It is the tragedian’s task, then, to force us to confront an almost unbearable truth: every folly or myopia of which any human being in history has been guilty may be traced back to some aspect of our collective nature. Because we each bear within ourselves the whole of the human condition, in its worst and best aspects, any one of us might be capable of doing anything at all, or nothing, under the right—or rather the most horribly wrong—conditions. Once theatregoers have experienced this truism, they may willingly dismount from their high horses and feel their powers of sympathy and humility return, enhanced. They may accept how readily their own lives might be shattered if certain of their more regrettable character traits, which have until now invited no serious trouble, were one day to coincide with a situation that allowed them unlimited and catastrophic dominion, leaving these heretofore innocents no less shamed and wretched than the unfortunate soul suffering beneath the headline “Royal in Incest Shocker.”
4.
The play that most perfectly accorded with Aristotle’s conception of the tragic art form was Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, first performed in Athens at the Festival of Dionysus in the spring of 430 B.C.
Sophocles’ Oedipus, the king of Thebes, is worshipped by his people for his benevolent rule and for the wisdom he displayed many years before in outwitting the Sphinx and driving it from the city— which exploit earned him his throne. For all his good qualities, however, the king is not flawless: most notably, he is impetuous and prone to rage. Long ago, in fact, during one particularly violent outburst on the road to Thebes, he killed an obstinate old man who refused to get out of his way. That incident was largely obscured, though, by subsequent events, as Oedipus’s victory over the Sphinx was followed by a period of prosperity and security for the city. During this time, Oedipus also married the beautiful Jocasta, widow of his predecessor, King Laius, who had died under unexplained circumstances while fighting with a young man just outside Thebes.
As the play opens, a new disaster no less menacing than the Sphinx has descended upon the city: a peculiar plague for which no cure can be found is ravaging the population. Desperate, the people turn to the royal family for help. Oedipus’s brother-in-law, Creon, is dispatched to seek answers from the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, who gnomically explains that Thebes is being forced to pay the price for an unclean thing within its walls. Creon and others at court decide this must be an allusion to the unsolved murder of the previous monarch. Oedipus agrees and vows that he personally will see to it that the killer is found and mercilessly punished.
Jocasta’s face darkens as she hears all this. As if for the first time, she remembers another prophecy from long ago, when King Laius was warned that he would perish by his son’s hand. To avert that outcome, Laius had ordered that the baby boy Jocasta later bore him be taken to a mountainside and left there to die.
But of course, there was no getting around fate: the shepherd charged with the task took pity on the infant and instead, in secret, gave him to the king of Corinth to raise as his own. When this boy reached maturity, yet another oracle revealed to the Corinthian king and queen that he would someday kill his father and marry his mother. Determined to avoid such crimes, Oedipus left his adoptive home and travelled the length of Greece, ending up … on the road leading into Thebes.
Jocasta, the first to comprehend what has happened, retires to her rooms in the royal palace and hangs herself. Oedipus finds her swinging from the rafters, cuts down her body and pierces his own eyes with the brooch from her dress. He embraces his two daughters, Ismene and Antigone, who are yet too young to understand the nightmare that is their parents’ situation, and then sends himself into exile, to wander the earth in shame until his death.
5.
We might, here, offer the rejoinder that patricide and incest are judgement errors of a sort that not many of us are liable to make. But the extraordinary dimensions of Oedipus’s hamartia do not detract from the more universal features of the play. Rather, the story moves us insofar as it reflects shocking aspects of everyman’s character and condition: the way apparently small missteps can result in the gravest of consequences; the blindness we often suffer with regard to the effects of our actions; our fatuous tendency to presume that we are in conscious command of our destiny; the speed and finality with which everything we cherish may be lost to us; and the mysterious and unvanquishable forces—for Sophocles, “fate”—against which our weak powers of reason and foresight are pitted. Oedipus is by no means without fault: he hubristically believes himself to have escaped the oracles’ prophecies and lazily accedes to his subjects’ high opinion of him. His pride and hot temper cause him to pick a fight with King Laius, and his emotional cowardice thereafter prevents him from linking the murder to the earlier prophecies. And his self-righteousness permits him to ignore the crime for many years and then to chide Creon for hinting at his guilt.
