Elucidate Raymond Williams’ views
on ‘Rejection of Tragedy’
Williams’ essay ‘Rejection of
Tragedy’ is a study of the rejection of tragedy in modern age with special
reference to Bertolt Brechet who founded epic theater as compared to the
emotional theory of Aristotle. He rejected the conventional idea of tragedy
and made tragedy more experiential and rational.
He made people think above the
situation presented in the tragedy and not within. Aristotelian drama enforced
thinking from within and Brechet’s theater from without. He used distancing
affects to turn people like spectators who sit in the chair, smoke and observe.
He showed what the audience wanted to see. Williams has discussed six plays:
The Three Penny Opera, Saint Joan of the Stockyard, Die Massnahme, The Good
Woman of Sezuen, Mother Courage and Her Children and the Life of Galileo.
In the last play mentioned, the hero is offered two choices one between
accepting the terms or the other being destroyed. Nevertheless, the hero
recants. Tragedy, says Williams, in some of its older senses is certainly
rejected by this ‘complex seeing’. The major achievement of Brechet is recovery
of history as a dimension of tragedy. In tragedy we must see continuity and
desire for change. Catastrophe should not halt the action or push the
contradictions of life into background. Suffering should be avoided because
suffering breaks us, Brechet thinks that our will to struggle should not die
under the weight of sufferings. Brechet’s own words are the precise expression
o this new sense of tragedy:
“The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are unnecessary”
Brechet believes that response to
suffering is crucial and weight of suffering is borne by all of us. Even the
spectator becomes a participant. As a participant he can condemn or comprehend
the sufferings. And for this purpose, he needs some active principle which he
finds in the system. But system makes its principles for its defense not for
its rejection. Our disgust is directed against morality; not upon the
system. Under these circumstances morality serves the cause of the cruel system
and religion and spiritualism lose their effectiveness. Morality, religion and
spiritualism are used by the exploiting class as a shield against public
resentment. Brechet rejected and exposed the validity of the so-called
refined sentiments of goodness, love and sacrifice. There are, to him, fake
sentiments, romanticized on purpose. Love, he thinks, separates us from
humanity. The emphasis on love can look like growth but it is often a simple
withdrawal from the human action. Love is defined and capitalized in separation
from humanity. Williams declares:
“An evil system is protected by a false morality”
Brecht's narrative style, which
he called ‘Epic Theater’, was directed against the illusion created by
traditional theater of witnessing a slice of life. Instead, Brecht encouraged
spectators to watch events on stage dispassionately and to reach
their own conclusions. To prevent spectators from becoming emotionally involved
with a play and identifying with its characters, Brecht used a variety of
techniques. Notable among them was the alienation or estrangement effect, which
was achieved through such devices as choosing (for German audiences) unfamiliar
settings, interrupting the action with songs, and announcing the contents of
each scene through posters.
Brecht first attracted attention
in the Berlin as the author of provocative plays that challenged the
tenets of traditional theater. In ‘St. Joan’ a modern-day Joan of Arc
advocates the use of force in the fight against exploitation of
workers. In his play, ‘Mother Courage and her Children’ Brechet invites us to
see what happens to a good person a bad society. Through Sheen Lee, he seeks to
show how goodness is exploited by gods and men and how good person is
alienated. The antiwar play ‘Mother Courage and Her Children’ shows an
indomitable mother figure who misguidedly seeks to profit from war but loses
her children instead. Brechet’s play ‘Good Woman of Sezuin’ presents a
kindhearted prostitute. She is good but she is alienated. Brecht called this a
parable play, the kindhearted prostitute is forced to disguise herself as her
ruthless male cousin and exploit others in order to survive. According to
Brechet the most alienated arethe best. He collects life from all corners
of the world when he says:
“Today when human character must be understood as the totality of allsocial
conditions, the epic theater is the only one that can
comprehend all the processes
which could serve for a fully representative picture of the world”
He rejected the idea that
suffering can ennoble us. Bad societies, he thinks, needs heroes and it is bad
life that needs sacrifices. He considers it a sin against life to allow oneself
to be destroyed by cruelty. His mature dramas show that it is not possible to
label people good or bad. Goodness and badness are the two alternate labels
in the same individual. We have a split consciousness and live under this
tension. Williams calls it ‘Complex Seeing’ which was rejected by the
traditional conception of tragedy. ‘Mother Courage and her Children’ is a
dramatization of conflicting instincts in a person who is not consciousness of
these conflicts. But the case in ‘The Life of Galileo’ is different. Galileo is
fully conscious and is free in making a choice. Galileo deals with
the responsibility of the intellectual to defend his or her beliefs in the face
of opposition from established authorities, in Galileo’s case the Roman
Catholic Church. We can admire or despite Galileo but Brechet
is not asking us to do this. He is only telling us what happens to
consciousness when it caught in a deadlock between individual and
social morality. We are so used to tragedy and martyrdom under such
circumstances that we are unable to see this experience in a radically
different way – complex seeing and accept the complexity of the situation as a
fact of life. Facts that are concealed and brought to light as in, ‘The
Life of Galileo’ Barberini says:
“It is my own mask that permits me certain freedoms today. Dressed like this. I
might be heard to murmur. If God did not exist, we should have to invent
him”
Williams in this case presents
the example of Mother Courage and comments that the history and people come
alive on the stage, leaping past the isolated and virtually static action
that we have got used to in most modern theatre. The drama, in his opinion,
simultaneously occurs and is seen. It is not ‘take the case of this woman’ but
‘see and consider what happens to these people’. The point is not what we feel
about her hard lively opportunism; it is what we see, in the action, of its
results. By enacting a genuine consequence, in Williams’ view, Brecht raises
his central question to a new level, both dramatically and intellectually. The
question is then no longer ‘are they good people?’ Nor is it, really, ‘what
should they have done?” It is, brilliantly, both ‘what are they doing?’ and
‘what is this doing to them?’ In Williams’ opinion, to detach thework from its
human purpose is, Brecht sees, to betray others and so betray life. It is not,
in the end, what we think of Galileo as a man, but what we think of
this result.
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