I have read and heard it said that the fact and specter of the Holocaust have rendered morally obsolete the traditional notion of Tragedy, once considered mankind's most painfully noble mode of art. Tragedy assumed a morally ordered and rational universe—so the argument goes—which contained and structured in some ultimately reassuring way our reactions to the tragic event, no matter how painful. The Holocaust has destroyed that universe, or that orderly conception; consequently, Tragedy cannot speak to us of our particular dislocations, the Holocaust included. Individual works may work for us, but as something other than Tragedy: melodrama, minor psychological intuitions, pure form moving like music, If they work as Tragedy, they do so as the still-pleasing archaic form of another age, revealing that older peoples had their depths too, even though they hadn't experienced the terrible knowledge we have.