In 1933, watching Hitler infect Germany with his nihilistic madness, Thomas Mann saw a parallel in the defeat of Erasmus, the greatest humanist of the Renaissance, by Luther, whose dark fanaticism plunged Europe into an entire century of religious war. Mann, who would have to flee the Nazi regime and take refuge in the United States, at one point commented, “mankind has no use for rational, decent order or tolerance, no yearning for ‘happiness’ at all, but prefers recurrent tragedy and untrammelled, destructive adventure” (Heilbut, 530). The parallel with our present moment is almost too obvious to state. Which is why, for a second week, I am writing on comedy. The theme of comedy is the victory of human desire, of “happiness” in all its forms. It forms a counter-voice, rational, decent, tolerant, to the addiction to tragedy and destruction that we hear all around us these days, amplified by the Internet. As a few shrewd journalists have pointed out, the mood of hysterical panic combined with pessimistic despair is being deliberately cultivated by the theatrical extremism of Trump and his followers, who are attempting by their antics to demoralize people so thoroughly that they will feel too paralyzed to resist the next attempt at a takeover.
Mann’s statement that there is something innately wrong with the human race, that it is innately depraved, and, left to its own devices, invariably prefers evil and misery, was more than a passing mood. It led to his late novel Dr. Faustus (1947), in which the self-destruction of Germany is paralleled with the self-destruction of modern art, symbolized by Mann’s Faust character, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, who feels that art is decadent and worn out. All possibilities have been explored and exhausted, so that the task of the true artist in our time is creative destruction, the production of anti-art that will hasten the end of a dying tradition, so that something else may be born in its place, even though we cannot say what that might be. This was a widespread feeling in the Modernist era before World War II: in The Use and Abuse of Art (1973), the cultural historian Jacques Barzun called it “abolitionism.” The idea that art—as opposed to temporary stylistic fashions in art—can be exhausted is obvious nonsense, giving rise to a suspicion that it is driven by underlying emotional factors. The same abolitionism surfaced again in the 1960’s through the 1980’s in the humanities, especially in philosophy and literary criticism, though, oddly enough, it had switched political allegiance, this time being a far-left rather than a far-right phenomenon, an example of what Jung called enantiodromia, the tendency of an unbalanced psychological tendency to swing over to its opposite.
I have been rereading Mann’s Dr. Faustus because of teaching the Faust legend in my Honors course; at the same time, in the Expanding Eyes podcast I have been examining Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, a so-called “problem comedy” that also wrestles with the idea that human nature may be intrinsically corrupt. As one character says, “Our natures do pursue, / Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, / A thirsty evil, and when we drink we die” (1.2. 128-30, Bevington edition). We are like rats that can’t resist the rat poison that kills us, because it just tastes so good. Ultimately, the play rejects that notion as a total picture of human nature, but not before it gives it a powerful hearing.
Jung’s idea of the shadow, the dark side of every human psyche, did not arise simply from his analytical experience with patients: as is evident from troubled passages in works from the 1920’s and 1930’s, it is also his way of trying to understand the past nightmare of World War I and the clearly forthcoming nightmare, just 20 years later, of World War II. Something in us, some internal tempter, is always whispering, beckoning, inviting us to go over to the dark side of the Force. Mann’s novel shows this shadow tendency at work not just in the Nazis themselves but in the German people, from “nice” ordinary Germans, the Aunt Joanie’s as I have called them, to the radical chic intellectual and artistic elite, babbling—as Yeats also did in Ireland—about “heroic violence.”
But Mann’s imagination had another side. Before Dr. Faustus, he had spent a whole decade writing the four-volume Joseph and His Brethren, a meditation on mythological patterns from a broadly comic perspective. In comedy, the happy ending is most typically romantic: love conquers all. But it may also, as Northrop Frye pointed out, be individual and social. More ambitious comedies, like Shakespeare’s, may realize all three. The individual happy ending, Frye says, is an attaining or regaining of identity, which may involve a casting off of false identity according to the plot device that science fiction writer Robert Heinlein called “the man who learned better.” This may be more prevalent in novelistic than in dramatic comedy, because of the novel’s greater capacity for interiority. Socially, in the recognition scenes in the fifth act of a Shakespearean comedy, a redeemed social order crystallizes around the union of the romantic protagonists.
