A Little History of Literature (5 page)

To return to the question with which we started, what makes
Oedipus Rex
tragic, as opposed to merely horrible? Why is the death and suffering of all those unidentified Thebans not more tragic than the story of a single man who survives, albeit disabled and broken in spirit?

These questions were addressed by one of the greatest of literary critics, Aristotle, another ancient Greek. His study of tragedy – specifically
Oedipus Rex
– is called the
Poetics
. The title does not mean that Aristotle is exclusively concerned with poetry (although
Oedipus Rex
and many of its translations are written in verse) but with what one could call the mechanics of literature: how it works. Aristotle sets out to answer that question, using
Oedipus Rex
as one of his main examples.

Aristotle begins with an illuminating paradox. Imagine, for example, the following. You meet a friend who is just coming out of a theatre showing Shakespeare's
King Lear
(a play strongly resembling
Oedipus Rex
). ‘Did you enjoy it?’ you ask. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I've never enjoyed a play so much in my whole life.’ ‘You cold-hearted thing!’ you retort. ‘You enjoy the spectacle of one old man being tormented to death by his devilish daughters, another old man being blinded on stage. You tell me you
enjoyed
that? Perhaps you should go to a bullfight next time.’

It's nonsense, of course. Aristotle makes the point that it is not
what
is depicted in tragedy (the story) which affects us, and gives us aesthetic pleasure, but
how
it is depicted (the plot). What we enjoy (and it's quite correct to use the word) in
King Lear
is not the cruelty, but the art, the ‘representation’ (Aristotle calls it ‘imitation’,
mimesis
).

Aristotle helps us understand what it is that makes a play like
Oedipus Rex
work as tragedy. Take that word ‘accident’. In tragedy, we are led to understand as the play progresses, there are no accidents. It is all foretold – which is why oracles and soothsayers are so central to the action. Everything fits and falls into place. We may not see that at the time, but we will later. As Aristotle puts it, when we see a tragedy acted the events should strike us as ‘necessary and probable’ as they unfold. What happens in tragedy
must
happen. But actually seeing what lies behind the unfolding of the predestined course of events is, typically, too much for flesh and blood to bear. When Oedipus sees how things have worked out, because, he now understands, they
had
to work out that way, he fulfils another of the soothsayer's claims – that he is (metaphorically) blind – by literally blinding himself. Humankind cannot bear too much reality.

With Aristotle's assistance we can take apart Sophocles' perfectly constructed tragedy, as a mechanic might dismantle an automobile
engine. Tragedy, he decrees, must address itself to personal histories of noble men, who actually existed. Royalty is an ideal subject (there was, in earlier times, actually a king called Oedipus). The idea of a slave or a woman being a tragic hero is, Aristotle says, absurd. The tragic play, Aristotle insists, must concentrate our attention on ‘process’ – there must be no distractions. Any violence must take place off-stage and, ideally, the tragedy must – as in
Oedipus Rex
– narrate the final phase of the tragic process. Tragedy is concerned with what in chess is called the ‘endgame’: consequences.

The modern French playwright Jean Anouilh (1910–87), discussing his adaptation of another of Sophocles' plays (about Oedipus's daughter, Antigone), described the tragic plot as a ‘machine’, all the component parts working with each other to produce the final effect, like the ‘movement’ of a Swiss watch. What gets the machinery moving? Aristotle says that there must be a trigger and the tragic hero must pull it. He calls that trigger
hamartia
which is usually translated, awkwardly, as ‘an error in judgement’. Oedipus triggers the tragedy that will ultimately destroy him by losing his temper and killing that infuriating stranger at the crossroads. He is hot-headed (so is Laius, his father – it runs in the family). That is his
hamartia
, or error in judgement, which starts the machine, just as a key starts the engine in a car – a car that drives off and has a fatal crash. It is terrifying because we all are guilty of such errors in our everyday lives.

Aristotle is particularly shrewd on how the audience collaborates, if the play is working as it should, in the full experience of tragic performance. He notes how emotionally powerful tragedy can be – pregnant women have been known to give premature birth, he says, while watching tragedy, so overwhelming was the tragic effect. The specific emotions that tragedy brings about, he says, are ‘pity and fear’. Pity, that is, for the tragic hero's suffering, and fear because, if it happens to the tragic hero, it can happen to anyone – even us.

The most controversial of Aristotle's arguments is his theory of
catharsis
. This word is untranslatable (we usually use Aristotle's own term) and it is best understood as a ‘tempering of the emotions’. Let's go back to our audience leaving the theatre after watching a
tragedy like
King Lear
or
Oedipus Rex
, performed well. The mood will be sober, reflective – people will be in a sense exhausted by what they have seen on stage. But also strangely elevated, as if they had gone through something like a religious experience.

We don't have to take everything Aristotle says as critical gospel – let's say he gives us a toolkit. But why does
Oedipus Rex
still work for us, separated as we are by all those centuries? We don't, for example, agree for a minute with Aristotle's social views on slaves and women, or his political views that only kings, queens and the nobility matter in the history of nations.

There are two plausible answers. One is that the play is so wonderfully well constructed. It is a thing of aesthetic beauty – like the Parthenon, or the Taj Mahal or a Da Vinci painting. Secondly, although the store of human knowledge has expanded hugely, life and the human condition are still very mysterious to the thinking person. Tragedy confronts that mystery, examines the big questions: What is life all about? What makes us human? In its aims, tragedy is the most ambitious of literary genres. Aristotle has no doubt that it is, as he tells us, the ‘noblest’.

