Introduction

In the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, generally speaking, tragedy and comedy were two genres which were held apart. The Roman playwright Plautus used the expression ‘tragicomedy’, it is true. But this was less about the idea of a play that combined moments of comedy with moments of tragedy within a unified whole, and more about any play which tended to crudely mix ‘important’, ‘elevated’ people like gods and kings with lowborn characters like servants and slaves in the context of a work of comedy more broadly. The implication being that ‘important’ ‘socially elevated’ characters have their rightful place in a tragedy, while the lives of those of a lesser social status tend to better befit comedy. And never the twain shall meet. For this reason, the tragicomedy was, in the eyes of the ancients, more of a muddle, an error, rather than an independent genre with its own rules and aesthetic logic.

By the time of the modern period there has been a significant evolution. The ‘tragicomedy’ starts to emerge not as an aberration but as a genre in its own right. The elements of comedy and tragedy are blended purposefully in works like Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in which a character, Shylock, endures a tragic downfall but at the same time the work is also punctuated by light-hearted and satirical moments. The Merchant of Venice is often classified as one of Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’, part of a group of his later works which were attacked because they violated the classical proscription against mixing the comic with the tragic. But the genre of tragicomedy would go on to flourish, expanding into some of the great novels of the 19^th century, Dickens’ Great Expectations for example, or Hugo’s Les Misérables. Even in 20^th-century modernism there is often a strong vein of the tragicomic; think for instance of Beckett’s famous tramps as they sit around, waiting for Godot, making small talk.

Most critics acknowledge that the fusion of the comic and the tragic has become a hallmark of much modern literature and film, and that this is at odds with antique drama. But while much ink has been expended on describing the character of tragicomedy in the modern age – the ‘how’ of the way it is shaped and organised and the rules which govern it – I have never come across a critical account of the ‘why’. Why is it that the genre of the tragicomic achieves such definition and ubiquity only in the modern era? What is it about the structure and content of modern existence which generates the tragicomic as a necessary aesthetic form? Why was tragicomedy unable to emerge as a genre in its own right during antiquity?

This essay attempts to look at that question and to offer up a general and tentative answer. To this end I look first at an aspect of Hegel’s theorisation of tragedy and comedy in the time of the ancient Greeks; specifically, how the German philosopher sees both forms expressing the same profound historical truths, but sees in the comedic protagonist such truths being relayed in a more abstract fashion, at the more superficial level; whereas the tragic protagonist exhibits the same truth in a more concrete and fundamental way. Once I have outlined Hegel’s theorisation, I go on to argue that the categories of the abstract and the concrete should be retained in their application to comedy and tragedy in the modern era though not quite in the original Hegelian sense. Rather I argue that we should first mobilise Lukács’s theory of reification which describes how capitalist society increasingly takes on a dual form: that the social relationships which structure the capitalist system at an essential level appear superficially as a simple exchange of ‘things’. Following Lukács, I argue that this dual form, this contradiction which opens up between appearance and essence, is most fully developed under capitalism; that in pre-capitalist forms appearance and essence attain an identity on some fundamental level. The means by which surplus product is extracted by the slave owner from the slave is a form of appropriation which is naked, visible, underlined by great force, and consummated through bondage. With capital appropriation it is somewhat different. The surplus product which is alienated from labour power by capital – i.e. the appropriation enacted by the ruling class over and against the direct producers – appears as a mere exchange of things – an equal wage for an equal amount of labour time expended. Thus the appropriation of profit by one class from another takes on an invisible character because it appears in a reified aspect as an exchange of things even if it too is ultimately underlined by force. The fact that capitalism is structured this way at the metabolic level means that a contradiction opens up between appearance and essence, not just at the economic level, but also at the level of the social world more broadly.

The way in which the capitalist social system creates in some sense a ‘dualistic’ reality becomes of necessity one of the key problems of art under capitalism. And that returns us to Hegel’s theorisation of comedy and tragedy. As a result of the processes of reification, and the tendency of capitalist reality to manifest in an increasingly heightened ‘dual’ aspect, I suggest that comedy is the form most suitable to treating the appearance of social contradictions and tragedy is the form most capable of treating their essence. In order to flesh out this very general thesis, I want to look at a particular example of art in the modern period which does fuse comedy and tragedy. The example I wish to turn to is the sitcom Frasier,¹ because I think it is a work of great art but also one that illustrates clearly some of the themes I have just laid out and provides the basis from which I can develop them in more detail. It deals with the appearance-essence contradiction by blending comedy and tragedy. And it does this by making the fundamental dramatic conflict of the piece one that entails a conflict of class.

Frasier

The character of Frasier Crane first appeared in an earlier television series, Cheers,² as a rather pompous but generous man approaching middle-age, a psychiatrist with a big heart to match his big forehead, and someone whose intellectual verbosity left him strangely vulnerable to the mockery of the more rough and ready, practical and plebeian characters who adorned the bar. Part of the comedy lay in his attempt to fit in, and the amusement with which he finally found the gentle acceptance and friendship he craved. Frasier the series (1993-2004) draws upon this; the sense that its protagonist – with his rather puffed up sense of intellect and his particular brand of enthused, amicable pomposity – is perhaps a little out of touch with ordinary people. For this reason, not only is there a whiff of the ridiculous about him, but also a level of vulnerability. This was hinted at in Cheers but never taken seriously, as the comic moment always intruded and overwhelmed this side of the character, rendering him, ultimately, a figure of fun.

