darwinism could hardly be clearer, but Conrad’s tragic pessimism is similar to Hardy’s in that it does not prevent his work being critical of social practices and institutions. Heart of Darkness (1902), for example, is a ferocious exposure of colonialism and imperialism, at least as practised by non-British colonialists. Marlow, the narrator, believes that colonialism can be redeemed only by an idea: ‘An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea’27 and his being pleased to see ‘a vast amount of red’ on the map suggests that he thinks British imperialism is motivated by an idea and not merely exploitative. Modern critics have, however, tended to focus on the text as an attack on imperialism and colonialism per se. Despite its critique of imperialism, the novella has been accused of promoting racism, notably in a much reprinted essay by Chinua Achebe in which Conrad is accused of being ‘a thoroughgoing racist’.28 For many recent critics influenced by post-colonialist theory this makes the text problematic even though it has been hailed as one of the key works of Modernism: ‘What does it mean to have as one of the best-known and most influential texts about Africa a work from which African history, culture, language, art, customs, ideas and religions are wholly absent?’29 Neither Modernist nor post-colonial criticism has tended to consider Heart of Darkness in the context of the tragic. To do so will not resolve critical debate between these opposed critical perspectives in regard to the work, but it may present some of the issues in a different context.

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Modernist criticism has often, at least implicitly, tried to deflect accusations of racism and Eurocentrism from Conrad by arguing that Marlow should be seen as a not completely reliable narrator whose views should not necessarily be identified with Conrad’s. It is highly unlikely, however, that though Conrad distances himself from Marlow, that this means he disagrees with his representation of the Africans as ‘savage’: ‘The glimpse of the steamboat had for some reason filled those savages with unrestrained grief’ (107). Conrad would certainly not have been alone in associating Africans with savagery. For example, Conrad’s contemporary, Gustav Mahler, expressed the following opinion in an interview about American popular music: [I]t seems to me that the popular music of America is not American at all, but rather that kind of music which the African Negro transplanted to American soil has chosen to adopt. It must be remembered that the music of the African savage, be he Zulu, Hottentot, Kafir or Abyssinian, rises but a trifle above the rhythmic basis. When these people, the ancestors of the present American Negroes, made their compulsory voyages from the jungles of the Dark Continent to the New World it should be remembered that they were in most cases savages pure and simple.

However, Mahler – like Conrad, as I shall argue – sees the savage condition of Africans as a historical phenomenon, not as something that differentiates Africans in a fundamental way from Europeans: It is not reasonable to expect that a race could arise from a savage condition to a high ethnological state in a century or two. It took Northern Europe nearly one thousand years to fight its way from barbarism to civilization. That the Negroes in America have accomplished so much is truly amazing.30

Darwin’s view of the Fuegians as expressed in The Descent of Man may have been a significant influence on Conrad: ‘But there can hardly be any doubt that we are descended from barbarians. The astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of Fuegians on a wild and broken shore will never be forgotten by me, for the reflection at once rushed into my mind – such were our ancestors.’ Darwin goes on to say he would as soon be descended from a monkey or a baboon ‘as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions’.31 Marlow’s views are similar but darker, in that the savagery and barbarism associated in the text with Africa exist for him not far below the surface in European civilisation. This is not sufficiently taken into account in the following position: Conrad’s critical stance toward European ‘civilisation’ and the behaviour of its representatives is perhaps the strongest argument in his favour, but this

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defence is powerfully countered by Terry Eagleton’s point that the novella shows Western civilisation to be ‘as barbarous as African society – a viewpoint that disturbs imperialist assumptions to the precise degree that it reinforces them’. That is, in showing London as also a ‘heart of darkness’, Conrad presupposes the ‘darkness’ or ‘savagery’ of Africa.32

Though Heart of Darkness shows that Europeans can become degenerate, for Conrad London or Western civilisation is not a ‘heart of darkness’ and subject to barbarity or savagery; he shows civilisation as being at the other end of the spectrum from the savagery of life in the African jungle. However, the story emphasises that Africans are not inherently different from white peoples of Europe, since the Ancient Britons were in an equally savage state when colonised by the Romans. Nineteenthcentury racist discourse saw Africans and Europeans as descended from different species – the ‘polygenist’ as opposed to the ‘monogenist’ position which claims all human beings belong to a single species33 – but Conrad, like Darwin, appears to reject the polygenist view. Where Marlow and his listeners sit ‘also . . . has been one of the dark places of the earth . . . Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages, – precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink’ (48–9). A Roman would feel that ‘savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him, – all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men’, and would experience the ‘fascination of the abomination’. Only ‘efficiency’ offers protection. The Romans, like those Europeans exploiting the Belgian Congo, were ‘no colonists’ but ‘conquerors’ who ‘grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got’ (50). Thus it is the British Isles at the time of the Roman conquest and Africa at the end of the nineteenth century that are equated by Marlow. Marlow’s reason for drawing this parallel is to impress on his listeners – the first narrator and three professional Englishmen: the director of companies, the lawyer and the accountant – the fragility of the civilisation they complacently take for granted. He refers several times to their unthinking acceptance of their civilised world: Here you all are, each moored with two good addresses, like a hulk with two anchors, a butcher round one corner, a policeman round another, excellent appetites, and temperature normal – you hear – normal from year’s end to year’s end . . . You can’t understand. How could you? – with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you. (114–16)

Unlike Marlow they are unconcerned with the fact that human beings have evolved from lower animals through a struggle for existence and that this inheritance can never be completely transcended: ‘The mind of

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man is capable of anything – because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future’ (96), and that past includes humanity’s evolutionary heritage. The Africans are different from Europeans only because they are closer to humanity’s essential animality since they are untouched by civilisation, at least as Marlow, and no doubt Conrad, understood it: ‘They still belonged to the beginnings of time – with no inherited experience to teach them as it were’ (103). The most shocking thing for Europeans is to recognise a kinship with them and feel an attraction to their activities: ‘They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar’ (96). Marlow’s narrative is a warning about the fragility of Western civilisation, and this of course is a major reason why Heart of Darkness has become one of the most discussed of literary texts, since the history of the twentieth century bore out the fears expressed in the text that savagery and barbarism could overpower civilised values in Europe, generally perceived at the time Conrad was writing, of course, as the most advanced form of civilisation. The behaviour of the Europeans in the Belgian Congo – especially Kurtz – is an anticipation of what ‘civilised’ white people are capable of when not subject to civilised constraints. Marlow himself resists any temptation to succumb to the amoral greed of Europeans in the Congo by remaining loyal to traditional values such as professionalism and self-discipline. He thus sees the looting of ivory as an ‘imbecile rapacity’ (76) which has ‘no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe’ (87). Why then does Marlow admire Kurtz who becomes the most rapacious of these European exploiters? For Marlow Kurtz is a tragic figure. He went to Africa not for material gain but to write a report for the ‘International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs’. Motivated by the belief that Europe represents civilisation at its height, his aim is to replace savagery with civilised values: He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings – we approach them with the might as of a deity’, and so on, and so on. ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded’, etc. etc. (118)

Marlow is overawed by such idealism: ‘It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence – of words – of burning noble words.’ Yet Kurtz, one of the higher representatives of European civilisation – ‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’

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(117) – whose combination of idealism and eloquence is able to change the lives of those he encounters, inserts into his report the ominous sentence, ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ Not only does he succumb to greed, but savagery and barbarism completely overwhelm his earlier idealism. His power of personality and eloquence become harnessed to dominating his savage African world: ‘He had the power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witchdance in his honour’ (119). Whereas Marlow avoided any real encounter with the destabilising power of Africa, having only ‘peeped over the edge himself’, Kurtz in contrast ‘had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot’ (151). In this confrontation between Europe and Africa, Kurtz degenerates from the highest ideals of civilisation to an amorality and barbarity that have the power to sweep aside his civilised consciousness. In the world of Africa Kurtz is able to indulge (and take guilt-free pleasure) in killing – ‘there was nothing on earth to stop him killing whom he jolly well pleased’ (128) – and in unrestrained lust and sensuality: ‘the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness – that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions’ (144). For Conrad and his narrator Marlow there is an irresolvable conflict between civilisation with its moral and social order and the amoral natural world governed by the Schopenhauerian will and the struggle for existence postulated by Darwinian evolutionary theory, and this conflict is played out within Kurtz. What makes Kurtz a tragic figure for Marlow is that despite an almost overwhelming attraction to the wilderness, both physical and mental, he eventually recognises it for what it is and chooses to resist it even if that involves the sacrifice of his life. A key scene is Marlow’s discovery that Kurtz has disappeared from his cabin and chosen to return to his African tribe. That someone like Kurtz can make such a choice is disorienting for Marlow: ‘What made this emotion so overpowering was – how shall I define it? – the moral shock I received, as if something altogether monstrous, intolerable to thought and odious to the soul, had been thrust upon me unexpectedly’ (141). He catches up with Kurtz and tells him: ‘You will be lost . . . utterly lost’ (143), and induces Kurtz to struggle against that which urges ‘his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations’ (144) in which opposed forces ‘fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions’ (147). This struggle culminates in his famous final words, ‘The horror! The horror!’ (149). Marlow interprets these words as the civilised man’s judgement against the wilderness: ‘He had summed up – he had judged.

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“The horror!” . . . It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by numerous defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory!’ (151). Yet it is a fragile victory, for the power of the wilderness remains. Marlow later has a vision in which the wilderness triumphs and he remembers the extent of Kurtz’s degradation: ‘I remembered his abject pleading, his abject threats, the colossal scale of his vile desires, the meanness, the torment, the tempestuous anguish of his soul’ (156). On the point of meeting Kurtz’s Intended, his final words seem to Marlow a less clear moral victory over the wilderness than they had before: ‘while I waited he seemed to stare at me out of the glassy panel – stare with that wide and immense stare embracing, condemning, loathing all the universe. I seemed to hear the whispered cry, “The horror! The horror!” ’ (156). Were Kurtz’s final words an assertion of a moral triumph over the wilderness or an expression of nihilistic disgust? If the former, then Kurtz’s experience may be seen as cathartic; if the latter, then Kurtz’s tragedy is one that offers little consolation. Despite this ambiguity, Kurtz has done a service for humanity. His experience in Africa provides testimony that even a man who has had all the advantages and opportunities that European civilisation appears to offer, when exposed to a world devoid of civilised constraints, can succumb to the animalistic and barbaric heritage of humanity. This is a warning to those who identify humanity with social order and civilised behaviour – such as Marlow’s auditors on the boat – that when social and moral structures are threatened from without, as in the African jungle, then the ‘monstrosity’ intrinsic to humanity’s evolutionary origins can re-emerge with overwhelming force. Marlow, however, despite using words like ‘monstrous’, ‘vile’, ‘diabolic’ – as well, of course, as the phrase ‘heart of darkness’ – to characterise the jungle as a moral wilderness, nevertheless respects it. Even for him it has a powerful attraction. Refusing to recognise its power or trying to repress it will be counter-productive since this is likely, as in the case of Kurtz, to make it break out all the more powerfully when civilised constraints cease to function. It cannot be reconciled with those values which Marlow identifies with civilisation, and the significance of Kurtz’s life for him is that the kind of constraints that had power in the past have become weakened. An implicit contrast with Kurtz are Christian missionaries like David Livingstone who explored the African continent and endeavoured to convert Africans to Christianity. Such missionaries were so assured in their religious belief that the world of Africa was not a mental threat. However, in place of Christian missionaries seeking to convert Africans there are now imperialists whose only interest is in

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material exploitation. By implication, also, Kurtz comes from a Europe in which religion and its associated moral values have been undermined by increasingly powerful alternatives based on rationalism and scepticism. Marlow’s search for Kurtz becomes an ironic version of Stanley’s search for Livingstone, and Conrad’s revision of it is an expression of his tragic perspective on the human situation after Schopenhauer and Darwin. Conrad can be compared to Tolstoy since both resist the tragic. Whereas for Tolstoy it can be overcome through adherence to religion in an extreme form, for Conrad it cannot be overcome but only held at bay by a combination of self-discipline, professionalism and constraint, summed up in the word ‘efficiency’: ‘What saves us is efficiency – the devotion to efficiency’ (50). This is a passive rather than an active solution and Marlow, despite his awareness of the existential disaster of Kurtz’s active encounter with the wilderness, also partly envies and certainly admires him. Though Kurtz’s life may have turned out disastrously, there is something heroic about it. Is the price to be paid for avoiding or evading tragic conflict to live less intensely? For Nietzsche, whose influence I shall go on to discuss, this would have been too high a price to pay. He also denied that the tragic need be equated with human defeat or pessimism. For him a radical revision of the concept was necessary in order to overcome what he saw as the defeatist form of it that had emerged from Schopenhauerian philosophy and Darwinian scientific theory.

Notes 1. Virtually every study of Hardy at least mentions Hardy’s connections with the tragic, but it is discussed in detail in Dale Kramer (1975), Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy, London: Macmillan; and Jeanette King (1978), Tragedy in the Victorian Novel: Theory and Practice in the Novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2. Cited by Friedrich Nietzsche (1993) from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, in Michael Tanner (ed.), The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music, trans. Shaun Whiteside, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 9–10. 3. Arthur Schopenhauer (1962), The Essential Schopenhauer, London: Unwin, pp. 85–6. 4. Quoted in Richard Dawkins (2004), A Devil’s Chaplain: Selected Writings, London: Phoenix, p. 10. 5. Ernst Haeckel (1879), The Evolution of Man, London, I, pp. 111–12. 6. Charles Lodge (1874), What is Darwinism?, London, pp. 172–3.

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7. Charles Darwin (1901), The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, London: John Murray, p. 937. 8. George Bernard Shaw (1949), Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch, London: Constable, pp. xlvii, xvi, xxii. 9. See Arnold Kettle (1972), ‘Hardy the Novelist: A Reconsideration’, in Arnold Kettle (ed.), The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Critical Essays and Documents, London: Heinemann, pp. 262–73. 10. Thomas Hardy (1968), Jude the Obscure, London: Macmillan, p. 338. Page numbers with henceforth be incorporated in the text. 11. Thomas Hardy (1968), Tess of the d’Urbervilles, London: Macmillan, p. 22. Page numbers will henceforth be incorporated in the text. 12. Michael Millgate (ed.) (1990), Thomas Hardy: Selected Letters, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 103–4. 13. George Steiner (1967), Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 256. 14. Raymond Williams (1960), ‘Lawrence and Tolstoy’, Critical Quarterly 2: 37. 15. Henri Troyat (1968), Tolstoy, trans. Nancy Amphoux, London: Allen and Unwin, p. 369. 16. Terry Eagleton (2003), Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 190. 17. Troyat, p. 359. 18. Leo Tolstoy (1978), Anna Karenin, trans. Rosemary Edmonds, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 75. Page numbers will henceforth be incorporated in the text. 19. T. G. S. Cain (1977), Tolstoy, London: Elek, p. 108. 20. Mary McCarthy (1981), ‘Anna Karenina’, The Observer (colour supplement), 22 March, p. 68. 21. F. R. Leavis (1967), ‘Anna Karenina’ and Other Essays, London: Chatto and Windus, p. 17. 22. Ibid., p.19. 23. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (eds) (1983), The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, 1861–1897, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 425. 24. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (eds) (1986), The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, 1898–1902, vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 16–17. 25. Ibid., p. 25. 26. Ibid., p. 30. 27. Joseph Conrad (1963), Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories, London: Dent, p. 51. Page numbers will henceforth be incorporated in the text. 28. Chinua Achebe (1998), ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, in Andrew Michael Roberts (ed.), Joseph Conrad, Harlow: Longman, p. 117. 29. Andrew Michael Roberts (ed.) (1998), Joseph Conrad, Harlow: Longman, p. 10. 30. See Norman Lebrecht (1987), Mahler Remembered, London: Faber and Faber, p. 292.

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31. Darwin, p. 946. 32. Roberts, p. 9. 33. For an informative discussion of debates on race in the nineteenth century see Brenda McKay (2003), George Eliot and Victorian Attitudes to Racial Diversity, Colonialism, Darwinism, Class, Gender, and Jewish Culture and Prophecy, Lampeter: Mellen Press, esp. Part 1 on ‘Racial Theory’.

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Chapter 5

Nietzsche and the Redefining of the Tragic

In Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, first published in 1872, he contrasts Apollo and Dionysus as deities: Apollo, as an ethical deity, demands moderation from his followers and, in order to maintain it, self-knowledge. And thus the admonitions ‘Know thyself’ and ‘Nothing to excess!’ coexist with the aesthetic necessity of beauty, while hubris and excess are considered the truly hostile spirits of the nonApolline realm, and hence qualities of the pre-Apolline age, the age of the Titans, and the world beyond the Apolline, the world of the barbarians . . . The Apolline Greeks also saw the effect of the Dionysiac as ‘Titanic’ and ‘barbaric’, unable to conceal from themselves the fact that they were also inwardly akin to those fallen Titans and heroes . . . And behold! Apollo could not live without Dionysus! . . . The individual, with all his restraints and moderations, was submerged in the self-oblivion of the Dionysiac state and forgot the Apolline dictates. Excess was revealed as truth, contradiction; the bliss born of pain spoke from the heart of nature. And consequently, whenever the Dionysiac invasion was successful, the Apollonian was negated and destroyed.1

It does not require great ingenuity to see a link with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, with Marlow tending to the Apollonian and Kurtz to the Dionysiac, though he returns to the Apollonian at the end. Nietzsche is the major counter-force to modern versions of the tragic, such as those discussed in the previous chapter, that are grounded in a pessimism drawn from Schopenhauer and Darwinism. Conrad is in deep disagreement with Nietzsche, as Nietzsche sees the suppression of what Dionysus represents as at the root of the decadence of Western civilisation, the seeds of which were sown in Greece itself with the emergence of Socratic reason, which he sees as the enemy of the Dionysiac. In contrast to Conrad in Heart of Darkness, Nietzsche advocates a return to the primitive as liberating suppressed ‘Dionysiac urges’: ‘Under the influence of the narcotic potion hymned by all primitive men and peoples, or in the powerful approach of spring, joyfully

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penetrating the whole of nature, those Dionysiac urges are awakened, and as they grow more intense, subjectivity becomes a complete forgetting of the self.’ Those who turn away the ‘Dionysiac power’ of ‘singing and dancing throngs . . . wandering from place to place’ may be ‘bolstered by a sense of their own sanity’ but they are ‘poor creatures [who] have no idea how blighted and ghostly this “sanity” of theirs sounds when the glowing life of Dionysiac revellers thunders past them’.2 While for the Schopenhauerian Conrad, the tragic lies in giving way to such ‘Dionysian’ impulses, the product of the unconstrained will, Nietzsche believes that the denial of the ‘Dionysian’ has led to forms of the tragic – Euripides being his major example – that are opposed to life, or at least to a life that is worth living. The tragic for him needs to recover its connection with Dionysus. In the first section of The Birth of Tragedy that Nietzsche added to the second edition of 1886, he contrasts Schopenhauer’s belief that the tragic spirit consists in the knowledge that ‘the world and life can give no true satisfaction’ and therefore must lead to resignation, with his own conception of it: ‘Ah, how differently Dionysus spoke to me!’3 Schopenhauer was an even more fundamental influence on Nietzsche than he was on Hardy, Tolstoy and Conrad, but resisting Schopenhauer without rejecting the basic assumptions underlying his philosophy became central to Nietzsche’s thinking. He was also aware of Darwinism – he refers to man’s ‘forcible sundering from his animal past’4 – which he interpreted not in optimistic terms as progressive development, but as confirming his view that life and the world have no intrinsic purpose or meaning. His new conception of the tragic which is opposed to Schopenhauer’s thus does not claim that either Schopenhauer or Darwin is wrong because their ideas promote pessimism, but that these ideas, if interpreted in Dionysian terms, can change the nature of the tragic: Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual predilection for what is hard, terrible, evil, problematic in existence, arising from well-being, overflowing health, the abundance of existence? Is it perhaps possible to suffer from overabundance? A tempting and challenging, sharp-eyed courage that craves the terrible as one craves the enemy, the worthy enemy, against whom it can test its strength? Wishing to learn from the meaning of ‘fear’. What is the meaning, for those Greeks of the best, strongest, most courageous age, of the tragic myth? And of the tremendous phenomenon of the Dionysiac? And of the tragedy that was born from it? And on the other hand, that which brought about the death of tragedy: the Socratism of morality, the dialectics, modesty and cheerfulness of theoretical man – could not that very Socratism be a symptom of decline, fatigue, infection and the anarchical dissolution of the instincts?5

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Nietzsche’s influence was ubiquitous in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and forms of the tragic reflecting his perspective emerged. In the first chapter I discussed Ibsen’s social realist drama of the 1870s as being anti-tragic. Ibsen is, however, proto-Modernist in that his work changes significantly over the course of his career and consists of radically distinct phases. The plays he wrote in the 1890s are a significant departure from his social realist drama and, I shall suggest, engage with Nietzsche’s reformulation of the tragic. Ibsen seems to have been familiar with Nietzsche,6 but given the extent of Nietzsche’s influence across Europe it would have been almost impossible for him not to have encountered Nietzsche’s ideas directly or indirectly, and Ibsen in any case had many German connections, having lived mainly in Germany between 1868 and 1891. The play in which the influence of Nietzsche is perhaps strongest is The Master Builder.

