Postcolonial Tragedy,Tragic Tradition and the Urgency of Tragedy Today:An Interview with Ato Quayson〔*〕

Liu Kun

(School of Foreign Studies　Nanjing University,Nanjing　Jiangsu　210046)



Postcolonial Tragedy,Tragic Tradition and the Urgency of Tragedy Today:An Interview with Ato Quayson〔*〕

Liu Kun

(School of Foreign StudiesNanjing University,NanjingJiangsu210046)

Nowadays,there is a growing concern that the term tragedy has been abused to such an extent that it has lost its original significance.This interview with the Canadian literary critic Ato Quayson explores the meaning of tragedy with a postcolonial sensibility,in the tragic tradition,and under contemporary context.In the interview,Quayson elaborates his recent research on postcolonial literature and theorizations of tragedy,underscoring that the parameters of what constitutes postcolonial tragedy can only be established through a link to the Western tragic tradition.For Quayson,what allows us to transcend the limitations of humanity is our alertness to what makes us human and our preparedness to defend at the cost of our own lives the universal human desires.This is also postcolonial tragedy’s significance to contemporary existence,hence the urgency of tragedy today.

postcolonial tragedy;tragic tradition;tragedy;Ato Quayson

In a post-conflict,post-traumatic age,the term tragedy seems to have been so overused that it barely means anything in everyday parlance.We can say it is a tragedy for a family having lost a son in the war or for a child whose pet died accidentally.Some critics even worry that to acknowledge something,such as the bombing of Hiroshima,as tragic may run the risk of “concealing or revealing troubling realities”,because it would lead us to understand an event as “lamentable but inevitable…rather than as political acts for which particular agents bear responsibility” (Foley and Howard 617-8).Has tragedy lost its original sense in the modern world? Do we still need tragedy today? With such concerns in mind,Kun Liu had an interview with Ato Quayson,University Professor at the University of Toronto,Fellow of Royal Society of Canada,and General Editor of Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.

This interview centers on such issues as tragedy with a postcolonial sensibility,postcolonial tragedy and the tragic tradition,and the urgency of tragedy today.In the interview,Quayson elaborates his recent research on postcolonial literature and theorizations of tragedy,underscoring that the parameters of what constitutes postcolonial tragedy can only be established through a link to the Western tragic tradition.For Quayson,what allows us to transcend the limitations of humanity is our alertness to what makes us human and our preparedness to defend at the cost of our own lives the universal human desires.This is also postcolonial tragedy’s significance to contemporary existence,hence the urgency of tragedy today.

Ⅰ.Tragedy with a postcolonial sensibility

Professor Quayson is currently working on a book on Postcolonial Literary Tragedy.Speaking of why,at this moment,it is tragedy that he wants to bring into postcolonial criticism,he recalled his days at the University of Cambridge where he taught the paper on Tragedy for Part II of the English Tripos (i.e.,the final year).He taught this paper for all the ten years at Cambridge.During this period,with an interest in the theme of tragedy,he delved into many tragic texts,from the Greeks,Shakespeare to various from the tradition.Thus the idea of tragedy has been on his mind for a very long time.The idea for linking postcolonial literature with tragedy,which has a substantial corpus both in terms of primary literary texts and also of theorizations of tragedy,is that as having taught postcolonial literature for almost two decades now,he has observed many reiterations of themes that he was familiar with in the tragic tradition.As he began to try to find out if there has been any discussion of tragedy in postcolonialism,he discovered that there was very little.Critics do talk about pain,suffering,alienation and trauma,but they don’t talk about tragedy as a concept.The two areas both interest him,hence the idea of starting a critical dialogue between them.

However,in order to establish critical connections between postcolonial criticism and tragedy,there comes the problem of what exactly makes a tragedy postcolonial.Take Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as an example.As we all know,it is a work of great significance in the history of African literature.And much discussion has been made on the tragedy of both the African community and the protagonist.Quayson himself once commented that “there is something of Oedipus and Agamemnon in Okonkwo;and Obierika’s refusal of closure echoes features of Hamlet”.But such intertexuality doesn’t actually convince us of the novel’s tragedy as postcolonial tragedy.With regard to this problem,Quayson explained that when we speak of tragedy,it has to be understood as a human condition.At one level,there is no postcolonial or western tragedy.Those are labels that are somewhat limiting.Be it pain,suffering,or confusion,they are human conditions.No human group,no individual culture has a monopoly on pain and suffering.Nor does it have a monopoly on how such pain and suffering are expressed.

