The Tragic Imagination is a compact and penetrating study of tragedy in its political, literary, philosophical and theological dimensions. The power of Williams's approach lies in its disciplined unrest in accepting the ‘tragic’ as confined to a kind of static, artistic representation of suffering, even if the genre implies some sort of claim about the human condition or the nature of existence. Instead (and following his Wittgensteinian roots), Williams proposes that ‘tragedy’ ought to be foremost regarded as a human activity – an insight which challenges the nature of textuality itself (as it did for Wittgenstein). Accordingly, The Tragic Imagination is a text which seeks to enact the drama of thinking the tragic – it is self-aware that the activity of thinking contains vulnerabilities by which it might, at its own risk, cheat itself from those most confronting of existential questions: the proclivity of the human being towards violence, the reality of collective inaction in the face of injustice, and the ways in which the traps of human selfhood can preclude reconciliation. (Williams lends credence to Hegel's account of Antigone here).
If thinking can, in a sense, produce blind spots in our commitment to confronting the tragic for the benefit of our humanity, then like the blinded Gloucester in King Lear (4.6.153), Williams would have us ‘see it feelingly’. In exploring the tragic imagination in this manner, Williams takes seriously the transformative possibilities of art (as would, say, Nietzsche) while also holding to the more sober and constructive view that the tragic drama has the capacity to lend us powerful – if shocking and disturbing – accounts of our ethical agency (via his reading of Hegel). The tragic drama surpasses its cathartic power and its ambiguous aesthetic combination of terror and exhilaration to promise meaningful insights into one's humanity the more a spectator invests their compassion into dramatic action. Such ethical growth is often (to reference the title of another of Williams's works) at the edge of words: that is, we should not be surprised that the cruel and shocking darkness which the tragedian plumbs tends to produce a kind of affective silence. The tragic is not so much discursive as experiential; it prefers to evade objectivity and conceptuality in favour of imparting intimate (if shared) truths.
That tragic imagination, then, is uniquely bound up in the dramatic. As a participative activity, the drama opens increasingly complex questions about the significance of an actor assuming the mantle of suffering in her dramatic enactment, about the centrality of the spectator as a powerless witness whose compassion is nevertheless absorbed in the unfolding of plot, and of the confusing array of conclusions we might then reach about the purpose of embroiling ourselves aesthetically in those most violent and treacherous aspects of life – something Williams considers through the Greek tragedians as much as Shakespeare and recent playwrights such as Sarah Kane. Indeed, in its dramatic form, tragedy becomes a living revelation of human vulnerability and failure, but it also performatively embodies an overriding and self-empowering human desire for honesty – being able to confront life in its ugliness and yet affirm one's agency as meaningful. This is because, Williams notes, the tragic drama, by its very nature as re-presentative and inclusive of an audience, renders its subject matter as something we are emboldened to narrate and thus transform by the aesthetic problematising of questions concerning responsibility, compassion and justice.
The tragic is a topic close to the heart of Williams's intellectual and spiritual interests, and so his attention understandably turns specifically to a consideration of how the tragic imagination might find an affinity with the Christian faith. This question among philosophers often provokes a kind of de rigueur recitation of Nietzsche; Williams is not goaded into tackling the charged nature of Nietzsche's claims, however. Instead, he considers Hegel's claims that Greek tragedy is specifically historical to antiquity (and thus the divine in Greek consciousness), while arguing that the dialectic nature underpinning Hegelian thinking shares formal similarities with the tragic more generally, and which allows us to imagine and represent suffering with a profoundly ethical (rather than essentialist) interest when turned to Christian theology.
The question of whether Christian hope allows an adequate space for the tragic was challenged more soberly than Nietzsche by philosophers such as Steiner and Kaufmann (though Kaufmann later reconsidered his position after Hochhuth's 1963 play Der Stellvertreter). Yet philosophical approaches have tended to emphasize the existential impacts of divinity considered onto-theologically, and to contrast an irreducible, pessimistic brand of the tragic against the teleological nature of the eschatological. Williams's study has already significantly challenged the presumptions underlying such contrasts, and he swiftly moves to combine his own insights in reply, asserting that the Christian faith indeed shares a narrative quality with the tragic – if by ‘tragic’ we conceive of an empowering form of witnessing suffering as the means of imparting an urgent truth about our ethical makeup. Here, Williams proposes that Balthasar's theology of the Cross integrates the tragic as essential to the Christian narrative and faith. He elaborates on Balthasarian Christology through the language of his study of tragedy as an activity, exploring the ways that the liturgy of the Eucharist shares something of the power of the Greek theatre in its capacity as a public ritual. This indeed goes a long way to challenging the presumption that Christianity and the tragic are exclusive.
Although Williams's methodology might risk inviting an unwieldy sprawling as much as a meaningful search, it is employed with economy and surgical accuracy, often arriving at a tightknit weave of the dramatic, political, ethical and theological in a manner which enriches our appreciation of tragedy well beyond considering these aspects more narrowly (as is the hazard with specialist accounts). A slender volume such as The Tragic Imagination cannot, naturally, comprise an exhaustive survey of thinkers for whom the tragic is central. The work is not presented as such. Rather, its methodological unrest implies that there is a danger in thinking that the exploration of the tragic imagination is properly complete with its final page. Hence, The Tragic Imagination beckons further research: what can now be said about Nietzsche's labyrinthine polemics on Christianity and the tragic? Does Williams's study allow for Balthasar's bolder claims that Greek (and Jewish) tragedy anticipates Christ as the eschaton, and that the crucifixion and resurrection are a kind of Aufhebung of tragedy? Certainly, if anything, it beckons a renewed consideration of the theology of suffering, and the possibility of reading the divine ecstasy of trinitarian kenotic love as the form of human relationships in general (per Lossky, for instance).