Ibsen’s The Master Builder From a dramatist’s point of view, Nietzsche is an attractive thinker as his philosophy is based on oppositions, most obviously Dionysian versus Apollonian and master morality versus slave morality, which have the potential to generate productive dramatic confrontations. In The Master Builder (1892), Nietzschean oppositions are central to the play’s dramatic structure. This is clear from the very beginning of the play. It opens in Halvard Solness’ house in the drawing office where his three employees work. Knut Brovik is described as ‘a shrunken old man with white hair and beard. He is dressed in a somewhat worn but wellcared for black coat.’ His son Ragner is ‘in his thirties, well-dressed, fairhaired, with a slight stoop’. The secretary, Kaja Fosli, is ‘a slenderly built girl a little over twenty, neatly dressed, but with a delicate look. She has a green shade over her eyes.’7 Such descriptions imply that these are not strong characters. The contrast when Solness enters is striking: ‘He is a man getting on in years, strong and vigorous, with close-cut curling hair, dark moustache, and dark, thick eyebrows. He wears a grey-green buttoned jacket with a high collar and broad revers’ (124). Solness appears to be a man of natural strength while his employees all show signs of being weak. Although Solness is an architect, he is not entitled to call himself that since he has not officially qualified, thus his description of himself as a ‘master builder’. Of course this is a much more resonant title and equates Solness with the artist. It is a critical commonplace that Solness

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has close affinities with Ibsen himself – William Archer, his first significant translator into English, claimed that the three stages of Ibsen’s drama, his verse plays, his social realist plays, and his final symbolist period, correspond to the different phases of Solness’ career as an architect or artist figure – but there may also be a Nietzschean connection, since Nietzsche associated art with both liberation and illusion, and this may have a bearing on the climax of the play. Many of Ibsen’s plays create an interplay between past and present that is destabilising in its effect, and this is especially the case in The Master Builder. It is a major factor in preventing the audience having a secure relationship with the action and interpreting it with any confidence. Interpretation therefore has to proceed carefully, initially in a linear fashion, in order to bring out the audience’s or reader’s insecure relationship with the action and characters. This opening scene apparently contrasts a man inherently strong with people who are in comparison weak and on an ordinary human level. Yet as the first scene develops it would appear that this is a mistaken impression. Brovik and Solness discuss a young couple who want a villa built. At first Solness has almost no interest in this project, yet when Brovik suggests that Ragnar could build the villa, Solness then contradicts his earlier attitude and refuses to step aside for Ragnar, asserting: ‘I’ll never retire! Never give way for anyone! Never of my own accord. Never in this world will I do that!’ (128). Though Solness appears strong and vigorous, even if he is no longer young, he is afraid of a man who quite clearly possesses only ordinary talents. Why therefore has this strong man been reduced to such level of weakness that he fears the likes of Ragnar? The first significant encounter between characters in which discussion of the past affects the audience’s or reader’s perception of the present is that between Solness and Dr Herdal, who has been visiting Solness’ wife, Aline. By this point we have a poor impression of Solness. Not only is he exploiting Ragnar and denying him advancement, but he uses Brovik to do the drudgery associated with architecture – ‘all that wretched stuff’ (136) – that he has no interest in. And worst of all, as he discloses to the doctor, after becoming his secretary Kaja has fallen in love with him and he has made use of this – in spite of there being no emotional involvement on his part – in order to prevent Ragnar leaving and setting up on his own. Solness, it would seem, is either an unscrupulous exploiter of these people or he must be suffering from some kind of psychological illness. The conversation with the doctor goes some way to providing insight into Solness’ paradoxical behaviour. The power of Solness’ personality emerges despite his insecurities. In telling the doctor of his relationship

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with Kaja, he claims he never exerted any pressure on her to become his secretary and fall in love with him; the idea occurred to him only as a silent wish and then she behaved exactly as he wanted. External reality seems to mould itself to his wishes. Obviously this situation has created difficulties between Solness and Aline, but he discloses to the doctor that he has made no attempt to let his wife know that this is not a serious relationship on his part, since an additional benefit of it for him is that it leads to his being wrongly blamed by Aline: ‘I feel there’s, as it were – a kind of salutary self-torture in letting Aline do me an injustice . . . Why, you see – because it’s as it were a small payment on a boundless, immeasurable debt’ (138). Solness is suffering from such an extreme sense of guilt that he finds relief in letting the person he feels he has wronged have grounds for believing him guilty of something quite unrelated to the wrong he believes he has done her. The futility of this is obvious since this form of expiation clearly does nothing to right that wrong. It creates only a factitious kind of equivalence since by letting her do him an injustice this balances out the injustice he did her at some point in the past. But since he knows he has purposely led her on to believe he is having an affair with Kaja and is quite content for her to believe he is guilty, he can’t experience any real sense of injustice at her wrongful assumptions. This is a prime example of a recurrent feature of Solness’ character: his need to impose a sense of equivalence on life, one which is clearly problematic and an escape from the underlying reasons for his sense of guilt. More light is thrown on Solness’ guilt when the doctor mentions his luck in getting started as an architect, since the burning down of his wife’s family home gave him the opportunity to rebuild on the site and make his name. Luck, of course, entails imbalance, which suggests one reason for Solness’ preoccupation with lack of equivalence and his desire to restore it. He claims Aline has never got over the burning of her home and the doctor alludes to a worse consequence of the fire, but this will not be revealed until later. One of Solness’ fears is that if he was lucky once then that luck will turn. As he used his luck to displace the generation above him, namely Brovik, the younger generation will inevitably want to supersede him: ‘The luck will turn. I can feel it getting near. One or other of them will start saying: Stand back for me! And all the others will come storming after, threatening and shouting: Make room! Make room! Make room! Yes, you can be sure of it, Doctor. Some day the younger generation will come knocking on my door’ (140–1). At this point there is a knocking on the door – an indication that in his later drama Ibsen has moved beyond the realism of his middle-period plays – and Hilde Wangel enters, that dangerous younger generation in

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such an unexpected form that Solness does not recognise it. Both the younger generation and the past are a threat to his present life, but not in the way he thinks. It is not from other architects such as Ragnar that the threat will come. Likewise there is something wrong in his past, but the real guilt is quite different from his conception of it. The scenes between Solness and Hilde are the dramatic highlight of the play. There is confrontation between age and youth, a guilt-ridden man and a young liberated woman. Not only does her appearance – tanned, wearing a short skirt and an open sailor’s collar – indicate that she is fit and energetic, but the fact that she has brought no luggage or money suggests that she is a free spirit. According to her she and Solness met ten years ago at Lysanger where he had a built a church. The play’s departure from conventional realism is apparent again in its not making clear what actually happened between them ten years ago. She claims Solness sang at the top of the church tower, but he asserts that he has never sung a note in his life. Nor does he have any recollection of saying that he would return in ten years time ‘like a troll’ (148) to carry her off, promising to buy her a kingdom, and bending her over backwards and kissing her many times. The play never resolves whether or not any of this took place. The important point is that Solness accepts responsibility for it: it must have corresponded with desire if not with fact: ‘I must have thought all this. I must have willed it. Have wished for it. Have wanted it’ (149). Hilde is unprepared, however, for the change that has taken place in Solness since his climbing to the top of the church tower in Lysanger. Now he no longer builds churches with high towers, but ‘Homes, for human beings’ (152), though the house he is currently building for himself and Aline to move into will have a tower. The Freudian connotations of towers are obvious, but their association with the desire to aspire beyond ordinary human limits was probably at least as important for Ibsen; Hilde sees a tower as ‘something that points – straight up into the free air. With a weather-cock so high it makes one giddy’ (152–3). Solness’ lack of perception of the danger represented by Hilde is apparent when he tells her of his fear of the younger generation without realising that she is of that generation; indeed he claims she’s ‘the very person I’ve needed most’, and shows no awareness of the possible implications of her demand for ‘my kingdom’ (156). How the vitality and daring of the Solness of ten years ago has been virtually crushed has still to be explained, and gradual insight is provided in other encounters he has with Hilde and with Aline, though the audience’s expectations often prove unreliable and insight is deferred. The ‘boundless, immeasurable debt’ he feels towards Aline is shown in the scene between them to have little connection with her perception of

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their relationship. His image of her is a projection of his feelings of guilt. The new house he is building is supposedly for her in order to provide a home that will remind her of her former home that burned down, but she asserts that it will be ‘Just as empty. Just as desolate’ (161). When he tells her about ‘this appalling burden of debt’ (162) he feels towards her, she has no understanding of why he should feel like that other than that he must be ill. This must leave the audience even more puzzled about Solness’ state of mind, but in the next scene with Hilde the truth seems about to emerge. Solness tells Hilde that he and Aline had twin boys who are now dead. Ibsen leads the audience on to expect that Solness’ guilt and sense of debt in regard to Aline must be because the fire which gave him his opportunity as an architect was at the expense of their lives. But it turns out the twins were rescued and only died as a result of a breast infection that Aline contracted after the fire. Aline insisted on feeding the children despite the infection because she held it to be her religious duty to do so, but Solness attaches no blame to her at all. Some time after the deaths of the children, when he had made his reputation by building on the site of the fire and then turned to building churches with high towers, his conscience began to bother him. He came to believe his success had been achieved at the price of his wife’s happiness; this lack of equivalence in life – that the price of his success was the sacrifice of her children – is impossible for him to accept. He decides therefore to stop building churches and instead build ‘Homes for human beings’ (169). Clearly Solness’ sense of guilt has led to a misdirection of his life. He is content to accept the apparent contradiction between on the one hand providing happiness for the families for whom he builds these homes, and on the other lacking any happiness in his own home life with Aline, as a family life with children is now impossible for him. He sees this as part of his debt: ‘That was the price of the happiness that people are always talking about.’ Because he succeeded as a builder at the expense of others, ‘I’ve got to make good. Pay for it. Not in money. But with human happiness. And not with my own happiness only. But with others’ too’ (171). Aline had a gift for building, in the form of ‘building up the souls of little children’, he tells Hilde, ‘But her life-work had to be ruined, crushed, all knocked to pieces – so that mine could break its way through to – to something like a great victory’ (172). Hilde’s doubt as to whether Solness was to blame leads to another confession on Solness’ part, one that seems to implicate him directly in the cause of the fire: that long before the fire happened he had noticed a crack in the chimney of his wife’s home. Hilde, like the audience, assumes that this crack must have precipitated the fire, but Solness

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informs her that the fire had started in a clothes cupboard nowhere near the crack. Though this might appear to make the cause of Solness’ sense of guilt even more puzzling, in fact it reveals that his guilt has nothing to do with deeds but is rooted in desire: the crack made him aware of a desire for an opportunity to prove himself as a master builder or artist even if that opportunity might involve the destruction of his wife’s family home: ‘Don’t you believe, too, Hilde, that there are a few, special, chosen people who’ve been graced with the power and ability to want something, desire something, will something – so insistently and so – so inexorably – that they must get it in the end?’ (176). His rise therefore becomes inextricably linked in his mind with the disastrous effect of the fire on his wife. This recognition that his desire for self-realisation through a form of art initially had greater power than moral repulsion against achieving success on such a basis is the main source of the guilt that now consumes him. He cannot accept a seeming lack of equivalence in the nature of things by which some people achieve success and self-realisation and others suffer unhappiness and a sense of failure; Aline’s gift for ‘building up the souls of little children’ has been left ‘’Unused and useless, for ever’ (172). Guilt is his means of trying to restore equivalence through a form of psychological compensation. Once Hilde grasps the root of what she sees as an almost pathological sense of guilt, she acts as a kind of Nietzschean psychoanalyst to enable him to recover the mental strength that enabled him in the past to climb to the top of a church tower. According to Aline, he now becomes giddy if he even steps out onto the balcony of their house. Hilde tells him he must have ‘come into the world with a sickly conscience . . . What I would like for you is a conscience – well, thoroughly robust’ (177–8). Her disclosure that she followed some spur within herself to leave her father even though she was ‘terribly fond of him’ leads Solness to assert that both of them have a ‘troll’ inside them that ‘calls on the powers outside us. And then we must give in – whether we want to or not’ (178). If one had a ‘thoroughly strong conscience’, she replies, one would dare to do what one wants. For Solness the Vikings as represented in the Scandinavian sagas – ‘who sailed to foreign lands and plundered and burnt and killed men’ as well as carrying off women and keeping them captive – exemplify a robust conscience: ‘When they got home again they could eat and drink. And they were as happy as children, too’ (179). Hilde is excited by the thought of the Vikings treating women ‘like the worst of trolls’ and goes on to dismiss Solness’ fear of Ragnar gaining ascendancy over him, rejecting his belief that ‘retribution is inexorable’. She persuades him to endorse Ragnar’s drawings, thus allowing Ragnar and Kaja their freedom from his control, and looks

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forward to him again becoming the man who could climb to the top of a church tower. The echoes of Nietzsche during this scene are striking. The troll which calls on powers beyond the conscious mind is similar to Nietzsche’s Dionysian. The alienation of modern Europeans from their animal instincts is a recurrent Nietzschean theme, and Solness’ description of the Vikings seems a fairly direct reference to a notorious passage in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: [I]n their relations with one another [men who belong to noble races] show themselves so resourceful in consideration, self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride, and friendship – once they go outside, where the strange, the stranger is found, they are not much better than uncaged beasts of prey. There they savor a freedom from all social constraints . . . they go back to the innocent conscience of the beast of prey, as triumphant monsters who perhaps emerge from a disgusting procession of murder, arson, rape, and torture, exhilarated and undisturbed of soul, as if it were no more than a student’s prank, convinced they have provided the poets with a lot more material for song and praise. One cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and back to the wilderness: the Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings – they all shared this need.8

Solness’ pity for his wife, his feeling of being ‘boundlessly in debt’ to her, and his need to impose equivalence between the injury he feels he has done her and what he perceives as her failure in life by punishing himself through guilt, also relate to Nietzsche in that pity and guilt are scathingly attacked in On the Genealogy of Morals, where he refers to ‘the ever spreading morality of pity that had seized even on philosophers and made them ill, as the most sinister symptom of a European culture that had itself become sinister’.9 He claims that guilt and debt are related concepts: ‘Have these genealogists of morals had even the remotest suspicion that, for example, the major moral concept Schuld [guilt] has its origin in the very material concept Schulden [debts]?’ He goes on to refer to: the idea that every injury has its equivalent and can actually be paid back, even if only through the pain of the culprit. And whence did this primeval, deeply rooted, perhaps by now ineradicable idea draw its power – this idea of an equivalence between injury and pain? I have already divulged it: in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the idea of ‘legal subjects’ and in turn points back to the fundamental forms of buying, selling, barter, trade, and traffic.10

Thus from a Nietzschean point of view Solness’ guilt and his sense of being in debt to Aline are connected, and seeing himself as to blame he

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seeks to create equivalence by punishing himself for this debt: the master builder no longer creates in the spirit of artistic expression, but has reduced himself to the level of a merely ordinary architect, building family homes for ordinary people. The play, however, should not be seen as merely a propaganda piece in favour of Nietzschean ideas. Ibsen is a dramatist rather than an ideologue and his primary interest in Nietzsche is dramatic. In the first scene of Act 3 one of the major encounters of the play takes place: that between the Nietzschean Hilde who has come to restore Solness to the man he was ten years ago and the wife who has been responsible even if only indirectly for reducing him to the guilt-ridden, emasculated figure he has become since his triumph at Lysanger. A different picture of Aline from that presented by Solness emerges in this scene. In contrast to Solness’ belief that his success was at the price of the ruin of her life because of the death of their children, she tells Hilde that she has no sense of regret about their deaths. Possessing a fundamentalist Christian faith she believes one must accept everything that happens as the will of God and that one has a Christian duty to perform certain duties, such as breastfeeding one’s own children, irrespective of the consequences. She accepts the deaths of the children as an act of God for which she has no responsibility: ‘one must submit to a thing like that. And give thanks, too’ (190). What she regretted as a result of the fire was not the consequent death of her sons but something else entirely: the loss in the fire of such things as paintings and clothing that had been in her family for generations, and especially the loss of nine beautiful dolls that she had owned since she was a child and kept even after her marriage; these were more precious to her than the lives of her sons: ‘For you know, in a way, there was life in them too. I carried them under my heart. Like small, unborn children’ (192). From a Nietzschean point of view, Aline would clearly be categorised as ‘sick’: The sick represent the greatest danger for the healthy; it is not the strongest but the weakest who spell disaster for the strong. Is this known? . . . The sick are man’s greatest danger; not the evil, not ‘the beasts of prey’ . . . The will of the weak to represent some form of superiority, their instinct for devious paths to tyranny over the healthy – where can it not be discovered, this will to power of the weakest! The sick woman especially: no one can excel her in the wiles to dominate, oppress, and tyrannize . . . Undoubtedly if [the sick] succeeded in poisoning the consciences of the fortunate with their own misery, with all misery, so that one day the fortunate began to be ashamed of their good fortune and perhaps said to one another: ‘it is disgraceful to be fortunate: there is too much misery!’ But no greater or more calamitous misunderstanding is possible than for the happy, well-constituted, powerful in soul and body, to begin to doubt their right to happiness in this fashion.11

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In one sense Solness is clearly deluded in feeling agonies of guilt about Aline and holding himself responsible for her unhappiness; but paradoxically this makes Aline a more pitiable person than in Solness’ interpretation of her, even for Hilde. When she meets Solness again and he reiterates his view that Aline will never get over the death of the boys, instead of enlightening him that his guilt in regard to Aline is completely misplaced and that she should be seen as having a sick consciousness, Hilde tells him she is leaving: ‘I can’t do any harm to a person I know! Not take away something that belongs to her’ (194). A Nietzschean ‘robust conscience’ may be attractive in theory, but when Hilde experiences directly what its consequences will be in practice in a specific situation, something resembling the guilt that has overcome Solness gains ascendancy over her. She speaks the language of Aline when Solness asks her what is to become of him if she leaves: ‘There’s no problem for you. You have your duties to her. Live for those duties’ (194). Both she and Solness are not living in a Viking-like world in which pity and compassion are no part of the ethos of such a society. They are living in a world in which Christian values have been dominant for centuries, so that pity and compassion inevitably become a formidable force if one attempts to create an alternative set of values that are anti-Christian in their basis. Where Ibsen differs from Nietzsche is that he cannot dismiss the sick and the weak, and by extension, Christian values, as categorically as Nietzsche; Ibsen’s representation of Aline is not reconcilable with Nietzsche’s contempt for the sick and the weak in On the Genealogy of Morals which leads him to assert that the healthy should be segregated from them, ‘guarded even from the sight of the sick, that they may not confound themselves with the sick’.12 Solness, however, has become a convert to Hilde’s earlier Nietzscheanism and for him there is no going back. It is ‘[t]oo late’ for those ‘duties’ and he refers to the ‘powers’ that are now driving him, but significantly Hilde sees them as ‘devils’, which provokes one of Solness’ most Nietzschean speeches: Yes, devils! And the troll in me too. They’ve sucked all the life-blood out of her. [With a laugh of despair.] They did it to make me happy! Yes, indeed! [Heavily.] And now she’s dead – for my sake. And I’m living, chained to the dead. [In desperate misery.] I – I who can’t live without joy. (194)

The ‘cosy, happy homes’ are rejected. When Hilde gradually recovers her ‘robust conscience’, Solness again invokes the Vikings: ‘If one could only face life like the Vikings’ (195). The implied absurdity of thinking that human beings in the modern world could live like Vikings creates an ambiguity that dominates the rest of the play. Are Solness and Hilde

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in the vanguard of a Nietzschean alternative to a decadent Christian civilisation, with the dominant slave morality of the weak being overcome by the master morality of the strong; or is this attempt to recover a ‘robust conscience’ inevitably doomed to failure in the modern world? Hilde demands the castle she claims Solness promised her ten years ago. At first this seems like mere fantasy – ‘we’ll build the most beautiful – quite the most beautiful thing to be found in all the world’ – but turns out to be ‘castles in the air’. Even Hilde recognises this, telling Solness with scorn that ‘they’re so easy to hide in. And easy to build, too’ (197–8). Yet Solness again seizes the initiative: the castle they build will be a ‘genuine’ castle, ‘One with a foundation under it’ (198). There may be an allusion here to Nietzsche’s discussion of art and the artist in The Birth of Tragedy when he writes that: in so far as the subject is an artist, he is already liberated from his individual will and has become a medium through which the only truly existent subject celebrates his redemption through illusion . . . for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.13

Solness, however, cannot resist the temptation to be Viking-like in life and – as Nietzsche famously urged – to ‘live dangerously’, as he had done before when he climbed the tower at Lysanger. He chooses to place the wreath which is presented to him on completion of his new house on top of the tower. He has to face another potentially guilt-inducing situation when he learns that old Brovik is almost dead of a stroke before seeing the drawings of Ragnar that Solness finally endorsed, but that fails to deflect him. Ragnar is convinced that he will never risk the climb and Aline thinks this is just another manifestation of mental illness on his part. Ibsen continues even in this last scene to exploit the dramatic strategy of revealing the past so as to change the audience’s perspective on the present. Solness confesses to Hilde his fear of ‘retribution’. After climbing the tower of Lysanger, he had rebelled against God whom he blamed for the fire because he claims it was a sign that God wanted him to become a master builder with no other commitment than serving God alone. At the top of the tower he rejected the authority of God – ‘Hear me, now, Thou Almighty! I too will be a free master builder’ (205) – and resolved to build only for human beings. He now sees that as a futile endeavour and commits himself to the next stage, building castles in the air or creating works of art neither for God nor to serve the utilitarian needs of human beings. Ambiguity is present to the end. Is Solness heroic in climbing the tower or is this an absurd gesture on the part of a man who is too old for such feats? Is his fall after he has put the wreath on the vane caused by taking on a task that was too much for him, or is Hilde responsible

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through distracting him by her shouting, or did the wooden planks at the top just give way? Is Ragnar right to assert: ‘Terrible business. So he couldn’t manage it’ or is Hilde justified in her claim that he triumphed – ‘But he got right to the top. And I heard harps in the air.’ It is easy to see that the ending is in keeping with Nietzsche’s redefinition of the tragic, with Solness’ death exemplifying ‘overabundance’ of existence, ‘[a] tempting and challenging, sharp-eyed courage that craves the terrible as one craves the enemy, the worthy enemy, against whom it can test its strength?’ Though he dies in the attempt, is death not preferable to continuing to live with Aline and being ‘chained to the dead’? Yet such a Nietzschean interpretation is complicated by the autobiographical aspect of the play. According to Emilie Bardach, who almost certainly suggested the character of Hilde to Ibsen when he met her in Gossensass in 1889, Ibsen had ‘spoken to her of the possibility of a divorce and of a subsequent union with her’,14 but in the event he ended the relationship and returned to his wife. Ibsen claimed that though her aim was ‘to lure other women’s husbands away from them’ he had instead studied her closely: ‘She did not get hold of me, but I got hold of her – for my play.’15 The biographical evidence would suggest that it is reasonable to speculate that though tempted, Ibsen realised the absurdity of leaving his wife for an 18 year-old girl some forty-three years younger than himself. This would have been the equivalent of trying to live like a Viking in the modern era: utterly unrealistic. What Ibsen gained from the experience was the idea for a play based on Nietzschean ideas that the experience with Emilie had suggested to his mind and that would constitute a quite radical break with the realism of his middle career. When Solness at the end rejects building houses for human beings in favour of castles in the air, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this represents Ibsen’s rejection of social realism for a symbolist drama heavily influenced by Nietzsche’s philosophy. Whereas Solness chose ultimately to ‘live dangerously’ in life and never got the chance as an artist to create a genuine castle in the air with a foundation, Ibsen resisted that and rather directed such a Nietzschean perspective into his art. Eloping with Emilie Bardach in a literal sense would have been an act of madness, but utilising his Nietzschean interpretation of her for the purposes of art was something different.

Strindberg’s The Father and Miss Julie Strindberg’s Nietzschean connections are, on the surface at least, stronger than Ibsen’s, since he had actually corresponded with the

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philosopher. However, whereas The Master Builder engages with the tragic in Nietzsche’s Dionysian conception of it, Strindberg, in The Father (1887) and Miss Julie (1888), which he entitled tragedies, subjects traditional tragic form to restructuring and revision by confronting Nietzsche’s negative critique, particularly his concept of ‘ressentiment’ and his claim that in the modern world ‘slave morality’ has gained ascendancy over ‘noble’ or ‘master morality’. This provided the basis for a tragic pessimism different in kind from the Schopenhauer-influenced pessimism already discussed. One can compare Strindberg in this respect with Eugene O’Neill, an admirer of Strindberg and a writer of tragic plays in which the conception of the tragic is strongly influenced by a reading of Nietzsche that sees the Dionysian and the Apollonian as intrinsically irreconcilable, so that tragic impasse is inevitable.16 Strindberg also exploits Nietzschean polarities, most obviously in his representation of the relationship between the sexes. He is, of course, notorious for his attitude to women, and it is often seen as part of a pathological mental state. However, Strindberg’s dramatic representation of gender conflict is more interestingly read as arising from an interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy in regard to ‘ressentiment’ and its relation to slave morality. Strindberg connects these to the conflict between men and women in the modern world which he sees as irresolvable, or unmendable, and therefore tragic. Though there is no positive Nietzschean aspect in The Father and Miss Julie – it is hard to see their pessimism as embodying Nietzsche’s pessimism of strength – neither is there the traditional tragic consolation of Aristotelian catharsis nor Schopenhauer’s tragic resignation. The Father is a tragedy of sexual politics and the underlying Nietzschean ideas are obvious. In On the Genealogy of Morals – which Strindberg in a letter to Nietzsche called ‘that splendid book’17 – Nietzsche states: The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is ‘outside’, what is ‘different’, and what is ‘not itself’; and this No is its creative deed . . . [I]n order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all – its action is fundamentally reaction.18

He goes on to contrast ‘the noble man’ who lives in trust and openness with himself with ‘the man of ressentiment’:

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His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors . . . he understands how to keep silent, how not to forget, how to wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble. A race of such men of ressentiment is bound to become eventually cleverer than any noble race; it will also honor cleverness to a far greater degree: namely, as a condition of existence of the first importance.19

Nietzsche in a letter to Strindberg saw a strong connection between his philosophy and The Father: ‘I read your tragedy twice with the deepest emotion; it surprised me beyond all measure to discover a work in which my own concept of love – in its means, war; in its foundation, the mortal hatred of the sexes – is expressed in a grandiose manner.’20 The play transforms Nietzsche’s ‘man of ressentiment’ into a woman and plays out the conflict between noble morality and slave morality within the sphere of the relationship between a man and a woman. This was not a major departure from Nietzsche, however, as many of Nietzsche’s comments on women and the woman question imply a connection between women and slave morality, associating ‘equal rights for women’ with ‘the religion of pity’ and ‘other symptoms of declining life’.21 Though The Father is a highly charged drama of naked confrontation in something like the naturalist style that Strindberg defends in his long preface to Miss Julie, this should not conceal the fact that underlying such naturalism there is literary allusiveness. Strindberg became increasingly hostile to Ibsen whom he called ‘the Norwegian bluestocking’ and accused of supporting the feminist cause. In some respects The Father is a reworking of Ibsen’s Ghosts from a Nietzschean perspective. Strindberg virtually points out the connection when the doctor remarks to the Captain: ‘And I must confide to you that when I heard Mrs Alving talk about her dead husband, I thought to myself: “What a damned shame the fellow is unable to talk back from the grave!” ’22 Whereas Ibsen’s Captain Alving does not appear in Ghosts, Strindberg’s Captain is placed right at the centre of his drama, and whereas Mrs Alving is a victim of her husband’s degeneracy, it is the Captain in The Father who is the victim, Mrs Alving being transformed into the Captain’s wife, Laura, a manipulative schemer determined to destroy her husband by having him confined in a mental institution. In both plays there is a struggle for control over a child. In Ghosts Mrs Alving sent her son Oswald away from Norway so as to free him from his father’s influence, and in The Father the main conflict between the Captain and Laura is over who should have control over their daughter Bertha’s education. The plays are similar in structure in that they observe the dramatic unities and have catastrophic endings.

