The Pleasures of Irreverent Reading

In the consideration of the faculties and impulses—of the prima mobilia—of the human soul, the phrenologists have failed to make room for a propensity which, although obviously existing as a radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment has been equally overlooked by all the moralists who have preceded them.

—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Imp of the Perverse”¹

Of all the kinds of reading pleasure that exist, there is one that is almost always excluded from taxonomy. This is the pleasure to be derived from laughing at the text. It is a perverse pleasure, for to laugh at is not very nice. From early childhood, we are instructed that to point and laugh is rude, and even cruel. Laugh with others, not at them: this is the kind and moral way. And yet, by the time we learn this lesson in ethics, it is already too late. Almost from infancy, we experience the delight of mockery, and the many other kinds of “laughing at.” We pull our father’s hair and grin at his dismayed face; we know it’s our bedtime, and we run around in circles, laughing gleefully at ineffectual attempts to get us dressed. We may learn to suppress the pleasure (this “imp”), but it is there. I am not sure that there is any joy to be derived from comedy that does not contain some trace of the perverse (and the deviation from virtue implied therein). Comedy and tragedy, laughing and crying, pleasure and pain: aren’t these always the two edges of the same knife?

But what of the particular perverse pleasure that is laughing at a text? Mocking a book might seem to be a sin of a different order, since the object inciting laughter is not a thinking, feeling person, but there is still a reluctance to acknowledge this kind of affective relation in the academy. Buffeted by waves of tedious editorials questioning the value of the humanities, we who read literature for a living seem pushed into two positions: a rapturous loyalty to the works we study or a glib dismissal of value itself. There seems to be little room for an attachment between reader and text that is playfully teasing—that is, in essence, perverse or irreverent. (I will admit that some kinds of laughing at are mean, mean in the sense of unkind and also scanty, narrow in their rewards.) But there are many enlivening pleasures to be found in irreverent reading. A misplaced sense of ethical responsibility crowds out a visceral delight in the many ways a text means. Our delight in a text should not be restricted to the author’s intentionality; nor should our reading be censored by expectations of what’s proper or respectful. Laughing at doesn’t distance us from the text; it can create an intimacy that is not dependent on a total alliance or identification—an intimacy that is not yoked to a “with.” We don’t need to take a text seriously to understand it. In fact, refusing to take it seriously (i.e. mocking a text) can be its own kind of intellectual practice, one that has the potential to rebound and slice through our own misconceptions about what it means to study literature.

It was a rather insignificant text—a parody of Stephen Crane written by Frank Norris and titled “The Green Stone of Unrest”—that reminded me how much my own work has been motivated by this kind of perverse pleasure. Norris’s story is short (in length), minor (even in terms of Frank Norris’s oeuvre), and funny only to a very few people. To find this parody amusing, you have to know Crane’s work, and you have to know Norris’s, the majority of which is dark, earnest, and tragic. It’s the very twist of seeing him try his hand at comedy that makes this parody funnier than it might otherwise be. But “The Green Stone” is more than an inside joke: it made me acknowledge the pleasures of mocking as a critical practice—as a very nice, if not nice, relation between scholar and...