1. University of Oregon
Aristotle, Frye, and the Theory of Tragedy
Author(s): Leon Golden
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Winter, 1975), pp. 47-58
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2. LEON GOLDEN
Aristotle, Frye,
And the
Theory of Tragedy
N ORTHROP FRYE has recognized a basic kinship between his
Anatomy of Criticism and Aristotle's Poetics. After noting with
regret the parochialismof many contemporarycritics, he warmly alludes
to Aristotle's conception of a "totally intelligible structure of knowledge
attainable about poetry which is not poetry itself, or the experience of it,
but poetics."' This conception, reflected concisely in the opening lines
of the Poetics, becomes the program of the Anatomy. Frye, however,
aspires to improve on his model by making use of all the relevant doc-
trines and techniques of criticism developed since Aristotle wrote.
Tragedy is the central theme of the Poetics and a subject of major
importancein the Anatomy as well. In comparing the two approachesto
this genre we are struck by their wide divergence in method and con-
clusions. Clearly both Aristotle and Frye make profound contributions
to our understanding of tragedy but neither succeeds in providing a
definitive statement that clarifies the nature of the genre as it has
emerged and developed in the western literary tradition. I propose in
this paper to assess our current understanding of the nature of tragedy
based on the contributions made by Aristotle and Frye and then to sug-
gest a method by which these important theoretical statements can be
harmonized to lead us to a fuller understanding of the potentialities and
boundaries of the genre.
The major tenets of Aristotle's theory of tragedy are well known. I
summarize them here for later comparison with Frye. For Aristotle
tragedy is an imitation (mimesis) of actions involving the pitiable and
fearful dimensions of human existence. This form of imitation repre-
1 Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J., 1957), p. 14.
47

3. COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
sents a noble (spoudaios) hero as its object; it uses artistically enhanced
language as its means; and its manner of presentation is dramatic rather
than narrative. The representation of pity (the feeling we have toward
the undeserved misfortune of others) and fear (the same feeling when
directed at our own vulnerability to such misfortune) requires that the
tragic hero fall from happiness to misery because of some intellectual,
not moral, error (hamartia). The effectiveness of any given tragedy is
dependent upon its possessing a plot that is complete, is of the proper
magnitude, and is developed in accordance with the laws of necessity
and probability.The ultimate goal and essential pleasure associated with
tragis mimesis is catharsis. Catharsis, a much disputed term, has been
interpreted in four principal ways: (1) as a form of medical purgation
in which the pathological elements of pity and fear are purged from the
spectator; (2) as a form of moral purification in which the spectator
achieves the proper mean between excess and deficiency in experiencing
pity and fear; (3) as a structuralprocess by which the tragic deed of the
hero is, in the course of the play, purified of its moral pollution; and (4)
as the process of intellectual clarificationby which the spectator comes to
understand, under a universal heading, the nature of the particular
pitiable and fearful events that have been depicted.2
The ultimate thrust of the Aristotelian theory of tragedy will, of
course, depend on which interpretation of catharsis we accept but the
basic nature of Aristotle's approach to tragedy is clear even without a
final decision about this important term. Aristotle's goal is to set forth
the conditions under which the essential tragic effect and pleasure will be
most fully achieved. His definition of tragedy is thus a prescription for
the creation of an ideal work of art rather than a general statement
applicable to all works traditionally included within the limits of the
genre. Most of the plays cited for one reason or another in the Poetics
cannot be dealt with effectively in terms of the definition of tragedy set
forth in Chapter VI and few of the tragedies written since Aristotle's
time will fit snugly within the confines of that definition. Recognizing
that Aristotle's definition of tragedy is a statement of the ideal conditions
2 For a discussion of the various theories of catharsis see the following: J.
Bernays, Zwei Abhandlungen iiber die aristotelische Theorie des Dramas (Berlin,
1880); I. Bywater, Aristotle on the Art of Poetry (Oxford, 1909), p. 160; G. F.