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However, Ibsen is not the only literary influence on The Father. At least equally important is Shakespeare. Strindberg incorporates a clear Shakespeare reference in the play by having the Captain address Laura in words that echo Shylock’s most famous speech in The Merchant of Venice: Yes – I am crying, even though I am a man. But has a man not eyes? Has a man not hands, limbs, likes, dislikes, passions? Is he not kept alive by the same nourishment, is he not wounded by the same weapons, is he not warmed by the same summer, cooled by the same winter as a woman? If you prick us, do we not bleed – if you tickle us, do we not burst into laughter? If you poison us, do we not die? Then why should a man not complain, a soldier cry? Because it is not manly? Why is it not manly? (39)

In Shakespeare’s play this is one of the great humanist speeches, at least when taken out of context. The effect of the Captain’s speech is quite different. Strindberg’s play is about power, and whereas Shylock’s speech is an appeal to a shared humanity, the Captain’s speech is a move in a power struggle against Laura. As Laura says in Act I: ‘What has all this struggle of life and death been for, if not for power?’ (37). The humanist content of Shylock’s speech, however, primarily functions rhetorically in that it culminates in and provides justification for his seeking revenge against his Christian tormentor just as a Christian would against a Jew who wronged him: ‘Revenge! If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why revenge!’ (III, i). Revenge is a ‘manly’ reaction to Shylock’s sense of being scorned and mocked and is in sharp contrast to the Captain’s response in his struggle with Laura. He cries like a woman and attempts to use ‘female’ devices against her: appealing to her pity in the way that, at least from a Nietzschean point of view, a woman might appeal to a man in a pitiful way in order to neutralise his power. What has brought the Captain – a man who in terms of his status as a soldier in a position to command, might seem potentially ‘noble’ or ‘aristocratic’ in a Nietzschean sense – to such an abject state? To account for this Strindberg adapts two other Shakespeare plays for his purposes: The Winter’s Tale and Othello. In The Winter’s Tale Leontes’ mind is overcome by jealousy: he accuses his wife of adultery, and is convinced that the child she bears is not his. His wife, Hermione, is represented as an innocent victim of male obsession. The Captain in The Father is subject to a similar obsession, that he is not the father of Bertha. In contrast to Hermione, however, it is Laura who plants this idea in his mind as part of her effort to gain power over him: ‘it has been discovered that no one can be absolutely certain who is the father of a child’ (25). She then tells the doctor she hopes will certify the Captain as insane that this

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is one of his ‘weird ideas’ and that she has not ‘the faintest idea’ where this notion has come from. She is seen by the Captain as devilish – ‘you have a fiendish, infernal way of getting what you want’ (24) and vampire-like: ‘Look at yourself in the mirror! You don’t dare!’, to which she replies: ‘I never use a mirror!’ (45). At the end of Othello, when Iago’s villainy is revealed, Othello looks at his feet to see if they are cloven like the Devil’s: ‘I look down toward his feet; but that’s a fable./If that thou be’st a devil, I cannot kill thee’ (V, ii). The relationship between the Captain and Laura resembles that of Othello and Iago in several respects, with Iago being transformed into a woman. Iago is able to gain ascendancy over Othello by destroying his nobleness of mind and reducing him to Iago’s own level, Iago being referred to several times as a ‘slave’ when his villainy is revealed. For Nietzsche: While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself . . . the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naïve nor honest and straightforward with himself . . . Ressentiment itself, if it should appear in the noble man, consummates and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction, and therefore does not poison: on the other hand, it fails to appear at all on the countless occasions on which it inevitably appears in the weak and impotent.23

This overcoming of ressentiment fails to happen in Othello’s case. When Iago succeeds in planting suspicion in Othello’s mind: ‘Villain, be sure thon prove my love a whore,/Be sure of it; give me the ocular proof’ (III, iii), and persuades him to engage in an ignoble act like eavesdropping, then Othello has been reduced to Iago’s level and his calculating craftiness can triumph over someone who is normally governed by what Nietzsche calls ‘unconscious instincts’.24 In The Father Laura, like Iago, has gradually reduced the Captain to her own level so that she can use her self-conscious cleverness to master him by breaking his power of will: ‘As long as my will-power remains unbroken, I have my emotions under control. But you have been nagging, and wearing it down, until it is about to fly off its cogs’ (36). Planting the suspicion that he is not the father of Bertha is the equivavlent of Iago planting doubts about Desdemona’s faithfulness in Othello’s mind. In this way Laura succeeds in poisoning his consciousness, for the Captain has ceased to be the natural aristocrat who can expel the poison of ressentiment by spontaneous reaction in the manner outlined by Nietzsche. The residue of a concept of honour remains but it only makes him more vulnerable: ‘For a man cannot live without honor,’ he proclaims to which Laura replies: ‘But a woman can!’ (40). But such statements conflict with his actual behaviour since he acted dishonourably in opening her letters just as she has done the same to him, to which she

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responds sarcastically: ‘How very noble of you!’ (35). In a struggle conducted in terms dictated by her he has no chance of winning. Iago is, of course, in the tradition of the Machiavellian villain and Coleridge characterised his actions famously as ‘motiveless malignity’. This does not apply to Laura. She is the product of a society in which the ascendancy of male power is being questioned. Why should she have no rights when it comes to her daughter’s education? The Captain cannot adjust to this changed social situation. The nurse-maid Magret advises him to seek a compromise in the struggle with Laura, ‘[D]on’t you think you could meet your wife halfway and come to some sort of understanding with her’ (20), but he cannot give up any of his rights with regard to his child: ‘[I]t is not enough for me to have given life to my child; I want her to have the essence of myself, my intellect, my ideals, as well’ (21). This would cut her off from her mother who refuses to accept this in the way that women in the past would have accepted it as part of the nature of things. Men have dominated women by making them see that dominance as natural, but as a result of works like A Doll’s House women such as Laura interpret dominance not as natural but as a function merely of male power, and are determined to fight it. The Captain sees Laura as devil-like, but outside their struggle neither Laura nor the Captain is perceived as the monster they regard each other as being. As Magret says: ‘But, God in heaven, must two people keep tormenting the life out of each other – two people who otherwise are so kind – and so good to everyone else? Your wife never acts like that to me or to anybody else’ (21). The Captain proclaims all women as his enemies, but Laura denies that and sees her actions as merely responses to his. Neither wanted this situation of conflict and struggle to arise as the Captain points out: ‘You did not wish it to become like this, nor did I – and yet it has’ (54). The implication is that it is the consequence of men and women in the modern world having different and irreconcilable interests; they are ruled by ‘The God of War and Strife . . . Or I should say, nowadays, the Goddess of Strife!’ (55). Yet men and women must co-operate if the human race is to survive and have a future. This irresolvable conflict between the sexes is one tragic aspect of The Father. It also has implications for human relationships at the most intimate level. When the relationship between a man and woman becomes part of a power struggle, love and even sex become poisoned. Laura claims that it was not her intention to destroy her husband, but merely the consequence of female interests and aspirations in the modern world being irreconcilable with male dominance: ‘Even if I should not be innocent, before God, and in my conscience, I feel I am. You weighed on my heart like a stone that pressed and pressed until at last I tried to shake off the

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oppressive burden’ (53–4). The Captain finds that ‘credible enough’ but it does not alter the facts of the case: One used to marry a woman for love; but nowadays one enters into partnership with a business or professional woman – or one shares one’s bed and board with a mistress! And then one has illegal intercourse with the partner – or one casts a stigma upon the mistress! But what becomes of love – healthy, sensuous love? It dies as a result! (54)

Neither wished this to happen but it did and there’s no solution except for one party to subjugate the other: ‘You did not wish it to become like this, nor did I – and yet it has.’ The tragic also manifests itself at the wider cultural level, since the Captain’s defeat represents the defeat of aristocratic values, crushed by the forces of ressentiment. Nietzsche supplies the foundation for this negative form of the tragic, at the opposite pole from a ‘pessimism of strength’: Supposing that . . . the meaning of all culture is the reduction of the beast of prey ‘man’ to a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal, then one would undoubtedly have to regard all those instincts of reaction and ressentiment through whose aid the noble races and their ideals were finally confounded and overthrown as the actual instruments of culture . . . These ‘instruments of culture’ are a disgrace to man and rather an accusation and counterargument against ‘culture’ in general! One may be quite justified in continuing to fear the blond beast at the core of all noble races and in being on one’s guard against it: but who would not a hundred times sooner fear where one can also admire than not fear but be permanently condemned to the repellent sight of the ill-constituted, dwarfed, atrophied, and poisoned? And is that not our fate?25

Strindberg takes this Nietzschean point of view and applies it to a conflict between male and female in which the male – not perhaps one of the most impressive representatives of ‘the noble races’, but one who ends up proclaiming Nietzschean sentiments: ‘Wake up, Hercules, before they take your club away from you! . . . Rude strength has given way before weakness fortified by treachery’ (55) – is defeated by a woman who embodies the ‘instincts of reaction and ressentiment’. He is outwitted and out-manoeuvred, reduced finally to near madness, ending up in a straitjacket probably dead from a stroke. Even if, as the doctor anticipates, there is an ‘awakening’ on his part, it will only be to confinement without limit in an asylum. At the end of Ghosts, Captain Alving has a kind of ironic victory over the wife who had tried to remove his son entirely from his power. Mrs Alving proclaims Oswald as ‘my child’ before discovering that the disease he has inherited from his father has taken him away from her, Oswald mindlessly crying out for ‘The sun’. In The Father, however, there is no victory of any kind for the

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Captain, and Laura, having now obtained total control of her daughter, ends the play with the words: ‘My child! My own child’ (56). In the light of The Father, it might seem odd that Strindberg’s next play should have as its tragic protagonist, a woman. The danger, however, of equating the struggle for power between a man and a woman with Nietzsche’s master and slave morality is that it could imply an essentialist ideology. In the preface to Miss Julie, Strindberg commits himself fully to naturalism, ‘a new form of drama . . . employing elements reflecting the ideas of modern times within the framework of the old forms’ (62), and naturalism by its very nature ought to be anti-essentialist, since one of its basic assumptions is that human beings should be thoroughly related to their social context and authentically represented without any idealisation. This requires that complexities be taken into account in any representation of male-female relationships, such as the existence of social class and of class conflict. In Miss Julie the main character is a woman from the upper class who accepts aristocratic values and who is involved in a power struggle with a male servant, Jean, a valet, who in Nietzschean terms would normally be associated with slave morality. Thus the class issue creates a reversal of the situation in The Father. Jean’s ‘slave’-like nature is apparent in his fear of Miss Julie’s father, the Count, who is absent but expected back very soon. As Strindberg puts it in the preface: ‘The mental attititude of the slave manifests itself in his inordinate respect for the Count (as exemplified in the scene with the boots), and in his religious superstition’ (69). However, he is a servant who is looking to better himself and escape from the power of the upper class: He is already a stranger to those around him (the servants and farmhands) whom he looks down upon, as he does upon the life he has turned his back on . . . This accounts for the duality of his indeterminate character, which vacillates between love of power and glory and hatred against those who have it. (68)

As long as Miss Julie uses her upper-class status as the basis of her power she can easily assert her dominance over a servant. However, Jean’s first speech indicates where that power is going to come under stress: And there I saw Miss Julie leading the dance with the gamekeeper. But the instant she set her eyes on me, she dashed straight over to me and asked me to dance the next waltz with her; and from that moment on she has been waltzing with me – and never in my life have I known anything like it! She is stark mad! (78)

Her sexual attraction to Jean is palpable. Despite their being of different social classes, Strindberg indicates in the preface that in the modern

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world hierarchic social distinctions are becoming unstable: ‘I have depicted my characters as modern characters, living in an age of transition at least more breathlessly hysterical than the period immediately preceding it’ (66). Miss Julie’s background also undermines a full commitment to the aristocratic, her mother being of ‘quite simple stock’ and a believer in ‘equality of the sexes’ and ‘the emancipation of women’ (99). In the conflict between her father and mother, she sided with her mother. Yet she enjoys dominating in the manner of an aristocrat. Her engagement has been broken off because she tried to control her fiancé with her whip: ‘She had him jump over her riding-crop – the way you train a dog to jump!’ (78). This may be an ironic reversal of Nietzsche’s maxim in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: ‘You are going to women? Don’t forget your whip’ or an allusion to the famous photograph of Lou Andreas-Salomé holding a whip over Nietzsche and Paul Rée. She tries to exert a similar power over Jean: ‘Now you must kiss my foot’ (84). However, after she and Jean have sex, her power over him drains away. Strindberg implies that in a sexual relationship a man has a natural advantage even though there is a risk of sexual failure and possible humiliation. For men to be able to perform sexually they need to be in a position of power over the woman, otherwise they are impotent, literally without power. A man can achieve sexual gratification even if the woman has no desire, or can use force to overcome a woman’s sexual resistance. If a woman is to have sexual satisfaction from a man, she can’t help but submit to male sexuality and thus male power. In The Master Builder it is implied that women in general, in the past at least, had been prepared to accept that. Solness tells Hilde that women who have been carried off, and presumably raped, by Vikings, would often be content with this situation: ‘And as for the women! Often they didn’t want to leave them [the Vikings] at all’ (179). However, both Ibsen and Strindberg suggest that in the modern era, whether women submit to or resist male sexual power, there is the potential for a tragic outcome. In Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890), a play similar in several respects to Miss Julie, Hedda is a woman who is faced with the conflict between male sexuality and female power. Though Hedda can easily dominate her somewhat ridiculous husband, Dr Tesman, she is extremely uncomfortable on her return from her honeymoon at allusions to the possibility that she might be pregnant. That it should be known that she has had to submit to male sexuality is intolerable to her self-esteem. The fact that Tesman thinks pregnancy is a possibility indicates that she must have allowed him to have sex with her. Her marriage to such a man seems inexplicable, unless one assumes that seeing no alternative to marriage she chose to marry a man who would be the least sexually imposing (in

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contrast to Lövborg whom she chose not to marry) as it was possible to be, and therefore no real threat to her power. However, when she realises that Judge Brack can blackmail her and therefore impose his sexual will on her, and that the power by which she defines herself will be crushed, she would rather kill herself than submit to the stronger will of another. Both Ibsen and Strindberg imply that if women are to resist male domination and have their own power, they must either refuse to submit to men sexually or find some means of retaining power even if they allow men to have sex with them. The difficulty of the latter situation is that sex then becomes incompatible with love. Yet for Miss Julie, at least, sex can’t be totally controlled by the will: she admits she hates most men: ‘But occasionally – when my weakness comes over me – oh, the shame of it!’ (101). Women are therefore in the unenviable position of having to choose between love and power in their sexual relationships with men. What puts Miss Julie in Jean’s power is not sex as such but that sex becomes love: ‘Tell me that you love me! Come and take me in your arms!’ (93), and when he only does so in a half-hearted manner, it is clear that her power is seriously under threat; when she calls him a servant he can trump that by calling her a ‘a menial’s strumpet – whore to a lackey’ (97). From this point on her options become limited. Jean initially tries to persuade her to go off with him and create a new life together, for example by starting a hotel business in Switzerland. The option of staying as his mistress is ruled out by her as impossible, the ‘humiliation and disgrace’ would be intolerable. She gradually becomes aware of the gravity of her situation: ‘Oh, my God, what have I done? My God!’ (95). Jean does not exult in the fact that power has now shifted to him. He tries to help her, by suggesting that her love for him is only on the same physical level as his and therefore not enslaving, to urge again the practical solution of going to Italy, but he eventually becomes exasperated with her, anticipating Freud’s famous question ‘What do women want?’: For the last time – what is it you want me to do? Do you want me to burst into tears? Do you want me to jump over your riding whip? Do you want me to kiss you? – to elope with you to Lake Como for three weeks? – and then . . . What do you want me to do? What is it you want? (102)

He tries to reassure her that nobody knows what has happened between them, but is shocked when she admits that she fears it could happen again and that there might then be ‘consequences’. He gives up the idea of their going away together and tells her she should leave on her own as eloping with ‘her lackey’ would cause a scandal. When the female servant to whom Jean is engaged, Kirstin, appears, and discovers what

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has happened, the affair can no longer be kept secret. Kirsten takes steps to prevent any escape on their part before the Count’s return so that Miss Julie’s situation becomes impossible. In her longest speech in the play Miss Julie acknowledges the tragic nature of being a woman, pulled in different directions by tensions within herself which finally prove irreconcilable: the aristocratic values derived from her father, the passionate nature of her mother, and the absorption of modern ideas such as that all people are equal. This makes her ‘part woman and part man’ (114) as a consequence, with no real self of her own. Unable to return to her father’s world with any dignity, or to escape with Jean, or to face the shame and humiliation from both her upper-class world and from the servant class, like Hedda Gabler she sees no alternative to suicide. Hedda had tried to exert and maintain power through controlling sexuality and denying love. But that power was also dependent on the protection offered by the apparent order and respectability of her bourgeois world that she shows no desire to reject. When the consequences of her power-driven actions in regard to Lövborg create a conflict with bourgeois order and respectability after he uses her pistol to shoot himself, she becomes vulnerable to the blackmail of Judge Brack and thus subject to the power of male sexuality. In such a situation her only means of resistance is through suicide. Miss Julie adopts an opposed strategy to that of Hedda in that she tries to reconcile power with sexuality and love, but such a reconciliation proves impossible. Like Hedda Miss Julie’s power is significantly derived from her social status and she can’t contemplate losing that, thus her terror of how both her father and the servants will react when they find out about her affair with Jean. For her also, suicide proves the only solution. Deprived of their former freedom and power both women are confronted with a choice of evils in a context of undecidability that nevertheless forces them to decide: either passively adapt to the world or resist tragically. Strindberg does not suggest any alternative to the tragic condition of being a woman, other than by adopting the strategies of ressentiment in the manner of Laura in The Father. Ibsen, through the character Hilde Wangel in The Master Builder, would seem to hold out the hope that some very exceptional women can move beyond the tragic in a conventional sense to a Nietzschean alternative that involves a full commitment to living dangerously, being prepared to discard even the strongest ties and duties, rejecting respectability and its moral values and conventions, confronting the recalcitrance of the world joyously even if one is defeated by it. This is taken further in the work of perhaps the most committed Nietzschean of major modern writers, D. H. Lawrence.

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1. Friedrich Nietzsche (1993), The Birth of Tragedy, ed. Michael Tanner, trans. Shaun Whiteside, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 26–7. 2. Ibid., p. 17. 3. Ibid., p. 10. 4. Nietzsche (1968), On the Genealogy of Morals, in Walter Kaufmann (ed. and trans.), Basic Writings of Nietzsche, New York: Random House, p. 521. 5. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, pp. 3–4. 6. See Michael Meyer (1971), Ibsen, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 841. 7. Henrik Ibsen (1971), The Master Builder and Other Plays, trans. Una EllisFelmor, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 123. Page numbers will henceforth be incorporated in the text. 8. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, pp. 476–7. 9. Ibid., p. 455. 10. Ibid., pp. 498–9. 11. Ibid., pp. 557–60. 12. Ibid., p. 560. 13. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 32. 14. Meyer, p. 640. 15. Ibid., pp. 653–4. 16. The influence of Nietzsche on O’Neill’s drama is discussed in some detail in Travis Bogard (1972), Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill, New York: Oxford University Press. 17. Nietzsche (1985), Selected Letters, trans. A. N. Ludovici, London: Soho Book Company, p. 310. 18. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, pp. 472–3. 19. Ibid., pp. 474–5. 20. Nietzsche, Selected Letters, p. 302. 21. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 590. 22. August Strindberg (1960), Seven Plays, trans. Arvid Paulson, New York: Bantam Books, pp. 34–5. Page numbers from The Father and Miss Julie will henceforth be incorporated in the text. 23. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, pp. 474–5. 24. Ibid., p. 475. 25. Ibid., pp. 478–9.

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Chapter 6

The ‘Tragico-Dionysian’ and D. H. Lawrence

Nietzsche’s role in the emergence of Modernism as an artistic movement is generally seen by commentators as crucial, since art as imitation of reality was radically called into question by Nietzsche’s philosophy: One of [Modernism’s] associations is with the coming of a new era of high aesthetic self-consciousness and non-representationalism, in which art turns from realism and humanistic representation towards style, technique, and spatial form in pursuit of a deeper penetration of life. ‘No artist tolerates reality,’ Nietzsche tells us; the task of art is its own self-realization, outside and beyond established orders, in a world of abnormally drawn perspectives.1

It is clear that Nietzsche’s radical scepticism about ‘truth’ and his emphasis on the role of language in constructing it (‘all that exists consists of interpretations’; ‘What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms’) – what philosophers term his ‘perspectivism’ – provided a theoretical underpinning for formal experimentation in all the arts, especially those that broke away from mimesis or realism in any conventional sense. Whether many Modernist writers – at least among writers in English – were significantly influenced by what Nietzsche called his ‘tragic philosophy’ is more doubtful. If one looks at the best known Modernists – T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf – there is little sign of major Nietzschean influence beyond the general effect of his philosophical undermining of mimetic conceptions of art. Certainly none of these writers could be persuasively described as proponents of Nietzschean philosophy, especially of the doctrine of the will to power and the radical conclusions Nietzsche drew from it. The will to power was Nietzsche’s transformation of Schopenhauer’s idea of the will as the blind driving force of life and of Darwin’s ‘natural selection’ or ‘survival of the fittest’ in Herbert Spencer’s formulation; they were subsumed, so Nietzsche argued, by the will to power. It was fundamentally unconscious in human beings

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as it was inseparable from humanity’s animal instincts and thus not accessible directly by the conscious mind. It is easy to see that Freud’s theories had their source in and were developed from the thought of Schopenhauer, Darwin and Nietzsche, with psychoanalysis being an attempt at a mapping of the unconscious. In Freud’s division of the human psyche into superego, ego and id, his debt to Darwin and Nietzsche is clear, as the id represents the amoral drives and impulses associated with humanity’s animal heritage which have been repressed as a result of the acquiring of language and the emergence of civilised forms of life incompatible with that animal heritage. Freud, however, was no Nietzschean and in a work like Civilization and Its Discontents is closer to Conrad’s tragic perspective than Nietzsche’s in accepting that the aggressive instincts human beings have inherited from their animal origins are irreconcilable with civilisation: ‘Civilization has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man’s aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of them in check by psychical reactionformations.’2 One Modernist whom it would not be an exaggeration to call a Nietzschean writer in the fullest sense is D. H Lawrence. He is sometimes seen as not completely a Modernist because he does not experiment with narrative and style in the way that Joyce does in Ulysses, for example. Yet it can be argued that the fictional techniques most associated with novelists such as Joyce and Woolf, notably stream of consciousness and the development of free indirect speech into something very much resembling stream of consciousness – though they may undermine the idea that the mind functions in a logical manner by showing how it moves forwards and backwards in time, is subject to fleeting impressions, makes apparently random connections – allude only indirectly to the existence of the unconscious and the instinctual, and that their prime aim is rather to represent the workings of the conscious mind more persuasively than was achieved by the nineteenthcentury realist novel. In other words, Darwinism and Nietzsche are not major influences. Lawrence’s aim in his fiction, in contrast, is to enable the unconscious and instinctual, normally repressed at the level of the conscious self, to find expression through literary language – as a comment on Gudrun by the narrator in Women in Love indicates: ‘All this Gudrun knew in her subconsciousness, not in her mind’3 – and to show that the discourse of the unconscious and the instinctual is best understood in terms of Nietzsche’s will to power. The will to power was central to Nietzsche’s ‘tragic philosophy’ and that Nietzschean redefining of the tragic is perhaps more powerfully exemplified in Lawrence’s work than in the work of any other major writer.

