A Display of Style, No Solution – A Review of Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure?
Anthony Nuttall, Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure?, Oxford University Press,
2001, pp. 128, £38.00 (Pbk) ISBN-13: 978-0198187660
Reviewed by Lenhardt Stevens, University of Edinburgh
Answering the question “why does tragedy give pleasure?” should start with
functional definitions of our two desiderata. What narrative elements do certain
kinds of stories possess in order to fall within the genre of tragedy and how might
we conceive of pleasure’s relationship to our experience of them? Nuttall begins,
appropriately, with Aristotle, who offers one of the oldest--if not the oldest-accounts of attempting to define the characteristics of tragic narrative and the
appropriate response from the audience who observe it. Nuttall’s approach to
Aristotle is a tempered reading, as the three lectures he delivered in 1992 at
University College, London were aimed at investigating the historical developments
of various systematic theories that underpin psychology, philosophy, and literary
criticism in relation to this question.
Still, it would help us as readers to know which direction we were going
before the journey began. After all, do we need pleasure per se for our evaluation of
a dramatic performance, so as to be part of our reasons for finding it rewarding to
watch, say, Oedipus Rex? I experience pleasure when I drink a zesty gin martini, but
this is different to the sense of satisfaction I get from watching and digesting a liveperformed Greek tragedy. Defining pleasure might have aimed his book in a
direction we could put these diverse accounts of pleasure up against. Thereafter, we
would have been better situated to reflect on our psychological response to tragic
stories and determine whether or not it falls under an instance of pleasure proper.
Nuttall’s 2001 collection of lectures, entitled Why Does Tragedy Give
Pleasure?, is brisk and disingenuous. It is a breakneck tour through a canonically
derived Western literary tradition, beginning in ancient Greece, continuing through
the Renaissance, and arriving at the truth-enfeebled postmodernists. On one page, it
is a serious exegetical study of Aristotle, acting as an incisive refutation of
translational decisions often taken for granted, and, at another turn, it is a baffling
commentary on the scientific merits of Freudian psychoanalytic theory.
We start with the good, which, to the relief of the busy reader, is his first
section. Aristotle posits oikeia hedone, or “proper pleasure,” as the appropriate
response from a rational reflecting audience member of a tragic performance. 1 For
Aristotle, grinning with delight while an onstage character is abused will not do for
proper pleasure; no sadism allowed. Relishing in someone’s misfortune is an
unhealthy response for the otherwise compassionate spectator. A tragedy must
invoke “pity or fear” in the viewer, so that the emotional-response is ennobled
under the right kind of intellectual guidance. 2 Among the possible affective
responses of the psyche at the theatre is catharsis. For Aristotle, our emotions must
1
2
Aristotle, Poetics. 1459a21
Golden, L. (1976) “Towards a Definition of Tragedy.” Classical Journal 72: 21-33.
be spent like fuel, else our bodily pots should fill up with too much unused feeling
and spill into inopportune moments. (p. 6) We see a value in these experiences for
their resultant emotional unloading, a pleasurable experience in virtue of its voiding
of tempestuous and psychically disruptive emotions.
Nuttall, with a deft onslaught of refutations, challenges Martha Nussbaum’s
translation of catharsis and, I think quite successfully, demonstrates that if anyone
wishes to interpret Aristotle as suggesting katharsis is reformulation of emotions, an
education of them, rather than a purge of emotions, like other medically-oriented
catharses, they will have to answer to the reasons he raises. Nuttall writes: "To say
that catharsis means 'clarification' [like Nussbaum] is very like saying that
παθηματα means 'events': it can bear the meaning, in special contexts, but normally
does not.' (p. 11) Sensitivity towards context while preserving the essential usage of
the term is what we want from our philologists, and Nuttall delivers in spades. It is
a pity we could not dwell on Aristotle’s Poetics for longer; I have the impression
Nuttall would have had a great deal more to say. In sum, we can conceive of the
disagreement between Nuttall and Nussbaum reduced to their differing on the
translation of the preposition δι (Nussbaum chooses “through,” whereas Nuttall
argues for “of”). If we have “catharsis of our emotions” rather than “catharsis
through our emotions,” catharsis will either reformulate our emotional states or
vacate them. Siding with Nuttall, Aristotle believed with the emotions purged, we
are enabled to respond with better fortitude in real life situations. Nuttall does not,
however, explicitly endorse this position, as he continues his Western-tour of
possible explanatory options for the tragically perplexed.
