The literature of the modern era immerses us again and again in disillusionment, anomie, alienation, and wretchedness. Matthew Arnold saw man in 1853 facing what the early Greeks had faced—loss of calm, cheerfulness, and disinterested objectivity. In their stead, “the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced; modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts, we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust.”1 Oswald Spengler anticipated something worse, predicting the decline of the west, and since Spengler’s day, man has been haunted by a nagging sense of absurdity and despair. Max Weber similarly predicted such a disenchantment in the West, and recently a typical commentator affirmed that “the writing of Tonnies, Marx, Whyte, Riesman, Kahler, Perkins, and others attest to the prevalence of that belief—that man has become materialized, automated, despiritualized, ‘disenchanted’—in the twentieth century.”2
And, to be truthful, the motifs of the satiric artistry early in this century—in the work of Strindberg, Mayakovsky, Proust, Mann, Joyce, Čapek, Sinclair Lewis, Orwell, Huxley, Waugh, Céline, and Nathanael West—have been dark indeed. The typical reified, denatured, dispirited inhabitant of our period is precisely characterized by Robert Musil’s designation: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Modern man, stripped of any distinguishing qualities, has arrived in the subbasement of life. Later writings merely continue to record this downward journey. In such a light, we should perceive the oeuvre of the angry young men, the absurdists of the theater, the novelists of black humor, the celebrants of pop art, and the theorists of deconstruction. Critics too tend to define the entire period in gloomy and tenebrous terms, speaking of the “revolt of the masses” and the “betrayal of the intellectuals,” noting the proliferation of the “anti-hero” and generating a host of the bleakest terms: “the power of blackness,” “the loss of self,” the “waiting for the end,” “nil,” “nightmare,” and “silence.”3 Even many of our lighter comedians have grown increasingly bleak and depressed toward the close of their careers; this has certainly been true of Dickens, Twain, Chaplin, Thurber, Waugh, and Lenny Bruce.
Furthermore, one will find precious little among recurrent literary subjects that one can designate beneficent or ameliorative. For instance, traditional utopian literature has turned “sour,” fostering the rise of a predominant genre, that of the antiutopia.4 In addition, literature’s concern with the scatological increases significantly in this century, plunging the reader into the urinal and the toilet; many artists of the lavatory—Joyce, Eliot, Golding, Grass, Marcel Duchamp, Southern, Barth, Updike, Claes Oldenburg, Beckett—appear eager to rush in where angels fear to tread. Similarly, modern writings startle readers by confronting them with the unsavory subject of cannibalism, as in works by Twain, Bierce, Waugh, Mailer, Burgess, Bellow, Hawkes, and Donleavy; such writers hint knowingly that man, for all his “humane” posturings and asseverations, secretly is prone (perhaps enthusiastically) to indulge quite savagely in consuming delectable human flesh.
In like manner, as if they utterly endorsed C.P. Snow’s concept of the isolated “two cultures” and indeed endorsed the triumph of science alone, numerous modern authors have discerned a grim species of humor in dramatizing the triumph of the machine over mankind. Such writers as E.M. Forster, Zamyatin, Elmer Rice, Čapek, Kafka, Barthelme, Pinter, Vonnegut, Lem, and Mailer generate fictions that portray automation taking over society, triumphing over feeble humanity. The mechanic embodies machismo, and the robot provides the reasonable solution, according to this revolutionary literature of the “revised new syllabus.” All these and other similar strategies in our literature diminish the human race, reducing it to manure, monkey-dom, savagery, or mechanism. What could be “darker” than this heart of darkness? Can anything be more despoiled after defoliation and depletion? Here is wretchedness par excellence!
