Sontag, "Happenings"

[Dave Monroe]

Nothing like trying to catch up here after being gone (in that
peculiarly postmodern sense of, here, but not online) for a coupla days,
but ... but much to take in, much to respond to, there's still the
matter of that Thomas Pynchon novel I've heard some talk of here as
well, but ... but, in the meantime, a couple of recaps I've been anxious
to get to, which have the added of attraction of being relevant to a few
of the responses I might or might not get to make anyway, es. in re:
terrance's evocation of contemporary (to V., for starters) art,
literature and criticism (and I've been much about that Abstract
Expressionism to Pop to Minimalism to ... of late), so ...

Selected selections from Susan Sontag, "Happenings: An Art of Radical
Juxtaposition," in Against Interpretation (New York: Dell, 1961), pp.
265-76 (a note on pagination: I seem to have an old pocket-sized ed.,
the page numbers for which do NOT seem to conform to any current, or
even much used, ed. of this seminal, as they say, volume, so ...):

Yet it is also interesting to note that this art form [i.e. the
"Happening"] which is designe to stir the modern audience from its cozy
emotional anaesthesia operates with images of anaesthetized persons,
acting in a kind of slow-motion disjunction with each other, and gives
us an image of action characterized above all by ceremoniousness and
ineffectuality.  At this point the Surrealist arts of terror [i.e.,
Antonin Artaud's "Theater of Cruelty"] link up with the deepest meaning
of comedy: the assertion of invulnerability.  In the heart of comedy,
there is emotional anaesthesia.  What permits us to laugfh at painful
and grotesque events is that we observe that the people to whom thses
events happen are really underreacting.  No matter how much they scream
or prance about or inveigh to heaven or lament their misfortune, th
audience knows they are really not feeling very much.  The protagonists
of great comedy all ahve something of the automaton or robot in them.
This is the secret of such different examples of comedy as Aristophanes'
The Clouds, Gulliver's Travels, Tex Avery cartoons, Candide, Kind Hearts
and Coronets, the films of Buster Keaton, Ubu Roi, the Goon Show.  The
secret of comedy is the dead-pan--or the exagerrated reaction or the
misplaced reaction that is a parody of true response.  Comedy, as much
as tragedy, works by a certain stylizaton of emotional response.  In the
case of tragedy, it is a heightening of the norm of feeling; in teh case
of comedy, it is by underreacting and misreacting according to the norms
of feeling.  (275)