Some Comic and Tragicomic Subjects

Abstract

This chapter seeks to define the generic issue implicit in my concentration thus far on tragedies and explicit in the emergence of aphanitic subjectivity as tragically coded. I also want to caution against turning a discursive effect into a marker of ‘psychological complexity’ or ‘realism’. A shift of generic perspective may usefully refocus the discourses of subjectivity as such, paradoxically by siting them at the crossroads of two basic formalist precepts regarding plot and characterization. These are the principles (to put them reductively) that tragedy kills off its main characters, while comedy does not, and that comedy, unlike tragedy, subordinates character-psychology to social pattern, the individual to the group.