The following pages, along with everything on this web site (and nearly everything on any web site), are copyrighted material.  For purposes of proper annotation, the author is Edward B. Germain, the copyright date is 1975 if not specified; the source is http://www.pafaculty.net/joyce .

What you will find here are definitions of comedy, tragedy, romance and satire that probably differ from ones you are familiar with. They fall into the general approach called Archetypal or Myth Criticism, but are simplified in an effort to create tools that anyone in need can use to sharpen perception.

Shapes of Literature

Much has been made of historical or autobiographical aspects of James Joyce's writing.   I'd like to start with an aside in order to note a difference between literature and history.  Then I'd like to explain the four kinds of literature that there are--the most useful division I know.

Let's begin with an assumption, that all literature, whether it has been written or is being written or will be written, tells one story, the story of people's experiences--their dreams, their desires, their acts, their mistakes.  It is, in a way, a in-process history of Man and Woman.  But whereas history gets "over," becomes part of the past to study, literature comes around again.  We pick up a Shakespeare play and read what was put on the page 400 years ago, and it can be live and real in our minds, alive in ways different from history--although if the historian is a writer, too, then the distinction needs gradations. 

But the difference I'm talking is a way of reading and thinking.  There's history in Shakespeare's so-called "history plays."  But lots of it is wrong, and that doesn't make a bit of difference --actually, it makes the plays better, that's one reason why Shakespeare changes historical facts.  So does Joyce (yet if you want to know Dublin in 1904, start with Ulysses).  In literature we are reading about human desire, about Romeo's love for Juliet, about his pride, about the pride of Juliet's cousin, Tybalt.  We are reading about  chance: Tybalt's sword slipping under Romeo's arm and piercing Mecrutio's heart.  Although it never happened, and is set in a time hundreds of years ago, we are reading about a world we recognize: the world of love and pride and revenge.  Emotions we experience, or will.  History gets "dated," but literature cycles around generation to generation.  Marilyn French begins her study of Ulysses with this sentence: "James Joyce set out to become immortal."  Perhaps.  Perhaps Shakespeare did, too.  If it happens, it happens by recycling.

You recycle an old book when you read it again.  Every summer my wife reads Charlotte Armstrong's mystery, A Dram of Poison.  She's read it about 32 times.  And this past August she read it again and saw this time how much compassion there is in that gentle, spine-tingling mystery.  Dozens of people stop their normal lives to help find a bottle of olive oil that's full of poison.  Those ignorant of history, I'm told, are destined to repeat it--meaning they'll make the same mistakes others have.  Those who know literature re-experience it on purpose.  It's scary watching those people chasing the olive oil--they find it eventually; somebody's made spaghetti with it and is just about to eat it.  Saved from death!  Saved from death!

That is a great theme in literature.  Juliet looks dead but comes back to life inside her own tomb.  You can catalogue literature by cataloging its themes.  Because the themes are human themes, they cycle around.  Every nation & tribe has stories about being "saved from death!"  In the last half-century several outstanding scholars have spent time trying to look at the recurring themes in all of the literature we know.  One of these is Joseph Campbell, who was the man I quoted when I said "All literature tells one story."  Another is a Canadian critic named Northrop Frye.  And it's part of Frye's division of literature that I'm about to sketch.  It's the most useful I've ever encountered..


Lots of stories concern getting things the heroes of heroines want.  Cinderella wants a husband; Rocky wants to be world champion.  Young Rose wants Jack (Titanic).  When the  hero or heroine gets what each wants we feel pleased.  When Lauren Bacall falls into Humphrey Bogart's arms saying, "I thought you'd never ask me," or whatever she says, we feel good; we all want love.  This kind of literature is Romance--not necessarily because it is "romantic," but because it's an adventure where the hero and heroine get what they want.  There's The Romance of Robin Hood.  Robin gets Maid Marion all right (at least in most of the versions), but what he really wants is revenge on the Sheriff.  And he gets that, too.  In Terminator II, the Terminator, like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, wants a human heart.  He gets it as he makes his thumbs-up sacrifice of his life for the boy. And the boy wants to survive with his mom.  That happens, too.  These are Romances.   Romance is one of the two forms of literature that project what human's desire.

