Many of you will be familiar with Homer. He is primarily known for two works, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, two parts of the epic nine part poetic cycle about the adventures and misfortunes of Greek soldiers during and after the Trojan war. Aristotle praised him as the greatest poet of all time, in a work called Poetika, a work so influential, it even continues to frame the structure of Hollywood movie scripts today. You know that whole three-act thing every film uses? Aristotle came up with that. Or rather Homer did with his play about incest and murder, Oedipus.
Aristotle believed that Oedipus was the greatest tragedy of all time, and based his theory of what tragedy even is, on the play. In this essay, he argues that tragic figures must be greater than us, larger than life, with great will and power, undone by flaws in their character which are evident to the audience from the first scene. This creates the necessity of the three-part structure; a set-up, which elaborates the characters and their flaws, powers desires and limitations, a middle, where events follow a logical sequence, and a climax where they reach their necessary conclusion. A modern version of an Aristotelian tragic figure would be Walter White’s – his hunger for respect and accomplishment is set up in the first episode, which leads first to the creation of a drug empire, and then to the destruction of all his freedoms, his family, his reputation and ultimately his life. The building of tension, towards a logical and emotionally wrought conclusion, gives us a cathartic moment, a release of emotion which elevates the audience to a deeper experience of their humanity. Supposedly. Audiences are still divided on Breaking Bad.
But Aristotle also wrote about comedy. This essay is lost, leaving only a couple of remarks to tell us about it.
Poetry now diverged in two directions, […] The graver spirits imitated noble actions, and the actions of [great] men. The more trivial sort imitated the actions of [more average] persons, at first composing satires, as the former did hymns to the gods and the praises of famous men. A poem of the satirical kind cannot indeed be put down to any author earlier than Homer; […]he too first laid down the main lines of comedy, by dramatizing the ludicrous instead of writing personal satire. His Margites bears the same relation to comedy that the Iliad and Odyssey do to tragedy.
Like Aristotle’s essay on comedy, and seven of the nine epics of the Homeric cycle, Margites is lost. What was this Margites about? What did Aristotle mean by “high comedy”? Perhaps there are enough breadcrumbs to figure it out, if we squint. Only a couple of fragments survive to tell us anything about the title character, collated by Greek scholar ML West. They reveal a portrait of a man so stupid and feckless his name was used as an insult for hundreds of years.
Some old man, a divine singer, came to Kolophon,
An assistant of the Muses and Apollo
Holding a sweet-singing lyre in his dear hands.
The gods didn’t make him an excavator or a ploughman
Nor wise in anything at all:
he screwed up every kind of craft:
He knew many deeds, but he knew all of them badly.
His name means raving mad or lustful – essentially, poor impulse control. This was an extremely lucky idiot, a manchild who failed upwards through life, encountering wild fortunes and adventures despite, or because of his complete ineptitude. The primary subject of ridicule was his ignorance of human sexuality. He didn’t know which parent gave birth to him, and refused to consummate his marriage, out of fear of his mother’s potential judgment, until his bride convinced him she had a scorpion sting on her vagina which could only be cured by a vigorous phallic drubbing. The only other sketch which survives is one referring to him getting his cock stuck in the neck of a chamber pot. The Greeks tended to think big dicks were stupid and comical rather than impressive or intimidating. In the end, Margites is supposed to have become a king by virtue of his happy accidents, and thus became the perfect insult for Alexander by his detractors like Demosthenes. The image of a lucky idiot failing upwards by virtue of his obscene incompetence, is only too tempting a narrative for people to fall for.
So, if high tragedy is about great characters brought low by their hubris, and comedy is about low characters brought high by the unintended consequences of their mistakes, who would be our modern day Margites? I have three candidates. First, Homer Simpson. Now, I don’t think I need to explain Homer to you. Aside from the coincidence of the name, Homer is a raving mad, distracted glutton with no awareness of even basic human biology. But as for high comedy, he has his ridiculous good fortune. Nothing illustrates this quite like this scene:
Second, Harry Flashman. Flashman is a low, cowardly liar, rapist, racist, sexist war criminal, and began life as a drunken school bully in Tom Brown’s School Days. His only skills are horseriding, languages and seduction, but they are enough for him to fail upward through the ranks of the British army and acquire a great reputation for heroism and gallantry despite doing nothing more than running away. He survives the Retreat from Kabul by passing out, and headed the charge of the light brigade in the battle of Crimea by having such bad dysentery that his farting scared his horse into the charge. He betrays every friend he makes, and cheats every deal. He lives to a ripe old age, after participating in almost every war crime in the British Colonial expansion, and leaves the novels behind as his memoirs.
But perhaps the finest fit is Forrest Gump. From his lowly beginnings as a mentally retarded inbred country hick, he inspires Elvis, becomes a war hero, feels the love of a beautiful woman, gains massive wealth and fortune and solid friendship, becomes an international sport star, and in the books even becomes an astronaut. All of this, despite being at least slightly mentally retarded, and being shot in the arse for comic relief. The story even ends with him raising a bright and healthy son. As if to tie the whole bundle together, the film is bookended by a feather on the wind, symbolising an unconscious subject carried high by the winds of chance.
What manages to tie Forrest Gump together is an interesting twist on one of the only surviving lines of Margites.
The fox knows many a wile,
but the hedgehog’s one trick can beat them all.
If Margites is the hedgehog, a jack of all trades and master of none, his competition may well be the hedgehog. But Forrest Gump seems to be the two rolled into one. His story is told with pathos, which the first two examples do not quite match (at least, not often after season 8 of the Simpsons anyway). It is run through with a single powerful cord which binds every moment of heartache and good fortune, every stupid, ridiculous error of unfeigned honesty and compassion, and that is a true, deep and innocent expression of love. Almost every virtue can stem from love if you tease out its meaning, even courage comes from the French word for heart. As Gump himself puts it,
“I’m not a smart man, but I know what love is.”
That is where Hollywood and Homer differ – comedies can be more than just jokes.
The Eccentric Flock 