Table Of ContentTragedy and Redress
in Western Literature
This book offers a unique interpretation of tragic literature in the Western
tradition, deploying the method and style of analytic philosophy. Richard
Gaskin argues that tragic literature seeks to offer moral and linguistic
redress (compensation) for suffering. Moral redress involves the balancing
of a protagonist’s suffering with guilt (and vice versa): Gaskin contends
that, to a much greater extent than has been recognized by recent critics,
traditional tragedy represents suffering as incurred by avoidable and
culpable mistakes of a cognitive nature. Moral redress operates in the
first instance at the level of the individual agent. Linguistic redress, by
contrast, operates at a higher level of generality, namely at the level of the
community: its fundamental motor is the sheer expressibility of suffering
in words. Against many writers on tragedy, Gaskin argues that language
is competent to express pain and suffering, and that tragic literature has
that expression as one of its principal purposes.
The definition of tragic literature in this book is expanded to include
more than stage drama: the treatment stretches from the Classical and
Medieval periods through to the early twentieth century. There is a
special focus on Sophocles, but Gaskin takes account of most other major
tragic authors in the European tradition, including Homer, Aeschylus,
Euripides, Virgil, Seneca, Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Corneille,
Racine, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Büchner, Ibsen, Hardy, Kafka,
and Mann; lesser-known areas, such as Renaissance neo-Latin tragedy,
are also covered. Among theorists of tragedy, Gaskin concentrates on
Aristotle and Bradley; but the contributions of numerous contemporary
commentators are also assessed. Tragedy and Redress in Western
Literature: A Philosophical Perspective offers a new and genuinely
interdisciplinary perspective on tragedy that will be of considerable
interest both to philosophers of literature and to literary critics.
Richard Gaskin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool,
UK. He is the author of seven books, including Horace and Housman
(2013), Language, Truth, and Literature: A Defence of Literary Humanism
(2013), and The Unity of the Proposition (2008).
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Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature
A Philosophical Perspective
Richard Gaskin
Tragedy and Redress in
Western Literature
A Philosophical Perspective
Richard Gaskin
First published 2018
by Routledge
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To the memory of Christopher Gray 1964–96
et tamen adhuc per fidem, nondum per speciem: spe
enim salvi facti sumus. spes autem quae videtur non est
spes. adhuc abyssus abyssum invocat, sed iam in voce
cataractarum tuarum. adhuc et ille qui dicit, ‘non potui
vobis loqui quasi spiritalibus, sed quasi carnalibus’,
etiam ipse nondum se arbitratur comprehendisse, et
quae retro oblitus, in ea quae ante sunt extenditur et
ingemescit gravatus, et sitit anima eius ad deum vivum,
quemadmodum cervi ad fontes aquarum, et dicit,
‘quando veniam?’, habitaculum suum, quod de caelo
est, superindui cupiens, et vocat inferiorem abyssum
dicens, ‘nolite conformari huic saeculo, sed reformamini
in novitate mentis vestrae’.
Augustine, Confessions XIII, 13.
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
PART I
Tragedy and Moral Redress 19
1 Oedipus: Hamartia, Freedom, and the Supernatural 21
2 Antigone’s Holy Crime 84
3 From Cognitive Failure to No-Fault Tragedy 131
PART II
Tragedy and Linguistic Redress 187
4 Theoretical Considerations 189
5 Can Suffering Be Expressed in Words? 266
6 Tragedy and Linguistic Idealism 322
Bibliography 358
Index 404
Acknowledgements
I am most grateful to several anonymous readers for their useful criti-
cisms of earlier drafts of part or all of this book, and especially to Mal-
colm Heath for his detailed and incisive comments on a late draft of
the whole thing. All these commentators found much to contest in my
argument; I am of course responsible for the final product, and for any
errors, factual or argumentational, that it may contain. In a few places
I have relayed, and responded to, some of these readers’ objections, since
I imagine that others will share their worries. As I explain in the Intro-
duction, the book is analytic and polemical in method and style. It chal-
lenges a number of settled views in the criticism of literature in general,
and in the reception of tragedy in particular. Whether I have made out a
satisfactory case will be for the reader to judge.
I could not have undertaken and completed this project without the
support and encouragement of my wife Cathrin and my sons Thomas
and Markus, and to them I express my deep gratitude, as I do also to my
sisters Rosemary, Hilary, and Fiona, to my brothers-in-law Chris, Ray-
mond, and Christopher, and to my friends and colleagues Barry Dainton,
Daniel Hill, and David Langslow: all of these helped me during a test-
ing bout of illness that befell me suddenly and unexpectedly during the
period of writing this book, and their support was invaluable in seeing
me through that difficult time. Barry and Daniel also commented on part
of an early draft of the book, as did Chris Bartley and Stephen McLeod.
I am further indebted to George Gereby and the members of an audi-
ence at Budapest to whom a syncopated version of the first chapter was
delivered as a talk.
I dedicate the book to the memory of my friend Christopher Gray, with
whom I had many discussions on topics philosophical and literary during
the time of our acquaintance, which, alas, proved all too brief. We did
not discuss the passage of Augustine that I quote in the dedication, but
I am confident that he would have loved it; and he would have read it
with the eye of faith, unlike me, who must secularize it to make it render
Acknowledgements ix
up its riches. But, to anticipate a point I shall make at more length in the
book, that secularizing move not only can be made, but has been avail-
able to be made since the earliest beginnings of Western literature.
Richard Gaskin
January 2018
