The Next Big Thing #2

'The Next Big Thing' is essentially a chain of blog posts prompting writers to interview themselves. Kirsty has already taken part in the exercise. Now it's my turn.

I've been tagged by the editor of US online journal Toe Good Poetry, Jerry Brunoe. Jerry's post is here. I'll be answering questions not about my next collection, but about the anthology I've been working on since the publication of the Domesday Books.

Title of the book?
Coin Opera 2: Fulminare's Revenge.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
It's the sequel to Coin Opera, a micro-anthology of computer game poems, and mimics the form of sequel titles in 90s console gaming, where it's not unusual for an antagonist to 'return', 'resurrect' or 'revenge' themselves upon the heroes.

What genre does the book fall under?
Poetry anthologies and, to a lesser extent, gaming.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
A massive collection of poems inspired by the lore, inhabitants, environments, limitations and rules of gaming titles and franchises spanning from the 1970s to the present day.

How long did it take you to write/edit the first draft of your manuscript?
I was soliciting for poems as early as spring 2011, and had a draft of everything ready to go in spring 2012. Since then, there's been a lot of careful tweaking, but most of the work has been on the design front, in particular the accompanying artwork.

Good grief. How come it's taken you so long?
Put simply, you blink and a month goes by. I don't think I've ever worked on editing a book quite this complex in terms of the balance and layout. Many of the poems employ unique shapes and forms and can't be just splashed across the page without due care. I also want to structure it in a way that makes it easy to navigate, and I've had to think carefully about what extra information readers might find useful.

Also, every single poet contributing is represented by a sprite in the style of Samurai Shodown for the NeoGeo Pocket Colour. I badly underestimated how long this would take me - the gradual improvement in handling the style meant that by the time I'd drawn everybody, the first dozen or so at least needed to be redone completely, since they were noticeably cruder.

What can I say? I've become obsessed with getting this book right, possibly out of an abundance of sensitivity to all the criticisms that could be used to dismiss it. And yes, 'right' does include the sprites, for reasons that I can only attribute to some kind of artistic instinct. At the same time, I've rarely been afforded the time to work on the project at full tilt - life has seen fit to land me with an endless conga line of higher priorities and exhausting distractions. I would estimate about a third of the time I've spent on it so far has been after midnight, when I barely even know what I'm looking at.

So when is it out?
I've given up on estimations and will update you on this when we finally get the pdfs safely to the printers! There may be a Kickstarter campaign before that to help with the initial costs.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Oh, it's incomparable. It's got that going for it at least. I mean, have you ever read a poem which is the result of two poets battling for control of the page? Or a five-page sensory exploration of the universe of Planescape: Torment patchworked from lines in pre-existing poems?

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Over 40 poets contributed to the book, under the explicit instruction that they should be inspired by games. Not the generalised act of gaming or a broad overview of gaming culture, but individual games.

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?
There will be a special edition that comes with an extra pamphlet of procedurally generated 'core sample' poems - word-based imaginary imitations of the strata patterns unearthed in virtual environments.

The people I'm tagging ... well, it's a TBA, really. Would anyone like to be tagged?

Sunday: Review. Seizing: Places.

posted by the Judge

Sunday review, gents. Harry Giles takes on a massively difficult piece of work, that being Seizing: Places by Hélène Dorion. Difficult because it was originally written in French, and we all know how tough the French poets can be (Rilke always messes me up, for instance). Difficult also because it's in translation, which means he's got an extra dimension to consider.

I'm sad to say that he doesn't live up to the challenge. Nor does the translator. Neither of them understood that the original title, Ravir: les lieux, is not translated as "Seizing Places" but as "Raving in Places". It's an open throwback to Dorion's background as a gypsy DJ. I know cause I was there (check out her dubstep remix of Seven Nations Army... damn if she rocks).

Still, they do what they can. Read the full review here.

Then go on and have a great Sunday!

