L'esprit tragique

By Nirina Mignon

Thus was conjoined the once parted arras, that limit which separated the murderous Medea with attendees of downcast brows and spent sighs. Their disquiet was silenced as Philomela now tongueless, by sorrow of all things! Now a little more guiltless is made the audience, a grace within them effaces vanity and their next weeping, enriched by the feigned death of another, is no longer of one who has lost but one who has gained. For once, Alcmaeon was right when he defied Aristotle, this audience breathed through its ears, not nostrils, inundating their lungs with this poetic character when listening to this final procession worthy of funerals. As for all occurrences of a strange character, it would do us well to write it into a compendium of monsters, illustrating its gracile and plastic shape that another may capture it, and to enjoy its providence:

“Tout est dans cet esprit ; tout y trouve sa place ;

Enfin il songe à tout, et rien ne l’embarasse ;” ¹

–Scudery, “Alaric”, Liber I.

It is surprising that the civilization which sees happiness as an operation of virtue (Aristotle, Ethics i. 13), and glory as the lauds responding to the completion of a life which made productive attempts for nothing but virtue now vanquished, has made simple virtue and success an entirely optional element of its best tragedies. Sincerely, Aristotle was in error when he stated that no audience could persevere without madness through the tragedy of a protagonist which is faultless; if anything, the spirit of comedia resides in a tragedy which justly punishes as “the causes resemble their effect”. It is Medea, deaf to the pleas of the Argonaut hero after tormenting him, that escapes justice by the descending grace of Helios. The eminence of tragedy in Greece is its ability to deny the pleadings of the philosopher’s casuist deontology, withal humiliating its national heroes to penury of recourse. In the end of Medea alone do we see derision for the audience, when the comfort of the ubiquitous deus ex machina is converted for the use of the author of every sorrow in the play. Conversely, Rome has understood tragedy by their own heroine, condensing in one act of history all of Euripides and Aeschylus. Lucretia is tragic not because of the success of her dagger’s sermon by which the Roman nobility and peasantry alike overthrew the decaying monarchy; nor by a perseverance of suffering the rape of Tarquinus, but by the contradictory effect of her suffering which magnifies both the blamelessness of her condition and the cruelty of her self-slaughter (Augustine, De civ. i. 19), as if by the accumulating weight of her persistent innocence under the concupiscent tyranny, the force of the blade plunged by her own hand increased with Rome’s tears. The Athenian virtue seeks an immunity from the worst effects of sorrow, the invincibility which denies the inordinate passions and makes Achilles only vulnerable by his heel. Lucretia may have become the she-wolf which nourished the new Romulus, but her eminence remains not in driving away the Tarquins and the success of the republic; but rather it is in the cruelty of Fate’s decree for her, to invest in her image the ideal only to deprive her of the simplicity by which cults are made. The cultists of Caesar deified by national decree had Brutus culpable, but the cultists of Lucretia could only see in her an avarice which bestowed a live image of virtue only to deprive the world of it. Tragedy could not find its better Muse, the lightness of virtue and the disquiet of actions provided by the same actor. There was never to be a cult of Lucretia for this cause, besides the honor pleasantly beneath deification; and within the spirit of the figure of Lucretia lives the Cybellian cult whose practicants are sanctioned and yet denied a place in the Roman convivium.

Again in praise of Rome’s tragic material, Vergil and Ovid’s treatment of Caenis improves upon the Greek myth in condensing tragedy. What myth Greece had of a furtively mentioned hero in the Iliad, Ovid saw a vow-bound woman of devotion forced by Poseidon, who parsimoniously receives in exchange for her forswearing rape from the venal sea-bearer the promise of invincibility as a man; in effect corrupting everything which underlies the sentiment uttered later: “Deum meum et deum vestrum” ² (Jn. XX, 17), since by the denial of her initial vow she received the vow of her captor, binding her to the duty of a warrior whose place is with the ceaseless praise of rapacious gods rather than the altar at Parnassus. The context behind the fall of the new Caenis, the hero under the trample of Minotaurs, improves upon the Greek myth by providing a cause for the creation of the myth: no longer do we simply hear of a warrior who became so through Fate’s enticement of glory, but one whose very heroic transformation of vows and physicality is theft of what everything Fate decreed. The end of Caenis provided by Vergil further increases her tragedy, regardless of whether the reader see her transformation as a gift or a burden. Since if her heroism gave her a heightened state of life, that which is given approbation by Aristotle and the philosophers, then she is consigned to the banality of her true nature in the depth of Hades: while Socrates in Crito revels in the possibility that the afterlife will be a time of meditation on the good deeds past, then a vain and faint dream is provided by her deeds as if they had been those of others, or in the words of Horace: “Velut aegri somnia, vanae finguntur species” ³ (Horace, De art. Poet., 7.). Now, if the transformation of Caenis is to be seen as a burden then the relief of reversion, even if eternal, magnifies her failure to uphold the initial vows of celibacy; since she can not be reassured that the duty of these vows had been nullified by the condition forced upon her by Poseidon. Thus, whichever mode of analysis is taken, the cruel passage consigns Caenis to the tragedy of a life and essence not lost by murder but theft:

“ite comes, et iuvenis quondam, nunc femina, Caenus,

rursus et in veterem fato revoluta figuram” ⁴

–Vergil, “Aenid”. Liber VI.

