Humorous and Comic Sympathies in Modern Literary Works

Humorous and Comic Sympathies in Modern Literary Works A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in English. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements................................................................................................................ iv Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1 A Withdrawal of Sympathy in a Time of Crisis: Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies .... 10 The Comic from Afar: Salman Rushdie’s Shame ......................................................... 27 Humor in The Glorious Heresies ....................................................................................... 45 Coda: Decadent Humor in Withnail and I and “What’s Chasing You” .................. 64 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 73 iii Acknowledgements A very loud, whooping thanks to my family. To my parents, who unwaveringly seek out the comic for sympathetic means and still giggle like they’re in high school. To my brother, who has given me all my best jokes and motivational speeches. iv Introduction Before the Beatles’ performance of “Twist and Shout” at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London, John Lennon showed off his humorous capabilities. The concert took place in 1963 at a Royal Variety Performance which included members of the British Royal Family, as well as the typical, screaming Beatles fans. Noting the class-divisions in the audience, Lennon quipped: “For our last number I’d like to ask your help. For the people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands. And the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your jewelry.” Lennon’s remark is a rich example of humor’s generous capabilities. Spoken to an economically diverse audience, the line has an emphatic, subversive sympathy with those who lack jewelry, an overt metonym for those in the upper classes. Following the joke, the audience erupted in laughter, which could suggest not only appreciation and recognition, but anxiety or guilt too. As Lennon throws in the Royalty as “the rest of you,” he displays the triumphant self-assertion that humor flaunts. Through humor, then, it is possible to resist structures of power, to find common ground in a theater full of people, to generously refuse them the condescension of pith through an insistence of one’s own force, and to relieve a listener of the burden of propriety. Thus, humor can be an expression of sympathy. Most often, humor suggests a political sympathy, as it dismantles the expectations that the speaker might wish to resist. As humor can reveal one’s own preferences or opinions, it is not always a gesture of kindness. Just as great poetry can be generous and adaptive to a listener, so too can the comic. Just as poetry can be hostile, aggressive, and violent, so too can the comic. In Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud uses the term Witzwerk (“Joke-work”) to refer to the “construction of the joke,” which precedes the work of understanding a joke, or, as Freud puts it, “the psychical processes involved in taking in the joke (Freud, Jokes…, 61). I hope to track comic and humorous forms of Witzwerk through modern texts and study the ways in which these texts employ jests, comedy, or humor to lend sympathy or hostility to their characters or the world in which these characters live. The framing questions for this study will be: What are the structures of Witzwerk in modern British novels? What effects does Witzwerk produce? What ethical considerations does Witzwerk seem to display? How are comic effects and humor produced in literary works? What might be appreciable about humor amid pressures for propriety? Beginning with a discussion of smaller, often crude, jests before turning to jokes and lastly to humor, Freud studies these productions of pleasures and finds that each requires a different ethical framework. In the early joke-work examples, Freud argues that “joke-work makes use of deviations from normal thinking—of displacement and absurdity—as technical methods,” and that joke-work often reveals steadfast absurdities that already exist as opposed to merely creating new absurdities (69). Even nonsensical jokes might offer bewildering enlightenment as their sense “lies in the revelation and demonstration of something else that is stupid and nonsensical,” which could be something as arbitrary as the shape of a cat, or as serious as the class system (67). Thus, jokes rely on the malleability of language and expression for their charge against sense. The comic, for Freud, encompasses all modes of laughter production, including, but not limited to: jokes, humor, puns, vulgarity, and ridicule. Unlike jokes, which are 2 made, the comic is found (225). One can make themselves or others comic by “putting them in a comic situation, mimicry, disguise, unmasking, caricature, parody, travesty, and so on” (234). Although these methods connote belittling the comic object, as Salman Rushdie’s Shame displays, gestures of sympathy can be found in these methods too. Through a discussion of the comic, Freud arrives at one of his biggest claims: “the joke, it may be said, is the contribution made to the comic from the realm of the unconscious” (258). In other words, the production of a joke is propelled by the unconscious toward comic effects. The recognition of some jokes as jokes requires awareness of their hostility to the objects that they engage, while that of others requires awareness of their sympathy for these objects. The person displaying humor (as opposed to mere jokes) exercises both an awareness of the conditions of pain/vulnerability that they face and a simultaneous refusal of pity for such pain or vulnerability. Freud says that humor requires magnanimity, as, in humor, the superego is elevated into an analytical and protective position that “speaks kindly words of comfort to the intimidated ego,” saying, in effect, “Look around you. There is nothing to fear” (Freud, Jokes…, 285; “Humour,” 433). The reassured, reinforced ego employs humor to assert implicitly to a listener, “‘I am too big (too fine) to be distressed by these things’” that had formerly intimidated it (Freud, Jokes…, 290). Through this, the expenditure of a feeling of pity is not expected of the listener. The speaker humorously confronts the burden of possible pain, but neither imposes it upon an audience nor invites sympathy, even through the indirect means of the comic. Relieving the audience of the strain to sympathize or offer another normative response to the speaker’s plight, humor, thus, spares the speaker’s audience what Freud 3 calls “the cost of an economy of piety” (Freud, Jokes…, 286). Humor resists selfcongratulation and can refuse pity through a disregard of personal circumstance for the production of pleasure in someone else. As the most overt, comic display of sympathy, humor is a compelling novelistic engine for expressing solidarities and generosities. Taking up Freud’s theorizations, Simon Critchley seeks to demonstrate the ethical dimensions of humor in his book Infinitely Demanding. Critchley begins with what he sees as the problem of the tragic paradigm, which is that the tragic hero “distorts the picture of human finitude by making the subject too heroic” (77-78). This distortion makes it seem as though authenticity is achieved through h understanding one’s own mortality and their refusal to give into their desires. Put simply, “the problem with the tragic paradigm is that it implies a heroic model of authenticity” (78). As opposed to promoting a heroic figure that achieves authenticity, Critchley argues for an a priori confession that authenticity is unachievable, what Critchley calls “originary inauthenticity” (78). The model for originary inauthenticity, Critchley decides, is the comic subject who provides a greater “picture of human finitude” through “comic acknowledgement rather than tragic affirmation” (78). Thus, for an ethics of resistance and solidarity through storytelling, Critchley puts forward the comic subject as perhaps the best chance of relaying the strange spirit of the human condition. In a brief aside, Critchley notes that humor might be more tragic than tragedy “because it perpetually forestalls the possibility of authenticity” (79). A major part in this idea of humor as tragedy is self-denial. Humor assertively insists that the subject is nearly invincible, and yet, if the insistence fails or if the listener knows all too well the pain that the subject diverts, an attempt at humor may actually translate into the appearance of self-denial. In 4 humor, there is always an unwillingness to settle upon one feeling. If repeated too often, humor might elicit unease or sorrow. Although it has—and perhaps because it has— potential for tragic implications, humor remains a greater mode for a portrayal of originary inauthenticity. After his discussion of authenticity, Critchley turns to Freud’s essay “Humour” for its radical revision of the superego. While the superego is typically described as the enforcer of culturally accepted behavior and a “critically degenerating” force against the ego, in humor there is a change in its oppressive role. Referring back to Freud’s essay, Critchley says that “what is evinced or glimpsed in humor is a non-hostile super-ego, a super-ego that has undergone what we might call ‘maturation’, a maturity that comes from learning to laugh at oneself, from finding oneself ridiculous” (83). Through this revised superego, humor offers the possibility for a non-hostile enforcer of power, or as Critchley puts it, a “comforting parent” (83). Many theories of the comic argue that humor is tied closely with automatism and that we laugh when human action and expression seem to be overtaken by a rote force. One clear instance of this occurs in the television show The Office. Inspired by the conditioning experiments of the physiologist, Ivan Pavlov, Jim, a witty office worker, tries to prank Dwight, a more gullible worker. Each time Jim reboots his computer, Jim asks Dwight if he’d like a mint, and by the last reboot, Dwight reflexively sticks out his hand in anticipation of a mint. The comic, here, relies on the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s idea of humor as “something mechanical encrusted upon the living” (Zupančič, 111). This scene might evoke laughter because Dwight’s own agency and ability to claim independent thought is cancelled by unconscious response to a computer 5 chime which then briefly calls into question any notion of free will. In The Odd One In, Alenka Zupančič takes up Bergson’s theory of comedy and attempts to refine and narrow his argument. Zupančič’s big problem with Bergson’s claim is that it assumes the full reducibility of life, as if all life can be mechanized and repeated. Instead, she writes, “life is not (fully) reducible to itself, which is why it does not constitute transcendence to all there is but, rather a crack in all there is” (119). Through this lens, comedy does not require the imitation of all that exists, but rather a comic moment seeks to expose the bizarre fact that all that exists does exist, thus “[it] is the noncoincidence of life with itself that takes the form of a relationship, and it is this relationship that can occasionally strike us as mechanical. It is in this sense that the mechanical is intrinsic to life,” thereby turning Bergson’s claim on its head (Zupančič, 118). In an effort to debase humor’s more radical capabilities, Zupančič cites Mladen Dolar’s remarks on laughter and ideology. Dolar states that the moment of laughter coincides with our place as ideological subjects because laughter “provides us with the distance, the very space in which ideology can take its full swing” (Zupančič, 4). In his recent book, Humour, Terry Eagleton complicates Zupančič’s arguments in favor of a less restrictive vision of humor. In response to Zupančič’s “rash generality,” Eagleton states, “[to] see humour as always and everywhere a reinforcement of power is too functionalist a standpoint, overlooking its manifest contradictions” (138). Eagleton resists the implicit binary of Zupančič’s claims, arguing instead for a more generous reading of humor that might be situation-specific. In other words, sometimes humor reinforces ideologies and power structures, sometimes it rages against them, shaking them to their core and exposing the innards for all to see. 6 Although Eagleton refutes the rigidity of Zupančič’s argument, she adds an important point to a discussion of humor, which is that humor does not only dismiss anxiety, but can also produce anxiety. The humorist is a gambler, potentially relieving her listener of a burdensome affect, or potentially inciting anger or condemnation. Thus, humor is always a risk. There are countless factors involved in telling and receiving a joke which means that there is never one steady, expected response. In pointing to this gamble, Zupančič and Eagleton initially seem to be reworking Freud’s earlier theorizations. These ostensible rebuttals to Freud, however, are not necessarily facts or possibilities that Freud ignores. If humor refuses pity or piety, Freud knows that humor is always a risk, and that it is always a laugh in the face of expectation. Through this lens, my inquiry will turn to three modern novels that all utilize the comic to varying degrees of sympathy or hostility. The first chapter of this thesis will study the role of joke-work in conjunction with implicit calls for sympathy and nihilism. The chapter is an examination of Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Vile Bodies, which demonstrates joke-work as a withdrawal of sympathies. The characters and the text of Vile Bodies lack sympathy and instead demonstrate melancholic passivity, what Critchley might call “passive nihilism” (4). Vile Bodies trivializes the world in which the characters live, but takes a slight turn mid-novel in its attention span. The initial comic effects of the novels turn, later, into more overt calls for sympathy that feed an apocalyptic drive in the text. Following an examination of the comic as a hostile means, the second chapter will focus on Salman Rushdie’s novel, Shame, which employs joke-work and humor to a far more sympathetic and generous extent than Vile Bodies. In many ways, the novel 7 demonstrates both “the victorious assertion of the ego’s invulnerability” in humor as well as Critchley’s notion of humor as heightened tragedy because it “forestall[s] authenticity” (Jokes…, 429, Infinitely Demanding, 77). Through humor, Shame gazes upon severe trauma or injustice with rage, and quickly turns to gaze upon something seemingly absurd. The switch to humor often makes dominant characters its target, implicitly or overtly supporting those whom they oppress, and offering again Freud’s notion of generosity through humor. In Shame, Rushdie is not ignorant of the pain that runs through his narratives; instead, he chooses to mention or allude to this pain while refusing to dilute or trivialize it with melodramatic calls for pity. Although Shame depicts Freud’s notion of generous humor, Lisa McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies shows a more intensely engaged narrative that employs the comic as a gesture of sympathy with its comic characters. While Shame seems to scold from afar, The Glorious Heresies reiterates the attitudes of its characters and thus extends Freud’s notion of magnanimous humor. The Glorious Heresies refuses to call for sympathy even though its characters are often woebegone, or occasionally, experiencing deep pain. Instead, it reflects the self-assertion of many of its characters and emphatically suggests, ‘we are too good, too fine.’ I will conclude with a brief look at Marlon William’s music video for “What’s Chasing You” and Bruce Robinson’s 1987 film, Withnail and I for their stylish, decadent, and subtle depictions of humor as a means of self-congratulation and as a risk. In both texts, there are obvious conditions of pain, but there is also an absence of any impulse to call attention to the peril and suffering in one’s own condition. 8 A guiding ambition here is to see if and how the comic can work simultaneously as critique and a withholding of literalist critical pedantry. Through an examination of a range of comic texts, I will argue in favor of humor as a novelistic engine for expressing sympathies. 9 A Withdrawal of Sympathy in a Time of Crisis: Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies uses the comic as a means for hostility and apathy in a narrative that depicts a world on the verge of collapse, thus exploring the relationship between the comic and relentless fatalism. Published in 1930, the novel is set between the two World Wars. As the author’s prefatory note for the book suggests, Waugh wrote this novel in anticipation of the greater strife and war to come: “The action of the book is laid in the near future, when existing social tendencies have become more marked” (iii). One big social tendency that Waugh sees as a threat in Vile Bodies is a generalized apathy, which in turn leads to a lackluster, unimaginative, and fearful culture. Through the author’s joyless apprehension, the world of Vile Bodies exists from the outset in a nearhopelessness, from which sympathy is readily removed. Waugh insists it will only get worse. Because of this beginning, the comic dimension of the text is tricky; although there is apparent invitation to laughter, the invitation is always tinged with a morbidness that suggests a cruelly predetermined disaster for all the characters. Through a narrator that sees the world as futile, characters that seem ambivalent about their own happiness, and joke-work that works as a scoffing, the comic of Vile Bodies predominantly shows a withdrawal of sympathy. Occasionally, however, the novel does recognize some pressure upon those who lack power without endorsing the pressures that produce their apathy altogether. As an emblem of degenerative social tendencies, socialites are the main focus of the novel. Vile Bodies insistently satirizes early London in the 20th century and the parasitic gossip culture of both the younger and the older generation. Much of the 10 younger generation in the novel is referred to as the “Bright Young People”: a group of socialites that thrived during the 1920s and who were marked by wealth, decadence, and indulgence. In Vile Bodies, Waugh extends the common imagery of the clumsily well-todo young person and explores a cultural tendency toward apathy that infiltrates the exorbitant party-goers. Commenting on such generalizing strategies in his essay “The Comic Mimesis,” Mladen Dolar notes that “comedy thrives on the generic, on types, on stereotypes and clichés, on replications, on repetition, on doubling” (585). In other words, the comic often relies on the blending and repeating of images, which is precisely Waugh’s main tactic. In Vile Bodies, Waugh sees these socialites as a homogenous group, refusing the tragic impulse to have one main character or plot. Generalization is thus the novel’s comedic basis, which also relies on strategies such as montage (in which perspective oscillates among characters, refusing to settle its gaze upon one tragic figure), exclusion (which explicitly omits significant moments/thoughts/feelings of someone’s life), and reduction (which categorizes a human as a “Bright Young Person” and clumps them together with their generational cohorts). These means, however, are not only for comedic effect. Waugh’s novel thoroughly mingles the serious and the comic, evoking both laughter and sadness in the apparent reducibility of an apathetic life. To distinguish between tragedy and comedy, Dolar writes, “Individuality, the real target of art, is the object of tragedy, whereas comedy doesn’t aim at individuality but at types and generalities” (585). Simon Critchley echoes Dolar’s claim, arguing for an “originary inauthenticity” which would grasp individuality better than tragedy as it immediately admits failure, but this figure, too, is absent in Vile Bodies (78). Waugh refuses even the possibility of tragic heroism or comedic authenticity, positing instead a 11 third figure: Adam Fenwick-Symes. Adam is no hero or anti-hero, simply a character to whom the novel devotes slightly more time and attention than to other characters. With its unusual protagonist, the novel does not grasp at authenticity through comic subjectivity, nor does it suggest that the novel itself is inadequate in describing a life; instead, the tone of the novel reflects the overwhelming passivity of its characters. Along with the apathetic characters, there are glaring moments of narrative indifference in the text too. One such moment occurs when Adam is reckoning with Simon Barclain: “‘Not only inconvenient, but impossible,’ said Adam in no particular manner” (34). Enlarging such lack of affect or manner, the novel itself fails to show any intense investment in these characters who seem to have no strong investment with living. Vile Bodies begins with the primary characters’ voyage home to London, an uncommon event to begin a novel. If the epic generically begins with the hero’s departure from home—a symbol of bravery and a foundation for maturity—then the return to London signals a regression, a journey back toward immaturity. This regressive tendency is prominent in the characters’ inability to express or grasp typically intense emotions. This inability is demonstrated in the Bright Young People’s strange lack of linguistic capacities and is the source for much of the novel’s comedy. During the turbulent voyage home, Waugh writes, “‘Oh,’ said the Bright Young People, ‘Oh, oh oh,’ depicting a collective, mild, passive upset—what the novel seems to offer as London’s zeitgeist. The series of “ohs” is followed by a common sentiment from one of the main Bright Young People: “too, too sick-making,” said Miss Runcible, with one of her rare flashes of accuracy” (9). The characters frequently employ this kind of speech, using compound adjectives with the suffix “-making,” which abstracts their own feelings and agency, as if 12 the active world is imposing its senses upon the passive objects: the Bright Young People were also known as the “Bright Young Things”. Here, however, the narrator explicitly acknowledges this language deficiency, describing Miss Runcible’s assessment of the world around her as “rare,” distancing the judgmental narration from the oblivious characters, and producing laughter in the dissonance. This laughter, furthermore, is both anxious and scornful. Thus, the comic of Vile Bodies complicates Freud’s identification of anxiety as the predominant ignition for the release of laughter (293). Although the novel is obviously comical and rage-fueled, the anxieties of the text come across as mere resignation. As Terry Eagleton suggests in Humour, there is a wide range of laughter and each laugh could indicate a different affect. The laughter that Vile Bodies seeks to produce is often a scoffing, contemptuous laugh that looks down upon the characters. This scolding laugh is largely produced by the narrator’s tone and commentary, which have led many scholars to attempt to narrow down and define the role and space of this narrator. In an essay on the role of futurism in Vile Bodies, Brooke Allen writes, “the role of the narrator has been purposely suppressed, giving a reader the impression of a narrative that is self-generating, almost mechanical,” partly confirming Bergson’s theory that the comic arises from a turn toward the mechanical (326). In contrast, Naomi Milthorpe argues that “there is not one ambivalent narrator, but two competing narrators: the first detached, insouciant, and smiling, the second, grim, factual, and dour” (37). Both these theories, though applicable at times, are unstable representations of the narrator, who it seems is much more invariable and human than given credit for. The narrator of Vile Bodies shows a steady futility and reiterates the cultural conditions that it simultaneously seeks to rebuke. The narrator consistently shows outright hostility 13 directed toward the lackluster characters and London’s culture in general, rarely ceasing its hostility during supposed moments of intense pain or emotion. In a comical description of Mr. Outrage, the former Prime Minister, Waugh writes, “Upstairs in No. 12, which is a suite of notable grandeur, Mr. Outrage was sliding back down the path of self-confidence he had so laboriously climbed” (57). Moments like this are satirical, as the novel takes overt aim at the Bright Young People and their frailty. Although Waugh may have resisted the term “satire,” the narrator of Vile Bodies is often ridiculing its characters to a comedic degree (Milthorpe, 2). While it can certainly be funny to expose the negligence of those who call for self-protection, the satire does not lend the novel much pathos—though there is a melancholic pathos in the text’s deterministic hurtle toward oblivion. This chapter will not focus on satire and will study, instead, the more complicated, potentially less hostile, devices of joke-work and the comic. Beyond critiquing the individual characters or the pompous, elitist culture of London, Waugh targets the systems of power and oppression that contribute to this society. As opposed to directly satirizing or condemning Christianity, Waugh includes Mrs. Melrose Ape, a crude evangelist pimp, and the ironically portrayed Vaudeville Angels into the world of Bright Young People. These angels go by the names “Faith,” “Charity,” “Fortitude,” “Chastity,” “Humility,” “Prudence,” “Divine Discontent”, “Mercy,” “Justice,” and “Creative Endeavour,” although they are quickly depicted as very non-angelic young women. Chastity keeps disappearing, Creative Endeavor loses her wings, and none of the angels is able to resist their sexual and aggressive impulses, all of which distorts the supposed virtues that these names recall. Because the young women are supposed to signify Christian values, Waugh evokes the irony not only of the women 14 but the values as well, refusing the reduction of one’s psychology to one singular quality. This refusal, furthermore, adds slight sympathy to the text as it acknowledges that even its own attempts at semantic reduction are futile. Although these women are named as mere caricature, the novel, in a small moment of sensitivity, thwarts the imposition of purity and benevolence onto young women. According to Freud, this extended joke on the angels’ names, which allows the novel sentences such as “‘Chastity didn’t feel well… She went below,’” would be categorized as “double meaning with allusion” (Waugh, 2; Freud, 45). On this category of joke, Freud writes: “[this] peculiarity, however, where in a case of double meaning the two meanings are not equally obvious, can also occur in jokes with no sexual reference— whether because one meaning is more usual than the other or because it is brought to the front by a connection with the other parts of the sentence” (45). Thus, with the cognomens of Mrs. Ape’s Angels, there are often sexual undertones, but laughter arises through this double reading as the mind oscillates undecidedly between multiple readings. With Mrs. Ape’s Angels, the Bible and their names are always simultaneously in the foreground. Thus, the comedy arises in the economy of using one word to denote multiple, incompatible meanings. With the brief allusion to the Bible, Waugh points to the fact that the actual biblical dogma is completely absent from the scene. The word is present, but its qualities and denotations are nowhere to be found in the corrupt city. Both Mrs. Ape’s angels (through their names) and Father Rothschild, the firstmentioned character and bumbling Jesuit, evoke aspects of the Church, while Mr. Outrage is the chaotic figure of the State. Outrage is known to his detective sergeant guards as “the Right Honourable Rape,” which the text tells us is inaccurate in matters of 15 his love affairs “in which, if the truth were known, he displayed a notable diffidence and the liability to panic” (5). Recently removed from office, Outrage represents a politics of carelessness and narcissism. When Simon Barclain is outed in his disguise, Waugh writes, “This concurrence of Church and State, coming so unexpectedly after an evening of prolonged embarrassment, was too much for Simon,” and within a few pages, Simon commits suicide. By personifying the Church and State through Rothschild and Outrage, Waugh does not diminish the power of these institutions but rather reveals the absurdity of the power given to often predacious leaders. As with Mrs. Ape’s angels, the novel enacts a similar but much too easy system of labelling by giving characters names like Mr. Outrage, Mrs. Ape, Miles Malpractice, etc. These are easy jokes that require hardly any psychical work from a reader. The casual metonyms could be read in two ways: perhaps the novel is drawn to easy laughs and readily reduces its characters to mere labels, or, the novel may be ironically replicating the very indifferent mistakes that the characters themselves make. At a gathering in Shepheard’s Hotel, the owner, Lottie Crump, introduces Adam to the usual crowd of visitors by asking, “‘[you] all know lord Thingummy, don’t you?’” and continues to introduce the rest of the party incorrectly; “‘that’s Mr. What’s-his-name… over there in the corner, that’s the Major, and there’s Mr. What-d'you call-him, and that’s an American, and there’s the King of Ruritania’'' (43-44). Lottie Crump’s impulse to invent her friends shatters any real, implicit categorization of the elite as elite. Although she assigns titles of esteem to her guests, in reality, they tend to lack money, and social wherewithal. Perhaps the novel has this impulse too, to reinvent its members and thus to fulfill, not social currency, but the pedantic, self-aggrandizing aims of its narrator. 16 Another prominent engine of comedy in the novel is that of bathetic humor. Vile Bodies builds up moments of tension that resolve in mild disappointment or dissatisfaction. In the ship, Fanny and Kitty argue about the presence of medication that could make Fanny feel better: “Oh Kitty, oh, Kitty, please … you would be sorry for this if I died … oh” “But I saw the sal volatile on your dressing-table after your luggage had gone down, dear. I remember thinking, I must take that down to Fanny, and then, dear, I got confused over the tips, so you see…” “I … put … it … in … myself …, Next to my brushes … you … beast.” “Oh Fanny…” “Oh … Oh … Oh.” (10) Afterward, the text’s formal montage quickly fixes its view upon Father Rothschild, leaving the moaning sisters alone and “oh”-ing. Although there is growing tension and anger, Waugh employs the anti-climax and steeps this novel further in a sea of indifference. Here, too, the successive “Ohs” show that the linguistic lack is not ascribed only to the Bright Young People, the reduction of language is not a generational phenomenon but a cultural phenomenon. The comedy thus arises in the characters’ own economy of language, similar to the frequent moments of absurdity in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, in which Vladimir and Estragon work their way to some conclusive 17 statement and tragically, hilariously, fall back upon the original sentiment and vague trajectory of their quest, thereby producing infinitely forestalled conclusions. The bathetic comedy of Vile Bodies is also reinforced by the text’s frequent employment of omission. The use of ellipses is reflective of the modernist tendency to acknowledge the insufficiency of language and to therefore rely on the exclusion of language to grasp at moments that seem too big to relay with language. In Vile Bodies, however, Waugh is not exactly suggesting an incapacity, but rather an unimportance in the dialogue of the characters, as here from Mrs. Mouse: “‘Of course, I never hear a word from Mary, but her maid told my maid …,’” page break, transition to Fanny: “‘What I always wonder, Kitty dear, is what they actually do at these parties of theirs. I mean, do they … ?’ ‘My dear, from all I hear, I think they do’” (180). Again, the narrator snobbishly decides to omit the interests of one of its characters, this time Mrs. Mouse (one might wonder: who makes her a Mouse?), either revealing a dislike of gossip or a severe disinterest in the peripheral lives. As for Fanny’s elliptical speech, the text employs this omission at a time when a reader’s interest is piqued, suggesting that every shocking thing that could be imagined is indeed done by these Bright Young People. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud uncovers the joke-work technique known as multiple use of the same material, which elucidates the capacities of single syllables, words, or phrases to elicit completely different meanings. Freud writes, “Words are a plastic material with which one can do all kinds of things. There are words which, when used in certain connections, have lost their original full meaning, but which regain it in other connections” (37). The examples given by Freud are brief and often rely on small syllabic shifts. Waugh, on a much larger scale, uses this technique, revealing the 18 “empty” language employed by the characters of Vile Bodies. One glaring instance of this occurs during Mrs. Melrose Ape’s speech at the Metrolands’ party. Mrs. Ape, eager to provoke chaos, greets the crowd by drawling, “‘Brothers and Sisters, … Just you look at yourselves,’” and immediately, “[magically], self-doubt began to spread in the audience” (136-137). This brief, common phrase incites panic in the crowd. Although “Just you look at yourselves” might typically connote a congratulatory tone, here, even just the possibility of introspection causes alarm: (Once in Kansas City, Mrs. Ape had got no further than these opening words; there had been a tornado of emotion and all the seats in the hall had been broken to splinters. It was there that humility had joined the angels.) There were a thousand things in Lady Throbbing’s past. … Every heart found something to bemoan. (137) As the novel begins with a regressive voyage, this passage continues the lineage. Through multiple use of the same material, Waugh points to the malleability of language that Freud emphasized. Furthermore, by showing the devastation that an innocuous idiom could initiate, Waugh resists complacent language, though he offers very little counter to it or to this cultural self-unknowing. This refusal to look inward is prominent throughout the text, coinciding with an overwhelming culture of dishonesty. This dishonesty is largely produced by the decisive fact of capital and the proceeding impulse to treat those around you as a means rather than an end. In one such instance, Nina Blount answers Adam’s call pretending to be a servant but the novel refuses her the solace of her invented narrative, saying, “[she] was 19 always rather snobbish about this fiction of having someone to answer the telephone,” explicitly mocking her desire to at least appear wealthy (37). As Dolar notes, “the basic instinct of comedy” is to address the aura of artwork, “make a copy of it, but within the artwork itself,” and “[dismantle] the aura,” which is how the novel creates its sharpest attacks against the characters’ own self-denial (586). Another such instance of comedic dishonesty occurs in a conversation between Sam Benfleet and Adam. Sam falsifies his boss’ character, suggesting that he is taking orders from the strict, oppressive old Rampole. In trying to appear as though he has no agency in the matter, Sam says, “‘I understand perfectly, and I’ll square old Rampole somehow, even if it comes out of my director’s fees,’” but the insistent, pesky narration follows with a new description of Rampole as “that benign old gentleman, who once a week drove up to board meetings from the country, whose chief interest in the business was confined to the progress of a little book of his own about bee-keeping,” (36). The laughter that arises from these moments of dishonest charades is that of mimetic comedy. For Mladen Dolar, the mimetic subject is disruptive: “they can cause havoc merely by replicating” and thus can blur the lines between themselves and their object by presenting a near copy (580). The act of imitation can be disruptive because it presents the possibility that life is reducible and replicable—a thought that challenges many notions of what it means to be an individual. This replication may look like Befleet’s fictitious adaptation of old Rampole, thus replicating and altering an existing person, or Nina’s invention of a servant. In Vile Bodies, the ease with which the characters choose to falsify themselves or the people around them, and the subsequent immunity they face, causes a sense of chaos. They also, however, contribute greatly to 20 the comedy of the novel. Dolar reminds us of the adage, “one is not funny, two is funny,” but finds that this is not quite right, and that the comedy is in the bizarre split between the ones, and the failure to add to a complete two. Thus, comedy arises not in a “two nor two ones, but a split one” (582-583). Thus, when Nina attempts to replicate the voice of a housemaid, she inevitably falls short, she is neither the maid nor is she presenting herself, creating the split one: “‘I’ll just see if she’s in,’ said Miss Blount’s voice” (Waugh 37). After discussing this comic, split identity, Dolar turns to Henri Bergson for his theories of the comic, citing his phrase, “[this] deflection of life towards the mechanical is here the real cause of laughter” (583). The cause of many failed relations throughout Vile Bodies is often an inability to listen followed by imposing mechanical speech patterns and gestures. These failed relations are often comic and confirm some of Bergson’s claims. One instance of this occurs with the character Doge, who has been conditioned by his boss, Lottie Crump, to respond in polite, unassuming phrases: “Doge. Doge. What’s the Prime Minister’s name?” “Beg pardon, mum.” “What’s the name of the Prime Minister?” “Not tonight, I don’t think, mum, not as I’ve been informed anyway.” “What’s the name of the Prime Minister, you stupid old man?” (Waugh, 47) Although Dolar refutes the theories at the basis of Bergson’s argument, Dolar picks up his interest with the mechanical and argues that when one repeats themselves or is mimicked, they may be “dispossessed of his or her uniqueness, which proved to be apt 21 for replication” (584). In the most recently-quoted passage from Vile Bodies, Doge’s reply, which has nothing to do with the question he was asked, alludes to a history of repetition and a lifetime of proclaiming his own ignorance to Lottie, likely as a means of self-protection—“by being redoubled the real loses its footing” (Dolar, 587). Thus, the comedy emerges in a split between the real and the mechanical, between the genuine and the rehearsed. The real is also lost each time Mr. Chatterbox enters the novel: “Then Adam became Mr. Chatterbox,” or “So Miles Malpractice became Mr. Chatterbox'' (Waugh, 148, 214). Waugh instills a fluidity among characters and their status, suggesting a sort of unimportance at the individual level and foreclosing even the possibility of uniqueness. The narrator becomes entangled with its characters causing the tone to flicker endlessly between critique and absorption; “‘Oh, Miles!,’” exclaims Agatha, “(Oh, Bright Young People!)” adds the narrator (30). The novel, the narrator, and the characters themselves are inducted into this strange world of mimetic comedy which “stages the machine but catches it just before it can yield faith, a machine already inhabited by spirit but not yet turned into faith, or it shows faith that cannot quite free itself from the machine” (Dolar, 589). The machine described by Dolar is seen in Waugh’s conveyorbelt procession of vile bodies. After listing the many types of parties that these Bright Young People attend, the narrator remarks with flagrant disgust: “all that succession and repetition of massed humanity … Those vile bodies…” (171). Disgust and comedy are intimately linked here as the grotesque and the glamorous converge in an incongruous depiction of this era. The novel stages the Gatsby-esque thrill of the ‘twenties but does 22 not allow a single moment in which the content and form neatly align in what could be a celebration of the young party-goers. Although the novel is comedic and at times brutally dismissive of its characters’ lifestyles, it is not entirely unaware of pain, nor does it try to neatly masquerade moments of injury. Instead, the narrator watches with a sharp eye but withdraws its own sympathy, staging the mechanism of sympathy but not allowing itself to yield faith. During the second half of Vile Bodies, the gravity of these young people’s lives seems to come into clearer view. The turning point arrives at the moment of Simon Balcairn’s suicide, a moment described with little affect, sympathy, or care; “soon he fell into a coma and presently died… the last Earl of Balcairn went, as they say, to his fathers” (146). The narrator shows no tonal shift from descriptions of parties to descriptions of suicide, but, at the very least, does not turn away from moments of extreme pain or destruction, sometimes it even seeks these moments out. One instance of this occurs with Agatha Runcible, a “Bright Young Person” with a strong desire for amusement and distraction. The novel attacks the characters’ claims to innocence, which often appear in the young generation’s explicit desire for the comforts and protection of childhood. At a car race, Miss Runcible insists on smoking cigarettes, even though she has been asked repeatedly to stop because of the related fire hazard. After being caught for the second time, Miss Runcible delivers an overtly disingenuous apology (“My dear, how awful of me. I quite forgot”) and attempts to smoke for the third time (235). The novel looks upon the nonchalance of the privileged with rage and refuses to let their moments of pretend-ignorance go unseen. The text notes where Miss Runcible’s cigarette lands, reporting the damage caused and disregarded by the elite: 23 “There were six open churns behind Miss Runcible, four containing petrol and two water. She threw her cigarette over her shoulder, and by a beneficent attention of Providence, which was quite rare in her career, it fell into the water” (234). Through its narrative gaze alone, the novel underlines the characters' destructive ignorance and evokes laughter through their sheer repetition of harmful forgetfulness and desire to regress. This instinct to watch and report casualties is not only angry, however. There is slight sympathy in the narrator’s willingness to record and their pedagogical approach with the “Bright Young Things.” As the passage on Miss Runcible shows, the text proclaims its indifference but subtly resists the characters’ apathy. The text begins by innocuously criticizing these “vile bodies” and the gluttony of post-war/pre-war England, but allows the severity of their situation to creep in. The aloof, comic engines transform into stages of deep pain. The most glaring example of this is Miss Runcible’s decline. Throughout the novel she is presented as detached and gleefully apathetic toward the world around her. This attitude leads her to accept the driver’s seat in a car race which prompts a complete neurosis, “[in] answer to some gentle questions, she replied that to the best of her knowledge she had no name,” and the novel briefly, vaguely addresses the possibility of remediation; “[so] they conveyed her to a nursing home in Wimpole Street and kept her for some time in a darkened room” (258). Once in the nursing home, Agatha dreams of endless motor races, speeding out of control until a final crash. Although there is slight comedy in Waugh’s metaphor of the motor for the Bright Young Things, the dominant feeling here is sorrow. By employing prior means of comedy – mimesis and multiple use of the same material – the novel catches its reader in the act of anticipating laughter but presents a far graver 24 truth, directing the emotional expenditure toward sympathy but constantly shifting gears, “‘I used to crash and wake up.’ Then the door opened and Miles came popping in” (266). The novel does not settle on one affective mode, constantly negating the possibility of sustained pathos. Chastity may be an even better example of this turn from the comic engine. Although initially she seems to work as a simple, sacrilegious figure and is then absent (she is in effect sex trafficked and relocated to Argentina) for much of the novel, she then reappears briefly once war breaks out. On this new, strange battlefield she, “the woebegone fragment of womanhood in the corner,” finds herself disassociated and alone with Adam and the General (318). The General assumes the role of the oppressive, powerful, masculine figure, while Adam sleeps, and young Chastity is left to survive. The novel suggests that her only means of survival at this moment is her sexual compliance and passivity; And Chastity in the prettiest way possible fingered the decorations on his uniform and asked him all about them. And presently, like a circling typhoon, the sounds of battle began to return. (321) Through these two last lines, the novel again insists on exposing the systems of power that prompt the dishonesty of the text but it will not linger, it must zoom out to a much larger, material battle. Although the quick turn from an anticipated emotion sounds as though it should fall neatly in Freud’s categorization of humor, unfortunately the novel is not quite generous enough to outright refuse the sympathy of its reader and posit instead 25 its own strength and durability. Instead, the novel insists that the world is collapsing and the focus for its blame seems to be everyone. While Waugh’s novel demonstrates the comic as a means of apocalyptic insistence, a generous humor does not beg for sympathy or declare imminent death. Thus, Vile Bodies refuses sympathy unless it is for those who are in the service of its didacticism, such as Adam, Agatha, and Chastity, and even with these characters, the novel is predominantly hostile. The novel does, however, acknowledge the pressures placed on these characters by a static, capitalist society. In “Real Tears,” Milthorpe cites a letter from Waugh to Henry York, in which he says the novel “seemed ‘to shrivel up and rot internally’ and any force the novel would have relied on ‘a sort of cumulative futility’” (36). In this quote, Waugh reveals that not only does the novel reproduce a hollow vision of the world, but that its very success would rely on the world’s hollowness and implosive decay. In other words, Waugh not only sought to replicate a cultural apathy, but understood that this replication would only succeed (an aim he sought at least for money’s sake) if Londoners were as futile and silly as he thought. Thus, Vile Bodies employs the comic to mock all of the characters it depicts and to endorse a futile standpoint in the midst of crises. However, as the next chapter will show, the comic can have generous and critical capacities, namely through humor, that allow it to avoid outright insult in the manner that Waugh adopts. 