Musings about the possibility of a modern tragedy

Exploring hidden theological themes in Hamlet and considering their implications for the modern conciseness.

I’ve had a long-term plan to write about a topic closely related to the problem of tragedy in philosophy. One of the more intriguing insights I aim to explore is that a tragic worldview is a necessary precondition for various religious phenomena that have faded from our world, mainly because we’ve lost the sensitivity to tragedy. I’m very interested in these phenomena, but I’ll leave that discussion for another time.

In the course of my readings for this project, I’ve come across some obscure but fascinating figures. For instance, I stumbled upon a book discarded by Tel Aviv University (or was it Hebrew University? I’m not sure). The book is called Tragic Method and Tragic Theology (1989) by the theologian Larry Bouchard, who is probably Jewish (though I’m not certain). One of his more interesting observations on the modern tragic consciousness comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Here it is:

Hamlet’s universe is distinct [from the Greek world]. No one hints that some entity has poisoned Denmark; Claudius poisoned it. That is the charge from the ghost of Hamlet’s father. However, while Hamlet’s world differs from Oedipus’s, Hamlet’s universe is still quite strange. He knows not to fully trust ghosts, and he knows this ghost has bound him to an obligation. There is no circumstantial evidence to incriminate Claudius, and conventional deductive methods are not available. Everything begins with the ghost’s testimony, which cannot be publicly used, and Hamlet has good reason to fear that the ghost itself may be demonic. In such cases, ghosts mediate between the secular and sacred realms, and the sacred remains incomprehensible, even within a universe where a transcendent benevolent being exists, as in the Christian cosmos. Thus, all of Hamlet’s actions [in the play] are based, at best, on unclear assumptions. As Marcellus and Horatio vaguely understand, they too face a problem of interpretation, quite different from the one Oedipus has access to.

Leaving aside the final sentence of this paragraph, this is an interesting distinction. The illusion (ate in Greek) at the heart of Hamlet differs in nature from its Attic counterpart. Shakespeare encounters a universe almost drained of malicious supernatural agencies after centuries of Christian theology and rule. But if the tragic experience is universal, then it cannot be removed from human existence. What does Shakespeare do, and later Goethe, even more emphatically? He leans on the fact that even if revelation has been expelled from the public world, it still holds a place in the private one. Yet to grasp tragedy, we are required to undermine the agency, the public stature, of the protagonist—not to eliminate it (otherwise there’s no tragic interest) but to destabilize it. From this, the new foundation for portraying tragedy involves the transition, the impossible interpretation of the private into the public.

This is an artistically fascinating solution. It succeeds, to some extent, in recreating part of the allure of Attic tragedy in a way that modern people can understand. Think of someone getting caught—sorry, I was reading Agnon on Shabbat—in “revolutionary nonsense,” for example. There’s a fundamental ambiguity in how responsible they are for their actions. In being caught, and I’m certainly not the first to note this, there’s something of the classic demonic possession. But it happens in a far stranger way than in the classical world. A classical person might contract impurity or enter an impure environment without clear guilt. A modern person must sit alone in their room, with a book or friends, hearing about a fantastic world different from the one they live in, and from that moment, that world holds a kind of sway over them and their actions.

In some sense, if we read Doctor Faustus by Marlowe, this is precisely what happens. Faustus sits alone in his room, a somewhat obscure but gifted intellectual, and gets caught up in an idea he read about in books. In his private sphere, visions appear to him—an evil and a good angel sitting on his shoulders, pushing him toward alchemy with disastrous consequences. Just as scholarship serves as a modern medium for the spiritual world, it bears more weight on its shoulders than it can handle. What in the primitive or classical world required certain training, sometimes even a purification process, mentoring, and was strictly limited to the medium’s setting, somehow blends with the ideal of a publicly active person (“Thou art a scholar! Speak to it!”)—what in modern terms we call an intellectual.

This combination, I argue, can be gleaned from modern tragedies as inherently tragic. The spiritual world seems insufficient; the mediation from it to the secular world seems insufficient; it’s too “weak” to serve as the foundation for one’s place in modern society. A unique function within the public framework is also required. Enter the modern poets, rubbing their hands together, thinking: “Ah! Here’s some excellent material to write a tragedy that suits the times.” And indeed, we’re not lacking in modern intellectual tragedies, where the hubris lies in an inability to be content with the spiritual world—not an inability stemming from any sin, but rather, quite the opposite, from good intentions, from the desire to participate in public affairs. This discontent is, ultimately, not under the intellectual’s control. The boundary here is invisible, appearing in highly unexpected places, which makes for excellent material for the intellectual’s tragic hamartia.