Chapter 1 notes that contemporary man as presented in modern literature is caught in a dilemma, facing the paralytic horror that some dread cataclysm awaits him together with the equally shattering fear that nothing whatsover will happen. Thus, he is captured, helpless and suspended, between inertia and catastrophe. The chapter examines the chief reasons for this impasse: decadent romanticism and excessive expectations about a grand individualist self, ideals of progress gone awry, and ruinous revolutions and world wars. The climate is particularly ripe for a satiric literature that laughs ruthlessly at the modern farce of man’s angst and tremblings, his lost hopes, posturings, and antiheroic ineptitudes.
Chapter 2 traces the origins of words like gothic and grotesque, illustrating their presence in much of previous world literature. Modern interest in the psyche, in man’s troublous inner life, renders the gloomy strategies of gothicism and grotesquerie more pertinent and apt. The tactics and themes of the grotesque are well suited to exaggerate the dark side of human nature, to shock the audience with scenes of the startling, the disturbing, the unnatural, and the absurd. Key exemplers of such modern artistry can be found in the work of Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, and Samuel Beckett. Such darkling artistry cannot help but alienate its audience and upset the bourgeoisie; indeed, it is thus that the traditional satiric artist, treating serious subjects, gains serious attention. Surely he wants it that way.
1
A pathetic image of “suspense” dramatizes the great trauma of modern literature: paranoid and “dangling man,” robbed of optimism, awaits some incalculable and ghastly catastrophe, yet he is equally fearful of failure even here, paralyzed by the dread that nothing will happen—alike benumbed by the anticipation that the world—or his own life—will end in a bang, or a whimper.1 This, of course, is the condition of any number of characters in the early poetry of Eliot and Auden, in Proust, Mansfield, Kafka, Mann’s Buddenbrooks, Céline, O’Neill, Golding, Burgess, Beckett, and Pinter, and in Karl Kraus’s monolithic epic drama, The Last Days of Mankind (1918–19). Events appalling enough regularly beset modern man in his fictions, the pages filling in plenty with corpses, slaughter, and bones. But even in less appalling fictions the characters are bemused and atremble about the imminence and the potential of disaster. How did twentieth-century man wind up in such a cul-de-sac, in such traumatic impasse and dither?
For one thing, the last four centuries have witnessed the rise of the bourgeoisie, the triumph of quotidian man, what Ortega y Gasset described as the horde of the masses—man freed of class, caste, roots, and standards—Mencken’s Boobocracy. In addition, man in the Age of Reason facilitated the “death of God”—and these two phenomena together conspired to rob modern man of sanctity and heroes, even of heroism itself. The subsequent media explosion fostered what Marshall McLuhan has called the “global village,” depriving modern man of new voyages and new frontiers.
The Renaissance and particularly the Enlightenment promised Western man an era of rationalism, the irrevocable march of science and technology. In short, it bequeathed to succeeding generations the myth of indelible growth, the idea of progress.2 Surely, a flock of optimists promised, we would soon attain nirvana, wherein everything would be found out. Swift’s modern in A Tale of a Tub, a half-baked apologist for projects and science, boasted that “every Branch of Knowledge has received such wonderful Acquirements since [Homer’s] Age, especially within these last three Years”; hence, it may be “reckoned, that there is not at this present, a sufficient Quantity of new Matter left in Nature, to furnish and adorn any one particular Subject to the Extent of a Volume.”3 Paradoxically, Swift’s fool simultaneously prophesies that all will be discovered—or else used up! But the appropriate stance was scientific, hopeful, idealizing: in an imminent earthly paradise, man trusted that he would no longer “see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). Two hundred years later, Chekhov’s battered and pathetic trio of sisters and their friends still melodramatically cling to a wistful yearning for the advent of such a brave new world: “Oh, my God! Time will pass, and we shall be gone forever, we’ll be forgotten, our faces will be forgotten, our voices, and how many there were of us, but our sufferings will turn into joy for those who live after us, happiness and peace will come to this earth.”4
Romanticism in its turn, of course, initiated a great tide (and even the habit) of rebellion and revolution. The romantics boldly disparaged classicism, tradition, and even Enlightenment rationalism, but they still retained an ardent faith in progress. Romanticism’s idealization of a “performing self,” of a Cartesian solipsistic investigator, of a tormented but swashbuckling Byronic actor, has led us to worship the “cult of the ego”—to seek to cultivate a magnificent and dynamic self that will fulfill all our hopes for a heroism that was lost in the communal and mythic past.5 We have turned almost desperately to Emersonian “self-reliance,” though we harbor increasing misgivings that that self can triumph or even survive.
