Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [196]
“the exploitable gulf.” Bertrand Evans, “Shakespeare’s Comedies,” excerpted in Levin, 164.
“A situation is invariably comic.” Bergson, in Sypher, 123. In the original text, this passage is italicized. Note that Bergson is defining but not subscribing to incongruity theory, which he rejects as descriptive but not explanatory. That is, it tells us that we laugh at incongruity, but it doesn’t tell us why. Bergson locates the source of the comedic instead in that which is essentially automatic and “rigid” instead of “supple.”
American Film Institute (FN). The complete list is available on the Institute’s website, http://www.afi.com/tvevents/100years/laughs.aspx.
“a disinterested spectator” (FN). Bergson, in Sypher, 63. For those of us who aren’t divine, Bergson’s argument that errors are always funny if viewed from a distance is pretty unsatisfying. Some mistakes really do feel tragic, and trying to make them comic by withdrawing interest or empathy seems cruel. The critic Harry Levin proffered a more palatable theory for why some mistakes are funny and others are not. “Our tragic heroes go astray grandly by committing some single and fatal mistake,” he wrote. “Comic figures, on the other hand, run through a whole train of petty errors, and somehow manage to extricate themselves from the final consequences” (Levin, p. xxv). As that suggests, and despite my argument in this chapter, both comedy and tragedy depend on error. In fact, false beliefs—which I characterized in this chapter as a classic comic device—are fundamental to the genre of tragedy as well. Romeo killed himself because he misinterpreted the evidence and mistakenly believed that Juliet was dead, and both King Lear and Othello are about being disastrously wrong about other people. The critic Maynard Mack called the latter “a tragedy of error,” a nice counterpoint to the comedy thereof. Mack, in Fraser, 230.
art “issues out of this encounter.” May, 88.
“Could reality come into direct contact.” Bergson, in Sypher, 157.
an ideal civilization would banish all artists. Plato, The Republic, Benjamin Jowett, trans. (Plain Label Books, 1946). The passage in question occurs in Book X. The “thrice removed from the truth” line is on p. 591, “All these poetical individuals” is on p. 586, “inferior degree of truth” is on p. 598, and the “companions and friends and associates” line is on p. 593.
“Let us try for once not to be right.” I came across this Tzara line in Peter Schjeldahl’s “Young at Heart: Dada at MOMA,” the New Yorker, June 26, 2006.
“and at once it struck me.” I first encountered Keats’s concept of negative capability in a lovely (and relevant) essay by the poet Jane Hirshfield called “Poetry and Uncertainty” (The American Poetry Review, Nov. 1, 2005). The complete quotation used here is taken from John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics, and After-Fame, Sir Sidney Colvin (Macmillan and Co., 1920), 253–254.
Wislawa Szymborska. The complete text of her speech is available on the Nobel Prize website: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1996/szymborska-lecture.html.
“What we are engaged in when we do poetry.” Anne Carson, “Essay on What I Think About Most,” Men in the Off Hours (Vintage, 2001), 30–36.
“Art is not truth.” The line appears in Picasso’s “Statement to Marius de Zayas,” 1923.
instant and violent self-destruction. For my purposes, the most crystalline example of this might come from the Star Trek episode “The Changeling,” which concerns a robot that thinks its mission is to eradicate everything that is imperfect and error-prone—a category that includes all organic entities. In the end, the robot learns that it was wrong about its own origins and mandate, and is therefore itself an example of error. Accordingly, it is obliged to destroy itself, and does. Violently.
“To see the world as it really is.” Quoted in Janoff-Bulman, 61.
“a key to the good life.” Janoff-Bulman, 24.