SOURCE: Aiello, Stephen. “Aristotle and Angels: Tragedy in the Age of Anomie.” Florida English (October 2003): 6-16.

[In the following essay, Aiello compares Angels in America with Aristotle's Poetics, claiming that Kushner's play vitiates the form of tragedy.]

It seems to be a contentious position throughout drama criticism that although there may be a tragic sense felt collectively in contemporary life that somehow such an experience when dramatized must be weighed against the classical tradition of tragedy. Thus, any reading of a modern drama as a tragedy dares to confront the same essentialist views as Arthur Miller did when he claimed a tragic dimension for his protagonist, Willy Loman, in Death of a Salesman. The playwright responded to critics who viewed Death of a Salesman in Aristotelian terms as a “pseudo-tragedy,” (108) by distancing his play and a sense of modern tragedy from Aristotle and his Poetics and reminding these critics that “even a genius is limited by his time and the nature of society” (108).

Certainly at first glance an exegesis based on Aristotle's Poetics of another acclaimed drama written over four decades later than Death of a Salesman that also confronts a social issue commonly regarded as tragic—the AIDS epidemic—would appear to create an even worse collision between the classical theory and a modern dramatic work: Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize winning Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. What is apparent when the dust settles from a confrontation between Aristotle and Angels in America is that although Kushner's play retains elements of tragedy delineated in Poetics, it also vitiates the form, which Aristotle describes as so essential to the nature and purpose of Greek tragedy. Much of what distances the two works from each other, however, exists ironically in a common assumption—the correlation each presents between literary form and the view of the world expressed in a dramatic work. Thus, an examination of this interdependence between artistic form and culture in the two works may yield insight into how both classical theory and modern practice perceive and render tragedy.

Clearly, the connection between the homogeneous cultural experience of the ancient Greeks and its artistic representation in tragedy determines Aristotle's concept of mimesis. Aristotle emphatically posits each tenet of Poetics as a mode of achieving an imitation of an action both so experientially and emotionally credible that audiences would be completely absorbed into the tragedy. Therefore, what emerges as the salient characteristics of mimesis in Poetics is the necessity for the tragic form to be unified, consistent and ultimately plausible for audiences. Aristotle's argument contends that without such unity and plausibility, audiences would distance themselves intellectually and emotionally from the work, thus prohibiting the “cathartic” reaction so essential in making tragedy a pleasurable and edifying theatrical experience.

Moreover, although there exists enough ambiguity and flexibility in Poetics to allow for interpretation or “distortion” by the playwright, a point to which this essay will return, the delimitations of what was to become the neoclassical “unities” centuries later are evidently a consequence of the classical poets' desire to produce a literary form that necessarily reflects the perception of order within the Greek society. Indeed from a modern perspective it is very difficult to understand such a sense of social and aesthetic equipoise. As Raymond Williams explains in his Modern Tragedy, the ordered form of classical tragedy, “embodies not an isolable metaphysical stance, rooted in individual experience, but a shared and indeed collective experience, at once and indistinguishably metaphysical and social” (18). Tom Driver argues that this harmony of literary form and culture is most apparent in Sophocles' Oedipus the King in that “the play itself is such a masterpiece of orderly construction that its very form mirrors the cosmic order it wishes to disclose” (248). What this attention to strict literary form creates (although in the case of Poetics and Oedipus the King the expected chronological relationship between theory and practice is reversed: theory followed practice) is an understanding of the universal through an examination of the particular, a quality, according to Aristotle, that distinguishes poetry from history and philosophy (45; ch. 9). Oedipus the King is unified in its focus upon one incident in the life of a hero that has tragic implications for Oedipus but universal ones for Sophocles' audience.

Based on a story well-known to its audiences, Oedipus the King presents a conditional state of the world, a “what would happen if” situation, in which a “famous” but ordinary man, “someone like us,” (Aristotle 49; ch. 13) who because of the mutability of Fate, his crimes of parricide and incest, and the predisposition of his own character, his hamartia, disrupts the “social and metaphysical order” (Williams 18). For this disruption a plague is cast upon Thebes by the gods. By recognizing the truth, Oedipus reverses the action of the play through his self-blinding and self-imposed exile from the social world. Even though audiences experience pity for the sufferings of a hero who in his attempt to save his nation and to seek the truth unwittingly causes his own downfall, they accept that such actions must be “redressed” by the gods, for “if it were not so, moral chaos would result; […] in a world maintained by a balance of forces among the ‘theoi,’ [gods] chaos is unthinkable” (Driver 48).