It is significant to note that the imagery of self-expression and self-fulfillment early in the nineteenth century turned extremist and, in a century of political wars and upheavals, militant. The term avant-garde, which became the watchword for bohemian leadership, fashion, and innovation in the arts, is borrowed from army lingo and retains implications of aggression, advance, dangerous missions of reconnaissance.6 Such imagery continues into the present century. Note D.H. Lawrence’s aspiration:
I wish we were all like kindled bonfires on the edge of space, marking out the advance-posts. What is the aim of self-preservation, but to carry us right out to the firing-line; there, what is is in contact with what is not. If many lives be lost by the way, it cannot be helped, nor if much suffering be entailed. I do not go out to war in the intention of avoiding all danger or discomfort: I go to fight for myself. Every step I move forward into being brings a newer, juster proportion into the world, gives me less need of storehouse and barn, allows me to leave all, and to take what I want by the way, sure that it will always be there; allows me in the end to fly the flag of myself, at the extreme tip of life.7
In some sense, this romantic assertion is ludicrous: the imagery of warfare and slaughter is unusual in this passage; why should Lawrence’s “advancing” self-seeking entail the death of many others? Nor is Lawrence’s figure even sensible, for he is a reconnaissance man who longs to outrun his own army and even its supplies. He may be “sure” that without supplies he can yet magically “take what [he] want[s] by the way”—but we must infer from the figure that it is far more plausible that he will outrun the war entirely and certainly cease to serve as part of any societal or military team. And worse, if in his isolation he is not captured by the enemy, we can at least anticipate that, without camp food and stores, he can well expect starvation.
Yet the metaphor is retained in the tradition. Guillaume Apollinaire similarly urges, “Pity us who battle ever at the frontiers of infinity and the future,” although, as we have noted, frontiers have been increasingly straitened and shut down.8 But the martial spirit of such egoism could become still more turbulent and severe. In boasting about the contemporary poet’s rejection of the past and concern for himself, his own nation, and the immediate future, Filippo Marinetti in the First Futurist Manifesto (February 20, 1909) goes far indeed:
We shall sing the love of danger, the habit . . . of boldness.
The essential elements of our poetry shall be courage, daring and rebellion. . . . we . . . extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double quick-step, the sommersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff. . . .
strife. No masterpiece without aggressiveness. . . . We stand upon the extreme promontory of the centuries! . . . We wish to glorify War—the only health giver of the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful ideas that kill, the contempt for women.
We wish to destroy the museums, the libraries, to fight against moralism, feminism, and all opportunist and utilitarian meannesses.9
The fanatic hysteria in the tone, so soon to be perfected by Stalinists and Nazis alike, boded ill for the future such extremists vaunted. Such a romantic self is, in its solipsism, its almost inchoate irrationality, and its rash celebration of power and immediacy, close to self-destruction, a self-destruction archetypally expressed by Jean Anouilh’s Antigone: “You [she exclaims to Creon] with your promise of a humdrum happiness—provided a person doesn’t ask too much of life. I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now! I want it total, complete: otherwise I reject it! If life must be a thing of fear and lying and compromise; if life cannot be free, gallant, incorruptible—then . . . I choose death!”10 Indeed this quest for an ideal self has led to self-destruction, to so-called identity crises, and to what Wylie Sypher has called “the Loss of self”—the discovery that no singular fulsome identity exists beneath the surface, merely schizophrenic doubles, multiples, and fragments.11 With an access of hubris and with the demolition of deities, contemporary man confronts an upsurge of guilt and anxiety. The Freudian hypothesis concerning the dominance of unconscious desires and a repressive id has been too awfully realized in events; our century has been forced to confront undercurrents and even open outbursts of irrationality. Modern physics overthrew laws, only to stress the inaccessibility of knowledge, celebrating instead indeterminacy, probability, randomness, and chance. The great spurt of leaping hearts and elevated hopes initiated by romanticism had by the middle of the nineteenth century turned to dejection and disillusionment. The literary prognosis thereafter increasingly heralded decline, degeneracy, entropy, and decay.12
Finally, the experience of the brutish and unprecedented savagery of world wars and further revolutions in this century climaxed in the demise of the idea of progress itself.13 Instead of hopefulness and anticipation, we now sluggishly observe, in George Santayana’s sarcastic words, “the power of idealization steadily [in] decline”; we woodenly scrutinize “the long comedy of modern social revolutions, so illusory in their aims and so productive in their aimlessness.”14
When wars and rebellions and new manifestos and “movements” incessantly recur—without significant results—the effect is numbing. As Marx once observed: “The first time . . . tragedy, the second . . . farce.”15 Hence, our response to this “long comedy” of recent history has been the hoarse cacophonous laughter of despair, expressed in the recurrent tides of our recent literary movements: decadent symbolism, expressionism, dada, surrealism, the theater of the absurd, the novels of black humor, and the flourishing genre of the dystopia. Knowing recent history and the aspirations of a few brief preceding generations, modern man tends merely to grin with spectral grimness and succumb to disappointment, trivialization, and ennui. He senses, exhaustedly, impotently, in Prufrock’s words, that
I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall.16
Needless to say, therefore, in the twentieth century man’s avant-garde response to this “long comedy” is a laughter that is militant, extremist, pitiable, and terrible.
