February 23, 2024
That extraordinary thinker William James declared that “The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments” (11). Although philosophers may attempt to judge only by logic and evidence, temperament “loads the evidence” and influences the conclusions drawn from it. James says of the philosopher, “He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it” (11). And what is true of philosophers must of course be true of the rest of us as well. In every area of human life, James says, there seems to be a basic contrast. In politics, there are liberals and conservatives; in art, romantics and classics; in the philosophy of James’s time, idealists and materialists; and, in general, there are optimists and pessimists. All these are variants of the contrast between temperaments he calls the “tenderminded” and the “toughminded,” resulting in “a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe” (11). The two types clash: “The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and soft-heads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous, or brutal” (14).
On the first page of A Natural Perspective, his book about Shakespearean comedy and romance, Northrop Frye adds to James’s catalogue by noting that Coleridge tells us that all philosophers are either Platonists or Aristotelians, then goes on to say, “I shall begin with a similar dichotomy about literary criticism. I may express it, in the manner of Coleridge, by saying that all literary critics are either Iliad critics or Odyssey critics. That is, interest in literature tends to center either in the area of tragedy, realism, and irony, or in the area of comedy and romance.” Many critics feel about literature “that its essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature….They are attracted to tragedy, to realism, or to irony, because it is in those modes that they find the clearest reflection of what Freud calls the reality principle” (2). He goes on to say, “I have always been temperamentally an Odyssean critic myself, attracted to comedy and romance. But I find myself, apparently, in a minority, in a somewhat furtive and anonymous group who have not much of a theory, implicit or explicit, to hold them together” (2).
I too am a member of Comedy and Romance Anonymous. It is not quite true that we have no theory, merely a theory that has not been much in fashion, the reason being that it is tenderminded, whereas the temperament of literary criticism during my lifetime has been toughminded and ironic. Readers of this newsletter will not be surprised to find that my intention is not to “win” by arguing that the tenderminded perspective is the right one, but rather to see whether the opposites can be turned from what Blake called a Negation into what he called Contraries. It is true, however, that doing so will involve arguing for the merits of the tenderminded, sentimental, idealistic tradition of comedy and romance, those genres that dramatize the victory of the pleasure principle over the reality principle.
As we have seen in the past two weeks, comedy in the Western world descends from Greek and Roman New Comedy, whose plots were structured upon the conflict between character types called the eiron and alazon. They are often defined by their manner: the eiron is modest and self-deprecating whereas the alazon is arrogant and boastful. But in terms of plot, the contrast is one of power: the alazon is powerful and dominating, while the eiron is the underdog. The typical comic plot ends with the triumph of the underdog over the bully, the weak over the strong. What that means is that even in light and escapist comedies lurks something potentially radical and subversive, for the whole heroic tradition in literature, as originally embodied in epic and tragedy, glorifies the triumph of the strong. From Achilles and Beowulf down to Western gunfighters and contemporary superheroes, the hero’s attribute is forza, force or power. The typical hero is, in the vocabulary of comedy, an alazon. Such heroes even have the alazon’s characteristic boastfulness, although both Achilles and Beowulf only trumpet their accomplishments when they feel their reputation has been besmirched. Traditional heroes may fight for their own glory, as Achilles does, or they may dedicate themselves to using their strength to protect the weak, even to the point of sacrificing themselves. But what defines them and gives them their value is their power and fighting prowess.
Power corrupts, and there are always those who are tempted by the intoxication of power into what Jung calls inflation. Usually, those who praise “heroic violence” are in fact weak figures tempted into overcompensating fantasies, like Nietzsche. But delusional thinking about supermen is highly contagious, and Nietzsche has managed to infect any number of people, from Yeats to Hitler to Ayn Rand, by his fantasies of the will to power. The foremost current would-be strongman is Vladimir Putin, who in earlier days liked to be photographed bare-chested to show off his manliness. The former kickboxer Andrew Tate acts as a pied piper to young and insecure teenage boys, teaching them that being a man means taking everything you want, including women, because the world belongs to the strong and the strong-willed, and anyone who criticizes you is only an envious weakling. This is the philosophy, if you want to call it that, taught to Donald Trump by his monstrous father. Trump is admired because he actually gets away with his bullying, and he has encouraged and served as a role model for any number of toxic males in the Republican Party, such as Jim Jordan, and even a few toxic females like Marjorie Taylor Green.
