Tragic errors and self narrative
Hamartia: the Tragic Error
Hamartia is the term in Aristotle’s Poetics that represents the error initiating the downfall toward the tragic. it is an error born of ignorance: the hero acts without knowing the full context in which his story unfolds – like Oedipus, who kills his father without knowing it is his father. Therefore, unlike sin – which denotes a moral failing and is often committed with awareness of the act’s implications – hamartia denotes a structural limitation for the one acting. There is a limited perspective of the facts, and one is fated to go wrong because of it.
It is interesting to note that the hero’s ignorance is only observed because we, in the audience, know the broader context. This point lies in the very distribution of knowledge in the tragic staging: the audience has access to all scenes; the hero only to those in which he is present. This disparity is one of the pillars of the tragic feeling. We see the hero in his downfall and know that “it's going to end badly”, but we also know he has no way to avoid it. As an audience, we are as powerless as he is before the unfolding fate.
There are ways of telling life events in which the structure of this relationship between audience and hero in Greek theater appears similarly in the relationship between narrator and narrated, especially when these two are identified as the same person. If someone narrates the past, it is believed they know more about the context (before and after) than the character who was living the scene at the moment.
If the distribution of knowledge occurs in a similar way, it would then be possible for the same feeling of tragedy to arise regarding acts we have committed. It can be cathartic to narrate past acts that failed, as they provoke pity for what could happen to someone who did not know, and fear that the one narrating today might be the tragic hero of tomorrow.
From Ignorance to Recognition
It is logical, then, to think that in these tragedy narratives, there must be a moment in which ignorance is converted into knowledge, which has traditionally been designated as anagnorisis, or recognition. This moment is thought of as the discovery of the larger context of things – the revelation that the act previously seen as logical was, in truth, an error: hamartia.
But it is precisely here that I would invite us to look at this critical moment with a bit more calm, as there seem to be important issues to consider.
In classical tragedy, the truth that is eventually discovered seems to have a silent pre-existence, visible only to a select group of entities: gods, fates, and oracles. The hero wounds himself precisely by trying to change a destiny that had already been predicted by one of these privileged entities, which have access to knowledge structurally forbidden to humans. Note that, in this configuration, the hero’s error is understood as a challenge to the authority of these figures who know more than everyone else – a kind of arrogance that even has a name in the poetic tradition: hubris.
The Modern Oracle
A problem then arises for us humans who constantly narrate the ups and downs of our lives: in our world, there are no oracles. Or are there?
My proposal is: if oracles exist for us, they are established as an effect of the act of narrating itself, or rather, by a neurotic way of narrating.
By saying that the truth “was always there to be seen”, we are gathering the consequences of failed acts and using them as material to found a past in which everything already existed. This founding of the past is not a discovery of what was always there, but rather an invention after the fact (a posteriori). We could only effectively speak about the true history of events if we were in the position of an oracle, or at least of an audience favored by one, possessing the privilege of knowing what destiny truly was.
However, here we see the difference between Greek tragedy and life narrative: the one narrating is not omniscient like the gods. If they try to be, they will feel the pain of the tragic firsthand, for they will see in everything they did previously the depth of their own ignorance – not to mention the fear they may feel if the idea strikes them that they are still living and might be erring at this very moment.
The Moral Distortion
However, the maneuver that causes the most suffering does not refer so much to these questions of knowledge, but rather to moral ones. There is a difference between saying “I acted this way because I didn’t know” and “I acted this way because I was too arrogant to know”. The central problem is that a cruel distortion takes place: it transforms a structural lack (the impossibility of knowing everything at the moment of action) into a historical and moral failure (a challenge to a “truth” that was supposedly already announcing itself). The more absolute the assumed knowledge of our “oracles” (friends, family, social networks, psychoanalysts, science), the more tragic our acts can become and the more excess will be seen in them.
As cruel as it may be, this maneuver seems to implicitly contain a type of hope: if my failure originated in the contingencies of my life story, then one can imagine a world in which everything would have been different, had those contingencies been otherwise. The tragedy of my present is the condition for imagining how good it would be in a parallel world where I would have seen things clearly, at the exact moment I should have seen them – neither too soon, nor too late.
Of course, what has been practiced here is just one perspective on the narrative of the self, and many other proposals exist on how to face tragedy. But that becomes a topic for another occasion.
