ON THE NATURE OF TRAGEDY - Arthur Miller

In our day, when there seems so little time ot inclination to theorize at all, certain elemental misconceptions have taken hold of critics such as A.C. Bradley and G.B. Harrison and renders to a point where the word tragedy has often been reduced to an epithet. A more exact appreciation of what tragedy entails can lead us all to a finer understanding of plays in general.

The most common confusion is that which fails to discriminate between the tragic and the pathetic. Any story, to have validity on the stage, MUST entail confllict. But such conflict is of the lowest, most elementary order; this conflict purely between people is all that is needed for melodrama and naturally reaches its apogee in physical violence. In fact, this kind of conflict defines melodrama.

The next rung of the ladder is the story which is not only a conflict bewteen people, but at the same time, within the minds of the combatants. When I show you why a man does what he does, I may do so melodramatically; but when I show why he almost did not do it, I am making drama.

Why is this higher? Because it more closely reflects the actual process of human action. It is quite possible to write a good melodrama without creating a single living character; in fact, meldodrama becomes diffused wherever the vagaries and contadictions of real characterizations come into play. But without living characters, it is not poosible to create drama or tragedy. For as soon as one investigates not only why a man is acting, but what is trying to prevent him from acting- assuming one does so honestly - it becomes extremely difficult to contain the action in the forced and arbitrary form of meldodrama.

Now standing upon this element of drama, we can try to reach toward tragedy. Tragedy, first of all, creates a certain order of feeling in the audience. The pathetic creates another order of feeling. Again, as with melodrama, one is higher than the other. But while drama may be differentiated psychologically from melodrama - the higher entailing conflict within each character - to separate tragedy from the mere pathetic is much more difficult. It is difficult because here society enters in.