What enables old tragic tales to live on for so long? Well, Joseph Krutch's "The Tragic Fallacy" argues that it is because tragedy is an "expression" of an artist that makes centuries-old works still relevant today.
The first part of Krutch's essay describes how Aristotle's traditional definition of tragedy says that it is the "imitation of noble actions." Krutch argues that tragedy is no mere imitation, for that implies that the artist simply observed the world and added none of his own thoughts into his tragic art. Instead, Krutch argues, tragedy is more of an interpretation of observations. There is an "interposition of the personality of the artist between the object and the beholder." This part of the essay, I completely agree with. Without the expression of human thought and emotions, art that simply describes a specific place or event would not be relatable to humans of today. Imagine if Sophocles's plays or Shakespeare's works were just observing the attitudes of their times without adding their own comments on them. The writings wouldn't be tragedies anymore: they would be history textbooks. Humans love tragedy because, like any good literature, it allows us to find relatable thoughts in works written by long-dead writers. We see that humans are truly interconnected, even across time.
The first part of Krutch's essay describes how Aristotle's traditional definition of tragedy says that it is the "imitation of noble actions." Krutch argues that tragedy is no mere imitation, for that implies that the artist simply observed the world and added none of his own thoughts into his tragic art. Instead, Krutch argues, tragedy is more of an interpretation of observations. There is an "interposition of the personality of the artist between the object and the beholder." This part of the essay, I completely agree with. Without the expression of human thought and emotions, art that simply describes a specific place or event would not be relatable to humans of today. Imagine if Sophocles's plays or Shakespeare's works were just observing the attitudes of their times without adding their own comments on them. The writings wouldn't be tragedies anymore: they would be history textbooks. Humans love tragedy because, like any good literature, it allows us to find relatable thoughts in works written by long-dead writers. We see that humans are truly interconnected, even across time.