The paradigms of comedy are manifold, outwardly disparate and even refractory in their refusal to yield to generalities. Far more than other genres, comedy invites a skeptical attitude toward any effort to isolate out its multiplicity a single principle of classification. Yet a serious attempt at comic theory can hardly escape the conviction that works customarily designated as comic, despite their variety, do indeed participate in some sort of community. If the tie joining them is something like the "gold to airy thiness beat" of Donne's superlunary lovers, undiscernible to those "whose soul is sense," it is nonetheless binding. Such dissimilar specimens as many-turning Odysseus's long voyage home, Aristophane's fantastic obscenities, and the worldly intrigues of New Comedy are upon examination found to be capable of coming together in an unlikely harmony with the churchly art of the mystery plays, the spiritual writings of Dante, and Shakespeare's benevolent deceptions for love. Something links together in one category works that are outrageously different, requiring anyone thinking about comedy to confront on all sides the most perplexing contradictions.
And apparently these troublesome antinomies contained within the phenomenon of the comic are ineradicable by any process of simple reduction: the notion of comedy seems by its very nature to include all aspects of human life, the darkest as well as the brightest elements in the entire literary spectrum. In fact, upon observation comedy shows itself to be the least exclusive of all literary forms, able to accommodate structures at once simple and complex, treating both the natural and artificial and reconciling the grossest bodily indecencies with the most rarefied spiritual and intellectual refinements. Yet despite a puzzling breadth and variety, any single comic specimen is likely to manifest a discernible characteristic that proclaims its identity. Critics and audiences alike have almost without fail been able to recognize a work of comic art, and not necessarily by its possible incitement to laughter. Comedies have been designated comedies even when their atmosphere is melancholy and depressing, as in the plays of Chekhov, or even painful and disgusting, as in those of Ben Jonson and Samuel Beckett.
Thus one might hazard that an encompassing image lies beyond mere appearances in comedy, capable of being recognized in countless situations, with varying characters, on different strata of life, with emphasis on many possible segments of the large central action. Such an image could be said to be expressive of a fundamental aspect of human feeling, as such, to elicit a response less acquired than innate, less reasoned than instinctive. In fact, the comic sense seems to suggest to its audience a hidden current in the flow of life, intelligible to all members of the human race, at its basic level what Susanne Langer has called "the pure sense of life," and at its highest the river of living water spoken of in the Scriptures. Well before apprehending plot, character, or theme, spectators or readers are able to observe clues pointing the direction in which their imaginations are impelled; they can almost unconsciously gauge from angle and speed the implied destination--- the completed curve, one might say, of which only an arc is visible. Audiences and readers are hence not likely to mistake comedy: they are able with little difficulty to distinguish it from tragic or epic. Further, comedy might be said to belong to the people as community even more than do the other genres. No culture has lacked some manifestation of it, and it is often so much woven into the patterns of a social order that it is taken for granted and comes to be disregarded as serious art by intellectual members of society. And yet comedy might be thought of as an expression of the communal unconscious of a people--- its yearning for a more liberated life--- and, as such, a binding force among its members. But if as viewers people apprehend comedy without much conscious effort, as critics, when they come to analyze the comic effect, they tend to mistake accidental properties of individual comedies--- for instance, satire, farce, wit, and humor--- for the comedic image itself.
But comedy, as a handful of authorities have pointed out throughout the ages, is not necessarily the laughable. W.K. Wimsatt's remark--- that a comedy that does not promote laughter seems to be "an odd success"--- is applicable only if one can discern no other, more compelling, purpose for the comic vision. Perhaps Plato began the oversimplification when, in the Philebus, he assumed comedy to be about "the ridiculous" and ascribed the audience's mixed feelings on viewing a comedy to a combination of pleasure and envy (that is, we are delighted at the misfortune of our friends). Aristotle continued this misconception when he viewed comedy as "an imitation of characters of a lower type," particularly the "ludicrous (which) consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive." Medieval theorists, largely following the lead of Aristotle and Horace in an analysis of the formal parts of comedy and its ethical nature, gave their chief concern to the comic catharsis, which they deemed to be laughter, and to the comic moral responsibility of teaching. The immense body of Italian Rennaissance literary criticism had no trouble reconciling the still- dominant medieval didacticism with the new humanism, and the subsequent result, later expressed in neoclassical theory, led to the widespread conviction by the eighteenth century that comedy teaches the sensible attitude toward life (raison) by ridiculing the rigid, extreme, fanatical, and pretentious. That interpretation has prevailed, with some exceptions, to the present.
