Show me a hero

and I'll write you a tragedy.

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

I am intrigued by the implications of this: is heroism possible without tragedy?  Is (as Greek tragedy seems to teach us) heroic greatness purchased with later misery?  Is Fitzgerald implying that our idea of heroism is a whitewash, constantly erasing the sadness that every human life contains?  Does our cultural desire to make heroes always contain a matching desire to see those heroes punished, diminished, fallen?

This world is a comedy to those that think,

a tragedy to those that feel.

-Horace Walpole

Is the difference between comedy and tragedy not one between disdain and sympathy, but rather between intellect and emotion?  Or are these two ways of saying the same thing?

Obviously Walpole isn't just getting at a difference between genres, an act of literary criticism, but rather making a commentary about the world itself.   To the empath, life must be a constant parade of suffering, an excruciating cavalcade of expectations disappointed and bonds betrayed.  To the intellectual, closed off from feeling, these same disappointments and betrayals become comic failures of expectation, festivals of irony.

-Miguel de Unamuno

from my journals, April 5, 1996

We are talking about Aristotle in my Introduction to Drama class, so the nature of comedy and tragedy have been on my mind a bit.  

What does Aristotle say the difference is?  Well among other things, tragedians (he says) portray human beings as better than we are, while comedians portray us as worse than we are.  

In other words, tragedy is about abstract disasters, idealized lives pushed off the track of happiness by smoothly polished juggernauts of moral conflict or divine will.  Comedy takes as its basis the messiness, the assymmetry of human fallibility, rather than its grandeur and order.  

We go to tragedy to feel fear that even those with power, wealth, talent, and status can suffer despite their best efforts at living a good life.  Fear that if their lives can go so far astray, so to can our much less blessed and careful ones. Count no man happy till he dies, free of pain.  But we go to comedy to despise, rather than to empathize. Or so this line of thinking goes.

I love the way Unamuno picks this up: killing time is such a fascinating turn of phrase, such a sharply moral stance on indolence.  To fritter away an hour is to be a murderer of time, a finite commodity; it is a slaughter of a concrete portion of your total life.  

Unamuno (in this translation, at least) highlights the moralism of the phrase, but also underscores the common ground between comedy and tragedy.  Both deal with the destructive nature of human behavior: to kill time is in some essential way to kill eternity, to waste some vital portion of the human opportunity. Thus there is always an element of absurdity in tragedy, and of pathos in comedy.

Play every comedy as if it were a tragedy, as acting coaches have been saying from time immemorial.