Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties by Max F. Schulz, and: The Comic Imagination in American Literature ed. by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., (review)

Abstract

Studies in American Fiction119 Rovit's Ernest Hemingway (Twayne), also cheaper and more thorough than Shaw's book. University of North DakotaRobert W. Lewis Schulz, Max F. Bkck Humor Fiction of the Sixties. Athens: Ohio University Press. 156 pp. Cloth: $8.50 The Comic Imagination in American Literature, ed. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 448 pp. Cloth: $12.50. The sixties have barely concluded and already they have become the subject of a substantial body of literary interpretation, much of it concentrating on black humor, the mode with which the period may well turn out to be permanently identified. Like earlier studies, Bhck Humor Fiction of the Sixties attempts a representative rather than a comprehensive definition of the genre, here concentrating on Barth, Vonnegut, Borges, Bruce J. Friedman, Leonard Cohen, Thomas Berger, Charles Wright, and Robert Coover. Characteristically, Schulz identifies the collective vision of these figures as one of a disintegrating world, unredeemed by a coherent order and consequently able to sustain only discontinuous states of being, in short an absurd universe. Schulz, however, makes a valuable distinction in seeing the black humor response to the "cosmic labyrinth" not as a constant mode of apprehending experience but as the product of a specific cultural context. Distinct from the sick jokes of Lenny Bruce, the theatrically absurd comedy of Joseph Heller, even from the existential assertion of self that marks the work of Saul Bellow, the operative term in his definition is "multiple possibilities." Arbitrarily suspending choices, he feels, black humor fosters a solipsism that itself becomes the object of its own ironic scrutiny, viewing reality as a constantly shifting series of masks or disguises. Through such open ended pluralism, however, the constriction of events, of identities, of value systems which obscure reality may be at least encountered if not overcome. In developing this thesis, Schulz's emphasis on culture remains chiefly attributive rather than demonstrable. That is to say, other than suggesting literary antecedents in the heroes of Scott's Waverly romances, who are similarly confronted with anxieties rising from fluid social conditions, Schulz does not identify either a literary tradition or an immediate historical context in which black humor may be seen. The cultural background he does provide is limited to comparisons with contemporary painting and sculpture. There is no direct examination of cultural phenomena as is given by critics such as Irving Howe, for whom the problem of personal identity in postmodern fiction emerges as a consequence of estrangement from the meanings afforded by a recognizable social order or by Leslie Fiedler, whose futurist projections conversely see that fiction turning to strategies of pornography and obscenity, finally to silence as a fulfillment of the cultural drive toward anti-rationalism. Schulz, accordingly, contents himself with identifying the dilemma raised in black humor rather than offering a perspective in which it may be evaluated. Alternating between allegorical and parodistic interpretations and psychological examinations of the characters, his discussion leaves unresolved the problems of Vonnegut's ironic undercutting of the redemptive figures in his fiction, his parody of their concern for the welfare of humanity, or, as it is stated paradoxically in Cat's Cradle, "the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it." Similarly, to say as Schulz does in talking about Barth, that the narrative refusal to confirm the plot is a reaction to the normative forms which illustrate the novel's 120Reviews dissonance, is to surrender to the complexities of the novel rather than to illuminate them. What is absent most importantly from the exceedingly narrow limits Schulz sets for himself is a view of the fictions he discusses in terms of their comic movement if not of their theoretical correspondence with a formal tradition. Schulz is aware of such technical strategies as the elimination of plot, the parody of literary constructs themselves, or the blending of narrative points of view. What he does not do, however, is show how these elements collaborate to maintain the comic tension. His discussion remains abstract, emerging as a distillation of the essence of the novels, suggested in the plot summaries he appends. Ignoring the grotesque element of black humor, which sees...