19 Mar The Tragic Art
Tragic art began in the theatres of ancient Greece in the sixth century BC and followed a hero, usually a high-born one, a king or a famous warrior, from prosperity and acclaim to ruin and shame, through some error of his own.The way the story was told was likely to leave members of an audience at once hesitant to condemn the hero for what had befallen him and humbled by a recognition of how easily they too might one day be ruined if ever they were presented with a situation similar to that with which the hero had been faced. The tragedy would leave them sorrowful before the difficulties of leading a good life and modest before those who had failed at the undertaking.
Tragedy embodies an attempt to build bridges between the guilty and the apparently lameless,
challenges our ordinary conceptions of responsibility, stands as the most
psychologically sophisticated, most respectful account of how a human being may be dishonoured without at the same time forfeiting the right to be heard.
If a tragic work allows us to experience a degree of concern for others’ failure so much greater than that we ordinarily feel, it is principally because it leads us to plumb the origins of failure. In this context, to know more is necessarily to understand and to forgive more. A tragic work leads us artfully through the minuscule, often innocent, steps connecting a hero or heroine’s prosperity to their downfall, and the perverse relationship between intentions and results. In the process we are unlikely to retain for long the indifferent
or vengeful tone we might have had recourse to had we merely read the bare bones of a story of failure in a newspaper.
In the summer of 1848, a terse item appeared in many newspapers across Normandy. A twenty-seven-year-old woman named Delphine Delamare, née Couturier, living in the small town of Ry,
not far from Rouen, had become dissatisfied with the routines of married life, had run up huge debts on superfluous clothes and household goods, had begun an affair and, under emotional and financial pressure, had taken her own life by swallowing arsenic. Madame Delamare left behind a young daughter and a distraught husband, Eugene Delamare, who had studied medicine in Rouen before taking up his post as a health officer in Ry, where he was loved by his clients and respected by the community.
One of those reading the newspaper was a twenty-seven year old aspiring novelist, Gustave Flaubert. The story of Madame Delamare stayed with him, it became something of an obsession, it followed him on a journey around Egypt and Palestine until, in September 1851, he settled down to work on Madame Bovary, published in Paris six years later.
One of the many things that happened when Madame Delamare, the adulteress from Ry, turned into Madame Bovary,the adulteress from Yonville, was that her life ceased to bear the dimensions of a black-and-white morality tale. As a newspaper story the case of Delphine Delamare had been seized upon by provincial conservative commentators as an example of the decline of respect
for marriage among the young, of the increasing commercialization of society and of the loss of religious values. But to Flaubert art was the very antithesis of crass moralism. It was a realm in which human motives and behaviour could for once be explored in a depth that made a mockery of any attempt to construe saints or sinners. Readers of Flaubert’s novel could observe Emma’s naive ideas of love, but also see where these had come from: they followed her into her childhood, they read over her shoulder at her convent, they sat with her and her father during long summer afternoons in Tostes, in a kitchen where the sound of pigs and chickens drifted in from the yard. They watched her and Charles falling into an ill-matched marriage.They saw how Charles had been seduced by his loneliness and by a young woman’s physical charms, and how Emma had been impelled by her desire to escape a cloistered life and by her lack of experience of men outside thirdrate romantic literature. Readers could sympathize with Charles’s complaints against Emma and Emma’s complaints against Charles. Flaubert seemed almost deliberately to enjoy unsettling readers’ desire to find comfortable answers. No sooner had he presented Emma in a positive light than he would undercut her with an ironic remark. But then, as readers were losing patience with her, as they felt her to be nothing more than a selfish hedonist, he would draw them back to her, would tell them something about her sensitivity that would make them cry. By the time Emma had lost her status in her community, had crammed arsenic into her mouth and lain down in her bedroom to await her death, few readers would be in a mood to judge.
STATUS ANXIETY
Alain de Botton