A few critics and philosophers in our time--- Susanne Langer, Albert Cook, Northrop Frye, Nevill Coghill, among others--- have given their attention to what is "behind" comedy, that invisible meta-form which I have been speaking of as the image. But in the main the bulk of comic theory today as in the past has tended to develop around the idea of social melioration--- largely deriving from Greek and Roman new comedy. And though over the years criticism has clarified formal elements and distinguished between such strains as wit and humor, burlesque and satire, farce and comedy of manners, it has remained concerned with constitutive elements rather than with the entire phenomenon of comedy, its governing outlook, one might say, that which makes it a single imaginative mode and animates its specific parts. Further, comic theory as it now stands seems to have made little effort to apprehend the way in which a particular instance of comedy, even when it represents only a portion of the complete comic action, evokes--- and fits into--- a full imaginative world of comedic possibilities.
The task of understanding the nature of comedy, then, is to be pursued less by analysis than by vision. Consequently comic theory poses a problem that can hardly be solved by empirical methods--- by juxtaposing or even superimposing art works generally designated comedies and attempting to ascertain their common structural or thematic constants, however much such a strategy may constitute a beginning. It is by necessity an ontological question that the literary critic poses in seeking to know the essential nature of comedy. And though a satisfactory apparatus for resolving ontological questions may not be ready at hand in our time, nonetheless the serious critic of comedy must at least make the attempt to engage the issue.
Admittedly, one can know the nature of comedy only through the immediate thing--- the individual work. But the fictional whole, the play or the novel, presents to the imagination an intuition of an invisible form which, from a glimpse, may be apprehended in it entirety. It is here that the underlying form of comedy is to be found, not so much in an abstraction as in an image that the mind seizes upon with delight. The task of the critic, however, is not to stay with this super-actual realm but rather to return to the work at hand, better equipped to explore its true nature. In such a process, a specific representation of human action is able to reveal the universal image of comedy that has rendered countless dramatic works of art comic and, as such, recognizable to their audiences throughout the years.
One does not have to eat the entire pudding to know that it is flavored with vanilla--- or that it is a pudding and not a cheese souffle. All that is required is a taste. Similarly, the character of comedy is so definitive, its reality so unquestionable, that one can discern its nature even from a brief experience of the work. Its qualities permeate it, as the vanilla permeates the pudding and thereby modifies its component parts. For it is not the separate features of an art product that make it comedy; rather it is the purpose, the form-making principle of the entire work that welds all its elements into a single unit. One should be able, I maintain, to choose any page of a work--- not necessarily the beginning or the end, but any portion of it--- and discern from a reading of that segment whether or not the work is comic. Even though tragic elements may be present in comedy or comic elements in tragedy, the reader--- or hearer--- can still detect the general character of the work as a whole.
In Hamlet, for example, the word-play, punning, levity, wit, Hamlet's "antic disposition," his wild and disconcerted action are devices that one associates with comedy rather than tragedy. And in point of fact the young prince does behave for a while like a comic protagonist--- as in his baiting of Polonius:
Polonius. Do you know me, my lord?
Hamlet. Excellent well. You are a fishmonger.
Polonius. Not I, my lord.
Hamlet. Then i would you were so honest a man.
(2.2.173-76)
And, later, in the same conversation, he purposely misunderstands Polonius's inquiry, "What is the matter, my lord?" and answers it with a pretended innocence:
Hamlet. Between who?
Polonius. I mean the matter that you read, my lord.
(2,2.196-97)
Hamlet responds with the verbal "patter" that marks the Fool or the Clown in Shakespeare's comedies:
Hamlet. Slanders, sir, for the satirical rogue
says here that old men have grey beards,
that their faces are wrinkled, their
eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree
gum, and that they have a plentiful lack
of wit, together with the most weak
hams. All which, sir, though I most
powerfully and potently believe, yet
hold it not honesty to have it thus set
down; for you yourself, sir, should be
old as I am if, like a crab, you could
go backward.
(2.2.198-206)
The undertone to this essentially comic routine is not only a dark irony, but a deathward pull, so that one is not surprised at Hamlet's reply to Polonius's solicitous question:
Polonius. Will you walk out of the air, my lord?
