Bible Comedy
There are so many things I have learned in this class that I didn’t know already, it wasn’t easy to choose a single topic, but initially, my first subject was to study the laughter I encountered in the Bible. I wanted to discuss the cultural implications of it, and why it was funny. When I began to research, I found that Frye has a theory that the Bible is a divine comedy. In his book The Great Code, he treats the Bible as a totally unified book and disregards the documentary hypothesis entirely. He describes the Bible as having a “U-Shaped plot” similar to a comedy. In Anatomy of Criticism, he uses four mythoi; comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony. These are four aspects of a central unifying myth. Frye creates five modes, the four mythoi and the mode of myth, defined by the status of the hero. From here I began to research distinctions between classical tragedy and comedy, or the Bible. This semester, we have focused on the tensions between these to types of literature, but I also began to wonder what the similarities were.
Frye explains how the Bible is a comedy by the format of the literature based on events and characters. The left side of the U represents the beginning of Genesis, which is the creation of earth and man who live together in a harmonious garden state. Genesis 1:28-31,
God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and ever tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.
Everything was good until Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Genesis 2:16-17, “And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.’” The Fall is the initial decline down the U.
The curve embodies the long alternation of historical fall and rise that the middle chapters of the Bible consist of. These mini-plots of disasters and triumphs are only little mini-Us that fluctuate up and down to foreshadow the ultimate end, or new beginning. An example of this is the Book of Job. “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil,” Job 1:1. One day Satan makes a bet with God that he could take Job’s faith by punishing him horribly. “Does Job fear God for nothing: Have you not put a fence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side: You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face,” Satan threatens in Job 1:9-11. God allows this test as long as Job’s life is not taken, so the reader is aware that Job’s struggling is the result of a contest between Satan and God while Job is not. Job loses his property and children, his body inflicted with sores, his wife tells him to curse God, he curses the day he was born, he continues to suffer as he loathes his life for his faithfulness to God who has not shown him mercy has made him a laughingstock. He loses all hope, yet he still holds on to his faith. He justifies his unjust suffering by acknowledging that the wicked often go unpunished in life. After Job challenges God, the Lord replies with a list of rhetorical questions signifying his almighty power that no other can possess. Job is humbled, and his fortunes are restored twofold and died a happy man. In the beginning, Job was blessed with happiness which was all taken from him. He fell into disparity, but he never cursed God. In the end, he was rewarded with a happiness greater than any he had ever had.
The end is the right side of the U which is the final ascent back to harmony in Jerusalem at the end of the book of Revelation. This book begins with an urgent message that the end of days is at hand. John encourages everyone to repent before Judgement Day. Then the moment of justice and punishment arrives with devastating destruction and disaster in the climactic fall of Babylon, “He has judged the great whore who corrupted the earth with her fornication, and he has avenged on her the blood of his servants...Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!” (14:8, 19:2). In the conclusion of Revelation, Jesus promises God will arrive to reward the righteous and punish the wicked, and John sees a vision of a new heaven, earth, and Jerusalem descended from heaven which is a gleaming picture of perfection that is illuminated by the glory of God and Jesus. “Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever,” (22:3-5).
The curve of the U evokes the sense that discreet events may have some symbolic significance, and this signifies a cyclic sense that time repeats itself and therefore may only be an illusion. The Apocalypse is not the end of the world, but a new beginning or unveiling of a new order on how we see the world. It is a metaphorical time that is not literal and calculatable like future eschatology. I agree with realized eschatology which presents the possibility that the apocalypse has already happened and no one notice because it is not a catastrophic event that anyone would notice. Frye portrayed the Great Catastrophes of the Apocalypse as the metaphorical destruction of the past way of seeing things associated with time and history.
Frye’s five modes of fiction are defined by the status of the hero. In the mode of myth, the hero is superior to men and the environment of men. He is a divine being. In romance, there is the realistic hero who is an extraordinary human being, superior to most men, but not all, and only superior ever the environment to a certain degree. In tragedy, or high mimetic mode, the hero is superior in degree to other men, but not to the environment. In comedy, or low mimetic mode, the hero is an ordinary human no different from the rest. In irony, other men are superior to the hero who is normally perceived as less intelligent and powerful than most. So how does the comic fictional role relate to the Bible and tragedy?
The archetypal theme of comedy, according to Frye, is anagnorisis; the recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a central character. The plot is the descent from the norm into suffering which is generally followed by some kind of enlightenment or understanding. Frye further compares the characters in romance to the characters is comedy as only being different because comedy is more realistic. In tragedy it is the opposite because the knowledge is not gained through suffering, the knowledge leads to suffering. Frye uses the example of Oedipus Rex. When he realizes his true identity and who his parents are, he puts out his eyes. The theme of tragedy is the story of dying gods. The hero is commonly isolated from the rest of society. Christ dying on the cross is representative of this mode. There is also the sense of tragedy in the Book of Job when he is being punished and doesn’t understand why suffering has come upon him. He curses the day that he was born, which in tragedy the only thing better than dying is to have never been born. “Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night that said, ‘A man-child is conceived,’” (3:3).
This is a subject that I have merely scratched the surface of, but I was really fascinated by. I did not have time to fully explore Frye’s theories, but his specific distinctions between literature modes helped me to understand what he meant by all literature is myth. I think the Bible embodies all the modes in some way. I must say that Frye is one of the most knowledgeable critics I have ever read, and when I have the chance I will read Words with Power again and his other books. I enjoyed this class because it gave me an opportunity to study the Bible, which I honestly would have never done on my own, but now that I have, I have a newfound respect for and attraction to it.