Antique and Modern Comedy

James Wood has an intriguing and self-revealing review of new translations of Leon Battista Alberti’s Momus and Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly in the December 22 issue of The New Republic . He begins with a contrast between antique comedy, which is “comedy of correction” and “modern” comedy, which is a “comedy of forgiveness.” (His use of “religious” and “secular,” corresponding to the ancient and modern respectively, is unfortunate and confuses the good points he makes.) He describes the comedy of correction, represented by Aristophanes, Erasmus, Rabelais, Swift, and others as “satirical in impulse, frequently violent and farcical, keen to see through the weaknesses of mankind, and essentially pre-novelistic.” He calls Flaubert’s comedy of correction “religious comedy” in order “to distinguish it from the more obviously secular nature of modern comedy.” In the comedy of correction, “The ambition of transparency, the desire to put a window in the human heart” comes to the fore, a transparency that “received its memorably terrifying formulation when Jesus ?Ewho weeps in the Gospels but never laughs ?Eadmonished us that to imagine adultery is to commit it; we are known, through and through. And the few references to Yahweh’s laughter in the Old Testament are anything but funny. In Psalm 2, we are told that God will ‘laugh at’ the heathen and ‘have them in derision’; and again in Psalm 37, the Lord will ‘laugh’ at the wicked man, ‘for he seeth that his day is coming.’ Job, in the midst of his despair, blasphemes against God, claiming that he ‘will laugh at the trial of the innocent.’ And the beginning of that very pagan book, which shows God engaging with Satan in what is essentially a game of torture, hardly negates Job’s accusation. Here, God is like Jupiter, who is described in Momus and The Praise of Folly as looking down from a watchtower.”

Modern or secular comedy on the other hand is the comedy of forgiveness. Wood says that “it seems to me almost entirely the creation of the modern novel ?Ewith the huge exception of Shakespeare.” He describes this form of comedy as follows: “If satire is punishment for those who deserve it, secular comedy is forgiveness for those who do not. If correction implies transparency, then forgiveness ?Eat least secular forgiveness ?Eimplies opacity, the drawing of a veil, a willingness to let obscurity go free.” Using Pride and Prejudice as an example, Wood argues that Elizabeth Bennet learns that “laughing at is cruel” and that she must “laugh with Darcy, which entails being laughted at BY him. For Austen, getting married ?Eor rather, falling in love ?Eis the conversion of laughing-at into laughing-with, since each lover, balacing the other, laughs equally at the other, and creates a new form of laughter, a kind of equal laughter.”

The combination of insight and maddening insanity in this analysis is typical of Wood’s work. On Pride and Prejudice , I couldn’t agree more, but to call Austen’s vision “secular” is absurd. And to think that the only form of “religious” comedy is a comedy of exposure shows how little Wood seems to have learned in his youth as a Christian. The comedy of the Christian vision is precisely the comedy of ABSOLUTE EXPOSURE joined to ABSOLUTE ACCEPTANCE. Auden’s comments on Christian comedy are much more accurate: Christian comedy exposes EVERYONE and yet offers (near) universal forgiveness. And, to suggest, as Wood does, that the comedy of forgiveness is the creation of the modern novel is a staggeringly ignorant reading of the Western tradition. Shakespeare is a key figure in any account of Western comedy, but it is hard to fathom how Wood can say he stands out as a “huge exception” to all that went before. Has he heard of Sir Gawain ? Of Chaucer?