Qué es una tragedia y cómo identificarla e interpretarla en el arte y la literatura

FATE in Shakespearean and Greek tragedies

Me citan en este artículo de Bangladesh:

Chowdhury, Takad Ahmed. (University of Asia Pacific, Bangladesh; takad@uap-bd.edu).  "Treatment of Fate in Shakespearean and Classical Greek Tragedies: A Comparison." Academic Journal Perspective: Language, Education and Literature 8.1 (May 2020): 29-38. Online at ResearchGate.*

DOI: 10.33603/perspective.v8i1.3378

         https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341669745

         2020

 —oOo—

Good vs. Good Is Tragic

Esquilo, por Carlos García Gual

Retropost (27 de noviembre de 2008): Monster

Película basada en la historia de Aileen Wuornos, prostituta que decidió empezar a matar clientes en lugar de pasar por la piedra y cobrar lo acordado. El tono de toda la película va destinado, desde el principio, a hacernos comprender las actuaciones y el personaje de Lee (Aileen): de niña descuidada y maltratada, pasando por embarazo infantil, carrera de prostitución y mala vida, hasta llegar a la desilusión casi total con el género humano. 

Lee ya está algo añosa como prostituta de lo más tirado, tiene un carácter violento y desagradable, inteligencia mínima y educación insuficiente para sacarse de la cuneta donde está sin un mínimo esfuerzo—esfuerzo que tampoco parece muy dispuesta a hacer, viviendo día a día con lo que llega. La película se centra en su relación con Selby, una chica lesbiana agobiada por sus fracasos sentimentales y por el ambiente opresivo de su casa—y juntas crean una burbujilla de realidad alternativa, una folie à deux, en la que Selby consigue por fin ligar y huir, que es lo que le pedía el cuerpo, y Lee recupera una ilusión por alguien y por llevar su vida en alguna dirección—buscando un mínimo de estabilidad económica. 

Pero cuando intenta trabajar enseguida detectan (con acierto me temo) que es un personaje sin sustancia y nada de fiar: vive en una realidad alternativa, al dictado de la euforia, el impulso y la improvisación. Cuando tiene dinero, lo chafa alegremente sin un átomo de previsión, pensando que le caerá antes o después un golpe de suerte. Y de ahí pasa sin transición a la realidad brutal de su vida de prostituta, en cuanto le falta el dinero para mantener la huída con Selby. Y va matando a hombres de todo pelaje, desde infelices o buena gente hasta tarados sacados del subsuelo de una América tan profunda que sólo llega a ella esta Lee. Vamos, una historia de pena, en la que la brutalidad del personaje sólo se ve compensada por la pena que da su historia y por su profunda estupidez. Claro que la guionista/directora narrativiza el material de partida, y lo transforma en una historia de valores humanos a un nivel digamos minimalista. Para que el título "Monster" sea adecuadamente irónico, hay que humanizar al personaje y atraer simpatía, además de comprensión. Eso se hace por medio de tres ingredientes que acercan el personaje a valores deseables: el sufrimiento moral de Lee por sus asesinatos, su amor por Selby, y su sacrificio al final. Sobre lo primero, Lee sufre un tormento interno (en la medida en que puede el personaje) cuando decide matar al buen samaritano que la quería ayudar, y lo elimina sólo por cubrir sus pistas perfectamente. En una elección trágica suele haber un elemento de bien que se destruye junto con el mal, y ese momento de sufrimiento de Lee, empeñada en seguir su camino de crimen con coherencia implacable, es quizá el mayor bien al que llega a elevarse esta individua—y su decisión es aplastar esa conciencia que le pide que no haga lo que va a hacer. Es lo que ha de redimirla (o casi) a ojos del espectador, esa parte de ella que se resiste a lo que va a hacer. 

A los ojos de la autora/directora es también la energía del personaje y su determinación lo que la hacen excepcional y casi admirable, aunque eso es más discutible viendo lo mal orientada que está esa determinación. Luego está, claro, el amor como redentor, "su chica", la relación ilusionada con Selby, un islote de perfección cutrilla y precaria en el mar de indiferencia y embrutecimiento que es su vida. El cóctel es explosivo, sin embargo: dos personajas sin talento ni miramiento a los demás, embobadas la una con la otra, en una sociedad que las rechaza y las encierra aún más una en otra, arrastrando una tonelada de frustraciones, compartiendo una tendencia a la huida delirante, a la influencia mutua, a la improvisación y a la autocomplacencia.... en fin, que cogen la vía rápida al dinero fácil. Lee descubre aquí el amor, y se vuelve una mártir por amor cuando acepta sacrificarse sin inculpar a Selby; en cuanto a ésta, ha salido de la burbuja y lleva adelante todo lo tiesa que puede su vergonzosa traición a su colega, inculpándola y salvando su propio pellejo como buenamente puede. Eso no la condena a los ojos de Lee, que ahora está decidida a vivir su condena sola y aislar su amor como objeto sagrado en un pequeño altar virtual del pasado—al menos conoció un momento de ilusión y esperanza, antes de que todo se fuese al traste. 

Vamos, una historia de amor y de cómo atesoramos las ilusiones que nos mantienen funcionando. Los avatares posteriores del personaje real de Wuornos aquí se eliminan y se da así a una versión más unificada, dramática y simple de la historia. Por mucho que se maquille y afee la Charlize, la realidad siempre es más fea que el cine—y más inmoral y con una hordinariez más densa aún. Aunque es cierto que las actuaciones tanto de Charlize Theron como de Christina Ricci son magníficas, y aunque fuese nada más por ellas merece la pena ver la película.