Hamlet. Into my grave.
(2.2.208-09)
The entire passage with the foolish old courtier has all the earmarks of comic repartee, as does the course jesting with Ophelia, the sparring with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the ironic exchange with the gravedigger. Yet it is clearly recognizable that in Hamlet one is not in a comic but in a tragic realm, no matter how foolishly people may conduct themselves in it.
In counterposition are many of the comedies--- All's Well that Ends Well, Much Ado about Nothing, along with The Merchant of Venice, and the later plays, particularly The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline. All contain dark, painful, and unpleasant elements--- the raw materials of tragedy, one could say--- and most of them have less to do with laughter than with shock and grief. In both The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline, for instance, the action begins in utmost malice and destruction: a husband turns against a wife, a father against a daughter. In both plays violence and betrayal increase until the entire action seems to be moving toward death. Hermione and Imogen are both falsely accused and thus separated from the beloved; but both behave not as a Gertrude or a Juliet would behave, but with staunch and enduring hearts. Hermione waits, for all of sixteen years, until her husband's jealousy has run its course. Imogen, unlike Juliet, when she awakes in a grave beside what seems to be the dead body of her husband, trusts in an ultimate power to work things out and joins the army of Romans marching through Wales. In both plays friends and guardians do what they can to avert catastrophe, and yet catastrophe does occur: after the death of the king's son from grief, Paulina attempts to persuade Leontes to reinstate his wife and baby daughter, and, failing, must take Hermione surreptitiously under her care. Antilochus, commanded to kill the child, leaves her instead on the seacoast of Bohemia before himself being overtaken by a bear. Pain, anguish, deception, jealousy, calumny, hatred, injury--- these are the materials of comedy as well as tragedy. If we were to place Hamlet beside The Tempest, for instance, seeking to ascertain their respective genres by a comparison of elements, we should find some striking similarities. Both plays are about usurpation, betrayal, assassination, revenge, the perils of the father-daughter relationship, the grief of a son for a father, death by water, rebirth out of the sea. Yet one play is quite definitely a tragedy and one a comedy.
Comedies are perceptibly governed by the comic image--- not simply by virtue of their happy endings or their discursive structure, but by their very being--- the way in which characters and plot develop, the manner in which people speak, the course that events take, the apparent incidentals that incorporate themselves into the action. Over and above these single works appear universal features, complex structures or qualities and values that are discernible in life only through having been given form in the realm of comedy. As Dante says (or, at least, as Barbara Reynolds has him say), "...my sight by seeing learns to see." Those things that are all about us are noticeable only by being fitted into a different kind of totality--- in this instance, a comic universe.
Such reflections on comedy give rise to fundamental questions concerning the meaning of literary genre. Poetic works, one would say following Aristotle, tend to aggregate in four moderately distinct segments of the poetic universe, tragedy, comedy, epic, and lyric. These are the genres of literature that express the basic gestures--- the actions--- of the soul. In his book The Formal Method (written with or without his colleague Pavel Medvedev) the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin indicates that, far from being an abstract description of devices, genre is a fundamental orientation toward reality. "One might say," he writes, "that human consciousness possesses a series of inner genres for seeing and conceptualizing reality." And he goes on: "A particular aspect of reality can be understood only in connection with the particular means of representing it."
It is with the "inner genre" of comedy that this volume is concerned--- and with the reality of which it speaks. "The particular means of representing it" is, if we use Aristotle's terms, the comic mimesis, the artistic representation, whereas the "particular aspect of reality" revealed by the art-form is the praxis, the action that is imitated. For the genres are not external structures governed by rules and conventions but internal forms, perspectives upon life that indicate the kind of response called for by a particular work. Not to know their nature is like being deaf to the tone of voice in which a comment is spoken and blind to the face and gesture that express it. To be oblivious of the large generic metaphor governing the climate of a work and hence the very atmosphere in which its characters live and breathe is to remain unaware of its deepest meaning and hence its power. The different contexts result, if we are to believe Aristotle, from the fact that different genres "imitate" different actions, different "movements-of-spirit," in Francis Fergusson's phrase, to which all the elements of a work conform. An entire world lies in and beyond the plot and characters--- a tragic, comic, epic, or lyric world--- and each act within it corresponds to the actual world only when the viewer or reader is aware of its mimetic distortion. It may be more profitable here, however, to be concerned with the genres as representing not so much particular kinds of action as actions that can fittingly take place in certain kinds of realms. A work is tragic, for instance, not because any of its analyzable elements make it so but because the action it imitates--- that which animates its inner being--- takes place in the region of tragedy.
