Re: Comedy of Survival

["Jay Ball" <ageeball@gmail.com>]

I would have to dispute with Rinda that tragedy is unconcerned with the
"community." Whether we are speaking of the Greeks, Shakespeare or Arthur
Miller, tragedy has historically been tightly wound to the fate of the
polis. Hamlet and Denmark are inseparable. Comedy, on the other hand, has
more often represented a retreat from the civic to the domestic sphere. The
irritation that attaches itself to any discussion of genre is that we can
always find exceptions - and often times the exceptions and the works that
mix genre are the most interesting and enduring literary artifacts. And, of
course, life is more interesting and complex than the genres we have
received from the past. However it has to be said that genre has hardly
disappeared, especially in popular forms of performance. And as Fred Jameson
got it right in the Political Unconscious, all but the most open-ended
narratives finally choose to enforce closure that is designed to produce a
certain attitude to its contents. Put simply, stories still tend to resolve
in either happy or sad endings. Sometimes loss is averted and one is left
touched by hope; in tragic endings, loss is presented as final and hope is
replaced by despair. Sometimes issues are binary or 'dichotomized.'  Polar
bears, for example, will or will not become extinct because of global
warming. So however we wish to define our terms with respect to genre,
people - such as the directors of An Inconvenient Truth - remain confronted
with decisions about how to frame these issues.

Thanks for following up on my query, Rinda.  ;) [a comic frame]

Jay



choices have to be made: is it better to represent the survival of polar
bears as imaginable (comedy) or should we start to frankly mourning their
inevitable decimation in the more deferred hope that a sustained
confrontation with loss




On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 12:31 PM, Rinda West <rindaw@comcast.net> wrote:

> Good comedy contains tragedy, and tragedy contains comedy.  In the first
> couple of acts of Shakespeare's plays there are characters and events that
> could lead to a comic resolution, but the characters are killed (Mercutio,
> Polonius) or banished (Kent) or the moments backfire.  Characters make
> choices that lead to the tragic outcome. Similarly, the comedies teeter on
> the verge of tragedy and some choice or, often, miracle of conversion or
> discovery yields the happy outcome.  Genre is a choice.  I agree that
> dichotomizing comedy and tragedy doesn't serve environmentalism.   Meeker
> makes the point that the focus of tragedy is the individual (I am going to
> die someday!) while comedy foregrounds the community (we are going to
> survive!), but both are part of our toolkit for bringing the moral and
> emotional content of the environmental crisis into focus for people for whom
> it's not as immediate a concern as the mortgage payment or job insecurity.
>
> Rinda
>
> Rinda West Landscape Designs
> 773-575-1205
> www.rindawestdesigns.com
> My new book, Out of the Shadow:  Ecopsychology, Story, and Encounters with
> the Land, is now available from
> http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/west.HTM or at Amazon.com
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: asle-owner@interversity.org [mailto:asle-owner@interversity.org] On
> Behalf Of Frank McGill
> Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2008 10:53 AM
> To: asle@interversity.org
> Subject: Re: [asle] Comedy of Survival
>
> I'd add that Meeker's very formulation--comic versus tragic--is itself a
> tragic view of the world, an us-vs.-them dichotomy that lies at the heart of
> much of what he classifies as a tragic attitude. Wouldn't a more comic
> formulation strive to accommodate the tragic view (and others) rather than
> demonizing or directly opposing them? Live *and let live*, isn't it?
>
> Frank
>
> -----Original Message-----
> >From: Richard Kerridge <r.kerridge@bathspa.ac.uk>
> >Sent: Sep 24, 2008 9:28 AM
> >To: asle@interversity.org, asle@interversity.org
> >Subject: Re: [asle] Comedy of Survival
> >
> >I've always found Meeker's argument troubling because it seems so close to
> fatalism. Survival, mere survival, is its highest ambition. Tragedy, at
> least in its Romantic form, can come to fatalism from the opposite
> direction, accepting death and the loss of the world because the world is
> not worthy of the Romantic idealist. I'm not sure either provides the right
> framing for environmentalism.
> >
> >Richard
>
>
> Tell me, what is it you plan to do
> with your one wild and precious life?
>                        --Mary Oliver
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