Else, Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 221-32,
436-44; Leon Golden, "Catharsis," Transactions of the American Philological
Association, 93 (1962), 51-60 and "Mimesis and Katharsis," Classical Philology,
64 (1969), 145-53; D. W. Lucas, Aristotle; Poetics: Introduction, Commentary,
and Appendixes (Oxford, 1968), pp. 282-86; H. Otte, Neue Beitriige zur aristo-
telischen Begriffsbestimmung der Tragidie (Berlin, 1928), p. 10; Kurt von Fritz,
Antike und moderne Tragidie (Berlin, 1962), p. xxvi.
48

4. ARISTOTLE AND FRYE
for the fulfillment of the tragic form prepares us for understanding
Frye's widely divergent approach.
Frye identifies five modes and six phases of tragedy at different
stages of his argument but he does not treat these in any systematic form.
The modes do relate to a development downward from stories about
heroes who are superior in kind to other men and their environment to
stories about heroes who are inferior in degree both to other men and to
their environment. Frye identifies salient features characteristic of each
level of development from the Dionysiac to the elegiac, high mimetic,
low mimetic, and ironic modes. Pity and fear (not necessarily in the
Aristotelian sense), hamartia (without moral coloring), and catharsis
(in the sense of purgation) are attributed to some of the modes but they
do not form a system of central, unifying ideas that establishes the
essential meaning of the concept of tragedy. The six phases of tragedy
represent a development from the heroic to the ironic world view. Here,
too, however we do not have so much a systematic theory as a citation
and analysis of particularexamples. Frye does assert that two commonly
held "reductive formulas" for tragedy are partially but not completely
valid: (1) that tragedy exhibits the omnipotence of an external fate
and (2) that the tragic process is primarily a violation of moral law.
Frye cites a number of examples which clash with these formulas.
We see that Frye, unlike Aristotle, is concerned with establishing a
critical position that will be relevant to the tremendous variety of works
traditionally included within the genre of tragedy. His discussion of five
modes and six phases recognizes the full range of manifestations tragedy
has taken in its historical development. Unfortunately, Frye's analysis
remains mostly on the level of a perceptive description of the salient
features of each mode and phase and does not establish a systematic
argument that would demonstrate the organic relationship among these
modes and phases. The major Aristotelian concepts of pity and fear,
hamartia, and catharsis are judged to occur in some dimensions of the
tragic experience but not in others and Frye supplies no substitutions
for them which would organize tragedy as a clearly unified territory
within the wide landscape of artistic mimesis.
The strength of Aristotle's theory is that it identifies with precision a
central, perhaps the central theme of the genre; its weakness is that it
fails to account for the great body of works which have historically
been designated as tragedies. Frye's approach to tragedy makes a
significant contribution toward overcoming this limitation but he, in
turn, fails to provide us with a rigorous system of standards and criteria
through which the boundaries of the genre can be fixed and its constitu-
ent elements analyzed. It thus appears that a major contribution to the
49

5. COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
theory of tragedy could be made if it were possible to follow Frye in his
attempt to do justice to the entire range of tragedies without abandon-
ing Aristotelian rigor in establishing the definition of the genre. Such
a compromise between the two approachesis not impossible; indeed, the
mechanism for attaining it is implicit in the Aristotelian system itself. It
is possible to isolate four parameters in the Aristotelian analysis of
tragedy: (1) the moral stature of the hero: whether he is noble
(spoudaios) or ignoble (phaulos); (2) the nature of the error (ha-
martia) committed by the hero: whether it is intellectual or moral; (3)
the destiny of the hero: whether he moves from happiness to misery or
the reverse; and (4) the response of the audience: whether pity and fear
are evoked and subjected to the process of catharsis in any of its possible
interpretations.
When we apply these categories to the data provided by the history
of tragedy, we find four distinct patterns of tragic action. We shall now
analyze these patterns in detail and suggest that, as a system, they repre-
sent a rigorous approach to the phenomenon of tragedy that is fully
adequate to deal with the diverse elements historically united in this
genre.
