‘For that – for that – I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!’
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
‘He felt that all his powers, hitherto dissipated and scattered, were now concentrated and directed with terrible energy towards one blissful aim.’
Vronsky in Anna Karenina
‘From that moment her whole existence was nothing but a maze of lies.’
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
‘Have mercy, Jesu! Soft! I did but dream.
O coward conscience, how thou dost afflict me!
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight.
Cold tearful drops do stand upon my trembling flesh...
All several sins, all us’d in each degree
Throng to the bar, crying all “Guilty! Guilty!”
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me.’
Richard III (on the eve of his death)
‘So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts;
Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause;
And in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall’n on the inventors’ heads.’
Hamlet, Act v. Sc.ii
Sooner or later, in any attempt to explore the deeper patterns which shape storytelling, we are brought up against one central, overwhelming fact. This is the way in which, through all the millions of stories thrown up by the human imagination, just two endings have far outweighed all others. In fact we might almost say that, for a story to resolve in a way which really seems final and complete, it can only do so in one of two ways. Either it ends with a man and a woman united in love. Or it ends in a death.
On the face of it, this might not seem particularly odd. Nothing in human life, after all, might be considered more final than death, What could be more natural than that our imaginations should conjure up stories which conclude with their hero or heroine reaching old age and death?
But the point is that the number of stories which end like this, with their hero or heroine passing peacefully away in the fullness of years, is not very great. When we talk of a story ending in a death we do not usually mean that kind of death at all. We mean a death that is violent, premature, a death that is ‘unnatural’. In other words, we mean a death which shows that something has gone hideously or, as we say, tragically wrong.
Of course the huge mass of stories which end in violent death do not by any means all have the same underlying shape. It is possible to arrive at such an ending by any of a number of routes. For a start, as we have seen from our glimpses of the ‘dark’ versions of other plots – the dark Rags to Riches story, the dark Quest and so on – it is possible for other basic types of story to lead up to such a conclusion, when we might talk of them having a ‘tragic ending’. And even when we turn to that great family of stories which have for thousands of years been more specifically described as ‘tragedies’, we find considerable variety in their underlying shape and moral emphasis. Even more than with Comedy, we are venturing here into an area of storytelling which cannot be delineated in just one simple formula.
Nevertheless, all through the history of storytelling, we find one particular type of story which is shaped by a pattern so persistent and so distinctive as to make it unmistakable. This can be illustrated by five well-known examples, composed in a wide variety of cultural circumstances and for greatly differing purposes: the Greek myth of Icarus; the German legend of Faust; Shakespeare’s Macbeth; Stevenson’s nineteenth-century horror story, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; and a modern novel, Nabokov’s Lolita.
The story of Icarus tells of how he and his father, the inventor Daedalus, are enabled to escape from the island of Crete by means of feathered wings. Before they set out his father gives him an impassioned warning to fly neither too high, lest the heat of the sun melt the wax holding the wings together, nor too low, lest they fall into in the sea. They set off, and for a while all goes well – until eventually the temptation to ignore his father’s advice to keep between the opposites proves too much for Icarus. He wishes to soar up higher and higher, towards the sun. His initial exhilaration turns first to anxiety, as the wax begins to melt, then to panic. The wings are giving way, Icarus can no longer keep up, and he plunges headlong to his death in the sea below.
The learned scholar Faust, eager for ‘forbidden knowledge’ and the mastery of occult powers, sells his soul to the devil. At first he is given glimpses of all sorts of marvels and wonders, and wins a great reputation. But gradually the insubstantiality of the visions he can conjure up begins to pall. Worse, Faust (in Marlowe’s dramatisation Dr Faustus) senses that the time is drawing near when he must pay the price – until, amid mounting horror, he sees the moment arrive when he is carried down to hell by demons, to face everlasting punishment.
Macbeth, the victorious and ambitious general, is told by the witches of all sorts of honours which will come to him, including the improbable promise that he will one day be king of Scotland. When their lesser prophecies begin to come true, Macbeth is drawn by the temptation to make them complete, by murdering the reigning king Duncan and so succeeding him. At first all seems to go well, and Macbeth becomes king; but he is not secure in his new state. First suspicion mounts around him, leading him to commit further crimes in a desperate effort to make his position safe. Then outright opposition gathers; until Macbeth is surrounded by his advancing enemies and killed.
Dr Jekyll, the outwardly respectable medical man with a dubious secret life, discovers a potion which will enable him to split into two personalities, one his normal ‘light’ self, the other the dark and deformed Mr Hyde. At first it is exhilarating to be able to escape at night into his Hyde-self, indulging in all sorts of nameless wickedness, then to return safely to his Jekyll-self by day. But gradually the Hyde-personality begins to take over, committing a succession of crimes, culminating in a particularly horrible murder. Jekyll has already found he is increasingly unable to control the switches between his light and dark personalities. Now he finds himself trapped forever in his alter-ego state, and on the run from the police, his friends, everyone. In a state of total despair he kills himself.
Humbert Humbert, the outwardly respectable scholar, has long nurtured a secret passion for very young girls. One day, when he is looking for lodgings, his obsession finds its ultimate focus when he sees sprawled on a suburban lawn the ‘nymphet’ of his dreams, Lolita. He takes a room in the house and marries Lolita’s widowed mother, in order to be near the object of his ‘dark’ desires. The mother then discovers the secret diaries to which he has confided his obsession: she runs out of the house, distracted with horror, and is killed by a passing car. Humbert thus becomes Lolita’s guardian, and he and his compliant ward then embark on a wild, dreamlike journey around America, enjoying forbidden sexual pleasure in a succession of motel rooms. But gradually the two fall to quarrelling and, as they settle in a little town where Lolita returns to her schooling, a mood of terrible frustration sets in. Humbert becomes dimly aware of another man hovering around, a playwright called Quilty, who seems to threaten his possession of Lolita like a kind of shadowy alter-ego. To get away, Humbert takes Lolita off on a second journey across America, this time more like a nightmare than a dream, as it seems increasingly obvious that the mysterious Quilty is following them; until one day Lolita disappears, kidnapped by Quilty. After some years of lonely misery Humbert eventually discovers what happened to them both. Lolita, grown up and married to someone else, no longer bears any relation to the little girl of his illicit fantasies. In a state of horror and distraction, Humbert vengefully tracks down Quilty, the alter-ego who had robbed him of his dream, and murders him in cold-blood. He is arrested and, after learning that Lolita has died in childbirth, himself dies in prison on the verge of his execution.
