Rembrandt, “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer”
Continuing my discussion of my faculty book group’s current work, Elizabeth Spelman’s Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering, today I look at what Aristotle teaches us about how we approach suffering. A key work is his Poetics, where he explores what constitutes a tragic hero. Spelman says that Aristotle’s influential formulation blinds us to much of the suffering in the world because he considers only a small number of cases to be tragic:
An Aristotelian tragedy, then, is about exemplary human suffering. Not all suffering is exemplary, not all of it is representative of important facts about human life. By Aristotelian criteria (and here of course he is not alone), suffering is not tragic in and of itself. It cannot be trivial: it cannot be that of an insignificant or base person, nor even the minor trials and tribulations of a good if not “preeminently good” man. What makes a poetic account of such suffering universal is that it is about important kinds of things likely to happen to a certain kind of man; but such an account is not tragic unless it arouses the pity and fear of those who hear it.
It’s a big deal for our suffering to be labeled tragic, Spelman says. That’s because tragedy snatches suffering out of its “threatening, chaotic horribleness.” As tragic figures, we no longer, in the words of poet Audre Lorde, experience “unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.” Instead, as Spelman puts it, our suffering is “diluted to some manageable degree by its riveting intelligibility.”
Labeling something tragic, in other words, allows us to make a certain kind of sense of it. We understand the flaws of an Oedipus or a Lear and are thereby able to fit their suffering into some kind of framework.
Spelman contrasts Aristotle’s approach with Plato’s, which I discussed yesterday. Where Plato worries that we will be engulfed by our own grief as we watch a tragedy, Aristotle says that tragedy teaches us the appropriate way to pity and fear. Spelman quotes Martha Nussbaum on the subject:
Through attending to our responses of pity, we can hope to learn more about our own implicit view of what matters in human life, about the vulnerability of our own deepest commitment.
Spelman elaborates, “One leaves a good tragedy not so much having spent one’s emotions as having enlarged one’s understanding of them and their appropriate place in human life.”
But for Aristotle, not everyone’s suffering can enlarge our understanding. The hero has to be comparable to an Athenian citizen or higher. He certainly can’t be tragic if he is born a slave.
The reason this is significant is because we continue to operate this way today. Tragedy is something that happens to people of our social status or above. Only such suffering has for us the kind of universal meaning spoken of by Aristotle. For everyone else, suffering, if noticed at all, is just a bummer.
Spelman makes the point with the scene from Huckleberry Finn where Huck is explaining to Aunt Sally why he/Tom Sawyer is late:
“We blowed out a cylinder-head.”
“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
“No’m. Killed a nigger.”
“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”
We of course are no longer living in Aristotle’s slave society, and our artists have worked very hard to expand the classes and races of people eligible for tragic status. Arthur Miller gives us Willie Loman, Chinua Achebe gives us Okonkwo, Richard Wright gives us Bigger Thomas, Toni Morrison gives us Sethe. But even with their efforts, we still find ourselves applying Aristotle’s elitist framework. Indeed, often we will reframe the tragedies of others as our own tragedies.
Spelman notes that this is the case with American slavery whenever it is referred to as “America’s tragedy.” In this formulation, the slaves themselves get sidelined:
If slavery is the American tragedy, then even though attention is directed to the suffering of slaves, the real subjects of tragedy nonetheless are some white Americans, good and grand enough of heart and mind to envision an egalitarian society, but also and necessarily good and grand enough ultimately to recognize and be pained by their own flaws and the wretched effect of them on Black Americans. How tragic, to be so great and yet so deeply implicated in the pain of others.
Spelman continues on with her sarcasm:
There is quite a difference between “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen” and “Everyone knows the trouble I’ve made.”
As our faculty group discussed these ideas, my colleague Elizabeth Applegate, a French professor who just taught a first year seminar on child soldiers, gave us an example. The film Blood Diamond purports to be about child soldiers, but if it had cast the children as the tragic heroes, it would not have been commercially successful. Instead, the tragic figure is Leonardo DiCaprio, who starts out a greedy mercenary but ends rediscovering his soul. He is the one we can relate to the most and who enlarges our understanding.
We thought of other films where this is true. Dances with Wolves is not primarily about the tragedy of the Lakota Sioux but of Kevin Costner, who sees his pastoral dream of America destroyed. Mississippi Burning focuses, not on the Civil Rights workers who were killed, but on the dawning enlightenment of an FBI official sent to investigate the case. Many so-called social problem melodramas are framed in this way.
Do you want to know what such white anguish looks like from the point of view of one who Aristotle would have dismissed? Here’s Spelman quoting African American author James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time:
The Negro’s experience of the white world cannot possibly create in him any respect for the standards by which the white world claims to live. His own condition is overwhelming proof that white people do not live by those standards.
Spelman adds,
Baldwin both pities and fears many white Americans but not because he is moved by the perception of a tragic flaw. He pities “spineless” whites, he says, “in order not to despise them.”
Note who is suddenly looking down on who.
Summing up the blindness that results from Aristotle’s notions of tragedy, Spelman concludes,
Is thinking of slavery in terms of an American tragedy a plausible and promising way of bring attention to the experience of slaves? The rhetoric of tragedy, at least in an Aristotelian mode, in this context turns out to lead mainly in quite other directions. While acknowledging the suffering of Blacks, it hovers around whites, not despite but because of their limitations; it redeems and articulates the anguish involved in doing wrong rather than that of having wrong done to one; it holds whites responsible for the suffering of Blacks in such a way as also ultimately to excuse them; it preempts the most biting criticism of whites by Blacks, and it obscures the spiritual resources of Blacks for dealing with suffering independently of their relationship to whites.
Since Spelman’s book aims to make us aware how we approach suffering, it’s good to know that what we’ve inherited from Aristotle can be misleading.
On the other hand, if we expand the franchise, then Aristotle can be useful. As I say, writers from oppressed communities can open our eyes to the suffering of people unlike us. In the end, the march of human justice may make us realize that we are all of us, in our suffering, fit subjects for soaring Greek tragedy.
Response from Elizabeth Applegate – My French colleague, she who taught the course on child soldiers, sent me the following e-mail in response to this post:
Robin, I absolutely agree with you about the political importance of making people from oppressed groups the center of tragic stories. By inviting a broad audience to identify with suffering people who belong to oppressed or marginal groups, artists DO invite us to expand our notion of who is a person of value. In my class on child soldiers, I showed the film Johnny Mad Dog as a counterpart to Blood Diamond. In this film about the taking of Monrovia, the actors had been child soldiers in Liberia’s civil war. They were children who had suffered from exploitation and neglect, and they also were responsible for the suffering of many others. The camera’s attention to the central character Johnny forces us to witness his many violent crimes, but at the same time, we see that he’s also suffered terrible loss, and that he’s driven by fear, shame, and rage. By making him the tragic hero who undergoes change and who is forced to recognize the consequences of his action, the film forces us to pay attention to his individual tragedy, but also the tragedy of Liberia during its period of civil war.
