Comedy Vs Tragedy in Literature

Rabble Rabble

Great piece here from Prospect magasine. He argues that the Greeks saw comedy as the greatest form of Art - the Gods laughing at human foibles, while tragedy was the humans stuck in their mortal strife ( therefore, tragedy is merely human not divine).

He charts the rise of tragedy both to the re-discovery of Aristotle ( and the losing of Aristotle's book on comedic forms), and to the cultural power of the Church in the middle ages.

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 decline of the Novel is placed at the door of the university.

But the universities are authority or they are nothing. As the west has grown secular, the university has, quite organically, taken over from the church as a cross-border entity claiming universality, claiming to influence the powerful but not to wield power. “Education” is the excuse for a self-perpetuating power structure now, just as “religion” was the excuse then.

and

The literary novel, by accepting the embrace of the universities, has moved inside the establishment and lost contact with what made it vital. It has, as a result, also lost the mass audience enjoyed by Twain and Dickens. The literary novel—born in Cervantes’s prison cell, continued in cellars, bars and rented rooms by Dostoevsky, Joyce and Beckett—is now being written from on high. Not the useful height of the gods, with its sharp, gods’-eye view of all human classes, all human folly, but the distancing, merely human height of the ruling elite, just too high up to see what’s happening on the street below.

He is particularly scathing about American universities and their creative writing classes; hardly an attack or a satire on authority but an appeal to it.

Great novelists write for their peers. he says Poor novelists write for their teachers.

Its a great read. The attacks on the academy ring true for me, the main theme is less important ( to me).

This forum sometimes wonders about why the novels are in decline, I think some of the answers are there.