Chapter 4 PATHOLOGIES: HUMOUR & IRONY

[Nigel Howard]

Chapter 4 PATHOLOGIES: HUMOUR & IRONY

An audience watching a drama unfold is seeing how characters deal with dilemmas. They feel satisfied when all dilemmas are eliminated, even when it happens through the death of all the main characters, as in a tragedy like Hamlet. This shows that the audience’s satisfaction is aesthetic. It’s not a matter of things turning out as they hoped.

Dilemmas may be eliminated by all hopes being satisfied. They may equally be eliminated by hope being given up.

Dilemmas are like unresolved chord sequences in music. They create an aesthetic need to see them resolved. Just as a piece of music is formally a matter of resolving chord sequences, so a plot is formally a matter of resolving dilemmas.

We enjoy following a plot because we need to understand how stable agreements are arrived at, or not arrived at. Having, in general, different objectives, human beings do not find themselves in agreement automatically. They have to build it. And the human way to reach stable agreement is just to react to dilemmas posed by disagreement (confrontational dilemmas) or mistrust (collaborational dilemmas) in a way that eliminates the dilemmas by redefining the problem.

More than other animals, we redefine the problems we face and justify our redefinition by arguments and evidence. For other animals, the problems they face are more a hard-wired part of their nature. So also are their solutions. We, by contrast, are more able to adjust to each other’s objectives in order to reach a cooperative agreement that benefits us all. Dilemma-provoked emotions jolt us out of adherence to our initial objectives, leading us to seek justifications for adjusting them.

A single adjustment does not, in general, eliminate all dilemmas. It is a first step, reducing or eliminating some dilemmas. Other dilemmas remain, or are created by previous adjustments. And so the process continues, driven by emotion and reason, unless and until all dilemmas are eliminated.

But this natural human process can go wrong. In describing dilemmas and our rational-emotional reactions to them, I’ve mostly looked at appropriate, well-judged reactions. But reactions can be pathological, just as the body’s reactions can be.

All reactions are dilemma-eliminating, in intention at least. But intentions may not be realized. Or the way in which dilemmas are eliminated may be dysfunctional in that it ignores the original issues at stake between the characters. This is pathological. An audience perceives it as humorous or ironic.

A husband and wife, for example, may avoid conflict over sex by never discussing it. In this way they avoid dilemmas. Without communication there can be no dilemmas. But they also avoid solving problems that communication could have enabled them to solve. In general, we need to communicate, and thereby risk conflict, in order to be able to cooperate over things where cooperation is not, as with other animals, hard-wired into our natures

[Nigel Howard]

4.1 Types of pathology: presumption

Pathology, then, consists of eliminating dilemmas while failing to solve the original problems that gave rise to them. This ineffective behavior comes about in two ways.

One kind of pathology arises from a fixed, limited view of how conflicts are resolved. Such a fixed view can be ideological and applied to all conflicts, like the Christian view that one should always turn the other cheek. Or it can be specific to the characters you’re interacting with, such as the view that people of a certain kind (Arabs, perhaps, or Soviets or Germans) only respond to threats of force.

We call these pathologies of presumption, since they consist of presuming that a general, fixed method of dilemma-elimination should be employed, preempting consideration of particular cases. Naturally, such a rule makes it impossible to resolve certain problems that arise.

Examples are the pathologies of “impossible trustâ€

[Nigel Howard]

4.2 Pathologies of ignorance

A second kind of pathology is based not on presumption, but on ignorance. This covers the usual "dramatic irony", where the process of conflict resolution goes wrong because a character is ignorant of something that the audience, & perhaps another character, know.

Here is a model of the famous pact between Othello & Iago. Iago agrees to prove that Othello's wife Desdemona, is guilty of adultery. Then Othello will kill her. The irony is that Iago knows she is innocent, having planted the evidence against her.



My model shows the audience’s view in a separate section at the bottom. Where characters don’t share the audience’s view on certain options, I put question-marks in that view—which don’t, however, give rise to trust & cooperation dilemmas, as do question-marks elsewhere. Characters don’t “distrustâ€