Moreover, the tragedy of Oedipus evokes the fear that all are subject to the whims of Fate. As the play ends, order is restored, and the salutary effects of Oedipus' exile are felt throughout Thebes. The final chorus of the play helps to signify the “learning and inference” (Golden 44) in Sophocles' Oedipus the King—the vulnerability of the individual to Fate, a universal truth that neither society nor the gods are able to meliorate:

Remember that death alone can end all sufferings;
Go towards death, and ask for no greater
Happiness than a life
In which there has been no anger and no pain.

(244)

Again, what Poetics effects in tragedy is a grounding of the dramatic action to the particular to reflect the universal. The “imitation” of one “object,” (Aristotle 45; ch. 8) an incident that occurs within “one revolution of the sun” (Aristotle 42; ch. 6) is juxtaposed against the eternal, just as the chaotic and tragic actions of the isolated hero stand in contrast to the harmony of social and religious order symbolized by the chorus. What lingers from the tragedy after all have left the orchestra is “fixed, given, and unchangeable […]” (Eagleton 64) existing beyond the grasp of history. It was through the aesthetics of classical tragedy that “the Greeks fought against time and won. They did it strangely by shutting out the future […] the enemy of timelessness, as the past which is fixed, and the present, which is ineffable, are not” (Driver 250).

What exists in the penumbra created by the superimposition of Poetics upon Angels in America is this use of the particular as a means to reveal a universal vision; however, the contextual form in which the hero's search occurs shifts the focus of the tragedy away from the hero to the world in which he exists. Prior Walter, the central protagonist of Angels in America, in fact, possesses several Aristotelian and Oedipal dimensions. He is at once, like Oedipus, a descendant from a noble family (depicted on the Bayeux tapestry) and simply a “man whom we know” (Aristotle 39; ch. 4), “neither outstanding in virtue and righteousness […]” [who] “falls into misfortune” (49; ch. 13). Furthermore, Prior, like Oedipus, suffers from a plague, the AIDS epidemic; and in the process of ridding himself of the effects of the plague, seeks both truth and meaning for his fate. Unlike Oedipus, however, Prior's search does not turn inward, resulting in a self-imposed blindness and isolation from the world. Although similarly blinded in his heroic transformation into a “prophet” for all those who have been abandoned by the “gods”—“I believe I've seen the end of things”¹ (II: 56) - Prior's journey is an expansive one, venturing into what Aristotle would most likely consider the realm of the “impossible” and “inexplicable” (58; ch. 24). In his search, Prior moves across time and space: from a discussion with his ancestors of centuries past to an interaction with the subconscious worlds of others; from wrestling with an angel in his hospital room to confronting the angels in heaven.

Prior's journey, therefore, is coterminous with the literary form of Angels in America that is so explicitly stated by Tony Kushner in the sub-title of the play: “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.” If we return to this essay's thesis that a “common assumption” of the intimate relationship between form and culture underscores an analysis of the tragic form described in Aristotle's Poetics and Kushner's Angels in America, then several questions emerge in regard to a “fantasia”: What is the relationship between form and culture in Angels in America? Is Angels in America a tragic work? And lastly, does the form of a fantasia necessarily clash with the form and function of tragedy as Aristotle describes them?

First, of all, an Aristotelian disclaimer: in regard to the use of the supernatural and the previously stated “impossible and inexplicable,” (58; ch. 24) Aristotle appears to subordinate considerations of form and content to the pleasurable, cathartic effect of “learning and inference” (Golden 44) through poetry: “Generally speaking, we must judge the impossible in relation to its poetic effect” (Aristotle 60; ch. 25). Thus, even though Aristotle states that “the plot should not consist of inexplicable incidents,” (58; ch. 24) and that “the solution of the story itself … should not require the use of the supernatural,” (52; ch. 15), Aristotle does seem to focus the objective of tragic poetry to the casual relationship between mimesis and the catharsis. Therefore, “what is impossible but can be believed should be preferred to what is plausible but unconvincing” (Aristotle 58; ch. 24). As previously stated in this essay, for the ancient Greeks the ordered aesthetic of classical tragedy almost perfectly reflects a harmonious view of the universe (Driver 48). Even though modern audiences may still realize universal truths from classical tragedy, its form and cathartic effects belong only to a specific culture and moment in history that produced them. Thus, as Raymond Williams explains, the development of Greek society had a deleterious effect on classical form:

It is no accident that as this unique culture changed, the chorus was the crucial element of dramatic form which was weakened and eventually discarded. The structure of feeling which, in the great period, had developed and sustained it as the dramatized tension and resolution of collective and individual experience, weakened and was lost, and with it a unique meaning of tragedy.

(18)

Consequently, what is considered as an “imitation, not of men, but of action and life, of happiness and misfortune” (42; ch. 6) and what is the literary “impossible” for each epoch would necessarily change in constancy with its social and ideological development.