Now this is where Frasier begins to depart from Cheers and at once evinces its fundamental superiority. Whereas Cheers was about the way in which the circumloquacious psychiatrist endeavoured to overcome his alienation through a series of comic interactions with the rather laconic denizens of the bar, in Frasier the question of alienation is posed in and through the relationship of the psychiatrist with his father. This has more gravitas, more fundamentally moving and serious implications. Frasier makes the move from Boston to his hometown of Seattle to start a new life but his plans are hampered from the start. His father, Martin Crane, is recovering from a bullet wound he took on the job as a cop, and now retired the old man can no longer properly look after himself. He comes to live with Frasier, in the new swanky penthouse that the psychiatrist has bought for himself. Martin’s presence, at first, is as a canker; rather effectively allegorized by his own tatty, beaten-down chair placed slap bang in the middle of the sleek, modernist furniture Frasier has used to decorate the apartment as a whole.

The Frasier-Martin storyline develops the element of class tension which was already present in Cheers. Martin Crane, now retired, had spent a lifetime on the force; pragmatic, rough and ready, he likes nothing better than a beer with the boys, or to watch baseball or a monster truck rally in his beaten down chair with a few cans of his beloved Ballantine. He is savvy, streetwise, practical and down to earth, and despite a rather gruff exterior which suffers no fools, he is at heart a loving and extremely ethical man. Frasier finds it difficult to connect to his father, for he is from a very different social world, the rarefied world of the middle-class professional and elite academic, and his father’s earthy brand of hard common sense is something that the obsessively analytical and somewhat foppish psychiatrist finds difficult to comprehend. Frasier’s younger sibling, Niles Crane, is also a psychiatrist; married to a society belle, his world of the Seattle rich is even more exclusive, and the gulf which opens up between the father and his two sons at times seems immense. Both Frasier and Niles take after their deceased mother, who was also a psychiatrist, rather than their more rough and ready plebeian father.

This, of course, is the fundamental dramatic conflict which pervades the series, and in a sense it crosses over to the other characters. Daphne Moon, with whom the still married Niles falls in love, is Martin’s physiotherapist and home help, and though at first she appears kooky, she is also very shrewd and practical, and regards the Crane brothers with an amused bafflement which eventually becomes a great fondness. Even though she eventually falls in love with and marries Niles, Daphne is more like Frasier and Niles’s father, Martin Crane, because she comes from a working-class family in Manchester, England, grew up surrounded by boisterous brothers, mixes with a more plebeian crowd and has much more of the common touch. Some of the comedy from Niles’s early attempts to woo her comes from the fact that he is a little priggish and out of touch, and is very much in tune with the more aristocratic pretensions of wealth and high society, whereas she is down to earth and direct, and thus his tragic and charming attempts to gain her attention go for years overlooked.

A similar dynamic is set up between Roz Doyle, Frasier’s producer, and the protagonist himself. Frasier and Roz eventually become the very best of friends, but again, their friendship is underwritten by a fundamental contradiction of type; Frasier is intellectual, kind-hearted and somewhat awkward – Roz is sweet, savvy and streetwise, and far more grounded. Often the comedy arrives when Roz drolly punctures Frasier’s pretensions. The same fundamental contradiction opens up between the relationships of all the central characters, the contradiction between those who are in some way part of the broad swell of the masses, and those who exist in a somewhat rarefied and elite realm outside it. The drive to overcome this contradiction – for Frasier and Niles to find common ground with their loved ones, especially their father – is what powers both the humour and the pathos of the show. And with this in mind, I would like to look at a particular episode in which this contradiction reaches its full human drama, both in terms of comedy and tragedy. In a show which ran for eleven years and featured over 260 episodes, many of the very highest artistic calibre, this episode stands out; it reaches a level of artistic perfection which I have rarely seen. The episode is called ‘Room Full of Heroes’.³ In it Frasier has decided to throw a Halloween Party but one with a twist, one where the guests have to come dressed as their heroes. Frasier himself comes dressed as Sigmund Freud.

The episode opens with a deft comic aside. Frasier and Daphne are in the elevator discussing the Halloween rituals of the children, and Frasier notes that the bowl of sweets Daphne is carrying might be too small for the legions of young trick-or-treaters the cheery psychiatrist expects to arrive at his door. Daphne explains that the number might not be so high, as the children in the building have become frightened by the figure of ‘Old Man Crane’. The psychiatrist chortles along with hearty amusement – ‘Poor Dad’ he chuckles in wry sympathy. At which point Daphne explains matter-of-factly that it is Frasier who has been given this particular epithet. Frasier, disconcerted and taken aback, protests at the outrage of this: ‘What?! I'm Old Man Crane? Good Lord, I have tousled every young head in this building from the laundry room to the rooftop.’ Daphne then explains that this is how his reputation developed – ‘They think you're feeling to see if their brains are ripe.’ She goes on rather gleefully (much to Frasier’s chagrin) to sing the rhyme the children have invented: ‘Old Man Crane, Old Man Crane, Make him mad and he'll eat your brain.’ Now the dialogue is light and witty; Frasier’s genuine look of hurt at being made an object of fun by the local children comically pricks his rather proud assumption that it is his father who is being mocked. In itself this is deft, intelligent writing, though perhaps nothing which would be engraved in one’s memory. And yet, it functions not just as a quick and witty segue by which the context of the episode is introduced; it also provides the acorn which yields the oak – a joke which the episode then builds upon throughout until it reaches a comical climax. More of which, later.

