THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING is one of the most pervasive preoccupations of narrative literature, particularly that kind of literature we may heuristically term “tragic.” The forms in which tragic literature comes to terms with the existence of suffering appear to be as varied as the obsession with suffering is unchanging. From the Book of Job to Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, by way of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, the life of Christ, the lives of saints and martyrs, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, or Richardson’s Clarissa, this literature brings us face to face with the existential problem of suffering; it also produces a multitude of narrative paradigms and hermeneutic frames that shape how we understand suffering within a life’s narrative. Some of the questions that recur in the context of this literature are: Why is there suffering at all? What is the meaning or purpose of suffering? Faced with the inescapability of suffering, can we nevertheless imagine what it might mean to be happy in such a world? There are of course a range of philosophical positions and existential attitudes one may take on such questions, but that is not my primary concern here. Rather, I want to show how a subtle and often invisible set of narrative decisions and choices conditions our thinking about happiness and suffering.

Happiness and suffering are nearly antithetical concepts and would seem to have their place in different literary forms, but there is in fact a close link between the interpretation of suffering in a text and the underlying narrative structure of the concept of happiness. Given the singular importance of the question of happiness, it is surprising that it has received so little systematic attention in literary criticism. The question of happiness is no ordinary question: it is the question of our lives. Commensurate with the importance of the concept, there have been comprehensive studies of it by philosophers, political theorists, economists, psychologists, and historians.  Yet literary critics are strangely silent on this matter; it seems embarrassing, even laughable, to address the question of happiness in relation to literary texts, even though there is hardly a narrative work of any length that does not raise the issue of happiness in one way or another.  Why? I believe that our embarrassment in the face of this question is due less to the banality of the question than to our lack of a critical language, a methodology, and a properly literary approach to address it. Without a systematic and rigorous method for treating happiness in narratives, all we can do is produce a history of ideas or philosophize. The specificity of the literary object vanishes with such an approach. To relinquish substantive and thematic questions to the intellectual historians, as narratology does, is to concede in advance that ideas about happiness and suffering are independent of their literary embedding. Nothing could be further from the truth. As literary critics, it is one of our responsibilities to restore the literary dimension to the history of ideas, if not to thinking itself. To think not only about literature, but with and through literature: this is our task as critics. I hope this essay will contribute to that task by offering a literary, even narratolological, approach to thinking about the question of happiness. Perhaps it can also serve as a model for how literary analysis might treat other concepts within the history of ideas and so offer insights that are not available through the conventional methods of intellectual history.

The lack of a sufficiently articulated critical language to talk about the question of happiness in narrative has obscured a fundamental narrative distinction, that between trial narratives and tragedies. When this distinction becomes invisible, we fail to see the ways in which narrative paradigms can shape our moral worlds and the concepts of happiness we take for granted. Conversely, attention to the narrative structure of the question of happiness offers a rigorous way to distinguish these narrative forms from one another, as well as insight into why the confusion between these forms has been so pervasive. When viewed from a literary perspective, the question of happiness has a rich narrative structure of its own, one which shapes the field of narrative possibilities and generates narrative forms. Indeed, if the question of happiness is as fundamental to understanding the stories of our lives as I am suggesting, then we must understand trials and tragedies not simply in terms of genres or narrative forms, but as what Peter Brooks has called “imaginative modes,” hermeneutic frames through which we make sense of our experience.

Let me begin with an initial clarification of terminology. By “tragic narratives,” I mean narratives of the sort that are common in Greek or even Shakespearean tragedy, narratives in which the protagonist’s life ends in catastrophe and the plot discloses the progressive foreclosure of all possibility for happiness: Oedipus the King, Antigone, Medea, The Bacchae, or King Lear, for example, but also Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz.  A “trial narrative,” by contrast, is a narrative in which the protagonist is subjected to a series of tests, ordeals, or temptations, so that the suffering and hardships are always viewed from the perspective of what can be learnt about the protagonist based on how he or she responds to adversity. In short, the concerns of trial narratives are epistemic rather than existential. Biblical narratives such as the life of Job, the life of Christ, Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, or the story of Eden are trial narratives in the broad sense, as is Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. But the paradigm is not purely theological, since it also includes Arthurian romances and novels from the eighteenth-century sentimental tradition (Pamela, Clarissa, The Vicar of Wakefield, and Julie). Surprisingly, it is only in the eighteenth-century tradition that the trial form in the strict sense really comes into its own, producing as it does so a structural transformation in Western cultural understandings of happiness.  This history remains to be told, and is the subject of the longer work from which this article is abstracted.

When presented so starkly, there appears to be almost no possibility of confusing trial narratives with tragedies. Yet matters are rarely this simple. After all, would it be so wrong to speak of the life of Job or Christ or even Clarissa as a tragedy, and if so, why? In a recent book about tragedy, Terry Eagleton insists that both the crucifixion of Christ and the life of Clarissa are tragic, and in Violence and the Sacred René Girard argues that sacrificial crises function similarly in Greek tragedy and the Hebrew Bible.  Nor is this confusion limited to contemporary criticism. On the contrary, as Milton makes clear in his preface to Samson Agonistes, there is a tradition of Christian tragedy in which events from the gospels serve as material for tragic dramas. Indeed, as Barbara Lewalski demonstrates, Christian writers appropriated tragic figures such as Oedipus, Prometheus, and Hercules as types of Christ, and there is an entire critical tradition that views Job as a tragic drama. Furthermore, if certain Christian narratives and trial narratives shade easily into tragedy, it is almost as easy to discover elements of trial narratives in tragedies. Trial narratives, I have suggested, are interested in epistemic (as opposed to existential) questions: the ordeal by suffering is not gratuitous because it teaches us something about the protagonist. But, in that case, isn’t Oedipus as much a trial narrative as a tragedy, since the play concerns the Delphic quest for self-knowledge? Doesn’t Aeschylus tell us that the tragic fate of the human being is to “suffer into truth"?  Indeed, whenever we claim that a tragic protagonist learns something from suffering or finds something redemptive in it, the sharp distinction between trial narratives and tragedies blurs.  Schiller’s essays on tragedy are perhaps the most notable instance of the instability of the distinction between the two forms, since they take it upon themselves to rewrite the concept of tragedy as trial narrative. Are we, then, just seeking the fabled philosopher’s stone when we try to distinguish these forms rigorously?