| | FRANK:
You asked:
"Should a tragedy portray a perfectly moral person, who makes a wrong decision and suffers because of this? ... Or should a tragedy portray an almost perfectly moral man, who makes a decision based on his vices instead of his virtues?" And then clarified:
"In the first case I was writing about errors of knowledge, while I was referring to errors of morality in the second case... Of course you can write an artwork about a man, who innocently makes a false decision, because he hadn't enough time to think about his habit, which he developed innocently, too. But I can't see, what the lesson of this artwork should be." Excellent questions both, and as you might expect Aristotle answered them in his Poetics [1453 a 1-7]. As I said in the article, Aristotle contended that tragedy should evoke intellectual clarification; it does this by generating pity and fear for someone 'like ourselves,' who, through some hamartia falls from happiness to misery. Like the translation of katharsis, the translation of hamartia also has some disagreement - it is understood either as "intellectual error" or as a "tragic flaw." Obviously if a character falls because of a 'tragic flaw' there is little interest in the drama, but if the error is an intellectual one we can take a profound interest in the outcome.
As three examples, just think of the characters of Dagny and Hank in Atlas Shrugged, and Dominique Francon from The Fountainhead. Both Dagny and Hank make intellectual errors in their evaluation of the nature of the world, their own place in it, and for what actions one should feel guilt or pride. In Hank's case his error leads him to signing over to the government his life's work, at which we do indeed feel enormous pity. In the case of Dagny and Dominique, they are both guilty of intellectual errors that make them the enemies of the men they love. In large part, the drama in both of Rand's novels occurs because of the conflict generated by these intellectual errors, and the drama is only resolved once the intellectual errors are resolved - both our own intellectual errors and those of the leading characters. Hence the importance of Galt's Speech dramatically - it is truly the climax of Atlas Shrugged, and to skip it when reading Atlas betrays a very poor sense of the dramatic. :-)
Now, our interest in both these novels is aroused by the 'pity and fear' we feel for the protagonists. I'll now give you the situations that Aristotle excluded from tragic mimesis, and you might now understand why he did so (or of course you can check the Poetics yourself for the reasons). He excluded:
1) the fall of an unqualifiedly good human being from happiness to misery;
2) movement of an extremely evil human being from bad fortune to good fortune;
3 ) the fall of a deeply human being from good fortune to bad.
Consider for example that by this estimation the fall of Macbeth is tragedy, but that of Richard III is not.
MARCUS:
You noted that you thought the film-makers intended the film to be understood as as a critique of the War in Iraq. In another response, Byron noted that Tolkien "did not want his "Lord of the Rings" trilogy to be directly compared to, say, his experiences in World War I, but rather as a work that addresses universal themes or archetypes (to borrow from the mythologist Joseph Campbell)." I have to confess to Marcus that I too saw the 'references' in Troy to the War in Iraq, but as the references were so poorly done and in such bad taste I didn't think I wanted to draw any more attention to that end than it really deserved - ie., nothing at all.
If the film had been purely didactic it would just have been a boring film in extremely bad taste. However, as the film-makers only included this 'theme' as one of their pot-pourri of 'sub-texts' I thought it was possible to ignore it, and I did. :-)
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