Once the party is in swing, the other costumes are revealed. Martin is dressed as his baseball hero Joe DiMaggio. Daphne dresses as Elton John. Roz comes dressed as Wonder Woman. And Niles comes dressed as his own father Martin, in a rather touching gesture, replete with a grey wig and the cane Martin uses to get around. When Frasier sees Roz’s costume, he is upset and dismissive, for he does not think she has taken the party game seriously. Roz explains that when Frasier said come dressed as a hero, she assumed he meant superhero. Later, she confesses that she knew what he meant all along, only as a girl Wonder Woman really had been her hero, for she provided an example of a strong and dynamic woman. Frasier is chastised and apologises for belittling her choice. Again the exchange is brief but instructive: Frasier is both brittle and refined; his aesthetic tastes are toned but do not extend very far into popular culture, and so he is able to overlook the positive and worthy aspects of Roz’s choice. And yet, once he sees how it is important to her, how it affected her own development, he immediately recants, and they find common ground in a rather touching and understated scene. But it also shows, with comic effect, how Frasier can be a little childish and petulant, how he is so determined to foist meaning on the game that he starts to forget the fun and light-hearted side of it.

As he tries to regulate the rules more and more tightly, as the whole spectacle loses its spontaneity and lightness, Frasier becomes frustrated and bad-tempered. His irritation is compounded by the fact that he feels Niles has stolen his thunder by coming dressed as their father. Again this brings out a key element of childishness; though they are both brilliant and accomplished adults, Frasier and his brother are often locked in furious competition for the approval of their father. As his feelings of resentment are compounded, Frasier tries – like a child – to get his own way, and when people protest, he storms out in an infantile strop, pausing at the door to declare mournfully: ‘I am not the bad guy here’. Only as he throws the door open, the kids who have been standing there nervously deciding whether to trick-or-treat – are suddenly confronted by the spectre of ‘Old Man Crane’ and scream out in unison, thereby casting poor Frasier very much as the bad guy of the piece. Again the lineaments of various plot threads are being pulled together: the old man Crane joke which was set up at the very beginning is further developed. As well we develop a more profound awareness of Frasier’s’ character – his intellectuality, but at the same time his childishness – and we gain a sense of the distance which so often opens up between him and others.

Perhaps the predominant thing about Frasier is his very kind nature. His snobbishness, his elitism and his petulance are all redeemed by this; indeed they even work to throw his better nature into relief. Frasier eventually returns to his party, sheepish and regretful, and his family are tolerant and kind, and offer to indulge another one of his party games. At once like an excitable child, Frasier takes them up on the offer – the game is to ask each of the heroes a question. Niles, meanwhile, is drinking beers in the fashion of his father, really enjoying role-playing his dad, but he is not used to the alcohol, and the exhilaration and humour which come from playing the role begin to overwhelm him. Frasier’s question to his brother (playing their father) is simple: What is your greatest disappointment? At this point, the mood in the party has become buoyant, everyone is more relaxed and cheery, and Niles begins to freewheel his response, playing the role of their dad. At first he answers lightly and with wry humour: ‘Oh, um, that I never got to take my kids to see Joe DiMaggio play.’ His father is in the same room, dressed as Joe DiMaggio, so this is not an unnatural response. But as Niles slips deeper into the role of his father, he reflects: ‘Guess it's not that important. My kids wouldn't know a baseball if it hit them in the face. In fact, that pretty much describes their one day in Little League.’ Everyone chuckles in the room, and you, the audience chuckle as well, and yet something is a little bit off kilter. Behind his humour there is a hint of desperation, and Niles, this eminent psychiatrist, seems childlike again. He looks at his father (dressed as Joe DiMaggio) and addresses him directly: ‘I'm just saying that you and me, we're regular guys. You know, we know how to hang out with regular guys and shoot the breeze and, and, and knock a few back. But, uh, not my kids. No, they're too good for that stuff. They got all their fancy degrees, but they never learned how to be regular guys. So I guess if I had to pick my two biggest disappointments...’

Niles’s light-hearted humour trails away and his voice reduces to a broken and curtailed whisper. Silence falls in the room, the others look concerned and shocked. Martin stands up, looks at his son and speaks in a husky voice: ‘You stop right there! You will not put these words in my mouth. I was always proud of you boys, and I will not be portrayed as some drunken, judgmental jackass!’ He leaves the room. In the aftermath of his departure it is not like you are watching a sitcom at all, but instead you are in a theatre, watching the most dramatic of plays from within the intimate darkness of the audience. You can hear a pin drop. Sobering up at once Niles gasps: ‘I am so sorry. I, uh, I don't know what got into me… Everything was so perfect, and I just...blew it. I, I...feel terrible.’ He is in genuine shock. Frasier consoles him ‘Niles, why don't you just go talk to him?’ Niles is adamant that his father won’t want anything to do with him after this outburst, but Frasier, who only moments before was jealous of his brother’s costume, responds with great savvy and compassion: ‘Oh, I wouldn't be so sure about that. He's not your hero for nothing.’

