[New-Poetry] FYRP: Divine Comedy

[Halvard Johnson]

Ignore this at your peril.

Hal


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Issue 134 , May 2007
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
Julian Gough's comic short story "The orphan and the mob" (published  
in Prospect, March 2006) has won the 2007 National Short Story prize
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."

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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  
clich?s.)

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.

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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.

It would be useful to look at a representative cross-section of the  
finest young novelists of the US, the largest and most diverse of the  
English-speaking nations. A big job, but luckily Granta has just  
carried out the task for me, and announced its Best of Young American  
Novelists 2, a list of 21 talents. In his summing up, the chair of  
the judges, Granta editor Ian Jack, mentions death, sorrow,  
uncertainty and anxiety. "All I know is that we read many books  
infused by loss and a feeling that present things would not go on  
forever." (These writers are mostly in their twenties and early  
thirties!) At the end, Jack regrets the absence from the list of  
Joshua Ferris, "whose first novel? had the singular distinction among  
all these writers of making me laugh aloud quite often."

No loud laughter in the whole top 21. Twenty-one Apollos, and not one  
Dionysus.

"Why so sad, people?" as Zadie Smith asks.

Well, it's just a habit by now. It's so ingrained in our culture that  
it has become an unexamined default position. What makes it much  
worse is that it is now being coached, reinforced. All of the writers  
on the Granta list attended university creative writing programmes.  
All, in other words, have submitted to authority. This is a  
catastrophe for them as novelists.

The novel cannot submit to authority. It is written against official  
language, against officialdom, and against whatever fixed form the  
novel has begun to take?it is always dying, and always being born.

If the literary novel has calcified into genre, the new novelists  
need to break its underlying, often unspoken rules. To not just  
question, but to overthrow authority. The novel, at its best, cannot  
even submit to the authority of the novelist: Gogol burnt his follow- 
up to Dead Souls because, on reading the book he had just written, he  
was shocked to find that he profoundly disagreed with it.

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. The modern universities  
could claim to have no single ideology, but the same could be said of  
the Vatican under the Medicis, or the Borgias.

The problem is not that the universities are malevolent; they are  
not. They have no sinister intent in taking over the novel,  
professionalising it, academicising it. Like most of those who  
colonise territories that were getting on fine without them, they  
believe they do no great damage, they believe it's for the novel's  
good, they believe they are benign, idealistic and quite a bit  
cleverer than the natives. As ever, none of these beliefs is entirely  
true.

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.

Luckily this situation is self-satirising. Campus authority generates  
campus comedy. The senior academic novelist is trapped in the small  
world of the university, cut off from the big world, embodying  
authority yet still driven to write. In this situation the novel, if  
it is to live, must turn against the novelist. Malcolm Bradbury and  
David Lodge, writing novels at night, attacked their day-selves,  
their academic selves, as absurd buffoons whose work was meaningless.  
And the novelist in them was right.

The university model, any teaching model, of necessity implies that  
there is a Platonic ideal novel in some other dimension, which has  
all the characteristics that make for novelness and that the more of  
these attributes a novel has, the more like a perfect novel it is.  
This concept works for the tragic, it works for the epic, it works  
(less well, but it works) for the lyric, it does not work for the  
novel because, as Mikhail Bakhtin has pointed out, the novel is the  
only post-Aristotelian literary form. It is not bound by classical  
rules. It is not bound by any rules. The novel is not a genre. The  
novel is always novel. The novel is always coming into being. The  
novel cannot be taught, because the novel does not yet exist.

This professionalisation will make poor writers adequate. And will  
make potentially great writers adequate. Great novelists write for  
their peers. Poor novelists write for their teachers. If you must  
please the older generation to pass (a student writing for an older  
teacher, a teacher writing to secure tenure), you end up with  
cautious, old-fashioned novels. Worse, the system turns peers into  
teachers. Destroyed as writers, many are immediately re-employed,  
teaching creative writing. This is a Ponzi scheme.

