We live in the era of melodrama.
It is the era of good and bad, there are no longer any shades of grey.
Recently, I read Streetcar Named Desire with my students and asked them if Stanley was a bad man. ‘Why yes of course —yes — he raped Blanche.’ I asked them to tell me, then, if Blanche was a good woman. They were confused —their faces contorted with discomfort. ‘But….you are asking us a question that can’t be answered,’ they said.
Ahh.
Well gee, I thought that was the whole point. Now the same students who are upset by Blanche’s dual nature — a mixture of good and evil — are obsessed with comic book heroes. I told my students I didn’t want any more talk of comic book heroes in their papers. One of them complained ‘But with comic book heroes, there is hope that good will triumph over evil.’
Okay, I get it. This is the world we live in now. Us and them. The world is divided into good and evil, period. How did we get here?
Adorno once stated (and I am paraphrasing) ‘there can be no art after The Holocaust.’ I fear he may have been right. What Adorno meant to say was that it was impossible to write about The Holocaust without trivializing human suffering. But what I think happened is this: when we saw naked human evil up close, we lost all sympathy for the tragic hero. (The only author who has dared to see Hitler somewhat as a tragic figure is Karl One Knausgaard in his novel The End.) That is why, these days, if you dislike your opponent enough, you call them ‘Nazi!’
What is lost in all this? Of course we have abandoned political civility — the ability to have rational debates in the public square. But we have lost much more than that. Tragedy is about looking inward, about seeing the flaws in ourselves. When Greek audiences wept, wailed and screamed — bewitched by the masks, the music, dancing, and the shocking portrayal of mothers killing their children (Medea), women falling in love with their stepsons (Phaedre) and bloodied heads nailed to the door (The Bacchae) it was not just because Euripides was a ‘shocking’ playwright (something we rarely see today!), but because he was forcing them to look inward, and examine themselves.
When Prospero says of Caliban “this thing of darkness I / acknowledge mine’ he is doing something we are incapable of doing anymore.
He is recognising the evil inside.