Sobre la representación de "monstruos" morales y acciones monstruosas siempre habrá debate. La tragedia (y Monster pertenece al género) nos hace comprender las circunstancias del criminal y la mezcla problemática que se da entre el bien y el mal. Eso puede hacer que resulte molesta a veces—que parezca justificar o defender al monstruo. Por aquello de tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner, los moralistas menos dispuestos a aceptar monstruosidades prefieren que ni siquiera se representen ni recuerden, siguiendo el razonamiento de Sir Thomas Browne al final de Pseudodoxia Epidemica:

Many other accounts like these we meet sometimes in history, scandalous unto Christianity, and even unto humanity; whose vertities not only, but whose relations honest minds do deprecate. For of sins heteroclital, and such as want either name or president, there is oft times a sin even in their histories. We desire no records of such enormities; sins should be accounted new, that so they may be esteemed monstrous. They omit of monstrosity as they fall from their rarity: for, men count it veniall to err with their forefathers, and foolishly conceive they divide a sin in its society. The pens of men may sufficiently expatiate without these singularities of villany; For, as they encrease the hatred of vice in some, so do they enlarge the theory of wickedness in all. And this is one thing that may make latter ages worse then were the former; For, the vicious examples of Ages past, poyson the curiosity of these present, affording a hint of sin unto seduceable spiritis, and soliciting those unto the imitation of them, whose heads were never so perversly principld as to invent them. In this kind we commend the wisdom and goodness of Galen, who would not leave unto the world too subtile a Theory of poisons; unarming thereby the malice of venomous spirits, whose ignorance must be contented with Sublimate and Arsenick. For, surely there are subtiler venenations, such as will invisibly destroy, and like the Basilisks of heaven. In things of this nature silence commendeth history: 'tis the veniable part of things lost; wherein there must never rise a Pancirollus,* nor remain any Register but that of hell.

 
* Who writ De Antiquis deperditis, or of inventions lost.

Monster. Writer and dir. Patty Jenkins. Cast: Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci, Bruce Dern, Lee Tergesen, Annie Corley, Scott Wilson. Music by BT and Howard Paar. Coprod. Brent Morris. Prod. des. Edward T. McAvoy. Ed. Jane Kurson and Arthur Coburn. Photog. Steven Bernstein. Exec. prod. Sammy Lee, Meagan Riley-Grant, Stewart Hall, Andreas Grosch, Andreas Schmid. Prod. Charlize Theron, Mark Damon, Clark Peterson, Donald Kushner, Brad Wyman. Media 8 Entertainment / DEJ Productions / KW Productions / Denver & Delilah Films, 2003. DVD: Prism Leisure, 2005.

Vivre sa vie

—oOo—

La patética tragedia de la caída de Cifuentes

Tragedia con ascenso glorioso, hamartia, hubris, peripecias, patetismo, anagnórisis, caída envuelta en llamas, y todo lo requerido.

—oOo—

Poetas y Filósofos (Medea)

Se oye la conferencia de Aída Míguez, más allá de un análisis filosófico, como una JUSTIFICACIÓN y defensa de la postura de Medea, lo cual equivale a silenciar o ignorar los derechos y perspectivas de otras personas, y subordinar los intereses de todos a las prioridades e interpretaciones de Medea. Que son, además de parciales, especialmente criminales. En ese sentido es una lectura sesgada y desequilibrada—más deudora de un pseudo-feminismo cegato, pretendiendo convertir a Medea en un icono feminista o reivindicadora justiciera, que de una visión equilibrada de la realidad humana. No se puede entender la figura de Medea sin entender la monstruosidad profunda de sus acciones (presentándolas como una especie de justicia como ella pretende) y creyendo que realiza algún tipo de contribución a la dignidad de las mujeres que dice reivindicar—una dignidad que contribuye notablemente a rebajar en su caso, convirtiéndose en un monstruo digno de infamia. La comprensión y justificación sin la condena destroza o anula la tragedia.


Así lo dice César Vidal:

 

 

 

 

Medea Empoderada

 

 

—oOo—

Tragedy's Philosophy, Simon Critchley

Le tragique et la tragédie, autour du livre de René Girard "La violence et le sacré"

Revenge Tragedy

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature:

revenge tragedy, a dramatic genre that flourished in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean period, sometimes known as 'the tragedy of blood'. Kyd's *The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587), a much-quoted prototype, helped to establish a demand for this popular form; later examples are Marlowe's *The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare's *Titus Andronicus, *The Revenger's Tragedy, and, most notably, *Hamlet; there are also strong revenge elements in *Webster. Common ingredients include the hero's quest for vengeance, often at the prompting of the ghost of a murdered kinsman or loved one; scenes of real or feigned insanity; a play-within-a-play; scenes in graveyards, severed limbs, scenes of carnage and mutilation, etc. Many of these items were inherited from Senecan drama, with the difference that in revenge tragedy violence was not reported but took place on stage: as Vendice in The Revenger's Tragedy rather baldly puts it, while in the process of slowly murdering the duke, 'when the bad bleeds, then is the tragedy good.' The revenge code also produced counter-attacks, as in *The Atheist's Tragedy, in Chapman's *The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois, and again in Hamlet, in which the heroes refuse or hesitate to follow the convention.

The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois, a tragedy by G. *Chapman, written 1610/11, printed 1613, a sequel to *Bussy D'Ambois.
     Clermont D'Ambois, brother of Bussy, described by his close friend the duc de Guise as the ideal 'Senecal [i.e. stoical] man', gentle, noble, generous, and 'fix'd in himself', is urged by his brother's ghost to avenge his murder, but will only do so by the honourable method of a duel. He sends a challenge to Muntsurry, who reads it; urged again by the ghost, he introduces himself to Montsurry's house, forces him to fight, and kills him. He then learns of the assassination of the Guise, and, refusing to live amid 'all the horrors of the vicious time' as 'the slave of power', he kills himself. The hero's reluctance to exact revenge recalls certain aspects of *Hamlet (See also REVENGE TRAGEDY.)

The Revenger's Tragedy, a tragedy published anonymously in 1607, and from 1656 ascribed to *Tourneur; its authorship has been disputed since 1891, with some scholars defending the traditional attribution and others championing the rival claims of *Middleton and others.
     The central character is Vendice (or Vindice), intent on revenging the death of his mistress, poisoned by the lecherous old duke. The court is a centre of vice and intrigue; the duchess's youngest son is convicted of rape, she herself seduces Spurio, the duke's bastard, and her two older sons, the duke's stepsons, plot against each other and against Lussurioso, the duke's heir. Vendice, disguised as Plato, appears to attempt to procure his own sister Castiza for Lussurioso; she resists, but their mother Gratiana temporarily succumbs to his bribes and agrees to play the bawd. Vendice murders the duke by tricking him into kissing the poisoned skull of his mistress, and most of the remaining characters kill one another or are killed in a final masque of revengers and murderers; Vendice, who survives the bloodbath, owns up to the murder of the duke, and is promptly condemned to death with his brother and accomplice Hippolite by the duke's successor, old Antonio. He is led off to execution, content to 'die after a nest of dukes'. The play is marked by a tragic intensity of feeling, a powerfully satiric wit, and passages of great poetic richness, all combined, for example, in Vendice's address to 'the bony lady', his dead mistress: 'Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours / For thee?' (III. v. 71 ff.) (See also REVENGE TRAGEDY.)

