Undervaluing Comedy

In this essay at Prospect, Julian Gough lucidly describes the kind of comedy he traces back to the Greeks and that the Russian linguist/theorist/philosopher M.M. Bakhtin called "carnivalesque." In this tradition of comedy, the comedic text (or performance) presents a thoroughly undeceived view of human life, responding to "our endless and repetitive cycle of suffering, our horror of it, our inability to escape it," with unremitting laughter. Although Gough doesn't use the term in his essay, Bakhtin further called such an attitude toward human affairs "radical skepticism." No authority is spared the corrosive perspective afforded by this sort of laughter, no conduct or discourse presented with "straightforward seriousness" can finally be taken seriously.

Such later European writers as Rabelais and Swift were literary comedians of the radically skeptical kind, but, as Gough also emphasizes, it was the development of the novel as a literary form that really gave writers the opportunity to exploit this comedy to its full potential. Gough includes Swift and Rabelais as "novelists," but even though Gargantua and Pantagruel and Gulliver's Travels could be called proto-novels, the tradition of carnivalesque comedy in the English novel would include some of the very first writers to produce what we now agree are novels: Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, as well as their greatest disciple, Charles Dickens. Bahktin admired all of these writers, and the broad, thoroughgoing comedy they practiced--separate from whatever "happy ending" their books supplied--is what Gough seems to have in mind when he writes of the novelist as one "who did not have a holy book. The novelist was on his own. Sometimes he's even a she. There were no rules. The chaos of carnival had found its form. The fool's sermon could be published, could live on."

Gough is right to assert that

The novel, when done right—when done to the best of the novelist's abilities, talent at full stretch—is always greater than the novelist. It is more intelligent. It is more vast.

This is especially true of comic novels, or at least those novels that are truly "comic" in the Bakhtinian sense and not just "satirical." Satire has traditionally been corrective, a way of using laughter to mock attitudes and behaviors the author wishes to reform. In other words, satire is usually another way of "saying something." It is not radically skeptical because it holds out one source of authority--the writer him/herself--as immune from such skepticism. The author's ultimate goal, cloaked in humor, is to be serious about the errors both individuals and society are prone to. He has a point to make, and the point exceeds the reach of comedy. The satirist doesn't willingly satirize himself.

Perhaps this is one reason why, after Dickens, comedy in fiction--satirical or otherwise--recedes in importance, replaced by realism and naturalism, both of which assume the structure of tragedy and essentially express the tragic view of life. This is, of course, "straightforward seriousness" of the highest order, and, as Gough points out, to be taken as a "serious" novelist required privileging tragedy over comedy:

. . .western culture since the middle ages has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic. We think of tragedy as major, and comedy as minor. . .

The fault is in the culture. But it is also internalised in the writers, who self-limit and self-censor. If the subject is big, difficult and serious, the writer tends to believe the treatment must be in the tragic mode. . . .

With the occasional exceptions Gough notes--Evelyn Waugh, Flann O'Brien--comedy essentially disappears from fiction, or at least so Gough appears to believe. He certainly does imply that little noteworthy comic fiction has appeared since Waugh, especially in the United States. Through the professionalization of fiction writing via creative writing programs, he writes:

The last 30 years have seen the effects of turning novel writing into an academic profession with a career path. As they became professional, writers began to write about writers. As they became academicised, writers began to write about writing.

And the language of the American literary novel began to drift away from anything used by human beings anywhere on earth. Thirty years of the feedback loop have led to a kind of generic American literary prose, instantly recognisable, but not as instantly comprehensible. Professions generate private languages designed to keep others out. This is irritating when done by architects. But it is a catastrophe for novelists, and the novel.

