Re: Comedy of Survival

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

Is it unsophisticated to attempt to frame *An Inconvenient Truth* in terms
of Meeker's thoughts about tragedy and comedy? Perhaps. Obviously the
drowning polar bear can't be a tragic figure. I was speaking of the
rhetorical force of its representation. The animal is dying as a consequence
of human agency. One could make the case that the pitiful and fearful image
of it drowning is meant to drive home a recognition in the audience about
the inexorable consequences of our collective techno-industrial hubris. But
trying to squeeze a polar bear into an Aristotelian model of tragedy doesn't
work, nor was that my point. For Meeker who, once again, drew on rhetorician
Kenneth Burke's more idiosyncratic theory of comic "framing" in Attitudes
Towards History, the comic is the spirit of successful, pragmatic
adaptation. The point about the caribou is that we see it suffer loss and,
then, adopt behavior that allows it to survive. The point about Al Gore's
polar bear is that human agents have created a situation where adaptation is
no longer possible. For Burke/Meeker, this is a tragic framework - it's
undesirable because it tends to produce fatalism or, worse, a tendency for
scapegoating and other kinds of unhelpful magical thinking. For my part, I
think tragic framing can also be employed for different purposes.

As for the irritation factor my thread is causing, I would only say that I
have never participated in a conversation about genre that didn't produce a
certain amount of discord over proliferating definitions of terms. In fact,
I wouldn't even pursue this except for the fact Meeker, very early on (1974)
produced one of the first, most sustained and interesting statements of
ecological dramatic theory in the field. And as someone who teaches theatre
history and dramatic literature, I'm just trying to read him closely and see
if his ideas still have some relevance.

Jay

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 4:17 PM, Richard Kerridge
<r.kerridge@bathspa.ac.uk>wrote:

> I'd like to see a few more examples, sophisticated examples, of both tragic
> and comic framings of environmental crisis. After all, the polar bear isn't
> tragic in any but the loosest sense. What was his transgression or flaw? I
> suppose he could be said to have been caught between two contradictory and
> inexorable forces (his evolved dependency on a certain set of ecological
> conditions on the one hand and climate change on the other), but modern
> tragedy, at least, requires an element of self-consciousness, awareness of
> having made a fatal choice, understanding that two elements of his being
> have become irreconcilable, or a perception of the irony, or moral
> meaninglessness of his own fate. These are the modern equivalents of the
> nobility necessary in the ancient tragic hero. What is the polar bear's
> nobility? What is the flaw his nobility transcends and for which it accepts
> the consequences?
>
> Comedy, in Meeker, as I remember it off the top of my head, means a
> willingness to detach oneself from beliefs and sacred attachments if they
> become impediments to survival. He starts, doesn't he, with the example of
> the caribou resuming its foraging minutes after seeing its calf eaten by a
> bear? What gives one this capacity for detachment - and adaptability - is
> the possibility of self-mockery: of seeing oneself and one's most sacred
> attachments comically rather than tragically. What exactly is the
> application of this principle to environmental crisis, beyond the banality
> that environmentalists can get too pious and ought to laugh at themselves a
> bit?
>
> Richard
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: asle-owner@interversity.org on behalf of Jay Ball
> Sent: Wed 24/09/2008 19:23
>  To: asle@interversity.org
> Subject: Re: [asle] Comedy of Survival
>
>
>
> 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
> > ---------------------------------------------------
> > Archives->
> > http://interversity.org/lists/asle/archives.html
> >
> >  ---------------------------------------------------
> > Report list problems to listmom@interversity.org
> >
> ---------------------------------------------------
> Subscribe/Unsubscribe->
> http://interversity.org/lists/asle/subscribe.html
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
> Subscribe/Unsubscribe->
> http://interversity.org/lists/asle/subscribe.html
>