At another level something can be said to be postcolonial because it comes from a postcolonial sensibility.This sensibility involves a number of dimensions,including the recognition of belatedness,which is to say,the recognition of having come after something else.Dipesh Chakrabarty,the Bengali historian and cultural critic,has observed how nationalism in the postcolonial world is a mark of belatedness since it was shaped by colonialism itself and integrates all the central features of what pertains to the nation-state in its European articulation.There are various ways of qualifying this claim,but Quayson believed that the insight can be expanded to include aspects of life after colonialism.The recognition of belatedness sits alongside the desire or indeed demand to act upon that belatedness either through a mode of differentiation or,more importantly,as a means of expressing something new in the world.And yet at the same time postcolonialism also implies the affliction of mimicry coupled with the terror of compromise.All these are part of a postcolonial sensibility without even having to name the conditions of economic and social malaise that are the direct consequence of empire and colonialism.The nature of the tragedy that is inspired by these recognitions and conditions is thus postcolonial.

With specific reference to Achebe,Quayson further explained,his tragic vision comes from an attempt to understand the colonial encounter and the many things that such encounter puts into play for traditional and indigenous cultures.Achebe and many other postcolonial writers like him give a kind of localization.So that even though the thematic of suffering or alienation is universal,the exemplar is local.The most readily accessible way in which Achebe has been discussed is that Things Fall Apart shows how the encounter with colonial authorities,or with colonial culture,destroyed this very beautiful and coherent traditional culture that pre-existed that encounter.Attractive though this commonplace reading is,it is actually a gross simplification.

The tragedy in Achebe,in Quayson’s opinion,is more complex than that.Where it comes from is the fact that the traditional culture that he describes for us so adroitly already has internal contradictions.Like every living culture,it is shaped out of social fissures and contradictions.The encounter with colonial template then serves to exacerbate the already-existing internal contradictions.And this is what leads things to fall apart.However,because it is a literary text and not a historical document,readers understand Things Fall Apart through their identification with the central protagonist,a character who has particular dispositions and impulses.When at the end Okonkwo commits suicide and dies quite a lonely and miserable death,this is what allows readers to see him as part of the larger tragic tradition because all tragedies are rooted through the consciousness of an individual personality.Despite the fact that the shape of the story is much more sophisticated and transcends the individual,readers empathize and identify with the individual because it is a literary text and not a historical document.This is what makes tragedy a universal idiom.Every culture knows pain and confusion.Every culture has been traumatized in certain ways.However,the articulation of this insight localizes it and gives it a particular color and texture.

Ⅱ.Postcolonial tragedy and the tragic tradition

Another issue that is inevitably involved in this critical dialogue is the tragic tradition.As is known to all,tragedy,rooted in ancient Greek drama,has been exemplified in a long literary tradition,all the way from Shakespeare,Racine,Schiller to Samuel Becket,Arthur Miller,etc.It thus seems necessary that postcolonial tragedy be intertextually related to this literary tradition.Quayson agreed with this point and explicated in detail how to build a connection between postcolonial tragedy and the tragic tradition.It is essential firstly to do an overview of the tragic tradition,both the literary tradition and the theories that have been developed around that tradition.By literary tradition,Quayson means all great playwrights within the tragic tradition,among which Samuel Becket is one of his favorite authors.And there are many others.However,it is not enough to just settle on a simple review of the history of western tragedy,for that has already been competently done.What makes the work innovative and meaningful is to isolate a number of repeated themes or features of the tragic form,whether we see it in the Greeks,in Shakespeare,in Becket,or in others and to see how these themes are reiterated and qualified in postcolonial tragedies.So far Quayson has identified three such thematic clusters.

One thematic cluster is the relationship between determinism and contingency.Labeled another way,it would be the gods and human agency,or fate and free will.They are all similar.Determinism serves as an umbrella term that covers gods,fate,destiny and so forth,whereas contingency is more complicated than just free will.The latter is a term or a category that fuses together aspects of determinism as well as free will.One of the characters in Achebe’s novels says that the thing that will destroy you often starts as an appetite.But appetite must interact with social or cultural environment before it can have an effect.It is the interaction that accentuates the appetite.Contingency thus derives from the variability and unpredictability of what might be produced from the interaction.A similar thing can be said for the vast content of the human psyche and its interaction with given social and cultural domains.

