— Those are very good questions. The answer to the first, can we access tragedy, is yes. The answer to the second is that it does illuminate the situation we’re in. Those are the short answers. This is where I turn to and lean on someone like Raymond Williams. There’s a view we can associate with someone like George Steiner that tragedy is dead, that’s the classical, reactionary, formalist aesthetic position, the glory that was Greece is gone and we live in a decaying modernity. The first thing to say is that makes very little sense of the extraordinary theatrical creativity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from people like Ibsen and Chekov through to Brecht and Beckett and beyond into people like Sarah Kane and Heiner Muller. Theatre is still fecund it seems to me, the theatrical is still fecund. I’m not a death of tragedy person at all and that means looking in different places, we could look at different media, film, T.V as places to access tragedy. People have written very well about series like The Wire
as a modern American tragedy, I won’t go into that now, it can be a bit boyish and obsessional but it is fascinating. What it can show us, and this is where I want to bring in Williams, who in his book Modern Tragedy makes a link between tragedy and revolution and it’s a kind of melancholic link. He says, for example, something like: ‘We need to understand revolution tragically’.
If we see revolution as a throwing off of repression and the experience of liberation that’s all very nice but we see just half of the picture. Revolution is always a dialectical process where revolution undergoes inversion in counter-revolution. So a tragic understanding of revolution would show the experience of liberation as always risking flipping over into a new experience of oppression and terror and the two things are intrinsically linked. Liberation and terror are intricated, are dialectically interdependent and that’s what a properly tragic understanding would lead us to. If we want to maintain something like revolution or rebellion then we have to see it tragically in terms of the inversions to which it is subject. If that sounds a bit abstract then if we think about, say, Egypt, well we have the experience of Tahrir Square and that’s one side of it but what’s happened in Egypt is what Gramsci would have called a passive revolution, one where everything seems to have changed but the institutions of society have remained the same – in Egypt’s case with the military and the rest – and because of that there’s a risk of inversion, a new form of oppression emerging, maybe not immediately but in perhaps ten, fifteen years down the road.
We have this progressivist liberal understanding of events like revolutions as being once and for all events where oppression is thrown off, whereas a properly tragical, dialectical understanding would see the situation as a much more complex question. And also, and this is the other crucial point about why tragedy is so important – and this goes back to a theme in the Faith of the Faithless on violence – that violence is a phenomenon with a history and violence is never one thing. Violence is always a part of a sequence of violence and counter-violence, each of which comes with its claim to justification. Williams says, and it’s a lovely phrase, ‘to say peace when there is no peace is to say nothing.’ So we have to understand the possibility of peace in relationship to the history of violence, which is our history wherever we may be. This violence has a tragic character, it’s about cycles of violence and counter-violence that unfold historically, and to imagine that can just be arrested, that it could be stopped in an experience of freedom is to risk disavowing that history and to understand nothing. So for example if we think about the situation in South Africa post apartheid, or indeed, what’s been happening in Ireland. To understand the Irish situation we have to grasp the history of violence that that emerges out of and the pattern of violence and counter-violence with their accompanying chains of justification which unfold.
So, yes tragedy is accessible, the world needs to be understood in tragic terms in the name of realism. Lastly, once we do that, we throw off a certain naïve, optimistic, progressivist view of history in the name of something much more bracing and much more pessimistic. But there’s still a glimmer of hope. For me, the intellectual discipline of the left has to be to take the long historical view and to see events of oppression in the context of liberation and to see events of liberation in the context of their reversal and to see the long view and the big picture. Which means we can still hope but there’s no point in hoping blindly.