My upcoming Trotcon & Bronycon talks · 9:34pm Jul 15th, 2018
I'm giving / helping give 3 talks / panels / events in the next 2 weeks, at Trotcon and Bronycon:
Trotcon, Columbus OH, Fri July 20, 11:30 AM: Aristotle vs. Fan-Fiction
Humans are weird. Sometimes they like to do painful or frightening things: ride roller-coasters, eat the extra-hot buffalo wings at Duff''s, climb mountains, watch horror movies.
Readers seem to enjoy reading about people they like suffering horrible difficulties. Why? I think understanding this would help us write better stories.
The first Westerner to ask this question was Aristotle, in his "Poetics". He speculated that the Greeks watched tragic drama in order to achieve "catharsis", a Greek word meaning "cleansing". Tragedy, he said, arouses pity and fear in a way that cleanses the audience of those passions. (He explained this more in his more-popular work "On the Poets", which is unfortunately lost, so we're stuck not quite knowing what he meant.)
For more than 2000 years, no one questioned whether Aristotle was right, though his theory did a poor job of explaining even the plays he used as examples (and in its historical context looks suspiciously like a politically-motivated hatchet job on Euripides and the 4th-century poets).
IMHO, tragedy just doesn't produce catharsis in real life. This is what it would look like if it did:
And it certainly does a poor job of explaining the reader responses I've gotten to my stories. Readers who've just finished "Twenty Minutes" or "Burning Man Brony" didn't usually say they felt cleansed or refreshed. They said things like:
Fucking Hell. OUCH. This was condensed, weaponized sadness. -- PrinceLexmarkThePrinted
I'm going to go and drink alcohol. I may never stop. -- GhostOfHeraclitus
That was motherfucking creepy in a way that'll stick with me for a while. -- horizon
I think another crack appeared in my mask of sanity and non-depression. -- Nharctic
Do you get hate mail for writing this stuff? It's awful and horrible and bleak and beautiful, all at the same time. -- JonOfEquestria
Heartbreaking and uplifting at once. … -- borvain tavers
I don't know whether to thank you for this beautiful story or yell at you for breaking my heart. I think instead I shall simply say thank you and leave the tears where they fall. -- Themaskedferret
I am not even going to try and explain how beautiful and sad and wonderful and horrible this story is... all at the same time. -- Francium Actinium
I may have to stare at the wall for a while after this. -- Blue_Paladin42
Tragedy isn't an evoking of pity and fear, followed by a cleansing. The horrifying note lingers, and if there's an uplifting feeling (which doesn't happen in Aristotelian tragedy), it comes at the same time. Something quite different than what Aristotle said is going on here.
I'll look at reader responses to my own stories The Magician & the Detective, Twenty Minutes, Burning Man Brony, Pony Play, Moments, and Shut Up, and hopefully some stories by other people as well, and propose a different theory:
- Catharsis happens in comedy, horror, adventure, slice-of-life, and basically every type of story except tragedy.
- Tragedy, unlike most fiction, isn't primarily emotional, but philosophical. It creates strange, disturbing feelings by poking at the cracks in our beliefs, at cases our philosophies don't cover.
And That's How Equestria Was Made!
I may also run a game of "And That's How Equestria Was Made!" at Trotcon, but I didn't submit it as a proposal, so it would be a last-minute event listed on their games room schedule. PM me if you're interested.
Bronycon, Baltimore MD, Fri July 27, 5 PM, Hall of Chaos: And That's How Equestria Was Made!
Super Trampoline is running it this time, but I'll be there slandering and blaming the other ponies.
Bronycon, Baltimore MD, Sat July 28, 11 PM, Hall of the Moon: Advanced Writing Toolkit: Try These Five Weird Tricks!
I'm on this panel with GaPJaxie & Wanderer_D, in which we talk about writing tricks that (a) are too advanced for your typical "how to write" book, and (b) are craft rather than art. I call them "tricks" because they're simple to explain, simple to use, and surprisingly effective, sometimes because they exploit human psychology. For example:
- Control what your readers remember or forget by knowing the capacity of typical human short-term memory.
- Use movement forward and backward in physical space to suggest forward and backward character progress.
- Balance familiarity with strangeness by taking plot steps that alternate between the mundane and the crazy. (GaPJaxie)
Flashbacks, flash-forwards, and POV switches aren't really special and confusing cases. (Wanderer D & me)
- The guideline is that each new scene expands on the previous scene, and sets up a question or contrast for the next scene.
