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Generic Progress
Ever since Leo Strauss began arguing in the 1950s that “tragedy and comedy are from Plato’s point of view equally necessary and equally problematic” 37 critics have been developing a view of Plato’s philosophy as itself tragicomic. Following on from Hayden White’s Metahistory, it has become apparent that historians and philosophers of history consistently use more than one trope or mode of ‘emplotment’ to express ideological preferences, which determine the ways in which political and ethical issues are handled. Invariably, moralistic or aesthetic choices determine the inclusion or exclusion of certain details, be they structural or stylistic. This appropriation of the telos of history as inherently poetic and rhetorical provides readers of historical texts with a code capable of unlocking the ideological remit of the literary. Why an author would choose to present their ideas in a particular mode is revealed as a polemic and strategic confrontation with the exigencies of time since stylistic or generic conventions contain socio-symbolic messages historically specific encryptions of concern. White argues that form is therefore immanently and intrinsically an ideology in its own right.38 Therefore, the modes of emplotment that White identifies are inevitably structured ideologically, as generic modulations which follow an organised hierarchy with a political imperative.
The materialisation of genre as a system of regulatory norms that have over time produced “the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface”39 exhibits the strenuous cultural labour required to produce a dramatic corpus and inscribe it with the marks of generic difference that eventually come to be taken as natural. The premise that genre entails a hierarchic and retrogressive social philosophy has resulted in many of the abuses of categorisation which ordained a rank-ordering system that corresponded to the divisions of feudal society. Critics such as Northrop Frye have not been alone in 38 Genre choices affect certain ideologically overdetermined categories (harmony, order, concord and discord, energy, nature, paternity, art, and so on) and offer at different times the possibility of a semantic fusion through which a text can thematize its own ambivalent relation to the structure of a social power. See also Macherey and Balibar, ‘On Literature as Ideological Form’ in Robert Young ed detecting the political bias of the relegation of comedy and satire to a lowly status, that reflects the moral standards and social classes they symbolise.40 Tragic drama may have been thought since Aristotle to represent “men better than they are” while comedy depicted “men as worse”41 but, the very fact that Plato’s anti-tragic dialogues appear to have been overlooked by those critics keen to adopt an Aristotelian rigour for tragedy, points to a preoccupation with decidedly unpleasant emotions.
George Steiner, who perhaps identifies images of humanity doubled up in agony to be more acceptable than images of humanity doubled up in laughter has dvanced the view that tragedy displays “in the very essence of his suffering… man’s
claim to dignity”.42 Fry e has also counselled against searching for moral or realistic conflicts in the comedies since only tragedy will satisfy those who believe that “literature’s essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature”.43 He goes on to argue that comedy merely “seeks its own end instead of holding the mirror up to nature”, to such an extent that he understands the comedies to be so “obviously conventionalised that a serious interest in them soon leads to an interest in convention itself”.44 We may read this as a claim that comedy holds up a mirror to custom, reflecting the tastes and limitations of any and every society. Similarly, Cicero claimed that comedy held up a “mirror to custom and an image of truth”,although he was well aware that it was a somewhat distorted fairground mirror.
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