8
Perhaps one of the most poignant means of inducing discomposure in an audience is by tampering with a story’s climax and finale, a deliberate ruffling of a work’s dénouement that we might jestingly designate as creating “the senselessness of an ending.”1 Since so many other disruptions have become normative, the desecration of conventional closings seems perfectly in order.
Ted Hughes created a terse and stark version of Seneca’s Oedipus in 1968, successfully produced that same year by Britain’s theatrical bad boy, Peter Brook. What is interesting is that Senecan theater has not been very popular since the Renaissance; it is a theater, like the Jacobean, of black moods, of bloodlust, of melancholy, of melodramatic despair and horror. The Senecan version of Oedipus is assuredly no hero in the Aristotelian sense; he appears to be a man worse than ourselves and one riddled by hesitancies, insecurities, passivity, and fitful self-doubt. The play is filled with morose black magical signs, prophecies, and portents of disaster, and a hapless Oedipus is merely swept along to his doom.2 However out of favor Seneca may have been for several centuries, times and tides and tastes change. The lurid theater of Büchner’s Woyzeck and of Strindberg, the excesses of Artaud and Jarry, and the new climate in our century heralding black humor and theater of the absurd have rendered Seneca altogether feasible—and even palatable.
But Hughes and Brook go one step further than merely revitalizing and refurbishing the lurid Senecan muse. Perhaps the most striking innovation they contribute is introduced at play’s end: “The CHORUS celebrate the departure of OEDIPUS with a dance.”3 After the blinded and demolished Oedipus has been led away like a cripple, the members of the chorus suddenly let out a huzzah of jubilation and, accompanied by music and dancing, parade in masks, laughing in the theater aisles: “A large gilded phallus was carried like a totem pole down the aisle by choristers singing Yes! We Have No Bananas.”4 The tragic mood of balance and restraint, the hushed dismay of pained and reflective awe that besets an audience at the close of tragedy and even of disaster-melodrama is here rudely disbursed, and satyrlike raucous hooting and cavorting take their place.
Initially, this appendage to tragedy might seem uncalled for, disturbing, and out of place. But upon consideration, we must concede a certain suitability: for much of twentieth-century art obtains its raw power precisely by crossing the wires of comedy and tragedy and by crippling traditional decorum and Arnoldian “high seriousness” with injections of laughter, absurdity, sex, scatology, and panpiping mayhem.5
This is not to say that the deliberate violation of a genre’s tone and decorum is unheard-of in classical antiquity.6 Late Euripidean plays read more like comedy than tragedy; Aristophanic pieces often end ominously, threatening something worse than comic laughter, and the portion of the Satyricon that has come down to us shades off, toward the close, from picaresque and parodic high spirits into darker moods that accompany the newly introduced topic of cannibalism.7 Mortal and grinning grotesquerie was a regular feature of the arts in the Middle Ages. In the Renaissance, too, stemming from the mixture of the serious and the comic in early mystery plays, are Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Hamlet’s grim graveyard humor, and Jacobean drama’s scenes of slaughter. The romantics, also, cultivated a fondness for the demonic and the terrible.8
Particularly the modern era, however, deliberately and perhaps permanently intermixes comedy and tragedy. Especially is this true when a somber theme is suddenly trivialized and unaccountably lightened in a finale. A spurt of explosive laughter climaxes the key moments of Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” for example, and a sudden influx of ironically brilliant, dawning sunlight concludes Ibsen’s Ghosts. Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” similarly concludes with sunlight, picnicking, and the celebration of the sister’s physical vigor as she dances into healthy maturity after her brother’s demise. In the final mad scene in Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, after the horror of the mass riots, poor Tod Hackett goes lightheadedly insane; we last hear the idiot voice childishly mimicking a police siren. In like manner, Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café concludes with the grotesque and cross-eyed Miss Amelia Evans left a lonely recluse forever and the townspeople miserable and let down. Souls “rot” and peach trees “grow more crooked.” Then, at this moment of final wretchedness, the author proposes turning, as relief, to a chain gang three miles down the road for consolation: the twelve prisoners are never lonely, because they sing and are conveniently shackled together. On such a ludicrous note of “solace,” the story draws to a close.9
