As mentioned in the previous Chronicle, my interest in paradox and in what Goldmann called the “tragic” worldview (vision du monde) goes back to my years at Johns Hopkins and to writings situated within the corpus of what was called at the time “French Theory.” Although Goldmann was not present at the famous Hopkins conference in 1966 that was its original catalyst, he was a significant presence in the US as well as in France. Goldmann was present at my doctoral oral at Hopkins, and when I taught at Indiana University from 1967-69, he served there for a semester as Visiting Professor. Sadly, he passed away prematurely in 1970 at the age of 57.
Rereading Le Dieu caché, which I had not opened since the 1970s, was an enlightening experience. It is a brilliant book, of remarkable rigor and thoroughness. Yet the fact that for Goldmann the “tragic” mode of thought that he attributes to Pascal and Racine—and subsequently to Kant and Goethe—is viewed in relation to an overall neo-Marxist perspective very much in the spirit of the later work of Hungarian Georg Lukács, that is, a perspective in which the “end of history” envisioned by Marx and his disciples (which many thought, ironically enough, had rather been realized with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991), provided an overall perspective that can clearly no longer be sustained.
This does not prevent Goldmann’s analysis of these works and of the worldview they embody from being rigorous and enlightening, but it does require us to reconceive it in a historical context where we can no longer imagine Communism, nor indeed any other mode of social organization, as defining the “end of history.” Above all, this notion of a worldview implies that social groups in early modern and modern society evolved more or less coherent understandings not simply of their expected career paths, but of their lives’ fulfillment of the requirements of the sacred—in Christian societies, the degree to which they could feel assured of salvation as opposed to damnation. Goldmann’s interest in the “tragic” reflects a problematic moment in the socio-economic functions of a social group, the noblesse de robe, which was opposed to the traditional higher nobility, the noblesse d’épée, descended from the military leaders of the past. These nobles of middle-class origins, engaged in legal and governmental functions, were with the progression of Louis XIV’s “absolute” monarchy in the process of losing their privileges and being replaced by functionaries wholly dependent on the king.
The tragic worldview of the Jansenists, among whom were Pascal and Racine, reflected this sense of déclassement, leading the more extreme members of the group to abandon “the world” altogether, and Pascal in particular to conceive Christian life in paradoxical terms, as (in contrast to Judaism) requiring belief in what could never be demonstrated but which our only hope was to “bet on” as our chance for salvation. Goldmann sees this tragic worldview as a major step in the direction of the “dialectical” thinking inaugurated by Hegel and given its “materialist” concreteness by Marx and his followers. And indeed, despite the breakup of the USSR, nations following versions of the Soviet formula, China in particular, remain in contention for world leadership today, in a curious “red-green” semi-alliance with Islamism to overturn the Judeo-Christian West’s longstanding hegemony.
How then should we understand the tragic worldview in the context of GA? By viewing the tragic, the worship of the “hidden God,” as an ancestor of Marxism, Goldmann might be thought to be suggesting that the same paradoxicality that was central to Pascal’s thought is, or should be, at the center of Marxism, which would certainly require a good deal of dialectics to explain its connection to the dogmatic, tyrannical politics that has characterized every society Marxism has inspired. But on the contrary, for Goldmann and all Marxists, dialectical materialism presumably resolves the paradox of the tragic by defining a praxis guaranteed to lead to the classless utopia of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”…
As I understand it, the paradox discovered by Pascal as implicit in Christianity is rather the source of the Western maximalization of personal/economic freedom that has maintained the socio-economic leadership of the world since the Renaissance. But there is no guarantee that the level of disorder that the individual freedoms of Western-style nations tend to inspire, although a stimulus to individual creativity, can maintain itself in the postmodern context of increasingly “intelligent” machines in competition with the more disciplined autocracies that surround it. As a result, we still remain in the paradoxical world of Pascal, betting on what might be called our postmodern version of Judeo-Christianity against the more highly concentrated efforts driven by strict top-down control, in the hope that the future development of AI will never be able to abolish the advantage of the fallible but “dialectical” human psyche.
Given Goldmann’s recognition of the open-ended nature of Pascal’s paradoxical view of our place in the world, I have no real quarrel with his reading of the Pensées and Pascal’s other writings, save that he views them in a “dialectical” perspective of which Marxism represents the fulfillment. For me, this sense of a predefined historical trajectory is ultimately incompatible with what I consider an appropriate reading of literary/artistic works in general, and tragedy in particular. Goldmann’s quasi-sacralization of the “tragic” character—implying the identification of this role with a future synthesis that transcends the paradox in which the character was caught and destroyed—is an artifact of his “dialectical” philosophy of history.
And in particular, concerning Phèdre, as discussed in Chronicle 843, although Goldmann admires this masterpiece as much as I do, his analysis of the play significantly avoids discussing the passage that seems to me without question the high point of the tragedy: the monologue in which the heroine, after noting Hippolyte’s resemblance to his father, proceeds to substitute him for Thésée in his descent into the Labyrinth, then Phèdre herself for Ariane as the bearer of the thread that will allow him to return from its depths, then imagines herself as accompanying him into the Labyrinth, and finally, forgetting their assigned task, converting what had been the monster’s lair into a trysting place in which she both finds and loses herself in her love for Hippolyte.
Goldmann quotes only a few lines from the beginning of this speech and deliberately omits any mention of the Labyrinth’s imaginary transformation. And as if to justify this omission, Goldmann insists throughout that the tragic heroine embodies an authenticity in attempting to realize her paradoxical desire that puts her on a higher ontological level than the merely “worldly” characters, whose inconsistent lives make them so to speak figures of situation comedy.
