Literature Will Break Your Heart

Tragedy as Therapy

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Literature, cinema, and television have very often presented us with scenes of extreme
violence, pain, and death. Brutality on screen in the twenty-first-century is also becoming more
frequent, gratuitous, and ever more graphic. What is puzzling and ironic is that we tend to recoil
from news broadcasts or real-life footage of violence such as ISIS beheadings, and yet many of us
flock eagerly to watch that whole new episode of Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead, or
Spartacus and Dexter back when they were still running. In point of fact, and many of us might not
want to confess this openly, tragedy could be one of the main reasons why we enjoy watching
these TV-series so much.
There might be several reasons for this. Our fear and repulsion toward tragedy in actual life
can provoke in us a certain awe and fascination when we see it happening in a movie from the
safe comfort of our homes. Tragedy is here taking place in a fictional scenario so we can take a
guilty-pleasure peek at what otherwise makes us so anxious and horrified in the real world.
For others, tragedy offers thrills and suspense. We love being jolted out of our seats by all
the shocking imagery. We want to experience that nervous excitement, which for a moment there
distracts us away from our humdrum lives.
Perhaps for some of us, however, tragedy is attractive because it feels somehow intimate.
We believe that it holds certain insights into human nature. Maybe it can reveal to us something
deep about ourselves and the world we live in.
Does this mean that tragedy can be more than a shock-effect? If we believe there is good
literature out there and this literature often involves itself with tragedy, are we to suppose that
tragedy, in these instances, is more than a sensational trick? If that is the case, what precisely are
its values? How can we distinguish this more meaningful tragedy, the reserve of what we would
like to believe is good literature, from the other type?

Introducing tragedy and catharsis

Before we explore these issues any further we would have to agree on what we usually
understand by ‘tragedy’. Our everyday usage of this word can refer to a whole wide variety of
situations. It can include school shootings, fatal car crashes, viral epidemics, suicides, and
starvation in third-world countries. The diversity of these situations is all too clear. There is one
important quality, however, which they all have in common. They are all instances of some event
which has to do with suffering and loss. More accurately still, the event has to do with a
recognition of this suffering and loss. When we say that this or that incident is tragic we are
implying that its victims or their spectator (us perhaps?) or both, is aware of how painful and
destructive this incident is. A tragic event cannot be tragic if no-one understands how tragic it is.
 Now tragedy in literature and film can go further than this. The catastrophic event they
show us is sometimes seen to be a form of therapy for its sufferer and/or its audience. Pain and
loss, these stories seem to tell us, can have a healing effect upon us. They can give us a new
strength and enhance the way we see our lives. Tragedy, they insist, can change us for the better.
Many thinkers have often called this particular ‘treatment’ brought about by tragedy ‘catharsis’.
The term ‘catharsis’ comes from the Greek ‘katharsis’, which means ‘purification’ or
‘cleansing’. It was first used in relation to the arts by the philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics (c. 335
BCE). In this work, he writes that catharsis is the effect that Ancient Greek tragedy plays (or
comedy plays and quite possibly other artforms) can have upon the spectators. This kind of
theatre purifies and purges certain strong emotions that we have suppressed, emotions that might
be destructive for us and others. Once released, we will feel renewed and restored. A new sense
of relief and calm will result.
The problem about the Poetics, however, is that nowhere in this book is it really clear what
‘catharsis’ is and how it is being used in relation to theatre, and by extension, the arts in general.
For this reason, a number of different interpretations have arisen since.

Caring for the victim

James Corby, senior lecturer and head of the Department of English in the University of
Malta, has offered his own significant contribution on the subject of catharsis and its connection
with literature. His insights have been mainly explained in his two papers, ‘Of Comfort No Man
Speak: Tragedy, Indifference, Consolation’ and ‘Ratio Essendi: Tragedy and the Scalar Therapeutics
of Loss’, which he delivered respectively in two conferences in Berlin and Malta.
In literature, Corby points out, tragedy brings about catharsis only after we have identified
ourselves with its victim. First, we have to care deeply for that person who will eventually meet
their downfall. Our care can sometimes be so strong that we might feel almost responsible for
their actions, responsible for what happens to them.
This is something which literature is very good at doing. Richard Kearney writes:

‘Literature inspires a sympathy that is more extensive and resonant than that experienced in
ordinary life. And it does so […] because it amplifies the range of those we might empathize
with – reaching beyond family, friends and familiars to all kinds of foreigners. If we read
Oedipus Rex, we experience what it is like to be a Greek who murders his father and marries
his mother. If we read Anna Karenina, we experience the tragic fate of a passionate woman
in nineteenth-century Russia. If we read Scarlet and Black, we relive the life of an erratic,
wilful youth in Napoleonic France.’

