Dark Laughter Research Articles

Oscar Mandel (review)

822 Reviews VictorHugo, un tempspour rire. By Joe Friedemann. Saint-Genouph: Nizet. 2002. 204 pp. ?22. ISBN 2-7078-1265-x. Five of the seven chapters of Joe Friedemann's study of the comic in six novels and one volume of rhapsodic essays (Han d'lslande, Notre-Dame de Paris, Les Miserables, William Shakespeare, and L'Homme qui rit) previously appeared as articles, between 1987 and 1995. Only the introduction and conclusion, and two chapters (on BugJargal and Le Dernier Jour d'un condamne; on the poetry), are new. The introduction recalls that in 1840 Hugo personified four separate elements in his personality, including 'Maglia, le rire' (p. 7). Friedemann claims to adopt a phe? nomenological approach (p. n), but lacks most ofthe philosophical background ordinarily associated with that method. He then presents four tables of word frequencies (forms of laughter; forms of irony,sarcasm, satire, and modes ofthe comic; associated ideas, particularly relating to performance; and total frequencies of all such words in each text treated). Unfortunately, he overlooks the essential procedure in such studies, which is to compare the frequency with which each key term appears in the target texts with its relative frequency in a large general sampling of written French (for a model see N. F. Cunen, 'Le gouffreet l'abime de Baudelaire: themes fondamentaux de Baudelaire', Travaux de linguistique et de litterature, 15 (1977), 109-39). The chapter on Han d'lslande usefully lists comic details (pp. 25, 37-39). The discussion of Bug-Jargal comments brieflybut eloquently on the dark laughter of the sadist and ofthe rebel (p. 60). But Friedemann never explains whether and how the modes of the comic in Hugo are part of a universal, national, or period typology. In what respects is his fictive laughter original? A look at Byron's poetry would have begun to clarify these questions. The chapter on Les Miserables (pp. 81-105) offersonly brief, passive descriptions of scenes involving laughter, without conveying any notion of the dry wit conveyed by the reversal of moral judgements, on which much of the persuasive force of Hugo's humanitarian masterpiece depends. After a pedestrian beginning, the first half of the chapter on L'Homme qui rit makes a few interesting observations on surprise and hyperbole in laughter (pp. 133-40). And the chapter on Hugo's verse usefully summarizes some of the poet's reflections on the polemical value, moral status, and epistemological function of irony and laughter (pp. 178-83). Friedemann seems a learned, cultured person. But his thought proceeds by enumeration and free association. His skimming treatment changes subject so often that one would almost think he suffers from an attention deficit. He fails to develop ab? stract ideas or sustain chains of reasoning. One finds many studies of the comic listed in his bibliography, but when he analyses the comic, he mainly confines himself to quoting or paraphrasing Hugo's remarks. He proposes few original insights into the texts he discusses, and he does not synthesize. Owing to these limitations, the reader is likely to find Friedemann's book disappointing. Michigan State University Laurence M. Porter Prosper Merimee: Plays on Hispanic Themes. Trans. and ed. by Oscar Mandel. New York: Peter Lang. 2003. viii + 205pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-8204-6308-6. Thirteen works in dramatic form constitute a substantial part of Merimee's liter? ary output, but, as Oscar Mandel observes in his comprehensive introductory essay 'Prosper Merimee Playwright', the range of those recently published is narrow and few are performed. Those translated here are the two Ines Mendo plays, Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement, and L'Occasion (from the Theatre de Clara Gazul; he excludes three others as lightweight), together with La Famille de Carvajal. His essay makes MLRy 100.3, 2005 823 two claims for Merimee's theatre. The first is for its seriousness: Merimee is nei? ther imitating nor parodying Spanish drama, but creating 'exuberantly original texts' (p. 34). The characteristic switch in the epilogue to the Clara Gazul plays from tragic to comic mode does not undermine their seriousness (any more than the ironic dis? tancing in the closure of several nouvelles), nor do its comic introductory letters in any...

