Schadenfreude's zing: Victory and misfortune both human

TALES of victory and misfortune are both about being human.

If Manchester United's fall continues, will Wayne Rooney, the one bright hope, blow a gasket, threaten another w...

NATURALLY I once wrote a bildungsroman. It was full of Sixties zeitgeist, though it perhaps sprang from a rather restricted weltanschauang.

Its failure to find favour with a publisher will no doubt excite schadenfreude in a few hearts.

Ah, those lovely German polysyllables, full of twanging consonant clusters, particularly vivid for people such as me who have little German beyond bier and stadion. You're not supposed to use foreign words unless there is no English equivalent, but they do make a chap look like un homme serieux. I was musing on this subject while watching Manchester United the other day: oh, what's the English for schadenfreude?

Well, there isn't anything, really. It's not that Anglophone people are incapable of taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others, it's just that we'd rather not put it in words. Apart from foreign ones, of course.

Let's be frank, if we set matters of partisanship aside, Manchester United is the story of the football season so far. United is really not very good. Its not actually winning many matches. It is at present lying - sorry, forgetting my cliches, I'll forget my own name next - at present languishing in ninth place in the Premier League. It's unheard of.

What will happen next? Will Wayne Rooney, Man U's one bright hope, blow a gasket, threaten another walkout, thump a team-mate? Will David Moyes crack up? Will the owners lose patience? Will they suddenly turn back into a leading force? Will Moyes pull a masterstroke? Will a single inspiring performance turn the tide?

The whole situation is fraught with possibilities.

So in terms of exciting serious interest, the misfortunes of Manchester United are giving considerable pleasure. Is that gloating, though? Most people who follow sport know enough not to gloat: your own misfortunes will follow soon enough. Few people who follow the England cricket team overdid the gloating as England won three successive Ashes series. Gloating exposes the gloater and, besides, superstitiously, gloating so often seems an active force in bringing about misfortune.

Plenty of people who support rival clubs will take a certain pleasure in Manchester United's struggles: now you know what it feels like, not so arrogant now, and all that. Yet for most of us, Manchester United's plight is more fascinating than amusing.

There's a great gung-ho column to be written condemning such feelings. How small-minded it is to revel in misfortune rather than admiring greatness: typical of the way this country thinks; no wonder the national team is in such poor shape; goodness gracious me, if you can't admire greatness when you find it, what's the point in sport, etc, etc.

The same sort of column was written about Tiger Woods.

Those people fascinated by his fall were apparently lesser human beings. What we should have been doing was admiring the greatness of the man and mourning the greatness lost. Never mind the cocktail waitresses, here's the golf. To be interested in anything else shows that everybody in sport is petty and small-minded. Apart from me, of course.

Yet, actually, Tiger's fall is part of the story, for stories are not always about happy endings. Lance Armstrong is another great sporting story. No one suggested this time that we were trivial and small-minded if we failed to concentrate only on the seven Tour de France victories.

Armstrong and Woods are both sporting stories that fascinate us, not because they are about greatness, and not because they are about great men cut down to size. It's because they are about humanity, nothing more, nothing less.

Take Agamemnon. If we were to take the orthodox sporting view and admire only his successes, we would concentrate on his leadership of the Greek forces in the ultimately victorious 10-year siege of Troy. To bother with anything else would be to demean a great man and to make ourselves smaller human beings.

Yet the story continues. Agamemnon goes home with Cassandra as part of his victory spoils. Instead of living happily ever after, he is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, with the aid of her lover Aegisthus.

Versions vary. In one he is killed in the bath after being immobilised with a net. Clytemnestra also kills Cassandra.

Nor does the story end there. Agamemnon's son Orestes and his sister Electra avenge their father by murdering both halves of the murderous couple, so bringing down on themselves the wrath of the Furies. In other words, Agamemnon's success story - the hardcore sports story if you like - is only the beginning. The real action, the truly compelling part of the narrative, is in the fall.

It is neither prurient nor gloating to find the story of a fall a fascinating thing. No one wishes ill on poor Gazza, but the ever-unwinding story of his decline and fall is as compelling as it is distressing. Perhaps even educational, but it's the narrative itself, rather than any potential therapeutic effects, that enthrals.

Or take Hamlet. We could rewrite the plot to make it a celebration of greatness. Hamlet beats his murderous uncle in a fair fight, sets up as a good and just ruler of Denmark and lives happily ever after. Or perhaps he leaves the sea of sorrows behind him, goes back to Wittenberg and becomes the greatest philosopher of his age. Or perhaps he elopes with Ophelia and becomes a wandering poet: wiser and happier than any tormented prince or king.

All these would be jollier stories than the one Shakespeare settled on, but sad stories also have their power and their meaning. The play's transition from Hamlet's black-clad sulks to the blood-bolstered shambles of Act V is as powerful a tale as exists; nor do we consider ourselves mean-minded and petty for finding it so.

Stories of sadness, failure and fall from greatness have their meaning, too. If you turn away from the sports pages you find the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping pell-mell through every double spread: carnal, bloody and unnatural acts on every page. Reputations are trampled underfoot. People stand before us with their pretensions stripped away, not by the malignity of newspapers but their own folly.

And such tales find their way into newspapers because readers want to read them. Sometimes we can accuse people of bad things for wanting to read such a story, but mostly the stories are there because they are compelling.

There is a side of us, not the one we most like to boast of, that does indeed take pleasure in the misfortunes of others, and sport dishes these up on a regular basis.

If Alex Ferguson were still in charge of Manchester United, there would, indeed, be a certain not unshaming zing of schadenfreude for many people.

We have a right to our tales of misfortune. In sport we celebrate the victor more often than we mourn defeat and misfortune, but both sorts of story are about being human. The decline and fall of any empire has its enthralling side: the unfolding tale of Manchester United's travails are given meaning by the heights they achieved over the past 20-odd years.

Tales have many shapes. Sport can bring all sorts of tales to us, and do so with the sort of vividness that compels again and again.