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Books by Joyce Carol Oates Wonderland The Wheel of Love
Them Expensive People A Garden of Earthly Delights
Upon the Sweeping Flood
With Shuddering Fall By the North Gate Anonymous Sins (poems)
Love and Its Derangements (poems)
THE EDGE OF
IMPOSSIBILITY: tragic forms in
literature
The Vanguard Press, Inc., New York
Copyright, ©, 1972, by Joyce Carol Oates Published simultaneously in Canada by The Copp Clark Publishing Company, Ltd., Toronto All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information or retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who may wish to quote brief passages in connection with a review for a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television. Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 77-188692 SBN 8149-0675-3 Manufactured in the United States of America Designer: Ernst Reichl
for Evelyn Shrifte
I dream that I am told: “The revelation, the an swer to all your questions can only come to you in a dream. You must have a dream.” So, in my dream, I fall asleep and I dream, in my dream, that Fm having the absolute dream. On waking, that’s to say on really waking, I remember having dreamed that I’d dreamed, but I can remember nothing about the dream within a dream, the dream of absolute truth, the dream that explained everything. I am so very true that I cannot escape from my self. I organize myself. I am the self that organizes myself thus, arranging the same materials in a unique pattern.
Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal
“The T ragedy of Existence : Shake speare’s Troilus and Cressida,"" is drawn from two essays, one of which appeared in Philological Quarterly, Spring 1967, and the other of which appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, Spring 1966. “The Tragedy of Imagination: Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,” appeared in Bucknell Review, Spring 1964; “Melville and the Tragedy of Nihilism” appeared in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Spring 1962; “Tragic and Comic Visions in The Brothers Karamazov"’ appeared in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Winter 1968-69; “Chekhov and the Theater of the Absurd” appeared in Bucknell Review, Winter 1966; “Art at the Edge of Impossibility: Mann’s Dr. Faustus"" appeared in The Southern Review, Spring 1969; “Ionesco’s Dances of Death” appeared in Thought, Fall 1965; “Yeats: Violence, Tragedy, Mutability,” appeared in Bucknell Review, Winter 1969-70; “Tragic Rites in Yeats’ A Full Moon in March"" appeared in The Antioch Review, Winter 1969-70. acknowledgments
CONTENTS
Introduction: Forms of Tragic Literature
1 2
3 4
5
6 7
8
9
The Tragedy of Existence: Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida The Tragedy of Imagination: Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra Melville and the Tragedy of Nihilism Tragic and Comic Visions in The Brothers Karamazov Chekhov and the Theater of the Absurd Yeats: Violence, Tragedy, Mutability Tragic Rites in Yeats’s A Full Moon in March Art at the Edge of Impossibility: Mann’s Dr. Faustus Ionesco’s Dances of Death Notes
1
g
y]
59
85 115
139 163 189 223
251
INTRODUCTION: Forms of Tragic
Literature
We seek the absolute dream. We are forced back con tinually to an acquiescence in all that is hallucinatory and wasteful, to a rejection of all norms and gods and dreams of “tragedy” followed by the violent loss of self that signals the start of artistic effort: an appropriation by destruction, or an assimilation into the self of a reality that cannot be named. The art of tragedy grows out of a break between self and com