The greatest distinction between Aristotle and Freud, whose treatment we
will come to in the next section, is that Aristotle emphasizes the audience member’s
ability to acknowledge the fictitiousness of the on-stage depiction of events while
still being able to achieve an emotional response from it. Disbelief is never
suspended, because we never stop believing that the performance is not real.
Whereas, even later developments in the psychological frameworks of
psychoanalytic theory hold onto Freud’s insistence that there are irrational
processes that underlie many of our common sense assumptions about human
psychology and emotional experiences. 3 Your ability to empathize with another
individual may be nothing more than a subconscious projection that you are that
individual, achieved through the attachment of beliefs and desires from ourselves
onto another. 4 For Freud and other psychoanalytic supporters, “imagination” is the
name given to the illusions consuming us in the presence of stories woven by
convincing objects in a subject’s environment, who are sometimes other people, and
can even become lenses like those of film cameras. 5 Subjects give unconsciously
selected objects in their environment subjecthood through the attachment of their
Cashing out the meaning of irrationality inside a psychoanalytic framework is
explored by Davidson, Donald. (1982) “Paradoxes of Irrationality.” Philosophical
Essays on Freud.
4 Pigman (1995). Freud and the History of Empathy
5 See Lapsey (2006) Film Theory: An introduction
3
own subjectivity. If this sounds implausible, phenomenologically dubious, or at
least not immediately convincing, you and I are in agreement. Even still, I will not
join Nuttall in his practice of discrediting whole branches of thought through a
couple of trenchant digs. We are better off not sterilizing elaborate theoretical
commitments, like the explanatory distinction between Aristotle and Freud outlined
above, with a rapid assessment until they appear to no longer have a ground to
stand on.
By continuing with Freud, the befuddlement knows no end as Nuttall tries to
discuss the merits of Freudian psychoanalytic theory posturing as a science, i.e. a
body of knowledge that posits the existence of observable and generalizable
phenomena that can we can interact with through experimentation and prediction,
and the theory’s pleasure principle as an explanation for our attraction to tragic
stories. 6 Never mind trying to exorcise some of the finer points of psychoanalytic
theory and its difficulty in pulling off the psychic lid to reveal the irrational monster
hiding beneath our mental covers, known as the unconscious, Nuttall glides passed
important critics like Wolpe and Rachmann 7 without ever developing their
arguments. In the face of a practicing psychologist, psychoanalyst, or psychiatrist,
Nuttall appears to be a troubling character. He set out to discuss pleasure in
relation to tragedy, and here we have him using Freud as another prosaic fixture
with which he can do whatever he pleases. If the implication in his intellectual
promiscuity is that we will never know who is right in the battle for the veracity, or
indeed usefulness, of psychoanalysis, then there is an implicit epistemic position in
place that deserves serious elaboration so that we may scrutinize it. Psychoanalysis
is not merely a toy criticial-telescope English professors look through to study
literary works; it is a seriously held practice defended by its practitioners as a viable
and effective means of relieving psychological torment in the analysand. Any
wholesale criticism of it had better well come to the table with a substantial
argument, otherwise we are merely shrugging in its direction and whispering its
name. Moreover, if we are genuinely interested in answering the question of the
book, it is not at all clear to me why we would not take up a position after
contrasting viewpoints have been revealed. How have things grown so
noncommittal?
