The comedic spirit of spring

February 29, 2024

This semester, I'm teaching one of my favorite classes—an upper-level course titled "Novel Writing," where students compose an entire novel from scratch.
 
At the outset of the course, I ask students to map out the trajectory of their novels. This involves outlining plots, charting the ebbs and flows of suspense and revelation, explaining character motivations, and situating their work within the conventions of a specific genre. To explain genre, I often use the metaphor of seasons. Genres are seasonal—I tell my students—and seasons are generic.
 
Summer represents romance in all its sincerity and abundance. It's a time of passion, embodiment, sensuality, and expression. Think of the sentimental novel or the chivalric romance.
 
The end of summer is tragic; thus Autumn signals tragedy. The tragic genre—no less dramatic than its romantic counterpart—is somber, melancholy, poignant. Think: The Great Gatsby, Giovanni's Room, etc.
 
But in time, tragedy is too much for us to bear and we begin to treat it with irony, contempt, even cynicism. And so comes winter. Winter—whose mood is caustic, biting, and bleak—is the season of satire. It assumes the role of the jester, the masked iconoclast. Winter mocks. It insults and offends. American Psycho, A Clockwork Orange, Invisible Man.
 
Eventually winter ends and in its place comes a season marked by complexity, intermediacy, ambiguity, anticipation. In generic terms, then, we might call spring a comedy. It is a genre of intricacies, contradictions, intertwining, missed connections, and mistaken identity which—in the end—eventually culminates in closure and symbolic rebirth. Think of Lysistrata by Aristophanes, where Lysistrata comes up with a plan to end a war by convincing the women of Greece to withhold sex from their husbands until they agree to negotiate peace. Or think of Shakespeare’s comedy of errors, Twelfth Night.
 
In their novels, most of my students gravitate towards either the earnest expression of summer or the irony of winter. In my own work, however, I aspire to inhabit the comedic spirit of spring—a season of in-betweenness and becoming-anew, where muddy entanglements give rise to newfound clarity and lightness.
 
Right now, as a new faculty member at Xavier University, I feel myself happily inhabiting a kind of comedy, navigating a plot that feels at times chaotic and tangled—what with the training programs, networking opportunities, various faculty meetings, institutional lingo to learn, and student novel drafts to read, all with the ongoing restructuring looming in the background of just about everything. And if the genre held true, there would be a neat resolution in sight.
 
Of course, this metaphor, like all metaphors, eventually fails. Real life is not a novel. It has no formally organized plot. But I offer this metaphor to my students precisely because I want them to see that, once they understand generic conventions, they are free to break them—both in their novels and in their actual lives. Maybe a comedy doesn’t need some tidy resolution in the third act. Maybe the second act—with its anxieties, absurdities, elisions—is its own arrival and model of being. Maybe there is some as-yet-unforeseen way of thinking about comedic genre. Maybe one of my students will discover it.

Dr. Conner Bassett
Assistant Professor, English