MetaThoughts

[larryhammer]

Life axioms: High school (or secondary school in general) is fundamentally weird. Survival means negotiating its artificial and distorted society. This negotiating/navigating is the basic matter of a comedy of manners. That it's a comedy, rather than tragedy, comes naturally from the weirdness. (Though of course, that last sentence is a pure handwaving. If, as Aristotle argues, that in a tragedy. the hero's virtues turn out to be her/his flaws (this is known as the dramatic irony), then it follows that in a comedy, the hero's flaws turn out to be her/his virtues. Either can arise from the same situation — indeed, many farces could have become tragedies but for the climax. But my Muse is antic, if not comic.)

Discuss.

ObFluffyLink: Cute, pastel procrastinations for surviving revisions.

---L.

Comments

[janni.livejournal.com]

Survival means negotiating its artificial and distorted society. This negotiating/navigating is the basic matter of a comedy of manners.

Though one can also survive by choosing not to negotiate said aritifician and distorted society.

[larryhammer]

I was thinking of stepping around it as being a type of navigation.

---L.

[janni.livejournal.com]

But there's a difference (to switch metaphors) between learning to play by a society's rules and deciding not to play at all.

[larryhammer]

I think there are two possibilities here. One is to opt out by the society's rules — thus small friendship circles with a defined place outside the heirarchy. The other is to refuse that clause.

---L.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Not sure friendship circles are opting out, seeing as they're so much a part of how high school works, for all that the members of each friendship circle feel like they're outsiders, not knowing about half the school is like them. The quest for popularity being not as universal as we think.

Not that I'm dissing friendship circles--they're how I survived high school. And one could write about a kid who feels like she's avoiding her society's rules that way, which in close enough a POV may be the same thing for all practical purposes.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

But sometimes one is not permitted not to play. I watched it happen, which is how I learned how to be invisible in groups as much as possible.

But to me a realistic treatment of that is a horror novel, not comedy of manners.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Being forced outside society's rules can be the stuff of horror, or it can be freeing. Or both at once.

(In second grade, having no friends was devastating. In seventh grade, it meant I didn't have to care what anyone wanted but myself.)

But yeah, once you've decided not to play, or are unequivocably told you cannot play, you're isn't in the realm of comedy of manners any more.

Which is part of the reason comedy of manners isn't the first thing I'm drawn to, as a reader or a writer. The intellectual part of me understands why, say, a Jane Austen character has to be quietly cutting while cultivating relationships so that she can build herself a life under the constraints she's subject to; the emotional part of me wants to tell said character to just ditch all those unpleasant people and go climb mountains or take up painting or some such.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

(In second grade, having no friends was devastating. In seventh grade, it meant I didn't have to care what anyone wanted but myself.)

But this supposes the comfort of being left alone, free to choose. At my high school, at least, a loner was a target for every single roving gang; when they weren't busy fighting each other, they all tormented anyone caught alone. This forced the loners together, even if they disliked one another, had nothing else in common but survival. I wrote a novel about all this when I was in high school, and even though there were funny things, I considered it then, and consider it now, a novel of warfare. It was not in any sense comedy of manners, which (in my view at least) can promise a happy ending to the subversive element, or at least a triumphant one.

The intellectual part of me understands why, say, a Jane Austen character has to be quietly cutting while cultivating relationships so that she can build herself a life under the constraints she's subject to... Where? At least to my readerly eye, she never holds this kind of behavior up as a good example. Such characters mostly get what they deserve; she consistently upholds principal, kindness, the notion of service to one's fellow-being, and genuine attachment, though she keeps her skirts strictly away from any hint of sentiment.

[larryhammer]

It can be horror, yes. But it can also be comedy of manners, because it's about the rules.

---L.

A pretty good LJ

[tabouli.livejournal.com]

I think I might Friend this guy called Larry. I might even give him another axiom on tragedy and comedy:

"Life is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel."

Re: A pretty good LJ

[larryhammer]

Yes, but what about those of us who feel it's a comedy?

---L.