Quayson intends to use contingency to demarcate the variability or unpredictability of the interaction of human nature,broadly defined,with environment,also broadly defined.A good illustration comes from Shakespeare’s Othello.When Othello walks on stage in Act 1,Scene 1,he seems be a good man,or at least unexceptionable despite all that Iago has said beforehand about him.He is bold,well-spoken,and shows himself capable of peacemaking,prevailing among the potential combatants to sheath their swords:“Keep your bright swords,for the dew will rust them” (1.2.59).And in answering Brabantio’s accusations before the Senate we find in Othello a man of eloquence and gentlemanly demeanour.Up to that stage it is only Iago’s words that tell us Othello is debased in some way.But the debasement is completely hidden.There is nothing to confirm Iago’s theory of debasement.It is when the action moves to Cyprus and a completely different and claustrophobic social environment that things shift.Note that it is not just a shift of location from Venice to Cyprus,but a shift in the texture of social life that takes place.The apparent institutional control of Venice gives way to the semblance and potential of chaos in Cyprus.As Othello interacts with the vicissitudes of the new environment,the signs of chaos or confusion introduce a sense of urgency that was previously absent.

On top of that,Othello is also submitted to the wiles of Iago.And Iago stands for a certain principle within his social environment which is essentially principle of cynicism.Iago is not cynical only to Othello,but also to everyone around him,including his wife Emilia and also Cassio and even Roderigo,from whom we already know he is extracting money with promises of gaining the attentions of Desdemona.Iago is an urban sophisticate and cynic who believe that all human nature,not just Othello’s is debased.And he sets out to prove it by working on the noblest of them all.Iago represents a principle of cynicism that is anti-life and that Shakespeare regularly reverted to as a foil to naivety and simple gullibility.Thus we find similar anti-life principles in different guises in his comedies.We see it for example in the person Malvolio in Twelfth Night.He hates having fun and tries to prevent others from having any fun as well.Or in the person of Shylock,who,despite his specific Jewishness,also falls in line with other such anti-life and anti-comedic spirits in Shakespeare.

It is Othello’s interaction with the social environment of Cyprus which is less stable and is more variable and potentially chaotic than that of Venice,and with the inherently cynical principle articulated in the character of Iago that then flips his character and lets out the hidden debasement.This is not so much an inherent evil as Iago would have us believe,but rather an extreme anxiety about loss of control of meaning,starting with the meaning of the duty of loyalty that he thinks his wife ought to have for him.This is entangled in another kind of anxiety,which is that of attaining epistemological certainty.That is the meaning of the “ocular proof” (3.3.361-5) he asks from Iago regarding the handkerchief.For once he has ocular proof,or epistemological certainty,he would be able to finally undertake an epic form of action.The theatre of such action is his bedroom,and the test of it is his wife.That is what he says to himself when he is walking towards her chamber:

It is the cause,it is the cause,my soul:

Let me not name it to you,you chaste stars,

It is the cause.Yet’ I’ll not shed her blood,

Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow

And smooth as monumental alabaster —

Yet she must die,else she’ll betray more men (5.2.1-6).

Othello’s condition might be described as a nervous condition and in modern day parlance we would consider him mad.The roots of the nervous condition have already been shown in his near epileptic trance in Act 4,Scene 1.It is thus in the interaction between disposition and social and cultural environment that we see the signs of contingency.Othello provides but one example,and we can see a similar interaction in a wide range of tragic texts,from,for instance,Othello and Hamlet to Ibsen’s Hedda Garbler,Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire,Arthur Miller’s All My Sons,Toni Morrison’s Beloved,Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea,and Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman.This is just a random selection of texts;there are many others that might serve as illustration.

Thus far contingency has been described as a configuration of elements that interactively trigger the process of what Aristotle describes as tragic reversal.So contingency is actually a fusion of both determinism and chance.Because one doesn’t always choose the environment in which he enacts his life,he is not always in control of how he expresses his ethical choices.One only has free will when he has a choice.But free will is ultimately circumscribed by the debilitations placed on choice.The reason why the concept of freedom is inherently problematized in tragedy is that for what is it really to be completely unencumbered of social expectations or norms? This is one question we find repeated in the tragic tradition.Often when a person expresses themselves they do so in choices that are at the very minimum self-negating,and at worst destructive of what they hold most dear.As they traverse a given social and cultural environment,their choices may suffer abbreviation or distortion because they do not control all the elements that impinge upon their choices.This is what Quayson means by contingency.He then elevates contingency and proffers it as the true mask of determinism.The two concepts are dialectically related.As inheritors of a post-Nietzschean and secular era,it is contingency and chance that we need to worry about,not the will of the gods.One could not,Quayson emphasized,have arrived at this general principle without having immersed himself in the tradition.

