Tragedy, Comedy, Reality

Warning: This might not make a lot of sense.

Something that I've been thinking about a lot lately is the concept of tragedy. I know in class we went over the basic elements to expect in a tragedy (death, sorrow, revenge, backstabbing, secret plots, etc.), but I've been trying to think of it more in a non-play setting.
In the movie "Stranger than Fiction", the main character, Harold Crick, is trying to decide whether is life is a comedy or a tragedy and starts keeping track of comedic moments during his day verses tragic ones. By the end of one day he has four marks under "Comedy" and at least a hundred under "Tragedy". At the end of that day he says, "I think I'm in a tragedy."

King Lear is definitely a tragedy. Everything about the play is tragic. But something that I've been thinking about and noticing is that even Comedic plays like "Love's Labour's Lost", "Taming of the Shrew", "Much Ado about Nothing", and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" all have some tragic element. The plays are not one long string of happy events and funny jokes. There is still guile, death, and sorrow, it just ends in a happier way than a tragedy.

In my Contemporary Theory of Anthropology this semester we read a book called "Pandora's Hope" by Bruno Latour. In this book Latour addresses the idea of reality- what it is, if it really exists, and the elements that contribute to it. Life is full of tragic and comedic events. Some days we might very well feel like we are in a tragedy and that we've past the point of no return. Our eyes have been stomped out of our heads and we have been tricked by someone we thought was very close to us. But that's not usually the case. Most of our lives are not just a tragedy or just a comedy. I feel like most of our lives, in reality are probably more like "Winter's Tale" with very strong elements of both.

King Leontes and everyone else in the beginning of the play had different realities. As I called it in a previous post "Emerald City Syndrome" The king believed that reality was that his wife had cheated on him with his best friend. But everyone else had the reality that she hadn't and that the king had gone mad. Leontes couldn't be convinced that his reality wasn't real, because he believed it to be so. How many times in our lives do we think something is reality, when no one else does, or very few people do? How crazy was Leontes in his reality? How crazy is King Lear in his reality? How crazy was Hamlet in his reality? How crazy is Harold Crick in his reality? How crazy are you in your reality? How crazy do I sound to you right now?

Everything is connected and everything is relative. We will always have contrasts of tragedy and comedy in our lives. Every day, week, month, etc. there will be an imbalance of tragic and comedic elements that we have to go through, but I think what really matters is how we perceive it. Other people are rarely going to see the same event the same way you do. That doesn't make either of you crazy, it just means you live in slightly different, but connected realities.