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Comic Aesthetics and the Effect of Realism in the Novel
A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of
The Department of English
Villanova University
In Partial Fulfillment
Of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
in
English
by
Michael Thomas Nace
April, 2008
Under the Direction of
Dr. Jean Lutes
UMI Number: 1450348
14503482008
UMI MicroformCopyright
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Table of Contents
ABSTRACT...........................................................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 – DEFINITIONS OF COMIC TERMINOLOGY IN NOVELS..........................................2
DEFINITIONS OF COMIC TERMINOLOGY IN NOVELS.........................................................................................6 CHAPTER 2 -- THE COMIC SPECTACLE ............................................................................................... 14
TORTILLA FLAT............................................................................................................................................... 18 DECLINE AND FALL......................................................................................................................................... 31
CHAPTER 3 -- THE COMIC INTERIOR IN NOVELISTIC HEROES................................................ 46 ULYSSES .......................................................................................................................................................... 54
WORKS CITED ................................................................................................................................................ 82 WORKS CONSULTED ................................................................................................................................... 84
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Abstract
The sensation of realism experienced in the reading of novels remains a peculiar
and mysterious problem of the scholarly reader. While a multitude of hypotheses exist for
understanding this realist mechanism found in the novel, I believe that a careful
consideration of the novel’s relationship to comedy and comic aesthetics offers a
fascinating schematic of how the reader is so consistently drawn into that state of
mystical connection with the text known as verisimilitude. By focusing on three novels
written in the first third of the 20th century, Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat (1935), Waugh’s
Decline and Fall (1928), and Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), I will examine the effect of the
“comic spectacle” so germane to the first two texts, and a more elusive “comic interior”
exemplified by the particularities of Joycean humor. My analysis will rely on a collection
of philosophical thought from the likes of Bergson, Freud, Bahktin, Eco, and Aristotle
which will help to illustrate how the novel performs comically when the reader witnesses
expectations defied and morals profaned, both of which give rise to realism and a sense
of intimacy with the text.
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Chapter 1 – Definitions of Comic Terminology in Novels
Introduction
The sensation of realism experienced in the reading of novels remains a peculiar
and mysterious problem for the scholarly reader. Indeed, it is a palpable sphere of
intimacy realized though the effect of realism that has attracted readers since the rise of
the popular English novel. A careful consideration of the novel’s relationship to comedy
and comic aesthetics offers a fascinating schematic of how the reader is so consistently
drawn into that state of connection with the text known as verisimilitude. Toward this
end, some students of literature claim that humor as it is recognized today is a modern
phenomenon and not the same species as what is experienced in ancient comedy. As
Octavio Paz states: “There is no humor in Homer or Virgil; Aristoso seems to foreshadow
it, but not until Cervantes does humor take shape . . . Humor is the great invention of the
modern spirit.” Similarly, Milan Kundera boldly asserts in Testaments Betrayed: “A
fundamental idea: humor is not an age-old human practice; it is an invention bound up
with the birth of the novel” (Kundera 5).
A primary focus of this thesis is to further develop Kundera’s claim that the rise
of the novel as a modern literary genre and the realization of modern comic aesthetics are
in fact inextricably linked, and that novels written in the modern tradition derive their
essential realist sensibilities in part from the participation that comic stimuli encourages
between the reader and the text. This interchange between reader and text, whether
overtly comic or, as will be investigated, borne of intrinsic comic virtues, challenges the
reader to perform according to a deliberate set of devices which are essential components
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of what can be termed as comic aesthetics. These devices include the suspension of moral
judgment (bound up in one’s “sense of humor” as Kundera suggests) and the reaction of
laughter, both of which contribute to endearing the novelistic hero to the reader in such a
way that evokes empathy and solidifies the sense of interiority gained through the
intimate access to a novel’s various narrative techniques.
Quite often, academic discussions of the novel and its relationship to comedy are
concerned with reconciling the modern characteristics of the novel and comedy with the
historical circumstances that occurred during the rise of these two phenomena. Therefore,
a historical reading on the topic of comic aesthetics and the novel would be a largely
diachronic one, perhaps beginning with the rise of the eighteenth century English novel,
for example, or even reaching farther back to Rabelais’ work, as Kundera does, and
connecting these texts with what Lukács calls a historico-philosophical analysis. My
study on comedy and the novel, however, is predominantly a-historical and formalist in
its approach. It is for this reason that the three principal texts being analyzed do not span
a vast, sweeping range of the novel’s history that could be considered modern, but rather
were particularly chosen from the modernist literary movement they hail from, a period
that came to exemplify the correlation between comedy and the novel. John Steinbeck’s
1935 publication of Tortilla Flat was his first commercially successful work and,
although he felt as though it was a partial failure due to its pseudo-allegorical Arthurian
underpinnings being lost of its readership, its overt wit and comic charm made it an
endearing and accessible novel. Similarly, Evelyn Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall
(1928), itself a searing indictment of the English Aristocracy, was loved mainly for its
acerbic wit and mirth. Finally, the third text analyzed here, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922),
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relies on a strong current of comic moments that run throughout the book that keeps the
reader primarily engaged in its audacious conceit. In spite of the relative parity between
the years they were published, these three works come from diverse artistic milieus and
were crafted from varied literary projects; justifying their relationship in a Historico-
Philosophical reading would prove daunting. After all, Tortilla Flat and Decline and Fall
are born of the comic novel sub-genre that came to be so popular in the modernist period,
whereas the breadth and controversy of Ulysses immediately imbued discussions about it
with a sense of critical gravitas. What links all three works in myhistorical and
synchronic reading, however, is the application and reliance on comedy to deliver to the
reader a tangible dose of realism. It is for this reason that the texts are discussed not in
chronological order, but instead by beginning first with a look into the comic spectacle, a
feature so germane to the first two texts, followed by the more elusive comic interior
model exemplified by the particularities of Joycean humor.
The position and order of these two primary focuses in this manner is justified by
a simple conceit. For most readers of novels, a comic moment is most often and
observably appreciated as a spectacle. When the reader confronts a comic spectacle – a
scene, for instance, where a character becomes the victim of an unfortunate circumstance
– he or she is encouraged to suspend any moral judgment of the action in question so that
a novel’s hero may be appreciated as possessing weakness and imperfection, attributes
that mimic the human condition. Thus, as Zach Bowen states in his book on Ulysses As
A Comic Novel, “when we laugh at the hero’s plight and his fumblings, we are assured –
without realizing that we harbor any pity and fear for the hero – that our problems are
universal” (Bowen 6). This universality that Bowen speaks of is indispensable to realism,
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as it allows the reader to empathically identify with the novelistic hero by relating to his
or her struggles and imperfections. And because in a comic spectacle “we laugh at the
hero’s plight and his fumblings” as a means of experiencing this empathic connection
with the novel, there is an undeniable relationship between realism and the comic
spectacle. Therefore, because the comic spectacle is a more immediately tangible and
recognizable notion of this argument, it makes sense to begin these analyses by looking at
the comic spectacle first.
The second focus of the thesis investigates Joyce’s Ulysses in order to consider
the notion of a comic interior found in novels that are not overtly comic either in form or
reputation. Joyce, as will be revealed in the comic interior chapter, renders Leopold
Bloom in stark realism by way of confounding the reader’s expectations. Rupturing
reader expectation and affecting the sense that his primary hero functions outside the will
of the author, a technique of the realist novel that transcends even Joyce, is itself a
product of humor’s contractual relationship between the novel and the reader and a
fundamental principle behind comedy’s mechanics. This is precisely where comedy loses
its overt spectacle altogether, instead bearing out to the reader the novelistic hero’s
interiority in the most subtle and complex manner.
The collection of these three chapters on comic aesthetics and their relationship to
the novel aspires not simply to situate comedy as a curious characteristic of a narrow
moment in literary history, but to argue philosophically that comedy and the novel are
inextricably linked. This hypothesis, proven through formalist experiments, suggests a
wider and more nuanced appreciation of what is considered comic. By analyzing these
three modernist texts and their use of comedy as a means of achieving the effect of
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realism, investigating comic aesthetics in novels written across the entire spectrum of
modernity will bear out a preponderance of evidence that comedy makes its way into the
overarching project of the novel as an art form.
Definitions of Comic Terminology in Novels
Although comedy is usually narrowly defined as a dramatic and performance-
oriented genre, reserved traditionally for the stage, and, in modern and now postmodern
times, sustained by the television and motion picture industry, one may perceive a
“comic” ethic applied across the entire spectrum of arts, particularly in relation to
literature. For the purposes of this argument – that the peculiar affectation of realism
experienced in the novel owes itself to the advent of what is considered comic in our
modern universe – it is important accurately to appropriate comedy’s jargon and
terminology: that which is “comic,” laughter, humor, satire – and how these terms, ill-
bred in their common usage for uncovering the phenomena of novelistic realism,
combine to form a methodology for better understanding how the novelist effectuates
realism through the device of comedy. Not only must this comic lexicon appropriately
express the apparatus of realism and its relationship to the comic spectacle found in the
novel, but it must also account for the presence of a comic mechanism found embedded
in novels that are not outwardly comic at first glance. I assert that the form of the novel,
at the center of its very conceit, is a product of the pure spirit of primordial human
laughter, a product that transcends the visceral, exhalable spirit that forms our immediate
sense of comedy. Therefore, to hold the comic methodology to only a limited sub-genre
of comic novels belies this charge.
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“Comedy” is often presumptuously defined as a performance-oriented genre
imbued with humorous and satirical elements wherein the hero must confront and
overcome some type of adversity. While the term should not be limited to theatre and
performance, this prosaic definition of comedy provides insight into its interplay with the
realist spirit of the novel, speaking to its depiction of amusing people or incidents in
which the characters overcome adversity. What is found to be “amusing,” particularly
within the sphere of a novel, cannot be sufficiently reconciled as comic, since some
elements, such as the ironic gesture between two opposing forces, might incite unbridled
laughter, whereas the delicate minutiae of a landscape may simply enkindle an eager
curiosity within the reader. In either case, both sensations can be characterized at first
impression as “amusing” if they encourage and captivate the reader’s attention. Comedy,
as we will see in practice heterogeneously with three early 20th century novels, enkindles
within the reader not only the tacit spike in curiosity found in the state of amusement, but
also the more transcendent evocation of laughter imbued with a pathos which renders
heroes as seeming quite real to the reader of novels. Therefore, a comic moment in the
novel can be appreciated as any moment where fictional characters are effectively
humanized. Comedy illuminates not the ideal, but the profane, imperfect qualities of
novelistic heroes. Where scenes of weeping and tragedy in a novel are an extrinsic
manifestation, a sequence of denotative affectation, comic moments reveal truths that
their characters seek to keep hidden. Moreover, comedy exposes the imperfect interior
nature of characters that outwardly would seem perfectly constructed in the epic. And
where, in the epic, its hero is victimized by a tragic flaw that is deliberately applied by
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outside forces (such as the gods), novelistic heroes suffer the flaws that exist in their
nature seemingly by their own doing.
In the first chapter of Testaments Betrayed, Kundera states that “the contract
between the novelist and the reader must be established from the outset; it must be clear:
the story being told here is not serious, even though it is about the most dreadful things”
(Kundera 4) the notion of juxtaposing the unserious with the dreadful is an allusion
consonant with the ends of comedy: even the most profane, victimizing comic moment in
a novel leads not to an erasure of realism, but rather a kind of humanizing reckoning
which allows its characters to assume autonomous idiosyncrasies that give the impression
of functioning outside the will of the author. For example, from the epic tradition,
Achilles’ flaw can be appreciated as an application of circumstance -- it was not borne of
his own trespasses or decisions, but by a divine force at work at the outset of his birth.
Because of this, the author of such an epic tale shows his hand in crafting a flaw or
weakness as an artifice; it functions not as a means of rendering Achilles as realistic to
the audience, but rather it simply occasions a means for Achilles to die. For when Lukács
aptly notes that “the novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no
longer directly given, in which the immanence of life has become a problem, yet which
still thinks in terms of totality” (Lukács 186), he conversely points out that the epic can
only succeed at representing this “totality of life” through presenting an extensive life
cycle which must naturally include death. Comedy, on the other hand, delivers in a
limited, synchronic gesture only a fragment of totality through the profane, grotesque,
even embarrassing revelations of its spectacle, thus portraying him in the light of an
autonomous character outside the will of the author. To be clear: this, too, is an artifice
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that the novelist uses just as it used in Homer, yet the conceit of comedy is sufficiently
concealed behind the realistic sphere of the novel, obscured by the effect of realism itself.
This paradox is what makes comedy so effective as a means to creating a realistic sphere
in the novel; the comic artifice is hidden from the reader by the very thing – realism –
that it is producing. Thus, the comic moment originates not from external circumstance
but from inside the will of the hero.
Kundera’s passage also speaks of a “contract” between the reader and a
mechanism of realism which the novelist constructs, with the idea that this contract, a
dialogue implicit in the absorbing quality of the novel, is a critical discovery in
understanding the elusive illusion of realism. Kundera’s claim here is crucial: in order for
comedy to succeed in rendering novelistic characters as realistic, the reader must
participate in its conceit. There must be a reaction on the part of the reader in order to
confirm a comic moment. This necessity creates a kind of “circuit” between the reader
and text, as well as all of the mechanisms contained within the crux of the text, including
the deployment of comic aesthetics. The novel requires the reader to complete its dialogic
mosaic so that he or she may be wholly invested in its realistic sphere; the reader must
contribute a segment of reality, whether this is something authentic (real) that occurs
between the reader and the novel or merely an artifice. Once this contract is established,
it is only then that the reader experiences the full function of the novel’s mechanism of
realism. And for the circuit of comedy to be completed, one of the reader’s principal
contributions is laughter.
The simple definition of laughter, a fundamental human action characterized by a
completely physical and instinctive reaction to comic stimuli, whether that stimuli be
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“lively amusement” or of a more derisive nature, requires further clarification in order for
it to be properly appropriated to this discussion. Laughter does not constitute an
unprovoked act – laughing without provocation or stimuli is typically the mark of a social
defect – but rather a reaction, perhaps the most basic and understood response, to comic
stimuli. And where popular comedy as found in the commercial media may constitute
“lively amusement,” it is the reaction to notes of contempt, derision, ridicule,
misunderstanding, and scorn which Kundera identifies as examples of primary comic
material in the crux of the novel:
Creating an imaginary terrain where moral judgment is suspended was a move of
enormous significance: only there could novelistic characters develop – that is,
individuals conceived not as a function of some preexistent truth, as examples of
good or evil . . . but as autonomous beings grounded in their own morality, their
own laws. (Kundera 7-8)
In this case, readers afford themselves a suspension of whatever moral code might
preclude them from denying responsive laughter and, by allowing these events to enter
their imagination, the art of the novel “teaches [them] to be curious about others” and
tries “to comprehend truths that differ from [their] own” (Kundera 8). These comic
implications marvelously expand the conventional notion of laughter. The reaction of
laughter on the part of the reader is an affirmation of suspended moral judgment: readers
will accept a comic moment because it either fails to tread upon their preexistent
morality, or they render that morality suspended and laugh. Therefore, as the reader
experiences comic moments in the story, his or her response is a product of the suspended
reflex of judgment that allows novelistic heroes to be experienced without prejudice.