The other is Comedy.  In a Comedy the hero or heroine gets what each wants, but not quite the way or even in the terms that either expects it, so that can't be its defining aspect.  In one episode of Happy Days --it is still in reruns!--the Fons has to ride a wild bull to save a ranch.  Not what he expected, but it works.  Archie Bunker [ All in the Family, and The Archie Bunker Show] reestablished love and order in his rerunning family, each week--but rarely the way he intended to, and always with unexpected surprise and embarrassments.  There are always temporary obstacles, but Comedy always ends in a reconciliation.  We may laugh, but we don't have to.  Comedy is the story of reconciliations, of the hero or heroine reconciled with family or society.  --Archie Bunker is a bigot after all, and some of the plots are poignant.  Does anyone recall the show when Archie and his son-in-law Meathead get locked in a storeroom and Archie gets drunk and tells what his childhood was like, when he didn't have clothes or shoes to go to school and the kids from affluent families made fun of him?  No, in a Comedy we don't have to laugh.  But the main character has got to reconcile himself with society.  That's what happened in All in the Family every week--and still does when the programs are recycled. In spite of the strain of Archie's personality, or Meathead's impetuousness, or Edith's brittle sentimentalism, or Gloria's enthusiasms, the family keeps coming back together again and again.  It's a Comedy.  Note that this is probably not the same as the definition you are probably used to (or even the one that your English teacher uses). But it's really helpful. Keep reading!.

So, thus far, classified by their themes, we have two kinds of literature Romance and Comedy.  They're both essential shapes of happiness:  We get what we desire.  We reintegrate ourselves with our society, our family.  These themes occur, over and over again, in every literature on earth.

Then there's the dark side of human experience.  The side that we don't want.  In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo sees Juliet lying on her grave and he thinks she's dead, so he kills himself.  Juliet wakes up--she's only been drugged--and sees Romeo dead, so she kills herself.  They almost had each other, what they most wanted.  Some kind of fate or bad luck had them wake at different times; they were "star-crossed," tragic figures.  Othello, Oedipus, The Godfather have themes that are similar in this regard: in each, the main character reaches for something worthwhile and that destroys him. Tragedy.

Tragedies are the exact opposite of comedies in that they deal with disintegration rather than reintegration.  There aren't so many tragedies regularly on TV, because who would want to watch a society or family disintegrate night after night, again and again.  But there are specials, like Shakespeare's King Lear.  Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman shows what it feels like to be beaten down trying to make a decent living.  Younger people may not know that feeling now.  But many of you will, unfortunately.   Some of your parents and most of your grandparents know it.  And the literature of tragedy projects these undesired experiences, these fears, and it sings about the breakup of men and women, of families and societies and nations.

So we have on the bright, springtime and summertime side, Romance and Comedy, and on the colder, darker fall side, Tragedy, which is formed by the momentum of disintegration: a man breaking from his family, forced out of the societal order, separated from his country.  A government breaking apart, a country breaking down, disintegrating.  All this happens in countless novels and films and plays and poems that embody the shape of Tragedy .

Finally, the fourth form, which a Dickens' novel Hard Times alludes to in its title.  Satire is what happens when there isn't any decent family or society available for the main character to reconcile himself to, or when the desires he has aren't worth desiring, or when the actions he takes aren't worth taking.  Satire is the literature that describes what our world is like when we try to reintegrate ourselves with it and can't, when all anyone can find are unintegrated fragmented pieces of a world. 

Satire, like the other three structures, is a shape of literature, shaped by a kind of human experience that all peoples and nations know--and like the other three, it has its own structure.  Where Romance is an adventure that is shaped by wish-fulfillment, and Comedy is shaped by a movement towards reintegration, and Tragedy is shaped by a relentless disintegration, Satire is shaped by fragmentation .  In a Satire, chaos isn't very far away.  In Satire, cities become wastelands, as in Clockwork Orange or T.S. Eliot's poem called "The Wasteland."  In Satire , a schoolroom becomes a Blackboard Jungle, society becomes just mobs or gangs, marriage becomes a mere convenience at best that works out for the worst.  Hard Times.  Crucial pieces of society are missing.  The whole social fabric threatens lies in pieces.  This is the kind of landscape Joyce draws in his very first collection of stories about Dubliners. It's the main reason why he had great trouble getting some of the pieces published individually.  Satire threatens the establishment and its views.  It always has, and always will.

Of course most stories are mixtures of these four forms, but often one form usually dominates, shapes the story towards wish-fulfillment, reconciliation, disintegration or fragmentation.  If you know a little calculus, you can think of these four words as being increments of change within a story, a dy/dx that shapes the plot just as the area under a curve is shaped.  And each curve has a name: Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, Satire.

Those are the four key words.  And though storytellers can use these themes in infinite variations, curving their threads in a tapestry that is still being woven, what we hope for, what we seek, what we fear, what we hate--makes literature.  And it comes around and around.

Go to A brief history of Satire.

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