TRAGEDY

Noted literary scholar Eagleton limns the literary genre of tragedy, “an aristocrat among art-forms.”

The author is among the most influential Marxist students of literature, and though he is by no means doctrinaire, he does locate the political dimension in tragedy, which, he holds, “began life as a political institution,” a vehicle by which the ancient Greek polis asserted and reinforced its values. The old joke that comedy is what happens when you fall down a staircase, while tragedy is what happens when I fall down that same staircase, doesn’t quite land with Eagleton, who finds much more serious elements in the transformation of tragedy into a kind of anti-politics, now a sort of repudiation of the workaday world in favor of something more elemental and exalted. Still, the old models hold: Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus affirmed the creation of a political institution while the Oresteia commemorated the transition of the polis from a vendetta-based system of justice to an actual legal system. Eagleton can be snippy about some of the figures that appear in his analysis, such as the principal actor of the New Testament. “There is nothing in the least noble or edifying about the squalid death of its low-life protagonist,” he writes, “a death traditionally reserved by the Roman imperial power for political insurgents.” Jesus as low-life is a curious formulation. Similarly, Eagleton rejects some of the noncathartic events that are commonly pegged as “tragic” today, such as the Holocaust. He links the tragic movement as a manifestation of free will: Jesus, whom he later elevates from his former scorn, did not have to appear at Golgotha to take his place on the cross, and neither did Agamemnon have to slay Iphigenia. The clash between “fate and freedom,” as he puts it, is really an argument between different ideas of freedom and a reminder that though we may be free, we are not always in charge of our lives.

An accessible, provocative, and philosophically rich view of a primal literary expression.