Comedies of Failure: O'Brien's The Hard Life and Moore's The Emperor of Ice Cream

Since its eighteenth-century inception, the bildungsroman's generic conventions have suggested that virtuous enterprise will be rewarded by a suitable marriage, economic prosperity, and social integration. Such social mobility and professional opportunity, in turn, confirm the justness of the society in which the protagonist matures. A variation on this convention, however, is the comic bildungsroman: a peculiar, hybrid formulation that mimics the expectations of self-cultivation, but then subverts its own narrative trajectory. That is, while the comic hero may negotiate the perambulations of youth to attain a wise, folly-free maturity, and while he may possess the virtue to succeed, he is typically an inferior being, incapable of heroic effort. Whatever success he achieves is usually attained through happenstance or luck, neither of which is likely to valorize the unstable or absurd environment in which the action is situated.

These comic transgressions seek to invalidate the social conditions in which the protagonist matures. The comic bildungsroman can be readily distinguished from the picaresque; its heroes are marked by indifference, exercise little wit or ingenuity, and make little or no effort to succeed in life. In other words, this variant invokes the generic conventions of the bildungsroman form in such a manner that it promises a maturity that is impossible, either because of the ineptitude of the hero or, more likely, because of the failure of his social environment.

In modern Irish fiction, social environments are rarely stable and the social and cultural hegemony is hardly ever validated in such a manner; hence, the comic bildungsroman becomes an apt generic hybrid in which to create comedies of failure that investigate the environments in which Irish youth are reared. In Irish fiction—where failure and unhappiness are such persistent conditions, both in the literature and in the surrounding culture—the humor itself fails through repetition, and laughter becomes mirthless. As Nell remarked in Beckett's Endgame: "nothing is funnier than unhappiness . . . but we don't laugh anymore."¹ These narratives reveal that unhappiness is such an unvarying condition in Ireland that the joke—the tension that arises through suffering and is relieved through laughter—is no longer funny.

If Henri Bergson was correct in viewing laughter as a response to mechanical inelasticity, then the protagonist's failure to adapt to his environment should produce laughter.² However, repetition destroys incongruity. For instance, a person slipping on a banana peel, or failing to sidestep this obstacle, involves incongruous action—but it is a form of physical comedy that has become exhausted through repetition. Thus, when the unexpected ceases to surprise, laughter becomes more reflexive, a gesture that acknowledges the "jokeness" of the joke, but does not find humor. This is not to say that such narratives themselves fail as social criticism. Rather, they seem to create elements of unease and surprise that—because one does not expect to be troubled by the failure of fools—the expectation of humor is deflated or quelled, leaving one aware of a deeply disquieting cosmology.

Flann O'Brien's The Hard Life (1961) and Brian Moore's The Emperor of Ice Cream (1965) are superb examples of this comedy of failure, bildungsromane that dramatize the sufferings and botched maturity of youthful comic figures whose failure produces a kind of mirthless laughter. Although they emerged from different historical and geographical contexts, and used different comic styles, both writers illustrate the manner in which the conventions of the bildungsroman, with its generic expectations of social integration, merge with the comedic mode's resolution of social conflict, to create insightful representations of failed maturity in Irish youth. Declan Kiberd, writing of "Underdeveloped Comedy" in the work of Patrick Kavanagh identifies a strain of comedy that exploits the humor of immaturity. Kiberd finds that Kavanagh's verse inclines to "question his own ridiculous pretensions to power and majesty, "which leads to "a rejection of the portentous or the significant."³ Notably, Kiberd detects a similar tendency to ridicule ambition and earnestness—particularly that which derived from a projection of Irish identity—in the dark...