Page 46 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes Hyde goes on to question the meaning of true hamartia and discovers that it is in fact error in the
article, "The Tragic Flaw: Is It a Tragic Error?" She claims that the true hamartia that occurs in
Oedipus is considered "his ignorance of his true parentage" that led him to become "unwittingly
the slayer of his own father". This example can be applied when reading literature in regards to
the true definition of hamartia and helps place the character's actions into the categories of character
flaws and simple mistakes all humans commit.

Aristotle’s dictum is quite justified on the principle that, “higher the state, the greater the
fall that follows,” or because heavens themselves blame forth the death of princes, while
the death of a beggar passes unnoticed. But it should be remembered that Aristotle
nowhere says that the hero should be a king or at least royally descended. They were the
Renaissance critics who distorted Aristotle and made the qualification more rigid and
narrow.

What is this error of judgement. The term Aristotle uses here, hamartia, often translated "tragic
flaw," (A.C.Bradely) has been the subject of much debate. Aristotle, as writer of the Poetics, has
had many a lusty infant, begot by some other critic, left howling upon his doorstep; and of all
these (which include the bastards Unity-of-Time and Unity-of-Place) not one is more trouble to
those who got to take it up than the foundling 'Tragic Flaw'. Humphrey House, in his lectures
(Aristotle's Poetics, ed. Colin Hardie (London, 1956), delivered in 1952-3, commented upon this
tiresome phrase: "The phrase 'tragic flaw' should be treated with suspicion. I do not know when
it was first used, or by whom. It is not an Aristotelian metaphor at all, and though it might be
adopted as an accepted technical translation of 'hamartia' in the strict and properly limited sense,
the fact is that it has not been adopted, and it is far more commonly used for a characteristic moral
failing in an otherwise predominantly good man. Thus, it may be said by some writers to be the
'tragic flaw' of Oedipus that he was hasty in temper; of Samson that he was sensually uxorious; of
Macbeth that he was ambitious; of Othello that he was proud and jealous - and so on … but these
things do not constitute the 'hamartia' of those characters in Aristotle's sense."
Mr. House goes on to urge that 'all serious modern Aristotelian scholarship agrees … that 'hamartia'
means an error which is derived from ignorance of some material fact or circumstance, and he
refers to Bywater and Rostangni in support of his view. But although 'all serious modern scholarship'
may have agreed to this point in 1952-3, in 1960 the good news has not yet reached the recesses of
the land and many young students of literature are still apparently instructed in the theory of the
'tragic flaw; a theory which appears at first sight to be a most convenient device for analyzing
tragedy but which leads the unfortunate user of it into a quicksand of absurdities in which he
rapidly sinks, dragging the tragedies down with him.
In his edition of Aristotle on the Art of Poetry (Oxford, 1909), Ingram Bywater refers to such a
misreading, though without using the term 'tragic flaw': "Hamartia in the Aristotelian sense of the
term is a mistake or error of judgement (error in Lat.), and the deed done in consequence of it is
an erratum. In the Ethics an erratum is said to originate not in vice or depravity but in ignorance
of some material fact or circumstance … this ignorance, we are told in another passage, takes the
deed out of the class of voluntary acts, and enables one to forgive or even pity the doer."
The meaning of the Greek word is closer to "mistake" than to "flaw," "a wrong step blindly taken",
"the missing of mark", and it is best interpreted in the context of what Aristotle has to say about
plot and "the law or probability or necessity." In the ideal tragedy, claims Aristotle, the protagonist

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