Emotion and the Communicability of Suffering

This long and complex book ranges extensively over a wide range of literary works in several languages, but its essential points are simple: tragedy1 offers two forms of redress or compensation for suffering—moral redress, involving a balance between suffering and culpable error or deficiency, and linguistic, which compensates the audience by demonstrating that suffering is expressible in language. The central claim of Part I is that, although undeserved suffering is portrayed in tragedy, it is much less common than claimed,2 and when it does occur it is associated with minor or peripheral characters (such as Medea’s children, Cassandra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Eurydice in Sophocles’ Antigone) who ‘are not, in the fullest sense, agents, or at any rate are not protagonists’ (169),3 whereas those characters who ‘are depicted as genuine agents, and particularly if they are made the protagonists of their stories’ are said to ‘fit the model according to which suffering is matched to desert’ (165; cf. 146, 347). This is Gaskin’s ‘moral theodicy’. In Part II he puts forward a complementary ‘linguistic theodicy’ which entails ‘the encompassing of suffering in language, in such a way as to generate a feeling that, ultimately, this is how things have to be and that it is somehow right, or all right’; ‘tragedy celebrates the sheer fact that suffering can be expressed in language’ (267). The book’s theory of tragedy (or of ‘genuine tragedy’, 349) is one in which ‘there is a deeper sense of recompense, of redress, for suffering, conveyed by our understanding of cause and effect and so of moral responsibility, and conveyed by the nature of language as adequate to the world and celebratory of human existence; these things give us a measure of cognitive control over our lot ... . Tragedy says, in effect: here are the mistakes that we can and do make; but mistakes, though we seem to keep on making them with depressing consistency, are not actually inevitable; in particular, there is a remedy for cognitive failure—learn more, know more, think more; know more about other people and how they work; know more about yourself and how you work’. But in the end ‘the deepest fact about the world that we find expounded in tragic literature is ... not a moral, but a linguistic one, and it is that everything, including suffering, can be presented in language’ (349–350

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Feeling · Literature · Redress · Theodicy · Theology · Tragedy (event · Emotions and Moral Behavior · History · Joseph Conrad and Literature · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy

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