The preceding chapters of this book illustrate two major points: that the subjects and strategies of the satiric grotesque belong to an age-old tradition, and that such satiric grotesquerie is wonderfully on the upswing, richly creative and alive in the twentieth century. Of course, as always, there was bound to be a chorus of naysayers and complainers, critics who argue that our literature is too negative, repellent, ugly, and depressing. But notwithstanding all this noisome foofaraw, we can point rather contentedly to a literature of the grotesque that has in our era been dynamic and inventive.
15
“There is no health anywhere,” Anthony Burgess recently intoned, musing upon current American fiction. He finds characters reduced to “thinghood,” protagonists without “the values out of which the novel-form was begotten.” For Burgess, such nonnovels merely present “porn, corruption, death”; he finally laments that “we need humanity [even] to observe the death of humanity.” These observations are moot: any reader knows about the decline of SAT scores, the decline of interest in humanities and foreign languages, or even the decline of capacity to overcome substandard English. One professor has even grandly labeled all reading and writing “elitist,” and he predicts that the electronics communications revolution will liberate the next generation from literacy entirely.1 Ours is the century of total war: it has witnessed, in Henry Adams’s words, the triumph of the dynamo over the Virgin; it has beheld the flourishing of the dystopia that predicates not merely Toffler’s future shock but future wretchedness; and much of its science fiction and black humor has utilized the theme of entropy and the unwinding of the universe.
Nearer home, a host of cultural observers detect “the death of tragedy,” “the death of satire,” “the death of the past,” and the “fall of American Humor.”2 John Barth doubtless sums up these gloomy anticipations when he speaks of “the literature of exhaustion.”3 Moreover, a rising froglike chorus of analysts lament almost all of literature, with its indecency, “sickness,” and “deviations.”4 The latest critic caught up in this most furious, slavering dither is John Gardner who finds that something dreadful “has gone wrong in recent years with the various arts.” For him, contemporary art is “bad,” “mediocre,” “dull,” “heretical,” and “wrong,” for it is the work of “nihilists, cynics, and merdistes,” “supports death and slavery,” and “must be driven out.”5
Our militant sense of modern “horrors,” if permitted to get out of hand, approaches hysteria—and the absurd. For assuredly, some of our plaintive contemporary observers seem quavering, stentorian, and unstrung. We have traveled a flight-shot beyond mere pessimism, the Spenglerian foreboding of a Decline of the West, to a romantic espousal of anticipated universal holocaust. We have been impelled beyond the two cultures, the tripartite high-, mid-, and mass-cult, and the schizophrenic divided self into fragmentation, shrapnel, and shards. From the point of view of an Othello, “Chaos is come again.”
But we must remember that this doomsaying is an attitude, a posture, a single (and therefore constricting) point of view. All civilizations have adopted at various times the dark perspective. The hero of the Gilgamesh epic, no less than Euripides, Tacitus, the Beowulf author, Breughel, or the saturnine and atrabilious melancholiacs of the late Renaissance, has perceived quite clearly the panic and perplexities of human existence as well as we have. Innumerable societies have embraced a reading of history as decline, history as march of the barbarians, over the centuries, both before and after Hesiod and Lucretius.6 And furthermore, the idealized pastoral world has always been juxtaposed with the supposedly corrupt city; indeed, each generation conceives of an ideal that existed in the recent past.7 Therefore it is interesting to note that man has always placed nirvana in the past or the future, never in a present that is so rigorously actualized and in transit.
Horace’s “laudator temporis acti se puero” in the Ars Poetica, the aged grumbler who praises the world of his boyhood, is a commonplace figure. One eternally laments the passing of his own pristine springtime, and of course the elderly in Joyce’s “The Dead” rue the passing of earlier operatic stars and are convinced that we shall never hear their likes again. “Mais où son les neiges d’antan?” Nostalgically, man ever grasps for the flown and benighted past that nevermore can return.
In such a broad sense, no time in history is “happy” and “affirmative”; such terms are part of the jargon of language arts programs, political Hegelians, HEW, and the Madison Avenue contrivers of slogans for social and moral uplift—so many spiritual athletic supporters and ethical brassieres. But the fact remains that most of man’s history is not endearing, most of his comedy not painlessly funny, most of his tragedy hardly cathartic, pedagogically instructive, or exalting.
Tragedy, for its part, invites us to find in it some pedagogic purpose, but the invitation cannot really be thought to be made in good faith. We cannot convince ourselves that the two Oedipus tragedies teach us anything, or show the hero as learning anything. . . . We [might] find ourselves in the unhappy situation [of arguing] . . . that Lear and Gloucester suffered to good purpose because their pain “educated” them before they died. When . . . a great tragedy is made to yield such conclusions as that fate is inscrutable and that it is a wise child who knows his own father, or . . . that the universe is uncomfortable and its governance morally incomprehensible, we decide that tragedy has indeed nothing to do with the practical conduct of life except as it transcends and negates it, that it celebrates a mystery debarred to reason, prudence, and morality.8
Ultimately, are not the incessantly lucid pictures of inscrutability, of apocalypse, of decline and fall themselves mere topoi, recurrent and significant conventions of Western literature and the humanities? Must satire, stoicism, and professional historical projections of cycles and of gloom require special apologetics or justification at so late a date? Seen from a particular point of view, the “divided self” is precisely what is called for in the complex, the urbane, and the ironic consciousness that tolerates (and even requires) a Timon, a Socrates, an Aristophanes, and a Sophocles at the forefront of its population.