26 The Comic from Afar: Salman Rushdie’s Shame While the narrator of Vile Bodies enters the comic through apathy and disgust, the narrator and characters of Shame frequently employ humor and jokes as a means of raging critique, resisting and confronting the violence they see and experience, respectively, in the novel. The comic critique in Shame is often aimed at the oppressive, patriarchal Pakistan of the nineteen-seventies and its preceding history of British colonialism. Shame begins as a story about young Omar Khayyam Shakil and his three, mysterious mothers, Chunni, Munnee, and Bunny, but gradually zooms out, offering a much larger scope of its fictionalized Pakistan, “Peccavistan,” while weaving its multiple narratives together. By zooming out, the narrator assumes an aerial view of the country, offering the novel’s comic sympathies at a distance, scolding those who wish to inflict pain upon others, and generously resisting pity in an insistence of the masses’ will to overcome. Although it employs jokes, vulgarity, and humor, the novel does not shy away from images of pain in search for the comic. Instead, the novel works to uncover oftenunbearably painful moments and point to the various causes for them, adding levity, ambiguity, or sympathy through the comic. Thus, constructing a painful story in a “laughable” way does not take the pain, or the sympathy, away from the story. One telling instance of this is at the wedding of Bilquìs, a young woman haunted by a traumatic past, and the army General, Raza Hyder. Rushdie writes, “Raza and Bilquìs were betrothed beneath the bitter eyes of the dispossessed multitudes; and afterwards the gifts continued, sweet-meats as well as bangles, soft drinks and square meals as well as 27 henna and rings” (63). In this passage there is clearly a façade of decorum and a harkening to an idyllic marriage ceremony, under the eyes of God, and with family and loved ones present. Here, however, the ceremony lacks the romance projected onto such idylls and offers a scene marked by the narrator’s disdain and by the dispossession of Pakistanis whom Hyder’s violence has ravaged. When Rushdie inverts a more generalized language through the incorporation of multiple tones and dictions, and describes very clear feelings of hate, disgust, or sorrow, the text might ironically elicit laughter, sympathy, and/or antipathy. The inversion of a wedding’s contagious elation is funny. The acknowledgement that Raza and Bilquìs seem ill-fated from the start might produce sympathy or anxious hesitancy from a reader. The image of the audience, the “dispossessed multitudes,” suggests a far darker implication about the deprived and destitute state of the masses which could elicit anger or resentment. Comingling the comic and the sinister or sorrowful, the novel refuses to forget or ignore actions that the characters (particularly the figures of power) might wish to repress, similarly to the narrator of Vile Bodies who watches as Ms. Runcible’s cigarette barely escapes arson. This ignorance is on display in moments of extreme inattention to suffering, or in moments of grand narcissism, though the two often coalesce. The tone and attitude of the novel fluctuate dramatically, but the insistence on memory and the resistance to willful ignorance does not change, despite its comic strategies. The son of the three sequestered sisters, Chunni, Munnee, and Bunny, Omar Khayyam Shakil is the peripheral anti-hero of Shame. Described by the narrator as “dizzy, peripheral, inverted, infatuated, insomniac, stargazing, fat,” Omar Khayyam is treated with little regard by the text (18). This removed, judgmental posture is qualified and justified, however, as 28 Rushdie describes the violent acts of the young Omar Khayyam, especially his violent acts directed toward women which the novel views with rage. As a successful hypnotist and horny teenager, Omar Khayyam lured his beloved into hypnosis. The novel briefly mentions this moment of luring, adds a paragraph break, and proceeds with: “when her womb began to swell…,” explicitly, yet disguisedly, alluding to Omar’s use of hypnosis as a means for sexual assault (48). Many years later, Omar Khayyam gives up hypnosis to become a renowned doctor and marries Sufiya Zinobia, the daughter of Raza Hyder, whose early traumas leave her stuck with the intelligence of a seven-year-old. Shahbanou, the servant of the house, asks Omar Khayyam how long he could possibly wait to consummate their marriage, to which he replies, “‘I am no junglee man’” and to which the narrator, in turn, remarks, “(But once – we remember – he had called himself a wolf-child)” (222). In this sequence of remarks, there is a clear breaking of the fourth wall, as the narrator, in a comic insinuation, conspires with its reader to refuse Omar Khayyam the solace of forgetting, emphasizing this through the sentence’s offset phrase “we remember.” By providing the faulty self-image of Omar Khayyam and the narrator’s own disavowal of this image, the novel invites laughter through this incongruity. In brief divergences from its agonized, angry narrative, the novel occasionally takes a moment to relay puns or jokes. After Raza begins to amass more power, the narrator deviates and celebrates a pun while searching for a name to encapsulate their fairytale: There’s an apocryphal story that Napier, after a successful campaign in what is now the south of Pakistan, sent back to England the guilty, one-word message, ‘Peccavi’. I have 29 Sind. I’m tempted to name my looking-glass Pakistan in honor of this bilingual (and fictional, because never really uttered) pun. Let it be Peccavistan. (113) Playing with the fact that Pakistan’s name literally translates to “the land of the pure,” Rushdie seeks to subvert this label and point to the presence of both sin and the comic in the country. By employing this apocryphal story, the novel overtly celebrates the use and techniques of joke-work. For Freud, the declared pun is the lowest form of a verbal joke because it “plays upon the word not as a word, but as a sound” (52). In the ‘Peccavi’-anecdote, however, this pun requires historical and cultural knowledge and builds beyond its categorization as mere pun, evolving into what Freud would consider to be a joke. Although ‘Peccavi’ is a pun, “Peccavistan” is a type of joke that relies on the blending of two words to create a composite word. By building upon the pun and insisting on this bilingual reading, the novel does not settle with one narrative and instead constantly oscillates among historical moments and figures. Here, the novel also employs the comic as a means of shifting among different belief systems. The “Peccavi” passage calls back to the actually naming of Pakistan which put religious exclusion at the forefront of the nation’s development. In an essay titled “Laughter and Bloodshed,” Michael Gorra points out that Pakistan’s “very name is an acronym… meant to denote the peoples and regions of its western portion— while ignoring the Bengalis who comprised the bulk of its population until the founding of Bangladesh. That irony makes the country’s history grotesque from the start, and yet Rushdie hesitates before assaulting it” (162). Gorra’s argument shows that by employing this joke/pun hybrid, the novel can hold disparate belief systems, judgements, and 30 histories simultaneously. A further point from Gorra is that the comic, for Rushdie, offers a narrative lens that describes an event before judging it, or “before assaulting it.” Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai’s essay, “Comedy Has Issues,” echoes this claim and proposes that there “is something internal to comedy—maybe its capacity to hold together a greater variety of manifestly clashing or ambiguous affects—that makes its boundaries so uniquely ambiguous” (239). While much of the comic in Rushdie’s novel explicitly denounces certain characters or events, there are also times when the comic suspends the rush to judgment. Although Rushdie has an obvious knack for puns, the novel predominantly employs jokes for their greater ambiguity and wit. Soon after recollecting the pun in the “Peccavi” story, the narrator describes a joke that they heard while in Pakistan. The joke is an ongoing conversation between God and an assortment of Pakistani political figures and leaders. The leaders repeatedly ask God to eliminate what they see to be the problems of society, leading God to erase civilians or give supreme power to a General. In the end, God asks General Zia-ul-Haq, “‘Look, I do all these things for this country, but what I don’t understand is: why don’t people seem to love me any more?’” (113). Through this joke, the text mocks the mutual reliance of religion and state in Pakistan, arguing that the violence done in God’s name may well turn a nation upon God. The irony arises in God’s ignorance as to why he could be hated when his image is pure. In this confusion, the text mocks the employment of a holy figure as a justification for war or power, leading the narrator to conclude: “It seems clear that the President of Pakistan managed to give God a satisfactory answer. I wonder what it was” (113). The narrator employs the retort to disparage Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, on whom the novel’s dictatorial Raza Hyder is based. 31 In an essay on the death of Zia-ul-Haq from Imaginary Homelands, Rushdie disdainfully writes: “[Zia-ul-Haq] burst out of his bottle like an Arabian Nights goblin, and although he seemed, at first, a small, puny sort of demon, he insistently commenced to grow, until he was gigantic enough to be able to grab the whole of Pakistan by the throat” (53). This quote from Rushdie, years after the publication of Shame, elucidates part of his motive for using an aerial narrator in the novel. Because Zia-ul-Haq’s tyranny was so widely distributed, the novel cannot fixate on one protagonist to capture his reign, and instead must leap across the country and vacillate among its characters to grasp at the gigantic tyrant. By acknowledging that the narrator heard this pun/joke while in Pakistan, the novel suggests that the dissatisfaction to the Pakistani government is both widespread and agitated through joke-work. Through the overt moment of resistance via joke, Rushdie pushes up against the joke’s implicit binary between the “no-good corrupt civilians” and the theocracy, echoing Jacques Derrida’s theorization in a piece on James Joyce titled “Yes, Laughter” (113). For Derrida and Joyce, “the yes and laughter are intertwined,” creating “one and the same condition of possibility, a kind of transcendental that for once provokes laughter while making one think” (Derrida, 19). This “condition of possibility” is a moment in which libidinal, emotional, and/or psychical investment is released, offering a starting point from which to leap into critique, sympathy, or possibly even apathy. In Shame, the narrator offers the joke about God and Pakistani leaders in a crucial moment of possibility. The joke follows the promotion of Raza Hyder, tyrant on the rise, to “administrator of the region,” and precedes a series of recounted moments that describe severe violence done against women. Thus, the joke is a moment of levity, a 32 condition of possibility, and an elucidation of resistance—a resistance formed by the very affirmation of laughter. These resistant, comic moments appear in Shame at unexpected times. As Babar Shakil, the second and preferred son of Chunni, Munnee, and Bunny, drunkenly exchanges sloppy jokes in a bar, the narrator inserts their voice: “Babar Shakil in a dangerous veil of brandy. Comedy enters his bloodstream, effects a permanent mutation” (134). In the analogy between alcohol and comedy, the text provides further insight into its own ethics. The comic is dangerous; it exists right on the cusp of judgement or persecution. In “Comedy Has Issues,” Berlant and Ngai write: “Some comedians have become…exiled to the outside of where they used to feel sovereign. It is as though comedy is freshly dangerous” (235). As Shame is a novel in part about the often-arbitrary construction of borderlands and territories, this comment from Berlant and Ngai is especially applicable. With various characters and the narrator acting as the comedians at times, the novel shows how comedy, dangerous comedy, might be utilized in a struggle against the construction of borders and the segmentation of peoples. Socrates, in Plato’s The Republic, knew of laughter’s capacity for solidarity and resistance. In building his utopia, Socrates insists that the citizens “must not be too fond of laugher either,” because the surrender “to violent laughter, generally speaking, is a violent agent for change” (75). Thus, laughter has the potential to promote dissent and affirm those who push for change from the margins. After this “permanent mutation” effected by comedy in Babar, the text swiftly changes tone, saying, “the next day Babar left home before dawn to join the guerillas and his family never saw him alive again” (134-136). The novel reveals soon after that he was 33 killed by eighteen bullets from Raza Hyder after Babar’s guerilla troupe attacked a train. Although this guerilla group is present only in relation to Babar Shakil’s death, the novel suggests that the moment of drunken comedy rattled something in Babar that led him to be one of the few characters that violently and politically resist the Pakistani regime. In this moment, the comic is a catalyst for Babar Shakil and for its reader to whom it helps shape the ambiguous, oscillating arguments of the text. As Berlant and Ngai argue, because comedy is “always crossing lines, it helps us figure out what lines we desire or can bear” (235). Although the text is overt in its reactions to masculinist pride and aggression, it refuses to neatly align its characters into faulty categories such as ‘good’ or ‘evil’. Through the comic, then, Shame presents conditions of possibility and concurrence, allowing a reader the possibility to forgive, or condemn, violence. Although the novel denounces shame as a large facet of violence, it repeats the bizarre phrase, “shame, shame, poppy-shame,” on multiple occasions (9, 241, 293). The narrator first utters this phrase after rumors of a Shakil sister’s pregnancy begin to spread, echoing the voices of gossip that aim to inflict shame for their own amusement. In “Making a Mockery of Mimicry: Salman Rushdie’s Shame,” David W. Hart argues that “Rushdie’s apparent mimicry is not so much mimicry, but a parody of colonial mimicry,” and thus, by evoking the gossiping voices of the masses, who are themselves imitating the sternness of their sanctimonious leaders or ex-leaders, Rushdie is in effect parodying colonial speech (Hart, 7). In Omar Khayyam’s bizarre fever-dream, he imagines the people of the street “chanting in unison, shame, shame, poppy-shame, all the girls, know your name” (293). Again, the nameless, faceless voices chant this child-like rhyme, suggesting the origin of shame to be an overwhelming, indistinct power. Furthermore, the 34 childlike rhythm of the taunting phrase also suggests a sort of immaturity about those who use it, ascribing a bullying tone to those who seek to inflict shame. Another instance of this taunting occurs each time Omar Khayyam is called “fat” by the narrator (18, 55, 79). When discussing Omar Khayyam, the text is saturated with insults and disapproving remarks. The jokes and flagrant fat-shaming are an attempt to shame Omar Khayyam and mediate the dispersal of shame throughout the text, not allowing only the women to feel such humiliation. One such joke occurs when Omar Khayyam reenters the text “with a high reputation as a doctor and a low reputation as a human being, a degenerate of whom it is often said that he appears to be entirely without shame” (79). The novel’s treatment of Omar Khayyam is seldom serious, as if the novel declines to engage with a man that lacks reflective capacities and in whom no shame (as a sign of ethical feeling) appears, opting instead to hyperbolize his flaws. These caricatures are similar in tone to the narrator’s repeated use of the word “idiot” when referring to Sufiya Zinobia, but are far different in sympathy. Soon after her birth, the narrator