Literature can put us in another’s shoes by its appeal to our imagination. I imagine I am
myself as another and that other as myself. If we feel close to a character in a story, their
misfortune will be felt just as well. We might experience their misfortune almost as if it is ours.
According to Aristotle, this reaction would involve two primary emotions. We respond by feeling
pity (eleos) and fear (phobos) for the character we love. Their suffering will cause us sorrow and
compassion. It will also compel us to be afraid for them as well as awed by the terrible things that
are happening to them. In the post-apocalyptic landscape of The Road, for example, our main
sympathies go for the unnamed father while the endless desolation and ruin around him and his
son together with the ever-impending threat of the cannibalism and cruelty of the human
survivors cannot but elicit a certain dread and fascination. In Edward Bond’s Lear, human cruelty
is taken to a further level in the name of power. Lear’s torture at the hands of his daughters with
a machine that sucks out his eyeballs is another source of pity, horror, and awe for the
unfortunate protagonist.
As Corby explains, our emotional response to the persecuted character above all reveals our
intense concern with the survival of that particular individual. What we undergo here is an
instinctive almost visceral reaction that worries about whether the character will get through or
fail to get through the ordeal they are being subjected to. Will they live or will they not? Will they
overcome their adversity or will they fail? This is a reaction that is in fact very similar to the flight-
or-fight reaction provoked in us when we find ourselves exposed to danger. In such moments, we
are taken over by the impulse to either run away or defend ourselves from the imminent threat.
Our response, in other words, is strictly concerned with self-preservation. Because we are seeing
ourselves in another person, our self-defensive instincts are also experienced for that person. Will
I, will that character, endure or escape from their calamity or not?

Losing care: Beyond caring

There comes a point when the character stops fighting against all the odds. The suffering
and loss are so overwhelming that the victims simply give themselves up to them. The misery is so
intense, so invincible that they surrender themselves to it. Our distress for them cannot go any
further, cannot bear itself any longer. We give up our urgent concerns for them as they give up
theirs.
This surrender is by no means a resignation or any other pessimistic attitude of any kind.
The character does not simply decide that everything is now over so they might as well dig a hole
and die there. Theirs is more of an acknowledgement, an affirmation of the harsh truth. It is an
acceptance of their tragedy. ‘Such acceptance’, Corby writes, ‘is rarely complete, of course. It is
more a recognition that the worst has happened, or is happening, and that our [and/or their]
direct emotional response is at some level irrelevant’. There is here the realization that there is
nothing that the character can do to save them from their predicament. Before the brute facts of
reality, they are helpless. They cannot escape them or resist them. Their losses are irrevocable.
The consequences are there for life. And this is precisely what Corby understands by ‘catharsis’.
I would add that by reconciling ourselves with the character’s downfall, our sorrow for them
burns itself out. Acknowledging the fatality of the situation slowly exhausts our pity and fear for
them. We tire ourselves of our emotions, we despair of them. We are worn out of their
significance. The inner torture that tragedy has been inflicting upon us has been used up. This is
an emotional draining that is shared by the victims themselves as well once they face their lot.
We experience this most acutely in such novels as Michel Houellebecq’s, Atomised and
Possibility of an Island. The obsession with physical illness, aging, and death that pervades these
stories builds up toward the decline and sad endings of many of the characters. It makes these
endings feel inevitable, inescapable. We realize at some point that we cannot do anything about
these people we have bonded with. In Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis, we are likewise
gradually assured of the protagonist’s impending destruction whenever we see his overspending
and overeating tendencies and his drunken bouts on display, his chance at love being thwarted
forever, and eventually, the discovery that all his credit-cards have been blocked and that he owes
a formidable amount of loans and debts.
 For Corby, in reconciling ourselves with tragedy in literature, we are released from the
anguish that was being caused by our survival relationship with the fictional person. The question
of their self-preservation, for what they have lost or what they are going to lose, does not affect us
directly any longer. The burden of our emotional care for them is lifted away. The unhappiness
that comes from personal loss therefore disappears. Loss is lost and it is lost by accepting loss.
What follows is a certain state of calm. We reach a place that is uninvolved and detached
from the emotional storm we had just been through. Freed from all attachments to any individual
self, our being now feels unencumbered, light. There is here a sense of liberation, an infinite
relief. I have finally given up all preoccupation with myself as another.
We see this mirrored in the characters as well. In accepting, they surrender all concern for
themselves. Corby gives three significant examples to illustrate this. He refers to Maurice
Blanchot’s story, The Instant of My Death. This recounts the author’s close brush with death
before a Nazi firing squad. He is lined up to be shot. At that moment when he is about to be
executed, his own inescapable death is accepted and with this comes ‘a feeling of extraordinary
lightness, a sort of beatitude (nothing happy, however) – sovereign elation […]? He was perhaps
suddenly invincible’.
Another instance is in Act III of Shakespeare’s play, King Richard the Second. Here, the
banished Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, has come back to challenge Richard for the crown
while his army has started deserting him. Further on, Richard also learns that his close friends
Bushy, Bagon, and Green have been killed. On hearing this news, his defiant front is broken. With
this final straw, in dazed semi-soliloquy, he talks about rejecting anything that can bring comfort
to a human being: hope, success, the satisfaction of our desires, safety: ‘of comfort no man speak
[…]’. Instead, he announces the need to talk about death and loss, the need to give in to the
insufferable distress that accompanies them. Corby insists on the comfort and consolation that all
this talk of misery gives the king. In accepting what has happened to him, Richard has finally
discovered a tranquillity that he would not have found had he denied them.
Lear in Shakespeare’s King Lear also seems to go through the same process. Having found
himself stripped of all power and facing possible death, he tries to comfort his daughter Cordelia
by encouraging her to accept imprisonment and their misfortune as necessary conditions for them
to

‘pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies […]
And take upon’s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies.’

