Farce

Faint morning twilight was overtaking him. In New York he'd honed and polished the first thirty pages of "The Academy Purple" until his memory of them was nearly eidetic, and now, as the Baltic sky brightened, he bore down with a mental red pencil on his mental reconstruction of these pages, made a little trim here, added emphasis or hyperbole there, and in his mind the scenes became what they'd wanted to be all along: ridiculous. The tragic BILL QUAINTENCE became a comic fool.

Chip picked up his pace as if hurrying toward a desk at which he could begin to revise the script immediately. He came over a rise and saw the blacked-out Lithuanian town of Eisiskes and, farther in the distance, beyond the frontier, some outdoor lights in Poland. Two dray horses, straining their heads over a barbed-wire fence, nickered at him optimistically.

He spoke out loud: "Make it ridiculous. Make it ridiculous."

-- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Novels such as this one make you want to go home and give the members of your family really big hugs, while reminding you why you left in the first place. I think I just paraphrased that last sentence from one I remember seeing in a review on the back cover, but oh well.

I think I got partially excited when I see evidence of the writing process that a real novelist must endure. The character Chip from the above quote writes a screenplay based primarily upon his personal experiences in regards to a sexual harassment charge that gets him fired from his position as a professor of English (and he was so close to making tenure too...). I think conceit drives one to attempt to portray himself as the victim of some terrible tragedy. Getting shot at in Lithuania seems to bring some sense of the ridiculous back into Chip's perspective on things.

Every now and then, everyone gets some epiphianic vision when far from the resources necessary to preserve it and expound upon it. It's a little like that feeling you get when you finally think up a good retort to some insult fifteen minutes after the fact. I suppose it isn't quite rational to expect someone to have a typewriter or correcting pen handy while getting shot at.

Farce (färs) n. A light dramatic work in which highly improbable plot situations, exaggerated characters , and often slapstick elements are used for humorous effect.

If I had the abilities to go back and rewrite my life as a farce, I think I would prefer it that way. But then again, for anyone that was watching me in action during my last couple months at Wabash College, my life was complete farce and little tragedy. All the proper elements for farce where there: extreme amounts of drinking and fun, a modicum of loathing and confusion, and a happiness rarely experienced. Taking my last final at Wabash drunk was....an accomplishment of sorts. Attending a physics department lunch with my fellow graduating seniors after spending the entire night awake at a sorority house in DePauw was better than an accomplishment, for all intensive purposes. Stumbling through the streets of Cincinnati lost, making out on the roof of a parking garage, and binge eating on White Castle cheeseburgers in front of a homeless man was truly a capstone experience for a wonderful four years of fraternity life. The thing is though, that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all the improbable plot situations, exaggerated characters, and slapstick elements. That is for another time though.

I suppose it's interesting when the end of a school year can bring about the end story to a tragedy and then the very next year you experience the end story to a farce. I suppose it all makes perfect sense though. You can't have the parody before the thing parodied, now can you?