Or so, at any rate, would many of our moralists and rhetoricians have it. They extol the “power of positive thinking”; they favor literatue that overtly accentuates the positive. Hence, the trends I have been tracing—consisting of literary explorations of tedium, disenchantment, scatology, machination, and blackness—strike them as monumental negations of hope, kindliness, and mirth. At the least, such interpreters of our century assess this body of literature as unfaithful to humanism. A typical example of such a dismayed observation is Jesse Bier’s study The Rise and Fall of American Humor (New York, 1968). After surveying the history of American laughter, Bier concludes that a monstrous falling-off has occurred; in the present century he detects a vast and terrible decline of native humor. The contemporary scene, he opines, is wretched, gloomy, decadent, almost barren. Yet who told Jesse Bier that the modern humorist’s imitation of a “dark” action in a creative work confirms its author’s “immoralism,” nihilism, or pathological illness? Bier’s premises would allow one in any era to consign half the writers of comedy (and all writers of satire) to Bedlam—or the flames.
Much is wrongheaded in this view. And most wrongheaded of all is Bier’s devotion to a prescriptive criticism: American humorists must not practice romantic comedy; American humorists must not be apostates or pessimists; American humorists must discover (and affirm) the power of positive funny-think. Long ago Henry James restated several traditional and seminal tenets for the critic of fiction: the artist must be permitted the “freedom to feel and say.” “We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donnée: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.”5 The point seems obvious, yet every generation finds its defense necessary. Ihab Hassan ventures even further, wishing to encourage the artist: “Praise, as we conceive it, is an inherent function of criticism. In an age of mendacity, kitsch art, and counterfeit leisure, the pursuit of genuine excellence is a dangerous and noble pursuit. We must raise the standards on ourselves, and raise the price. We should tolerate arrogance in our novelists and encourage the kind of artistic courage and ruthlessness society calls subversive. We must always demand more. And still we must praise, for without praise criticism manages, somehow, to deny the values it sets out to preserve.”6 One might have hoped that such concepts needed no repetition. But as long as pious and somber sermons pronouncing the death of comedy and tragedy, of satire, of poetry, and of Western culture continue to abound, then the tedious but necessary defense of art and artistry must again be made.
Yet I suspect that such vindications will always be necessary. Particularly in our present century, so long as a great body of comic and satiric literature continues to bask in so-called heresies of nightmare, negativism, and despair, moralizers will proceed to decry and denounce. For literature, according to their view, is a question of acquisition: debits and credits are assembled, representing the century’s balance sheet. This is the C.P.A.s’ assessment of art; their idea of “accountability” merely entails tabulating pluses and minuses, labeling and formulating “affirmatives,” dogmatic positives, that they insist be tangibly present in the world’s works of art. Yet art is a complex creative amalgam that can never be narrowly quantified, reduced to some lowest arithmetical common denominator.
For all such reasons, art associated with negation, art that shocks its readership or that gives us a regulated glimpse of Avernus or of chaos is not “negative art” at all. “I think it can be argued that there is in fact a literature of negative energy which is yet affirmative of life.”7 Indeed, every well-managed work of art is an inventive and fruitful construct; hence it renders an overt and positive contribution to society and to culture. Satirists, too, must be included in this circle of creators; they happen to be the creators of devastation. They dramatize (and explore) weakness, decadence, and denigration. “As no one writer is adequate to all the needs of literature or life, it may be equally appropriate to recommend the satirists as a complement and correction to the literature of philanthropy.”8 In any event, recent satiric literature has virtually supplied an overdose in this kind, providing us with daily examples of die Ausrottung der Besten. Perhaps we even secretly require this dosage of bad news. “There is no psychic fact more available to our modern comprehension than that there are human impulses which, in one degree or another, and sometimes in the very highest degree, repudiate pleasure and seek gratification in—to use Freud’s word—unpleasure.”9 Indeed, modern art has proved vigorous precisely where it has been unpleasant.