The Duke of Milan, a tragedy by *Massinger, printed 1623, one of his earliest independent plays and a popular one. It is based on the story of Herod and Mariamne as told by Josephus.
     Lodovico Sforza, duke of Milan, has, in the war between the Emperor Charles and the King of France, allied himself with the latter. On their defeat, he goes to surrender himself to Charles, but, fearing for his life, leaves a written instruction with his wicked favourite Francisco to put his beloved wife Marcella to death if he himself is killed. Francisco, seeking to corrupt Marcella in revenge for the dishonoring of his own sister Eugenia by Sforza, reveals the existence of the warrant to her, but fails to move her chastity and only incenses her against the duke, so that on his return after a reconciliation with Charles she receives him coldly. This, coupled with accusations from various quarters of his wife's intmacy with Francisco, makes the duke suspicious of her. Francisco now tells Sforza that Marcella made amorous advances to him, which so inflames the duke with anger that he stabs her to death; dying, she reveals the truth, leaving her husband distracted with remorse. Francisco flees, then returns to court diguised as a Jewish doctor and undertakes to restore Marcella to life. He is discovered and tortured, but not before he succeeds in poisoning the duke.

The Tragic Law

—oOo—

SAMSON AGONISTES

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble:

Samson Agonistes, a tragedy by *Milton, published 1671, in the same volume as *Paradise Regained. Its composition was traditionally assigned to 1666-70, but W. R. Parker in his biography (1968) argues that it was written much earlier, possibly as early as 1647. A closet drama never intended for the stage, it is modelled on Greek tragedy, and has been frequently compared to Prometheus Bound by *Aeschylus or Oedipus at Colonus by *Sophocles: other critics have claimed that its spirit is more Hebraic (or indeed Christian) than Hellenic. Proedominantly in blank verse, it also contains passages of great metrical freedom and originality, and some rhyme. Samson Agonistes (i.e. Samson the Wrestler, or Champion) deasl with the last phase of the life of the Samson of the Book of Judges when he is a prisoner of the Philistines and blind, a phase which many have compared to the assumed circumstances of the blind poet himself, after the collapse of the Commonwealth and his political hopes.

Samson, in prison at Gaza, is visited by friends of his tribe (the chorus) who comfort him; then by his old father Manoa, who holds out hopes of securing his release; then by his wife *Dalila, who seeks pardon and reconciliation, but by being repudiated shows herself 'a manifest Serpent'; then by Harapha, a strong man of Gath, who taunts Samson. He is finally summoned to provide amusement by feats of strength for the Philistines, who are celebrating a feast to *Dagon. He goes, and presently a messenger brings news of his final feat of strength in which he pulled down the pillars of the place where the assembly was gathered, destroying himself as well as the entire throng. The tragedy, which has many passages questioning divine providence ('Just or unjust, alike seem miserable'), ends with the chorus's conclusion that despite human doubts, all is for the best in the 'unsearchable dispose/ Of highest wisdom': its last words, 'calm of mind all passion spent', strike a note of Aristotelian *catharsis, and the whole piece conforms to the *neo-classical doctrine of unities.

Samson Agonistes (Yale Courses)

 

—oOo— 

 

An Introduction to Greek Theatre

    

An Introduction to Greek Tragedy

 

—oOo—

On Tragedy and Otherness

LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM eJOURNAL Vol. 2, No. 2: Jan 30, 2012 Browse ALL abstracts for this journal Links: Subscribe ~ Unsubscribe | Distribution | Advisory Board | Submit ~ Revise Your Papers Table of Contents Review of Nicholas Ray's Tragedy and Otherness Jose Angel Garcia Landa, Universidad de Zaragoza ^top LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM eJOURNAL "Review of Nicholas Ray's Tragedy and Otherness"  Journal of English and American Studies, Vol. 44, pp. 167-173, 2011 JOSE ANGEL GARCIA LANDA, Universidad de Zaragoza Email: garciala@unizar.es A review of Nicholas Ray's book Tragedy and Otherness: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis (Peter Lang, 2009). The book offers a post structuralist/psychoanalytic reading of Oedipus the King, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet, as well as a reworking of Freud's insights on tragedy, from a perspective informed by the work of Jean Laplanche and an emphasis on the experience of otherness.

Freud y la interiorización

Ojo a los ojos

Hoy he hecho una incursión por el congreso de la Sociedad Española de Estudios Clásicos, para oír una conferencia de Carlos García Gual sobre el mito de Edipo, muy ilustradora como no podía ser menos, y sugestiva de los muchísimos sentidos y dimensiones que van saliendo en este mito conforme más de cerca lo mira uno. La cojera del nombre de Edipo, ¿prefigura de alguna manera que andará con un bastón, aunque no precisamente por cojo? Aunque cojo ya fue. ¿Es Edipo un nuevo Ulises, y un nuevo Polifemo, cuando dice que "nadie" le ha arrancado los ojos? Luego nos dice que el dios le hizo hacerlo, y así asoma otra vez Apolo de Delfos, al principio y al final de la historia....

Infinitas historias vienen a la cabeza. A mí me ha venido a la cabeza ésta: Freud y el enigma de la esfinge, texto enigmático que escribí a los cincuenta años.