It is a moving scene and it imparts great truth. It exhibits the tension between different generations, different classes, and fundamentally different personalities, but people who are at the same time held together by the greatest love and affection. It does this through the prism of the father-son relationship which is often fraught with difficulty and remains suspended in the type of silence which consists of everything that should be said but almost never is. The scene acts as a perfectly crafted dramatic tool, because it begins with the humour which forms so much of the everyday banter – the surface expression of ordinary familial interactions, only underneath all of this there are the most elemental fears, inadequacies, hopes and a thwarted sense of love. These invisible but profound feelings underpin human relationships but often remain submerged. When Niles – having drunk a few too many – begins to put into words spontaneously and organically his feelings about his father his speech acts as a dramatic flashpoint, a bolt of lightning, which illumines entirely those invisible tensions and contradictions that are at work beneath the surface of family relationships, and the mood passes from light, delicate humour into the most profound pathos, as Niles’s desperation – his hurt and fear – renders him like a child again. Perhaps that is another truth the scene conveys: that however old we get, there will always remain a part of our psyches which is invariably childlike, lost, vulnerable and unsure of the love of others.

And then with the same seamlessness, the episode changes tack again. Frasier, having counselled Niles to go and speak with Martin, suggests that his brother has the conversation with their father as Niles again, rather than remaining dressed as Martin. Niles agrees but when he tries to remove his wig from his head he finds that it is firmly stuck in place. Frasier attempts to help him remove it using a ladle to pry it off and Niles shrieks in pain. It should be mentioned that earlier, when Frasier stormed out of the apartment in a strop, he ended up in a laundry room where he was able to convince a frightened youngster that he did not in fact eat children’s brains. Now that boy has told his friends, the children feel emboldened again, and a group arrive at the Crane apartment in order to resume trick-or-treating as normal. But when Daphne opens the door, it corresponds with the exact moment Frasier manages to pry off Niles’s wig. For the children, of course (having overcome their fear of ‘Old Man Crane’, having decided it was all just a scary story), seeing Frasier in his Freudian beard appearing to rip off the top of his brother’s head, is something that doesn’t go down well. As the children run screaming from the apartment, Frasier charges after them, still holding the wig/scalp all the while whimpering piteously: ‘No, children, come back! I've got candy!!’ It is, laugh out loud, gut wrenchingly funny stuff, but it also provides a level of exquisite balance and harmony to the episode itself. As we remember, the show begins with Daphne and Frasier discussing ‘Old Man Crane’ in an amusing aside, but throughout the episode this incident is developed and deepened, until that exquisite comic climax brings things full circle.

Hegel’s theorisation of comedy and tragedy in the time of Antiquity and its relevance to Frasier and the modern period

Hegel categorises comedy in several different ways, one of which is to describe a play where the hero or the protagonist desires something noble: the desire to effect a change in external reality which is in accordance with a ‘substantial’ human end, to transform an aspect of the world in line with the loftiest ideality. And yet the protagonists in question are entirely lacking the qualities or abilities that might allow them to achieve their goal: ‘[the] situation occurs when individuals plume themselves on their substantial characters and aims, but as instruments for accomplishing something substantial, they, as individuals, are the precise opposite of what is required’.⁴ In a sense this holds a certain parity with tragedy. A crucial difference, in the Hegelian scheme, is that the tragic character does have many noble and ‘substantial’ powers of personality, but is thwarted from achieving their ends, not as a result of a personal lack but because the powers which their personality conveys are met by a historical opposition of equal weight. Antigone, for instance, represents the collision of fundamentally opposed historical forces reaching a crescendo which is exhibited in and through the destinies of the human actors (Antigone and Creon) who are pulled into dramatic conflict. Antigone reposes in herself some of the very best and heroic aspects of the old society, the sense of loyalty to her deceased brother which arises out of the communal traditions of the life of the tribe, and the incredible courage she evinces in fighting for her ideal; she is destroyed not simply by her antagonist Creon, but by the fact that they have reached a historical juncture by which the old forms of life are perishing before the new. It is inconceivable that Antigone’s destruction could have appeared in a humorous light, for the profundity of her character and the gravity of her situation annul any such possibility.

The difference between comedy and tragedy lies in this then: in the comic version the personality is of necessity more superficial and less grounded in the social world from which the character emerges – the comic character does not embody a broader and necessary historical force but merely holds to a utopian aspiration which he or she lacks all means to achieve. In tragedy the protagonist is also asked to achieve an insurmountable social task, but at the same time his or her heroic qualities are themselves the expression of a deeper and abiding historical trend.