It is sad to watch immature teenage boys learn from the likes of Andrew Tate that it is cool to strut around like a rooster. But there are pressures on men to be “strong” that are less naïve and harder to resist. Some of those pressures are perhaps fading as society changes. The disappearance of blue collar work means the gradual disappearance of the blue collar worker whose job, and therefore whose place in society, depends on physical strength and endurance. But we do not seem to know how to raise men any other way. I teach a lot of football players who do not have much sense of identity outside of football, who spend hours and hours in arduous practice and physical conditioning, and who regularly suffer concussions. Their commonest major is Sports Management, which is apparently a euphemism for coaching, teaching other young men to destroy their bodies and minds in a dangerous sport. At the moment, America’s sweetheart Taylor Swift is dating a football player, and they are a charming couple. Travis Kelce seems to be a nice guy with liberal values, but football is a violent game, which any number of young men play, not because they are stupid and can’t do anything else, but because, first, it gives them a place to belong, and, second, it is their way out of economic hardship. The point is, why football, and not, say, golf? Athletic competition is noble in itself: the point is that football embodies, in all senses, the value of a certain kind of manliness—a toughminded ideal.
The military used to be another place that taught that manhood was equivalent to physical toughness, especially elite branches of the military like the Marines and the Navy Seals. It may be that modern warfare is making the tough-guy warrior obsolete. The early part of Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper documents the brutal physical endurance contest of Chris Kyle’s basic training. But what it prepared him for turned out to be a job picking off people at long distance with a rifle. Of course, the American cult of guns is motivated by masculine self-proving. Guns are phallic, guns are power—easy power, because you don’t have to go to the trouble of getting into fighting shape. So anyone who wants to take your guns away from you is trying to emasculate you.
Nevertheless, when I was growing up, men were taught that, even if you weren’t blue collar or military or a football player, you had to be “manly” enough to defend yourself and maybe your girlfriend, wife, or children, because there are a lot of rough customers in this world, and what if one of them wants to make trouble in a bar or parking lot? About the time I came of age, there were a surprising number of films that partly affirmed and partly interrogated the idea that this is a tough world with some nasty people in it, and men have to be tough themselves to defend against its possible nastiness. Three of them appeared in 1971: Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, and Tom Laughlin’s Billy Jack. In 1973, Walking Tall dramatized the career of real-life sheriff Buford Pusser, whose weapon of choice was a wooden club, as if he were Hercules. All were controversial, accused of sexism, of glorifying vigilante violence, of what amounts to a fascist mentality of worshipping the “strong” man. Today’s women may rightly say that it is sexist and presumptuous of a man to appoint himself a woman’s protector, that women can take care of themselves. Liberals may rightly say that it is the job of law enforcement to protect everyone from bullies and thugs, that if you appoint yourself the protector of the weak you are in danger of ending up crazed, like Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), who trains himself doing relentless pushups while watching John Wayne movies, preparing himself to be a hero by eliminating the scum of the earth. Or, for that matter, Batman. However, self-righteous dismissal is too easy. The question remains: if push came to shove, and shove came to blows, could you defend yourself against a bully, or would you be one of the humiliated victims, like Les Moore in Tom Batiuk’s Pulitzer-Prize-nominated comic strip Funky Winkerbean, repeatedly bullied by football player Bill Bushka? Years later, as the characters aged, Les became an English teacher and writer; Bill died of CTE.
The movies listed above are not great art, and not the kind of film that liberals and progressives are comfortable with. But they raise, however simplistically, the question of whether a certain “toughminded” attitude is justified. The films deal with the dilemma on an individual level. But the issue is actually more pressing on a social and international level. What would Martin Luther King have done about Vladimir Putin? King’s insistence on non-violence was derived from Gandhi’s, and it is often said that Gandhi’s type of non-violent resistance worked against the British Empire because of British scruples, but what to do when some thug raises an army and simply starts taking over countries, as Hitler did, as Putin is trying to do? Non-violent protest? I write this on the day after the announcement of dissident Alexei Navalny’s death in a Russian prison camp. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is fantasy, but fantasy deeply informed by the old heroic epics, with their ideal of the tragic necessity of forza in the face of true evil. Frodo may be the one to destroy the ring of power, but the peaceful hobbits are not by themselves going to defeat the likes of Sauron, Saruman, and the Orcs. They need the assistance of power, the magical power of Gandalf, the martial power of Aragorn.
