Cannibal Joyce

5. A Taste for/of “inferior literary style”: The (Tom) Swiftian Comedy of Scylla and Charybdis

5 A Taste for/of “inferior literary style” The (Tom) Swiftian Comedy of Scylla and Charybdis “How do you know if there’s an elephant in your refrigerator?” “You can smell the peanuts on his breath.” “I’ve just had a frontal lobotomy,” Tom said absentmindedly. Inthelatespringof1963twonewformsofverbalhumor,sampledabove,were making the rounds at suburban cocktail parties: elephant jokes and another more literate and witty kind of wordplay called the “Tom Swiftie.” Both of these joke fads became so popular that they gained the notice of the national press.1 While the Tom Swiftie has, alas, long since departed, the elephant joke has remained a staple form of humor, as long-lived as its subject, to be rediscovered by each generation of elementary-school children, together with “knock-knock” jokes and variations upon “moron” jokes. Frank Kermode testifies to its longevity by planting an elephant joke in the unlikely context of his discussion of hermeneutic criticism in The Genesis of Secrecy: “how [do] you fit five elephants in a Volkswagen?” The answer is “two in the front, three in the back” (24, 149). Such logical analysis of an illogical, physical absurdity delights the child and may amuse an older audience as well. However, the Tom Swiftie appealed chiefly to the literate adult because its effectiveness,asitsnamesuggests,residedinthehearer’sawarenessofaliterary model for its humor: the novels about Tom Swift (among many other heroes and heroines) featured in the so-called Series for Young Americans published throughout the twentieth century in the United States by the Stratemeyer syndicate and Grosset and Dunlap. The Tom Swiftie is pure verbal play, relying on a syntactic paradigm familiar to veteran readers of these enormously successful series, and of much uninspired writing: the use of post-position adverbs to modify a reported speech, appropriately. Since these jokes have 74 / Cannibalizing Literature disappeared from the cocktail party circuit, perhaps to our general relief, there would seem to be little purpose in resurrecting their memory, except to suggest that their demise has something to do with the decline of reading in adolescence; however, Joyce’s readers should be intrigued by the similarity between the technique of the Tom Swiftie and the kinds of verbal humor found in the ninth episode of Ulysses, Scylla and Charybdis. Joyce’s jokes are not simply similar in method; they share the Tom Swiftie’s origins in popular literature. The Tom Swift novels have long been among the most popular of the Stratemeyer syndicate’s books. Preceded by several other series, including the “Rover Boys,” “Baseball Joe,” and the still popular “Bobbsey Twins,” the Tom Swift novels began to appear in 1910. Purportedly written by Victor Appleton , the books were in fact composed as a sideline by a stable of New York journalists to the prescriptions of Edward Stratemeyer.2 “The Perfect Inventor ,” as he has been described, Tom began his career as inventor modestly enough with Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle (1910), but shortly moved on to more ambitious modes of transport, such as his electric auto (unfortunately not named “Prius”), his hybrid dirigible-airplane (called “Red Cloud”), his monoplane “Humming-Bird,” his combination plane, auto, and speedboat “Air Monarch,” his magnetic-propulsion submarine “Advance,” and his anticipation of current stealth-technology, the silent airplane “Air Scout.”3 Tom developed mid-ocean floating airports, color television in 1928, three-dimensional TV in 1934, and X-ray vision by means of his “Television Detector” of 1933. An American Library Association survey in 1926 discovered that an amazing 98 percent of public school children listed the Stratemeyer syndicate books as their preferred reading and Tom Swift as their favorite series of all. But this was to change shortly: in 1927 Stratemeyer launched the “Hardy Boys,” with The Tower Treasure, and soon after their female counterpart, Nancy Drew. Now dated by his younger competitors, Tom finally grew out of adolescence and out of publication. We do know that he eventually married his teen sweetheart, Mary Nestor, because he fathered a son who achieved lesser celebrity in a second generation of books, the “Tom Swift Junior” series, first appearing in 1954. This set was authored, naturally, by Victor Appleton, Jr., and featured even greater technological wonders: Atomic Earth Blasters, Jetmarines, and Triphibian Atomicars.4 The Tom Swiftie joke became a fad in the early 1960s as the subjects of the 1926 Library Association survey, and their children, reached maturity. As the Figure 5.1. After...