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Our initial definition of laughter, however, also presumes that it is to some extent
an instinctive or involuntary physical reaction. Does Kundera’s concept of a “suspension
of moral belief” and the reaction of laughter as an affirmation of this contradict the notion
of it being an instinctive reaction? After all, suspending a systemic construct of human
reaction seems like a suspension of something inherent or instinctive in our behavior as
readers. If laughter is instinctive and spontaneous, how do we reconcile it with a
deliberate suspension of our initial response to a text? The answer lies in the final
component of these critical comic definitions: humor. If the comic aesthetic denotes the
novelist’s conceit behind affecting realism in his novel, and laughter is the reader’s
instinctive response to that comic landscape, it is humor, the a priori contract, where the
occasion for comic suggestion is agreed upon between reader and author. Humor’s
definition need not be probed too deeply to arrive at this conclusion: where it might be
chiefly thought of as simply the quality of comedy, humor is also appreciated to be one’s
ability to appreciate a comic moment. Thus, having a sense of humor, in itself a kind of
virtue possessed by some and sorely lacking in others, is not inborn or assumed in every
individual. Humor is something to be cultivated and, more importantly in the sense of this
discussion, agreed upon. It is for this reason that what is considered to be humorous is
subjective and volatile from one person to the next; nothing has been found to be safely
and universally accepted as humorous. Even within the same individual, what strikes him
as particularly funny one day might offend him the next. All of these abstract examples
point to humor, the ability to perceive something as comic, as a well-appropriated
signifier of Kundera’s suspension of moral belief. The contract of humor must be agreed-
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upon between reader and novelist so that the realist mechanism of the comic landscape
may commence.
These three definitions combine to create a “comic formula” that can be
appreciated within the genre of the novel: the deployment of a comic landscape by the
novelist, the agreement on humor between the reader and text, and the reader’s
responsive laughter, combine to become an invention of modernity, comprised through a
mechanism indigenous to the rise of the individual mind, of the secular. It is inextricably
connected with the birth of the novel. He goes on to say that “humor is not laughter, not
mockery, not satire, but a particular species of the comic” (Kundera 5). Kundera confirms
that humor is indeed not to be equated with laughter – laughter belongs solely to the
reader, or in a wider sense, to an audience. Rather, humor, for the purpose of this
discussion, is a shared status between the reader and the suggestive purpose of the comic
aesthetic found in the novel’s mechanism of realism. But in the above-referenced
quotation, Kundera describes humor as “a particular species of the comic.” How does he
arrive at this conclusion that there is a connection between humor and what is comic
within the discussion of the novel? The question remains largely unanswered, and is
precisely where one begins to unravel the mechanics of realism as it pertains to these
ideas of the comic aesthetic. Paz’s quote from the introduction provides a foretaste: by
rendering everything “ambiguous.” The ambiguity promulgated in the course of a novel’s
reading is really how the interiority of novelistic characters develop and subsequently are
able to succeed and fail in their roles in such a way that renders them as seemingly real.
As a result of this effect, the reader of novels experiences a novelistic character
who seems to function substantially outside the will of the author, at times failing to act,
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react, fully realize, live up to and defy the expectations as established in the imbedded
suggestions of the novelist’s ventriloquated appendage, the narrative. Much is to be made
of reader expectation and the development of realistic novelistic characters: because the
reader’s expectation is often ruptured, characters seem to behave independently of the
author’s will as suggested in the narrative. The result, in all its reduced essence,
constitutes the implicit nature of comedy in the novel, realized not in outwardly
humorous tones, but in the interior of the novelistic hero. Both this interior quality of
comedy as well as the extrinsic nature of the comic spectacle interact with and challenge
the expectations of the reader, setting the novel’s path on a trajectory towards achieving
the effect of realism. We will see this substantially at work in Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat
and Waugh’s Decline and Fall in the following chapter concerning the comic spectacle.
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Chapter 2 -- The Comic Spectacle
The comic aesthetic is a pervasive feature of the novels of the early 20th century,
both overtly and implicitly; secularism and the arts converged violently in the works of
Joyce, Woolf, Dunleavy, D.H. Lawrence, Flann O’Brien, some of Huxley, and early
Evelyn Waugh, so that many of their landmark novels were regarded as crass, base, and
even pornographic at the time of their publication. It is the culmination of these works,
however, which established a clear, discernable comic trend in the project of the modern
novel. John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat and Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall certainly
reside in this genre of the modernist “comic novel,” and therefore serve as prime
examples of the comic spectacle. More specifically, they were chosen to represent this
particular focus of my thesis because they are demonstrably spectacle-driven in their
deployment of comic aesthetics. That is to say that both novels, while strikingly different
in the characters and novelistic spheres they render, rely heavily on stringing together
hilarious comic events one after another that are played out not simply within the mind of
the hero’s interior, but rather out in the open, drawing the community backdrop as well as
the reader into a gyre of escalating laughter. And it is this reaction of laughter that breaks
down moral judgment in the reader and sufficiently humanizes novelistic heroes. This
brand of comic aesthetic I call a spectacle is so germane to these two novels because their
comedy is both extrinsic and spectacular at its very core.
This chapter, therefore, will first continue to build upon the principles of the
comic spectacle that were introduced in chapter one so that a close reading of Tortilla
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Flat and Decline and Fall will present clear and poignant examples of novelistic comedy
in action. By concentrating on Kundera’s thoughts regarding “profanation” and “the
suspension of moral judgment,” the connection between comedy and realism in the novel
will be appreciated after a penetrating look into the engaging comedy of both Steinbeck
and Waugh’s memorable works.
Published in 1942, C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters can assist in ascribing the
essential connection between this extrinsic comic spectacle and the kind of “moral
profanation” that Kundera speaks of when he develops his notion of comedy within the
novel. By pursuing the moral implications of human laughter through his inverted
“diabolical attitude,” Lewis uses Screwtape, the seasoned, tenured tempter and uncle to
his demon-in-training nephew, Toadpipe, to parse out the subject of laughter with zeal,
explaining to his nephew, “I divide the causes of human laughter into joy, fun, the Joke
Proper, and Flippancy” (Lewis 53). Though he described the process of writing in
Screwtape’s voice as, “a sort of spiritual cramp” (Lewis 183), through this morally-
inverted character, Lewis explores each of these subdivisions separately and
syllogistically, with “the Joke Proper” and “Flippancy” being the fields which illustrate
the most promise in terms of Kundera’s notion of “moral profanation” and its function
within the comic spectacle (Lewis 54). In particular, Screwtape’s lesson on flippancy
offers a poignant insight into the profane nature of the comic aesthetic in the novel,
declaiming that:
Humor is for [the English] the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing grace
of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame. . . Mere cowardice
is shameful; Cowardice boasted of with humorous exaggerations and grotesque
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gestures can be passed off as funny. Cruelty is shameful – unless the cruel man
can represent it as a practical joke. A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous,
jokes do not help towards a man’s damnation so much as his discovery that
almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but
with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a joke. (Lewis
55)
Thus, the power of moral ambiguity begins to take shape, so that the black-and-white
hierarchies of morality are suppressed and moral judgment of any behavior may be
suspended for the sake of appreciating the totality of a novelistic hero’s interior. This
point is where the comic spectacle can be appreciated as a component of the mechanism
of realism, that multi-faceted, creative device of the novelist that deploys a myriad of
techniques and artifices directed at humanizing its sphere so that the reader experiences
the sphere of the novel as seeming real. The comic spectacle works toward morally
neutralizing or equivocating about an event or behavior within the story that would
otherwise seem grave or even tragic. By encouraging the reader to appreciate an aspect of
the novelistic hero’s self outside of his or her moral proclivities, the novelist utilizes the
comic spectacle to “explain away” questionable behavior with the same set of delusions
that we as individuals engage in internally. It is for this reason that the comic spectacle
taps into the spirit of the human condition and prompts the reader to project themselves
into the minutiae of the novel.
Screwtape accurately identifies this transcendent power of the comic spectacle
and the condition of humor, this agreement between two parties discussed in Chapter one
– in his example, the progenitor of the Joke and the audience – potentially to expose
Nace 17
everything between them to profanation, a commitment to excluding nothing, however
sacred it may be, as enough to transmute shameful cruelty and blasphemy into an
endearing quality when performed in what Lewis casually refers to as a “joke,” but what
we as readers identify in the novel as the comic spectacle.
The harvest of early 20th century novels, British and American alike, exemplifies
these comic ideals in the English language canon. Though few writers were consciously
outlining these aesthetics as a specific technique, the first third of the 1900s saw an
expansion of the “comic novel” as a sub-genre of the novelistic species in Literature.
These works are predicated on a purveyance of the comic spectacle; clearly, their
narrative is built upon the Flippancy which Screwtape heralds, explaining that, “Among
Flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it;
but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already
found a ridiculous side to it” (Lewis 56). What novelists comes to understand, then, is
that the landscape of their novelistic world need not be constructed on gravitas and
tragedy in order for its characters to succeed in achieving the effect of realism, a
fundamental quality of the novel as experienced through the vicarious imagination of the
reader that is unmatched by any other genre in rendering its fictional sphere as palpable.
Furthermore, a potential exists, particularly in the modern novel, for Lewis’ “flippancy”
to overturn the moral stability found throughout the classic literary genres, such as the
epic, where, “One can only accept the epic world with reverence; it is impossible to really
touch it, for it is beyond the realm of human activity, the realm in which everything
humans touch is altered and rethought” (Bahktin 17). On the other hand, comedy’s ability
to alter, rethink, render ambiguous, and even profane every convention, every dogma
Nace 18
illustrates, “Precisely here, in popular laughter, the authentic folkloric roots of the novel
are to be sought” amidst the novel’s comic, meandering tendencies, which Bahktin agrees
are, “originally the objects of ambivalent laughter” (Bahktin 21). Indeed, provided that
comic spectacles intersect with the interiority of our novelistic heroes, the reader
confronts an increasingly more fleshbound, mortal, fallible, and autonomous cast of
characters, exposed to the harsh and unpredictable elements of circumstance, with
Kundera’s axiom: that a story can in fact be “not serious, even though it is about the most
dreadful things” (Kundera 4), coming to light in both the “light reading” of the overtly
comic novel as well as the expansive, heterogeneous narratives of Joyce and Woolf.
Tortilla Flat
In 1935, John Steinbeck published Tortilla Flat, a slim novel not frequently
discussed by critics, and most certainly a comic novel to the very core of its conceit,
which not surprisingly was his earliest commercial success on account of its spectacular
comic underpinning and jocund narrative. It was a particular frustration to Steinbeck that
the Arthurian conceit of his novel was never fully perceived or appreciated by his
readership, and much of the scholarly work done on Tortilla Flat concerns itself with
either highlighting the Arthurian structure and allusions or justifying why the book’s
audience missed them1. Although Steinbeck critic Arthur Kinney recognizes that “it is the
comic that is Steinbeck’s salvation” (Kinney 44) with regards to the commercial success
of the novel, few (including Steinbeck perhaps) fail to embrace the simple claim that
Tortilla Flat is a successful work of Literature primarily because of its comedy. As a
1 For more research on this critical discussion of Tortilla Flat, see Joseph Fontenrose’s essay “Tortilla Flat and the Creation of a Legend.”
Nace 19
result, it offers us an ideal entrance into novelistic comic aesthetics. A sequence from the
middle of the book is a good place to begin, since it demonstrates the progression of a
comic spectacle: The morning after Pilon, Pedro, and Jesus Maria Corcoran accidentally
burned down their rented house, amidst the “square black ashes and twisted plumbing
which had once been his other house,” Danny, their lackadaisical landlord, dear friend,
and gallant leader, battles through mild anger and resentment towards his careless,
drunken comrades and arrives finally at “his true emotion, one of relief that at least one
of his burdens was removed. ‘If it were still there, I would be covetous of the rent,’ he
thought. ‘My friends have been cool toward me because they owed me money. Now we
can be free and happy again’” (Steinbeck 51). This interior revelation of Danny’s is
expected, given the similarly interior scope of the novel -- the nonchalance of Paisano
culture, which is well-developed by Steinbeck from the outset and the particular avarice
toward materialism which Danny ruminates on throughout the story. In his own
idiosyncratic way, Danny arrives at the conclusion that the burning down of his second
house is actually fortunate, since it will facilitate that which he genuinely cherishes – not
money, power, and property, but drunken reverie and camaraderie with his fellow
Paisano amigos. Certainly up to this point in our examination, we observe the novel
doing what it does best: giving the reader candid access into the mind of the hero.
Yet, without a comic turn, the reader’s emotional reaction may remain at mere
curiosity. When the reader is informed that, “Danny knew he must discipline his friends a
little, or they would consider him soft,” (Steinbeck 51) it is the juxtaposition of Danny’s
interior thoughts and outward actions, a prime example of the comic spectacle, which sets
him in the midst of an ambiguous, unpredictable world that the reader recognizes to be
Nace 20
remarkably like his own. Therefore, armed with the insight into Danny’s true feelings
toward the whole event, the reader enjoys the fleecing of Danny’s friends who come to
him penitently, bearing stolen and lascivious gifts in meek reparation:
Danny saw them coming, and he stood up and tried to remember the things he
had to say. They lined up in front of him and hung their heads. ‘Dogs of dogs,’
Danny called them, and ‘Thieves of decent folks’ other house,’ and ‘Spawn of
cuttlefish.’ He named their mothers cows and fathers ancient sheep. (Steinbeck
53)
The reader instantly understands the ramifications of this scene: what Danny feels
internally and how he is obliged by his own ethics to comport himself outwardly in order
to maintain his leadership status among his cronies, and what Pilon, Pedro, and Jesus
Maria must do to be accepted back into their leader’s graces, lavishing Danny with stolen
picnic fare, and finally presenting him with a pink brassiere as a gift for Mrs. Morales,
which he consequently deems too extravagant for the likes of her. It is important to
appreciate that the comedy of this scene is only fully developed and appreciated after
Danny’s interior thoughts and intentions collude with the outward, external reaction
toward his shameful friends. The reader appreciates the contradiction between Danny’s
interior self and external actions, a contradiction that mirrors human reality in the way
that people may think one thing and do another. It is in this way that the comic spectacle
works toward the realistic goals of the novelist, playing off the interior thoughts of its
hero in order to illustrate the genuine nature or interiority and the delusion of outward
action.
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Tortilla Flat is a comic novel explicitly constructed on spectacle – one mishap or
malfeasance almost systematically leads into the next. Consistently throughout this string
of comic spectacles, the interior conditions of the novel’s heroes fuel the comedy of the
extrinsic spectacle; without the reader gaining access into the inner realities of the
characters, the contradictory, deluded, and sometimes absurd external reactions of the
heroes would not function comically. In the following example, even the narrator
functions as a means of exacerbating the comic spectacle: it was a blessed candle which
burned Danny’s second home down, the mishap ascribed to the curse of St. Francis as
punishment for the behavior and drunken carelessness of the tenants. The narrator states,
“In the sky, saints and martyrs looked on with set and unforgiving faces. The candle was
blessed. It belonged to Saint Francis. Saint Francis will have a big candle in its place
tonight” (Steinbeck 47). Here the narrator re-appropriates the tragic force found in the
epic, where the deliberately applied outside force of the gods victimizes the hero. Instead,
the narrator absorbs the superstitions and religious beliefs of its novelistic heroes so that
the misfortune of burning down Danny’s house comes only as a result of their own
careless shortcomings. It is in this way that Steinbeck wields the comic spectacle: the
spectacle here is heightened not by the literal divine punishment of St. Francis and the
communion of saints, but rather by the imaginations and delusions of Pilon, Jesus Maria,
and Pablo so that their sufferings here come as a result of their own beliefs as much as
from their actions.
Kundera’s appreciation of the sequence of scenes in the art of the realist novel
supports this notion: “The scene becomes the basic element of the novel’s composition . .
