desire self-annulment without promoting itself in disguise? Schopenhauer
prohibited suicide for this very reason. But if the hero simply follows
Schopenhauer’s prescriptions to become will-less and profoundly indif-
ferent to his or her earthly fate, there would be no tragedy at all, for it
would make no difference if the hero lived or died. Schopenhauer admits
that ‘rarely in the tragedy of the ancients is this spirit of resignation seen
and directly expressed’ (II: 434 ), and one of his sharpest critics, Walter
Benjamin, was to seize on this admission to point out exactly why
Schopenhauer’s notion of tragedy was not tragedy at all, but a drama
which has no ending, the play of melancholia. The comparison comes
in Benjamin’sUrsprung des Deustschen Trauerspiels, which disguises in a
learned study of seventeenth-century German Baroque drama an analysis
of melancholia as a fully modern political condition, not restricted to the
Baroque, and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche its unwitting prophets.
According to Benjamin, Schopenhauer’s definition mistakes the melan-
choly of these Baroque dramas for real tragedy, because it makes the tragic
hero into a martyr and saint, the passive victim of a cruel external force of
Fate. Baroque mourning-plays consequently focus on their characters’
sufferings, which are lamented volubly and endlessly. ‘Again and again’,
he wrote, ‘theTrauerspieleof the seventeenth century treat the same
subjects, and treat them in such a way as to permit, indeed necessitate
repetition.’^45 In ancient tragedy, by contrast, the hero is not concerned
with psychology and self-explanation, but a silence ‘which neither looks
for nor finds any justification, and therefore throws suspicion back onto
his persecutors... in tragedy pagan man realizes he is better than his
gods’ ( 109 – 10 ). For Benjamin, ancient tragedy acts like a trial, where the
death of the hero is actually the paralegal staging of the overthrow of
the old gods of fate for ‘the benefit of the, as yet unborn, national
community’; the hero’s silence, his absorption of his unjust fate, is what
gives the tragedy an ending and a sense of fulfilment. By contrast, the
melancholic plays in Benjamin’s study have no sacrificial mechanism
whereby suffering can come to an end; rather, they exist so as to display
endless unresolved unhappiness. ‘These are not so much plays which
cause mourning, as plays through which mournfulness finds satisfaction:
plays for the mournful’ ( 119 ).
Benjamin’s overall purposes for the book were manifold; themes in-
clude a covert reading of the totalitarian politics of the state of emergency,
an early engagement with Heidegger, and an attempt to re-think the idea
of the fragment.^46 But the reader emerging from a perusal of all 943
poems may feel such a comment also throws a good deal of light on
Hardy’s indifference 165