says that Sufiya “contracted a case of brain fever that turned her into an idiot,” and proceeds to call her an idiot for much of the novel (100). Although this nickname seems similar to Omar Khayyam’s designation as “fat-man,” Shame directs much more sympathy to Sufiya. Her nickname, then, becomes a reminder of the shame imposed by her family, especially the men of her family. The page that follows the mention of brain fever shows Bilquìs’ reaction to her daughter: “[Raza] wanted a hero of a son; I gave him an idiot female instead… Nothing upstairs. Straw instead of cabbage between the ears… That birdbrain, that mouse! I must accept it: she is my shame’ (101). Thus, as the narrator insistently refers to this young, helpless girl as “idiot,” the text, in an 35 angrily ironic move, reproduces the rhetoric shaping the overwhelming causes of Sufiya’s shame. The narrator points to the cruelty of others’ perspectives through a performance of that cruelty, both exhausting and teaching its reader. Part of the reason why the words “idiot” and “fat” stir simultaneous laughter and discomfort is due to their vulgarity. The novel is filled with vulgar, obscene language, refusing the propriety that the ruling class might typically wish to impose. Shame begins with the death of old Mr. Shakil, the father of Chunni, Munnee, and Bunny, and the cause for the three sisters’ life-long quarantine in their insular home. His death is not mourned by the sisters or the text and although his presence is brief, his hostility and oppression loom over the following generations. Old Mr. Shakil utters the first vulgar accusation in the novel, setting the tone for the rest of the novel’s predominantly male-uttered obscenity. On Mr. Shakil’s deathbed, Chhunni selfishly asks, “‘Father, we are going to be very rich now, is that not so?’” followed by one of Mr. Shakil’s two lines in the novel, “‘Whores,’ the dying man cursed them, ‘don’t count on it’” (6). Selfish, greedy, eager to be autonomous, sure. Whores? The text gives no evidence for such a claim. Even though the obscenity has no semblance of a real accusation, the rage of the patriarch and his willto-shame by suggesting female promiscuity is a prominent fact in the remote border town of Q. In Lars Porsena or The Future of Swearing and Improper Language, Robert Graves uncovers why English swearing has recently declined in character and quality. In doing so, Graves proposes effective swearing methods, one of which is: “[to] curse effectively one must invoke a reality or, at the least, a possibility” and thus, for example, ‘bastard’ is always a stronger insult than ‘whore’ because “[bastardy] is always a 36 possibility” (14-15). In Shame, possibilities are dictated by the men of the text. A prominent character is nicknamed Mahmoud the Woman because he is considered weak by the masses: [W]hen children spoke of Mahmoud the Woman they meant Mahmoud the Weakling, the Shameful, the Fool. “Woman,” he sighed resignedly to his daughter, “what a term! Is there no end to the burdens this word is capable of bearing? Was there ever such a broad-backed and also such a dirty word?” (58) This passage elucidates the shame placed on women for merely existing. In this hostile climate, “woman” becomes an insult because women are so severely tied with weakness. For Graves, this would be a shallow insult as it evokes no reality. However, the insult does elucidate who is constructing this reality. If men write the narratives and dictate this world, then “woman” is a fine insult if nothing is intended to evoke a possibility and fascists can construct their own reality. This patriarchal literalism and willed ignorance is on display during the birth of “the heroine of our story, the wrong miracle,” Sufiya Zinobia, the should-be-son of Bilquìs and Raza Hyder (88). Raza’s disappointment in his daughter’s sex appears in his screamed bargaining: “Mistakes are often made!” Raza shouted. “Terrible blunders are not unknown!” … And even louder: “Babies do not come clean into this world!” And blasted from his 37 lips like cannonballs: “Genitalia! Can! Be! Obscured!” Raza Hyder raging roaring. (88) In this painful, comic passage, the novel mocks Raza’s inability to control reality. Shame scorns Raza’s tyranny in this scene by highlighting his blind stupidity and the ineffectiveness of his constant aggression. The novel does not, however, suggest that Raza’s useless rage is unfelt or unseen by those to whom he rages at. The narrator quotes the family legend that “‘when [Sufiya’s] parents had to admit the immutability of her gender, to submit, as faith demands, to God; at this very instant the extremely new and soporific being in Raza’s arms began – it’s true – to blush,’” and so began a lifetime of shame for Sufiya Zinobia. As its title suggests, Shame rages against the impositions of humiliation, especially onto women, and reveals shame to be a major source of violence. To counteract this violence, the novel focuses its attention on the women of the text, or as the narrator puts it half-way through the novel, “the woman seem to have taken over; they marched in from the peripheries of the story to demand the inclusion of their own tragedies, histories and comedies, obliging me to couch my narrative in all manner of sinuous complexities, to see my ‘male’ plot refracted” (181). The novel cannot help but turn its attention to the women in its story in its story whose lives, it realizes, are important. In this act alone, the novel distances itself from the men in its story who seek to subsume or consume the women and thereby erase and obliterate them. Thus, the novel swivels toward the women and their zenana (barricaded domestic space for women), offering insight into that which is forbidden from public view. Until their father died, the Shakil sisters lived in the zenana wing, the part of a house where the women are secluded to. The novel does not abide by the aim of this forbidden wing, 38 decidedly offering a glimpse inside the private lives of these women. The novel breaks its tie with formality early on as it says: [Chunni, Munnee, and Bunny] were imprisoned in the zenana wing where they amused each other by inventing private languages and fantasizing about what a man might look like when undressed, imagining, during their prepubertal years, bizarre genitalia such as holes in the chest into which their own nipples might snugly fit. (5) By beginning the novel with a focus on the three sisters and their irreverent response to their patriarch’s death, the novel had already shown a close engagement with the sequestered lives of women before he claims “they have taken over.” This passage, too, works to undo the stereotype of the sexually incurious woman. The genitalia that the sisters imagine is funny because it brings to light the arbitrary placement of human genitalia and its sheer absurdity. Of course, it also reveals the sad fact that these young women were “virtually uneducated” and sectioned off with only their imaginations in the zenana wing (5). Contrasting the quiet sullenness of the Shakil home in the zenana wing, other female spaces in the novel can be those of laughter and relief. As Rani and Bilquìs wait in a female dormitory for the military husbands to descend upon the women of the wing, Rani makes scandalous remarks on the scheduled sex-time of this military space: “Bilquìs enjoys (while pretending to be scandalized) Rani’s malicious ruminations on the subject of the household sleeping arrangements. ‘Imagine, in that darkness,’ Rani 39 giggles while the two of them grind the daily spices, ‘who would know if her real husband had come to her? And who could complain? ... Bilquìs blushes gracefully and covers Rani’s mouth with a coriander-scented hand. ‘Stop darling, what a dirtyfilthy mind!’” (70). Although men are absent from this scene, the male expectations initially seem to shape the space. The giggles and Bilquìs’ portmanteau, however, show that she only pretends to be scandalized, thus performing the proper, expected response to vulgarity. Her phrase, “dirtyfilthy,” is a list of normative responses, rushed and ingenuous, and her giggles (as opposed to the more derisive forms of laughter) reveal an enjoyment in subversive talk. Thus, the two friends’ intimacy surmounts and dismisses the norms of male expectations. By including this scene, Rushdie subverts any connotations and expectations of female spaces to be prudish, quiet, and clean. In Shame, the women are clearly thinking about sex but they do not fulfill the idealized role constructed for them by men; they do not wait patiently for men to bring them pleasure. Instead, the pleasure, or the cause of their giggles, arises from undermining the systemized experience of sex. Before Good News Hyder’s wedding, the older women in her family attempt to describe what sex will be like for her: “‘[I]magine having a fish up your fundament, an eel that spits at your inside…’” suggests her mother, or “‘[think] of a sikh kabab that leaks hot cooking fat,’ Duniyazad Begum suggested, old quarrels bright in her eyes” (151). These metaphors paint sex to be a bleak, uncomfortable endeavor for a woman. In their absurdity, mischief, and vulgarity, the descriptions also elicit laughter and produce a sense of camaraderie between these women who freely, but behind closed doors, discuss 40 their intimate lives. Thus, by refusing the male carving up of public and private spaces, the novel shows these Pakistani women’s fine vulgarity, comedy, and humor. In this same space of wedding preparations, Good News Hyder’s relatives taunt her with songs about her fiancé, Haroun Harappa: “‘Face like a potato! Skin like a tomato! Walks like an elephant! Tiny plantain in his pant’” (152). Through the taunts, the funny caricature of young Haroun turns into vulgarity as they diminish his “tiny plantain,” or the source of his power: his masculinity. The female-empowerment in this scene comes from the redirection of the pressures upon women in the direction of absent men. The novel is aware that the zenana wing is a function of unfortunate, deprived circumstances for women, but protests the image of these spaces as joyless or quiet. Through humor and jokes, the women subvert these designated spaces by denouncing the powers that created these spaces and still finding joy. Reflecting Freud’s theorizations of humor arising “from an economy in expenditure upon feeling,” Shame begins humorously. With humor, we laugh because our more predictable and more emotional reaction has been cancelled by a sudden change in the humorist’s tone, narrative, or affect—changes that Rushdie often employs. The narrator describes the town of Q and the “three lovely and loving sisters,” and begins the novel with an ethereal, fairytale tone (3). After a drawling start, the narrator ironically switches gears and rushes himself: “the three sisters, I should state without further delay bore the family name of Shakil, and were universally known (in descending order of age) as Chhunni, Munnee and Bunny,” paragraph break, “one day their father died” (3). Through this sudden swivel from fairytale to formal introduction and finally to morbid announcement, the novel does not allow a reader the adequate time or space to exhibit a 41 generic emotional response. Instead, the text insists on these quick impediments, saving a reader their expenditure upon feeling. The novel and the sisters do not grant Mr. Shakil the mourning and attention that he implicitly asks for; they recognize a tyrant as a tyrant and therefore his death as an occurrence that does not merit grief. His death appears as an interruption to the sisters’ own narrative through its brief and sudden mention. At the conclusion of the novel, the narration returns once more to the three sisters’ house where they plot to kill Raza Hyder, the man who murdered their second son. Seeking asylum, Omar Khayyam returned to his childhood home with now-in-laws Raza and Bilquìs. After a brief, somber moment in which Raza encounters Bilquìs’s dead body, the tone pirouettes again as the three sisters appear to deliver their final blow: “You should be dead instead of her,” Chhunni Shakil declared. The anger had gone out with the optimism. “Go ahead,” he encouraged the sisters. “God will judge us all.” “He did well to bring you here,” Bunny reflected, “our son. He did well to wait for your fall. There is no shame in killing you now, because you are a dead man anyway. It is only the execution of a corpse.” “Also,’ Munnee Shakil said, ‘there is no God.” (299) Through this series of closing remarks, tensions are heightened until Munnee delivers the final blow, also derailing the conversation’s focus. For Raza, Munnee’s comment likely would not offer levity or distraction from his imminent death. For a reader, Munnee’s 42 desire to destroy the Pakistani president’s last hope, might be delightfully surprising. Furthermore, Munnee’s immunity in blasphemy and her sudden power over the fallen symbol of power, show the mechanisms of humor on a macrocosmic scale, likely leaving a reader with a sense of bewilderment and hopefully, laughter. The ethics of Shame are most evident in these moments of humor. Early in the novel, the narrator makes a crucial concession: “as to whether [Omar Khayyam] grew up into caped crusader or cloaked bloodsucker, into Batman or Dracula, I leave it to the reader to decide” (15). Here, the narrator makes his ethics as a storyteller translucent – if not opaque - by acknowledging his own incapacity to judge. The narrator does not, however, assume the passive role of the narrator of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. The narrator of Shame overtly claims to leave judgement by the wayside but his sympathies and attentions are caught by the characters to whom shame is inflicted. With his focus on the female characters, the narrator’s rage is openly directed at those in power, but, of course, this rage is not on sustained display as the novel quickly pivots away from intense moments of pain: “I have one last, and most damning, accusation. Men who deny their pasts become incapable of thinking them real. Absorbed in the great whore-city[, Omar Khayyam considers it] a bad dream, a fantasy, a ghost (149). The passage ends, however, on a far different note: “I dislike arranged marriages. There are some mistakes for which one should not be able to blame one’s poor parents” (!50). In this shift, the novel reveals the instability and unsustainability of its own rage, turning, instead, to laugh. At such moments in Shame, Rushdie is not ignorant of the pain that runs through his narratives; instead, he chooses to mention, or allude to, this pain while refusing to dwell on it and make a melodramatic call for pity. 43 Extending this latter resistance, Shame employs a sympathetic humor, but it does so from afar, from a critical distance. This aerial position is necessary for the novel’s frequent scolding and for the larger depiction of Pakistan, but it does not provide the narrator with a stance from which to fully engage with its characters. The next novel that I will look at, Lisa McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies, offers a comparison in humorous sympathies and a contrast to Shame in the spatial relationship of its narrator. Although both novels point to individual pain, often as a product of larger systems, The Glorious Heresies focuses on the micro-relations, eliciting sympathy without the distanced scolding of Shame. 