ABSTRACT
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) named “omnishambles” its word of the year in 2012, with senior editor Fiona McPherson defining it as “a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, and is characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations” (McPherson 2012). That’s how the word was utilized by British politicians to describe opponents’ grand (mis-)doings in Parliament. The British press even coined the term “Romney-shambles” to describe Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s UK visit and his ill-timed critique of the 2012 London Summer Olympics. Omnishambles is simultaneously comic and tragic. You might identify
another’s grave blunder – Aristotle in his Poetics called it that tragic miscalculation hamartia – that magnifies horribly into the tragic, bloody ends of Oedipus or Hamlet. Yet how can we help but laugh, as British politicians and press are surely doing, at the blunders of another? Nobel Prize-winning writer of tragicomedy, Harold Pinter reminds us that “everything is funny. […] Even tragedy is funny. […] The point about tragedy is that it is no longer funny. It is funny, and then it is no longer funny” (Hallam Tennyson in Gale 1996, 853). This tragicomic edge comes when the comedy (barely) stops, awakening us to fresh, complex possibilities in a given dramatic moment: it laces a character’s comic omnishambles with gravitas, an air of humanity and dignity that tragedy brings. A tragicomic moment might even be both sublimely tragic and grotesquely comical. Pinter’s twentieth-century contemporary Friedrich Dürrenmatt (2006, 137) argues that the
tragic is still possible even if pure tragedy [re: classical Oedipus or Renaissance Hamlet] is not […] We can achieve the tragic out of comedy. We can bring it forth as an enlightening moment, as an abyss that suddenly opens; indeed many of Shakespeare’s tragedies are really comedies out of which the tragic arises.
