On the whole I do feel that comedy is the only form left. The reason why comedy looks so odd is that tragedy doesn't exist any more, it doesn't resonate - no one's going to believe in it any more. So comedy is having to take on all the real ills, the refugees from other genres. The original butts of comedy used to be buffoonery, pretension, pedantry, but now they have to include murder and child abuse, the decay of society. Dickens, a comic writer of another age, dealt with his villains by either tritely punishing them or improbably converting them. But the old schema no longer work. We know that evil isn't necessarily punished any more than good is necessarily rewarded. I think now we can deal with iniquity only be sneering and laughing it off the stage. It's all you can do because you know that in real life it's not going to be converted or punished, it will go on. There's a lovely bit of Nabokov in one of his lectures where he said: You do no punish the criminal in his armchair by having a conspirator tiptoe up behind him with a pistol; you punish him by watching that little finger of his probing in a profitable nostril. You watch him picking his nose, that's how you get your own back as a writer. You use ridicule, not an obsolete machinery of punishment and conversion because that just doesn't convince any more.
- Martin Amis, in conversation with Eleanor Wachtel. As published in More Writers & Company: New Conversations with CBC Radio's Eleanor Wachtel.
No comments:
Post a Comment