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Overview
Originally published in 1982.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691642253 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #653 |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.90(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Discovering the Comic
By George McFadden
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1982 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06496-3
CHAPTER 1
THE COMIC AS A LITERARY QUALITY
1. Preliminary Inquiry: The Essence of the Comic
When we return to a beginning and ask what is the comic, none of the familiar answers proves quite satisfactory. It is not that they are all wrong, but they are inadequate if we intend to form an idea of the comic that will reach its essence. The most natural reply, "the comic is that which causes laughter," was rejected by Aristotle long ago, and for good reasons. Anyone can see there is only a partial overlap in the appropriate use of the term "laughable" and the proper meaning of our term "comic." Still, if not laughter, then smiling, or at the very least a sparkling in the eyes or an enlivening of the expression on one's face, is a spontaneous accompaniment of the comic experience. Deadpan humor or dry wit is no exception to this rule, but is itself a branch of the comic that uses assumed insensitivity as a foil. In the presence of the comic, failure to respond to it is comic.
The comic appears to be neither a simple experience nor simply a response to a certain kind of experience. It is complex, at least in that it includes both an experience of something that can be called funny or amusing and some kind of gesture, expression, or formulation that marks if off and begins to make it communicable. Such communication, of course, need not be in writing, nor addressed to anyone besides oneself; all that is absolutely necessary is a seizure or comprehension of the amusing moment so as to make it in some degree noteworthy and memorable. One could be entertained for hours by the sight of children or young animals at play, but if one never had a particular momentary sense of certain of its aspects falling into a particularly characteristic structure, the experience would be pleasant or enjoyable but not ever comic.
The essence of the comic thus includes a positing and structuring moment when what-is-funny may be grasped with enough definiteness to be recalled or retold; it has acquired anecdotal permanence, if not continuance or duration. But the most important question still remains. It concerns the essence of that which is grasped as funny or amusing and which is made to continue. I shall be content to seek for an answer that will prove adequate to our sense of the comic as it has been perceived during the last two centuries. Modern people have found that the characteristic feeling of fun or joy that identifies the comic arises from their sense of the activity of a being that is notably engaged in being-itself, in self-activity, in self-assertion by utterly characteristic behavior; in self-maintenance, self-definition, and self-sustenance. This sense, of course, would be very weak or would vanish if the being merely maintained itself; such monotony would be boring or would simply pass without our notice. The comic prominently includes, therefore, an aspect of the changeable, actually posed as a threat of alteration to the self-continuing structure. It is essential that this threat be present, and also that it be successfully resisted by the self-governing process of the comic structure itself, rather than by factors exernal to it.
Within the romantic frame of mind which sees political independence as a necessary aspect of fully human existence, the term "self-governing" serves to disclose an actual, and perhaps universal, requirement for the comic: freedom. Since the mid-eighteenth century, self-government has been no mere metaphor for freedom but a necessary condition of it. The associations of the comic with spontaneity, liberation from inhibition and constraint, unblocking, vital movement, and ease and grace of behavior all point to freedom as an indispensable component.
The essence of the comic, therefore, is founded in a being that shows the power of continuing as itself, substantially unchanged, while overcoming a force or forces that would substantially alter it. Both continuance and change are necessary to the comic; but the impulse to change, as soon as it appears, becomes a movement of challenge or stimulus to the comic entity, a kind of test and proof of it. The comic itself, in its kernel, is so much itself, so characteristic, that it stands out, draws attention to itself, and invites or actually begets some counterforce — be it rivalry, mere conformity to the average, or sheer inertia. This force takes the form of a threat, or an opponent in some contest or game, either of which serves to accentuate the unchanging identity of the comic. What it overcomes is peculiarly visible in the light of the comic, so that the latter has a creative aspect to it: it seems to provide its own objects for fun-making. This active, independent, and productive power goes along with freedom and is always a mark of the genuinely comic.
2. The Question of Literary Genre
Before going further, however, we must face the problem of distinguishing the explicitly comic in literary works from the accompanying but universally aesthetic qualities of freedom, self-sustainedness, and spontaneity. Since we are trying to confront the question at a time when old, well-defined literary genres have ceased to retain much explanatory value except for historical purposes, we look for terms in the context of a modern literary theory. I choose Schiller's, believing that it emerged along with explicitly romantic writing and also helped give the lead to its development. The basis of his theory is Kant's opposition of the human mind to nature, and Schiller's analysis of the alienated stance of the modern writer is indispensable if we are to bring the problem of the comic to a contemporary focus.
