And it is definitely a Greek word. It has been a very long time since I read Aristotle's _Aesthetics_, but I was alsways under the impression that tragedy was meant to give a catharsis. The whole point of the ritualized song and dance, the stylized script, the subject matter chosen, etc was to reduce the (male) audience to tears. This would not only give them a spiritual illumination, but would also allow them to unrestrainedly let loose their controlled emotions. The classical tragedy served the purpose that the original sacrifice of the scapegoat did (and remember, the goat was not always a goat. The sacrifice was originally human.) Tragedy - and catharsis - thus served a sacred purpose.
Perhaps one reason one was meant to feel pity for a character whose hybris made him rebel against the edicts of the gods was that all of us have that individualistic, Promethean instinct. We are Oedipus. We are Pentheus. We are Prometheus, Antigone (who defies society, not the gods, but this in itself is interesting because she is female, thus her tragedy takes place in the microcosm of the mundane world). Even Atreus. We all want to think that we are greater than our moira, than the will of the gods. We all suspect that the gods use us as pawns, and our individual conscience or instincts are in fact a higher order...There is a strong conflict between individual conscience/instinct and fate in Greek drama, and the fate/free will argument is made much more powerful by the fact that ancient greek society was shame based rather than guilt based, placing the good of the people above individual concerns, and fate above individual defiance. The individual is doomed from the start. Nobody really wants to be doomed, not even the most melodramatic of people. The only people who want to be doomed are those who have no implication of what they are asking for.
(Which is probably a common theme in vampire novels as well. "What do mean, you want to be a vampire? Are you mad?...")
A. The central character is of the noble class. He has traits which draw our admiration and our "sympathy" (in the sense of our wish to identify with him).
Noble both in deed, and in caste. Later this was relaxed to mean either nobility or noble of heart, but in earlier times, this was not the case.
B. The central character oversteps his bounds through hubris. We are drawn into this to an extent through our sympathetic identification.
Or some other tragic flaw - but the tragic flaw was generally linked to hybris, in the end.
C. The prime consequences of the central character's indulgence in hubris lead us to reject our sympathy with him and to turn against him. Unless my memory is mistaken, that is the intitial point of "catharsis".
I thought catharsis had to do with an emotional cleansing - as the character was punished, we lived through the character, and so we ourselves were brought down, and made clean. There's something rather perverted about this whole idea, but even though my modern conscience rebels against the notion, I have to grudgingly admit that the magic of the stage does work; and certainly I think it is better to have that catharsis brought about by a tragic performance than by the slaughtering of a human or non-human sscapegoat.
Of course, the primal urge for blood remains. Tragedy can only go so far. the down side of civilization is that one's atavistic instincts are not completely taken care of; civilization can keep the darker needs of humanity at bay, but conquering them is another matter entirely.
There are some interesting vampire parallels here as well. Effectively, a fictional vampire who takes his or her victim's lives turns them into the scapegoats for his/her tainted inner nature. This might be part of the reason why vampires who are "too nice" and don't kill are seen as wimpy, cop-outs, not "real" vampires, etc. We want to see them kill the victim. We need that catharsis, too. Blood imagery is very powerful.
I can't say I always agree with White Wolf's conceptions of vampires (sorry to bring this up, but I've been heavily involved in a White Wolf game these past couple of weeks, and my character is an extension of me, so I'm learning things about my subconscious as I go along - it's a fascinating process) but one good thing about White Wolf is that the gaming company does invoke certain psychological truths. One is that vampirism does involve being tainted - you have an urge that is antisocial and all-consuming, and you know that it is dangerous, and one of the key challenges of your life is the challenge to redeem yourself from your darker side. The same can be said, perhaps, of any human, but vampires are psychologically powerful because a vampire is a larger-than-life human. Everything is in black and white, even the shades of grey. Invoking the archetype of a vampire (a certain type of vampire, anyway) brings out the dichotomies of stark good and evil that we bottle up in the back of our minds, also a lot of buried need. Need is such a strong force. Need is a fearsome thing. To be caught in the grip of need is to become temporarily helpless - to admit that one's individual consciousness is perhaps weaker than need itself. However, it is powerful to admit one's basic powerlessness; something that the tragedians knew well, and something that also is brought out into stark awareness when one plays a vampire whose catharsis and whose addiction is linked to blood.
D. Further events constitute the downfall of the central character. This completes the catharsis.
Yes. (In effect, if not terminology. Catharsis is a visceral emotional reaction, not a plot device) In short, Fate is greater than the individual; one cannot escape one's moira. This notion is so offensive to many. Free will is a concept that we'd like to believe in, because the notion that we don't have free will offends the conscience and the individual spirit. I imagine that this was true even for the ancient Greeks. If it were not true at all, there would be no real conflict in the plays. Hybris cannot exist without the instinct to defy, after all.
My recollection also tells me that this ideal outline was first formulated by Aristotle, but I might be mistaken here.
Aristotle certainly discusses it, but I am not a classicist, and I don't know if anyone else came up with the ingredients or not.
"In tragedy, everyone tends to die before there can be any kind of emotional purging (which is what "catharsis" means) and resolution."
Yes, in classic tragedy the central character so dies. The carthasis is entirely on the part of the audience.
And i would argue that it is the character's death which generally causes the catharsis to occur. The death of the character stands in for human sacrifice. and one must love a sacrifice for it to have any meaning; it just doesn't mean the same thing to cheer on a condemned villain. Villains deserve to die. It doesn't hurt us so much to part with a villain - but to sacrifice a hero puts us all in pain. We die with our hero.
One thing that I was trying to point out in my post was that Coppola's movie deviates from the classic outline of tragedy by having the main charater, Dracula himself, undergoing catharsis in the end.
I concur. I also think we identify with him, and/or with Mina. We might not like identifying with him, because he does display some reprehensible qualities (that selfishness!) but he actually does know that he is reprehensible, and tries to redeem himself; through Mina, he succeeds. Selfish? Yes, but then, who isn't at least a little bit selfish?