From Saturday’s Guardian I learnt that frivolity and seriousness were ‘the same thing’.
The same thing.
It was repeated like that. And it occurred to me: Adam Thirlwell can only say this with the expectation that it will interest us because the two things are what they are, and not each other; or because we assume as much. But if he is right — if he convinces us — the statement must become tautologous, and boring. We will no longer be able to detect frivolity in seriousness or seriousness in frivolity because, after all, they are one and the same.
In case his publishers ask for a second edition of his book Serious Poetry, I have alerted Peter McDonald to this. In light of the arguments in Saturday’s Guardian, I suggested, he may want to retool his whole argument.
Except there are questions. Is one seriousness, for example, the same as another? If frivolity and seriousness are the same thing, what is that thing?
The article does not consider them, though, because to the writer they are beside the point. They make the mistake of taking Thirlwell literally: which is a mistake because as soon as Thirlwell's point is made, it ceases to mean what Thirlwell means. Its meaning, and function, is really to indicate in metaphor the writer’s cast of mind, according to which seriousness is frivolous, and frivolity serious. But the article only says what it says intelligibly because we do not share this cast of mind: because the writer is, literally, wrong.
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