Dreams of Manhood: Narrative, Gender, and History in Winesburg, Ohio

DREAMS OF MANHOOD: NARRATIVE, GENDER, AND HISTORY IN WINESBURG, OHIO Mark Whalan University of Exeter Gender—or what he called the "man-woman thing"—was a careerlong obsession for Sherwood Anderson. In assessments of his most famous text, Winesburg, Ohio (1919), the failure of heterosexual relationships has often been cited as the reason for the "grotesque" nature of several of Winesburg' s inhabitants, and his three novels of the 1920s—Poor White (1920) Many Marriages (1923) and Dark Laughter (1925)—can read as quest narratives, with their male protagonists searching for an elusive heterosexual happiness. Yet what early critics perceived as Anderson's radical sexual politics (one anonymous early reviewer claimed his fiction was "of a character which no man would wish to see in the hands of a daughter or sister") has in the past thirty years more often been seen as a restrictive conventionality. ' Anderson's frequent insistence on the absolute differentiation between men and women relied on binaries such as activity/passivity, or culture/nature, which feminist criticism has long identified with patriarchal culture, and recent critics have not been slow to remark on this aspect of his work.2 Yet criticism engaging with the gender politics of Winesburg, Ohio has tended to ignore the fact that it was written during the First World War—a war that provoked a period of what Kaja Silverman has called "historical trauma" that problematized the "dominant fictions" of personal (and specifically gender) identity.3 It is this "trauma," I shall argue, that was implicated in many of the formal innovations of Winesburg, Ohio, a text that marks a distinctly different approach to the relationship between narrative and gender than is evident in the rest of Anderson's writing. Often celebrated as a timeless text exhibiting universal truths about isolation, small-town life, and male adolescence, Winesburg, Ohio connects with Anderson's often-overlooked sense of unease about the effect of the First World War on white American masculinity. For much of his writing life Sherwood Anderson was fascinated by history. In his letters, autobiographical writings, and fiction, he often produced accounts of the coming of industrialism, the Civil War, and the expansion ofthe frontier. He considered writing abiography of 230Mark Whalan Grant, in collaboration with Gertrude Stein; he also discussed writing a history of the Mississippi. This interest was most clear in shaping his thoughts on national identity and Americanness, but was also central to his ideas of gender identity. As he wrote in his Memoirs, in one of his most reductive and starkly binaristic statements about gender difference : "In reality women have no desire to DO. Doing is for them a substitute. Their desire is to BE. There was never a real woman lived who did not hunger to be beautiful. The male desires not to be beautiful but to create beauty."4 According to such a misogynist logic, which predicates masculinity on agency and action and femininity on passivity and absence, "history" as a narrative of change and development inevitably comes to be gendered as masculine. In Winesburg, Ohio, indeed, the central character George Willard's progress into manhood is dependent on his developing an historical sense, as "there is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes a backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood ."5 The "backward view" of placing the self in an historical perspective and therefore becoming both an inheritor and a progenitor marks the beginning of George's "manhood." Although the category of "manhood" and his identification with this category is always problematic for George, this moment nonetheless marks the empowerment of being inducted into a temporal order and invested with the potential for historical agency. The simultaneous conferral of manhood and historical agency is evident in several of Anderson' s works, yet it was constituted within a specifically martial framework in Anderson's important pre-war novel Marching Men. In the section from Winesburg, Ohio quoted above, the "backward view" fills George with feelings of his own insignificance and provides a reminder to him of his own mortality. Yet in Marching Men, which was composed at...

Dark laughter: war in song and popular culture

Dark laughter: war in song and popular culture

Books Reviews

Communication Theory Today. David Crowley and David Mitchell, editors. Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film. Stuart C. Aitken and Leo E. Zonn, editors. The Ad Men and Women: A Biographical Dictionary of Advertising. Edd Applegate. Kewpies and Beyond: The World of Rose O'Neill. Shelly Armitage. Marching to a Different Drummer: Unrecognized Heroes of American History. Robin Kadison Berson. The Schocking Ballad Picture Show: German Popular Literature and Cultural History. Tom Cheesman. From A to Zotamorf: The Dictionary of Palindromes. Stephen J. Chism. Dark Laughter: War in Song and Popular Culture. Les Cleveland. The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late Renaissance Venice. Robert C. Davis. Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India. Sara Dickey. The Cockfight: A Casebook. Alan Dundes, editor. The Lawyer and Popular Culture: Proceedings of a Conference. David L. Gunn, editor. Pride in the Jungle: Community and Everyday Life in Back of the Yards Chicago. Thomas J. Jablonsky. Out of the Garden: Toys and Children's Culture in the Age of TV Marketing. Stephen Kline. Being Religious, American Style: A History of Popular Religiosity in the United States. Charles H. Lippy. Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut. Robert Merrill. The Unreality Industry. Ian I. Mitroff and Warren Bennis. Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy. William Paul. Black and White in Colour: Black People in British Television Since 1936. Jim Pines, editor. The Man in the Bowler Hat: His History and Iconography. Fred Miller Robinson. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Jonathan Shay. American Eats. Nelson Algren. The Beaver Bites Back: American Popular Culture in Canada. David H. Flaherty and Frank E. Manning, eds. The Battle of the Frogs and a Fairford's Flies: Miracles and the Pulp Press During the Engligh Revolution. Jerome Friedman. Chocolate Fads, Folklore & Fantasies: 1,000 Chunks of Chocolate Information. Linda K. Fuller. Andrew M. Greeley: An Annotated Bibliography. Elizabeth Harrison. Creativity and Popular Culture. David Holbrook. Schooling in the Light of Popular Culture. Paul Farber, Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr. and Gunilla Holm, editors. Perspectives on American Culture: Essays on Humor, Literature and the Popular Arts. M. Thomas Inge. The Gas Station in America. John A. Jakle & Keith A. Sculle. Montgomery Clift: A Bio‐Bibliography. Mary C. Kalfatovic 7 Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon. Norman M. Klein. Animation, Caricature and Gag and Political Cartoons in the United States and Canada. An International Bibliography. Compiles by John A. Lent. Radical Visions: American Film Renaissance, 1967‐1976. Glenn Man. Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain 1914‐1950. Joseph McAleer. Medieval Balladry and the Courtly Tradition: Literature of Revolt and Assimilation. Gwendolyn A. Morgan. Republic of Signs: Liberal Theory and American Popular Culture. Anne Norton. High Performance: The Culture and Technology of Drag Racing 1950‐1990. Robert C. Post. Science, Culture and Popular Belief in Renaissance Europe. Stephen Pumfrey, Paolo L. Rossi & Maurice Slawinski, editors. Contemporary Hollywood's Negative Hispanic Image: An Interpretive Filmography, 1956‐1993. Alfred Charles Richard, Jr.Peter Freese and Michael Porsche, editors. Popular culture in the United States.

