Dick Simon--In Memoriam April 10 2005

For most of the time since last Monday when Dick died, I've been in bed with a chest cold and a cough—unable to sleep at night, short of breath, fretting about missed classes, fussing with doctors appointments and medications, shamed by burdening my family, interrupted in my projects, wondering when it will be over.

This trivial illness and its attendant discomforts, frustrations and anxieties has allowed me to grasp more about what Dick went through for the last two years than my periodic visits with him. Because he so generously welcomed company and never complained about his woes, but rather described them with detachment and whimsy, I would leave after our talks more exhilirated than saddened. That was really fun, I'd reflect, a conversation with edge and fluency. I marvelled at the way he'd become easier to be with than in the past. We could share news, exchange views, express affection without strain, the occasional silences meditative rather than awkward. His brave demeanor spared me from paying full attention to his ordeal.

Laid up and longing to hear his voice again this week, I turned to the two books he left us. The first, The Labyrinth of the Comic, interprets difficult works by Erasmus, Kierkegaard, Bergson and Freud in light of recondite philosophic and psychological issues of their times. He led me through a tortuous maze searching for the essential definition of what is funny, to arrive finally at the realization that the theory of the comic can only be understood as a joke.

The quest ended with these words: "Read as a series of attempts to answer unanswerable questions about the meaning of comedy and the nature of laughter, the inquiry into the comic appears as 2500 years of interesting failure. ...The best of [the writers] have also masked their analysis in mockery. …In the inquiry into laughter and the comic, the best critics are unreliable."

I heard here the voice of a scholar's scholar. It kindled my admiration for the ambition of his project, the intricacy of its design and the prodigious labor that went into completing it--dozens of primary sources discovered and untangled, hundreds of secondary works considered and cited, served up in dense but immaculate prose. It concludes: "The intellectual history of the comic is thus ready for a major reinterpretation. This book has been a first step in that process." Those who have reviewed and cited the book in print confirm that proud claim.

After fifteen more years of research, teaching, and reflection, most of it at Cal Poly, Dick published his second book, Trash Culture. Rereading it was less arduous but no less challenging. The scholarship here hides below the surface but ranges even more widely through disciplines and periods. The topic is of universal interest, the prose vernacular and engaging. Trash Culture examines stories, ancient and modern, the links between the great books of old and new artifacts of popular culture: movies, tv shows and magazines by many regarded as garbage.

In both statement and style, this book evolves far from his first book's sober investigations of humor. With amiable defiance, he asserts, "There is something in this book to offend almost everybody who works in the criticism industry." I heard again the voice of the Dick Simon we remember—the serious clown, the demanding professor and colleague who wears silly hats. In places startlingly insightful, in others headscratchingly perverse, it unfolds the argument about stories with storytelling rather than dialectic. It makes profound assertions that are also tongue-in-cheek. It mocks the idea of quality as provincial, yet searches for the essence of quality in the arts. After finishing the book, I felt I understood him in a new way. Trash Culture was Dick Simon's own creative work, his Erasmian Praise of Folly.

The comic and its relation to the serious always intrigued Dick. On this tragic and yet festive occasion of celebrating his life and accomplishments, I'd like to offer an old poem by Sir Walter Ralegh:

What is our life? A play of passion.

Our mirth the music of division

Our mothers' wombs the attiring houses be

Where we are dressed for this short comedy.

Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is

That sits and marks still who doth act amiss.

Our graves that hide us from the searching sun

Are like drawn curtains when the play is done.

Thus march we playing to our latest rest

Only we die in earnest, that's no jest.