Ye t even if Oedipus bears responsibility for his own fate, the tragic art form renders any easy condemnation impossible. It apportions blame to him without denying him sympathy. As Aristotle imagined, the audience must leave the theatre appalled yet compassionate, haunted by the universal implications of the concluding message of the chorus:
People of Thebes, my countrymen, look on Oedipus.
He solved the famous riddle with his brilliance,
He rose to power, a man beyond all power.
Who could behold his greatness without envy?
Now what a black sea of terror has overwhelmed him.
Now as we keep our watch and wait the final day,
Count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.
6.
If a tragic work allows us to feel a much greater degree of sympathy for others’ failings than we ordinarily might, it is principally because the form itself seeks to plumb the origins of failure. To know more is, in this context, necessarily to understand and forgive more. Tragedy leads us artfully through the minuscule, often innocent acts that connect heroes’ and heroines’ prosperity to their downfall, disclosing along the way the perverse relationships between intentions and consequences. Thus well informed, we are unlikely to maintain for long the indifferent or vengeful tone we might have clung to had we merely read the bare bones of the very same stories of failure in the popular press.
In the summer of 1848, a terse item appeared in many newspapers across Normandy. A twenty-seven-year-old woman named Delphine Delamare, née Couturier, of Ry, a small town not far from Rouen, had tired of the routines of marriage and, after running up huge debts on extravagant purchases of clothing and household goods, had embarked on an affair. Under emotional and financial pressure, she had at last taken her own life by swallowing arsenic. Madame Delamare had left behind a young daughter and a distraught husband, Eugène, who had once studied medicine in Rouen. In his post as a health officer in Ry, the papers noted, Delamare was loved by his patients and respected by the community.
Among those who saw this item was a twenty-seven-year-old aspiring novelist named Gustave Flaubert. The story of Madame Delamare would stay with him, becoming something of an obsession (it even followed him on a journey around Egypt and Palestine) until, in September 1851, he settled down to work on it. Madame Bovary would be published in Paris six years later.
One of the many things that happened when Madame Delamare, the adulteress from Ry, turned into Madame Bovary, the adulteress from Yonville, was that her life began to expand beyond the dimensions of a black-and-white morality tale. As a newspaper story, the case of Delphine Delamare had been seized upon by conservative provincial commentators as an example of the declining respect for marriage among the young, of the increasing commercialisation of society and of the loss of religious values. But for Flaubert, art was the very antithesis of crass moralism. It was a realm in which human motives and behaviour could for once be explored in real depth, with a sensitivity that would make a mockery of any desire on the part of the reader to construe saints or sinners. Flaubert’s audience would hear of Emma’s naive ideas about love, but they would also learn where these had come from: they would follow her back to her childhood, read over her shoulder at the convent, sit with her and her father through long summer afternoons in their kitchen in Tostes, as the squeals and clucks of pigs and chickens drifted in from the yard. They would watch as she and Charles stumbled into an ill-matched marriage, and then witness Charles’s seduction by his own loneliness and a young woman’s physical charms. They would feel Emma’s need to escape her cloistered life, ironically fuelled by her lack of experience with men outside thirdrate romantic literature. Readers would be able to—would have to—sympathise equally with Charles’s complaints about Emma and with Emma’s about Charles. Flaubert seemed to take an almost deliberate pleasure in everywhere unsettling his readers’ inclination to find comfortable answers: no sooner had he presented Emma in a positive light, for example, than he would undercut her with a mordant remark. And then, just as readers were losing patience with her, just as they began to think her nothing more than a selfish hedonist, he would draw them back to her, tell them something about her inner life that would make them cry. By the time she lost her status in her community, crammed arsenic into her mouth and lay down in her bedroom to await her death, few who knew her history would be disposed to judge her.