Each of these stories shows a hero being tempted or impelled into a course of action which is in some way dark or forbidden. For a time, as the hero embarks on a course, he enjoys almost unbelievable, dreamlike success. But somehow it is in the nature of the course he is pursuing that he cannot achieve satisfaction. His mood is increasingly chequered by a sense of frustration. As he still pursues the dream, vainly trying to make his position secure, he begins to feel more and more threatened – things have got out of control. The original dream has soured into a nightmare where everything is going more and more wrong. This eventually culminates in the hero’s violent destruction.
In fact we can set out the general stages through which the pattern unfolds like this:
1. Anticipation Stage: the hero is in some way incomplete or unfulfilled and his thoughts are turned towards the future in hope of some unusual gratification. Some object of desire or course of action presents itself, and his energies have found a focus.
2. Dream Stage: he becomes in some way committed to his course of action (e.g., Faust signing his pact with the devil, Humbert causing the death of Lolita’s mother which enables him to enter on his affair) and for a while things go almost improbably well for the hero. He is winning the gratification he had dreamed of, and seems to be ‘getting away with it’.
3. Frustration Stage: almost imperceptibly things begin to go wrong. The hero cannot find a point of rest. He begins to experience a sense of frustration, and in order to secure his position may feel compelled to further ‘dark acts’ which lock him into his course of action even more irrevocably. A ‘shadow figure’ may appear at this point, seeming in some obscure way to threaten him.
4. Nightmare Stage: things are now slipping seriously out of the hero’s control. He has a mounting sense of threat and despair. Forces of opposition and fate are closing in on him.
5. Destruction or death wish Stage: either by the forces he has aroused against him, or by some final act of violence which precipitates his own death (e.g., murder or suicide), the hero is destroyed.
If we look again at the familiar example of Macbeth, we can see how these five stages correspond exactly to the five acts into which Shakespeare divides the drama:
1. Act One (Anticipation Stage) shows the triumphant generals Macbeth and Banquo returning from winning a great victory. They meet the three ‘dark sisters’, who prophesy to Macbeth that he will hold three great titles, Glamis, Cawdor and King. This fires his ambition and when he hears that a grateful King Duncan has already rewarded him with the first two titles, he writes to his wife to tell her about the witches’ prediction that he would one day hold the third as well. She eggs him on to make the prediction complete, and they find their ‘focus’ in the conspiracy to murder Duncan.
2. Act Two (Dream Stage) shows Macbeth comitting the ‘dark deed’ and subsequently killing the two grooms to cover up his crime. Initially things could not go better for the hero. Duncan’s two sons flee to England, arousing suspicion that they had somehow been implicated in the crime, and Macbeth is chosen to be king.
3. Act Three (Frustration Stage) opens with Banquo soliloquising ‘Thou hast it all now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all, as the weird women promis’d; and, I fear, thou play’dst most foully for it’. The first inklings of suspicion are arising. Macbeth in turn is distrustful of Banquo because of the witches’ prediction that it would be his descendants, not Macbeth’s, who would sit on the throne of Scotland. He arranges for Banquo’s murder. Macbeth expresses his growing frustration in such phrases as ‘we have scotch’d the snake, not killed it’, and this is heightened when the murderers report that they have killed Banquo, but that his son Fleance escaped. At dinner that night Macbeth is confronted with Banquo’s accusing ghost, and the act ends with the news that Macbeth’s last supporter among the great Scottish lords, Macduff, has fled to England to join Duncan’s sons.
4. Act Four (Nightmare Stage) opens with Macbeth’s second, much more fearful visit to the witches, who give him three increasingly enigmatic warnings: that he should ‘beware Macduff’; that he will only be overthrown by ‘man not of woman born’; and that this can only happen when ‘Birnam wood has come to Dunsinane’. Now in a state of mounting terror, Macbeth lashes out at the man who seems most to threaten him, the fled Macduff, by arranging for his wife and children to be brutally murdered. The second part of the act shows the horror with which this news is greeted by the exiles in England, and the coming together of an army to invade Scotland and overthrow the tyrant whose villainy is now clear for all to see.
5. Act Five (Destruction Stage) shows the nightmare closing in around Macbeth and deepening to its climax: with Lady Macbeth’s guilty sleepwalking scene (‘unnatural deeds do bring unnatural troubles’); the approach of the avenging army to Macbeth’s lair at Dunsinane; Lady Macbeth’s death; and finally the battle, when Macbeth learns that Macduff was ‘not of woman born’ just before Macduff slays him. The pattern is complete.
The pattern we have been looking at here is in fact so fundamental to the understanding of stories that its implications will be with us for the rest of this book. It is not just the starting point for exploring all that complex family of stories which we think of under the general heading of Tragedy, because it presents the tragic theme in its blackest and most basic form. It also, as we shall eventually see, provides one of the best starting points for exploring the profound link between the patterns which shape stories and those which shape events in what we call ‘real life’.
Indeed, so important is it that we should become completely familiar with the workings of this tragic cycle that we shall shortly look in rather more detail at a further half-dozen examples; and these have been chosen, in addition to those already touched on, to build up a fuller picture of the range of basic situations from which a Tragedy can unfold.
We shall then, at the end of this chapter, take a look at the most obvious way in which storytellers may sometimes vary the emphasis of their presentation of the basic tragic theme: by concentrating only on the closing stages and beginning at the point, halfway through the complete cycle, where the mood of frustration is coming to be uppermost.
Finally we shall be in a position, in the two chapters that follow, to draw on all these and other examples to look at the essence of Tragedy in a deeper and more general way. What is really happening to the hero or heroine of a tragedy as they get drawn into their fatal course of action? Why does it seem to lead so inexorably to disaster? And what is it which distinguishes this type of story from all the others we have looked at, where the fundamental impulse is to lead the hero or heroine to a happy ending?
