Most of us vaguely remember encountering Marx’s pithy observation about history repeating itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. Repetition can be absurd, the embarrassingly shallow and artificial effort to recreate what’s lost, or to appropriate the dramatic dignity of past events to clothe the naked triviality of what is currently going on. Marx was thinking of the surreally awful politics of early- to mid-19th-century France; but the comment applies to a wide range of political phenomena – to various attempts to “take back” sovereignty, make America great again, restore the timeless integrity of the Russian world, and so on. But to list these – and to think of what a second Donald Trump presidency might mean in the US, for example – reminds us that ‘“farce” in this context does not preclude a new round of bloody catastrophe. It may not be classical tragedy, but the body count is still high.
Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips have produced a compellingly readable and intelligent book, inviting us to dig back even further: what generates tragedy in the first place? And the answer, for both Shakespeare and Freud, is, it seems, that tragedy is what happens when we are left without resources (inner or outer) to reimagine what is possible for us – to repeat events with some transformative variation. Both authors write with impressive energy. Greenblatt’s chapters are page-turners, accessible, fresh and provocative; Phillips, characteristically, gives us a wealth of aphoristic wisdom, if sometimes tying himself up in arguments whose structure is rather hard to decipher.
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