- Something should usually remain constant between each scene to connect them, but it doesn't have to be POV or chronology.
- Tacos. (This is Wanderer D's topic. Ask him.)
I keep saying I wish I could be there.
I wish I could be there. This last panel sounds right up my alley.
I also want to get you, me and D in a room with some decent whisky and see what drops out.
There's an 11pm panel? Ok, but I'm warning you. I'm old, and may require some poking and prodding to stay up that late past my bedtime. And Pepsi. Mostly Pepsi.
-On balancing familiarity with the odd: You're going to see a variant of this in about every Real Worlds Have Monsters story in commercial fiction, which I like to call Incrementalism. Two good examples are The Shambling Guide to New York City and the first story in Monster Hunters International. You start with a normal world, then add the first odd thing, then a second, and by the time you reach the end the hero is fighting hordes of demons with an auto-loading shotgun and chainsaw bayonet and the reader is just fine with it.
-On physical motion relating to character advancement: FOE:Pink Eyes is a good example. Puppysmiles is always moving forward to a physical goal and advancing character traits in the process until she reaches the end and rips the heart out of the reader.
Looking forward to seeing and blaming you!
Is the theory of the sublime a useful replacement for the concept of catharsis? The tragic tries to expose the audience to something sublime - something greater, more dangerous, more threatening than the mere human, while at a safe remove. A sort of guided tour to existential dread. "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result." (And damn, it's a supposed Churchill quote which actually seems to have originated with Winston himself.)
Strong emotion does leave behind it strong and nonintuitive consequences. I've had many a depressive episode in the wake of a wrathful outburst, and a big success often brings with it a sort of floating melancholy in the listless aftermath.
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It seems to have something in common with it, doesn't it? The sublime isn't associated with tragedy, but I can see making a connection. We might call something sublime that seems large and frightening and beautiful at the same time, like Niagara Falls.
Consider the Ted Chiang story "Story of Your Life", which was bowdlerized into the movie Arrival. In the short story, the heroine doesn't try to change the future, even though she knows what will happen. She has been given a new perspective, essentially the same God perspective that Jorge Luis Borges described in "The God's Script" (also called "The Jaguar's Spots" or "The Writing of the God"). The person sees history with a kind of aesthetic perspective, in which everything that happens is--appropriate, somehow. The person becomes enraptured with the sublime picture of how the entire history of the world fits together, and would not change any part of it, not even to save their own life. That's a summary of both of those stories.
But the sublime may also be the aesthetic basis of HP Lovecraft stories. Again, the sublime goes beyond good and evil. This is unclear, since sometimes Lovecraft seems to describe his monsters as evil, but I don't think that was quite what he meant. I think he uses "evil" (and some pretty clear instances of evil) as a placeholder for "things that seem evil to us just because they are at right angles to our thoughts".
I don't think the sublime and the tragic are quite the same--most tragedies don't have anything beautiful left at the end; they're definite downers. I confused the issue by including reader comments from 20 Minutes & Moments, which aren't tragedies, but bittersweet, with a simultaneous upbeat/downbeat on the ending.
But they're similar enough that they might be studied side-by-side and reveal some deeper principle which they have in common.
I wish I was gooder at thinkin' 'bout stuff. :B I've been trying to figure out why I love tragedy so much for years now.
Enjoy Trotcon! I'll be off celebrating my birthday by, um ... probably blowing a party horn by myself on top of a mountain or something.
(I'd rather be at the con, but airfare and vacation time.
)
I don't know if I write tragedy in the sense you're referring to. Is The Price of a Smile tragedy? Is Motherly tragedy? Is Recycled? Those are three stories I've written which I like, that don't leave me smiling at the end... but they're thought-provoking. They don't leave me devastated or sad, they make me think about what makes life valuable, and even in the tragedy of it there's an upbeat sense of "understanding what matters".
Wait, Trotcon is in Columbus? I could actually make that!
Assuming it isn't too late, anyway.
Looking forward to it! See you at Bronycon!
I'm probably going to do my main party Saturday 6pm to 1am seeing as so many writing panels are on Friday. AWT is the only victim.
