When reading the Commentary on Greek Comedy I was, surprisingly, relating it more to last semester’s reading for English 300, Don Quixote. Besides being the funniest book I’ve every read, it also has one of the most tragic endings. It is a perfect balance of comedy and tragedy. If you do not want me to ruin the book for you, don’t read to far along; however, even if this blog ruins the ending of DQ for you it still deserves to be read, to be experienced first-hand, word by word, all 900-and-some pages.
In Greek, drama meant ‘to do, to act’ a story. The story was typically a tragedy, comedy, or satyr. And if you’ve taken a class with Marvin Lansverk this helps explain his obsession with puppets and ‘doing’ something.
Ruden writes, “no one has any idea how comedy – or tragedy – came to have its particular form. … (She) can characterize comedy by turning the better known genre of tragedy upside down and shaking it.”
But in their basic form comedy and tragedy are comprised of the ‘same main medium, language.’ This brings me back to lit crit and the simplistic notion that all literature, and therefore language, is letterally – my version of literally – created with letters and words. This means that there are of course going to be crossovers and similarities between tragedy and comedy. Ruden briefly writes about this on pages 114-115. “The marvelous poetic qualities of surviving comedy suggest that this genre had not much less reliance on words.” “… the generally similar metrical format of tragedy and comedy kept them closer together in subject matter and tone than anything else did.”
Depending on the words used, the genre and level of literature can be considered. Think about the word anagogy we discussed in class. Anagogy refers to literature of the heavenly realm, gods, deities, and the supernatural or unexplainable, words that refer to another world, that create their own nature rather than reside on our own. Ruden writes, “The most ornate words are for the gods: words that look outward from the drama’s story into yet another world.”
Returning to comedy, tragedy, and Don Quixote I can explain how this epic novel contains both genres, though much more comedy. To begin, Don Quixote brings about his comedic trails and tribulations by means of his own, rather hilarious, transformation into a knight errant. In an anagogic sense DQ liberates himself from the common world and creates his own chivalric knight errant world in his head; however, everyone else in the novel are still members of the common world which makes DQ’s experiences all the more funny. “Laughter is more likely after events unlikely, unexpected, or absurd.” Practically everything DQ does, especially in the beginning, is unexpected. But when Ruden writes, “Comedy, whose scenes are not taken up with the somewhat stereotyped big events of tragedy, such as the recognition of lost relatives, jumps between incidents of considerable variety and oddity;” an interesting thing can be mentioned about DQ. His scenes are certainly of considerable variety and oddity, but each scene is told as though it was a tragedy, drawn out with enough detail and big, sometimes violent events take place.
The use of the chorus in Greek plays is somewhat reflected in DQ’s partner in comedic tragedy, the infamous squire, Sancho Panza. “Whatever strange things go on, the chorus makes them stranger.” This perfectly parallels Sancho. Whatever strange event DQ gets involved in, something just as strange, if not more so, happens to Sancho.
Don Quixote can also relate to the theory that ‘Comedy is reactive. Tragedy is about the universe.” It is the mismatched universe in which Don Quixote rides about doing his knight errant business that makes it a tragic novel in one sense: he strives to be a knight errant in a society that doesn’t accept knight-errants; yet how Don Quixote and the people he encounters react to these two clashing worlds is what makes it a comedy as well.
In order not to ruin the ending for those who haven’t read Cervantes’ masterpiece, I will end here. But know, that the ending is about the inevitable tragedies in the world, which affect not only DQ and Sancho but the reader as well.
