Tragic vs. Sad

What makes a novel tragic? Is there a difference between sadness and tragedy?

In his book "Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic," the British critic Terry Eagleton addresses this very question, conceding, however, that he does not have a particularly satisfying answer. "In everyday language, the word 'tragedy' means something like 'very sad,'" he wrote. "It may well turn out that 'very sad' is also the best we can do when it comes to the more exalted realm of tragic art."

Yet there are clear differences to the admittedly subjective feeling of sorrow. While it's sad for a son to see his elderly father dying (as in "Dad" by William Wharton), it's a very different kind of grief from a Polish woman who is forced to decide which of her two children will survive Auschwitz ("Sophie's Choice" by William Styron). As Thomas Hardy wrote, "That which, socially, is a great tragedy, may be in Nature no alarming circumstance."

Hardy wrote tragic novels, including "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," "Jude the Obscure" and "The Mayor of Casterbridge," but unlike earlier tragedies, the fallen in Hardy's stories are ordinary people, dairymaids and wood cutters rather than kings and princes, who are undone by ordinary human "passions, prejudices and ambitions," as Hardy wrote, and their inability to escape the consequences. That's also at the heart of the tragedies of "Anna Karenina," "The Scarlet Letter" and "Madame Bovary."

David Nicholls's "One Day" ended on a sad note, but I wouldn't call it a tragedy. Nor, I feel certain, would Aristotle, an early theoretician of the tragic, who believed tragedies should inspire not just pity but also fear. Although Richard Yates's and Cormac McCarthy's novels are almost unbearably morbid, they're not tragedies on the order of "Macbeth" or "King Lear." Theodore Dreiser named his novel about an ambitious young man murdering his pregnant girlfriend "An American Tragedy," but the story was based on a squalid real-life crime of an ambitious young man murdering his pregnant girlfriend.

It's clear how profligately the word tragic is tossed around when you look at what books users of LibraryThing (librarything.com) have tagged as "tragedy." Barbara Kingsolver's "The Poisonwood Bible"? Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections"? "The Rotters' Club" by Jonathan Coe? These are all fine novels in which people suffer, but that's life, not tragedy. It would be impossible to write great fiction without some characters, even beloved ones, suffering misfortune. "The novelist can not write a novel which is felt to be an absolutely comic novel or an absolutely tragic novel," Thornton Wilder once wrote. "Human experience can only be regarded as presenting a synthesis of both." (Read entire article.)

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