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It isn't too late! :V
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AFAIK you don't write tragedy as Aristotle defined it, but Price of a Smile certainly fits the characteristics of tragedy that I identify in this talk. Aristotelian tragedy seems to me inferior and less interesting. I argue that Aristotle defined tragedy the way he did in order to prevent people from writing good tragedy, which he saw as a threat to social order, because it makes them ask questions.
Sorry for digging up ancient post, I had some thoughts and I was reminded of this.
I always wondered what catharsis was supposed to mean (besides "I know it when I feel it"), but when I looked into this, apparently nobody is quite sure what Aristotle meant. The best theory I found is that he previously wrote about medicine and the human body, where his main observation was that a sick body will purge unhealthy substances until it is cleansed, and some medicines could aid this. Catharsis! He was so proud of this idea that he later used it as a metaphor for unrelated subjects such as art.
If he means that repressing emotions is unhealthy, then yeah there's some truth to that, and it matches our modern understanding of psychology. Or maybe he's saying that emotions themselves are an unwanted poison, in which case: ehhh....
Anyway, that funny GIF made me think, there's actually a lot of people who do just that! It's like in Fight Club, where the protagonist is sneaking into support groups so he can share in others' tragedy, all so he can let out his pain and cry himself to blissful sleep. Only the big difference here is he's enjoying real life tragedy, rather than tragic fiction. It's like whenever a celebrity dies, people pour out their sorrow and then feel more determined. People don't get quite that inspired over Stan Lee still kicking it as a weird old man, not until he's gone forever and it's a beautiful end.
People also get that kind of catharsis from sad music, like dancing to the Blues. Or Johnny Cash covering a NIN song about drugs & depression, and everyone weeps at the pain they couldn't express on their own. Or in the movies, there's tragic heroes who sacrifice everything, sometimes even themselves, but the ending itself is still happy or bittersweet (I'm reminded of Muhammad Ali talking about Rocky movies: how all the men in the theater will be crying harder than the women). It's weird, catharsis in tragedy seems to be everywhere... except the genre of tragedy itself.
Has tragedy evolved that much over time? You're right that the entire genre seems to be philosophical instead of emotional. Even when I think of Shakespeare's famous tragedies, I don't feel sorry for beloved heroes, just emotionally drained and numb. He shows that the world sure is a bummer, full of sound and fury, and it's almost nihilistic. Did Shakespeare himself redefine the genre, and we're all copying him?
I kinda wonder if our definition of tragedy has become so narrow and recursive that we can't have any that are actually sad? We have "sadfics" but they're not considered proper tragedies. Philosophical art is still important, but emotional art seems to have become so underrated. Then again, I'm reminded being taught examples of "comedy" that are important as social satire yet are not funny at all. I'm starting to wonder if it's a purely academic shift.
Okay this comment was longer than I planned, on a panel topic that already happened months ago anyway, sorry!
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Some caveats here: I think current thinking in psychology is closer to "Repressing desires is unhealthy". E.g., the Victorians pretended not to be interested in sex, which led them to replace their sexy cabriole "Queen Anne" table legs...
mbwfurniture.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/ant-q-v-2.jpg
... with the less-libidinous Victorian legs...
woodturn.com.au/system/product_image/image/0000/0317/normal/CT002.jpg
... because otherwise their faces would flush and their naughty bits get all excited whenever they saw a table leg.
Desires are more cognitive; they correspond to long-term or ongoing goals, and involve a conscious awareness of what the desire is. Emotions are transient, and sub-conscious, in that while they may help you achieve goals, you aren't usually conscious of how they do so (e.g., a hot temper helps you avoid being abused by people who believe rational agents won't take revenge). "Repressing emotions is unhealthy", taken to mean that you should scream or hit something if you feel angry, was a popular belief for a long time. It was based on the hydraulic model of emotions--that emotions are like a fluid that exerts pressure, which must be released. That was an idea of Freud's, I think. But, like most of Freud, he just made it up without actually checking it against reality. It's now fallen out of favor owing to experiments indicating that screaming when you're angry just makes you angrier longer. See e.g. "Catharsis"; the study it's based on is here.
There's a more subtle, and, I think, plausible story about this, told not by a scientist, but just some guy who had anger problems. In Anger Busting 101: The New ABC's for Angry Men and the Women who Love Them (2002, Houstin, TX: Bayou Publishing), Newton Hightower wrote (p. 29-30),
So this guy's experience is that catharsis feels good, so we like cathartic experiences--but they aren't actually good for us.
