Divine comedy

[Dave Monroe]

Divine comedy
by Julian Gough

The Greeks understood that comedy (the gods' view of life) is superior
to tragedy (the merely human). But since the middle ages, western
culture has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic. This is
why fiction today is so full of anxiety and suffering. It's time
writers got back to the serious business of making us laugh

What is wrong with the modern literary novel? Why is it so worthy and
dull? Why is it so anxious? Why is it so bloody boring?

Well, let's go back a bit first. Two and a half thousand years ago, at
the time of Aristophanes, the Greeks believed that comedy was superior
to tragedy: tragedy was the merely human view of life (we sicken, we
die). But comedy was the gods' view, from on high: our endless and
repetitive cycle of suffering, our horror of it, our inability to
escape it. The big, drunk, flawed, horny Greek gods watched us for
entertainment, like a dirty, funny, violent, repetitive cartoon. And
the best of the old Greek comedy tried to give us that relaxed, amused
perspective on our flawed selves. We became as gods, laughing at our
own follies.

Many of the finest novels—and certainly the novels I love most—are in
the Greek comic tradition, rather than the tragic: Rabelais,
Cervantes, Swift, Voltaire, and on through to Joseph Heller's Catch-22
and the late Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5.

Yet western culture since the middle ages has overvalued the tragic
and undervalued the comic. We think of tragedy as major, and comedy as
minor. Brilliant comedies never win the best film Oscar. The Booker
prize leans toward the tragic. In 1984, Martin Amis reinvented
Rabelais in his comic masterpiece Money. The best English novel of the
1980s, it didn't even make the shortlist. Anita Brookner won that
year, for Hotel du Lac, written, as the Observer put it, "with a
beautiful grave formality."

The fault is in the culture. But it is also internalised in the
writers, who self-limit and self-censor. If the subject is big,
difficult and serious, the writer tends to believe the treatment must
be in the tragic mode. When Amis addressed the Holocaust in his minor
novel Time's Arrow (1991), he switched off the jokes, and the energy,
and was rewarded with his only Booker shortlisting.

But why this pressure, from within and without? There are two good
reasons. The first is the west's unexamined cultural cringe before the
Greeks. For most of the last 500 years, Homer and Sophocles have been
held to be the supreme exponents of their arts. (Even Homer's constant
repetition of stock phrases like "rosy-fingered dawn" and "wine-dark
sea" are praised, rather than recognised as tiresome clichés.)

The second reason is that our classical inheritance is lop-sided. We
have a rich range of tragedies—Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides (18
by Euripides alone). Of the comic writers, only Aristophanes survived.
In an age of kings, time is a filter that works against comedy. Plays
that say, "Boy, it's a tough job, leading a nation" tend to survive;
plays that say, "Our leaders are dumb arseholes, just like us" tend
not to.

More importantly, Aristotle's work on tragedy survived; his work on
comedy did not. We have the classical rules for the one but not the
other, and this has biased the development of all western literature.
We've been off-centre ever since.

But of course Europe in the middle ages was peculiarly primed to
rediscover tragedy: the one church spoke in one voice, drawn from one
book, and that book was at heart tragic. All of human history, from
the creation, was a story that climaxed with the sadistic murder of a
man by those he was trying to save, whose fatal flaw was that he was
perfect in an imperfect world. The nicest man ever, he is murdered by
everybody. Not only is this tragedy; it is kitsch tragedy, overegged,
a joke. It cannot survive laughter, it is too vulnerable to it. And
the Bible, from apple to Armageddon, does not contain a single joke.

The church spoke with one voice because it was on such shaky
foundations. The largest and richest property empire of all time had
somehow been built on the gospel of the poor. All other voices had to
be suppressed, even dissenting gospels. Only once a year, in carnival,
on the feast of fools, could the unsayable be said. A fool was crowned
king, and gave a fool's sermon from the altar that reversed the usual
pieties. But these speeches could not be written down or circulated.
They existed in the air, for a day, and were gone. By the late middle
ages, the paralysis was almost total. If you change one word of the
old Vulgate Bible, the whole thing comes under suspicion. All you
could hear was a single voice reading a single book, the Vulgate, a
Latin translation from a Greek original. When Erasmus finally
retranslated the Bible, threw it open to interpretation, he caused a
crisis that ultimately tore the church apart.

The problem is not specific to Christianity. Islam has always had a
problem with comedy at its expense, as Salman Rushdie showed in The
Satanic Verses. In Medina, in year two of the Hijra migration, with
Mecca not yet fallen, the Prophet asked the faithful to kill the
Jewish-Arab poet Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf for reciting his poems satirising
the Prophet (and joking about Muslim women). The faithful obliged.

It is interesting, but unsurprising, that all the satirists murdered
and allegedly murdered on Muhammad's orders were, among other things,
Jewish. With its vigorous tradition of Talmudic debate, and with no
Jewish state to stifle or control that debate, Judaism never fell into
the paralysis of the younger monotheisms. It was, to put it mildly,
never state-approved. Judaism, excluded from the establishment in so
many Christian and Muslim nations, has consequently produced a high
proportion of the world's great satirists, comedians and novelists.
And, in Yiddish, it produced perhaps the world's first compulsively
comic, anti-authoritarian language, with its structural mockery of
high German.