During their second year, students are offered teaching appointments  
to teach introductory undergraduate creative writing workshops (ENL  
5F or ENL 5P) in their genre or are hired as literature TAs or GSRs.  
(From the website of the English department at the University of  
California, Davis)

The damage this is causing to novel, writer and audience is  
particularly advanced in America. The last 30 years have seen the  
effects of turning novel writing into an academic profession with a  
career path. As they became professional, writers began to write  
about writers. As they became academicised, writers began to write  
about writing.

And the language of the American literary novel began to drift away  
from anything used by human beings anywhere on earth. Thirty years of  
the feedback loop have led to a kind of generic American literary  
prose, instantly recognisable, but not as instantly comprehensible.  
Professions generate private languages designed to keep others out.  
This is irritating when done by architects. But it is a catastrophe  
for novelists, and the novel.

Lastly, a series of thesis units, which is your writing time guided  
by your thesis committee members, will fulfil the required 36 units.  
(From the website of the English department at the University of  
California, Davis)

Much of their fiction contains not so much tragedy as mere anxiety.  
Pushed to look for tragedy in lives that contain none, to generate  
suffering in order to be proper writers, they force themselves to  
frown rather than smile; and their work fills with a self-indulgent  
anxiety that could perhaps best be called "wangst."

To teach is to imply that one would not otherwise learn. Do we teach  
children to breathe? The illusion that there is a solution comes from  
the illusion that there is a problem. There is not. The forest is  
open. Strike out.

The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his  
predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not  
say. Flaubert's poetics does not devalue Balzac's, anymore than the  
discovery of the North Pole renders obsolete the discovery of  
America. (Milan Kundera, "The Curtain")

If I don't like what the novel is doing, do I have any suggestions as  
to what it should do? Perhaps.

The novel grows by theft and observation, both of real life and of  
other "newer," yet often more conservative art forms. (Cinema was a  
tremendous influence on Joyce.) The problem with the novels of, say,  
John Banville is that, although brilliantly written, they steal only  
from other novels (and a few oil paintings). His is a universe in  
which the internet does not exist, and television scarcely exists.  
Yet new art forms, and their delivery systems, change the way we read  
the novel, and therefore must change the way we write it. This is not  
a catastrophe; it is an opportunity. We are free to do new things  
with the novel, which could not have been understood before now.

My generation, and those younger, spend a lot of time taking in  
information not in long, linear, structured, coherent, self-contained  
units (a film, a novel), but in short bursts, with wildly different  
tones. A youth spent channel-hopping and surfing the internet rewires  
the brain. (So does a youth spent reading critical theory: be  
careful.) See 10,000 Hollywood movies and the journey of the hero  
becomes utterly predictable: you can see the plot twists and ending  
coming from the start. Traditional story may have been broken by this  
overload: certainly it suffers from repetitive strain injury.  
Television has responded to this crisis. The novel has not.

A comparison between The Simpsons and a soap opera is instructive. A  
soap opera is trapped inside the rules of the format; all soaps  
resemble each other (like psychologically plausible realist novels).  
What the makers of The Simpsons did was take a soap opera and put a  
frame around it: "this is a cartoon about a soap opera." This freed  
them from the need to map its event-rate on to real life: they could  
map its event-rate on to cartoon life. A fast event-rate is  
inherently comic, so the tone is, of necessity, comic. But that is  
not to say it isn't serious. The Simpsons is profoundly serious. And  
profoundly comic. Like Aristophanes, debating the war between Athens  
and Sparta by writing about a sex strike by the women of Athens and  
beyond.

With its cartoon event-rate, a classic series of The Simpsons has  
more ideas over a broader cultural range than any novel written the  
same year. The speed, the density of information, the range of  
reference; the quantity, quality and rich humanity of the jokes?they  
make almost all contemporary novels seem slow, dour, monotonous and  
almost empty of ideas.

The Sopranos took a more subtle approach to the problem of the broken  
hero, the broken heroic saga, by deconstructing the hero through  
psychoanalysis, inside the frame. Twin Peaks and Lost have taken a  
more ostentatiously radical, metafictive approach to the breakdown of  
story.