But Fight Club is a work of fiction, probably written by somebody who was influenced by Aristotle's writings on catharsis. I'll perform a little experiment: Was he? What does googling "Chuck catharsis" turn up?
Well, it turns up this:
So not only is Chuck Palahniuk familiar with the Aristotelian concept of catharsis, he chose to write particular stories specifically because he believed Aristotle's theory of catharsis and thought it would do social good to give people hydraulic-theory psychotherapy with his stories.
I can't speak for other people, especially because I'm usually weird and react to things quite differently. But I was much more moved by seeing Stan Lee last year at the Samsung Developer's Conference, where I was impressed by how energetic, enthusiastic, quirky, and fun he was, than by news of his death.
Right--that's also what I saw. And years ago, when I was extremely depressed, I used to listen to Pink Floyd's The Wall, and wonder why listening to such depressing music made me feel better. (Though The Wall (spoiler!) has a happy ending.)
I think the difference is that catharsis happens with emotional experiences, but tragedy is the genre that is most philosophical, intellectual, cognitive. Tragedy seems to always involves an apparent paradox, contradiction, or unacceptable conclusion. For the ancient Greeks, this was often one or more of:
I don't know whether to say that he invented the rules, or that he played with and broke the rules. The only rules he had for tragedy were from Aristotle, Horace, and Renaissance commentators on them, I think. He didn't stick to the notion that tragedy and comedy were distinct genres, to the Aristotelian unities, or to the use of mistaken identities (which he used in his comedies, but drawing on different models). I'm not sure whether he stuck to the use of scenes of reversal, recognition, and epiphany. I don't think the notion of a character arc existed before him, and I can't think right now whether he ever used one. I don't think the idea of a rising plot had been articulated, either. "Show, don't tell" existed (in Aristotle), but Shakespeare ignored it.
I think a lot of his plays were experimental in either case, since they broke even the few rules that existed. In most cases, later writers just rejected his experiments.
Like, MacBeth and King Lear are both "all ending" (said Alexander Pope and Mark van Doren): the central conflict resides entirely within the protagonist, and is over by the end of Act I Scene 1, and the rest of the play shows the protagonist being ground to dust by his own bad decision. Nobody else ever wrote stories like that. Merchant of Venice can't decide whether it's a comedy or a tragedy. Much Ado About Nothing seems to be a Claudio/Hero tragedy intermixed with a Benedick/Beatrice comedy in which he made the comic relief overshadow the tragic plot and then gave the tragedy a happy ending. I think Hamlet is about the conflict between Hamlet's duty to revenge his father, and his duty to preserve his country (which he knows will be rent apart if he does, and in fact it is conquered by foreigners in the last scene, a fact critics strangely ignore). But in any case it's very weird, mainly because Hamlet's dilemma is never communicated clearly, and because he never tries to execute a plan and then faces external obstacles. People don't write stories like that now, either.
(Also, re. tragedy evolving, there was a vast break between the end of Greek tragedy in the 4th century BC, and Shakespeare, during which AFAIK no tragedies (by our semi-Aristotelian definition) were written, because the Romans preferred comedy, and the medievals had only comedy, romance, and morality tales and allegories.)
Hmm. If you say "philosophical art is still important", I think you have to be counting things like modern art, post-modern art, conceptual art, and anti-democracy, anti-humanist, anti-technology, post-modernist, and post-colonial literary novels. Those are "philosophical", but only in the sense of Plato's later dialogues, medieval scholasticism, or Nazi or Stalinist literature; not in the sense of Plato's early dialogues, or of Enlightenment philosophy or scientific inquiry. In the former, there is a worked-out philosophical system which the writer is absolutely certain is true, and he's trying to stuff it down your throat and suppress all other ideas. In the latter, the writer is bothered by something that doesn't seem right, and is poking at it, trying to figure it out, maybe never coming to any conclusion.
I don't think good philosophical art, by which I mean art that doesn't pretend to have all the answers and is done in a sincere spirit of inquiry, is considered even acceptable anymore. Note that Fight Club was not a literary novel, and didn't win any literary awards! In fact it was published by W W Norton, who rarely publish original fiction, and that suggests to me that Palahniuk couldn't get it published anywhere else (tho I could be totally wrong). I doubt that any literary press today would publish something so philosophical, by which I mean something trying to find an answer to a philosophical or psychological question, rather than one trying to provide the accepted Yale / Manhattan / Los Angeles dogma.
