The Logic of Wish and Fear: New Perspectives on Genres of Western Fiction

New Perspectives on Genres of Western Fiction

Kenneth A. Loparo, Ben La Farge

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137470843
• eBook ISBN: 9781137465689
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Moving effortlessly from Greek to Shakespearean tragedies, to nineteenth and twentieth-century British, American and Russian drama, and fiction and contemporary television, this study sheds new light on the art of comedy.

Part I

The Convergence of Comedy and Romance

1

Comedy’s Logic

Abstract: Comedy obeys a structure that is emotionally logical, and it is this logic that generates a catharsis: in every comedy, there is a correspondence between the possible success or failure of the protagonist’s intention and the audience’s wish or fear on his behalf. The successful achievement of his intention produces a catharsis of those two feelings in the audience, and that catharsis is the ultimate source of all comedic pleasure, just as a catharsis of terror and pity is the source of all tragic pleasure. In every comedy, finally, the protagonist embodies both the author’s will and the audience’s wish, and the purpose of their unacknowledged collaboration is to play a game that will end happily for both of them. Their will-to-play, their game-playing, is the true spirit of all comedy, its festive spirit.

La Farge, Ben. The Logic of Wish and Fear: New Perspectives on Genres of Western Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137465689.0004.

1

One evening years ago I was watching a performance of the Chinese Magic Circus of Taiwan when it suddenly came to me that the fundamental characteristics of comedy were being acted out before my eyes. The discovery seems ironic in retrospect, as I did not find the performance very amusing, but the crude simplicity of the act illuminated the underlying dynamics of the genre. Two Taiwanese clowns came on stage dressed in the traditional white coverall and floppy hat that signify a chef. One of them announced that he and his companion were Puerto Rican chefs, and they proceeded to set up a row of nine springy bamboo poles, each about seven feet high, each one stuck vertically into a firm base and separated from the next pole by several feet. His companion left the stage, returning with a stack of nine china plates, one of which he tossed over a considerable distance to the first chef, who proceeded to flip it high above his head onto the peak of the first bamboo pole, which he had set into vibrating motion by plucking it like a harp string. The vibration caused the plate to whirl so rapidly that it stayed in place without wobbling. Then his companion tossed him another plate, which he flipped onto the top of a second pole. After he had started three or four of these in motion, the trouble began, as one or another would begin to slow down, wobbling precariously. He ran over, gave the pole another harp-string pluck to get the plate whirling safely again, and ran back to launch another plate onto still another pole. In this way he managed to launch all nine plates without a mishap. Having stepped back a moment to admire his triumphant feat with his companion, he set about dismantling the whole enterprise, always managing to catch each plate just as it threatened to wobble, fall off, and smash on the stage floor.

Three factors in the dynamics of this event are characteristic of all comic structures. The first has to do with the logic of situation; the second with the feelings that situation evokes; and the third with the hidden identity of the clown himself.

The logic of the situation was so completely graphic that it gave the step-by-step procedure of the enterprise an air of inevitability, something essential to all good drama. Once the clown had succeeded in launching the first plate onto the first pole, it was clear that he would have to launch each of the remaining eight plates onto each of the remaining eight poles. No doubt, if he dropped a plate, his companion would produce another to take its place. The act could not be completed until he had succeeded in getting all nine plates whirling simultaneously on their nine separate poles. The logic of the situation demanded that what was thus begun must thus be concluded.

By the same logic, however, it was equally clear that he might not succeed. He might lose only one plate, or he might lose so many plates that he would simply have to give up the enterprise and be hooted off the stage. In this sense the entire enterprise was as precarious as the equilibrium of each whirling plate. The logic of the situation could therefore work in only one of two ways, both of them leading inexorably toward a foreseeable conclusion. He could succeed, or he could fail.

The logic was so compelling that it evoked in the audience a corresponding set of emotions. We wanted him to succeed, and we were afraid he might fail. The danger of failure was all too visible, as we didn’t know how skillful he might prove to be, but so was the exhilarating possibility of success. So much would depend on his timing, and so much would depend on the pressure—neither too hard nor too gentle—with which he plucked each pole and sailed each plate aloft. In either case, we were so completely identified with his enterprise that our feelings of wish and fear corresponded exactly to the two possible directions the logic of the situation could take. When at the end he succeeded in completing the task he had set for himself, our two feelings were happily purged in a comedic catharsis—the catharsis of wish and fear.