Creative Writing and the Writing Life

written by Gregory Leadbetter

Given the striking rise in the number of university courses in creative writing over the last ten years, it was probably only a matter of time. Students just starting out on Masters programmes in creative writing have begun to ask: ‘how do I become a creative writing lecturer?’

The question was put to me by one of my own MA students recently – someone whom, in fact, I can indeed imagine becoming a lecturer in creative writing one day, should he wish to. But at the same time, alarm bells rang – and what I said to him in reply forms the basis of what I have to say here.

I have written elsewhere on the moot role of writers in the academy. Quite properly, it’s the focus of lively debate: these things matter and, at the moment, everything is in a molten state. Leaving aside the contentious word ‘creative’ for a moment, my own view is that the presence of writers, and the study of the craft of writing in universities is – potentially – enormously beneficial, for all concerned. Needless to say, there are a lot of variables involved (not least the commitment of the student), but if the focus is on reading well as much as writing well; on writing as a way of knowing the world through language; on thinking with the imagination as much as the analytical intellect; on the inherent value of fine writing as much as finding an audience; on cultivating subjectivity itself as much as exploring principles of taste; then creative writing has just as much a claim on our respect as any of the other humanities – not to mention its cousins in music, fine art, dance, and drama.

So what might be wrong with doing an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing, followed straight after by an MA in Creative Writing, and then straight after that a PhD in Creative Writing, all with a view to becoming a creative writing lecturer – just as those choosing an academic career might do in more established university subjects, like English Literature?

Two things.

The first is that when studying creative writing, the student’s mind should be focussed entirely on the writing as an end in itself – not as a stepping stone to something else other than the writing. This is fundamental. Students should be encouraged to use the precious freedom that comes with doing a BA, MA or PhD to make themselves stronger writers. That, after all, is what it is all about – and will define all that follows for the individual concerned.

The second point relates to one of the key things that writers bring to universities: namely, that by the time they join the academy, they have had an independent existence, as writers, outside the university system – and of course, that they continue to live that life, in concert with their university role. To lose that heterodoxical energy would be to lose the  transformative, radical life writers (again, potentially) kindle within universities.

To put it another way: the university job should follow upon being a writer – the writing should not follow upon being a creative writing lecturer. Psychologically, it’s a crucial difference. A writer earns the right to be regarded as such through his or her own endeavours, as a writer and thinker – not by having a certain job.

It may be that anyone, no matter what subject, who plans to go straight through the university system should, ideally, do something else before taking up a role as a university lecturer – but given its crucial dependence on individuality, on the person of the writer, the dangers of careerism are more acute in creative writing. It may be that people can establish a writing career while doing a BA/MA/PhD in Creative Writing just as well as doing anything else. Maybe. But that isn’t the point.

Let me offer an analogy from contemporary politics. It is alarmingly frequent now for British Members of Parliament never to have worked outside politics: instead, they’ve worked as party officials, lobbyists, speech-writers, ‘thinktank’ researchers, and so on. Instead of representing the nation – the actual energies and activities of the people – becoming an MP has, for many, become just another career choice. Such so-called ‘professionalization’ increases the risk of a self-enclosed discourse – think of all those meaningless and evasive phrases with which we are constantly bombarded – and diminishes the possibility of authenticity. Creative writing in universities must be on its guard against any tendency towards a similarly self-enclosed, self-cloning production-line, cut off from vital sources of experience beyond the institutional apparatus.

A writer best serves their future, as a writer, by focussing on their writing. That in itself is as rich a vocation as one could wish for: to explore our plural, infinitely complex reality through the tactile intelligence of language. The possibilities are manifold – though it is, quite properly, a demanding way of life. I encourage my writing students to cultivate themselves as independent cultural agents in the world – to create the order to which they wish to belong.

Writers make themselves valuable to their fellow human beings by what they do – and if things go well, it is through that success that opportunities come.

A writer might even choose to reflect upon and articulate their ongoing experience – and teach creative writing.