Here, I'm afraid, Gough really misses the boat. Comedy in fiction--comedy as Bakhtin would recognize it--has flourished in American fiction since at least the 1960s. One of the few postwar American novels Gough mentions is John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. This is a fine book, but it is far from the only "carnivalesque" novel to be found in postwar fiction. (And I'm not sure I would finally identify it as truly carnivalesque, at least not insofar as this kind of comedy requires "radical skepticism." Ignatius J. Reilly is surely a Rabelaisian character who rejects the authority of everything associated with the "modern," but his own superior status--despite his vices--as one who sees through it all is never really questioned, nor is the authority of his anti-modern views, which have been especially lauded by contemporary conservatives who see Reilly as a kind of moral hero.) Perhaps the finest postwar American writer (in my view) is Stanley Elkin, whose work is relentlessly comic in an almost vaudevillian way, and which implicitly includes within its comic purview Elkin's own hyperactive, gloriously excessive style, its at times ridiculously extended tropes and setpieces offered up as the focus of laughter in and of themselves. Gilbert Sorrentino takes fiction itself as a subject of merciless laughter, in novels such as Mulligan Stew submitting all of its assumptions and devices to his inspired mockery. Novels such as Catch-22, Portnoy's Complaint, Gravity's Rainbow, and The Public Burning stretch satire almost to the breaking point, using comedy to deflate even the most "profound" of subjects--war, sex, democracy--and reveal them to be laughing matters like anything else.

Furthermore, despite Gough's quick dismissal of writers "who began to write about writing," this particular mode of postwar American fiction--metafiction--is actually the most radically comic writing yet produced in American or English fiction (with the possible exception of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, which was uproariously metafictional before its time). The fiction of writers like Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Robert Coover, as well as Sorrentino, through its self-reflexivity, its insistence that readers be aware of writing as writing, exposes the act of writing, of fiction-making, to a kind of ridicule. These are the calculations that writers make? Here's how a "story" gets strung together? This is what writers do? In the end, the grand pretensions of fiction are shown to be very artificial indeed, novels and short stories unmistakably disclosed as only words. These writers have been accused of frivolity, of--wittingly or unwittingly--undermining their own craft. But this is the very goal of this kind of comedy. Only by stripping even literature itself of its dignity, of its pretensions to "signify," can fiction keep faith with what I agree with Gough is its real mission: "The task of the novelist is. . .not to fake a coherence that does not exist, but to capture the chaos that does. And in so doing, perhaps we shall discover that chaos and permanence are not, in fact, opposed. The novel, self-renewing, self-destroying, always the same, always new, always… novel… is the art of permanent chaos."

I also agree with Gough that the academization of fiction through creative writing programs has probably discouraged writers from further exploring the possibilities of Bakhtinian comedy. It probably has contributed to the creation of "a kind of generic American literary prose." But I can't agree that it has done so by valorizing metafiction. The problem is not that there's too much postmodernism floating around; it's that there's not enough of it. In my view, only someone who's willfully misreading American postmodernism--the most indispensable ingredient in which is laughter--would say that "Since Joyce and Woolf (and Eliot), the novel's wheels have spun in the sand." Postmodern comedy has taken the anarchic comedy implicit in Joyce and made it explicit. It's the rejection of this liberating anarchy by "professional" Creative Writing that has stultified "literary prose," not the acceptance of a "private language" too influenced by postmodernism. If Gough wants American writers to again see the virtues of his "divine comedy," he could start by urging them to read carefully the very postmodernism he for some reason wants them to think "never happened."

Comments

[anonymous]

bravo

[Richard]

I agree with the general thrust of this post. I also agree that Gough glides right over the period you're talking about, but this comment from Gough means something different to me:

"The last 30 years have seen the effects of turning novel writing into an academic profession with a career path. As they became professional, writers began to write about writers. As they became academicised, writers began to write about writing."

I don't think he's talking about "metafiction" at all here. (He certainly seems unaware of the likes of Elkin and Sorrentino and the other comic writers you're referring to here.) I think he's talking about "academic writing"--he seems to me to be making the common complaint about workshops and the like. Especially where he says in the next paragraph that "Thirty years of the feedback loop have led to a kind of generic American literary prose, instantly recognisable, but not as instantly comprehensible." This doesn't sound like metafiction to me.

In some respects, in the rest of his piece Gough seems to making the same sort of argument David Foster Wallace made in his "E Pluribus Unum" essay, without being as aware as DFW is of the history of the post-modern novelists coming before him.

