~Ligue des Tragédiens~

Our sincerest laughter with some pain is fraught; our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought- in these puissant lines, resonant from Shelley’s ‘Skylark’, one can reckon his exhaustive attempts at generalising sorrow and concealing the burden of tragedy in the dominance of words. What he doesn’t know is that his words themselves have become lugubrious!

The 4th century B.C. was the ‘époque littéraire’, stemming from Aristotle’s epic The Poetics, which is rendered as one of the oldest literary gospels. It has through its various interpretations and applications from the Renaissance onward had a profound impact on Western aesthetic philosophy and artistic production. One of the most intrinsic concepts highlighted in The Poetics is that of ‘Catharsis’, which shall forever remain a historical footnote to Aristotelian conception. It refers to the sensation, or literary effect, that would ideally overcome an audience upon watching or reading a tragedy (a release of pent-up emotion or energy), auguring restoration, renewal and revitalisation in their minds.

The contemporary Ligue Des Tragédiens Méconnus (league of the unsung tragedians), known for their inconspicuous and elusive cathartic ways comprise Kafka, Borges, Murakami and Masud. This quartet, claim literary critiques, is bound together by a thin strand of ‘pathos’. Moreover, their work echoes ambushed sorrow and plain catharsis, suggesting that they have all brought forward the Aristotelian legacy.
Franz Kafka was one of the major German writers of the 20th century. Although Kafka wrote short stories all his life, most of them were incomplete with the exception of The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) and The Dream (der Traum). Kafka and Catharsis have long shared a tumultuous relationship that sceptics claim were influenced by the last years of his life. Those, in which he had failed to stir approbation for himself. ‘Two men were standing behind the grave and were holding a tombstone between them in the air; scarcely had K. arrived when they thrust the stone into the earth and it stood as if cemented there’. He leaves the readers overwhelmed in the climax of The Dream that tells the tale of a man who is arrested by death on charges never disclosed.

Closely compared to Kafka is Naiyer Masud, known for his spare and seductive prose and most of all his eloquent Sufi- like style. Masud is little known outside Pakistan and sceptics claim that he began writing stories in early boyhood. His highly controversial Essence of Camphor (Itr- e- Kaafuur) and Snake- Catcher (Maargeer) tell us volumes about his style, capable of pulling the reader into the centre of an inescapable vortex, echoing surreal lines- Attempting to smell it one feels a vacant forlornness, but the next time around, breathing deeply, one detects something in this forlornness…voluptuous slumber.

In close proximity to Kafka and Masud, was Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges, an Argentine writer. Borges is known most for his cathartic stories The Garden of Forking Paths (El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan) and The Circular Ruins (Las ruinas circulares), a tale of a magicians conquests to conjure the perfect individual . “It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death”, blurts the magician when he is dabbling with failure. Borges was thus an artful stoic whose tales reeked copious amounts of catharsis. Catharsis has also found its contemporary in Haruki Murakami, a Kyoto born writer, prolific and profound. Murakami began writing at 29 and the journey has only commenced from there. His fantastical plots containing modernist rationale and conspicuous rhetoric are clearly visible through The Wind- Up Bird Chronicle (Dorobō kasasagi hen), the tale of Okada Toru, whose cat disappears and the seuqence of events that follow and Sputnik Sweetheart (Spūtoniku no koibito) the tantalising story of upcoming lesbianism in Japan.

This eclectic quartet comprising contributions both posthomous and contemporary can be called the undercurrent of modernist tragedy and catharsis, that one can discover and rather magnanimously accept only after reading them- the Ligue des Tragédiens.