A story which expresses the basic plot of Tragedy with almost allegorical simplicity, like a kind of ‘black fairy tale’, is Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture Of Dorian Gray (1890). We meet the hero, a languid and exceptionally beautiful young man, at just the moment when his artist friend Basil Hallward is completing a portrait of him. At this point the ‘dark’ figure of Lord Henry Wootton enters, and tempts the hero with two thoughts. The first is how wonderful it would be if Dorian Gray could always remain looking as young and beautiful as he does in the picture, while his portrait took on the ravages of the years instead. The second is how wonderful it would be to live a life of total physical self-indulgence, recognising that the most intense spiritual experiences in life come through the senses.
This is the moment of Temptation, or Focus. The young hero becomes possessed by these two related thoughts, and by the excitement of his ‘dangerous’ new friendship with Lord Henry. He takes his portrait home, and immediately plunges into the Dream Stage of his adventure by falling rapturously in love with a beautiful young actress, Sibyl Vane, whom he goes to see playing Shakespeare every night. He proposes to Sibyl; she accepts; and the following night she gives a thoroughly flat and wooden performance. She explains to Dorian that she had only been able to put her heart into acting because it was a substitute for real life, but now he has come into her life, her motivation as an actress has gone. Dorian is horrified and angrily tells her that he had only loved her for her brilliant persona on stage. He walks out on her, and she commits suicide. For the first time he notices a slight change in the portrait which he keeps at home: a new, cruel twist to the mouth. He hides the portrait away, but otherwise experiences no remorse for what has happened.
In a sense the Dream Stage of the story continues for a long time. Dorian throws himself into a relentless round of sensual gratification, sometimes aided and abetted by his friend Lord Henry, and seems able to indulge himself wherever his fancy leads him. But gradually we are made aware that a dark aura of scandal is surrounding his name. A growing succession of young men and women are being destroyed, even committing suicide, because of their association with him. We learn of his increasingly morbid fascination with historical tales about sexual excess, murder and insanity (‘there were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realise his conception of the beautiful’); and although after many years he still looks outwardly as young and beautiful as on the day he was painted by Hallward, the portrait locked away in his house shows more and more signs of a terrible corruption.
The Frustration Stage is setting in, and eventually someone – Hallward himself – has the courage to confront Dorian with the shocking stories which are circulating about him. Gray reacts with cold rage and cold-bloodedly murders Hallward (like Macbeth’s murder of Banquo, a new ‘dark act’ committed in an attempt to secure his position). An increasingly nightmarish atmosphere now shrouds the tale, as Gray blackmails a friend into dissolving Hallward’s body in acid, fills the house with orchids to disguise the stench and heads off to the opium dens of east London (‘dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new’). Here, in the fume-filled shadows, he is threatened with a revolver by Sibyl Vane’s sailor brother, who has returned from years in Australia, bent on revenge.
Gray manages to extricate himself from this nightmare scene but is haunted by the mysterious figure of Jim Vane. Staying at a country house, he glimpses Vane peering through the conservatory windows and faints, and although Vane is accidentally killed the next day by a shooting party, Gray’s thoughts are now in a ceaseless turmoil of horror and ‘wild longing for the unstained purity of his boyhood’ before he had embarked on corrupting and destroying so many people’s lives. ‘A new life! That was what he wanted ... he would never again tempt innocence. He would be good.’
So he muses, alone one night in his house, and decides to take another look at his portrait, which he finds not only looking ‘more loathsome, if possible, than before’ but shining with newly-spilt blood. If only he could ‘kill this monstrous life-soul’ he thinks, ‘he could be at peace’. He takes up the knife with which he stabbed Hallward, to slash the picture. There is a tremendous crash and a cry, and his servants rush upstairs to find
‘hanging on the wall, a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man ... with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage. It was not until they had examined the rings that they recognised who it was.’
Our next example is the story of Bizet’s opera Carmen (1875), based on a novel by Prosper Merimée. When we meet the hero Don José, a corporal in the army, he is in love with a shy young girl, Micaela, and she with him. All might seem well, but our sense that something is about to disturb their happiness is aroused by the entry of the beautiful and imposing Carmen, a classic Temptress. She tries to flirt with Jose, at first in vain. She stalks off, but not before she has thrown down a blood-red flower at his feet. Wavering for a moment, he picks it up and places it next to his heart. Micaela returns, and José seems freed from Carmen’s spell. A short time later, however, he is sent to restore order after a fight. Carmen has been involved and he has to arrest her. Once again she directs all her seductive charm at him, and this time he falls completely (‘Carmen you have bewitched me’). Temptation has won. The Focus has been found.
Plunging recklessly into the Dream Stage, José allows Carmen to escape and tollows her to a tavern, where they ecstatically declare their love for one another. José gets involved in a fight over Carmen with one of his officers, and to avoid punishment for insubordination he deserts the army and flees to join Carmen and a gang of bandits in the mountains. No sooner has this dark act committed José irrevocably to his course than frustration sets in. The fickle Carmen begins to lose interest in José and transfers her admiration to the handsome bullfighter Escamillo. The unhappy José feels increasingly trapped. He cannot now return to his former life, despite a pitiful attempt by young Micaela to win him back. He is still infatuated with Carmen, although it is becoming obvious to everyone except himself that he has lost her.
The nightmarish nature of his plight is now brought home to him when José meets Escamillo coming up the mountainside. Not recognising him, the bull-fighter recounts how Carmen used to love a soldier but that it is all over. José lashes out at his rival and the two have to be pulled apart by the bandits. The triumphant Escamillo invites them all to a bullfight, in which he will be the hero of the hour.
All that is left to unfold is the final stage. The ‘pale and haggard’ José, his eyes ‘hollow’ and ‘glowing with a dangerous light’, arrives at the bullfight to confront Carmen, who scornfully rejects him and tells him she now loves Escamillo. In the last paroxysm of desperation, José stabs her to death – thus ensuring his own immediate arrest and, presumably, execution.
Our third example is the film Bonnie and Clyde (1967), based like many fictional tragedies on an episode from ‘real life’: in this instance the story of two notorious young American ‘gangsters’ of the 1930’s.
