Author goes off into self-imposed exile
Paul Wiebe grew up in the Idaho Outback. Very early he found that the life of irrigating spuds, driving trucks, repairing fences, digging ditches, and chasing deranged steers across the open range was quickly losing its fascination.
This discovery led him to the halls of higher education: Bethel College (Kansas) and The University of Chicago, which eventually gave him a Ph.D. and sent him away to Wichita State University. There he taught comparative religion and literature and performed the duties of his chosen profession: translating and writing books, composing footnotes for journal articles, and arriving late at the meetings of those committees of which he could remember being a member.
But his mastery of the academic proprieties was never solid. Thus it came as no surprise to his colleagues when he resigned his tenured position and, in an attempt to recapture a vanishing sanity, took to writing comic novels.
Wiebe now lives in Colorado with his wife and a bevy of pet mockingbirds.
The Komos Credo
The author’s credo can be summed up in three quotations.
It’s a tough business, making serious people laugh.
Molière knew whereof he spoke. He spent a career in the tough stage business, as a playwright, actor, and founder of a traveling company of players that eventually became Le Troupe du Roi – the King’s Players, grandfather of the Comédie Française. In order to rise to this position, he must have learned how to make the right people laugh.
But “serious people”? There’s a word for them, but it’s used so rarely that even an out-of-date Webster’sdoesn’t list it. You have to apply a magnifying glass to The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary to find it. “Agelast: one who never laughs.” John Calvin is the standard example; but his spirit lives on today in writers such as George Will and the late Christopher Hitchens.
This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.
No translation necessary. This is straight from the quill of a long-forgotten eighteenth-century Englishman, Horace Walpole, in a letter to an even-more-forgotten countess.
Whatever else was in that letter – and we can be forgiven for wondering – Walpole had this part right. Tragedy (stage, fiction, or cinema) goes for our feelings. Comedy asks us to take leave of our emotions and create an intellectual distance from the characters and their actions. If we laugh at a tragic hero or heroine during a fine performance, we invite frowns. And if we expect to “identify with” a comic character, why shouldn’t we be regarded as dolts?
Which of the two is superior? Walpole doesn’t tell us. The truth is that we both think and feel. Of course both comedy and tragedy can easily fail. When comedy misses the mark, it becomes silly. When tragedy (or, as it now called, drama) falls through, it degenerates into sentimentality.
And if I laugh at any mortal thing, / ’Tis that I may not weep.
Another Englishman, Lord Byron. But he plagiarized these lines from a Frenchman, Beaumarchais. They lose nothing in the translation.
They also need little explanation.
The “mortal things” to which Byron refers are life’s incongruities. To laugh at them means to accept, even celebrate, them. To keep our tears in check is to recognize that life is incompatible with our false hopes and excessive expectations.
This amounts to saying that comedy is a road to salvation. It is therefore a way of being serious, but not solemn.
So maybe Molière wasn’t foolish to spend a career in the difficult business of making serious people, including the critics, laugh.
It’s also said he spent his career trying to show that comedy, if it not superior to tragedy, is at least its equal.
This discovery led him to the halls of higher education: Bethel College (Kansas) and The University of Chicago, which eventually gave him a Ph.D. and sent him away to Wichita State University. There he taught comparative religion and literature and performed the duties of his chosen profession: translating and writing books, composing footnotes for journal articles, and arriving late at the meetings of those committees of which he could remember being a member.
But his mastery of the academic proprieties was never solid. Thus it came as no surprise to his colleagues when he resigned his tenured position and, in an attempt to recapture a vanishing sanity, took to writing comic novels.
Wiebe now lives in Colorado with his wife and a bevy of pet mockingbirds.
The Komos Credo
The author’s credo can be summed up in three quotations.
It’s a tough business, making serious people laugh.
Molière knew whereof he spoke. He spent a career in the tough stage business, as a playwright, actor, and founder of a traveling company of players that eventually became Le Troupe du Roi – the King’s Players, grandfather of the Comédie Française. In order to rise to this position, he must have learned how to make the right people laugh.
But “serious people”? There’s a word for them, but it’s used so rarely that even an out-of-date Webster’sdoesn’t list it. You have to apply a magnifying glass to The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary to find it. “Agelast: one who never laughs.” John Calvin is the standard example; but his spirit lives on today in writers such as George Will and the late Christopher Hitchens.
This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.
No translation necessary. This is straight from the quill of a long-forgotten eighteenth-century Englishman, Horace Walpole, in a letter to an even-more-forgotten countess.
Whatever else was in that letter – and we can be forgiven for wondering – Walpole had this part right. Tragedy (stage, fiction, or cinema) goes for our feelings. Comedy asks us to take leave of our emotions and create an intellectual distance from the characters and their actions. If we laugh at a tragic hero or heroine during a fine performance, we invite frowns. And if we expect to “identify with” a comic character, why shouldn’t we be regarded as dolts?
Which of the two is superior? Walpole doesn’t tell us. The truth is that we both think and feel. Of course both comedy and tragedy can easily fail. When comedy misses the mark, it becomes silly. When tragedy (or, as it now called, drama) falls through, it degenerates into sentimentality.
And if I laugh at any mortal thing, / ’Tis that I may not weep.
Another Englishman, Lord Byron. But he plagiarized these lines from a Frenchman, Beaumarchais. They lose nothing in the translation.
They also need little explanation.
The “mortal things” to which Byron refers are life’s incongruities. To laugh at them means to accept, even celebrate, them. To keep our tears in check is to recognize that life is incompatible with our false hopes and excessive expectations.
This amounts to saying that comedy is a road to salvation. It is therefore a way of being serious, but not solemn.
So maybe Molière wasn’t foolish to spend a career in the difficult business of making serious people, including the critics, laugh.
It’s also said he spent his career trying to show that comedy, if it not superior to tragedy, is at least its equal.