En la sesión de preguntas, le he preguntado (siguiendo un poco la línea de Goux en Œdipe philosophe) si convenía el conferenciante con esta lectura del mito, y convenía: si podemos ver a Edipo como un presuntuoso adivinador (que no adivino), que cree haber descrifrado los enigmas del mundo, pero el mundo es un enigma permanente o un enigma que oculta otro, y a Edipo le queda por descifrar un enigma que le toca más de cerca, a su propia identidad y su propio destino. La respuesta correcta al enigma de la esfinge no es "el hombre" sino "Edipo". De modo más general, ¿no es un aviso terrible éste, al principio de la tradición humanista, en el arranque de la filosofía? Este Edipo confiado en sí mismo, decidido a hallar la verdad de las cosas, y de sí mismo, contra las advertencias del ya ciego adivino Tiresias...

...pero Edipo ha de llegar a su propia ceguera por sí mismo, y recorrer el camino del gnothi seauton hasta el final terrible. Es una tragedia no sólo sobre la voluntad de saber, sino sobre el destino trágico de la voluntad de saber. Hay que conocerse a uno mismo (conócete a ti mismo es el lema de la filosofía griega)—pero lo que hallemos al desvelarse el misterio no necesariamente nos hará más felices. Más sabios, sí, pero es una sabiduría desoladora. Con la que hay que vivir, sin embargo, y seguir andando, aunque sea a tres patas. Es un mito comparable al mito de la manzana del Árbol de la Ciencia, o al mito del pacto con el diablo de Fausto—un mito con un antes, y con un después, mito con anticipación ambiciosa e ingenua, y con retrospección horrorizada y desilusionada.  

La verdad os hará tristes—el ver claro os dejará ciegos. No estaría mal, para grabarlo como nota a pie de página, tras el conócete a ti mismo.



______


Sobre un tema parecido puede leerse también mi artículo "Wilde y el Enigma de la Esfinge." Aquí está en PhilPapers; tenían el registro y he subido una copia para archivarlo allí.

Sonnet—To Science

 

—oOo—

The Changeling

(From The Oxford Companion to English Literature:)

Changeling, The, a tragedy by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, printed 1653, but acted as early as 1622.

Beatrice Joanna, daughter of the governor of Alicant, is ordered by her father to marry Alonzo de Piracquo. She falls in love with Alsemero and in order to avoid the marriage employs the ill-favoured villain De Flores, whom she detests but who cherishes a passion for her, to murder Alonzo. To the horror of Beatrice, De Flores exacts the reward he had lusted for. Beatrice is now to marry Alsemero. To escape detection she arranges that her maid Diaphanta shall take her place on the wedding night; and to remove a dangerous witness, De Flores then kills the maid. The guilt of Beatrice and De Flores is revealed to Alemero, and they are both brought before the governor, whereupon they take their own lives. The title of the play is taken from the sub-plot, in which Antonio disguises himself as a crazy changeling in order to get access to Isabella, wife of the keeper of a madhouse. The main plot is taken from John Reynolds's God's Revenge against Murther (1621).

The Tragic Law

 

—oOo—

Las dos leyes

—según la lectura que hace J. N. Findlay de la Fenomenología del Espíritu de Hegel. Según Hegel, el primer paso más allá de la ética racionalista hacia una ética espiritual se discierne en la tragedia griega. Su análisis es de interés no sólo para una teoría del espíritu o del conocimiento (en la que se inserta) sino de modo más local en tanto que es un análisis profundo de la estructura ideológica del drama— sus esquemas organizativos, o su estructura profunda, si así queremos decirlo. Es por tanto una interpretación del drama basada en una teoría cultural de la sociedad, y también una teoría narratológica. Anticipa también de modo notable la oposición nietzscheana entre el lado apolíneo y dionisíaco de la tragedia. También es toda una teoría del género, y resulta ser así una narratología cultural de la diferencia genérica. En fin, que es una perspectiva sobre la tragedia griega enormemente sugerente. Así la sintetiza Findlay en su prólogo a la Fenomenología del Espíritu:

Hegel finds the exemplary material for this first, rudimentary form of spirituality in the ethical world of Greek tragedy, with which he had come into vivid contact in his Gymnasium studies at Stuttgart. Rudimentary spiritual life is not the life of an undivided community with which the individual subject identifies himself whole-heartedly: it is essentially bifocal, and centres as much in the family, with its unwritten prescriptions dimly backed by dead ancestors, as in the overt power of the State, with its openly proclaimed, 'daylight' laws. The law of the family is a divine law, a law stemming from the underworld of the unconscious, and interpreted by the intuitive females of the family: the state law is on the contrary human, and is proclaimed and enforced by mature males. Hegel makes plain that these laws must at times clash—the theme of the Antigone and other tragedies: in the case of such clashes, the individual incurs guilt whatever he may do. Obviously Hegel has here seized on a very profound source of disunity in ethical spiritual life: the clash between a self-transcendence which is deep, but also tinged with contingent immediacy, and a self-transcencence which can be extended indefinitely, but in that very extensibility necessarily lacks depth. The truly moral life to which we must advance will be as deep in its care for individual problems and circumstances as it is wide in its concern for anyone and everyone. For the time being, however, the rent life of the primitive ethical community must yield place to a spiritual life where all intimacy is dissolved. (Findlay xxi).

—que será ejemplificada por Hegel, en las fases fenomenológicas atravesadas por el espíritu, por el mundo del imperio romano.

Los apartados en que trata Hegel la cuestión de las dos leyes y de los conflictos éticos, con el ejemplo de Antígona, están en la scción VI, "Spirit", de la Fenomenología del Espíritu, especialmente §438-476. Reproduciré aquí no el texto de Hegel, sino su síntesis en el comentario o explicación de Findlay sobre las secciones más relevantes para el drama.
Primero, establece Hegel cómo la vida espiritual de una comunidad se divide en dos ámbitos regidos por dos leyes: el ámbito humano del Estado, la ley y la vida "diurna" de la comunidad, y el ámbito familiar, ámbito divino y más unido a la intuición y a la tradición. El primero es masculino y el segundo femenino, y el primero descansa en última instancia sobre el segundo.

VI. SPIRIT

(...)

§439. The essence of Spirit has already been recognized as the ethical substance, the customs and laws of a society. Spirit, however, is the ethical actuality which, when it confronts itself in objective social form, has lost all sense of strangeness in what it has before it. The ethical substance of custom and law is the foundation and source of everyone's action and the aim towards which it tends: it is the common work which men's co-operative efforts seek to bring about. The etical substance is as it were the infinite self-dispending benevolence on which every individual draws. It is of the essence of this substance to come to life in distinct individuals and to act through and in them.

