Henry Ansgar Kelly, Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xvii + 257. $54.95. ISBN 0-521
Henry Ansgar Kelly, Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xvii + 257. $54.95. ISBN 0-521-43184-0.
Reviewed by Eugene Vance, University of Washington.
Henry Ansgar Kelly has provided a well-informed study of the history of the concept of tragedy in European culture, both classical and vernacular, from Aristotle to the time of Italian humanism. The result of an enormous exploration of sources in six languages, here is a book for which a need has existed for a long time. Kelly has not written a history of "tragedy" as drama per se; rather, the semantic history of a term. Its title is a bit misleading, then: until the very last pages, at no point doe s either Kelly or his sources ever pinpoint a cogent concept of tragedy as a "form" that might be apprehended and described, nor do the works that Kelly describe in the final chapter make or break any clearcut norms or rules.
Kelly starts with the Greeks, though with Aristotle and not Plato. I find this decision odd, since so many of Plato's criticisms of tragedy and of dramatic art in the Republic become the basis of hostility toward theater in the Christian era. Platonic notions of mimesis are at the heart, for example, of Augustine's rejection of dramatic art in the Soliloquia and tragedy as a cathartic experience in the Confessions. Not being, himself, a classicist, Kelly does not bring new scholarly theories to the aporias of his classical sources; nor does he approach the art of classical tragedy itself or probe either its poetics or its function in Greek society. Rather, Kelly's purpose throughout his book is to proceed from Aristotle's inconclusive concepts of tragedy to hundreds of statements by late Roman and medieval writers about tragedy, all of which he takes at face value. By doing so, Kelly unpacks a granny's trunk of claims without a common denominator, many of them bizarre, that have accumulated around the term "tragedy" during some 15 centuries of pre-modern culture. It goes without saying that Kelly resists the modern temptation to essentialize the notion of tragedy, as did, for example, Northrop Frye; nor does Kelly harbor any romantic illusions about tragedy as some exalted state of consciousness embodying the fulfillment of Selbstbewusstsein. To the contrary, Kelly's patient and persistent semantic history of the term "tragedy" points up the inaugural fuzziness of an ancient term that endures in the modern critical lexicon. If we concede that an equivalent fuzziness might inhabit conventional terms for many other genres (among them, epic, romance, roman, novel, allegory, and parody), we cannot escape the worry that genre-based "literary criticism" is a discourse shot through with conventional terms that do not bear definition.
Kelly approaches Aristotle as a skeptic: "It is clear that many self-proclaimed Aristotelians not only read Aristotle selectively, but also employ a double standard in their use of the term 'tragedy.' They seem willing enough to use a simple generic meaning of the word when speaking of ancient tragedies: that is, they accept as tragedy any play designated as tragedy. But when it comes to postclassical works, they restrict the term to mean 'great tragedy,' in accordance with their own definition of tragedy" (xv). Kelly illustrates this claim as he swiftly evokes (in a mere 4 pp.) the apparent inconsistencies in descriptions of tragedy in Aristotle, proceeding then (in 9 pp.) to the Romans. Thereafter, he fans out into the various vernaculars of the European middle ages, including those of England and of the Romance languages.
Thus, without entertaining any modern attempts to reconstruct what Aristotle really means in all of the ellipses of the Poetics, Kelly simply deduces from what is said about "tragedy" or "the tragic" in the Poetics that no clear discursive boundaries existed in Aristotle's mind (for instance, epic is "tragic"). Nor did Aristotle evoke any adequate formal criteria for tragedy: pitiable, fearful or pathetic events and a catastrophic ending are not necessary to make a play tragic: "Aristotle could not avoid the fact that more than a third of Euripides's tragedies ended happily. And no matter how he rated their effectiveness, he could not deny them the name of tragedy" (4). Nor, finally, is the social function of tragedy very clear, for, as Kelly notes (3), the notion of catharsis is never developed by Aristotle beyond its first brief mention.
If the Greeks left a legacy of shifting sands in their critical thinking about about the poetics of tragedy, we could not have expected the Romans to shore things up. Kelly shows how Horace and Ovid diverted thoughts about tragedy into criteria of poetic style that had nothing to do with the form, subject matter, or social purpose of tragedy. The Roman link of tragedy with