Nonetheless, such negative explorations do render the reader uncomfortable. But it cannot be helped, for our era follows a period of excessive optimism, and the reaction has set in with a vengeance. Our artists now overtly wish to explore and bring to light human paradoxes, the dark/darker/darkest side of mankind. As Dostoevsky’s Underground Man perceives, “Man loves to create. . . . But why . . . does he also passionately love destruction and chaos?” Indeed, as we are made to confront man’s tormented psyche and to unravel his poor defenses, if we grin at all, we do it crookedly. “He is fond of striving toward achievement, but not so very fond of the achievement itself, and this is, naturally, terribly funny. In short, man is constructed comically; there is evidently some joke in all of this.”10 It is a particularly painful joke, surely, and our century has sought with tragic monomania to seek it out. The resulting literature is almost certain to cause titter and terror, yet it has been a brilliantly rich literature—possibly because of its grotesque intensity and seriousness.
In this century, therefore, positive creation extols the dark thought, the humiliating eventuality, the culpable man. Irving and Harriet Deer rightly assess contemporary artistry as generating the “power of negative thinking.” They analyze our art’s devotion to “this quality of protest without apparent solution.” Again and again, the artist posits “the game of evil,” “fondles” obscurity, and “pollutes” our thought.11 The artist invests positive energy in manifest impiety, violence, madness, and death.
Paradoxically enough, such an art still stands at the center of humanistic concerns. In no way has this art abandoned the Terentian mandate, “Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.”12 For the proper study of mankind in any century, including the twentieth, remains the study of man. Whatever humankind is worth—including its buffoonery, absurdity, ambivalence, and vice—the human being in all forms and disguises must not become alien to us. We must direct our attention implacably at him.
And, contrary to what many presume, twentieth-century art is as concerned for and involved with mankind as any that can be found. This study will consider the how and the why of such involvement and concern. To facilitate clarity, the present volume is arranged in four parts. Part I explores the dark mood of so much of our literature, tracing the reasons for its fascination with gloom and snicker (chapter 1). Then, traditions of the gothic and the grotesque are analyzed; I argue that horror and grotesquerie are especially suited to the modern era, in which the self has been recognized as being irrational and unstable and a traumatic parade of dreadful current events has helped topple conventional idols of Renaissance humanitas and idealism. Very deliberately, much modern literature probes and portrays the swart and seamy side of the human condition (chapter 2).
Part II investigates authors’ methods for shocking readers and capturing their attention by utilizing disjunctive tactics that confound normative expectations and defy everyday artistic usage: debasing or destroying the conventional protagonist or hero (chapter 3); undercutting the stature of artistes or even the author (chapter 4); deploying unusually inept language and low diction (chapter 5); treating life and fictions about life as mere games (chapter 6); intruding in propria persona upon fictions and otherwise shattering the ordonnance of coherent works of art (chapter 7); jarring the reader with abrupt, ineffectual, or puzzling endings to stories (chapter 8); and often indeed devising tales in which scenes, sections, and experiences repeat themselves and characters, rather than advancing to some new stage of knowledge or fortune, plod aimlessly upon a treadmill, like Sisyphus, getting nowhere at all (chapter 9).
Whereas Part II explores grotesque satire’s abuse of normative artistic conventions and forms, Part III surveys a number of such satire’s unsavory subjects. It is to be expected that this literature gambols in subject areas normally considered off-limits to decorous works of art. Hence, we encounter displeasing, taboo, and even dreadful topics here: suicide, incest, coprophilia, insanity, child abuse, and so on. Specifically distasteful topics are canvassed, including boredom (chapter 10); excrement (chapter 11); cannibalism (chapter 12); machine-tooled totalitarian antiutopias (chapter 13); and even the entropic death of the universe (chapter 14).
Despite the appalling disagreeableness of our art and the ugliness of our belles lettres, Part IV (the conclusion) stresses that we need not respond with groans, with pious censure, or with total revulsion to our era’s satiric art. For this disquieting literature has proven vigorous, investigative, oftentimes profound, and astonishingly imaginative and fecund. We should hardly be thinking of giving up, when our literary team is so evidently bent on winning.