I suppose this ambivalence towards theoretical commitment is not unique
to Nuttall. Paradigms of knowledge that suggest shades of post-structuralism are
the only acceptable path for a career humanities academic to follow are an
insistence that we all must confront as we develop our critical thinking within
university life. 8 Relativism reigns supreme. Nietzsche is totted, perhaps, more than
anybody as the supreme example of philosophically self-evidential proof that social
determination guided by inchoate power structures is the process through which
Freud (1956) On Sexuality.
Joseph Wolpe and Stanley Rachman, ‘Psychoanalytic “Evidence”: A Critique Based
on Freud's Case of Little Hans’, The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, vol. cxxxi
(1960), pp. 135–48.
8 See Ellis, J. (1997) Literature Lost for a meritorious jab at the widespread status of
this position within the humanities.
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7
knowledge gains its supporters and detractors. His analysis of the inversion of the
master/slave moral order was meant to reveal groveling Christians as power
driving manipulators, thus showing how even at our most ostensibly selfless
moments we are really all vying for the top spot in the social order. 9 The
methodology guiding Nuttalls’ historical tour is another kind of application of an
extra-historical lens through which we can observe the trajectory of cultural
dominance in its efforts to seize the grandest events of Western civilization’s
development and understand their significance by means of a dialectical
relationship of ideas, viz. Aristotle against Freud, Apollo against Dionysus, etc.
Nuttall writes: “If the Enlightenment had bleached the ancient world then Nietzsche
was responsible for its darkening.” (p. 61) How much we are supposed to subscribe
to the program of an outsider’s view, able to observe intellectual movements in
history? It would do us good to back up and ask ourselves whether or not we can
understand history as a series of epochs locatable by dominant social characteristic.
Must historical periods be cast in ways that attempt to encapsulate their central
milieus in order to guide our retrospective investigations? Nuttall is not alone in
this tendency, and its application as a fruitful heuristic is demonstrated time and
time again, but I find it wholly unsupportable. If we grant that any time period is a
complex one, in which multitudes of social circumstances may inspire and (I use
with reservation) determine thought, then we should pause before ever giving a
dominant ideological colorization to them. Totalizing history into dialectics is a
futile procedure, because any dichotomization of ideas abstracted from a passage in
history will miss all the other non-bilaterally-opposed ideologies in the society at
the time of the alleged most salient thoughts. What we will have gained in
abandoning this reading of history is a complex portrait of human civilization, in
which various factors all contribute to a thorough and complex study of a particular
time period in human history. It will never be final, but that should not be the goal
anyway.
Nuttall flirts with commitment when he thinks about reasoning in relation to
imagination, which is right on track as an important reproof for the camp that place
the psychology of audience-response to tragedy under irrational beliefs. While
reflecting upon how catharsis is brought about, Nuttall realizes that our awareness
of a play’s fiction may mean a kind of deliberative entertaining of the story on the
part of the spectator is necessary in order to access our emotions. Imagination is
consented simulation. 10 In doing so, he “…[has] now substituted an active term for
the passive catharsis. The human capacity to think provisionally, to do thoughtexperiments, to form hypotheses, to imagine what may happen before it happens…”
(p. 76) I think this is on target. 11 Certainly, emotions cannot always answer to the
rational, because, like William James, I think emotions subsist in the body as
opposed to purely cognitive content, thereby emotional states can influence our
inferences to the point that they become unjustified or poorly developed. Provoking
Nietzsche (1895) The Antichrist.
See Meskin and Weinberg. (2003) “Emotions, Fiction, and Cognitive Architecture.”
British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 43, No. 1, January.
11 Forthcoming Stevens, L. (2014) “Film Fiction, Values, and Emotional Response.”
9
10
an emotional reaction, however, is answerable to the committed entertaining of a
possible scenario, like the murder of someone’s loved one or the loss of a kingdom
for a horse.