Modern Narrative Techniques: Jarry, the Pre-Text

Alfred Jarry's influence on successive generations of writers is both explicit, in the sense of direct recognition by his heirs, and implicit, in the sense of creating a climate propitious for textual experimentation and for changes in conceptual foundations. Much critical attention has been devoted to Jarry's role in avant-garde theater, and specifically to his fathering of the Theater of the Absurd.I Ubu's legacy traces its iconoclastic path through Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, to the Theater of the Absurd, which, generally speaking, is metaphysical, irrational, provocative, and given to black humor.2 The Dadaists perceived a kindred spirit in Jarry owing to his treatment of language, his desire to shock, and his grotesque allegories of social conditioning. They continued his demystification of morality, patriotism, religion, and logical thought. The Futurists sympathized with Jarry's passion for machines and scientific discoveries. For the Surrealists, he was an unknowing champion of the unconscious. Artaud founded the Thidtre AlfredJarry in honor of a man whose aesthetic programme explored the agony and dark laughter elicited by the encounter with one's doubles. Finally, the Theater of the Absurd developed the brand of tragi-comedy characteristic ofJarry's plays: man, forced to confront his schizoid world, his fears and alienation, his uncertain identity, and his revolting corporeality, finds release in uneasy laughter. The decor was nonmimetic, synecdochical, suggestive. But ifJarry's role in the theater and his intuition of Freudian psychology have been amply attended to,3 no recognition has been granted his remarkable prescience in the writing of prose fiction.4 Narrotology has ignored Jarry in all probability because, of those few readers who know him to be a novelist, it seems most have not read the novels, content to write him off as an eccentric playwright. A major portion of his work has been occultated by biographical anecdotes and the scandal of Ubu Roi. This has not been helped by the crafty ways of the Collkge de Pataphysique, which, while publishing invaluable mate-

Dark Laughter and Light Comedy: Humor and the American Character

James C. Austin. American Humor in France. Two Centuries of French Criticism of the Comic Spirit in American Literature. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1978. 177 pp. Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill. America's Humor. From Poor Richard to Doonesbury. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. 559 pp. Ronald Wallace. The Last Laugh: Form and Affirmation in the Contemporary American Comic Novel. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979. 159 pp. In the Tom Stoppard play Night and Day, two English colonials in an African country are briefing a newly arrived journalist. The black strong man who runs the country as president—a mixture of Idi Amin and George Washington — is expected to arrive at their house at any moment, and the journalist is warned of his unpredictable temper in something like the following words: "Don't worry, unless he laughs. If he laughs, look out!" Buried in the general discussion, the comment is apt soon to be forgotten by the audience. A few minutes later the dictator arrives, and slouches amiably in a deck chair as the group engages in conversation. Then, a casual comment by the journalist evokes a booming laugh; a second later, the massive fist of the black ruler lashes out and strikes the journalist to the floor.

Anderson, Hemingway, and Faulkner's The Wild Palms

William Faulkner's The Wild Palms (1939) contains many allusions to the lives and writings of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. The parallels to A Farewell to Arms (1929), often noted by critics, are more numerous and more meaningful than hitherto shown. They work in context with references to Anderson's Dark Laughter (1925) and with sketches of Anderson and Hemingway and a full portrait of Anderson's second wife, Tennessee Mitchell, who seems to be the model for Faulkner's heroine, Charlotte Rittenmeyer. The background of these allusions is the mid-twenties, when Hemingway and Faulkner both benefited from Anderson's encouragement and aid but lost his friendship, possibly through related incidents. One explanation for the mingling of the Anderson-Hemingway material in The Wild Palms is that it represents a gesture of gratitude and artistic agreement from Faulkner to Anderson set against Hemingway's behavior to the older writer and triggered, in part, by a visit Anderson paid to Faulkner in 1937 when the Mississippian was injured in New York. The allusions also make plain Faulkner's philosophical and artistic differences with Hemingway, provide insight into his view of a major competitor, and show the intricate workings of Faulkner's art.