In the 1920s Thomas Mann remarked this tendency toward the rash, the unnatural, and the extreme: “I feel that, broadly and essentially, the striking feature of modern art is that it has ceased to recognize the categories of tragic and comic, or the dramatic classifications, tragedy and comedy. It sees life as tragicomedy, with the result that the grotesque is its most genuine style.”17 And consider Eugène Ionesco’s program for the theater: “magnifying . . . effects. . . . No drawing room comedies, but farce, the extreme exaggeration of parody. . . . No dramatic comedies either. But back to the unendurable. Everything raised to paroxysm. . . . A theatre of violence: violently comic, violently dramatic.”18 The masterworks of this century have responded nicely, utilizing just such hyena-forms of extremity; the most powerful works develop increasingly bizarre and “forbidden” topics of exorbitancy, violence, and grotesquerie: decadence and homosexuality, child abuse, insanity, suicide, lobotomy, bestiality, incest, cannibalism, and ultimately the apocalyptic, featuring scenarios of the end of the world.19 These are the immoderate subjects treated by Proust, Mann, Pirandello, Gide, Zamyatin, Čapek, Kafka, Faulkner, Céline, Nabokov, Heller, Ellison, Beckett, Vonnegut, Pinter, García Márquez, Grass, and Pynchon.
Like the romantics, we still call for revolution, imagination, extremity, but unlike them our manner is no longer exalted, earnest, serious, holy; instead, we provoke the paroxysm of hopeless laughter and desperate, unnatural comedy. Our moderns ask, as George Steiner remarks, “inherently destructive questions”: “It may be, in fact, that the aspect of demolition, the apocalyptic strain, gently tempt us. We are fascinated by ‘last things,’ by the end of cultures, of ideologies, of art forms, of modes of sensibility. We are, certainly since Nietzsche and Spengler, ‘terminalists.’ Our view of history, says Levi-Strauss in a deep pun, is not an anthropology but an ‘entropology.’ ”20 It is indeed impressive when we consider the vast number of modern masterpieces that employ features of the surrealistic-grotesque and travel upon a journey that runs downhill.
It will prove useful here to mention four seminal works that usher in the century and exemplify modern themes: Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” (1864), Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (1899), James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903), and Mann’s “Death in Venice” (1912). All these short masterpieces are built upon the premise of “great expectations” that are foiled, disappointed, demolished. All supply to some extent an unnatural setting and an atmosphere of anticipation and waiting, and all of them are “dark comedies.”21 Each introduces a distorted protagonist—Dostoevsky’s narrator, Mr. Kurtz, John Marcher, and Gustave von Aschenbach—who is in essence a “humour character,” crippled and incapacitated by personality and locale. James’s John Marcher is particularly prototypical and unsoldierly, for he literally “marches” to no place at all. All these works deploy key words that suggest extremities—the underworld, darkness, beastliness, and death—symbolizing the debilitating nature of external environment as well as of man’s inner life. They handsomely set the stage, the pattern, and the mood for the ensuing century’s violent and dread-ridden comedies of manners.
