Thursday, August 6, 2009
The Dialectic of Romantic Comedy
An example of how the dialectic between freedom and necessity influences all the most important aspects of our psychic lives: We want to believe two contradictory things about love, that it is destiny to fall in love with the people we fall in love with, and that we have chosen them. Our love affairs have to be both the result of destiny and of a choice freely made. This is why romantic comedies always have a two-part structure. Boy meets girl; boy falls in love with girl—that’s FATE. Boy loses girl; boy struggles to get girl back—that’s FREE WILL—there is always a moment of decision for the boy: should he mope about feeling sorry for himself for having lost the girl of his dreams, or should he run after her and through some feat of daring win her back? Of course, he gets her back in the end and she, in turn, forgives him. Thus fate and free will end up happily married.
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Does this mean that fate and free will end up unhappily divorced in tragedy? In the first part, fate deprives Oedipus of everything he held dear; and then, in the second part, free will leaves Oedipus...bereft of everything he held dear?
ReplyDeleteHey Chris,
ReplyDeleteI would say that tragedy tackles the same problem, but in an entirely different arena. Love stories tackle the dialectic of freedom and necessity in the realm of the amatory, while tragedy tackles it in the ethical and judicial realms. I have a very particular theory about tragedy, that it always asks the question, how do we hold people accountable for actions that may very well be determined, whether by fate (Oedipus), custom (Antigone), or what have you? Every tragedy depicts an action that is at once both determined and the result of a choice freely made (Oedipus is destined to kill his father, but he also does so of his own free will). Afterwards, almost every tragedy turns into some sort of trial, either implicitly or explicitly-- is this character guilty, even though the crime he committed was necessary and determined? Different tragedies come up with different answers: Orestes is let off the hook on a technicality. Oedipus pleads guilty and puts out his own eyes. Afterwards, at Colonus, Oedipus is vindicated and allowed to ascend to the heavens, while Philoctetes, facing a similar situation (punished for a crime he committed out of ignorance), is told to get over it and move on with his life.
You can see why this would be a problem a society would want to work through. For us, psychology (and more and more neuroscience as well) is a form of determinism. In our own trials we ask how responsible a person is for their actions when those actions are a result of their psychological drives and neuroses (although Euripides might have anticipated the "temporary insanity" plea in the Bacchae...).