Abstract
This chapter focuses on tragedy, disgust as an affect, and sets the conditions for applying Tomkins’ theories to the culturally specific yet universal case studies. Disgust-contamination scripts are proposed as ubiquitous and formative but unacknowledged emotional experiences in tragedy. Shame plays a significant role in tragedy, primarily as a “catalyst for change” in character behaviour. The chapter considers tragedy in human life to show how and why literary tragedy is more narrowly defined, particularly in emotional terms. Analysing literary tragedy leads to formulating a singular concept called hamartia-até, which represents relative but problematic degrees of action-knowledge for the hero with inevitable tragic consequences. The idea of rejection in tragedy follows, and the pharmakos (scapegoat) reveals the “trope of disgust” in tragedy and the concept of miasma, or “pollution.” The chapter circles back to discussion of Tomkins’ ideas about disgust (de)contamination and shame damage-reparation scripts and applies them to tragedy.
The Case Studies
Having set the theoretical conditions, the three case studies belong under the rubric of psychoanalytical readings. If readers accept that Tomkins’ affect-script theory can reinvigorate psychoanalytical discussions, then the interpretive case studies can equally refresh correlated scholarship.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
Milton, Paradise Lost
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Notes
- 1.
This perverse observation, or observed perversion, I think, belongs within one aspect of Kristeva’s abjection, which recognizes that it is “not the lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order.” Abjection is “immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, and friend who stabs you” (1982, 4), and which thus makes nazis (intentional lowercase) possible.
- 2.
Although Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone follow an apparent chronology, they were not written as a set, in keeping with the Ancient Greek custom of presenting a trilogy of tragedies plus a comedy but individually circa 426, 405, and 441 BCE, respectively (Grene 1991a, 1).
- 3.
“It cannot be too strongly insisted, however, that tragedy was not itself ritual, having none of that rigid repetitive character by which ritual is marked, though tragedies did incorporate ritual features if the action so demanded (and choral odes often take the form of hymns and use hymn-language )” (Easterling 1985a, 262).
- 4.
See Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 366–68 and “Letter to Fleiss, October 15, 1897,” Freud Reader, pp. 114–16.
- 5.
Freud begins Totem and Taboo, subtitled “Resemblances between the psychic lives of savages and neurotics,” by identifying the “aborigines of Australia” as the “most backward and wretched” of tribes, whom he also erroneously describes as “cannibals” (1918, 4). They thus represent “savage” in contrast to his assumed superior European civilization. The colonial terrorism of this position is clear, though that critique diverges from my purposes here.
- 6.
Indicative of a growing interest in disgust as a ‘core emotion,’ in March 2014, The International Society for Research on Emotion published a special edition of their newsletter, Emotion Researcher, which focussed on “Understanding Disgust.”
- 7.
I must also acknowledge Dan Kelly’s (2011) Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust, which aims to explore “the psychological mechanisms underlying the main features of the emotion” and to explain “the evolutionary pressures that molded the emotion into its current form” (3), particularly with regard to morality. Kelly’s book is good, though focussed on issues of cognition and the “architecture” (4) thereof, and relevant literature within the realm of empirical studies. I’ve left Kelly’s book out of the body of my argument given his cognitive focus, which diverges from my affect bias, even while I acknowledge the necessary interpenetration of affect and cognition. To Kelly’s credit, he attempts to account for the link between the innate, evolutionary functions of disgust and its sublimation into higher-order cognitive and moral functions, and so to that end, he appears to be accounting for the shift from disgust as a drive auxiliary into a sublimated signal of disapproval both to the self and others as per Tomkins. There is much in Kelly’s book that owes a debt to the antecedent work of Silvan Tomkins—the “affect program” (15), higher-order cognition as executive control via an “execution subsystem” (37), and facial feedback loops (66)—so it is a shame that Kelly does not appear to know this, even while citing Darwin and Ekman.
- 8.
