Tragic Hero

                                                                     Paper No: 3 Unit No: 1

                                                                     Name: Pooja N. Trivedi

                                                                     Roll No: 36

                                                                     M.A. Part - I SEM – I

                                                                     Year: 2010-11

Submitted To: Dr. Dilip Barad

                         Department of English

                          Bhavnagar University,

                          Bhavnagar.

        What constitutes tragedy in a world in which we witness everyday disaster in newspaper or television or on the internet? We wonder what makes a tragedy different from all these, all common horrors of life? In general, tragedy is essentially a tale of death or suffering. M. H. Abrams defines it in his 'A Glossary of Literary Terms' as:

      “The term is broadly applied to literary

And especially to dramatic representation

Of serious actions which evaluate in a

Disastrous conclusion for the protagonist”

        At that juncture the query crops up that: Is tragedy something that happens only to heroes? If one is asked this question, the prudent reply usually is: first, we need to know what a hero is: from there the conversation can run in circles: tragedy shapes our idea of what a hero is, but then we measure her or him by the values of our time. And tragic heroism is always in tension with these communal beliefs and standards of behavior. Hence

        The important question confronts here is: What sort of person ought the chief character of tragedy to be?

        The ideal type of protagonist is deduced by Aristotle from the function of tragedy, in other words, “pity being felt for a person who, if not wholly innocent meets with suffering beyond his deserts: fear being awakened when the sufferer is a man like nature with ourselves”. Aristotle wrote a small treatise called 'poetics' into which he put some of his ideas about “Literature in general and tragedy in particular” where he has enumerated the qualities of an ideal Tragic Hero.

        Aristotle has excluded certain types of characters:

·             A good man – coming to bad end.

·             A bad man - coming to bad end.

The downfall of the former, a completely virtuous man would be odious and repellent. His fall will not arouse pity or fear but is shocking. As Dr. Johnson certainly of that view “Good does not allow such things to happen”

Similarly, the spectacle of an utterly wicked person passing from happiness to misery may satisfy our moral sense, but is lacking in the proper tragic qualities. Such a person is not like us, and his fall is felt to be well deserved and in accordance with the requirement of “Justice”. It excites neither pity not fear. Thus, Aristotle disqualifies –purely virtuous and thoroughly bad. There remains but one kind of character, who can best satisfy this requirement – “A man who is not eminently good and just yet whose misfortune is not brought by vice or depravity but by some error of frailly.’ Aristotle used for this kind of fault or weakness in an otherwise good character is.

                                Hamartia

This term is usually rendered in to English as “tragic flaw” perhaps no idea has gripped the conversation about tragic heroism more than the tragic flaw. Like a conscientious doctor, we poke and prod each protagonist to find the “flaw” or the vulnebrability that explains everything. “The American Heritage Dictionary confidently defines the tragic flaw as:

“A flaw in the character of the

Protagonist of a tragedy that

Beings the protagonist to tuin

Or sorrow.”

The root meaning of Hamatia is “missing the make” He falls not because of the act of some outside agency or vice but because of “miscalculation”. As Aristotle himself specifies what he thought was the right course in shaping tragic hero : the proper tragic hero is the man who is neither a paragon of virtue and justice nor undergoes the change to misfortune through any real badness or wickedness but because of some mistake.

“A single great error, whether Morally culpable or not: a single Defect in a character otherwise Noble – each and all of these May carry with them the tragic Issues of life and death”

“Othello” in the modern drama “Oedipus” in the ancient are the two most conspicuous examples of ruin wrought by characters, noble indeed, but not without defect, acting in the dark and as it seemed for the best.

Even the best of us makes mistakes, but a moral flaw in particular to an individual and part of nature. As the horrified audience witnesses the consequences of the hero’s hamartia., it may be a consolation.

“I am not like that, or I can try not to

be like that : it so, surely this misfor-

tune will not happen to me”

But in the end, the notion of the tragic flaw is not helpful critical tool for understanding the tragic hero. It obscures the complexity of the relationship between the hero’s values and those of the world he or she inhabits.

