The Pleasure of Tragedy

• The Blinding of Oedipus

  • Blinded himself with two pins from his mother's dress
  • Immediately distinguishable from what Aristotle called the okeia hedone, 'the proper pleasure' of tragedy
  • In the tragic theatre suffering and death are perceived as matters for grief and fear, after which it seems that grief and fear become in their turn a matter of enjoyment for the audience
  • A.D. Nuttall 'Aristotle and After'
• The pleasure of tragedy

  • Immediately an uncomfortable phrase
  • Collision between words seems awkward - mildness of the term 'pleasure' seems punny next to the thunderous term 'tragedy'
  • The Nietzschean oxymoron 'tragic joy' is, oddly, easier to accept because it fights fire with fire
  • Later kind of moralism taught to a new generation of readers to despite the pleasurable and value the disturbing.
  • It is now unimaginable that a reviewer of a new play should praise it by saying it offers solace
  • From A. D. Nuttall's 'Aristotle and After'
• Taste for discomfort

  • If people go again and again to see disturbing things they must enjoy them
  • Similarly, if you like the disturbing kind of play then this disturbance is something you like and therefore pleasure must be gained from it
  • This shift in problem does not resolve the problem of tragic pleasure; rather sets an allied similarly challenging problem - that of enjoyed discomfort - alongside it
• Notion of pleasure

  • 'Quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry' - Jeremy Bentham
  • Here pleasure is offered for inspection as a luminously simple datum: of course, poetry and pin-push are profoundly different things but meanwhile, pleasure is pleasure, semper idem
  • But the datum can prove strangely elusive
• Notion of pleasure pt 2

  • While it may seem essential to the idea of pleasure that it be felt, pleasure need not occupy the foreground of consciousness, which will afford simultaneous space for objects of another kind
  • From A.D. Nuttall 'Aristotle and After'
• Notion of pleasure pt 3

  • We don't actively think 'I am enjoying this' when doing a task
  • When talking we may observe it is pleasant but if per impossible one obtained entry to their fields of consciousness one would never find at any point a separately introspected element, 'the pleasant' but instead an unbroken preoccupation with the subject of the conversation itself.
  • From A.D. Nuttall 'Aristotle and After'