We shall begin with the pattern of tragic action which Aristotle
specifically identifies as ideal in the Poetics and which, in my view, is
represented in Greek tragedy only by the Oedipus Tyrannus. In this
pattern a spoudaios hero, that is, one of moral nobility and integrity,
makes an intellectual rather than a moral mistake (hamartia) which
triggers a fall from happiness to misery and evokes the response of pity
and fear from the audience. For Aristotle the evocation of pity and
fear is the proper goal of tragedy and it is only by this pattern of tragic
action that the goal can be achieved. To see the reason for this we must
understandclearly the meaning of pity and fear for Aristotle. In Chapter
XIII of the Poetics he defines these terms as follows: ".. . for pity is
aroused by someone who undeservedly falls into misfortune, and fear is
evoked by our recognizing that it is someone like ourselves who en-
counters this misfortune (pity, as I say, arising for the former reason,
fear for the latter)." Thus for Aristotle pity refers to our sympathetic
response to the undeserved misfortune of someone else and fear indi-
cates, narrowly and specifically, the anxiety we feel that such misfor-
tune can befall those who have the same degree of intelligence and moral
stature as ourselves. In order for the emotions of pity and fear to be
evoked we must have a tragic hero of sufficient moral stature to
deserve our respect and one with whom it is easy for us to identify.
Moreover, this hero must commit a significant error (hamartia) or else
the events of the drama would not be motivated and would not be linked
50

6. ARISTOTLE AND FRYE
by necessity and probability; nevertheless the error must be intellectual
rather than moral or else the undeserved quality of the misfortune would
be destroyed and with it the necessary preconditions for the evocation of
pity and fear.
The Oedipus Tyrannus offers a good example of this pattern of tragic
action.3 Oedipus is clearly spoudaios because he always strives to ac-
complish morally justifiable goals: he flees from Corinth when it seems
possible that he might commit terrible crimes against those he assumes
to be his parents; he exerts himself without limit in seeking to lift the
plague from the people of Thebes; and, with total integrity, he brings
to light the truth about himself despite all efforts by others to prevent
his terrible moment of self-discovery. Some critics have seen Oedipus'
rashness and quickness to anger as signs of a moral flaw in his character.
They have failed to notice that such episodes occur when Oedipus' life
is in danger or when a citizen of great reputation and authority appears
to be withholding significant information that is necessary for the safety
of the state. Oedipus' very human response in these situations is not his
flaw; rather, his essential hamartia is his failure to understand the true
relationship between his own, finite human existence and the infinitely
powerful and mysterious nature of Apollo. Oedipus' attempt to avoid
committing incest and parricide and his efforts to free Thebes from its
suffering are the very virtues out of which his profound misunder-
standing of Apollo arises. In the Oedipus Tyrannus we observe the
evocation of both pity and fear because we are led to respect the moral
stature of the hero, to understand and pardon the intellectual mistake
which triggers his downfall, and to recognize ourselves as vulnerable to
the same fate.
The second pattern of tragic action is observed in those situations
where pity alone is evoked without any concomitant fear in the technical
Aristotelian senses of those terms. In this pattern the hero is no longer
fully spoudaios but has only a hint of this quality and the mistake he
makes is essentially a moral one. The fall from happiness to misery
occurs with the same intensity as in the first pattern. Works that illus-
trate the second pattern of tragic action must have a hero who at least
aspires to act in accordance with moral virtue but is too weak to resist
the external pressures that drive him to commit a debased or criminal
act. The fact that the hero did not initially will his act but succumbed to
external pressure makes it possible for us to feel some measure of
3 The view presented here of Oedipus as a noble hero is widely held today. See,
for example, the perceptive discussion by Bernard Knox, Oedipus at Thebes (New
Haven, Conn., 1957), pp. 194-96. An eloquent refutation of those who still wish
to fix moral blame on Oedipus is provided by Kurt von Fritz, Antike und moderne
Tragidie (Berlin, 1962), pp. 7-8.
