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Displacing the Hero in Modern Irish Drama
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Extract
The values of a community are revealed in its tragedies, and it is increasingly clear that the classical form of tragedy has been unable to accommodate modern values. It is too aristocratic for a democratic age. Sometimes it has been felt that we no longer merit a hero, and sometimes that heroes are now very dangerous and delusive. This latter view was articulated eloquently by the German philosopher-theologian, Karl Jaspers, in the aftermath of the defeat of Nazism:
Tragedy becomes the privilege of the exalted few – all others must be content to be wiped out indifferently in disaster. Tragedy then becomes a characteristic not of man, but of a human aristocracy. As the code of privilege, this philosophy becomes arrogant and unloving; it gives us comfort by pandering to our self-esteem.
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References
Notes
1. Jaspers, Karl, Tragedy is Not Enough, translated by Reiche, Harald A. T., Moore, Harry T. and Deutsch, Karl W. (London, Victor Gollancz, 1953), 99.Google Scholar
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512 [5 March, 1924]
But that full house, the packed pit and gallery, the fine play, the call of the mother for the putting away of hatred – ‘give us Thine own eternal love!’ made me say to Yeats ‘This is one of the evenings at the Abbey that makes me glad to have been born.’
Her whispered conversation was thus recorded:
513 [9 March, 1924]
When the mother whose son has been killed – ‘Leader of an ambush where my neighbour's Free State soldier son was killed’ cries out ‘Mother of Jesus put away from us this murderous hatred and give us thine own eternal love’ I whispered to Casey ‘that is the prayer we must all use, it is the only thing that will save us, the teaching of Christ’. He said ‘Of humanity’. But what would that be without the Divine Atom?
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