Modernism, Satire, and the Novel by Jonathan Greenberg

Abstract

by Jonathan Greenberg Cambridge University Press, 2011. 220 pages The first line of Jonathan Greenberg's chapter Laughter and Fear in A Handful of is one of my favorites: In Evelyn Waugh's universe, life is nasty, British, and short (70). Of course anyone writing about Waugh, Stella Gibbons, Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes or the other modernist satirists whom Greenberg examines had better keep their wits about them, and it's a treat see an intelligent critic be funny about the complexities of what could be called modernism's most duplicitous mode. A Handful of Dust (1934), for example, has always been received as a social satire of cosmopolitan desires and post-imperial Britishness, but its ending seems nothing less than generic betrayal. How can we reconcile satire's supposedly corrective aim with Waugh's concluding grotesquery in which the hero, Tony Last, has been transported from his stately home and the decadence of interwar British gentility the Amazonian jungle where he is held captive and condemned read Dickens death? Greenberg's claim--that Waugh's comic satire collapses into the negative affective territory of the uncanny, a destination increasingly sought out by modernists as the new century wore on--exemplifies the most ambitious claims of his book: that early modernists' attempts escape the sentimental., whether of the utopian humanist (Eliot, Joyce) or aggressive antihumanist (Lewis, Pound) variety, gave rise in the works of late modernists to an undertow in which the claims of feeling reassert themselves in negative form (89). Greenberg argues that by the 1930s, a period of late modernism, satire became the culturally dominant mode or sensibility of modernist novelists (36), with the grotesque serving as both target and method. Most memorably, he insists only that modernism and satire are not incompatible, but ... they are very nearly the same thing (9). Greenberg's first chapter locates his treatment of satire, comedy, and the grotesque within a necessarily abbreviated history of its definition and use by critics such as George Meredith, Alvin Kernan, and John Ruskin, and theorists such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Bakhtin. Here Greenberg tells us that Feeling, then, has its own within modernism, and one of the central points of this book is that an account of satire--specifically what I call late modernist satire--is indispensable telling that story (2). This of feeling is one that Greenberg tells well, and his subtle discussions of satire's dynamic repudiation of and dependence on sentimentality, in particular, marks his original contribution a growing body of scholarship on comic and late modernism. This scholarship includes studies with which Greenberg engages closely--including Justus Ni eland's Feeling Modern (2008), Michael Seidel's Satiric Inheritance (1979), and especially Tyrus Miller's Late Modernism (1999)--as well as Lisa Colletta's Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Noel (2003), Janet Montefiore's Men and Women Writers of the 1930s (1996), and Marina MacKay's Modernism and World War II (2007). All of these studies concern themselves, a greater or lesser degree, with the same constellation of theoretical questions of period and style that concern Greenberg, but none approach these problems with such careful analysis of modernists' increasing dependence on satire and satire's own developing relation sentimentality Cutting through the stalemate of tears and laughter that characterizes other critics' responses satire, Greenberg gives us instead the Uncle Fester Principle, certainly one of the most ingenious explanations for trends in modernist narrative ever produced by scholarly study. At the outset of Greenberg's preface he reproduces Charles Addams's 1946 New Yorker cartoon. Sad Movie, which shows the upturned, tearful faces of the members of an audience of a packed movie theater whose screen is hidden from us. …