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Lawrence had certainly read Nietzsche and it would be easy to demonstrate his direct influence on various works of non-fiction, such as the Study of Thomas Hardy, ‘The Crown’ and Fantasia of the Unconscious, as in this passage from the last: For many ages we have been suppressing the avid, negroid, sensual will. We have been converting ourselves into ideal creatures, all spiritually conscious, and active dynamically only on one plane, the upper, spiritual plane. Our mouth has contracted, our teeth have become soft and unquickened. Where in us are the sharp and vivid teeth of the wolf, keen to defend and devour? If we had them more, we should be happier. Where are the white negroid teeth? Where? In our little pinched mouths they have no room. We are sympathy-rotten, and spirit-rotten, and idea-rotten. We have forfeited our flashing sensual power. And we have false teeth in our mouths. In the same way the lips of our sensual desire go thinner and more meaningless, in the compression of our upper will and our idea-driven impulse. Let us break the conscious, self-conscious love ideal, and we shall grow strong, resistant teeth once more, and the teething of our young will not be the hell it is.4

Lawrence’s desire to shift focus from the conscious to the unconscious is apparent in all of his mature fiction and it is clearly expressed in the often quoted passage from a letter to Edward Garnett in 1914 when he was writing The Rainbow: You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically-unchanged element.5

The attempt to represent by means of literary language unconscious drives and instincts, together with a radical engagement with Nietzschean ideas, perhaps find their most artistically powerful realisation in that novel, published in 1915, and its companion work, Women in Love (1920), Lawrence originally having intended them to constitute one novel.

The Rainbow No reader of The Rainbow and Women in Love can fail to notice Lawrence’s repeated use of the words ‘dark’ and ‘darkness’ to represent unconscious drives and instinctual feelings. Clearly there is a relationship between them and Nietzsche’s Dionysian and Freud’s id. There is also an obvious link with Conrad’s similar use of ‘dark’ and ‘darkness’

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in Heart of Darkness. In The Rainbow Conrad’s novella is surely alluded to in this passage: Then in a low, vibrating voice [Skrebensky] told [Ursula] about Africa, the strange darkness, the strange, blood fear. ‘I am not afraid of the darkness in England,’ he said. ‘It is soft, and natural to me, it is my medium, especially when you are here. But in Africa it seems massive and fluid with terror – not fear of anything – just fear. One breathes it, like the smell of blood. The blacks know it. They worship it, really, the darkness. One almost likes it – the fear – something sensual.’ She thrilled again to him. He was to her a voice out of the darkness. He talked to her all the while, in low tones, about Africa, conveying something strange and sensual to her: the negro, with his loose, soft passion that could envelop one like a bath. Gradually he transferred to her the hot, fecund darkness that possessed his own blood.6

In Conrad, as already discussed, Marlow perceives the darkness as a threat, referring to Africa’s ‘treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart’,7 and though Kurtz is admired by Marlow for confronting that darkness and finally resisting it, even if at the expense of his own life, it is clearly a threat to civilised values, with Kurtz’s experience acting as a warning. Lawrence takes quite a different view: following Nietzsche he believes the threat to civilisation lies in its failure to achieve an authentic relationship with the darkness or, in Nietzschean terms, the Dionysian, in contrast to Freud’s view that civilisation could not exist without the suppression of instincts. In Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence’s opposition to this view is at its most explicit: The dark, glancing sightlessness of the intent savage, the narrowed vision of the cat, the single point of vision of the hawk – these we do not know any more. We live far too much from the sympathetic centres, without the balance from the voluntary mode.8

The fact that Lawrence refers to ‘balance’ in that passage again has a Nietzschean connotation since for Nietzsche the Dionysian and Apollonian interacted dialectically, though without aspiring towards synthesis. Indeed in his writings on the subject after The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche suggested that the Apollonian, Apollo being ‘the apotheosis of the principium individuationis’,9 was not separate from the Dionysian but a transformation of it. However, whether such a balance can ever be achieved is a question that Lawrence poses in his fiction. Is it futile even to attempt to attain it since it will always at the very least be unstable, or does he believe in Nietzsche’s reformulation of the tragic in which the Dionysian or the ‘darkness’ has to be embraced even if the result may be destructive at both the individual and cultural level? And in The Rainbow

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the destructive potential of the darkness is clear, as in the following passage describing Will Brangwen’s feelings towards Anna: ‘seething with inchoate rage . . . his whole nature seemed to disintegrate. He seemed to live with a strain upon himself, and occasionally came these dark, chaotic rages, the lust for destruction’ (194). Will’s darkness remains locked within; no Apollonian transformation of it is possible: ‘some folded centres of darkness . . . would never develop and unfold whilst he was alive in the body . . . [T]here was a darkness in him which he could not unfold, which would never unfold in him’ (195). Darkness can, however, obliterate the kind of individuality that both Nietzsche and Lawrence abhor: that which functions at the level of the conscious ego and suppresses the instinctual and animalistic. But it is necessary to move on from that and discover an individuality that does not suppress them. Something like that is occasionally achieved in The Rainbow, obliteration followed by a kind of rebirth of individuality. Tom Brangwen and Lydia Lensky become part of ‘the fecund darkness’ and then move on to a form of individuality that can incorporate it: ‘He returned gradually, but newly created, as after a gestation, a new birth, in the womb of darkness . . . And she sat utterly still with him, as if in the same’ (44–5). However, as the novel shows, this is seldom achieved and is inherently insecure. With the relationship that follows that of Tom and Lydia, between Will and Anna, no balance is achieved and the darkness is predominantly destructive: ‘they lived in the darkness and death of their own sensual activities . . . a sensuality violent and extreme as death’ with ‘no conscious intimacy’ (219–20). The Apollonian principle is virtually abolished. Yet the novel recognises that even this complete surrender to the darkness cannot be condemned as sheer degeneracy, in contrast to Marlow’s representation of Kurtz’s life among the Africans. It can have both value and beauty: It was pure darkness, also. All the shameful things of the body revealed themselves to [Will] now with a sort of sinister, tropical beauty . . . Shame, what was it? It was part of extreme delight. It was that part of delight of which man is usually afraid. Why afraid? The secret, shameful things are most terribly beautiful. (220)

One recalls the line by Lawrence’s contemporary Yeats, another writer influenced by Nietzsche, ‘A terrible beauty is born’ (‘Easter 1916’). But as the passage makes clear, individuality is lost, Anna no longer being a particular person, but ‘the woman’. What had led on to this experience with Anna was Will’s earlier sexual encounter with a woman in Nottingham in which he gives way to sheer animal lust: ‘She was like a piece of palpable darkness’ (213). He has no interest in her as an individual, both of them ‘almost swooning in the absolute of sensual

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knowledge’, yet he discovers something of value in what might be seen as a reversion to the animalistic. Such experiences may be necessary to overcome the power of the spiritual and the ideal that has gained control over human consciousness, though conscious individuality and a relation to the other can be lost in the process: ‘They had no conscious intimacy, no tenderness of love. It was all the lust and the infinite, maddening intoxication of the senses, a passion of death’ (220). The Apollonian is excluded. In Lawrence’s Study of Thomas Hardy, originally called Le Gai Savaire, probably an allusion to Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, Lawrence tried to create conceptual terms – somewhat in the manner of Freud with his ego, superego, and id – that would allow him to study the workings of the unconscious and the instinctual as well as showing them in operation in his fiction. He rejects the idea that men and women embody an essential maleness or femaleness: both man and woman contain two forces, which he calls ‘male’ and ‘female’, opposed principles which exist within every human being. ‘For every man comprises male and female in his being, the male always struggling for predominance. A woman likewise consists in male, and female, with female predominant.’10 As one sees in The Rainbow the polarity or balanced opposition between ‘male’ and ‘female’ has for the most part been seriously undermined. Not only must each individual man or woman strive to achieve polarity between male and female forces within the self, but a relationship with the other must also function dialectically, leading on to a sense of oneness in which each nevertheless retains individuality. Lawrence allegorises these categories, the ‘male’ principle is the force of love, identified with God the Son; the ‘female’ principle is the force of law, of God the Father, which he identifies with pure, undifferentiated being. Love or the ‘male’ principle desires to move from being to knowing, from unity of being to an encounter with the other. It is easy to see that Lawrence is adapting or revising the Nietzschean categories of the Dionysian and the Apollonian for his own purposes, the ‘male’ force being Apollonian and the ‘female’ force being Dionysian. In The Rainbow there are a series of marriages, and marriage is an attempt to achieve an authentic balance between ‘male’ and ‘female’ both in the normal sense of a relationship between individual men and women but also between principles: In woman, man finds his root and establishment. In man, woman finds her exfoliation and florescence. The woman grows downwards, like a root, towards the centre and the darkness and the origin. The man grows upwards, like the stalk, towards discovery and light and utterance . . . Man and Woman are, roughly, the embodiment of Love and the Law: they are the two complementary parts . . . We start from one side or the other, from the

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female side or the male, but what we want is always the perfect union of the two. That is the Law of the Holy Spirit, the law of Consummate Marriage . . . He must know that he is half, and the woman is the other half: that they are two, but that they are two-in-one.11

Given the intrinsic tensions both within and between, can such consummation or true marriage ever be realised? Are human relationships bound to be tragic failures? How can oneness or consummation ever be achieved without individuality being obliterated – a recurrent word in The Rainbow – in the process? On the surface it might seem that The Rainbow’s prime focus is on the existential and psychological with little concern for the historical or the cultural which encompasses the various relationships that make up the novel. But the novel suggests the two can’t be separated. The three generations that the novel studies develop from the 1840s up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Lawrence was also writing the novel in 1914 when the First World War started, a war which radically undermined nineteenth-century optimistic assumptions. Though The Rainbow does not discuss the major historical forces that shaped that period, their effect on the self and consciousness is clear. The difference between Ursula, who belongs to the final generation that the novel focuses on, and her mother and grandmother is a historical one: with Ursula a modern sensibility has emerged. The Brangwens had for generations been farmers on Marsh Farm on the border of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, and their lives have been governed by the rhythm of the cycle of the seasons, creating a sense of timelessness as one generation succeeded another with the minimum of change. Sexual relations between men and women corresponded to the cycle of nature. But the world beyond is impinging on this pre-industrial world and those who are looking beyond it are women. The men are content to continue with a life close to the land and nature: But the women looked out from the heated, blind intercourse of farm-life, to the spoken world beyond. They were aware of the lips and mind of the world speaking and giving utterance, they heard the sound in the distance, and they strained to listen. It was enough for the men, that the earth heaved and opened its furrow to them . . . But the woman wanted another form of life than this, something that was not blood-intimacy . . . She faced outwards to where men moved dominant and creative, having turned their back on the pulsing heat of creation, and with this behind them, were set to discover what was beyond, to enlarge their own scope and range and freedom; whereas the Brangwen men faced inwards to the teeming life of creation, which poured unresolved into their veins. (10–11)

In the terms Lawrence used in the Study of Thomas Hardy, the male principle within women is asserting itself over the female principle – they

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want greater individuality – whereas among the men, the female principle, the desire for blood intimacy, undifferentiated oneness, is still strong. An imbalance is thus introduced both within and between men and women. In the various relationships that make up the novel, the conflicts these imbalances create and the various attempts to overcome them are explored and worked out. As suggested in the previous chapter, Strindberg took the view that female demands for emancipation and equality had created a struggle for power between men and women that would inevitably have a tragic outcome: one or other had to end up defeated or destroyed. Lawrence’s relationships are also struggles for power but he does not necessarily represent them in Strindbergian terms. If Strindberg can be seen as a negative Nietzschean, Lawrence is a positive one. Though each of the relationships he depicts in The Rainbow ends up as a failure, all of them have positive aspects, that between Tom Brangwen and Lydia Lensky being the most successful. Tom is making some attempt to break away from his ancestors’ identification with the land in being attracted to this Polish woman who had previously been married to an intellectual, a doctor involved in revolutionary politics, who had ‘incorporated her in his ideas as if she were not a person herself’ (238) so that she had felt ‘obliterated’ (49). She is thus seeking to establish connection with her femaleness. They are relatively happy because they complement each other. The main weakness of their relationship lies in the imbalance between maleness and femaleness within him especially which prevents him achieving anything other than a physical contact with her. He has no intellectual talents, nor can he find any individualising form of work: ‘He did not count his work, anybody could have done it. What had he known, but the long, marital embrace with his wife?’ (120). All of the men in the novel fail in one way or another to measure up to the challenge represented by the women. Anna ceases to respect Will Brangwen because, like her stepfather, he fails to achieve an individuality that can exist in polarity with ‘blood-intimacy’ (157). Anna aspires towards a balanced polarity between maleness and femaleness in Lawrence’s terms or Apollonian and Dionysian in Nietzsche’s. But such an aspiration involves a risk for the self and previously she had been fearful of abandoning the ‘known self’ (155). She settles for the substitute satisfaction of giving birth to nine children and ‘[w]ith satisfaction she relinquished the adventure to the unknown’ (182). The third major relationship, between Ursula and Anton Skrebensky, shows the problems of the previous two being exacerbated. Ursula is a modern woman, and the male principle is stronger in her than in her mother or grandmother: she has received an education and goes on to

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train as a teacher, thus confronting the world in conventional male terms. She aspires to individual self-definition: ‘How to act, that was the question? Whither to go? How to become oneself?’ (264). Yet like her father she is drawn to both religion and sexuality, but neither is easily integrated with her aspiration to a separate individuality. Skrebensky, as discussed earlier, becomes powerfully attracted to the dark forces of the self and there is thus the potential to achieve contact with a ‘dark underworld’ (276). Previously she had felt no sense of complementarity with him, as the male side of his self is purely determined by conventional ideas: ‘To his own intrinsic life he was dead . . . His life lay in the established order of things’ (304). A relationship at the opposite extreme from her later one with Skrebensky is offered by Winifred Inger, Ursula’s class mistress, a feminist in whom the male principle completely dominates and who believes all problems can be solved by science and rationalism: ‘Their lives suddenly seemed to fuse into one, inseparable’ (316). Winifred frees Ursula from her religion but again no secure complementarity is established. Winifred marries Ursula’s Uncle Tom, a colliery manager, a man who no longer cares about anything and in whom darkness has become corrupt since he is dedicated to ‘serving the machine’ (325). This unites him and Winifred, who ‘worshipped the impure abstraction, the mechanisms of matter’ (325), in a relationship that contrasts with that between Anna and Will in which the female principle was utterly dominant. The last section of the novel focuses on Ursula’s attempt to find a way of integrating such conflicting forces as Winifred’s intellectuality and her mother’s luxuriating in the darkness of physical being through childbirth, both of which attract her and repel her at the same time. At school she takes over a class that a male teacher had ruled with a rod of iron. In a struggle for power between her and the class she has to assert all the maleness in her nature in order to gain control, finally having to thrash the pupil who is her main challenger. Though individuality overcame this severe test, the price is high. Her sense of felt life has drained away leaving only mechanism. The price of male power seems to be brutalism. This experience draws her again to the darkness of the female principle and when Skrebensky returns from the Boer War she is once again attracted to him because he seems to have achieved a balanced relation to ‘darkness’ though it becomes clear that the darkness in him is not reconciled with authentic individuality. But after both her school experience and attending college in Nottingham, she is drawn towards it: ‘The profound darkness was their universe’ (412). She responds to his experience of the darkness of Africa and feels a sense of wholeness. But when he proposes marriage she fears this will lead to his embracing ‘his

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social self’ and thus being ‘put in the range with all the things which nullified him’ (419). As his ‘social wife’ their connection at the level of darkness would be undermined, yet nor was he ‘aware of the separate being of her’ (421). A conflict takes place within him between the ‘close, living, pulsing world, where everything pulsed with rich being’ in which he lives with Ursula, and the social world in which he would have to fit as an individual, ‘an ashen-dry, cold world of rigidity, dead walls and mechanical traffic, and creeping, spectre-like people’ (423). Skrebensky is a more divided character than any other in the novel and there is no prospect of him finding balance within himself or a complementary relationship with the otherness of another person. One or other side of him must achieve victory. Like Jane Eyre with St John Rivers, Ursula is nevertheless tempted to become his wife and leave England with him. But when he regards her failing her BA examination as unimportant since she is going to be Mrs Skrebensky, this makes ‘her harder, more ruthless’ (439). Though their break-up is traumatic for him, in a sense it is a relief because his conventional self is now in the ascendant. In contrast to his earlier exultation in the darkness of Africa, Kurtz-like he now sees Ursula as the ‘darkness’ that has to be resisted and defined as ‘horror’: ‘She was the darkness, the challenge, the horror. He turned to immediate things. He wanted to marry, quickly, to screen himself from the darkness, the challenge of his own soul. He would marry his Colonel’s daughter’ (447). His engagement to Ursula is dismissed as ‘a temporary infatuation’. It is as if Kurtz had returned from Africa, having rejected his ‘savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent’12 African woman and married the Intended. All the major relationships of the novel thus end up as failures to a greater or lesser degree, with that between Ursula and Skrebensky being the most clear-cut failure. Yet the vision of the rainbow is re-asserted in the last chapter, enabling her to resist the temptation of a conventional marriage to Skrebensky. She becomes aware of an alternative when she encounters horses which take on a symbolic power; the forces of darkness that break down distinctions exist in polarity with the horses’ individuality: ‘Their great haunches were smoothed and darkened with rain. But the darkness and wetness of rain could not put out the hard, urgent, massive fire that was locked within these flanks, never, never’ (452). The opposites water and fire exist in perpetual and productive tension, representing both sides of the arch of the rainbow. She aspires to achieve polarity between opposites, to encounter otherness, to risk – in contrast to her mother – contact with the unknown which may be a threat to the ego. The novel ends with what might appear to be a religious vision, one which triumphs over the horror of the socio-economic world when she

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sees before her ‘a dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the land, and she was sick with a nausea so deep that she perished as she sat’ (458). This pessimistic vision is dispelled by the appearance of a rainbow and the vision it provokes: The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption of the new houses on the low hill, its arch the top of heaven. And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to live in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. (458–9)

But this vision is one of immanence or rootedness in this world, not transcendence of it, and it is thus perhaps akin to Nietzsche’s doctrines of eternal recurrence – which Lawrence refers to in the Study of Thomas Hardy13 – and amor fati or love of fate, in which the world is affirmed without denying what underlies Kurtz’s alternative vision of ‘The horror! The horror!’: the corruption of the humanly created world and the moral indifference of nature.

Women in Love The Rainbow ended with the emergence of the modern world. In Women in Love that modern world is now the dominant focus and all the characters belong to it. In a letter Lawrence commented on the difference he saw between the novels: There is another novel, sequel to The Rainbow, called Women in Love . . . I don’t think anyone will publish this, either. This actually does contain the results in one’s soul of the war: it is purely destructive, not like The Rainbow, destructive- consummating. It is very wonderful and terrifying, even to me who have written it.14

This would suggest a shift in point of view from Nietzsche’s positive conception of the tragic – ‘destructive-consummating’ – towards a more negative perspective. However, for Nietzsche what is destructive is not necessarily negative; it is always part of a never-ending dialectic that has to be gone through before any alternative to the destructive can emerge. Though the war is not specifically mentioned, it acts as a subtext to the lives of the individual characters and their relationships. The novel is an

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attempt to understand the roots and nature of this crisis for Western civilisation: tensions and conflicts which affect the lives of Lawrence’s characters are not presented just for their own sake but are representative of forces that are related to the catastrophe of the First World War. Lawrence, in other words, is writing a novel about history but his primary focus is on its existential and psychic determinants rather than on the socio-economic or political determinants, though the two are intrinsically related. That Lawrence sees Western civilisation as having come to a tragic impasse is most strongly suggested by his representation of Gerald Crich, whose fate is tragic at an individual level but symptomatic of a deeper cultural tragedy. He is a representative consciousness, a product of the most advanced civilisation the world had yet seen, but one which has exploded into an apparent apocalypse of violence and destruction in the bloodiest war in human history. More than any of the other characters Gerald is directly connected with wider social and cultural concerns. He is an industrialist, capitalist, potentially someone who could go into politics and might end up as prime minister. He is both physically and mentally strong. In some respects he is the best representative of his culture and civilisation – perhaps like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – incorporating in himself their confidence, their energy, their power. This power has been achieved by the human domination and exploitation of nature. Coal is extracted from the earth and transformed into the major source of power for industry, and significantly Gerald is a mine owner. His will and self-belief are strong and he believes he has the will under conscious control and therefore can dominate nature. He aims to increase production and human control by substituting the mechanical for the organic. Thus greater use will be made of technology and human labour will be mechanised: There were two opposites, his will and the resistant Matter of the earth. And between these he could establish the very expression of his will, the incarnation of his power, a great and perfect machine, a system, an activity of pure order, pure mechanical repetition, repetition ad infinitum, hence eternal and infinite. (228)

Those who work in his mines are also ‘reduced to mere mechanical instruments’ (230). What this fails to take into account is that human beings are also part of nature and that therefore there may be a price to pay for this assertion of mechanistic power. Gerald is representative of the kind of individualism that promotes the triumph of both capitalism and industrialism. He’s a captain of industry, to use Carlyle’s phrase, who believes that he can subjugate all aspects of nature to serve his purposes, exemplified when he asserts his

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power over the mare to force it to submit to his will even though a train is passing next to it. But he has no wider social or spiritual vision. Increasing material prosperity is for him an end in itself. He regards workers as quite separate beings whose lives are of no interest to him outside working hours. When Birkin asks him what he lives for he replies: ‘I suppose I live to work, to produce something, in so far as I am a purposive being’ (56). The mention of production being the driving force of his life reveals his identification with the forces that have been responsible for the ascendancy of the West: capitalism; industrialism; the organisation of society to facilitate those; the development of technology to achieve greater and greater mastery over nature. Mechanism and alienation are the result: ‘Only work, the business of production, held men together. It was mechanical, but then society was a mechanism. Apart from work they were isolated, free to do as they liked’ (102). Nothing beyond the material is necessary, and any spiritual dimension to life is dismissed: ‘And Gerald was the God of the Machine, Deus ex Machina. And the whole productive will of man was the Godhead’ (228). All of this is justified in Utilitarian terms: happiness is measured as that which provides the greatest number of people with material prosperity. The novel links Gerald’s belief in the will and individualism which have their basis in bourgeois liberal values with a different and often seen as opposed tradition which emphasised ego and will: namely Romanticism in its more negative and pessimistic aspect. The drive to dominate nature by force of will, the novel suggests, has its roots in the kind of sadistic or perverted human impulses explored in Romantic writing influenced by such figures as Byron and the Marquis de Sade: ‘As soon as Gerald entered the firm, the convulsion of death ran through the old system. He had all his life been tortured by a furious and destructive demon, which possessed him sometimes like an insanity’ (229). He is directly associated with this Romantic tradition: ‘[h]e had killed his brother when a boy, and was set apart, like Cain’ (172), Byron having written a poem entitled Cain.15 Though supposedly this was an accident, Birkin claims there are no pure accidents. His association with the darker side of Romanticism is reinforced by allusion to Wagner, Wagner’s music being ‘romantic pessimism in its most expressive form’16 for Nietzsche. The themes of power and love clearly owe a good deal to the Wagnerian treatment of such themes. Wagner had been strongly influenced by Schopenhauer, particularly by his pessimistic interpretation of the will. In his Der Ring des Nibelungen power and love are in conflict and love must be sacrificed in order to achieve supreme power. This has disastrous consequences both individually and culturally, as is

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apparent in the catastrophe that ends the Ring cycle. Gerald is directly linked with the Nibelung Alberich – who renounces love for power – in Chapter 4 of the novel when Ursula compares him, while he is swimming, to a ‘Nibelung’ (47). Gerald’s commitment to the conscious will and power makes him virtually incapable of love. Yet the futility of basing a life on the power of the will is revealed since, having mechanised both nature and workers, his power of will becomes redundant as the mechanism runs itself. His philosophy of the will is also undermined by Birkin’s sceptical critique: ‘And what’s your work? Getting so many more thousands of tons of coal out of the earth every day. And when we’ve got all the coal we want, and all the plush furniture, and pianofortes, and the rabbits are all stewed and eaten, and we’re all warm and our bellies are filled and we’re listening to the young lady performing on the pianoforte – what then? What then, when you’ve made a real fair start with your material things?’ (56)

