Tragedy, Tragic Irony, and War: A Dialectical Approach

Abstract

Tragic irony may mean the dramatic irony in scripted tragedy (tragic play). The audience can predict the regrettable outcome on the stage before the main characters do. I focus on non-scripted events and their tragic aspects. Colloquially, disaster and tragedy are synonyms, but this is misleading. Tragedy means a disaster in special circumstances, which I suggest we can read ironically. This is to say, as I argue, tragedy is necessarily ironic. I read Richard Rorty on irony and Hegel on tragic irony and cunning of reason. My aim is to redescribe real-life conflicts by using the dialectical understanding of irony and tragedy. Following Rorty and Hegel, I apply their theories of identity to real tragedies. The validation of the theory of literary criticism is a practical matter. My key illustrations come from modern wars; wars are and cause disasters, and thus I expect we can discover cases of tragic irony in factual and counterfactual contexts. Sometimes, the losses and suffering would have been meaningless regardless of the war’s outcome. The winner suffers, but it would have been better not to win. The losers suffer, but it would not have been better had they won. A total defeat would have been better than a conditional one. These redescriptions show the ironic differences between disaster and tragedy in non-scripted contexts—and all these cases are controversial.