§440. Spirit is the absolutely real being of which all previous forms of consciousness have represented falsely isolated abstractions, which the dialectic development has shown them to be. In the previous stage of observational and active Reason, Sirit has rather had Reason than been Reason: it has imposed itself as a category on material not intrinsically categorized. When Spirit sees itself and its world as being Reason it becomes ethical substance actualized.

§441. Spirit in its immediacy is the ethical life of a people, of individuality at once with a social world. But it must advance to the full consciousness of what it immediately is through many complex stages, stages realized in a total social world and not merely in a separate individual consciousness.

§442-3. The living ethical world of spirit is its truth, its abstract self-knowledge being the formal generality of law. But it dirempts itself on the one hand into the hard reality of a world of culture, and on the other hand into the inner reality of a world of faith and insight. The conflict between these two modes of experience is resolved in Spirit-sure-of-itself, i.e. in morality. Out of all these attitudes the actual self-consciousness of absolute Spirit will make its appearance.


THE TRUE SPIRIT. THE ETHICAL ORDER. 

§444. Spirit is a consciousness which intrinsically separates its moments, whether in its substance or in its consciousness. In its consciousness the individual moral act and the accomplished work are separated from the general moral substance or essence: the term which serves as middle term between them is the individual conscious agent.

§445. The ethical substance, i.e. the system of laws and customs, itself reflects the distinction between the individual action or agent, on the one hand, and the moral substance or essence, on the other. It splits up into a human and a divine law. The individual harried by these contradictory laws both knows and does not know the wrongness of his acts, and is tragically destroyed in the conflict. Through such tragic instances, individuals learn to advance beyond blind obedience to law and custom. They achieve the ability to make conscious decisions to obey or disobey.

THE ETHICAL WORLD

§446. Spirit is essentially self-diremptive. But just as bare being dirempts itself into the Thing with its many properties, so the ethical life dirempts itself into a web of ethical relations. Adn just as the many properties of the Thing concentrate themselves into the contrast between individuality and universality, so too do ethical laws resolve themselves into individual and universal laws.

§447. The ethical substance, as individual reality, is the commonality which realizes itself in a plurality of existent consciousnesses in all of which it is consciously reflected, but which also underlies them as substance and contains them in itself. As actual substance it is a people, as actual consciousness the citizens of that people. Such a people is not anything unreal: it exists and prevails.

§448. This Spirit can be called the human law since it is a completely self-conscious actuality. It is present as the known law and the prevailing custom. It shows itself in the assurance of individuals generally, and of the government in particular. It has a daylight sway, and lets individuals go freely about their business.

§449. The ethical substance reveals itself, however, in another law, the Divine Law, which springs from the immediate, simple essence of the ethical, and is opposed to the fully conscious dimension of action, and extends down to the inner essence of individuals. 

§450. The Divine Law has its own self-consciousness, the immediate consciousness of self-in-other, in a natural ethical community, the Family. The Family is that elementary, unconscious ethical being which is opposed to, and yet is also presupposed by, the conscious ethical being of the people and their devotion to common ends.

§451. In the Family natural relations carry universal ethical meaning. The individual in the Family is primarily related to the Family as a whole, and not by ties of love and sentiment to its particular members. The Family, further, is not concerned to promote the well-being of its particular members, nor to offer them protection. It is concerned with individuality raised out of the unrest and change of life into the universality of death, i.e. the Family exists to promote the cult of the dead.

§452. The individuality by dying achieves peace and universality through a merely natural process. As regards its timing it is only accidentally connected with the services he performs to the community, even though dying is in a sense the supreme service to the community that a man can perform, in furnishing the Family with its ancestral pantheon, its household Lares. In order, however, that the individual's taking up into universality may be effective, it must be helped out by a conscious act on the part of the Family members. This act may indifferently be regarded as the saving of the deceased individual from destruction, or as the conscious effecting of that destruction, so that the individual becomes a thing of the past, a universal meaning. The Family resists the corruption of worms and of chemical agencies by substituting their own conscious work in its place, by consigning the dead individual solemnly to the imperishable elementary individual, the earth. It thereby also makes the dead person an imperishable presiding part of the Family.

§454. There are in both laws differences and gradations. In discussing these we shall see them in active operation, enjoying their own self-consciousness and also interacting with one another.

§455. The human law has its living seat in the government in which it also assumes individual form. The government is the actual Spirit which reflects on itself, and is the self of the whole ethical substance. It may accord a limited independence to the families under its sway, but is always ready to subordinate them to the whole. It may likewise accord a limited independence to individuals promoting their own gain and enjoyment, but it has to prevent such individual concerns from becoming overriding. From time to time it must foster wars to prevent individual life from becoming a mere case of natural being, and ceasing to serve the freedom and power of the social whole. The daylight, human law, however, always bases its authority on the deeper authority of the subterranean Divine Law.

§456. The Divine Law governs three different family-relationships, that of husband to wife, of parents  to children, and of siblings to one another. The husband-wife relation is a case of immediate self-recognition in another consciousness which has also a mainly natural character: its reality lies outside of itself, in the children, in which it passes away.

§457. A relationship unmiexed with transience or inequality of status is that of brother and sister. In them identity of blood has come to tranquillity and equilibrium. As sister, a woman has the highest intimations of ethical essence, not yet brought out into actuality or full consciousness: she manifests internal feeling and the divinity that is raised above the actual. As daughter, a woman must see her parents pass away with resigned tenderness, as mother and wife there is something natural and replaceable about her, and her unequal relation to her husband, in which she has duties where he mainly has pleasures, means that she cannot be fully aware of herself in another. In brother and sister there are none of the inequalities due to desire nor any possibility of replacement: the loss of a brother is irreparable to a sister, and her duty to him is the highest.

§458. The brother represents the family-spirit at its most individual and therefore turned outwards towards a wider universality. The brother leaves the immediate, elemental, negative ethical life of the family to achieve a self-conscious, actual ethical life.