44 Humor in The Glorious Heresies Lisa McInerney’s 2015 novel The Glorious Heresies extends Rushdie’s employment of humor as critique, as in its sympathies, the novel evokes Freud’s writings on humor’s capacity for magnanimity. In a divergence from Rushdie’s novel, however, The Glorious Heresies does not admonish from afar, but rather, it erupts from within by placing its narrator in close proximity to the characters. Following a lineage of funny Irish writers such as Jonathan Swift and James Joyce, Lisa McInerney writes from the outskirts, critiquing both the imperial forces of England and the Irish Catholic churchstate. From this vantage point amongst the lowly, underseen populations of Ireland, the novel withholds its judgement and generously bolsters its characters’ capacities to endure. The Glorious Heresies begins with Ryan Cusack, a teenager, deciding to become a man as his childhood crush, Karine D’Arcy, enters his home with the promise of a sexual and spiritual awakening. It is not immediately apparent that the novel is describing such an awakening as it opens as follows: “He left the boy outside its own front door. Farewell to it, and good luck to it” (3). Through the multiple subjects, the line corroborates Ryan’s imagined departure from his younger self, adding to the initial deception. This opening turns funny as soon as the novel reveals that this “pile of mangled, skinny limbs,” is really just the virginal Ryan, not an abandoned child in the typical sense (3). Ryan, however, has an alcoholic, abusive father and a recently deceased mother, revealing him to be a kind of abandoned or disposed kid. Because the novel reveals these factors of his upbringing later, the description of Ryan’s abandonment 45 moves from deceitful, to comical, and lastly, to sorrowful. Through this opening, the novel’s humor sympathizes with conditions of abandonment—a common theme among many of the characters in the text. In much of the book, there is a tug toward sweet, heartwarming scenes, but these moments are usually steeped in histories of violence. Furthermore, through this ambiguous beginning, the novel asks its audience to read backwards for its humorous implications, rejecting a neat, linear plot. This introduction to Ryan and Karine is soon offset by the suggestion of his father’s impromptu return home. Ryan assures Karine that his father, Tony Cusack, will not intrude, but the novel sarcastically and eerily hints at his father's capabilities: “This morning he’d warned that he’d be out and about, so the kids would have to make their own dinner, though he’d be back later, trailing divilment and, knowing the kindness of the pit, a foul temper” (3). The image of the absent father, “trailing divilment,” is comic in its subversion of the good father figure and in its anticipation of displeasure spreading from one’s work to one’s home, but there remains a mixture of the comic with the threat of violence. This joke relies on the novel’s use of condensation which compacts Tony Cusack’s poor labor-conditions and foul temper into this brief passage. Although the opening promised to be about Ryan’s entrance into manhood, the conversation and the narrator seem to pivot back to Ryan’s family, undoing the abandoning act that Ryan had staged in his mind by showing the scene to be haunted by his father. The novel tries to guess at Tony’s arrival: “If he came home now, if, all lopsided with defeat, the worse for wear because of drink, or poker or whatever the fuck, it’d still take him only a moment to figure out that his son was on the lang, and for one reason only” (4). Through this passage, the narrator takes on Ryan’s tone and attitude to guess at Tony’s drunken, but 46 apparently, coherent state with the ubiquitous teenage signifier of rage: “or whatever the fuck.” By merging the perspective of its characters and the narration, the novel employs what Gerard Genette termed “internal, variable focalization” (189). Focalization differs from the narrator’s voice because it refers to vision and point of view, not vocalizations. The internal focalization places the characters as the seers, and it is variable because the focal point changes between characters (Genette, 189). While the opening of the novel adopts Ryan’s point of view, this changes as new characters are introduced. For instance, after the opening scene with Ryan ends, there is a brief interlude in which an omniscient narrator appears to describe the city, and then the novel shifts to Maureen and her point of view. By having a point of view that confirms and thereby affirms its characters, the novel reveals its sympathies early on. Furthermore, through this variable, internal focalization, the novel tries to see the town of Cork through many perspectives, not allowing one dominant voice to consume the story, and thereby giving the novel a democratic humor which embraces a variety of contending views desires, priorities, and perspectives. Crucially, some of these perspectives are incompatible. Through these incompatibilities in focalization, the novel sets the grounds for incongruous humor. The comic and humor in The Glorious Heresies, relies heavily on incongruity, which, for Terry Eagleton, is “the most plausible account of why we laugh” (67). According to Eagleton, the incongruity theory posits that humor arises from “a clash of incongruous aspects – a sudden shift of perspective, an unexpected slippage of meaning, an arresting dissonance or discrepancy, a momentary defamiliarizing of the familiar and so on” (67). Incongruities can appear in all aspects of form and content. Funny, disarming 47 incongruities can occur at the visual level, the auditory level, perhaps even the tactile level (think of reaching your hand into a bag of rice to find a gelatinous substance, that might just evoke laughter). For comic means, incongruity can work by negating the expected logic of a story, presenting two incompatible ideas simultaneously, flaunting absurdity, or even joining two distinct words to create a new word, as in Freud's punchline: “he treated me quite famillionairely” (14). Much of the incongruity of The Glorious Heresies arises from incompatibilities in focalization. One major instance of this occurs with Maureen, a woman who murders an intruder at the beginning of the novel. While Maureen debates whether to ring the guards or hide the body, McInerney writes: She did think – her face by now halfway to her ankles – that it might be jolly to ring for a priest, just to see how God and his bandits felt about it. … But she didn’t think she’d be able for inviting one of them fellas over the threshold. Two invasions in a day? She didn’t have the bleach. (11) Here, the narrator initially watches Maureen, but her inflections and tone pervade the perspective, particularly with the words “bandits” and “fellas,” and the final, humorous question. Through the seamless flow in and out of the characters’ perspectives, incompatibilities arise in narration and focalization, producing humorous solidarity with the differing points of view. McInerney writes in Irish English, often lashed with heavy obscenity depending on the focal point. Sometimes the obscenity of the novel becomes just a soundbite for 48 unwanted, unacknowledged feelings. When Tony Cusack justifies giving away Ryan’s piano, the novel assumes his voice: “Oh, you fucking gom, boy, for fuck’s sake, it’s only a fucking piano, it wasn’t your knob you lost,” revealing Tony’s guilt and anger through the onslaught of unintelligent vulgarity (62). Another moment of this occurs with Tony as he is caught by Tara Duane, his pestilent neighbor: “Shit, he thought. Fuck. Fuck shit fuck” (205). Through the assault of language here, the novel mocks Tony’s incapacity for honesty, but also works to undo the schematics of language that push a strict signified/signifier relationship. Here, each “fuck” could connote a different reaction. Tony’s speech is redundant and simple, showing less incongruity than Ryan, who, in contrast, says things like “it’s the fucking berries,” or “it’s fucking lovely,” showing a softer use of obscenity as hyperbole (263, 277). These incongruities from Ryan, however, are not jarring enough to be comic. As seen in Ryan’s exaltations, incongruity in The Glorious Heresies often also from the concoction of vulgarity and poetry. Aside from Ryan, none of the characters are lauded for their smarts, and yet, the dialogue is often witty, inventive, and sly. The insults, furthermore, are not always crude. Maureen is described as “crazier than a dustbin fox,” and “an odd fish” (13,17). Through these unusual descriptions, the novel’s eloquence shines as strict linguistic meaning is subverted by metaphor. When discussing the Catholic Church and its conversion of Georgie, a young prostitute, Ryan says, “‘It’s just judgey bollocks all round, isn’t it? That’s the whole point’” (104). For Ryan and the novel, the church is an unwelcoming space, designed to enlighten, but sustained to condemn; a sentiment contained in the brief, but compelling “judgey bollocks.” In this reduction of a massive institution, McInerney employs incongruity as a means of humor, 49 but does not neglect the tragic overtones of this dismissal. For Georgie, this “bollocks” is now the only thing keeping her alive and safe. As my chapter on Rushdie’s Shame has shown, comedy is a multi-edged sword that can be employed for the purpose of belittling, reimagining, sympathizing, or denouncing, though it is not limited to just these. Trickily, a momentary joke might gleefully lift the veil on something as ugly as institutionalized racism or it might provide a brief alleviation from one’s marginalized space in a fascist regime by subverting the ridiculous power of a nation. Thus, there is no through line for ethics in jokes; there is no common mode of retaliation from the joke-teller, nor does every joke evoke laughter. Even if laughter was the indicator for a successful joke, as Terry Eagleton points out in Humor, laughter “is a language with a host of different idioms: cackling, chortling, grunting, chuckling, shrieking, bellowing, screaming…,” the list goes on (1). Smiling, Eagleton adds, has a similar, expansive list. Thus, not only does a joke itself suggest a range of potential attitudes, different responses (laughter, smiling, silence, impassivity) bring different sympathies as well. Humor, however, might offer a far narrower study in light of Freud’s definition and his distinction of jokes, the comic, and humor. As the main source for the comic in The Glorious Heresies, humor provides much of the levity throughout the novel, but is also the dominant engine for vocalizations of pain. In its form, humor constantly swerves from the anticipated, prescribed utterance and offers in its place a more psychologically economized view. For the listener, Freud argues, humor can be generous, saving an investment in an emotional reaction. After discussing gallows humor, Freud writes: 50 It must be confessed that there is something like magnanimity in this blague, in the man’s tenacious hold upon his customary self and his disregard of what might overthrow that self and drive it to despair. This kind of grandeur of humour appears unmistakable in cases in which our admiration is not inhibited by the circumstances of the humorous person. (285) This theorization of humor shows the intersection between the comic and sympathy. Unlike jokes, humor has the capacity to interfere with the generation of affect, giving its audience relief from an expected response. With the case of the man heading to the gallows remarking “Well, this week’s beginning nicely,’” the listener and the speaker are momentarily relieved of solemnities (Freud, 284). This relief does not mean that a listener would be led to think kindly of death row, but for a moment, there is a lift on the affective expectation and emotional energy is contained. Humor in The Glorious Heresies is often both generous and extremely disruptive. The title alone suggests a strong deviation from normative discourse. To be glorious is to be filled with externally or self-imposed honor or pride, to be praiseworthy. A heresy, in stark contrast, is a belief that is not generally accepted. To be a heretic is to exist in the margins, to feverishly push up against the systems built around us that are constantly iterating and affirming themselves as fact. If the title refers to its cast of characters, ‘the glorious heresies’ is an adequate oxymoron for this group of successful miscreants — miscreants in their disbelief and unaccepted behavior. Furthermore, the word ‘heresy’ has a nice history of redefinitions: the word originated in Greek as “to take for oneself, 51 choose” (Oxford English Dictionary). This new vision of ‘heresy’ shows that resistance, especially McInerney’s funny, provocative, flagrant resistance, might offer choice to both speaker and listener. The ability to choose is heavily lacking the lives of drug dealers, prostitutes, alcoholics, murderers, and the like. Heresy offers a choice, then, because it reveals a moment when one can prescribe to easy ideology or critique it. The more appreciable decision in this novel is critique. Just before what might be a moment of intense passion, the novel says, “[Ryan] wondered if he should stop wondering, when a wandering mind was heresy,” both suggesting that the characters themselves might have an awareness that a critical capacity is dangerous, and that in Cork and Ireland in general, the dominant culture attempts to stabilize and confine thought (10). Through the title and endorsement of critical thought, the novel celebrates the wandering, rambling minds and honors (glorifies) the heretics—the deviants of Ireland. The characters of The Glorious Heresies employ the comic and humor as a means of resistance and survival. Maureen seeks the comic out most vigorously. Jimmy, Maureen’s son, asks Maureen why an intruder would enter her home and she responds, “‘[i]sn’t it funny; I didn’t think to ask,’” already seeking levity in a grave situation (15). As Jimmy searches for someone to clean the murder scene, he ponders Dougan, “whose brutish dexterity and wicked sense of humor would be just right for the occasion” (17). A dark sense of humor might help remove a corpse because Dougan could provide some levity for Jimmy during a stressful, oppressive time. Thus, humor can deflect, redirect, and level the oppression thrown at these characters. By pointing to Dougan’s humorous capacities as helpful, devious tools, the novel is gesturing to its own mechanisms. 