[— Karen Myers —]

I was thinking about my characters (I do that a lot), and I noticed something about the old forms of Classical (Greco-Roman) theatre which has somehow stupidly eluded me until now. Why (said I to myself) do you put classical comedies together out of character archetypes, but refer to characters in tragedies (think “Shakespeare”) as complex?

There’s a lot to be said about dramatic structures, of course (and their strong persistence into modern-ish theatre), but what struck me was a visualization of classical comedies as mechanisms — you put the known gear-driven bits into a situation and watch the predictable interactions, with a bit of surprise friction or fortune-driven oiling, and maybe the breath of a passing Fate, and you can both anticipate the likely reactions as well as appreciate the authorial craft misdirections in the mix. The mechanism runs to the end in a satisfying life-affirming way, and you put the archetypes back into the box for next time. (This has a lot to do with the origins of Comedy in religious/festival affirmations of life and the gods.)

Tragedies… not so much.

I think of tragedies as typically featuring an individualist who will not defer to some important moral stricture or a person without sympathies who cares not what stands in the way of his desires, and therefore is not fit to live (morally speaking). He believes himself justified in his hubris to be above all others, until in the end he discovers that there are gods who disagree. He is not forced to do this — he has made some sort of choice that, once made, compels him to his end. What did the Greeks feel about tragic characters? Pity and fear. The catharsis at the end of a tragedy readjusts the cosmic balances and lets life as a whole continue.

Tragic characters have a tendency to stand alone, each with his own unique flaws. We may sympathize with their desires, we may pardon the accidents that made them, or we may despise them as villains, but we definitely have opinions about them, and we’re not displeased morally when they come to a bad end, in the righting of the universe.

We moderns still use these tropes everywhere in our own fiction (they’re universal human psychological structures, after all) but we’ve introduced one hideous concept of our own — the grey man, the conformist, the man who has stepped away from striving and effort – the man who has given up the responsibilities of life. He is neither born with the god-given spark of life nor imbued with the desire to explore the lives of others. He is not the man who does things, he is the man to whom things are done — random things, hideous things. (Anyone can suffer, but defining yourself as a helpless victim to justify your actions is a choice.) He has no moral agency. He is a witness, at best, but not an actor. Stage scenery.

Identify with grey goo at your peril. If we cannot bask in the richness of the comedy of life nor identify tragic situations well enough to avoid them for ourselves, if we can, or pity those who can’t, then what is left — abdication from human moral choices altogether? This anomie is like an infectious disease — it’s deadly, in real life. As writers we can describe it, we can make our readers feel it, but it is not the stuff of heroes, and that which does not make us stronger kills us.