744
PARTISAN REVIEW
define the word "action," goes on to discuss the mechanics of plotting;
but what Aristotle meant by "action," Mr. Fergusson believes, is "not the
events of the story but the focus or aim of psychic life from which the
events ... proceed." What, then, is the "focus or aim of psychic life"
in Greek tragedy, and particularly in
Oedipus Rex?
The answer, accord–
ing to Mr. Fergusson, can be found in the ritual origins of Greek tragedy.
This ritual, an outgrowth of primitive vegetation ceremonies, celebrated
in dance and song the struggle, death and rebirth of the year-god; the
pattern of the ritual moved in a three-fold rhythm determined by the
structure of this experience; and the "action" of Greek tragedy is an
"imitation" of the emotional structure of the ritual experience, or more
precisely, of the "prerational image of human nature and destiny which
the ritual conveyed."
In dramatizing the myth of Oedipus, Mr. Fergusson explains, So–
phocles cast it in the form of this ancient ritual, so that the playas a
whole, and each incident within the play, moves in the "tragic rhythm"–
the sequence of "Purpose, Passion (or Suffering) and Perception" which
is the "substance or spiritual content of the play," and, at the same time,
of the ritual experience. Closely analyzing the play from this point of
view, Mr. Fergusson shows how Oedipus, in his relation to the city of
Thebes, took on many of the attributes originally possessed by the year–
god; and to a Greek audience, equipped by their whole culture with a
"ritual expectancy," the quest for the slayer of Laius was felt, on a
level below the incidents of the plot, as involving the "welfare of the
City" and as "imitating and celebrating the mystery of human nature
and destiny."
In the French classic theater of Corneille and Racine, as in the late
Romantic theater of Wagner, this totality is sacrificed to one of its aspects.
Purpose or Reason is the dominant mode of experience in Racine's
Bire,nice:
Passion or Suffering is the dominant mode of
Tristan und
Isolde:
in both, the action of the play "imitates" this single mode of
experience, rather than, as in Sophocles, moving through a succession of
modes of moral change. Only in Shakespeare's
Hamlet
do we find a
theater which, like that of the Greeks, encompasses the full range of
the "tragic rhythm."
The most influential modern interpretation of
Hamlet
is that of
T. S. Eliot in the
Sacred Wood,
where Eliot accepts
J.
M. Robertson's
thesis that "the essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son
toward a guilty mother."
On
this basis, both Eliot and Robertson con–
clude that
Hamlet
is an artistic failure, marred by undigested rempants
of the original Hamlet-story that have no rationally explicable reIa-