This exact correspondence between our feelings and the two possible outcomes of the situation points to the third factor in the dynamics of the act—the hidden identity of the clown himself. As I mentioned earlier, both clowns were dressed as Puerto Rican chefs, but this outward identity was absurdly irrelevant to the actual feat one of them was trying to perform. At best, it seemed nothing more than a flimsy pretext for using plates. And even as a pretext it was excessive, out of all proportion to the real purpose of the performance, the successful fulfillment of the clown’s plate-launching game. Yet therein lies a clue to what it was that really held our interest. For the chef costumes served an indispensable function. They transformed what would otherwise have been a rather unimpressive game into a playful event, and this transformation was accomplished on two simultaneous levels of playfulness: the level of visual humor, or joking; and the level of identity. On the level of visual humor, the costumes were an obvious joke, a visual pun that provided an absurd pretext for using plates, instead of some other kind of disc—frisbees, say, or hub caps—which might have been just as whirlable but not as funny. The notorious fragility of china plates contributed to the humor and excitement of the situation.

On the level of identity, the costumes also transformed a silly activity into a comical game by seeming to disguise the clowns as something they were not, but the disguise was so transparent that it was clearly not intended to deceive. On the contrary, we were expected to enjoy the visible discrepancy between what the clowns really were and what they were pretending to be. The transparent silliness of this discrepancy was, in effect, an invitation for the audience to collaborate with the clowns in playing a game. You might almost say the clowns embodied both the unnamed author’s intention and the audience’s sympathy, at least to the degree that we identified with their intention of bringing their game to a happy conclusion.

2

Each of these three dynamic factors is characteristic of all comedy. In every comedy there is an irresistible logic of situation to which the characters are helplessly obedient—a logic that is funny to the degree that it is absurdly illogical. In every comedy, there is also a correspondence between the possible success or failure of the protagonist’s intention and the audience’s wish and fear on his behalf. The successful achievement of his intention produces a catharsis of those two feelings in the audience, and that catharsis is the ultimate source of all comedic pleasure, just as a catharsis of terror and pity is the source of all tragic pleasure, as Aristotle saw. In every comedy, finally, the protagonist embodies both the author’s will and the audience’s wish, and the purpose of their unacknowledged collaboration is to play a game—the Game of Success and Failure—that will end happily for both. Their will-to-play, their game-playing, is the true spirit of all comedy, its festive spirit.

The pleasure of games derives from their unique combination of artifice and competitive emotion, and the underlying affinity between games and comedy is one that Henri Bergson’s theory of laughter illuminates. What makes us laugh, he thought, is what he called “the mechanical encrusted on the living,” as when someone imitates a puppet by moving jerkily. “We laugh,” he said, “every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing.” If we apply this idea to games, we can say that the rigidity of the rules embodies his principle of “the mechanical,” and the power of the feelings aroused embodies his principle of “the living,” “the moral personality.” The tension between the artificial rules of the game and the living passions of competition is what gives us pleasure, arousing and purging our desire for victory and our fear of defeat.

All games, whether athletic or intellectual, may be characterized by a structure of artificial rules and the competitive emotions they arouse. The desire to win and the fear of losing substitute for the complexities of our “real” lives, which we momentarily suspend during our participation, either as players or as spectators. Just as a game arouses our wish for a triumphant encounter with the opponent, comedy arouses our wish for a triumphant encounter with moral or social chaos. In a bedroom farce, we begin by wishing to see adultery committed, but later, when the triumph of adultery seems unavoidable, that wish turns into a longing for reprieve, which is happily (and mechanically) granted.

The ending of a comedy, its closure, is the ultimate measure of its success, since the logic of our illogical wish and fear has led us to expect a happy resolution of the conflict, no matter how unrealistic such an ending may be. It is the happy resolution of our wish and fear that makes the ending pleasurable, even though it violates our sense of reality. The more desirable and unlikely a happy ending is made to be—that is, the more unrealistic and mechanical—the funnier it will seem. The ending is the realization of what the beginning promised, against all odds.

The ultimate effect of comedic pleasure—the pleasure afforded by comedic conflict and catharsis—is to generate in us an attitude of forgiving sympathy, an acceptance of the characters and their confusions for what they are: the confusions of people like ourselves. This is true even when the social implications of a comedy are subversive, as they are in Lysistrata, where Aristophanes, in a brilliant role reversal, has the women force the men to end the civil war between Athens and Sparta. They do this not only by refusing to sleep with their husbands until they agree to stop fighting, but also by occupying the Acropolis, where the Athenian treasury on which the war depends is housed. Thus, like games, comedy replaces the troublesome complexities of life with a fictional artifice, which allows us to experience the wholly artificial pleasure of catharsis.

