As resident pseudo-expert of ancient buggery, I would like to make a few hair-splitting remark on the concepts of catharsis and tragedy.
Tragedy was not molded on the concept of catharsis. Aristotle derived his concept from the plays. Between the original performance of the tragedies and Aristotle dicking around in Athens passed as much as 150 years. The original plays, especially Aeschylus, were still pretty much religious ceremonies as well as entertainment - though frankly I am not sure if we can call any of these plays entertainment. Only Aristophanes, for sure, but the comedies were a much more uh profane genre.
Aristotle, not being a citizen, nor privy to the original works or original scripts, would have had a very different experience watching these play and his conclusion about them are, at best, iffy.
Or, as I like to put it - everything Aristotle has written is pretty much wrong. His definition of catharsis and tragedy and comedy only sort of work for most of the extent corpus. Ironically, the one who's corpus matches Aristotle's definition the least - Euripides - is also the one we have the most left of. And not because he was better. We just happen to find a more complete Byzantine complete works of Euripides than the rest of his competitors.
Catharsis, as formulated by Aristotle, is basically just audience response. Aristotle interpreted the actions illustrated in tragedies as designed to illicit particular emotions. Considering the complexity of the original affair, that's a bit reductive, to say the least. The tragic competitions (the Greeks being Greeks they basically applied the Olympic model to theater as well) served, possibly, a much wider social and cultural purpose than a mere emotional purgative.
From the perspective of a modern, I certainly feel no such emotion toward these works.
Next problem - Aristotle, being Aristotle, went on to basically define "scientific" and philosophical research for the next 2000 years or so - in the west, at any rate. Which is an achievement of its own, I suppose. There is also something somewhat damning about the culture of the Occident that it seems to be built on cumulative misreading of a few handful of texts. Aristotle being a major culprit here.
Far from starting in the 1800's, people have gleefully taken up and applied Aristotle's theoretical speculations since the Romans. Starting with Horace, among those whose works have survived, and his Art of Poetry. Now in Europe plays kind of disappeared for a while - until they were reborn under the form, once again but in a completely different context, of mystery plays. Once mystery plans began to be banned by the Church, some troupe simply changed the name of their plays to "tragedy". Which, as plays that were also a religious explanation of a corpus, was strikingly similar to the original tragedies of the greek - which can also be said to be the illustration of religious content through performance. This was followed and influenced by some of the rediscoveries of the renaissance. Aristotle became a serious source in France in the debates surrounding literature in the 16th, 17th and 18th century, or at least Aristotle through Horace. A lot of Art of Poetry-style treatises sprang up around that time. Hell most of what is called Classical French Theater is the literal application of Aristotle's doctrine, reworked and, dare I say, radicalized in a rather fundamentalist reading. The theories of the Poetics became the hard precepts dictating the form of what good theater should look like. If you want to see what that looks like, I direct you to the playwrights Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine. Corneille's Le Cid is an example of a play built specifically according to the specifications of Aristotle. The famous Académie Française had for mandate to enforce and criticize on the basis of the revealed truths of Aristotle.
It makes for okay watching and reading.
(casually dismisses works that are judged to be near perfection and undeniable in gravitas)
If we stick to the more theoretical sense of tragedy, what Mors is talking about is drama. And drama also, I think, better captures what could be called the more popular sense catharsis: in other words, straight up emotional manipulation by setting up scenes and situations that illicit emotional reactions. To take France as an example again, they had many weird subgenre that met that definition - "théatres de la cruautés" or "fables sanguinaires", which staged gratuitous violence and sordid scenarios in what was the 16th and 17th century equivalent of horror movies and snuff films. Later on you have the "comédies larmoyantes", which are kind of like romantic comedies today. Actually a lot of film genres today continue these non-tragic genres. Probably because a "tragedy" put on film would make a terrible movie if played straight or according to Aristotle's view of tragedy. These plays really amped up the emotional connections.
If I can give my own version of what is meant by tragedy, I would define it so:
Tragedy is a scenario in which a protagonist struggles with destiny, and, usually, fails.
The Greeks were quite the fatalists, addicted to oracles and astrology, and believed that in many ways your fate was already sealed. A tragic struggle is anyone who fights against it, willingly or unwillingly, in trying to outwit or discover their destiny. To struggle against this alien force, in the form of gods, spirits, the fates - it will be revealed that the hero was doomed from the start, for in the struggle their weakness is revealed and they seldom overcome it. Some accept it, some have to deal with the ramification of their actions, others fight to the very end: at the end of the day they all bow down to it, though. To really drive this home, the tragedies were all taken from the stories that everyone in the public knew. Everyone knew how it would end.
I would not classify Game of Thrones as a tragic work. A drama, for sure, I suppose. It certainly shares a lot with the older genre of theater of cruelty, but I get very little sense of fate in the series. Mind you, I only watched the show. But to me, the story as I watched it, seem to have made a point to kill off character pointlessly or abruptly in attempt to reflect the instability and arbitrariness of "Real Life". None of the character is fighting against fate in this world - fate literally does not exist, and so it cannot be a tragic work, according to my definition derived from my reading of ancient works and contra Aristotle.
TL:DR
Tragedy, as a genre, is a tad complicated.
Drama is probably the more accurate word.
Aristotle's Poetics is sketchy as balls in trying to analyse the ancient works.
Most of modern conceptions of tragedy, and our categories more generally, are inherited from Aristotle,
and from those who have disagreed with The Teacher.
Aristotle sucks. I could make a fruitful academic career in demonstrating that.
Edited by Vafhudr, 09 April 2016 - 05:07 PM.
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