Christopher Webber, in response to me:

>>We will have to turn back to the word "tragedy".
>
>Oh dear, what have I started?!  Having spent a whole University year
>studying Tragedy, of course you'll find a different (pretty inadequate)
>definition from every time and place that has produced the stuff.
>Aristotelian rules are OK for Sophocles and Aeschylus, but they don't
>even fit Euripides in, so what hope for later writers?

You forget perhaps that I wasn't talking about any of the famous
Aristotelian rules.  I just picked from Aristoteles his classical
and simple deffinition of tragedy, which fits very well with my
former argument, by the way.

>>>"Tosca" most certainly is not tragic, merely a melodramatic series of
>>>unlucky accidents and temporary derangements.
>>
>>Oedipus's story is exactly the same.  What else do you want for a
>>tragedy?.
>
>With respect, it is not the same at all.  Tosca hasn't the foggiest idea
>what she is doing from one moment to the next.  She acts on impulse,
>rather with brain, heart and liver.

This is matter for long discussion.  What about Hamlet ripping Polonius?.
However I don't think that the consciousness or not of the characters may
lead us to a deffinition of what tragedy is.

>Her story has a large if rather short term emotional impact, and the end
>of it would have been the same whether or not she'd killed Scarpia, an
>act which she doesn't reflect much on before or after the event.

I'm afraid that you are confusing "tragedy" in itself with "mythos" (not
"myth", of course).  I picked the aristotelian deffinition of tragedy
because it's broad enough and it's focused on the effects that tragedy
produces ("katharsis") rather than on the means by which those effects
are produced.  Aristotles mentions "mythos" just as one --though very
important-- among many components of tragedy.  According to Aristotelian
standards, the lack of a strong "mythos" (lack of unity or "organicity"
at the plot) implies a "bad" tragedy, not a non-tragic play.

>Oedipus's story (c.f. Stravinsky and Enescu's versions) has a huge
>resonance precisely because he's told what's going to happen to him from
>the start (as are his parents) and in striving to avoid it they all three
>- half-wittingly, perhaps - contrive to bring about the very conditions
>which bring the prophecies to pass.  The implications for humanity itself
>in this tale are immense, and manifold, affecting many areas of our
>experience.

Again, you are confusing here "tragedy" with "mythos", and even with "myth"
in its broad sense.

>There's something utterly absurd about mentioning Sardou and/or Puccini's
>sexy heroine in the same breath, or claiming comparable status.

Why?.  Perhaps because Sophocles is "high" art and Sardou/Illica/Giacosa
is cheap melodrama?.  I'm afraid that you are just showing here your
literary prejudices rather than a theory of what tragedy is.

>Another sad, not tragic, figure.  It's Hamlet's tragedy, not hers.

Again: why?. Just because she hadn't a dilemma?.

>>Tragedy is when some forces bigger than ourselves -just as the destiny,
>>or stupidity, which is equally incommensurable- drives us to terrible
>>acts.  Isn't that the case of Butterfly?.
>
>Tragedy can be that, but not inevitably.  Stupidity is the mainspring of
>the absurd, not the tragic.

We could discuss this forever.  You think that tragedy lies at the plot
rather than at the facts in themselves...I have a broader concept: my own
archetype of tragedy lies at the book of Job.  Personally I see the myth
of Orpheus as the other great archetype of tragedy, precisely because of
the absurd and stupidity of the "plot".  Orpheus myth is all the opposite
to Aristotelian "mythos": the story doesn't offers us a closed gestalt,
rather it seems a mutilated or unfinished torso, even to the point that
Virgil, Ovidius and others gave different endings to the story.  Once that
Orpheus has lost his beloved by second time....  what's the difference?,
the poets may finish this story as they want.  Is there something more
tragic than this?.

>In Puccini, it depends whether you see Butterfly's suicide as terrible.
>The effect in the theatre (unlike Oedipus' blinding) is just to make us
>cry, or thrill us, as with Tosca's sorry demise.

To cry, due to "eleos" and to thrill, due to "phobos".  The fact that
Oedipus is a far better tragedy doesn't means that Tosca and Butterfly
are not of the same genre.

>What we cannot say, to wrench a more interesting dialogue back onto topic,
>is that operetta excludes the tragic - it doesn't, whether in England,
>Spain or France; even if in some cases (especially with the French) we're
>reflecting on tragedy from the farcical side of the coin.

I wrote exactly:

>>Operetta is never (or almost never) related to tragedy.  Operetta may
>>not exclude the tragic, of course, but I just said that this is not the
>>most common case.

Pablo Massa
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