Tragedy

The main source of tragedy in Antigone is neither character death nor postwar Thebes, as most would assume. The play's most tragic aspect lies with the inability of the main characters -- Antigone and Creon -- to listen to each other despite logic or reason. Trapped in their own natures, they make bad decisions and are unable to depart from them. They know all along that those decisions will end in death (or in Creon's case, something worse), and the audience must watch them on their downward spiral. The characters act as others expect them to, and are caught in that obligation, afraid to move out of that box.

Example: Antigone is trying too hard to defy everyone's expectations of her. She tries too hard to present herself to others as a martyr, but she ends up falling short.
Example deux: Creon feels very obligated to fulfill his role as a resolute ruler, and to have his people keep thinking of that way. Because of this, he goes with his decision to keep the body unburied, even when the decision starts looking destructive. In the end, it brings about the death of his family.

When I first read the play before arriving at Philosophical Stages, I thought it was hilarious -- and so did Plato (ask Jason, slippage between comedy and tragedy). You can make these tragic, grandiose events human through the "downward spiral" concept. Everyone has made bad decisions, right?

Tragedy & Comedy

• Enormous stakes (even if in Comedy something starts mundanely)
• Characters are resolute in their choices
• People often make terrible choices

The difference: in Comedy, the choices do not lead to pain that the audience can sympathize with.

"[Tragedy] being a development of the Satyr play, it was quite late before tragedy rose from short plots and comic diction to its full dignity, and that the iambic metre was used instead of the trochaic tetrameter." - The Poetics, Aristotle
(They used iambic pentameter instead because it was more suited for speaking. Trochaic tetrameter was suited for singing and dancing).

"[Comedy] consists in some blunder or ugliness that does not cause pain or disaster, an obvious example being the comic mask which is ugly and distorted but not painful." - The Poetics, Aristotle

"The hero must not deserve his misfortune, but he must cause it by making a fatal mistake, an error of judgement. . ." - The Poetics, Aristotle

When I first read the play Antigone, I thought it was hilarious. No, I am not a sadist; the amount of drama in the play simply struck me as funny. Coming into Philosophical Stages, I felt like that awkward person in the movie theater who laughs during a scene of dramatic tension. As it turns out, Plato might have been laughing with me. In the Symposium, he had said, "the same man could have the knowledge required for writing comedy and tragedy—that the fully skilled tragedian could be a comedian as well." Although the concept may seem odd, tragedy and comedy tend to have a lot in common: the characters are resolute in their objectives and choices; those choices are often terrible; and the stakes are enormous. Consider a comedy sketch in which two characters fight over a cup of coffee: the situation is mundane, but the characters will often treat it as a battle to the death.

There is historical evidence that Greek tragedy actually arose from the Satyr play. The Satyr play was characterized by a short plot and comic diction, and the use of the trochaic tetrameter -- a meter suited for singing and dancing. Like tragedy, Satyr plays were based off of Greek mythology.

However, something very important separates tragedy from comedy. In comedy, we do not often sympathize for the characters. They may bring awful things upon themselves, but all we do is laugh. Aristotle recognized this same idea in his work, the Poetics. He said, "[Comedy] consists in some blunder or ugliness that does not cause pain or disaster, an obvious example being the comic mask which is ugly and distorted but not painful." In tragedy, on the other hand, characters experience immense pain that is supposed to illicit sympathy from the audience. Keeping this in mind, I was caught in a dilemma: I hadn't been sympathetic to the characters in Antigone--far from it. That's what had made it funny to me. How could I relate to them? They deal with issues I hope to never encounter in my lifetime. How could I bring their grand plights down to my level of understanding?

The answer, I found, is in what makes them most human: their mistakes. Commenting on the tragic character, Aristotle said, "The hero must not deserve his misfortune, but he must cause it by making a fatal mistake, an error of judgment." Tragic characters are never completely evil, and yet they are never completely good; they always have some fatal flaw.

Creon and Antigone may be powerful characters, but they share a fatal flaw I'm sure all of us can recognize: their inability to listen. From the moment Antigone hits the stage, it is clear that she is headstrong and resolute in her opinions. Set in her quest to become a martyr, she listens to neither Ismene's warnings nor Creon's threats. As Creon speaks of her crime, she says, "Your words disgust me, I hope they always will." Her statement makes it clear that even if Creon began reasoning with her, she would stubbornly stay disgusted. Why? Simply because he is Creon. In the play's end, Antigone neither stays alive nor becomes a martyr -- she simply dies, just like any other human being.

Creon counters her character with an equal amount of stubborness. Because he desperately wants Thebes to view him as a strong leader, he upholds his decree in spite of logic, reason and even love for his son. He insists, "If [Antigone is] not punished for taking the upper hand, then I am not a man." When he sentences his neice to death, he does so not in the interest of justice, but in the interest of making a point and preserving his dominance. From that point on, Creon seems incapable of making commands based on reason. His son becomes a victim of such tyrannical behavior, and his guilt leaves a mark on his life forever.