And the issue is not just of violent opposition to a would-be dictator. Wars invariably result in the death of civilians, including children and old people. If you decide you must wage a just war, you are saying that, because of the nature of the world, a certain number of innocent people, including children, are going to have to die, some of them by your bombs and bullets. Or by your nuclear warheads, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s a terrible necessity, but you have to be tough enough to face it. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen, said toughminded Harry Truman. Or get the hell out of Hiroshima.
In addition to forza, there is froda, fraud, trickery. In a toughminded context, however, froda is not so much an alternative to forza but its continuation by other means. If first you fail by force, resort to fraud. Satan, in Paradise Lost, having failed at storming heaven with an army, resorts to the treacherous deception of Adam and Eve. Trickery may not seem so heroic and glorious as violence, but it gets the job done. After ten years of heroic escapades, Troy fell by the trick of the Trojan horse. As the Iliad is the epic of forza, the Odyssey is the epic of froda. Deception is held to be a woman’s device, because women have been forced to resort to it for lack of power. Penelope deceives 108 suitors for several years with the lie that she will marry one of them only when she finishes weaving her father-in-law’s burial shroud—but unravels every night what she wove by day. Her success depends partly on the stupidity of the suitors, who are alazon types with a Clockwork Orange mentality. They enjoy taking over a household when the only resistance could come from a woman, her 19-year-old son, an old housekeeper, and the local commoners, who lack weapons and aristocratic warrior training. Even Odysseus, when he returns, cannot defeat that many enemies singlehandedly, so he too resorts to trickery, disguising himself as a beggar and what not. But once he has trapped them in an enclosed room and evened the odds, it’s forza all the way. There is mass slaughter, after which the treacherous maidservants who slept with the suitors are hanged by Telemachus, who needs to learn the toughness requisite to being a man. The traitorous goatherd Melanthios has all his parts hacked off—all his parts, if you take my meaning. As Dirty Harry said, make my day.
Milton calls necessity the tyrant’s plea, but it is actually the plea of the toughminded attitude, often rationalized as fate or the will of the gods, or indeed of the Biblical God. Saul lost the favor of Yahweh when he spared the life of the enemy king, Agag, and Yahweh’s command during the Israelite invasion of the Promised Land was often to spare no one. Christianity’s Messiah said, “Love your enemies” and “Turn the other cheek,” but the Church had no trouble rationalizing the Crusades, the Inquisition, the persecution of the Jews, and so on. We’re very sorry: we know you’re just a naïve country girl, but burning you for heresy is strictly necessary for the security of Church and state, say Joan of Arc’s inquisitors in George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan. So many harsh practices are deemed “necessary” in a toughminded world. No social safety net for poor or unlucky people: it is “necessary” to have a firm attitude about this, or the underprivileged will only become parasites. No sympathy for immigrants fleeing the poverty and violence of their native lands. A bleeding-heart attitude is just sentimentality. We have to be “realistic.” And, by the way, don’t major in the liberal arts in university: those tenderminded subjects do not prepare you for the demands of the “real world.”
The toughminded attitude sees life in terms of the subject-object split, in which the self looks out upon an objective world indifferent or hostile to its desires. The world doesn’t exist to make you happy: that is the lesson that parents have to teach their children, lest the children grow up to be sociopaths. Darwinism postulated a nature red in tooth and claw, ruled by ruthless competition, the survival of the fittest. The economic theory called Social Darwinism said that the same zero-sum competition is the basis of human society as well. So long as we remain trapped within the subject-object mode of alienated experience, which is more or less what Freud meant by the “reality principle,” the toughminded attitude is inevitable, along with its motto: Get Over It. Yet toughmindedness is not the same as indifferent cruelty. In its authentic form, it is rather a detachment necessary at times both for mental health and to benefit others. A limited detachment is necessary lest we be overwhelmed by life’s cruelty and horror. Those who are critical of the idea of “trigger warnings” about potentially disturbing content maintain that young people have to develop an ability to shrug off the representation of traumatic experiences that are part of life. Overprotected young people may become “special snowflakes” unable to cope with the rough-and-tumble of the world. While there is some truth to this, the argument, as usual, is confused by ignorance. Older people who sneer at trigger warnings may not realize that young women may be traumatized by a rape scene because they themselves or one (or more) of their friends have been raped. Nonetheless it is true that sensitivity, beyond a point, risks becoming neurotic.
