More Fallout from The Death of Tragedy

More Fallout from the Death of Tragedy

TLDR: The second corollary to the death of tragedy is that strong men appear ridiculous and attract not the brightest lights, post-tragedy. Stifter was motivated negatively by Napoleon. Beethoven did the right thing, revoking his dedication.

The structure that created the strong man role has fallen apart. A sorry lot is left stranded.

And we acknowledge here that secularization had a role, but no less important in levering away from tragedy is Romanticism.

The first corollary said that the tragic economy required someone to be cast as nature so that someone else could be freedom, and that the requirement, not merely the casting, no longer suits us. This needs a correction, and the correction is messier than the original claim.

A stepping stone, not an error

Parsifal loses his mother, Herzeleide, to grief while he is off adventuring, and learns of it from Kundry as part of what he must carry into his own completion. Bambi’s mother is shot crossing the meadow. Both are the same trope, stated for two different audiences a world apart: the maternal, sensuous origin has to die, narratively, before the hero can complete his separation into an independent, cultured self.

This is not simply Schiller’s error appearing in a different genre. It is closer to what developmental psychology, Margaret Mahler’s work in particular, calls separation-individuation — the real and necessary process by which a child differentiates from the maternal figure in order to become a self at all. Read this way, essentializing woman as the sensuous origin to be left behind is not a mistake invented by opera and inherited by animated features. It is a genuine childhood phase, correctly named, that culture then freezes and re-stages at adult scale, permanently, as though the separation had to be performed again in every generation’s art rather than completed once in every person’s actual growing up.

Which means the object of correction is not essentializing itself. It is the freezing: a phase belonging properly to childhood, kept running as the central machinery of adult tragic seriousness — Schiller’s economy, Wagner’s operas, Hughes’s Shakespeare — long after any individual mind has had occasion to need it. The error is not that the mother had to be symbolically left. The error is failing to notice that she already has been, and building cathedrals to a departure that finished long ago.

This does not resolve as cleanly as the first version of the corollary did, and perhaps it shouldn’t. The trope is baked into the culture too thoroughly to be a thing simply dispensed with; the honest position is not that it should vanish but that it should be relocated to where it actually belongs, as a phase gone through rather than a permanent structure of what art is for. And storytellers are finding ways to reframe the process.

What Jean Paul needed

Every complaint requires something to complain about, and this has its own logic worth stating plainly. Borges liked to say there is no Christianity without Judas — the doctrine needs its betrayer to have a shape. Jean Paul’s complaint against the poetic nihilists needed Lessing, Fichte, and Novalis named specifically, not as an incidental list of examples but as the necessary villains without whom the complaint has no object. A diagnosis of untethering requires someone tethered loosely enough to diagnose.

Hamann sits oddly across this line, and is worth naming as a genuine complication rather than smoothing him into either camp. He is a founding figure of the Counter-Enlightenment whose faith-soaked irrationalism fed directly into the Sturm und Drang current that produced Fichte’s absolute ego and the whole tradition Jean Paul would later complain of. And he is also the author of a Metakritik arguing that reason is never pure, never self-sufficient, always embedded in language, body, and history — a position close to where this essay has been trying to arrive by way of William James. Hamann appears to have supplied ammunition to both the untethering and its correction, which suggests the line between them was never as clean as either Schiller or Jean Paul needed it to be for their own arguments to hold.

James did not coin his own term for the mind’s capacity to come untethered from the body and/or the matter immediately at hand. He took it from Frederic Myers, his colleague in psychical research: the subliminal self, the region from which automatic writing, mystical experience, and multiple personality all erupt, ungoverned by the ordinary controlling ego. James treated this seriously rather than dismissing it, in his 1896 lectures on exceptional mental states, which set hysteria, automatism, degeneration, and genius on a single continuum rather than sorting them into separate boxes in advance.

His response to it is the pragmatist’s answer and nothing else: by their fruits ye shall know them. He refuses to judge the eruption by its source, since mysticism, pathology, and genius draw from the identical well, and insists instead on judging it by what it produces. Hulme has no such test and can only propose containment. Jean Paul has only taste, and despises what he calls “free play in the void” without a way to distinguish it, on principle, from something that might turn out to bear good fruit. James supplies the missing instrument: wait, and see what comes of it.

No one wants to say that large schools of compositon should be dismissed as “free play in the void” or, as Broch says, “pantheistic chatter”. I sometimes think of this group as the verloren hoop. “Verloren hoop” was famoulsy mistranslated during Dowland’s time as “forlorne hope”. The Dutch actually means, “verlorn heap”. A heap of dead bodies beneath the scaling ladder, perhaps killed by molten lead or hot oil, or pieced by a lance. Our young boys are, by design, equipped with brains that have no fear and easily fall into line within military pack structures.

This is where Romanticism enters the death of tragedy as a second pivot, standing beside secularization rather than replacing it. Secularization removed the counterweight that kept Schiller’s will-worship from running to its Nietzschean extreme unopposed. Romanticism, in Hulme’s and Jean Paul’s own diagnoses of it, is the name for what fills the space once the counterweight is gone — the ego’s free play in the cleared void. Both men were describing exactly the phenomenon James would later propose to test by its fruits, without yet having the test. They may have been on their way to his position.

The fruits, once James’s instrument is applied, turn out to diverge sharply from the identical source. John Cage’s free-associative openness to the sensual — chance procedures, indeterminacy, silence given equal standing with sound — is untethering that has borne remarkably durable fruit, decades on. If you don’t like it the first time, listen again, Cage said, and continued, if you still don’t like it, listen again….. The Gospel trope of tearing it all down is untethering from the same well, answered with the opposite outcome: Bloch’s hope, when it finds no legitimate channel, does not evaporate. It curdles into apocalypse, the only remaining shape large enough to hold what was hoped for. Creative destruction is a real thing. It is costly, inefficient. It’s regrettable when it’s unnecessary and motivated by misunderstanding and ignorance, lack of self-knowledge, and applied by those who we would not trust to babysit our children.

This is frustrating for some, but I do tend to go around full circle. I’m defending free play in the void. I now have clarity; free play in the void is not my project. James was famous for defending people who disagreed with him and actually became very annoyed with him. My allies can get frustrated with me when I get to this point.

I touched on two fruits of free play in the void. There are infinitely more fruits, that’s the point; you may place yourself anyhwere. Some, perhaps destined to be in the verloren hoop, choose to place themselves in infinite space. As with the monkeys at the typewriter, there will be fruits!

These two fruits are not evenly available to whomever might reach for either. Cage’s untethering was the privilege of a man with institutional standing, an audience willing to sit through four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, and time enough to make a career of the experiment. The gospel trope belongs most often to those for whom Cage’s route was never actually on offer — for whom the free-associative relationship with the sensual was not a door available to walk through. Same mechanism, same subliminal source (remember James’ adoption of Frederic Myer’s term), and which fruit a person reaches for tracks, more than anything else, what they have recourse to in the first place.

Another caveat – Albert Salomon, in his essay on Weber, shows a legitimate suspicion of the irrational because of its adoption by the nazi machine. This caused Salomon and Weber to be wary of Jung. They may have found the subliminal self no less disturbing.

Salomon, Albert. From Albert Salomon: Essays on Social Thinkers. Edited by Duffy Graham and Robert Jackall. Knoxville: Newfound Press (University of Tennessee Libraries), 2019. DOI: 10.7290/ygtr4qv6.