What Quayson also wants to draw out from the tradition is the issue of the problematics of giving an account of oneself.How do we give an account of ourselves when the instruments of giving that account are contaminated or beyond our control? By instruments of accounting he means,among other things,the narratives that are given to one as a person to tell his story.Shakespeare is always a perfect touchstone.Take Hamlet as an example;his father asks him to kill his uncle without harming his mother.Hamlet promises to take revenge.But there are deep-seated problems with his emotional life.Hamlet is in love with Ophelia who seems strangely unresponsive after an initial show of interest.What he doesn’t know,is their budding love affair is the subject of surveillance within the Danish court.At the same time Hamlet,as a philosopher,entertains doubts about the afterlife.

These are not enough to completely make him skeptical or even agnostic but definitely enough to make him pause in the course of contemplating any action that might impinge on questions of the afterlife.That is the significance of his famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy.The terrible emotions he experiences of learning his father’s assassination and bearing witness to his mother’s over-hasty marriage to what he considers to be his utterly vulgar uncle - “Hyperion to a satyr” (1.2.140) is how he compares father and uncle - are all indices of his internal turmoil.Thus we might say that Hamlet has an unruly affective life that prevents him from giving an account of himself as an avenger.Part of the process that Hamlet goes through in the play then is to adduce a usable truth that will allow him to perform a course of action,in this case revenge.It is also a truth that will satisfy his own ability to give a coherent narrative about himself,the first instalment of which he gives to Horatio at the start of Act 5,Scene 2,after he has returned from the sea voyage to England in which he was supposed to have been murdered by his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,and the second is when,with his last dying breath,he begs his friend:

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world dray thy breath in pain

To tell my story (5.2.351-354).

Even at death,Hamlet’s concern is with how to give an account of himself,even if in this case through the mouth of his best friend.

As can be observed then,to establish these thematic clusters,Quayson has delved into the tragic tradition.Once their genealogy and specific illustration are established through a reading of the tragic tradition,postcolonial exemplars will be raised from Achebe,Soyinka,Marquez,Morrison,Ondaatje,Rhys,and various others.As Quayson noted,postcolonialism is a status of sensibility in and to history.Therefore,in order to establish the parameters of what constitutes postcolonial tragedy,one has to link it to forms within the older Western tradition.

Furthermore,similar to tragedy per se,the poetics of tragedy has also had a long history.However,much exploration of tragedy in postcolonial writings,with a few exceptions,has been focusing on modern tragedy or cultural tragedy in a general sense.Quayson believed that we still need to return to Aristotle today,while other issues should also be involved in the discussion of postcolonial tragedy.On one hand,Aristotle is important because he sets out a very useful formal definition of tragedy with recognizable elements.Though he didn’t get everything right,he did set out an extraordinarily supple set of definitions which people have gone back to again and again.

On the other hand,it is not just Aristotle we have to be interested in.There are also for example insightful explorations of tragedy that derive from understandings of ritual,of which Aristotle makes no mention in the Poetics.What does ritual mean? And the relationship between ritual and representation,ritual and reality,or ritual and drama,ritual and the taking on of a persona that is not one’s own,what do they mean? As in being possessed? When a person is in a ritual,there is always a possibility of being taken over by a force other than himself.Ritual raises many philosophical questions that should be of interest to anyone thinking about tragedy.

We also have to look at psychoanalysis.Now there is no argument that the mind is an entire universe all unto itself.And it’s a universe that we don’t always control.Our internal life sets are sometimes larger and more complicated than the Milky Way.That universe also has an impact on our ethical choices.Freud,Winnicott,and Lacan,all these theorists of the mind will come into play.There is trauma as well.If we couple trauma with tragedy,we are obliged to delve into theories of trauma,traumatic affect,post-traumatic stress disorder,and so forth.Thus,it’s not just a return to Aristotle that is required,but to any theorists that allow us to understand and grasp in the most subtle way the complexities of the human condition.One has to get into those areas to think about why the human action leads to Aristotle’s reversal of fortunes and essentially to the loss of the capacity for ethical action.

Ⅲ.The urgency of tragedy today

After a discussion of the tragic tradition,Quayson made a comment on why it is problematic to refer to Hiroshima as tragedy.He acknowledged that the term tragedy is often used in the news media to refer to something sad or nasty:wars and rumors of war,failing states,civil conflicts,the rape and abuse of women,religious intolerance and the concomitant violence that comes out of it,and so on.But the reference to Hiroshima also suggests that tragedy implies inevitability.The matter seems to Quayson a bit more complex than that.Something extremely sad and terrible is not necessarily something that was inevitable because inevitability also implies that it was fated and predestined,or utterly beyond human choice.