A certain kind of detachment has to be cultivated by doctors, teachers, and trainers. A doctor who has to cause pain in order to alleviate it, or who has to deliver a terminal diagnosis, must be detached without becoming indifferent. As Dr. Rieux says in Camus’ novel The Plague, you have to have a bit of the plague in you to fight the plague. Teachers and trainers whose job entails giving criticism have to be honest, even while knowing how much criticism hurts. Artists in the tragic, realistic, and ironic genres of literature have to tell it like it is. In Creative Mythology, Joseph Campbell quotes Thomas Mann, who defined the novelist’s attitude as one of “erotic irony.” In Campbell’s words:
It is the posture of an artist not afraid to see what is before him in its truth, its frailty, its inadequacy to the ideal, and whose heart then goes out to it in affirmation of this frailty, as of its life. For it is according to its imperfection that each existence acts, and becomes, perfection being not of this earth. Consequently, it is in naming its imperfection that the artist gives to each its life, its possibility; and this, be it said, is a cruel act—though with ironic result. (329)
But what, then, of the tenderminded attitude, and of the genres of comedy and romance that are its vehicles? Are they no more than comfort food for the soul? The most basic form of romance is the fairy tale, in other words a story for children, for the naïve. For adults, the term is a dismissal—“just a fairy tale.” When tendermindedness forms a binary opposition with toughmindedness, it does become an escape from reality, though not necessarily an illegitimate one. Freud called the arts a pleasant narcosis, but narcotics have a merciful role as painkillers. Still, binaries can be a trap: their neat closure tends to shut down thinking. We should always look for a third factor that escapes from the circularity of binary thinking, one that widens the perspective beyond the binary either-or.
We return to the eiron, the underdog character who in comedy wins despite the power of the alazon. Eiron characters are unheroic, and both comedy and romance may give prominence to characters often considered to be “weak,” such as women, children, or, in fairy tales and cartoons, intelligent or talking animals. But it is the nature of eiron types to be underestimated, and they are often not the helpless victims they are taken to be. Shakespearean comedy is full of wonderfully witty, intelligent, resourceful women who are far more impressive than the men: Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Rosalind in As You Like It, Viola in Twelfth Night. Their very presence calls into question certain assumptions. What few women appear at all in the history plays are merely pawns in the power games of men, just as they are in the Iliad. Whereas in the comedies, the women are active agents, and, if their gender limits them, they simply change it, disguising themselves as men. So much for the unchangeable limits of the reality principle. And that hints at the wonderful subversiveness latent in the comic-romantic tradition. These genres may prompt us to wonder whether all those inescapable limitations postulated by the toughminded way of thinking are not ultimately mental blocks. Fate, destiny, the reality principle, the human condition, the innate depravity of human nature, the indifference of a cold, inhuman universe, the prisonhouse of language, the lack of any foundation for truth or morality—we may begin to wonder whether toughmindedness does not protest too much. How much of the world’s trouble is not due to some inherent cruelty in the nature of things but rather to our own foolishness, fearfulness, and stupidity? If the United States votes Donald Trump back into power and destroys American democracy, the ensuing disaster will be entirely the fault of the American people.
Speaking of protesting too much, Hamlet is in fact a perfect example of alazon self-destruction disguised as heroic struggle. Hamlet rants and raves and chews the scenery, projecting his faults onto everyone around him. He tells the Players not to overact because he himself overacts constantly; he cannot bear Polonius, a windbag who is full of himself, because Hamlet is likewise endlessly talkative and self-important; he spews misogynistic vitriol at his innocent victim of a girlfriend because of women’s supposed impurity, but the sexual obsession is actually his own. Most of all he complains about being miscast: he says he cannot escape the role of heroic warrior avenger, and yet cannot be a manly man like Fortinbras, and would really like to go back to Wittenburg and major in English. What is keeping him? A ghost whose veracity is very much to be distrusted, and the fact that he is stuck in a “revenge tragedy,” and the show must go on, though no one ever says for what reason. Of course, I am doing what George Bernard Shaw liked to do: showing how, from a detached, comic point of view, all that toughminded stuff starts looking a bit absurd, and, more to the point, manufactured. Men are capable of working themselves up into a blustering, horn-locking frenzy, and in comedy it is often the woman who has to prick the balloon and let out the hot air, eiron deflating alazon. Hamlet needed a girlfriend who would have said to him, “If you don’t calm down and shut up, I’m out of here.”
