Aphra Behn, No. 6

A Play on Genres

The generic distinctions between grotesque, tragic, pastoral and satiric discourses.  This discussion is based distantly on Northrop Frye’s structuralism and seasonal calendar of genres.  But, of course, I have long since moved beyond and away from his concepts.  These four categories are somewhat fluid, more dynamic than usually set out, and clash on the matter of how to control and keep intact the presence of contradictory elements.

Grotesque, sometimes referred to by Renaissance authors like Shakespeare as antic, the term seems to have arisen following excavations in Rome by popes seeking to restore and exploit ancient ruins; the characteristic of discovered sunken gardens near the Holy City were murals painted of intricate, interwoven patterns of vegetation, animals and some humanoid figures,  It was this intricate and mixed imagery, along with the half-hidden emplacement of the ancient and archaic features that gave a term for the sense of uncanny, wild and pagan works of art, so that what was like these grotto-like (grotesque) places seemed to open up Europeans eyes to the long-lost world of their ancestors, something still lurking heretofore mostly unrecognized, if not completely unseen, in the uncivilized zones of the Continent—in faraway mountain valleys, forests and politically isolated or contested areas—and in the reports appearing in travelers’, pilgrims’, merchants, explorers’ and conquerors’ books, and then eventually within the dark shadows of each individual’s mind, soul or dreams.  These ‘antique” visions were in many ways, too, like the festive processions, masquerades and plays performed in small villages, towns, courts and urban areas during carnival time. Such antics” could be taken, because of their constant threat of breaking into more normal, profane, controlled activities, as experiences of the insane and sacred—with sacred returning to its older etymological sense of what was sacra, split, juxtaposed, or superimposed of incompatible holy and demonic qualities.  In a general sense today, stripped of most of its archaic and carnival dimensions, the grotesque refers to the conjoining of unassimilable qualities.

Tragic elements derive from the archaic processions that began with ceremonial expulsion of uncomfortable, unwanted and designated characters—or surrogate creatures—to be sacrificed, killed in order to shed their blood and thus redeem the populace from the burden of filth and sin; in order for these victims to be most efficacious they would be treated as honorable and holy, their expulsion and destruction marking the intensity and depth of loss the community demonstrated to placate the supernatural forces causing such harm, pain and humiliation.  Sfter the sacrificial shedding of blood, all participants would then share in the meal prepared, sometimes wholly given up to the gods in a holocaust, sometimes divided in a communion-meal wherein the divine offering was of the smoke of fat and bones, the mortals taking and sharing the flesh, while the skin might be donned as memorial restoration of the creatures sacrificed.  The act having served its temporary purpose of relieving the populace of its bad feelings, the procession returns home in joyful celebration, the victims who had been at once vilified—the community’s collective sins, dirt and hatred invested in their bodies-and worshiped as chosen gifts and emissaries whose passage through death and into the realm of the holy by transformation into smoke or into the digestive system of the body politic—now are brought home in some disguised format, as well as in the dance-song orchestration of the comos, or comedic procession.  Tragic therefore came to be the enactment or recitation of events, characters and themes appropriate to the mysterious (sacred) conjoining of the vilified victims whose death makes them recognizable as heroic, saintly and godlike beings.  Such heroes stand up against the forces that seem on the point of annihilating the populace and in their refusal to accede or compromise madly, foolishly or selflessly affirm the right of the group to be purged, reinvested with glory and returned to ordinary peaceful pursuits.  The comic elements are separated into separate performances, leaving tragedy as the site of loss—death through sacrifice (including suicidal acts), expulsion (or self-imposed exile) or some kind of magical disappearance (apotheosis or occlusion).  Tragic persons, places, objects, actions and meanings therefore are those which build up the grotesque contradictions of the festival, climax in the despair and exaltation of the loss, and leave unresolved the significance of the moment of absence or disappearance of the hero.

