Ours is one of the few periods in history in which the tragic sense has flourished—along with Homeric Ionia, classical Athens, and Elizabethan England. From Wagner, from Melville, from some of Strindberg and Ibsen, Hardy and Wharton, from O'Neill, from Faulkner, Welty and Styron, from Philip Roth, from August Wilson and Tony Kushner, and from other writers, some readers and audiences have felt an ineffable, subjective intimation of being in the presence of the tragic. One of the more enduring and interesting aspects of tragedy is that we are more likely to know it when we experience it than be able to say what it is.

In a brief, valuable book, The Tragic Plane (Oxford 1985), H.A. Mason, then emeritus fellow of Clare Hall, Oxford, abandons "normal modes of definition" and substitutes various paradoxes and impressions. He asks us to hypothesize being taken to a plane different from that we occupy daily, in which we can consider as co-existing such contradictory propositions as: "Tragedy must be religious" and "Tragedy cannot be religious," or "Tragedy is an affair of men" and "Tragedy is the concern of the gods" (v). In part, Mason believes that although we cannot define it, we know dramatic tragedy when we experience it: we know we are on that plane of experience.¹ On the tragic plane, Mason says, "We are required to confront terrors and desires" which we believe humanity has progressed beyond in our social and economic evolution, terrors and desires we, like the ancient Greeks, believe no longer beset us as they did our most primal ancestors.

In Greek tragedies, the problem of why things happen appears at crucial times to reveal that godly processes of cause and effect are inaccessible to human thought or senses, except insofar as we can perceive the consequences. The younger Oedipus had to believe that the power to evade his prophesied fate rested in his own mind and decisions. Not to believe that would make him feel helpless to a degree that we can barely imagine, let alone tolerate knowing. But in the past 150 years or so we have been forced to tolerate repeatedly discoveries by the scientist-priests of our modern gods that we have relatively little ability to know or control the future. Controlling our lives, controlling the future—these are a large part of what we mean when we use the word "humanism." The inability is an affront to what we think of as "humanism." Though they didn't use any such word, the Greeks of the Classical age, the fifth century BCE, are credited with developing, beside tragic drama, most of the literary, visual, plastic and architectural arts, along with great leaps in mathematics and its applications, and humanist philosophy had its origins in Socrates and Plato.

The conflict between the religious and the humanistic is made especially clear in two of the last written of the great tragedies: The Bakkhai by Euripides, written near the end of his life, about 407 BCE, when he was about 80, and produced in 403 in Athens, and Oedipus at Colonos, written by Sophocles in 406, at the age of about 90, and produced in 401 by his grandson. Each of them in its different way constitutes a profoundly religious argument against the rationalism that was coming to dominate Greek civilization at the same time that the tragedies expressed simultaneous admiration and apprehension for rational humanity. Plato's famous dislike and distrust of the poets rested on the opposition between the sort of rationalism fundamental to the Western philosophy of which he was the leading pioneer, and the deep distrust of the purely rational which is apparent everywhere in tragedy—in ancient Greek, in Shakespearean, and in modern tragic works.

From Mason's subjective, eccentric-seeming approach to tragedy, and from my reflections on Greek tragedy, I will move to what I consider a remarkable description of an experience sometimes evoked in an audience by tragedy from an essay that has nothing directly to do with tragedy. It is something I recognize when I experience it, and, subjectively speaking, it tells me I'm in the presence of tragedy or something very like it. It is a description by the philosopher Stanley Cavell of Wittgenstein's method of philosophical inquiry, which he compares to the progress of a psychoanalytic therapy. Cavell writes:

[. . .] problems are solved only when they disappear, and answers are arrived at only when there are no longer questions—when, as it were, our accounts have cancelled them. [. . .] The more one learns, so to speak, the hang of one's self, and mounts one's problems, the less one is able to say what one has learned; not because you have forgotten what it was, but because nothing you say would seem like an answer or a solution: there is no longer any question or problem which your words would match. You have reached conviction, but not about a proposition; and consistency, but not in a theory. You are different, what you recognize as problems are different, your world is different. (85-86) ²

The power of tragedy, I believe, is the power to make one gradually or suddenly realize that the world is not the place you may vaguely remember it seeming to be a moment before but someplace completely different. Consider that such is the moment when Oedipus finally allows himself to know who the man he killed was, and who are his wife and children. Consider that such is the moment in The Bakkhai when Pentheus realizes that the young stranger he has bullied is unlike any being he has seen before. Such is the moment when Othello realizes the character of the woman he killed, and his own capacity for error. Such is the moment at the end of A Winter's Tale when Leontes discovers that the statue of his long dead wife breathes.

