[New-Poetry] Re: FYRP: Divine Comedy

[Crisman Cooley]

Mx. Gough speaks truly, aye, verily, verily-- but has neglected some  
seriously funny boox, to wit: Lucius Apuleis, _The Golden Ass_, L.  
Sterne, _Tristram Shandy_, M. Twain, _Hucky Finn_, T. Pynchon,  
_Gravity's Rainbow_ ...

Who are the great funny poets?

> Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 10:08:01 -0500
> From: Halvard Johnson <halvard at earthlink.net>
> Subject: [New-Poetry] FYRP: Divine Comedy
>
> 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
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
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> End of New-Poetry Digest, Vol 35, Issue 35
> ******************************************
>