Ethics comes from a calm place

Catharsis therefore purifies us or purges us. It liberates us from a narrowed vision that is
bound up with the immediate concerns for an individual who is seen to be an imaginary extension
of ourselves. This does not mean that we stop caring about them. It simply means that our caring
no longer comes from our raw self-centred emotions. It comes from elsewhere. The fight-or-flight
impulse does not get the better of us in response to the events in the story. It no longer controls
or influences us.
Our perception now comes from a place that is not engaged directly with the person we
have been relating to. Our mindset is now composed. It enables us to see things from a much
broader and more sensible viewpoint. It allows us to take in the bigger picture. In doing so, the
possibility opens up for new different ways of responding to experiences. We find in ourselves the
potential to see the story’s universe through other forms of understanding. For Corby, this is how
ethical thought begins.

Tragedy in Our Lives

So is catharsis important for our lives?

The answer is definitely yes if it can lead us toward a mindframe that can help us handle our
own tragedies and recover from them. When we are struck by misfortune, when, for instance, a
loved one dies or our life-projects fail, we need to be able to face this reality and move on.
It goes without saying that this is not easy to achieve. Intense grief is not pleasant to face. It
is not pleasant to face at all. Our suffering can be so overpowering that it can make us despair of
ever finding happiness and hope again. We might also seek to escape our pain by repressing it. In
our darkest moments anything would do, so long as we get away from the consciousness of what
we have lost. In our denial, however, we can find ourselves reliving consciously or unconsciously
the tragic event we are trying to forget. That event will keep on demanding our attention,
haunting us time and again in various ways.
Catharsis, on the other hand, calls for the unconditional acceptance of our loss as there, ever
present in our lives. It is an experience where we have to come to terms with the fact that what
we have lost will never come back, that the rest of our life must be lived with this loss some way or
another. We realize here that our personal tragedy must be dealt with. We must work through it
somehow. And we can do so because catharsis can also give us the calm and disengagement
required in order to decide and act intelligently when confronted with our troubles. Catharsis,
Kearney writes, ‘turns passive lament into possibilities of active complaint […]. [It] transform[s]
paralysis into protest […]. [It] invites the victim to resist the alienation of evil, that is, to move
from a position of mute helplessness to acts of revolt and self-renewal [italics removed]’.
The serene and clear-sighted mindset we acquire through this experience also enables us to
make choices that are quite possibly more just, prudent, and moral than ever before. Blinded no
longer by our self-defensive impulses, we can now think more deeply and carefully on our attitude
and behaviour. Perhaps we can now find out how to make the best of what we have in order to
help and improve ourselves and those around us. Our faith in ourselves is returned to us. We are
reendowed with esteem and belief in what we can do.
And this is where literature (and film and other artforms) comes in. Literature can help us
achieve this. Both Corby and Kearney believe that some of the tragedy we experience in literature
can assist us in experiencing catharsis in our actual lives. In other words, the mindset literature
inspires through its stories of violence and death can in turn incline us toward that same mindset
in our response to actual tragedies. Literature can influence the way we look at our misfortunes.
Engaging with its stories is a training of sorts. It trains us in the art of seeing our world in a more
effective and a certainly more enlightened way.
Good literature is an initiation.

Below is a list of a few works which involve on some level the sense of tragedy that has been
discussed in this article:
Amis Martin
Money

Bond Edward
Lear

Camus Albert
The Plague

Carver Raymond
Cathedral

Houellebecq Michel
Atomised
Possibility of an Island

Dostoyevsky Fyodor
Crime and Punishment

Hemingway Ernest
The Old Man and the Sea
The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Hesse Hermann
Narcissus and Goldmund
Siddhartha

McCarthy Cormac
The Road

Roth Philip
Everyman

Shakespeare William
King Lear
Richard the Second

References:

Corby James
‘Of Comfort No Man Speak: Tragedy, Indifference, Consolation’ at Thinking through tragedy and
comedy: Performance philosophy and the future of genre conference organized by ICI Berlin
‘Ratio Essendi: Tragedy and the Scalar Therapeutics of Loss’ at Scale conference organized by
European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSAeu) in Malta.
Kearney Richard
On Stories (London: Routledge, 2002)
Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London: Routledge, 2003).