Clearly Goldmann’s notion of tragic paradox is at odds with the spectator’s experience. No doubt Phèdre is of a different intensity and significance from the other characters, and in this sense, closer to the sacred, but, in contrast to Pascal’s infinitely deferred bet, the tragic hero’s quest for immediate satisfaction must always fail. Goldmann is aware that Phèdre isn’t what we would consider a “good person,” but he takes her literary superiority as the equivalent of an ontological superiority to the non-tragic characters, who lack the special charm of tragic paradox. What fascinates us in Phèdre, nowhere more than in her labyrinth speech, is the passion that transforms a hiding place for evil into its opposite, the extremes of both destruction and redemption both needing to be kept hidden from the everyday world. But when in Act 5: 3, Aricie says to Thésée that, although he has killed many monsters, he is still leaving one alive, the spectator cannot miss—nor reject—this clear reference to Phèdre, whose banishment of Hippolyte through the agency of her servant Oenone, as we will soon discover, has brought about his violent death.
No doubt the Jansenists disdained “the world” of everyday life, but I cannot accept Goldmann’s judgment that when in the final scene Thésée reestablishes order, pledges to bury his son and to adopt Aricie, Hippolyte’s beloved, to take on the role of his daughter, we experience this as “an abrupt passage from tragedy to what, in itself, would be a drama, but being so close to the tragic universe, is on the border of comedy and farce” (p. 440). On the contrary, the sacrifice of the tragic hero, here, Phèdre’s suicide that ends the play, allows real life to go on; those who seek to embody, to live out paradox are false idols, for the audience as well as their fellow characters—if not for the critics! I am sure that Racine would have found Goldmann’s reading the height of perversity, as though the esthetic value of Phèdre (and not just that of Phèdre) were the equivalent of a moral value. We may pity Phèdre and wish that her paradox could somehow have found a worldly resolution—a wish whose impossibility of fulfillment is the very substance of tragedy—but in the Jansenist worldview as described by Pascal our only chance is to wager on the infinitesimal chance of redemption.
And it is in this perspective that, once more, the minimal starting point of GA allows us to avoid turning the paradoxical nature of the sacred’s relationship to the “objective” world into an ethic. The greatness of Christianity is no doubt defined by its insistence on the paradoxical affirmation of its spiritual truth as objective reality, but the temptation for us mere mortals to see paradox as transcending reality itself must always be resisted. To aspire to bring together good and evil so as to abolish the latter’s presence in the world can only be done one step at a time; the tragic figure, in seeking to precipitate their synthesis, can only destroy the good along with the evil.
If we merely recall humanity’s point of departure in deferral, we will never lose sight of why such deferral—of desire that seeks immediate satisfaction in its object independently of the needs of the community, so powerfully illustrated in Phèdre’s labyrinth fantasy—remains always necessary if the act of fulfilling one’s desire is to be moral, fulfilling the need of the community as well as of the desiring individual. The imaginary beauty of the reconciliation of evil with good can exist only on the scene of culture, where reality is deferred by its representation; that is the substance of Aristotle’s Poetics.
In the most simple terms, the sacred is the human community’s sense of what prevents conflict among its members from endangering its coherence and consequently its survival. It is experienced variously by each individual, but it motivates the creation of religions, which insist that the scenic element of the human be reinforced and shown to lead to communal unity.
The scenic portrayal of fictions: the arts, and most particularly, literature, offer imaginary utopias of various kinds that lead, in the broadest sense, from disorder to order, whether or not to the satisfaction of the characters. The originary model of this “narrative” process is the originary scene itself, as the first example of the establishment of a human order, and even if the tragic protagonist must suffer death or expulsion, the end result is a reestablishment of order.
I would trace GA back to Pascal because his conception of the bet as the ultimate “proof” of the existence of God, or in other terms, the meaningfulness and presumed eternality of human life, is in effect the concretization in each human life of the meaningfulness of the survival of the human community. As he said, il faut parier: we must make the bet, since our continued existence as a species, in which the différance enforced by our common sense of the sacred has permitted/obliged us to create a scene of representation on which we use the signs of language to refer to potential objects of desire and hopefully to organize their distribution and eventually their production in the interests of our community, depends on the perpetuation and flourishing of this scenic structure for the good of the human community. Pascal sees this as a bet on the existence of God; but the way in which a human-like mind can be considered to preside over the universe is ultimately a model for our action, a way of judging in what ways our acts can be seen as conducive to the success of our species.
Western civilization as a transcultural phenomenon began with the adoption, which I see as the discovery, of monotheism—the unity of the sacred, with the One God as a guarantee of the unity of human morality. Christianity adds to its Jewish basis the anthropological revelation that the sacred is not other than, but merely the extreme limit of the human, yet one we all bear within ourselves.
This is why I will never forget (see Chronicles 530 and 834) Girard’s saying to me nous sommes tous fils de Dieu—we are all sons of God. As Pascal saw clearly, we are all embarqués, our very lives embody the pari, whether we like it or not. However differently we envision the embodiment of the sacred, its existence, as holding us together in the face of our rivalries, is what we must count on to assure at least the possibility of our survival.
Whether this will serve to protect us against the violence of the cosmos is a different matter, although as I suggested in Chronicle 841, we will at least have the consolation of anticipating with some confidence the evolution of increasingly complex beings with increasing abilities to manipulate their environment, thus making it likely that whatever happens to humanity, it will have worthy successors who will some day discover and honor the memory of its greatness.