Another destabilising experience is witnessing the death of his father, a man who exercised iron control throughout his life and who has never confronted the inevitability of death and the disintegration of the self – ‘the centralising force that had held the world together seemed to collapse with his father’ (221) – but the culmination of the crisis in Gerald’s life is brought about through his relationship with Gudrun. Relationships with women had only previously featured in Gerald’s life as a form of power struggle in which he would endeavour to impose his will on the woman, but as soon as this was achieved he lost interest. His relationship with Gudrun is different, as she sees his vulnerable side when he seeks comfort from her after having witnessed the death of his father and the defeat of his father’s will. Gerald had identified with his father’s commitment to the will, but now he is exposed to ‘the great dark void which circled at the centre of his soul’ (322). It is in this state of mind that he goes to Gudrun, unable to bear the ‘bottomless pit of nothingness’ (337). In lying in her arms he is like ‘an infant at its mother’s breast’ (345). This weakened figure sharply contrasts with the man to whom she was first attracted when she saw him exert his power over the mare. For the first time he is in a relationship with a woman who has a will at least as strong as his and who knows his strength of will is brittle. These experiences of death and then love in which the desire to dominate is for once set aside, however, create the opportunity for him to find an alternative to his bankrupt power philosophy. Birkin goes beyond critique of Gerald and tries to encourage him to trust his spontaneous impulses and thus explore the unconscious or ‘dark’ side of the self, Lawrence perhaps creating an ironic contrast with the Marlow-Kurtz relationship in which Marlow tries to save Kurtz by

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persuading him to abandon the darkness. But Gerald fears such an exploration as it would require surrendering the power of the conscious will. Birkin is well aware of the dangers of breaking the power of the will in a person whose identity is constituted by it. In his relationship with Hermione he would ‘never, never dare to break her will, and let loose the maelström of her subconsciousness’ as that would lead to ‘madness’ (140). But he regards an excessive exercise of the conscious will as an ‘obscenity’ and hopes to save Gerald from its dire effects. Birkin sees in him the potential to change and the fact that he has this potential differentiates him from his father and sister Winifred, who like her father defines herself by the controlling will. But Gerald resists Birkin’s offer of blood-brotherhood, a form of contact between men that involves the body and is not merely mental, as he fears this would be unnatural. Likewise he can’t tolerate a relationship with a woman where he is not in control, which makes his affair with Gudrun one in which a Strindbergian power struggle inevitably destroys love. Gerald comes to recognise the ultimate sterility of such control and the negative effects of the repression of the ‘dark’ forces in the self, but he is equally aware of the danger of contact with such forces. He fears to allow his will to submit to the sexuality of Gudrun as it would ‘[tear] the surface of his ultimate consciousness, letting through the for ever unconscious, unthinkable red ether of the beyond, the obscene beyond’ (242). Gudrun in contrast is more prepared to allow ‘that which was unknown and suppressed in her’ to be ‘let loose’ (287). Their relationship is a struggle for power in which neither, ultimately, is willing to allow the ego or will to lose its dominance. However, not only can Gerald not give up control over the will and the conscious self, but he is reluctant to lose contact with their social concomitants, conformity and respectability. Since there is no going back or forward for him, he is in a situation of impasse out of which emerges a tragic choice: that of ceasing to live, succumbing to a ‘disgust [that] went to the very bottom of him, a nausea’ (472). That Gerald would rather die than confront the emptiness of his power-based philosophy and its destructive undercurrents, or risk going beyond conscious self-control into an unknown realm that he fears could threaten the ego, clearly has a strong relation to what Lawrence believes are the deeper roots of the First World War. On one level Gerald is the embodiment of what Nietzsche calls Nihilism, the crisis in Western civilisation that is discussed most fully in his book, The Will to Power, unpublished writings which his sister brought together and published under that title, and a book Lawrence had read.17 Nihilism is the consequence of Nietzsche’s ‘discovery’ that God is dead and the refusal of

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Western culture to grasp the implications of that. Belief in God was the basis of immutable values that grounded morality, truth, purpose and ideals intrinsic to Western civilisation; and for Nietzsche alternatives based on science and rationalism were no adequate substitute, and much Nietzschean scorn was directed at thinkers, particularly British intellectuals, who he believed refused to face this fact. The result, he claims, is an intellectual and moral void and Lawrence’s exploration in Women in Love of the emotional and psychological consequences of that has strong echoes of Nietzsche in The Will to Power, as the discussion of Nihilism in relation to psychology suggests: Nihilism will have to manifest itself as a psychological condition, first when we have sought in all that has happened a purpose that is not there: so that the seeker will ultimately lose courage . . . in the second place, when man has fixed a totality, a systematisation, even an organisation in and behind all phenomena . . . Nihilism, as a psychological condition, has yet a third and last form . . . [t]he moment . . . when man perceives that this world has been devised only for the purpose of meeting certain psychological needs . . . In short, the categories ‘Purpose’, ‘Unity’, ‘Being’, by means of which we had lent some worth to life, we have once more divorced from it – and the world now appears worthless to us.18

For Nietzsche, however, Nihilism is not purely negative. He views it dialectically as inevitable in all cultures and thus necessary to the process of ‘overcoming’, what the subtitle of The Will to Power calls ‘An Attempted Transvaluation of all Values’, and thus to a recovery of the tragic in what he conceives as its positive Dionysian aspect: It is clear that in this book pessimism, or, better still, Nihilism, stands for ‘truth’. But truth is not postulated as the highest measure of value, and still less as the highest power. The will to appearance, to illusion, to deception, to becoming and to change . . . is here regarded as more profound, as more primeval, as more metaphysical than the will to truth, to reality, to appearance . . . The highest state of Yea-saying to existence is conceived as one from which the greatest pain may not be excluded: the tragico-Dionysian state.19

Birkin perceives in an African statuette the decay of a civilisation: ‘the goodness, the holiness, the desire for creation and productive happiness must have lapsed, leaving . . . mystic knowledge in disintegration and dissolution, knowledge such as beetles have, which live purely within the world of corruption and cold dissolution’ (253). Among the white races of the North, destruction and decay would take a different form: in contrast to ‘sun-destruction, the putrescent mystery of sun rays’, there would be ‘a mystery of ice-destructive knowledge, snow-abstract annihilation . . . Does there remain to us only the strange, awful afterwards of the knowledge in dissolution, the African knowledge, but different in us, who are blond and blue-eyed from the north?’ In this context Gerald

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takes on a wider significance: ‘He was one of these strange white wonderful demons of the north, fulfilled in the destructive frost mystery . . . Was he a messenger, an omen of the universal dissolution into whiteness and snow?’ (254). For Nietzsche this negation must be faced, lived through and become creative so that Nihilism can be overcome and lead on to his new conception of the tragic: Health and morbidness: let us be careful! The standard is the bloom of the body, the agility, courage, and cheerfulness of the mind – but also, of course, how much morbidness a man can bear and overcome, – and convert into health. That which would send more delicate natures to the dogs, belongs to the stimulating means of great health.20

Nietzsche declares: ‘I was the first to discover the tragic. Thanks to their superficiality in ethics, the Greeks misunderstood it’, and later, ‘The tragic man says yea even to the most excruciating suffering.’21 In place of concepts such as purpose or meaning Nietzsche substitutes the will to power as a creative force that creates its own goals. The last section of The Will to Power states: And do ye know what ‘the universe’ is to my mind? . . . This universe is a monster of energy, without beginning or end . . . for ever blessing itself as something which recurs for all eternity, – a becoming which knows not satiety, or disgust, or weariness: – this, my Dionysian world of eternal selfcreation, of eternal self-destruction, this mysterious world of twofold voluptuousness; this, my ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, without aim, unless there is an aim in the bliss of the circle, without will, unless a ring must by nature keep goodwill to itself.22

In contrast to Gerald, for whom Nihilism leads to tragedy in the conventional sense, the novel contains characters who seek to go beyond Nihilism. However, the integrity of Gerald’s traditional tragic choice is not called into question, though Lawrence may be ideologically opposed to it: being unable either to return to his former life and beliefs or to come to terms with the existential strategies for confronting Nihilism of Birkin or Loerke, his choice of death is not necessarily a negative act. The inescapability of death – ‘the pure inhuman otherness of death’ (194) – is of fundamental value for Ursula as the mechanised world she hates is in denial of it; and for Gerald, previously the embodiment of that mechanised world, acceptance of death, in contrast with his terror of it when he sees his father die, can be seen as having a positive aspect. Birkin and Ursula, however, embrace the tragic in Nietzsche’s Dionysian sense through a process of becoming that does not turn away from ‘morbidity’, ‘satiety’, ‘disgust’, ‘voluptuousness’, thus going ‘Beyond Good and Evil’. They are experimenters in life. Gudrun and Loerke are also experimenters, but of a different type. What both couples

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have in common is alienation from society, and indeed from what European civilisation has become, and a willingness to explore sensuality beyond conventional limits. Gudrun is initially tempted by a life of high social status and success in the world’s terms that Gerald could offer her: ‘He would be a Napoleon of peace, or a Bismarck – and she the woman behind him’ (417–18). But this temptation is temporary. She becomes attracted to Loerke because he absorbs and goes beyond Nihilism, seeing him as ‘the rock bottom of all life . . . In the last issue he cared about nothing, he was troubled about nothing . . . He existed a pure, unconnected will, stoical and momentous’ (427). Birkin calls him ‘a little obscene monster of the darkness . . . a gnawing little negation, gnawing at the roots of life’ (428). An extreme Modernist artist who sees art as completely separate from the organic, he is not constrained either by nature or by conventional moral norms and can offer Gudrun, so she thinks, ‘the subtle thrills of extreme sensation in reduction’ (451). Whereas Gerald for her was ‘the most crucial instance of the existing world, the ne plus ultra of the world of man as it existed for her’, that world ‘was finished now for her’ (452). Gerald’s life was governed by a belief in some ‘ultimate purpose’, but Loerke ‘admitted no allegiance, he gave no adherence anywhere’ (452). When Gerald’s belief in ultimate purpose disintegrated, he would rather die than become an experimenter in life in a world in which all former stabilities have collapsed. Gudrun and Loerke can be seen as Nietzscheans who build a worldview and a life-style on an insouciant acceptance of Nihilism; they reject traditional ideas of the tragic but are not interested in the process of ‘overcoming’ which will go beyond that into ‘the tragico-Dionysian state’. The emphasis for them is on the negative advantages of enthusiastically embracing alienation by taking irony and mockery and a hatred of bourgeois civilisation to an extreme. Gudrun explains to Ursula her decision to leave with Loerke for Dresden: ‘One will escape from so much, that is the chief thing, escape so much hideous boring repetition of vulgar actions, vulgar phrases, vulgar postures. I don’t delude myself that I shall find an elixir of life in Dresden. I know I shan’t. But I shall get away from people who have their own homes and their own children and their own acquaintances and their own this and their own that.’ . . . The thought of the mechanical succession of day following day, day following day, ad infinitum, was one of the things that made her heart palpitate with a real approach of madness. (464)

Her relationship with him will reject passion and replace it with irony and a kind of gaiety of spirit: ‘Their natures seemed to sparkle in full interplay, they were enjoying a pure game. And they wanted to keep it on the level of a game, their relationship: such a fine game’ (468).

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Much of Gudrun’s and Loerke’s negative critique is shared by Birkin and there is considerable similarity between all of their ideas. Birkin’s view of people is Loerke-like: ‘Not many people are anything at all . . . They jingle and giggle. It would be much better if they were just wiped out. Essentially, they don’t exist, they aren’t there’ (25). He’s attracted by the notion of a human-less world: ‘Humanity itself is dry-rotten’ (126); ‘Man is a mistake, he must go’ (128). He rejects social advancement and aspiration in a similar spirit to Gudrun and rebels against the organic in the manner of Loerke: ‘I don’t believe in the humanity I pretend to be part of, I don’t care a straw for the social ideals I live by, I hate the dying organic form of social mankind’ (132). He thus gives up his work as a school inspector as Gudrun gives up school teaching. And both he and Ursula like Gudrun and Loerke reject what Birkin calls the ‘old way of love’: ‘the thought of love, marriage, and children, and a life lived together, in the horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction, was repulsive’ (199). Loerke also scorns love: ‘I detest it in every language. Women and love, there is no greater tedium . . . I would give everything, everything, all your love, for a little companionship in intelligence’ (458–9). Loerke appears to be bi-sexual and has had a relationship with a man, Leitner, before meeting Gudrun, and Birkin seeks an intense male relationship with Gerald that would include physical contact: ‘it had been a necessity inside himself all his life – to love a man purely and fully’ (206). Though both couples go beyond the bounds of conventional sexuality, what makes Birkin and Ursula different is that they allow the darkness or the Dionysian to break the shell of the ego and expose the conscious self to the unknown. The division between disgust and exultation is broken down: ‘So bestial, they two! – so degraded! She winced. – But after all, why not? She exulted as well’ (413). The connections between this and Nietzsche’s account of Dionysian voluptuousness that goes beyond good and evil is clear. Lawrence elaborates on this in his non-fiction essay ‘The Crown’: ‘It is thus, seeking consummation in the utter darkness, that I come to the woman in desire. She is the doorway, she is the gate to the dark eternity of power, the creator’s power. When I put my hand on her . . . I apprehend my own consummation in a darkness which obliterates me in its infinity.’23 Yet early in the Birkin-Ursula relationship Birkin fears that giving way to the Dionysian is a threat to individuality: ‘I don’t mean let yourself go in the Dionysic ecstatic way . . . I know you can do that. But I hate ecstasy, Dionysic or any other’ (251). As with Nietzsche the Apollonian must be created out of the Dionysian. It is the difficulty of achieving this that is the main dynamic of the Birkin-Ursula relationship. Birkin wants ‘an

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equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings: – as the stars balance each other’ (148) and rebels against ‘any of the horrible merging, mingling, self-abnegation of love. There is only the pure duality of polarisation, each one free from any contamination of the other’ (201). At times an ideal balance is almost reached, consummation that overcomes control by the mind but does not obliterate individuality or involve absorption into the other: vital, sensual reality that can never be transmuted into mind content, but remains outside, living body of darkness and silence and subtlety, the mystic body of reality. She had her desire fulfilled, he had his desire fulfilled. For she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real otherness. (320)

In ‘The Crown’ Lawrence asserts that ‘[t]he Crown is upon the perfect balance of the fight’ and that ‘the fight of opposites is holy’.24 But what happens when such balance is threatened? Can the will to power with no goal beyond itself ever arrive at balance when it subsumes everything, ‘energy everywhere, the play of forces and force-waves . . . a sea of forces storming and raging in itself, for ever changing’ (431)? The novel suggests that ‘perfect balance’, like the vision of the rainbow, is necessarily fleeting, but the purpose of the fight of opposites is not to achieve victory for one party but involves both parties accepting both triumph and defeat in the struggle of wills, something that Gudrun and Gerald are not prepared to accept and which dooms their affair. In ‘The Crown’ Lawrence asserts: ‘Anything that triumphs, perishes. The consummation comes from perfect relatedness.’25 The fight of opposites is a kind of shifting dialectic in which there is no ultimate synthesis or absolute since neither one nor other opposite should aim at complete domination. The negative consequences of achieving such domination are illustrated throughout the novel. But difference and conflict can never be eradicated as the novel shows in ending with an unresolved opposition about love between Birkin and Ursula: ‘ “You can’t have two kinds of love. Why should you?” . . . “I don’t believe that,” he answered’ (481). Of course, this conflict could always lead to the disintegration of their relationship but not necessarily since an acceptance of the other’s difference is fundamental. Nor is individuality seen as separate from the darkness or the Dionysian, or as Lawrence puts it in ‘The Crown’: ‘The crown is not the prize of either combatant. It is the raison d’être of both. It is the absolute within the fight.’26 The will to power may be impossible to transcend but for Lawrence, like Nietzsche, only that makes possible the ‘Dionysian world of eternal self-creation, of eternal self-destruction’. It is easy to see the Gudrun-Loerke relationship as completely opposite to that of Birkin and Gudrun and thus as utterly sterile, especially

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in the light of Birkin’s comments on Loerke, comparing him to ‘a rat, in the river of corruption’ (428) and Gerald seeing in him only ‘insect-like repulsiveness’ (454). However, negative judgements of Gudrun and Loerke are a limited response to the novel. As I suggested above, Loerke can be connected with Nietzsche, not the apocalyptic side of him, but Nietzsche the sceptical and witty writer of books such as Human AllToo-Human and the admirer of a Romantic ironist such as Heine, and of Goethe for whom Loerke also has high regard. Irony and mockery remain as alternatives to the more intense and transformative conception of Nietzsche’s idea of the tragic exemplified in the Birkin-Ursula relationship. The description of Loerke and Gudrun toboganning stands in appealing contrast to the intensities of the relationships of Birkin and Ursula and Gudrun and Gerald. When Gudrun had previously gone tobogganing with Gerald, ‘[u]tter oblivion came over her, as she lay for a few moments abandoned against him’ (420). With Loerke she has quite a different experience: She was weary, oh so weary of Gerald’s gripped intensity of physical motion. Loerke let the sledge go wildly and gaily, like a flying leaf, and when, at a bend, he pitched both her and him out into the snow, he only waited for them both to pick themselves up unhurt off the keen white ground, to be laughing and pert as a pixie. She knew he would be making ironical, playful remarks as he wandered in hell – if he were in the humour. And that pleased her immensely. It seemed like a rising above the dreariness of actuality, the monotony of contingencies . . . Ha! Ha!’ she laughed, warmed by the whimsical way in which he mocked at her verbal extravagances. He was always teasing her, mocking her ways. But as he in his mockery was even more absurd than she in her extravagances, what could one do but laugh and feel liberated. (468–9)

The Gudrun-Loerke relationship ends as openly as that between Birkin and Ursula: ‘Gudrun went to Dresden. She wrote no particulars of herself’ (481). Though non-fiction texts like ‘The Crown’ and Fantasia of the Unconscious clearly show Lawrence’s preference for the apocalyptic side of Nietzsche’s tragic philosophy, his fiction, especially Women in Love, has a strongly dialogic dimension. It has been pointed out by previous critics that though Birkin is based on Lawrence himself and represents Lawrence’s philosophical doctrine, he is often viewed sceptically, being shown as strident, contradictory, ridiculous even. This in itself can be seen as Nietzschean since the apocalyptic side of Nietzsche is not reconcilable with his scepticism about truth, his mockery of systematic philosophers. Nietzsche’s tragic philosophy accepts the inevitability of contradiction and inconsistency but regards that as unimportant in comparison to ‘a Dionysian affirmation of the world’.27 Acknowledgment of this is incorporated into Women in

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Love: contradictions within Nietzsche’s philosophy are not suppressed, thus his ideas can be represented by such divergent figures as Birkin and Loerke, both of them being subject to critique and mockery at times. The open ending with Birkin and Ursula being unable to agree also points to the untranscendability of difference, the world consisting in the ceaseless striving of the will to power that embraces all living things. There is no ultimate consummation, even for Birkin and Ursula, nor, alternatively, is Schopenhauer’s Nirvana-like ideal in which willing finally ceases possible. The last two sentences of The Will to Power perhaps sum up Lawrence’s final position as well as Nietzsche’s: ‘This world is the Will to Power – and nothing else! And even ye yourselves are this will to power – and nothing besides!’28

Notes 1. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds) (1976), Modernism 1890– 1930, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 25. 2. Sigmund Freud (1963), Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. James Strachey, trans. Joan Riviere, London: Hogarth Press, p. 49. 3. D. H. Lawrence (1987), Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 508. Page numbers will henceforth be incorporated in the text. 4. Lawrence (1930), Fantasia of the Unconscious, London: Martin Secker, p. 54. 5. George T. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (eds) (1981), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 183. 6. Lawrence (1989), The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 413. Page numbers will henceforth be incorporated in the text. 7. Joseph Conrad (1963), Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories, London: Dent, p. 38. 8. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, p. 57. 9. Friedrich Nietzsche (1993), The Birth of Tragedy, ed. Michael Tanner, trans. Shaun Whiteside, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 26. 10. Lawrence (1985), Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 94. 11. Ibid., pp. 127–8. 12. Conrad, Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories, pp. 135–6. 13. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, p. 72. 14. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson (eds) (1984), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 143. 15. This aspect of Romanticism is explored in Mario Praz (1962), The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson, London: Fontana. 16. Nietzsche (1974), The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage Books, p. 330.

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17. See Keith Sagar (ed.) (1982), A D. H. Lawrence Handbook, Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 72. 18. Nietzsche (1909), The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, vol. 1, pp. 12–14. 19. Ibid., 2: 291. 20. Ibid., 2: 393–4. 21. Ibid., 2: 406, 421. 22. Ibid., 2: 431–2. 23. Lawrence (1968), Phoenix II, ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore, London: Heinemann, p. 377. 24. Ibid., pp. 373, 374. 25. Ibid., p. 373. 26. Ibid. 27. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 2: 412. 28. Ibid., 2: 432.

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Chapter 7

The Theatre of the Absurd and the Tragic

Beckett and the Tragic Any discussion of the tragic in the modern period must consider where those writers who have been characterised as belonging to the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ stand in relation to it. ‘Absurdist’ writing has a strong relation to Modernism, most obviously through the work of Samuel Beckett, but it is a form of Modernism that in the second half of the twentieth century sees little if any grounds for hope or optimism. Does absurdist writing have any links with the perspectives on the tragic previously discussed or should it be seen as post-tragic, that is departing quite fundamentally from the tragic as a concept or tragedy as dramatic form? The creator of the phrase, ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, Martin Esslin, defines it thus in his book of the same name: The hallmark of [the attitude underlying it] is its sense that the certitudes and unshakable basic assumptions of former ages have been swept away, that they have been tested and found wanting, that they have been discredited as cheap and somewhat childish illusions. The decline of religious faith was masked until the end of the Second World War by the substitute religions of faith in progress, nationalism, and various totalitarian fallacies. All this was shattered by the war.1

Albert Camus had used ‘absurdity’ to describe the human situation in 1942 in his book The Myth of Sisyphus: ‘This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity’, and Eugène Ionesco had defined it thus in 1957: ‘Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose . . . Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless absurd, useless.’ For Esslin ‘[t]his sense of metaphysical anguish at the absurdity of the human condition’2 characterises the absurdist writers he discusses in his book. The question is what relation this has, if any, to the tragic.