. anything that is not scene is considered and felt to be secondary, even superfluous”
Nace 22
(Kundera 127). Thus, the progression of this comic spectacle gives rise not only to jocose
laughter on the part of the reader, but also to an endearing quality one senses of these
comic heroes. None of them is morally uni-dimensional; it requires a moral complexity
for Pilon to wholly excuse his thievery for the sake of making reparations to Danny not
only for himself, but for his friends as well. The comic spectacle, then, affords a novel
like Tortilla Flat the dexterity to oscillate between themes of forgiveness, honor,
generosity, deception, debauchery, and mischievousness; the suspension of moral
judgment agreed upon in the comic moment juxtaposes both good and evil and, because
of that state of being, temporal and virtual as it may be in the moment of the novel, a
comic scene registers as quite real in the heart of the reader.
Steinbeck is demonstrative in this particular component of his novel, and it is no
wonder that he ascribes to Pilon’s character, perhaps the conflicted Launcelot figure
given Tortilla Flat’s homage to Arthurian legend, a pirouetting path between the moral
and immoral. Much is invested in Pilon, since he is the moral leader of the troupe, a
cavalcade that is “merely lovable; worse, they can also be laughable and foolish” (Kinney
44). Ironically, it isn’t the immorality, but the morality of these figures that compel the
reader. Critic Joseph Fontenrose states: “The paisanos are great moralizers, but their
moralizing too often consists in finding noble reasons for satisfying desires at a friend’s
expense . . .” (Fontenrose 21). Kinney concurs in this notion, noting that, “there is no
moral norm in Steinbeck” (Kinney 44) and that “Steinbeck’s morality in Tortilla Flat is
never fervent; it is relaxed and comic” (Kinney 43). Pilon’s prevailing moral logic always
seeks to equivocate, as here when he pilfers Mrs. Morales’ chicken:
Nace 23
Pilon mused, “Poor little bare fowl. How cold it must be for you in the early
morning, when the dew falls, and the air grows cold with the dawn. The good God
is not always so good to little beasts.” And he thought, “Here you play in the
street, little chicken. Some day an automobile will run over you; and if it kills
you, that will be the best thing that can happen. It may only break your leg or your
wing. Then all of your life you will drag along in misery. Life is too hard for you,
little bird.” (Steinbeck 15)
This long passage needs to be seen in its entirety in order to appreciate the comic
mechanism at work. Here, Pilon’s internal monologue here is discursive, syllogistic. He
has employed a delusive thought-process that is so developed and airtight in its moral
equivocation that it is quite difficult for even the reader to see the conceit behind it that is
working towards committing an immoral act. It isn’t that Pilon has abandoned his
morality – in fact, the reader finds Pilon’s moral mechanism in full employ, working
toward justifying the mercy killing of the chicken while extracting theft from the ethical
equation altogether. Once again, the audacity of the comic spectacle causes a rupture not
in the morality of the novelistic hero, but in the reader himself; it is the reader who must
suspend moral judgment. Again, the onus for this comic moment originates from Pilon’s
interiority and progresses outward into his external actions. Finally,
That chicken, which Pilon had prophesied might live painfully, died peacefully, or
at least quietly . . . The little rooster, picked and dismembered, was distributed in
his pockets. If there was one rule of conduct more strong than any other to Pilon,
it was this: never under any circumstances bring feathers, head or feet home, for
without these a chicken cannot be identified. (Steinbeck 15)
Nace 24
The narrator’s proclamation of Pilon’s essential “rule of conduct” – to be sure to “cover
one’s tracks” in the act of thievery – sustains Steinbeck’s use of the narrator as a comic
arbitrator, injecting the moral paradoxes and inconsistencies of Pilon into his nefarious
behavior. After the deep moral and ethical consideration that Pilon gives to the decision
to kill and steal Mrs. Morales’ chicken, it is this vulgar ethic – the ethic of a criminal –
that concludes the sequence. Given this exposé into Pilon’s moral character, it isn’t
inconsistent with his modus operandi that he later commands his marauding picnic
thieves: “’Do not bring the basket if you can help it’” (Steinbeck 52). This brief vignette
involving Mrs. Morales’ chicken, a fleeting scene that merely foreshadows a closer
examination of Pilon’s character in chapter three, establishes a moral consistency that the
reader comes to identify as paisano virtue; a thread runs deep throughout the novel which
links Danny and his four “knights” in a quest for selflessness and altruism, generosity,
and magnanimity – it is of no consequence to the narrator that, at face value, the success
of this ongoing quest rests on the victimization and exploitation of Tortilla Flat proper.
After all, “Since the novel’s purpose is to deceive, lying is the law by which it abides . . .
since its reality derives from it” (Robert 66). The narrator, indeed a flippant, tongue-in-
cheek commentator on the exploits of Danny, Pilon, and the others, turns a blind moral
eye to the heroes’ questionable tactics, and by doing so prompts readers to share in the
mirth by retracting their own judgment. And yet, because of the tenderness and complex
emotional motivation of its heroes, Danny is not on a mock quest; the journey here is both
sincere and earnest. Without the comic spectacle, these scenes would be dreadful to
behold. However, with the ambiguity of comedy clouding the moral clarity of characters
Nace 25
like Danny, an emotional totality is presented to the reader – sincerity, delusion, charity,
and selfishness – which renders Danny as a strikingly real novelistic hero.
Here a schematic of the comic spectacle begins to take form: when novelistic
heroes are made to bear the brunt of injustice, victimized by irony or circumstance, or
when they themselves are the instrument of such malicious proclivities in their own
sphere of life or in the lives of other characters, the reader responds to this cue
emotionally – for laughter is a species of human emotion, unchained by the agreement
instituted by one’s sense of humor – because, at its root, the reader feels empathy for the
victim of comedy and, more importantly, the provocateur of mischief, the hypocrite,
challenges the reader to love him in spite of his audacity. In this way, “suspending moral
judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands
against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone. . . “
(Kundera 7). What Kundera says of Panurge – “not only does this coward, this liar, this
faker, provoke no indignation, but it is at the peak of his braggadocio that we love him
most” (Kundera 7) – could also be said of Pilon. The novel makes no moral judgment of
Pilon’s provocative acts; in fact, the narrator, as already noted, audaciously decrees that,
“Pilon was an honest man” (Steinbeck 19) and, “Honor and peace to Pilon, for he had
discovered how to uncover and disclose to the world the good that lay in every evil thing”
(Steinbeck 61). So, by extension, the response of readers is similar, laughing as they read,
enkindled by the bond they share with Pilon, this fictional character who, like themselves,
constantly confronts the nuance of human morality. The narrator and the reader are both
inextricably linked with the conceit of the comic spectacle, with the collusion of the
narrator and characters like Pilon encouraging us as readers to collude with the
Nace 26
questionable nature of his being and in turn appreciate him in the light of human
imperfection.
The comic spectacle is the most immediately recognizable brand of comedy. A
spectacle, an absurdity which rises out of the real in order to be seen, by definition
transcends the mundane, prosaic, predictable, and is regarded as “spectacular” by way of
how the event departs from what the onlooker perceives hegemonically as the norm. Not
all spectacles, to be sure, are necessarily comic, since humor, as we’ve surmised, must be
agreed upon between author and audience so that moral judgment is sufficiently
suspended. Comic spectacles such as the ones discussed here are identified as extrinsic
for the purpose of identifying them in novels because they take place not between the
prompting of a narrator and his novel’s hero, but rather between the hero and his foils, or
the hero and his own external, unpredictable environment. What is decidedly comic in the
novel is the occasion where the hero thinks one thing and does another, all at the expense
of someone or something. The introduction of the Pirate in chapter seven and his
subsequent admittance into Danny’s circle of friends illustrates the power of the comic
spectacle in the novel and how these mechanisms portray to the reader a realist portrait of
the heroes concerned in the story. For both the Pirate and Pilon complete an opposing
circuit of comic characterization – the Pirate being the principal comic target in this
sequence and Pilon acting as the provocateur – which, by virtue of these character’s
particular moral qualities and choices, lead the reader into perceiving both of these
characters as sufficiently humanized within the crux of the novel.
Steinbeck presents the Pirate as an antidote for the disordered moral perspectives
of Danny, Pilon, Pedro, and Jesus Maria. His inclusion in their syndicate evokes a
Nace 27
sustained shift in the behavior of our mischievous paisanos; due in large measure to his
altruistic lifestyle and philanthropic mission – to earn a thousand two-bitses so that he can
purchase for the church a golden candlestick for his favorite saint, the patron saint of his
beloved pack of dogs, St. Francis of Assisi. The Pirate later explains to his newfound
friends: “‘Once I had a nice dog, and that dog was sick; and I promised a gold candlestick
of one thousand days if that dog would get well. And,’ he spread his great hands, ‘that
dog got well.’ ‘Is it one of these dogs? Pilon demanded. ‘No,’ said the Pirate. ‘A truck
ran over him a little later’” (Steinbeck 76). This early characterization of the Pirate
portrays him as a pathetic character as well as a product of Steinbeck’s use of the comic
spectacle. Like the burning down of Danny’s house being explained by the anger of St.
Francis, the Pirate ascribes his inner faith and beliefs to the miracle of his dog
overcoming his sickness, in spite of his eventual demise underneath the wheel of a truck.
Although this scene involving the Pirate’s deceased dog is once removed from the
narration – he is assuming the role of narrator here, telling the story to his new friends –
he is also inadvertently telling it to the reader and functioning much in the same manner
as the narrator.
This admission of the Pirate’s intention to invest in a candle for the church comes
as a great disappointment to Danny and his friends, since, “no one except Pilon knew
everything the Pirate did. Pilon knew everybody and everything about everybody”
(Steinbeck 58), and, in the same manner that Pilon justifies his stealing and killing of
chickens, theft of other people’s property, and groping of other men’s wives, he is aware
of the Pirate’s cache of coins. Because he is so able, “to uncover and to disclose to the
world the good that lay in every evil thing,” (Steinbeck 61), it is not merely theft, but also
Nace 28
a sincere concern and commitment to stewardship on Pilon’s part that motivates him to
acquire the Pirate’s money and spend it for him: “He felt very sorry for the Pirate. ‘Poor
little half-formed one,’ he said to himself. ‘God did not give him all the brain he should
have. That poor little Pirate cannot look after himself’” (Steinbeck 60). Here we can see
the cycle of the comic spectacle beginning, with Pilon laying the groundwork for morally
justifying his intention to eventually steal the Pirates money. As with the chicken, Pilon’s
rationale progresses syllogistically:
“Would it not be a thing of merit,’ he thought, ‘to do those things for him which
he cannot do for himself? To buy him warm clothes, to feed him food fit for a
human? But,” he reminded himself, “I have no money to do these things, although
they lie squirming in my heart. How can these charitable things be
accomplished?” (Steinbeck 61)
Because the reader implicitly understands Pilon’s basic intention here, the ensuing comic
suggestion only functions as a result of the reader suspending moral judgment of Pilon’s
desire to rob the Pirate. Only by agreeing to this contract of humor can this thought
process progress into the realm of the comic, where Pilon’s thoughts, while completely
devoid of any clue of moral self-deception, are a unified nexus of self-delusion for the
sake of morally justifying his actions. But the delusion is so complete, so true to itself,
that it is only the narrator’s interjection that reminds the reader of the conceit here: “Now
he was getting somewhere. Like the cat, which during a long hour closes in on a sparrow,
Pilon was ready for his pounce” (Steinbeck 61). It is only through this allusion and
suggestion that Pilon’s thought process has a purpose outside of mere altruism that the
reader appreciates the true spectacle of this moment. When Pilon finally concludes, “I
Nace 29
will give freely of my mind. That shall be my charity toward this poor little half-made
man” (Steinbeck 61), the construction of Pilon as a morally-complex man is complete. To
be sure, Pilon is not to be seen as a morally conflicted character; in fact, his moral
decisions are fundamentally decided upon before any new mission in begun. But it is the
moral process that the reader experiences inside of Pilon’s head and the ensuing spectacle
that results from his moral decisions that ultimately render him as realistic.
Does the reader question Pilon’s sincerity? Surely his rationalization smacks of
wholesale self-deception. And yet, as opposed to Pilon conspiring with himself simply to
pilfer the coins from the Pirate – a morally-atrocious act, to be sure, but simpler and more
definitive – Pilon’s seemingly sincere and selfless reach for a charitable angle for his
desire is terribly profane and at the same time endearing. The narrator only furthers the
effect, opining on the goodness of Pilon’s resolve: It is astounding to find that the belly of
every black and evil thing is as white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the
concealed parts of angels are leprous . . . Enough for Pilon to do good and to be rewarded
by the glow of human brotherhood accomplished (Steinbeck 62). The narrative of Tortilla
Flat remains consistent in doing one thing: rendering the morality of its characters as
ambiguous, as per Kundera’s faithful model. The narrator’s perspective is not merely an
apologist for the likes of Pilon; in fact, he celebrates his righteousness with great fervor.
Is the narrator being serious or sarcastic? If the latter, no clue is ever offered to prove it
conclusively, yet, given our expectations as readers, inherently we come to realize that
the narrator is not serious. But the lack of seriousness doesn’t preclude Tortilla Flat or
any comic novel from exciting pathos in the heart of its reader.
Nace 30
The conflation of Pilon’s equivocation and the narrator’s heraldry is only trumped
by the sincere and authentic nature of the Pirate, a simple character both in the eyes of his
friends and in his contextual construction, whose purity and transcendent good-
heartedness finally triumphs over any designs to bilk him out of his money, and in turn
bonds him to the circle of friends not through debauchery, but through demonstrative
altruism. Upon learning from Pilon that Danny and company are concerned for him, the
Pirate is overwhelmed:
The Pirate was following [Pilon’s] words with breathless astonishment, and his
brain tried to realize these new things he was hearing. It did not occur to him to
doubt them, since Pilon was saying them. “I have all these friends?” he said in
wonder. “And I did not know it. I am a worry to these friends. I did not know,
Pilon. I would not have worried them if I had known.” He swallowed to clear his
throat of emotion. (Steinbeck 64)
Here Steinbeck establishes the Pirate as an authentic, sincere, sentimental figure and a
foil to Pilon’s complex, morally ambivalent nature. So authentic is the Pirate’s genteel
nature that, upon witnessing it himself, Danny comments to his men after inviting the
Pirate to live with them, saying, “’Poor little lonely man. . . If I had known, I would have
asked him long ago, even if he had no treasure,’” and, “A flame of joy burned in all of
them” (Steinbeck 69). In keeping with Steinbeck’s constant cycling from one comic
spectacle to another, in spite of the fact that, “[The Pirate’s] friends were kind to him.
They treated him with a sweet courtesy: but always there was some eye open and upon
him” (Steinbeck 70) in search of his money, the Pirate’s naive trust in his cronies,
eventually leading him to trust them with the task of safeguarding his money so that it
Nace 31
will not be stolen, hiding it under Danny’s bed of all places, the comic axis is inverted,
and the provocateurs become themselves victimized:
In time they would take a certain pleasure in the knowledge that this money lay
under the pillow, but now . . . their defeat was bitter . . . The Pirate stood before
them, and there were tears of happiness in his eyes, for he had proved his love for
his friends. “To think,” he said, “all those years I lay in that chicken house, and I
did not know any pleasure. But now,” he added, “oh, now I am very happy.”