Schiller realized that once the writer saw nature as something other than himself he became free of nature as a universally determining source or model but at the same time lost his feeling for nature as the human home. His resultant sense of loss provoked the most powerful of all romantic feelings. Its name, Heimweh, only dates from Schiller's youth as a word in German, and it was soon converted into the learned term familiar to the world, "nostalgia," by a backformation using the Greek nóstos (journey back to one's home) and álgos (pain, distress). The term is highly appropriate, recalling the nóstoi, or sad wanderings, of the Greek heroes after their victory at Troy, when they sought homecomings that most of them never achieved. In an irresistible movement, loss by human beings of their natural home was converted into a sense of loss of innocence and of their simple happiness in childhood. We should call this dominant feeling, I am convinced, "nostalgia for the naive." Provided we think of nostalgia as having its positive, re-creative side as well as its distressful one, nostalgia for the naive is the most persistent identifying mark of literature written during the last two hundred years.
Schiller used this development of alienation from nature and of nostalgia to uncover a new structure of the literary genres. He also described two different kinds of writer, with opposing temperaments and sensibilities to match. The new situation appears most clearly in Schiller's description of the opposing genres of elegy and satire. In elegy, we have the artistic overcoming of alienation in the form of a beautiful lament for a once-existing harmony of the human in nature, especially in the setting of classical Greece; or we have the idyll, which in easy disregard of actuality treats that harmony of human and natural as if it were existing "now." For the latter treatment, however, we need a new kind of writer, the idealist. He seeks to re-unite mind and nature in the ideal rather than in the historical past.
Similarly he identifies two kinds of satire: the sublime and the mocking or playful. The basis for the distinction is the kind of feeling involved. Sublime satire employs tempestuous, even tragic, passions. It is serious, punitive, or pathetic in its demands. It works powerfully upon the will, driving to put an end to the disjunction between what is and what ought to be. On the other hand, playful satire (which Schiller clearly prefers) often treats a morally neutral subject; yet it avoids the trivial because the beautiful soul (schone Seele, Bel âme)of the poet redeems and supports his material.
At this point in his account of the specifically new genres Schiller enters into a digression amounting only to two paragraphs wherein he discusses tragedy and comedy. Like sublime satire, tragedy arouses strong passions and hence it limits freedom, if only temporarily. Comedy, on the other hand, never suspends freedom but perpetually asserts it, not least because the comic writer need admit no dependency at all upon substantial, fateful ties to state, society, and history. He is free to move at will in his imagination, free to play with these "substantialities" and to call his readers to an equal freedom. What he must do, however, is to remain himself, to be always at home in his own beautiful soul (or sensibility, or vision, as we should say), preserving a lively vigor that pervades and sustains his themes with inner resources of his own. He must beware of pathos and oracular meanings, and "look serenely about and within himself to find everywhere more coincidence than fate, and rather to laugh at absurdity than to rage or weep at malice."
Making the most of this account, we can conclude that the comic is in a special relation to freedom. Other genres of art cannot do without freedom; but comedy is the only genre continually to assert it. Furthermore, though no genre may be adequately defined by a simple quality, comedy is the only one wherein freedom predominantly gives the tone to the complex quality that emerges from the work as a whole. This statement can be made while admitting that one should not attempt to base rules upon it, but only point to freedom among a set of exemplary conditions, as Kant proposed. The kind of freedom that is exemplary for art, according to Schiller, differs in the naive writer and the reflective one, and, in the latter, between the idealist and the realist. Likewise, among the genres — which in modern times tend to be satire, comedy, elegy, and idyll — there are differences in the kinds and extent of freedom.
Finally, Schiller would seem to be the first writer on art to introduce the notion of a Fall, in the manner of Roland Barthes's division between "works of our modernity," which are "writable," and the bygone "classic" works, which are only "readable." There is an important difference, of course: Schiller's Fall is an historical one in the main, although he does insist that "reflective" geniuses have written in the age of the "naive," and "naive" writers can still exist in a world that has lost its naivete. Barthes's "modernity" is more like an ever-shifting present, a rather arbitrary canon including Sade, Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécouchet, and Mallarmé, because they still have something new to offer to the reading and writing community of which Barthes found himself a member. Schiller, on the other hand, was Professor of History at Jena at the time of his aesthetic inquiries, and he wrote in direct response to the events of the revolution in France — in all of European history, surely, the most plausible septennium (1789-95) for an actual fall. Schiller's Fall, nevertheless, like that of Adam and Barthes, involved human freedom above all. When human beings fell out of nature and began to look at all the rest of the world as "other," they became free and responsible in essential ways, unsuspected before the novus ordo seclorum we celebrate on our paper money.
