May 01, 2007
comedy beats tragedy
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.
more from Prospect Magazine here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 08:11 AM | Permalink
Comments
This piece was almost bearable until the writer brought in Kurt Vonnegut, who is a writer of popular, not literary, fiction.
His recent death makes mentions such as this obligatory. Bad taste, in my books.
But just because he's a popular, rather than a literary, author doesn't make him bad.
But really, who cares what the great unwashed think of good writing. Walter Scott was phenomenally successful in his day. In the twenty-first century the only people who read him are patriotic Scots PhD students.
Success in the present is no guarantee of longevity. Jane Austen earned, if memory serves, about 500 pounds from her writing, before she died prematurely, aged 42. Now, she tops the lists of favourite books in the U.K., Australia and Malaysia. For all I know, there are other countries who love her to pieces.
Posted by: Dean | May 3, 2007 8:33:09 AM
Post a comment