Dialogue: A modern-day tragedy

By JOE BENNETT

Whoa. Rein the horses, stop the wagon train, form a circle, shelter the women and children, load the muskets and prepare to do battle. (On second thoughts, just shelter the children, the women today are up to it.)

The vandals have come down from the hills and civilisation is under threat. (On third thoughts, might as well let the children have a go, too. If they can put up with body piercing, they can go to war. If anyone needs shelter today, it's the men.).

But it's time to kill or be killed. If we lose this one, well, who cares? It will be all over and there will be nothing left to fight for.

Sound the bugle, sing heigh ho, for this is it, the big one, the decisive engagement between culture and barbarism, and there's something scary but pleasing after decades of decline to have the enemy in plain view.

Now at last we have something to shoot at. The years of endurance are over and courtesy is long gone. These are raw days. The enemy has a name and a form at last. It is called the Bee Gees.

You've heard the story. Students of English at the University of Cambridge sit a compulsory paper on the subject of tragedy. That tragedy is the only compulsory paper deserves an article on its own with a fat dose of irony, but now is no time for irony. Now is the time for cold steel.

Those who set this exam have stooped to baseness. After years of blameless academic purity - "Ibsen's tragic vision was predicated on the image of disease. Discuss"; "Address the notion of literal and metaphorical blindness in the tragic oeuvre" and so on - they have let down their guard and the subculture of inanity has thrown a huge right hook through the gap. That right hook is the Bee Gees.

The walls of academe have crumbled, eaten out by the maggot called relevance. And that maggot has crawled on to the exam paper in the form of these words:

Tragedy.

When the feeling's gone and you

hp+1can't go on

It's tragedy.

When you lose control and you've

hp+1got no soul

It's tragedy.

Words written by the Bee Gees. It is tempting at this point simply to take sides, to throw in one's lot with the Mounted Battalion of The Educated Few and rally beneath a standard embroidered with the legend: "We shall not dumb down."

The Bee Gees represent everything that education is supposed to drag us out of. They are a pop group (nasty), they are impossibly wealthy (nastier still) and they cause men and women of unimaginable poverty of mind to form "fan clubs" - groups of such unmitigated awfulness that we must needs be protected from the possibility of infection by shrouding them in inverted commas.

But though the temptation is strong, it ignores the fact that the Bee Gees' words make a rather good question. They invite debate and disagreement and that is what exam questions are for.

To take a tragedy at random: Macbeth by Act V (oh, that lovely educated V) has lost the power to feel the virtuous emotions of pity or grief; has lost, in short, his soul - and can go on only as a murderous automaton. That, indeed, as the Bee Gees suggest, is tragedy.

Meanwhile, Mrs Macbeth has lost control and cannot go on in any way at all. She flings herself from the battlements. That, too, is tragedy.

Ah ha, perhaps so, scream the defenders of the faith, but the Bee Gees didn't know that. They just flung a few emotive words together, found that they rhymed and sang them.

And besides, the masses who writhe and squirm to their "music" (more disinfectant punctuation) pay no attention to the lyrics of the songs. Those lyrics are merely noise, an anodyne addition to the simian rhythm of the drums and that crudest of instruments, the electric guitar.

The Bee Gees know not what they say. They gibber like parrots, but are incapable of consecutive thought.

Well, perhaps so and perhaps not. Nevertheless I think we should note the fundamental irony in all this: the great tragedians, whose work we revere but don't read, were the Bee Gees of their day.

Look at the size of the theatres in Athens. Four-fifths of the population rolled up to see Aeschylus' latest blood-spattered epic. Or consider Shakespeare's Globe with its pit for the impoverished groundlings with their bad teeth and worse armpits.

The ancient tragedians were popular. Popular does not mean bad.

But I argue against myself. I have been trained in cultural supremacy. My education obliges me to take arms against a sea of Bee Gees. Don't shoot till you can see the whites of their teeth.