Hegelianism suggests that comedy and tragedy address the same social contradiction, but differ in terms of one offering a more abstract, superficial protagonist, while the other offers a more socially concrete hero. To return to Frasier, the fundamental dramatic contradiction, as we have seen, is one of class – specifically that which opens up in the relationship between plebeian Martin Crane and his more dandified upper crust sons Frasier and Niles. The question of abstraction here should not be applied, a la Hegel, to the characters themselves – for the main characters of Frasier are delicate and socially realist. They are all concrete and profound. The question of abstraction should be applied to the broader reality of the world those characters inhabit, a reality which attains a specifically dualistic character. The comedy comes from addressing the social contradiction which opens up between the sons and their father, at a level of reality which is essentially abstract – i.e. the surface level of modern relationships which is defined by small talk, light banter, everyday conversation – but which only hints at the more voluble and fundamental social contradictions that are at work beneath the surface all the time. The tragedy comes from more profound dramatic conflicts and conversations when those contradictions are revealed, are brought into light of day, and so become fully visible to the audience in all their ramifications, thus demonstrating how the lives of the characters have been profoundly marked by them.

So, for instance, when Frasier first sees his father’s costume at the Halloween party, he does not know who Martin is supposed to be, and stutters and fumbles: ‘Hello...baseball man.’ Martin is amused and aghast at the same time: ‘Oh, come on! Joe DiMaggio. You know who he is, don't you?’ In trying to recover his position and show himself knowledgeable Frasier retorts rather pompously: ‘Well, of course. Joe DiMaggio was married to Marilyn Monroe…who was also married to Arthur Miller, the playwright who wrote Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View From the Bridge...you see, Dad, I know a lot more about baseball than you think.’ Now the exchange clearly registers the same social contradiction; Frasier is ill at ease in the world of popular culture for his tastes are more elitist, and yet, he strives to understand something of it and thus breach the cultural gap between himself and his father. He does this in a rather sophistic and ridiculous way – DiMaggio was married to Monroe who was married to Miller who was a playwright I know – ergo I know about baseball! It is funny because what he is saying is tongue-in-cheek. And even though it hints at the deeper fact that Martin and Frasier are estranged from one another in terms of the cultural and social divide which opens up between them, nevertheless the ramifications of this are not truly called forth as the conversation remains on a level of abstract light-heartedness revolving around a specific issue – Who is Joe DiMaggio? – which in and of itself has no greater import to the relationships of the characters.

But when Niles begins to talk from his father’s perspective after he has had those few beers too many, the same contradiction – the fact that he and his father come from very different social worlds – is made manifest in all its debilitating and tragic force. The audience come to realise just how such a lonely ontological separation from your father can create terrible sadness, and more than this, how such sadness is always present, even in the lighter exchanges, just below the surface. It is only when social life reaches its most intense – through an argument, through someone getting drunk for instance – that such a contradiction suddenly bursts through the carapace of the social world and reveals in tragic and conscious outline the true nature of the relationships which inspire it. So here the Hegelian insight is germane; tragedy and comedy address the same fundamental social contradiction, only comedy looks at it from the surface of social life, while tragedy addresses and brings to fruition that contradiction highlighting its destructive effects on the all too human characters who are touched by it.

In other words, in the modern epoch, the relationship between comedy and tragedy becomes a dialectical one by which comedy provides the appearance of the more tragic essence, and tragedy, when its pathos has been achieved, passes into the comedic appearance once again. So in the greatest episode of Frasier – ‘Room Full of Heroes’ – such a dialectic is manifested, expertly and organically, as we begin with the comic, the appearance, which then fissures and fractures under the sheer pressure of the more underlying contradiction, raising the tragic moment into full self-consciousness, and thus permitting the possibility of some kind of reconciliation, before fading back into the appearance once more. The tragic and the comic attain a dialectical harmony within the remit of a single work.

The transition from the Ancient to the Modern and the development of subjectivity

Now the question opens up: Why was it impossible to achieve the synthesis of comedy and tragedy in Greek antiquity? I think the answer is two-fold. To elaborate it we must again return to Hegel. Hegel argued that Socrates was such an important philosopher because he heralds the first appearance of the modern in philosophy, specifically the point at which ‘the subjectivity of thought was brought to consciousness in a more definite and more thorough manner’.⁵ The pre-Socratics tended to be concerned with objective, external existence in isolation, they were cosmologists and naturalists by trade, and so they derived the nature of human thought and essence from the broader external patterns and logic of the universe as they saw it; the human life was simply an adjunct of this greater universal development, and as such, was wholly subservient to it. This was a sensibility which extended beyond philosophy and pervaded the spirit of the times; military leaders would consult oracles who would divine victory in battle, not only from a sober assessment of the strength of the contending forces, but often from their mystical knowledge of a broader, predetermined fate which acted on men from the outside and behind their backs so to speak. In many Greek plays the same principle of an external and overarching fate was on display; most famously, perhaps, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex where the subjective desires of the protagonist not to sleep with his mother and to avoid killing his father are overwritten by a greater and implacable destiny. But with Socrates, Hegel observes, is achieved ‘the moment of subjective freedom…the directing of consciousness into itself’.⁶ In other words, Socrates phrased ethical questions in terms of the subjective moral conscience of the given individual in the context of the needs of the objective wider society. In his assessment Hegel is quite materialist here, in the sense that the shift is not just a shift in social consciousness but is one which takes place primarily at the level of social being; for Hegel it marks the shift from an earlier historical period (Oriental) – in which ‘[n]othing subjective in the shape of disposition, Conscience, formal Freedom is recognized. Justice is administered only on the basis of external morality’⁷ – to a more modern form which allows for the transformation of the merely natural into an expression of [the individual’s] own being’.⁸ According to Hegel, Socrates had to be killed, for the forms of the old epoch recognised in him the germ of their own dissolution.

