the pleasure of tragedy- nuttall

tension between pain and pleasure in tragedy

• Nuttall considers tension between pain and pleasure in tragedy

• early critical responses to tragedy consider audience pleasure in relation to the pain they were witnessing on stage

• contemporary viewers praise the playwrights ability to disturb the emotions of the audience and render them uncomfortabl

envy driven audience

• it would not be uprising if an audience was inwardly driven by envy were to delight in the fall of someone greater they

• but why does tragedy give pleasure to people like ourselves?

• in the tragic theatre, suffering and death are seen as a matter for grief and fear , after which it seems that grief and fear become in their turn, matter for enjoyment

the pleasure of tragedy

• is an immediate uncomfortable phase

• there is an awkwardness somehow in the mild term ‘pleasure’ it seems as a puny word to set beside the word ‘tragedy’ adding an insult to injury

• the Nietzschean oxymoron ‘tragic joy’ is oddly easier to accept because it fights fire with fire

• the awkwardness has become more obvious in our century

dr johnson

• its self-evident that poetry and drama must please

• a later kind of moralism taught a new generation of readers and theatre goers to despise the pleasurable and to value the disturbing,the jagged, the painful work

• the adjective ‘uncomfortable’ is automatically read as praise

• ancient stoics and epicureans argued about most things but would be united in their bewilderment at this

• if people go again and again to see such things then they must enjoy them

• if you like the disturbing types of plays then this disturbance is something you like and must be a further mode of pleasure

jeremy bentham

• ‘quantity of pleasure being equal ,push pin is as good as poetry’

• here, pleasure is offered for inspection, while poetry and push pins are profoundly different things, meanwhile pleasure is pleasure

• pleasure need not occupy the foreground of consciousness which will afford simultaneous space for objects of another kind

• this means that one can enjoy an activtity or process without any point thinking consciously , ‘iam enjoying this’ or ‘this is very agreeable’ ; instead, one may only think of the activity itself