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"If mediation does not, never did and never will exist," Kott concludes, pushing himself and his heroes against the wall, "if cruelty is the rule of the universe, one can confirm it even with one's own agony." What the tragic hero knows at last is that he is in rebellion against life itself—against the very terms of human mortality. No wonder the tragic hero became obsolete even in his own time, replaced as a heroic prototype by the crafty, adjustable Odysseus—a survivor who was excessive only at compromise, the perfect artist of the possible.
For the latter-day equivalent of Greek tragedy, Kott recommends, as a salient example, the spectacle of a paralyzed man confronting a woman half-buried alive: Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, "the final version of the Prometheus myth." Nor does Kott fail to provide the unerringly apt caption—Sophocles' dread-filled line, "Nothing surpasses not being born."
If most academics are too sublimating, is Kott too abominating? Characteristically he keeps his intellectual balance on the brink of nihilism by reaching out, not to Aristotle but to a Resistance fighter named Albert Camus. In paraphrase of Camus, Kott writes: "Prometheus' greatness is his revolt without hope." Like a banner he majestically raises Camus' fine and all-important distinction: "Being deprived of hope is not despairing." No 20th century margin shaver could come closer to making Sophocles a contemporary. Melvin Maddocks