We Came Along with a Hammer

The Magnificent Ambersons, oddly, has got me thinking about the difference between tragedy and pathos. Wait, where are you all going? Come back!

Okay, so maybe it’s a pompous question. Let me rephrase: I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to feel bad for George. What I’m not sure about is whether I’m supposed to like him.

Ambersons was, as Penny mentioned, included on the Modern Library’s list of great novels of the century (squeaking in at the bottom, No. 100). And it concerns grand themes, as she said — the decline of a single wealthy family and an entire way of life. Normally that’d be the recipe for tragedy — the suffering and decline of the great and grand.

But George doesn’t seem very great at all. He seems like a jerk. When we’re first introduced to him, he’s a nine-year-old brat in ringlets, disrespectful, rude, and convinced the world revolves around him. The town hates him; so do we. The town longs for his come-uppance; so do we. By the end of the book, when he does get his, I did feel a bit sorry for the poor old bastard because Tarkington has him take in on the chin so stoically. (Which, in retrospect, I’m not quite sure is believable.) But we never really like him.

The thing is, I think Tarkington likes him the whole time. George hates the “riff raff” and modernity, and revels in his family’s stately manner and nouveau-feudal relationship to the rest of the town. At the same time, Tarkington’s own nostalgia for horses and quietude and small town life is amply on display throughout the book, along with its counterpoint, a distaste for the dirty, destructive, grasping city (filled to brimming with dirty, destructive, grasping immigrants). You see it in his objective, third person descriptions of the scenery —  Take this paragraph as a sample, from Chapter 28:

“These were bad times for Amberson Addition. This quarter, already old, lay within a mile of the centre of the town, but business moved in other directions; and the Addition’s share of Prosperity was only the smoke and dirt, with the bank credit left out. The owners of the original big houses sold them, or rented them to boarding-house keepers, and the tenants of the multitude of small houses moved “farther out” (where the smoke was thinner) or into apartment houses, which were built by dozens now. Cheaper tenants took their places, and the rents were lower and lower, and the houses shabbier and shabbier—for all these shabby houses, burning soft coal, did their best to help in the destruction of their own value. They helped to make the quarter so dingy and the air so foul to breathe that no one would live there who had money enough to get “farther out” where there were glimpses of ungrayed sky and breaths of cleaner winds. And with the coming of the new speed, “farther out” was now as close to business as the addition had been in the days of its prosperity. Distances had ceased to matter.”

That’s all dry, third person omniscience, which is to say it’s all Tarkington, not George. Yet by planting these same repugnance toward the new in the arrogant and privileged personage of G. “Magnificant” Amberson. as snot-nosed a little punk as ever lived, Tarkington gets to have his cake and eat it too, indulging a bit revanchist nostalgia while at the same time acknowledging and tut-tutting the blinkered, hidebound attitude that led to the extinction of Georgie and his ilk. He wants to turn the tables on the reader, and I think largely succeeds — we, like the townsfolk, despise George for the douche his is, but by the time George gets what’s coming to him he has become irrelevant to the town, and the irrelevance makes him pathetic to the reader. You can’t have a tragic catharsis without tragedy, and George is so small-time that he can’t be tragic — that is, deliberately, his flaw, his inability to recognize the degradation of his circumstances, his insistence on behaving as if he were a prince and this his kingdom, when really he’s clinging by the skin of his teeth to a position in the respectable middle class.

And that, I have decided, is the difference for me between pathos and tragedy. The tragic figure and his flaw stands in for all humanity, for all our weakness and pride and foolishness; he embodies us, and so when we see him destroyed we feel compassion, literally; we feel with him. But the pathetic figure stands only for himself; his flaw is his own and we do not share it, we are repulsed by it. And so when see him destroyed we feel bad for him, we pity him, but we don’t feel like what happened to him could happen to us. Even though in both cases, strictly speaking, the misfortune that befalls the character is their own fault.

The thing about this is, for a writer pathos is a weird thing to opt for. As Arthur Miller strove to prove, you don’t have to write about the epic to evoke the tragic; your characters don’t have to be high and mighty to bring forth profound emotion. But sometimes I got the feeling reading this book that Tarkington wasn’t really going for profound emotion. The vast majority of authors — especially when you’re writing the Great American Novel, the Big Picture, the Sprawling Canvas, the Titanic Yarn — are going for that. Hell, even if you’re writing a small, drawing-room novel, few days, a few characters, 60,000 words, most writers are hoping to leave the reader profoundly moved. (Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, is the supreme example of the opposite sublimation: he writes about the pathetic so well, with such clarity and precision, that it becomes tragic.)

But George never works like that: we don’t long to see him destroyed the way you want to see a great villan take it on the chin — dragged off stage in chains, howling. Rather, you want to see him pranked, humiliated, embarrassed, made to grow up, like some friend’s pest of a little brother. It is a petulant pleasure that we want to take, not a grim one. And so when he finally does take it on the chin — is forced to realize that he unjustly deprived his mother of happiness and love in the last years of her life, contributing to her early death, in order merely to serve his own pride —- you don’t feel particularly gratified. It’s learning that the neighbor kid, the one who egged your car every Halloween and seemed to throw a kegger every time his parents left the house for two hours together, got drunk and wrapped his dad’s car around a tree. You can’t say you’re surprised but you can’t say that that’s what you wanted, either; it’s a fate too grim to gloat over.

What do you think, Penny? Is George pathetic or tragic? Is the book? And which are they each meant to be?