Gregory Leadbetter is Director of the Institute of Creative and Critical Writing, and of the MA in Writing, at Birmingham City University. A pamphlet of his poems, The Body in the Well, was published by HappenStance in 2007. He was a scriptwriter for the BBC radio drama Silver Street (2005-07). His book of literary criticism, Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) won the CCUE Book Prize 2012. He has been awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship for 2013. His website/blog can be found here.

Sunday Review: Pilinszky's 'Passio'

posted by the Judge

Well, it's my turn to review a book again. I'm dealing with János Pilinszky's Passio, translated from the Hungarian by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri. Read the review here.

I was mightily disappointed by this book. There isn't as much as one mention of the Golden Team, or even one poem discussing the great Ferenc Puskás. Instead, all we get is great literature.

I don't know what this continent is coming to, really.

Enjoy your Sunday!
 

Anatomy of Tragedy #7: Videogames

written by the Judge

XVI

Our anatomy of tragedy is finished, and the question is – where do we go from here? It is interesting to contemplate the tradition of criticism behind this genre, and look at the path that winds towards us. When Hegel developed his brilliant theory of literature, it was the beginning of the nineteenth century. A new literary genre, called the novel, had become very popular.

Novels, back in Hegel’s time, were far less sophisticated than they are today. And they were not recognised as a legitimate part of ‘high’ culture. Indeed, reading many novels was seen as the symptom of a shallow mind, one only occupied with frivolities (amusing, given that the contemporary cliché says exactly the opposite – reading many novels is now characteristic of the deep and intellectual mind). This is, I suppose, the reason why Hegel decided not to bother with this new mode of writing – but now it seems like the most glaring omission from his theory.

Enter Mikhail Bakhtin, writing from his position of complete obscurity in the first half of the twentieth century, and producing one of the most important and original studies of the novel ever written. His work is very seldom connected to Hegel and Nietzsche, but in my opinion it makes for a natural sequel to their investigations. Bakhtin never mentioned the I and O symbols, but he identified the stand-out trait of the novel as a literary genre: while poetry transitions from one primal symbol to the other, and drama synthesises them both in a single effect, the novel simply uses them liberally, with no consistent rule or method at all. The resulting condition of chaos, in which anything goes, even something as polymorphous as Joyce’s Ulysses, is the realm of the novel. Cinema, though a new revolutionary art in its own right, did not innovate the symbolic arena the way that the novel did. The language of film is always either the language of drama or that of the novel (and as of late, even that of poetry!); images are used instead of words, but the rules (or lack thereof) stay unchanged.

For my own part, having written a series on poetry and one on drama, I appear to be left with the task of getting one done on the novel. I doubt that I will. My impression is that it would be redundant: Bakhtin’s work may not include a specific discussion of the I and the O, but it is very exhaustive in all other matters. And since the novel is defined by not having a consistent structure for the dynamics of the I and the O, I feel there is little I may add, at least for now.

Are we, then, at the end of hermeneutics? Has this tradition – the one embodied in the continuity of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Bakhtin, not the broader one which includes Heidegger, Gadamer and other illustrious thinkers – been completely mined out? What fascinates me is that we find ourselves today in a similar position to Hegel’s two-hundred years ago. Hegel may have had all the intellectual means – if not a great deal of predisposition – to study the novel, but there would have been little material for him to look into: novels back then were just too simple. Dostoevsky, on whose work the theory of Bakhtin was wholly predicated, published his major works thirty years after Hegel’s death. The German philosopher simply came too early.

We are, as I said, in a very similar position. Though cinema may not have changed the structure of narrative from literature, we are today witnessing the rise of a new, fresh, revolutionary art-form that does. I am talking about videogames.