The ability to create the conditions in which conflicting ways of perceiving reality collide against each other seems fundamental to the power to make tragic art. Such a capacity seems more likely to occur in times of great changes in the ways we try to understand our lives, our world, and whatever connects us to life. The discovery that the world is nothing like it had seemed to be moments before shows Oedipus to have learned something, at least, from his ordeal, although what he has learned is not what we might today call "empowering": no, just the opposite. It shows he has learned that nothing he has done or known has taught him anything of value about the nature of life and the world. And so he goes out into the wilderness without eyes, and without any illusions that if he could see, sight would give him any control over his future.

I think this view of tragedy describes how O'Neill's late plays work. By the end of The Iceman Cometh, Larry realizes that an old skeptical foolosopher who insists he has never been certain of anything must at least consider that he knows that Parritt is doing a reasonable thing when he determines that capital punishment suits the betrayer of his mother, and that watching Hickey has taught him something, something that Hickey himself doesn't necessarily understand, about the reality of death. At the end of Long Day's Journey into Night, the audience and Edmund seem to know at least as much as Oedipus did at the end of his play: that Edmund has learned in the house of Tyrone only that he knows almost nothing and will somehow have to begin to learn. At the end of A Moon for the Misbegotten Josie and the audience sense that she has learned from Jim Tyrone's dreadful story that wherever her life is to go, she can no longer continue to be simply aide and audience to her father's schemes and practical jokes, and that the world is far larger and different from what she has let herself see of it. And at the end of Hughie the audience knows that Erie has well begun the process of accepting how his sense of the world has changed because he must mourn the death of his only friend.

O'Neill travelled a great distance to reach the state of being in which he wrote the late plays, but from time to time even when he was just beginning to write plays one can see evidence of a man who is already deeply imbued with the tragic sense. As early as the end of his second play, The Web (summer 1913), one hears the prostitute Rose reach beyond the banal life that is destroying her. Rose finds herself arrested for the murder, committed by someone else, of a man who has been kind to her: "Gawd! Gawd!" she says, "Why d'yuh hate me so?" The cry, in which the word "Gawd" is not a meaningless profanity, has occasionally come to mind when I haven't thought of the play in some time and can't at once recall its source. In O'Neill's stage directions, Rose's words "shock" the arresting policeman enough that he rebukes her for "rough talk." O'Neill instructs the actor that Rose's talk sounds to the officer like blasphemy, rather than commonplace words of self-pity. Events have shown Rose that she isn't merely in a helpless situation, but that the world's notion of what causes good and bad things to happen to people is nothing like what people commonly say.

Some of the plays O'Neill wrote, at this time and later, conceived the tragic in ways that imply that human ways and institutions determine our fates, rather than the ways of the gods. Warnings, like Thirst, written in early 1914, comes in the wake of the shipwreck and lifeboat disaster fiction that followed the Titanic's sinking. O'Neill makes an audience or reader sympathize with the wife and children of a ship's telegrapher, James Knapp, who is becoming deaf, and also with Knapp himself, whose sense of responsibility toward his wife and children makes it impossible for him to do what otherwise seems to him the right thing: to resign his job for the sake of the ship even if it thrusts his family into poverty. He's in a true double bind. If there were to be a solution to his problems it would have to come through, say, paid medical leave and or a pension from the shipping company or from society. His situation is hopeless, but I think that is not the same as it being tragic in the Greek or Shakespearean sense.