See Carroll Izard, Human Emotions (New York: Plenum Press, 1977, chapter 13, p. 340). See also Rozin et al. (1999), “The CAD triad hypothesis” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76(4); “CAD” represents contempt, anger, disgust in community, autonomy, divinity.
- 9.
“Our sensory systems are responsible for generating an internal representation of the outside world, including its chemical (taste and olfaction) and physical (mechanical, sound, vision and temperature)…. Taste is in charge of evaluating the nutritious content of food and preventing the ingestion of toxic substances…. In humans, taste has the additional value of contributing to the overall pleasure and enjoyment of a meal. Surprisingly, although we can taste a vast array of chemical entities, it is now generally accepted that, qualitatively, they evoke few distinct taste sensations: sweet, bitter, sour, salty and savoury (or umami )” (Chandrashekar et al. 2006, 288). See also Rozin (1982) for an informative discussion of gustatory/olfactory conflation in “‘Taste-smell confusions’ and the duality of the olfactory sense.” According to Aspler , taste requires some 25,000 molecules of a substance, whereas a healthy human can smell as little as 400 molecules and discern about 5000 smells (1994, 38). For a thorough discussion of smell and taste information distinction in the context of wine tasting, see Ronald Jackson (2009), Wine Tasting: a professional handbook, particularly Chaps. 3 and 4 on olfaction and gustation, respectively.
- 10.
Other psychoanalytically oriented theorists and therapists—Adamson and Sedgwick in the humanities and Nathanson , Wurmser , and Kaufman in psychoanalytics—have done much the same with shame. By comparison, Tomkins wrote that the “history of shame is also a history of civilization” (1987, 156). He also wrote: “A history of learned contempt as it appears in philosophy and science, in manners and morals, and in esthetics would be nothing less than the story of civilization” (1963, 2: 240).
- 11.
The OED (1989) gives Northrop Frye and his Anatomy of Criticism fourth credit for the introduction and use of pharmakos in English, after Harrison in 1903, A. Le Marchant (1923) with Greek Religion to the Time of Hesiod, and J. Buchan (1926) in The Dancing Floor.
- 12.
Harpocration was an Alexandria-based Greek lexicographer, c. second century CE (Smith 1958, 139).
- 13.
The other three questions are: how may men and women “establish connections between life and death, so that death is not a meaningless termination of everything?”; “live responsibly in the absence of freedom?”; and “live decently together in a world full of evil, hurt, and pain ?” (Alford 1992, 8).
- 14.
Alford : Klein’s paranoid child projects “hate and love into the world” and onto the mother; the schizoid child “holds good and bad rigidly apart” and the mother is bifurcated into “two beings: good mother and bad mother” (1992, 11).
- 15.
The other four scenarios are: a good person moves from bad to good fortune; an evil person moves from good to bad; an evil person moves from bad to good fortune; and an in-between person changes from bad to good.
- 16.
“… unqualified good people must not appear to fall from good fortune to bad; for that is neither pitiable nor fearful; it is rather, repellant ” (Aristotle; Golden trans. 1989, 50). “… it should not show (I) decent men undergoing a change from good fortune to misfortune; for this is neither terrifying nor pitiable , but shocking ” (Aristotle; Janko trans. 1987, 16).
- 17.
Definitions in square brackets are drawn from Belfiore’s own appended glossary.
- 18.
In terms of object relations , Klein (1980) conceived two basic infant “positions,” as opposed to phases, between which they could freely move: the earlier manifesting paranoid-schizoid child splits the mother into a frustrating, punishing “bad” breast and a gratifying, rewarding “good” breast; in the developmental depressive position, the mother acquires rudimentary subjectivity whom the infant fears hurting. For another application of Klein’s ideas of envy and greed to tragedy, see Patrick Roberts (1975), The Psychology of Tragic Drama.
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Lucas, D.A. (2018). Tragedy and the Trope of Disgust. In: Affect Theory, Genre, and the Example of Tragedy. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94863-8_3
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