Games appear to be at a stage of development not unlike the novel in Hegelian times. They are not accepted as legitimate members of high culture, and people who indulge in them are often frowned on as time-wasters. They have developed by leaps and bounds since their appearance in the 1970s, but they are still very rudimentary: more often than not, developers struggle to weave narrative into gameplay, and they borrow methods and techniques from other forms, especially film. Games that involve ‘cut-scenes’ – moments in which the game stops and you simply watch an animated sequence – are trying to replicate an effect which does not belong to their medium. There is no material in these cut-scenes to develop a new branch of hermeneutic theory, because this type of narrative is derivative.

And yet games genuinely exhibit the potential for new narrative structures, much more so than film ever did. At the heart of the original gaming experience there is interactivity – not only the possibility of choosing between different paths on a story, but the possibility of making one’s own arrangement with the symbols that one is offered. A structure that efficiently, uniquely suits the videogame format sees the player coming to a scenario after some great event has happened, and reconstructing the story by finding fragments left by the previous occupants (diary entries, pictures, memos, objects, living creatures, etc.). If the order in which these fragments are found and the option itself of finding them is not linear (as in the original Resident Evil) but left to the player’s decisions on where to go and what to do (as in the GameCube’s Metroid Prime), we have a structure that no other art-form can replicate at all. If poetry has no time, if drama has time self-contained and bound to the continuum of the stage, and if the novel has time which is not self-contained and follows no rules but its own, then videogames have something completely new – in a videogame, the factor of time is transferred from the space of the text onto the reader: you are time. Causality takes on a new dimension. The symbolic value of signifiers – whether objects stand for the I or the O – relies on the arrangement effected by the player’s actions and therefore depends on a whole new principle, has whole new effects. The very structure of the novel is contained within that of videogames, as a player forms his / her own novel out of the fragments and variables that s/he is offered – exactly like the structure of drama is contained in the novel, and the structure of poetry is contained in drama. We have finally reached the next level.

As something of an aside, it’s worth pausing for a moment and looking at the evolution of literary theory and the way that it paced after the evolution of the great literary forms. Studying a poem meant studying the text itself and what it said, while studying a play meant studying the characters and what they believed in. The rise of the novel coincided with the explosion of a concept that, in literary theory, had until then been given relatively less attention – the concept of the author, and the idea that meaning is buried deeper than in the previous levels and in the author’s mind. As the symbolic play of the text went into more and more subterranean levels, the theory behind those texts correspondingly started hunting for meaning in new, hidden agents. In cinema, there is no new level to make the previous ones redundant. But in games, intended in the sense that I discussed above, the author clearly takes a back-seat and the player comes to the fore as the matrix of meaning, in a way that even contemporary theories on subjectivity and literary con/text cannot fully account for.

At this point, though, our series must genuinely come to a close, and a white flag must be raised. Not because the topic has been exhaustively treated, as in the case of the novel, but for the opposite reason – because there is not enough material to study. Videogames are, as I mentioned, still quite rudimentary. There has been no Dostoevsky in their world. There has been no Proust. An anatomy of gaming must be left to scholars as of yet unborn, and my best wishes – along with a quantum of irrepressible envy – go out to all of them.

Sunday review: Anthony Wilson's Riddance

posted by the Judge

Goddamn, what a day. I was out in London with a friend and I was reminded of every reason I love that city so much. I was also reminded of the fact that Camden Town is DAMNED TO HELL with me. Every time I go there something bad happens - in this case, someone nicked a hat I was exceptionally fond of. I walked out of that pub and would have welcomed a fist fight, no joke.

So after all that stuff happened, I got back home and finally found the time to stop thinking about hats and turn my mind to poetry criticism. Here's our Sunday review, gents. Judi Sutherland reviews Anthony Wilson's Riddance, which is about the lugubrious topic of cancer. A difficult topic, but apparently Wilson handles it in a pretty detached manner.

I'd love to close with our usual 'Have a great Sunday', but it may be a bit late for that. And 'have a great Monday' sounds like I'm mocking you.