MURPHY’S LAW: If anything can go wrong, it will.
Corollary 5. Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.9
The Murphy pronouncements merely happen to be the latest comic and mock scientific codifications, like Parkinson’s Laws, the Chilholm Effect, and the Peter Principle, that continue to thrive in our society. Yet things cannot be all wrong when there is a Mark Twain, an H.L. Mencken, a W.C. Fields, a James Thurber, a Lenny Bruce, or a Woody Allen in our midst. The ideal of humanism, after all, is the bold-faced insistence upon the careful scrutiny of humanity in all its aspects and especially in all its multifarious (even contradictory and devious) forms.
“Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto”: Since we are human, nothing human should be alien to us.10 Such a concept remains true, even after we concede that today there are more humans upon the planet than ever before, even after we admit that a worldwide network of communications conveys to us human behavior with a speed and in a quantity never before conceived, and even after we confess that recently Darwin, Dostoevsky, Freud, Kafka, Einstein, Cassirer, Sartre, Stravinsky, and García Márquez have coerced us into peering into the heart of darkness of this selfsame mankind. Nowhere has there been such a viewing as in our black comedy of the grotesque. In sum, the picture we have been getting is sharper than ever before, delivered in technicolor, in 3-D, in stereo—and yet it is still not entirely dusk and melancholy.
The historian J.H. Plumb acknowledges that our present age appears baffled, seemingly meaningless, and unpleasant, yet he reminds us that there are more historians alive today than perhaps the sum total of all historians who have ever lived before. This plentitude applies equally well to scientists, artists, nurses, and metaphysicians. Today, he argues, we must admit that “ordinary” humans can secure “a richer life than their ancestors”: “There is more food in the world, more opportunity of advancement, greater areas of liberty in ideas and in living than the world has ever known: art, music, literature can be enjoyed by tens of millions, not tens of thousands. This has been achieved . . . by the application of human ingenuity [and] . . . rationalism.”11
If an honest and inclusive world view were projected upon an enormous screen, we would expect that a considerable representation of wretchedness would be included in that portrayal. And so it should, if we were to pay the least homage to honesty and reality. The same holds true in the arts. Whitman was grandly inclusive in his verse: “I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.” William Carlos Williams provides a suitable exposition of this Whitman text, explaining the gesture that seeks to incorporate wickedness: “The commonplace, the tawdry, the sordid all have their poetic uses if the imagination can lighten them.”12 Yet the imagination can lighten only that which it has been able to confront and depict. The modern era, in its prevalently wry and grotesque manner, has deliberately enabled its imagination to play upon the wicked and the paltry, the sordid and the mundane, in a concerted and even painful quest for comprehension and enlightenment.
A classic instance of such a quest in the modern novel is Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (El Beso de la Mujer Arana 1976). On the surface, Puig’s novel seems totally natural: two prisoners slowly come to admire and appreciate one another through acts of mutual aid and loving kindness. They both seem to grow, learning to renounce exploitation of others. Perhaps it is the rest of society that is unkind. One prisoner relates a number of standard cinema story lines: one about a woman who helplessly and repeatedly turns into a panther, another about a witch doctor’s voodoo that converts numerous peons into zombies. Even when films are not overtly grotesque, however, they nonetheless distort and distend reality: a Nazi film glorifies the SS, turning innocent Jews into archfiends; another film depicts frustrated lovers who transform themselves, one into a prostitute, the other into a derelict, dying of alcoholism. Even so, the Nazi film purports to be a patriotic spy thriller, and the other postures as a sentimental musical romance.
Doubtless society, weaned upon such “entertainments,” is itself infected and unsound. Supposedly, the two prisoners are poised on the outer fringes of society, the one a violent political revolutionary, the other a perverse homosexual and seducer of minors. Nor is prison an island or haven from the cruel and obfuscating outside world. For the one prisoner wishes to “exploit” the other as a possible “contact” with his guerilla cadre in Buenos Aires, and the other is a “spider woman,” seeking to entangle the revolutionary in a shabby homosexual amour. Meanwhile, prison officials and espionage agents attempt throughout the novel to manipulate both prisoners for arcane reasons of state.
Is anyone in such a society free from machination and false representation? No one is. And yet, curiously, the two prisoners (trebly incarcerated in a distorting and repressive society) do change and pulsate and grow, finding moments of distress, sorrow, happiness—even of laughter and release—in the midst of their bondage. Against all probability, they manage (in Dylan Thomas’s phrase) to “sing in their chains like the sea.”13 Nevertheless, both men, Valentin and Molina, sustain at a number of levels deliberate intentions to use and abuse other human beings; their motives, in short, are tainted. Is there no redress? Or is man eternally condemned to be mixed—a fusion of pathetic apportionments of animal, vegetable, and human? Alas, such a decoction defines, and with profundity, the essence of the grotesque. “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties; in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.”14
Manuel Puig’s (and William Shakespeare’s) portrayal of the human condition is anything but affable, romantic, or serene. Yet, despite the complaints and objections of numerous high-flown moralist and desperate cynics, our arts and sciences are hardly on the verge of dying out. Indeed, if this book has attempted anything at all, it has sought to illustrate the vigor of satiric humor, the amplitude of its horrific imagery, the challenges of its startling ideas, and the continuity it sustains within an age-old, ongoing tradition. In this atmosphere of copious creativity, it should be patently obvious that comedy, satire, history, the novel—nay, culture itself—have not yet perished from the earth, but are, rather, quick and various and cunning, and very much alive.