51

7. COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
sympathy and anguish for an undeserved element in his fate. The moral-
ly debased quality of his actions, however, interferes with the recogni-
tion of our own vulnerability to a similar destiny and thus frustrates
the evocation of Aristotelian "fear."
Euripides' Medea is a clear example.4 Medea tells us how totally she
had devoted herself to Jason's interests when he cunningly won her
affection as part of his strategy for obtaining the golden fleece. She
committed heinous crimes and cut all ties to her home and country to
serve his needs. Her anger at her betrayal by the always pragmatic
Jason drives her to seek revenge against him. She discovers the appro-
priate means in a plan that requires her to murder her own children
because only in this way can she hurt Jason as much as he has hurt her.
From the moment she adopts the plan to the moment she completes it,
we see Medea in an anguished and ambivalent state of mind toward the
children. In feigning compliance with Jason's recommendations for her
future life, she is brought to the verge of tears when she mentions the
children to him and thinks of the terrible destiny she has designed for
them. Her torment is intensified when she learns that Creon's daughter
has accepted the fatal gifts from her children for now she knows that
there can be no turning back from her decision. She agonizingly vacil-
lates before taking the final, irrevocable step toward killing them as she
sees how much they mean to her and how much she will suffer after
she has murdered them. Nevertheless, the injury Jason has done to her
pride threatens her existence so seriously that it must be redressed at
any cost. In a poignant soliloquy, marked by passages of deep maternal
love and flashes of angry indignation, Medea sees clearly that an evil
passion for revenge will dominate all her rational misgivings about the
act she is going to perform. It is possible to censure Medea for her
inability to control her passions and her refusal to place the children's
interests above her own but it is also clear that her fury is not willed by
her but caused by Jason's callous treatment. Medea herself clearly is
capable of the most intense love and loyalty as well as the most violent
anger and vengeance.
Because Medea realizes that the murder of her children is an evil and
irrational act she cannot be a spoudaios hero like Oedipus in the Oedipus
Tyrannus. We can, however, still pity her fate as not being fully de-
served because she did not hate her children or desire to harm them. She
acted in response to the pressure exerted by Jason's cruel and cynical
abandonmentand committed an act she did not will and struggled hard
not to perform. Aristotelian "fear"is largely absent here, however, since
4 An excellent insight into Medea'smood and characteris given by D. J. Cona-
cher, EuripideanDrama: Myth, Theme and Structure (Toronto, 1967), p. 196.
.52

8. ARISTOTLE AND FRYE
very few of us can imagine making the same decision as Medea under
any sort of external duress. Thus the second pattern of tragic action
shows some palpable differences from the pattern identified as ideal by
Aristotle. The spoudaios quality of the hero is greatly diminished, he
commits a serious moral error rather than simply an intellectual one,
and he falls from happiness to misery in such a way as to elicit only pity,
not fear, in the technical Aristotelian senses of those terms.
The third pattern of tragic action involves the complete obliteration
of pity and fear. In it a depraved rather than spoudaios hero commits
the gravest moral errors and moves, because or in spite of them, not
from happiness to misery but from misery to happiness. In this type of
tragedy a profound flaw is usually uncovered in the order and govern-
ance of the universe.
Euripides' Orestes offers an excellent example of this type of
tragedy.5Although the entire play is permeatedwith absurdist elements,
a discussion of the ending will be sufficient for our present purposes.
Orestes and Electra, having been betrayed by Menelaus, find themselves
facing a death sentence in Argos. With their friend Pylades they plot to
take appropriate vengeance on Menelaus by killing Menelaus' wife,
Helen, before their own death sentence can be carried out. In addition,
Electra urges that they seize Helen's daughter, Hermione, as a hostage.
She notes that if Menelaus wants to take vengeance for Helen's death,
they need only to threaten to cut Hermione's throat and Menelaus, who
is a coward, will think better of it and allow them to escape. The plan is
enthusiastically agreed upon, and Pylades and Orestes enter the palace
to take their joyous revenge on Helen who is murderously attacked
while Electra shouts encouragement from in front of the palace.
