Volume 51, Number 12 · July 15, 2004
Nailed!
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary Fiction
by Dale Peck
New Press, 228 pp., $23.95
Ever since 405 BC, when Aristophanes, in a comedy entitled Frogs, hit upon the sublime idea of staging a literary contest in the Underworld between two dead writers who loathe each other's work (Euripides and Aeschylus), the best literary criticism has often been a form of sadistic entertainment—one that uses comedy's tools (humiliation, ridicule, exaggeration) to comment not on society but on art. There is, of course, an equally long tradition of critics who don't strive to score belly laughs as they illuminate great texts; that tradition, in fact, begins with Aristophanes' near contemporary Aristotle, to whose Poetics, written sometime in the middle of the fourth century BC, we owe the first full-scale and intellectually sophisticated attempt to analyze the nature of aesthetic pleasure and to systematize the mechanisms by which literary texts produce that pleasure. (Aristotle's own text is, it must be said, not the most fun to read: it would be hard to find a less humorous explanation of humor than 'Comedy is (as we have said) an imitation of inferior people—not, however, with respect to every kind of defect: the laughable is a species of what is disgraceful. The laughable is an error or disgrace that does not involve pain or destruction,' etc., etc.[*])
Review, 5076 words
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