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onward-that the movement from suffering to insight is at the center of
tragedy's religious core while comedy celebrates the body (or is it the
"bawdy"?), often in terms of Dionysian revel or the triumph of young
lovers over the impediment of social restrictions. Here, a passage from
Charles Simmons's largely forgotten novel,
Powdered Eggs
(1964), is
instructive:
The tragic hero says this, I am at odds with the world, I cannot
change the world and I will not change myself. He goes down. We
watch him go down and experience Aristotle's catharsis, which is
the feeling of Yes, there was a time somewhere back then, when I
too felt at odds with the world, but I changed myself-I survived.
I admire this man for going down, but I am nonetheless very glad
I am not he. That's why tragedy makes you sad and relieved and
respectful all at the same time. But the comic hero, he only half
senses that he is at odds with the world. Thus he prosecutes his
folly, and so steady is he that the wide world adjusts to him. That's
why you laugh and feel gay and why you love a comic hero: he has
maintained his madness and survived.
So far, so good, but the long, complicated history of efforts to sharply
define the comic suggests that even Simmons's delightfully rendered cate–
gories are something of a mug's game. Perhaps no one was more teasing,
more frustrating,
in
this regard than was Socrates. In the concluding lines of
The Symposium,
he advances the curious proposition that tragedy and come–
dy are mirror images of one another. Unfortunately (or perhaps "ironically"
is the more precise term), Socrates did not go on to unpack his bold asser–
tion. Mter a long evening of booze and debates about love, his audience was
exhausted. Exploring the congruences between the comic and the tragic
would have to wai t for another day-one that, alas, never arrived.
What we are left with, then, is something of a muddle. About the trag–
ic sensibility we know much, however remote its essential rhythms may be
to our secular, democratic age. As for comedy, the popular culture serves
up versions, good and bad, in giddy abundance. The difficulty comes when
we try to move from accounts of what provokes laughter (or offense) to
explanations that justifY these responses. What we lack, in short, is a theo–
ry of the comic able to encompass Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Cervantes,
Mark Twain, Sholem Aleichem,james Thurber, and the latest sketch on
"Saturday Night Live." No easy trick, to be sure, and one that quickly gives
rise to the following complication-namely, how it is that the penchant
for rigorous analysis often ends in utterly destroying the very thing it seeks