Pastoral, taken as a mode of comedy, is a form of activity and a place of controlled isolation for the kinds of characters whose loss from the community remains always ambiguous.  Though defined by its setting among shepherds and their flocks, supposedly peaceful and free from the serious historical problems of the city, the court and the world that needs the cleansing sacrifices of tragedy, swains and nymphs frolic in their small feelings about love, jealousy, rivalry, and need to protect their sheep from wolves and other small predators, storms and periods of drought.  Yet because many of the inhabitants of this pastoral landscape are refugees or exiles from the places of confusion, humiliation and ambitious rancor, they retell and thus relive their ordeals and humiliations, read into the simple activities of the local people the deeper significations of their own previous lives.  A set of variations on the shepherding life of the pastoral is found in those poems of more complex rural activities, the bucolic and the georgian, that is, the people and labors of herders and of crop-farmers; and because these last two modes of activity and life require more settled types of governance, control and class-structure, they slide easily into what Horace called “the mean estate”, the place where urban and court people take temporary retirement, to live off the produce of, while governing the relationships and overseeing the agricultural actions of the peasantry: this enclosure of moderation requires sufficient wealth, status and maturity to remain protected both from the long-grasp of the city and the imperial powers and the natural flaws, weaknesses and ignorance of the local peasantry. A different set of variations, anterior and outside of the increasingly complex and therefore disguised slave-based systems of the bucolic and georgian genres, in the arcadian and the edenic.  Whereas Arcadia was an isolated, sometimes unreachable land—not the real geographical part of the southern Greek peninsula, but the hypostasized mythical landscape of a primary zone—in which undifferentiated and unsustainable mixed-creatures lived together in alternating or overlapping bouts of contention, fauns, satyrs, uneducated and uncivilized humans without useful occupations and subject to unruly passions was the more sheltered, garden or orchard, enclosed by walls, rivers or guardian creatures, in which primary human beings lived in a peaceful harmony with nature and themselves, not yet entered into history and devoid of the need for government, occupations or culture. In Arcadia, the unruly and irregular elements of life remain unimpeded by the themes and activities of civilization. and the passions race about freely, colliding often, and not yet subject to the forces of either permanence or change, the inhabitants of Eden are grotesque only to the extent that they are naïve, innocent and unaware of the powerful contradictions always at the point of breaking out of themselves or breaking in from the outside, so that this paradise—on earth or in heaven—can be seen from without as a fool’s dream or a form of sacred madness.

Satiric comes from satire as satura, an overstuffed, supersaturated container of mixed ingredients that, like a pot of stew that boils over or sizzled sausage that explodes, on other words, a mismatched, incongruous and seething mass of tones, topics and activities; sometimes a parody, wherein the hodge-podge on the inside bursts through the apparent seemliness of the generic covering.  During the Renaissance, critics misconstrued the relationship of satura to satyr, thus bringing into play the images and acts of sexuality, gluttony and subversive politics.  Now whereas in tragedy the uncoordinated clash of cultural motifs leads to the death, exile or disappearance of the offending persons, so as to leave in the wake of their collision an inconsolable grief and sense of emptiness, at the same time as there is an appreciation for the sacrifice made, however foolish or ecstatic, in satire the explosive bursting apart of normal distinctions, boundaries and categories leaves an exposure of the folly, duplicity, hypocrisy and malice of the offenders, the resulting laughter—rather than sorrow and admiration—seeks to purge away the pains and humiliations of established and institutionalized society.  Moreover, whereas pastoral games and comedic celebrations balance out loss with gain, disorder with controlled containment, the satire keeps boiling, seething and sizzling, until the very idea of order, containment and closure overtakes the desire for control and balance.

Again, these terms and concepts derive from Classical and Christian literatures, although it is possible to find them useful in discussing Jewish literature.  More importantly, it helps us approach the kind of Marrano or Crypto-Jewish texts created by Aphra Behn.  But before that, we need to examine some rabbinical concepts as models of interpretation.