1. Anticipation Stage: the young hero Clyde arrives at a house in a little Texan town to make an amateurish attempt to steal a car. Through a window of the house he sees the heroine Bonnie, naked. She sees him, apparently doing something wild and daring, and their curiosity mutually aroused, they get together at a nearby drugstore where Bonnie dares Clyde to commit a real, grown-up robbery. This is the moment of Temptation and Focus.
2. Dream Stage: Clyde successfully holds up a grocery store, Bonnie is impressed and they drive off together. They begin to rob banks with seemingly dreamlike impunity; they recruit a third member to their gang, C. W. Moss, and the exhilarating series of robberies continues. But then they shoot a policeman dead after a bank hold-up, a ‘dark act’ which places them, as murderers, in a new, more serious league.
3. Frustration Stage: a series of incidents creates a mood of deepening frustration. They capture a policeman who has been trailing them, insult him and let him go, in such a way that he is left swearing revenge. It transpires that Clyde is physically unable to make love to Bonnie: he works out his frustration through his obsession with guns. They hi-jack a couple’s car, ask the man casually what he does for a living and he replies that he is an undertaker. Bonnie reacts hysterically, taking this as a terrible omen. The mood is becoming steadily darker and more threatening.
4. Nightmare Stage: there is a brief unreal interlude when the doomed couple fantasise in familiar fashion (cf. Dorian Gray) of escaping back to the days of innocence before all their troubles began. They take Bonnie’s mother for a picnic and Clyde talks about their settling down near her, to live a quiet life. But they remember they are now the most wanted criminals in the state, and have no alternative but to keep running. The nightmare deepens as they are spotted by the police and have to fight two gun battles, in which two members of the gang (now grown to five) are killed or injured.
5. Destruction Stage: as the police close in, the remaining trio, Bonnie, Clyde and C. W. Moss, take refuge with Moss’s father. The atmosphere between them all is now fraught and quarrelsome. Eventually, in return for a promise of leniency to his son, the father betrays Bonnie and Clyde, who are tricked into their third and final confrontation with the police. Helpless and trapped, they are bloodily gunned down.
Our fourth example is another well-known film of the 1960’s, Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962).
1. Anticipation Stage: Jules and Jim, two high-spirited young men in pre-First World War Paris are full of nervous energy but lack direction, until a friend, Albert, shows them some lantern slides, including one of a female statue recently dug up on the Adriatic. A silent film-type caption tells us that they had never seen such ‘a calm, tranquil smile’ as that which appears on the statue, but that if they saw it again ‘they would follow it’. It is the beginning of a Focus for their fantasy state, and when three strange girls shortly afterwards turn up for dinner they see that the third, Catherine, has exactly the smile of the statue. She is a bewitching madcap, given to impulsive pranks, and the two heroes are captivated. The Focus is complete.
2. Dream Stage : Catherine moves in to live with Jules, but the three become otherwise inseparable, enjoying a mad time all over Bohemian Paris. The sense of being drawn into a reckless, exhilarating dream is heightened when the three go off to the South of France together for the summer. ‘After a long search they found the house of their dreams’ says a caption. Here they play childish games together in the sun, Catherine always leading. ‘I think we are lost children’ she says, and a caption tells us ‘she is an apparition’. They return to Paris, where Jules and Catherine decide to get married.
3. Frustration Stage : gradually the mood of the story darkens. The First World War approaches and the three are separated because Jules, as an Austrian, has to return with his wife Catherine to the other side of the great European divide created by the war. When hostilities are over, Jim travels to be reunited with his friends, who are living in a lonely chalet in the mountains with a little daughter, and finds all is not well with the marriage. They are all awkward together, talking in platitudes punctuated by silences; Catherine sleeping alone (‘we lead a monastic life’); and the mood is darkened still further by the surrounding gloomy forests and mist-shrouded lakes and mountains. Their old friend Albert reappears in rather sinister, enigmatic fashion, living nearby (is he having an affair with Catherine?). The sense that they may all be caught in some impending vortex is conveyed by the introduction of the film’s theme song Le Tourbillon, ‘the Whirlpool’. Jim finds he is slipping hopelessly into love with Catherine himself. Jules allows him to move into the chalet, though not without a warning: ‘watch out’.
4. Nightmare Stage : as the three of them return to France the action of the film becomes more and more fragmented, as if they are all sleepwalking through some baffling nightmare, with many premonitory references to death. Catherine, becoming ever more withdrawn and enigmatic, with manic outbursts of fey gaiety, shuttles between the two men (with Albert making a last ominous, mysterious appearance). Jim makes a last desperate bid to escape from the vortex by returning to his old girl friend Gilberte, telling Catherine that he wants to marry and have children.
5. Destruction Stage: Catherine, with a strangely purposeful air, summons both Jules and Jim for a drive in the country in her little car. They stop at an inn for lunch. She calls Jim to her car, and deliberately drives it over a broken bridge into the river. Both are drowned, leaving a sadly uncomprehending Jules to superintend the burning of their coffins to ashes.
For two final examples of Tragedy in its full five-stage form we may consider the stories of two of the most haunting tragic heroines in literature, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
The thousand-odd pages of Anna Karenina really tell two stories, interwoven but completely contrasting: that of Levin and that of Anna herself, each shaped by a quite different plot. We shall concentrate here entirely on the story of Anna.
When we meet Anna she is one of the most beautiful women in St Petersburg, married for some years to a senior and highly-esteemed government official. But living in the shadow of her husband’s dry, intellectual high-mindedness, and preoccupation with his work, the passionate Anna feels a void in her life and heart. On a visit to Moscow, she briefly meets on her arrival at the railway station a handsome young cavalry officer, Count Alexei Vronsky. At a grand ball, they run into each other again, and both begin to be swept off their feet by violent mutual attraction. When they meet a third time, back in St Petersburg, Vronsky feels that ‘all his powers, hitherto dissipated and scattered’ have now become ‘directed with terrible energy towards one blissful aim’. When Anna arrives home from their next encounter
‘her face shone with a vivid glow, but it was not a joyous glow – it resembled the terrible glow of a conflagration on a dark night.’
