Comic Novels Research Articles

Kingsley Amis: in search of the Simple Life

A delicate shift of tone occurs at that point in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot when Pope abandons the lethal wit of his “Bill of Attainder” against London society, fashionable, professional, literary, and turns to the other business of the poem, the quiet praise of his father, a simple man who only knew “the language of the Heart”. It is a triumph of Horatian satire, a telling move from the essentially comic to a sustaining solemnity. All good comic writers, whatever genre they choose, ultimately want to be able to do something like this, they want their comic perceptions of life’s complexities to issue in simple visions of serious truth. Novelists, who depend so much on establishing a reliable “voice”, have special problems when their natural mode is comic. When the habitual expression is a grin or a grimace that all-important modulation is far from easy to carry off. An interesting case is the contemporary comic novelist Kingsley Amis. Modern British comedy is notably off-hand and sardonic in tone, and the sought-for shift from hard-bitten cerebration to the large simplicities of the language of the heart is correspondingly hard to make.But Amis clearly wants to make it. “Serio-comic”, he has said of himself, and if in his quirky, variegated oeuvre, social novels, sex novels, mystery novels, love stories, science fiction, plain verse and plain man’s criticism the comic is everywhere, the simply serious tries hard to be there too.

The Onion Eaters and the Rhetoric of Donleavy's Comedy

How does a man weakened by an awareness of death survive in a world experienced as magical with malevolence? This is question heroes of J. P. Donleavy's novels answer in their own, progressively inefficacious ways. To evade his consciousness of mortality, Sebastian Dangerfield of The Ginger Man lives a hedonistic life in present and dreams of relaxed ease for future. George Smith of A Singular Man separates himself from world in a parody of Howard Hughes' and John Paul Getty's attempts to avoid disease of life. In The Saddest Summer of Samuel S and The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, heroes find heterosexual love combatant of mutability's sadness. Donleavy's most recent hero, Clayton Claw Cleaver Clementine of The Onion Eaters, tries an uneasy synthesis of his fictional cousins' survival strategies, but his attempt to live life he wants fails more miserably than similar attempts of his predecessors. The degree of misery in Clementine's role of powerless victim seems to signal Donleavy's reaching dead end of a theme victimization developing in his work since The Ginger Man. The Onion Eaters also introduces a fiction different in kind from that which precedes it, for although familiar features are here, often in exaggerated form, psychological exploration which helped unify and made serious earlier rambling plots is much diminished in The Onion Eaters. Whether dead end or new beginning, The Onion Eaters furnishes a useful perspective on rhetorical strategies of Donleavy's always comic novels, for rhetoric of this latest novel both parallels and significantly differs from rhetoric of his early work. By examining these changing rhetorical strategies, what Wayne Booth calls the author's means of controlling his reader, one can better understand thematic development of Donleavy's fiction and can better judge relative success of his novels.'

Barchester Towers and the Nature of Conservative Comedy

Trollope not only writes in the tradition of Jane Austen but shares many of her values. But if her rational and balanced comic norms might be called conservative, Trollope's are even more so. Pride and Prejudice,. for example, is really rather blunt in its absolute rejection of those who are deluded, selfish, and mean, particularly, of course, Mrs. Bennet, and a large component of the comic satisfaction at the end is provided for by the removal from the neighborhood of their parents of both Elizabeth (whose parents' society was little pleasing to her) and Jane (who runs from Netherfield Park after a year, when even her affectionate heart is unable to stand so near a vicinity to her mothers) . The struggle between parents and children basic to all comedy is seldom presented very clearly, and, for all its emphasis on equipoise and education toward moderation, Pride and Prejudice takes the position traditional to all comedy in its celebration of an escape from parents. But the comedy of Barchester Towers avoids even this basic position; underneath all, it celebrates an escape not from parents but from children. It is one of the warmest of all the great English comic novels, but it is also one of the subtlest. Despite Henry James's oft-repeated notion that Trollope is, above all, safe, that he never played with a subject, never juggled with the sympathies or the credulity of his reader, was never in the least paradoxical or mystifying, 2 this early novel, I believe, manages to establish itself as comic

Context and Structure of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited, which appeared in 1945, seems to have provided both the impetus and focal point for most of the existing criticism of Evelyn Waugh's fiction. If one wishes to discuss the six earlier novels -Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), Scoop, (1938), and Put Out More Flags (1942)-it has become more or less customary to mention how Brideshead Revisited, the seventh novel and the first work, differs from them. And if one examines Mr. Waugh's post-war novels, Brideshead Revisited can always be used as a kind -of norm: a later novel belongs either with the serious works, or with the peculiar comic tradition established by the first six novels. However, Brideshead Revisited has itself evoked sufficient critical disagreement to imply that, even at this late date, it still presents problems worth investigating. One of the difficulties confronting the student of Mr. Waugh's fiction is the virtual impossibility of placing this author securely within a single comic tradition. His obviously comic novels seem far too meaningful to be regarded as mere caricature, and yet they lack both the tinge of bitterness one normally associates with irony, and the moral indigation which usually accompanies satire. Erwin Stiirzl identifies him with the tradition of Defoe and Smollett;' and while this is certainly debatable, it emphasizes the importance of plot and craftsmanship in the creation of the earlier novels. The distinctions usually accorded Mr. Waugh are that, until 1945, his fiction reveals a steady progression away from this craftsman's tradition and toward the more conventional novel in which action grows out of motivation fimly grounded upon character, and that Brideshead Revisited represents a complete escape from his earlier tradition. Although critics have disagreed with both of these judgments, none has examined Brideshead Revisited within the specific context provided by the six novels which preceded it, a context of both thought and technique. Such a consideration will reveal a remarkable amount of similarity between this novel and the earlier ones; further, a detailed examination of these similari-