Dialogues with the Dead IV
Tragedies, Fatal Flaws, Humans.
Shiyoun Kim (Liz)
Some books are like people, those unforgettable few who come into our lives unexpected and leave us irrevocably changed. To many of us in the Faculty of Classics, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is such. Being the writer’s debut work published almost three decades ago, the novel is not, naturally, as highly acclaimed as her most recent Pulitzer-prize winning The Goldfinch. But it nevertheless enjoys cult-like adoration from its avid readers – a surprisingly large portion of which is claimed by teenagers – up until today. The plot of the novel, loosely summarised, surrounds a campus murder mystery heavily influenced by the ancient Greek tragedy The Bacchae of Euripides. The novel has a clique of classicists as central characters, among whom our unreliable first-person narrator Richard Papen stands. He starts the Proustian recollection of his university life, his friends, and their murder(s) with a question:
“Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw’, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does.”
The ‘fatal flaw’, also known as ‘the tragic flaw’, is a well-known literary notion which indicates “inherent defect or shortcoming in the hero of a tragedy, who is in other respects a superior being favoured by fortune”. In short, the fatal flaw is what makes the hero fall, causing the reversal of his fortune from good to bad. Most of the time this flaw of the hero is defined by simplifying his chief moral failing into one term; jealousy is attributed to Othello as his tragic flaw, irresolution/procrastination to Hamlet, and to our Richard, in his own words, “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs”¹. We see that the term ‘fatal flaw’ has strong moral/ethical undertone as it is often interchangeable with the word ‘vice’ in these contexts.
Considering that the concept of the fatal flaw originated from Aristotle’s idea of ἁμαρτια (hamartia) in his Poetics, one of the earliest and the most influential work of literary criticism, it seems perfectly appropriate for Richard the ex-classicist to begin his own Bacchic tragedy with the question on his own hamartia. Yet upon a closer inspection of the Aristotelian terminology ἁμαρτια, we soon realise that there is an incongruity between Aristotle’s usage of hamartia and that of the fatal flaw in modern literature. For the verb ἁμαρτάνειν (hamartanein), from which the noun derives from, primarily means ‘to miss the mark’, ‘to mistake’, ‘to err’. Rarely is the verb charged with the moral connotations of sinning. The context in which Aristotle introduces the term ἁμαρτια reveals that the philosopher himself, in his discussion on the best plot of a tragedy, employs the word in the former sense. After establishing that the best tragedy should evoke pity and fear from the audience in order to produce the desired effect of catharsis, Aristotle further develops his idea on the optimal structure of the tragedy in terms of the peripeteia (a reversal of fortune/circumstances) of the tragic hero:
While the language of Poetics is in general notoriously cryptic, here Aristotle explicitly states that the idea of hamartia should not imply moral condemnation, as it would be counter-effective for the overall plot of the tragedy: if the tragic hero was an amoral, deprived sinner, we as an audience would not feel pity and fear at the sight of his eventual downfall but would deem it as justified punishment. The true force of Greek tragedy comes from witnessing a fellow human who is neither morally perfect nor a despicable criminal, but one who makes an error, a mistake that causes his suffering. Thus in Greek tragedies, the ‘hero’ does not carry the modern, Marvel-esque implication as someone who always saves the day, but the ‘tragic hero’ is a royal/noble-born who starts his life in good fortune, only for it to be overturned throughout the course of the tragic plot. On this ground we feel pity for the man, and fear that his fate as the result of an all-too-human mistake can become our own one day. Only after feeling the pity and fear, according to Aristotle, we can finally experience catharsis, the purification of our emotions and self-consciousness in this bewildering world.
How come, then, has the concept of hamartia transformed into the wholly misleading ‘fatal flaw’ in modern literature? At this point we must remember that between the Ancient Greeks and us in the modern world, centuries of Christianity stand. The term hamartia is employed in Christian theology for several usages, as shown in the Septuagint and New Testament. Firstly, the Greek word is interpreted as the straightforward act of sinning, as in Romans 5: 12 - “all have sinned”. Secondly, the word is also used to indicate the Christian idea of ‘the original sin’ of all men in the post-lapsarian world, as in Romans 3:9 - “[all is] under the power of sin”. The word is further employed in Stuart era sermons to depict man’s propensity for sin due to weakness, that the original inclination to sin in mankind comes from the weakness of the flesh². The fact that the branch of Christian theology dedicated to the study of sin is named Hamartiology is most revealing of all. This shift in the meaning of hamartia is reflective of the shift in the moral framing from the ancients’ culture of honour and shame to the Christians’ culture of guilt. The latter's traces are still deeply rooted in the Western societies of the present.
Let us now go back to Richard and his musing on his fatal flaw. Considering the author Donna Tartt’s background, it is very unlikely that she, a classicist herself during her college years, was unaware of the original Aristotelian meaning of hamartia. I think there is a purposeful duality in Richard’s warped interpretation of hamartia, designed to reveal how Richard, despite his yearning to be psychologically liberated, to be detached from all the modern mundanities he so despises in favour of the distant, strange world of the Ancient Greeks, is never free from his guilt, as his own morality is based on Western Christian society. The disparity between the meaning of hamartia and that of the fatal flaw is also a commentary on our own lens, through which we view ourselves and our tragedies; maybe there are no fatal flaws in real lives, maybe we are not flawed from birth - sinners who must seek forgiveness perpetually. Maybe our tragedies are due to nothing except that we are humans, for it is human to err.
¹ Tartt, D. 1992, The Secret History, Alfred A. Knopf, U.S., p. 5.
² Stillingfleet, E. 1707, Fifty Sermons Preached Upon Several Occasions, Phanix, London.