From: msmorris@watsci.UWaterloo.ca (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: The Truth According to Mickie Medved
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 04:32:20 GMT


                        Tuesday, the 10th of November, 1992, II

Also, Fiona, I wasn't being crypto-religious out of sheer
perversity. My response to Francis reprised an old argument
I had had with Joe Green. About the blurring of the distinction
between Reality and Fiction. About the wisdom of Nietzsche
and his descendants laughing off any attempted objective
construction of language. About the Joyceans and their elevation
of style over substance.

My claim is simply that tragedy and Aristotle have (or, given
the age, make that ought to have) their place, too.

And I have in mind three passages that I will here recycle from
out of previous threads.

1.    `` (On Two Kinds of Laughter)
         Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil
   and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of
   the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
         Angels are partisans not of Good, but of divine creation.
   The Devil, on the other hand, denies all rational meaning to
   God's world.
         World domination, as everyone knows, is divided between
   demons and angels. But the good of the world does not require
   the latter to gain precedence over the former (as I thought when
   I was young); all it needs is a certain equilibrium of power. If
   there is too much uncontested meaning on earth (the reign of the
   angels), man collapses under the burden; if the world loses all
   its meaning (the reign of the demons), life is every bit as
   impossible.
         Things deprived suddenly of their putative meaning, the
   place assigned them in the ostensible order of things (a Moscow-
   trained Marxist who believes in horoscopes), make us laugh. Initially,
   therefore, laughter is the province of the Devil. It has a certain
   malice to it (things have turned out differently from the way they
   tried to seem), but a certain beneficent relief as well (things
   are looser than they seemed, we have greater latitude in living
   with them, their gravity does not oppress us).
         The first time an angel heard the Devil's laughter, he was
   horrified. It was in the middle of a feast with a lot of people
   around, and one after the other they joined in the Devil's
   laughter. It was terribly contagious. The angel was all too aware
   the laughter was aimed against God and the wonder of His works.
   He knew he had to act fast, but felt weak and defenseless. And
   unable to fabricate anything of his own, he simply turned his
   enemy's tactics against him. He opened his mouth and let out a wobbly,
   breathy sound in the upper reaches of his vocal register (much like
   the sound Gabrielle and Michelle produced in the streets of the little
   town on the Riviera) and endowed it with the opposite meaning. Whereas
   the Devil's laughter pointed up the meaninglessness of things, the
   angel's shout rejoiced in how rationally organized, well conceived,
   beautiful, good, and sensible everything on earth was.
         There they stood, Devil and angel, face to face, mouths open,
   both making more or less the same sound, but each expressing
   himself in a unique timbre---absolute opposites. And seeing the
   laughing angel, the Devil laughed all the harder, all the louder,
   all the more openly, because the laughing angel was infinitely
   laughable.
         Laughable laughter is cataclysmic. And even so, the angels
   have gained something by it. They have tricked us all with their
   semantic hoax. Their imitation laughter and its original (the
   Devil's) have the same name. People nowadays do not even realize
   that one and the same external phenomenon embraces two contradictory
   internal attitudes. There are two kinds of laughter, and we lack the
   words to distinguish them. ''
        [Milan Kundera, _The Book of Laughter and Forgetting_, pp. 61,62]

2. From Paul Fussell's _The Great War and Modern Memory_:

    And working up his memories into a mode of theater,
    Graves eschewed tragedy and melodrama in favor of farce
    and comedy, as if anticipating Friedrich Durrenmatt's
    observation of 1954 that ``comedy alone is suitable
    for us,'' because ``tragedy presupposes guilt, despair,
    moderation, lucidity, vision, a sense of responsibility,''
    none of which we have got:
        In the Punch-and-Judy show of our century...there are
        no more guilty and also, no responsible men. It is always,
        ``We couldn't help it'' and ``We didn't really want that
        to happen.'' And indeed, things happen without anyone
        in particular being responsible for them. Everything
        is dragged along and everyone gets caught somewhere in the
        sweep of events. We are all collectively guilty, collectively
        bogged down in the sins of our fathers and of our forefathers...
        That is our misfortune, but not our guilt...Comedy
        alone is suitable for us.

      [pp. 203,204, the Durrenmatt is referenced to _Problems of the
      Theatre_, trans. Gerhard Nellhaus (New York, 1964), p. 31]

3. In the thirteenth book of the Analects, there is an
exchange which Pound liked to quote, and which goes something
like:
   ``Master, if you were to be given the government, what is
         the first thing you would do?'' 
   ``Call things by their proper names.''

                   Mike Morris
           (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)