By the time of Shakespeare and the beginnings of the modern age, the development of the inner life of the subjective consciousness had become significantly more pronounced. In Shakespeare we are treated to a technique which renders subjectivity more concrete and more palpable, and was unknown to the Greeks. I refer to the soliloquy. Dramatic monologues, of course, had been a feature of ancient Greek drama, so for example when Euripides’ eponymous Electra berates her mother’s lover for his role in the murder of her father, one is treated to an intimate manifestation of her rage and grief. But the soliloquy involves the type of intimate, dramatic heightened speech which is not directed outwards but is spoken to one’s self. In this way it acts as a vehicle for revealing the innermost subjectivity and hidden thoughts of the protagonist. When Hamlet speculates on the nature of being and nothingness in his most famous soliloquy, when he wonders whether ‘it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ or ‘by a sleep’ put an end to ‘the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to’ – the sheer broiling torment of his own psyche, torn between action and inaction, righteousness and despair, being and non-being, is exhibited with a lacerating and volatile beauty which reveals fully the nature of the social and dramatic contradictions his existence is in thrall to. That sense of an inner landscape, the haunting abyss of the psyche, for much of the time veiled, wreathed in shadow, is – by the soliloquy – illuminated in all its gaping vastness.

The ‘modern’ drama, therefore, is able to call into being simultaneously and coextensively two worlds: the external world in which the dramatic and ‘objective’ action is enacted, and the subjective private interior, the rich inner life of the individual psyche and its implications – both realms to be penetrated by the central social contradictions the work of literature unfurls; both realms to be fused harmoniously within the whole. For this reason, an appearance-essence dialectic can be observed in the modern drama; when Niles has those beers, and when he finds himself, almost involuntarily, making his forlorn and harrowing riposte to his father, it is at that point that the underlying essence, the hidden interior world which mediates social contradiction at the most elemental level, erupts into the life of the objective-exterior, thereby constituting the tragic moment.

The appearance-essence duality of a reified world

In the modern form of drama a type of dualism opens up between the objective and subjective worlds, between appearance and essence, a contradiction which went undeveloped at the time of Greek antiquity. For this reason one can say that comedy and tragedy are able to achieve some form of synthesis within the same single work for they are able to mediate, to different degrees of abstraction, the same social contradiction. But it is in late capitalism that this duality reaches its highest fruition, for the reason that such a duality is inscribed so profoundly into the heart of its social being. The capitalist mode of production is unique in the form of its social exploitation – i.e., the way in which the ruling class extracts surplus product from the directly productive class. In pre-capitalist societies, the manner in which this extraction took place was, by and large, naked and visible to the human eye – slave owners, for instance, used the state apparatus to forcibly bind the slaves to the land and to enslave their persons; the enforced process of labour and the expropriation of its product by an exploiting class was as clear as daylight. One might argue that the appearance at the same time denotes the essential social relationship. I don’t mean to suggest that such a relationship wasn’t subject to the warping effects of ruling class ideology. The slave’s subjugation was often ‘naturalised’ or ‘eternalised’; it was argued, most famously by Aristotle, that a certain group of people were inherently more suited to the role of slaves and that the condition of slavery per-se was a natural and requisite feature of any ‘higher’ civilisation.

But although pre-capitalist forms of exploitation were ideologically rationalised according to the character and prerogatives of their ruling classes, the act of appropriation itself was nearly always conducted in the open with visible brutality. Capitalist social relations, on the other hand, are cloaked in a reifying veil. The capitalist system, then, manifests in a dual form; an appearance-essence dialectic in which the social realities of class exploitation appear on the surface as fixed thing-like objectivities; the fact that society is constituted in such a fashion has the broadest and most profound implications for social consciousness. As György Lukács noted in his masterful study on reification: ‘The transformation of the commodity relation into a thing of ‘ghostly objectivity’ cannot therefore content itself with the reduction of all objects for the gratification of human needs to commodities. It stamps its imprint on the whole consciousness of man’.⁹ Lukács cites Kant who famously and rather misanthropically described marriage as being ‘the union of two people of different sexes with a view to the mutual possession of each other’s sexual attributes for the duration of their lives’.¹⁰ Without scrutinizing the rather abstract bluntness of such a categorisation, one can see why Lukács homes in on it; it illustrates the way in which a human relation can be transformed into a contractual obligation involving the exchange of ‘things’. But the essence-appearance dialectic which opens up between social relationships and their reified appearance has more subtle implications too. I think the phenomenon of small talk is instructive with regard to this. Small talk is defined as informal conversation which does not address any functional or fundamental need; so, for example, we British are (in)famed for talking about the weather ad infinitum.