Their mutual passion and sense of anticipation mount until at last they perform the irrevocable act which binds them together:
‘That which for nearly a year had been Vronsky’s sole, exclusive desire, supplanting all his former desires, but which for Anna had been an impossible, dreadful, but all the more bewitching dream of happiness, had come to pass.’
Firmly into the Dream Stage, they continue to meet more or less secretly, in a series of passionate encounters. But already others, including the increasingly chilly, unhappy Karenin, have some suspicion of what is going on. Tongues begin to wag, ‘waiting for the scandal to break’; and the premonition of some ultimate disaster is heightened by an emotionally fraught incident at the race course when Vronsky, leading in a steeplechase on his beautiful English mare Frou-Frou, makes a stupid error, forcing his horse to stumble so that she has to be destroyed:
‘for the first time in his life he experienced the worst kind of misfortune – one that was irretrievable, and caused by his own fault.’
Both Anna and Vronsky have the same terrible dream, of ‘a peasant with a rough beard, small and dreadful’, fumbling in a sack and muttering to hImself in French about ‘battering’ and ‘iron’: and gradually the story is drawn up to its first great climax. Anna has become pregnant and as she is delivered of a baby girl she falls desperately ill of puerperal fever. Thinking she is about to die, in her delirium she tells her husband how she has felt divided into two people:
‘I am still the same ... but there is another in me as well, and I am afraid of her. It was she who fell in love with that other one, and I wished to hate you, but could not forget her who was before. That other is not I. Now I am the real one, all of me.’
The dying Anna and Karenin appear to be reconciled. Vronsky stumbles off in despair and attempts to shoot himself. It might seem that the story was, however messily, approaching a conclusion. But, at a deeper level, too much is still unresolved. Anna and Vronsky separately recover. Anna’s old fatal yearnings return. She succumbs and leaves her husband forever, to throw in her lot irrevocably with Vronsky.
At this turning point in the story, Tolstoy opens Book Two with the biblical quotation ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay’. Vronsky and the now-totally compromised Anna flee from Russia for Italy:
‘During this, the first period of her freedom and rapid recovery, Anna felt unpardonably happy and full of the joy of life...’
It might all seem like a new Dream Stage, after the nightmare of her illness, But when, at the book’s ending, we look back over the whole story, we can see how this central period of turmoil in fact marks the Frustration Stage of the affair. Anna’s abortive reconciliation with Karenin is her last attempt to erase all that had happened. Her running away with Vronsky is the final ‘dark act’ which commits her to her ultimate fate.
Indeed even when they are newly arrived in Italy, Vronsky, who has now thrown up his career for his passion:
‘soon felt that the realisation of his longing gave him only one grain of the mountain of bliss he had anticipated. That realisation showed him the eternal error men make by imagining that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes.’
Vronsky begins to feel bored and aimless, and after a while they return to Russia. Anna almost imperceptibly begins to feel her lover withdrawing from her and becomes increasingly obsessed with the little son Seryosha she has had to leave behind. She is refused permission to see him, but manages to snatch a brief meeting with him by penetrating Karenin’s house in disguise. As we are told that, upon her son ‘all Anna’s unsatisfied capacity for loving was satisfied’, it is a heartrending glimpse of all she has lost. She then throws all her energies into a protracted battle to get Karenin to grant her a divorce, so that she can marry Vronsky: a last pitiful attempt to make her now rapidly crumbling position secure. All ends in failure. Vronsky is becoming more and more openly cold towards her. She becomes prey to all sorts of jealous imaginings about his relations with other women. They fall to endless quarrelling. Feeling increasingly lost and desperate, Anna for the first time contemplates suicide. She again has her nightmare about the little old peasant, who seems to be doing something terrible to her with iron. After a final trivial misunderstanding with Vronsky, Anna drives across Moscow, her mind whirling with inconsequential thoughts. Almost without being aware of what she is doing, she arrives at the station where she and Vronsky first met, and on a sudden impulse throws herself under the wheels of an oncoming train:
‘a little peasant muttering something was working at the rails. The candle, by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up with a brighter light than before, lit up for her all that had before been dark, flickered, began to grow dim, and went out for ever.’
In terms of the pattern we are looking at, one of the things which may strike us about Madame Bovary is how far we are into the story before the heroine finally becomes committed to the course of infidelity which ultimately destroys her. In Anna Karenina the heroine’s inner restlessness which lays her open to her grand passion is deftly stated and she is already embarked on the heady early stages of the fatal affair with Vronsky within a short while of the story’s opening. In Madame Bovary, however, the long-drawn out Anticipation Stage lasts for nearly half the book. This is not least because so much of Flaubert’s intention is to show how Emma’s fatal craving for excitement and romance builds up over a long period in her head, fuelled by her reading of romantic fiction, before she is finally drawn to act it out in real life.
To set the stage we first have to see the young Emma married to the limited and unambitious country doctor Charles Bovary: as incomplete an answer to her inward craving for passion as Karenin was for Anna. When the first pleasure of finding herself married wears off, the warning signs of distant danger begin to gather, as Flaubert puts it, like tiny rivulets gathering almost imperceptibly to make an eventually irresistible torrent:
‘Emma tried hard to discover what, precisely, it was in life that was denoted by the words joy, passion, intoxication, which had always looked so fine in books.’
There is the excitement of the invitation to the local great house, when Emma is swept off her feet by the brief chance to mingle with such fashionable, titled people: the bright mysterious ‘other world’ which is beckoning her on. As months, even years go by, we are told that ‘the void in her heart remained’, that ‘deep down in her heart she was waiting and waiting for something to happen’. But even when, thanks to her restlessness, Charles and Emma make the quite unnecessary move to Yonville, and she finds herself strangely exhilarated by her conversations with the young law student Leon, nothing is outwardly committed. Her dreams and desires are still only in her head. It is only when Leon leaves for Rouen and Emma meets the attractive, womanising local farmer Rodolphe that the dark anticipatory nervous energy seething within her at last finds its Focus. The two embark on a passionate secret affair. Emma has committed the irrevocable act which is to launch her on her fatal course
The Dream Stage lasts as long as the secret affair with Rodolphe:
‘Never had Madame Bovary looked so beautiful as now. She went clothed in that indefinable loveliness which comes of joy, enthusiasm, success, and is produced by the perfect harmony of temperament and outward circumstances.’