Almost equally disruptive is the finale of Tennessee Williams’s play Orpheus Descending. At the most painful and penultimate moment, Lady Torrance is gunned down in her home by her sick and malevolent husband, Jabe. Her last words constitute another, seemingly frivolous non sequitur: “The show is over. The monkey is dead.” Or consider Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, which concludes with the onset of an atomic Armageddon, yet accompanied by the cheerful whoops of the gung-ho Texan astride the first falling bomb as if at a gala upon a bronco (but he is riding backward). Pinter’s Birthday Party moves rapidly toward doomsday celebration despite the festivities and childish toys, and Gabriel García Márquez’s story “Big Mama’s Funeral” swiftly becomes a hilarious epiclike extravaganza of drunken festivities and surrealistic hoopla. And strikingly, Donald Barthelme’s tale “Views of My Father Weeping” is a “retrospective” of the son’s responses to his father’s suffering; a parody of a detective story in which the son, however reluctantly, is coerced by destiny, circumstances, and clues to plunge deeper and deeper into the routine “investigation” of and “revenge” for his father’s murder, it nonetheless becomes simultaneously more and more absurd, ending abruptly with a comic disruption: the tale is truncated by a mere “Etc.”10
Audiences are shocked at the close of Slawomir Mrozek’s drama Tango (1965), when the young idealistic hero is brutally slaughtered and the murderer and the boy’s uncle commence dancing to the music of “La Cumparsita” as the curtain falls. In fact, death and dying appear to be the appropriate topics for the violation of solemnity, as is illustrated by the finale of two recent satiric motion pictures. Blake Edwards’s S.O.B. (1981) concludes with director Felix Farmer’s funeral, an occasion for corpse-stealing and hilarious drunken orgy. Hal Ashby’s Being There (1980) ends at a solemn funeral of a millionaire, from which the moronic Peter Sellers character wanders away in a daze, dawdles among some trees and shrubs like Charlie Chaplin, and then proceeds, like Christ, nonchalantly to walk away upon the water.11
Such deliberate violations of seriousness in a work’s climax are, therefore, a striking and recurrent phenomenon of twentieth-century literature and constitute a kind of “literary openness” as R.M. Adams defines it: “A literary form . . . which includes a major unresolved conflict with the intent of displaying its unresolvedness.” Or, in Thomas Mann’s phrase, modern literature is most comfortable when confounding genres and tones, generating what he terms “the grotesque”; indeed, Mann predicted that the grotesque would grow to be the predominant mode in this century’s literature.12 He has been very largely right. Hence, the impish foolery of Ted Hughes and Peter Brook’s finale to the Senecan Oedipus can be understood as anything but an aberration. In the present chapter we will briefly consider some of the reasons for and the meaning of intrusive comic spurts that frequently invade ultimate scenes at austere moments and in supposedly grave and serious works.
In the present century, we continue to share with the romantics the custom of debunking traditional literary decorum. It is also a commonplace that we have retained the romantic author’s penchant for mocking the earlier Enlightenment’s ideal of rationalism; Freud’s ideas about the irrational psyche and the aggressiveness of humor, together with our experience of the brutal history of the twentieth century, have increased the degree and quantity of the nightmarish injected into our literature. After several generations, our response to science’s principles of indeterminacy and randomness and to the existentialists’ agonies over the absurd have become thoroughly domesticated. We virtually laugh now, however nervously, at ideas of fate and chance, disruptiveness and chaos. Then, too, the romantic’s quest for a unique and exalted self has been dissipated and largely dispatched by disillusionment, and therefore more than ever we have discredited ideas of the hero. As a result of these factors, we tend to renounce ideas of tragedy; our major mode becomes mocking, parodic.13 Unsurprisingly, therefore, our literature and other arts regularly intrude upon conventional seriousness with debunking laughter.
Perhaps no better concluding scene illustrates the intrusion of the comic/absurd upon potential tragedy than that devised by William Styron in The Long March (1952). Marine troops on maneuvers in the Carolinas are randomly ordered by their colonel on an overnight thirty-six-mile hike. The distance seems cruel and impossible to most of the officers, and before the ordeal the men have had little rest or sleep. Indeed, the setting for this hike is deliberately ominous; only the day before, several misfired mortar shells killed eight or more soldiers in a chow line, and death is made to seem hovering everywhere, militant, foreboding, and inevitable. The author’s language throughout suggests as much, darkly hinting that “the end was at hand.” Yet after a titanic struggle and after most of the troops have been allowed to drop out of the march as they falter and collapse, a remnant of the soldiers completes the hike. All our fearful expectations are anticlimatically disbursed and wafted away.