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Beckett is without doubt the major figure associated with the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’. Critics often use the word ‘tragic’, though sometimes ‘tragicomic’ is preferred, in relation to his work: ‘Beckett’s vision is tragic in its pain at human suffering, in its dismay at life’s brevity, in its frustration at absurdity.’3 Whether Beckett’s drama is tragic in any more definite sense is, however, more problematic: If there is a tragic element in these plays . . . it is a shadow-image of what has usually been understood as tragedy. Classical tragedy, whether in its Greek form or its subsequent evolution through the European theatre, has generally involved some kind of breakdown of order: man falls because he has somehow, usually unknowingly or against his will, violated the order laid down by divine will . . . But in Beckett this is not the case, since there is no order to violate.4

Nor, the argument continues, is Beckett’s drama tragic in a formal sense: The fate of Beckett’s characters is in fact never in the balance, they do not develop through crisis to resolution as in classical tragedy. In fact in this kind of tragedy there is no ‘action’ to speak of at all.5

Perhaps the fundamental difference between Beckett and the tragic as used in critical and philosophical discussion is that there is no conflict or collision between opposed positions in Beckett, with both sides commanding respect; and consequently no sense of human disaster being the outcome because the conflict or opposition is irresolvable or unmendable. It could be argued, however, that absurdist drama does generate an opposition between human belief, hope or expectation and a universe that is senseless or arbitrary, so that attempts to discover meaning in it are doomed to failure and the sense of being rooted or of having a purpose in life lost. In Beckett’s drama, however, there is little or no indication that this is a meaningful opposition. If one compares Beckett’s most famous play, Waiting for Godot (1952), with the kind of oppositions characteristic of tragic literature, whether in the classical period or even in a writer like Hardy, it is clear that Beckett’s plays are not grounded in conflict or opposition. Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot, who seems certain to defer his arrival and keep them waiting for ever, but does this create conflict? Are they disappointed or resentful that Godot doesn’t come? Do they even have any strong expectation that Godot will come? Is there any alternative to waiting? The answer to such questions is, I think, in the negative. To see a conflict with tragic implications between Vladimir’s and Estragon’s waiting and the non-appearance of Godot would indirectly suggest that Godot’s coming would somehow provide meaning and purpose to human life, and since he won’t come this meaning and purpose

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is tragically denied to human beings who can live only with the vain hope that he might come. But the play does not imply that there is any meaning or purpose to life that could be imparted by some external power such as Godot. Rather, the governing assumption of the play is that all that human beings can do while they are in the world is wait and try to find ways of passing the time while they are waiting. Waiting creates its own object and gives a structure and forward movement to time, but this is produced by the human mind and sensibility and it should not be expected that the world will reflect a mental structuring process built into the human brain as part of its evolutionary heritage. There is thus no real conflict or opposition, no real protest that Godot doesn’t come. It’s not as if there is anything else to do but wait or that waiting for Godot is preventing them doing something more worthwhile. Godot is not separate from waiting, but a mere epiphenomenon of the condition of waiting. The fact that all that human beings can do in life is wait creates and projects into mental objectivity a Godot figure whom human beings can’t help but hope will bring an end to waiting in some inconceivable way. Beckett’s drama shows that this is fantasy, but nevertheless there is no alternative to waiting or merely distracting oneself from its inexorability. It might seem that in contrast to Vladimir and Estragon there is conflict in Endgame between Clov and Hamm, but the conflict is a pseudo-conflict that arises only from their playing different roles in the desolate world of the play. There is no difference between them in regard to their views of life and the world, nor does the action of the play bring their disagreements to any climax, since instead of a forward moving action there is only repetition. Both want life to end and their debates have little substance or connection with ideas but merely play with words and destabilise the relation between language and reference. Central to Beckett’s aesthetic is the unification of form and content, and conflict and opposition incorporated into a plot are conventional formal devices that create a dramatic structure that provides a coherent set of events, purposeful development and some kind of resolution, which because of drama’s mimetic aspect tend to be projected onto the world and suggest that the world has a corresponding structure. This is, of course, irreconcilable with absurdist ideas. Waiting for Godot is a play in which, it’s been said, nothing happens twice and Beckett avoids or undermines those elements of dramatic form and structure that might appear to create a sense of order and meaning irreconcilable with the ‘content’ of the play. His drama then might be said to go beyond the tragic, at least in any conventional sense, and to deny the audience anything resembling catastrophe or catharsis as that would provide an

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inauthentic emotional consolation. Perhaps at the root of what makes Beckett’s drama post-tragic is that though it is accepted that human beings can never completely free themselves from a humanly-centred perspective on the world and life, there is no respect for that perspective with its assumptions that life should have meaning, purpose, hope or value, nor is there any respect for any Godot-like other that can either provide confirmation of the humanly-centred perspective or else be indifferent to it. Any conflict between the two is only a human construction that may pass the time, but it is not one which can be taken with tragic seriousness. According to Beckett’s publisher and friend John Calder he was attracted to Schopenhauer – ‘Schopenhauer, one of the most potent influences on Beckett, felt much the same way about the curse of being born’6 – who constructed a theory of the tragic based on his philosophy, to which I referred earlier in connection with Nietzsche’s rejection of it. If Beckett’s drama has any relation to the tragic it would be to Schopenhauer’s conception of it: For in tragedy we are confronted with the terrible side of life, the misery of mankind, the dominion of accident and error, the fall of the just man, the triumph of the wicked: thus the condition of the world that is downright repugnant to our will is brought before our eyes. At this sight, we feel called upon to turn our will away from life, not to want to love it any more.7

Walter Kaufmann has argued that if one looks at the history and practice of tragedy in drama, Schopenhauer’s view of it has little or no substance: ‘The main objection to this theory is that it does not accord with the facts.’8 Schopenhauer himself acknowledged that his theory is not easily reconciled with classical tragedy: I concede that in the tragedy of the ancients this spirit of resignation rarely emerges or is articulated directly . . . Almost all of [Greek tragedies] show the human race under the most horrible dominion of accident and error, but not the resignation that is occasioned by it and redeems from it.9

Modern tragedy, particularly Shakespeare, he believes is superior to Greek tragedy in this respect. But, Kaufmann argues, Shakespearean tragedy in general does not bear out Schopenhauer’s theory any more than Greek tragedy, since in neither is the spectator ‘led to realize “that it is better for him to tear his heart away from life, to turn his desires away from it, and to cease loving the world and life” ’.10 If there is any dramatist who has produced a form of drama that has links with Schopenhauer’s theory of the tragic it is surely Beckett and perhaps it is not too much of an exaggeration to claim that his plays might be viewed, on one level at least, as belated exemplifications of Schopenhauer’s theory.

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Modern Literature and the Tragic Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker

Esslin includes Pinter in his study of the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ and it used to be common among critics generally to link him with Beckett,11 yet it is obvious that there are major differences between his work and Beckett’s despite some strong links between Pinter’s early plays and absurdist drama. There is little evidence that Pinter had a strong commitment to absurdism in an intellectual or philosophical sense and this creates differences at the level of both form and content between his plays and Beckett’s. Esslin writes of Waiting for Godot and Endgame: They lack both characters and plot in the conventional sense because they tackle their subject-matter at a level where neither characters nor plot exist. Characters presuppose that human nature, the diversity of personality and individuality, is real and matters; plot can exist only on the assumption that events in time are significant. These are precisely the assumptions that the two plays put in question.’12

Pinter, who had been an actor and therefore was at least partially a product of the conventional theatre, clearly does not, like Beckett, virtually discard traditional characterisation and plot. Rather, his approach is to use them but at the same time to defamiliarise them in such a way that the audience’s expectations about both are severely disrupted, as responses by reviewers to the first productions would indicate: What part does the tramp-caretaker play in the lives of his ex-lunatic host and his brother? Why do they act as they do? How do they communicate, or do they communicate at all? We do not know, and strangely enough, while the play is on, it never occurs to us to worry about not knowing.’13

However, the fact that character and plot can be discussed meaningfully in Pinter’s drama, in contrast to Beckett’s plays in which it is misleading to make use of such categories, potentially gives Pinter’s drama, particularly The Caretaker (1960) as I shall argue, a relation to tragic drama, though the influence of Beckett and Ionesco enabled him to break radically with traditional tragic form and content. Despite the influence of Beckett on Pinter and his admiration for him – ‘I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, way outs, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous writer going’14 – his drama is human-centred in a way that Beckett’s is not. His commitment to the reality of his characters is clear in early interviews: ‘I’m dealing with these characters at the extreme edge of their living, where they are living pretty much alone, at their hearth, their home hearth.’15 It is this focus on ‘characters at the extreme edge of their living’ that creates tragic potential in his early

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plays. In contrast to traditional tragic structures in which the tragic conflict is between the human and some more powerful non-human force, such as the gods or nature, Pinter’s drama emerges from a fundamentally different context. The main threat to humanity in the second half of the twentieth century comes from within the human realm itself and not from some non-human ‘other’, since human beings had created the means, most obviously nuclear weapons, that gave them the capacity for destroying themselves and the whole of life. If human conflicts and oppositions could not be overcome then the consequences were potentially catastrophic. Interestingly Pinter’s more recent writing and his embrace of political activism – in his early career he was often accused on being apolitical16 – suggest that he has moved towards a commitment to radical change in the world and thus closer to an anti-tragic position. In The Caretaker, however, as generally in his early drama, a more pessimistic perspective on life and the world is implied and this situates the play within the orbit of the tragic, both in terms of human relationships and politics since power relations are central to both. However, before one can begin to discuss a Pinter play in relation to the tragic or any other general interpretive category, one needs to confront the difficulty of interpreting Pinter in general. Though his plays may deviate in significant ways from the absurdist drama of Beckett or Ionesco, they cannot be easily aligned with conventional categories such as realism or symbolism. Realism is not rejected as in Beckett but it is destabilised by being taken to an extreme that deconstructs it. Pinter’s drama for example does not omit such characteristics of ordinary speech as repetition, incoherence, broken sentences, pauses, nor does it have a plot that creates a structure that encompasses the characters and the action. If symbolism is present, it is not a symbolism that is easily decoded. Chekhov’s drama may have influenced Pinter to some degree, but where he departs most radically from previous drama is in terms of the relation between the linguistic and the semantic: the language uttered by his characters is not necessarily a reliable guide to what they might mean. This does not represent ‘a breakdown in communication’, a phrase that was much used in early discussions of Pinter, but is a reflection of the view that what language may signify conventionally or literally in terms of its dictionary meaning does not have any intrinsic relation to its meaning in specific situations. One could discuss this in terms of linguistics or philosophy, but perhaps the clearest illustration can be found in the writing of R. D. Laing, particularly in works such as Self and Others and Knots. In the former, Laing writes:

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The same arrangement of words, grunts or groans, smiles, frowns, or gestures can function in many possible ways according to context. But who ‘defines’ the context? The same form of words can be used as a plain statement of fact, as an accusation, as an injunction, as an attribution, a joke, a threat. Jack says to Jill, ‘It’s a rainy day’. This statement could be intended in various ways: 1. Simply to register and share the fact that it is a rainy day. 2. Jack might have agreed reluctantly yesterday to go for a walk with Jill instead of going to see a film. By saying now that it’s a rainy day he is saying, ‘Thank God we will not be going for a walk. I’ll probably get to see my film.’ 3. Jack might be implying, ‘Because it’s rainy, I don’t think you should go out’; or, ‘Perhaps you do not want to go out (I hope) since it’s raining’, or, ‘I feel depressed. I don’t want to go out, but if you insist, I suppose I shall have to.’ 4. Jack and Jill might have had an argument yesterday about how the weather was going to turn out. The statement might mean therefore, ‘You’re right again’, or, ‘You see how I’m always correct.’ 5. The window may be open. The statement may imply that Jack wishes Jill to close the window, etc. Such multiple possible ambiguities are features of ordinary discourse.17

Clearly if such a view of the relationship between language and meaning is incorporated in drama then it makes interpretation problematic, though not necessarily impossible. In drama in general the meaning of a particular utterance may normally be clear, as in Ibsen for example, but the meaning of the whole play is a different issue and will always be a matter of interpretation. Where Pinter is different is that the meaning of any single utterance or the significance of any action can’t be securely pinned down and is always open to interpretation, and it could thus be argued that interpreting the whole play is virtually impossible, as meaning at the most basic semantic level can never be established with any confidence. Certainly general interpretations of Pinter’s plays that don’t engage in detail with the language and action are seldom persuasive, but if one proceeds with a dual interpretive method the plays are interpretable, even if there may be much greater scope for a multiplicity of interpretations than in Ibsen. It’s essential, however, to interpret the language and action in close detail before there is any possibility of putting forward a potentially persuasive reading of a whole play. If one adopts this approach, then I believe one can justify seeing The Caretaker as a tragedy for the modern era. The opening of the play confronts one immediately with an action whose meaning is not clear and is open to various interpretations. Mick is sitting alone on the bed. As soon as he hears the noise of someone

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coming in, a door banging and muffled voices, he gets up and leaves. If one is seeing the play for the first time, no secure interpretation of his behaviour is possible. But in the context of the action as it develops, a possible interpretation might be that he has a problematic relationship with his brother. Aston has brought the tramp Davies back to his home. His reasons for doing this are not any clearer initially than Mick’s in leaving the room. Davies dominates the dialogue while Aston engages in activities like rolling a cigarette and unscrewing the electrical plug on a toaster. If Aston can achieve no real contact with his brother then this may explain why he invites Davies to his home: he is seeking an alternative relationship. From Davies’ point of view, why someone should do him a good turn and offer him shelter is a complete mystery, since he is used to being despised and rejected, as the stories he tells suggest. The literal content of what he says is not significant in itself: he is attempting to project an image of himself that will restore his sense of dignity after his humiliating treatment in the café. Thus his efforts to elevate himself above ‘Poles, Greeks, Blacks’.18 More than racial prejudice is at work here, for Davies is implicitly looking for some affirmation of himself from Aston and also connection with him through shared beliefs. What he says is intended primarily to imprint an image of himself in Aston’s mind and to elicit from Aston approval of that image. Aston, however, makes no attempt to supply that approval. The conversation inevitably breaks down, as the numerous pauses indicate. Since Aston fails to produce the kind of responses Davies expects, Davies has continually to restart the conversation. Why Aston doesn’t give Davies the affirmation he is seeking again has to be interpreted. As in the R. D. Laing example, one could construct a whole series of possibilities that might account for Aston’s nonaffirmation of Davies’ racial prejudices, for example that he doesn’t share them and keeps a politic silence, or uses non-response as a psychological strategy, withholding reinforcement of Davies’ self-image in order to put himself in a position of power over Davies. Perhaps a more persuasive reason is that Aston is a victim of autism or that his communicative skills have been damaged by the electric shock treatment he has received, as he discloses later; he is incapable of or doesn’t understand the necessity for engaging in the kind of conversation that involves responding to the other in such a way as to affirm the other’s sense of identity or establish a shared connection with him. He does, however, try to connect with Davies on a different level, for example when he talks about the shed he is going to build and shows Davies his lawn, but Davies can no more talk on Aston’s terms than Aston can talk on Davies’s. Though Aston has done him a good turn and seems willing to

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offer him shelter, Davies is unable to comprehend the situation or feel in the least comfortable with Aston. Yet Aston provides him with a bed and shoes, puts up with his disruptive behaviour, suggesting a deep need for relationship, which culminates in his offering Davies the role of caretaker. The dialogue between them at this point exemplifies Pinter’s undermining of the idea that language functions as communication in any straightforward sense. At first it might seem to illustrate merely the breakdown of communication: ASTON. How do you feel about being one, then? DAVIES. Well I reckon . . . Well, I’d have to know . . . you know . . . ASTON. What sort of . . . DAVIES. Yes, what sort of . . . you know . . . Pause. ASTON. Well, I mean . . . DAVIES. I mean, I’d have to . . . I’d have to . . . ASTON. Well, I could tell you . . . DAVIES. That’s . . . that’s it . . . you see . . . you get my meaning? ASTON. When the time comes . . . DAVIES. I mean, that’s what I’m getting at, you see . . . ASTON. More or less exactly what you . . . DAVIES. You see, what I mean to say . . . what I’m getting at it . . . I mean, what sort of jobs . . . Pause. (42–3)

To have any chance of understanding this exchange one has to look beyond the language to try to interpret the underlying motives that determine what the characters say. Davies is not bumblingly inarticulate at other times, so why can’t he frame a sentence here? First of all he is taken by surprise by this offer and doesn’t know what caretaking involves. Why should Aston want to do him a good turn? Davies’ experience of life has led him to expect the worst from people, so Aston’s apparent altruism is incomprehensible to him. Aston must have an ulterior motive but Davies is at a loss to understand what it can be. He’s therefore naturally suspicious, but at the same time he doesn’t want to turn it down as it could be in his interests to accept it. His solution therefore is to play for time and manipulate language in such a way that he neither accepts nor rejects the offer. As I’ve suggested, Aston does have a motive but Davies has no comprehension of it. Another factor is that by this time Davies has encountered Mick, and though Mick dominates him by his physical presence and also linguistically by a discourse of shifting registers that Davies can’t cope with, Davies is more comfortable with Mick. He’s familiar with such aggressive and contemptuous treatment – as illustrated by the story he tells

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Aston of his treatment at the monastery in Luton where the monk tells him to ‘piss off’ – and thinks he can cope with it, whereas Aston is a mystery to him. Mick also offers Davies the job of caretaker. If Aston’s motive is a need for human contact, something his brother can’t provide, Mick’s motive is clearly different. Since the brothers are unable to have any meaningful human contact, but can only get their house into some kind of order if they can co-operate, a possible reading is that it’s in Mick’s interest to find some indirect way of achieving contact with his brother. The incident with Davies’ bag near the beginning of the second act is particularly significant. Aston has retrieved this bag for Davies, Mick keeps snatching it from him, but Mick always gives up the bag to Aston. Mick’s method of confronting life is founded on aggression, both physical and linguistic, and he appears to be unable to work in any other mode, but while he can dominate the likes of Davies, Aston is impervious to such aggression, and enters into no relationship with it, either physically or linguistically. For whatever reason, either as part of his nature or through the effect of electric shock treatment, he is at the opposite extreme from Mick, displaying almost no aggressiveness or desire to impose his self on the world. Mick’s frustration with this can be detected in his smashing of the Buddha at the end of the play. Though Mick loses the bag to Aston, Aston gives it to Davies, so Davies stands between the brothers. Yet while Mick is unable or unwilling to prevent Aston taking the bag from him, when Aston returns it to Davies Mick can gain control of it again. Thus even if Mick can’t assert any direct power over Aston, he can dominate Davies, with whom Aston seems to have formed some kind of bond. Davies can be useful to Mick as someone whom he can easily dominate, and through Davies’ contact with Aston achieve some indirect relationship with and perhaps influence over his brother. This may account for his offering the job of caretaker to him. Davies, however, has no understanding of the situation. When Mick asks him a leading question: ‘I can’t help being interested in any friend of my brother’s. I mean, you’re my brother’s friend, aren’t you?’ (47), Davies at first tries to distance himself from Aston because he believes this is in his interest and will help to create a relationship with Mick. The frustration that Mick expresses towards his brother makes Davies believe that Mick wants to force his brother out, and he doesn’t show any understanding of the various signals that indicate that Mick won’t tolerate any criticism of his brother. Having been offered the job of caretaker by both brothers – neither of whose motives he has any inkling of – he thinks he can play one off against the other, failing to realise that he’s only of use to Mick if he can perform a mediating role

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between him and Aston. When Mick confirms that he is the owner of the house – ‘I got deeds to prove it’ (51) – Davies’ commitment to Mick is complete. From that point on Davies’ relationship with Aston deteriorates drastically, as in their disagreement as to whether the window should be open or closed. But even here, despite great provocation, Aston is prepared to compromise: ‘Close it for the time being’ (54). Aston’s effort to establish a relationship with Davies culminates in his long account of his confinement in a mental institution and of the electric shock treatment administered to him there, which ends the second act. Why Aston tells Davies this is not made explicit, but it can be interpreted as an attempt on Aston’s part to overcome the division and conflict that is developing between himself and Davies, by giving Davies an insight into why he is the kind of man he is, since it is obvious that Davies has great difficulty relating to him. However, Davies is not the man to respond to such a disclosure with sympathy. It merely exacerbates the alienation between the two, for Davies’ sense of identity is heavily dependent on his need to feel superior to certain groups of people, such as foreigners or immigrants. Having little positive sense of self, since as a homeless man living hand to mouth he is continually abused and treated with contempt, he can only sustain some sense of identity negatively by denigrating those he regards as even lower in status than himself. Clearly the mentally ill for him fit into that category, along with blacks, Poles and Greeks. In the third act the effect of Aston’s account of his life on Davies is clear; he dismisses it to Mick as merely ‘a long chat’ in which he, Davies, was excluded, and later he uses it to assert superiority to Aston: ‘Nobody ever got me inside one of them places, anyway. I’m a sane man! . . . They had you inside one of them places before, they can have you inside again . . . They can put the pincers on your head again . . . I never been inside a nuthouse!’ (67). At last it becomes clear to Aston that no relationship with Davies is possible. In the earlier scene between Mick and Davies, Davies’ lack of comprehension of why Mick is interested in a relationship with him is shown. Not only does he continue to be critical of Aston to Mick, but his response to the following question by Mick is a fatal error: ‘But he doesn’t seem to be interested in what I got in mind, that’s the trouble. Why don’t you have a chat with him, see if he’s interested?’ (61). This is something Mick can’t do but that Davies as mediator might be able to do for him, allowing the brothers to co-operate in order to bring the chaotic house into some kind of order. ‘You’re a friend of his,’ Mick goes on. Not only does Davies deny being a friend but he goes on to urge that Mick be the one to speak to Aston:

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‘No, what you want to do, you want to speak to him, see? I got . . . I got that worked out. You want to tell him . . . that we got ideas for this place, we could build it up, we could get it started. You see, I could decorate it for you, I could give you a hand in doing it . . . between us . . . No, you see, you’re the bloke who wants to talk to him. I mean, you’re his brother.’ (63–4)

From that point, Davies is of no use to Mick. When Davies confirms that his relationship with Aston has broken down and seeks to align himself with Mick – ‘I take orders from you, I do my caretaking for you’ (70) – Mick ruthlessly, though amusingly for the audience, discards him by claiming that Davies has represented himself as an interior decorator, one who would be able ‘to decorate out a table in afromasia teak veneer’ (72), and expresses frustration with his situation by smashing the Buddha. When Aston enters, again no communication is possible with him. All Mick can say, after a faint smile between the two, is ‘Look . . . uh . . .’ (75). Though Davies desperately tries to patch up things with Aston when his plan to align himself with Mick collapses, Aston has withdrawn back into himself. In the numerous pauses in this final scene between them, in contrast to the first scene in the play in which he tends to have the ascendancy over Aston, Davies’ powerlessness is now evident. Aston is the dominant figure, and though his rejection and discarding of Davies displays none of the aggressiveness of Mick’s, it is equally ruthless. He and Mick return to their original isolation and non-communication, and Davies has thrown away his opportunity of finding a home and shelter and will have to return to his former mode of life. Clearly all three characters end up as losers. Each could have gained if this threesome could have established a working relationship or sense of connection. Not only will they continue to be isolated, but the house that Aston and Mick share will remain in a state of disorder. This situation obviously lends itself to symbolic interpretation. Esslin remarks that Davies’ ejection ‘assumes almost the cosmic proportions of Adam’s expulsion from paradise’ and that ‘Aston is the poet whom society crushes under the weight of its machinery of legal forms and bureaucracy.’19 It may also be tempting to see Aston, Davies and Mick as symbolically related respectively to Freud’s superego, ego and id. However, in an interview quoted by Esslin, Pinter denied any symbolic intention: ‘I do see this play as merely . . . a particular human situation, concerning three particular people and not, incidentally . . . symbols.’ Yet he does disclose that his original intention was ‘to end the play with the violent death of the tramp’20 until this struck him as unnecessary. This suggests the play’s connections with the tragic. In a letter to the Sunday Times in 1960, Pinter expressed his concern that audiences were

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responding to the play as if it were ‘merely a laughable farce’, and went on to say that ‘where the comic and the tragic (for want of a better word) are closely interwoven, certain members of an audience will always give emphasis to the comic as opposed to the other, for by so doing they rationalize the other out of existence.’21 This would strongly suggest that the play is aspiring to the tragic, though Pinter clearly doesn’t want to state this explicitly. Although symbolic readings risk replacing the felt life of the specific human situation portrayed in the play with a set of abstractions, the ‘other issues’ which Pinter mentions in his letter and which take it beyond comedy inevitably involve ideas that transcend the particularity of the characters and their concrete situations. If identifying Mick with the id may be too crude, he does represent an approach to life based on aggressiveness and the assertion of direct power. Aston represents an approach to life that aims at transcendence of self, one that favours the moral, the imaginative, the religious in the wider sense, over egotism and power. One can recognise this polarity as both existing within the individual subject and in human society and culture at large. The tension and perhaps irreconcilability between the two creates disorder both in terms of the self and the human world. Existing between these opposed forces – Davies’ role – is that which is neither wholly one nor the other but potentially can negotiate between the two in order to create some kind of stability or compromise. In the play such compromise fails: the characters remain separate and unreconciled and the house is as disorderly as it was at the beginning. Yet this serves no one’s interest. Wider political implications are suggested, since conflicts in the world also don’t serve human interests, yet they seem never ending and irresolvable, so that the tragic impasse of the play’s conclusion has both a human and wider political aspect. By looking at human relations in microcosm in The Caretaker, Pinter explores why this tragic state of affairs may be the case. Davies is the key character, since he has the potential to change and adapt in a way that Mick and Aston cannot. They are trapped in their personalities and situations, apparently through mental illness and its consequences in Aston’s case and a dominating, almost sadistic nature in Mick’s; and they are also locked together through their joint connection with the house as tenant and owner. Davies, however, seems to be more of a victim of circumstances, of the contingencies of life. His condition is thus not determined by forces beyond his control in the way that both Mick’s and Aston’s appears to be. It is also in his interest, as well as in Aston’s and Mick’s, for him to create connection between the brothers and in so doing to find a home for himself. What

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links the play with the tragic is that an optimistic ending in which Davies comes to a realisation of what his role should be and finds he can act as a mediator between the brothers, thus serving the interests of all three men, would lack any dramatic credibility. Though the theoretical possibility of change seems open to Davies, in practice Davies is as, or even more, trapped in his personality and behaviour patterns as Aston and Mick are in theirs, though in his case the major shaping force is experience of the world. To expect someone who is habituated to being despised and looked down upon; who has been able to preserve some sense of his own dignity only by elevating himself above those he sees as even lower in status than himself – such as foreigners, blacks and the mentally ill; who has been able to survive only by making his own interests paramount at all times – to expect someone shaped by such a background to be able to transcend narrow self-interest and respond to the otherness of the brothers, attaining sympathetic understanding of their needs and motivations, is to take optimism into the realms of fantasy. Given the kind of man his background and way of life have made him into, when offered the job of caretaker by both brothers he inevitably sees this as an opportunity to play one off against the other for his own advantage, thus precipitating the disastrous outcome for everybody. It is possible that Pinter in The Caretaker is presenting a kind of counter-argument to the view that human beings are always free to overcome their past selves and create themselves anew, a position that was most forcibly supported by Jean-Paul Sartre – ‘Sartre argues that existence comes before essence and that human personality can be reduced to pure potentiality and the freedom to choose itself anew at any moment’22 – a philosopher whose view of the world had links with that of the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, but whose response to the idea of the absurd was clearly anti-tragic. Pinter’s early work at least is in the spirit of the tragic. Not only are we presented in The Caretaker with brothers who need to co-operate and communicate if they are to bring order into their world, but who possess irreconcilable personalities and attributes that make co-operation and communication virtually impossible, but in the case of Davies the freedom to create a new self and a new future is overpowered by the shaping forces of the past. Like every human being Davies may have the theoretical possibility of escaping from his existing self and of creating a new self but, as is also the experience of virtually every human being, such theoretical freedom comes into conflict with the power of repetition that is identifiable with one’s existing self and that comes into play as soon as one has to choose and act, so that the potential freedom to create a new self drains away.

