Darkness We Carry

CHAPTER THREE: The (Tragi)Comic Vision

C H A P T E R zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQ Three The (Tragi)Comic Vision So the theatre has the task of expressing, symbolizing, and representing how, in the face of or the threat of extinction, one imagines human continuity. —Robert J. Lifton "Art and the Imagery of Extinction" zyxwvutsrqponm O UR instinctual feeling that comedy and the Holocaust are incompatible is appropriate but mistaken in light of the theatrical evidence at hand. Although it would be difficult to find a Holocaust play that could be called a comedy, it is easy to find plays on the Holocaust theme that use comic strategies to make their points, one of which surely is to help show the terror of the Holocaust. This kind of Holocaust drama may involve comic characters, structures, or viewpoints that, in the context of history, provoke startling and controversial responses ; a review of comic theory and of some of these plays shows why. It is by now commonplace to analyze comic form in terms of its tragic opposite, and critics frequently compare the two to better understand each of them. Most modern critics agree, however, that comedy can only appearzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCB after tragedy has been in evidence so as to present an alternative to the tragic vision or to comment upon it. "Comedy seems not only to follow tragedy," writes Walter Kerr, "but to derive from it,"1 by which he means that our dominant vision of life is serious, but that comedy is a "drag or reminder" that other perspectives on life are possible because the tragic perspective is, by itself, incomplete. This relationship of comedy as a dependent aspect of tragedy and often a 43 44 The (Tragi)Comic Vision zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZY commentator on it, is relevant to one way in which comedy is used in Holocaust drama. Subscribing to even this contingent relationship requires a decision that not all playwrights can make: to see the Holocaust as tragic in the first place, providing material for tragic plays. I have noted elsewhere that many dramatists and critics reject tragedy as an artistic option because they cannot extract from the historical evidence any meaning that would allow the Holocaust experience to be transcended. From the murder of six million Jews no positive message can be discerned, they say, and to imply that one is possible is to impose a romantic and sentimental (and morally offensive) vision of an unredeemed and unredeemable event. To them, the Holocaust is the incontrovertible validation of our unheroic age, impossible to be enriched or ennobled, merely to be recorded with a maximum of respect for the victims and a minimum of authorial interference. Of course these writers, and others as well, reject a comic perspective on the Holocaust, too. However the Holocaust may exist in the minds of playwrights, it nevertheless exists in history as an irreparable, ineffaceable event. For playwrights who do engage the Holocaust experience, the pressure of history enforces an essential seriousness on the circumstances to be explained and the situations to be retold. All playwrights (and audiences) would agree that the most objectionable approach to the Holocaust in both a moral as well as aesthetic sense is the frivolous one, i.e., of viewing the events unseriously and of treating the victims disrespectfully. There is, however, no sure agreement as to what constitutes a frivolous treatment, and there is much disagreement among critics and audiences concerning plays whose incorporation of comic elements seems to show this attitude, whether or not the playwright intended to. The great absurdist playwright, Eugene Ionesco, about whom more will be said, may have summed up (and avoided) the issue best in his implied request for a less formal approach to drama: "It all comes to the same thing anyway; comic and tragic are merely two aspects of the same situation , and I have reached the stage when I find it hard to distinguish one from the other."2 Robert Corrigan has written about how "comedy is negative in its definition," i.e., operable only after tragedy defines the standards that comedy seeks to oppose. He has also spoken of how, in comedy, "death is never taken seriously or even considered as a serious threat."3 For obvious reasons, this viewpoint is impossible to sustain completely in dramas of the Holocaust, where death is everywhere and unavoidable . Thus, the appearance of comedy in Holocaust drama is often in- The (Tragi)Comic Vision 45 zyxwvutsrq trusive...