Comedy and the Evitability Principle

In a series of footnotes in a recent post, Suspended Reason riffs on his own in-the-body-text observation that Thomas Pynchon’s detectives always hunt for an “Authoritative Representation” and only ever unearth “one more partial vision”.

I share the general sentiment. It’s a kind of endless tessellation of presence-in-absence with Pynchon: an infinite regress; the creative genius of the paranoid, rendered with such vibrant colour that you honestly feel a little jealous of the SoCal (or Blitzed-in-London) metaphysician who’s going slowly mad. Certainly, one is in the presence of a powerful enchanter. More importantly, these ‘detectives hunting for authoritative representations’ are themselves symptoms of Something Larger. The narratives in a Pynchon novel hang, like threads of spun sugar, from a superstructural metaphysics-of-pragmatics. As Suspended puts it, “representations leave things out, and then the left-out excess rises up to spank the hubris of the would-be systematizer, see also James C. Scott”. All of this prompts him to remark, in footnote, that:

This makes Pynchon’s work “comic,” in the sense of tragedy and comedy outlined by Hotel Concierge in the lost masterpiece “Distance & Closeness.” Tragedy is defined by its fatedness: a set of premises are laid out at the start, and the plot moves mechanically to their conclusion. Even a superficially “happy” ending can be tragic insofar as it presents a closed world. Comedy, on the other hand, sees its initial premises actively subverted, often by wilderness magic—that is, by the extra-rational and supernatural that lies outside the city gate, out beyond the mapped and gridded order of things. Of particular interest to Pynchon scholarship is the conceptualization of comedy and tragedy as high entropy and low entropy, respectively (in the information-theoretic sense of the term).

A well-written footnote is a fine thing. (Better, even, than a quiet hot dog lunch with your own thoughts.) This footnote is one of the greats. If the Hotel Concierge masterpiece ‘Distance & Closeness’ is lost, then it is necessary to reinvent it. I see that now.

In the ideal case, we would labour to reconstruct the text of this ‘Distance & Closeness’ work in full, like Cicero’s De Re Publica, from quote and fragment and commentary. If necessary, yes, reading palimpsests in the works of Augustine in the locked Vatican Archive.

Reality is rarely ideal, of course. I have no connects at the Vatican. So let’s begin by doing what humans actually do with most lost classics: gesture at the shadows cast, and use limited evidence to speculate wildly. Let’s do — for Hotel Concierge’s ‘Distance & Closeness’ — what Ol’ Mate Cliff so famously said that an anthropologist does with the (mostly metaphorical) “ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles” that is “the culture of a people”; let’s “[strain] to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong” (Geertz 452).

I imagine that that the hypothetical HC took their tragedy-as-hard-determinism definition from “The Genres of Shakespeare’s Plays” in the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (2001) —

What is implied by the most basic distinction of all, that comedy ends happily and tragedy unhappily? Since all plots involve threats and dangers, the assumption is that while in tragedies these threats are fulfilled, in comedies they may be evaded. Evanthius characterizes the dangers of comedy as small in scale compared to those of tragedy, but Shakespeare’s comic protagonists regularly face alienation, abandonment, and death. What makes the difference is not less serious perils but the operation of a kind of ‘evitability’ principle whereby shifts and stratagems and sheer good luck break the chain of causality that seemed headed for certain catastrophe. Portia finds a hole in Venetian law through which Antonio may escape without paying his pound of flesh (The Merchant of Venice); Dogberry’s watchmen accidentally uncover the villainy of Don John and deliver Hero from disgrace and death (Much Ado about Nothing). Reality itself, seemingly fixed, turns out in the comic world to be both mutable and malleable. In As You Like It a chance meeting with a hermit results in the sudden conversion of the tyrant Duke Frederick, who then easily gives back the throne he usurped from his brother; Oberon’s magic redirects Demetrius’ love from Hermia to Helena so that the lovers of A Midsummer Night’s Dream may be tidily paired. In tragedy, on the other hand, the causal chain unwinds inexorably towards destruction, cutting off alternative possibilities of escape or potential new beginnings. In King Lear the army led by Cordelia that seemed to promise deliverance is defeated; and in a final shocking blow even the refounded relationship of father and daughter is cut off by Cordelia’s murder. In Antony and Cleopatra, Antony is cornered in Egypt, loses his last battle, and can find himself again only by dying.

Even though Shakespeare occasionally drew a tragic plot from fiction, the premise that tragedies are based on the givens of history or established legend and comedies on fictional events the writer can mould as he wishes has its own internal logic. The chain of cause and consequence is more usual in lived experience than magical transformation. Actual lives, no matter how rich in power and achievement, always end in the final defeat of death, and tragedies, whether they end in death or not (Shakespeare’s always do), have the same fated quality of what has already happened and cannot be changed or evaded. In its unerring movement towards that inevitable conclusion, tragedy enacts the cadential rhythm of every human existence, even while it protests against that inevitable end in its countermovement of expanding heroic self-realization. (Snyder 85, emphasis mine).

One of the striking parts of Susan Snyder’s definition is that it echoes a more general tendency in the discourse of tragedy: a desire to define it, as a genre and a performance, in terms of what it is not.

In comedy, the chain of causality is a breakable thing; fate is malleable, luck is real, and catastrophes — no matter how significant — are ultimately averted. Tragedy is the opposite.