Antigone and Creon chose their paths, and they were bound to them until the very end. One could say they were trapped in their own natures. Perhaps the pair knew that their choices would lead them to death and worse, but in their need to be viewed a certain way, they could not act differently than they did. Antigone herself says, ". . . I chose death." And there was no going back.

Ultimately, the play Antigone is not about death or war. It is about having the wisdom to listen to others. We all have a potentially tragic fatal flaw, and it can be anything, anything at all. Yet, our fate is not decided by that flaw; it is decided by whether we control it, or whether we let it control us. After all, "the mind that is most rigid stumbles soonest."

So next time you come across some other melodramatic Greek play, try not to laugh. Think beyond the death, the murder and the betrayal. If you look hard enough, the larger-than-life characters are worried about the same things that concern us real people.

Posted at Jul 16/2007 11:11AM:
Jason: Interesting. From the end of Plato's Symposium:
"He awoke towards dawn, as the cocks were crowing; and immediately he saw that all the company were either sleeping or gone, except Agathon, Aristophanes, and Socrates, who alone remained awake and were drinking out of a large vessel, from left to right; and Socrates was arguing with them. As to most of the talk, Aristodemus had no recollection, 223d for he had missed the beginning and was also rather drowsy; but the substance of it was, he said, that Socrates was driving them to the admission that the same man could have the knowledge required for writing comedy and tragedy—that the fully skilled tragedian could be a comedian as well."

Posted at Jul 16/2007 11:36AM:
Jason: Aristotle's Poetics:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0056%3Asection%3D1449a

Posted at Jul 19/2007 09:50AM:
Jason: One more thing: remember the vase paintings in which we can compare tragic actors and (comic) satyrs in the same tableaux, performing the same actions with the same props! These two paintings can be your images for your talk.

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Posted at Jul 19/2007 11:48AM:
Jason: On the satyr play: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyr_play

Posted at Jul 24/2007 01:46AM:
Jason: Hi Maya. It's getting there.

In the second paragraph you might mention the images (attached above) in which we found satyrs and human (tragic?) actors engaged in the very same activities. This would support the distinctions you make between comedy and tragedy.

Aristotle had a lot to say about mistakes (hamartia) in his Poetics, if you want to flesh out that aspect.

Specific evidence of being "trapped in their own natures" would help; for example, at v. 523 she says, "I cannot side with hatred. My nature sides with love." You can no doubt find a better quotation.

In general, be sure to back up your claims about the play with as many quotations as you've used from Plato and Aristotle.

By the end of your essay is the comparison with comedy over?

See you tomorrow.

Posted at Jul 24/2007 01:31PM:
Jason: Hi Maya. If you want to read more about flaws in tragedy, see Aristotle here:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0056:section=1453a

Which I excerpt here:

1453a [1] Nor again the passing of a thoroughly bad man from good fortune to bad fortune. Such a structure might satisfy our feelings but it arouses neither pity nor fear, the one being for the man who does not deserve his misfortune and the other for the man who is like ourselves—pity for the undeserved misfortune, fear for the man like ourselves—so that the result will arouse neither pity nor fear. There remains then the mean between these. This is the sort of man who is not pre-eminently virtous and just, and yet it is through no badness or villainy of his own that he falls into the fortune, but rather through some flaw in him,1 he being one of those who are in high station and good fortune, like Oedipus and Thyestes and the famous men of such families as those. The successful plot must then have a single2 and not, as some say, a double issue; and the change must be not to good fortune from bad but, on the contrary, from good to bad fortune, and it must not be due to villainy but to some great flaw in such a man as we have described, or of one who is better rather than worse. This can be seen also in actual practice. For at first poets accepted any plots, but to-day the best tragedies are written about a few families— [20] Alcmaeon for instance and Oedipus and Orestes and Meleager and Thyestes and Telephus and all the others whom it befell to suffer or inflict terrible disasters.

Judged then by the theory of the art, the best3 tragedy is of this construction. Those critics are therefore wrong who charge Euripides with doing this in his tragedies, and say that many of his end in misfortune. That is, as we have shown, correct. And there is very good evidence of this, for on the stage and in competitions such plays appear the most tragic of all, if they are successful, and even if Euripides is in other respects a bad manager,4 yet he is certainly the most tragic of the poets.

Next in order comes the structure which some put first, that which has a double issue, like the Odyssey, and ends in opposite ways for the good characters and the bad. It is the sentimentality of the audience which makes this seem the best form; for the poets follow the wish of the spectators. But this is not the true tragic pleasure but rather characteristic of comedy, where those who are bitter enemies in the story, Orestes and Aegisthus, for instance, go off at the end, having made friends, and nobody kills anybody.

Note that "whether Aristotle regards the “flaw” as intellectual or moral has been hotly discussed. It may cover both senses. The hero must not deserve his misfortune, but he must cause it by making a fatal mistake, an error of judgement, which may well involve some imperfection of character but not such as to make us regard him as “morally responsible” for the disasters although they are nevertheless the consequences of the flaw in him, and his wrong decision at a crisis is the inevitable outcome of his character（cf. Aristot. Poet. 6.24.）."

Posted at Jul 25/2007 12:20AM:
maya: Thank you so much, Jason!