Small talk probably did not exist in pre-capitalist societies, or at least not to the extent where it could be identified as a palpable social phenomenon. We have a sense of this because nothing equivalent to small talk appears in the literature of pre- or even proto-capitalist societies. In comparison, consider a 20^th-century play like Waiting for Godot which was famously described as a play in which ‘nothing happens, twice.’ That lack of action involves long meandering periods where the tramps talk constantly but inanely, and often about nothing in particular. Or consider films like Pulp Fiction which have a certain Beckettian inflection and where, despite the often frenetic action, the characters are concerned with the aimless pondering of fleeting trivialities. Or to say the same, its dialogue is riven with small talk. Is there an equivalent to this in earlier forms of literature? It is true that the 14^th-century set of stories, The Canterbury Tales, uses the noun ‘jangler’ which refers to an ‘idle talker’. This noun is derived from the old French verb ‘to jangle’ which means to nag or grumble. In other words it refers to being upset over trivial things. It can also refer to gossip, so again an element of the trivial or the petty intrudes. But small talk is something different from gossip, for gossip is often intimate, personal and salacious. Small talk is about triviality, that is true, but it is about more than this. When and why do we use small talk? Usually one talks about nothing in particular, nothing of consequence, as a means to induce a level of familiarity with an entity who, by and large, remains an unknown proposition – i.e. someone you are not connected with fundamentally. So let’s say you meet a workmate, someone you don’t know that well, by the coffee machine. You cannot gossip about what so and so did at the weekend, because you have not established that level of intimacy. And yet you are, at least, in some way connected, for you are both employees of the same firm, in similar positions, so you natter about the nice period of late summer weather you are both enjoying. How does this bear on the issue of reification?

Well when you encounter people in this type of work context you encounter them in a reified guise. What unites you is the fact that you are both bearers of labour power, that is to say, you are both enthral to the processes by which a facet of your individuality has been converted into a purely ‘thing-like’ entity which you bring before the market, and such a process, to a lesser or greater degree, stands in opposition to your social essence in its un-reified reality (the person you are at home or with friends, the set of human interests you follow which have not been determined by market prerogatives but grow out of the organic basis of your own free individuality). Thus, an antagonism is called into being between the individual’s private life – her set of personal and familial relationships, the rich interior world of her authentic personality – and the person she is compelled to be in her worklife, according to the formal position of her job, and the set of requirements it mediates. I think, in a general sense, the modern form of small talk arises out of this contradiction; it is part and parcel of the etiquette by which reified social relationships are enacted; that is to say, you talk about nothing in particular because you are situated in a reified context and the possibility of referencing the un-reified reality of your private and more authentic existence is inhibited. At the same time, small talk is about more than just the reified reality – for if it was only this, it would be limited to discussions which explicitly revolved always and only around a particular job role.

In other words small talk is (most often) the attempt to establish a more personal and authentic relationship in a situation where the reified reality is still profoundly in effect; it represents the endeavour to create a more personable connection which might act as a conduit by which the deeper more authentic reality is to be broached. Small talk expresses the need to achieve a more authentic human relationship in the context of inhuman and ossified conditions; it begins to lay the groundwork by which a more profound and truly human connection can be established. This is its social function. That is why, in earlier societies, small talk, inasmuch as it existed at all, would have had a much smaller role to play. People would still talk about the petty and the trivial in terms of rumour-mongering and gossip. But small talk couldn’t have featured so heavily because there wasn’t the same need for individuals to overcome the reified appearance.

And that is why the phenomenon of small talk is instructive: because it allows us to see how, in capitalist society, two layers open up – the social essence which manifests itself as a reified appearance – and it shows how human beings are always longing to make the transition from the appearance to the essence, not simply in terms of the political transformation and supersession of capitalism itself as a collective and revolutionary act, but in unconscious terms at the level of the individual’s spiritual and personal life. The same dynamic also shows us how the ‘private’ individual existence is often thrown into opposition by the reified, formal etiquette which dominates when we encounter others, like ourselves, in the broader world, as bearers of commodities, as carriers of things.

The form of modern drama, in which comedy and tragedy often run parallel and coextensive to one another in the same work, is at the same time a form which mediates a given content, that is to say a developed capitalism in which the contradiction between social relationships and their appearance in the guise of things has reached its most acute fruition. For this reason, the modern dramatic form is required to depict the ‘true’ authentic existence of the reified individual, and to do this is required the development of a private world: a rich, personal subjective consciousness must be opened up in terms of a depth and intimacy which remained forever unknowable to classical Greek drama. Through its feelings and thoughts, such a world better helps reveal the true nature of social relationships which appear most commonly in a reified guise. Comedy addresses the underlying social contradictions and relationships only at the level of the appearance, and like small talk itself, provides the necessary prerequisite, the means by which social relationships are manifested at the level of appearance, so that eventually the more profound reality might be discerned.

In the broadest political terms when capitalist society is thrown into profound crisis and revolutionary outbreaks erupt, we see very vividly that the objectification of social relationships in and through the processes of reification suddenly begins to fragment; the challenge to the social order comes from the collective political action of large swathes of people who are not confronting each other as isolated consumers or sellers of labour power competing according to market prerogatives, but rather are now beginning to self-determine in accordance with the political and universal bonds which open up between them as members of an oppressed class and are a product of their deepest human needs. Social relationships begin to shed their reified character; the objectified shell of the appearance begins to crack, and the more authentic and human reality shines through. In modern drama, such crisis is also required – though in a purely individualised and fantasised way – so that the viewer or reader might glimpse the full scope of the authentic social dimensions that are alive behind the surface of the everyday reality.