Taken in this light, the form of a fantasia in Angels in America with its referencing of the “impossible and inexplicable” as its cultural context signifies a condition of the modern world that is in many ways the reverse of the ancient one Aristotle's Poetics reflects. As the Angel of America explains to Prior Walter, the epoch of the play is the “Age of Anomie,” (II: 56) in which the plastic form of the fantasia so well accommodates the chaotic and vertiginous 1980's. This sense of a fragmented and almost surreal America is echoed in Harper Pitt's description of a disordered modern life as “beautiful systems dying, fixed orders falling apart … everywhere things are collapsing, lies surfacing, systems of defense are giving way […]” (I: 16). A breaking apart of social and ideological rationality is visible as well as in the play's presentation of what can be described as a cinematic reality consisting of split scenes, simultaneous action scenes [an Aristotelian “no-no”: “tragedy cannot represent different parts of the action at the same time” (58; ch. 24)], dream sequences, sub-plots and even a bifurcation into two distinct dramas: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. The two plays in one, which are sometimes performed separately or jointly, express an almost schizophrenic confusion as to what is real or illusory in the modern world. It may not seem possible but it doesn't seem totally inappropriate or unconvincing that the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg explains to a smug Roy Cohn that “history is about to crack wide open,” (I: 112) or that Prior Walter and Harper Pitt for a moment share the same consciousness. Thus, as a “structure of feeling,” (Williams 18) the fantasia makes the “impossible” seem plausible; whether the fantasia achieves enough of a mimetic description of life to create an Aristotelian cathartic reaction is doubtful.

However, what the form of a fantasia does allow in Angels in America is enough range and scope to explore fully its “national themes.” Jointly stretching Poetics to the seams, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, in their multiple sub-plots and cross-cultural and historical references to Mormons, Jewish immigrants, and Bolsheviks, as well as their conflation of angels and apparitions, gays and straights, and the powerless and the powerful, encompass many perspectives: historical, sexual, political, psychological, and spiritual. What results is a shift of the focus away from the particular, as in classical tragedy, to a general condition. Disorder is seen to originate not from the effect of fate on the individual but rather from society itself. If “revolution as such is in a common sense, tragedy, a time of chaos and suffering,” (Williams 65) then a relationship between social upheaval and tragic form is a valid one. Possibly George Bernard Shaw realized the same connection in similarly sub-titling Heartbreak House a “fantasia,” for the play concludes with the resonance of Great War bombers raining destruction on England. As the millennium approaches in Angels in America, society itself acquires a tragic dimension.

In an Oedipal fashion, the social world, as Prior Walter learns, has been abandoned by what seems to be a conservative, anti-progressive God who blames humankind for creating history, the “virus of time,” (II: 48) as his bureaucratic angels describe it. Cast out alone in the universe, society similarly suffers from blindness in its search for meaning, a condition of modern life cited by such political antipodes as the World's Oldest Living Bolshevik, whose speech at the Kremlin in “Perestroika” recounts the failure of past ideologies—“I promise the blind eyes will see again […] show me the words that will reorder the world” (II: 14)—and the generation of the 80's, “Reagan's children,” who are described by Louis Ironson as “selfish and greedy and loveless and blind” (I: 74). In the “Age of Anomie” blindness manifests itself as a world lost in its illusions in which truth, power, stability and community have become indeterminate. For Joe Pitt, the Reagan era “[…] is a great thing. The truth restored. Law restored. That's what President Reagan has done […]. He says, ‘Truth exists and can be spoken’” (I: 26). Pace Harper Pitt: “So when we think we have escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth” (I: 32).

Lies and illusions as a condition of a social tragedy also arise within the context of AIDS in Angels in America. AIDS as a metaphor for social tragedy exists not only in the pity and fear felt for the physical suffering of two characters, Prior Walter and Roy Cohn, and by implication, for all those stricken with the disease, but also for a group of protagonists who are specifically connected to them. In the unity formed around their suffering from a common lack of identity, these protagonists are reminiscent of the Greek chorus in their representation of an expression of a “shared and […] collective experience” (Williams 18). What is essentially tragic about them—Joe Pitt, Harper Pitt, and Louis Ironson—is that each struggles with a state of false consciousness about him or herself, a group hamartia: for Joe, it exists in his conservative Mormon image as a straight man and husband belied by his true sexual identity; for Harper, it is in her role as a fulfilled wife and mother that is in truth a dream; and for Louis it is in his commitment as a lover to Prior Walter that is undermined by his inability to face life. For each of the group protagonists “to shed your skin, every old skin, one by one and then walk away unencumbered” (I: 72,73) requires the same kind of “moral choice” (52; ch. 15), which Aristotle felt necessary for the sole tragic figure. That moral choice, presented for each in a moment of Aristotelian recognition and reversal (Joe punches Louis and Harper slaps Joe), determines their “happiness and misfortune” (42; ch. 6). In Joe's situation, his choice leads him, like Oedipus, into isolation; while for Prior and Harper their decisions lead them to a greater sense of community.