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1. Martin Esslin (1968), The Theatre of the Absurd, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 23. 2. Ibid., pp. 23–4. 3. Ruby Cohn (1980), Just Play: Beckett’s Theater, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 11. 4. J. P. Little (1981), ‘En Attendant Godot’ and ‘Fin de Partie’, London: Grant and Cutler, p. 69. 5. Ibid., p. 72. 6. John Calder (2001), The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, London: Calder, p. 25. 7. Quoted from Schopenhauer in Walter Kaufmann (1969), Tragedy and Philosophy, New York: Anchor Books, pp. 341–2. 8. Ibid., p. 342. 9. Ibid., p. 342–3. 10. Ibid., p. 345. 11. ‘Pinter has repeatedly been named as Beckett’s heir on the English stage.’ See Ruby Cohn (1986), ‘The World of Harold Pinter’, in Michael Scott (ed.), Harold Pinter: The Birthday Party, The Caretaker and The Homecoming: A Casebook, Basingstoke: Macmillan, p. 25. 12. Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 75. 13. Quoted from The Times in 1960 in Martin Esslin (1970), The Peopled Wound: The Plays of Harold Pinter, London: Methuen, p. 22. 14. John Calder (1967), Beckett at Sixty, London: Calder, p. 86. 15. Esslin, The Peopled Wound, p. 34. 16. See ibid., p. 32: ‘Pinter has, at times, been accused of being totally apolitical. He himself has, occasionally, seemed to have wanted to create such an impression.’ 17. R. D. Laing (1969), Self and Others, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 159. 18. Harold Pinter (1973), The Caretaker, London: Methuen, p. 8. Page numbers will henceforth be incorporated in the text. 19. Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, pp. 279, 282. 20. Ibid., p. 280. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., p. 24.

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Chapter 8

The Tragic, Pragmatism and the Postmodern

While the tragic is generally identified with high seriousness, the postmodern is often associated with the playful or pastiche, placing it at the other end of the literary spectrum. The tragic is also arguably part of a foundationalist discourse, that is, one grounded in certain basic assumptions, most obviously that conflicts are intrinsic to life in the world, creating inevitable catastrophic collisions. Postmodern thinking is extremely various, but is generally held to be anti-foundationalist: that is, it is unconvinced of the existence of, or even the need for fundamental values or standards that stand apart from the exigencies and particularities of life or the world. Stanley Fish, for example, has argued that human beings are inevitably enmeshed in cultural practices that are rule-governed so that values, constraints and standards will emerge from the particularity of the situation one is in without the need for anything more fundamental. Fish has clearly been influenced by the philosopher Richard Rorty,1 one of the leading thinkers associated with the postmodern. For both Fish and Rorty, in place of confrontation between fixed positions there is pragmatism or some form of lateral thinking, so that by implication the necessity for a tragic outcome to any conflict is challenged, and it is pragmatism in this postmodern anti-foundationalist context that I shall contrast with the tragic in this chapter. The postmodern, though associated with the arts and perhaps emerging first in the context of the arts, is not an artistic movement in the conventional sense. Like deconstruction, which has been seen as a parasite that coexists with its host even if antithetical to it, it is not a separate phenomenon that can be positioned conventionally after Modernism in the way that Modernism comes after Romanticism. The main roots of the postmodern have been traced to the Romantic period – there is an obvious relationship with Romantic irony – so that it might be seen as preceding rather than succeeding Modernism.2 It exists potentially within particular forms, genres and perspectives so that certain writers

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or works that are conventionally grouped within a specific genre or school or movement can be open to postmodern interpretation. James Joyce and Ezra Pound are generally identified with high Modernism, Joyce often being seen as its leading exponent, but texts like Finnegans Wake or Pound’s Cantos may be more persuasively discussed as postmodern texts. It might seem paradoxical that the text I shall discuss in detail as a postmodern alternative to the tragic is part of modern literature only in the wider sense, but in terms of the postmodern this is perhaps appropriate. Indeed its author, Anthony Trollope, is often regarded as the least experimental and most intellectually conventional of nineteenth-century novelists, a writer who could finish writing a novel one day and begin a new one on the following day. A reading of the whole of Trollope’s oeuvre in postmodern terms would be difficult even for the most ingenious of critics, but in at least two of his novels, The Warden and Barchester Towers, especially the former, I shall argue that the postmodern makes its presence felt to a significant degree. One influential view of the literary postmodern, especially in relation to fiction, sees it as a self-conscious reflection on a text’s status as fiction or as a questioning of literary conventions without, however, seeking to undermine them in any absolute sense. One of the most intriguing passages in Trollope’s fiction is a description of the archdeacon’s breakfast parlour in Chapter 8 of The Warden, beginning ‘And now let us observe the well-furnished breakfast-parlour at Plumstead Episcopi, and the comfortable air of all the belongings of the rectory.’3 It goes on to itemise these belongings, culminating in the following: The tea consumed was the very best, the coffee the very blackest, the cream the very thickest; there was dry toast and buttered toast, muffins and crumpets; hot bread and cold bread, white bread and brown bread; home-made bread and bakers’ bread, wheaten bread and oaten bread, and if there be other breads than these, they were there; there were eggs in napkins, and crispy bits of bacon under silver covers; and there were little fishes in a little box, and devilled kidneys frizzling on a hot-water dish; which, by the by, were placed closely contiguous to the plate of the worthy archdeacon himself. Over and above this, on a snow-white napkin, spread upon the sideboard, was a huge ham and a huge sirloin; the latter having laden the dinner table on the previous evening. Such was the ordinary fare at Plumstead Episcopi. (67–8)

Sterne’s Tristram Shandy has been seen as a precursor of the selfconscious undermining of the conventions of realist fiction that is often associated with postmodern writing and there is surely a Shandean subtext to this description of the archdeacon’s parlour (in Chapter 4 of Barchester Towers, Tristram Shandy is playfully alluded to when the

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narrator refers to a rumour that Mr Slope is descended from a doctor ‘who assisted at the birth of a Mr T. Shandy’), for it is implied that realistic description is endless and that if the novel took it seriously it would be difficult to get beyond a single room since every item, as well as its associations, could be described at length, categorised, sub-categorised and so on. This passage from The Warden does enough to raise that spectre in the reader’s mind before continuing with the story. It follows that for a novel to come into being there can be no full description of the world and therefore realism in any complete sense is impossible, an idea that conventional realist fiction does not promote as it might be seen to undermine its credibility. The narrator makes a similar point with reference to the representation of speech: It is indeed a matter of thankfulness that neither the historian nor the novelist hears all that is said by their heroes or heroines, or how would three volumes or twenty suffice! In the present case so little of this sort have I overheard, that I live in hopes of finishing my work within 300 pages, and of completing that pleasant task – a novel in one volume. (54)

Like description, dialogue must be controlled by the needs of narrative and plot, so where does that leave realism? Trollope’s narrator’s disclosing that he is writing a novel in which the characters and events are fictitious also on the face of it undermines conventional realism. The fact that the novelist and the historian are equated introduces another idea associated with the postmodern: that historical writing constructs reality in the manner of works of fiction, thus questioning whether there is any fundamental difference between historiography and fiction. A related question that is raised is that even if the representation of reality in realist fiction must be selective, is the need for particularity in the novel’s representation of the world, as illustrated in the description of the archdeacon’s breakfast parlour, not at odds with the expression of ideas of general significance, and does this not diminish the artistic value of the novel as a literary genre? Part of the interest of The Warden is the adoption of an aesthetic strategy that implicitly confronts these objections to realist fiction, and central to that strategy is allegory, not an artistic device realist novels are normally comfortable with. Although in the description of the breakfast room we appear close to a situation in which description takes on a life of its own, displacing narrative by sheer accumulation of data, this passage is only ostensibly an agglomerative piling up of descriptive detail. The narrator goes on to make it clear that detail is under the control of selection and serves the interests of the novel’s larger plot, for the accumulation of ‘ordinary fare’ in the breakfast room raises the question as to why the archdeacon, a rich man, should spend so much money on such basic types of

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food, and associated with that, uninteresting crockery, cutlery and furniture. This implied question is an example of the operation of what Roland Barthes called the hermeneutic code, a device constitutive of realist fiction which presents the reader with a question, a problem, or an enigma that drives the narrative forward as the reader is encouraged to read on in order discover how it will be resolved or work itself out. As the narrator remarks – after pointing out that the belongings of the rectory were ‘neither gorgeous nor even grand’ – ‘considering the money that had been spent there, the eye and taste might have been better served’ (67). Some answers as to why the archdeacon spends money to such little effect in artistic terms are suggested but are not persuasive. For example, it might appear that the archdeacon’s taste is deficient but the reader is then informed that if the rectory had been more aesthetically pleasing ‘the thorough clerical aspect of the whole might have been somewhat marred’. The underlying intention behind the dull furnishings, unattractive crockery and cutlery, the accumulation of types of bread is, it seems, ‘to spend money without obtaining brilliancy or splendour’. Why should the archdeacon choose to do this? Although the use of the hermeneutic code may motivate a novel reader to read on to have a question answered or a problem resolved, in a novel that has any aspiration to artistic merit a straightforward resolution may be denied to the reader who has to come up with his or her own solution. Trollope implies an answer but doesn’t state it in explicit terms. It’s clear that the archbishop embodies a contradiction: he is rich and an important figure in the Christian Church, but the founder of his religion urged the rich to give their wealth to the poor and asserted that a rich man had as much chance of entering the kingdom of heaven as a camel had of getting through the eye of a needle. Here we have one of the many apparently irresolvable conflicts the novel explores: how can Christianity, with its elevation of the spiritual over the material, be reconciled with living in the world, since even the most extreme forms of Christianity can’t reject the world completely, and the archdeacon certainly represents a very worldly form of Christianity. His life style indicates a recognition of this problem. Though theoretically committed to the idea that the spiritual is what is important and that material possessions are so much dust, he makes no attempt to overcome the contradiction in his life by impoverishing himself, but instead surrounds himself with objects that do not overtly advertise his wealth. Hence the simple fare in his breakfast parlour. Conspicuous consumption would be inconsistent with the tenets of his faith, but by concealing outward signs of wealth in the provision of such everyday foods as tea, bread, eggs, bacon and so on, the contradiction is apparently neutralised. The

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narrator’s tone in his final comment – ‘Such was the ordinary fare at Plumstead Episcopi’ (68) (as does his use in the next paragraph of the phrase ‘man shall not live by bread alone’) – indicates that he sees this irony and is encouraging the reader to do so. Yet it is not suggested that the archdeacon is a hypocritical Christian, nor is his way of life condemned: instead of exploiting the potentially tragic conflict between the spiritual and the material – as Hardy would do in Jude the Obscure – The Warden suggests that the archdeacon’s solution to the problem of being a Christian theologically committed to the spiritual yet inevitably part of the material world is a pragmatic one that sidesteps an irresolvable opposition which could lead to a tragic collision between conflicting claims. This contradiction between the archdeacon’s wealth and his theoretical commitment to a spiritual ideal, together with his way of overcoming or deflecting it, is also not merely an individual question but has wider implications for the Church in general and related institutions, since Churches habitually elevate the spiritual and condemn materialism while often being fabulously wealthy. In other words the novel has an allegorical dimension. What appears in the description of the breakfast room to be mere accumulation of realistic detail turns out to be allegorical, so that two seemingly opposed elements in fiction that logically are difficult to reconcile are accommodated. The advantage of allegory for realist fiction is that it enables it to transcend the artistic limitations of mere fact and accurate observation. It would be absurd, of course, to claim that The Warden is a full-blown allegory like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (although the latter may have exerted some influence): the ‘reality effect’- to use a phrase of Roland Barthes’ – comes first, but a less ostentatious form of allegory is also at work. Allegory is fairly obvious in the depiction of the main characters and widens their significance: John Bold is ‘the Barchester Brutus’ (51); the archdeacon is portrayed in language associated with the CounterReformation, ready ‘to take up his cudgel against all comers on behalf of the church militant’ (24); Eleanor Harding, in defending her father, Septimus Harding, is ‘quite worthy of Jephtha’s daughter or of Iphigenia either’ (92); and her father is associated with Agamemnon: ‘Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia’ (90). Carlyle and Dickens are allegorised for satirical purposes as Dr Pessimist Anticant and Mr Popular Sentiment. The inclusion of these satiric portraits is something else that breaks with the conventions of realism since allegorical satire is a form of discourse that would normally be seen as at odds with realism. One can understand the objections of Henry James, who pointed out the use of allegory in the novel, as at the time he wrote his major essay

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on Trollope in 1888 he was a critical foundationalist with regard to the theory of the novel. He objected to allegory and anything that undermined the realistic illusion that fiction creates: It is impossible to imagine what a novelist takes himself to be unless he regard himself as an historian and his narrative as a history . . . As a narrator of fictitious events he is nowhere; to insert into his attempt a back-bone of logic, he must relate events that are assumed to be real.

Allegory advertises fictionality and is thus as offensive to James as Trollope’s occasional confessions to the reader in both The Warden and Barchester Towers that his characters and story are fictional and thus completely under his control: [W]hen Trollope suddenly winks at us and reminds us that he is telling us an arbitrary thing, we are startled and shocked in quite the same way as if Macaulay or Motley were to drop the historic mask and intimate that William of Orange was a myth or the Duke of Alva an invention.4

James also objects to the names Trollope often gives his characters as undermining the credibility of the fiction: ‘A Mr Quiverful with fourteen children . . . is too difficult to believe in. We can believe in the name and we can believe in the children; but we cannot manage the combination.’5 But is James right that Trollope’s use of allegory, his playful use of names, his – ‘suicidal’ for James – breaking of the realistic illusion and admitting that he is writing a novel rather than reflecting reality – ‘How easily would [Eleanor] have forgiven and forgotten the archdeacon’s suspicions had she but heard the whole truth from Mr Arabin. But then, where would have been my novel?’ (Barchester Towers, Chap. 30) – all have the effect of undermining the credibility of the novel, as the reader will take the characters and situations less seriously than in fiction which ‘relate[s] events that are assumed to be real’? With regard to allegory Trollope’s hope, one may assume, is that in giving the realist novel an allegorical dimension, the novelist can gain the best of both worlds: powerful representation of situations and people that the reader can identify with reality, and also layers of meaning that go beyond the particularity of those characters and situations. A wider issue related to the postmodern is raised in relation to narrative in general by this implicit debate between Trollope and James. For James there is a discontinuity between narrative as history – the only way that he believes a novel’s representation of reality can be persuasive – and the rhetorical and poetic means necessarily employed in narrative as representation. By exposing the latter to the reader, as Trollope does, James believes historical credibility is lost. But since rhetoric and poetic tropes are intrinsic to narrative, do these not inevitably undermine any claim

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that fiction can represent reality neutrally and without significant distortion? James was not unaware of this. In his preface to Roderick Hudson of 1876 in which he famously commented that ‘universally, relations stop nowhere’, he went on to claim that in the novel they must nevertheless appear to stop: ‘the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so’.6 But whereas he takes the view that the novel should cover up this discontinuity, Trollope, at least in The Warden and Barchester Towers, playfully acknowledges it in the manner of Sterne and later writers associated with the postmodern. This difference between James and Trollope also anticipates debates between traditional historians and postmodern theory, since such historians have felt threatened by a theorist like Hayden White’s analysis of historical narrative in terms of rhetoric and poetics, which calls into question the very possibility of truthfully reflecting the world through neutral forms of representation.7 Such a conflict can lead to extreme positivism on the one side, which would claim that language and its modes of representation, whether in fiction or historical narrative, can truthfully reflect reality; and on the other to a scepticism about any such claim, based on the idea that no form of discourse can free itself from the linguistic and rhetorical. In The Warden and Barchester Towers, Trollope in effect refuses to engage with such a conflict by adopting the implicitly pragmatist position that there is no need either to accept one point of view or the other or even to look for some way of resolving them. In terms of the novel, readers can accept as realist representation narratives that employ allegory and various types of playfulness, and though historiography is inevitably mediated through language with its narrative devices and poetic tropes, this does not undermine its credibility. It merely suggests that as soon as events are narrated in historical writing, interpretation inevitably comes into play, which does not mean that events are not real or that all interpretations are equal. The conflict which is most central to The Warden and which creates a potentially tragic situation is a political one in which there is a power struggle between conservatism and radicalism and their irreconcilable philosophies, and language is a significant aspect of this conflict. The fundamental difference between the two opposed political positions is brought into relief by the will that John Hiram left during the Middle Ages setting up a charitable institution, Hiram’s Hospital, for the care of destitute working men in their old age. He also decreed that a residence should be built for a warden, to be appointed by the bishop, to look after the old men. Over time, however, the relation between the warden and the old men, or bedesmen, has altered. The bedesmen

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receive from the income generated by the property a specified amount of money per day to enable them to live sparingly, with the remainder of the income passing to the warden. Because the property has been developed and appreciated in value, while the bedesmen’s allowance remains at a fixed rate, the warden now receives a very considerable £800 a year. This situation allows Trollope to consider how social institutions are affected by time and change and what, if anything, should be done to enable them to adjust to new sets of circumstances. It is well known that Trollope based the story mainly on the St Cross affair, in which an almshouse for the poor, set up in the twelfth century, was the means by which its master or warden had enriched himself.8 What is striking about Trollope’s adaptation of it is that he shifts the focus from an abuse of privilege in the Anglican Church to a dispute in which there is no intentional abuse and both parties believe they have right on their side. Historical fact is shaped for artistic ends in order to create and dramatise a political and philosophical divide between left and right. Left-wing or radical thinking claims that all institutions should be subject to change and reform in order to adapt to modern conditions and serve the needs of the present or the future, while right-wing or conservative thinking believes that continuity with the past must be preserved with the minimum of change and that anomalies emerging over time should be tolerated in the interests of maintaining tradition. In Trollope’s day, of course, the left-wing position would have been identified with the Liberals or the Radicals and the right with the Conservatives or Tories, but clearly the division is much more fundamental than that and is perhaps at the core of all political conflict. At the extreme, both positions make foundationalist assumptions. In The Warden the Anglican Church establishment supports conservatism and its main spokesman is the archdeacon, Dr Grantly, while the main representatives of radicalism are John Bold and the London journalist, Tom Towers. Bold, we are informed, is ‘a strong reformer. His passion is the reform of all abuses; state abuses, church abuses, corporation abuses . . . abuses in medical practice, and general abuses in the world at large’ (10). The narrator also declares, emphasising his allegorical role, that ‘Bold has all the ardour, and all the self-assurance of a Danton, and hurls his anathemas against time-honoured practices with the violence of a French Jacobin.’ The archdeacon, Bold’s ideological adversary, is eager to oppose him but ‘he would do so on the distasteful [to Harding] ground of the Church’s infallibility’ (24). This connects him with a Catholic tradition of thought which is committed to authority, hierarchy and tradition and thus enlarges the significance of his views and his conflict with Bold.

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As Trollope himself is often seen as conservative in outlook, the tendency is to regard him as more strongly in sympathy with the position of the Church, even if critical of the archdeacon’s excessive zeal. He has been accused of a ‘failure to strike a balance between his two “evils” ’9 but the novel is not obliged to be even-handed, and lack of ‘balance’ should not prevent one noticing that its predominant interest is in exploring the roots of political conflict. It asks the question whether political conflict is inevitable, with the result that people must fall into one dominant political camp or another – must one be, as W. S. Gilbert put it in Iolanthe, ‘either a little Liberal,/ Or else a little Conservative’ – or whether one can escape the political by disinterestedly committing oneself to truth or justice in a supra-political sense. The novel suggests that though very few people actually have strong views, they are drawn into identifying with or supporting a particular viewpoint by those, like Bold or the archdeacon, who are committed to one side in the struggle and thus polarise opinion. Mr Harding, the warden of Hiram’s Hospital, is by nature a nonpolitical animal. He has no theoretical affiliation either to the conservative or to the radical position but becomes caught up in the conflict between Bold and the archdeacon inadvertently. If he chooses to remain as warden in the face of Bold’s attack on the institution, he will be seen as implicitly accepting the conservative position; whereas if he resigns he will be seen as implicitly accepting the radical standpoint of Bold. Harding’s daughter Eleanor is also drawn into the conflict and presents Bold, who wishes to marry her, with an ultimatum: if he does not withdraw his attack on her father’s position any relationship between them will be over. Although she does not see this as a political action, it effectively undermines Bold and strengthens the conservative standpoint. All sides in the dispute are subjected to critique by the narrator. Bold emerges as naive, as a man so committed to justice in the abstract that he fails to anticipate Eleanor’s response to what she sees as a personal attack. Bold’s description as ‘the Barchester Brutus’ who is given to ‘meditations on his own virtue’ (51), suggests that there is a Shakespearean aspect to the allegory. Shakespeare’s representation of Brutus as an idealist drawn into a conspiracy by men whose motives are much less pure than his may be seen as similar to the way in which Bold’s idealism is manipulated by the apparently unprincipled metropolitan journalist, Tom Towers. One of the postmodern features of the novel is its treatment of the law and what we would now call ‘the media’. Towers, leader-writer for the Jupiter (The Times), presents his attack on the wardenship of Hiram’s Hospital as a principled response to an outrageous abuse. He is not,

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however, a radical like Bold. While Bold’s motivation is political in the traditional sense, since he adheres to Enlightenment principles and ideas and tries to change the world by exposing what he sees as injustice or exploitation, Towers is committed not to political ideas in any direct sense but to rhetoric as an instrument of power: ‘He could speak out withering words, and no one could answer him . . . It is probable that Tom Towers considered himself the most powerful man in Europe’ (124– 5). In newspapers, language can become an independent force and take on a life of its own separate from its ostensive or communicative function. It is not apparent that Towers is a man who has strong beliefs or principles: he is defined by his role as a newspaperman and has little else in his life. Foundationalist Enlightenment principles become the mere vehicle for the rhetorical posturing of editorial comment: ‘On what foundation, moral or divine, traditional or legal, is grounded the warden’s claim to a large income for doing nothing?’ (59). As editor of a newspaper he has to sell copies and what sells in the world of newspapers is of course ‘a good story’. And one of the things that makes a good story is a black and white issue such as an outrageous injustice, and if the perpetrator of that injustice is a churchman supposedly committed to higher ideals such as the tenets of Christianity, so much the better. Such stories are preferred as they can be personalised and can allow the journalist to exploit rhetorical devices in order to have the maximum impact; and Carlyle and Dickens are satirised in the novel because their writings represent this performative power of language at its height and can be seen as the inspiration for the likes of Towers. But with Towers rhetoric is employed primarily as a means of personal power and to sell newspapers, for the abuse that is being exposed is clearly a minor one by virtually any standards, hardly worthy of thunderous editorials. Nevertheless it enables Towers to whip up indignation in his readers by inviting them to identify with his factitious outrage. The scandal as presented by him has no troublesome ambiguity that might render solutions problematic, and he has no interest in looking for complexities that would get in the way of his rhetoric and reduce its impact. In the discourse of newspapers there can be no commitment to ‘truth’ in any objective sense or even to disinterestedness, since inevitably they are secondary both to commercial considerations and to the exercise of power through manipulating opinion, and opinion is more easily manipulated by simple stories in which right and wrong seem clear cut. When Bold, chastened by Eleanor’s ultimatum that their relationship will end if attacks on her father continue, tries to stop these personal attacks on Harding in the Jupiter because of the pain it is causing him and his family, Towers falls back on the mantra of freedom of the press and

