ABSTRACT
The subject matter of this book is tragic literature in the Western tradition, approached from an analytic perspective and with a particular argumentative project in view. My general contention is that tragic literature offers, or purports to offer, to a much greater extent than has been appreciated, redress (equivalently: compensation) for suffering. The sorts of redress that I am concerned with are two: moral and linguistic. In Part I of the book I argue that tragic literature represents suffering as incurred by culpable agent error, in particular by cognitive failure, and so as deserved, to a much greater extent than has been recognized by critics, especially in recent decades. We normally think of redress as operative in one temporal direction only—so that the compensating event comes after what is compensated—but the sheer idea of balancing one thing with another is temporally neutral, and it is important to my argument that redress can precede what is redressed. Undeserved suffering does occur in the tragic corpus, but I argue that the suffering of protagonists is not treated by the tragic tradition as being of this kind, and that undeserved suffering is largely restricted in that tradition to figures that are not the protagonists of their stories, or are even not agents in the full Aristotelian sense. In Part II of the book I argue that, in cases both of deserved and of undeserved suffering, suffering is subject to a kind of linguistic redress, in the sense that its sheer expressibility brings it under our control, places it for us emotionally and intellectually, and in a certain measure celebrates it. By way of arguing for this latter thesis, it is an important part of my project to show that pain, loss, and suffering are indeed expressible in language; for this has often been denied.
The Introduction discusses definitional matters, and there I take a large view of my subject matter, so that I include under the rubric of ‘tragedy’ much more than tragic stage drama. There is, I suggest here (and argue in the course of the book), such a thing as a ‘tragic tradition’, stretching from Homer to (at least) Hardy and Mann, and there are fundamental characteristics of tragic literature that cross temporal, cultural, and generic boundaries.