It is a powerful suggestion, and, in my estimation, worth taking up. The
vivacity of the imagined scenario is what serves to grant the highest emotional
response from the audience member, and they are also responsible for allowing
these emotions their full course or their truncation. By this suggestion, we have
returned to Aristotelian beliefs about the mind and its relationship to fictional stage
play. The idea is this: one must earnestly contemplate the action on stage in order
to activate catharsis, something for which we do not need to appeal to subconscious
mechanisms. Had Nuttall signaled this return as the redemption of Aristotle and the
triumphant endorsement of his audience-theory, the book would be in better
standing. Alas, no such luck. For the final section of the book, King Lear is read as a
play that contorts our preconceptions about tragic storytelling. Nuttall suggests that
Shakespeare plays with our understanding of the roles of its characters as pitiable
and deplorable, expecting us to excavate the question of pleasure and tragedy from
his analysis.
What the collection of lectures suffers from, above all else, is its incessant
lack of clarity. We neither know nor become aware of the direction Nuttall will take
us as we read through its chapters, nor what the position of the author ultimately is
relative to the various approaches we might take towards understanding the human
response towards fiction. In alignment with a criticism from Nussbaum, this
“…book exudes a complacency that is most unphilosophical.” 12 Sadly, Nussbaum
was discussing a separate book by Nuttall, which might prompt us to enter into a
greater discussion of Nuttall’s overall body of work that I will not indulge here. The
larger point remains unchanged. If you have the spirit to title your book in the form
of a question, I should hope you possess the wherewithal to venture an appropriate
answer. If not, the title of your book is false advertising.
I claim we “enjoy” watching tragic stories for two-fold reasons: i) the
bivalence of the excitement produced by a heightened emotional state can swing
towards pleasure at the turn of a thought and ii) the kind of access to fundamental
questions about human existence it grants us. If the performance only satisfies
reason (i), then we are in the presence of a maudlin melodrama, possibly without
artistic virtue. Obtaining only reason (ii) will make for a great argument, but seems
to have missed out on the performance element so intertwined with the dramatic
genre. Sleepless in Seattle (1993) is tripe precisely because it appeals solely to the
saccharine, the gross inflation of hackneyed romantic occurrences with profound
emotional pangs. On the other hand, someone reading out Nora’s closing
monologue from A Doll’s House (1879) with a lackluster performance will cheat the
audience out of the surge of individuality Nora gains at the play’s end. The marriage
between these two forms, the exposure of a profound human experience through
the mold of skilled dramatic interpretation, is why tragedy is pleasurable in a loftier
sense.
12
Nussbaum, M. Philosophical Interventions: Reviews 1986-2011, p. 368
His rapid, overweening traverses through the literary landscape are not
without self-awareness. At one point, after a biographical tangent into T.S. Eliot,
which covers “Dante…Nietzsche…Aquinas…Schopenhauer…Plato…Bergson…[and]
Schopenhauer…” (p. 60) claiming them all as influences on Eliot’s poetry, Nuttall
acknowledges “[i]t may seem that my references are multiplying unmanageably…”
(Ibid.) and, indeed, they are. Would we allow this kind of pat from an eager,
budding young scholar while we are marking their submission for a term paper? I
cannot help but feel his confidence in his abilities to flag these thinkers for us, and
being able to follow these invocations is only possible on a general and utterly
superficial level. Maybe traces of all the aforementioned philosophers and writers
line the poetry of Eliot, but giving me a sentence to consider it simply will not do for
interpretation. It is like going to your favorite restaurant, seeing the options on the
menu, and having the waiter return empty handed only to say: “You do not need the
real food, because the words on the menu prompted in your mind the meal’s
complete satisfaction.” True, some of these philosophers had important things to
say about tragedy, although my reading of T.S. Eliot has not been informed as a
result of their mention in passing. Names of authors are not like divination rods;
neither their work nor your interpretation appears miraculously after their
utterance.
In this manner of conjecturing, theories are endorsed like football clubs. If
you were raised to believe one, you will most likely stick to it, not because it has
more fans or better players, but because the rules of association, the only means of
endorsement in postmodern ambivalence, say all teams should be treated equally
with regard to their worth. You should stick to your club with the only guiding
principle acting on your loyalty being which was your earliest exposure. Aristotle,
Nietzsche and Freud have equal worth, Nuttall says, so take your pick.