Post-Tragic Visions

Forest fires are still raging in the West. Covid is still gaining ground all over the world. And chaos at the top is still pushing the United States into disarray. Lots of us are casting anxious, hopeful glances toward the future, crossing our fingers for a recovery.

Recent advances in medicine and the social sciences have taught us about how we recover–from surgeries, from addictions and traumas, and even from the ordinary losses and disappointments of life. Some forms of literature do, too.

My senior year in college first gave me an inkling of this. I was writing about Dante’s Comedy, tracing the imagery of “middles” through the poem, from the opening line (“In the middle of the journey of our lives”) to the final, dazzling metaphors for the sight of God. My friend Richard was writing about Mozart’s Magic Flute. By a wonderful chance, we were also rehearsing The Tempest, with him playing Prospero and me playing Ariel. During that winter and spring, these three rich, peculiar works of art collided with a big life-transition (finishing college, off to whatever followed). The reverberations of that collision have echoed down my life to the present day.

All three works were composed by men near the ends of their lives and careers. When Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, he was a rich and successful man, but he was preparing to retire to Stratford and leave behind his immersion in the lively world of London theater. Shortly after Dante finished the final cantos of The Comedy, he died in Ravenna, having spent his entire adult life in exile from beloved Florence. And although Mozart was only thirty-five when he conducted the premiere of The Magic Flute, he told his wife he was dying. Two months later, after completing his Requiem, he did die.

Yet the works these men wrote so near the end are not bitter, cynical, or despairing. They’re oddly hopeful. Each begins in tragedy and moves towards a new kind of comedy—delicate, individual, and complex, with elegiac threads woven into the happy endings.

They’re also oddly hopeful. They are definitely not realistic fictions. Improbable coincidences abound. The plots are simple. The characters feel archetypal rather than rounded. Yet magic, music, and allegory cast a golden glow over them.

They are not to everyone’s taste.

But for me, during my senior year of college, they seemed to insist that tragedy is not the final word about the human condition. They told stories about recovery from grief and trauma—how ordinary it is, and also how miraculous. After winter comes spring. After a forest fire, tiny pines and shrubs poke up out of the blackened landscape. After economic or political disaster, a new generation grows up that wants to embrace life, however imperfect it is. I have come to call this the “post-tragic vision.”  

Here are a few of the lessons that post-tragic works suggest:

Recovery is slow. In Shakespeare’s late plays, there’s usually a ten- or fifteen-year gap between the tragedies that set the plot in motion and the flowering of something lovely at the end. Likewise with us. Even if we wake up on November 4^th to a new administration, it’s going to take a long time to undo the damage that’s been done in the past four years. Even if a vaccine for Covid passes its early trials soon, it won’t make its way to us ordinary folks for quite a long time. We’re exhausted. We want our lives to return to normal now. But it won’t happen like that. Patience may be too much to ask for, but we will definitely have to wait.

Recovery is chancy. In The Tempest, Prospero’s regaining of his dukedom takes work: it requires him to use his intelligence, his skill in magic, and his long relationship with Ariel. But it also relies on luck: Fortune, so cruel to him twelve years ago, has sent him “a most auspicious star, whose influence / If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes / Will ever after drop” (.1.2.182-184). His success is not guaranteed, but now he has a chance. For us, too, recovery is chancy. Many things can—and some things will—go awry. It will take a lot of work to help the economy recover, restore the promise of justice and democracy, and slow the accelerating effects of climate change.

Recovery is unfair. Prospero’s brother and the King of Naples, who conspired to unseat Prospero from the dukedom of Milan, are not punished at the end of The Tempest. Prospero “forgives” (i.e., doesn’t punish) his brother, even though Antonio doesn’t display a single sign of repentance. In 2020, big companies have been bailed out while little ones have sunk under the waves. Many of the policemen who’ve killed black people seem likely to evade prosecution. Not all the senators who have tried to halt social progress in its tracks will get voted out. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  

Recovery is uneven. Not everyone and everything recovers. At the end of The Tempest, Propero has regained his dukedom and married his daughter to the heir to the throne of Naples, but he’s far from ebullient. In Act V, he gives up his magic, he says goodbye to Ariel, and he forecasts that, when he returns to Milan, “Every third thought shall be my grave” (5.1.313). We have losses to be grieved, too. Over 200,000 Americans have died of Covid—and many more around the world. Many people’s dreams, businesses, and lifesavings have been destroyed in the financial stresses of the pandemic. The Arctic ice that’s melted will probably never come back. We have to grieve the losses and incorporate them into our futures.

Despite all these problems, recovery happens.

We have a tough fall and winter ahead of us. It’ll take work to keep our eyes and hearts fixed on spring—or, as one of my husband’s colleagues puts it, to “stay positive and test negative.” If I show signs of sinking, please buoy me up. And I’ll try to do the same for you.