But the alazon has power, sometimes murderous power. What good did Navalny’s resistance to Putin do? Putin squelched him like a mosquito. People are mystified by what Navalny did: put himself back into the hands of a psychotic thug, surely knowing what would happen to him. It was a breathtaking, terrifying act, all the more so because it was not an act of religious martyrdom by someone who expected a heavenly reward. I see it as a refusal, a refusal to grant the premises of the power game, which means a refusal to grant the basis of the reality principle. Shaw’s St. Joan did the same thing, refused to renounce her visions despite the efforts of church and state to intimidate her. Such a refusal is very dangerous to the powers that be: who knows what it might inspire? One of my favorite poems is Milton’s Paradise Regained, which turns the Temptation of Christ by Satan into a wonderful, witty metaphysical comedy in which the eiron refuses to be bought by the diabolic alazon, though Satan keeps raising the stakes, rising from physical temptations like food and luxury to the temptations of fame and political dominion. Jesus’s dryly satiric refusals indicate far more than his lack of interest in “stuff,” in worldly satisfactions. That would be mere piety. This is a refusal to play the game at all. Satan is lord of this world, and Jesus is rejecting the entirety of what we call the real world as an illusion. Once we buy into it, it has power over us. It is not inevitable, but it becomes inevitable once we agree to its terms.
We began with William James, who wrote a book called The Will to Believe. Comedy’s gift is, rather, a will to disbelieve. In Aristotle’s theory, tragedy arrives at an anagnosisis, or moment of recognition, which may be on the part of the characters, the audience, or both. The recognition is of the catastrophe that has always been inevitable, but is now revealed. Comedy also arrives at a recognition, but one that works in the opposite direction, the direction I have called decreation. Problems resolve, things “turn up,” people have conversions, changes of heart, what is lost is found, the villains are disempowered and hooted off the stage. Reality, it turns out, is not fixed but metamorphic—unpredictably metamorphic, for comedy’s twist towards the happy ending is the opposite of tragedy’s inevitability, or so it seems on the surface. It is not a result of fate or the will of the gods or a psychological version thereof, like “character is destiny.”
Does the happy ending result from luck, from chance, or is there a mysterious hidden will directing the course of events that only seem to occur by luck or chance? It is typical of Shakespeare to hint at something like that, or seem to, because the way the action has been contrived into a fortunate resolution so often seems to be surrounded by religious language. I argued in The Productions of Time that the Biblical God is invisible and inscrutable: justifying his ways to men is a futile ambition. He is too much a Trickster to be justified. How, then, can he be trusted? By his works he shall be known. Shakespeare is fond of using the word “grace” to signify the comic recreation of a more desirable world that follows the decreation of the undesirable world at the beginning of the play. People are cured of their neuroses, lovers are reconciled, the social order is renewed. Grace traditionally falls, like mercy in Portia’s speech, from the heavens. The post-Romantic re-orientation of mythology has meant that we now are more likely to think of a mysterious knowledge, power, and love rising from below.
The question of where it comes from, whether it is transcendent or immanent, to use the fancy terms, is less important than how we respond to it. Jesus was an eiron. His message was tenderminded, at least before the powermongers revised it. It was the message of the angels to the shepherds: Be not afraid. Take no thought for the morrow. All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well, said Julian of Norwich of that comedy in which we are all players. We have to become as little children to believe in it, brave enough to accept the terrifying gift of innocence, of believing in the good, of believing, despite the demonic mockery that denies and negates, that innocence will prevail, that peace and good will are what we have been predestined to before the foundation of the universe.
References
Campbell, Joseph. Creative Mythology. Volume 4 of The Masks of God. Viking, 1968.
Frye, Northrop. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965. Also in Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance. Volume 28 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2010.
James, William. Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. Harvard, 1975.