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shows no interest in knowing more about Harding than will serve his purposes. If Towers were to investigate the Harding situation more thoroughly it would inevitably reveal a more complicated situation than one in which a greedy clergyman has defrauded old men and grows wealthy at their expense, and the story would thus lose its force. Although the conservative position is not presented in such negative terms, the archdeacon is no more devoted to disinterestedness than his opponents. He is wedded to a philosophy of my Church right or wrong: ‘could he have his way, he would consign to darkness and perdition not only every individual reformer, but every committee and every commission that would even dare to ask a question respecting the appropriation of church revenues’ (14). Like the radicals, he has no interest in looking in detail at any particular case. There is also an obvious irony in the fact that a Christian should view his opponents in such an unchristian light. Military language and imagery are continually invoked: ‘he was quite willing to meet his enemy on any field, and with any weapon.’ Almost any means of achieving victory would for him be justified, whether or not it can be reconciled with the spirit of Christianity. When he puts on his robes, he becomes the personification of the position of the Church, though the novel shows that this role is not reconcilable with other aspects of his selfhood, which is revealed as in large part roleplaying. Arguing with his wife in his nightclothes he is quite a different person, and when alone he enjoys reading Rabelais though the text vanishes back into his desk if someone knocks at his door. Bold’s radical perspective is supported by the press; the archdeacon’s conservatism seeks the support of the law. Although the law is conventionally associated with the search for truth and justice, it too proves to be no more disinterested than the press; both seek power through language – the law by exploiting ambiguities and obscurities in documents such as wills in order to serve a particular set of interests. Towers and his legal equivalent, Sir Abraham Haphazard, are parallel characters. Signficantly Towers had been a lawyer before turning to journalism. Like Towers, Haphazard values little in his life apart from his profession: ‘He knew every one whom to know was an honour, but he was without a friend’ (150). When Harding asks Haphazard directly whether he as warden is ‘distinctly and legally entitled to the proceeds of the property, after the due maintenance of the twelve bedesmen’ (152), Haphazard finds the question incomprehensible. For him the law has nothing to do with truth in any intrinsic sense; rather it decides issues on the basis of legal technicalities. Thus the law can serve any interest that is willing to pay for its services. In the case of the wardenship, the law can enable the Church to win by devious ingenuity in the

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interpretation of documents, so that the law’s power over language will outflank the rhetoric of the press. From a foundationalist point of view it may be shocking that such institutions, ostensibly committed to truth and justice, do not transcend particularity or situatedness any more than the most self-interested elements of society. The novel, however, only satirises them gently as it implies that they are defined by their social role and function and could only be changed by a revolutionary restructuring of society and its institutions, something the novel clearly does not even contemplate. The novel’s perspective can thus be compared with the position taken by theorists associated with the postmodern, such as Stanley Fish: ‘For Fish, as for many other postmodern critics of law and literature . . . there are no essences, no final or founding truths, no absolute and unchanging values; all is contingency, rhetoric and historicity.’10 Harding simply wants to do what is right but he is a man caught between two opposed and irreconcilable political forces, one supported by the press, the other by the law. Whereas the radical and conservative views are ideological in that they identify a particular political perspective on the world with what is right, Harding seeks some concept of the right which is non-ideological, an equally foundationalist aspiration. Most readings of The Warden see Harding as its moral centre: The purest and most complex moral consciousness which we encounter is Mr Harding’s, and his sensibility, for which principle has the immediacy of feeling, is shaped by a life of devotion in a community of love.11

But underlying the novel’s treatment of him is the question of whether a perspective on truth free from ideology and the political is possible or even desirable. The core of the problem as to whether one can arrive at a concept of the right which is objective and non-ideological in its basis is presented by John Hiram’s will. Hiram could not have foreseen that his property would increase in value. For the radicals the will should therefore be reinterpreted because they believe Hiram would never have intended the warden to profit from it in the way that he has. As Towers puts it: it appears palpably clear that [the warden] can be entitled to no portion of the revenue of the hospital, excepting that which the founder set apart for him; and it is equally clear that the founder did not intend that three fifths of his charity should be so consumed. (111)

But the archdeacon also appeals to intention in attacking the radicals’ claim that the revenue should be divided equally among the bedesmen: ‘Do you think John Hiram intended to give a hundred a year to old single men, who earned perhaps two shillings or half a crown a day for

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themselves and families in the best of their time?’ (43). Appealing to John Hiram’s intention is pointless in the present situation as Hiram’s intention is only accessible through the words of the will, and these words now exist in a context that has changed drastically since they were written. The meaning of the will becomes undecidable and attempts at interpretation of it inevitably become mired in ideology. Harding, in demanding to know what is the right thing to do, asks a question that is unanswerable. His desire that ‘he might stand justified before the world’ (73) cannot be fulfilled since he lacks solid ground on which he can stand. Whether he remains in post or resigns any decision he makes will inevitably be seen in political terms despite his wish to transcend the political. Faced with this dilemma, he endeavours to escape, aligning himself with neither one side nor the other. Although he gives up his former income, he does not express support for the view that the money from the estate should therefore be divided among the bedesmen. Harding’s resignation as warden is motivated by a desire to escape the conflict and find solace in living a secluded life with his daughter: That he could leave Sir Abraham, and the archdeacon, and Bold, and the rest of them with their lawsuit among them, and wipe his hands altogether of so sorrow-stirring a concern. Ah, what happiness might there be in the distance, with Eleanor and him in some small cottage, and nothing left of their former grandeur but their music! Yes, they would walk forth with their music books, and their instruments, and shaking the dust from off their feet as they went, leave the ungrateful place. (87)

Critics have claimed that this is a positive and admirable act on Harding’s part: ‘Though the idyllic society of the Hospital is thus destroyed, the sympathy of father and daughter creates a perfect community in miniature’;12 ‘By resigning quietly when he does not have to . . . he gains selfrespect and asserts the integrity of his conscience.’13 But is there not a Shakespearean allusion? Harding in escaping from the fray into a world of music can be seen as a comic version of King Lear in his fantasy that he and Cordelia might find prison a desirable alternative to a chaotic world after defeat in battle: ‘We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage’ (V, iii). Lear desires to escape with Cordelia from the reality of power and politics through physical and mental withdrawal, but discovers that such escape is impossible. Is this the case also with Harding? It has been claimed that Harding is Christ-like at this point and that Christian overtones in the text support such a reading: ‘the warden seems almost to have redeemed a world which rejects him. Certainly he is himself transfigured. As he offers wine to his twelve bedesmen and bids them farewell, the eucharistic overtones seem unmistakable.’14 Although

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one can agree that Harding aspires to live in accordance with Christian ideals, can ordinary mortals ever be sufficiently Christ-like to transcend human desire, self-interest and political choice? The allegorical dimension of the novel should rather warn us that no person can emulate Christ, who had the advantage of being the son of God. Harding’s overriding desire to do what is right is viewed with a certain irony. His own peace of mind becomes the major factor when he fails to discover what is the right thing to do in absolute terms, but the practical effect of his action is also made clear. The consequence of his withdrawal is that Hiram’s Hospital falls into decay and the bedesmen are worse off than before: the wardenship remains unfilled; six of the bedesmen die, possibly before their time; dissension spoils the lives of the survivors; the property becomes ‘disordered and ugly’, and the warden’s garden is ‘a wretched wilderness’ (182–3). Although Harding does not desert the bedesmen, all he can provide since he is no longer on hand as warden is ‘the occasional kindness of a stranger’ – hardly Christ-like. Is this not a tragic outcome both for the individual bedesmen and for the charity set up by John Hiram? Harding cannot be blamed for believing his only option was to give up the wardenship given the intolerable strain he was under, and it is the bishop’s decision to leave the position vacant, but he has nevertheless created a worse situation for Hiram’s Hospital, even if he had no intention of doing so. The imagery associated with the warden’s garden after Harding’s departure – decay, disorder, wilderness – strongly suggests a fallen world and this is not unexpected given the allegorical tendency of the novel. But in what might be called Trollope’s version of the Fall it is difficult to find any equivalent to Satan. Everyone is responsible for it to some degree but no one is really guilty – apart from the press, and even then it is suggested that its need to appeal to readers and generate sales will inevitably lead it to present grey issues as black and white. One can understand and even respect the competing principles which lead the reformers, the conservatives and Harding himself to act in the ways they do; even the bedesmen’s succumbing to greed is understandable. But indisputably things have turned out disastrously for Hiram’s Hospital and its occupants. Does the novel, or its narrator, suggest any means by which this tragic outcome could have been avoided? The conventional view that the narrator in nineteenth-century fiction is ‘omniscient’ needs to be modified in relation to Trollope. Since Trollope always makes it clear to the reader that the narrator is a novelist, the ‘omniscience’ of the narrator is not god-like, but rather a function of his role as a novelist who is allowed to penetrate the minds of his characters, range backwards and forwards in time, and so on. To suggest that the narrator is all-powerful would be as problematic for

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Trollope as making Harding Christ-like, since both involve elevating the human to the superhuman. Trollope’s narrator is, one might say, antifoundationalist in conception, continually referring to himself in the first person and emphasising his humanness rather than god-like qualities. And if all human action is implicated in the political, then this must apply to the narrator also. The criticism that Trollope fails ‘to strike a balance between his two “evils” ’ and thus favours the Church’s position is not reasonable since strict political impartiality is impossible. Even if the narrator is taken to favour the Church’s conservatism rather than the position of the reformers, this does not mean that the novel is necessarily written from a conservative perspective. In a different dispute between radicals and conservatives, it is conceivable that the radical side might have been preferred. Although the term would not have been available to Trollope, The Warden’s position is essentially pragmatist in the sense favoured by Rorty and Fish: it does not matter that one cannot transcend the political as long as one avoids becoming trapped within a fixed set of political principles. What is important is not abstract principle but the likely consequences of given actions, their practical effect. The conservative doctrine in which tradition is sacrosanct and compromise with a changing world is always to be resisted; the radical belief that present needs and standards should always override the past; the individual’s desire to act on pure moral principle: all have undesirable effects in this case. Hiram’s Hospital, a valuable social institution, is ruined by the adopting of foundationalist positions, and the formerly comfortable and contented lives of the old men are destroyed. None of the parties to the dispute seems concerned about this; even Harding at the end of the novel expresses no strong sense of regret. It is only the narrator who recognises the dispute’s disastrous effects. Since all of the parties within the novel feel they are justified in their actions and that they have nothing to reproach themselves for, they are unable to see how things could have turned out differently. Trollope, when standing for Parliament himself in 1868, described his political position as that of ‘an advanced Conservative-Liberal’.15 On the face of it this seems rather absurd but a pragmatic impulse underlies this description. Instead of identifying with a set of principles which are wholly liberal or wholly conservative one chooses whatever principles are likely to lead to effective action in a particular set of circumstances. In the case of Hiram’s Hospital, it is clear that adopting a conservative philosophy would have been better. Although this creates an anomaly in terms of John Hiram’s will, since he plainly had no intention of enriching the warden, one should bear in mind the effect of removing that anomaly. Enriching the bedesmen by dividing the income from the property among

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them would only create another anomaly. In terms of the letter of the will, the matter is irresolvable, and appeals to John Hiram’s original intention are not helpful. A solution might have been for the warden to admit that his position was anomalous and to have donated a significant portion of his income to charity, but in the heated political atmosphere none of the parties thinks in such pragmatic terms. Harding himself, while he is warden and before John Bold launches his attack, approaches the wardenship in a pragmatic spirit, though unconsciously. Hiram’s will had decreed that twelve wool-carders were to be given refuge, but because wool-carding no longer exists as a trade in Barchester, the Church chose to accommodate retired workers in a more general sense; the money the men receive is increased from sixpence a day, as originally determined, to one and fourpence a day. But when Harding decides on a further increase the archdeacon disapproves: to introduce too much change might compromise the Church’s traditionalist position by suggesting that it is right for institutions constantly to adjust to the needs of the present. But although Harding’s basic impulse with regard to the running of Hiram’s Hospital is pragmatic, as soon as he is drawn into the political dispute, his thinking reverts to the search for the right in absolute terms, and when that proves elusive he feels his only option is to withdraw from the fray altogether. Only the narrator is able intellectually to escape the drive for absolutes, pointing out that ‘in this world no good is unalloyed, and that there is but little evil that has not in it some seed of what is goodly’ (127). In a world without absolutes, in which no one can transcend egotism, historicity and political choice, only a philosophy in which action is conceived in instrumentalist terms can offer any hope. Trollope’s refusal to embrace the tragic can be seen as a weakness when he is compared to Victorian contemporaries such as Dickens, Eliot and Hardy. The postmodern has been accused by Terry Eagleton of evading any confrontation with the tragic: ‘there is no postmodern tragedy to speak of.’16 But as I have argued above, this resistance to the tragic that one finds in Trollope as well as in postmodern thinking is not necessarily a lack or an evasion but a principled opposition that can be linked with pragmatism in a Rortian sense. The anti-tragic as manifested in Trollope is different from that of middle-period Ibsen or Shaw as theirs is not based on pragmatism but on a desire to change either the world or the dominant belief system. No such idealism or attraction to utopian aspiration emerges in Trollope’s fiction. Rather it suggests that competing interests can only be resolved by compromise, that people should learn to live with or accept imperfection or contingency, and attempt to moderate their negative effects where possible without

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worrying too much about whether one’s actions derive from a logically coherent or consistent set of principles, since these would inevitably be difficult to reconcile with the muddled and messy circumstances that arise in the world. Thus a more pragmatic approach to what is the ‘true’ or the ‘good’ is required. Rorty’s characterisation of the pragmatist is perhaps particularly appropriate for Trollope: Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the True or the Good, or to define the word ‘true’ or ‘good’, supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area . . . When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that ‘there is no such thing’ as Truth and Goodness. Nor do they have a ‘relativistic’ or subjectivist’ theory of Truth and Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject.17

Notes 1. In his book What’s Wrong With Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (1990, New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf), Christopher Norris relates Fish and Rorty to ‘the postmodern-pragmatist malaise (Baudrillard, Fish, Rorty, some aspects of Lyotard)’ (p. 5), and discusses Fish at length and Rorty in various chapters. Rorty is also central to Norris’ chapter, ‘Getting at Truth: Genealogy, Critique and Postmodern Scepticism’ in his book, The Truth About Postmodernism (1993, Oxford: Blackwell). See especially pp. 278–85. 2. See Patricia Waugh (1992), Practising Postmodernism: Reading Modernism, London, Edward Arnold, p. 3: ‘Postmodernism as an aesthetic and body of thought can be seen as a late-flowering Romanticism.’ 3. Anthony Trollope (1984), The Warden, ed. Robin Gilmour, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 67. Page numbers will henceforth be incorporated in the text. 4. Henry James (1969), ‘Anthony Trollope’, in Donald Smalley (ed.), in Trollope: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. 536. James points to allegory only in relation to the archdeacon’s three sons and does not state, as I argue, that the novel as a whole can be read allegorically, although the particular example he comments on is clearly characteristic of Trollope’s general method in this novel. 5. Ibid., p. 535. 6. Preface to Roderick Hudson (1980), Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. xli. Emphasis in original. 7. See Hayden White (1973), Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 8. See Gilmour’s introduction to his edition, pp. xiv–xxi. 9. P. D. Edwards (1978), Anthony Trollope: His Art and Scope, Sussex: Harvester, p. 15.

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10. Steven Connor (2001), Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 66–7. 11. Sherman Hawkins, ‘Mr Harding’s Church Music’, in Anthony Trollope’s ‘Barchester Towers’ and ‘The Warden’, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), p. 25. 12. Ibid., p. 18. 13. R. M. Polhemus (1983), ‘Changing England: Problems, Compromise and Comic Possibilities’, in T. Bareham (ed.), The Barsetshire Novels: A Selection of Critical Essays, London: Macmillan, pp. 138–9. 14. Hawkins, p. 21. 15. See Anthony Trollope (1946), An Autobiography, London: Williams and Norgate, p. 259. 16. Terry Eagleton (2003), Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 287. 17. Richard Rorty (1982), Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972–1980), Brighton: Harvester, p. xiv.

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Index

Achebe, Chinua, 88 Aeschylus, 43 Oresteia, 43 Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 117 Archer, William, 100 Aristotle, 2, 6, 15, 17, 23, 36, 37, 44, 110 Poetics, 1, 9, 63, 72 Bardach, Emilie, 109 Barnett, Sylvan, 22 Barthes, Roland, 162, 163 Baudrillard, Jean, 175n Beckett, Samuel, 7, 144–7, 148, 149 Endgame, 146, 148 Waiting for Godot, 145–7, 148 Bismarck, Otto von, 138 Blake, William, 21 Bogard, Travis, 120n Bolt, Robert, 38, 39, 40 A Man for All Seasons, 38–43 Bradley, A. C., 2 Brecht, Bertolt, 36–8, 39, 42 Mother Courage, 37–8, 39 Bridgwater Patrick, 50n Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre, 130 Brustein, Robert, 22 Bunyan, John, 163 The Pilgrim’s Progress, 163 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 133 Cain, 133 Childe Harold, 33 Cain, T. G. S., 82 Calder, John, 147 Camus, Albert, 144 The Myth of Sisyphus, 144

Carlyle, Thomas, 132, 163, 168 Chekhov, Anton, 51–61, 149 The Cherry Orchard, 57, 61 A Dull Story, 53, 55 Ivanov, 52, 55–6 ‘Lady with the Dog’, 57–61 Three Sisters, 52, 56–7, 58–9 Uncle Vanya, 53 Ward Six, 53–4, 55 Cohn, Ruby, 145, 158n Connor, Steven, 170 Conrad, Joseph, 6, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94, 98, 122, 123–4 Heart of Darkness, 88–94, 97, 124, 125, 130, 131, 132, 134–5 Cunninghame Graham, R. B., 87, 88 Danton, Georges, 166 Darwin, Charles, 6, 21, 64–9, 72, 73, 74, 75, 79, 80, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 94, 98, 121–2 The Descent of Man, 89 The Origin of Species, 68, 69, 97 Derrida, Jacques, 3–5 Dickens, Charles, 163, 168, 174 Eagleton, Terry, 6, 8n, 90, 95n, 174 Edwards, P. D., 167 Eliot, George, 2, 69–72, 84, 174 Daniel Deronda, 71–2 Felix Holt, 70 The Mill on the Floss, 69–71 Romola, 69 The Spanish Gypsy, 70 Eliot, T. S., 121 Esslin, Martin, 144, 148, 149, 155, 158n

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Euripides, 98 The Bacchae, 2 Hyppolytus, 2 Medea, 3, 22, 43

Kaufmann, Walter, 1, 147 Kettle, Arnold, 65 King, Jeanette, 94n Kramer, Dale, 94n

Fielden, John, 23 Fish, Stanley, 159, 170, 175n Freud, Sigmund, 118, 122, 123, 124, 126 Civilization and Its Discontents, 122

Laing, R. D., 149, 151 Knots, 149 Self and Others, 149–50 Lamarck, J. B., 21, 22, 65 Lawrence, D. H., 7, 83, 84, 119, 121–42 ‘The Crown’, 123, 139, 140, 141 Fantasia of the Unconscious, 123, 124, 141 The Rainbow, 123–31 Study of Thomas Hardy, 123, 126, 127, 131 Women in Love, 123, 131–42 Leavis, F. R., 83, 84 Little, J. P., 145 Livingstone, David, 93, 94 Lodge, Charles, 65 Lyotard, J-F., 175n

Gilbert, W. S., 167 Iolanthe, 167 Gilmour, Robin, 175n Goethe, J. W. von, 141 Gosse, Edmund, 78 Haeckel, Ernst, 65 Haggard, Rider, 39 Hardy, Thomas, 6, 63–70, 83, 84, 88, 98, 145, 163, 174 Jude the Obscure, 65–8, 69, 72–5, 76–80, 163 The Mayor of Casterbridge, 70 Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 66, 69, 75–6, 77, 79 Hawkins, Sherman, 170, 171 Hebbel, Friedrich, 10 Hegel, G. W. F., 2, 4, 5, 6, 7n, 10, 23, 29, 39, 70 Heine, Heinrich, 141 Ibsen, Henrik, 6, 9, 10, 12, 21, 22, 25, 36, 37, 42, 44, 46, 51, 53, 63, 67, 99, 100, 117, 118, 150, 174 Brand, 10, 33 A Doll’s House, 9, 18, 20n, 21, 84, 114 An Enemy of the People, 44 Ghosts, 9, 10, 13–20, 21, 25, 43, 55, 67, 84, 111, 115 Hedda Gabler, 117–19 The Master Builder, 99–109, 110, 117, 119 Ionesco, Eugène, 144, 148 James, Henry, 163–5, 175n Roderick Hudson, 165 Joyce, James, 121, 122, 160 Finnegans Wake, 160 Ulysses, 122

Macaulay, T. B., 164 McCarthy, Mary, 82 Machiavelli, N., 114 McKay, Brenda, 96n Mahler, Gustav, 89 Mann, Thomas, 21 Martz, Louis, 24 Marx, Karl, 36–7 Miller, Arthur, 43–4, 48 Death of a Salesman, 43–9 Morgan, J. P., 48 Morgan, Margery M., 49 Motley, J. L., 164 Napoleon, 138 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 7, 43, 94, 97–100, 104, 105–9, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 119, 121–6, 128, 131, 133, 135–42, 147 The Birth of Tragedy, 97–8, 108, 124 The Gay Science, 126 Human All-Too-Human, 141 On the Genealogy of Morals, 105–7, 110–11, 113, 115 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 117 The Will to Power, 135–42 Norris, Christopher, 175n Novalis, 69, 70

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Index O’Neill, Eugene, 43, 48, 49, 110 The Iceman Cometh, 43, 47–8 Mourning Becomes Electra, 43 Pinter, Harold, 148 The Caretaker, 7, 148, 149–57 Plato, 1 Polhemus, R. M., 171 Poole, Adrian, 2 Pound, Ezra, 160 The Cantos, 160 Praz, Mario, 142 Pushkin, Alexander, 54 Rabelais, François, 169 Racine, Jean, 51, 52, 53 Andromaque, 51–2, 53 Rée, Paul, 117 Roberts, A. M., 88, 89–90 Rorty, Richard, 159, 174, 175, 175n Sade, Marquis de, 133 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 40, 157 Schelling, Friedrich, 2 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 6, 52, 57, 61, 63–4, 69, 72, 74, 75, 80, 81, 83, 84, 87, 88, 94, 97, 98, 110, 121, 122, 142, 147 Shakespeare, William, 1, 2, 5, 6, 70, 112, 147, 171 Hamlet, 4, 5, 43, 51, 53, 55–6, 70 King Lear, 3, 22, 171 Macbeth, 43, 79 The Merchant of Venice, 112 Othello, 3, 53, 112, 113 The Winter’s Tale, 112 Shaw, Bernard, 6, 21–2, 36, 37, 42, 44, 46, 51, 63, 65, 174 Arms and the Man, 33–6 The Devil’s Disciple, 29–33 Mrs Warren’s Profession, 22 The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 22 Saint Joan, 22–9, 39 Shelley, P. B., 21

179

Socrates, 97, 98 Solomon, Stanley J., 2 Sophocles, 2, 6, 11. 18, 36, 37, 46, 48, 51, 53, 68 Antigone, 2, 4, 22, 24–5, 26, 32, 34, 39, 40, 41, 42, Oedipus the King, 1, 4, 5, 9, 11–19, 25, 26, 37, 47, 68, 73 Speidel, E., 37 Spencer, Herbert, 64, 121 Stanley, H. M., 94 Steiner, George, 5, 9, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20n, 22, 38, 51, 63, 80 Sterne, Laurence, 160 Tristram Shandy, 160 Storm, William, 3, 30 Strindberg, Auguste, 109–10, 128, 135 The Father, 110–16, 119 Szondi, Peter, 2, 3, 4 Taxidou, Olga, 7n Thomas, David, 20n Tolstoy, Leo, 6, 54, 57, 60, 80, 87, 98 Anna Karenina, 60, 61, 80–7 Trollope, Anthony, 160 Barchester Towers, 160, 165 The Warden, 7, 160–75 Troyat, Henri, 80, 81 Turco, Alfred, 28 Valency, Maurice, 23, 33 Wagner, Richard, 133 Der Ring des Nibelungen, 133–4 Waugh, Patricia, 175 White, Hayden, 165 Whitman, Robert F., 27 Wilde, Oscar, 33 Williams, Raymond, 18, 38, 80, 85 Wilson, Edmund, 22 Wisenthal, J. L., 28, 29 Woodbridge, Homer E., 22 Woolf, Virginia, 121, 122 Yeats, W. B., 125

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