Anatomy of Tragedy #6: Modern Film

written by the Judge

XV

A more ‘proper’ study of these genres would have seen me writing about tragedy and comedy simultaneously, drawing examples from each in turn and constructing a single argument for both. In reality, though structurally very close, tragedy and comedy are historically so distant that they are best studied separately.

My choice was to focus on tragedy because it is, by and large, an easier subject. Since tragedy has always been identified as ‘high’ culture, even by Aristotle, dramatic traditions have generally striven for greater and greater purity of the genre. Playwrights were interested in writing true, classical, eternal tragedies. Comedy, by contrast, has always been seen as a ‘low’ genre – and it does not help that Aristotle’s book on comedy should have been lost, resulting in a millenarian scholarly slant in favour of tragedy (famously fictionalised by Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose). As a consequence, writers of comedies have liberally moved away from – rather than towards – formal purity. Classical plot structures have been sacrificed in favour of (or contaminated by) contingent humour, slapstick and vulgarity. The precept was, and still is, to use anything in order to please the immediate crowds, rather than the eternal reader.

Modern film reflects the disparity in the historical fortune of tragedy and comedy very well. Modern comedies, in particular family and romantic comedies, are usually classical in their format. Family comedies have a hero, typically a father who is somewhat foolish, irresponsible or down on his luck, and an anti-hero, some bad guy who represents a corporation or another collective group. Once the interests of these two characters collide, the hero ‘finds himself’ and is reconciled with his family (sometimes, by metonymic extension, he gains the admiration of an even wider group, like having all of his friends or colleagues applauding him), while the anti-hero is deprived of his power or status. In love stories, the structure is not dissimilar, though the triangles are a little different – instead of the father who must reconcile himself with the family, we may have a single girl who must get together with the ‘right’ guy, and who succeeds in doing so as she overcomes a number of obstacles in the form of nefarious social pressure: other guys trying to seduce her, her family opposing her, her career choices clashing with the sentimental ones, and so on.

There are many other types of comedy in film, some of which are utterly modern and have nothing to do with the ancients. Certain unbridled comedies along the lines of the Naked Gun or Scary Movie series are little more than a string of all sorts of gags, held together by a pretext narrative. The old Disney and Warner Bros cartoons are entirely based on visual slapstick and they all have the same story (a morality tale in which the bully gets punished, whether his form be that of a cat, a coyote, a duck or whatever else), or else they have no story at all – some of them simply stage an isolated episode in which a character or a group of characters are doing something (examples include building a ship, trying to put out a fire, cleaning a car, taking a train, skating on ice, and many more). Artists such as the Monty Python group have developed entire feature-length films which are based on an absurd type of humour which has nothing to do with classical comedy. Indeed, comedy has genuinely exploded in the last century, as the classical format has established itself and been taken to new heights, while new modes and genres have developed alongside it (I say this with the qualifier that a great deal of comedy from the past has simply not survived – for all we know there might well have been such a thing as an equivalent of the Naked Gun films in Classical Athens, but one understands why they may not have been recorded for posterity).

On the other hand, tragedies have not flourished at all in cinema. There are some genuine representatives of the genre, but they are few and far between. The only ones I can think of are Coppola’s first two Godfather movies, De Palma’s Scarface, Woody Allen’s Match Point, and George Lucas’ Revenge of the Sith (the latter being quite possibly the most dreadfully written tragedy in recorded history). Other than that, there is no such thing as an established tragic genre in cinema. The movies that we file under the official genre of ‘Drama’, from Spielberg’s Schindler’s List to Mendes’ American Beauty, are works of considerable merit and undeniable moving power, but they have nothing to do with tragedies. If anything, they are closer in form to the novel, a story-telling mode in which signifiers of the I and the O are used freely, without being organised into coherent structures. This is true even of films that stage apparently ‘tragic’ plots, like Scott’s Thelma & Louise, which is not a tragedy for the simple reason that the death of the two heroines is an act of ultimate affirmation, not one of surrender.

