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Tragedy and Temporality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Rebecca Bushnell
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Extract

For many commentators on tragic temporality, tragic time is the “now,” binding the characters—the actors of the catastrophe—in the anxiety and horror of a blinding present moment. As Northrop Frye observed in his Fools of Time, “The basis of the tragic vision is being in time, the sense of the one-directional quality of life, where everything happens once and for all, where every act brings unavoidable and fateful consequences, and where all experience vanishes, not simply into the past, but into nothingness, annihilation” (3). In performance, in particular, that presentness feels relentless: as Stanley Cavell writes, tragic performance “demands a continuous attention to what is happening at each here and now, as if everything of significance is happening at this moment, while each thing that happens turns a leaf of time” (93). This sense of the present mimics our everyday sense of how we live in this world: in David Kastan's words, “Tragic time is, then, the experiential time of human life—a time, that like life itself to which it is inextricably tied, is directional, irreversible, and finite” (80).

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 129 , Issue 4: Special Topic Tragedy , October 2014 , pp. 783 - 789
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2014

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