profane vs tragic
i was talking to a friend about my post on the profane, and she asked me how the profane differed from tragedy. what it came down to is that profane things contain an element of indignity, while tragic things do not have to, necessarily. the profane is stuff that has to do with gross, cosmic unfairness.
romeo and juliet, for example. when romeo kills himself, thinking juliet is dead, that’s profane. it’s the part that fills you with a helpless feeling of “what the fuck?” but when juliet kills herself, that’s tragic. it at least makes a narrative kind of sense. or take eponine in les miserables. unrequited love is fairly profane, but it can be borne with a becoming stoicism. overall, eponine dies quite nobly. but imagine that eponine is, say, also barren. and then marius and cosette get married and have a kid. and then cosette dies. and then eponine has to raise their kid for some reason. and marius still doesn’t like her.* that’s profane. the profane is what gives a tragedy bite. it’s the part that it’s hard to feel catharsis about and the thing that is difficult to make noble.
when things feel profane in real life, i think that is when we are most at risk of narrativizing. there is a need to resolve profane things and real life will usually not cooperate with that need. say someone has rejected you romantically, and you feel like shit about it but (of course) you have no moral high ground from which to punish them for that rejection. maybe you start telling yourself that they were actually a bad person. maybe they led you on. maybe you adopt a woeful persona (so that rejection is no longer a narrative contradiction). say you were harmed by your upbringing, but your parents were not outright abusive. maybe you tell yourself they were. there’s a narrative for that. it’s no coincidence that conspiracy takes root in the profane. say you can’t cope with the loss of life on 9/11: over-narrativize it. systemic, deliberate villainy has a certain dignity to it. fighting nazis and secret cabals feels somehow noble, cowboy-like, narratively familiar and complete.
soothing, ritualistic behaviors probably have a lot to do with coping with the profane. compulsive tics restore order. a romantic book soothes the profane reality that pair bonds are rare and difficult to find. getting off to a piece of porn that depicts your humiliating sexual desires allows one to have the narrative experience of fulfilling them. when i cringe-pause during a movie or tv show, it’s usually because it’s making me face some sort of ugly indignity. it refuses my desire for resolution.
*i’m cribbing from the plot of the most interminable, awe-inspiringly unpleasant piece of fan fiction i ever read, here.
"romeo and juliet, for example. when romeo kills himself, thinking juliet is dead, that’s profane." Why is that? Somewhere else you wrote that dignity is about having (a sense of?) control, and I couldn't agree more. The way I always understood tragedy is that it emerges when people are the agents of their own undoing. People acting in circumstances of ignorance in a way that they wouldn't had they had knowledge, had they understood the situation. The punishment, as it were, of acting with self-assurance when it's unwarranted. Wouldn't it had been profane if what had happened was that some brigands passed by, and out of some maliciousness killed Romeo? And then, when Juliet woke up, lying on her dead lover, they passed by again and killed her too? The end result would have been the same, but their death would have been meaningless. Oedipus committed a murder. Murders can have all kinds of dreadful consequences for the living, but for Oedipus it was just a cheeky rude passerby that he had killed (if I recall correctly), but really it was his father, and therefore tragic (to put rather simply). Had he acted differently, the death of his "real father" would have been spared. Romeo committed suicide. Was that a virtuous act? The world sucks but we have to deal with it, or remit the pleasures of life. It was his own doing that put a final end to his acquaintance with Juliet. As far as I see it, the tragedy of Juliet's suicide is contingent on Romeo's death being tragic. Romeo killed himself because of Juliet's death, ignorant of the fact that she was alive. Juliet killed herself because Romeo was dead, as he was indeed. Romeo thought he knew what he was doing. Juliet knew what she was doing.
