CHAPTER
5

English Tales

C
HAUCER

English literature – as we know it – starts with Geoffrey Chaucer (
c
. 1343–1400), 700 years ago. But I'll rephrase that sentence. Not ‘English literature’ but ‘literature in English’ starts with Chaucer. It was a long time before England had a language that unified the speech and writing practice of the whole population – and Chaucer marks the point where we can see it happening, around the fourteenth century.

Compare the two following quotations. They are the opening lines of two great poems written, in what we now think of as England, at almost exactly the same time, toward the end of the fourteenth century:

The first quotation is by someone known only as the ‘Gawain Poet’, and is the opening of
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
, a semimythic tale set in the reign of King Arthur (discussed in Chapter 2). The second is by Chaucer and is the opening couplet of
The Canterbury Tales
.

Most readers – unfamiliar with Anglo-Saxon poetic diction, its two-stress rhythms, half-lines and vocabulary sometimes as alien as Klingon – will make heavy weather of the
Gawain
example. Only a few of the words hint that it is a kind of English. The second extract (with the information that ‘swoot’ means ‘sweet’) is, for the modern reader, broadly understandable – as is the whole poem, its rhymes and rhythms. With a few words translated for us, most of us can handle the poem in the various early forms in which it was transcribed. And it's more enjoyable in the original. It speaks to us, as we say.

Fine poem though
Gawain
is, its retention of the language and style of Old English stands at a literary dead end. Those people to whom it once spoke are long gone. There was no future for writing like that – beautiful as the poem is to those today who trouble to learn the dialect in which it is written. Chaucer's ‘new’ English is at the threshold of centuries of great literature to come. He was hailed as ‘Dan’ Chaucer by his follower, the great Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser – ‘Dan’ is short for Dominus, ‘Master’. The leader of the pack. Chaucer was, Spenser said, ‘the source of English undefiled’. He gave our literature its language. And he himself was the first to do great things with it, opening the way for others to do great things.

It is significant that we know who Chaucer actually was and can see him, as we read, in our mind's eye. Literature, after him, has ‘authors’. We do not know who composed
Beowulf
. It was probably the work of many anonymous hands and minds. Nor do we know who the ‘Gawain Poet’ was. It could have been more than one person. Who knows?

Much had changed in the regional kingdoms and fiefdoms (estates controlled by lords) of Britain during the half-century that separates
Beowulf
from
The Canterbury Tales
. It wasn't just
‘English’ that had happened, but ‘England’ itself. The British Isles were conquered by William, Duke of Normandy, in 1066. ‘The Conqueror’, as he is called, brought with him the apparatus of what we recognise as the modern state. The Normans continued the unification of the land they had invaded, installing an official language, a system of common law, coinage, a class system, Parliament, London as the capital city, and other institutions, many of which have come down to us today. Chaucer was this new England's pioneer author, and his English was the London dialect. One can still hear the old rhythms and vocabularies of Anglo-Saxon literature, even in his verse, but it is subterranean, like a drumbeat reaching us from vibrations in the ground.

So who was this man? He was born Geoffroy de Chaucer, his family name derived from the French
chausseur
, or ‘shoemaker’. The family had, over the centuries, risen well above the cobbler level and their Norman-French origins. In Geoffrey's time they had connections with, and received favours from, the court. Luckily, under Edward III the country was more or less at peace – although occasional forays were made into France, now a foe with whom England would be at odds for 500 years. Geoffrey's father was in the import/export wine trade. This line of work meant intimate contact with continental Europe, whose literatures (well ahead of England's at the time) would later be drawn on extensively by Geoffrey.

Chaucer may have officially or unofficially attended one of the great universities or he may have received his impressive education from home tutors. We don't know. What is clear is that he came into manhood extraordinarily well read and fluent in several languages. As a young man he craved adventure and embarked on a military career. (One of his two great poems,
Troilus and Criseyde
, is set in the background of the greatest war in literature – that between the Greeks and Trojans.) In France the young English soldier was taken prisoner and ransomed. In later life his favourite thinker was the Roman poet Boethius who wrote his great treatise,
The Consolation of Philosophy
, in prison. Chaucer translated it from the original Latin, partly via a French version, into English, and absorbed its thinking, particularly on
the uncertainty of ‘fortune’ – life's ups and downs.

On his return from the wars he married and settled down. His wife, Philippa, was nobly born and brought him money as well as status. His private life is a matter of persistent debate. From his often bawdy writings, however, we can assume that Geoffrey Chaucer was not puritanical by nature. The term ‘Chaucerian’ has become proverbial for someone who enjoys life to the full.

His early career was assisted by friends at court. Patronage was how you got on in those days. In 1367 the king settled a generous life pension of twenty marks on him for his service as ‘our beloved Valet’ (courtier). Today we would call Chaucer a civil servant. In the early 1370s he was employed in the king's service abroad. He may well have met the great Italian writers, Petrarch and Boccaccio, in Italy – then the literary capital of the modern world. Both would go on to be major influences on his own writing.

In the mid-1370s Chaucer was appointed Controller of Customs in the Port of London. This was the highpoint of his professional life. Had he continued to rise in the world it is unlikely that we would have
The Canterbury Tales
. But in the 1380s, his fortunes declined. His friends and patrons could no longer help him. Now a widower, and out of favour at court, he retired to Kent, where he wrote
The Canterbury Tales
, his great Kentish poem. He had, at this stage of his life, apparently nothing to do but enjoy life as best he could in his provincial retirement.