Divina Commedia (Part 2 of 2)

The following is an excerpt of a July 2014 email exchange between Will and Art.

Will:

I can also point to a single moment in which I grasped almost on a mystical level the power of tragedy. For years, students asked me why I taught so much tragedy, and if not tragedy, at least novels and plays with sad endings. I sincerely thought that tragedy taught more than comedy. Honestly, I still do, but only because we are better at writing tragedy than at writing comedy. 

But it struck me that when we map out the plots of tragedy and comedy, comedy parallels the reality of God better than tragedy, which tends to parallel the reality of human endeavors. So how could it be that we were so much better than tragedy? Why did comedy seem so slight and inconsequential to me, and tragedy so profound? I figured that the power of tragedy is that it realigns us with the comic: it scares us into rejecting pride and accepting God's friendship so that we can serve him instead of ourselves through the grace of humility. But still...why so many sucky comedies and profound tragedies? Why couldn't I experience a catharsis in a comedy, since I believe that God wants to lead us to happy endings and pulled out all the stops to lead us there, and since I believed in our power to repent through grace, reject pride, and accept God's salvation and in my own ability to use the gifts God gave me in His service instead of my own? 

Then I saw a version of As You Like It at Stratford that had a profound, mystical effect on me. 

Stratford Shakespeare Festival's 2010 production of As You Like It

I can barely describe it. I'd seen As You Like It several times and read it in college, but suddenly, I had my confirmation that comedy can deal with profound issues successfully. I felt so much empathy for the exiles in the woods of Arden; I marveled at the joy they found in the beauty, friendship, and I'd dare say swaddled existence--freedom from the burdens of the secular world. 

My description of what I felt limps, but I had the moment for which I longed: the experience of catharsis in a comedy. And what really hit me was how much more of an emotional outpouring it was in me than any catharsis I had experienced in tragedy. Those experiences tended to be intellectual. This experience was far more visceral. 

From there, texts like Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday and Greene's The Power and the Glory began taking on new power. And I've also got to say that I started feeling new emotions as a result of reading tragedy. The gravity of tragedy started slipping. Epic changed, too: The Odyssey started feeling like a horror novel! Lord of the Rings made me cry instead of merely entertaining me. Frankenstein became more two dimensional and political. Death of a Salesman shifted, too: I started wondering more and more about Biff. I used to think Biff was right for calling himself a dime a dozen, but now I think he was overcompensating for his former ill-founded pride. He really is a poet, and I mourn that he can't see in himself what even Happy, who strikes me as a fairly dense and pathetic character, can see. 

I guess a third thing, not exactly an experience but a tendency, is that I see myself as someone who very easily could have become a tragic figure and who instead became someone who hungers for God's grace and mercy and rejoices in it. I haven't lost my desire to create crazy schemes (as this project attests), but there's a light-hearted joy that comes from the recognition of my foolishness and God's majesty that the Famous Willy project lacked (that was a very serious project by comparison). I was out to build a Tower of Babel. I might still be, but I see what an absolutely hilarious idea the Tower of Babel is. It's a meta-tower at this point, a type of cute joke.

Art:

I think you're right. I too have experienced something like catharsis watching a comedy. I certainly came out of Twelfth Night a few years ago feeling more alive. And then I think about St. Lawrence who told his torturers who were grilling him alive to "turn me over, I'm done on this side." Also, I guess Dante didn't call it the Commedia for no reason (not just because it was one of the first serious poems written in the vulgate). 

Stratford Shakespeare Festival's 2012 production of Twelfth Night

I'm not sure I buy the tragic being a response to the absurdity of polytheism--most writers seemed to be grappling with the absurdity of human existence, not with the capriciousness of one or more gods. Perhaps this is what postlapsarian life amounts to without the Pascal solution. 

Christianity is comedy that can laugh in the face of anything, sing taunt songs in the face of death, even harrow Hell like Dante.