Infinite Possibility and Inevitable Death
The true tragic form lies at the intersection of boundless hope and certain doom, where we encounter a reminder of what it means to be human.
By Shawn Phillip Cooper
A work that is successfully framed as a tragedy need not be grim and sad throughout. In fact, it almost certainly should not be unremittingly miserable: despite what Lemony Snicket might suggest to the contrary, truly successful tragedy is not merely a series of unfortunate events followed by an unhappy end. Shakespeare is the obvious place to look for confirmation: there is humour in Hamlet and there are fleeting triumphs of love in Romeo and Juliet. But, as in that latter work, the best tragedies begin by foregrounding knowledge of their fatal conclusions:
“Two households both alike in dignity
(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene)
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life,
Whose misadventur’d piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.”
(Romeo and Juliet, Prologue ll. 1–8)
As a scholar of Arthurian literature, I hold that the absolute pinnacle of the tragic form is to be found in the Matter of Britain, best exemplified by Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, and further developed in two successive works: Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. In these three works, the tragic form is at its most profound because the certainty of death and failure is known in advance and suffused throughout the narrative, and is therefore always in the background even as the texts focus on the hopes and optimism of youth. Examining why and how death functions in the Arthurian world helps us better to understand the fundamental essence of tragedy itself.
The story of King Arthur is moving because the reader is constantly aware that, in the end, Arthur will fail and die while, simultaneously, throughout the course of the narrative, every possibility of success is open to him. The title of Malory’s work—Le Morte Darthur (The Death of Arthur)—makes it clear from the very beginning what its central focus is, despite the fact that Arthur’s death occurs only at the end of the book. Reading the work with the knowledge of his coming death, Arthur appears nevertheless to stand upon the threshold of attaining victory—of building an earthly paradise in the form of a kingdom where the chivalric ethos is successfully and uncomplicatedly advanced as a principle of government, ushering in an age of justice, piety, courtesy, prowess, and peace. But the reader is also aware that this is not to be, drawing attention to the seemingly paradoxical contrast between certain doom and optimistic possibility that is the existential essence of the human condition.
If the full arc of tragedy is to be displayed, it must have, as its foundation, its own antithesis. For this reason, King Lear begins with Lear in full command both of his unbowed senses and his mighty kingdom, with his dutiful daughters awaiting receipt of their royal patrimony. Likewise, to read of Arthur’s opening victory over the rebel kings and over the Emperor Lucius is to see the promising foundations of a Britain no longer in a state of historical chaos or subjugation. Not only Arthur, but also the kingdom itself, beholds an open horizon of seemingly limitless possibilities. Malory’s gift is his ability to present these potential futures as not only possible but attainable in spite of the reader’s knowledge that a far unhappier fate awaits. So powerful are these narrative gifts, married to the desperate human yearning for justice and goodness to prevail, that Le Morte Darthur places the reader in the curious position of believing two contradictory things: both that Arthur can succeed in building an enduring Arthurian kingdom, and that Arthur must fail and die with his task incomplete and his noble ideas in ruins. The result is Arthur as Schrödinger’s King, at once both triumphant and not, as long as one does not look inside the final chapter of the narrative.
Memento mori is the first and most essential component of tragedy.
Death and failure are always lurking in the Matter of Britain, especially in the optimism of Arthur’s youth and amongst the joy of his wedding to Gwenyvere. When he selects his bride, Malory reports that “Merlin warned the king covertly that Gwenyvere was not wholesome for him to take to wife. For he warned him that Launcelot should love her and she him again.” Arthur is not to be moved, and Merlin wryly observes, “But thereas man’s heart is set, he will be loth to return.” Arthur ignores the warning of his best counsellor, though he can hardly doubt its provenance. In the full flush of joyous, lovesick youth, with its invincible aura of optimism, he cannot bring himself to compass the grim but distant consequences of his actions. Arthur thus embodies the human experience of possessing a seemingly infinite horizon of possibility beyond which is the absolute certainty of death. Arthur proceeds heedless of Merlin’s warning, and the narrator moves quickly over the dark prophecy, thereby ensuring that the reader does likewise. In this way, the reader begins to share the fatal vision of the Arthurian court, hurrying past the warning signs and focusing on the diverting pleasures and adventures of the Round Table knights. But the fatal future is known, not only to Merlin, but to Arthur and the reader alike. When it comes, it comes despite the best efforts of might and men who have always been aware of and able to prepare for it, and thus it seems more, not less, potent for having been known all along.
The fullness of the tragedy comes not only in the unhappy fall of the Arthurian court and the death of Arthur that is proclaimed in the title. As T. H. White observes near the end of The Once and Future King, it is not the fatal means which is the heart of tragedy, but the greater power which lies behind it and governs it to its ultimate execution:
“People write tragedies in which fatal blondes betray their paramours to ruin, in which Cressidas, Cleopatras, Delilahs, and sometimes even naughty daughters like Jessica bring their lovers or their parents to distress: but these are not the heart of tragedy. They are fripperies to the soul of man. What does it matter if Antony did fall upon his sword? It only killed him.”