For the most part Niles and his father engage in light-hearted conversation, often humorous and witty, which serves to lightly demark the differences in their demeanours; but when Niles has those beers, the light-hearted etiquette is breached by the tragic force of the contradictions that underpin their relationship – contradictions of love and alienation – which suddenly force their way to the surface. Their relationship sheds its formalistic character and the true and tragic nature of what holds them together and holds them apart is revealed in all its nakedness and dramatic intensity.

At this point I need to qualify the analysis somewhat. Even though I believe that small talk is something which grows out of a social being in which individuals encounter one another as bearers or consumers of the commodity form, nevertheless I do not mean to suggest that the phenomenon only encompasses strangers or colleagues who encounter others out in the wider world. As a social practise the phenomenon has bled into broader walks of life; people make small talk when they are speaking with family members at a Christmas party, for example, or after they have had an argument with a spouse and want to start to make things right, or for any number of other reasons. I just mean that small talk contains in itself a character of ‘superficiality’ in the most literal sense of the word – i.e. of, or relating to the surface, and that such a character could only reach such pronounced definition, become such a palpable and ubiquitous social phenomenon when social existence itself has assumed a fully dualistic form, whereby essence manifests in a reified fashion at the surface level of social relations in and through the exchange of things.

Conclusion

The appearance-essence dialectic which opens up under capitalism at the level of social being necessarily finds expression in the structure of the modern drama which involves two levels of abstraction – one pertaining to relationships as they appear on the surface of social life; the other pertaining to the fundamental and essential contradictions in human relationships which generate that appearance. The first tends to be described in comedic terms, and the second, by revealing social contradictions at the level of personal relationships in all their intensity and nakedness, necessarily assumes the form of tragedy. In addition, these personal relationships should in some way – although not directly or mechanically – mediate the fundamental class contradictions which set the basis for the capitalist social system and the phenomenon of reification in the modern age. So, for example, the emotional conflict and contradiction which open up between Frasier and Niles and their father is one ultimately of class, particularly that of proletariat and bourgeoisie.

One might argue, of course, that Martin, as a retired cop, has little in common with the working class. One of the central social functions of any police force is, after all, to facilitate class rule and class oppression. But there is a danger of reading the role of the police too literally in any rendering of the aesthetic. Martin, as a retired cop, is in no way proletarian in class terms. And the conflicts between the father and his sons are rarely ever about politics or class in any obvious fashion. Nevertheless the spiritual sensibilities of the characters have a certain class aroma; Martin more plebeian, hardy, stoical and ironic – his sons more ‘sophisticated’, refined, pretentious and more ostentatiously ‘intellectual’. Their different modes of life, albeit indirectly, reflect different modes of class being.

To sum up; I have tried to use the episode “Room Full of Heroes” as a kind of case study to illustrate just how comedy and tragedy are often necessarily blended in the great work of realist drama in the modern age. Such a synthesis is made possible by two specific phenomena. The first is the process of reification by which social reality increasingly appears in a dual form: the underlying social relationships and contradictions increasingly manifest in a formal, external guise as an exchange of things. This contradiction between appearance and essence is also facilitated by the development of subjectivity as an increasingly prominent aesthetic principle in the modern age. The development of subjectivity at the level of the aesthetic helps mediate the contradiction between appearance and essence at the socio-historical level; the rich private inner world of the individual, suffused with profound social contradictions, is in some way submerged under the lighter, more superficial small talk and etiquette which tends to take place and predominate on the surface of social relations. The comedic moment hints at the more profound social contradictions from the point of view of the superficial veneer of social life. The tragic moment calls those same contradictions into the light in all their full, debilitating and explicit character. In synthesising comedy and tragedy in the same work, the modern aesthetic is able to encompass the dual form of capitalist society itself; i.e. it is able to hold the appearance and the essence in a mediated totality. The antique drama could not achieve such a synthesis of comedy and tragedy because the appearance-essence contradiction had not been developed at the level of social existence itself. Some level of reification probably did exist in ancient Greek society but only embryonically at the most.

I should also point out that I am certainly not saying that every great work of modern drama requires this particular formulation. There are, of course, great dramas which do not rely on comedy as the means to elucidate the surface level of their dramatic world, but rather just proceed through a more dispassionate portrayal of the surface of social relationships before excavating fully the profound contradictions which lie beneath. Something like Madmen – the meticulously observed and dapper drama which focuses on the US advertising industry during the 60s – does have the odd highly amusing moment but does not use comedy rhythmically and systematically as a counterpoint to tragedy; the appearance passes into essence merely in terms of graduating the ‘straight’ dialogue which overlays the surface of the social interactions of the characters – into periods of more heightened drama which bring out the underlying contradictions more vividly.

Setting these technical qualifications aside, it is worth concluding that Frasier as a whole is of interest not just to philosophers exploring the relationship between aesthetics and ontology, but as an example of great writing which should be lovingly absorbed by writers everywhere as a way of honing our craft. It reveals human frailty and human love with great warmth, pathos and humour, and it does so in a style which is deceptively simple and always engaging; it wears the dialectic of comedy and tragedy lightly, but with the most moving of consequences.