Comedy, Tragedy, Rage, and Joy

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. -- Ernest Hemingway

It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one. -- David Foster Wallace

This gold image is called: "The Three Faces of Life: Comedy, Tragedy, and Rage." I am accustomed to seeing the masks of Comedy and Tragedy on playbills, theater programs, and drama anthologies. Usually the faces point this way and that rather than right at the viewer, but I keep staring at this one with its hybrid face of rage staring right back at me. The Comedy mask includes the smile, and the Tragedy mask provides the frown, but the center mask for rage leaves the actor's mouth exposed. An eye from comedy, and eye from tragedy, and blankness where the human mouth must be screaming in rage. Yes. But is that the point? I keep gazing at Rage because I am not sure. Maybe comedy and tragedy are not art so much as artifice, and primal rage is truth. But on the other hand, maybe the face of Rage is the artist, who glares at life with one eye focused through comedy and the other through tragedy. The mouth has no expression at all, perhaps, except as presented through tragic or comic art, or more simply, through language. Rage itself has no voice but what the artist can provide.

I wonder if this vision approximates how some writers approach their work, writers who are sometimes described as Tortured Artists. I recently tuned into an argument being carried on another Blogger channel, Universal Acid. In "This Page is My War Zone," Ryan Amfahr Longhorn collars Sean Platt of Collective Inkwell and berates him for his sneering treatment of "The Tortured Writer." Sean explains that he was so alarmed about the agony purportedly experienced by writers that his fear "kept me from spilling ink at least two decades too long." But now, he notes happily, "I never allow the sun to set without the jotted thoughts of my day, for the best moments of each earthly orbit should never be abandoned." Sean is the smiley face of contemporary writing; he has neither a comic nor a tragic vision, but is practical and commercial. That's fine for Sean, but I am puzzled at his hostility. Why not consider the possibility that different writers experience their lives in different ways? Just because Sean finds writing fun and profitable and suffers angst only when the cash flow runs thin (see the comment stream following his post), it does not follow that authors who pursue their art with gut wrenching passion and intensity are phony, self indulgent masochists. Art, did I say? Sean does not use that word.


Ryan could not be a stronger contrast to sunny Sean. For one thing, Ryan keeps handing out free advice -- I've even seen him offer to read an unknown correspondent's fiction, whereas Sean would ask that aspiring writer for up to $750, depending on word count. No wonder Sean does not want young writers discouraged by accounts of discomfort at the keyboard. When you sell a product, you want a maximum number of potential consumers.


Of course there are poseurs who wear the tragic mask but never actually dive into the wreck, but Sean doesn't introduce us to any. Nor does he directly mock Sylvia Plath or Ernest Hemingway or David Foster Wallace or Virginia Woolf -- extraordinary artists who lost their lives to depression.

Sean says he is talking to "the classic inebriated writer, wasting away as they eek through insurmountable emotional agony and too many adverbs. Sure writing is difficult, but so is driving a car or walking a dog… when you’re drunk." Is that so? I will NOT, I promise I WILL not, stoop to grammar sniping here by pointing out the error in his sentence. But I WILL fault Sean for failing to make an argument that goes past scatter shot insult and conceited assumptions: his blog drips in scorn but is dry of evidence. Where we might expect examples, we get self promotion.

But Ryan offers himself as an example. He says, yeah, I'm one of those arrogant tortured writers Sean complains about: "I think the level of endured psychological torture varies from writer to writer, I'll concede that. But, for someone to even identify as a writer there has to be a certain imbalance in there somewhere." Sean says that if writing is not fun it may not be for you. Ryan says:

Once, writing was fun. Then, I went way down deep and saw the hell burning at the core of my being and I cannot do anything else that comes close to satisfying the self-actualizing urge to reveal, over the course of whatever ends up being my lifetime, exactly what I saw and felt and smelled and tasted and heard down there.

There's the rage, see it? There's the tortured writer right there. And here's another who blogs under the name of Annie Mac:

this. is. necessary.

i am writing this which, i promise, is shit, so that i might not take out my extra-ordinary McRage on parties who shall remain unnamed. My Daddy is sick again; he is - was? i don't know if he still is in the hospital or not because i'm so disconnected from - never mind. . . . despite what's been "diagnosed" thus far, you never know what's to come with him, what's hiding, and i don't trust the sources providing my long-distance clues. this is my blog; my writing; my words; my goddamn truth.

the truth.

And from another of Annie's pieces, "The Glamorous Life of a Writer!":

Honestly, I'm tired. That's the stupidest thing I have ever said. No, that is. But "I'm tired" is one of the greatest understatements of my life. This waking up at 5 am, writing until 2 or 3 pm, drinking mad quantities of coffee throughout the hours - then the exhaustion, like a...it's like some purple-black F5 tornado-tidal-wave of sleepless 3 am and that makes no sense - I know - but that's what it is - comes up over the back of the couch in the middle of the afternoon and just wallops me, bashes me over the head and it's...it's fucking ausgespielt, is what it is. I'm out. But I can't sleep. Can't nap, rest (I know - lay off the coffee, dumbass), but you'd think with that kind of fatigue, a wink or two wouldn't be too difficult to catch. You'd be wrong. . . . No matter how much I eat, The Muse works it off.

How could Sean possibly understand either Annie or Ryan? For Sean, "Creativity is a garden that only grows with nutrients in the soil and sunlight in the sky." It's okay that Sean has a different view, of course it is. But I cannot help but wonder how much better a writer he could be if he dug into the dirt of his garden and sat out in a couple of thunderstorms. At the very least, he would have a better chance of understanding why some writers take their work so seriously:

I want my words to matter to someone. I want them to mean something. I want my electric guitar machine gun in the hands of every starving child—for whom the gun will shoot food. I want it in the hands of the abused girlfriend who clings to that bastard because she doesn’t feel like she has anything else—for whom the gun will provide courage. I want it in the hands of the bastard, too—for whom it will provide salvation. And I want my loved ones and my friends to have it so they can know who I am and what I stand for without me ever having to say it. That’s why I write, at the core. The other stuff just feels good but this part is about love.

Ryan, "Have You Ever Shot a Guitar"

The triple gold mask places rage in the center of comedy and tragedy, but if I could have an artist craft that mask for me, it would have a fourth face. Rage is not the only raw emotion, and the image is incomplete unless there is a mask on the reverse side, also borrowing from both comedy and tragedy, one that expresses primal joy. If rage stares with eyes of comedy and tragedy, so does joy. And it surely hurts just as much to write from joy, to write from a gut-deep love, as it does to write from rage. That is my view.


Am I a tortured writer or just an apologist? I'm not sure. I'm digging in the garden to see what's what. I've got some joy, and some rage, and some confusion. I've got fatigue. This is the second night I've worked on this blog until 2:30 a.m. I threw out a third of yesterday's work but I'm not sure I've improved it. I still don't think I've managed to say what I wanted to say, maybe because when I'm immersed in the writing of others, their voices get busy and my own is harder to hear. Do I need to add a disclaimer? I do not think a great writer must be miserable, and I certainly do not think that because a writer is anguished that writer is destined for greatness. Just because someone is misunderstood doesn't make that person a genius. But why am I working so hard on something only a few people will read unless I'm a sucker for punishment? I don't know for sure. Ask me tomorrow but not today.