Within recent history, one of the effects of the spirit of many tragic figures was surprisingly grasped in the confluence of the Estates by Sieyès within his apology for the Third Estate. Grégoire and his clergy along with Mirabeau and his nobility recused themselves to the lowest gentry, denying their exemptions from the taille by adjoining themselves to the then-fictional National Assembly, who like the igniis fatuus ⁵ hovering over lakes, formed the matter of dreams. Since everything which by law was not the Third Estate adjoined itself to it, the importance in the result of Sieyès’ apology was not the reformation of the temporal state of taxation but the spirit of its character. The very incipit of his apology nearly grasps tragedy, that which is everything and yet nothing knelt to receive the sacrament of worth, like the blameless and ermine-colored Viaticum: à être quelque-chose⁶ (c.f. Sieyès, “Qu’est-ce que c’est le Tiers-État?”). The dismissed Necker in his departure from the courts of Versailles advocated for the return of Calonne, and stated with authority:

"[…] les Lameth, les Pauvres qui n’ont plus rien, les Riches n’ont plus rien, tous, oui, tous, Sire, nous sommes Aristocrates." ⁷

–Necker, “Derniers conseils de M. Necker au roi”.

Thus, it is confirmed that the Third Estate was amorphous as an economic strata, its description becoming ever more nebulous as the “fivefold increase” of foreign trade also suggests an increase in the population proportion of the merchant class (Palmer, A Hist., p.351). And the inadequacy in describing spirit by gentry had become evident with the fact that the intellectuals of France could be found as much in the so-called “bourgeoisie” as the aristocrats, who it is said frequented novels more than treatises, a fact which is likely considering the bureaucratic and judicial functions of the state had been relegated to the Third Estate as absolutism increased. Furthermore the Law of Ventôse (1794) confirmed that the stratification of the dissolved Estates belonged in something more than economic position, that law which had made widows of ladies-in-waiting and had exacted penury on those who recoiled at those spitting on the statue of Henry of Navarre, by confiscating what estates were shared by widow and cadaver. Thus, the answer to the question, “What is the Third-Estate?”, while sufficiently answered by the economic provisions of Sieyès before the dissolution of estates, was grasped by the initial answers of the text paraphrased: tout qui est rien à présent, voulant juste être quelque chose⁸. The essence of the speech of Sieyès existed before the first convocation of the Estates General, before Drusus’ campaign over France, and remains evermore in tragic figures.

Besides the figure of Caenis who is condemned from life to Hades to being nothing seeking worth, this sentiment is shared by the orphan Mignon, who is reticent in accosting others due to the danger of her own mystery; in Miranda who knows not “one of [her] sex” (The Tempest, 3.1.60), and in Adam. In the figure of Adam is found the prototypical outcast who debases the very nature recently awarded to him, not out of the enticement of concupiscence since the depravity of this condition was the result of his sin, and not out of pleasure since a peaceful satisfaction (or what the Greek calls Ataraxia) was implied in his previous condition, but rather out of the “socialis necessitudo” which demands him to be a sinner for its own sake, to receive the mark of fraternity which excises him from the justified and places his association with that of his fallen Eve (Augustine, De civ. xiv. 11). The recency of his nature is mentioned in order to underline the cause of his socialis necessitudo, though the fullness of his being was confirmed by the presence of all his limbs it could be said that he felt himself inchoate and still nothing but the remaining product of dust animated; even such is confirmed by the Providence of his nature, who concedes that Adam’s solitude leaves him inadequate, requiring the creation of Eve, his “adjutorium simile sibi”⁹ (Gen. II., 18). Though some may indicate that the inadequacy of Adam in his solitude results from his inability to create for himself a posterity, that fact of every species, his inadequate being resulted out of the inability to associate and solder friendship, since the vocation which even allowed the possibility for the two to continue a lineage is received much later. The plight of Adam amidst the garden free of hunger follows from his nature as Aristotle’s social animal (zoon politikon), which requires the completion of another individual’s friendship. One can only see a resemblance to Romeo and Juliet, that of Adam declaring himself nothing without the association of the banished Eve, enjoining himself to her friendship in the fate of Purgatory and the valley of tears; and then like the invoker of Lazarus who asks nothing more but for the coolness of a finger to touch his lips of putrefaction, the spent breath of Hagar fleeing the angel and the drowned Ophelia forming for herself a garland is found under the mantle of Tragedy:

“De profundis ad te clamavi Domine […] fiant aures tuae intendentes in vocem deprecationis meam.” ¹⁰

–(Psalmi, CXXIX., i-iv)