Dear Henry:
It depends on which theory of catharsis you are referring to...for either Aristotle or Freud, it isn't the protagonist that is redeemed, but rather the value of the genre, by virtue of its purgative powers. Is Hamlet's a redemptive tale, if Horatio was wrong and there were no flights of angels to sing him to his rest?
Indeed, if redemption is meant in the biblical sense of the term, then tragedy and Christianity are antithetical...our sense that Thomas More (Paul Scofield) believes in his personal redemption makes his death at the end of "A Man for all Seasons" much less tragic (at least in the sense of much less unjust, and much less of a waste). The real challenge is to accept tragedy when there is no afterlife in which the good will be redeemed and the evil be punished...that's where the Greeks were unsurpassed.
Don't get me started.
"For beauty is the beginning of terror we are still able to bear, and why we love it so is because it so serenely disdains to destroy us" Rilke's First Duino Elegy
Daniel Shaw
Professor of Philosophy and Film
Lock Haven University
Managing Editor, Film and Philosophy
website: www.lhup.edu/dshaw
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