Quotable: Tragicomic

A few more thoughts on tragedy, in keeping with my teaching this week:

Show me a hero

and I'll write you a tragedy.

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

I am intrigued by the implications of this: is heroism possible without tragedy?  Is (as Greek tragedy seems to teach us) heroic greatness purchased with later misery?  Is Fitzgerald implying that our idea of heroism is a whitewash, constantly erasing the sadness that every human life contains?  Does our cultural desire to make heroes always contain a matching desire to see those heroes punished, diminished, fallen?

This world is a comedy to those that think,

a tragedy to those that feel.

-Horace Walpole

Is the difference between comedy and tragedy not one between disdain and sympathy, but rather between intellect and emotion?  Or are these two ways of saying the same thing?

Obviously Walpole isn't just getting at a difference between genres, an act of literary criticism, but rather making a commentary about the world itself.   To the empath, life must be a constant parade of suffering, an excruciating cavalcade of expectations disappointed and bonds betrayed.  To the intellectual, closed off from feeling, these same disappointments and betrayals become comic failures of expectation, festivals of irony.

Quotable: The Murder of Time

And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy,

just as the essence of tragedy 

is killing eternity.

-Miguel de Unamuno

from my journals, April 5, 1996

We are talking about Aristotle in my Introduction to Drama class, so the nature of comedy and tragedy have been on my mind a bit.  

What does Aristotle say the difference is?  Well among other things, tragedians (he says) portray human beings as better than we are, while comedians portray us as worse than we are.  

In other words, tragedy is about abstract disasters, idealized lives pushed off the track of happiness by smoothly polished juggernauts of moral conflict or divine will.  Comedy takes as its basis the messiness, the assymmetry of human fallibility, rather than its grandeur and order.  

We go to tragedy to feel fear that even those with power, wealth, talent, and status can suffer despite their best efforts at living a good life.  Fear that if their lives can go so far astray, so to can our much less blessed and careful ones. Count no man happy till he dies, free of pain.  But we go to comedy to despise, rather than to empathize. Or so this line of thinking goes.

I love the way Unamuno picks this up: killing time is such a fascinating turn of phrase, such a sharply moral stance on indolence.  To fritter away an hour is to be a murderer of time, a finite commodity; it is a slaughter of a concrete portion of your total life.  

Unamuno (in this translation, at least) highlights the moralism of the phrase, but also underscores the common ground between comedy and tragedy.  Both deal with the destructive nature of human behavior: to kill time is in some essential way to kill eternity, to waste some vital portion of the human opportunity. Thus there is always an element of absurdity in tragedy, and of pathos in comedy.

Play every comedy as if it were a tragedy, as acting coaches have been saying from time immemorial.  

On the death of the original

It's a platonic problem, really.  If you have conceptual art, then how do you tell the difference between the original and a copy?  Even the "original" is just a pale material shadow of the work of art, which exists only on the plane of ideas.

But somehow it all seems more than Plato anticipated when shark corpses get involved.

As this article from the New York Observer notes:

The artists are doing this on purpose, obviously, having spent the best part of the past century making work that vigorously and repeatedly challenged concepts of originality, authenticity, and uniqueness-- concepts that crucially inform how conservators have preserved and restored work, and how curators have displayed and studied it.

It’s driving museum people crazy. How do you acquire or display a work of performance art that exists only in the form of an instruction sheet? What should conservators do about works that are deteriorating because they were made from unstable materials, such as neon, or sharks?

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The other day I was talking to a close friend from graduate school, and we both began to reflect on how much more  vital our twenties would have seemed if we hadn't spent them desperately seeking to achieve some amorphous form of status and self-worth at our competitive university.  "Looking back," my friend JJ said to me, "it almost seems like a waste. Well, I mean, it can't have been a waste, because we have our doctorates, but...," she sighed, "I want to look back on my thirties and see that I've done something more ... coherent."

Now the conventional wisdom being given to undergrads with an eye on academe is this: look elsewhere for coherence.  Advising against anyone following his (and our) path to a doctorate in the humanities, Thomas H. Benton writes:

What almost no prospective graduate students can understand is the extent to which doctoral education in the humanities socializes idealistic, naïve, and psychologically vulnerable people into a profession with a very clear set of values. It teaches them that life outside of academe means failure, which explains the large numbers of graduates who labor for decades as adjuncts, just so they can stay on the periphery of academe.

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Looking back at the "Death of the Author"in a new Guardian blog on the sexiest moments in literary theory.

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Is it possible to make a living as a playwright in America today?  A new study reveals that there are very few writers who can claim that the theatre entirely supports them today.  Where is the support for innovation in theatrical writing today?  Since I have been studying the 1956 moment in British theatre, it is easy to see how complaisance and the idea that innovation is the province of individual genius-artists rather than a result of national or industrial commitment can result in cultural stagnation.

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Germany becomes the third country to produce a musical about Barack Obama.  An odd additional note:

As part of an interactive gimmick, the audience will be asked to participate in the show by playing tiny drums built into their chairs.

Yes, we can?


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This study about the correlation between large amounts of time spent on the computer or watching television and cardiovascular disease - even among exercisers - has me totally, totally freaked out. 


So I am going to get off the computer now and go do something a bit more ... circulation-inducing.