(Steinbeck 75)
In a similar manner to Pilon’s deluded exercises toward the Machiavellian, the Pirate’s
naive realization of happiness and security for him and his dogs leaves a trial of comic
victims in its wake, the onus for laughter, constructed on the foundation of humor as
contract between the author and reader. As opposed to victims of tragedy, our comic
victims are subjected not to the decisive, objective damnation of death, an extrinsic force
which results in a permanent, static, and external termination of a literary character, but
to a dynamic potentiality of moral development. One need only to look comparatively at
Shakespeare’s works to see this point fundamentally illustrated: Hamlet realizes an epic
conclusion at his death, all possibility of revelation irrevocably terminated, whereas the
newly-married couple realizes a new beginning at the end of The Taming of the Shrew.
Decline and Fall
The theme of rebirth is a byproduct of the novel, distilled from the genesis of
novelistic comedy. Rebirth is the prerogative of the novelistic hero, after all, since it is a
theme bound up in the manner in which characters develop internally. Rebirth and
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interior development appeals to the reader of novels because, contextually, they are
essential attributes of realism; just as it is our right to develop as individuals, reinvent
ourselves, and begin again, so it is that when novelistic heroes are designed by the author
and permitted by the narrator to behave in a similar manner, the reader then experiences
the hero in a similar reality as his own, able to influence his interiority, if only that.
Clearly rebirth is unattainable in a tragedy, and wasted on an epic character, and in both
of these cases heroes of these genres arrive at a strictly external victory or demise.
Comedy, on the other hand, often affords its heroes a “second chance” at their life, which
is assumed to continue even after the book has ended; the comic effect in novels leaves
the reader with a sense that our novelistic hero’s life existed before the first page of the
book and will continue after the last. Thus, the use of comedy in the novel, while merely
an artifice wielded by the author, contributes to exposing the reader to the hope, freedom,
and possibility for the world of a novel to seem tangible and unaware of its fictiveness.
Quite a contrast to Steinbeck’s world of lazy paisanos living on a dusty hill above
Monterey, Evelyn Waugh’s first novel Decline and Fall, a novel that established the
author as a capable comic novelist, reveals instead the absurd pomposity of the English
aristocracy in the early 20th Century. In spite of their subject and stylistic differences,
both novels thrive equally on the unrelenting chain of comic spectacles. Like Tortilla
Flat, Waugh’s novel rarely allows itself any gravity, and yet manages to achieve a
standard of realism that the modern reader has come to expect. More importantly,
Decline and Fall exemplifies the novel’s urge to see its heroes reborn and redeveloped
through the influence of the comic spectacle.
Nace 33
Stephen Greenblatt aptly states that, “one of Waugh’s favorite satiric devices is
suddenly to catapult a totally naïve individual into a grotesque and uncontrollable world .
. . “ (Greenblatt 8). To be sure, our protagonist Paul Pennyfeather is immediately
portrayed as a naïve victim of his particular circumstances: with the prelude beginning on
the evening of the Bollinger hazing occasion at Scone College, Oxford, the narrator
reports that, “It was his third year of uneventful residence at Scone . . . At home he lived
in Onslow Square with his guardian, a prosperous solicitor who was proud of his progress
and abysmally bored by his company” (Waugh 4). And, unlike Pilon, who wrestles from
beginning to end with his inner demons, “Paul Pennyfeather was reading for the Church .
. . and had, as his report said, ‘exercised a wholesome influence for good’ in the house in
which he was head boy” (Waugh 4). To be sure, these first impressions of Pennyfeather
are indicative and representative of his character in action; he scarcely makes a moral
misstep, and his propensity toward meekness and submissiveness renders him a constant
target for comic victimization, of which he complacently complies with and ultimately
finds his life destroyed and rebuilt anew.
Pennyfeather’s luck begins to decline rapidly in the preface as he returns back to
his dorm after attending a meeting of the League of Nations, the organization that would
eventually lead him to prison. Waugh introduces his first comic cue – that Paul’s striped
tie, “bore a marked resemblance to the pale blue and white of the Bollinger Club . . . “
(Waugh 5), a club he was wholly unaware of – which centers on the often replayed theme
so aptly identified by Kundera when he remarks that, “Realizing that our destiny is
determined by something utterly trivial is depressing. But any revelation of some
expected triviality is a source of comedy as well” (Kundera 45). A comic cycle of
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misfortune is tipped off by nothing more than the unpredictable circumstance of a
mistaken tie – a Bollinger tie, ironically, which is the premiere aristocratic club on
campus. But unlike the various circumstances of Tortilla Flat that lead to the hilarity of
its comic spectacles, Paul’s susceptibility to comic victimization comes not as a result of
his own shortcomings, but instead by random circumstance and the viciousness of the
various aristocrats he comes in contact with. Thus, as a result of this opening triviality,
Pennyfeather’s nemesis, Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington, hazes our unsuspecting
hero, stripping him of his clothes and sending him scampering through the college quad
naked.
In this opening comic exchange, Waugh expose the crux of his novel: he clearly
defines his own particular brand of comedy – the comic spectacle situated around the
trivial and the circumstantial. Like the Pirate and Pilon, there is an axis of morality
represented by Paul, a moral character, educated and raised amidst the English
aristocracy though definitely set apart from it, and aristocratic characters like
Trumpington, a bourgeois archetype who manages to reappear throughout the novel
(again, circumstantially and seemingly at random) as the novel’s antagonistic force.
Waugh’s use of the comic spectacle functions around presenting Paul as a protagonist
who is born more out of apathy, ambivalence, and submissiveness than bravery,
principles, and autonomy. He is essentially the butt of all jokes in the novel, in near
constant reception of a combination of negative circumstances that are beyond his control
and other characters’ questionable and reprehensible behavior toward him. It is through
this constant subjection to comically cruel treatment and misfortune, however, that the
Nace 35
reader appreciates Paul’s palpable rebirth into society as a result of his function in
Waugh’s comic idiom.
Similar to Tortilla Flat, Waugh is keen to compound his own comic spectacles: if
the Bollinger hazing incident wasn’t humiliating enough, the Masters of Scone, all the
while witnessing the incident, resolve to expelling Paul. Yet while the circumstances
behind Paul’s initial hazing incident were clearly random, the reaction of the deans
introduce the theme repeated throughout the novel that the aristocratic powers above Paul
are acting in concert to destroy him for the sake of their own amusement:
“The case of Pennyfeather,” the Master was saying, “seems to be quite a difficult
matter altogether. He ran the whole length of the quadrangle, you say, without his
trousers. It is unseemly. It is more: it is indecent. In fact, I am almost prepared to
say that it is flagrantly indecent. It is not the conduct we expect of a scholar.”
“Perhaps if we fined him really heavily?” suggested the Junior Dean. “I very
much doubt whether he could pay. I understand he is not well off. Without
trousers, indeed! And at that time of night! I think we should do far better to get
rid of him altogether. That sort of young man does the College no good.” (Waugh
6-7)
Similar to Pilon’s internalized, delusive sequences where we witness him working up
toward committing a crime, or how Danny feels relieved when his house burns down, but
must chastise his friends all the same, here we see the comic spectacle at work in how the
injustice and absurdity of the deans is repressed by their own seemingly unearned will to
see Paul expelled. Although it is obvious to the reader that Paul represents absolutely no
kind of threat to Scone – he possesses no particular clout on campus and is an unknown
Nace 36
entity – the deans work themselves into a distaste toward Paul for no apparent reason
aside from the fact that he is not wealthy. Random and unaccountable forces are all that
can account for Paul’s misfortunes, and one misfortune compounds into another, thus
compiling the comic material of the scene. As Henri Bergson observes in his study of
comedy: “No sooner, then, does the comic poet strike the first note than he will add the
second on to it, involuntarily and instinctively. In other words, he will duplicate what is
ridiculous professionally with something that is ridiculous physically” (Bergson 27). Not
only does Paul fail to offer any bit of defense to this unjust aggression toward him, he
even submits to paying the nit-picking fines to the domestic bursar for two minor
cigarette burns in his dorm. For as Greenblatt notes, Paul “is a shadow-man, completely
passive, completely innocent” (Greenblatt 8). Alas, the reader might easily be compelled
to lose patience with Paul’s inscrutable obsequiousness and compliance with such abject
injustice levied against him.
As these offenses against his wealth, career, and future continue on, one would
expect the reader’s pity toward Paul to quickly transform into disdain; he is a perennial
pacifist who refuses to fight, not cynically, as though he realizes he can never defeat the
predestined privilege of his aristocratic nemeses, but simply because it is not built into his
nature. We will explore how this quality clearly designed to function within the milieu of
comic realism, enables Waugh to develop and unfold his novelistic landscape in a
remarkably fresh way, however, what must be noted here is how remarkably Paul’s
pacifism serves him well as a sympathetic comic hero: the reader, immediately detecting
a conceit, understands that the torrent of disaster visited on Paul, undeniably hilarious,
will lead him to a conclusion of dynamic development. With a serious hero, taken from
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tragedy or from epic realms, the reader would lose hope, since the tragic hero eschews
the condition of the body and attends to the soul, and at the very least cannot permit
himself to be subjected to such injustice (Bergson 25). Yet, because “Any incident is
comic that calls our attention to the physical in a person . . . “ (Bergson 25), with Paul,
our comic hero, the reader laughs, and the occasion for laughter endears Paul to his
readers, since his submissiveness toward all the misfortune he is subjected to, however
unacceptable it may be deemed to our logic, through the comic imagination reinvents the
mechanism of realism radically. So Paul is meek, yes, but his character function is
audacious as a result of the comic spectacle he is subjected to.
Ultimately for Waugh, justice for Paul is served by way of comic aesthetics. Just
as the comic spectacle is morally restorative for the paisanos of Tortilla Flat, their
salvation only realized after the Pirate invests all of his love and trust in them, dashing
their hopes of stealing his money, so too does the chain reaction of comic spectacle
restore Paul’s contentedness at the onset of the story. All he loses in his expulsion from
Oxford and eventual entrance into the high society are the blessings which seemed not to
occupy him while studying for the Church at Scone: his engagement to Margot Beste-
Chetwynde and the shallow, opulent lifestyle that envelops her. The comic genius of
Decline and Fall delivers Paul from a seven-year prison sentence back to his life at Scone
in the manner of a mock Christ figure. After being publicly pronounced dead from a
staged appendix operation, reclining in the lap of luxury one last time at Margaret’s
German villa, he receives a communiqué from her, ironically now married to
Trumpington:
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That morning Margot had sent him a bunch of Press cuttings about himself, most
of them headed “Wedding Sensation Echo” or “Death of a Society Bridegroom
Convict.” With them were his tie pin and the rest of his possessions . . . He felt the
need of the bustle of the cafes and the quay side to convince him fully of his
existence. He stopped at a stall and bought some Turkish delight. It was odd being
dead. (Waugh 279-80)
Paul’s passive, narrow vision of his own existence impairs him from realizing exactly
what has transpired in the tumultuous year or so which took him from Oxford to the
verge of a society marriage to jail and finally a faked death. Waugh continues to suggest
the allusion of a mock Christ figure when Paul finds himself still buried in the tomb, no
longer subjected to the victimizing profanation of the comic spectacle, and not yet
restored to his old life in a manner that the absurdity of comedy could deliver. It takes the
insight of Otto Silenus, that nihilist architect of Margot’s modernist manor house,
“King’s Thursday.” Several time Waugh employs his secondary characters to
ventriloquize his own moral directives, and finally Silenus puts Paul into perspective for
him, relating life to “the big wheel at Luna Park” (Waugh 282). He explains candidly:
“Now you’re a person who was clearly meant to stay in the seats and sit still and
if you get bored watch the others. Somehow you got onto the wheel, and got
thrown off again at once with a hard bump. It’s all right for Margot, who can cling
on, and for me, at the centre, but you’re static. Instead of this absurd division into
sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic. There’s a real distinction
there, though I can’t tell you how it comes. I think we’re probably two quite
different species spiritually.” (Waugh 283-284)
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Foreshadowing the commensurate classification of novelistic characters, Silenus
unwittingly interchanges terms for the characters in Decline and Fall. Considering his
role as protagonist at the center of the novel, Paul is at first glance a static character of
sorts, since his inner self fails to realize on his own any significant truth or revelation. Yet
the conceit of the novel is funneled through his static propensities; as flat as he may seem
in contrast with other novelistic heroes, no other character vies for central position – they
are all markedly flat, static characters, tagged as archetypes, so that by committee they
portray a widespread flatness that Waugh seeks to indict the English aristocracy with.
Thus, Paul in his static, bland, unaware manner is as dynamic as Decline and Fall can
allow, and his passivity allows him to function as a transparent camera lens for the reader
to see into the cross-section of such a society. As a novelistic hero, Paul would be a
failure if he was not situated in Waugh’s brand of comedy: that the series of victimization
can ultimately resurrect him to the life he had initially chosen for himself reconciles him
to the status of a sympathetic character. In their own ways, all of the remaining characters
are betrayed by their own flatness, with his pupil Peter, now attending Scone himself, the
most defiled, himself now a drunk:
“Paul, do you remember a thing you said once at the Ritz – Alastair
[Trumpington] was there – that’s Margot Metroland’s young man, you know –
d’you remember? I was rather tight then too. You said, ‘fortune, a much-maligned
lady.’ D’you remember that?” “Yes,” said Paul, “I remember.” “Good old Paul! I
knew you would. Let’s drink to that now; shall we?” . . . “You drink too much,
Peter.” “Oh, damn, what else is there to do?” (Waugh 292)
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Waugh chooses to end his novel grotesquely, with Peter, himself a victim of the
shallowness and dysfunction of the upper class, presented to the reader as a stark
reminder of the realities of the privileged life that Paul was ultimately delivered from.
Even though “the grotesque, the unreasonable, and the cruel are always asserting
themselves in the satirist’s world . . . “ (Greenblatt 10), the sum total of the victimization
of Paul culminates not in his demise but in his deliverance; at his most prosperous
moment, engaged to Margot, leading the life of a bon vivant, the reader finds him at his
most unrealized self, drifting toward becoming the man he is not. The narrator even
makes a deliberate gesture toward outlining this provocative shift in Paul’s character
when he says:
This was the Paul Pennyfeather who had been developing in the placid years
which preceded this story. In fact, the whole of the book is really an account of
the mysterious disappearance of Paul Pennyfeather, so that readers must not
complain if the shadow which took his name does not amply fill the important
part of hero for which he was originally cast. (Waugh 163)
The narrator’s attempt at prompting the reader’s expectations corroborates the conceit
behind Waugh’s comic design. Again, in a more dramatic setting, the didactic
presumption of the narrator here might appear as amateur on the part of Waugh, failing to
remain a transparent vehicle for presenting the story. However, in the comic novel, with a
peculiar hero such as Paul Pennyfeather so isolated from his own fictiveness, yet left to
the discretion and disposal of nearly every external force which he confronts, the narrator
helps here to establish the reader’s expectation that Paul is in fact a developing character,
a detail easily missed due to his passiveness. It is only because “the most outrageous
Nace 41
events are reported with cavalier disregard” (Greenblatt 10) that we as readers can
associate this device as overtly comic.
With the exception of its dark ending and like Tortilla Flat, very little of Decline
and Fall registers to the reader as critical or serious. To all intents and purposes, it is a
work of fiction, which faithfully bears the terms “novel” for its quirkiness and satirical
proclivities. In spite of its comic sensibilities, how far removed in project is it from
Thackeray’s Vanity Fair? As we have shown, the functioning realism of Paul’s character
is manifested comically, himself the consummate victim. Though rebirth is the thematic
achievement of the novel, Waugh realizes this through a series of comic spectacles that
envelop Paul no matter where he is or what he is doing. And where with Steinbeck the
catalyst for the comic spectacle typically involves the absurdity of some extrinsic event,
with Decline and Fall many of its comic spectacles thrive on Paul’s own intrinsic flaws.
