Elucidate Raymond Williams’ views on ‘Rejection of Tragedy’

Williams’ essay ‘Rejection of Tragedy’ is a study of the rejection of tragedy in modern age with special
reference to Bertolt Brechet who founded epic theater as compared to the emotional theory of
Aristotle. He rejected the conventional idea of tragedy and made tragedy more experiential and
rational.

He made people think above the situation presented in the tragedy and not within. Aristotelian drama
enforced thinking from within and Brechet’s theater from without. He used distancing affects to turn
people like spectators who sit in the chair, smoke and observe. He showed what the audience wanted to
see. Williams has discussed six plays: The Three Penny Opera, Saint Joan of the Stockyard, Die
Massnahme, The Good Woman of Sezuen, Mother Courage and Her Children and the Life of Galileo. In
the last play mentioned, the hero is offered two choices one between accepting the terms or the other
being destroyed. Nevertheless, the hero recants. Tragedy, says Williams, in some of its older senses is
certainly rejected by this ‘complexseeing’. The major achievement of Brechet is recovery of history as a
dimension of tragedy. In tragedy we must see continuity and desire for change. Catastrophe should not
halt the action or push the contradictions of life into background. Suffering should be avoided because
suffering breaks us, Brechet thinks that our will to struggle should not die under the weight of sufferings.
Brechet’s own words are the precise expression o this new sense of tragedy:

“The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are unnecessary”

Brechet believes that response to suffering is crucial and weight of suffering is borne by all of us. Even
the spectator becomes a participant. As a participant he can condemn or comprehend the sufferings.
And for this purpose, he needs some active principle which he finds in the system. But system makes its
principles for its defense not for its rejection. Our disgust is directed against morality; not upon the
system. Under these circumstances morality serves the cause of the cruel system and religion and
spiritualism lose their effectiveness. Morality, religion and spiritualism are used by the exploiting class as
a shield against public resentment. Brechet rejected and exposed the validity of the so-called refined
sentiments of goodness, love and sacrifice. There are, to him, fake sentiments, romanticized on purpose.
Love, he thinks, separates us from humanity. The emphasis on love can look like growth but it is often a
simple withdrawal from the human action. Love is defined and capitalized in separation from humanity.
Williams declares:

“An evil system is protected by a false morality”

Brecht's narrative style, which he called ‘Epic Theater’, was directed against the illusion created by
traditional theater of witnessing a slice of life. Instead, Brecht encouraged spectators to watch events on
stage dispassionately and to reach their own conclusions. To prevent spectators from becoming
emotionally involved with a play and identifying with its characters, Brecht used a variety of techniques.
Notable among them was the alienation or estrangement effect, which was achieved through such
devices as choosing (for German audiences) unfamiliar settings, interrupting the action with songs, and
announcing the contents of each scene through posters.

Brecht first attracted attention in the Berlin as the author of provocative plays that challenged the
tenets of traditional theater. In ‘St. Joan’ a modern-day Joan of Arc advocates the use of force in the
fight against exploitation of workers. In his play, ‘Mother Courage and her Children’ Brechet invites us to
see what happens to a good person a bad society. Through Sheen Lee, he seeks to show how goodness
is exploited by gods and men and how good person is alienated. The antiwar play ‘Mother Courage and
Her Children’ shows an indomitable mother figure who misguidedly seeks to profit from war but loses
her children instead. Brechet’s play ‘Good Woman of Sezuin’ presents a kindhearted prostitute. She is
good but she is alienated. Brecht called this a parable play, the kindhearted prostitute is forced to
disguise herself as her ruthless male cousin and exploit others in order to survive. According to Brechet
the most alienated are the best. He collects life from all corners of the world when he says:

“Today when human character must be understood as the totality of all social conditions, the
epic theater is the only one that can comprehend all the processes which could serve for a
fully representative picture of the world”

He rejected the idea that suffering can ennoble us. Bad societies, he thinks, needs heroes and it is bad
life that needs sacrifices. He considers it a sin against life to allow oneself to be destroyed by cruelty. His
mature dramas show that it is not possible to label people good or bad. Goodness and badness are the
two alternate labels in the same individual. We have a split consciousness and live under this tension.
Williams calls it ‘Complex Seeing’ which was rejected by the traditional conception of tragedy. ‘Mother
Courage and her Children’ is a dramatization of conflicting instincts in a person who is not consciousness
of these conflicts. But the case in ‘The Life of Galileo’ is different. Galileo is fully conscious and is free in
making a choice. Galileo deals with the responsibility of the intellectual to defend his or her beliefs in
the face of opposition from established authorities, in Galileo’s case the Roman CatholicChurch. We
can admire or despite Galileo but Brechet is not asking us to do this. He is only telling us what happens
to consciousness when it caught in a deadlock between individual and social morality. We are so used to
tragedy and martyrdom under such circumstances that we are unable to see this experience in a
radically different way – complex seeing and accept the complexity of the situation as a fact of
life. Facts that are concealed and brought to light as in, ‘The Life of Galileo’ Barberini says:

“It is my own mask that permits me certain freedoms today. Dressed like this. I might be heard
to murmur. If God did not exist, we should have to invent him”

Williams in this case presents the example of Mother Courage and comments that the history and
people come alive on the stage, leaping past the isolated and virtually static action that we have got
used to in most modern theatre. The drama, in his opinion, simultaneously occurs and is seen. It is not
‘take the case of this woman’ but ‘see and consider what happens to these people’. The point is not
what we feel about her hard lively opportunism; it is what we see, in the action, of its results. By
enacting a genuine consequence, in Williams’ view, Brecht raises his central question to a new level,
both dramatically and intellectually. The question is then no longer ‘are they good people?’ Nor is it,
really, ‘what should they have done?” It is, brilliantly, both ‘what are they doing?’ and ‘what is this doing
to them?’ In Williams’ opinion, to detach the work from its human purpose is, Brecht sees, to betray
others and so betray life. It is not, in the end, what we think of Galileo as a man, but what we think of
this result.