RC 1

What is wrong with the modern literary novel? Why is it so worthy and
dull? Why is it so anxious? Why is it
so bloody boring? Well, let's go back a bit first. Two and a half
thousand years ago, at the time of Aristophanes,
the Greeks believed that comedy was superior to tragedy: tragedy was
the merely human view of life (we
sicken, we die). But comedy was the gods' view, from on high: our
endless and repetitive cycle of suffering,
our horror of it, our inability to escape it. The big, drunk, flawed,
Greek gods watched us for entertainment,
like a dirty, funny, violent, repetitive cartoon. And the best of the
old Greek comedy tried to give us that
relaxed, amused perspective on our flawed selves. We became as gods,
laughing at our own follies.
Many of the finest novels—and certainly the novels I love most—are in
the Greek comic tradition, rather than
the tragic: Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Voltaire, and on through to
Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and the late Kurt
Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5.
Yet western culture since the middle ages has overvalued the tragic
and undervalued the comic. We think of
tragedy as major, and comedy as minor. Brilliant comedies never win
the best film Oscar. The Booker prize
leans toward the tragic. In 1984, Martin Amis reinvented Rabelais in
his comic masterpiece Money. The best
English novel of the 1980s, it didn't even make the shortlist. Anita
Brookner won that year, for Hotel du Lac,
written, as the Observer put it, "with a beautiful grave formality."
The fault is in the culture. But it is also in the writers, who
self-limit and self-censor. If the subject is big,
difficult and serious, the writer tends to believe the treatment must
be in the tragic mode. When Amis addressed
the Holocaust in his minor novel Time's Arrow (1991), he switched off
the jokes, and the energy, and was
rewarded with his only Booker shortlisting.
But why this pressure, from within and without? There are two good
reasons. The first is the west's unexamined
cultural cringe before the Greeks. For most of the last 500 years,
Homer and Sophocles have been held to be
the supreme exponents of their arts. (Even Homer's constant repetition
of stock phrases like "rosy-fingered
dawn" and "wine-dark sea" are praised, rather than recognised as
tiresome clichés.)
The second reason is that our classical inheritance is lop-sided. We
have a rich range of tragedies—Sophocles,
Aeschylus and Euripides (18 by Euripides alone). Of the comic writers,
only Aristophanes survived. In an age
of kings, time is a filter that works against comedy. Plays that say,
"Boy, it's a tough job, leading a nation"
tend to survive; plays that say, "Our leaders are dumb arseholes, just
like us" tend not to.
More importantly, Aristotle's work on tragedy survived; his work on
comedy did not. We have the classical
rules for the one but not the other, and this has biased the
development of all western literature. We've been
off-centre ever since. But of course Europe in the middle ages was
peculiarly primed to rediscover tragedy:
the one church spoke in one voice, drawn from one book, and that book
was at heart tragic. The church had
somehow been built on the gospel of the poor.


46. According to the author, the intrinsic reason for the predilection
for tragedies lies in:
(1) The internalization of tragedy by the writers.
(2) The socio-cultural pressure on the writers.
(3) The Greek way of thinking of the writers.
(4) The lure of the prizes for the writers.
(5) The submission to all things Greek by the writers.

47. According to the passage, which one of the following did not
contribute to the spread of tragedy?
(1) The fact that tragedies have survived over time.
(2) The fact that Europe was full of tragedies.
(3) The reality that the church spoke the voice of the poor.
(4) The fact that classical rules exist for tragedy.
(5) The fact that Greek gods appreciated comedy.


48. The tone of the passage is:
(1) Questioning
(2) Sarcastic
(3) Analytical
(4) Critical
(5) Humorous