Such a generic territory is ruled by its own laws, analogically related to life yet different from daily experience. The vision of the individual work emerges in this space, and the warping of the space that typifies the genre governs the kind of art through which it may be expressed. As Susanne Langer has written, "In any work of art, the dimensionality of its space and the continuous character of it are always implicitly assured. Perceptual forms are carved out of it and must appear to be still related to it despite their most definite boundaries." Hence the particular distortions of its elements identify it as belonging to a particular genre. In a sense a knowledge of genre might be thought of as a guide to the laws of the land, if one is willing to grant the existence of a territory of the imagination. Our attempt to ascertain what gives a single work of art a comic identity, then, leads us to the necessity of distinguishing the image of a world--- the comic terrain--- lying behind the action of the work and presupposed by it. And what we find first of all in such an endeavor is that comedy, any comedy, seems to be enacted in an identifiable and familiar world, so familiar that anyone, whether prince or pauper, can walk about in it and find it home.
When we speak of a comic terrain, we must locate it somewhere within what we might call an entire cosmos of imagined forms. This virtual cosmos, like what Adolf Hildebrand calls "total space," can be visualized "as a body of water into which we may sink certain vessels, and thus be able to define individual volumes of the water without, however, destroying the idea of a continuous mass of water enveloping all." The mundos imaginalis is not a mere mental replica of the world in which we have our daily existence, though it resembles it in many ways and derives from it through poetic vision. This cosmos of the imagination is a realm not of pure spirit, but of matter permeated by spirit, a realm of "ontological splendor," in Jacques Maritain's phrase. It possesses an order that guides interpretation of individual works and of whole families of works. The large forms of lyric, tragedy, comedy, and epic make up this universe, embodying certain complex attitudes of the soul, constituting complete worlds in themselves. No work therefore stands entirely alone, but takes its place within both the genre to which it belongs and the complete cosmos that make's up the whole of man's image of himself. If one seeks to visualize this image in its totality, one must resort to some kind of schematic diagram, one that is more an aid to reflection than a literal representation or a prescription. My own such diagram would consist of a circle, with lyric at the summit, tragedy following clockwise after lyric in a descending fall, comedy continuing in the lower arc directly opposite to lyric, and epic following after comedy and rising toward lyric (see below).
The lyric realm is the place of origins and sources, the land of heart's desire, symbolized by the garden. Tragedy, marked by the sudden catastrophe of the loss of a garden state, takes place most often in a palace or a great dynastic house. Comedy endures and perseveres in a fallen world, occurring in city streets or drawing rooms, escaping sometimes to a world of fantasy, making its way by mutual helpfulness toward a community of love within the larger order of society. Epic, though taking place in some sort of natural surrounding, struggles to build or cleanse or govern this larger order, the just city. Hence the epic goal, as it presses to complete the circle, is no longer Eden, but the New Jerusalem, the major human enterprise redeemed and made new.
It is by simultaneous contemplation of several examples of a genre that one can discern, in a kind of visionary form, its large, invisible patterns: for the lyric, one puts together Donne's love poems, Keats's odes, the Hebrew Psalms, and The Song of Songs; for tragedy, the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare; for epic, Homer, Virgil, the Anglo-Saxon poets, Milton. For comedy, the concern of this volume, the paradigms, as i have earlier maintained are numerous and widely diverging. The work of two poets, however, seem to me most fully to establish the large pattern of the comic genre: Aristophanes and Dante. Both evoke expansive images of the comic terrain, images that remain in the realm of imagination, available to all of us after they have been given form.
For Aristophanes access to the fullness of the comic vision was available only potentially, through an apocalyptic vision of final fulfillment. Dante, coming at a time that endowed him with what Maritain calls "luck," found the philosophical and theological presuppositions of his poetic visions ready at hand to give his poem the completeness of an intellective as well as an imaginative act. Hence Dante provides the clearest image of the comic terrain. Further, his art is incarnational, finding in the very makeup of the world the radiant play of spirit. His figural design of the possible states of soul after death represents, as every reflective reader recognizes, something hidden but nonetheless present in the depths of the soul during life. Thus Dante envisions three possible conditions for the individual and for the community, each located in a realm where the laws explicitly reflect an inner spiritual state. These three quite different "places" objectifying the three states of the soul can consequently be seen to represent the three possible regions of the comic terrain.
