“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”: tragedy and the environmental crisis

Our environmental crisis is often described in tragic terms. Weather events shaped by global warming are deemed tragic for the communities affected. Declines in fish populations are attributed to the so-called tragedy of the commons. Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of England, has spoken of a “tragedy of the horizon”: that the “catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors – imposing a cost on future generations that the current generation has no direct incentive to fix”.

Literary theorists point out that, when used in non-literary contexts such as these, the word tragedy often loses its distinct meanings. Nonetheless, working with tragic theory can, I think, help us reflect on the environmental crisis.

If, for example, we assume—as some commentators have—that the tragic figure is always somehow implicated in their suffering, then this brings into focus issues of climate justice: tragic narratives’ concern with accountability, that is, may illuminate the responsibility some global communities have to compensate others for the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Working with tragic theory might also help us reflect on our difficulty in responding to the crisis. In arguing that literary genres struggle to grapple with the timespans of environmental catastrophe (drawn attention to by Carney), the author Amitav Ghosh takes the realist novel as his example. As Jennifer Wallace points out, tragic catastrophe tends, similarly, to play out within a relatively short period—according to Aristotle’s strictures, a single day. This may render it unsuitable for representing environmental degradation and its impact on the world’s poor, a process influentially described by Rob Nixon as “slow violence”. Equally, Wallace argues, it may inhibit our capacity to see the environmental crisis as tragic.

Tragedy may also appear an unhelpful frame through which to approach the environmental crisis because, again like the realist novel, it’s a genre tightly focused on human experience rather than­—like pastoral or the georgic—on human interactions with the natural world. Tragedy is, we might say, created through the interplay of strong human emotions (ambition, love, grief) and situations where individual desires come into conflict with social—that is, manmade—systems.

Or so we’ve been told. Many scholars of tragedy have been wary of discussing other-than-human agency, and with good reason. Ascribing tragic suffering to fate or to the gods risks mystifying actions and consequences that should, in fact, be laid at the door of humans and their ideologies. Just as speaking of “natural” disasters—such as hurricanes—diverts attention from the political decisions—such as failing to maintain flood defences—that are responsible for human misery (and its inequitable distribution), so blaming tragic catastrophes on more-than-human forces might constitute an evasion of political responsibility.

But what if we were to take tragedy as a genre uncertain about human imbrication in the more-than-human world?

Shakespeare’s Macbeth offers a helpful example. For some critics, this play needs to be understood in human terms: for all its supernatural paraphernalia and gestures towards the natural world, it’s at heart a play interested in how toxic ideas about gender and human worth create conflict and suffering. Any attempt to explain its tragedy in more-than-human terms—for example, to see the storm that surrounds Duncan’s murder as indicative of a “natural” order violated by regicide—risks reiterating the damaging ideology that the play itself works to expose.

In my recent book, I argue instead that the tragic energy of Macbeth and a clutch of other plays from the period lies in their restless interrogation of a world whose shape and operations remain indecipherable. Precisely what bewilders varies from play to play: in some, it’s what happens after death; in others, it’s the source of human desires (including one’s own). But in certain plays, in particular Macbeth and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, what remains beyond understanding is precisely how the more-than-human world relates to the human one.

In what respects, then, can seeing tragedy in these terms speak to our environmental crisis? In a more general sense, I think, there is value in attending to how tragedies written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries present characters in dialogue with the wider worlds through which they move. An unwillingness to appreciate this dimension of English Renaissance tragedy might, perhaps, be ascribed to a broader failure (at least in the West) to recognise human entanglement in the more-than-human world. Any response to our environmental crisis needs to begin with this recognition.

More specifically, though also perhaps more obliquely, reading tragedy in this way may be helpful because responding to the environmental crisis requires the jolt in conventional wisdom often experienced by tragic figures: it asks us to acknowledge (to paraphrase Hamlet) there that are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the dominant philosophies of the present. Tragedy has the power to shatter our usual ideas of the world, and to replace these ideas with something more complex and expansive.

These plays do not hold out an optimistic message. But they do, I think, point to the problem: they show us how difficult it is to move beyond our usual horizons of thought, how much easier it is—to return again to Carney’s claim—to think about today than about “[t]omorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”, to borrow Macbeth’s words.

Macbeth’s apocalyptic and nihilistic vision of the future is hardly a torch to guide us. But it might, perhaps, be considered a lightning strike illuminating the reorientation of perspective required of us.

_{Feature image by Marée-Breyer (Ivry, Val-de-Marne), Bibliothèque nationale de France via Wikimedia Commons. CC0 1.0}