Spread evenly across the story, Paul faces the unmitigated scourge of never being
taken seriously by the other characters he associates with. Waugh is unrelenting in
deploying this comic mechanism and, when Salinus finally accurately defines Paul as “a
person clearly meant to stay in the seats and sit still,” the reader is certainly unable to
deny that fact. The full measure of mirth is shared with the reader in these crass, profane
comic moments, such as when Mr. Levy, who is looking to place Paul as a teacher at
Llanaba, reads the job requirements, which include teaching, “Classics and English to
University Standard with Subsidiary Mathematics, German, and French. Experience
essential; First class games essential” (Waugh 13). When Paul admits, “But I don’t know
a word of German, I’ve had no experience, I’ve got no testimonials, and I can’t play
cricket,” Mr. Levy simply deflects, saying, “It doesn’t do to be modest . . . It’s wonderful
Nace 42
what one can teach when one tries” (Waugh 14). And to add to this, Mr. Levy says,
“Between ourselves, Llanaba hasn’t a good name in the profession . . . I think you’ll find
it a very suitable post. So far as I know, there are only two other candidates, and one of
them is totally deaf, poor fellow” (Waugh 14). The preceding example typifies a
masterstroke of the comic genius in action.
In a similar manner, Paul is so confronted with the moral question of whether or
not he should accept from Trumpington a sum of twenty pounds in reparation for his
prank, which led to Paul’s expulsion from Scone. Attempting to explain his inner conflict
to his colleague Grimes, he explore the complexity of matter, saying:
“It is a test case of the durability of my ideals . . . I suppose it’s largely a matter of
upbringing . . . Owing to his party I have suffered irreparable harm. My whole
future is shattered . . . By any ordinary process of thought, the money is justly
mine. But . . . there is my honour. For generations the British bourgeoisie have
spoken of themselves as gentlemen, and by that they have meant, among other
things, a self-respecting scorn of irregular perquisites. It is the quality that
distinguishes the gentlemen from both the artist and the aristocrat. Now I am a
gentleman. I can’t help it: it’s born in me. I just can’t take that money.” (Waugh
54)
Paul’s first moment of principle is Kafkaesque in nature – he senses for the first and last
time in the story an instance where he is obliged by his own morality to decline
Trumpington’s money. Herein the overarching conflict of the novel – to expose the
viciousness of the English aristocracy – set firmly in Paul’s passions on the subject. And
then, of course, Waugh delivers a comic blow, when Grimes admits:
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“I was afraid you might feel like that, so I did my best for you and saved you from
yourself . . . Dear old boy, don’t be angry, but immediately after tea I sent off a
wire to your friend Potts: tell Trumpington send money quick, and signed it
‘Pennyfeather.’” (Waugh 54).
In a pivotal moment for Paul, where for only the first time the reader gains access to his
ideals and experiences his unbridled feelings regarding the incident at Scope, Grimes
disregards and undermines Paul’s grave decision. For where Paul is the victim of the
comic spectacle in Decline and Fall, “Grimes is a powerful life-force existing outside the
pale of conventional morality . . . “ (Greenblatt 11) and the vehicle by which Kundera’s
notion of profanation speaks to the crux of the novel. At once Paul tries and fails to assert
himself over the bourgeoisie, only to be robbed of his noble intentions. Again, like
Kafka’s Karl Rossman, Josef K., and the surveyor, the moment for decisive action is
missed, or the hero’s perception that such a moment exists, proves to be erroneous –
laughable, even. This variable is indeed a species of the comic spectacle, which
summarily invalidates idealism.
Throughout his experience at Llanaba, Paul’s decisions and desires continue to be
transgressed. Not wanting to endear himself to the seedy butler Philbrick, he repeatedly
attempts to stifle the conversation between them:
“I expect you wonder how it is that I come to be here?’ said Philbrick. “No,” said
Paul firmly, “nothing of the kind. I don’t in the least want to know anything about
you; d’you hear?” “I’ll tell you,” said Philbrick; “it was like this –“ “I don’t want
to hear your loathsome confessions; can’t you understand?” “It isn’t a loathsome
Nace 44
confession,” said Philbrick. “It’s a story of love. I think it is without exception the
most beautiful story I know.” (Waugh 63-4)
This example highlights a recurring theme in Decline and Fall where Paul possesses no
power to control his own fate. Just as he is powerless to control his own fate at Scone, he
also cannot control the actions of his friends on his own behalf, nor can he simply decline
conversations. Later, when the school sponsors a day of poorly administered sports as a
prerogative for entertaining the parents of some of the most well-to-do students, the
caustic lady Circumference introduces herself to Paul, asking, “So you’re the Doctor’s
hired assassin, eh? Well, I hope you keep a firm hand on my toad of a son. How’s he
doin’?” (Waugh 85). When Paul responds, “Quite well,” she dismissively retorts,
“Nonsense!” which is the same exact response he receives later in the novel when he
explains to the Governor of the prison he is confined to: “I don’t want to have my
appendix removed. In fact, it was done years ago when I was still at school” (Waugh
271).
Almost all of these examples exemplify the comic spectacle, clearly invented in
Decline and Fall as a means of subjecting Paul to humiliation and ruin, which in turn acts
as the primary catalyst for his own inner development. For when these instances occur –
when Paul’s opinions are disregarded, his admissions dispelled, his desires contradicted,
it comes as a revelation to him that a kernel of truth about himself arises, and, although
the onus for these revelations are extrinsic, they are nonetheless revealing for Paul and
the manner in which he develops. In the case of Trumpington’s money, immediately
afterward Paul is grateful to Grimes for acting on behalf. And it is the mock-appendix
operation that Margot concocts so that Paul may escape from his harsh prison sentence
Nace 45
and eventually leads to his new identity (who, coincidentally, also has the last name of
Pennyfeather) and second chance at finishing his education to become an Anglican
minister. It can be said that there is a kind of serendipitous magic bound up in all of these
proceedings, a formidable force evidenced in both of the novels analyzed here, which
functions not simply as a secondary component of the novelist’s style or for some other
superfluous reasons, but rather as an all-encompassing method for achieving what the
reader of novels appreciates most – realism. For inasmuch as laughter for us soothes the
sufferings rendered in the past and reveals the chaos of the present, so does the comic
landscape, it complexities and perplexities converging, construct a scaffold – however
much an artifice it may be – for the novelistic hero to thrive in a world as boundlessly
ambiguous and profane as our own.
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Chapter 3 -- The Comic Interior in Novelistic Heroes
While there exists an endless array of varying ideas on the subject of novelistic
realism, it is principally the exposition of a novelistic character’s interiority, that intimate
world where readers of novels unlock the similitude that exists between them and their
textual counterparts, where the novelistic world generates its own illusion of a tangible
“third dimension” as Bakhtin calls it. In this sphere, the reader gains access to the novel’s
heroes and is actively involved in reconciling their interiority not only with the novelistic
universe surrounding them, but with their own sensitivities as well.
This phenomenon of the novel is precisely where the stratum that separates the
epic hero from the novelistic hero shifts. This shift in Literature, away from the extrinsic
qualities of the epic hero and toward the intrinsic idiosyncrasies of the novelistic hero,
relates to the project of this thesis in that the purpose of the novelistic hero is to establish
realism in the novel, and, by extension, the presence of comic aesthetics can be
appreciated as a result of the rise of the novel. In the case of the epic, “the story has
taken place and can no longer be denied,” and the epic hero “has been made real through
a development of temporal events” (Eco 108). The epic hero’s audience cannot
experience him as a “living” being in the novelistic sense since the epic hero is always
relegated to either the past or some other abstract timeframe, a tangential plane which
defies the temporal necessities of a human individual, who, in spite of his obsessions
regarding both past and future, is positively a creature of the present. Bakhtin supports
this claim, stating:
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The epic was never a poem about the present, about its own time. . . . The epic, as
a specific genre known to us today, has been from the beginning a poem about the
past, and the authorial position immanent in the epic and constitutive for it . . . is
the environment of a man speaking about a past that is to him inaccessible. . . .
(Bakhtin 13)
Key to Bakhtin’s comment is the idea of inaccessibility: the arcane nature of the epic
hero, disconnected from the reality of the present, only touches the reader as a nostalgic
character, not a particularly realistic one. The idea of crafting fictional characters in a
realistic light is not of particular concern to the epic poet; the epic hero serves as a
mouthpiece for the epic poet to ventriloquize through to the audience, utilizing the
subject matter of the ancient past, not the potentiality of the near future, nor the reality of
the present, to edify and entertain the audience. Thus, it is not necessary for the audience
to identify personally with the epic hero in order for the epic art form to be a success; the
epic audience looks back into the past through their epic hero, unlocking an abstract truth.
Conversely, the success of the novel depends greatly on portraying its novelistic hero in a
manner that must delicately depict the reality of the individual in its realization of the
present and its speculation of the future as an indefinite, shapeable unknown. Therefore,
any truth that the reader of novels comes to realize through its novelistic hero is as a
result of the personal, intimate world he or she accesses and not as a result of abstract
platitudes. Umberto Eco explains:
The “civilisation” of the modern novel offers a story in which the reader’s main
interest is transferred to the unpredictable nature of what will happen and,
therefore, to the plot invention which now holds our attention. The event has not
Nace 48
happened before the story; it happens while it is being told, and usually even the
author does not know what will take place. (Eco 109)
Eco’s contrasting of time elements in the epic and the novel illustrate one of its
overarching features: its real-time function as a fiction of the present is a key factor in
engaging the reader’s imagination with regard to what expectations he applies to the hero.
In other words, it is the situation of the present and the anticipation of the future in the
genre of the novel that leads the reader to engage in expecting and predicting what may
happen and, more important, what the novelistic hero may or may not do in response to
the circumstances of the near future. And it is this set of expectations that affects the
elements of realism as the plot unfolds and the characters react to its unpredictable
nature. For, “The mythic character embodies a law, or a universal demand, and therefore
must be in part predictable and cannot hold surprises for us; the character of a novel
wants, rather, to be a man like anyone else, and what could befall him is as unforeseeable
as what may happen to us” (Eco 109). From this, we can surmise that, using one of Eco’s
constructions, there is an “elisional similitude” between the predictable nature of the
extrinsic, mythic character experienced in the epic, the past, passive temporality of the
epic story which the reader perceives, and the absence of an interior self on the part of the
epic hero; he is a construct of the “national tradition” and therefore all edifice.
Conversely, the novelistic character, situated in the present-minded visage of the
narrative, benefits from the unforeseeable and unexpected, and in turn, renders its reader
a more engaged participant in the mechanism of realism by thinking ahead and predicting
how the hero may behave or react. It is this act of prediction as well as the reaction of the
novelistic hero that I will situate in the discussion of comedy, realism, and the novel.
Nace 49
For the sake of this argument, Umberto Eco’s landmark semiotic book The Role
of the Reader affords us a helpful apparatus for establishing the brand of comic aesthetics
at work in the project of modern novelistic realism. The tenets of Eco’s ideas will then be
applied to Joyce Ulysses which, as will be revealed, renders its hero Leopold Bloom in
stark realism by way of confounding the reader’s expectations as schematized by Eco – a
species of humor’s contractual relationship between the novel and the reader and a
fundamental principle behind comedy’s mechanics – and, by affecting the sense that his
primary hero functions outside the will of the author. This is precisely where comedy
loses its overt spectacle, its extrinsicity, altogether, instead bearing out to the reader the
novelistic hero’s interiority in the most subtle and complex manner. As discussed earlier,
because comic aesthetics are achieved only by way of a participation and agreement
between the author and reader – because the empathetic reaction of laughter can only
commence once the contract of humor is established – an understanding of the
relationship between a novelist’s text and its reader is essential to drawing from a novel
the essence of intrinsic comic features and how they serve as catalysts for the purpose of
establishing the effect of realism. I argue that the comic aesthetic is present to some
degree in all remarkably realistic novelistic heroes, however muted the reaction of
laughter may be in the heart of the reader. I claim that a comic nature exists inside the
spirit of the most beloved novelistic heroes, regardless of how outwardly comic the
project of the novel that hosts them may be, and that both the comic spectacle as well as a
novelistic hero’s comic interiority achieve a perceived reflection of our own lives by way
of suspending and frustrating the biases and expectations of the reader. And though Eco’s
semiotic research does not address comedy directly, its “macropropositional” application
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to the overarching function of novels allows the comic focus I am addressing here, itself a
formal element of the novel, to be plausibly conjoined with Eco’s ideas concerning the
role of the reader. Kant’s idea of laughter and expectation states this claim plainly:
“Laughter is the result of an expectation which, of a sudden, ends in nothing (sic)”
(Bergson 42).
One of the first principles that Eco defines in his discourses is the idea of “The
Model Reader,” a fundamental segment of his semiotic argument that parses the author’s
role in stirring the conceit of the novel by way of anticipating and prompting his reader
with cues (Eco refers to them as “codes”). In his discussion of the Model Reader, he also
considers the conditions that arise when a congruity is established between the concealed
will of the author and the participation of the reader. He states:
To organize a text, its author has to rely upon a series of codes that assign given
contents to the expressions he uses. To make the text communicative, the author
has to assume that the ensemble of codes he relies upon is the same as that shared
by his possible readers. The author has thus to foresee a model of the possible
reader . . . supposedly able to deal interpretively with the expressions in the same
way as the author deals generatively with them. (Eco 7)
In the context of the comic aesthetic, Eco’s quotation reveals how the author anticipates a
reader who is capable of entering into the contract of humor wherein Kundera’s
“suspension of moral belief” can be realized. Such a reader is necessary in order to
foresee the project of novelistic realism achieved – in this case through the comic
aesthetic. For, “if there is a ‘jouissance du texte’ (Barthes 1973), it cannot be aroused and
implemented except by a text producing all the paths of its ‘good’ reading” (Eco 10). Eco
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identifies a key concept: that the novelist must pave expectational pathways between the
text and the reader that are both identifiable and clear in their function in order for a
novel to succeed as a realistic text. And it is this kind of text – a text that streams a series
of cues for its readers to interpret, the kinds of texts that largely concern the critical
reader and scholar – which Eco calls “an open text.”
Even though a text may be seen as “open” by Eco’s standards – its felicitous
communicative exchange between the author and reader deemed successful based on its
ability to involve the reader in responding to expedient cues – its openness is not a
product of ambiguous composition, but rather it is meticulously established through, “the
exactness of the textual project” which, “makes for the freedom of its Model Reader”
(Eco 10). Quite the opposite of ambiguous composition, the superstructure of cues which
guide the reader are expertly deployed when the comic apparatus is well-represented in
the conceit of the novel. Paradoxically, it is the hidden nexus of carefully-plotted cues
which lead the reader toward abandoning a restrictive moral reading and embracing an
existential ambiguity in his perceptions towards the novelistic hero. As Eco aptly states,
“In the last analysis what matters is not the various issues in themselves but the maze-like
structure of the text. You cannot use the text as you want, but only as the text wants you
to use it. An open text, however ‘open’ it be, cannot afford whatever interpolation” (Eco
9). Eco’s analysis here is extraordinary in that it identifies how the novel effectively
guides and even manipulates the reader along a carefully-crafted pathway. Along this
pathway, the reader is confronted with expectational occasions that are both unavoidable
and necessary for exploring the sphere of that particular novelistic sphere. Eco’s idea can
be seamlessly matched with the comic attributes of expectation established by the
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novelist, cued within the context of the narrative, and consummated by the cooperation of
the reader. A text’s openness is defined not simply by what is left out for the reader to
complete, but also by its moral flexibility; its willingness to defy its own pre-established
rules and order. Itself a functional idea of novelistic realism, the same can be said for the
efficacy of comedy: unpredictability is a necessary condition for laughter in the same
manner that it can serve as a precondition for the composition of realistic novelistic
heroes.