The typical comic plot, in a thousand varieties, derives logically from its theme of the victory of desire over its obstacles, as the sympathetic characters representing the former come up against various obstructive characters representing the latter. In a pattern that goes back to Greek Old Comedy and Greek and Roman New Comedy, this takes the form, as noted in last week’s newsletter, of an agon or conflict between what were called the eiron and the alazon, dramatic types that are also observable in real life, as Aristotle said in the Nicomachean Ethics. The eiron appears to be less than he really is (in traditional comedy, it would be a “he”), whether because of a humble or obscure background or a modest and self-deprecating manner, and is frequently underestimated, sometimes even by himself. The alazon appears to be, and commonly believes himself to be, more than he really is, and is frequently boastful and overbearing, a bully. It is instructive to ask why we reflexively side with the underdog, with the eiron. The answer is that the eiron minimizes his ego. The eiron is unselfish, whereas the alazon is self-centered and therefore ruled by some kind of power drive. In more traditional comedy, the alazon is more absurd than evil, although he may aspire to villainy: the more evil and powerful he is, the more ironic the comedy.
Because the eiron is by nature self-sacrificing rather than self-seeking—he is “sympathetic” in more than one sense—he unites other people to him, and for this reason the happy ending of comedy is inclusive. It is comedy’s inclusiveness that I really want to talk about, the theme of what we could call the triumph of empathy. That inclusiveness is made visible onstage by various representations, listed by Frye in Anatomy of Criticism (163-65). The most obvious is the wedding of the romantic couple—or couples. Shakespeare’s habit of marrying off half the cast in the fifth act is motivated by the impulse to include as many people in the happy ending as possible. Despite being an unusually ironic comedy, Measure for Measure concludes with the possibility of four weddings after the play is over.
Another symbol of inclusion is the banquet, which may combine with the theme of romance in the form of reservations made for a party of two. This should need no great elaboration in a newsletter that will appear two days after Valentine’s Day. With its red and white color symbolism surrounding the successful elopement of two lovers, subverting the will of obstructing elders, Keat’s Eve of St. Agnes amounts to a Valentine’s poem, even though St. Agnes’ Eve is actually January 20. In it, the hero, Porphyro (whose name means “red”) sneaks into the castle and sets a banquet before his sleeping, white-clad beloved:
And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep, In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender'd, While he forth from the closet brought a heap Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd; With jellies soother than the creamy curd, And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon; Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one, From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon. These delicates he heap'd with glowing hand On golden dishes and in baskets bright Of wreathed silver: sumptuous they stand In the retired quiet of the night, Filling the chilly room with perfume light.— "And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake!
Presented with a dessert menu like that, how could any woman resist? At any rate, it works, and the lovers disappear into the night. Banquets, however, easily expand into a more social dimension. When we are given a detailed description of how Achilles prepares a meal for his closest friends in Book 9 of the Iliad, it is not because Homer was a foodie. Human beings let down their defenses and unite at a common meal, from the Last Supper to American Thanksgiving. Film’s greater representational resources have enabled the development of a sub-genre of comedy that centers around the creation of a meal or meals rather than, or in addition to, romance. A quick check of the Internet astonished me: one site listed 55 food comedies! Examples include Babette’s Feast (1987), Like Water for Chocolate (1992), Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994), Big Night (Stanley Tucci, 1996), My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), Ratatouille (Pixar, 2009), and Julie & Julia (Nora Ephron, with Meryl Streep playing Julia Child, 2009). There are literally dozens more.
The image of the communal dinner modulates easily into that of the party, and comedy’s theme of inclusiveness makes clear why being invited or not invited to a party is such an anxious feature of human life, from the penthouse cocktail party to the prom. And weddings, dinners, and parties often involve dancing. From there, it is a short symbolic step to concerts, especially of the type that unite audience and performers in a common experience that is as much social as musical, the inevitable example being Woodstock. Whether or not it actually developed out of religious ritual, theatre itself is a unifying experience. Shakespeare provides a gently satiric version as the wedding party laughs at the play put on by the rude mechanicals at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A brilliant film version is the camera’s panning of the huge variety of human faces in the audience during the overture of Ingmar Bergman’s film rendition of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1975), the camera returning time and again to the rapt expression on the face of a red-haired young girl watching one of the world’s great comic fairy tales, a girl who was actually Bergman’s daughter with Liv Ullmann.
