I am always hesitant to brand something a “tragedy.” Like using the word, “literally” when you actually mean, “figuratively,” or like Alanis Morrisette labeling things “ironic” when she really means “unfortunate,” the word “tragic” has been misapplied to any event that is actually just “sad.”
According to Aristotle, who literally wrote the book on tragedy (okay, figuratively: he literally gave the first recorded lecture on tragedy in The Poetics that someone else copied down), any sad event does not qualify as “tragedy.” There are several elements that must be present in order for a story to be truly “tragic.” These include:
– The tragic hero (i.e. the person to whom the tragedy is happening) must be someone of high status who has a lot to lose. Classically speaking, if Oedipus had been a bachelor shepherd who owned nothing but one coat and his hut, his fall in which he lost everything wouldn’t have been tragic. However, for Oedipus the King, a beloved ruler with wealth, power, a hot wife and (spoiler alert) eyesight, his fall into oblivion is truly a tragedy.
– The fall must be inevitable. In the classical sense, this usually meant that an oracle had foretold the events of the tragedy in advance (Oedipus was told by an oracle that he would kill his father and marry his mother), but today I look at it as meaning that it could have been seen coming.
So when there is a car accident resulting in a death, it’s sad but it isn’t really tragic: there was no inevitability there (yes, yes, unless there’s additional context like the driver had already been arrested 21 times for driving without a license but was never sent to jail, for example).
Of course, everyone called Newtown a tragedy. Was it really?
In this case, I say yes. Maybe a shooting at that particular school wasn’t inevitable, but given our national obsession with guns (we Americans own one gun for every man, woman, and child in the country…to say nothing of illegally-owned guns not on the books or guns sitting in Walmart waiting to be bought), our medieval policy on gun control and gun ownership, our politicians’ unwillingness to challenge the NRA’s radical stance on the issue, and our head-in-the-sand attitude towards mental health, yes, I think 20 children killed in an elementary school was inevitable. It was going to happen sooner or later.
But what about the tragic hero? Who is it in this tragedy? Was it the rich suburban parents? The young children who had their whole lives ahead of them? The gun owner with the mentally challenged son? The shooter himself who could have been helped, maybe, with some intervention?
All of these and more. I think in this story, the tragic hero is us. All of us: America.
We need to act now to prevent these sorts of tragedies from recurring. When Oedipus fell, all of his people paid the price. We’re reaping the harvest of our political inaction with every victim of gun violence we eulogize. Let’s end the tragedy now. In subsequent posts, I’ll talk about ways we can do it.
vanquishingvoldemort 