Don't be sorry! Anything that wasn't worth commenting on months later, couldn't have been worth writing in the first place.
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You bring up an excellent point: our modern common understanding of "catharsis" seems to borrow much more from Freud than Aristotle himself. Freud's whole metaphor of pressure build-up is describing a steam engine, still the hot technology of his time. Aristotle's definition was so vague that it could mean anything, but in 16th century england maybe it meant something very different than boiling water. After all, if Aristotle's theory was so accepted in Europe for so long, how come nobody actually wrote tragedies that fit that description? (well maybe some, I have no idea)
Catharsis as a term gets tossed around a lot, it's likely that Palahniuk was more familiar with the Freud-derived term than the original Aristotle. (extra evidence: so many themes about repressed sexuality)
That's fair. I mean on a communal level, people aren't quite sure how to celebrate a figure. It's kinda weird. Kinda like how the fictional Fight Club protagonist goes to collective grieving rather than work out his own problems.
That's one theory of tragedy I've seen, focusing on the individual rather than the communal. The literature of China and neighboring cultures never seemed much interested in tragedy... at least as our literature defines it. This paper argues there's a similar structure but a different use of endings.... well now I'm more unsure than ever.
However, this one's a really illuminating look at how the Chinese judge and critique tragedy, rather than the definition itself. They simply don't get what's so great about tragedy, and they're curious why we love it so much.
Japanese literature went down a weird evolutionary path, where overall structure wasn't as important as individual moments. They seemed much more interested in exploring the melancholy, than any kind of cohesive tragic arc. But that's a whole different topic.
So it's usually explained as a tradition of Confucian ethics that don't value the individual, but also from Buddhist morals where passions and emotions must be eliminated. The religious aspect could also explain much of that gap where it wasn't popular in the West; who needs tragedy to question our fate in the universe when the people have Christianity to explore suffering and destiny, and provide them with answers too. Philosophy and Tragedy seem to align more secular?
(the pre-Christian Romans were apparently bad at writing tragedies. Not sure if they had important philosophers? Despite how much they imitated the Greeks I think they were much more religious, in terms of «purpose» rather than gods and mythology. Or maybe it's because they were deeply into Stoicism, much like the Christians and Chinese?)
(just remembered that Indian philosophy was a huge field, but I know less about that than Greek philosophy. and the latter I know almost nothing to begin with)
I personally thought the ending was happy but in a very pessimistic way. The tape loop connecting the end back to the beginning meant it was all cyclical and never-ending, just a momentary relief. Maybe there's some truth in that though...
It was taught to me that Gilgamesh is one of the rare ancient examples of a character arc. Though it was relatively unknown and unstudied until the 19th century, so it probably didn't have much influence on storytelling.
Looking at it again, I have to admit that Shakespeare has more in common with the Greek tragedies than I gave him credit for, since the stories focus so much on questioning life (as Vonnegut put it, we can't tell if events are good or bad for Hamlet, and the character can't seem to decide either)
New theory: perhaps Aristotle meant catharsis not as a release of pressure, but as sobering? These tragedies don't make us emotional, they wake us up and make us think. That could fit the metaphor of cleansing/purification in a better way than Freud's theories.
On the other hand, I learned something new: apparently Oedipus Rex was Aristotle's favorite tragedy, and he used it as his model. And one interpretation of the play I read is that Oedipus isn't entirely a victim of fate, but at the end he accepts it and sacrifices himself, transcending to something nobler. Not sure if everyone sees the story this way, but it sure has a lot in common with those "cathartic" heroes I talked about - Rocky, Terminator 2's Arnold, Kamina. Whether the ending is positive or negative, it hits this consistent emotion. (Hrmm, a hero dying but becoming something greater -- the religious parallel hits again)
So I think Aristotle was observing something that was there. He was probably just blinded by bias towards Sophocles, his favorite. Critics still do that a lot, conusing a particular style with "how everyone should do it"
One last theory: there's a type of tragedy where we do laugh: schadenfreude. Seeing someone suffer is quite cathartic, for very different reasons.
Ok, I'm joking here.
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That paper was, I think, written by someone who's never tried to write a tragedy. If he/she had, ze would realize that there are lots of ways to write "happy, sad", and most of them aren't tragic. Even Aristotle knew you had to at least also consider the social status, merits, & faults of the protagonist.
