The Homeless Muse

THE DEATH OF TRAGEDY (354 pp.)--George Steiner--Knopf ($5).

"Attention must be paid to such a person," says Mrs. Willy Loman of her husband in Death of a Salesman. It is a poignant plaint, and she repeats it as if she did not quite believe it. The fact is, no one is really convinced that the tormented figures of modern drama have the stature of tragic heroes. The measure of that disbelief is to imagine Jocasta asking an audience to pay attention to Oedipus, or Cordelia to Lear. Try not paying attention to them.

Does the decline of tragedy imply its death? Critic George Steiner answers with a provisional yes in a book that is less remarkable for its conclusions than for its sense, style, erudition and critical verve. At 32, Critic Steiner shapes his definitions and distinctions with mature authority, and shows a kind of Goethian aplomb in stating bald-faced but sometimes neglected truths, as when he writes, "Tragedies end badly."

Job v. Oedipus. What is the essence of tragedy? Steiner goes back to the two earliest moral visions of man's fate in Western civilization, the Judaic and the Hellenic. In the Judaic view, the universe is a parable of justice. Jehovah is wrathful and awesome, but ultimately fair. In the Greek view, "men's accounts with the gods do not balance." The world is riddled with "mysteries of injustice, disasters in excess of guilt." After his agonizing ordeal, Job "gets back double the number of she-asses; so he should, for God has enacted upon him a parable of justice. Oedipus does not get back his eyes or his scepter over Thebes."

Moving from Greece to Elizabethan England, Steiner notes that Victor Hugo called Shakespeare "Aeschylus the second." It wasn't quite true. Shakespeare violated the classic unities of time, place and action and altered the tragedy of destiny to the tragedy of will. The underlying unity of Shakespearean tragedy, as Steiner sees it, is "the universal drama of the fall of man." This introduces Christian values without the Christian metaphysic, which is nontragic, since it contains the hope of heaven and redemptive grace. Critic Steiner fails to explore one pagan link between Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, the obsession with death. In the Elizabethan theater, death often plays the role of nemesis.

To the strict Aristotelian, Shakespeare is a kind of monumental fluke of genius, and Steiner skillfully covers a century of frantic effort among playwrights and critics to make Shakespeare and Sophocles compatible within the house of tragedy. The zenith of the neoclassic movement was Racine, and Steiner makes a powerful case for him as the last bona fide playwright of tragedy. The fact remains that Racine's greatest play, Phedre, draws half its impact from the Greek myth and Euripidean play on which it is based.

Ben Franklin's Kite. The 17th century is the great divide, as Steiner sees it. After that, tragedy is doomed by a triple decadence--the decline of the word, the myth, and the audience. Verse succumbed to prose, and prose itself, Steiner feels, is now debased, stale and lackluster. Both the Greek myths and Christian values were ravaged by rationalism. In tragedy, "lightning is a messenger. But it can no longer be so once Benjamin Franklin has flown a kite to it." The audience changed most of all. The rising middle class was not interested in the fall of princes and the death of kings. The romantic, ameliorative, democratic temper could abide neither the aristocratic pride of the tragic hero nor his implacable doom. Democracy has bred the kind of mind that believes King Lear would have been better off in a home for senior citizens.

There might have been great modern "prose tragedy," argues Steiner, if contemporary playwrights had modeled themselves on Ibsen and Chekhov. The weakness of this argument is that some did, without achieving any notably tragic vision. Shaw proved that there could be a laughing Ibsen, and wrote social-uplift comedies, while someone like Odets became the subway Chekhov, oozing lower-middle-class pathos.

Cassandra's Scream. Amusingly caustic is Steiner's account of the literary bootleggers who pour new psychoanalytic wine in the old stolen bottles of the Greek myths. Gide, for instance, produced an Oedipus "who arrives at the extraordinary insight that his marriage to Jocasta was evil because it drew him back to his childhood and thus prevented the free development of his personality." White forgoing these lapses of taste, T. S. Eliot merely domesticates the Greek myths till they are as tame as Old Possum's pet cals.

Having broken all the toys in his theatrical playpen, Critic Steiner feels a twinge of remorse. He closes his book with the memory of a great tragic moment in the modern theater. It was a performance by Helene Weigel, widow of Bertolt Brecht, in Brecht's Mother Courage. Mother Courage has just been forced to look at her dead soldier son twice without permitting herself a sign of recognition: "As the body was carried off, Weigel looked the other way and tore her mouth wide open. The shape of the gesture was that of the screaming horse in Picasso's Guernica. The sound that came out was raw and terrible beyond any description I could give of it. But, in fact, there was no sound. Nothing. The sound was total silence. It was silence which screamed and screamed through the whole theater so that the audience lowered its head. And that scream inside the silence seemed to me to be the same as Cassandra's when she divines the reek of blood in the house of Atreus. It was the same wild cry with which the tragic imagination first marked our sense of life."

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