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English 478A: Comedy and Cruelty - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Twelfth Night plays with class and gender in two different ways:
        
        Viola, during the course of the play, dresses up in disguise as Sebastian. Her character bends the boundaries of the idea of a character with a stable gender in the play, as she spends time in both roles and perceived as such.
        
        The trickery of Malvolio by the other servants in the play could be viewed as an issue of class. Malvolio is a servant that is "higher up" in the class hierarchy than Maria, for example. Maria's trick on Malvolio, who the other servants find annoying and condescending, involves locking Malvolio away into a room and trying to convince him he is crazy. It is a cruel trick rooted in jealousy about class and hierarchy.
    - - Class is central to one of the stories within Pantagruel. In one chapter, Pantagruel encounters a man, who says he's from Paris, speaking a language Pantagruel does not understand, with enhanced and unnecessary vocabulary. At first, Pantagruel thinks he is talking nonsense, but then it is revealed that the man is a student from Paris, and he is originally from Limousin, a rural town. The student is pretending to be someonne else, and it punished by it in the end.
        
        Pantagruel says: “What is this idiot talking about? I suspect he’s weaving some diabolical language, trying to enchant us with an evil spell. [...] Ha: I understand perfectly,” said Pantagruel. “You’re a Limousin through and through, and here you are pretending to be a Parisian. Come here and I’ll whip that out of you!” (149). In other words, class mobility (specifically upward mobility) is punished.
    - - Marie De Gournay, in this essay, highlights the contradictions of men who critique her work as a writer. She argues that their critiques are rooted in misogyny, but at the same time, pays no mind to their actual critique by making fun of them.
    - - The narrator of this poem critiques the woman of his interest about her "coyness," or shyness, saying that "had we but world enough and time, this coyness, lady, were no crime." It is a "carpe diem" type poem about this woman's hesitancy to get involved with the narrator. It provides a perspective into gender relations, since it is the man who is pursuing the woman.
    - - Emma centers on a upper-class woman named Emma, who likes to meddle with other peoples' lives by playing a matchmaker. Emma, through her position, is allowed to control and meddle with the lives of other people. The only person who critiques her, or sees through it, is Mr. Knightley: "Mr. Knightley might quarrel with her, but Emma could not quarrel with herself. He was so much displeased, that it was longer than usual before he came to Hartfield again; and when they did meet, his grave looks shewed that she was not forgiven. She was sorry, but she could not repent" (49).
- - - - This poem highlights the mundanity of suffering in human life. Auden writes, "About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood, Its human position: how it takes place, While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along." Suffering is something that happens every day, and in the mundane.
    - - The narrator of this poem speaks in a "carpe diem" manner to young, inexperienced "virgins," saying that "For having lost but once your prime,/You may forever tarry." The narrator argues that one should embrace life, otherwise you will pay ("tarry") or regret it. The narrator celebrates the mundane in life, saying none of it should be wasted.
    - - The narrator of the poem is trying to convince a woman to be with him by argue that the act is as mundane and meaningless as their two bloods mixed together within the body of a flea. The narrator says, "Mark but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is." He argues that that which she "denies" him is "little," it is meaningless. The flea is used as an example of this meaninglessness.
    - - Violence in this story is treated as a very mundane phenomenon; the main character is unfazed by it. In making the violent and the cruel mundane, the narrator gives it less power over him.
- - - - In the Palm Wine Drinkard, the main character of the story subverts many instances of violence, trickery, and harm. For example, when he is sent to be killed by the old man who sends him to Death's house, the narrator instead outsmarts Death when he tries to kill him, captures Death, and brings him to the old man, who is terrified. The narrator pays no mind to the violence he encounters in the novel, rather than be terrified or horrified, and in this way subverts the power that violence has over him. He subverts a method of control.
    - - Plato makes a note in this text that comedy often serves a different function or effect in different instances of power: “Among all those who are so foolish as to have this false impression about themselves, some must have power and strength, others the opposite [...] then you must divide them by [...] those whose ignorance is accompanied by weakness and the inability to retaliate if laughed at, [...] [and] those who are powerful and able to retaliate” (34).
        
