Paradox informs the narrative sequence, images, and rhetorical
tactics contrived by skilled dramatists and novelists. Their
literary languages depict not only a war between rivals but also
simultaneous affirmation and negation voiced by a tragic
individual. They reveal the treason, flux, and duplicity brought
into play by an unrelenting drive for respect. Their patterns of
speech, action, and image project a convergence of polarities, the
convergence of integrity and radical change, of constancy and
infidelity. A fanatical drive to fulfill a traditional code of
masculine conduct produces the ironic consequence of de-forming
that code-the tragic paradox. Tragic literature exploits irony. In
Athenian and Shakespearean tragedy, self-righteous male or female
aristocrats instigate their own disgrace, shame, and guilt, an
un-expected diminishment. They are victimized by a magnificent
obsession, a fantasy of un-alloyed authority or virtue, a dream of
perfect self-sufficiency or trust. The authors of tragedy revised
the concept of "nobility" to reflect the strange fact that grandeur
elicits its own annulment. "Strengths by strengths do fail,"
Shakespeare wrote in Coriolanus. The playwrights made this
paradoxical predicament concrete with a narrative format that
equates self-assertion with self-detraction, images that revolve
between incredible reversals and provisional reinstatements, and
speech that sounds impressively weighty but masks deception,
disloyalty, cynicism, and insecurity. Three heroic philosophers,
Plato, Hegel, and Nietzsche, contributed invaluable but contrasting
accounts of these literary languages (Aristotle's Poetics will be
discussed in connection with Plato's attitude toward poetry). Their
divergent descriptions can be reconciled to show that invalidations
as well as affirmations-the transmission of contraries-are
essential for tragic composition. An equivocal rhetoric, a mutable
imagery, and an ironic progression convey the tortuous pursuit of
personal preeminence or (in later tragic works by Kafka and
Strindberg) family solidarity and communal safety. I am trying to
integrate the disparate arguments offered by several notable
theorists with technical procedures fashioned by the Athenian
dramatists and recast by Shakespeare and other writers, procedures
that articulate the tragic paradox.
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