§459. The brother passes from the suzerainty of the divine to that of the human law: the sister or wife remains the guardian of the Divine Law. They have each a different natural vocation, a sequel of the vocation considered above in the 'task itself', a vocation which has its outer expression in the distinction of sex.

§460. The human and ethical orders require one another. The human law has its roots in the divine order, whereas the Divine law is only actual in the daylight realm of existence and activity.

§461. The ethical system in its two branches fulfils all the perfect categories that have led up to it. It is rational in that it unites self-consciousness and objectivity. It observes itself in the customs which surround it. It has pleasure in the family life and necessity in the wider social order. It has the law of the heart at its root which is also the law of all hearts. It exhibits virtue and the devotion to the 'task itself'. It provides the criterion by which all detailed projects and acts are tested.

§462. The ethical whole is a tranquil equilibrium of parts in which each finds its stisfaction in this equilibrium with the whole. Justice is the agency which restores this equilibrium whenever it is disturbed by individuals or classes. The communal spirit avenges itself on wrongs done to its members, wrongs which have the mechanical character of the merely natural, by equally natural expedients of revenge.

§463. Universal self-conscious Spirit is chiefly manifest in the man, unconscious individualized Spirit in the woman: both serve as middle terms in what amounts to the same syllogism uniting the divine with the human law.

A continuación ejemplifica Hegel, aludiendo al ejemplo de Antígona, el surgimiento del acto moral (y trágico) como consecuencia del conflicto entre las dos leyes, entre el ámbito del Estado y el ámbito de la familia. Es un conflicto surgido de la acción individual:

§464. In the opposition of the two laws we have not yet considered the role of the individual and his deed. It is the individual's deed which brings the two laws into conflict. A dreadful fate (Schicksal) here enters the scene and makes action come out on one side or the other.

§465. The individual's self-alignment with one law does not, however, involve internal debate and arbitrary choice, only immediate, unhesitant, dutiful self-commitment. There is no quarrel of duty with duty. It is one's sex, Hegel suggests, which decides which law one will obey.

§466. In self-consciousness the two laws are explicit, not merely implicit as in ordinary ethical life. The individual's character commits him to one law. The other seems to him only an unrighteous actuality (será el punto de vista de Antígona sobre la orden de Creonte) or a case of human obstinacy or perversity (es así como ve Creonte la obstinación de Antígona).

§467. The ethical consciousness cannot (like the consciousness that preceded it) draw any distinction between an objective order and its own subjective order: it cannot doubt that the law it obeys has absolute authority. Nor is there any taint of individuality left over that can deflect it from the path of duty. (Así pues, la acción de Antígona no se debe a un impulso individualista o de aserción de su propio yo). It cannot conceive that the duty could be other than what it knows it to be.

§468. None the less the ethical consciousness cannot divert itself of allegiance to both laws, and so cannot escape guilt when it opts for the one as opposed for the other. Only an inert, unconscious stone can avoid incurring guilt. The guilt is, however, not individual, but collective. It is the guilt of a whole class or sex.

§469. The law violated by an individual's act necessarily demands vindication, even though its voice was not at the time heard by the violator. Action brings the unconscious into the daylight, and forces consciousness to bow to its offended majesty.

§470. The ethical consciousness is most truly guilty when it wittingly rejects the behests of one law and holds them to be violent and wrong. Its action denies the demand for real fulfilment which is part of the law, and so involves real guilt.

§471. The individual cannot survive the tragic conflict in him of the two laws, neither of which he can repudiate. He cannot merely have a sentiment (Gesinnung) for the one. His whole being is consumed in pathos, which is part of his character as an ethical being.

§472. In the fateful conflict of two laws in different individuals both individuals undergo destruction. Each is guilty in the face of the law he has violated. It is in the ethical subordination of both sides that absolute right is first carried out.

§473. A young man leaves the unconscious natural medium of ethical life to become ruler of the community and administer the human law. But the natural character of his origins may show itself in a duplicity of existence, e.g. Eteocles and Polynices. The community is bound to honour the one who actually possesses power, and to dishonour the mere claimant to state power who takes up arms against the community. This dishonour involves deprivation of burial rights. (Es la forma que toma el conflicto en la Antígona de Sófocles).

§474. The family-spirit, backed by the Divine Law, and with its roots in the underworld waters of forgetfulness, is affronted by these human arrangements. The dead man finds instruments of vengeance by which the representatives of the human law are in their turn destroyed.

§475. The battle of laws, with its inherent pathos, is carried on by human agents, which gives it an air of contingency. The atomistic family has to be liquidated in the continity of communal life, but the latter continues to have its roots in the former. Womankind, that eternal source of irony, reduces to ridicule the grave deliberations of the state elders, and asserts the claims of youth. The communal spirit then takes its revenge of feminine anarchy by impressing youth into war. In war the ethical substance asserts its negativity, its freedom from all existing arrangements. But since victory depends on fortune and strength, this sort of ethical community breaks down, and is superseded by a soulless, universal ethical community, based on limitless individualism.

§476. The destruction of the ethical world of custom lies in its mere naturalness, its immediacy. This immediacy breaks down because it tries to combine the unconscious peace of nature with the self-conscious, unresting peace of Spirit. An ethical system of this natural sort is inevitably restricted, and gets superseded by another similar system. Spiritual communal life necessarily detaches itself from such tribalism, and erects itself into a formally universal 'open society' (term not used by Hegel) dispersed among a vast horde of separate individuals.

Sobre la lectura hegeliana de Antígona, puede verse también la interpretación de Slavoj Zizek, que enfatiza la dimensión retroactiva de las acciones morales de Antígona.

La idea central de la Fenomenología del Espíritu

 

—oOo—

Role at variance with Self

From the Treacherous Entertainment to the Noble Death. Further reflections on the "World as a Stage" theme, or the self-conscious depiction of the theatricality of self and social life in Renaissance drama:

From McAlindon, English Renaissance Tragedy (I.IV: "The Treacherous Entertainment: The Symbolism of Rite and Play"):

Any account of the core elements of Renaissance tragedy must necessarily inquire into the function and significance of its most characteristic and conventionalised scene, the Treacherous Entertainment (as I have called it). This scene may coincide with the major point of change near the centre of the action, but as a rule it forms the catastrophe. It may consist simply of a banquet or a game; more often it is a play or masque performed in conjunction with a marriage. But, whatever its position or form, it is always a ritual affirmation of love and union which turns out to be a monstrous negation of everything it affirms.

