ABSTRACT
This chapter starts by revisiting the thesis that, at least in the case of protagonists, catastrophe is precipitated by avoidable errors, usually of a cognitive nature, and that the role of the gods, where present, subserves rather than undermines this naturalistic agenda. This makes tragedy—contra Nietzsche and Steiner—an essentially rationalistic genre. Tragic catastrophe is precipitated by error, usually of a cognitive cast, and by free actions; but freely performed mistakes based on cognitive failure are corrigible. So far from destroying tragedy, Socratic confidence in the comprehensibility of the world lies at the very base of tragic literature. In his early works, Steiner argued that only what he calls ‘absolute tragedy’, in which the suffering incurred is undeserved, counts as genuine tragedy, though he has since modified his position. But he mislocates where undeserved suffering occurs in tragedy: it does not befall protagonists, but relatively minor characters and figures whose entitlement to agency is dubious. A striking illustration of the claim that undeserved suffering primarily affects figures that are not agents in the full Aristotelian sense is afforded by the animals who are plague victims in Virgil’s third Georgic, and whose sufferings are described in unmistakeably anthropomorphic and tragic terms. Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites is also a telling case in this regard: most of the nuns are innocent victims of the Terror, but the figure on whom the opera focuses, and whom it makes its protagonist, namely Blanche, is compromised and rendered ambivalent, in accordance with what I am calling the standard model. The chapter, and this part, ends by supporting Bradley’s view that tragedy reveals the workings of the moral order, in the sense that tragic heroes and heroines are shown acting freely, and incurring punishment through their own (usually cognitive) shortcomings.