(Also, it seems clear that Gough's claim about the problem with John Banville is based on just the one book that won the Booker.)

[Dan Green]

I don't know. "Professions generate private languages designed to keep others out. This is irritating when done by architects. But it is a catastrophe for novelists, and the novel." Sounds like a swipe at postmodernism/metafiction to me.

[Richard]

Yeah, that part gave me pause...

Maybe he doesn't know what he means.

[Julian Gough]

Whoah! Before this horse gallops much further in this particular direction, could I step (metacritically) out of the shadows and explain what I meant? (Of course, Richard may well be correct when he says, maybe I don't know what mean...)

In fact, I largely agree with Daniel. I love Barthelme, I love Pynchon. I think that American metafiction has been where a lot of the Hot! Comic! Action! has been this past half century.

But in my essay, I'm trying to make a book-length argument in 4,500 words, and I simply didn't have time or space to explore US metafiction. My broad argument was not that nobody is writing good comic fiction (that'd be nuts): It was that the general tendency of the culture leans against treating serious stuff through comedy. And I wrote the article for Prospect magazine, in London, and for a largely London readership. My examples were thus largely drawn from the right hand side of the Atlantic.

Some of the lines that I had to cut from the finished essay, due to lack of space, might have made this clearer. Here’s an example of a lost paragraph which in fact mentions Pynchon:

“So it is likely that the great novels which effortlessly cut the Gordian knot I have described have not only been written already, but published already, reviewed and dismissed already. Certainly they have not won the Booker Prize. Nor are they ever likely to. The Pulitzer Prize, consistently picking the wrong novel throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties, once almost got it right, in 1974. The novel committee unanimously chose Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (undoubtedly the greatest American novel of that year). But the overall Pulitzer committee refused to award the prize to Pynchon for such a tasteless book. So no award was given that year.”

I don’t think we disagree. My argument was a little overcompressed in the edit, but to clarify it here: I agree with Daniel when he says:

‘It's the rejection of this liberating anarchy by "professional" Creative Writing that has stultified "literary prose," not the acceptance of a "private language" too influenced by postmodernism.’

But I’m glad you enjoyed so much of the article, and I’m delighted you and your readers have engaged with it so full-bloodedly.

[Dan Green]

Julian: Thanks for the clarification. Your description of what was left out of your essay does explain my confusion at what seemed to be its omissions.

[Julian Gough]

No problem, Daniel. Here at Gough Literary Industries, we like to provide a full-function essay service with 24-hour online technical support.

Plus, I like arguing about books.

[aporia]

heh, did you just finish rereading some nietzsche?

I agree completely with the mfa bashing; however I am going to apply to a program this year for all the hot conects and wanna-be intellectual scenester chicks with emo glasses (hot librians!!!) more interested in looking like an author than acutally being one. But hey, I bet they give A+ dome. Too, my work of iconoclastic comic metafiction has generated some really great form letters, and it looks like the letters "mfa" from a sexy university add some weight to query letters. I'll do the mfa like kierkegaard did the phd.

I don't think the satire is getting published (best recent satire is marshal mathers), because when agents talk about satire in the states, they mean sex and the city, will and grace, or some trash along those lines; you give them juvenal (_real_ controversial critique of the contemps, those _cons_) and they say "I can't sell this" because its too literary; then on the indi publishing side of things, they dont want your work either, because as a satirist, you hit _everyone_ (both the publishing industry, out for evil profits and dumbing down books to compete with DVDs, and "marginalized" [i hate derrida for the widespread use of that word] presses with thier tired politcal agendas). Even better, you cant self publish because those printers cant deal with aesthetic expiriments so necessary to modern-post-modern fiction (but how can there be fiction when there is no truth?) Sorry, you could have skipped this paragraph because I have some sand in my vag, but DONT have a myspace =((((( But the but, or detour, is SO postmodern gusy, as is my most recent attempt to espace from the metaphysical cloture of spelling guys, gusy.

perhaps ill take some moonlit walks in the rain and then ask for somone to loan me pistols instead; nietzsche democratised irony, that's something i can't laugh over.

"look on the brightside/suicide"-Kurt Cobain