3

The dynamic of comedy is generated by the illogical logic that governs comedic structure. This is what creates the defining conflict between the destructive and restorative impulses and evokes in us an ambivalent response of wish and fear. Illogical logic functions on two planes simultaneously. The first is the plane of verbal or visual wit. This is the plane of language, both in the textual sense of dialogue and the cinematic sense of image. Comic wit, whether verbal or visual, is created by clever banter, puns, and jokes of all kinds, including sight gags. The second is the plane of structural irony, comprising six familiar plot devices. These are deception and/or disguise, mistaken identity, reversal of roles, coincidence, and the use of a naïve persona. All such devices are ironic in the sense that they are characterized by a principle of reversal: what appears to be so turns out to be the opposite. The ironic discrepancy between appearance and reality essential to comedy (and sometimes thought to be its defining characteristic) is made possible by the use of such structural devices.

The function of all these devices, both verbal and structural, is to reduce the comic characters to absurdity. Their ultimate effect is to depersonalize the comic characters—to flatten them into one-dimensional caricatures with which we can only empathize. Comic characters always give the impression of being helplessly obedient to some invisible force. Tragic heroes may be governed by their destinies, but they manage to retain their individual dignity, their uniqueness and their complexity, to the end. Comic heroes never seem to lose their dignity either, no matter how humiliating their dilemmas may be, but from the start they are devoid of complexity, more recognizable as familiar types than as unique individuals. And this is not only because they are imprisoned in a circumstance beyond their control, the circumstance of illogical logic; it is also because they do not reflect upon their situation—unlike the tragic heroes of Sophocles, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Racine, who are given to long soliloquies.

Perhaps all of this will be made clearer by an example from the lowest form of comedy, slapstick. In slapstick the complex organism of human character is reduced to a single ruling passion—most often some form of aggression or hostility. In a one-reel silent film of 1929 called Big Business, (Stan) Laurel and (Oliver) Hardy are selling Christmas trees in California when they ring the doorbell of a one-story suburban house. The owner (played by James Finlayson), poking his head out the door, declines to buy and shuts the door, but the tip of the Christmas tree, which Laurel has been carrying under his arm, is caught in the door frame. Hardy rings again. Again the owner, poking his head out, tells them “No” and slams the door shut. Again the tip of the tree is caught. Hardy rings the doorbell yet again, but this time the owner storms out of the house with a pair of garden shears, with which he first cuts off the top of the Christmas tree and then cuts the remaining part in half before retreating inside. In retaliation, Laurel aims a garden hose at the door and turns the water on full-force; Hardy rings again, the owner opens and, after being doused, charges down the path to their automobile, which is parked by the curb, and rips off one of the headlights. Laurel and Hardy get even by entering the house and throwing pieces of furniture on to the lawn. The owner rips off more auto parts—first a door, then a fender, then the radiator, and so on. Laurel trundles an upright piano out the door and smashes it to pieces on the path. Meanwhile a cop arrives and, seated in his auto, begins to write up a report while the devastation continues. Finally, after each one tearfully tells the cop his version of what happened, they all shake hands. Laurel gives the owner a conciliatory cigar, which later blows up in his face. When the cop sees Laurel and Hardy chuckling complacently and starts to go after them, they scamper down the street, with the cop in baffled pursuit. End of film.

The kind of pleasure we get from watching Big Business is the kind we get from all slapstick comedy. It is the pleasure of seeing familiar kinds of aggression and hostility—familiar destructive impulses—being vented or acted out before our eyes. The reductive method used in this case was a process of depersonalization occurring on the plane of visual wit. Laurel and Hardy’s chief personal characteristics are the shapes of their bodies—Hardy’s large and plump, Laurel’s smaller and thinner—an inseparable dual caricature. We didn’t need to identify with either one personally; we empathized with their anger. The process by which they were thus depersonalized involved all three of the factors we saw in the plate-spinning act of the Chinese Magic Circus of Taiwan. Once the house-owner had cut Laurel and Hardy’s Christmas tree into three pieces and they had turned the garden hose on him, the logic of the situation required that neither antagonist could stop until the former had destroyed Laurel and Hardy’s automobile and they in turn had destroyed his house. Their acts of reciprocal violence were a visual representation of their mutual anger. Furthermore, our feelings corresponded to the situation. Once we understood they weren’t going to stop at sho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I  The Convergence of Comedy and Romance
• Part II  Secular Myth
• Part III  The Pleasures of Tragedy
• Conclusion
• Appendix