It reaches its height when Emma lays plans to elope with her lover and leave her despised, ‘repulsive’ husband forever. But on the very verge of her leaving home, the Frustration Stage arrives like a thunderbolt. A note comes from Rodolphe:
‘have you carefully weighed the consequences of your intended action? Have you realised the awful abyss to which I was dragging you, poor angel? No, ... you were going on, confident and heedless, imagining that all would be well, trusting in the future.’
Her lover is not going to elope with her. He had never thought of her as anything but a conveniently married mistress. Their ‘grand affair of the heart’ had only been in her head, a figment of her fantasy. Emma is so shocked that for several months she lies seriously ill; at the end of which her husband makes a last pathetic attempt to re-establish their marriage by taking her off on a brief holiday to Rouen. It is as doomed as the fragile reconciliation between Karenin and his wife at a similar stage in their story. For it is here, at the theatre, that Emma once again meets Leon. The concluding part of the story opens, like Book Two of Anna Karenina (‘vengeance is mine’), on a note of dire foreboding.
To begin with, as when Anna and Vronsky flee to Italy, there is a last hectic echo of the Dream Stage, as Emma and Leon embark on their physical affair in the most dramatic and reckless way possible, driving round and round the daylit streets of Rouen in a darkened fiacre. Emma begins to find excuses, such as an imaginary course of piano lessons, to visit Rouen more and more often. She begins to borrow money recklessly from the unscrupulous M. Lheureux. Like Anna, with her recurrent nightmare of the little bearded peasant, Emma becomes haunted on her visits to Rouen by the sight of a hideous beggar (‘in the place where his eyelids should have been, two gaping cavities all filled with blood’) whose wailing cries go ‘sheer down into the depths of her soul like a whirlwind in a chasm’. She is very nearly caught out by Charles in her ‘cover story’ about the piano lessons and adds one deceit to another (‘from that moment her whole existence was a maze of lies’). She becomes more and more enmeshed in her tangle of debt to M. Lheureux. Even her relations with Leon become increasingly fraught and quarrelsome, as ‘every day saw her calling for madder music and stronger wine’. Like so many tragic heroes and heroines, she dreams that she might escape back to happier, more innocent times, before the net began closing in. But the Nightmare Stage is inexorably nearing its climax:
‘She was now always depressed, everywhere and about everything. Everything and everyone, herself included, was intolerable to her.’
Finally M. Lheureux forecloses, getting judgment for a sum of money that will involve selling everything she and Charles possess. Distractedly she runs to anyone she can think of to borrow from, ending up with Rodolphe. When he turns her away, she heads for the cupboard where the pharmacist keeps his poisons and takes a huge dose of arsenic. She has a final nightmare vision of the beggar from Rouen,
‘thinking she saw the hideous features of the wretched being, rising up to strike terror to her soul, on the very threshold of eternal night’
and dies in agony. Sometime later the bankrupt Charles, ruined and turned into a wraith by her death, also dies.
On this sombre note we may conclude this introductory survey of stories which present the five-stage cycle of Tragedy in its entirety and move on to those – including some of the best-known tragic stories in the world – which concentrate only on the concluding phases of the cycle, picking it up, as it were, halfway through. The initial stages are already over before the story, as we see it, opens, and can only be reconstructed by means of flashback and sympathetic imagination.
We can see the difference between these two types of Tragedy clearly illustrated when we compare two of the tragedies of Shakespeare, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. The first of these is of the type with which we are already familiar, portraying the complete five-stage pattern. In this sense Julius Caesar is essentially the tragedy of Brutus. It is he, ‘the noblest Roman of them all’, who has to be persuaded, as the conspirators gather together in the Anticipation Stage, to join the plot to kill Caesar. It is in Brutus’s soul that we see the battle of temptation acted out, in Act II Scene i, when the other conspirators, led by the chief Tempter Cassius, call on him at night. When he finally succumbs, the Focus has been found and the Dream Stage follows, including the ‘dark act’ of the assassination itself, with Brutus as the conspirator who strikes the last fatal blow, and the heady aftermath, when it seems that the people of Rome are prepared to welcome Caesar’s murder as the overthrow of an over-ambitious tyrant. But then the Frustration Stage begins, when the eloquence of Mark Antony presents a very different view of Caesar, as the people’s friend. The crowd begins to turn against the conspirators. They are forced to flee from Rome and we see the triumvirate of Antony, Octavius and Lepidus assuming full authority, gathering their forces to avenge Caesar’s death. The Nightmare Stage shows the conspirators on the run and beginning to fall out among themselves, with Brutus pursued by Caesar’s ghost; and this culminates at Philippi in their total overthrow, first with the death of Cassius and finally Brutus’s suicide.
In Antony and Cleopatra, we see the emphasis of the story falling quite differently. The essence of the situation is that the great soldier Antony has been caught between two poles: on the one hand his duty, his manly responsibilities as one of the triumvirs of Rome; on the other, his pleasure, his all-consuming infatuation with the Queen of Egypt. The basic question of the play, posed from its opening lines (‘Nay, but this dotage of our general’s overflows the measure ... the triple pillar of the world transform’d into a strumpet’s fool’) is: which pole will win?
The point is that we pick up the story of Antony’s fatal love for Cleopatra halfway through. He has already embarked on the cycle of self-destruction which is to bring him down long before our story opens. Indeed we can reconstruct the moment when he was caught, the moment of Focus, when, in one of the play’s most memorable speeches, Enobarbus recalls the occasion when the stern hero first set eyes on the voluptuous Temptress, on his arrival in Egypt:
‘the barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne burned on the water....’
From there the Dream Stage follows, as Antony plunges into his affair with Cleopatra and begins to forget his soldierly responsibilities in endless nights of carousing. But eventually a series of threats to the security of Rome, such as that posed by the rebellious young Pompey, serve to remind Antony of his duty. An element of frustration has appeared, and it is only at this point, when Antony is being called back to his ‘proper Roman self’, that the play begins.