Comedies feature scenes of reunion and reconciliation, in which those who have been separated or lost are found, estrangements and feuds knit into unity, often accompanied in Shakespeare by the musical image of resolving discord into harmony. Lovers’ quarrels, jealousies, and misunderstandings melt into mutual understanding and forgiveness. Much of human history consists of feuds that, on a big enough scale, we call wars, from the Iliad to the Mahabharata. Shakespeare’s double tetralogy of history plays might be regarded as an experiment (with Virgil’s Aeneid as its model) in constructing British history as a comic shape, with two “happy endings,” one at the end of each tetralogy. Such political happy endings are often alliances cemented by marriage, which is why Henry V connives for the hand of the French king’s daughter. Two of the late romances, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, feature reconciliations of kingdoms. Lest we dismiss dreams of political harmonization as illusory, or, worse, colonialist, we should remember that the members of NATO and the European Union were at war with one another within my parents’ lifetime. And on the other side of the Atlantic, former colonists forged a Constitution whose goal was to establish “a more perfect union” among independent states. The idealism of something like Star Trek’s Federation is not just ungrounded, so to speak.
The opposite of that dream of reconciliation is the alazon ideology that all human activities are merely war by other means. Driven by the will to power, the alazon reflex is to exclude rather than include, to scapegoat and think in terms of “us” and “them.” In Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown, a musical version of the myth of Orpheus, Hades, lord of the underworld and figure of power, sings “Why We Build the Wall,” a song that, surprisingly, predates Trump’s talk of a border wall. Why do we build the wall? “The wall keeps out the enemy.” But “What do we have that they should want? / We have a wall to work upon.” Such an attitude is anti-American, even when it disguises itself as patriotism, for the true American myth is one of inclusiveness, as articulated by Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which tries to include absolutely everything, and by the Statue of Liberty, subject of one of the earliest newsletters. To be sure, Whitman’s is an extravert’s idea of inclusiveness. The introvert’s ideal is one of selective inclusiveness, as when Emily Dickinson says that “The Soul selects her own Society— / Then—Shuts the door”:
I've known her — from an ample nation — Choose One — Then — close the Valves of her attention — Like Stone —
But inclusiveness and a society, however intimate, are still important to Dickinson, whereas the alazon knows only solitude and domination.
In romance, the social norm is monogamy, which chooses one and then closes the valves of attention. Or such is the pretense: in real life, there is a good deal of unacknowledged polyamory, some of it too emotionally rich to be dismissed as “promiscuity” or an “affair.” In Steven Spielberg’s beautiful, semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans (2022), the young boy learns something about love by realizing that his mother loves both his father and his father’s best friend. Occasionally, such inclusiveness expands—at least theoretically—into an ideal of “free love,” as in the early Christian agape feasts. Shelley tried to live the free-love vision, rationalizing it in his poem Epipsychidion, as apparently did Blake, rationalizing it in Visions of the Daughters of Albion. In science fiction, the two greatest writers of the Golden Age, Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon, advocated a non-monogamous inclusiveness in various works, most famously in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Influenced by both Heinlein and Sturgeon, Samuel Delany imagines a gay men’s commune in Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012) founded on the premise that “free sex” and devotion to a single partner are not mutually exclusive, as middle class possessiveness would have us believe. And Delany has made clear that although his community is a utopia, it corresponds to real experiences in his own life. When such practices are dismissed as unrealistic, it is always on the grounds that jealous exclusivity is simply part of human nature, and free love is just a pornographic daydream. That sounds so knowing and real-world: yet meanwhile, the Internet, that was supposed to connect everyone, has isolated everyone so badly that the Secretary General of the United Nations is crusading against an “epidemic of loneliness,” people everywhere are having less sex than they used to, and some young people are uncomfortable with any face-to-face interaction.
