Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature by Neil Schmitz

Abstract

Reviews 83 poetry and particularly deepens our knowledge of Snyder and Rexroth. The footnotes are crammed with interesting information and the bibliography isvery full. BERT ALMON University of Alberta Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature. By Neil Schmitz. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. 286 pages, $25.00 cloth, $10.95 paper.) Schmitz’s mirthless approach to literary humor utilizes three abstruse disciplines: semiotics (the way signs and symbols operate within a system), epistemology (the nature of knowledge, including its origin, limits, and validity), and grammatology (the study, or theory, of writing). Schmitz employs them in his elaborate study of Huckleberry Finn, Gertrude Stem’s Alice B. Toklas, and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comic strip. He applies them also to other writers, briefly noted, including Lowell (Biglow Papers), Harris (Sut Lovingood), Donald Barthelme, and Philip Roth. The key to Schmitz’sbook isin the “Projectof Humor” chapter, in oneof the many Krazy Kat discussions. He favors true humor—a warm, amiable response from the heart—over Romantic or blackhumor—a witty, dry, ironic, cerebral response. In the former category are Krazy Kat, “Twain in Huck’s voice,” and Stein: individuals with heart who are unable to deal with an authority-figure with rule book or its symbol, such as the brick that Ignatz the mouse always hurls at Krazy Kat. Such individuals misunderstand or “do not get” the message, communicating usually through speech instead of writing. “Writing wrongs Speech,” Schmitz argues, himself influenced byDerrida and the “deconstruction” concept of literary criticism, with its “grammatol­ ogy,” its view that the text’strue meaning eludesus, its underlying assumption that speech does not take priorityoverwritingbut isitselfa form ofunrecorded script. Among Schmitz’s excursions into his own newly-claimed domain of humor are these: Huckspeech, resulting from Huck’s being caught between Jim’s illiterate slave-speech and Tom Sawyer’s bookish-writing style; Krazy Kat’s remarkable conglomeration of signs, aside from that brick: misspelling, baby talk, immigrant English, etc.; the effect of Alice B. Toklas’s personality on Stein’s shapeless prose, with its intricate sexual politics, fragmentary nonsequiturs , and reductive kiddie-language. For all its difficult literary style, Schmitz’s Of Huck and Alice is a valu­ able if agreeably bothersome addition to the recent scholarly literature on that will-o’-the-wisp subject: humor. SAMUEL I. BELLMAN California State Polytechnic Univ. Pomona ...