Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, by Terry Eagleton

Tragedy gives us hideous tales of death and despair - and it does so with huge, life-affirming energy. Jonathan Dollimore asks why the worst events we can ever imagine generate our greatest art

Tragedy is widely regarded as the most profound of all literary forms. Nothing can touch its depth of insight into human life. Yet the essence of tragedy is paradoxical and contradictory: it deals with intense suffering and failure, yet is strangely affirmative; both free will and destiny take its protagonists to their ruin. And the evil it dramatises is notoriously inexplicable and compromising. As Terry Eagleton wryly remarks, this is an evil which is autotelic, "having its grounds, ends and causes in itself. It thus joins a privileged, somewhat underpopulated class of objects, which includes God and art."

Hamlet, the most famous tragedy of all, is also one of the most difficult to pin down. What is Hamlet's problem? Who is he? From one point of view he's the most fascinating of all protagonists, and one with whom we can't help but identify. As someone once said, "everyone thinks Hamlet was written for them. I know he was written for me." If his appearance coincides with the emergence of modern individualism, it's also the case that he displays all the symptoms of individualism gone wrong – a dysfunctional depressive who simply can't get his act together.

A larger question has never been adequately answered. Why do the greatest expressions of the tragic vision seemingly coincide with the heights of cultural achievement, even of optimism, as with the Greeks and the Renaissance? Across two millennia, the most famous philosophers and critics have failed to define tragedy adequately. The best that can be done is to propose criteria which illuminate even as they fail. Isn't it something to do with the way we die rather than the way we live? Yes, but only certain kinds of dying count. To die in real life by falling off the toilet isn't going to constitute the tragic fall, not even if you're one of the Great Men of history (such as Elvis Presley). So heroic noble death is the order of tragedy? Yes, except that some tragedies are about being condemned to live, Beckett's Waiting for Godot being the most famous.

Yet this inability to pin down tragedy hardly matters because, from Aristotle to Hegel, failed attempts have become philosophies in their own right. When, in the modern period, the tragic vision became almost a surrogate religion which offered a higher wisdom removed from the allegedly shallow, materialist vulgarity of modernity, writing about it became even more significant. Books such as Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, George Steiner's The Death of Tragedy and Raymond Williams's Modern Tragedy have also been compelling expressions of contemporary concerns, and searching critiques of our cultural past.

In Sweet Violence, Terry Eagleton gives deft accounts of all these writers, along with his own insightful readings of specific texts. Eagleton is one of the most prolific and readable of contemporary critics. He is also that rare beast, an intellectual who carries his wisdom lightly and doesn't feel compromised by the demands of maximum accessibility. He confirms the old maxim that one has to understand deeply to explain simply. In this book, complex ideas are not just made accessible, but conveyed in a way which registers their ethical and intellectual importance. The pages devoted to Hegel and Lacan are especially impressive.

For some time, Eagleton has been finding radical potential in cultural forms which fashion regards as conservative, and complacent tendencies in those assumed to be radical. He thinks and writes against both the anti-intellectual right, and the self-congratulatory metropolitan cultural left. He is a Marxist engaged by theology and metaphysics.

Not surprisingly, he enjoys ridiculing the ultra-secular aspirations of postmodernism. If Eagleton is always lucid and responsible with writers from the past, he's tempted to caricature those in the present. You realise that he revels in being something of an intellectual satirist.

Trenchantly left-wing himself, Eagleton perceives a narrowness in the Left's current intellectual range. He believes it needs to be revitalised by critical engagement with some of the ideas it has rejected as reactionary or just irrelevant. In Sweet Violence, he does this with the idea of tragedy, with some of its most suspect categories (like "fate" and "sacrifice"), and with the dubious (and again contradictory) experiences it has conventionally been said to elicit – pity, terror and pleasure.

Eagleton questions the cornerstone of so much progressive thought: that culture goes "all the way down". Tragedy tells us otherwise: there are things in nature deeply alien to humanity and, because we are still part of nature, they remain within us. They are, as St Thomas Aquinas says of God, closer to us than we are to ourselves. Many today believe that if sex is freed from religion and superstition, it will become a pleasure just like any other. Again, tragedy tells us otherwise: human desire retains something potentially destructive of social cohesion and individual identity.

That's why, as Eagleton shows, the idea of tragedy is as applicable to history as to texts. If Stalinism was the abiding tragedy of the last century, it was because socialism proved least possible where it was most necessary. Noble intentions were deflected into their opposites on the fatal inversion which Aristotle called peripeteia.

Eagleton's commitments are apparent – this is an avowedly "political" reading of tragedy – and, in spite or because of that, his judgments are never less than astute. Anyway, his is not the first political study of tragedy. In the fullest sense of "political", all studies are that, even or especially when their authors don't know it.

Even Eagleton's tendency to score political points is saved from being reductive by the satirical impulse that animates it. Of Hegel's belief that the tragic experience that befalls the individual is in complete concord with reason, Eagleton remarks: "it's unlikely that Marlowe's Edward the Second, who dies with a red hot poker thrust up his anus, would rush to endorse this view". It's the "rush" there which gets reason back on Eagleton's side.

Jonathan Dollimore's books include 'Radical Tragedy' and 'Sex, Literature and Censorship' (Polity Press)