In terms of the complete five-stage cycle of Tragedy, in short, the play picks up the story at the Frustration Stage. The first two acts show the hero – rather like Anna Karenina at a similar stage in her story, when she attempts a last reconciliation with her husband – making a final effort to return to his Roman self, by going back to Rome to join Octavius and Lepidus in dealing with Pompey. To emphasise his determination to break with the past and make a fresh start, Antony even marries Octavius’s sister. But, just as the unresolved lure of Vronsky had proved too much for Anna, the fatal lure of Cleopatra is too strong. Antony returns to Egypt, throwing him into final opposition to Octavius. There follows the battle of Actium, the beginning of the Nightmare Stage, when just as Antony thinks victory is in his grasp, Cleopatra leads her ships into headlong retreat, giving the day to Octavius. Octavius pursues Antony to Egypt and there is a second battle, in which again Antony sees victory torn from his grasp by the flight of Cleopatra’s forces. Thirdly Antony falls out with Cleopatra, berating her for her treachery. She sends him word that she has killed herself, and in despair he commits suicide. Finally, when she sees what she has brought about by her foolish ‘feminine’ wiles, Cleopatra commits suicide herself.
Another familiar tragic story we pick up at the Frustration Stage is that of Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni, derived via the version by Molière from the original ‘Don Juan’ play, the Burlador de Sevilla, by the pseudonymous ‘Tirso de Molina’. Don Giovanni’s reckless career as an insatiable and heartless seducer has obviously begun long before the story opens. Indeed, when Don Giovanni’s servant Leporello recites a catalogue of his master’s conquests (including the ‘1003’ in Spain alone), it is clear just how long the Dream Stage of the adventure, when the hero was ‘getting away with it’, must have lasted. But as the opera begins, Don Giovanni is for the first time beginning to ran into serious trouble. He is embarking on a sequence of events which will first drive him into a mounting frenzy of frustration and ultimately destroy him. In the opening scene we see his latest attempted conquest, Donna Anna (who is engaged to Don Ottavio) struggling to get away from him. Her father, the Commendatore, intervenes and Don Giovanni kills him: the fatal ‘dark act’ which is going to be his downfall. From then on the whole story shows the hero getting enmeshed in an ever-tightening web of frustration, as he is driven on by his fatal weakness and only succeeds in arousing around him an ever-growing army of opponents. He attempts to seduce a woman in disguise, only to find to their mutual horror that she is one of his former conquests, Donna Elvira, whom he had cruelly thrown aside. He attempts to seduce the pretty young peasant girl Zerlina, and not only is frustrated by the intervention of Donna Elvira but also arouses the vengeful wrath of Zerlina’s betrothed, Masetto. He now has on his trail both Masetto and Donna Anna’s betrothed, Don Ottavio. He even falls out for a time with the only person who has hitherto always remained faithful to him, Leporello. Don Giovanni makes a last desperate attempt to seduce Donna Elvira’s maid and is again frustrated. Everyone is now set against him, in a typical Nightmare Stage pursuit. And it is at this moment that, having fled into a graveyard, Don Giovanni finds himself confronted with the grim statue of the Commendatore, who seems, as in some nightmarish hallucination, to be addressing him. Mockingly he invites the statue to dinner and is horrified to hear it accept. Finally when he is sitting down to his supper table, the statue enters. After a terrifying exchange, the fires of hell blaze up in the darkness and the ghostly statue of his victim carries Don Giovanni off to his doom.
We end this chapter by looking at a story which presents a subtle variation on the basic shape of the tragic plot, not least because it mixes together both the forms of the plot we have been looking at: Dostoyevsky’s great prophetic novel on the social and spiritual disintegration of late-nineteenth century, pre-Revolutionary Russia, The Devils (or The Possessed). For a long time – nearly 400 pages of a 700-page book – it is not entirely clear what plot is shaping the narrative, or even whether the book has a clearly defined plot at all. But when the plot does finally emerge we see that one reason why this novel is in some ways so puzzling is that it is made up of two quite distinct but interwoven tragedies which eventually converge. The first is a collective tragedy, drawing in a large group of people, and this has a very long Anticipation Stage which occupies the greater part of the book. The other is the personal tragedy of the character who becomes the story’s ‘dark hero’, Nikolai Stavrogin – and this has already been through its initial stages before the opening of the story, as Dostoyevsky unfolds it.
The early chapters of the novel, as we are introduced to the life of a provincial Russian town, are in fact dominated by two middle-aged characters, the rich, indulgent widow Mrs Stavrogin and her weak, vain hanger-on Mr Verkhovensky, who likes to flatter himself that he is feared by the government in distant St Petersburg as a ‘dangerous liberal’. But eventually we come to see these two primarily in their role as mother and father to the other two leading characters of the book, who return to the town after some years in the capital: Mrs Stavrogin’s son Nikolai and Mr Verkhovensky’s son Peter. The handsome Nikolai is a mysterious, romantic figure who returns with something of a scandalous reputation for having lived strangely and dissolutely, Outwardly he seems grave and well-mannered, but he shocks polite society in the town by one or two apparently inexplicable lapses, such as biting the ear of the provincial governor. His friend and admirer Peter Verkhovensky has apparently been associated with a secret society of revolutionaries.
Even after their return, life in the town continues for a long time to flow fairly placidly onwards, like a great river. But then odd little incidents occur, as if the surface is being disturbed by eddies, warning of the approach of some mighty cataract. A strange, crippled girl, Maria Lebyatkin, arrives, and it seems she may be married to Nikolai Stavrogin. A psychopathic criminal Fedka turns up in the town, and shortly afterwards everyone is scandalised by the theft of precious stones from a much-prized icon in the church. One night Fedka waylays Stavrogin and offers to murder his embarrassing wife for money, a suggestion Nikolai angrily dismisses. Finally there is a meeting of 15 people of loosely-assorted progressive or revolutionary views, organised by Peter Verkhovensky and attended by Stavrogin; and the outlines of the plot at last begin to emerge. We gather that Verkhovensky has a wild dream of unleashing chaos in the town as a preliminary to revolution. He is somehow inspired by a vision of Stavrogin as the charismatic figure of destiny who will then emerge as leader; but Stavrogin will apparently have none of this, and has already turned angrily on Verkhovensky, accusing him of wishing to arrange for the murder of his wife Maria and of another revolutionary Shatov, suspected of being a police spy, as a way to cement the revolutionaries’ determination. What we are seeing, well over halfway through the book, is the culmination of a subtly sketched Anticipation Stage, where a whole mass of disparate dreams and vague fantasies about chaos, violence and some future revolution are at last being given their Focus round some specific plan.