The first, infernal comedy, is a state in which grace is utterly absent and where selfishness and malice prevail. The community has accepted its fallen condition and cynically attributes its corruption to "the way of the world." Love cannot dwell in such society; everyone is fundamentally alone, though hypocrisy and self-serving may give the appearance of friendship. None of the virtues is present: only a sinister "double" of each prevails. The style of a comedy portraying this darkness may be light and witty; nevertheless grotesque and bestial forces are not far underneath its surface--- and may, in some comedies, be openly present, testifying to the deformation of forms and the hideousness of the soul when it attempts to establish itself as autonomous. This is the prevailing moral climate of such a world, not everyone in it however is in the infernal state. Like the pilgrim Dante, someone may find himself trapped in an infernal society without participating in its malice. If innocence or truth does wander into this no man's land, it is preyed upon and virtually destroyed, I use the word "virtually" because the real destruction of tragedy is alien to the comic muse. In this totally fallen world, her "humanely malign" light, to use`George Meredith's phrase, is grantedly merciless; but she stops short of evoking pity or terror.
In the infernal state the pretty girl, who is one of the chief identifying marks of comedy, is either absent or, if she does enter the boundaries of this dark region, victimized. Lust, avarice, hypocrisy, and treachery are the vices most prevalent in this doleful city. Irony and wit govern the utterance of its characters. The intellect is supreme in its own self-love. The body is debased, ill, deformed, or totally ignored in favor of abstract and over-systematic rationality. Natural pleasure, such as feasting or love-making, is diseased or distorted. The comic hero, whom Cedric Whitman is his study of Aristophanes characterizes as a poneros--- the rogue who puts survival above all else and whose inventiveness is constantly turned to that end--- becomes, in this realm, really wicked, like Mosca or Tartuffe, or naughty like Face or Mak; if he is good-hearted, he is either willing to compromise with the world, like Callimacho or Mirabell or he finds escape as quickly as possible, like Dikaiopolis or Yossarian. He cannot, while remaining in this region, win the lovely lady. For marriage, ordinarily the goal of all comedy and its chief good, is maligned in dark comedy: old husbands tyrannize young wives, spouses are unfaithful, maidens are linked by opportunism to unsuitable mates: society has allowed its codes to degenerate to the falsest of conventions.
Deception and disguise, characterizing marks of comedy, are used in infernal society for the purpose or gaining advantage, usually to the harm of others. Even the guardians, those figures of disinterested benevolence who manifest themselves from time to time within the comic tradition, realize their helplessness to change the general situation and either withdraw as does Alceste or concentrate their efforts on the rescue of the feminine victim, as do Ligurio, Paulina, Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly and Julia, and Gavin Stevens and Ratliff. The wicked are in control of the city, though frequently in the end they are outwitted by someone even more tricky than they. Face is outfaced; Shylock is outlegalized; Flem Snopes is destroyed by something within Snopesism itself. The bitter bit, the gull gulled--- these eventualities are often the outcome of infernal comedy, since wickedness multiplies incrementally and gives the appearance of infinite resource. Yet there is usually a reckoning, in which the community is reaffirmed, even if in the sternest possible way; justice is meted out to offenders, and the innocent are vindicated. This is the realm of dirty jokes, of harmful trickery, of cruel deceit. The Greeks were only imperfectly aware of it as a human possibility, the Old Testament portrays it but seldom, for it is less the world of sin than of abomination--- Sodom and Gomorrah, the false prophets in Pharaoh's court, Jezebel, the Tower of Babel. But the medieval world, fully aware of its implications, found it in daily experience: Chaucer's pardoner and his friar inhabit this world, as do the characters in the miller's and the merchant's tales. Piers Plowman's vision of the seven deadly sins is in this infernal mold. Machiavelli continues it into the Renaissance in his Mandragola, Ben Jonson in his Volpone and The Alchemist, Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, and the characters of Shylock, Lucio, Cloten, and Iachimo. Moliere and Restoration comedy are in this mode also, a fact that explains the frequent charge of "immortality" leveled against them. Blake's "London," Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Gogal's Dead Souls, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Dostoevsky's The Possessed, Eliot's The Waste Land, Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools, O'Connor's Wise Blood exhibit its dark and malevolent lineage. William Faulkner, as one can judge from his early drafts of the Snopes sage, gradually turned from tragedy to comedy in conceiving his trilogy over the years, coming to see the evil engulfing the human enterprise as contemptible and ultimately defeatable.
