To the Editor:
Lionel Abel’s “Is There A Tragic Sense of Life?” [December 1964] is a beautiful essay, written in the peculiar plastic style which recalls Socrates’s colloquii. But Abel’s interpretation of Unamuno is strange. The author of The Tragic Sense of Life defined all his thinking in the famous sentence: “El dolor es la constancia de la vida y la raiz de la personalidad, puer solo sufriendo se es persona” [Pain is the constant factor of life and the source of being, for only through suffering does one become a man].
José Mirelman
Tel Aviv, Israel
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To the Editor:
To ask an old Jew if there is a tragic sense of life is like asking him if there is a God and is He One? He would disdain to answer, regarding the poser of such questions as disqualified even to ask them. Belonging to a small but timeless community . . . his tragic sense of life is communal, emotional, and historic, an integral part of his faith and transmitted from generation to generation. . . .
And it has nothing to do with the reading, writing, or witnessing of tragedy on or off the stage. It is an all-pervasive feeling as omnipresent as light, in the presence of which experience and memory are entertained, tested, and endured. . . .
In America, a secular country, the tragic sense of life is without tradition. . . . Not even Lionel Abel can envision us living in a world whose spiritual windows open on a tragic view of life. . . .
Eugene J. Hochman
Toledo, Ohio
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To the Editor:
. . . Tragedy does not automatically occur with the collision of two goods—it occurs when this collision, or some other necessary but painful choice, is imposed upon a certain individual. The protagonist must have predominantly strong qualities (usually identified with the moral “good” of the era in which the tragedy is written) with one or a few flaws. The choice presented him by fate must strike the Achilles’ heel of his character—Macbeth’s choice between “good” metaphysical spirits and ordinary morality would have created no conflict in the mind of Duncan; it seemed especially created to tempt the ambitious Macbeth. . . .
Consider an imaginary tragic situation: a woman must choose between the good of attending a religious rite which her religion demands she attend upon pain of “mortal” sin, and the alternate good of staying home and tending her sick child. Suppose she chooses to attend the religious rite and her child dies while she is gone, whereupon she denounces her church and lives out her life in bleak and bitter defiance of all her former religion’s tenets, finally dying in a state of despair. Where is the tragedy here? The collision of goods was certainly present.
What this would-be tragedy lacks is a protagonist of noble (to use an antiquated word . . .) character. For tragedy’s mark is the glory of man which it demonstrates. Part of man’s glory is his ability to have resolve “when nothing can follow from resolve.” But an equal part of man’s glory consists of his ability to triumph over life’s negative factors, to triumph over the forces within himself which make him a prey to the choice presented him. Man triumphs by finding resolve and reasons for resolve solely within the confines of his own character, flawed as it may be, thus affirming man’s individual possibilities for glory. (It follows that Christian tragedy, like Christian existentialism, is a distorted variety.) In order to find resolve, the protagonist of the tragedy must have a strong character, while in order to suffer conflict from the choice presented him by fate he must not be perfect.
There are, then, the protagonist, fate, which presents the exact situation which will cause conflict in the individual protagonist, and the situation itself. Tragedy thus cannot reside in the situation alone, as Mr. Abel holds. . . .
(Mrs.) Margaret S. Riebman
Charleston, Illinois
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Mr. Abel writes:
May I answer all of my critics by pointing out that in my essay on the tragic sense of life, I merely introduced a number of themes which I hope to develop in separate pieces. Obviously I did not do anything like justice to the problems presented by Macbeth in the one or two paragraphs I devoted to that tragedy.
But to Mr. Mirelman, who was kind enough to praise my piece, I want to say this: In the very quote he cites from Unamuno it is evident that Unamuno takes the optimistic view that pain is of some utility. “. . . for only through suffering does one become a man.” And I still insist that Unamuno’s argument for immortality commits him to a certain optimism. Pain may be constant in life, but I think most of us would rather live and suffer than die. Hopelessness (despite Dante) is for many of us more closely connected with the prospect of annihilation than with the prospect of continuing pain, even the pain of hell. Besides, for Unamuno, pain is at least thrilling. Now I don’t think this is always the case. Finally, I don’t think Unamuno’s notion of pain a good one, philosophically speaking. I much prefer, for example, Max Scheler’s view that pain occurs when one whole is sacrificed to another whole.
To Mr. Hochman, I want to say this: If he does belong to the kind of community he describes, and if, in this community, the tragic sense is constant, then he, like others in there, has little need for the masterpieces of Sophocles, Shakespeare, or Racine. The function of the art of tragedy, I assume, is to supply what experience cannot normally supply: the tragic sense.
And to Mrs. Margaret S. Riebman: I never said that tragedy ever occurs automatically. And I remarked that in the Greek world the collision of two goods was made inevitable only for persons of superior character, who had what I called “a superior experience of life.” Now as to the instance you cite of a woman torn between attending to her sick child or attending a religious rite: here the choice is precisely untragic, though it might be difficult. The point is that the woman in question can make a choice which might not be fatal. Her child is not fated to die if she attends the religious rite, which shows there is no essential contradiction between being religious and being a mother. Now there was, I claim, an essential contradiction in the Greek world for superior individuals between the family and the state—that is to say, the Polis.