In Christian Europe, the Renaissance rediscovery of the classical
texts occurred when the habit of submission to authority was at its
most extreme. When printing was invented, no one thought to use it for
anything other than the Christian Bible, for that was the myth of
Europe, the one true myth.

As writers began moving cautiously away from the theological shore,
they still felt the need for a holy book to guide them, to tell them
how to write. Aristotle's Poetics provided that. If you wanted to
write tragedy or epic, here were the rules. You need not think for
yourself. It's particularly sad to see the narrowness of subject
matter and style in the pictorial art of the era—Madonna after
pink-cheeked Madonna, saint after martyred saint. So much talent, all
wasted doing the Renaissance equivalent of Soviet realist art.

And then something astonishing happened: the invention of the novel
privatised myth, because the novel, invented after Aristotle, did not
have a holy book. The novelist was on his own. Sometimes he's even a
she. There were no rules. The chaos of carnival had found its form.
The fool's sermon could be published, could live on. All you learned
from Rabelais or Cervantes was to mock everything sacred, all that
went before. Including them.

And the reaction was fierce. Rabelais was jailed for his wild
comedies. Voltaire, praised for his early tragedies, was jailed for
his satires. Cervantes apparently started Don Quixote in a debtors'
prison. All had to flee town on occasion for fear of worse. Printing
had to be done abroad, in secret, and the books smuggled to their
destinations. The early years of the novel look remarkably like a
guerrilla war, as pro-Bible forces try to put down the insurgency of
the novel across Europe. Both were fighting for the same piece of
territory: the territory inside your head.

Now a man could invent his own myth and spread it across the world.
And the reader, head bowed over the novel, could have a vision without
religion: a full vision, transmitted through space and time by marks
on paper, using the novelist's arts.

The novel, when done right—when done to the best of the novelist's
abilities, talent at full stretch—is always greater than the novelist.
It is more intelligent. It is more vast. It can change your entire
internal world. Of course, so can a scientific truth. So can a
religious experience. So can some drugs. So can a sublime event in
nature. But the novel operates on that high level. Sitting there,
alone, quite still, you laugh, you murmur, you cry, and you can come
out of it with a new worldview, in a new reality. It's a controlled
breakdown, or breakthrough. It's dangerous.

The resistance of the monotheisms to comedy has another, more subtle,
cause. The comic point of view—the gods'-eye view—is much more
uncomfortable for a believer in one all-powerful God than it was for
the polytheistic Greeks. To have the gods laughing at us through our
fictions is acceptable if the gods are multiple, and flawed like us,
laughing in recognition and sympathy: if they are Greek gods. But to
have the single omnipotent, omniscient God who made us laughing at us
is a very different thing: sadistic, and almost unbearable. We do not
wish to hear the sound of one God laughing. The western comic novel
has often had a harsh, judgemental edge. Swift has a hint of Yahweh
about him. But the recent death of God has freed a lot of space for
the comic novel. Science has given us a high, impersonal,
non-judgemental perspective from which to regard ourselves
(brilliantly used by Vonnegut in books like Breakfast of Champions).
The various eastern philosophies give us other high vantage points.
Indeed, both physics and Zen can handle laughter, and are superb tools
for writing the western comic novel because they do not require
absolute faith and they do not claim absolute certainty. With freedom
from a death-obsessed monotheism and new tools, new places from which
to view humanity, we should have entered a golden age of comedy.

Some writers seized the chance. Evelyn Waugh became perhaps the
greatest English novelist of the 20th century by applying a flawless,
deadpan, comic technique to everything from modern manners to modern
warfare. PG Wodehouse developed the purest comic style of his age but,
unlike Waugh, felt no need to apply it to real life. The great comic
writers do survive, but are seldom seen as great till much later. The
tragic bias remains deep in the industry. And the more original the
comic masterpiece, the harder it is to get it through the filters of
western commercial publishing. Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman,
one of Ireland's three greatest novels, could not find a publisher in
the author's lifetime. John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces
was rejected by 36 publishers, and Toole eventually killed himself.
Only a decade after his death was it published. Publishing is a form
of authority too.

No, the novel has not, in general, been able to seize its freedom—it
has not gone comic. This has consequences. An unnecessary tragic bias,
in something so powerful, will cause a great deal of avoidable
suffering. Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, with its revoltingly
sentimental suicide note, depressed a generation and caused a wave of
fashionable suicides across Europe. (They even dressed in the same
blue frock coat and yellow waistcoat.) Autobiographical novels are
particularly revealing of the bias in the culture: in real life Goethe
felt no need to kill himself after his heart was broken, but when he
wrote a book about it, it had to be a tragedy and the hero had to die.
A comedy would have been far more suitable. It might even have led to
a cheerful late 18th-century Europe. But no, he gave us the
furrow-browed Romantics.

Tragically (or comically, depending on your temperament), the bias
caused by Aristotle, Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus and the church
continues today. The youthful brow remains furrowed.

TO BE CONT'D ...

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9276