        Furthermore, “ignorance by the powerful [...] is hostile and disgraceful, since it harms others; but weak ignorance is naturally classed as something ridiculous” (34).
    - - To Be or Not to Be centers around a Polish theatre group during the occupation of Warsaw by the Nazis in the 1940s. In the film, the main characters outsmart and play tricks on the Nazis, as they impersonate various Nazi party members. Instead of being horrified, the characters give less power to the Nazis by treating their presence as a comedic opportunity, rather than a horrific situation. The characters subvert Nazi domination.
    - - Clueless is about Cher, a rich girl who embraces new student Tai and intends to give her a transformation as a good deed. Through the lens of gender and class, this movie is, from one perspective, about hierarchy. Tai’s as a character functions as an extension to Cher’s character; Cher helps Tai as a sort of vanity project, existing to make herself feel good. Tai eventually becomes her own autonomous character, so much so that Cher is offended when Tai becomes her own person and stands up to her.
- - - - Montaigne highlights the contradictions of comedy and human life in this essay. He says there exists two different perspectives on life, Democritus, “finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face," and Heraclitus, “having pity and compassion on this same condition of our, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears” (220). Furthermore, he argues that both exist at the same time: “pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless” (221). These two emotions should contradict, but both often exist at the same time.
    - - Rabelais, in the introduction to Gargantua, jokingly starts the novel with a warning: “may you be burned in a living fire of sulfur, like Sodom and Gomorrah, dropped deep in the bottomless pit, if you don’t devoutly believe everything I tell you in this chronicle!” (135). Meanwhile, the rest of the book contains exaggerated and unrealistic story elements; the story is clearly, in some parts, false, and Rabelais knows this. He is contradicting his seeming investment in the story, and warning those that don't believe it shall suffer, for comedic effect.
    - - In this poem, the narrator critiques the woman of his interest by saying that she's going to take back everything she said she felt for him; he argues that women are inconsistent. The narrator says, "wilt thou then antedate some new-made vow/Or say that now/We are not just those persons which we were?" In other words, he worries that she is going to change her mind about him later. He argues that she is going to be inconsistent, contradictory, and/or a hypocrite.
    - - The speaker of this poem finds pleasure in things that should be considered "disorder[ed]" or uncivil. He writes, "I see a wild civility," a phrase that should be an oxymoron, but instead highlights the subtle and contradicting elements of a person. He is enchanted by those contradictions and seeming messiness, saying that they “do more bewitch me, than when art/Is too precise inn every part." He enjoys humanness over perfection, though the latter is more encouraged.
    - - The Merchant of Venice elucidates the contradiction of anti-semitic Venetian merchants. Shylock, a Jewish man who offers a loan in exchange for a pound of flesh if the loan is not paid back, is put on trial for the cruelty of his offer. Shylock calls these people hypocrites, saying "“What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong? You have among you many a purchased slave, Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules, You use in abject and in slavish parts” (147).
    - - In this poem, the speaker contradicts himself. He says that if someone reads a single piece by him and dislikes it, then that person is allowed to think that it is his worst piece, or, in his words: "If thou dislik’st the piece thou light’st on first, Think that of all that I have writ the worst." But, if someone reads his whole book, and still dislikes it, then he wishes them the worst: But if thou read’st my book unto the end, And still dost this and that verse reprehend, [...] The extreme scab take thee and thine, for me." In other words, he accepts critique, but only in limited amounts, which is contradictory for someone who says that they accept critique.
    - - In this poem, the speaker describes an encounter between two lovers underneath a tree. The narrator is both descriptive and vague about their encounter, giving details but also leaving some up to the imagination, sayin "A many Kisses he did give, And I return’d the same, Which made me willing to receive, That which I dare not name." She names some aspects of the encounter, like the "Kisses," but leaves out others, like those "which [she] dare not name." The narrator contradicts herself within this, which adds to the elusive yet definitively imagined aspects of the poem.
    - - Baudelaire writes that “if we are willing to adopt the orthodox standpoint, it is certain that human laughter is intimately connected with the accident of an ancient fall, of a physical and moral degradation” (202). In other words, though laughter is joyous, we often laugh because we are fearful, uncomfortable. Baudelaire highlights the contradictions of laughter in this passage.
    - - In this fragment, Aristotle writes that comedy, though it is equally present as tragedy, was not as well-documented as tragedy, because it was taken less seriously at its start, even though both contain elements of each ("the ridiculous consists of baseness which causes no pain and is not destructive" (37)). This passage is yet another text that highlights the contradiction of defining things in terms of either comedy or tragedy; often they are interwoven in each other.
    - - Montaigne writes that “just as in our body they say there is an assemblage of diverse humors, of which that one is master which most ordinarily rules within us, according to our constitution; so in our soul, though various impulses stir it, there must be one that remains master of the field” (173). In other words, Montaigne says that it is possible to contradict yourself, to feel multiple things at the same time. Thus, we often laugh and cry at the same thing.