The Order of the Secret Chefs: A Comment by Simon Sheridan

What is the point of narrative comedy: A reply to Ugo Bardi

From Simon Sheridan's blog

Recently, Ugo Bardi wrote a fine review of my second novel, The Order of the Secret Chiefs. There was one criticism Ugo made that I thought was unjustified but in an interesting way. Ugo made the point that the characters in the novel do not evolve but remain static. This would normally be a valid criticism. Any story which follows the Hero’s Journey pattern should have a denouement at the end where the protagonist transcends their old self and transforms into something new. However, comedy is the one genre where this is not true. To understand why, let’s first define some terms. I define a comedy as follows:

A story where the protagonist wins in spite of, or even because of, their vices.

We can contrast this with a tragedy:

A story where the protagonist loses in spite of, or even because of, their virtues.

The ur-novel of the modern West is also the ur-comedy of the modern West: Don Quixote. The protagonist, Alonso Quixano, is a fifty year old low level noble who is married and lives a comfortable life for the time. He decides to drop everything, call himself Don Quixote and go off on a grand adventure as a knight-errant. I hope it’s not a spoiler alert to say that Quixano “wins” in the end. Despite his vice – insanity – he makes it home safe and sound. What’s important to note is that Quixano has not evolved in any way. At the end of the story he is right back where he started and, although he renounces his previous actions, this is more of a social commentary on the part of Cervantes than a great revelation for the character.

Given that comedy is the genre where the protagonist wins in spite of their faults, it makes sense that the protagonist does not evolve. They have no need to. When things go well in life, we tend not to learn much. It’s mostly through pain and suffering that lessons get learned. This is one of the reasons why protagonists in comedy stories tend to finish where they started.

We see a similar pattern in what I consider to be the greatest comedic novels in the English language: the Jeeves books by P G Wodehouse. The protagonist, Bertie Wooster, is as clueless as Quixote. He is an inversion of the stereotypical English gentleman of the 1800s. Not for Bertie the gallant adventures of a Richard Francis Burton or squandering the family fortune on coke and hookers (I guess it was opium and hookers at that time) like many other young “gentlemen” of the age. Bertie is a wealthy man in his early twenties who could be playing the field, travelling or involved in affairs of state. Instead, he is wound up in trifling domestic disputes that get blown out of proportion through his own bungling. Fortunately, his trusty butler, Jeeves, is there to save the day. Jeeves must solve the problem while keeping the solution secret from Bertie who will only mess things up if he gets involved.

Like Quixote, what is going on in Bertie’s mind and what is actually happening in the real world are very different things and this drives the comedy in both books. There is nothing for Bertie to learn because he completely misunderstands what is going on. Because he doesn’t learn anything, he doesn’t evolve either. Again, we find that the protagonist in the comedy stays the same. The formula is neatly summed up in a line from another great comedy, The Big Lebowski: the Dude abides.

There is something else going on in Quixote and the Jeeves books that I think is interesting and relevant to larger social issues at the moment. Both Quixote and Bertie Wooster are anachronisms. Quixote has been reading too many old books and got himself riled up over a mythology about knights errant that was out of date even at that time. Wooster is an English gentleman of the old school at the time when that stereotype was fast going out of date and would be completely extinct after WW2. The fact that both characters are anachronisms is part of their charm. Both men are not just unwilling to conform to social expectations, they are completely unaware of them. The result is that they are not fitted for their world and must continually be rescued giving both of them an eternal childlike quality; two grown men who still believe in fairy tales. Another way to think about it is that they are out there in the real world acting as if the ideal in their mind were true and consistently ignoring all the feedback that it is not. This is in contrast to most of us who give up on whatever ideals we had in order to get by in society. There are strong parallels with Christ which Dostoevsky captured quite precisely in his fittingly-titled book, The Idiot.

What happens when we apply a standard comedic technique and invert this configuration? Instead of individuals who are running on an outdated social script, we make society the one which is running on an outdated social script. Then we change the individual from an idealist into a realist. Now it’s society forcing the individual to conform to an outdated, often absurd social script. This is still a source for comedy. I’m reminded of the Seinfeld episode where George is forced to eat a poisoned pie by his co-workers: “If you’re one of us, you’ll take a bite.” It’s also an excellent description of where our society is at right now. On a daily basis, we are expected to believe all kinds of outright nonsense; to eat all kinds of poisoned pie. The process was in place before corona and has only gone into hyperdrive since.

As I’m sure Ugo would agree, we are coming to the end of the line of our current social arrangements. The story could be a tragedy and there are plenty of people who want to view it as such. That is the driver of many of the apocalypse fantasies that float around these days. There are a lot of people who want to heroically go down with the ship. However, societies, like most things in nature, operate in cycles. The end of one cycle is also the beginning of another. So, another way to think about where we are right now is the beginning of a new cycle. That is where the protagonist of the comedy, the Fool, comes into the picture.

