Literary Improvisation, Hermes’s Farts, and Communitas

Improv is a form with roots that go back well before 60’s happenings, experimental theatre, and Keith Johnstone. Randy Fertel will explore what light Victor Turner’s idea of communitas sheds on improv, and what light the long, unacknowledged literary tradition of improv reflects back on Turner’s idea. In sum, while Turner finds in rituals of initiation expressions of existential communitas and its embrace of anti-structure, and traces the inevitable “decline and fall” back into structure, the same dynamic can be found in examples of improv since classical times. What Turner says of "Ritual’s liminal phase” is true of improv: it "approximates to the ‘subjunctive mood’ of sociocultural action.” Both ask, what if life could be experienced with the immediacy — the freedom from mediation and structure — of Hermes. Where Turner’s focus, and perhaps Performance Theory’s emphasis, is in exploring the nature of existential communitas in ritual and its connections to drama, Fertel wants to offer a new pair: not ritual but archetypal myth; and not drama but this other performative literary form which Fertel calls improvisation.

Randy Fertel holds a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard University, where he received a teaching award by student vote. He has taught English at Harvard, Tulane, LeMoyne College, and the New School for Social Research. He specializes in the literature of the Vietnam War and the literature of exile.

Fertel has been featured in People, Bloomberg, and Esquire and has contributed to The New York Times, NPR, Smithsonian, Kenyon Review,Gastronomica, Creative Nonfiction, The Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Language Quarterly, Victorian Poetry, Spring Journal, Tikkun, WLA, New Orleans Review, and The Huffington Post. His first book, The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir, the tale of two distinctive people — his parents — and his efforts to survive them, is now in its fourth printing.

He is president of the Fertel Foundation and co-founded, with the Nation Institute, the Ridenhour Prizes for Courageous Truth-Telling, named for My Lai whistleblower and investigative reporter Ron Ridenhour (ridenhour.org). He lives in New Orleans and New York.