Instead of assuming the hero’s moral character(ethos), in contrast you could see them as the ritual scapegoat, a victim who takes on the collective guilt or pollution of society. With the death or expulsion of that scapegoat, a society is thought to be cleansed of its evils. As

Rene Griard describes the scenario in

“Violence and the sacred”

“The surrogate victim dies to that the entire community, threatened by the same fate, can be reborn in a new or renewed cultural order. Having sown the seeds of death, the God, ancestor, or mythic hero then dies himself of selects a victim to die in his stead. In so doing he bestows new life on men.”

The scapegoat takes on the collective guilt, not necessarily because he or she is guilty of any particular crime or sin or has a flaw, but rather because someone must do so. Oedipus as a scapegoat or sacrificed victim who must be expelled from these, not because he is proud or defies the gods, but because someone must carry that burden to care the city of the plague of its cycle of violence.

The paradox that tragic heroism poses is:

“TO assert yourself is to destroy yourself”

Stay out of trouble, keep a low profile: that’s the advice that the Greek chorus usually gives, and the advice that the protagonist must

“Ignore in order to be a Hero”. As the closing lines of “Antigone’s chorus solemnly declares:

“Wisdom is by far the greatest part of joy

And reverence towards the god

Must be safeguarded

The mighty words of the proud

Are paid in full

With mighty blows of fate and

At long last

Those blows will teach us wisdom”

        They fear hubris, a confidence that goes beyond a strong sense of self to threaten the fabric of ordinary society and the restraints of religion.

Further, the ideal hero always presents a conflict. In Greek tragedy, the conflict was different. The hero was pitted against two forces: firstly, the superior strength of the rival party and another against Destiny. Thus, in Greek tragedy, there is a clash or conflict of groups and cliques, of passions along with the hero’s frantic struggle against a ruthless fate. But the latter Greek tragedians have introduced the inner conflict. As Bernard Knox argued in “The Heroic Temper” about sophodes,

“The presentation of the tragic dilemma

in the figure of a single dominating

character”.

It provokes conflict which reacts on his character and culminates in tragic disaster. In Shakespearian tragedies, the conflict of tragic hero is different from Greek tragedies. Where not just by the impact of human and superhuman forces tragedy is brought, but catastrophe is owing to his mental or inner conflict. In the present age, things have radically changed. Tragic be roes are presented with notable contrast to Elizabethan Tragic Heroes.

Tragic heroes have various characteristics.The characteristics of a tragic hero are that he is generally superior to the average man and is a representative of mankind. “The chief reason why the hero must be generally superior to most men is that otherwise he cannot awaken that intense concern for man’s plight which is certainly essential to tragedy.” Although the hero no longer needs to be of high social rank, he must speak to us of the actions in which he surpasses ourselves; of the moments in which we attain some barely probable kind of excellence. He must sustain our belief that our finest moments are real and no illusion. In our times, the function may be accompanied by one of the humble social position as easily as by a kind or a general.

In the present era, The concept has undergone a revolutionary change with the course of the time. As Arthur Miller delivered a manifesto on “Tragedy and the common Man”, in 1949, in defense of the possibility of tragedy in a modern world in which we all seem more or less “common”.

“In this age few tragedies are written It has often been held that the luck Is due to a paucity of heroes among us, or else that modern man has Had the blood drawn out of his organs of belief by the skepticism of Science, and the heroic –attack on Life cannot feed on an attitude Of reserve and circumspection For one reason or another, we Are often held to be below tragedy Or tragedy above us. The inevitable Conclusion is, of course, that the Tragic mode is archaic, fit only For the very highly placed, the

Kings or the kingly, and where This admission is not made In so many words it is mot often implied. I believe that the common Man is as apt of subject for Tragedy in its highest sense As kings were”.

To sum up, more precise and detailed discussion of the tragic hero properly begins with although they should not end with – Aristotle’s classical analysis in the “poetics”. Aristotle based his theory on introduction from the only examples available to him. On the contrary, in modern era, the paradigm evoked is that of a hero as everyman from the medieval morality play, whose suffering is an emblem for all of our pain. The question remains of how to reconcile the tradition of the tragic hero as the exceptional human being who represents our aspirations in going beyond all our dreams and the idea that the everyday action of simply being human in itself holds tragic possibilities.