THE PATTERN OF TRAGEDY
Aristotle understood a tragedy to be an artificial
thing, an imitation (mimesis) of the nature of man
coming to mature self-realization. This dramatic doc-
trine should be interpreted within Aristotle's meta-
physics and is skillfully replaced in this context by K.
Telford (1965, pp. 89f.). An actual and complete human
action must, Aristotle held, have a certain magnitude
or significance. It is a whole having concrete parts.
These parts, beginning, middle, and end (Poetics, 1450b
26f.), occur in temporal succession and can be under-
stood as a unity by reference to a principle.
The principles of necessity (ἀνάγκη) and likelihood
(τὸ εἰκός, 1451b 1f.) are exhibited in the definitions of
the three parts of an action. The beginning of an action
is not altogether necessitated by preceding events but
is reasonably (probably) followed by other events. The
end is necessitated by all that precedes and is followed
by no further part of that action. The middle is both
necessitated by what precedes and points with proba-
bility to subsequent events. A man's action, consisting
in his free decision and its consequences up to a termi-
nal effect, would satisfy these conditions. The conse-
quence of a decision can be foreseen only with proba-
bility, but once enacted the decision takes its place
in the necessary order and exercises compelling power
upon the present. This necessity in its action upon the
protagonist acquires the terrifying force of fate.
Aristotle may be interpreted to hold that the appro-
priate pleasure of tragedy follows upon a catharsis of
the audience's emotions of pity and fear (and like
emotions) effected by means of the dramatic pres-
entation of incidents involving pity and fear. Pity is
a human reaction to events which awaken our sympa-
thy, or an inclination to identify one's self with the
personages caught up in these events. Terror is the
concurrent reaction to that which repels or overawes.
By awakening the audience's pity the poet induces the
audience to participate in the terror which the pro-
tagonist also senses. This is terror in the face of fate.
Hence the audience comes to share to some degree
in the heroic manner in which the protagonist con-
fronts this fearful fate. The peculiar quality of the
hero's suffering both attracts and repels the audience
and readjusts its inclinations to approach the humanly
attractive and to flee from evil.
It is essential now to determine how to recognize
the completeness of an action involving the piteous
and the terrible. This action must have a beginning,
a middle, and an end, and be unified by the principles
of necessity and likelihood. In Aristotle's favorite
drama, the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, these three parts
are easy to recognize. Briefly, the beginning is Oedipus'
identification of himself as the father of his family, the
just king of Thebes, able and obligated to rid Thebes
of the plague, sign of the gods' displeasure. The middle
is the struggle to retain this character and also to effect
the desired riddance. The end comes with his self-
recognition as an offense to the gods and the cause
of the plague through his foretold and foreordained
incest and patricide. Thus, the drama moves through
a decision concerning identity and role, a struggle to
retain this identity and role, and an end or insight into
the erroneously and arrogantly assumed identity and
role. The completeness of the action may be inter-
preted as the return of the end to the beginning, a
return in which the past is seen to bear unexpectedly
upon the present yet in a manner which is in accord
with fate. A complete action of this kind must be
distinguished from a series of events which is merely
calamitous, pathetic, or piteous but which is not
accompanied by an insight, for the insight which
reevaluates the series of events or sets it into a new
perspective is essential.
Variations upon this pattern of decision, struggle, and
insight-laden return to the decision are demonstrably
descriptive of a great many, if not all, tragedies. To
take one instance: in Sophocles' Antigone, both Creon
and Antigone move through the pattern; but the insight
of the play as a totality lies in the evident point that
although each may be justified in his own course of
action, no reconciliation between the two is possible;
there is no just universe which includes both.
There are other accounts of the pattern of tragic
action. Gilbert Murray develops an elaborate one in
“An Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek
Tragedy” contributed to Themis by Jane Harrison
(Cambridge, 1917). Kenneth Burke describes his un-
derstanding of the tragic rhythm in terms of “purpose,
passion, perception” in A Grammar of Motives (New
York [1945], pp. 38f.); cf. also Francis Fergusson, The
Idea of a Theater (Princeton [1949], Ch. I). These
accounts are not inconsistent with the one presented
here. The “three unities,” however, which express what
the neo-classic authors learned from Aristotle by way
of J. C. Scaliger (Poetics, 1561) and L. Castelvetro
(Poetics, 1570), communicate only a superficial grasp
of this pattern.
The tragic view of life may, up to this point, be
said to be the faith, or at least the hope, that the
struggle will indeed be followed by an insight which
will illuminate the decision or reaffirm the value of
the struggle, even though the value may be affirmed
only in an ironic sense. However, this faith or this hope,
expressed in so abstract a manner, scarcely does justice
to the hero's motivation to embark upon the tragic
action. Moreover, this pattern may be discovered in
other kinds of action; thus, it is not sufficient to define
the tragic sense.