Fashioned by Thomas Kyd with great originality out of elements drawn from Seneca's Thyestes and Medea, the Treacherous Entertainment is a dramatic device whose popularity must be ascribed to its symbolic function as well as to its great theatrical potential. Every dramatist who uses it seeks to give it some original twist, but all follow Kyd in shaping it as an elaborate model of the play-world to which it belongs. Thus, however much it may differ in detail from play to play, its guiding principle is always a lightning confusion of opposites which summarises the essential nature of life in its tragic perspective. Hospitality and violence, love and hatred, marriage and mourning, play and earnest, and comedy and tragedy are all likely to be involved here in a sudden and 'huge eclipse'.

Although by far the most important, the Treacherous Entertainment is seldom if ever the only action of its kind in a tragedy. Usually there are two to three well-distributed ritual scenes, standing out clearly from the rest of the action and related to each other by analogy and contrast and sometimes cause and effect; indeed, it is difficult not to see in this pattern a basic constructional formula on which the dramatists are heavily dependent. Some ritual scenes exhibit an achieved order, but they are the exception rather than the rule, and even they are darkened by external threats or flawed by some subtle internal discord. The general impression given by ritual scenes, an impression which transfers to the tragedies built round them, is an impression of rite gone wrong: the pun, facilitated by interchangeable spelling in the seventeenth century, is ubiquitous.

it has been argued with great persuasiveness that the symbolic strategies of Renaissance drama, ritual and pageant serve to express two quite different conceptions of life. Whereas rite, cremony, and pageant, it is said, stand for the traditional view of the world as a stable and immutable order, play signifies the new and disturbing notion of life—embraced in their different ways by Promethean heroes and Machiavellian politicians—as a historical process in which nothing is stable and the individual is free to assume ever new identities.(97) I would suggest, however, that the operative distinction is not between rite and play (drama) but between the proper and the improper use of each. The Treacherous Entertainment in its most typical form exemplifies this point. Ritual and play are both presented in it as accepted signs and instruments of harmonious order, and both are either violently truncated or wilfully perverted for destructive ends. As in Renaissance tragedy generally, they function in this scene as symbolic partners.

(...)

The radical discrepancy between self and role (or style) which the villain cheerfully ignores becomes a source of painful self-consciousness, of division within and alientation without, in characters of tragic stature; and we may include in this category introspective 'tool villains' such as Webster's Bosola, specifically described as 'a good actor . . . playing a villain's part'.(115) Such characters come to adopt roles at variance with their true or better selves not knowingly and eagerly, like the villain, but blindly and in response to powerful compulsions. These compulsions may be objectifies in the figure of the tyrant or usurper, who characteristically redistributes roles at will, or the Machiavellian tempter, who would make a change of role seem no change at all.

Because conceptions of the self and its relation to society have changed enormously since the seventeenth century, and are much more variable today they were then, the significance of role as a metaphor in the characterisation of the Renaissance tragic hero and heroine seems bound to give rise to doubtful interpretations and critical dispute.  I would draw attention here to two critical tendencies which, although obviously distinguishable, share the common assumption that the hero is presented as unable in the nature of things to find his personal identity in any one socially defined role. One of these approaches stems from romantic and existentialist positions suggesting that the individual life in in a developed community is necessarily inauthentic, and that social alienation is prerequisite for self-realisation: it encourages us to see the hero of Renaissance tragedy advencing towards self-discovery as a result of his refusal to play out a given role. The other approach stems from socioanthropological perceptions concerning the plasticity of human nature; it suggests that the hero discovers or uncovers the truth about his self—that it is multiple rather than single, artificial rather than innate—in the very process of acting out many roles. (116)

There is much in the texts to justify these critical perspectives. Moreover, they have the great virtue of highlighting the dramatists' often profound sense of the elusive complexity of the human personality, as well as their recognition of the multiple forces which continually threaten the integrity of the individual. But it may be that they help to conceal at least as much as they reveal. In the first place, it is surely incorrect to speak of the protagonist as moving out of role into character (or vice versa), since the dramatists and their contemporaries took it as axiomatic that charafter without role, like thought without language, is in practical terms non-existent. It is true that role-playing usually begins to catch attention when it is clear that the hero and his world are out of joint. But that is not because playing a part is in itself considered to be unnatural; it is because a part well played is felt to be a harmony of nature and art and so does not call attention to itself. We begin to reflect on the problems of 'acting' when characters have disqualified themselves from playing the part which is properly theirs (Richard II arbitrating in a dispute where he himself is the chief culprit, Beatrice-Joanna rebuking the insolence of a servant whom she has hired to commit murder); or when they assume an alien role in order to reassert themselves (Lear kneeling in mock petition to Goneril, the usurped Duke Altofronto disguised as a railing malcontent), or when their self-regard is ominously tainted with self-ignorance or pride (Othello affirming that Cupid's toys will not interfere with his martial duties, Bussy D'Ambois indulging in 'bravery'); or when self-will and desperation have compelled them along the path of deceit (Juliet playing the obedient daughter to Capulet, the Duchess of Malfi going through the charade of dismissing Antonio as a dishonest servant). Thus, instead of moving from role to character (or character to role), the tragic protagonist is more likely to be seen as exchanging of having to exchange a role which harmonises with the conditions of his nature for another or others which do not: so that in losing his original role he loses himself.

