Comedy: The Irrational Vision by Morton Gurewitch (review)

Reviews 1 8 1 translations) , Knapp's anthology will be useful also. She has chosen Cousin's Le Voyage de derriere la montagne, Vauthier's Le personnage combattant, Gatti's La vie imaginaire de l'eboueur Auguste G., Michel's L'Agression, and Rezvani's Body. The translations will suffice for a class­ room where the instructor can make rectifications from the original. In­ troductory materials provide passwords; e.g. of the Absurdists, "Plays, therefore, no longer analyzed man's anguish; they showed it. The play became the action" (p. 92) . ( Compare this with the third sentence in Off-Stage Voices: "French theatre throughout the centuries has been particularly beguiling," p. 1.) Knapp's commentaries on Celine's plots bear only peripherally on contemporary drama. This is quite simply because he wrote only one play L'Eglise ( 1928, 1933 ) , yet to be produced professionally. For an understanding of celine's literary merits and his inner motivations, read­ ers should still rely on Erika Ostrovsky's Celine and His Vision and Voyeur Voyant: A Portrait of Lauis-Ferdinand Celine. Knapp demon­ strates that celine's work, apart from Le Voyage au bout de la nuit, belongs not to literature, but to psychopathology. But once again, we should be grateful, for her careful plot summaries will spare many of us the reading of this repugnant material. Indeed, the merits of these three books are those of the criltural intermediary : · they permit specialists to be more selective and beginners to be better informed. Knapp is a popularizer par excellence. MARILYN GADDIS ROSE State University of New York at Binghamton Morton Gurewitch. Comedy: The Irrational Vision. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. Pp. 245. $ 10.00. Comedy: The Irrational Vision is a solid citizen of the world of criticism. Its merits are substantial-accurate, sensible summaries of previous criticism, a generous sprinkling of brief (2-4 pages) but re­ freshingly accurate discussions of an interesting variety of comic works, and intelligent ideas about an important subject. Yet like many other solid citizens it is finally somewhat disappointing; feeling like an in­ grate, one wants to complain that there is less here than meets the eye at first reading. The probable truth is that the subject calls for less solidity and more wildness, for a riskier, less seemly, more arrogant kind of criticism. "Yes," Mr. Gurewitch is entitled to mutter in reply, "and imagine the pot shots that academic reviewers would take at a book like that." He would have a point. But a man who is going to admire Tropic of Can­ cer, The Ginger Man, and Lolita and to adore Gargantua and Pantagruel ought to consider it a pious duty to draw down on himself the wrath of the seemly. A critical celebration of the irrational vision ought to seem a bit crazy and not quite respectable. Mr. Gurewitch's aim in Comedy: The Irrational Vision is "to focus 182 Comparative Drama on comedy's interest in illogic and irreverence, in disorder and disin­ hibition." He pursues this aim through five well-planned chapters. Chapter I reviews most of the existing theories of comedy, finding them either too abstract to be useful to the literary critic or too narrow to deal with the diversity of comedy. It arrives at the eminently sound conclusion that " 'comedy' has to be recognized .as a matrix term that embraces miscellaneous impulses which can be sensed empirically as effects before they are regarded as intentions." One such impulse, "drastic irrationality," becomes progressively the center of attention in the remaining chapters. The second chapter deals at length with the theories that Freud de­ veloped in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and with their implications for literary criticism. Chapter ill , "Truth, Humor, and Non­ sense," begins, unfortunately, by setting up a straw man, Scott Buchanan's effort in Poetry and Mathematics to drape over literature the intellectual and social dignity of science, and it goes on to argue through a series of explications that in comedy attitudes toward truth are more important than truth itself. This enables Gurewitch to finish by valuing nonsense for its own sake. (Alas, he takes as his final example Joseph Heller's Catch-22...