The grim absurdity of human existence pictured in this play is under-
scored when Hermione appears and, taken in by Electra's cunning,
agrees with kindly human decency to intercede for Orestes and Electra
with Helen. When Hermione has been seized, Electra is proud of this
"heroic" action which will teach Menelaus to respect his formidable
adversaries. In place of the awesome confrontations found in Homer,
Aeschylus, and Sophocles we have here a competition in cunning, deceit,
and cowardice which emphasizes the absurdity of the human condition.
Before, however, the murder of Helen can be consummated, we are told
by a servant that she has mysteriously disappearedinto the sky.
The climax of the play brings Menelaus onto the.scene to discover the
fate of Helen and take vengeance on those who may have harmed her.
5 Significant assistance in understanding this unusual play is given by Kurt von
Fritz, op cit., pp. 312-16 and by William Arrowsmith in the introduction to his
translation of this play in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. D. Grene and R.
Lattimore, Vol. IV (Chicago, 1958), 186-91.
53

9. COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
In a sardonic debate Orestes regrets that Helen disappeared before he
could kill her, and Menelaus, who believes that Orestes actually has
murdered his wife, threatens vengeance if he attempts to enhance his
reputation as a matricide by the additional slaughter of Hermione.
Orestes trades insults with Menelaus as he holds his sword to Her-
mione's throat and orders Pylades and Electra to set the palace afire. At
this moment the greatest absurdity of all takes place as Apollo appears
in the role of deus ex machina and suddenly reverses the action of the
play. He announces that he has transported Helen to live in the heavens
for ever, that Menelaus is to remarry, that Orestes is to take his sword
away from Hermione's throat and marry her instead, and that Pylades
and Electra are also to be married. Orestes welcomes and obeys the
injunctions of Apollo but notes a threatening and fearful quality in the
god's voice. So this "tragedy" comes to an end.
In this pattern of tragic action pity and fear are destroyed since the
necessary conditions for them are not present. In order to have pity and
fear we need a spoudaios hero who makes an intellectual (not moral)
error which triggers but does not fully cause his fall from happiness to
misery. In the Orestes instead of a spoudaios hero we have a morally
depraved one who moves from misery to happiness under divine sanc-
tion in a way that defies both reason and justice. We respond to this
revelation of profound irrationality in the universe not with pity and
fear but rather with emotional shock, mirthless laughter, and a sense
of spiritual desolation over the mockery and meaninglessness of human
existence.
The fourth pattern of tragic action stands in polar opposition to the
third. Instead of pity and fear being obliterated by an explosion of
cosmic evil they are transcended by an impressive manifestation of
divine love for man. A clear example of this rather unusual dimension
of tragedy is found in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus.6
The Oedipus of the Oedipus at Colonus has undergone the purifying
fire of suffering and, though not purged of his human passions, has
attained a deeper understanding of the human condition. He clearly
perceives that he has been punished far too severely for any crime he has
committed, that he has been betrayed and manipulated by his sons and
Creon, and that he has benefitedfrom the love and kindness of Antigone,
Ismene, and Theseus. As in the Oedipus Tyrannus, divine purpose is
an ever-present controlling factor, but in this play it changes from a
painfully mysterious force to a benign and affirmativeone.
The action of the Oedipus at Colonus provides several dramatic
6 A good discussionof the characterof Oedipusas it is developedin this play is
found in CedricWhitman,Sophocles: A Study of Heroic Humanism (Cambridge,
Mass., 1951), p. 214.
