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The Tragic Paradox

Leonard Moss

Paradox informs the narrative sequence, images, and rhetorical tactics contrived by skilled dramatists and novelists. Their literary languages depict not only a war between rivals but also simultaneous affirmation and negation voiced by a tragic individual. They reveal the treason, flux, and duplicity brought into play by an unrelenting drive for respect. Their patterns of speech, action, and image project a convergence of polarities, the convergence of integrity and radical change, of constancy and infidelity. A fanatical drive to fulfill a traditional code of masculine conduct produces the ironic consequence of de-forming that code—the tragic paradox.

Tragic literature exploits irony. In Athenian and Shakespearean tragedy, self-righteous male or female aristocrats instigate their own disgrace, shame, and guilt, an un-expected diminishment. They are victimized by a magnificent obsession, a fantasy of un-alloyed authority or virtue, a dream of perfect self-sufficiency or trust. The authors of tragedy revised the concept of “nobility” to reflect the strange fact that grandeur elicits its own annulment. “Strengths by strengths do fail,” Shakespeare wrote in Coriolanus.

The playwrights made this paradoxical predicament concrete with a narrative format that equates self-assertion with self-detraction, images that revolve between incredible reversals and provisional reinstatements, and speech that sounds impressively weighty but masks deception, disloyalty, cynicism, and insecurity. Three heroic philosophers, Plato, Hegel, and Nietzsche, contributed invaluable but contrasting accounts of these literary languages (Aristotle's Poetics will be discussed in connection with Plato's attitude toward poetry). Their divergent descriptions can be reconciled to show that invalidations as well as affirmations—the transmission of contraries—are essential for tragic composition.

An equivocal rhetoric, a mutable imagery, and an ironic progression convey the tortuous pursuit of personal preeminence or (in later tragic works by Kafka and Strindberg) family solidarity and communal safety. I am trying to integrate the disparate arguments offered by several notable theorists with technical procedures fashioned by the Athenian dramatists and recast by Shakespeare and other writers, procedures that articulate the tragic paradox.

Lexington Books

Pages: 262 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-0-7391-7121-9 • Hardback • April 2012 • $133.00 • (£102.00)

978-0-7391-7122-6 • eBook • March 2014 • $126.00 • (£97.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Drama, Literary Criticism / General

The Tragic Paradox

Hardback

eBook

Summary

Paradox informs the narrative sequence, images, and rhetorical tactics contrived by skilled dramatists and novelists. Their literary languages depict not only a war between rivals but also simultaneous affirmation and negation voiced by a tragic individual. They reveal the treason, flux, and duplicity brought into play by an unrelenting drive for respect. Their patterns of speech, action, and image project a convergence of polarities, the convergence of integrity and radical change, of constancy and infidelity. A fanatical drive to fulfill a traditional code of masculine conduct produces the ironic consequence of de-forming that code—the tragic paradox.

Tragic literature exploits irony. In Athenian and Shakespearean tragedy, self-righteous male or female aristocrats instigate their own disgrace, shame, and guilt, an un-expected diminishment. They are victimized by a magnificent obsession, a fantasy of un-alloyed authority or virtue, a dream of perfect self-sufficiency or trust. The authors of tragedy revised the concept of “nobility” to reflect the strange fact that grandeur elicits its own annulment. “Strengths by strengths do fail,” Shakespeare wrote in Coriolanus.

The playwrights made this paradoxical predicament concrete with a narrative format that equates self-assertion with self-detraction, images that revolve between incredible reversals and provisional reinstatements, and speech that sounds impressively weighty but masks deception, disloyalty, cynicism, and insecurity. Three heroic philosophers, Plato, Hegel, and Nietzsche, contributed invaluable but contrasting accounts of these literary languages (Aristotle's Poetics will be discussed in connection with Plato's attitude toward poetry). Their divergent descriptions can be reconciled to show that invalidations as well as affirmations—the transmission of contraries—are essential for tragic composition.

An equivocal rhetoric, a mutable imagery, and an ironic progression convey the tortuous pursuit of personal preeminence or (in later tragic works by Kafka and Strindberg) family solidarity and communal safety. I am trying to integrate the disparate arguments offered by several notable theorists with technical procedures fashioned by the Athenian dramatists and recast by Shakespeare and other writers, procedures that articulate the tragic paradox.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 262 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-0-7391-7121-9 • Hardback • April 2012 • $133.00 • (£102.00)

978-0-7391-7122-6 • eBook • March 2014 • $126.00 • (£97.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Drama, Literary Criticism / General

Author

Leonard Moss attended three state universities (Oklahoma, Indiana, and California), then taught American and European literature at a fourth (SUNY at Geneseo), where he directed a program in comparative studies until his retirement. The best part of teaching, he felt, was swapping ideas with his students; he learned as much as they did from the lively give-and-take of guided discussions.

As a Fulbright professor he chaired the English Department at the University of Athens in 1976-77, and taught graduate English majors at the Foreign Studies University in Beijing in 1985-87 and again in 1993-94. In Beijing he met and married, after surmounting formidable bureaucratic obstacles, Shaoping Wu, a spirited English teacher. Recalling their courtship, travels, and dealings with difficult officials, they co-authored a memoir entitled China Was Paradise, China Was Hell! They also co-authored a son, now a bio-tech craftsman in Boston.

Professor Moss has written books on Arthur Miller, Joseph Conrad, literature and evolution, and tragedy and philosophy. He edited the journal of the Rhode Island Jewish Historical Association in Providence from 1998 to 2004. Now he lives in happy retirement with his wife in Walnut Creek, California (lenmoss@gmail.com).

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Languages of Paradox
Part I: The Narrative Language
Chapter 1: The Masculine Model
Chapter 2: The Tragic Female
Chapter 3: The Tragic Sequence
Chapter 4: Shakespeare’s Dangerous Companion
Chapter 5: The Relevance of Hegel
Part II: The Metaphorical Language
Chapter 6: The Artistry of Flux
Chapter 7: The Logic of Dreams
Part III: The Rhetorical Language
Chapter 8: Plato’s Paragon
Chapter 9: Milton’s Potpourri
Chapter 10: Shakespeare’s Paradox
Conclusion: The Truth of Tragedy
Notes
Two Checklists, 1900-2010
The Theory of Tragedy
Plato and Aristotle on the Craft of Literature (Annotated)

Reviews

With The Tragic Paradox, Leonard Moss succeeds admirably in demonstrating how major tragic figures in Western literature are defined not by monolithic grandeur, but by self-contradiction. Shakespeare’s phrase in Coriolanus—'Strengths by strengths do fail'— encapsulates the paradox at the heart of tragedy: it is not exterior forces or inner weakness but rather the striving for greatness itself that causes the tragic protagonist to fall. In some cases it is a stubborn adherence to a model of masculinity, in others a threat to pride or position that triggers an emotional blindness. Discussing major theoreticians of tragedy (Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche) as well as major practitioners (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, and Milton), Moss works on both the macro and the micro level. In the first part of the book, titled 'The Narrative Language,' he shows how narrative design in tragedy carries out the paradox and in the second two parts, 'The Metaphorical Language' and 'The Rhetorical Language,' he analyzes how paradox functions on the level of figures and images. On both levels, Moss’s readings illuminate a fruitful approach to the understanding of tragedy.

— Mary Anne Frese Witt, author of "The Search for Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France" (Cornell UP, 2001)

The Tragic Paradox

Leonard Moss

The Tragic Paradox

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