We have invested the greatest amount of our suspense in the figure of the rebellious Jewish captain, Mannix. He has all along thought the forced march a brutal exercise in sadism, but the colonel has especially designated his company as “soft,” and Captain Mannix is as furiously determined to complete the march with his men as if their lives depended upon it. The captain also bears a grave handicap; a nail in his boot early in the hike rapidly tears into his heel, and although the nail is subsequently removed, his hobbled foot soon swells at the ankle to the size of a small balloon. Still he perseveres and limps onward. We clearly expect the worst. And yet, although court-martialed for insubordination, Captain Mannix simply completes the hike. Not only has our sense of tragic extremity failed to be fulfilled, but also the ludicrous and the absurd intrude as we watch the captain painfully staggering and lurching along the last part of the march:
Mannix’s perpetual tread on his toe alone gave to his gait a ponderous, bobbing motion which resembles that of a man wretchedly spastic and paralyzed. It lent to his face too . . . an aspect of deep, almost prayerfully passionate concentration—eyes thrown skyward and lips fluttering feverishly in pain—so that if one did not know he was in agony one might imagine that he was a communicant in rapture, offering up breaths of hot desire to the heavens. It was impossible to imagine such a distorted face; it was the painted, suffering face of a clown, and the heaving gait was a grotesque and indecent parody of a hopeless cripple, with shoulders gyrating like a seesaw and with flapping, stricken arms.14
Our tragic appetite has been whetted, and the religious imagery is some sense suggests that the Jewish captain is near sainthood, possibly even fulfilling a version of the suffering Christ traveling along the Stations of the Cross. Yet all is scheduled for put-down: finally the flapping body seems ludicrous, the suffering parodic, and the martyr’s face suddenly metamorphoses into that of a clown. The book concludes on such a ludicrous note. Bumbling toward the shower room clad in a towel, the captain encounters a black maid in the halls. She empathizes with him: “Oh my, you poor man. What you been doin’? Do it hurt?” She answers her own question: “Oh, I bet it does. Deed it does.” Mannix exhaustedly drops his towel, and standing there in absurd birthday-suit nakedness, he can only repeat and mimic her dialect: “Deed it does.”15 They are the last three words in the tale, again tingeing the bitter with light comedy routine, suggestive of vaudeville blackface and travesty. Such comic disruptions do not, however, weaken this novel, dismantle its themes, or mitigate its impact—far from it. The reader is disturbed by the letdown, yet the suffering is not expelled; what the men have endured in a Marine camp is but an emblem of what all men suffer in the military—and even of what mankind suffers in a ruthless world. It is meaningless, ugly, enraging, and yet it is comedic.
A number of our practitioners and theoreticians in the twentieth century have called for large doses of extremities—pushing comedy toward disaster, smashing barriers between genres, preventing audiences from responding with a single complacent emotion or reaction. Hence, Artaud alleged: “Everything that acts is a cruelty. It is upon this idea of extreme action, pushed beyond all limits, that theater must be built.” Ionesco concurred: “The essence of the theatre lay in magnifying . . . effects . . . farce . . . parody . . . back to the unendurable. Everything raised to paroxysm, where the source of tragedy lies. A theatre of violence.”16 Indeed, a group of scholars recently sought to distinguish a modern genre, based upon pronouncements like the ones we have just recorded, that might be designated “savage comedy.”17 Still, we must make a distinction here. We are not concerned in this chapter with comedy that abruptly or by stages metamorphoses into savagery or cruelty, but rather with tragic and painful acts that are toward the close modified by comic touches, with impact offset and somehow modified by the ludicrous or the flippant. Styron’s work is not weakened by the final tapering off toward comedy. On the contrary, we are apt to believe that such fiction is psychologically right simply because reality seldom provides either humor or tragic suffering in undiluted form; all too often the two are—perhaps still more painfully and senselessly—intermixed.
Our age is somehow especially ripe for such ironic and multiple perceptions. After all, our civilization has long assembled and scrutinized its own history; we have witnessed eras of great hope and aspiration and equally terrible eras of squalor and defeat. We have come to expect the up-and-down wobble of historical events, and we are forced to confront such mechanical gyrations with more knowledgeability than we could ever have wished. All things, after all, that are incessant in their motion have a kind of humor as well as terror. Repetition pure and simple, from one point of view, is risible. And we dwell in such an era of jingles and repetitions. Even the vast interminable tortures of a Sisyphus rolling his stone, of the Danaïds eternally seeking to fill their perforated jugs, of Prometheus forever having his liver consumed by a predatory vulture—all these events once terrified the Greeks and tangibly constituted for them the idea of hell. Today such perennial motions are domesticated, perceived as “clockwork oranges,” as the commonplace and everyday ludicrous and absurd machinery of nonproduction. We perceive ourselves as inhabiting such a hell, and we grimly grin and attempt to bear it. According to Richard Pearce, many of our major fictions are fully tinged with vaudeville, and men are dramatized not only as clowns but as clowns who have elected their clownishness—the case, say, with Oskar in Grass’s Tin Drum, or with Macmann, Molloy, and the Unnameable in Beckett’s trilogy.18 Hence in our time the rachitic laughter continues. Nowhere is it better displayed than in the disquieting conclusion of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934), in which Tony Last, a country gentleman on an expedition in the South American wilds, becomes hopelessly lost in the immense jungle. There he is captured by a savage hermit and coerced—ever after—to read and reread aloud to his captor and interminable novels of Charles Dickens. It is hellish torment indeed—but one (as is so often the case nowadays) riddled with the senseless cacophony of laughter.