Meanwhile, the internet is rapidly becoming Borges's library of  
Babel, Rushdie's sea of stories: everything is turning up there, in  
potential promiscuous intercourse with everything else. Everything is  
happening all at once, in the same place, with no hierarchy. It's as  
though space and time have collapsed. It's exhilarating, and  
frightening. Who's capturing that in the novel? Because the novel is  
the place to capture it. The novel has freedoms which television has  
not. It can shape and structure multiplicity and chaos in ways the  
internet cannot.

Novelists can take from these new art forms new structures and  
techniques for telling stories, as Joyce did from cinema. But who  
has? Weirdly, the modernists have a more accurate take on now than  
the most recent Booker winners. Finnegans Wake reads like a mash-up  
of a Google translation of everything ever. But John Banville and  
Anita Desai read like nostalgia (for Nabokov, for Dickens, for  
traditional virtues, for the canon). They feel far less contemporary  
than The Waste Land?which is what Bakhtin would call a novelised  
poem: a poem that escapes Aristotle's Poetics and hitches a ride on  
the energy of the novel. As Baudrillard should have said:  
postmodernism never happened. Since Joyce and Woolf (and Eliot), the  
novel's wheels have spun in the sand.

So steal from The Simpsons, not Henry James.

Realistic texture and a cartoon event-rate with a broad range of  
reference: is this a revolutionary new way of writing the novel? Of  
course not. It's ancient. Voltaire, for example, did it in Candide.  
But we keep forgetting. The novel is constantly pushed by the culture  
towards worthiness, towards Aristotle's Poetics, towards tragedy. The  
next great novel will do to the contemporary literary novel what  
Cervantes did to the chivalric romance. It's not that contemporary  
literary novels are bad. Line by line, book by book, they're often  
wonderful. But in the same few ways. Who needs more of that?

You may think that to praise The Simpsons at the expense of Henry  
James makes me a barbarian. Well, it does, but I'm a very cultured  
barbarian. The literary novel has gone late Roman. It needs the  
barbarians. It secretly yearns for them. It's leading them on. How  
many novels influenced by Henry James very politely fought it out for  
the Booker in 2004?

GS Frazer, writing about Henry James in 1964, said: "The novelist  
must recognise that the foundations of the world he walks are  
dangerously shifting, that we are living in a world of rapid and  
disturbing change, so that we can neither say with certainty when  
some new pattern of relative stability will emerge, nor what sort of  
pattern it might be. Yet the task of the novelist also, since the  
human heart hungers after permanence, is to project some image of  
permanence and to give the novel a coherence that life at large does  
not? possess."

This is completely wrong. The task of the novelist is precisely the  
opposite: not to fake a coherence that does not exist, but to capture  
the chaos that does. And in so doing, perhaps we shall discover that  
chaos and permanence are not, in fact, opposed. The novel, self- 
renewing, self-destroying, always the same, always new, always?  
novel? is the art of permanent chaos.

And to clarify: I don't want everybody to write comedies. I just  
don't want everybody to write minor, anxious, banal tragedies,  
without thinking about why they've chosen such a crowded mode. Why  
all cluster under the one tree when there's a forest to explore? We  
do not live in tragic times. We do not live in comic times. We live  
in novel times.

Ah well, this praising of comedy at the expense of tragedy has gone  
on forever. Let us go back to Greece, before Muhammad, before Christ,  
and let someone else have the last word. In Plato's Symposium,  
Aristodemus, a bit pissed, has just woken up to find "? there  
remained awake only Aristophanes, Agathon and Socrates, who were  
drinking out of a large goblet that was passed around, while Socrates  
was discoursing to them. Aristodemus did not hear all the discourse,  
for he was only half awake; but he remembered Socrates insisting to  
the other two that the genius of comedy was the same as that of  
tragedy, and that the writer of the one should also be a writer of  
the other. To this they were compelled to assent, being sleepy, and  
not quite understanding what he meant. And first Aristophanes fell  
asleep, and then, when the day was dawning, Agathon."

"America loves a successful sociopath."
		--Gary Indiana

Halvard Johnson
================
halvard at gmail.com
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
http://www.hamiltonstone.org