The only time that something like an incipient tragic tradition developed in cinema was in the 1940s, when the genre of film noir made its appearance in America. These dark brooding films consistently play around with tropes belonging to classical tragedy (broken dreams, forbidden love, inevitability, violation of the law, murder of kin), and a drive towards reviving the old dramatic tradition – whether deliberate or not – can be read everywhere. A few of the films are successful in executing the tragic effect, such as Billy Wilder’s unforgettable Double Indemnity, which is as impeccably tragic as anything by Shakespeare. Most of the others start out by establishing a tragic premise, but they abort it halfway, or are simply unable to sustain the tension between Achilles and the sea over the complicated structure of a feature-length film. The decline of film noir after less than a couple of decades meant that the genre never had the time to evolve into a real continuity – so that North America does not (yet) have its own tragic tradition the way that the European countries do. There have been attempts at reviving or simply referencing film noir, but even when the results were gorgeous (one film to bind them all – Scott’s Blade Runner) the elements that were reproduced were those of lighting, frame, character or tone. In other words, it was always primarily a visual revival. The tragic tension that characterised these early films has been all but forgotten.

This cross-contamination of genres in cinema is in fact a good thing; it allows for an enormous variety and freedom of expression. But it does mean, at least for now, the death of tragedy, in a way which even George Steiner (author of a book called Death of Tragedy) would not have anticipated.

A coda to wrap it all up next week and then we're done, ladies and gents!

SUN-day review! Sarah Arvio's night thoughts

posted by the Judge

It’s Sunday! And, er, it’s chaos. I’ve been all caught up with stuff that’s been happening, and in the middle of it all Blogger decided to die on me (hence the fact that I skipped the local update to the review ofTodorovic’s Little Red Transistor Radiolast week).

 

As importantly, I only just found out that “It’s Sunday!” is alarmingly close to the catchphrase for Rebecca Black’s dumbass hit video. Apparently I’m a gigantic fool for being the only person on the planet not to have heard of Miss Black (I only found out about her through her death battlewith Justin Bieber), who has the most contradictory name for the type of persona she projects. It would be much more fitting if she were reading Sylvia Plath and acting all goth, like I would have done at sixteen had I been a girl. Come to think of it, I was doing pretty much the same as a boy, ‘cept that instead of Plath I was reading Leopardi. ANYWAY. You can picture me announcing this weekend’s review with flashing multicoloured pop-lights all around me and this rapper dude driving around in a car making rhymes about poetry criticism.* That would be the day.

 

It’s Sun-day! Sun-day! We’re reviewing poetry to-day! It’s being reviewed by Shane A! He’ reviewing Sarah Arvio, hey! Her book is night thoughts, yay! Read it over at this link, wa-hay! Fun, yeah! Party, yeah!

 

(Wait a second. There’s a connection even between night thoughts and Rebecca Black’s name now? WTF???)

 

I’m over that. Have a great Sun-day!

*(I’m off to try and make that video).

NaPoWriMo and the Pulitzer Remix!

It's that time again! Like many other masochists across the globe, Jon and I are diligently offering ourselves up to Lord April for the annual creative carbolic soaping that is NaPoWriMo.

In celebration of this year's scribblefest, why not check out found poetry extravaganza The Pulitzer Remix? Eighty-five poets from seven countries will create found poetry from the 85 Pulitzer Prize-winning works of fiction. Each poet will post one poem per day on the project’s website (www.pulitzerremix.com) during the month of April, resulting in the creation of more than 2,500 poems by the project’s conclusion.

The project is sponsored by the Found Poetry Review, the only literary journal in print dedicated to publishing found poetry.

“We recognize that there are many prestigious awards recognizing the work of writers from around the world,” explains Jenni B. Baker, project creator and editor-in-chief at the Found Poetry Review. “Understanding that all lists have their shortcomings, we chose the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction list for both its length and its potential to spur new works of found poetry by our poets.”

Pulitzer Remix poets are challenged to create new works of poetry that vary in topic and theme from the original text, rather than merely regurgitating the novels in poetic form. Posted texts will take the form of blackouts, whiteouts, collages and more, and will range from structured to more experimental forms.