It is not without good reason that the Fool card is the first in the tarot deck. It symbolises among other things the beginning of a journey. Quixote was a fool. So was Bertie Wooster. We are all now fools in that we belong to a society running on an outdated script. We must search for a new script but this mission is also foolish. We can expect many failures so we’ll need our Sancho Panza to keep our spirits up and our Jeeves to keep us from our worst mistakes. Like Quixote, we have to metaphorically leave our comfortable home where everything is still functioning more or less and go out into the world looking for adventure. We have to do that knowing full well that most of what we try won’t succeed but with the fool’s assurance that it will be alright in the end and if it’s not alright, it’s not the end.

My Answer to Simon Sheridan

Interesting discussion, Simon. For some miracle, we find ourselves discussing about literature as if we were still living in the 1950s, the last great period of Western literature. Then, everything went down the drain, unfortunately. Or perhaps it was written in sympathetic ink on all the book covers of all novels. I discuss this point in a previous post of mine https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2015/01/where-have-our-dreams-gone-death-of.html

Anyway, yes, you have an excellent point: comedy is a different genre than tragedy, and your novel falls straight in the former category. I must say that I have a personal penchant for the latter. As an example, I never liked the “Quixote” — I read it, but it seemed to me completely pointless. Jorge Luis Borges (whom I immensely admire) criticized it in the same way I could have criticized it: the protagonist goes through the story experiencing all sorts of disasters, never learning anything from them!

But I also understand your point on how the Quixote needs to be read as a piece of societal criticism, just like your novel does. Here, we go into a fundamental point: societies are all based on stories. For a certain time, our society (broadly defined as the “Western” one, including the USSR) expressed its story lines in the form of novels. And novels could be a powerful force for social change, think of “The Catcher in the rye” Or of “The Gulag Archipelago”And now?

We seem to have run out of stories, but I think we just ran out of a certain format of stories. We are still telling stories to each other but in a much more compact form — they have become the memes that move through the internet. In large part, they are generated by governments as propaganda. Think of the epic story of the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” in Iraq! It was a complete saga, including heroes battling and defeating a dragon called “Saddam.” Then, there were no WMDs, but who ever saw the treasure that the dragon Fafnir was said to keep in its cave? Nothing new, here, after all, the “Aeneid” that we rightly consider as a masterpiece of literature, was commissioned to Virgil by Octavianus as a piece of propaganda for his imperial rule.

And we move along. We’ll never stop dreaming, our dreams are our life.

The Order of the Secret Chiefs

 

What sense does it make to write a novel in the 21st century? As tools for expressing ideas, novel lost their usefulness at some moment during the second half of the 20th century, and from then on they were no more an art form of much significance. Maybe it was the TV, maybe the decline of literacy, maybe something else. Whatever it was, it had to happen because it happened.

Yet, it is still possible to write novels. I have been exploring a few modern attempts to do just that and the results are usually dismaying. Mostly, recent novels are hopelessly amateurish, some are so convoluted that only their authors can understand what they wanted to say. 

So, I read this novel by Simon Sheridan, Australian writer who blogs at http://simonsheridan.me/. I had been reading his post on the Covid epidemics and I was impressed by his capability of dissecting the myths surrounding the story. I also read his book "The Devouring Mother," also dedicated to the epidemics.  Sheridan is not a professional psychologist, but he has clearly delved in depth into Jungian psychology and myth examination. 

How about this book, "The Order of the Secret Chiefs?" Well, unlike most modern novels, it is clearly the work of a professional writer. Sheridan writes of himself that: 

I mostly write comedy and have a particular love of farce: tall stories with outrageous plots told in a realist style. My books are snappy and irreverent featuring everyday characters doing distinctly non-everyday things.

This paragraph describes well the "Secret Chiefs" novel. It is indeed snappy and irreverent. It moves fast in a realistic -- although wildly exaggerated modern world. The characters are clearly described, the dialog is fast-paced, and the story is full of quirks and showdowns. Professional, by all means, obviously influenced by modern screenplay writing. You can almost see in front of your eyes the movie that the novel could become. 

Then, as most modern fiction, Sheridan's novel has the defect of being somewhat shallow. A novel has this enormous advantage over a visual technique such as movies, that it can tell the story from different angles and in a depth that a movie can never reach. But this novel is mostly a movie or a comedy script, almost ready to be set on stage. 

The result is that characters behave as you would expect them to behave, but you never get more than a glimpse of what makes them move the way they do. The protagonist, the focal point of the story and the narrative "eye" is Adam Sampson, someone clearly looking for something, but he doesn't know what. And the readers don't either. The same is for the female counterpart of the protagonist, the Russian girl called Natashya. Sort of a femme fatale, surely sexy, but we never understand what she really wants or what she is trying to accomplish. 

By far the most lovely and endearing character is the smart and quick-witted Mrs. Mitchell, who enjoys playing the role of the Russian babushka, supposed to be Natashya's grandmother, without being Russian and without speaking a single word of Russian except "Nyet." Mrs. Mitchell is the only character that evolves, at least a little, as the story goes on. The other characters remain static. At the end, they are exactly what they were at the beginning. 

So, you arrive to the end of the novel with the feeling to have gone for a ride on the roller coaster of an amusement park. It was fun, sure, but what was the point? With the remarkable insight that Sheridan has, he probably understands that his novel mirrors our world: lots of noise and movement but, in the end, nothing changes. And so it goes.