Eco’s investigation into the temporal element of the Model Reader continues,
parsing this expectational cognition into two contrasting processes – the fabula and the
sjuzet. These formalist Russian terms deal directly with the interpretative mode of the
reader and how in an open text both are simultaneously appropriated in the practice of
critical reading:
The fabula is the basic story stuff, the logic of actions or the syntax of characters,
the time-oriented course of events. It need not necessarily be a sequence of human
actions (physical or not), but can also concern a temporal transformation of ideas
. . . The plot [sjuzet] is the story as actually told, along with all its deviations,
digressions, flashbacks, and the whole of the verbal devices. (Eco 27)
Whereas the sjuzet constitutes a more discursive and initial surface sense of what Eco
calls “micropropositions,” the fabula, “through an imprecise series of mediatory
abstractions . . .” allows the reader to “elaborate a more precise series of
macropropositions” (Eco 28). Eco’s claim here illustrates a crucial feature of the comic
aesthetic: Because the fabula is not arrived at by the reader once the plot has been fully
unwound at the end of the book, but rather it is a characteristic of the reader’s on-the-fly
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processing of the cues as provided by the narrative (Eco 31), the reader’s processing of
cues and manufacturing of expectations is ongoing, applying new ones at the same time
that previous ones are being met or missed by the protagonist.
Eco anticipates that the study of the fabula in novels may be handled in a more
restrictive manner, such as it is for the purpose of enhancing our understanding of how
ruptured expectation is intertwined with the comic aesthetic in the novel. His restricted
definition of appropriating the fabula, “requires, for instance, for any action an intention,
a person (agent), a state or possible world, a change, its cause, and a purpose – to which,
one can also add mental states, emotions, and circumstances” (Eco 30). As we will see
later on in the analysis of our sample text, these materials of the fabula are indeed the
very evidentiary building blocks of the comic interior of novelistic heroes. Even Eco
identifies the presence of these features as an ideal environment for the reader’s
expectations to be utilized for the purpose of facilitated communication, suggesting that:
“A description of an action should then be complete and relevant while the actions
described should be difficult, the agent should not have an obvious choice . . . the
following events should be unexpected, and some of them should be unusual or strange
(van Dijk, 1974)” (Eco 30). This difficult situation staged by the author and traversed by
the novelistic hero – himself an agent (aware or unaware) for the thematic discourse of
the novel – gives rise to a sense of autonomy and realism on the part of the hero that the
reader beholds as endearingly comic. The hero is endearing precisely because not only is
he an agent of theme, but also an agent of reacting to the expectations that the reader
measures him by. Eco explains that: “To expect means to forecast: the reader
collaborates in the course of the fabula, making forecasts about the forthcoming state of
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affairs. The further states must prove or disprove his hypothesis” (Eco 32). This idea is
essential to understanding how the comic aesthetic fits into the realism of the novel.
While the reader is actively engaged in postulating forecasts as suggested by the author
through a myriad of narrative mechanisms, the novelistic hero plods along unknowingly,
himself ignorant of his own fictitious existence and the realist mechanism of the fabula in
operation around him. And as he confronts the plot points of the sjuzet, with the reader’s
expectations infused into their camouflage, it is here that the novelistic hero can blossom
into comic splendor, missing the mark – however obvious it may seem to the reader – or
finding his or her own way of meeting the heroic challenges posited by the story’s forces
of antagonism. As a rule, only the unexpected is funny and only the unexpected seems
gravely real; convention and status quo only have a place in comedy as expectational
cues for the purpose of conditioning the audience for the comic moment which invariably
deviates from the prosaic. This communicative junction, encountered tautologically in a
wide cross-section of communicative media, is at work most subtly and pervasively in the
art of the novel, as we will witness by exploring one of the genre’s most revered modern
works.
Ulysses
While certainly not lacking in its moments of mirth and wit, Joyce’s Ulysses has
never been strictly categorized as a comic novel. Given its grandiosity and timeless
literary relevance since its publication in 1922, claiming it as a work of comedy would
for Joycean scholars limit the appreciation of its linguistic and narrative significance:
Ulysses is almost Biblical in scope, a work of obsessive beauty and design, polyphonic
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and exhaustively inclusive in detail. Joyce’s claim that if Dublin were destroyed, his
novel could rebuild it brick by brick, is at first a claim of braggadocio. And yet, merely
the intricate superstructure of background, of setting, of landscape, of early 20th Century
Dublin, which, by virtue of the minutiae of its kinetic current of life – almost atomic in its
attention to detail – seems to live on timelessly even after the book is closed. This
aesthetic is centrifugal to Joyce’s project: that mortaring brick after brick of obsessive
detail drives the novel infinitely towards the real. Kundera heralds this aesthetic to be
indispensable to the affectation of realism in the novel. First, speaking of the history of
the background scene in painting, he states that, “the imbalance, in a painting , between
the privileged areas and those that are, a priori, secondary still had to be compensated for,
remedied, brought back into balance” (Kundera 155). With this idea of balance in mind,
Kundera appreciates novelists such as Joyce to be part of a movement of writers who, by
their construction of novelistic spheres realize that, “since it is meticulous casual logic
that makes events so convincing, no link of the chain can be omitted (However devoid of
interest it may be in itself)” and, “since the characters must appear to be ‘living,’ as much
data about them as possible must be reported (however unremarkable)” (Kundera 154).
These are two crucial mechanisms which comprise “a whole apparatus for fabricating the
illusion of reality” (Kundera 154). Thomas Mann, of similar mind on this topic, echoes
this idea in his foreword to The Magic Mountain in which the narrator states that he:
. . . shall tell [the story] at length, in precise and thorough detail – for when was a
story short on diversion or long on boredom simply because of the time and space
required for the telling? Unafraid of the odium of appearing too meticulous, we
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are much more inclined to the view that only thoroughness can be truly
entertaining. (Mann xii)
Indeed, the meticulous array of detail greatly contributes to the reader’s sense of realism
in a novel such as Ulysses. After all, one of the most remarkable qualities of the novel as
a genre is how, from its origins, it has managed to captivate its readers not by weaving
epic tales of larger-than-life heroes functioning on the vaguest of moral platitudes, but by
depicting no more than the typical and the mundane in the external lives of its heroes, and
the most private and intimate in their interior, reaching, “its apogee, its very monument,
in James Joyce’s Ulysses, which in nearly eight hundred pages describes eighteen hours
of life . . . In Joyce, a single second of the present becomes a little infinity” (Kundera
129). With this feature omnipresent in the novel, it is no wonder that obsessive detail and
a variety of narrative approaches capture our contemporary understanding of one
characteristic which marks a novel as impressive.
And so, when we contemplate the period of the 1920s and 1930s, including
Ulysses with a discussion of the comic aesthetic in novels that began with Tortilla Flat
and Decline and Fall may seem dismissive of its literary importance. And yet, Ulysses
can be seen as Bakhtin’s quintessential novelistic model when he describes novels as
becoming, “more free and flexible, their language renew[ing] itself by incorporating
extraliterary heteroglossia and the ‘novelistic’ layers of literary language, they become
dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, [and] elements of self-parody . . .”
(Bakhtin 7). All of these elements (with special emphasis on humor and laughter) account
for Joyce’s hefty layer of detail. However, although the arc of realism might progress
exponentially and infinitely towards the Real in fiction as more and more detail is
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accrued, the reader never experiences as fully as it is experienced in the exposition of the
novelistic hero’s interiority: the most brilliantly-conceived background stage set can
never replace the actors who comprise the foreground; without its characters, the
narrative would only have façade to behold. Iser states that, “The unstructured material of
Ulysses is taken directly from life itself, but. . . it cannot be taken for life itself” and so
“When details no longer serve to reinforce probability or to stabilize the illusion of
reality, they must become a sort of end in themselves, such as one finds in the art-form of
the collage” (Iser 198). Since the claim here is that comic aesthetics are at work in the
preponderance of realism in the novel, Ulysses offers an astoundingly sophisticated,
connotative deployment of comedy. Myles na Gopaleen aptly recognized that Joyce “was
a great master of the banal in Literature. By “banal,” I mean the fusion of uproarious
comic stuff and deep tragedy” (from G xiv), which is indeed the concoction that leads
readers of novels toward verisimilitude.
Of its panoply of themes and allusions, Ulysses achieves its cogent and elemental
themes of love and the railing against hatred and history by reappropriating the
characteristics which comprise a hero. While the previous two centuries of the European
novel had all but exploded the epic model from its heroes, Ulysses, as Richard Ellmann
states in his preface, finds its heroes to be “reconceived: they offer new blends of heroism
and mock-heroism” (Ellmann ix). Indeed, a primary component of Joyce’s success in
achieving such a fresh approach to the novelistic hero stems from the fact that, “their
thoughts are disclosed in internal monologues that register the slightest waverings of
consciousness or of the world that surrounds consciousness” (Ellmann ix). To be sure,
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reworking the Odyssean hero is implicit in Ulysses, or otherwise the Homeric parallel,
itself an apparent cue for such discursiveness, would be deemed superfluous.
Instead, Joyce recreates the Odyssean hero not in the epic tradition, but rather by
utilizing the power of the novel: Iser notes that the novelistic revision of the epic is
implicit in the entirety of the novel’s details, stating that as the reader experiences the
novel,
. . . he finds that everyday life in Dublin is, so to speak, continually breaking its
banks, and the resultant flood of detail induces the reader to try and build his own
dams of meaning – though these in turn are inevitably broken down. . . . [T]he
apparent lack of connection between the many details creates the impression of a
thoroughly chaotic world . . . one wonders what the return of Ulysses in modern
trappings is supposed to signify. (Iser 199)
Here we see how this ambiguous, subjective, “chaotic” minutiae of urban life teeming
uncontrollably behind the foreground is in itself a stage set for comic aesthetics to thrive.
The unpredictability of the background leads the reader to experience the seemingly
uncontrolled, autonomous nature of its novelistic hero, whose sense of realism rises out
of this chaos. Leopold Bloom assumes the role of the modern novelistic hero through the
interplay between the manners in which his interiority unknowingly defies the
expectation of the reader as established by Joyce through his panoptical narrative
medium. Bloom succeeds in obtaining this heroic status by saving Dedalus and his own
marriage while defending his commitment to the novel’s virtuous themes against the
forces of anti-Semitism and hatred.
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The comic nature of this fulfillment is realized not because Bloom possesses a
decisive, epic nature, but rather because of his tendency to perform against the reader’s
expectations, and his propensity for being victimized by his own weaknesses. Bloom
conceived of and portrayed as a half-bred Jew together with the contextual Christ figure
cue can be seen as a particularly prime example of this idea, and might be easily
categorized not as heroism but of mock-heroism. However, the widespread and consistent
reappearance of its conceit throughout the novel deserves careful consideration, not
simply to be dismissed as mere satire. Joyce’s appropriation of it demonstrates the notion
of the comic interior, an aspect of Bloom’s spirit which, as a mechanism of realism,
serves Joyce in drawing Bloom as one of the more mystifying creatures of realism found
in the 20th Century novel. Even before Bloom’s introduction in chapter four, Joyce
establishes for the reader a streak of deep-rooted anti-Semitism which Bloom repeatedly
encounters, finally concluding with him and Dedalus when they meet in the latter
chapters of the book. But for the purposes of understanding Bloom as a comic character,
we must first appreciate Stephen’s role as his tragic foil.
Prior to Bloom’s entrance, we find Stephen Dedalus enduring his employer, Mr.
Deasy: “Mark my words, Mr. Dedalus, he said. England is in the hands of the jews. In all
the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the sign of a nation’s decay”
(Joyce 28). Deasy continues his anti-Semitic banter at the very end of chapter two when
he quips to Stephen as he departs the school:
-- I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honor of being the only
country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know that? No. And do you
know why? He frowned sternly on the bright air. – Why, sir, Stephen asked,
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beginning to smile. – Because she never let them in, Mr. Deasy said solemnly. A
coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a rattling chain of
phlegm. (Joyce 30)
As we see here, before Bloom appears in chapter four, Joyce positions Stephen in such a
way that he must confront these sentiments in the figure of Mr. Deasy, who, self-
possessed with his prejudices, personifies the anti-themes of both history and hatred that
later bonds him and Bloom so impressionably. Deasy’s sentiments are in lock-step with
the men that Bloom must confront in the pub later on in the novel. Joyce has so deftly, so
subtly fitted such a lofty thematic axiom into the milieu of the life of this young Dubliner,
as though testing it first against the tragic construct of Stephen before it is to be unleashed
on Bloom. The forces of anti-Semitism will be the onus for Bloom to interact with his
elusive Christ figure role, thus engaging the occasion for his own interior comic
tendencies to develop. But for now the reader has only Stephen to consider: how he reacts
to these anti-Semitic sentiments, and then, later on, how his reactions to them will differ
from those of Bloom.
Stephen does manage to mount a defense against these anti-Semitic ideas –
chapter two and his command of the classroom is perhaps Stephen’s sole attempt at a
heroic moment in the novel – both at the expense of his students and Deasy. After
confounding the former with his convoluted riddle, Stephen answers Mr. Deasy’s anti-
Semitic comments: “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to
awake,” and then, “from the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal.
What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?” (Joyce 28). Deasy answers Stephen’s
indictment of history with a platitude, a vapid abstraction of the historical mindset,
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replying that, “all human history moves toward one great goal, the manifestation of God,”
to which, “Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying: -- That is God,”
indicating the children at play (Joyce 28). Stephen’s response encapsulates the ideology
of Ulysses, the heroic ideology that Bloom wrestles with for the remaining majority of
the novel. In this manner he is an asset to Joyce and, in this rare and particular moment,
where Stephen manages to make his feelings known rather lucidly to both the reader and
to Mr. Deasy, he functions according to his predetermined role.
However, Stephen’s tragic nature as Bloom’s foil is unable to perform heroically
against these forces of history and hatred. It is a character trait that Joyce hard-wires into
Stephen’s construct: from the outset of the novel, he is repeatedly victimized and hurt by
the world around him: by his friends and peers, his father, the sinister violence of the city,
and even his own inner voice. Over and over again, Stephen suffers at the hands of a
novelistic world utterly incongruous with himself, which, as Eco states, “involves the
character in a series of events, reversals, recognitions, pitiful and terrifying cases that
culminate in a catastrophe” (Eco 110) – much more so than the previously-studied works
which exploit the comic spectacle to their own realist ends – and yet the result is not a
comically realistic character, but rather a figure of tragedy, a foil for the reader to contrast
against Bloom. Stephen Dedalus, aware of these lofty themes at play in his own decline –
the lack of love left in the vacuum of his mother’s death and the alienation from his
family, as well as his incongruity with the hegemony of modern Irish culture – has,
unlike Bloom, such a focused, realized perspective of how these elements frustrate and
conquer him. As a result,
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The perplexing effect of the monologue derives mainly from the fact that the
individual sentences or passages, which all deal with recognizable but unrelated
themes, are simply set side by side without any apparent connection. Thus the
vacant spaces in the text increase dramatically in number . . . They prevent the
reader from correlating what he observes, with the result that the facets of the
external world – as evoked by Stephen’s perception – are constantly made to
merge into one another. (Iser 209-210)
And because of this self-omniscience, inherent in his construction as a novelistic
character, there is little left to be developed in him through the imagination of the reader;
he is a tragic character, whose only function is to assist Bloom in completing his own
inner reconciliations with his emotional estrangement from Molly, the loss of his infant
son Rudy, and the hostile community that he encounters in his daily life, and to assist the
reader in experiencing Bloom as a remarkably autonomous novelistic hero. To be sure,
juxtaposing a tragic figure or “straight man” alongside a comedian is a well-known
convention. Clearly the complementing nature of Stephen and Bloom functions similarly
in order to tease out the magical moments where Bloom becomes so tangible to the
reader. But of course, this isn’t to say that Stephen’s character never converges on comic
landscapes.