52 Although the text is not using humor as a means of covering up violence, it is employing levity to endure and tell stories of pain. As humor is the dominant means for resistance in the novel, there might be an ethical imperative as to why this funny heresy is the discursive route for its characters. In his discussion of humor, Terry Eagleton cites Mary Douglas for her theorizations on the comic: “Mary Douglas regards all jokes as subversive since they expose the essential arbitrariness of social meanings,” and thus a joke damages and disrupts any notion of purity. This is true for much of the comic in The Glorious Heresies, which eagerly seeks to reveal the silliness of social meanings. One moment of this undoing occurs after the heroine, Maureen, commits arson by burning down her home which was previously a brothel: Easier get a taste for arson than murder. Maureen accidentally-on-purpose left the candles by the curtains and burned her house down. It had, at the time, been a means to an end but she’d really enjoyed the spectacle once it got going. (280) The narrator’s pre-justification of arson is immediately disorientating. In suggesting that it might be physically and morally “easier” to repeatedly commit arson than murder, the narrator draws an unlikely and humorous comparison. The “accidentally-on-purpose” that follows is more than a bewildering oxymoron. The phrase reveals the possibility that these two motives can coexist, and that violence can occur almost unconsciously. For Maureen to set flame to her house, a house with a history of violence and trauma, there may have been an acknowledgment that this would get her in trouble and a simultaneous 53 drive to destroy and erase a place that stores memories of violence. Humor, then, has a similar imperative to metaphor, both seeking to show a non-literal possibility. Although this passage on arson is humorous, a reader is not saved from feelings of anxiety entirely. McInerney employs humor and the novel requests no pity, but this sort of humor may actually provoke anxiety. Humor, then, is constantly navigating the boundaries of what is “say-able,” it is always risking condemnation and self-exposure. After Maureen calls upon her son Jimmy Phelan to assist in cleaning up her victim, Robbie O’Donovan, the narrator adopts Jimmy’s annoyance: “The bint had only gone and killed someone. He supposed it was appropriate carry-on for the block he was chipped from but it didn’t make it any less of an arseache” (13). By depicting a murder as an obnoxious, time-consuming, trivial blunder, the novel irreverently refuses to invite pity for the living or the dead, and reveals the pervasiveness of violence in these characters’ lives. This irreverence, however, might not land with some as only funny, it might anger, annoy, or sadden. While the novel insists in this passage on reading from Jimmy’s perspective, this incongruity risks condemnation from an audience opposed to senseless murder. In this space between condemnation and laughter, anxiety may arise in a torn reader. Although the ethical ambiguity of some humor may bring anxiety rather than dispel it, with Robbie, for instance, the novel insists on not only using his dead body as a turning point for other characters, refusing in its form the trivialization that Jimmy performs. Thus, a reader’s own comfort or anxiety might not settle fully while reading because the novel looks closer at these lives and qualifies the violence in Cork. Jimmy’s view of Robbie’s death would be more damning if this novel did not also include the 54 perspectives of Georgie, his former friend/partner/prostitute, and Maureen. We are introduced to Robbie as a victim, but again, through the novel’s non-linear movement, his past life (his pitfalls and his successes) are revealed. Thus, The Glorious Heresies fiercely mixes pleasure with displeasure, and laughter with tears. In Humour, Eagleton writes of laughter’s close semblance to crying and argues that because “being out of control is never entirely gratifying, laughter can easily border on the unpleasant,” and therefore, laughter can quickly turn to crying and vice versa (6). Thus, humor does not only risk transgression, it also confuses and intensifies certain moments. One such moment occurs as Georgie believes she is about to be killed by Ryan because she has inquired after her dead boyfriend. The novel gives a crude, single sentence lead-in: Georgie is in the horrors. She sits on her haunches on the floor of her rented one-bed, crying, and distracting herself with the stupidest of notions. Sniff. Sob. That’s it, it ends here. Gulp. Cough. Look how dirty the carpet is. (351) Although the novel sympathizes with Georgie and does not look away from the horrifying realities of her occupation, this moment, on the brink of death, lacks overt pathos. By switching to Georgie’s internal monologue to track her physical reactions to Ryan’s claims, the text defers its own summation. While The Glorious Heresies has many scenes of violence, it refuses to make a caricature out of pain and it leaves little ambiguity about its own attitudes on senseless violence. Ryan stumbles upon his friends watching clips from the show Family Guy. The 55 clip shows its protagonist, Peter Griffin, “lashing out with trademark brutality” at his son, leading the novel to ask: “What was is, ten seconds? If that? Ten fucking seconds of a cartoon man punching a cartoon kid, and it stretched into a wound” (221). Here, the novel acknowledges the comic’s close ties with violence, especially the repetition of violence. And, even though this caricature is aimed at unassuming youth, this mass-marketed comic violence has the potential to dredge up deep pains. In a scene of terrible brutality, the narrator of The Glorious Heresies describes one of Georgie’s clients who beats and rapes her. Leading to this moment, the narrator vengefully remarks on “the real evil bastards, the ones who hid behind stony facades the rage, the frustration, the deep-seated mammy issues they were only dying to take out on you. You, the dirty whore” (98). Similar to Shame, The Glorious Heresies takes aim at men who make women the target of their aggression. McInerney emphasizes the fact that blame does not sit merely on one person or one gender, referring to “the deep-seated mammy issues” that could lead to struggles later in life. After being attacked, Georgie “began walking back into town, and a host of the oblivious walked and drove past,” zooming out and forming a larger condemnation aimed at the insular passersby of the city. On occasion, the novel zooms out to uncover histories of misery that inform and reinforce one another, using humor when available, employing sincere, honest engagement when possible, and listening to stories of pain. The dominant source of amalgamated comedy and sympathy in the novel is Maureen, who herself is a surprising incongruity; she is an older woman, Catholicleaning mother, murderer, arsonist, and care-taker. In an essay on McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies and its sequel The Blood Miracles, Katarzyna Ostalska argues that 56 Maureen “constitutes a voice of conscience for an entire generation of unmarried Irish mothers, ignored, mistreated and silenced in the past” (238). Although this is indeed too great a generalization to make, it is true that Maureen elucidates a vast and violent Irish history that is not often depicted. If she is a voice for some of the unsung women of Ireland, that voice is vulgar, sharp, and candid. The novel takes place after the “Celtic Tiger,” a period from the 1990s-2000s of economic growth in Ireland, followed by a steep crash. In an essay on the effects of the “Celtic Tiger” on women in the workforce, Sinead Kennedy argues that this crash has disproportionately affected women who continue to earn far less than their male counterparts. The younger characters of the novel seem to view the workforce as only prostitutes and drug-dealers. Georgie tells Ryan, “‘aren’t you lucky you were born a boy, then? All you have to do is sell drugs,’” suggesting that women in the lowest class are forced into prostitution while their male counterparts endure far less violence as drug dealers. Although this binary is not true for all people in the Irish lower classes, it does reiterate the novel’s focus on gender and the privilege that even Ryan has by not having to sell his body to earn a living. Another instance of Maureen’s resistance to feminine expectations occurs after she kills Robbie. She thinks of the mess it made and the novel says she “was shit at cleaning, too. Homemaking skills were for good girls and it was forty years since anyone had told her she was one of them” (11). In this humorous moment, the text pokes fun at Maureen for her lack of typically-feminine skills, not only is she a murderer, but a messy, un-ladylike woman —the heresy! By adopting Maureen’s self-deprecating humor, the narrator implies a complicity with Maureen against those who impose their gender-roles upon her. Here, the humor relies on the economy of pity as the narrator insists Maureen 57 hasn’t been a “good girl” for a long time and she won’t be starting anytime soon, saving a reader feelings of charity toward Maureen. As an older figure in the novel who has witnessed more of the country’s fluctuations, Maureen provides the sharpest critique of Ireland and the Catholic Church. As Ostalska points out, Maureen “enters the narrative not only as a murderess but also as a believer,” and the novel follows the dissolution of her faith. The murder weapon Maureen uses is a “flat rock, about a fistful, painted gold and mounted on polished wood, with a picture of the Virgin Mary holding Chubby Toddler Jesus printed on one side in bright Celtic colors,” and after the murder, the narrator describes the priests as “bandits” (11, 15). The novel refuses to adhere to the normative, respectful reverence given to the church, thereby subverting any priestly authority. If priests are bandits, they are criminals too, but they perform a different kind of invasion. Thus, the novel (which follows the illegal wrongdoings of many) reserves its own judgement for the church’s sanctimony. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud focuses on an economy of pity as a source of laughter, though he argues that humor may also occur from an economy in any type of affect as “the kingdom of humour is constantly being enlarged whenever an artist or writer succeeds in submitting some hitherto unconquered emotions to the control of humour” (288). After recounting a tale from Mark Twain about his ancestry, Freud remarks, “we cannot help laughing at the cost of an economy of the feelings of piety into which we were prepared to enter at the beginning of this family history” (286). Much of the humor in The Glorious Heresies relies on this mechanism. When beginning to read or listen to a story about an old Catholic mother and a young teenage boy, one might enter with the reflexive expectation of piety, as if there will 58 certainly be a call for obedience or deference because we are told family is sacred. Then, as a reader delves into McInerney’s novel, they might find no such need for piety, no one and nothing in the story asks us to respect those in charge, and laughter emerges from the suspended affect in favor of humor. If there is relief, there might also be a recognition of why this is relief and what has previously felt like a constraint. In other words, by using humor to life the veil on some of Catholicism’s silly arbitrariness, the novel might shift the attitudes of its readership. After committing murder and initially refusing to call upon God’s bandits, Maureen decides to try confessional to lift some of the burden of guilt: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been decades since my last confession.” “Decades?” “Oh, aeons. Can you imagine what a burden it’s been, Father? Carrying all that sin around, like saddlebags on the back of an ass? … I killed a man” “… Are you joking?” (125) “‘Are you joking?’” is really the statement, ‘you should not be joking,’ which is a judgement unlikely to scathe Maureen, who enters confessional with a seriousness and honestly that is rare in fictionalized murder confessions. She begins with an innocent, innocuous tone, freely exposing herself to potential judgement. Although the priest tries to steer her toward the church’s priorities, Maureen remains indignant. As she tries to grapple with the various moments in life that have led her to sin, the priest chalks it up to God’s “‘unique challenges,’” to which Maureen replies, “‘I suppose God was challenging 59 me to deny my son’s father his hole. But the Trickster was having none of it, so off my drawers came,’” to which the priest condemns her for her disrespectful tone (126). In this sorrowful moment, Maureen tries to employ the mechanisms of humor, burying the grief of her rape in metaphor and crude language, but fails to elicit either laughter or sympathy from the priest, finding condemnation and upset instead. Arriving at this memory of trauma and having the priest silence her is dismal. This moment signals a shift in Maureen’s docility as the priest’s lack of concern for her is clarified: “‘You’re crosser about my language in the confessional than you are about the fact that I killed a man’” (127). This scene proclaims the churches many violations against its own stated positions. Maureen is there in a last-ditch effort to repent, shockingly open for self-exposure, but fervently opposed to condemnation. In a gesture of sympathy from the novel, the scene ends with Maureen’s final blow: “How many lives did you destroy with your morality and your Seal of Confession and your lies? Now. For the absolution. Once God knows you’re sorry he lets you off the hook, isn’t that right?” “How can I believe that you’re sorry when you’re— ” “Me? Oh, Father. I know I’m sorry. What about you? Bless me, Ireland, for I have sinned. Go on, boy. No wonder you say Holy God is brimming with the clemency; for how else would any of you bastards sleep at night?” (128-129) 60 The novel praises Maureen’s honesty and strength. It does not attempt to justify her violence, but through its engagement with her moments of pain, it underscores the factors that led her to commit murder or arson. In an essay on the era following the “Celtic Tiger” and the strange, apocalyptic nation that emerged, Kieran Keohane and Carmen Kuhling write, “as people are torn and tear themselves free from traditional worlds, they are also free to fall in love with them again,” producing a strong ambivalence about the nation and its ideologies, but not a useless, wavering hesitance (127). In The Glorious Heresies, this ambivalence is highlighted in Maureen, a woman who has nearly given up on her country, but seeks her own secular redemption. Although the novel critiques the nation, it comically proclaims its affection for the characters of Cork. Robbie and Georgie had a unique relationship that the novel treats with reverence and hesitation: “Outside of their appetite for inebriation, Georgie and Robbie had little to hold them together, and there were more photogenic couples” (29). This small comment on their unfortunate appearance might initially come across as hostile or demeaning, but it could also be read as a gesture of kindness. Another such moment occurs as Tony first meets Maureen: “He knocked and the door was opened by an ould wan, about his mother’s age, dressed like a chilblained scarecrow with a face that would have reversed the course of the Grand National” (44). Again, the narrator’s startlingly honest remark seems like a crude, mocking insult. With closer examination, however, there is also a basis of kinship. If the narrator is so unapologetically honest and also intensely engaged with the characters, there is a sympathy that arises through sheer candor and intimacy. This kind of sympathy is common in humor. The novel is not asking for pity when it describes Maureen’s stark face. Instead, the text suggests that she 61 herself is too big, too fine to take heed of a small, inflammatory remark. Freud writes of the humorous processes: “The exaltation of [the humorist’s] ego, to which the humorous displacement bears witness,” would be translated as “‘I am too big (too fine) to be distressed by these things,’” (290). By describing Maureen and Ryan with humor, it is as if the humorist is not merely asserting their own victorious self, but another’s. The humor, then, relies on intimacy, informality, and candor. By reinforcing the strength of its characters through humor, the novel again shows its warm attitude towards its people. They will endure. They might be ugly, crude, murdering blokes, but they will endure. While Maureen besmirches the church, the novel looks at the city in an ambivalent mix of spite and reverence. For much of the novel, the city is an unassuming host of misfits which fosters countless cycles of violence and pain. After Ryan is introduced, McInerney writes: Cork City isn’t going to notice the first brave steps of a resolute little man. The city runs on the macro: traffic jams, All-Ireland finals, drug busts, general elections. … There were people dying, too. That’s the way of the city: one new man to take the place of another, bleeding out on a polished kitchen floor. (10) The novel reiterates this sentiment: the city will not notice or celebrate the lives of the people, especially the “little” people. In a post from Lisa McInerney’s blog, Arse End of Ireland, titled “Innovation and The Council Estate,” McInerney turns fictitious caricature into a burning plea to Irish residents. She writes, “I’m talking about the despondency that can set in all too easily when your world extends only to the town borders, or the distance 62 of the local bus route into town. The lack of confidence.” McInerney pleads for expansive borders and minds, urging Irish residents, especially those in small towns, to escape their confines and engage with a larger world. The novel echoes this resistance in an unexpected way. As opposed to enlisting the narrator of Shame, for instance, who pans across Pakistan for a glimpse at Zia-ul-Haq’s violent reign, The Glorious Heresies has a Steadicam affixed to each character within Cork, traverses among them, and highlights their borders. Although the narrator seems resigned to hopelessness, stuck in this cycle or misery facilitated by the city, by the end of the novel, the attitude slightly shifts: Cork City isn’t going to notice the last faltering steps of a lost little man. All those lives, all those beams, crisscrossed into the grandest of structures … the city won’t see the snapping sticks, or feel the first sparks. So scale it down. Zoom in. Look closer. (363) By the end of the novel, the city’s involvement has not changed, but the text’s has. The city cannot and will not watch or record every life under the sun, but the novel can try to capture a few. This is the biggest distinguishing fact in the humor of Shame and of The Glorious Heresies. Rushdie’s humor in Shame predominantly scolds from afar, keeping its narrator at an elevated stance. McInerney’s narrative, however, displays a pressure to document these lives because no one else will, leading to a tireless, kind commitment. 