Au Revoir, Tragic Flaw

If only.

Oedipus the King ends with a great man brought low. Whose fault is it? His? His father’s? A mortal’s fate, that not even the gods control (or so it seems)? Why did it have to happen?

(If you need a refresher on the story, my apologies for not knowing how to put links to older posts here; please be so kind as to go to my home page and click away, starting with December 2023.)

Every time I’ve taught Oedipus the King, students struggle to find a way to keep Oedipus from fulfilling his fate. Many of them think that he could have avoided it. He knew that the prophecy said he was fated to kill his father. Why didn’t he vow never to kill anybody? The prophecy said that he was fated to have sex with his mother. Why didn’t he resign himself to not having sex with women? Why didn’t he just ask the people he thought were his parents if he was adopted? (Now we’re getting somewhere: Oedipus is a champion problem-solver, but still prone to mistakes.) Why didn’t he just accept the prophecy and stay put, and then it would never have been fulfilled? (See above: classic problem-solver move. Ask me how I know.)

Now, I am not mocking my students’ questions. I love questions (and most of my students). The play asks us to wonder about Oedipus and why he did what he did.

The obvious and (surprise) least helpful answer to these questions is that if Oedipus had chosen to do any of those sensible things, there would be no story. Sensible decisions stop stories dead. But an even less helpful answer is surprisingly popular.

When we get to the why and why not part of our discussion, someone will put their hand up and say, It all happened because of Oedipus’ tragic flaw. This person was paying attention in high school English class, for which I applaud them, in solidarity with teachers everywhere.

In case you have escaped hearing the term, ‘the tragic flaw’ is shorthand for the idea that the hero or heroine has something innately wrong with their character that causes tragedy in their lives. It is something that you have, like a disease, and it controls your actions.

Here’s what I don’t say in response to the person who offered the tragic flaw explanation, as much as I would love to: There was no such concept as a tragic flaw. It’s like saying that what’s wrong with Oedipus is that he’s not a Christian. There was no such thing as Christianity in the fifth-century BC.

I don’t say that - straight off, anyway – because it makes the person who offered the answer feel stupid, and that, as the young people say, is off-brand for me. What I say is, I’m so glad you brought that up! There’s an interesting history behind that idea.

Buckle up.

 ‘Tragic flaw’ and its close relation, ‘fatal flaw,’ are mistranslations of a single word in Aristotle’s Poetics, which he wrote 100 years after Oedipus the King’s first performance.  The word is hamartia, and its most basic meaning is ‘error.’ The term was used in the context of archery as well: it meant ‘to miss the mark.’ (It’s pronounced ha-mar-TEE-ah, although I’ve heard people say haMARSHee-a).

Here’s what Aristotle said.

“This is what makes a tragedy: The tragic character, a person of high station but not a perfect model of good behavior, falls into a miserable state, not due to depravity but because of an error.”

“Error” – that’s hamartia.

The difference between a flaw and an error is important. An error is not a flaw. An error is an action based on misapprehension or an unfortunate impulse. Persistent errors may be indicative of character defects, or Satanic influence; or they may not. Depends on the error, the person, and the circumstances. A flaw, by contrast, is something inherent, some kind of spiritual disfigurement.

Why is this mistranslation of one word worth even thinking about? For starters, it does not help us understand tragedy to say that tragic heroes are tragic heroes because they have tragic flaws. More importantly, however, this notion of a tragic flaw keeps us from appreciating the richness and complexity of Greek tragedy, the way in which, to quote Aristotle again: “a tragedy creates in the audience feelings of pity and fear, and subsequently a catharsis [purging] of those feelings.”

And yet, in my experience, people don’t want to hear that there is no tragic flaw. They like the idea of a tragic flaw, or they have fond memories of a teacher who liked the idea, and I have gone and ruined it all. Seriously, people get upset. I’ve had my credentials as a classicist questioned.

We get to ask a meta-question now: Where did things go wrong for hamartia? Why does this error persist?

The current use in English is roughly 100 years old. I can’t say with complete certainty, but the detective work I’ve done points to a particular translation by an influential classicist, the happily named S.W. Butcher. He gave it to the world in his 1929 translation of the Poetics. The mistake was repeated by another influential scholar, Francis Fergusson, and somehow ‘tragic flaw’ took hold of the public imagination, especially in school curricula. There it remains, taught in high schools everywhere, and that is how it gets into college classes on Greek tragedy, where I have to shut it down.

Classicists have been complaining about the fatal mistranslation of hamartia for a very long time. A favorite example of mine comes from one Isabel Hyde, graduate of Somerville College at Oxford. She expressed her proper indignation on the subject in the July 1963 issue of Modern Language Review, saying that “all serious modern scholarship agrees that there is no such term anywhere in Aristotle,” but “the good news has not yet reached the recesses of the land, and many young students of literature are still apparently instructed in the theory of the tragic flaw; a theory which appears at first sight to be a most convenient device for analyzing tragedy but which leads the unfortunate user of it into a quicksand of absurdities in which he rapidly sinks, dragging down the tragedies with him.”

(Miss Hyde did not live to see the worst of it. When I typed ‘tragic flaw’ into my magic search engine, up came twelve entries for ‘Martha Stewart’s tragic flaw.’ The wisdom of the internet says that her TF was greed. I think it was being a woman who made money all on her own and believed that she could do what men do without punishment and who thus needed to be made an example of.)

Now, there are many kinds of errors, some of them intellectual, some of them wrong choices, some inconsequential, some the cause of tragic events. So we do in fact have room to translate hamartia in more than one way. Nevertheless, there is no evidence from other occurrences of the word in Classical literature that it means anything other than error. In New Testament Greek, however, which is separated from Aristotle’s Greek by several hundred years, the word hamartia taken on the meaning of “sin,” as in ‘the error of your ways.’ That may be at the root of the confusion.

Of course, there are other words for actions and qualities that lead to disaster, disaster and arrogant fools being the stock in trade of the Greek tragic world (and ours, at the moment):

-até: madness sent by a god           

-being a nepios: thinking you can achieve something that you can’t; being given to folly

-hubris: assertion of your privilege with the threat of or use of physical violence, running roughshod over someone, e.g., police brutality. (This word is even more misunderstood than hamartia, but we grow weary of correcting error for the moment.) To be hubristic is to not recognize that the laws and customs of the civilized world apply to you, as if you were a god; only the gods can do whatever they want.                     

-ignobility, i.e., not following your family’s aristocratic code of honor    

-greediness

But Aristotle chose none of these for his famous definition of the tragic hero. The Homeric heroes, by contrast, absolutely live to make those kinds of errors. Aristotle said that tragedy begins with the Iliad, and comedy with the Odyssey. I don’t know about the Odyssey as a comedy – some hideous and needless killings take place – but yes to the Iliad as the cradle of Greek tragedy. More about that later.

Next: a little known play about Oedipus, also by Sophocles, the work of his great old age, in which our hero appears to agree with Albert Camus, who famously said that there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.