Although Shakespeare blithely ignored the “unities” of time and space that dramas were supposed to observe according to the Aristotelian critics, the resolution of the comedies is usually within a relatively short period of time. One reason for Shakespeare’s development of the romance form at the end of his career was to gain some of the novel’s ability to show development over many years. The happy ending as a sudden reversal is dramatically effective, but at the cost of plausibility. The final recognition scenes in which all is made well risk coming off as a kind of miracle cure. And yet, the religious language pervading some of them suggests that Shakespeare was thinking exactly in those terms, of the curing of individual neurosis through some kind of “conversion,” a metanoia or turning-around in New Testament terms. In Twelfth Night, Duke Orsino has to be cured of his romantic mooning and Olivia of her anti-romantic mourning, both of which are forms of narcissistic escapism, before they are ready to be included in the happy ending. Usually, the characters are not capable of breaking out of their neuroses, or their humors, to use the terminology of the time, without some kind of well-meaning intervention. In Much Ado about Nothing, Benedick and Beatrice have to be extracted from their mutual prickliness, which is really a fear of getting hurt, by certain faked conversations of their friends. This is typical: the changing of people’s minds and hearts in the comedies is through a kind of theatre. People put other people through transformative ordeals that are really mini-dramas, plays within a play. The Duke in Measure for Measure puppeteers everyone, meddling with their lives in a way that would cause him to lose his license if he were a therapist. Yet the inclusiveness at the end of comedy only seems to be possible through such ordeals, which are mostly psychological rather than physical, because the real barriers to inclusion are in people’s heads. Jesus suggests as much when he says “Go and sin no more” after curing someone of an illness.
The desirable endings of comedies may also include reunions of people who have been separated and the finding of people who have been lost, especially lost children. In The Winter’s Tale, a baby girl who is born in the first half of the play is seen again as a teenager in the second half after a gap of 16 years. She is appropriately named “Perdita,” which means “lost.” One of the most moving and beautiful poems I know is T.S. Eliot’s “Marina,” which takes off from Shakespeare’s romance Pericles. It is a dramatic monologue spoken at the moment in which Pericles realizes that the girl before him is his long-lost daughter Marina, but it combines the motif of reunion with what has been lost with the moment of epiphany that is at once religious conversion and psychological cure. Pericles speaks as one coming out of a dream or daze because he is in fact making the crossing from madness to sanity, illusion to reality. The first words of the poem are Latin for “What place is this?”, borrowed from Seneca’s tragedy about Hercules, who wakes from madness to find that he has lost his wife and children, having slaughtered them in his psychosis. Pericles, however, is moving in the other direction, towards recovery in all senses. As he does so, he expresses a newfound conviction that unites Eliot, despite his anti-Romanticism, with Blake and Shelley, the poets who tell us that the imagination is the home of human life:
Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat. I made this, I have forgotten And remember. The rigging weak and the canvas rotten Between one June and another September. Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.
The quick turnaround of the comedies to a scene of recognition, reconciliation, and reunion is in the romances achieved only through an ordeal lasting much of a lifetime. I would make an argument that this may represent an evolution of Shakespeare’s thinking over time comparable to that undergone by the great Romantic poets. In their youth, excited by the hopes raised by the French Revolution, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley all looked forward to a great comic reversal of history. The alazons who ruled the world would be overthrown and what would ensue would be not the end of the world, as in the divine comedy of traditional Christianity, but its beginning, the recognition scene of a human comedy in which what humanity recognized was its own power to remake the world in the image of human needs and desires, to liberate itself from tyrannies and neuroses that it has unconsciously constructed and unconsciously keeps in place. The collapse of the French Revolution and the collapse of Europe into hysterical reaction led to the hard realization that, as Eliot says in Four Quartets, only through time is time conquered. The revolution will be in slow motion. It seems to be something that has to be learned again in age after age, since it mirrors the early Christian shift from an ecstatic expectation of a kingdom coming soon to resigned expectation of a kingdom coming…someday. The difference being that in traditional Christianity there was nothing to do but wait on God to bring the divine comedy to its conclusion, whereas in post-Romantic revolutionary mythology we are faced with the task of trying to work towards it ourselves. I first read the Romantics at the height of countercultural euphoria, in 1970, so that when Woodstock collapsed into Watergate, I was not left, the day the music died, disillusioned and without purpose.
The mental revolution is perhaps to see one’s whole life as one slow-motion recognition scene, to gradually clarify one’s own vision, by means of both expanded understanding and, well, getting one’s shit together, and also to discover a network of kindred spirits across time. At my age, it can be appalling to contemplate, not just one’s own forthcoming lack of existence but, far worse, the apparent disappearance of everything one has known, valued, and loved into air, into thin air, as Prospero says. I look at the albums of photographs, at my mother’s glassware collection, and wonder what dumpster they will end up in. I am without children, but that is not the reason: there is no necessary reason anyone’s children will value anything of the past that is so precious to us.
