GETTING ALBEE'S GOAT: 'Notes toward a Definition of Tragedy'

An examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, emasculation and vacuity.

According to the play's values, Ross, not Martin or Billy or Stevie, carries the "contagious" pestilence of the national tendency that Albee is still decrying. Ross's sanctimonious hypocrisy makes him repulsive. His is the societal disease that The Goat addresses for healing. His projections and substitutions distort downward the reality of what is happening. he is thoroughly unsympathetic and represents the blithe ignorance of a class Albee calls "suburban." The other characters' pain lies in their continuing love for each other. The three Grays honestly try to understand what has happened. That they fail to reach such an understanding is their catastrophe, but this failure of comprehension is due in part to the mysterious physical/spiritual ambivalence of Martin's action with Sylvia. Albee expects the audience too to try to understand, and, in a real sense, to love Martin, Stevie and Billy. The tragedy, which they lived through and we attended, becomes itself the healing process.

Satisfying in performance, The Goat 'heals' an audience by its medicative treatment of what Aristotle would call the Gray family's 'history'. The main characters go through an emotionally painful and informative action that arouses in its course potentially destructive judgments and emotions in its audience as well. The play invites recognition, participation and identifications. But the comedy and laughter also allow the audience a perspective that objectifies the action and the judgments while calling into play our sympathetic recognition of the characters' suffering and destruction. The action is complete and emotionally charged at several levels as the dialogue takes us from one character's point of view to another's. The play generates intellectual and moral insight. If the classic test of a tragedy is its effect, Albee's "Notes toward a definition of tragedy" is an effective tragedy.

Fucking an animal is the play's "given" fact. Martin and Stevie's pride (hubris) about themselves and their love-marriage is a well defined liability and vulnerability [ii; 88]. We continue to admire and pity them even as we are terrified to realize this plot could happen to any man or woman. Even the 'unnatural act" of bestiality is a 'natural' possibility imbedded in the nature of man, his body and his mind. Witness the parable of the baby's friction in the lap [iii; 104-105]. Martin is perhaps "sick," certainly "compulsive" (the so-called tragic flaw), but he would not choose to do "wrong" and never fully admits that he has [Pp. 10, 65, 73, 107]. Conscientious, he aspires to a kind of sainthood, a "salvation" [iii; 97] as he calls his marriage-but in Sylvia as well as with Stevie. Because he presumes that he could not have chosen to do wrong, he is blind to any wrongness of his action. Unable to acknowledge the offensiveness and destructiveness of his act, he fails to come to terms with the hamartia that has brought about their downfall. What is disgustingly 'naturalistic' and un-natural to Ross and unacceptably animalistic to the loving Stevie (her "flaw"?) is a religious experience for Martin. he had no choice but to accept what happened, and there began the tragedy. Stevie, compelled to love Martin, cannot accept what has happened, and especially not if it is still happening. This revelation is happening [i; passim] to her as his encounter happened to him. They are both trapped: "And when it happens, there's no retreating, no holding back" [ii; 81]. Thus, Billy's kiss [iii; 102]. When Martin is at last forced to see bloody Stevie and dead Sylvia side by side, he has no choice but to accept what has happened. "I'm sorry." An accident? "Great are the wonders of earth / and the greatest of these is man!" declares Sophocles in Antigone's first choral ode [469], marveling at the amazing variety and range of humanity.