In this passage, White is writing of Mordred’s unhappy fate as a knight who is at once both son and nephew to Arthur, having been conceived in accidental incest between Arthur and his half-sister Morgawse. White goes on to postulate that it is the mother’s love, not the lover’s, which condemns the subject of the tragedy—here, Mordred—to a smothered, walking death, living only as a vessel for the will of the mother to be expressed through him. In such a reading, the seeds of individual tragedy have their genesis even before the subject’s birth—as in this case, where Mordred’s fate is sealed at the moment of conception. Thus the structure of individual tragedy runs parallel to the structure of tragedy more generally, in which the tragic arc is presented when (or even before) the story commences, as in both Le Morte Darthur and Romeo and Juliet. Moreover, in both stories, the means by which that tragedy is delivered appears to be outside of the control of the subjects: they are innocent of its wroth but are caught up in its effects natheless, such that their fates seem inescapable.
We may begin to determine the elements of tragedy by considering that these works connect the literary or dramatic presentation of the tragic tale to the grand narrative of the human experience. Hence, the first part of the equation is the absolute foreknowledge of the tragic character’s ultimate end. In this, all humans share, as Thomas Gray observes in his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”:
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave. (ll. 33–36)
Memento mori is the first and most essential component of tragedy: “remember your death” or, better still for the purpose of the tragedian, “remember that you will die”. Without this principle, such a tale would be only the story of a man-like animal, semi-sentient, blithely unaware of the limitations imposed upon him by mortality. He may live and die in an affecting way, but he would do so innocent of the existential anguish experienced by sentient beings who have advance knowledge that their own deaths must, in time, come. It is impossible for a reader to see their own existential challenges embodied in such a story; it cannot tell us anything about how to face our very different fate. With the understanding that death is coming for the tragic subject, readers are capable of uniting their own existential anxieties with that subject: their awareness of Arthur’s fate becomes a point of resonance for their own existential awareness. Hence, the tragic subject’s actions and inevitable death are potently experienced as foreshadowing the readers’ own inevitable demise, in the same way that the tragedy foreshadows the death of its subject.
Oedipus, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet all craft schemes that seem so likely to succeed that they beguile the very readers who know that their attempts must come to naught.
In addition to foreknowledge of inevitable death, the successful tragedy must also suggest the apparent ability (coupled with an actual inability) of the tragic subjects to escape their fate. Oedipus, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet all craft schemes that seem so likely to succeed that they beguile the very readers who know that their attempts must come to naught. Here, too, Le Morte Darthur excels as being a complete text that is about the scheme by which fate might be avoided. Arthur’s attempt is thus summed up in Tennyson’s opening lines to “The Coming of Arthur” from his own Arthuriad, Idylls of the King:
“For many a petty king ere Arthur came
Ruled in this isle, and ever waging war
Each upon other, wasted all the land;
And still from time to time the heathen host
Swarmed overseas, and harried what was left.
And so there grew great tracts of wilderness,
Wherein the beast was ever more and more,
But man was less and less, till Arthur came.
For first Aurelius lived and fought and died,
And after him King Uther fought and died,
But either failed to make the kingdom one.
And after these King Arthur for a space,
And through the puissance of his Table Round,
Drew all their petty princedoms under him,
Their king and head, and made a realm, and reigned.” (ll. 5–19)
Tennyson goes on to detail the period of strife and chaos which precedes Arthur’s kingship, with Leodogran crying out, “Arise, and help us thou! / For here between the man and beast we die.” This Arthur sets out to do in Le Morte Darthur just as in Idylls of the King, first by quelling the civil strife, and then through successful campaigns abroad. The unification of the kingdom seems to be at hand, but there are cracks in the foundation: not only Gwenyvere and Morgawse, but also the Quest for the Grail, which costs the lives of many Round Table knights. Arthur thus finds himself reliant on but a few surviving counsellors, including unhappy knights like Aggravayne and Mordred, who seek the satisfaction of their private hatreds rather than the good of the realm, precisely at the moment when the stability of the realm is most threatened. When the end comes, as it must, it is the heaviest possible blow because, as readers, we have allowed Malory’s tale to beguile us into believing that Arthur might escape his doom; and, in so believing, we begin to think that it might be possible for us to escape our own fate, as well. The possibilities afforded to us, it turns out, are not endless after all.
For this reason, encountering a well-wrought tragedy makes us aware of far more than the abstract fact of death as such; it forces us to grapple with the death of a whole universe of possibilities. And it is so affecting because it reminds us, at some deep and terrifying level, of the possibilities that we have wilfully abandoned or squandered, and which others would have cherished, had they lived. Yet that is what it is to be human; to live in the necessity that every choice is made to the exclusion of all others, without perfect knowledge of what will follow or what would have been. The feelings that follow those choices—joy and pain—shape us into the people we become, and works like Le Morte Darthur remind us that the experiences of joy and tragedy alike are an inescapably intertwined part of what it is to be human.
Shawn Phillip Cooper, Ph.D. is Assistant Editor at The European Conservative and Vice President of the International Courtly Literature Society’s North American Branch. His work, addressing the intersection of culture and politics, has been published in venues including The European Conservative, The Lamp, Encomia, Law & Liberty, The American Mind, North American Anglican, Forma, and in scholarly volumes including Courtly Pastimes (2022), and Unveiling the Green Knight: Critical Essays on Gawain’s Journey (2023).