Take the story of Meng Jiang Nu from Wallace's "Tragedy in China" (the next paper you linked). If the story ended with the wife asking for her husband's bones and the authorities denying her, that would be "happy sad", but that wouldn't make it a tragedy. It would be sad, but there would be no paradox or scrutiny of social values. It leaves the reader with emotions, but with nothing to cogitate about.
Nor could a tragedy be made into a happy-sad-happy story by tacking on a happy ending, because the happy-sad-happy story is supposed to be unambiguously happy, while the ending of a tragic story usually requires (I think) showing that no happy ending was possible, that all possible outcomes are unsatisfactory (which presents the paradox or dilemma). How would you make Hamlet happy? It already has the "happy" ending in that justice has been done. It's tragic despite justice having been done, because one is left wondering whether the price paid for justice was too high, and whether justice is overrated.
Now that was an interesting paper. And to me, scary. A society that's so collectivist that it isn't interested in stories about individuals, or in the efforts of individuals, creeps me out--it seems like a colony of bees, living for the hive, having no personal time, no personal thoughts. One of my main fears about the future is that consciousness may be inefficient--that a race of artificial intelligences would necessarily shed consciousness as a costly luxury, giving us a future full of mere unfeeling machines. Chinese society as described in that paper seems to have already gone halfway there.
And it only makes me more frightened that radical leftists also have this collectivist attitude. Compare what's said in both these papers to literature made in the Soviet Union & you'll find similarities: all endings are happy for society, individuals can't solve their own problems and are not important. The main difference I can think of is that in Soviet novels, the individual vs. collective question will be tackled directly, and the individual will sacrifice his individuality or his life for the sake of the collective.
Lennard Davis, a Marxist at the U. of Illinois at Chicago, wrote a book Resisting Novels which criticizes Western novels for "pretending" that individuals can solve their own problems. He says only collective action can solve social problems (implying that only social problems matter), and that novels are inherently bad because they must perpetuate the bourgeois myth that a person can live life as an individual, and thus prevent people from acquiring revolutionary consciousness. The best we can do, he says, is to train students to read novels using a hermeneutics of suspicion, meaning they try to read between the lines and determine the author's class interests and the ways in which she's trying to mislead us.
There's an old book about Japanese aesthetics--I can't remember its name--which claims that melancholy is a basic value in Japanese aesthetics. I don't know why.
That Japanese aesthetic for capturing snapshots / moments was what inspired Ezra Pound to develop Imagist poetry.
You're touching on an issue that I've been studying intensely for the past 3 years, looking for recurring patterns among Western belief systems. In the West, individualism has always gone hand-in-hand with glorifying emotions, and collectivism with demeaning them. China got that combination of collectivism and suppression of emotions by mashing up Confucianism and Buddhism. I suspect the combination is more stable than either one individually.
Philosophy and Tragedy are incompatible with totalitarianism. Totalitarianism wants to control thought, and tragedy and philosophy are supposed to question received wisdom and inspire thought. Medieval Christianity was totalitarian. Buddhism and Confucianism aren't, but the combination of them might be thought of as enabling totalitarian government. I guess. I hadn't thought about it before.
Really interesting point! Yes, I don't know any Roman tragedies, although the Aeneid is pretty tragic in that Aeneas had to give up everything he had and everything he wanted in order to obey the gods and do his duty. GhostOfHeraclitus could fill you in on their philosophers, but AFAIK stoicism was their only original contribution, and it is, like the Romans, very pragmatic. They were a very un-philosophical people. Their culture was an inconsistent grab-bag of things from many different cultures and time periods that would have driven intellectuals mad, and they considered scholarship and intellectual work to be something that slaves could do for them. The only work of Plato they translated was the Timaeus, because they thought it was a history. I think of the Romans as barbarians, but very clever ones.
I never thought of that.
Oh, yeah, Gilgamesh had a character arc. I actually have a 9,000-word blog post about that, that I wrote, like, a year ago but never posted. That was one of the first clues to me that the Sumerians had what I call a "naturalist" or "empiricist" culture. That's really important, but it would take a few thousand words to explain why.
(Interesting note: The first version of Gilgamesh discovered actually changed the ending, so Gilgamesh became immortal & didn't have a character arc.)
