of the dawn

A tragedy is the story of a human growing into his death mask. What has been done is too total to be undone, or even regretted; it defines the doer once and for all and renders the future impossible. (Macbeth is the story of Macbeth growing into his regicide, even as his wife collapses under it; the hesitant hen-pecked man of the first act becomes a monstrous king with burning eyes, master of the deed that mastered him.) The tragic hero attains something like divine completeness, except that for human beings completeness is death. So the ubiquitous counsel of the chorus concerning the hero—look what fortune has done here, she used to be on top of the world, don’t count on happiness, don’t believe anyone happy until he is dead—says more than it seems to. In the last analysis, what can one say of mere mortals? A human is just too partial, too speckled and subject and already-half-gone, for anything to be really true or false of him. Is he happy, is she sad? Maybe, a bit, for a time, but really—who can say, who can even care? That’s how it is for humans, unless and until they are tragic. The tragic hero is complete. You can call him unhappy (miserable, utterly broken) even before he is dead. For an instant he is something like divine. And then he dies, because there’s nothing left to do. The center of every tragedy is the image of a human being who has already died but keeps talking, someone whose face is a mask. Antigone says this explicitly—she is already dead; Oedipus acts it out in gouging out his eyes.