Joyce introduces Ulysses to the reader not with drama, but with levity, a smart,
Wilde-like wit. Buck Mulligan, a comic archetype that might just as well be found in the
comic works of Waugh or “The Importance of Being Earnest,” is the ordained master of
ceremonies, a profane, flippant cynic and intellectual, “the spirit that always denies”
(Joyce xiii) and, for all intents and purposes, a bully. He ascribes a litany of jeering
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nicknames and diminutives to Stephen from the outset, calling, “Come on, Kinch! Come
up, you fearful Jesuit!” (Joyce 3). All throughout the chapter, Buck lampoons his friend,
exploiting Stephen’s secular humanist beliefs, his work as a scholar, and the events
surrounding the death of Stephen’s mother, all of which Stephen anguishes over, unable
to defend himself in the wake of Mulligan’s wit. The “Stately, plump” Buck Mulligan, if
he can be so easily understood as a mere composite, clearly foreshadows the robust
forces of the novel’s antagonist, not as facile and straightforward as a villain, but rather a
network of sinister psychological threads which Joyce establishes throughout the milieu
of Dublin life.
Stephen is portrayed as passive, powerless, and fearful of these forces, his own
passions and talents nothing more than manifestations of his ineptitude, reminders of his
own personal failures. From the moment of his introduction into the novel, looking
“displeased and sleepy,” he endures Mulligan’s mock blessings, finally inquiring, “How
long is Haines going to stay in the tower?” (Joyce 4). Fearful of being killed during one
the Englishman’s violent, raving nightmares, Stephen admits to Buck, “You saved men
from downing. I’m not a hero, however. If he stays on here I am off” (Joyce 4). In
addition to suggesting Stephen’s subsequent expulsion from the tower, an expulsion that
he fully anticipates, this quote illustrates one of Stephen’s tragic qualities which
disqualify him from possessing a truly comic interior: he fully realizes what he is and
what he is not; he is in command and fully aware of his tragic condition and remains
static within it. Joyce builds off of this foundation, exposing the reader to the bits of
rambling frustrations he encounters emotionally in the midst of the morning spent with
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Haines and Buck. Mulligan challenges him, “Look at yourself, you dreadful bard!”
(Joyce 4) upon which:
Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked
crack. Hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This
dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too. – I pinched it out of the skivvy’s room,
Buck Mulligan said. . . . Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from
Stephen’s peering eyes. (Joyce 4)
The construction of this fleeting moment is indeed witty, not at all dissimilar from the
comic examples already discussed in both Tortilla Flat and Decline and Fall: the action of
the scene – Buck Mulligan continuing to mock Stephen and admitting that he has stolen
the mirror from a skivvy – is indeed comedic. However, what deflates the opportunity for
comic realism to be realized in Stephen here is his connectedness to the will of the
author, his acquaintance to the expectation that he is indeed a somber, defeated victim,
playing the puppet role for Joyce and building toward his role as tragic foil for Bloom.
The scene may have continued in comic fashion, but Stephen’s internal monologue
squelches that opportunity. “As he and others see me” is a recurring concern for Dedalus,
and it reveals his designated sensitivity to the sources on conflict throughout the novel.
He is, however, unable to traverse them heroically as Bloom does; he can only be
victimized by them, awaiting rescue. Following his gaze into the mirror, “Drawing back
and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness – it is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked
lookingglass of a servant” (Joyce 4). Stephen ascribes symbolic meaning to the mirror
since it aptly pictorializes the distorted vision it maintains according to his own
perceptions, a sensation that Bloom relates to as well. As he peers into this “symbol of
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Irish art,” realizing that it criticizes him through its distortedness (“It asks me too”), he is
powerless to even turn away from it – Buck finally removes it from his sight:
Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen’s and walked with him around
the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had thrust them. –
It’s not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, is it? He said kindly. God knows you
have more spirit them any of them. Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as
I fear that of his. The cold steel pen. (Joyce 4)
Though evoking a mental image of a comic spectacle, the levity, the wit, and the subtle
irony that, situated in the comic aesthetic, is left to be discovered by the imagination of
the reader, is suppressed by Stephen’s incessant, obsessively sensitive internalization of
the moment, embodied in his need to parse every dialogue, every exposure, to the
strengths and weaknesses of his character. There are many examples of this realization in
the scenes that involve Stephen and Mulligan, with Mulligan’s antics further illustrating
Stephen’s shrill, tragic internal voice. And because it is Stephen’s mind that the reader
has access to, the comic nature of Buck Mulligan only augments Stephen’s tragic
qualities.
The alienation from Irish hegemony which bonds Stephen and Bloom is again
tested against Stephen’s tragic manner in Chapter one as well when the milkmaid arrives,
complimenting Mulligan: “Stephen listened in scornful silence. She bows her old head to
a voice that speaks to her loudly, her bonesetter, her medicineman: me she slights” (Joyce
12). Dedalus feels everything slipping from him – in more esoteric terms, his Irish
identity, and in the moment of this particular day, his residence at the tower. He
recognizes it before it has even happened, his frustration brimming over when he finally
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confronts Haines, who comments: “Personally I couldn’t stomach that idea of a personal
God. You don’t stand for that, I suppose?” to which Stephen replies: “You behold in me,
Stephen said with a grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought” (Joyce 17).
This final rupture leads Stephen to realize that he will depart from the tower for good: “A
wavering line along the path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark. He
wants that key. It is mine. I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt bread. Give him the key, too.
All. He will ask for it. That was in his eyes” (Joyce 17). Just as we see here, there are few
examples of success or vindication in Stephen’s experiences throughout Ulysses – he is
consistently subjected to the tragic forces of the novel. Even when he is absent, the
verdant, witty mirth of his father in conversation with Bloom as they travel to Paddy
Dignam’s funeral seems to further Stephen to an ineffectual, incapable tragic figure.
By the end of the chapter, Stephen finds himself participating in his own
victimization, or unable to prevent it from happening, just as he was unable to turn from
the oppressive gaze of the cracked mirror. As Buck is bathing, he says to Stephen:
Give us that key, Kinch . . . to keep my chemise flat. Stephen handed him the key.
Buck Mulligan laid it across his heaped clothes. – And twopence, he said, for a
pint. Throw it here. Stephen threw two pennies on the soft heap. Dressing,
undressing. Buck Mulligan erect, with joined hands before him, said solemnly: He
who stealeth from the poor lendth to the Lord. Thus spake Zarathustra. (Joyce 19)
At first glance at this quote, with Stephen giving in to Buck’s commands, one might
equate Stephen’s passive servility to similar acts of fleecing and bilking observed in both
Tortilla Flat and Decline and Fall. However the nature of Stephen’s victimhood is quite
different in that his responses are what the reader might expect, given his static nature:
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Stephen himself is left powerless in the vacuum of his humorless interior; the contract
between the reader and novel is disengaged, and Mulligan’s coarse spirit, encompasses a
wide spectrum of the comic mechanism, from familiar mirth to biting derision, leads not
to an expose of Stephen’s empathy-evoking innocence, but to a presentation of
antagonistic forces – the subtle forces that replace the epic monsters of The Odyssey –
which Bloom subsequently must face not only for himself, but for Stephen as well.
Stephen is the consummate victim, a tragedy waiting to be saved.
The compiling of these various examples portray Stephen’s role as a tragic foil
and “soul in need of saving,” operating outside of the comic paradigm and therefore
functioning as an agent of the author and his thematic intentions, so that, in contrast,
Leopold Bloom can be accurately appreciated as a beneficiary of the comic interior
model. For as we will see, Bloom, too, is subjected to a myriad of antagonistic forces in
Ulysses which parallel the ones cited in our observation of Stephen. To be more precise,
Bloom’s centrality to the novel brings him in near constant contact with these forces –
much more so than Stephen – though his reaction to them is markedly different from
Stephen’s, and this difference brings the comic interior into focus for a novelistic hero.
Where the reader witnesses Stephen behaving in accordance with his assigned role as per
the will of the author and the expectations of the reader, playing off his narrative cues and
teasing out the thematic frames of the story, Bloom on the other hand fails to perform
commensurately with the cues and expectations which manifest themselves throughout
the day; he unknowingly defies them, and fulfills Eco’s claim that: “the character of a
novel wants . . . to be a man like anyone else, and what could befall him is as
unforeseeable as what may happen to us” (Eco 109). When Joyce cues the reader and
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piques expectation, Bloom benefits from the realist artifice of the comic aesthetic found
in novels. For, when one’s expectations are unfulfilled in the atmosphere of humor’s
suspended state of ambiguity, amidst the veiled voyeurism of the novel reader’s
privileged position of observation, what is discovered is a novelistic hero who appears to
exist outside the will of the author.
Bloom’s interplay with the suggested failed Christ figure provides a fascinating
entrance into Joyce’s use of exploding readers’ expectations by way of comically
subjecting his hero’s interiority to the novel’s antagonistic forces. The “issue” of anti-
Semitism deeply pervades Ulysses, and it serves as the hegemonic pretense for Bloom’s
proximity to the Savior imagery imbedded both in the narrative and in his own conflicted
thought patterns. Like a series of Freudian slips, these allusions and suggestions
intersperse with vagaries and vulgarities, their deliberate, suggesting power lost on the
unsuspecting Bloom: only the reader, observing high above the labyrinth of various
voices, narration intermingled with internal monologue, the camera lens panning from its
central focus, understands the meticulousness of imbedded cues Joyce leaves for him. It
seems at times it is only Bloom who misses them altogether. Yet it is this particular
quality of Bloom’s that the reader finds endearing and leads to such a peculiar brand of
heroism on his part, a realist-steeped heroism defined in comic terms. For, “There is
nothing heroic about Bloom, nothing outstanding in any way; it is difficult at first sight to
see why anyone should want to write about him” (Watt 207). It is this quality that
personifies Bloom as a comic hero, since the unaware, unassuming quality of his
character is what makes him so heroic: when Bloom finally manages to achieve a victory,
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whether it be internally or externally, the victory seems to the reader to be truly earned by
Bloom’s own doing, and not merely led to conquest by Joyce.
Chapter five’s scene in the church introduces the Christ cues to the reader. Here
the narrator, Joyce’s lesser-used narrative agent, suggests an expectation for the reader to
apply to Bloom: a tactile, spiritual calling which draws Bloom into the church: “The cold
smell of sacred stone called him. He trod the worn steps, pushed the swingdoor and
entered softly by the rere” (Joyce 66). The reader expects something spiritual,
transcendental in the works with Bloom as the narration gives way to his autoresponsive
stream of consciousness. The ensuing succession of thoughts, however, explodes that
expectation:
Something going on: some sodality. Pity so empty. Nice discreet place to be next
some girl. Who is my neighbor? Jammed in by the hour to slow music. That
woman at midnight mass. Seventh heaven. Woman knelt in the benches with
crimson halters round their necks, heads bowed. A batch knelt at the alterrails.
The priest went along by them, murmuring, holding the thing in his hands. He
stopped off at each, took out a communion, shook a drop or two (are they in
water?) off it and put it neatly in her mouth . . . waiting for it to melt in their
stomachs. (Joyce 66)
Here we notice a reversal of expectation that is undeniably comic in its conception.
Rather than cueing on the solemnity of the mass, Bloom quite naturally, quite
automatically sensualizes the moment, keying on the church as a locale for sexualized
fantasy as opposed to piety. This passage exemplifies Kundera’s idea that the profane is
bound up in the mechanics of comic realism. Yet interspersed between these banalities,
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Bloom’s mind fires in Christo-centric “artifacts,” punctuated by question marks which
denote Bloom’s own surprise at their appearance. In the above quotation we recall “(are
they in water?)” a suggestion of Baptism, then as the paragraph continues: “What?
Corpus: body,” an allusion to “this is My body,” and, later on, “Christ or Pilate? Christ”
an unconscious acknowledgement (Joyce 66-67). These examples of Bloom’s half-
conscious self-analysis shows that the Christ figure expectation emanates from the will of
the author telegraphed into Bloom’s stream of consciousness: the suggestion even
manifests itself in the form of self-questioning moments of near-revelation. But it is
Bloom’s consciousness, exquisitely real, that suppresses them into an ordinary or sexual
thought.
It is the suppression of these suggestions that continuously render Leopold Bloom
as a novelistic hero that seems to function completely outside the will of the author. A
prime example of this occurs as Bloom observes the priest after Communion has been
distributed to the sodality:
He saw the priest stow the communion cup away, well in, and kneel an instant
before it, showing a large grey boot-sole from under the lace affair he had on.
Suppose he lost the pin of his. He wouldn’t know what to do. Bald spot behind.
Letters on his back: I.N.R.I? No: I.H.S. Molly told me one time I asked her. I
have sinned: or no: I have suffered, it is. And the other one? Iron nails ran in.
(Joyce 66)
Again, the narrator only sets the scene and summarily recedes so that Bloom’s thoughts
may come to light. In this thought sequence, Bloom only notices the banal, the temporal,
the corporal dimension of the priest, focusing on the dark boot peeking out of an
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otherwise angelic façade of the priest’s undergarments. Bloom’s concentration on the
mortal element leads again to a confrontation with hints of his Christ role, when he
corrects “I have sinned,” with “I have suffered,” and finally, “Iron nails ran in,” a
powerful suggestion of the crucifixion.
As the reader observes this exchange of suggestions and propositions by the
narrator and Bloom’s failure to realize it, his failure to consummate this expectation
renders him in the image of our comic model. For his own limitations and idiosyncrasies
– the kind that the reader identifies with – limit him from realizing the role of the Christ-
like savior he is at first seemingly positioned to assume. And Bloom failing to perform in
the Christ figure expectation serves Joyce well, since by failing to perceive the Christ
role, he negates not only the expectation for an epic hero to emerge in Bloom as
suggested by the Homeric parallel embedded in the conceit of Ulysses, but also the
infallibility of the Christ figure, which would if realized by Bloom close up the occasion
for moral failure and ignorance that Joyce relies on in order for Bloom to seem so real in
the eyes of the reader: “If one looks at Bloom against the background of Ulysses, one is
immediately struck by . . . the many features of [his] conduct that either go beyond or fall
short of what we know of Ulysses’s character” (Iser 229). So the reader looks with
sympathy, with fondness on the unknowing, unsuspecting Leopold Bloom – the position
of an omniscient creature – who recognizes Bloom to be comprised of the same imperfect
proclivities, made in his image and likeness. The scene ends with Bloom catching himself
not in the midst of this comically connotative moment of nonfulfillment, but rather a bit
humiliation which goes unnoticed by everyone in the church, by all except the reader:
“He stood up. Hello. Were those two buttons of my waistcoat open all the time? Women
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enjoy it . . . Good job it wasn’t farther south. He passed, discreetly buttoning, down the
aisle and out through the main door” (Joyce 68). Whereas the comic spectacle is
extrinsic, proceeding within the sphere of the novel’s own universe, here the comic
aesthetic of Bloom’s interior proceeds between he and the reader, so that this
embarrassing moment only impacts Bloom’s interior and the perceptions of the reader.