In my talk, I said that you can read Aristotle's Poetics as reactionary: an attempt to declaw Greek tragedy by persuading people that its effect is purely emotional, and its radical content is unimportant. He dismissed the idea that tragedy has something to do with thought in a single sentence, saying that was the job of rhetoric. Anybody following Aristotle's guidelines would've been unable to make good--or dangerous--tragedy, except by luck.
If you want to figure that out, you should read Oedipus at Colonus, which is the sequel to Oedipus Rex. I haven't read it.
I'm writing another blog post on comedy theory. There's a bunch of comedy theory developed around 1900, capped off by Freud around 1930. His work on comedy was quite good, I thought--it was actually empirical; he studied real jokes. But comedy theory focuses on jokes, and mostly on cruel jokes.
The interesting thing to me is that there's a sharp divide between two mindsets about comedy. Nearly all these guys writing about the theory of jokes said that all jokes are mean, all humor is cruelty or satire. And that doesn't match my experience at all.
It seems to me that these are the same guys who insist that Shakespeare comedies are funny. Now, first of all, Shakespeare probably didn't consider humor to be an important part of comedy. The word "comedy", from the Greek, didn't originally mean a funny play, just as a "tragedy" didn't have to have a sad ending. The words defined the performance conventions at Athens. A tragedy had a chorus, was about noble people from mythical times trying to act noble, etc. A comedy was usually about the present day, starred middle-class people & sometimes slaves, acting ignobly. There are other aspects important to comedy in the Greek tradition, and in the Roman and Italian traditions that Shakespeare was borrowing more from, and being funny was only one of them.
The only things that are funny in Shakespeare to me are some bits in his tragedies, like Hamlet's "Yorick" scene. I find his comedies completely humorless. A lot of them are cruel, or cynical, or bitter, and… I'm sorry, but there's something wrong with somebody who thinks Merchant of Venice or Measure for Measure is funny. Scholars call these his "problem comedies", and puzzle over what Shakespeare was trying to accomplish, but I think he just couldn't do comedy.
But that's because I don't think comedy is just cruelty and stupidity. If I did, they'd probably seem funny to me.
More interesting is why some people only see humor in cruelty and satire. From another year-old unposted blog post:
The difference between me & Plato is that he thinks poetry should be used to indoctrinate children, & I think it should make people think.
The difference between me & Aristotle is that he thinks tragedy should create an emotional response, & I think it should make you think.
The difference between me & Lennard Davis is that he thinks a novel should make its readers unhappy, & I think it should make them think.
The difference between me & modern artists is that they think art should bring you into contact with the spiritual world, & I think it should make you think.
The difference between me & people who think Shakespeare comedies are funny is that they think humor is laughing at stupid people, & I think humor should make you think.
You could say I'm hung up on thinking. But I'd say, there's a whole lot of people who don't want the public at large to think.
The problem I see with that view is that Aristotle and Shakespeare were both very thoughtful guys who tried to make people think. I don't think Shakespeare had any models of my kind of humor, though.
Another theory is that this is yet another conflict between those who focus on the universal, and those who focus on the particular.
Plato, Aristotle, Marxists, modern artists, and the particular critics who like Shakespeares comedies are all philosophical idealists. A whole lot of other baggage goes with this worldview, but key here is that they think that true knowledge is eternal, timeless knowledge about universals (categories). And when they watch a play, they want to watch a play about universal characters--archetypes--not about individuals.
A funny thing about Shakespeare criticism is that different people praise him for opposite reasons. People today praise his characters for being distinctive. In the 18th century, Samuel Johnson praised them for not being distinctive. 'Coz he was an idealist. True art, he presumably thought, must be about universal characters.
Now, the humor I like best is about particulars. In this case, particular people. Character humor, stuff that wouldn't be funny if someone else did it. That kind of humor is invisible to people who only want to hear about archetypes because they think only the universal is real. Plato doesn't want Achilles to be a real person; he wants him to be an idealized hero. Aristotle doesn't talk about Oedipus' personal merits and faults; he wants to show how he's just like Cleon in Antigone: a virtuous man brought low by a mistake. Lennard Davis doesn't want to talk about the characters in a novel; he wants to talk about the mode of production that produced that novel. Modern artists don't want to paint a picture of a particular thing; they want to paint Angst, or Chaos, or... spiritual, universal stuff. And the particular obnoxious critic I was listening to last week who thinks Twelfth Night is hilarious didn't want to talk about Shakespeare characters as individuals; he wanted to talk about the abstract roles they filled, and show how these roles recur in different plays.