This is the second year the Found Poetry Review has lead a project for National Poetry Month, Last year, on the heels of a successful Kickstarter campaign, the journal enlisted volunteers to distribute 500 found poetry kits in public spaces in communities across the US and abroad.

After the conclusion of Pulitzer Remix, Baker intends to seek a publisher for an edited collection of poems from the project.

“Compared to traditional poetry, very few works of found poetry ever see publication. We look forward to putting together a manuscript of the best pieces from the project in hopes that these poems will live on beyond National Poetry Month,”she concludes.

You can follow the project at pulitzerremix.com or on Twitter at the hashtag #pulitzerremix. Project updates can also be found on the Found Poetry Review’s Facebook page and Twitter profile.

Anatomy of Tragedy #5: Comedy

written by the Judge

XIV

As we go towards the end of these meditations, a few words must be said on the subject of comedy. Comedy stands to tragedy in the same way that epic poetry stands to lyric poetry: it is the diametrical opposite, but in its true nature it is not as widely appreciated or understood by criticism.

If we start from the precept that comedy is the opposite of tragedy, it seems natural to look at the parable of its protagonists to make a comparison. Unfortunately, this is a topic on which comedies are frequently misleading: the character most central to the narrative (sometimes the one who gives the comedy its title) is not the equivalent of the tragic hero. Think of Shakespeare’s The Jew of Malta. Anyone would agree that Shylock is the most memorable character in the play, and maybe the most important. It is also possible to recognise in his parable the downfall of a tragic hero, and some modern renditions of the play have attempted to give it an accordingly serious, sombre slant.

This line of thinking only leads to confusion. The ‘protagonists’ of comedies are usually anti-heroes – old men who are rich and / or powerful, corrupted in their value-systems, trying to use their leverage to bend someone else to their repulsive will. The typical set-up sees one of these old men trying to marry a girl whom another character, a young man, happens to be in love with. It is this ‘young man’ who is the actual equivalent of the hero, having to fight for his individual love against unfavourable social forces, while the old man, as a representative of power, money and law, is the chorus (as often as not he is also the younger man’s father, thus standing in also for familial responsibility, history and heritage).

There are alternative set-ups, of course. One of the most popular consists in having a titular character who is not an old man, but a sly, witty, low-born servant who drives the plot forward with his clever tricks, such as Figaro or Scapin. This makes for another choral figure, because the servant represents the lower classes, in contrast to the play’s actual protagonists who are always of higher and more distinguished birth. Yet it does not change the actual structure of the play – the servant is normally there to help develop the same conflict between some grumpy aged bureaucrat and a younger hero. 

This structure has led a number of commentators to describe comedy as a type of story in which a young generation prevails over the old. This is historically true, but the question of age is of course not strictly necessary to develop a comic drama. Strepsiades, the real hero of Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds, is in fact an old father who is trying to educate his son (in this case the anti-hero figure is played by Socrates, the misleading, pompous head of the philosophers). Strepsiades ends the play in the most active condition it is possible to imagine, as he is single-handedly smashing down and burning the school of the philosophers with an axe, while Socrates cries out O signifiers in his final line, ‘Ah! ah! woe is upon me! I am suffocating!’

The above example reveals the true difference between tragedy and comedy. Though the structure is the same for both genres, the dynamics are reversed. At the end of comedies, the chorus figures close on signifiers of the O, that is to say, on equality and peace:

KING: All yet seems well, and if it end so meet,

The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.
(All’s Well That Ends Well).
 
CLOWN: But that’s all one, our play is done,

And we’ll strive to please you every day.

(Twelfth Night).

DAKE: Proceed, proceed: we will begin these rites

As we do trust they’ll end in true delights.
(As You Like It).