However, that is the shadow’s reductionism, the counsel of despair. That is exactly the enemy to be fought, the enemy that is hidden most deeply inside one’s head, the nihilism, the deathwish that can only be resisted by means of its opposite: creation. Artistic and scholarly creation, yes: we write to counteract mutability, to “leave something behind,” perhaps lurking someplace where someone might find it after we are gone and otherwise forgotten. But the building up of something “inclusive” across time extends far beyond the arts themselves, though they provide the model. This is my 40th year in the classroom, and over those years there has come into being an invisible but real network of kindred spirits that is not done expanding yet. It is like a positive conspiracy theory. The Expanding Eyes podcast has a small audience—yet it spreads across a dozen countries. This newsletter has a maximum of 70 readers, yet I have known most of them as students, colleagues, friends, even former relationships. Nor am I the maestro here: some of them are teachers, writers, and artists themselves, and have published books. Watching a child grow and develop is miraculous, but with the mind’s eye we may look back and see the grain of mustard seed that is the self slowly exfoliate out of solitude, a self that is paradoxically at once both singular and plural. In George Eliot’s Silas Marner, a lonely, embittered miser is rescued from his solitude by the advent in his life of an orphan child, caring for which connects him back to common humanity. The theme of the human webwork of connections is also the theme of Eliot’s Middlemarch. In one of the greatest comic strips of all time, Gasoline Alley, originally by Frank King, confirmed bachelor Walt Wallet finds an abandoned baby on his doorstep, whom he names Skeezix. That was on February 14, 1921, which became Skeezix’s birthday. His love for this baby changes Walt’s life: he marries a woman, Phyllis Blossom, and becomes the progenitor of a whole family tree of characters that are by now in at least the fourth generation, for the strip is still running. Making the date Valentine’s Day was more than just a gimmick.
Comedy’s ideal of inclusiveness means that the group of characters who gather around the eiron figure are a motley crew. They are not “normal” but “eccentric,” and they are sympathetic characters not despite but because of it. Frye notes that the hero and heroine of many comedies are ciphers, bland and unmemorable because they represent the social norm. Since our society has become less coercively normative and more anarchistic, however, the normal characters may be fading away. In Lewis Carroll’s comic satires, Alice is something of a parody of the normative character. She makes prim and proper judgments wherever she goes, but the judgments have no force against the mad tea party she finds herself caught up in. Thomas Pynchon uses the same technique in The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), in which the protagonist, Oedipa Maas, who has her issues but is basically sane, is surrounded by men who are basically nuts, including, and in fact especially, her psychiatrist, who turns out to be an ex-Nazi on LSD suffering from paranoia. The motto of satiric comedy is the title of one of the Firesign Theatre’s early comedy albums: We’re All Bozos on This Bus, “bozos” in the sense of clowns. The name Monty Python’s Flying Circus means much the same thing. A whole society of eccentrics can be exhausting, but welcome to the human race. Anyway, the tendency of comedy to include as many people as possible in the happy ending makes it a potentially educational force in society, the lesson it teaches being that everyone deserves to be included because no one is normal. “Normal” is an ideological fiction, a practical necessity but at the same time dangerous. The fellowship of the ring and Hogwarts Academy are “diverse,” the latter so much so that it includes dead people. A common theme is that people may find a place in their community not by trying to fit in and be “normal” but by contributing their unique gifts. The “Misfit” in Robert Heinlein’s early science fiction story of that title (1939) turns out to have extraordinary mathematical ability that saves the day. The name Stephen Hawking is enough to prove that the idea is not merely sentimental.
Northrop Frye’s central critical idea, that all works of literature are included in a total “order of words,” not because they are monotonously alike but because their endless variety emerges from the recombination of some very simple universal patterns, is a basically comic conception, as Frye himself recognized: for some years, he planned a sequel to Anatomy of Criticism that at one point in his notebooks he considered calling The Critical Comedy. The inclusiveness of Frye’s vision is matched by an inclusive style: even critics who disagree with him remark on his warm, witty, graceful prose. Comedy is governed by the pleasure principle, and Frye is one of the few critics it is a genuine pleasure to read. He never wanted disciples but got one anyway in the form of Harold Bloom, who promptly renounced him and formulated his own theory that was like a Bizarro-world reversal of Frye’s. According to Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence,” it is a sentimental error to assume that literature is inclusive. No, it is an agon or battle in which the strong poet is the one who symbolically kills his Precursor by misreading him in the act of appropriating him (the male pronouns are fairly inevitable, given that the theory is a literary-critical version of the Oedipus complex). Bloom is Jewish, and suffered under the anti-Semitism of Yale in the 1950’s. He was told by someone that he did not belong because of course English and American literature are Christian. The philosopher who invented “deconstruction,” Jacques Derrida, which says that the order of words is itself a sentimental error, was also Jewish and suffered from anti-Semitism growing up in Algeria. No one can say for certain to what extent the experience of being excluded influenced the work of these two ironic theorists, but it is certainly something to think about.