Social events are often due to human choice;but in tragedy we find structures of causal intelligibility that seem to suggest that the tragedy of the hero was somehow inevitable.We ought to draw a sharp distinction between the events that politics and poor human judgment allow to take place in real life and the representation of causal intelligibility in tragedy.The two are not the same.When we use the term tragic to refer to Hiroshima we do so by way of analogy or the importation of the sensibility we attach to literary objects or to a real life event.The same can be said for say the events of September 11th or some other world historical cataclysm.The use of the word tragedy in such instances means sad or terrible,but in Quayson’s view,it also encourages us to see beyond the event to some significance much higher than itself,much as we are encouraged to do when we watch King Lear or Endgame or Mother Courage.

What we need to do when grieving with the hypothetical family that has lost a child in war is that,we must also make space to pose serious questions about whether war is inevitable or the product of faulty political calculations.We need to interrogate the political calculation that assumes that fatal force is what is required in the resolution of what first appear as fundamental differences between states.For behind this thinking is also a level of impatience,the reaching for absolute closure as an instrument of decision making.This is comparable to John Keats’s term negative capability.Keats muses on this quality in a letter he writes in 1817:“what quality went to form a Man of Achievement,especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability,that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties,Mysteries,doubts,without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (60).Ever since he first wrote it the term has been used by philosophers and others to refer to various states of mind,all of which share something regarding undecidability and the reluctance for easy closures.This is obviously not the way of politicians.

At the end of the interview,Quayson analyzed from the perspective of the social dimension the insight that tragedy brings into the criticism of the postcolonial present.He explained that the world is very complex,and we all have similar aspirations wherever we come from.We want security,we want geographical coherence in the sense that we want to be able to traverse geographical landscapes that are predictable.We long for stability and predictability.It doesn’t matter who we are or where we come from.We don’t want barriers,though there are national barriers across which you have to carry a passport.Within those limitations,we want to be free.These are universal.We all feel the same way about such things.We want to love and be loved.And we want the people that we love to be safe and be protected by every means possible,whether by God or by the health care system.

What tragedy tells us is that all these desires,which are universal,have to be struggled for.There is nothing that can guarantee their protection or indeed continuity.We have to fight for them and we have to guard them.And then we have to be prepared to lose them and start anew.What allows us to transcend the limitations of our humanity is our alertness to what makes us human and our preparedness to defend it at the cost of our own existence.What Quayson found particularly inspirational is a beautiful passage from Nelson Mandela’s speech.The speech was delivered in 1964 during the Rivonia Trial which later sent him to jail for 27 years.Quayson took inspiration from Mandela’s closing statement because this is what he deemed as postcolonial tragedy’s meaningfulness to our contemporary social lives.This is what Mandela says toward the end of his final speech before the court:

“Above all,we want equal political rights,because without them our disabilities will be permanent.I know this sounds revolutionary to the whites in this country,because the majority of voters will be Africans.This makes the white man fear democracy.

But this fear cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the only solution which will guarantee racial harmony and freedom for all.It is not true that the enfranchisement of all will result in racial domination.Political division,based on colour,is entirely artificial and,when it disappears,so will the domination of one colour group by another.The ANC has spent half a century fighting against racialism.When it triumphs it will not change that policy.…

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people.I have fought against white domination,and I have fought against black domination.I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve.But if needs be,it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die” (169-170).

As Mandela’s courageous speech shows,one should love freedom to the point to want to die for it.This also comes from a supremely tragic sensibility.This is what Quayson believed tragedy can teach people today and what gives an ethics beyond our ordinary circumstances,which is of great value.

Notes:

〔1〕Foley,Helene P,and Jean E.Howard,Introduction:The Urgency of Tragedy Now,PMLA October,2014,pp.617-633.

〔2〕Keats John,to George and Tom Keats 21,27(?) December,Selected Letters of John Keats:Revised Edition,Ed,Grant F.Scott,Cambridge:Harvard University Press,2002,pp.59-61.

〔3〕Mandela,Nelson,The Rivonia Trial,No Easy Walk to Freedom:Speeches,Letters and Other Writings.Ed.Ato Quayson.London:Penguin,2001,pp.143-170.

〔4〕Shakespeare,William,The Norton Shakespeare,Based on the Oxford Edition,Ed,Stephen Greenblatt.2nd ed,New York:W.W.Norton & Company,2008.

About the author：Liu Kun,a Ph.D.candidate in English language and literature at the School of Foreign Studies,Nanjing University,She was a visiting research graduate student from 2014-15 in the English Department at the University of Toronto,under the sponsorship of Chinese Scholarship Council,her major research interests are contemporary Canadian and American literature.

〔*〕This essay is funded by the National Key Research Program of China (Grant No.11&ZD137).