My thesis is that the concepts and terms with which Schiller described the new order of writing are still valid. They account both for the systemic state and the ongoing transformations within literary work and literary studies today. This means, I believe, that we are still in the cultural epoch widely known as the romantic period. The extraordinary turbulencies of the last thirty years may well prove to be threshold phenomena of a breakthrough in our progress to an entirely new epoch; still similar disturbances have already occurred (around 1830 and 1910) without putting a closing bracket to the stage of Western consciousness that Schiller described in two critical masterpieces, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man and Naive and Sentimental Poetry. (Lest this last claim seem forced, it should be pointed out that the Hegelian dialectic, Marxist alienation, the all-importance of artistic culture, and other essential components of our continuing world view were already present seminally in Schiller's texts.)
3. The Comic in Modern Literature
Let us proceed, then, with an inquiry into the conditions that are exemplary for the comic in modern literature, trying first to explore the content of Schiller's concepts and to determine (not too aggressively) the applicability of his terms to works that are of interest to us now. A convenient text will be the material from Kant and Schiller collected and commented upon by R. D. Miller in his Schiller and the Ideal of Freedom (Oxford, 1970). First, let us reaffirm Kant's insistence upon exemplary rather than rule-governed or constrained generation either of art or the experience of works of art. Kant, as Miller says,
is concerned to safeguard the principle of freedom in aesthetic experience ... from the restricting influence of all "interests," all concepts, and all purposes, so [that] the necessity which is a feature of aesthetic experience is not imposed by a rule or a law. Kant calls this aesthetic necessity "exemplary," because we notice a certain regularity, certain effects which appear to be examples of the working of a rule, without being able to state what the rule actually is.
We can ask, "What is the rule of Falstaff's character?" meaning its secret, its idea or principle, its essence; but we cannot hope to supplant the insights of Dryden, Morgann, or Bradley into Falstaff with any final formula.
In an essay of 1793, "Grace and Dignity," Schiller developed in a highly significant way the need, as Miller puts it, to "reconcile the freedom of man, as an independent rational being, with the freedom of nature." On the one hand, grace is restricted to human beings, but on the other hand, for their own sake human beings are led by grace in themselves to go further and set nature free. Here Schiller very clearly puts forward the principle of preserving the natural and liberating it from inhibitions, one of the most important clues for us in our grasp of the comic.
4. Aesthetic Freedom and the Comic Redemption of Power
In his essay "Of Grace and Dignity" Schiller established a metaphoric union between the aesthetic and the political that was at the heart of his whole response to the demands of his time. Miller sums it up: "Just as a liberal government refrains from treating individuals as a means to an end, but respects their individual freedom, so man with his aesthetic sense is concerned not to interfere with the freedom of nature." Schiller sees the aesthetic as a way of redeeming power: it becomes a freely flowing energy within a community governed by mutual respect, instead of being mere violence against aggressive enemies, passive subjects, and inert nature.
Schiller described his own age as one torn between the perversity and artificiality of the refined classes, with their moral rootlessness, and the rawness, coarseness, and mere nature of the lower classes, with their superstitions. Schiller also talked of ancient Greece as a naive state of ideal harmony between nature and reason, which too soon declined. After the Greeks, an artificial political structure of lifeless mechanical parts replaced an organic community, and the human was neglected in the specialized pursuits of each man. In Schiller's protest, we have seeds that fell on fertile ground not in Matthew Arnold alone, but in Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Freud. Schiller's way of meeting the needs of his chaotic era was through totality of personal character, where principles and feelings united, and where the victorious forms of art served as examples (but not as programs or manifestoes) and helped individual human beings to solve the problem, posed so sharply by the Terror in France, of a disintegrating modern community ripe for an intellectual tyranny. This urge toward freedom from compulsion and violence was bound to promote the comic, as Schiller saw, and to undercut the tragic except as an historical mode, a genre fit for revivals rather than premieres.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Discovering the Comic by George McFadden. Copyright © 1982 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- PREFACE, pg. ix
- Introduction, pg. 1
- 1. The Comic as a Literary Quality, pg. 10
- 2. Description of the Comic as a General Feature in Literature, pg. 22
- 3. Comic Ethos: The Classical View, pg. 49
- 4. The Romantic Theory of the Comic, pg. 80
- 5. The Modern Comic Ethos: Bergson's Laughter, pg. 111
- 6. Modern Comic Ethos Continued: Freud, pg. 131
- 7. Twentieth-Century Theorists: Mauron, Cornford, Frye, pg. 152
- 8. Nietzschean Values in Comic Writing, pg. 174
- 9. After Barthes: Death of the Comic?, pg. 204
- 10. Conclusions and Continuing Issues, pg. 242
- Selected Bibliography, pg. 255
- Index of Names and Titles, pg. 263
- Subject Index, pg. 266