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May 21, 2007
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Did you laugh today?
Julian Gough asks why the novel has lost its grip on good humor and comes up with some interesting hypotheses. Noting that the novel has become a dour, oh-so-self-consciously-deep production, he gives credit for humor where credit is due: to Joseph Heller, Evelyn Waugh, Kurt Vonnegut, Flann O'Brien, John Kennedy Toole. And he notes the role of the university in helping excise the novel's funny bone (a symptom, he notes, of a larger creative paralysis inflicted on the genre by its institutional appropriators):
...professionalisation will make poor writers adequate. And will make potentially great writers adequate. Great novelists write for their peers. Poor novelists write for their teachers. If you must please the older generation to pass (a student writing for an older teacher, a teacher writing to secure tenure), you end up with cautious, old-fashioned novels. Worse, the system turns peers into teachers. Destroyed as writers, many are immediately re-employed, teaching creative writing. This is a Ponzi scheme.During their second year, students are offered teaching appointments to teach introductory undergraduate creative writing workshops (ENL 5F or ENL 5P) in their genre or are hired as literature TAs or GSRs. (From the website of the English department at the University of California, Davis)
The damage this is causing to novel, writer and audience is particularly advanced in America. The last 30 years have seen the effects of turning novel writing into an academic profession with a career path. As they became professional, writers began to write about writers. As they became academicised, writers began to write about writing.
And the language of the American literary novel began to drift away from anything used by human beings anywhere on earth. Thirty years of the feedback loop have led to a kind of generic American literary prose, instantly recognisable, but not as instantly comprehensible. Professions generate private languages designed to keep others out. This is irritating when done by architects. But it is a catastrophe for novelists, and the novel.
Lastly, a series of thesis units, which is your writing time guided by your thesis committee members, will fulfil the required 36 units. (From the website of the English department at the University of California, Davis)
Much of their fiction contains not so much tragedy as mere anxiety. Pushed to look for tragedy in lives that contain none, to generate suffering in order to be proper writers, they force themselves to frown rather than smile; and their work fills with a self-indulgent anxiety that could perhaps best be called "wangst."
He goes on to offer rules of thumb for aspiring novelists, among them "steal from The Simpsons, not Henry James." Literary allusion, Gough argues, can be inbred to the point of sterility. This is a complaint he has about John Banville.
I'm guessing people who care about novels in general and about contemporary fiction in particular will find this essay invigorating and maddening by turns. But it's well worth a read, even if you don't completely buy either its polemic or its history. If nothing else, it's a tacit reminder of the lasting value of great nineteenth-century comic writers such as Dickens, Twain, and Austen, who were all hilarious novelists, and whose wildly different senses of humor led each to reinvent the novel form. None, of course, ever came within spitting distance of a creative writing class, let alone a university degree.
Comments as ever are welcome, though I am especially interested in novels that have made readers laugh. My first memory of laughing out loud while reading centers on Patrick Dennis' Auntie Mame, which had me in stitches as a twelve-year-old. Others include Catch-22, Richard Russo's Straight Man, and Huckleberry Finn.
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For starters: the Flashman series (George MacDonald Fraser) is extremely funny, although there are also occasional passages of great seriousness.
I'm sure lots of others would nominate these, but the academic novels of David Lodge and Kingsley Amis leap to my mind. Jane Smiley never did much for me, though others love her. I'm sure there are unfunny academic novels, but the richness and absurdity of the material makes that tougher to achieve.
Ironic, isn't it? Universities make for funny novels; university training for unfunny novels.
Yet another evidence-free story of the novel's decline.
Pynchon's novels are hilarious, all the more in the 30 years since *Gravity's Rainbow*.
DeLillo's *White Noise* is laugh-out-loud funny.
Younger writers like Paul Beatty, Colson Whitehead, and Percival Everett keep the comic tradition alive in smart fiction.
Actually, it was postmodernism that returned us to humor. Just compare the short fiction of Donald Barthelme with any of his realist contemporaries: Cheever, Updike, Malamud.
Ishmael Reed remains the best satirist of the last 30 years.
Michael Malone's Handling Sin.
I laughed till I cried, literally.
Jane Smiley's _Moo_ makes me laugh, but I guess ya gotta be there, at ye olde landgrant, Dave, to appreciate the comic turns. _Straight Man_ is LOL too. I remember laughing til tears started at _Pale Fire_ many years ago.
For some reason, it's easier for me to remember the crying-out-loud first reads: Charlotte's Web, Black Beauty, and, if we cross over to television, episodes of "Lassie." Surely Anthony Trollope deserves a place in the list of great nineteenth-century comic writers; the depiction of the relationship between Bishop and Mrs Proudie in Barchester Towers is hilarious. For more contemporary writers, I'd nominate Barbara Pym as at least a smile-out-loud writer.