Thus, whereas, “a character in a tragedy will make no change in his conduct because he
will know how it is judged by us,” we find exemplified in Bloom that, “a comic character
is generally comic in proportion to his ignorance of himself. The comic person is
unconscious” (Bergson 8). He is “a person embarrassed by his body,” (Bergson 25)
grounded to the affectation of realism not through his platitudes, but rather his banalities.
The same is true of the fleeting echoes of the Christ role that pass unappreciated
through Bloom’s mind. Joyce repeats it intermittently throughout the novel: at the end of
Chapter five, Bloom muses, “This is my body” (Joyce 71) as he soaks in his bath, an
image which recalls the church scene just before, and at the start of Chapter eight, when a
young evangelist hands Bloom a religious pamphlet: “A somber Y.M.C.A. young man,
watchful among the warm sweet fumes of Graham Lemon’s, placed a throwaway in a
hand of Mr. Bloom. Heart to heart talks. Bloo . . . Me? No. Blood of the Lamb. His slow
feet walked him riverward, reading. Are you saved? All are washed in the blood of the
lamb” (Joyce 124). Though a random ordinary moment on the streets of Dublin for
Bloom, the reader understands the importance of this scene. Again, Bloom’s own psyche
is imbued with the suggestion of a Christ figure, emanating from a coded question that he
asks himself, sparked by a quick misreading of the religious pamphlet. “Bloo . . . Me?”
links Bloom’s name with “Blood of the Lamb,” the powerful allusion to Christ’s sacrifice
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on the cross in the book of Revelation, an example of an even more direct cue than those
that were cited earlier, which again goes awry. As he continues to read, Bloom’s heroic
qualities ruminate in the Christ imagery, while Bloom himself is ignorant of his power
and destiny in this light; whereas Stephen’s meta-cognitive stream of thoughts
foreshadow for the reader all that is at stake thematically, Bloom’s human traits only
allow him to live in the moment of the word, a tangential trait borne out of his
independence and autonomy as a novelistic hero.
The ingenuity of Ulysses’ comic realism owes itself in part to the ever-reaching
panoply of narrative textures: while the tonic narrator is functioning in a third person
omniscient voice, Joyce constantly modulates this perspective, allowing the thoughts of
his primary characters as well as various narrative constructs (such as the play-like
narratives featured in Chapter fifteen, complete with stage direction) to overtake the
narrative, eventually reducing the omniscient narrator to nothing more than introductions
and egress: “In order to moderate, if not actually to neutralize, the interpretative nature of
style, Joyce called upon virtually every stylistic mode that the novel had evolved during
its comparatively short history” (Iser 203). It is in this way, by accentuating its limited
narratives, and then presenting an obsessive number of them to the reader, that Joyce
continues to suggest the Christ figure expectation for Bloom as the chapters continue,
eventually shifting the cues from the intrinsic to the extrinsic. Chapter twelve’s scene at
Kiernan’s pub gives way to this limited, prejudiced narrative, infused with the novel’s
forces of hatred, and Bloom put to the challenge of confronting and defending the virtue
of love and indicting these destructive forces in the face of his own victimization. It is the
first overt realization of Bloom as a hero, standing up to his peers, defending his position.
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His ejaculations would appear as positively epic if it wasn’t for the comic element
interwoven in this clash of thematic forces: Bloom’s defense of love’s virtue is so
understated, so unstable in spite of its truthfulness and honesty, that the reader cannot
help but perceive him as an honest, independent broker of the novel’s themes, not simply
acting on behalf of the author’s will. And the ensuing persecution and mockery the reader
experiences after Bloom’s agree solidifies both the expectation the reader is primed for
and the autonomy that Bloom enjoys by failing to perform by it.
Because Chapter twelve’s narrative voice is quite limited, and because the reader
loses access to Bloom’s rambling interiority for the duration of the scene, Joyce implants
the Christ figure cues into the insinuations of the secondary characters’ conversation. The
suggestions begin just as Bloom appears at the doorway of the pub, fearful of entering
because of an intimidating dog:
—There he is again, says the citizen, staring out. – Who? Says I. – Bloom, says
he. He’s on point duty up and down there for the last ten minutes. And, begob, I
saw his physog do a peep in and then slider off again. Little Alf was knocked
bawways, Faith, he was. – Good Christ! Says he. I could have sworn it was him.
(Joyce 248)
From the very beginning of this scene, the narrator and his allies foster an immediate and
derisive attitude toward Bloom and, because the reader has no access to Bloom’s
thoughts on the matter, he is effectively objectified. As their conversations maunder
along, Bloom’s personality in these conversations finally gives rise to the narrator’s ire:
So off they started about Irish sports and shoneen games the like of lawn tennis . .
. And of course Bloom had to have his say too . . . if you took up a straw from the
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bloody floor and if you said to Bloom: Look at, Bloom. Do you see that straw?
That’s a straw. Declare to my aunt he’d talk about it for an hour so he would at
talk steady. (Joyce 260)
Bloom’s parsing, reaching intellect, in search of nuance, disrupts the flatness of his
cronies: the complexity of his character is precisely what drives them to resent him and
foment their anti-Semitic prejudices. Later on in the conversation when Bloom tries to
change the subject after Blazes Boylan is mentioned, his cronies take to blatant snubs:
—I heard so and so made a cool hundred quid over it, says Alf. – Who? Blazes?
Says Joe. And says Bloom: -- What I meant about tennis, for example, is the
agility and training the eye. – Ay, Blazes, says Alf. He let out that Myler was on
the beer to run up the odds and he swatting all the time . . . And Bloom cuts in
again about lawn tennis and the circulation of the blood, asking Alf: -- Now, don’t
you think, Bergan? – Myler dusted the floor with him, says Alf. (Joyce 261)
Bloom’s exasperating desire to shift the conversation away from Boylan is palpable. And
the ensuing lack of respect that Alf pays him in this broken interchange is only seconded
by the narrator who aptly highlights it for the reader. Thus, the reader beholds his hero in
a disagreeable situation, unable to control the conversation, given his colleagues’ biases
against him. From Bloom’s role as the booby, however, emerges his first portrayal of the
novelistic hero, set in the atmosphere of the comic interior.
Joyce overtly intermingles the cues and implications of the Christ figure in the
midst of this comic moment, when Bloom stumbles across the crux of Ulysses’ thematic
message. The subject is broached by accident, when the citizen carelessly comments:
“Pity about her . . . Or any other woman marries a half and half” upon which Bloom
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nervously replies, “How half and half? . . . Do you mean he . . .” (Joyce 263). The issue
of Bloom’s Jewish roots periodically appear throughout the novel, and in the cold
empirical voice of Chapter seventeen, when the narrator asks: “Had Bloom and Stephen
been baptized, and where and by whom, cleric or layman?” he answers, “Bloom (three
times)” as if baptizing him three times would wash away his Jewishness (Joyce 558). As
the tension mounts, Bloom’s resolve to defend his heritage increases and, in a turn that
can only be appreciated as comically ironic, comments to the citizen: “Some people . . .
can see the mote in others’ eyes but they can’t see the beam in their own” (Joyce 267),
ironic, of course, that Bloom’s heroic candor here is built on the words of Christ.
It is here that we witness the conflation of the comic with the pathos-driven drama
of the novel: the platform of mockery and suppressed invective that Bloom is subjected to
in this hostile scene – a scene where he is depicted as victimized by the vanity of these
pub mates and Bloom’s status as a denizen (he even refuses to drink with them, opting
for a cigar instead) – that we see Alf’s careless comment allow the moment to cross from
comic victimization into gravitas. Absent Bloom’s thoughts on the matter, the reader is
engaged in contemplating this scene as an inverse of the previously-discussed selections;
to be sure, it is by far Bloom’s most epic, extrinsically-heroic moment, his whole being
acting in solidarity. The reader sees in him the beginning of his heroic fulfillment. After
the citizen challenges him by asking, “What is your nation if I may ask?” Bloom
demonstrably answers, “Ireland . . . I was born here. Ireland” (Joyce 272). Given the
“Irishness” of Ulysses – the obsessively detailed construction of its Irish façade – the
reader understands implicitly that Bloom has challenged the representatives of the
negative forces in the novel to defend the most serious stake – that of the identity of
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Ireland. There is no greater threat to the pub mates than to have Bloom – the intellect, the
lover of love, the supposed Freemason, and the half Jew – define their homeland.
The reader brings to this conflict the full measure of bloom’s fallibility, having
collected along the way all his vulgarities and banalities, as well as his psychic limits. In
short, the reader carries over Bloom’s interiority, painted in the atmosphere of the comic
aesthetic, to this pivotal moment in the novel where Bloom fulfills his Christ role, albeit
unknowingly, when he continues: “And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated
and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant . . . Robbed . . .
Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs to us by right. At this very
moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold by auction in Morocco like slaves or cattle”
(Joyce 273). Though the reader can only judge by his actions and words, Bloom’s
diatribe yet again inverts an expectation. It is an expectation constructed over the course
of the novel which grooms the reader into regarding Bloom as similarly passive-
aggressive as Stephen, noncommittal in moments where the antagonistic forces must be
met. In light of that regard, Bloom disrupts the reader’s expectations of his heroic
capabilities; the portrait of the delionized cuckold, the misfit, rallies his will to confront
not only the ideas of hatred, but the forces at work at destroying him “at this very
moment . . . putting up his fist.” It is precisely here that Bloom proves his heroic worth,
and it allows the reader yet another occasion to witness his character confounding all that
might be expected or anticipated of him. This scene sets the stage for his saving of
Dedalus from similar forces of hatred – engendered in the likes of Buck Mulligan and
Haines – and his eroding relationship with Molly as well.
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The conflict concludes with Bloom’s most Christ-like declaration of theme in the
entirety of the novel. When Bloom answers the citizen’s mockery by stating, “I’m talking
about injustice,” John Wyse responds aggressively in a manner expected by the likes of
this group, saying, “Right . . . stand up to it then with force like men,” and the narrator
adding sympathetically a mocking gesture aimed at Bloom: “That’s an almanac picture
for you. Mark for a soft-nosed bullet. Old lardyface standing up to the business end of a
gun. Gob, he’d adorn a sweeping-brush, so he would, if only he had a nurse’s apron on
him” (Joyce 273). Joyce again shifts Bloom’s reaction to this invective away from
immediate expectation. In contrast to his raised fist,
. . . he collapses all of a sudden, twisting around all the opposite, as limp as a wet
rag. – But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, humanity, all that. That’s not life for
men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very
opposite of that that is really life. – What? Says Alf. – Love, says Bloom. I mean
the opposite of hatred. (Joyce 273)
Indeed it is true that Bloom’s final thought on the matter equates to “twisting around all
the opposite.” Unlike any of his adversaries, who remain on one simple trajectory of
aggressiveness, Bloom’s behavior here is complex, irregular, and altogether
unpredictable, having modulated first from an uneasy meekness to angst and then finally
arriving at Love, an abstraction that the reader only allows Bloom to arrive at legitimately
because it is uttered in the midst of such a sincere, humanized moment of intellectual
exhaustion. Bergson aptly points out that this inner duality, while a proponent of realism,
isn’t necessarily a fundamental quality of the comic, stating that:
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. . . [the] duel between two opposing feelings will not even then be comic, rather it
will appear the essence of seriousness if these two feelings through their very
distinctions complete each other, develop side by side, and make up between them
a composite mental condition, adopting in short, a modus vivendi which merely
gives us the complex impression of life. But . . . make him oscillate from one to
the other . . . by adopting the well-known form of some habitual, simple, childish
contrivance: then you will get the image we have so far found in all laughable
objects, something mechanical in something living; in fact, something comic.
(Bergson 38)
In the case of this example, there isn’t anything “inelastic” in Bloom’s heroic moment;
nothing particularly mechanical or divergent from life in his oscillating gesture.
However, there is a contrivance behind Bloom’s oscillation, but it is not of Bloom’s will,
but of Joyce’s.
In fact, Bloom is wholly unaware that this comic mechanism is at work inside of
his character, which makes him all the more endearingly delicate and real: “There are
innumerable comedies in which one of the characters thinks he is speaking and acting
freely, and consequently retains all the essentials of life, whereas, viewed from a certain
standpoint, he appears as a mere toy in the hands of another, who is playing with him”
(Bergson 38). To be sure, the privileged seat of the reader, now able to partake both in
Bloom’s performance and the comic apparatus functioning through and behind him,
emboldens the reader to imagine his hero voyeuristically, perhaps because, “Instinctively,
and because one would rather be a cheat than be cheated, in imagination at all events, the
spectator sides with the knaves . . .” (Bergson 38). Joyce’s use of this particular comic
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apparatus is absolutely essential to delivering such a crucial thematic turn in Ulysses, and
it remains to be seen if it could be earned in the eyes of the reader had it been undertaken
using the tenets of the epic.
The simple utterance of “love” is of course a dangerous conclusion here for the
reader of novels, since by the nature of the genre, the novel seeks a more nuanced
epiphany than such an epic abstraction. Joyce, however, manages to earn this simple
explanation for Bloom through the confluence of the comic threads which meet in a delta
of realism: first, the realization of Christ’s essential message in a man who has no
concept of the suggestion working in and around him, as well as the epic utterance of
“love” followed by, “I mean the opposite of hatred.” As Ellmann aptly states, “It is a kind
of parody that protects seriousness by immediately moving away from intensity. Love
cannot be discussed without peril, but Bloom has nobly named it” (Joyce xiii). In the
final revolution of this confrontation, Bloom’s most bravely-stated terms are one final
time complicated by a reduction – a comic reduction, since, as is demonstrated in this
argument, comic and tragic forces reduce one another.
Although this collection of ideas and readings constitutes a concerted effort to
understand the relationship between comedy and realism in the novel, in many instances,
the appreciation of comic notions discussed in my thesis was facilitated not by an intense
analysis, but rather by relaxing my close, critical reading skills and allowing myself the
occasion to appreciate the gestures of these great authors as being funny. In the case of
Ulysses, for example, the intensity of that novel’s reputation can intimidate the reader to
such a point that the wit and comedy that Joyce most certainly intends can be lost amidst
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his or her efforts to consume all of thematic matter and intricate allusions built into the
structure of the novel. As both Kundera and Eco clearly argue -- albeit in different ways
-- if the reader comes to the reading of a novel as an “open reader” (Eco’s term), or as a
reader who can effectively suspend their moral belief (Kundera’s term), then the
endearing magic of comedy will be detected and appreciated in numerous texts, whether
overtly comic or not. Moreover, the reader can come to appreciate how these moments of
comic mirth often coincide with the moments were one feels closest to the novel’s
protagonist.
Certainly, an entirely historical approach to discussing the theme of this thesis
could greatly expand our understanding of the link between the rise of modern comedy
and the genre of the novel. Very little work of that kind is manifest in this thesis, since to
balance a historical discussion with the close reading of these novels would constitute a
much larger work. However, the abundance of examples of the comic aesthetic found in
Tortilla Flat, Decline and Fall, and Ulysses point to the implicit relationship between the
rise of comic aesthetics, the secular individual, and the genre of the novel in Europe and
America. This new modern person entertained a new curiosity for a smaller, globalized
world, a self-centered existence, and a life that could be enhanced by the immutable rise
of the spirit that comes through the euphoria of human laughter.
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