In performance, dramatic comedy reaches out to include the audience in the final festive resolution. The curtain call after a successful production may go on for a long time, and the feeling generated is a bond between the audience and the actors that is really a part of the dramatic experience and not a polite add-on. In concerts, the generating of applause enthusiastic enough to elicit an encore or encores also becomes a bonding experience that, at least on an emotional level, works to abolish the distinction between the seats and the stage. Comedy is ruled by the pleasure principle, which is precisely why some critics and artists distrust it. But the motto of Shakespearean comedy is “We’ll strive to please you every day.” It does so by presenting a world of gratified desire, of life as it should be. Then it takes one step further and invites the audience into that world, by means of a subversion of the normal sense of reality and illusion. The commonsense view is that the world of the happy ending is an illusion and the world of the audience is real. But Shakespearean comedy reverses the commonsense view, showing that it is the supposed “real” world that is illusory. In The Tempest, the magician Prospero commands an “art” that basically consists of theatrical illusions, that appear and then vanish. But his great speech at the end of The Tempest is only the most explicit statement of what all the comedies and romances tell us: that it is ordinary life that is the illusion, that we are such things as dreams are made on.
“That is,” Frye says in the final paragraph of his book on Shakespearean comedy and romance, “the world of the spectator is ultimately abolished. What is presented must be possessed by us, as Prospero tells us in the Epilogue….If anything is to make sense of this play, no less than of Peter Quince’s play [in A Midsummer Night’s Dream], it must be, as Hippolyta says, our imagination and not theirs. When Prospero's work is done, and there is nothing left to see, the vision of the brave new world becomes the world itself, and the dance of vanishing spirits a revel that has no end." Frye titled his book A Natural Perspective, from the line in Twelfth Night, “A natural perspective, that is and is not.”
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), one of the chief comic novels of the 20th century, deals with the same subject as Mann’s Dr. Faustus, the nihilistic deathwish of the Nazis in World War II. The title refers to the ballistic arc of a V2 rocket about to fall, a symbol of annihilation and yet also a rainbow suggesting some kind of hope. On its final page, as it has throughout, the novel likens its readers’ experience to that of an audience watching a film in a theatre:
And it is just here, just at this dark and silent frame, that the pointed tip of the Rocket, falling nearly a mile per second, absolutely and forever without sound, reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof of this old theatre, the last delta-t.
At this moment of potential annihilation, which is every moment of human life, the spontaneous response is to join together singing:
There is time, if you need the comfort, to touch the person next to you, or to reach between your own cold legs…or, if song must find you, here’s one They never taught anyone to sing, a hymn by William Slothrop…Follow the bouncing ball….
The hymn speaks of a “Hand to turn the time,” to reverse the hourglass, until a Light shines on every poor Preterite—the Preterites being those who are excluded by predestination from the divine comedy of redemption.
It may be that we are all Preterite, that there are no Elect. But perhaps there is a Light that includes the Preterite anyway, despite what “They” say. On those grounds, we sing together. The last line of this 760-page comedy is, “Now everybody—“.
Now, everybody—
References
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, 1957. Also volume 22 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, edited by Robert D. Denham. University of Toronto Press, 2006.
Frye, Northrop. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. Columbia, 1965. Included in Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance, volume 28 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, edited by Troni Y. Grande and Garry Sherbert. University of Toronto Press, 2010.
Heilbut, Anthony. Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature. Knopf, 1996.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. Viking, 1973.
I was fortunate as an undergraduate in the 1960s to read Thomas Mann's fiction with the philosopher Thelma Z. Lavine, author of "From Socrates to Sartre," which was made into a PBS series. If I were an undergraduate today, I would hope to have a teacher who could write this newsletter issue.