Cat Urine and Aristotelian Tragedy

The Fall

Slopes Can Be Slippery

Before I leave the subject of football, something just called to mind a wondrous southern ditty that captures and clarifies the essence of Aristotelian tragic theory.

In the 1988 movie Everybody’s All American, Dennis Quaid plays an LSU halfback, Jessica Lange is his girlfriend, then wife, and John Goodman plays a big ol’, good ol’ boy lineman.  At one point, Goodman delivers this gem of a lyric:

Listen, listen,

Cat’s a pissin’.

Where, where?!

Under the chair!

Run, run! Get the gun.

Too late, too late.

‘Tis already done. 

Classical tragedy?  Somebody or some group is taking, or has taken has made a mess in the putatively clean house:  “Cat’s a pissin’/. . . Under the chair!”  

Usually guns and other violence are what a society turns to in order to clean up its messes, and cats are more dispensable than dogs or humans. But by the time the civilized society of that household is aware of the scope and complexity of the problem, getting the gun is pointless:  “Too late, too late./’Tis already done.”

How is that different from the messes created in our major tragedies? To mention a few:  King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, Oedipus Rex, The Great Gatsby, A Streetcar Named Desire, Fences, Equus . . . .  Those tragic heroes, heroines, and some supporting characters (under the marvelous label of Tragic Waste) didn’t have a chance. If they didn’t soil the house themselves (and most did), somebody had already done it for them, before they ever took center stage.

Sometimes the grand is also basic. Some ditties are better than others.