My favorite funny novels are:
"The Winshaw Legacy" by Jonathan Coe (a comic mystery novel that's also very sharp political satire and quite literary)
"A Dog of the South" by Charles Portis, which features eccentric characters and bizarre situations that owe as much to Henry Fielding as they do to John Kennedy Toole
"The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4" by Sue Townsend. I like all of the Adrian Mole books, but this is the first one and by far the most ridiculous. It's as funny at age 23 as it was at age 12
Sometimes I prefer a snicker to a laugh, and low-brow novels to high-brow ones. When in that mood I read Elmore Leonard. The opening scene of "Freaky Deaky" is cynical humor at its most hilarious. If that doesn't produce a nasty laugh, or a snicker-out-loud moment nothing will....unless it's other scenes in the same novel. Leonard said at a booksigning that his publisher tried to get him to change the opening scene because it would cause the reader to lose sympathy for the main character, his actions being so cynical and so hilarious. Leonard said he won the fight with his publisher but lost a similiar one with a film producer who had optioned the screen rights to the novel. When Leonard refused to allow the film producer to neuter the opening scene, the producer decided against producing the film and allowed the option to expire.
Also, James Buckley's novel "Thank You For Smoking"---the novel not the movie---has several passages that are both cynical and hilarious, as is the novel's premise.
"turning novel writing into an academic profession with a career path"...this is an example of a worrisome trend in our society: the assumption that the only way people learn how to do X--whatever X may be--is to take some kind of formal class or series of classes.
In the May issue of Flying magazine, a long-time pilot and FAA inspector expresses her concerns about trends in the aviation industry. "I worried about the young guys and gals who struggle through rigid curricula at (various training institutions). At 600 to 1000 hours, much of it in simulators, with almost no time truly 'alone' in an airplane and no sense of 'the fun of it,' they graduate to instructing and then into the right seat of a commuter." (commuter=commuter airliner) Her point is that you learn things flying the real midnight freight in real icing conditions that you just aren't going to learn in a classroom/simulator, no matter how good the program, and that there ay be real safety implications to the shift in emphasis from experience to training.
No one denies the value of education/training, but I do think that we are in danger of going overboard.
Dunno, David. Creative writing classes aren't simulated writing situations. They are simply socially sanctioned places where a young person can practice his or her craft. Your analogy would work for writers who study literature rather than writing. Then we could say that the student is not having real hands-on training. But, of course, the situations are quite different: we *hope* creative writing students study literature.
For me, the main problem with the creativewritingization of fiction (or poetry) is the intense mimicry it induces. Creative writing professor X teaches how to write poem Y, and X's students all write mini-Ys. Given the huge splits in the poetry world (just look at foetry or Silliman's Blog), this often means that creative writing students read, or are exposed to, only a limited subset of good writing models.
Writing has been a professional activity for a long time -- long before creative writing programs. What's the difference between novel writing as a career path to professorhood and novel writing as a woman's opportunity to support her family? Or Dicken's job? And is it worse than novel writing as the leisure pursuit of the leisure classes?
Some of our best fiction writers have been creative writing professors. Think of John Hawkes or Donald Barthelme or John Gardner. Some of our best novelists won't teach at all: think Pynchon. Some great writers teach, but they don't teach writing: the poet Bruce Andrews is a political scientist. Others don't teach and have a real day job: Ron Silliman is a market analyst.
The problem for me, then, is how most creative writing programs totally lack intellectual rigor and how they churn out inferior versions of their often not-so-interesting faculty.
True that creative writing courses aren't simulations as far as the writing itself goes..but they are environments in which one must do things to the satisfaction of the professor, who may be motivated by whatever is trendy in the field at the moment. (Of course, when you start writing on your own, you will also find that *publishers* are motivated by whatever is trendy at the moment, although in this case the trends will be those of the marketplace rather than academia)
I don't doubt that creative-writing programs can be valuable: certainly it should be useful to get feedback on one's work in a form more granular than an acceptance or a rejection slip! But I would hate to see "professionalization" go so far that such programs become the *only* route to becoming a writer and that publishers expect to see the appropriate certification attached to manuscripts!
I agree with some of David Foster's remarks, though, to be honest, I think the only lessons I learned from creative writing classes were deadlines--that is, it forced me to put my ideas on paper and produce something. The many mediocre students or even mediocre creative writing professors do little to help improve a manuscript. Close friends provide better feedback often (as long as you know they are being honest), and the real instructor on how to improve your creative writing is to read...a lot. The more ideas and styles that you expose yourself to, the more your writing may improve--at least that's what I've found. I suppose that creative writing programs are only useful to the pretentious who want to join the literati, or for those who want connections in order to get more crap published in The New Yorker. Higher education in the humanities has sadly become just as bad and nasty as Wall Street and MBA programs.
On the original question of novels that make us laugh, David Foster is quite right to mention Kingsley Amis, but no one has noted the comic mastery of his son, Martin Amis. Martin's novels have been making me laugh out loud for over ten years. Will Self has his moments, too. Robert McLiam Wilson also deserves attention.
Don't forget Martin Amis: a modern master of the comic novel. The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, Money, and London Fields all had me shaking with laughter.
Irish novelist Robert McLiam Wilson has some genuine funny moments in Eureka Street.
