A Show for the Ground-lings
Criticism is not my job. I am not a critic, much less a writer. I write for epistemological reasons. I write in order to aggregate related data gathered from various authors and sources in one place. I perceive, or think I perceive, in the set of items a pattern. That pattern I then attempt to summarize, condense, into a meaningful statement of my own. Like Diogenes, seeking amid the many (hoi polloi) the "true" man (archetype), the meaning of allegory, as such, is, for me, the object of my search.
It was satisfying to read the comments of Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. He comes well-recommended as a critic of criticism. It is a work of meta-criticism, or, philosophy of criticism, and, I believe, relevant criticism of my subject. Briefly, for me, how to think about The Homeless comes down to humor. In the first paragraph of "First Essay," Frye comes straight to the point:
"In the second paragraph of the Poetics Aristotle speaks of the differences in works of fiction which are caused by the different elevations of the characters in them. In some fictions, he says, the characters are better than we are, in others worse, in still others on the same level."
In other words, Frye deduces (on Aristotle's authority) five classes of drama, four above standard, one beneath. We are concerned with Number Five:
"If inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic mode. This is still true when the reader feels that he is or might be in the same situation, as the situation is being judged by the norms of a greater freedom."
We take irony and humor as being in an as-yet unspecified relationship, but irrelevant to tragedy, melancholy, and myth, subject of the four dismissed classes of fiction defined, by Frye, as not ironic.
"The result as a rule is not tragedy so much as the kind of melodrama which may be defined as comedy without humor."
I might add more sub-standard classes, lower types of humor than poetic irony, but which neither Frye nor I will mention, in order to scrutinize the one under consideration.
"But the ironist fables without moralizing, and has no object but his subject."
I would point out that "fables" may include myths, and therefore the validity of criticism of unwritten subject matter. Myths, as all agree, were originally an oral tradition. I find this fortuitous for the criticism of art, as one such subject of criticism without a written tradition.
"Tragic irony, then, becomes simply the study of tragic isolation as such, and it thereby drops out the element of the special case, which in some degree is in all the other modes. Its hero does not necessarily have any tragic hamartia or pathetic obsession: he is only somebody who gets isolated from his society."
What is the antonym of "hero"? As I see it, the homeless person, bum, tramp, vagabond, etc., is that "somebody."
"In ironic comedy we begin to see that art has also a lower limit in actual life. This is the condition of savagery, the world in which comedy consists of inflicting pain on a helpless victim, and tragedy in enduring it. Ironic comedy brings us to the figure of the scapegoat ritual and the nightmare dream, the human symbol that concentrates our fears and hates."
I didn't know it before now, but the plight of The Homeless is a drama, ritualistic, an annual event to be observed, a holiday, when shops and schools, offices and banks officially close.
"But the element of play is the barrier that separates art from savagery, and playing at human sacrifice seems to be an important theme of ironic comedy. Even in laughter itself some kind of deliverance from the unpleasant, even the horrible, seems to be very important. We notice this particularly in all forms of art in which a large number of auditors are simultaneously present, as in drama, and, still more obviously, in games."
It is a lottery, but one in which the winner loses, and in which everyone participates without exception. It is a drama, a play, even a sham, one that casts society as perpetrator. Frye mentions in this context the Sherlock Holmes novels of Arthur Conan Doyle. Frye offers the brilliant deduction that the law enforcement function of crime detection constitutes plot in the novels, the pathos of the criminal functions as character development, the cause of his fall from grace as dramatic climax, and the conviction that eliminates a group of "suspects," finally settling on a culprit as dramatic resolution.
"The sense of a victim chosen by lot is very strong, for the case against him is only plausibly manipulated."
One-of-a-kind works of art can be viewed at: https://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/1840403