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THE SEMANTIC FIELD of the noun "tragedy" and of the adjective "tragic" remains as indeterminate as its origin. Colloquial, idiomatic usage attaches "tragic" to experiences, mental or material, which range from triviality-"the cake has burned in the oven"-to ultimate disaster and sorrow. The intentional focus can be narrow and specific, as in "a tragic accident," or undefinably spacious, as in the shopworn phrase "a tragic sense of life." The numerous intermediate hybrids under the rubric of "tragi-comedy" or even "optimistic tragedy," a tag publicized in Soviet parlance, further blur linguistic and existential demarcations.
"Tragedy" in reference to western literature is itself an elusive branch of tangled ramifications. If its roots are to be found in drama, in the scenic enactment of those "goat-songs" cherished by nineteenth-century philologists and ethnographers, its application to other genres may well have been as ancient. The ascription of tragic sentiments to episodes in the Homeric epics appears to have been current. Whether the epithet characterized lyric poetry is not known; but it will pertain habitually to narratives of grief and of death in Ovid or Virgil. As our literatures evolve, the concept of tragedy extends far beyond the dramatic genre. It serves for poetry and prose fiction-for d'Aubigne's Tragiques as for Dreiser's An American Tragedy. In turn, by osmosis as it were, it permeates the descriptions of ballet, of film. Composers such as Beethoven, Berlioz, Brahms incorporate the marking "tragic" in their compositions. Throughout this seemingly unbounded and mobile spectrum, "tragedy" and "tragic" can lose their sometime specificity. They come to enhance any conceivable nuance of sadness, misfortune, or loss. Dionysian rites of heroic sacrifice-if that is what they were-have all but receded from definition.
At least one classical usage, moreover, suggests that we do not know, at some elemental level, what it is we are talking about. It occurs in Laws 7.817b. The context is that of Plato's notorious repudiation of mundane letters, notably drama (the young Plato having himself hoped to be a tragedian). The Athenian informs Clinias that there is no need for writers of tragedy, though they "may be men of genius," in the projected polis:
Respected visitors, we are ourselves authors of a tragedy, and that the finest and the best we know how to...