In a sense, such themes of antiheroism and destruction can be seen from two different perspectives. On the one hand, betraying comedy’s traditional tendency to sustain social standards and to foster the reintegration of characters into society, modern grotesqueries dramatize the corruption of entire communities. Archetypal works of this kind include Mark Twain’s “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1900) and Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit (1956): in both, dollar bills and rampant greed insidiously “tempt” an entire society until if “falls.” The populace is induced to renounce amity and humanitas, degenerating as individuals into isolated particles; all become petty, lying, cheating, and even committing ritual murder. Writers in our century frequently explore such a theme of inane and corrupt society. It flourishes in most science fiction, in the great quantity of writings categorized as dystopias. Perhaps Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) represents the apex of such explorations.
On the other hand, individualism and the noble protagonist are equally perverted and destroyed. As extreme versions of the Don Quixote and Candide motif, we should consider John Crowe Ransom’s poem “Captain Carpenter” (1924) and Nathanael West’s novel A Cool Million (1934). In both, the naive central character sets out upon a romantic quest to attain fortune and maturation but is instead savagely and systematically “dismantled,” losing limb after limb until the antihero’s very “heart” is penetrated or torn from his torso and he is blatantly extirpated. These modern versions of satiric decline and fall offer no opportunity for growth, recantation, or the “cultivation of one’s garden”; rather, characters are reduced to mutilated corpses. Again, the motif of the dismembered antihero can be traced through a great many instances of wounded heroes, castrati, and lobotomized vegetables who appear in our literature throughout the century and who are perhaps most luridly depicted in the fictions and dramas of Samuel Beckett.
Both extremes—society’s growing increasingly alien, fatuous, smug, and corrupt, as well as the individual protagonist’s being progressively stripped bare of heroic characteristics—are often portrayed together. The masterpieces doubtless are James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities (1930–43). An exemplary instance in miniature can be encountered in a passage by Flannery O’Connor, which might be designated “Mrs. Shortley and the Peacock”: “[Mrs. Shortley] stood a while longer, reflecting, her unseeing eyes directly in front of the peacock’s tail. He had jumped into the tree and his tail hung in front of her, full of fierce planets with eyes that were each ringed in green and set against a sun that was gold in one second’s light and salmon-colored in the next. She might have been looking at a map of the universe but she didn’t notice it any more than she did the spots of sky that cracked the dull green of the tree.”22
One can hardly assert that bird and woman have met at all. On the one hand, Mrs. Shortley does not even see what is in front of her face. She cannot respond to beauty, to terror, or to meaning. There is, in fact, something almost dreadful about her unhealthy and permanent indifference, insensitivity, and isolation. On the other hand, when it is viewed and appreciated, the peacock’s tail seems ambivalent and unnerving. It might well be taken as emblematic of nature, of the creation, of beauty. But the feathered scene transcends the beautiful and turns ominous: for pictured in the bird’s fanning tail are a shimmering, changeable sun and “fierce planets” with lurid eyeballs. We confront a living “map of the universe,” and we begin to recognize the eerie sensations produced by the unnatural, the grotesque. As if to punctuate the scene with approval, the “spots of sky” flash and ominously “crack” against the nearby tree. Mrs. Shortley sees nothing, whereas we have apparently seen too much. The natural unaccountably metamorphoses into the unnatural and fractures our complacency.
Doubtless the reader might well commence to wonder how people for more than a century could continue to smile upon all these crass, demeaning and disturbing topics. One might well object that our dire situation is no laughing matter. So it would seem. We could reply by punning, saying that we seek to laugh ourselves into stitches or, further, to laugh ourselves to death. But moderns could perhaps best respond by quoting Byron:
And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
‘Tis that I may not weep; . . .
’Tis that our nature cannot always bring
Itself to apathy.23
We are not yet reduced to apathy, and therefore we still react to violence violently. Hence we choose to confront our gods and devils with a ritualized and cathartic blast and guffaw as rejoinder and counter-statement. One thinks of Robin’s irrepressible burst of laughter at the moment of catastrophe in Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” A deliberately articulated human response is, after all, on this side of life and outside the confines of madness. We could do much worse. For in spite of all the sick and deadly substance of contemporary art, it is still within the precincts of sanity that we persist in making our stand. In the words of Edgar in King Lear:
To be worst,
The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,
Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear:
The lamentable change is from the best;
The worst returns to laughter.24