Divine comedy

Writer Julian Gough on why modern (western) literary fiction is heavily leaning towards the tragic, in opposition to the comic. (Via Austin Kleon)

A few interesting points:

• The Greeks believed comedy to be superior to tragedy: tragedy was the merely human view of life (we sicken, we die), while comedy tried to give us the relaxed, amusing perspective on our flawed selves afforded by the god’s view of life, from on high. (“We became as gods, laughing at our own follies.”)
  • However: “The comic point of view—the gods’-eye view—is much more uncomfortable for a believer in one all-powerful God than it was for the polytheistic Greeks. To have the gods laughing at us through our fictions is acceptable if the gods are multiple, and flawed like us, laughing in recognition and sympathy: if they are Greek gods. But to have the single omnipotent, omniscient God who made us laughing at us is a very different thing: sadistic, and almost unbearable. We do not wish to hear the sound of one God laughing.”
  • “The various eastern philosophies give us other high vantage points. Indeed, both physics and Zen can handle laughter, and are superb tools for writing the western comic novel because they do not require absolute faith and they do not claim absolute certainty.”
• One of the reasons modern western literary fiction overvalues tragedy is because our inheritance is lop-sided: a greater range of classical tragedies have survived, compared to the amount of classical comedies:

  Plays that say, “Boy, it’s a tough job, leading a nation” tend to survive; plays that say, “Our leaders are dumb arseholes, just like us” tend not to.

• The novel could have been (or might be, in the future) a way out, because it was invented after Aristotle, and so had no classical canon and could go wild into comedy territory