Tragedy of the Moderns

On tragedy, from William F. Lynch's classic Christ and Apollo: "It is my deep conviction that the literary imagination, as it has been used in the theory and making of modern tragedy, has been "dishonest." It knows quite well, as we all do, that tragedy, when it is really achieved, produces an extraordinary impact of beauty and exaltation in the spectator. My own conclusion is that this achievement of tragedy has always occurred when the dramatic text has allowed itself to move through human time to the very last point of human finitude and helplessness. Here we have once again a form of the remarkable human law . . . that a kind of infinite is reached by marching through a finite. It might be put this way, somewhat paradoxically but truly, according to the feeling and actuality of great tragic texts: in tragedy a spectator is brought to the experience of a deep beauty and exaltation, but not by the way of beauty and exaltation. This is indeed . . . a natural mystery, understandable to the deep, experiential intelligence but not to the purely rational intelligence.

But the terms of this situation (and the textual facts) have been completely switched around by very many of the theorists and playwrights of our day. Apparently quite incapable of believing that anything good (much less beauty and exaltation) can come out of so enslaving a thing as the limited finite, the narrow gates of human helplessness, they have insisted, both as critics and writers, that exaltation must come out of exaltation, that infinites must come out of infinites. They therefore do a very dishonest thing . . . because they proclaim, against all the evidence, that the achievement of great tragedy has always been rooted in mystical conquests of the human spirit over pain, in the emergence of godlike strength and qualities in man in the very midst of tragic defeat. The tragic figure is really an exalted conqueror."

"A God on a Cross, that is all my theology."