A CRITIQUE OF MODERN TRAGEDY Modern Tragedy by Raymond Henry Williams is a compilation of eleven essayswritten on various aspects of tragedy and

a play Koba. These essays were publishedfrom 1962 to 1964 in various magazines like Kenyon Review, New Left Review, Studieson the Left, and Critical Quarterly. These essays were published in book form by the titleof Modern Tragedy in 1966. The book was thoroughly revised and again published in1979."Modern Tragedy", is perhaps the most important twentieth-century inquiry intothe ideas and ideologies that have influenced the production and analysis of tragedy.Williams sees tragedy both in terms of literary tradition and in relation to the tragedies ofmodern society, of revolution and disorder, and of the experiences of all of us asindividuals.Like Culture and Society, Modern Tragedy discussed textsthe main tragic textsand texts about tragic theory that had been written in Europe and the United States sinceIbsenand extracted from them a political message about the inadequacy ofindividuation and about the desirability of revolution.Modern Tragedy was written in a dense, coded prose. Decoded, it manifests theconfusion between the cultural elite and the people which was a feature of Williamssdoctrine throughout his work and which became particularly troublesome in this book,where dramatic and fictional tragedy were presented as realizations of the shape andset of modern culture, and the dramatists and novelists who had produced it wereassumed to represent our minds and experience.This thesis was both elitist and anti-elitist, nave about the prospect of bridging thegap between the cultural elite and the people but emphasizing the affiliations that keptWilliams, as a member of the former, in conscious empathy with the latter. The effect wasnevertheless odd, implying that Strindberg, Brechet, and Arthur Miller, for example,were not arcane, and amalgamating the we who went to their plays or listened toWilliamss lectures in Cambridge with the we who had been described appreciativelyin Border Country. However deep Williamss desire was to make criticaldiscrimination relevant to the people among whom he had grown up, moreover, itneglected the consideration that critical discrimination was in fact a minority activitywhich spoke meaningfully only to those who had already heard Leaviss voice.Modern Tragedy owns three major parts. The first part is about the history andcriticism of ideas regarding tragedy, and follows in some respects, the work attempted inhis famous books Culture and Society and The Long Revolution. The second partfollows from Drama from Ibsen to Eliot, though the questions raised here are different.Over four years, Williams gave a series of lectures on Modern Tragedy in the Englishfaculty at Cambridge, and this second part is a revised version of those lectures. Thethird part consists of a play called Koba which the writer has been working onintermittently to the other writings on Tragedy. The literature of ideas and of experienceis a single literature. Tragedy is the most important example of this complex andnecessary unity. So, the writer says, the book is about the connections, in moderntragedy, between event and experience and idea, and its form is designed at once toexplore and to emphasise these radical connections. Qaisar Iqbal Janjua, Contact: (92) 300 94 678qaisarjanjua@hotmail.com ,qaisarjanjoa@yahoo.com 14 powerful linking of tragedy with myth, the rejection of science and political reaction hasbeen of major importance. As a consequence of this, in tragic theory, the emphasis is onmyth as the source of tragic knowledge, and on ritual as a description of communicatedaction.The central thesis of Nietzsches book Birth of Tragedy is: the ritual origin of Greektragedy as well as the interdependence of myth and ritual in all primitive cultures. Lateron anthropologists also emphasized the importance of myth and ritual in differentcultures. Then this came to be known as the latest mode of an idea of tragedy. We shouldexamine this idea in its historical and ideological context as it has played a crucialinterpretative role. The terms myth and ritual seem capable of infinite extension. Whatwe need to clarify is the difference between myth as heroic legend and myth in theNietzsche and sense of a supra-rational source of spiritual wisdom. There is a plenty ofevidence connecting tragedy of all periods with the former. The heroic

legend, in theGreeks and others, is neither rational nor irrational, in the modern sense, because it wasprimarily taken as history. The ways dramatising it have been various. Similarly ritual inthe sense of a form of worship of a particular god cannot be glibly identified with themany forms of dramatic action, in which there is no properly ritual action at all. The factis that myth and ritual are being used, in this modern idea of tragedy, as metaphors.The meaning of the tragic action, in this version, is a cyclic death and rebirth, linked tothe seasons and centring on a sacrificial death which through lament and discoverybecomes a rebirth: the death of the old is the triumph of the new. Now the essentialmovement described here is indeed a common tragic meaning. But we cannot identifythis interpretation as the tragic vision as established by facts of tragic origins, whichhave somehow persisted through so many historical periods.What this idea of tragedy seems essentially to teach is that suffering is a vital andenergising part of the natural order. To participate in this version of the life-process isseen as the tragic response, as opposed to the moral or optimistic or a rationalresponse Williams concludes: At the centre of this ritual action, after all, is the tragic hero, whose inner conflict is the whole tragic action, and whose crisis and destruction can be seenas the ritual tearing-to-pieces and sacrifice for life. Thus, not only do we find the use of myth in a specifically modern sense to rationalise a post Christianmetaphysics, but the conversion of the ritual figure to a form of the modernhero the hero who in liberal tragedy is also the victim, who is destroyed by hissociety but who is capable of saving it.