The Last Laugh: Form and Affirmation in the Contemporary American Comic Novel (review)

116Reviews represent Ye Olde Literarye Historye—a traditional branch of criticism frequently assumed to be defunct, but just as frequently phoenix-like rising to function again." And his most valuable insights derive from this conservative stance—from his grounding a contemporary rebellion in basic impulses that were reflected in one of the first books printed in English, or in showing modern fabulation to be a transvaluation of values. But he cannot embrace what I at least think is the radical affirmation of a world view based on absolute alienation and an absolute rejection of rational humanism. Fabulation may lead to a rebirth of the integrating imagination as it touches "the earth of popular narrative." And he sees this rebirth taking the form of science fiction, although he does not discuss this branch of fabulative literature here. But self-reflexiveness, the essence of fabulation and metafiction, he ultimately sees as narcissistic and evasive. Its joy, he finaUy declares, is masturbatory. Ultimately, that is, the rational humanist cannot accept the full implication of Borges' opposition between language and life, the consequences of Murdoch's and Fowles's existential romance, or the dark and absolute gaps exposed by Barth, Hawkes, Pynchon, and Coover. Wheaton CollegeRichard Pearce Wallace, Ronald. The Last Laugh: Form and Affirmation in the Contemporary American Comic Novel. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1979. 159 pp. Cloth: $14.95. In the modern novel, as Roland Barthes has written of Michael Butor, ideas are not developed, they are distributed. The distribution is almost always random, the ideas pessimistic about the present, apocalyptic when dealing with the future, and in American fiction the whole situation is often treated as a joke. It is the joking element rather than the violence, the nihUism, the absurdity, that Ronald Wallace emphasizes in this study. Concentrating on five representative novelists—Barth, Hawkes, Nabokov, Kesey, Coover—Wallace argues that contemporary comic writing is squarely within a recognizable tradition, a tradition he sees exemplified in Aristophanes, in Cervantes, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, and, perhaps most revealing, in Henry James. Wallace identifies their shared comedie element—the tendency to affirm survival and continuity —in variants of such traditional forms as the romantic triumph of lovers over a blocking figure and the correlative ritualistic origin of comedy as an outgrowth of fertility rites; the exposure of a deluded protagonist who is then reformed through ridicule; the escape from a frantic, existent world to one of the narrator's imagination; and the authorial parody of the narrative pose itself. The social forms—irony and satire—do not parallel or even alternate with the ritual ones, however, so much as dominate them, ultimately emerging as the definitive element of comedy. At one point Wallace explicitly argues that comedy is fundamentally a social art in which "when a character is isolated from the community he is usually a figure of satire" (p. 40) . At the same time he recognizes that in the contemporary novel the social representative has himself become the villain, the blocking figure. Social rather than individual pretensions are exposed and the antagonists elude society rather than become converted by and included in it. In a parallel shift, Wallace notes the ironic figure who pretends innocence, often an artist, merges with Studies in American Fiction117 the vain braggart, sometimes an imposter, other times merely ignorant. Thus he may be seen as a complementary protagonist to the rebel-victim that Ihab Hassan identified as the representative hero of the sixties. "Established society in the contemporary novel," Wallace observes, "is usually satirically exposed as destructive, mechanistic, and sick, a world in which human values have been inverted" (p. 140). As a result, the didactic social impulse which accounted for Meredith's "thoughtful laughter," Bergson's dehumanizing rigidity, L. J. Potts relative eccentricity no longer describes contemporary comic forms. The hero does not represent the triumph of youth but more often than not is himself middle aged or old to begin with; his struggle is not with his world but with his words. Affirmation results from a balance between the vitality of this figure and the parody to which he is subject. The comic norms, Wallace concludes, are now located outside rather than within the work...