The Power of Catharsis from Sophocles to Ginsberg

In a recent opinion piece in The Washington Post, Paul M. Blowers criticized the apparent “selfishness” of Greek tragedy, expounding pretentiously about Augustine of Hippo’s shame at the “emotional voyeurism” of the Greek tragic theater that he attended as a youth. Tragedy and tragic heroes, in the Greek sense, are far more than selfish reminders of how bad it could be. The power of catharsis goes far beyond “voyeurism.” In the same way that a great melancholic novel like Saul Bellow’s Herzog allows one to learn from the mistakes of others without living them and offers poignant social and philosophical commentary, so too does Greek tragedy. The power of these tragic heroes transcends time, subtly finding its way into the work of modern day poets and social commentators. This Greek tragic hero’s cycle is found in the work of such anti-traditionalist poets as Allen Ginsberg. “Howl”, his masterpiece, follows the outline of a Greek tragedy on the lines of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, tracing the naivete and tragic hamartia of his generation of beatniks and rebels.

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Oedipus Rex, from Sophocles, the master of Greek tragedy himself, is the enduring standard of classical tragedy. It follows the flawed hero of Oedipus, prophesied to kill his father, Laius, the king of Thebes, and share a bed with his mother, Jocasta, the queen. Abandoned on a hillside to die at birth, Oedipus is spared by a servant and raised as a prince by the king and queen of Corinth. Oedipus is told by an oracle about the prophecy, and distraught, decides to leave his “home” of Cornith so that it can never become true. Unbeknownst to him, along the way, he gets into an argument with his father and his lavish entourage, killing him and fufilling the first part of the oracle. Oedipus comes upon the city of Thebes which is plagued by the Sphinx, a horrible monster. Oedipus outwits the Sphinx and is put on the throne of Thebes whose king has recently been mysteriously killed. He marries the widowed queen Jocasta, his mother, and has many children with her. Oedipus only discovers how true the oracle proved to be when he tries to rid the city of a plague caused by the injustice of Laius’ death. Determined to find the culprit, Oedipus, with the help of the seer Teresias, eventually discovers the tragedy that has unfolded at the climax of his peripeteia or tragic fall. Jocasta hangs herself, and Oedipus gouges out his eyes, wandering the land blind. Oedipus’ hamartia or tragic flaw, which Aristotle describes as an essential characteristic of every tragic hero, has long been debated, but is widely considered to be his hubris in believing that he can outwit the oracle that represents the will and way of the gods.

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Ginsberg’s "Howl", written in a vastly different era about the tragic lives of American bohemians like himself, actually follows a similar pattern. In the beginning of "Howl", Ginsberg’s tragic heroes are those “who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,” (line 13). The bohemian souls characterized so eloquently in Ginsberg’s poetry are innocent young people, suffering intense pain in their striving for beauty. The imagery of these young men shivering and cold, half-naked in dark rooms, renders an almost Messiah-like quality to their struggles. They are innocent, holy adolescents, able to find beauty in their pain. However, this saintly striving for meaning is the very catalyst for their peripeteia. The hamartia of Ginsberg’s tragic heroes is that they can never stop looking for beauty. They are too removed from reality and too sensual. They are “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” (lines 3-4). Ginsberg’s heroes find themselves over-invested in the idea of the starving artist. They strive too much for ideals and forget the realities around them. This naiveté leads them down a dark path towards substance abuse and overeroticism. The protagonists of this tragedy are those “who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,” (line 11). The hamartia of Ginsberg’s enigmatic characters is their attraction to anything different, to anything rebellious. They seek poetry in the obscene, in the breaking of the rules, and they fail to see the more obvious beauty around them. The lost souls of Ginsberg’s poem tragically look for the beauty in everything illegal, everything detrimental to their minds, instead of seeing things more realistically. These starving bohemians are tragic heroes, suffering under the burden of their fatal hamartia and teetering on the precipice of their inevitable peripeteia.

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Stylistically, the two works are vastly different. Ginsberg’s "Howl" is the meterless culmination of the work of a long line of poets from Walt Whitman to William Carlos Williams who sought to make poetry resemble breath and the spoken word. Sophocles’ play is written in a more sparse and traditional style, mainly switching between iambic trimeter and lyrical text. However, the two works share the backbone of the Greek tragic hero’s cycle, illuminated by Aristotle and perfected by Sophocles. Ginsberg appeals to the inately human sense of catharsis, showing its immense power to provoke empathy and its value in a humanistic society. Greek tragedy is not selfish “emotional voyeurism” at all but a transcendent dedication to the shared humanity within all of us.