If that had ended on a downer there would be no reversal and without a reversal it's not a tragedy. When Oedipus finally gets his happy ending he starts out already screwed over by fate: blind, outcast, with a dead mother/wife, and haunted by the knowledge of what he'd unintentionally done. The other sort of tragedy is the mirror image. Tragedy with a bad ending requires people to have it good, even if it's only the half-good of Antigone's position in society while emotionally she's wrecked, and then have it all come crashing down. If someone starts in a shitty place, stays in a shitty place, and ends in a shitty place, that isn't tragedy. People rise, or (as in the Greek version) have already risen, and then they fall. Tragedy as we know it these days is all about that kind of reversal. She ends up dying unnecessarily after being entombed alive. Antigone begins with the title character in a half-dead train-wreck family, but she's in a position of privilege and engaged to the prince so, while stuff around her is bad and she feels bad about it, she's sort of ok. Oedipus Rex has the title character start out as a beloved king, we all know what happened to him. It hurts to see the character go through that, and in the end you're relieved when he finally tells Odysseus to fuck off and isn't being torn inside anymore because it means the hurting will finally stop.īut a part that is perhaps more important is reversal.Īgamemnon starts his play returning triumphant from war. Lying goes contrary to his very nature, but he's a soldier and his commander (Odysseus) has ordered him to take place in a morally repugnant deception. In the Philoctetes, for example, the character of Neoptolemus spends most of the play in an ethical dilemma that's tearing him apart. The endings are happy, but getting there is painful. Part of what makes them tragedies is that they hurt. These things with happy endings are all tragedies. Euripides wrote one where Hercules goes down into the underworld and brings someone back to get a happy ending. My favorite tragedy is the Philoctetes by Sophocles. The last play, the Eumenides, has happy ending all around. Nietzche's beloved Aeschylus produced the one surviving trilogy. The famous king Oedipus finally, at the end of his life, is allowed to die in peace on his own terms having at last been forgiven for his unintentional crimes. Prometheus got his happy ending, but we don't get to read it or preform it on stage because those happy ending tragedies weren't preserved.īut some happy endings do survive. Prometheus Bound survives, but it had two sequels in which Prometheus was first unbound and then he was reconciled with Zeus. One result of this is that we've lost most of our happy ending tragedies and thus have a warped sense of the term. Every single tragedy was part of a set of three. Sometimes they were thematically linked, sometimes they were actually a trilogy narrative. If memory serves (I'm not going to look it up right now) Aeschylus is our best preserved author and we've got maybe ten percent of his work. So Nietzsche thought Euripides was supporting the very thing he was attacking, and things like that are why Nietzsche didn't like Euripides.įor Nietzsche, tragedy was embodied in Aeschylus (the canonical early tragedian) and to a lesser extent Sophocles (the canonical middle tragedian) and utterly destroyed by Euripides (the canonical late tragedian.)īut Nietzsche likes them by way of taking part in a millennia long process of cherry picking. Characters that existed to be farcically wrong in their thinking and were put on stage to be ridiculed were ones that Nietzsche thought were acting as mouthpieces of the author. But Nietzsche didn't like it because the joke flew over his head. There are plenty of good reasons to not like Euripides. One of the great examples of this is why he didn't like Euripides. Trained in classics and specializing in philology, he definitely came from a place of authority and he understood the words quite well. He thought it was the highest art form because of it's blending of Dionysian and Apollonian. Nietzsche liked early and mid tragedy and Athenian pessimism. If you're the type to go to Facebook, you can find a nascent version of this there.
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