In tragedy, the hero goes through a lyric transition (I to O) while the chorus draws an epic parable (O to I). In comedy, it is the other way round: the anti-hero, who is the chorus figure, goes through a lyric movement, while the young man, who is the actual hero, lives through an epic. The young man starts from a condition of passivity, being subject to the laws and the will of the old man (especially when the latter is framed as his father), and by the end of the comedy gets to marry the girl he desires – thus starting his own family, achieving economic independence and becoming his own self-subsistent pater familias. The old man, by contrast, goes from being in a position where he may enforce his will, to being compelled to surrender it. This does not make of him a tragic hero, on the contrary: we are able to empathise with a tragic hero because he represents the I, which is what allows us to identify with him. But the comedic anti-hero represents the O, and when he makes a lyric speech, the social values he defends or expresses are repressive (and not assertive) of the individual, such that we are pleased to see them undone. This is the lyric monologue that Molière’s Harpagon enounces at the end of the fourth act of The Miser, after his money has been stolen:

Ah! I’ve seized my own self. My spirit is troubled, and I ignore where I am, who I am, and what I do. Alas! My poor money, my poor money, my dear friend! They have deprived me of you, and since you have been taken from me, I have lost my support, my consolation, my joy; all is finished for me, and I have nothing else left in the world: without you, it is impossible for me to live. It’s finished, I can’t take it any longer; I die, I am dead, I am buried.
 

Some rhetorical subtleties aside, this speech is not qualitatively different from those made by tragic characters. The difference between Harpagon’s speech and that of someone like Romeo is that Harpagon is appealing to a social construct – money – that we are not able to identify with; the fact that we may desire money does not mean that we are willing to define it as our identity. Romeo, on the other hand, is speaking for an individual, internal will – in this case, his love for Juliet – that we can instantly make our own.

 

The result is that Harpagon’s speech is met with social rejection by the audience, in the form of laughter. Laughter is originally a mechanism developed for the expression of social allegiance: we laugh with the people we like, and at the people we dislike. By contrast in a tragedy, the lyric speech is made by someone the audience is siding with, and the result is that we suffer together with him.
 

In both tragedy and comedy, we walk out with a feeling of existential satisfaction, as though the order and harmony of the universe had been re-established. The difference between the two genres is rather subtle, and it is defined by the way they cross over the lyric and epic effect. If we agree that in the lyric we experience a dissolution, a gentle dissipation of the self, while in the epic we experience its affirmation, then here is how they are crossed over in drama: in tragedy, we identify with the hero as he dissolves lyrically, and with the chorus as it assumes the ideal of the hero (by picking up the I which he has relinquished). Thus, we are effectively dissolving into an ideal. We may be disappearing, but we are disappearing into something greater, more noble – and that’s why the tragic is uplifting even as it is sad. In comedy, we identify with the hero as he wins an epic struggle for his own individual agency, and with the chorus as it surrenders its active agency to the hero. In this case it is the hero who is picking up the mantle of a social collectivity or a social rule – that is why his victory is normally expressed through the group ritual of marriage. In comedy, we are being named, born, individualised, accepted as we truly are, by and into a group that is larger than we are, namely society. Our own individualism is defined and supported by the social context in which it subsists, while in tragedy it is society which marches on under the banner of the fallen hero’s individual values. This is not a ‘philosophical’ difference; you could argue that the two things are really the same thing, at least in terms of what they mean and imply. It is, rather, an aesthetic difference: even if we can’t pin down tragedy and comedy in terms of an ideological distinction, we feel the difference between them, we experience it fully on an emotive level, much like we feel the difference between an epic and a lyric poem even if they are both, say, about a religious poet’s love for God.
 

Thus a genuine comedy does more than simply make you laugh. Unlike satire, parody, common jokes or desecrating humour, which can be just as funny as anything in the above classical format, you will walk out of a comedy with a harmonious feeling that more elementary humour cannot give to you: it’s like knowing that the world is beautiful.

Final part coming along next week, fellas, with a look at tragedy in the world of film. See you then!