I have gone into this first stage at such length because it is the most misunderstood mode of comedy, least considered in any comic theory. In practical criticism, it is frequently confused with tragedy or considered to be a kind of "tragi-comedy," and often interpreted as nihilistic when, on the contrary, at least traditionally, it has been the most severely moral of all the guises of comedy. The other two comic worlds--- the purgatorial and paradisal--- are less misconstrued, since they more naturally tend toward the "happy frame of mind," to use Hegel's phrase, that is ordinarily associated with the comic. In fact, many theories of comedy are based almost entirely on the second, or purgatorial, stage and thus fail to take account of the entire comedic scope.
This middle stage of comedy is, as we have indicated, the purgatorial realm. Its mood is pathos: in it the community hopes and waits, powerless to save itself. This is by far the broadest region of comedy; a large part of the literature that is generally considered comic inhabits this terrain: the Old Testament, The Odyssey, most of Aristophanes, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, Cervantes, Fielding, Jane Austen, Dostoevsky, Henry James, Chekhov, Beckett, Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away. In it people, though lost and in need of delivery from something outside themselves, are not really wicked. Neither are they positively good, but most of the characters in this kind of world do the best they can and patiently endure. Imperfection and weakness rather than malice and evil are the obstacles to happiness in this realm of middle comedy; the pretty girl is yearned for, though not to be possessed; and deception and disguise are undertaken to make bad situations work out better. Time, in this realm, stretches out its lengthy wait; but time is benevolent and will eventually permit things to be healed. In the realm of space, too, this middle region has greater largesse. This is the stage in which the "second world" of comedy accomplishes its effects most beneficently--- a community may locate itself in a place where things can work out according to laws other than those that have gone astray in civilization. The "worlds" of Circe, Queen Arete, Calypso, in particular for Odysseus, aid him in understanding and undertaking his task. For Aristophanes' solitary little hopeful figures, the heavens, or the underworld, or the bedroom are places of strength to be used against the corruption and decay of the city. For Shakespeare, Belmont, the Forest of Arden, the woods outside Athens, and Milford Haven are places of sanctuary and healing. For Henry James, Europe; for Melville, a sea-voyage; for Mark Twain, the river; for Faulkner, the big woods--- these other "places" shelter the realities that the world has forgotten and offer and experience of renewal, allowing the time and space necessary to keep the protagonist and other members of the community from despair or some irrevocably hasty action. In this stage, the action ends with mercy rather than justice; its mood is wistful sadness, or muted joy. In it, love is beginning to be apprehended, if not as the power that "moves the sun and the stars," than at least as that which can change and modify human existence.
The highest realm within the comic terrain is the paradisal: here grace and forgiveness supplant even mercy. Man is lifted up into a realm beyond himself, one that he has not gained by his own effort. Aristophanes' Birds portrays this realm symbolically; Dante's Paradiso, Shakespeare's Tempest, Faulkner's Reivers body it forth. Its mood is merriment and joy, its motive pleasure and freedom. Deception and disguise are revealed to be what they are in reality: magic, grace, art. Here love is supreme; one is not required by one's own efforts to save the day--- the natural tendency of things is upward. The pretty girl has become the vessel of reality and grace: Basileia, Beatrice, Portia, Miranda. In the modern world she has been victimized and injured, but the quality of which she is the bearer remains undamaged: Sonya Marmeladov, Mme. de Vionnet, Everbe Corinthia, and Linda Snopes. Very few literary works take place entirely in this realm--- perhaps only Dante's Paradiso--- but many make their way to it, stumblingly and feelingly. The mark of it is not simply romantic love, the attainment of the beautiful lady, but the movement beyond her to that of which she has borne witness: universal love.