63 Coda: Decadent Humor in Withnail and I and “What’s Chasing You” As The Glorious Heresies shows, humor often bends the line between relief and unease, sometimes producing and sometimes dispelling anxiety. Humor thwarts expectations and evades neat categorization, making it a disruptive and subversive force. The Glorious Heresies depicts Freud’s notion of humor as an economy of piety and pity through a comic refusal of sanctimony. Pushing up against normative expectation, humor dismantles binaries and boundaries through its bewildering, ambivalent proclamations. In a slight departure from and extension of the humor of McInerney’s novel, Bruce Robinson’s film Withnail and I and Marlon William’s music-video for “What’s Chasing You,” both employ humor as a strategy for ethical disruption and decadence. Each film refuses literalism, flaunts isolation, and decidedly offers sympathy to their strutting characters. Withnail and I was directed by Bruce Robinson and released in 1986. The film stars Richard E. Grant as Withnail and Paul McGann as the unnamed “I.” The two play struggling actors and close companions. In need of an escape from the pressures and chaos of London, they visit Withnail’s uncle, Monty’s home in the countryside for some quiet. The big pressures of London for the two main characters are work and survival, as evident when Withnail exclaims, “‘Oh God, it’s a nightmare out there I tell you,’” suggesting that London, in and of itself, places pressure onto the duo. Their countryside escape, however, proves to be less of a vacation than anticipated, demystifying a seclusion to pastoral life. Marlon Williams’ “What’s Chasing You” also depicts a kind of social retreat and seclusion. The music video was shot in one take and transpires on a 64 densely crowded area of a beach. In the video, directed by Marin Sagadin, Williams meanders back and forth, singing to the camera, and navigating, with hostility, the various beach-goers. Initially, Withnail and I seems to dispute Freud’s notion of humor as an economy of pity. Unlike the predominant characters in Shame or The Glorious Heresies, Withnail appears to almost exclusively beg for sympathy, shown in his many cries of distress. “I,” too, declares his anxieties freely, thinking early on, “we are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell.” This line foreshadows a lot of the film which largely shows the pair’s descent into distress. Although much of the dialogue seems like a cry for attention, the form itself refuses pity. Therefore, while the content (the words and gestures of Withnail and “I”) ostensibly reiterates a depleted cry for pity, the form mocks their hyperbole, producing humor in its discordance. This quote reveals that in Withnail and I, there is a large gap between the content’s calls for pity and the form’s assertion of invulnerability, and that this gap is a predominant engine for humor. While Rushdie’s Shame, too, shows a wide gap in its form and content, its gap results in far less laughter, as seen in the narrator’s repeated, mimicked mocking of Sufiya Zinobia, which echoes the oppressive voices that call her “‘idiot’” (100). As Eagleton writes in Humour, Comedy establishes a cognitive distance from its object, and in doing so knows it cannot know itself. It must shape and surmount its materials, not simply reflect them. Its form is in this sense askew to its content. (152) This incongruity between form and content also plays a major part in the humor of Williams’ video. Crouching to look into the camera, Williams sings “why do we do what 65 we do when we lie?” with a strong tinge of irony. Although the lyrics inquire into the roots of dishonesty, the visual seems to show a sauntering self-deceit as Williams dances alone, refusing to engage with fellow beach-goers. Thus, both Withnail and I and “What’s Chasing You,” refuse a literalist reading, insisting instead on subtle and multidimensional readings. With this kind of humor, the audience needs to go beyond the literal in order for the sympathy to register. If humor is generous because it cancels an expected response, it requires an active, engaged listener who anticipates their own sympathies. Humor brings to the forefront the possibility of one’s own sensitivity, while rerouting the energy toward laughter. Thus, when Withnail says “‘We are on holiday by mistake,’” or “‘I’m in a park and I’m practically dead,’” the humor works through nonliteral misstatement that relies on defamiliarization. Although much of the laughter evoked in Withnail and I is through this gap in calls for sympathy, the humor also relies on the defiance of norms and overt morality. By refusing the expected norm, the text’s humor produces an economy of pedantry or pretension in its audience. While announcing ‘I feel dreadful, I feel fucking dreadful’ and showing little motivation to make a lifestyle change, Withnail and “I” refuse a pedagogical sympathy that would shame their habits, thus sparing the viewer of their own ethical apprehensions. The two main characters do not hold on to convention for prescribed routes for power, insisting instead on their lifestyle while also shamelessly flaunting their misery. Thus, the characters refuse to compromise the idiosyncrasies of their lives and the text sympathetically endorses their decision to not conform. The film, then, offers criticism and sympathy at the same time. It both admires the decadence of its 66 characters and critiques the hyperbole and self-congratulation involved in their refusal to adhere to a normative lifestyle, producing a more covert humor and sympathy. This subtler humor, that relies on undisguised pain, points to the larger fact of decadence throughout Withnail and I. A.O. Scott of the New York Times once said: Withnail and I is an “exploration of the aesthetics of awfulness,” and “a fairly brutal corrective to the mythology of the sixties.” The “aesthetics of awfulness” in this case are closely tied with decadence, in which decay or illness is a pre-condition for pleasure. For George C. Schoolfield, a decadent is someone “who regards himself as being set apart, more fragile, more learned, more perverse, and certainly more sensitive than his contemporaries” (xiii). Withnail and “I” openly exhibit these decadent characteristics, as seen in Withnail’s dramatic exclamations: “We’ve got to get some booze. It’s the only solution to this intense cold. Something’s got to be done. We can’t go on like this. I’m a trained actor reduced to the status of a bum. I mean look at us! Nothing that reasonable members of society demand as their rights!” This passage shows fragility, desperation, a desire for pleasure through alcohol, and a sensitivity regarding his status as an actor. Thus, Withnail and “I” are open decadents, living in a constant state of failure and seeking small pleasures in friendship, food, or drink. In nearly every scene, food and alcohol are in the foreground. Withnail lavishly orders “‘a pair of quadruple whiskies and another pair of pints, please.’” Their eagerness to indulge is most obvious in their hunger and thirst. The fact that they are actors, furthermore, highlights their decadence and desire to find and capture heightened 67 emotions. Monty, too, proclaims his fragility by saying such things as: “I can never touch meat until it’s cooked. As a youth, I used to weep in butcher shops.” In a scene of comic indulgence, Withnail pleads with “I” for some alcohol, remembering at last that he has antifreeze. In response to Withnail’s horrific suggestion to drink poison, “I” angrily remarks, “‘[you] bloody fool. You should never mix your drinks.’” In Withnail and I, pleasure and agony are intertwined in a cycle of selfpollution. “I’s” humorous response is funny in part because it presents a fundamental rule-system for indulgence. The antifreeze consumption does not seem to be inherently wrong or unhealthy, it is the mixing of antifreeze with other substances that causes alarm. In an advertisement of decadence and play, Havelock Ellis concludes in his introduction to J.K. Huysmans’ decadent A Rebours: Therefore soak yourself in mysticism, follow every intoxicating path to every impossible Beyond, be drunken with medievalism, occultism. Yet be sure that Nature is your home, and that from the farthest excursions you will return the more certainly to those fundamental instincts which are rooted in the zoological series at the summit of which we stand. A return to nature, for Ellis, is not the escape to the countryside in search of peace; instead, it is following one’s instincts in search of pleasure. Ellis seeks to demystify nature as nourishing and spontaneous. Decadence, furthermore, complicates the binary between the natural and the mechanical, purity and corruption, and thereby favors uncertainty and pleasure-seeking. The invitation to uncertainty, love of intoxication, and 68 natural instinct are all on display in both Withnail and I and “What’s Chasing You,” and it is the very incongruity in and possibility of decadence that evokes laughter. In Freud’s 1927 essay he argues that in humor, the ego “insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure” (162). This, too, is a decadent impulse which refutes (or requires) pain in search of pleasure. In a moment of absurdity and deprivation, Withnail covers himself in embrocation to try and keep warm and alive, becoming a pasty, white, gangly man in underwear and a thick coat, and exclaiming, “‘I’m a trained actor reduced to the status of a bum.’” Although the content shows a desperate man trying to survive, the form does not validate Withnail’s complaints, instead fixing the camera upon his incongruous body and deelevating him from his supposed status as trained actor. Three decades later, the scrawny and swaggering Marlon Williams appears from the left side of the frame onto a beach, sporting bright white shorts and long black socks in his music video for “What’s Chasing You.” There is a strong physiognomic resemblance in Williams to Richard E. Grant as Withnail. Both figures are tall, decadently handsome, with hair forcefully slicked back and an aggressive raffish manner, but simultaneously and overtly fragile in their minimal white clothing, pale skin, and thin physique. “What’s Chasing You,” does not open itself for easy interpretation as both the song and video are filled with incongruities. The title lacks a question mark, suggesting that the song is an exploration of the things chasing a lost lover, as opposed to a question, although the intonation in the chorus’ “What’s chasing you” does seem like a true inquiry. Williams sings to what seems to be a lover from whom he lacks an obviously direct address: “I don’t understand a single word that 69 you say. Baby, are you talking to me?” In a performance with NPR, however, Williams leads into “What’s Chasing You” by saying, “it’s about horror movies.” With this in mind, the image of the chase becomes far more sinister. While the reader may instinctively think that this swooning song is about a lost love, Williams insists it be read differently. Refusing one distinct reading of himself, Marlon echoes David Bowie’s absurd and beautiful song, “The Bewlay Brothers:” “[he] could be dead, he could be not, he could be you. He’s chameleon, comedian, Corinthian, and caricature.” As Williams saunters among the living in a state of isolation, the music-video frames him as a ghostly figure, perhaps the one doing the “chasing.” Just as Bowie pleads “please come away, just for the day,” Withnail and I and “What’s Chasing You” also depict a desire and willed isolation for better, or preferred relations. While Williams sings to an absent “you,” he makes gestures that are ostensible rejections of sincere emotions (like knocking down a sandcastle under construction), thereby revealing his own isolation and loneliness. The lyrics insist it is “too late, too late to tell you I’m gonna build a world around you,” and the absent “you” is “too far, too far away.” Williams and Withnail incongruously perform the reasons for their isolations by demanding sympathy or inquiring into the reasons for their loneliness while also retreating to the countryside or dancing in solitude among a crowd. Lastly, both texts involve the visual and the sonic, overtly stressing the importance of the cooperation between music and the visual. As mentioned before, Marlon Williams’ track features on his album Make Way for Love, a title that points to the necessity of greater sympathies and engagement among us. Even as Williams pushes men out of his way and smashes sandcastles, he still sings of longing and yearning, 70 questioning how a relationship could fail. The humor arises in the discrepancy between physical retreat and uttered longing. The music of Withnail and I, too, expresses an ethics of resistance built upon love. While Withnail recklessly and drunkenly drives toward London, Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile,” with its booming self-assertion, (“I stand up next to a mountain and I chop it down with the edge of hand”) drowns out the noise of the pursuing police. Withnail hyperbolically insists he is “‘making time’” by driving so fast, but Hendrix’s more sober assertion diminishes Withnail’s. The resistance and intensity of the song is applied incongruously here, as drunken Withnail does not quite live up to the rebelliousness of Hendrix’s electric guitar. As Withnail and “I” finally arrive back to their apartment after a circuitous trip to the police station, the Beatles’ song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” plays in the background, signaling a tonal shift for the film as the duo are forced to depart from their decadent, collaborative, static lifestyles. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” in part, describes the humorist’s position, except that the weeping guitar becomes a victorious, generous assertion of invulnerability: I don't know how you were diverted You were perverted too I don't know how you were inverted No one alerted you I look at you all, see the love there that's sleeping While my guitar gently weeps. 71 The comic diverts, perverts, and inverts its audience, often without warning and without explanation. A sympathetic comedy, namely humor, takes aim at the “love there that’s sleeping,” hoping to rattle and shake awake its sympathies. 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