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I wrote something on Antigone, then lost it - will try to come back to it.
On Aristotle: he writes:
There remains then the mean between these [the good man and the bad man]. This is the sort of man who is not pre-eminently virtous and just, and yet it is through no badness or villainy of his own that he falls into the fortune, but rather through some flaw in him, he being one of those who are in high station and good fortune, like Oedipus and Thyestes and the famous men of such families as those. The successful plot must then have a single and not, as some say, a double issue; and the change must be not to good fortune from bad but, on the contrary, from good to bad fortune, and it must not be due to villainy but to some great flaw in such a man as we have described, or of one who is better rather than worse. This can be seen also in actual practice. For at first poets accepted any plots, but to-day the best tragedies are written about a few families-- Alcmaeon for instance and Oedipus and Orestes and Meleager and Thyestes and Telephus and all the others whom it befell to suffer or inflict terrible disasters.
Judged then by the theory of the art, the best tragedy is of this construction. Those critics are therefore wrong who charge Euripides with doing this in his tragedies, and say that many of his end in misfortune. That is, as we have shown, correct. And there is very good evidence of this, for on the stage and in competitions such plays appear the most tragic of all, if they are successful, and even if Euripides is in other respects a bad manager, yet he is certainly the most tragic of the poets.
Next in order comes the structure which some put first, that which has a double issue, like the Odyssey, and ends in opposite ways for the good characters and the bad. It is the sentimentality of the audience which makes this seem the best form; for the poets follow the wish of the spectators. But this is not the true tragic pleasure but rather characteristic of comedy, where those who are bitter enemies in the story, Orestes and Aegisthus, for instance, go off at the end, having made friends, and nobody kills anybody.
The flaw that he is talking about is hamartia - which actually comes from the verb for failing to hit a target with an arrow - so, a missing of the mark.
So, tragedy and comedy. Tragedy generally concerns the actions of mythical characters (although not always, possibly - cf Persae), and of great houses. If there is a standard plot, it is something like "the protagonist's failing leads them to their own destruction". However, "failing" here can apply to any number of things, which are often either not really flaws as such or are things the hero is powerless to avoid or avert.
Oedipus is a goood example of this - his failing in Oedipus Tyrannos is... what? That he killed his father and married his mother? He certainly _did_, but he didn't mean to, and in fact tried quite hard to avoid it - is trying to escape a divine prophesy itself impious? And what choice does he have? He is King of Thebes, Thebes is struck by plague, and the only way to lift the plague is to find out why the gods are punishing Thebes - he does what a good king would do, which is to seek to life the plague, even though it leads to his destruction. Perhaps his flaw is not really a flaw so much as a characteristic - he solves riddles. In fact, he is the great solver of riddles and, confronted by a puzzle, he has to get to the bottom of it, even when he has realised where it will take him... |
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