54

10. ARISTOTLE AND FRYE
occasions for revealing the aspects of Oedipus' character and destiny
which determine the play's specific tragic form. Oedipus' essential inno-
cence is expressed in his argument with Creon when the latter cruelly
attempts to take him back to Thebes against his will. Oedipus declares
that no evil or sin within himself drove him to commit the terrible deeds
whose source lay in a fearful ignorance over which he had no control. He
would not willingly or knowingly have married Jocasta, nor would he
willingly and knowingly have slain his father, but when attacked by
apparent strangers, in a desolate area, he defended his own life and he
poignantly calls upon his dead father's spirit to bear witness for him.
Most important, however, is the manifestation of the benign interest
which the gods now take in Oedipus. In the climactic scene of the play
the blind Oedipus is suddenly given mysterious powers and guides his
sighted companions to a sacred place where a divine voice summons him
to his ultimate destiny and reward. Mystically, the heavens open and
receive Oedipus who at the end of a troubled life is the recipient of infi-
nite divine grace.
Divine intervention has raised Oedipus above the human condition.
As a result of that intervention he makes no mistake that leads him from
happiness to misery but is instead led by divine grace from suffering to
supreme happiness. His stature is now far above our own and since we
cannot view him as someone like ourselves who has incurred undeserved
misfortune because of an intellectual error, we do not respond with the
emotions of pity and fear, but must rather view his final triumph with
awe. Thus the Oedipus at Colonus as a tragedy directly contradicts the
experience we have of the Oedipus Tyrannus as a tragedy. In place of a
spoudaios hero who makes an intellectual mistake, it offers us a divinely
protected hero who makes no essential error; in place of a fall from hap-
piness to misery, it describes the reverse movement from misery to
happiness; in place of pity and fear, it evokes awe and wonder.
We have now identified four patterns of tragic action and provided
an example from Greek tragedy to illustrate each of them. Similar
examples can be found in Shakespearean and modern tragedy.7 The
7 An analogous descending movement from high tragedy to pathetic tragedy to
absurd tragedy can be traced in Othello, Macbeth, and Richard III. In these plays
we move from a spoudaios hero such as Othello (Iago himself refers to the Moor's
"noble nature"), to one like Macbeth who is pressed by an external force to commit
a crime he would not undertake by himself, to one, finally, like Richard III who is
utterly depraved and rejoices in the evil he accomplishes. For a discussion of
Othello's character see A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1929),
pp. 189-91. Bradley also provides us with a perceptive analysis of the characters
of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, op. cit., pp. 351 ff. A good discussion of the impact
of Richard III is provided by H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Tragedy (Cambridge,
1952), p. 39. It should be noted that because of the death of Richard this play does
not attain to the consummate absurdity of the Orestes. I know of no Shakespearean
55

11. COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
first form of tragedy we shall call high tragedy: it is the form specifically
defined by Aristotle in the Poetics and involves a spoudaios hero who
makes an intellectual mistake and whose fall from happiness to misery
evokes from the audience the emotions of pity and fear (in the technical
Aristotelian senses of those terms). The second form we shall call
pathetic tragedy: it portrays a hero who is not fully spoudaios but who
manifests at least a trace or hint of nobility and who, under the pressure
of some external force, makes both moral and intellectual errors that
lead to his downfall from happiness to misery. The fate of the hero of
pathetic tragedy evokes only pity, not fear, from the audience. The third
form we shall call absurd tragedy: it depicts a depraved or ignoble hero
who commits a combination of moral and intelectual errors that are
terrifyingly complemented by grim flaws in the universe itself. In its
extreme form, this type of tragedy presents its depraved or ignoble hero
as moving triumphantly from misery to happiness although a number
of works stop just short of this radicalmanifestation of cosmic absurdity.
Instead of evoking pity and fear, absurd tragedy obliterates those emo-
tions by creating a mood of spiritual desolation and a sense of the mean-
inglessness and mockery of human existence. The fourth form of trag-
edy we shall call heroic tragedy: it presents a hero who is superior to
ordinary standards of human nobility because he has been granted
divine interest and protection. The hero commits no essential error,
moves from misery or relative misery to supreme happiness, and evokes
awe from the audience. Absurd tragedy destroys pity and fear; heroic
tragedy completely transcends them.