What is the terrain of comedy? What is the slant of light, the curving of space that identifies it? One might attempt to visualize it, though the actual image remains elusive, revealing itself only to an interior sense. But the intuition of place is unmistakable; and perhaps only a metaphor can do justice to it. The image has the largesse, the "room" of a land, a terrain. There is darkness in that land, we might begin by saying; but in its mellow atmosphere shadows move before the protagonist and shorten in the course of the day. The path cutting through the hills and valleys, crossing the wide plains, and winding upward in a gentle slope is one that various characters trudge upon for only partially completed journeys, stopping along the way for retreats in woods or caves, or gathering together at intervals for festivity. Homer, Aristophanes, Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare have given us specific metaphors for this constant image. But the geography of this terrain informs all comedy, whether dark and bitter or full of mirth and delight, whatever the local territory or temporal code. It informs each genuine work of comedic art not as a map or an outline would do, but as an image. The image is complex, containing an order and an interplay of values which in each comedy must be worked out by mutual accommodation. The comic terrain, then, is a figure of the permanent laws of being as seen under a single aspect, a governing figure that provides the most humble comedy with its power. It is a correlative for the hope--- and then, finally, one realizes, the experience--- of being loved, of being cared about and guarded and showered with "tender mercies." If the high peak of lyric is insight into knowing and loving, then the corresponding insight of comedy lies not in knowing, but in being shown, being led into the harmony of the cosmos to receive better than one deserves. Not revelation, then, but receptivity leads to its summit, its permitted high vista.
What are the laws and customs of its land, acknowledged even by those who flout them? Its supreme law, of course, is love; its concern is with physis, the flow of being that animates and connects all things. Comedy takes place in a fallen world; it begins in established disorder, usually with an old regime in control, where people have lived by law, by reason, or by custom, neglecting wholeness, pleasure, and love. It moves toward the recapturing of those qualities by ingenuity and audacity. It may resort to the fantastic in order to effect a needed break with routine, and it pulls others along with it in a creative recapturing of community, with friends and helpers serving as guardians and counsellors. Its justice is mercy and forgiveness. Its supreme fiction is the journey of the soul; its virtues, faith, hope, and charity, its vices the seven deadly sins. Its mode of action is deception and delay, since if Fortune and not Fate is to be the governing authority, one must do whatever is necessary to stave off the ultimate fatal defeat. Life must go on, at any cost, since in comedy life can blossom again even out of impossibility if only the final, unthinkable event does not occur. Life, the elan vital, is far more important than established morality, since the very continuance of the human species is in question. In the end, however, the comic seeks to reestablish morality and to reanimate the life of moral and spiritual forms. The terrain of comedy is, in fine, an image of the world as organic rather than mechanic--- as living, inter-relating, aspiring, growing, and healing. It is a vision of matter participating in spirit, of grace permeating nature, of the body being lifted up, like Bottom, in an overwhelming and irrational joy.
The authors of the essays in this volume would conceive of this comic territory, I think, as having, like Gaul, a tripartite division and would see each comedy as positioned chiefly in one of the three regions. They would agree that comedy represents one of the major spatializations of reality of which literature is capable, would not limit its presence to drama, and would view individual examples of comedy as representations of an order in reality, images of which may recur throughout history without need of direct influence between writers. And, finally, these critics might agree, though I am making perhaps an ungrounded assumption here, that the action of all comedy possesses that polysemousness that Dante attributed to his Commedia: that (if we translate the medieval exegetic schema into our own terms) archetypally, the comic action is the psyche moving out of stasis into the rhythm of the life force; culturally, it is the flexibility of the community prevailing over rigid and oppressive custom; psychologically, it is the heart finding its right order, its abundance, in love; and anagogically, it is the soul's participation, through the komos, the marriage feast, in universal blessedness.
But though there lies behind these essays a more or less shared theory of comedy, the essays themselves are, in general, exercises in practical rather than theoretical criticism. That is, they examine specific comic elements or themes and specific comic literary works or groups of works. They make no attempt at completeness. What the essays do, however, is to adumbrate the comic terrain: they show it as a world in which people must keep going, must "endure." And they show that if they do keep going, whether in hope or desperation, they finally, so to speak, catch the bus. When they have caught it, even if they have fallen and skinned their knees and made fools of themselves in the process, they are as surely on it and going with it to its destination as if they had arrived a couple of hours before departure and decorously availed themselves of the best possible seats. The point of arrival is the same; and, at least for those comedies that tale us the whole distance, or even imply it, the end is nothing short of joy, transcendence, and love.
Cowan, Louise, Ed. The Terrain of Comedy. The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1984. 1-17.