But our attention is then abruptly switched to the much more personal tragedy which has already been unfolding for a long time in the life of Nikolai Stavrogin himself. He visits a wise old monk, Father Tikhon, and presents him with a written confession of a hideous episode which had taken place when he was living in St Petersburg. Finding himself alone one day in his lodgings with the daughter of the house, a 12-year old girl called Matryosha, he had on a sudden depraved impulse violently raped her. The girl had been reduced to such a state of shock that she had sat in a catatonic trance, only able to mutter ‘I have killed God’, and had eventually hanged herself. Stavrogin had found himself morally quite numb about the episode, but from then on had begun to act more and more strangely. For no apparent reason he had gone through a ceremony of marriage with the crippled and mentally defective Maria Lebyatkin. He had then abandoned her and travelled abroad for three years, where he had entered on an affair with Lisa Drozdov, a girl from the same town, and for a while contemplated bigamously marrying her, although he had then abruptly ended the affair (Lisa is now back home, and we have already met her as a friend of Mrs Stavrogin’s). Eventually Nikolai had returned to their home town himself, where his strange behaviour now has some explanation. He has become plagued by hallucinations, often seeming to sense near him
‘some evil creature, mocking and “rational”, which took on a variety of personalities and characters, but which he knew was always the same creature’
and which he supposes to be the Devil. He has finally, in a desperate bid to free himself of his curse (or at least to come clean about it), had 300 copies printed of his ‘Confession’, which he is planning to distribute through the town. But at the end of their interview, Father Tikhon merely warns Stavrogin that he will probably ‘feel driven to commit some new and still more heinous crime to avoid publication of the confession’. He has sensed that, like many tragic heroes wriggling on the hook in the Frustration Stage, Stavrogin may now be tempted into some new dark act, in a last effort at a cover up.
All is now set up for the concluding chapters of the novel which are as packed with incident as the earlier chapters seem uneventful. There are signs, such as a protest march of workers at the local factory, that some strange spirit of disorder is loose in the town which no one seems able to control. Everything comes to a climax at an absurd literary festival, organised by various local notables, with speeches and a ball. As this is unfolding, disorder breaks out, in a way which seems not so much planned as simply the breaking of the storm which has been brewing up throughout the preceding 500 pages of the book. The festival disintegrates into chaos. A great fire breaks out in part of the town and, in a house where the fire appears to have been started, the bodies of Maria and her brother are found. They have been murdered by Fedka the convict, in circumstances not altogether clear. What is clear, as the spirit of disorder takes charge in the town, is that Nikolai Stavrogin watches as if in a trance a horrifying sequence of events which he has no direct part in, but which in some terrible way he has inspired and made possible (as he admits about the first killings, ‘I didn’t kill them – I was against the killing, but I knew they were going to be killed and I didn’t stop the killers’). Other deaths follow in chaotic profusion. Lisa, the other girl wronged by Stavrogin but who still loves him, is almost casually murdered by an angry mob. The convict Fedka is found murdered outside the town. Old Mr Verkhovensky makes a last pitiful attempt to run away from Mrs Stavrogin’s suffocating clutches and dies on the journey. The growing nightmare finds a final focus round Peter Verkhovensky’s organising of the cold-blooded killing of the unhappy Shatov by a group of would-be ‘revolutionaries’, which unleashes among those responsible a holocaust of remorse, confessions and suicide. At last Nikolai Stavrogin can take no more and hangs himself.
The overwhelming impression of The Devils – clearly intended from Dostoyevsky’s opening quotation of the biblical story of the Gadarene swine – is of a whole group of people becoming possessed, for all sorts of disparate reasons, by a collective fantasy of violent ‘revolutionary action’. For a long time they are merely swept along in a state of vague anticipation, talking and dreaming of the blood and chaos which is going to be unleashed on some day in the distant future. But finally the day arrives and it is not long before the Dream Stage of initial chaos spins rapidly out of control, until some of them are carried over the edge into a deadly vortex of destruction and self-destruction. Such, in a sense, is the greater Tragedy described by the book; and it was this which made the novel historically prophetic. But the greater Tragedy could not have taken place in the way it did without the much more personal and intense tragedy of Stavrogin, beginning with the rape and suicide of little Matryosha in St Petersburg. Without Stavrogin, the chief instigator of the collective Tragedy, Peter Verkhovensky would not have had his inspiration, his imagined leader. Verkhovensky would not have had his excuse to plot the murder of the crippled Maria, the event which more than any other eventually turns the town into a bloodbath, if it had not been for Stavrogin’s reckless folly in marrying her. Stavrogin would not have got into the state where he was tempted into the quixotic and heartless gesture of marrying Maria if it had not been for the horrible preceding episode of Matryosha’s death. Stavrogin could not have committed his crime against Matryosha, if he had not already lost his moral centre. And neither he nor Peter Verkhovensky would have lost their moral bearings and been reduced to the state where the ‘devils’ could so easily have possessed them in the first place, so Dostoyevsky’s thread runs, without the initial weakness of their parents: Mrs Stavrogin’s spoiling indulgence of her beloved Nikolai and Mr Verkhovensky’s self-deluding fantasies about being a ‘dangerous liberal’; which is why these two are placed in such a prominent position at the beginning of the story.
The Devils is one of the blackest of all literary portrayals of the spirit of Tragedy entering the ascendant, taking over men’s hearts and minds and prompting them to unleash a torrent of death and destruction which eventually sweeps them away. In fact it provides an appropriate cue for us at last to stand back to look at this kind of story in more general terms: to examine what it is in the inner logic of storytelling which decrees that such disparate figures as Faust and Macbeth, Humbert Humbert and Dorian Gray, Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, Don Giovanni and Nikolai Stavrogin, should all ultimately be trapped in the same black vortex and be carried down to the same violent end. So fundamental is this question to the whole of storytelling (and to the relationship of stories to what we call ‘real life’) that it may be reserved for a separate chapter.