Blog 4: 9/11 [Sara]

Though many of the readings for today grappled with definitions of tragedy, I was particularly struck by Marvin Carlson's unabashed discussion of genre in the Theatre Journal forum piece. Having only just taught a lesson on genre to my undergraduates earlier today, I, much like Carlson, grapple with the merits of making distinctions between categories of performance that seem, to the average spectator, to be above the realm of categorization. Acknowledging the aesthetic frame that shapes a story often seems, in my students' eyes, as an excuse to pigeon-hole personal stories and make a mockery of "truth" and "humanity" through my heartless clinical detachment. In my lecture I attempt to nuance genre, question its usefulness not only as a tool for script analysis but of cultural study, contrasting the OED definition with the one in our textbook:

Genre, n.
a.  A Kind; sort; style.
b. spec. A particular style or category of works of art; esp. a type of literary work characterized by a particular form, style, or purpose. (Oxford English Dictionary)

“Genre relates to the kind of emotional response a play creates in the audience.” (Wainscott and Fletcher, Theatre: Collaborative Acts 104)

The OED makes note of genre's affiliation with purpose, but Wainscott and Fletcher name that purpose "emotional response." Taking this to heart, I ask them directly:

1. What can genre tell us about the plays that we write [or performances we create] in a given period and their desired effect on the audience?

2. What does that "desired effect" tell us about ourselves as a culture?

In his analysis of the replays of the 9/11 news coverage Carlson seems to pose the same questions, not to students of the theatre, but to newly formed spectators of the 9/11 narrative. As Taylor glibly notes, the yearning for engagement and desire to participate in that narrative transformed many, perhaps against their will, from witnesses to spectators and in that new role they began looking at the television and seeing that what had first appeared to be a tragedy was quickly shifting to something that more closely fit the schematic of melodrama. No sooner had the dust settled and that army of flags been raised to half-mast was President Bush transformed from the proverbial tragic hero with his glaring hubris and (though perhaps yet unseen) fatal flaw to a freshly spangled defender of the united-we-stands complete with white horse and Stetson hat. While so many others regarded the post-9/11 world as being gripped tightly by a moment of "sacred authenticity" or, even the recently minted "New Sincerity," Carlson dismissed this saccharine sentimentality within the year, pointing to genre conventions and the performance frame. He makes note of the role of our spectatorship in a new world order or, at the very least, a return to the Manichean religiosity of the Cold War era. Urging "us" to engage in a little Davis-style theatricality, he poses another question to a country on the brink of a war of false pretenses:

"What will happen to both sides when the clear-cut world of the melodramatic imagination encounters the complex, ambiguous, shifting, and dangerous world of contingent reality that will inevitably occupy our attention for the forseeable future." (Carlson 134)

And now standing on the other side of that war with a decade's worth of hindsight, I say to Carlson, "I'm still not really sure." Although we've traded in one fearless leader for another who espouses "Change," I don't know that much of the narrative has. Living in a world where "General Motors is alive and Osama Bin Laden is dead," one might expect the catharsis that is meant to come with melodrama's promised poetic justice, but still the war in Afghanistan rages on--a bit of background noise in the news cycle that still seems to be pitting the good guys against the bad. Like Carlson, I too feel that,

"What seems clear at present, nevertheless, is that however frequently the term tragedy may be heard today, there is at least so far very little evidence of tragic insight." (Carlson 134)

Perhaps our only Hope of redemption might be to capitalize on the momentum of evil's defeat and shift our genre again. With the introduction of the possibility of marriage equality on the platform this year, we as a nation have an ever increasing chance of making a comedy out of this spectacle after all.