Conversely, AIDS in Angels in America also lends itself as a metaphor for a tragic society that has lost its sense of community. Reagan-era individualism as a political force is personified in the play by the “power broker,” Roy Cohn, who excoriates his own fate as an AIDS victim, not only because it labels him as a gay man and therefore relegates him to a lower, minority status as a “nobody […] in the pecking order” (I: 45) of the power structure in Washington, but also because those in Cohn's view in the Reagan 80's who are considered the weak and therefore vulnerable are “booted out of the parade” (II: 62). Prior Walter, too, experiences feelings of isolation as a victim of the disease but with a different perspective. His reminiscence of a sea captain ancestor's shipwreck evokes a fearful image of a callous America as a lifeboat on a stormy sea in which those who lack authority because of disease are “pitched into freezing, turbulent water and salt and darkness to drown […] by implacable, unsmiling men” (I: 42).

Despite the considerable pathos that both AIDS victims Prior Walter and Roy Cohn arouse, the juxtaposition of these two almost Manichean characters serves to inhibit any cathartic reaction. Placed within the form of the fantasia, Prior and Cohn's stories create the double-plot of the tragicomedy, which mitigates the emotional extremities of pity and fear. Prior's recognition of himself as a prophet reverses his action in the play, transforming his previous moribund feelings to those of transcendence in his wrestling from the angels his blessing for “more life” (II: 48). Cohn's experience of AIDS, however, directs him otherwise. As prophecies of “modern conservatism,” (II: 81) Cohn's revelations to his young disciple, Joe Pitt, are those of existential terror. For Cohn AIDS avails him of no such recognition and reversal; instead what remains is that “life is full of horror; [and] nobody escapes, nobody, save yourself” (I: 58). Countering the movement of Prior Walter's “death” which brings him back to earth and community, Cohn dies alone, and any sense of pity for him is negated by the final hoax he plays on the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, whom he entreats for comfort as his mother. However, the fantasia's last image of Cohn in heaven as God's lawyer is a humorous one (Cohn revels in insult comedy throughout both plays), exemplifying the Aristotelian rubric that tragedy, in Prior's case, imitates “the noble deeds of noble men” and comedy “the actions of meaner men” (39; ch. 4). The tragicomic fantasia mediates these forms, and in doing so enables Angels in America to achieve a harmonious conclusion with Cohn somewhat punished and Walter somewhat rewarded.

Again, working from our common assumption of the correlation between literary form and culture, we can see by distancing our two works from each other that diachronic movement underscores one and clashes with the other. For the Greeks, the mimetic form of tragedy prescribed in Aristotle's Poetics reveals universal truths that seem “incapable of being influenced by human initiative” (Esslin 134). Kushner's fantasia, on the other hand, brings the whole universe onto the stage to be wrestled with or altered however the playwright's imagination dictates. Whereas the more static form of Poetics uses history to achieve a credible connection to contemporary life, Angels in America extols an epic vision as a way to access and alter the future. Themes of the necessity of change and accepting responsibility for our actions are redolent in both Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. Moreover, they are expressed from equally divergent sources as well: the Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz plays cards in heaven to continue the human experience of the “the Unknown, the Future,” (II: 137) and Louis Ironson, who relishes a bloody lip gained from his confrontation with Joe Pitt, acknowledges that if he didn't suffer for abandoning Prior, “the universe would become unbalanced” (II: 33). Thus, what separates classical theory and modern practice in Poetics and Angels in America is that there is more to draw from the tragic in the contemporary world than an emotional catharsis and acceptance of the way things are; instead we must, too, wrestle with our angels.

Note

1. All references are to the following edition: Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches and Part Two: Perestroika. New York: Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 1992, 1993, 1994).

Works Cited

Aristotle. The “Poetics.” Sources of Dramatic Theory. Ed. Michael J. Sidnell. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 32-61.

Driver, Tom F. “Oedipus the King.” Classical Tragedy: Greek and Roman. Ed. Robert W. Corrigan. New York: Applause, 1990. 246-251.

Eagleton, Terry. Marxism and Literary Criticism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976.

Esslin, Martin. Brecht: The Man and His Work. New York: Anchor Books, 1971.

Golden, Leon. “Aristotle.” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 41-44.

Kushner, Tony. Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches. Part Two: Perestroika. New York: Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 1992, 1993, 1994.

Miller, Arthur. “Death of a Salesman: A Modern Tragedy?” Modern Theories of Drama. Ed. George W. Brandt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. 106-112.

Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.