Moreover, rather than uncovering a suppressed identity, or creating a new one, the tragic character more probably acquires a new understanding of his lost self and of those elements in his own and other men's nature which separated him from it. This understanding is often embodied in what is arguably the only pefect piece of theatre and ritual in the Renaissance tragic world—the Noble Death, in which the protagonist is sublimely constant and true to himself. Despite the splendour of this final 'act', the new understanding which gives it moral substance embraces a recognition that the individual is bound and limited, not only self-made but shaped and help in being by a context of relationships—interpersonal, social, and cosmic. Thus the famous words uttered by Webster's heroine at death, 'I am Duchess of Malfi still', are not simply the triumphant assertion of an indestructible personal identity. They are also a reminder from the dramatist that, despite her marriage to her steward, this great lady will always find her identity in the name and duchy of her dead husband. And they are but a prelude to the complete revelation, which comes when the Duchess accepts—on bended knee— Bosola's suggestion that aristocratic pride debars her from self-knowledge and lasting glory. She dies 'like' the Duchess of Malfi indeed, but in a manner which shows what that means in terms of nobilty, frailty, and dependence.

One cannot, however, ascribe to the dramatists of this period any firm belief that the individual will be true to himself, or maintain a sense of his own identity, for very long. Because the self is an unstable synthesis of opposites, 'None can be always one' (117). The psychic life seems here to be a kind of continuing Fall: a banishment from the person one would and should be, and in some sense was; a restless search for self-realisation in roles which too often have the effect of making one feel 'cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd, bound in / To saucy doubts and fears' (Macbeth, iii.iv.24-5). But however subtle and unremitting their sense of the strange mutations in man's character the tragedians stop short of abandoning the notion of psychic continuity and making metamorphosis a positive. Like Montaigne, who explores with such acuteness the mercuriality of the self, they 'Esteeme it a great matter, to play but one man' (118). In the closely related spheres of psychology and ethics, constancy —which presupposes unity and harmony—remains their primary value. (119)



________


(97) Alvin Kernan, "The Henriad: Shakespeare's Major History Plays", YR LIX (1969-70): 3-32, and in The Revels History of the Drama in English, Vol. III:  1576-1613, ed. J. Leeds Barroll, Alexander Leggatt, Richard Hosley and Alvin Kernan (London: Methuen, 1975) pp. 241ff. As Kernan notes, he is developing ideas suggested by C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy

(115) The Duchess of Malfi, IV.ii.289-90. Cf. V.v.85-6., where the dying Bosola refers to himself as 'an actor in the main of all / Much 'gainst mine own good nature'. The Duchess, too, sees herself as an unwilling performer: 'I do account this world a tedious theatre, / For I do play a part in't 'gainst my will' (VI.i.84-5).
(116) See, for instance, Kernan, in YR, LIX 3-32, and The Revels History of the Drama in English, IIII 241ff.; John Holloway, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959) pp. 193-5. The Story of the Night: Studies in Shakespeare's Major Tragedies (London: Routledge, 1961) pp. 26-87, 35-6, 57; Hugh P. Richmond, "Personal Identity and Literary Personae: A Study in Historical Psychology",  PMLA, LXXXX (1975): 209-21. Disagreement with Kernan's interpretation of the role metaphor in Shakespeare has been expressed by Philip Edwards in 'Person and Office in Shakespeare's Plays', PBA LVI (1970) 93-109; he does not find in Shakespeare a 'necessary disjunction between the inner self and the public self'.
(117) Bussy D'Ambois, IV.i.25.
(118) Montaigne, Essays, trs. Florio, II 15 (II.i) (Author's emphasis.)
(119) In Role Playing in Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), p. 180, Thomas Van Laan notes that in Shakespeare's tragedies, by contrast with the comedies, 'losing oneself' is not a necessary and ultimately beneficial stage in the progress towards final happiness. It is to lose all, to be torn loose and cast adrift in a void without dimensions . . . an experience that no one can survive.'

Out of Character

 

—oOo—

The Tragic Law

From McAlindon's English Renaissance Tragedy (38-39):

In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe shows all the sensitivity to the theological and symbolic implications of this legend that one would expect from a former student of divinity. Having denied God's love and grace, Faustus becomes enchanted with stellar gods and mythological fables and commits himself to a demon whose name, Lucifer, is that of a Babylonian tyrant in 'Jerome's Bible' (Isa.14:12; Doctor Faustus, I.i.38); he is easily persuaded that 'Marriage is but a ceremonial toy' (II.i.147), and finally seals his damnation by embracing the succubine Helen. But Marlowe's great achievement was to have seized on the legend's core of universal truth and tragic irony. What his play communicates with terrible force is that there can be no such thing as autonomy of action in the real world: every act either confirms an existing bond or creates a new one; it has binding consequences and is a deed in two senses of the world. Thus the tragic design of Doctor Faustus turns on the appalling peripeteia whereby the rejection of a bond whose grant of limited freedom (the freedom of the sons of God) has begun to seem intolerably constricting and servile leads not to liberty and power but to a condition of claustrophobic and degrading servitude: the hero becomes the deed's creature, a prisoner of what he himself has willed.

This tragic law is operative in plays as diverse as Macbeth, Othello, The White Devil, and The Changeling, its presence signalled by the symbolism of the demonic pact or marriage, or by the Marlovian pun on 'deed' and 'will'. Even in the pagan context of King Lear its presence is keenly felt at the outset. The 'hideous rashness' (I.i.150) which thrusts Lear into 'the tyrannous night' (III.iv.147) involves a ritual abjuring of love, grace, and benison (I.i.265), a brutal attempt to prevent a marriage of true minds, and an act of fatal submission to the will of two women who seem to fetch their nature from 'the mysteries of Hecat and the night' (l. 109).

Nevertheless the paradigm of ordered and disordered relationships that deeply affects Renaissance tragedy as a whole is the cosmological and not the theological one. The bonds undone in Lear are not—or not primarily—those between men and gods. As in The Spanish Tragedy, they are familial, matrimonial, and national bonds, as well as the bonds of service and hospitality; and, as in Kyd's play, their universal model is the union of contrary elements in a just and fruitful relationship where individuality and mutuality are simultaneously acknowledged. here the sign of catastrophe is the sudden eruption of a fiery, primordial hatred which would consume its opposite or consign it to the void: 'No contraries hold more antipathy / Than I and such a knave'; 'as a stranger to my heart and me / Hold thee from this for ever' (II.ii.82-3; I.i.114-15). Here too the experience of Hell is the discovery that a human bond of incomparable value has been violently and irrevocably broken: 'Thou'lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never' (V.iii.306-7).

Tragedia y dinámica de fuerzas

—oOo—