The analysis of tragedy given above is based on an extrapolation from
the criteria set down by Aristotle in the Poetics. We have noted that
Aristotle's specific and literal discussion of tragedy centers on the ideal
conditions for the evocation of pity and fear which are seen to be the
truly tragic emotions. Aristotle's concern with these ideal conditions
is reflected in his famous definition of tragedy which applies fully to only
a small number of works. The history of tragedy provides us with many
more examples of pathetic tragedy than of Aristotelian high tragedy.
The attempt to make a literal application of Aristotle's definition to
tragedy, in general, results in a distortion either of the definition or of
empirical reality. The expansion of the Aristotelian system provided in
our analysis overcomes the narrowness inherent in the original defini-
drama that fits easily within the boundaries of what we have called heroic tragedy
but this concept precisely fits works which we today designate as "Christian trag-
edy." For discussions of Christian tragedy which will illuminate its articulation
with the pattern of tragic action we have called heroic see Karl Jaspers, Tragedy
Is Not Enough, trans. H. A. T. Reiche, H. T. Moore, and K. W. Deutsch (Boston,
1952), pp. 28-87, and Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian
Interpretation of History (New York, 1965), pp. 155-69.
56

12. ARISTOTLE AND FRYE
tion and makes the Aristotelian approach truly viable in terms of the
history of tragedy.
Frye does attempt to deal with the greatly varied forms which tragedy
has manifested throughout its historical development, but he does not
provide firm and specific criteria by which the related forms of tragedy
can be compared and analyzed. Thus in his discussion of the five modes
of tragedy we learn that there is a Dionysiac mode that deals with
"stories of dying gods"; an elegiac mode that "presents a heroism un-
spoiled by irony"; a high mimetic mode which "mingles the heroic with
the ironic" and in which "pity and fear become, respectively, favorable
and adverse moral judgment, which are relevant to tragedy but not
central to it"; a low mimetic mode in which "pity and fear are neither
purged nor absorbed into pleasures, but are communicated externally,
as sensation" and whose root idea "is the exclusion of an individual on
our own level from a social group to which he is trying to belong": and
an ironic mode in which pity and fear are not "raised" but rather "re-
flected" to the reader and which represents "simply the study of tragic
isolation as such" inasmuch as its tragic hero "does not necessarily have
any tragic hamartiaor pathetic obsession: he is only somebody who gets
isolated from his society."8
I find a similar problem in Frye's subsequent discussion of six phases
of tragedy. His first phase is one "in which the central character is
given the greatest possible dignity in contrast to the other characters,
so that we get the perspective of a stag pulled down by wolves"; his
second phase "is in one way or another the tragedy of innocence in the
sense of inexperience, usually involving young people"; his third phase
is one "in which a strong emphasis is thrown on the success or com-
pleteness of the hero's achievement"; his fourth phase involves "the
typical fall of the hero through hybris and hamartia"; his fifth phase is
an ironic perspective of tragedy which "presents for the most part the
tragedy of lost direction and lack of knowledge, not unlike the second
phase except that the context is the world of adult experience";
his sixth plhaserepresents "a world of shock and horror in which the
central images are images of sparagmos, that is, cannibalism, mutilation,
and torture."9
Frye's discussion of tragedy thus provides some perceptive descrip-
tive statements about possible kinds of tragic experience but it does not
provide us with firm and objective criteria by which the various modes
and phases of tragedy can be compared and understood.
In place of Aristotle's rigorous but very narrow prescription for the
8 Frye, pp. 35-43.
9 Frye, pp.219-23.
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13. COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
attainment of the ideal form of tragedy and Frye's comprehensive but
too subjective description of the varieties of tragic experience, we have
presented a system of analysis rooted in an expansion of, and extrapola-
tion from, the objective criteria utilized by Aristotle in the Poetics. This
system provides a means of making an objective analysis and compari-
son of all the various patterns of tragedy and of observing the unity that
underlies their diversity.
Florida State University
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