O'Neill gets closer to his own sense of the tragic, I think, in Fog, the sixth play he wrote (probably in February 1914), about eight months after getting out of the T.B. sanatorium. Like Warnings, it presents disaster at sea. In a lifeboat after a shipwreck, The Business Man and The Poet talk of their chances of rescue. The businessman is in a barely controlled state of panic; the writer seems to cope with the situation by assuming that they will soon die, while also trying to evaluate their situation as realistically as possible. They are in a fog so dense that at first the audience can only hear their voices. When they can be seen the audience discovers that beside the two men lie a Polish peasant woman who never speaks, and her dead little boy. The Poet seems to get a certain comfort from telling the Business Man that he had meant to take his own life when the ship had been wrecked, knowing that no one could ever know he had not simply died in the shipwreck. But he had changed his mind when he had seen the Polish woman's love for her child; he helped them into the lifeboat at the last moment before the ship had sunk, and got into the boat himself. Later he had rescued the businessman, who had been in another lifeboat that had sunk.

The boat has no oars, so they can only drift. The Business Man desperately hopes for rescue, but throughout the play, hope becomes increasingly baseless, especially when the lifeboat drifts against an iceberg. The sound of a ship's whistle near them forces them to confront the most difficult choice imaginable. The Poet realizes instantly that if they call for help they may cause the rescuing ship to collide with the iceberg and kill everyone aboard. He forcibly prevents the businessman from screaming for help and makes them simply wait passively for whatever will happen. They happen to be found by a rescue cutter sent out by the ship to look for survivors of the wreck. An officer on the cutter tells them an unaccountable story: they found the lifeboat only because they heard the cries of the frightened child and rowed toward the sound. But the child had been dead when the play began. The play ends with the lifeboat being towed to the ship by the cutter, the businessman chattering in the cutter, and the poet choosing to remain alone and silent in the lifeboat with the woman, who has died sometime during the play, and the dead child.

I suspect that Fog could be very effective on stage or perhaps in a short film if it were done in as lean and spare a style as O'Neill calls for, perhaps in a diptych with, perhaps, Bound East for Cardiff, or another of the sea plays he was about to write. To make it work a director or filmmaker would have to take the ending seriously and find a way to let an audience glimpse what O'Neill reaches for. I think the play catches some of what O'Neill would achieve in his later plays, to make his characters and an audience discover that we have almost no idea about the nature of life or death or the world, and less power than we can tolerate knowing to affect our life and death.

I neither claim that Fog is a great play nor that it is as fine as Bound East for Cardiff, which he would write a few weeks later, and possibly it is inferior to The Sniper, The Long Voyage Home, perhaps The Moon of the Caribbees, and it is certain that O'Neill is not yet capable of such an achievement as he would make in writing Beyond the Horizon, all of which he would write during the four years after he wrote Fog. But I find valuable in Fog the evidence it gives of a core idea that O'Neill would work toward throughout his writing-life. The idea is not exactly pessimistic, nor is The Poet exactly pessimistic. His desire for death is not so self-centered that he cannot perceive or be impressed by the depth of love he sees in the woman for her child.

At the heart of tragedy, Greek, Shakespearean or modern, is the idea, the almost intolerable idea, that we understand very little of ourselves or the world we live in and have even less control over ourselves and the world than our pessimistic philosophers and our scientists have claimed. At the heart of tragedy must lie a kind of curiosity about existence, a curiosity so deep that one must be willing to contemplate, to look directly in the face, non-existence, not because one wants to die, but because one wants to understand, no matter what such understanding may bring.

Such was the curiosity that O'Neill tried to satisfy in writing his first plays, and that he brought to Provincetown in 1916. That is the curiosity that led Robert Mayo, even at the moment of his dying, to want to see the sunrise. It took him to the plane of the tragic which has to do with people as well as with gods.

NOTES

1. I reviewed Mason's book in Modern Drama 31.3 (September 1988): 462-65.

2. I am grateful to Meredith Anne Skura for calling Cavell's essay to my attention through her book, The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) 214.

WORKS CITED

Cavell, Stanley. Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Mason, H.A. The Tragic Plane. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.