On Tragedy and The Traitor Baru Cormorant

I read Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant earlier this month, and it still smarts.

(If you haven’t read it yet, fear not: I won’t reveal anything past what you might gather from the cover copy.)

I’m not usually a fan of epic fantasy or political machinations or all the dukes in the kingdom stabbing each other in the back every page, but once the plot had gained momentum, I couldn’t put this book down. I turned page after page both in sick dread of the thing I suspected would happen (it did) and in anticipation of the thing I really wanted to happen (worst of all, it also did). I started the book at least three times before I actually committed to reading it, in part because it was so intense and painful even from the first few pages.

After reading it, I selfishly recommended it to the friends who could talk with me about it (misery loves company!), and I Googled around for reviews, fanfic, any salve to ease the burn.

You should know that I can’t think of a book that’s ever made me cry. I love books. I read a lot. They make me feel things, yeah, but usually strong emotions of empowerment or joy.

This one came close to breaking my “record.”

And it occurs to me that perhaps this is the first time I’ve read a tragedy that actually engaged my emotions the way classic tragedy is supposed to.*

First, a confession: this book hits most of my buttons. Not just my ideological interests, with ruminations on empire and complicity, but also my personal vulnerable points. Having to repress the deep core of who you are. A character who is smart and badass and desperately lonely. Two awesome people who can’t be together. And, look, I don’t care whether you’re pan, bi, gay, straight, ace–whatever your sexual/romantic/platonic way of falling for a person is, by the end of this book, you’ll have done it for duchess Tain Hu, the “brigand bitch.”

I tell you that because most tragedies don’t hit my buttons. Any of them.

Like many, I studied tragedies in school, mostly Shakespeare. I’ve read and seen and sometimes performed in Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet. But none of them rent me in half.

Why not? A little bit because I already knew the plot going in, but a lot because I didn’t care about these characters. The stories were engaging, yes, but they were intellectual exercises. I appreciated their structure, the cleverness of Macbeth’s downfall, the dramatic irony of Polonius’s death, but I didn’t and don’t see myself in these characters. Sometimes, if a production is good, I feel something–dread, perhaps, or horror–but never grief. Despair. Catharsis.

Likewise, sometimes I consume sad stories, but they’re not tragedies. Bad things happen to sympathetic characters, but that’s not enough to make me grieve in the holistic way that brings relief and restoration: the world conspires against the protagonists in The Fault in Our Stars, and, as a Jew, believe me, I’ve encountered dozens and dozens of fictionalized Holocaust narratives, from Schindler’s List to The Book Thief. Yes, they were moving and upsetting. No, they didn’t bring me catharsis either.

They lacked one of the key features of Aristotelian tragedy: the protagonist’s hamartia, commonly translated as “tragic flaw” or “mistake.”

According to Aristotle, the most effective tragic protagonists are just like us, only given more responsibility, more choices, by virtue of their social position, talents, or both. They may be more good than bad, but they shouldn’t be saints. Still, in the best tragedies, the protagonist isn’t morally at fault; although their fate is the result of their own choices, it was inevitable given who they are, their good intentions, and the information they had.

Far be it from me to suggest that Sophocles or Shakespeare don’t know how to write tragic heroes; their protagonists follow almost all of those principles.

Except, for me, the first part: “just like us.”

Hamlet isn’t like me. Neither is Oedipus. They don’t represent universal humanity, because they can’t. Although different productions might make them more like me, I don’t see myself in the texts. Their personal flaws and positions in society–privileged white dudes with enough power to kill people, accidentally, arbitrarily, as something normal–don’t reach deep into my secret self, clench my heart, and squeeze.

Baru, though. Baru is like me.

All that stuff I mentioned above? The complicity. The packaging away who you are and where you come from to fit in, gain power and acceptance, promising yourself the whole time that you’re doing it not to assimilate but to resist. The times you find yourself forced to choose between preserving your self at the expense of someone else’s, telling yourself that with whatever social capital you receive in exchange, you’ll make things right. Well, more right than they are. Right?

Being female in a male-dominated society. Being Jewish in a Christian-dominated country. Being gender-non-conforming and finding all genders attractive in a heteronormative, gender-codified culture.

As I wrote above, there are lots of sad stories about people like me. But this one is the first tragedy I’ve encountered.

Because Baru isn’t merely unfortunate; it’s not that the cruel forces of this world and its powers catch her up and swirl her around the maelstrom. The reason Baru’s story resonates so much with me, stays longer and hurts deeper than the sadness of novels about love thwarted by circumstance or evil governments destroying people, is because she makes a choice.

The same way Hamlet chooses not to kill the king. The way Oedipus chooses to pursue the truth, no matter the personal cost.

Because she is who she is, she can’t escape her choice, any more than Hamlet can conscientiously kill Claudius, or Oedipus can wallow in happy ignorance while his kingdom wastes away. Hamlet won’t walk away from either the moral ramifications of his actions or his responsibility to his dead father; Oedipus can’t abandon his duties as ruler or his past actions. Like them, instead of being bound by external forces, Baru’s bound by her own ambition, borne of her intelligence, her pain, and her sense of justice and truth.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant takes us through each step of the decision with her, so even though we know she could have taken a different path, we can’t see where. If she’d taken any of the roads that would have saved her, she would have killed the courage and competence at her core. By the end, we’d still be mourning part of her self–just a different part.

In my heart of hearts, I’m a comedian, not a tragedian. I end in weddings. This isn’t the kind of story I write or the kind I usually seek out to read. But there should be more: tragedies for everyone, not just the Danish princes and Greek royalty.

We all deserve to transmute our personal grief, our private pain into public catharsis.

* Also, a caveat: this tragedy is about queer, colonized women of colour. As a settler and a queer White Jewish woman who sometimes passes as straight (because my only serious relationship has been my current one, which is heterosexual) but more often doesn’t (because my gender presentation is non-conventional), I felt like the tragedy in this story spoke to me. But I can’t tell you whether this is the tragedy you crave or the tragedy you’re sick of; only you know that, and I respect your view.